Unfortunately for J Street and its enablers, you can’t have a conference in Washington D.C. for four days and disguise your core beliefs. Really, the jig is up.
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/rubin/149092

Call these sheep and tell them that AIPAC is losing power and will lose them more if they support this genocide. Look at the latest reports on the withholding of water..Shameless..

Note that BiBi is less in the news and even more rarely with World leaders as a result of the atrocities in Gaza and his refusal to be helpful in discussions on the ceasation of settlements...

1.800.828.0498 or 1.877.264.4226.

you will see that some of your favorite "courageous" liberals are none too courageous when it comes to this issue

We've already seen that right here on Josh Marshall's TPMCAFÉ with the obscene flashing paid ads by the Israeli Foreign Ministry, Josh acting as an agent of a foreign power thereby. Shame!

Thanks for reporting the coming outrageous betrayal of America by the US Congress. It is an old story, but that does not make it remotely acceptable. Having heard a great deal from, and even more about, J Street over the past few weeks, it is however reasonable to ask now what if anything it will be doing against this insult to our country.

I visited the link and read the resolution. I can't agree that it "basically endorses everything Israel did" I believe others should read it to judge for themselves. The resolution did not endorse every Israeli action but did criticize bias in the Goldstone report. I perceive the same bias in this post in its misrepresentation of what the resolution actually said.

Just as the resolution did not endorse eveything Israel did, I don't either. However, the resolution makes some legitimate points that deserve more consideration than the one-sided characterization and unwarranted dismissal presented here.

It appears that the views expressed in the resolution are widespread outside of the U.S., in Europe and elsewhere, and don't reflect an idiosyncratic perspective of the U.S. Congress. In any case, the best recourse is for readers to read the resolution to draw their own conclusions.

The kill ratio was 100-to-1 in our favor. The destruction ratio was much, much greater than that. To this day, thousands of Gazans are living in tents because we won't let them import cement to rebuild the homes we destroyed. We turned the Gaza Strip into a disaster area, a humanitarian case, and we're keeping it that way with our blockade.

Meanwhile, here on the Israeli side of the border, it's hard to remember when life was so safe and secure.

So let's decide: Who was the victim of Operation Cast Lead, them or us?

No question - us. We Israelis were the victims and we still are. In fact, our victimhood is getting worse by the day. The Goldstone report was the real war crime. The Goldstone report, the UN debates, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Red Cross, B'Tselem, the traitorous soldiers of Breaking the Silence and the Rabin Academy - those were the true crimes against humanity. This is what's meant by "war is hell."

It is we who've been going through hell from the war in Gaza. It is we who've been suffering.

Gazans? Suffering? What's everybody talking about?

We let them eat, don't we?

This imaginary monologue is how we actually see ourselves today. We initiated the war in Gaza, we waged one of the most one-sided military campaigns anyone's ever seen - and we're the victims.

We're fighting off the world with the Holocaust; witness Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu at the UN with his Auschwitz props. "We won't go like lambs to the slaughter again," vowed his protégé, Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz, in a cabinet discussion of the Goldstone report.

Auschwitz, lambs to the slaughter, Operation Cast Lead. To Israelis today, it's all of a piece, it's one story, one unbroken legacy of righteous victimhood.

The truth is that the State of Israel has never been a victim, and our likening of ourselves to the 6 million has been embarrassing from the beginning - but now? After what we did in Gaza? With the stranglehold we have on that society, while we over here live free and easy?

Victims? Lambs to the slaughter? Us?

No, this has gone beyond embarrassing; this is out-and-out shameful.

And, despite our excuses, it's not that we're "traumatized" by the past into believing that we're still weak, still the frightened, powerless Jews about to be led to the gas chambers. Many Holocaust survivors still believe this, and to some very limited extent, this vestigial fear still takes up space in the Israeli mind.

But by now, 64 years after the Holocaust, 42 years after seeing in the Six Day War how strong we'd become, we know, whether we admit it to ourselves or not, that we aren't the victims anymore. We know we aren't a continuation of the 6 million but rather a deliberate and stark departure from them.

THE REASON we tell ourselves and the world that we are victims is because we know, whether we admit it to ourselves or not, that victimhood is power. Victimhood is freedom. A victim can't be told to restrain himself. A victim fighting for survival can't be accused of abusing his power because, after all, his back is to the wall, he's desperate.

On the facts, it's very hard to convince ourselves, let alone the world, that Gaza and its Kassams have pushed Fortress Israel's back to the wall, that we're desperate, that we're struggling to survive. So, to convince ourselves and the world that this really is so, we do two things.

One, we refuse to acknowledge any facts that mar this image of ourselves as victims, and instead go over and over and over only the facts that fit the picture.

We talk only about the thousands of Kassams fired at Sderot; we never mention the thousands of Gazans we killed at the same time.

We talk only about Gilad Schalit; we never mention the 8,000 Palestinian prisoners we're holding.

And we never mention our ongoing blockade of Gaza or the devastation it does to those people.

The second thing we do to convince ourselves and the world that we're still victims is to never, ever, ever let go of the Holocaust - because that's when we really were victims. Victims like nobody's ever known, victims a million times worse than the Gazans.

Auschwitz, lambs to the slaughter. Remember us, the people of the Holocaust? That wasn't the Middle East's superpower you saw fighting in Gaza.

That was the 6 million.

So you can't blame us. We're immune from your criticism. We're the biggest victims the world has ever known. We're desperate, so don't tell us about kill ratios and disproportionate use of force and collective punishment. We're fighting for our survival.

This is what we tell ourselves and the world, and, in the face of what we did and are still doing in Gaza, it has become intolerable. We are not the 6 million. The 6 million were powerless Jews three generations ago; we cannot wrap our abuses of power in their tragedy.

Instead, let's take a good, hard look at what we did and what we're doing in Gaza. Then let's take a good, hard look in the mirror. And then let's admit who's the true victim here and now, and, more importantly, who isn't.

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1256740787801&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

The whole US debate is beyond absurd. Our representatives want to debate whether the crushing Israeli tactics in a supposedly defensive war against rocket attacks from Gaza are justified, when those rocket attacks are themselves just miserably ineffective pinprick actions in a broader defensive war by the whole Palestinian people against an Israeli state that has been carrying out an extended campaign of aggression, occupation and colonization for decades. The bottom line is that the US Congress has made it clear that while Israelis may be credited with the human right to defend themselves against violence, there are no acts of Palestinian resistance to aggression that our own government will support. The House supports violent aggression and colonialism. Like the Israelis, it regards Palestinian Arabs as sub-human bugs.

The only bright spot in this nonsense is that the US Congress has a trust and credibility rating that falls somewhat below that of Tokyo Rose and Baghdad Bob. If our Congress asserts something, not only is the believability of what they assert immediately reduced to the laugh level, but the believability of the opposite of what they assert is immediately elevated and rendered more dignified.

My hope is that the House of Representatives now passes a resolution endorsing climate change denialism. It's the only way to reduce public doubts about the reality of climate change.

dgsdfsddf

The good news is that J Street is opposed to it.

But it seems that AIPAC and its friends walk all over J Street.

Why is this surprising? 95% of the American people do not care one whit about Israel or Palestine as long as U.S. troops aren't being deployed there; and of the 5% who do care, most of the Members of Congress whom you revile long ago determined that a clear majority of their constituents, and their campaign contributors, favor Israel's position over the Arabs, even with J Street's success in attracting some--by no means all-- younger Jews who oppose the Likud's policies.

I invite you to go door to door in Bethesda and Silver Spring, or Larchmont and Scarsdale, or West Hollywood and Studio City, and ask how many of the respondents who answer you will say they definitely will vote against liberal Democratic Representatives Chris Van Hollen, Nita Lowey and Henry Waxman because each Representative is going to support the resolution slamming Goldstone's report as biased, or because each Representative would strongly oppose conditioning U.S. aid to Israel on the Government of Israel doing what Obama wants.

If you want to change Congressional policy on I/P issues that you despise, you will have to persuade millions of Americans who have never cared about those issues to get really vocal. Not gonna happen.

This is a response both to Anna and to Flavius above Anna's comment.

Flavius stated the following: "But those who died because Israel had decided- in Sharon's words-if we hit them hard enough ,they'll give in - were victims of an IDF strategy of waging war by the random killing of enemy civilians."

I see this charge as worth investigating, but with several constraints in mind.

1. I believe that in any large scale military conflict ever waged in the history of the human species, atrocities inflicted on the innocent have occurred. Their existence is not an indictment of a society but of those who committed them.

2. In some cases, the perpetrators have been individuals, and in others groups acting under the instruction of low level commanders (as in Vietnam). In other cases, governments themselves have been the perpetrators. The accusations of war crimes leveled against Serb leaders Karadzic
(on trial) and Mladic (on the run) are examples of hundreds or even thousands of civilians rounded up, lined up in a field, and shot to death.

3. Israel has been accused of involvement at the governmental level, but to my knowledge, that accusation has not been sustained, even though atrocities at the individual or small unit level may well have occurred. Despite Anna's description of safeguards for Gazans, it's my understanding that the IDF wanted most to safeguard its own soldiers against death, and even more importantly, against capture. This may well have led to a policy of "shoot first, ask questions later" - a claim requiring much scrutiny - but it does not automatically translate into an IDF policy of deliberately targeting innocents who were known to pose no threat whatsoever. Until the latter is proved, a presumption of innocence on that particular charge is required. Similar distinctions are required between claims of reckless targeting that resulted in unacceptable "collateral damage" and deliberate targeting aimed specifically at innocents as an IDF policy. It would be deplorable to accept allegations as proof in any of these instances.

Although I may not agree with Anna that the Israeli incursion into Gaza was extraordinarily scrupulous, I see little reason at this point to conclude that it was criminal or unusually malicious in intent at the governmental level. This distinguishes the Israeli effort from many other conflicts in which the role of the government in atrocious behavior appears to be well documented. The anti-Israel sentiment within many UN member nations guilty of many abuses of their own gives little credence to the belief that justice is at the heart of current attempts to focus on Israel.

All this crap about Hitler and Stalin and Fallujah and the Man in the Moon is a pitiful waste of cyberspace space.

What the IDF and the Loser Israeli Triumvirate clique did in Gaza last January was brutal, disproportionate, outrageous, cynical, criminal, corrupt and incredibly cowardly. Period. No excuses, no saying Attila the Hun was even worse, filthy AIPAC trickery repeated a million times in billion deceit-base variations to the contrary notwithstanding.

The Gaza bloodbath was also NOT in the interests of most Israelis.

Most important of all, it was NOT in the interest of AMERICA.

If the US Congress says ANYTHING at all about Gaza that in any way shape or form excuses or belittles or tries to relativize this atrocity, it is acting like a bunch of ultra craven fools, casting shame upon our country, and the civilized world knows it.

All this is basic common sense to anyone following this mess with a reasonable amount of objectivity. This is not to say (because Anna or Spider or some similar 8 year old maturity level pathological liar will otherwise claim so) that all Jews are evil or that the Palestinians and Arabs have not frequently been guilty of much the same if not worse. But the Congress is not eternally kissing the asses of the most disgusting lying hypocritical Arabs on a regular basis is it?

THE only REAL QUESTION here is:
Will J Street, its organizers, or fellow-travelers DO anything about this idiocy?

I look forward to comments on THAT point only.

I am assuming you are not seriously suggesting that wounded Iraqi civilians should have been flown several thousand miles to the USA when there were adequate medical facilities inside Iraq

Of the roughly 50,000 buildings in Fallujah, between 7,000 and 10,000 were estimated to have been destroyed in the offensive and from half to two-thirds of the remaining buildings had notable damage

From your questioning Johnboy4546 ,it seems that you suggest the following proper military tactics for Israel:
-Divide Gaza strip in half.
-Order all civilians to leave one half.
-Level that half.
-Build tent camps
-Order all civilian population to move to the tent camps.
-Level the rest of the Gaza strip.
-Still manage to kill 60 thousands civilians.

because Anna or Spider or some similar 8 year old maturity level pathological liar

Now, what do you really think about A & S?