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The response to Joe Biden finally surrendering the Democratic presidential nomination has been instructive.
Since Israel’s genocidal rampage in Gaza began, there has been a common theme in how Western politicians and media outlets have approached the horror: that Palestinian life has little or even no meaningful worth. This has not been subtle.
Sure, this has ranged from the crude — that is, outright genocidal incitement, despite its legal prohibition in the 1948 Genocide Convention — to the lack of concern about tens of thousands slaughtered with Western arms and diplomatic support, not least from the US.
As the farce over Biden’s collapsing mental faculties forced him out, the tributes flooded in. “Having led us out of the worst public health and economic crises in most of our lives, President Joe Biden should be remembered as one of our great leaders,” cooed former US Secretary of State Robert Reich.
“A courageous and selfless decision,” was former Obama official Jon Favreau’s take, in which the President “put the country’s interests ahead of his own” as he had done for the previous four years. “Biden’s legacy as a statesman who defended democracy rather than himself is now cemented”, said one associate professor in global politics at University College London.
Let’s not mince our words: this is nauseating. If you believe that Israel has committed egregious war crimes — those who do not should be regarded as sadistic flat-earthers — then it is not possible to blindly cheer Biden without expressing contempt for Palestinian life.
Without Joe Biden, one of the worst crimes of our age would not have been possible.
Here is a man with a lifelong zealous commitment to Israel: in a fiery speech in 1986, he demanded politicians stop apologising for supporting Israel, and suggested it served US interests so much it would have to be invented if it did not exist.
In the aftermath of the October 7 attacks, Biden used the bully pulpit of the US presidency to spread pro-Israel lies used to build a case for genocide.
There is no dispute that Hamas and other armed groups committed war crimes that day. What Biden specifically claimed was that he saw pictures of children being beheaded. No such pictures exist: the claim that 40 Israeli babies were beheaded spread like wildfire thanks in large part to the US President, and was used to manufacture consent for the genocidal assault which followed.
How Joe Biden bankrolled and incited Israel’s assault on Gaza
While peddling false claims about Hamas atrocities, Biden engaged in atrocity denial in favour of Israel. He told the world in late October: “I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed. I’m sure innocents have been killed, and it’s the price of waging a war.”
As well as dismissing what at the time was over 7,000 killed — including more than 3,000 children — as an inevitable cost of war, he sought to deflect horror at Israel’s butchery.
Gaza’s official statistics had been confirmed in previous Israeli assaults, and in any case, the health ministry released all the names, personal information and Israeli-approved IDs of the killed — but the damage was done.
Here is a man who bypassed Congress twice in the first two months after October 7 to approve emergency weapons sales to Israel. That included 2,000-pound bombs which — as the New York Times uncovered — had been repeatedly used to slaughter Palestinian civilians in areas designed by Israel as safe zones.
He claimed a major Israeli offensive against Rafah was the red line, but then Israel unleashed it with murderous effect, but Biden judged no red line had been crossed. When dozens of Palestinians were killed in Rafah in May — including children who were burned to death and indeed beheaded by the explosion — the weapons used were US-supplied.
The US has refused to state that a single war crime has been committed by Israel.
Joe Biden’s spokespeople have fallen back on generic responses about asking Israel for further information and even repeatedly expressing confidence in the state’s ability to investigate itself despite all the evidence.
The administration repeatedly echoed Israeli attempts to lie, deflect and muddy the water about atrocities committed by Israel, such as the assault on al-Shifa hospital.
It has taken no action against Israel’s policy of starvation, building a floating pier which repeatedly fell apart and delivered almost no aid before being abandoned, while resisting lawmakers’ demands to make aid conditional on Israel allowing humanitarian aid into Gaza.
Biden ensured the US used its diplomatic power to protect Israel, such as vetoing ceasefire demands from the UN Security Council, while denouncing the attempt by the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, to have arrest warrants issued for Benjamin Netanyahu and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant.
Yes, it would be a reprehensible revision of history to portray this as a Biden-specific problem: the US facilitation of Israel’s bloody dispossession of the Palestinian people is a systemic injustice.
But it is nonetheless notable that Biden has taken a weaker line than right-wing Republican presidents. When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, Ronald Reagan rang Prime Minister Menachem Begin and condemned a “Holocaust” and demanded the bombing stopped — successfully, as it turned out.
In 2002, George W Bush’s administration condemned Israel for killing Hamas’ most wanted militant, because 14 Palestinian civilians were also killed.
If this world has any justice, Biden will be remembered properly not as a kindly, avuncular if gaffe-prone president, who put his country before his own interests.
Joe Biden is a monster. He has facilitated one of the most obscene crimes of our age. And those blindly praising him are telling the world a message which is loudly received — that they simply do not think Palestinian life matters.