The Pelosi Squad and deceptive token dissent
Hold the applause for isolated "rebel" Democrats in Congress
I am no longer impressed by US Congresswoman Barbara Lee’s lone vote against the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. For years, I was extremely impressed - amazed really - by her vote. If you remember the hysteria following the 9/11 attacks like I do, it is still easy to be impressed as you watch her speech.[1] Skip ahead to 2017 and she was praising the “unparalleled decency” of the racist war criminal John McCain. Her dissenting vote in 2001 not only failed to spark the growth of a civilizing force in Congress, but whatever moral spark she had inside her in 2001 was extinguished.
The Democrats are the second faction of the ruling party in the US. Lee’s dissent, and other similarly isolated “rebel” votes in Congress, merely serve to dangle false hopes that reform of the Democratic Party may be possible - a real shift away from its imperialist, oligarchic-serving nature. The lonely rebels serve as “sheepdogs” as the late Bruce Dixon explained for Black Agenda Report several years ago: “herding activists and voters back into the Democratic fold who might otherwise drift leftward and outside of the Democratic party”.
In recent days, it’s been Democratic Party “Squad” member Rashida Tlaib’s turn to receive accolades for a dissenting speech in Congress where she stated the obvious: that Israel is an apartheid state. Her speech uncritically cited two despicable organizations to back up her position: Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW). Officials from both organizations, especially HRW, spread praise for John McCain when he died just like Barbara Lee did. These two “human rights'' groups ensure that liberals can support crimes like Trump’s efforts to colonize and loot Venezuela but rationalize it with much loftier sounding rhetoric than Trump uses.
Apartheid Israel is a failed version of Canada and the United States which were both able to genocide the indigenous population into being a tiny minority. The defeat of apartheid in Israel looks inevitable in the long run, as do efforts by the apartheid state to make itself increasingly embarrassing to liberal imperialists like the folks who run HRW. Nevertheless, the devotion of US politicians to apartheid remains almost as solid as the pro-war consensus was in 2001 when Barbara Lee made her isolated stand. Last week, Tlaib was one of only nine representatives in Congress to vote against a resolution that denied that Israel is an apartheid state.
While Tlaib did not back down directly from her denunciation of apartheid (as her “progressive” colleague Pramila Jayapal had recently done) she and her fellow “Squad” member Ilhan Omar quickly found a way to make amends to the US Empire. Tlaib took to twitter to announce that she and Omar were introducing a resolution to hold Syrian president Asad accountable as a war criminal. Their hypocrisy was sickening.
Biden, by any reasonable definition, is a war criminal many times over. He not only played a leading role as US senator in bringing about the Iraq war, he was not only part of the Obama's effort to use islamic extremists to oust Assad, but as president Biden has perpetrated numerous unprovoked and murderous acts of war against various countries: Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Iran, Afghanistan and Syria.
Whatever crimes Assad’s military perpetrated (setting aside the usual lies and exaggerations endorsed by western media) it was done in defense of his own country, to prevent the jihadist nightmare that Washington was willing to impose on Syria. Biden’s war crimes have no such justification. Biden’s are purely the acts of a global predator who enjoys complete impunity.
As independent journalist Richard Medhurst pointed out, Tlaib has acknowledged some of the facts regarding Syria by recently voting to lift US sanctions. But that didn’t stop her from parroting the neocon line on Syria to make amends for her dissenting views on Israel.
Considering Apartheid Israel alone, Tlaib had to be pressured by Electronic Intifada editor Ali Abunimah in 2018 to break ties with an Israel lobby group, and since then usually taken better positions on Apartheid Israel than her colleagues in Congress. But only last year, Tlaib showered praise on the fanatically pro- apartheid Nancy Pelosi
As of 2021, Ali Abunimah dubbed Rashida Tlaib and her “Squad” colleagues as “The Pelosi Squad”. When a vote was not hopelessly one sided and dissent would not be totally isolated and symbolic, when it could have squeezed concessions from the likes of Pelosi, the Squad rolled over. As Ali Abunimah put it at the time on Twitter ‘ The sheer hypocrisy and cowardice of @AOC and the rest of the #PelosiSquad is plain and undeniable…”
The kind of moral clarity, vision and determination it would take to end US impunity is obviously lacking in Tlaib. It is lacking from anyone who chooses to be a representative of the Democratic Party.
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NOTE
[1] It wasn’t all racism and bloodlust. There were some positive aspects to how the US public rallied around the victims in New York and recognized the courage of emergency responders - unionized public sector workers who, like working people in general, have been assailed by a hostile corporate media for decades.