US midterms: Progressives rally behind war criminal Obama’s attacks on Trump

Former US President Barack Obama is on the campaign trail to support Democratic Party candidates. In speeches in Ohio and Michigan, he has condemned the Trump administration for policies not unlike the ones he pursued in office. A Harvard Youth Poll published last week found that two-thirds of registered young voters disapprove of the Democratic Party's performance in Congress, while nearly two-thirds of young Democrats want an end to US military aid to Israel. Democrats and so-called progressives are nonetheless deploying Obama to win support for their candidates, despite his own abysmal record. Obama, the "deporter-in-chief" who cruelly deported more than three million immigrants, now has the audacity to denounce Trump as an agent of "chaos and cruelty, corruption, and incompetence". His administration also jailed asylum-seeking mothers and children by the thousands. In 2014, it revived mass family detention, expanding capacity from fewer than 100 beds to some 3,700 by 2015. It defended detaining these families to deter other migrants until a federal judge blocked that policy. It is not that Trump is not cruel; it is that Obama is mercilessly cruel. New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters That US liberals and progressives still support this same Obama as a beacon of hope against Trump's ongoing depredations reveals yet again the moral and political bankruptcy of the US liberal left. Cruelty and chaos For so-called progressives to rally behind the war criminal Obama's attacks on Trump is truly ironic. Obama thinks he has the moral authority to condemn Trump's war on Iran, which led to Americans being killed. Obama's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq cost the lives of more than 100,000 Afghans and Iraqis during his two terms, as well as 2,500 Americans, yet he condemns Trump for the death of 21 US soldiers in the war on Iran. This is the same Obama who kept a weekly kill list as president, whose drone strikes killed 16-year-old American citizen Abdulrahman al-Awlaki in Yemen in 2011. What was nonsensical, tomfoolish and ridiculous was Obama's acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 for his wars against Pakistanis, Afghans and Iraqis He bombed weddings in Yemen and Afghanistan, a funeral in Pakistan and a hospital in Kunduz, along with other civilian sites, killing hundreds of people. In 2015, Obama also authorised logistical and intelligence support, including aerial refuelling, for the Saudi-led war on Yemen. As for the "chaos" he now deplores, Obama launched the 2011 military intervention in Libya that plunged the country into years of warfare and political collapse. The shameless Obama now pontificates on how Trump's performance in office smacks of "tomfoolery and nonsense". What was nonsensical, tomfoolish and utterly ridiculous was Obama's acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 for his wars against Pakistanis, Afghans and Iraqis, his support for the overthrow of democracy in Honduras, his abetting dictatorships across the Arab and Muslim worlds, his threats of a possible invasion of Iran and his enthusiastic support for the racist Israeli settler colony. That Trump thinks he also deserves the prize is not hypocritical at all; rather, it is the Nobel Prize committee that is hypocritical for refusing to give it to him. Lecturing the Arabs In his infamous Cairo University speech in 2009, Obama addressed the entire Muslim world as the president who had already guaranteed the Bush administration impunity for its crimes and would go on to expand the "war on terror" and never close Guantanamo Bay. He made no mention of the hundreds of thousands of people, by some estimates more than a million, already killed by US wars from Iraq to Afghanistan. He expressed no grief for the tens of thousands of Arab civilians, including Egyptians, killed by what were then six decades of Israeli wars and massacres against them. Nor did he show solidarity with the millions of Arabs rendered refugees by Israel's barbaric bombings, including one million Egyptians during the War of Attrition. Obama condemned Palestinians for refusing to recognise Israel's right to be a racist "Jewish" state and issued racist directives to Arabs and Muslims. His commitment to a racist Israel surpassed that of his vice president, Joe Biden. He sought to teach Arabs a lesson in European Jewish history and enjoined them to appreciate the Holocaust committed by European Christians against European Jews and not the ongoing Nakba committed by European Jewish colonial settlers against Arabs. Obama immorally accused the Arab people of being Holocaust deniers for questioning European Jewish settler-colonialism in Palestine: "Six million Jews were killed - more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today. Denying that fact is baseless, it is ignorant, and it is hateful. Threatening Israel with destruction - or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews - is deeply wrong, and only serves to evoke in the minds of Israelis this most painful of memories while preventing the peace that the people of this region deserve." He further reminded his Cairo audience that America's bond with Israel is "unbreakable". Rather than demand that Israel cease its wanton violence, the uber-Zionist Obama insisted that "Palestinians must abandon violence. Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and it does not succeed." He forbade Palestinians and other Arabs from ever attempting to destroy the racist structures upon which Israel's rule is based. He warned the Arab peoples that any attempt by them to destroy the racist basis of the Israeli state would be seen as tantamount to a "Holocaust". A year later, from the pulpit of the United Nations, the first Black American president went as far as enjoining Palestinians, as well as Arab and Muslim countries, to recognise Israel's right to be a racist Jewish state, and insisted that "Israel's existence must not be a subject for debate. Israel is a sovereign state, and the historic homeland of the Jewish people." Gifts to Israel In February 2011, Obama cast the only UN Security Council veto of his first term to kill a resolution condemning Israel's settlements that all 14 other members had supported. Obama also threatened to veto Palestine's application for UN membership in 2011 and cut off US funding to Unesco when it admitted Palestine as a member. In the middle of Israel's 2014 war on Gaza, which killed 2,251 Palestinians, his Pentagon resupplied the Israeli army with mortar rounds, grenades and Hellfire missiles. It was Obama's years of unconditional backing, capped by his parting gift to Israel to the tune of $38bn in US aid over ten fiscal years from 2019 to 2028 - the largest US military aid package to Israel ever at that point - that helped it perpetrate its ongoing genocide in Gaza since 2023. Yet Michigan's Democratic Party Senate nominee Abdulrahman "Abdul" El-Sayed, who claims to oppose the ongoing Israeli genocide and what he calls US "corporate socialism", enthusiastically embraced Obama, who armed and funded the Israeli genocide and enabled it with his Zionist rhetoric. During his tenure, Obama also carried out the starkest example of "corporate socialism": the half-trillion-dollar taxpayer bailout of the corrupt American banking system. Abdul El-Sayed helps launch the unforgivable rehabilitation of Kamala Harris Read More » A month earlier, El-Sayed had campaigned across Detroit with failed presidential candidate Kamala Harris, who, as vice president, continued to back Israel's genocide in Gaza and expansionist project without reserve. None of this is new. We already saw this shameful performance when Obama and US liberals and "leftists" campaigned for those other war criminals Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020, depicting them as the "lesser evil". No crime committed by Democratic presidents, no matter how horrendous, would ever deter US liberals from supporting them. As Obama prepared to take office, he urged Americans to "look forward as opposed to looking backwards" when he refused to prosecute Bush administration officials for torture. Today, Democrats look instead to their former leaders to preserve the policies young voters want them to abandon. That these same liberals want us to support that same party's candidates shows the unrepentant nature of the liberal political agenda in the US. In seeking to maintain their grip on the party, they may be ensuring its disintegration, which should be a welcome development to all Americans. The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.