US senators push to legalize discrimination against Americans on behalf of Israel

By Nureddin Sabir,

Editor, Redress Information & Analysis

It is hard to muster sympathy for the US, its ignorant country bumpkins and vacuous city slickers, but one can’t resist a degree of pity at the sight of “the world’s only superpower” being humiliated by what one French diplomat described in a moment of honesty as “that shitty little country Israel”.

As always, the humiliation is being administered by Israel’s stooges in the US Congress, this time the Democratic Party’s Senator Barbara Boxer and other Democrats and Republicans working on behalf of the USA’s leading Zionist lobby group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

She is introducing an AIPAC-supported bill that would allow Israel to discriminate against Americans of Arab descent. The move is part of an AIPAC push to pass legislation that would allow visa-free travel between the US and Israel. But there is a hitch.

…the bill sponsored by these American senators would exempt Israel from a requirement that applies to every other nation on the planet, for no reason other than to allow the Israeli government to engage in racial, ethnic and religious discrimination against US citizens. (Glenn Greenwald)

Normally – in fact, always and without exception – in order for the US to permit citizens of a foreign country to enter the US without a visa, that country must allow Americans to enter without a visa as well. There are 37 countries which have been permitted entrance into America’s “visa waiver” programme, and all of them – all 37 – reciprocate by allowing American citizens to enter their country without a visa.

This, however, doesn’t suit Israel, which routinely refuses to permit Americans of Arab ethnicity or Muslim backgrounds, or anyone who is critical of Israeli actions or supportive of Palestinian rights, to enter the country or the occupied territories it controls. In a massive display of chutzpah, it refuses to relinquish this discriminatory practice of exclusion toward Americans, even as it seeks to enter the US’s visa-free programme for the benefit of Israeli citizens.

But rather than tell Israel to either behave as civilized nations do or go to hell, the Zionist stooge, Boxer, joined by eight other Democrats and nine Republicans, has introduced a bill that would provide for Israel’s membership of the visa waiver programme while vesting it with a right that no other country in this programme has: namely, the right to exclude selected Americans from the visa-free right of entrance.

As Guardian newspaper columnist Glenn Greenwald says, “the bill sponsored by these American senators would exempt Israel from a requirement that applies to every other nation on the planet, for no reason other than to allow the Israeli government to engage in racial, ethnic and religious discrimination against US citizens”.

What is shocking is that these senators are pushing for legislation that would allow a foreign country, Israel, to discriminate against the Americans these senators are supposed to represent.

To quote Lara Friedman, Director of Policy and Government Relations for Americans for Peace Now, the bill “takes the extraordinary step of seeking to change the current US law to create a special and unique exception for Israel in US immigration law”. It is, Greenwald correctly observes, “as pure and blatant an example of prioritizing the interests of the Israeli government over the rights of US citizens as one can imagine, and it’s being pushed by AIPAC and a cast of bipartisan senators”.

What is shocking is that these senators are pushing for legislation that would allow a foreign country, Israel, to discriminate against the Americans these senators are supposed to represent.

Just as shocking is the fact that AIPAC and its US stooges are not even attempting to pretend this exemption has a non-discriminatory purpose.

As Mike Coogan of the US Campaign to End Israeli Occupation wrote in the Hill, off-the-record accounts show that AIPAC officials told members of Congress there would need to be flexibility on the legal requirement for reciprocity in the visa-waiver programme “to accommodate Israel’s ongoing discrimination against Arab- and Muslim-Americans who attempt to travel to Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories”.

But such matters as enshrining discrimination in US law on behalf of Israel is of no concern to Boxer and the other AIPAC stooges sponsoring the legislation. As Greenwald says, “[p]rotecting the equal rights of their own country’s citizens quite obviously has little significance when weighed against the supreme mandate to serve the interests of the Israeli government. That’s not hyperbole: how else can this bill be fairly described?”

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