From the Genius of Dr. Patton
Two years into the obliteration of Gaza, Barack Obama logged onto the Internet and typed an elegant, hollow, exquisitely balanced statement that could only be written by a man fluent in the language of empire.
The former president called the war in Gaza a tragedy. He wrote about unimaginable loss on both sides, urged restraint, pleaded for common humanity, and reminded the world that rebuilding Gaza must be part of any lasting peace. Every sentence arrived perfectly measured and designed to grieve just enough without ever naming guilt. It was sorrow in the key of diplomacy that doesn’t disrupt power. His sentences glowed with balance and civility and just enough empathy to seem moral, and just enough vagueness to offend nobody in Washington.
But read it in the context of the second anniversary of the war, after 67,000 Palestinians dead, tens of thousands maimed, entire families wiped from the civil registry, children starving in tent cities built on their bombed-out homes, and those words curdle.
Both sides sounds like a damn slap.
Peace sounds like propaganda.
And rebuilding sounds like a euphemism for burying the evidence.
How in the hell can Obama see the blatant genocide happening in Gaza and still fix his fingers to type those words?
How can a man who once wept on national television over Newtown watch tens of thousands of children buried under rubble and still talk about restraint? How can someone who knows the machinery of U.S. warfare, every drone feed, every shipment, every signature strike, pretend this is just a tragedy instead of a policy? How can a man so fluent in history act like he doesn’t recognize the language of occupation when he helped write its lexicon?
Enough with the liberal theater of grief!
Let’s slow it down and look at what he actually said. Let’s take his statement apart line by line because every sentence in that post was a masterclass in how empire speaks empathy while protecting itself.
“Two years of unimaginable loss for Israeli families and the people of Gaza.” That’s how Obama opens. He is demonstrating symmetrical grief and equalized agony. He places Israelis and “the people of Gaza” side by side, two nouns that pretend there’s equality where none exists. “Unimaginable loss” sounds compassionate, but it collapses 67,000 Palestinian deaths and 1,200 Israeli deaths into a single, sanitized ledger of grief. It turns structural violence into shared misfortune and the aggressor and the besieged get fused under one soft blanket of sorrow.
“Unimaginable” is also a kind of evasion. It implies that the horror is beyond comprehension, even though it’s been meticulously documented. The hospitals bombed, neighborhoods leveled, aid blocked, flotillas intercepted, journalists killed. It’s not unimaginable. Nah, it’s too damn unbearable to acknowledge.
Obama never mentions occupation. Never says siege. Never uses the words “blockade,” “bombing,” or “starvation,” or “genocide.” He didn’t call out the United States for bankrolling the weapons that leveled Gaza, or demand that Israel face any form of accountability. He wrote as if the horror were weather, tragic but inevitable, and something the world must simply endure and someday rebuild from.
That omission is the statement. The absence of nouns is the policy. When you have the moral vocabulary of a superpower, silence is a strategy. You don’t have to lie if you can just refuse to name what’s true.
Then he writes, “ … we should all be encouraged and relieved that an end to the conflict is within sight …” Encouraged? Relieved? As if the world has been holding its breath for peace rather than gasping from complicity. The phrasing implies progress, a turning point, what we historians call a watershed moment. Not because justice has been done, but because the violence may soon quiet down enough to make everybody comfortable again.
“An end to the conflict” erases who ended whom. It suggests mutual cessation, not exhaustion by massacre. In this sentence, cessation equals closure not accountability, not restoration, just quiet. The priority isn’t liberation but emotional relief for all the spectators around the world.
Keep moving, Y’all: “… that those hostages still being held will be reunited with their families …” Hostages are the only people in this statement granted individuality. They have families, reunions, futures. By contrast, Palestinians are a collective mass. They are “the people of Gaza.” They are nameless, faceless, an abstract body of suffering. This imbalance of humanization is deliberate. It centers Western empathy where it’s politically safe and removes it where it’s inconvenient.
Because what about all the dead in Gaza? The ones who will never be reunited or buried? The parents whose children were snatched from the future? The grandparents who watched their bloodlines vanish under bomb craters, whole families obliterated with no chance to mourn, name, or bury? This statement gestures to reunion and repair but doesn’t say shit about the missing, the skeletons in rubble, or the ruptured grief that no aid convoys will ever heal.
Look at the scale: over 67,000 Palestinians killed and of those, around 30 percent were children. Innocent children. That’s tens of thousands of futures erased. These children were the future of Gaza. It’s doctors, engineers, poets, healers, farmers. Their names will never be called in this mea culpa-tone-ass essay of Obama’s. He makes zero mention of them. Zero mention and it pisses me TF off.
And so the balance of humanity tilts, by omission, toward the Israeli settlers, colonizers, hostages, and those who still walk free. He builds sympathy around the potential reunion, while erasing the deeper rupture that can never be undone.
Next he says, “… and that vital aid can start reaching those inside Gaza whose lives have been shattered.”
Sounds generous, right? But look at the framing: Palestinians appear only as recipients of mercy, not agents of justice. “Whose lives have been shattered” is passive voice doing political work. Who shattered them? By what weapons? Funded by which government? Built by which contractors? Signed off by which presidents, including him? The sentence floats above the rubble like a drone camera that’s detached, objective, emotion disguised as mercy.
That single passive phrase does more political work than a Pentagon press release. It strips the violence of agency, turns the deliberate into the accidental, and lets the perpetrators disappear into grammar.
Who dropped the bombs that ripped through apartment blocks? Who targeted the schools, the hospitals, the refugee camps? Who green-lit the shipments that turned neighborhoods into craters? Whose tax dollars paid for the ordnance that shredded children in their sleep?
There’s no “act of god” here. This isn’t a natural disaster. Gaza wasn’t hit by an earthquake. It was hit by policy. And every time a politician uses that soft, bloodless language, another layer of accountability is buried under rubble.
Obama writes as if the destruction just happened, as if the sky opened and chaos fell. The people of Gaza didn’t simply lose their lives; they were taken. And now the same powers that armed the devastation are writing sentences about aid and promising to send bandages to the bodies they helped break.
He says “vital aid,” but aid isn’t life. It’s aftercare for survivors of indifference. It’s empire’s version of remorse. Send crates of rice instead of accountability and medical tents instead of memory. Obama doesn’t call for the end of siege, the return of stolen land, or the accountability of those who ordered the strikes. He calls for aid. This is how liberal power converts political subjugation into a charity problem. Turn the occupied into victims of circumstance and then congratulate yourself for sending Band-Aids.
If lives have been shattered, name the hand that swung the damn hammer. Name the state that kept fueling it. Name the allies who looked away. Because until you do, your sorrow is all just theater, and your language is complicity dressed as compassion.
And now, here comes the pivot from condolence to responsibility, but not for the powerful. “More than that, though, it now falls on Israelis and Palestinians, with the support of the US. and the entire world community, to begin the hard task of rebuilding Gaza …”
So, the “hard task” of rebuilding somehow falls on the very people who’ve been bombed, starved, and displaced. Imagine that: survivors of mass destruction told to pick up the bricks, sweep the ashes, and start again with help from the same empire that sold the bombs and vetoed every attempt at accountability. That ain’t empathy. That’s moral outsourcing under the guise of global partnership.
Ugh, and that phrase“the entire world community,” is pure misdirection. The U.S. is not a member of a grieving collective. It is the primary financier of this nightmare! The warplanes, the munitions, the vetoes at the U.N., the silence from its allies. All of it is stamped Made in America. Yet Obama writes as if responsibility is a group project. As if the nations who begged for a ceasefire from the first week share equal blame with the country that armed the siege and defended it in every diplomatic arena.
This is pure gaslighting on an international scale. The U.S. sets the fire, films the flames, then calls for a community cleanup. WTF? And in this framing, America becomes not the arsonist, but the volunteer firefighter and the moral adult in a room it built to burn.
“Rebuilding Gaza” in Obama’s language doesn’t mean reparations or justice. It means narrative control. It’s the ritual of empire rebuilding its image on the ruins it created. This is the sleight of hand that turns the destroyer into the donor. The U.S. doesn’t rebuild Gaza out of guilt. It rebuilds to prove that empire is merciful after it’s done being a fucking monster.
And now, for Obama’s closing flourish: “… and to commit to a process that, by recognizing the common humanity and basic rights of both peoples, can achieve a lasting peace.” Listen to that, “Common humanity” and “lasting peace.” Deep sigh. That is the oldest spell in the playbook. It sounds healing, but it functions as sedation. “Common humanity” erases asymmetry. It asks the oppressed to meet their oppressor halfway. “Basic rights of both peoples” sounds noble until you remember that one people is stateless, occupied, and encaged. What “both” means in practice is that the oppressor’s comfort is equal to the oppressed’s survival.
“Lasting peace” is a moral horizon that never arrives. It’s a phrase built to defer justice indefinitely. Peace is always the prize just out of reach and the reason we’re told not to demand more right now.
Obama’s post reads like a eulogy for accountability. Every word is careful, tempered, and bipartisan. It invites mourning without naming a murderer. It offers compassion without consequence. It’s diplomacy as absolution. The grammar itself performs denial so that agency disappears, and empire hides behind syntax and passive voice.
Each of these lines does political work. Together, they perform the ritual that keeps the empire morally intact: This is how liberal power grieves efficiently and decorously from a distance. It speaks the language of heartbreak while keeping its boots on the neck of the suffering.
Obama’s post wasn’t an act of reflection. It was crisis management. A linguistic ceasefire. It offered Americans a way to feel ethical without interrupting the machinery of empire. It was the literary version of a ceasefire with morality itself temporary, strategic, and guaranteed to expire the moment the news cycle moves on. Obama’s “genius” was always that he could translate brutality into elegy.
The people of Gaza don’t need the poetry of balance. They need the end of siege. They need water, power, medicine, safety, and a future. Obama’s statement wasn’t for the people dying. It was for the people watching who need moral permission to look away. His calmness signals to them that this, too, is manageable. That if the right words are said in the right tone, no reckoning is required.
And that’s the part that sears: he knows better. He’s a man who understands narrative power, who built his career on moral storytelling. But in the story he’s telling now, the murdered are still characters without names, without agency, without history. They exist only to illustrate “loss.” Their killers are policy actors. Their suffering is context.
It’s the same pattern that defined his presidency, the high-minded rhetoric of fairness masking the cold math of U.S. interests. Under his watch, military aid to Israel continued to flow without condition. Settlements multiplied. Every attempt at accountability was softened into “dialogue.” And when Palestinians sought recognition in international forums, his administration blocked it in the name of “negotiated peace.”
I’m tired of the mythology of Obama as untouchable moral compass. For two decades, Democrats have used his tone as a template for palatable cruelty. His calm, balanced, bipartisan sorrow lets U.S. policy remain untouched. By dissecting his words, we can indict the entire architecture of liberal respectability that enables mass death abroad while congratulating itself for civility. Intelligence, empathy, and eloquence mean nothing without courage. What good is grace if it can’t save a single life?
So when Obama posts about Gaza now, it’s moral continuity. He’s still the high priest of civility and still managing outrage so the empire doesn’t choke on its own reflection. Because empire doesn’t just bomb, it narrates. And Obama is still one of its most gifted storytellers.
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