Congressional Hypocrisy Returns as We Near Presidential Election Season

By Ray Hanania

In much the same manner as the flu, outrageous acts of pandering to Israel and its supporters return to afflict the members of the United States Congress.

How else does one explain a one-sided, irrelevant resolution with no teeth that spews a lot of anti-Arab hatred and ignores America’s self-proclaimed role as the champion of righteousness and justice?

The U.S. House of Representatives—often referred to correctly as “Israeli-Occupied Territory”—approved a non-binding resolution urging President Clinton to use all means to prevent the Palestinian people from exercising their inalienable rights to nationhood.

The resolution, sponsored by dozens of the most right-wing extremists ever to wear a congressional pin on their lapels—by a lopsided vote of 380 to 24—arrogantly declares that the United States should not recognize a Palestinian state if such a state is declared by Palestinian President Yasser Arafat.

The resolution, in the highest form of pontificating hypocrisy yet, further asserts that such a declaration is a “grievous violation of the Oslo accords.”

Are we still talking about that dead agreement? “Dead Man Walking” is how the peace agreement is now introduced at the few and far-between meetings of Palestinian and Israeli Oslo negotiators.

What is courageous is to stand up for what is right and what is just.

And while the members of Congress scrambled atop one another to “out-Israel” each other in denouncing, decrying and defiling legitimate Palestinian rights, they were blind to the real issue of Israeli violations, such as the continuation of Israel’s “illegal” policy to steal more Arab land and establish more racist, exclusively Jewish and anti-Arab settlements.

Many Palestinians are beside themselves about the actions of the U.S. Congress, following on a similar vote by the U.S. Senate (98 to 1).

I’m not angry. And, I’m not surprised either.

The adoption of the resolution only proves what most intelligent people have known for years, that the U.S. Congress is a pathetic representative of the virtues of human and civil rights.

I must, however, offer my true adulation to the 24 brave members of the United States House of Representatives who voted against this obscene act of political criminality. (Editor’s note: see April/May 1999 issue of the Washington Report, p. 50.)

These 24 members of Congress deserve our deepest admiration.

We all know that any idiot can stand up and praise Israel. Any coward can stand up with his or her hand extended outwardly in the face of millions in Israeli-funded political action committee bribes.

That is so uncourageous.

What is courageous is to know that you are going to lose a vote, and yet stand up for what is right and what is just and what is fair, in much the same way that the American forefathers stood up more than 200 years ago in the face of a similar aggression from the British government.

Those 24 congressmen epitomize the meaning of “profiles in courage.”

Ray Hanania is a Palestinian-American author and journalist. His columns are archived on the Web at http://www.hanania.com/