YOUR starter for ten: Who said the following:
“Even if the bad guys are there, you can’t take out two, ten, twelve, fifteen thousand people, innocent people, in order to get the one bad guy.”
No, it wasn’t me, although I have to say that it’s a piece of simple, human common sense with which I would heartily concur.
No, it wasn’t Jeremy Corbyn, although I’m pretty sure that the former Labour leader agrees that dropping a 2,000lb bomb (that’s a ton, by the way) on a residential apartment block or a tent village is not the kind of behaviour envisioned by the authors of the Geneva Convention. And no, it wasn’t President Higgins, the guy the Brit and West Brit media have now decided is a greater threat to world peace than James McClean.
The words were in fact spoken by election loser Joe Biden in an Oval Office interview with MSNBC explaining why he’s an election loser. Speaking over the sound of the removal men’s radio, Biden told Lawrence O’Donnell that he said the above to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he visited Israel 10 days after the Hamas invasion of October 7, 2023. It was a rare moment of honesty from Biden, who over the past 15 months has not exactly been known for his speaking the truth about how Israel has been prosecuting its war.
Well, I say war, but a powerful air force and a heavily mechanised army pouring an endless supply of US- and Europe-supplied bombs from the air and ground at lightly-armed fighters in sandals armed with AKs is not what you would call a clash of the Titans. Especially when after the dust clears the bodies are considerably more likely to be women and children than Hamas. What Genocide Joe is doing is preparing the ground for posterity. It might have saved a lot of trouble and a lot of lives if the proud Irish-American (©Joe Biden) had said this to the world 15 months ago, as he now claims to have said it to Benjamin Nosferatu. Or even after the latest bloodsoaked atrocity.
CHANGED TIMES: Joe Biden’s hugely successful visit to Ireland in April 2023 seems very long ago
But he didn’t. He’s saying it now so that the quote is there to be found on Google by future historians and biographers, and he’s saying it now so he can pretend to have been aware all the time that ‘Bibi’ was likely to go full psycho on the people of Gaza.
Just as a little exercise, let’s pretend that Genocide Joe really did tell Benny the Butcher to go easy on the mass murder back in October 2023. What consequences did the US President say would flow from any failure by Israel to heed his wise words? Joe didn’t say, so we can only go by his actions and as the entrails of children hung from telegraph wires and the small, stiff bodies of Palestinian babies lay in the powerless incubators of Gaza’s hospitals, not only did Joe do nothing to stop the slaughter, he sped up the conveyor belt delivering the bombs and bullets that enabled the slaughter to be escalated.
The good news is that Biden won’t be planning any trips to kiss the Blarney Stone or sip Guinness in a thatched pub during his retirement years. Or if he does, he’s going to have to do so behind a thick wall of Gardaí and to a roaring cacophony of disgusted Irish protestors – and I won’t be unadjacent if and when that day comes.
If he’s being honest about how much his Irish ancestry means to him, his effective banishment from the land of his forebears in his twilight years will be a blow to him. It’s not the most draconian punishment that somebody responsible for war crimes has ever been handed – but it’s something.
