03/24/17 – Grant F. Smith on the Israel Lobby and American Policy Conference – The Scott Horton Show

Alright y'all, Scott Horton Show.
I'm Scott Horton.
Check out the archives at scotthorton.org and at libertarianinstitute.org slash scotthortonshow.
And introducing our friend Grant Smith.
He runs the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy.
Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy, that's I-R-M-E-P dot org.
And he is hosting this giant conference this weekend.
It's the Israel Lobby and American Policy, March 24th at the National Press Club in Washington D.C.
Welcome back to the show, Grant.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great, Scott.
Thanks for having me on.
Very happy to have you here.
First of all, what's the Israel Lobby and what's it got to do with American policy?
Well, take into consideration these figures and facts.
It's been around since the start of Israel.
It's got a budget of almost four billion dollars this year, going up to six billion dollars by 2020, 343,000 employees, and a whole constellation of organizations that want the United States to give preferential treatment to Israel.
They want to advance Israel by working inside the United States.
So that's the Israel Lobby, and this entire conference is about its impact on America.
All right then.
So who's talking?
Well, the lineup is incredible.
If people want to see the program, it's already up on the website, Israel Lobby and American policy.org.
But I'll be kicking off the ceremonies with a set of brand new polls about American attitudes about Israel Lobby programs.
Professor John Mearsheimer is coming to give an update on his book, The Israel Lobby.
After that, we have Center for Constitutional Rights, Maria LaHood, who will be talking about efforts by the Israel Lobby to quash, boycott, divestment, and sanctions, and other initiatives that go against that program in the United States.
Congressman Jim Moran and Nick Rahal are going to be sitting down with the co-organizing Washington Report on Middle East Affairs magazine editor, Janet McMahon, to have a conversation about the Israel Lobby as it affected their work in Congress.
We've also got a lunch screening of a special Al Jazeera six-month report, undercover investigation of AIPAC's activities in London, as well as Israel Embassy operatives.
After that, we'll be having Palestinian legislator, Hanan Ashrawi, talk about the so-called peace process on the receiving end on the Palestinian side.
Tom Hayes, documentary film producer, has a new documentary based on 25 years of his work in Israel and the occupied territories called Two Blue Lines.
He's going to screen that and make a presentation.
We've got Jack Shaheen, the Hollywood critics, who wrote the book Real, R-E-E-L, Bad Arabs, about Hollywood's portrayal of Arabs and Muslims, is going to talk.
We've got Wajahat Ali, who wrote Fear, Inc., for the Center for American Policy before he and all the other authors, Eli Clifton and Ali Gharib, got fired and ousted because it pointed the finger squarely at the Israel lobby and many of its big funders for giant Islamophobia campaigns in America.
And finally, keynote, Ilan Pape, will talk about changing views on just what Israel is in terms of settler colonialism.
He'll be followed up by Clayton Swisher, the director of Al Jazeera's investigative unit, former U.S. military spokesperson in Iraq but now working for Al Jazeera, is going to talk about that four-part investigative series and really show what journalists can do as investigative reporters to reveal the activities of this incredibly powerful force.
After that, there's a giant networking reception.
People are going to talk.
There's going to be book signings and all sorts of very high-level discussions, but also students and others who are coming together to talk about this.
That's the program.
Man, that sounds great.
And hey, listen, I can speak from experience that Grant here runs a real tight ship and he puts on a serious conference.
There's a reason this is at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
This is ...
It's a great place to do it.
You know, we get a lot of establishment journalists coming down, sneaking down.
They don't always write about it, but a lot of them come.
Yeah.
Well, and you can tell everybody from what you're hearing, the caliber of the guests here are all the top experts in their field, et cetera, like that.
Is it okay if I follow up on a couple of these real quick?
How big of a hurry are you in?
No hurry at all, Scott.
Shoot.
All right.
So, well, first, I want to talk about this guy, Wajahat Ali.
I don't really know much about him.
I guess I already knew Eli Clifton, so when Fear, Inc. came out, I just got Eli on the phone kind of thing, because that's easy, and I've interviewed him about that numerous times.
In fact, I have the tab open right now, because it's a footnote in my book, of course, Fear, Inc.
So, to me, this is such a key kind of a thing.
I don't know, is this what he's actually going to be giving the talk about?
Is that research, and can you share with us some of the interesting narratives from that work?
Yeah.
Well, first of all, because he's the one who was the director of that entire effort that produced the report.
It's probably one of the most stunning and controversialized report ever to come out of an American think tank.
He worked with Ali Gharib and Eli Clifton, who continue to follow this, but he has also continued to be involved in talking about the Muslim experience in America, and he's going to take all of this research that went into Fear, Inc., which really revealed an incredible amount of effort, whether it was by Frank Gaffney's organization, the Center for Security Policy, whether it was from the makers of the videos, Uranium, the Clarion Foundation, and all of these other organizations profiled.
He's going to talk about how they've all essentially become an important part of the foreign policy thinking and direct connection to the Muslim band and the Trump administration.
So he's taking that 2011 report and bringing it right into the current day, essentially revealing that formerly fringe actors who did not have very much pull are now in positions of vast influence and able to influence the commander in chief.
Basically the organizations, the Middle East Forum, headed by Daniel Pipes, Center for Security Policy, Investigative Project on Terrorism, the Clarion Fund, the David Horowitz Freedom Center, American Congress for Truth, all of these organizations have had a huge impact on policy making, so he's going to bring it right into the present.
Now he's probably not going to have time to do everything, but in my last book I followed up on what happened.
There was a particular view that right-wing foundations were providing substantial support to these organizations.
The bottom line, though, is that most of their funding always came from key backers of the Israel lobby, whether it was Lynn Shusterman or others.
Only 32% came from so-called right-wing foundations.
And so he's going to be talking about the current impact of this vital, seminal piece of research that they did.
Yeah, man, yeah, that's so important.
I wish I could be there for that, but yeah, for anybody who hasn't read it, it's still there at the Center for American Policy site there, and it's called Fear, Inc., the Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America.
And in other words, all this scaremongering that you hear about Muslims all the time is one cover for the fact that our government picked this fight by intervening in the Middle East, and two, it's a massive corporate public relations front to try to get you to conflate all of your fears with all of Israel's problems.
And it's really a hell of a thing, and it was written by six people or something.
It's a great study, Fear, Inc., at the Center for American Progress.
And yeah, that is Podesta and a bunch of horrible people, but as he was saying, it's good people wrote this up, including our friends Eli Clifton and Ali Gharib.
Okay, now tell me a little bit more about Ilan, is it Papa, Papi, what?
Yeah, Ilan Pape is an Israeli.
I got the book.
It's on my shelf.
What can I say?
Well, you better read it.
He's got a new book coming out, but the one everyone knows about is called The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, which came out in 2007, and he's really saying that if you want to take an analytical view of the situation, don't focus too much on the PR framing or kind of the older image of making the desert bloom and land without a people for a people without a land.
Look at it through the framework of settler colonialism, in which the core effort is displacement and occupation rather than any sort of shorter term impact.
So he's going to be talking about his work as it relates to the current situation.
He's not a very revered figure in Israel, and so he is teaching at Exeter in the UK now, but he is a fascinating, fascinating analyst and will be our last keynote.
Cool.
And that's great that you got John Mearsheimer, and you said that his speech is going to be an update on the Israel lobby book that he wrote with Stephen Walt there?
Right.
I mean, his task is really to answer a number of questions that were posed to them.
Number one, what, if anything, has changed in the decades since the book came out and your subsequent findings?
He makes it clear when he gets the chance to do it, although he's not given the chance in too many conferences, that he follows this closely.
So we want to know what his subsequent findings are.
And as it pertains to the current situation, the foreign policy choices the U.S. makes that it otherwise would not, if not for Israel, and especially what he thinks the new administration could do differently that would better serve broader American interests.
That doesn't mean his advice is going to be taken, but he's one of the most high-level realist foreign policy thinkers.
I think you've had Stephen Walt on your show a few times.
I don't know whether you've interviewed him, but it's basically all very much realpolitik.
I think he's got a picture of himself on the University of Chicago website, kind of looking like Machiavelli.
It's kind of funny, but he's considered to be this very much leader in the realist school of foreign policy thought.
Yeah, you know, I've interviewed him.
I know I interviewed him one time about his foreign affairs article about how America picked the fight in Ukraine, not Russia.
But I'm trying to think if I don't think I ever interviewed him about the lobby.
I think I interviewed Walt about the lobby or about the book, the paper, but not the book.
Right.
Anyway, well, yeah, I have interviewed him one time, at least, I think.
But yeah.
Yeah.
The paper is still, if you don't have time to read the book, it's still got all of the core arguments.
Yeah.
Especially about the role that they played, the very important role that they played in getting us into the Iraq War.
That is probably one of the most underappreciated parts of the argument, that if you had removed the neoconservative thought leaders, there wouldn't have been a war, basically, is the argument.
Well, you know what, too?
As we can see, kind of the relief in 2013, you have the same dynamic, only with all the kind of PR stripped down.
So it was just Obama and AIPAC wanted to bomb Syria, and there was nobody else in the country wanted to do it.
It's that the neoconservative movement, the Israel lobby, and the President.
The President didn't even really want to do it.
In fact, I don't know if you remember, I even speculated that the President had already decided he was going to back down, but he had asked the lobby to go ahead and push for the war, just to help draw them further out on a limb, so he could saw it off on them.
I don't know if that's really true, I like to think that.
But it was just the exact same Iraq War coalition all over again, only it was just the very core of it, without anybody else.
And there they all are, our neocon friends.
Well, and that's kind of the interesting thing when you do public opinion polling.
You can see that it's the lobby virtually alone that wants to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
It's the lobby virtually alone fighting this BDS campaign.
It's the lobby virtually alone that pushed for and got trade preferences, which make the U.S.-Israel trade agreement the worst bilateral by some measures of any.
I mean, they're alone on a lot of issues that have vast impact.
They're the only ones who want to know daylight policy between the U.S. and Israel.
And so, because they're so isolated, it's now possible to do surveys and ask the American public, what do you think about this particular program?
And it's incredible to see what their responses are.
Yeah, well, there's daylight.
It's funny, right as you say that, the sun came out and in my window.
Ain't that something?
There you go.
Hey, man.
Thank you very much for coming on the show.
Best of luck to you at this great conference.
I'm sure it's going to be great.
Are we going to be able to watch a live stream of it online somehow?
Well, I'm here today on your show, Scott, as the first official media outlet to be able to announce that, yes, this conference will be streamed, and you can see that stream.
Let me give you some websites that aren't experiencing technical difficulties, wrmea.org, israellobbyandamericanpolicy.org, irmep.org, so hit those websites in that order and sit back and send in your tweets to at wrmea or use the Twitter handle Israel Lobby Con.
Israel Lobby Con.
Short Israel Lobby Conference.
Oh, that's what it's short for.
Okay.
Yeah, I think so.
I thought you meant conference game.
No.
Okay.
Absolutely.
Well, gee, Scott.
Shows where your mind is.
I thought you meant convict.
No?
Oh, I'm sorry.
I just, I'm no good at...
We tried to add an F.
We tried to add an F for conference, but it just didn't fit, but so that's what we got.
We're bringing that to our game.
I got you.
Okay.
Israel Lobby Con.
Is the hashtag.
Is the hashtag.
There you go.
Okay.
Right.
IsraelLobbyCon.org.
That's the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.
They're the good guys working with Grant on setting this thing up.
Check out that site.
And then also IsraelLobby and AmericanPolicy.org.
That's a website where you can read all about the different guests and this and that.
Program.
Yeah, it's all there.
And people can still come.
This is Saturday morning at what time?
No, sir.
This is tomorrow.
Tomorrow, Friday.
Yeah.
Tomorrow, Friday at 9 a.m.
Oh, man.
Okay.
I better hit save and put this out on the feed as fast as I can.
Sounds good to me.
All right.
Hey, best of luck to you.
I'll be watching.
Thanks, Scott.
Thank you, Grant.
All right, you guys.
That is the great Grant Smith.
He's the author of Big Israel.
The big book about the Israel Lobby in the United States and a whole bunch before that about how they stole nuclear weapons material from us and everything.
The Israel Lobby and American Policy.
It's IsraelLobbyandAmericanPolicy.org.
IsraelLobbyandAmericanPolicy.org.
Also go to Wormia.
Grant's site is having a couple of problems right now.
Go to Wormia.
W-R-M-E-A.
Wormia.
That's Washington Report on Middle Eastern Affairs.
So either of those, IsraelLobbyandAmericanPolicy.org or Wormia.org.
And then the conference starts Friday morning, 9 o'clock, March the 24th, 2017.
Hashtag IsraelLobbyCon.
All right.
Thanks you guys.
I'm Scott Horton.
Check out the archives at ScottHorton.org and all the latest at LibertarianInstitute.org slash ScottHortonShow.
Oh yeah, and check out all my questions and answers stuff.
If you guys miss the old live show, I'm doing questions and answers over on the old live show feed.
It's ScottHorton.org slash show.
You can sign up for the RSS feed for that too.
All right.
Thanks you guys.