■ It is prima facie impossible, as all sensible people will know, to enable, support, and altogether approve of a lawless nation’s genocide of another population and then defend one’s enabling, supporting, and approving in the court of public opinion, in a court of international law, or in international fora such as the United Nations. There is no chance whatsoever of winning broad acceptance for such conduct. It simply cannot be done. Only foolish people would even attempt to seek the approval of others. Opprobrium is the only possible outcome. But the Biden regime, if this is not already obvious, is comprised of foolish people. It would be best if the rest of the world accepts this as an American reality. And foolishness in combination with power—another American reality—is bound to produce disastrous results. The Biden White House, its supporters on Capitol Hill, and its clerks in corporate media have tried since the events of 7 October to justify not only apartheid Israel’s murder spree against the Palestinians of Gaza but also U.S support of the Israelis’ daily barbarities. They succeeded only briefly, when, during the early days of Israel’s invasion, reflexive sympathy was evident and the extent of Israel’s savagery not yet clear. Of late Washington’s failure to justify these atrocities has grown too evident either to deny or obscure. Over the past several weeks, I would say, this has produced yet another American reality. The foolish but powerful in America, as just described, have never hesitated to misrepresent the freakish inhumanity of Israel’s extreme-right regime, of late the grotesque events in Gaza, or, it may as well be noted, the imperium’s record altogether. But as opposition to Israel and Washington’s support of it now threatens to expand exponentially, to the point it resembles the antiwar movement of the 1960s, we witness—one more new reality—a full-dress attack on the truth. Video footage of police attacks on peaceful demonstrators is by now available in plenty. Over the weekend police in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn attacked—viciously, primitively, looking like the Birmingham police in the mid–1960s—a large street protest in support of the Palestinian cause. There is a considerable population of Arabs in Bay Ridge. A group called In Our Lifetime, founded by Nerdeen Kiswani, has organized this event for some years to mark al–Nakba, the “catastrophe” of the violent removal from their land of Palestinians in 1948. The New York Times published a sound report on this honorable event-turned-ugly in its Sunday editions. I do not like The Times’s headline—the protest was not “chaotic” until the N.Y.P.D arrived— but the paper did include numerous videos recorded by participants and bystanders. Look at any selection drawn from what is by now a large inventory of videos showing confrontations between demonstrators and police, and then consider what you see. Who are the people being attacked? Students, Arab immigrants, Arab–Americans, engaged people of all kinds standing against the Israeli–U.S. genocide in Gaza, yes. But we need to understand them now as something more: as representatives of simple humanity, simple morality, clear language—altogether the human cause and the truth of our time. And it is for this, at bottom, they are beaten and arrested. Viewed in this way, in the videos we see what the Israeli–American genocide is doing beyond all the unconscionable suffering in Gaza. It would be easy to miss this turn for those reliant on mainstream media, but it is otherwise difficult to overstate the significance of our moment. Those exercising power have opened the door to a dangerous new level of repression—suppression of free speech, free association, and open dissent, and a grotesque perversion of public discourse its most malign features. How dangerous is “dangerous?” I refer readers to all the pleasantries we assign today to the McCarthy era of the 1950s, when America surrendered democracy to a paranoiac pursuit of totalized power—and when prison terms, exile, or silence were the only alternatives for very many principled people. ■ Can we date this escalating anti-democratic campaign? I think so. As I read recent events it began in mid–April, when students at Columbia University in New York pitched tents and protested in support of the Palestinians of Gaza. Demonstrations quickly spread to scores of universities across the country, confronting otherwise disengaged Americans—a majority, or nearly one—with the obscenity of the Israel–U.S. genocide. The Biden administration at first ignored the protest movement, but when it grew into the elephant in America’s living room the president found himself caught in a trap of his own making. In his first remarks on the movement, delivered 2 May at the White House, Biden pretended to approve of it. “Peaceful protest is in the best tradition of how Americans respond to consequential issues,” he grandly declared. “Dissent is essential for democracy.” I locate the precise start of this regime’s new determination to suppress truthful renderings of events to his next sentence. “But dissent must never lead to disorder,” Biden said. A few minutes later a reporter asked, “Mr. President, have the protests forced you to reconsider any of the policies with regard to the region?” Biden’s replied in one word. “No,” he said firmly. We should read these statements carefully. What do they say, side by side? Two important things, as I read the transcript of Bidens remarks. One, Biden professed support for the democratic right to dissent while in essence dismissing it. All dissent is by definition intended to “lead to disorder” in one or another way. By delimiting dissent as Biden did, he deprived demonstrators of a constitutional right and effectively told them, “I permit you nothing beyond ritual. Dissent cannot be more than performative.” This is the very essence of what I call “apple-pie authoritarianism.” Two, and related to my first point, to state that he, Biden, had no intention of altering course despite the nationwide spread of demonstrations against the Israeli–U.S. genocide is directly to discredit the exercise of dissent as in any way “essential to democracy.” The subtext here is easily read: Dissent if you wish, but we will pay no attention. There is only one version of the truth, in this case our version of events in Gaza, and there is no place for any other. This is American authoritarianism made flesh, if you ask me. Five days after his remarks at the White House, Biden marked the Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Annual Days of Remembrance in a speech at the Capitol. Much had occurred in those intervening days. The protests on university campuses had spread, and so had their message: The demonstrations were getting a great deal of media coverage. Related to this, public officials, elected legislators, and the media had begun vigorously to cast those pitching tents, occupying buildings, and speaking out as “anti–Semitic.” Here is a portion of Biden’s 7 May speech, much noted since for its “ferocious surge” passage. I draw from the White House transcript:
There is but one way to describe this speech. It is a ferocious attack on the truth and the Biden regime’s announcement that it intends to coerce Americans into acceptance of a rendering of the critical events they daily witness that is absolutely Orwellian in its distance from reality. Let us call this spade a spade. It is important to do so at this moment. There is no ferocious surge of anti–Semitism in the U.S. If there is anti–Semitic propaganda on social media, it is difficult to find and no more prominent in public discourse than it has been for decades. Posters, slogans, cowering Jewish students hiding their identities: There is no evidence of any of this—and no evidence there is any evidence. Nobody is ignoring the Holocaust—although many people, many Jews among them, find it a cynically overplayed card at this point. Stories of Hamas’s sexual violence during the events of 7 October—notably but not only The New York Times’s infamously fabricated accounts last December—are by now thoroughly discredited. The suggestion that the campus demonstrations are inherently anti–Semitic is concocted of whole cloth, as contemporaneous scholarly studies of them—there are a few already—clearly indicate. In this last matter, it is worth noting, a group of 750 Jewish university students, proportionately representative of campuses across the U.S., recently made public a letter protesting in properly vigorous language what has now emerged as the orthodoxy on these questions. The Guardian noted this document in a piece dated 7 May, but it has gone unreported in the American press. The letter reads in part:
Charges of anti–Semitism are now ubiquitous in America in part because they are useful to those who would discredit the truths for which demonstrators and others stand, as the signatories of the above-quoted letter astutely note, and in part because the House of Representatives recently passed legislation defining anti–Semitism in terms so ridiculously broad that criticism of Israel will, if the Senate passes this bill, be officially considered anti–Semitic. In this connection, the truth that no one in power will utter makes all other elephants in the room look like toy miniatures. It is the more or less complete control Zionist Israel has, by means of the bribes it distributes or the coercion it threatens, over the Biden regime, all but a few holdouts in Congress, and the media. To obscure or neglect this, as all concerned do, amounts to a monstrous lie. This lie of omission is not new. It has been told many times over many years. But it is apartheid Israel’s effective ownership of Washington—I choose the phrase deliberately—that now leads the Biden regime to its current folly. Israel has made itself a pariah state, and there seems little chance of retrieving it from this fate. It is a fool’s errand to try. The only resort left for the foolish people running the White House is to mount a forlorn attack on the truth itself. It is destroying America, or what is left of it, piece by piece. We will have to see the extent to which this means the Israelis will take America down with them. This is an edited and updated version of an essay that appeared, in German and English, in Global Bridge. |