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<b><small><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://blackagendareport.com/content/cowardly-hypocritical-subservient-congressional-black-caucus-endorses-israeli-apartheid-and">http://blackagendareport.com/content/cowardly-hypocritical-subservient-congressional-black-caucus-endorses-israeli-apartheid-and</a>-</small></small></small></b><br>
7/30/2014<br>
<h2>Cowardly, Hypocritical, Subservient Congressional Black Caucus
Endorses Israeli Apartheid and Current War Crimes in Gaza</h2>
<h3>by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>By the 109<sup>th</sup> 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 <a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2005/09/02/will-the-quot-new-quot-new-orleans-be-black/"
target="_blank">the excuse for authorities to permanently expel
more than a hundred thousand African Americans,</a> 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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="http://www.katrina.house.gov/" target="_blank">Katrina
hearings</a> 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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="http://rawstory.com/news/2005/FEMA_outsources_Katrina_body_count_to_firm_implicated_in_bodydumping_scan_0913.html"
target="_blank">suspiciously small count </a>of fatalities.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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, <a
href="http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2009/roll010.xml"
target="_blank">with 390 yeas, 5 nays and 22 “present”</a>. <strong>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).</strong></p>
<p>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 <a
href="http://www.aipac.org/learn/resources/aipac-publications/publication?pubpath=PolicyPolitics/Press/AIPAC%20Statements/2014/07/House%20Stands%20with%20Israels%20Right%20to%20SelfDefense"
target="_blank">unanimous</a>. <strong>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.</strong> After signing the blank check with the rest of
their colleagues, CBC members Conyers (MI), Lee (CA), Johnson (GA)
and Ellison (MN) <a
href="http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/07/congress-gaza-cease-fire-democrats-letter-obama-kerry-talks.html#"
target="_blank">tried to cover their shame</a> with a letter to
Secretary of State Kerry urging a cease-fire, something which
Kerry claims to have been doing anyway.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>As we wrote in BAR <a
href="http://blackagendareport.com/content/disconnecting-dots-israel-palestine-apartheid-only-crime-when-committed-against-blacks"
target="_blank">back in 2012... </a></p>
<blockquote>
<p>“<em>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.</em></p>
<p>“<em>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...”</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>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?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><em>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.</em></p>
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