Weekly Briefing: The political and moral consequences of hallowing Trump’s verdict while nullifying the Hague

Joe Biden is trying to end the war in Gaza. He’s not trying that hard. But he’s trying.

Biden knows that the Democratic base is on fire. He knows that for a certain bloc of voters in American society – Genocide is not acceptable. Sadly, most people will go along fine with a genocide. That’s what history tells us and what the U.S. establishment is demonstrating right now. Samantha Power wrote a whole book about the Sarajevo genocide and launched a great career but now she’s a top Biden aide and just keeps her head down. It’s not fair to single her out — because all the editorial writers and politicians have a similar stance. It’s a terrible thing that so many civilians and babies are being killed by American weaponry in Gaza, but hey, look what Hamas did on October 7. That’s the ultimate in whatabboutery. What about Hamas? While we are burning up civilians.

Something else they do, on the cables and PBS, is to publicize the poll showing that only 8 percent of the U.S. population thinks that the Gaza war is an issue for the U.S. So it hardly matters in the presidential race, after inflation, immigration, guns, climate change, abortion, crime and racial equality. (But that poll is obviously biased. It’s by my old friend Mark Penn, a longtime supporter of right-wing Israeli politicians).

They can say that all they want. Let’s say only one in 12 care about genocide– for or against it. 8 percent is an important bloc in a presidential race that is sure to be decided by a single digit. And the Democratic base is on fire. Many Democrats don’t want to vote for a president who has approved genocide.

Biden is plainly trying to have it both ways. He wants the base to calm down and the only way he can get them to do that is to put the genocide in the rear view mirror. He wants to keep Haim Saban and the big funders on his side– the Israel lobby that can pour $12 million into two congressional races, in its effort to remove “the most virulently anti-Israel voices in Congress,” meaning the Squad, Reps. Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush.

Biden really needs that money to run his presidential campaign. He needs to hold on to Haim Saban– who spent three hours in the White House a few months ago then hosted a Biden fundraiser in California and who said in Hebrew this week it was a “catastrophe” when Biden “paused” the delivery of 2000 pound bombs to Israel.

Saban surely meant that it was a symbolic catastrophe for Israel, a symbolic victory for BDS. Saban has been leading Democratic candidates for the presidency around by the nose on BDS for many years. Because it wasn’t functionally a catastrophe for Israel. Israel doesn’t need 2000 pound bombs to carry out massacres. The American bomb that detonated the fire that burned up so many Palestinian women and children huddled in tents this week, causing great handwringing even in the mainstream, was only 250 pounds. Even CBS informs us.

Everyone knows that Biden is trying to please the lobby not his base. That same poll that says only 8 percent care about Gaza shows that a large majority of voters 45 and older say that Biden’s stance is also driven by “domestic politics” not just the U.S. national interest. About 56 percent of Americans say that…

So Biden is trying to have it both ways. He wants Saban’s friend Netanyahu to come to speak to the Congress, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has now invited Netanyahu along with the Republicans. And at the same time Chuck Schumer gave a landmark speech as a Jew saying that Netanyahu was a bad leader for Israel and Netanyahu must resign, and Biden endorsed the speech. “He made a good speech, and I think he expressed a serious concern shared not only by him but by many Americans,” Biden said in March.

So Netanyahu who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes must be invited to the Congress. After saying he should resign, now they want to give him another 29 standing ovations. Surely on the principle laid down by Senator Lindsey Graham, if they are coming for the Israelis, they will come for us.

Americans who oppose genocide surely accept the idea that if the court is coming for the Israelis they should also come for U.S. war criminals.

That is the most important idea of the week. After Trump was convicted of financial crimes to cover up his hush money payments to a porn star—the Republicans all came out in support of Trump and said the system is broken — and the Democrats and the cables and PBS News Hour all cried out, That is so irresponsible, they are putting our democracy at risk.

Those mainstream voices really need to consider why the students and the left share the belief, that the system is broken. They need to consider that the U.S. has been bombing Arab countries for the last 20 years and more with unending horrific consequences to those societies, and zero consequences for American leaders, and Israeli ones too. No, they get to incinerate villages and tent camps in Arab countries on slim/tactical pretext and thumb their noses at international law. And all the journalists and politicians who called for the Iraq war invasion that resulted in hundreds of thousands of dead are still in office and/or honored. Zero consequences.

So the establishment is hosting a war criminal with honor at the Congress to keep Haim Saban giving Biden money and sniggering at the tent encampments.

After Trump was convicted, John Hudson of the Washington Post asked Secretary of State Antony Blinken the perfect question in Prague:

You do represent the United States on the world stage… and former President Trump’s trial was defined by his efforts to castigate and delegitimize a court of law.  Does that give you any pause about how the Biden administration has responded to another court of law, the International Criminal Court, as well as the International Court of Justice, with regards to Gaza?

Blinken — who looks hollowed out by the hard work of defending genocide — tried to brush it off with the usual bullshit. Israel has democratically-elected leaders. Israel has “a vibrant, independent, and very active judicial system.” As if an apartheid country can be a democracy. As if Israel ever really investigates its own crimes.

And no one followed up. “Even good American reporters are too restrained, trained to be too deferential, so they just let him get away with non sequiturs,” Donald Johnson wrote. “Does this mean that democratically elected officials are incapable of ever committing war crimes or are they allowed to do whatever they want in wartime because they were elected? Is torture a crime?  If a U.S. official allows torture, is that official guilty of a crime?  Is a violation of the Leahy law a crime?”

These questions are not occult. They are bubbling away in the American mind. They are strengthening the analysis of the young. They are fostering a discourse that says that Palestinian lives matter as much as anyone else’s.

They are generating the tent encampments, which the media snigger over, but that American history will honor some day not long from now.