Let them eat ice cream

On Monday evening, Feb. 26, President Joe Biden was interviewed in an ice cream parlor. With a cone crowned with a copious three-scoop serving in his hand and a smirk on his face, he fabricated an announcement about an impending cease-fire between Israel and Hamas.

This callous display was a cheap and pathetic campaign stunt.

That his handlers chose Monday evening’s “Late Night with Seth Meyers” segment to orchestrate this ghoulish display of banality is an insult to the 2.3 million dead, dying, homeless, wounded, destitute and starving Gazans who, because of Biden’s shameless, obsessive and passionate love affair with Israel, are being savagely murdered, wounded, maimed and ethnically cleansed from their homes and refugee camps — many for the third and fourth time in a five-month genocidal killing spree.

It also is an insult to Palestinians everywhere, and especially to the Arab Christian and Muslim Michiganders who are witnessing the systematic slaughter of family members — knowing full well their tax dollars are supporting these forever wars.

Hoping to woo Michigan Arabs and Muslims to vote for him in the next day’s primary, Biden lied to the newsman that his “national security adviser tells me that we’re close, close (to a cease-fire) but not yet done.”

Hamas and Israel both denied an agreement is in the offing, or even close.

Tired of his deeply rooted antipathy (bordering on xenophobia) toward Palestinians, his repeated lies, his disregard for Palestinian lives and his open-ended $14 billion worth of the most sophisticated arms in the U.S. arsenal, 101,436 (13.2%) Michigan Arab and Muslim voters delivered a forceful message: Joe Biden, if you want our votes on Nov. 5, stop the Israeli genocide by calling for a durable and permanent UN cease-fire.

Some media headlines ran as follows: “Fox News Freaks Out Over Biden’s Ice Cream”; “Fox News Has Jesse Watters React to Biden Eating Ice Cream in Public”;  “Watch: BIDEN MUNCHES ICE CREAM while telling press Israel-Hamas could have CEASEFIRE come Monday“; “CNN Host Taken Aback by Biden’s ‘Big Announcement’ from Ice Cream Shop”; and “Late Night chides Biden for Talking about Gaza while Eating Ice Cream.”

The most poignant comment was made by Daily Show host Michael Kosta: “Joe Biden had delivered his response ‘in the most Joe Biden way possible’ — that is while eating an ice cream cone.” Kosta said while Biden was gleefully munching on an ice cream cone, it was “not the most dignified way to deliver world-changing news. … I’ll tell you what, if I was a politician, I would always have an ice cream with me, just to cram in my mouth just in case I got asked about Israel-Palestine.”

Mairav Zonszein, an Israeli American journalist, stated: “This appears to be both irresponsible, and with the ice cream cone, tone deaf and tactless.”

And Greg Carlston, The Economist’s Middle East correspondent, agreed, saying, “Nothing says we’re taking this seriously like talking about war that has killed 30,000 people with an ice-cream cone halfway to your mouth.”

So, while Gaza’s Palestinian children are starving to death, in a staged theater of the absurd (directed by Netanyahu and assisted by Biden) framed in macabre and sardonic irony, Joe Biden was feasting on a large ice cream cone.

That he would lie about a Gaza cease-fire during his kiddish act is an insult to the 2.3 million Palestinians crying out to the world for help. Israel’s genocide — sanctioned, abetted and fully supported by Biden — has resulted in the malevolent destruction of 80% of Gaza’s private and public structures. Schools, churches, mosques, historic and cultural sites, universities and hospitals are being pulverized for the sole purpose of ethnically cleansing Gaza of its inhabitants.

That aid trucks are not allowed to deliver much-needed food and medicines adds heaps of heinous insults to heaps of contemptible injuries and goes against Talmudic, Christian, Muslim and Hindu values.

“The few Jewish voices of conscience who’ve spoken out and stood up in words and deeds to the Gaza carnage are those who’ve taken their religious teachings seriously.”

And the West, silent during the Holocaust years, is exposing the paucity of its moral principles. Germany stands out as a prime example. But then did the West, beginning with the Crusades and culminating with its colonization of the world, ever possess a moral compass? And the vast majority of those who suffered during the Holocaust are now advocating for a Final Gaza Solution to their cousins, the destitute people of Palestine. The few Jewish voices of conscience who’ve spoken out and stood up in words and deeds to the Gaza carnage are those who’ve taken their religious teachings seriously. They are the ones who will inherit the earth.

In the West, the silence is deafening.

So, President Biden, from where I stand, I see your callous disregard for the more than 13,600 children crying from their graves and the countless thousands from under the rubble as abhorrent. I also see the hypocritical, xenophobic, banal and hateful side of your character. And the hundreds of thousands of surviving children who’ve been forced to shelter in tents and shacks, with no heat, clean water, health care, or nourishment will remember you as the heir to Hitler’s legacy. You’ve helped create 2.3 million emaciated, starved and anemic children and adults with life-long traumas.

Killing people standing in line to receive meager food rations (if they are lucky), bombing ambulances, holding up and bombing trucks laden with food, medicine, much-needed diapers and feminine hygiene items, and looting vacated homes is a daily occurrence. That Israeli soldiers are sending selfies of them blowing up structures in a jovial manner is abhorrent. In a video clip and prior to blowing up the entire Gaza University campus structures, an Israeli soldier invites the viewer to observe the result of his action: pressing a detonator, the footage shows how the entire campus is blown up and collapsed to rubble. Bragging, the soldier then tells his viewers “Now, this is an open university.”

“That Israeli soldiers are sending selfies of them blowing up structures in a jovial manner is abhorrent.”

President Biden, during the past eight years, you’ve repeatedly cited the tragic death of your first wife and infant daughter and made numerous references to your son, Beau’s, battle with cranial cancer. And in a January 2020 MSNBC interview, you stated: “You’d be surprised at the number of people who come up to me … I mean hundreds of people over time. They’ll throw their arms around me, men and women and say, ‘ I just lost my son, I just lost my father, I just lost my wife’ … hundreds of people … throw their arms over me to tell about the loss of their sons, daughters.”

Today, 2.3 million destitute Palestinians are telling you that, amidst a landscape pocked with deep craters, collapsed concrete and rebar, and a ravaged landscape, they are losing newborn babies, infants, toddlers, teenagers, mothers, fathers, grandparents, entire families and entire bloodlines numbering in the hundreds. They are telling you that 110 journalists have been deliberately killed lest they expose your complicity in the daily carnage and the misery inflicted on medical staff as tanks shatter large hospital compounds and as scores of doctors, nurses and health professionals are arrested, humiliated, tortured and often killed.

Surely the U.S. drones you’ve sent over the Gaza skies relay footage of Israeli tanks running over dead bodies and running amok in cemeteries, digging up and desecrating the remains of the deceased buried during 76 years of occupation and humiliation.

And to the right to lifers and Christian evangelicals, especially the rabid American stripe, do you even care that pregnant women are miscarrying, delivering dead fetuses and losing their newborn babies after their first gasp of air? That C-sections are performed without anesthetics? Are you bothered by the daily images of babies and children, draped in white plastic bags and deposited in large pits turned into mass graves?

Hunger, thirst, starvation, homelessness, disease and the stench of death emanate from human corpses left to decompose as maggots lay waste to what was once a precious life but is now left to rot while competing dogs are eating the remains of the Gaza Palestinians. These noble men, women and children have been dealt an egregious sentence by history, their Jewish cousins and the corrupt, theocratic and tyrannical Arab (with just a few exceptions) so-called brothers, and the so-called civilized world.

The many exceptions in the American and world Jewish communities such as Peace Now and If Not Now, including many in Israeli society, stand head and shoulders above those who profess to follow Christ.

President Biden, please stop and think what a war you refuse to stop is doing to 2.3 million beggared, dispossessed and pauperized human beings and their relatives in Gaza, the West Bank and around the world. And please, especially think about the 1.2 million suffering Gaza children on whom you turned your back.

In his powerful painting, The Scream, the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch poured his heart out and voiced the anguished agony of millions of destitute human beings across time and geography. Walking into the distance on the boardwalk that stretches into the background is a nicely dressed couple oblivious to the anxious, tormented, distraught, traumatized and distorted human figure whose scream is the prototype scream of all the oppressed, brutalized, tormented human beings of the world.

In the fourth chapter of Genesis, God admonishes Cain with the following: “What have you done? Listen! Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground.”

President Biden, while Gaza’s blood cries out from the ground, enjoy your ice cream.

 

Raouf J. Halaby is a professor emeritus of English and art. He is a writer, photographer, sculptor, an avid gardener and a peace activist.