Our Country Is Complicit In Israel’s Palestinian Genocide— We Need To Stop It

Hubert Humphrey Lost Because Of Vietnam, Not Because People Thought Nixon Was Better

Is The Democratic Party Going To Screw America Again, Like They Did In 1968?

In the end, 101,100 Michigan Democrats decided to send Biden a message: you want our votes, stop the genocide— or at least the U.S. complicity in it. No one is interested in his hideous, insulting bullshit either: the genocide has to stop for real. If you want my opinion, he should fire Blinken and cut ties with AIPAC and Democratic Majority For Israel, the 2 main genocide lobbying firms. 

And the problem for Biden isn’t just in Michigan— although if enough Democrats sit on their hands in November in that state, Trump will win it… and the presidency. New polling from Data for Progress shows that 57% of likely voters disapprove of the way Biden is handling the conflict between Israel and Palestine (although most of them are Republicans and they would disapprove no matter what he did).

However, “around two-thirds of voters (67%)— including majorities of Democrats (77%), Independents (69%), and Republicans (56%)— support the U.S. calling for a permanent ceasefire and a de-escalation of violence in Gaza. This represents a 6-point increase in support for the U.S. calling for a permanent ceasefire since Data for Progress last polled this question in November, with a 12-point increase among Independents.”

Requiring Israel to agree to certain conditions related to human rights and the resolution of the war in Gaza to receive military aid from the U.S. is broadly popular. Voters support placing the following conditions on aid to Israel: 

• Guaranteeing the right of displaced Palestinians to be able to return to their homes in Gaza following the conclusion of the war (+59)

• Committing to peace talks with the Palestinians for a two-state solution (+52)

• Committing to a de-escalation of violence in Gaza and stopping any indiscriminate bombing to protect Palestinian civilians (+46)

• Pledging to stop building settlements in the Palestinian territories, which violates international law (+47)

• Pledging to not occupy Gaza following the conclusion of the war (+38)

Most voters (68%— including 75% of Democrats) also support a two-state solution and oppose Israel controlling Palestine. So who supports genocide? Well, AIPAC is all in on it. (Help the candidates they are targeting with their $10 million war-chest .) And, of course the Republicans in Congress. As Branko Marcetic noted over the weekend, “Rep. Andy Ogles’s comment that ‘we should kill them all’ in Gaza has drawn little outrage, to say nothing of public censure like what Rep. Rashida Tlaib has faced. That’s because openly calling for genocide of Palestinians has become normalized in America.”

He added “Hamas and the Palestinians have been attacking Israel for twenty years, and it’s time to pay the piper,” straight out of the AIPAC playbook. There’s been very little coverage of pushback.

But Ogles isn’t even the first US politician to say something like this since the war’s outbreak. Earlier this month, Representative Brian Mast, a Florida Republican, repeatedly told antiwar activists that Palestinian civilians, including children, should be murdered. “You haven’t seen the pictures of all the babies being killed?” one protester asked him.

“These are not innocent Palestinian civilians,” he replied.

“The half a million people starving to death are people that should go out there and put a government in place that doesn’t go out there and attack Israel on a daily basis,” a smirking Mast added, referring to Israel’s policy of deliberately engineered famine in the territory. At another point, Mast told a protester that “it would be better if you kill all the terrorists and kill everyone who are supporters” — meaning, civilians — calling this “a great solution.”

This is three months after Mast had urged his colleagues on the House floor “to not so lightly throw around the idea of innocent Palestinian civilians,” any more than they would “throw around the term ‘innocent Nazi civilians’ during World War II.”

That same month, another Floridian, Republican state representative Michelle Salzman, was caught on tape saying basically the same thing in the Florida legislature as Ogles just had. “We are at ten thousand dead Palestinians. How many will be enough?” asked her Democratic colleague Angie Nixon. “All of them,” replied Salzman.

The list goes on. Representative Max Miller, an Ohio Republican, told Fox that “we’re going to turn that”— meaning, the Gaza strip— “into a parking lot.”

“As far as I’m concerned, Israel can bounce the rubble in Gaza,” tweeted Senator Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, in a reference to a Winston Churchill quote about the destruction caused by nuclear weapons.

South Carolina Republican senator Lindsay Graham has made a variety of similarly deranged genocidal comments. He called on Israel to “level the place,” charging that “the most radicalized people on the planet live in the Gaza Strip” who “have been taught since birth to kill and hate the Jews,” and stating flatly that “there is no limit” to the amount of civilian casualties Israel can inflict in its nominal goal of destroying Hamas.

It’s not just Republicans. Democratic New York governor Kathy Hochul recently justified what has now been declared by the International Court of Justice a plausible genocide by Israel by telling an audience the United States would do the exact same thing. “If Canada someday ever attacked Buffalo, I’m sorry my friends, there would be no Canada the next day,” she said.

This is itself an echo of the words of President Joe Biden, reportedly the driving force behind current US steadfast support for Israel’s military campaign, who just over forty years ago disturbed even then Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin when he endorsed his destruction of Beirut: “It was great! It had to be done! If attacks were launched from Canada into the United States, everyone here would have said, ‘Attack all the cities of Canada, and we don’t care if all the civilians get killed.’”

There’s been a lot of talk about how Congress could angrily condemn a statement by Tlaib they misconstrued as genocidal toward Israelis, while supporting what has now been declared by numerous experts an actual, ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people. It may well be that, as many of them have said quite openly, a shocking amount of US politicians simply genuinely believe in and support the mass extermination of Palestinians.

I salute Aaron Bushnell, a 25 year old senior airman raised in a Community of Jesus religious cult in Massachusetts, who live-streamed his self-immolation in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, shouting “Free Palestine,” before dying. Every voter should consider his statement before filling out their ballot:

“My name is Aaron Bushnell, I am an active-duty member of the United States Air Force and I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it's not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”

When I was in high school and the American genocide in Vietnam was in it’s early stages (1963), a Vietnamese Mahayana Buddhist monk, Thích Quảng Đức, captured the attention of the world by setting himself ablaze in a busy Saigon intersection to protest the American puppet government of fascist Ngô Đình Diệm. Pressure build up and Diệm promised reforms. But he never delivered. However, I don’t think I was the only American high school student who started thinking seriously about Vietnam and turned into an avid opponent. It took a full decade for the U.S. to finally pull its troops out of Vietnam, but not before the country’s politics were shattered and Nixon was elected president— twice. Biden should go back and read his history books of the era.

Xin hãy giúp chúng tôi ngăn chặn AIPAC đánh bại những người cấp tiến trong Quốc hội phản đối nạn diệt chủng