Genocide Joe's Not-So Red Lines

A Verdict-Interrupted Reflection on Amerika's Two-Faced, Single-Standard Imperialism

Dear readers: the essay below was ten minutes from being sent off to my other favorite other outlet  – CounterPunch – when I got a surprising message telling me that the New York jury in Donald Trump’s Stormy Daniels-David Pecker-Michael Cohen “hush money” trial had just come in Guilty on All 34 Felony Counts.  I missed the CounterPunch deadline as I went online to read about the verdict and reflect on what I rightly imagined would be some of the problematic responses to it: an exaggerated sense that “the system works after all” among liberals and flat denigration of the ruling, judge, and jury combined with the dangerous intensification of Republi-fascist madness, paranoia, and victimhood on the right.

Going to the New York Times website, I was knocked out when I saw a different and (to me) shocking report that would have been a far bigger story and topic of political discussion but for the Trump verdict blockbuster: the longtime imperialist warmonger Biden had just signed off on Ukraine attacking Russian territory with US-made weapons.

I will no doubt have to include a commentary on the verdict in my writing schedule next week: how can a longtime antifascist Trump chronicler, Trump critic, Trump analyst and (oh, yes) Trump-loather (“hater” is too weak) like me avoid doing that? (I may try though.)  

For what it’s worth, here (before the aforementioned Biden essay) in chronological order are my veridct-induced comments on so-called social media yesterday late afternoon and evening and this morning:

·        Holy F’ng sh*t. I am very happy to be wrong in my prediction. I didn't think prosecutors could get 12-0 on this. I am glad to have been wrong.

·        Thirty-four felony convictions for the orange sack of fascist sh#t. Lock this sick mfer up and throw away the key.  

·        So we are about to find out just how fully cultified the Republikan base is. The orange-hued hunk of fascist shit is running for POTUS with 34 felony convictions on his Hitlerian ass!  If this doesn't cost him significant points in the electorate/polling , we'll get yet another chilling sense of how deranged the Republikaner base is now.

·        Btw, fascism will not be trumped with verdicts and elections.

·        Judge Merchan has been insulted, demeaned, menaced, and mocked by Tangerine Assface throughout this trial. He needs to pay Tangerine Assface back with significant jail time...  Trump even attacked Merchan's daughter, ffs.

·        Christian fascist lowlife and US House Speaker Mike Johnson has denounced the verdict of 12 US citizens.

·        In recent pre-verdict polling, Republicans were MORE LIKELY to vote for Trump if he was convicted!

·        Looks like the Times sounded out some abject morons for quick and reactionary reactions: “The Trump Verdict: Americans React,” https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/30/nyregion/trump-guilty-verdict-react.html?

·        Loathsome Republi-fascists spewing shit out their mouths and fingertips: see David Moye, “MAGA Has Mega-Meltdown At Trump’s Verdict,” Huffington Post, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-verdict-maga-has-mega-meltdown_n_6658f967e4b08f9fa13ff7a3?

·        The verdict helps liberals think the system works for justice. It doesn't. The verdict could help Trump actually. By the way, the January 6 cases, the real shit, are still pathetically delayed past the election the orange fascist malignancy may very well still win. So is the classified document case.

·        In other news, Biden has insanely signed off on US weapons being used to attack Russia.

·        Also in other news, temperature in India's capital just hit a record-breaking 52.3°C (126.1°F). Apparently the Trump verdict didn't end capitalism-imperialism's accelerating cancellation of livable ecology.

·        How many Trumpist employers refuse to hire anyone with a felony record...they are ready to vote for a felon POTUS though!

·       Hey Genocide Joe, How Many Charred Corpses in Ukraine and Gaza Before You Stop Funding and Equipping Mass Killing?

·       Not having cable in Iowa City, I  am assuming that the New York Trump verdict has pushed the US-backed genocide in Gaza/Rafah and the Biden decision to let Ukraine attack Russia with US-made weapons off the banner/headlines and discussion topics....

….Okay, now the essay I was writing and that would have gone to CounterPunch before I heard about Michael Cohen’s Revenge yesterday around 4 pm CST….

…Genocide Joe’s No-So Red Lines

Imagine Joe Biden After Being Visited by the Ghosts of Wars and Genocides Past and Present

Take a trip down Dickensian fantasy lane and imagine what would happen if Lie’n Joe Biden were visited in his sleep by the Ghosts of Wars and Genocides Past and Present and suddenly became a man of peace and honor.

He would wake up the next day and go on national television to apologize to the American people and the world for backing Israel’s genocidal ethnic cleansing of Gaza and fueling mass slaughter in Ukraine.

It’s not for nothing that the International Criminal Court (ICC) has filed arrest warrants for Israel’s genocidal prime minister Bibi Netanyahu and Israeli War Cabinet member Yoav Gallant. These Judeo-fascist butchers in Tel Aviv have murdered 40,000 Palestinians over just eight months.  They have devastated Gaza, burying families and hospital patients in rubble, and placed more than a million people at the risk of famine. They are epic war criminals and good candidates for hanging if Nuremburg principles held.

And they’ve done it largely with US-made weapons and under the military, political, and diplomatic protection of the American Empire.

How should we evaluate the culpability of “Genocide Joe” and the rest of the US imperialist ruling class in the infliction these horrific wrongs? Would the ICC like to investigate their central role in Israel’s crimes?

Despite his early friendly warnings to Israel about going overboard far after October 7 and regardless of his recent politically calculated grumblings over Israel’s “excessive”[ly] genocidal conduct, Biden has consistently approved US funding, equipping and military, political, and diplomatic protecting of Israel’s Holocaust against the people of Gaza.

Listening to His Own Imperialist Self

I spoke at an antiwar/anti-genocide rally recently where a local longtime activist said that this is because “Biden is listening to the wrong people.” What nonsense. Biden has been listening to himself. Since the latest and most gruesome Israeli assault ever on Gaza began last October, he has more than once repeated something he tellingly said as a US Senator in 1986: “the US would have to invent the [occupation and apartheid] state of Israel if didn't already exist.”

Translation: Israel is an indispensable US strategic imperial asset in the Middle East and around the world.

Killing Kids With Smaller Bombs

Biden recently said he was suspending the export of US-made 2000-pound bombs to Israel.  Great. So what? The New York Times reports that:

“The bombs used in the Israeli strike that killed dozens of Palestinians in a camp for displaced people in Rafah [last] Sunday were made in the United States, according to weapons experts and visual evidence reviewed by The New York Times. Munition debris filmed at the strike location the next day was remnants from a GBU-39, a bomb designed and manufactured in the United States…U.S. officials have been pushing Israel to use more of this type of bomb, which they say can reduce civilian casualties… At least 45 people in Kuwaiti Al-Salam Camp 1, which was built in early January, were killed by the blast and subsequent fires, according to the Gazan Health Ministry. More than 240 were wounded…U.S. officials have been encouraging the Israeli military for months to increase the use of GBU-39 bombs in Gaza because they are generally more precise and better suited to urban environments than larger bombs, including U.S.-made 2,000-pound bombs that Israel routinely uses. President Biden said earlier this month that the United States was pausing a delivery of the larger bombs. Wes J. Bryant, a retired American Air Force master sergeant who served on a task force critical of Israel’s use of weapons in Gaza, told The Times that he had dropped many GBU-39 bombs during his military service and that this strike was problematic.’ It indicates continued targeting negligence — either an unwillingness or inability to effectively safeguard civilians,’ Mr. Bryant said. ‘When you use a weapon that’s intended as precision and low collateral damage in an area where civilians are saturated, it really negates that intended use’” (boldface emphasis added).

Two thousand bombs or GBU-39 bombs: either way the mad dog killers atop the Israeli Defense Forces use the weapons of mass destruction supplied to them by Uncle Sam’s current commander-in-chief to slaughter Palestinians en masse.

Hey Joe, How Many “Charred Corpses”?

Now we have the abject absurdity of the Biden administration claiming that Israel is not really crossing Joe’s supposed “red line” by undertaking a ground invasion of Rafah, the southern Gaza city to which the US-Israel assault has sent hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees.  Look at this from NBC News:

“As Israeli forces pushed deeper into Rafah just days after an airstrike sparked a major fire that killed dozens of Palestinians, the White House said that its ally had not crossed the Biden administration’s ‘red line.’…Israeli tanks were seen entering central Rafah for the first time Tuesday, as global condemnation mounted over the deaths in a crowded tent camp for displaced civilians and as U.S. aid deliveries to Gaza by sea were suspended …But U.S. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters at a briefing that the U.S. was not turning a ‘blind eye’ to Israel’s operations in the southern Gaza city, from which around 1 million Palestinians have fled in recent weeks…He said the Biden administration did not believe Israel’s actions in Rafah so far represented a ‘major ground operation’ that would violate President Joe Biden’s warnings and trigger a change in U.S. policy, including a threatened halt to weapons shipments. ‘A major ground operation is, you know, thousands and thousands of troops moving in a maneuvered, concentrated, coordinated way against a variety of targets on the ground,’ he said…A U.S. official similarly told NBC News that while America believed the deadly strike was a ‘horrific incident,’ it appeared to be the result of an airstrike gone ‘horribly wrong’ and didn’t represent Israel ‘smashing into Rafah.’…Hala Rharrit, a U.S. diplomat and veteran foreign service officer who resigned from the State Department last month in protest over Washington’s policy on Israel’s war in Gaza, said she felt the Biden administration was now trying to ‘wiggle their way out of this latest shift’ on what constitutes a red line. ‘The point of the president saying population centers were a *red line* is to avoid mass civilian casualties,’ she said in a phone interview with NBC News on Wednesday. ‘Whether they’re going in by tanks or it’s happening via bombs coming from the air, are we really trying to mince words?’ …The images from the strike have piled pressure on the U.S. to act. Asked during Tuesday’s White House briefing how many ‘charred corpses’ Biden needed to see before changing policy, Kirby said he took ‘offense’ to the question, saying: ‘We don’t want to see a single more innocent life taken’” (boldface emphasis added).

Kirby “took offense” to being asked about “how many charred corpses” the US wants to create in Gaza before changing course.  Is that so? Really? Ain’t that some shit!

Biden’s “red line” looks pink to non-existent!

That Other US-Fueled Slaughter

While apologizing to the world for backing genocide in Gaza, Biden might ask forgiveness for his role in leading support from the Democratic side of the US Senate for George W. Bush’s arch-criminal and mass murderous invasion of Iraq in 2002 and 2003.

Moving back to current events, Biden should apologize to humanity for his failure to save untold hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian lives by picking up a telephone and telling Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky to publicly promise that Ukraine would never become a US/NATO military outpost on a giant and repeatedly invaded stretch of Russia’s western border.

Do the venerable Chomsky exercise and invert the situation: how long would it take for the United States to militarily decimate a section/state/province of Mexico or Canada that was preparing to join an anti-US military alliance under the direction of and with weapons from China and/or Russia?! Let’s get real here.

Rather than preserve and protect lives in Eastern Europe, Joe “Every Last Ukrainian” Biden has instead fanned the flames of a miserable, prolonged, and dug-in war that has helped raised the threat of nuclear war to its highest level in decades. He refuses to meaningfully negotiate for peace as the bodies pile higher and higher in a war many top US military insiders know “the West” can’t win.   

Good grief, think of all the lives and limbs that could have been preserved with five simple words: “Ukraine Will Never Join NATO.”

This critique doesn’t just come from Chomsky and others on the “radical left” like me. Longtime “US foreign policy” (he official term for US imperialism) elites and experts like George Kennan, Henry Kissinger, and (current CIA director) William Burns have long warned that Ukraine is a “red line” the US should not cross if it doesn’t wish to spark a potentially nuclear war.  

[And yes, speaking of crossing “red lines,” Biden okaying the attack of Russia with US weapons would seem to be a glaring example!]  

My imagined Dickensian charavter Ebeneezer Joe would also apologize (i) to righteous campus protesters for (like a true imeprialist bastard) calling their anti-genocide movement “antisemitic” and (ii) to the world for the transparent imperialist and racist hypocrisy inherent in the openly absurd moral contradiction between (a) his outrage over Russia’s war on Ukraine and (b) his embrace of Israel’s war on Gaza.  As Chomsky has long said, it’s not about a “double standard”: it’s about the “single standard” of US imperialism. Behind the two faces — offically “worthy victims” in Ukraine and officially “unworthy victims” in Gaza — is a single imperialist mindset and policy. In the case of Ukraine, the victims are white Europeans and the invading power (Russia) is on the American Empire’s strategic enemy list.  In the case of Gaza, the victims are brown-skinned Arabs and Muslims and the genocidal invader (Israel) is on the American Empire’s strategic ally and asset list.  

Most of politically attentive and knowledgeable humanity sees though the US-led West’s putrid two-facedness.  Good. It’s for some very good reasons that, as I wrote a few years back, “The World Will Not Mourn the Decline of US Hegemony.”