Biden to Bibi: ‘OK to continue Gaza genocide till after election’

 

Biden to Bibi: ‘OK to continue Gaza genocide till after election’

On October 14, President Biden sent a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu giving Israel 30 days to allow more aid of food, water and medicine into Gaza’s 139 square miles being utterly destroyed by Israel for the past year. It’s noteworthy that the 30 day time limit ends 9 days after the US election.

Biden’s letter is brilliant politics and grotesque governance. Biden, who has been funding, supporting and enabling the yearlong genocide in Gaza, desperately needs to appear peace loving ahead of the election. He knows a majority of his Democratic voters are horrified by his genocide enabling. They want him to end the so far 50,000 tons of weapons he’s already given Israel to demolish Gaza.

The letter, designed to promote his concern for the devastation he’s enabled, will do nothing to end the genocide in Gaza. Netanyahu has ignored every one of Biden’s pleas for supplying life sustaining aid there. The letter doesn’t even state Biden will cut off aid to Israel. It merely implies that if US demands aren’t met, the US might consider enforcing foreign assistance laws. Those laws forbid the US from sending weapons to any nation committing wholesale destruction of civilian populations. But not one word about actually cutting off those weapons destroying Gaza.

Every day dozens, hundreds, even a thousand or more Palestinians die in Gaza, obliterated by Biden’s 2,000 lb. bombs, or killed more slowly from disease or starvation. Biden does not care. His toothless letter begging for more aid to the 2,300,000 Palestinians will do nothing to alleviate their suffering. But it may mollify his antiwar critics enough to help achieve Democratic victory Election Day.

Win or lose November 5, Biden is unlikely to do anything substantive to end the genocidal ethnic cleansing of Gaza. It goes against everything he’s believed in and supported about Israeli colonial domination of Palestine for his entire 52 year governmental career. But it will ensure he descends into historical infamy for enabling the worst genocide of the 21st century.

Release Menendez brothers….impose death penalty on life imprisonment

 

Release Menendez brothers….impose death penalty on life imprisonment

 

It’s good to hear LA District Attorney George Gascon recommending Erik and Lyle Menendez be released after serving 35 years of a life sentence for killing their parents in 1989.

"I believe that they have paid their debt to society," are words one never hears from top prosecutors in heinous murder cases. But it’s about time. Society squanders billions of scarce public treasure to become essentially a nursing home for aging murderers who are no longer a threat to society.

 

Indeed, the Menendez boys, just 19 and 21 when they shot gunned their parents to death, may have been acting from extreme parental abuse that was prevented from discussion during the retrial that convicted them in 1996.

 

DA Gascon understands that the unallowed evidence may have resulted in a prison term lower than the actual 35 years they have now served. Gascon believes the two are no longer a threat to society at large, if they ever were.

 

The Menendez case should reemphasize the need to abolish life sentences including its noxious corollary, ‘without parole.’ They are a throwback to unenlightened times when the goto punishment for murder, if not the death penalty, was life in a prison cage. But life sentences have nothing to do with punishing wrongdoing and protecting society. They are primarily a reflex revenge action that hinders rather than improves society.

 

Over 200,000 of America’s 1,400,000 prisoners are serving life. Some cannot safely be released till they’re to infirm to no longer threaten society. But many thousands have been rehabilitated, indeed have become decent persons after long incarceration, justifying their eligibility for parole.

That certainly applies to the Menendez brothers. A couple of hundred thousand more deserve their chance at improving the American system of justice thru parole as well.

Harris admits US/Israeli genocide in Gaza….then says ‘Never mind’

 

Harris admits US/Israeli genocide in Gaza….then says ‘Never mind’

 

At a campaign stop in Milwaukee, Kamala Harris was confronted by a protester who charged the Biden administration “invested “billions of dollars in genocide in Gaza that has resulted in massive child casualties.”

 

Before Harris could consult her scripted genocide denial playbook, she blurted out “What he’s talking about, it’s real. That’s not the subject that I came to discuss today, but it’s real.”

 

Mainstream news didn’t cover Harris’ US genocide agreement comment. But just to be safe her campaign issued a statement that Harris “doesn’t agree with defining the war as a genocide, and she has not expressed such a stance in the past, as this is not her position.”

 

Perhaps the guilt of participating in the most grotesque genocide in this century is beginning to weigh on the conscience of Kamala Harris. If so campaign protesters, keep holding up the mirror of Biden/Harris genocide enabling in Gaza to Kamala at every campaign stop. She must be constantly reminded she cannot escape the depravity into which she has sunk to achieve the US presidency.

President Biden’s depraved last 15 months enables Israel’s genocidal destruction of Gaza

 

President Biden’s depraved last 15 months enables Israel’s genocidal destruction of Gaza

November 7th marks 52 years since Joe Biden was first elected to national office as Senator from Delaware. During that time as Senator, Vice President, President, he’s supported every US military intervention sowing havoc around the world from Vietnam thru Iraq, Afghanistan, Iraq again, Yemen, Syria, Libya and Ukraine to name eight.

He’s also been a self-proclaimed Zionist. On October 21, 2023 he met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin in Israel and told him "I don't believe you have to be a Jew to be a Zionist, and I am a Zionist." This was at the beginning of Netanyahu’s scorched earth policy of genocidal ethnic cleaning to remove all 2,300,000 Palestinians from Gaza.

Biden pledged America’s military treasure for Netanyahu to complete his decades’ long dream of expelling Palestinians from Gaza for Israeli settlement. Of course, Biden was careful to couch the so far $17.9 billion in US weaponry as purely defensive to complete the destruction of Hamas following their October 7, 2023 attack.

But in the ensuing year, Netanyahu has used our treasure to utterly destroy Gaza as a habitable land. He’s dropped Biden’s 2,000 lb. blockbuster bombs to obliterate most of Gaza’s infrastructure including schools, hospitals, water and sewage treatment facilities along with tens of thousands of Palestinians moms and kids. The death toll likely exceeds a hundred thousand with virtually every remaining Palestinian suffering starvation and illness from Netanyahu’s preventing most food, water and medicine from reaching Gaza.

All of this grotesque carnage is financed and enabled by President Joe Biden.

What Biden calls defense, the Israelis call Palestinian Removal. Was he even aware of this week’s Israeli conference on Israeli resettlement of Gaza titled ‘Preparing to Resettle Gaza’ organized by Netanyahu’s government and settler organization Nachala? The topic was not defense against Hamas. It was about removing the remaining 2,200,000 Palestinians trapped in the moonscape created by Biden’s bombs. Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir told attendees “We will encourage the voluntary transfer of all Gazan citizens. We will offer them the opportunity to move to other countries because that land belongs to us.” What Ben Gvir didn’t articulate was that those not leaving voluntarily will be killed.

Joe Biden has been a career long supporter of Israeli colonial Apartheid control of the Palestinian people. He’s never taken a significant action to advance Palestinian statehood much less recognize Palestinians’ humanity. But in his last 15 months as president, he’s gone over the abyss into depravity, enabling the most grotesque genocide in this century.

Alas, Joe Biden is not leaving the presidency on a high note.

Path to peace in Ukraine is thru negotiated settlement, not escalatory war that could go nuclear

 

Path to peace in Ukraine is thru negotiated settlement, not escalatory war that could go nuclear

Ethan Finegold’s October 20 letter ‘The US has the power to end the war in Ukraine’ offers just one simplistic remedy to achieve a Ukrainian victory over Russia. Finegold argues the US must approve long range missile strikes by Ukraine with the missiles we’ve already provided but restrict their long range use.

There are 2 problems with this solution. First, long range missile strikes will have no effect on achieving a Ukrainian victory. This is not just the opinion of we in the community including esteemed University of Chicago political science expert John Mearsheimer. It’s the opinion of his polar opposite, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who argues such strikes will have no effect because Russia has already moved over 90% of its strategic targets beyond the range of these long range missiles.

The second reason is decidedly more ominous. Russia has made clear both publicly at the UN and privately in backchannel talks with the Biden administration, that such attacks using US/UK missiles, fired using US technology and logistics, will put Russia at war with NATO. These communications so unnerved Biden that he rebuffed UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky last month who both sought US approval for such strikes. Russia upped the ante against such strikes by publicly revising its nuclear strategy to allow for use of nuclear weapons if a non-nuclear state strikes deep into Russia supported by weaponry from a nuclear state. So far, President Biden has wisely gotten the message.

Finegold is correct in stating “Every day that this war is allowed to continue is another day that risks Russia’s use of nuclear weapons on the battlefield.” That is precisely why the US must pivot from endless weaponizing this 32 month long unwinnable war to a sensible negotiated peace.

Walt Zlotow, West Suburban Peace Coalition, Glen Ellyn IL