Rep. Hillary Scholten lied once again, then she insulted the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

On Thursday, January 16th, Rep. Hillary Scholten made a couple of posts on her Facebook page that were both instructive and infuriating, especially if you honestly care about justice and truth.

In one post, which included an article from the New York Times about the tentative ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas, Scholten wrote:

Since day 1 of this devastating conflict, I’ve called for humanitarianism and encouraged negotiating parties to work toward a cease-fire deal.

I pray that hostages are finally reunited with their loved ones and will continue working to support the innocent people devastated by this war. 

These two sentences include a lie and performative non-sense that only acknowledges Israeli hostages, yet never mentions Palestinian deaths, suffering or the thousands of Palestinian prisoners that have also been part of the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas. 

GRIID has methodically documented the role that Rep. Scholten has played in Israel’s war crimes and the ongoing genocide, which you can read here. So when Rep. Scholten says that she has, “called for humanitarianism and encouraged negotiating parties to work toward a cease-fire deal,” she is outright lying. Whatever US humanitarian aid that was earmarked for Palestinians, the Israeli military has consistently either prevented or significantly delayed such aid. Numerous independent media sources have documented this dynamic, such as the Electronic Intifada, which nearly a year ago wrote a post entitled, Israel blocking aid, fuel to Gaza hospitals. The Biden Administration has know about this and said and done nothing.

The US has also done a great deal to delay any real ceasefire agreement, as has been documented in an excellent article entitled, A Year of Empty Threats and a “Smokescreen” Policy: How the State Department Let Israel Get Away With Horrors in Gaza. A major point of the article states: 

Time and again, Israel crossed the Biden administration’s red lines without changing course in a meaningful way, according to interviews with government officials and outside experts. Each time, the U.S. yielded and continued to send Israel’s military deadly weapons of war, approving more than $17.9 billion in military assistance since late 2023, by some estimates. The State Department recently told Congress about another $8 billion proposed deal to sell Israel munitions and artillery shells.

Another article from the Intercepted also encapsulates the absurdity of the Israeli willingness to negotiate a ceasefire, which is cited in their article, A Deal Too Late: Israel agrees to a ceasefire deal it rejected months ago, thousands more died.

In addition to lying to us about her call for humanitarianism in Israel’s brutal genocidal campaign against the Palestinians, Rep. Scholten then claims to honor the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, writing:

Today we honor the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who was born on this day in 1929. While his life was tragically cut short, his legacy has lived on for generations. It is our duty to continue following in his footsteps in our work toward freedom and justice for all.

Dr. King was fundamentally opposed to militarism and violence. In his famous 1967 speech at Riverside Church, he came out against the US war in Vietnam, stating: “As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems… But they asked, and rightly so, ‘what about Vietnam?’ They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.” 

Rep. Scholten has been deeply committed to militarism. Since she was elected to office in 2022, she has voted for every Department of Defense Budget, with the last budget being the largest in US history at $886 Billion. Rep. Scholten has unconditionally supported the US sending billions to Israel during the genocidal campaign, along with supporting the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and the Israeli system of Apartheid. Rep. Hillary Scholten insults the memory of Dr. King and we must call her out on this fact.

Source of the photo above is from CNN.