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Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the wax museum again and get the finger that FDR.
We know Al Qaeda Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else except as a fact, he came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We'd be on CNN, like say our name, been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right.
You guys introducing the great Grant F.
Smith.
He wrote the book, big Israel, and he runs the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy.
It's IRMEP, I-R-M-E-P dot org.
And along with the Washington report on Middle Eastern affairs, he just put on another great conference on the subject of the Israel lobby.
It's the Israel lobby and American policy, 2018 Israel lobby and American policy.org Israel lobby and American policy.org.
And then when you go there, just click videos at the top of the screen and you'll see all the great speeches from last Friday have already been posted up there.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Grant?
I'm doing great.
Good to talk to you again, Scott.
Thanks for having me out at the thing.
It was awesome.
Yeah, it was.
It's become kind of a five year deal now and we get more and more great people coming out, whether it's to speak or exhibit or participate in some way or the other.
It's just growing every single year.
Yeah, I got to meet Max Blumenthal in person.
Yeah, he was running around as well.
Yeah, Gideon was there all day, all day long.
So where else can you see that?
Hey, let's talk about Gideon Levy for a second.
Who's Gideon Levy for a second?
Well, I learned something very important.
He pronounces his last name Levy, Gideon Levy.
So see, that's how I always said it until you mess me up, dude.
Well, you know, I messed up a lot of people because I introduced him.
So it's, uh, yeah, well, Gideon Levy is, is an important columnist, uh, with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz and unlike 99.99%, uh, of the sort of pundit class over there, he is extremely serious about documenting what's really going on in the Israeli, uh, occupied territories.
And so even when the, uh, IDF is conducting what are popular exercises among the Israeli public, such as bombing Gaza and invading it, he's out there saying, no, this is, uh, this is horrible.
This is what's actually happening.
And you should be opposed to this.
And for that, he's routinely attacked.
Uh, he made clear in his presentation that Haaretz is basically a tiny little island, uh, in the Israeli media.
It's kind of like, uh, antiwar.com in the United States.
It's there.
It's, uh, isolated.
It's unique.
It's doing important work.
And he's one of the top opinion writers there.
Yeah, but at the same time, and this was the real point of a speech was that is basically alone in the way and, and in a worse way, I guess, even then antiwar.com is alone, at least we have code pink and this and that he was saying the entire political spectrum in Israel is just absolutely horrible on the occupation.
He said, you know, the hardcore leftists, they're still good, but they don't count.
Nobody cares what they say anyway.
And that everybody else is bad on it.
They don't count.
And some of the people in the audience, you know, I like you guys, you need to learn about prices, but no, on Palestine, they're awesome.
Always pretty much.
Some of the questions from the audience, which he pretty much transcended were, ah, isn't B'Tselem and these groups against the occupation and the soldiers who are conscientious objectors, aren't they great?
And he basically said what you just said.
Yeah, they may be great, but they're a tiny, tiny fraction of society and they don't matter.
So forget about it.
And nobody in the audience, uh, wants to hear that.
So he kind of comes and he, he tells the American audience, uh, these harsh truths, just like he does the Israeli audience.
Yeah.
Well, see, now I want to spoil it because there's so much that he said.
That's so important that I want to talk with you about, but we shouldn't talk about that.
We should just talk about the speakers.
And then that way, these people listening will say, you know what?
I want to see that Gideon Levy speech.
And then they'll go and look at it at Israel lobby and American policy.org slash video slash index dot HTML where it is.
Well, let's just do this.
Let's extract one nugget from each speech.
So not get with the whole thing.
Okay.
So, um, you know, we can take it from the top, the nugget that I got from Virginia Tilly and just explained who she is.
Um, she's this academic and she contributed to United Nations, uh, reports on whether or not, uh, Israel, Israeli practices toward the Palestinians, uh, are apartheid.
And he, she basically says no holds barred.
Yes.
Yes.
They are apartheid.
And so she had this incredibly detailed presentation that she put up and the nugget that really struck home for me.
And I've never, never seen this before.
Uh, least of all in a slide presentation, she basically had a, uh, slide with a picture of the apartheid South Africa organization to administer the Bantu stands.
And then she had right next to it, a picture of the Palestinian authority, which is essentially, uh, set up more or less to administer the Bantu stands in the occupied territories.
And there it is clear model.
And she was explaining, these really studied the South African model and they decided that this would be a good way to administer, uh, the occupied territories.
If there wasn't a thing called the Palestinian authority, I think the waters would be a lot less muddy on this issue, Graham, because it makes it sound like, isn't there kind of already a Palestinian state and they have their own government there and you know, people don't understand it's foreign military police who are coming and stealing these children, infantry who are coming and taking these children out of their beds in the middle of the night.
It's not the Palestinian cops that do that.
It's the occupying army.
But the problem with the Palestinian authority is that it's there essentially to perpetuate the occupation and be colonial administrators.
So the point that she was hammering home is, you know, here you have this unelected so-called president, Mahmoud Abbas, who everyone confers great legitimacy upon him.
Well, he hasn't been elected.
I mean, he's been out of office now officially for years and years and has no legitimacy in terms of democratic vote.
And yet he's there and everyone pretends as though he's some sort of a great leader when there's been absolutely no advice and consent process to put this, uh, administrator in place.
So, I mean, in other words, the PA is sort of a public relations stunt for the Israelis to just confuse the issue over whether the Palestinians have their own government or not a representative one or otherwise.
Well, when it's really just, they're the trustees operating an Israeli prison is what they are.
There you go.
And she makes it very clear in the presentation.
If you watch any presentation, uh, and you want to see it, uh, with, uh, slides, hers is clearly one of the best of this entire conference.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, so, um, I didn't get to see her or Ian Williams, the Israel lobby and the United nations.
That's interesting.
Yeah.
Ian Williams is this incredibly affable Brit and he's been at the UN as a correspondent for decades and decades, as he said, he knows for, uh, UN, uh, uh, for the UN chiefs personally.
And so he's, he's extremely, uh, knowledgeable about the machinations of the UN and his whole focus was what does the Israel lobby do at the UN?
And basically they're a force multiplier for the Israeli diplomatic core.
And so he essentially went through how they're able to sort of get things going, uh, with many, many more people from the Israel lobby in the U S in terms of interfacing with Congress and turning Congress against the UN.
Whenever something happens that the Israelis don't like and gave this incredibly detailed, uh, presentation about that.
So the gold nugget that came out of this for me was really, uh, that even worse than John Bolton, Nikki Haley, as he said, clearly should have been credentialed by Tel Aviv and not the U S she is so ultra, ultra, ultra, uh, Israeli in her perspective that it almost, uh, it's as though the United States just doesn't have any independent policy at this point.
Yeah, man.
Well, I mean, it certainly doesn't surprise me to hear him say that.
Um, although the comparison to Bolton, I'm trying to think like, in which ways is he, does he tilt more toward America, but anyway, right.
Yeah, that's true.
That's true.
Maybe, uh, but his point was really about Haley, not the patriotism of John Bolton.
So, all right.
Um, now I did see this one and I love this lady, Nora Arakat, and I think I've had her on the show at least one time.
And, uh, she got up there and just killed it in terms of relaying the history of the United Nations resolutions and, uh, what they say and how important it all is.
Can you sum up a little bit of that for us?
Sure.
Well, she's a, an attorney, and so she's got this, uh, viewpoint that is very, uh, legally oriented.
Uh, she's worked for a number of organizations, including the U S campaign to end the Israeli occupation and others.
Uh, so she really knows the letter, uh, the letter of the law in terms of, you know, what should be happening.
Um, but her whole, her whole presentation really covered, um, what the, the, uh, United Nations resolutions are and, uh, what, what the definitions really mean.
Um, I guess, you know, I would just hand it to you.
What, what made the biggest impression on you?
Well, she was going through, I mean, she was talking about the wars that always get skipped over, right?
1967 gets the highest thing, but the part that, um, that stuck out for me where she was talking about the all important article, the, and whether the resolution, I think it was one that had been put forward by the French.
Um, and I could be messing it up.
I think it was like a 1953 or something like this, or no, no, no.
It would have been after 67.
Maybe it was after the 73 war or something.
And they said, and the Israelis have to get out of the occupied territories.
And then they changed that.
They just took the, the out.
And then, so without the, the, it changed it to a sort of some, even though it didn't say that it just sort of implied, well, it didn't, it didn't describe which territories they're supposed to get out of.
So maybe they'll get out of the Sinai, but not the West bank or in this and that kind of thing.
And just legal loopholes for getting around stealing property from people really.
Right.
It was, uh, I mean, if you had to take away a nugget from this, it was all about the loopholes and how essentially, you know, the spirit of the law is being violated by the letter.
So you've really got to almost watch her presentation two or three times.
She reminds me a little bit of you, Scott.
I mean, she's incredibly detailed and she talks with great authority and complex subjects and some knowledge assumed.
So, uh, she's, you know, she's an expert and it's, uh, it's something that you almost have to listen to twice to really get, yeah, well, that's my plan.
So Israel lobby and American policy.org.
You just click videos at the top of the page there and you can see all this stuff and she's really impressive.
It's, it's really an important talk that she gave there.
All right.
So now tell me about, uh, Barry Trachtenberg.
Yeah.
Barry Trachtenberg is a scholar at Wake Forest university and he's a Holocaust scholar.
He's been teaching for quite a number of years.
Uh, his new book, uh, is really a Frank discussion of what was going on and what wasn't going on in the United States in terms of, uh, the rise of the Nazis in Germany.
And so, uh, he has a lot of authority on what is antisemitism and what isn't antisemitism.
And so he not only, uh, came and testified on November seven before the house judiciary committee, when they were considering this, uh, Israel lobby backed bill called the antisemitism awareness act, which would basically defund colleges and universities that hold too many protests or too many harsh academic gatherings to look at, uh, Israel in the way that, for example, a Virginia Tilley would, but he came in and basically, uh, expounded and expanded upon his points that were made, uh, to the congressional committee in a very succinct, uh, presentation, uh, on, on the, uh, panel on free speech.
So, um, you know, key takeaway, uh, from Trachtenberg, I think was that a very expansive definition of antisemitism, which these Israel lobby has backed, uh, that the U S state department use, uh, is inappropriate and, uh, way overbroad for any sort of application toward, uh, places of learning where people are trying to iron out, uh, incredibly difficult and incredibly controversial issues.
So, uh, he's a very interesting, uh, person in terms of the authority brings to this sort of discussion.
And, you know, he's sitting next to Rabab Abduhadi, who is a professor who's been under numerous attacks, uh, as the lobby tries to shut her down.
Uh, and as I said, probably, uh, would not have survived if such laws were in place.
So it was a really interesting panel and he kicked it off.
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And that's the thing too, is obviously I'm the libertarian idol ideologue to the nth degree over here, but this is just basic Americanism.
One-on-one man, Thomas Jefferson said, we need a free market of ideas so that where opinions are in error, reason is left free to combat it.
You know, let some committee decide what you're allowed to say and what you're not allowed to say, conflate opposition to the policies of the government of Israel with just being anti-Semitic.
And of course we're talking about.
Especially on campuses where the whole point, otherwise, why are we all forced at gunpoint to subsidize these higher learning institutions if they're not going to sit around and learn higher things and debate these ideas and make each other prove their right, or at least make their best case for Christ's sake.
Right.
Exactly.
Well, and what the hell is this France or something, you know, Germany where if you say something they don't like, they put you in jail.
It may be though, because you've got Senator Cardin, Ben Cardin, who's the backer of this bill.
He's still trying to get it modified in such a way that he can ram it through Congress with the help of the lobby.
And they all marched up on Capitol Hill straight from AIPAC yesterday to try to get their senators and congressmen to pass this thing.
So it may seem like it could never happen, but I wouldn't hold your breath.
I think it actually could happen.
So this is a very timely talk.
Well, and it's interesting too, right?
That it's the leftists who are mostly trying to shut down free speech on campus, except in this instance.
And it's the right-wingers who all of a sudden are saying, oh yeah, no, we're totally free speech, except where are they on this?
I don't know if they support these kinds of bans, but they don't seem to be speaking out and saying, yeah, look, if the anti-Zionist leftists want to trash Israel all day, good for them.
That would be if they really believed in free speech, not just their right to trash leftists.
I don't think either side is actually principled in this case.
They both want to do what they want to do.
And they're not arguing for the principle of anything.
It's all tactical in my view, but yeah, I agree.
So, yeah.
So moving on to Rabab Abdel-Hadi, she's a San Francisco university professor who has essentially, she was sued by one of these Israeli lawfare organizations for creating a hostile environment for Jewish students.
And they were really, even before the anti-Semitism Awareness Act was passed, trying to get her fired and shut down all these activities that they have on campus, creating sort of sister colleges in the occupied territories and focusing on Palestinian studies and having extremely inclusive gatherings and discussions with Jewish Voice for Peace and all sorts of other dissident groups that the lobby really wants shut down.
She's just too prominent.
She's too outspoken.
So she came in with this giant presentation, my God, I think it was 80 slides, just detailing all of the tactics that were lodged against her in the course of a year as this lawsuit unfolded and every response that they took.
And so, you know, given sort of the audience, some of whom were activists and others who were just observers, I think it really gave a level of detail about what's going on on campus that they could really wrap their brains around in terms of, wow, they're going to these lengths, all these posters and all of these different campaigns to shut them down on campus.
You know, not to say that some of the groups that they represent don't shout down Israeli speakers and, you know, have their sort of thing, but they're not doing it in a way that would legally prohibit them from ever setting foot on campus again.
So the two sides of this battle have radically different tactics and radically different visions for what should be happening.
And so she gave a very good breakdown of what's going on.
All right, so now and real quick here, man, I'm sorry I'm over time and I got to go in like five minutes, but Thomas Getman was on about the born again Christian Republican right and their support for the Israel lobby.
So I guess I didn't see that, but I have a specific question for you there, which is did he address the relative amount of power that they play or in terms of numbers, in terms of influence of how do you estimate their role in the Israel lobby compared to Jewish groups in D.C.?
Well, we kind of knocked that off in the introduction, but yeah, he did reiterate it.
The basic facts are these, Scott, you have 80 million Christian evangelical Zionists and according to Pew Research, 90 percent of them.
Well, you could you could actually say 80 million, 80 million, according to Pew Research, and 95 percent of them say that support for Israel is either the primary or important, most important or an important criteria for selecting a president.
So, you know, multiply 95 times 80 and you can really see why this incredible sort of drive by Pence and President Trump to just do anything the lobby wants is underway because these guys are financially irrelevant in terms of the six billion dollar Israel lobby.
But at the voting booth, they are extremely important to the lobby and they're extremely important because most Americans are not Zionists.
And on the Democratic and independent side, sympathy for Israel has tanked.
It's 27 percent sympathy for Israel on the part of Democrats and 42 percent on the part of independents.
And so Getman really went through the not so much that in detail, although that was presented in the introduction, he kind of said, how did this happen in the first place?
And why are some Christian evangelicals starting to push back now and say, look, this sort of dispensationalist ideology that's been brewing for so many decades is really not the way we should be acting.
So very interesting.
The year 2000 came and went, Iraq War II came and went, and the rapture never did come.
So maybe the dates are off and now we need to look at Earth like its actual real place instead of, you know, something that's just to be examined through religious eyes.
I mean, I'm not knocking anybody's right to believe whatever they want, but, you know, a big part of supporting the Iraq War was like, yeah, this is part of the ultimate confrontation with Satan.
Well, no, actually it wasn't.
It was just a genocide for no good reason at all.
And what a big mistake to make based on a religious belief in your Republican leadership.
And maybe, you know what, what if the date was just 1733 right now or something like that?
And there was no odometer effect from the new millennium.
And you just look out your window, no Jesus anywhere for miles.
Yeah, this guy is a theologian and he found it within himself to make a joke about exactly that, talking about the end times and the seriousness with which people read the left behind series and all of these predictions you just mentioned.
He said, quote, You may have noticed recently there have been some predictions about when it was coming and I hope you got your stuff stored away, unquote.
So so he had a little levity there.
Yeah.
And listen, I mean, I really I'm not a religious guy, but I'm not trying to knock people for being religious.
People can believe whatever they want.
That's my highest principle, right, is in freedom and especially if people's freedom of their own consciousness.
People want to believe in Judgment Day.
That's fine.
But why do they got to mix it with contemporary politics when, look, it's 2018.
All the magic stuff that was supposed to happen never happened.
It wasn't ever going to happen.
It didn't.
Right.
This was a theologian from World Vision saying essentially the same thing.
So it's the first time we've ever had anybody really get into it from inside.
And he went out and he said, frankly, hey, I used to be a Christian evangelical Zionist.
And I'm here to tell you, this is what happened.
Yeah.
So very, very interesting stuff.
And he's a very good speaker.
I mean, just in terms of, you know, being able to communicate so much and so little time.
But you got to go on and on about that.
It's just it's such an important subject and something I don't really cover enough.
Maybe I'm just making up for that.
All right.
So tell me about Andrew Cotty and Ali Abu Nima.
I learned how to pronounce it correctly, I think, sort of.
Yeah.
So Andrew Andrew Cotty came in.
He's with the U.S. campaign to end the Israeli occupation.
And he basically just came in to give an overview of what BDS is, because it's being demonized.
It's being legislated against.
There's the Israel Anti-Boycott Act, which says that every American who participates in a conscientious boycott of Israel is going to have to do either 20 years of prison or be fined a million dollars.
And so we thought it might be good to have somebody who knows something about it to just explain where it came from and what it is.
And he basically gave a solid half hour overview about the conditions that have promulgated or resulted in this campaign of targeted economic sanctions and some of the huge victories that they've scored in getting corporations to pull out of the occupied territories, making the comparison to the civil rights movement.
And so it was basically a giant debunking of all the hype and, you know, really ill informed disinformation coming out about what the movement is from just a purely academic or what the heck is this?
I'm very happy that people watching C-SPAN or people who are watching online can see a rational, very low key objective presentation of what it's supposed to be about from one, you know, from a person who's an advocate.
But he wasn't there selling it.
He was basically saying, this is what's happening and here are the attacks on it.
And here's what we're doing about that.
And this is what free speech, how that comes into play and blah, blah, blah.
Thank you.
So it's a very good presentation.
Now, Ali Abunimah, he runs the Electronic Intifada, which is a web publication with a pretty big following.
And he basically compared Russian media influence to Israeli media influence and made the point that the registration of RT as a foreign agent has now set the stage for registering Al Jazeera as a foreign agent and really accomplished the Israel lobby's goal of quashing an Al Jazeera documentary about how the Israel lobby works in Washington.
They did this undercover expose in 2016, which was aired in 2017, that really exposed Israel lobby operations in the UK and through a number of threats, including the threat of registering Al Jazeera as a foreign agent.
The U.S.-Israel lobby has managed to get the documentary quashed and scared Qatar, the government to clamp down on Al Jazeera and not actually release it.
So he did this really succinct presentation about that as a case study.
Yeah, man, not that they have a guilty conscience or they're worried about what's in there or anything.
And in fact, let me just mention that Asa Winstanley has written up a thing based on a secret source that he has for Electronic Intifada describing what's in that documentary and how the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies is literally acting as agents of influence for the Israelis with no degrees of separation.
And that's what's in there.
So, yeah, no wonder they're quashing it and doing everything they can.
All right.
Now, I'm sorry, over time here.
Jefferson Morley and Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, both are extremely important here, Grant.
So go ahead.
Right.
So key takeaway.
Jefferson Morley explained how the CIA under James Angleton came to become a strategic partner with the Mossad and some of the costs that that incurred, particularly mentioning the new Mac diversion.
And you and I have talked about that at length.
And he's also gotten documents declassified, showing that the CIA basically look the other way as the Israelis pilfered U.S. weapons grade uranium.
And then Lawrence Wilkerson basically came in and said no holds barred that Israel wants the U.S. to attack Iran for its own strategic strategic reasons and that he sees the situation as it's developing in the region, reminiscent of the prelude to World War One.
And it was terrifying and he had no good news.
And if you want to be scared, you can watch Colonel Wilkerson's final sort of capstone of the conference.
Yeah, well, that was the one I was watching this morning.
I was in the other room selling some books and meeting later and all this kind of crap.
But yeah, but yeah, no, I'm having a great time going back through and watching all these videos.
I really hope everyone will check this stuff out.
It's well, I mean, seriously, think of how lucky we are that such a thing even exists that Grant and the guys from IRMEP every year put this on.
Oh, and of course, we're me, the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and allow the other side of the story to have their say all in one day like this.
And at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., that kind of deal, if he wasn't doing the work, if they weren't doing the work, it wouldn't be getting done.
And this is huge.
This is really important.
And so they deserve the traffic and the shares and the likes and the the viral spreading of these speeches, these great videos here.
And especially I want to vouch for Nora Erekat and Gideon Levy, whose speeches I saw.
They're just great.
It's the Israel Lobby and American Policy dot org.
And then you just click on videos there, and that's the great Grant Smith, author of Big Israel and the keeper of IRMEP, the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy.
Thanks again, Grant.
Thanks a lot, Scott.
