Metro Voice News Celebrating Faith, Family & Community
Missouri Congresswoman Cori Bush has come out on the House floor as publicly “in solidarity” with Hamas and the attacks on Israel.
As of this week, more than 3,000 rockets have been fired at Israeli citizens from the Hamas-controlled Gaza strip. Hamas is officially labeled a terrorist organization by the European Union and the United States.
Bush, who won her seat in the November 2020 election, began her controversial speech by attacking the U.S. government saying, “Our government sends our tax dollars to the Israeli military.” She claimed her voters knew of her support for Hamas saying, “St. Louis sent me here to save lives. Bassem’s loved ones and his community, our St. Louis community, sent me here to save lives.”
Bush was referencing Bassem Masri, who died in 2018, and was famous for his pro-Hamas stance and rhetoric. But he didn’t only speak about death to Israel and Jews.
During the Ferguson, Missouri protests, Masri garnered fame for malicious messages that he would scream at police officers and would regularly call for their deaths. He was one of the BLM activists who popularized the notorious anti-police chant: “Pigs in a blanket! Fry ’em like bacon!”
Bush, who sees Masri as a hero, continues to equate Israel with apartheid daying, “So, we, … that means we oppose our money going to fund militarized policing, occupation and systems of violent oppression and trauma. We are anti-war, we are anti-occupation and we are anti-apartheid, period.”
The Congresswoman failed to state the facts that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East and that its Arab and Palestinian citizens have full rights afforded to everyone in the country – including Jews and Christians. In fact, Arabs hold seats in the country’s parliament – the Knesset – and were recently courted to be part of a unity government. “If this body is looking for something productive to do with three million dollars, instead of funding a military that polices and kills Palestinians, I have some communities in St. Louis city, and in St. Louis county where that money can go, where we desperately need investment, where we are hurting, where we need help.”
“So today, we remember Bassem. We remember his resistance in the face of militarized police occupation as a St. Louisan and a Palestinian. We lost him to the health crisis, but we remember his words today: ‘Until all our children our safe, we will continue to fight for our rights in Ferguson and in Palestine.’ We stand with him today in solidarity. Thank you.”
Bush defeated longtime Israel supporter and Democrat Lacy Clay in the 2020 Democrat primary and went on to win the heavily Democrat district in November. Clay even used Bush’s support for the radical Palesitinian movement BDS, in his campaign mailers.
In a now-deleted page on her campaign website, first uncovered by Jewish Insider, Bush expressed support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, or BDS.
“In these times, it is important to be specific with our language and direct in the actions we take. In our current geopolitical economy, money talks far louder than speech alone,” the website said. “This is why nonviolent actions like the BDS movement are so important—and why the effort to mischaracterize and demonize the BDS movement by its opponents is so urgent.”
–Metro Voice and wire services
