CARTOON: Democratic Party Lovefest Vibes Paper Over Party's Support For Bloody Genocide
Normalizing deception about the past sets a pattern for perpetrating such deception in the future.
Cartoons by Mark Taylor / DeMOCKracy.ink
Biden's Cruel, Callous Orwellian Remarks On Gaza At The DNC
Joe Biden walked off stage holding the hand of his cute little grandson, a precious child no more precious than any one of the many thousands of children the president has helped Israel to kill.
By Norman Soloman
Common Dreams (8/20/23)
An observation from George Orwell—“those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future”—is acutely relevant to how President Biden talked about Gaza during his speech at the Democratic convention Monday night. His words fit into a messaging template now in its eleventh month, depicting the U.S. government as tirelessly seeking peace, while supplying the weapons and bombs that have enabled Israel’s continual slaughter of civilians.
“We’ll keep working, to bring hostages home, and end the war in Gaza, and bring peace and security to the Middle East,” Biden told the cheering delegates. “As you know, I wrote a peace treaty for Gaza. A few days ago I put forward a proposal that brought us closer to doing that than we’ve done since October 7th.”
It was a journey into an alternative universe of political guile from a president who just six days earlier had approved sending $20 billion worth of more weapons to Israel. Yet the Biden delegates in the convention hall responded with a crescendo of roaring admiration.
A political reflex has been in motion from top U.S. leaders, claiming to be peace seekers while aiding and abetting the slaughter. Normalizing deception about the past sets a pattern for perpetrating such deception in the future.
Applause swelled as Biden continued: “We’re working around-the-clock, my secretary of state, to prevent a wider war and reunite hostages with their families, and surge humanitarian health and food assistance into Gaza now, to end the civilian suffering of the Palestinian people and finally, finally, finally deliver a ceasefire and end this war.”
In Chicago’s United Center, the president basked in adulation while claiming to be a peacemaker despite a record of literally making possible the methodical massacres of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians.
Bloody peace seekers
Orwell would have understood. A political reflex has been in motion from top U.S. leaders, claiming to be peace seekers while aiding and abetting the slaughter. Normalizing deception about the past sets a pattern for perpetrating such deception in the future.
And so, working inside the paradigm that Orwell described, Biden exerts control over the present, strives to control narratives about the past, and seeks to make it all seem normal, prefiguring the future.
The eagerness of delegates to cheer for Biden’s mendaciously absurd narrative about his administration’s policies toward Gaza was, in a broader context, the convention’s lovefest for the lame-duck president.
Hours before the convention opened, Peter Beinart released a short video essay anticipating the fervent adulation. “I just don't think when you’re analyzing a presidency or a person, you sequester what’s happened in Gaza,” he said. “I mean, if you’re a liberal-minded person, you believe that genocide is just about the worst thing that a country can do, and it’s just about the worst thing that your country can do if your country is arming a genocide.”
Democratic Party grotesque moral obtuseness
Beinart continued: “And it’s really not that controversial anymore that this qualifies as a genocide. I read the academic writing on this. I don’t see any genuine scholars of human rights international law who are saying it's not indeed there. . . . If you’re gonna say something about Joe Biden, the president, Joe Biden, the man, you have to factor in what Joe Biden, the president, Joe Biden, the man, has done, vis-a-vis Gaza. It’s central to his legacy. It's central to his character. And if you don’t, then you’re saying that Palestinian lives just don’t matter, or at least they don’t matter this particular day, and I think that’s inhumane. I don’t think we can ever say that some group of people’s lives simply don't matter because it’s inconvenient for us to talk about them at a particular moment.”
Underscoring the grotesque moral obtuseness from the convention stage was the joyful display of generations as the president praised and embraced his offspring. Joe Biden walked off stage holding the hand of his cute little grandson, a precious child no more precious than any one of the many thousands of children the president has helped Israel to kill.
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Democrats Release Insanely Hawkish Middle East Policy Platform
When you’re siding with John Bolton on whether to bomb Iran, you’re as insanely hawkish as it gets.”
[Editor’s Note: In case you had any doubts Israel will order United States troops to war with Iran, just listen to the Democratic Party platform war porn. — Mark Taylor]
By Caitlin Johnstone
Caitlin’s Newsletter (8/21/24)
Celebrity progressive Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez falsely claimed that Vice President Kamala Harris “is working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza” at the Democratic National Convention on Monday night. There is literally no evidentiary basis anywhere for this assertion. She made it up.
Kamala Harris is not “working tirelessly” to do anything at this time besides become the next president. Her own staff are saying she is opposed to an arms embargo on Israel and won’t consider cutting or conditioning military aid, which is the only way the Israeli government can be effectively forced to stop sabotaging a peace deal so that the US-backed genocide can finally end. Saying you’ll continue pouring military explosives into a regime that is using those military explosives to conduct regular massacres of civilians is the exact opposite of working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire.
“This is false, it’s propaganda, and it’s making people misunderstand the issue,” Current Affairs’ Nathan Robinson said of AOC’s statement. “The Biden administration could have imposed a ceasefire anytime it wanted to. The only reason there isn’t one is that Biden has made sure Israel has no incentive to agree to one.”
As we deal with this crap, the DNC has approved a 2024 party platform whose section on the middle east is so surprisingly hawkish that it largely reads like it could have been written by some of Washington’s most war-horny Republicans. It repeatedly calls its support for Israel and the continuation of arms shipments thereto “ironclad”. It criticizes Trump as having been too soft on Iran, for god’s sake.
After boasting about the Biden administration’s bombing campaign against the “Iranian-linked Houthi forces” in Yemen, its “precision airstrikes on key Iranian-linked targets,” and its success in neutralizing Iran’s retaliatory strikes on Israel after Israel assassinated multiple Iranian military officials in Syria, the platform says that this “stands in sharp contrast to Trump’s fecklessness and weakness in the face of Iranian aggression during his presidency.”
Then they literally attack Trump for not going to war with Iran:
“In 2018, when Iranian-backed militias repeatedly attacked the U.S. consulate in Basra, Iraq Trump’s only response was to close our diplomatic facility. In June 2019, when Iran shot down a U.S. surveillance aircraft operating in international airspace above the Straits of Hormuz, Trump responded by tweet and then abruptly called off any actual retaliation, causing confusion and concern among his own national security team. In September 2019, when Iranian-backed groups threatened global energy markets by attacking Saudi oil infrastructure, Trump failed to respond against Iran or its proxies. In January 2020, when Iran, for the first and only time in its history, directly launched ballistic missiles against U.S. troops in western Iraq, Trump mocked the resulting Traumatic Brain Injuries suffered by dozens of American servicemembers as mere ‘headaches’ — and again, took no action.”
The “national security team” who suffered “confusion and concern” when Trump opted not to wade into a middle eastern war of unfathomable horror includes psychopathic war criminal John Bolton, who was reportedly “devastated” when Trump called off a deadly military assault on Iran in retaliation for its shooting down the aforementioned (unmanned) surveillance aircraft.
When you’re siding with John Bolton on whether to bomb Iran, you’re as insanely hawkish as it gets.
“President Biden and Vice President Harris believe a strong, secure, and democratic Israel is vital to the interests of the United States,” the platform reads. “Their commitment to Israel’s security, its qualitative military edge, its right to defend itself, and the 2016 Memorandum of Understanding is ironclad.”
The 2016 Memorandum of Understanding is the agreement by which the United States agrees to continue sending Israel $3.8 billion a year to spend on weapons.
This comes as Kamala Harris’ current and former staff members report that not only will the vice president refuse to cut or condition military support to Israel, she will also refuse to re-enter the Iran deal to ease tensions in the region. The Times of Israel cites congressman Brad Schneider saying he was told by the Harris campaign’s Jewish outreach chief that “the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee would oppose a return to the Iran nuclear deal.”
The Iran nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, was one of the only decent foreign policy moves made by the Obama administration, and killing it was one of the nastiest things Trump did as president — along with his other recklessly hawkish actions against Iran like implementing starvation sanctions and assassinating Soleimani. But rather than pledging to re-enter the Obama era of de-escalation and detente with Iran, the Democrats are attacking Trump for not fighting a war with Iran while pledging ironclad support for the nation that’s doing everything it can to get that war started.
So yeah, that’s the Democratic Party for you. Vote for them and you get a nicer-looking mask on the blood-spattered face of the US war machine. It’ll kill just as many middle eastern kids as the Republicans will, but it will kill them under the presidency of a woman of color with “she/her” in her Twitter bio.
Link to story and 6-minute video
'ENTIRE GENERATION AT RISK’: Aid Agencies Warn Of Mass Polio Outbreak In Gaza
Bt Jake Johnson
Common Dreams (8/20/24)
Dozens of humanitarian aid groups and medical professionals warned Tuesday that Gaza could soon face a mass polio outbreak that would endanger children across the enclave and the region if Israel does not immediately stop its bombardment and siege of the Palestinian territory.
"Without immediate action, an entire generation is at risk of infection, and hundreds of children face paralysis by a highly communicable disease that can be prevented with a simple vaccine," said Jeremy Stoner of Save the Children, part of a coalition of aid organizations and physicians that demanded "an immediate and sustained cease-fire to allow polio vaccinations to take place in Gaza."
"For a polio vaccination campaign to be effective, it must be able to reach at least 95% of targeted children, and this cannot happen in an active war zone," the coalition said. "Any cease-fire or pause requested by the U.N. must be used to facilitate full humanitarian access, not just for vaccines but for the full range of assistance needed to sustain civilians' basic needs. All parties to conflict have an obligation to facilitate humanitarian access at all times, regardless of whether conflict is active or not."
The groups' call came days after Gaza health officials found the enclave's first polio case in more than two decades after testing a 10-month-old child in Deir al-Balah—one of the cities in which Gaza's health ministry and the World Health Organization detected poliovirus in wastewater last month.
Much of Gaza's population currently lives in makeshift tents surrounded by rotting garbage and other waste, unsanitary conditions that heighten the risk of infectious disease outbreaks. Israel's relentless U.S.-backed bombardment of Gaza has decimated the territory's waste-removal infrastructure and healthcare system, laying the groundwork for a public health catastrophe.
Nahed Abu Iyada, the health program field officer at CARE West Bank and Gaza, said Tuesday that "without an immediate cease-fire and access to vaccines and humanitarian aid across the Strip, the people of Gaza are facing a public health disaster that will spread and endanger children across the region and beyond."
But the prospects of an imminent cease-fire agreement appeared remote Tuesday as Hamas accused the Biden administration of "buying time for Israel to continue its genocide" by pushing for a deal that grants some of far-right Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's major demands.
The New York Timesreported that "under the new U.S. proposal, Israeli troops would be able to continue to patrol part of the Gazan border with Egypt, albeit in reduced numbers—one of Mr. Netanyahu's core demands."
Hamas has said that "any agreement must guarantee the cessation of aggression against our people, withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, provision of urgent relief in the form of food and medicine, and reaching a real deal to exchange prisoners."
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Palestinian Rights Advocates Hold Sit-In After DNC Refuses Speaking Slot
"We will conduct a moral act of sitting in at the convention to push our party to better align our actions, instead of just our words, with the notion that every life is valuable by simply allowing a Palestinian American to speak from the stage."
By Jake Johnson
Common Dreams (8/22/24)
Delegates from the "uncommitted" movement led a sit-in outside of the Democratic National Convention and refused to accept no for an answer late Wednesday after the party reportedly declined their request to provide a mere five minutes of onstage time for a Palestinian American to speak to the horrors unfolding in the Gaza Strip, which Israel has been bombing relentlessly with U.S. support for more than 10 months.
DNC organizers did not say publicly why they are refusing to allow a Palestinian American to speak at the event at Chicago's United Center, which is located in the county with the largest Palestinian American population in the U.S.
The Uncommitted National Movement secured dozens of delegates to the DNC after hundreds of thousands of Democratic primary voters cast ballots earlier this year protesting the Biden administration's support for Israel's assault on Gaza.
In a joint statement late Wednesday, Abbas Alawieh, June Rose, Sabrene Odeh, and other uncommitted delegates said that "we are waiting for a phone call from Vice President [Kamala] Harris and the DNC to allow a single Palestinian American speaker from the convention stage."
"Our party's platform states that every life is valuable: whether American, Palestinian, or Israeli," the delegates said. "We will conduct a moral act of sitting in at the convention to push our party to better align our actions, instead of just our words, with the notion that every life is valuable by simply allowing a Palestinian American to speak from the stage."
The DNC's speaker lineup thus far has included Republicans, the former CEO of American Express, and the parents of an Israeli American held hostage in Gaza. …
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I've been studiously trying to avoid American politics, since I'm not American and I'm trying to reduce my screen time.
However, the DNC convention, and their response to the pro-Palestine demonstration outside -- with no Palestinian speakers at said convention -- was surreal.
Why everyone in the USA isn't vote third party, I can't fathom.
Beautiful cartoon. All jokes are riddles, Freud should have said that, simple as pie. Genz yes, good people, lettuce blame them. Naught but 50 of THEM have said to burn it down, i mean nought but 50 of gen Alpha have, because they have not sailed to curse like sailors.