AIPAC Is Called A “Hate Group”
Allan C. Brownfeld, Editor
Special Interest Report
April 2020
Rep. Betty McCollum (D-MN) called the American Israel Public Affairs
committee (AIPAC) a “hate group” after it placed ads on Facebook that
implied that McCollum and other members of Congress who had defended the
rights of Palestinians were worse than the terrorist group ISIS.
McCollum declared: “as a member of Congress and the vice-chair of the House
Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, I believe defending human rights and
freedom are foundational to international security and our democracy. The
struggle to promote human dignity inevitably results in confronting
entrenched forces determined to dehumanize, debase and demonize individuals
or even entire populations to maintain dominance and an unjust status quo.
hate is used as a weapon to incite and silence dissent. Unfortunately, this
is my experience with AIPAC.”
Rep. McCollum has introduced legislation which would protect the rights of
Palestinian children imprisoned by the Israeli military. It would prohibit
U.S. funding to “military detention, interrogation, abuse or ill-treatment
of Palestinian children in violation of international humanitarian law.”
Since 2000, an estimated 10,000 Palestinian children have been detained,
prosecuted and incarcerated by the Israeli military in the occupied West
Bank.” This legislation has been endorsed by a number of Jewish groups,
including the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association.
In explaining why he was not attending this year’s AIPAC conference, Sen.
Bernie Sanders declared: “The Israeli people have the right to live in peace
and security. So do the Palestinian people. I am concerned about the
platform AIPAC provides for leaders who express bigotry and oppose basic
Palestinian rights.”
In a column headlined, “AIPAC Makes Sanders’s Point for Him,” Washington
Post (March 3, 2020) columnist Dana Milbank writes: “AIPAC and Netanyahu
seemed intent on proving Sanders’s point. As the conference
opened...Netanyahu, speaking to the group via satellite...derided the
Palestinians as the pampered children of the international community.’ The
AIPAC audience applauded....Netanyahu told AIPAC he was moving forward with
plans to annex Palestinian territory—a move that would make the long sought
two-state solution all but impossible.”
In what many considered a direct effort to influence the American
presidential election, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon
declared: “We don’t want Sanders at AIPAC. We don’t want him in Israel.
Anyone who calls our prime minister a racist is either a liar, an ignorant
fool, or both.”
In Dana Milbank’s view, “AIPAC...finds itself not only at odds with
Democrats, but also with most American Jews, instead of its tradition of
representing strong, broad support for Israel, AIPAC is becoming about as
bipartisan as the National Rifle Association. Even Netanyahu reportedly
regards AIPAC as just another right-wing American interest group. ‘We don’t
need AIPAC anymore,’ Netanyahu reportedly told one of his advisers. ‘We have
enough support in the United States from the evangelicals. I’d happily give
up on AIPAC if didn’t need to counteract J Street,’ a liberal pro-Israel
group.”
Writing in The Forward (March 2, 2020), Batya Ungar Sargon, in an article
titled, “How AIPAC Proved Bernie Right,” notes that, “I had never before
been in the same room as a person who has defended genocide...until the
AIPAC policy conference. Words like apartheid and genocide and ethnic
cleansing are often thrown around in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict....But it wasn’t a defender of Israeli war crimes, real or
imagined, who was hosted by AIPAC. It was someone from a different context
entirely. In July of 1995, 8,000 Muslims were murdered in Srebrenica in what
the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia deemed a
genocide. Under the command of Ratko Mladik, a Serbian paramilitary unit
killed thousands and thousands...Aleksander Vucic was then serving as
Minister of Information. He imposed fines for journalists who opposed the
government and banned foreign t.v. Networks. The Serbian media he oversaw
was accused of justifying atrocities and demonizing ethnic minorities....He
has reinvented himself and has been serving as president of Serbia since
2017...AIPAC welcomed the Serbian President to address its 18,000
delegates.”*
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