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By Guy Page
An anti-Israel umbrella organization comprised of socialist and pro-Palestinian advocacy groups wants five Vermont legislators to resign following their September junket to Israel.
A bill before the Vermont Legislature, H.310, would require education about anti-semitism. Four of the five legislators are on the lengthy, bi-partisan list of bill sponsors.
On January 6 at 11am in the Statehouse’s Cedar Creek Room in Montpelier, the Vermont Coalition for Palestinian Liberation (VCPL) will hold a press conference demanding that five legislators who travelled to Israel to support its war on Gaza resign immediately.
VCPL is comprised of advocacy groups including Central Vermont Democratic Socialists of America and the Champlain Valley Democratic Socialists of America.
Will Greer (D – Bennington-2), Matthew Birong (D – Addison-3), James Gregorie (R – Franklin-6), Sarah “Sarita” Austin (D – Chittenden-19), and Gina Galfetti (R – Washington-Orange) joined the “50 States, One Israel,” met with Israeli officials, and posed for a picture with a Vermont flag. VCPL claims it has collected over 1,000 signatures on a petition demanding their resignation.
According to Seven Days, Gregoire said the recent trip offered a rare chance to learn firsthand about the region’s history and ongoing conflict, while acknowledging that the Israeli government controlled much of the itinerary. He said the visit still provided opportunities for dialogue that would not have been possible otherwise. “We wouldn’t have had those opportunities, any of us, to ask those questions if we stayed at our houses,” Gregoire said.
In a public statement reported in Seven Days, Greer said he traveled to Israel not to support Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government or “the genocide taking place in Gaza nor the ground offensive that has taken place as well in the past week,” but to represent his Bennington district. He emphasized that no taxpayer funds were used for the trip. “I do not want Vermont to be excluded from having conversations as they relate to our current concerns around, and hopes for, achieving peace in Gaza and the West Bank,” Greer wrote.
The petition claims that ‘these five legislators have implicated our state in one of the greatest crimes against humanity in history” – not Hamas’s October 7, 2023 surprise attack on Israel, killing over 2000 people, mostly civilians;. Instead it refers to Israel’s counter-attack that destroyed much of Gaza in its efforts to destroy those who planned and staged the Hamas attack.
VCPL’s press conference will feature Palestinian Vermonters Wafic Faour, Samia Abbass, and a written statement from Mohsen Mahdawi, the Palestinian-born Columbia University activist briefly detained by federal authorities this year. Federal authorities say Mahdawi asked a Vermont museum owner about purchasing a machine gun after he moved to Vermont more than a decade ago. Also, his social media site showed slain family members in Israel/Palestine holding guns. Mahdawi has since become a professing Buddhist seeking a path to peace, although he failed to condemn the Oct. 7 attack when the subject was broached on 60 Minutes.
VCPL will be joined by, among others, State Senator Tanya Vyhovsky, former Representative David Templeman, Mark Hughes from the Richard Kemp Center, Fran Miller of Jewish Voice for Peace, Reverend Chelsea Page of the United Church of Christ, and two eyewitnesses to the Israeli occupation, Carmela Ormando and Bethany Logan, who just returned from the West Bank.
VCPL claims the lawmakers “went to Israel, not for educational purposes as they claimed, but to receive guidance on how to lobby for bills to criminalize any opposition to Israel, its apartheid regime, occupation of Palestinian land, and genocidal war on Gaza.”
VCPL will call for the legislators to pass bill H.168 to defend freedom of speech for all activists, including Palestinians and Palestine solidarity activists. VCPL will also encourage them to pass its other proposed bills, most importantly one that pledges Vermont will become an apartheid-free state.
H168, sponsored by Reps. Troy Headrick (I-Burlington) and Kate McCann (D-Burlington) would: prohibit restriction in public schools of instruction on social equity and justice; require instruction in public schools on social equity and justice; require public schools to adopt policies that affirm the dignity of educators and students; prohibit the influence of privately funded groups on the development of public school curriculum; amend the minimum course of study to include social equity and justice; (6) require the Agency of Education to develop resources and supports for LGBTQIA+ students and families; and prohibit adverse action against teachers for performing work activities in a manner consistent with State or federal law.
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Categories: State Government
Another iteration of the Democrats My Way or The Highway thinking
ICE needs to check every single member of VCPL and their ‘advocacy groups’.
These propagandists have it all wrong. Apartheid? Moslem Arabs are members of the Knesset and work side by side as doctors, nurses, etc., in Israeli hospitals and other professional positions. In fact, Druze, Christian and Moslem Arabs are members of the Israeli Defence Forces. They don’t have to enlist like Jewish Israelis, but join because they love living in the highly developed Jewish state. Palestinians are second class citizens in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq but these activists ignore reality and depend upon hate mongering, and the repitition of lies, not unlike Hitler’s Reich Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.
Or like the Muslim Grand Mufi, the leader of the religion at the time, made a pact with Hitler to eliminate all jews in Middle East ‘When’ he won WWII, with the current leader of Iran being a direct descendant of Grand Mufi of 1930’s along with a grand child Yasser Arifat.
With his comment about “the genocide taking place in Gaza,” Will Greer surely must be referring to the decades-long genocidal efforts by Palestinians, Muslims in general, Hamas, and Hamas supporters around the world to kill Jews and eliminate Israel from the river to the sea. THAT is the only genocide—defined as the deliberate, systematic destruction of a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group—taking place in Gaza.
Israel is not attacking Palestinians because they are Muslims. It is attacking Hamas and other jihadists, who happen to be Muslims, because they are terrorists and relentlessly attacking Israel.
Israel is fighting for its very existence. If Hamas stopped fighting, there would be no war. If Israel stopped fighting, there would be no Israel.
Not sure why anyone would care what you want or why you think anyone would listen to racial, genocidal accusations or your religious objections to Israel defending itself!
I don’t think anyone is, It appears to me that America defending Isreal, and Israel having American congress in its hand is the problem, not Isreal defending itself, its not OUR job to defend it or anyone else, but ourselves.
Who paid for the trip is the first question everyone should be asking
Well, we don’t have our Soldiers over there fighting their war, so we are not exactly as you say defending them. but you are entitled to read into it whatever you want. If we had Troops involved, I could go along with your opinion, thank God we don’t.
They have now accepted and admitted to TAKING A BRIBE…Charge them criminally…is what I would do. Lobbying monies ARE BRIBES, not “contributions”
And since Israel is a foreign nation, the 4 may be guilty of treason as well.
Do tou have the same feeling for Mr. Sanders? He has taking millions in pharma money, not a trip to Israel, the land where the King of Kings was born, my personal savior. Take Israel out of it. Has anyone in our local government taken money from say freemasons? Other countries perhaps, Canada, etc. Be careful how you word things. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. They all should be held accountable. Nothing sides.
Meh. I just wonder why 90% of our politicians in Washington receive money from a lobbying group for a foreign country. (Election interference, anyone?) Doesn’t seem to happen with any of our other “allies.”
Can we please have an honest accounting of every trip made by a Vermont official to a communist or majority-moslem country lately, along with who paid for it…
Majority moslem countries are SYSTEMICALLY MISOGYNIST. Our elected officials who support misogyny should resign.
How dare you “demand resignation ” from our duly elected legislators because of disagreement. I hate Netanyahu and most of the Israeli political behaviors. Have always supported a 2 state solution; since the 70’s. Always hated radical right wing religions. Religion has always created chaos and war throughout history. And your group has demanded everything the opposite of our country’s foundation. We should be looking in our own backyard at intolerance, religious discrimination, sexual discrimination, racial, and economic discrimination. Look at our “leaders ” and behaviors.
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I have no ‘tolerance’ for thieves, drug dealers, corrupt politicians and uneducated people who consistently vote for mental midgets like Sanders and Balint.
It’s up to us to refute all lawmaking that’s done on foreign government’s behalf. We are not subsidiaries of another nation, and no legislator or congress person CAN hold dual citizens ship, even Omar and be loyal to the American People. We need to notice them of failure to uphold their oath to the Constitution, and fraudulent representation. All of them that follow orders from foreign nations or feed, and house and support foreign nations before our own. It’s not America First, its just America is for Americans, not any other nation.
They should counter with a bill declaring the Vermont Coalition for Palestinian Liberation a domestic terror organization.
How about labeling these “groups” what they truly are: pro-jihad.
They keep going on and on about the Palestinian pretendicide, while being dead silent on the Christian genocide in Africa.
That’s so ridiculous! I don’t understand why these people think they have the right to demand crap like this!!
We are should be appalled at a truth seeking trip ? Sad 🙁
Not Terrorists but domestic sympathizers or…. Whackadoodles…
Teach history and your children will be media savvy. Teach Biblical Truth and your children will be Truth teachers. All that anyone needs to know is these folks despise themselves and their American cousins for no good reason.
If you read the last paragraph, H168 seems to have little to do with Israel or Gaza and is really to jam DEI, LGBT, social justice, equity, etc. back into the public schools. It’s a Trojan horse for a Leftist laundry list of garbage. The students already can’t read, write or do math, but they want even more time taken up for brainwashing.
Israel is not the problem. If hamas had done to America what they did Oct. 7th, we would have turned Gaza to glass. Israel probably has done questionable things over there, individuals will pay their price. Point being, Hamas raped, brutally murdered, beheaded, filmed it, and boasts about using their own as shields. No other country wants any Palestinian refugees, why? We all know the answer, most are vicious animals, who will eventually be radical islamists. People need to wake up. When Islam tries to take over, (we will fight back), their supporters think there safe. That religion is comply, or die, dont be fooled. Only one religion claims to behead the infidels, and it’s not Christian!
Remove them from their political positions immediately. The white people they should be worried about is the United States and America if they are in a political office here. Did they use taxpayer money to travel there???
Blah blah blah, get in line, there’s a whole heap of legislators I’d like to resign too. Baruth, LaLonde and our entire Washington delegation to name a few!