Make love, not CO2…

On March 22, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

Make love, not CO2: Students worldwide demand climate action

BERLIN (AP) — From the South Pacific to the edge of the Arctic Circle, students mobilized by word of mouth and social media are skipping class to protest what they see as the failures by their governments to take tough action against global warming.

Friday’s rallies were one of the biggest international climate change actions yet, involving hundreds of thousands of students in more than 100 countries around the globe.

The coordinated “school strikes” were inspired by 16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, who began holding solitary demonstrations outside the Swedish parliament last year.

Since then, the weekly protests have snowballed from a handful of cities to hundreds, fueled by dramatic headlines about the impact of climate change during the students’ lifetime. Scientists have backed the protests, with thousands in Britain, Finland, Germany and the United States signing petitions in support of the students.

Thunberg, who has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, said at a rally in Stockholm that the world faces an “existential crisis, the biggest crisis humanity ever has faced and still it has been ignored for decades.”

“And you know who you are, you that have ignored this,” she said.

Across the globe, protests big and small urged politicians to act against climate change while also highlighting local environmental problems:

— In India’s capital of New Delhi, schoolchildren protested inaction on climate change and demanded that authorities tackle rising air pollution levels in the country, which often far exceed World Health Organization limits.

— In Paris, teenagers thronged the cobblestoned streets around the domed Pantheon building. Some criticized French President Emmanuel Macron, who sees himself as the guarantor of the landmark 2015 Paris climate accord but is criticized by activists for being too business-friendly and not ambitious enough in efforts to reduce emissions.

Raphael Devautour, high school student said it was his first protest. “We can feel that something is happening,” he said. “When the youths start acting, it get things moving. We saw it in 1968.”

— In South Africa’s capital, Pretoria, one protester held a sign reading “You’ll Miss The Rains Down in Africa.” Experts say Africa, with its population of more than 1 billion people, is expected to be hardest hit by global warming even though it contributes least to the greenhouse gas emissions that cause it.

— Thousands marched in rainy Warsaw and other Polish cities to demand a ban on burning coal, a major source of carbon dioxide. Some wore face masks as they carried banners that read “Make Love, Not CO2.”

— Speakers at the U.S. Capitol in Washington stood behind a banner that said “We don’t want to die.”

— Protests in Madrid and more than 50 other Spanish cities drew thousands. The country is vulnerable to rising sea levels and rapid desertification .

— In Berlin, police said as many as 20,000 protesters gathered in a downtown square, waving signs such as “March now or swim later” before marching through the German capital to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s office.

Carla Reemtsma, a 20-year-old student who helped organize the protest in Berlin, said she’s part of about 50 WhatsApp groups devoted to discussing climate change.

“A lot happens on social media because you can reach a lot of young people very quickly,” she told The Associated Press.

Azalea Danes, a student at the Bronx High School of Science, wasn’t a climate activist until two weeks ago when she read about Thunberg’s efforts. Now she is one of the top organizers of the youth climate strike in New York City, where she hopes thousands will rally in three places later Friday.

That shows how these protests are organized from the bottom up, she said.

Volker Quaschning, a professor of engineering at Berlin’s University of Applied Sciences, said it was easy for politicians to belittle students.

“That’s why they need our support,” he said. “If we do nothing, then parts of this planet could become uninhabitable by the end of the century.”

But some politicians praised the students. Danish Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen showed up at a protest in Copenhagen and tweeted Friday “we must listen to the youth. Especially when they’re right: the climate must be one of our top priorities.”

Scientists have warned for decades that current levels of greenhouse gas emissions are unsustainable, so far with little effect.

In 2015, world leaders agreed in Paris to a goal of keeping the Earth’s global temperature rise by the end of the century well below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) compared with pre-industrial times.

Yet the world has already warmed by 1 degree C since then and is on track for an increase of 4 degrees Celsius, which experts say would have far-reaching consequences for life on the planet

In Germany, environmental groups and experts have criticized government plans to continue using coal and natural gas for decades to come.

Quaschning, one of more than 23,000 German-speaking scientists to sign a letter of support this week, said Germany should stop using all fossil fuels by 2040. This would give less-advanced nations a bit more time to wean themselves off coal, gas and oil while still meeting the Paris goal globally.

“This is going to require radical measures and there isn’t the slightest sign of that happening yet,” said Quaschning.

In Stockholm, Thunberg predicted that students won’t let up their climate protests.

“There are a crisis in front of us that we have to live with, that we will have to live with for all our lives, our children, our grandchildren and all future generations,” she said. “We are on strike because we do want a future.”

___

Seth Borenstein in Washington; Rishahb R. Jain in New Delhi; Monika Scislowska in Warsaw, Poland; Nqobile Ntshangase in Pretoria, South Africa; Angela Charlton in Paris; Jari Tanner in Helsinki, Finland; Jan M. Olsen in Copenhagen, Denmark, and Bernat Armangue in Madrid contributed to this report.

___

Read more AP climate news here: https://www.apnews.com/Climate

China is using "Buddhist diplomacy" in its quest to dominate global trade

On March 22, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

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Sixty years after China brutally squashed the Tibetan uprising against the Communist Party, it’s still ruling with an iron fist, making Tibet one of the least free regions in the world. But even as they continue to oppress Tibetan Buddhists, Chinese leaders are strategically leveraging Buddhism in their quest to dominate global trade.

Tibetans rallied this week to mark the 60th anniversary of the failed uprising, protesting the continued occupation of their land and restrictions on their freedom — tens of thousands of Communist cadres supervise Buddhist monasteries and villages, people are forced to replace pictures of the Dalai Lama with photos of Party leaders, and China boasts Tibet’s capital as its “safest” city.

“One of the prime requirements for monks and nuns is that they should be loyal to the Communist Party before they are loyal to their faith,” Bhuchung Tsering, the vice president of the International Campaign for Tibet, told VICE News. “Everything is being dictated by the Chinese Communist Party.”

Yet China has invested heavily in projecting itself as pro-Buddhist, for calculated reasons. Buddhists make up a huge population in countries that China wants to connect to its Belt and Road Initiative — a multibillion-dollar project to dominate global trade.

Take, for example, Myanmar. In the last decade, China has actively worked to improve religious relations with its southern neighbor, which is 88 percent Buddhist. In that same time frame, it spent $2.5 billion to build oil and gas pipelines and is now negotiating multibillion-dollar port and dam deals.

“China’s use of Buddhist diplomacy is significant because several of these countries are apprehensive of this giant power — whether all the loans they are taking from China will drive them into a debt trap,” Dr. Sudha Ramachandran, a South Asia analyst, told VICE News.

The latest case of China’s “debt-trap diplomacy” is Sri Lanka.

After the Chinese helped the country’s Buddhist majority win a decades-long civil war, Sri Lanka’s president gave China a billion-dollar port deal in his hometown. Eight years after the deal was signed, Sri Lanka was unable to pay back its loans and surrendered the Hambantota port to China for 99 years as repayment.

“In all these countries, you find that the public feels that, ‘Well if we want improved infrastructure, it is only the Chinese who are willing to, you know, extend loans.” Ramachandran told VICE News. “Yes, there is a concern, but there is no other alternative.”

This segment originally aired March 13, 2019, on VICE News Tonight on HBO.

Bolsonaro Is Betting His Presidency on Trump

On March 22, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

During his visit to the United States Monday and Tuesday, Jair Bolsonaro, the right-wing extremist sworn in as Brazil’s president in January, appeared visibly giddy at the prospect of meeting Donald Trump, gamely playing the amiable ally. While Bolsonaro represents a distinctly Brazilian and deeply militaristic strain of authoritarianism, he has expressed admiration for Trump’s combativeness and disregard for political correctness, revealing that he had been “rooting for” Trump in 2016. But Bolsonaro was not only excited to meet Trump because the two men have much in common—a tendency to invent wild attacks against opponents while denouncing the media as fake news and inciting violence against minorities, for example—but also because he believes this seeming alignment of personalities will yield positive results for Brazil.

President Trump so far has given him every indication that this is a winning strategy. During a joint press conference on Tuesday, Trump said he would support Brazil joining the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and possibly even the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), both exclusive clubs reserved for some of the wealthiest and most influential countries in the world. Membership for Brazil would reflect the kind of international recognition the country so craves. Matias Spektor, a professor of international relations at Brazilian university Fundação Getúlio Vargas who has been critical of Bolsonaro, called this “the largest concession package given by a U.S. president to a Brazilian counterpart in the last thirty years.” Brazilian papers later reported Trump felt such a kinship with Bolsonaro that he gave the Brazilian president his personal phone number so that he could “call whenever he wants.”

The Trump administration’s aims in pursuing such a close partnership—aside from President Trump’s well-documented love of flattery—are relatively clear. Although Brazil has declared it will not support an invasion of its collapsing neighbor, Venezuela, Trump wants Brazil to continue doing all it can to keep the pressure on Maduro. The United States will also likely push Bolsonaro to make it harder for Russia and China to exert the kind of pressure they have increasingly brought to bear in Latin America in recent years. Putin has lent crucial support for the Maduro regime while China has become a major trading partner and investor in infrastructure across Latin America, meaning that Brazil must articulate a clear policy in relation to these countries, both of which represent perhaps the greatest geopolitical challenges for the United States in the short and long term. And Trump’s willingness to even entertain the idea of Brazil joining NATO as anything other than a major non-member ally suggests an aggressive attempt to wrest Brazil away from the so-called BRICS—the association composed of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—for good.

With almost any other American president, one would also expect some sort of human rights pressure to be put on Bolsonaro, who has issued several orders targeting minority groups since he took office, has made a variety of sexist and racist remarks, spoken approvingly of the brutal military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964-1985, and insinuated that opponents should be met with violence. Instead, Trump’s and Bolsonaro’s joint press conference featured Bolsonaro declaring, via translator, that “Brazil and the United States stand side by side in their efforts to ensure liberties and respect to traditional family lifestyles, respect to God our creator, and stand against gender ideologies and politically incorrect attitudes and against fake news.”

Back in Brazil, there are some concerns that Bolsonaro is confusing fleeting ideological affinities with strategic geopolitical realignment. He was widely pilloried in the Brazilian press, for example, for visiting CIA headquarters, a step no Brazilian president has ever taken—for good reason, considering the CIA’s role in Latin America since the 1950s. And Bolsonaro seemed blithely unconcerned by the fact that political winds in the United States might shift next year. During a joint press conference on Tuesday, Bolsonaro was asked how he would react if a self-avowed socialist were to beat Trump in the 2020 presidential election. “Well, it’s an internal matter. We will respect whatever the ballots tell us in 2020, but I do fully believe Donald Trump is going to be reelected.”

While Trump has begun to ratchet up his rhetorical attacks on socialism in response to its rising appeal among younger voters and within the Democratic party, Bolsonaro has been railing against it for years, proclaiming that the mild center-leftism of the Workers’ Party that governed Brazil for thirteen years was leading the country to an authoritarian abyss. “Every day,” he declared at the White House on Tuesday, “more and more people that are prone to socialism, and even communism, slowly are going to be opening their minds to the reality. And you can see the border with Venezuela and Brazil was recently closed—not for Brazilians, which are pro-socialism, to go into Venezuela, but the other way around, so that Venezuelans who support democracy wouldn’t go into Brazil. This feeling most certainly is going to be very much seen when 2020 comes.” Through Bolsonaro’s fanciful assessments of the political landscape in Brazil, which he argues is largely controlled by nefarious “cultural Marxists” despite the fact that he handily won a national election on a campaign defined by homophobia, belligerence, and racism, a strategy begins to emerge: Bolsonaro is betting the rest of his presidency on a continued partnership with Trump.

This gamble is due primarily to the paranoid conspiratorial worldview both men share. They mostly agree on the problems facing the world and how to solve them. But Bolsonaro may also have little choice but to cling to his U.S. analogue: He has become so internationally reviled so quickly that finding willing partners going forward may prove difficult. Since October of last year, Democrats have urged Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to denounce Bolsonaro’s most egregious statements. In a major foreign policy speech at Johns Hopkins University, Bernie Sanders included Bolsonaro in a global far-right wave of “demagogues who exploit people’s fears, prejudices and grievances to gain and hold on to power.” Sanders has also established close ties with Fernando Haddad, the Workers’ Party candidate Bolsonaro defeated in the 2018 elections. Bolsonaro, in other words, will likely not find a friendly ear should the Democrats win the presidency. While becoming a pariah would obviously not be in Brazil’s best interest, Bolsonaro—along with his foreign minister, as I have argued elsewhere—has shown little willingness to soften his rhetorical edges for foreign audiences.

This is why, rather than adopt a diplomatic approach to the current occupant of the White House, seeing him as a temporary partner, Bolsonaro instead treats Trump as a life jacket. As long as he has an ally in Washington as reactionary and aggressively ignorant as Trump, Bolsonaro will have the latitude to pretend his administration has influence at the highest echelons of global power. If, instead, the tide is turning on Trumpism and the 2020 election results reflect that, Bolsonaro may very well be held accountable abroad for his hyperviolent rhetoric.

Some of Bolsonaro’s critics, particularly those on the left, argue that it doesn’t matter who the U.S. president is—Brazil will always be placed in a junior position and taken advantage of by the world’s hegemonic power. It is true that the United States has never treated Brazil with the respect Brazilians feel they deserve as a large democracy with a diverse population, an appealing and vibrant national culture, and abundant natural resources. But wholeheartedly embracing an American president as erratic as Trump is more risky for Brazil than a balanced posture would be, one that would give Brazilian policymakers room to maneuver should the political situation in Brazil and the world begin to change.

By committing to Trumpism, Bolsonaro has linked his administration’s credibility to a U.S. administration that may or may not be around to accommodate him in two years. In Bolsonaro, Trump has found a lackey eager to do Washington’s bidding in a supposedly shared civilizational crusade against progressive values, aligning the United States with the most ultra-reactionary political forces in Latin America’s largest nation.

Jordan Peele’s “Us” Goes Down the Rabbit Hole of Identity

On March 22, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

Jordan Peele loves a rabbit. There is a song that appears in the first scene of Get Out, Peele’s Oscar-winning debut as a movie writer and director, that goes “Run, rabbit, run, rabbit, run! Run! Run!” as Lakeith Stanfield’s character Dre strolls to his doom through a white suburb. It’s an old British song from World War II, and to the modern ear, it rings as nostalgic for a time of jolly tea parties and unchecked white supremacy. Peele proved himself to be a master of genre contrast in Get Out by mixing horror with black satire, and the juxtaposition between “Run, Rabbit, Run” and Childish Gambino’s “Redbone,” whose “stay woke” refrain is another key theme in the movie’s soundtrack, added another layer to the movie’s atmospheric tension.

A rabbit also opens Us, Peele’s follow-up effort. The opening credits play out across a long, lingering close-up of a white rabbit’s eye. It won’t make sense until much later in the movie, when we learn what exactly rabbits have to do with the bloody chaos that is about to be unleashed. For now, though, the rabbit is just a clue—a trembling, vulnerable animal.

Get Out is an extraordinary movie, a great catapulting leap forward in the satirical examination of race in American screen fiction. Possessed of a golden plot—interracial couple visits white liberal parents upstate, who turn out to be enslaving black people—Peele focused on executing it perfectly, tying up all the loose ends and drawing the movie to a satisfying close. In his second outing, however, Peele has given himself a little more room to stretch out and experiment. Having been frustrated by the misinterpretation of Get Out as a comedy, Peele has responded by delivering a movie soaked in blood, terror, and ambiguity.

Us is stranger than Get Out, with deeper philosophical undercurrents flowing through it. The rabbit that greets you at the movie’s start is an invitation. Will you follow, like Alice in her Wonderland? The journey will be at your peril—there’s no telling how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Us is a movie about an American family: Adelaide Wilson (Lupita Nyong’o) is the mom, Gabe Wilson (Winston Duke) is the dad, and they’re vacationing with their kids, teenaged Zora (Shahadi Wright), and her little brother Jason (Evan Alex). After a tantalizing flashback to Adelaide’s childhood in the mid-1980s, we skip to the present day. Adelaide is now a grown woman. She wears a breezy cream linen dress, and the sun is shining over the beach on Santa Cruz.

But Adelaide just can’t get comfortable. Something happened on this beach when she was a child, she tells Gabe: She thinks she saw a little girl who was her double in a funhouse mirror. We saw it, too, in that flashback scene: As in the René Magritte painting Not to Be Reproduced (La reproduction interdite), Adelaide turned to look in the mirror but saw the back of her own head. Is this really another self, or just some hallucination? Gabe is skeptical. “I don’t feel like myself,” Adelaide says. “I think you look like yourself,” Gabe replies.

Are we who we feel ourselves to be? Or are we simply a composite of other people’s perceptions of us? It’s the first of Us’s big questions about identity. A whole slew of new questions soon show up, however, as a mysterious family appears in the Wilsons’ driveway at their vacation home.

There are four figures; two adults, two children. They are all wearing identical red jumpsuits, perfectly cut, like some quartet of Rachel Comey models. They each wear one glove and carry a large pair of dressmaking scissors. They are motionless, until they aren’t. As they break their way into the Wilsons’ home, we realize that they are the family’s doppelgängers, and they are there to kill.

Adelaide was the only one who saw them coming, but her reaction to their arrival is straight denial: “Uh uh. Uh uh. Uh uh,” she repeats, shaking her head. Once inside, the doppelgängers force the Wilsons to sit across from them. They are the Wilsons’ shadows, the double-Adelaide explains. Everything that Adelaide did in her life, the shadow-Adelaide had to act out, too. “When the shadow was hungry she had to eat rabbit, raw,” the double says, referring to herself in the third person. When Adelaide got toys as presents, the shadow-Adelaide received metal that cut her fingers. When Adelaide had a C-section, the shadow-self had to perform the operation on herself.

“Who are you people?” the real Wilsons ask. The answer? “We are Americans.”

There are many ways to interpret the sudden arrival of doppelgängers hell-bent on murder. As in Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (1997), there is the sense that the Wilsons simply deserve to be destroyed, because all bourgeois families are in possession of riches and comfort that are not rightfully theirs. The shadow-Wilsons are identical in appearance to their counterparts, though evil of eye and ragged of speech (only shadow-Adelaide can speak, the others growl). The dichotomy suggests that every happy American family exists at the expense of another family, like the other in all ways except social circumstances.

Doubles are often introduced to push the protagonists into an identity crisis, such as in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation, Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan, Duncan Jones’s Moon. But the story that resonates most strongly with the shadow-people of Us is J.M. Barrie’s 1911 novel Peter Pan. As you might remember, Peter loses his shadow when a window shuts suddenly after he leaps through it, severing it from him. The children’s nanny doesn’t know what to do with it: “unfortunately Mrs. Darling could not leave it hanging out at the window; it looked so like the washing and lowered the whole tone of the house.” Neither does Peter:

If he thought at all, but I don’t believe he ever thought, it was that he and his shadow, when brought near each other, would join like drops of water; and when they did not he was appalled. He tried to stick it on with soap from the bathroom, but that also failed. A shudder passed through Peter, and he sat on the floor and cried.

It’s one of the very saddest moments in a very sad story. But it’s precisely the same unnameable grief that hovers between Adelaide and her shadow when they meet. Wendy eventually sews Peter’s shadow back on, but the Wilsons have no such luck—they will have to fight the severed shadows for the right to exist.

The notion of a person’s “shadow” has also been examined extensively by postcolonial theorists. In Franz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, he writes of the “Manichaean delirium” that buzzes through a colonial society, where existence is split into subaltern suffering and the colonizer’s ease. A kind of madness spreads through such a society, he writes, a neurosis that affects the haves and the haves-not alike, because they are bound together in a horribly anxious dyad.

America is not a colony like Algeria, but its economic and racial inequalities (which overlap to a large degree) have fashioned society into distinct strata: the privileged and the others. (It is worth noting here that Us can be read as “U.S.”) If in an unequal society the poor and the disenfranchised always exist as a shadow double to the rich, then the severing of the link may result in a traumatic shattering of the privileged person’s sense of herself.

This is what happens to Adelaide and her family; the shadow-Adelaide, credited as Red, calls her family’s appearance in the normal world “The Untethering.” Playing both Red and Adelaide, Lupita Nyong’o must establish both characters as distinct entities. As Adelaide, Nyong’o’s prettiness reads as maternal and decorative. But as Red, the smooth curves of her face and eyes become dead and unresponsive as a porcelain doll.

But the Wilsons do not collapse so easily, and this is where Peele expands upon the political critique that he formed in Get Out. Held together by strong bonds of love and African American identity (Gabe wears a Howard sweatshirt throughout the movie, and the family groove together to “I Got 5 On It” in the car), the Wilsons (spoiler alert) outlive countless white people whose doubles easily slaughter them.

If the postcolonial theoretical framework of Us is the right one, then it makes sense that African Americans would be the citizens who know enough of subaltern existence to be able to survive their shadows’ attacks. They would be, themselves, shadow people, haunted by the profound certainty that oppressors cannot exist without those who are oppressed.

It would ruin the movie to explain exactly how The Tethered (as the shadow people are called) came to exist, and why they attacked the rest of humanity, but suffice it to say, the explanation does not match up to the sophisticated and funny exploration of identity that the rest of the movie presents. It’s an answer that shuts down the possibilities of its own question, and it’s the one truly disappointing moment in Us.

Still, Us is an uncanny movie, and an implicit riposte to the questions Peele himself asked in Get Out. What if there’s no easy ending? What if the real struggle takes place within? In the tradition of some of this country’s finest authors on race and politics, Peele pushes the conversation forward.

Trump Puts America Last

On March 22, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

As usual, Trump made the announcement of recognizing Israel’s claim to the Golan Heights without any consultation with any of the relevant administration officials:

President Donald Trump’s tweet on Thursday recognizing the Golan Heights as Israeli territory surprised members of his own Middle East peace team, the State Department, and Israeli officials.

U.S. diplomats and White House aides had believed the Golan Heights issue would be front and center at next week’s meetings between Trump and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House. But they were unprepared for any presidential announcement this week.

No formal U.S. process or executive committees were initiated to review the policy before Trump’s decision, and the diplomats responsible for implementing the policy were left in the dark.

Even the Israelis, who have advocated for this move for years, were stunned at the timing of Trump’s message.

After more than two years of watching Trump’s impulsive and reckless “governing” style, it doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone that he makes these decisions without advance warning. There is no evidence that Trump ever thinks anything through, and so he probably sees no reason to tell anyone in advance what he is going to do. Trump almost never bothers consulting with the people who will be responsible for carrying out his policies and dealing with the international fallout, and that is probably why so many of his policy decisions end up being exceptionally poor ones. The substance of most of Trump’s foreign policy decisions was never likely to be good, but the lack of an organized policy process on major decisions makes those decisions even more haphazard and chaotic than they would otherwise be.

There is absolutely no upside for the United States in endorsing illegal Israeli claims to the Golan Heights. It is a cynical political stunt intended to boost Netanyahu and Likud’s fortunes in the upcoming election, and it is also a cynical stunt aimed at shoring up Trump’s support from Republican “pro-Israel” voters and donors. Whatever short-term benefit Israel gains from it, the U.S. gains nothing and stands to lose quite a bit in terms of our international standing. There has been no consideration of the costs and problems this will create for the U.S. in its relations with other regional states and beyond because Trump couldn’t care less about the long-term effects that his decisions have on the country. Once again, Trump has put narrow political ambitions and the interests of a foreign government ahead of the interests of the United States. That seems to be the inevitable result of electing a narcissist who conducts foreign policy based on which leaders flatter and praise him.

Trump’s bad decision can be traced back to Bolton’s visit to Israel earlier this year:

Administration officials said that National Security Advisor John Bolton was instrumental to the decision, after visiting Israel in January to assure officials there that the United States would not abandon them in Syria despite Trump’s sudden withdrawal of troops from the battlefield.

Nervous Israeli officials saw an opportunity. “It was an ask,” one Israeli source said, “because of the timing — it suddenly became a relevant issue about Iran.”

Bolton is usually the culprit responsible any destructive and foolish policy decision over the last year, and his baleful influence continues to grow. We can also see the harmful effects of the administration’s Iran obsession at work. In the end, the Syria “withdrawal” hasn’t happened and apparently isn’t going to, but Trump nonetheless gives Israel whatever it wants in exchange for nothing so that they will be “reassured” of our unthinking support.

2020 Democrats are dropping like flies from pro-Israel AIPAC conference

On March 22, 2019 By admin

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Democrats appear to be moving left on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Just weeks after Democrats had a meltdown over Rep. Ilhan Omar’s criticism of Israel, seven 2020 Democratic presidential candidates have opted to skip this year’s American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) policy conference, which annually convenes prominent Israel supporters.

Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke, Pete Buttigieg, Jay Inslee, and Julian Castro have all confirmed they won’t attend the pro-Israel conference this year. Democrats started pulling out after MoveOn, a progressive advocacy group, called on Democratic presidential candidates to skip the event, which typically enjoys support from major Democrats. Top Dems, including Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, are speaking at AIPAC this year.

“He’s concerned about the platform AIPAC is providing for leaders who have expressed bigotry and oppose a two-state solution,” Bernie Sanders’ policy director, Josh Orton, told the Huffington Post. Sanders has highlighted his Jewish faith as part of his 2020 presidential campaign.

Multiple presidential candidates skipping the conference marks another sign that Democrats are being forced to reckon with their years of support for Israel. On Thursday, for example, the House unveiled a bipartisan resolution to condemn boycott movements against Israel. The United Nations and numerous human-rights groups have repeatedly condemned Israel over its occupation of Palestinian territories, which the U.S. doesn’t recognize as an official state. Just last week, the U.N. said that Israel may have committed war crimes in 2018 by shooting at unarmed Palestinians. Israeli forces killed at least 189 Palestinians in clashes last year.

Minnesota Democrat Rep. Omar and Michigan Democrat Rep. Rashida Tlaib — the first two Muslim women in Congress — are also the only members in the legislative body that support the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. Since taking office for the first time earlier this year, Omar has become the most vocal critic of Israel and AIPAC’s influence on American politics.

But Omar has faced fierce backlash from Democrats and Republicans alike — and even death threats. Critics have tried to paint her comments, which called out AIPAC’s use of money to influence politics, as anti-Semitic.

Earlier this month, the House planned to condemn anti-Semitism as a direct rebuke of Omar, though a huge amount of grassroots support manifested for her. Democrats ultimately decided to water down the resolution to instead condemn all forms of hatred, including Islamophobia and white supremacy.

Harris, Sanders, Warren, and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand — another 2020 presidential candidate, who has not pulled out of AIPAC — all voiced support for Omar in the wake of her criticism of Israel.

Cover image: 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders speaks at a rally Saturday, March 16, 2019, in Henderson, Nev. Sanders injured his head on a glass shower door on Friday. (AP Photo/John Locher)