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HASSAN EL-TAYYAB, hassan@fcnl.org, @HassanElTayyab
While most reporters at the White House have pressed the administration to be more hawkish on Ukraine, Ryan Grim of the The Intercept asked the White House what role it was playing to promote negotiations. “One of the steps we’ve taken — a significant one — is to be the largest provider of military and humanitarian and economic assistance in the world, to put them in a greater position of strength as they go into these negotiations,” said White House press secretary Jen Psaki.

Grim’s piece in The Intercept, “Will the United States Empower Zelenskyy to Negotiate an End to the War?” extensively quotes El-Tayyab, legislative director for Middle East policy at the Friends Committee on National Legislation: “The United States is in a punishment mindset with regards to Russia and it needs to quickly transition to a more balanced, diplomacy-based approach, that includes clear incentives, off-ramps for sanctions, and a realistic pathway to a ceasefire. While only Ukraine and Russia can ultimately decide the framework for a negotiated settlement, the United States can help talks by signaling it would support a deal that ends the conflict and meaningfully preserves Ukraine’s sovereignty.”

El-Tayyab added: “If the Biden administration shows it’s willing to lift sanctions if peace talks are successful, and champions possibilities for compromise as they emerge, it can positively contribute to ending the conflict and suffering of millions of innocent Ukrainians.”

El-Tayyab has worked extensively to end the Saudi bombing of Yemen. Jeremy Scahill summarizes information from the Yemen Data Project: “Over the past four months, the U.S.-armed and supported Saudi regime has engaged in its most sustained period of heavy bombing of Yemen since 2018. Since 2015, air strikes/air raids have killed at least 8,900 civilians.” Despite campaign promises to the contrary, the Biden administration is continuing to arm the Saudis as they escalate their bombing. See El-Tayyab’s latest piece “Lawmakers take action on Biden’s failed Yemen policy.”

HASSAN EL-TAYYAB, hassan@fcnl.org, @HassanElTayyab
El-Tayyab is legislative director for Middle East policy for the Friends Committee on National Legislation, he said today “U.S. media is blatantly displaying racism by only adequately covering a war between white people. In comparison, we see almost no coverage of wars in Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria, Palestine, Somalia, Ethiopia, etc. Implication is white lives matter more to them than black/brown lives.”

On Feb. 11, El-Tayyab wrote the piece “Lawmakers take action on Biden’s failed Yemen policy,” noting: “Two House members announced this week they’d be introducing a War Powers Resolution to put an end to America’s role in the Saudi-led conflict.” The Ukraine crisis might delay the introduction, but legislation is expected to proceed.

JEFF COHEN, jcohen@ithaca.edu, @Roots_Action
Cohen is co-founder of RootsAction.org, a retired journalism professor at Ithaca College and author of Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media. In 1986, he founded the media watch group FAIR.He just wrote the piece “Mainstream media opposes military aggression — unless the U.S. is doing it,” which states: “While covering Russia’s horrific aggression in Ukraine, there is a real focus — as there always should be — on civilian victims of war. Today, the focus on that essential aspect of the Russian invasion is prominent and continuous — from civilian deaths to the trauma felt by civilians as missiles strike nearby.

“Unfortunately, there was virtually no focus on civilian death and agony when it was the U.S. military launching the invasions. After the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003 on false pretenses — made possible by U.S. mainstream media complicity that I witnessed firsthand — civilian deaths were largely ignored and undercounted through the years.”
Cohen also scrutinizes the highly selective coverage of international law and “imperialism.”

Eoin Higgins in “‘Relatively Civilized, Relatively European’: Media Bias Infects Coverage of Ukraine War” notes Nashwa Khan’s tweet: “Palestinians are called terrorists for throwing rocks during occupation while Ukrainians are celebrated and shown on TV making Molotov cocktails.”

In “Ukraine, Palestine and the propaganda of war,” the Electronic Intifada notes examples of footage of Palestinians that have been misattributed to having happened in Ukraine.

They write: “The whiteness of Ukrainians may make it easier for Western governments to sell to their publics escalation and intervention instead of urgent negotiations to defuse a potentially catastrophic crisis between nuclear superpowers.

“But that is not the whole story. … ‘It’s not about their whiteness, but about Ukraine’s geopolitical significance to American capitalism and the expansion of its empire.’”

On Monday, President Biden said about his recent statement that Russian President Vladimir Putin should not be in power: “I wasn’t then, nor am I now, articulating a policy change. I was expressing the moral outrage that I feel, and I make no apologies for it.”

Some analysts have noted that Biden has dropped his condemnations of Saudi Arabia as it has accelerated its bombing of Yemen in recent months.

NORMAN SOLOMON, solomonprogressive@gmail.com, @normansolomon

“By doubling down on his call for regime change, President Biden has undercut the words of top U.S. officials that appeared to ‘walk back’ his initial irresponsible statement in Warsaw,” Solomon said today. “Rather than trying to soothe the dangerous waters, Biden has made them even more dangerous. This should be condemned — rather than silently aided and abetted — by members of Congress.”

Solomon recently wrote the piece “Biden’s Dangerous Call for Regime Change in Russia,” which states: “Ever since Joe Biden ended his speech in Poland on Saturday night by making one of the most dangerous statements ever uttered by a U.S. president in the nuclear age, efforts to clean up after him have been profuse. Administration officials scurried to assert that Biden didn’t mean what he said. Yet no amount of trying to ‘walk back’ his unhinged comment at the end of his speech in front of Warsaw’s Royal Castle can change the fact that Biden had called for regime change in Russia.

“They were nine words about Russian President Vladimir Putin that shook the world: ‘For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.’

“With a reckless genie out of the bottle, no amount of damage control from the president’s top underlings could stuff it back in. ‘We do not have a strategy of regime change in Russia, or anywhere else, for that matter,’ Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters on Sunday. Such words might plausibly have less than full weight; Blinken was chief of staff at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when, in mid-2002, then-Senator Biden wielded the gavel at crucial hearings that completely stacked the witness deck in support of the subsequent U.S. invasion of Iraq, with the explicit goal of regime change. …

“Mainstream journalists have avoided putting a fine point on the likelihood that World War III just got closer thanks to Biden’s words, whether or not they were ‘a slip’ or ‘a veiled threat.’ In fact, it might never be possible to know which it was. But that ambiguity underscores that his slip and/or threat was mind-blowingly irresponsible, endangering the survival of humanity on this planet.

“Outrage is the appropriate response. And a special onus is on Democrats in Congress, who should be willing to put humanity above party and condemn Biden’s extreme irresponsibility. But prospects for such condemnation look bleak. …

“Overall, in recent weeks, President Biden has jettisoned all but the flimsiest pretenses of seeking a diplomatic solution to end the horrors of the war in Ukraine. Instead, his administration keeps ratcheting up the self-righteous rhetoric while moving the world closer to ultimate catastrophe.”

Solomon is executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy and the national director of RootsAction.org. He is the author of a dozen books including Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State, published this year in a new edition as a free e-book. His other books include War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 and 2020 Democratic National Conventions.