Part Fourteen – November 30th
Nothing justifies this. Nothing. President Joe Biden will go down in history as an accomplice to genocide. May the ghosts of the thousands of children he has participated in murdering haunt him for the rest of his life…Israel and Washington’s cynicism is breathtaking. There are no differences in intent. Washington only wants it done quickly. – Chris Hedges
If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. – Hannah Arendt
Democrats are so morally bankrupt that right now they are angrier at people who say they refuse to vote for Biden because of his support for the Gaza massacre than they are at Biden for supporting the Gaza massacre. – Caitlin Johnstone
With less than a year to go, American politics in general and the presidential campaign in particular have already entered the realm of “truth stranger than fiction”, or “you can’t make this shit up”.
I refer to Trump as “Trumpus” to remind the reader that, at every level of interpretation, the man is us. He embodies and enacts our national myths. It’s time to for intelligent people to graduate from binary thinking and stop blaming him, the Republican Party or Vlad Putin for all our problems. If he is our problem, then we are the problem. To paraphrase Biden (see below), if Trumpus didn’t exist, we’d have to invite someone else to play the role.
But none of Biden’s nicknames (“Hidin’ Biden”, “Sleepy Joe”, “Let’s go, Brandon” or “Dementia Joe”) have stuck for me until this one: Genocide Joe, 
which, sadly, should remind the reader that this man also expresses much of the worst in us.
Can his popularity sink even further? Oh, yes. In mid-November a NYT poll showed him virtually tied with Trumpus among voters younger than 30, with 30% backing him, 29% backing Trumpus and 34% supporting Kennedy. Four years ago, Genocide Joe had won 61% of them. As for Arab-Americans: In Michigan, Biden won by 154,000 votes. The state’s Arab American population is at least 278,000. He won Arizona, which has 55,000 Arab Americans, by 10,500 votes. And he took Georgia by 11,800 votes, where the Arab American population is over 57,000.
By December, the U.S. had provided Israel with 57,000 artillery shells and 15,000 bombs, including over 5,000 “blockbusters” with 2,000-pound warheads.
The Nation lamentd that “Biden is tearing his own coalition apart”. Two-thirds of all voters (80% of Democrats and half of Republicans) want him to call for a cease-fire. Some 500 U.S. officials signed a letter protesting the massacres, while 100 A.I.D. employees signed another letter blasting his “unwillingness to de-escalate”. Over 130 former Obama campaign staffers and political appointees – including, ironically, Rashida Tlaib – urged a ceasefire. Over 400 of Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign sent her a similar letter, and another 400 former Bernie Sanders staffers sent him one as well. Sanders responded by telling the WAPO that Hamas wants “permanent war and the destruction of Israel” and wouldn’t abide by a ceasefire.
By the end of the month, the list of Congresspersons calling for a ceasefire had grown to about four dozen, although some of their statements raised questions about their actual motives, since some were coupling their calls for a ceasefire with conditions like – you can’t make this shit up – the removal of Hamas. But the mainstream media avoided the obvious, wrote Adam Johnson:
Recent reports on Biden’s bad polling in The New York Times, The Atlantic, CNN, ABC News, New York Magazine, and Financial Times ignore the role of Biden’s backing of Gaza’s bombardment entirely. None of the above polls even asked respondents specifically about Biden’s role in Israel’s scorched earth bombing and siege of Gaza.
Eventually someone in authority must have noticed the polls. Emmanuel Macron became the first Western leader to call for a ceasefire. On November 14th, after 5 weeks of mass murder (and still discreetly sending arms shipments), the U.S. began to push a bogus narrative that it is seeking to moderate Israel’s tactics. Genocide Joe made a weak and hypocritical plea: “Hospitals must be protected” – but only after being directly asked by a reporter.
You can’t make this shit up. That same day, at a pro-Israel rally on the National Mall, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries shared the platform with anti-Semitic, homophobic televangelist John Hagee, whose words (God sent Hitler to carry out the Holocaust “to help Jews reach the promised land”) even John McCain had found “deeply offensive and indefensible”.
On November 22nd, the administration doubled down once again, as White House spokesperson John Kirby said, “This word ‘genocide’ is getting thrown around in a pretty inappropriate way…” and accused Hamas of being the party seeking genocide. Ignoring six weeks of horrific photos and multiple statements by Israeli leaders themselves, he willfully denied that genocide was taking place. In the following weeks, Harris, Blinken and Austin used unusually blunt language to warn against the massacres. But the money and weapons kept flowing. On December 8th, 13 of the 14 members of the U.N. security council voted for an immediate cease-fire. The U.S. vetoed the motion. Hours later, the administration bypassed Congress to sell the Israelis 13,000 rounds of tank ammunition. Even the NYT reported, “The arms shipment has been put on an expedited track, and Congress has no power to stop it.” Aaron Mate writes:
The White House’s circumvention of Congressional review is consistent with its refusal to follow US law, which bars weapons transfers to countries that commit serious human rights abuses. The Biden administration has evaded this requirement by simply pretending that it is a helpless bystander, rather than willing accomplice… The White House commitment to Israel is so devout that it cannot even ensure the paltry levels of humanitarian aid that it has promised.
Trumpus couldn’t tolerate Genocide Joe getting all the publicity, even if it was bad (and of course, for him bad publicity is great publicity). So he doubled down on his theatrics, telling a crowd he’d “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country…” and demanding live TV coverage of his trial over election subversion. But his biggest, most brilliant move was to vow to resume his role as the “Peacemaker” president with the slogan “peace through strength”:
So whether you are a Democrat, Republican, or
independent: If you don’t want your sons and daughters drafted to fight and die in distant foreign lands, if you don’t want your nation wrecked, if you don’t want your economy destroyed, if you don’t want American blood and American treasure squandered in a needless global war…
It wasn’t clear whether he was talking about Gaza, Ukraine or China, or what “peace through strength” meant, or how it would differ from Biden’s record military expenditures, provocations and support for war crimes. I doubt if anyone believed him, but he definitely offered a brand that was “not-Biden”. Readers of this series may recall that I predicted this (at least in terms of Ukraine) in August:
…if both of these old fools make it through the primary season next year without being arrested (or in Biden’s case, impeached), we will be faced with a situation in which Trumpus will run against the war (even though absolutely no one will believe him, including Vladimir Putin) and Biden will be forced to defend it…
Elie Mystal sums up the situation from the liberal point of view:
I will be voting for Joe Biden. I am a single-issue voter—that single issue is the Supreme Court—and (this) allows me to put on ethical blinders to just about everything else…But my vote is not the one I’m worried about. I do not think establishment Democrats and hard-core Biden supporters appreciate how useless the “Trump would be worse” argument is to young voters…What Arab Americans and especially Palestinian Americans are saying is not that Trump would be a better president for their community, but that Biden’s decision not to do anything to stop the bombardment and killing of their families and friends means that the differences between the two hardly matter.
Welcome to the world of the other fifty percent – those who haven’t voted at all for decades, for the same reason: Why bother? There’s no difference. Long before Joe Biden became Genocide Joe, he was already profoundly unpopular among independents, young people and people of color, all of whom are rapidly abandoning him. True, they won some important state-level elections in early November, and many MSM writers hailed the news as biding well for next year. But these votes were about protecting freedom, not for Biden.
The young and the people of color who were critical to his 2020 success in swing states were activists – precisely the kind of people who, a thousand of them, shut down the California Democratic Party convention in Sacramento on November 18th over the demand for a cease-fire. Some may hold their noses next year and choose the lesser of two evils, but they won’t be motivated to hit the streets and canvass for votes. What were they chanting in Sacramento? We will remember next November.
The leaders of the DNC may be corporate stooges, but they aren’t stupid; they understand this. So we ask once again, why is Biden committing political suicide and inviting the very fascist takeover of the nation that he seemingly fears? Why is he – like every president for over forty years – especially Barack Obama – defending, supporting and resupplying mass murder?
Analysts such as economist Michael Hudson have long offered geopolitical explanations centering around Israel’s function as a trusted, white, Euro-facing outpost of the American empire in the Middle East and how it has repeatedly sabotaged U.S. nuclear diplomacy with Iran, as well as the massive influence of American televangelists. And of course, they are right. Biden himself said it – in 1986:
There is no apology to be made. None. It is the best $3 billion investment we make. Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region; the United States would have to go out and invent an Israel.
Caitlin Johnstone, however, reminds us (because many of us need to be reminded):
Biden wasn’t fully lying when he said “Were there not an Israel the United States would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region.” He’s just telling a half-truth, because by “the United States” he means the U.S. empire, not the U.S. as a nation.
The money spent by the Israeli lobby is almost infinite, and not just to keep moderates and liberals on their side.
The 8-story AIPAC building
The money spent by the Israeli lobby is almost infinite, and not just to keep moderates and liberals on their side. They even offered Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez $100,000. Alan MacLeod’s article “Blood Money: The Top Ten Politicians Taking the Most Israel Lobby Cash” begins with Genocide Joe himself. He is followed by the usual crowd: Robert Menendez, Mitch McConnell, Chuck Schumer, etc.
AIPAC was new House speaker Mike Johnson’s top donor in 2023, pouring $95,000 into his coffers just after he led the passage of a $14 billion aid package to Israel. The billionaire Sheldon Adelson was a two-issue sugar daddy (the other issue of course was cutting taxes on the rich) who spent over $500 million in support of Republicans to maintain a hardline Israel policy, while Haim Saban has similarly piled cash onto Democrats with exactly the same agenda. Palestinians of course have no lobby in Washington. Nor do they have government agencies charged with the explicit purpose of targeting U.S. universities, including outlawing peaceful student groups, using wealthy benefactors to threaten to withhold donations and deeming students accused as antisemites ineligible for employment. The results fit a long-term pattern: the top recipients of pro-Israel contributions in recent elections were centrist Democrats who defeated progressives in primaries.
On the other side of the ledger are the companies profiting from the destruction of Gaza, such as Boeing, Caterpillar, General Dynamics, General Electric, L3Harris Technologies, Leonardo, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and RTX (formerly Raytheon), as well as vehicle manufacturers Ford and Toyota, and drone manufacturers AeroVironment, Skydio, and XTEND.
But I can’t help but wonder: Is following the money enough? Does even this tsunami of cash fully explain the genocidal madness that American leaders have so consistently supported and frequently enacted for so long? Perhaps – bear with me – conspiracy theory may help, as we’ll see in Part Fifteen.
madnessatthegates 