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https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2023/11/03/biden-countering-islamophobia-while-incinerating-gaza-is-the-most-democrat-thing-ever/

Biden ‘Countering Islamophobia’ While Incinerating Gaza Is The Most Democrat Thing Ever

In what is arguably the most liberal thing ever to have happened in all of human history, the Biden administration has announced its plans to develop a US National Strategy to Counter Islamophobia even as it helps Israel massacre Muslims by the thousands in Gaza.

“For too long, Muslims in America, and those perceived to be Muslim, such as Arabs and Sikhs, have endured a disproportionate number of hate-fueled attacks and other discriminatory incidents,” reads a White House statement on the announcement. “We all mourn the recent barbaric killing of Wadea Al-Fayoume, a 6-year-old Palestinian American Muslim boy, and the brutal attack on his mother in their home outside Chicago.”

This comes as the death toll from the US-backed bombing campaign in Gaza nears 10,000, including 3,760 children, in what experts and authorities around the world are describing with increasing frequency as a genocide. If these people were Jewish instead of Muslim, they would not be trapped in a giant concentration camp while the IDF hammers them with a nonstop barrage of military explosives, but because of their ethnicity they are subjected to this horror.

There’s a classic meme which makes fun of the way US foreign policy under Democrats is the same murderous foreign policy as it is under Republicans, but with a bunch of woke-sounding bumper stickers slapped on the surface to make it palatable for progressive sensibilities:

Can you think of a better illustration of the dynamic that’s highlighted by this criticism than what we’re seeing from the Biden administration today? This is after all the same administration whose Department of Defense recently said they are putting zero limits on what Israel may or may not do with the weapons it’s being given by the United States.

“We are not putting any limits on how Israel uses weapons that is provided,” Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh told the press on Monday. “That is really up to the Israel Defense Force to use in how they are going to conduct their operations. But we’re not putting any constraints on that.”

As In These Times reports, this same administration is also trying to get permission to conduct arms deals with Israel without congressional supervision, in complete secrecy and without accountability to the voting public.

The US government is every bit as culpable in the massacre of thousands of Muslim children as Israel, because this entire massacre is happening with both its assistance and its express permission. But here is its government pretending to care deeply that one Muslim child was killed by an Islamophobic psycho in America. 

This is everything that’s disgusting about the Democratic Party. It puts a warm, friendly face on the most murderous and tyrannical power structure on earth, posing as a defender of marginalized groups while dropping bombs on the most marginalized populations on this planet. It selects a high number of women and racially diverse officials for its cabinet positions to convey the illusion that it has transcended the abusive bigotries of the past, while subjecting impoverished brown-skinned foreigners to a nonstop barrage of high-tech explosive munitions in massacres that would be the envy of the worst white supremacist imperialists in history.

A much more accurate image for the United States than the one it tries to give itself with its fraudulent progressive virtue signalling would be the one it was given by protesters who interrupted Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee on Tuesday. Demonstrators painted their hands red to show the blood this administration has on its own hands, resulting in viral images of Blinken’s face surrounded by bloody hands circulating all over the internet. 

That’s what the US empire really is. Not the liberal bastion of human rights it presents itself as, but a blood-spattered psychopathic murder machine which maintains its domination of this planet with the nonstop butchery of human beings. 

The longer the massacre in Gaza goes on, the more people are catching a glimpse behind the plastic smiley-faced mask of the US empire and seeing the cold-eyed killer underneath.

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https://scheerpost.com/2023/11/03/palestines-obituary/

Palestine’s Obituary

Juan Cole offers his expertise in the Middle East to explain how we’ve gotten to the current state of affairs in Palestine and Israel.  

Historian Juan Cole minces no words in offering a grave and sobering account of the conflict in Palestine and Israel on this episode of the Scheer Intelligence podcast. In a comprehensive reflection of the history and current day situation in the Middle East, Cole uses his expertise as one of the leading historians of the region to paint a picture of the war. He asserts that in all definitions of the words, Israel is actively committing war crimes, like the United States in Iraq, a genocide and ethnic cleansing aimed at eliminating the Palestinian presence from their homeland.

Cole’s characterization of Netanyahu and his government as fascist immediately brings up the gross complicity at the hands of the U.S. and the politicians who have supported and continue to publicly stand by Israel. It’s worse when considering the high-ranking officials in Netanyahu’s cabinet.

“[H]e brought into his government, when he came back to power late last year, the most extreme, I mean, this is beyond fascism, the most extreme parties in Israel. The religious Zionists and the Jewish power. I mean, these people are terrorists and some of them actually have been on the State Department terrorism watch list, not allowed in the United States in the past. And he brought them into the cabinet. He made one of these guys the minister of national security, put the other in the finance ministry and then gave him responsibilities as a civilian for overseeing the Palestinian West Bank. And both of these ministers who are extremists were also squatters on Palestinian land in the West Bank and wanted to steal the rest of it to bring in more settlers.”

It was not hard to see the irony in the Western response, as Scheer points out: “The hypocrisy of Germany, which was the author of the worst crime of modern history, the Holocaust, and the French, who certainly were anti-Semitic to a considerable degree, and others in Western Europe, [are] now saying you can’t even demonstrate for Palestinian rights.”

Pointing out the individuals with a real hand in the situation, who have the money to lobby for Israel’s interests, Cole says, “[the power] lies with the people that are most comfortable with seeing the Palestinians simply ethnically cleansed.”

Transcript of interview at article address

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https://scheerpost.com/2023/11/03/eulogy-for-my-father-daniel-ellsberg/

Eulogy for My Father, Daniel Ellsberg

In the final days, his joy and gratitude were based on the hope that others would carry on the effort for a better, more peaceful future. I pray that his joy may be justified.  

Peacemaker and whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg died on June 16, 2023, four months after his diagnosis with inoperable pancreatic cancer. In March, he shared news of his prognosis with friends and supporters in the peace movement in a letter posted on Common Dreams. On October 22 his family hosted an online Celebration of Life which featured testimonials by his wife, Patricia, his children, Robert, Mary, and Michael, his grandchildren, and a wide range of friends, fellow peacemakers, and whistleblowers, including Edward Snowden, Jane Fonda, Barbra Streisand, Rev. John Dear, Norman Soloman, Rep. Barbara Lee, Gov. Jerry Brown, Tom Reiffer, Richard Falk, and Randy Kehler. Dan’s son Robert, the Publisher of Orbis Books, delivered this opening eulogy:

During a phone call in February, Dad mentioned—almost as a side note—“If I had a potentially serious condition, would you want to know about it?” I answered with words to the effect: Hell yes! Thus, I learned of a possible mass on his pancreas, which was later confirmed to be pancreatic cancer and was deemed inoperable. He was told he had three to six months to live. He lived for four.

I had known that Dad was never particularly worried or anxious about the prospect of his own death. Since surviving the car accident that killed his mother and sister when he was 15, I think he had always felt he was living on borrowed time. He admitted to me that this probably accounted for his ability to take risks that others might have feared—some of them, arguably reckless, such as driving through the countryside of Vietnam in his Triumph Spitfire. Others, like his willingness to risk life in prison for releasing the Pentagon Papers, served a higher purpose. That lack of fear was one of his superpowers.

Yet if the prospect of his own death did not concern him, he spent a lifetime warning against the prospect of mass death hovering over the earth. He stared into the heart of darkness, envisioning a scale of death for which most people have no adequate language or capacity to contemplate. In countless hours in his study, he scratched out thoughts about this danger on one of his yellow legal pads, trying to conceive of words or actions that could arouse humanity to avert the death of our species and the creatures we would take with us.

Compared with that prospect, he accepted his own demise with calm detachment, thus foregoing all the preliminary stages of grief that Elisabeth Kübler Russ famously outlined: denial, grief, bargaining, and depression.

What surprised us was something we would not have predicted: his evident happiness, or what my brother Michael termed “ebullience.”

This was not because he felt any optimism about the state of the world. “I am not generally an optimist,” he told me. “No,” I said, “you are generally a catastrophist.” In fact, he foresaw nothing but sadness and suffering for the future. In light of the dangers posed by the war in Ukraine, he said, “I feel I’m leaving just where I first came in.”

My father was capable of joy and laughter. Often our conversations were a sustained laugh fest. He saw the humor and absurdity in so many things. But none of us had ever witnessed the sustained happiness and enjoyment of life that he showed in the three months following his diagnosis. How to explain what even he acknowledged was a mystery?

I think it came from the sense, as he confided to Patricia, that “a tremendous burden has been lifted from my shoulders.”

He had often spoken of his identification with the mythical seer Cassandra: who received the gift of seeing the future, but also the curse that no one would believe her. For most of his life, he had struggled with this dubious gift and the driven sense that he must find some way to make people see and act appropriately. He believed that the danger facing humanity came not just from our technology and our policies but from the tragic defect that allowed so many humans not to identify with the sufferings and fate of others far away, not of their tribe.

He was not alone in his mission, and it gave him great joy to be around those he called his “tribe”—the peacemakers and resisters, the whistleblowers, the fellow prophets like Greta Thunberg—those he said who care about the others. It was that kind of deep empathy that had helped him turn against the war in Vietnam, whose people, he said, “had become as real to me as my own hands.”

And yet the burden of this responsibility definitely dimmed his capacity for sustained happiness—the feeling that somehow the fate of the world depended on him.

I tried at various times, with limited success, to lighten this burden. Using a sports metaphor that I knew was meaningless to him, I once told him that his job was not to get the ball across the goal line—just to move it down the field. Others would carry on.

It was a message he wanted and needed to believe. One time when he was feeling particularly down, I wrote him a letter saying, “Dad, you should never feel you have to do anything—give another interview, spend another night in jail, write another book. You helped end a war. And you set an example of heroic action for peace that will inspire and challenge generations to come. I couldn’t be prouder to be your son.”

After his death I found that message taped to his computer.

I had the great privilege of working with him for two years on his book, The Doomsday Machine. He once told me that he would be happy if his book could prolong the survival of the planet for 43 seconds—the time between the release of the first atomic bomb and its detonation over Hiroshima. “Forgive me,” I told him, “if I hope to aim a little bit higher.”

In his last months, I believe it was given to him to raise his eyes and see a little higher—beyond the doomsday scenarios on his yellow legal pad: to sense that he had done what was given to him to accomplish; the rest was out of his hands. In a letter he sent to friends, he wrote, “I’ve always known that I work better under a deadline. It turns out that I live better under a deadline!”

That letter, which he posted in March, was a great step on his final journey. I believe it will stand as part of his legacy, a message about his own life, about what it means to be a responsible person, and the message of realism and encouragement he hoped to pass along. He described the risk he had undertaken in releasing the Pentagon Papers, and the unexpected results it had achieved, even contributing to the end of the Vietnam War. He was spared a lifetime in prison and allowed to spend the subsequent years attempting to alert the world to the perils of nuclear war. He regretted that his efforts to dismantle the Doomsday Machine had not shown better results. And yet, he wrote, “As I look back on the last sixty years of my life, I think there is no greater cause to which I could have dedicated my efforts.”

He acknowledged and thanked his fellow peacemakers for their efforts. “Your dedication, courage, and determination to act have inspired and sustained my own efforts.” He said he could depart this life knowing that others would carry on.

And he concluded: “My wish for you is that at the end of your days you will feel as much joy and gratitude as I do now.”

His letter evoked an extraordinary response, and I think for the first time he realized how much he was loved. This came as a surprise: yes, people had told him he was admired—but loved?

The last time he left the house was for an outing we shared to Stimson Beach, one of his favorite places in the world. It was too cold to dip our toes in the water, but we lay on the sand, surrounded by seagulls and the sound of the surf. It reminded me that his horror at the dangers of nuclear war and climate change were fueled by his love for the earth—nature, the ocean, flowers, animals, children, music, poetry, beauty in all is forms, and what it would mean if we were never to see and enjoy these things again. We talked for hours.

Many of his interviewers, he said, wanted to talk about his “legacy.” He didn’t know exactly what that meant. But he told me that maybe this was his message: That you can’t know what you will accomplish, and you may not ever know the results of your actions—but the chance that you can make a difference is worth taking and at the end of the day that is a good way to use your life.

When we drove home he told me, “This has been a marvelous day.”

That was his final gift to me, the memory of a marvelous day, the example of a marvelous life. To the extent that his joy and gratitude were based on the hope that others would carry on, I pray that his joy may be justified by the way we remember him and by the way we use our lives.