As Israel launched into the primary steps of its long-promised invasion of Rafah, Biden delivered a chilling speech scapegoating Hamas militants and pro-Palestine protesters for antisemitism within the U.S. on Tuesday, vowing a crackdown on demonstrators in search of to finish Israel’s atrocities in Gaza.
Throughout remarks on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Annual Days of Remembrance ceremony, Biden interweaved dialogue of the Holocaust with condemnation of Hamas militants’ assault on Israelis on October 7, 2023. Invoking racist tropes, Biden claimed that Hamas militants harbor the identical “historical hatred” of Jewish people who spurred the Holocaust — an equivalence that has been drawn by Israeli officers time and time once more to justify Israel’s brutality towards Palestinians.
Antisemitic “hatred was dropped at life on October 7 of 2023,” Biden mentioned, by Hamas militants “pushed by an historical want to wipe out the Jewish individuals off the face of the earth.” At one level, he equated the assault on October 7 to the Holocaust. “Too many individuals denying, downplaying, rationalizing, ignoring the horrors of the Holocaust on October 7, together with Hamas’s appalling use of sexual violence to torture and terrorize Jews.”
This assertion is wrong and harmful for a lot of causes, as human rights advocates have identified. As a bunch, Hamas is way from “historical” — Hamas was established 37 years in the past by revolutionaries in search of to liberate Palestine from many years of violent Israeli occupation, ethnic cleaning and apartheid, with an opposition to Zionism, not the Jewish individuals, because the group established of their 2017 constitution.
Saying that there’s an “historical want” to kill Jewish individuals inside the Palestinian resistance, then, implies that Biden believes that Palestinians have an innate want to oppose Jewish individuals — an implication that many advocates for Palestinian rights have identified is deeply racist, and an accusation that has lengthy been levied towards Palestinians so as to justify their slaughter.
“Hamas was based in 1987. So when the president says ‘historical needs’ to eradicate the Jews, he’s making some extent about Arabs/Muslims as inherently and viscerally genocidal,” mentioned AJ+’s Sana Saeed on social media.
The president spent roughly half of his speech, supposedly aimed toward addressing antisemitism, denouncing Hamas and scholar protesters towards genocide, with out a phrase in regards to the antisemitism rising inside the Republican Celebration and embraced by his opponent within the presidential election. That is solely the most recent instance of Biden and Zionists inside his administration cynically utilizing antisemitism as a bludgeon to silence critics of Israel’s genocide — a observe that many Jewish anti-Zionists have mentioned solely makes it more durable to struggle precise antisemitism.
Biden is likely one of the solely individuals on the earth with the singular energy to finish Israel’s genocide, which has killed at the least 34,000 Palestinians to this point, together with over 14,500 kids, with full U.S. backing.
However quite than cease Israel because it started its raid of Rafah on Monday and Tuesday — one thing Biden mentioned was a “purple line” that Israel can not cross simply two months in the past and that advocates have warned is the “ultimate part” of the genocide — Biden targeted on vilifying the wave of pro-Palestine scholar protesters opposing Israel’s genocide. For the second time in days, he smeared the protesters as antisemitic with out proof, and vowed to crack down on them.
“We’ve seen a ferocious surge of antisemitism in America and around the globe,” Biden mentioned earlier than occurring to reference the protests. After implying that campus protests and pro-Palestine advocates have been a hazard to Jewish individuals within the U.S., he mentioned that his administration is “mobilizing the complete power of the federal authorities to guard Jewish communities.”
Jewish advocates for Palestinian rights reacted with horror to Biden’s speech.
“It’s a horrific lie that Jewish security is protected by the Israeli authorities’s slaughter of Palestinian households or that riot police arresting peaceable protestors is for the sake of Jewish college students,” mentioned Stefanie Fox, Jewish Voice for Peace’s govt director, in a press release. “Biden’s speech used accusations of antisemitism to distract the American public from our complicity within the ongoing genocide of Palestinians. It was a grotesque betrayal of the reminiscences of our households murdered within the Holocaust.”
These remarks play into the custom of Zionists weaponizing antisemitism so as to gas repression of pro-Palestine advocates, levying accusations of antisemitism towards advocates when many Jewish advocates and Jewish organizations have mentioned that they’ve seen no proof of widespread antisemitism amongst protesters. Relatively, Zionists are in search of to obfuscate the historical past of Palestinian resistance and Israeli occupation by saying that any criticism of Israel is antisemitic; mockingly, Zionist Republicans have invoked detestable antisemitic tropes themselves so as to smear protesters as the true antisemites.
Members of Congress just lately sought to codify this into legislation with a invoice that might explicitly undertake a definition of antisemitism that features criticism of Israel. However this conflation really dangers worsening antisemitism and weakening the motion towards it, as San Diego State College political science professor Jonathan Graubart just lately wrote for Truthout.
“Shamelessly … the [Anti-Defamation League] and different mainstream Jewish organizations add gas to antisemitism by subordinating the wrestle towards antisemitism to advocacy on behalf of the state of Israel,” Graubart wrote. “Relatively than educate the general public in regards to the risks of conflating Israel’s actions with Jews at massive, these organizations do the other by framing just about all criticisms of Israel as antisemitic.”
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