By Fighting Words Staff
Lost in the tumultuous events around the 2024 presidential election, with Biden’s incoherent debate performance in the face of Trump’s racist anti-migrant rant, followed by the Trump shooting, then Biden’s dropping out of the race and endorsing Vice President Harris, is the question of Gaza.
In the din of the corporate media coverage of these events and the liberal portion of the corporate media gushing with support for the Kamala Harris candidacy, a huge factor in this election cycle is being largely overlooked: the resilient and growing mass opposition to the Israeli genocidal slaughter in Gaza along with its massive military, economic, diplomatic and political support by both the Biden-Harris administration as well as both political parties.
Since Kamala Harris is both Black and Indian, Marxism-Leninism demands that we must defend her from the ongoing racist and sexist attacks in order to defend these communities as a whole.
But it would be foolish not to recognize that she is a minion of the capitalist ruling class and complicit with Biden’s support for the zionist’s genocide in Gaza.
This electoral opposition movement in the U.S, to the U.S.-zionist entity’s war against the Palestinian people, dubbed the “Abandon Biden” movement, has many facets. More than 700,000 people voted “undecided” in one way or another in the Democratic Party primaries, openly signaling their opposition to U.S. support to the genocidal war in Gaza.
Black clergy have demanded that the White House force a cease fire and end the shipment of bombs and weapons to Israel.
Campuses across the country have erupted with “camp-ins” in support of the people of Gaza. As police were sent in to arrest thousands of students and faculty, that only made these demonstrations and those in the streets more frequent and more militant.
The newly energized union movement has joined the fray. On July 23, a group of unions including the American Postal Workers Union, Association of Flight Attendants, the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, the National Education Association, Service Employees International Union, United Auto Workers and United Electrical Workers, sent a letter to the White House. It demanded that Biden stop sending all military aid to Netanyahu and an immediate ceasefire.
Unfortunately, many unions like the UAW have now endorsed Harris.
Meanwhile, the supply of cash, bombs and other weapons to the zionist settler state has not stopped. War criminal Netanyahu was feted in both Congress and the White House, although many legislators boycotted his speech.
With the zionist entity’s July 31 assassination of Hamas’s leader and chief negotiator Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran and the killing of Hezbollah Commander Faud Shukr in Beirut it is clear that Netanyahu’s only aim is continue the butchery in Gaza, as well as to draw in the U.S into a war against Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iran and Arab people as a whole.
The quiet acceptance of all this means that Netanyahu has the full backing of the White House and U.S. imperialism as a whole, and that any expression of concern over the civilian death toll in Gaza, which is now officially near 40,000, is all a sham.
With the new candidate Kamala Harris, the anti-war and anti-genocide movement hopes to force Harris to actively challenge the administration’s support for genocide in Gaza. The Abandon Biden organization’s press release states:
With the announcement that Kamala Harris has received Joe Biden’s endorsement to be the Democratic nominee, we invite her to meet with the Abandon Biden campaign. Our demands remain unchanged: call for and pressure an unconditional ceasefire in Gaza. The new candidate must address these critical issues and break from the destructive legacy of the current administration.
As the group told MPR News:
And so we’re willing to take the sacrifice that for years living under any Republican is incomparable to one day in Gaza, and that we have to take this stand to ensure that the president, the party, the presidential candidate, will be punished if they pursue a policy that enables genocide.
Echoes of Humphrey in 1968
On January 30, 1968, the National Liberation Front (NLF) launched the powerful Tet offensive against the Saigon regime. Cities, towns and hamlets throughout south Vietnam came under attack, facing off against not only 850,00 ARVN (south Vietnamese) troops, but also 500,000 U.S. occupying soldiers.
This heroic battle by the liberation forces proved that Lyndon Johnson’s effort to prop up the Saigon puppet regime was bound to fail. Consequently, in March Johnson dropped out of the race and endorsed Vice President Humphrey for Democratic Party candidacy, but not without threatening Humphrey that he would withdraw his support if he failed to support the war.
Since Johnson’s main opponent Robert Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles in June, Humphrey was able to secure the nomination in Chicago in the midst of a police riot. He never challenged the U.S. war in Vietnam.
Humphrey’s Republican opponent Richard Nixon, as reported in a 2017 Politico article, sabotaged the Geneva peace talks by secretly telling the Saigon regime that he would continue U.S. support if they would refuse to bargain with the liberation negotiators.
Nixon promised a “secret plan” to end the war in Vietnam. That plan turned out to be to intensify the bombing and the ground war, north and south, and to expand it into Laos and Cambodia.
At a terrible cost in lives, Vietnam did win its liberation in May 1975.
For all the pro-Harris hoopla, Jamelle Bouie, in a July 30 New York Times column titled, “Kamala Harris Can’t Escape Gaza Any More Than Joe Biden Can”, reported that:
Will a President Harris refrain from making additional weapons shipments? Will she attach humanitarian conditions to future military aid? Will she direct her U.N. ambassador to veto Palestinian requests for full membership in the global body? It is difficult to say. According to CNN, aides and allies who have talked with Harris say that “substantively there is little daylight between her and the president.”
The Democratic convention will be August 19-22. Plans are for a massive “March on the DNC”.
“From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free!”
Chicago!
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