Perception is reality, as the saying goes.
And with the wave of protests against the war in Gaza, it would appear a pro-Israel Washington is indeed living in a different reality than college students across the country.
Pro-Palestine demonstrations at the University of California, Los Angeles, turned violent this week and police at Columbia University in New York made hundreds of arrests after raiding a building that demonstrators had occupied.
Protesters say they are taking a stand against “genocide”, advocating an end to the war in Gaza that has killed more than 34,500 Palestinians. They are also demanding university divestment from Israeli and military-linked entities.
Leadership in Washington is clinging to the narrative that these demonstrations are dangerous and anti-Semitic.
At Columbia, students took over an academic building and hung a banner from a balcony reading “Hind's Hall”. Hind Rajab was a six-year-old Palestinian girl, killed along with her family by Israeli forces, whose recorded pleas for help to rescue personnel shocked the world.
House Speaker Mike Johnson this week announced a sweeping Republican-led effort to “combat anti-Semitism” in response to the demonstrations, and referred to the banner unfurled at the Columbia building as an “intifada banner”.
That perception has extended to Washington's response to the news that the International Criminal Court may issue war crimes warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Mr Johnson told reporters that in a recent phone call with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, President Joe Biden's administration had communicated that it is calling on the ICC to “stand down”.
Washington's adversaries in Russia seemed to find this amusing – pointing to Mr Biden's endorsement of a similar warrant against Russian President Vladimir Putin last year.
Columbia protesters who last week booed Mr Johnson are not the House Speaker's only source of opposition – far-right Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene announced yesterday that she will officially move to remove him from his post.
In passing foreign aid spending for Ukraine and Israel last week, Ms Greene charges that he “fully joined the disgusting business model of Washington, DC, to fund forever wars”.
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EYE ON 2024
Explained: Trump’s Gulf money ties and their impact on his White House run
Donald Trump made at least $9.6 million from countries in the Middle East during his presidency, according to an analysis of his tax returns last year by non-profit watchdog organisation Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew).
That means Mr Trump pulled in at least six times his official presidential salary in side income from the Middle East alone during his time in office, the study showed.
The total could be much higher but public reporting only sheds light on the most high-profile instances of profiteering, Crew’s analysis found.
According to the 1978 Ethics in Government Act, all high-ranking federal officials are required to disclose their financial holdings and recuse themselves from any government business in which they, their families or close associates have a financial interest.
All federal officials except the president, the vice president, members of Congress and federal judges.
“The profiteering paid off and Trump raked in tens of millions from international business interests during his time in office,” the Crew report said.
Under what is known as the Foreign Emoluments Clause in the US, presidents are barred from benefiting from foreign governments or affiliated entities without the consent of Congress, says Kate Belinski, a government ethics lawyer at Ballard Spahr in Washington.
“It is clear that Trump’s continued involvement in his business interests violated the Foreign Emoluments Clause, but the problem is enforcement,” she says.
What's Washington talking about?
Assad Anti-Normalisation Act Reports circulated that legislation aiming to block Syrian President Bashar Al Assad's normalisation with Washington and its partners was removed from the massive supplemental funding package amid concerns from the Biden administration and Democrats in the Senate. The Syrian American Council said the move “signals a disturbing tolerance towards the rehabilitation of a war criminal”. Meanwhile, the mother of American detainee Austin Tice spoke out against the legislation at a House Foreign Affairs Committee roundtable, saying barring avenues of co-operation with Mr Al Assad “is effectively condemning Austin and any other Americans detained in Syria to lie in prison”.
World Central Kitchen World Central Kitchen has resumed operations in Gaza after Israel killed seven of its aid workers last month. “The humanitarian situation in Gaza remains dire,” Erin Gore, chief executive of WCK, said in a statement. “Food is a universal right, and our work in Palestine has been the most life-saving mission in our 14-year organisational history.” The aid group, founded by chef Jose Andres, is restarting its Gaza food delivery operations with a Palestinian team, WCK said.
If he wins A Time magazine story this week left many in Washington aghast after it revealed, based on two interviews with Donald Trump, how the former president plans to approach a second term in the White House if he wins in November. Among his promises: allowing Republican states to monitor pregnant women and prosecute them if they have abortions, pardoning the January 6, 2021 insurrectionists and mass deportations of immigrants.
QUOTED
“More lives could have been saved”
– A Ukrainian official at Kyiv's embassy in Washington tells me, reflecting on the months-long delay of passing US funds for the war against Russia
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Comment: Biden hails press freedom while ignoring plight of Gaza journalists
Washington’s media found itself under the spotlight at the weekend, when hundreds of pro-Palestinian demonstrators flipped the cameras on correspondents attending an annual industry gala.
Live-streaming protesters stood outside the White House Correspondents' Association dinner and yelled “Shame on you” at a who’s who of big-name US journalists, celebrities and their guests as they arrived in tuxedos and gowns.
Before the dinner, arguably the main event on DC’s social calendar, a collection of Palestinian journalists had issued a public call for colleagues around the globe to boycott it.
“For journalists to fraternise at an event with President Biden and Vice President Harris would be to normalise, sanitise and whitewash the administration’s role in genocide,” they said in a statement.
So how did President Biden and the fillet mignon-munching 2,600 guests at the Washington Hilton address the protests happening outside?
They didn't.
Instead of tackling the elephant in the room, Mr Biden and the Washington establishment did themselves a disservice that will further fuel critics' claims that we are not fairly and impartially covering the war in Gaza.
Read Bureau Chief Thomas Watkins's column
Only in America
'Dystopian': Authorities crack down on student protests
Arrests and scuffles have broken out at institutions across the country this week, including the University of Wisconsin and the City College of New York, as administrators called in police to deal with demonstrations that have rocked campuses in a mass movement not seen since the Vietnam War protests of the 1960s and 70s.
The violence at the University of California, Los Angeles, broke out overnight after Israel supporters attacked a camp set up by pro-Palestinian protesters. The university called police, who moved in to restore order.
At the University of Texas at Austin, authorities arrested 79 people during the second police crackdown on pro-Palestinian demonstrators, according to local reports.
Undeterred by recent arrests, students and faculty members regrouped yesterday at Columbia University's main gates of the campus to make their voices heard.
“Honestly, it was very scary to watch what happened and we thought that all the trust had been broken between admin and students before, but now it just decimated it,” one student, who did not wish to be identified, told The National.
“A lot of kids have been describing it as 'dystopian'.”
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