Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain
No one has ever accused U.S. President Joe (Genocide Joe) Biden of being the brightest bulb in the lamp. That his particular bulb seems to be dimming cannot be questioned; after all, people are still scratching their heads, trying to figure out why he concluded a speech on gun control with the words ‘God save the Queen, man.” This is the Democratic Party’s choice for president, going, in all likelihood, up against a man who suggested injecting disinfectant into people to prevent COVID. How on earth did we ever get here?
But this writer digresses.
It has recently been reported that Biden told donors at a fundraising dinner in the nation’s capital that Israeli Prime Murderer Netanyahu “…has to change, and with this government, this government in Israel is making it very difficult for him to move.” At the same event, he said that the current Israeli government isn’t interested in at two-state solution. He also said that Israel is losing international support. This may indicate a slight loss of gray cells, since it should be apparent to everyone not ensconced in the ivory tower known as the White House that no Israeli government has ever supported an independent state of Palestine, and now has little international support among the world’s population, which is increasingly making its wishes and demands heard by its apparently tone-deaf government ‘leaders’.
Much hoopla is being made about this ‘criticism’ by Biden of Netanyahu, despite Biden saying that U.S. support for Israel is ‘unshakeable’.
Let’s look for a minute at the current results of that ‘unshakeable’ commitment to the apartheid regime of Israel.
• The official death toll in Gaza is approaching 20,000 people, with at least 70% of them women and children. How many of the remaining 30% are innocent men who simply wanted to live their lives free of any oppression, but were not militantly and actively opposed to Israel is not known. And the death toll is probably much higher, since thousands are unaccounted for and are presumed dead beneath the rubble of their bombed homes.
• International law has been rendered meaningless. These are just some of its violations by Israel in the last two months: bombing residences, hospitals, United Nations refugee centers, schools and places of worship; killing journalists; killing non-combatants; depriving the population of food, water, electricity and medical supplies; forcibly removing people from their homes and telling them to relocate to another area, and then bombing their escape routes to that area, and then bombing the area they were told to evacuate to; stripping prisoners, photographing them and then publishing the photos. The list goes on.
• Growing hostility towards Israel and its main supplier, the United States, thus increasing, rather than decreasing, the risk of ‘terrorist’ attacks in those countries. It is difficult to conceive how this fact escapes the august thinkers in the nation’s capital who are cheerleaders for genocide. Killing someone’s family does not endear the survivors to the killers.
• More U.S. tax dollars going to genocide rather than remaining in the U.S. and, perhaps, providing more people with health care, or reducing the very burdensome student debt under which millions of people struggle, or even providing drinking water for residents of cities who cannot drink what flows from their taps.
Genocide Joe, we are told, is trying to convince the Israeli Prime Murderer to be more circumspect; really, the slaughter of thousands of children doesn’t have a good look to it. Now, let’s consider for a moment what leverage the U.S. government might have to persuade the Israeli government to adhere to international law and stop committing war crimes and crimes against humanity. Well, the U.S. does give Israel nearly $4 billion in aid annually. Perhaps threatening to turn off that particular money tap may have some impact on Netanyahu and his criminal cohorts. However, this is not to be; the precedent of giving Israel whatever it wants is well-established. For example, in 1988, U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz recommended a fairly reasonable timeline for a peace plan for Palestine and Israel. The Israeli Prime Murderer at the time, Yitzhak Shamir, rejected the plan out of hand. In response to this rejection, the U.S. issued a new memorandum, emphasizing economic and security agreements with Israel, and accelerating the delivery of seventy-five F-16 fighter jets. This, ostensibly, was to encourage Israel to accept the peace plan proposals. Yet Israel did not yield. “Instead, as an Israeli journalist commented, the message received was: ‘One may say no to America and still get a bonus.’”
So what is the U.S. to do to stop this horrific, ongoing genocide? One must not expect the elected officials to act. Oh, no, that might jeopardize campaign contributions from pro-Israeli lobbies. It would be naïve indeed to think those contributions don’t matter. According to Open Secrets, the top Israeli lobby group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) donated $23,204,327.00 to U.S. candidates running for election or re-election in the 2021 – 2022 election cycle. The next 19 most ‘generous’- to-candidates of the pro-Israel lobbies donated a combined amount of $14,782,238.00 during the same time period. That is certainly a lot of money donated by a foreign government to influence U.S. elections.
With Genocide Joe facing re-election in less than 12 months, he really should be looking more carefully at poll numbers. His support for genocide is costing him dearly in terms of the support of young voters, usually a mainstay of Democratic support. His support of voters under 30 years of age in some swing states is now in the single digits. Additionally, the #AbandonBiden campaign, created by and targeting Muslims in swing states, is growing in size and strength.
Yet the Biden team seems to think that, when it comes down to election day, voters in these groups will decide they have no option: Biden, the team believes they will say, is better than Trump. This is extremely short-sighted on many levels. Regarding Palestine, could Trump be any worse than Biden? And increasingly, voters dissatisfied with the Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee offerings of the Republican and Democratic Parties are looking to Third-Party candidates. These candidates may have no chance of victory, but voting for them can be a significant protest action, and the more votes they get each year, the better their chances of future viability. Cornell West, running as an independent, and Claudia De la Cruz of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), are two candidates that disaffected young (and not so young) voters are considering.
It is impossible to know what tomorrow will bring, let along the next year. But one can realistically assume that Biden will continue to ignore the will of the people who voted him into office, and support Israeli genocide; the unspeakable barbarity of the Israel government will continue, and that the election next year will, as is generally the case with U.S. elections, change nothing. That is a tragedy for the world, since so much change is needed, and the one nation that most needs to change is the United States.
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