A recent Data For Progress poll showed the following voter support for immediate ceasefire to end civilian deaths in Gaza.
ALL VOTERS 66%
DEMOCRATS 80%
INDEPENDENTS 57%
REPUBLICANS 56%
Tragically, support for that ceasefire in Congress is a minuscule 2.4%, just 13 of 535. No wonder Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has rejected any consideration of ceasefire. The bombings and invasion of Gaza will likely continue till its 139 square miles are ethnically cleansed.
Walt Zlotow became involved in antiwar activities upon entering University of Chicago in 1963. He is current president of the West Suburban Peace Coalition based in the Chicago western suburbs. He blogs daily on antiwar and other issues at www.heartlandprogressive.blogspot.com.
AIPAC has more influence on Congress than shifting popular opinion. This will not change until the US empire and economy have crashed, or we all go up in smoke.
The ADL wants to criminalize dissent and is playing the “anti-zionism and anti- supremacy is anti-semitism” card, calling for reeducation propaganda to be taught in elementary schools.
The ADL Is Defaming Palestinian Students as Terrorist Supporters
The group is urging hundreds of colleges to investigate Students for Justice in Palestine for material support for terrorism. September 11 politics are back in force.
An “urgent” open letter issued last Thursday by the ADL—which, lest we forget, promotes itself as one of America’s leading defenders of civil rights—and the Louis Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law urged college and university administrators to “immediately investigate” their campus chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) for “potential violations of the prohibition against materially supporting a foreign terrorist organization.” They claim to have sent the letter to nearly 200 schools.
The ADL provided not a shred of evidence for that incendiary, potentially life-ruining accusation. It instead cited overheated rhetoric at pro-Palestinian campus demonstrations post–October 7, including from some who defended Hamas. It interpreted references to “resistance” to the siege, bombardment, and invasion of Gaza exclusively as support for terrorism—not, say, as a rejection of the Israeli stranglehold around a densely packed area of 2.3 million people.
Even if you accepted the ADL’s interpretations of those comments, it would still not amount to evidence that anyone targeted by the group had gone beyond rhetorical support of Hamas—something that, no matter your opinion of the comments themselves, is protected speech under the First Amendment, at least as of this writing. It is with such frivolousness that the ADL made allegations that can land people in prison for up to 20 years.….Now, an institution that bills itself as the guardian of Jewish civil rights in America is reaching for a signature tool of the War on Terror—one made infamous by the 2001 Patriot Act—to suppress speech it finds objectionable. (This is not the only way the ADL is choosing to stoke division instead of acting as a voice of reason. Its national director, Jonathan Greenblatt, has outrageously compared anti-Zionists, including anti-Zionist Jews like myself, to white supremacists in the last few weeks.)
The consequences of a material-support investigation can extend far beyond the loss of job opportunities. Allegations of “standing with quote-unquote terrorist groups can cause people significant criminal repercussions and put them and their families at risk,” said Malak Afaneh, a law student at the University of California–Berkeley and a member of the local SJP chapter, known as Berkeley Law Students for Justice in Palestine. “What we’re seeing are McCarthyesque tactics, like those used post-9/11.”
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/adl-palestine-terrorism-letter/
They also want the department to consider training for K-12 educators on antisemitism.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/31/jewish-organizations-cardona-antisemitism-action-plan-00124383
All people and groups with power want to eliminate dissent, starting with governments, the ruling class, and the latter’s large corporations. We have to constantly fight against repression of dissent, but they’re making it harder by the second, and have convinced formerly progressive people that restriction of speech is OK (probably by infecting them with TDS, which has caused their minds to short-circuit).
Agreed Jeff
Losing work and earnings by taking a stand against present US-Israeli genocide in Palestine feels good. Collaboration and association with people who openly support ongoing mass-murder hurts more deeply.
While true, countries in the EU are trying to criminalize even criticism of Israel. And the US has already made punishments for programs of BDS. https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/04/23/us-states-use-anti-boycott-laws-punish-responsible-businesses
We must be vigilant and fight back against all governmental acts of censorship and criminalization of dissent. We are already heading in that direction.
Yes, but the vast majority of people are not willing to make that kind of sacrifice unless they’re in a desperate situation. We can’t expect ordinary people to be self-sacrificial heroes or martyrs, because they’re not.
I claim no hero nor martyr status- I’ve lost some business is all.
I’ve had no success trying to convince financially comfortable — not rich — people to give up very small things to help other people or the environment. Kudos to you, but you’re clearly in a small minority in this way.
Last week Bernie Sanders was critical of Israel bombing hospitals, schools, etc. Then he switches gears and is against a cease fire because, “Hamas wants to destroy Israel”. Norman Finkelstein issued a rebuttal to Bernie: https://scheerpost.com/2023/11/07/norman-finkelstein-responds-to-bernie-sanders/ Warning! Mr. Finkelstein cites facts and is quite emotional at the end of his talk.
His indictment should apply to US empire as well. Bernie has backpeddled, and many other US politicians will also. Nevertheless the moral depravity consistently demonstrated by the US empire requires its demotion from authority and the dismantling of its hegemonic agency by the rest of world without delay.
Bernie Sanders is a fraud. He is nothing more than a typical politician.
Bernie is a fraud. He is no antiwar peacemaking politician. He condemns what Hamas is doing but not what Israel is doing. The US and Israel cause the Gazans to support Hamas.
I’ve seen bumper stickers saying “FEEL THE BERN”, there should be bumper stickers saying “WE’VE BEEN BERNED”.
I’m waiting for Knapp to release my comment.
Your wait is over.
Thank you sir.
Sorry for the wait . Disqus grabbed your comment because it had links in it. Sometimes it interprets those as possible spam. And sometimes it doesn’t. When it does, it seems to do so in big batches. And then it may go a month without caring.
Thanks for the explanation- It’s important for commenters to know about. The inconsistencies of Disqus policy often cause misplaced suspicions about who’s interfering.
Thanks for caring. It would have been stinging irony that a comment about censorship was censored.
I don’t really know ANY policy position that Congress is in sync with the American people are, tbh. Congress only represents the military industrial complex, the duopoly and their donors, and the lobbyists these days.
That aside, our founders probably never envisioned how broken Congress would become with the two-party system. We’re pretty much a model of how NOT to run a democracy these days – the anti-democratic Senate where Wyoming gets the same representation as California and Texas, the electoral college that makes it pointless to vote except if you live in a battleground state, Trump’s efforts to fight the 2020 election forever, gerrymandered maps in every state, no open primaries even though no one likes Biden or Trump, and of course the constant suppression of third parties by the two war parties. What a great “democracy” we have….
Hate to break it to you, but Congress is wildliy out of sync with the population on everything. The U.S. is not a democracy, far from it. Just look at the 2014 Princeton study.
But wildly in sync with the MIC.
On October 24, a statement by United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres caused a sharp reaction by Israel. While addressing the UN Security Council, the UN chief said that while he condemned in the strongest terms the massacre committed by Hamas on October 7, he wished to remind the world that it did not take place in a vacuum. He explained that one cannot dissociate 56 years of occupation from our engagement with the tragedy that unfolded on that day.
The Israeli government was quick to condemn the statement. Israeli officials demanded Guterres’s resignation, claiming that he supported Hamas and justified the massacre it carried out. The Israeli media also jumped on the bandwagon, asserting among other things that the UN chief “has demonstrated a stunning degree of moral bankruptcy”.
This reaction suggests that a new type of allegation of anti-Semitism may now be on the table. Until October 7, Israel had pushed for the definition of anti-Semitism to be expanded to include criticism of the Israeli state and questioning the moral basis of Zionism. Now, contextualising and historicising what is going on could also trigger an accusation of anti-Semitism.
The dehistoricisation of these events aids Israel and governments in the West in pursuing policies they shunned in the past due to either ethical, tactical, or strategic considerations.
Thus, the October 7 attack is used by Israel as a pretext to pursue genocidal policies in the Gaza Strip. It is also a pretext for the United States to try and reassert its presence in the Middle East. And it is a pretext for some European countries to violate and limit democratic freedoms in the name of a new “war on terror”.
But there are several historical contexts for what is going on now in Israel-Palestine that cannot be ignored. The wider historical context goes back to the mid-19th century, when evangelical Christianity in the West turned the idea of the “return of the Jews” into a religious millennial imperative and advocated the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine as part of the steps that would lead to the resurrection of the dead, the return of the Messiah, and the end of time.
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/11/5/why-israel-wants-to-erase-context-and-history-in-the-war-on-gaza
Some people think that Israel wanted Hamas to follow through with this attack so that Israel could annex Gaza. Did you know that Israel has been funding Hamas for years, with the idea that promoting Hamas to a position of power would split the Palestinians between Hamas and the PLO? Netanyahu is on video in 2019 urging fellow Israelis to support funding of Hamas for this reason.
Some, including retired Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, have nefarious thoughts about the “blunder”. On KPFK, Ralph Nader interviews Col. Wilkerson about the 7 Oct 23 attack. After listening to what he had to say, I really wonder if it was a set up, 9/11 style so that Israel’s Zionist fascists could “mow the lawn” (or roto till), which is exactly what is happening. Mr. Nader’s show was on Sunday, November 5, 2023. Look up KPFK, then go to the archives.
If Congress is out of sync with its voters, the people should elect people to replace them. The politicians only care about keeping the jobs they never do and being re-elected.
But first Citizens United must be reversed.
Also Buckley v. Valeo. Much older than Citizens United, and more fundamentally the problem. Citizens United just made a bad situation worse, but Buckley prevented outlawing or even seriously restricting certain campaign contributions by ruling that money is speech.
Citizens United should be replaced with United Citizens. There is no such group as that as far as I know, it would be the opposite of Citizens United and they would take down the duopoly parties.
We can’t because the system is rigged. The system must be overturned & replaced, that’s the only solution. Eliminate private campaign contributions, replace the winner-take-all BS system with proportional representation, and give all candidates equal & free TV time. That’s just the start, but it should get things going in the right direction.
It’s not possible to give all candidates equal and free TV time. Or, rather, it is, if you give every candidate a split-second image flash per election cycle.
On Newsmax this evening the new nightmarish speaker of the house is at a “vigil for Israel”. I guess the oh so evangelical Johnson is OK with nearly 5,000 children murdered.