By Chris Fry
The Democratic Party National Committee (DNC) called it the Chicago “Unity” Convention. But beneath the hoopla, the dancing in the aisles, the rousing speeches attacking Trump’s fascist “2025 Program”, the balloon drop and all the rest, lay a deep contradiction.
That is the war in Gaza and the U.S. supplying massive numbers of bombs and piles of cash to the Netanyahu regime.
Despite protests by thousands outside the convention hall, despite more than 700,000 Democratic voters casting their ballots for “Uncommitted” in primaries across the country, including more than 100,000 in Michigan, despite pleas by pro-Palestinian delegates, including the UAW leadership, to allow just one speaker to describe the awful slaughter that has killed or wounded hundreds of thousands of people in Gaza, the convention organizers gave their cold answer. “No!”
Georgia Republican former Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan, a rabid foe of reproductive rights, was given the platform to speak about how voting for Harris is the act of a “patriot.” This contradicts the main plank of the Democratic platform on abortion rights.
The platform does support israel while it is completely silent on Gaza and the Palestinian people.
As reported by an August 23 article in The Guardian titled “Uncommitted holds sit-in outside Democratic convention after Palestinians denied a speaker”:
Ruwa Romman, a state representative from Georgia who is Palestinian American, was among those the movement suggested [to speak]. She said on X that her speech “urged us to unite behind Harris, criticized Trump, and spoke about the promise of this moment. The only reason we’re doing this is to save the soul of our party and prevent bad actors from using our pain in an ongoing voter suppression campaign.”
Muslim Women for Harris said in a statement that the group could not continue in good conscience given the denial of a Palestinian voice. “The family of the israeli hostage that was on the stage tonight has shown more empathy towards Palestinian Americans and Palestinians than our candidate or the DNC has.”
Some 30 delegates at the convention represented the uncommitted voters. On the first night, when three of them unfurled a banner reading “Stop Arming Israel!”, they were struck from behind by “We Love Joe” signs, had the lights over them turned off, had the banner ripped out of their hands, and finally were thrown out of the convention hall.
This outrage was matched by the Chicago cops arresting more than 90 protestors from the thousands in the streets asserting their right to assemble and speak out against the U.S.-supported apartheid israeli atrocities in Gaza.
To the DNC, Imperialist hegemony trumps class struggle.
The first days of the conference contained references to unions and even the working class as a whole. UAW President Sean Fain, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders all proclaimed how Kamala Harris would fight against “greedy corporations” and implement all kinds of social reforms.
These “progressives” even said that Harris and Biden were working “around the clock” to stop the war in Gaza. But that was all a sham.
But by the end of convention with Harris’s acceptance speech, all talk of the working class and social reforms went out the window.
In her acceptance speech, Harris spoke about how as prosecutor she confronted corporate polluters and banks who foreclosed thousands of families out of their homes during the Great Recession. But she failed to talk about the thousands of poor people she sent to California’s prisons. She didn’t mention the prisoners “enlisted” to fight dangerous wildfires so that the state would not have to hire union workers at decent pay to do that job.
Oh yes, Harris felt great “sympathy” for the Palestinian people in Gaza, but “security” for israel was paramount. This is music to the ears for the patrons of the party, the weapons industry, the oil companies, and the banks that rely on apartheid israel to ensure that the flow of profits from the oil-rich Mideast region stay unimpeded by the impoverished residents of those countries.
The Democratic Party leadership actually allowed the well-funded right wing AIPAC, a coalition of Jewish and white Christian nationalist zionists, to massively finance opponent primary candidates to progressive incumbent Democratic congresspeople. Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman were ousted because they had spoken out for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza.
Biden and Harris have openly defied the Leahy Act, in a way that mimics Trump famous illegalities. They are violating the 1997 Leahy Law, which stipulates that:
[W]hen the U.S. finds credible evidence that a unit of foreign security forces has committed gross human rights abuses, any U.S. aid to that unit is supposed to be automatically suspended.
International organizations have listed many such abuses by the israeli Occupation Forces (IOF), where hospitals, schools and homes have been systematically bombed, where hundreds of aid workers have been killed, where food and medical aid has been held up at the border while typhus, hepatitis A, infectious diseases, intestinal disease and respiratory diseases like measles, whooping cough and now even polio epidemics are threatened because of the israeli-destroyed sanitary system and bombed out medical centers.
Hundreds of health workers have been killed.
And this does not include the human rights abuses of the evictions and murders of Palestinian families on the West Bank, another clear violation of international law by the U.S.-supported Netanyahu regime.
The Biden White House, when queried by Congress about this, simply ignored those questions. And when the Netanyahu regime even ignores the pleas from “hostage” families to agree to a ceasefire, Biden and Harris cover for the zionist entity by continually announcing that a deal is “just around the corner”. They have been saying that since March.
Democratic legislators who had complained about the Biden-Harris legal violations stayed mum about all this at the convention. The brave protestors outside did not.
Harris openly boasted: “As commander in chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.”
To Harris, other countries are not friends. They are either “allies” or else “tyrants” in the never-ending U.S. global war for imperialist domination. According to her, Putin is a “tyrant” for intervening in a U.S.-engineered civil war directed at the ethnic Russian population in Ukraine and objecting to a hostile NATO on Russia’s border. China’s President Xi is a “tyrant” because of that country’s “production overcapacity.” But Netanyahu is a valued “ally” even as he massacres tens of thousands of Palestinian people, including many children and babies.
Chants of “USA! USA!” ringing through the hall made this convention strikingly resembled the July Trumpist Republican convention in Milwaukee. And when a few protestors in front of the convention center shouted out the names of children killed by U.S. bombs in Gaza, delegates going in were filmed holding their hands over their ears in callous disregard.
Both Harris and Trump may be the enemies of the people of Gaza and the West Bank, as well as all the Arab people in the Mideast and the Palestinian community here, but that only means that we must step up the struggle to support the national and human rights of the Palestinian people.
From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free!
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