Antinuclear

Biden’s war on Gaza is now a war on truth and the right to protest

The media’s role is to draw attention away from what the students are protesting – complicity in genocide – and engineer a moral panic to leave the genocide undisturbed

JONATHAN COOK, MAY 10, 2024, First published by Middle East Eye

As mass student protests quickly spread to campuses across the United States last week, and others took hold in Britain and elsewhere in Europe, the western media gave centre stage to one man to arbitrate on whether the demonstrations should be allowed to continue: US President Joe Biden. 

The establishment media reverentially relayed the president’s message that the protests were violent and dangerous, treating his assessment as if it had been handed down on a tablet of stone. 

Biden declared the protesters had no “right to cause chaos”, giving the green light for police to go in with even greater force to clear the encampments.  

This week, Biden raised the stakes further by suggesting the protests were evidence of a “ferocious surge” of antisemitism in the US. 

According to reports, more than 2,000 protesters have been arrested after some university administrators – under growing pressure from the White House and their own wealthy donors – called in local police. 

In approving the crushing of dissent, Biden contradicted himself: “We are not an authoritarian nation where we silence people or squash dissent. But order must prevail.”

One small problem went unmentioned: Biden was not a disinterested party. In fact, his conflict of interest was so gigantic it could, like the damage to Gaza, be seen from outer space. 

The students were calling on their universities to pull all investments from companies that are assisting Israel in carrying out what the World Court has called a “plausible” genocide in Gaza. Those weapons are being supplied in huge quantities largely thanks to the decisions of one man. 

Yes, Joe Biden. 

Law-breaking Biden

The “order” the US president wants to prevail is one in which his decisions to block any ceasefire and arm the slaughter, maiming and orphaning of many tens of thousands of Palestinian children go unchallenged. 

Biden has been so indulgent of Israel’s destruction of Gaza that Benjamin Netanyahu’s government crossed the president’s supposed “red line” this week. Israel launched the initial stages of its long-threatened final assault on Rafah in southern Gaza. Some 1.3 million Palestinians have been huddling in makeshift tents there. 

Biden could easily have forced Israel to change course at any point over the past seven months, but chose not to, even as he feigned concern about the ever-rising death toll among Palestinian civilians. Only under growing popular pressure, fuelled by the protests, has he finally appeared to pause arms shipments as the attack on Rafah intensifies.    

The White House has authorised vast shipments of arms to Israel, including 2,000lb bombs that have levelled whole neighbourhoods, killing men, women and children outright or leaving them trapped under rubble to slowly suffocate or starve to death.

Late last month Biden signed a further $26bn of US taxpayers’ money to Israel, the majority military aid – just as mass graves of Palestinians killed by Israel were coming to light. He has been able to do so only by flagrantly ignoring the requirement in US law that any weapons supplied not be used in ways likely to constitute war crimes. 

Human rights groups have warned his administration repeatedly that Israel is routinely breaking international law. 

At least 20 of Biden administration’s own lawyers are reported to have signed off on a letter that Israel’s actions violate a host of US statutes, including the Arms Export Control Act and Leahy Laws, as well as the Geneva Conventions.  

Meanwhile, the State Department’s investigations show that, even before Israel’s destruction of Gaza began seven months ago, five Israeli military units were committing gross violations of the human rights of Palestinians in the separate enclave of the Occupied West Bank. 

There, Israel doesn’t even have the one-size-fits-all excuse that the abuse and killing of Palestinian civilians are unfortunate “collateral damage” in an operation to “eradicate Hamas”. The West Bank is under the control of the Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas, not Hamas.

Nonetheless, no action has been taken to stop the arms transfers. US laws, it seems, don’t apply to the Biden administration, any more than international law does to Israel.

Protest quicksand

In denying students the right to protest at the US arming of Israel’s plausible genocide, Biden is also denying them the right to protest the most consequential policy of his four-year term – and of at least the last two decades of US foreign policy, since the US invasion of Iraq. 

And it is all happening in a presidential election year.

The students’ immediate aim is to stop their universities’ complicity in the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza. But there are two obvious wider goals.

The first is to bring attention back to the endless suffering of Palestinians in the tiny, besieged enclave. Until this week’s attack on Rafah, the plight of Gaza had increasingly dropped off front pages, even as Israeli-induced famine and disease tightened their grip over the past month. 

When Gaza has made the news, it is invariably through a lens unrelated to the slaughter and starvation. It is details of the interminable negotiations, or political tensions over Israel’s Rafah “invasion”, or plans for the “day after” in Gaza, or the plight of the Israeli hostages, or their families’ agonies, or where to draw the line on free speech in criticising Israel.

The students’ second goal is to make it politically uncomfortable for Biden to continue providing the weapons and diplomatic cover that have permitted Israel’s actions – from slaughter to starvation, and now the imminent destruction of Rafah. 

The students have been trying to change the national conversation in ways that will pressure Biden to stop his all-too-visible law-breaking. 

But they have run up against the usual problem: the national conversation is largely dictated by the political and media class in their own interests. And they are all for the genocide continuing, it seems, whatever the law says.

Which means the media has carefully refocused attention, dealing exclusively with the nature of the protests – and a supposed threat they pose to “order” – not addressing what the protests are actually about.  

Last Sunday, the head of the UN Food Aid Programme, Cindy McCain, warned that northern Gaza was in the grip of “full-blown famine” and that the south was not far behind. Dozens of children were reported to have died of dehydration and malnutrition. “It’s horror,” she said.  

The head of Unicef pointed out last week, a few days before Israel ordered the evacuation of eastern Rafah: “Nearly all of the some 600,000 children now crammed into Rafah are either injured, sick, malnourished, traumatized, or living with disabilities.” 

A separate UN report recently revealed it will take 80 years to rebuild Gaza, based on the historic levels of materials allowed in by Israel. On a highly unlikey, best-case scenario, it will take 16 years. 

As ever, establishment journalists have been essential to distracting from these horrendous realities. 

The students are caught in a protest equivalent of quicksand: the more they struggle to draw attention to the Gaza genocide, the more the Gaza genocide sinks from view. The media have seized on their struggle as a pretext to ignore Gaza and turn the spotlight on to their protests instead.

Feeling ‘unsafe’

The student protest movement has been remarkably peaceful – a fact that is all the more obvious when compared to the Black Lives Matter protests that swept the US in 2020, with Biden’s approval. 

Four years ago there were many episodes of property damage, but that has been all but unheard of in the student protests, which are mostly confined to encampments on university campus lawns………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… more https://jonathancook.substack.com/p/bidens-war-on-gaza-is-now-a-war-on?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=476450&post_id=144499809&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=ln98x&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

May 12, 2024 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized