All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, introducing the great Grant F. Smith, the founder and director of the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy, IRMEP, I-R-M-E-P, IRMEP.org.
And he wrote a whole bunch of books, and they're all about different aspects of one thing, the Israel lobby, and it's corrupt and aboveboard, but also maligned influence on American politics.
The last one was Big Israel.
The new one is The Israel Lobby Enters State Government, and it's full of a bunch of say-it-ain't-sos.
I'll tell you what, too.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Grant?
Hey, Scott, thanks for having me back.
Appreciate you being here, man.
So this book, it's called The Israel Lobby Enters State Government, Rise of the Virginia Israel Advisory Board.
That sounds like a lot of fun, or maybe not.
Maybe it sounds completely innocuous.
What could your problem possibly be?
What is the Virginia Israel Advisory Board?
Well, the Virginia Israel Advisory Board is a unit of the government in Virginia, as the name implies, that was spurred on by Eric Cantor before he went on to bigger and better things in Congress.
Its mandate was to, as you might guess, bring Virginia as a state and Israel as a country together in terms of increasing mainly Israeli exports to the state, and closer economic ties in other ways, as well as cultural exchanges.
And so the interesting thing about this is that it is the only entity across the United States in terms of having an actual agency of the state mandate.
It's not an outside chamber of commerce like you find across the important states of the United States, from Texas and New England to California.
It's not a 501c3 nonprofit outside of government with a board of directors struggling to raise funds and, of course, send legislators and governors to Israel and demanding signing MOUs to increase trade.
It's not that.
It's an actual state-funded board with a slot of members drawn from a number of different parts of the government, and in particular, local Jewish federations, to spearhead all sorts of economic projects that tap state resources.
And so it was formerly positioned as a office inside the office of the governor.
But when it ran into some opposition to its choice of a new executive director and realized that the governor had sole authority to appoint that director, they reconstituted themselves into the much more pliable state legislature so that they could appoint their own executive director.
And so this new book, The Israel Lobby Interstate Government, is about the history of the Virginia Israel Advisory Board and the very large impact it's had on trade and the use of various pools of state money to advance Israeli companies inside the Commonwealth.
Man, you know, it's a really kind of a fun story to read, in a way, just for how outrageous it all is.
I mean, if you had this kind of an agency representing any American interest, this would be the poster child for corruption, crony capitalism.
Not outright government contracting, but such government intervention on behalf of companies and putting their thumb on the scale in terms of special tax treatments here and subsidies there and all this kind of stuff.
It's really quite astounding.
It's the kind of thing where it makes me wonder, if it wasn't about the Israel Lobby being behind this whole thing, whether this would be a gigantic scandal and we could all watch about it on 60 Minutes and stuff.
Well, I had an opportunity to talk to a state legislator who I can't name a couple of weeks ago, and his perspective is that given the way economic development is done in the Commonwealth and the fact that money plays such a huge role, there are unlimited campaign contributions from unlimited sources, both inside and outside the state, that he felt that it's more representative of general corruption across the Commonwealth.
I don't know if he was dodging the question, but didn't quite feel that it was anything out of the ordinary.
There are different perspectives on that.
I might be assuming too much.
That is how business is done in America, right?
It is a quasi-free market.
Wink-wink.
Exactly.
As you've said, the state subsidies make this more like Tammany Hall in New York and a giant political machine that's growing as we speak than a lot of other different Israel lobbies, even like AIPAC, which are not part of the government in terms of actually being a government agency, although they have extreme influence over the legislature.
Virginia is somewhat unique in terms of I can basically walk into any member of the state assembly with a $50,000 check from a corporation or an individual and pretty much sit down and talk business.
It's an extremely fluid environment when it comes to this sort of thing.
The thing that makes Viab unique is that they are inside the government.
They're not lobbyists coming in from outside and writing checks.
They are calling members of the legislature to come to their office in the Pocahontas down the block, that's what it's called, and meet with them around their table as they gather other fellow state agencies, including from the Attorney General, from the Economic Development Partnership, and basically flesh out preferential market entry points for Israeli companies.
This includes such luminaries as Orin Safety Glass to make bulletproof tank windshields.
It includes Sabra Dipping Company to try to dominate the market in that particular package foods.
It involves Aqua Mouth, which is an Israeli company that as part of a Viab study tour, they noticed that aquaculture is big at a certain latitude in Virginia and wanted to take away the market of a domestic producer, so they've put together a nice almost $12 million incentive package for them to come in as a struggling company and take over that market.
It involves other industries such as the solar energy industry, where Energex wants to install half a billion dollars of utility scale solar projects across the state to be able to become a major electricity provider, making the utility purchase their generated electricity over 30 year periods as they spread out these vast solar arrays.
We're talking about big money, giant government subsidies, and a lot of secrecy.
When Amazon went in to Northern Virginia instead of hostile territory in New York, Virginia's economic development folks were very open about their courting and putting together incentives, rebates of training costs, tax holidays, etc., etc. for them to come.
It was a public bidding war to get Amazon to come into the state, whereas when you're talking about the Virginia Israel Advisory Board and its portfolio of projects, it actually codenames them so that they are not revealing who is actually behind the, well, they're not really investments in terms of bringing new money into the state, but hide the Israeli counterpart.
This book is the very first book that unmasks the various companies, such as Project Turbine was Energex, Project Ballistic was very obviously Orin Safety Glass, Project EcoWave Power, which we didn't put into the book, was a company to generate power from tidal movement, Vegan non-meat producer and packager was Sabra Dipping Company, Project Jonah was Aquamouth from Israel, and although it didn't make it into the book, the company behind a biofuels operation was also unmasked under subsequent articles.
The idea was to put a spotlight on the large amounts of taxpayer funding or simple state economic development funding that these secret projects were pulling into their coffers in an almost, I would say, unprecedented cloak of secrecy that could be penetrated via the Virginia Freedom of Information Act, which is much stronger and much faster than the federal FOIA.
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So to sum up here, to zoom out a little bit and recapitulate the story, we're talking about a chamber of commerce type group, but whose interest is in not promoting the companies in Virginia, but in promoting Israeli companies to come in and compete with, in many cases, outright supplant the industries and leaders in the state who are already there.
But not through free market competition at all, but because this chamber of commerce is actually a state agency.
This Israel lobby group has been enthroned as a state agency and intervenes directly on their behalf with tax incentives and subsidies in order to help foreign companies come in and destroy domestic ones.
And right under everybody's nose.
Right.
That's the gist of it, except for a couple of details.
They're not chambers of commerce.
The Texas-Israel Chamber of Commerce is a chamber of commerce, but they're outside.
The Southeast Region Association, called Connex, is an Israel chamber of commerce, where all of the people involved are promoting Israel and trying to get the state that they work in to do something.
Which, hey, it's a global free market, and the more competition, the better for the consumer.
That's one thing.
That's different.
Right.
Right.
That is, I would say, that is acceptable.
If you want to try to increase commerce on your own dime between the U.S. and a small foreign country with your resources, that's fine.
But that's not what's going on here.
And so I would argue that this is not a chamber of commerce.
And the director of this unit, Dov Haak, who was imported from Israel to run it, after running some state chambers of commerce, makes a real distinction, where he says, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
We're sitting down as fellow members of government, and I can make people do things that I could not when I was in the chamber of commerce.
So if you really go through the model of looking at different entities, which we do in the final chapter, chapter 11, it's not an advisory board.
It doesn't advise anybody.
So it's really just like AIPAC is not a political action committee.
It's not, for the most part, putting together money and paying it out to candidates.
So the name Virginia-Israel Advisory Board is misleading.
The model they most represent is an export promotion board, except they should actually be located in Israel and openly working as a promoter of Israeli exports, including companies.
But they're not.
They're sitting inside the Virginia state government, exporting companies and trying to invest Virginia resources within Virginia.
So they most represent a foreign export promotion board that is attempting to basically explode even further the Virginia trade deficit with Israel, which under the U.S.-Israel Free Trade Agreement is already a half a billion dollar deficit per year with Israel.
Their activities are on track to massively increase that already large deficit by importing, for the most part, licenses, proprietary technology, inputs into things like biofuels, and exporting the net income and equity in these various businesses.
So it's a really interesting model in that its name is so deceptive, and then it's engaged exclusively and not even in coordination with the legitimate, I would say, state economic development partnership, if any really is.
But if you had to say that economic development with the hand of the state is something that should be done, and not just the free market, there's already a Virginia Economic Development Partnership, but they don't work very closely with them.
And the Virginia Economic Development Partnership doesn't know what they're up to half of the time.
So it's designed to deliver preferences.
It's designed to get these companies, some of which are on very shaky grounds and really don't have a lot going for them, and are like ore and safety glass was built in a tiny kibbutz of basically stolen Palestinian land and struggled and struggled until it started getting massive inputs from Greenfield County in its current location, including a practically free building and all sorts of other goodies.
There's a lot of, from the perspective of this is not the free market, these are, in the case of Oren, it's a company that came in on the expectation of massive Pentagon contracts, got extreme funding from the county, benefited from all sorts of giveaways and goodies, and then couldn't even deliver on its defense contracts.
But it's something that could have only happened in a culture of secrecy where the local media was never on the case except to rewrite a press release once in a while.
And they've actually managed to keep going, I would say, until now.
Now there is a lot of attention, not from the news media, but from local human rights groups that are beginning to become aware of the fact that a lot of these companies have had ties to settlements, have had ties to doing projects in the occupied Golan Heights, etc., etc.
So there's at least a grassroots and I would say new media awareness of what's happening with Bayeb.
Oh, that's really important.
That's one of the most important parts of the book here is that these companies are directly tied, not just somehow indirectly, but directly tied to things like land rustling on the Golan Heights, for example.
Right.
Well, there are mainstream human rights organizations that have kind of outed Energex in this case, which is in solar and wind energy, along with its parent company, Ohlone Hetz, for, again, displacing people to build projects, building projects in occupied territories, just running into conflicts with various Palestinian groups.
And so they bring this question to the fore, which is, do you really want your state, the state that you pay taxes to, coddling and advancing sort of settler colonial business projects on your dime?
And most people, you know, particularly in some of these economically challenged areas, they don't want to look too closely at investment, because if you're in Southwest Virginia, where coal has collapsed, where tobacco has collapsed, where virtually everything from furniture companies to the local business relying on other things such as wood and agriculture has gone out of business, you don't look too closely at any project that's coming in that says, yeah, we're going to create 40 jobs, invest $3 million in capital into an abandoned building.
And we promise to pay at least a $35,000 salary to each of those full-time employees.
You wouldn't particularly want to look at that gift horse in the mouth.
But it turns out that in many cases, these promises have been made, the county and in this case, Tobacco Commission, which is trying to revitalize these areas with settlements from tobacco industry lawsuits amounting in over a billion dollars in the case of Virginia, have paid out funds to get some of these things going.
And the funds never come back, or a few of them come back, and no project is ever built.
So yeah, there is attention.
There's growing attention to the false promises that have been made by VIAB, which is essentially a press release mill.
They will put out annual reports claiming massive job creation, massive tax revenues generated.
And it got so bad to the point that the last governor's administration, while they were still inside the governor's office, one of the economic development people said that they just thought these claims were inflated without merit, was the quote.
And so not only, I mean, you would expect someone trying to put their hands on the free market and engage in state planning, particularly with the added risk of a foreign company's involvement and shaky companies over there, not to have a very high success rate, but these guys have truly had a series of disasters where they would just like people to forget that there ever was a fish farm project, which was supposed to open up in 2015.
Because here it is, 2020, five years later, the money's gone, there's no fish farm, and I actually went to the place where it was supposed to be built, which was a secret site, just to make sure, there's no fish farm there.
And there's a lot of hype and a lot of kind of juggling around.
And there are a number of people from the Israeli company that are supposed to pay the money back for the millions that they've taken in economic development funding, but they're keeping a very low profile.
They didn't even want their company name to be circulated in public.
So it's kind of, I guess, Scott, kind of what you would expect, except the hype machine, and particularly the ascension this week of a Virginia Israel Advisory Board board member to become Speaker of the House in Virginia, Eileen Filler-Corn is her name.
It's fantastic, because, you know, she's the first woman who's ever going to have led in 400 years the Commonwealth's legislature.
So there's a ton of hype.
Congratulations from Hillary Clinton, congratulations from the state Democratic Party.
The telegrams, you know, I'm just being facetious, but they're pouring in.
But nobody's looking at her role in steering any of this economic development funding.
And as the book foretold, she's kind of a creature of Viab in another sense as well, in that every Virginia Israel Advisory Board member, upon her running to become a major state legislature in the Fairfax area, which is a critical part of Virginia, made large contributions, whether they were Republicans or Democrats, to get her in place.
So this is Tammany Hall.
This is, you know, Boss Tweed beginning to dole out contracts for $75 chairs during the Depression.
So it's a repeat of history, but there's no press on the case in terms of the mainstream media or even, you know, the Virginia Mercury, which is the upstart.
Yeah, we're not taking prisoners.
We're going out and investigating unit, which just happens to get Democratic Party PAC contributions as part of its funding strategy.
So it's just, at one level, it's sordid and unseemly.
But it's also, as you say, it's a fascinating story just because of all the gyrations and machinations of this board, which, you know, I got to tell you about what's going to happen to Virginia FOIL law after this book came out, but that's a whole other story.
All right, well, wait, save that one for the end of this, because I want you to actually go in and talk about the Glass Company, the Fish Farm, and the Sabra Hummus and all this stuff, because these are great kind of anecdotes illustrating your story here, man.
So can you start with the bulletproof glass scam here?
Yeah, let's start with that, because really, I think it's one of the most important, because Mel Chaskin, who's the chairman of the board of Viab, he came out of defense contracting.
He came up in the 60s and 70s as a defense contractor, did very well for himself.
And under his tutelage, one of the major inflows of defense contractors from Israel is coming in to take advantage of the fact that they can essentially get a giant share of the Obama administration MOU as manufacturers of a billion dollars in Israeli manufactured goods, but they can also get some of the US $3.8 billion in defense aid by manufacturing in the state.
So rather than even have these contracts go to US companies, as dubious as that is, the Israeli companies are coming in to get that, and probably will.
But anyway, Orin Safety Glass came in to manufacture bulletproof glass for MRAPs, mine-resistant ambush-protected all-terrain vehicles, and their success was predicated upon getting US government contracts to manufacture glass.
And so they opened in Greensville County, near Emporia, and they had to overcome a couple of challenges to get into this business.
One of them was that the US government doesn't just accept anyone's bulletproof glass.
You actually have to manufacture it according to a secret recipe that the government, the army, owns.
It's their secret recipe, and all of the ballistic testing and characteristics and specs of the glass are secret.
So you have to be able to handle secret information in your facility, and Orin Safety Glass didn't have that in 2014 when it went after the contracts.
And so, but they lowballed all of the industry, typical military contractors, and because of that, they got some contracts to build bulletproof glass.
But it turned out that they didn't think they could access the materials, they knew they couldn't get the materials to manufacture the recipe, so they just used their own recipe to manufacture and deliver glass, which was installed on MRAPs and shipped overseas.
The army was notified that their glass was out of spec, and they were under extreme pressure because this glass was not able to withstand the types of threats that they required in the product, and there was also a lawsuit that came at them.
And so, OSG, after having delivered all of this faulty glass, had to agree to only use the US Army's recipe in their manufacturing.
They quietly repaid $5 million in 2016 because the government had to go through all these extra steps in testing, and in some cases, replacing glass.
And of course, the Virginia and Israel Advisory Board portrays Orin Safety Glass as this massive success, as does all of the press in Virginia.
So they'll run headlines like, Orin Safety Glass expands Greensville County, Virginia manufacturing complex.
But a far more accurate headline would have been, Greensville County expands Orin Safety Glass complex.
I mean, really, that is what happened, in fact.
So what the county has done is, it's gone into debt to bring Orin Safety Glass into their region.
It has given them a building and allowed them to acquire it for the cost of their outstanding loan on the building.
It has worked diligently to make sure that they had the electricity and the trained employees they needed.
But it doesn't appear that the Orin Safety Glass is meeting any of its performance agreements.
They heavily use temporary employees.
They were supposed to have 150 full-time employees, but it's uncertain whether that's actually occurring.
And whenever the county tries to get some information about what's actually going on, they typically get letters saying that, assuring them that everything is going well, but nothing actually of the substance of an audit.
So it's looking bad because Orin Safety Glass' contracts have plummeted since 2016.
It looks as though the Army doesn't trust them anymore and that they squandered one of their biggest opportunities just by not delivering in spec products.
But this is kind of symbolic.
I mean, this is what's going to happen when everything is state-funded and there's no real skin in the game.
I mean, in fact, think of it, right?
So never mind the fact that the customer is the military rather than any kind of free market customer.
They're spending other people's money, so they have an incentive to be kind of loose with good-enough-for-government-work kind of ideals about things.
But on the other side, on the supplier side, these guys can't arrange for private investors to put up the money for all of this stuff that they need to make their glass?
Why not?
Why would they need government support?
It's because they don't have their act together by definition, or at least they have less reason to need to get their act together when they're on the dole as they're starting up their business here.
Exactly.
So there is no market discipline because, as you say, the buyer is the sole source buyer.
It's the military.
It's the Army.
I mean, there aren't any market forces in those transactions.
Exactly.
Because they don't have private equity, nobody's really watching, and the county, which does have public equity, they're just not in a position to oversee this, nor should they, because for the most part, they shouldn't even be in this position.
So it's a terrible story.
I think the theme of this is sham contracting versus the effect of state planning.
So it's a horrible story that has only, for the most part, defrauded taxpayers who have to pay for MRAPs and put the county in jeopardy.
It doesn't look like they could go bankrupt over Orin Safety Glass, but now they have on their hands a company that really needs the United States to be involved in ground wars all across the Middle East because they've got to sell bulletproof glass.
I mean, they can make it for the occasional freight train, but that's not their business.
Freight trains need really good glass, too, but these guys are in the business as military contractors.
It's how they came up, and it's the kind of business they do in Israel where they came out of, again, a tiny kibbutz that was dedicated to supplying the Israeli military.
So it's an incredible story.
But the other stories are just as incredible.
The story of the solar energy company, Energix and Ohlone Hatz, I think the real theme there is insider dealing, in which VIAB board members have been directly involved as officers of the Israeli companies that are coming into the market.
And so Project Turbine, as it's known, is trying to- You can't make this stuff up, man.
You just can't.
Well, the funny thing is, are all the little anecdotes, because- Yeah, I'm sorry.
I didn't mean to interrupt.
No, no, no.
Please keep going, because I like the whole story version of this.
The long version is good.
All right, well, Project Turbine, as they said, is a multi-billion dollar Israeli real estate and renewable energy concern with properties in D.C. and northern Virginia, and it's developing solar energy sites in Virginia to produce electricity.
So there's nothing, I don't think, wrong with solar energy.
It's a pretty interesting thing, especially for off the grid applications and if you just happen to have a ton of land that can be put to no productive use, but that's not what's going on here.
In particular, Virginia Israel Advisory Board member Aviva Frye, who came up through the catering and travel agency world, and this is kind of a common theme, is few of the people on VIAB have any experience in the industries they're trying to bring into Virginia, but anyway, she would go into the governor's office and other government agencies as a Virginia Israel Advisory Board member.
In fact, we got a bunch of her emails, and she goes in requesting these meetings to discuss Energix, but she requests the meeting as a Virginia Israel Advisory Board member.
So she's already got the inside track with setting up these appointments, and she also set up appointments with various energy development and energy regulators inside the state government.
So Aviva Frye has had her name on four major contracts to produce, in one case, 60 megawatts of energy over 35 years as an executive of the Israeli company that wants to build these things.
So they need state law to permit seamless interconnection with Dominion Energy.
They would like to be able to sell at the highest rate possible.
They would like to be able to accelerate their permitting so they can, in many cases, clear cut giant swaths of forest to make their plants, their solar arrays possible.
It basically involves cutting down trees and then treating the ground with all sorts of pesticides and then installing a number of panels.
So Aviva Frye is working out of a government-funded building to bring in an Israeli company where she is a vice president at that Israeli company, and is trying to make the state government contracts and make the interconnection with the local utility grid much easier.
One of the biggest projects she worked on was a giant data center in Mineral Gap, which is something that she met directly with regulators to pitch solar energy as something that should drive this plant since it was, or this data farm, since it was in a fairly remote area.
But then suddenly, a new company actually signed the contract, which was called SunTribe Solar, and we go into in the chapter about how it looks as though SunTribe now, for sensitive projects, and those projects in Northern Virginia, is the new front company for Energex and Ohlone when they deal with things like public schools and smaller scale rooftop connections.
So we've got an article coming out in depth about that in a few weeks.
But needless to say, the real story of Energex, like the story of Appalachian biofuels, is self-dealing.
It's a case where a board member gets to run around inside government, making appointments as a government official, but also being not just on that side of the transaction, but also the Israeli side of the transaction as well, with unknown equity in the solar projects as a Energex Ohlone Hetz vice president.
So the self-dealing here is documented throughout chapter seven, all of the emails, the undeniable use of her position.
Now, in Virginia, you can sign a conflict of interest waiver, and then just basically say, yeah, I'm on both sides of the transaction.
And that gets into the thing we talked about before, just a general climate of, I would say, tolerance for self-dealing, that I think in a real economy, you wouldn't have people on both sides of the transaction.
But that's the story of Energex Ohlone Hetz.
I think probably the most interesting story in the entire book is about another Virginia Israel advisory board, in this case, vice chairman, who, when he saw some of the massive amounts of funding coming out of the Tobacco Commission, again, this pool of resources that schools and different energy and telecom infrastructure projects can go to for funding, said he wanted to go to it, even though he's a VIAB member, and get money for a business that he didn't have any experience in, which was the production of biofuels.
So he put together a project called Appalachian Biofuels, in which he would put in a refinery in St. Paul, Virginia, which is a beautiful part of the state, down near the point in the southwest.
And even though his only experience was running bingo outside of Richmond, bringing in $40 billion over two decades, he suddenly wanted to jump into refining biofuel with an Israeli company, TransBiodiesel, it was called, and make money during a period of $100 per barrel oil prices by refining.
And so he managed to get together a Tobacco Commission loan and signed his conflict of interest waiver, and went into biofuels production just as prices collapsed.
And for years and years and years, there was no word from Appalachian Biofuels.
All the press releases and photographs inside the proposed sites are still out there, but nobody knew what happened to the money.
And what happened to the money was, a lot of it was kept by Chuck Lessen, who is still on the Virginia's Real Advisory Board as vice president, $210,000 that he never returned, because he sat down with his friend over at the Tobacco Commission, and they basically, in September of last year, he presented a case that because he was a Viab official, and Viab was building all sorts of projects across Virginia, that they ought to just let this one go, and not force Appalachian Biofuels to repay any portion of the $565,000 grant they took out.
So another case of self-dealing.
It's worse than the fact that there was a charity involved, and all of that's in Chapter 1, the story of this project that benefited from the sort of thing you would expect to see in a political machine, where it's two government officials sitting down to determine the fate of state resources.
If you're just tuning in, we're talking with Grant Smith about the Afghanistan papers.
Oh, wait, no, sorry, this is how business is done in Virginia, same difference.
You like my funny joke?
Yeah, I thought that was pretty funny.
Don't even get me started on the Afghanistan papers, and the virtue signaling that's there.
If you look at the Washington Post, virtually every column that they had come out in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq was pro-invasion of Iraq.
Ever since then, man.
Pro-invasion of Afghanistan.
I mean, yeah.
What are they even talking about?
What is this virtue signaling coming out of it?
Well, and all the people they quote, too, where they're like, yeah, it's a little bit my fault, and a lot everybody else's fault, too.
Lots of that.
Anyway, and lots of stuff like this.
Lots of stuff where the economy is just completely corrupt, and there's just no market about it.
The whole thing is just a scam.
And there's the whole, not just some foreign government doing this, but the Israelis, always.
There's no amount of bloody murder that they can get away with in this country that will be enough.
You know?
I know.
Well, go ahead.
It's interesting, though, in that the job VIAB has is interesting, because they want to really further empower their pro-Israel community, which is, in the scheme of things, tiny in Virginia.
Very small.
The number of people who are working on Israel is a major part of their professional lives.
Projects like this produce an incredible amount of resources and influence for them.
And they're fully aligned with their vision.
And so if you're a pro-Israel ideologue, and you want to see a forever war, or at least forever US presence in the region because it's good for Israel, well, then Orin's Safety Glass is 100% aligned with what you would want to be doing with your time.
And to be able to make money on it at the same time is just winning the lottery every single day you go to work.
And so the interesting thing about VIAB is that it also has its hand in anti-boycott legislation.
And so they've been defeated.
Virginia does not have an anti-BDS law, but these were the guys who spearheaded and met on the state government dime in their office to work out, well, should we use an executive order like New York, or should we get legislation passed?
So their board is meeting using state resources to undermine the free speech rights and the right of anyone in Virginia to economically boycott the foreign country of interest to them.
And then the organizations that back VIAB are heavily involved in rewriting state textbooks to say what they believe to be true, which is that everyone but Israel has been the instigator of Middle East conflict, that there was no ethnic cleansing, that there are neighborhoods but not settlements, that Israel annexed East Jerusalem.
They want that written down as fact, and that there is no international question over that.
So it's a large, like I said, political machine which has its arms in a lot of different areas of the state.
And when they can get away with it, like in modifying state textbooks, they try to do it entirely in secret.
They want to do it without anything leaking out into the press.
And yet time after time, the Freedom of Information Act statute of the state empowers people to get the information about what it is they're doing in a way that's simply impossible to do at the federal level.
Yeah.
Which raises the question why anyone would put their kid in a government school anyway.
What are you, crazy?
Would any power, left or right, or foreign or domestic, decide what the textbook has to say?
I mean, the fact that that's even a discussion is proof that you're in the wrong place.
No, I agree.
I agree.
The fact that this curriculum and all of the pressure that they put on National Geographic and Prentice Hall and all of the textbook publishers is immense.
Because they're basically saying, well, either you put in this example of Israel's perspective on the security fence, don't use wall, you either write that in your textbooks or we're going to do everything we can as a powerful organization to make sure you don't sell a single textbook in the state.
That's power.
This book is a study of power and how it's exercised in Virginia to the detriment, not only of public school kids, but the truth in this case.
Yeah.
Well, they should just have that be the introduction.
That American democracy, boy, it's not a self-enforcing mechanism, dude.
You got to fight for it.
Like, for example, we were going to put out this textbook and a foreign government tried to come and tell us what it's supposed to say.
We can flip to chapter 93 or whatever it is to see how we explain the truth anyway.
One of the interesting things is that a whole group of high-level Virginia professors, when they found out about it, were not happy.
And it was the easiest thing in the world for the Virginia Coalition of Human Rights, which is an organization of organizations across the state, to put out a news release in which they pushed back against all of these changes.
And who did they get to sign off on it?
Nora Arakat from George Mason, Michael Fischbach from Randolph-Macon College, William Quant over at the University of Virginia.
And of course, that distinguished adjunct professor, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, signed on.
And so when they are exposed doing this sort of thing, undermining the accuracy of textbooks and really slanting them toward one end, once people know it's going on, they can take action.
And that is why secrecy has been paramount at the Virginia Israel Advisory Board.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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All right, so talk to me a little bit about Governor McAuliffe here.
I know him as the major fundraiser for Hillary Clinton back when, and I know he became the governor.
But when he was way out of power, he got himself into a fight with these guys.
Yeah, he did get himself into a fight with them.
And it was surprising because before Terry McAuliffe got to be governor, a lot of out-of-state money came his way from J.B. Pritzker, who's governor of Illinois, Haim Saban, who's a giant fundraiser for all things pro-Israel and has funded the Democratic National Commission.
Well, these guys pumped more than a million dollars into the government race and had a lot of influence over Viab projects, shall we say, because they had put so much into getting McAuliffe elected.
Well, McAuliffe, toward the end, didn't like being pushed around by Viab, and since he was on his way out anyway, decided he wasn't going to rubber stamp their choice for executive director.
And so he told them, basically, through his attorney general, that he was going to appoint Viab's director himself.
And of course, that is something that you don't tell a powerful coalition political machine that they don't have the right to do whatever they want.
And they basically, under no uncertain terms in their insider negotiations, said, no, we're going to change the law, and we are definitely going to choose our own executive director, no matter what.
And so they got the local Jewish federations involved, which are behind Viab on everything.
They started talking in their various meetings about how this was unfair.
They put together legislations and a lobbying team of unpaid beneficiaries of Viab projects across the state to do the drafting of legislation and work to make sure it would pass on greased skids through the state legislature.
And they managed to completely restructure the way Viab operated so that it would be an office of the legislature and not an office of the governor anymore.
They just get their way easy, one way or the other.
Yeah, it's an amazing story, because the governor's office released all this information, and it was something that really did not make Viab happy, because it was obvious that they were getting free lobbying support from the local lobbying shop.
They were working with people inside the governor's office who didn't agree with the governor's policy.
And they were outed, Laura Schmidt, who has since gone back to lobbying land, their pressure on Tim Hugo.
But they also had a couple of senators who didn't like this, like Ryan McDougal, who said, you know what, let's just fold Viab into the Virginia Economic Development Partnership.
You know, they can work with them.
And that was like the death knell for Viab.
That was the last thing they wanted, because then they couldn't have secrets, they couldn't exclusively promote Israeli companies.
They were in jeopardy briefly during their reorganization and reconstitution in 2018.
But basically, they managed to pressure enough people in House Bill 1297 to completely reconstitute the legal basis of their existence.
And they did it right at the last minute, in the last 45 minutes of the session, where Senators Hugo and McDougal finally agreed to pass Viab into their own body, where they would escape all oversight on their travel expenditures, which had been investigated and found to be out of control.
They managed to pass oversight of their operations to probably the most compliant body in Virginia, now led by Liam Filler-Corn, one of their fellow board members, so that they could continue to exercise complete autonomy in every respect, except for their taxpayer funding.
So that story is in there as well.
You know, for people who want to know how power works, this is the kind of stuff you got to read, unfortunately.
You know, I was going to say, this is such a great book here.
It's almost thin enough that you could call it a monograph or something.
This could be a great featured article in, you know, some fancy magazine or what have you kind of deal, you know?
The New York Times magazine on the weekend, or the New Yorker, that kind of deal, the Atlantic.
I'm convinced that there isn't a single mainstream publication that's in a position to do this kind of reporting.
Oh yeah, no, no.
It would have to be about any subject but Israel, but plug in a different name on that variable, and then.
Ukraine.
Yeah, Russia, Ukraine, or Venezuela, and I wouldn't have been the one who broke the story, I can tell you that.
But because it's Israel, and because it's a machine with, again, connections across party lines, you know, let me tell you a little story.
I did send a copy of a preview to a couple of Washington Post reporters, and I particularly called their attention to the solar projects.
And within two weeks, they had a story out saying that these solar projects were just no brainers and should be, you know, pursued by everyone, not just in Virginia.
So I mean, that's what we're dealing with.
And I knew better, I knew better that this was not be worth the $2.52 per book to send it to them.
But there is absolutely no mainstream channel that is capable of withstanding the onslaught of outing this level of corruption, whether it's the embezzlement from the Tobacco Commission, the self-dealing at Energic, Saloni Hetz, whether the ongoing scandal of Aquamouth, or the totality of it.
They're not going to do it, because they've been working with Viab in some cases.
And Viab even has in their meeting minutes how effective they are at getting their message out through mainstream media.
And you see it.
You see it.
Virtually everything in the state press is a news release from Viab.
And even the Washington Post.
When you look at their stories, they're just incredible.
They're basically also news releases with better photos.
Yeah, well, I sure hope that people will read this.
I had fun reading it.
It's a really a great book.
And you would think it's kind of a dry subject matter, but it's outrageous enough that it's a page-turner, too, and has a lot of great stuff in there.
So I really hope people look at that and get a kick out of it, too.
But you know what?
I also want them to look at Israel and its U.S. lobby finally achieve a long-term objective direct U.S.-Iranian military conflict.
And this is on the blog at Antiwar.com, and it starts off with your phone call to Washington Journal on C-SPAN.
And then you back that up with a lot of substance here, explaining, what is it, five major points from the past of the Israelis trying to provoke this conflict.
Hey, what the hell?
You want to go through that a little bit?
It's just five.
That's a small number.
Yeah, it's only five.
And if you ask a logical question, why are the U.S.'s options so limited when it comes to everything Iran?
You really have to look at AIPAC and its actions.
And one of them was clearly lobbying to create the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, which basically is the primary tool waging economic warfare against Iran.
It's devastating the secondary and tertiary blockades they've been able to mount against Iran.
It forecloses any sort of productive engagement with Iran.
And AIPAC has been working on that since 2007.
I mean, that's their baby, getting those economic sanctions and designating the Iranian Guard Corps as a foreign terrorist organization.
But number two, the entire story of the theft of Department of Defense secrets in concert with Colonel Lawrence Franklin was about Iran.
AIPAC was trying to get Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post to report to Americans that in Iraq Americans were fighting Iran, essentially, and needed to pivot toward Iran as the next step of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
And two AIPAC officials were indicted for espionage, and Larry Franklin was convicted of espionage.
That was an effort.
And I'm not rewriting history.
That was an effort to try to get information, classified information, out to convince Americans to go to war with Iran in 2004, 2005.
The other story is really the intense pressure the Israelis put on the United States to mount Olympic Games and Stuxnet attacks on the Iranian nuclear facility, which cost billions of dollars and was done because essentially the insider intelligence officials anyway thought it was either that or Iran was going to bomb them.
And so, you know, who was behind that?
Israel in the lobby.
Number four, coordinated opposition to JCPOA.
There were many reports about how Israel spied upon the negotiations, released them to people they thought could help thwart it, and AIPAC and all the mainstream Israel lobbying organizations were corralled to oppose it, and they inserted a poison pill requiring waivers so that someday it could be undone.
So the article that we blogged about and that I spoke to in uninvited fashion on C-SPAN was really, you can't see this limiting of U.S. options as anything but Israeli and AIPAC involvement.
And it goes into kind of the history of Israeli involvement in Iran, which is, you know, I couldn't do it justice, and also AIPAC involvement to some extent with Iranian policy back in the 60s.
But the gist of it is, who narrowed all of the options?
Who was working for this moment?
Who is celebrating success that there's now direct U.S.-Iranian military conflict?
Israel in its U.S. lobby.
Yep.
And just like who was egging on war with Syria over the fake sarin attack of 2013, Israel in its lobby.
Yeah.
They're pretty much alone on a lot of these things and don't seem to mind sticking their neck out that far and letting us all see.
But here we are again.
Yeah.
They really don't want to be perceived in a lot of this stuff.
I mean, you know, their involvement lobbying for the Iraq invasion, there was a concerted attempt not to have their fingerprints show up on that one.
But, you know, thanks to the Mearsheimer-Walt book and thanks to some confessions, they were very obviously key players in all of that.
Yeah.
Well, and you just mean AIPAC there, because the rest of the Israel lobby, I don't know about AIPAC as an organization, but the entire Israel lobby was organized for that thing and led by the neoconservative movement, of course.
Right.
Braying at the top of their lungs the whole time to get that thing going.
Yeah.
It's an incredible, it's an incredible machine.
We've never seen anything like it.
And the thing that makes it worse than Tammany Hall is it's not even designed to improve the lot of Irish immigrants or downtrodden Jews fleeing Russia in this country.
No, it's designed, unlike those machines, to advance a foreign country that has interests in many cases that are diametrically opposed to the United States.
So the Tammany Hall analogy doesn't work, and maybe people don't even know about it, but it is a political machine.
And if you want to understand the exercise of power, I do encourage people to read what's going on at the state level.
And if you simply Google it, you can find it in four different formats.
It's not hard to spend four or five hours, because in that sense, it's something that could happen to other major states.
And it will happen if it's not exposed and discussed like it should be.
Yep.
All right, you guys, that's Grant Smith.
It's I-R-M-E-P.
IRMEP.
I-R-M-E-P dot org.
And also the brand new book, and you'll find the link there, The Israel Lobby Enters State Government.
Thanks a lot, Grant.
Thank you, Scott.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com, www.antiwar.com, scotthorton.org, and libertarianinstitute.org.
