Joe Biden is uniquely depraved

In the pantheon of bloodthirsty American leadership, Biden stands apart.

The United States has had some depraved leaders throughout its history. Even in the sanitised teachings of American exceptionalism, some of the depravity of its leadership is hard to overlook. From Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act that legalised ethnic cleansing to the “Manifest Destiny” expansionism under James K. Polk, and from Woodrow Wilson’s fraudulent entry into the First World War after making promises against it during his election campaign to FDR’s Japanese internment camps and Harry Truman’s incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the Second World War — to name just a few — American leadership has been extraordinarily violent to its own citizens and foreigners abroad.

Once American interventionism went mainstream after the Second World War, the gloves went off. American savagery became unhinged and has gone on to kill tens of millions across all corners of the globe. The American empire over the past three decades in particular has been a murder machine so depraved and efficient that it is hard to find an equivalent. The geographical expanse of American butchery has been staggering. No matter where you are, the likelihood of an American military base nearby is around 100 percent. The system of indirect control that American culture exerts over the global population remains unmatched.

The criminal so-called “war on terror” brought to life by George W. Bush, one study estimates, has killed around 4 million people and displaced over 38 million more. Bush led the United States into Afghanistan and Iraq and his handiwork has been carefully transferred to and gradually expanded by the US leadership after him. Barack Obama went further than Bush and started bombing parts of Yemen, Pakistan, Syria, and Somalia, and led a regime change operation in Libya that has reduced a once prosperous nation to a failed state with open-air slave markets to boot. Donald Trump laid the groundwork for yet another American war with massive arming of Ukraine that eventually paved the way for Russia’s incursion on Ukrainian soil in a war that has killed hundreds of thousands and is still not showing any sign of stopping.

But even in this modern milieu of unhinged American barbarity, Biden stands out.

Biden started his political career as a right-wing Democrat who was friends with avowed racists like James Eastland and Storm Thurmond and opposed desegregation of public schools. He went on to author the infamous crime bill that has played a significant part in bulging the mass incarceration rates in the US, but it is the cruelty of his foreign policy positions that puts Biden in a league of his own.

There hasn’t been a war that hasn’t had unabashed Biden support. He was one of the loudest advocates for the illegal invasion and decimation of Iraq and was Obama’s deputy when he launched criminal wars all over the Global South during his presidency. The Russia-Ukraine war also has had his unfettered support and funding, but even in a career devoted to savagery, it is Biden’s deference to the Israeli diktats that stands out.

Biden, who loses no opportunity to declare himself a Zionist, once proudly announced on the Senate floor: “Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region.”

In the same vein, Biden paved the way for the ongoing genocide in Gaza, beginning October last year, when he mouthed without evidence the thoroughly debunked Israeli propaganda narratives about “beheaded babies” and “mass rapes.” Since then, he has gone on to proudly fund, facilitate, and oversee the slaughter of over 40,000 Palestinians.

He has supplied hundreds of shipments to the Israelis with 2000 pound “dumb” and precision-guided bombs — among other weapons of mass destruction — that have reduced most of Gaza to rubble and blown Palestinian children and women into countless pieces. Biden has supplied the Israelis with white phosphorus — a banned chemical weapon — that has burned the skin off Palestinian bones. He has given the Zionists weapons have caused the bodies of children in Gaza to melt or evaporate, leaving no trace of its victims.

motaz_azaiza

A post shared by @motaz_azaiza

Biden has feigned helplessness while the Zionist blockade has ensured a famine in Gaza, a famine so extreme that it has killed dozens of children and at one point of time, made the tiny enclave home to four of the five hungriest people in the world.

An investigation by The Independent has revealed that the Biden administration has been directly responsible for causing famine in Gaza. “I believe the US to be complicit in creating the conditions for famine. Not only has our response been woefully inadequate, but we’re actively responsible in large part for it,” a USAID employee told the British paper.

A report published in Responsible Statecraft paints a similarly grim picture of American complicity. “Any kind of initiative to expedite help for Palestinians has been blocked or quelled or slowed down dramatically in a way that I’ve never seen before,” a homeland security official told the publication.

Officials across the administrations have resigned in frustration, the latest one accusing Biden of having the blood of Palestinians on his hands, but it hasn't affected him one bit.

While the Zionists have committed hundreds of massacres, blown limbs off innocent civilians, raped and abused women, laid waste to Gaza’s civilian infrastructure, put hospitals out of use, reduced over a hundred mosques to rubble while drawing graffiti of the mythical Third Temple on their walls, desecrated the Qur’an and carried Torah scrolls in the Muslim places of worship, Biden sees fictional “antisemitism” and “ancient hatred of Jews” as justifications for his unmitigated support for the criminal Zionist enterprise in the Middle East.

In what can only be described as a PR exercise — and an extremely shoddy one at that — Biden held supplies of some incendiary weapons to the Israelis to deter them from invading Rafah. The Israelis have invaded Rafah anyway. Biden has reverted to his natural position of total deference to the Zionists by sending $1 billion in arms and ammunition within days of his tough man posturing.

In any case, the US Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew had been quick to emphasise that “fundamentally, nothing has changed in the basic relationship” and that only “one set of munitions” had been held back, and that “everything else keeps flowing.”

While sycophancy to the Israeli regime has been one of the hallmarks of American leadership, the earlier White House incumbents felt compelled to pull the plug at some point. Not Biden. Not during this genocide.

As commentator Trita Parsi has pointed out, in many ways, Biden’s unhinged support for this Israeli genocide is unprecedented even for an American president:

Biden’s support for Israel in the past few months is often described as a continuation of a long-standing U.S. policy toward Israel. In reality, it is a break with tradition.

That’s because Biden has refused to press Israel to show restraint in the manner that U.S. presidents such as Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Obama often did. It is also a break from the previous position of firmly rejecting attempts by Israel to drag the United States into war with Iran.

There is plenty of evidence to back Parsi’s assertion.

Back in 1982, when Israel was unleashing one of its many barbarities on neighbouring Lebanon, a mere phone call from then-President Ronald Reagan to Menachem Begin was enough to stop them. From The New York Times:

The president was Ronald Reagan, the year was 1982, and the battlefield was Lebanon, where Israelis were attacking Palestinian fighters. The conversation Mr. Reagan had with Prime Minister Menachem Begin that day, Aug. 12, would be one of the few times aides ever heard the usually mild-mannered president so exercised.

“It is a holocaust,” Mr. Reagan told Mr. Begin angrily.

Mr. Begin, whose parents and brother were killed by the Nazis, snapped back, “Mr. President, I know all about a holocaust.”

Nonetheless, Mr. Reagan retorted, it had to stop. Mr. Begin heeded the demand. Twenty minutes later, he called back and told the president that he had ordered a halt to the shelling. “I didn’t know I had that kind of power,” Mr. Reagan marveled to aides afterward.

In contrast, Biden would have proudly killed women and children, as he told Begin in the early days of the same Israeli savagery in Lebanon:

In June 1982, a few days after the start of the Lebanon War, known as Operation Peace for the Galilee, Begin met with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in Washington. Several lawmakers grilled him over Israel’s alleged disproportionate use of force.

“A young senator rose and delivered a very impassioned speech — I must say that it’s been a while since I’ve heard such a talented speaker — and he actually supported Operation Peace for the Galilee,” Begin told Israeli reporters after he returned to Jerusalem.

The senator — Biden — said he would go even further than Israel, adding that he’d forcefully fend off anyone who sought to invade his country, even if that meant killing women or children. [emphasis added]

Even a proscribed terrorist like Begin — who once featured on a Wanted poster by the Palestine Police Force and was banned from travelling to the UK for being the “leader of the notorious terrorist organisation Irgun” — couldn’t get behind (at least for the record) Biden’s depravity, as he told the then-Senator: “I disassociated myself from these remarks.”

Biden was perfectly fine with killing women and children back in 1982. He is still perfectly fine with killing women and children 42 years later. He has sacrificed the blood of countless women, children, and men for his bloodlust over the decades with his full backing of criminal American wars across the globe and is showing no signs of stopping even in his dotage.

Indeed, Israeli military spokesperson Daniel Hagari has described the ongoing coordination between Israel and the United States as reaching “a scope without precedent, I think, in Israel’s history.” He went on to laud the close American participation in this campaign of extermination, saying: “[T]here is something more important than security assistance and that is operational support.”

One phone call is all it will take for Biden to stop this genocide. He would know from experience, having stopped one of the many Israeli butcheries in Gaza, over phone in 2021. But Biden wants this genocide.

He has been parroting about non-existing “red lines,” while the only red that Palestinians have seen over the past eight months is the blood of their loved ones.

This is as much an American genocide as it is Israeli.

Among active politicians, no one has pocketed more money from AIPAC than Biden (over $4.2 million so far). His “ironclad” support for Israel despite its months-long live-streamed genocide in Gaza would be making AIPAC bosses clink a glass or two on the success of their investment.

---

Parts of this article were written on my phone during commute so please forgive any typos/errors. I need your help to continue writing, please consider buying me a coffee. You can also buy a paid subscription at the same link. It will help me immensely. Thank you.

---

Israel: A children's story