True, if Biden is not actually senile, he may understand he has lost the election. But does he then understand that Trump—or someone even worse than Trump—will win? As a Catholic, I can’t understand Biden’s Zionism. My faith teaches me that all God’s creation is a marvel to be loved and cherished, and that all humans are equally children of God. Zionism is the dead opposite of this
But still less can I understand his lack of concern for his own legacy and his own country. Doesn’t he realize that Trump—or someone like him—will undo the good he has actually done where labor rights and the environment are concerned? Doesn’t he care?
There are a couple of accounts I follow, actually three, that make the case that: this - genocide is to them, unsurprising. Our society is built on white supremacy and genocide is exactly where white supremacy leads. They go through the bottom layers of the foundation, which include verbal attacks thru racist and dehumanizing speech, then threats of physical violence, violence by law enforcement targeting non whites, and we definitely have moved right on up each of the lower steps and have now reached the apex - genocide.
They have made the point that avoiding conflict is a white supremacist tactic. That hit hard.
Well, heh, perhaps I shouldn’t point out that Biden is Catholic? Zionism is some sort of superimposition, it would seem, something that can modularly fit over top another belief system. (At the same time, I’m reading A Psychohistory of Zionism where the author has advanced that some early theorists and leaders in Israel were extremely concerned that Zionism had superseded Judaism to become a sort of secular religion substitute.)
Anyway, I’m not sure how Biden reconciles these two belief systems. Some folks I know have said that, in the US, support for Israel has been seen as, again, a secular religion, just part of what it means to be American. And I’ve encountered some people who note that, until very recently, there was no downside to avidly supporting the Zionist cause in political circles. It was another layer of networking, so far as I can tell.
As for whether Biden recognizes the danger not only that he’s placed himself in but the country as a whole, I don’t know. He has a blind spot. As I’ve noted before, he bristles when it’s suggested to him, even apologetically, that some people think he’s supporting genocide. He takes it personally. So as long as that’s the case, he is invested in not seeing what he’s doing. This is why I say he’s operating irrationally, at least as far as this one policy point is concerned. He’s not being logical.
The fact that he’s willing to risk the election for this tells me that it's probably hype on the part of the Democratic Party that this election is the last thing that stands between us and the end of the Republic. One, they’ve been saying that for the last three elections combined. Two, if it were true, Biden would do well to get out of the way and let someone else without the taint of genocide become the standard bearer. He’d sacrifice his desire for a second term and put the country first. He’s not doing that, so how much truth is in the sentiment in the first place?
It’s as simple as the fact that Biden believes that supporting Israel is in line with American foreign policy objectives. He’s not a Christian Zionist in the way that evangelicals are (there are Catholic Zionists, but the more self-aware ones know they can’t shoehorn it into a theological framework). Whether unconditional support for Israel is actually good for the US in the long run is debatable, but our political establishment believes that it is. The anti-Muslim and anti-Arab sentiment that flowered after 9/11 was never properly dealt with. The fact that so many “progressives” think that it’s okay to kill 200+ Palestinians, including women and children, to rescue four Israelis says a lot about who does and doesn’t matter in this world. It’s also worth noting that the freed Israelis look pretty good, whereas Palestinians released from Israeli jails always show visible signs of abuse, torture, and neglect.
I am having a tough time understanding Biden’s motivation(s) for supporting Israel’s genocidal acts. Is he getting terrible advice? Or does he believe that this scale of killing and starving down civilians is somehow justified?
I cannot divine why Biden has behaved the way he has. And that’s a problem in itself: people should not have to wrack their brains trying to figure out a president’s basis for foreign policy. All throughout this military incursion by Israel, commentators here have publicly wondered why Biden has left no daylight between the US and Israel. And that began right away, when Biden sent ships into the Mediterranean to give cover to Israel as it began its bombing campaign. People said it wasn’t in US interests to be so deeply involved, and that hasn’t changed.
Some people point to Biden’s long-standing devotion to the State of Israel since he had a conversation with Golda Meir, the storied Prime Minister of Israel, back in the ‘70s. He’s also a self-professed Zionist. At the same time, some people such as journalist Jeremy Scahill point to a conversation Biden had with PM Menachem Begin, where Biden said he too would have gone into Lebanon and if women and children had to die to accomplish the mission then so be it. (As the story goes, Begin said this sentiment was too extreme, even for him, a former Irgun member.)
If Biden is getting bad advice, that’s on him. It is he who assembled the team of 20-30 close advisers on this topic and who iced the State Department out of deliberations for the most part. He set the standard very early on; you had diplomats (especially those who resigned their posts and so had more freedom to discuss their experiences) say that both the tone and the directive were established so that criticism of Biden’s policy in the Middle East was not to be countenanced. That’s setting the stage for groupthink to form. In that way, Biden did it to himself.
I think some of his handlers / advisers clearly thought that this issue was a side issue that would not figure in the 2024 election, and so they committed full bore, possibly to earn as much benefit politically in the immediate short-term. Perhaps they thought it would wrap up by the end of last year. The moment Israel started plainly committing war crimes and expressly going against the Geneva Conventions (i.e., sieging and destroying a hospital), that was the time to create space, and certainly it was at that point that putting condition on aid should have been seriously deliberated. None of that seems to have happened. Again, that’s on Biden — he has eyes to see, and as the pinnacle leader, it was his responsibility to gauge when Israel had gone too far.
I’m probably recounting things you already are aware of, so apologies if I’m retreading ground with which you’re already familiar.
The US did not count on South Africa to bring a case before the International Court of Justice. I think the credible point that Israel is plausibly committing genocide threw Biden & Netanyahu’s entire strategy for a loop, because now their opponents had a serious charge with which to make rhetorical inroads. And I think Biden & Co. recognized the danger of that ruling, because only that explains why the US & other countries pulled UNRWA funding on the same day — by all accounts, to coordinate a move like that, the timing had to be one of the things considered.
So right then and ever since, Biden has in one way or another been involved in Israel’s state policy of restricting aid to the populace in territory Israel occupies. Biden’s WH says that it’s doing all it can to pressure Israel to open land crossings, but it has dithered. The pier was a gambit to extend people’s time horizon for how much longer this military incursion would run.
This is getting lengthy. Suffice it to say that I think that Biden got in deep when he withdrew UNRWA funding and signed that rescinding of funds into law. I think he’s committed to Israel’s use of starvation as a method of warfare now, which helps explain the explosive and over-the-top reaction to the news that the ICC was seeking arrest warrants for Netanyahu & Yoav “human animals” Gallant.
To wrap, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that many commentators that I’ve encountered, especially in the last two weeks but particularly over this weekend, have said that Biden clearly doesn’t value Palestinian life. Perhaps he doesn’t accord them the same value as Israeli life; perhaps he doesn’t value them at all. Either way, his callousness toward the plight of the Palestinians has shone through, extraordinarily so.
What gets me about this is his sheer ignorance and racism. Biden is Catholic, so he says. Then why doesn’t he care that Israel is besieging and starving one of the oldest Catholic communities in the world—the Parish of the Holy Family in Gaza? Doesn’t he care what the Pope thinks? The Pope opposes this genocide, and calls that parish every blessed day.
Of course, as a Catholic, I’m also against the wholesale murder of little Muslim children. I’m against the starvation and torture of any civilians, regardless of their faith. I will never understand why President Biden is okay with such things. As you say, he’s irrational on this. And that’s honestly terrifying.
In my experience, white American and European Catholics have very little knowledge or understanding about non-white Catholics. At best, they think they’re “doing it wrong” and it worst they think Catholicism is a sort of racial religion for whites. Obviously, neither of these statements is true, but there is a failure to understand that the power dynamics within Catholicism have shifted away from Europe. As to Biden, I just don’t think he considers Palestinian Christians to be worthy of concern. If he met any, I’m sure he’d probably chide them for being “antisemitic” and not accepting their inferior status, as was the case in an essay I read in “First Things” on the subject. Biden has always been very conservative and personally close to members of the Dixiecrat faction. I suspect that he thinks that American interests in the Middle East outweigh human right concerns, especially if he doesn’t think the people being affected are actually human.
Since the end of the Cold War (well, the first one anyway) a sort of messianic neoconservativism has become the default position of the American foreign policy establishment. That is to say, there’s a belief that the goal of American foreign policy is perpetual world dominance in all spheres of life: cultural, political, militarily, the control of telecommunications, and outer space. The Wolfowitz doctrine that was devised shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union states that no rival country can be allowed to usurp the US’ pre-eminent position in the world. Not the EU countries, not Japan, not China, not Russia, nobody. When some loser like Victoria Nuland talks about “spreading democracy,” what she actually means is increasing the number of American vassal states. Israel serves an important function for the US’ mission in that it is a strategically located laboratory for new forms of surveillance and imprisonment. There are lots of articles about how Israel helps to train American cops, how Israeli engineers are creating new forms of surveillance to better monitor Palestinians and other undesirables, partnerships between Israeli and American defense companies, etc. What’s being used against the Palestinians inevitably gets used against us (during the George Floyd protests, Palestinians were actually giving advice on Twitter about what to do if you get tear gassed or shot by rubber bullets). This is why Biden famously proclaimed forty odd years ago that if Israel didn’t exist, it would have to be invented.
Incidentally, I have never understood why Biden thought that was a good thing to say, considering that he was reprising a Hitler quote. Nazism’s form of totalitarianism needed a despised scapegoat. Hitler said that if Jews didn’t exist, he would have had to have invented them.
True, if Biden is not actually senile, he may understand he has lost the election. But does he then understand that Trump—or someone even worse than Trump—will win? As a Catholic, I can’t understand Biden’s Zionism. My faith teaches me that all God’s creation is a marvel to be loved and cherished, and that all humans are equally children of God. Zionism is the dead opposite of this
But still less can I understand his lack of concern for his own legacy and his own country. Doesn’t he realize that Trump—or someone like him—will undo the good he has actually done where labor rights and the environment are concerned? Doesn’t he care?
I’m completely baffled by this.
There are a couple of accounts I follow, actually three, that make the case that: this - genocide is to them, unsurprising. Our society is built on white supremacy and genocide is exactly where white supremacy leads. They go through the bottom layers of the foundation, which include verbal attacks thru racist and dehumanizing speech, then threats of physical violence, violence by law enforcement targeting non whites, and we definitely have moved right on up each of the lower steps and have now reached the apex - genocide.
They have made the point that avoiding conflict is a white supremacist tactic. That hit hard.
Well, heh, perhaps I shouldn’t point out that Biden is Catholic? Zionism is some sort of superimposition, it would seem, something that can modularly fit over top another belief system. (At the same time, I’m reading A Psychohistory of Zionism where the author has advanced that some early theorists and leaders in Israel were extremely concerned that Zionism had superseded Judaism to become a sort of secular religion substitute.)
Anyway, I’m not sure how Biden reconciles these two belief systems. Some folks I know have said that, in the US, support for Israel has been seen as, again, a secular religion, just part of what it means to be American. And I’ve encountered some people who note that, until very recently, there was no downside to avidly supporting the Zionist cause in political circles. It was another layer of networking, so far as I can tell.
As for whether Biden recognizes the danger not only that he’s placed himself in but the country as a whole, I don’t know. He has a blind spot. As I’ve noted before, he bristles when it’s suggested to him, even apologetically, that some people think he’s supporting genocide. He takes it personally. So as long as that’s the case, he is invested in not seeing what he’s doing. This is why I say he’s operating irrationally, at least as far as this one policy point is concerned. He’s not being logical.
The fact that he’s willing to risk the election for this tells me that it's probably hype on the part of the Democratic Party that this election is the last thing that stands between us and the end of the Republic. One, they’ve been saying that for the last three elections combined. Two, if it were true, Biden would do well to get out of the way and let someone else without the taint of genocide become the standard bearer. He’d sacrifice his desire for a second term and put the country first. He’s not doing that, so how much truth is in the sentiment in the first place?
It’s as simple as the fact that Biden believes that supporting Israel is in line with American foreign policy objectives. He’s not a Christian Zionist in the way that evangelicals are (there are Catholic Zionists, but the more self-aware ones know they can’t shoehorn it into a theological framework). Whether unconditional support for Israel is actually good for the US in the long run is debatable, but our political establishment believes that it is. The anti-Muslim and anti-Arab sentiment that flowered after 9/11 was never properly dealt with. The fact that so many “progressives” think that it’s okay to kill 200+ Palestinians, including women and children, to rescue four Israelis says a lot about who does and doesn’t matter in this world. It’s also worth noting that the freed Israelis look pretty good, whereas Palestinians released from Israeli jails always show visible signs of abuse, torture, and neglect.
I am having a tough time understanding Biden’s motivation(s) for supporting Israel’s genocidal acts. Is he getting terrible advice? Or does he believe that this scale of killing and starving down civilians is somehow justified?
I cannot divine why Biden has behaved the way he has. And that’s a problem in itself: people should not have to wrack their brains trying to figure out a president’s basis for foreign policy. All throughout this military incursion by Israel, commentators here have publicly wondered why Biden has left no daylight between the US and Israel. And that began right away, when Biden sent ships into the Mediterranean to give cover to Israel as it began its bombing campaign. People said it wasn’t in US interests to be so deeply involved, and that hasn’t changed.
Some people point to Biden’s long-standing devotion to the State of Israel since he had a conversation with Golda Meir, the storied Prime Minister of Israel, back in the ‘70s. He’s also a self-professed Zionist. At the same time, some people such as journalist Jeremy Scahill point to a conversation Biden had with PM Menachem Begin, where Biden said he too would have gone into Lebanon and if women and children had to die to accomplish the mission then so be it. (As the story goes, Begin said this sentiment was too extreme, even for him, a former Irgun member.)
If Biden is getting bad advice, that’s on him. It is he who assembled the team of 20-30 close advisers on this topic and who iced the State Department out of deliberations for the most part. He set the standard very early on; you had diplomats (especially those who resigned their posts and so had more freedom to discuss their experiences) say that both the tone and the directive were established so that criticism of Biden’s policy in the Middle East was not to be countenanced. That’s setting the stage for groupthink to form. In that way, Biden did it to himself.
I think some of his handlers / advisers clearly thought that this issue was a side issue that would not figure in the 2024 election, and so they committed full bore, possibly to earn as much benefit politically in the immediate short-term. Perhaps they thought it would wrap up by the end of last year. The moment Israel started plainly committing war crimes and expressly going against the Geneva Conventions (i.e., sieging and destroying a hospital), that was the time to create space, and certainly it was at that point that putting condition on aid should have been seriously deliberated. None of that seems to have happened. Again, that’s on Biden — he has eyes to see, and as the pinnacle leader, it was his responsibility to gauge when Israel had gone too far.
I’m probably recounting things you already are aware of, so apologies if I’m retreading ground with which you’re already familiar.
The US did not count on South Africa to bring a case before the International Court of Justice. I think the credible point that Israel is plausibly committing genocide threw Biden & Netanyahu’s entire strategy for a loop, because now their opponents had a serious charge with which to make rhetorical inroads. And I think Biden & Co. recognized the danger of that ruling, because only that explains why the US & other countries pulled UNRWA funding on the same day — by all accounts, to coordinate a move like that, the timing had to be one of the things considered.
So right then and ever since, Biden has in one way or another been involved in Israel’s state policy of restricting aid to the populace in territory Israel occupies. Biden’s WH says that it’s doing all it can to pressure Israel to open land crossings, but it has dithered. The pier was a gambit to extend people’s time horizon for how much longer this military incursion would run.
This is getting lengthy. Suffice it to say that I think that Biden got in deep when he withdrew UNRWA funding and signed that rescinding of funds into law. I think he’s committed to Israel’s use of starvation as a method of warfare now, which helps explain the explosive and over-the-top reaction to the news that the ICC was seeking arrest warrants for Netanyahu & Yoav “human animals” Gallant.
To wrap, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that many commentators that I’ve encountered, especially in the last two weeks but particularly over this weekend, have said that Biden clearly doesn’t value Palestinian life. Perhaps he doesn’t accord them the same value as Israeli life; perhaps he doesn’t value them at all. Either way, his callousness toward the plight of the Palestinians has shone through, extraordinarily so.
What gets me about this is his sheer ignorance and racism. Biden is Catholic, so he says. Then why doesn’t he care that Israel is besieging and starving one of the oldest Catholic communities in the world—the Parish of the Holy Family in Gaza? Doesn’t he care what the Pope thinks? The Pope opposes this genocide, and calls that parish every blessed day.
Of course, as a Catholic, I’m also against the wholesale murder of little Muslim children. I’m against the starvation and torture of any civilians, regardless of their faith. I will never understand why President Biden is okay with such things. As you say, he’s irrational on this. And that’s honestly terrifying.
In my experience, white American and European Catholics have very little knowledge or understanding about non-white Catholics. At best, they think they’re “doing it wrong” and it worst they think Catholicism is a sort of racial religion for whites. Obviously, neither of these statements is true, but there is a failure to understand that the power dynamics within Catholicism have shifted away from Europe. As to Biden, I just don’t think he considers Palestinian Christians to be worthy of concern. If he met any, I’m sure he’d probably chide them for being “antisemitic” and not accepting their inferior status, as was the case in an essay I read in “First Things” on the subject. Biden has always been very conservative and personally close to members of the Dixiecrat faction. I suspect that he thinks that American interests in the Middle East outweigh human right concerns, especially if he doesn’t think the people being affected are actually human.
Since the end of the Cold War (well, the first one anyway) a sort of messianic neoconservativism has become the default position of the American foreign policy establishment. That is to say, there’s a belief that the goal of American foreign policy is perpetual world dominance in all spheres of life: cultural, political, militarily, the control of telecommunications, and outer space. The Wolfowitz doctrine that was devised shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union states that no rival country can be allowed to usurp the US’ pre-eminent position in the world. Not the EU countries, not Japan, not China, not Russia, nobody. When some loser like Victoria Nuland talks about “spreading democracy,” what she actually means is increasing the number of American vassal states. Israel serves an important function for the US’ mission in that it is a strategically located laboratory for new forms of surveillance and imprisonment. There are lots of articles about how Israel helps to train American cops, how Israeli engineers are creating new forms of surveillance to better monitor Palestinians and other undesirables, partnerships between Israeli and American defense companies, etc. What’s being used against the Palestinians inevitably gets used against us (during the George Floyd protests, Palestinians were actually giving advice on Twitter about what to do if you get tear gassed or shot by rubber bullets). This is why Biden famously proclaimed forty odd years ago that if Israel didn’t exist, it would have to be invented.
Incidentally, I have never understood why Biden thought that was a good thing to say, considering that he was reprising a Hitler quote. Nazism’s form of totalitarianism needed a despised scapegoat. Hitler said that if Jews didn’t exist, he would have had to have invented them.