Cynthia McKinney, the far-left former Georgia congresswoman and presidential candidate in 2008 on the Green Party ticket, is readying an attempt to win back her old congressional seat. She needs 18,860 signatures to get on the ballot, and last week she was recruiting volunteers. McKinney served in Congress from 1993-2003, and 2005-2007.
After 9/11, McKinney cultivated relations with Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who had attempted using his $10 million charity donation to criticize U.S. support for Israel. Rudy Guiliani blew the prince off, but McKinney sent the prince a letter saying:
Your Royal Highness, many of us here in the United States have long been concerned about reports by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch that reveal a pattern of excessive, and often indiscriminate, use of lethal force by Israeli security forces in situations where Palestinian demonstrators were unarmed and posed no threat of death or serious injury to the security forces or to others.
McKinney also implied that President Bush, knowing the 9/11 attacks were imminent, had permitted the attacks because he would gain financially and politically. She took huge campaign donations from the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee while cozying up to Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. She also hired aides such as Raeed Tayeh, who said that, “the Israeli occupation of all territories must end, including Congress.”
Hired by Cornell University as a visiting professor after losing her congressional seat, McKinney was described this way by Cornell Professor Emeritus Peter Swartz:
The selection of Cynthia McKinney as a … professor is an affront to the intellectualism of Cornell University. Ms. McKinney is a racist and anti-Semite of the first rank. If she were white and male, she would be David Duke. It is unfortunate that the selection committee was so open minded that its collective brain fell on floor.
Among her other left-wing actions, McKinney voted against the development of a national missile defense system; against the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2001; against the Patriot Act; against allowing the U.S. government to use electronic surveillance to investigate suspected terrorists; against the establishment of military commissions to try enemy combatants captured in the war on terror; against a welfare reform bill that would have moved people off of welfare rolls and into paying jobs, and against legislation to ban partial-birth abortion. She was one of only 15 congressmen to vote against the “Born-Alive Infants Protection Act,” which stated that if an infant survived an abortion, it would have the human rights of a person already born.
The question isn’t why McKinney is running again. It’s why she feels it necessary to do so from within the Green Party, when the Democratic Party already supports so many of her positions.
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