Summary
Elise Stefanik, President Trump’s nominee for U.S. ambassador to the UN, stated during her confirmation hearing that Israel has a “biblical right” to the occupied West Bank, aligning with far-right Israeli officials.
Stefanik sidestepped support for Palestinian self-determination, blaming their leadership for failures.
Her stance signals a shift from Biden-era opposition to Israeli settlements, with Trump lifting sanctions on Israeli settler groups and nominating pro-settlement figures like Mike Huckabee for key roles.
Stefanik also vowed to audit UN funding and block aid to Palestinian refugee agencies.
We did it, Patrick. We saved Palestine.
… genocide joe and kamalacaust after getting their “ceasefire”.
Kamala would’ve nuked it.
You know, hormones and the predisposition to genocide, or whatever.
Great work everyone.
As a bonus, we get to:
The original EO is here, and was really difficult to Google:
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2022/10/19/2022-22834/lowering-prescription-drug-costs-for-americans).
Hurray.
Everyone do a
nazielon saluteEdit: bullet points
Stop believing your lying eyes
As somebody who has done courses in gender studies it is painful how plain wrong and unscientific this is. Sure will be true for a lot of the other ones (especially climate). The sex ideology one (and contrary to their claim they of course are the ones with an ideology, because that is what you have when you ignore reality and make up your own truth based on falsehood) will do a lot of harm on the short term. There are real people out there who’s whole existence just got denied. My heart goes out (without a Sieg Heil, but in an empatic way) to all the Transpeople, Intersex People, Non-Binary People and all others who just got their identity denied. Please stay safe and hold tight. There are sane cis people out here who know you exist and stand by your side. For what ever that will be worth in the time to come.
And this is exactly why they’re doing everything they can to make sure people can’t learn this stuff in the future.
Correction on your one point - they declared that everyone is neither male nor female, since no one at conception produces reproductive cells. That starts happening later.
Yeah, more accurate to say everyone is androgynous based on the order.
Let the shoulder patting commence.
As recently as yesterday, someone on Lemmy was showcasing to me the cease-fire Trump skillfully engineered in Gaza, with his straight-talking diplomatic skills, as an example of what Biden could have been doing any time he felt up to getting on Trump’s level, and a reason why Trump was better.
Lol right? They didn’t even wait for the fucking ink to dry…
What was Biden actually doing (as opposed to just saying) regarding the West Bank which you liked better?
(My impression is that Biden’s sanctions on the settlers has no practical consequences, but I’m not 100% sure of that.)
Not nominating a UN ambassador who said Israel had a biblical right to it, for one thing.
Biden’s “stop or I’ll say stop again also here’s more weapons” level of ‘resistance’ to Netanyahu sure wasn’t anything to be real proud of, but I’ll take that over enthusiastic encouragement any day. Trump also has unpaused some of the military shipments that Biden had paused, today, on day one. Sending even more weapons than Biden was one of his key priorities for the next few years, apparently.
Edit: Also, Biden sanctioned settlers in the West Bank, which never happened before, which Trump also undid on day one. Also, Biden resumed shipments to Palestinian aid organizations which Trump had stopped. Has Trump stopped those again? I don’t know whether that rose to the level of a day-one priority, but I’m absolutely sure it is coming.
B-b-but, both sides. Genocide Joe.
I will never co-sign a genocide. That’s why I’m voting for Cornel West. Don’t thank me, I don’t have time, I have another comment to write.
Gotta meet your quota
As it stands in terms of manifested actual political effects, not virtue signaling and token efforts, Trump managed to push for the ceasefire Biden was unwilling to apply pressure for.
We will see, how the politics of Trump look, when it comes to material on the ground effects, but Biden proudly stood by and gave more bombs while watching daily how women and children are murdered with them and millions of people have their everything destroyed.
So so far Trump did much more for Palestinian lifes than Biden. That is not a big achievement of Trump. It just shows that Biden indeed is genocide Joe, who chose every day to continue this, despite all it taking to end it being a phone call.
Also as Biden delivered weapons while Israel was murdering US aid workers he directly violated US laws.
You know they’ve still been shooting people in Gaza past Sunday, right?
An Israeli sniper just shot a kid. Yesterday or today I think. They also air-struck a refugee camp in the West Bank, which hasn’t been happening recently.
I don’t even know why I’m still here, having these conversations. This place is very weird. On most of Lemmy, it’s kind of isolated spots of “yay Trump he fixed it, Israel’s gonna be good now” from time to time, but mostly it just gets laughed out of the room. On [email protected] it’s like a mob of it.
That is, unfortunately, just what happens when Israel accepts a ceasefire. It’s definitely not good, but it’s better than when the genocide was going full steam ahead.
The ceasefire doesn’t cover the West Bank. Again not good, but this is how Israel does things and isn’t an indication that the ceasefire is going to fail.
Why does the ceasefire and gaza matter when the genocide is going full steam ahead in the west bank? Genocide Joe could’ve got the ceasefire agreed on those terms too without taking $100m from Adelson for the privlege
I didnt say Trump fixed it. I said that Biden put the bar so ridiciously low, that it was easy for Trump to step over it.
And while i hope that murder who sho the kid in Gaza will be punished for it in this world and the next, it is certainly a much smaller extend than what Israel was doing daily for the past year with full support from Biden.
So your answer to the question is “nothing”? And yes, the sum total of four settlers Biden sanction do qualify as “nothing”.
I know. It never stops.
Not that it’s the point, but here’s a summary of the sanctions at one point. 11 individuals, 11 entities, I don’t know what changed about it after that: https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-issues-new-batch-of-sanctions-targeting-west-bank-settlers-amid-rampant-violence/
He also paused some weapons shipments, he re-funded Palestinian aid organizations, he tried to get them food, yada yada yada I’ll just repeat what I said about it before since you seem to have missed that part of it:
I would broadly agree with you that the sum total of what Biden did was infinitesimal. He was hitting a boulder with a rubber mallet. He was throwing water bottles at a house fire that he helped ignite. The difference is, Trump is showing up with gasoline, a whole truck full of it, and spraying it on and wants to burn five other houses in addition to this one. Biden at least wasn’t doing that. That makes Trump way worse, even though Biden is bad. I don’t know how that simple logical construction turns into this post-graduate equation that people can’t fathom, or means that they claim I’m saying Biden wasn’t abetting a genocide, but that’s how I see it.
I eagerly await the strawman through which this fairly crystal clear explanation, in my view, gets turned into something else which it isn’t.
I’m not gonna say this assumption is wrong, because we’ll have to wait and see about that, but people who disagree with your position (including me) see what Biden was doing as nearly the worst way he could’ve handled the war in Gaza. Trump’s rhetoric is definitely worse than Biden, but on the ground what he did in his first term and what he’s doing now is what other US presidents were also doing، give or take symbolic actions like moving the US embassy. To borrow your analogy, the worst Trump could possibly do is put some lego bricks on the boulder and pretend he contributed to its structural stability. The whole thing boils down to: What can he do that Biden didn’t already do?
Also note that I’m discounting any possible relation between Trump and the ceasefire; if we assume he did contribute to the ceasefire then he becomes objectively the better candidate for Palestine no matter what he does from this point, but let’s not get into that.
He wasn’t moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, signalling in no uncertain terms his personal position.
I think a lot of people really misunderstood the no-lose scenario Trump engineered wrt Israel.
He got to call him Genocide Joe, while hammering on the debates saying, and I quote that Harris and Joe HATE Israel.
I have absolutely no doubt that both Russia and Israel timed their respective beligerences to try to politically hog-tie Biden knowing Trump could hammer him and once he was in give them both carte blanche.
Like, I have many many issues with how Biden specifically didn’t do the right things in the middle east, but he was attempting to thread a political needle to not hand Trump the ammunition he needed to get re-elected. In retrospect, and I’m sure Joe would agree, that given the reality that Trump was getting the big seat again, he should have just said “fuck it” and done the morally correct things.
And things, now, are going to get so much worse. Trump’s teams position is that it’s acceptable for Israel to just take and settle everything that the Palestinians had. There no longer is an alternative view that involves coexistence from the US government.
Specifically wrt to the middle east, there was a bad option and a worse option. Had Harris won, the political realities could have allowed the expenditure of political capital to do the right (or at least righter) thing. Trump won’t even consider it.
I also like how every pretty valid criticism that could be levied at Biden because of his support for the war in Gaza somehow instantly applied, also, to Kamala Harris. Successfully. There was pretty much no change or hesitation just because it was a whole new person who was, at most, in an advisory role to Mr. Genocide himself.
It was all a bunch of bullshit from the beginning. I don’t think that one issue made a huge difference in the election, honestly, I don’t think enough Americans care. I think it was a combination of multiple issues, each one expertly tuned to different audiences according to their preexisting prejudices to exploit whatever fault lines existed, and then relentlessly pushed. There was a little bit on news media and podcasts and whatever crap. But I definitely think social media was a huge part of it, and we on Lemmy were privileged to see just that one facet of it, with a huge helping of “Palestine” because we tend to be left enough for that one to be one that can really hit home.
You’ll notice that nearly all the people who couldn’t stop posting articles about what disasters Biden was engineering in Palestine, and how big a problem it was, are no longer as enthusiastic about the nightmarish future that’s now on deck there, now that there’s no profit in it for them.
Harris was put in place by the Democratic party and advertised herself to be precisely the continuation of Biden. Aside from some token gestures she did nothing different in regards to Palestine.
And she made a point of denying Democrats who wanted an end of the genocide to speak at the DNC convention, even though they wanted to advocate people to vote for her, despite the previous actions of the administration she was Vice President in.
She really hammered home the point that she will continue Bidens murderous Zionism legacy with that one.
I mean it certainly didn’t help that she actively refused to break from Biden on Gaza, said the exact same things Biden was saying and had a VP that said he supported Israeli expansion.
Meanwhile, Palestine…
I’m surprised you’re still here, to be honest. Yes, I know what Palestine is like right now. I care a lot about it. I wrote my congresspeople, back when they were approving the aid, trying to tell them not to do it. I didn’t think it would do anything, and it didn’t. That’s why I didn’t want Trump to come, and make things quite a bit worse than even Biden’s already war-criminal level of performance.
Around 85% of the Palestinians in Gaza are still alive right now, as far as I know. How many once Trump is done with them?
50%?
80%? Will he solve the Middle East during his term, and bring an end to the killing? It seems unlikely.
Less than 10%, with a lot of it annexed to Israel?
That last one seems pretty probable to me. I think better than 50/50 odds. I don’t want to bet.
Removed by mod
Realpolitiks hasn’t failed the West yet, why should it now?
Are you fucking for real dude? That’s your defense?
I’m not even going to ask you to elaborate on how you believe that just invoking the term “realpolitik” explains your position, because frankly I just don’t care enough to know.
Absolutely:
How else could we explain America allowing a genocide with 46,000+ deaths? It’s the reason people supported the Democrats, and a genocide, despite the threat of Trump and fascism. The ends justify the means.
I had a feeling you wouldn’t really want to engage with that conversation. It’s pretty fucking upsetting.
You’re so sure of yourself. A little humility goes a long way:
I’m sure the Palestinians sleeping in tents tonight are wistfully reminding themselves that Biden was better because Trump might be worse.
I actually commented at more length on this exact article a while back, when one of my bots posted it:
https://ponder.cat/post/1337717/1524546
Now that the Israeli military has done several more attacks in Gaza since the ceasefire (including by a sniper who killed a child), and attacked a refugee camp in the West Bank for good measure, I stand even more so behind my assessment that taking the cease-fire seriously without having a reason to think it will continue is just poor pattern recognition.
You could have had Kamala Harris, who you could say might have been worse or might have been better than Biden. Instead, we have Trump, who is catastrophically worse, in every objective sense, by such a wide margin that I don’t want to think about it. Congratulations, I guess.
I don’t want to talk about this any more. I’m not sure why I engaged with it for this long.
Edit: I was thinking to myself, what the fuck? What are all these weird comments, why am I back in this experience of having this type of conversation?
And then I thought, ooooohhhhh, I resubscribed to [email protected] for some one-off reason, and this came up in my feed without me realizing that was where it’s from. There’s a reason I unsubscribed, because it is filled with an unusually high proportion of this stuff. Okay, peace. I’m back to unsubscribing, because I remember how infinitely more pleasant my Lemmy experience is without quite so many of the aggressively wrong people who always adhere to exactly one viewpoint and never stop replying. Cheers, you can carry on without me with what you’d wanted to say.
I’m sorry if I make you feel like you need to leave, it’s just a different way of viewing the world. I understand your sentiment about the threat of Trump, but I don’t excuse the Democrats role in allowing this to happen.
No matter how I try to express this it’s never eloquent enough for folks who don’t already see this to see it. I hope you are having better luck, you definitely crafted your argument better than I often do.
No it isn’t. It’s a different way of holding the conversation. I’m fine with different ways of viewing the world, I’ve been in contact with quite a few of them on and offline.
You’re filling in both sides of the conversation. We’re talking about what a catastrophic fuck-up Trump is for the Palestinians, somehow managing to be incredibly worse than Biden was, and you’re over here pretending that someone is “excusing the Democrats role in allowing this to happen,” and deflecting away from what we’re talking about into literally probably the 30th time I’ve had some variation, yet again, of this exact same conversation. As far as I know, no one was making excuses for Democrats or anything remotely like it. I called Biden a war criminal. It literally doesn’t matter what I say. You have a tailor-made imaginary opponent you are debating, who’s trying to make excuses for Democrats, and so you’re out here debating against that imaginary person. And as far as I can tell, you’ll keep replying forever, always against that imaginary person, always saying the same 4 or 5 different counter-points to the things no one said, never admitting any kind of error, or listening to anything.
That’s a waste of time for me to be a part of. It’s not your way of viewing the world. It is your absolute refusal to take part in the conversation on any kind of genuine basis.