In today's interview with Grant Smith, we covered a great many topics dealing with the Israel Lobby, beginning with the routine refusal of the national media to cover the annual conferences at the National Press Club in Washington designed to expose The Lobby's power over the US political processes at every level, our media as well as our public education system as it relates to Israel, insuring what American students read about the Israel-Palestinian conflict in their textbooks is pure Israeli propaganda.
Speeches from the latest conference on The Israel Lobby and American Policy, held March 2, sponsored by IRmep and the Washington Rept. on Middle East Affairs which include those by Gideon Levy, Lawrence Wilkerson, Rabab Abdulhadi, Virginia Tilley. Ali Abunimah and Barry Trachtenberg, can be viewed and heard by clicking on the link at www.irmep.org.
With 17,000 paid employees among the scores of lobbying groups and tens of thousands more volunteering their time and energy, I suggest that it is an occupying army. Grant points that the grassroots, acting through Jewish Community Relations Councils, across the country that monitors their politicians as well as their local media is key to its overall success.
He speaks of ongoing efforts in Congress to censor the free speech of Israel's critics, beginning with the AIPAC-sponsored âAnti-Semitism Awareness Act" being pushed in the Senate by Maryland's Ben Cardin and the money that Cardin (who is Jewish) has been receiving from pro-Israel donors and âstealth PACs,â (the kind whose name disguises their true purpose), as well as promoting anti-BDS legislation.
Regarding the Lobby's pushing for confrontation with Iran he refers to the suggestion by Patrick Clawson,, Research Director for The Washington Inst. For Near East Policy, the leading beltway think tank on the Middle East spawned by AIPAC in 1985, to launch a âfalse flagâ incident, like the Gulf of Tonkin, etc., to justify going to war with Iran.
None of AIPAC's activities or those of other Israel-focused organizations, he notes, would be possible had President Kennedy not been assassinated and had his 1962 order that the American Zionist Council, the main Israel lobbying group at the time of his death, register as a foreign agent been carried out.
Interviewed by Jeff Blankfort
Speechas and transcripts from the March 2nd conference on The Israel Lobby and American Policy sponsored by IRmep and the Washington Rept. on Middle East Affairs can be found on a link on this site: www.irmep.org
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