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Jamal Khashoggi

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Shireen Abu Akleh

The B’Tselem report on the May 11 killing of Shireen Abu Akleh emphasizes eyewitness accounts, including the stunning heroism of Sharif al-‘Azab who tried to save her life amid gunfire. And it blows up the U.S. claim that the Israeli shooting was “tragic” not “intentional.” Such a finding is “detached from reality” — in this case, repeated “shooting directly at unarmed civilians” demonstrates that Israel uses live fire in non-life-threatening circumstances and takes no action against killers. And Israel is whitewashing the Abu Akleh killing, like 100s of cases before it, B’Tselem says.

After the State Department tries to sweep journalist Shireen Abu Akleh’s killing under the rug ahead of Biden’s visit to Israel by saying it can tell nothing from the bullet, her family dismisses the statement as “CSI-style forensics” designed to reach the “political” conclusion that an Israeli soldier did not intentionally target her, but was going after terrorists. Meanwhile the Israelis refuse to release evidence and demand a complete whitewash.

The PBS News Hour host rightly grilled Antony Blinken about why Joe Biden is meeting with the Saudi Crown Prince next month despite the 2018 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. But Woodruff cannot bring herself to mention Biden’s visit to Israel weeks after its killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, which it has yet to account for.

Joe Biden at the Sheraton West Des Moines Hotel in Iowa, January 2020. (Photo: Gage Skidmore/Flickr)

Joe Biden and his associates appear demonstrably incapable of exchanging the history that they know for a history on which our future may well depend. As a result, they will cling to an increasingly irrelevant past. Under the guise of correcting Trump’s failures, they will perpetuate their own.