Here’s an item for the PEP file: Progressive Except Palestine, that malady of liberal politics in the United States.
Today 60 members of the Republican National Committee are flying off to Israel and occupied Palestine at the behest of a rightwing Christian organization called the American Family Association. The trip is said to cost $400,000. Reince Priebus, the head of the RNC, and party secretary Susie Hudson are reported to be on the junket.
The Southern Poverty Law Center has urged the RNC to cancel the trip because the American Family Association is bigoted against minorities in the United States.
As a result, the American Family Association fired an official who had made repugnant statements about the US being a Christian country.
Then Rachel Maddow covered the hullabaloo on MSNBC. She too focused on the AFA’s bigoted record (video doesn’t load or I’d quote it verbatim). As Nadia Saah wrote on the MSNBC site:
Rachel, I appreciate that you’re troubled by the AFA’s position that America was ‘established as a Christian nation in the name of God and for the advancement of the Christian faith’ – But how do you feel about Israel as a Jewish State, created at the expense of the indigenous Palestinians who were driven out from their homes in 1948 in order to make Israel more purely Jewish? And about the 600k+ illegal Jewish settlers in the West bank who, with the full support of the Israeli government, are stealing what is left of Palestinian land ?– About Israel’s law of return for Jews only, and the 50+ discriminatory laws that undermine the rights of non-Jews inside Israel?
Good luck, Ms. Saah; but I’ve never heard Rachel Maddow talk about Palestinian human rights.
As for the Southern Poverty Law Center, it is a leading organization in the U.S. civil rights movement, founded in Montgomery, Alabama, 44 years ago. Its letter of complaint to the Republican National Committee praises Israel as the refuge for Jews worldwide, without any reference to Palestinians. Writes Richard Cohen, the head of the Southern Poverty Law Center:
“Given that the disease of anti-Semitism is flaring throughout the world, we certainly understand your desire to show your commitment to Israel at this time. But accepting funding from an extremist group like the AFA would make a mockery of that commitment and legitimize its extremism.”
The SPLC regards the AFA as a “hate group… due to its persistent use of falsehoods to demonize the LGBT community,” Jews, and other minorities, including statements by the fired official, Bryan Fischer, suggesting that “Jews are second-class citizens” and “we are a Christian nation, and not a Jewish or Muslim one.”
But Palestinians are second-class citizens, and Israel has created Jim Crow, apartheid conditions and worse across the occupation.
Then there’s People for the American Way, the group founded by Norman Lear. It has also come out against the trip. Its letter also has no problem with visiting Israel.
Although we have no objection to RNC members travelling to Israel, we urge you not to collaborate with those who are funding and coordinating this trip. The American Family Association and Mr. [David] Lane have made it clear that they view the Republican Party as a vehicle for ensuring that the U.S. government is operated by and for conservative Christians, at the expense of those of other faiths and no faith, and those Christians who do not share their particular beliefs.
But the trip isn’t just to Israel. It’s also to the occupied territories, according to Haaretz:
Participants will travel from the Galilee and Golan Heights to Jerusalem and the Dead Sea, [organizer David Lane] told Haaretz, with Jewish tour guides and two evangelical pastors in tow.
Haaretz also quotes an SPLC official praising Israel:
“Our issue is not with these folks going to Israel, which is an important ally and important for international policy,” said Heidi Beirich, director of the Intelligence Project of the SPLC. “Our issue is that one of our mainstream political parties and a group with these heinous beliefs is sponsoring it.”
Thanks, Phil, for your truly Progessive work, today and every day:
https://mondoweiss.net/2009/04/american-jewish-committee-and-southern-poverty-law-center-endorse-antiarab-image.
It seems our “elites” require excessive toadying upon approach, with deference shown in every imaginable other direction, before any hint of criticism is voiced with respect to any particular issue. Otherwise, the criticism is certain to be dismissed without response and the critic smeared as suffering from any number of contrived personal failings. Especially, our media “elites,” who treat stories critical of their favored members of our power elites with the same protocols.
In this way, the straightforward storyline that our elites are abusing power and avoiding accountability, with example after example marshaled as straightforward proof, is verboten, proof of the reporter’s bias, immaturity, stupidity, fringiness, and justification for his or her never working again.
PHIL- “As for the Southern Poverty Law Center, it is a leading organization in the U.S. civil rights movement, founded in Montgomery, Alabama, 44 years ago.”
At one time the SPLC was arguably an effective civil rights organization. It would appear that this is no longer true. Like many progressive organizations which start out pure at heart, the SPLC nowadays seems more concerned with fund raising than civil rights. As such, it naturally follows that it is a friend to Israel. To appear otherwise would be to jeopardize its funding. A couple of quotes and links follow.
“… during its earlier years when its co-founder, Atlanta civil rights activist Julian Bond, was still involved, the SPLC achieved an admirable record in helping bring to justice those accused of racially based murders, lynchings, and beatings.
Forty years later the SPLC has evolved into the cash cow of the civil rights movement and behaves as though it were the left-wing equivalent of the John Birch Society, a right-wing, 1950’s anticommunist group which was certain that behind every bush was a card-carrying communist. Today anyone with whom the SPLC happens to disagree is assumed to be either a racist or guilty of a hate crime.” (Thomas Naylor)
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/07/13/new-frontiers-in-hate-crimes/
“As of October 2008 the net assets of the SPLC were $170,240,129, The merchant of hate himself, Mr. Dees, was paid an annual $273,132 as chief trial counsel, and the SPLC’s president and CEO, Richard Cohen, $290,193. Total revenue in 2007 was $44,727,257 and program expenses $20,804,536. In other words, the Southern Poverty Law Center was raising twice as much as it was spending on its proclaimed mission. Fund-raising and administrative expenses accounted for $9 million, leaving $14 million to be put in the center’s vast asset portfolio.” (Alexander Cockburn)
http://www.counterpunch.org/2009/05/15/king-of-the-hate-business/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpP6o7-beNc
Here is a link to a video in which Maddow gives us the stock, Zionist propaganda line on Israel. Don’t watch it on a full stomach.
One can’t, of course, account for what goes through a person’s mind, but given the depth of her knowledge of foreign policy issues overall and her extreme level of intelligence (as I understand it, she has a genius level IQ) my personal opinion is that she is purposefully misinforming her viewers, as she does on so many subjects. It would be difficult to imagine she is unaware of the actually history behind the lies and spin she regurgitates here.
Like so many talking heads, she is a millionaire propagandist first and foremost, serving up just the necessary amount of infotainment mixed with the occasional factoid to keep her willfully ignorant audience enthralled without ever risking offending her corporate sponsors and pay masters.
It’s sad. At one point during the Bush administration, her radio show actually provided a modicum of truth and resistance to the power elite. She was staunchly antiwar. But that was before the Dems got into office and Rachel got the big promotion to prime time and the huge seven figure salary. Now she is little more than a shill for the Corporate Dems and a huge apologist for the war-mongering Assassinator in Chief who occupies the White House. Clearly she knows who signs her paycheck.
Cohen is a good example of a racial hypocrite. He is obssessed with the marginal Ku Klux Klan but is giving a total pass to the Apartheid rulers in Israel.
He is not just PEP, he is not liberal at all. He is from the same cloth as Abe Foxman.