All it takes for AIPAC to call someone an anti-Semite is to not kow-tow to them and/or to flat out state that the Palestinians have been gravely wronged. That was McKinney's only crime.
Peace
Deconstructing Cynthia McKinney
A passionate legislator and her complex relationship with the Jewish community
Bill Nigut Special to the Jewish Times
In 1981, Billy McKinney made a difficult decision. It was a mayoral election year in the city of Atlanta, and the race was shaping up as a showdown between Andrew Young and Sidney Marcus, one of the city's best-known Jewish leaders. McKinney threw his support behind fellow state legislator Marcus, and became co-chairman of the Marcus campaign. Throughout his public career McKinney had always delighted in taking contrarian positions. In this case he was excoriated for choosing Marcus over Young. McKinney was one of the black Marcus supporters whom Maynard Jackson sneeringly referred to as "shuffling, grinning Negroes." Marcus lost the race, but 18 years later, McKinney's relationships with some local black leaders remains strained because of the choice he made in that long-ago mayor's contest. Atlanta businessman Jules Stine remembers the story well. "Billy was very much out front in the Marcus campaign," Stine told the Atlanta Jewish Times. "A black man taking on Andy Young!"
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Tensions with AIPAC
Frank blames the tenuous relationship between McKinney and Atlanta Jews on the Mitnick-McKinney contest. "It was a terrible election that left scars that aren't healing."
But the first signs of estrangement pre-date the stormy 1996 campaign.
In 1992, in her first race for Congress in what was then Georgia's 11th District, McKinney made it clear she wouldn't be beholden to the
American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Stine said McKinney
thought AIPAC was heavy-handed in demanding her endorsement of their
positions in return for its support. McKinney refused to play ball.
"Here was a young woman who had not yet been elected to Congress and AIPAC was saying 'This is our point of view, sign off on this.' Cynthia being Cynthia was not going to do that. Had it been a Catholic group, had it been the Pope, she wasn't going to do this. I think Cynthia was taken aback by the aggressiveness that is how AIPAC does business."
McKinney's relationship with AIPAC continued to deteriorate after she won the 1992 race. An AIPAC source, who insisted on anonymity, said that tension grew to the extent that, "for the next few years, AIPAC saw Congress as having 434 members. We didn't send her the information we sent to every other member. We didn't talk to her. She didn't ask us not to. We were told to leave her alone by other members of the Georgia delegation." To this day McKinney has never been to an AIPAC convention, an event that annually draws up to 200 U.S. senators and representatives.
http://www.atljewishtimes.com/archives/1999/110599cs.htm--------------
"Despite the strong criticism expressed by many of the Jews who were interviewed for this article, none accuses McKinney of being anti-Semitic, although some believe her father is. At the same time, many believe she uses the politics of divisiveness as a weapon," Nigut wrote.
Nigut's rundown of strife between Jews and McKinney included a contentious 1996 primary contest against a Jew and McKinney's refusal on free speech grounds to condemn an associate of Louis Farrakhan who made alleged anti- Semitic statements. Her foreign policy stances earned her the enmity of the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). In the article, a Jewish businessman from Atlanta and a longtime friend of McKinney, Jules Stine, said that the AIPAC made some "heavy-handed" demands but "McKinney refused to play ball." Stine called himself a "strong supporter of AIPAC" who defends McKinney for "refusing to placate an organization which
thinks plays a disproportionate role in defining how Jews view elected officials." McKinney has also voted to reduce U.S. aid to Israel during her tenure in Congress, according to the article.
As a result, McKinney was targeted by the AIPAC and other Jewish groups angered by her perceived pro-Palestinian position on the Middle East, according to an Aug. 23, 2002 article in the Baltimore Jewish Times, also included in Olpadwala's file responding to Martin's questions. The article stated that McKinney's primary opponent "received hundreds of thousands of dollars from Jewish supporters around the country." The first sentence said, "The score is now Jewish activists 2, anti-Israel members of Congress 0. "One thorny issue the article mentioned was a request by McKinney for a Saudi prince to donate $10 million to African-American causes in her district -- after Rudolph Giuliani, as administrator of the Sept. 11 relief fund, rejected the same.
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http://www.cornelldailysun.com/articles/8956/