It’s not just the genocide in Gaza. These are his decades of warmongering in the Middle East.
Joe Biden coughs during a speech at the Department of Labor on December 16, 2024.
(Kevin Deitch/Getty Images)
As his presidency draws to a close, the question of Joe Biden’s “legacy” hangs heavily in the air. Although he ends his term as a deeply unpopular figure who paved the way for Donald Trump’s return to the White House, some liberal politicians and pundits are trying to celebrate his time in office as hard as possible.
“By any objective standard … he was a very good president whose achievements will benefit the nation for years to come,” The Washington PostEugene Robinson insisted recently. Vice President Kamala Harris said that “Biden’s legacy of accomplishments over the past three years is unparalleled in modern history” and that “in one term, he has already surpassed the legacy of most two-term presidents.”
Biden also touts his supposed accomplishments. In a speech Of his foreign policy legacy, he said Monday that he “leaves the next administration with a very strong hand to play” on the world stage.
For millions of Arab Americans, these statements make us wonder if we’ve been living in an alternate universe. That’s because for us, Biden’s legacy will be defined by one thing and one thing only: his support for the genocide in Gaza and his bloody history in the Middle East more generally, spanning decades.
Biden has consistently harmed Arabs and Muslims with his foreign policy decisions long before he became president. In October 2002, while serving as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he joined 76 other senators Art authorization for the use of military force in Iraq.
In the article for The New York Timeshe repeated the Bush administration’s false claims that the only way to stop Saddam Hussein’s “relentless pursuit of weapons of mass destruction” was to go to war with Iraq.
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Biden showed no humility when these lies were exposed. In October 2004 he said the Council on Foreign Relations that he “never believed they had weapons of mass destruction.” He then tried to withdraw his support for the war in November 2005, calling it ” an error“, but only afterwards more than 39,332 civilians was killed in Iraq. In 2006, he launched a funny plan divide Iraq into three zones, which the media duplicated “Shiastan, Sunistan and Kurdistan.”
As a senator in 2001, so did Biden voted for the US invasion of Afghanistan and made statements extension support international military forces in Kabul. Twenty years later, after the disastrous withdrawal of troops in 2021, he will continue to lie again, stating: “I was against that war in Afghanistan from the beginning.”
As vice president, Biden supported the Obama administration’s efforts to make Americans comfortable with drone strikes. According to Bureau of investigative journalismwere 10 times more airstrikes in the war on terror” during the Obama and Biden years than during the Bush administration. They carried out more airstrikes in their first year in office than Bush did in his entire presidency.
The Obama-led, Biden-backed air campaign has destroyed lives in Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan and caused massive civilian casualties – despite their claims that their drone strikes were ” exceptionally surgical and precise.”
As vice president, Biden stood behind Obama when he launched his first strike on Yemen, which was catastrophic. The commanders claimed they were targeting al Qaeda – instead they hit the tribe with cluster munitions, killing 55 people, including 21 children and five pregnant women.
Biden’s years as vice president will be remembered by Arab and Muslim Americans as some of the deadliest for our families at home, with an average of 582 civilians reportedly killed each year from 2007 to 2016, an era that largely spanned his time on position. Only in 2016, the Obama administration dropped 26,171 bombs in seven countries: Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan.
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Now, while liberals try to find a way to praise Biden for his domestic policy decisions, they need to remember that to Arab Americans he will forever be remembered as the Butcher of Gaza, thanks to his political, military and financial support of Israel’s campaign of genocide.
In just one year, from October 2023 to 2024, Biden sent a record amount of military aid – at least $17.9 billion – to Israel, from precision munitions to artillery shells to 2,000-pound bombs. In addition, he used American taxpayer dollars to fund $4 billion in upgrades to Israel’s Iron Dome and David Sling missile defense systems. The arms transfer he signed was used in horrific massacres in both Palestine and Lebanon, which international organizations such as Amnesty International say violate international law and US law. considered a crime of genocide.
On May 26, Ahmad Al-Najjar, who was only 18 months old, was beheaded when Israel struck the tents of displaced Palestinians in the Tal al-Sultan neighborhood of Rafah. The video of Al-Najjar’s decapitated body shocked the world. “I saw the bodies of my wife Faten and daughter Huda, my son Arkan and my child Ahmad,” said his father Abdul Hafez. Al Jazeera. “I was told he was headless; I just looked in the body bag and saw his body without his head and I couldn’t see it anymore.’
The weapon used to kill Al-Najjar’s family, behead his son, burn their tents, kill 45 Palestinian refugees and injure 200 others has been identified by an explosives expert as American-made ammunition. This happened a few weeks after Biden argued that he would no longer allow US weapons to be used in a major offensive against Rafah.
Biden repeatedly ignored his constituents when they asked him to call for a ceasefire. Instead, he repeated an amazing statement that “if Israel didn’t exist, there wouldn’t be a single Jew in the world who would be safe” (implying that the country he rules is not a safe space for the Jewish people) and lied all the time about his allegedly “red” line” for Israel. (It is important to note that the Western media were absolutely instrumental in washing the blood off Biden’s hands.)
On January 15, Biden stood at a podium surrounded by his fellow Genocide activists Kamala Harris and Anthony Blinken and announced that a cease-fire agreement had been reached between Israel and Hamas. As expected, Biden took credit for the deal, despite the fact that the terms were nearly identical to the deal struck in the spring of 2024. Then he had emphasized that it was “Israel’s proposal” but now, days before leaving office, he was insisting that the deal was “the exact framework I proposed back in May. Exactly.”
As he left the press conference, a reporter shouted the sharp question that was on everyone’s mind: “Who do you think deserves the credit for this, Mr. President: you or (Donald) Trump?”
“Is this a joke?” asked the president with a smug look. But one of the latest headlines from Times of Israel reads: “Arab officials: Trump’s envoy swayed Netanyahu more than Biden all year in one meeting.” And according to GuardianAccording to a Pentagon source, the ceasefire was “driven by the Trump team … and Biden, Blinken and the entire administration have secured his legacy as enabling factors.”
In the First Month of Genocide, by Omar El Akad wrote on X: “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold someone accountable, everyone will always be against it.” We already see people trying to rewrite history, but the Palestinians were serious when we said we would never forget and never forgive.
We will remember how Biden walked away when his constituents asked for a ceasefire; we will remember the lies he told that led to more than 17,400 children were killed; and we will remember that in one of his last acts in office he signed $8 billion more for Israel so that it can do its best to end the genocide.
I will never be able to summarize every death warrant that Biden has signed in Gaza. There is no way to capture the horrors he has committed during his political career and condense them into a neat summary, as Biden’s allies have tried to do with his “accomplishments.” I can’t even keep track of all the lies he has told the American public.
At the end of the day, there is no “win” for us in Biden’s resignation. The orphans in Gaza will have to grow up knowing that the man responsible for killing their parents will live out the rest of his days in peace in some huge estate in Delaware. The thousands of people trapped under the rubble, the newborn babies who froze to death, all the mothers who wept at the graves of their children – he would never have to face any of that. There will never be any semblance of justice here. Some may see ” rises” or a “courageous” figure when they look at Biden. All I see is an endless trail of blood.
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