AIPAC Amping Up For Its Multimillion Dollar, GOP-Financed, War Against Progressives

God: "Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass."

The House was unable to vote on anything for the 3 chaotic weeks when the GOP dumped McCarthy and then was unable to elect a replacement. So they took a vacation. Finally, last Wednesday, they settled on a genial Trump-approved extremist from Louisiana, MAGA Mike Johnson. After he was elected on a strictly party line vote at 1:50 PM, the House took up it’s first legislation 3 hours later, a resolution from Michael McCaul (R-TX) to suspend the rules and “stand with Israel.” It had 425 co-sponsors, so there was no drama that it would pass.

The only drama was around which members had the guts to stand up to AIPAC and vote “Nay.” There were 9 Democrats and a crackpot Republican, plus 6 progressive Dems who voted “Present.”

• AOC (R-NY)

• Ilhan Omar (R-MN)

• Rashida Tlaib (R-MI)

• Cori Bush (D-MO)

• Jamaal Bowman (R-NY)

• Andre Carson (R-IN)

• Summer Lee (R-PA)

• Delia Ramirez (D-IL)

• Al Green (D-TX)

• Thomas Massie (R-KY)

Present

• Greg Casar (D-TX)

• Joaquin Castro (D-TX)

• Chuy Garcia (D-IL)

• Pramila Jayapal (D-WA)

• Ayanna Presley (D-MA)

• Nydia Velázquez (D-NY)

That was only the second time in her career that Pramila ever voted "present." In a statement, she said "On October 7, 2023, Hamas’s horrific terrorist attack killed 1,400 Israelis, wounded over 5,000 others and took hostage 200 people, including children. I sponsored H.Res 771 as a way to immediately condemn this attack. Since then, I have continued to condemn the attack, reaffirmed Israel’s right to defend itself and called for the immediate release of all hostages. However, in the 14 days since the resolution was introduced, Israel’s bombings of Gaza have killed more than 5,800 Palestinians, almost half of whom are children. Another 16,000 have been injured and 613,000 internally displaced. Israel has refused to allow fuel and other humanitarian aid to flow freely and has continued mass bombings of Gaza. I cannot in good conscience vote for a resolution that ignores these critical factors and the humanitarian impact on Palestinian civilians and their families as this war has unfolded and escalated. I am voting present to be clear that while I still condemn Hamas’s attacks and the pain and suffering of the Jewish people everywhere, I also condemn the violations of international humanitarian law by Israel and the pain and suffering of Palestinian people everywhere that are not recognized anywhere in this resolution.” And she was a guest on Meet The Press yesterday:

Yesterday the AP reported that there had been over 8,000 Palestine deaths, mostly women and children, in Gaza. Since over 1,400 Israelis had been murdered by Hamas and Israel aims for a 10 to 1 ratio, that means at least another 6,000 Palestinians will be killed before there’s any serious talk of a cease fire.

Israel’s optimal “solution”-- it leaked out (not covered by the U.S. corporate media of course)-- would be for the Gazans to move to Sinai (and anywhere else, other than the West Bank, that will take them). I’m pretty sure ethnic cleansing is illegal. But you know what God told Saul to do to the Amalekites, who lived in Gaza, right? They attacked the Jews fleeing to what is now Israel from Egypt and later plotted to annihilate the Jews again— so kind of like Hamas, real assholes.

According to Samuel, God ordered King Saul to kill every single Amalekite, the king, men, women, children and all their livestock. God was pissed an he wanted them dead. Saul attacked and killed all the ones who didn’t escape except the king, Agag, and some of the livestock which he kept for himself. God flipped out and Samuel killed Agag himself and then confronted Samuel about disobeying God. Saul tried to worm out of it but eventually Samuel got him to confess, which later led to him losing his crown and his life. Saul’s disobedience in this matter was a big deal and Samuel asked him "What is the bleating of sheep in my ears and the lowing of cattle I hear?" Saul admitted that "They have brought them from the Amalekites; the soldiers spared the best of the sheep and cattle to sacrifice to the Lord your God, but we have destroyed the rest." Samuel flipped out.

Samuel said to Saul, "Stop! Let me declare to you what the Lord said to me last night."

Saul replied, "Speak."

Samuel said, "Though you were small in your own eyes, did you not become the head of the tribes of Israel? The Lord anointed you king over Israel. And the Lord sent you on a mission, saying, 'Go and completely destroy the sinners, the Amalekites. Make war on them until you have wiped them out.' Why did you disobey the Lord's command? Why did you take plunder and do what is evil in the Lord's sight?"

Then Saul said to Samuel, "I have sinned. I violated the Lord's command and your instructions. But I was afraid of the people and so I gave in to them. Now I beg you, forgive my sin and come back with me so that I may worship the Lord."

But Samuel said to Saul, "I will not go back with you. You have rejected the word of the Lord, and the Lord has rejected you as king over Israel."

And that brings us right to…AIPAC and Mark Mellman’s Democratic Majority for Israel, which are raising money to recruit and support primary candidates against the Democrats who refused to agree to give Israel a blank check. They’re encouraging Bhavini Patel to run against Summer Lee, Sarah Gad to run against Ilhan Omar, George Latimer to run against Jamaal Bowman, Wesley Bell to run against Cori Bush and they’re still looking for a candidate to take on Rashida . AIPAC wants Democrats to be afraid of them, whether then win-- and they usually do-- or lose. If Democrats are afraid, they'll bow down to AIPAC's (and Israel's) demands.

“They spent a historic amount of money to intervene, and try and buy primaries in 2022,” said Usamah Andrabi, spokesman for Justice Democrats, the liberal insurgent group that helped elect many of the progressives now on the primary target list. “I think we will see a doubling and tripling down, because no one in the Democratic leadership is trying to stop them.”

…AIPAC’s jabs have already begun. Responding to a post by Bowman extolling his “Ceasefire Now” resolution, the lobbying group called it “a transparent ploy to paint Israel as the aggressor and allow Hamas to control Gaza.” Hitting Lee, AIPAC wrote on X, “Emboldening a group that massacres Israelis and uses Palestinians as human shields will never achieve peace.”

Waleed Shahid, a former leader of Justice Democrats, predicted that the current environment, in which leaders of both parties, including President Biden, are aligned with Israeli leadership and the Palestinian cause is represented by protesters in the streets and on college campuses, would yield a trove of fund-raising for pro-Israel groups ahead of 2024. He suggested that there may be an “asymmetrical” fight during the primaries.

“I think we’re in a post-9/11 environment where there’s a lot of fear to speak out against war, and there could be political electoral consequences for not lining up for the cause of war, the way there was in 2002,” he said.

Progressive Democrats like Lee have other constituents to consider, including progressive Jews who remain by her side. Avigail Oren, a nonprofit professional in Pittsburgh, said that the Tree of Life attack led her to conclude that Jewish safety rested with securing the safety of all vulnerable communities, especially those targeted by white supremacists. That propelled her to work toward Lee’s election, she said, and her support for the congresswoman “was reinforced, not shaken” by the events in Israel, which she said underscored the need for an Arab-Jewish-Muslim alliance.

Lee said Jews were “10 percent of our district, but we also have Muslim, Arab, Palestinian constituents who are afraid for their families and their lives.”

But formany Jews, especially Jewish Democrats, the emotional cost of the conflict goes beyond politics. Older Jews, recoiling still from the carnage in Israel, find themselves confronted even by their children, who see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in starkly different terms than the post-Holocaust narrative of heroic Zionism on which they were raised. The Israeli pioneers who made the desert bloom and defended the new state with their lives have been replaced, in a newer narrative, by colonial settlers displacing and oppressing the Holy Land’s rightful inhabitants.

In Pittsburgh, the politics of division are acutely painful, a fact acknowledged by Lee on Oct. 20, as she stood under an umbrella on a rainy day outside of the Capitol and said, “Peace means that we hold space for each and every one of our communities, including my Jewish community.”

But she stood her ground on her demand that Israel cease its retaliatory action against Gaza, threatening to use Congress’s “power of the purse” to force it, because, she said, “when the political pressure is on us the most, even when the spotlight is looking right at us, those are the moments where even if our voice quakes, or our knees shake, we have to speak out.”

click the image to hear Netanyahu preparing for genocide

If you’d like to help these righteous and courageous progressives-- who AIPAC and Mellman are going to try to eliminate-- most of them are on this page.