Biden Official Refuses to Answer Whether Israel Cutting Off Water Is a War Crime

White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby refused to answer whether Israel cutting off Palestinians’ access to water is a war crime.

During a press conference on Wednesday, Kirby was asked about the upcoming International Court of Justice case accusing Israel of committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

South Africa brought the charges against Israel and, as proof of its case, submitted an 84-page filing in December documenting Israeli war crimes as well as statements by various Israeli officials that it says proves “genocidal intent.” The ICJ will hear its first public hearing on the case on Thursday.

Kirby—and the Biden administration writ large—have completely dismissed the case thus far. Kirby last week called it “meritless, counterproductive, and completely without any basis in fact whatsoever.”

On Wednesday, however, Kirby was again asked about whether he had read the actual filing against Israel.

“You dismissed a few days ago the case brought by South Africa against Israel at the ICJ. Did you read the indictment, and if you did, do you believe that cutting off water, electricity, and fuel from a civilian population does not constitute a war crime by itself?”

“Yes I read the indictment,” Kirby replied angrily. “And as I said, we stand by what we said about this. We find it without merit. We find it counterproductive. And I’ll leave it there.”

South Africa’s filing links to several reports of Israel cutting off water, electricity, fuel, and food supplies—all of which has been documented extensively in the media.

In December, Unicef Executive Director Catherine Russell warned that clean water is so hard to find that “children in Gaza have barely a drop to drink.” Public health officials have repeatedly raised “grave concerns” over the lack of clean water and the outbreak of infectious diseases, including waterborne illnesses like cholera and typhoid.

One in every 100 people in Gaza has been killed since October 7, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry in Ramallah. That’s nearly 23,000 people—and that’s the most conservative estimate. The nonprofit Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor puts the death toll at nearly 30,000.

Taylor Swift, 12-time Grammy Award winner, Spotify’s most streamed artist in 2023, and Time Person of the Year, can add another line to her résumé: Democratic Party psyop. At least according to Fox News.

Fox host Jesse Watters, and frequent  Fox contributor Stuart Kaplan, spent Tuesday evening musing that the Biden administration may have been behind Swift’s recent post encouraging people to register to vote.

“When she posted the link to the Vote.org, like hundreds of thousands of young Taylor Swift fans all of a sudden registered to vote,” Watters began. “I wonder who got to her, from the White House or from wherever?”

Kaplan went on to suggest that the administration had sought out Swift, “whether with [her] knowledge or without [her] knowledge,” to lend her 279 million Instagram followers for a “covert” get-out-the-vote initiative.

Watters, of course, offered no pushback on the psyops narrative.

For what it’s worth, 35,000 new voters registered on Vote.org as a result of Swift’s Instagram post in September.

It is hardly forbidden knowledge that the Democratic Party has made celebrity endorsements of its candidates part of its campaigning strategy. The 2020 and 2016 Democratic National Conventions were, to mixed reviews, studded with the stars of today and yesteryear. But Swift, whose forays into activism have been mostly limited to anodyne denunciations of Tennessee Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn and the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning abortion rights, and support for Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ+ rights, has not been outspoken in her support for Joe Biden ahead of the 2024 election.

This, of course, has not stopped conservatives like Watters and Kaplan from indulging their obsession with Swift and their suspicion that her popularity among young people betrays, at best, a symptom of national decadence and impending decline and, at worst, a government conspiracy.

This is not even the first time Swift has been accused of participating in psyops; the far-right provocateur Jack Posobiec previously linked her to a “2024 voter operation for Democrats on abortion rights.”

Swift is only the latest celebrity to incur the wrath of the right. It once famously harnessed outrage at Colin Kaepernick and made it into a foundational block of its brand of reaction. But the obsession with Swift, about as inoffensive a cultural figure as exists in the United States, may just be the strangest.

Watters closed the segment by lamenting that he “now [knows] a lot more about Taylor Swift than [he] ever wanted to know,” but it’s clear that the right’s Swift-hatred is a product of its own making. As 2024 approaches, it’s yet to be seen whether this fixation will reap electoral rewards.

The Anti-Defamation League has made a startling confession: It is now including pro-Palestine marches in its count of antisemitic incidents in the United States.

The ADL released its annual antisemitism report on Wednesday, announcing that there were a stunning 3,283 such incidents in 2023. That’s a 361 percent increase compared to the previous year, according to the organization, which noted the “American Jewish community is facing a threat level that’s now unprecedented in modern history.”

The organization also stated that two-thirds of the total incidents could be “directly related to the Israel-Hamas war.”

The ADL report was widely covered by mainstream outlets like CNN, NBC, and Axios, which simply took the organization’s word for the gigantic increase without actually checking the data behind the claim.

Not all media outlets fumbled the ball, however. As The Forward first noted, there’s one big problem with the numbers: The ADL admits in its own press release that it includes pro-Palestine rallies in its list of antisemitic incidents, even if these featured no overt hostility toward Jewish people. Any anti-Israel or anti-Zionist chants are enough for the ADL’s new definition of antisemitism.

The report’s full list of antisemitic incidents isn’t public, but under the new definition, it could even count anti-Israel protests by Jewish activists as antisemitic. Many Jewish Americans have been at the forefront of the pro-Palestine protests over the last three months.

The 2023 report includes a whopping 1,317 rallies in its list of antisemitic incidents, with no clear distinction between whether the rallies included antisemitic rhetoric or anti-Zionist chants and without regard for whether there were Jewish organizers or participants involved. In other words, the underlying data in support of this assertion is likely to be considerably inflated.

Antisemitism is a real, and growing, problem—especially in the United States. But the ADL isn’t helping anyone when it defines a bomb threat at a synagogue and a Students for Justice in Palestine rally as equally antisemitic.

The problems with ADL’s reporting methods have been obvious for some time to anyone paying close attention. As Eric Alterman wrote for The New Republic, the ADL has, since its founding, repeatedly changed its counting method—and then followed these periodic rejiggerings with reports asserting massive increases in antisemitic incidents. Even more troubling, the organization habitually fails to make distinctions between the various antisemitic incidents it is tracking. Graffiti found on the walls of a college dorm gets lumped together with more deadly tragedies, such as the 2018 shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.

The organization’s reporting has taken an even greater turn for the worse under chief executive Jonathan Greenblatt. In 2015, he began his leadership at the organization with a speech that made virtually no mention of the dangers of white Christian nationalism. And on Israel, Greenblatt in 2022 firmly announced: “Anti-Zionism is antisemitism, full stop.”

In October, an ADL researcher resigned over Greenblatt’s condemnation of Jewish Americans protesting Israel’s war on Gaza. But the next month, Greenblatt only doubled down on his position, when he said that pro-Palestine activism has “clarified and confirmed that fanatical anti-Zionism from the hard left is as dangerous to the Jewish community as rabid white supremacy from the extreme right.”

Along the way, Greenblatt has demonstrated a hesitance to criticize one of the more appalling antisemites in public life: Elon Musk. The two men’s strange alliance has drawn criticism from Greenblatt’s predecessor, Abe Foxman.

All that to say, the ADL’s new counting method isn’t a huge surprise. But it sure is disappointing to see so many media outlets take the organization’s word at face value.

The House tried to hold a hearing Wednesday on whether to hold Hunter Biden in contempt of Congress, but things went off the rails so quickly that not much actually got done.

Instead, the members of the House Oversight Committee ended up taking wild swings at Biden—and at each other.

Here are five of the craziest things that happened during the hearing.

1. Nancy Mace said Hunter Biden has “no balls.”

Things got off to a strong start when Huner Biden himself appeared unannounced at the hearing. For some reason, this set off South Carolina Representative Nancy Mace.

“My first question is, who bribed Hunter Biden to be here today?” she demanded.

“Second question: You’re the epitome of white privilege. Coming into the Oversight Committee, spitting in our face, ignoring a congressional subpoena to be deposed. What are you afraid of? You have no balls to come up here today.”

2. Robert Garcia entered “dick pics” into the House record.

Biden left the hearing soon after Mace’s rant. His exit coincided with Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s opening remarks, much to her frustration. But her Democratic colleague Robert Garcia had a pretty good explanation for why Biden might not want to be in the room.

“I think it’s really interesting to hear the gentlelady from Georgia speak about Hunter Biden leaving, when she is the person that showed nude photos of Hunter Biden in this very committee room,” Garcia said. “Showing dick picks in this committee room of Hunter Biden!”

During a House Oversight Committee hearing in July, Greene tried to claim that Biden had engaged in sex trafficking and had listed payments to sex workers as a tax write-off. To support her argument, she held up poster-size prints of Biden’s nude photos, which she later also posted on X (then called Twitter) and shared in her email newsletter to unsuspecting subscribers.

3. Jamie Raskin called Marjorie Taylor Greene an “expert” in pornography.

Representative Jamie Raskin also couldn’t resist a jab at Greene for sharing Biden’s nude photos. Greene asked to enter evidence into the record, and Raskin objected due to the fact that Democrats had not received advance copies of Greene’s information.

“In the past, she’s displayed pornography. Are pornographic photos allowed to be displayed in this committee room?” Raskin asked.

When Greene said it wasn’t pornography, Raskin clapped back, “OK, well, you’re the expert.”

Raskin has previously criticized Greene for displaying Biden’s nudes during a hearing. In July, he accused Oversight Chair James Comer of undermining the committee’s credibility by allowing Greene to show the photos, saying the committee had been “reduced to the level of a 1970s-era dime store peep show.”

4. Jared Moskowitz held up a photo of Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein.

At one point, the committee had to take a break from the hearing. Representative Maxwell Frost said on X (formerly Twitter) the recess was because Greene was “being unhinged.” He did not provide further details on what that meant.

Frost then shared a photo of Representative Jared Moskowitz holding up a poster-size picture of Donald Trump hugging convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Trump was named on a recently released list of the disgraced financier’s known associates. Republicans have tied themselves into knots trying to shift attention off of Trump and onto other names on the list. (Being named on the list is not proof of legal wrongdoing.)

5. Republicans accidentally gave away their own game.

Toward the end of the hearing, Moskowitz pointed out that if the issue is that Biden won’t testify, it could be easily resolved then and there. After all, Biden was at the hearing.

But when Moskowitz asked for a show of hands from people who wanted to hear Biden’s testimony, almost no Republicans raised their hand.

“I’m a visual learner,” Moskowitz quipped. “And the visual is clear. Nobody over there wants to hear from the witness.”

“The majority of my colleagues over there, including the chairman, don’t want to hear from the witness with the American people watching.”

Biden has offered to testify in a public hearing, but Comer rejected the offer almost immediately. He insisted Biden must first sit for a closed-door deposition, infuriating Democrats. Raskin slammed Comer’s response in November as an “epic humiliation for our colleagues and … a frank confession that they are simply not interested in the facts and have no confidence in their own case or the ability of their own members to pursue it.”

A Democratic representative skewered Republicans on Wednesday for seeking to penalize Hunter Biden for not responding to a congressional subpoena, when many members of the GOP have done much worse.

The House Oversight Committee held a hearing on whether to hold Biden in contempt of Congress, after he refused to comply with a subpoena to sit for a closed-door deposition. Biden has offered to testify publicly, but Republicans rejected his offer.

Florida Democrat Jared Moskowitz tore into Republicans for wanting to hold Biden in contempt. “I’ll make this bipartisan. I’ll vote for the Hunter contempt today,” Moskowitz said. “You can get my vote, but I want you to show the American people that you’re serious.”

Moskowitz then proceeded to enter into the record subpoenas for multiple Republican representatives to testify before the House January 6 investigative committee. As Moskowitz pointed out, Scott Perry, Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan, Mo Brooks, Andy Biggs, and Kevin McCarthy all refused to appear before the committee.

“There’s an amendment coming to add some of those names into the contempt order. You vote to add those names, and show the American people that we apply the law equally, not just when it’s Democrats,” Moskowitz said. “Show that you’re serious and that everyone is not above the law.”

Republicans, led by Oversight Chair James Comer, have insisted for months that Biden and his father, President Joe Biden, are guilty of corruption. The probe has yet to produce any evidence of wrongdoing by the president.

Comer issued subpoenas in early November to multiple members of the Biden family, including Hunter and his uncle Jim. He has repeatedly demanded that they testify. Hunter responded later that month, offering to testify in a public hearing.

Comer rejected the offer almost immediately and insisted the younger Biden must first sit for a closed-door deposition. His response frustrated Democrats, who felt Comer was moving the goalposts.