Friday, February 9: "Over the top" Behavior
Buckle up my pals, this election season is gonna be one for the books
Yesterday, the geriatric president of the United States decided to share some “previously unscheduled remarks” with the press and public, because it’s always a good idea to have your cognitive decline on full display. During his brief speech, Joey Biden referred to the Egyptian dictator El-Sisi as the "president of Mexico", which is objectively funny, and proceeded to describe the Palestinian side of the Rafah border crossing as "the Israeli side", which is less funny. For the love of God, someone kindly get this man to an assisted living community immediately!
This is the husk of a man who, if you started burying him in the ground right now he wouldn’t even argue, he’d just get comfortable and happily embrace the long sleep. As election season enters full swing, there’s a better than decent chance that by the end of this year we have columnists at major newspapers and cable news talking heads trying to explain that “actually, it's perfectly normal to soil yourself in public” as a defense of one candidate or the other. Apart from his numerous gaffes and evident inability to focus on the most basic of topics, the most controversial thing Biden said was apparently his description of Israel’s assault on Gaza.
“The conduct of the response in Gaza – in the Gaza Strip – has been over the top.”
–Joseph Biden, with a strong contender for understatement of the year
This is the first time I’ve heard Biden say anything other than total support for the apartheid regime, and all he could manage was “over the top”. This coward had four months to come up with a way to describe the war crimes and unimaginable carnage our tax dollars are funding, and he winds up describing it the way I might describe a stranger’s outfit. Off the top of my head I can think of about a thousand ways to describe the inhumanity we’ve seen over the past 124 days; horrifying, gut-wrenching, nightmare-inducing, barbaric, destructive, intentionally murderous, and of course my go-to, genocidal. See how easy it is to call things accurately when your brain hasn’t been reduced to mushy oatmeal?
Despite Biden’s ridiculous claims about protecting the safety of Americans everywhere, two Palestinian-American brothers with roots in the Chicago-area were abducted by Israeli forces in an early morning raid on their shelter in Gaza yesterday. These brothers, Borak and Hashem Alagha, 18 and 20 years old, were born and raised in Chicago’s western suburb of Lombard before their family moved to Canada and eventually Gaza. Their abduction comes months after American officials approved them for evacuation but failed to secure their exit. When asked about the kidnapping of American citizens by Israeli soldiers, national security council spokesman John Kirby said, “We’re obviously talking to our Israeli counterparts about this to get more information about what happened here. I mean, we take this seriously as you would expect we would.”
Elsewhere in the US, Minneapolis officially passed the strongest ceasefire resolution in the country earlier this week, calling not only for an immediate and permanent ceasefire, but also ending US aid to the apartheid state of Israel and freeing Palestinian prisoners. The office of Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, who is Jewish, claimed he’s been “clear and consistent” in his support for a ceasefire, but that he vetoed this resolution last week due to his concerns that its language was “one-sided” and about rising antisemitism in Minneapolis. Not sure how freeing Palestinian prisoners is antisemitic, but alas, I still have much to learn.
Side Items
Hospital Attacks: Israeli snipers have killed at least 21 Palestinians after they opened fire on displaced civilians trying to reach Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza’s Khan Younis. Al Jazeera reports that snipers have surrounded the hospital and were “shooting at every moving object” as people were trying to reach it from two nearby densely-populated residential neighborhoods. The world might choose to focus on Biden’s cognitive limitations, but don’t forget that every day, innocent Palestinians are being targeted and killed by the apartheid regime
Love Still Prevails: This brief video illustrates the depth of resolve in not just Palestinians, but in their neighboring Lebanese brethren as well. A reporter for al-Mayadeen in Lebanon proposed to his wife with an Israeli artillery shell which almost hit and killed him, but failed to detonate. This hopeless romantic took this shell, filled it with flowers, and proposed to the woman he loves. The haters are furious