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As it has for decades, Israel has counted on the United States as a diplomatic shield in its latest crisis. But once unwavering US support is looking increasingly precarious as calls grow on the left to advance Palestinian rights.
With violence that has killed more than 200 people, mostly Palestinians, entering a second week, Israel has emerged as rarely before as a partisan issue in Washington with members of former president Donald Trump's Republican Party boasting of unstinting backing of Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The line of President Joe Biden has been consistent with previous Democratic administrations -- no public daylight with Israel but diplomatic efforts aimed at restoring calm.
Biden's approach has won praise from Israel but few other places.
Even Senator Bob Menendez, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee seen as a reliably pro-Israel Democratic voice, said Saturday he was "deeply troubled" by Israeli strikes on Gaza that killed civilians and destroyed media offices, calling for "a full accounting."
Senator Bernie Sanders, Biden's main challenger from the left for the Democratic presidential nomination last year, has called the devastation "unconscionable" and, in a threat once taboo in Washington, said Sunday that the United States should take a "hard look" at the nearly $4 billion in military aid it provides each year to Israel.
Israel has historically enjoyed support from the Democrats, owing in part to the party's status as the favored home for American Jews and Israel's socialist roots.
But Sanders and other US progressives have come to see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the prism of broader movements for social justice, especially as Netanyahu clings to power through an alliance with the far-right.
In a New York Times opinion piece, Sanders wrote that Netanyahu has "cultivated an increasingly intolerant and authoritarian type of racist nationalism" and ended with the line: "Palestinian lives matter."
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of the highest-profile progressive Democrats, urged action against Israeli "apartheid" -- a term that infuriates Israel but was recently backed by Human Rights Watch, which said it was government policy to maintain the domination of Jewish Israelis over Palestinians.
"The president and many other figures this week stated that Israel has a right to self-defense," Ocasio-Cortez said on the House floor Thursday.
"But do Palestinians have a right to survive? Do we believe that? And if so, we have a responsibility to that."
- Biden at odds with party -
Israel launched the offensive after Hamas, the Islamist movement that controls Gaza, began firing rockets into the Jewish state in what it said was a response to Israeli moves in Jerusalem.
Logan Bayroff of J Street, a progressive pro-Israel group, said there was a growing recognition that Israeli actions including moves to evict Palestinian families in east Jerusalem contributed to the crisis.
"You're seeing much more willingness across a wide spectrum of the Democratic Party to criticize not just Hamas rockets -- and Hamas is involved in this -- but also Israeli government policy," said Bayroff, the group's vice president of communications.
"That forms a pretty strong contrast with how the Biden administration unfortunately seems to be on a different page in a way that frankly has not been adequate to the severity of the crisis," he said.
The Biden administration has not explicitly called for a ceasefire and has so far blocked a statement at the UN Security Council three times in a week, saying it could be counterproductive.
Bayroff said the shift in opinion was also due to Netanyahu's "disrespect" for the last Democratic president, Barack Obama, with the Israeli leader openly rallying Republicans against a denuclearization accord with Iran.
Americans overwhelmingly still see Israel positively, according to a Gallup survey in February, but 34 percent called for more pressure on Israel to resolve the conflict, the highest since the question was asked in 2007.
In a Pew poll this year, more than half of American Jews gave negative marks to Netanyahu and nearly two-thirds voiced optimism about coexistence with a Palestinian state.
Hawkish support for Israel comes largely not from American Jews but from the Christian right, where some see Biblical justifications to promote the Jewish state.
One Republican, Senator Todd Young, has joined calls for a ceasefire but much of the party has either accused Biden of insufficent support of Israel or accused left-wing Democrats of siding with Hamas, designated by Washington as a terrorist group.
"There is no moral equivalency between Israel and Hamas," said House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy, pledging, "The United States unequivocally stands with our ally Israel and the Jewish people."
© 2021 AFP
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Secret Service fears they're stretched too thin and the president could get shot: report
May 17, 2021
The understaffing of the Secret Service has become a national security problem, according to an alarming report from MSNBC and Washington Post reporter Carol Leonnig.
While the Secret Service has suffered from scandals in the past, the main scandal is that funding for the USSS hasn't kept up with the technology and growing threats.
As the first Black president, Barack Obama and his family experienced their own unique challenges with fence-jumpers and shots fired at the White House that made it to the walls of the building. While the first couple wasn't in the White House during the shooting, their daughter and Mrs. Obama's mother were inside. But the Obamas were never told about the incident.
During Donald Trump's administration, the president sought to ban overweight agents from his detail. He explained that they couldn't possibly protect him if they were too fat to run down the street. During his time in the White House, Trump's wife and young son weren't the only ones being protected by the Secret Service. Taxpayer dollars also went to protect Tiffany Trump, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, Eric Trump and his wife, and Donald Trump Jr. and his family.
The protection of Trump's family has lasted months after he was removed from office. It ultimately has cost millions of additional dollars to protect Trump's adult children. In one month, the adult children cost taxpayers $140,000, found the Citizens For Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW).
"But the numbers omit what's likely the most expensive and certainly the most controversial aspect of the extended protection: the cost for agents to stay at Trump properties, which CREW said the Secret Service did not provide," said Forbes May 5.
Leonnig's book reveals that Trump's daughter Tiffany and ex-daughter-in-law Vanessa got "inappropriately close" to their Secret Service. There were also allegations that Trump directly profited off of the Secret Service staying in his properties.
The Biden Administration is denying a report that the incoming administration demanded a fresh set of agents for Biden.
At the same time, in Secret Service Facebook groups, the agents were speculating that President Joe Biden's election was illegitimate. They even went so far as to call the rioters patriots.
"Nobody's paying enough attention," Leonnig said, noting that it applies to the Department of Homeland Security and Congress.
See the interview below:
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Pharma executives mocked addicts as 'pillbillies' as they drowned West Virginia in opiates
May 17, 2021
Pharmaceutical executives mocked customers who became addicted to their company's painkillers, according to newly released emails.
The emails were revealed by West Virginia prosecutor Paul Farrell Jr. in a trial against drug makers AmerisourceBergen, Cardinal Health Inc. and McKesson Corp., whose executives mocked addicts as "pillbillies," reported the Herald-Dispatch.
"Watch out Georgia and Alabama, there will be a mass exodus of pillbillies heading north," wrote AmerisourceBergen executive Chris Zimmerman after Florida passed legislation in 2011 cracking down on the pharmacies.
Other executives made up songs about Appalachian addicts to the tune of "The Beverly Hillbillies" theme and Jimmy Buffett's "Margaritaville," while a corporate investigator forwarded an email titled "Oxycontin for kids" showing a cereal box altered to read "SMACK."
"You're just a barrel of laughs today," a co-worker replied.
Zimmerman apologized in court for sending the email but insisted the term "pillbillies" was in reference to drug dealers, not to his company's patients.
"I shouldn't have sent the emails," he said.
AmerisourceBergen, Cardinal Health Inc. and McKesson Corp. sent 127.9 million opiate doses into Cabell County between 2006 and 2014, despite the area having a population of only 90,000 people.
"It is a pattern of conduct by those people charged with protecting our community, and they're circulating emails disparaging hillbillies," Farrell said.
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