By Mohsen Badakhsh *
The blatant attempts by the U.S. government and the mainstream American media to parrot ridiculous Israeli lies about the ongoing genocide in the besieged Gaza Strip have seriously backfired.
These attempts have included projecting the occupying regime that has wreaked havoc in the densely populated coastal territory of 2.2 million people since October 7 as “victims”.
However, Americans have refused to fall into the trap this time, coming out in large numbers in different states, including Washington DC, to express solidarity with Palestinians and condemn the Israeli regime.
One of the largest pro-Palestine rallies was witnessed on Saturday in the American capital city, which came amid reports of growing divisions over the Gaza war within the ruling Democratic Party.
The massive protest against the Israeli regime’s genocidal attacks against Palestinians in the besieged strip and Washington’s continued support for the regime and its pledge to give $14 billion more in military aid brought together over 150,000 people of diverse faiths and nationalities from across the US.
It is widely agreed that the massive show of support by people who are angered by the carnage of mostly Palestinian women and children in Gaza was a direct outcome of the propaganda campaign orchestrated by US officials and media in a bid to whitewash the Zionist regime’s war crimes.
The official pro-Israel publicity campaign and declaration of all-out support for Tel-Aviv’s war machine came in the face of widely shared accounts and documented evidence on social media platforms of indiscriminate bombings and other war crimes perpetrated by the Zionist regime against Gazans.
While the state-sponsored American media outlets conveniently ignored or censored previously held protest rallies against the Gaza genocide in major cities across the US, ignoring the latest and unarguably unprecedented pro-Palestine demonstration in DC wasn’t possible.
Pro-Palestine protests have also been reported in other US states, including, California, New York, Ohio, Utah, Michigan and Pennsylvania in recent weeks.
Such tremendous outpouring of support for Palestine has come despite attempts by a massive network of pro-Israel lobby groups and propaganda institutions across the US to identify and blacklist the demonstrators as “anti-Semitic”, which would result in their potential dismissal from jobs.
Protest organizers in Washington had cautioned the participants after media reports that students in New York saw their job offers being revoked for taking part in pro-Palestinian events and rallies.
The state of New York is home to the largest population of Zionist Jews in the US who share close ties with the Israeli regime and hold dual citizenship of the occupying entity.
The remarkable show of support for Palestine in a country that officially prides itself on its unreserved support for the apartheid Israeli regime comes amid reports of growing divisions among politicians and lawmakers affiliated with the ruling Democrat Party.
The divisions have been fueled by the Joe Biden administration’s all-out push to defend and justify the ongoing genocide in Gaza by the Zionist regime. One of the oft-repeated slogans during Saturday’s protest march referred to US President Joe Biden as “Genocide Joe.”
This is while the pro-Israel news outlet, Axios, seen by many as affiliated with the ruling party, reported last week that Biden’s political team “is in turmoil” over the regime’s war with the Hamas resistance group.
“Infighting is spreading, slowly but meaningfully, at every layer of the Democratic Party over Biden's full-throated support of Israel,” the outlet reported Saturday, insisting that it runs “much deeper” than college campus protests or scathing remarks uttered by elected officials.
Pro-Palestinian Democrats, it conceded, “are outraged” at the persisting carnage in Gaza and believe that it has been facilitated by Biden’s open support for the Tel Aviv regime.
Many liberal Jews, on the other hand, “are furious that so many progressive Democrats aren’t more outraged” by the unprecedented Hamas military operation that inflicted heavy losses on the Israeli military, threatening to leave the party.
The report further pointed out that nearly 20 percent of the 300 employees of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) have signed a letter calling on their boss (Biden) to demand a ceasefire.
Additionally, a US State Department “foreign affairs officer” sent a massive internal email to organize a "dissent cable" on the administration's Israel policy — insisting in a social media post that Biden is "complicit in genocide" in Gaza.
Day after day, the report emphasized, more Democrats in the House of Representatives are expressing growing concerns over Biden’s pro-Israel policy and slamming Tel Aviv’s aggression against Gaza.
The report went on to describe Biden’s “war-planning team” as “pro-Israel across the board,” but hastened to caution that top Biden administration officials “know their own party decidedly” does not favor the Tel Aviv regime and remain “deeply divided over Israel’s leadership and Gaza strategy.”
The hasty move by the Biden administration and the US corporate media empire to openly back and justify the brutal Israeli terrorism against the defenseless civilian population in Gaza is a blunder that is already backfiring. It will ultimately expose the true and historic nature of the US foreign policy in perpetrating and justifying military aggressions, foreign interference, war crimes and racism across the world.
By all indications, Biden stands no chance to return to office in 2024 amid growing divisions within the ruling party and enormous dissatisfied voters who regret casting their ballot for a deceptive politician.
The mainstream US propaganda machine will also continue to lose audiences amid rising awareness among the masses who are now relying more on alternative sources to obtain reliable information.
* Mohsen Badakhsh is an educator and freelance journalist.
