On Tuesday, Biden made news for saying “Tomorrow I’m doing 9/11.” It would be easier to enjoy some innocent laughs at/with Diamond Joe if not for another bit of verbiage he emitted the same day: “Apparently, it was an accident. It ricocheted off the ground and — got hit by accident, but we’re working that out now.” This was Biden’s comment on Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, an American citizen shot in the head by an IDF sniper last week in the occupied West Bank. Michael Kinsley once said that “a gaffe is when a politician tells the truth.” By that definition, Biden’s comment on Eygi was no gaffe. But if a gaffe is when a politician says what he means, then this fits the bill. It’s worth recalling what former State Department official Aaron David Miller told Isaac Chotiner back in April:
Oh, if you’re asking me: Do I think that Joe Biden has the same depth of feeling and empathy for the Palestinians of Gaza as he does for the Israelis? No, he doesn’t, nor does he convey it. I don’t think there’s any doubt about that.
In an official statement, Biden affirmed his “confidence” in the IDF’s investigation of itself. White House spokesman John Kirby, who somehow still gets up every morning to do his hair and go to work lying about war crimes, confirmed that Biden—whose ability to empathize with the grief of others has often been described by sycophantic journalists as his “superpower”—has not spoken with Eygi’s family.
Do you remember “9/11 units”? On October 18 of last year, Biden said that 10/7 “for a nation the size of Israel…was like fifteen 9/11s.” Let’s say one 9/11 unit is 3,000/300,000,000, or .00001. If you don’t distinguish soldiers from civilians, the massacres led by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad on 10/7 killed around 1,200 people. The population of Israel, including Arab citizens but not including stateless Palestinians living in the occupied territories, is around 9.5 million. 1,200/9.5 million gives you .000126, which is actually “just” the per capita equivalent of twelve or thirteen 9/11s. As far as I can tell, the only way to get close to Biden’s “fifteen 9/11s” is if you exclude Arab citizens of Israel from the denominator, which gives you 1,200/7.2 million or .000167. As if the whole idea of 9/11 units wasn’t offensively dumb enough, Biden’s specific accounting principles make gratuitously clear his support for exclusionary definitions of belonging. On the back of his proverbial envelope, he sketched an apartheid fence.
Just doing the math feels disgusting. Every one of these deaths is horrifying, and regardless of intent the actual effect of dividing things by large denominators is to make them look small. The trauma that Americans experienced on 9/11 had nothing to do with per capita mortality, and I imagine this is true in Israel as well, though I genuinely find it impossible to imagine what Israelis have gone through since 10/7. If fractions enter into it at all, you’d probably want to look at the New York metro area, or the Gaza envelope, not at the entire country.
At any rate, you don’t hear too much about 9/11 units anymore, for obvious reasons. The Israeli military, with lavish moral and material support from my own government, has now killed at least 40,000 people, 2% of the prewar population of Gaza. 2% of the US population in 2001 would have been six million Americans, or 2,000 9/11 units.
If one 9/11 unit is .00001 of the total population, then it “only” takes 20 deaths to constitute a 9/11 in Gaza. As it happens, on September 10, 2024, a single Israeli attack killed at least 40 people in a “safe zone” in Khan Younis. When Biden said “I’m doing 9/11,” he was in a sense speaking literally. It was a Kinsley gaffe. He’s doing it, he’s done it before, and he’ll do it again.
Who knows if Biden is still Catholic enough to care, but he will never be able to claim ignorance of the evil with which he has become inextricably involved.
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