USA

… But most Americans are in the middle. They don’t care much about anything. They not only do not know where Gaza is, but they do not know what Hamas stands for, or what Hamas holds holy. If you told them, they would probably listen – just like they would listen to the detractors. And their takeaway would be that a keffiyeh makes a very attractive scarf.

When people stop caring, they stop caring about everything. “Right” and “wrong,” “evil” and “justice” become just words. Issues-based dialogue and decisions become less relevant, often even totally irrelevant.

Israel’s military says it already looked into reports of mass graves and found no wrongdoing by its forces, even as the Biden administration calls for an investigation into the matter.

Over the past few days, U.S. officials, including national security adviser Jake Sullivan, have called for Israel to “thoroughly and transparently” investigate reports of mass graves at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, which Israeli forces last raided in February. The State Department came under fire from advocates for refusing to call for an independent investigation, instead saying the U.S. will press Israel for information.

On Friday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” White House National Security Communications Adviser John Kirby stated that Hamas doesn’t care about the Palestinian people and if they did, “they’d lay down their arms, they’d step aside, they’d release those hostages,” but they’ve refused hostage release offers. Kirby also stated that there have been too many civilians killed in Gaza and the number of civilian casualties “needs to be zero.”

If I didn’t know better I’d say there was an election pending.

Pundits and protestors are drawing parallels between Joe Biden and Lyndon B Johnson – another liberal presidency doomed by an ugly war. In so many ways, Gaza is not Vietnam. America has no boots on the ground; no draft if it did. Yet the analogy builds in three troubling steps.

One: Biden owns the Middle East conflict even as he denounces the casualties. Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times notes that in January, the Israelis dropped a US-made bomb from a US-made plane on a US-relief group in a war supported by the US. “How can that not come back to Biden?” Kristof concludes that the President, for all his anti-war instincts, remains a die-hard Zionist, reluctant even to cut ties with an alleged crook like Netanyahu (there is reportedly a photo of the President on the prime minister’s desk inscribed: “Bibi, I love you but I don’t agree with a damn thing you have to say.”)

Confrontations between pro-Palestinian student protesters and police continued to spread at colleges across the country, with fresh arrests at Emerson College, the University of Southern California and the University of Texas at Austin, and reports of new encampments set up at Princeton University and Northwestern University.

In Boston, police moved to break up a protest led by Emerson College students outside the State Transportation Building, moving in on students who formed a human wall and raised umbrellas, according to video footage from the scene.

Mass arrests begin pic.twitter.com/IqBJLdrbTE

— Working Mass (@DSAWorkingMass) April 25, 2024