292
Biden admin again bypasses Congress to sell military equipment to Israel
(edition.cnn.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2023
292 points (90.6% liked)
World News
39033 readers
784 users here now
A community for discussing events around the World
Rules:
-
Rule 1: posts have the following requirements:
- Post news articles only
- Video links are NOT articles and will be removed.
- Title must match the article headline
- Not United States Internal News
- Recent (Past 30 Days)
- Screenshots/links to other social media sites (Twitter/X/Facebook/Youtube/reddit, etc.) are explicitly forbidden, as are link shorteners.
-
Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post. The key points in 1-2 paragraphs is allowed (even encouraged!), but large segments of articles posted in the body will result in the post being removed. If you have to stop and think "Is this fair use?", it probably isn't. Archive links, especially the ones created on link submission, are absolutely allowed but those that avoid paywalls are not.
-
Rule 3: Opinions articles, or Articles based on misinformation/propaganda may be removed. Sources that have a Low or Very Low factual reporting rating or MBFC Credibility Rating may be removed.
-
Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, anti-religious, or ableist will be removed. “Ironic” prejudice is just prejudiced.
-
Posts and comments must abide by the lemmy.world terms of service UPDATED AS OF 10/19
-
Rule 5: Keep it civil. It's OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It's NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
-
Rule 6: Memes, spam, other low effort posting, reposts, misinformation, advocating violence, off-topic, trolling, offensive, regarding the moderators or meta in content may be removed at any time.
-
Rule 7: We didn't USED to need a rule about how many posts one could make in a day, then someone posted NINETEEN articles in a single day. Not comments, FULL ARTICLES. If you're posting more than say, 10 or so, consider going outside and touching grass. We reserve the right to limit over-posting so a single user does not dominate the front page.
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
Lemmy World Partners
News !news@lemmy.world
Politics !politics@lemmy.world
World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world
Recommendations
For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/
- Consider including the article’s mediabiasfactcheck.com/ link
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Israel received $3.18B in FY 2022 compared to $11.8B for Ukraine.
USNews - US Aid history
Edit to add a quote from the link:
It'll be interesting to see what that chart looks like for 2023 and 2024. And hopefully there's less genocide all around, eh?
Israel received 1/4 the money of Ukraine in 2022 when israel wasn't even fighting anyone.
At best they used it to shoot and kill an American journalist and then launch a propaganda campaign to lie that they didn't do it
And of course give all their ZioNazi colonists weapons to terrorize and annex the West Bank with
I found more up-to-date numbers that suggest it's more like 23x the aid (Ukraine:Israel):
How Much Aid Has the U.S. Sent Ukraine? Here Are Six Charts.
In any event, the US appears to have sent substantial aid to Ukraine, and it's in jeopardy only (to my knowledge) if congress can't get more through in early 2024. My understanding is that the war-specific funding (so far) requested by the Biden administration for Israel has been more to the tune of $14B requested for 2023 (e.g. this article), concurrent with a roughly-quadruple $60B+ request for Ukraine (this article).
It seems to me that the Biden administration is strongly in support for Ukraine, and is making (and, historically, getting through) requests for continued aid far in excess of those to Israel (which receives multi-billion-dollar aid from the U.S. every year and under every administration). Biden's only non-standard "funding" here is authorizing sale of arms to Israel, which is in place of any congressional funding due to the unpopularity of the Israel war in the USA (which is unpopular for a variety of, in my opinion, very good reasons).
To be clear: I'm not suggesting that the U.S.A. should blindly fund genocide. I'm simply arguing that continued (substantial) funding for Ukraine hasn't been in jeopardy until recently, and that it is still not a guarantee that extraordinary measures (beyond what Biden has already done with the lend-lease-style "loaning" of US Arms to Ukraine, etc.) will be necessary or helpful, given the broad support in the US Congress (to date) for the war in Ukraine. My expectation is that the Democrats in congress will make some concessions to the Republicans in congress, and a Ukraine funding package will pass early in the new year.
TL;DR: equating the funding of Ukraine to the funding of the war in Israel and using it to suggest the Biden administration hasn't adequately attempted to fund Ukraine doesn't make a ton of sense to me.
Ukraine has been at war since the beginning of 2022. Israel started their genocide only three months ago. Biden is doing everything in his power for israel right now, not for Ukraine. He removed all weapons restrictions for israel on civilian casualties because normally the US wouldn't even be able to give weapons to such a genocide.
The three aircraft carriers next to israel to protect them aren't even counted under their aid package. Nor is America defending israel against attacks from Yemen. Nor is the direct amount of American intelligence israel is receiving.
Israel has barely taken any damage so far and already they are getting 14.3 billion to bombard Gaza with. And israel is getting the high tech stuff not the hand me downs like Ukraine.
If a large scale war would develop because of retaliation against israel, there is no doubt Biden would drop Ukraine in a heartbeat and send everything to israel.
Currently though Ukraine is fighting a world superpower called Russia with a population of 140 million and a massive gas field economy, while israel is "fighting" Hamas, a group of 30.000 members in a population of 2 million on a small strip of land with zero economy.
And they are getting 1/4 the budget for it, direct military aid and priority over Ukraine. Ukraine's budget seems to also go down by the amount given to israel.