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Josh Shapiro Trying to Derail Progressive Rabb in Favor of AIPAC Candidate for Pennsylvania House Race
One human rights lawyer said the centrist Pennsylvania governor was trying to stop Rabb because he's "anti-genocide, anti-AIPAC, pro-universal healthcare, and pro-labor."
May 11, 2026
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro is working behind the scenes to derail progressive state representative Chris Rabb in his bid for a seat representing the state's 3rd Congressional District in the US House—reportedly putting his thumb on the scale to drag pediatric surgeon Dr. Ala Stanford, the Israel lobby’s preferred candidate, over the finish line.
Axios reported this weekend that the Democratic governor, who has sought to punish boycotts and other activism against Israel, was seeking to quietly influence the race to defeat Rabb, who has been an outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights on the campaign trail and a critic of Shapiro’s centrist stances.
Rabb has called for an arms embargo against Israel amid the genocide in Gaza and endorsed the right of return for Palestinian refugees. But he's also pressured Shapiro to end what he says is "state collaboration" with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
While still considered an underdog in the three-way primary, which takes place on May 19, Rabb has gained steam in recent weeks with key endorsements from progressive leaders, most notably Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who has raised funds and plans to visit Philadelphia to campaign with him on Friday, days before voters head to the polls.
Shapiro has not publicly weighed in on the race and has not endorsed a candidate. But according to Axios, he and his team "privately told allies that he disapproves of Rabb and has taken steps to block his path, according to three people familiar with the discussions."
The report continued:
Shapiro has privately advised Philadelphia's building trades unions to avoid inadvertently helping Rabb, the lone progressive in the race, by attacking one of his center-left opponents, two of our sources told us.
The sources said Shapiro suggested that the building trades, which are backing another candidate, Sharif Street, avoid running negative ads against a third contender, Ala Stanford.
Street and Stanford are seen as traditional Democrats who share similar voters.
Stanford led the race with 28% of the vote, ahead of Rabb’s 23%, in a poll conducted in April by the 314 Action Fund, a super PAC backing Stanford.
However, that very PAC has proven a liability for Stanford in the stretch run of the campaign. Last month, Drop Site News revealed that 314 Action Fund had acted as a shell organization for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and had covertly received $500,000 from the lobbying group, which Democratic voters have come to overwhelmingly view as toxic.
The revelation has proven a public relations disaster for Stanford, who had said she “did not accept money from AIPAC” back in March. When confronted by voters about her views on the conflict, she has struggled to answer their questions and has faced heavy criticism for her statements that accusing Israel of "genocide," an opinion held by many leading human rights organizations and UN experts, is "hurtful" to Jewish people in the same way that using a racial slur is hurtful to Black people.
Amid other embarrassments, including her failure to explain her plan to "abolish" ICE and her rollout of what was described as a "comedically amateurish" policy platform on social media, Stanford dropped out of an April 29 debate just hours before it was set to take place, citing unspecified “misogynistic attacks and lies from both of my opponents.”
There have not been any public opinion polls on the race since Stanford's crash. But PoliticsPA.com now gives Street a 61% chance of winning, Rabb a 33% chance, and Stanford a distant 5% chance, citing prediction markets.
Axios suggested that Shapiro's primary goal is to prevent the votes from splitting between the two centrists, thereby allowing Rabb to win. But the piece suggests that Stanford is Shapiro's preferred horse.
Stanford has the backing of PA-03’s outgoing occupant, Rep. Dwight Evans (D), who is described as a close ally of Shapiro. Street is also described as having a “strained relationship” with Shapiro, who backed his rival in a 2022 struggle for leadership of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party.
Shapiro's push to blunt Rabb's momentum casts Philadelphia as yet another battleground in the broader war over the Democratic Party's identity, especially surrounding support for Israel, but also with other issues like immigration and healthcare, where leadership is out of step with voters' demands.
" Josh Shapiro is trying to derail the congressional run of Democratic PA State Rep Chris Rabb because Rabb is anti-genocide, anti-AIPAC, pro-universal healthcare, and pro-labor," said human rights lawyer Qasim Rashid.
Will Bunch, a columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, said the governor's effort to defeat Rabb was “one more reminder that Josh Shapiro is who we thought he was.”
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Not Just a Moral Crisis, Israel Is Now a Political Liability for the Democratic Party
Democrats appear unable to grasp how dramatically public consciousness around Israel has shifted.
May 11, 2026
The political ground beneath unconditional US support for Israel has shifted dramatically. For Democrats in particular, continuing to arm a genocidal apartheid state has always been morally indefensible, and is becoming increasingly politically incoherent.
That shift is already visible inside the Party, as demonstrated with the mid-April 2026 Senate vote on the Joint Resolutions of Disapproval (JRDs). A substantial majority of Democratic senators voted to block the transfer of hundreds of millions of dollars in offensive weapons to Israel, including 1,000-pound bombs and bulldozers almost certain to be used in the destruction of Palestinian homes and the bombing of neighborhoods across occupied Palestine and Lebanon.
Still, many of the Democratic senators who voted against those resolutions, along with House members who continue refusing to sign onto legislation to “Block the Bombs” and halt US investment in such terror, remain unable to recognize what even Trump has recently acknowledged: The Zionist state is increasingly becoming a political liability, with unconditional support no longer automatic or easy to defend.
Over the past few months, Democrats have by and large criticized the war and overwhelmingly voted in favor of War Powers resolutions, seeming at the very least eager to capitalize on mounting anti-Trump sentiment. Even longtime, steadfast allies of Israel within the Senate and broader Democratic leadership—many of whom have been proud to serve as political representatives for Israeli interests inside the US Congress—have shown a willingness to publicly draw a line on Iran.
Yet when it comes to publicly condemning Israel itself, or calling to end ongoing arms transfers, many of these same members of Congress remain in lockstep with both the Israeli regime and the US administration they would otherwise claim to oppose.
Beyond the blatant hypocrisy and duplicity of such a position, many Democrats appear unable to grasp how dramatically public consciousness around Israel has shifted. Recent polling has shown that a growing number of Americans believe the war on Iran is being fought more in service of Israeli interests than those of the United States.
A rising portion of the public recognizes the absurdity and futility of continuing to bankroll a wider war that promises nothing beyond mass civilian death, economic hardship, geopolitical fallout, and endless regional escalation. For an ever-loyal MAGA base, when anti-Iranian propaganda fails to persuade, Israel emerges as the next most digestible explanation for this violent catastrophe. Rather than confronting Trump’s own agency or private interests in dragging the US into another intractable conflict with no coherent objective, many instead frame him as having fallen captive to Israeli interests—fulfilling ambitions Netanyahu has articulated for decades to advance the “Greater Israel” project.
The GOP itself has increasingly begun fracturing along the fault lines of unwavering support for Israel. Some of the party’s most prominent public figures and media propagandists have emerged as unusually vocal critics of Israel. While there remain conservatives whose Zionist ideology produces a near cult-like acceptance of Israeli violence and even an embrace of apocalyptic regional war, others increasingly view unconditional support for Israel as directly conflicting with Trump’s otherwise nationalist, supposedly “America First” agenda. For Democrats—whose base polls far more critically of Israel—that shift should be setting off political alarms.
Democrats, then, who will publicly rage that the war on Iran endangers public welfare, costs taxpayers billions, and undermines long-term US “security” objectives, yet remain staunch allies of Israel committed to subsidizing its arms transfers, prove themselves incapable of recognizing their own political reality. To say they have lost sight of their own constituencies, if not captured by Zionist PAC donor interests, would be an understatement.
Last week, fourteen US citizens were abducted by the Israeli military in international waters, only 37 miles off the coast of Greece, for participating in a international, nonviolent direct action aimed at challenging Israel’s ongoing illegal siege and blockade. Israeli forces violently seized and sabotaged civilian vessels belonging to the Global Sumud Flotilla before abducting more than 175 civilians, many of whom were subsequently assaulted, brutalized, and tortured inside Israeli prisons.
That American civilians were attacked by a foreign military in blatant disregard for international law should have provoked outrage across the United States. Instead, it was met with near total silence from both mainstream media and US lawmakers.
Only a small cohort of nineteen members of the House of Representatives, and not a single Senator, made any formal statement on the matter. The few who did speak out were largely the same contingent of progressives who have long been willing to condemn Israel since it launched its full-scale assault on the Palestinian people and the destruction of the Gaza Strip in 2023.
After years of functioning as the primary political and PR shield for the genocide in Gaza under the Biden administration, it is perhaps no longer surprising that much of the Democratic Party remains unwilling to confront Israeli terrorism–even when waged against US citizens.
But this silence is not just another profound abdication of Congressional duty and moral responsibility. It is political idiocy.
It has now been months since the DNC’s own political autopsy reportedly found that Democratic backing of the genocide likely cost Harris a significant percentage of votes in the presidential election. The rise of figures like Zohran Mamdani has further underscored how dramatically the Democratic voter base has shifted on Palestine. It has shown that even as pro-Israel lobbying groups and militarized donor networks spend tens of millions attempting to shape electoral outcomes and discipline Democratic politicians, anti-Zionist candidates can still win, while establishment-backed candidates can—and likely will—lose.
And as always, the material reality of what Democrats continue funding and shielding has become too horrific, too visible, and too widely documented to continue obscuring behind the language of “self-defense.”
Gaza remains under an Israeli blockade engineered to sustain a biological genocide. The almost total restriction of food, water, medicine, fuel, and other basic life-essentials, alongside the systematic destruction of hospitals, sanitation systems, and civilian infrastructure, has produced a deliberately manufactured catastrophe of disease, displacement, and mass malnutrition.
In Lebanon, civilians continue to be massacred daily in Israeli strikes that mirror the total, genocidal bombardment of Gaza, while Iranians endure US and Israeli war crimes–including attacks on schools, hospitals, universities, and other civilian infrastructure. Across occupied Palestine, especially in the West Bank, Israeli settler attacks and military raids continue to escalate in pace, scale, and brutality, as Israel moves ever more openly toward ethnic cleansing and the seizure of Palestinian land. This all falls under the full protection of the so-called global “Board of Peace."
Israel also continues pushing the boundaries of what world governments are willing to excuse, as the impunity protecting its violence deepens without consequence. That now includes abducting foreign nationals like Saif Abukeshek and Thiago Ávila in international waters before imprisoning and torturing them without charge for an entire week.
Israel’s level of depravity may not register as morally or legally disqualifying to members of Congress, but it has become untenable to continue parroting the absurd claim that US weapons transfers to the state are remotely connected to legitimate “security” objectives. The underlying ambitions of the Zionist project become harder to conceal with every noose pin worn, every land grab and expulsion openly celebrated, and every new Kushner-Witkoff contract signed or verbal slip exposing the true agenda.
Many Democrats also fail to recognize another political shift unfolding among their own base: the growing tendency to connect the Trump administration’s expanding authoritarian “immigration crackdown” and investment in DHS ‘detention’ infrastructure with Israel’s militarized apparatus of surveillance, occupation, and control.
As public outrage has intensified over the unfathomably cruel separation of families, disappearances, deaths, and systemic abuse and neglect inside DHS concentration camps, along with the targeting and killing of US citizens standing in peaceful solidarity against ICE operations, more communities, civil liberties advocates, and grassroots movements have begun drawing direct connections to Israel.
In particular, many have pointed to Israeli surveillance technology, along with longstanding institutional relationships and tactical training involving the Israeli military, US policing and ‘immigration enforcement’ agencies.
So while Democrats position themselves against Trump’s masked “secret police,” many still fail to recognize how deeply these systems have been shaped by the broader US-Israeli “security” relationship itself.
It is the very same political culture that normalizes Israeli military occupation—including the systematic torture, abduction, imprisonment, and repression of Palestinian men, women, and children—that helps legitimize and operationalize hardline state violence in the United States. For many younger voters, immigrant rights advocates, civil liberties groups, and grassroots organizers, these issues can no longer be viewed as separate.
Palestine has thus become a broader test of moral clarity and political corruption. At this point, continued support for arming Israel signals not only complicity in war crimes, crimes against humanity, and mass destruction on a scale that will take generations to repair, but alignment with the same predatory billionaire political class that profits from state violence and racist repression domestically.
Arming genocide has never been political realism. It is moral collapse and structural rot elevated for decades as inevitability—a party consensus built around unwavering support for the United States’ supposed ‘greatest ally.’ It is the delusion of a political class profoundly removed from the violence it defends and facilitates.
Democrats who continue clinging to that collapsing consensus increasingly stand in direct opposition to both the consciousness of their own base and the political reality taking shape around them.
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Are Trump’s nuclear plans illegal?
13 organizations, including Beyond Nuclear and Nuclear Information & Resource Service, have filed comments to the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, suggesting Trump’s nuclear “orders” may violate long-standing legislation
May 11, 2026
The so-called “Rubber-Stamp Rule”, an effort by the Trump administration to “Make America Nuclear Again”, violates key components of the Atomic Energy Act (AEA) and Energy Reorganization Act, according to comments filed this week by 13 organizations including the Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS) and Beyond Nuclear. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC) proposed rule will allow reactor designs that the Department of Energy (DOE) and Department of Defense (DOD) have approved to bypass required safety reviews by the NRC.
In a separate comment filing in March, 11 state attorneys general concurred with the organizations’ findings that the Department of Energy ‘s new policy to exclude “pilot reactors” from both NRC licensing and environmental reviews violates existing law. In that case, the Department of Energy announced, in violation of federal law, that it would exempt previously untested reactors that it approves to be built and operated from any review of their environmental impacts.
“Along with the DOE’s environmental ‘free pass’ policy, the whole ‘expedited licensing’ regime the administration is attempting to set up appears to be illegal,” said Tim Judson, executive director of NIRS and co-author of comments filed to the NRC. “The White House is trying to create a ‘regulatory tunnel’ around NRC’s safety regulations. That would mean DOE’s biases and obviously false assumptions about the safety of nuclear power plants become the new normal, exposing the public to unacceptable dangers to our health and safety.”
The NRC’s proposed regulation would allow companies that want to build a nuclear reactor of the same design as one DOE has previously approved to merely submit documentation of that approval and claim that the previously built reactor “is safe.” Such companies would likely never have to go through a detailed safety review by NRC to build and operate such reactors. In 1974, Congress amended the Atomic Energy Act to prohibit such a scheme.
“Fifty years ago, the Atomic Energy Commission was abolished because they became too much of a promoter and lost the confidence of Congress and the public over safety,” said Paul Gunter, director of the reactor oversight project at Beyond Nuclear. “The NRC was established to provide a regulator that prioritizes safety and is obligated not to take shortcuts for a production agenda. Instead, half a century later, we are on the same dangerous collision course, casting aside the NRC in favor of the DOE, which doesn’t have the experience or the staff to get the industry in line with safety and security. This capitulation to the Trump agenda could lead to the NRC being abolished altogether, because nobody will have confidence in them.”
The groups also told NRC that it cannot simply “rubber-stamp” reactors that the military builds, either. “And while the law allows the DOD to build its own nuclear reactors,” said Tim Judson of NIRS, “it does not allow the NRC to skip safety reviews for civilian nuclear plants just because they use the same designs. The military routinely exposes its personnel to dangers that civilians are supposed to be protected from.”
“In its eagerness to short-circuit reactor safeguards, the Trump administration is once again doing what it does best – demonstrating a complete disregard for the law,” said Linda Pentz Gunter, executive director of Beyond Nuclear. “But nuclear technology is too inherently dangerous to operate as an outlaw. Ignoring those dangers will put millions of Americans at risk of another catastrophic nuclear accident.”
- NIRS, BN, et al comments on NRC Proposed Rule — https://www.nirs.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/DocketID_NRC-2025-1503_Comments_-BeyondNuclear-NIRS-etal.pdf
- Comments on DOE Categorical Exclusion Policy — https://www.nirs.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/2026.03.04-NIRS-et-al-Comments-re-DOE-categorical-exclusion-for-advanced-nuclear-reactors.pdf
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'We Refuse to Be Silenced': Gaza Doctors Documentary Censored by BBC Wins Prestigious Award
“Just a question to the BBC,” said the documentary's executive producer. “Given you dropped our film, will you drop us from the BAFTAs screening later tonight?”
May 11, 2026
The makers of a documentary about Israeli attacks on healthcare workers and infrastructure in Gaza won a prestigious BAFTA award on Sunday—and they used their acceptance speech to lash out at BBC for refusing to air their work.
The film, "Gaza: Doctors Under Attack," was originally scheduled to be aired by the BBC in early 2025 before the network announced in June that it would not be releasing the documentary because it had "come to the conclusion that broadcasting this material risked creating a perception of partiality."
Shortly after, the documentary was picked up by the UK-based Channel 4 and aired in July.
UK journalist Ramita Navai, the main reporter of the documentary, criticized the BBC for declining to show the film, which she denounced as a political decision.
“Israel has killed over 47,000 children and women in Gaza so far," Navai said. "Israel has... targeted every single one of Gaza’s hospitals. It’s killed over 1,700 Palestinian doctors and healthcare workers. It has imprisoned over 400 in what the UN now calls a ‘medicide.’ These are the findings of our investigation that the BBC paid for but refuses to show. But we refuse to be silenced and censored."
🇵🇸🇬🇧 A Gaza documentary the BBC paid for and refused to air just won a Bafta.
The filmmakers used their acceptance speech to call out the BBC directly.
Presenter Ramita Navai:
"We refuse to be silenced and censored."
The BBC then edited portions of her remarks from its own… https://t.co/xLRLfdLV6W pic.twitter.com/K8pYhOzJTd
— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) May 11, 2026
Ben de Pear, the film's executive producer, also pointed the finger at the BBC as he accepted the BAFTA award for best current affairs television program.
"Just a question to the BBC,” said de Pear, according to The Hollywood Reporter. “Given you dropped our film, will you drop us from the BAFTAs screening later tonight?"
As reported by Al Jazeera, de Pear after accepting the award also praised Palestinian journalists Jaber Badwan and Osana Al Ashi, who contributed on-the-ground footage for the documentary at the risk of their own lives.
"[We] woke up every day wondering if the two journalists on the ground were still alive," de Pear told reporters backstage.
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