Pro-Israeli Money Defeats Pro-Palestine Candidates

by Alexander Cockburn

Yet when a torrent of money from out-of-state American Jewish organizations smashed David Hilliard, first elected black congressperson in Alabama since Reconstruction, you could have heard a mouse cough. Hilliard had made the fatal error of calling for some measure of even-handedness in the Middle East. So he was targeted by AIPAC and the others. Down he went, defeated in the Democratic primary by Artur Davis, a black lawyer who obediently sang for his supper of the topic of Israel.

Then it was McKinney's turn. A terrific liberal black congresswoman. Like Hilliard she wasn't cowed by the Israel right-or-wrong lobby and called for real debate on the Middle East. And she called for a real examination of the lead-up to 9/11. So the sky fell in on her. Torrents of American Jewish money showered her opponent, a black woman judge called Denise Majette. Buckets of sewage were poured over McKinney's head in The Washington Post and The Atlanta Constitution.

Here's how it worked: McKinney saw what happened to Hilliard and that American Jewish money was pumping up Majette's challenge. So she went to Arab-American groups to try to raise money to fight back. This allowed Tom Edsall to attack her in The Washington Post as being in receipt of money from pro-terror Muslims. Lots of nasty-looking Arab/Muslim names suddenly filled Edsall's stories.

Now just suppose someone started looking at names in the pro-Israel groups funding Majette, who by mid-August had raised twice as much money as McKinney. Aren't they supporting and helping fund terror that has U.S.-made F-16s machine-gunning kids in Gaza? What's the game here? It's the reiteration of the same message delivered to politicians down the years, as when Senator Charles Percy went down. Put your head over the parapet on the topic of Israel and the Palestinians, and we'll blow it off.

Oh, and when furious blacks start denouncing the role of outside Jewish money in the onslaughts on Hilliard and McKinney, what then? There'll be intricate articles with intricate exit poll calculations promoting the conclusion that the money from the Jewish groups "wasn't a factor." Then there'll be an avalanche of hysterical columns about the ever-present menace of black anti-Semitism. More spleen the ILWU? That's the West Coast Longshoremen. Their contract expired at the end of June. The contract is being renewed on a daily basis. The employers are playing very tough, well aware that the Bush high command has told the ILWU leaders that Bush would invoke Taft Hartley, bring in troops if necessary, destroy the ILWU as a bargaining agent for the whole West Coast. Separately, Tom Ridge, calling in his capacity as chief of Homeland Security has done some heavy breathing in the ear of ILWU leaders about the inadvisability of a strike at this time.

The ILWU's coastwide contract was won in the 1934 strike, along with the hiring hall, which replaced the old shape-up system where the boss could keep out organizers and anyone liable to cause trouble. These are bedrock issues for which strikers fought and died in 1934, in San Francisco and in Seattle.

The West Coast Longshoremen stand as a beacon of what union organizing can do. Of course the Bush White House yearns to destroy it, maybe using the War on Terror as half a pretext. If ever there was time for solidarity, this is it.

Final splenetic thought on Paul Krugman. Krugman? The economist and New York Times columnist has just conceded that maybe neo-liberal policies haven't worked too well in Latin America. Look it up. It's in his column for August 9, "The Lost Continent." He spent 184 words on the matter. "Why hasn't reform worked as promised? That's a difficult and disturbing question."

Well, gee, Paul, since you constitute the entirety of the Democratic Party's opposition to the Bush administration, I know you're as busy as hell. But since you and your crowd supervised a good deal of the economic destruction of Latin America, and your economic faction offered all the basic rationales for that devastation, I hope you return to the problem. Maybe you won't be so snooty about the opponents of "free trade." Maybe even have a quiet word with Tom Friedman.