Far-left California Democrats want to link Israeli gov’t to Pittsburgh massacre
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Far-left Democrats in California have put forth draft resolutions fiercely critical of Israel ahead of this weekend’s state party convention, including one suggesting that the Israeli government is partly responsible for the atmosphere inspiring last October’s massacre at a Pittsburgh synagogue.
One resolution, first reported by Fox News, calls the murder of 11 Jews by a white supremacist “the culmination of an alarming re-emergence of virulent antisemitism that is a core element of historical and currently resurgent white supremacism in the United States and around the world.” The “Israeli government, along with some of its U.S. backers,” the resolution continues, “welcomed support from Christian fundamentalist and ultra-right groups in the United States and abroad, dangerously ignoring their deeply rooted antisemitism while aligning with their virulent Islamophobia.”
That platform resolution was authored by David Mandel, a state Assembly delegate from the Sacramento area who Fox says holds dual US-Israel citizenship.
Other resolutions to be introduced at the San Francisco confab urge a rollback of President Donald Trump’s Israel policies, including recognizing Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights; condemn Israel for clashes with Palestinians in Gaza without mentioning provocations or attacks by the Hamas leadership there; and direct party officials to take a subsidized trip to Israel only if they spend the same amount of time visiting Palestinian communities and leaders as Israeli ones.
Mandel’s resolution opposes “all efforts to stigmatize and suppress support for Palestinian human rights by falsely conflating it with antisemitism.”
The latter is a reference to criticism of Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., who apologized after fellow Democrats and others said she had invoked several anti-Semitic tropes in her criticism of Israel.
Whether the resolutions will be debated by the full assembly of 3,000-4,000 delegates at the Moscone Convention Center is up to a Resolutions Committee. Delegates have the option of gathering 300 signatures to force a debate on the floor.
The Jewish Democratic Council of America expressed “deep concern” about the resolutions.
“We urge the California Democratic Party not to fall into the trap of letting Republicans divide us on Israel and the fight against anti-Semitism,” Halie Soifer, the council’s executive director, said in a statement. “Nearly all extremist violence in the United States, including attacks on Jews and Muslims, have come from right-wing extremists.”
She added: “While Republicans continue to attempt to turn Israel into a partisan wedge issue, the Democratic Party remains staunchly pro-Israel. The Democratic Platform adopted in 2016 affirms that ‘we will always support Israel’s right to defend itself, including by retaining its qualitative military edge, and oppose any effort to delegitimize Israel, including at the United Nations or through the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement.’”
The current California Democratic state platform, adopted in 2018, supports “a solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict negotiated by the parties that guarantees equality, security and democracy for all, recognizes Israel’s future as a secure and democratic Jewish state with recognized borders and provides the Palestinians with independence, sovereignty and dignity.”
It also regards Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, but says the relocation of the US Embassy to Jerusalem “should not remove [Jerusalem] from final status negotiations, nor should it be used to undermine the peace process.”
In 2018, California delegates also adopted two resolutions, neither of which made it into the platform, which were opposed by many in the pro-Israel camp. One opposed federal bills targeting the boycott Israel movement, and the other proposed a federal bill preventing Israel from using US tax dollars to detain Palestinian children.
The Progressive Zionists of the California Democratic Party urged party members to oppose the Israel resolutions.
“These six anti-Israel resolutions divide us rather than bring us together,” the group said in a statement to the Jewish News Syndicate. “They give no care for the human rights, self-determination, and safety of the Jewish people in their ancestral homeland. As they all demonize Israel and hold Palestinian leadership completely harmless, one resolution even calls for the destruction of Israel as the Jewish state.”
Democratic presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders are expected to attend the convention.
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The Jews in America should start to dissociate from the democrat party. Voting for and supporting them is not in their best interests.
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As a point of medical information: It is not possible to die merely by holding one's breath.
So after all the "Don't tell us we're voting against our own interests by voting Republican", you're trying to tell Jewish Americans basically the same thing? Democrats and the Democrat party have been embracing our fellow Jewish Americans and incorporating them in the party and electing them to the Senate and House for decades, that's why Democrats receive more funding from pro-Israel groups than Republicans do. Republicans are just now trying to appeal to Jewish Americans but they've had to do it relatively quiet so they don't upset their white supremacist and KKK members.
You don't have to try and tell them what's best for them, they've known for years and support like minded freedom loving Americans and understand that means giving Muslim Americans the same religious freedoms they enjoy and working hard to meet every minority community within the US to feel represented and listened to. Just because Democrats have also welcomed in Muslim Americans along with Jewish Americans does not in any way mean they are "anti-Semitic", they simply believe in true religious freedom, not the faux religious freedom of many Republicans which is more of a pedestal for Christianity with an invisible ceiling created underneath to keep any other faith from being as successful in this land of the free.
You'd think they'd know better than to say this. We know how much good it does to tell poor white voters why they shouldn't be voting for Republicans-------[0].
[deleted] But it is another attempt to deflect away from the people who really do kill Jews and those are far-right, white-supremacist, racist nazis whose only complaint about Shitbag is that he's just not quite there yet. But he's trying.
This was an interesting take on that subject by security analyst and associate professor at American University Stephen Tankel:
"Like many security analysts of my generation, the 9/11 attacks shaped my scholarly interests and career trajectory. I have spent years researching jihadist terrorism in the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, and the Balkans — regions where leaders have embraced hardline religious movements, concocted conspiracy theories, and instrumentalized ethno-national, tribal, and sectarian sentiments in pursuit of power. America is still much safer from political violence than the places I study, but the growing threat from right-wing extremism is narrowing the gap.
This trend began before Donald Trump became president, but has been worsening since then. A lot of ink has been spilled trying to explain whether or not President Trump is culpable for far-right terrorism. If I look at my own country through the lens I normally apply to foreign lands it seems clear that the president and his allies are indeed enabling the right-wing movements whose adherents are responsible for the recent paroxysm of violence.
Right-wing extremist movements, which include white supremacists, neo-Nazis, sovereign citizens, anti-immigrant zealots, and neo-Confederates, are a product of longstanding fault lines in American society. Their level of activity has ebbed and flowed over the years. Law enforcement stepped up its investigations of right-wing extremist groups in the 1980s following a series of bombings, armed robberies, and murders. The FBI infiltrated various right-wing movements, arresting people involved in illegal activities, and provoking paranoia among others. Many violent members of the far-right were imprisoned or dead by the early 1990s, when federal government sieges at Ruby Ridge and Waco triggered another wave of activism and violence. Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, who executed the deadliest terrorist attack ever to have taken place on U.S. soil at the time, aimed to avenge those killed by law enforcement at Ruby Ridge and Waco, as well as to spark an uprising against the U.S. government. Additional government resources and action followed. Right-wing domestic terrorism appeared to decline by the end of the decade, while the threats from international terrorism were growing.
Analysts at the Department of Homeland Security became increasingly worried about rising right-wing extremist activities following Barack Obama’s election . After a 2009 Homeland Security report sounded the warning on this issue leaked, Republican lawmakers lashed out at the administration and conservative media outlets claimed the report was evidence of a plot to spy on Obama’s political opponents.
Trump’s campaign was a coming-out party for far-right groups , which by 2016 were coordinating more and pooling resources. The United States experienced a 70 percent increase in violent attacks perpetrated in the name of far-right ideology during his first year in office. The Anti-Defamation League reported a 57 percent growth in the number of anti-Semitic incidents in the United States during his first year in office , the largest increase it has ever recorded over a one-year period . We also should not lose sight of Trump’s wider impact on right-wing recruitment and mobilization. For example, the Anti-Defamation League also observed a 77 percent increase in incidents of white supremacist propaganda and recruitment efforts on college campuses from 2017 to 2018 .
Currently, the U.S. legal code defines domestic terrorism , but, unlike with international terrorism, there are no penalties associated with it. As a result, individuals responsible for domestic terrorism are not charged as terrorists because this charge carries no punitive measures. It is true that there are other criminal statutes that have been used to arrest, prosecute, convict, and punish people involved in acts that qualify as domestic terrorism. Nevertheless, as Mary McCord, the former acting assistant attorney general, wrote after the Charlottesville attack last year, it is past time to recognize that domestic terrorism is no less dangerous or malicious than international terrorism.
Criminalizing domestic terrorism would help to ensure that acts of domestic terrorism are labeled as such. When former Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson was asked about the decision not to label Dylann Roof a terrorist, he reportedly responded that, it was not his place to call Roof a terrorist because there is not a crime of “domestic terrorism” to charge someone with. This is about more than semantics. First, charging individuals involved in attacks that meet the definition of domestic terrorism accordingly could help to discredit them and their actions among potential supporters, and isolate them from the wider public."
I'll let the ADL do the talking:
Right-Wing Extremism Linked to Every 2018 Extremist Murder in the U.S., ADL Finds
More satire?
How to know?