On Friday morning, part of the Quba Islamic Institute in Houston went up in flames, and local firefighters spent over an hour battling the blaze before extinguishing it, saving the institute's school and mosque. The building set ablaze, which stored religious books, was completely destroyed, and came after the center's staff chased off a masked man from the premises earlier this week.

Houston officials believe the fire was set intentionally, and many are calling for this to be investigated as a hate crime. Unfortunately, the hate which likely ignited this fire wasn't just contained to the blaze, for as news of the fire spread, a retired Houston-area firefighter who still (update: no longer) volunteers for Crystal Beach Fire & Rescue posted

Muslim-Americans in Houston, shaken by this attack, were already shaken not just by the Chapel Hill shooting, but by the bigoted rush of white Americans arguing that the execution of three Muslim-Americans was really just about a parking dispute. They were already shaken because they know to be true what family of the victims understand: that this wasn't about parking, but the same hatred which ignited their place of worship in Houston. They were already shaken by the brutality of the crime in Chapel Hill — leaked information indicates the three young citizens were lined up on the ground, kneeling, and shot in the back of their heads execution style. And they were already shaken knowing that, had a Muslim perpetrated this crime, it would have been proclaimed a terror attack.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/02/14/1364404/-As-Houston-Islamic-Center-Burns-Firefighter-Posts-Let-it-burn-block-the-fire-hydrant?detail=facebook

Update: Politico is reporting that Vice President Joe Biden will be out of town when Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is scheduled to come to Washington to address a joint session of Congress, March 3.


The vice president’s office on Friday confirmed the plans to skip the March 3 speech.

“We are not ready to announce details of his trip yet, and normally our office wouldn’t announce this early, but the planning process has been underway for a while,” a spokesperson for the office said.

Amazing. This will give permission to a lot of Democrats to make other plans and will embarrass the rightwing prime minister. Even as various Jewish organizations are saying they are going to be collecting the names of those who don’t show up. This is a big name alright!

Original post: Let’s keep the pot boiling over the scandal of Netanyahu’s planned speech to a joint session of Congress to push the U.S. to attack Iran, why don’t we?

The latest news is that there are now a handful of Democratic congressmen who say they won’t attend the speech, but the Democratic leadership is trying to hold the line on defections. The Democrats don’t want a wedge driven between the parties over their love for Israel. So while House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi says the invitation to Netanyahu was a mistake and the speech ought to be cancelled, she also said yesterday she’s going to attend the speech. No one should be using the word “boycott” about the Democratic leadership!


“I don’t think anybody should use the word ‘boycott,'” Pelosi said in her weekly press conference.

Boycott was the word of the day yesterday, re the Democratic leadership’s anger over the speech.

Pelosi says the speech is so awful that “maybe we need to review the idea” of foreign leaders giving speeches to joint sessions of Congress. But in her remarks (at 1:15 here), you will see that her entire concern is the U.S. meddling in Israeli politics — Netanyahu’s campaign ahead of the March 17 elections — and not a word about Israel and its lobby meddling in our Iran policy. No, that’s just fine.


We have great friendships in terms of country to country, leaders to leaders; it’s really something that we should be able to resolve. Maybe we have to even review the idea of joint sessions of congress because they should not be a political arena two weeks before an election. Some people just think it’s outrageous. Some staunch supporters of Israel call me and tell me, it’s outrageous– and they’re supporters of Netanyahu– that our floor of the House would be used, exploited in that way, for a political purpose, in Israel and the United States.”

So you have to be a staunch supporter of Israel to object to the speech. Netanyahu also is worried about the political fallout. He’s now saying he was hornswoggled by Boehner. He thought that the invitation came from Democrats too.

We’ve compiled a list of five Democrats who say they won’t attend: Jim McGovern, Jim McDermott, John Lewis, Earl Blumenauer, G.K. Butterfield. The Guardian says three prominent Dems, Blumenauer, Butterfield, Lewis. And that Pelosi is saying others may also have “diary clashes,” when Netanyahu shows up

- See more at: http://mondoweiss.net/2015/02/butterfield-refuseniks-netanyahu?

You see this napkin? In twenty-four hours, we could have the signatures of seventy senators on this napkin.” Those were the words of American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) official, Stephen Rosen, describing the power of the pro-Israel lobby to journalist Jeffrey Goldberg.

Four years earlier, while boasting about his bad faith implementation of the Oslo Accords to a group of Israeli settlers, Benjamin Netanyahu said, “America is a thing you can move very easily.”

These sort of stories have long haunted efforts in the U.S. to advocate for a more balanced American policy toward Israel/Palestine. They represent a general public perception that Israeli leaders like Netanyahu and lobbying groups like AIPAC are all-powerful forces in the halls of congress, a perception that vote counts on the lobby’s legislative initiatives often bear out. They’ve symbolized the idea that pro-Israel organizations’ money, political connections, and successful intimidation of opposition groups have effectively made their cause impervious to counter-lobbying efforts.

But at a moment when an unprecedented number of members of Congress are up in arms over Netanyahu’s efforts to sabotage the Obama administration’s policy towards Iran, there are other signs that the pro-Israel lobby may not be invincible in Washington. Here are seven pieces of news from the last year that proponents of a less lopsided policy towards Israel/Palestine should find heartening.
1.Grassroots activists helped defeat one of Netanyahu’s top legislative priorities.
2.Student groups passed at least eight resolutionsin 2014 and there’s already a wave of divestment proposals being considered in 2015.
3.All eight of the candidates supported by Sheldon Adelson lost their elections.
4.Representative Eric Cantor lost his primary.
5.Representative Justin Amash won his election.
6.Senator Boxer was forced to acknowledge and challenge Israel’s discriminatory policies.
7.Even some evangelical’s are beginning to withdraw unconditional support for Israel’s policies.

Before you write this off as Pollyannaish bordering on delusional, let me explain.

One of the clearest examples of increasing success by grassroots activists was the challenge mounted against the United States-Israel Strategic Partnership Act of 2014. Unlike the 70 Senate signatures promised by Mr. Rosen on a napkin, it took more than a year to get 63 co-sponsors for the United States Israel Strategic Partnership Act and it took twenty months and a significant watering down of the legislation for it to pass. The bill also faced an enormous public outcry and ignited a fierce debate across the country about Israel’s discriminatory policies against U.S. citizens, at one point leading to a stunning exchange between George Bisharat and Senator Barbara Boxer in the Los Angeles Times.

Even some of AIPAC’s hand-picked candidates initially refused to co-sponsor the egregious legislation. As many may remember, in 1983 Dick Durbin was promoted by pro-Israel groups as a replacement for Paul Findley, the latter of whom was targeted because he was seen as being insufficiently supportive of Israel. In the case of AIPAC’s most recent priority legislation, Senator Durbin recognized the detrimental impact it would have on the civil rights of U.S. citizens, particularly Americans of Arab and Muslim heritage, and he refused to support the bill until the language was changed.

Because of widespread opposition, Senator Boxer was forced to reintroduce the legislation with an amendment that essentially bars Israel from entering the Visa Wavier Program until it ceases its discriminatory policies against U.S. citizens. Although the bill ultimately passed after twenty months, a group of organizations with a tiny fraction of the opposition’s budget successfully challenged Israel’s entry into the Visa Waiver Program, which Haaretz described as “a top priority for Prime Minister Netanyahu and the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC.”

In addition to facing a more emboldened and successful opposition, pro-Israel groups are increasingly coming to terms with the fact that their strategic depth comes from a deeply problematic and notoriously unreliable source, namely evangelical groups like Christians United for Israel (CUFI). Pastor John Hagee, the head of CUFI, has a long history of making anti-Semitic remarks and offering deeply disturbing interpretations of the Holocaust. Thus far, pro-Israel Jewish organization have maintained their myopic alliance with CUFI, but the current détente is far from durable. Compounding the problem for pro-Israel groups is that in recent years significant numbers of young evangelicals have begun to question and challenge their church leaders’ unconditional support for Israel.

Within the Jewish community itself, organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) are achieving incredible growth in their numbers and success in their work. From divestment campaigns to lobbying on Capitol Hill, organizations like JVP are challenging the status quo in unprecedented ways.

A number of other examples haven’t exactly been clear victories for social justice or human rights, but they should dispel any idea that money and unconditional support for Israel are the sole determining factors in elections. This past summer Representative Eric Cantor, the former Republican House Majority Leader who was beloved by AIPAC and in line to be Speaker of the House, was defeated by a primary opponent with less than $300,000. A well organized group of activists from both ends of the political spectrum managed to handily win an election against Cantor, who outspent his opponent David Brat by 40 to 1. Shortly after Cantor lost his primary, Representative Justin Amash, a tea party leaning Palestinian-American from Michigan, won his primary within weeks of voting against more funding for Israel’s Iron Dome missile system.

The Potemkin village of invincibility that pro-Israel groups have built over decades is beginning to crumble. As Netanyahu and Republicans increasingly use Israel as a wedge issue, Democratic support will continue to erode as lawmakers adopt positions more in line with the opinions of their constituencies. We’ve already seen large swaths of the Democratic base begin to break. As recently as 2014, delegates at the Democratic National Convention resoundingly rejected an attempt to reinstate language recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital only to have their decision repeatedly ignored by party leadership.

In all likelihood, many Republicans will also eventually withdraw support as well to bring the party’s position more in line with the opinions of their own core constituencies. National security hawks like General Petraeus think unconditional support for Israel is a strategic liability, libertarians like Rand Paul want to end military aid to everyone, and as mentioned earlier support from evangelicals is also beginning to evaporate. It’s also worth recalling that both Reagan and George H.W. Bush sanctioned Israel.

If the past year has taught me anything, it’s that AIPAC and Netanyahu are paper tigers; money doesn’t necessarily buy elections, grassroots organizing works, and the movement for Palestinian rights has far more latent political power than it realizes.

As the political rift between the US and Israeli government appears to grow, it’s incumbent upon us to utilize this moment to address more than just a breach in diplomatic protocol. Mounting antipathy by Democrats towards Netanyahu presents a real opening to strengthen campaigns aimed at addressing the real issue, Israel’s decades of brutal military occupation and its systemic discrimination against Palestinians. As Netanyahu self-destructs under the weight of his own hubris, we should view Israel’s new status as a wedge issue as an opportunity to permanently change lawmakers’ political calculus on Israel/Palestine.​

- See more at: http://mondoweiss.net/2015/02/netanyahu-paper-tiger?utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=88d54832ee-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b86bace129-88d54832ee-309261746#sthash.E4vC3AuE.dpuf