Joe Biden Is Not a “Genocidal Maniac”
And it’s not just wrong but reckless and irresponsible to say he is.
1. Genocide No(e)
One thing I discovered upon leaving the dark arts of public relations and opposition research for the green pastures of journalism commentary content creation is that even if something seems blazingly obvious to you, it is still important to write about it—because no matter how self-evident a #take may seem, out there among The People there are still those who will need to hear it. Maybe they just want to be reassured that they are correct about something. Or maybe they have been unreliably informed about the subject matter by Chinese social media spyware or a renegade Australian’s primetime cable lineup.
It is in that spirit that I offer today’s entry into our national dialogue, the latest in a series:
Joe Biden is not a genocidal maniac.
To be sure—my on-the-job journalism-career training has also taught me that the pros throw in sentences starting with “to be sure” to cover their bases—clearing Biden of the accusation of genocide will not absolve him of any mistakes of judgment in directing America’s response to a religious and territorial conflict between an actual genocidal terrorist group and an American ally currently led by a scandal-plagued right-wing hardliner.
People of goodwill will continue to have serious disagreements over how President Biden is navigating the Gaza conflict. But that policy debate presupposes some facts about him that are apparently in dispute. Specifically whether or not he is itching for a genocide.
Being non-genocidal and non-maniacal are not particularly high bars to clear for the presidency. But they are particularly important this year, seeing as at least with regards to the mania, it is a high enough bar to make Biden the far, far better of the two contenders for the presidency. As such, it is important that those who think he may have genocidal tendencies have access to a clear rebuttal.
So here goes.
By way of background, the charge that the president is a genocidal maniac has emanated from the progressive left, mostly the TikTok youth. That exact phrase—“genocidal maniac”—arose in the debate about a recent Atlantic article by Theo Baker, a high-achieving college sophomore who was reporting on his experience with antisemitism and anti-Bidenism on Stanford’s campus. Baker opens his piece with this:
One of the section leaders for my computer-science class, Hamza El Boudali, believes that President Joe Biden should be killed. “I’m not calling for a civilian to do it, but I think a military should,” the 23-year-old Stanford University student told a small group of protesters last month. “I’d be happy if Biden was dead.”
El Boudali took issue with the way Baker presented this anecdote—not because he felt that he was misquoted or misrepresented but because he did not concur that wishing death upon President Biden was the extreme position that Baker made it out to be. Here’s his argument:
I would say that comparing the mainstream Democrat currently leading the United States to Hitler and wishing death upon him does make one extreme, yes. But El Boudali is not alone in his view. Many others with big social media followings have echoed similar rhetoric, and the nickname “Genocide Joe” has proliferated on social media.
2. 10,000 Maniacs
The use of the “Genocide Joe” nickname reveals a double misunderstanding: The people who use it get Joe Biden wrong and get genocide wrong.
The most obvious evidence that Joe Biden is not a genocidal maniac is the fact that so many people feel comfortable calling him one on social media.
This is a bit reductive of course. But fundamentally speaking, people who live in countries run by genocidal maniacs tend to be scared to express that feeling for fear that the leader’s rage will rain down upon them. That fear is not apparent in Joe Biden’s America because people have no reason to be concerned that he’s going to target them for speaking out, particularly critics on the left. The only folks who have deluded themselves into thinking that Biden might target them unfairly are the Great Patriots who stormed the Capitol on January 6th and mauled police officers in a ham-handed attempt to overthrow the government, as well as the allies who listen to their jailhouse concerts. The problem with that group’s claim of persecution is that the perpetrators are being found guilty not by some government or military tribunal but by juries of their peers.
In addition to protecting freedom of expression at home, there is not any evidence of President Biden’s supposed genocidal mania abroad. Despite the claims of many on the far left and MAGA right, the president has not started any new wars. In fact, he got America out of the decades long-war that both of his immediate predecessors had failed to extricate us from despite a stated desire to do so. (I didn’t like how he extricated us from that war, but that’s beside the point.) In addition, Biden dramatically scaled back the number of drone strikes that those presidents had executed.
So clearly this is not a person with an unquenchable bloodlust or uncontrollable rage that manifests in dealing out death around the world.
As such the claim of his genocidal intent rests on America’s support of Israel’s action in Gaza. So let’s look at that.
For starters, I don’t believe there’s any meaningful sense in which what is happening in Gaza could be described as a genocide. The attacks targeting the Hamas leadership and their sponsors are clearly legitimate; the attacks on Hamas fighters are legitimate; and if Hamas were to surrender tomorrow and release all of Israel’s hostages, the attack on Gaza would stop. This is not how actual genocides work. If Biden, or Israel for that matter, wanted to perpetrate a deliberate genocidal “cleansing” of the people of Gaza they could’ve done so before the terrorist attack and the release of hostages would not have an impact on their actions, and they would not be taking any of the care that Israel has been taking to reduce civilian casualties. And to the extent that Israelis are taking actions against Palestinians outside of Gaza—in the West Bank settlements, where Israeli settlers have reportedly stepped up violence since October 7—Biden has been more explicitly critical than any other president.
None of this is to minimize the horrific deaths of many thousands of innocent Palestinians and the real suffering of hundreds of thousands of more, and none of this is to excuse or endorse the manner in which Benjamin Netanyahu has prosecuted the war. It is fair to question and criticize Israel’s actions, including the recent killing of seven World Central Kitchen workers.
But words have meaning and the word “genocide” is not apt in this situation.
Even if you drop the debate over the term “genocide” and just want to argue more narrowly that the president is to blame for the suffering in Gaza, here’s the thing: It’s not Joe Biden who is spearheading the attack in Gaza. He has repeatedly expressed reservations about the tactics deployed by Israel. Yesterday after what was reportedly a heated phone call with Netanyahu, Israel conceded to Biden’s demands that more humanitarian aid get into Gaza.
Again, ensuring that more aid trucks reach civilians doesn’t sound like the type of demand that would be made by a genocidal maniac.
Maybe Biden should have been doing more to try to curb Israel’s conduct. Again, that’s a fair criticism, and one we will have to grapple with for a long time to come.
But one thing that should not be up for debate is the reckless, irresponsible claim that Joe Biden is a genocidal maniac.
Because as long as some of those who should be in Biden’s camp are being convinced he might be, we are more likely to get an actual Muslim-banning maniac like Donald Trump in the White House next year.
3. Anti-Trump Wives Club
I keep saying it: The key to winning over some of the reluctant anti-Trump Republican politicians this year is pressure from their families. I continue to fantasize about a Democratic National Convention featuring Republican spouses: Laura Bush, Lynne Cheney—and now maybe I can wishcast about Marty Kemp:
"I don’t believe there’s any meaningful sense in which what is happening in Gaza could be described as a genocide. The attacks targeting the Hamas leadership and their sponsors are clearly legitimate; the attacks on Hamas fighters are legitimate; and if Hamas were to surrender tomorrow and release all of Israel’s hostages, the attack on Gaza would stop. This is not how actual genocides work."
Thank you. This is correct, and genocide is a serious word that should not be trivialized--lest it be watered down into meaning nothing and rendering it as a useless descriptor when new genocides actually *do* happen. You can call what the IDF doing a "Nakba," or a "violently-forced displacement," or whatever other term you want to come up with, but it is *not* a genocide. Ask the Rwandan Tutsis what a genocide looks like and they'll tell you it does not look like Gaza. Ask the Iraqi Yazidis what a genocide looks like, and they will tell you it does not look like Gaza. Ask the folks in Darfur what a genocide looks like and they will tell you it does not look like Gaza. Ask the Rohingya in Myanmar what a genocide looks like and they will tell you it does not look like Gaza. Ask the Bosnians what genocide looks like and they will tell you it does not look like Gaza. Ask Holocaust survivors--and not just the Jewish ones--what a genocide looks like and they will tell you that it does not look like Gaza. Words matter, and trivializing real genocides by declaring that what the IDF are doing is one risks delegitimizing the descriptor when it happens to the next set of ethnic minorities that it *actually* happens to.
"Despite the claims of many on the far left and MAGA right, the president has not started any new wars. In fact, he got America out of the decades long-war that both of his immediate predecessors had failed to extricate us from despite a stated desire to do so. (I didn’t like how he extricated us from that war, but that’s beside the point.) In addition, Biden dramatically scaled back the number of drone strikes that those presidents had executed."
This is exactly correct. Despite how awful our exit from Afghanistan was, that was something that the American public had been calling for for a very long time, and Biden was the only president with the guts to follow through on it and shoulder whatever fallout came from it--unlike Trump, who had personally authorized that withdrawal in his final months via the surrender agreement that released 5k Talib fighters and set up the timeline for withdrawal into 2021 beyond the election. And Trump damn-near started a war with Iran by killing their top hero general of the Quds Force, Qasem Soleimani! We had not conducted publicly-open kinetic military operations against the Iranians since the 1980's to my knowledge (during the "tanker wars" of the Iran-Iraq conflict), and a modern war with Iran would have made the Iraq war look like a walk in the park by comparison. Trump almost brought us to that point because he's a loose cannon who doesn't understand these things and doesn't listen to his military, intelligence, or geopolitical advisors (unlike Biden, who does the opposite).
And if you think the WCK strike by the IDF was bad, just know that that exact kind of thing happened *constantly* in places like Pakistan/Afghanistan/Yemen/Somalia from 2009-2020. Biden scaled those drone strikes back--many of which were the "signature strikes" that caused the most civilian casualties by chasing "pattern-of-life"--based targets who were in the wrong place, at the wrong time, doing things that looked suspicious to thermal drone camera observers looking for "targets of opportunity." So if you felt sick to your stomach about the WCK strike--as I did--just know that Joe Biden significantly cut back the US military and intelligence community from doing those kinds of strikes on a rolling basis. Joe Biden is a lot closer to a peace-seeking president than a "genocidal" president via his record, and thems are the facts, whether people want to acknowledge them or not.
Thank you for writing this. As a Jew, I feel I have been transported to a surreal crazy-town. The idea that this is “genocide” is insane. If so, it’s the only genocide in history where the alleged “victim” turns down multiple ceasefire offers, receives hundreds of tons of humanitarian supplies from the “culprit” and experiences a historic low in civilian/militant casualty rates. I have determined that while liberals and progressives are quite good at recognizing the Russian influence campaign targeting conservatives/MAGA, they are shockingly blind to the Iranian influence campaign targeting them. As Bari Weiss wrote the other day (and if you knew me you would realize how insane it is that I am even reading Bari Weiss):
“A global movement sympathetic to Hamas is fighting an information war with the objective of isolating Israel diplomatically and undermining its right to exist. We have learned that the United States, our universities, and our social media platforms are fronts in this campaign. And we have learned that anti-Semitism has returned with shocking power to demonize, harass, intimidate, and assault Jews throughout the diaspora."
I cannot tell you the antisemitic crap that has come across my feed. It is absolutely clear to me that the “project” is to cancel/attack and intimidate Jewish life - wherever it is. This is organized and it’s deliberate. Iran has realized that the college kids/progressives are an easy mark when you can produce pictures of dead kids. They have honed their skills from protests on countless other issues, and they’ll pick the side of the “underdog” do the work for “change” - with a shocking lack of critical thinking skills.