AIPAC Is Called A “Hate Group”

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.”*