At the Democratic National Convention (DNC), August 19-22, elected delegates, Palestinian-Americans and other opponents of Israel’s genocide in Gaza were banned from speaking. They had negotiated for days for a chance to present what they later said would have been a “sanitized” picture of what the U.S. is funding, enabling, and whitewashing in Gaza and all of Palestine. They were reportedly told the ban on them speaking came directly from Kamala Harris’s people.

What follows are three events that took place or got revealed almost exactly as this “sanitized” picture of what was going on was banned. Read them. Stop and think about them. Feel them.

And then we will come back to what this all tells you about what Harris and the Democrats actually represent, why, and what you can do that is REAL. 

U.S. + Israel: Genocidal Baby Killers and Orphan-Makers

Among the more than 40,000 Palestinians slaughtered in Gaza by Israel since October 7, 2023, more than 16,000 are children. And among the surviving children, thousands are orphans.

An article in the August 24 New York Times titled “The War in Gaza is Making Thousands of Orphans” includes the story of Mennat-Allah Salah, age 11, “who talks constantly about her parents. Orphaned in December, she copies the way her mother laughed, winked, walked. She wears her mother’s sneakers and favorite T-shirt, too big though they are. 'My mom,' she said, 'was everything to me,' and tears came, and she could not go on.”

And the article tells the story of a three-week-old baby girl who was brought to the Emirati Hospital in Rafah in November. She had been found, alone, next to a Gaza City mosque after an airstrike killed dozens of people. 

The stories are heartbreaking. And there are uncounted thousands of orphans in Gaza now. But the NY Times framework is an obscene whitewash. It attributes these orphaned children to “the war” in Gaza. Liars! These children have been orphaned, in a place with no shelter, no social services, and have no networks of support because of U.S.-supplied Israeli bombs carrying out a one-sided massacre of defenseless Palestinians.

Bombed in Homes, Cars, Schools, and “Safe Zones”

On August 22, right in the middle of the DNC, Al Jazeera reported at least 47 Palestinians killed by Israel over the preceding days in or around the cities of Khan Younis, Nuseirat, Deir al-Balah, and Gaza City. On August 23, Al Jazeera reported “horrific bombardment” in the city of Deir al-Balah, with Palestinian families trapped, unable to flee the city. 

Among the dead were at least four people and 18 were wounded in an Israeli strike on Salah al-Din school, which is sheltering displaced Palestinians in Gaza City. Mahmud Bassal told the French news agency AFP that his child was among those killed in the strike while playing in the schoolyard. “We ran to see and saw my son dead,” he said. “What did this child do to deserve this? He had no missile, no plane, no tank.” 

As they do in every single instance of carrying out massacres of civilians, the official Israeli response was that this child was killed as part of “a precise strike on Hamas terrorists who were operating inside a command and control centre."

Driven into a Shrinking Death Camp

Israel’s ferocious, and continually escalating massacre of civilians in every corner of Gaza has driven 1.7 million Palestinians in Gaza into a rapidly shrinking section of the Al-Mawasi “safe zone” on the western edge of Gaza. That is a space one tenth the size of Gaza. 

On August 22, the New York Times reported that Palestinian civilians who were ordered by Israel to flee their homes and shelters in large sections of Gaza “immediately” were being shelled in the area they were ordered to flee to. One man who packed up his few remaining belongings and fled to the supposed “safe zone” in Al-Mawasi told the Times that after he arrived, Israeli tanks were shelling people in tents, people who had been ordered to flee there.

On August 13, a report to the UN Security Council said, “Civilians are repeatedly asked to evacuate to areas where essentials for their survival are absent. They are repeatedly being killed and injured in the very places they have been told were safe to go.” (boldface added)

And that under these conditions, “Acute respiratory infections, diarrheal illnesses, acute jaundice syndrome and skin infections are all surging. And – very worryingly – with school immunization programmes practically impossible, polio looms as a new threat after six circulating poliovirus strains were detected in environmental samples in June. As a matter of urgency, health workers must be allowed to carry out an immunization campaign…. It bears repeating: There is no protection of civilians in Gaza. Alongside the relentless mass displacement within Gaza, many thousands of Palestinians have left and many more are trying to.”

Kamala Harris = Genocide

Think about the world-historic, horrific crimes you just read about that took place, or were revealed just at the time that people inside the DNC, and millions more watching on TV or social media, were being whipped up into a delusional frenzy of support for a presidential candidate who has been Genocide Joe Biden’s vice president during this entire time.

And then listen, honestly and with critical thinking, to what Kamala Harris said in her acceptance speech:

With respect to the war in Gaza, President Biden and I are working around the clock, because now is the time to get a hostage deal and a ceasefire deal done.

And let me be clear. And let me be clear. I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself, and I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself, because the people of Israel must never again face the horror that a terrorist organization called Hamas caused on Oct. 7, including unspeakable sexual violence and the massacre of young people at a music festival.

At the same time, what has happened in Gaza over the past 10 months is devastating. So many innocent lives lost. Desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, over and over again. The scale of suffering is heartbreaking.

President Biden and I are working to end this war, such that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination.

The reality behind the “around the clock” bullshit is that during ten months of Israel’s genocidal slaughter in Gaza, it is Israel that has stonewalled a ceasefire while the Biden-Harris administration blames Hamas.

The reality behind the “innocent lives have been lost…” bullshit: They weren’t lost! They were murdered by U.S.-supplied Israeli bombs and missiles that destroyed entire apartment buildings, schools, hospitals, and over, and over, and over again, “safe zones” that Palestinian people were ordered to flee to.

The reality about Israel’s “right to defend itself…”: Israel is an apartheid state built on the blood and bones of the Palestinian people through genocidal ethnic cleansing. And therefore, killing civilians at random, killing babies, leaving others orphans; driving desperate, hungry people from place to place and then bombing them in “safe” zones; terrorizing and traumatizing an entire people… is what it means to “ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself.”

Kamala Harris just told you that this is the “bottom line” for her. One of the people who sincerely thought that they had a chance to testify at the convention about the reality of Palestine talked about “fighting for the soul of the Democratic Party.” The soul of the Democratic Party is the soul of capitalist-imperialist exploitation and cutthroat competition and rivalry with other capitalist-imperialist powers. You want to “fight for the soul” of the Democratic Party? You aren’t changing them; they are changing you! As Bob Avakian has said, “If you try to make the Democrats be what they are not and never will be, you will end up being more like what the Democrats actually are.”

There is another way this world could be. But to get there, you have to confront (and act on) reality. In Bob Avakian’s social media post REVOLUTION 7, Why is the U.S. supporting Israel's genocide of Palestinians, he cuts to the core of that, and what needs to be done to stop it. Bob Avakian posted this before Genocide Joe got pushed aside, but it applies every bit as much to Kamala Harris.

Why is Biden, and basically the entire government and ruling class of the U.S., supporting Israel in carrying out genocide against the Palestinian people, before the whole world? Here is the answer to that crucial question:

This is not because of “the power of the Jewish lobby”—or because of some ignorant, ridiculous and outrageous notion that “Jews are controlling everything.” It is because Israel plays a “special role” as a heavily armed bastion of support for U.S. imperialism in a strategically important part of the world (the “Middle East”). And Israel has been a key force in the commission of atrocities which have helped to maintain the oppressive rule of U.S. imperialism in many other parts of the world.

(That is from my statement Some Basic Truths About the U.S.-Supported Israeli War Against Palestine, which is posted at revcom.us.)

It’s the system! The system of capitalism-imperialism that Biden serves. The system he has to serve—the system that anybody and everybody has to serve if they want to hold office, and especially “high office,” like president, within this system. That is why Biden is doing what he’s doing—what all these politicians are doing—above and beyond their more narrow personal interests.

It’s the system! This system of capitalism-imperialism that embodies and enforces white supremacy, patriarchal male supremacy and other brutal oppression—this system resting on ruthless life-stealing exploitation of masses of people in this country and literally billions of people worldwide, including more than 150 million children—all enforced with massive violence and destruction, of people and the environment, posing a very real threat to the future and the existence of humanity.

This system that needs to be overthrown at the soonest possible time, through an actual revolution.

IMPORTANT: Bob Avakian is the revolutionary leader, author of the new communism, and the only person on earth (along with his followers) who is even talking about that actual revolution. In his whole series of social media posts, he gets directly into why this revolution is possible, in this time, and what we need to be doing, right now, so there will be a real possibility for this revolution to succeed.

If the small slice of the reality that Palestinians in Gaza face every day moves you… if you are sickened by the reality of deceit, hypocrisy and horror that Kamala Harris really represents… if you agonize not only about Gaza—which you should—but about what kind of future every person on the planet faces… how can you NOT seriously engage Bob Avakian?!?