Johannah King-Slutzky, a Columbia University graduate student in English and comparative literature, complained to the Intercept, a left-wing publication with a staunchly anti-Israel line, “A president who supports genocide and is actively sending funds and weapons to Israel to kill children, families, that’s not something that I feel has earned my endorsement.”And Politico reports on additional signs that anger over Gaza is making it difficult for Biden to connect with young people who are concerned about other issues on which Trump is far to the right:
Aparna Gopalan, also a graduate student (Harvard Anthropology) and UAW member, wrote a scathing article for Jewish Currents, a left-wing publication, decrying the endorsement....
Gopalan’s story quotes fellow UAW member Adithya Gungi (also a grad student at Columbia), who says, “Donald Trump needs to be opposed. But this does not mean a full-throated endorsement of a Democratic president who has been actively supporting a catastrophic genocide in Palestine.”
Pro-cease-fire outbursts have interrupted a series of public appearances by Biden and his aides in recent weeks, including a climate speech Tuesday by USAID Administrator Samantha Power where someone in the audience urged her to “resign and speak up.”Biden is publicly supporting Israel while his administration works to try to get to a ceasefire. He's beginning to remind me of Hubert Humphrey in 1968 -- a Vietnam War skeptic who, as vice president, eventually came out in support of the war, and then called for a bombing halt late in the campaign. His war support cost him the votes of angry opponents -- who thus handed control of the war to Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.
“27,000 people have been killed,” the person called out during the former U.N. ambassador’s speech on “climate shocks” at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg Center in Washington. “You know what would cause a lot of climate shock — is the bombardment of Gaza.”
Earlier this month, audience members chanted “cease-fire now” during Biden’s remarks on extremism and democracy at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, the site of the 2015 murders of nine Black churchgoers by a white supremacist. Last week, more than a dozen protesters yelling slogans such as “genocide Joe” repeatedly interrupted an abortion-rights rally that Biden was holding in Virginia with Vice President Kamala Harris.
In a 2018 New York Times op-ed, Michael Brenes wrote:
On Feb. 17, 1965, Vice President Hubert Humphrey sent President Lyndon B. Johnson a memorandum stating the United States must begin an exit strategy in Vietnam: “It is always hard to cut losses. But the Johnson administration is in a stronger position to do so now than any administration in this century.” ...Humphrey called for a bombing halt in late September 1968, but this didn't save his candidacy.
Johnson ignored Humphrey’s advice. In fact, he was described as infuriated with the vice president....
For his dissent against the war (his “disloyalty”), Humphrey suffered the brunt of Johnson’s unpredictable wrath. Humphrey’s advisers felt Johnson’s intimidating, dismissive treatment was the reason Humphrey reversed his position on Vietnam a year later....
The war alienated Humphrey from liberals, civil rights activists and young Americans — the same people who, for decades, had loved Humphrey for his support of racial justice, full employment and the labor movement — and ultimately cost him the presidency in 1968.
... as he promoted the war to the American people (his main task after 1966), Humphrey was increasingly taunted by the antiwar movement. When Humphrey emerged as the Democratic candidate in 1968 ... “Dump the Hump” became a common motto. Signs with slogans such as “Killer of Babies” and “Humphrey’s Johnson’s War Salesman” regularly greeted him on the campaign trail.
Biden's position on the Gaza war may infuriate progressives, but as Chait notes, the candidate who'll win if Biden doesn't will be far worse on Gaza and the rights of Palestinians (and Muslims in general):
The trouble is that [Biden's] opponent, Trump, is considerably less empathetic toward Palestinian lives than Biden is. He has not only given complete support to the Israeli right, but also “would support expelling Democratic representatives Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) from Congress for voting against a resolution condemning Hamas.” So, supporting Trump is a very strange position even for a single-issue anti-Israel voter.Also, shortly after October 7, Trump vowed to ban refugees from Gaza if elected, and suggested that he'd deport foreign nationals who express support for a ceasefire:
The ex-president and 2024 Republican frontrunner also said he would aggressively deport resident aliens with “jihadist sympathies” and send immigration agents to “pro-jihadist demonstrations” to identify violators.And there's this Trump campaign promise:
“In the wake of the attacks on Israel, Americans have been disgusted to see the open support for terrorists among the legions of foreign nationals on college campuses. They’re teaching your children hate,” he said. “Under the Trump administration, we will revoke the student visas of radical anti-American and antisemitic foreigners at our colleges and universities and we will send them straight back home.”
“I will restore my travel ban to keep radical Islamic terrorists out of our country,” Trump said in a late-April appearance in New Hampshire. “We were very tough on that. We don’t want our buildings blown up. We don’t want to have problems.”He subsequently promised a Muslim ban that will be "even bigger than before."
“My wonderful travel ban, it was so wonderful,” he lamented during a March appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference as he promised mass deportations if reelected.
Anti-war progressives made the wrong choice in 1968. This year, let's hope history merely rhymes and doesn't repeat.
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