There are heightening “War on Terror” vibes here in the United States.
Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) attended a pro-Israel rally in Boston Common. “The United States and the international community must keep pushing for diplomacy and the ending of civilian casualties on all sides,” he told the crowd. “There must be a deescalation of the current violence.”
He was greeted with loud boos.
Fifteen minutes later Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-MA) spoke and seemingly pushed back on his Democratic colleague’s sentiment. “Now is not the time for equivocation,” he declared. “Israel did not ask America to deescalate on September 12, 2001.”
Thank God the United States didn’t deescalate after 9/11! Hundreds of thousands of people would still be alive and we wouldn’t have flushed $8 trillion down the drain. Maybe Auchincloss knows a country with no connections to Hamas that can be invaded.
The staples of that period are on full display. Once again people are getting Dixie Chick’d. A beat writer for the 76ers got fired from the website PhillyVoice.com for criticizing in team post in support of Israel. Playboy fired media personality and former adult film star Mia Khalifa for supporting Palestinian resistance. The student president of the NYU Law School Bar Association lost his job for publishing a statement in support of Palestine. Billionaire Bill Ackman says CEOs should blacklist Harvard students who sign statements blaming Israel for the current situation.
Blatant calls for genocide are voiced across cable news. “We are in a religious war, and I am with Israel…Level the place,” says Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC). ““I don’t think there’s any way Israel can be expected to coexist or find some diplomatic off-ramp with these savages,” says Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL). “…You can’t coexist. They have to be eradicated.” “They’re a territory that’s about to probably get eviscerated and go away here shortly, as we’re going to turn that into a parking lot,” says GOP Rep. Max Miller.
Most Democrats don’t use this kind of rhetoric, but what do people mean when they say “Israel has the right to defend itself”? The extent of death and destruction that’s acceptable is never articulated or defined. At the time I’m typing this Israel is attacking Gaza for the fifth day and at least 1,100 Palestinians have been killed. More than 260 of them have been children. Over 50,000 Palestinians have been wounded. Over 260,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been internally displaced. The only power plant is out of power and hospitals are on the verge of collapse.
Here’s State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller when he was asked about the devastation by Al Quds’ Said Arikat:
QUESTION: Okay. I understand. I mean, Hamas – you have Hamas listed as a terrorist organization. They don’t get $4 billion a year from you. They don’t have military aid and support and so on. So that is established. You’re saying that Israel is a democracy, it’s a country that abides by international law. I am asking you: the cutoff of water, electricity, food, and medicine is considered a war crime. Do you call on Israel to cease its – its effort now in cutting so medicine, water, humanitarian aid —
MR MILLER: So let me start by saying that we are in the early days of Israel’s response. Israel has a right to conduct an aggressive response to respond to the terrorism that’s been committed against its citizens. We expect them to follow international law, we believe that they will, and we will remain in close contact with them about it.
QUESTION: You believe they should not intentionally target civilians. That’s one. Second, do you have any idea on the number of Palestinians killed by Israel in the last four days?
MR MILLER: I have seen public reports.
QUESTION: What are these reports?
MR MILLER: I am not going to speak to the —
QUESTION: Are they in the hundreds, in the thousands?
MR MILLER: So I – Said, I’m going to speak to what the U.S. Government can verify, which I’ve done with the number of U.S. citizens. I will let Israel speak to the number of Israeli citizens they have killed as well as the number of Palestinians they have killed.
Then there’s the standard red-baiting. New York establishment Democrats have had an axe to grind over the local DSA’s position on Israel and the domestic reaction to the situation has generated a new thing that must be denounced: a Times Square rally that occurred last weekend.
The event was not even sponsored by the DSA chapter, but the New York Post said they organized and the word of the right-wing rag is apparently enough for Democrats.
“The NYC-DSA is planning to hold a rally tomorrow, glorifying the terrorism of Hamas as ‘resistance.’,” tweeted AIPAC favorite Ritchie Torres “Never mind the hundreds of Israeli civilians and children who have been murdered, wounded, abducted, and terrorized. Their lives mean nothing to the DSA. Nothing. The NYC-DSA is revealing itself for what it truly is: an antisemitic stain on the soul of America’s largest city. There is a special place in hell for those who glorify the cold-blooded murder of civilians and children.”
New York Democrats Chairman Jay Jacobs said that the socialist organization “sought to justify the wonton [ sic ] violence, terrorism, kidnapping, and murder that was perpetrated on Israel this weekend.”
“[DSA] supports rape, murder, kidnapping, torture, rocket attacks,” tweeted the lobbying group Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI), “Sad how sick these folks are.”
The pressure was enough to get DSA-endorsed lawmakers like AOC and Jamaal Bowman to condemn the event.
The comedian Sarah Silverman declared she’s quitting DSA over its statement on the violence. “I am still a democratic socialist like my man, Bernie, who, also despite popular understanding, has nothing to do with this f*cked up, arrogant, ignorant, piece of shit group,” she wrote.
Michigan Rep. Shri Thanedar publicly renounced his membership in the group, but neglected to mention the Detroit chapter voted to expel him last month for accompanying Indian Prime Minister Modi to congress. Over the summer Thanedar attended an AIPAC trip to Israel and returned singing its praises.
But don’t fire up the freedom fries quite yet. There is some wider context permeating the mainstream media.
“There are evidently more such voices on air today than made it into the mainstream media to explain the causes of the 9/11 attack in 2001,” writes Phil Weiss at the site. “The BBC, NPR, and MSNBC have all had reports on the history of Palestinian dispossession. To the point that Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL complained on MSNBC two days ago: ‘I love this network, but I’ve got to ask who is writing the scripts– Hamas. The people who did this they are not fighters, they are not militants, they are terrorists.'”
Weiss continues: “Greenblatt was likely referencing reports by Ali Velshi, Joy Reid and Ayman Mohyeldin. Velshi hosted Diana Buttu, who said the causes of violence was the “denial of freedom” for 75 years, including the killing of over 250 Palestinians earlier this year. Velshi criticized the press’s blindness: ‘Palestinians are exclusively the bad guys here…Anybody that wants to help the Palestinians, watch out.'”
Updates
Slightly different format with today’s newsletter. We have been running daily blogs at the site (from Palestine and the U.S.) as news is moving quickly. I am going to link them here along with our additional coverage and analysis:
October 8: Israel declares war as casualties skyrocket
October 9: Israeli Defense Minister orders full siege of Gaza “No power, no food, no gas”
October 10:
- ‘You wanted hell, you will get hell,’ Israeli army chief says, calling Palestinians ‘human animals’
- Blinken deletes call for cease-fire while Israeli defense minister orders ‘complete siege’ of Gaza
October 11:
- ‘Human catastrophe’ in Gaza as Israel prepares for ground invasion
- ADL CEO compares Palestine solidarity events to 1939 Nazi rally
October 12:
- Calls for ceasefire overshadowed by brazen U.S. support for all-out war
- Boston activists shut down Israeli weapons supplier
Report from Gaza: fears that Israeli army is preparing for ethnic cleansing
There is no proof Palestinian fighters ‘beheaded’ babies. The only source is a radical settler
We must refuse to apologize for Palestinian humanity
Despite what you think, Palestinians are not celebrating death
Odds & Ends
???????? Fantastic interview with Al-Shabaka president Tareq Baconi on Hamas in The New Yorker (?!):
I don’t think Hamas set out to create a new paradigm. But Western policymakers and, more generally, the international community have been changing their understanding of this reality. That change has been happening for a few years. It is now pretty much consensus among Palestinians and Israelis in the human-rights world, and other international members of that field, that this is a regime of apartheid. In 2021, Palestinians emerged in demonstrations and protests throughout the land of historic Palestine, in a unity intifada meant to overcome this idea that there’s a partition between, let’s say, the interior of Israel and the occupied territories. That was, in some ways, the beginning of this shift, to move away from this Oslo design of partitioning Palestinians and into really understanding the Palestinian struggle as a struggle of a single people against a single regime of oppression. But what Hamas has done now—and I’m not entirely sure that Hamas thought its offensive could be as major as it ultimately was—really shattered the idea that Israel can maintain a regime of apartheid, or, rather, that Israel can still pretend to be a Jewish and democratic state while it’s oppressing another people interminably.
???????? Alice Speri in The Intercept: “Hamas and Israel’s crimes against civilians, which are likely to escalate in the coming days, come after years of impunity for Israel’s crimes against Palestinians. The historical lack of accountability has bred a culture of disregard for international law that directly resulted in the weekend’s violence, human rights advocates say.”
???????? Biden cheerleads Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza
????️ Akela Lacy writes about the predictable attacks on Rep. Rashida Tlaib in The Intercept. Tlaib was one of the only lawmakers to put out a good statement on the recent violence:
The attacks are coming from Democrats who retain close ties to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the flagship of the Israel lobby groups. Gottheimer is one of the top recipients in Congress of money from the group.
Meanwhile, members of the leadership remaining silent on the political broadsides are also close to AIPAC. House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., a staunch AIPAC ally, has taken nearly half a million dollars from the group since last year; he also led an AIPAC-sponsored trip to Israel for incoming House Democrats. (Gottheimer and Jeffries did not respond to requests for comment.)
Progressive activists on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict said Tlaib and Bush stood out as two of the only members of Congress to call for an end to the violence and mourn both Israeli and Palestinian lives.
???????? Trita Parsi on Twitter: “If Biden re-freezes the Iranian funds, it will not only be the second time in 5 years that the US cheats on an agreement with Iran, but it will be worse than Trump’s exit from the JCPOA. Trump cheated on Obama’s deal. Biden will have cheated on his own deal.”
???? AIPAC tries to distort and damage U.S. foreign policy beyond the Middle East
???? A truck apparently drove by Harvard University doxxing Palestine activists by face and name.
???????? Someone spray painted a swastika on the sign outside Boston’s Palestinian Cultural Center for Peace.
Stay safe out there,
Michael
