Public Comment

I’ve been doing more reading than writing in the recent weeks and as usual the reading content is heavy, bringing a different frame to the war in Ukraine, Israel and Gaza, the debate and the Supreme Court. 

After reading Anne Applebaum’s Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine on the Holodomor the entirely manmade famine of the 1930s also known as the Ukrainian Famine engineered by Joseph Stalin, it is difficult to believe the Ukrainians all these years later would be willing to negotiate a peace agreement with Russia that would give away any Ukrainian land. 

Memories are long. 

When I read Ronen Bergman’s book Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations I described it as brutal and it was with descriptions of bombings and torture followed by murder. But even that did not prepare me for the brutality in Ilan Pappe’s description of the Nakba in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.  

In Ashfaaq Carim’s March 15, 2024 interview with Pappe, Pappe describes his journey sharing how through declassification of the historical documents of the Nakba in 1978 challenged the narrative and everything he and his friends had come to believe. Reading the declassified documents changed the trajectory of his career as a historian resulting in becoming an Israeli dissident and authoring The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine in 2006. https://youtu.be/Bu1_OFUcd0g?si=81-xdtA6ftEmSPfO 

There seems to be an endless list of books on Israel and Palestine. Since November 2023, I’ve made my way through thirteen, have three in process and six more on hold. But it was Peter Maass’s April 9, 2024 opinion piece in the Washington Post, “I’m Jewish, and I’ve covered wars. I know war crimes when I see them” that led me to reading about the war in Bosnia in his first book Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War published in 1996. 

There is a through line in my recent reading. Maass ponders in Love Thy Neighbor how the “wild beast” in human nature can so easily break the restraints of civilization and incite neighbors to torture, rape and murder one another. 

Bosnia was an integrated pluralistic society in 1992 prior to the war.  

There is so much that is quotable and memorable in Love Thy Neighbor that it seemed like the entire book was underlined when I borrowed it from the Berkeley library. The book isn’t easy to get. The Berkeley Central Library has one print copy and there are no e-editions. My reading journal is filled with pages of notes. 

From Love Thy Neighbor 

“What happened in Bosnia was not a Balkan Freak Show, but a violent process of national breakdown at the hand of political manipulators. The dynamics of fear and loathing between people of different backgrounds – ethnic or religious or economic – are not as unique or complex as we might like to believe. Violent breakdowns can occur in virtually any country during times of economic hardship, political transition or moral infirmity; such troubles create opportunities for manipulators and the manipulators create opportunities for the wild beast.” 

We are in a perilous time for our country. With the Heritage Foundation Project 2025 as a guide, Donald Trump and all of his enabling sycophants are poised to dismantle the governing we have known into an authoritarian state. 

With no hope of expanding the Supreme Court or impeaching the corrupted Clarence Thomas, the secure conservative majority of six to three has free rein or better free reign to create endless damage. 

We could say the dismantling has already begun with the decisions coming from the Supreme Court. 

The Court has even gone so far as to encourage payoffs. In Snyder v. United States, the Court decided in a 6 – 3 opinion that generous gifts after a “service” by state and local officials is not bribery/corruption. This was before Monday, July 1, 2024 when the Court bestowed broad immunity on a past and future Trump presidency, “The Court thus concludes that the President is absolutely immune from criminal prosecution for conduct within his exclusive sphere of constitutional authority.” (page 2 TRUMP v. UNITED STATES) https://d3i6fh83elv35t.cloudfront.net/static/2024/07/scotus_immunity-7-1.pdf 

Women, pregnant people were already disposable with the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the abortion bans that followed. As if that wasn’t enough, through the use of the filibuster the Senate minority blocked legislation to protect the right to contraception on June 5, 2024. And then, there was Biden’s inability to articulate a coherent answer to a question on abortion at the June 27, 2024 debate. 

Biden’s performance in the debate was a disaster. Friends were texting me they couldn’t take it anymore and shut off the debate. 

In the thread of emails, I’ve been receiving from a Democratic party-based group sending links to donating to Biden’s campaign and articles supporting Biden countering my comment that Biden looked like a deer in headlights and that his performance reinforced all my fears about his aging, they are all in. 

Biden has accomplished a lot, but these are no ordinary times. And prior to the debate, his accomplishments weren’t translating into a lead over Trump. In fact, besides being on the losing end, Biden has been polling behind Democratic Senators and Representatives. 

In the fallout from the debate, it is not the loyal Democrats that worry me. They will vote the ticket regardless. It is the people like the woman standing next to me waiting for the light to change to cross the street on Friday afternoon. I asked her if she watched the debate and what she thought. To her the debate was such a disaster, she said she can’t vote for either Biden or Trump. She expects to sit out voting. She voted for Biden last time. 

There was the young man at my house for the inspection of my rooftop solar. He didn’t watch the debate and wasn’t planning on voting. If he did vote he said he would probably vote for Trump as he is not impressed with Biden. 

What appears obvious is that Biden can perform exceptionally when he has a teleprompter. But, stepping away from scripted settings and rote glad-handing interactions, Biden falls apart. Biden lost his train of thought, was at times incoherent, was unable to counter Trump’s barrage of lies and on the question on abortion which is undoubtedly one of the most important issues for young voters he blew it. 

This cannot be explained away, by saying Biden has a stutter or he had a cold or was tired. 

We need a fully functioning president or at the very least we need a team around Biden who have enough sense, not to put him into situations where he will fail. 

Think back to the 2020 Biden Trump debate. Biden was sharp in control. This time Biden struggled through responses. The description I heard that was most fitting was in the Ezra Klein post-debate podcast. It was, as if Biden’s cue cards fell on the floor in a pile and as he was trying to pick them up he spouted off in whatever order he found them. 

Friday morning following the debate on Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough left behind his usual cheer leading for another Biden term and spoke honestly “failure is not an option” and asked if any Fortune 500 company would keep a CEO in place who appeared as Biden did last night losing his train of thought unable to respond to Trump’s continuous string of lies. The answer is, of course, no. 

Mika (on Morning Joe) came to Biden’s defense, saying we shouldn’t be so quick to judge. 

I agree with Ezra Klein’s post saying that the job of the president is not just to do the job, but to instill confidence that as president he is capable of doing the job. 

I can’t imagine a President Biden able to fulfill his responsibilities for another term. 

As I see it, we don’t have a large enough core of faithful supporters who will vote for Biden to defeat Trump even without considering third party candidates siphoning away votes. 

Plus, Biden losing means an unrestrained Trump. When Trump tells his followers, “I am your retribution” we should believe him. 

Biden’s responses in the debate told me why we are nine months into a war on Gaza that is an unremitting horror, a moral and political failure and the move to peace in Ukraine is beyond grasp. 

Biden has burned through voters who supported him in 2020 in his handling of Israel in the war on Gaza. 

This is a train wreck. 

Back to Love Thy Neighbor. 

“The goal of imperial wars, which we are most familiar with is to conquer and rule [Russia’s war on Ukraine]. The goal of nationalist wars, as in Bosnia [and the Nakba] is to conquer and cleanse. These contests are winner take-all. When you are faced with enemies who wish to expunge you from your land, and when those enemies offer a treaty that ensures their boots will stay on your throat, suffocating you one day, you have little choice but to keep struggling, even though the odds are against you and people who call themselves your friends are saying you should give up. Resistance becomes not an option but an imperative.” 

An article on Gaza in the Guardian many weeks ago described the destruction of housing and the toxins from bombings left behind would take possibly fourteen years to clean up. Looking at the photos of the devastation that make it out despite the targeted killing of journalists in Palestine makes fourteen years sound like unrealistic optimism. Along with the destruction of housing (domicide), hospitals and infrastructure, there is the destruction of schools and universities (scholasticide) and the killing of scholars, educators, artists – the erasure of history. 

Then there is the war crime of starvation. 

I find it difficult to describe what is happening in Gaza as anything other than genocide. 

Councilmember Lunaparra at the dais with the keffiyeh over her shoulders is smart, articulate, well-informed, impressive as someone who is young and a fresh college graduate, but she is no match for the pro-Israel power players dominating Berkeley City Council leadership. Her promise of a ceasefire resolution is dead just like the thousands of innocent Palestinian children.  

There was one bright spot in my recent reading, Ali Velshi’s just released Small Acts of Courage: A legacy of Endurance and the Fight for Democracy. The book is part memoir, part history. It is the story of immigration, finding country and home beginning with Velshi’s great grandfather leaving India for South Africa and family members crossing paths with Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, Tolstoy Farm, living through Apartheid, the liberation of Kenya to self-governing and landing in Canada. The section on the pluralistic, multi-culture, immigrant welcoming Canada is inspiring. Small Acts of Courage is a book I highly recommend.