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morehouse college
'Stop It. Stop It Now, Joe.'
Even though fascist Donald Trump is still worse, just look at the latest polls in the swing states and recognize where we are heading. A true leader doesn't zig and zag when innocent people are being killed.
May 25, 2024
As the keynote speaker at Morehouse College in Atlanta last week, Joe Biden listened to the class Valedictorian’s call for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza. The President nodded and applauded with others in the assembly. In contrast, he had just approved another billion dollars in killer weapons for the genocidal Netanyahu regime to blow up what’s left of the Death Camps in Gaza. “Stop it, stop it now, Joe,” declared his wife, Dr. Jill Biden months ago.
Countless times Joe Biden has publicly urged Netanyahu to allow the waiting trucks carrying – food, water, and medicine – blocked at the Egyptian and Israeli borders to deliver this humanitarian aid. But Biden declined to demand sanctions and an end to the Israeli military blocking hundreds of trucks, paid for by the U.S., into Gaza to help the dying population. He could have draped American flags over these trucks and dared the Israeli state terrorists to stop them. Biden showed lethal weakness from an unused position of great presidential power. “Stop it, stop it now, Joe,” implored his wife Dr. Jill Biden as thousands of children are being killed who could have been saved.
When Biden took his oath of office, he swore to uphold the laws of the land. That oath requires action.
Biden asked early on that Netanyahu comply with international law. His government commits daily overt numerous war crimes targeting civilians, homes, schools, markets, hospitals and health clinics, ambulances, fleeing refugees, and even Mosques and Churches. The Israeli regime also violates the international law that requires the conquerors to protect the civilian population. Biden, Blinken and Austin have refused to condemn such “crimes against humanity,” halt arms shipments and thereby obey five federal laws prohibiting the U.S. from sending weapons to countries that are violating human rights or being used for offensive purposes.
When Biden took his oath of office, he swore to uphold the laws of the land. That oath requires action. His State Department, in a required compliance report this month to Congress, disgracefully punted. “Stop it, stop it now, Joe,” beseeched Dr. Jill Biden.
From the beginning, Biden has backed a two-state solution publicly and in private conversations with Netanyahu. These words support a peaceful settlement. Yet whether under Obama as vice president for eight years or since 2021, as president, Biden has not connected to any action advancing the two-state proposal. Worse, he has never called out Netanyahu, with consequences, for bragging year after year to his Likud Party that he has been supporting the Hamas regime and helping to fund it because Hamas, like Netanyahu, opposes a two-state solution.
Biden is still rejecting the recognition of a Palestinian state by 143 of the 193 member states of the United Nations. This week Spain, Norway and Ireland said they would recognize a Palestinian state. Biden bizarrely insists statehood be negotiated with Israel. He knows, of course, how many Israeli colonies (so-called settlements) exist in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Israel rejects outright any such Free Palestine. Weak Joe Biden is okay with that brutal occupation. “Stop it, stop it now, Joe,” says Dr. Jill Biden.
Joe Biden is always condemning anti-semitism against Jews, while he spends billions of dollars weaponizing Netanyahu’s violent anti-semitism against Arab semites in Palestine. This “other” anti-semitism has been violently inflicted, with very racist epithets, on defenseless, subjugated Palestinian families for over fifty-five years. The violence includes U.S. fighter planes bombing, ground troops smashing homes, and refugee camps, blowing up homes, imprisoning and torturing thousands of men, women and children, without charges, and hundreds of dictates, checkpoints, and other maddening harassments. (See the New York Times Magazine Sunday, May 19, 2024 piece “The Unpunished: How Extremists Took Over Israel”). Biden and Netanyahu are arm-in-arm anti-semites against Arabs. (See the “Anti-Semitism Against Arab and Jewish Americans” speech by Jim Zogby and DebatingTaboos.org).
It’s the ongoing massacre of these little innocents—in their mother’s or father’s arms or in crumbling hospitals that led Dr. Jill Biden to admonish: “Stop it, stop it now, Joe.”
Throughout his fifty-year political career, Biden has never said that “Palestinians have a right to defend themselves.” Only the overwhelmingly more powerful, occupying Israelis have this right, as he has repeated hundreds of times. “Stop it, stop it now, Joe,” advises Dr. Jill Biden.
Biden has expressed doubt about the Hamas Health Ministry’s fatality count in Gaza – itself a huge undercount. (See my column March 5, 2024 column: Stop the Worsening UNDERCOUNT of Palestinian Casualties in Gaza). His actions enabling the Israeli annihilations (“over the top” he once blurted) are moving the real fatality toll, especially with the Rafah invasion and starvation, to the fastest rate ever recorded in 21st century conflicts, according to experts. This includes the bloody, accelerating deaths of babies and children.
It’s the ongoing massacre of these little innocents—in their mother’s or father’s arms or in crumbling hospitals that led Dr. Jill Biden to admonish: “Stop it, stop it now, Joe.”
Still, Joe Biden conveys weakness to Netanyahu, to Netanyahu’s Congress and its omnipresent “Israel-can-do-no-wrong” lobby. Being weak on such a high visibility and protested genocide in Gaza is bad for your re-election, Joe. Even though Der Führer Donald is worse. Look at the latest polls in the swing states! A true leader doesn’t zig and zag when innocent people are being killed. “Stop it, stop it now, Joe.”
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Morehouse Students Show Solidarity With Gaza During Biden Commencement Speech
"It is my stance as a Morehouse man, nay as a human being, to call for an immediate and permanent cease-fire in the Gaza Strip," said valedictorian DeAngelo Fletcher.
May 19, 2024
Advisers for U.S. President Biden reportedly saw Morehouse College, a historically Black men's college in Atlanta where he gave the commencement address Sunday, as a school where the president was unlikely to face protests over his continued support for Israel's assault on Gaza, which has been the subject of mass demonstrations led by students at universities across the country over the past month.
But students and faculty made clear at the ceremony that many of them, like others in higher education, are intent on sending Biden a strong message of disapproval over his Israel policy.
A number of faculty members and students wore keffiyehs, the traditional scarves worn in parts of the Middle East including Palestine, and by some supporters of Palestinian rights to show solidarity with civilians in Gaza. Others displayed the Palestinian flag on their graduation gowns.
ABC News White House correspondent Selina Wang reported that while most of the alumni present at the graduation stood up when Biden was introduced, all but a few of the students remained seated.
The war in Gaza, where Israel has killed more than 35,000 Palestinians since October while receiving billions of dollars in military aid from the Biden administration, was directly mentioned by valedictorian DeAngelo Fletcher, who had placed a Palestinian flag motif on his graduation cap.
"It is my stance as a Morehouse man, nay, as a human being, to call for an immediate and permanent cease-fire in the Gaza Strip," said Fletcher as Biden sat behind him and applauded. "From the comfort of our homes, we watch an unprecedented number of civilians mourn the loss of men, women, and children, while calling for the release of all hostages."
Some students and faculty turned their backs when the president gave his address, in which he said he supports "peaceful, non-violent protest." Other students walked out of the ceremony, but Biden's speech was not disrupted like the last time he addressed a group of college students at George Mason University, when protesters interrupted him 10 times.
Biden has been rebuked by First Amendment advocates for suggesting the Palestinian solidarity and anti-war protests that have spread across college campuses in recent weeks are inherently antisemitic, and for failing to speak out against aggressive police responses to protests at schools including Emory University, Columbia University, and University of Texas at Austin.
"It's a humanitarian crisis in Gaza. That's why I've called for an immediate cease-fire, an immediate cease-fire to stop the fighting. Bring the hostages home," said the president, adding that he is "working around the clock" to secure a two-state solution in the Middle East and to ensure aid is allowed into Gaza, where key border crossings are now closed by Israel.
Middle Eastern policy expert Assal Rad said Biden's call for a cease-fire seven months into Israel's escalation amounts to "nonsense," considering his administration's veto of several cease-fire resolutions at the U.N. Security Council and the $17 billion military aid package Biden signed in April for Israel.
A majority of Americans disapprove of Israel's assault on Gaza, and Black voters, a key constituency who supported Biden in 2020, are no exception.
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace found last month that 68% of Black Americans wanted the U.S. to demand an immediate and permanent cease-fire, and 59% said conditions must be applied to U.S. military aid to Israel to ensure the Middle Eastern country is using U.S. weapons for "legitimate self-defense and in a way that is consistent with human rights standards."
While 66% of Black Americans overall said their feelings toward Biden had not changed due to his Israel policy, those under age 30 were more likely to say their views on the president had become more negative since October.
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Julian Bond: Race Man, Poet, Movement-Builder -- and Friend
Aug 17, 2015
America has lost a great leader, and many of us lost a good friend.
By the time Julian Bond was 20 years old, he had helped lead the sit-in movement that began dismantling official segregation in Atlanta and he had left the academic life of Morehouse College to help found the legendary Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). As the communications director of SNCC, he worked to call attention of the rest of the world to the struggle by some of the poorest, most disenfranchised Americans to wrest political power from the white establishment in some of the most dangerous parts of the Jim Crow South. SNCC was the #BlackLivesMatter movement before there were hashtags.
By the time he was 30 years old, Julian Bond had been elected to the Georgia Legislature, whose all-white members refused to seat him because of his opposition to the war in Vietnam. He was elected to his own vacant seat three times and seated only after a unanimous decision by the United States Supreme Court. Also, before he was thirty, he led an insurgent Georgia delegation to the 1968 Democratic Convention, where they unseated the segregationist "regular" democratic party delegation. And at that convention he was nominated for Vice-President - an office he was too young to win -- in order to raise the visibility of the civil rights and anti-Vietnam war forces in the Democratic party.
For those of us becoming active in the movement -- especially those of us in the South -- Julian Bond was an absolute hero. He had the courage underfire of the SNCC organizers. And he stood up to the whole Georgia power structure not only against racism but also against the war in Vietnam. He was cool.
The man who shook the world at an early age stayed engaged -- as a movement builder and networker for our 21st Century movement. I first met him in 1970 when he and friends of mine from the Southern Students Organizing Committee worked together to create the Institute for Southern Studies.
He became Chairman of the NAACP in 1998 and worked with others to revitalize that old and respected organization. And he always sought to build a larger, more powerful progressive movement.
Julian was part of the core group who attended the first planning retreat that eventually gave birth to our economic-change organization, the Campaign for America's Future.
In June 2004, I had the honor of introducing Julian at our Take Back America conference. We asked him to speak at a fascinating plenary with the two founders of MoveOn.org, Wes Boyd and Joan Blades. Everyone in the audience was transfixed as Julian imagined what SNCC organizing might have been like with the online networking, actions and fundraising that MoveOn were then pioneering. And Julian, Wes and Joan (who later helped launch Moms Rising) joined together to discuss how the work of the civil rights and anti-war movement had to be expanded to fight for the rights of women, families, LGBT people, and the rights of workers around the world.
Sunday night on PBS Newhour, Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton, another SNCC veteran, shared her memories of Julian -- and declared that she was unprepared because she had just seen him at a Howard University forum with Black Lives Matter activists, and, though she had memories of him going back to the 1960s, he was still a man of the moment:
What Julian managed to do was something that most of us who were in SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, didn't do. He managed to spend his entire life in civil rights, not the sentimental civil rights of our SNCC days, but the civil rights of our time. And that's why he was so respected.
In addition to his ongoing movement-building, Julian eventually became a professor and a scholar, teaching, among other places, at the school I attended in the 1960s, the University of Virginia. He was teaching Southern history and the movements of the 1960s. In 1990, he invited me and another comrade from those days to take over one of his classes to talk to 300 of his students about the Virginia of the segregationist Sen. Harry Byrd machine -- and the almost completely segregated UVa. And, since it was Julian Bond's class, we were able to get the Charlottesville Daily Progress and the Cavalier Daily to come and cover a discussion of how things had changed at that campus and that Southern State -- and how they had not changed enough.
Julian only recently retired from teaching at UVa, and in the process of moving on, he gave an interview to the University of Virginia Magazine that is worth reading. At the end, he was asked, "What would you like your tombstone to say?" His answer was classic Julian:
I want to have a double-sided tombstone, so you have something on each side. And on one side, it's going to say "Race Man." A race man is an expression that's not used anymore, but it used to describe a man--usually a man, could have been a woman too--who was a good defender of the race, who didn't dislike white people, but who stood up for black people, who fought for black people. I'd want people to say that about me. He was a race man. There's no implication here that white people are evil, just that black people are good people and they need somebody to fight for them, and I'm that person. The other side is going to say "Easily Amused," because I am easily amused.
The obituary by Roy Reed that ran on the New York Times website on Sunday ended in a way that captured the easily amused and poetic, soulful side of Julian Bond.
His most famous [piece of poetry] was perhaps a two-line doggerel that he dashed off after one too many overly concerned white students offended him by saying, "If only they were all like you."
The verse:
Look at that girl shake that thing,
We can't all be Martin Luther King.
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