....Democratic candidate for the Senate from Pennsylvania (Specter's seat).
Whether you call it the Israel Lobby or AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee) or the Neocons, there's no question that as a result of Sestak's past criticisms of Israel, they are now an albatross around his neck. Check out this political ad paid for by a new (old) group of Washington pro-Israel Neocons just resurrected as the The Emergency Committee for Israel. If you ask whether Sestak is in the process of being AIPAC'ed just as Cynthia McKinney (D-Georgia) was several years ago, this time with the Neocons leading the way, it turns out to be a silly question. Of course. Watch the attack video just released by this Neocon group:
AIPAC said it would eventually control our college campuses. Although it was not carried by the mainstream media, AIPAC announced that it would take over college campuses just as it has taken over Congress.
The student government of UC Berkeley, historically a leading university in civil and human rights activism, recently voted to divest from companies that support the illegal occupation of Palestine. The 16-4 majority vote, however, was vetoed by the Senate president. AIPAC, the core of Israel Lobby, reacted. Although it was not carried by the mainstream media, it announced that it would take over college campuses just as it has taken over Congress.
A vote to overturn the veto fell one short of the 14 vote majority needed. The vote was then tabled for a future vote to overturn the veto, which will occur in five days, April 28.
If Daniel Pipes and his organization, Campus Watch, Israel's sentinel on campus Alan Dershowitz, and numerous pro-Israel college organizations all towing the right wing Zionist line, were not enough, we now hear that AIPAC, the main constituent of the Israel Lobby, intends to get involved in American college campus political activity.
The main target is UC Berkeley where the student government recently passed a resolution for the university to divest from corporations that support the Israeli occupation and colonization of Palestine. The danger lies in the fact Berkley is renown for lighting the fire under numerous civil and human rights movements, such as bringing down South African Apartheid, sweatshops in Indonesia, the Burmese (Myanmar) dictatorship, political killings in Nigeria, and so on, which have then spread across the country from one university campus to another.
The prospect that the UC Berkeley action will start a tsunami of divestments presents a dilemma for the Israel Lobby. The publicity alone could create a crisis in the Israeli-US relationship.
In spite of Obama's historic speech in Cairo early last year finding Israel's siege "intolerable," the siege remains intact and deprivations worsened by Israel's three week attack a year ago continue. At least 1,400 Palestinians, mostly civilians and roughly 300 children were killed. Israel has since ignored Washington pleas to permit sufficient humanitarian aid and building materials into the Strip.
Now, two Congressmen, Rep. Jim McDermott and Rep. Keith Ellison, have acted to create a letter to President Obama calling attention to the devastating humanitarian impact of Israel's illegal blockade of the occupied Gaza Strip
54 Members of Congress have signed on, irrespective of possible repercussions from the Israel Lobby, AIPAC, in particular.
Marcy Winograd, Co-founder of Progressive Democrats of Los Angeles, is establishing an exploratory committee to challenge incumbent Jane Harman (CA-36) following explosive new revelations about Harman's involvement in potentially illegal obsctruction of justice, which the Bush Department of Justice overlooked because of her political support. Winograd won almost 38% of the vote in a 2006 primary challenge.
Following Jeff Stein's initial revelation of the the Jane-Harman/Alberto-Gonzales/AIPAC scandal last weekend, Harman whipped herself into a frenzy of denial, whilst simultaneously transforming herself into the least believable champion of civil liberties outside the Republican Party.
And speaking of the Republican Party, what may have been the most significant news of the week was the revelation that--totally fulfilling Fredo's expectations--Harman was such a staunch defender of Bush lawlessness that she weighed in to help stop the NY Times from publishing the NSA wiretap story before the 2004 election.
It was known before that Harman had offered to interfere with an investigation into alleged spying by two AIPAC staffers. What wasn't known was the real reason the Bush Justice Department dropped the investigation into what she did: they needed her political support. And now it seems that they got it, too.
On April 21, NYT spokesperson Catherine Mathis emailed a statement from NYT executive editor Bill Keller to Greg Sarget, stating, in part:
Congresswoman Harman spoke to Washington Bureau Chief Phil Taubman in late October or early November, 2004, apparently at the request of General Hayden. She urged that The Times not publish the story.
It doesn't appear that Harman played a major role--such as talking directly to Keller--but she clearly did weigh in. And that could be just one step too far to keep her in the good graces of her party brethren and sistren.
"I think her credibility with fellow Democrats is going to be strained at best," said grassroots activist Marcy Winograd, co-founder of Progressive Democrats of Los Angeles--who ran a strong campaign against Harman in 2006--just before confirming that she was forming an exploratory committee for another primary challenge in 2010.
Right-wing ethnic lobbies have taken a total beating this cycle. In South Florida, all three right-wing Republicans who based their politics on a hardline against Castro are being challenged for the first time by Democrats who have changed the subject to the economy. Al Wynn got crunched by progressive Donna Edwards, and many entrenched corporate CBC members got primary challengers. But the biggest loser of the cycle is AIPAC and its orbit of right-wing allies (like Abe Foxman's Anti-Defamation League). These groups largely supported Bush in 2004 and Lieberman in 2006, using charges of antisemitism against the progressive organizations like Moveon and the blogs. This fierce conservative offensive was finally stopped in intellectual circles by the acknowledgement of a powerful and reactionary existence of an 'Israel lobby', whose interests in starting another conflict with Iran ran directly counter to the interests of most Jews.
A counter-organization, J Street, emerged, and it looks like 37 of their candidates are going to be sitting in Congress next year. Right-wing older Jews went after Obama with a vengeance, both in the primary and the general, and used every trick in the book, going so far as to argue that Obama would somehow bring forth another holocaust. Other organizations, like JewsVote, used celebrities like Sarah Silverman to reach out to younger Jews, and none of the standard propagandizing from McCain worked. Finally, the mystique of AIPAC as an unstoppable force has been punctured.
Well we smashed our goal, something I think all of us can get used to around here. Part of what we're going to do with our site is build a culture around Better Democrats, with things like a Responsible Plan to End the War in Iraq and net neutrality.
Earlier today, Karl (who you are sponsoring) put up a page on the Democratic Senate candidates who are out on net neutrality. Subsequent to putting up the page, the Tom Udall and Jeff Merkley campaigns contacted us to let us know they are for net neutrality. We have some work to do with Kay Hagan, Al Franken, Ronnie Musgrove, Scott Kleeb, Rick Noriega and Mark Udall.
We're also going to have a chart up for House candidates. It is far easier to establish positions for these candidates now before they come into the House, so this is money well-spent. It's not often that we get to outsmart AT&T lobbyists who spend about $2M a cycle on their PAC (which is just one of many telecom PACs), but this is one place we can do it.
On Friday, I was on the phone with Darcy Burner, who told me that she got a call from people affiliated with the conservative Jewish political group AIPAC. They told her to distance herself from the new pro-peace group J Street, which they said is full of radical leftists who believe in capitulation to the forces of the Arab world who would overrun and destroy Israel. Like most conservative arguments, it is utter nonsense backed up by a political threat designed to suppress alternative legitimate political views.
J Street is engaging in such controversial anti-Israel stances as praising the Israeli government for negotiating a Gaza ceasefire and using diplomacy to achieve security. AIPAC is silent on the negotiations, focusing on supporting the use of force and sanctions against Iran. Rather than a pro-Israel group designed to back the policies of the Israeli government, they are, to be blunt, acting as warmongers and using the shield of a Jewish ethnicity to push their own far right views. This has provoked a reaction in the form of J Street, which thousands of Jews support, including me (I am an advisor).
AIPAC's people are backing Darcy's opponent, Dave Reichert, so if they are calling her up and arguing with her, it shows just how confident they are politically at intimidating the opposition. A J Street endorsement is clearly a very risky and scary thing to take, because you'll bring down the wrath of a powerful and well-organized group. I know of several candidates who have refused J Street's endorsements because they don't want to become targets for AIPAC. Darcy Burner, Steve Cohen, Dennis Schulman, Debbie Halvorson, and Mary Jo Kilroy are all showing incredible bravery in doing so; they are not just running as Democrats, they are running as leaders.
And this is how change happens. What's important to understand in calculating where we should direct our resources is how much candidates are willing to lead as candidates, so that we know what kind of risk profiles they will take as office-holders. Every House candidate was offered the opportunity to endorse a Responsible Plan to End the War in Iraq, despite substantial institutional opposition. Every House candidate could seek the endorsement of J Street. Every House candidate could come out for net neutrality. Every candidate could associate themselves heavily with the internet left.
And yet, very few of them actually do this. It's far easier to take PAC money and AIPAC money and telecom money and say 'change' and 'Obama' and fill out some questionnaires. It's easy to go through existing power centers, existing networks, rather than support new ones that are competitive to the ones dominating the status quo. Of course, the cost to the politician of using existing networks is that they have to pretend like attacking Iran is the right thing to do, that the lies the telecom companies tell us have merit, and that liberals are crazy. They have to, in other words, sell their soul and become part of an incredibly corroded establishment process.
I'd be remiss if I didn't push our Actblue page of 'Better Democrats' as changing this dynamic. Merkley, Massa, Burner, Perriello and Donna Edwards have all come out for a Responsible Plan to End the war in Iraq. All of them are out on net neutrality. And Darcy Burner and Donna Edwards are also endorsed by J Street. This is a powerful group of candidates who reinforce each other and new centers of power through their campaigns, explicitly and overtly. So supporting them with donations strengthens the whole network and weakens the conservative side, whereas just giving to random Democrats, the Presidential ticket, or establishment parties like the DSCC or DCCC may not do so.
If you follow me on to the flip, I'll discuss how this relates to our project on mapping Congress.
Speaking before the annual AIPAC Policy Conference in Washington on Wednesday, Barack Obama made a significant break from moderate Israeli MKs and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. At issue: Arab neighborhoods in east Jerusalem that the opposition Likud refuses to concede to a Palestinian state.
Abbas sees east Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state, but hardliners have been pressuring Prime Minister Olmert and Secretary Rice for months to take the city limits off the table. Outlining his vision of Middle East policy to the pro-Israel lobby, Obama aligned himself with the more extreme elements (emphasis mine):
The Palestinians need a state that is contiguous and cohesive, and that allows them to prosper - but any agreement with the Palestinian people must preserve Israel's identity as a Jewish state, with secure, recognized and defensible borders. Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.
Abbas reacted with frustration. At its lowest point in months, the energy for an "undivided Jerusalem" may have been renewed by a powerful endorsement.
Barack Obama will put his Foreign Policy vision front and center tomorrow in an address to the annual AIPAC Policy Conference in Washington, D.C. A long way from being the fresh-faced upstart too green to compete on national security, Obama is now charged with presenting the Conference with a reasoned alternative to the neanderthal worldview endorsed on Monday by John McCain.
What follows Obama to AIPAC is the consistent effort among Republicans and the similarly afflicted to tie the change agent's campaign staff (or failing that, anyone he has met) to anti-Semitic nonsense. The lame effort hasn't yet forced Obama to dissociate himself from notorious terrorist-sympathizers like former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski or Columbia University cultural scholar Rashid Khalidi.
Sean Hannity is left clamoring in the meantime for a repudiation of Louis Farrakhan, having missed the last three.
I'm on the advisory board of a new pro-Israel PAC launching today called 'J Street'. It's a significant moment for progressive Jews who have previously not had our voices represented in the foreign policy realm, drowned out by right-wingers intent on the most hawkish policies out there. I am pro-Israel, I believe that respect for the Palestinians is the only way to build a sustainable living space for the Israeli populace to live in peace. The more extreme AIPAC adherents are quite different and have a more eliminationist bent. Aside from the immoral human rights violations, the Likudnick strategy is a failure both here in the US and in Israel.
AIPAC pushes the war with Iraq and it is pushing a war with Iran. It is long past time there is a different voice for American Jews, and I am proud J Street is here.
UPDATE: Here's an Op-ed by Jeremy Ben-Ami on the new initiative.
This is one of the most sane and concise statements about how this country should be thinking about its policy towards Israel that I have ever seen from any Presidential candidate from any party. And boy was I thrilled to hear it from Obama, that candidate whom I already favored.
"I think there is a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt an unwavering pro-Likud ap-proach to Israel, then you're anti-Israel, and that can't be the measure of our friendship with Israel," leading Democratic presidential contender Illinois Senator Barack Obama said Sunday.
"If we cannot have an honest dialogue about how do we achieve these goals, then we're not going to make progress," he said.
He also criticized the notion that anyone who asks tough questions about advancing the peace process or tries to secure Israel by anyway other than "just crushing the opposition" is being "soft or anti-Israel."
Wow. That was an incredibly refreshing statement on Israel especially to hear coming from a major Presidential contender. This also appears to be another area within foreign policy where Obama differs from Hillary in a real/serious/substansive/whatever sorta way.
Update: this unhelpful/gotcha politics/irrelevant exchange happened during last night's debate in relation to something or another about Louis Farrakahn:
Referring to Farrakhan as "Minister Farrakhan," Obama hedged about whether he would reject his support. Finally, after Clinton interjected that she would reject any such support, Obama conceded: "If the word 'reject' Sen. Clinton feels is stronger than the word 'denounce,' then I'm happy to concede the point, and I would reject and denounce."
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