Children are a gift from God. In a world rigged against the little guy – where BlackRock and its ilk scoop up homes while families scrape by on shrinking paychecks – the laughter of a child can cut through the despair like sunlight through storm clouds. I’ve seen it in my own life, and I’ve heard it from neighbors drowning in inflation and taxes. That joy is universal, priceless, and utterly innocent. It doesn’t matter if you’re in a cramped apartment in Denver or a tent in Rafah; a child’s smile is the same miracle. Yet in Gaza, that miracle is being systematically extinguished under the rubble of American-funded bombs, and Lakewood, Colorado’s Democratic Rep. Brittany Pettersen keeps voting to send the checks.
Pettersen has taken at least $140,000 from AIPAC, her top donor, and another $10,000 from BlackRock. With one hand she cradles her infant son on the House floor – a poignant photo-op meant to signal that even a congresswoman with a high-six-figure household income can’t afford childcare without government help. With the other hand, she pushes the button for more military aid to Israel, aid that has rained hell on Palestinian families for over a year. The contrast is stomach-churning: a healthy American baby as political prop while thousands of Gazan children lie maimed, starved, or dead.
Let’s be clear about the timeline. Hamas’s last election was in 2006 – nineteen years ago. The median age in Gaza is 18. More than half the population was born after that vote. They did not choose Hamas. They did not arm Hamas. They did not greenlight October 7. In fact, mountains of reporting – from Haaretz to The Intercept – show that Israel helped nurture Hamas as a counterweight to the PLO, allowing Qatari cash to flow in, propping up a divided Palestinian leadership to avoid negotiations. The U.S. looked the other way. Then, when the predictable blowback came, Israel responded not with surgical precision but with a sledgehammer, demolishing entire cities and calling it self-defense.
The world has seen the images. Entire neighborhoods flattened. Hospitals bombed. Aid convoys blocked. The United Nations, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and even some Israeli journalists have documented the targeting of civilians. Over 69,000 Palestinians killed, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry – more than half women and children. Thousands more buried under rubble, uncounted. The Israeli military has used 2,000-pound bombs in densely populated areas, bombed “safe zones,” and blocked food, water, and medicine. This is not collateral damage. This is policy.
Basic ethics – Christian, natural-law, or simply human—forbid harming the innocent for the crimes of the guilty. If a gangster shoots up your neighborhood, you don’t level the whole block and call it justice. You don’t starve the children because their uncle joined a gang. Yet that is precisely what Pettersen’s votes enable. She rejects the term “ethnic cleansing,” but when an occupying power displaces two million people, confines them to a shrinking strip of land, and drops bombs on tents, the label fits whether she likes it or not. The International Court of Justice has said there’s a plausible case of genocide. South Africa has brought charges. Pettersen’s response? More money. More bombs. More silence.
Pettersen’s unyielding support for these atrocities is disqualifying on its own. But it also rips away the fake veneer of empathy she wears as a progressive Democrat. She campaigns on compassion – on healthcare, on housing, on “believing women,” on protecting the vulnerable. She posts about the sacred bond of motherhood, about the exhaustion and joy of raising a child in a broken system. Yet when AIPAC dangles six figures and the promise of party power, that empathy evaporates. The same woman who tearfully invokes her own baby votes to fund the maiming of thousands of others. The mask slips: her compassion is transactional, expendable the moment it conflicts with donor demands or the ladder to greater influence.
She brands herself a role model for young moms. She posts about motherhood, about balancing career and family, about the struggles of working parents. On what moral planet does that title belong to someone who trades children’s lives for campaign cash? She holds her baby in one arm while voting to fund the destruction of thousands of others. Does she see the photos? Does she read the reports of children pulled from rubble with their limbs blown off? Or has she convinced herself that these are “Hamas babies,” that their lives are expendable because of where they were born?
The question is ugly, but her actions demand it. Does she weigh brown babies differently on some unspoken scale? Because the math doesn’t lie: AIPAC and associates’s $140,000 bought her silence, her votes, her complicity. BlackRock’s $10,000 bought her indifference to the economic war being waged on her own constituents – the same families who can’t afford rent while Wall Street buys up entire neighborhoods. She could return AIPAC’s money tomorrow and redirect it to the homeless encampments in her district, to families crushed by the same inflationary policies her party cheers. She could make reparations – real ones – to the victims whose suffering she has prolonged. Instead, she doubles down, parroting talking points while the body count climbs.
Complicity is not absolved by distance or committee votes. “I was just following orders” didn’t work at Nuremberg, and “everyone else voted for it” won’t work at the final judgment. When you know – know – that your tax dollars are being used to bomb refugee camps, and you vote to send more, you are not a bystander. You are a participant. When you take money from the lobby that demands those bombs, you are not a public servant. You are a hired gun.
This is not about being “pro-Israel” or “anti-Israel.” It’s about being pro-human. It’s about recognizing that a child in Gaza is no less a gift from God than a child in Colorado. It’s about refusing to let foreign lobbies write American foreign policy with American blood and treasure. It’s about rejecting the lie that endless war is the only path to peace.
Pettersen still has time to repent. She can return the blood money. She can reject AIPAC. She can speak for the children buried under the rubble her aid financed. She can stand with the mothers in her district who are struggling to feed their kids, not with the war profiteers who fund her campaigns.
If she cannot, she has no business representing Colorado families. The House is already full of politicians who sacrifice other people’s children for power and profit – Pettersen promised to be different. She lied. Gaza’s children deserve better. So do ours. And so does the soul of this nation.
Reprinted with permission from Antiwar.com.
