By Ralph Nader
October 18, 2024
Biden’s
bombs and missiles, dropped daily on Lebanon, a U.S. ally, by his
puppet master Netanyahu, is wreaking havoc in this small defenseless
country. The Israeli genocidal machine is waging an incinerating assault
on fleeing civilians and critical facilities. The scorched-earth
Israeli strategy is the same as what we have seen in Gaza. Attack in
Lebanon anyone who moves or anything that stands – whether a hospital, a
dense residential area, a café, a municipal building, a market, a
school, or a Mosque – and allege there was a Hezbollah commander or a
Hezbollah site here or there. Two recent New York Times headlines
express some of the impact of this latest Israeli war: “In Just a Week, a
Million People in Lebanon Have Been Displaced” and “Lebanon’s Hospitals
Buckle Amid an Onslaught: ‘Indiscriminate’ Strikes Overwhelm Health
System, U.N. Says.”
Historical
note: Hezbollah, also a political Party and social service
organization, was created to defend impoverished Shiite Muslims in
southern Lebanon in 1982 right after the Israeli army once again invaded
Lebanon and badly mistreated the residents during an 18-year-long
military occupation.
No
matter what or who the Israeli Air Force’s American F-16 fighter
aircraft bomb, no matter the deaths and injuries to thousands of
Lebanese families, many of them children and women, Biden keeps
unconditionally and savagely shipping weapons of mass destruction. He is
violating six federal laws requiring conditions be met – such as not
violating human rights or not obstructing U.S. humanitarian aid.
Netanyahu is violating these and other conditions and mocking his major
benefactor, the United States government.
Israel
has long had designs on a slice of Lebanon going up to and including
the Litani River area. Water is valuable. Over the years, Israel has
routinely violated Lebanese air space, executed incursions into Lebanon
and has used forbidden cluster bombs and white phosphorous. According to
Aya Majzoub, Deputy Regional Director for the Middle East and North
Africa at Amnesty International, “It is beyond horrific that the Israeli
army has indiscriminately used white phosphorous in violation of
international humanitarian law.”
The
White House knows all this. It doesn’t care. Wherever Israel invades,
bombs, assassinates, or boobytraps pagers and walkie-talkies, Bibi-Biden
continues his servility to the Israeli terror regime and its genocidal
leader Netanyahu, who is despised by three out of four Israelis for his
domestic policies and is under indictment by Israeli prosecutors for
corruption.
Despite reports that Biden steams in private against Netanyahu, and
considers him a liar and a supporter of Trump’s re-election, Biden knows
that that this foreign authoritarian has the big card: CONGRESS. Most
of the legislators who attended his noxious address to a joint
congressional session last June gave him a record-breaking 52 standing
ovations. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, “Benjamin Netanyahu’s
presentation in the House Chamber today was by far the worst
presentation of any foreign dignitary invited and honored with the
privilege of addressing the Congress of the United States.”
Biden,
who is known to conduct foreign and military policy without any
authorization by Congress, doesn’t want to offend the powerful “Israel
government can do no wrong” Lobby in the U.S. – to which he has been
indentured for his entire fifty-year political career. This includes
Israel’s current destruction of Lebanon, where tens of thousands of
Americans are residing. The Washington Post reports that the Biden White
House “has so far given full backing to Israel’s ground operations in
Lebanon, even amid a growing international outcry over the civilian toll
… and Israeli clashes with United Nations peacekeepers,” who have been
assigned there for decades.
Having
full U.S. government backing, and now backed by U.S. warships, Marines
and logistics, plus 100 U.S. soldiers arriving this week in Israel,
Netanyahu knows he has a free hand to attack Iran and drag the U.S. into
a regional war.
Both Netanyahu and Bibi-Biden have been briefed about the possibilities
of “blowback” (the CIA’s term) against the U.S. These concerns come from
U.S. intelligence agencies who study scenarios like future 9/11s or the
recent inexpensive armed drones that can be constructed and deployed
anywhere. Militarists and corporatists in the U.S. aren’t that concerned
because whenever “blowback” occurs they can concentrate more power,
with bigger military budgets and profits, in another “war on terror,”
silencing dissent and subordinating or sidelining critical domestic
priorities.
That
is the lethal fix and fate that America has been subjected to by its
cowardly, Constitution-violating politicians from both Parties. The
power structure – the corporate state – or what Franklin Delano
Roosevelt once called in a 1938 message to Congress “fascism,” is
telling the American people: “Heads we win, Tails you lose.”
Here
is how bad Biden has gotten. Recently, two letters signed by 65
American doctors and health workers back from the horrors, the killing
fields of Gaza, to President Joe Biden, have gone unanswered. (See, “65 Doctors, Nurses and Paramedics: What We Saw in Gaza”
by Feroze Sidhwa, New York Times Sunday, October 13, 2024). Their
letters plead for a ceasefire and immediate humanitarian aid for the
starving, dying people of Gaza. They request a meeting with President
Biden, who has often met with the pro-Israeli lobby. Scranton Joe says
no way.
These
brave physicians and nurses also are requesting that Joe Biden demand
that Netanyahu allow children in Gaza who are seriously burned or are
amputees be air-lifted to America to be treated by compassionate
specialists in ready American hospitals. Biden, a practicing Catholic,
has no interest.
President
George Washington warned his country about avoiding foreign
entanglements in his farewell address. Were he possessed of more
prescience; he would have added the word “surrenders.”