Andrew Mitrovica
It is over. I wrote a column a few months ago expressing the sincere hope that Joe Biden would lose the upcoming presidential election. Now, I can confidently predict that this craven, self-anointed “Zionist” will join the roster of presidential has-beens; an unremarkable one-term commander-in-chief who will be remembered chiefly for abetting a genocide instead of stopping it.
That will be Biden’s permanent and disgraceful epitaph. Biden’s sorry fate was confirmed earlier this week after more than 100,000 enlightened Americans voted “uncommitted” in Michigan’s Democratic presidential primary. Their act of tangible resistance delivered a blunt rebuke not only of Biden but the whole, decrepit Democratic Party establishment that has enabled, supported, and encouraged a diseased apartheid regime to commit genocide against imprisoned Palestinians in Gaza and beyond. Biden and company will be unable to resuscitate his fast-eroding prospects among enlightened Americans who are motivated by one, defining moral imperative: to repudiate through their suffrage the complicit perpetrators of the deliberate, wholesale destruction of Palestine and its desperate people.
It is too late. The deep damage cannot be undone. Gaza is gone. Reduced by methodical and cruel design to a wasteland at the foul hands of a ruthless, occupying army. More than 30,000 innocents, mostly infants and children, have been killed. Blown to scattered bits. Their small, dismembered bodies left hanging like grotesque ornaments on a bloodied wall in Rafah. Families erased. Children orphaned. Parents grieving over the remains of their beloved dead wrapped tight in white shrouds and buried by hand in shallow pits. Thousands more have been maimed or injured – in mind, body, and spirit. Starvation, thirst, and disease run rampant in the makeshift camps where millions of homeless Palestinians have sought – in vain – refuge from Israel’s “killing rage”. All of it, every inhumane measure of it, is a man-made catastrophe engineered by irredeemable sociopaths in tailored suits, like President Biden. So, enlightened Americans in Michigan – many of them Arab and Muslim Americans – did what I knew they would do. No longer content to be ghosted by an administration addicted to empty, performative acts of “solidarity”, they organised. They mobilised. They staffed phone banks. They went door to door. They persuaded other enlightened Americans to join them in their resolve to be heard and counted. Together, they told Biden that his complicity and cowardice will not stand. They translated their anger and disgust into a potent political force while an old, dithering president licked an ice cream cone and donned his aviator sunglasses for an agreeable late-night talk show comic.
This was not a “warning” or a “protest”. It was a statement. A verdict. A judgement. Worse, for Biden, it was a commitment. The “uncommitted” are committed to defeating Biden and depriving him of what he values most: power, position, and prestige. Michigan’s “uncommitted” voters will exercise their franchise in November. Biden will have his comeuppance because, without Michigan’s crucial 16 electoral votes, his already precarious bid for re-election will be doomed. In 2020, Biden prevailed in Michigan by a little more than 100,000 votes. Recent polls show the state tipping into Trump’s favour. The math is simple. Subtract the 100,000 “uncommitted” voters and Michigan is lost and likely with it, the presidency.
The calculated leaks and rhetorical chicanery aimed at convincing enlightened Americans of Biden’s “frustration” with a recalcitrant Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the president’s “determined efforts” at arranging a ceasefire are a choreographed pantomime. Biden is no more interested in a ceasefire than Netanyahu and his rabid, evangelical cabinet which has made it plain that their goal is to obliterate Palestine and plot a second, decisive Nakba. Just as lunatic is the suggestion that a “miffed” Biden is poised to withhold America’s purse and lethal munitions to “pressure” Israel into bending to its phantom will to “protect” Palestinian civilians and enact his “grand” geostrategic plans to establish a “two-state solution”. All of it, every disingenuous ounce of it, is a familiar lie. Biden has not been and never will be a “peacemaker”.
He is a 100 percent-proof warmonger practised at backing US invasions of sovereign country after sovereign country and damn the disastrous human consequences. Enlightened Americans won’t be fooled again. Still, Biden and his surrogates believe that money will be their salvation from the genocidal quagmire of their making. After ordering his quislings – my apologies, diplomats – at the United Nations to veto another ceasefire resolution, Biden attended a lucrative fundraiser in Los Angeles co-hosted by the billionaire honorary vice chairman of the Anti-Defamation League, Haim Saban.
Prior to the up to $250,000-a-plate fete-a-tete, Biden’s gushing super fan described the president’s steadfast support of Israel as “pristine”. “There’s never been a president as supportive in facts, not only in words, of Israel,” Saban said. “And most specifically, in these dire times for Israel, he’s been pristine.” Saban is right. Biden has long been a “pristine” backer of an apartheid state that the International Court of Justice at the Hague accepted the “plausibility” of having committed genocide as defined by the Genocide Convention. In instructive contrast to Biden’s rich benefactors, the organisers of Michigan’s “uncommitted” campaign reportedly earned their astonishing success on a paltry budget of $200,000. Their principled, people-driven initiative will, no doubt, be a template for enlightened Americans in other toss-up states to follow honourable and necessary suit. The disgust and anger that fuelled Michigan’s “uncommitted” voters to turn out in such extraordinary numbers may soon be replicated throughout the daunting electoral college map that Biden confronts. That is the fatal reality. It’s the genocide, stupid. When he is obliged, by tradition, to leave behind a congratulatory note on the Oval Office desk wishing President Donald Trump every success, one person will be to blame: Joe Biden. The faux “progressive” and “liberal” cognoscenti will wail at the impending demise of America’s sham “democracy”. In their quest for an easy scapegoat, they are bound, of course, to point an accusatory finger at the “short-sighted protest vote” that “condemned” America to the horror of a second Trump presidency. As always, they will be wrong. Enlightened Americans are no longer willing to tolerate the egregious status quo by opting, as expected, for the “lesser of two evils”. The only evil is genocide. Period.
Aljazeera
