They Used to Say Arabs Can’t Have Democracy Because It’d Be Bad for Israel. Now the U.S. Can’t Have It Either.
They Used to Say Arabs Can’t Have Democracy Because It’d Be Bad for Israel. Now the U.S. Can’t Have It Either.
There’s a battle in Congress, the courts, and Washington to suppress American democratic freedoms by crushing dissent on Israel.
A serious red line has been crossed: America’s democratic freedoms, expansive on paper, will simply not tolerate serious dissent on the U.S.–Israel relationship. As criticisms of Israel have become more mainstream, the attempt to shut them down entirely has become more extreme.
In pursuit of this blank-check relationship with an Israeli government that is becoming ever-more intransigent with each passing year, pro-Israel forces in the U.S. are attacking our own democratic freedoms in order to suppress public outcry about apartheid and potential genocide 6,000 miles away. And, if the recent campus crackdowns are any indication, these forces are winning their battle.
With tens of thousands of Palestinians left dead and the Israeli assault on Gaza ongoing, the U.S. protests targeting university ties with Israel over the last month — voluble and outspoken — have been overwhelmingly nonviolent.
Yet these nonviolent protests have met with the full brutal force of the U.S. security state. Dispersing the protest encampments, police have viciously beaten protesters, fired rubber bullets, and enveloped students in dense clouds of tear gas.
Anyone remember the war in Iraq? How people criticizing that war were treated as anti patriotic?
What a photo. A guy clad head to toe in black squared up with a club in front of the ruins of a protest, the only color in his uniform a big gold star and an American flag.
Why do they have flags on their uniform? Is someone going to mistake which country they're in? Are they soldiers at war? Bringing righteous patriotism into a career that mostly attacks US citizens is a really chilling idea.
Cops don't have any direct association with America as a whole. They're a civilian organization employed and directed by local officials. I believe those are California Highway Patrol officers. If they absolutely have to wear a flag, they can have a bear.
It seems they are utilizing it the way people on the right do. If you are queer for instance and you come across a gathering where a bunch of people are flying the stars and stripes you remove yourself from that situation because those people are almost always not safe. Those people have used it as a symbol of fear and intimidation wrapped up cloak of patriot rhetoric for a good decade now.
The flag is being used as a symbol of government authority. Governments are big on symbols (YT link) because they work.
Is that a Star of David? Oof…
No, it's a seven-pointed star used by the CHP.
Of course the US will have democracy, it's just that poor people having it would be bad for the US
You know what they say... fascism is just colonialism coming home to roost.
Israel itself means little to the US. It's merely the conduit through which the US Geo-political power gets channeled through in the Middle East at the moment. The moment that Israel become more burden than value, they will be dropped and abandoned like many of nations/regions across the planet.
That's not even it though. The US has so many military bases around the world that Israel is hardly worth maintaining a presence in, much less giving them billions in aid a year. I don't think the US even used Israel for any significant staging for the gulf war and they were all but involved.
It’s merely the conduit through which the US Geo-political power gets channeled through in the Middle East at the moment.
Well... there's always Saudi Arabia - another shining example of "succesful" US foreign policy.
Gee, who could have predicted electing someone that spent 50 fucking years loudly declaring that there is absolutely nothing that would ever make him support Israel any less....
Biden talking about current protestors sounds a hell of a lot like trump talking about BLM tho
“Dissent is essential for democracy,” Biden said at the White House. “But dissent must never lead to disorder.”
"Can't you just shoot them, just shoot them in the legs or something?"
Yup. Indistinguishable.
“There’s the right to protest, but not the right to cause chaos,” Mr. Biden said into cameras in his first personal remarks on the campus fray in 10 days. “People have the right to get an education, the right to get a degree, the right to walk across the campus safely without fear of being attacked.” Antisemitism, he added, “has no place” in America.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/02/us/politics/biden-campus-protests.html
It's peaceful protests to get him to stop funding a genocide, and he's saying the protestors are the violent ones...
Like, you realize racists said the same thing about MLK and the civil rights movement?
Biden was friends with most of those senators. When he talks about the "good ole days" he's talking about hanging out with Strom Thurmond and fighting school integration.
This is who he's always been.
If protests arent inconvenient, how is it going to work?
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