Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites 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, 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 on the line.
I got the great Grant Smith from the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy and regular writer, of course, for Antiwar.com.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Grant?
Doing well.
Thanks for having me back.
Hey, very happy to have you here.
And especially to tell the people all about the great event that you are hosting in Washington, D.C. at the National Press Club this Friday, the 22nd of March, 2019.
Absolutely.
It's an action-packed day, starting with registration and the opening of our exhibitions at 8 o'clock a.m.and then going all the way through 5 p.m. with a full program of a really wide array of speakers from different backgrounds and different perspectives.
And they'll all be talking just two days before the big American-Israel Public Affairs Committee conference.
They'll be talking about the Israel lobby and its impact on the United States.
What fun.
And it comes with lunch, you say?
Well, it comes with one of the finest box lunches in Washington, D.C., I tell you, Scott.
Well, that's really good to know, because I think if people are thinking, geez, I'm going to spend my entire day at the National Press Club, I might get hungry in the middle of that.
But you have that base covered there.
We have not only that base covered, but we have one of the most dynamite receptions in Washington, because at 5 p.m., after everyone's been going to the breakouts in our Ideas Fair and talking to other organizations that are all working on various aspects of Middle East policy, they have a chance to attend a giant reception.
We pull back the curtains, reveal the cityscape, the wall opens, and it's reception time.
So one of the most highly rated aspects of this conference, and this is the sixth one we've done, is that networking time that starts right at 5 p.m. until 7 p.m.
Great.
Now, listen, before we talk about all the great guests that you're going to have, I mean, the guest speakers and all of that that you're going to have, tell us a little bit about the Israel lobby.
Grant, you wrote a book, well, you wrote many books about this subject, and obviously run the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy.
But, you know, the controversy surrounding Ilan Omar's recent comments have probably, I would guess, have brought the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, APAC as it's called, to a lot of people's attention for the first time.
They might not know too much about this.
You know enough that you don't like it, and you host a whole event about how things really could and should be different.
So tell me first your motive for that.
What's going on with the Israel lobby that is such a problem to you anyway?
Well, once you start digging into the authorship of a lot of major policymaking in the United States, and this year I'll be focusing on how the U.S. original goal for having nuclear nonproliferation in the Middle East was essentially supplanted by Israel and its lobby's interest in Israel having nuclear weapons and the U.S. not talking about it, you start seeing that this was not a lone event, that there's a long history of the lobby and Israel supplanting U.S. policy, silencing any sort of examination through whether it's insistence on secrecy, censorship, accusing people of anti-Semitism for raising it, or government operatives simply classifying everything, and then finally really exploiting that cycle to continue to bring a lot of benefits to Israel at huge cost to the United States.
So I'm going to be talking about the supplant, silence, exploit cycle, because it's really something that's been going on since 1948 when the lobby was established in this country.
And of course, the important thing that's never discussed in any mainstream discussion, and even people who are generally good on this topic, is that the lobby really was set up essentially to influence the U.S. to give diplomatic support and arms to Israel with foreign money.
The head of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee was on the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs payroll all through the 50s.
He was receiving foreign money from Israel to set up public relations and lobbying in this country.
They were essentially caught and ordered to register as foreign agents.
But again, this supplant, silence, and exploit cycle kicked in, and instead of having a properly regulated foreign lobby whose activities are exposed and whose coordination with the Israeli government is exposed, we instead see that supplant, silence, and exploit worked once again.
When the lobby itself was able to push back on the Department of Justice registration order, silence them by insisting that everything had to be done secretly, and that all of the documents related to this would be classified until 2010, from the date of the order, 1962 to 2010, and then really exploiting that lack of proper disclosure to get all sorts of things from the United States.
Most of the aid that's been given to Israel, and it's well over a quarter of a billion dollars in known aid at this point, if you adjust for inflation, has been given since the U.S. first attempted to properly regulate the lobby.
So there are a lot of problems with this spectacle that we're going to be seeing on Sunday, where virtually the entire U.S. Congress heads over to the Washington Convention Center and essentially is there to uncritically give claims and proclamations of unconditional U.S. support for Israel.
Meanwhile, the entire rest of U.S. policy in the region is essentially in tatters.
So there's a real problem with what's been going on for decades.
And this conference has been getting bigger every year because more and more people have heard about it.
More and more people want to be a part of it.
Their conference, it's hard to say how big that's going to be this year.
I think they peaked at about 18,000 people.
Many of them just shipped in, students and people.
We don't ship in anybody because, you know, we essentially don't have the resources.
But yeah, this conference has been growing.
I hope someday that we'll outgrow the Washington Press Club, even though we like it a lot.
But, you know, it's hard to say.
They've basically, you know, they've got a hard sell this year.
They've got a lot of problems with politics in Israel.
Netanyahu's not quite the rock star.
He's under a cloud of corruption, scandals in his own country.
And they've got, you know, basically settlers taking over a lot of the party momentum over there.
They're going to have a settler speak for the first time at the AIPAC conference, which previously had had a two-state solution type of standard, because that was the American government's line.
But now that the American government has changed their line on that, then I guess it's alright that they're going to go ahead.
And that's what's really at issue here, isn't it, Grant?
That it's not just the creation of Israel in 1948, because they got away with that.
It's the fact that they annexed all of the rest of Palestine, essentially, in 1967, and all of the people with it, but never gave them any political or civil rights or liberties of any kind, and keep them under occupation this whole time.
Absolutely.
And try to deny it.
It's a root issue.
It's a root cause of a lot of the problems that, you know, people coming to our conference want addressed.
And they would like to see it done with more justice, and not just have the whole thing papered over with coordinated campaign contributions and Sheldon Adelson's demands.
In fact, one of the people coming to speak at the conference has sued Adelson and a whole bunch of these organizations and individuals who pretty much dictate and fund a lot of the policy formulation.
And so it's good to see why they're doing that, and what the damage and backlash has been to just pumping so much unregulated non-tax deductible funding into illegal settlements with absolutely no consequences or no real observation of law or IRS regulations or anything like that.
So that'll be really interesting.
But you're right.
I think it's going to be more difficult.
You know, they're pushing their whole legislative agenda.
All of these or many of these people going to AIPAC will be streaming out into Congress and demanding, Hey, keep U.S. troops in Syria.
Hey, it's time to attack Iran.
Hey, we need more money for weapons in Israel.
And hey, you've got to pass the Anti-BDS Act to strip away the rights of Americans to engage in lawful boycotts in their own country.
And it's getting to be a much tougher sell when people are willing to push back and say, Hey, you know what?
These policies are horrible.
And the way you get them implemented is incredibly corrupt.
And here's why nobody should allow this to happen.
And I think they're, you know, the counterfactual is, you know, maybe we would have been at war with Iran by now if more people hadn't been getting together at meetings like this.
Maybe, you know, maybe these draconian measures to shut down speech on campus would be even further along if people weren't organizing more.
And one of the things we're featuring at this conference are some of the organizations talking about tactics to fight these things, particularly at the state level.
Back to that in just one second.
I want to point out from what you're just saying, though, about the former head of AIPAC, Steve Rosen, once told Jeffrey Goldberg, Commissar Goldberg, back then writing for The New Yorker, that a lobby is like a night flower, the lobby, and it does its best operations in the dark.
And, you know, I think there was a time specifically before Mearsheimer and Walt, but it's almost hard to remember now where you couldn't really talk about this at all or something.
It's like the forgotten war in Korea or something.
It's just, it's not something that is really discussed.
But they've, they just got, well, first of all, their positions are too controversial now.
And also the AIPAC meetings themselves have gotten way too big.
They weren't supposed to be these giant, you know, spectacles for the whole world to see.
They're just supposed to be big enough to intimidate people with power in D.C. into going along with this thing.
But so now I wonder what you think of the context that we're dealing with, the immediate short-term political reaction aftermath of Representative Ilhan Omar's comments about the power of the Israel lobby and the money they raise and they spend in Washington, D.C., in order to get their way.
And everyone denounces this woman who never said the word Jew at all.
She made direct comparisons to the tobacco lobbies and the gun lobbies and the whichever other lobbies.
I forget which all she cited.
But she was clearly talking about money and political influence and demands based on that money and influence that American representatives must be loyal to this foreign country and that she had a problem with that.
And they said, you are such a hateful, evil, anti-Semite for even saying that that's even, has anything to do with anything.
That's a total lie and it's totally wrong.
And you would have to be an anti-Semite to say that.
And then, by the way, in three weeks is our giant, massive summit in D.C. where we're going to spend tens of millions of dollars and we're going to raise hundreds of millions of dollars spent on House and Senate races across this country to make sure.
And then they even say in the New York Times, we're going to bankroll anyone who primaries her.
We're going to take her out by spending money to back her opponents.
And they blatantly say it.
So I guess they're anti-Semites too, but anyway.
Well, I think what you're pointing out is that Omar has really revealed that not only is Steve Rosen right, they will die in sunlight if too many people find out what they're doing.
But she also revealed the fragility of their arguments.
They can't come back at her and say, why, we're actually not coordinating campaign contributions.
How dare you say that?
Because, quite obviously, that's the whole point of AIPAC is to make sure that the money flows to the right candidates.
I mean, the entire thing was born on the concept of AIPAC's mentor, Abraham Feinberg, who said, you know, I've helped a lot by making sure politicians get what they need.
And that's campaign contributions.
This is no secret if you know the history.
You know what we should do is we should make an alliance with the Yes Men or some sophisticated hoaxsters and put out a press release saying AIPAC is going to prove how wrong she is by foregoing any participation in fundraising or donations in this election cycle at all.
And prove that all congressional loyalty to Israel is based purely on the most honest emotions of the members of Congress and has nothing to do with money and put it on official letterhead.
See if we can get CNN to put that out there and see what happens.
Yeah, I think that would be tough.
I think nothing is more scrutinized and there's no more gatekeeping going on than in this particular division.
Somebody put that memo in front of Wolf Blitzer and make him read it on air and then see what happens.
Yeah, well, since Wolf used to work on the newsletter for AIPAC, I kind of doubt he'd be fooled either.
Oh, you don't say.
Nice try, Scott.
Nice try.
But, you know, just getting back to Omar, I think the fact that, you know, the lobby can't directly answer back to her.
And one of the reasons they've been so quietly pushing these state anti-BDS laws is they do manage to get them passed very quietly.
Most of the people in the states where they've been implemented, essentially making people sign what she referred to as loyalty pledges, they've all been passed in the dark of night.
And when you do any sort of polling, hey, member of the Commonwealth of Virginia, do you think these anti-BDS laws are good?
And most people say, no, they're not.
So, you know, that's the reason it tries to operate in the dark.
And one of its first strategies has been taking members of Congress on trips to Israel where they can be faded and lobbied and shown one side of the story in complete secrecy.
And so when you look across the years, you know, they started doing it when they passed some of the first truly large aid packages, when you adjusted for inflation, you know, close to a billion in today's dollars, 100 million back in the 1950s dollars.
They were able to take people to Congress, take Congress members to Israel and really reward them firsthand for having passed these aid deals.
So it's been going on a long time and it's still going on to the extent that, you know, any three members of Congress jumping on a plane to go overseas anywhere on a privately funded trip are headed for Israel.
So it's really got to be quite blatant.
I just read in The Forward last week that, I'm 99% sure it was in The Forward, it was an article about that.
Now that Sheldon Adelson seems to be dying, what about all the things that he's financing?
Man, I'm not positive, but I'm pretty sure the number was 700 and something million dollars that he had spent on birthright trips over there for young American Jews to go over there, which is just, I don't know how many actual people in and out of there that amounts to.
Well, he's not the only one who funds that though, either.
He has been one of the fastest growing Israel affinity organizations in this $6 billion per year constellation that I'm talking about in my book, Big Israel.
He's been one of the people funding it, but a lot of people have funded it and it's gotten a lot of mainstream support, even though, you know, if you're a Palestinian, you can't take a birthright trip over there, obviously.
It's creating a lot more controversy among American Jews too, because that's another thing you can read about in The Forward, is young American Jews leaving the birthright trip and going and hanging out with Palestinians in Hebron, and saying, what's really going on around here, and this kind of thing, and they don't want that.
Sure, you know, there are many that are not willing to kind of be propagandized and want to see the other side, but, you know, the members of Congress, there's nobody who's ever gotten off an AIPAC junket and tried to go do that.
That's true.
So while maybe some young JV peers and other young Jewish students going over there will do that and then expose it in Mondo Weiss, the problem is most members of Congress are making multiple trips over there, $10,000 a pop, and they're not even, you know, they're not even getting good information.
They come back terrified that this country is going to be wiped off the map.
They don't get any information about the nuclear triad that's been put together with a lot of U.S. technology and misuse of U.S. technology in terms of atoms for peace reactors like SOREC and others, and they come back with this distorted view, and so they pass all this distorted legislation.
And so Rashida Tlaib's modest proposal of not taking private funds but actually congressional funds and taking official delegation over there has been, you know, one of the most sensible things that's been said about trips, and yet that represents a gigantic threat because it would blow away five decades of carefully crafted, you know, basic myths that members of Congress have been taught.
So it's one of those situations where they just can't stand any sort of sunlight or truth or balance because it would blow up their entire agenda, and that really says a lot in itself.
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And especially in the context of the fact that these congressmen, almost all of them know nothing about anything when it comes to foreign policy at all.
In fact, I forgot if we spoke about this or not.
I'm pretty sure it was a Max Blumenthal thing where he was asking them about the Yemen vote last fall.
Just some members of the House walking around the Capitol building outside and this kind of thing.
And the responses he was mostly getting was like, I have no idea about that.
I don't know anything about that.
Look, man, I'm on the tax committee, dude.
Yemen's someone else's thing.
So, you know, the average guy reading the internet knows more about what's going on with these things than these members of Congress.
So you take one of these, you know, bimbos essentially, put them on a plane over there, and say, look at how thin the border is between the West Bank and the sea right here, and how vulnerable we are to the hordes of orcs out there that are surrounding us.
And they don't know that.
Yeah, but you've had a peace deal with Egypt and Jordan since Scott was a toddler.
And, you know, Bashar al-Assad, you were ready to make a peace deal with him before George Bush ruined it.
And so why should I believe any of this?
You know what I mean?
They don't know anything.
They don't even know where Hezbollah is from.
Do you remember this one where the reporter asked Sylvester Reyes, the head at that time, the Democratic chair of the House Intelligence Committee, after Jane Harman's, you know, treasonous removal thing going on there.
And he was in charge.
And they asked him, well, where's Hezbollah even from?
And he had no idea that they even lived in southern Lebanon.
To him, Hezbollah is a scary word that floats in the air.
He doesn't know anything about it at all.
Chair of the committee.
And Trump's pretty much the same way.
He wants them out, but he doesn't realize they're part of the government.
The ignorance is appalling, but it's also deadly because if all you have are lawmakers and elected officials bankrolled by the lobby spouting propaganda points all day, then the country's just going to keep moving into these senseless wars, wasting countless resources, really foreclosing the future of the people in the region.
And people here have to go fight those wars.
It's just unconscionable that this can be continuing so many years after 9-11.
So it's really something that there's a lot of momentum.
I don't think they're going to be able to extricate Omar Tlaib and others who are beginning to become a little more vocal on this issue without probably just completely splitting the Democratic Party for sure.
I love it.
I think it's such a great fight that's about to break out.
And you know what?
Bill Maher, he said something that was half right about this, where he said, oh yeah, and boo-hoo, you can't touch her because she's this intersectional thing where she's a refugee and she's black and she's a woman and she's not gay.
But other than that, she fits the perfect social justice warrior poster child type thing that they could never turn their back on her.
She's not going to back down on this.
And there are enough people in the Democratic Party on the left half of it who they choose her.
And then, of course, the joke is that Bill Maher was saying that, oh yeah, because of political correctness, you can't criticize her.
But who's you?
Fellow Jewish Zionists like him who want to demonize her for daring to say anything about the Israel lobby and pretend that she said something anti-Semitic because he's just as much of a little social justice crybaby as all of her supporters that he's accusing and absolutely refuses to just argue the facts on the merits.
Yeah, well, he's got a really problematic stance, an inconsistent stance on a lot of things.
I mean, he can be a really funny guy, but I just wish he would bring Max Blumenthal on because he would basically find that his inconsistencies are, you know.
Boy, wouldn't that be something to see.
Absolutely.
They foreclose any real authority on this issue.
You got that right.
That's a good choice, too, for him.
But it won't happen.
Phil Weiss is too sweet.
Max Blumenthal can get in there and say, now listen here and really lay it down.
I think you're right about that.
Absolutely.
I wonder if that could be made to happen.
I don't know.
It doesn't seem completely outside the realm of possibility, you know.
Well, he's got to leave Venezuela first.
I think he's been down there forever now.
I'm trying to get him on the show, man.
Hey, listen, tell me more about this conference.
You got Ali Abunimah is speaking there.
Tell me about him.
Well, he's the founder of the Electronic Intifada, and he's authored a bunch of books that are really interesting about the battle for justice in Palestine.
It's one of them and a bold proposal to end the Israeli-Palestinian impasse about a one-state solution.
So he's pretty much the most principled and unbending voice when it comes to advocating for the underdog.
And he has also really set the standard for journalism in terms of bringing things and stories.
And Azza Winstanley, I'm sure you've had him on the show as well.
Yeah, he's great.
With their incredible Electronic Intifada.
So he'll be speaking about the Al Jazeera censored documentary, The Lobby USA, that he had a major role in after the Qataris were intimidated by the Israel lobby not to actually air the four-part documentary about the U.S. shenanigans of AIPAC and other organizations.
He actually put it out, somehow got a hold of it and circulated it, put it on YouTube and Daily Motion and other places.
And now anyone who wants to watch it can watch it.
So he's going to not talk about the release.
He's going to talk about what this documentary actually reveals.
And because he's so on top of things, I'm sure he'll speak about whatever he wants to speak about.
He's one of the key analysts of what's going on.
Hey, listen, I got to interrupt you to say that it is so good, that documentary.
And along with that, it's so important that Ali Abunimah put that up on electronicintifada.net and also on YouTube.
And I like to say about it that if it was an undercover infiltration, secret video and microphone journalistic endeavor against any institution in the world or in America, it would be Pulitzer Prize winning stuff.
If this was about tobacco or if it was about whatever issue, I don't care, nuclear power, I don't care.
Anybody who does what this journalist did in infiltrating these groups and getting hired by these groups and spending this amount of time secretly videoing and tape recording or the equivalent audio recording of the leaders of these Israel lobby groups in some of the most heinous activities that they are committing against students at college and, of course, in influencing Congress and so many other things.
I mean, this is just absolutely spectacular reporting.
It really is.
It's just incredible to see.
I think one of the things that's so illuminating about it is unstated, which is the fact that a young, highly educated kid from the U.K. who comes over to the U.S. and says that he wants to work with them is instantly embraced and put into touch with the highest echelons of leadership, which reveals their desperation, really.
They're so, I would say, alienating to the truly principled, younger Jewish generation that when they do have this kid come in, they basically faded him, showed him around, gave him insights into all of their problems that he wouldn't have gotten otherwise and thereby revealing their weakness.
And their weakness isn't the fact that Al Jazeera made an undercover video.
It's just that all the people, all the truly conscientious people that they're trying to get into the bandwagon don't want to be on the bandwagon anymore.
Right.
And that's just because it doesn't hold up, as you and I've talked about over and over again.
Once you show somebody a map and you explain that, look, Palestine ain't the state next door.
That's why they're always talking about a possible two state solution someday is because this is occupied, conquered territory for the last 50 years.
That's the context.
The Palestinians aren't occupying the Israelis.
The Israelis are occupying the Palestinians.
They have no political rights, no civil rights, no protection of law whatsoever.
The so-called Palestinian authority that kind of clouds the issue and makes it sound like they have their own government.
Why do you think it's called an authority and not a government?
Because it's essentially like the jailers allowing the Crips or the Bloods to run as trustees and have their own sub law inside the prison.
But that doesn't mean that the people of Palestine are sovereign in any way.
They're not.
By definition, anyone who's referred to as having territories or is referred to as under an authority is colonized people.
I mean, we know that from U.S. history, the Philippines, Pacific Islands, our own Puerto Rico.
Yeah.
And I think – and I don't know if you exactly agree with this or what, if we talked about that part.
I really believe that this is why we don't ever see maps on TV and this thing really explained about who's who and for how long and what have you.
Because the American people would side with the Palestinians.
Absolutely.
But there's one thing that I believe one of our other speakers, Walter Hickson, is going to cover.
And he's written the latest sort of blockbuster book about the lobby, Israel's armor, the role of the Israel lobby in the history of the Palestine conflict, which isn't even out yet from Cambridge University Press.
He does make connections in his galleys to the U.S. history, of course, of being colonized and the frontier and the settler mentality.
And he argues that that is ingrained in U.S. culture thinking history.
And so that also helps boost the affinity that some Americans anyway feel with the Israeli side of the story.
Yeah, I absolutely agree with that.
At the same time, though, you know, I think most of American culture regrets the colonization of what happened to the Indians and that so many of them died, whether of disease or outright death squads hunting and murdering them.
A terrible history of how the West was lost by the Indians.
And most Americans now, I think, wish that their great grandparents had done a better job of figuring out how to.
I mean, it was inevitable the Europeans were coming and there was no stopping them, but it didn't have to play out as horribly as it did.
And that's the consensus, right?
You know, we wish it had been done a different and a better way.
So how does that translate to support for the Israelis mimicking our worst kind of version of the way Manifest Destiny was carried out?
Right.
Supposedly we're more enlightened about Jim Crow, more enlightened about that era.
Exactly.
Don't want to go back to that.
And yet our policy and our tax dollars are supporting just that.
And that I think is the best metaphor, really.
That's the best analogy I like to invoke nowadays is this is essentially the West Bank is like the Mississippi in 1955 when it's still Plessy versus Ferguson and you can't do a damn thing about it.
And if you know, yeah, we have a limited government.
Unless you're black, you live in a totalitarian police state.
That's how it is in Palestine.
Right.
And so I think he's going to help us with that, that whole story.
And I'm going to throw out a name I didn't throw out last time we talked, which is Kathy Drinkard.
You're going to be like, who, what?
And she's a former educator in Virginia, and she's at the forefront of an organization called the Virginia Coalition for Human Rights.
And what they're working on, they're fighting to keep their textbooks from being politicized.
And she's going to be on a panel from that organization at the very end of the conference.
And she's going to be talking about how they're trying to keep the local Israel affinity organizations from editing the textbooks so that settlements, you know, that's even a euphemism.
They're not called colonies, but they're trying to change references to settlements, to references to neighborhoods.
They're trying to control discussions in textbooks about occupation and, you know, put in more softer language like Israeli control.
And, you know, they've got to fight pretty much line by line through seven to 10 high school K through 12 social studies and history textbooks.
And keep an eye on this because the incessant demands for softening and making the Israeli version of history in the Middle East is just a constant battle in that state.
And so that is amazing.
You could write a sitcom about that or something.
It sounds like to me.
Well, but I mean, here it is.
Here's the fact, you know, underfunded, small but concerned groups of people with experience in particular industries can actually make a difference when they strike back, put out news releases, argue in public budget hearings and just make a lot of noise.
It really is, again, getting back to the whole cycle of supplant silence and exploits.
They're breaking the cycle and not being silent.
And they're saying, look, we don't want our textbooks modified to propagandize for the Israelis.
And, you know, on the same organization, they've got another guy, Jim Metz, who has a lot of industry experience in Virginia.
Wait, get back to that in a second, because I wanted to apologize for making light of the absurdity of the Israel lobby stooping to such depth.
But I didn't want to undermine what you're saying about this great lady and her efforts.
And as you're saying, it's proved to be effective that you can push back against this nonsense.
Oh, yeah.
Yes, you can.
Sure.
OK, now I'm sorry.
Tell me about Jim Metz.
Well, so Jim Metz noticed a long time ago that there's this entity that was created back in the 90s called the Virginia Israel Advisory Board that had all of these quasi governmental powers.
And he began looking into it and found out that not only are they state funded, but basically they're replicating the Virginia Economic Development Commission's work.
Except all they do is try to benefit Israeli companies all day and essentially bring them into the states, claim that it's making a lot of job opportunities, claim that, you know, the Virginians couldn't do any of these things themselves with proper business plans.
And dug into it and really got a lot of inside documentation from the governor's office, Ralph Northam's office, about what they were really up to.
And there's just a lot of self-dealing, a lot of claims, false claims about their economic impact.
And so they've put a spotlight on that and the fact that Virginia's trade deficit with Israel has just been booming and that the goal of a lot of these companies is to get military contracts now that there's sort of a buy USA mandate in the annual aid package.
And so they're exposing all of that and they're calling for the shutdown and audit of this organization.
And so they've got a really solid case.
They've been developing against it.
They've been very vocal in the state.
They've done some polling in the state, finding that people are against this organization.
So it's another case of people always asking, well, what can I do?
This is so overwhelming.
Well, they're basically fighting AIPAC astroturf organizations in their state.
And they're saying, no, you guys are wasting money.
You're making false claims.
The public doesn't want you.
Maybe you're able to fund politicians, which is always the name of the game with the Israel lobby.
But, you know, the people in the state don't want this.
And the Virginia Israel Advisory Board is kind of hitting a stone wall with this group.
So I think that'll be probably one of the most exciting panels because it answers the question.
Well, what can I do?
And the answer is always.
You can join a local organization that knows what's going on and work with them.
And that's where this group came from.
They came from a bunch of different organizations, different rich mongers for peace and Jewish voice for peace chapters in the states.
And they put together a coalition to specifically tackle some of the most harmful Israel lobby programs in their state because, you know, they realize that the lobby is the source of the problem.
It's not something that you can't fight back.
And so by making that realization, by saying, yes, it is, in fact, a lobby, that's a problem here.
What can we do about it?
They've come up with some great programs for exposing and breaking the cycle.
Great, man.
That's great.
OK, so they say you're not supposed to ask questions that you don't already know the answer to.
Not that you're on trial and I'm cross examining you or anything, but who's James North?
James North has been burning up Mondoweiss for years now.
He's a guy who was on the ground in South Africa during apartheid and wrote a book about it, about the battle for rights in South Africa.
And James North, who's obviously not as famous as founder or co-founder Philip Weiss of Mondoweiss, is the guy who tracks the New York Times all day long.
And so he's got this fantastic presentation he's making about all of the tactics the New York Times uses to rig the news on Israel-Palestine.
And they're so brilliant.
And I've seen some of his slides, so I'm not going to I'm not going to reveal anything.
But it just blew me away that he has deconstructed the New York Times propaganda model for this issue to the extent that, you know, I just I feel sorry for the Times.
I mean, it's a great newspaper in some respects, but he is cold, absolutely cold on what they've been doing for decades in their so-called news reporting on this issue.
So he's going to be talking about specifically his presentation is how the New York Times rigs the news on Israel-Palestine.
Cool.
Man, I can't wait to, I don't know, find out what he said later.
Yeah, there's not a lot of video of the guy, not a lot of audio.
So it's I think it's important to see the man himself and and see this, you know, his his distillation of years of great work.
Tell me more about more people speaking at this thing.
Yeah, sure.
So I'm trying to look for the ones that we haven't talked about before.
And certainly I'm not I'm not sure that we talked about Martin McMahon.
I was just going to ask you, he seems like an interesting character.
Well, he's a very interesting character.
He's with this firm called McMahon and Associates, and he filed two lawsuits back in 2015.
One of them was suing the Treasury Department, the IRS and a whole bunch of nonprofit organizations.
And basically saying, look, you know, here's the New York Times, which says that you funneled 50 billion dollars into illegal settlements.
And none of that has any tax exempt social welfare benefit.
So I'm suing all of you.
And of course, the government has unlimited resources and he was not able to sustain that lawsuit.
But at the same time, he filed another lawsuit against Sheldon Adelson, Haim Saban, Ahava, that group that's always funding the IDF, Friends of the IDF.
And basically did so on behalf of Palestinians who are being ethnically cleansed by Israeli settlers.
And his lawsuit was kicked out of court in the D.C. circuit and he appealed it.
And some judges just recently ruled in the appeals and the appellate level that his arguments about ethnic cleansing and financial harm could in fact be litigated because they had absolutely nothing to do with U.S. foreign policy.
Oh, and by the way, Elliott Abrams is one of the defendants of his lawsuit.
And so, of course, he enjoys unlimited Department of Justice litigation support because of his role now in the Trump administration.
But anyway, he successfully beat them in appellate court.
They were trying to get the thing thrown out and the judge said, no, these are actually things that should be settled.
So they've just sent it down to the lower court to keep going.
So he's going to talk about his successful lawsuit and why they can actually proceed with these sorts of things.
And I hope he gives people more hope that you should at least try to sue on some of these issues.
And so that's really why he's going to be there.
Fantastic litigator who's actually brought a win to the table.
Cool.
Very cool.
All right.
So pick another.
Well, here's one you haven't heard.
The editor of The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs is going to be covering why talking about the Israel lobby matters.
And she's got a very I mean, obviously, The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.
It's a 30 year old magazine founded by former diplomats.
It had a big impact on finally reporting and exposing stealth Israel packs and their ties to AIPAC back in the 80s and 90s.
You know, really showing that AIPAC was coordinating these groups with anodyne names to contribute and break some limits on contributions to the people that they wanted to win elections because they thought they'd be good for Israel.
So The Washington Report's been reporting on the region from the region, all sorts of news for decades.
And she's going to be kicking off the conference, talking about why the Israel lobby matters, contextualizing some of the new so-called controversies that you've been talking about with Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar and Ocasio-Cortez, as well as why these sorts of issues always seem to wind up as issues about approaches to topics and how to talk about things as opposed to actually talking about them.
So she's got a really interesting presentation.
I, again, I've seen it, so I'm not going to say anything more because it's going to be fantastic live the day of.
And so we've talked about Walter Hickson.
We've talked about Ali Abunimah.
Right in the middle of the morning, instead of just drinking coffee, there's going to be this thing called the Ideas Fair.
And I think people who come to the conference are going to be amazed because it's basically a whole bunch of organizations that have been working on these things for decades, have little tables set up of all sorts of materials.
And they're going to be talking to people at the conference about what their initiatives are and why they're productive.
So you've got Eyewitness Palestine, Americans from Middle East Understanding, Consortium News is going to be there as a media organization doing good work.
Mondoweiss has a booth there.
The Museum of Palestinian People has an entire room with portions of their museum set up.
The Virginia Coalition for Human Rights has a bunch of their people are going to be presenting.
Rather than just mill around or buy some books this year, it's actually going to be all about interfacing with some organizations, finding out how they were created, how they work.
And so it's a real break from some of our previous conferences where we had a lot of speakers from such organizations, but didn't necessarily have their representatives there interacting with the audience.
So that's going to happen three times during the conference.
They're not really breakout sessions.
They're really free form and just go talk to the people set up all over the National Press Club.
So they'll be in the Holman Lounge.
They'll be in the West Room or the Ballroom.
They'll be in the Bloomberg Room.
I mean, just everywhere you turn, there are going to be these organizations doing great work with some of their materials and best people there to talk to the attendees.
Right on, man.
That sounds like so much fun and like a lot of great work is going to get done there, too.
A lot of great speeches to be given.
Well, yeah.
People have come away from this conference and then written books.
People have come away from this conference and then formed new organizations.
And that's really what it's all about.
You know, it's really important for people who understand that there's something wrong to get together and figure out how to fix the situation.
And so that ideas fair is going to happen in the morning, at lunch and in the afternoon.
And I think the fact that we've got for our keynote, Susan Abulhawa, whose stark title of her speech is Israel More Than Apartheid.
She has spoken at the conference before.
She blew people away.
I think it was the only standing ovation.
Well, one of the only ones we've ever had.
And she's really going to be talking about the Israel of reality versus the Israel of public relations and lobbying.
And she's got an incredible trajectory of being born to refugees expelled during the 67 war to Kuwait and being brought up and understanding what the situation was.
And has written some incredible books about about what's going on.
She's really poetic and very impactful in her presentations.
Again, I don't want to get too much into the content of it, but I've taken I've taken a quick look for technical reasons to make sure it looks good at the press club.
And she's just got a presentation is just going to blow everyone away again.
And it's really from somebody who doesn't ever, you know, this profile of person with direct ties just doesn't get a platform in the US, much less, you know, at the National Press Club.
So she's she's got a really interesting, hard hitting expose that's going to be 30 minutes of pure, unadulterated.
You know, this is what's happening.
Here's what you can do that I think is going to be one of the best keynotes we've ever had.
Cool, man.
Well, you don't need it, but best of luck to you with this thing.
I know it's going to be really great.
It's this Friday starts at eight o'clock in the morning.
Don't worry about spending all day at the press club because you get a box lunch, too.
And maybe you get to meet Max Blumenthal.
I did last year.
It was really cool.
He shows up at a lot of these and, you know, we can't promise anything, but a lot of a lot of interesting people show up.
That's true.
Yeah, no, I got to meet Jim Loeb there finally in my life, which was cool.
I didn't know if I'd ever get a chance to meet him in person.
And I love that guy.
In fact, I got to say not to highlight the video aspect of this thing too much because I want people to show up at the press club.
But one time a few years ago, you had Jim Loeb give a speech about the neoconservative movement.
That's one of the greatest speeches anybody ever gave about anything as far as what people need to know.
Yeah.
Neoconservatism in a nutshell, it was called.
Right.
Yes, exactly.
Neoconservatism in a nutshell.
Jim Loeb, who has been covering the neocons as a distinct species of Republican hawk since the late 70s.
And in fact, maybe even the early 70s when they were still Scoop Jackson Democrats and this and that.
But he's been on their case for decades and knows the subject as well or better than anyone and gave such a great speech about that back then.
Well, and if people can't make it, I would urge them to subscribe to the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs YouTube channel, the Wormia channel.
If you subscribe, you'll get a notice of when it goes live.
We usually, of course, webcast these things.
And if you also go to the Israel Lobby and AmericanPolicy.org website or just punch in Israel Lobby Con in your browser, you should see some video coming up, once again, directly streamed to that conference web page.
Yeah.
So look, if you can go, go.
But if you can't, then check out the video for sure.
Of course, people should go.
You know, there's no video stream that's ever going to replace face to face.
And especially with the Ideas Fair.
I'm not even sure how our crack video streaming crew is going to cover that.
Probably, you know, they'll be learning how to do it.
But you got to go if you can.
And if you can't, you can also see it on Wormia, W-R-M-E-A.org, I-R-M-E-P.org.
So, you know, people can tweet in questions to hashtag Israel Lobby Con and certainly the chat channel in the YouTube stream on the Wormia channel.
So, you know, if you can't, you can still try to get some questions into these great speakers.
We always do a good moderated Q&A where we get all the best questions bundled together and shot across the bow of the speakers.
And also Israel Lobby and AmericanPolicy.org is the official site of the event, right?
That's it.
There you go.
The Israel Lobby and American Policy Conference 2019, March 22nd, all day at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
Thanks again for coming on the show, Grant.
Appreciate it.
Thanks so much.
All right, you guys, that's Grant F. Smith, author of Big Israel and director of the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy.
That's I-R-M-E-P.org, I-R-M-E-P.org.
You can also find all those articles at AntiWar.com.
And once again, the site for the event is IsraelLobbyandAmericanPolicy.org.
All right, y'all, thanks.
Find me at LibertarianInstitute.org, at ScottHorton.org, AntiWar.com, and Reddit.com slash Scott Horton Show.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan, at foolserrand.us.
