Every day provides a new low. Just when I think we’ve reached the bottom, somehow I’m proven wrong and we plunge to depths I couldn’t imagine. It wasn’t enough for Gaza to be blockaded for 16 years, and it wasn’t enough to drop 12,000 tons of ordnance on a besieged civilian population, and it wasn’t enough to cut off their access to food, water, electricity, and medical supplies, and it’s not enough to grieve their dead while being called terrorist sympathizers, now we’ve reached a point where the number of dead is being publicly questioned by the most powerful politician on the planet.
The dusty worm himself, Joe Biden, took to the stage yesterday and confidently refuted Palestinian casualty figures, saying, "I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed. I'm sure innocents have been killed, and it's the price of waging a war." If I wasn’t actively rooting for Biden’s downfall before yesterday, you better believe I’m hoping and praying that the senile bastard takes a dive down the next flight of stairs he encounters. I’m one step away from making a trip to our nation’s capital just to leave banana peels around the white house in hopes that the useless old coward slips and enjoys his final tumble. On everything that I love I haven’t hated a geriatric this much since I learned about the crimes of Henry Kissinger. I’m honestly running out of insults for a guy in obvious cognitive decline.
There’s this inexplicable western mentality that somehow suggests that Israel is the only credible actor in the region, despite the apartheid regime’s well-documented history of lying about their responsibility for acts of horrific violence. Sorry, did I say inexplicable? I meant openly and obviously racist. I don't know how else to explain it. Has Biden not been shown the same videos and images we’ve been seeing? Do the people in Gaza need to send over pictures and ID papers for every dead Palestinian? Would it be more convincing if Biden had access to a running tally of exactly who was killed and how they lost their lives? If an organization like Human Rights Watch understands that the death toll reported by the Gaza Health Ministry is accurate, what exactly is the evidence necessary for the so-called leader of the free world to acknowledge that thousands of innocent Palestinians have been slaughtered in the past two weeks?
This phenomenon is nothing new. The American government, under both democratic and republican administrations, has always denied atrocities carried out by client states and allies and used its diplomatic and media influence to this end. It happened in East Timor in the 70’s and in El Salvador in the 80’s and it continues to happen with the atrocities unfolding in Yemen today. When Biden says he doesn’t believe the Palestinian death toll, he’s effectively telling the murderous Israeli forces that mass civilian casualties are fine because we won’t believe the numbers anyway and it’s just “the price of doing business”. But this price has names and faces and families.
The prominent Palestinian journalist Wael Dahdouh was reporting on the violence yesterday when he learned that his own wife and children had been murdered by an Israeli airstrike which targeted them in southern Gaza. His family had fled to the area and were sheltering there because they’d been led to believe that it would be safe from the bombardment. But it’s clear that no area of Gaza is immune to the ethnic cleansing being carried out by Israel and funded by America.
Meanwhile, the American secretary of state Tony Blinken told a group of Jewish community leaders earlier this week that he asked the Qatari prime minister less than two weeks ago to tone down Al Jazeera's rhetoric surrounding the genocide in Gaza. American officials are upset that the details of their complicity to mass murder are becoming public knowledge, so rather than change their behavior, they’re trying to turn the volume down.
What these American officials need to recognize is that there is no “post-war” plan for the Israeli regime. With each passing day it’s becoming increasingly obvious that this isn’t a “war” but is instead a genocidal campaign of complete, or at the very least significant, forcible population transfer of Palestinians out of Palestine. The post-war plan for Gaza in the eyes of Benny Netanyahu is that there is no Gaza.
There’s a very specific and unnamed horror to watching Palestinian writers and activists whose accounts I’ve followed for years go from posts of desperation about the current hell in Gaza to radio silence, followed by an eventual announcement of their deaths. People I’ve never met and will never have the opportunity to meet, but I’ve watched and listened to from a distance for a long time. I’m not exactly sure when humanity dropped to the all-time low of having to prove the deaths of thousands of children or to explain that killing thousands of kids is a bad thing, but here we are, explaining anyway.
In contrast to the apathy and inaction of American elected officials, college students at more than 100 campuses across the country walked out yesterday to protest for a ceasefire in Gaza. Many of these students also called for their universities to sever their close ties to arms manufacturers providing Israel with its genocidal weapons. Solidarity can take a thousand different forms, and these students rose to the challenge of speaking out for the innocent people of Gaza.
Celtic Football Club, the top-flight Scottish team, defied orders from soccer’s highest governing body and made their support for Palestine known yesterday. Fans were ordered not to bring flags or demonstrate their solidarity, but the Scots brought out hundreds of Palestinian flags anyway to remind the world that the Palestinian struggle is a global struggle against oppression, against apartheid, and against genocide.
Side Items
Another One: In the 36th American mass killing of 2023, a man in Maine shot and killed at least 16 people at a bowling alley in Lewiston, Maine, and then fled, prompting an extensive manhunt. Robert Card, a firearms instructor and reservist in the army, is believed to be the perpetrator