Showing posts with label Israel-Palestine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Israel-Palestine. Show all posts

Mar 30, 2026

Democrats, Zionism Target Liberty in Wisconsin

Over 850 people hit the streets in Ashland, Wisconsin
No Kings march. (Image from Ros Nelson, Facebook). 

Democrats Give Up Ship to Zionists

Commentary

Madison, Wisconsin — Wisconsin remains peace-and-liberty-minded. Peace movement flourishes here as exemplified in No Kings protests across the state last Saturday, seeing Jewish Voice for Peace and Vets for Peace folk, for example, as well as 1,000s of anti-ICE folks.

But elected Wisconsin Democrats in the state Capitol and Congress don't get the message of the people. 

In fact, Wisconsin Democrat politicians reject peace-and-liberty commitments of the people whom they represent, and Zionist work abounds among elected officials.

Wisconsin Democrat Pols Equal Zionists

The day before the No Kings demonstrations, Gov Tony Evers (D) signed into law Zionist-pushed legislation, (Assembly Bill 446; 2025 Wisconsin Act 143). 

The Zionist Act adapts absurd political definitions of anti-Semitism to further anti-liberty, thought-control purposes of aiding criminal sanction, codifying Zionist tenets, right as Zionist movement commits Genocide and annexes land, ala Nazi Germany, South Africa, and other totalitarian movements, (Wisconsin Examiner; The Capital Times; The Progressive Magazine).

The anti-Semitism definitions were adopted by the ironically self-defined International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, a project advocating punitive criminal sanction worldwide for voicing thought at variance with Apartheid-Zionist thought. 

For example, the anti-Semitism definition would bring criminal sanction for, "drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis," (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance), if a legal claim is made of discrimination, or prejudicial action.

Some 37 states adopt some manner of Zionist thought control, as countries across the Western world even criminalize slogans calling for peace and human rights.

In practice, the new Zionist codification of alleged hate speech would empower Wisconsin municipalities' police, for example, to walk up to a citizen holding a sign condemning Israeli Apartheid, or torture, or rape, or Genocide, write a citation for disorderly conduct or some other bullshit municipal ticket, then under color of, and with aid of anti-Semitism statute, pursue hate-crime enhancer charges.

Notes Howard Schweber, UW-Madison First Amendment scholar, "But they’re [Wisconsin speech-code advocates] saying in all the contexts in which we already have laws that … target racist or prejudicial actions, where the claim is that the action is anti-Semitic, this is the definition we’ll use to test that claim," (Jacobs, The Capital Times).

And the hell with the First Amendment. Wisconsin already has a hate crime statute on the books.

In Wisconsin, municipal citations are first litigated in municipal courts, kangaroo courts in which Due Process rights are virtually non-existent. [See an illustration of mass politically motivated police actions and adjudication in action when 1,000s of citations from 2011-12 at the Wisconsin Capitol were written for singing or walking by and listening during anti-Gov. Scott Walker thought actions. All citations, after years of litigation, were thrown out and found violative of the First Amendment.]

All criminal prosecutions of lawful speech require is a dishonest cop and a crooked district attorney. As a lifelong Wisconsinite, I can assure such people exist.
Zionist work is about crushing dissent and liberty, just as Gov Scott Walker did.

UW-Madison Takes Aim at Anti-Genocide Student Government

The University of Wisconsin at Madison last week officially condemned a student government resolution advocating a Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions action against the Apartheid entity of Israel.

Reports the Badger Herald daily student newspaper: 
"The University of Wisconsin said Wednesday that it is disappointed with the passage of an Associated Students of Madison (ASM) resolution, according to a UW press release. The resolution issued a number of flawed, unrelated and illegal demands, according to the press release."

The ASM resolution, introduced by Students for Justice in Palestine, calls for the Universities of Wisconsin to divest from BlackRock index funds, which contain holdings in weapons manufacturers that supply weapons and military technology to the Rapid Support Forces in Sudan and the Israeli Defense Force, according to the resolution."

Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D)

Tammy Baldwin offers her Zionist perspective on a recent PBS Wisconsin interview, by omitting mention of Israel altogether in her discussion of the Israeli-U.S. war against Iran.

Sen Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisconsin) leads 
the Wisconsin congressional delegation in 
accepting Israel Lobby funds. Baldwin is a
reliable vote for the Israeli Lobby, and is
known as calculating and mealy-mouthed.
This apes a recent trend in which writers absurdly minimize or obscure Israeli involvement in the Israeli-U.S. war against Iran, (Foreign Policy; Jewish Currents; CounterPunch; ScheerReport). 

Iran War? Who? Israel?

From social media, to columns in weekly newspapers such as the Mount Horeb Mail, Baldwin takes the Zionist line on anti-Semitism and Israeli wars. [Full disclosure. I wrote in a reply to Baldwin's PBS Wisconsin interview: "Typical Baldwin. Not one word about Israel (Baldwin took $700,000 from Israel Lobby), national security state, a moral assessment. Baldwin was vacuous and clueless. How can you address the Israeli-U.S. War against Iran, and not mention Israel?"]

Meanwhile, fellow Zionists in Congress such as Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla) work with the police to target anti-Zionist thought, lest the American people put a stop to American support for the Zionist entity, Israel. 

In Miami Beach, police visit the homes of those citizens who dare voice disapproval of Israel.

The aim is intimidation. Now, one woman is suing. 

Wasserman Schultz and similarly-minded Zionists will not stop.


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Wisconsin people remain tied to best traditions, but we face a time when virtually all state and federal elected representatives are First Amendment illiterates and pro-Zionist cowards, preferring passive compliance over active thought. 

The country witnesses Zionist attempts to criminalize lawful public dissent, disregarding liberty and open discussion of governments—human work that remains not just personal liberty but an essential part of our free society, and simple decency.

But not if  Zionists and allies get their way.  #
MICHAEL LEON is a writer living in Madison, Wisconsin. His writing has appeared nationally in The Progressive, In These Times, and CounterPunch.

May 11, 2024

Macklemore's Defiaint Song Against Genocide and Joe Biden

Palestinian girl Hind Rajab poses for photograph in this
undated handout picture obtained by Reuters on February 10,
2024 [Palestine Red Crescent Society/Reuters]

Genocide Machine and Joe Biden Under Fire

Singer-songwriter Macklemore just released a powerful opus against Israeli-American genocide in Gaza and the West Bank.
Macklemore's song, Hinds Hall, is named after Hind Rajab joined in song title with Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall.
The six-year-old Gazan girl's family was slaughtered by Israeli Defense Forces, trapping the girl in a car begging for help in her cell phone to the Red Crescent Society.
Israel proceeded to slaughter the rescue party sent by Red Recreant, then murdered  Hind Rajab in a horrid act much of which is caught on audio.
Macklemore's Hinds Hall is below.


Mar 10, 2024

Israel Is Sadistic State-Movement Committing Genocide — Time to Detach America from Annilation Machine

Pietà (Mother with dead Son), 1937-1939
In 1937, on the anniversary of her son
Peter’s death in WW I, the anti-fascist
artist Käthe Kollwitz wrote in her diary:
"The mother is seated, her dead son lying
on her lap between her knees.
-- Käthe Kollwitz, Diaries, 22 October 1937
Käthe Kollwitz Museum Kollwitz was
adored by the German people; even the
Nazis minimized their harassment.
---
Notes Käthe Kollwitz Museum:
"In 1993, a version of the Pietà
sculpture, executed by Harald Haake
four times its original size, was installed
on the initiative of Helmut Kohl,
the German Chancellor at that
time, at the Neue Wache in Berlin, which
is the central memorial site of the
Federal Republic of Germany for the victims
of war and dictatorship."
--
In the brilliant 2017 anti-war movie, War
Machine (David Michôd
), United States Army
General Stanley McChrystal, is played by Brad
Pitt, and memorably featured in a powerful
scene saluting the Pietà sculpture in Berlin.
Artist Käthe Kollwitz never recovered from
the death on her son in WW I.
See Brad Pitt below.



Joe Biden, Democrats Lead U.S. into Moral Oblivion


Commentary
 
Like any sentient, post-World War II American, at an early age, I developed an ethic to oppose totalitarianism, fascism, anti-Semitism, creeping authoritarianism where it slithered its way onto our liberties.

Zionism and supporting Israel seemed natural.

No more. Israel is a sick, fiest pack slaughtering 10,000s, with sights on 100,000 more.

Here is the United States, a moral person must abandon the Democrats, all the Democrats.

How many more mothers must endure the gruesome deaths of their children?

From susan abulhawa in The Electronic Intifada:

It’s 8 pm in Gaza, Palestine right now, the end of my fourth day in Rafah and the first moment I’ve had to sit in a quiet place to reflect.

I’ve tried to take notes, photos, mental images, but this moment is too big for a notepad or my struggling memory. Nothing prepared me for what I would witness.

Before I made it across the Rafah-Egypt border, I read every bit of news coming out of Gaza or about Gaza. I did not look away from any video or image posted from the ground, no matter how gruesome, shocking or traumatizing.

I kept in touch with friends who reported on their situations in the north, middle and south of Gaza – each area suffering in different ways. I stayed current on the latest statistics, the latest political, military and economic maneuverings of Israel, the US and the rest of the world.

I thought I understood the situation on the ground. But I didn’t.

Nothing can truly prepare you for this dystopia. What reaches the rest of the world is a fraction of what I’ve seen so far, which is only a fraction of this horror’s totality.

Gaza is hell. It is an inferno teeming with innocents gasping for air.

But even the air here is scorched. Every breath scratches and sticks to the throat and lungs.

What was once vibrant, colorful, full of beauty, potential and hope against all odds, is draped in gray-colored misery and grime.
#

Jun 22, 2018

Trump, Israel, White Racists, Blood Libel, Myths and Storms on the Horizon

Emboldened American racists feel free to act out and display
antipathy towards those with dark complexions. The crowd
at the Make America Great Again rally in Minnesota on
June 22, 2018 joined the president in jeering and outrage.
Photo by Tom Brenner, the New York Times
Updated - America's chief racist pulled the United States out of the United Nations Human Rights Council, a nemesis of the worst human rights abusers such as Israel, the United States and the Gulf monarchies. But pick a state outside of Scandinavia and it's not clear world history is bending towards human rights.

Trump's asinine act is preceded by world criticism of the latest Israeli border massacre and the Israeli blood sport of shooting the legs off of Palestinian teenagers for laughs. The withdrawal also follows Trump's expansion of caging children and families and the United Nations calls for human rights for refugees seeking asylum in America, (Richard Falk, New York Times).

Since Trump began campaigning for president in 2015, his anti-Semitic tropes and myriad blood libels against selected groups have repulsed the narrow majority of Americans who can still be counted in the company of the decent. But the blood libel is escalating, (Krugman, New York Times).

Paul Krugman is alarmed:

The speed of America’s moral descent under Donald Trump is breathtaking. In a matter of months we’ve gone from a nation that stood for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to a nation that tears children from their parents and puts them in cages.

What’s almost equally remarkable about this plunge into barbarism is that it’s not a response to any actual problem. The mass influx of murderers and rapists that Trump talks about, the wave of crime committed by immigrants here (and, in his mind, refugees in Germany), are things that simply aren’t happening. They’re just sick fantasies being used to justify real atrocities.

And you know what this reminds me of? The history of anti-Semitism, a tale of prejudice fueled by myths and hoaxes that ended in genocide.

An open question is whether the logical extension of Trump's white supremacist blood libel — a Holocaust, a war — is on the horizons as Trump presents his evolving and incoherent warrant for genocide to American whites, Evangelicals, local municipal police and every Republican officeholder, all of whom comprise his base.

The former Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper warned this week Trump's new and still-strong "zero-tolerance" policy is harming America's "international image," (CNN).

It's a ridiculous statement by Clapper who discusses moral atrocities by accessing effectiveness in transmitting public relations messages. Trump's detractors in the intelligence community are perhaps not the most effective human rights activists.
---
Trump's public relations messages at some point will not be enough for his base that will quickly veer out of Trump's control. The mindless mania of Trumpists require feeding, a blood sugar-high with screams, dismemberment and tangible displays of cruelty. Trump, from his perspective, was wrong to halt the emission of images of suffering and cruelty. His people love it.

Evangelicals and cops take to social media with malice, relishing the assaults against a black athlete like Sterling Brown with seven squad cars full of racist Milwaukee Police for a parking ticket infraction. Brown has filed a federal civil rights action against the cops and the city of Milwaukee, (Mal Contends).

Trump knows the appetites of his base and he seems to be enjoying the resulting spectacle of chaos and dehumanization that he daily feeds our country.

This is not the time to be on the sidelines.

History may show the Summer of 2018 as one of the most consequential periods in the life of America.

Trump's unite-the-right project has targeted human beings for banishment, imprisonment and extermination, no less.

The capacity of decent people, people like Steve Schmidt, to speak out, to act is the margin of mitigation and is necessary for the reversal of Trump's Make America Great Again (MAGA) project.

MAGA fascists are like Trump, a fearful people. Blacks, Browns, Muslims, anything different from their limited experience and alien to their closed minds are feared.

Attempts to study human nature to explain the human susceptibility to fascism and authoritarian political movements are doomed. Psychology as a discipline has not advanced sufficiently to address the human condition.

Each individual mind must access the bellicose and malicious and the condition of others and make a decision on the relevancy of human suffering to one's life.

Consider the words of the British thinker, Bertrand Russell, on the objectives of a liberal education, an endeavor feared by Trumpists and MAGA minds of all stripes:

 "... to give a sense of the value of things other than domination, to help create wise citizens of a free community, and through the combination of citizenship with liberty in individual creativeness to enable men [and all genders] to give to human life that splendor which some few have shown that it can achieve." (Russell, Power: A New Social Analysis (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1938) p.319. Cited in Chomsky, Problems of Knowledge and Freedom, The Russell Lectures - (delivered in 1971), (New York: Pantheon Books, Random House) Introduction).

For a movement like MAGA dedicated to conquest and demonization following the worst traditions of America, human splendor, creativeness and liberty are to be feared in all realms of the human condition.