An all expenses paid pro-Israel summit marketed to local government councillors raises concerns about ethics and politics in their local communities. Wendy Bacon and Yaakov Aharon report.

The Australian Mayors Summit Against Antisemitism (CAM Summit) will lobby for the widespread adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism and support for Israel, including bans on promoting Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) of Israel.

However, hundreds of letters have been sent to local councillors around Australia calling on them not to attend the Summit. 

Australian local councillors first heard of the Summit earlier this year when they received letters and texts from the Israel-US-based CAM movement inviting them to an all-expenses-paid National Mayors’ summit on the Gold Coast in early September.

For those who did not respond, there was a follow-up letter signed by CAM’s CEO, Sasha Roytman, who is based in Tel Aviv and previously headed a 25-strong IDF team responsible for the IDF’s digital media strategy.

Ethical concerns raised

Even seasoned Councillors were astonished by the sizeable offer of hospitality. Many experienced it as a ‘hard sell’, which raised an ethical red flag.

In response to three emails, one of which incorrectly addressed him as Mayor, Councillor Gideon Cordover at Kingborough in Tasmania told MWM his personal reaction was that, “We’re talking big money. In my six years on local council in Tasmania, I’ve never come across such a tactic by a lobby group with such a wide-reaching cash splash”.

Not developers, not the miners, not the big salmon farms….they seem to have more funding available for lobbying than those groups.

Local government Codes of Conduct around Australia differ, but all caution Councillors against accepting gifts or benefits that could lead others to think they could be influenced when making future decisions.

Anyone who glanced at the Summit program would know it is all about influencing decisions. Its key goal is to embed the IHRA definition across local government and introduce the Municipal Antisemitism Action Index, which ranks municipalities based on their “effectiveness in combating antisemitism, providing a clear framework to measure progress, identify gaps, and promote best practices in local government action.”

Some councils, including Merri-bek in Melbourne and Sutherland in Sydney, maintain a transparency register that records not only benefits received but also offers that are declined. Other councils only require councillors to register offers that are accepted.

Staff at one council in Sydney sent an email to councillors simply advising them to decline the CAM offer.

There is an exception in some codes for a councillor to accept a ‘benefit’ if approved by council to attend an event as part of official council business. But even then, councillors still need to consider conflict of interest situations that could arise in the future.

In this case, potential conflicts of interest are confused because the invitation letters referred to both ‘partners’ and ‘sponsors’.

MWM could not confirm whether CAM sought legal and ethical advice before it sent the free hospitality offer to councillors. However, it’s notable that respected corporate lawyer David Gonski is chairing the Summit organising committee and is listed as a speaker at the summit.

MWM has sent questions to Gonski in relation to the summit and how it fits with his role as Chancellor of UNSW. His response will be published when received.

CAM out of council campaign

When a council adopt unpopular policies, the brunt is borne by council workers. This is why the Australian Services Union launched a campaign against the CAM Summit this week. Phillipa Balk, assistant branch secretary, ASU Vic Tas Authorities and Services Branch, said,

“This conference has troubling connections to the Israeli military and to people with a history of racist remarks. We urge all local government officials not to participate in this conference and to work together more broadly across their communities to fight racism in all its forms.”

https://michaelwest.com.au/point-of-order-antisemitism-summit-raises-ethics-eyebrows/

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

 

 

The Loomering of Injured Gazan Children
American humanitarian policy is now subject to the whims of a very influential self-proclaimed “Islamophobe.”

Kelley Beaucar Vlahos

 

As he said the words, young conservatives sat pie-eyed in their seats.

“There’s never been a nation like the United States, ever. It begins with the principles of our founding documents, principles that recognize that our rights come from God, not from our government—principles that recognize that because all of us are equal in the eyes of our creator, all life is sacred at every stage of life.”

That was Marco Rubio, then a senator, speaking to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) 15 years ago. This week we found out how he envisions the uniqueness of America and whose lives are actually sacred in the eyes of the U.S. government.

 

Rubio, now secretary of state, sat on Face the Nation on August 17 and attempted to justify his department’s decision over the weekend to stop giving temporarymedical visas to a small number of Palestinian children from Gaza (mostly amputees and burn victims) coming into the States to receive specialized and urgent care paid for by the generosity of private donors—that is, free to the U.S. taxpayer—primarily through one non-profit organization called HEAL Palestine.

Rubio said he had “evidence that some of the organizations bragging about, and involved in, acquiring these visas have strong links to terrorist groups like Hamas.” 

“And so we are not going to be in partnership with groups that are friendly with Hamas. So we need to—we’re going to pause those visas” pending a full and thorough assessment of them, he added.

 

Which means, in government speak, there will be no more visas today, or likely any day for these children, most of whom are victims of American-made bombs and other explosives that have torn through their homes, shelters, hospitals and makeshift tents over the last 22 months in Gaza. Why would we want to help them?

Why indeed, said rightwing influencer and MAGA activist Laura Loomer, who is boasting today that Rubio stopped all visas for the children because of her urgent August 15 posts on X warning of an “Islamic invasion” of the U.S., demanding that these visas be revoked. She also claims to have spoken to him personally. She also wants “to know who issued these visas so they can be fired.” 

Congressmen Chip Roy (R-TX) and Randy Fine (R-FL), thanked Loomer hours after her posts. During his Face the Nation interview, Rubio claimed his “evidence” of a Hamas connection came from concerned members of Congress. (Who?) Rubio never presented it, nor did he mention on Face the Nation that those obtaining the visas go through extensive security checks at the U.S. embassies in Amman, Jerusalem or Cairo, before even setting foot on American soil.

 

The State Department has not responded to inquiries from The American Conservative asking what that evidence is, what offices contacted him, or whether the State Department’s sudden decision to halt the visas was a direct response to Loomer’s hyperbolic postings about a refugee “invasion.” (Just to make it crystal clear, these are not “refugees” but individuals coming into the country to get treatment and then flown back to Egypt afterwards, according to HEAL Palestine.)

Having claimed that the U.S. does not support the collective punishment of innocent Gazans for the crimes of Hamas, Washington is collectively punishing them all over again by denying the meekest and weakest a modicum of kindness—a prosthetic limb, or plastic surgery to fix a smile literally torn from a face.

“Denying visas to children in need of medical care is inhumane,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) told TAC, adding that “the care of Palestinian children is a matter of conscience.”

 

According to the New York Times, quoting HEAL Palestine, to date the group helped to evacuate 63 injured children to hospitals in nine U.S. cities this month, for treatment.

“Despite what any right-wing conspiracists may say, America has treated young medical evacuees from Gaza throughout this conflict without compromising our national security,” Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) told TAC, calling the visa restrictions for the children “unconscionable.” 

“It is truly despicable that the Secretary of State has suspended this program,” said Van Hollen. “We must continue these lifesaving efforts—and we can do so while protecting our national security.”

Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), who had a falling out with Loomer in 2022, said in a recent interview that “[Loomer] attacks some of the most loyal people to the president, people that are unapologetically America first.” Greene’s vision of America First has certainly diverged from Loomer’s, particularly on the issue of Israel and Gaza. Greene has been more critical of unconditional support of Isreal than most members on either side of the aisle on Capitol Hill, and has invoked her own Christian conservatism to oppose what she has called a genocide against Palestinians in the Strip.

Her disgust with Rubio’s decision to halt the visas and Loomer’s involvement was clear in her X post on Tuesday.

“I’m not saying bring in refugees or use tax payer dollars, not at all, but when did America’s heart grow so cold to refuse innocent children privately funded surgeries and then they return home after they recover?” she charged. “Wouldn’t we allow Israeli children if they were the ones needing surgery?”

Even after the notional end of the War on Terror, people like Loomer are still able to wield the extreme Islamophobia fashionable in the post-9/11 era to manipulate American policy and bully Washington officials in the manner we are witnessing today—and not just Rubio.

By August 5, ABC News counted 15 Trump officials who have fallen victim to Loomer’s “pressure campaigns” for various reasons, “through either direct firings or the withdrawal of senior political nominations, across six different federal agencies.” 

“I don’t keep count anymore,” Loomer told ABC News when asked how many officials she had helped force out. “There’s too many to keep track of.”

Attacking amputee children as tools of Hamas and preventing their medical care could be her lowest blow, but it has some competition for the title. Loomer has called Islam “a cancer on society” and openly identifies as a proud Islamophobe who is preventing the takeover of the U.S. government of the Muslim Brotherhood.  

No surprise she at one time worked under Pamela Geller, the doyenne of Islamophobia, who believes all Muslims are terrorists and to achieve true national security, Islam and everyone who practices it must be banned from the country. 

Loomer has a particular bee in her bonnet about Somali-American Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), whom Loomer once referred to as an “inbred” “black dog” and said was the reason we should not allow Muslims to hold office in the United States (because they want to install a caliphate and Sharia law in the U.S.). In 2019 her coconspirator Jacob Wohl was barred by CPAC from presenting their purported evidence that Omar was married to her brother. 

Funnily, Loomer’s mentor Geller was forced out of CPAC in 2010 for accusing CPAC board member Grover Norquist (and his wife) of “ties to Islamic supremacists and jihadists.” Geller’s spiel then was eerily like Loomer’s today, that Islamists “have infiltrated at every level of society and every level of government” in the United States. 

If they have, they certainly aren’t capable of doing anything about the absolute deference and billions of dollars in support the U.S. gives annually to Israel, which has been used to kill and maim and starve hundreds of thousands of Muslims in Gaza since October 7. That would include 18,885 Gazans under the age of 18 killed (as of this writing), more than 50,000 wounded (as of May), and 40,000 who have lost one or both parents (as of April). 

The conservative Saagar Enjeti, co-host of Breaking Points, criticized the State Department for caving to Loomer’s demands. He also noted that wounded Israeli soldiers have come here for medical treatment with no problem. 

“I mean, I think with Loomer, really, what you're watching is kind of this, like weaponized hysteria over Palestinians and others, where, if they actually cared about not wanting Palestinians to have to go anywhere—which, of course, they don’t,” said Enjeti. “They support it. They actually support the mass ethnic cleansing, really—then you would support basically telling Israel no.

“Our federal government basically, you know, rolls out the red carpet for former IDF soldiers who are coming here, who are responsible, in some cases, for creating much of this. But then, you know, the victims of it are then treated with contempt.”

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-loomering-of-injured-gazan-children/

 

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

 

Heaven Is No Place for War Criminals
The newly afterlife-concerned Trump betrays his peacenik promises with effervescent Netanyahu praise.

 

Spencer Neale

 

President Donald Trump couldn’t help himself. 

Speaking with the unabashed Israel apologist Mark Levin on Tuesday, Trump, who is coming off arguably one of the strongest weeks of his second administration, threw away any goodwill earned from his cross-country peace summits by lavishly praising Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “He’s a war hero,” Trump said of Netanyahu, a man who has been charged with crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court. “I guess I am too,” Trump added with a chuckle. 

Levin, who has used his platform to openly advocate for the genocide of tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, loved every second of Trump’s sparkling praise for Netanyahu. Levin, who this month accused Netanyahu critics of attempting to “incite Kristallnachts all over this country,” chuckled along with the president. Two genocidal peas in a pod.

 

The question of Gaza is the haunting specter of Trump’s second term in the Oval Office. No matter what comes of the proposed stalemate along the Ukrainian border, Trump will have to answer for his derelict and thuggish approach to the desperate, degenerating situation in Gaza where men, women, and children are being systematically starved and bombed every day by an Israeli war machine backed by the power of Trump’s American empire. Despite repeated attempts by pro-Israel outlets to question the starvation of Palestinians in Gaza, even Trump admitted in July that the people of Gaza are experiencing “real starvation.” Trump’s celebratory praise of Netanyahu, who received multiple red-carpet rollouts from the Trump administration in the first eight months of 2025, is indicative of a president who has loudly promised peace but time and time again supported Netanyahu, a man who ranks among the worst of today’s war criminals.

According to the Gaza Healthy Ministry, more than 60,000 Palestinians have been ruthlessly snuffed out by the Israeli war machine since Hamas terrorists attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, killing more than 1,200 Israelis. And new numbers from a classified Israeli military intelligence database that were corroborated by the Guardian suggest that 83 percent of those killed in the Gaza Strip these last two years were civilians. Tens of thousands of innocents have died in the past two years, and 100,000 more are estimated to have been injured in the same time frame. 

These numbers are staggering. To accuse Netanyahu of war crimes is not the same as absolving Hamas of its dreadful role in the killing fields, an accusation that American media members such as Levin have recklessly assigned to anyone who questions the ethnic cleansing campaign against Palestinians in Gaza.

 

During his primetime speech at the Christians United for Israel conference in July, Levin framed the genocide in Gaza as “God’s war” and accused European skeptics of Israel’s wrath as being the same “stupid” people who gave rise to Adolf Hitler. Miriam Adelson, who contributed more than $100 million to Trump’s 2024 campaign, was spotted cheering in the crowd. So, for those who have closely followed the Trump arc this past decade, especially with regard to Israel, the president’s open-mouthed tongue-bathing of Netanyahu shouldn’t come as a surprise. But it does help shed light on an open-ended question that the president pondered during an appearance earlier that same day on Fox and Friends—the question of Heaven. 

“I want to try to get to heaven if possible,” Trump said, only hours before calling Netanyahu a war hero. 

“I’m hearing that I’m not doing well. I am really at the bottom of the totem pole,” he added in jest. It was the sort of comment that has made Trump such a generational enigma. There appeared to be a striking humility in his admission that he was at the “bottom of the totem pole.” But was it humility or simply a stark admission of what Trump, the man, must question of himself when he peers into his gaudy, gold-leafed mirrors at the White House? How can a man, any man, who supports the continued starvation and systematic destruction of poor, helpless people who were unlucky enough to be born into an ancient blood feud thread the eye of the needle? 

 

Furthermore, how can a man who has promised to end wars but has consistently signed off on bombing campaigns realistically believe he is a true peacemaker? As then-Rep. Ron Paul warned throughout his numerous presidential campaigns, “They attack us because we’ve been over there.” Paul’s righteous messageironically helped fuel Trump’s ascension; Trump smartly adopted, if in speech only, Paul’s belief that our indiscriminate war campaigns in the Middle East have sowed more war the planet over. 

The promise of heaven and the idea of divine intervention have infused Trump’s rhetoric ever since the president survived a would-be assassin’s bullet in Butler, Pennsylvania in July of 2024. Now, Trump often suggests he was saved that fateful day so he can lead the country through a time of deep secularism; never mind the fact that the assassin’s bullet struck down firefighter Corey Comperatore, a loving husband and father of two, who was killed protecting his family only feet behind Trump at the speech. 

“I felt then and I believe even more so now that my life was saved for a reason,” Trump said during his inauguration in January. “I was saved by God to Make America Great Again.” It’s worth noting that in this scenario, the same God who saved Trump permitted Comperatore to be killed for reasons which aren’t exactly clear. Evidence of Trump’s turn toward the evangelical wing of the Republican Party was further exhibited later that month when he appointed Paula White, a millionaire televangelist who speaks in tongues, to become the senior adviser for Trump’s newly created “White House Faith Office” at the start of Trump’s second term.

 

When Trump attacked three Iranian nuclear facilities in June, he credited the Lord. “I want to just thank everybody, and in particular, God,” Trump said in a televised address following the bombings. “I want to just say, ‘We love you God’ and we love our great military, protect them. God bless the Middle East. God bless Israel and God bless America.” 

A month before American bombs rained down on another Middle Eastern enclave thousands of miles from our shores, the Catholic Church selected its next Pope. They chose an American. Amid all the war, and it’s been decades of unrelenting war now, the cardinals chose a pope who in his words and deeds has prioritized the message and salvation of peace. Leo XIV has been vocal in his opposition to the brutal violence and starvation in Gaza that dominates today’s headlines without criticizing Trump directly. 

Nor is the pope alone. On Thursday, Matteo Cardinal Zuppi, the head of the Italian Bishops' Conference, spent seven hours reading the names of all 12,211 children killed in Gaza during Israel’s multi-year destruction campaign. “They ask us all to commit ourselves to finding or pursuing the path to peace with greater intelligence and passion, starting with a ceasefire and offering the conditions for doing so, from the release of hostages to not taking an entire people hostage,” stated Zuppi. 

It’s not only the Catholic Church that is witnessing a surge in visibility as the ethnic cleansing continues apace. The antiwar wing of the Republican Party is also suddenly in the ascendency as its members watch Israel ramp up its offensive in the Gaza Strip. Some of Trump’s most vocal and ardent supporters have found their own brave voices and courageously broken from the president, despite real concerns it may cost them future campaign money and alienation in key parts of the MAGA base. After an Israeli shell struck the only Catholic church in Gaza this July, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) pulled the ripcord. In a series of tweets and interviews, Greene, who has long questioned the Israeli influence on America’s foreign policy, dropped any pretense that she would continue to support a state that has its hooks deep in the halls of our American Congress.  

“Israel is the only country I know of that has some sort of incredible influence and control over nearly every single one of my colleagues,” Greene told Megyn Kelly. That “incredible influence” was on full display when a group of bipartisan Congressional members visited Netanyahu in Israel in early August. The meeting was hastily organized after House Speaker Mike Johnson quickly recessed the House in July amid calls for the Republicans to release Department of Justice files on Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex criminal and onetime friend of Trump. 

As if America’s unending financial and military entanglement in the Middle East and Eastern Europe isn’t enough, the Trump administration is also eyeing new incursions in Mexico and Venezuela to slow the cartels and the onslaught of drugs and human trafficking through our southern border. And though we do witness the substantial risks of the cartels’ influence on the health and wellbeing of our American public, and though there is a responsible argument for curbing the chaos that emanates from regions either partially or fully attached to our great land mass, any military strike against our southern neighbors will only further ensnare our nation’s children in the sort of forever wars that bleed our people and its Treasury. It’s the exact opposite of what Trump the candidate promised Americans and especially his war-weary voters— an end to the relentless bloodshed and misery that has made us into new imperialists. 

In 1958, during the cold, relentless New York City winter, the legendary jazz pianist Bill Evans penned a beautiful, pastoral improvisation he would later title “Peace Piece.” It's a strange tune that instantly recalls the lushness of Satie and the bitterness of Chopin. On its surface, “Peace Piece” is a lovely tune but underneath there lives a somber, deeply unnerving energy. An extreme dissonance in the sweet song suggests what peace might fully encompass—a peculiar, widening fault between unfocused lines of harmony and violence and an earnest appreciation for the deeper reality: None of us are perfect. Our meager attempts at peace within our souls and beyond our doorsteps requires monotonous, everyday dedication, despite our animalistic tendency to strike out against one another in rage. 

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/heaven-is-no-place-for-war-criminals/

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.