Opinion Editorials, April 2011

Moving AIPAC Over with Facts, Founders and Activists

By Eileen Fleming

Al-Jazeerah, CCUN, April 18, 2011

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will address a joint meeting of the U.S. Congress during his visit to Washington next month. He also is headline speaker for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee/AIPAC’s Annual Conference. Other confirmed speakers include: 

John Boehner (R-OH) Speaker of the House, U.S. House of Representatives

Harry Reid (D-NV) Majority Leader, U.S. Senate

Robert Casey (D-PA) U.S. Senate

John Thune (R-SD) U.S. Senate

Eric Cantor (R-VA) Majority Leader, U.S. House of Representatives

Steny Hoyer (D-MD) Democratic Whip, U.S. House of Representatives

Jim Woolsey Former Director, Central Intelligence Agency

Martin Indyk Vice President for Foreign Policy, Brookings Institution; Former U.S. Ambassador to Israel

Dan Senor Adjunct Senior Fellow for Middle East Studies, Council on Foreign Relations

Paul Begala Democratic Political Analyst and CNN Contributor

Ralph Reed President, Century Strategies. 

So far, over 100 organizations have already endorsed Move Over AIPAC, including CODEPINK: Women for Peace, Global Exchange, and the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation [See full list of endorsers] to coincide with the annual policy meeting of AIPAC in DC from May 21-24. 

“AIPAC’s unrelenting support for the illegal policies of the Israeli government—separation walls, settlements, the siege of Gaza—in addition to its bellicose policies across the region, especially Iran, has been devastating for Palestinians and the Middle East, including Israel. It also harms our reputation around the world and squanders $3 billion a year subsidizing the powerful Israeli military when we need that money to rebuild the United States. 

A Few Facts: 

 #1: Between the years 1949 and 2010, the United States granted $61.3 billion in military aid to Israel. 

#2: A whopping $30 billion in U.S. military aid has been promised to Israel for the years 2009 to 2018. 

#3: Approximately 500,000 Israeli settlers live within the occupied Palestinian territory in violation of international law. 

#4: There are approximately four million Palestinians living under Israeli occupation in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza, according to 2007 census figures compiled by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics and reported in Ha’aretz. 

#5: Between September 29, 2000 and August 31, 2010, 1,084 Israelis were killed by Palestinians, including 124 minors. During the same period, 6,408 Palestinians were killed by Israelis, including 1,315 minors. These statistics, reported by B’Tselem Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, reflect the extreme disparity in the capacity of the two parties to inflict trauma, loss, and death through acts of violence. Israel’s military dominance is largely a result of U.S. largesse through military aid, as well as access to sophisticated U.S.-designed military technology. 

#6: Weapons purchased by Israel using U.S. military aid are used against civilians in violation of U.S. laws.” [1] 

Further Background: 

“Foreign Agents: The American Israel Public Affairs Committee from the 1963 Fulbright Hearings to the 2005 Espionage Scandal” exposes how US Middle East policy has been formulated and thrives due to the dearth of relevant reporting on AIPAC's activities.

Author Grant F. Smith begins with Senator Fulbright's on target questions to Jewish-Agency-funded US foreign agents who did not register with the Justice Department or disclose their true financing, funding flows and covert activities and illuminates how AIPAC: the American Israel Public Affairs Committee operates "within a murky nexus regulated by four important but seldom enforced US laws." [2]

The lax enforcement of The Logan Act, The Foreign Agents Registration Act/FARA, the 1917 Espionage Act, Thompson Memorandum guidelines for prosecuting corporate crime coupled with the fear of being labeled anti-Semitic and a media who have failed at their commission to seek and report the truth have all colluded to exert an undue influence over Congress and thus; we the people of America to be "under the de facto influence of a powerful foreign interest." [Ibid]

Smith documents how AIPAC-a constellation of individuals and organizations that make up the "Israel lobby" continue to actively steer USA foreign policy in a militant and pro-Israel only direction.

Senator Fulbright's concerns over activities of unregistered foreign agents who worked to influence public opinion and policy resulted in the 1963 Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings to investigate the Jewish Agency and uncovered the "conduit" operation run by the American Zionist Council. In 1959, The American Zionist Council was renamed AIPAC.

Within eight years, the Council received over a half a million "from the Jewish Agency to create a favorable opinion in this country for Israeli government policies. The Senate investigation closed down the conduit, but the extensive propaganda activities still go on…[and] by 1998, "US aid to Israel exceeded $3 billion a year, the highest amount of US aid given to any country." [3]

"AIPAC's illegal tactics harm America…[and] corporate crime inflicts far more damage on society than all street crime combined…Harvard economist Thomas Stauffer estimated the total cost of [the] prolonged conflict in the Middle East at $3 trillion [in 2002 USA dollars and he] lays a good deal of the blame for this at the doorstep of AIPAC." [4]

Smith also illuminates how money laundering of over 50 billion US dollars to "charitable" organizations and massive covert activities has enabled the ongoing building of the illegal apartheid Israeli settlements which have expropriated legally owned Palestinian land. Today, a quarter of a million Jewish settlers, most all of which have no historical tie to the Holy Land, have created facts on the ground to disable a viable contiguous Palestinian state.

Every American politician is aware of Israel's clandestine nuclear weapons development, stockpile, and launch capabilities, but due to the influence of AIPAC "it is business as usual in Washington: criminal wrongdoing continues to corrupt America's core values, rule of law, and Middle East policy, as the Israel lobby's cross-hairs shift almost completely to Iran." [5]

In 1976, the Symington Amendment was adopted to fortify and extend the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It prohibited US assistance to any country trafficking in nuclear enrichment equipment or technology outside of international safeguards.

The world learned about Israel's secret underground nuclear weapons facility in 1986 due to Mordechai Vanunu's photographic evidence, but the American government ignores this elephant in the world and has refused to insist Israel allow international inspection of their nuclear facilities which are older than Japan’s reactors and share the same technology.

Beginning in the 1990's and even more so after 9/11, US politicians blind allegiance to Israel has been furthered by the claim that both states are threatened by Arab terrorist groups and rogue states bent on acquiring weapons of mass destruction.

Many Americans see Israel as an ally and Iran and Syria as our mutual enemies. The "war on terror" has become a tactic to infuse fear while it ignores that much of the anger in the Arab world is in response to Israel's 40+ years of military occupation of Palestine and the concrete wall and electrified fence built on legally owned Palestinian property which is "financed with U.S. aid at a cost of $1.5 million per mile. The Israeli wall prevents residents from receiving health care and emergency medical services. In other areas, the barrier separates farmers from their olive groves which have been their families' sole livelihood for generations." [6]

William Fulbright warned, "The age of warrior kings and of warrior presidents has passed. The nuclear age calls for a different kind of leadership....a leadership of intellect, judgment, tolerance and rationality, a leadership committed to human values, to world peace, and to the improvement of the human condition. The attributes upon which we must draw are the human attributes of compassion and common sense, of intellect and creative imagination, and of empathy and understanding between cultures." 

Yet, America's 'leaders' continue to cower and pander to an "illegal foreign lobby that has long flouted US law and suborned the national interest as a foreign agent." [7]

On George Washington's birth date, his Farewell Address has been read aloud in Congress ever since 1896: 

 "Observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all...and passionate attachments for others should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave...a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former in the quarrels and wars of the latter, without adequate justification." 

Move Over AIPAC moves that spirit back into the halls of Congress on Lobby Day, 24 May 2011. 
1.  http://www.moveoveraipac.org/about-us/

2. Grant F. Smith, Foreign Agents: The American Israel Public Affairs Committee from the 1963 Fulbright Hearings to the 2005 Espionage Scandal, Page 15. Published 2007 by the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy, Washington D.C.
3.    Page 20, 22
4.    Page 149-150
5.   Page 155

6. Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Page 43, Jan/Feb. 2007
7. Grant F. Smith, Page 168
 

 In Solidarity YES WE CAN begin the world again.

Eileen Fleming,

A Citizen of Conscience for House of Representatives
Founder of WeAreWideAwake.org
Staff Member of Salem-news.com
A Feature Correspondent for Arabisto.com  

Producer "30 Minutes with Vanunu" and "13 Minutes with Vanunu" 

Author of "Keep Hope Alive" and "Memoirs of a Nice Irish American 'Girl's' Life in Occupied Territory" and BEYOND NUCLEAR: Mordechai Vanunu's FREEDOM of SPEECH Trial and My Life as a Muckraker: 2005-2010

http://www.youtube.com/user/eileenfleming

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editor@aljazeerah.info & editor@ccun.org