by Whitney Webb, MintPress News
Presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg, whose candidacy is currently being heavily promoted by corporate media,
was one of the many 2020 contenders for the Democratic Party who
declined to attend the recent annual conference of the American Israel
Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in apparent response to calls from
prominent “progressive” organizations to boycott the event and a growing
shift among Democratic voters in favor of Palestinian rights.
However, despite his absence from the
AIPAC conference, Buttigieg’s past public statements on the
Israel/Palestine conflict echo those of pro-Israel stalwarts in the
Democratic Party. Indeed, Buttigieg, in a trip to Israel
last year that was funded by the pro-Israel lobby, praised Israel’s
security response to protests by Palestinians on the Gaza-Israel border
just four days after the slaughter of Gazan protesters by Israeli
military snipers — repeating many of the same one-sided talking points
about the conflict that define centrists in both the Republican and
Democratic parties.
Last May, Buttigieg traveled to
Israel as part of a trip for U.S. mayors organized by Project
Interchange, an affiliate of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), one of
the oldest and most influential Israel lobby organizations in the United States. The AJC regularly conflates criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism and has even accused progressive American Jews of anti-Semitism for their critiques of Israeli government policy.
Soon after the Israel lobby-sponsored trip, which the Times of Israel referred to as a “learning experience trip,” Buttigieg appeared on
AJC’s Passport podcast, hosted by Seffi Kogen. Buttigieg, during the
22-minute discussion, stated that Israel’s security policy is “on the
one hand very intentional, very serious and very effective when it comes
to security and on the other hand not allowing concerns about security
to dominate your consciousness.” He then added that his trip to Israel
showed him that Israel’s security policy offers “a very important lesson
that hopefully, Americans can look to [when] we think about how to
navigate a world that unfortunately has become smaller and more
dangerous for all of us.”..
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