Why Democrat John Hall Does Not Deserve an Endorsement From MoveOn.org

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In the face of expected Republican gains this year, receiving the support of MoveOn, one of the country's largest progressive advocacy groups, is of particular importance for Democratic candidates. One of only a handful of House incumbents to receive the coveted endorsement by MoveOn's political action committee is Democrat John Hall, who represents the 19th district in upstate New York.

John Hall is the former front man for the band Orleans ("Dance with Me," "Still the One," etc.) As a solo act, he was the writer of a number of additional songs of note, including "Power" -- recorded by Holly Near and others -- which became something of an anthem of the anti-nuclear movement. He was one of the co-founders of Musicians United for Safe Energy (M.U.S.E.) and was a long-time supporter of various progressive causes, through which I got to know him personally. In what was initially seen as a progressive victory, Hall was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from the 19th district in upstate New York back in 2006.

Since being elected to Congress, however, Rep. Hall has moved far to the right. Despite hopes that he would become a leading voice in support of human rights, Hall has instead gone in the opposite direction. Last year, he shocked his progressive supporters by co-sponsoring two resolutions defending a series of war crimes by a right-wing Middle Eastern government allied with the United States and endorsing war against Syria and Iran.

Hall's first resolution (H. Res. 34), passed last January during Israel's massive assault on the heavily-populated Palestinian enclave of the Gaza Strip, insisted that the high numbers of civilian casualties was not the result of yet another implementation of the Dahiya Doctrine -- the widely-known Israeli military policy of inflicting overwhelmingly disproportionate casualties on civilian populations in urban settings -- but a result of Hamas using "human shields." Subsequent detailed empirical studies by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the UN Human Rights Council, however, failed to find any such cases of Hamas deliberately using civilians against their will to deter attacks. His second resolution, written long after these studies had been published, similarly insisted there was widespread evidence of Hamas using human shields, but when asked to give even a single example of Hamas doing so, his office refused comment.

Rep. Hall did not stop with this apparent fabrication, however, in his effort to defend the killing of over 700 civilians by Israeli armed forces. His resolution "calls on all nations … to lay blame both for the breaking of the calm and for subsequent civilian casualties in Gaza precisely where blame belongs, that is, on Hamas" (emphasis added). Even putting aside disagreements among outside observers as to whether Hamas was indeed the party primarily guilty for "the breaking of the calm," Hall appears to be making the argument that if one party initiates a conflict, then the other party therefore has no moral or legal responsibility for war crimes they may subsequently commit. This constitutes a radical reworking of international humanitarian law, essentially legitimizing massive war crimes by a nation's armed force if the other side allegedly initiates hostilities. Such an re-interpretation, for example, would mean that the large-scale civilian casualties inflicted by Russian forces in Georgia during the 2008 conflict between those countries lies solely with the Georgian government, since they initiated the conflict by shelling civilian areas in South Ossetia.

In reality, international humanitarian law forbids the killing of civilians, even if the other party is using and human shields and even if the other party started the war.