A tale of two Congress members and the Capitol Police - 12 April 2006

A tale of two Congress members and the Capitol Police
12 April 2006
By Jeffrey Blankfort

Rep. Tom Lantos and Rep. Cynthia McKinney are members of the Democratic Party, but there the similarities end. Lantos represents South San Francisco and San Mateo County. He is white, Jewish, Hungarian born and portrays himself as "the only Holocaust survivor ever elected to Congress." He is an unabashed supporter of Israel. That makes him, of course, an "untouchable." He is also the ranking Democrat on the powerful House International Relations Committee, which provides him with unusual opportunities to help Israel. He sponsors repressive legislation targeting the Palestinians and Israel's Middle East adversaries and, when called upon by Israel, he represents it in countries where Israel has no diplomatic relations, a questionable activity by a member of the U.S. Congress.
"He's true blue and white" – the colors of the Israeli flag – a former leader of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, Israel's official lobby, told the Jerusalem Post, referring to Lantos' devotion to Israel. Lantos made his first trip to the Jewish state in 1956 and has been there nearly 60 times since.«
In 1991, in an effort to convince Congress and the world that Iraq needed to be forcibly removed from Kuwait, Lantos helped stage a hearing before his private Congressional Human Rights Caucus at which the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador, pretending she was a nurse who had been working in a Kuwaiti hospital at the time of Iraq's invasion, testified that she had witnessed Iraqi soldiers throwing babies out of scores of incubators on to the hospital floor in order to take the incubators back to Iraq.«
McKinney, of course, is African-American, and one of the few members of the Congressional Black Caucus who has not been cowed into submission by the Democratic Party and the only one who has refused to genuflect to the Israel lobby. But, again, this story isn't about Israel, although its specter and that of its lobby seem ever present. To make matters worse – for McKinney, not for the pursuit of truth and justice – she has refused to accept the official Bush administration explanation of the events of 9-11, and she has participated in events alongside of other critics of that narrative who have been marginalized not only by both political parties and the mainstream media but by the "gatekeepers" of the left led by Noam Chomsky.«
She has also been outspoken – while the Democratic Party has been largely silent – about the disenfranchisement of Black voters in Florida in the last two presidential elections, which is the subject of a new film about her on that subject, "American Blackout," that opened in February at the Sundance Film Festival. In other words, she is considered a "trouble-maker" in a colony of "go-along-to-get-alongs."«

Source: http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=36868