‘Deadline’ is designed to lure voters in the presidential election in reaction to the burning of Palestinian families without requiring any action until a u-turn won’t do electoral damage
Joe Biden, after horrific footage of Palestinian patients and families burning to death after Israeli missile strikes in the grounds of Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, has announced that he has issued Israel with a thirty-day deadline to take “urgent and sustained actions” to improve humanitarian conditions in Gaza. Biden’s letter to Israel, leaked to the media, is dated 13 October, the day (on US time) of the deadly missile attack, but it is unclear whether it was written before it, or after and backdated.
The letter refers to US legal provision 620i of the Foreign Assistance Act, which requires the US to cease all arms supplies to any country which is blocking US-approved humanitarian assistance – and the letter acknowledges that aid trucks are being ‘delayed’, that barely any aid is reaching the people of Gaza is effectively being withheld and that the amount that does get through is plummeting constantly. It could hardly do otherwise after the revelation that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken knew full well Israel was blocking aid even as he lied to Congress that it was not.
It goes on to demand a list of actions on humanitarian aid as well as protection of UNRWA, the UN relief agency for Palestinians:
However, the letter’s con is exposed by the fact that Biden allows thirty days for compliance – when the US presidential election is only twenty-one days away at the time of writing. Democrat presidential candidate Kamala Harris already faces outrage from Muslim groups and other opponents of Israel’s genocide and has entrenched her own problem by pledging, in campaign speeches, continual support for Israel. The viral footage of burning Palestinian patients and families and the global disgust and outrage it has fuelled deepen Harris’s problems and, after an initial campaign surge in which she rocked the Trump campaign, the outcome of the election is looking far less clear.
Let me be clear, I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself and I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself (Kamala Harris, but ‘defend itself’ has always been code for slaughter)
Biden’s ultimatum appears to be nothing more than theatre designed to con voters into taking their eye off Israel’s hideous war crime – just the latest of an endless chain – and believing that the Democrats are finally taking action, in the hope that they will hold their nose and vote for Harris.
But once the die – and votes – are cast in twenty-one days, Biden can ignore his ultimatum or, as the US has done constantly until now with what it claimed were ‘red lines’ in its tolerance for Israel’s behaviour, simply make excuses for why it suddenly now has to move the goalposts.
Because the Trumpian US Supreme Court has declared that no president or former president can be prosecuted for any act that can remotely be considered to have taken place in the context of presidential duties, Biden could not be prosecuted no matter how clear the breach of the Foreign Assistance law. Harris, if she wins, would be similarly protected – and if Trump wins, nobody expects him to honour a Biden promise anyway.
By all appearances and rational analysis, Biden – or more likely whoever is pulling his strings now his mental capacity has collapsed – is attempting to con voters for long enough to get Kamala Harris elected despite her avowed Zionism. The time for action against Israel to bring an end to its genocide and war crimes is now, not in thirty days when thousands more civilians have been slaughtered or starved to death.
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” ..or more likely whoever is pulling his strings now his mental capacity has collapsed ..”
Yes of course it has and it sounds as if his adviser’s has too. They should “seize the day”
and stop the Arms to Israel NOW. Anyone who saw the horrific footage in the Hospital
grounds should be in no doubt of what is right to do .. Goodness know what Trump will
do if he gains power ..
I wish I was fit enough to join the march at the weekend as I am assume there must
be one?
There certainly is!
https://palestinecampaign.org/events/day-of-action-for-palestine-19-october-2024/
Hope you find a way…
In 1982, Reagan rang up Begin and got him to stop shelling the same day.
What will Trump do if he wins? 😔
There is not much that he can do- the US and its satraps have done just about everything Israel asked for already. And the net result has been to expose the enormous gap between the vast amounts spent on the military and the ability of said forces to do much more than bomb undefended civilians. ‘ The problem is that ‘Israel’ has no right whatever to be in either the West Bank or Gaza and less right to defend its nationals in places where they are not allowed to be.
Trump can do nothing except prepare refugee facilities – the die is cast and ‘Israel’, like the Republic of Vietnam, the Afghan thing and the Rhodesian state, will soon be no more.
According to an April report by the Congressional Research Service, THAAD batteries usually are made up of 95 soldiers, six truck-mounted launchers, 48 interceptors – eight for each launcher – one radar system, and a fire control and communications component.
In Iran’s latest barrage they launched approx 180 ballistic missiles most got through, even if the Thaad system was 100% successful most of those missiles would have got through. Of course Iran could send barrages of missiles of which they have hundreds of thousands hidden in silos all over the Iranian desert completely overwhelming all Israels air defences. If Israel attacks they would be committing suicide,
Uzi Rubin, a former head of the Israel Missile Defense Organization and a preeminent missile expert, has a chilling presentation he gives on the all-but-existential threat posed by precision-guided munitions to small states. Rubin uses Greece as an example, but it’s obvious he’s really talking about Israel. By perusing easily available public sources, Rubin suggests there are roughly 30 facilities in all of Greece that allow modern society as we know it to function there — systems for water, fuel, electricity, sea and air transport, and communications. Generously assuming his tally of critical targets undercounts the actual number by a factor of three, Rubin soberly makes the point that with fewer than 300 precision-guided munitions, an adversary could quickly make life unviable for Greece’s 10 million citizens.
If anything, tiny Israel may be even more vulnerable than Greece. Though the two countries are close in population, Israel’s land area is not even 20 percent of Greece’s. And while Israeli counterproliferation efforts have severely limited Iran’s ability to transfer precision-guided munitions along various routes to Hezbollah, some Israeli officials privately suggest that the terrorist group could already have several hundred in its arsenal. Once it acquires 1,000, it could fire 10 precision strikes at each of Israel’s 100 most critical pieces of national infrastructure. Even assuming a 90 percent success rate for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense, the math at that point will favor Hezbollah, putting the possible paralysis of Israeli civil society within its reach.
He points out that many years ago precision missiles used to cost millions; now with the introduction of the smart phone GPS and all the coordinates can be factored in to the missiles plus winglets for 10’s of dollars, These developments are game changers which even the Houthis have. Not to mention hypersonics.
I suspect US/Israel control of the GPS satellites would be a factor here. US/allies are probably able to switch ’em off or corrupt the data they produce at will. Stranger things can happen when powerful people need to protect their power.
I’m wondering if we’re being fed all this dis?-information to scare people and disable/disorientate the world’s escalating Peace Movements.
One thing is clear to me though: Iran and Hezbollah are behaving more responsibly than the USA and its allies
It is a common mistake in the “West” to under-estimate the technical capabilities of Iran.
They have some of the world’s most outstanding scientists and technicians.
It is clear that Iran has not been seeking conflict with the “West”.
However – The horrific assault on the Palestinians in Gaza, and Israel’s clear intention to widen the conflict are making this outcome much more likely.
Yeah, it was clear this US statement was more about the US election than about any ‘humanitarian aid’ – the timing said it all.
Though, I’m not sure if I am hoping for too much, but it is just possible we are more generally beginning to see western politicians starting to wake up to the fact that the horrors we are witnessing daily in the Middle East are starting to impact them themselves … and I think we can safely assume that only self-interest will ever make these creatures take any serious action … we’ll see …