President Joe Biden bragged about his supposed charity to Palestinians in an interview on Monday, claiming that he’s done “more” for Palestinians “than anybody” — despite the fact that he has done more to perpetuate the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza than any world leader outside of Israel.
In an interview on Complex’s “360 With Speedy” released Monday, Biden implied that he deserves praise for supposedly allowing Palestinians in Gaza to access humanitarian aid. In reality, however, his administration has consistently encouraged Israeli officials to block all humanitarian aid into Gaza, resulting in famine and widespread disease for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.
“By the way, I’m the guy that did more for the Palestinian community than anybody. I’m the guy that opened up all the assets. I’m the guy that made sure that I got the Egyptians to open the border to let goods through, medicine and food,” Biden said in the interview that was filmed on Friday.
Many advocates for Palestinian rights were horrified by Biden’s remark. The president has provided uncritical support to Israel as it has killed at least 39,000 Palestinians in the past nine months — and experts say that that is a low estimate of the true death toll, which researchers recently calculated could be 186,000 people or more.
The Biden administration has repeatedly attempted to justify Israel’s near-total blockade on humanitarian aid entering Gaza, which has resulted in the spread of famine across the entirety of Gaza. UN officials have referred to the U.S.-backed Israeli blockade as a “genocidal starvation campaign.”
Though Biden has sometimes acknowledged the humanitarian catastrophe that Israeli forces have manufactured in Gaza, he has allowed it to continue virtually unabated. His comment may have referred to his administration’s expensive Gaza pier that delivered essentially no aid to Palestinians; or perhaps his recent agreement with Egypt’s president to open the Karem Abu Salem border crossing — after Israel waged a bloody takeover of the Rafah crossing, which was where the vast majority of humanitarian aid had entered Gaza before May.
Biden is also providing the weapons that Israel is using to kill Palestinians. The U.S. is and has long been Israel’s largest supplier of weapons, providing roughly 70 percent of Israel’s weapons in recent years; together, the U.S. and Germany are responsible for 99 percent of Israel’s weapons imports.
Biden has continued the U.S.’s long tradition of arming Israel and has even accelerated it amid Israel’s genocide. The Biden administration has sent at least $6.5 billion in military assistance to Israel just since October, amounting to roughly $25 million every day. This includes at least 14,000 2,000-pound bombs, as well as tens of thousands of other bombs and missiles.
Elsewhere in the interview, Biden affirmed that he is a Zionist, and claimed that Jewish people around the world would not be safe without Israel — despite many Jewish people noting that the ideology of Zionism and figures like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu actually endanger Jewish people because the existence of Israel is predicated on apartheid and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
Biden also straight out lied about the nature of the bomb shipments when asked about his comment on “providing Israel with all the weapons they need and when they need them” during the disastrous debate between him and Donald Trump in June.
“I said defensive weapons. I denied them offensive weapons that they were using, 2,000-pound bombs and the rest,” he said in the Complex interview. “I made it real clear. They cannot use weapons that we provide them to, in fact, use in civilian areas.”
This is not true. The “rest” of the bombs that were grouped in with the 2,000-pound bombs that his administration has put on pause were recently given the go-ahead by administration officials to be sent to Israel — a shipment of 1,700 500-pound bombs that are similarly deadly to 2,000-pound bombs, but with a smaller area of destruction. Israel has used smaller bombs in “offensive” attacks that have killed dozens of Palestinians.
The Israeli military has used these bombs extensively in civilian areas. One was used in a recent attack on an area that Israel had designated as a “humanitarian safe zone,” killing at least 90 Palestinians on Saturday — the day after Biden’s interview was filmed.
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