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.”

  • CommanderCloon@lemmy.ml
    1313·
    1 year ago

    So, genocide is a “single issue” which means it should be ignored? How can you hope for any semblance of change if you start by overlooking literal genocide

    • assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world
      4·
      1 year ago

      It isn’t overlooking it to accept that there’s nothing we can do about it. There will be no viable candidate who opposes Israel, and that’s the unfortunate truth. There are still significant differences however between the two candidates, and I don’t want the one who’s likely to start a domestic genocide to win.

      There’s blood on our hands, and we don’t have a way to wipe it off. I’d rather accept it and try to move forward than try in vain to clean them.

    • dvoraqs@lemmy.world
      84·
      1 year ago

      How can you hope for any semblance of change…

      You balance it against your other priorities

    • SCB@lemmy.world
      415·
      1 year 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
        92·
        1 year 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·
          1 year 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