[News] Cowardly, Hypocritical, Subservient Congressional Black Caucus Endorses Israeli Apartheid and Current War Crimes in Gaza

[Anti-Imperialist News]

*http://blackagendareport.com/content/cowardly-hypocritical-subservient-congressional-black-caucus-endorses-israeli-apartheid-and-*
7/30/2014


    Cowardly, Hypocritical, Subservient Congressional Black Caucus
    Endorses Israeli Apartheid and Current War Crimes in Gaza


      by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

Back in the 1970s, when the Congressional Black Caucus began calling 
itself "the conscience of the Congress," that was almost literally true. 
CBC members could be relied upon not just to reliably vote for raising 
wages and expenditures on housing, health care and education, but to 
keep the issues of full employment and opposition to unjust war near the 
front of their public agendas.

By the late 1980s, a gaggle of former CBC staffers had moved through the 
revolving doors of elite affirmative action to become corporate 
lobbyists, with the same ethics and table manners as their white 
colleagues, but with black faces. Thanks in large part to their efforts, 
by 2000 a tsunami of corporate cash began filling up the coffers of 
incumbent CBC members, their black replacements, or in the cases of 
Alabama's Earl Hilliard and Georgia's Cynthia McKinney, their black 
opponents.

Only a single member of the CBC, Rep. Barabra Lee opposed President 
Bush's blank check for invading anywhere he pleased in Septermber of 
2001, and by the 2003 invasion of Iraq, four CBC members, some of them 
swimming in donations from military contractors, raced down to the White 
House to have their pictures taken with Bush as the bombs were about to 
explode over Baghdad.

By the 109^th Congress of 2005-2006 the CBC's political compass had been 
decisively reset. 2005 was the year of Katrina. For decades there had 
been predictions that whenever "the big one" hit New Orleans, a city 
where a majority of residents didn't even own cars, thousands or tens of 
thousands would perish. I lived in Chicago and read those predictions in 
the papers there several times during the 80s and 90s. Katrina 
ultimately proved to be the excuse for authorities to permanently expel 
more than a hundred thousand African Americans, 
<http://www.counterpunch.org/2005/09/02/will-the-quot-new-quot-new-orleans-be-black/> 
mostly renters but also entire neighborhoods of black homeowners and 
black owned local businesses as well. As the highest ranking black 
politicians in the nation, the Congressional Black Caucus could have 
demanded and held federal hearings on every aspect of the Katrina 
disaster and its aftermath, ensuring a real public debate on how the 
region would be rebuilt and for whom.

But House Democrats were focused narrowly on winning the 2006 election, 
and in their political calculus, having Democrats identified as the 
party of black people was not a winning strategy. Democratic House 
leader Nancy Pelosi forbade the Congressional Black Caucus from 
demanding or holding hearings. Only Georgia's Cynthia McKinney defied 
her, and was forced to partner with House Republicans for the hearings 
to take place at all. The only CBC member Pelosi allowed to take part in 
the Katrina hearings <http://www.katrina.house.gov/> was the lazy and 
corrupt "Dollar Bill" Jefferson who nominally represented black New 
Orleans. The rest of the supposedly powerful and influential CBC, from 
its deans Conyers and Rangel on down stayed away.

If they were still the conscience of the Congress the CBC would have 
called together some of the nation's black civil engineers, architects, 
urban planners and others to articulate a vision of a rebuilt Gulf Coast 
for the people who lived there before. Instead the vision of the 
Heritage Foundation prevailed. A hundred thousand black New Orleans 
residents were deported to the four corners of the continental US, their 
public school system privatized, their rental apartments razed, their 
health care systems shut down, and the water, electric and gas grids not 
reactivated for the entire sections of town where they once lived. 
Thanks to the hands-off attitude of the CBC, President Bush was even 
able to exclude all journalists from the teams which recovered bodies or 
the places where remains were assembled, so there is no independent 
verification of the government's suspiciously small count 
<http://rawstory.com/news/2005/FEMA_outsources_Katrina_body_count_to_firm_implicated_in_bodydumping_scan_0913.html>of 
fatalities.

That was when Democrats were still the minority in Congress. We're 
always told how important it is for Democrats to gain or maintain 
control of the House. They got that in the 2006 elections, and Democrats 
have had the White House since the 2008 election as well, though they 
handed the House back at the end of 2010. Has all that extra power made 
them bolder in the pursuit of justice? Sadly, no.

Israel's vicious apartheid regime celebrated Barack Obama's 2009 
inauguration with the massacre of 1400 people in Gaza, mostly civilians, 
and the destruction of a great part of the enclave's infrastructure, 
down to chicken farms and water systems. The new Congress called it 
righteous self-defense, with 390 yeas, 5 nays and 22 "present" 
<http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2009/roll010.xml>. *The CBC was 2 of those 
nays, Gwen Moore (WI) and Maxine Waters (CA), and 7 of the "presents", 
Edwards (MD), Ellison (MN), Johnson (GA), Lee (TX), Payne (NJ), 
Kilpatrick (MI), and Watson (CA).*

This month, as the civilian death toll in the latest Israeli criminal 
orgy of collective punishment mounted toward 1,000, the US House passed 
a nearly identical resolution, calling this massacre legitimate 
"self-defense" as well. This time the House vote, including that of the 
Congressional Black Caucus was unanimous 
<http://www.aipac.org/learn/resources/aipac-publications/publication?pubpath=PolicyPolitics/Press/AIPAC%20Statements/2014/07/House%20Stands%20with%20Israels%20Right%20to%20SelfDefense>. 
*Not a single member of the CBC, despite their much heralded brand of 
standing for civil rights and against apartheid here and around the 
world, bothered to publicly question the racist ethnocracy that is the 
Israeli state.* After signing the blank check with the rest of their 
colleagues, CBC members Conyers (MI), Lee (CA), Johnson (GA) and Ellison 
(MN) tried to cover their shame 
<http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/07/congress-gaza-cease-fire-democrats-letter-obama-kerry-talks.html#> 
with a letter to Secretary of State Kerry urging a cease-fire, something 
which Kerry claims to have been doing anyway.

All CBC members absolutely know that Israel is an apartheid society, 
with one set of laws applying to Jews, a second to Israeli Arabs and a 
third to Palestinians. Congressional Black Caucus members know that 
Israel requires different colored license plates for non-Jews so their 
vehicles can be profiled at a distance, and Jewish-only roads between 
settlements carved from the villages of Palestinians and watched voer by 
military garrisons. They know that Israel refuses to recognize mixed 
marriages, or even marriages between Palestinians in Gaza and those on 
the West Bank. Black members of Congress know what an ethnocracy is, and 
even though they claim to have opposed it in South Africa and here at 
home, they choose to endorse it in Israel, out of greed and subservience.

As we wrote in BAR back in 2012... 
<http://blackagendareport.com/content/disconnecting-dots-israel-palestine-apartheid-only-crime-when-committed-against-blacks>

    "/Whatever its root cause, the current support of the black
    political class for Israel's maintenance of a colonial settler state
    constitutes a massive, hypocritical hole in their collective souls.
    Most of the world backed our own struggle against Jim Crow, and we
    congratulated ourselves for contributing to the downfall of the old
    regime in South Africa. And now, when our turn comes round again,
    when the United States is the only government capable of restraining
    the vicious Israeli onslaught, just by the threat of its
    disapproval, its non-renewal of loan guarantees or weapons giveways
    or military contracts ---- we are silent./

    "/For African Americans, our hypocrisy goes deeper and further than
    our leaders. It filters all the way down to ordinary people whose
    attachment to their First Black President is so uncritical that they
    decouple their FBP from any responsibility for his policies. Many
    Obama supporters say they oppose Israeli aggression and wring their
    hands wishing the president they voted for and hustled others into
    voting for would do something different. In the eyes of the rest of
    the world, as Margaret Kimberley points out, they are as guilty of
    abetting Israeli atrocities as the rabid partisans of AIPAC..."/

What would one of our glittering and supposedly powerful members of the 
Congressional Black Caucus tell a child in Gaza today? What would they 
tell a parent whose children have been maimed or murdered, with weaponry 
probably designed and/or manufactured in the US?

Our nation is the armorer, financier and protector of Israel's savage 
ethnocracy.  We are all compromised, we are all implicated in its 
crimes.  It's time to call our black political class, and each other to 
account. In the coming week, Black Agenda Report will reach out to our 
friends and colleagues and try to find some new ways to do exactly that.

/Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report, and a state 
committee member of the GA Green Party. He lives and works near Marietta 
GA, and can be reached via this site's contact page or at 
bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com./

-- 
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