Contact Senators, Nov. 2024
We finally have a serious piece of legislation to be brought to the Senate floor this month. It is the first time that individual Senators will be forced to vote on sending arms to Israel, without the excuse that it's packaged in with a bunch of other things! These resolutions will establish a baseline from which we can build towards more complete arms restrictions.
We are asking everyone to CALL YOUR SENATORS!
For CT residents
Senator Chris Murphy (202) 224-4041 and
@senmurphyoffice
is considered a possible co-sponsor (and we know he's already gotten lots of calls)
This is a link to the phone numbers of all U.S. Senators
https://www.senate.gov/general/resources/pdf/senators_phone_list.pdf
Often we go into offices, and they ask us if we're constituents. It really matters to them, folks. They know that for everyone who calls, there are many more who care deeply about this issue.
Sample Script
“Hello, my name is ________ and I am your constituent in __ (state). I'm calling to ask Senator ____ to co-sponsor and vote "yes" on the six Joint Resolutions of Disapproval introduced by senators Sanders, Merkley, Welch and Schatz. These resolutions would block some of the upcoming shipments of offensive weapons to Israel, and they include several systems that have been used to violate International Humanitarian Law and kill tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza. “
[Add a comment about why this vote is important to you]
Ask, what is the Senator's thinking about this?
Let us know what reaction you get. mail@thestruggle.org
Contact Congress
Call the Capitol Hill Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and ask to be connected to your Senators' and your Representative's offices.
Or via Email
To Reach CT Reps and Senators
Senator Richard Blumenthal
@SenBlumenthal contact Senator Blumenthal and call in DC 202-224-2823
Senator Chris Murphy (202) 224-4041 and
@senmurphyoffice
contact Senator Murphy
John Larson - 1st District
@RepJohnLarson (202) 225-2265 Email John Larson (You'll need a Hartford zip code like 06106 to use)
Joe Courtney - 2nd District
Email Joe Courtney @RepJoeCourtney
(202) 225-2076
Rosa DeLauro - 3rd District
@Rosa_DeLauro (202) 225-3661 Email to Rosa DeLauro You'll need a local zip code like 06510
Jim Himes - 4th District
@jahimes (202)225-5541 https://himes.house.gov/contact/email
Johanna Hayes - 5th District
@RepJahanaHayes 202-225-4476
The Nader/Fein Letter of Dec. 3
December 3, 2024
Honorable Richard Blumenthal
United States Senate
706 Hart Senate Office Building Washington, D.C. 20510
Dear Senator Blumenthal,
Following our conversation with you and your chief of staff, Joel Kelsey early September, we were encouraged by your open mind on some aspects of Netanyahu’s slaughter of many thousands of families who had nothing to do with October 7th. Many of these civilians have borne the brunt of previous Israeli military bombings in prior years, with losses of loved ones. You’ll recall that we sent you a letter dated June 28, 2024, which is attached, which questions any suspension of judgment by a member of Congress in favor of a blanket declaration of unconditional support for a foreign government, and for that matter the U.S. government.
Of the issues we shared with you, two invited your public stance. The first was to challenge the obstruction of entry by U.S.-paid humanitarian aid trucks, with food, water, medicine and other critical necessities for the sick and dying people of the Gaza Strip. Since our exchange, the evidential case to oppose vocally the worsening obstructions has become overwhelming. The majority in Congress is standing by and watching a genocide becoming an omnicide in North Gaza, with dominant extremists in Israel clearing the area for the Israeli real estate industry.
Will you speak out and join some of your progressive colleagues in jawboning the outgoing Biden Administration to apply its leverage to open these gates and demand that Israel comply with international law which requires safeguarding the civilian population under military occupation and minimizing civilian Palestinian casualties? That shouldn’t be too hard a position to take.
Second, when asked whether you would consider making a public statement on the Senate floor supporting the demands of over 70 leading media and media organizations in a full-page ad (attached) in July in the Washington Post (and not for the first time) to have Biden insist that Netanyahu‘s regime allow U.S. reporters to independently report from Gaza about how U.S. tax dollars are being used there and other needed reports back to the American people, you replied “absolutely” though with “some restrictions” for safety.
We have not heard anything from your office about these requests. In the meantime, 64 House Democratic members issued this demand on Biden (see attached letter) – many of them your colleagues.
Third, airlifting horribly burned infants and children, and amputees needing specialized care, unavailable in Palestine and its destroyed health facilities, to ready and able hospitals in the U.S. Scores of American doctors and health workers back from Gaza have written Biden two detailed letters (attached) without receiving even the courtesy of acknowledgment of receipt. These valiant medical experts want someone in Congress to take the lead in urging such a humanitarian rescue. Why not you?
Over the years, you have listened extensively to the demands of the “Israeli government can do no wrong” lobby in the U.S. Isn’t it time to listen to the seventeen Israeli human rights groups (see the letter in the New York Times published as an ad) who have a record of accuracy with morality in their reports and civic activity? One would think, given your past actions in Connecticut, that you would find them far more congenial to your public philosophy than the self-proclaimed annihilators of the Palestinian people headed by war criminal Netanyahu. Have you read their racist, bigoted, violent vituperative against the Palestinian Semites? There is a phrase for such vile words and savage deeds – “the other antisemitism.” (See the “Anti-Semitism Against Arab and Jewish Americans” speech by Jim Zogby and DebatingTaboos.org).
Perhaps if your staff brings to your attention, the probative evidence estimating at least 400,000 Palestinian deaths since October 7, and not the self-serving Hamas vast undercount (you’ll recall Netanyahu bragging to his Likud Party in 2019 of his strategic support and funding facilitation of Hamas due to its opposition to a two-state solution), you’ll at long last reach a stage of “enough is enough.”.
Senator Blumenthal, you need to take these modest steps supported by a growing majority of people in the U.S., who are noticing the gap between the White House and Congress, on the one hand, and informed public opinion on the other. Are you so mired in the Israeli lobby to turn away the discerning judgments more typical of your domestic career? Contemporary historians may not be as puzzled as many of your longtime supporters in Connecticut. Some of these people have observed your way of avoiding responding by permanent procrastination. Not good.
On another note, we asked you to help open the way to Senator Gary Peters' committee. You said you would try. Like the rest of our discussions, we received no follow-up information, again the procrastination. As the Democrats keep turning their back on the civic community, they will continue to lose to the undeniably worst GOP in history since 1854.
Because of the obvious shortage of time left before the Trumpsters take over and reduce the Democrats and Congress to an even more pitiful state of resistance, we request an expeditious and hopefully affirmative response to the above three modest declarations. How about by December 11? Thank you.
Sincerely, Bruce Fein, Esq. Ralph Nader, Esq.
P.S. Enclosed is our proposal for six individual committee hearings needed in December before the Democrats relinquish control in January. The many benefits of these hearings are noted therein. Will you help with one of them? Please RSVP. Enclosed: • Letter to Senator Richard Blumenthal – June 28, 2024. • Open Letter by the Committee to Protect Journalists, Washington Post – July 11, 2024 • 64 House Democrats Write to Biden Administration Urging Unimpeded Media Access to Gaza, October 11, 2024. • “65 Doctors, Nurses and Paramedics: What We Saw in Gaza” by Feroze Sidhwa, New York Times Sunday, October 13, 2024. • July 25, 2024 letter “Re: American physicians’ and nurses’ observations from the Gaza Strip since October 7, 2023.” • “Re: The humanitarian catastrophe in the Gaza Strip” December 13, 2023 ad in the New York Times. • Column: The Democratic Senate Must Hold These Public Hearings Before January 3, 2025.
Ralph Nader's Scathing Answer to Sen. Blumenthal's Gaza Form Letter
300 New Jersey Avenue, N.W., Suite 900 Washington, D.C. 20001
June 28, 2024 Honorable Richard Blumenthal
United States Senate 706 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510
Re: Israel-Hamas Form Letter (February 29, 2024)
Dear Senator Blumenthal:
With all due respect, we were appalled by your tendentious Form Letter to one of us regarding the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas. You are a United States Senator who works for us as citizens, not vice versa. Accordingly, we expect substantive responses to our transmitted criticisms as expected under the First Amendment right to petition for redress of grievances – a constitutional right you are sworn to uphold and defend.
The criticisms are numbered for ease of reference.
1. “I have stated unequivocally and clearly that America must stand with Israel.” (Form Letter, p.1., paragraph 1). In other words, you back a rock-solid policy of Israel's right or wrong, including genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and multiple violations of six United States laws, e.g., the Leahy Amendments or the Foreign Assistance Act, the latter prohibiting weapons to any country obstructing delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian citizens, most of them children, women and the elderly, have been killed, seriously injured or rendered very sick with permanent disabilities. Starved babies and children who survive are impaired for life. No government, including ours, should be accorded such a blanket suspension of judgment by a U.S. Senator, especially a former state attorney general dedicated to the rule of law.
Consider in addition your “standing with Israel” for many years regarding its violent, illegal occupation of the West Bank. With daily terrorizing war crimes, the Israeli government seizes and colonizes Palestinian land, steals precious water, smashes at will civilian structures with casualties, installs many invasive military checkpoints, obstructing and humiliating daily existence, and limits the importation of critical goods and services, while taking thousands of hostages into prisons indefinitely without charges. All this against a defenseless population, excluded from Israeli-only highways in the West Bank of Palestine.
Were you at all concerned with this serial violence against innocent families, including children and women, bombing with U.S. government weapons anything that stands and anyone who moves, you would have objected in the U.S. Senate and through your constituent letters.
As a regular reader of the New York Times, you might have been horrified absorbing the documented, on-the-scene feature covering the oppression of Palestinian lives and livelihoods in the West Bank, including the violent emptying of villages (May 19, 2024). This cover story in the Sunday New York Times Magazine was titled “The Unpunished: How Extremists Took Over Israel,” by Ronen Bergman and Mark Mazzetti.
The casualty toll and raids caused by extremist Israeli colonizers, police and army have risen sharply in the West Bank in recent months and have been repeatedly condemned, though futilely, by Biden and Blinken. Yet you continue your unwavering support of Netanyahu, with even Senator Chuck Schumer parting company and declaring that Netanyahu “has lost his way.”
We submit your limitless support of Israel notwithstanding serial criminality is beyond the pale in the United States born of the principle that the rule of law is king, the king is not law. We urge you to consider that your unconditional support of Israel is at war with your oath of office and your domestic record of compassion toward innocent families in the U.S.
2. “On October 7, 2023, Hamas led a brutal and murderous attack on Israeli civilians.” Id. paragraph 2. The statement (300 Israeli soldiers and 1600 Hamas fighters were killed according to the IDF) is incomplete, denuded of context. The Hamas regime’s homicide/suicide assault crossed the border because of a stunning, stupendous multi-tiered border security collapse. Netanyahu is still blocking an official investigation into how these multiple border protections all failed together at the same time. As an elderly Holocaust survivor told the New York Times, “It should never have happened.” The Israeli regime of extremely violent right-wing racists, always being on the record for taking all the rest of Palestine, used the preventable Hamas attack as the occasion for exterminating not only Hamas (long supported and enabled by Netanyahu’s own admission) but for destroying or expelling the civilian Palestinians – children, women and men – now in Gaza and the West Bank. As you know, what happened accrued to the temporary political benefit of Netanyahu who had a year earlier obtained the secret Hamas plans in stark detail.
Moreover, you neglect the decades-long punitive Israeli illegal aggressions and embargoes against Palestinians since at least 1967 leaving millions of civilians starved of the bare necessities and denied the right to self-determination celebrated in the American Declaration of Independence. The most conservative estimates place the ratio of Palestinian to Israeli dead and injured since 1967 at 400 to 1. You airbrush out of history Israel’s theft of Palestinian land and water, its cruel and lethal illegal military occupation of conquered territories, and arbitrary, indefinite imprisonment of tens of thousands of harshly treated Palestinians including children and women, without due process of law. The American colonies took up arms against Great Britain, among other things, over taxation without representation and denial of a right to a jury trial – far less repression than what Palestinians have suffered under Israeli violent rule for decades.
3. “I am working with my colleagues to ensure that Israel has the military aid needed to prevail in this extraordinary crisis.” Id. You neglect that the military aid is aiding and abetting Israel’s genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, and, exposing the United States to accountability before the International Court of Justice. Further, Israel commands a staggering military advantage over Hamas because of billions of dollars of the most advanced weapons sales over decades to guarantee Israel a “qualitative military edge” over its neighbors. 22 U.S.C. 2776 note, Section 36 (h) of the Arms Export Control Act. You have inflated a blockaded Hamas with its limited small arms and diminished Israel which is a military, technological, nuclear armed superpower. 4. “I will continue to advocate for enabling lifesaving humanitarian assistance to reach all who need it in Israel and Gaza.” Id. paragraph
4. You have done no such thing. You have repeatedly voted for unconditional weapons deliveries to Israel notwithstanding the volumes of ocular evidence of Israel’s blocking humanitarian aid in Gaza, including the murders of seven World Central Kitchen workers. Impartial famine experts foresee an additional 125,000 to one million deaths in Gaza from starvation within weeks if nothing changes – 100 to 1000 times the Israeli deaths on October 7. Does this satisfy the international humanitarian law principle of proportionality? Unlike your colleagues Senators Van Hollen, Durbin, Sanders, and Schumer, you have not once criticized Netanyahu for the continued obstruction of thousands of trucks entering Gaza with food, water and medicines paid for by U.S. taxpayers. You have shut your eyes to an easy way to open the humanitarian aid corridors and save lives: Dispatch these American paid-for trucks flying large American flags to make the deliveries. Depend upon it. Israel would immediately back off from its patron saint.
5. You boast of your support for lavish foreign and military aid to Israel. Id. pp.1-2, paragraph 5. You omit that Israel is the prosperous superpower of the Middle East with more than ample ability to defend itself without United States assistance. The arms the United States supplies emboldens Israel to become an aggressor – as witnessed in Gaza and the West Bank. They are superfluous to Israel’s self-defense. Have you asked your Connecticut constituents whether they would prefer spending the billions of American taxpayer dollars annually gratuitously showered on this dictatorial war criminal Netanyahu, despised by 3 of 4 Israelis and under indictment by Israeli prosecutors for corruption, to bettering Connecticut schools, roads, bridges, mass transit, healthcare, hospitals, and the environment? Recall Netanyahu’s speech to Congress in 1996 assuring the applauding legislators of ending U.S. aid because he boasted, Israel was a prosperous country. The price of that broken promise has cost American taxpayers over $150 billion.
6. “Diplomatic efforts to achieve peace demand a renewed commitment to a two-state solution. I believe the Israeli-Palestinian peace process requires active engagement by the United States. I will continue to support efforts to promote a two-state solution that is acceptable to all parties through direct negotiations.” Id. p. 2, paragraph 7. Your actions, however, speak louder than your misleading rhetorical flourishes. The Israeli government adamantly opposes a two-state solution. Here is Prime Minister Netanyahu, to the Knesset, on January 21, 2024 (Twitter): “I will not compromise on full Israeli security control over all the territory west of the Jordan River – and this is contrary to a Palestinian state.” Can you square the circle? How can you support a two-state solution while simultaneously standing unconditionally behind a dominant party implacably fighting a two-state solution?
7. “I am deeply committed to ensuring lasting peace in the region.” Id. p. 2, paragraph 8. But you haven’t lifted a finger on that score. You have done everything possible to destroy the prospects of peace by unconditionally arming Israel to the teeth with the objective of exterminating or exiling Palestinians. Emblematic was the statement of Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir on January 1, 2024, previously convicted in Israel of supporting a terrorist organization: “We must promote a solution to encourage the emigration of Gaza’s residents. [Evicting Palestinians] is a correct, just, moral human solution.” The military teaches that you cannot win your way to triumph by killing civilians. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michal Mullen, elaborated in 2008, “We can’t kill our way to victory.”
Stripped of euphemisms, misrepresentations, and evasions, your Form Letter salutes “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must,” a lawless national security policy tracing back to Thucydides and The History of the Peloponnesian War. It is an embarrassment to the countless people who have risked or given that last measure of devotion for a nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
Please refer to the Israeli media (e.g., Haaretz, Channel 14, etc.) and the many courageous Israeli human rights groups for verification and elaboration of the above accounts. See also the attached open letter to Joe Biden “Stop the Humanitarian Catastrophe” by 16 Israeli human rights groups in the December 13, 2023 issue of the New York Times. Also note that in February 2015, over 400 Rabbis from Israel, the USA, Britain, and Canada called on Prime Minister Netanyahu “to stop the practice of home demolitions” in Palestinian villages.
We expect as citizens a response on the merits, not another Form Letter that could have been an AI answer. Bruce Fein, having testified over 200 times in Congress as an international law and constitutional law specialist and practitioner, requests a meeting with you at your Senate office.
Sincerely,
Bruce Fein, Esq.
Ralph Nader, Esq.
Mike Ferner, Special Projects Coordinator– Veterans for Peace
Contact New Haven Alders
The New Haven Board of Alders works like a city council.
To send the same email to all Alders at once copy this block into the "To:" field of your email.
Ward30@newhavenct.gov; Ward28@newhavenct.gov; Ward27@newhavenct.gov; Ward26@newhavenct.gov; Ward25@newhavenct.gov; Ward23@newhavenct.gov; Ward22@newhavenct.gov; Ward21@newhavenct.gov; Ward20@newhavenct.gov; Ward19@newhavenct.gov; Ward18@newhavenct.gov; Ward17@newhavenct.gov; Ward16@newhavenct.gov; Ward15@newhavenct.gov; Ward14@newhavenct.gov; Ward13@newhavenct.gov; Ward12@newhavenct.gov; Ward11@newhavenct.gov; Ward10@newhavenct.gov; Ward9@newhavenct.gov; Ward8@newhavenct.gov; Ward7@newhavenct.gov; Ward6@newhavenct.gov; Ward5@newhavenct.gov; Ward4@newhavenct.gov; Ward3@newhavenct.gov; Ward2@newhavenct.gov; Ward1@newhavenct.gov;
Here's the official page with pictures and individual contact information. The President of the Board of Alders is Tyisha Walker-Myers from Word 23.