Man carrying child’s body in Gaza. Fars Media Corporation.  Attribution 4.0 International license.

On May 20, Israeli forces bombed two homes in Gaza, where, Reuters reports, “children were among the 18 dead.” The attack was justified, the Israeli regime claims, because — who knows? — there might have been a Hamas member hiding in one of the closets or something. To criticize those killings, we’re told, is “anti-semitic” even though the dead were almost certainly all semites (Palestinian Arabs). And there are a LOT of such attacks.

On May 21, a gunman killed two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, DC. Cue outrage — THAT attack, the Israeli regime tells us, was both unjustified and “anti-semitic.”

It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the victims being actual, voluntary employees of the regime that’s conducting those daily attacks in Gaza, even though the perpetrator (allegedly one Elias Rodriguez of Chicago) was shouting “free free Palestine” as he was taken into custody outside a pro-Israel “Young Diplomats” event. He obviously just hates Jews, see?

And maybe he DOES just hate Jews. There’s certainly a lot of ethnic hatred out there, and it’s sick regardless of who’s infected with it or who it’s aimed at.

A lot of that ethnic hatred is aimed at Palestinian Arabs (who are, again, semites), by the Israeli regime,  used by that regime and its supporters to justify the murders of, at a minimum, tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians over the last year-and-a-half. Multiple Israeli officials have openly called for the “ethnic cleansing” of Gaza and even genocide of the Palestinian Arab population.

But we’re supposed to ignore all that — the pro-Israel media “charm offensive” is already in full swing. The victims (Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky), the New York Times laments, were young. They were in love. They were just minding their own business and looking forward to a trip to Israeli-occupied Jerusalem next week, where Lischinsky intended to propose.

Yes, it’s very sad. I mean that. When it comes to murder, my sympathies are always with the victims, not the perpetrators.

But  similarly sad things could be, and haven’t been, widely reported concerning the victims of the Israeli strike. Mainstream media haven’t mentioned the victims’ marriage or travel plans, their occupations, or even their names. They’re just not important, I guess.

As in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, “all animals are equal — but some animals are more equal than others.”

What can we do about that? I’m not going to try to solve the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians here. That’s a thorny matter with a long, ugly history.

But there’s one obvious first step, and that’s for people to stop murdering and excusing murder over it.

Unfortunately, both sides suffer from an over-abundance of people who aren’t willing to take that first step.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“I guarantee you,” Joe Biden told CNN’s Jake Tapper two months before winning the 2020 US presidential election, “I will be totally transparent in terms of my health and all aspects of my health.”

Even as we’ve continued to learn more about the Biden administration’s desperate attempts to hide his severe cognitive decline over the last couple of years of his administration, his personal post-presidency office issued a statement on May 18 announcing that the 82-year-old was diagnosed, on May 16, with stage 5 prostate cancer that has metastasized to his bones. Thoughts, prayers, etc.

Various medical experts seem inclined to argue the matter, but I’m just not buying the “just now diagnosed” story.

Joe Biden, like other presidents, belongs to a special class of people, also including e.g. “super-athletes,” whose health and physical conditions are subject to near-constant monitoring and analysis by medical professionals.

The public, naturally, wants to know everything about a president’s health. So does that president and his inner circle. But that doesn’t mean the latter group wants or intends to disclose bad news to the former group.

The president’s perceived health affects everything from markets to foreign relations to, yes, voting inclinations. Therefore, the line from the White House — not just Biden’s White House, any White House — will always be that the president is in excellent health. He’s vigorous! He’s in great shape! No worries!

The claim that Joe Biden’s “aggressive” prostate cancer went from “undetected” to “stage 5 metastatic” in the four months since he left office is risible.

He and his doctors almost certainly knew about the cancer while he was still president.

They probably knew about it before he dropped out of the 2024 presidential race last July.

They just didn’t want YOU to know about it until he was well out of office and merely a sympathetic old man whose health situation affected only himself and his loved ones, rather than the so-called “leader of the free world” whose admission of a serious health problem might cost him, or his party, votes in an upcoming election.

“Totally transparent,” in Bidenese,  means “people look right through me and seeing nothing I don’t want them to see.”

It’s not just Biden. It’s not just serious medical conditions. It’s government, and the political class, from top to bottom.

Politicians love to squawk about “transparency,” but in reality they spend much of their time hiding anything they don’t want known and punishing anyone who dares reveal it. If you don’t believe me, ask Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Reality Winner,  or any of the other whistleblowers prosecuted for telling the public the truth.

The secrecy cancer inherent in politics is much more aggressive and deadly than one man’s medical diagnosis.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“8647.”

Those numbers are spelled out — in seashells — in a May 15 Instagram photo posted by former FBI director James Comey.

The meaning doesn’t seem unclear. To “86” someone, as I recall from my brief late-1980s career in nightclub security, means to remove and ban someone from a bar or club for bad behavior. “47,” of course, refers to Donald Trump, 47th president of the United States.

Cute? I guess. Comey doesn’t like Trump, Trump doesn’t like Comey, and neither of them ever skips an opportunity to tell us so. Big whoop. Any serious editor would classify a story on the seashell photo as “dog bites man.” It’s just not “news” by any traditional definition.

Trump, however, has mastered the art of creating fake “news” as a distraction whenever the real news (for example, billions of dollars in Qatari bribes, failure to make any progress, after more than 100 days, in ending a war he said would be over within 24 hours of his inauguration, a congressional stall on his “big beautiful [spending] bill,” etc.) makes him look bad.

Thus “86”  suddenly and magically became code — to Trump and his MAGA cultists, anyway — for “assassination,” and Comey got called in, with full “news cycle” fanfare, to explain himself to the Secret Service.

There are at least three ways, other than the assassination that the number in no way implies, to “86” a sitting president. One is impeachment and conviction. Another is invocation of the 25th Amendment by the vice president and a majority of the cabinet (or other congressionally defined body) to declare him unable to serve. The third is resignation under pressure from a credible threat of one of the first two.

Comey’s “8647” was neither a call to assassinate, nor a threat to assassinate, Trump. Period.

“The Constitution and the rule of law are not partisan political tools,” Comey writes in A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership. “Lady Justice wears a blindfold. She is not supposed to peek out to see how her political master wishes her to weigh a matter.”

It’s hard to dredge up much sympathy for Comey. He arrived at that sentiment long after he should have. Long after, for example, his announcement that an FBI investigation into illegal use of a private email server to transmit and store classified information had established the commission of the crimes, but that the perpetrator wouldn’t be prosecuted because, and only because, that perpetrator’s name was “Hillary Clinton.”

No blindfold there. Comey peeked, saw that his political masters didn’t want a Democratic presidential candidate charged with crimes she had provably committed, then “weighed” the matter as ordered.

Comey’s past failure to charge real criminals with real crimes does not, however, mean that he should be accused of a fake one.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY