The White House on Tuesday condemned “death to America” chants that surfaced online from a recent rally in Dearborn, Mich., protesting Israel’s war in Gaza.
Press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre replied, “yes” when asked if President Biden condemns the comments in the chants, which were captured on video by some attendees.
“Peaceful protests are something that the president has also been very clear that, its important to give folks space to peacefully protest. But any type of violent rhetoric, we are going to denounce,” she said.
Dearborn mayor Abdullah Hammoud (D) has also denounced the chants, sharing in a statement on X that “Dearborn is a city of proud Americans.”
Putting aside that this is clearly pearl clutching [over a chant made by a handful of people] to distract from the fact that the US government fully supports genocide, let’s think about this for a minute. Would it be controversial to say “Death to Nazi Germany”? Surely such a horrendous institution should be killed off, right? The argument could be made that the US government, with all the horrible things it has done (slavery, wars, coups, the main driver of climate change, pollution, genocide, etc), does deserve death. That doesn’t mean death to the people of the US (or even the people in the US government), it means death to the institution known as America that is carrying out such horrendous things.
“Death to America” absolutely means killing US Citizens. This is the the chant at every anti-American rally in Iran, and something ISIS has been chanting for a very long time.
Who cares.