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It's all about the Benjamins


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2019 Feb 14, 7:30am   1,214 views  10 comments

by MisdemeanorRebel   ➕follow (12)   💰tip   ignore  

Ilhan Omar to Keynote at a Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) Fundraiser.

https://www.conservativereview.com/news/money-politics-ilhan-omar-will-fly-la-fundraiser-terror-tied-cair/

It's all about the Benjamins, Baby.

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1   MisdemeanorRebel   2019 Feb 14, 7:57am  

Newly elected Rep. Ilhan Omar will jet off to Los Angeles next month to keynote a fundraiser for the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), a terror-tied organization that was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terrorist financing case in U.S. history.

On March 23, Omar will speak at CAIR-Los Angeles’ 4th Annual Valley Banquet, where tables will cost $500.

“CAIR-LA is honored to have Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-MN) as the featured speaker for the 4th Annual Valley Banquet,” reads a press release from the Los Angeles chapter of the group that was formed as a Hamas support network in the United States.

She will deliver her address alongside CAIR-Florida director Hassan Shibly, according to a CAIR flier promoting the event. Shibly is a dedicated Islamist and bigoted gay basher. A fan of radical clerics, he has routinely refused to categorize U.S.-designated terror groups Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations, according to the Clarion Project. Moreover, Shibly regularly takes to social media to demonize the U.S. military as equivalent to the jihadi terrorists that they are fighting.

The director of CAIR-Los Angeles is Hussam Ayloush, who, like many CAIR executives, has disturbing Islamist views. Following the tragic San Bernardino terrorist attacks, Ayloush suggested that the United States was “partly responsible” for the ISIS-led attack on innocents in California. “Let’s not forget that some of our own foreign policy, as Americans, as the West, have fueled that extremism,” he added. Ayloush has in the past described U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan as part of a campaign to instill “fear of the Muslims.”

2   Bd6r   2019 Feb 14, 8:24am  

MisterLearnToCode says
Ilhan Omar to Keynote at a Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) Fundraiser.

Why do you hate the correct type of diversity...
3   anonymous   2019 Feb 15, 12:13am  

If Ilhan Omar is a terrorist - then we should be trying Elliott Abrams for war crimes and crimes against humanity along with Dubya and his top administration officails.

Rep. Ilhan Omar Went After Elliott Abrams for Lying to Congress. Then He Did It Again.

President Donald Trump’s special envoy for Venezuela, appeared before the House Committee on Foreign Relations on Wednesday.

About two hours into the hearing, committee member Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., noted that Abrams pleaded guilty in 1991 to withholding information about the Iran-Contra affair from Congress. “I fail to understand,” Omar said, “why members of this committee or the American people should find any testimony that you give today to be truthful.”

Omar’s skepticism was well-founded: Just moments later, Abrams told her several egregious lies.

Abrams’s most notable lies occurred during this exchange about his actions as assistant secretary of state in the 1980s during the Reagan administration:

OMAR: On February 8, 1982, you testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about U.S. policy in El Salvador. In that hearing, you dismissed as communist propaganda reports about the massacre at El Mozote in which more than 800 civilians, including children as young as 2 years old, were brutally murdered by U.S.-trained troops. During that massacre, some of those troops bragged about raping a 12-year-old girl, girls, before they killed them. You later said that the U.S. policy in El Salvador was a “fabulous achievement.” Yes or no, do you still think so?

ABRAMS: From the day that President Duarte was elected in a free election, to this day, El Salvador has been a democracy. That’s a fabulous achievement.

Abrams’s words were “not only factually, demonstrably untrue, but grossly so,” according to Alejandro Velasco, a professor of modern Latin American history at New York University. His testimony, said Velasco, “continues a pattern he has shown since the 1980s of hubristically rejecting out of hand any suggestion that defeating social justice struggles in the 1980s, through the most brutal means, should in any way be seen as anything other than a resounding victory for the U.S.”

To start: When José Napoleón Duarte was elected president of El Salvador in 1984, it was not “a free election.”

Duarte was one of many Salvadoran politicians who spent time on the CIA’s payroll. In March 1980, he joined a junta that had recently seized power, and by the end of the year had become the junta’s head. He stayed there for the next year and a half — a period of stunning, gaudy brutality by the Salvadoran military against the country’s population. Tens of thousands were slaughtered with U.S support, including those killed during the El Mozote massacre described by Omar.

Pratap Chitnis, a member of the U.K. House of Lords, traveled to El Salvador to witness the 1984 election on behalf of the British Parliamentary Human Rights Group. “Crucial to the whole standing of the exercise,” he reported, “was the fact that no politicians to the left of [Duarte’s] Christian Democrats” could participate. Why? Because, said official British observers, “had these representatives campaigned openly, they would have run a very high risk of being assassinated” by right-wing death squads.

This was something like a U.S. presidential election in which the furthest-left candidate was Ted Cruz. Duarte’s only real competition was Roberto D’Aubuisson, founder of the ultraright wing ARENA party, who several years before had ordered the assassination of Óscar Romero, the beloved archbishop of San Salvador.

Many Salvadorans he encountered, Chitnis wrote, “laughed at the significance of the elections” given “the atmosphere of terror and despair, of macabre rumour and grisly reality.”

However, the Reagan administration realized that D’Aubuisson would be a PR disaster. So after enabling the elimination of El Salvador’s left, they intervened with massive covert support for Duarte, the “moderate.”

Thomas Carothers, a colleague of Abrams at the State Department, later wrote a book titled “In the Name of Democracy: U.S. Policy Toward Latin America in the Reagan Years.” Carothers was sympathetic to Abrams’s perspective and in fact, interviewed him for the book. Carothers states that “the administration approached the elections with two goals: ensuring that technically credible elections were held and that the Christian Democratic candidate, José Napoleón Duarte, won.”

To that end, Carothers said, the CIA provided “a significant amount of funds, possibly between $1 million and $3 million, for Duarte’s campaign.” In addition, the U.S. Agency for International Development overtly provided significant funds to help him. Jesse Helms, then North Carolina’s far-right senator and a supporter of D’Aubuisson, complained bitterly that the CIA bought the election for Duarte, whom he described as “a socialist.”

“An election was held within a very limited range of the political spectrum; choices were given but very few,” Chitnis wrote. “I asked relatives of the disappeared and brutally murdered, ‘Do you think things will be better now that President Duarte has been elected?’ ‘It was under President Duarte that these things happened in the first place’, they replied.”

Thus, Abrams obviously knows that this was no “free election.” As in the past, he was consciously attempting to deceive Congress.

Needless to say, it also is not the case that “El Salvador has been a democracy” since 1984. Control of the country remained in the hands of the military, with Duarte a largely powerless figurehead. The cruel war of the government against Salvadorans ground on for years. In 1986, the archbishop of El Salvador condemned indiscriminate bombing of civilians by the air force, and the establishment of free fire zones in which any inhabitants were deemed to be guerrillas and hence worthy targets.

When Duarte’s term was ending in 1989, the FMLN guerrilla group proposed a peace plan under which they would participate in the elections for a new president. Duarte rejected it, setting up a second election in which his party would be the left-most boundary of the possible. This time, however, ARENA “won.” According to the center-right Economist magazine, the “army frightened the voters, [ARENA] fixed the results, and its electoral commission delayed announcing them” until the vote tallies could be adjusted.

ARENA celebrated its democratic triumph with the notorious murder of six Jesuit priests and their housekeeper at Central American University in San Salvador. When Congress sent a delegation to investigate what was going on in El Salvador, they found that 14 of the top 15 highest-ranking Salvadoran military officers had ties to death squads.

By the time the next two elections came in 1994 and 1999, Abrams was out of office. Perhaps coincidentally, both were largely legitimate, at least formally. By 2004, Abrams was back in government in the George W. Bush administration, and the U.S. again attempted to intervene to pick the election’s winner. In 2009, with Abrams out of power once again, the FMLN won a presidential election for the first time.

More: https://theintercept.com/2019/02/14/ilhan-omar-elliott-abrams-hearing/
4   anonymous   2019 Feb 15, 12:16am  

MisterLearnToCode says
It's all about the Benjamins


Yes, yes it is. Benjamin's from the Isarelis so we continue to do their work for them. Oh, and the House of Saud as well.

What Ilhan Omar Said About AIPAC Was Right. By Ady Barkan

I’m ashamed to admit that endorsing AIPAC positions was all about the Benjamins for me and my candidate.

Over the weekend, Republican House minority leader Kevin McCarthy said he would seek to formally sanction the first two Muslim congresswomen, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, because their criticism of Israel’s occupation of Palestine was even more reprehensible than Congressman Steve King’s defense of white supremacy. What motivated McCarthy’s false accusations of anti-Semitism? On Twitter, Omar suggested, “It’s all about the Benjamins baby,” quoting Puff Daddy’s ’90s paean to cash money. Omar subsequently specified that she was talking about spending from the likes of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, better known as AIPAC, the powerful pro-Israel lobbying organization.

By Monday morning, AIPAC had mobilized its allies to condemn Omar’s comment for playing into centuries-old anti-Semitic tropes that wealthy Jews control the world. Even the Democratic leadership put out a statement condemning her. All because she dared to point out that the emperor has no clothes.

As a Jew, an Israeli citizen, and a professional lobbyist (ahem, activist), I speak from personal experience when I say that AIPAC is tremendously effective, and the lubricant that makes its operation hum is dollar, dollar bills.

In 2006, fresh out of college, I landed a job as the first real staffer on a long-shot Democratic congressional race in deep-red Ohio. My boss, Victoria Wulsin, was a charming hippie doctor with a lefty perspective on international affairs. She was skeptical of military force and opposed to the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

About a month after winning the Democratic primary, we were struggling to gain attention or money. Nobody gave us a chance to win. One political-action organization, however, did reach out to us. It wasn’t Emily’s List, although Vic was fiercely pro-choice. It wasn’t a labor union or even a doctors’ association. It was AIPAC.

A local Democratic volunteer leader of the Cincinnati AIPAC chapter sat down in Vic’s living room and I recall him saying that he would like to raise $5,000 for our campaign and would also like to see Vic take a public stance on two relatively obscure issues relating to Iranian sanctions, arms sales to Israel, or some other such topic that very few voters in the district cared about.

Vic and I both thought of ourselves as pro-peace, not pro-Israel. We both felt icky about doing it; it was too hawkish and too quid pro quo. But we were desperate. So I read the AIPAC position papers that the volunteer left with us, I wrote up a statement saying that Vic supported AIPAC’s stance on its two pet issues of the cycle, she approved it, I posted it online, and the checks promptly arrived in the mail thereafter. We didn’t win, but the money helped us get close.

It was, I am ashamed to say, definitely about the Benjamins. We never would have done it otherwise. AIPAC’s power is about more than money, certainly. It’s about great organizing (they built a local chapter, and sent a local Democratic volunteer emissary who then facilitated the contributions). It’s about diligence (they paid attention to Vic’s campaign long before anyone else, and were happy to donate to both us and the militaristic, pro-Likud Republican incumbent). Their lobbyists on the Hill are the best in the business, and their legislator junkets to the Holy Land are masterfully orchestrated. But money is central to the whole system.

Technically, AIPAC doesn’t make the political contributions. Instead, as it notes proudly on its website, individual members of its “Congressional Club,” like that Cincinnati resident, do the bundling and donating directly, both as individuals and through Political Action Committees that AIPAC and its members have set up.

Omar is right to point all this out. These dynamics are not unique to the Israel-Palestine issue, however, and there is no reason that Americans should be surprised or offended by what she and I are saying. The NRA and the broader gun lobby operate in the same way. Same with ExxonMobil and the fossil-fuel lobby. But since Omar and Tlaib are powerful new spokeswomen for the movement to end the Israeli occupation, delegitimizing them is a central aim of the Israel lobby.

AIPAC and its partners, which include Christian Zionists and military contractors, are a central pillar of the Israeli occupation. Without congressional support, the Likud/anti-Palestine/pro-occupation project would be radically undermined. The money that AIPAC and the rest of the lobby spend is indispensable to that work. That’s why they spend it. Pointing this out is not anti-Semitic.

https://www.thenation.com/article/ady-barkan-aipac-ilhan-omar/
5   anonymous   2019 Feb 15, 12:18am  

The U.S. has an Israeli foreign policy in the Middle East, a Saudi foreign policy in the Middle East, a Big Oil foreign policy in the Middle East
but no foreign policy for the good of the American People in the region - like getting the fuck out and staying the fuck out - period.
6   anonymous   2019 Feb 15, 3:53am  

llhan Omar, Anti-Semitism and AIPAC

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a political statement triggering evidence (mixed) about its own truth as dramatically as Ilhan Omar’s quip that pro-Israeli bias in congress is “about the Benjamins, baby”. It’s as if you wrote a letter criticizing the Post Office and had it returned to you with a USPS message stamped on it.

But let’s dig down one level. The criticism, partly fair, of Omar is that she bought into (so to speak) the anti-semitic slur that Jewish money constitutes a secret conspiracy against “the people”. This is the old socialism-of-fools stuff, endlessly recycled by bigots right up until this morning; see the demonization of George Soros, for instance. Because it exists, people who want to combat bigotry—and this includes progressive politicians—should build a giant moat around it and not go there. By suggesting that hidden Jewish money had bribed Congress into blind support for Israel, Omar crossed a line. It’s the same line that George Bush senior crossed with the Willie Horton ad, and that Trump crosses a dozen times every Twitter-soaked evening. Invoking a bigoted stereotype is a bad thing to do, especially for politicians with giant megaphones.

Yet the very response to Omar’s tweet demonstrated the truth she was stumbling for. A chorus of political and media honchos of every denomination, religious and political, rose up to denounce her. They didn’t make fine distinctions and they didn’t welcome a correction; their goal was to punish and silence. Sweeping accusations were made against Omar’s character, leaving the impression that any criticism of AIPAC, the powerful pro-Israel lobby, was proof of antisemitism. And this attempt to isolate and politically crush Omar was itself the embodiment of her protest. This is the power of AIPAC in action, the lobby that can’t be named, the doctrine—the transcendental importance of Israel and the rightness of its religious self-definition—that can’t be questioned.

So the truth content of the original Omar tweet depends on how we explain this onslaught. If it’s really just about the Benjamins (the hundred dollar bills with Ben Franklin looking back at us), that means she was being trashed, directly or indirectly, for pay. Politicians joined the mob either to protect their campaign revenue or shield themselves from other politicians defending their own campaign revenue. How likely is that? The answer depends on two prior questions: how important is campaign finance in setting the basic contours of US policy, and what proportion of this finance is controlled or strongly influenced by AIPAC?

These are questions for specialists in these areas, not me. I will go out on a limb, however, and say that the truth lies between the endpoints: some but not all of the bias in the US political system is attributable to the influence of big donors, and AIPAC has a substantial but far less than a complete lock on the flow of political money. You could compare it to other lobbies, like the NRA (National Rifle Association) and AARP (American Association of Retired Persons), both of which are feared for their ability to alter the balance of funding in competitive political contests. But neither of these two outfits is immune from attack, while AIPAC is. Gun control advocates go after the NRA all the time, and, while AARP is not exactly a political lightening rod, the complaint that greedy seniors are stealing money from our children is a popular meme on the Right. So AIPAC is different. This difference does not seem to be about money, at least not solely, as important as money is to the system and the groups that try to dominate it. AIPAC appears to possess a complementary form of power, perhaps rooted in the infrastructure of synagogues and other religious organizations as well as the allegiance of many socially prominent Jews active in secular organizations. When it marshals this network, you get the sort of response we saw to Omar.

This was a ferocious rebuke of a politician, clearly intended to be career-ending. It will be interesting to see if she can recover without abandoning her advocacy of Palestinians; I certainly hope so. The attack on Omar, however, is itself the embodiment of the fear all of her colleagues have to feel, that if they step out of line on Israel they will be crushed. Catering, intentionally or otherwise, to antisemitic tropes is completely unnecessary: the proof of the pudding is in the attack on it.

https://econospeak.blogspot.com/2019/02/test-tube-politics-llhan-omar-anti.html
7   Al_Sharpton_for_President   2019 Feb 15, 4:04am  

Kill the white debils!
8   MisdemeanorRebel   2019 Feb 15, 7:14am  

Kakistocracy says
But let’s dig down one level. The criticism, partly fair, of Omar is that she bought into (so to speak) the anti-semitic slur that Jewish money constitutes a secret conspiracy against “the people”. This is the old socialism-of-fools stuff, endlessly recycled by bigots right up until this morning; see the demonization of George Soros, for instance. Because it exists, people who want to combat bigotry—and this includes progressive politicians—should build a giant moat around it and not go there. By suggesting that hidden Jewish money had bribed Congress into blind support for Israel, Omar crossed a line. It’s the same line that George Bush senior crossed with the Willie Horton ad, and that Trump crosses a dozen times every Twitter-soaked evening. Invoking a bigoted stereotype is a bad thing to do, especially for politicians with giant megaphones.


LOL. Soros definitely pushes an agenda with huge amounts of cash: Open Borders, Anti-White, Militant Left-Wing Groups like and surprisingly, militantly Anti-Israel - he funds all kinds of Anti-Israel groups. Particularly the Open Society Groups which wants to weaken nation states and democracies in particular by eliminating their border controls.

There is no blind support for Israel: No nation has been beset by so many internal/external threats at such a degree for so long and behaved so well, particularly when the other side is well funded to keep going indefinitely and refuses peace offer after offer, making no reasonable counter-offers. Palestinians are the only "Refugees" in the world who maintain their refugee status even after settled somewhere else (Sarsour, her husband, her children, etc. are still considered refugees, though born in Brooklyn and owning multiple properties). A UN special rule just for Palestinians alone (not for Darfur, or the Hutu/Tutsi, or Syrians, or anybody else) Pakistan cancelled an election and committed Genocide of 500,000+ in Bangladesh when their order was threatened by East Pakistan refusing to elect the "Right People".

America's support for Pakistan is the real problem in South Asia.
9   anonymous   2019 Mar 5, 7:39am  

MisterLearnToCode says
America's support for Pakistan is the real problem in South Asia.


On am equal basis is ignoring the threat coming from Radical Islam. Pretending something doesn't exist or isn't the threat is is and declaring victory because a Caliphate but not the enemy or ideology was defeated is nonsense.
10   Ceffer   2019 Mar 5, 11:33am  

It is suspicious that she is sponsoring collateral legislation to improve compact plastic explosives technology.

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