A group of Biden's reelection campaign staff said in a letter that volunteers are upset with his handling of the Israel-Hamas war.

In a letter published Wednesday on Medium, an anonymous group of Biden’s campaign staffers demanded the president call for a ceasefire in Gaza, citing concerns that not shifting his policy on the issue could hurt his 2024 chances.

“Biden for President staff have seen volunteers quit in droves, and people who have voted blue for decades feel uncertain about doing so for the first time ever, because of this conflict,” the Medium letter read.

“It is not enough to merely be the alternative to Donald Trump,” the campaigners continued. “The campaign has to shift the feeling in the pits of voters’ stomachs, the same feeling that weighs on us every day as we fight for your reelection. The only way to do that is to call for a ceasefire.”

  • SCB@lemmy.world
    415·
    6 months ago

    It isn’t a literal genocide, but a figurative one, which is the source of the disagreement.

    0.0044% of Gazans have been killed. The US killed the same net amount of civilians during the Battle of Mosul, and Gaza is three times as dense as Mosul.

    This number will go up, because this war is being brutally waged, and Israel does deserve criticism for it. But words matter, and genocide is a dumb word to use because it has actual meanings, and requires specific intent

    • Silverseren@kbin.socialOP
      91·
      6 months ago

      0.0044% of Gazans have been killed.

      ???

      The population of the Gaza Strip is just over 2 million (2.048). The amount of Gazans killed in the past three months is 22600, as of today. That is, by my math, 1.13% of the population that has been killed in those three months, or 1 out of every 100 people.

      • Prophet@lemmy.worldEnglish
        8·
        6 months ago

        To add to this, genocide (as defined by the UN) does not just include directly killing a particular group:

        Definition Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide

        Article II

        In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

        1. Killing members of the group; 2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; 3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; 4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; 5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

        So in addition to killing 20k+ Gaza civilians, Israel’s response has displaced countless others with their intense and indiscriminate bombing (see points #2, #3, possibly #4). NYT and other sources claim that up to 1.8 million Gazans have been displaced, which NYT claims is 80% of their population. This is in addition to the conditions Gaza was already being subjected to, such as being denied water and electricity (#3) by Israel.

        The evidence overwhelmingly shows that this is genocide. “Figurative” is such a sleazy doublespeak way of excusing the behavior here.

        Edit: sorry my link should work now