Marcy Winograd: "Israel murdered Gaza flotilla passengers to discourage aid"

Congressional candidate Marcy Winograd has issued a statement accusing the government of Israel of "murdering" Gaza flotilla passengers in order to discourage humanitarian aid efforts for Gaza. Here's an excerpt of her press release:

Congressional Candidate Marcy Winograd (CA-36) denounces the Israeli military's killing of at least 10 Free Gaza activists and wounding of dozens more on board a flotilla delivering humanitarian aid to Gaza. A founder of LA Jews for Peace, Winograd calls for an international investigation into the Israeli military's use of deadly force and urges Congress to immediately pass a resolution supporting such an investigation. Earlier, CNN reported Israeli troops opened fire on civilians aboard the flotilla in international waters.

As a sign of solidarity with the Free Gaza movement, a Winograd for Congress t-shirt had been sent and worn on the flotilla.

Says Winograd, "I suspect the murders were committed as a warning to others who might want to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza. Ironically, the killings are bound to heighten awareness about the brutal blockade and to increase pressure to end the imprisonment of over a million people in Gaza."

read the rest here: OpEdNews - Article: Peace Candidate Winograd Denounces Murders of Free Gaza Activists; Calls for International Investigation


UPDATE #1 (June 1, 2010):

On the other hand, Israeli novelist, intellectual and peace activist David Grossman writes the following in the Guardian (read here):

No explanation can justify or whitewash the crime that was committed, and no excuse can explain away the stupid actions of the government and the army. Israel did not send its soldiers to kill civilians in cold blood; this is the last thing it wanted. Yet, a small Turkish organisation, fanatical in its religious views and radically hostile to Israel, recruited to its cause several hundred seekers of peace and justice, and managed to lure Israel into a trap, because it knew how Israel would react, knew how Israel is destined and compelled, like a puppet on a string, to react the way it did.

I added the bold font to emphasize the truth of the matter: no one but an extreme ideologue could possibly believe that Israel intended to kill people on the flotilla as a way to send a message to those wanting to send aid to Gaza.

Marcy Winograd in the Tehran Times: ‘U.S. policy is nuclear narcissism’

Marcy Winograd, who's running in the Democratic primary for U.S. Congress in Jane Harmon's district in California, has given an interview to the Mehr News Agency, the official news agency of Iran's dictatorship. In that interview, which was published in the Tehran Times, Winograd condemned President Obama's Iran policies, calling them "nuclear narcissism". She also described herself, apropos of nothing, as a "non-Zionist Jew".

Read here: Tehran Times : ‘U.S. policy is nuclear narcissism’ and here: Politico: Harman, Winograd spar over Iran

Jewish anti-Israel activist and "9/11 truth" advocate disrupt Pelosi speech

CINDY SHEEHAN SUPPORTERS INTERRUPT SPEECH AT L.A.'s UNIVERSITY OF JUDAISM


Here, in their own words, are the stories of anti-Israel activist Marcy Winograd and "9/11 truth" advocate and 2006 Green Party state assembly candidate Peter Thottam disrupting a speech by Nancy Pelosi.

I've written about Winograd, a leader of L.A. Jews for Peace, before here. In that piece, I quoted Winograd to the effect that she does not support the existence of Israel and that she is reluctant to state this to the media because it may alienate voters. Ya think? She made this statement in a speech to the pro-Palestinian group Friends of Sabeel entitled "Call For One State", which is available here (cached here).  Here are two quotes:

Not only do I think a two-state solution is unrealistic, but also fundamentally wrong because it only reinforces heightened nationalism.   You cannot establish a democracy in a state founded on the institutionalized superiority or exclusivity of one of religion, ethnicity or culture.  I do not support the notion of an Islamic state or a Christian state any more than I support a Jewish state.  As a citizen of the United States, I do not want my tax dollars to support institutionalized racism. 

and...

You are a supporter of Israel’s right to exist, aren’t you? she said.

Well, I told the CNN reporter, I certainly support the right of all people to exist. No one should be persecuted for their religion and everyone deserves protection from religious persecution.

She gave up trying to get a straight answer out of me, but she covered our protest in front of the Holocaust Museum...

Here is a photo of Winograd (below left) and her fellow LA Jews for Peace members demonstrating outside the Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles.

Thottam, a hard-core "9/11 truth" conspiracy advocate ran for the California state assembly on the Green ticket in 2006. His website still lists him as a candidate for the assembly but does not state his party. Based on some of the content of his website, Thottam may have gone through the rabbit hole of the far left and come out in the nether region between far left and far right. Thottam's website prominantly features both photos of him with Howard Zinn and a link to the far-right anti-Semitic conspiracy website American Free Press, publisher of Michael Collins Piper (read here) and promoter of Christian Identity theology. Here's a quote from their mission statement:

The average American has no idea that super-rich predators with names like Rockefeller, Rothschild, Bronfman, Newhouse, Murdoch and Redstone are making vast profits and achieving immense power through their stranglehold on the American media (and, increasingly, on media around the globe.)

� These shadowy media controllers decide which politicians are “in” and which politicians are “out.” (They made Bill Clinton overnight. They also broke Richard Nixon overnight.)

� The Masters of the Media decide which issues can—or cannot—be debated. (Imagine a public de bate (sic) over the Federal Reserve system on Ted Coppell’s (sic) Nightline. It will never happen!)

� The Masters of the Media promote the perverse, anti-Christian Cultural Communist ideology that permeates publishing and broadcasting today.

Thottam's website has a lot of stuff about what he calls the "NWO" which is the term far right conspiracy buffs use for "New World Order" (read here):

3 IMPORTANT LINKS WITH NWO ANALYSIS & RELATED CONTENT:

#1: JFK's '63 assassination, Federal Reserve, ZION & Crown Corp. relationships; Misc. NWO & Related Links

While Thottam lets his political freak flag fly and makes no pretense of being a Democrat, Winograd actually has a leadership position in the Progressive Democrats of Los Angeles, a position from which she can recklessly hurt the Democrats. Should she be called a DINO of the left? She and the PDLA advocate much that I and other liberal Democrats support, then attach to that position poison pills that harm the Democratic Party and its nominees. To that end, she supports Cindy Sheehan's candidacy to unseat Rep. Pelosi. And she does it with such class. Notice how Winograd gloats in her piece about how scared Nancy Pelosi looked when Winograd leapt to her feet in the audience and began shouting at the stage. For Winograd, that's apparently a point of pride. Rep. Pelosi, who is undoubtedly the subject of constant threats, probably feared that she was about to be the victim of a physical attack, not a harangue. If activists like Code Pink, the "9/11 truth" crowd and Winograd wish to be considered non-violent advocates of peace, how can they take such pleasure in subjecting people to this sort of implicit threat? Let them get their jollies scaring people in some other way -- like telling the truth about their extremist positions instead of burying them in blizzards of good intentions.

Here, from Peter Thottam's website, are first person accounts and video. Here are first person accounts posted on the Impeach Bush For Peace website. Here's a link to a photo showing Code Pink's Linda Milazzo holding up a dust jacket of Pelosi's book on which she's written a pro-Cindy Sheehan slogan. DINOs of the left?

Here's a quote from Winograd's account:

Jumping up, a few seats back from the stage, Thottam shouted, Who gave you the right to destroy the Constitution and take Impeachment off the table? Our first, second, fourth, fifth and eight Constitutional amendments are being annihilated. 1 million Iraqis are dead. 5,000 Americans including Cindy Sheehan's son. We've spent over 1 trillion taxpayer dollars on a war that should never have been started. Our constitution is being destroyed, Nancy. Bring back our Constitution… Bring it back … Security moved in on Peter, took him away, arrested him and threw him in jail for the night.
Quote from Peter Thottam — Security Guard called the LAPD officers and made a citizen's arrest. Spent the night in jail. The police officers were sympathetic and agreed about the role of big money in Congress. They agreed that Pelosi and these reps are just tools.
Seconds after Peter's challenge, I shot up, two rows back from the stage, smack dab in the center of the audience, asking, Nancy, were you fully briefed on torture? Were you briefed on torture? Then came Jodie Evans, co-founder of Code Pink, holding out a copy of the US Constitution, offering it to Pelosi, just in case she missed the repeated mentions of impeachment as a remedy for abuse of power. Security moved in on Jodie, too, whisking her out of the auditorium at American Jewish University, high atop Sepulveda, just past the fifty protestors (sic) who came to greet Pelosi with Impeachment is on Our Table and Out of Iraq Now! and No Attack on Iran! signs and banners.
During Pelosi's entire book talk, some of us — Sara Nichols, Jodie Evans, Linda Milazzo, Marcy Winograd, Tighe Barry – held up our Nancy books with messages we scrawled in big black letters on the inside cover — Protect Iran - Honor Your Oath - Impeach! - Hold Bolton and Rove in Contempt — Nancy, Torture? Torture? Torture? and more about specific articles of the Constitution which called for impeachment. Security personnel whispered, watched us — seemingly unsure of how to respond to this act of subtle, yet distracting resistance. (continued below)
At one point during her talk, Pelosi, visibly nervous, looked right at us, those of us sitting two rows back, front and center, and told us, almost apologetically, "I was an activist too, I am a progressive, I want the war to end, too. I want to get out of Iraq" and then — "We need to move our troops into Afghanistan, not Iraq."

In case any reader of this blog hasn't figured it out yet, I am a Democrat and a liberal one at that. I proclaim in strong terms my opposition to the Bush administration and the war in Iraq. Both have been and continue to be disastrous for this country and the world. But the answer is not to descend into the madness of 9/11 conspiracy theory. The answer is not to terrify innocent people with childish, sometimes malicious, theatrics. And it certainly helps no one except the Republicans for Thottam, Winograd and other Sheehan supporters and DINOs of the left to try to do locally what Nader supporters did nationally in 2000.

Marcy Winograd: Hates Israel, "Loves to Hava Nagilah"

Charter school teacher and long-time political activist Marcy Winograd is the founder of L.A. Jews for Peace. Winograd is an executive board member of the California Democratic Party and president of Progressive Democrats of Los Angeles. She is also on the list of potential Obama delegates to the Democratic convention, after having been removed from the list, complaining about it in her blog on the Huffington Post (read here and here), and subsequently being returned by the Obama campaign to their list of delegates (read here).

Winograd ran against Rep. Jane Harmon for the Democratic nomination in California's 36th District in 2006, as an opponent of the Patriot Act, Iraq War enabling acts, bankruptcy bill and other Bush initiatives which Harmon supported. She got endorsements from Tom Hayden, Gore Vidal, Ed Asner, Ed Begley Jr. and Daniel Ellsberg. Although she had campaigned on behalf of Senator Barbara Boxer and Congressman Henry Waxman, both endorsed Harmon over Winograd, who ended up losing the primary with about 1/3 of the vote.

Winograd is also an ardent opponent of Israel and a member of Friends of Sabeel. Sabeel is the Liberation Theology-based organization largely responsible for promoting anti-Israel divestment and spreading bigoted anti-Israel propaganda within the mainline Protestant churches. Their view of Jews and Judaism is sometimes called Replacement Theology, sometimes supercessionism. This theology maintains that Judaism is obsolete -- an oppressive regime against which Christianity rebelled as a liberation movement. (Read here and here and here and here and here. Christians for Fair Witness analyzes Sabeel’s opposition to the existence of Israel here. Sabeel uses the deicide trope as a spur for the second intifada here. For more on Liberation Theology's use of Jews as symbolic of oppressors see Amy-Jill Levine's The Misunderstood Jew.)

Winograd participated in Febraury's Sabeel conference at All Saint's Episcopal Church in Pasadena. (Read about that conference here.) According to the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles (read here), on February 16, Winograd promoted the following views to the Friends of Sabeel:

She explained her advocacy for a single Arab-Jewish state by saying, "We are not talking about 'destroying' Israel, but about a transformation to a one-state solution."

Among Winograd's targets is the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance, and she urged pressure on school boards to stop transporting students there on educational trips.

She claimed that the museum's Holocaust exhibits are used for pro-Israel lobbying and demanded exhibit space for the Palestinian nakba.

Winograd posts her text version of her speech in Pasadena on her organization's website, (read here) including the following:

LA Jews for Peace was born in the midst of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon two summers ago, almost immediately following my congressional challenge to Jane Harman in the 36^th District. During my campaign, I prayed no one would ask me to clarify my position on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. On my candidate web site, I said I supported the Geneva Accord, a two-state solution....

Personally, I think it is too late for a two-state solution...

Not only do I think a two-state solution is unrealistic, but also fundamentally wrong because it only reinforces heightened nationalism.

In her speech, Winograd also pointedly recounts her refusal to answer a CNN interviewer who had the temerity to ask her whether she believes that Israel has a right to exist. She stonewalled that question. Clearly, she's a candidate who feels she has something to hide from the general public, even as she touts it to her anti-Israel allies.

The hypocrisy of sometimes claiming not to oppose the existence of Israel and sometimes actively opposing its existence and advocating a "single-state solution" is so obvious that it should require no elucidation. This hypocrisy is entirely consistent with that of Sabeel which has both advocated land-for-peace and opposed it, and supported the second intifada as it opposed violence.

Concluding her speech, Winograd claimed (in poetry no less) to oppose all nationalism. It appears that she would like to put this opposition into action only against the existence of Israel.

To compound the hypocrisy of her purported "peace" proposal, Winograd opposes Holocaust education because it denies equal time for dissemination of pro-Palestinian propaganda. Moreover, she is organizing those who oppose Holocaust education to pressure local school boards to cease support for public school students visiting L.A.'s Simon Wiesenthal Center Museum of Tolerance. (Click here for the museum's website.) Below (from the LA Jews for peace website) is a photo of their demonstration outside the museum on October 19. Six protesters and one pedestrian. That may be Winograd on the left in shades holding an illegible sign.

Blogger Ami Isseroff was emailed the following:

Marcy Winograd is the co-founder of the LA Jews for Peace collective and a long-time anti-war activist in Los Angeles. Inspired by author Joel Kovel's book Overcoming Zionism, she is interested in assembling and publishing an anthology entitled: From Zionism to Humanism: Personal Stories of Jews Who Dare to Speak Out...If you know of Jews who might be interested in contributing to her anthology, please encourage them to submit their story to Marcy at Winogradcoach@aol.com.

---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----

Though I identify with persecuted Jews, I grow up longing to be part of the dominant culture. I hang little red and green lights on plastic Christmas trees and rarely visit temple except to hava nagila at the boys' bar mitzvahs or to pray on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, when we never atone for the sin of theft, slaughter, or occupation.

In response, Isseroff wrote, in part (from Zionism-Israel Web Log: "A Jew who dares to speak out about Zionism")

It is no secret that I am what is usually called a "leftist." I cofounded a dialogue group of Jews and Arabs and I am director of an NGO that promotes peace education and dialogue. I am committed to rights for the Arabs of Palestine, as I am committed to rights for the Jews of Israel and the Arabs of Israel.

I am a leftist from a family of leftists. My great uncle Noteh (Nathan) was a Bolshevik. He fled Russia in 1905 for the safety of Poland. I am told that he was known as "The angel of the Warsaw Ghetto." Being a citizen of the world, he was killed along with all the other Jewish citizens of the world, who happened to be in the way of the Nazis, and discovered that "the world" would not grant passports to anybody. Had he stayed in Russia and survived, there is no doubt that along with many other "citizens of the world" of the Yevsektsia, the Jewish Communists, he would have found himself in Lyubjanka prison or Siberia. That's what the progressive forces did to Jews who were not afraid to speak out. My great uncle was not afraid to speak out, you see.

I noticed that there were several segments of public opinion that were actively working against peace and dialogue, and in favor of genocide and denial of the right of self determination to one side or another in the conflict. There are the extremists of the Kahana Hai movement, who call themselves Zionists, and there are also extremists on the other side. There are those who blacken and distort Islam and Arabs, and there are those who blacken and distort Judaism and Zionism.

Understandably, there are groups like Stormfront who have no use for "Zionists" because they are Nazis. We all know what Nazis are, don't we? We all know that not long ago, American fascist white supremacist racists coined the acronym ZOG - Zionist Occupied government for example. The typical fascist argument features the Jew as a sly, greedy and evil creature out to control the world through the International Jewish Conspiracy. Until recently, this was the property of a tiny, benighted, reactionary minority, spurned by all decent folks.

But about three or four years ago, I became painfully aware of a new phenomenon. The racist arguments of the fascists against Jews were now being used against "Zionists" and the "Israel Lobby" and were indistinguishable from the old fascist claims. Searching the Web, I found hundreds of sites telling the world about Zionist plots, all about Zionism and its pernicious influence, explaining that the Zionists started World War II, the Zionists started World War I, and even that the "Zionists" were responsible for the French revolution. The Zionists are also responsible, according to them, for the Holocaust Myth, created for the financial and political benefit of Israel. And on Yom Kippur, the "Zionists" do not ask forgiveness for the French Revolution. Indeed, as Ziopedia notes, the "Zionists" say the Kol Nidre prayer on Yom Kippur. According to the progressive and peace-loving citizens of the world edit Ziopedia, Kol Nidre is the sneaky "Zionist" way of getting out of their obligations to non-Jews.

More bizarrely, it seems that a great number of Jews have joined in this campaign. Many of them call themselves "Jews for Peace" and similar names. They do not realize apparently, that when people say that "the Jews" are responsible for the war in Iraq, the accusers mean them,

I don't know if Marcy Winograd has read Ami Isseroffs' reply to her request for the testimony of Jews who promote human rights. I'm pretty sure that she won't publish it.

If you happen to see her demonstrating against Holocaust education outside the Wiesnthal Center's Museum of Tolerance, maybe you can read it to her.

A couple of notes on Winograd's organizations views of Israel

• Winograd's Progressive Democrats of L.A. website accuses AIPAC of interfering with a resolution against the Iraq War which was under consideration by the California Democratic Party (read here under the headline "Anti-War Resolution Passes California Democratic Party Convention"), alleging "severe pressures to water down or derail the resolution by more hawkish Democrats, including delegates associated with the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)." They offer no evidence of this purported AIPAC intrusion into the agenda of the state Democratic party, and no basis for the purported connection to Israel at all. Did someone say "conspiracy theory"?

• Winograd's L.A. Jews for Peace website includes their endorsement of a fire-breathing anti-Israel screed by Scott Ritter reposted from the paleoconservative isolationist website Antiwar.com. (The Jews for Peace website links to a politically neutral website to avoid the taint of association with the paleo-conservatives, read here.) Here's a taste of Ritter's writing:

Israel's current policies, rooted in ethnic and religious hatred, are the antithesis of tolerance. Israel at present can have no friends, because Israel does not know how to be a friend. Driven by xenophobic paranoia and historical grievances, Israel is embarked on a path that can only lead to death and destruction...Israel has been drunk on arrogance and power.

More to follow on this...