The elephant in the (blue) room and the moral compass

Now that a winner has been named in the special election for the Democratic nomination to fill the vacant congressional seat of Governor Mikie Sherrill, after many days of vote counting, we should consider which public figure had the most meaningful assessment of the campaign.

My choice is Jeff Grayzel, the Jewish two-time mayor and current deputy mayor of Morris Plains, who was one of the unsuccessful candidates. Grayzel is both a committed Democrat, as most of us Jewish Americans tend to be, and a board member of both the Morristown Jewish Center and the Jewish Federation of Greater MetroWest. Grayzel said that AIPAC, in its big-money stealth attack ads on his fellow Democrat, Tom Malinowski, has “lost its moral compass.”

For those who haven’t been following the election, Malinowski is a two-term former House member who ran for the now-open seat in NJ District 11. When he was 6 years old, he and his mother immigrated to the United States from Poland after the family lived through the Nazi occupation in World War II and then the corrupt Communist dictatorship that followed.

Before his time in Congress, Malinowski was a Rhodes Scholar and a leading human rights campaigner and President Obama’s assistant secretary of state for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor. He has been a vocal opponent of President Donald Trump’s authoritarian moves, which he likens to his family’s experiences in Communist Poland. While in Congress, Malinowski was popular among Democrats and a large number of independents he represented, who considered him a straight shooter. He has also been articulate in explaining his view that a serious counterattack on antisemitism and hatred must include challenging the big tech algorithms that drive internet discussions into these toxic pools. All this made him a very formidable candidate in the special election. But AIPAC, which had supported him in the past, regarded him as a threat, as I’ll explain later.

The common theme that runs through AIPAC’s attack advertising against Malinowski and others is deception. It starts with the inconspicuous name of AIPAC’s super PAC, the United Democracy Project. This entity was formed in large part to exploit the Supreme Court rulings that allow independent expenditure committees to avoid federal election laws that still apply to direct donations to candidates’ campaigns. Because the permissive rules don’t require any transparency about the purpose of the advertisements and the nature of the funding group, the UDP has decided to say little about Israel, much less disclose AIPAC’s intense commitment to the Israeli government, including Netanyahu’s far-right government. UDP cynically picks any topic it believes might resonate with a particular voting group to manipulate them against the target candidate.

The most frequent AIPAC ad against Tom Malinowski in the special election attacked him from what seemed on the surface to be a left-wing angle. It accused the representative of giving Trump a “blank check” to advance the violence that has become a critical part of the MAGA/ICE deportation agenda. Since we’re now in the midst of unrestrained thuggish ICE rampages and actual killings of American citizens in Minneapolis and elsewhere, this claim — if it were actually true — would be a terrible mark on any candidate running in a Democratic Party primary anywhere in the country. But the accusation refers to a 2019 legislative package whose actual major purpose was humanitarian relief for migrant families trapped in inhumane conditions at our southern border during the first Trump administration. What else was deliberately omitted in the ad is that most Democrats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the most progressive members of New Jersey’s delegation at that time, Bonnie Watson-Coleman and the late Donald Payne Jr., voted the same way as Malinowski to fund that relief. The portion of the $4.6 billion package that provided any funding at all to ICE was less than 5 percent, and as those of us who were paying attention at that time may recall, ICE itself was only a shell of the highly militarized attack force we have seen during Trump’s second term.

In the television and internet versions of the ad about ICE, it’s also unmistakable that the vocal tone of the narrator sounds to be that of an African-American woman, a demographic that is widely understood as a mainstay of the Democratic Party, but that has no special prominence among the particular group of partisans aligned with AIPAC on Israel and Palestinian issues. This is undoubtedly not a coincidence. All these tactics are the ultimate in stealth campaigning — false flags.

In 2024, AIPAC was the largest source of Republican donors for Democratic candidates in primary races. It is a blatant contradiction that their ads claim to be attacking a candidate like Tom Malinowski, who has been solidly supporting the rights of immigrants like himself for a very long time, as AIPAC neglects to stand up to Trump or ICE. We also know that AIPAC has not hesitated to endorse dozens of Republican candidates for office who support ICE and have refused to vote to certify President Biden’s victory in the 2020 elections; this fact by itself makes clear that the word “democracy” in the name of its affiliated group is a consequential lie.

As for Malinowski’s record on Israel, it’s well aligned with Jewish voters in our area. He tells audiences in shorthand that he is “pro-Israel, but anti-Netanyahu; pro-Palestinian and anti-Hamas.”

Malinowski also says that Israel’s government, like that of any other U.S. ally, needs to act in accordance with U.S. strategic interests and enforce the standards of U.S. law for its use of American aid.

What sounds like a reasonable, well thought out set of principles for most of us has been a red line to AIPAC, which demands absolute conformity to the Israeli government, right or wrong, or else face maximum punishment.

The well-informed journal Politico is reporting that mainstream Democrats, including many of the most pro-Israel ones like Rep. Brad Schneider of Illinois and former Rep. Steve Israel of New York, are now “livid” about AIPAC’s move against Malinowski. Some consider it a big blunder, since Analilia Mejia, the rival Democrat who eventually eked out a narrow win over Malinowski, is significantly to his left on Israel. But AIPAC’s own spokesman has confirmed that the targeting of Malinowski was deliberate.

The stealth sabotage attacks against Democratic candidates and false flag advertising campaigns say a lot about the overall evolution of AIPAC over recent years, away from both the Democratic Party and mainstream of the American Jewish community.

The targeting of Tom Malinowski is a bad sign that AIPAC, far from pursuing its original stated mission of building bipartisan support for strong U.S.-Israel relations, has become the deep red MAGA elephant inside the Democratic blue room. AIPAC has lost both its political way and, as Jeff Grayzel put it, its “moral compass.”

Mark Lurinsky of Montclair recently retired from a career in public accounting. He is an activist in local politics and a member of the steering committee of J Street’s New Jersey chapter.