Thanks for the rec! I’ll give it a listen.

He’s alienated the young people who could make up for his own lack of charisma with youthful energy, and he can’t even campaign properly because he gets protested every time he shows his face. He’s toast.

Except you’re comparing apples to oranges. The October poll was national while the most recent poll was just done in battleground states.

I imagine watching your extended family suffer under an artificial famine while dodging bombs and shells raises your tolerance for discomfort while punishing those responsible.

59% in 2020 to 25% in 2024 is a decrease of 34% for Biden.

Are you puzzled by these numbers? Are you asking, “How could they think letting Trump win is going to make anything better?” Well, if you genuinely want to understand, read this reporting by Slate.

Here are some highlights:

I heard a similar sentiment from another patron, Fares, a Palestinian man who became a U.S. citizen 20 years ago, and voted for Biden in 2020. “I feel like, whether Republicans or Democrats, it’s all the same,” he said. “I don’t think I’m going to vote for any because it doesn’t matter.” It’s a major shift for him. He was born in Syria to parents exiled in 1948 from what is now Haifa. He told me he hadn’t missed a presidential election before, but now he doesn’t see a point. “If 12,000 dead kids don’t change their hearts, you think you or I will?”

…

In a conversation at Qahwah House, Elabed seemed tired. It had become obvious to her she could no longer support Biden, and she didn’t see why that was so hard to understand. “It is hard for me to reconcile my core beliefs and morals to support a president that dehumanizes my people,” Elabed said. “This is a president that I met in person. That knows my sister. That met my mom, who wore a traditional Palestinian thobe at the White House.”

…

I posed the obvious question, asking if she thought Trump would be better. “What’s worse than genocide?” she retorted. “Maybe if the Democrats lose this election, they’ll learn their lesson. I’m happy to take several steps back if that’s what it takes to take a step forward.” When I argued, I got thousand-yard stares.

A poll published at the end of October 2023 found “only 17% of Arab American voters saying they will vote for Biden in 2024—a staggering drop from 59% in 2020.”

Then a couple weeks ago a NYT poll “found Trump leading among registered Middle Eastern, North African or Muslim voters in the swing states, with 57 percent saying they were planning to back him in November. Only 25 percent said they were supporting Biden.”

The top editor at the NYT has problematic ties to Zionism, too.

Schwartz is, pretty clearly, a symptom of a much bigger problem with the Israel/Palestine coverage coming out of the New York Times. A clue as to how it could have happened comes from a closer look at the executive editor who was mentioned above.

As Ryan Grim and Daniel Boguslaw have reported at the Intercept, Kahn’s father Leo Kahn was a longtime board member at the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA), which has sought to enforce adherence to a pro-Israel line in media coverage by “smear[ing] journalists whose work it disagrees with and launch[ing] boycott campaigns against news organizations it believes are not responding with enough deference to its requests.” And, according to the Times’s own profile of Joe Kahn published when he became the paper’s executive editor in 2022, father and son frequently “often ‘dissected newspaper coverage’ together.” While the Times denies that CAMERA has any particular influence on its reporting, Grim and Boguslaw note that the paper’s “record of acquiescing to CAMERA’s relentless requests” is “striking in contrast to its historic resistance to correcting its stories.”

It was a total coincidence that it happened right after Hamas fired rockets at Tel-Aviv for the first time in months. \s

If the US were invaded by Australia, we would fight them on the shores of California and the fields of Pennsylvania, but we would also rain down hellfire on Perth and Sydney. I’m not sure why you think the history of the particular place the IOF soldiers were stationed at is relevant. That’s setting aside that the reason the occupation troops were there is to enforce the siege of Gaza that has been in place since 2007.

Good call

Occupying Palestine. If you think Israel has a right to exist within the pre-1967 borders, then occupying Gaza and the West Bank.

Don’t compare the oppressors and colonizers to the freedom fighters.

In its bare reality, decolonization reeks of red-hot cannonballs and bloody knives. For the last can be the first only after a murderous and decisive confrontation between the two protagonists. This determination to have the last move up to the front, to have them clamber up (too quickly, say some) the famous echelons of an organized society, can only succeed by resorting to every means, including, of course, violence.

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

Soldiers of an occupying force are fair game.

It’s outrageous that Europe and the US continue to hang on to their colonies and then feign moral outrage when Russia or China tries to exploit their neighbors.

France claims 13 overseas territories and the UK claims 14 overseas territories. France continues to exploit the its former African colonies.

You may have noticed that Haiti is a shambles these days. Well part of the reason is that after Haiti won it’s independance, France demanded reparations. That’s right, the colonizer demanded reparations from the nation of slaves who won their freedom. And for 122 years, until 1947, Haiti was saddled with this debt.

Avril Benoît, executive director for Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) USA stated on March 8:

"The US plan for a temporary pier in Gaza to increase the flow of humanitarian aid is a glaring distraction from the real problem: Israel’s indiscriminate and disproportionate military campaign and punishing siege. The food, water, and medical supplies so desperately needed by people in Gaza are sitting just across the border. Israel needs to facilitate rather than block the flow of supplies. This is not a logistics problem; it is a political problem. Rather than look to the US military to build a work-around, the US should insist on immediate humanitarian access using the roads and entry points that already exist.

In the past months, the US has vetoed three UN Security Council resolutions calling for a ceasefire—which is the only way to ensure a real scale up in emergency assistance. We reiterate our call for an immediate and sustained ceasefire to stop the killing of thousands more civilians and allow for the delivery of desperately needed humanitarian aid."

Stephen Zunes, a professor of Politics at the University of San Francisco, is currently the Torgny Segerstedt Visiting Research professor at the Gothenburg University in Sweden.

Yes, that’s covered in the Jacobin article I linked to.

We’re talking about French colonialism