I don’t know what will come of the effort to encourage Wisconsin voters to vote “uninstructed”in our April 2 Democratic presidential primary, after more than 100,000 Michigan voterschose the equivalent “uncommitted” option in that state’s primary. Call it just a protest vote campaign, but I’m curious to see what it says about the conscience of voters here, and about their willingness to demand something better. Like Michigan, Wisconsin has open primaries, so you don’t have to be a registered Democrat or Republican to vote, though you can only vote in one. Thank god for small mercies.
Numerically, the “uncommitted”/”uninstructed” campaign isn’t threatening Joe Biden’s coast to the nomination as an incumbent. The greater threat may be that these disaffected voters will also abandon Biden in the general election, especially given that Wisconsin specializes in razor-thin electoral margins. What matters is that it is wrong for the United States to enable Israel’s slaughter of 31,000 people and counting in Gaza, and that a decent-sized chunk of the Democratic electorate—including those who are engaged enough to vote in primaries—is willing to take a stand. Whether or not they come around and hold their noses to vote Biden in November, it’s worth putting real pressure on Biden to support a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and do more to reign in Israel’s belligerent regime.
It would be hard to get any momentum behind a movement like this if Democrats understood or respected what drives a lot of us, let’s say… “ugh yeah fine I’ll vote Dem by default again” voters. For a long time, I’ve felt ambivalent about leftists who sit out elections. I’m starting to understand them a lot better. No, I don’t want Donald Trump back in office. If I had my way, the Republican Party would be outlawed and busted up, along with a host of right-wing civil-society organizations that have tried to help it seize power through violence and legal trickery. It’s also disturbingly clear how much certain Dems relish the threat of Trump as a bargaining chip, and how much they still share Republicans’ commitments to capital and empire.
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Trump would likely help Israel do even more gruesome things in Gaza, Biden’s defenders often remind the pro-Palestinian crowd, as if we should be grateful for the restraint Biden is showing. I’m reminded of conservatives who respond to our critique of the American justice system by going off about how “well, in such-and-such country, they’d just chop off your hands or throw you off a building!” This is a very messed-up way to talk about the world’s problems. If you want to draw a real contrast with Trump’s GOP or such-and-such country’s hand-chopping practices, you should aim to do way better, not just a little better. Take some responsibility for what you can do. Or if you’re the Democratic Party, reflect on all the choices over time that leave you depending on a blood-soaked creep like Biden.
This is our newsletter-first column, Microtones. It runs on the site on Fridays, but you can get it in your inbox on Thursdays by signing up for our email newsletter.
How willing are we to at least send a message to President Joe Biden, and to Wisconsin’s Congressional delegation, including Senator Tammy Baldwin, that enabling Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza is unacceptable? How many voters will Democrats accuse of “just helping Trump,” as the Democratic leaders of Wisconsin’s biggest, most diverse city roll out the red carpet for Trump’s white-supremacist party?
Given that Republicans tried to stage a coup and have become even more explicit in their embrace of vigilante violence (for instance, making a folk hero out of a guy who went around shooting people in Kenosha), we’ll just be lucky if the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee doesn’t turn out to be a nightmare for a city full of people Republicans hate. (Anyways it’s actually really great and smart because conventioners will stay in hotels, and stuff.) This is not simply an opposition party that plays by the rules and can be reasoned with. These are people who, if you keep enabling them, will keep working very hard to erode your rights and quite possibly just kill you.
So, as Democrats continue to tell us how urgent it is to beat the Republicans in elections and save democracy, they’re maybe not really that icked out. They’ve perhaps not outgrown the blithe arrogance and calculated tepidness that cost them Michigan and Wisconsin in 2016.
Let’s look at just a few recent things elected Democrats have done with the power they have, and whether they are the actions of people serious about stopping fascism. People serious about stopping fascism would not humiliate themselves to try passing immigration legislation that panders to the right. They would not throw around terms like “illegals” in the same speech where they congratulate themselves for supposedly not demonizing immigrants. They would not send National Guard troops to harass people in the New York City subways. They would not openly enable the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu, a man every bit as corrupt and authoritarian as Trump. They would maybe stop short of smooching the far-right prime minister of Italy. (I’m sorry, truly… it’s so embarrassing that we have to think about this kind of shit. Our precious Dark Brandon is just so tactile!) They would not cross the aisle in Congress to pass a pointless, racist resolution attacking a Palestinian member of their own caucus. Granted, that last one was a minority of House Democrats, but even so, it’s never any of these folks with actual power who get perversely blamed for helping Trump, the march of fascism, or whatever.
The Teamsters, supposedly a cornerstone of the Democratic coalition, made a hefty donation to the Republican National Committee in February. Liberal commentators in recent years have routinely argued that it’s practical to downplay “culture war” issues like trans rights, notwithstanding the self-evident practicality of making sure people whose vote you seek aren’t killed or persecuted. Democratic elected officials and liberal politicos who should be encouraging a more open debate about Israel are instead aiding ridiculous smear campaigns, like the effort to convince people that the phrase “from the river to the sea” is an anti-Semitic call for genocide. Dress these examples up in all the campaign consultant-speak you want—they’re major capitulations.
When all this is going on, it’s selective and disingenuous to dismiss the pro-Palestine movement as petulant and unrealistic saboteurs. “Uncommitted” or “uninstructed” voters are people the Democratic Party has taken for granted and failed to properly engage. If you’re asking voters to line up behind Biden without question and lay aside any political leverage they might have, you’re asking them for a level of discipline the Dems can’t even get from their own elected members.
Some of us formed our politics in the wake of 9/11, watching our country treat the threat of terrorism as a blank check for bloodshed abroad and surveillance at home. Speaking for myself, I’m a “yeah just not a Republican” voter because I think American belligerence sucks, blind belief sucks, patriotic gibberish sucks, the reflexive demonization of all things Arab or Muslim sucks, and contempt for mass movements sucks. I think moderates give the whole game away by failing to fight for something better. I think this country is basically a huge wealth-management office draped with human entrails, and I’ll believe differently when we achieve something different.
All these years later, we still find ourselves asked to be part of an uneasy coalition with a lot of people who refuse to understand the glaring lessons of the post-9/11 era, and who will respond to concerns about actual war-crimes with an insufferable horse-race mentality. (If you’re in my agéd-millennial age bracket and you still dance to the “because terrorism” tune in any variety… what the hell is wrong with you?) A lot of the people we’re arguing with these days don’t seem to understand that debate within a political party/faction/movement is a good thing, and so is demanding accountability from the very people you’ve voted for. Defending the people you vote for with simplistic excuses and wishful thinking is… not behavior worthy of free people. This is getting so old.
Let’s keep in mind that voters delivered major upsets for Democrats in 2020. Six states that went to Trump in 2016 flipped to Biden in 2020. Voters delivered Georgia’s electoral votes—and both its Senate seats, which required them to come out twice in tough runoff elections. All of this during an absolutely horrible, exhausting year, and in spite of the fact that no one in their right mind was thrilled about Biden, exactly. If you are a reasonable person and convinced yourself that you were thrilled about Biden, well… we all have our moments.
Between 2021 and 2023, what we needed was for Democrats to deliver, as swiftly as possible, to treat their two years in control of both the White House and both houses of Congress like they treat every election—as an emergency. Sure, they got some meaningful things done. Still, priorities like codifying abortion rights and filibuster reform fell prey to the same “well you see it’s the art of the possible” fiddle-dickery Democrats have been stuck on for ages. (Yes yes, I’m sure we’ll keep hearing the pleas that Democrats were helpless to discipline Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, two politicians who have turned out to be notlong for public office. Isn’t the whole point of electing Biden that he’s a creature of the Senate and can maybe work out these sorts of things?)
In 2022, Democrats lost the House but kept the Senate, avoiding the bloodbath that often awaits the party holding the Presidency during midterm elections. That’s in part because voters came through for candidates like Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman. After years of progressive posturing, Fetterman turned around and declared he wasn’t so progressive after all. Fetterman has taught the nation a lesson that we in Wisconsin, especially Madison, know all too well: “Progressive” has become a weasel word, divorced from specific historical moments and movements. Everyone can hide behind it, and no one can be held to it. The bait-and-switch will continue until faith in the process improves.
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SCOTT GORDON
Editor-in-chief and publisher Scott Gordon has covered music and the arts in Madison since 2006 for publications including The A.V. Club, Dane101, and Isthmus, and has also covered policy, environmental issues, and public health for WisContext. He co-founded Tone Madison in 2014.
From Craig Corrie – 21 Years Later
Gaza Crushed With Our Tax Dollars
On March 16, 2003, our daughter Rachel Corrie was killed as she stood to protect the home of a Palestinian family in Rafah in Gaza. Rachel was crushed to death by the Israeli military under a militarized, Caterpillar, Inc. D9R bulldozer, supplied by our United States government, paid for by our tax dollars. Now, twenty-one years later, we are witnessing the entire Gaza population being crushed by the Israeli military, using planes, bombs, shells, tanks and, yes, even bulldozers supplied by the United States. Genocide. Paid for by our tax dollars.
In some ways you could see this coming: soldiers never held accountable for their war crimes, human rights violations by the army of a country feeling entitled to the land of another people. We know this story, and we have seen this genocide. Ask any native American.
Our family worked for almost two decades to secure accountability in Rachel’s case, first through diplomatic means, and when that failed, through a civil lawsuit in Israeli courts. Some of the court testimony is particularly telling. An IDF Colonel responsible for training stated that there are no civilians in war zones, and the officer responsible for the military police investigation into Rachel’s killing testified that he thought Israel was at war with everyone in Gaza, including the peace activists. And all the time, the Israeli defense team referred to the people of Gaza – Rachel’s friends, our friends – as “the terrorists.” Even the Israeli high court said that international law did not apply to the actions of Israel in Gaza. How telling.
Repeatedly, the U.S. supplies weapons to Israel that are used in ways giving probable cause of human rights violations. But when the U.S. asks for investigation, Israel replies with reports that are far from the result of the thorough, credible, and transparent investigation required of, or in Rachel’s case promised by, Israel. Citing that violations cannot be proven, the U.S. continues military aid – rather than withholding more funding until our questions are properly answered, as allowed by U.S. law and dictated by common sense. The U.S. routinely rewards IDF war crimes with increased military aid, rather than sanctions. When that aid is abetting genocide, as it has since October 7, 2023, the aid itself is a war crime.
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The time to avert the massacre of October 7 and the genocide that has followed was during all the prior years of the Israeli occupation. Repeatedly, Palestinians, often joined by Jewish Israelis, have protested nonviolently to have their rights respected. Cindy and I have joined them for Friday afternoon protests in the olive groves west of Bil’in in the West Bank and have been met by teargas and small arms fire from the IDF, even though we never left Bil’in land. I remember stumbling up the hillside while an Israeli friend helped Cindy to medical aid for gas inhalation.
We have watched a landowner weeping as her olive trees were being uprooted to make way for a great wall to divide her forever from her crops. We watched from afar the Great March of Return in Gaza, again met by gunfire – often targeted at medics, journalists, and even children. Had Israel and the U.S. been moved by any of these nonviolent protests to respect the rights of Palestinians, then the violence of October 7, 2023, and the more than five months of carnage and destruction in Gaza thereafter might have been avoided. To have peace, there must be justice, and there is nothing peaceful about the daily injustice of the occupation.
On a larger, even more depressing scale, I remember in grade school wondering how it was possible that any nation could ever let the Holocaust happen. It was personal. Linda, the girl I shared a desk with, was Jewish. Now, as I watch in horror at the atrocities perpetrated in Gaza and rationalized in Washington DC, I see how genocide happens: by nations making excuses and looking the other way.
That is where we come in – by refusing to look the other way. And an amazing number of us around the world have done so. Activists on the street corners, in city council meetings, in front of the White House, on state capitol steps, many for the first time in their lives, refusing to hear the excuses, refusing to look the other way. We are heartened by each one of you and by the visible, constructive actions you are taking. You have joined with Rachel, who wrote to her mother more than two decades ago, “This has to stop. I think it is a good idea for us all to drop everything and devote our lives to making this stop.”
The Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization. Donations by check can be mailed to the Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace & Justice, 203 East 4th Ave, Suite 402, Olympia, WA 98501.
Madmen Arsonists Strike Again: They as Much as Lit Aaron Bushnell’s Match for Him
Aaron Bushnell just couldn’t take any more.
He couldn’t bear to see any more people eviscerated and incinerated by American bombs dropped by Israelis on innocent Palestinians.
So, in his Air Force uniform, he walked determinedly to the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. and set himself on fire.
What can we say about a young man who would do that to protest his government’s acts of cruelty and genocide?
It is important we say nothing before quoting his own calmly spoken, final words to the world.
“I am an active-duty member of the United States Air Force and I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest. But compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal. Free Palestine!”
You can see Aaron’s last minute of life in this video, blurred out after he strikes the match.
In it, he shouts, “Free Palestine” six times. The last five are combined with screams of agony before he falls silent.
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A voice off-camera, shouts repeatedly, “Get him on the ground…on the ground,” which is the correct thing to do when someone is on fire.
People frantically rush in with a fire extinguisher. A police officer or uniformed guard appears and points a gun in Aaron’s direction. Someone calls out “I need a fire extinguisher…a fire extinguisher…another one…I don’t need guns; I need a fire extinguisher.”
Why would Aaron do something this extreme?
More of the “why” may come to light. But what he said in that video is sufficient. He could “no longer be complicit in genocide.”
Aaron’s motivation is strikingly similar to that of Norman Morrison, a 35-year-old, Quaker activist who set himself ablaze in the Pentagon parking lot below Secretary of War McNamara’s office, November 2, 1965.
In a letter to his wife, Morrison had written, “Dearest Anne, For weeks, even months, I have been praying only that I be shown what I must do. This morning with no warning, I was shown … Know that I love thee but must act for the children in the Priest’s village,” in reference to an article he had read in which a Catholic priest described Vietnamese “women and children blown to bits” from U.S. bombing and napalm.
Too many of us in VFP have seen the suffering war creates and it never leaves our memories. All of us agonize over our government’s aiding and abetting the slaughter of innocents.
We prod ourselves, “what is the most, the very best thing, I can do?”
That question moves some to learn the history of Palestine that they’ve too long ignored; some to contact elected officials; some to join a public protest; some to go on fasts; some to block roads or congressional offices and go to jail. But it never feels like enough.
Some may perceive fasting to the death or self-immolation as crazy and extreme beyond measure. Others see it as entirely appropriate because the horror protested is itself insane and extreme beyond measure.
Few who care deeply will have the courage to fast to the death or do what Aaron Bushnell did. But in addition to whatever inadequate things we already do, we can, we must, do two more things.
The first is to consciously let people who are pained and grieving at what our government does know that they are not alone. We should not assume our colleagues and comrades know we are aware of their anguish.
Secondly, we can resolve that we will move beyond simply reacting to bestial policies.
We could call our policymakers “madmen arsonists” because they go around the globe setting fires much faster than we can extinguish them.
These policymakers, swaddled in privilege, take their orders from those who profit from death and suffering. We know who they are: the people who run Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics and their fellow merchants of death, and the people who finance what the merchants do.
These madmen arsonists operate on a grand scale internationally but also on a singular, small scale as in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. They as much as lit the match for Aaron Bushnell. The fire that killed Airman Bushnell was simply the “collateral damage,” as it’s so callously called, of the ongoing conflagration in Palestine.
Our firefighting will never keep up with arsonists who operate on a global scale. We are long overdue to learn the fire prevention skills needed to halt them.
Fire prevention in this context means prohibiting the lobbying, advertising, vote buying, campaign funding and actual legislation writing that corporations do behind constitutional shields given them by the Supreme Court, like free speech and protection.
Until we strip corporations of their shields, they will continue to amass economic and political power to govern us, to set fires large and small, while we run frantically for fire extinguishers until we are exhausted, penniless and gone.
Veterans For Peace is learning the necessary fire prevention skills we need as we continue fighting fires set by the madmen arsonists. It is simply our responsibility to do both at the same time.
Millions will be in the streets against the Rafah invasion on March 2; find a demonstration near you. Vigils will be held across the country for Aaron Bushnell in the coming days.
If you are a member of the US military want expert, confidential advice on how to get out, call the GI Rights Hotline 24/7 at 1-877-447-4487
CALL Pocan’s offices and insist on a pledge not to vote for any further military aid. He’s still not done that. Here is the link to the Democratic discharge petition.
Pocan in Madison (608) 258-9800
Pocan in DC (202) 225-2906
Right now, the Israeli military is preparing to invade Rafah, where over 1.7 million Palestinians are sheltering and starving from months of brutal bombardment.
Yesterday, AIPAC was on Capitol Hill lobbying members of Congress to give billions in unconditional weapons funding to Israel — directly enabling the attack on Rafah.
Now, Democratic leadership is using a procedure called a discharge petition to try to force a vote through and fund Israel’s assault on Gaza this week.1
We put this easy tool together for you — all you have to do is fill in your information and press the button!
Here’s why this is urgent: The discharge petition only needs 218 signatures to bring a vote to the floor — and at least 169 Democrats have already signed on.
That means we need to take action today to urge our representatives to refuse to sign or withdraw their signatures — and make it clear that they oppose billions in unconditional weapons funding for Israel.
The Israeli government has made its intention to invade Rafah very clear. Sending $14 billion in military funding would only enable Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza, which has already killed over 31,000 Palestinians.
On Monday, we joined a broad coalition of nearly two dozen progressive organizations calling on the Democratic Party to reject AIPAC.2
Moments like this are exactly why we organize — and exactly why we need people like you in our movement.
When you send a letter to Congress, you’ll be joining thousands of people across the country who are saying NO to AIPAC’s agenda and NO to Israel’s massacre of Palestinians.
Palestinians in Gaza marked the first day of Ramadan on Monday amid rising hunger and desperation, with Israel continuing to restrict aid shipments into the besieged territory. United Nations officials have complained that even basic items like medical scissors have resulted in trucks being stopped by Israeli forces at the border. This comes as countries such as the United States conduct dangerous airdrops of essential supplies and have announced plans to build a pier off the coast of Gaza to deliver aid. “It’s going to be more simple, more realistic and more efficient if the United States has pushed the Israelis to allow the aid truck to go into the north of Gaza and Gaza City,” says Yousef Hammash, advocacy officer with the Norwegian Refugee Council, speaking to us from Rafah. “The only issue that we are facing on delivering the aid on the ground is the restrictions the Israelis put on it.” Hammash also describes “living day by day” amid “madness, violence [and] bombardment.”
The US President and the Democratic party are betting voters are dumb enough to fall for this charade. Please don’t prove them right.
A few observations on President Biden’s building of a “temporary pier” – or what his officials are grandly calling a “port” – to get aid into Gaza:
1. Though no one is mentioning it, Biden is actually violating Israel’s 17-year blockade of Gaza with his plan. Gaza doesn’t have a sea port, or an airport, because Israel, its occupier, has long banned it from having either.
Israel barred anything getting into Gaza that didn’t come through the land crossings it controls. Israel stopped international aid flotillas, often violently, from reaching Gaza to bring in medicine. The blockade also created a captive market for Israel’s own poor-quality goods, like damaged fruit and veg, and allowed Israel to skim off money at the land crossings that should have gone to the Palestinians in fees and duties.
2. It will take many weeks for the US to build this pier off-shore and get it up and running. Why the delay? Because every western capital, including the United States, has supported the blockade for the past 17 years.
The siege of Gaza caused gradual malnutrition among the enclave’s children, rather the the current rapid starvation. By helping Israel inflict collective punishment on Gaza for all those years, the US and Europe were complicit in a gross and enduring violation of international law, even before the current genocide.
With his pier, Biden isn’t reversing that long-standing collusion in a crime against humanity. He has stressed it will be temporary. In other words, it will be back to business in Gaza as usual afterwards: any children who survive will once again be allowed to starve in slow-motion, at a rate that doesn’t register with the establishment media and put pressure on Washington to be seen to be doing something.
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3. Biden could get aid into Gaza much faster than by building a pier, if he wanted to. He could simply insist that Israel let aid trucks through the land crossings, and threaten it with serious repercussions should it fail to comply. He could threaten to withhold the US bombs he is sending to kill more children in Gaza. Or he could threaten to cut off the billions in military aid Washington sends to Israel every year. Or he could threaten to refuse to cast a US veto to protect Israel from diplomatic fallout at the United Nations. He could do any of that and more, but he chooses not to.
4. Even after Biden buys Israel a few more weeks to further aggressively starve Palestinians in Gaza, while we wait for his temporary pier to be completed, nothing may actually change in practice. Israel will still get to carry out the same checks it currently does at the land crossings but instead in Lanarca, Cyprus, where the aid will be loaded on to ships. In other words, Israel will still be able to create the same interminable hold-ups using “security concerns” as the pretext.
5. Biden isn’t changing course – temporarily – because he suddenly cares about the people, or even the children, of Gaza. They have been suffering in their open-air prison, to varying degrees, for decades. If he had cared, he would have done something to end that suffering after he became president. If he had done something then, October 7 might never have happened, and all those lives lost on both sides – lives continuing to be lost on the Palestinian side every few minutes – might have been saved.
And if he really cared, he wouldn’t have helped Israel in its efforts to destroy UNRWA, the UN relief agency for Palestinians and a vital lifeline for Gaza, by freezing its funding, based on unevidenced claims against the agency by Israel.
No, Biden doesn’t care about Palestinian suffering, or about the fact that, while he’s been busy eating ice cream, many, many tens of thousands of children have been murdered, maimed or orphaned – and the rest starved. He cares about the polls. His timetable for helping Palestinians is being strictly dictated by the schedule of the presidential election. He needs to look like Gaza’s saviour when Democrats are deciding who they are voting for.
He and the Democratic party are betting voters are dumb enough to fall for this charade. Please don’t prove them right.
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JONATHAN COOK
Jonathan Cook is a Nazareth- based journalist and winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism [ MORE ]
This week, after witnessing the Flour Massacre in which over 100 Palestinians were killed at the site of a food aid shipment and over 750 more starving Palestinians were injured, the Biden Administration has announced its intention to conduct air drops of humanitarian aid to Gaza. This act is too little too late and an effort to evade holding Israel accountable to its duties before both U.S. and international law as a recipient of billions in taxpayer dollars.
This cosmetic change in the Biden Administration’s approach suggests that the President and U.S. government have lost complete control over any actions of the Israeli government. In the face of what experts have called the fastest-ever onset of famine since WWII—imposed by Israel on the Palestinian people in Gaza—the Biden administration’s actions show a crass dismissal of Palestinian suffering directly aided and abetted by both U.S. weapons and military aid. The administration must drastically change course as its current approach has indisputably failed while giving Israel license since October 7th to exact deadly collective punishment on the Palestinian people in Gaza—with full U.S. financial and political coverage.
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The humanitarian catastrophe wrought by the Israeli campaign in Gaza is the disastrous next phase in Israel’s genocide. In addition to over 30,000 Palestinians killed by Israel including over 13,000 children, over 70% of homes have been destroyed, at least 10 children have died from hunger, and over a million Palestinian civilians face starvation and indefinite displacement. The Biden Administration pleading with Israel for the entry of limited humanitarian aid and a temporary ceasefire has failed. The United States provided cover for Israel through vetoes of a ceasefire at the UN Security Council even as most of our allies voted for ceasefire.
Israel has completely ignored the demands of the International Court of Justice which found genocide “plausible” in Gaza if Israel took no action to allow the free entry of humanitarian aid, to avoid continued killing of Palestinian civilians, and to prevent conditions “calculated to bring about [Palestinians’] physical destruction in whole or in part.” Alongside the U.S. federal court’s finding regarding genocide in Gaza, these acts implicate the United States as complicit in genocide. Dropping aid from the sky does not change this reality and indeed, Israel may still obstruct or bomb such aid given the precedent of the past few weeks.
The U.S. must cut military aid to Israel, thereby compelling an immediate and permanent ceasefire. Compel Israel to withdraw from Gaza. Recognize Palestinians’ full human and political rights, and pressure Israel and Egypt to immediately allow the full flow of humanitarian trucks into Gaza without restriction. This is the only strategy that can emerge from a commitment to doing what is right and humane—in addition to what is in the U.S.’s best interest for its standing before the world.
Political expediency and election prospects are only secondary considerations amidst an unmitigated genocide enabled by this administration. Speeches of sympathy with Palestinians are directly at odds with current policy. The Flour Massacre must compel the U.S. to reckon with Israel’s intent and our complicity: the Biden administration must act decisively to stop genocide.
Sincerely, Dr. Osama Abu Irshaid Executive Director
Biden’s 2020 margin over Trump in Michigan was 150,000 votes. The Uncommitted vote in the Democratic Presidential Primary was 13% of the total. Michigan’s Arab-American population is 2%.
Dearborn, MI | www.adc.org | February 28, 2024 – Over 100,000 people voted for uncommitted in the Michigan Democratic Presidential Primary yesterday. This record breaking total for the uncommitted option sent a loud and clear message to the Democratic Party and the Biden Campaign – it is time to take action to end the genocide in Gaza. Over 100,000 people voted for uncommitted in the Michigan Democratic Presidential Primary. Uncommitted voters represent diverse demographics, including young voters, progressive voters, and a significant number of voters from ally communities.
ADC National Executive Director Abed Ayoub said, “We want to thank the Listen 2 Michigan campaign and coalition, including the Truth Project. These results would not have been possible without the commitment from our partners. Yesterday our community reclaimed its electoral power in Michigan. The majority of Americans do not support the continued US complicity in the active genocide of Palestinians, and this will be reflective at the ballot box on election day. It is time for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire, stopping of military aid to Israel, and an immediate measure to provide much needed humanitarian aid to those in Gaza.
In early February, ADC, partnering with the Truth Project, launched efforts alongside Listen to Michigan to educate voters about the campaign. In under three weeks those efforts led to the activation of over 500,000 voters across southeast Michigan, resulting in what we saw tonight. This impressive showing is a result of a disciplined approach to voter engagement and a testament to the deep opposition to the Biden Administration’s complicity in genocide.
ADC efforts are funded by the community, and for the community. Your support is crucial in continuing this work and ensuring the organization has the resources needed to continue this important work in other states. Take a moment and make a contribution to ADC by clicking here.
Following Washington’s lead, key US allies have cut funding for the United Nations Relief Works Agency for Palestine—making them all complicit in genocide.
When the 17 judges of the International Court of Justice issued their near-unanimous ruling on January 26, making clear that Israel’s actions in Gaza plausibly constituted genocide, they asserted the legitimacy of the world’s most influential judicial body to hold Israel provisionally accountable for those violations.
Israel was having none of it.
Just hours after the court’s decision was announced in The Hague, Israel went public with an unsubstantiated allegation that 12 Gazan employees of the UN’s Relief Works Agency, the primary body responsible for providing humanitarian support to Palestine refugees, supposedly were tied to Hamas and may have played some role in the attack on Israel on October 7. (In fact, the names of all UNRWA employees had been provided to Israel earlier in the year for Tel Aviv’s vetting—and Israel made no complaints.) Despite the lack of evidence, UNRWA—presumably in an effort to avoid a dangerous collective punishment by Israel’s allies—immediately announced that it was firing the named employees (two were confirmed dead) and the UN launched two separate investigations.
Not wanting to wait a moment, however, Washington announced on the same day that it was cutting its entire aid allocation to UNRWA, despite the agency’s irreplaceable role in getting desperately needed aid into Gaza. A few hours later, key US allies announced that they were joining Washington in cutting aid: the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and new NATO-member Finland. The United States provides by far the largest annual donation available to the UN agency (although, at just over $300 million, it’s a pittance compared to the almost $4 billion the US sends to the Israeli military every year). And combined with the at least 15 countries that eventually joined the US cuts, the impact on UNRWA’s ability to provide even the most minimal of basic services is enormous. With those services destroyed by Israel’s war, this US role in further undermining Palestinians’ access to water, food, medicine, shelter, and fuel makes Washington—again —directly complicit in Israel’s genocide.
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Then things got worse. Two weeks later, on February 9, Israel launched another PR attack on UNRWA, this time claiming that a tunnel under the agency’s headquarters in Gaza City had been used by Hamas—variously identified as a communications center, a command center or a data center. Again no evidence was made public, but, among other responses, the US Senate bill authorizing $14 billion for unconditional aid to the Israeli military stated explicitly that none of the bill’s separate humanitarian aid (for conflict zones around the world) could go to UNRWA. US officials themselves had argued earlier that UNRWA was “the only game in town” in terms of getting any significant aid into Gaza, but the bill still imposed a permanent ban on US funding. (If passed by the House, it would even prevent UNRWA from receiving a tiny $300,000 grant that had already been approved.)
The impact of the aid cuts on the already threatened lives of 2.3 million displaced Gazans, as well as millions more Palestinian refugees in the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, can hardly be overstated. US officials who suggested redirection of UNRWA funds to UNICEF and the World Food Program only showed their ignorance of conditions on the ground, and the capacities of aid organizations. UNICEF and WFP together have less than 70 staff on the ground in Gaza; UNRWA has over 13,000 providing, for more than half a century, all the services that ordinarily would be provided by a government civil service. Most of Gaza’s doctors, nurses, teachers, engineers, street sweepers are UNRWA employees. Without UNRWA, all the UN agencies and NGOs would be unable to carry out their crucial work. Thousands, probably tens of thousands more civilians—especially babies, children, pregnant women, and the elderly—will die.
And there is another price to be paid as well. Along with its critical role in lifesaving humanitarian assistance, UNRWA remains the only international agency in the UN system whose mandate includes protection of the rights of Palestinians as refugees. The work of UNRWA, from its creation in 1949, was designed to continue until Palestinian refugees achieved “a just and durable solution to their plight” on the basis of all the human rights and refugee rights to which they are entitled.
That means that UNRWA’s work is unfinished until the Palestinian refugees’ right to return to their homes, guaranteed by international law, is made real. Refugees—dispossessed in 1948 of their homes and land from what is now southern Israel—make up 70 percent of Gaza’s population. Without UNRWA, their right of return, indeed the very existence of Palestinians as a refugee community, is threatened with erasure. And that—creating conditions that make the survival of all or part of a threatened group as a group impossible—is part of the very definition of genocide.
No wonder Israel is so eager to get rid of UNRWA. And for the same reason, no wonder the defense of UNRWA remains such a critical factor in our continuing work for an immediate cease-fire and Palestinian access to unhindered humanitarian assistance in Gaza.
12-2:00 pm Sen Baldwin’s office, 30 W Mifflin Street
2:00 pm walk to Rep Pocan’s office
2:15 pm Rep Pocan’s office, 10 E Doty St, #405
Emergency National Security Supplemental Appropriation Bill
After passing the US Senate with Sen. Baldwin’s YES vote, the $95 billion gift to the weapons industry is going to the House; this is a supplement to our $886 billion dollar 2024 military budget already approved.
CodePink explains:
“The Senate bill includes another $14.3 billion for weapons for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, $60 billion to continue the war in Ukraine (bringing that total to $170 billion) and almost $8 billion to further militarize east Asia for a confrontation with China. The bill also includes $9 billion in humanitarian aid to be split between Ukraine, Israel and Gaza; In other words; a few sips of water before the bombing resumes.
As if that isn’t bad enough, the Senate bill also includes a prohibition against US funding for UNRWA, the lifeline for water and food to Gaza, to threaten mass starvation for over two million people. Finally, there’s a provision that allows President Biden to send unlimited weapons to Israel without the legally-required notification to Congress.”
Rep. Pocan has previously voted against this supplemental bill. We will visit his office and ask him to continue to oppose it. As for Sen. Baldwin, we’ll visit her office again to continue to condemn her votes that fund murderous policies; deaf and blind to the genocide, she continues to promote the defense industry as an economic boon for Wisconsin. What a racket! Can you join us?
RSVP if you can to warabolition@gmail.com, or just show up for any part; and to access Baldwin’s office during the time of vigil, you can call 608 217 2248.
Palestinians and Israelis who’ve experienced the settlers’ attacks first-hand see the move as a positive but wholly insufficient step toward accountability.
In partnership with After years of toothless verbal condemnation of Israeli settler violence by successive U.S. governments, the Biden administration took the historic step last week of imposing sanctions against four settlers involved in recent attacks in the occupied West Bank. The executive order includes freezing the settlers’ assets in the United States and banning their entry into the country. Israeli banks have also frozen the accounts of two of the settlers on the list in compliance with the U.S. sanctions.
These attacks are succeeding in their state-sanctioned goal of cleansing vast regions of the West Bank of their Palestinian inhabitants to enable the further expansion of Jewish settlements. And the situation has deteriorated even further under the shadow of war, with settlers forcibly displacing at least 16 entire Palestinian villages since October 7.
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To try to assess the significance of Biden’s decision, +972 Magazine and Local Call spoke with Palestinians and Israelis who have been directly impacted by the violence of the targeted settlers — David Chai Chasdai, Shalom Zicherman, Einan Tanjil, and Yinon Levi — and their comrades in arms. Most welcomed the executive order but wondered whether it would have any effect on the ground; whether it would deter other settlers; whether sanctions would be extended to other settlers involved in the violence; and whether such sanctions would ultimately reach the leadership of the settlement movement, including those sitting in government.
‘These are organized groups that come to kill’
David Chai Chasdai was arrested for leading one of the worst instances of settler violence in recent memory: the pogrom in the Palestinian town of Huwara in February 2023, during which hundreds of settlers set fire to dozens of homes and hundreds of vehicles, wounding over 100 residents in the process. Sameh Aqtash, from the nearby village of Za’atara, was shot and killed during the attack.
Chasdai, who lives in the settlement of Beit El, is a familiar figure in the world of the “hilltop youth” — the generic term given to young Israeli settlers who routinely descend from illegal West Bank outposts to attack Palestinians. In 2014, then a teenager, he was described in the settler news outlet Makor Rishon as “the number one target of the Nationalist Crimes Division in the Judea and Samaria [police] district and one of the names that causes the greatest headaches for members of the Jewish Unit of the Shin Bet.”
In 2015, Chasdai was convicted of intent to unlawfully use hazardous materials after bottles filled with gasoline and other flammable substances were found in his car. Two years later, he was convicted of aggravated assault for attacking a Palestinian taxi driver with tear gas. In 2021, he was convicted of threatening a police officer.
Chasdai was one of only 18 settlers arrested after the Huwara pogrom (only one of whom was charged). He was soon released but then re-arrested and placed into three months of administrative detention — a tool Israel uses almost exclusively against Palestinians to detain whomever it wants without charge or trial. 50 Knesset members signed a call for his release.
“It’s a symbolic measure,” a resident of Huwara from the Awwad family, who asked that his first name not be published for fear of settler reprisal, told +972. “America says, ‘We also watch what’s going on in the [occupied] territories. It helps a little that the Israeli government knows that the Palestinians have good relations with the U.S. and are giving them material about what the settlers are doing.”
Awwad believes that although the sanctions are a good start, they are not nearly enough to deter settler violence. “It’s not just Huwara — it’s everywhere in the West Bank,” he said. “Settlers walking around in military uniforms and with weapons. These are not people who just shoot and run. These are organized groups that come to kill, and America should declare them terrorist organizations. They are part of the right [wing], and the right wing is responsible for them: it gives them orders, gives them lawyers and money, and supports their criminal behavior.”
Awwad also questions the effectiveness of this initial package of sanctions, as these settlers likely do not regularly — if ever — travel to the United States, and they almost certainly do not have American bank accounts. “We need the sanctions to be here,” he says. “The ones who need to act against the settlers are the government and the law enforcement authorities in Israel. Only if this happens will they begin to be afraid.
“The problem is that the government here doesn’t want to act against them,” Awwad continued. “The settlers are part of the government, so the government doesn’t want to deal with them because they’re afraid that the coalition will fall.”
Chasdai himself responded to the freezing of his bank accounts, telling Israel’s public broadcaster Kan that it was a “national disgrace,” all the more so because it took place under a right-wing government. “Throughout the generations we have seen many oppressors who have harmed the people of Israel,” Chasdai said. “We will also get through the persecution of Biden and his collaborators.”
‘It’s convenient to blame the small fish’
Another settler on Biden’s list is Shalom Zicherman, a resident of the Mitzpe Yair outpost. In June 2022, he threw stones through the window of a car belonging to left-wing Israeli activists. I was present at the scene and documented the attack, after which Zicherman was able to return to the outpost, despite the fact that the army’s Judea Area Brigade Commander Col. Yehuda Rosilio saw the attack and did nothing to stop or detain him. The IDF Spokesperson initially described the incident as “friction between settlers and protesters,” but Zicherman was later indicted, and his trial is ongoing.
The U.S. State Department notes that “according to video evidence, [Zicherman] assaulted Israeli activists and their vehicles in the West Bank, blocking them on the street, and attempted to break the windows of passing vehicles with activists inside. Zicherman cornered at least two of the activists and injured both.”
According to the order, Zicherman and another settler “directly or indirectly engaged or attempted to engage in planning, ordering, otherwise directing, or participating in efforts to place civilians in reasonable fear of violence with the purpose or effect of necessitating a change of residence to avoid such violence, affecting the West Bank.”
Yasmin Eran Vardi, a left-wing activist who spends most of her time in the West Bank doing “protect presence” solidarity work — whereby Israeli and international activists put their bodies in between Palestinians on the one hand and settlers and soldiers on the other — was wounded in the attack. “I’m in favor of sanctions being imposed, but these sanctions don’t mean a lot,” she told +972. “It’s clear that these four [settlers] did bad things, but there is a whole policy here that allows them to do whatever they want, under the auspices of the army and the government, all with American funding.”
Like Awwad, Eran Vardi wondered whether these sanctions would effectively deter other settlers, or whether they would even deter the four who were themselves sanctioned. “The question is whether anything will change, even a little,” she said.
Eran Vardi wants to see more significant sanctions, but she has no expectation that the U.S. will impose them. “These sanctions demonstrate Biden’s full cooperation with Israel’s needs,” she said. “It’s convenient to blame the small fish, especially because [the settlers] hurt Israeli citizens. Biden could stop funding the killing in Gaza if he wanted to.”
‘Why focus specifically on those who harmed Israelis?’
Einan Tanjil, a third settler named in Biden’s executive order, was documented in November 2021 attacking Palestinian farmers and Israeli activists who came to harvest olives in the village of Surif. The order states that Tanjil “was involved in assaulting Palestinian farmers and Israeli activists by attacking them with stones and clubs, resulting in wounds that required medical treatment.”
+972 and Local Call reported at the time that masked settlers descended from nearby outposts and, using stones and clubs, wounded at least three Israeli activists who subsequently needed medical treatment, including the veteran activist Rabbi Arik Asherman. Tanjil was charged with assault and causing bodily harm.
Netta Ben Porat, an Israeli human rights activist, was wounded during the incident. “There were eight of us Israelis,” she recounted. “Einan and his friend attacked us with clubs, and another activist stood between me and them, and then he beat me.
“He was only charged with assault, not even aggravated assault or politically-driven assault [which would carry a more severe punishment],” Ben Porat continued. “They omitted that he attacked more people. The indictment does not clarify why he attacked us. He claimed self-defense, even though I was standing to the side and filming while he hit me.”
To Ben Porat, the sanctions appear “ridiculous.” “Out of all [the settlers], the one the U.S. imposes sanctions on is a 19-year-old who attacked Israelis once or twice? It’s irrelevant,” she said. “They could have tried a little harder — what about the military security coordinator who was armed and who brought the settlers [to where we were] and watched from above [as they attacked us]? Or the farmers responsible for expelling entire communities? If the problem is settler violence and its impact on Palestinians, then why focus specifically on those who harmed Israelis?
“Maybe this is a harbinger of things to come,” she continued. “I hope this is a first step, that sanctions will be imposed on [Bezalel] Smotrich and [prominent settler leader] Yossi Dagan.”
‘We hope this will help us return to our lands’
The final settler targeted by the sanctions is Yinon Levi, who helped found the Meitarim Farm outpost. According to Kerem Navot, an NGO that tracks the dispossession of Palestinian land, Levi owns an earthworks company that has been hired by state authorities to carry out demolition orders in Palestinian villages in the West Bank.
Last November, violence emanating from Meitarim Farm led to the expulsion of the Palestinian community of Khirbet Zanuta — 27 families, totalling around 250 people — from their homes near the Meitar checkpoint in the southern West Bank. At the beginning of the war, Levi’s company also blocked roads leading to the entrance of the Palestinian village of Susiya — an apparent attempt to intimidate the village residents.
A petition filed on behalf of the Palestinians expelled from Zanuta states that Levi headed a group of settlers who, accompanied by two soldiers, came to the village on Oct. 12, beat village residents, threatened to kill them, smashed solar panels, and destroyed a car. According to the petition, Levi drove a bulldozer and “began extensive and massive demolitions of buildings, infrastructure, olive trees, and other agricultural crops belonging to the villagers.”
Levi differs slightly from the other three settlers on the American list in that he is not merely a hilltop youth activist, but rather the leader of a settler farm. In recent years, dozens of such farms have been established in the West Bank, and they are at the heart of the effort to expel Palestinians from their land. Although most of them were not established legally, they receive government support and protection from the military.
“I didn’t believe this would happen,” Fayez al-Tal, the leader of Khirbet Zanuta, told +972 in response to the announcement of sanctions against Levi. “We read the decision and were overjoyed. Yinon Levi is in charge of the outpost: he is one of the people who came at the beginning of the war and threatened us. We hope this will help us in our lawsuit requesting to return to our lands, and we hope that the court will see that the Americans are imposing sanctions. But Israel is not doing anything.”
According to al-Tal, it is important to remember the broader context of settler violence: “The settlers don’t do it alone. They serve the government, and the police do nothing when they attack us. They know that no law applies to them. They are not afraid of anything. The Americans can’t say a word about Gaza, because Hamas is there — but there is no Hamas here, so they can ask why there are violent attacks by settlers.”
Like other interviewees, al-Tal hopes that the order will later be extended to other settlers, including Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, and that “the U.S. Consulate and Embassy will pressure the Civil Administration or the police to prevent the attacks and bring us back to our land.”
+972 and Local Call contacted Chasdai’s lawyer, but he did not respond. We also contacted Levi, but he didn’t respond. Levi told other media outlets that the accusations leveled against him are “false.” Tanjil’s lawyer referred us to the Honenu legal organization, which said that it does not represent him on the issue of U.S. sanctions. Zicherman could not be reached for comment.
A version of this article was first published in Hebrew on Local Call. Read it here.
Oren Ziv is a photojournalist, reporter for Local Call, and a founding member of the Activestills photography collective.
Our team has been devastated by the horrific events of this latest war – the atrocities committed by Hamas in Israel and the massive retaliatory Israeli attacks on Gaza. Our hearts are with all the people and communities facing violence.
We are in an extraordinarily dangerous era in Israel-Palestine. The bloodshed unleashed by these events has reached extreme levels of brutality and threatens to engulf the entire region. Hamas’ murderous assault in southern Israel has devastated and shocked the country to its core. Israel’s retaliatory bombing of Gaza is wreaking destruction on the already besieged strip and killing a ballooning number of civilians. Emboldened settlers in the West Bank, backed by the army, are seizing the opportunity to escalate their attacks on Palestinians.
This escalation has a very clear context, one that +972 has spent the past 13 years covering: Israeli society’s growing racism and militarism, the entrenched occupation, and an increasingly normalized siege on Gaza.
We are well positioned to cover this perilous moment – but we need your help to do it. This terrible period will challenge the humanity of all of those working for a better future in this land. Palestinians and Israelis are already organizing and strategizing to put up the fight of their lives.
Can we count on your support? +972 Magazine is the leading media voice of this movement, a desperately needed platform where Palestinian and Israeli journalists and activists can report on and analyze what is happening, guided by humanism, equality, and justice. Join us.
One of the most disturbing things about our society—we’re not alone in this—is how easily our culture slips quickly into promoting violent bigotry. Usually what happens is this: a tiny number of people who are members of a particular demographic group carry out some outrageous act, and then the group as a whole is stigmatized and made to be feared even though nearly everyone in the group had nothing to do with the outrageous act whatsoever.
After the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941, for instance, anti-Japanese bigotry exploded. The Democratic president, known for his compassionate social democratic politics, rounded up around 125,000 Japanese Americans, the vast majority of the population living on the U.S. mainland at the time, and put them into internment camps. The Japanese were treated as subhumans—even Dr. Seuss started drawing grotesque racist caricatures of them—and the U.S. military had no hesitation in vaporizing Japanese civilian populations. (“There are no civilians in Japan,” declared an Air Force intelligence officer, who deemed the entire population a “legitimate military target,” a view that is defended by some to this day.) As John Dower writes in War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War:
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They were perceived as a race apart, even a species apart—and an overpoweringly monolithic one at that. There was no Japanese counterpart to the “good German” in the popular consciousness of the Western Allies…. The racist code words and imagery that accompanied the war in Asia were often exceedingly graphic and contemptuous. The Western Allies, for example, consistently emphasized the “subhuman” nature of the Japanese, routinely turning to images of apes and vermin to convey this. With more tempered disdain, they portrayed the Japanese as inherently inferior men and women who had to be understood in terms of primitivism, childishness, and collective mental and emotional deficiency. Cartoonists, songwriters, filmmakers, war correspondents, and the mass media in general all seized on these images…. An endless stream of evidence ranging from atrocities to suicidal tactics could be cited…. to substantiate the belief that the Japanese were a uniquely contemptible and formidable foe who deserved no mercy and virtually demanded extermination.
Japanese nationalists dehumanized their own enemies in the same way, of course, perpetuating myths of Japanese racial superiority. These kinds of stories about the big scary Other are ubiquitous in times of war. George Orwell observed in 1937 that “Every war is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.” Given this fact, Orwell said that our “essential job is to get people to recognize war propaganda when they see it, especially when it is disguised as peace propaganda.” Looking back we can recognize it in the way Germans were portrayed during World War I—one infamous U.S. Army poster depicted Germany as an ape wielding a bloodstained club, with the caption “DESTROY THIS MAD BRUTE”—and in the treatment of Muslims after 9/11.
Khaled Beydoun, a scholar who studies Islamophobia around the world, spoke to Current Affairs last year about how the hatred and suspicion of Muslims spread along with the U.S. “war on terror.” He spoke, for instance, to a U.S. soldier who signed up to fight in Iraq because he believed he was going to fight a terrible enemy that had attacked the country. Instead, he found himself destroying a country whose people had never attacked the U.S. at all. Afterwards, he felt betrayed by his country, and Beydoun reflected on how effective propaganda can be:
“It’s really frightening how very good men, like the man I spoke to in the book, can be made into monsters with a scintilla of propaganda. When I sat across from this guy, he and I could be friends. We liked the same things. We live 10 miles away from one another. He was sort of an alpha male, and I say that in a benign way, where his objective was to just take care of his family and his community, and he had a love for his country. Those are beautiful things to be commended. But the way in which the media was disseminating this violent, vile information about Muslims—people like me, somebody who sat across him at the table—mobilized him to want to enlist in a war in a place that he had no knowledge of. He just knew that he wanted to defend his country and wanted vengeance, and that these Muslims, these Arabs, who were a world away, were the culprits of the 9/11 terror attacks…. [Afterward] he realized how the war had broken people like him, and how it told lies about people like me.”
By now, we have seen the same processes enough times to understand how they work, and we should be on our guard. We know that war drives people crazy. They see the body counts on their own side, and they want revenge, and empathy for the “other side” is in short supply. They see the enemy as monstrous and their own actions as purely defensive. They aren’t in the mood to make too many distinctions between civilians and soldiers on the other side.
That’s true in U.S. media, too. We know that Palestinian deaths are given a lot less weight than Israeli deaths in the American media, and even the liberal Washington Post ran (before deleting, under pressure) a nasty propaganda cartoon showing a swarthy Hamas terrorist strapping babies to his body. This past week, the major newspapers and TV networks hit a new low, with three especially egregious cases.
First was the Wall Street Journal, which ran an op-ed on February 2 calling Dearborn, Michigan, “America’s Jihad Capital.” Given the inflammatory title, you might think the author—one Steven Stalinsky—had uncovered evidence that some kind of political violence or “holy war,” as the word “jihad” is often interpreted in the West, was going on in Dearborn. But that’s not the case. Instead, Stalinsky spent 800 words clutching his pearls about the fact that—shockingly enough—some Muslims in Michigan don’t like Israel very much. The editorial is a masterpiece of dishonesty and Islamophobic fearmongering. It cherrypicks isolated expressions of anger, like when one imam said that Israel’s actions have filled his congregation with “fire in our hearts that will burn that state” and pretends they’re representative of the Michigan Muslim community as a whole, spinning them as evidence of “local enthusiasm for jihad.” It conflates simple political statements such as “America is a terrorist state”—which is straightforwardly true, if we apply the dictionary definition of “terrorism” consistently—with “open support for Hamas.” The Wall Street Journal has been on a roll lately, using the headline “Chicago Votes for Hamas” when that city called for a ceasefire in Gaza at the end of January. But Stalinsky’s rhetoric is irresponsible even by the Journal’s standards. TheDetroit Free Press reports that, since the article was published, “swarms of online hate” have been directed toward Dearborn’s Muslim community, leading Mayor Abdullah Hammoud to ramp up security around mosques and other places of worship. (Not that more police will necessarily help, since U.S. law enforcement has a well-documentedIslamophobia problem of its own.) All of this is a predictable consequence of publishing what amounts to a racist incitement, and any editor with even the slightest professional competence or ethics would have known better.
Meanwhile, a handful of whistleblowers at CNN have confirmed what was already fairly obvious: that the network has a systematic anti-Palestinian bias in its coverage. Summing up the testimonies of six anonymous staffers, The Guardian reports that CNN has “tight restrictions on quoting Hamas and reporting other Palestinian perspectives” at an institutional level, while “Israeli official statements are often quickly cleared and make it on air on the principle that they are to be trusted at face value, seemingly rubber-stamped for broadcast….” The principle of journalistic neutrality in reporting on a conflict, it seems, has been disregarded. In particular, CNN journalists say they’ve been instructed to include the words “Hamas-controlled” any time they cite statistics from the Gaza Ministry of Health, implicitly casting doubt on the legitimacy of civilian death tolls from the region, even though the Ministry’s figures have held up to scrutiny from numerous outside observers, including Israel itself. (Israel has sometimes even suggested that Israeli bombs have been flattening bakeries and apartment blocks without killing any innocent children at all.) They also report that memos have been circulated around the newsroom instructing them to always emphasize Hamas as the “cause of this current conflict,” ignoring the decades of Israeli occupation and violence in Palestine before October 7. At the same time, prominent anchors like Anderson Cooper have allowed current and former Israeli officials, like ex-Mossad leader Rami Igra, to say blatantly inflammatory things like “the non-combatant population in the Gaza Strip is really a nonexistent term” without pushback during interviews. At this point, unless dramatic changes are made, there’s little choice but to regard CNN’s Gaza coverage as ethically compromised and unreliable and to treat it accordingly.
Finally, in a column called “Understanding the Middle East Through the Animal Kingdom,” notorious New York Times writer and Iraq War booster Thomas Friedman has decided it’s a good idea to compare a variety of Muslim and Arab people to parasitic insects. The column is so breathtakingly racist, it seems like something out of a Victorian newspaper—but don’t take our word for it, read Friedman in his own words:
Iran is to geopolitics what a recently discovered species of parasitoid wasp is to nature. What does this parasitoid wasp do? According to Science Daily, the wasp “injects its eggs into live caterpillars, and the baby wasp larvae slowly eat the caterpillar from the inside out, bursting out once they have eaten their fill.” Is there a better description of Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq today? They are the caterpillars. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is the wasp. The Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas and Kataib Hezbollah are the eggs that hatch inside the host—Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq—and eat it from the inside out. We have no counterstrategy that safely and efficiently kills the wasp without setting fire to the whole jungle.
What can you even say to something like this? It’s well-known that comparing your political enemies to rats and insects is a dehumanizing tactic, just as it was in the lead-up to Japanese internment. Certainly Friedman, who was educated at Brandeis and the University of Oxford, knows it—and yet here he is, spewing this rhetoric anyway. The late Edward Said had him dead to rights in 1989, when he described Friedman’s writing as a “threadbare repertoire of often racist clichés.” Nothing has changed. If anything, the New York Times has gotten worse, seemingly not bothering to edit the excretions of its tenured staff whatsoever. Just like in Dearborn, there are real-world consequences to promoting this kind of imagery in the paper of record. Friedman’s argument that “setting fire to the whole jungle” is the only way to kill the Iranian “wasp” is an argument for unrestrained war in the Middle East, and unfortunately many political leaders still read the New York Times.
History shows that dehumanization takes hold easily, and its effects are deadly. At its worst, it is the road to concentration camps, gas chambers, and mass executions. We have to always be on guard against it, especially during times when war is causing a suspension of people’s usual critical faculties. It’s disgusting, but not surprising, to see even liberal papers printing, without a second thought, analysis that treats Iranians as insects. But one of the crucial lessons that history offers is that societies don’t notice themselves heading into this kind of moral abyss. Only the victims do. But their cries can’t be heard because they’re treated as menacing oppressors. Islamophobia, like all forms of bigotry, is poison to the soul of this country and portends terrible consequences for Muslims around the world. We have to fight against it—and remember that it won’t be the last time.