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rashid khalidi
The Genocidal Legacy of Joe Biden Will Not Be Forgotten
While Biden refused to acknowledge the ethnic cleansing and mass murder that he kept making possible with bombs and political support for Netanyahu, Democrats in his orbit cooperated with silence or other types of evasion.
Jan 06, 2025
When news broke over the weekend that President Biden just approved an $8 billion deal for shipping weapons to Israel, a nameless official vowed that “we will continue to provide the capabilities necessary for Israel's defense.” Following the reports last month from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch concluding that Israeli actions in Gaza are genocide, Biden’s decision was a new low for his presidency.
It’s logical to focus on Biden as an individual. His choices to keep sending huge quantities of weaponry to Israel have been pivotal and calamitous. But the presidential genocide and the active acquiescence of the vast majority of Congress are matched by the dominant media and overall politics of the United States.
Forty days after the Gaza war began, Anne Boyer announced her resignation as poetry editor of the New York Times Magazine. More than a year later, her statement illuminates why the moral credibility of so many liberal institutions has collapsed in the wake of Gaza’s destruction.
While Boyer denounced “the Israeli state’s U.S.-backed war against the people of Gaza,” she emphatically chose to disassociate herself from the nation’s leading liberal news organization: “I can’t write about poetry amidst the ‘reasonable’ tones of those who aim to acclimatize us to this unreasonable suffering. No more ghoulish euphemisms. No more verbally sanitized hellscapes. No more warmongering lies.”
The conformist media climate smoothed the way for Biden and his prominent rationalizers to slide off the hook and shape the narrative, disguising complicity as evenhanded policy.
The acclimatizing process soon became routine. It was most crucially abetted by President Biden and his loyalists, who were especially motivated to pretend that he wasn’t really doing what he was really doing.
For mainline journalists, the process required the willing suspension of belief in a consistent standard of language and humanity. When Boyer acutely grasped the dire significance of its Gaza coverage, she withdrew from “the newspaper of record.”
Content analysis of the war’s first six weeks found that coverage by the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times had a steeply dehumanizing slant toward Palestinians. The three papers “disproportionately emphasized Israeli deaths in the conflict” and “used emotive language to describe the killings of Israelis, but not Palestinians,” a study by The Intercept showed. “The term ‘slaughter’ was used by editors and reporters to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 60 to 1, and ‘massacre’ was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 125 to 2. ‘Horrific’ was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 36 to 4.”
After a year of the Gaza war, Arab-American historian Rashid Khalidi said: “My objection to organs of opinion like the New York Times is that they see absolutely everything from an Israeli perspective. ‘How does it affect Israel, how do the Israelis see it?’ Israel is at the center of their worldview, and that’s true of our elites generally, all over the West. The Israelis have very shrewdly, by preventing direct reportage from Gaza, further enabled that Israelocentric perspective.”
Khalidi summed up: “The mainstream media is as blind as it ever was, as willing to shill for any monstrous Israeli lie, to act as stenographers for power, repeating what is said in Washington.”
The conformist media climate smoothed the way for Biden and his prominent rationalizers to slide off the hook and shape the narrative, disguising complicity as evenhanded policy. Meanwhile, mighty boosts of Israel’s weapons and ammunition were coming from the United States. Nearly half of the Palestinians they killed were children.
For those children and their families, the road to hell was paved with good doublethink. So, for instance, while the Gaza horrors went on, no journalist would confront Biden with what he’d said at the time of the widely decried school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, when the president had quickly gone on live television. “There are parents who will never see their child again,” he said, adding: “To lose a child is like having a piece of your soul ripped away. . . . It’s a feeling shared by the siblings, and the grandparents, and their family members, and the community that’s left behind.” And he asked plaintively, “Why are we willing to live with this carnage? Why do we keep letting this happen?”
The massacre in Uvalde killed 19 children. The daily massacre in Gaza has taken the lives of that many Palestinian kids in a matter of hours.
While Biden refused to acknowledge the ethnic cleansing and mass murder that he kept making possible, Democrats in his orbit cooperated with silence or other types of evasion. A longstanding maneuver amounts to checking the box for a requisite platitude by affirming support for a “two-state solution.”
Dominating Capitol Hill, an unspoken precept has held that Palestinian people are expendable as a practical political matter. Party leaders like Senator Chuck Schumer and Representative Hakeem Jeffries did virtually nothing to indicate otherwise. Nor did they exert themselves to defend incumbent House Democrats Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, defeated in summer primaries with an unprecedented deluge of multimillion-dollar ad campaigns funded by AIPAC and Republican donors.
The overall media environment was a bit more varied but no less lethal for Palestinian civilians. During its first several months, the Gaza war received huge quantities of mainstream media coverage, which thinned over time; the effects were largely to normalize the continual slaughter. Some exceptional reporting existed about the suffering, but the journalism gradually took on a media ambience akin to background noise, while credulously hyping Biden’s weak ceasefire efforts as determined quests.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came in for increasing amounts of criticism. But the prevalent U.S. media coverage and political rhetoric—unwilling to expose the Israeli mission to destroy Palestinians en masse—rarely went beyond portraying Israel’s leaders as insufficiently concerned with protecting Palestinian civilians.
Instead of candor about horrific truths, the usual tales of U.S. media and politics have offered euphemisms and evasions.
When she resigned as the New York Times Magazine poetry editor in mid-November 2023, Anne Boyer condemned what she called “an ongoing war against the people of Palestine, people who have resisted through decades of occupation, forced dislocation, deprivation, surveillance, siege, imprisonment, and torture.” Another poet, William Stafford, wrote decades ago:
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.
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Opposed to Genocide in Gaza, This Is the Conscience of a Nation Speaking Through Your Kids
This is about a genocide being carried out with American money and with American weapons against a people that has been living under occupation for generation after generation after generation.
May 03, 2024
Common Dreams Editor's Note: This is a transcript of remarks made by Professor Rashid Khalidi just outside the gates of Columbia University on Wednesday, May 1, 2024, just hours after NYPD officers raided Hamilton Hall to remove demonstrators who had occupied the building in protest of Israel's ongoing military assault on the people of Gaza.
My name is Rashid Khalidi. I am the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University. I've been teaching here for a total of 22 years.
When I was a student back in the 60s, we were told we were "led by a bunch of outside agitators" by politicians nobody remembers the name of today. We were the conscience of this nation when we opposed the Vietnam War and racism back in 1968 and 1969 and 1970. The Vietnam War stopped because the people opposed it, and the people who led that were students, and the students who led that were here at Columbia and at Berkeley and a few other campuses on this fair Turtle Island.
This is not about Columbia or CCNY or Berkeley or UCLA or any other place where the students have risen up. This is the conscience of a nation speaking through your kids—through young people who are risking their futures, who are risking suspension, expulsion, and criminal arrest in order to wake people up in this country.
Students have been on the right side of history at Columbia and at other universities ever since the 1960s. We today honor the students who in 1968 opposed a genocidal, illegal, shameful war. Columbia University honors them. They're on the Columbia website; you can check it out yourself—1968 is commemorated. And one day what our students did here will be commemorated in the same way.
They are—and they were—on the right side of history, and that will go down in history, that when the change finally came and finally the American people who have already opposed this war—who've already opposed this genocide—are able to force their craven politicians to stop it, which we can do.
The United States is part of this war. Every plane bombing Gaza is an American plane: F-16s, F-15s, F-35s. Every Apache helicopter is American. Every bomb dropped is American. Those are our taxes. Those are our representatives. Shame on them and shame on the administration of this university. They will go down in infamy for having done what they did the other night.
Columbia Prof’s Fiery Speech—Students opposed Vietnam War in '68, fighting against Gaza genocide nowwww.youtube.com
Today, nobody remembers the names of the administrators and the trustees who ordered the police onto the Columbia campus in 1968. They have gone down in ignominy and so will these leaders, President [Minouche] Shafik and the Board of Trustees.
And the students will be remembered one day on a Columbia website as the people who helped change the course of this country, together with the brave students up at CCNY. We should shout out to them—together with the students at NYU, FIT, and all over this country.
What we are witnessing in terms of police repression is a tiny fraction of what people under occupation in Palestine have been experiencing for 56 years: the kettling, the checkpoints, the blockades, the police dragging students out (many of them were injured last night), the lies [about] outside agitators. Wait until the numbers come out from One Police Plaza. They were all students. They were our students. And we are ashamed of our university for instead of continuing the negotiations—that many faculty were happy to be part of—decided to bring in the NYPD.
This administration has brought disgrace on Columbia University. Shame on them. Shame on them.
This is not and was not about safety and comfort, which is what they claimed. Do we feel safer today now that 100 of our students have been processed down at One Police Plaza? Do we feel safer today that faculty and students cannot get onto their own campus? Of course not.
Public opinion is already with us. It's just the politicians, the media, and the trustees and administration of this university who are blind, death, and dumb to the demand of a moral imperative coming from our students.
This was a craven capitulation to external pressure. The students didn't want it. The faculty didn't want it. Outside forces wanted it: the politicians; the media—which has shamefully failed to report so much of what's actually happening here and which has exaggerated incidents instead of looking at the whole picture.
I don't want to talk more about the media. This is not about safety and comfort. This is about a genocide being carried out with American money and with American weapons against a people that has been living under occupation for generation after generation after generation. That's what it's really about. That's what the students were about and that's what Faculty and Staff for justice in Palestine are about.
What we are witnessing in terms of police repression is a tiny fraction of what people under occupation in Palestine have been experiencing for 56 years.
We are faculty and staff who believe that our students should be safe—all of our students should be safe. But the right to protest, the right to free speech, and academic freedom—which is being infringed as we speak. University protocols, the arrangements that this university made since 1968 to deal with these things, have been swept aside in an arbitrary fashion by this administration in response to external pressure. Shame on this administration.
I repeat one
more time: This is not about Columbia or CCNY or Berkeley or UCLA or any other
place where the students have risen up. This is the conscience of a nation
speaking through your kids—through young
people who are risking their futures,
who are risking suspension, expulsion, and criminal arrest in order to
wake people up in this country. It's
absolutely essential.
Public opinion is already with us. It's just the politicians, the media, and the trustees and administration of this university who are blind, death, and dumb to the demand of a moral imperative coming from our students. Thank you very much.
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