In June 2011, an effort to codify state legislative support for Israel’s right to control the occupied territories kicked off in South Carolina.
Since then, similar resolutions have passed in five other states–with New Mexico the latest legislature to consider the measure. No votes have been cast on the resolution so far in the state, and local activists have put up a fight against it. The effort would put New Mexico on the record as supporting a God-given Greater Israel.
Like all the others, the New Mexico legislation “commends” Israel for its “beneficial” relationship with the U.S. and the state. It claims a biblical mandate for Israel and states that a 1922 League of Nations resolution legitimized Jewish control over “Judea, Samaria and eastern Jerusalem.”
While the exact language on these measures changes from state to state, the tenor and general text of each bill are similar. Republican state Representative Yvette Herrell introduced the New Mexico resolution in early January. Herrell did not respond to inquiries for comment.
In an e-mail Herrell sent to one opponent of the bill, the representative explained that “the importance of Israel’s Biblical history to Jews and Christians is a simple matter of fact that is referred to for the sake of context and understanding.” Herrell also directed the opponent to look at the website MythsandFacts.org, which she said backed the resolution’s claims up. Created by pro-Israel businessman and AIPAC Executive Council member Eli Hertz, the website claims that there is no Palestinian people and that Palestinian society “sacrifices its own youth for political gain.”
“The house of representatives supports Israel in its legal, historical, moral and God-given right of self-governance and self-defense upon the entirety of its own lands, recognizing that Israel is neither an attacking force nor an occupier of the lands of others, and that peace can be afforded the region only through a whole and united Israel,” the bill reads.
The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), the oldest pro-Israel group in the U.S., pushed for the bill to pass in a number of state legislatures, including New Mexico, though they signed on to the effort only after a South Carolina legislator penned his own version. “We’ve been in touch with many, many state legislatures. New Mexico is one of the legislatures we were in touch with a while back,” said Morton Klein, the president of the ZOA. “It’s important to not simply talk about security issues, as if security is the only reason Israel wants to hold onto certain territory. We should also make arguments for the political, legal and Biblical religious claims as well. And this is one way to do that.”
It has sailed through other state legislatures in deeply red states. In the Oklahoma House, for instance, the resolution garnered the support of all 101 representatives. But in New Mexico, activist groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, Peace And Justice Organizations Linking Arms (a project of the Albuquerque Center for Peace and Justice), Students for Justice in Palestine (University of New Mexico chapter), and the Coalition to Stop $30 Billion to Israel have lobbied legislators against the bill. In an e-mail sent to supporters, the Jewish Voice for Peace chapter in Albuquerque blasted the resolution as privileging Judaism and Christianity over Islam and as supporting “a prescription for a caste system.”
The lobbying has had an impact. The House Judiciary Committee was originally set to hear the bill. But the chair of the committee, progressive legislator Gail Chasey, decided to move it into the House Consumer and Public Affairs Committee, where “it can be heard quickly and dispensed with quickly,” she told me in an interview.
“I was just alarmed at the title,” Chasey said. “It’s designed for political purposes. I mean, what are we doing in international relations? We’re a state legislature.”
The resolution’s roots lie in the pen of South Carolina lawmaker Alan Clemmons, who authored the measure that passed the state’s House of Representatives in 2011. Clemmons told the Jewish Daily Forward’s Josh Nathan-Kazis that the bill passed to “send a signal to Jews worldwide and to Israel that…we consider Judea and Samaria and East Jerusalem to be part of Israel, and what Israel decides to do with it is Israel’s business.”
As writer and analyst Mitchell Plitnick first reported, the Republican National Committee adopted the measure in January 2012. The resolution then migrated to Florida, where the Zionist Organization of America slightly changed the text. The ZOA took out some references to the Bible and replaced them by citing the 1922 League of Nations resolution, the Forward’s Nathan-Kazis reported. It passed both bodies in the Florida state legislature in February 2012.
The latest legislative body to pass the resolution was the Georgia State Senate, which approved the measure in mid-January. A Los Angeles Times Op-Ed by Michael McGough, a senior editorial writer for the paper, criticized the resolution.
The New Mexico resolution is tentatively scheduled for discussion on February 18th, according one House staffer. But if it’s up to Rep. Gail Chasey, the bill won’t move any further.
“I predict that it will die” in the Consumer and Public Affairs Committee, said Chasey. “People have their agendas and then all we do is kill it, if it’s ridiculous–which this is.”
To call it God-given Greater Israel means that Paul was wrong that Abraham’s descendants are Christians (Gal 3-4) and that Christian and Jewish nationalism are correct.
Jews, Israel, the Christian Zios and the Bible as Government?
There are too many imbeciles in this country.
I keep wanting to fast forward all this insanity to see how it ends.
LOL. The lies are getting wierder and wierder.
Here’s some more crazy. France cant break its Vichy France habit. First it was occupied by the the Nazis, now its occupied by the Israelis.
France Crackdown on Boycott Israel Activists Sparks Backlash
How Does Anti-Israel Protest Amount to Hate Speech?
By Cnaan Liphshiz
Published February 14, 2014.
Paris — (JTA) — When Farida Trichine and 11 of her friends burst into a French supermarket in 2009 and began applying stickers with anti-Israel slogans to vegetables imported from the Jewish state, she expected to be escorted from the store by police.
What she didn’t expect was to be convicted of inciting racial hatred and slapped with a $650 fine.
Three months ago, a court in Colmar convicted the 12 activists under a French law that extended the definition of discrimination beyond the expected parameters of race, religion and sexual orientation to include members of national groups.
What Trichine, who was wearing a “boycott Israel” shirt during the protest, saw as a protected act of political speech was being treated by the authorities like a hate crime.
“It’s surprising that our actions are considered a crime when the real criminals are the colonists, the butchers of Gaza,” Trichine said in a video message in 2011, soon after her legal troubles began.
Trichine, 54, is one of approximately 20 anti-Israel activists who have been convicted under France’s so-called Lellouche law. Named for the Jewish parliamentarian who introduced it in 2003, the law is among the world’s most potent legislative tools to fight the growing Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, or BDS, and has catapulted France to the forefront of efforts to counter the movement through legal means.
“The French government and judiciary’s determination in fighting discrimination, and the Lellouche law especially, are exemplary for Belgium and other nations where discriminatory BDS is happening,” said Joel Rubinfeld, co-chair of the European Jewish Parliament and president of the Belgian League Against Anti-Semitism.
French authorities have acted aggressively in recent weeks to crack down on anti-Israel and anti-Jewish speech, most prominently by banning a tour by the comedian Dieudonne M’bala M’bala, who has been convicted multiple times of belittling the Holocaust and alleging that a Jewish mafia runs France, among other offenses. But the dragnet has also swept up BDS protesters whose actions have targeted Israel, not Jews.
Pro-Israel activists in neighboring Belgium are pushing for a similar law to Lellouche, hoping it might also put a dent in BDS activities in that country. No other countries have followed France’s lead.
In France, the official crackdown is sparking a backlash from activists who argue that the Lellouche law is too restrictive of free speech”
continued….
Read more: http://forward.com/articles/192807/france-crackdown-on-boycott-israel-activists-spark/?p=all#ixzz2tKGX6hdt
Fundamentalist are real problems everywhere