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Written by Eric Zuesse
On Wednesday, July 19th, the Asian-American Sharon Zhang headlined “Only 9 House Reps Vote Against Resolution Denying Israeli Apartheid” and reported that on the prior day, the U.S. House passed 412 to 9 “a resolution vowing perpetual allyship with Israel and denying the country’s apartheid against Palestinians.” Zhang wrote:
In a fiery speech on the House floor Tuesday, Tlaib — the sole Palestinian member of Congress — rebuked lawmakers for “reaffirming Congress’s support for apartheid.”
“Let’s just get the record straight here… The United Nations, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Israel’s own largest human rights organization, B’Tselem, all agree that Israel is an apartheid state. To assert otherwise, Mr. Speaker, in the face of this body of evidence, is an attempt to deny the reality and to normalize violence of apartheid,” Tlaib said.
“This week, we’re gonna hear consistently people touting about, ‘oh, this is bipartisan support here.’ Well don’t forget: This body, this Congress, supported a South African apartheid regime, and it was bipartisan as well,” she continued.
The lawmaker went on to quote Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s own words about his regime’s hatred of Palestinians.
“Beat them up, not once but repeatedly, beat them up … until it’s unbearable,” Netanyahu once said, as Tlaib noted. She pointed out another time, recently, when Netanyahu said that Israel must “crush” Palestinians’ hopes for sovereignty, as well as when former defense minister Rabbi Eli Ben-Dahan said in 2013 that Palestinians are “beasts” and “not human.”
All of the 9 who voted against the Resolution were Democrats who had pro-Palestinian constituencies; and, so, the 412 supporters of the Resolution had anti-Palestinian and pro-Israel constituencies: it was unanimously a vote for and against ethnic groups not about matters of ethics. Truth was irrelevant.
Furthermore, when Tlaib said “This body, this Congress, supported a South African apartheid regime, and it was bipartisan as well,” her suggestion there that congressional support was as unanimous for racism then as it is now was false, because there was nothing comparable to today’s 412-to-9 support for apartheid in South Africa; such unanimity supporting that apartheid did not exist. The unanimity of American support for racism today exceeds by far what existed back in the 1970s concerning South Africa. Only 1% of Americans are Muslims (and so sympathize with the victims of Israel’s racism), but 12% are and were Blacks (and so sympathized with the victims of South Africa’s racism) at the time when South Africa’s racism was the issue in America. So: there was much more opposition to South Africa’s racism then than there is to Israel’s racism today (and ever since Israel was founded in 1948). Bigotry is the same regardless whether on racial or religious grounds, and is normal in every country, but perhaps especially in America, where truth has so little impact as to produce a 412-to-9 House vote against truth. The 412 who voted for that Resolution were voting not for truth but to ‘justify’ the lies they were espousing in it — as-if their lying would change what is true. It’s magical thinking: that ‘truth’ is whatever they believe; not that they believe whatever is true. Or else, they knew that it’s false, but endorsed it anyway.
Also worth pointing out is that all 9 who voted on July 19th against Israel’s racism have voted for U.S. imperialism and are almost consistently neoconservatives (U.S. imperialists); so, have no ‘moral’ compass except whatever happen to be the particular prejudices of their congressional districts — and in virtually NO congressional district is U.S. imperialism (the control over the U.S. Government by the billionaires who control the U.S. weapons-manufacturers and other ‘Defense’ contractors) a matter that excites the voters even nearly to the extent that ethnic prejudices do. In politics, ethnics trump ethics every time. And truth counts virtually nil (as it did in that 412-to-9 vote). Maybe the percentage of people for whom truth comes first is one in a thousand; but, anyway, it’s politically insignificant.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.
