Netanyahu to Biden: “Well, You Dropped the Atom Bomb.”
Image by Alex Shuper
Israel’s ghastly genocidal destruction of Gaza drags on and is horrifyingly clear for all to see. The Israeli Defense Forces’ criminal mass murder is so blatant and unabashed that in December last year, even U.S. President Joe Biden challenged Israel’s President Netanyahu. Speaking to an audience of campaign donors in Washington, D.C. including a former president of the AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Biden said Israel was “starting to lose support by the indiscriminate bombing that takes place.”
According to Philip Weiss at mondoweiss.net, Biden went on to say that when speaking with Netanyahu himself, the Israeli leader justified the mass attacks by reminding Biden of U.S. massacres. Biden reportedly said to the donors:
“It was pointed out to me — I’m being very blunt with you all — it was pointed out to me — by Bibi [Benjamin Netanyahu] — that “Well, you carpet-bombed Germany. You dropped the atom bomb. A lot of civilians died.”
Such a face-to-face plastering of U.S. hypocrisy by a head-of-state is unheard of. Netanyahu’s smug spanking of a sitting U.S. president over U.S. massacres at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was absolutely unprecedented.
Netanyahu’s mass killing has garnered him an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court, yet that stinging global stigma is hardly enough of a condemnation in view of the 42,000 civilians his government has seen killed in Gaza. Netanyahu’s grizzly indiscriminate bombardment of schools, hospitals, churches, mosques, apartment buildings, open markets, and other civilian gathering points is such an open-and-shut case of criminal war-making, that only blindly obedient sycophants or collaborators can imagine any rationalization of it.
Bibi’s point in slapping Biden in the face with “you dropped the atom bomb” is that President Truman and his administration claimed to have “saved lives” by killing 210,000 civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The guilt-ridden, self-righteous absurdity of the president’s claim has always been clear to historians and outside observers. Dorothy Day, Albert Camus and others immediately condemned the atomic bombings for what they were. Nothing excuses mass destruction of innocent non-combatants. Regardless of the circumstances, deliberately indiscriminate attacks on civilians and civilian objects have been a violation of universal laws of war since 1907.
The truth-telling thrown at Biden is that the United States of Amnesia has no moral authority to brandish, no superior standing of any kind from which to condemn Israeli atrocities or bemoan its multiple massacres in Gaza. Regardless of the IDF’s unjustified, unlawful, and criminal murder of civilians there, U.S. military action in WW II, in Korea, in Southeast Asia, in Afghanistan and in Iraq, in Abu Ghraib, CIA Black Sites, and at Guantanamo Bay, has permanently erased any claim the U.S. government ever had as a defender of human rights or the so-called rules-based order.
Our U.S. high school history books’ vision of the U.S. as a “shining city on a hill” was always a fiction that drew groans from Native American descendants of genocidal U.S. Army raids of the 1800s, and from African American descendants of 300 years of slavery.
No wonder Netanyahu punched Biden in the nose. The U.S. has never even acknowledged the criminality of killing Japanese civilians in order to save soldiers’ lives, much less apologized for it. Yet for Netanyahu to call Biden a fraud is an indirect admission that his government has adopted the murderous metrics of historical U.S. militarism and made them its own. Massacres are just as criminal in Gaza as they were in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
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