Haq's Musings

Riaz Haq writes this data-driven blog to provide information, express his opinions and make comments on many topics. Subjects include personal activities, education, South Asia, South Asian community, regional and international affairs and US politics to financial markets. For investors interested in South Asia, Riaz has another blog called South Asia Investor at http://www.southasiainvestor.com and a YouTube video channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkrIDyFbC9N9evXYb9cA_gQ

Showing posts with label Gaza Genocide. Show all posts

Sunday, October 5, 2025

Gaza Genocide: Is the Powerful Israel Lobby AIPAC Losing Influence?

Several Congressional Democrats have recently refused campaign contributions from AIPAC, the powerful Israel lobby, according to media reports. “Democrats who once counted AIPAC among their top donors have in recent weeks refused to take the group’s donations”, says a New York Times story titled "Democrats Pull Away From AIPAC, Reflecting a Broader Shift". “AIPAC is becoming an increasingly toxic brand for some Democrats on Capitol Hill," it says. It cites the example of Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., the minority leader, who has long been endorsed by the hardline AIPAC, has now chosen to accept the support of J Street, the competing Israel lobby that advocates a two-state solution.

Results of Recent Poll of American Jews. Source: Washington Post

A recent poll conducted by the Washington Post has found that "most (American) Jews (61%) say Israel is committing war crimes — and 39% say genocide — while often distinguishing between the country and its leadership". American Jews are particularly unhappy with the current right-wing government of Israel. 68% give negative marks to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership of Israel, with 48% it “poor” — a 20-percentage-point jump from a Pew Research Center poll five years ago.

Zohran Mamdani's campaign for the New York City mayor has brought into sharp focus the rapidly falling support for Israel amid the ongoing Gaza Genocide being perpetrated by the Zionist state. Newsweek has reported that Mamdani enjoys a 17-point lead among New York City's Jewish voters. Mamdani's top opponent Andrew Cuomo, former New York State governor, continues to significantly lag Mamdani in the polls in spite of having a huge funding advantage. A CBS News/YouGov poll (September 7–13) put Mamdani at 43% to Cuomo's 28%, a 15-point lead. A Marist survey the same week showed Mamdani ahead 45% to 24%, while Quinnipiac gave him a 22-point lead at 45% to 23%. An Emerson College poll for PIX11 and The Hill had a nearly identical 43% to 28% margin, and a New York Times/Siena poll (September 2–6) showed Mamdani leading 46% to 24%, according to Newsweek.

Mamdani's resounding win in New York City, a city that has the world's second largest Jewish population after Tel Aviv, will be particularly significant. It will send a clear message to American politicians, particularly Democrats, that they don't have to bow to hardline AIPAC to win elections.

Although the rebellion against AIPAC is mainly among Democrats, there's also growing anger among Trump's "America First" base who see the Trump Administration's policies as "Israel First". Prominent among Republican critics of Trump's pro-Israel policies are Republican Representatives Thomas Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene, talk show host Tucker Carlsen and former Trump advisor Steve Bannon.

Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of Anti-Defamation League, has blamed the shift in the US public opinion against Israel on popular social app TikTok. “We really have a TikTok problem, a Gen Z problem,” he said in a leaked audio recording. “The same brains that gave us Taglit, the same brains that gave us all of these amazing other innovations, need to put our energy towards this, like fast.”

TikTok is particularly popular among young people. It has carried viral short videos of the Gaza Genocide over the last two years. The pressure from the Israel lobby forced the sale of Chinese-owned TikTok to an American Zionist group led by Oracle's billionaire founder Larry Ellison. Ellison has given tens of millions of dollars to pro-Israel groups. He is reported to be among the six American Zionist billionaires supporting Israel's wartime economy.

Thursday, December 21, 2023

Bibi to Biden: "You Carpet Bombed Germany. You Dropped the Atom Bomb. A Lot of Civilians Died"

At a recent Democratic fundraiser organized by the Israel lobby in the United States, President Joseph R. Biden shared some details of the conversations he has had with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu about protecting civilians in Gaza. Justifying Israel's genocidal war on Gaza, Netanyahu told Biden: “You carpet-bombed Germany. You dropped the atom bomb. A lot of civilians died”. Netanyahu is “a good friend, but I think he has to change, and… This (extremist coalition) government in Israel is making it very difficult for him to move,” Biden told the attendees at the campaign fundraiser in Washington hosted by former AIPAC board chair Lee Rosenberg. Last month, Biden used the word “indiscriminate” to describe Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza, according to a report in the Times of Israel.

President Biden and Prime Minister Netanyahu

The Israel Lobby:

American Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC), also known as the Israel lobby, is considered the most powerful lobby in Washington D.C. The lobby has showered its friendly politicians with money from Jewish donors. It has also ensured the defeat of those politicians who dared to speak out against Israeli policies in the Middle East. As one former Democratic senator, Ernest Hollings, put it on leaving office, ‘you can’t have an Israeli policy other than what AIPAC gives you around here.’ Or as Ariel Sharon once told an American audience, ‘when people ask me how they can help Israel, I tell them: “Help AIPAC.”’

President Jimmy Carter who helped broker peace between Israel and Egypt knows the Israel lobby well. He told Amy Goodman of "Democracy Now" many years ago: "I think it’s accurate to say that not a single member of Congress with whom I’m familiar would possibly speak out and call for Israel to withdraw to their legal boundaries or to publicize the plight of the Palestinians or even to call publicly and repeatedly for good faith peace talks..... And I would say that if any member of Congress did speak out, as I’ve just described, they would probably not be back in the Congress the next term ".

Biden-Netanyahu Conversations:

President Biden recalled how during one of their many conversations since October 7, Netanyahu sought to justify the deaths of civilians in Gaza by recalling how many died in the US response to the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, according to the Times of Israel.

“You carpet-bombed Germany. You dropped the atom bomb. A lot of civilians died,” Biden quoted Netanyahu as having said. “They not only want to have retribution — which they should — for what Hamas did, but against all Palestinians… They don’t want anything to (do) with the Palestinians,” Biden said, reiterating the US stance that Hamas does not represent all Palestinians and that not all of Gaza should suffer because of the October 7 attack by Hamas on Israel.

It should be noted that the reason Netanyahu sounds American is because he was raised and educated in the United States. He is essentially an American who was born in Tel Aviv, raised in Philadelphia, and then returned to Israel after finishing higher education at MIT and Harvard.

The US and Israel:

While acknowledging the US role in killing large number of civilians during WW II, Biden pointed out to Netanyahu that the conventions and laws agreed to by the international community after the war were designed to stop the kind of excesses Netanyahu mentioned, such as the carpet bombing of Germany and the dropping of the atomic bombs on civilian populations in Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

“I said, ‘Yeah, that’s why all these institutions were set up after World War II to see to it that it didn’t happen again,'” Biden said he told Netanyahu. Biden also advised Netanyahu not to repeat the mistakes the US made in response to the terrorist attacks in New York in 2001. “Don’t make the same mistakes we made [after] 9/11. There was no reason why we had to be in a war in Afghanistan [after] 9/11. There was no reason why we had to do some of the things we did,” Biden said.

While Biden's response makes sense, it is hard not to see the parallels between the United States and Israel. Both of them are settler colonial societies built on genocide of the native populations and their replacement by Europeans. This process was endorsed by top British politicians like Winston Churchill.

This process of Israel's creation was endorsed by top British politicians like Winston Churchill. “I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger,” former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill told the Peel Commission in 1937, “even though he may have lain there for a very long time.” He denied that “a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the Black people of Australia,” by their replacement with “a higher grade race.”