Hey 'U.S. Official': Just Quit Your Goddamn Job

Enough anonymous carping to reporters about how awful the Gaza policy is. LEAVE.

Over the weekend, Joe Biden put out a statement “marking 100 days of captivity for hostages in Gaza.” The statement contained no mention of the over 24,000 Palestinians who have been killed since October 7.

In response, a State Department official reached out to HuffPost’s senior diplomatic correspondent Akbar Shahid Ahmed with this comment:

If that kind of reaction from within the Biden administration sounds familiar to you, that’s because government officials have been saying versions of this to Ahmed for months. In October, he reported that there was a “mutiny brewing” inside the State Department over Gaza, and separately quoted a U.S. official saying that Biden was showing a “monstrous disregard for innocent Palestinian lives.” In November, Ahmed wrote about State Department officials who felt sidelined and frustrated at the aforementioned disregard for Palestinians. In December, he quoted a State Department official who said that the U.S. was “patting ourselves on the back while it increasingly seems like the IDF are waging a campaign of ethnic cleansing.”

I’m not listing these things to slight Ahmed. He’s a great reporter who has been doing great work in the last few months. He’s also one of the relatively few mainstream journalists covering the Biden administration’s handling of the Gaza crisis with any skepticism. So it’s only natural that people within the U.S. government wishing to express their discontent with the White House or the State Department are turning to him.

But it has been over three months since October 7. The United States has had endless opportunities to prove that it cares about Palestinian lives. It has comprehensively declined to seize those opportunities. There’s no ambiguity about its approach. It is letting Israel kill as many Palestinians as it can, and it is providing Israel the weapons to do so.

At this point, if you’re working for the State Department—the branch of government that has, among other things, led the charge to fast-track weapons to Israel—you must be aware that you are helping to abet genocidal slaughter and ethnic cleansing.

So please, enough with the anonymous quotes to journalists about how mad you are. Quit your goddamn job!!!