One can be very proud of Joe Biden, as he has taken the right stand on campus unrest throughout the nation.
As he stated, there is the right of demonstration and freedom of assembly, but NOT to cause destruction or occupation by anyone or to promote persecution, discrimination, and hatred of any kind.
Biden will have problems with both the Jewish community and the Muslim community, since he is treading a very delicate balance on the Israel-Hamas War, wanting a ceasefire, release of hostages, and to prevent, if possible, any further bloodshed.
For any reasonable person to think Donald Trump is better situated to deal with the crisis requires a sense of delusion and naivete!
I heard on CNN that Netanyahu is still determined to attack Rafah. Biden needs to get tougher with that stubborn old fool!
Alternet has a good article talking about the youth vote. Race is more determinative than age.
https://www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/campus-protests/
This is why Adolf Trump is suddenly worried about RFK Jr. – He’s embracing Trump’s MAGA nuts, speaking at a fundraiser for anti-government groups with January 6 ties.
https://www.alternet.org/jan-6-rfk-jr/
Another good comment from another person on Twitter about the things Biden is doing that the protesters clearly don’t understand.
https://twitter.com/BlackKnight10k/status/1786073003383521335
He’s negotiating a deal to end the war that includes:
• rebuilding Gaza
• a Palestinian state
•normalization between Israel, Saudi Arabia, and other Arab states
He successfully negotiated the only ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, which ended because Hamas wouldn’t abide by the terms
He’s responsible for the only instance of hostages being released by Hamas
He sent billions in foreign aid to Gaza including:
• food
• medical supplies
• clean water
Building a pier off the shore of Gaza to get them more aid (which terrorists have already attacked to delay the aid)
He’s stated over and over that the war against Hamas should be fought with the intent of minimizing civilian casualties
He helped prevent a single casualty from Iran’s attack which included hundreds of drones and missiles
He’s encouraged and supported peaceful protests
He’s condemned Islamophobia
He’s condemned antisemitism
He’s condemned his opponent’s plan to ban Muslims that includes a ban on any refugees from Gaza
A group of nearly 90 House Democrats is urging President Biden to consider halting sales of offensive weaponry to Israel over concerns about continued restrictions on the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza.
https://www.axios.com/2024/05/03/biden-house-democrats-israel-gaza
Counter protesters at the University of Mississippi consisted of a largely, white, male group carrying Trump flags and making racial gestures at the pro-Palestine protesters.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/04/university-of-mississippi-counter-protesters
One thing I’ve heard about the restrictions on aid is that Israel is checking to ensure that no weapons are being smuggled in to Gaza.
It wouldn’t surprise me if someone shows up with a gun at one of these protests.
Several of the progressive anchors on MSNBC are criticizing the rest of the media of being hysterical over the protests and not telling the truth about the police crackdowns. They were even critical of the moderate anchors on the network.
I’ve noticed that as well. Makes it hard to know what to believe.
According to the New York Post, MSNBC’s ratings supposedly went down when the war first started and CNN’s and Fox’s ratings went up. After listening to coverage by some of MSNBC’s anchors, it doesn’t surprise me.
Police tactics have varied in breaking up the protests, with some police using excessive force – clad in riot gear, deploying rubber bullets, using chemical irritants and pepper balls.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/05/us/police-tactics-campus-protests-george-floyd/index.html
We have some Congressional primaries coming up in our neck of the woods in June. Three Democrats are running to replace Bob Good. All three say that Israel has gone too far in their response.
The UN says that northern Gaza is in a full-blown famine.
https://www.npr.org/2024/05/04/1249153712/united-nations-northern-gaza-famine
That’s totally unacceptable – get food, medicine, etc. in there NOW!
Bob Good is being challenged by another Republican who is just as MAGA as Bob Good is. Whichever one of them wins, will go up against whichever Democrat wins in November.
Israel shut down Al Jazeera’s news network in their country. The shuttering of Al Jazeera’s bureau marks the first time Israeli lawmakers have voted to unilaterally shutter operations of a foreign media entity in the country. Press freedom experts warn that it could be a slippery slope.
https://www.axios.com/2024/05/05/israeli-officials-raid-al-jazeeras-jerusalem-bureau-after-shutdown-order
The Biden administration last week put a hold on a shipment of U.S.-made ammunition to Israel. It is the first time since the Oct. 7 attack that the U.S. has stopped a weapons shipment intended for the Israeli military.
https://www.axios.com/2024/05/05/israel-us-ammunition-shipment-hold
Ugh! Trump is soooo despicable! He likened Biden’s White House to Nazis!
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-biden-gestapo-administration-nazi-attack_n_663701c8e4b001bbb50fc79a
IDF is dropping leaflets telling civilians to evacuate eastern Rafah.
Evacuate where? There’s nowhere safe in Gaza to go.
Washington Post nails it!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/05/06/student-protests-mistakes-gaza-help-trump/
I’ve read student protesters’ manifestos. This is ugly stuff. Clueless, too.
Visiting Columbia University last week to see the pro-Palestinian protests took me back to my own student days at the University of California at Berkeley, from 1987 to 1991.
As a journalist for the Daily Californian, the university’s independent, student-run newspaper, I covered a lot of protests for causes as varied as divesting from South Africa, ending U.S. proxy wars in Central America, getting the ROTC off campus and staying out of the 1991 Gulf War (“no blood for oil”). But underlying all of the transitory passions of the day, I detected a powerful nostalgia for the 1960s — that heady era when mere students could imagine they were heroic figures in the vanguard of historical change. It often felt as if the students of my generation were simply historical reenactors of past glories for whom the act of protest was more important than the causes for which they protested.
I discern a similar spirit of revolutionary cosplay among today’s youthful activists who claim to be creating “liberated zones” on campus quads. Indeed, the website of the National Students for Justice in Palestine — the umbrella organization coordinating protests across the country — proclaims wistfully: “There are many parallels between our current movement and the opposition to the war on Vietnam.”
In truth, the current protest movement is minuscule in comparison with the one a half-century ago. There is no military draft to galvanize student activism — this is Israel’s war, not America’s. But there is one glaring similarity between protests then and now: In both cases, the protesters’ ideological and behavioral excesses undermine the very causes for which they fight.
The antiwar movement of the 1960s has been vindicated by history; the Vietnam War is now widely seen as an unwinnable conflict that the United States should never have entered. But that doesn’t mean the protesters were effective in ending it. Far from it. Their extreme tactics — burning draft cards and U.S. flags, trying to shut down draft induction centers and universities by force, chanting pro-Vietcong slogans, clashing with police (“the pigs”) and even carrying out bombings and acts of arson — often backfired.
In a 1988 academic journal, two scholars who studied the impact of the Vietnam-era protests concluded that “anti-war protesters were viewed negatively by the great majority of Middle Americans” and that “anti-war protesters probably increased support for the war.” Indeed, revulsion over campus unrest helped rally the “silent majority” behind President Richard M. Nixon and allowed him to keep the war in Vietnam going for four more futile years in a failed bid for “peace with honor.”
So, too, today’s pro-Palestinian protesters are their own worst enemies; they have even been reenacting some of the excesses of the past, such as briefly occupying Columbia’s Hamilton Hall last week before police cleared them out. The students are not succeeding in forcing universities to divest from Israel, and even if they were, it wouldn’t have much impact on Israel’s economy.
Instead, the demonstrations are making an in-kind contribution to former president Donald Trump’s campaign by fostering an erroneous impression that the country is out of control and requires his authoritarian rule to restore “law and order.” The damage will only grow if demonstrators disrupt this year’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August as they did the one there in 1968.
MAGA Republicans are wrong to exaggerate the importance of the protests or to call for the National Guard to crush them; benign neglect is generally a much more powerful weapon in dealing with attention-seeking activists. But mainstream figures in both parties are right to denounce the demonstrators’ anti-Israel and even anti-Jewish bias and their disruptions of campus life.
Defenders of the protesters dismiss manifestations of antisemitism (such as the Columbia student leader who said that “Zionists don’t deserve to live”) as unfortunate aberrations. But if you read what the protesters have written about their own movement, it’s clear that animus against Israel runs deep — and is far from the only problem with their cause.
The protesters are usually described as being opposed to the war in Gaza and in favor of Palestinian rights. In truth, the groups organizing these protests are opposed to the very existence of what they call the “Zionist project.” As a manifesto from Columbia University Apartheid Divest, endorsed by 94 student groups, states: “The brutal onslaught over the last month is but another chapter in over 75 years of violence, dispossession, and ethnic cleansing against the Palestinian people.” No mention, naturally, of all the violence perpetrated against Israel, including the horrifying Hamas attack on Oct. 7 and the Iranian drone and missile strike on April 13.
The manifesto goes on to endorse “the Right of Return” for Palestinian refugees who have fled Israel since its creation in 1948. Allowing 7 million Palestinians — most of them the descendants of refugees — to move to Israel (with its 7 million Jewish and 2 million Arab residents) would be a death knell for Israel as a Jewish state. The protesters’ slogan “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is a call not for a two-state solution but for a single Palestinian state — and a mass exodus of Jews.
Note how one-sided all of this is: While denouncing alleged Israeli atrocities, the manifesto has not one word of censure for Hamas or its brutal tactics, which include seizing hostages and perpetrating sexual violence, in addition to committing wholesale murder. Indeed, even though the protesters claim to care about Palestinian lives, they do not denounce Hamas for stealing international aid to build its tunnels and missiles or for using civilians as human shields. They call for Israel to stop fighting but not for Hamas to release its hostages or surrender.
The protesters’ agenda does not end in the Middle East; indeed, the movement’s ideologues see Israel as merely an “imperial outpost in the Arab world,” even though Jews have lived in the area since antiquity. The Columbia University Apartheid Divest manifesto proclaims: “We believe in liberation. All systems of oppression are interlinked: The fates of the peoples of Palestine, Kurdistan, Sudan, Congo, Armenia, Ireland, Puerto Rico, Korea, Guam, Haiti, Hawai’i, Kashmir, Cuba, Turtle Island, and other colonized bodies are interconnected.”
Reading this politically correct claptrap, I was left with many questions, beginning with: What the heck is Turtle Island? A quick internet search revealed that this was a name used by some indigenous groups for Central America and North America, but that only raises another question: Who do the students want to liberate “Turtle Island” from? Assuming that most of them aren’t Native Americans, aren’t they occupiers, too? Many of the other territories listed are just as puzzling — who, exactly, is occupying Sudan, Congo, Armenia, Haiti, Cuba or Korea (either North or South)? I can guess who is supposedly oppressing Hawaii and Puerto Rico, but I’m at a loss to say what this oppression consists of. Too much tourism?
Just as notable are the omissions — there is no call to liberate Ukrainian territory from Russian occupation, the Uyghurs from Chinese imperialism, Syria from Bashar al-Assad’s bloody reign or North Korea from Kim Jong Un’s Stalinist police state. This is not an objective list of global injustices; it is a grab bag of far-left grievances that includes trendy but vacuous calls for “creating a multi-generational, intersectional, and accessible space dedicated to fighting for abolition, transnational feminism, anticapitalism, and decolonization.”
The National Students for Justice in Palestine website is even more radical. It approvingly quotes Mao Zedong and Vladimir Lenin, denounces “bourgeois democracy” and showers praise on the fundamentalist Houthis (“Yemeni comrades stopping commerce in the Red Sea”). It feels like something that could have been written by a propaganda ministry in Pyongyang or Caracas.
Granted, most of the rank-and-file demonstrators probably are not Marxist revolutionaries. Many probably are not even Hamas supporters. Most, I imagine, are simply well-meaning young people who are understandably troubled by all the suffering caused by Israel’s counteroffensive in Gaza. But the protesters are repeating the mistakes of the 1960s by letting the most extreme elements define their movement, thereby discrediting their cause among an electorate that is not immersed in the work of Frantz Fanon or Herbert Marcuse. The protesters might even be losing student support. “Most of the people I speak to are not really supportive of the protests,” one Columbia undergraduate told me. “The incredible militancy of the protesters, I suspect, is stopping new people from joining their cause.”
Although the students are failing to achieve their ostensible goals, they are getting to enjoy the thrill — and the media attention that comes with it — of revolutionary cosplay. They have managed to shift attention from what’s going on in Gaza to what’s going on on U.S. college campuses. That’s a victory for self-regarding student radicals — not for long-suffering Palestinians.
Sounds like the attack in eastern Rafah has begun.
The Biden administration is rushing to finish a high-stakes report due to Congress this week on whether Israel has violated international humanitarian law during its war in Gaza — a determination that could lead to significant repercussions and further inflame divisions at home and abroad.
The report has been the subject of intense debate for months across the administration and has already led to deep divisions inside the State Department, where some offices have expressed doubt over Israel’s assurances that it has used US weapons without violating international law during its 7-month war in Gaza.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/07/politics/report-looms-biden-israel-international-law/index.html
Former Republican –
New York Times has an article as well expressing some similar criticism about the protests.
Here’s a quote from it:
“I find the whole thing very troubling, because the dominant messages from the loudest voices and many placards reject important truths about how this latest Gaza war started and what will be required to bring it to a fair and sustainable conclusion…they are virtually all about stopping Israel’s shameful behavior in killing so many Palestinian civilians in its pursuit of Hamas fighters, while giving a free pass to Hamas’s shameful breaking of the cease-fire that existed on Oct. 7… when people chant slogans like ‘liberate Palestine’ and ‘from the river to the sea,’ they are essentially calling for the erasure of the state of Israel, not a two-state solution…The third reason that these protests have become part of the problem is that they ignore the view of many Palestinians in Gaza who detest Hamas’s autocracy.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/08/opinion/campus-protests-gaza.html
Republicans don’t like that Biden pausing that shipment of bombs.
I don’t particularly like progressive politicians, progressive news media, and the protesters using the term genocide either.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/07/opinions/columbia-university-israel-campus-protests-antisemitism-ghitis/index.html
During a recent visit to the student encampment at Columbia University, Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota made what she may have thought was an enlightened statement. “We should not have to tolerate antisemitism or bigotry for all Jewish students,” she declared, “whether they are pro-genocide or anti-genocide.” Omar, whose daughter was arrested in the protests, appeared to be implying that students who back Israel’s actions in Gaza are supporters of genocide.
The claim, the chants, the smearing of President Joe Biden as “Genocide Joe” (to former President Donald Trump’s delight) for his support for Israel are part of an astonishingly successful campaign to paint Israel’s defensive war against Hamas as an act of genocide.
The charge is not just absurd, it’s outrageous. Yet incredibly, it’s a smear that has gained traction.
Yes, Israel has killed thousands of Palestinians following the Hamas attacks of October 7. The suffering of the population in Gaza is heartbreaking, horrific. And Israel may not have done everything it could to minimize the civilian death toll. But the leap to brand its military campaign as a genocide — the depth of humanity’s depravity — is unconscionable.
Many people see, as I do, a direct connection in the genocide accusations to a centuries’ old calumny that has bedeviled the Jewish people, used since the Middle Ages to taunt them and even to justify massacring and exiling them. It’s called the blood libel, and it has long helped fuel the apparently undying fires of antisemitism.
The original blood libel claimed that Jews murdered Christians, particularly children, so they could use their blood in rituals. It may sound laughable, ridiculous, but across hundreds of years many have believed it. Some still do. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer confronted a Hamas official on air in 2014 about his assertion that Jews use Christian blood in the matzo they eat at Passover.
Over the centuries, this defamation gave rise to other well-worn antisemitic tropes — that Jews are vampires, blood-suckers and organ-harvesters. Images of Jews and Stars of David dripping blood have cropped up repeatedly since October 7.
Indeed, too many today are willing to assume the worst possible motives for the actions of Jews — or in this case, the Jewish state — making the historical blood libel the heir to an ever-evolving series of modern slanders culminating in genocide.
Genocide is a term that became enshrined in international law after Nazi Germany sought to annihilate every Jew in Europe, killing 6 million, including about 1.5 million children. It is something completely different from what is happening in Gaza.
The UN’s Genocide Convention defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.” The term was coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish jurist who in the 1930s began to push for an international law barring such atrocities as Jews in Eastern Europe endured brutal pogroms. He escaped to the US and later helped prepare the Nuremberg trials against the Nazis who, among the millions they had killed, had murdered his family who remained behind in Europe.
Claims that Israel has been committing a genocide of Palestinians date to long before October 7. Yet the population of Gaza was estimated to be less than 400,000 when Israel captured the territory from Egypt in a war against multiple Arab countries in 1967. It’s now estimated at just over 2 million. Population growth of almost 600% would make it the most inept genocide in the history of the world.
What about now?
Those repeating the word genocide over and over, turning it into a mantra that penetrates the public consciousness, smearing Israel and anyone who supports it, ignore the facts of this war.
This is not an unprovoked war, like Russia’s against Ukraine. It’s not a civil war between rival militias, like the one raging in Sudan — which, by the way, is being ignored by almost everyone, even though the UN describes it as one of the “worst humanitarian crises in recent memory,” where a famine could kill 500,000 people.
No, Israel was attacked. On October 7, Hamas launched a gruesome assault on Israeli civilians, killing some 1,200 — including many women and children — and dragging hundreds of them as hostages into Gaza. Today dozens — including many women and children — remain in captivity.
Those who keep saying that Israel’s response is an act of revenge rather than the strategic, defensive war that most Israelis view as a fight for national survival against a determined enemy backed by a powerful country are deliberately distorting reality. In doing so, they are perversely evoking the same false blood lust and grotesqueness embedded in the blood libel archetype.
Hamas’ massacre, its wide-ranging sexual violence, its burning of entire families in their homes, its vow to do it again — these and other serious threats that the group poses to Israelis get ignored in the characterizations of the Israel Defense Forces as pursuing only vengeance by killing Gazan civilians.
Indeed, Hamas’ actions, which precipitated this war, don’t seem to exist in the minds of ostensibly humanitarian-minded protesters. Nor even the fate of the hostages, still captive in Hamas tunnels.
Although the campus protests vary in their message and actions from school to school, we never hear protesters chant that Hamas should release the hostages or accept a ceasefire. Quite the contrary. Accusations against Israel at times include praise for Hamas, one of whose aims — the end of the Jewish state — is shared by some key organizers of the student protests. As Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently said, “It remains astounding to me that the world is almost deafeningly silent when it comes to Hamas.”
Accusing Israel of genocide and putting the entire onus for stopping the war, putting all the blame for the deaths, on the Jewish state is even more astounding because Hamas — designated a terrorist organization by the US, the European Union and many other countries — is a group whose explicit goal, according to its founding charter, is not just to destroy Israel, but to kill Jews. That is the definition of genocide.
Yet the casualty figures from Gaza are produced by people who report to Hamas, which has ruled Gaza as a dictatorship for nearly two decades. They are repeated regularly, without noticeable skepticism, often without specific attribution to Hamas as the source. I don’t know how many people have died. But it’s reasonable to believe that Hamas has an incentive to inflate the numbers.
Still, the death toll, even by the Hamas count, does not in any way suggest a genocidal campaign. The terror organization puts the total at about 35,000. The figure, disputed by The Washington Institute for Near East Policy among other think tanks and researchers, includes Hamas fighters. That means the number of civilians killed, whatever the total, is actually lower.
Compare that to the death toll in Mosul, Iraq, where coalition forces uprooted ISIS from a city that had some 600,000 people at the time. Estimates of the exact number of deaths vary, ranging from 9,000 to 40,000 (the latter is the estimate of Kurdish intelligence). The lowest figure is on par with the rate of total deaths reported by Hamas authorities in Gaza that does not distinguish civilians from Hamas fighters, while the highest is four times greater.
I don’t recall hearing the term genocide used there, or in any of the battles that led to more than half a million people being killed in Afghanistan and Iraq during America’s wars there. And yet, Israel has been repeatedly smeared with this damning accusation.
CNN’s Jake Tapper recently asked Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, a distinguished and experienced US military leader, if he thought Israel is conducting its war by the same standards — weighing the military value of targets versus the risk to civilians — that the US would use. His answer: “Yes, I do.”
The death of any innocent civilian is a tragedy, and too many have died in Gaza. My heart aches when I see the images and hear the stories of what they’re enduring. But Israel is fighting a war unlike any in recent memory. Urban combat is notoriously difficult, notoriously hard on civilians. That’s magnified in Gaza by Hamas’ deliberate effort to surround itself with civilians, embedded in tunnels, with the knowledge — accurate, as it turns out — that high death counts turn global opinion against Israel and create pressure to stop the war so that Hamas may survive to continue fighting.
South Africa formalized the newest incarnation of the blood libel when it brought a case to the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide. The court’s response has been misreported, as its former president just explained. It found that Palestinians have a “plausible right” to be protected from genocide. Many had erroneously reported that the court said South Africa’s accusation of genocide itself was plausible.
Israel’s image is not helped by its current government. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has brought into his coalition some extremist ministers whose utterances and behavior are beyond repugnant. But their words are not national policy. In fact, some Israelis themselves — including high-profile politicians — have condemned them in the strongest terms. Which is part of why Omar’s efforts to clean up her aspersions toward Jewish students by pointing to such rhetoric after she came under pressure is unconvincing.
One of the areas where Israel has failed is in the delivery of food to the region. The UN says parts of Gaza, particularly the north, are facing starvation, or are already in the midst of a famine. Any death from hunger is appalling, and Israel should have long ago improved the operations to screen deliveries. But the dire situation is hardly evidence of genocidal intent.
Aid distribution in the middle of a lawless war zone without police to protect supplies is incredibly difficult, and Hamas at times appears to be trying to make the situation worse. Hamas has “intercepted and diverted” food aid, according to the State Department. Trucks carrying food have been ransacked, looted and otherwise attacked, according to UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Palestine James McGoldrick, though he didn’t specify by which groups. On Sunday, Hamas fired rockets in the direction of one of the main aid crossings, killing four Israeli soldiers and disrupting humanitarian deliveries. Even the pier being built by the US to boost aid deliveries has come under fire.
It’s fair to criticize Israel on many counts. Its conduct of this war can and will be debated for years to come. But protesters calling Israel’s defensive war a genocidal one, politicians accusing supporters of Israel of being pro-genocide and even journalists and other observers being so accepting of the premise that they let such charges stand unchallenged — as so often happens — is another ugly example of the resurgence of the oldest hate: antisemitism for the 21st century.
Now some Democrats are also upset about Biden pausing the weapons shipment.
If true, torture of detained Palestinians is totally unacceptable.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/10/middleeast/israel-sde-teiman-detention-whistleblowers-intl-cmd/index.html