Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to 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 accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, saying three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Hey, check it out, guys.
On the phone, I got the great Philip Weiss from the Mondoweiss blog, mondoweiss.net.
And make sure especially to sign up for their morning email blast to keep up on all the latest.
It's a great way to start your morning with your coffee if you're anything like me, which you may or may not be.
Welcome back to the show, Phil.
How you doing, man?
Good.
How you doing?
I'm doing really great.
And listen, one thing I always have to do when I introduce you is praise all your great writing.
And I've learned so much from you.
Honestly, I cite you all the time of the things that I learned from you.
But also I like saying how you have such a great stable of writers there at mondoweiss.net.
And you cover all aspects of Middle East policy in the Middle East, Israeli politics, the colonization and the persecution in Gaza and all this.
But also all of the American politics and all of the, you know, whatever else behind it.
All the different kind of genres you could cut these questions into.
Man, you're really great on all of them and all your great writers.
Thank you.
Love mondoweiss.net.
How do you like that?
And you know how important anti-war.com has been to us in that connection and your work.
Two websites totally in love with each other here.
Yeah.
All right.
Hey, listen, man, you wrote some interesting stuff.
You're the first person I ever learned this from.
That the Israel lobby had a role to play in the 1992 election in tilting against George H.W. Bush and for Bill Clinton.
And I don't know what else.
But just to set up real fast is that I was only ninth grade.
So I wasn't all plugged in and reading The New York Observer and all of these things where I could have read you back then, I think.
But I was paying very close attention.
I was very interested in seeing the demise of the Republicans and what was going to come after that.
And the whole narrative of that election.
Not that I ever believed in Bill Clinton, but I hated the Republicans.
And it was, you know, you know, Reagan and Bush.
Anyway, so I never heard a peep about this.
Wow.
During that time.
Wow.
I mean, to me, when I was 14, even paying attention to that election, if you had asked me about Israel, I would have said it's a word in a Christmas song.
I don't know anything about it at all.
Wow.
And I certainly had no idea that the Israel lobby had decided they didn't like George H.W. Bush anymore and that they were going to do something about it.
I swear to you they never mentioned that on TV.
Not one time.
No.
Not on any.
Not Rather, Jennings or Brokaw.
Not Ted Turner.
Nobody.
No.
And, you know, the thing is that because they don't mention it, you know, some people think it's everything and some people think it's nothing.
And I don't know exactly how large it was, but I think George Bush himself said it was a factor in his losing that election.
Just as Jimmy Carter felt that his opposition to Israeli policies in the settlements cost him the election in 1980.
So, you know, when do we hear these voices?
We don't hear them, so we don't get to assess it.
But I think that, you know, actually the most interesting comment on this whole thing was from Tom Friedman, not in his column, but in speaking at Oxford to Al Jazeera.
He said that he pointed out, as everyone knows, President Bush, the first, stood outside the White House one day and said, I'm one lonely man standing up against the Israel lobby.
And what happened as a result of that is that the Republicans post Bush and manifestly most in his son, Bush, too, took a strategic decision.
They will never be out Israel again.
Why wouldn't they be out Israel again?
Because they believe that it cost them electorally.
That's what Tom Friedman said.
So why this isn't in his column in a prominent way, I don't understand.
But people have a right to talk about it.
And, you know, even if you mention the power of the Israel lobby, then you're an anti-Semite.
So that's the way our discourse is right now.
And, you know, Katie, bar the door.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I think all that's wearing thin, and I'm certainly not concerned about those kinds of accusations because that's stupid.
I mean, all racism and bigotry is stupid.
And that's actually the most, to me, the most obvious characteristic of racism and bigotry is the stupidity of it.
I don't have time for that.
And that clearly doesn't have anything to do with what you're saying or what I'm saying, other than in describing the bigotry against the Palestinians that helps to abet the constant war crimes being committed against them, if you want to talk about that.
No, no, no.
On the politics here, Walt Mearsheimer talked about how – and this was just one of the many anecdotes and what have you – but where Colin Powell had Junior's ear on the West Bank for a minute after 9-11 and said, you know what?
You have so much political capital.
Now is the time to really have peace for American security, to have peace in Palestine.
It will really take the edge off of the terrorist propaganda against us and this whole problem.
And Bush was like, OK, Colin Powell, you sound pretty smart about that.
And then Tom DeLay came to town, the exterminator, the house whip from Texas came and said, hey, if you want the San Antonio-led 80 million American Christian Zionists to turn on you like they did your old man, that's exactly what we'll do.
And they put him right in check.
Tom DeLay standing up to George Bush like that on behalf of Israel.
I did not – I forget that anecdote.
That's in their book.
Yeah.
Or I forget if it's in the book or in the article.
Yeah.
It's one or the other.
Or both.
I do tend to focus on the Eastern Establishment Israel lobby and not the evangelical one.
I think my establishment lobby has a lot more power than the evangelical one.
Well, I agree with you.
But that's a great story.
They have a lot of votes, though.
And so it's always money on one side and votes on the other.
And if you have both of those on your side, as seems to be this case, then you have this lock on the Republican Party.
Yeah.
But it's interesting that you mentioned Powell.
I mean subsequently Condoleezza Rice also said, hey, we got to do something about this.
And Elliott Abrams did everything to frustrate her.
And he was coming from the – he wasn't coming from DeLay's constituency but from the neoconservative one.
So it's a powerful block, obviously.
But now take me back to 1992.
And especially there are a bunch of kids who – this would be like the FDR years to them or something.
This is way back in history when George Bush's dad was the president.
He was Ronald Reagan's vice president and served one term.
And in 1992 he was up against Bill Clinton.
And so first set it up with what you were talking about, one lonely man up against the Israel lobby here.
Okay, I think what people should understand is that it was longtime American policy to oppose the Israeli settlements or colonies in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
That's been our policy since it began around 1970.
And yet no president has been forceful about this.
And George Bush, who just died, was.
He finally was.
In 1991 he said, yeah, I will give you these loan guarantees you've sought for housing, Israel.
Israel wanted $10 billion to help build housing.
If you can assure me that none of that money is going into the West Bank or East Jerusalem, we believe that that is against international law.
And so I think most Americans will support me in this, George Bush said.
And what happened was that he was overwhelmed by the Israel lobby.
They lobbied against him and said that – went on Capitol Hill to take the teeth out of his proposal.
Now, that's when he made the famous statement, I'm one lonely guy standing up against the Israel lobby and a bunch of lobbyists.
And people said, oh, that's anti-Semitic.
He's talking about the Israel lobby as if we have so much power.
Well, they did have power.
And Bush actually won on that question for a little while.
He froze up that money for a little while.
And as a result, Yitzhak Shamir, the Israeli prime minister, lost his job the next year because the Israeli voters didn't like it that he was sparring with the U.S. president.
But similarly, George H.W. Bush, he also lost his job in the following year.
And one of the reasons was that when Bill Clinton ran against him in 1992, Bill Clinton said, I'm for the settlements, in so many words.
He said, I'm not going to take Israel on on this one.
And so you had a Democratic president running to the right of a Republican on this question.
And so that shows us that support for Israel must be bipartisan, according to the Israel lobby, and also that some of the strongest voices against Israel's colonization, against the displacement of the refugees, of the Palestinian refugees and for Palestinian human rights, some of the strongest voices have been in the Republican Party and from Republican realists, although they have been quashed in recent years, as you know.
Sorry, just one second.
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Hey, let me ask you about this.
What was Ross Perot's position on the colonization of the West Bank?
I have no idea.
Because what did he get, 19%?
Yeah.
And I actually have read a thing.
I mean, who knows?
But I read a thing that said that basically all his influence was revenue neutral in the states.
You know, if you count it state by state.
Really?
That it didn't really make a difference.
Certainly overall.
Maybe it made a difference in some states, but mostly they went the way they would have gone anyway kind of thing.
Yeah.
Well, I guess that was in the years before the Russians were influencing our election.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, man.
I might die of fright.
But, you know, and I don't want to be too anti-Semitic about it, but I've got to wonder if, you know, I mean, he was from Texas.
Maybe he was a John Hagee Zionist guy.
Maybe that was part of the influence on him.
That's a good question.
Or maybe he had giant contracts.
He was, I know, an American government computer contractor company.
That's how he made his billions.
Maybe he was a giant contractor for Israel.
Maybe he had some friends encouraging him to run for president.
I'm just making stuff up.
I'm just saying that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But I'm just saying that could be part of the story, and I think that's a legitimate line of inquiry, too, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, I'm interested.
You know, I have this theory.
It's not even a theory.
It's that, you know, Israel, the road to Washington these days runs through Tel Aviv.
I mean, the Turks knew that, right?
Like, that was all the scandals of the Turkish lobby back in the Bush years was that the Turks figured out that you definitely got to go through the Israelis and get the Israelis help to set up the Turkish lobby on their own model.
Wow.
Yeah.
And we see it now with Saudi Arabia and even Russia.
You know, there's a report out today that the Russians had a deal for Syria that they went to the Israelis and said, hey, bring this to Washington for us because they knew that's the way you get there.
That's interesting.
I had missed that.
Yeah, it came out today that Russians had a deal on sort of, you know, neutralizing Iran and Syria but also, you know, getting the U.S. out and that it would involve.
But they went to – as an Israeli said to Axios, they asked us to open the gates of Washington.
So that's the way it works.
That's Axios today, huh?
OK.
I'm taking notes here, man.
I got to keep track of all this stuff somehow.
And you know about Al Jazeera's documentary being suppressed after, you know, Israel's friends wanted, you know, appeal to Qatar.
So that's how it works.
Right.
And speaking of which, everyone can find that on YouTube.
And I know you covered it.
It's at Electronic Intifada.
There's a blog entry about it at the Libertarian Institute site.
And it's so worth watching.
I mean, it's just incredible.
I got to hand it to them just in terms of work ethic.
I feel like such a loser.
And I work 12-hour days every day at least.
A lot of times a lot more than that.
But they get stuff done, these Israel lobbyist types.
Oh, my God.
And I'm sure the zillions of dollars helps.
Yeah.
I think they're pushing on an open door in a lot of cases.
Yeah.
Yeah, definitely.
But, you know, just in terms of, like, you can't see me clap my hands and have a bus full of astroturfers going around making me look like people agree with me and stuff like this.
I mean, I wouldn't know where to begin even if I had the money.
You know, they really are a capable bunch of lobbyists in many ways, legal and illegal.
Scott, I don't think that's quite your – was ever going to be your destiny.
Yeah, no, certainly not.
But it still isn't – I'm just saying I'm impressed by it in a perverse kind of a way because, of course, I resent the whole thing.
And so much of it is just absolutely dastardly where they're smearing these students and destroying congressmen and, you know, decent ones relatively and over the slightest infraction and this kind of attitude that I really don't like.
So, yeah, I mean, it's just astounding to see.
It's just like a construction worker who gets up at 5 a.m. and works all day.
Like, I really respect the hard work that goes into that.
But, you know, they're also going after our free speech rights, as you may have – it's happening down in Texas.
Hey, why don't you elaborate on some of that?
Well, Israel has pushed and the Israel lobby has pushed this legislation around the country to punish people who support a boycott of Israel.
Now, there's a movement to boycott Israel because – to finally have some accountability for its human rights violations.
And it's the BDS movement, Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions.
And numerous states, 18 states now, I think, have passed laws saying that if you participate in that boycott, then you can't be a state contractor.
And, therefore, they have demanded in state contracts in several states now a commitment that I will not advocate for a boycott of Israel.
So that is a free speech right of any American to make a political dissent that they are having to repudiate that right in contracts with the state.
And so in Texas right now, you have a few contractors to the state who are suing the university system and the attorney general saying, hey, I had to sign this contract.
It's a violation of my rights.
And one of them is George Hale at KETR, I think, in northeast Texas.
There is a schoolteacher who has had to give up a contract because of this because she doesn't want to buy Israeli hummus in the supermarket, and she says so.
So just because of that, she has to give up a state contract.
That's a punishment that really goes against our bedrock principles, as even the New York Times said the other day.
Yeah, I'm telling you, that's only one neighborhood from here in the Pflugerville town and school district there.
And, man, that story is just infuriating where she's a speech therapist for young children who desperately need speech therapy here.
And she's made to swear a loyalty oath, I love the way Tom Knapp put it.
I mean, we'd be against any loyalty oath of any kind anyway, right?
Right.
This isn't to Texas.
No.
This isn't a loyalty oath to Texas or to the United States of America.
Right.
She has to make a loyalty oath to Israel?
Yeah.
To be a contractor for the Pflugerville public school district?
Unbelievable.
Says who?
What the hell?
Unbelievable.
And don't you think the lobby is overplaying it?
I think this is a victory for the forces of human rights because this is such a blatant overreach by the Israel lobby that it's exposing the Israel lobby as anti-American in some ways.
Absolutely.
Hey, listen, if there's anything we agree on, all of us, it better be the First Amendment.
If we don't have that, we got nothing, man.
No, I agree.
Yeah, that's something I'm actually proud of about our country.
Yeah, absolutely.
And just think of how doomed we'd be without it.
Think, without that protection there, how many excuses there are for how many laws to put us all in jail for disagreeing with whoever has power about what have you.
That's the history of all of humanity up until the First Amendment, by the way.
That's great.
Yeah, I agree with you.
And then, you know, one great thing that happened out of this is the New York Times wrote an editorial calling out AIPAC and the ADL over this.
And that editorial, I think, could have appeared anti-war, could have appeared a mondo.
It was strong, and it was just saying, hey, this goes against American principles.
And it's the Israel lobby that's doing it at the behest of the Israeli government, which is somehow obsessed with BDS.
Well, screw them.
All right, hold it right there just one moment.
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Well, and that's – in a sense, it's the point of BDS is to, you know, bring attention to the cause, and they certainly have got the Israelis' attention.
And yet, you know, in effect, because of the way the Israelis have reacted – I'm not saying this is the purpose of BDS in the first place – but the Israelis have reacted basically like a mark to a troll where they just keep blowing this thing up and blowing this thing up.
I love it.
Which absolutely serves the purpose of people – I mean, look.
I mean, don't we all like Israel?
Why would people not like Israel?
Especially why would you have a bunch of American liberal Jews who are constantly complaining about Israel?
What's the problem anyway?
And then the reality is, oh, okay, this thing about the occupation I didn't understand before, but now that I do, I see.
There's really a problem here.
That's what the problem is, is the occupation of the Palestinians and all of the problems that that causes for the United States.
Anyway, wait.
So we've got to go back to Bush Senior for a minute because we've got so many great tangents here.
But once they were all so angry – I know one anecdote was that Baker – and I assume he probably said it jokingly in a way, but James Baker III is James Baker III, the Secretary of State.
And he said, F the Jews.
They don't vote for us anyway.
And so I don't know because, again, I was too young and all this argument was way over my head at the time.
But apparently that really helped to kind of galvanize reaction against them.
But what does that amount to?
Because he's right about that in a sense, technically speaking, the second part.
And so what difference did it make?
I think that – yes, I think it made a difference in money.
I had a friend who was working for Clinton at the time.
And during the Democratic primaries – I'll never forget this story – that I was talking to him.
I was a young liberal at the time.
And I was talking to him about all Clinton's great policies and on this, on economic justice, on racial justice, on health.
Just finally having a real health insurance program and health reform.
And I remember him saying, you know, Phil, these are great ideas, but you have not been to a fundraiser in a skyscraper in New York with me.
And I said, why?
What's the problem?
He says, well, you get in there and Bill gives a great speech.
And at the end of the speech you have some guy waving his hand at the back of the room.
And Clinton calls on him and the guy says, where are you on Israeli settlements?
OK?
So, you know, settlements was an issue in his fundraising that year.
And he managed to raise a lot of money.
And as David Frum puts it, the neoconservative, Bill Clinton became the most philo-Semitic president in history.
And that was partly because he supported Israel so strongly.
But he had gotten a lot of money from the Israel lobby, and it helped put him over the top.
And does that go – does that extend to Jewish Zionist donors to the Republican Party who were angry at Bush and really changed their mind and started supporting the Democrats instead?
Do you know about that?
I don't know about the donors.
I know that per what James Baker was saying – I mean, Baker was obviously making a kind of a crude political comment.
I think he's a little bit wrong in that they actually – they lost some Jewish voters in that election.
And that really could be the margin of victory in some states.
I have not analyzed it, but there is a – Mike Dasch, who's at Notre Dame, says that in comments once at the Bush International School at UT or Texas A&M, Bush himself said that he thinks that it might have cost him the election.
So it's a – Mike Dasch heard that.
And I think you'd be curious to see what – I don't know what documentation exists about Bush's state of mind, but I think that there were a number of – I think his Jewish vote went down a lot from – what was it?
88 to 92.
And what's funny, of course, is that – I'm sure you would agree with this, but it's almost certain to me that even from the point of view of the Israeli state or the leadership cast of Israeli society or whatever, that they should have followed Bush's leadership then and made a damn deal then and think of how much different and better history would have been.
Absolutely.
They would have saved – the offer was on the table, a historic concession by the Palestinians that we will accept a state on 22 percent of our lands.
It's like the Cherokees or the Apaches accepting a state out of – finally, we'll take one out of 50.
We'll take 22 percent of the land.
Give us a state.
We've been defeated again and again.
And Israelis did not move on that.
They had the hubris to think, no, we want greater Israel.
And look what they've got.
They have got the biggest crisis ever, and they are getting delegitimized before our eyes.
And more and more Americans are saying we believe in one democratic state with rights for all and religious state.
We're not down with that.
Yeah.
And the consequences for the United States too, even if you boil it down only to the fact that throughout the 1990s – I mean starting with the first World Trade Center bombing by – which was primarily done by Egyptian Islamic Jihad and their associates who did that.
Starting with that and all the way through and of course including September 11th, one major part of the motivation was American support for Israel.
Absolutely.
Bin Laden, the way he put it always was bases in Saudi Arabia, one, that are used to bomb and blockade Iraq, two, and also support for Israel in Palestine and Lebanon, three.
I mean that – and he said the same thing over and over and over again.
Yes.
And we would have defused that.
If we had been – if Oslo – even if Oslo had worked out in the 90s, if we had actually followed through on that in an honest way and created a Palestinian state, who knows what would have happened.
It would have defused a lot of that.
And they keep talking about what a bad neighborhood the Middle East is.
This neighborhood – I live in the most beautiful part of the world as far as I'm concerned.
This would be a terrible neighborhood if someone moved in and started colonizing my land.
So, yeah, we have reaped the whirlwind on this.
And by the way, I mean I know there's a lot of American bribe money involved but not absolutely necessarily.
But Israel has had a peace going on my almost entire lifetime since I was three with Egypt and with Jordan.
Yes.
And we know that however this exactly happened – you probably understand the details a lot better than me.
But the Bush administration, Bush Jr. administration stopped Ehud Olmert's government from very encouraging peace talks with Syria.
They could have had a deal with Assad and negated the need for Operation Sycamore and all of the consequences of that, Timber Sycamore, and all the consequences since then in this whole time.
If they had allowed that – but that goes to – and of course they have peace even with Hezbollah.
They have virtually solid peace for going on 20 years right now.
And so what dangerous neighborhood?
They're fine.
Yeah, yeah.
They just – the danger is that when Israelis – when you protest at the Gaza fence, Israelis are going to shoot you.
Or if you live in the West Bank, you're going to have to be going to checkpoints.
And it makes – it leads to violence in the West Bank.
So – Yeah.
I like the way – in a way the symmetry kind of of the accusation that all of the Muslim Arab nations surrounding Israel are at a permanent threat, Defcon 3 or something, to invade and kill all of the Israeli Jews and force them all to drown in the Mediterranean Sea and all of this.
When in fact that almost exact situation does apply.
Yes.
To the people of Gaza at the hands of the Israelis.
That's right.
It's the exact same accusation only in slightly miniature, scaled down I guess.
Yeah.
But in the same place, right where they're saying it and everything.
Yes.
And a lot of those people in Gaza are refugees from the creation of Israel in 1948.
And when that happened, 750,000 refugees were created, many of them forced into the sea at Jaffa.
And they had to jump into boats or rafts or anything to escape the Zionist forces.
So yeah, it's a projection.
Man, it really is something.
I'm so sorry that I'm out of time because I could just talk to you for the rest of the afternoon.
Great talking, Scott.
I really appreciate your time and all your great work, Phil.
Thanks, man.
Same to you.
All right, you guys.
That's the great Philip Weiss.
Check out his great website, mondoweiss.net, and dig through the US Politics Archive there.
I forget the title, but there's a great piece from back when Bush Sr. died about recounting this story for you.
And he's written more about that in the past too.
So check all that out at mondoweiss.net.
Hey, guys.
This is Bird and Carr from the Friends Against Government podcast here.
And you've probably heard Scott talk about the crowdsourcing effort on Reddit about his upcoming book.
All you got to do to get in is to donate $5 a month to Scott's Patreon and request to join the private Reddit group.
In Scott's Reddit group, you will find a pin post outlining the details for how you can help find source material for Scott's upcoming book by listening to archived interviews and taking a few notes.
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We look forward to seeing you in there.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan, at foolserrand.us.
