Since September 2023, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has poured over $96,000 into the campaign coffers of U.S. Representative Shri Thanedar (D-MI).
It’s an odd choice considering that Thanedar, as a state legislator in 2021, co-sponsored a Michigan House resolution describing Israel as an “apartheid state.” After launching his congressional campaign, Thanedar quickly retracted his support as an AIPAC-affiliated super PAC poured millions into backing his primary opponent.
By August 2023, the newly-elected Congress member was on an AIPAC-funded trip to Israel to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Immediately after, Thanedar jetted to India to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He had just escorted Modi, in June 2023, to address a joint session of Congress in Washington, DC. That Modi was previously banned from America for his role in a 2002 pogrom against Indian Muslims apparently gave the Michigan representative no pause.
In just his first seven months in office, Thanedar circled the globe to meet both the leader of “the world’s largest democracy” as well as the leader of “the only democracy in the Middle East.” While his flip-flop on Israel may reflect how politicians — especially those, like him, who are accused by Huffington Post of holding “malleable political beliefs” — react to the power of the Zionist lobby in America, his dual embrace of Netanyahu and Modi reveals another aspect of the current geopolitical landscape: the Hindutva lobby.
This story was originally published in mondoweiss.net. Read the full story here.
