It's All About the White Settler Colonialism

 What took European invaders close to 400 years to accomplish in the Americas, the State of Israel hopes to accomplish in less than a quarter of that time. I am talking, of course, about the State of Israel's pivot from its protracted ethnic cleansing of Palestine to the outright genocide of the Palestinians trapped in Gaza.

Just as the Puritans self-righteously justified their own wars against native populations by pointing to their own persecution at the hands of the British, and later, by the often-violent reaction of Indians against the settler-colonists, so too do the Zionists of Israel justify their treatment of native populations by pointing to their own long history of persecution in Europe, which culminated with the Holocaust.  As long as the perpetrators can gloss over their racist white supremacy with the shield of perpetual victimhood, they feel free to do plenty of victimizing of their own. If you criticize their actions, you are labeled an anti-Semite. You might even have a Wall Street job offer rescinded if you're an Ivy League student. (Which might not be a bad thing, in the long run. Maybe these elite college kids can now oot for a teaching job in an underserved public school!)

Joe Biden, on his quick campaign stop in Israel, wasted no time in embracing both Binyamin Netanyahu and Bibi's predictable denial of responsibility for the explosion at a Gaza hospital, which has claimed the lives of at least 500 people. The US president glibly explained his belief that Hamas ("the other team") was responsible by saying that "his" defense department had already told him so. This is the same dude who had enthusiastically embraced the debunked war propaganda of decapitated Israeli babies.

It's all about the solidarity among the settler-colonialists of the world. Both the United States and Israel consider themselves to be exceptional nations, among God's chosen ones. They do pre-emptive war with impunity.

Why else would the US military, in which Biden puts so much demented faith and trust, name a whole series of its lethal weapons and hardware after the native populations it had finally conquered in the late 19th century?  

Here's just a partial list of what the perpetual US war machine has used to maim and kill untold millions of people, the majority of whom have been non-white in the ludicrously-named post World War II "Pax Americana" --

Apache attack helicopter, Tomahawk cruise missile,  a whole series of helicopters bearing such tribal names as Cayuga, Huron, and Iroquois, not to mention the high-tech spy aircraft called Kiowa, Ute and Mohawk. And who can forget that the mission to murder Osama Bin Laden was named after the great Indian warrior against US occupation - Geronimo?

Such naming is a way to continue denigrating American Indians while justifying their own modern wars of aggression. It speaks to a kind of distorted genetic memory  of all those innocent settler-folk being scalped by the "savages" who had the effrontery to resent their invaders. Not for nothing do supporters of the genocide in Palestine attempt to dehumanize the actual victims by calling thenm "savages" and "human animals." It's all too familiar. 

And now, with most of the civilized world aghast and protesting in the streets at the blatant and even downright gleeful genocide of Palestinians, the US has effectively joined Israel in being viewed as a pariah state by the rest of the world.  The US itself is still an apartheid state in all but name, discriminating against and punishing its own citizens based upon their race and class and gender - and lately, even their  independent thought - despite all the sanctimonious laws that it has on the books. Jim Crow is still alive and well. Just witness the gross expansion of the US prison system, the largest in the world, with more Black people now incarcerated than there were slaves prior to the Civil War. This statistic is largely the result of then-Senator Biden's crime bills, passed with bipartisan support in the 90s.

It should come as no surprise, therefore, that in 2023, the Biden administration is such an unabashed champion of Palestinian genocide, albeit with the usual ass-covering platitudes about humanitarian concerns. It is somewhat gratifying - or worrisome, as far as the New York Times is concerned - that even timorous "progressive" politicians are just now beginning to make the tiniest possible demands of Biden to broker a ceasefire. It was only a week ago that the Democratic Party was so unified. They voted en masse against ex-House Speaker McCarthy. Most of them already endorsed Joe Biden for re-election, for cryin out loud! 

But even the reliably pro-Israel Times isn't quite as gung-ho about Zionist revenge as it was in the immediate aftermath of the atrocious slaughter of Israeli civilians by Hamas.  Perhaps it has something to do both with the backlash from readers in the comments sections, and from the public at large. Not when "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" has been expanded so disproportionately. Like Biden, Netanyahu's political viability was also in question prior to the allegedly surprise attack by Hamas.

Biden's gruesome theatrical embrace on Wednesday of this brutal right-wing leader of Israel was intended to recast him as a courageous wartime statesman rather than as a bumbling old man with low domestic approval ratings. However, any additional support or kudos that he gets from his fellow Neocons in both war parties will be diluted by the two other hawkish xenophobic presidential candidates in the mix. - Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. There are already indications that his political stunt has backfired.

 This creates a much bigger opening for the lone antiwar candidate, Cornel West. He may not win - actually allowed to win - the election, or even get ballot access. But at least the corporate media are now being forced to give him a regular platform. No matter if it's just an attempt to co-opt him in their corporate fold or boost their ratings among the younger demographic.

Because despite its own ham-handed efforts, the Censorship-Industrial Complex cannot control the narrative. The grotesque reality speaks for itself.

Imperial America Unmasked

The mask was ripped off the U.S. in more ways than one during the past week. And each of these ways exposes the big lie that our leaders care deeply about "our children."

But maybe, just maybe, once the government starts sending those direct cash deposits to families with children this summer, these families will forget all about the cruelty of opening all the schools before young children under the age of 12 will even qualify for vaccination against Covid-19. Maybe they will swallow whole the government's decidedly unscientific claim that unvaccinated kids cannot possibly spread the virus to others. Maybe they will ignore the warning from the country's largest nurses' union that the CDC's convoluted guidelines over whether to mask or not to mask exposes families and individuals to unnecessary danger, given that the reports of the end of the pandemic have been, ahem, somewhat exaggerated.Maybe Americans will ignore the troubling reality that even as President Biden is getting plaudits for his tax credits and his plans for Pre-K and subsidized child care, he is at the same time giving his tacit approval to the murders of other people's children. He is turning a cold and blind eye to the children of Gaza, who are being injured at the rate of about three per hour by US-subsidized Israeli airstrikes.

 If Joe Biden is sincere about restoring America's global reputation and its "soul" in the aftermath of Trump, he certainly has a strange way of showing it, what with his tepid response to a campaign of ethnic cleansing by the monster Bibi Netanyahu.

Although support for Israel may be crumbling due to the elite establishment no longer having a monopoly on news coverage and ownership of the means of persuasion, the "woke" New York Times is doing its best.

It helpfully reports, for instance,  that the "proportionality" of an estimated 40 Palestinian kids getting killed compared to only three Israeli kids can be ascribed to Palestinian mothers being lazy and having too many babies. Reporter and former Jerusalem bureau chief David M. Halbfinger ever so delicately tiptoes around the Israeli government's grotesque rationale for genocide:

Relatively few women in Gaza are employed, and the fertility rate is high, leaving the median age in the crowded coastal enclave at just 18, compared to 30 in Israel and 31 worldwide. And Israel says that Hamas positions its fighters in or underneath residential areas, deliberately exposing civilians — and children — to harm.

In other words, there are far too many children taking up space in Gaza to expect Israel to avoid bombing them to death, especially since their fecund mothers insist upon housing them above Hamas tunnels.

What is to be done? For starters, we can boycott US corporations doing business with Israel, and start harassing and scaring elected representatives in Congress, who keep right on approving military aid to genocidal maniacs no matter how many children may be killed in all our names.  The nihilistic Republicans are a lost cause. But if your congress critter happens to be one of those selectively woke Democrats who just signed a letter pledging their unconditional support for military aid to Israel, you might want to give them a friendly buzz and demand they rescind their pledge.

As reported by Truthout, virtually all GOP members of the House of Representatives and more than half of their Democratic colleagues - including several members of the Progressive Caucus - signed a letter in late April stating that Israel can violate international human rights statutes with impunity and still get its annual $3.8 billion for its fighter jets, bombs, and other child-killing hardware. You can read the letter here,  and see whether your representative signed it. You might be in for a very unpleasant surprise.

No wonder that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has decreed that all her members keep their own masks on in public. Besides protecting themselves from the virus, they have to enhance the barbed wire currently surrounding the Capitol. They have to do something to hide their cynical smirks from the public.

With the help of a complicit press and generous donations from Pentagon contractors, these people have been inoculated against public accountability for far too long.

Joe Biden ostentatiously ripped off his own Covid mask last week in the Rose Garden, exposing his veneered rictus to the maudlin accompaniment of comparisons of America's victory over the Nazis and Japan in World War II

Vice President Kamala Harris, doing her own facial striptease for the cameras, chortled modestly: "What a contrast to the bad old days of lies, stupidity, denial, hyping hydroxychlroquine and bleach!"

But just as suddenly, the masks are right back on, both literally and figuratively. Transparency, what with all its exposure of their death's head grimaces, must have been more than they could bear.