Acclimatizing the U.S. to the Gaza genocide was most crucially abetted by Biden and his loyalists, who pretended he wasn’t doing what he was really doing, says Norman Solomon.
Free Gaza demonstration at The White House, Nov. 4, 2023. (Diane Krauthamer, Flickr, CC BY-NC)
When news broke last week that President Joe Biden just approved another $8 billion for shipping weapons to Israel, a nameless official vowed that “we will continue to provide the capabilities necessary for Israel’s defense.”
Following reports last month from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch concluding that Israeli actions in Gaza are genocide, Biden’s decision was a new low for his presidency.
It’s logical to focus on Biden as an individual. His choices to keep sending huge quantities of weaponry to Israel have been pivotal and calamitous. But the presidential genocide and the active acquiescence of the vast majority of Congress are matched by the dominant media and overall politics of the United States.
Forty days after the Gaza war began, Anne Boyer announced her resignation as poetry editor of The New York Times Magazine. More than a year later, her statement illuminates why the moral credibility of so many liberal institutions has collapsed in the wake of Gaza’s destruction.
While Boyer denounced “the Israeli state’s U.S.-backed war against the people of Gaza,” she emphatically chose to disassociate herself from the nation’s leading liberal news organization:
“I can’t write about poetry amidst the ‘reasonable’ tones of those who aim to acclimatize us to this unreasonable suffering. No more ghoulish euphemisms. No more verbally sanitized hellscapes. No more warmongering lies.”
Anne Boyer at a poetry festival in Buenos Aires in February 2023. (Ministerio de Cultura de la Nación, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0)
The acclimatizing process soon became routine. It was most crucially abetted by President Biden and his loyalists, who were especially motivated to pretend that he wasn’t really doing what he was really doing.
For mainline journalists, the process required the willing suspension of belief in a consistent standard of language and humanity. When Boyer acutely grasped the dire significance of its Gaza coverage, she withdrew from “the newspaper of record.”
Content analysis of the war’s first six weeks found that coverage by The New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times had a steeply dehumanizing slant toward Palestinians. The three papers “disproportionately emphasized Israeli deaths in the conflict” and “used emotive language to describe the killings of Israelis, but not Palestinians,” a study by The Intercept showed.
“The term ‘slaughter’ was used by editors and reporters to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 60 to 1, and ‘massacre’ was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 125 to 2. ‘Horrific’ was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 36 to 4.”
After a year of the Gaza war, Arab-American historian Rashid Khalidi said:
“My objection to organs of opinion like The New York Times is that they see absolutely everything from an Israeli perspective. ‘How does it affect Israel, how do the Israelis see it?’ Israel is at the center of their worldview, and that’s true of our elites generally, all over the West. The Israelis have very shrewdly, by preventing direct reportage from Gaza, further enabled that Israelocentric perspective.”
Khalidi summed up: “The mainstream media is as blind as it ever was, as willing to shill for any monstrous Israeli lie, to act as stenographers for power, repeating what is said in Washington.”
Khalidi in 2011. (IMF, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
The conformist media climate smoothed the way for Biden and his prominent rationalizers to slide off the hook and shape the narrative, disguising complicity as even-handed policy. Meanwhile, mighty boosts of Israel’s weapons and ammunition were coming from the United States. Nearly half of the Palestinians they killed were children.
For those children and their families, the road to hell was paved with good doublethink. So, for instance, while the Gaza horrors went on, no journalist would confront Biden with what he’d said at the time of the widely decried school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, when the president had quickly gone on live television.
“There are parents who will never see their child again,” he said, adding: “To lose a child is like having a piece of your soul ripped away. . . . It’s a feeling shared by the siblings, and the grandparents, and their family members, and the community that’s left behind.”
And he asked plaintively, “Why are we willing to live with this carnage? Why do we keep letting this happen?”
Biden meeting on May 24, 2022, with families of the victims of the mass shooting days before at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. (White House, Adam Schultz)
The massacre in Uvalde killed 19 children. The daily massacre in Gaza has taken the lives of that many Palestinian kids in a matter of hours.
While Biden refused to acknowledge the ethnic cleansing and mass murder that he kept making possible, Democrats in his orbit cooperated with silence or other types of evasion. A longstanding maneuver amounts to checking the box for a requisite platitude by affirming support for a “two-state solution.”
Dominating Capitol Hill, an unspoken precept has held that Palestinian people are expendable as a practical political matter.
Party leaders like Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries did virtually nothing to indicate otherwise. Nor did they exert themselves to defend incumbent House Democrats Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, defeated in summer primaries with an unprecedented deluge of multimillion-dollar ad campaigns funded by AIPAC and Republican donors.
Thank you Congress/Biden, your aid was received! March for a Free Palestine, Freedom Plaza, Washington, D.C., Nov. 4, 2023. (Diane Krauthamer, Flickr, CC BY-NC)
The overall media environment was a bit more varied but no less lethal for Palestinian civilians. During its first several months, the Gaza war received huge quantities of mainstream media coverage, which thinned over time; the effects were largely to normalize the continual slaughter.
Some exceptional reporting existed about the suffering, but the journalism gradually took on a media ambience akin to background noise, while credulously hyping Biden’s weak ceasefire efforts as determined quests.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came in for increasing amounts of criticism. But the prevalent U.S. media coverage and political rhetoric — unwilling to expose the Israeli mission to destroy Palestinians en masse — rarely went beyond portraying Israel’s leaders as insufficiently concerned with protecting Palestinian civilians.
Instead of candor about horrific truths, the usual tales of U.S. media and politics have offered euphemisms and evasions.
When she resigned as The New York Times Magazine poetry editor in mid-November 2023, Boyer condemned what she called “an ongoing war against the people of Palestine, people who have resisted through decades of occupation, forced dislocation, deprivation, surveillance, siege, imprisonment, and torture.”
Another poet, William Stafford, wrote decades ago:
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.
Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, was published in June 2023 by The New Press.
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“Nor did they exert themselves to defend incumbent House Democrats Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush”
Who in turn did nothing to file or rally others to file articles of impeachment on Biden for high crimes. Not even after losing those elections did/do they think Gaza’s ethnic cleansing is an impeachment-worthy offense. At least not with a [D] doing it.
Palestinians have no true allies in Washington. None, zip, zero.
Not “he”, but “they”
This piece begins by acknowledging the Democrat obfuscation around Joe Biden, and then proceeds to ignore it in the next sentence. The sub-title talks of “Biden and his loyalists” both acclimating people to and actually committing genocide. But, then the sub-title immediately switches to the singular, male pronoun as if every death is being done by a nearly 90 year old man who can’t decide which exit to use from an empty stage
Mr. Soloman got it right when he included the “loyalists”. Biden+Netanyahu can not have killed a hundred thousand or so human souls in Gaza on their own …. they needed accomplices.
The term “good German” was used in derision after the European genocide of the twentieth century. These were the people who claimed they had no idea of what was going on, and would never have supported it had they known …. after 13 years of living under that government. Yeah, right, you thought the camp down the road was a “fat farm” creating fit, skinny citizens.
Today, now we get to ‘move on’ to the term “Good Democrat”
Although the Israelis have, since October 2023, massively increased their genocidal policies, this has been ongoing in one form or another since 1948, 77 years. And, for most of that time the USA, amongst others, has supported the killings and forceful relocations.
Where were all these people, who are now complaining, over the last few decades ?
Although it’s great to see, at last, public condemnation of Israel’s behaviour and the USA’s complicity, I cannot give them much praise as they appear to play politics with peoples lives.
This genocide belongs fully to Washington. Policy makers there have long regarded the Palestinians as an impediment to the American imperium in the region. The determination of the Biden administration to extinguish the cause and exterminate the people of Palestine has been clear from the start of this terminal phase. Israel is merely the instrument of the plan’s execution. And can we please drop the pretense that Biden has been personally in charge of anything?
mgt, I totally agree with you. For over a year, I’ve been trying to convince my friends, who are mostly life-long Democrats, that Biden and his Secretary of State have been complicit is the Genocide that Israel is doing in Gaza and the West Bank. But most friends have totally denied or remained silent in acceptance of our taxes being used to aid Netanyahu and the truly non-democratic Israel. Like most
American citizens, they have no idea or even care about what is happening outside the good old USA, which is the biggest empire ever in the world. Such companies as Ratheon and Boeing and many others are booming on the stock market, as they rake in the money with the sales of all of the weapons and bombs and planes that are the Israeli air force all made in the chant “USA! USA! USA!”
Do you think a time will come wherein the same is done to us? Even the shills for the empire, their homes and families will not be exempt. It is hard to imagine that this treatment of others will be the same for us someday. But how can one not see what happens to Palestinians happens to us all, even if not yet.
Depends on where you live in America. As someone who grew up in Appalachia, and who for decades had to find housing in the low income areas of American cities, don’t be too sure that that “not yet” is not a lot closer in the mirror than the optical illusion makes you believe.
America runs the world’s largest prison system, a fair bit of it on a for-profit basis. The American police who keep that system stocked, full and profitable, often get trained by former Israeli soldiers. Just one small example to illustrate the point.
Live on the bottom of this society for awhile, and you quickly realize that to the American elites you are only a source of labor and otherwise a person to be suppressed and not allowed to express any of your own politics about what you think the world should be like. And, just like the Israeli economy decided awhile back to get rid of its Palestinian labor force, the same thing is happening in America right now with a combination of immigration and robots. Yep, that ‘not yet’ is a whole lot closer than many might imagine. We are walking the same road behind the same rulers. We are all Palestinians to the elites.
Yes. American somnambulance.”a sleep disorder that causes people to move around or perform activities while asleep.” What makes people go to sleep? Psychologically, what has happened when fundamental human instincts no longer operate for the survival of the species? And there’s a let down (numbing? a split from?) of vividness, that is the Life Force, necessary to go beyond the usual, accustomed self-definition that the threat of imminent death of something precious (Earth as we know it, Democracy, Justice)requires to mobilize, focus and concentrate to lift those tons of an automobile off the (metaphorical) prostrate child? “But most friends have totally denied or remained silent in acceptance of our taxes being used to aid Netanyahu and the truly non-democratic Israel. Like most American citizens, they have no idea or even care”…”America was a place where colonists were free to do things differently. It was an opportunity to have a better life.” “Women (23.8%) and adults aged 18 to 29 (24.6%) also have the highest rates of current depression or treatment for depression. These two groups (up 6.2 and 11.6 percentage points, respectively), as well as adults aged 30 to 44, have the fastest-rising rates compared with 2017 estimates.
Lifetime depression rates are also climbing fast among Black and Hispanic adults and have now surpassed those of White respondents. (Historically, White adults have reported marginally higher rates of both lifetime and current depression.)”(news.gallup.com)
Every accusation on the part of the Israelis is s cloaked confession. They are slaughtering, and Biden is enabling. It is difficult to understand how he can live with himself. The harmful acts have probably contributed to his Dementia as he pretends not to know what he is really doing, along with everyone else. Striving to be right while being so very wrong.
Biden is the face or personna. Aren’t the true manipulators Blinken, Sullivan, Hochstein? All three are Zionists. The latter has dual Israeli-USA citizenship and happened to have been in the IDF. The question, of course, arises. In and for what does a person’s deepest spiritual roots lie? What caused colonists to serve “the peoples’ voice” instead of that of an authoritarian? What promotes citizen agency for the civic good? What has happened to that spirit/allegiance/passion? How?
There is a new movement to sue congress members for using taxpayer’s money to fund genocide.
hxxps://consortiumnews.com/2025/01/08/taxpayers-suing-us-reps-for-funding-genocide/
I really like this idea. Let’s do this!
Yes! Excellent cause, Lois Gagnon!
A perfect picture of Biden and the utter banality of evil. But more, he has made every American citizen complicit as well, with the Democratic Party behind him.
“Inverted totalitarianism is a system where economic powers like corporations exert subtle but substantial power over a system that superficially seems democratic. Over time, this theory predicts a sense of powerlessness and political apathy, continuing a slide away from political egalitarianism.
Sheldon Wolin coined the term in 2003 …” (Wikipedia) Biden has had the reputation of not only being Genocide Joe but the “Senator from MBNA”.