Democratic leaders did not tell members to vote against an amendment to block the State Department from citing Gaza’s Health Ministry.

Democratic leaders did not tell members to vote against an amendment to block the State Department from citing the Gaza Health Ministry’s statistics.

The House of Representatives has voted to effectively conceal the death toll from Israel’s war on Gaza.

On Thursday, lawmakers voted 269-144 on an amendment to prohibit the State Department from citing statistics from the Gaza Health Ministry. The measure is part of the annual State Department appropriations bill. It was led by Democratic Reps. Jared Moskowitz, Fla., and Josh Gottheimer, N.J., and Republican Reps. Joe Wilson, S.C.; Mike Lawler, N.Y.; and Carol Miller, W.V.

Mohammed Khader, policy manager at the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights Action, told The Intercept that the amendment is part of a trend of anti-Palestinian sentiment in Congress since the start of Israel’s atrocities in Gaza. “By preventing any recognition of the number of Palestinians killed since October, this amendment is a clear example of genocide denial and is no different from what was done towards victims of genocides in Rwanda and Armenia.”

  • @UnderpantsWeevil
    6•5 months ago

    if my children or wife had been taken hostage

    The first thing I’d do is find a dozen people of the same ethnicity as the hostage taker and kill them. Then I’d send in a strike team to grab anyone I believed was affiliated with the hostage taker - coworkers, family members, social media contacts - and imprison them indefinitely. Finally, I’d bulldoze someone’s house. Doesn’t really matter whose. Just to show people I mean business.

    The difference between my opinion and yours is that you consider it incidental murder, while I consider it a war

    I’m reminded of this old Thomas Friedman quote.

    It’s important to stop for a moment here and take note of the fact that Friedman’s idea wasn’t that we specifically needed to attack Iraq. Friedman didn’t even bother to claim to Charlie Rose that there was, for example, a link between Iraq and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Instead, he said that the problem is that “they” needed to see that Americans didn’t care so much about our “stock options and Hummers” that we were unwilling to make sacrifices.

    What was the “they,” exactly? Muslim extremists? Muslims in general? The Middle East as a region? Friedman casts a very wide net:

    “What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house—from Basra to Baghdad—and basically saying:

    “Which part of this sentence don’t you understand?: You don’t think we care about our open society? You think this fantasy—we’re just gonna let it grow? Well, suck. On. This. That, Charlie, was what this war was about. We coulda hit Saudi Arabia… We coulda hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could.”