{"id":262472,"date":"2024-05-20T12:00:36","date_gmt":"2024-05-20T11:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=262472"},"modified":"2024-05-15T08:35:40","modified_gmt":"2024-05-15T07:35:40","slug":"bidens-genocide-on-gaza-is-now-a-war-on-truth-and-the-right-to-protest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/05\/bidens-genocide-on-gaza-is-now-a-war-on-truth-and-the-right-to-protest\/","title":{"rendered":"Biden\u2019s Genocide on Gaza Is Now a War on Truth and the Right to Protest"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The media\u2019s role is to draw attention away from what the students are protesting \u2013 complicity in genocide \u2013 and engineer a moral panic to leave the genocide undisturbed<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

10 May 2024 <\/em>– As mass student protests quickly spread to campuses across the United States last week, and others took hold in Britain and elsewhere in Europe, the western media gave centre stage<\/a> to one man to arbitrate on whether the demonstrations should be allowed to continue: US President Joe Biden.<\/p>\n

The establishment media reverentially relayed the president\u2019s message that the protests were violent and dangerous, treating his assessment as if it had been handed down on a tablet of stone.<\/p>\n

Biden declared<\/a> the protesters had no \u201cright to cause chaos\u201d, giving the green light for police to go in with even greater force to clear the encampments.<\/p>\n

This week, Biden raised<\/a> the stakes further by suggesting the protests were evidence of a \u201cferocious surge\u201d of antisemitism in the US.<\/p>\n

According to reports, more than 2,000 protesters have been arrested after some university administrators \u2013 under growing pressure<\/a> from the White House and their own wealthy donors \u2013 called in local police.<\/p>\n

In approving the crushing of dissent, Biden contradicted himself: \u201cWe are not an authoritarian nation where we silence people or squash dissent. But order must prevail.\u201d<\/p>\n

One small problem went unmentioned: Biden was not a disinterested party. In fact, his conflict of interest was so gigantic it could, like the damage to Gaza, be seen from outer space.<\/p>\n

The students were calling on their universities to pull all investments from companies that are assisting Israel in carrying out what the World Court has called a \u201cplausible\u201d genocide<\/a>in Gaza. Those weapons are being supplied in huge quantities largely thanks to the decisions of one man.<\/p>\n

Yes, Joe Biden.<\/p>\n

Law-breaking Biden<\/strong><\/h3>\n

The \u201corder\u201d the US president wants to prevail is one in which his decisions to block any ceasefire and arm the slaughter, maiming and orphaning of many tens of thousands of Palestinian children go unchallenged.<\/p>\n

Biden has been so indulgent of Israel\u2019s destruction of Gaza that Benjamin Netanyahu\u2019s government crossed the president\u2019s supposed \u201cred line\u201d<\/a> this week. Israel launched<\/a>\u00a0the initial stages of its long-threatened final assault on Rafah in southern Gaza.\u00a0Some 1.3 million Palestinians have been huddling in makeshift tents there.<\/p>\n

Biden could easily have forced Israel to change course at any point over the past seven months, but chose not to, even as he feigned concern about the ever-rising death toll among Palestinian civilians.\u00a0Only under growing popular pressure, fuelled by the protests, has he finally appeared to pause arms shipments as the attack on Rafah intensifies.<\/p>\n

The White House has authorised<\/a> vast shipments of arms to Israel, including 2,000lb bombs that have levelled whole neighbourhoods, killing men, women and children outright or leaving them trapped under rubble to slowly suffocate or starve to death.<\/p>\n

Late last month Biden signed a further $26bn of US taxpayers\u2019 money<\/a> to Israel, the majority military aid \u2013\u00a0just as mass graves<\/a> of Palestinians killed by Israel were coming to light.\u00a0He has been able to do so only by flagrantly ignoring the requirement in US law that any weapons supplied not be used in ways likely to constitute war crimes<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Human rights groups have warned<\/a> his administration repeatedly that Israel is routinely breaking international law.<\/p>\n

At least 20 of Biden administration\u2019s\u00a0own lawyers are reported<\/a> to have signed off on a letter that Israel\u2019s actions violate a host of US statutes, including the Arms Export Control Act and Leahy Laws, as well as the Geneva Conventions.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the State Department\u2019s investigations show that, even before Israel\u2019s destruction of Gaza began seven months ago, five Israeli military units <\/a>were committing gross violations of the human rights of Palestinians in the separate enclave of the Occupied West Bank.<\/p>\n

There, Israel doesn\u2019t even have the one-size-fits-all excuse that the abuse and killing of Palestinian civilians are unfortunate \u201ccollateral damage\u201d in an operation to \u201ceradicate Hamas\u201d. The\u00a0West Bank is under the control of the Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas, not Hamas.<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, no action has been taken to stop the arms transfers. US laws, it seems, don\u2019t apply to the Biden administration, any more than international law does to Israel.<\/p>\n

Protest quicksand<\/strong><\/h3>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

In denying students the right to protest at the US arming of Israel\u2019s plausible genocide, Biden is also denying them the right to protest the most consequential policy of his four-year term \u2013 and of at least the last two decades of US foreign policy, since the US invasion of Iraq.<\/p>\n

And it is all happening in a presidential election year.<\/p>\n

The students\u2019 immediate aim is to stop their universities\u2019 complicity in the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza. But there are two obvious wider goals.<\/p>\n

The first is to bring attention back to the endless suffering of Palestinians in the tiny, besieged enclave. Until this week\u2019s attack on Rafah,\u00a0the plight of Gaza had increasingly dropped off front pages, even as Israeli-induced famine and disease tightened their grip over the past month.<\/p>\n

When Gaza has made the news, it is invariably through a lens unrelated to the slaughter and starvation. It is details of the interminable negotiations, or political tensions over Israel\u2019s Rafah \u201cinvasion\u201d, or plans for the \u201cday after\u201d in Gaza, or the plight of the Israeli hostages, or their families\u2019 agonies, or where to draw the line on free speech in criticising Israel.<\/p>\n

The students\u2019 second goal is to make it politically uncomfortable for Biden to continue providing the weapons and diplomatic cover that have permitted Israel\u2019s actions \u2013 from slaughter to starvation, and now the imminent destruction of Rafah.<\/p>\n

The students have been trying to change the national conversation in ways that will pressure Biden to stop his all-too-visible law-breaking.<\/p>\n

But they have run up against the usual problem: the national conversation is largely dictated by the political and media class in their own interests. And they are all for the genocide continuing, it seems, whatever the law says.<\/p>\n

Which means the media has carefully refocused attention, dealing exclusively with the nature of the protests \u2013 and a supposed threat they pose to \u201corder\u201d\u00a0\u2013 not addressing what the protests are actually about.<\/p>\n

Last Sunday, the head of the UN Food Aid Programme, Cindy McCain, warned<\/a> that northern Gaza was in the grip of \u201cfull-blown famine\u201d and that the south was not far behind. Dozens of children were reported to have died of dehydration and malnutrition. \u201cIt\u2019s horror,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

The head of Unicef pointed out<\/a> last week, a few days before Israel ordered the evacuation of eastern Rafah: \u201cNearly all of the some 600,000 children now crammed into Rafah are either injured, sick, malnourished, traumatized, or living with disabilities.\u201d<\/p>\n

A separate UN report<\/a> recently revealed it will take 80 years to rebuild Gaza, based on the historic levels of materials allowed in by Israel. On a highly unlikey, best-case scenario, it will take 16 years.<\/p>\n

As ever, establishment journalists have been essential to distracting from these horrendous realities.<\/p>\n

The students are caught in a protest equivalent of quicksand: the more they struggle to draw attention to the Gaza genocide, the more the Gaza genocide sinks from view. The media have seized on their struggle as a pretext to ignore Gaza and turn the spotlight on to their protests instead.<\/p>\n

Feeling \u2018unsafe\u2019<\/strong><\/h3>\n

The student protest movement has been remarkably peaceful<\/a> \u2013 a fact that is all the more obvious when compared to the Black Lives Matter protests that swept the US in 2020, with Biden\u2019s approval.<\/p>\n

Four years ago there were many episodes of property damage, but that has been all but unheard of in the student protests, which are mostly confined to encampments on university campus lawns.<\/p>\n

Initially, the idea that student protests were violent depended on a highly improbable claim: that chants<\/a> calling for the liberation of Palestinians from occupation, or for equality between Israeli Jews and Palestinians, were inherently antisemitic.<\/p>\n

The coverage had to studiously ignore the fact that a sizeable chunk of those protesting on campus were Jewish.<\/p>\n

The media\u2019s manufactured narrative was then put to further, mischievous purpose. Zionist Jews on campus \u2013 those who identify with Israel rather than the global movement to stop a genocide \u2013 were reported to be uncomfortable when faced by the protests. Or \u201cunsafe\u201d, as the media preferred to call it.<\/p>\n

In all this hysteria, no one seemed to care how \u201cunsafe\u201d anti-Zionist Jewish students felt, or Palestinian and Muslim students, after being publicly labelled antisemitic and a threat to \u201corder\u201d by Congress and their own president.<\/p>\n

But this would soon become about a lot more than a clash of feelings. Stoked on by Biden\u2019s condemnations and by political and financial pressures on the universities, administrations took the unusual step of inviting local police forces on to their campuses. Soon police in riot gear were massed against the students.<\/p>\n

With the political and media climate mounting against academic freedom and the right to protest on issues of Israel and genocide, university staff turned out in a show of support for their embattled students.<\/p>\n

At Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, for example, a Jewish professor, Annelise Orleck, joined<\/a> colleagues hoping to protect their students by placing themselves between the police and the encampments. It was a pattern repeated across the country.<\/p>\n

The police, she told<\/a> Democracy Now, were clearly determined to break up the encampments using force.<\/p>\n

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Dartmouth professor @AnneliseOrleck1<\/a>, whose violent arrest during a campus protest was captured on video last week, describes what happened and why she felt compelled to defend her students. "People have to be able to talk about Palestine without being attacked by police." pic.twitter.com\/qLDbZXMEUk<\/a><\/p>\n

— Democracy Now! (@democracynow) May 7, 2024<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n