Update/correction: I received the following note today from Peter Beinart explaining why his East Bay appearance was cancelled: “[The East Bay JCC] pulled out because a JVP person was moderator and then when there were no sponsors who were Zionist and anti-full BDS, I pulled out. I did that sadly–cause I agree with JVP on the awfulness of the occupation–but given my strong opposition to BDS targeting all of Israel, it didn’t make sense for me to speak to a forum in which there was not one anti-BDS organization sponsoring.”

Last week, when Peter Beinart embarked on a tour to promote his new book, “The Crisis of Zionism,” leading pro-Israel figures initiated an assault that was as hysterical as it was predictable. The campaign scored its first victory on March 23, when Bay Area pro-Israel groups including the Jewish Federation of the East Bay successfully pressured the East Bay Jewish Community Federation (the same group that helped block a Gaza children’s art exhibition last year) to withdraw its sponsorship of East Bay Jewish Community Center to cancel Beinart’s scheduled appearance. The pressure began when Jonathan Wornick, a Jewish Federation board member, took to Facebook to urge his friends in the local pro-Israel community to call for pulling out the cancellation of Beinart’s talk. “Write or call the East Bay JCC and tell them to REMOVE THEIR SPONSORSHIP of this event,” Wornick demanded.

After trashing Beinart and the sponsors of his talk, Wornick opened a Facebook thread mocking the family of Trayvon Martin, the black teenager killed by a neighborhood vigilante for no apparent reason other than being black. At the end of the thread, Wornick offered a list of hypothetical situations that would provoke him to shoot someone to death. He added: “and of course i’d shoot anyone anywhere if they were yelling allahu akbar! [sic]”

Below is Wornick’s call to ban Beinart:

After extended ranting about Beinart, Wornick linked to an article reporting the vigilante-killer George Zimmerman’s claim that his teen victim punched him. “So now that the facts have come out…are you proud of yourselves for jumping to conclusions?” Wornick railed.

Several screeds later, Wornick descended into murderous fantasies:

Wornick seems to have a penchant for extreme tirades. In March 2011, he published the following rant on his Facebook page:

“When will it end? Kill or be killed? Radical Islam, or, maybe all Islam is the problem. It’s a backward, misogynistic, hateful, anti-democratic, ant-semetic, and corrupt. We need to expose this to the western world and get people to realize that NOT ALL CULTURES ARE EQUAL. Islam, if allowed will spread and destroy all Western values. In order to stop films like this we need to stop the spread of Islam. Period.”

Though Wornick’s Islamophobic screed was publicly exposed, the East Bay Jewish Federation took no action against him. There is no reason to believe they will do anything this time, either. Thus important pillars of the Jewish establishment continue to confirm Beinart’s trenchant critique of them.

By the way, I have substantial criticisms of Beinart’s book which I will make known in the days ahead and in a review for the Journal of Palestine Studies. Mark Levine seems to share my opinions. Read his excellent review at Al Jazeera English.

This was cross-posted at Al Akhbar English.

On RT, I discussed AIPAC’s recent national convention and the Lobby’s push for a US war on Iran:

On Al Jazeera’s The Stream, I discuss the Israel Lobby’s use of blackwashing tactics to stifle allegations that Israel engages in the crime of apartheid:

This weekend’s One State Conference at Harvard University has prompted predictable cries of outrage and calls for cancellation from the Israel lobby and its allies in Congress. Senator Scott Brown, a Republican from Massachusetts, is the latest Friend of Israel to join the chorus of condemnation, calling for Harvard to ban the conference altogether. The campaign of intimidation and smears highlights America’s pro-Israel community as the political element most devoted to suppressing free speech and academic inquiry on campuses across the United States.

Abraham Foxman, the national director for the Anti-Defamation League, is at the helm of the campaign to censor the discussion at Harvard of equal rights in Israel-Palestine. In an op-ed for the Boston Globe, Foxman wrote, “Let’s be frank. The term ‘one-state solution’’ is a euphemism for the destruction of the Jewish state of Israel.” He attacked the conference participants for their ” alleged concerns about Israel’s ‘occupation’’ and treatment of the Palestinians,” claiming that their true goal was to “make anti-Semitism more acceptable and more likely.”

In light of Foxman’s assaults on the academic discussion of equal rights for all living under Israel’s control, it is worth recalling an angry letter he sent to the editors of the New York Times on June 20, 1984. In the letter, Foxman took issue with an editorial the Times published calling for a two state solution that would have required Israel to give up control of the West Bank. Foxman criticized the authors for casting Israel’s undemocratic control of the West Bank in a negative light, insisting that Israeli control of the Palestinians was not “deleterious to [Israel's] well being.” And in the end, he suggested that Israel should consider”fully integrating the Palestinian Arabs into the Israeli body politics.” This is the very concept that will be discussed and promoted at the One State Conference this weekend at Harvard.

Below the fold is the full text of Foxman’s letter, which I retrieved from Lexis-Nexis:

To the Editor:

The debate as to whether Israel’s control over the West Bank is irreversible or not is a legitimate and important one. Unfortunately, the writers you chose to conduct that debate on your Op-Page, David Shaham and Geoffrey Aronson, share the assumption that Israel’s control of the West Bank is bad.

The issue of reversibility aside, Times readers should not be given the impression that Israelis or those who write about Israel are united in thinking that Israeli control of the West Bank is deleterious to its well-being. Indeed, a vibrant and ofttimes emotional debate is taking place among the people of Israel as to what would be good for Israel – considering Israel’s narrow security options in that small area, considering the arms buildup of its neighbors, considering Israel’s historical and religious ties to the area and considering whether fully integrating the Palestinian Arabs into the Israeli body politic is the best thing for the country.

The tragedy of the West Bank has been the tragedy of the region for 35 years. While Israelis debate the wisdom of a particular regional policy, the Arabs continue to reject peace and negotiations, making the debate in Israel abstract rather than real.

Your biggest contribution would be to find people who would advocate that the Arabs finally come to the peace table. ABRAHAM H. FOXMAN New York, June 13, 1984

The writer is associate national director of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith.

Few congressional candidates have excited the progressive base of the Democratic party as much as consumer advocate Elizabeth Warren has. With her tenacious advocacy for a consumer protection agency to fight unfair lending practices and her consistent framing of economic issues in terms of structural inequality has earned her enthusiastic promotion from major progressive figures from Markos Moulitsas to Rachel Maddow to Michael Moore.

Warren has focused her race against incumbent Republican Senator Scott Brown almost entirely around issues of economic justice, placing her quixotic battle for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau at the center of her campaign narrative. During an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Warren boasted that she succeeded in creating the bureau despite opposition from “the toughest lobbying force ever assembled on the face of the earth.”

While progressives celebrate Warren for her fight against the big banks and the financial industry’s lobbying arm, they have kept silent over the fact that she has enlisted with another powerful lobby that is willing to sabotage America’s economic recovery in order to advance its narrow interests. It is AIPAC, the key arm of the Israel lobby; a group that is openly pushing for a US war on Iran that would likely trigger a global recession, as the renowned economist Nouriel Roubini recently warned. The national security/foreign policy position page on Warren’s campaign website reads as though it was cobbled together from AIPAC memos and the website of the Israeli Foreign Ministry by the Democratic Party hacks who are advising her. It is pure boilerplate that suggests she knows about as much about the Middle East as Herman “Uzbeki-beki-stan-stan” Cain, and that she doesn’t care.

Warren’s statement on Israel consumes far more space than any other foreign policy issue on the page (she makes no mention of China, Latin America, or Africa). To justify what she calls the “unbreakable bond” between the US and Israel, Warren repeats the thoughtless cant about “a natural partnership resting on our mutual commitment to democracy and freedom and on our shared values.” She then declares that the United States must reject any Palestinian plans to pursue statehood outside of negotiations with Israel. While the US can preach to the Palestinians about how and when to demand the end of their 45-year-long military occupation, Warren says the US “cannot dictate the terms” to Israel.

Warren goes on to describe Iran as “a significant threat to the United States,” echoing a key talking point of fear-mongering pro-war forces. She calls for “strong sanctions” and declares that the “United States must take the necessary steps to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon” — a veiled endorsement of a military strike if Iran crosses the constantly shifting American “red lines.” Perhaps the only option Warren does not endorse or implicitly support is diplomacy. Her foreign policy views are hardly distinguishable from those of her Republican rival, who also marches in lockstep with AIPAC.

The same progressives who refused to vet Barack Obama’s views on foreign policy when he ran for president in 2008, and who now feel betrayed that he is not the liberal savior they imagined him to be, are repeating their mistake with Warren. With AIPAC leading the push for war at the height of an election campaign, there is no better time to demand accountability from candidates like Warren. Who does she serve? The liberal grassroots forces that made her into a populist hero or the lobby seeking to drag the US into a dubious, potentially catastrophic war? It is far better for progressives to grill her on her foreign policy positions before the campaign is over than after the next war begins.

Yesterday, the New York Times reported on the depressingly predictable consequences of US-led sanctions against Iran: they have reinforced the regime’s hold on power and enriched the elite while wrecking the lives of millions of middle and working class Iranians. The Times’ Robert Worth made prominent note of the fact that sanctions were motivated at least as much by President Barack Obama’s domestic political ambitions as they were by American foreign pollicy interests:

Yet this economic burden is falling largely on the middle class, raising the prospect of more resentment against the West and complicating the effort to deter Iran’s nuclear program — a central priority for the Obama administration in this election year…

Ordinary Iranians complain that the sanctions are hurting them, while those at the top are unscathed, or even benefit. Many wealthy Iranians made huge profits in recent weeks by buying dollars at the government rate (available to insiders) and then selling them for almost twice as many rials on the soaring black market. Some analysts and opposition political figures contend that Mr. Ahmadinejad deliberately worsened the currency crisis so that his cronies could generate profits this way.

More pointless, politics-driven economic warfare is on the way. At the prompting of United Against A Nuclear Iran, a neocon front group whose board members have already urged “military action” against Iran, the Senate Banking Committee recently approved a new round of sanctions that would force the “Swift” telecommunications industry to expel Iranian banks. The New York Times noted that the Swift sanctions “would be financially catastrophic for Iran if carried out fully, according to proponents and sanctions experts.”

One Democratic congressional aide who supports the Swift sanctions touted the Senate legislation as a collective strangulation of the Iranian population, remarking to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “every time that a new sanctions bill is passed, the noose gets tighter around the neck of the Iranian economy.”

A co-sponsor of the Swift sanctions, Republican Senator Mark Kirk, has been the largest single recipient of AIPAC-related donations in Congress. Kirk’s desire to collectively punish the Iranian people for anything their government might or might not have done is unconcealed. In an October 2011 appearance on a Chicago-area radio show, Kirk spent his time harumphing over a transparently trumped up Iranian government terror plot. But the host interrupted the senator with an important question: “Are you really going after the government of the country, or are you taking food out of the mouths of the citizens?‘”

Kirk’s reply neatly encapsulated the sadistic consensus in Washington: “It’s okay to take the food out of the mouths of the citizens from a government that’s plotting an attack directly on American soil.”

In 2005, a group of graduate students at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced and International Studies (SAIS) participated in the school’s annual diplomatic simulation. The high-pressure scenario required the students to negotiate a resolution to a standoff with a nuclear-armed Republic of Pakistan. Mara Karlin, a student known for her hawkish politics on Israel and the Middle East, played President of the United States.

Though most of the participants were confident they could head off a military conflict with diplomatic measures, Karlin jumped the gun. According to a former SAIS student, not only did Karlin order a nuclear strike on Pakistan, she also took the opportunity to nuke Iran. Her classmates were shocked. It was the first time in 45 years that a simulation concluded with the deployment of a nuclear weapon.

That year, Karlin received a plum job in the Bush administration’s Department of Defense where, according to her bio she was “intimately involved in formulating U.S. policy on Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Israel-Palestinian affairs.” Lebanon was a special area of focus for Karlin. She claims to have helped structure the Lebanese Armed Forces and coordinated relations between the US and Lebanese militaries.

According to the former SAIS student, Karlin was a favorite of Eliot Cohen, an ultra-hawkish professor of strategic studies at SAIS, which is regarded in American foreign policy circles as a training ground for the neoconservative movement. Through Cohen’s connections among the neocons occupying key civilian posts in Bush’s Defense Department, the former student claims Cohen was able to arrange an attractive sinecure for Karlin. Besides Karlin, the ex-SAIS student told me Cohen has promoted the career ambitions of many former pupils, including Kelly Magsamen, who worked under Cohen in the Bush administration and now oversees the Iran portfolio in the Obama administration’s State Department.

Today, Cohen is among Republican presidential front-runner Mitt Romney’s top campaign advisers. He is the primary author of Romney’s foreign policy white paper, which attacks Obama for “currying favor with [America’s] enemies” and “ostentatiously shunning Jerusalem.”

The paper urges a policy of regime change in Iran including possible coordination with Israel on military strikes to prevent the Iranian regime from developing a nuclear weapon. It is an aggressive Republican election season document presenting a concoction of post-9/11 unilateralism and unvarnished neo-imperialism as the antidote to a sitting president Cohen accused of “unilateral disarmament in the diplomatic and moral sphere.” More importantly, it suggests that a Romney administration’s foreign policy might look remarkably similar to – and perhaps more extreme than – that of the Bush administration.

Cohen rose through the ranks of the Republican foreign policy elite as a protégé of Paul Wolfowitz.Stephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at Harvard University’s School of Government who has been on the receiving end of aggressive attacks by Cohen, called Cohen “a classic neoconservative.” Walt said, “He is constantly fretting about alleged U.S. vulnerabilities, consistently supportive of increased defense spending, and generally inclined to favor U.S. intervention in other countries. Second, like virtually all neoconservatives, he is also deeply attached to Israel, as well as to the United States. I do not question his patriotism, but I think he tends to see U.S. and Israeli interests as more-or-less identical and doesn’t see a trade-off between support for one and support for the other.”

Cohen rose through the ranks of the Republican foreign policy elite as a protégé of Paul Wolfowitz, the former Assistant Secretary of Defense who is credited with playing a central role in the push for invading Iraq. In 1990, Wolfowitz secured a position for Cohen working beside him on the policy planning staff of the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Three years later, when Wolfowitz was appointed dean of SAIS, he began using his influence to propel Cohen’s career. According to a former State Department official who graduated from SAIS, it was through the beneficence of Wolfowitz that Cohen earned an endowed teaching position at SAIS as the Robert E. Osgood Professor of Strategic Studies.

In 1997, Wolfowitz and Cohen joined forces to form the Project for a New American Century, a neoconservative umbrella group that served as the key non-governmental vehicle for promoting the case for invading Iraq after 9/11. In the immediate wake of al-Qaeda’s attack on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., Cohen took to the media to map out the next phase of a grand global military venture that he coined, “World War IV.”

Describing Iraq as “the big prize,” Cohen urged a unilateral invasion of Iraq that would advance the ambitions of the now-discredited political charlatan Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress. Like so many of his neoconservative peers, Cohen claimed Saddam Hussein’s regime maintained “a connection with the 9/11 terrorists.” With the war deteriorating into a chaotic bloodbath and as his own son was called up for duty, Cohen criticized the Bush administration for “happy talk and denials of error.” However, he refused to admit fault for his role in selling Americans on the invasion.

Despite mildly dissenting from the White House line, Cohen continued his ascent, replacing Philip Zelikow as counselor to then-Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice in 2007. According to the former State Department official, Rice had almost no role in Cohen’s appointment. Instead, Cohen was recommended for the position by Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz. Cheney’s daughter headed the Iran Syrian Operations Group, a newly created, neoconservative-inspired initiative burrowed within the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. At the time of Cohen’s appointment, Rice was attempting to open diplomatic lines to Iran, North Korea, and Syria – a move Cohen and the Cheneys fiercely opposed.

A few months after Bush left office, the former State Department official said Cohen and Wolfowitz rewarded their neoconservative fellow traveler Eric Edelman – a former Defense Department official during the later Bush years – with a visiting scholarship at SAIS. In private, Johns Hopkins alumni expressed outrage at the installment of Edelman, a career diplomat with no academic background, accusing the neoconservatives of exploiting SAIS to create a system of political patronage.

Cohen advised that the “US actively seek the overthrow of the Islamic Republic…through every instrument of U.S. power, soft more than hard.”Cohen’s extensive web of foreign policy and military connections forms a seamless line to Tel Aviv. There, on the top floor of one of the office buildings known as “HaKirya,” is the office of one of Cohen’s former pupils, Aviv Kochavi. Kochavi is now the director of Israeli military intelligence, making him one of the most quietly influential figures in the country. In 2006, Kochavi, who also holds a philosophy degree, boasted to the Israeli architect and anti-occupation activist Eyal Weizmann about how he and his troops crushed Palestinian resistance cells in Nablus through the use of “inverse geometry” and “micro-tactical actions” inspired by the theories of post-structuralist philosophers like Deleuze and Guattari. On February 2, Kochavi appeared at the annual Herzliya Conference to issue grave warnings about the rapid progress of Iran’s nuclear program, suggesting that sanctions and diplomacy have failed, and that more aggressive action might be required.

Despite Cohen’s deep Israeli ties, he has proven extremely sensitive to critiques of the connection. When Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, the latter a professor of International Relations at the University of Chicago, published their widely debated paper on the Israel lobby in 2006, Cohen authored one of the first attempts to discredit their thesis about a loose coalition of individuals and organizations creating political pressure to move US foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction. In an op-ed in the Washington Post, Cohen accused the authors of “kooky academic work” and “obsessive and irrationally hostile beliefs about Jews.”

“Cohen’s rather hysterical reaction to our work was both typical and easy to explain,” Walt remarked. “Given that he and other neoconservatives had played a key role in convincing George Bush to invade Iraq in 2003, he was understandably upset when we pointed this out and provided extensive documentation of their role in the run-up to this disastrous war. He could not refute our logic or our evidence, however, so he chose to misrepresent our views and smear us falsely as anti-Semites and conspiracy theorists.”

With the last battalions of US troops preparing to redeploy from Iraq to other conflict zones, Cohen is homing in on Iran. In a September 2009 editorial for the Wall Street Journal, he dismissed diplomacy and sanctions as feasible means of curbing Iran’s nuclear ambitions. “Pressure, be it gentle or severe, will not erase that nuclear program,” he wrote. “The choices are now what they ever were: an American or an Israeli strike, which would probably cause a substantial war, or living in a world with Iranian nuclear weapons, which may also result in war, perhaps nuclear, over a longer period of time.” While not ruling out the necessity of an American strike on Iranian facilities, Cohen advised that the “US actively seek the overthrow of the Islamic Republic…through every instrument of U.S. power, soft more than hard.”

As tensions between Israel and Iran rise to unprecedented levels, and Israel’s leadership beseeches the US to join a military strike on Iran, Cohen’s visions of regime change seem closer to realization than ever before. For him and the neoconservative policy elite, a Romney victory in November might deliver the next “big prize.”

I recently spent three weeks in Lebanon to research the Palestinian refugee situation and the effects of the uprising in Syria on the region. I will be writing extensively about my trip when I return from Israel-Palestine later this month. For now, I have posted my appearance on Transit, a current affairs/political interview program on Lebanon’s Future TV (the official network of the Hariri family’s Future Party). To my complete surprise, the producers decided to air the complete, uncensored “Feeling the Hate in Jerusalem” video in the middle of the interview. The video punctuated a lengthy discussion of issues ranging from AIPAC to the Tea Party to the Palestinian statehood resolution to Barack Obama’s disappointing presidency. I appear at the 1 minute mark in the first clip:

On May 22, thousands of supporters of America’s most powerful pro-Israel lobbying group, the America-Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, converged on Washington for the group’s annual conference. For two days they watched Democratic and Republican congressional leaders pledge their undivided loyalty to the state of Israel, and by extension, to AIPAC’s legislative agenda. Speeches by President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu highlighted the conference, with Obama attempting to clarify his statement demanding that 1967 borders be the “starting point” for negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

I interviewed several AIPAC delegates in the streets outside the conference. While few, if any, of them were able to demonstrate the slightest degree of sophistication in their understanding of the Israel-Palestine crisis, they had been briefed inside on how to respond to critics. No one I spoke to would concede that Israel occupied any part of Palestinian territory; none would concede that Israel had committed acts of indiscriminate violence or that it had transferred Palestinians by force; one interviewee could not distinguish Palestine from Pakistan. With considerable wealth and negligible knowledge — few had spent much time inside Israel — the delegates were easily melded by the cadre of neoconservative and Israeli “experts” appearing in AIPAC’s briefing sessions.

As the day wore on, many delegates waded into confrontations with members of Code Pink and Palestine solidarity demonstrators who had set up a protest camp across the street. With conflict intensifying on the sidewalk, Code Pink’s Medea Benjamin invited AIPAC delegates to express themselves from the protest stage. There, their most visceral feelings and deeply held views about Israel-Palestine crisis were revealed. See it for yourself.

The police investigation into the Itamar murders remains under a gag order. No individual Palestinian has been accused or even named as a suspect by the police. However, the resident of the neighboring Palestinian village Awarta, who have suffered for years from settler pogroms, are being collectively blamed and punished. According to a report by three International Solidarity Movement volunteers living under curfew in Awarta, Israeli soldiers and settlers have rampaged through the village in recent days, seeking murder suspects and the satisfaction that comes with retributive violence.

The soldiers reportedly destroyed property, stole money, defecated on the floors of homes, and blindfolded and beat residents, leaving one 28-year-old man so badly injured he had to be smuggled to a hospital in Nablus. Afterwards, approximately 300 masked settlers descended on the town and attacked its residents, breaking the arms of two men.

”Why do you have to punish all this people?” an ISM activist asked one of the soldiers. ”We have to punish these people so they will understand,” the soldier reportedly replied.

Jewish settlers from East Jerusalem filmed themselves humiliating a local Palestinian man, or, as they called it, “lower[ing] the confidence of Palestinians in the neighborhood].”

The one-two punch of settler “price tag” attacks carried out under the watch of the army and with the encouragement of state-funded religious nationalist rabbis is common all over the West Bank. Most Jewish Israelis view the army with reverence, and are reluctant to criticize its conduct under any circumstance. And though settler violence is considered a matter of controversy in Israeli society, a new poll shows that a staggering number of Israelis support the pogroms meted out by fanatical settlers against defenseless Palestinians.

A new Ynet-Gesher survey of 504 Jewish Israeli adults revealed that 46 percent of Israelis support settler “price tag” terror. Only 33 percent of those polled believed that price tag attacks were “never justified.” A sectoral breakdown shows that  a wide majority of religious nationalist and ultra-Orthodox respondents support the attacks: 56 percent of “traditional” types, 70 percent of those identifying as Orthodox, and 71 percent of the religious nationalists declared price tag violence to be justified. The most remarkable finding, in my opinion, is that 36 percent of secular respondents support settler terror. Even though 56 percent are against the practice, this is a remarkably high number for a population segment that lives primarily inside the Green Line. (The poll results and Ynet article detailing its contents are only in Hebrew at the moment).

68 percent of all of those polled stated their belief that rabbis had the power to stop price tag attacks (for fairly obvious reasons, this opinion is shared by only a minority of religious nationalist settlers). In Safed, a mixed city in Northern Israel that is home to Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, local Orthodox youth have staged a string of vigilante attacks on Palestinian-Israeli residents. The attacks include the stabbing of a Palestinian Christian man, the torching of Palestinian cars after a Jewish-Arab dialogue meeting, and a wave of racist vandalism. The violence follows Eliyahu’s declaration that the “seducing” of Jewish girls by Arab men was “a form of war” and his drafting of a letter forbidding renting property to Arabs. (55% of Jewish Israelis support the content of Eliyahu’s letter).

Above: Settlers assault Palestinian girls on their way to school in occupied Hebron

Eliyahu recently admitted that the Shin Bet beseeched him to speak out against price tag terror after the Itamar murders. “I told [the Shin Bet agent], if you expect me to stop someone engaging in ‘price tags,’ you’re mistaken,” Eliyahu said. “I don’t work for you. But I want to tell you that unless the government takes action, the public will feel a need to take action. And if you don’t act, even if I stand with my arms wide open, I won’t be able to stop those who would act.”

While taxpayer funded rabbis like Eliyahu (he is literally a state employee) incite with impunity against Palestinians, and cheer on the terror attacks that flow from their words, letters are circulating through the US Congress condemning the Palestinian Authority for incitement. One of the letters, co-authored by Senators Kirsten Gilibrand (D-NY) and Mark Kirk (R-IL) — Kirk is arguably AIPAC’s greatest tool in Congress — demanded that the Palestinian Authority “stop allowing the incitement that leads to such crimes [as the one committed in Itamar].” Though no individual Palestinian has been named as a suspect in the crime and the PA has condemned the murders, top lawmakers like Gilibrand and Kirk have already convicted every Palestinian, providing congressional cover for more destructive raids, vandalism, and price tag terror.