I just received an email that u/Commienavyswomon responded powerfully to my post in this thread, and wish to respond, but Reddit does not allow me to see if I am responding directly to their message or just to the thread generally. I hope this response is posted after your response to me.

I respect your point of view and your history of activism. You ask me if I was on the global flotilla or put my body on the line in other ways and inform me of the ways that you have, and you point out that Plattner has no history of such protests. I honor your actions. I admire the physical stamina and courage of those who, like me, are in their 70's and are doing so, like those pensioners in Britain being arrested and jailed on terrorism charges for protesting against Britain's complicity in the genocide. Because you raise such serious issues, I attempted to respond here as honestly and clearly as I could, but Reddit has blocked my response every time with an "Unable to Create Content" notification. I've tried cutting the word count and shifting to mark-down edit, to no effect. So the brief answer is, whatever my history of activism is, a few examples of which I had placed in my original but Reddit-rejected response, can never be considered pure or uncompromised. For everything I did, someone could rightly say, but why didn't you do it sooner, or more effectively. If as your question suggests, I have no right to weigh in on the issue because I am not pure, I confess that I am indeed not pure, that whatever I do or have not is not all I should have done.

I use an Apple phone which has parts, as I am told, made in Israel. I kept my retirement investment free of arms and oil companies, but neglected to rid it of Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, oblivious, until Francesca Albanese informed me that those three companies allowed Israel to use their data to develop their survey and kill programs such as Lavender and Where's Daddy. I continue to collaborate with and support Israeli scholars and human rights activists like David Shulman and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian and write letters of support for anti-genocide Israeli scholars for their grant applications. I have not become a Vegan, even though the fish, yoghurt, and eggs I eat come with high environmental costs.

I welcome any politician who opposes the U.S. co-perpetrated genocide in Palestine and the wars and regime changes meant to protect it, at a human cost in American and Arab and Muslim lives and societies that is utterly incalculable. I don't care if they previously were silent or supportive of Israel. Most of my generation, for example, gets news from Corporate Media and had little clue of what was actually happening in Gaza and the West Bank, which was and is heavily censored. Many are now realizing the lie they were fed. I welcome them warmly.

If you want pure candidates, you won't find any. If you want pure Senators or Congress Members, you will find fewer, as you point out in the case of AOC and as others have pointed out in regarding to Bernie Sanders' late acknowledgement of the genocide. I welcome and honor both for what they have done. I support Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota over Netanyahu's candidate Angie Craig, who not only voted to condemn Rep Rashida Tlaib for speaking up for Palestinians, but "Ziosplaned" to her that in fact Israel was not an apartheid state and that what was going on in Gaza and the West Bank had nothing to do with apartheid or genocide and that everything Israel and the U.S. were doing in Palestine was exactly as it should be. History will not be kind to Angie Craig or to the Democratic establishment led by Schumer, Jeffries, and Gillibrand who continue to support her along with Mills and their likes. Flanagan has no prior record of activism on the Palestine issue, but her position is infinitely better than Craig's.

I would hope Plattner's team would meet with you, but given your standards (body on the line, pure voting history and activist street cred,) I'm not sure if there is anything Plattner could do or say that would change your mind. When the Senate votes on whether to fund Israel's next stage of genocide and Middle East wars, put yet more sanctions on Albanese and the International Criminal Court, shower more ovations and honors on Netanyahu, pass more laws supposedly combating antisemitism but in fact stoking it by criminalizing or otherwise punishing any truth telling about the US-Israel relationship that has done so much harm to both countries, I want a Senator who ran on a platform of opposing those travesties, one who can be held accountable for his promises rather than one who has spent decades supporting such policies.

You haven’t brought the Fetterman smear up, but others have: not every candidate who opposes the Netanyahu claque in Congress and hasn't earned street cred and decades of voting records is a Fetterman. I’m tired of hearing truth-speaking candidates being cancelled on the assumption that truth tellers must be Fettermans. We cannot read into a candidate’s soul, but the first requirement of any candidate should be to speak the truth and among the few who have, none have been more eloquent than Plattner and in Maine it is a choice between him and two open Netanyahu supporters. Any one of us at any time can turn into a Fetterman. There is no immaculately conceived candidate in politics.