Barbara Boxer, AIPAC seek to codify Israel’s right to discriminate against Americans | Glenn Greenwald | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
▻http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/13/barbara-boxer-aipac-israel-discrimination
L’AIPAC veut intégrer Israël dans la liste des pays dont les ressortissants entrent aux Etats-Unis sans visa, tout en lui accordant le droit de demander lui-même un visa pour les ressortissants US d’origine arabe et/ou musulmane ou sympathisants de la cause palestinienne.
As a result, at the behest of Aipac, Democrat Barbara Boxer, joined by Republican Roy Blunt, has introduced a bill that would provide for Israel’s membership in the program [entrée sans visa] while vesting it with a right that no other country in this program has: namely, the right to exclude selected Americans from this visa-free right of entrance. In other words, the bill sponsored by these American senators would exempt Israel from a requirement that applies to every other nation on the planet, for no reason other than to allow the Israeli government to engage in racial, ethnic and religious discrimination against US citizens. As Lara Friedman explained when the Senate bill was first introduced, it “takes the extraordinary step of seeking to change the current US law to create a special and unique exception for Israel in US immigration law.”
Le plus « drôle » est que les Etats-Unis avaient refusé jusque là d’accorder ce privilège à Israël par crainte de... ses ressortissants palestiniens.
Somewhat ironically, as Kampeas notes, what long kept Israel out of the US’s visa-free program were “concerns in Congress’ Homeland Security and Intelligence Committees that granting visa-free access to Israel’s Arab minority could pose a security risk to the United States.” So what had previously prevented this deal was that the US was long driven by the same discriminatory mindset that is now driving Israel: we want to keep Arabs out of our country! Notably, the Boxer/Aipac bill accommodates only the Israeli concern about Arabs in their country, but not the identical US concern, as they provide this discriminatory exemption right only to Israel but not to their own country.