IMPORTANT NEW BOOKS:

Metaracism: How Systemic Racism Devastates Black Lives―and How We Break Free
by Tricia Rose
‎ Basic Books, 2024

[Publication date: March 5, 2024]

The definitive book on how systemic racism in America really works, revealing the vast and often hidden network of interconnected policies, practices, and beliefs that combine to devastate Black lives

In recent years, condemnations of racism in America have echoed from the streets to corporate boardrooms. At the same time, politicians and commentators fiercely debate racism’s very existence. And so, our conversations about racial inequalities remain muddled.

In Metaracism, pioneering scholar Tricia Rose cuts through the noise with a bracing and invaluable new account of what systemic racism actually is, how it works, and how we can fight back. She reveals how—from housing to education to criminal justice—an array of policies and practices connect and interact to produce an even more devastating “metaracism” far worse than the sum of its parts. While these systemic connections can be difficult to see—and are often portrayed as “color-blind”—again and again they function to disproportionately contain, exploit, and punish Black people.

By helping us to comprehend systemic racism’s inner workings and destructive impacts, Metaracism shows us also how to break free—and how to create a more just America for us all. 

 

REVIEWS

“Throughout this trenchant book, Rose’s analysis is rigorous, insightful, and lucid, and her language glimmers with lyrical clarity…A brilliant guide to a systemic malady that cannot be denied.”―Kirkus (starred review)

“Marshalling extensive evidence into a lucid and powerful narrative, Rose provides an essential new look at American inequality. Even readers well versed in the topic will have their eyes opened by this cogent analysis.”―Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Tricia Rose has long set the bar for what it means to be a leading public intellectual. Brilliant, astute, and fearless, she has taken on the difficult task of demystifying ‘systemic racism’ from a catchphrase that merely asserts racial disparities are the result of hidden forces, explaining exactly how systemic racism works in the United States. With great clarity and precision, she moves beyond the shocking story, the point of trauma, or the dizzying statistics to expose the system as a whole; apprehending its operations by revealing each part, policy, and practice, and the myriad ways they conjoin. In the face of relentless attacks on the mere mention of racism, and the nonsense spewing from the new ‘anti-racism industry,’ Metaracism offers the clear-eyed analysis we urgently need.”―Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams

“Rose is one of our most dynamic and thoughtful public intellectuals today, and in her new book, Metaracism, she gives us the gift of sight. At a time when terms like ‘structural racism’ and ‘systemic racism’ are tossed around in the political fires with little rigor or reflection, Metaracism provides a much-needed primer on the real-world meaning of the problem. From housing to education, economic inequality to the criminal justice system, Rose invites us to see that the roots of racism run deep and are pervasive in the traumatic suffering we have witnessed in our time—of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Kelley Williams-Bolar, and so many others. We must not only say their names. We must be able to name the reasons why. In this critical text, Rose helps us to do just that.”―Henry Louis Gates Jr., New York Times–bestselling author of Stony the Road

“Rose is a brilliant scholar who has been on the cutting edge of every concept she’s touched. I read everything she writes and always learn from her insights and analyses.”―Imani Perry, National Book Award–winning author of South to America

“This book will be the most definitive and comprehensive treatment of systemic racism we have from the academy for the larger culture in America! There is simply no one better equipped to write this magisterial text than Rose! She brings together the best of sociological analysis, cultural criticism, and brilliant prose!”―Cornel West, New York Times–bestselling author of Democracy Matters

“Rose is one of our most powerful and profound public intellectuals. Her work on systemic racism is groundbreaking in its ability to elucidate the myriad ways in which we are still blind to how race operates under the surface of every American encounter. This book will become essential reading for anyone seriously interested in understanding the ways racism is seamlessly reproduced in this culture.”―Michael Eric Dyson, New York Times–bestselling author of Tears We Cannot Stop

“Rose shook the ground with Black Noise in 1994, calling a field into existence and making rigorous work in the history and rhythms of Black popular culture possible. She wrote the groundbreaking Longing to Tell, setting a new standard for how to talk about the sexual lives of Black women. And The Hip Hop Wars inaugurated an entirely new generation of students into what it means to critically engage the music we bop to. When Rose takes to her pen, we listen for the record scratch, for the invitation to read closely. We do so because we know things will be different and we will be different after picking up whatever Rose is putting down.”―Brittney Cooper, New York Times–bestselling author of Eloquent Rage

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Tricia Rose is Chancellor’s Professor of Africana Studies and the director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University. The author of three books, including The Hip Hop Wars, she has received fellowships from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, and her research has been funded by the Mellon and Robert Wood Johnson Foundations.  

The Black Box
by Henry Louis Gates
Penguin Press 2024

[Publication date:  March 19, 2024]

“Henry Louis Gates is a national treasure. Here, he returns with an intellectual and at times deeply personal meditation on the hard-fought evolution and the very meaning of African American identity, calling upon our country to transcend its manufactured divisions.”
— Isabel Wilkerson, author of The Warmth of Other Suns and Caste

“This is a literary history of Black America, but it is also an argument that African American history is inextricable from the history of African American literature.”

—The New York Times

A magnificent, foundational reckoning with how Black Americans have used the written word to define and redefine themselves, in resistance to the lies of racism and often in heated disagreement with each other, over the course of the country’s history.

Distilled over many years from Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s legendary Harvard introductory course in African American Studies, The Black Box: Writing the Race, is the story of Black self-definition in America through the prism of the writers who have led the way. From Phillis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, to Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison—these writers used words to create a livable world—a "home" —for Black people destined to live out their lives in a bitterly racist society.

It is a book grounded in the beautiful irony that a community formed legally and conceptually by its oppressors to justify brutal sub-human bondage, transformed itself through the word into a community whose foundational definition was based on overcoming one of history’s most pernicious lies. This collective act of resistance and transcendence is at the heart of its self-definition as a "community." Out of that contested ground has flowered a resilient, creative, powerful, diverse culture formed by people who have often disagreed markedly about what it means to be "Black," and about how best to shape a usable past out of the materials at hand to call into being a more just and equitable future. 

This is the epic story of how, through essays and speeches, novels, plays, and poems, a long line of creative thinkers has unveiled the contours of—and resisted confinement in—the "black box" inside which this "nation within a nation" has been assigned, willy nilly, from the nation’s founding through to today. This is a book that records the compelling saga of the creation of a people.

REVIEWS

 

“The allure of this book, and the reason for its existence, are the narrative links he draws among these people and events, and his insistence that a survey of African American history is incomplete without a special consideration of how writing has undergirded and powered it. This is a literary history of Black America, but it is also an argument that African American history is inextricable from the history of African American literature.”

—Tope Folarin, The New York Times

“An absolute tour de force . . . A study in the art, intellect, and inherent contradictions that define the making of a people.” —Elle

“Gates tracks questions of class, language, aesthetics, and resistance in a many faceted, clarifying, era-by-era chronicle propelled by vivid considerations of such influential Black writers as Phillis Wheatley, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Toni Morrison . . . A call to protect the free exchange of ideas in the classroom and beyond.” —Booklist (starred review)

“A must for scholars, yet still accessible to general audiences, by arguably the preeminent scholar of African American studies. This gem brilliantly reflects multiple depictions of what it means to be a Black American amid complex, structured interracial and color-based discrimination discourses, in which writing and language are keys.” —Library Journal (starred review)

“Henry Louis Gates is a national treasure. Here, he returns with an intellectual and at times deeply personal meditation on the hard-fought evolution and the very meaning of African American identity, calling upon our country to transcend its manufactured divisions.” —Isabel Wilkerson, New York Times bestselling author of The Warmth of Other Suns and Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. An award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist, cultural critic, and institution builder, Professor Gates has authored or coauthored more than twenty books, including Stony the Road, The Black Church, and The Black Box, and created more than twenty documentary films, including his groundbreaking genealogy series Finding Your Roots. His six-part PBS documentary, The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, earned an Emmy Award, a Peabody Award, and an NAACP Image Award. This series and his PBS documentary series Reconstruction: America after the Civil War were both honored with the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award.

What Does The Passing Of the Security Council Resolution in the UN Calling For An Immediate Ceasefire in Gaza Really Mean Given the Ongoing Fierce Opposition To It by the Oppressive Apartheid Israeli Government, and the Blatant Gaslighting, Enabling Military Support, Shameless Opportunism, and Brazen Hypocrisy by the U.S. Government Led by Joe Biden

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/25/world/middleeast/un-security-council-gaza-ceasefire.html

U.N. Security Council Calls for Immediate Cease-Fire in Gaza as U.S. Abstains

The U.S. decision not to vote on the resolution drew criticism from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who ordered a delegation to hold back from a planned trip to Washington.

by Farnaz Fassihi, Aaron Boxerman and Thomas Fuller
March 25, 2024
New York Times

The United Nations Security Council on Monday passed a resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire in the Gaza Strip during the remaining weeks of Ramadan, breaking a five-month impasse during which the United States vetoed three calls for a halt to the fighting.

The resolution passed with 14 votes in favor and the United States abstaining, which U.S. officials said they did in part because the resolution did not condemn Hamas. In addition to a cease-fire, the resolution also called for the “immediate and unconditional release of all hostages” and the lifting of “all barriers to the provision of humanitarian assistance.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel immediately criticized the United States for allowing the resolution to pass, and ordered a delegation scheduled to go to Washington to hold high-level talks with U.S. officials to remain in Israel instead. President Biden had requested those meetings to discuss alternatives to a planned Israeli offensive into Rafah, the city in southern Gaza where more than a million people have sought refuge. American officials have said such an operation would create a humanitarian disaster.

Mr. Netanyahu’s office called the U.S. abstention from the vote a “clear departure from the consistent U.S. position in the Security Council since the beginning of the war,” and said it “harms both the war effort and the effort to release the hostages.”


Top Israeli officials indicated that they would not implement the resolution for now. “The State of Israel will not cease firing. We will destroy Hamas and continue fighting until the every last hostage has come home,” Israel Katz, the country’s foreign minister, wrote on social media.
 

Smoke rising during an Israeli bombardment on a building in Rafah on Sunday.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images


Yoav Gallant, the Israeli defense minister, who was already in Washington for meetings with top Biden administration officials, similarly gave no sign Israel would implement a cease-fire.

“We will operate against Hamas everywhere — including in places where we have not yet been,” he said. He added, “We have no moral right to stop the war while there are still hostages held in Gaza.”

The White House sought to play down the growing rift with Israel. John F. Kirby, a spokesman for the National Security Council, insisted there had been no change in U.S. policy. He said there had been no official notification that the full delegation from Israel was not coming to Washington, but added: “We were looking forward to having an opportunity to speak to a delegation later this week on exploring viable options and alternatives to a major ground offensive in Rafah.”“We felt we had valuable lessons to share,” Mr. Kirby said. He noted that Mr. Gallant was still expected to meet with Mr. Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, as well as Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III.


Inside the Security Council, the passage of the resolution was greeted with applause.

“Finally, finally, the Security Council is shouldering its responsibility,” said Amar Bendjama, the Algerian ambassador to the U.N. and the only Arab member of the Council. “It is finally responding to the calls of the international community.”

The resolution, which was put forth by the 10 nonpermanent members of the Council, was being negotiated intensely until the last minute, with the United States asking for revisions in the text.

Children injured during an Israeli bombardment at the al-Najjar hospital in Rafah on Sunday.Credit: Mohammed Abed/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images


Sheltering under a tent in Rafah, Mohammed Radi, 37, said that the notion of the war ending was a dream after so many months of fighting.

“Things have not changed and I don’t see people celebrating,” he said by telephone when asked about the resolution. “We are still at war.”

António Guterres, the U.N. secretary general, who is in the Middle East meeting with Arab leaders about the war, said in a post on social media that “this resolution must be implemented. Failure would be unforgivable.”

In recent years, the United States has rarely broken with Israel in the Security Council. In 2009, in the final days of the George W. Bush presidency, the United States abstained on a cease-fire resolution on a previous war in Gaza. Under President Barack Obama, it abstained on the 2016 resolution on Israeli settlements. And it abstained again on a resolution three months ago on humanitarian aid for Gaza.


Israel-Hamas War: Live Updates
 

Updated 

 
March 29, 2024

6:26 a.m.

 

Days after the U.N. cease-fire resolution, has anything changed in the war in Gaza?

 
The U.N.’s top court orders Israel to allow ‘unhindered’ aid into Gaza.

 
The Palestinian Authority forms a new cabinet, but doubts remain about its independence.

“The crucial variable is that the Biden administration is obviously not happy with Israel’s military posture now, and allowing this resolution to pass was one relatively soft way to signal its concern,” said Richard Gowan, an expert on the United Nations at the International Crisis Group. “But the abstention is a not-too-coded hint to Netanyahu to rein in operations, above all over Rafah.”

Since the war began, the United States had vetoed three previous resolutions calling for a cease-fire, agreeing with Israel’s position that it had a right to defend itself, that a permanent cease-fire would benefit Hamas and that such a resolution could jeopardize diplomatic talks. Those vetoes infuriated many diplomats and U.N. officials as the civilian death toll in the war rose, and created rifts with staunch U.S. allies in Europe, including France.


Russia and China then vetoed two alternative resolutions put forth by the United States, the most recent one last Friday, because, they said, the proposals did not clearly demand a cease-fire.

The United States has been sharply criticized by many leaders for failing to persuade Israel, its close ally, to stop or scale back its bombing campaign and ground invasion in Gaza, which the territory’s health officials say have killed some 32,000 people, displaced most of the population and reduced much of the strip to ruins.

Israel launched the war after a Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7 that killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took over 250 hostage into Gaza, according to Israeli officials. Israeli leaders continue to insist that their aims, including the defeat of Hamas, have yet to be fully realized, meaning they cannot countenance a permanent cease-fire.

Security Council resolutions are considered to be international law. And while the Council has no means of enforcing the resolution, it could impose punitive measures, such as sanctions, on Israel, so long as member states agreed.

Families and supporters of Israeli hostages held by Hamas in Gaza, calling for their return, in Tel Aviv, on Friday. Credit:  Oded Balilty/Associated Press


Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador, said the adopted resolution fell in line with diplomatic efforts by the United States, Qatar and Egypt to broker a cease-fire in exchange for the release of hostages held in Gaza. She said the U.S. abstained because it did not agree with everything in the resolution, including the decision not to condemn Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks.


“A cease-fire of any duration must come with the release of hostages — this is the only path,” Ms. Thomas-Greenfield said.

The United States asked for a change in the text that removed “permanent cease-fire” and replaced it with a “lasting cease-fire,” according to diplomats, and wanted to make a cease-fire conditional to the release of the hostages, which is in line with its policy and the negotiations it is leading with Qatar and Egypt.

The resolution adopted on Monday does demand for the unconditional and immediate release of all hostages, but does not make its cease-fire demand conditional on the releases. Ms. Thomas-Greenfield called the resolution “nonbinding.”

The U.S.-backed resolution that failed on Friday also condemned Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack and called for U.N. member states to restrict funding to the Palestinian armed group.


Whereas the failed resolution drafted by the United States said the Security Council “determines the imperative of an immediate and sustained cease-fire,” the resolution that passed Monday was far more concise and direct. It demanded “an immediate cease-fire for the month of Ramadan respected by all parties leading to a permanent sustainable cease-fire.”

There are two weeks remaining in the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

 

A mass “iftar,” or fast-breaking meal, in Rafah on Sunday.Credit...Mohammed Abed/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images


The resolution also deplores “all attacks against civilians” and “all acts of terrorism,” specifically singling out the taking of hostages.

Israel’s ambassador to the U.N., Gilad Erdan, accused the Council of being biased against Israel because it had taken no action on helping secure hostages held captive in Gaza. He said all Council members should have voted “against this shameful resolution.”

As images of starving children, carnage and vast destruction of civilian infrastructure from Gaza have circulated, pressure has mounted on the Security Council to act and for the U.S. not to wield its veto.


“When such atrocities are being committed in broad daylight against defenseless civilians, including women and children, the right thing to do, the only thing to do morally, legally and politically is to put an end to it,” Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian representative to the United Nations, said to the Council.

International aid agencies, which have for months pleaded for a cease-fire in Gaza, welcomed the resolution and said in statements that it must be implemented immediately to provide civilians with a respite and allow aid workers to deliver food, medicine, water and other crucial items at the scale needed.

“A cease-fire is the only way to ensure civilians are protected and is central to enabling the scale up of humanitarian assistance to safely reach those in desperate need. This resolution must serve as a critical turning point,” the International Rescue Committee said in a statement.

Hamas, which is holding more than 100 hostages seized during the Oct. 7 attack on Israel that set off the war, welcomed the Security Council resolution in a statement on Telegram. It added that the Palestinian armed group was willing “to immediately engage on a prisoner exchange process that would lead to the release of prisoners on both sides.”

The resolution that passed on Monday also called for both sides to “comply with their obligations under international law in relation to all persons they detain.”

Iyad Abuheweila contributed reporting.

 

 

ABOUT THE AUTHORS:


Farnaz Fassihi is a reporter for The New York Times based in New York. Previously she was a senior writer and war correspondent for the Wall Street Journal for 17 years based in the Middle East.  

 

More about Farnaz Fassihi


Aaron Boxerman is a Times reporting fellow with a focus on international news. More about Aaron Boxerman


Thomas Fuller, a Page One Correspondent for The Times, writes and rewrites stories for the front page. More about Thomas Fuller

 
A version of this article appears in print on March 26, 2024, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Security Council Urges Cease-Fire As U.S. Abstains. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper

 

Posted by Kofi Natambu at 6:25 AM

Why Ireland Does Not Love Joe Biden--and yes-- it is very much related to his deadly policy regarding Israel, Palestine, and Genocide in Gaza

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/27/opinion/biden-ireland-gaza-varadkar.html

Opinion

Guest Essay

Biden Loves Ireland. It Doesn’t Love Him Back.
March 27, 2024
New York Times

Credit: Jim Watson/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

by Una Mullally

Ms. Mullally, a columnist for The Irish Times, wrote from Dublin.

 

[Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Ireland, Israel, and West Bank and Gaza Strip? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.]

If there’s one thing Irish people know about President Biden, it’s that he’s one of us. He says so all the time. “Remember,” he recalls his grandfather saying, “the best drop of blood in you is Irish.” He has a habit of quoting the poet Seamus Heaney and never lets an opportunity to recall his origins go to waste. His Secret Service code name, tellingly, is Celtic.

So when he visited Ireland last year, it felt like a homecoming. “Today you are amongst friends because you are one of us,” the speaker of Parliament announced before Mr. Biden addressed Irish lawmakers. If the trip took on the sheen of a wealthy Irish American searching for his roots, a constant of Irish tourism, it also cemented the bond between him and the country. When Mr. Biden referred to the Irish rugby team beating “the Black and Tans” — the notoriously brutal 1920s police force — as opposed to the All Blacks, as New Zealand’s rugby team is known, the gaffe became an instant, affectionate meme.

By the end of the trip, it was official: Mr. Biden loves Ireland, and Ireland loves Mr. Biden. But last October changed everything. After Hamas’s attacks, the Israeli bombardment of Gaza appalled the Irish. Mr. Biden, as the leader of Israel’s closest ally and chief military supplier, was seen to be enabling the devastation. That complicity has damaged both his reputation and his relationship with the Irish people, perhaps irreparably. His ancestral homeland no longer loves him back.

Ireland has long and emotional links to Palestinians, something the world has become steadily more aware of in recent months. The Irish government, for its part, unequivocally condemns the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks and repeatedly calls for the release of Israeli hostages. But it also urges restraint in Israel’s response, making multiple interventions at the European Union level and consistently calling for a cease-fire and a political solution to the carnage. Ireland knows all about cease-fires and peace building, after all.


On this matter, Ireland is something of an outlier in Europe. In a January poll, 71 percent of respondents in Ireland said they believed Palestinians lived under an Israeli apartheid system; in another poll in February, 79 percent said they believed Israel was committing genocide. By contrast, no more than 27 percent of people in seven Western European countries said they sympathized more with Palestinians than with Israelis. Here in Britain’s first colony — a status cast off through a war of independence — empathy for Palestinians is deeply rooted, born of shared historical experience.

This feeling has given rise to an extraordinary wave of pro-Palestinian actions in Ireland since the war began. The array of protests — countless concerts, fund-raisers and demonstrations calling for a cease-fire and an end to the bombardment of Gaza — goes far beyond any fringe concern. Protests in Ireland are large and spread across the country, with attendees diverse in age, class, ethnicity and political affiliation. They bring together trade unionists, Gaelic football players, journalists, ordinary citizens young and old, politicians, health care workers, L.G.B.T.Q. people and many more. It is a truly national phenomenon.

Around the world, chants at pro-Palestinian demonstrations are pretty similar. But over the winter, a specific chant took hold on Irish streets. Though St. Patrick’s Day was months away, protesters looked to the annual meeting in Washington between the Irish prime minister, or taoiseach, and the American president. At the Oval Office every March 17, the Irish leader presents to the American president a bowl of shamrock. The chant, taking notice of this tradition, was bracingly simple: “No shamrocks for Genocide Joe.”

It caught on, becoming the aural centerpiece of protests across the country, especially at the largest demonstrations on Saturdays in Dublin’s city center. It was transformed with a slight modification into a mural in Belfast, a city where Palestinian flags have long flown in nationalist communities; was spray-painted along tram tracks in Dublin; and took hold on social media, where people drew black shamrocks on the palms of their hands. Such agitation coalesced around the demand that the prime minister, Leo Varadkar, boycott this year’s White House visit.

Along with that demand, Mr. Biden became the focus of Irish ire. At protests he was rebuked by public figures, not least Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, a hero of the 1960s civil rights movement in the north of Ireland. In the press, commentators lined up to pass judgment on the American president, including the acclaimed novelist Sally Rooney, who characterized the assault on Gaza as “Biden’s war.” The criticism, at times, has been intimate. In County Louth, where Mr. Biden’s great-grandfather James Finnegan was born, a group of people gathered at a graveyard to castigate the president for betraying his roots.

The disapproval has cut through. While half of Irish voters would still rather Mr. Biden win re-election over Donald Trump, nearly a third would like to see neither man win the presidency. An open letter revoking “symbolic support” for his 2024 election campaign has been signed by 20,000 people. Given 80 percent of Irish people backed Mr. Biden in 2020 and his victory was widely welcomed, it is a startling decline in esteem for our emigrant son.

As calls to boycott the White House meeting and shamrock presentation grew, Mr. Varadkar’s own criticism of the war in Gaza became more robust. He spoke about the “hope” a cease-fire could bring and “believing in our shared humanity.” But he was never going to skip the trip. Strong relations with the United States are central to Ireland’s economic and foreign policy, after all. Even so, Irish people’s expectations for the visit, which offered an opportunity to impress on Mr. Biden their views, were high.

Mr. Varadkar did his best to relay the message. “Mr. President, as you know, the Irish people are deeply troubled about the catastrophe that’s unfolding before our eyes in Gaza,” he said at the shamrock presentation. “Leaders often ask me why the Irish have so much empathy for the Palestinian people. The answer is simple: We see our history in their eyes.”

This stirring speech turned out to be one of his final acts in office. Mr. Varadkar, worn out by the job, announced his resignation last week. Coming within a year of the next elections, the decision was certainly a surprise. But it did little to dampen the defiant mood in Ireland.

Mr. Biden often cites Mr. Heaney’s “The Cure at Troy.” “History says don’t hope/On this side of the grave,” the poem runs. “But then, once in a lifetime/The longed-for tidal wave/Of justice can rise up,/And hope and history rhyme.” As Irish people look across the Atlantic to Ireland’s great-grandson, many are waiting for that rhyme to land.

More on Biden and Ireland

‘I’m Comin’ Home’: Biden Takes a Tour of His Irish Heritage

April 12, 2023

Opinion | Maeve Higgins

Joe Biden, the Irishman

Jan. 28, 2021

Opinion | Séamas O’Reilly

Watching the U.S. Election While Irish

Nov. 13, 2020

Opinion | Shawn McCreesh

Donald Trump, Joe Biden and the Vote of the Irish

May 25, 2020

Una Mullally (@UnaMullally) is a columnist for The Irish Times.

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Congresswoman Alexandria Ocascio-Cortez Comes Out Forcefully Against the Israeli Government's Genocidal Campaign in Gaza And On Behalf Of the 1.1 Million Palestinians Now Under A Devastating Siege From Looming Conditions of A Deadly Famine

https://twitter.com/TeamAOC/status/1771928638067184111akid=6067.697202.FtTG1H&rd=1&s=20/utm_campaign=email&t=1&utm_source=em20240324-6067

VIDEO:

https://t.co/f1rZL2A6nn" / X

Since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas War, Alexandria has called for a permanent ceasefire — and as one of the original cosponsors of the Ceasefire Now Resolution, she has helped grow the number of representatives calling for one to 66 members strong.

And on Friday, Alexandria spoke on the House floor about the unfolding genocide in Palestine for the first time.

This morning, Alexandria went on CNN to continue to speak out about the atrocities taking place in Gaza.

Take a few minutes to watch her interview on X (formerly known as Twitter) or Instagram.

The actions of Hamas should not be tied to whether a 3-year-old can eat.

The actions of Hamas do not justify forcing hundreds of thousands of people to eat grass as their bodies consume themselves.

Thank you for reading,

Team AOC

 

S