Let me start up by saying that I don't see this as it is often discussed. I don't think that the US voters were sufficiently concerned about the genocide taking place in Gaza to swing the election against Harris/Biden. I don't think this was like 2016, when Trump was elected to his apprenticeship term. Then the white Left, as represented by the Green Party did actually have the power to swing the election towards Trump. In that election, the votes for Jill Stein in three critical states, PA, WI & MI, were enough to swing the election to Clinton had they chose to vote for her rather than use it as a "feel good" vote. In 2024, the white Left had no such clout. Even if the uncommitted movement gave MI to Trump, he would have done perfectly fine without their help. Nevertheless, those who used Israel's genocide in Gaza in a bid to defeat Harris will still own what Trump helps Israel do to Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon going forward.
In my telling of this tale, it is the corporate media, most notably MSNBC, that is most responsible for a white supremacist and fascist being elected president of the United States. While MSNBC was the most vocal of all the corporate media in voicing opposition the MAGA movements bid for power, it has also been the most silent about Israel's crimes in Gaza, and its massacres in the West Bank and Lebanon. CNN, ABC, NBC and CBS have similarly been engaged in a cover-up of Israel's war crimes. While Fox News did give more time to these stories, they did so from a racist Christian-Zionist perspective, which is arguable worst than silence.
Those that know better what has been going on in Gaza from the daily news reports from Al Jazeera, Democracy Now, and other more truthful news source, have a much clearer idea of what is going on in Gaza. Those daily reports on the Israeli attacks and Palestinian deaths make it obvious why so many international organizations have branded it a genocide. But those well informed Americans are still a minority of US voters.
Most US voters live in an alternate reality carefully cultivated by the US corporate media, and its masters, with regards to what has been happening in Gaza in the last 13 months, or even the last 13 year times three.
The problem for anyone running for president with the intention of actually winning state power and being able to affect US policy from that position, as opposed to someone running a performative campaign designed to seize the moral high ground and garner like minded votes, is that they have to win a majority of voters who see the conflict through the lens of this alternate reality.
By representing this limited, and warped, view of what has been happening in Lebanon. Israel, the West Bank, and particularly Gaza, this supposedly liberal media undermined the fight against the Trump takeover in two fundamental ways:
1.) By forcing the whole discussion around Gaza to operate within their alternate reality, they also undermined the ability for a politician to take a position based of justice and still win a majority of US voters. This made the alienation of many voters that demanded justice from the Harris campaign inevitable.
2.) By revealing to those in the know that they were willing to countenance genocide, they undermined their own calls to defend democracy, as many saw it as a call to defend a social order where genocide is okay. And who would want to vote for that?
Based on this thinking, I have conclude that was most necessary from the pro-Palestinian community in the past year, and still most necessary going forward, is a sustained campaign that simply demands that the US corporate media tell US voters and tax payers the truth about what our government is supporting in Palestine.
Clay Claiborne
18 November 2024
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