Hubert Humphrey Redux? Biden is Risking Election and Country with his Embrace of Netanyahu’s War
Juan Cole 04/30/2024
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – CNN reports ominously this week that “Biden is actually 11 percentage points behind Trump among young voters 18-34 in a head-to-head match in a CNN poll conducted by SSRS and released over the weekend.”
CNN continues that 71% of Americans disapprove of his handling of the Gaza campaign! That rises to 81% disapproval among those under 35.
Biden could lose this thing.
The turmoil on American campuses over the Gaza War is Joe Biden’s fault. Biden could have shut down this nearly seven-month-long atrocity at any time this year. The current extremist government of Israel ran out of ammunition and key arms long ago, and Biden could have denied them to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far right cronies on the cabinet, the Israeli equivalents of Neo-Nazis.
Defenders of this indefensible total war on Gaza’s civilians blame the death toll on Hamas instead of the Israeli government and military. Certainly, Hamas bears some responsibility for these sanguinary events. In its bloodthirsty attack on October 7, its cadres used machine guns to mow down attendees of a peace-oriented rave, killing hundreds of innocent civilians. These were acts of cowardice and stupidity, likely influenced by the nihilistic ISIL movement’s fascination with spectacular terrorist acts as ways to reshuffle geopolitical reality. That Hegelian apocalypticism did not serve ISIL well. It did not serve the people of Gaza.
An Israeli campaign to detain or kill the perpetrators would of course have been justified. Israeli intelligence had mapped Gaza intensively and knew the cell phone GPS of all members of the Hamas paramilitary, the Qassam Brigades. Intelligence had more than that. They had facial recognition information and home addresses. They routinely fly drones over the Gaza Strip. When the Israeli military wants to kill an individual, they can. Last January, the Israelis assassinated a Hezbollah commander in Lebanon with a strike on his SUV. Nobody else was killed. No buildings were destroyed– not apartment buildings with civilian families in them, not schools, not hospitals. The extremist Israeli government could have done the same thing to the paramilitary cadres behind October 7. The extremist cabine had other plans. They wanted ethnic cleansing.
In short, the allegation that Hamas fighters can’t be killed cleanly because they hide among the population is a bald-faced lie. The Israeli investigative reporters at +972 Mag have revealed that the Israeli military tracks suspected Qassam Brigades cadres through the day, presumably through drone facial recognition since they surely can’t be dense enough to still be carrying around smart phones. The Israelis wait until the individual has gone home to his family at night and strike him in his own home, killing his wife, children, relatives, friends and neighbors as well. Their shockingly inhumane rules of engagement allow for 15-20 civilian deaths per killed operative. Apparently this technique helps account for the wholesale destruction of apartment blocks, some of which have been targeted with 5,000-pound bombs. The US did not use 5,000-pound bombs against ISIL, the most virulent terrorism threat of the past decade.
The Israeli military has displaced some 1.8 million people, many into makeshift tents, and destroyed hundreds of schools, dozens of hospitals, even mosques and churches. There were no Hamas fighters in the churches. The goal of this wholesale destruction is the permanent displacement of the Palestinians of Gaza, which the Israeli cabinet discussions have frankly admitted. The Israeli government has deployed starvation as a tool of war, so that some Palestinians are already dying of hunger, including babies and children. The USAID assesses that a famine is now inevitable. The destruction of sewage systems also ensures cholera and other disease outbreaks, which could account for one in seven deaths in the strip this summer.
Biden aides have leaked to the press that he sees these death statistics in his briefings every morning, but is all right with them. He has drunk the Kahanist Kool Aid that requires mass death in order to root out Hamas “so this [Oct. 7] will never happen again.” It is such a brain-dead talking point. As if mass atrocities have ever made a country safe. Ariel Sharon aggressively invaded Lebanon in 1982 for the same purpose, killing thousands and subjecting Beirut to the sort of indiscriminate destruction more recently visited on Gaza City. Osama Bin Laden said that his 9/11 attack on New York and Washington, D.C., was in part inspired by his horror on witnessing the fall of the towers of Beirut. There are certainly young Bin Ladens watching what the Israelis (and Biden) are doing to Gaza, who will eventually strike back.
Middle aged and older Americans haven’t seen much of the Israeli war on Gaza. The major corporate news networks have largely kept it off the air, in my view quite deliberately. But America’s youths have seen the war daily on their smartphones, via TikTok and other social media networks. They have seen the bloodied infants and starved babies. They have heard from the real-life tortured (and murdered) poets’ department. Hence there is a big generational divide on the campaign. The youths feel the targeting of civilian families and the starvation of children in their guts. For the elders it is distant and abstract.
Many college-age youths know that the US is complicit in this vicious campaign against a whole civilian population. President Biden has made over 100 arms deals with Netanyahu while the war has been going on. He sidestepped Congress to give Israel’s army access to the prepositioned American arsenal stored in that country. He vetoed 3 cease-fire resolutions at the UN Security Council and gutted the fourth, on which he abstained, by calling it “non-binding.” He is absolutely determined to bestow impunity on Netanyahu and his rogues’ gallery of genocidaires. And thus the butchery continues. It is Biden’s war as much as it is Netanyahu’s, Itamar Ben-Gvir’s or Bezalel Smotrich’s.
Fareed Zakaria, who is smarter than that, went on for ten minutes on Sunday with a disquisition on why America’s youths were revolting on campus, concluding that it was owing to a decline in community. It was a Talcott Parsons sort of explanation that managed to dance around the videos of Palestinian mothers grieving for the bits and pieces of their children or the astounding number of dead, probably well over the announced 34,000. Zakaria then brought on big Establishment right wing Zionists to defend what Tel Aviv is doing. His GPS 360 on CNN, which once had me on as a guest, is usually thoughtful and informative, though of course it skews toward neoliberalism. The April 28 edition, however, might as well have been a Fox News propaganda segment. He should please consult the CNN opinion poll with which I began this column.
I remember 1968, and the intense demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. I was only 15, but I was maybe precociously interested in politics. It seemed clear that Nixon won against Hubert Humphrey in part because he said he had a secret plan to end the Vietnam War, while Humphrey had the war as an albatross around his neck since he had been Johnson’s vice president. But Nixon also won because the suburbanites saw the disturbances at the DNC and and concluded that the Democrats were polarizing the country and allowing it to spin out of control.
The turmoil on college campuses has similar potential to dismay the conventional burgers. Texas Governor Greg Abbott, by calling in the militarized police on UT Austin students and breaking heads, knows he is creating a bad image for Biden and the Democrats. Moreover, it may not stay on campus. There is already an encampment at Jackson Park in New Orleans, unconnected to any university. What will this year’s Democratic National Convention — again in Chicago! — look like? Will there be heavily armed police breaking the heads of protesters in the streets as Biden tries to take credit for job creation and economic growth and diminished inflation and green energy? He has had a remarkable string of domestic successes, but they are being thrown into the shade by his infuriating foreign policy.
CBS Texas Video: “Protest encampment forcibly dismantled, arrests made at UT-Austin”
Joe Biden, by his bear hug of Netanyahu and his implication of himself in the latter’s genocidal project, is turning himself into Hubert Humphrey.
Nothing could be more dangerous. Nixon was, like Donald Trump, a dangerous psychopath. As a man of the right and a friend of the rich, he was determined to dismantle Johnson’s Great Society social programs. He was willing to burglarize the Democratic Party headquarters in search of dirt he could use to ensure his reelection, and so was craftily lawless. He was not, however, a Napoleon Bonaparte in the making, determined to chase the legislators out the windows of the Capitol and crown himself emperor, gutting the constitution forever.
I do not forgive Biden for putting the country in this bind. He just had to do the decent thing, which was to rein in the Revisionist Zionists and Kahanists when it became clear that the were waging a total war on the civilian population. He could at least have done the expedient thing for his party and for the country. He had done it before. I frankly cannot understand what drives the man to destroy himself and the USA in this way. He is swatting down the clear conclusions of his own appointees at US AID and the State Department that the Israelis are committing serious war crimes and setting up a man-made famine of ugly proportions. You never want, as a politician, to be associated with AP photos of emaciated toddlers, even if you have no internal conscience about it. It turns out that the man famed for empathy has a fatal blind spot when it comes to brown people. And don’t think the black and brown people don’t notice.
Moreover, the youth vote matters to Democratic presidents.
I wrote earlier this year, “According to the Pew Research Center, Barack Obama got 66% of the youth vote in 2008, and 60% of it in 2012. He outperformed Mitt Romney by 24% among those under 30.
“The Center writes, ‘In Florida, Ohio, Virginia and Pennsylvania, Obama also failed to win a majority of voters 30 and older. Yet he swept all four battleground states, in part because he won majorities of 60% or more among young voters. Just as critically, young people made up as large a share of the overall electorate as they did in 2008, according to the national exit poll (19% in 2012, 18% in 2008).’
“So Obama benefited from the under-30 vote in two absolutely essential ways. First, they came out to vote in large numbers, and mostly voted for him. Second, they provided the margin of victory in four swing states where Obama did not win 51% of the over-30 vote.
“Candidates should not underestimate the possibility of youth apathy. Famously, the under-30 set declined to go to the polls in big numbers in 2004. They had largely turned on Bush because of the Iraq War, but they weren’t brought out to vote by enthusiasm for John Kerry. Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, a Democrat, lamented, ‘The little bastards screwed us again.’”
I have a sinking feeling about this loss of the youth vote. A wise cabinet would invoke the 25th amendment, declare Biden non compos mentis, cut Netanyahu off at the knees, and save the country from the looming catastrophe.