Philip Brutus might have been fined eighteen times by the Florida Elections Commission since 1999 over the course of his political career, but that’s not even a record.

As the Miami Herald reported, State Senator Dwight Bullard, who is running for re-election, has been fined seven times during this year’s election cycle alone.

According to the article, Bullard has racked up $7,000.00 in fines so far and has yet to pay any of them.

His defense?  According to the Herald:

Bullard said it’s easy to miss deadlines and inadvertently make mistakes that result in campaign violations. He says his violations were due to months when he didn’t fundraise and he filed a blank report instead of a waiver indicating he didn’t raise money.

“I didn’t know the procedures for filing without expenditures,” said Bullard, who has been in the Senate since 2012. “There’s a special way that I wasn’t privy to at the time. It was a computer misunderstanding on my part.”

Either he’s completely out of touch, or that has got to be the biggest lie ever told by someone who’s been in office since 2008.

Bullard successfully ran for State Representative twice (2008 and 2010), and then again for the Florida Senate in 2012.

He is now running his fourth campaign and it’s absolutely IMPOSSIBLE that he didn’t know about filing waivers in lieu of reports.

The Florida Elections Commission didn’t buy his crap, either.

The Florida Division of Elections said that it sent nine letters to Bullard and that his violations were “willful.”

“Respondent committed the acts while knowing that, or showing reckless disregard for whether, the acts were prohibited,” the state order said.

Despite his willful disregard for the law, and his abject refusal to accept responsibility for his actions, the Miami Herald endorsed him anyway.

Even worse, Dwight Bullard is apparently intent on alienating the Jewish residents in his district.

As reported by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, In linking Black Lives Matter with Palestinian cause, Miami lawmaker riles pro-Israel activists,  Bullard was “the guest of a group that backs the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions [BDS] movement” during a trip to the West Bank in May.  “His delegation met with a founder of the anti-Israel BDS movement and were led by a tour guide identified with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a State Department-designated terrorist group.”

Bullard traveled with a civil rights group called Dream Defenders, which accuses Israel as being an “Apartheid state.”

Ironically, Jews have always been staunch supporters of the civil rights movement.

The Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism notes that, “Jewish activists represented a disproportionate number of whites involved in the struggle. Jews made up half of the young people who participated in the Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964. Leaders of the Reform Movement were arrested with Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in St. Augustine, Florida, in 1964 after a challenge to racial segregation in public accommodations. Most famously, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marched arm-in-arm with Dr. King in his 1965 March on Selma.”

Despite that historical support by American Jews, the Dream Defenders’ website “rejected criticism of the platform from members of the Jewish community who might otherwise embrace the Black Lives Matter agenda.”

In the same way Dwight Bullard claimed he didn’t know about the filing of waivers, he also claimed that he had no idea that his West Bank tour guide was affiliated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine until after he returned from his trip in May.

His excuse is obviously suspect since, as you can see from the photo above, two months later he attended the Democratic National Convention sporting a Palestinian keffiyeh, which is a symbol of Palestinian nationalism.  This traditional headscarf was worn by Yassir Arafat, who was responsible for the “wave of Palestinian terrorism known as the Second Intifada.”

The keffiyeh is also most notably worn by another infamous Palestinian figure and member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Leila Khaled, who gained notoriety by being the first woman to hijack a plane.  Khaled “shot to global prominence with a series of hijackings in 1969 and 1970,” and also “participated in the simultaneous hijacking of four El Al planes,” according to Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper.

Journalist Ben Norton wrote that the wearing of the keffiyeh by “non-Palestinians, and particularly non-Arabs, wear it only out of respect for the wishes of Palestinians themselves.”

Since it’s common knowledge, or at least it should be, that the goal of the Palestinians is the complete destruction of Israel, Dwight Bullard’s wearing of the keffiyeh is very much a political statement.

And then there’s Bullard’s voting record in the Florida House of Representatives.

“Bullard was the only senator who opposed a similar Florida-based anti-BDS resolution,” as noted in a vehemently anti-Israel July 17, 2016 article in Colorlines about the Dream Defenders’ trip to the West Bank.  Rachel Gilmer, the group’s chief strategist, said that while Israeli “occupation” is not the same as the struggles of “Black people in the U.S.,” but that it was important for the tour group members “to be hyper-specific about the differences we face under systems of White supremacy, corporate capitalism and patriarchy,” and how activists “have been indoctrinated by U.S.-centrism.”

It’s quite obvious that Dwight Bullard and the people with whom he associates believe that Israel has no right to exist as a nation and as a Jewish homeland.

This is also despite the fact that Muslim Arabs make up 20% of Israel’s population, there are 50 Muslim dominated countries, in which Jews are not welcome.

But, yeah.  Let’s stop Israel’s “illegal occupation” of Arab land.

Give me a break!

Since he returned from his West Bank trip, Bullard says that “he was alarmed by the vitriol he encountered subsequent to the trip.”

A national pro-Israel group known as The Israel Project is planning a local protest against Dwight Bullard in objection to “the groups and people he met while visiting” the West Bank in May.

The Israel Project’s Southeast Regional director, Ken Bricker, told JTA, “Any Florida state legislator who would go to Israel and choose to meet with those groups, it’s more than troubling, it’s deeply disturbing.  I have to wonder if the constituents in his district [are] aware of who he is and what he believes in.”

Bricker also said, “It’s hard to imagine a constructive dialogue with someone who thinks it’s acceptable to meet with a barbaric terrorist organization that has the blood of innocents on his hands.”

Based on Dwight Bullard’s comments, his voting record, his pro-Palestinian/anti-Israel stance, and apparent sympathy with a State Department-designated terrorist group, I would urge the voters in State Senate District 40, especially its considerable Jewish population, to carefully consider whether or not they want to be represented by this person in Tallahassee.

All things considered, his campaign finance violations are nothing compared to his apparent antagonism toward Israel.

Stephanie