topic by
Balder
12/6/2001 (19:21)

Even our European and Asian allies have joined in deploring the perpetual
American tilt toward Israel. In a recent vote on a U.N. General Assembly
resolution calling upon Israel to curb further encroachments on Palestinian
lands by Jewish settlers, only the United States and Micronesia voted with
Israel. Of the 185 U.N. member nations, all of the others, without
exception, voted against Israel or abstained.

Yet Americans seem oblivious to such examples of how their
Israel-centered Middle East policies are isolating the United States in the
world.

Next is the cost of Israel to the American domestic political system. In
December 1997, Fortune magazine asked professional lobbyists to select the
most powerful special interest group in the United States. They chose the
American Association of Retired Persons, which lobbies on behalf of all
Americans over 60.

In second place, however, was the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee, Israel's official Washington, D.C. lobby, with a $15 million
budget - the sources of which AIPAC refuses to disclose - and 150
employees. AIPAC, in turn, can draw upon the resources of the Conference of
Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, a roof group set up to
coordinate the efforts on behalf of Israel of some 52 national Jewish
organizations.

Among those organizations are groups such as B'nai B'rith's
Anti-Defamation League (ADL), with a $45 million budget, and Hadassah, the
Zionist women's group, which spends more than AIPAC and sends thousands of
Americans every year to Israel on Israeli government-supervised visits.

Both AIPAC and the ADL maintain secret 'opposition research' departments
which compile files on politicians, journalists, academics and
organizations, and circulate this information through local Jewish
community councils to pro-Israel groups and activists in order to damage
the reputations of those who dare to speak out and thus have been
blackballed as 'enemies of Israel.' In the case of ADL, police raids on the
organization's Los Angeles and San Francisco offices established that much
of the information they had compiled was erroneous, and thus slanderous,
and some also was illegally obtained.

In the case of AIPAC, this is not the organization's most controversial
activity. In the 1970s members of AIPAC's national board of directors set
out to form deceptively named local political action committees (PACs)
which could coordinate their efforts in supporting candidates in federal
elections. To date, at least 126 pro-Israel PACs have been registered, and
no fewer than 50 PACs, like AIPAC, can give a candidate who is facing a
tough opponent and who has voted according to AIPAC recommendations up to
half a million dollars. That's enough money to buy all the television time
needed to get elected in most parts of the country.

What is totally unique about AIPAC's network of political action
committees is that they all have deceptive names. Who could possibly know
that the Delaware Valley PAC in Philadelphia, San Franciscans for Good
Government in California, Cactus PAC in Arizona, Chili PAC in New Mexico,
Beaver PAC in Wisconsin and even Ice PAC in New York are really pro-Israel
PACs. So just as no other special interest can put so much hard money into
any candidate's election campaign as can the Israel lobby, no other special
interest has gone to such elaborate lengths to hide its tracks.

Some of America's wisest and most distinguished public servants have been
kept from higher office by the blackballing of the Israel lobby. One such
leader was George Ball, who served the Kennedy administration as Under
Secretary of State and the Johnson administration as U.S. Ambassador to the
United Nations. Given his unmatched brilliance in forecasting international
developments, there is no doubt that he would have become secretary of
state had he not publicly expressed the skepticism about the U.S.
relationship with Israel which most Americans involved in foreign affairs
privately feel.

In membership meetings which journalists are not allowed to attend, AIPAC
presidents have boasted that the organization was responsible for the
defeats of two of history's most distinguished chairmen of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee - Democrat J. William Fulbright of Arkansas and
Republican Charles Percy of Illinois. The list of other Senators and House
members for whose election defeats AIPAC takes credit is too long to
recount.

There is good evidence also that had it not been for complex maneuvers by
the Israel lobby, including encouragement of third party candidates and
unrelenting partisanship by pro-Israeli syndicated columnists and other
media figures, Democratic President Jimmy Carter probably would have been
reelected in 1980, and Republican President George Bush almost certainly
would have been reelected in 1992.

The cost to our political system of losing national figures who refused
to allow U.S. domestic political interests to dictate U.S. foreign policy
has been enormous. So long as AIPAC and other powerful lobbies continue to
thwart meaningful efforts on behalf of campaign finance reform, Americans
will continue unknowingly paying such costs.

Finally, there is the cost of Israel in American lives. References to the
attack by Israeli aircraft and torpedo boats on the USS Liberty in which 34
Americans were killed and 171 wounded on the fourth day of the Six-Day War
of June 1967 often are met by disbelief. Very few Americans seem to have
heard of the attack on the ship operated by the U.S. Navy for the National
Security Agency to monitor Israel and Arab military communications during
the fighting.

The Israeli government claimed it was a case of mistaken identity. The
members of the crew and other naval officers who were stationed in the
Mediterranean and in Washington at the time state that it was a deliberate
attempt to sink the ship and blame Egyptian forces for the disaster. It is
the only such event in U.S. Naval history the cause of which has never been
formally investigated either by Congress or by the Navy itself.

Major losses of American lives at the hands of Arab forces opposing Israel
are better known. These include the loss of 141 U.S. service personnel in
the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in 1984. They also
include the loss of several U.S. diplomats and local employees of the U.S.
government in two bombings of the American Embassy in Beirut. Other such
events include the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait, the taking of
U.S. hostages in Beirut of whom three were killed, the deaths of Americans
in a series of Middle East related skyjackings, the deaths of 19 U.S.
service personnel in the bombing of the Al Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia,
and the 1997 assassination of four U.S. accountants working for an American
company in Karachi.