Maryland Senator Benjamin Louis Cardin should know better as he, commendably, supported boycotts in support of justice, peace, and freedom for decades.

Now however,  at a time when we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom in the Hague, honesty needs to be the foundation for democratic peace and freedom and for the achievement of freedom specifically from the noxious and corrupting special interest groups of undue influence in America.

Most particularly at this time when a majority of rational, humanist, progressive Jews and others, increasingly support Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) on Israel as it is being  misled by PM Netanyahu, who, while bizarrely and recklessly trying to undermine our President’s  successful Iran diplomacy, and simultaneously further pushes Israel into the utterly unsustainable dead-end of its present Apartheid character state, Senator Cardin has chosen suddenly and abruptly to reverse his long stand in support of boycott for justice, peace, and hence freedom from democracy erosion, by imposing an amendment to a trade bill which would allow Israel to be immune to the peaceful and effective BDS approach to force it to abide by international law.   This is a truly intolerable and illogical move.

Inexplicably, after Netanyahu’s recent declaration that there will no longer be a Palestinian state, this in the aftermath of the horrific Gaza massacres  recently meted out on innocent unarmed civilians by his extreme right wing regime,   Senator Cardin yielded to the undue influence of AIPAC, and other Israel undue influence lobbies to the detriment and hopes of his supporters, which include people such as the writer of this letter, who are direct descendant of parents who survived the Nazi genocide.

Senator Cardin did this by his introduction of an amendment to be attached to a trade bill which puts undue, unethical, and inappropriate pressure on our EU partners to abandon opposition to Israel’s international law violating occupation of Palestinian lands, a provision in that bill which prevents them from embracing the peaceful BDS based policy which succeeded in the dismantling of the racist South African Apartheid regime, with which, incidentally, Israel was clandestinely involved as it proliferated thereto its nuclear energy weaponization technology.

See, inter alia, documentation for this fact in “The Unspoken Alliance : Israel’s Secret Relationship With Apartheid South Africa” by the son of Austrian Jews who had fled the Nazi persecution to South Africa and therefrom had to emigrate to the U.S.

BDS is the only and most effective peaceful approach to changing the course of the present disastrous and destructive Netanyahu regime at this point.  To oppose BDS is in effect to invite adding literally insult to injury to all Palestinians and to creating the path for more horrific violence being meted out them as well as on innocent and decent Israelis as the result of relatively minor but grave desperate reprisal violent acts.

Of course the Israeli occupiers and the Palestinian victims of the murderous occupation cannot be considered  to be morally equivalent from any perspective, since one has been, from 1948 and on beyond most particularly 1967,  the major catastrophic violence perpetrating invader and occupier, while the other is the minor desperation-driven blow back resistance violence driven victim, a violence which is generated by the former.

Violence generates violence, and it is the moral imperative for the United States to end once for all its complicity in this vicious cycle by no longer being the bizarre enabler of this violence as it provides Israel with more military and financial support than it does to the rest of the world combined, and to boot, protects Israel from global condemnation at the United Nations for decades of U.N. Resolution and Forth Geneva Convention egregious violations by multiple Israeli misleaderships.

Senator Cardin must engage in some serious soul-searching and remain true to his record’s apparent noble principles and ideals, and must be part of a solution, and cease and desist from being deferential to undue pressures which are destructive  and against the best interests of the U.S., and Israel, not to mention that of the autochthonous Palestinians who have been abused in Kafkaesque ways since 1948.

The world at this time dramatically and rapidly changing democratically.

To wit the electoral success of the independent Syriza progressives in Greece, the progressive “Podemos” movement in Spain, the elections of progressives throughout Latin America, and now, with the unexpected high probability of next week’s election of progressive British Labor leader, Ed Miliband, as well as with the candidacy of progressive liberal Bernie Sanders for the presidential campaign,  a move which will vibrantly energize and enrich the national debate and expose the tested and failed policies of the neocons and neoliberals.

It now clear that in the U.S., the neocons as well as the neoliberals have lost enormous credibility in their rebranded agendas which continue to be responsive to the drum beats of our degraded democracy lead by invisible actors on Wall Street, in the industrial-military complex, and by the pernicious undue influence infiltrating agents of special interests at home and from abroad, which sow fear and hatred in efforts which continue our hemorrhage of treasury and blood by senseless, destructive, divide-to-conquer and exploit war by drone bombings and other means agendas, which deflect trillions of U.S. dollars which should spent on our educational, health, and infrastructure sectors.

These policies started most intensively by the Bush/Cheney regime started 12 years ago and have brought us the execrable Daish (the Arab characterization of “Islamic State”) phenomenon, and the destruction of Iraq, on the basis of false claims and with the false invocation of being carried out in the pursuit of “freedom and democracy”,

We are now on to the dawning of a new era of nationwide and global clamors for governance characterized by the equitable redistribution of rights, obligations, and funds, so that, in our society, “we the people” become the owners of our democracy which must become genuinely representative of us, and therefore the political prostitutes who campaign on false promises and then defer to the sinister, capitalism run amok, anti-democracy manipulators will be marginalized by being voted out of office and/or impeached.

Senator Cardin can redeem himself, given his past record, and must reverse his course if he understands that by deferring to the undue influence of the likes of the politically, ethically, and intellectually bankrupt Netanyahu regime and AIPAC et al. , he is losing the respect and support of all decent, rational, progressive, Jews of Maryland, not to mention all others regardless of their religious affiliations or lack thereof, e.g, those culturally oriented by either religiously humanistic values, or by secular humanistic values.

It behooves Senator Carding to update himself on the demographics of this constituency.

We the progressive liberals, Jews and others, represent the majority of his constituency, and we therefore we naturally expect him to represent us, who helped to elect him.