Joe Biden as Fascist

 

US 'not at war', Biden boasts, while setting Mideast on fire

Ignoring the Palestinian toll under US-armed Israeli bombardment, Biden appears indifferent to greater catastrophe.

AARON MATÉ AUG 12 ∙ PAID

READ IN APP

(Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

In his first public address since dropping out of the presidential race last month, Joe Biden claimed that he had ushered in a historic moment of peace.

“I’m the first president in this century to report to the American people that the United States is not at war anywhere in the world,” Biden bragged.

Biden’s statement was startling, and not just because it is transparently false. The US is actively engaged in global warfare, including in Yemen, which has been bombed multiple times under Biden’s watch – including the same night that he spoke from the Oval Office. The US maintains an illegal and unwelcome military occupation of Syria with the stated intension, as both Donald Trump and a senior Biden official have admitted, of stealing Syria’s resources to prevent the country’s recovery from the decade-long dirty war launched by Biden’s former boss, Barack Obama.

As a result of Biden’s commitment to looting and impoverishing Syria, US troops remain under continued threat. The president has apparently forgotten that three US troops were killed and dozens were wounded in a January attack at the Jordan-Syria border. Just this month, five US troops and two contractors were injured in a rocket attack on Iraq’s Al Asad air base, which supports US forces in neigboring Syria. Another attack hit a US position in Syria just last week.

Even if Biden’s boast was not a demonstrable lie on its own, the statement is shocking for what it elides. While the US isn’t technically at war in Ukraine or the Gaza Strip, Biden is nonetheless singularly fueling both conflicts by pouring in US weaponry and blocking all diplomatic alternatives – at great threat not just to those respective regions, but the entire world.

When it comes to the Middle East, Biden claimed Sunday that he’s “working literally every single day... to see to it that it doesn't escalate into a regional war.” But, he added, “it easily can.”

Indeed, the Middle East could easily escalate into regional war precisely because of Biden’s daily work in that direction. Despite repeated humiliations from Benjamin Netanyahu – who has openly vowed to prevent a Palestinian state and rejected the ceasefire proposal that Biden falsely claimed he had accepted – Biden still refuses to use the decisive leverage that the US has over Israel. (The same could be said for ending the war in Ukraine, which I will turn to in my next article).

Just hours before Israel slaughtered around one hundred civilians as they gathered for morning prayers at a school turned shelter in Gaza City on Saturday, the White House unveiled another $3.5 billion in US military support to Israel. The State Department also announced that it will continueto arm an Israeli unit notorious for human rights abuses, including the torture and murder of an elderly Palestinian American in the occupied West Bank.

The administration then responded to the Tabeen school massacre with a de-facto endorsement of Israel’s stated rationale that – as with Gaza’s hospitals, mosques, and more schools – it was targeting a Hamas “command center.”

“Israel has a right to go after the terrorists that are Hamas,” Vice President Kamala Harris declared. “But they also have an important responsibility to avoid civilian casualties.”

Israel has caused tens of thousands of civilian casualties under the guise of “going after” Hamas. So long as the US accepts Israel’s right to murder civilians if it can claim – accurately or falsely – that a member of Hamas was in the area, then the US is ensuring countless more casualties. By the US-Israeli rationale, Hamas would have the right to kill tens of thousands of Israeli civilians if it could prove that an Israeli soldier was somewhere in the vicinity. This is essentially the logic of Oct. 7^th, although with one crucial difference: Palestinians have the right to resist military occupation; the Israeli occupier does not have the right to use military force to defend it.

As for asking Israel to “avoid civilian casualties” as it pulverizes an entrapped population with US-supplied weapons, this is akin to an accomplice in a school shooting asking the shooter to “avoid child casualties.”

To underscore its support for Israeli aggression, the Biden administration has also sent US military assets to the region for the second time this month; this time, a guided-missile submarine and a second aircraft carrier. As part of “our commitment to take every possible step to defend Israel,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said, the US is “strengthening... U.S. military force posture and capabilities throughout the Middle East.” In other words, rather than insist that Israel accept a ceasefire deal – the main demand not only of Hamas but its allies in Iran and Hezbollah – the US is willing to fuel the regional escalation that Biden claims to want to avoid.

As I have written since the start of this crisis, the US could have prevented all of this carnage and escalation by withholding military support to Israel and insisting that it negotiate a hostage release, which Hamas offered before and after Israeli forces invaded Gaza. More broadly, the Biden administration, like every White House over many decades, could have brought peace to the region had it been willing to engage in multiple Arab peace overtures – including by Hamas – premised on recognizing Palestinian self-determination over Israeli colonization. But making Gaza unhabitable and restoring Israel’s “aura of power” – the freedom to carry out aggression without resistance – has been a higher priority for Netanyahu and his chief backer in Washington.

Biden and his allies will occasionally lodge complaints about Netanyahu and his supremacist coalition partners, such as Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who recently complained that “no one in the world will allow us to starve 2 million people, even though it might be justified and moral in order to free the hostages.”

Yet when it comes to seeing Palestinians as lesser humans, the US president is an ideological partner of his Israeli extremist counterparts. A blunt admission of this determinative mindset came recently from Aaron David Miller, a veteran State Department official who played a critical role in the so-called “peace process” of the 1990s and early 2000s. “Do I think that Joe Biden has the same depth of feeling and empathy for the Palestinians of Gaza as he does for the Israelis?” David Miller told the New Yorker. “No, he doesn’t.”

In short, Biden holds bigoted views toward the indigenous people of Israel-Palestine – so much so that he’s content to set their region further aflame.