From the New Republic


THE GROUPS WHO CRIED ANTI-SEMITISM

Moran Down
by John B. Judis
Only at TNR Online
Post date: 10.03.07
Virginia Representative Jim Moran is no stranger to controversy. And he now finds himself in midst of another one--over what he said about Jews, Iraq, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in an interview in the September-October issue of Tikkun magazine. Moran's statements have been denounced as anti-Semitic by the officials of Jewish political and religious organizations and by members of Congress. These critics see Moran's statements as part of a wave of anti-Semitism--of which Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer's book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy is the crest.

Moran has certainly made his share of reckless and ill-founded statements--some of which have been directed at Jews. Four years ago, Moran said that 'if it were not for the strong support of the Jewish community for this war with Iraq, we would not be doing this.' That statement is false and reprehensible. But in this case, it is Moran's critics who are making reckless charges. And although the controversy may remain confined to the Beltway, it's no small matter when a politician is accused of anti-Semitism. This kind of charge, if wielded without caution, makes it more difficult for politicians and policy-makers to have a frank and open discussion about American foreign policy in the Middle East.
In Moran's interview with Tikkun, a liberal Jewish publication, he made several claims about AIPAC and Jewish-Americans that have drawn flack: He said AIPAC was 'the best-organized national lobbying force' and that its power rests on the wealth of its members, who can help or hinder political candidates with their contributions, and on the organization and its leaders' ties to the media. He said that AIPAC was in favor of the Iraq war and 'pushed this war from the beginning.' And he claimed that on the Iraq war, AIPAC didn't represent 'the mainstream of American Jewish thinking at all.'
Moran had other things to say--much of it having to do with AIPAC's lobbying on U.S. relations to Iran. And what he said here was partly right (AIPAC did lobby successfully against restrictions on George W. Bush's war-making authority) and partly wrong (AIPAC hasn't advocated going to war with Iran, although its lobbying could pave the way for the Bush administration to take military action.) But Moran's critics focused on his statements about U.S. policy toward Iraq and about the power of AIPAC.
Ira Forman, the executive director of the National Jewish Democratic Council, said, 'While there is nothing wrong with criticizing AIPAC--or for that matter any organization with which you disagree--spreading false statements is clearly irresponsible. At a time when Professors Walt and Mearsheimer are attempting to defame the so-called Israel Lobby with a phony connection between the pro-Israel community and the Iraq War, Representative Moran's comments are not only incorrect and irresponsible--they are downright dangerous.' Ronald Halber, the executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington, accused Moran of using 'clearly anti-Semitic images such as Jewish control of the media and wealthy Jews using their wealth to control policy.'


oran's Congressional colleagues joined the fray. 'Unfortunately, Jim Moran has made it a habit now to lash out to the American Jewish community. I think his remarks are reprehensible,' Virginia Representative Eric Cantor said in a press conference. 'I think his remarks are anachronistic and hearken back to the day of Adolf Hitler ... of 'Mein Kampf,' of ... a resurgent anti-Semitic sentiment worldwide.' House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer demanded that Moran retract his comments, and sixteen Jewish House Democrats, including Henry Waxman, Rahm Emanuel, and Barney Frank, sent the Northern Virginia Democrat a letter charging that his 'assertions are irresponsible and have absolutely no basis in fact ... The idea that the war in Iraq began because of the influence of Jewish Americans is factually incorrect and unfortunately fits the anti-Semitic stereotypes some have used historically against Jews.' They also objected to Moran drawing a distinction between AIPAC's opinions and those of mainstream Jewry.

What most of Moran's critics singled out was what Moran asserted to be AIPAC's role in promoting the Iraq war. But Moran did not say in his interview that the 'war in Iraq began because of the influence of Jewish-Americans.' He made a specific charge about AIPAC's lobbying for the war. And he didn't say, as Walt and Mearsheimer do, that Israel or the Israel lobby was behind the war. He said that AIPAC 'pushed this war from the beginning.'
Is that true? At the time, a Senate staff person with a responsibility for foreign policy told me of AIPAC's lobbying. But I don't have to rely on my memory. AIPAC's lobbying wasn't widely reported because AIPAC didn't want Arab states, whose support the Bush administration was soliciting, to be able to tie Bush's plans to Israel, but it lobbied nonetheless. In September 2002, before Congress had begun considering the administration's proposal authorizing force with Iraq, Rebecca Needler, a spokeswoman for AIPAC, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 'If the president asks Congress to support action in Iraq, AIPAC would lobby members of Congress to support him.' Then at an AIPAC meeting in New York in January 2003, before the war began, but after Congress had voted to authorize Bush to go to war, Howard Kohr, AIPAC's executive director, boasted of AIPAC's success in lobbying for the war. Reported the New York Sun, 'According to Mr. Kohr, AIPAC's successes over the past year also include guaranteeing Israel's annual aid package and 'quietly' lobbying Congress to approve the use of force in Iraq.' (AIPAC's spokesman Josh Block insists that the organization did no lobbying and that Kohr was misquoted.)
What about Moran's other statements? Is AIPAC an extremely powerful organization? In 1998, Fortune ranked AIPAC as the second most powerful lobby in Washington. In 2005, the National Journal also ranked it second. Jeffrey Goldberg wrote in The New Yorker in 2005, AIPAC 'is a leviathan among lobbies, as influential in its sphere as the National Rifle Association and the American Association of Retired Persons are in theirs, although it is, by comparison, much smaller.' Are many of AIPAC's members wealthy? They certainly are--at least, to judge by the attendance at its conferences, its leadership, and by the amount of money it raises. It exercises its political influence primarily through recommending candidates to friendly PACs (AIPAC is not itself a PAC) and individuals. The Center for Responsive Politics estimates that in 2006, 'pro-Israel' individuals and PACs (the term used for these friendly groups and individuals) donated $10,832,291 to candidates. AIPAC-influence money was very important in the defeat of Illinois Senator Charles Percy in 1984 and Alabama Representative Earl Hilliard in 2002. Influence on the media? From my knowledge, yes, but I can't cite any figures here.
Finally, can one detect, as Moran claimed, a difference between AIPAC's views and those of the Jewish mainstream? On going to war with Iraq, I'm not so sure. According to the American Jewish Committee's annual survey, released in January 2003, 59 percent of Americans Jews approved and 36 percent disapproved of the United States taking military action against Iraq. So I am not sure whether AIPAC was out of the American Jewish mainstream in 2002 when it quietly lobbied to authorize a war with Iraq. But Moran's error on this point hardly justifies comparing him to Hitler.
These hyperbolic charges against Moran may indicate a certain amount of score settling for Moran's past statements: Critics of Moran, who earlier took offense at his statements about Jews, jumped on him for this one because they saw it as recurrence of what he had said before. Or perhaps--more ominously--the harsh response on Capitol Hill proves exactly Moran's point about the pervasive influence of AIPAC and the reluctance of any politician to cross the organization. Whatever the reason, the effect of these charges will be to discourage anyone, or any publication, from criticizing AIPAC for fear of being branded anti-Semitic.

Thursday, October 4, 2007
‘The Israel Lobby’ Goes International
Marc Perelman | Wed. Oct 03, 2007

After hitting Europe earlier this month, “The Israel Lobby” is preparing for a frontal assault on the Muslim world.


The controversial book by American academics Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, who accuse the pro-Israel lobby of hijacking American policy, hit bookstores in Europe in September and soon will be published across the Arab world and in Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country in the world.

Hebrew-only readers, however, will have to wait. To date, no Israeli publishing house has agreed to translate the book.

“We are hoping that the most liberal publishers in Israel might consider publishing it, however, it has proven very difficult,” said Christine Hsu, assistant to Walt and Mearsheimer’s agent at the William Morris Agency, Raffaella De Angelis. The agency declined to be more specific.

The book will be translated into Arabic by All-Prints, a Beirut-based publisher that also translates books from the likes of the late anti-Zionist Israel Shahak, soccer star David Beckham and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. Readers in Indonesia, where some 220 million Muslims live, will be able to buy it from Pustaka Utama a mainstream publisher. And in an indication of the strong interest the book is attracting in Europe, it is being translated into German, Dutch, Danish, French, Italian, Spanish and even Catalan.

“The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” is an extended version of an article that appeared last year in The London Review of Books and on the Web site of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. The two scholars contend that a wide array of Jewish and pro-Israel groups has tilted American foreign policy in favor of Israel to the point of endangering America’s national security.

In recent weeks, the authors have been crisscrossing the United States, where they have been criticized for having an anti-Israel agenda and for shoddy research, but also hailed for provoking a long overdue debate about Israel’s influence on American policymaking.

The controversy has been covered heavily by the foreign media, particularly in the Arab world on television channels such as Al Jazeera, on which both authors have appeared.

“Books don’t sell all that well in the Arab world, where the tradition is more oral and visual,” said Shibley Telhami, a professor at the University of Maryland and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “But people are aware of it because of satellite TV.”

While no information was available as of press time about a Walt-Mearsheimer book tour in Muslim countries, the authors are embarking on a European visit next month, with speaking engagements scheduled at prestigious universities and think-tanks in Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris, Vienna and London. In London, they will also have an event at the House of Lords.

In Germany, where the book was released September 4 and received mixed reviews in the media, the publisher opted not to hold a promotional debate after the organization that was asked to host the event proposed inviting critics of the book. The publisher, Campus, did not return calls seeking comment.

A similar issue arose in the United States when the Forward rejected a proposal by publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux to host a debate on the book. The Forward instead proposed to be a participant in a conversation with the authors.

“I am concerned about the indirect impact this book could have,” said Deidre Berger, director of the American Jewish Committee’s office in Berlin. “It reinforces stereotypes in Germany that are probably even stronger than in the U.S. about the alleged influence of Jewish organizations on American foreign policy.”

Wed. Oct 03, 2007

Posted by CRIMES AND CORRUPTION OF THE NEW WORLD ORDER NEWS mparent7777 Marc Parent CCNWON at 11:07 AM

Labels: Europe, Israel, Israel lobby, Mearsheimer, Muslims, US foreign policy, Walt, Zionism

Subject: The Huffington Post: Mearsheimer & Walt
Date: Wed, 05 Sep 2007 13:57:21 +0000
The Huffington Post
David Bromwich

Iraq, Israel, Iran
Posted September 4, 2007 | 10:38 AM (EST)


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When John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's article on the Israel Lobby appeared in the London Review of Books, after having been commissioned and killed by the Atlantic Monthly, neoconservative publicists launched an all-out campaign to slander the authors as anti-Semites. Now that their book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy has appeared--a work of considerable scope, carefully documented, and not just an expanded version of the article--the imputation of anti-Semitism will doubtless be repeated more sparingly for readers lower down the educational ladder. Meanwhile, the literate establishment press will (a) ignore it, (b) pretend that it says nothing new or surprising, and (c) rule out the probable inferences from the data, on the ground that the very meaning of the word "lobby" is elusive.
The truth is that many new facts are in this book, and many surprising facts. By reconstructing a trail of meetings and public statements in 2001-2002, for example, the authors show that much of the leadership of Israel was puzzled at first by the boyish enthusiasm for a war on Iraq among their neoconservative allies. Why Iraq ? they asked. Why now? They would appear to have obtained assurances, however, that once the "regime change" in Iraq was accomplished, the next war would be against Iran .

A notable pilgrimage followed. One by one they lined up, Netanyahu, Sharon, Peres, and Barak, writing op-eds and issuing flaming warnings to convince Americans that Saddam Hussein was a menace of world-historical magnitude. Suddenly the message was that any delay of the president's plan to bomb, invade, and occupy Iraq would be seized on by "the terrorists" as a sign of weakness. Regarding the correct treatment of terrorists, as also regarding the avoidance of weakness, Americans look to Israelis as mentors in a class by themselves.









So a war projected years before by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz--a war secured at last by the fixing of the facts around the policy at the Office of the Vice President--was allowed to borrow some prestige at an intermediate stage by the consent of a few well-regarded Israeli politicians. Yet their target of choice had been Iran . They accepted the change of sequence without outward signs of doubt, possibly owing to their acquaintance with the Middle East doctrine espoused by the Weekly Standard and the American Enterprise Institute--a doctrine which held that to create a viable order after the fall of Iraq , regime change in Iran and Syria would have to follow expeditiously.

To sum up this part: the evidence of Mearsheimer and Walt suggests that Israel was never the prime mover of the Iraq war. Rather, once the Cheney-Wolfowitz design was in place, the Israeli ministers who trooped through American opinion pages and news-talk shows did what they could to heat up the war fever. This war was on the cards before they threw in their lot with Cheney and Bush; by their efforts they merely helped to confer on the plan an aura of legitimacy and worldly wisdom.

But now the American war with Iran they originally wanted is coming closer. Last Tuesday, when the mass media were crammed to distraction with the behavior of a senator in an airport washroom, few could be troubled to notice an important speech by President Bush. If Iran is allowed to persist in its present state, the president told the American Legion convention in Reno , it threatens "to put a region already known for instability and violence under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust." He said he had no intention of allowing that; and so he has "authorized our military commanders in Iraq to confront Tehran 's murderous activities." Those words come close to saying not that a war is coming but that it is already here. No lawmaker who reads them can affect the slightest shock at any action the president takes against Iran .

Admittedly, it was a showdown speech, reckless and belligerent, to a soldier audience; but then, this has been just the sort of crowd and message that Cheney and Bush favor when they are about to open a new round of killings. And in a sense, the Senate had given the president his cue when it approved, by a vote of 97-0, the July 11 Lieberman Amendment to Confront Iran . It is hardly an accident that the president and his favorite tame senator concurred in their choice of the word "confront." The pretext for the Lieberman amendment, as for the president's order, was the discovery of caches of weapons alleged to belong to Iran, the capture of Iranian advisers said to be operating against American troops, and the assertion that the most deadly IEDs used against Americans are often traceable to Iranian sources--claims that have been widely treated in the press as possible, but suspect and unverified. Still, the vote was 97-0. If few Americans took notice, the government of Iran surely did.







That unanimous vote was the latest in a series of capitulations that has included the apparent end of resistance by Nancy Pelosi to the next war. After the election of 2006, the speaker of the house declared her intention to enact into law a requirement that this president seek separate authorization for a war against Iran . On the point of doing so, she addressed the AIPAC convention, and was booed for criticizing the escalation of the Iraq war. Pelosi took the hint, shelved her authorization plan, and went with AIPAC against the anti-war base of the Democratic party.

This much, one might know without the help of Mearsheimer and Walt. But without their record, how many would trace the connection between the removal of Philip Zelikow as policy counselor of the state department, at the end of 2006, and a speech Zelikow had given in September 2006 urging serious negotiation and a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine? The ousting of Zelikow was a blessing to the war party, since it freed them from a skeptical confidant of Secretary of State Rice--perhaps the only person of stature anywhere near the administration whom she treated as an ally and friend. And the meaning of the change was clear when Zelikow's replacement turned out to be Eliot Cohen: a neoconservative war scholar and enthusiast, an early booster of the "surge" on the pundit shows, and incidentally a shameless slanderer of Mearsheimer-Walt ("Yes, It's Anti-Semitic," Washington Post, April 5, 2006).

From Zelikow to Cohen was only a step on the long path of humiliation that now stretched before Condoleeza Rice. When, in March 2007, amid suggestions of a renewal of diplomacy, she intimated that talks might be helpful in dealing with the Hamas-Fatah unity government (whose formation the Arab world had greeted as offering a promise of peace), she was demolished by an AIPAC-backed advisory letter bearing the signatures of 79 senators, which directed her not to speak with a government that had not yet recognized Israel. From that moment Rice was effectively neutralized.

The hottest cries for another war have been coming this summer from Joe Lieberman. He has called for attacks on Iran , and for attacks on Syria . It is as if Lieberman, with his appetite for multiple theaters of conflict, spoke from the congealed memory of all the wars he never fought. But Joe Lieberman is a stalking-horse. He would not say these things without getting permission from Vice President Cheney, a close and admired friend. Nor would Cheney permit a high-profile lawmaker whom he partly controls to set the United States and Israel on so perilous a course unless he had ascertained its acceptability to Ehud Olmert.









Yet the chief orchestrater of the second neoconservative war of aggression is Elliott Abrams. Convicted for deceptions around Iran-Contra, as Lewis Libby was convicted for deceptions stemming from Iraq --and pardoned by the elder Bush just as Libby had his sentence commuted by the younger--Abrams now presides over the Middle East desk at the National Security Council. All of the wildness of this astonishing functionary and all his reckless love of subversion will be required to pump up the "imminent danger" of Iran . For here, as with Iraq , the danger can only be made to look imminent by manipulation and forgery. On all sober estimates, Iran is several months from mastering the nuclear cycle, and several years from producing a weapon. Whereas Israel for decades has been in possession of a substantial nuclear arsenal.

How mad is Elliott Abrams? If one passage cited by Mearsheimer-Walt is quoted accurately, it would seem to be the duty of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to subject Abrams to as exacting a challenge as the Senate Judiciary Committee brought to Alberto Gonzales. The man at the Middle East desk of the National Security Council wrote in 1997 in his book Faith or Fear: "there can be no doubt that Jews, faithful to the covenant between God and Abraham, are to stand apart from the nation in which they live. It is the very nature of being Jewish to be apart--except in Israel --from the rest of the population." When he wrote those words, Abrams probably did not expect to serve in another American administration. He certainly did not expect to occupy a position that would require him to weigh the national interest of Israel, the country with which he confessed himself uniquely at one, alongside the national interest of a country in which he felt himself to stand "apart...from the rest of the population." Now that he is calling the shots against Hamas and Hezbollah, Damascus and Tehran , his words of 1997 ought to alarm us into reflection.

Among many possible lines of inquiry, the senators might begin by recognizing that the United States has other allies in Asia besides Israel . One of those allies is India ; and there is a further point of resemblance. In a distinct exception to our anti-proliferation policy, we have allowed India to develop nuclear weapons; just as, in an earlier such exception, we allowed Israel to do the same. But suppose we read tomorrow a statement by the director of the South Asia desk of the National Security Council which declared: "There can be no doubt that Hindus are to stand apart from any nation in which they live. It is the very nature of being Hindu to be apart--except in India --from the rest of the population." Suppose, further, we knew this man still held these beliefs at a time of maximum tension between India and Pakistan ; and that he had recently channeled 86 million dollars to regional gangs and militias bent on increasing the tension. Would we not conclude that something in our counsels of state had gone seriously out of joint?







The Mearsheimer-Walt study of American policy deserves to be widely read and discussed. It could not be more timely. If the speeches and saber-rattling by the president, the ambassador to Iraq , and several army officers mean anything, they mean that Cheney and Abrams are preparing to do to Iran what Cheney and Wolfowitz did to Iraq . They are gunning for an incident. They are working against some resistance from the armed forces but none from the opposition party at home. The president has ordered American troops to confront Iran . Sarkozy has fallen into line, Brown and Merkel are silent, and outside the United States only Mohamed ElBaradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency stands between the war party and a prefabricated justification for a war that would extend across a vast subcontinent. Unless some opposition can rouse itself, we are poised to descend with non-partisan compliance into a moral and political disaster that will dwarf anything America has seen.





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