US pro-Israeli lobby waging negative ad campaign against Bernie Sanders

The Israeli lobby in the US has reportedly waged a huge campaign against Democratic Party’s leading 2020 presidential contender Bernie Sanders in a bid to prevent him from winning the nomination of the party for the November’s presidential election.

“The powerful lobby group known as American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is helping to fund a Super PAC launching attack ads against Sen. Bernie Sanders in Nevada on Saturday,” independent US-based news outlet The Intercept reported, citing tow sources with knowledge of the arrangement.

According to the report, the negative ad campaign is being run by a group known as the Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI), led by its founder Mark Mellman, a longtime AIPAC strategist.

With a week to go until the Nevada primary election, DMFI has been airing ads criticizing Sanders’ “electability” — a vague concept that nobody except political strategists seem to understand. The ads started airing on Saturday.

Although AIPAC claims to have no involvement with the anti-Sanders ad campaign, the report insists that the pro-Israel political pressure group is allowing donations to DMFI to count as donations to AIPAC, with big money contributions buying donors access to AIPAC’s list of friendly congressmen, all without implicating AIPAC in the Sanders smear campaign.

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The investigative news site also reported that DMFI is staffed by a host of AIPAC alumni, who switched over to focus their lobbying efforts exclusively on the Democratic Party, following the Republican Party’s rightward drift on the Israeli regime in recent years.

According to the report, DMFI also spent $800,000 on anti-Sanders ads in Iowa, prompting Sanders himself to slate the “big-money interests” for attempting to derail his campaign with “negative ads.” 

AIPAC, the report said, spent more than $3.2 million on federal lobbying in 2016. It was forced to apologize to congressional Democrats this week for an ad campaign that accused Muslim congresswomen Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota — outspoken opponents of Israeli atrocities in the occupied territories — of being "radical" threats “maybe more sinister” than the ISIL terrorist group. 

AIPAC has persistently lobbied American politicians from both dominant political parties in the country.

Sanders came out victorious in last week’s New Hampshire primary. With the Nevada primary just a week away, a Morning Consult poll published this week put the progressive senator ten points ahead of Joe Biden, the former vice president and until now, the supposed front-runner for the 2020 Democratic Party’s nomination.

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