"A powerful, necessary indictment of efforts to disguise the human toll of American foreign policy."
– Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"A powerful, necessary indictment of efforts to disguise the human toll of American foreign policy."
– Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
August 11, 2024 | Permalink
By Norman Solomon
With Election Day just three weeks off and voting already underway in some states, the race for president is down to the wire. Progressives could make the difference.
While no one in their left mind plans to vote for the fascistic and unhinged Donald Trump, some say they won’t vote for Kamala Harris because of her loyalty to President Biden’s support for the Israeli war on Gaza. That might enable Trump to win with enough electoral votes from swing states -- Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Those seven states are where progressives may well hold the future in their voting hands.
The policy that Harris has defended for the war on Gaza is despicable. At the same time, she is the only candidate who can spare us from another Trump presidency, which -- from all indications -- would be far worse than the first one.
The need is urgent for dialectics -- “a method of examining and discussing opposing ideas in order to find the truth” -- in this case, the truth of what’s most needed at this electoral crossroads of fateful history.
“The harms of the other options” mean that the best course of action is to vote for Harris, 25 Islamic clerics said in a letter released last week. They focused on an overarching truth: “Particularly in swing states, a vote for a third party could enable Trump to win that state and therefore the election.” The U.S. clerics called such a vote “both a moral and a strategic failure.”
Personally, as a resident of solid-blue California, I have no intention of voting for Harris. But if I lived in one of the seven swing states, I wouldn’t hesitate to join in voting for her as the only way to defeat Trump.
Some speak of the need to exercise conscience rather than voting for Harris. Yet in swing states, what kind of “conscience” is so self-focused that it risks doing harm to others as a result of a Trump presidency?
Continue reading "Time for a United Front Against Trump and Realism About Harris" »
October 13, 2024 | Permalink
By Norman Solomon
Everything is at stake. Everything is at stake with nuclear weapons.
While working as a nuclear war planner for the Kennedy administration, Daniel Ellsberg was shown a document calculating that a U.S. nuclear attack on communist countries would result in 600 million dead. As he put it later: “A hundred Holocausts.”
That was in 1961.
Today, with nuclear arsenals vastly larger and more powerful, scientists know that a nuclear exchange would cause “nuclear winter.” And the nearly complete end of agriculture on the planet. Some estimates put the survival rate of humans on Earth at 1 or 2 percent.
No longer 100 Holocausts.
More than 1,000 Holocausts.
If such a nuclear war happens, of course we won’t be around for any retrospective analysis. Or regrets. So, candid introspection is in a category of now or never.
What if we did have the opportunity for hindsight? What if we could somehow hover over this planet? And see what had become a global crematorium and an unspeakable ordeal of human agony? Where, in words attributed to both Nikita Khruschev and Winston Churchill, “the living would envy the dead.”
What might we Americans say about the actions and inaction of our leaders?
In 2023: The nine nuclear-armed countries spent $91 billion on their nuclear weapons. Most of that amount, $51 billion, was the U.S. share. And our country accounted for 80 percent of the increase in nuclear weapons spending.
The United States is leading the way in the nuclear arms race. And we’re encouraged to see that as a good thing. “Escalation dominance.”
But escalation doesn’t remain unipolar. As time goes on, “Do as we say, not as we do” isn’t convincing to other nations.
China is now expanding its nuclear arsenal. That escalation does not exist in a vacuum. Official Washington pretends that Chinese policies are shifting without regard to the U.S. pursuit of “escalation dominance.” But that’s a disingenuous pretense. What the great critic of Vietnam War escalation during the 1960s, Senator William Fulbright, called “the arrogance of power.”
Continue reading "“Escalation Dominance” . . . and the Prospect of More Than 1,000 Holocausts" »
September 30, 2024 | Permalink
By Norman Solomon
Kamala Harris won the debate. People being bombed in Gaza did not.
The banner headline across the top of the New York Times home page -- “Harris Puts Trump on Defensive in Fierce Debate” -- was accurate enough. But despite the good news for people understandably eager for Trump to be defeated, the Harris debate performance was a moral and political tragedy.
In Gaza “now an estimated 40,000 Palestinians are dead,” an ABC News moderator said. “Nearly 100 hostages remain. . . . President Biden has not been able to break through the stalemate. How would you do it?”
Vice President Harris replied with her standard wording: “Israel has a right to defend itself. We would. And how it does so matters. Because it is also true far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed. Children, mothers. What we know is that this war must end. It must when, end immediately, and the way it will end is we need a ceasefire deal and we need the hostages out.”
“End immediately”? Anyone who isn’t in fantasyland knows that the only way to soon end the slaughter of Palestinian civilians would be for the U.S. government -- the overwhelmingly biggest supplier of Israel’s armaments -- to stop sending weapons to Israel.
Meanwhile, a pivot to advocating for a cutoff of weapons to Israel would help Harris win the presidency. After the debate, the Institute for Middle East Understanding pointed out that the need to halt the weapons is not only moral and legal -- it’s also smart politics. Polls are clear that most Americans want to stop arming Israel. In swing states, polling has found that a large number of voters say they’d be more likely to cast a ballot for Harris if she would support a halt.
What Kamala Harris and Donald Trump said about Israel and Gaza in their debate was predictable. Even more certain was what they absolutely would not say -- with silences speaking loudest of all. “Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth,” Aldous Huxley wrote, describing “the greatest triumphs of propaganda.”
By coincidence, the debate happened on the same date as publication of a new afterword about the Gaza war in the paperback edition of my book War Made Invisible. To fill in for the debate’s abysmal silences, here are a few quotes from the afterword about the ongoing carnage:
That and so much more -- left unsaid from the debate stage, dodged in U.S. mass media and evaded from the podiums of power in Washington -- indict not only the Israeli government but also the U.S. government as an accomplice to mass murder that has escalated into genocide.
Silence is a blanket that smothers genuine democratic discourse and the outcries of moral voices. Making those voices inaudible is a key goal for the functioning of the warfare state.
Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His latest book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," was published in paperback this month with a new afterword about the Gaza war.
September 10, 2024 | Permalink
By Norman Solomon
One evening in early September 1964, a frightening commercial jolted 50 million Americans who were partway through watching “Monday Night at the Movies” on NBC. The ad began with an adorable three-year-old girl counting petals as she pulled them from a daisy. Then came a man’s somber voiceover, counting down from ten to zero. Then an ominous roar and a mushroom cloud from a nuclear bomb explosion.
The one-minute TV spot reached its climax with audio from President Lyndon Johnson, concluding that “we must love each other, or we must die.” The ad did not mention his opponent in the upcoming election, Sen. Barry Goldwater, but it didn’t need to. By then, his cavalier attitude toward nuclear weapons was well established.
Goldwater’s bestseller The Conscience of a Conservative, published at the start of the decade, was unnervingly open to the idea of launching a nuclear war, while the book exuded disdain for leaders who “would rather crawl on knees to Moscow than die under an Atom bomb.” Closing in on the Republican nomination for president, the Arizona senator suggested that “low-yield” nuclear bombs could be useful to defoliate forests in Vietnam.
His own words gave plenty of fodder to others seeking the GOP nomination. Pennsylvania Gov. William Scranton called Goldwater “a trigger-happy dreamer” and said that he “too often casually prescribed nuclear war as a solution to a troubled world.” New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller unloaded with a rhetorical question: “How can there be sanity when he wants to give area commanders the authority to make decisions on the use of nuclear weapons?”
So, the stage was set for the “daisy ad,” which packed an emotional wallop -- and provoked a fierce backlash. Critics cried foul, deploring an attempt to use the specter of nuclear annihilation for political gain. Having accomplished the goal of putting the Goldwater camp on the defensive, the commercial never aired again as a paid ad. But national newscasts showed it while reporting on the controversy.
Today, a campaign ad akin to the daisy spot is hard to imagine from the Democratic or Republican nominee to be commander in chief, who seem content to bypass the subject of nuclear-war dangers. Yet those dangers are actually much higher now than they were 60 years ago. In 1964, the Doomsday Clock maintained by experts at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was set at 12 minutes to apocalyptic midnight. The ominous hands are now just 90 seconds away.
Yet, in their convention speeches this summer, both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris were silent on the need to engage in genuine diplomacy for nuclear arms control, let alone take steps toward disarmament.
Trump offered standard warnings about Russian and Chinese arsenals and Iran’s nuclear program, and boasted of his rapport with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. Left unmentioned was Trump’s presidential statement in 2017 that if North Korea made “any more threats to the United States,” that country “will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” Nor did he refer to his highly irresponsible tweet that Kim should be informed “I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”
When Harris delivered her acceptance speech, it did not include the words “atomic” or “nuclear” at all.
Now in high gear, the 2024 presidential campaign is completely lacking in the kind of wisdom about nuclear weapons and relations between the nuclear superpowers that Lyndon Johnson and, eventually, Ronald Reagan attained during their presidencies.
Johnson privately acknowledged that the daisy commercial scared voters about Goldwater, which “we goddamned set out to do.” But the president was engaged in more than an electoral tactic. At the same time that he methodically deceived the American people while escalating the horrific war on Vietnam, Johnson pursued efforts to defuse the nuclear time bomb.
“We have made further progress in an effort to improve our understanding of each other’s thinking on a number of questions,” Johnson said at the conclusion of his extensive summit meeting with Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin in Glassboro, New Jersey, on June 25, 1967. But fifty-seven years later, there is scant evidence that the current or next president of the United States is genuinely interested in improving such understanding between leaders of the biggest nuclear states.
Two decades after the summit that defrosted the cold war and gave rise to what was dubbed “the spirit of Glassboro,” President Reagan stood next to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and said: “We decided to talk to each other instead of about each other.” But such an attitude would be heresy in the 2024 presidential campaign.
“These are the stakes,” Johnson said in the daisy ad as a mushroom cloud rose on screen, “to make a world in which all God’s children can live, or to go into the dark.”
Those are still the stakes. But you wouldn’t know it now from either of the candidates vying to be the next president of the United States.
Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His latest book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," was published in paperback this month with a new afterword about the Gaza war.
September 08, 2024 | Permalink
By Norman Solomon
With nearly 18 million students on U.S. college campuses this fall, defenders of the war on Gaza don’t want to hear any backtalk. Silence is complicity, and that’s the way Israel’s allies like it. For them, the new academic term restarts a threat to the status quo. But for supporters of human rights, it’s a renewed opportunity to turn higher education into something more than a comfort zone.
In the United States, the extent and arrogance of the emerging collegiate repression is, quite literally, breathtaking. Every day, people are dying due to their transgression of breathing while Palestinian.
The Gaza death toll adds up to more than one Kristallnacht per day -- for upwards of 333 days and counting, with no end in sight. The shattering of a society’s entire infrastructure has been horrendous. Months ago, citing data from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, ABC News reported that “25,000 buildings have been destroyed, 32 hospitals forced out of service, and three churches, 341 mosques and 100 universities and schools destroyed.”
Not that this should disturb the tranquility of campuses in the country whose taxpayers and elected leaders make it all possible. Top college officials wax eloquent about the sanctity of higher learning and academic freedom while they suppress protests against policies that have destroyed scores of universities in Palestine.
A key rationale for quashing dissent is that anti-Israel protests make some Jewish students uncomfortable. But the purposes of college education shouldn’t include always making people feel comfortable. How comfortable should students be in a nation enabling mass murder in Gaza?
What would we say about claims that students in the North with southern accents should not have been made uncomfortable by on-campus civil rights protests and denunciations of Jim Crow in the 1950s and 1960s? Or white students from South Africa, studying in the United States, made uncomfortable by anti-apartheid protests in the 1980s?
A bedrock for the edifice of speech suppression and virtual thought-policing is the old standby of equating criticism of Israel with antisemitism. Likewise, the ideology of Zionism that tries to justify Israeli policies is supposed to get a pass no matter what -- while opponents, including many Jews, are liable to be denounced as antisemites.
But polling shows that more younger Americans are supportive of Palestinians than they are of Israelis. The ongoing atrocities by the Israel “Defense” Forces in Gaza, killing a daily average of more than 100 people -- mostly children and women -- have galvanized many young people to take action in the United States.
“Protests rocked American campuses toward the end of the last academic year,” a front-page New York Times story reported in late August, adding: “Many administrators remain shaken by the closing weeks of the spring semester, when encampments, building occupations and clashes with the police helped lead to thousands of arrests across the country.” (Overall, the phrase “clashes with the police” served as a euphemism for police violently attacking nonviolent protesters.)
From the hazy ivory towers and corporate suites inhabited by so many college presidents and boards of trustees, Palestinian people are scarcely more than abstractions compared to far more real priorities. An understated sentence from the Times sheds a bit of light: “The strategies that are coming into public view suggest that some administrators at schools large and small have concluded that permissiveness is perilous, and that a harder line may be the best option -- or perhaps just the one least likely to invite blowback from elected officials and donors who have demanded that universities take stronger action against protesters.”
Much more clarity is available from a new Mondoweiss article by activist Carrie Zaremba, a researcher with training in anthropology. “University administrators across the United States have declared an indefinite state of emergency on college campuses,” she wrote. “Schools are rolling out policies in preparation for quashing pro-Palestine student activism this fall semester, and reshaping regulations and even campuses in the process to suit this new normal.
“Many of these policies being instituted share a common formula: more militarization, more law enforcement, more criminalization, and more consolidation of institutional power. But where do these policies originate and why are they so similar across all campuses? The answer lies in the fact that they have been provided by the ‘risk and crisis management’ consulting industries, with the tacit support of trustees, Zionist advocacy groups, and federal agencies. Together, they deploy the language of safety to disguise a deeper logic of control and securitization.”
Countering such top-down moves will require intensive grassroots organizing. Sustained pushback against campus repression will be essential, to continually assert the right to speak out and protest as guaranteed by the First Amendment.
Insistence on acquiring knowledge while gaining power for progressive forces will be vital. That’s why the national Teach-In Network was launched this week by the RootsAction Education Fund (which I help lead), under the banner “Knowledge Is Power -- and Our Grassroots Movements Need Both.”
The elites that were appalled by the moral uprising on college campuses against Israel’s slaughter in Gaza are now doing all they can to prevent a resurgence of that uprising. But the mass murder continues, subsidized by the U.S. government. When students insist that true knowledge and ethical action need each other, they can help make history and not just study it.
Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His latest book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," was published in paperback this month with a new afterword about the Gaza war.
September 05, 2024 | Permalink
By Norman Solomon
Time is running out for Kamala Harris to distance herself from U.S. policies that enable Israel to continue with mass murder and genocide in Gaza. Polling shows that a pivot toward moral decency would improve her chances of defeating Donald Trump. But during her CNN interview Thursday night, Harris remained in lockstep with President Biden’s unconditional arming of Israel.
Two weeks ago, YouGov pollsters released findings in Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania, three swing states now on a razor’s edge between Harris and Trump. “In Pennsylvania, 34 percent of respondents said they would be more likely to vote for the Democratic nominee if the nominee vowed to withhold weapons to Israel, compared to 7 percent who said they would be less likely. The rest said it would make no difference,” the new journalism site Zeteo reported.
Results in the two other states were similar. “In Arizona, 35 percent said they’d be more likely, while 5 percent would be less likely. And in Georgia, 39 percent said they’d be more likely, also compared to 5 percent who would be less likely.”
But on CNN, Harris stuck to echoing Biden’s rhetoric -- calling for a ceasefire while dodging the reality that the U.S. government could force one by implementing an arms embargo on Israel.
Huge U.S. shipments of weapons and bombs to Israel keep allowing it to massacre and starve civilians of all ages while violating federal statutes as well as international law. Days ago, Biden approved sending arms to Israel worth upwards of $20 billion. The transfers were called “sales,” but as policy analyst Stephen Semler pointed out, “most if not all of this matériel is paid for by U.S. taxpayers -- Israel uses much of the military aid Congress approves for it effectively as a gift card to buy U.S.-made weapons.”
Just listening to Harris during her CNN interview, you’d be clueless about the realities that the UN high commissioner for human rights, Volker Türk, spelled out in a statement midway through August: “The people of Gaza are now grieving 40,000 Palestinian lives lost, according to Gaza’s health ministry. Most of the dead are women and children. This unimaginable situation is overwhelmingly due to recurring failures by the Israeli Defense Forces to comply with the rules of war. On average, about 130 people have been killed every day in Gaza over the past 10 months. The scale of the Israeli military’s destruction of homes, hospitals, schools and places of worship is deeply shocking.”
Notably, Harris gave no indication of the number of Palestinian lives lost -- while she did say that 1,200 Israelis, including “many young people,” lost their lives on October 7. That most of the Palestinians who died were children and women went unmentioned.
While the vice president said that Israelis were “massacred,” she relied on passive voice to say only that too many Palestinians “have been killed.”
August 30, 2024 | Permalink
By Norman Solomon
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.
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.
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.”
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.
Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of many books including "War Made Easy." His latest book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," was published in 2023 by The New Press.
August 20, 2024 | Permalink
By Norman Solomon
After the Democrat in the White House decided not to run for reelection, the vice president got the party’s presidential nod -- and continued to back the administration’s policies for an unpopular war. As the election neared, the candidate had to decide whether to keep supporting the war or speak out for a change.
Hubert Humphrey faced that choice in 1968. Kamala Harris faces it now.
Despite the differences in eras and circumstances, key dynamics are eerily similar. The history of how Vice President Humphrey navigated the political terrain of the war in Vietnam has ominous parallels with how Vice President Harris has been dealing with the war in Gaza.
***** ***** *****
For millions of liberals, during the first half of the 1960s, Hubert Humphrey was the nation’s most heroic politician. As the Senate majority whip, he deftly championed landmark bills for civil rights and social programs. By the time President Lyndon B. Johnson put him on the Democratic ticket in 1964, progressive momentum was in high gear.
LBJ defeated ultra-conservative Barry Goldwater in a landslide. As vice president, Humphrey assisted Johnson to follow up on the 1964 Civil Rights Act with the 1965 Voting Rights Act and a huge set of antipoverty measures while enacting broad social programs in realms of education, health care, nutrition, housing and the environment. Midway through the summer of 1965, Johnson signed Medicare and Medicaid into law.
Meanwhile, escalation of the U.S. war on Vietnam was taking off. And, as Martin Luther King Jr. soon pointed out, “When a nation becomes obsessed with the guns of war, social programs must inevitably suffer. We can talk about guns and butter all we want to, but when the guns are there with all of its emphasis you don’t even get good oleo [margarine]. These are facts of life.”
At first, Vice President Humphrey wrote slightly dovish memos to Johnson, who angrily rejected the advice and retaliated by excluding him from key meetings. Banished to the doghouse, Humphrey licked his wounds and changed his approach. By early 1966, he was deferring to Johnson’s war views in private and advocating for the Vietnam War in public.
As the war escalated, so did the vice president’s zeal to extol it as a fight for freedom and democracy. “By 1967 he had become a hawk on Vietnam,” biographer Arnold Offner noted. Beneath the lofty rhetoric was cold calculation.
“Humphrey’s passage from dove to hawk on Vietnam was not the result of one-sided White House briefings or of his ability, as one journalist had noted, to see silver linings in the stormiest clouds,” Offner wrote. “His change of position derived from a case of willful mind over matter, from his strong anti-Communism combined with political expediency driven by ambition, namely desire to remain in Johnson’s good graces and perhaps succeed him whenever his presidency ended.”
That desire to be in the president’s good graces did not dissipate after Johnson suddenly announced in a televised address on March 31, 1968 that he would not seek reelection. Four weeks later, Humphrey launched a presidential campaign that pitted him against two antiwar candidates, Senators Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy.
From the outset, Humphrey was plagued by his fear of antagonizing Johnson if he were to depart from a pro-war script. The United States had “nothing to apologize for,” Humphrey said. He didn’t run in any primaries and was not willing to debate McCarthy or Kennedy.
Humphrey mouthed the same old rhetoric to rationalize the administration’s policies for the war in Vietnam. Several high-level supporters -- including Iowa’s Governor Harold Hughes, Vermont’s Governor Philip Hoff, and the venerable former New York governor and ambassador Averell Harriman -- advised him to resign the vice presidency and thus free himself from entanglement with Johnson. But to Humphrey, such a step was unthinkable.
And so, Hubert Humphrey rode in the caboose of the war train all summer. In late August, the day before the Democratic National Convention got underway in Chicago, he told viewers of the CBS program Face the Nation that the administration’s policies in Vietnam were “basically sound.”
Continue reading "The Ghost of Hubert Humphrey Is Stalking Kamala Harris" »
August 15, 2024 | Permalink
By Norman Solomon
Soon after the Gaza war began 10 months ago, a prominent newspaper columnist denounced Congresswoman Cori Bush under a headline declaring that “anti-Israel comments make her unfit for reelection.” The piece appeared in the newspaper with the second-largest readership in Missouri, the Kansas City Star. Multimillion-dollar attacks on Bush followed.
Bush’s opponent, county prosecutor Wesley Bell, “is now the number-one recipient of AIPAC cash this election cycle,” according to Justice Democrats. “Almost two-thirds of all his donations came from the anti-Palestinian, far-right megadonor-funded lobby group.” The Intercept reports that “AIPAC’s super PAC, United Democracy Project, has gone on to spend a total of $7 million so far to oust Bush” in the Aug. 6 Democratic primary in her St. Louis area district.
“The $2.1 million in ads spent for her campaign is up against $12.2 million spent to attack her or support Bell,” The American Prospect points out. AIPAC “is trying to pull voters away from her without ever saying the words ‘Israel’ or ‘Palestine.’ Instead, their advertising against Bush centers around her record on infrastructure legislation, in a manner that lacks context.”
It's easy to see why AIPAC and allied forces are so eager to defeat Bush. She courageously introduced a ceasefire resolution in the House nine days after the bloodshed began on Oct. 7, calling for “an immediate de-escalation and ceasefire in Israel and occupied Palestine.”
The Kansas City Star article, published shortly after Bush introduced the resolution, was written by former New York Times reporter Melinda Henneberger, now a member of the Star’s editorial board. “A military attack in response to the massacre of civilians by a group committed in writing to ‘carnage, displacement and terror’ for Jews is not my idea of ‘ethnic cleansing,’” she wrote in early November. “But it is Missouri Rep. Cori Bush’s, which is why she deserves to lose her congressional race next year.”
Bush supposedly became unfit to keep her seat in Congress because, after three weeks of methodical killing in Gaza, she tweeted: “We can’t be silent about Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign. Babies, dead. Pregnant women, dead. Elderly, dead. Generations of families, dead. Millions of people in Gaza with nowhere to go being slaughtered. The U.S. must stop funding these atrocities against Palestinians.”
Henneberger’s response was hit-and-run. She wrote a hit piece. And then she ran.
Ever since late April, I’ve been asking Henneberger just one question, over and over. Every few weeks, I have sent another email directly to her. I also wrote to her care of an editor at the newspaper. And I even mailed a certified letter, which the post office delivered to her office in June.
No reply.
Continue reading "The Smearing of Cori Bush for Being Truthful About the Gaza War" »
August 01, 2024 | Permalink
By Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon
Kamala Harris has gained strong support as the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate. Putting Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro on the ticket would likely fracture that support.
The most divisive issue among Democrats is the U.S.-enabled Israeli war against the civilian population of Gaza. To unify the party and defeat Trump’s MAGA forces, Harris needs to distance herself in a meaningful way from Joe Biden’s Gaza policy. If she does so, she can win back the votes and energy of young activists, progressives, racial justice organizers, Arab Americans and Muslims – many of whom devoted weeks or months of their lives in 2020 to defeating Trump on behalf of the Biden-Harris ticket.
But a Harris-Shapiro ticket would jeopardize all that.
Today, parallels are apparent with pivotal events of 1968, when President Lyndon B. Johnson – increasingly unpopular among Democrats and others because of his Vietnam War – stunned the political world by announcing he would not seek reelection. At the Democratic convention in Chicago, the party nominated LBJ’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, as its standard-bearer. Humphrey’s halting efforts to distance himself from Johnson’s war policy were too little, too late, and he was unable to connect with many of the dedicated Democratic activists and voters who were antiwar. Failing to detach himself sufficiently from the president’s war policy, Humphrey lost a winnable election to Republican Richard Nixon.
If Harris now chooses a running mate who intensely connects her to Biden’s policies on the Gaza war that are so unpopular with much of the Democratic base, party unity – and the chances of defeating Trump – would be undermined.
Overall, Josh Shapiro is liberal and sometimes progressive on domestic issues (though notably not on fracking or tax subsidies for private schools). But on the contentious issue of Israel’s relentless war against Palestinian civilians in Gaza, Shapiro sounds much less bothered by the lethal violence than by U.S. ceasefire activists, many of whom he has demonized. Here’s a bit of the history:
In 2021, after Ben & Jerry’s (a company founded and led by Jewish Americans) refused to sell its products in Israel’s illegal settlements, then-Attorney General Josh Shapiro threatened the company by urging Pennsylvania state agencies to enforce a constitutionally suspect law targeting advocates of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel over its discriminatory policies. Shapiro smeared such advocates by claiming that “BDS is rooted in antisemitism” – although the effort has wide support globally, including from many Jews, as a thoroughly nonviolent tactic in advancing Palestinian rights.
After the horrific Hamas attack of October 7, several dozen Pennsylvania-based Muslim groups wrote a letter protesting Governor Shapiro’s one-sided comments: “Not only did you fail to recognize the structural root causes of the conflict, you chose to intentionally ignore the civilian loss of life in Gaza.” Responding to the letter after Israeli bombs and missiles had killed more civilians in Gaza than had been killed by Hamas in Israel on October 7, the governor’s spokesman said: “We all must speak with moral clarity and support Israel’s right to defend itself.”
Last December, after he amplified the Capitol Hill demagoguery of MAGA Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, Gov. Shapiro contributed to the firing of the University of Pennsylvania president. Referring to UPenn’s president, Shapiro said: “I thought her comments were absolutely shameful. It should not be hard to condemn genocide.” By then, after two months of Israeli bombing, more than 17,000 Gazans had been killed, mostly women and children – and later that month, Israel was charged with violations of the Genocide Convention in South Africa’s filing at the International Court of Justice.
In early April, after Democratic governors in other states had called for a ceasefire in Gaza, Muslim leaders in Philadelphia criticized Shapiro for his refusal to do so.
Beginning in late April, Gov. Shapiro and his office repeatedly prodded campuses to “restore order” and take action against student encampments, including the University of Pennsylvania Gaza Solidarity Encampment which called on the college administration to provide greater transparency on university investments, divest from Israel, and reinstate the banned student group Penn Students Against the Occupation.
On May 9, Shapiro invoked student “safety” in demanding the encampment be shut down. Police shut it down the next day, arresting 33. In two different interviews, Shapiro seemed to compare campus ceasefire activists, many of whom are Jewish or students of color, to “white supremacists camped out and yelling racial slurs” and “people dressed up in KKK outfits or KKK regalia making comments about people who’re African American.”
In May, as activism continued to grow over Israel’s lethal violence against civilians in Gaza, Gov. Shapiro issued an order aimed at Israel’s critics that revised his administration’s code of conduct to bar state employees from “scandalous or disgraceful” conduct – a vague and subjective directive criticized by the legal director of Pennsylvania’s ACLU as a possible violation of free speech protections.
In a July 23 tweet on X, progressive leader and former Ohio State Senator Nina Turner wrote: “Choosing Governor Josh Shapiro for Vice President would be a mistake. Governor Shapiro compared pro-peace protesters to the KKK. That’s simply unacceptable & would stifle the momentum VP Harris has. Hopefully she is looking to build a broad coalition to beat Trump.”
A broad coalition to defeat Donald Trump and the fascistic MAGA movement is exactly what we need. Making Josh Shapiro the nominee for vice president is exactly what we don’t need.
Jeff Cohen is co-founder of RootsAction.org, a retired journalism professor at Ithaca College, and author of "Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media." In 1986, he founded the media watch group FAIR.
Norman Solomon is national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of many books including "War Made Easy." His latest book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," was published in 2023 by The New Press.
July 28, 2024 | Permalink
By Norman Solomon / TomDispatch
The Biden campaign drove the Democratic Party into a ditch and speculation is rampant about grim prospects for the election. But little scrutiny has gone into examining how such a dire situation developed in the first place.
Joe Biden was on a collision course with reality long before his abysmal debate performance led to his withdrawal from the race. “Several current and former officials and others who encountered him behind closed doors noticed that he increasingly appeared confused or listless, or would lose the thread of conversations,” the New York Times reported five days after the debate. Some had noticed the glaring problem months earlier but kept quiet.
A culture of dubious loyalty festered far beyond the Biden White House. It encompassed Democratic leaders at the Capitol and across the country, as well as countless allied organizations and individuals. The routine was to pretend that Biden’s obvious cognitive deficits didn’t exist or didn’t really matter.
Because his mental impairment was so apparent to debate viewers, some notable Democratic dissenters in Congress stepped up to oppose his renomination. But for weeks, relatively few colleagues followed the lead of Texas Representative Lloyd Doggett, who broke the congressional ice by calling for Biden to “make the painful and difficult decision to withdraw.”
Heads in the Sand
Acuity came from Julián Castro, former secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Obama administration, who kept up a barrage of cogent tweets. One message referred to Biden’s “unique political liability” and warned: “It’s not going to get any better — and has a high risk of scrambling the race again, sealing Dems fate. Burying our heads in the sand won’t assuage voters concerns, which have been painfully obvious for years.”
A literal heads-in-the-sand photo was at the top of a full-page print ad that the Don’t Run Joe team at RootsAction.org (where I’m national director) placed in The Hill a year and a half ago. Headlined “An Open Letter to Democrats in the House and Senate,” it said: “Many of your colleagues, and maybe you, are expressing public enthusiasm for another Biden presidential campaign in on-the-record quotes to journalists — while privately voicing trepidation. This widespread gap ill serves the party or the nation… There are ample indications that having Joe Biden at the top of ballots across the country in autumn 2024 would bring enormous political vulnerabilities for the ticket and for down-ballot races. No amount of spin can change key realities.”
But the spin never stopped and, in fact, went into high gear this summer with Biden trying to make his candidacy a fait accompli. Meanwhile, the culture of loyalty kept a grip on the delegates who’ll be heading to Chicago in mid-August for the Democratic National Convention. As the second week of July began, CNN reported that “a host of party leaders and rank-and-file members selected to formally nominate Biden said they were loath to consider any other option.” A delegate from Florida put it this way: “There is no plan B. The president is the nominee. And that’s where I and everyone that I’ve been talking to stands — until and unless he says otherwise.”
The lure of going along to get along with high-ranking officials is part of the Democratic Party’s dominant political culture. I saw such dynamics up close, countless times, during my 10 years as a member of the California Democratic Party’s state central committee, and as a delegate to three Democratic National Conventions. I viewed such conformist attitudes with alarm at meetings of the Democratic National Committee (DNC).
July 25, 2024 | Permalink
By Norman Solomon and Jeff Cohen
Let’s face it: Donald Trump is in a stronger position than ever to win a second term in November, with his active supporters even more motivated in the wake of the shooting Saturday. Preventing a Trump victory is now unlikely. But we must try.
Top Trump strategists are very eager for their candidate to run against Joe Biden. They’re now worried that the Democratic Party might end up with a different standard bearer.
Days ago, The Atlantic published journalist Tim Alberta’s in-depth examination of the Trump campaign’s strategic approach. “Everything they have been doing, the targeting that they have been doing of voters, the advertisements that they’re cutting, the fund-raising ploys that they’re making, the viral Internet videos that they have been churning out, they’re all designed around Joe Biden,” Alberta told the PBS NewsHour.
“So if suddenly he were replaced at the top of the ticket,” he added, “I think in many ways it’s back to square one for the Trump campaign. They recognize this. And I think they’re deeply unnerved by the possibility of a switcheroo at the top of the Democratic ticket.”
Last weekend, the Washington Post put it this way: “As Democrats debate the future of Biden’s reelection bid, Republicans would prefer he stay in a race they believe they are already winning.”
On Sunday, Face the Nation reported “top Democratic sources believe that Democrats who had thoughts about challenging President Biden are now standing down ‘because of this fragile political moment.’” Yet a guest on the same CBS program, Democratic Rep. Jason Crow, warned of a “high risk” that his party will lose the election “unless there is a major change.” He said that messaging from Biden’s campaign “is not effectively breaking through.”
While Biden boosters like to talk about national polling that sometimes puts Biden within a couple of points of Trump, such surveys mean little. Due to the Electoral College, the swing states will determine the winner. Biden is behind -- and falling further behind in most of them. Arizona, Georgia and Nevada have moved from “toss up” states to “lean Republican” according to the Cook Political Report.
And with an approval rating that now hovers around an abysmal 37 percent, Biden is increasingly playing defense in states he won easily four years ago.
“Democrats’ concerns about Biden’s ability to win are expanding beyond this cycle’s predetermined battlegrounds into states that long ago turned blue in presidential elections,” Politico reported last week, in an article raising doubts about Biden’s prospects in New Hampshire, Maine, New Mexico and Minnesota. The headline: “Dems Are Freaking Out About Biden Even in Once Safely Blue States.”
Around the country, Democratic candidates are running well ahead of Biden. Last week, the Economist/YouGov poll found that “96 percent of registered Democrats say they will vote for a Democratic House candidate in the fall, compared with 85 percent who plan to vote for Biden.”
Biden’s presence at the top of the ticket promises to not only deliver the White House to Trump but also the House and Senate to Republicans.
In the light of such realities less than four months before Election Day, it’s alarming to hear many elected Democrats -- including some progressives in Congress -- publicly claim that Biden is just fine as the party’s nominee.
The happy-talk denialism from those congressional progressives shows a disconnect from the progressive grassroots. Many activists who devoted months of their lives on behalf of Biden in 2020 to vote Trump out are disaffected from Biden in 2024. Many are furious over Biden’s nonstop support of Israel during its continuous slaughter of civilians in Gaza. That includes Arab-American and Muslim activists and groups who mobilized for Biden four years ago against his Islamophobic opponent. Many climate activists who fought for Biden in 2020 against the “drill, baby, drill” Trump are disgusted with his reversals on climate policy.
So, the depressing poll numbers may understate the problem for Biden as the Democratic nominee, because they don’t count the gap in campaign volunteer energy -- especially in contrast with the highly energized MAGA base. Early this year, an anonymous letter from 17 Biden 2024 campaign staffers urged Biden to reverse himself on Gaza and seek an immediate ceasefire: “Biden for President staff have seen volunteers quit in droves, and people who have voted blue for decades feel uncertain about doing so for the first time ever.”
In 2017, the Trump presidency was properly mocked for its brazen assertions of “alternative facts.” It’s now disconcerting that Biden and his advocates so often lapse into puffery as to his true political situation.
That situation was laid out with chilling candor in a detailed New York Times piece by longtime Democratic strategist Doug Sosnik, who was a senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and has advised dozens of governors and senators. The article makes for grim reading: “President Biden has spent much of 2024 with a more challenging path to winning a second presidential term in November than Donald Trump. But for reasons that have become glaringly obvious, that path has all but vanished.”
Biden “not only faces losing battleground states he won in 2020,” Sosnik wrote, “he is also at risk of losing traditional Democratic states like Minnesota and New Hampshire, which Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama carried. If current trends continue, Mr. Trump could rack up one of the most decisive presidential victories since 2008.”
But so many Democrats in Congress are refusing to call for Biden to step aside. And a lot of them are even cheering him on, encouraging his intransigence, as though nothing is amiss.
Until the Democratic Party officially nominates its presidential candidate, the push for Biden to withdraw from the ticket should continue.
Norman Solomon is national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of many books including "War Made Easy." His latest book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," was published in summer 2023 by The New Press.
Jeff Cohen is co-founder of RootsAction.org, a retired journalism professor at Ithaca College, and author of "Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media." In 1986, he founded the media watch group FAIR.
July 14, 2024 | Permalink
By Norman Solomon
I love Bernie Sanders. By most measures, he’s the greatest senator in the last 50 years. I was very glad to be a Sanders delegate to the 2016 and 2020 Democratic National Conventions. But when Bernie screws up, his progressive base should say so.
That happened during the first months of Israel’s war on Gaza that began last October. Initially, Bernie sounded equivocal as Israeli forces engaged in mass murder. After several weeks of carnage, antiwar activists occupied his D.C. office to demand support for a ceasefire. Some were arrested for their civil disobedience.
Bernie gradually changed his position and became a fierce critic of Israel, denouncing it for horrific large-scale crimes against Palestinian civilians and challenging the shipment of weapons to the Israeli military. There’s no telling if the public pressure from progressives hastened his shift to strongly oppose Israel’s genocidal war. But that pressure was necessary.
Unfortunately, after President Biden’s debate debacle on June 27, Bernie did not weigh in against the gaslighting maneuvers by the White House and the Biden campaign. In fact, Bernie aided them by downplaying the importance of what had happened on the debate stage.
Since then, Bernie has encouraged the illusion that Biden now has the capacity to be an effective candidate against Donald Trump. Equally problematic has been the implicit pretense that Biden could be up to the job as president until January 2029.
Such evasion not only dodges the reality that Biden was inept and sometimes incoherent during the debate. Since then, much stunning information has come to light, illuminating how badly Biden’s mental capacities have diminished.
“In the weeks and months before President Biden’s politically devastating performance on the debate stage in Atlanta, several current and former officials and others who encountered him behind closed doors noticed that he increasingly appeared confused or listless, or would lose the thread of conversations,” the New York Times reported on July 2.
But on July 3 and again on July 5, email from Bernie to supporters told them: “President Biden said today that he is staying in the race, and I take him at his word.”
However, taking Biden “at his word” is beside the point. As the party’s nominee, Biden would drag down many Democratic candidates with him while making it easy for Donald Trump to win the presidency again.
The problem isn’t only what Bernie has been telling people on his email list. He has also been putting out important messages to the broader public via mass media -- in the process sending positive signals to Biden and his top aides while they gauge whether to continue the Biden 2024 campaign.
And Bernie is talking directly with the president. Biden “has spoken to me in recent days,” Bernie said on Sunday during an interview on the CBS program Face the Nation. It’s very likely that what Bernie told Biden was consistent with what he told the Associated Press, which reported on July 2 that Sanders “does not want Biden to step aside.”
The AP quoted Bernie as saying: “A presidential election is not a Grammy Award contest for the best singer or entertainer. It’s about who has the best policies that impact our lives.”
But Biden’s inability to clearly advocate for popular policies -- or to effectively refute lies and demagogic statements from Donald Trump -- is not like a failure to be “the best singer or entertainer.” The president’s glaring inabilities amount to huge failures as a candidate and as a leader.
It’s well known that Bernie Sanders has personal warmth toward Joe Biden. But, given the enormity of what is at stake, personal ties should not get in the way of realizing what ought to be crystal clear: Every day that goes by with Joe Biden as the presumptive Democratic nominee will work to the further advantage of Trump and his extremist right-wing forces.
“I’m going to do everything I can to see that Biden gets reelected,” Bernie told the Associated Press. But at this juncture, that’s the wrong vow. What we really need to hear from Bernie Sanders is a pledge to do everything he can to see that Trump is defeated -- and that means replacing Biden with someone who has a better chance of getting the job done.
Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of many books including "War Made Easy." His latest book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," was published in 2023 by The New Press.
July 08, 2024 | Permalink
By Norman Solomon and Jeff Cohen
When Joe Biden’s ABC News interview aired on Friday night, it made clear that he should not be running for re-election. Rather than reduce the concerns sparked by his abysmal debate performance eight days earlier, the interview underscored that the president is in denial about his current political standing and unable to offer reassurance that his mental capacities are unimpaired.
Notably, Biden kept dodging and refusing to reply in the affirmative when journalist George Stephanopoulos asked whether he has had “a full neurological and cognitive evaluation” and if he would “be willing to have the independent medical evaluation.”
While insisting that his behavior during the debate was “no indication of any serious condition,” Biden evaded key questions while resorting to snippets of stump speeches emphasizing purported foreign-policy “successes.” The interview transcript makes for ominous reading. If Joe Biden is the candidate standing between America and a second Trump presidency, the nation is in extremely dire straits.
Four years after the Democratic Party and grassroots activists propelled Biden into the presidency, he is now adamant that he’ll stay the course as the 2024 nominee -- in effect, greatly boosting the Republican Party’s prospects for winning control of the White House and Congress.
It was widely reported that Joe Biden told more than 20 Democratic governors on Wednesday that he needs more sleep and that events should not be scheduled for him after 8 pm. Democrats have reason to question whether Biden is capable of mounting a vigorous presidential campaign; swing voters may wonder if he can run the White House.
It's all too tempting to lapse into spectator mode as developments in the current Biden psychodrama unfold. But progressives and others who understand the imperative of preventing a second Trump term should be determined to help shape history rather than just watching it in real time.
In recent days, it has become clear that only direct intervention by Democrats in Congress, propelled by grassroots pressure, can avert a Biden 2024 train wreck. It’s time to pull the emergency cord. And that means constituents should deluge every congressional Democrat with demands that they insist on Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race.
This telling exchange occurred near the end of the interview:
STEPHANOPOULOS: “If you are told reliably from your allies, from your friends and supporters in the Democratic Party in the House and the Senate that they're concerned you're gonna lose the House and the Senate if you stay in, what will you do?”
BIDEN: “I'm not gonna answer that question. It's not gonna happen.”
Proving Biden wrong on that point will be essential.
Nothing in Biden’s interview will in the slightest mitigate the urgency of the Step Aside Joe campaign (which we help lead). On the contrary, Biden’s frequent dalliance with magical thinking rather than realism makes him the most powerful de facto ally that Donald Trump has in his quest to regain the White House.
For progressives, the task should be clear: Join with other political forces to insist that Biden voluntarily become a one-term president.
Norman Solomon is national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of many books including "War Made Easy." His latest book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," was published in summer 2023 by The New Press.
Jeff Cohen is co-founder of RootsAction.org, a retired journalism professor at Ithaca College, and author of "Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media." In 1986, he founded the media watch group FAIR.
July 05, 2024 | Permalink
By Norman Solomon
Almost as appalling as President Biden’s debate performance are the efforts of his loyalists to pretend that what 50 million viewers saw and heard didn’t happen or didn’t really matter. What has unfolded in the last few days amounts to a political gaslighting operation by the Biden campaign and supportive pretenders who’ve been trying to erase history as soon as it happened.
Apparently, Biden’s ego has proven to be much more resilient than his cognition, while loved ones and sycophants in concentric inner and outer circles cling desperately to talking points that are patently dishonest, often preposterous, and virulently dangerous for prospects of preventing a second Trump presidency.
By whistling past the graveyard of Biden’s credibility as a viable candidate in 2024, the pretenders are doing a huge disservice to all who want to avert a full takeover of the U.S. government by the fascistic Republican Party.
Let’s start with the innermost circle -- the First Couple. The day after the debate, both sidestepped what it had shown, instead striving to make it about one man’s quest to show individual resilience.
“I know like millions of Americans know -- when you get knocked down, you get back up,” the president told rallygoers in North Carolina. Meeting in New York with donors, Jill Biden said: “When Joe gets knocked down, Joe gets back up, and that’s what we’re doing today.”
Jill Biden’s role goes far beyond the personal with her husband. After Biden became president, Vogue described his wife as “a key player in her husband’s administration, a West Wing surrogate and policy advocate.”
But it’s worth asking what kind of “key player” could tell President Biden immediately after his disastrous debate performance, as Jill Biden did late Thursday night: “Joe, you did such a great job! You answered every question! You knew all the facts!”
Party leadership was worse than dubious when, following the debate, House Democratic power broker Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina intoned: “Let’s just stay the course.” And when a former Democratic president, Barack Obama, dismissively declared on X: “Bad debate nights happen.”
A master class in evasion and obfuscation came moments after the debate ended when California Gov. Gavin Newsom went on MSNBC to exhibit his damage-control skills. The damage was beyond repair, but he did his best.
“On the signature issue the Democrats have, which is abortion, the president’s response was garbled and undirected at best,” a reporter pointed out. “Do you feel like he did what he needed to do on an issue that could motivate voters?”
“I think it’s significantly insignificant, because it’s de minimis, because the American people have made up their minds,” Newsom replied. “They don’t support the policies of Donald Trump” on abortion.
Newsom went on: “We have the opportunity to universally have the back of this president, who’s had our back. You don’t turn your back, you go home with the one that brought you to the dance. A hundred percent. All in. And I was very very proud that he was able to articulate the work that he has done, and lay a foundation of understanding of the lies and the deceit that continue to come out of Donald Trump’s mouth.”
The day after the debate, interviewed by Al Sharpton on MSNBC, the Democratic National Committee’s chair Jamie Harrison -- who serves at Biden’s pleasure -- echoed Newsom’s carefully obtuse rhetoric, proclaiming that “Joe Biden has always had our back, and we’re gonna have his.”
Meanwhile, liberal mega-substacker Heather Cox Richardson absurdly extended her longstanding record as a scholarly shill for President Biden by writing: “Biden needed to demonstrate that his mental capacity is strong in order to push back on the Republicans’ insistence that he is incapable of being president. That, he did, thoroughly. Biden began with a weak start but hit his stride as the evening wore on. Indeed, he covered his bases too thoroughly, listing the many accomplishments of his administration in such a hurry that he was sometimes hard to understand.”
But such intellectually disingenuous claims have suddenly worn thin in a wide range of media. Habitual supporters of Biden, such as Joe Scarborough at MSNBC and Thomas Friedman at the New York Times, responded to his abysmal effort in the debate by calling for him to drop out of the race. The Times editorial board did the same. During the last few days, a vast array of mainstream outlets featured urgent calls for Biden to withdraw as a candidate.
But the prominent Democrats now refusing to acknowledge that Biden was awful in the debate also refuse to acknowledge that he has been directly aiding mass murder of Palestinians in Gaza. That’s what happens when deference to a leader substitutes fealty for humanity.
Continue reading "Who You Gonna Believe, Biden Loyalists or Your Own Eyes and Ears?" »
July 01, 2024 | Permalink
By Norman Solomon
New York Congressman Jamaal Bowman lost a primary election Tuesday because of unprecedented spending against him by powerful forces that insist Israel does no wrong. By last week, AIPAC had already devoted more than $14 million to defeating Bowman, in retaliation for his outspoken support of human rights for all -- including Palestinian -- people.
Since last fall, most Democratic voters -- especially young people -- have recoiled at the ongoing slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. But despite the magnitude of the horrors inflicted on civilians, the vast bulk of the U.S. media and political establishment has remained on automatic pro-Israel pilot, while often tarring strong opponents of the mass murder as antisemitic.
Although usually eager to defend Democratic incumbents facing strong primary challenges, this time the party’s leadership offered winks and nods to Bowman’s AIPAC-funded opponent, George Latimer. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries went through only perfunctory motions of supporting Bowman. Another fellow Democrat, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, was in the groove when she declared on Sunday: “I am not weighing in on primaries intentionally. But what I'm very focused on is number one, I stand strongly with Israel.”
The meaning of such declarations is rote complicity with nonstop U.S. military aid to Israel as it maintains a siege of Gaza that has already lasted more than 260 days. During that time, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights said last week, “more than 120,000 people in Gaza, overwhelmingly women and children, have been killed or injured” -- “as a result of the intensive Israeli offensives.”
When this week began, Save the Children reported that “up to 21,000 children are estimated to be missing in the chaos of the war in Gaza, many trapped beneath rubble, detained, buried in unmarked graves, or lost from their families.” While voters were casting ballots on Tuesday, the Washington Post summarized a new assessment from experts reporting to the United Nations: “The threat of famine in the Gaza Strip has been revived after Israel’s military operation in the southern city of Rafah disrupted aid deliveries, leaving more than 500,000 Palestinians on the brink of starvation.”
Israel’s warfare -- fully enabled by the U.S. government -- is continuing to cause those systematic atrocities.
“All available evidence indicates that U.S. officials hold Israel to a lower standard than just about any other country,” Responsible Statecraft reporter Connor Echols pointed out last month. The evidence is ample.
The rock-bottom standards applied to the Israeli government are in sync with what the U.S. media and political establishment routinely apply to the United States government. The same basic mass-messaging patterns that confer absolution on whatever the U.S. military does (as described in my book War Made Invisible) are operative in making excuses for what the Israeli military does.
The militaries of the two nations are enmeshed. Not only does the U.S. send huge amounts of weapons and ammunition to Israel. The countries are also constantly exchanging intelligence as well as data on evaluating the efficacy of weaponry and warfare tactics. They share, and create, the same enemies in the Middle East. And the two nations execute highly deceptive maneuvers from the same propaganda playbooks.
In short, while their command structures are separate and they can sometimes be at odds over tactics and proprieties, the Israeli military largely operates as an extension of the U.S. armed forces.
Meanwhile, in the United States, dominant mentalities -- constantly reinforced by mass media and mainstream politics -- run along parallel ruts of Zionism and militarism that are mutually reinforcing and increasingly intersecting. Along the way, toxins draw strength from the poisons that Martin Luther King Jr. denounced as “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism.”
All the denials notwithstanding, a bedrock of unwavering support for Israel as it continues the mass killing of Palestinian civilians is the base assumption -- conscious or not -- that Palestinian lives are far less valuable than Jewish Israeli lives. Or American lives.
The merger of American and Israeli militarism is now more comprehensive than ever. Both are driven by extreme nationalism, war profiteering, and ethnocentric bigotry. Nonviolent unyielding resistance is not futile. It is essential.
Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of many books including "War Made Easy." His latest book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," was published in 2023 by The New Press.
June 26, 2024 | Permalink
By Norman Solomon
"When someone shows you who they are,” Maya Angelou said, “believe them the first time."
That should apply to foreign-policy elites who show you who they are, time after time.
Officials running the Pentagon and State Department have been in overdrive for more than 250 days in support of Israel’s ongoing slaughter of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Supposedly dedicated to defense and diplomacy, those officials have worked to implement and disguise Washington’s war policies, which have taken more lives than any other government in this century.
Among the weapons of war, cluster munitions are especially horrific. That’s why 67 Democrats and an equal number of Republicans in the House of Representatives voted last week to prevent the U.S. government from continuing to send those weapons to armies overseas.
But more than twice as many House members voted the other way. They defeated a Pentagon funding amendment that would have prohibited the transfer of cluster munitions to other countries. The lawmakers ensured that the U.S. can keep supplying those weapons to the military forces of Ukraine and Israel.
As of now, 124 nations have signed onto a treaty banning cluster munitions, which often wreck the bodies of civilians. The “bomblets” from cluster munitions “are particularly attractive to children because they resemble a bell with a loop of ribbon at the end,” the Just Security organization explains.
But no member of Congress need worry that one of their own children might pick up such a bomblet someday, perhaps mistaking it for a toy, only to be instantly killed or maimed with shrapnel.
The Biden administration correctly responded to indications (later proven accurate) that Russia was using cluster munitions in Ukraine. On Feb. 28, 2022, White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki told journalists that if the reports of Russian use of those weapons turned out to be true, “it would potentially be a war crime.”
Back then, the front page of the New York Times described “internationally banned cluster munitions” as “a variety of weapons -- rockets, bombs, missiles and artillery projectiles -- that disperse lethal bomblets in midair over a wide area, hitting military targets and civilians alike.”
Days later, the Times reported that NATO officials “accused Russia of using cluster bombs in its invasion,” and the newspaper added that “anti-personnel cluster bombs . . . kill so indiscriminately they are banned under international law.”
But when the Ukrainian military forces ran low on ammunition last year, the U.S. administration decided to start shipping cluster munitions to them.
“All countries should condemn the use of these weapons under any circumstances,” Human Rights Watch has declared.
BBC correspondent John Simpson summed up a quarter-century ago: “Used against human beings, cluster bombs are some of the most savage weapons of modern warfare.”
As the Congressional Research Service reported this spring, cluster munitions “disperse large numbers of submunitions imprecisely over an extended area.” They “frequently fail to detonate and are difficult to detect,” and “can remain explosive hazards for decades.”
The CRS report added: “Civilian casualties are primarily caused by munitions being fired into areas where soldiers and civilians are intermixed, inaccurate cluster munitions landing in populated areas, or civilians traversing areas where cluster munitions have been employed but failed to explode.”
The horrible immediate effects are just the beginning. “It’s been over five decades since the U.S. dropped cluster bombs on Laos, the most bombed country in the world per capita,” Human Rights Watch points out. “The contamination from cluster munitions remnants and other unexploded ordnance is so vast that fewer than 10 percent of affected areas have been cleared. An estimated 80 million submunitions still pose a danger, especially to curious children.”
The members of Congress who just greenlighted more cluster munitions are dodging grisly realities. The basic approach is to proceed as though such human realities don’t matter if an ally is using those weapons (or if the United States uses them, as happened in Southeast Asia, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Yemen).
Overall, with carnage persisting in Gaza, it's easy enough to say that Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has shown us who he is. But so has Presidente Biden, and so have the most powerful Republicans and Democrats in Congress.
Continue reading "When U.S. Officials Show You Who They Are, Believe Them" »
June 20, 2024 | Permalink