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perpetual motions....

Democratic Party leaders had a chance this week to push back against Israel’s violent expansionism and the Israel lobby’s massive political spending in the United States.

Once again, Democrats chose instead to punt the issue despite plummeting public support for Israel, both among their base and the wider U.S. public, ahead of the midterms. 

 

Democrats Reject Resolution Condemning AIPAC Money in Primaries

“Democrats chose genocide over winning in 2024,” one Palestinian rights advocate said. “When does this stop?”

By Mike Ludwig , TRUTHOUT

 

At a meeting in New Orleans on April 9, members of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) voted down a symbolic resolution to limit the “growing influence” of dark money and corporate outside spending on Democratic races, particularly the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which recently pumped tens of millions of dollars into Democratic primaries in New Jersey and Illinois.

A draft of the resolution stated that “massive outside spending” by groups on candidates based on “positions regarding international conflicts or foreign governments” raises concerns about undue influence on debate and policy making, potentially “constraining elected officials’ ability to represent the views of their constituents.” The resolution specifically called out AIPAC by name.

The DNC Resolutions Committee also tabled a pair of resolutions to recognize a Palestinian state and support restrictions on aid to units in the Israeli military accused of war crimes. Those resolutions were referred to the party’s nascent Middle East Working Group, which was created last year as it became increasingly clear that public opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza cost Democrats votes in the 2024 elections.

DNC members also sent to the working group a resolution calling for an end to the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran and pointing to potential war crimes in the suspected U.S. strike on a girls’ school in Minab that killed at least 175 people, most of them children, on February 28. 

The Middle East Working Group, which includes members with diverging views on Israel, held its fourth meeting this week but has been slow to agree on an agenda. Hamid Bendaas, communications director at the Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) Policy Project, said the group does not appear on track to accomplish much before voters go to the polls in November.

“The Democratic Party seems asleep at the wheel and is not responding to this very quick and very influential public opinion shift on Israel,” Bendaas told Truthout in an interview.

However, some Democrats know that the party cannot forever avoid either U.S. financial and military support for Israel’s expansionist conquests or the influence of AIPAC. One DNC member speaking on the condition of anonymity said they had received direct calls about the resolutions from “two presidential aspirants who would have to answer for the DNC’s positions on Israel and AIPAC if they run,” according to Politico.

Meanwhile, Israel’s violent apartheid and ethnic cleansing, perpetrated with U.S. weapons and funding, continues unabated, according to the American Friends Service Committee’s Just Peace Global Policy Director Mike Merryman-Lotze.

“The failure of the DNC to take even minimal action in the face of ethnic cleansing and genocide is shameful,” Merryman-Lotze said.

Merryman-Lotze said the DNC’s tabling of the resolutions on a Palestinian state and military support to Israel came as the Israeli government announced 34 new settlements in the occupied West Bank, where extremist settlers are violently forcingPalestinians from their homes with support from the Israeli government and military. The DNC resolutions reaffirm that such settlements are illegal under international law.

“The approval of these new settlements follows a year of extreme violence by the Israeli military and settlers in the West Bank that has killed hundreds of Palestinians and displaced tens of thousands from their homes,” Merryman-Lotze said in an email. “Despite the six-month-old ceasefire, Israel has bombed Gaza on 36 of the last 40 days, killing at least 107 people.”

In a memo urging DNC members to adopt the resolutions on Palestine and AIPAC, IMEU pointed to polls showing the vast majority of Democrats (77 percent in August 2025) agree with leading human rights groups that Israel is committing the crime of genocide in Gaza. Support for providing U.S. military aid to Israel has plummeted across the political spectrum, including among Republicans and especially younger voters. 

New polling found notably strong support for Palestinian rights in Texas, a historically red state. According to a poll released on April 6 by the IMEU Policy Project and conducted by Data for Progress, 76 percent of voters in the March 3 Texas Democratic Senate primary agree that Israel is committing genocide, and 80 percent support ending weapons funding to Israel.

Nationwide, a Pew Research survey released on April 7 found that 80 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents hold unfavorable views of Israel, compared to 69 percent in 2024 and 53 percent in 2022.

Bendaas said IMEU consulted with Democrats on the party’s own autopsy of the 2024 elections. That autopsy concluded that Kamala Harris lost significant support in the presidential race due to the Biden administration’s policy of providing seemingly limitless funding for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. 

“We are just not seeing any movement from the Democratic Party leadership to adjust from this reality,” Bendaas said. “There’s no urgency to react to what will clearly be an issue for many of their own voters in the November midterms.”

DNC Chair Ken Martin touted a resolution passed on April 9 that condemns the “corrosive influence” of dark money on Democratic primaries but does not single out AIPAC or any other specific interest group.

“We had various resolutions that focused on different industries and groups, and instead of going one-by-one, we passed a blanket repudiation,” Martin said on social media, adding that he supports an end to dark money in politics.

Brian Romick, president and CEO of Democratic Majority for Israel, applauded the DNC for rejecting a “set of divisive, anti-Israel resolutions.”

“These measures would be a gift to Republicans, would further fracture our party, and do nothing to bring Israelis and Palestinians closer to peace,” Romick said in a statement that did not mention AIPAC by name.

However, Bendaas said that Democrats face intense pressure from powerful lobbyists at AIPAC to take positions that do not align with their own voters. AIPAC is funded by Republican billionaire mega-donors such as Miriam Adelson and Paul Singer, and in 2024 the group was the largest source of GOP donations funneled into in Democratic elections. AIPAC’s $100 million in campaign spending in 2024 exceeded the spending of any organization in a single cycle in U.S. history.

“They are invested in defeating Democrats, and they are also flooding money into Democratic elections to support people who do not have voter support otherwise,” Bendaas said. “And this is an existential risk for Democratic Party if you are being propped up by the opposition.”

Bendaas said there appears to be an intentional strategy among AIPAC and its mega-donors to weaken and hollow out the Democratic Party as its voter base increasingly turns against Israel.

“Democrats chose genocide over winning in 2024,” Bendaas said. “When does this stop?”

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https://truthout.org/articles/democrats-reject-resolution-condemning-aipac-money-in-primaries/

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

         RABID ATHEIST.

         WELCOME TO THIS INSANE WORLD….

rape....

 

Israeli soldiers raped her. Australian customs threatened her

by Andrew Brown

 

A Gaza flotilla activist was raped and tortured by a foreign military; her own country ransacked her luggage, seized her phone and laptop. Andrew Brown with Juliet Lamont’s story.

Hold two images in your head at once.

The first. An Australian citizen, face down on the deck of an Israeli naval vessel in international waters, cable tied and shackled, soldiers standing on her legs, a rifle butt smashing into her head each time she turns her face away, water thrown at her until it fills her mouth and nose and she is certain she is drowning. Waterboarding without the board.

Then a darkened shipping container. Five soldiers. Raped from behind, bent double in a chokehold, while one soldier rips fistfuls of hair from her scalp. She fixed her mind on his boots and pushed everything behind her far away, until it was happening to a woman she could watch from somewhere else.

It was the only way to live through it.

The second image. An Australian citizen who served in the Israel Defence Forces, the army, before the International Court of Justice on charges of genocide, strolled off a flight at Sydney Airport. Nobody stops him. Nobody asks what he did. He gets his coffee in Double Bay by mid-morning.

Now guess which one Australian Border Force detained, searched, and threatened with arrest.

Juliet Lamont came home from being raped and tortured by a foreign military, and her own country ransacked her luggage, seized her phone and laptop, and told her she was under arrest unless she surrendered her passcodes.

Her government did not protect her. Her government investigated her.

Planned and systematic. Right from the top.

Call the crime by its name. The seizure of 42 unarmed civilian boats carrying medicine and prosthetics, 270 nautical miles out in international waters, is piracy.

What followed was an industrial process. Four hundred and twenty-eight civilians from thirty countries fed one by one through a container the survivors called the torture tunnel, by soldiers in balaclavas who hide their faces because they know The Hague is coming.

They knew Lamont’s name. Out of 428 people, hers. “Welcome to Israel, Juliet,” an officer purred. “You’re gonna really enjoy this.”

Weeks later, at a forensic examination in Tweed Valley Hospital, it was the nurses’ latex gloves that broke her. She had seen them before. Her rapists wore them. No DNA. No evidence of their crimes. The men who broke her coccyx gloved up before they touched her, so that this exact examination would come up empty.

That is not soldiers losing control. That is planning, and it comes from the top. Israel has denied everything through a spokesperson. A denial from a military whose soldiers glove up before a rape is not a denial. It is a confession of method.

The violence followed the survivors into the desert. On the night of 20 May, Lamont’s daughter Isla, a 25-year-old Australian youth worker, was dragged shackled from her Naqab prison cell to a room of armed soldiers. Her own published words: “They pulled down my pants to my ankles, where the shackles were, and my underpants, and took off my top, unclipped my bra. That’s when there were, like, four soldiers in there with a gun to my head,

saying they will shoot me if I don’t say I love Israel.

A loyalty oath, extracted at gunpoint, from a stripped and shackled Australian woman. Her mother was somewhere in the same prison. Neither knew what was being done to the other.

At every stage, the fear was the product. Lamont believed she was drowning twenty minutes into captivity. Cable tied in stress positions for five hours in the midday heat, the Israeli anthem on a loop, she calmly concluded they would all be lined up, shot, and thrown in the ocean. A soldier strolled the lines saying, I feel like killing somebody today, it’s going to be one of you.

A worthless passport

An Australian passport is supposed to mean that the government stands behind you. Lamont carried hers through the container, through Kesiot Prison, and home, and at every point it was worth precisely nothing. DFAT officials photographed survivors hugging for the website and refused every actual request. Then Border Force gave her a homecoming interrogation.

Meanwhile, roughly 800 Australians have returned from IDF service without one phone seized or one question asked. Australia arrests citizens who flew drones for Ukraine, an ally. It jailed people for a decade for merely talking about joining ISIS. Service in a military facing genocide charges earns a sunny walk through customs.

The double standard is not a flaw in the system. It is the system.

When 34 Australian women were invasively searched at Doha airport in 2020, Canberra erupted within days. Flying rights threatened, a major deal killed, and no proof demanded first. Qatar could be punished. Israel must be protected, even from the testimony of raped Australians.

Penny Wong, champion of women, would not raise her eyes to the survivors in Parliament House, then called for the Israeli government to investigate itself. The rapists will audit the rapes. She offered a meeting with some of the victims after 11 pm. It never happened.

The media completed the abandonment. CNN and the New York Times found this story. The SMH and the Telegraph could not. And when ABC‘s 7.30 sat survivor Neve O’Connor before Sarah Ferguson, the very morning she landed, Ferguson cross-examined her like a hostile witness.

The same interviewer was rightly hailed for the dignity of her Gisèle Pelicot interview. The difference was not the credibility of the women. It was the identity of the perpetrators.

Make it cost

The survivors’ demands are the bare minimum of a self-respecting nation. Expel the Israeli ambassador. An independent investigation, not a perpetrator’s self-audit. End the two-way arms trade. Sanctions. Bar dual citizens from IDF service. All ignored, and they will stay ignored exactly as long as ignoring them remains free of consequences.

So make it cost. Ring your federal MP and ask one question. Do you believe Juliet Lamont? Make them answer on the record, because every evasion is an answer too. Say her name. Say Isla’s. Say Neve O’Connor’s. The lobby’s entire strategy is silence, and

silence cannot be manufactured without your cooperation.

The gloves were meant to erase the evidence. They cannot erase the witness. No glove has ever been made that fits over a story.

Believe her. Then make Canberra act as it should.

https://michaelwest.com.au/israeli-soldiers-raped-her-australian-customs-threatened-her/

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91qEcnBgtEk

 

==================

 

Foreign Minister Penny Wong and Greens Senator David Shoebridge clash in a heated Senate Estimates exchange over Gaza, Palestine recognition and Australia’s response to the humanitarian crisis.

The confrontation centres on calls to assist Palestinians seeking evacuation from Gaza, Australia’s recognition of the State of Palestine, and the government’s refusal to formally accept the credentials of a Palestinian ambassador. Wong accuses Shoebridge of spreading misinformation and exploiting grief for political purposes, while Shoebridge presses the government on what practical steps it is taking.

https://michaelwest.com.au/penny-wong-explodes-over-palestine-questions-in-senate-estimates-michael-west-media/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8rObJqyYJM

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJpRBvU_vUU

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

         RABID ATHEIST.

         WELCOME TO THIS INSANE WORLD….

 

robbery....

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - Israel plans to allocate over $350 million to establish 61 settlements on the West Bank of the Jordan River, Axios journalist Barak Ravid reported on Thursday, citing a government directive he reviewed.

"The Israeli cabinet is expected to approve on Thursday a plan to fund the de facto establishment of 61 new settlements in the occupied West Bank... A source familiar with the proposal said the government is expected to allocate more than $350 million over several years to move 61 newly authorized settlements from paper to reality," Ravid wrote on X.

The plan includes funding for temporary housing complexes and public infrastructure, marking one of the most significant settlement expansion moves in recent decades, the journalist said.

Israeli settlement activity on the West Bank remains a major point of contention with the international community and the Palestinian Authority. Palestinians view this as a policy of entrenching the Jewish state on their territories.

At the end of May, the European Union imposed sanctions on several individuals and organizations involved in violating Palestinian rights on the West Bank as part of Israeli settlement activities.

https://sputnikglobe.com/20260611/israel-preparing-to-create-61-settlements-on-west-bank--reports-1124296567.html

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

         RABID ATHEIST.

         WELCOME TO THIS INSANE WORLD….

 

OUR HEARTS BLEED FOR ALL THE FAMILIES AND COMMUNITIES AFFECTED BY THE TRAGIC ACT OF TERRORISM AT BONDI.
THE JEWISH COMMUNITY IN AUSTRALIA DESERVES AS MUCH PEACE AS ALL THE PEOPLE AROUND THE WORLD.

AND WE MEAN IT.

 

SEE ALSO: 

apologies for being correct about showing netanyahu being a genocidal maniac....

 

in absentia.....

 

REMINISCING...

 

In 2010, McGeough travelled on a Gaza-bound flotilla, reporting for The Sydney Morning Herald and Brisbane Times[4] from aboard the MV Samoud (also known as the MV Challenger I).[5] When Israeli forces boarded the flotilla's vessels on 31 May, McGeough and Herald photographer Kate Geraghty were among those detained.[6] In an audio transmission sent shortly before the MV Samoud was intercepted, he said:

"At 4.20(am local time) (11.20am Sydney time) we realised all communications on the boat were jammed, 4.22 (am) – we see two zodiacs moving in, pressing through. Two more zodiacs. Now there are five of them astern of us. There's white wakes on black water. Search lights on one of the cargo ships and from the Turkish ferry are picking up the zodiacs now."[5]

The following day, Fairfax confirmed that McGeough had, along with Geraghty, been detained by Israel in the city of Beersheba. According to the Herald's editor Peter Fray, McGeough turned down the option of being deported immediately, in return for signing a form in which he would have admitted entering Israel illegally.[6]When meeting with Australian and Irish consular officials in Beersheba's Ela prison, McGeough told them that he intended to challenge attempts by Israeli authorities to deport him.[7]

However, Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Herald confirmed on 3 June that both McGeough and Geraghty had been taken to Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv to be deported.[8]McGeough said that he had left "on legal advice that we will be able to appeal our deportation in absentia".[8]

Speaking to the Herald from Istanbul, McGeough described his treatment as "an absolute disrespect by Israel", accusing Israeli authorities of "a total disrespect to the fundamentals of democracy, and the fundamentals of the rights of journalists under the Geneva Convention".[9][10]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_McGeough?ysclid=mqa720njqs725784576

 

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

         RABID ATHEIST.

         WELCOME TO THIS INSANE WORLD….