07/23/14 – Grant F. Smith – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, so you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, Scott Horton Show.
Next up on the show today is our friend Grant F. Smith.
He runs the Institute for Research Middle East Policy.
That's earmap.org.
I R M E P.
I R M E P, earmap.org.
He's the author of Spy Trade, Deadly Dogma, Divert, Foreign Agents, America's Defense Line, and Visa Deny.
I know, that's a lot of books, right?
Welcome back to the show, Grant.
How are you doing?
Hey, Scott.
I'm doing great.
Thanks for having me back again.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you here.
Tell me, what's the Israel lobby?
What is the Israel lobby?
Well, the Israel lobby, as far as definitions, has been defined by Walt and Mearsheimer.
It's been defined by the Israel lobby itself, many times saying that it doesn't exist.
Walt Mearsheimer is saying it's a loose coalition of organizations.
My definition, sort of working definition, is that it's really an overlapping matrix of organizations, some working in direct coordination with the Israeli government, that extract military, financial, and political resources from America through policy formulation, grassroots and direct lobbying, pressure on media and elites, and direction of rewards and punishments.
So my definition is somewhat longer.
There are other people who don't even want to call it a lobby as much as a power configuration, but if anything has come out of the Israel lobby book that Professor Walt Mearsheimer published a while back, it's been at least having a name to kind of talk about this collection of organizations that have a great deal of impact on U.S. Middle East policy.
And just to go into it a little bit further, I think if you take apart my definition of overlapping, one of the things that's interesting about Israel lobbying organizations, and my number is that there are about 200 of them that have sort of a very major direct role in trying to influence policy through a variety of means, is you have overlap of key people on multiple boards of directors.
You have a lot of common tactics in which if you are looking to find the single organization that sends the most sort of policy elites and press members or members of Congress to Israel, you'll find a lot of them do that.
The ADL, the American Israel Education Foundation, other organizations such as Birthright Israel.
So you know, there's sort of a lack of division of labor in the sense that many of them engage in the same tactics to accomplish the same goals.
And you know, some of them are very tightly coordinated with the Israeli government, maintaining offices in Israel and state openly how they coordinate with the government that would include both AIPAC and the Zionist Organization of America.
And they achieve an extremely high return on investment.
If you consider that the top 200 organizations raise between a billion and $1.4 billion a year coming in, and what's going out of the United States government is $3.5 to $4 billion, it's a pretty high ROI in terms of the total accomplishment of these organizations.
I think if you start dicing the data in another way, and kind of looking at the major activity categories of the Israel lobby, you find that policy formulation basically saying what the U.S. should do because it's in the U.S. interest as opposed to saying just openly it's in Israel's interest.
You find AIPAC, the Washington Institute, formerly known as the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the Foreign Policy Initiative, which I think comes up on your show quite a bit, as the new Bill Kristol organization supplanting the previous organization to get us into war with Iraq.
I would include JINZA, J Street.
You know, these are policy and lobbying organizations.
Many organizations, however, including the Zionist Organization of America and the AVL, lobby on Capitol Hill.
So just because these are policy formulation and lobbying category sort of organizations doesn't mean others don't do it.
You have the media pressure and Israel in danger category.
I would include, certainly, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, the Emergency Committee for Israel, the Israel Project, CAMERA, the Investigative Project on Terrorism, Honest Reporting, and the Anti-Defamation League, which has that as a major part of its program.
That's a $54 million in revenue a year organization, whereas, you know, the smaller ones, such as Foundation for Defense of Democracy, raise about $7 million.
But you have this whole other arm of leadership development to make sure that there's a large pool of highly educated, motivated, knowledgeable people who are ready to work in U.S. government agencies or as elected representatives all across the United States political system to steer and move U.S. policy in directions favorable to Israel.
I would include the Birthright Israel Foundation, a $100 million organization, the Saban Leadership Summit, which works with AIPAC and the American Israel Education Foundation.
Even Alpha Epsilon Pi, a fraternity, is very interested in seeing its members become the future leaders in the U.S. political system.
But then you also have, you know, the straight lobbying junket category, bringing people, elected officials to Israel, the American Israel Education Foundation.
It's supposed to be a broadly educational organization.
It's got a $46 million a year budget, but it basically only does one thing, and that's bring members of Congress to Israel.
They don't even have a website.
They've failed to provide one to the IRS in each of the past few years.
There's no information you can get of their education program.
So it's basically a way to bring Congress members on junkets to Israel.
And then you have the big transfer organizations.
There isn't only the transfer of U.S. tax dollars to Israel, but of course many organizations that are lobbying on Capitol Hill, but also just collecting and transferring tax-exempt donations to Israel, such as the United Israel Appeal, the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, $114 million.
The United Israel Appeal is almost $200 million.
Friends of the IDF, sending over $70 million to the IDF every year.
Hadassah.
The Weizmann Institute of Science, which has been heavily involved in nuclear weapons research and development, they get $68 million in transfers from U.S. donors each year.
And every single one of these organizations making up the core 200, which doesn't count Christian churches or synagogues or anything like that, but just this core 200, along with those organizations, is doing grassroots lobbying constantly.
Everyone, whether they claim it or not in their tax reporting, is involved in some level of trying to engender support, sell Israel, brand it as a startup nation, redirect the debate, introduce the terms of the debates, and that sort of thing.
So that would be kind of my profile and sizing of the entire sort of matrix of organizations.
All right, everybody.
It's the Scott Horton Show.
I'm Scott Horton, and he's Grant F. Smith from the Institute for Research Middle East Policy, IRMEP.org, the author of a great many books about the Israel Lobby and Foyer Sewer Extraordinaire.
And when we get back, follow-up questions.
Hey, all.
Scott here.
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Speaking of the Israel lobby, Rand Paul is saying America needs an iron dome system.
Maybe we could buy an iron dome from you.
To protect from what?
From who?
The hell does America need an iron dome for?
What is he even talking about?
Who gives him these talking points?
This fool.
I think he didn't get that from the lobby.
He's trying to pander to him, but he must have just made that one up because no one else is so stupid.
Anyway, welcome back to the show.
I'm talking with Grant Smith, the Institute for Research Middle East Policy.
And I got to say, that's a long list of groups there.
And, you know, I was listening pretty carefully and they sounded all, you know, and you described them all pretty specifically as much as you could kind of in there.
But it was such a long list.
I began to wonder at least whether others might wonder, Grant, whether you were just listing every Jewish organization in America.
Were you?
Are you saying that every Jewish organization in America is part of the Israel lobby?
Or you really just went on for 10 minutes listing various organizations who really are about lobbying the people and the people of America and their government to support the Israeli government in its policies?
Yeah, no, that's a good question.
Now, I didn't mention Jewish Federation, the Rabbinical Council of America, the Cantor's Assembly, Maccabee, Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association.
Those are all religious organizations that are primarily trying to promote and educate about Jewish life.
Some of them do lend their names to the Conference of Presidents of major Jewish organizations, but I would not include any organization that isn't taking a strong and sustained position on U.S. policy toward the Middle East.
So if I did, then we would be doing this for a six-hour show, and I would be listing hundreds and hundreds of organizations that don't even report their revenue to the IRS because they're predominantly religious.
And I also did include, I believe, I'll have to go back and listen, International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, and I would also include CUFI, Christians United for Israel.
And they're in D.C. this week, right?
It's a big organization, yeah.
Lobbying and having dinners honoring Israel and all of that.
A gigantic organization which I find to be extremely problematic because, and even other, well, Christian organizational critics and editors have asked them for information about how they use the money, and it's not unclear how much they bring in or even what they spend it on.
How much influence would you estimate that they have?
And let me interrupt for just a sec.
John Hagee from Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, he's the leader of Christians United for Israel, and it's the hurry up and force Jesus' hand and make him invade and kill everyone so they can go to heaven all at once or end of the world.
But how powerful are they, say, compared to AIPAC or, I don't know, something?
I think their influence is overestimated.
If you look at the early documents from the 60s and 50s, you see that Israel lobbying organizations were trying to get something like CUFI created, and they're working very hard to spread their message, and basically strike a deal in which they would not be proselytized at every Christian organization that was supporting Israel, meaning that they wouldn't be asked to convert, and that they would sort of, in return, ignore the dispensationalist, hey, all of you have to convert or die type dogma that are at the basis of a lot of these evangelical support organizations' message.
But I don't think they're that important, actually.
They haven't been around as long.
They weren't there promoting the foundation of the state.
But again, it's extremely hard to research the biggest ones.
Well, what about just as votes?
I mean, can they be convinced to come out or stay home over Israel issues?
I mean, for example, I think, didn't Tom DeLay threaten George W. Bush to back off of Powell's push for a Palestinian state after September 11th because he said, you'll be a one-term president like your father, I'll turn all the Christians against you.
Yeah, but that's mainly—it's like a lot of, you know, organizations that overstate their influence.
When they claim millions and millions of members, what they're basically saying is someone sent their email in, or they obtained an email, and they'll never take them off their list.
So I'm more skeptical than many others about the political impact.
I know it's there, but it wasn't there at the creation, and there simply aren't as many organizations lobbying for Israel and putting out solid work that I've been able to determine.
I would be happy, though, to change that, to update the database, so to speak, as soon as I see a more meaningful contribution and higher numbers and higher revenues in those organizations.
Yeah.
Well, so, you know, I guess the vote to support Israel in their attack on Gaza is unanimous, or I don't know if anybody, you know, was just, you know, voted present or maybe wasn't present, but was it all 100 voted?
Do you know?
It's, you know, it's a case where you have kind of a strange situation, you know, where you have this absolute support, but I see it more as a function of the fact that all of the resources, organization, and time is favoring the side of the issue that is demanding unconditional support.
But the real, I think the real dilemma is the fact that the central claim, and you hear it over and over again, I heard it on, you know, NPR this morning when, you know, basically on Morning Edition, they say, our only, our most important ally in the Middle East is this, and we're going to have a national security advisor talk about why the U.S. is supporting the Gaza invasion, blah, blah, blah.
But the vacuousness of the argument of Israel as a strategic asset of the United States is really, I think, refuted by the fact of how much it costs to create and sustain that every year.
If Israel were an inherently valuable asset to the United States, it wouldn't require, you know, $1.4 billion a year to pump out the message, the propaganda, to put out, as the Israel Project does, speaking points, talking guides.
It wouldn't be necessary to dial test the word terror tunnels and then insist that media people and the entire social network use the word terror tunnels so that Americans would think, oh my God, terror tunnels, you know.
So it's, I think the number of organizations and how hard they have to work really belies this argument that the country is such a valuable asset to the United States, and that every dollar sent over there is a benefit to the United States.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, hey, it's the proof's in the pudding.
You look at how they get us into these things and they lie their asses off.
I mean, everybody in the whole world knows.
I think even his allies recognize that Netanyahu never really believed or had evidence that Hamas was behind the kidnapping of those three, you know, teenagers.
He just decided that he was going to make this his excuse to do what he wanted to do.
Simple as that.
So, yeah, I can see why it would take a lot of K Street money to try to overcome the fact that, geez, these people are damn liars as they kill little kids all day.
Right.
They got no real argument.
No wonder they have to lie because they're guilty.
You see it in some of the revenue flows.
Some of the highest revenues went into the Israel project, this propaganda outfit, at precisely the time when people were becoming concerned about Iraq, and it was their guide for convincing Americans and talking about how that invasion was more in the interest of the U.S. than Israel at precisely the moment where Americans were wondering, hey, you know, who are the people pushing for this and why is it costing so much?
So, you know, something that's inherently intelligent, policy that's inherently beneficial does not require this level of infrastructure to promulgate it.
Simply, you know, the proof is in the fact that you have this massive lobbying infrastructure that gets good return on its investment, but it's extremely costly.
And it also, we don't have time to talk about this, but most of my books are about some of the illegal things that they have to do to sustain this, which, you know, also are an argument for the fact that none of this, if you have to spy to pass a trade agreement or try to tripwire the U.S. into a war with Iran by obtaining classified documents, that is more argument about the fundamental fact that you're not acting in any sort of broader interest.
Right.
Well, and, you know, along with the dishonesty becomes, you know, as the former analyst at MSNBC explained, the reason the American people are the only people in the world who side with Israel in the polls on this stuff is because they don't ever explain about the facts of the occupation at all.
So we make all our decisions.
The people, at least, accept such false premises that they'll go along with, you know, really bad policies under complete, you know, misperceptions of the actual situation.
You know, who's supposed to stop the massive Arab juggernaut coming their way?
Of course, they have the right to defend themselves when defending themselves doesn't have anything to do with it at all, you know?
Yeah, absolutely.
There's a lot of dishonesty and a lot of money to pay for that dishonesty to be thorough enough to inculcate an entire population.
That's pretty impressive policy.
I got to tell you, they got it together.
That's a lot of money.
If only I had a zillion dollars and I could forge a peace lobby that was so single-minded and determined to end this kind of intervention.
But anyway.
Well, you're off to a good start.
Thanks very much, Grant.
We're way over time and I'm talking on and on and I got to go.
But you're awesome.
Appreciate it.
Appreciate it.
Thanks.
That's the great Grant F. Smith, everybody.
He wrote Visa Denied and America's Defense Line Foreign Agents Divert.
That's the most important one.
That's how they stole their nuclear weapons materials from the United States.
Deadly Dogma and also Spy Trade.
Look them up at Amazon.com and at IRMEP.
I-R-M-E-P.
IRMEP.org for the Institute for Research Middle East Policy.
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