The Last Place To Look For Solutions

A news story yesterday in the New York Times quoted Cindy McCain, director of the World Food Program, as saying that northern Gaza has descended into full-blown famine, and that it is spreading south. In other words, the genocide is nearing completion. With our help.

This is part of a pattern. Our president, Joe Biden, has lied and euphemized about the carnage in Gaza since October 7 of last year, and eagerly sent Israel billions more in money and weaponry. He excuses the genocide with the crude excuse "Israel has the right to self-defense." When starving families sitting in their apartments are bombed and buried under rubble it counts as legitimate self-defense in the Genocide Joe calculus.

Students at colleges and universities across the country are demonstrating in support of the Palestinians and shaming their administrations for their investments in Israel. Our corporate media cover this, but frame it in terms of lawlessness and "anti-Semitism." In media parlance this is known as a "narrative." A mob attacked student protesters with clubs and metal pipes at UCLA on Thursday, but the LA Times described the mob as "counter-demonstrators." I suspect that when it is found out just who these attackers are it will be something much more ominous.

The most well-known protest is going on at Columbia University in New York City, where students are being vilified, beaten and arrested by police, and expelled from school. This follows months of university presidents being bullied by Congressional committees about supposed anti-Semitism, and the Speaker of the House Mike Johnson coming to the Columbia campus to insult and denigrate the students, all for purposes other than addressing anything real about Gaza, genocide, freedom of speech or the right to freely assemble.

Here in Madison, home of the University of Wisconsin’s main campus, students are camped out at the Library Mall, similar to the student protesters at Columbia. Campus police and sheriff’s deputies broke up the encampment Wednesday, arresting 34 students and professors, similar to what is going on in New York. 

The encampment resumed two hours later, and the tents are back, being given a temporary suspension of police involvement while "negotiations" are being pursued. It has been a huge embarrassment for the university chancellor Jennifer Mnookin and her bureaucratic bunglers, and most importantly is unpopular.

I stopped by the encampment Friday, talked with a few students, took some pictures, and listened to an eloquent speech by a Palestinian imam from Milwaukee, Sheikh Rami Bleibel. It was a relaxing, sunny day, and the students were casually engaged in conversations and study for final exams. There was one non-student decked out in "patriotic" regalia of the MAGA kind, wandering around the crowd seeking attention or trouble, but being completely ignored. I followed him for a few minutes, just to see what he was up to. He left after parading through the area, full of swagger to the end, but no one paid him any attention. Had it been UCLA it would not have been one guy, they would have been bigger, and with weapons.

I spent four months in Los Angeles in 1968, a last fling before going into the U.S. Army. Hitchhiking was pretty common in those days, and one night I got bored with what I was doing with friends in Northridge and tried my luck hitchhiking back to the apartment we lived in. I got ticketed by a cop for being off the curb when I was hitchhiking. There was no curb on that part of the street, but all the arresting officer needed was an excuse. I looked like a hippie, and that was enough. When I protested that there was no curb the cop made it clear that this was non-negotiable. 

I had to go to court in nearby Van Nuys a couple of weeks later to pay a fine, around $25, if I remember right. Not long after that I returned to Illinois to embark on a three-year indenture to the U.S. military. Heh. I hitchhiked a few times while in the Army, once from Fort Monmouth to D.C. and later in Germany. No police ever stopped me.

It didn’t seem like it at the time, but looking back on it, I was lucky. The cop was looking for trouble. I remember him saying how surprised he was that I was polite, and I suppose it was due to the fact that I was from out-of-state that I just kind of went with the flow. Had I not been polite, who knows how it would have turned out.

What I have learned since then is that California police, and especially in Los Angeles, are in general the most brutal and corrupt in the country, though many other places are catching up. Student protests are an opportunity to practice their skills and get in a bit of sadism. All with impunity, as bureaucrats in higher education desperately try to do what they think will help them keep their jobs. Career outweighs any consideration of ethics, morality or common decency. Serve power at all times, however illegitimate.

What we have is a genocide nearing its dénouement, and the money, weapons and political sponsor, us, doing whatever possible to provide propaganda cover and bullying of dissenters. Members of Congress who question our support for Israel are being threatened and having primary election challenges, their opponents sponsored by AIPAC, the American Israel Political Affairs Committee.

Genocide Joe Biden needs to toe the line with the Israeli genocide, lest he find AIPAC turn its support to deranged criminal sociopath Donald Trump. Politicians routinely sell their souls to the Devil, in metaphorical terms, so Biden is not unique. What may be a bit unique, though, is how transparently phony his complicity with Israel’s genocide is, and how silly he looks pretending he is concerned about the Palestinians when he so eagerly sends Israel more money and weapons, repeatedly.

As I have said before, this will not end well for anyone. It certainly won’t end well for the Palestinians, who face the deaths of millions from indiscriminate bombing, starvation, and from the pending and meaningless attack on Rafah. It won’t end well for Joe Biden, who from my perspective will not be the "Democratic" candidate for president by November 5, election day. It won’t end well for the university presidents who chose career over competence and decency. 

And it won't end well for the United States of America, a nation that has abandoned its role as the champion of human rights and respect for any kind of rule of law. We, along with Israel, are becoming a world pariah. This all comes at a time when climate change is kicking into high gear, and the worldwide infinite-growth industrial behemoth is about to face finitude. As global Capitalism finally reaches its day of reckoning, the last place people on this planet look to for solutions will be the gone mad U.S. of A.

______________________________________

Here's a song. Original version.  John Lennon. Hans Wilhelm explains Karma. Allen Ginsberg. Buffalo Springfield. David Bowie.

A fresh perspective on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Professors nationwide are supporting their students in their protests against the genocide in Gaza.