Juan Cole
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Democratic National Committee is sitting on a report that demonstrated that Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris lost significant support because of Joe Biden’s perceived “blank check” to the Netanyahu government to pursue its total war on little Gaza. This, according to Holly Otterbein at Axios.
The analysis is certainly correct. Democrats win when the youth and progressives join their wider coalition. The youth didn’t come out to vote in 2004, and John Kerry lost. The youth came out big time in 2008 and Barack Obama won. In fact, the youth delivered key states like Pennsylvania for him, without which he would have lost.
In spring 2024, I wrote an impassioned column predicting that Biden would turn the country over to Trump and imperil American democracy by alienating the young people this way. It wasn’t just that Biden refused to tell Netanyahu to cut it out, something he had done before. It was that he was joined at the hip with the extremist Kahanist cabinet. Gaza was Biden’s genocide as much as it was Netanyahu’s. Biden was resupplying the Israeli military in real time.
Aside perhaps from some form of dementia, I cannot explain Biden’s blindness on this issue or his inability to see that he would lose the 2024 election to Trump if he went on like that.
We don’t know what Biden was thinking. He got the daily situation reports on Gaza. Young staffers showed him the pictures of the dead, but he is said to have remained unmoved.
We do know that Biden was gaslighted by the Israelis into doubting the Gaza Ministry of Health statistics on deaths in Gaza. He said publicly, “I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed,”
In mid-February this year, The Lancet published an article by public health specialists, with Prof Michael Spagat, MD, in the Department of Economics at the UK’s Royal Holloway University, as the lead author. The team did not depend on the Ministry of Health figures. They used public health statistical methods, interviewing a weighted sample of 2,000 households that comprised nearly 10,000 individuals.
https://www.juancole.com/2026/02/disbelieving-statistics-underestimates.html
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17,000 Unaccompanied Orphans in Gaza, in World’s Biggest Orphan Crisis
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Earlier this month, Jonathan Crickx, the State of Palestine Chief of Communication for UNICEF (the UN International Children’s Emergency Fund), revealed that his agency “estimates that at least 17,000 children in the Gaza Strip are unaccompanied or separated. Each one, a heartbreaking story of loss and grief. This corresponds to 1% of the overall displaced population – 1.7 million people.”
These 17,000 children are alone and on their own. An estimated 39,000 children have lost one or both parents to Israeli bombardment, but about half of them have been taken in by relatives or strangers. Al Jazeera calls it the world’s largest orphan crisis, proportionally.
The reason Gaza has this monstrous number of orphans is that the Israeli government killed their parents, including their mothers. The majority of the more than 70,000 people the Israeli air force and army have killed in Gaza are innocent civilians, often evaporated by one ton bombs dropped on inhabited family apartment buildings with no military purpose.
Crickx said at a press conference in Geneva, “In a center where unaccompanied children are hosted and cared for, I also saw two very young children aged 6 and 4. They are cousins and their entire respective families were killed in the first half of December. The four year old girl – in particular – is still very much in shock.”
https://www.juancole.com/2026/02/unaccompanied-orphans-biggest.html
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Natalia Ginzburg: Our Monstrous Ideas
Biblical Archaeology and the Judeo-Christian legends / The Deconstruction of the Walls of Jericho
Gaza and the Death of Conscience
Pankaj Mishra: The Shoah after Gaza
Israel’s War in Gaza Is Nothing but a War of Annihilation
Arab Failures: The Unspoken Complicity in Israel’s Genocide
After the truth-shower 