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Sorry, I'm late.
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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 and 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 they army, but we killing them.
We 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 Smith.
He wrote like eight or 10 books about the Israel lobby and their machinations in this country.
He runs the Institute for Research, Middle Eastern Policy.
It's irmep.org, irmep.
And you know what, put that in YouTube and watch all those speeches from these great Israel lobby, anti Israel lobby conferences that Grant has put on these last many years.
They're just so great.
It's just such great work and great for opening up new eyes and that kind of thing.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Grant?
Hey, Scott, thanks a lot.
And yeah, there are growing numbers of videos on that conference.
It turns out they're growing numbers of critics of Israel lobby policies.
So it just gets easier every year to put those up.
Right on.
And you obviously, like me, you have the very best taste in guests.
And so, you sure have a lot of really great speakers, you know?
Yeah, I poach a lot of people who have been on your show.
So maybe that's not good taste, but just poaching.
Yeah, there you go.
All right, that's fine with me.
Please poach away.
That's why I interview these people so that you know about them.
That's the only reason Grant.
You specifically.
Now listen, you write great stuff.
And we run it all at antiwar.com.
And it's at irmep.org.
And then so there's a couple of things I want to talk with you about the textbooks, which is just funny to me, although I know it is important, but it's more funny.
And then but the polls, you have a new one by the time anybody hears this, it'll be running at antiwar.com about new polls about American attitudes towards Israel.
So what are you reporting some changes in these attitudes?
I'm not reporting changes.
I'm just reporting what I would consider to be the truth, which is that there isn't quite as high as sympathy for Israel as Gallup in particular says there is.
And that's the whole thesis of the report, which is called why Gallup overstates American sympathy for Israel.
So I'm not claiming that there's been any change.
I'm just saying that it's pretty low.
And that if you dig into the two primary sources of information, which are endlessly cited by pro Israel factions in the case of Gallup, or ignored utterly in the case of the other leading pollster, which is the Pew Research, then you start to see that this is not set in stone.
And it was enough to actually go out and do our own poll.
Alright, well, so what's the discrepancy then?
Yeah, well, the biggest discrepancy is that since 2001, Gallup has claimed consistently that in its survey of Americans, which is typically telephone survey of just over 1000, that they consistently sympathize more with the Israelis and the Palestinians.
So their question is, quote, in the Middle East situation, are your sympathies more with the Israelis or more with the Palestinians, unquote.
And they claim that it's consistently the majority US position, that it's never not been the majority US position since 2001 to 2018.
And then they released this data with spectacular headlines, such as Americans would lean more on the Palestinians to make peace.
That was their last release or Americans remain staunchly in Israel's corner, or Israel maintains positive image in the US.
So it's an extremely highly cited report.
It's even in a Congressional Research Service annual report called US foreign aid to Israel, which explains that this high support is a proxy, revealing that Americans support high foreign aid to Israel.
And so the importance of this poll just can't be overemphasized.
But Gallup itself is a private polling company.
It does a lot of consulting work.
As one academic said, recently, the public polling that it releases like, you know, on the Middle East issues and whatever is the tail.
It's not the dog of Gallup.
The dog is really consulting and proprietary services that it offers to governments and businesses.
So if you look into this, you can quickly see that the reason that Algemeiner and the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League and the Israel Project and all sorts of mainstream publications cite this poll is that it's exciting.
They like the data, but it's not replicable.
All right, well, what happens when you try to replicate it?
Well, before replicating it, what I did was look at the same year period from Pew Research.
Pew Research is a charity.
It's run by Pew Charitable Trust, a multi-billion dollar foundation that, you know, the money came from the Sun Oil Trust.
It doesn't seem to have any particular agenda.
And if you look at the same period where Gallup is quoting 59 percent support for the Israelis, they're consistently reporting around 47 percent support on average, with almost 40 percent saying that they just don't even have an opinion about the issue at all.
So the interesting thing about that huge gap is that, number one, Pew Research, their poll doesn't get any mainstream press at all.
So if you're cherry picking data, you're just going to go to the Pew site and they kind of release a report saying, you know, with an exciting title that reads Middle East Release, and it's in their asset upload section of their website, no marketing behind it at all.
So the question really becomes, well, who's right?
Is it Pew or is it Gallup?
And if you want to conduct a modern tech savvy poll and really test the issue, then a smart thing to do is to take Pew Research's own opinion, which is that telephone polls are increasingly less accurate because they have to reach out now, because people are cutting the cord, they have to reach out to cell phone, mobile phone users and call them for their multi-question surveys.
And I don't know about you, but when I get a call and I have absolutely no idea who it is, or if it looks like it's just a marketing call, I don't always prioritize picking that up.
And the same goes with Gallup and Pew Research polls.
So we did, of course, having been doing this since 2014, we turned to Google Surveys, which has an enormous population of survey respondents who are really motivated to answer questions and aren't as bothered by being asked to answer a question before accessing some content that they wanted to get to.
The other big problem is that when you do a phone survey, and this is identified by multiple pollsters who were doing kind of a post-disaster look at the polling of the Clinton versus Trump election polls, which were so wrong, they basically said that when you're doing a poll over the phone, there's modal bias and people start trying to answer the way the poll interviewer, the way they think he or she wants them to answer, which is not going to do a very good result when you compile all of that bad data.
And so again, doing the poll that goes through Google Surveys and appears on news websites or smartphones with no human interaction is considered to be a more accurate way to poll.
And so to cut to the chase, if you put out the very same question that Gallup's putting out, again, in the Middle East situation, are your sympathies more with the Israelis or more with the Palestinians?
It turns out that the majority of Americans don't have an opinion about it.
Yeah, they don't express sympathy for the Israelis.
That sounds right, too.
It says 51.1% in the poll in your article here, right?
Exactly.
Have no opinion, eh?
Well, I mean, and it's, you know, you do have to know something to answer that question.
When we talked a couple years ago, you said, Grant, you know, I just even wonder, do Americans even know whether the Israelis are occupying Palestinian territory or the Palestinians are occupying Israeli territory?
I took you up on that, polled that, and it turns out that among Canada, Mexico and the U.K., Americans are uniquely in the position of being the only country that believes that the Palestinians occupy Israeli territory.
Right, I had forgotten about that.
They don't know anything.
And if you don't put them on the spot and you don't embarrass them or set them up for being, you know, looking bad, which nobody wants, that's another problem with phone interviews.
They'll just say, I don't know.
I don't have an opinion.
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I mean, and this is the thing, too.
If you get just, you know, the 101 education on how polling works, according to all the greatest poll masters.
Oh, yeah, it's fraught with problems.
The multiple choice, the phrasing of the questions, the tone of voice of the person on the phone, as you say, the right self selection of people who have caller ID and choose to answer the phone versus those who don't, or this, that the other thing, and really making a multiple choice question out of opinions is kind of a weird thing to do anyway, to quantify equality in that way.
But uh, so yeah, now I'm not exactly certain what all incentives and disincentives exist on on articles.
I mean, maybe it's people who are more highly educated are the ones clicking on this in the first place.
But so that may or may not be representative, but I'm just making up.
Well, yeah, the one the one advantage of this is, you're not just randomly dialing what you hope will be a representative population of the United States.
What you have in the most in most circumstances for the Google poll, our 1500 partner websites where people are going like to YouTube, you know, everyone goes to YouTube.
And so if a survey pops up, and you're just trying to get to that latest NASCAR video, or you want to see, you know, what's going on in a news broadcast, a question will pop up on the screen, you answer it almost without thinking and then boom, there's your content.
But then it's also that way for newspapers and news websites.
And some smartphone users have also just said, Look, I like getting premium content, just ask me questions whenever you want.
And they actually exchange their demographics, there's no longer guessing about how old they are, what their income is where they're located.
So well, look at the question is, and I know you're you're asking the same question as them.
It's not your question.
You're trying to be fair, and ask the same question, as they put it, but are your sympathies more with I mean, what the hell kind of question is that?
Well, what if it gets worse?
Yeah, what if it's your cousin, and you love him, and you'd kill a man to protect your cousin.
But in this situation, he's wrong.
He lost the bet and knows the guy 50 bucks or whatever.
You know what I mean?
My sympathies are more of my cousin, but that doesn't mean he's right in all cases.
Well, it's it's worse than that.
Because as I said, I don't have a cousin that owes anyone $50.
I have no idea where I came up with that crap.
But anyway, go ahead.
Gosh, I hope not.
That's a lot of money, Scott.
I guess the real problem.
The real problem is that this is used as a proxy.
Again, as as is stated in Jeremy Sharpe's annual report, US foreign aid to Israel, he claims wrongly, as it turns out, that there really aren't any polls of significance about whether Americans even approve of USAID to Israel.
So he just out and out says, well, this is what we got.
We've got to use these sympathy polls, particularly because Gallup's got such a great reputation.
Right.
You know, because, quote, there's less specific public polling data and support for aid for Israel.
Well, that's not true.
Shibley Telhami has done polling, and he's mainline Brookings type guy.
He gets pretty much the same results that I've gotten using Google, which is that most Americans are opposed, especially when they know relatively how much it is, which is at this point more than the U.S. spent to rebuild Europe postwar during the Marshall Plan and more than any other country gets from us.
So, you know, it's used as a proxy when there's no need for proxies anymore.
You can just go get a perfectly credible survey.
And in the case of the polls I do, you can download the data and look for yourself and find out that, yeah, actually, you know what should be in the CRS report.
There isn't any broad public support for foreign aid to Israel.
In fact, Americans don't even really like foreign aid that much anyway.
Looking at your poll results here, it seems meaningful to me.
And this is part of the thing with polls is I can take whatever meaning out of it I want.
But if you take 51.1 percent, no opinion, and then you combine that with ten and a half percent for both and 9.7 percent for neither, then you could, I think, fairly interpret that as Americans in their majority don't want the American government to take a side one versus the other there.
These are foreign people in foreign countries.
Well, one has a country, the other side doesn't have a country.
But anyway, that basically they want to mind their own business is the way I interpret that.
Yeah.
And again, there are specific questions about taking sides that have been done as well that show exactly that, especially by Pew, that Americans would rather not take sides.
And again, a lot of them feel that they don't know enough about it to have an opinion about it.
The other big thing, though, that I think is worth mentioning and maybe, you know, the article is a lot longer.
I had to cut it back.
But but Gallup has a pretty solid reputation for, you know, its origins and George Gallup predicting presidential elections, saying he'd never get involved with either political party because he wanted to maintain credibility.
Well, all that changed when the company was bought out and started going into private sector consulting more than public polling.
And, you know, it's it's hard.
And I make this point in the article, it's hard to take seriously the claims of an organization that's actually been prosecuted for false claims or at least had a complaint filed because of massive false data that it gave in government contracts, not only to the U.S. Mint, but to FEMA and the State Department and had to pay a 10 million dollar fine to avoid being criminally prosecuted.
I just add that in the article as part of the mix of, you know, Gallup has an agenda with a lot of these polls.
They have clients with a lot of these polls.
They're at the front end of of trying to move opinion as much as, say, what public opinion is.
And the case study in the article is Gallup predicting that Americans would just be absolutely ecstatic to use the U.S. Mint's dollar coins.
And of course, the dollar coin was one of the biggest recent government program disasters.
I mean, I guess it doesn't stack up against the Iraq invasion, but nobody accepted dollar coins.
And within a year of introducing billions of these things, they were all sitting in the vault at the U.S. Mint because they couldn't circulate.
And that's thanks to Gallup predicting that Americans would love this.
That's funny.
I didn't know that.
All right.
Now, listen, man, I'm sorry, because we're so short on time.
This one is called Why Gallup Overstates American Sympathy for Israel.
And now talk to me real quick about this new one that you just posted yesterday.
This will run on Antiwar.com by the end of the week.
Anyway, it's or maybe we're already running it.
I forget.
Anyway, Israel advocacy groups demand questionable changes to Virginia textbooks, reports, ear map.
And, you know, I'll ask you to be real brief, but you got to tell me about this one.
It's hilarious.
Yeah, well, basically, a group of pro-Israel organizations in Virginia, the Commonwealth, along with a couple of national organizations are trying to pressure the Department of Education into inserting all sorts of crazy misinformation into textbooks and teaching guides.
And just to give you a quick rundown, they want the maps to be changed of the Middle East, showing that Israel owns East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, not Syria.
They want it changed.
All references to occupied territories, which has some legal and human rights implications.
They want the wording changed to captured areas.
They don't want any Jewish settlers or settlements mentioned in the textbooks.
They want to talk about building homes and communities of territories that Israel annexed, as if everyone accepts that.
So it's just this incredible travesty that they're trying to muscle in behind the scenes.
And we obtain the documents through FOIA.
People can look at them themselves.
Yeah, some of them are humorous, but it's going to create an entire generation of misinformed Virginians if they manage to push this through.
So I encourage people to look at it.
It's at israellobby.org slash ICS.
All of the things, all of the documents, the Orwellian Institute for Curriculum Services submitted with the help of the local organizations are there.
And they're frightening, I would say.
No, I shouldn't make too much light of it.
I guess what's funny to me is just the irony of people working this hard to lie this bad and make sure that, like, are we forgetting anything?
Oh yeah, no, we got to make sure to get all the textbooks in all the colleges and whatever they can.
It's just, you know, the squeaky wheel gets the grease in a representative democracy.
It's not really about majority rule.
It's about who gets the work done.
And you got to hand it to him, Grant.
Yeah, it's a lot of work.
It's happening while all attention is elsewhere.
But it's ongoing, as you say.
It's one of those long-term things that the lobby just, it does particularly well to everyone else's detriment.
Yeah.
Well, I think more and more people are getting educated about this really because of the internet and the ability of people like yourself to go around the normal channels of communication.
And then I think, you know, just like with you and with me, or I don't know about you.
With me, when I learned about the reality of the thing compared to the way they always spin it, which is mostly just confusion and pro-Israel bias, but no real details.
When I learned about who's occupying who and since when and how so, man, it's pretty shocking to realize that you've been misled so badly for so long.
And I find that reaction oftentimes with people that, you know, it's one of the real drawbacks of all this Hasbara is that, you know, what they tell everybody else is, it's such an unreality.
It's based on so many lies.
That's like an alternative dimension from what's really going on around here.
And when people snap out of that, it causes quite a reaction, I think.
It does.
It does.
And particularly if people become aware that, you know what, actually, not everybody is fooled.
And this polling that appears to show this incredible support because people are misinformed.
Actually, people aren't that misinformed.
So these two things are sort of tied together, I would say.
Yeah.
All right.
That's the great Grant Smith.
The latest is Big Israel, all about the Israel lobby.
Before that, Divert, all about the Israelis stealing weapons-grade uranium from the USA.
And before that, a whole bunch of books about the Israel lobby in the US.
It's IRMEP, the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy.
IRMEP.org.
Thanks, Grant.
Much appreciated.
