Seattle Pro-Israel Stealth PACs Smear Local Candidates

An election mailer promoting a local school board candidate headlined: “Support Seattle school board candidates who put techers, children and families first.”  Sound pretty innocuous right? What parent wouldn’t vote for such a person? Until you read the website of the PAC which spent $20,000 sending it. It paints a different story and reads:

The Kids Table (TKT) is a new political action committee designed to support pro-Jewish candidates for state and local office…and oppose candidates who are complicit or complacent in the face of anti-Jewish hate. Simply put, political antisemitism has found a home here. It is ignored or encouraged…

What does such innocuous school campaign literature have in common with the PAC’s inflammatory rhetoric?  Candidates “complicit in the face of ‘Jew hatred.'” “Political anti-Semitism encouraged.”  Sounds ominous. If true, it would be troubling. But is it borne out by facts or evidence? For the answer, read on.

Thanks to Citizens United, corporations (which are people) and PACs have poisoned American democracy by dumping billions (yes, billions) on Congressional, presidential and state races.  But intervention in local city elections is a newer and pernicious phenomenon.

The second pro-Israel Seattle-area PAC is Washingtonians for a Brighter Future (WFBF). Both are funded by wealthy pro-Israel Jews, who’ve raised over $100,000 between the two. They’ve only spent it on two races: one for Tacoma city council and a school board race in Seattle.  They claim their agenda seeks to promote candidates who will fight anti-Semitism.  However, their purpose is to defeat candidates who are anti-Zionist or have an anti-Zionist spouse (see below).

 

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WFBF’s website describes its mission:

“Washingtonians for a Brighter Future (WBF) is the Political Action Committee (PAC) of the Jewish community and its allies in Washington State, dedicated to keeping the community safe.

Safe from “enemies,” imagined or otherwise. Safe for Israel.  Safe for Zionists. The claim it represents the “Jewish community” is also false. The rest of us here did not appoint them to represent us.  They aren’t even endorsed by any communal groups, pro-Israel or otherwise.

“Anti-Semitism” rears its ugly head in school hallways and classrooms

What do these PACs consider anti-Semitism?  Where do they find it in schools?  Stop Hate in Schools (SHS) maintains reports on such “incidents.”  Its mission aligns fully with the PACs.  SHS reports, for example, that a school featured an assembly with a Palestinian-American author. This angered some unnamed parents who warned the school that it “may be challenging for any of our Jewish families.” The school hosted the event anyway.  Anti-Semitism, according to SHS.

In another case, a school social justice conference featured a Jewish speaker who “equated Zionism with right-wing racist political interests.”  Again, anti-Semitism. These “anti-Semitism hunters” fancy themselves intrepid heroes defending the Jewish people.  But the quality and credibility of these reports is nil.  None of the events are authenticated. Few school names and no victim names are mentioned. The individual reporting the incident is unknown.  It’s an exercise in paranoia, rather than facts.

Full disclosure: my wife, Janis White is the school board candidate who’s been falsely targeted— in an anonymous voter guide heavily influenced by WFBF, as “a Jewish lady who hates Israel” (see screenshot). I am the real target–because of this blog. But they can’t explicitly attack me since I’m not running for anything.  She is being targeted solely because we are married.

The Kid’s Table also spent $30,000 on two mailers supporting Janis’ opponent. It too never mentioned Israel. Thus in effect, concealing its agenda behind education-related sloganeering.  TKT’s mailer hid a political agenda behind an education facade.  Its mission is not to support or improve public education. It is to promote an educational system that roots out “anti-Israel” content in the guise of fighting anti-Semitism. For these PACs, schools are the latest battleground for the hearts and minds of America.

In fact, they barely mention Israel at all in their mailers and endorsements. Instead, they cloak them in terms like “anti-Jewish” or “Jew hatred;” attempting to make an even more explicit reference to attacks on Jews.  “Jew hatred” has a more alarming, visceral impact than terms like “anti-Israel or “anti-Semitic.”

One pro-Israel candidate guide smears candidates because of perceived relationships with “Jewish enemies.”  This is rank guilt by association.  Most of the examples of “Jew hatred” offered in their literature don’t even mount to a relationship, let alone some sort of shady network of anti-Semites infiltrating our public schools.

Janis has never made any public statement about Israel. Never attended a protest, signed a petition, made a speech. She’s never mentioned Israel in any of her scores of appearances at Seattle Public Schools board meetings.

In fact, she has been active in the Jewish community for her entire life, has visited Israel, and was a member of a local shul for 20 years.

In Tacoma, a trans, anti-Zionist council candidate, Zev Cook, was targeted by multiple mailers.  WFBF, whose name obscures its single issue focus on its pro-Israel agenda, spent close to $35,000 on this election.  The group is chaired by Nevet (“Hamas is a Death Cult”) Basker, a long-time fixture with the far-right, StandWithUs. Her Twitter feed is filled with vitriol targeting Israel’s critics. For example:

“Anti-Zionism means rejecting Israel’s very *existence*. In practical terms, it also means supporting the murder of millions of Jews.”

Not to mention that’s not what anti-Zionism is.  In fact, there are hundreds of thousands of anti-Zionist Jews in Israel and the Diaspora.  They certainly love their people and their Jewish identity.  The claim that they support murdering Jews is a schandeh: obscene hateful, even anti-Semitic.

The PAC mailers for the Seattle elections do not mention Israel. They do not even mention anti-Semitism. They focus on education and school-related subjects.  They wage stealth campaigns concealing their real intent: to police curriculum and classroom discourse, ensuring it maintains a pro-Israel perspective.

TKT also created its own slate of three candidates, one of whom is Janis’ opponent. I doubt they care much about the other two. Janis is the one they’re targeting. It spent $10,000 on a separeate mailer specifically endorsing her wealthy opponent.

The donors funding this efforts read like a Who’s Who of the greater Seattle Jewish community. They are its pillars. Wealthy donors who fund right-wing Israel Lobby groups like Stand With Us, Hillel and the Jewish Federation.  Whether they know it or not, they are enabling this travesty. They are turning our schools into pro-Israel propaganda mills, which dispense with the free exchange of ideas in favor of rote boosterism.

Among them are:

• Bob Sulkin
• Saul and Deborah Gamoran
• Doug and Deborah Rosen
• Michele Rosen
• Michael Spektor
• William Hochberg
• Rob Spitzer
• Nevet Basker
• Paul Burstein
• Rabbi Daniel Weiner

This election strategy is a stealth attack on criticism of Israel in school and on candidates who are guilty of insufficient loyalty to it and its interests.  It is unfortunately characteristic of the Lobby, its donors and supporters. They have lost the hearts and minds of the American public, so they substitute an issue disturbing to everyone: anti Semitism. Then they attempt to discredit pro-Palestine protesters by falsely linking them to it.

This may work for the older generation of dyed-in-the-wool Zionists. But the younger generation sees through this stratagem. It no longer resonates with them. That’s why tens of thousands protested on college campuses. It’s why Israel faces a mass extinction event among much of the American public. Support for it is at its lowest ebb in a generation. Its status is unrecoverable.

My wife, offended by the manipulative PAC behavior, wrote to all of the school board candidates, challenging them to renounce their support. Most didn’t respond.

This is how the poison spreads.  School board races are generally non-partisan affairs, based on hyper-local educational issues.  But accepting such outside support, candidates are injecting extraneous partisan issues into elections.  This is Citizens United run amok.

Aipac: the “art” of the smear

It is a tactic Aipac and its affiliate PACs have used to defeat candidates in federal elections. When polled about their priorities, Americans ranked Israel 20th on their list. Only 9% of American Jews rank Israel among their two top priorities.  The Israel Lobby, which probably has done its own polling on this issue, knows that attack ads intended to smear progressive Democratic primary candidates, will not resonate based on Israel.  So they identify weaknesses in these candidates wholly unrelated to Israel, and air ads which smear them with blaring, false claims intended to suppress turnout among their likely supporters.

It’s a nasty, underhanded strategy.  But in many cases it works. Aipac boasts of the “anti-Israel” or “anti-Semitic” candidates it’s defeated; while trumpeting the pro-Israel Congress it has created.  Success leads them to replicate the playbook over and over again.  As I wrote in my last post, the stealth strategy and the hundreds of millions pro-Israel donors dump on such campaigns poison the American electoral system.  Most of them are MAGA billionaires.  Thus, wealthy Republican oligarchs are meddling in internal Democratic processes in order to transform the Party into a bunch of pro-Israel automatons.

The mission of these two Seattle PACs is not fighting anti-Semitism, but rather anti-Zionism.  Most of the examples of alleged anti-Semitic incidents they feature refer to Israel.  Few of the examples portray actual anti-Semitism.  Rather, the sole purpose of these money mills is to root out anti-Zionism.  In other words, for them anti-Zionism = anti-Semitism.

As I’ve stated here numerous times, this is a false equivalence: Judaism and Zionism are separate entities. As seems obvious, Zionism is nationalism. Judaism is a religion. Jews and Israelis are not the same.  After all, there are more non-Jewish Zionists (40-million Christian evangelicals count themselves as such) than Jewish.

The attempt by Zionists (including the Israel Lobby and Israeli leaders) to conflate the two puts a target on the backs of Diaspora Jews, who are blamed by white supremacists and Muslim fundamentalists for Israel’s crimes.  In other words, this phenomenon itself is anti-Semitic.

Injecting this Zionist battle for the hearts and minds of Americans into local school boards will poison our educational system, just as it has poisoned our electoral system.