Please don’t need our help right now Kenya… Please don’t need our help right now Kenya… Please don’t need our help right now Kenya… Please don’t need our help right now Kenya… … …
Well, good I suppose, though I feel like this could be sort of a desperate attempt to shore up geopolitical influence that’s being deflated by our relationship with Israel.
Post-WWII rules based order is kind of disintegrating and neoliberals are scrambling to prop it up without actually admitting to why it’s failing.
I’d imagine it’s connected to both. Russia and China are the main antagonists to US hegemony, hoping they’ll get to be the next empire if they can drive enough of a wedge between western allies and get enough debt colonialism going in SA and Africa.
So yeah, they are fostering crisis, authoritarian sentiment, and spinning anti-democratic narrative wherever they can, but Israel’s genocide and complete disregard for things like the ICC/ICJ (the kinds of institutions upon which the post-war rules based order is supposed to rest) has only further degraded US international standing. Biden vetoing UN resolutions and chastising the international courts for investigating Israel does not help.
Biden’s whole election schtick was that he was there to reassure the rest of the world after Trump’s carastrophic administration, and now he’s showing his ass anyway.
A vote for Biden was a vote to return to the status quo, which is appealing when the country is slipping into fascism but doesn’t actually solve the root problems.
Definitely, he never should’ve run and the other candidates never should have endorsed him as they dropped, especially since Sanders actually had steam and could’ve easily fulfilled the “Not Trump” space that Biden claimed he needed to be there to fill.
You do understand Haiti is being run by gangs at the moment, right? Close to a hundred thousand people have fled the capital city, this isn’t some righteous revolution or something, it’s a bunch of small time fascists taking advantage of a weak state and an unwillingness by the US to get involved try to seize power.
The UN and US are providing funding to help Kenya provide some kind of security. Whats your alternative? Let Haiti burn?
The USA has been letting Haiti burn for decades. It’s not an alternative, it’s the status quo of US intervention. The alternative is intervention by BRICS countries, but the USA would never allow it because of their blood thirsty Monroe Doctrine
Please… Haiti has been run by mob bosses as long as it’s been Haiti. Papa Doc? That name ring any bells? It’s a sovereign nation. They’ve obviously been okay with this for quite some time.
And this is why the rules based international order was always a farce. Only third world countries need to play by the rules, while western powers just override them and do as they please.
Fucking Biden, you literally need to do one thing correct to beat Trump. Stop giving Israel aid. For some reason people are under the assumption that Trump wouldn’t be doing worse things for the people of Palestine, but at this point Biden’s on the hot seat. Stop calling Netan-baboon Bibi, cut off his aid and let the courts bring him to justice for his crimes against Palestine. An Israeli version of Hitler isn’t a better version of Hitler, just a repackaging. Not to mention that prior to all his actions recently the dude is an absolute piece of shit who has skirted justice in his own country for years by maintaining his vice grip on the Premiership (which is exactly the playbook Trump hopes to follow if re-elected)
Is this true though? Don’t many liberals support Israel? Are there actual polls that show Biden would benefit from taking a stance against Israel? Genuinely asking.
Seems to me that the people who support Israel unconditionally fall into two groups: The people who’d never vote for him no matter what he does (Republicans), and people who have no choice but to vote for him no matter what he does (Democrats). He can’t gain any votes by giving aid to Israel.
Millions of Palestinians are forced to live under Israeli military rule but are not entitled to citizenship or suffrage. If they were of a different ethnicity (Jewish), they would be given those rights. It’s also not a geographical distinction, settlers in the West Bank are given full rights while Palestinians living nearby are not.
Elect a group of far right religious criminals to take over your government, cancel all future elections, and then spend sixty years plundering your vast natural resources, corrupting all institutions and foreign relations, and sending suicide bombers down here, and we can see about that.
This didn’t happen over night. Gaza had chance after chance after chance. Even now: well meaning people there could point out the tunnels, point out Hamas.
No? Okay, they’re obviously comfortable enough with the status quo. Sorry they are brainwashed into being useful idiots for terrorists. Their deaths are clearly on Hamas’s hands.
These lies would be more believable if Israel wasn’t also settling and committing genocide in the West Bank, despite the lack of Hamas. Or if they hadn’t been committing genocide since before Hamas ever existed.
Biden’s really willing to fuck around and let trump win…
All he has do is chill out for 6 fucking months and keep his hands clean, but this is how he’s always responded to people challenging him.
What sank his 88 run wasn’t the plagiarism, it was how he treated reporters that would ask him about.
The more people that protest for him to stop funding a genocide, the more he’s going to lash out like this, and the more voters will equate him to trump.
Which is incredibly dangerous when the most common reason for voting Biden is:
Biden is betting he loses more supporters if he doesn’t defend Israel. I hope beyond hope that he’s right, but I’m not so sure.
The larger problem is that Biden doesn’t seem capable of nuance. This is a complex situation, and it would be cool to have a leader who can acknowledge that Israel has the right to exist, and has also gone too far in it’s war on the Palestinian people.
There are no heroes in this story. Nobody occupies the moral highground. Innocent blood is being spilled, and the people suffering have no agency in the conflict. It’s just politics and victims of political violence.
It’s a safe bet, by a lot, and the calculus doesn’t really change no matter how much nuance you apply, because with every statement you’re always trading some nebulous number of single-issue pro-Palestine/anti-Zionist voters for a much larger group of pro-Israel/Zionist voters.
Then you have folks like the OP who are essentially working as a thinly-veiled propaganda arm of Hamas/Russia/etc., and it really muddies the signal-to-noise analysis on the issue.
It’s a problem for Biden, but there’s no winning. Trump doesn’t have the problem only because he’s not the incumbent right now, so he can hem and haw and try to deflect from the reality that he’s much worse on the issue–like every other issue–for people who align even a little bit with any policies left of center.
So Biden just has to basically take the hit, because the Democrats care about functional government and stable diplomacy and foreign policy relationships, whereas the GOP, as the party of dysfunction, white grievance, and ethno-religious fascism, isn’t saddled with the same considerations. Biden actually tried–and partially succeeded–in slowing down arms shipments to Israel, and the GOP threw a shitfit in Congress because they want those arms shipments: Their donors want them, and they can hang it on Biden’s neck no matter what, because people like OP will continue to go to bat for them.
I’m not exactly sure it’s a safe bet. Hillary was a safe bet over Bernie, right? A few votes in the right areas could tip the election either way. The fact that he can’t find a way to appease both the people who are against genocide and the people who are pro-Israel is worrying to me.
You are definitely right about Trump not having the same problem though. However, Trump could also say literally anything on the issue and still get support because nothing he does actually matters.
It’s a safe bet. The number of voters Biden loses if he were to change positions enough to appease any authentic anti-Zionists (as opposed to agitprop elements, for whom no position would be good enough to silence) would dwarf the number of voters he might gain. That might not mean he gets reelected, but hell, changing positions at all would cost him votes. Like I said: all choices are bad. It would have been a political disaster for any president, because every voter who cares enough about it to be a single-issue voter is entrenched enough to not be swayed at all unless the other side is completely alienated.
He can’t find a way to appease both sides? Well what does that look like? What’s the position that appeases both staunch Zionist voters and the subsection of the anti-Zionist protestors who vote? That’s not a rhetorical question. Every other US politics-adjacent post on Lemmy recently has been OP or one of their comrades criticizing Biden for his position on Israel, and I’m genuinely interested to hear someone articulate the nuanced position that Biden should supposedly take that he’s currently failing at, and how he’s supposed to do that and not immediately lose all prospects of reelection. FFS, even characterizing this as a division between “pro-Israel” and “against genocide” is already throwing nuance out the window. From where I’m sitting, Joe Biden has as nuanced a position as he can, because the nature of foreign relations in the Middle East in 2024 is itself nuanced and, for US interests, profoundly precarious. If you want nuance, you better be prepared to swallow a healthy dose of realpolitik alongside it, and that’s something that as of yet I’ve not found any noble armchair advocates and red-shadowed “patriots” willing to do.
Israel doesn’t have a right to exist. The levant is a diverse area with a rich history, and Israel looks to genocide the people that are the result of that and replace them exclusively with a single group of people that haven’t been the majority in the area for thousands of years, if ever. Jewish people deserve security and self determination but Israel isn’t it.
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