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American Democracy: Pro-Israel Tweedledum And Tweedledee
By Maidhc Ó Cathail
Sabbah Report
Helen Keller's pithy observation about American democracy
being little more than a choice "between Tweedledum and
Tweedledee" was never more true than in the upcoming mid-
term elections in the ninth congressional district of
Illinois.
In a district which includes the affluent northern suburbs
of Chicago along the shore of Lake Michigan, the central
issue is not the two wars-or is it now three?-the country
is fighting, nor is it the tanking economy, in great part
caused by those debt-inducing wars. No, the burning issue
here is... who cares more about Israel?
"A Jewish candidate has been trying to convince the mostly
Jewish voters that his Jewish opponent has not done enough
to protect the Jewish interest," reports Ynetnews, the
English language website of Israel's most-read newspaper,
Yedioth Ahronoth. Although less than 25 percent of the
ninth district's constituents are Jewish, and there is
little agreement about what constitutes "the Jewish
interest," it's not a bad summary of Republican challenger
Joel Pollak's campaign to oust the Democratic incumbent,
Rep. Jan Schakowsky.
Pollak, an Orthodox Jew born in South Africa, charges Rep.
Schakowsky with being "soft on Israel's security."
Let's take a brief look at Congresswoman Schakowsky's
record on Capitol Hill to see if there's any truth to
Pollak's allegations.
Since she was first elected to Congress in 1998, Schakowsky
has consistently backed policies sought by Tel Aviv and
its unregistered foreign agents in Washington, ensuring
the continuation of the U.S. military, diplomatic, and
financial support on which Israel crucially depends. As
might be expected, her "100 percent" pro-Israel record has
included a reflexive defense of Israeli aggression and
demands for crippling sanctions against Iran.
In the wake of Operation Cast Lead, which killed over
300 Palestinian children, Schakowsky voted for a House
resolution supporting Israel's right to defend itself
against attacks from Gaza. Later, she co-sponsored what
Rep. Dennis Kucinich dubbed the "wrong is right" resolution
condemning the Goldstone report, which Kucinich said his
colleagues had not even read. And after Furkan Dogan, a
19-year-old U.S. citizen armed with nothing more than a
small video camera, was murdered execution-style by Israeli
commandos on the Gaza flotilla, she signed the Poe/Peters
letter to President Obama again touting Israel's right to
self-defense.
Echoing Tel Aviv's rhetoric about the "existential threat"
posed by Iran's non-existent nuclear weapons programme,
Congresswoman Schakowsky has long been lending her name to
a raft of legislation targeting Tehran. In 1999, Schakowsky
co-sponsored the Iran Nonproliferation Act. In 2001, she
co-sponsored the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act Extension Act.
She has also co-sponsored the Iran Refined Petroleum
Sanctions Act, the Iran Sanctions Enabling Act, the Iran
Counter-Proliferation Act, and the Iran Freedom Support
Act. More recently, Schakowsky co-sponsored the
Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divest-
ment Act of 2010, which a former CIA officer and political
analyst described as "basically an act of war."
"There's more, much more, but you get the idea," as Steve
Sheffey, a pro-Israel political activist, put it in his
Huffington Post defense of Schakowsky.
Her opponent, however, does not get the idea.
To Joel Pollak and his supporters, which include his
Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, Schakowsky is "too
sympathetic" to Palestinians and the sanctions against
Iran are "weak."
But the GOP nominee is most concerned about Obama's feeble
efforts to coax Netanyahu to comply with international law
by ceasing the building of Jewish settlements on occupied
Palestinian territory. In a statement, Pollak called on
Schakowsky to join him in "condemning the Obama administr-
ation's ongoing attack on Israel."
Among pro-Israelis there are concerns, however, that
"efforts to transform support for Israel from a long-
standing bipartisan national consensus into a divisive
partisan wedge issue" could be counterproductive.
"Ironically, by using Israel as a political football for
partisan gain," writes Sheffey, "Pollak's supporters
ignore the cardinal principle of pro-Israel advocacy:
Support for Israel is and must remain bi-partisan."
According to Sheffey, Pollak has broken the Republican
Party's "friendly incumbent rule," whereby pro-Israel
opponents are expected to "disregard all other issues
and vote solely based on Israel."
Deeply concerned about the increasing use of support for
Israel as a partisan issue in American domestic politics,
Israel's ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren,
reminded everyone that "bipartisan support for Israel is
a strategic national interest for the State of Israel."
One rule that Pollak didn't break, however, is the tacit
agreement among both major parties to never expose how
profoundly corrupt the political system really is.
In 2000, the FBI began wiretapping Congresswoman Schakowsky
as part of a wider investigation into foreign espionage
and the corruption of American public officials. "The
epicenter of a lot of the foreign espionage activity was
Chicago," according to former FBI translator Sibel
Edmonds, in an interview with The American Conservative
magazine. "They needed Schakowsky and her husband Robert
Creamer to perform certain illegal operational facilit-
ations for them in Illinois."
One would think that Joel Pollak would relish exposing
Schakowsky's entrapment by a female Turkish agent,
revealed in Edmonds' testimony under oath in a court
case filed in Ohio. The problem for the aspiring pro-
Israel legislator, however, is that the FBI investigation
"started with the Israeli Embassy."
And what choice does that leave American voters? As one
frustrated commentator put it, there's "not a dime's worth
of difference between the two parties." Nowhere is that
more true than when it comes to their corrupt bipartisan
support for Israel.
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