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Free Speech on the Ropes: Legislation to Revoke Not-for-Profit Status of Organizations that Support Palestine Protests Passes in House

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Chuck L alerted me to an important tweetstorm by Lara Friedman of the Foundation for Middle East Peace about legislation designed to drop a hammer on not-for-profits deemed to be supporting pro-Palestine protests by revoking their not-for-profit status. As Friedman explains, this bill, H.R. 6408, also removes pretty much all due process rights, so its targets have effectively no recourse. The pretext is that pro-Palestine protests are supporting terrorist organizations, as in Hamas.

This measures is so far under the radar that so far, only Friedman and Matthew Petti at Reason seem to have noticed it. And Petti has pointed out that the Secretary of the Treasury can designate any organization to be “terrorist-supporting organization,” so the does not think, as Friedman seems to, that any other measures are needed to allow an Administration to try to financially cripple not-for-profits engaging in wrong speech.

Note that the messaging depicting Hamas as somehow behind the campus protests has increased:

And Aljazeera has already produced evidence of Zionist groups trying to stoke confrontations at the demonstrations (hat tip Erasmus):

Mind you, not-for-profits are already subject to mission and censorship pressures by large donors, witness the billionaires who loudly said they would halt donations to Ivy League schools if they “tolerated anti-Semitism,” as in did not quash criticism of Israel. But as you will see, this is a whole different level of censorship.

First, we are hoisting Friedman’s entire tweetstorm. She stresses that not only does this bill create a star chamber when existing laws allow for crackwdowns on terrorist supports, but that it could be easily extended to other types of establishment-threatening speech.

Petti at Reason is more pointed. From This Bill Would Give the Treasury Nearly Unlimited Power To Destroy Nonprofits:

A bipartisan bill would give the secretary of the treasury unilateral power to classify any charity as a terrorist-supporting organization, automatically stripping away its nonprofit status….

In theory, the bill is a measure to fight terrorism financing…

Financing terrorism is already very illegal. Anyone who gives money, goods, or services to a U.S.-designated terrorist organization can be charged with a felony under the Antiterrorism Act and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. And those terrorist organizations are already banned from claiming tax-exempt status under section 501(c)(3) of the tax code. Nine charities have been shut down since 2001 under the law.

The new bill would allow the feds to shut down a charity without an official terrorism designation. It creates a new label called “terrorist-supporting organization” that the secretary of the treasury could slap onto nonprofits, removing their tax exempt status within 90 days. Only the secretary of the treasury could cancel that designation.

In other words, the bill’s authors believe that some charities are too dangerous to give tax exemptions to, but not dangerous enough to take to court. Although the label is supposed to apply to supporters of designated terrorist groups, nothing in the law prevents the Department of the Treasury from shutting down any 501(c)(3) nonprofit, from the Red Cross to the Reason Foundation.

Petti explains that an initial target appears to be Students for Justice in Palestine, which he says have not had enough of an attack surface to be targeted under current law; in fact, Florida governor DeSantis had to shelve a plan to shut down Students for Justice in Palestine when confronted with a lawsuit.

Petti explains that his concerns are not unwarranted:

Under the proposed bill, murky innuendo could be enough to target pro-Palestinian groups. But it likely wouldn’t stop there. After all, during the Obama administration, the IRS put aggressive extra scrutiny on nonprofit groups with “Tea Party” or “patriot” in their names. And under the Biden administration, the FBI issued a memo on the potential terrorist threat that right-wing Catholics pose.

The Charity and Security Network, a coalition of charities that operate in conflict zones, warned that its own members could be hindered from helping the neediest people in the world.

“Charitable organizations, especially those who work in settings where designated terrorist groups operate, already undergo strict internal due diligence and risk mitigation measures and…face extra scrutiny by the U.S. government, the financial sector, and all actors necessary to operate and conduct financial transactions in such complex settings,” the network declared in November. “This legislation presents dangerous potential as a weapon to be used against civil society in the context of Gaza and beyond.”

Recall how the US has fired on Médecins Sans Frontières staff who were according to the US, assisting bad guys in their relief efforts? Financial sanctions are so much tidier.

I urge readers, and particularly donors, to alert the fundraising and executive staff at not-for-profits, particularly the journalistic sort, so they can object to this legislation. It would likely not survive a Supreme Court challenge in its current form, but that’s an awfully heavy load to have to carry, plus the legislation might not be subject to an injunction in the meantime.

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68 comments

  1. DJG, Reality Czar

    As Randolph Bourne wrote, War is the health of the state. Let’s keep in mind that Mike Johnson had his “soil my pants” moment and led FISA reauthorization through the Congress in spite of well-documented stories by journalists of extensive abuse of the FISA court. Then Johnson “Elect of God” goes to Columbia for his Joe McCarthy moment.

    Note the roll call, which is in the original tweet by Lara Friedman but requires clicking through:
    I’m talking here about a bipartisan legislation the House passed last week (382-11) & that was intro’d last week in the Senate — HR 6408 & S. 1436.

    Roll call: Find your congresscreature!
    https://clerk.house.gov/Votes/2024121

    I am pleased to see that Jan Schakowsky had the guts to vote against this abomination. As someone overseas, I don’t have much influence except for my ballot.

    And I can hardly wait to see how the knuckle-headed warmongering Tammy Duckworth handles this bill (!). I have truly lost patience with this Rahm Emanuel creation who ran on a dubious pedigree.

    Thanks, too, for the mention of Médecins Sans Frontières. I have donated to them for some time. What caught my eye years back was how they were such stalwarts during the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2013-2016 when everyone else was panicking. Likewise, their exemplary presence in Gaza.

    1. gk

      I see Menendez voted for it. I’ve already voted against him in the primary, and I’ll have to do so again in the general.

    2. John Wright

      Here is a list of the reps that actually voted against it:

      One Republican, the rest Democrats

      Bowman(NY) Democratic
      Bush(MO) Democratic
      García (IL) Democratic
      Lee (PA) Democratic
      Massie(KY) Republican
      Ocasio-Cortez(NY) Democratic
      Omar(MN) Democratic
      Pressley(MA) Democratic
      Ramirez(IL) Democratic
      Schakowsky(IL) Democratic
      Tlaib(MI) Democratic

      There were 37 “Non-voting” fence sitting representatives.

      Profiles in Courage is a book, not a typical political behavior.

      1. CaliDan

        I wouldn’t exactly characterize this as courageous. Against a majority of 97%, their no votes and abstentions are meaningless, except for the effect it has on their reelction chances.

        1. John Wright

          Similar to Nancy pelosi working behind the scenes to line up enough supporting votes for the TPP so her constituents could see her vote against it.

        2. Selina Sweet

          So courageous, then. The home folk get you into and or out of Congress. Also, in disparaging their vote as not courageous – are you building energy for more such stands or whittling away that energy for the future? We are all witnesses of such votes. Consider your wet blanketism ‘s impact too on us witnesses. Love thy God (whatever defines your God) with all thy mind, all thy soul, all thy might. That “all” includes your skepticism too, the shadow of you. Live with your all. Not just your pure heartedness.

        3. DMK

          Schakowsky is my rep, and has a safe seat in the liberal part of Chicago’s north shore suburbs. She sent letters in support of a ceasefire in Gaza, but voted for the recent military aid package to Israel, Ukraine and Taiwant. She is adept at talking out of both sides of her mouth.

    3. Kouros

      I was thinking at MSF and Red Cross myself. Because providing medical help to Palestinians in Gaza might be considered a terrorist action…

  2. timbers

    Looking at the latest legislation that Biden just signed into law, has it occurred yo anyone else that we the American people are slowly being Palestinian-ized? How long do we have until many of us are living in open air fenced in encampments with water that can turned on and by bybthe authorities as a compliance tool?

    1. Patrick Donnelly

      Slowly the heat increases … as the Great Theft strips the finance sector bare by filling it with useless debt.

      There is a reason why there has been a massive lack of investment in the USA.

    2. Carolinian

      I’d say the War on Terror itself is part of the attempted Israelification of American society so this frog has been boiling for some time. State laws curbing speech against Israel are now common (SC has one) and while they typically get struck down on Constitutional grounds when challenged there are, oddly, a lack of challengers with the needed deep pockets to go against the Lobby. The ACLU isn’t nearly what it was.

      We’ve had our spasms of repression in the past–WW1, McCarthy–but at least these conjured a threat to the United States itself rather than some settler colonial project thousands of miles away. What’s going on is a real test of the degree the USG can be suborned by big money and media ideological monopoly. Of course it’s not only in the Zionists interests that the voices who protest be suppressed. As with Occupy Wall Street the upper class warriors are more than willing to embrace repression if they can use their media assets to keep it on the down low. But rich parents seeing their kids hauled off to jail for trumped up reasons may join a revolt of the lowers. Netanyahu and his government of fanatics may be too much for anyone to stomach–except Congress of course.

    4. Oh

      All of the Congress critters, Senators, White house and Supreme Court residents should be loaded onto corrections buses and charged with being terrorists.

  3. Dissident Dreamer

    Craig Murray – Worse than you can imagine.

    Murray, who as a former UK ambassador knows about these things, explains how it was absolutely impossible for all the required organs of state in the UK to have come to the decision to defund UNWRA in the one day in which it is purported to have happened and that the same is true for all the other countries which did the same and managed to coordinate their responses to the unevidenced claims by Israel.

    He concludes that the whole thing was agreed weeks before and timed to deflect from the ICJ decision on Israel’s “plausible genocide” of Palestinians.

    It worked of course and just goes to show that Biden, Sunak, Starmer and all the rest of the western ptbs are all in favour of the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the shutting down of any debate on the matter.

    No surprise really but more evidence.

  4. Jamie

    If this becomes law, watch PayPal reinstate that $2500 fine for “the promotion of hate, violence, racial or other forms of intolerance that is discriminatory” for donating to these Non Profits.
    I think Congress has a bad case of Anosognosia. Hope this blows up in their face, on X. Wile E. Coyote style. mweep, mweep.

    1. timbers

      I wouldn’t under estimate the influence of Israel. Just the prior day Netanyahu publically called for a crackdown on American students protesting Isreali actions in Palestine. The following day we saw reports of local police arresting news reporters (maybe we will soon be shooting them dead like Israel does?) at student gatherings and students more robustly than usual with Governors and House Speakers and others echoing Netanyahu. calling these students being antisemitic and terrorisrt supportes and worse. We are being slowly Palestinian-ized almost like the Israeli playbook calls for. Max Blumenthal stated that the Israeli lobby “is an existential threat to American freedom and rights” along the same lines of laws passed after 9/11 like The Patriotic Act. Washington takes its orders from the Israeli lobby, it controls our government and it is throwing Americans under the bus.

      1. nippersdad

        Watching the news yesterday it came as a real shock to hear that the police had been shooting rubber bullets and letting off tear gas on the Emory quad. It wasn’t so long ago that they were celebrating the life of Nelson Mandela*, and I seem to recall his speaking at Glenn Memorial, the church upon whose lawn the press was reporting. That it was the Emory administration that called the police in was just the sickest kind of irony.

        https://news.emory.edu/stories/2013/12/er_emory_remembers_nelson_mandela/campus.html

        1. hnd

          Please think of yesterday’s news, and how it compares with the events of Jan6 at the Capital. Note the reactions of the members of Congress, and how their reactions to these events stack up.
          I think that it was in ‘The Idiot’ that Dostoyevsky had a character declare, at a party, that no one could lead him around by his nose; and that’s exactly what happened a short time later, when someone grabbed that character and led him around by his nose. Netanyahu must have a thousand fingers, because he’s able to lead ninety-nine percent of these congressional members, and them some, by their nasal protuberances. And all at the same time. In fact, they jostle each other in line, waiting to offer that particular orifice to Bibi.

      2. Jamie

        Yeah, I know. Cynthia McKinney demolished for supporting Palestine. They all know to keep their traps shut.

        In 2008, when Israel was slaughtering Palestinians, YouTube censored it using the Jewish Defense League (JDL, inactive by 2015). There was no TikTok. Twitter was only a couple years old, and highly censored by Dorsey. Podcasts, in infancy. People weren’t glued to their phones.

        The influence of Israel is becoming apparent to a new generation of Influencers. AIPAC’s publicly losing some face, because of Social Media.

        People under 30 are shocked, learning about Palestine. That screeching ‘Antisemite’ at them, is bizarrely inappropriate. Main stream news people sound unhinged, supporting Israel.

        Seems different today, than it was a couple years ago. Glimmer.

  5. Patrick Donnelly

    As the pressure mounts the levers are more and more obvious.

    Where are the Epstein tapes?
    Who is controlling this show?
    If incumbents are turfed out, will attitudes change radically?
    So many enemies are being made in these crude attempts to censor and blacklist the brave.

  6. Fred

    Citizens United protects free speech by corporations. This proposed legislation is an interesting carve-out.

  7. The Rev Kev

    The lame excuse for this legislation is to shut down pro-Palestine protest groups but it will not take long to go after any and all groups such as those protesting pipelines & other environmental causes as an example with sabotage allegations. But I would not put it past the Biden White House to use this legislation to go after MAGA groups on the grounds that they are American terrorists or some such. Due process? What’s that?

    1. DJG, Reality Czar

      The Rev Kev: The authorities already brutalized the water protectors during the protests in South Dakota a few years back, which wasn’t even all that unusual then. This legislation is an instance of the War State indicating just how the populace is to be treated.

      I also note another symptom (and I’m surprised you haven’t mentioned it already): The “Putin lover” stuff. The treatment of people opposed to the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine is also lead-in to this legislation. Hillary Clinton’s use of “fifth columnists”–who should be taken out and shot, I s’pose.

      And one final symptom, if I may: The shabby McCarthyist treatment of Matt Taibbi during those congressional hearings by the mediocre Garcia, corrupt-up-to-her-eyeballs Wasserman-Schulz, and Epstein-adjacent representative-simulacrum Plaskett.

      And here we are.

      1. Es s Ce Tera

        And in that case it was scenes straight out of South African apartheid complete with use of dogs and APC’s and Casspirs.

        Coming soon to wrong thinking Americans everywhere.

      2. steppenwolf fetchit

        One wishes Taibbi had said to her in response to her calling him a ” so-called journalist” . . . ” ‘So-called journalis?’ That’s rich, coming from a so-called Representative.”

    2. JonnyJames

      That will never happen: the Rs won’t go for it and: the cult of conman DT is good for ratings, good to divide and distract the public. There is no difference anyway if DT “wins” the sham “elections” then the Genocide of Palestine will continue and Kushner will develop prime “waterfront properties” on the Mediterranean coastline using Palestinian bodies as landfill. As if we have any democratic choice in the first place.

      There is no free speech: protest against Israel and you will be fired, blacklisted, lose benefits and go bankrupt. The only freedom one has is to die in the street.

    3. steppenwolf fetchit

      Assuming this bill passes and Biden signs it, President Trump ( when re-elected) will use it to suppress things like the Audubon Society for support of environmental terrorism because Audubon opposes old-growth logging and that makes loggers feel terrorized.

  8. Patrick Donnelly

    If there is total censorship, just imagine what the consequences will be, when the next pandemic arrives …

    1. steppenwolf fetchit

      A faster deeper dieoff, which suits the establishment agenda just fine, thank you very much.

  9. Pat

    Well, my current flaming piece of excrement congressional representative voted for it, Goldman, but that was to be expected. Sadder is that my much better despite a case of TDS former representative, Nadler, also voted for it. Jerry has had some surprising moments of not toeing the AIPAC line.

    I have no doubt Schumer is all in.

    Every day I find myself weeping for both the country I once believed in and the good people I know live here and will pay a high price for the perfidy of our supposed representatives.

  10. britzklieg

    The uniparty’s long knives might, at this point, seem shorter than the fuhrer’s but the effect is essentially the same. Welcome to the ugly truth of “our democracy” – ya know, the one they are… saving.

    Looks like Russia and China could be the real heroes… again.

    Alas, I’ll be dead before that history is written.

  11. John W

    This anti-free speech bill covers all organizations considered tax exempt as 501( c )( 3 )s, which includes, as I understand it, religious organizations. That will cause some fireworks.

  13. Rip Van Winkle

    The recent ‘protests’ at Chicago ORD entrance roads were complete astroturf. Purpose is to discredit their apparent cause with the normie public. The tell – meh from CPD. I’ve had bigger reaction from the authorities when I bring an oversized tube of toothpaste through security. They knew better than to pull a stunt like that at MDW. The based southsider drivers would have just run them over to make their flights, nothing personal mind you.

  14. Eclair

    Pat, “… the country I once believed in …” never existed. Oh, maybe for brief moments, here and there, for certain select groups. For the wealthy, white (or ‘white by courtesy’,) male, it has always been a safe place. For the Indigenous, Black, brown, recent immigrants from ‘non-Western nations,’ the working class of whatever shade, …. not so much.

    It is telling, I think, that I characterize the periods of my life, from 1940 onwards, as defined by America’s wars: WW 2, the Korean War, the Cold War, Vietnam, Granada (blink and you missed it!) Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Balkan wars, (they all began to blend into one never-ending conflict,) Ukraine and Palestine. And, those were the ones I knew about. Somewhere in between Iraq and Syria, there was Occupy and the realization that the top 1% ran the world and us 99% were here as disposable fodder to feed the money machine. Resistance is futile. Until it’s not.

      1. Eclair

        Thank you, Michaelmas, for listing some of the US-involved (instigated?) conflicts we didn’t know about at the time. I read the names of the ‘bad guys’ in our small east-coast industrial city evening paper (the city becoming smaller by the day, as the 1% closed the mills and moved manufacturing to more beneficent climes:) Mohammed Mosaddegh, Patrice Lumumba, Salvadore Allende ….

    2. Pat

      Think of it as my Christian upbringing, but like being a better human there was an aspirational quality to the country I loved. Yes, past tense is intentional. I knew even as an idealistic youth that there were massive holes in how the government worked versus it’s stated ideals. But there were so many times when there really appeared to be two steps forward for every step back. Times when the courts upheld the ideals of the Constitution versus the times they ignored it. Times when elected officials actually did the right thing for whatever reason.
      I don’t see that anymore. We have spent twenty+ years taking five or ten steps back for every tiny baby step forward. They have been actively destroying every curb on power particularly the ability to speak truth to power.
      You speak of wars, I know that using fiction and movies to mark things isn’t really right as the propaganda has always been great in them. But so often for me they were the crack in the curtain, they raised the question not addressed in the official narrative, not the wars. But I was remembering the Costa Gravas film “Missing” from the early 80’s. It wasn’t the most impactful of the films critical of US policies, certainly not as much as it should have been, but could something like that get made or distributed today. Grapes of Wrath was published in 1939. NAFTA accelerated the destruction of the rust belt starting thirty years ago, where is that novel and motion picture. It isn’t just government, we know they are a fully owned subsidiary. But that subsidiary just criminalized protest to limit it to the one person screaming in the park.
      I don’t see anyway to overcome that.

    3. Wukchumni

      Was in Humordor about 20 years ago and walked around the USMC Iwo Jima statue and around the periphery are all the engagements the semper fi’s have been involved in around the world, and there was hardly enough space to list them all.

  15. jhallc

    Here in Massachusetts, where our patriots fired the “shot heard round the world”, all House members voted for it except Pressley (nay) and Keating (not voting..coward).

  17. Spokey Dokes

    “Material support or resources” is a well-defined legal category of tangible property or services, of which medicine and religious material is excluded. [18 USC sec 2339A(b)(1)] Does your non-profit provide forged documentation or safe-houses to gunmen? They do? Then I guess you have to pay taxes.

    No worries, charitable organizations will still be free to demand Columbia University stop selling guided munitions to Israel from the safety of their hobo camp, or whatever. But it raises questions as to why these protests are located at universities, institutions, by light-years, most sympathetic to their cause, beyond landscaping of spacious lawns. Confrontation is inevitable; what conciliation could Columbia possibly offer? While these schools, as extensions of local and state governments, are at the forefront of domestic civil rights movements, foreign policy influence is beyond the administrations’ portfolios.

    What Columbia does have is an over-represented Jewish audience before which to vent anger about Israel not being entitled to the security that protesters themselves are so close to abusing where they yell and camp. Lost is the irony of occupying a space made absolutely safe by enormous security expenditures to demand cessation of security measures taken elsewhere. That space, violently intolerant of any dissent, let alone protest, dedicated itself to the perpetual creation of cadres of cross-border terror squads. How many hostages did campus police take from their homes?

    I recall some passionate defense, right here, of Bashar when he unilaterally massacred a couple (or five) hundred-thousand Syrians in places like Homs, displacing 13 million people. — But imperialism and lobbyists!

    1. Uncle Doug

      “Lost is the irony of occupying a space made absolutely safe by enormous security expenditures to demand cessation of security measures taken elsewhere.”

      Apparently, you think mass slaughter — plausibly genocide, per the International Court of Justice — is a “security measure.”

    2. JonnyJames

      Ah yes, an apologist for abuse of power, lawlessness, institutional corruption, genocide and tyranny complete with corporate media misinformation. You got the wrong audience, you need to post this BS on sites that have more gullible and ignorant types. Off you go then…

    3. Donald Obama

      It seems like you are claiming the protests are meant to intimidate or complain to an “an over-represented Jewish audience”. I mean, there is the inconvenient fact that Jewish groups are participating on the side of these pro-Palestinian protests. And I think more to the point – the students are protesting at these universities because – wait for it – those are THEIR communities and they LIVE there.

  18. Feral Finster

    “Land of the Free(R)!” my tail. Go on, tell us some more about how censorship and repression are things that only happen in other countries.

  19. Feral Finster

    The other funny thing is that MAGA is apparently all for it.

    As if the Establishment never ever would use its newly granted powers on them. Stupid scrotes.

    1. JonnyJames

      Of course, the DT is just as genocidal as JB. He says Jews should vote for him because he will exterminate Palestinians even faster than JB. And son-in-law Kushner will buy up waterfront property on the Med for rock-bottom prices – he’ll get a special deal from Uncle Bibi.

      Like we have a meaningful choice. At this point I would have thought that most informed people would realize that we have no functioning democracy. But still many are in denial and think that one more “election” will bring “change”. How many times do we have to heart that BS before folks get a clue?

      1. steppenwolf fetchit

        If DT would exterminate the Palestinians even faster than JB would, that would make DT the meaningfully worse choice. Yes? No?

          1. steppenwolf fetchit

            You may not like the choice. I may not like it either.

            But if you choose to affect the belief that there is no difference and hence no choice, I would invite you to f*ck around and find out.

  20. David in Friday Harbor

    In order to persecute Wrongthink our Inverted Totalitarian system requires a Newspeak definition of “terrorism” — which our billionaire-subservient lawmakers have struggled with.

    The 22 USC 2656f definition used by the SoS limits “terrorism” to “subnational groups or clandestine agents” in order to get around the obvious problem that “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets” has been the policy tool of the U.S. government and its proxies since forever.

    This is why Biden and Blinken defied the entire UN Security Council to veto statehood for Palestine. Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir ran the Stern Gang; their successor Nut ‘n Yahoo regime’s “war” on Gaza is explicitly intended to terrorize the population for political purposes. But they’re white folks representing a “state” so it’s OK.

    As always, It’s all about the Benjamins, baby…

    1. JonnyJames

      And intertwined with financial power is the maintenance of “global hegemony”. Palestine has been a key geo-strategic location for millennia. The US will risk nuclear war if the region looks like it will come under control or influence of China/Russia/Iran. A declining, desperate empire resorts to reckless, desperate measures.

      1. David in Friday Harbor

        “Global hegemony” is nothing more than a rebranding of “The White Man’s Burden.” This is simply moralistic code for “The white folks get to take all the marbles, because they can kick your ass.”

        And I’ll do anything I got to do
        Cut my hair and shine my shoes
        And keep on singin’ the blues
        If I can stay here in Borrell’s garden…

        — With apologies to Stephen Stills

        1. JonnyJames

          The pathetic and tragically humorous bit is that the white oligarchy can’t kick anyone’s ass: they are bed-wetting, coddled, privileged, and protected cowards who would promptly soil themselves if confronted with even a whiff of danger. They get the plebs to do the dirty work, of course. The world must do as they are told or get bombed into the Stone Age or nuked. But China, Russia, Iran, the “Houthis”, Hezbollah and the Palestinians won’t comply.

          1. David in Friday Harbor

            I’m imagining that Antony Blinken got punked for his lunch money daily on his walk to l’École Jeannine Manuel by arabes from the cités, but Hellfires and Tomahawks conveyed his revenge throughout the Middle East.

            Our Billionaire Overlords may be bed-wetters, but they’re bed-wetters with nukes…

    2. steppenwolf fetchit

      There is a working operational definition of terrorism. Terrorism is an activity or operation designed to scare or enrage the target into doing what you want the target to do when you are not strong enough to force the target to do what you want it to do if the target does not feel like doing what you want it to do.

      Hamas was not/ is not strong enough to make IsraelGov conduct mass murder in Gaza if the IsraelGov does not/ did not feel like conducting mass murder in Gaza. The IsraelGov had the free choice to freely decide to fight Hamas man to man and hand to hand down in the tunnels. Hamas could not make the IsraelGov decide to mass murder Gaza. So they tried to enrage the IsraelGov into choosing to mass murder Gaza. And the IsraelGov freely decided to follow its pre-programed instincts and cheerfully comply with Hamas’s wishes, thereby serving Hamas’s long term goal of getting Israel to show its ugliest face to the world for days after weeks after months.

      Terrorism works. It has gotten Israel to reveal the current state of its current self. It got America to invade Afghanistan and especially Iraq for long enough to leave itself substantially weakened and disliked more widely than before.

  21. Es s Ce Tera

    On the whole I think this will be a good thing, as it then becomes about any non-profit that is against genocide, which will be most of them, and as Catholic churches and charities find their statuses challenged it will bring clarity of mission and vision for these groups. In other words, I’m anticipating this law will have the exact opposite effect than intended.

  22. Waking Up

    Today there is an article at counterpunch.org by Henry Giroux titled “Poisoning the American Mind: Student Protests in the New McCarthyism”. Although he makes a number of valid points, he is still blaming the “far right” GOP for the crackdown on students and free speech.

    I bring this up because based on the vote in the House of Representatives (382 – 11) passing this bill to “Give the Treasury Nearly Unlimited Power To Destroy Nonprofits” as stated by Petti at Reason, does he believe the 382 members who passed this bill are all “far right” GOP? What will it take for some people to recognize that what we are seeing is WAY BEYOND the “far right” GOP?

    1. MFB

      Yes, I noticed that. Giroux still owes allegiance to the system that bred him, no matter how shabbily it has treated him.

      I was reading Adam Tooze’s THE WAGES OF DESTRUCTION (Tooze is another one who owes allegiance to the system but inadvertently questions it) and noticing that he mentioned that at the start of Hitler’s takeover the trade unions decided not to protest against the arrest of Social Democrats because he offered them a May Day holiday.

      The trade unions were closed down the following day and their assets seized . . .

  23. Kouros

    The silver lining here is that for the world at large, the moment of clarity is upon us.

    The US is like Dorian Gray, puting for all to see, the real face, hidden in the attic.

  24. Albe Vado

    Between this and the Israel lobby finally being the twig that broke the camel’s back on a Tiktok ban, it really is fascinating how much influence the little pissant desert parasite nation has. It’s reaching beyond absurd levels now.

    1. steppenwolf fetchit

      How much of “ban TikTok” is due to Israel and how much is it due to domestic billionaires hoping to buy up a potentially lucrative property? And how much is for “revenge against China” by a Chinaphobic Biden?

      Are there enough disgruntled TikTok-Americans to change the outcome of elections if they all vote against every officeholder who voted to ban TikTok, or signed the bill to ban TikTok? It would be interesting to find out.

  25. Kairos

    We can bellyache about the corrupt 2 party system with JB and DT both being two sides of the same corrupt and dangerous coin, so why vote for either of them? We can voice our dissent and our beliefs by voting for Jill Stein and supporting her candidacy for President. She is the only peace candidate running and has the experience to run a well-oiled campaign. She stands for the working class, Medicare for All, free speech, a ceasefire and the defunding of the genocidal war on Gaza/Palestinians by Israel, and she is an environmental activist. We have nothing to lose by ceasing to support both the Dems and the Republicans.
    https://www.jillstein2024.com

  26. Dave

    Expensive $peech wins – Kerching

    Washington Marshmen and Shakedown Swamp Sisters like nice stuff!

    Bombs away!

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