Biden's Gaza Legacy Is Not Just Death and Destruction, But Lies, Lies, and More Lies
Here are seven of his worst, as we bid farewell to a president who will be remembered in the same way that we remember George W. Bush and Lyndon B. Johnson.
There are a plethora of much-discussed reasons as to why Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. will not be sworn in for a second term as president of the United States next week. His age and mental incompetence, for example; not to mention the catastrophic TV debate that exposed his mental incompetence to over 50 million viewers. There was the painful spike in inflation in 2022 from which he and his administration never fully recovered. And the online propaganda war waged against him by the world’s richest man. The sitting president was also one of multiple elected victims of a post-COVID anti-incumbency wave across the democratic world.
However, as we approach January 20 and his ignominious exit from the Oval Office, the Very Serious People in our mainstream media continue to ignore one key factor in Biden’s fall from grace: the US-backed slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza.
Yes, Biden’s complicity in the Gaza genocide cost him and his party tremendous support with key Democratic constituencies, from young voters, to Black pastors, to Muslim and Arab-American communities in swing states.
Don’t take my word for it. Here’s what Biden’s own ambassador to Israel, Jack Lew, said in his exit interview with the Times of Israel earlier this week: “Standing with Israel for these past 15 months, with huge opposition in the media, in parts of his own party, you could argue that it contributed to making his challenge for reelection insurmountable.”
Insurmountable. Think about that. The president of the United States, charged with protecting American democracy from the most far-right Republican presidential candidate of our lifetime, helped wreck his own chances for re-election by “standing with” the most far-right Israeli government in history.
But Biden didn’t just throw his unwavering support behind Benjamin Netanyahu and his hawkish coterie of fascists and racists. The US president also lied to the American public on behalf of the Israeli premier and his génocidaires. And he has done so, without any shame or compunction, over and over again since Oct. 7, 2023.
Here is a timeline of his seven worst Gaza lies:
1. ‘Beheaded Babies’
On Oct. 11, 2023, four days after the Hamas attacks inside of Israel, Biden lied when he said he had seen “confirmed pictures of terrorists beheading children.” Biden could not have seen any such “confirmed” pictures as there were no children beheaded on Oct. 7. “A White House spokesperson later clarified that US officials and the president have not seen pictures or confirmed such reports independently,” the Washington Post reported. But it was too late: The alleged killer of 6-year-old Palestinian-American Wadea Al-Fayoume in Illinois “had become enraged due to coverage of the Israel-Hamas war, including claims that Israeli babies had been beheaded by Hamas fighters,” per the BBC.
2. Casualty Figures
On Oct. 25, 2023, Biden lied when he said that he was “sure innocents have been killed” in Gaza but that he had “no confidence in the number that Palestinians are using.” Yet Biden knew that his own State Department trusted, relied on, and cited Gaza Health Ministry casualty figures in its own internal reports. His own assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, Barbara Leaf, even told a House panel the following month that the number of Palestinians killed more than one month into the war was likely “higher than is being cited.” She was right: A new peer-reviewed analysis from The Lancet medical journal found that “deaths from bombs and other traumatic injuries during the first nine months of the war in Gaza may have been underestimated by more than 40 percent.”
3. Al-Shifa Hospital
On Nov. 16, 2023, Biden lied when he claimed Hamas had “their headquarters, their military hidden under a hospital,” in reference to al-Shifa hospital in northern Gaza. “That’s a fact,” he added. Yet no such “headquarters” or Hamas “military” were ever discovered under that hospital, despite multiple Israeli raids. A month later, an investigation by the Washington Post concluded that the evidence on al-Shifa presented by the Israeli government fell “short of showing that Hamas had been using the hospital as a command and control center” and there was “no immediate evidence of military use by Hamas.” The Israeli military left the hospital “in ruins and littered with human remains.”
4. ‘Beheaded Babies’ (Again!)
On Dec. 12, 2023, Biden lied again about having seen pictures of beheaded babies at a campaign event in Washington, DC. “I saw some of the photographs when I was there,” he told the audience. “Tying a mother and her daughter together on a rope and then pouring kerosene on them and then burning them, beheading infants, doing things that are just inhuman — totally, completely inhuman.” To reiterate: there were no beheaded infants on Oct. 7 and, therefore, no photographs of beheaded infants for Biden to have seen.
5. Rafah ‘Red Line’
On March 8, 2024, Biden lied when he said in an interview with MSNBC that an Israeli invasion of Rafah in southern Gaza would be “a red line” for him. On May 8, he lied again when he told CNN that if the Israeli military “go into Rafah, I’m not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah… we’re not going to supply the weapons and artillery shells.” Less than a week later, Israeli forces entered several neighborhoods in eastern Rafah; less than three weeks later, Israeli tanks could be seen in central Rafah. Today, Rafah is in ruins.
Did Biden halt the supply of weapons to Israel? In August 2024, his administration approved more than $20 billion in major arms sales to Israel, “including new F-15 fighter jets and tens of thousands of tank and mortar shells.” Between October 2023 and October 2024, the US approved $17.9 billion in security assistance for Israeli military operations in Gaza and beyond.
So much for “red lines.”
6. Hostage Deals
On June 27, 2024, Biden lied when he insisted, in his disastrous debate with Donald Trump on live television, that Hamas, and not Israel, was the party blocking a hostage deal and ceasefire and that the “only one who wants the war to continue is Hamas.”
Yet Biden must have known that, just four days earlier, Netanyahu had told Israeli television that he was “committed to continuing the war after a pause” and that he would only agree to a “partial” ceasefire. Again and again, Netanyahu had rejected hostage deals and insisted on continuing his savage bombardment of the Gaza Strip. Netanyahu’s own Defense Minister Yoav Gallant at the time would accuse the Israeli prime minister of “abandoning the hostages” in August. Earlier this week, as the incoming Trump administration pressured the Israeli government into agreeing to a hostage deal, far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir bragged how “in the past year, through our political power, we succeeded in preventing this deal from moving forward, time and time again.” (Last time I checked, Ben-Gvir was not a member of Hamas.)
7. Netanyahu’s Intentions
On Oct. 4, 2024, Biden lied about whether he believed Netanyahu was resisting a ceasefire deal in order to help Trump get elected. “Whether he’s trying to influence the election, I don’t know,” he told reporters during a surprise appearance at a White House press briefing.
And yet, in private, according to reporting from Politico just two days earlier, Biden had told confidants that “he did not believe his Israeli counterpart wanted a ceasefire deal, arguing that Netanyahu was trying to perpetuate the conflict to save his political future and assist Trump in November’s election.”
Got that? One message in public and another in private.
Biden’s Middle East record is one of fecklessness and failure; of chaos and carnage; of death and destruction. But at the core of his legacy on Gaza are lies, lies, and more lies. An arc of deception and dishonesty that matches Lyndon B. Johnson on Vietnam and George W. Bush on Iraq.
And, as with the 36th and 43rd presidents of the United States, history will not be kind to the 46th president.
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As Chomsky said, every American president since FDR could have been hanged if we actually applied the Nuremberg principles to ourselves:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mlnBp_NWU30&pp=ygUiQW1lcmljYW4gcHJlc2lkZW50cyBjaG9tc2t5IGhhbmdlZA%3D%3D
Thank you for setting the record straight! Sadly, it's too late to save the lives of around 61,000 innocent men, women, and children! Biden needs to be prosecuted for war crimes along with Netanyahu, Smotrich, and the other extremists in the Israeli cabinet.