Philip Giraldi – The Unz Review May 17, 2024

It is extremely difficult to discern what might be the thinking behind the clueless President Joe Biden and his Blinken-Austin-Mayorkas foreign-policy-plus national security team. Or rather, the problem is that there does not appear to be any thinking about it at all if one measures it by what benefits it brings to the American people. It all actually seems to derive from a desire to construct a narrative that will win the presidential election coming up in November, which will fortunately be run against a deeply flawed GOP candidate named Donald J. Trump. But look at what is on the Biden record: the country’s southern border with Mexico is a porous as a Swiss cheese, allowing literally millions of illegal immigrants into the USA since Biden took office; Washington is both de facto and de jure simultaneously fighting and losing two unnecessary wars involving nuclear powers which has cost a nearly bankrupt Treasury well into the hundreds of billions of dollars; and the White House is needlessly sanctioning non-hostile competitors like China while also making illegal popular social media sites like TikTok which have committed the sin of reporting and disseminating accurate narratives about good old “best friend and closest ally” Israel. Predictably, neither of the assertions about the value of the Jewish state is true, nor is it a democracy, but who cares when you’re having fun shooting people and spending someone else’s money?

Oh, and just try to exercise your first amendment free speech rights by demonstrating against Israel’s slaughter of upwards of 40,000 Palestinian civilians using US provided weapons and you will be hit on the head by a cop, possibly arrested, and even expelled from college! If you want to see where this is all going, check out reports of the recent FBI detention and interrogation of distinguished Israeli historian Ilan Pappe seeking to enter the US through the Detroit International Airport. Pappe is a critic of the Netanyahu government and of US policy so he was held, questioned in detailed about his contacts, and had his phone copied before being allowed to proceed. Meanwhile, a group of top federal judges have signed a letter stating that they will strike back against the demonstrating students by refusing to hire any graduates of Columbia University Law School as law clerks. And there even is a bill currently before Congress that would empower the government to label the foreign protesters “antisemites and terrorism supporters” and deport them, with some going to Gaza with the expectation that they would be killed, possibly by the mighty Israel Defense Forces (IDF)! It would be a startling new development to punish those whose crime consists mostly of trespass even given the rather loose ethical boundaries established by the war on terror and the Antisemitism Awareness Act! Or indeed one might follow the Senatorial route led by a chirping Lindsey Graham who recommends dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza to kill everyone who has survived the Israeli onslaught. The area then might be developed after the radiation dies down for those splendid seaside villas for Jews only suggested by the esteemed Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner.

To be sure, Joe sometimes mumbles something that might just be viewed positively, like his recent blocking on humanitarian grounds of a consignment of bunker buster bombs on their way to Israel due to Benjamin Netanyahu’s insistence that, no matter what, he would invade Rafah to completely destroy Hamas and whoever else might happen to get in his way. Joe predictably reversed that decision last Tuesday, approving a $1 billion supply of munitions after he came under pressure from the Israelis and their many friends in the US, to include a host of Israel-loving GOP congressmen who have carried their fight on behalf of the Jewish state to The Hague, where the International Criminal Court (ICC) is being directly threatened with American wrath lest it try to punish Israeli leaders for their genocide in Gaza. As Bill Astore put it “Last week, President Biden appeared to have strapped on a temporary spine in delaying shipments of ‘offensive’ weaponry to Israel for its murderous invasion of Rafah in Gaza. That spine had a short duration as Biden announced [Tuesday] renewed shipments of tank and mortar rounds to Israel.” Congress has also gotten into the game with the GOP controlled House of Representatives having passed a bill that would compel the White House to continue all arms shipments to Israel. Joe might also be thinking of political contributions, as American Jews donate the majority of Democratic Party funding, as well guaranteeing a friendly media in his campaign as they dominate both the news and the entertainment industries. See, Joe can figure some things out all by himself every once in a while!

Here’s the problem with Joe, apart from the roughly $12 million in gift-donations from Jewish/Israeli sources that he has obtained in his political career. His tactical thinking does not extend beyond his personal interests, to include his corrupt children, a trait very much like that which is possessed by his good buddy Netanyahu who is facing corruption charges of his own in Israel. Joe believes he is much cleverer than he actually is and thinks that an occasional mild verbal criticism of the Israeli behavior will convince his target audience of voters that he really is concerned about the continuing death toll in Gaza, where the Israelis have already been taking initial steps in their attack on Rafah by using their tanks to penetrate into the targeted zone to destroy and kill.

And as for the reported completion and initial functioning of the floating pier connected to Gaza constructed by US military engineers, it will not dramatically change reality on the ground even though Biden is claiming that it will enable the entry of much needed food and medical aid. Israel will still “security” control what is allowed to enter into Gaza proper while Netanyahu is seeing the pier as a bridge to nowhere, usable primarily to export excess Palestinians to foreign lands that are either willing or unwilling to accept them. And its existence creates some interesting possibilities. As it presumably will be logistically supported on the pier itself by US-based personnel, Netanyahu might well be tempted to stage a false flag attack blamed on Hamas to kill a few Americans and lock Biden into Israel’s right-wing Gaza policies from now on. Bear in mind that, in reality, Biden could care less if all the Palestinians might be “disappeared” just as he would like to see any and all critics of Israel be subjected to the harshest punishments, including prison and denial of basic rights as well as being stripped of government benefits. He has called the protesters “lawbreakers” and spreaders of “chaos” and congress is currently investigating the alleged “subversive organizers” of the “anti-Israel terrorists.”

Biden and company, as well as Trump, who is advising the Israeli government to “finish the job” with the Palestinians, clearly have no actual red lines that must not be crossed when it comes to Israel. The war of extermination of the Gazans has been accompanied by a more hidden war being conducted by the Jewish settlers on the West Bank, which has been largely under Israeli occupation since 1967. The frequently armed settlers have been attacking unarmed Palestinians, destroying their homes and businesses, ruining their crops and vineyards, and even killing them on occasion. Israeli police and army standing by do nothing to stop the fun and even frequently participate themselves by arresting and beating Palestinians who are guilty only of being Palestinian. Hundreds of Palestinians have been arrested without charges apart from “preventive detention” since the troubles began in October and the jails are overflowing. The clear intention, verbalized without any shame by senior Israeli government officials like Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, is to produce a Greater Israel cleansed of Arabs. And Biden, who pretends to favor a two-state solution to the unrest, helps the process along by vetoing UN resolutions that would help create separate sovereignty for Palestine.

Some of the most outrageous recent developments have been the settlers’ interfering with shipments of food and medicines entering into Gaza, a point that a faux-sympathetic Biden stresses repeatedly when pontificating regarding bringing aid to the starving people who are trapped with nowhere to go inside the enclave. The Israel clampdown even includes the Mediterranean Sea being blocked off by the Israeli navy which shoots any desperate Gazans who try to go close to the water so they can fish for food. In the most recent incidents, observed by the standing-by but inert Israeli army and police, truckloads of food were blocked, the drivers and aid workers removed and beaten, and the food was destroyed and burned before the trucks were treated likewise. In another incident settlers dumped huge boulders on one of the access roads to a checkpoint leading into Gaza, rendering it impassible and blocking any aid. Journalists and aid workers are meanwhile being killed by the army to prevent any reporting of what is going on while the US State Department refuses to condemn the activity. Biden called the interference with assistance convoys “outrageous” but has done nothing whatsoever about it, nor has he followed up on pledges to sanction Israelis who attack Palestinians or their property on the West Bank.

The whole problem is that Israel is a monster, an apartheid state that somehow feels it is empowered by God and the United States to kill all its neighbors and rob the American taxpayer to pay for and equip the slaughter. Israel is backed by an all-powerful US domestic lobby that includes unlimited Jewish money and activist Zionist groups like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) led by the hideous Jonathan Greenblatt and the venerable American Israel Political Affairs Committee (AIPAC), both of which are now busy raising money to defeat all congress critters who have ever criticized the Jewish state. ADL and AIPAC are also linked to “that old time religion” knucklehead Christian Zionists concentrated in the Republican Party who have their Scofield Bibles firmly embedded between their ears where their brains are supposed be. A partial solution would be to make the Jewish-Zionist groups register as foreign government agents directed by Israel under the the terms of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), which is exactly what they are, but that will never happen. President John F. Kennedy tried to register the predecessor group to AIPAC and many believe he paid the ultimate price for that affront as well as for his bid to stop Israel’s nuclear weapons program.

So, my fellow Americans, what should we do? Well, we should do whatever we can, which includes speaking out about how we have been sold out by our leaders and opinion makers, and we should continue to do that even knowing that they will try to silence us by destroying free speech in this country. It is all we have left and we should continue to oppose what is happening. The first step however, is to get rid of politicians like Joe and Donald, who have been completely corrupted by more than fifty years in the “system” and are totally sold out and irresponsible in their behavior. There are honest politicians and journalists out there and we just have to find them, support them and get them elected and in positions where they will be able to bring about change in how things are done in Washington! One might call it the New American Revolution to restore our rights and free us from foreign oppression!

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org

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