By Imam Zaid Shakir

July 24, 2024 will soon be remembered as a day of infamy in the history of the United States. That is the day that the war criminal, the child murderer, the Butcher of Gaza, Benyamin Netanyahu (Bibi) derided as Iran’s “useful idiots” American citizens who dare challenge his genocidal policies. His derision of our fellow citizens is bad enough. The fact that he did it while addressing a kowtowing, bootlicking rabble, who claim to be representatives of the American people, renders it beyond disgraceful.

The term “useful idiots,” attributed by some to Vladimir Lenin, refers to well-meaning people standing for a cause they believe to be righteous while they are unwittingly being manipulated by a nefarious force advancing its own vile interests. In this case, the supposed useful idiots are the growing masses of Americans disgusted by the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza. The manipulative force is Iran. Bibi’s proof is the preposterous claim that Iran is financing pro-Palestinian protests that have rocked American society from our cities to our college campuses. The evidence for this fabrication being an unsubstantiated claim put forth by a single Zionist apparatchik.

The real useful idiots were the ones Bibi was addressing. In giving Israel carte blanc to continue the Gazan genocide and to expand it beyond Gaza to the occupied Palestinian West Bank; to breach international law by engaging in extrajudicial assassinations in foreign embassies and sovereign countries; to continue supplying the fascist Zionist regime with the weapons it needs to perpetuate its murder, mayhem, and massacres; sycophantic members of the US Congress are enabling a rogue power to continue to operate with total disregard for any conventions of international law. By so doing, America is not only aiding in the evisceration of international humanitarian and human rights law (as if its own wars have not already done this), it is also allowing itself to be drawn into a war in which it has no identifiable interests other than expanding its weapons sales.

Many Muslims believe that the Zionist lobbying juggernaut that paved the way for Bibi’s pompous presentation before Congress is undefeatable. They forget that the last time Bibi visited his US Congress both he and AIPAC lost! The overarching context in that 2015 address was also US policy towards Iran. Bibi undertook a shameless one-man lobbying effort to undermine the Iran Nuclear deal that the Obama administration had painstakingly hammered out in conjunction with its European allies. In addition to the address before both Houses of a groveling Congress, he visited a host of high-level Republicans politicians and donors. Despite his dirtiest efforts, aided and abetted by AIPAC, he lost.

He lost then and he is losing now. Israelis are lining up in droves to flee his failed state. The Israeli economy is in shambles. The vaunted IDF, “the world’s most moral military,” has been reduced to a gang of thuggish child murderers who cannot defeat a determined militia with a tiny fraction of its manpower and materiel. Large swaths of the southern and northern regions of his country have been abandoned. Now, to save his political hide he is trying to ignite a war that he thinks Israel will fight to the last American.

Bibi will learn that while the plutocrats and their lackeys in Congress may be his useful idiots, the masses in this country are waking up to the reality of what Israel is and what it stands for. Once the human toll of its misadventures becomes fully visible in the coming months to those who have not already seen its ugly face in Gaza, American support for the Zionist entity will erode like the walls of an outdated New Orleans levy in the face of Hurricane Katrina’s fury.

I ask in conclusion, how could any American politician support a government led by cabinet members who would participate in a mob that would break into their own prison to free a group of soldiers merely being questioned, not punished, for sodomizing a detainee in their custody? The answer is obvious. If you are a prostitute (sex worker if you like), you provide your services to the highest bidder. Useful idiots indeed.

© 2024 New Islamic Directions ™

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