Nov-1975 - Arab-Islamic anti-Jewish racist lobby hijack the U.N. and --unfairly-- denounce Zionism, leading to UN resolution 3379

November 10, 1975

Arab-Islamic anti-Jewish racist lobby (with Communists' help) hijack the U.N. and --unfairly-- denounce Zionism, leading to the UN resolution 3379

The hypocrisy of both forms of exclusiveness; pan-Arabism and pan-Islamism denouncing Israel's democracy where its Arab-Muslims have equal rights.

Anti-Semitism in the United Nations

As a result of such bias, the UN has lost credibility. ... The infamous “Zionism is Racism” resolution was passed in 1975

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/UN/unantisem.html

Testimony of The Anti-Defamation League on The United Nations..

http://www.adl.org/durban/testimony.asp

Jul 31, 2001 – The infamous “Zionism = racism” resolution was rescinded and the UN

What is the evidence that the United Nations is biased against Israel ...

[...] The UN General Assembly is still dominated by blocks of third-world countries that are anti-American and anti-Israel. The numerical strength of the Arab states and the Non-Aligned Movement in the General Assembly created the long series of offensive, anti-Israel, anti-American and anti-Western resolutions, capped by the infamous 1975 “Zionism equals racism” Resolution 3379. Except for Resolution 3379 itself, repealed in 1991, these black marks of injustice remain on the General Assembly’s record.

In December 1991, the infamous 1975 “Zionism equals racism” resolution was repealed by the General Ass

embly. The repeal effort, which should have been a self-evident proposition, required an extensive diplomatic lobbying campaign by the United States, Israel and a few others. It included the direct, personal participation of President Bush, Vice President Quayle, and Secretary of State Baker; massive efforts by every regional bureau of the Department of State in Washington, American Ambassadors and their staffs in New York and every UN member capital; and lobbying by private groups around the world. The very difficulty of repealing Resolution 3379 showed just how deeply ingrained in the UN system was its anti-Semitic bias, and why, even after repeal, its effects linger.

The UN has repeatedly held Emergency Special Sessions of the General Assembly on Israeli construction in Jerusalem. The Emergency Special Session was originally convened in 1950 for emergencies like the Korean War. In the last 15 years, these special meetings have only been held regarding Israel. Emergency Special Sessions were not convened over the genocide in Rwanda, ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, or with regard to the other major world conflicts, but they were convened to condemn Israelis moving into buildings they own in territory they have a legitimate claim to.

http://www.palestinefacts.org/pf_faq_palestine_un_anti_israel_bias.php

... In 1974, when the UN General Assembly invited Yaser Arafat to address the body, and in 1975 granted the PLO “observer status”, the first time any non-nation was give such recognition or standing.

Even with this prelude, it was shocking when on November 10, 1975 the United Nations General Assembly adopted, by a vote of 72 to 35 (with 32 abstentions), its Resolution 3379, which states as its conclusion..

http://www.palestinefacts.org/pf_1967to1991_un_zionism_racism.php

Anti-Semitism Entraps U.N.

Palm Beach Post - Nov 7, 1975

By Abba Eban

The United Nations began its life as an anti-Nazi alliance. Thirty years later it is on the way to becoming the world center of anti-Semitism. There is no other tribunal form which such a torrent of abuse is poured forth every year against values, ideals and articles of faith revered by the Jewish people across the centuries. The horrifying truth that Hitler himself would often have felt at home in a forum which gave applause to a gun-toting Yasir Arafat and an obsequious ovation to the murderous Idi Amin.

There is, of course, no difference whatever between anti-Semitism and the denial of Israel’s statehood. Classical anti-Semitism denies the equal rights of Jews as citizens within society. Anti-Zionism denies the equal rights of the Jewish people to its lawful sovereignty within the community of nations. The common principle in the two cases is discrimination.

Zionism is nothing more — but also nothing less — that the Jewish people’s sense of origin and destination in the land linked eternally with its name. It is also the instrument whereby the Jewish nation seeks an authentic fulfillment of itself.

And the drama is enacted in the region in which the Arab nation has realized its sovereignty in 20 states comprising 200 million people in four and a half million square miles, with vast resources.

The issue therefore is not whether the world will come to terms with Arab nationalism. The question is at what point Arab nationalism, with its prodigious glut if advantage, wealth and opportunity, will come to terms with the modest but equal right of another Middle Eastern nation to pursue its life in security and peace.

There are any ways in which Zionism can be defined. I hold in memory a concise formulation made 28 years ago: When Arab armies has attacked Israel on the day of its birth. Andrei Gromyko said in the Security Council on May 21, 1948, that Arab military operations were “aimed at the suppression of a national liberation movement.” It is as simple as that. Truth does not change just because those who proclaim it get tired of their own veracity.

Recently, a coalition of Moslem and Communist depotisms, reinforced, I hope temporarily, by a few Latin-American governments, produced an innovation. In the past decade it has often been possible for the United Nations to adopt resolutions criticizing the policies of member states — provided only that they are non-Moslem non-Communist states which practice parliamentary democracy and are not in the “third world” There are not very many of these, and these alone are considered fair game.

But never before until recently has the Moslem-Communist coalition sought to deploy its assured majority for the defamation of an ideology, a historic doctrine and a spiritual faith endorsed by the United Nations itself 28 years ago. What the General Assembly’s Social, Humanitarian and Cultural Committee conducted was not so much a debate as a doctrinal Inquisition, as in the Middle Ages.

The Intellectual default is no less spectacular that the moral decline. The charge is, of all things, “racism”! Yet it is just as natural for Arabs to be citizens and members of Parliament in Israel today as it is inconceivable for non-Moslems to be citizens, still less office-holders, in Saudi Arabia or Yemen.

The real essence of the draft resolution is to affirm a principle of monolithic exclusiveness for the Middle East, and to iron out all wrinkles of diversity. Thus, Kurdish individualities brutally oppressed in Iraq; the Christian particularity of Lebanon is to be drowned in a bloodbath; and Israel’s specific Jewish vocation is assailed. The purpose of the resolution’s sponsors is that in a region where many nations, tongues and faiths had their birth the monopoly of independence must be for Moslem pan-Arabism alone. The paradox is that Israel is less likely than others to be injured by the fiasco. The strongest of certainties is that Israel will not disappear, or be swallowed up into something else, or renounce its name, its tongue, its faith, its Jewish solidarities or its Zionist vocation...

http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=7iYvAAAAIBAJ&sjid=qs0FAAAAIBAJ&pg=3758,2505344

Zionism and the U.N.

New York Times - Nov 3, 1975

By Abba Eban

http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F20810FE3B5F1B7493C1A9178AD95F418785F9

Out of step: life-story of a politician : politics and religion in a world ...‎ - Page 112 Jack Brian Bloom - Antisemitism - 2005 - 391 pages

"Arabism is racism" would have been an interesting debating topic. The OIC
countries were very clever in how they deflected the slavery issue that could so easily have been turned on them with a vengeance

http://books.google.com/books?lr=&cd=25&id=Kr2gAAAAMAAJ&dq=arabism+is+racism

Arabism Equals Racism

By: Gerald A. Honigman

FrontPageMagazine.com Friday, October 13, 2006

There’s an expression, “The pot calling the kettle black.” It refers to someone claiming a sin in others that is at least as prevalent - if not more so - in the accuser than it is in the accused. Hypocrisy is the name of the game.

Turn the clock back three decades.

Some things change, others never will - such as the acceptance of anyone else’s political rights in a multi-ethnic region that most Arabs see exclusively as “purely Arab patrimony.” That’s the Arab-Israel conflict in a nutshell; but it is also the core of the Arab-Berber, Arab-Kurd, Arab-Black African, Arab-Copt, Arab-Assyrian, Arab-non-Arab Lebanese conflicts, as well, among others. The Arabs’ Anfal Campaign against the Kurds and their actions in Darfur and the rest of the southern Sudan are just a few of many examples of Arab genocidal actions against all who might disagree.

To be accepted, and not literally exterminated, one must do what Egypt’s most successful Copt did - consent to this age-old forced subjugation and Arabization. Dr. Boutros Boutros Ghali became a top official in President Anwar Sadat’s government and went on to become Secretary General of the United Nations, as well.

“Uncle Butros” instead of “Uncle Tom”.

He also instructed that for it to be accepted, Israel, as an entire country, must consent to being Arabized; like those Kurdish kids in Syrian Kurdistan who are forced today to sing songs praising their “Arab identity” and so forth.

Back in the 1970s, I was a consultant for a major organization while trying to finish my own doctoral work. One of my main jobs involved being brought in by dozens of major colleges and universities across a three-state region in the American Midwest to balance anti-Israel spokesmen on campus. One such visit was to Ohio University in Athens, near my small-mouth bass fishing grounds in the Hocking River.

OU was famous for its English language program for foreign students, so there were numerous folks there from all over the Arab and African worlds.

Those were the days of the United Nations’ infamous Zionism Equals Racism resolution. Arab and pro-Arab professors were already hijacking the campus scene, constantly putting Israel under the high-power lens of moral scrutiny in ways that they would never dream of doing to the Jewish State’s surrounding Arab neighbors.

It was arranged for me to come to deliver a lecture to balance one given previously by the other side.

The Arabs and their supporters - often left-wing Jews themselves - were “loaded for game” when they heard of my invitation. But so was I.

I was a card-carrying member of the London-based Anti-Slavery Society, and persistent reports were coming through of slavery (and worse) still being practiced in Arab lands, the lands of some of the same folks screaming about alleged “Zionist racists”. I prepared a small booklet called “Look Who’s Calling the Kettle Black”, which consisted of about a dozen short articles dealing with the hypocrisy of the Arab position. I had numerous copies prepared for distribution.

I had some of my host students in the audience ready for action. They were in the company of hundreds who packed the lecture hall, including college officials, professors and so forth. Unlike some of the Hillel organizations elsewhere, the director at OU was on the ball when it came to these issues. My cadre consisted largely of Hillel members.

After my presentation, I had my usual question-and-answer session. That’s when the proverbial manure hit the fan. I was anticipating a Zionism-equals-racism question from the audience and, sure enough, I was blessed with one.

I calmly replied, “Since you are so concerned about such issues, I believe you’ll be interested in the packet of information you are about to receive.”

I then had my cadre pass out the “Look Who’s Calling The Kettle Black” booklets.

After the commotion and dust settled, and it was time to leave for my hotel, several carloads of Arab students followed me. Some members of my group decided it was best to keep me company that night. Think of the Danish cartoons and the Pope’s comment incidents today. The Arab idea of free speech is the same now as it was back then, and as it has always been.

The next day, before returning to my office in Columbus, I decided to visit the nearby famous boot factory in Nelsonville.

What I’m going to relate next may sound a bit melodramatic, but it was for real.

I was on one of the top floors of the factory outlet looking at brand-name dress boots. There was hardly anyone else there, so I was sort of isolated.

All of a sudden, I spotted a half dozen tall, Black men down the aisle from me. One of them then called out, “Mr. Hooonigmannn!”

After my experience the night before, I figured that my time on Earth was up. There were definitely folks at OU who wanted to kill me that night. I nervously stood my ground as they ran up to me.

And if you offered me a million dollars, I would not have traded it for the subsequent experience.

As they grabbed my hands, they said, “Thank you so much for last night. We had never heard or seen what you shared with us before.”

Should I be ashamed to tell you of the tears in my eyes at that moment?

These were not just any folks. These were students, sent by their countries, who would later go on to become some of those nations’ future professionals and leaders.

As I did on dozens of other campuses, through scores of other platforms, and in dozens of op-eds for leading newspapers all over the region, I tried my best to help change some minds - one at a time.

The struggle is as hard, if not harder, today, but those of us who care have no other choice but to continue in this ever-growing uphill battle for a bit of justice for the Jew of the nations.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=24912

Canadian Friends ICEJ Spearheaded Successful Campaign To ...


INFAMOUS UNITED NATIONS GENERAL ASSEMBLY RESOLUTION 3379 DECLARING...
http://www.cdn-friends-icej.ca/un/anti3379.html

One Against the World

UN resolutions established the State of Israel and through them this country ... the notorious resolution equating Zionism with racism, passed in November 1975 .... law became increasingly central to the UN agenda, the Arab lobby has been...

http://www.cdn-friends-icej.ca/un/one.html

United Nations Anti Israel Arab Lobby

The most repugnant of these anti-Semitic resolutions came in November 1975,..

http://www.scottishfriendsofisrael.org/united_nations.htm

THE UN'S ANTI-ZIONISM RESOLUTION: CHRISTIAN RESPONSES...

by JH Banki

United Nations resolution equating Zionism with racism "be counter- balanced ..... than the Arab lobby usually encounters on UN votes...

http://www.ajcarchives.org/AJC_DATA/Files/740.PDF

The Arab Lobby: The Invisible Alliance That Undermines America's Interests in the Middle East - Page 411 - Mitchell Bard - HarperCollins, 2010 - 412 pages

... Zionism and racism resolution 3379...

http://books.google.com/books?id=QKraRyoXbvoC&pg=PA411

Tags: 1975, Anti-Semitism, Arab anti-Semitism, Arab racism, Arabism is racism, Arafat, Idi Amin, Islamic anti-Semitism, Islamic bigotry, Islamofascism, Israel, palestinians, pan Arabism, pan Islamism, UN, UN resolution 3379, United Nations

Arab lobby power - More Arabist anti Israel US foreign policy - India abandons (Israeli) spy satellite launch under US pressure

Arab lobby power - More Arabist anti Israel US foreign policy - India abandons (Israeli) spy satellite launch under US pressure

India abandons (Israeli) spy satellite launch under US pressure

Daily News & Analysis,India ^ December 03, 2007 Sanjay Singh/Josy Joseph

India abandons spy satellite launch under US pressure
Sanjay Singh/Josy Joseph
Monday, December 03, 2007
TechSAR was to be launched with Israeli help last month
NEW DELHI: India’s strategic space-based surveillance (SBS) programme has suffered a huge setback.
Following last-minute US pressure, the launch of an Indo-Israeli spy satellite with synthetic aperture radar (SAR) was aborted literally at the launch pad stage.
Images from the satellite, with sub-metre picture resolution, would have significantly boosted India’s intelligence-gathering abilities. The satellite is capable of obtaining sharp images of civilian construction activities, including nuclear plants, that may have a strategic bearing. It can also scan cloud-covered mountain peaks. Lack of this capability enabled Pakistan-backed militants and army regulars to entrench themselves on the heights of Kargil, necessitating a huge armed response with many casualties.
If the SAR satellite had been launched on schedule, it would have been a first for both Israel and India. This is the second strategic programme to have received a setback after American intervention in recent times. Earlier, India curtailed the range of its missiles under development to 5,000 km under US pressure. It has advised military scientists not to think of developing a full-fledged inter-continental ballistic missile above 800 km range.
When DNA contacted a senior official involved in India’s strategic engagements with Israel, he insisted that the satellite launch, slated for end October or early November, was aborted because of “technical glitches”. He added: “Our decision to abort the launch at the last minute was not guided by any American pressure.”
However, at least three sources privy to the entire programme confirmed that the launch of TechSAR, mounted on a PSLV (Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle), was aborted after American intervention. TechSAR is technically an Israeli satellite being launched by the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) for a fee, but the imagery captured by it would have been available to Indian intelligence. Most importantly, this was to be the first in a series of spy satellites India was to launch with Israeli collaboration.
The need for satellites with SAR technology was felt very strongly after Kargil, when Indian agencies were caught napping as Pakistani intruders entered Indian peaks and set up bases. The images, available then from the Indian Remote Sensing (IRS) satellites and spy planes, were hazy and did not reveal any ground level movement – an intelligence failure which proved critical.
The proposal for cutting-edge space-based intelligence gathering was then put on the fast-track and made possible through strategic cooperation with Israel. The Jewish state is one of the rare few in the world with SAR technology and was also working on TechSAR. The microwaves sent from SAR can penetrate cloudy areas like Kargil and garner images. When these images are processed using advanced software, they can produce very sharp photographs even if there is cloud cover or dust storm.
The satellite was to be the first of three produced exclusively by or in partnership with Israel for meeting India’s intelligence requirements.
Sources say that TechSAR, weighing 260 kg, had arrived in India a few months ago. It was moved to the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, Sriharikota, for launch. A dependable source told DNA that the satellite was “mounted” on the PSLV when the American pressure came. “We had to literally dismantle it,” he said.
The countdown to a satellite launch begins three months before it is fired into orbit. A senior official in Delhi told DNA that India is “presently dependent on other countries for sub-metre resolution pictures. That is our handicap. We firmly believe that we must have our own system in place.”
“We have planned three satellites for now. We hope to have even more. Having more than one such satellite in orbit would reduce revisit time (when a satellite is orbiting) and we would have more data to make an analysis. This would give pictures of less than a metre’s resolution of rail lines, new roads, new services, and any civilian construction activity that could be of a nuclear nature in neighbouring countries,” another official said.

http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?newsid=1136837
___________

Report: US halted launch of Israeli satellite

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?c=JPArticle&cid=1195546795593&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

Technorati - ‘palestinian’ terrorism ‘palestinians’ Israel IDF ‘palestinian’ Apartheid Zionism Anti Israel bigotry Islamic Apartheid War on terror Terror victims ‘palestinian’ propaganda jihad Genocide bombing Anti Israel bias Arab racism Jews IDF Anti Israel racism Islamofacsism Conflict Israel “Palestine” “Palestinians” Israelis Civilwar Arabs MuslimsJihad Terrorism Fatah non-Muslims Christians Hamas Oil Saudi Arabia Oil lobby Islamic lobby Lobbies Arab lobby US Arab lobbyGaza Terrorism Islamofascism Jerusalem Arabism Bush Foreign policy Muslims

What the pro Terror (pro Genocidal-Hamas), 'Islamic Lobby CAIR' didn't want you to hear

What the pro Terror (pro Genocidal-Hamas), 'Islamic Lobby CAIR' didn't want you to hear
http://youtube.com/watch?v=J34Ub8q2niE

Are American Jews Too Powerful? Not Even Close.

From: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/02/AR2007110201659.html

Are American Jews Too Powerful? Not Even Close.

By Ruth Wisse
Sunday, November 4, 2007; Page B03

These days, it's becoming downright chic to hint forebodingly that America's Jews are just too powerful. But whether it's the political scientists John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt or former president Jimmy Carter, those who accuse modern Jews of having excessive clout are getting it precisely backward. In the real world, Jews have too little power and influence. They also have too little self-confidence about defending themselves.

Consider a basic paradox. Even anti-Semites often give Jews credit for having exceptional intelligence. Self-congratulatory Web sites reckon that Jews, who make up about 0.2 percent of the world's population, have been awarded more than 160 Nobel Prizes. But if Jews are so smart, why do 22 Arab League countries account for a tenth of the Earth's land surface while the Israelis struggle to secure a country that is 1/19th the size of California? If Jews are so powerful, why does Israel attract twice as many venture-capital investments as all of Europe, even while it's the only one of the United Nations' 192 member states that has been charged with racism for the crime of its existence? How powerful is that?


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In fact, there's an excellent historical reason why Jewish intellectual achievement sits alongside political weakness. Simply put, Jewish achievement in other areas has come at the expense of political strength, and the strange relationship of Jews and power has made them history's favorite prey. Centuries of survival in other people's lands prevented Jews from achieving full acceptance -- and access to the levers of government. Some individual Jews may have lived large, but the Jewish people as a whole lived on sufferance, afraid to antagonize those from whom they sought tolerance.

These questions mean a lot to me. I'm often asked how I, a teacher of Yiddish literature, came to write about politics. But remember that the Yiddish language, developed by European Jews over almost a thousand years, was practically erased along with them in a mere six, 1939-45. So studying Yiddish literature, almost by definition, concentrates the mind on Jewish political disabilities.

When Jerusalem was crushed by Rome in the year 70 -- so brutally that, according to the historian Josephus, "no one visiting the spot would believe it had once been inhabited" -- some Jews stayed on, but the vast majority made their homes in foreign lands. For more than 18 centuries, Jews survived as a nation without three basic staples of nationhood: land, central government and independent means of self-defense.

Instead, Jews turned to strategies of accommodation. They provided goods and services to their gentile neighbors in return for being allowed to stay in the country. They became money-lenders, bankers, minters, craftsmen, midwives -- trades that gentiles would let them perform and that allowed Jews to observe their calendar, customs and religious laws. But they had no independent way to protect their achievements.


Unlike their Christian and Muslim overlords, Jews had good reasons to avoid irking those from whom they sought acceptance. The German poet Heinrich Heine, who called conversion to Christianity his "ticket of admission" to European culture, likened Jews to a prince whom "black magic" had transformed into a dog: "All week long he goes on scraping/Through life's excrement and sweepings/To the mockery of jeers of street boys." Only on Friday evenings, while ushering the Sabbath into his own home, does the dog resume its human shape. Heine saw that the humiliation of the Jews was offset by a moral serenity, and that their moral serenity was offset by acute political vulnerability.

The creation of the state of Israel in May 1948, after the carnage of the Holocaust, was supposed to change all this. But the newly formed Arab League made opposition to Israel the only common goal of its otherwise quarrelsome membership. The new United Nations, tribune of emerging post-colonial nations, did not protect Israel from assault, and over time the world body became a party to the Arab League's war against Jewish statehood.

Of course, Israel now had an army, and a formidable one at that. But the Israel Defense Forces did not change the Jews' existential condition as a minority; Israel was now a minority among the nations, contending with Arab states that sought to dominate or destroy it. Israel still lived by strategies of accommodation, trying to supply its neighborhood with useful services and goods such as medical, agricultural and technological know-how. In the 1990s, utopians such as Shimon Peres, now Israel's president, hailed a "new Middle East" of economic and political cooperation. When Peres and Israel's late prime minister Yitzhak Rabin installed Yasser Arafat as the head of a Palestinian proto-state, they began another doomed Jewish political experiment -- making Israel, as best I can figure, the first country in the world ever to arm its enemy in hopes of gaining security.

What about American Jewry? Mearsheimer and Walt allege that a Jewish cabal dictates U.S. policy in the Middle East, helping Israeli interests and hurting U.S. ones. So have American Jews really begun to mobilize effectively to protect Israel, or are people again overstating Jewish power and its supposed dangers?

Consider the halls of ivy where, if anywhere, the intellectual firepower of Jews might be expected to be on display in defense of Jewish interests. At Columbia University, the late Edward Said used his authority as a teacher of comparative literature to apologize for Palestinian terrorism and condone Arab violence against Israel, including, in one instance, by personal example. (In 2000, a photographer for a French news agency snapped him in southern Lebanon tossing a rock toward an Israeli position.) Much of the Jewish professoriat looked the other way or signed his petitions.

Elsewhere in the academy, Jewish professors themselves lead the anti-Israel barrage. In fact, Mearsheimer and Walt expected Jewish organizations to sponsor their talks and complained of "censorship" when the groups did not. Clearly, there is nothing quite as fun -- or as lucrative -- as baiting Jews.

Read rest of article at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/02/AR2007110201659.html

Technorati - 'palestinian' terrorism 'palestinians' Israel IDF 'palestinian' Apartheid Zionism Anti Israel bigotry Islamic Apartheid War on terror Terror victims 'palestinian' propaganda jihad Genocide bombing Anti Israel bias Arab racism Jews IDF Anti Israel racism Islamofacsism Conflict Israel "Palestine" "Palestinians" Israelis Civilwar Arabs MuslimsJihad Terrorism Fatah non-Muslims Christians Hamas Gaza Terrorism Islamofascism Jerusalem Muslims Oil lobby Islamic lobby Arab lobby Lobbies Lobby Wahabbi Lobby

The U.S. Invasion of Iraq: Not the Fault of Israel and Its Supporters

The U.S. Invasion of Iraq: Not the Fault of Israel and Its Supporters

http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/3011

The U.S. Invasion of Iraq: Not the Fault of Israel and Its Supporters

Stephen Zunes January 4, 2006


Foreign Policy In Focus www.fpif.org


As the official rationales for the U.S. invasion of Iraq—that Iraq possessed “weapons of mass destruction” which threatened the national security of the United States and that the Iraqi government had operational ties to al-Qaida—are now widely acknowledged to have been fabricated, and the back-up rationalization—of bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq—is also losing credibility, increasing attention is being given as to why the U.S. government, with broad bipartisan support, made such a fateful decision.

There are a number of plausible explanations, ranging from control of the country's oil resources to strategic interests to ideological motivations. One explanation which should not be taken seriously, however, is the assertion that the right-wing government of Israel and its American supporters played a major role in leading the United States to invade Iraq.

The government of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and its supporters here in the United States deserve blame for many tragic policies in recent years which have led to needless human suffering, increased extremism in the Islamic world, decreased security, and rampant violations of the UN Charter, international humanitarian law, and other international legal principles. The U.S. invasion of Iraq, however, is not one of them.

Arguments Supporting Claims of a Major Israeli Role in the U.S. Invasion of Iraq
There are four major arguments made by those who allege a key role by Israel and its American supporters in leading the United States to war in Iraq:

“Despite propaganda by the Bush administration and its bipartisan supporters on Capitol Hill, Iraq was not a military threat to the United States. As a result, the invasion had to have been done to protect Israel for an Iraqi attack.”

To begin with, Iraq during the final years of Saddam Hussein's rule was no more of a threat to Israel than it was to the United States. All Iraqi missiles capable of reaching Israel had been accounted for and destroyed by UNSCOM, the International Atomic Energy Agency had determined that Iraq no longer had a nuclear program, and virtually all the country's chemical weapons had similarly been accounted for and destroyed. All this was presumably known to the Israelis, who actively monitored United Nations disarmament efforts in Iraq and had the best military intelligence capabilities in the region.

Though observers were less confident regarding the absence of biological weapons, the Israelis recognized that there was no realistic threat from that source either. Respected Israeli military analyst Meir Stieglitz, writing in the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot, stated categorically that “there is no such thing as a long-range Iraqi missile with an effective biological warhead. No one has found an Iraqi biological warhead. The chances of Iraq having succeeded in developing operative warheads without tests are zero.” Similarly, it is highly doubtful that Iraq would be able to attack Israel with biological weapons by other means, either. For example, it is hard to imagine that an Iraqi aircraft carrying biological weapons, presumably some kind of subsonic drone, could somehow make the 600-mile trip to Israel without being detected and shot down. Israel—as well as Iraq's immediate neighbors—had sophisticated anti-aircraft capability.

More fundamentally, if the United States was really concerned with Israel's safety from Iraqi attack, why did the U.S. government provide Iraq with key elements of its WMD capability during the 1980s—including the seed stock for its anthrax and many of the components for its chemical weapons program—back when Iraq clearly did have the capability of striking Israel ? How could the “pro-Israel lobby”—which was no more influential in 2002 than it was fifteen years earlier—have the power to push the United States to invade Iraq when Saddam was no longer a threat to Israel when the lobby was unable to stop U.S. technology transfers to Iraq when it really could have potentially harmed Israel ?

“Though Iraq had no connection with al-Qaida, they were supporting other terrorist groups that were attacking Israel. A U.S. invasion was seen as a means to stopping the terrorist threat targeted at the Jewish state.”

Saddam Hussein did support the Abu Nidal group, a radical secular Palestinian movement, during the mid-1980s, though they tended to target moderate leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organizations as much as they did Israelis. Ironically, the Reagan administration dropped Iraq from its list of states sponsoring terrorism at that time in order to be able to transfer arms and technology to Saddam Hussein's regime that would have otherwise been illegal. Iraq was put back on the list of state sponsors of terrorism immediately following its invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, despite evidence that Iraq's support for international terrorism had actually declined. Abu Nidal himself became chronically ill not long afterward and his group had been largely moribund for more than a decade when Saddam Hussein had him killed in his Baghdad apartment in 2002.

Iraq did support a tiny pro-Iraqi Palestinian group known as the Arab Liberation Front, which was known to pass on much of these funds to families of Palestinians who died in the struggle against Israel. These recipients included families of Palestine Authority police and families of nonviolent protesters, though some recipients were families of suicide bombers. Such Iraqi support was significantly less than the support many of these same families had received from Saudi Arabia and other U.S.-backed Arab monarchies, which—unlike Iraq—also provided direct funding for Hamas and other radical Palestinian Islamists. In any case, given that Israeli occupation forces routinely destroyed the homes of families of suicide bombers and the Iraqi money fell way short of making up for their losses, it was hardly an incentive for someone to commit an act of terrorism, which tends to be driven by the anger, hopelessness, and desperation from living under an oppressive military occupation, not from financial incentives.

“Individuals and organizations sympathetic to Israel strongly supported the invasion. Sizable numbers of otherwise dovish Jewish members of Congress voted in support of the war resolution, and the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), long considered one of the most powerful lobbying groups on Capitol Hill, pushed Congress to authorize an invasion on behalf of Israel.”

While AIPAC undeniably has influenced Congressional votes regarding Israeli-Palestinian concerns and related issues, they did not play a major role lobbying members of Congress to vote in favor of the resolution authorizing a U.S. invasion of Iraq, in large part because they knew there was such overwhelming bipartisan support for invading that oil-rich country they did not need to. More fundamentally, there are far more powerful interests that have a stake in what happens in the Persian Gulf region than does AIPAC, such as the oil companies, the arms industry, and other special interests whose lobbying influence and campaign contributions far surpass that of the much-vaunted “Zionist lobby” and its allied donors to Congressional races. The American Jewish community, like most Americans, is turning against the war. Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, along with its chairman of the board, Robert Heller, recently sent a letter to President Bush stating that “We call not only for a clear exit strategy but also for specific goals for troop withdrawal to commence after the completion of parliamentary elections.”

It is noteworthy that in the authorization of force for the 1991 Gulf War, the majority of Jewish members of Congress voted against the war resolution, which is more than can be said for its non-Jewish members. In the more lopsided vote authorizing the use of force in October 2002, a majority of Jewish members of Congress did authorize the use of force, though proportionately less so than did non-Jewish members.

“Pro-Israel Jewish neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, and others were among the key architects of the policy of ‘preventative war' and were the strongest advocates for a U.S. invasion of Iraq.”

While it is true that a disproportionate number of Jews could be found among the policy makers in Washington who pushed for a U.S. invasion of Iraq, it is also true that a disproportionate number of Jews could be found among liberal Democrats in Congress and leftist intellectuals in universities who opposed the invasion of Iraq. Furthermore, while a number of prominent neoconservative intellectuals are of Jewish background, they have tended not to be religious nor have they, despite their support for the current right-wing Israeli government, been strongly identified as Zionists.

It should also be noted that these same neoconservatives, while in the Reagan administration during the 1980s, were advocates of a U.S. invasion of Nicaragua and Cuba as well as a nuclear first strike—in a so-called “limited nuclear war”—against the Soviet Union. In short, they are hawks across the board, not just in regard to the Middle East . Support for Israel has always been seen as part of a broader strategic design to advance perceived U.S. interests in the region.

Furthermore, the most prominent backers of the U.S. invasion of Iraq—Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney—are neither Jewish nor prone to put the perceived interests of Israel ahead of that of the United States. Indeed, strong U.S. strategic interests in the Persian Gulf region, home of most of the world's known oil reserves, have existed for many decades and even pre-date the establishment of modern Israel.

Has the U.S. Invasion of Iraq Helped Israel?
To argue that support for Israel and/or pressure by supporters of Israel was a crucial variable in prompting the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq assumes that the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq has been good for Israel .

Evidence suggests strongly to the contrary, however. As cited above, in the years leading up to the March 2003 U.S. invasion, Iraq was no longer a strategic threat to Israel nor was it actively involved in anti-Israeli terrorism. In short, Israel had little to worry about Iraq during Saddam Hussein's final years in power. They do now, however.

Key leaders of Iraq's current government and likely future government are part of fundamentalist Shiite political movements heavily influenced by Iran . These movements are strongly anti-Zionist in orientation and some have maintained close ties to other radical Arab Shiite groups, such as the Lebanese Hizbullah, whose militia has battled Israel for more than twenty years. One of the dominant parties of the U.S.-backed governing coalition has been the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq , whose 15,000-strong paramilitary unit, known as the Badr Brigade, was trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, who also helped trained the Hizbullah.

Meanwhile, the anti-government and anti-U.S. insurgents in Iraq are dominated by Sunni Salafists and radical nationalists, both of whom tend to be anti-Israel extremists. Thanks to the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq , these insurgents are becoming stronger and increasingly sophisticated fighters gaining valuable new experiences in urban guerrilla warfare as well as terrorist tactics. These Iraqi insurgents have developed close ties with radical Jordanian and Palestinian groups with the means and motivation to harm Israeli civilians and Israel will undoubtedly feel their impact.

University of Michigan historian Juan Cole, a leading authority on internal Iraqi politics, has noted that while such radical currents were kept under control by Saddam Hussein, “An Iraq in which armed fundamentalist and nationalist militias proliferate is inevitably a security worry for Israel .” General Shlomo Brom, former chief of the Israeli army's strategic planning division, has stated that “The U.S. presence there actually causes harm to some of our interests.”

To help the United States deal with the deteriorating situation in Iraq , Israel has helped train U.S. Special Forces in aggressive counter-insurgency operations, sending urban warfare specialists to Fort Bragg to, among other things, train assassination squads against suspected Iraqi guerrilla leaders. American officers have also traveled to Israel and Israeli officers have traveled to Iraq for additional consulting. In addition, Israelis have helped arm and train pro-American Kurdish militias and have assisted U.S. officials in interrogation centers for suspected insurgents under detention near Baghdad . Israeli advisers have provided advice on erecting and manning roadblocks and checkpoints, mine-clearing and wall-breaching methods, as well as techniques for tracking suspected insurgents using drone aircraft. Israel has also provided aerial surveillance equipment, decoy drones, and armored construction equipment.

It has long been assumed that working so closely with Israel would harm U.S. interests in the Middle East, given the longstanding anti-Israeli sentiment in the region. However, as a result of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the bloody counter-insurgency war which has followed, popular resentment in the Middle East against the United States today is arguably even greater than popular resentment against Israel. Indeed, the death, destruction, and dislocation resulting from U.S. policies in Iraq eclipse that from Israeli policies in the West Bank. Israel's war crimes against civilians living in Jenin in 2002 were horrendous, but pale in comparison with U.S. war crimes committed in Fallujah in 2004. Israel's mistreatment of Palestinian prisoners is also a serious matter, but does not come close in scale to America's torture and abuse of Iraqi prisoners. Israel has openly violated the United Nations Charter and other critical standards of international law, but the U.S. invasion of Iraq and its aftermath is of even greater negative consequence to the international legal order.

As with other powers that have tried to control the Middle East, American efforts to impose its hegemony has spawned its own resistance. With the United States itself on the other side of the globe, Israel may become an easier target by those resisting this hegemonic American effort in the heart of the Middle East by going after its closest regional ally. While in the past, U.S. support for Israel has led to increased anti-Americanism in the Arab-Islamic world, today it appears that Israeli support for the American invasion and occupation of Iraq is exacerbating anti-Israeli sentiments. By further solidifying its strategic relationship with the United States through support of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, Israel is finding itself further isolated, less likely to be able to normalize relations with Arab states, more likely to be subjected to terrorist attacks by extremists, and more vulnerable to the whims of U.S. foreign policy.

As a result, rather than goading the United States into taking military action against Syria, the Israeli government has been cautioning the United States to back off from its pressure against the Assad regime, fearing that if the Baathist leader was overthrown, more radical elements could come to power or that the country could be thrown into a destabilizing civil war. Similarly, public opinion polls show that a sizable majority of Israelis oppose pre-emptive military action against Iran for fear that an attack on that large Islamic country could have serious negative consequences to Israeli security interests.

The U.S.-Israeli Alliance
Using Israel to advance perceived American interests in the Middle East and beyond is nothing new. In previous decades, Israel helped prevent victories by radical nationalist movements in Lebanon and Jordan, as well as in Palestine. They have kept Syria, with its radical nationalist regime and its role as a one-time ally of the Soviet Union, in check. Their air force is predominant throughout the region. Israel's frequent wars have provided battlefield testing for American arms. Israel has missiles with ranges of thousands of miles and has cooperated with the U.S. military-industrial complex in research and development for new jet fighters, anti-missile defense systems, and other sophisticated weapons systems. Israel also served as a conduit for U.S. arms to regimes and movements too unpopular in the United States for openly granting direct military assistance, such as apartheid South Africa, Iran's Islamic republic, Guatemala under its rightist juntas, and the Nicaraguan Contras. Israeli military advisers have assisted the Contras, the Salvadoran junta, and other movements and governments backed by the United States. The Mossad has cooperated with the CIA and other U.S. intelligence services in intelligence gathering and covert operations.

As one Israeli analyst described it during the Iran-Contra scandal, “It's like Israel has become just another federal agency, one that's convenient to use when you want something done quietly.”

Rather than being a liability, the 1991 Gulf War proved Israel once again to be a strategic asset for the United States: Israeli developments in air-to-ground warfare were integrated into allied bombing against Iraqi missile sites and other targets; Israeli-designed conformal fuel tanks for F-15 fighter-bombers greatly enhanced their range; the Israeli-provided mine plows were utilized during the final assaults on Iraqi positions; Israeli mobile bridges were used by U.S. Marines; Israeli targeting systems and low-altitude warning devices were utilized by American helicopters; and, Israel developed key components for the widely-used Tomahawk missiles.

One of the more unsettling aspects of this kind of strategic cooperation is how closely it corresponds with historic anti-Semitism:

Throughout Europe in past centuries, the ruling class of a given country would, in return for granting limited religious and cultural autonomy, set up certain individuals in the Jewish community to become the visible agents of the oppressive social order, such as tax collectors and money lenders. When the population would threaten to rise up against the ruling class, the rulers could then blame the Jews, sending the wrath of an exploited people against convenient scapegoats, resulting in the pogroms and other notorious waves of repression which have taken place throughout the Jewish Diaspora over the centuries.

The idea behind Zionism was to break this cycle through the creation of a Jewish nation-state, where Jews would no longer be dependent on the ruling class of a given country. The tragic irony is that this cycle has been perpetuated through Israel being used by Western powers to maintain their interests in the Middle East . Great Britain and France , in their unsuccessful military campaign to bring “regime change” to Egypt in 1956, enlisted Israel in their fight. Subsequent to 1967, in ways described above, the United States has used Israel to advance its strategic interests in the region and beyond.

Therefore, one finds autocratic Arab governments, Islamic extremists, and others blaming Israel, Zionism, or the Jews for their problems rather than the United States or the broader exploitative global economic system and their own elites who benefit from and help perpetuate such a system.

The late respected Israeli intellectual Ishawa Leibowitz once observed, “The existence of the Jewish people of 60 to 80 generations … was a heroic situation. We never got from the goyish world a cent. We supported ourselves. We maintained our own institutions. Now we have taken three million Jews, gathered them here and turned them over to be parasites of America. And in some sense we are even the mercenaries of America to fight the wars of what the ruling persons in America consider to be American interests.”

In the Israeli press, one can find comments like those in Yediot Ahronot which describes their country as “the Godfather's messenger,” since Israel undertakes the “dirty work” of the Godfather, who “always tries to appear to be the owner of some large respectable business.” Israeli satirist B. Michael describes U.S. aid to Israel as a situation where “My master gives me food to eat and I bite those whom he tells me to bite. It's called strategic cooperation.”

This explains why the United States has moved increasingly toward Sharon's position of refusing to engage in serious peace negotiations with the Palestinians and continuing to occupy and colonize large sectors of the West Bank while rejecting Israeli moderates who are willing to accept Palestinian offers of enforceable security guarantees in exchange for a withdrawal from the occupied territories: an Israel in a continuing state of violence and insecurity is far more likely to do the bidding of the United States than an Israel at peace. As former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once noted, “Israel's obstinacy serves our interests best.”

The United States and Israel under their right-wing governments do share a number of common perceived strategic interests. However, rather than being a tail-wagging-the-dog situation, as apologists for U.S. policy contend, Israel still is very much the junior partner in the relationship and is playing that role to its own detriment.

Blaming the Jews
As part of its desperate strategy to defend its disastrous policies in Iraq, the Bush administration and its supporters are now using the defense of Israel as an excuse. While such claims have no more validity than claims that Saddam Hussein had operational ties to al-Qaida or still possessed WMDs, it carries the additional danger that Israel and its American Jewish supporters will end up getting blamed for the whole Iraqi debacle. The American Jewish newspaper The Forward noted how a number of pro-Israel American activists and prominent Israelis had criticized recent comments by President George W. Bush and other prominent Republicans who have recently played the Israel card to justify the increasingly unpopular war. For example, Dani Rothschild, a retired Israeli major general who had served as the Israeli army's top administrator in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, noted how “It could put Israel in a very awkward situation with the American public, if Israel would be the excuse for losing more American soldiers every day.”

Using Israel as an excuse for unpopular U.S. policies in the Middle East is nothing new, either. Over the past decade, I have had the opportunity to meet with a half dozen Arab foreign ministers and deputy foreign ministers and have asked each of them why their government was still so friendly with the United States, given U.S. policy toward the Palestinians, the Iraqis, and other Arabs. Every one has answered to the effect that U.S. officials had explained to them that the anti-Arab bias in U.S. foreign policy was not the fault of the U.S. government itself, but was the result of wealthy Jews who essentially ran U.S. foreign policy.

In short, American officials are utilizing classic anti-Semitic scapegoating by blaming an alleged cabal of rich Jews behind the scenes for being responsible for a widely-perceived injustice as a means of deflecting attention away from those who actually are responsible.

Similarly, some defenders of members of Congress who voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq and falsely claimed that Iraq still had “weapons of mass destruction” are now trying to deflect criticism directed at these powerful senators and representatives by claiming they were somehow forced into voting for the war by powerful Jewish interests. In reality, however, the only people responsible for authorizing the illegal and tragic U.S. invasion of Iraq are those individuals who cast their votes in favor of the resolution and should therefore be held personally responsible.

This does not mean the growing awareness of the tragedy of the Iraq war cannot be utilized to raise consciousness regarding certain institutional factors which helped make the invasion possible. Indeed, this could be a great opportunity for progressives to demonstrate that this tragedy was a result of not only the war mongering of the individual members of Congress and the administration who made it possible, but that it was also a reflection of the power of the oil companies, military contractors, right-wing ideologues, the corporate-owned media, and overall excessive corporate influence over our government's foreign and domestic policy. This, in turn, could spur demands for badly-needed radical reforms in the American political and economic systems.

It would be tragic if this opportunity for pressing for advancing such badly-needed social change becomes sidetracked by the time-honored tactic of diverting attention from the real issues and instead “blaming the Jews.”

This does not mean those who exaggerate the role of Israel in propelling the United States to war with Iraq are necessarily guilty of anti-Semitism. There are any number of theories as to why the United States government decided to invade that oil-rich country. This one just happens to be wrong. Because this particular theory parallels dangerous anti-Semitic stereotypes which exaggerate Jewish power and influence, however, it is a particularly grievous misinterpretation, not just because it reinforces longstanding oppressive attitudes against a minority group, but because it diverts attention away from those who really are responsible for the unfolding tragedy in Iraq.

Indeed, that has largely been the functional purpose of anti-Semitism throughout Western history: to misdirect popular opposition to economic injustice, disastrous military campaigns, or other failures by political and economic elites onto a convenient and expendable target. It is critical, therefore, for people to resist—particularly those who identify with the peace movement—buying into this myth that it was Israel and its supporters who were responsible for the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Technorati - 'palestinian' terrorism 'palestinians' Israel IDF 'palestinian' Apartheid Zionism Anti Israel bigotry Islamic Apartheid War on terror Terror victims 'palestinian' propaganda jihad Genocide bombing Anti Israel bias Arab racism Jews IDF Anti Israel racism Islamofacsism Conflict Israel "Palestine" "Palestinians" Israelis Civilwar Arabs MuslimsJihad Terrorism Fatah non-Muslims Christians Hamas Gaza Terrorism Islamofascism Jerusalem Muslims Oil lobby Islamic lobby Arab lobby Lobbies Lobby Wahabbi Lobby

What about the Arab lobby?

What about the Arab lobby?

http://israeltheviewfromhere.blogspot.com/2007/10/israel-lobby-what-about-arab-lobby.html

Thursday, October 4, 2007
The Israel lobby? What about the Arab lobby?
With the publication of the book 'The Israel Lobby' by renowned academics Professors Mearsheimer and Walt the notion is out there that Israeli pressure groups have had a major effect in coloring American foreign policy to the detriment of the US.
The learned couple would have you believe that Israeli and Jewish lobbyists are the most powerful influence on the US Administration.

My friend, Maurice Ostroff, has partially answered the claims made by these supposed researchers in a rebuttal entitled 'Academic Freedom and Sloppy Research'.

Mearsheimer and Walts findings fail on two counts. One of incorrect assertions. The other is the failure of what the did not include in their book. This, perhaps deliberate, omission is the most dangerous of their faults. It leaves the reader with the impression that Israeli and Jewish leaders have an unrivalled access to policy makers in Congress and in the State Department.
This is wrong. The biggest investment in lobbying power has, for a long time, been invested in the rich hands of the Arabs, led by the Saudis, and the other oil interests.
Against this powerful force Israel can never successfully compete.
However, the small voice of reason and democracy is trying to make itself heard.


ACADEMIC FREEDOM & SLOPPY RESEARCH
by Maurice Ostroff


The much discussed articles and latest book by Professors Mearsheimer and Walt, attacking the Israel Lobby, are glaring examples of misleading by omission of vital relevant data.

Of course there is no objection to academics expressing unpopular opinions, but it’s scary to realize that some university students are being taught by mentors who, in their public pronouncements and publications, exhibit shockingly low standards of scholarship and even ignorance. Even when they don’t write in the names of their universities, serious readers are entitled to expect a minimum standard of objectivity and intellectual honesty from tenured professors.

The website of Students for Academic Freedom pinpoints one of the most egregious sins of a growing number of academics in its slogan: "You can’t get a good education if they’re telling you only half the story".

Too many opinion-makers mislead by telling half the story; deliberately omitting all relevant information that may contradict their preconceived opinions. The much discussed articles and latest book by Professors Mearsheimer and Walt, attacking the Israel Lobby, are glaring examples of misleading by omission of vital relevant data.

In response to a letter I sent criticizing their articles published last year, I received an 81-page paper from Professor Mearsheimer, titled "Setting the record straight: a response to critics of The Israel Lobby” (which I will refer to in this article as their response paper). In it, the authors admit that being fallible human beings, their work contained a few minor errors. Let’s take the example of one of their central claims – that pressure from Israel was critical in the US decision to attack Iraq in March 2003 ­ and let the reader judge whether this is merely a minor error.

If they had done a modest amount of research they would have learned and disclosed that contrary to their allegation, Israeli officials had warned the Bush administration against destabilizing the region by invading Iraq.

This information was available to the professors. In an interview with the Mother Jones blog, Professor Walt emphasized that he and Mearsheimer relied heavily on both Israeli sources and Jewish newspapers like the Forward. And in the Forward of January 12, 2007, Yossi Alpher, an adviser to former PM Ehud Barak, confirmed that prior to March 2003, Israel PM Sharon advised Bush not to occupy Iraq and that AIPAC officials in Washington told visiting Arab intellectuals they would rather the United States deal militarily with Iran than with Iraq.

This refutation of the professors’ allegation has since been confirmed by Lawrence Wilkerson, a former member of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff as reported by ISP.

Was this a minor error?

In the interview with Mother Jones, Professor Walt explained that as he and Mearsheimer aren't investigative reporters and have a day job, they weren't in a position to spend a lot of time interviewing people in Washington. This statement possibly encapsulates the underlying weakness of their publications. Far from being in-depth products of original research by academics from prestigious institutions, they are a rehash of carefully selected extracts from the writings of others, mainly new historians like Noam Chomsky and Benny Morris, whose methodologies have been severely criticized by authoritative historians.

It is almost amusing to note how in their response paper, the authors praise Benny Morris as a respected historian when he expresses views they accept, and then reject his views when they don’t serve their purpose. Having served in the Israel army during the 1948 war, I have challenged from personal knowledge some of the conclusions Morris derived from his interpretation of archived documents, and I absolutely challenge M & W’s third and possibly fourth-hand views on this subject.

In their March 2006 article, the professors wrote: "Contrary to popular belief, the Zionists had larger, better-equipped and better-led forces during the 1947-49 War of Independence." It is difficult to understand the reason for inserting this bit of totally irrelevant disinformation into a paper about the Israel Lobby.

Those of us who were there in 1948 know that Israel was invaded by five armies in a Holy War to drive us into the sea. The Arab armies included the British-trained Jordanian Legion, the well-equipped Egyptian army, navy and air force and the armies of Lebanon, Iraq and Syria. And we know how desperate and badly equipped we were. We remember how rickety old trucks were converted to homemade armored vehicles nicknamed sandwiches, because the armor comprised timber between two steel plates. (See photo.)

We know that our total population of only 600,000 included women, children and the elderly and that, tragically, 6,000 were killed in the War, not to mention the seriously wounded. We know that many of our troops were untrained newcomers, who had survived the death camps, only to be thrown directly into battle.

In their response paper, the professors go to great lengths elaborating on remarks by Ben Gurion and others indicating that they had hoped for a greater area than allocated under the 1947 partition plan. But they ignore the fact that Israel nevertheless reluctantly, but unconditionally, accepted the partition resolution while all Arab states rejected it outright. There would be no Palestinian refugees today if they had accepted instead of immediately declaring Holy War, with the publicly proclaimed intention of driving the Jews into the sea.

Arab League Secretary, General Azzam Pasha declared, "This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades," and the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Al Husseini echoed, "I declare a holy war, my Moslem brothers! Murder the Jews! Murder them all!"

The professors ignore how Israel reacted to Arabs who stayed neutral in 1948 – such as the village of Abu Ghosh. In an article in the Jerusalem Post in 1997, Sam Orbaum quoted Mohammed Abu Ghosh as saying, "What we did, we did for Abu Ghosh, for nobody else. Others who lost their land, hated us then, but now all over the Arab world, many people see we were right. If everyone did what we did, there'd be no refugee problem . . . And if we were traitors? Look where we are, look where they are."

Incredibly, their strong prejudices prevent the professors from acknowledging not only Israel’s attempts to negotiate peace, but also the infamous three no's response of Arab leaders in Khartoum in August 1967: "no peace, no recognition of Israel and no negotiation.”

The professors’ claim that US policy towards Israel is a main contributor to America's terrorist problem deserves critical examination. In November 2002, Alex Alexiev, in an article published by the United States Committee for a Free Lebanon (USCFL), pointed out that Riyadh, flush with oil money, became the paymaster of most of the militant Islamic movements, which advocated terror. In its aggressive support for radical Islam, even the most violent of Islamic groups, like Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, receives Saudi largesse. He claims that official Saudi sources indicate that between 1975 and 1987, Riyadh's "overseas development aid" averaged $4 billion per year, of which at least $50 billion over two-and-a-half decades financed Islamic activities exclusively. The SAAR Foundation alone, which has been closed down since 9/11, received $1.7 billion in donations in 1998.

Compared to these numbers, the miniscule Israeli PR budget is laughable.

It is incredible that academics discussing external influences on USA policy ignore the dramatic stranglehold of OPEC, the blatantly monopolistic cartel which threatens not only the US, but the world economy. This stranglehold began with the Arab decision to use oil as a political weapon in 1973 when the price was $2.60 per barrel. After October 1973, when the Arab members of OPEC imposed their oil embargo against the West, the price quadrupled to about $12 by January 1974 and is now soaring to $80. All this, while, believe it or not, production costs average about $6 per barrel for non-OPEC producers and $1.50 per barrel for OPEC producers (Bulletin of Atomic Scientists May/June 2005).

By focusing on one lobby only without placing it in the context of the prevailing phenomenon of the numerous lobbies that are an essential part of the Washington scene, this work cannot be regarded as a scholarly study, but rather as a subjective, no-holds-barred political attack.

Dozens of interest groups spend billions to convince politicians to pass or oppose particular laws. Any study of the Jewish Lobby cannot avoid comparison with Arab influence on Washington, which is indeed harmful to American interests.

But the professors claim: “There is no well organized and politically potent Arab Lobby and little evidence that US politicians ever feel much pressure from pro-Arab groups.” This categorical statement in their response paper is mind-boggling. It indicates either inexcusable ignorance or deliberate suppression of information about the many Arab lobbyists who have had, and continue to have, intimate access to US presidents.

In an article in Harpers magazine of April 17, 2007, John R. MacArthur wrote about Saudi ambassador to Washington, Prince Bandar Bin Sultan:


When he wasn't entertaining congressmen and spreading good cheer through his highly paid lobbyist, Fred Dutton, Bandar was busy making friends with, at first vice president, and then president, George H.W. Bush, and by extension with Bush's son, the future president. This personal relationship with the Bush family has served Bandar and his family very well, as documented in Craig Unger's book, House of Bush, House of Saud.

Before he died in the World Trade Center on 9/11, the former FBI counterterrorism chief John O'Neill complained to French investigator Jean-Charles Brisard that Saudi pressure on the State Department had prevented him from fully investigating possible al-Qaida involvement in the Khobar Towers bombing in 1996, which killed 19 U.S. servicemen, and of the destroyer Cole in 2000.


Now, according to Seymour Hersh, Bandar has virtually joined the Bush administration as a shadow cabinet member. In a March 5, 2007 New Yorker article, “The Redirection,” Hersh writes that Bandar, the Saudi national-security adviser, served as Ambassador to the United States for twenty-two years, until 2005, and has maintained a friendship with President Bush and Vice-President Cheney. In his new post, he continues to meet privately with them.

The organization Axis Information and Analysis (AIA), which specializes in information about Asia and Eastern Europe, has rated Prince Bandar as the most influential foreigner in the USA. As head of the Saudi embassy in Washington in 1983, he was an important participant in backstage intrigues, clandestine negotiations, and billion-dollar deals relating to US interests in the Middle East, with broad links among high-ranking officials in the State Department, the Pentagon and the CIA. Bandar's father, Sultan Bin Abdul Aziz al Saud, was a leading figure in the ruling dynasty, which decides the extent of military cooperation with the United States. AIA has publicly stated that it was Bandar Bin Sultan who initiated the first Gulf War in 1990-91, by pushing President Bush the elder to start the military campaign against Iraq.

In an obituary to Clark Clifford (October 11, 1998), the New York Times spoke of him not only as a key adviser to four presidents, but also as a powerful lobbyist for Arab sources. In his memoir, Counsel to the President, Clifford wrote that he advised clients:


What we can offer you is an extensive knowledge of how to deal with the government on your problems. We will be able to give you advice on how best to present your position to the appropriate departments and agencies of the government.


Clifford, a paid lobbyist, made about $6 million in profits from bank stock that he bought with an unsecured loan from the failed Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI).

In an interview on Democracy Now, Craig Unger, author of House of Bush, House of Saud, spoke of Bandar’s influence. Referring to the fact that the 9/11 Commission said it knew of six chartered flights with 142 people aboard, mostly Saudis, that left the United States between Sept. 14 and 24, 2001, Unger said that if you look at Prince Bandar’s body language in photos of him and President Bush, this is not a guy standing in awe of the President of the United States. This is a guy who is visiting his friend's son, and he’s sort of lounging on the arm of a big armchair by 9/13, two days after 9-11. And suddenly, flights began going out.

Unger tells of Saudis investing as much as $800 billion into American Equities, not only in massive blue chip companies but also into companies that weren't doing so well, but were linked to powerful politicians.

He also speaks of at least $1 million donated to each presidential library, emphasizing that the Saudis give to Democrats and Republicans alike:


Prince Bandar has been quite frank. If we give to our friends after they get out of office, the people in office will get the message.

The Saudis are fabulous at public relations. If you look at their whole campaign over the last 30 years, they spent $70 billion on propaganda. It's the biggest propaganda campaign in the history of the world, more than Soviet communism at the height of the Cold war. Immediately after 9-11, Bandar hired Burson Marsteller, the huge American public relations firm.


In the knowledge that the above information is readily available, would a first-year student, let alone a tenured professor, earn a passing mark for submitting a paper claiming that there is no well-organized and politically potent Arab Lobby and little evidence that US politicians ever feel much pressure from pro-Arab groups?

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