Can someone explain to me why Americans seem so hostile towards Biden over Gaza all of a sudden?
US support for Israel goes back decades. America has been in bed with all sorts of dictators commiting heinous crimes and still is. Not to forget the illegal invasion of Iraq with hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties or the long list of US war crimes revealed by WikiLeaks and largely indiscriminate drone strikes across the globe. Most of these seemed to elicit much harsher condemnation overseas while the US public appeared generally uninterested. So why does this conflict in Palestine in which the US isn’t even an active party suddenly evoke such an emotional response?
It’s one of the chosen flavor of the month hot topics of manufactured outrage they all jump on every election year.
In 2016 and 2020 it was the Bernie Bros. This year it’s this mess. Most of them didn’t have two shits to give about Palestine six months ago, and probably couldn’t have pointed to it on a map- and now they’re all experts on the Palestinian/Israeli war.
They’ll all disappear after the election not giving a shit over who won- and they’ll be indistinguishable from the rest of the people complaining about whoever wins.
Yeah, genocide sure is manufactured outage. I’m sure you’re one of those people who think you would’ve stood up to the nazis. In reality you stan the democrat party, which insists we work with republicans and which also loves funding genocide.
I “stan” for democracy. And yes- your accusation of Biden committing genocide is absolutely manufactured outrage. It reads like the type of right-wing rhetoric that the rest of us aren’t ignorant enough to fall for.
And if we’re labeling, it’s only fair-
I’m sure you’re one of those people that didn’t give a shit about Palestine six months ago, nor was able to point to it on a map.
I wasn’t on Lemmy for the 2021 bombing campaign. Trying to look at people’s comment history on a new platform to see if they cared about it in the past is hilarious.
Mainly just due to the recency and severity of the conflict in Gaza, and the fact that it’s an election year. Americans never cared when Israeli soldiers routinely dehumanized, murdered, and raped Palestinians in small numbers here and there, but the widespread media coverage of the conflict in Palestine has helped shape public opinion to recognize the incredibly disproportionate response on the part of Israel to the Oct. 7 attacks.
Biden is reaffirming the US’s long-held stance on Israel, but it is a stance that is becoming less popular with many who disagree with what Israel is doing. Michigan in particular has a high population of Muslims who turned out in large numbers to oppose Biden, which is why this managed to become newsworthy.
I would also wager a good chunk of this narrative (certainly not all or even the majority, but a good chunk) is likely promoted by Republican-aligned groups who are using this momentum to discourage people on the fence from voting for Biden in the general to help secure a Trump win. Notably a lot of news coverage I’ve seen lately featured people confirming their plan to vote for Trump, rather than vote for no one, because of Biden’s stance on Israel.
Trump himself is remaining relatively tight-lipped about his stance on Israel during this election cycle, despite being a vocal ally of Netanyahu during his previous term, to try to keep the dialog focused on Biden. But it is expected he will continue support for Israel, or even escalate it, due to his previous amicable relationship with Israel and based on how much his voter base likes to dehumanize Muslims (blocking all Muslims from entering the US was an early campaign promise of his in 2016).
There’s a segment of liberals that view any victimized or oppressed group as morally superior regardless of context.
Michigan specifically has a very high population of Muslim/middle eastern descent.
It’s not that sudden, there’s been growing criticism and calling Israel an apartheid state for years. The recent escalation in hostilities just made it more newsworthy.
OK but republicans demanded help to Israel to help Ukraine, until they changed it up.
So it seems that although Biden may be bad, the only alternative is worse.
No, the president gets our votes automatically because he’s got the job already and can beat the mean fascist man without tying! All we have to do is verbally abuse anyone criticizing Biden and we’ll surely have him as president again and there’ll be no problems come 2028 or anything!
Downvote them all you want, it’s a very poignant point that’s left at the wayside of defeating Trump right now. Joe wins in ‘24? The threat of a second Trump presidency is deferred, but he has fundamentally transformed American politics regardless
“Deferred” like he’s likely to be back in 2028. Extremely unlikely he will be eligible by then, and even more unlikely he’ll even be able to mentally/physically fit enough to campaign. He’s already falling to pieces.
Progressives in a nutshell. They will be upset with the status quo no matter what.
Even if Bernie was nominated and elected, progressives would have turned on him within a year, because he wouldn’t have been able to get policy passed without major concessions, which would then alienate the progressive base for not being perfect.
You are correct. People expect big sweeping changes and are upset when it doesn’t. What people need to realise is that it’s like a rudder on a giant ship. If you keep voting left then you slowly move left. Which also means any time the right wins we stay on course or move further right.
Even if Bernie was nominated and elected, progressives would have turned on him within a year, because he wouldn’t have been able to get policy passed without major concessions, which would then alienate the progressive base for not being perfect.
I’m starting to believe the worse guy isn’t much worse after all. I wanted Biden to win because of promised immigration reform. He promised to halt the expansion of the wall. Give a pathway to all the people under DACA suffering in eternal immigration limbo.
What does he do instead? Continues the Trump administration’s policies of using COVID loopholes to deny people at the border seeking asylum. Then he expands construction of the wall he promised to halt, and meanwhile does a couple photoshoots at the border with CBP officers.
Of course, absolutely squat was said about DACA or the millions of people who were filled with hope in 2020 after Biden won. Now we know the hope was a scam. It was all an illusion. A mirage.
My main reason I don’t want Trump is because he is racist and xenophobic against Latin Americans. But if Biden is following in his footsteps virtually exactly…
Why should I give a shit who becomes president? I don’t like Trump but there’s no way I’m voting for Biden. I want him to lose. I want the Democrats to realize they can’t just do this forever. I want them to change their strategy. If I vote for Biden and he wins, they learn nothing. They will continue lying and being hypocrites forever.
If Trump wins, you may never get a chance to vote for another president.
Trump is a narcissistic sociopath, to even try to compare the 2 on the level of evil they are capable of, is extremely naive. Also Trump is a traitor who is willing to sell out American interests to Putin.
You may be disappointed with Biden, but there is zero doubt he is the lesser of 2 evils by far. Especially if you are not a billionaire.
If Trump wins, you may never get a chance to vote for another president.
what is the difference between not being able to vote and being forced into voting for one candidate you hate?
Trump is a narcissistic sociopath, to even try to compare the 2 on the level of evil they are capable of, is extremely naive
i think you are the one being naive. trump cannot be the eternal boogeyman that justifies giving the democrats a blank check to do whatever they want. they are both equally shit. trump’s a xenophobic racist who was aspirations to be another mussolini, biden actively supports genocide and does not give a single fuck about the people who put him in power.
there is no lesser evil here. just two different types of evil
Can someone explain to me why Americans seem so hostile towards Biden over Gaza all of a sudden?
He proactively circumvented congress to sell Netanyahu weapons that he knew would be used for genocide.
Democrats can always find a lame procedural excuse when there’s something they ran on but don’t want to do, but when it’s something they want to do like enable genocide (and oh lordy do they ever), procedure and decorum evaporate in a puff of hypocrisy and convenience.
Potential narrative or sentiment shift driven by bots in the wake of the upcoming election?
There’s definitely a lot of sentiment against him for what he’s done in regards to this of course but it’s seemed to have accelerated in an unnatural fashion.
“Everyone I disagree with is a bot and it is only I, the one with the correct opinions, who is a thinking human being who is also immune to propaganda”
In the early 2000’s we weren’t as connected as we are now and people relied a lot more on cable/network news.
But also, and this is really important to understand, the civilian casualties from the Iraq war were over much larger areas, populations, and time. In the same time frame the rate of casualties was far lower. Coalition forces also did their best to avoid civilian casualties by not targeting hospitals, not kettling civilians, and certainly not doing a concerted bombing campaign with large bombs into highly populated areas.
A lot of what’s happening with the rate of civilian casualties is because the IDF has thrown all of those protections out the window. They’re specifically destroying the food, water, and medical infrastructure of Gaza. When people inevitably try to evacuate they can only do so further into Gaza. The IDF doesn’t allow them to evacuate through their lines into cleared areas. This means people can never actually get away from the fighting. Those are all large scale war crimes designed to increase the number of civilian casualties. But they aren’t removing troops credibly accused of war crimes from the area either. In fact they’ve shown no willingness to prosecute tactical level warcrimes such as shooting clearly marked journalists in a quiet area in broad daylight.
Just today the report landed on NPR radio that the IDF opened fire into a crowd waiting for food aid. The IDF is of course claiming the crowd was threatening. But we’ve known how to securely disperse food aid for decades. Those soldiers may very well have been threatened, but their officers set that situation up. Also of note is just how fast this gets out to the world in the era of social media.
And we haven’t even talked about the immense amount of war weariness in the US.
So why does this conflict in Palestine in which the US isn’t even an active party suddenly evoke such an emotional response?
Because the US is by all means an active party. The US is selling Israel weapons (including weapons Biden has been bypassing Congress to sell), defending them on the international stage and literally sent them aircraft carriers to prevent anyone in the region from taking action. People have been found guilty in the Numenberg trials for less and people aren’t liking the man who’s supposed to represent them doing these things.
Because the genocide in Gaza is currently at an all time high? Israel is actively in the process of invading them, supported and defended fully by the US to the detriment of the international community?
America isn’t currently arming death squads in South America or where right now at the moment or you’d be hearing about that instead.
It’s like asking why are Americans talking so much more about trans rights lately when they’ve always been bad.
There were marches like, every other weekend about the invasion of Iraq even before the news came out that we were there over a lie. But Bush was president and it was like, “aww… look at the hippies… they think they’re helping… lol!”
It was honestly hard to protest when Obama was in office because there were so many frothing racists about that any public protests against the actions of the president would be joined by literal KKK members. But we wrote letters… oh boy did we ever write letters. Letter writing parties, phone banking about writing letters, sending out mailers with contact info for all of the local reps and higher ups to send letters to, including pre stamped envelopes and form letters to add your name to.
Nobody cared because Obama was so popular that there wasn’t really a question of his reelection. Biden is not that popular, the rare opportunity to use a major issue as leverage to threaten a reelection campaign, even if the result of his loss would be dire is why there is so much news about public opinion on Israel/Palestine.
The American left is furious at Biden for the same reason we’re angry at pretty much any President’s foreign policy. We’ve opposed most of the interventions and support for dictators that presidents in the latter half of the twentieth century up to today have engaged in. But we have never been the majority, and haven’t had the power to stop them. It’s important to remember that about a third of the US is composed or pretty reasonable, pro-peace social democrats. The problem is that another third are “moderates” that are okay with empire as long as we pretend we’re being nice, and the last third are maniacal religious fascists.
Guess you missed the huge anti Iraq war protests in the early 2000s. And the fact that we’ve been making Internet jokes about that and George Bush junior since forever.
Can someone explain to me why Americans seem so hostile towards Biden over Gaza all of a sudden?
US support for Israel goes back decades. America has been in bed with all sorts of dictators commiting heinous crimes and still is. Not to forget the illegal invasion of Iraq with hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties or the long list of US war crimes revealed by WikiLeaks and largely indiscriminate drone strikes across the globe. Most of these seemed to elicit much harsher condemnation overseas while the US public appeared generally uninterested. So why does this conflict in Palestine in which the US isn’t even an active party suddenly evoke such an emotional response?
It’s one of the chosen flavor of the month hot topics of manufactured outrage they all jump on every election year.
In 2016 and 2020 it was the Bernie Bros. This year it’s this mess. Most of them didn’t have two shits to give about Palestine six months ago, and probably couldn’t have pointed to it on a map- and now they’re all experts on the Palestinian/Israeli war.
They’ll all disappear after the election not giving a shit over who won- and they’ll be indistinguishable from the rest of the people complaining about whoever wins.
Yeah, genocide sure is manufactured outage. I’m sure you’re one of those people who think you would’ve stood up to the nazis. In reality you stan the democrat party, which insists we work with republicans and which also loves funding genocide.
I “stan” for democracy. And yes- your accusation of Biden committing genocide is absolutely manufactured outrage. It reads like the type of right-wing rhetoric that the rest of us aren’t ignorant enough to fall for.
And if we’re labeling, it’s only fair-
I’m sure you’re one of those people that didn’t give a shit about Palestine six months ago, nor was able to point to it on a map.
I wasn’t on Lemmy for the 2021 bombing campaign. Trying to look at people’s comment history on a new platform to see if they cared about it in the past is hilarious.
Mainly just due to the recency and severity of the conflict in Gaza, and the fact that it’s an election year. Americans never cared when Israeli soldiers routinely dehumanized, murdered, and raped Palestinians in small numbers here and there, but the widespread media coverage of the conflict in Palestine has helped shape public opinion to recognize the incredibly disproportionate response on the part of Israel to the Oct. 7 attacks.
Biden is reaffirming the US’s long-held stance on Israel, but it is a stance that is becoming less popular with many who disagree with what Israel is doing. Michigan in particular has a high population of Muslims who turned out in large numbers to oppose Biden, which is why this managed to become newsworthy.
I would also wager a good chunk of this narrative (certainly not all or even the majority, but a good chunk) is likely promoted by Republican-aligned groups who are using this momentum to discourage people on the fence from voting for Biden in the general to help secure a Trump win. Notably a lot of news coverage I’ve seen lately featured people confirming their plan to vote for Trump, rather than vote for no one, because of Biden’s stance on Israel.
Trump himself is remaining relatively tight-lipped about his stance on Israel during this election cycle, despite being a vocal ally of Netanyahu during his previous term, to try to keep the dialog focused on Biden. But it is expected he will continue support for Israel, or even escalate it, due to his previous amicable relationship with Israel and based on how much his voter base likes to dehumanize Muslims (blocking all Muslims from entering the US was an early campaign promise of his in 2016).
No. We cared. It’s just really hard to get anyone to look at the issue when the standard media line was, lol brown people terrorists.
Progressives who pay attention to international politics have been yelling from the rooftops about Israel’s Apartheid tactics for at least 2 decades.
I would also add that social media showing real-time atrocities happening has also played a role.
OK but republicans demanded help to Israel to help Ukraine, until they changed it up.
So it seems that although Biden may be bad, the only alternative is worse.
If you’re being punched in the gut, it’s not reassuring that the other option is going to use a bat instead.
But why clear the way for the worse guy to get to you?
Ya, Trump bad and all, but maybe it’s Biden who should do more to get the anti-genocide vote. Isn’t getting votes part of his job?
No, the president gets our votes automatically because he’s got the job already and can beat the mean fascist man without tying! All we have to do is verbally abuse anyone criticizing Biden and we’ll surely have him as president again and there’ll be no problems come 2028 or anything!
Downvote them all you want, it’s a very poignant point that’s left at the wayside of defeating Trump right now. Joe wins in ‘24? The threat of a second Trump presidency is deferred, but he has fundamentally transformed American politics regardless
“Deferred” like he’s likely to be back in 2028. Extremely unlikely he will be eligible by then, and even more unlikely he’ll even be able to mentally/physically fit enough to campaign. He’s already falling to pieces.
Glad someone else is talking about this, fascism is not going away.
Progressives in a nutshell. They will be upset with the status quo no matter what.
Even if Bernie was nominated and elected, progressives would have turned on him within a year, because he wouldn’t have been able to get policy passed without major concessions, which would then alienate the progressive base for not being perfect.
“If you don’t like our hellscape status quo then you’re just looking for perfection” - out of touch democrat stans
You are correct. People expect big sweeping changes and are upset when it doesn’t. What people need to realise is that it’s like a rudder on a giant ship. If you keep voting left then you slowly move left. Which also means any time the right wins we stay on course or move further right.
People need to take a long term view.
Until you actually look at the rudder and realize it’s not connected to the electoral system at all.
I’m gonna borrow this, very succinct.
So you support genocide, but you’re mad that progressives don’t?
Really? You believe that’s a good talking point?
Wow.
I’m starting to believe the worse guy isn’t much worse after all. I wanted Biden to win because of promised immigration reform. He promised to halt the expansion of the wall. Give a pathway to all the people under DACA suffering in eternal immigration limbo.
What does he do instead? Continues the Trump administration’s policies of using COVID loopholes to deny people at the border seeking asylum. Then he expands construction of the wall he promised to halt, and meanwhile does a couple photoshoots at the border with CBP officers.
Of course, absolutely squat was said about DACA or the millions of people who were filled with hope in 2020 after Biden won. Now we know the hope was a scam. It was all an illusion. A mirage.
My main reason I don’t want Trump is because he is racist and xenophobic against Latin Americans. But if Biden is following in his footsteps virtually exactly…
Why should I give a shit who becomes president? I don’t like Trump but there’s no way I’m voting for Biden. I want him to lose. I want the Democrats to realize they can’t just do this forever. I want them to change their strategy. If I vote for Biden and he wins, they learn nothing. They will continue lying and being hypocrites forever.
If Trump wins, you may never get a chance to vote for another president.
Trump is a narcissistic sociopath, to even try to compare the 2 on the level of evil they are capable of, is extremely naive. Also Trump is a traitor who is willing to sell out American interests to Putin.
You may be disappointed with Biden, but there is zero doubt he is the lesser of 2 evils by far. Especially if you are not a billionaire.
what is the difference between not being able to vote and being forced into voting for one candidate you hate?
i think you are the one being naive. trump cannot be the eternal boogeyman that justifies giving the democrats a blank check to do whatever they want. they are both equally shit. trump’s a xenophobic racist who was aspirations to be another mussolini, biden actively supports genocide and does not give a single fuck about the people who put him in power.
there is no lesser evil here. just two different types of evil
He proactively circumvented congress to sell Netanyahu weapons that he knew would be used for genocide.
Democrats can always find a lame procedural excuse when there’s something they ran on but don’t want to do, but when it’s something they want to do like enable genocide (and oh lordy do they ever), procedure and decorum evaporate in a puff of hypocrisy and convenience.
Potential narrative or sentiment shift driven by bots in the wake of the upcoming election?
There’s definitely a lot of sentiment against him for what he’s done in regards to this of course but it’s seemed to have accelerated in an unnatural fashion.
“Everyone I disagree with is a bot and it is only I, the one with the correct opinions, who is a thinking human being who is also immune to propaganda”
propaganda and division bots mostly.
In the early 2000’s we weren’t as connected as we are now and people relied a lot more on cable/network news.
But also, and this is really important to understand, the civilian casualties from the Iraq war were over much larger areas, populations, and time. In the same time frame the rate of casualties was far lower. Coalition forces also did their best to avoid civilian casualties by not targeting hospitals, not kettling civilians, and certainly not doing a concerted bombing campaign with large bombs into highly populated areas.
A lot of what’s happening with the rate of civilian casualties is because the IDF has thrown all of those protections out the window. They’re specifically destroying the food, water, and medical infrastructure of Gaza. When people inevitably try to evacuate they can only do so further into Gaza. The IDF doesn’t allow them to evacuate through their lines into cleared areas. This means people can never actually get away from the fighting. Those are all large scale war crimes designed to increase the number of civilian casualties. But they aren’t removing troops credibly accused of war crimes from the area either. In fact they’ve shown no willingness to prosecute tactical level warcrimes such as shooting clearly marked journalists in a quiet area in broad daylight.
Just today the report landed on NPR radio that the IDF opened fire into a crowd waiting for food aid. The IDF is of course claiming the crowd was threatening. But we’ve known how to securely disperse food aid for decades. Those soldiers may very well have been threatened, but their officers set that situation up. Also of note is just how fast this gets out to the world in the era of social media.
And we haven’t even talked about the immense amount of war weariness in the US.
Because the US is by all means an active party. The US is selling Israel weapons (including weapons Biden has been bypassing Congress to sell), defending them on the international stage and literally sent them aircraft carriers to prevent anyone in the region from taking action. People have been found guilty in the Numenberg trials for less and people aren’t liking the man who’s supposed to represent them doing these things.
Because the genocide in Gaza is currently at an all time high? Israel is actively in the process of invading them, supported and defended fully by the US to the detriment of the international community?
America isn’t currently arming death squads in South America or where right now at the moment or you’d be hearing about that instead.
It’s like asking why are Americans talking so much more about trans rights lately when they’ve always been bad.
I need to know more about these South American death squads. Can you point me in the right direction?
There were marches like, every other weekend about the invasion of Iraq even before the news came out that we were there over a lie. But Bush was president and it was like, “aww… look at the hippies… they think they’re helping… lol!”
It was honestly hard to protest when Obama was in office because there were so many frothing racists about that any public protests against the actions of the president would be joined by literal KKK members. But we wrote letters… oh boy did we ever write letters. Letter writing parties, phone banking about writing letters, sending out mailers with contact info for all of the local reps and higher ups to send letters to, including pre stamped envelopes and form letters to add your name to.
Nobody cared because Obama was so popular that there wasn’t really a question of his reelection. Biden is not that popular, the rare opportunity to use a major issue as leverage to threaten a reelection campaign, even if the result of his loss would be dire is why there is so much news about public opinion on Israel/Palestine.
The American left is furious at Biden for the same reason we’re angry at pretty much any President’s foreign policy. We’ve opposed most of the interventions and support for dictators that presidents in the latter half of the twentieth century up to today have engaged in. But we have never been the majority, and haven’t had the power to stop them. It’s important to remember that about a third of the US is composed or pretty reasonable, pro-peace social democrats. The problem is that another third are “moderates” that are okay with empire as long as we pretend we’re being nice, and the last third are maniacal religious fascists.
Guess you missed the huge anti Iraq war protests in the early 2000s. And the fact that we’ve been making Internet jokes about that and George Bush junior since forever.