United States
The Memory Hole
An empty bucket, a Zappos shoebox, potting soil, a collapsed dog crate, a dog bed, a broken lamp wrapped in duct tape, some synthetic firewood—the flotsam and jetsam of the half-forgotten years. These leftovers from past lives accumulate in suburban garages as the people who once wanted them get older and older. Useless and unnoticed, they yet cling on doggedly until time does its work, their owners depart for good, and new people move in and take them to the dump.
But this particular jumble of detritus has been rescued from oblivion and given a new home in the eternal archives of US history. For it included another item: a damaged box containing classified documents relating to America’s failed war in Afghanistan. That box, like Pandora’s, contained a whole world of trouble. From it has emerged the reality that the Democrats have been trying to evade—the vulnerability created by Joe Biden’s senescence.
In the report of the special counsel Robert Hur into Biden’s retention of official documents at his homes, there is a photograph taken in the garage of his residence in Wilmington, Delaware, by an FBI agent in December 2022. It shows a familiar chaos of discarded objects: the console of a treadmill, red drain rods and a blue ladder, dried white flowers drooping disconsolately from a basket—kept, presumably, because they once meant something. Among them is the open brown cardboard box, its left side tattered and dented, from which peep the blue and white tops of documents Biden used when he was vice-president and then forgot to return after he left office.
US Department of Justice
A photograph of Joe Biden’s Delaware garage reproduced in the special counsel’s report, December 21, 2022
Seen differently, it might all be a conceptual art installation, a mordant commentary on the way America’s longest war has already been consigned to the national garage as just another dust-gathering discard. Instead, it dramatizes a much more literal question of memory and forgetting. Hur used the opportunity of his report to characterize Biden as an “elderly man with a poor memory” and “diminished faculties.” In his disastrous press conference of January 8, responding to Hur’s report, Biden in turn made a verbal slip that seemed to contradict his insistence that “my memory is fine,” describing the Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as “the president of Mexico, el-Sisi.”
The irony here is that Hur uses the location of the box of Afghanistan-related papers in the garage in Wilmington as evidence of Biden’s likely innocence of any crime:
A reasonable juror could conclude that this is not where a person intentionally stores what he supposedly considers to be important classified documents, critical to his legacy. Rather, it looks more like a place a person stores classified documents he has forgotten about or is unaware of.
Hur, in the body of his report, is actually quite good on the subject of forgetfulness. He recognizes that Biden, after he left office as vice-president, had such long experience of reading official documents that they might not be especially memorable to him: “Mr. Biden, after all, had seen classified documents nearly every day for the previous eight years.” In relation to the contentious documents that Biden retained, including a memo he wrote to then-president Barack Obama opposing a “surge” of US troops in Afghanistan, Hur suggests that some members of a putative jury might “conclude that if Mr. Biden found the classified Afghanistan documents in the Virginia home, he forgot about them rather than willfully retaining them.” In other words, Biden’s forgetfulness was not pathological—it was merely the mundane operation of the human mind, which a jury would accept as normal and understandable.
This is surely right. It’s not just that the evidence related to the classified documents does not support any accusation that Biden deliberately withheld them from the archives. It’s also that it does not support the much more politically charged implication that the poor treatment of these documents is evidence of senility. Biden had these papers in his homes quite legitimately while he was vice-president. Some of them got shunted into the memory hole of an ordinary suburban garage. That he forgot about them is emphatically not evidence of “diminished faculties in advancing age.”
The plain fact is that memory is always somewhat hazy, at any age. Indeed, as the White House noted in its rebuttal to the report, Hur references other instances of imprecise recall. Biden’s counsel Patrick Moore had the job of sorting Biden’s archives and searching for potentially missing documents that Biden should have handed over. Moore found documents in a small closet in Biden’s office at the Penn Biden Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Hur reports that “When interviewed by FBI agents, Moore believed the small closet was initially locked and that a Penn Biden Center staff member provided a key to unlock it, but his memory was fuzzy on that point.” Equally, Hur reports of another of Biden’s lawyers, John McGrail, that his memory of certain events was inconsistent with contemporary written records but concedes sensibly that “McGrail’s memory of these events could well have faded over the course of more than six years.” Does this mean that Moore and McGrail had diminished faculties? Of course not—people forget things.
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The politically explosive part of Hur’s report, however, relates to a much more concentrated period of time: what Biden identified in his press conference as a five-hour grilling by the special counsel’s team over two days on October 8 and 9, 2023. This was in the immediate aftermath of the shock of Hamas’s atrocious assault on civilians in Israel. As Biden put it in his press conference, “it was in the middle of handling an international crisis.” In its rebuttal, appended to Hur’s report, the White House says that “in the lead up to the interview, the President was conducting calls with heads of state, Cabinet members, members of Congress, and meeting repeatedly with his national security team.” If Biden’s mind was elsewhere during the interviews with Hur, most of the world would surely agree that that’s exactly where it should have been.
Hur’s account of this meeting is nonetheless worrying:
In his interview with our office, Mr. Biden’s memory was worse. He did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended (“if it was 2013—when did I stop being Vice President?”), and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began (“in 2009, am I still Vice President?”). He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died. And his memory appeared hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him. Among other things, he mistakenly said he “had a real difference” of opinion with General Karl Eikenberry, when, in fact, Eikenberry was an ally whom Mr. Biden cited approvingly in his Thanksgiving memo to President Obama.
These lapses of memory are significant and they do provide a troubling glimpse of how Biden may sometimes function in private meetings in the White House. But Hur also performs a sleight-of-hand. He turns the evidence from these two meetings in October into a much more sweeping insinuation about Biden’s mental capacities by linking it back to his unremarkable amnesia about the storage of the documents. He does this by projecting himself into the minds of putative jury members who would see Biden “as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
How does he reach this surmise? He tells us explicitly: “At trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him” (my emphasis). What Hur does here is to fuse the events that would be the subject of such a trial—Biden’s failure to remember where some documents were stored, a failure Hur accepts as perfectly normal—with his own characterization of Biden’s demeanor at the two meetings in October. Thus the perfectly mundane imperfections of memory become part of an accusation of near-senility, the only evidence for which is in those two meetings on especially fraught days in October.
This is grossly unfair. Insofar as Hur has a legitimate concern with the operation of Biden’s memory, it relates to the actual subject of his investigation: the storage of the documents. He provides no evidence at all that there was anything remarkable about Biden’s forgetfulness in this regard. Instead of sticking to his brief, however, Hur then shapes a politically lethal phrase out of a judgment he is not qualified to make—the lawyer appointing himself both as a doctor making a cognitive assessment and as a dramatist inventing a scenario for how twelve members of an imaginary jury might perceive Biden’s imaginary appearance in a witness box. It would be naive to think that Hur was unaware of the potentially historic consequences of this leap from evidence to conjecture.
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This unfairness creates in turn a natural reaction among Democrats. If Biden is being treated so badly, the decent thing is to defend him and to dismiss the whole story as a politically motivated farrago. This is a serious mistake. Hur’s commentary on Biden’s cognitive abilities may be irrelevant to the job he was supposed to be doing. But it is not, alas, irrelevant to a presidential election that could shape American history for decades to come. For even if Hur’s is a low blow, it is a punch that someone was always going to land. Biden’s age is a gaping vulnerability that the Democrats have pretended not to see.
The right seizes on and magnifies every gaffe that Biden makes, but the blunders are real and seem increasingly frequent. In the days before he mixed up Sisi and Andrés Manuel López Obrador, he also confused Helmut Kohl with Angela Merkel and François Mitterrand with Emmanuel Macron. Under the pressure of a vicious election campaign, these moments may well happen more often and attract more attention. Hur’s report feeds into a narrative that was already established—that Biden is losing it—and makes it unavoidable.
Four days before Biden’s disastrous press conference, Hage Geingob died in a hospital in Windhoek, the capital of Namibia. Geingob, who was eighty-two and the serving president of Namibia, was the only other octogenarian running a democracy. His death leaves Biden in a club of one. Biden really is exceptionally old for a working head of government. And there has been consistent polling evidence that this is one kind of exceptionalism that Americans don’t want to claim. As the New York Times’s chief political analyst Nate Cohn puts it, Biden’s age is “arguably the single most straightforward explanation” for why he is trailing Donald Trump. “It’s what voters are telling pollsters, whether in open-ended questioning about Mr. Biden or when specifically asked about his age, and they say it in overwhelming numbers.” Those numbers include a majority of Democrats.
It’s no good pointing out that Trump is almost as old and equally prone to verbal slips. It’s no good highlighting the undoubted truth that, while Biden’s language may sometimes be uncomfortably sloppy, Trump’s loose lips utter toxic lies and dangerous slurs. These things don’t change the facts that no one has ever run for a presidential term at the end of which he would be eighty-six, that Trump gets a free pass on almost everything, and that Biden, fairly or otherwise, is the lightning rod for deep generational discontents and widespread unhappiness at the persistence of an American gerontocracy. His age gives Biden an apolitical way to retire gracefully, standing by his considerable achievements in office while passing the problem of being too old to be president onto Trump.
Nikki Haley was probably not wrong when she suggested after Biden’s press conference that “the first party to retire its eighty-year-old candidate will win the White House.” But if Biden persists in running, there will in effect be only one candidate: Trump. He will be the Republican contender but he will also be, as the monster to be feared, the primary motivator for Democratic voters. The election will be a referendum not on the incumbent president but on his challenger. Since Biden is unable to shake off the perception that he is too old to be president, he cannot make his own case effectively. He will rely on the simple proposition that he is not Trump. In a deeply uncomfortable sense, Trump, having taken ownership of the Republicans, will own the Democrats too.
The post The Memory Hole appeared first on The New York Review of Books.
Study Finds Media Giants New York Times, CNN, and Fox News Pushing for US War in Yemen
A MintPress study of major U.S. media outlets’ coverage of the Yemeni Red Sea blockade has found an overwhelming bias in the press, which presented the event as an aggressive, hostile act of terrorism by Ansar Allah (a.k.a. the Houthis), who were presented as pawns of the Iranian government. While constantly putting forward pro-war talking points, the U.S. was portrayed as a good faith, neutral actor being “dragged” into another Middle Eastern conflict against its will.
Since November, Ansar Allah has been conducting a blockade of Israeli ships entering the Red Sea in an attempt to force Israel to stop its attack on the people of Gaza. The U.S. government, which has refused to act to stop a genocide, sprang into action to prevent damage to private property, leading an international coalition to bomb targets in Yemen.
The effect of the blockade has been substantial. With hundreds of vessels taking the detour around Africa, big businesses like Tesla and Volvo have announced they have suspended European production. Ikea has warned that it is running low on supplies, and the price of a standard shipping container between China and Europe has more than doubled. Ansar Allah, evidently, has been able to target a weak spot of global capitalism.
Western airstrikes on Yemen, however, according to Ansar Allah spokesperson Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, at least, said that they have had only a “very limited” impact so far. Al-Bukhaiti made these comments in a recent interview with MintPress News.
Biased Reporting
MintPress conducted a study of four leading American outlets: The New York Times, CNN, Fox News and NBC News. Together, these outlets often set the agenda for the rest of the media system and could be said to be a reasonable representation of the corporate media spectrum as a whole.
Using the search term “Yemen” in the Dow Jones Factiva global news database, the fifteen most recent relevant articles from each outlet were read and studied, giving a total sample of 60 articles. All articles were published in January 2024 or December 2023.
For full information and coding, see the attached viewable spreadsheet.
The study found the media wildly distorted reality, presenting a skewed picture that aided U.S. imperial ambitions. For one, every article in the study (60 out of 60) used the word “Houthis” rather than “Ansar Allah” to describe the movement which took part in the Yemeni Revolution of 2011 and rose up against the government in 2014, taking control of the capital Sanaa, becoming the new de facto government. Many in Yemen consider the term “Houthi” to be a derogatory term for an umbrella movement of people. As Mohammed Ali al-Houthi, Head of Yemen’s Supreme Revolutionary Committee, told MintPress:
‘Houthis’ is not a name we apply to ourselves. We refuse to be called Houthis. It is not from us. It is a name given to us by our enemies in an attempt to frame the broad masses in Yemeni society that belong to our project.”
Yet only two articles even mentioned the name “Ansar Allah” at all.
Since 2014, Ansar Allah has been in control of the vast majority of Yemen, despite a U.S.-backed Saudi coalition attempting to beat them back and restore the previous administration.
Many of the articles studied, however (22 of the 60 in total), did not present Ansar Allah as a governmental force but rather as a “tribal group” (the New York Times), a “ragtag but effective” rebel organization (CNN), or a “large clan” of “extremists” (NBC News). Fourteen articles went further, using the word “terrorist” in reference to Ansar Allah, usually in the context of the U.S. government or American officials calling them such.
Some, however, used it as a supposedly uncontroversial descriptor. One Fox article, for example, read: “For weeks, the Yemeni terrorist group’s actions have been disrupting maritime traffic, while the U.S. military has been responding with strikes.” And a CNN caption noted that U.S. forces “conducted strikes on 8 Houthi targets in Iranian-backed Houthi terrorist-controlled areas of Yemen on January 22.”
Ansar Allah is responding to an Israeli onslaught that has killed tens of thousands of civilians and displaced around 1.9 million Gazans. Yet Israel and its actions were almost never described as “terrorism,” despite arguably fitting the definition far better than the Yemeni movement. The sole exception to this was a comment from al-Houthi, whom CNN quoted as calling Israel a “terrorist state.” Neither the United States nor its actions were ever described using such language.
Eyes on Iran
Although the perpetrator of the attacks on shipping is unquestionably Ansar Allah, corporate media had another culprit in mind: Iran. Fifty-nine of the 60 articles studied reminded readers that the Yemeni group is supported by the Islamic Republic, thereby directly pointing the finger at Tehran.
It is indeed true that Iran supports Ansar Allah politically and militarily. When directly asked by MintPress if Tehran supplies it with weapons, al-Bukhaiti dodged the question, calling it a “marginal issue.” Why this facet of the story needed to be repeated literally hundreds of times is unclear. Often, the media studied would repeat it ad nauseam, to the point where a reader would be forgiven for thinking Ansar Allah’s official name was the “Iran-backed Houthis.” One CNN round-up used the phrase (or similar) seven times, a Fox News article six times, and an NBC News report five times.
Not only was the “Iran-backed” factoid used constantly, but it was also made a prominent part of how the issue was framed to the American public. The title of one Fox News report, for instance, read (emphasis added throughout): “U.S.-U.K. coalition strike Iran-backed Houthi targets in Yemen after spate of ship attacks in Red Sea,” its subheadline stated that: “Yemen’s Iranian-backed Houthi militants have stepped up attacks on commercial vessels in the Red Sea in recent weeks,” and its first sentence read: “The United States and Britain carried out a series of airstrikes on military locations belonging to Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen early Friday in response to the militant group’s ongoing attacks on vessels traveling through the Red Sea.”
From a stylistic point of view, repeating the same phrase continuously is very poor form. It does, however, drive the point home, suggesting perhaps that this was an inorganic directive from above.
This is far from an unlikely event. We know, for example, that in October, new CNN CEO Mark Thompson sent out a memo to staff instructing them to always use the moniker “Hamas-controlled” when discussing the Gazan Health Ministry and their figures for deaths from Israeli bombardment. This was done with the clear intent to undermine the Palestinian side of the story.
Not only did the four outlets studied constantly remind readers that Ansar Allah is supported by Iran, but they also regularly framed the violence as orchestrated by Tehran and that Ansar Allah is little more than a group of mindless, unthinking pawns of Ayatollah Khamenei. As the New York Times wrote:
Investing in proxy forces — fellow Shiites in Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen, and the Sunni Hamas in the Gaza Strip — allows Iran to cause trouble for its enemies, and to raise the prospect of causing more if attacked…The Houthi movement in Yemen launched an insurgency against the government two decades ago. What was once a ragtag rebel force gained power thanks at least in part to covert military aid from Iran, according to American and Middle Eastern officials and analysts.”
This “Iran is masterfully pulling all the strings” framing was present in 21 of the 60 articles.
The fearmongering about Iran did not stop there, however, with some outlets suggesting Tehran is building an international terror network or constructing an atomic bomb. The New York Times quoted one analyst who said:
Iran is really pushing it…It’s another reason they don’t want a war now: They want their centrifuges to run peacefully.” The Iranians do not have a nuclear weapon but could enrich enough uranium to weapons-grade in a few weeks, from the current 60 percent enrichment to 90 percent, he said. ”They’ve done 95 percent of the work.’”
The point of all this was to demonize Ansar Allah and ramp up tensions with Iran, leading to the inevitable calls for war. “The U.S. needs to strike Iran, and make it smart,” ran the (since changed) title of a Washington Post editorial. “The West may now have no option but to attack Iran,” wrote neoconservative Iran hawk John Bolton in the pages of The Daily Telegraph. Bolton, of course, is part of a group called United Against Nuclear Iran that, since its inception, has been attempting to convince the U.S. to bomb Iran. Earlier this year, MintPress News profiled the shady think tank.
While the media in the sample reminded us literally hundreds of times that Ansar Allah is Iran-backed, similar phrases such as “U.S.-backed Saudi Arabia” or “America-backed Israel” were never used, despite the fact that Washington props both those countries up, with diplomatic, military and economic support. The Biden administration has rushed more than $14 billion in military aid to Israel since October 7, sent a fleet of warships to the region, and blocked diplomatic efforts to stop Israel’s attack on Gaza.
Meanwhile, it is doubtful whether Saudi Arabia would exist in its current form without U.S. support. Militarily alone, the U.S. has sold tens of billions of dollars worth of weaponry to Riyadh, helping the petro-state to convert its oil profits into security. From 2014 to 2023, Saudi Arabia led a U.S.-backed coalition force attempting to remove Ansar Allah from power. This consisted primarily of a massive bombing campaign against civilian targets in Yemen, including farms, hospitals and sanitation infrastructure. The violence turned Yemen into what the United Nations regularly called the “world’s worst humanitarian crisis,” with around 400,000 people dying and tens of millions going hungry and lacking even basic healthcare.
The U.S. backed Saudi Arabia the whole way, selling the government at least $28.4 billion worth of arms, according to a MintPress study. In 2021, the Biden administration announced it would only sell the kingdom “defensive” technology. However, this has included shipments of cruise missiles, attack helicopters, and support for gunships.
Both Saudi Arabia and Israel featured prominently in the articles studied. But only five of the 60 mentioned U.S. support for Saudi Arabia, and none at all for Israel. This context is extremely important for American audiences to know. Without their government’s political, military, economic and diplomatic support, none of this would be possible, and the current situation would be radically different. Only six articles mentioned U.S. support for the Saudi onslaught against Yemen – and none featured the fact prominently as they did with Iranian support for Ansar Allah.
Only one article in the sample suggested that Ansar Allah might not simply be an Iranian cat’s paw. The New York Times wrote that: “The Houthis are an important arm of Iran’s so-called ‘axis of resistance,’ which includes armed groups across the Middle East. But Yemeni analysts say they view the militia as a complex Yemeni group, rather than just an Iranian proxy.” This was the sum total of information given suggesting Ansar Allah is an independent actor.
A Humanitarian Blockade?
Yemen considers its actions in blocking Israeli traffic from the Red Sea as a humanitarian gesture, similar to the “right to protect” concept the U.S. frequently invokes to justify what it sees as humanitarian interventions across the world. As al-Houthi told MintPress:
First, our position is religious and humanitarian, and we see a tremendous injustice. We know the size and severity of these massacres committed against the people of Gaza. We have suffered from American-Saudi-Emirati terrorism in a coalition that has launched a war and imposed a blockade against us that is still ongoing. Therefore, we move from this standpoint and do not want the same crime to be repeated.”
Al-Bukhati said that Ansar Allah did not intend to kill anyone with their actions and that they would stop if Israel ceased its attack on Gaza, telling MintCast host Mnar Adley that:
We affirm to everyone that we only target ships associated with the Zionist entity [Israel], not with the intention of sinking or seizing them, but rather to divert them from their course in order to increase the economic cost on the Zionist entity [Israel] as a pressure tactic to stop the crimes of genocide in Gaza.”
However, this “humanitarian” framing of Yemen’s actions was not prominently used and was only introduced by identifying it as a Houthi claim. Many articles only alluded to the position of Ansar Allah. CNN wrote that “The Iran-backed Houthis have said they won’t stop their attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea until the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza ends.” Meanwhile, NBC News and Fox News frequently presented Ansar Allah’s actions as purely in support of their ally, Hamas, as the following two examples illustrate:
“The Iran-backed militants, who say their actions are aimed at supporting Hamas, vowed retaliation and said the attacks had killed at least 5 fighters at multiple rebel-held sites” (NBC News).
“Houthi forces have taken credit for continued attacks on merchant vessels and threatened to expand their targets to include U.S. and British vessels — all in a campaign to support Hamas in its war against Israel” (Fox News).
Therefore, humanitarian action was refashioned into support for terrorism.
Other articles also suggested a wide range of reasons for the blockade, including to “expand a regional war” and “distract the [Yemeni] public” from their “failing…governance” (New York Times), to “attempt to gain legitimacy at home,” (CNN), and “revenge against the U.S. for supporting Saudi Arabia,” (NBC News). Many offered no explanation for the blockade whatsoever.
A War “Nobody Wants”
As al-Bukhaiti’s comments suggest, there would be a very easy way to end the blockade: get Israel to end its operations in Gaza. But only twice in 60 articles was this reality even mentioned; one noting that Omani and Qatari officials advised that “reaching a cease-fire in Gaza would remove the Houthis’ stated impetus for the attacks,” and once in the final sentence of an NBC News article quoting al-Bukhaiti himself saying exactly as much. However, due to the placement of the information and the fact that it came from an organization regularly described as an Iran-backed extremist terrorist group, that idea likely held little weight with readers. Instead, military solutions (i.e., bombing Yemen) were the overwhelming response offered by the corporate press in their reporting.
Despite this, the media consistently presented the United States as a neutral and honest actor in the Middle East, on the verge of being “sucked” into another war against its will. As the New York Times wrote, “President Biden and his aides have struggled to keep the war contained, fearful that a regional escalation could quickly draw in American forces.” There was a profound “reluctance,” the Times told readers, from Biden to strike Yemen, but he had been left with “no real choice” but to do so.
This framing follows the classic trope of the bumbling empire “stumbling” into war that media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting has documented, where the United States is always “responding” to crises and is never the aggressor. “How America Could Stumble Into War With Iran,” wrote The Atlantic; “Trump could easily get us sucked into Afghanistan again,” Slate worried; “What It Would Take to Pull the US Into a War in Asia,” Quartz told readers.
None of the journalists writing about the U.S.’ frequent misfortune with war ever seem to contemplate why China, Brazil, Indonesia, or any other similarly large country do not get pulled into wars of their own volition as the United States does.
The four media outlets studied regularly presented the U.S. bombing one of the world’s poorest countries as a method of defending itself. CNN wrote that “Administration officials have repeatedly said that they see these actions as defensive rather than escalatory,” without comment. And Fox News ran with the extraordinary headline, “U.S. carries out ‘self-defense’ strike in Yemen against Iran-backed Houthi missiles” – a framing which could surely only fly in a deeply propagandized nation.
In reality, the United States’ military meddling in Yemen did not start this winter. Biden is the fourth successive U.S. president to bomb the country. In December, the White House confirmed that there are already American troops in Yemen, though what their precise focus is remains unclear.
How Propaganda Works
This sort of wildly skewed coverage does not happen by accident. Rather, it is the outcome of structural and ideological factors inherent within corporate media. The New York Times is committed to Zionism as an ideology, and its writers on the Middle East are not neutral actors but protagonists in the ongoing displacement of Palestinians. The newspaper owns property in West Jerusalem that was seized from the family of writer Ghada Kharmi during the 1948 ethnic cleansing. And while many Times writers are openly supportive of the Israeli project and have family members serving in the Israeli Defense Forces, staff who speak out against the ongoing genocide are promptly shown the door.
Fox News is no less complicit in the Israeli project. Its owner, Rupert Murdoch, is a major owner in Genie Energy, a company profiting from oil drilling in the illegally occupied Golan Heights region. Murdoch is famously hands-on as a boss and makes sure all of his media outlets follow his line on major issues. And on Israel, the Australian billionaire is explicit: “Israel is the greatest ally of democracy in a region beset with turmoil and radicalism,” he said in 2013. The network’s massive Evangelical Christian viewership would expect little else than strong support for the U.S.-Israeli position, either.
CNN, meanwhile, operates a strict, censorious, top-down approach to its Middle East coverage, with everything the outlet prints having to go through its notoriously pro-Israel Jerusalem bureau before publishing. Senior executives send out directives instructing staff to make sure that Hamas (not Israel) is always presented as responsible for the current violence while, at the same time, barring any reporting of Hamas’ viewpoint, which its senior director of news standards and practices told staff was “not newsworthy” and amounted to “inflammatory rhetoric and propaganda.”
Therefore, the results of this study, while shocking, should not be surprising, given this context. Through examining the coverage of Yemen in four leading U.S. outlets, it is clear that corporate media are failing to inform the public of many of the basic realities of who Ansar Allah is, why they are carrying out their campaign, and what it would take to end the hostilities, they are perpetuating this war, and therefore are every bit as responsible as the politicians and military commanders who keep the bloodshed going.
Feature photo | Illustration by MintPress News
Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles. He has also contributed to FAIR.org, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, and Common Dreams.
The post Study Finds Media Giants New York Times, CNN, and Fox News Pushing for US War in Yemen appeared first on MintPress News.
The IDF’s Failing Gaza War, with ex-U.S. Special Forces’ Greg Stoker
The death and destruction caused in Gaza is almost beyond comprehension. Over 25,000 people have died at the hands of the Israeli air and ground assault, and virtually the entire population of the densely populated strip has been forced to flee their homes.
Few governments have been willing to put up meaningful resistance to Israeli aggression. One exception is Yemen, whose de-facto government Ansar Allah (often referred to as the Houthis) has engaged in a blockade of the Red Sea in an attempt to halt the onslaught.
In response, the U.S. is leading a Western alliance of nations to break the blockade and support the genocide. Yet joining the “MintCast” today is a guest who claims that, for all the destruction, Israel’s war in Gaza is failing. Greg Stoker is a former U.S. Army Special Operations member who left the military and became a committed anti-imperialist. Greg produces content analyzing Western imperialism and the current wars in the Middle East, and his videos explaining the situation regularly go viral, attracting an audience of millions of people.
Today, he sat down with “MintCast” host Mnar Adley to discuss Israel, Yemen and the U.S. role in the chaos. He explained how the IDF is losing the ground war based upon a number of factors, errors and assumptions it made, including an overreliance on air superiority and bombing, the assumption that collective punishment would be an effective deterrent, a shocking lack of training for Israeli ground forces, perilously little infantry cover for Israeli armor making their tanks sitting ducks, and an inability to set realistic goals and targets in the war.
While the Israelis might have all the technology, money and Western backing, they are fighting a close-quarters ground war with a guerilla foe – a sort of war they are woefully unsuited for. With no aircraft or even vehicles of any note, Hamas’ focus is hand-to-hand fighting and hit-and-run skirmishes. Once they hit the Israelis, they can immediately disappear into a myriad of tunnels or bombed-out ruins, making them extremely difficult to pin down. The IDF has been unable to deal Hamas a serious blow despite confidently predicting that it would destroy the group altogether by the end of the fighting.
Meanwhile, the United States continues to escalate its attacks against Yemen. President Biden is the fourth consecutive president to bomb the country. It remains to be seen whether the U.S. will make the same mistakes the IDF has been making, but the threat of a new global conflict is on the horizon, even though the White House refuses to describe what it is currently doing as a “war.”
Join us for this special edition of the “MintCast.” You won’t want to miss it.
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Mnar Adley is an award-winning journalist and editor and is the founder and director of MintPress News. She is also president and director of the non-profit media organization Behind the Headlines. Adley also co-hosts the MintCast podcast and is a producer and host of the video series Behind The Headlines. Contact Mnar at mnar@mintpressnews.com or follow her on Twitter at @mnarmuh.
Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles. He has also contributed to FAIR.org, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, and Common Dreams.
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Yemen’s Houthis Speak to MintPress About US Attacks, Their Blockade of Israel
The United States and the United Kingdom recently carried out their eighth round of strikes against targets in Yemen that they claim are being used by Yemen’s Ansar Allah – known in the West as the Houthis – to threaten maritime navigation in the Red Sea.
Since Israel began its deadly incursion into Gaza on October 7 of last year, Ansar Allah has carried out a de facto campaign of targeted sanctions against Israeli economic interests, attacking ships traveling through the Red Sea that it says are tied to Israel. The operation stands out in the region, as neighboring Arab countries have largely stayed out of the fray, if not directly supported Israel’s bloody campaign.
While Ansar Allah has been much discussed (or, more accurately, denounced) in Western media, they have rarely been allowed to talk for themselves. Joining the MintCast today to discuss the blockade and Yemen’s escalating tensions with the United States is Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, a senior political official and spokesperson for Ansar Allah. Bukhaiti has held his position since 2014, when the failed U.S.-backed Saudi campaign to dislodge Ansar Allah from power began.
The human cost of the U.S.-Saudi campaign has been enormous. More than 400,000 people are thought to have been killed, and tens of millions of people lost their access to food, shelter and medical treatment in what the United Nations consistently called “the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.” A 2021 MintPress investigation found that the United States had supplied Saudi Arabia with at least $28.4 billion worth of weapons and provided diplomatic support for the onslaught.
Ansar Allah officials have repeatedly stated that the goal of their blockade is to pressure Israel into halting its assault on the besieged Gaza Strip, a deadly campaign that has claimed the lives of well over 25,000 people and has left over 63,000 injured, most of them women and children.
Ansar Allah says that their blockade against Israeli interests is working, and indeed, major ocean carriers have suspended Red Sea and Suez Canal transport, instead sailing around Africa, creating significant delays and supply bottlenecks and costing the Israeli economy billions.
When asked by reporters if U.S. strikes on Yemen were effective, President Biden responded by stating: “When you say ‘working,’ are they stopping the Houthis? No. Are they going to continue? Yes.” Biden is now the fourth successive American president to bomb Yemen, a country of 33 million people.
Join us exclusively on MintPress News to hear a side of the story completely missing in Western media.
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Mnar Adley is an award-winning journalist and editor and is the founder and director of MintPress News. She is also president and director of the non-profit media organization Behind the Headlines. Adley also co-hosts the MintCast podcast and is a producer and host of the video series Behind The Headlines. Contact Mnar at mnar@mintpressnews.com or follow her on Twitter at @mnarmuh
The post Yemen’s Houthis Speak to MintPress About US Attacks, Their Blockade of Israel appeared first on MintPress News.
Why Abortion Alone Does Not Make Women Free
A conversation with Felicia Kornbluh on Roe v. Wade. Let’s recap how abortion, after almost 50 years, once again became a matter of state law. ...
Rage over Gaza: Washington Will Pay for Its Support of Israel
A famous quote by Franz Kafka says, “Every thing you love is very likely to be lost, but in the end, love will return in a different way.”
The same principle, I believe, applies to any other powerful feeling, including resentment, hate, anger, even rage.
American officials should know this well as they continue to support Israel with billions of dollars of military and economic aid and anything and everything that would allow Israel to continue with its genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza.
The Arabs, the Muslims – in fact, the whole world – are watching, listening, reading, and are getting angrier by the day at the direct American role in facilitating the Gaza bloodbath.
Israel’s military campaign in Gaza “has wreaked more destruction than the razing of Syria’s Aleppo between 2012 and 2016, Ukraine’s Mariupol or, proportionally, the Allied bombing of Germany in World War II” and “now sits among the deadliest and most destructive in recent history,” the Associated Press reported, based on recent satellite data analysis.
Aside from the tens of thousands of dead and missing in the rubble, even a higher number of people have been injured and maimed, including thousands of children. Countless children are left “grappling with the loss of an arm or a leg,” according to UNICEF.
This agony of Gaza is being watched on television and is also being viewed through every possible medium of communication. It is as if the world is suffering along with the Gaza children, but without being able to stop or slow down the genocide.
And, yet, even when all European countries, save a few, reversed their position on the war, joining the rest of the world in demanding an immediate and comprehensive ceasefire, Washington continued to reject these calls.
UNICEF | SoP | 2023
This is how US Ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, justified her country’s use of the veto, striking down the first serious attempt by the UN Security Council to achieve a permanent truce on October 18: “Israel has the inherent right of self-defense as reflected in Article 51 of the UN Charter.”
That same logic has been repeated many times by US officials since then, even when the extent of the Gaza tragedy became known to everyone, including the Americans themselves.
This self-serving logic goes against the very spirit of international and humanitarian law, which vehemently rejects the targeting of civilians during times of war and conflict and the prevention of humanitarian aid from reaching civilian victims of war.
Indeed, the vast majority of Gaza’s victims are civilians, and according to UNICEF, over 70 percent of all of those killed and wounded are women and children.
Moreover, due to the inhumane Israeli practices, Gaza survivors are now dealing with an actual famine, an unprecedented event in the modern history of Palestine.
“Every day is a struggle for survival, finding food and finding water” @TomWhiteGaza
#Gaza is grappling with catastrophic hunger. 40% of the population are now at risk of famine.
The reality is, we need more aid. The only remaining hope is a humanitarian #ceasefire https://t.co/8a5a4AjBt3
— UNRWA (@UNRWA) December 28, 2023
Yet, Israel continues to prevent access to food, medicine, fuel, and other urgent supplies to Gaza, thus violating Washington’s own laws on the matter.
“No assistance shall be furnished to any country when it is made known to the President that the government of such country prohibits or otherwise restricts, directly or indirectly, the transport or delivery of US humanitarian assistance,” the US Foreign Assistance Act (Section 620I) states.
The Biden Administration has done nothing to pressure – let alone force – Israel to adhere to the most basic humanitarian laws in its ongoing genocide in Gaza. Worse, President Biden is furnishing Israel with the needed tools to prolong this destructive war.
According to a December 25 report by Israel’s Channel 12, more than 20 ships and 244 US airplanes have delivered over 10,000 tons of armaments and military equipment to Israel since the start of the war.
These military supplies include, according to the Wall Street Journal, at least 100 BLU-109, 2,000-pound bunker-buster bombs, which have been repeatedly used throughout the Israeli war, killing and wounding hundreds each time.
The only tangible action that the US has taken since the start of the war was to create a coalition named ‘Operation Prosperity Guardian,’ with the sole purpose of ensuring the safety of ships crossing the Red Sea into or from Israel.
The US, however, seems to have learned nothing from the past, from its devastating wars on Iraq, from the so-called war on terror, and from its failure to find a balance between its support for Israel and its respect for Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims. On the contrary, some US officials seem entirely detached from this reality.
Israeli soldiers watch over a leveled neighborhood in the Gaza Strip, Dec. 29, 2023. Ariel Schalit | AP
At a press conference at the White House on December 7, US National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications, John Kirby, proclaimed:
Tell me, name me, one more nation, any other nation, that is doing as much as the United States to alleviate the pain and suffering of the people of Gaza. You can’t. You just can’t.”
But how are ‘dumb bombs,’ ‘smart bombs,’ bunker busters, and tens of thousands of tons of explosives “alleviating the pain and suffering” of Gaza and her children?
If Kirby is unaware of his country’s role in the genocide in Gaza, then the crisis in American foreign policy is worse than we could have imagined. If he is aware, as he should be, then his country’s moral crisis is arguably unprecedented in modern history.
The problem in US politics is that American administrations have a segmented view of reality, as they are intently focused on how their action, or inaction, will affect their political parties in future elections.
But Americans who care about their country and its position in a vastly changing Middle East and rapidly shifting global geopolitics should remember that history neither starts nor finishes on a fixed November date, once every four years.
“In the end, love will return in a different way,” Kafka wrote. He is right. But hate, too, tends to return as well, manifesting itself in myriad ways. Washington should have realized that on its own more than any other country.
Feature photo | People use phones to photograph a Palestinian man carrying the body of a child in Al-Najjar Hospital killed in an Israeli airstrike in the city of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, December 4, 2023. Abed Rahim Khatib | AP
Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of six books. His latest book, co-edited with Ilan Pappé, is ‘Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak Out.’ His other books include ‘My Father Was a Freedom Fighter’ and ‘The Last Earth.’ Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net
The post Rage over Gaza: Washington Will Pay for Its Support of Israel appeared first on MintPress News.
How a Puritan Society invented Modern Currency and a Monetary Committee
by Dror Goldberg* Where and when did modern currency originate? My book Easy Money: American Puritans and the Invention of Modern Currency (University of Chicago Press, 2023) tackles this fascinating question. I discover and explain the origin of modern currency in 1690 in the English colony of Massachusetts Bay — an unimportant place, compared to […]
Eldest Statesmen
Illustration by The Heads of State
For a long time, two of the great gerontocracies were the Roman Catholic Church and the Chinese Communist Party. It is quite a thought that if Joe Biden were a Catholic bishop, he would have been required to submit his resignation to the pope five years ago. If he were a cardinal, he would, when he turned eighty in November 2022, have lost his right to vote in the conclave that will choose the next pope. These rules were introduced in 1970 in a papal instruction titled “Ingravescentem Aetatem”—Growing Old. If Biden won a second term as president, he would (assuming he survives) be older at its end than Pope Benedict XVI was when he announced, against the church’s long-standing precedent of popes dying in office, that he was retiring because he was simply too old to continue. Meanwhile, the Chinese Communist Party’s unwritten rule, introduced in the 1990s, is that members of the Politburo Standing Committee should retire if they are sixty-eight or older at the time of the party congress, which is held every five years. Li Keqiang, the former premier who died unexpectedly in October, had stepped down in March, four months before his sixty-eighth birthday.
There is no “Ingravescentem Aetatem” for American politics. The term “gerontocracy” was coined in 1828 by Jean-Jacques Fazy, a Swiss republican, in the title of his book De la gérontocratie. He jeered that, in political terms, “France has been reduced to seven to eight thousand eligible individuals, asthmatic, gouty, paralytic, impaired, and only aspiring to rest.” In the contemporary US, the gerontocracy seems even more exclusive and its membership even older than the one that was swept away in France by the July Revolution of 1830. The baby boomers who sang along with Bob Dylan when he warned, “Senators, congressmen/Please heed the call/Don’t stand in the doorway/Don’t block up the hall,” now linger in the lobbies.
Age has not withered their appetite for power. In 2014 the US elected the oldest Congress in its history. The record did not last long: It was broken in 2016. And then again in 2018. And yet again in 2020, when—remarkably—the majority of the incumbents who lost their seats were replaced by someone even older. In the 2022 midterms, the House did become slightly younger (the mean age of representatives dropped by a year, from fifty-nine to fifty-eight), but the mean age of senators continued to rise and is now over sixty-five.
The Senate allocates committee places according to seniority, compounding the disproportionate power of its oldest members. The Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, who is eighty-one, appeared to freeze during several press conferences and interviews last summer and fall, apparently losing the power of speech. The veteran California senator Dianne Feinstein died in September at the age of ninety, after a period in which she was clearly too frail to fulfill all the duties of office. The former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who is eighty-three, announced in the same month that, even though she had stepped down as minority leader, she intends to run for Congress again in 2024. She was first elected in 1987, two years before Taylor Swift was born. When Mitt Romney announced his intention not to seek reelection to the Senate in 2024, he explained that “at the end of another term, I’d be in my mid-eighties. Frankly, it’s time for a new generation of leaders. They’re the ones that need to make the decisions that will shape the world they will be living in.” This conclusion would once have seemed obvious—now it feels almost eccentric.
The presidency is following the same trend. In 2016 Donald Trump, at seventy, became the oldest president ever elected. In 2020, at seventy-seven, Joe Biden demolished that record. If Biden and Trump are the main candidates in 2024, it will be a contest between a man just weeks off his eighty-second birthday and one well past his seventy-eighth. Both Trump and Biden were born in the 1940s, the same decade as presidential candidates from 1992 (Bill Clinton), 1996 (Clinton), 2000 (Al Gore and George W. Bush), and 2004 (Bush and John Kerry). A pattern of forcing Americans to choose between men born during or shortly after World War II was seemingly broken by the election of Barack Obama. But it has returned with a vengeance. The torch was passed to a new generation but the old one grabbed it back again.
It’s also true, of course, that younger politicians can suffer debilitating illnesses. The Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman’s struggles with a stroke and depression and the Maryland congressman Jamie Raskin’s treatment for lymphoma have been highly visible political dramas. True, too, that older people with access to good health care can now lead productive public lives well past the ages at which their political forebears would have died or become incapable. But in other democracies where healthy life spans are just as long as those in the US, the governing class is nonetheless much younger.
The average age of the members of the European Parliament elected in 2019 was fifty. In Canada, the average age in the House of Commons is fifty-two. The average in Australia’s parliament is fifty-one. According to the Pew Research Center, the median age of heads of government across the world, as of last March, was sixty-two. Just 5 percent are in their eighties, and most of those are autocrats. Apart from Biden, the only octogenarian currently running a democracy is Hage Geingob of Namibia, which has a smaller population than Mississippi.
America’s gerontocracy may well reflect a broader cultural obsession with the denial of aging and a peculiar disdain for retirement, which seems to be regarded as a very European form of decadence. Yet this doesn’t mean that Americans are happy to be ruled by gerontocrats. In recent Pew surveys, only 3 percent of adults said it is best for US presidents to be in their seventies or older, while 79 percent favor maximum age limits for elected federal officials (a change that would likely require a constitutional amendment). Nearly half of Democrats say the best age for presidents is in their fifties, while a quarter prefer presidents in their forties. These are, of course, the age ranges at the time of election of all Democratic presidents since 1961, except Biden. It is not for nothing that, in the Kennedy era, when Biden’s political consciousness was formed, youth was a Democratic brand. As his sister and campaign manager, Valerie, recalled in Growing Up Biden, “In the early ’60s, Washington was the province of youthful, beautiful Democratic idealists…. Republicans, back then, were seen as stodgy, old.”
Being the bright young thing was part of Biden’s own appeal when he was first elected to the Senate at the age of twenty-nine in 1972. He won in part by successfully labeling the Republican incumbent, J. Caleb Boggs, who was a mere sixty-three, as too old to understand contemporary problems. Biden’s characterization of Boggs was summed up at the time as “Dear old dad may have been right for his time—and I love him—but things are different now.” Campaign reporters noted that “the younger men get that ‘new hero’ look when Biden raps about how the old guard has bungled things,” while Boggs “gets tongue-tied and dry-throated in public.”
It should hardly surprise Biden, therefore, that his verbal gaffes and dry-throated voice do not say “new hero” to most voters now. In early November The New York Times published a poll that showed Trump ahead in five of the six swing states. It found that 62 percent of respondents did not think Biden had “the mental sharpness” to be effective as president and that 71 percent thought him “too old”—an opinion shared even by 54 percent of Biden’s own supporters. While polling may not be a reliable indicator of voting intentions this far from Election Day, it seems foolish to pretend that Biden’s age is not a serious obstacle.
Those who think otherwise point to Trump’s almost equally advanced years. Yet, on this as on so much else, Trump gets a pass. Just 39 percent of respondents in that New York Times poll viewed him as too old to be an effective president. On the face of it, this makes little sense. Trump’s mental sharpness is at least as questionable as Biden’s—he has recently claimed that Biden would lead the US into “World War II” and that he himself defeated Barack Obama in the 2016 presidential election. He claims that “Kim Jong-un leads 1.4 billion people,” apparently confusing the North Korean dictator with the Chinese leader Xi Jinping. He told supporters at a rally that the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, has recently called on “President Obama” to resign and be replaced by Trump. Nikki Haley’s repeated calls in her Republican primary campaign for cognitive tests to be made mandatory for officeholders over seventy-five are aimed as much at Trump as at Biden. Yet it seems to be Biden alone whose age will matter in the coming presidential election.
Some of this concern is manufactured. Both the Republican National Committee and the online alt-right nexus have manipulated or faked images that purport to show Biden as literally senile. Yet there is an underlying reality. Biden is not just chronologically old—he is politically ancient. Trump has clocked less than a decade in the electoral arena. Biden has been around for half a century as senator, vice-president, Democratic primary candidate, and president. He launched his first bid for the presidency in 1987, when today’s median American was four years old.
Those who now make light of his verbal slips note, as Franklin Foer does in his recent book The Last Politician, that the problem is less “Biden’s age or acuity” and more “his indiscipline and imprecision, traits that stalked the entirety of his career.” This may well be true, but reminding voters that Biden was always thus is no great help when that “always” seems to stretch back into what is, for most of today’s voters, a fuzzy prehistory. Biden’s longevity in public office means that, unlike Trump, he can appear as an embodiment of the gerontocracy that Americans do not want but have ended up with anyway.
Trump, meanwhile, exudes a dark energy. His is perhaps the most radical mainstream presidential candidacy in US history. He offers a program of organized revenge, telling his fans that “I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.” He promises a transformation of democracy into authoritarianism. He envisages a war on all the “vermin” who have thwarted him. He plans, as The New York Times has reported, “to scour the country for unauthorized immigrants and deport people by the millions per year.” He wants to build giant camps to house those awaiting deportation and to vet would-be travelers to the US for political (and presumably also religious) purity: “US consular officials abroad will be directed to expand ideological screening of visa applicants to block people the Trump administration considers to have undesirable attitudes.” The relentlessness of this determination to reshape the US into an autocracy may be horrifying, but it has the vigor of grand ambition.
Another reason why Biden’s age works so much against him is that he did not present himself in the 2020 campaign as a man who would still be running in 2024 and intending to still be in the Oval Office in 2028. “Look,” he told a rally in Detroit in March 2020, “I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else.” He referred to three much younger Democratic politicians who were standing behind him on the platform, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Gretchen Whitmer: “There’s an entire generation of leaders you saw stand behind me. They are the future of this country.” It is true that he did not explicitly promise to stand down after one term to make way for that future, but the signals were clear enough.
They were also effective. Americans were struggling to come to terms with a deadly pandemic and the chaos of the Trump presidency. They needed not so much a radical break with the past as simply a break. Biden could present himself as a national grandfather who could provide a calm space in which, as he put it in his inaugural address, he would emulate those past presidents who “healed a broken land.” But no one imagines a period of recuperation lasting eight years. If the broken land is not healed by now, many will seek a different doctor.
Historically, gerontocracy was a way of ensuring that leaders did not last too long, with death operating as the functional equivalent of term limits. Republican Venice controlled its doges by electing them, on average, at the age of sixty-eight. Nature could be relied on to make sure that rulers did not overstay their welcome. A similar impulse may have been at work for many voters in 2020. Biden could be embraced for what he was not (Trump) rather than for what he was. Being a very familiar face was, in a time of strangeness and disorientation, quite appealing. But by insisting on running again, Biden risks stirring the kind of familiarity that breeds contempt—not just for him but for the whole gerontocratic system. He already had a problem with young voters, who were not particularly excited about him in 2020. Now, polls consistently suggest that young voters are by far the most likely to say that he is too old to be an effective president.
Foer concludes his sympathetic account of Biden in the White House by twisting the idea that he is a “man of his age” into the notion that he is, rather, “a man for his age.” He concedes the validity of the first phrase: “His public persona reflected physical decline and time’s dulling of mental faculties that no pill or exercise regimen can resist. In private, he would occasionally admit to friends that he felt tired.” But Foer balances these acknowledged deficits with an insistence that, in his response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Biden showed “the advantages of having an older president.” Biden was “the West’s father figure, whom foreign leaders could call for advice and look to for assurance.” Foer praises in particular Biden’s “strategic clarity.” Even if this is true in relation to Ukraine, it would be quite a stretch to claim that, in the crisis triggered on October 7 by the Hamas assault on Israel and amplified by Israel’s violent response, Biden has been the West’s father figure or that he has shown much strategic clarity. He has seemed, rather, both impulsive and relatively powerless, a combination that is far from reassuring.1 The appeal of the wise old man has been greatly diminished.
In fairness to Biden, it should be stressed that he has not actually governed as a gerontocrat. A standard accusation against elderly leaders is that they have little interest in, or incentive to think about, the future. But Biden’s signature achievements as president—securing large-scale investment in infrastructure and in the transition to a carbon-free economy—are about the long term. He can claim with justice to be the first US president to achieve at least the beginnings of an adequate response to the climate crisis. In this he has been addressing a temporal horizon that stretches far beyond his own remaining life span, giving him a good case for insisting that his age should not matter. That it does indeed matter is a consequence of another long-term problem whose lightning rod, fairly or not, he has become: generational inequality.
Biden’s personal and political identity is heavily infused with the history of immigration (in his case Irish) and of generational mobility. Immigrants are driven by the faith that, even if their own lives will be hard, their children and grandchildren will have more opportunities and do better than in their home countries. This confidence was richly vindicated for Biden’s own generation. Among those born, as Biden was, during World War II, 90 percent went on to earn more than their parents. No nation has ever achieved a rise in earnings better than this. But, as analysis published by Raj Chetty and others in Science in 2017 has shown, the graph that maps this trend over time looks pretty much like a ski slope. There has been a relentless decline in absolute mobility from one generation to the next: from over 90 percent when Biden was born to around 50 percent for those who were born in the 1980s. In other words, if you were born in 1985, you are as likely to be less well off than your parents as you are to be richer. Just as the rise in mobility for Biden’s generation was virtually unique, this subsequent fall is also greater than in almost any other country.
It is, moreover, driven as much by politics as by economics. According to Chetty:
Most of the decline in absolute mobility is driven by the more unequal distribution of economic growth in recent decades, rather than by the slowdown in GDP growth rates. In this sense, the rise in inequality and the decline in absolute mobility are closely linked.
The unequal distribution of the proceeds of growth has been facilitated by government policies. But it also further distorts the distribution of power between the old and the young. As the political scientist Kevin Munger points out in his recent book Generation Gap: Why the Baby Boomers Still Dominate American Politics and Culture,
historically, other generations have faded from relevance as they reach retirement age. The factors that empower a given group fall away in time. In the past, older generations have seen their numbers dwindle, their economic power wane, and their cultural relevance decline. But the Boomers are unique on each of these dimensions. Their numbers have declined less, their economic power has only grown, and their cultural relevance—or their insistence on it—persists.
So, of course, does their outsize political influence, as donors, candidates, and voters. The baby boomers are no longer the largest generational cohort of the US population, but they have more money to contribute to political campaigns, and because they turn out to cast their ballots, they are still the largest voting bloc.
The experiences of these older citizens differ greatly from those of their children and grandchildren, in relation not just to economics but to race and social diversity. Munger writes that
the Baby Boomers are the whitest generation in American history, through a combination of immigration restrictions, the deracialization of groups like Irish and Italian Americans, and the unequal distribution of resources among the parents of Black and white Boomers.
Because Black and Hispanic Americans benefited much less from the economic boom of the 1950s and 1960s, and because they have subsequently died earlier than their white counterparts, Munger suggests that “the Baby Boom is today an almost entirely white phenomenon…. Popular stereotypes about Boomer power being concentrated in ‘old white people’ are to a large extent true.”
None of this is Biden’s fault—but it is his problem. He stands for a grim continuity: thirty consecutive years, so far, of boomer (or, in Biden’s case, technically preboomer) occupants of the Oval Office. He is caught in a generational paradox. He does not, in electoral terms, actually represent the boomers: a majority of “old white people” voted for Trump in 2020 and will, if given the chance, surely do so again in 2024. But he can be seen nonetheless as a representative boomer figure, the most prominent and powerful embodiment of the demographic group that has dominated American wealth, politics, and culture since the 1970s. He suffers on both sides of this contradiction—most of his own generation does not identify with him, but many younger Americans identify him with the age-related injustices that have shaped their lives. It is this incongruity that makes Biden so vulnerable. Being the old white man brings him no rewards, only resentments. And resentment is the medium in which Trump thrives.
Yet Biden himself does not seem to have much awareness of the seriousness of this threat to his reelection. He has little instinctive sympathy with the specific struggles of younger Americans. In 2018, when he was briefly out of public office, he told Patt Morrison of the Los Angeles Times:
The younger generation now tells me how tough things are—give me a break! No, no, I have no empathy for it, give me a break! Because here’s the deal, guys, we decided we were going to change the world, and we did.
That “we” is an explicitly generational identity. In Biden’s mind, he and his age cohort changed the world in much tougher circumstances than those that millennials and Gen Z face today. He seems barely conscious of the implication that it’s their fault if they fail to change it again.
More profoundly, though, Biden has his own very particular difficulties with death and succession. He is the most death-haunted figure in American public life.2 His heroes Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. His first wife, Neilia, and their daughter, Naomi, were killed in a car crash. His son Beau died of brain cancer in 2015 at the age of forty-six. A large part of Biden’s psychological armor is the feeling that death must not be allowed its dominion. He is a death-defier. He insists on being undaunted by the relentless power of mortality. And while this attitude is what makes him so strong and sympathetic, it is also what makes him so blind to the obvious reality that death is not just an existential truth—it is a political fact.
In the public mind, the risk that Biden might die or be incapacitated during a second term is inflated beyond its real probability. Polls show only around a third of respondents expect him to finish a second term if he wins one. Though Biden seems able to blot out those hazards, it is not at all obvious that voters will do so. Death will be on the Democratic ticket but he will not acknowledge its icy presence.
Biden is troubled by strange notions of political succession. His touchstone was the Kennedy family, and he dreamed of achieving what it could not: the creation of a presidential dynasty. The Bidens, very unusually for Irish Catholics, have that monarchical habit of using Roman numerals after their names. Biden himself is Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.; Beau (also christened Joseph Robinette) was III; his brother Hunter’s son is IV. This is more than a private affectation. It was intended to mark a governing bloodline. As Biden wrote in his memoir Promise Me, Dad, “I was pretty sure Beau could run for president some day and, with his brother’s help, he could win.” Before his untimely death, Beau was apparently ascending in this direction. Having served two terms as attorney general of Delaware, he had announced his candidacy for governor. His father had also suggested, when he vacated his Senate seat to become Obama’s vice-president, that “it is no secret that I believe my son, Attorney General Beau Biden, would make a great United States Senator.” There is surely a feeling that a one-term Biden presidency is a poor substitute for what should have been eight years of Joe, followed by eight years of Beau.
Who takes Beau’s place as the presidential son, given that Hunter’s messy life has put him out of contention? We know the answer because Biden has told us. In March 2020, accepting the endorsement of Pete Buttigieg, he said, “I don’t think I’ve ever done this before, but [Buttigieg] reminds me of my son, Beau, and I know that may not mean much to most people, but to me, it’s the highest compliment I can give any man or woman.” But passing the throne to his adopted political son would, for Biden, force him to confront the truth that his real son, the one who was once the future of both the family and America, is inescapably dead. Nor, on a more mundane level, does Buttigieg seem ready to seize the crown if there were a competitive Democratic primary in 2024.
Delaying the succession must seem, in this light, quite logical for Biden. Perhaps he feels that Buttigieg, Harris, Booker, Whitmer, Gavin Newsom, or other younger candidates have not yet established themselves sufficiently on the national stage—a somewhat circular argument given that a competitive primary would be the obvious way for them to do so. In his most recent remarks on the subject, Biden has seemed to suggest both that “I’m not sure I’d be running” if Trump were not also seeking a second term and that he would run if Trump were to drop out. He acknowledged, on the one hand, that “probably fifty” Democrats could beat Trump, and on the other that “I’m not the only one who could defeat him, but I will defeat him.”
These are fascinatingly contrary impulses for a character in a psychodrama. They are not good calculations about how the Democrats should face arguably the most consequential presidential election in US history. Trump’s senescence and mental fitness will not be an effective issue for the Democrats. Derangement, in his mad-avenger persona, is good. It is, rather, the Democrats, if they are led by an eighty-one-year-old man, who will have to bear the burden of America’s generational divide. Gerontocracy—in reality a bipartisan phenomenon—will be their brand. With the promised bridge to a new generation as yet unbuilt, time is not on Biden’s side, or on the side of American democracy. The Democrats have to determine very quickly whether they can reset that loudly ticking clock.
The post Eldest Statesmen appeared first on The New York Review of Books.
Blood Money: The Top Ten Politicians Taking the Most Israel Lobby Cash
As the Israeli attack on Gaza, Lebanon and Syria intensifies, the U.S. public watch on aghast. A new poll finds that Americans support a permanent ceasefire by a more than 2:1 ratio (including the vast majority of Democrats and a plurality of Republicans).
And yet, despite this, only 4% of elected members of the House support even a temporary ceasefire, and the United States continues to veto U.N. resolutions working towards ending the violence. Walter Hixson, a historian concentrating on U.S. foreign relations, told MintPress News:
Unfettered support for Israel and the lobby consistently puts the United States at odds with international human rights organizations and the vast majority of nations over Israel’s war crimes and blatant violations of international law. The current U.N. vote on a ceasefire in Gaza [which the U.S. vetoed] is just the latest example.”
Here, Hixson is referring to the pro-Israel lobby, a loose connection of influential groups that spend millions on pressure campaigns, outreach programs, and donations to American politicians, all with one goal in mind: making sure the United States supports the Israeli government’s policies full stop, including backing Israeli expansion, blocking Palestinian statehood and opposing a growing boycott divestment and sanctions movement (BDS) at home.
Internationally, Israel has lost virtually all its support. But it still has one major backer: the United States government. Part of this is undoubtedly down to the extraordinary lengths the lobby goes to secure backing, including showering U.S. politicians with millions of dollars in contributions. In this investigation, MintPress News breaks down the top ten currently serving politicians who have taken the most pro-Israel cash since 1990.
#1 Joe Biden, $4,346,264
The largest recipient of Israel lobby money is President Joe Biden. From the beginning of his political career, Biden, according to his biographer Branko Marcetic, “established himself as an implacable friend of Israel,” spending his Senate career “showering Israel with unquestioning support, even when its behavior elicited bipartisan outrage.” The future president was a key figure in securing record sums of U.S. aid to the Jewish state and helped block a 1998 peace proposal with Palestine.
The support for Israeli policies has continued into the present, with his administration insisting that there are “no red lines” that it could cross that would cause it to lose American support. In essence, Biden has given Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a carte blanche to break any rules, norms or laws he wishes to.
Biden runs up a set of stairs to address the 2016 American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) Conference in Washington. Cliff Owen | AP
This has included ethnic cleansing and war crimes such as the bombing of schools, hospitals and places of worship using banned weapons like white phosphorous munitions. The arms Israel is using come supplied directly by the U.S. In November, the Biden administration rubber-stamped another $14.5 billion military aid package to Israel, ensuring the carnage would continue.
For his staunch support, Biden has received more than $4.3 million from pro-Israel groups since 1990.
#2 Robert Menéndez, $2,483,205
The New Jersey senator has received nearly $2.5 million in contributions and, in the wake of the Hamas attack on October 7, has been a key figure in drumming up support for Israel. Describing Operation Al-Aqsa Flood as “barbaric atrocities” that were an “affront to humankind itself,” Menéndez gave an impassioned speech on the Senate floor where he addressed Biden directly, stating:
Mr. President, in the face of unspeakable evil, we must not mince words. We must not waver in our resolve. Every single one of us in this chamber has a moral responsibility to speak out — unequivocally and unapologetically — as we stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Israel and her people. I’ve been staunchly devoted to this cause for 31 years in Congress.”
He went on to claim that Israel and the United States are intrinsically linked and were founded on the same principles.
Menéndez also courted controversy after he demanded that the U.S. help Israel “wipe Hamas from the face of the Earth,” even as Israel was leveling Gaza by carpet bombing it.
In October, he co-sponsored a Senate resolution “standing with Israel against terrorism” that passed unanimously, without dissent.
#3 Mitch McConnell, $1,953,160
The Senate Minority Leader is one of the most powerful politicians in America and has used his influence to attempt to force through legislation criminalizing BDS. He has described the peaceful tactic as “an economic form of anti-Semitism that targets Israel.”
McConnell is known to be very close to Prime Minister Netanyahu and supported a bill condemning the United Nations and calling on the U.S. to continue to veto any U.N. resolution critical of Israel. Last month, he strongly opposed steps taken towards applying basic U.S. and international law on weapons shipments to Israel.
Under current U.S. law, Washington is duty-bound to stop supplying arms to nations committing serious human rights violations. McConnell, however, said that applying these standards to Israel would be “ridiculous,” explaining that:
Our relationship with Israel is the closest national security relationship we have with any country in the world, and to condition, in effect, our assistance to Israel to their meeting our standards it seems to me is totally unnecessary… This is a democracy, a great ally of ours, and I do not think we need to condition the support that hopefully we will give to Israel very soon.”
McConnell has received nearly $2 million from pro-Israel groups.
#4 Chuck Schumer, $1,725,324
Next on the list is McConnell’s Democratic opponent, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who had taken over $1.7 million from Israel lobbying groups. In recent weeks, Schumer has taken the lead in steering the public conversation away from Israel’s crimes and towards a supposed rise in anti-Semitism across America. “To us, the Jewish people, the rise in anti-semitism is a crisis. A five-alarm fire that must be extinguished,” the New York Senator said, adding that “Jewish-Americans are feeling singled out, targeted and isolated. In many ways, we feel alone.”
The idea that anti-Semitic hate is exploding across the United States comes largely from a report published by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which claims that anti-Semitic incidents have risen by 337% since October 7. Buried in the small print, however, is the fact that 45% of these “anti-Semitic” incidents the ADL has tallied are pro-Palestine, pro-peace marches calling for ceasefires, including ones led by Jewish groups like If Not Now or Jewish Voice for Peace. (MintPress recently published an investigation into the ADL’s fudged numbers and its history of working for Israel and spying on progressive American groups.)
Schumer, right, speaks as Republican Mike Johnson, left, and Democrat Hakeem Jeffries, listen at a pro-Israel march in D.C., Nov. 14, 2023. Mark Schiefelbein | AP
Schumer, however, has deliberately tried to conflate opposition to Israel’s bombardment of its neighbors with anti-Jewish racism, writing:
Today, too many Americans are exploiting arguments against Israel and leaping toward a virulent antisemitism. The normalization and intensifying of this rise in hate is the danger many Jewish people fear most.”
He has even gone so far as to label Dave Zirin – a Jewish journalist who supports justice for Palestinians – as an anti-Semite.
As Senate Majority Leader, Schumer has used his influence to push through military aid packages to Israel, even as it carries out actions many have labeled war crimes, writing that:
One of the most important tasks we must finish is taking up and passing a funding bill to ensure we, as well as our friends and partners in Ukraine, Israel, and the Indo-Pacific region, have the necessary military capabilities to confront and deter our adversaries and competitors.”
He added that “Senators should be prepared to stay in Washington until we finish our work” and that they should expect to work “long days and nights, and potentially weekends in December,” until the deal was done.
#5 Steny Hoyer, $1,620,294
The former House Majority Leader is one of Israel’s most vocal supporters in the House of Representatives. Hoyer has demanded that “Congress must immediately and unconditionally fund Israel,” thereby giving the Netanyahu administration the green light to do whatever it pleases.
An ardent Zionist, the Maryland native explained that he believes it is:
…[T]he world’s duty that set aside a land, a land that Israel has occupied for millennia, and said: this is your place of security, this is your place of sovereignty, this is your place of safety.”
Hoyer speaks at the Jewish Community Relations Council’s Stand with Israel event on October 13, 2023. Photo | House.gov
Earlier this month, Hoyer also voted in favor of a bill stating that anti-Zionism is inherently anti-Semitic, thereby declaring all criticism of Israel to be invalid and racist.
Hoyer has received more than $1.6 million in donations from pro-Israel lobbying groups.
#6 Ted Cruz, $1,299,194
Over his career, the Texas Republican has received $1.3 million from the Israel lobby. After October 7, Cruz sprang into action, announcing that it was “critical” that every American supports Israel “100 percent.” “Israel is going to be demonized by Democrats in the current corrupt corporate media. We need to make clear that Hamas is using human shields and Israel has a right to defend itself,” Cruz said, hitting many of the classic pro-Israel talking points.
Cruz also went above and beyond in his defense of Israeli crimes in a bizarre interview with Breaking Points’ Ryan Grim. When asked if he opposes Israeli officials suggesting a nuclear attack on Gaza, Cruz replied:
I condemn nothing that the Israeli government is doing. The Israeli government does not target civilians; they target military targets… There is no military on the face of the planet, including the U.S. military, that goes to the lengths that the Israeli military goes to avoid civilian casualties.”
When confronted with statements from the IDF directly refuting his point, noting that their focus is on damage, not precision, Cruz flipped his answer around, replying, “Yes, damage to Hamas, to terrorists.” And when Grim gave him more statements from senior IDF officials explicitly contradicting his previous statement, Cruz retorted, “That’s simply not true. They are targeting the terrorists,” thereby defending the IDF even from itself.
#7 Ron Wyden, $1,279,376
Senator Ron Wyden (D—OR) has long been one of Israel’s staunchest advocates in Washington, supporting President Trump’s decision to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem and opposing BDS in all its forms.
In 2017, he co-sponsored a bill that made it a federal crime, punishable by a maximum prison sentence of 20 years, for Americans to participate in or even encourage boycotts against Israel and illegal Israeli settlements.
On the settlements, he was one of the most vigorous opponents of UN Security Council Resolution 2334, which describes them as a “flagrant violation” of international law.
For his troubles, Wyden has received $1,279,376 from pro-Israel groups.
#8 Dick Durbin, $1,126,020
In some ways, Dick Durbin owes his political career to the Israel lobby. In 1982, the then-obscure college professor benefitted enormously from AIPAC money to defeat incumbent Paul Findley, a strong proponent of the Palestinian people.
The Illinois Democrat has called for immediate military aid to Israel and co-signed a Senate resolution reaffirming Washington’s support for Israel’s “right to self-defense” in the wake of October 7.
Despite this, he has angered some in the pro-Israel crowd by supporting President Obama’s initiatives to reduce tensions with Iran and has now come out in favor of a ceasefire in Gaza.
#9 Josh Gottheimer, $1,109,370
Despite only being in office since 2017, Gottheimer has already received more than $1.1 million from pro-Israel lobbying groups. The New Jersey Congressman has served as a pro-Israeli attack dog in Washington, co-sponsoring the bill equating opposition to Israeli government policy with anti-Semitism and introducing legislation to block and criminalize boycotting the state of Israel.
In the wake of October 7, Gottheimer has attempted to cancel a number of public figures. Earlier this month, for instance, he tried to pressure Rutgers University into calling off an event on Palestine featuring former CNN anchor Marc Lamont Hill and organizer and journalist Nick Estes, both of whom support Palestinian rights and statehood.
Gottheimer speaks at the American Zionist Movement / AZM in Washington, DC on December 12, 2018. Michael Brochstein | Sipa via AP Images
Gottheimer has even caused rifts within his own party, attacking the small, progressive wing of Democrats who have failed to toe the line on Israel and Hamas. “Last night, 15 of my Democratic colleagues voted AGAINST standing with our ally Israel and condemning Hamas terrorists who brutally murdered, raped, and kidnapped babies, children, men, women, and elderly, including Americans. They are despicable and do not speak for our party,” he wrote, making a number of highly incendiary and questionable assertions.
#10 Shontel Brown, $1,028,686
Perhaps no other political case reveals the power of the Israel lobby than Shontel Brown. In 2021, Nina Turner, a democratic socialist, national co-chair of Bernie Sanders’ 2020 election campaign, and an outspoken advocate for justice in Palestine, ran for election in Ohio’s 11th congressional district. Her opponent was the little-known but strongly pro-Israel Brown.
Brown received more pro-Israel money than any other politician nationwide during that two-year election cycle, helping her overcome a double-digit polling deficit to defeat Turner. Over $1 million was spent plastering Cleveland with attack ads against Turner. In her acceptance speech, Brown praised Israel and later thanked the Jewish community for “help[ing] me get over the finish line”
Since then, she has supported Israeli actions in Gaza and rejected the idea of Israel as an apartheid state, writing:
Let’s be clear: Israel is not an apartheid state. Any mischaracterizations otherwise attempt to delegitimize Israel, a robust democracy, and will only serve to fuel rising antisemitism. I will always advocate for a strong U.S.-Israel relationship founded on our shared values.”
Check out the bag dropping ahead of tomorrow’s #OH11 primary. DMFI has spent more opposing Nina Turner than nearly all other outside spending combined. pic.twitter.com/2QC8py0sWu
— Kirk A. Bado (@kirk_bado) August 2, 2021
A Dark Force in US Politics
The most well-known and likely most influential group in the loose coalition referred to as the Israel lobby is AIPAC. With a staff of around 400 people and annual revenues that frequently top over $100 million, the organization is a huge, conservative force in American politics, flooding the system with gigantic amounts of money. Worse still, the group does not disclose the sources of its funding.
AIPAC’s stated goal is:
To make America’s friendship with Israel so robust, so certain, so broadly based, and so dependable that even the deep divisions of American politics can never imperil that relationship and the ability of the Jewish state to defend itself.”
Yet Israel is widely recognized by international bodies such as the United Nations and human rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch as an apartheid state. It has near total control over the Gaza Strip, which, even before the latest attack, was an “unlivable” “open-air prison.” It is this state and these injustices that AIPAC and others seek U.S. support for.
American intransigence on Israel has helped make it a pariah nation, one that constantly has to veto U.N. resolutions and has lost its voting rights at UNESCO.
Not only does it give more money to Republicans than Democrats, but AIPAC also floods conservative Democrats’ coffers with funds, especially when they are up against progressive, pro-Palestine challengers.
In 2022, it spent $2.3 million in a (failed) bid to stop leftist Summer Lee from being elected to Congress. However, it fared better in North Carolina, where $2 million was given to Valeria Foushee over Nida Allam, the director of Sanders’ 2016 campaign. Meanwhile, $1.2 million in donations to Henry Cuellar might have been the deciding factor in an extremely close win over progressive activist Jessica Cisneros in Texas’ 28th congressional district. And a number of prominent Michigan Democrats have come forward claiming that AIPAC offered them $20 million each to primary Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian-American in Congress.
“Certainly the lobby can influence elections, but it doesn’t win them all,” Hixson, the author of “Architects of Repression: How Israel and Its Lobby Put Racism, Violence and Injustice at the Center of US Middle East Policy,” said, adding:
It targets the aforementioned House progressives every two years but can’t always dictate the outcome of localized elections. They do better with broader canvasses; hence, no one in the Senate other than Bernie takes them on. When it comes to Israel, most American politicians are craven hypocrites.”
Yet Sanders’ recent refusal to endorse a permanent ceasefire (a position held by virtually the entire world) has earned him AIPAC’s praise.
Thank you @SenSanders for your strong opposition to a permanent ceasefire with Hamas.@FaceTheNation pic.twitter.com/78PdsAKm1D
— AIPAC | Text ISRAEL to 24722 | #StandWithIsrael (@AIPAC) December 10, 2023
Is the Tail Wagging the Dog?
As such, AIPAC acts as a bulwark against progressive political change. In such a divisive political environment, few political issues unite Democrats and Republicans, as well as Israel and shutting down anti-establishment figures. As Hixson told MintPress:
Other than a handful of progressives (Bernie Sanders, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, etc.), the U.S. Congress invariably gives the lobby everything it wants, namely massive regular funding for Israeli militarism and an endless series of resolutions condemning Israel’s international foes and domestic critics.”
The question that arises from this is why? Why does Israel always seem to receive full support from Washington? Is the lobby really that effective? Why do so many U.S. politicians go along with it? Mazin Qumsiyeh, a professor at Bethlehem University, characterized Washington as full of amoral careerists, telling MintPress that:
They [Senators and Congresspersons] do not buy the Zionist argument. It is strictly personal interest: money and good media coverage and avoiding blackmail, as the Zionists have their dirty secrets which they could expose if they step out of line.”
Yet Israel also serves a vital purpose for the American empire. The region is not only geographically strategic but home to the world’s largest resources of hydrocarbons. Washington has always made it a top priority to control the flow of oil around the world, and Israel helps them do this. Militarily, Israel serves as a conduit the U.S. can work through, farming out its dirty work to Tel Aviv. It, therefore, represents an unofficial and beneficial “51st state.” As Joe Biden said in 1986 and has regularly repeated, Israel is the best investment the U.S. makes. “Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect our interests in the region,” he added.
Many other nations or industries have lobbied in Washington, D.C. But few have proven to be as organized or effective as the pro-Israel one. Nevertheless, public opinion, particularly among young people, has begun to drift away from it. The Overton Window is shifting; Professor Qumsiyeh told MintPress. “When I first went to the U.S. in 1979, the average citizen did not know anything about Palestine or knew only a negative, distorted picture driven by Hollywood and biased media. Things [have] changed,” he said.
Things have indeed changed. The streets of America have been filled with demonstrations against Israeli aggression. Millions of Americans have participated in Palestine solidarity protests, including hundreds of thousands in Washington, D.C. alone. Celebrities have spoken out against injustice. And social media is filled with posts showing sympathy for Gazans. There, too, Israel and pro-Israel groups have attempted to use their financial clout to influence the conversation, but to limited effect.
Fortunately for Israel, for now, at least, they can still rely on the unwavering support of senior American politicians, their pockets filled with AIPAC money, turning the other way as Israel carries out another genocide against Palestine.
Feature photo | Joe Biden, projected on screens, gestures as he addresses the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) 2013 Policy Conference, March 4, 2013, at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington. Susan Walsh | AP
Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017, he published two books, Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles. He has also contributed to FAIR.org, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, and Common Dreams.
The post Blood Money: The Top Ten Politicians Taking the Most Israel Lobby Cash appeared first on MintPress News.
South Korea and Japan Emerge as Key Battlegrounds in US Strategy Against China, Featuring Tim Shorrock
As China continues rising and the U.S. attempts to dominate the world, Northeast Asia becomes an increasingly crucial battleground. The United States is trying to encircle China with a network of hundreds of military bases while building a trilateral military alliance with South Korea and Japan. But many in those countries want to be free of U.S. domination.
Today’s MintCast focuses on Japan and Korea and how deeply the United States has crafted and shaped the internal politics of those nations. Our guest today is Tim Shorrock, a writer and commentator who has covered the region since the 1970s. Growing up in Japan, Tim has covered Korea for The Nation magazine since 1983. His writing can also be found on his personal website, TimShorrock.com.
While Japan is often presented as a model democracy and a stable society with low rates of crime and inequality, beneath the surface, a different story can also be told. The U.S. has occupied the island nation since the end of the Second World War, with more than 54,000 troops stationed across 120 military bases. Washington also heavily interfered in Japanese politics, funding and supporting the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which has remained in power almost uninterrupted since the 1950s. In turn, the LDP allows the U.S. military to do what it likes in Japan.
As Shorrock noted:
They are the most loyal, subservient, pro-American government in the world, the LDP. They will do anything to satisfy the U.S. need for military bases and hegemony in the area. It is pathetic to see what is going on in Okinawa. The LDP are the ones building the new U.S. marine base, where there have been all these protests.”
“It is difficult to call a country sovereign when another country’s military has control over its airspace,” he added.
Likewise, South Korea is often presented as a modern, efficient, “good” nation instead of an authoritarian “bad” North Korea. But here again, the reality is considerably murkier. For much of its history, the South was ruled by a brutal military dictatorship that massacred its progressive opponents, ushering in a climate of fear across the country.
While the dictatorship has gone, many of its anti-democratic laws remain. One is the National Security Law, which effectively allows the government to prosecute any left-wing political opponents (including human rights activists or unionists) under the premise that they are in league with the Communist North.
And like Japan, South Korea was occupied by the United States, which maintains tens of thousands of troops there to this day. The U.S. presence is a major factor hindering the possibility of Korean unification. As Shorrock told MintCast host Alan MacLeod:
The U.S. has always been against unification. They wanted the southern part of Korea to be part of their empire and linked up with Japan. That is what this trilateral alliance is all about maintaining U.S. forces there, basically forever.”
Unification, for Shorrock, is still a possibility. But Korea would need to be free of foreign troops for it to work. And the only foreign troops there are American ones.
From there, the pair discussed North Korea, China, and the role of the U.S. in destabilizing the region.
Listen to or watch the full interview exclusively at MintPress News.
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Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles. He has also contributed to FAIR.org, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, and Common Dreams.
The post South Korea and Japan Emerge as Key Battlegrounds in US Strategy Against China, Featuring Tim Shorrock appeared first on MintPress News.