Genocide is Over if America Wants it
By: "American leadership is what holds the world together." President Joe Biden (October 2023)
"American leadership," subtle in nature, is a diluted way to get others to ingest its embedded imperialism and oppressive structure. There are three things, usually in a specific sequential order, that the so-called "American leadership" does when presented with a crisis: it creates a global narrative for the situation, it chooses a "worthy" victim for one-sided media coverage to further support that narrative, and then it drops a shit ton of money for the cause. There was no deviation from this method with Israel and Palestine. In October, President Biden was swift to present a narrative that conveniently placed Hamas with Vladimir Putin and said that both parties are seeking to "annihilate a neighboring democracy." Such equivalences aren't naive or well-intentioned. They stem from a supremacist, capitalist, and imperialistic agenda.
News outlets flooded each segment with one-sided coverage from Israel and hardly any from Gaza and Palestine. The overwhelming one-sided media coverage made many Americans feel confident enough to buy into the narrative initially given. After the narrative was spun and citizens were given their victims, America funded a genocide. President Biden proposed a 14 billion dollar request to Congress for Military aid for Israel.
It's one thing to execute a genocide, but for it to be a "slam dunk," America must throw its justification for the "alley-oop." The American rationale was foreseeable; Biden, along with many other lawmakers, preached that "Israel has a right to defend itself." And with the narrative now fully developed, exhaustive one-sided news coverage, 14 billion U.S. taxpayer dollars for Israel to "defend itself" seemed like reasonable grounds for many Americans, who not only bought into it but were inclined to not invest in any accountability. The accountability is two-fold and on each side: research about what's happening to innocent civilians on the receiving end of a healthy military budget that's American-supported and what will constitute the limit of support to distinguish "defending" and "massacring."
Interestingly, despite being positioned time and time again in history as aggressors of violence, inciters and funders of world wars, and upholders of systematic racism and oppression, the Western "superpowers" of the world, in 2024, continue to choose to operate as the keys used to ignite the devastation we see across the globe. In every instance of mass oppression, genocide, and war, the U.S., UK, Germany, France, etc., are found to be at the core. If not directly enacting the violence and terror, they are funding and arming it.
The U.S., in particular, has a history as long as its existence, including its involvement with world conflict. Whether providing funding and arms to militia groups who overthrow governments, allowing drugs to be flooded in black and brown communities, or literally funding, arming, and politically supporting genocide. In its inception, the United States was not and is not a country; it is a massive Settler colony that did to the many diverse communities of Indigenous people across the Americas what Israel has done (and Britain before them) to the various peoples of Palestine. Today, the presence of Indigenous communities within the U.S. has been pushed to the margins, experiencing not only an attempt at eradication of their heritage but very real economic, public health, and social implications as a result of this systematic attempt at displacing and massacring them.
One must question why the "countries" that have continued to try and uphold the outward appearance of being the world elite, the moral authority, continue to find themselves reflecting immorality, evil deeds, and global destruction. Could it be that they directly benefit from these conflicts? Sure, but is there more than just a capitalistic motive for the often tax-funded international acts of terror the U.S. is involved in?
It is hard to miss some commonalities amongst the communities, countries, and people that have been oppressed and massacred while simultaneously being depicted as the incisors of the violence being enacted on them. Yes, the "terrorists" on the globe, as deemed by the Western white power base, largely have been black, brown, non-Christian or non-Jewish, poor, communist, and socialist. The term terrorist seems almost to have an unsaid association with nonwhite resistors. The American public became conditioned long before 9/11 to be Islamophobic and racist, but it has intensified since 2001.
We’re sure most can recall the Family Guy episode in which Peter is driving, and a police officer stops him and holds a sign up to his face reading OK (next to 3 very light shades of skin color) and NOT OK (next to 3 brown and black shades of skin color). While the episode is memorable, it reflects a societal truth across the Western world that states "white is right" and everyone else is less than, even barbaric, in need of white intervention.
This must lend itself to the reasoning for the U.S.'s continued positioning. We have just witnessed the same U.S. administration that has funded, armed, and supported Ukraine's resistance to Russia deem the Palestinians as unworthy of support to do the same against Israel. It takes it a step further by continuing to spew propaganda that positions the Palestinian people as a monolith that is all collectively responsible or expendable in Israel's "right to self-defense." Additionally, a faction of Palestinian resisters, labeled as "terrorists" by the Western world, is unfairly blamed for the ongoing state-sponsored genocide that they have been experiencing for the last 100 plus days for the world to see, but also quietly over the previous 75 years.
Why is it a valiant cause to support Ukraine in its resistance, never once labeling them terrorist groups in their resistance (which includes violence) towards or in response to their oppressor Russia; but it is not the same in this instance with Israel's ethnic cleansing of Palestine. What makes the Ukrainian people worthier than the Palestinian people, the Sudanese people, the Iraqis and Afghan people, the Congolese, the Yemenis, and the Lebanese?
Why is it so easy to understand the plight of Ukrainians but not that of the many oppressed others of the world? To ignore the common thread of whiteness would be irresponsible at best. While we understand that reducing everything back to systematic racism is an argument many are tired of hearing, it continues to underwrite history, time and time again. Systemic racism manifests in various ways, one of which is the tendency to empathize with the struggles of whites, presuming their innocence and worthiness from the start. This is not given to marginalized or minoritized peoples.
Even today, these colonial ideals and principles very much season the melting pot that the U.S. claims to be. Globally, the U.S. continues to enact the same level of savagery that the Indigenous peoples of this land, the enslaved Africans of this land, and the Mexican people of this land experienced from the time of its creation.