I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the brand new Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism, and I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy, and all available for you at scotthorton.org.
You can sign up for the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
Hey look guys, I got Grant, well listen is really more appropriate, hey listen, I got Grant F. Smith on the line.
That's why he is the founder and the director of the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy, IRMEP, I-R-M-E-P dot org, and that's exactly what he does is research on American Middle Eastern policy, and he's written a plethora of books all about the Israel lobby and their legal and illegal activities inside the United States.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, my friend?
Doing very well, Scott.
Thanks for having me on again.
Great.
Welcome.
Hey, you wrote a thing.
I really like it.
Israel's nukes make U.S. aid illegal.
Is there such a thing as a law that dictates the behavior of government agents?
I hadn't heard that.
I thought law was just for us little people.
Yeah.
You know, I wrote about that.
It's not like I haven't written about it a million times before, but I was really intrigued when Peter Beinart, I think it was on the 12th of this month, came out with a New York Times essay called, America Needs to Start Telling the Truth About Israel's Nukes.
And it got a lot of attention, a ton of people retweeting it, a lot of pushback.
What struck me about it is how little Beinart appeared to know about some of the infrastructure around that lie of omission that's been going on since the Nixon administration.
So I was really intrigued.
And it's something I've seen before in other places where people start picking up the story and then when they realize what's happening a little bit deeper, they kind of put it back down.
So I was eager to get into some of the things he left out of his essay and you guys were gracious enough to put it up over at antiwar.com and then Phil Weiss poached it for his site.
So it got a lot of play.
Yeah.
Yeah, man.
Hey, look, when those nukes go off, they're hotter than the sun.
So that's everybody's business.
Yeah, absolutely.
You know, I think the interesting thing that keeps coming up over and over and over again is what impact does it have for the U.S. to be in lockstep with the Israelis in and not admitting that they have nuclear weapons?
You know, every time an administration comes into office, there is a concerted attempt by Israelis and their lobby to get them to sign off on a letter saying that they won't talk about the Israeli nuclear weapons program.
And so we sued the National Archives for those letters and they fought for a long time not to release them.
And so the question is now, today, as the Naftali Bennett and Joe Biden meeting takes place at the White House, whether the same request for a letter took place or not.
The timing's right.
You know, Biden's under pressure.
The Israelis have lots of levers they can pull against him.
The last thing they want is for him to pressure them in any way as they insist that Iran's nuclear program's the problem and that, you know, the lie of omission is that if the Iranians were to get a nuclear weapons program, it would initiate an arms race in the Middle East as if Israel hasn't had them since the mid-60s.
So it's a relevant thing to be talking about.
And I think, you know, the biggest problem with the Binart article and even some of the responses to it is they just don't understand some of the backgrounds in how the president's said yes, we'll be quiet about that and we'll engage in strategic ambiguity.
And then two senators who actually visited the CIA because they were outraged after they caught wind of the diversion from the NUMEC facility in the mid-60s, you know, enough weapons-grade uranium to feed the Israeli program and produce a dozen weapons.
But they kept visiting the CIA and asking what happened.
And they were mad there was no accountability.
And so they limited the president's and supposedly their own maneuverability by passing amendments to the Foreign Assistance Act, which are now part of the Arms Export Control Act, saying, if you're going to deliver aid to a non-NPT signatory nuclear weapons state, first of all, you've got to justify publicly in a formal request for a waiver to Congress that there's a compelling need to keep doing that even though our nonproliferation regime is being trashed or you've got to just stop giving aid.
And so that was a significant supposed accountability moment on this whole scheme to give aid without ever, you know, talking about the nukes.
So that's been in place since the mid-70s.
And you know, Baynard apparently didn't realize that.
He didn't realize why beyond just being nice or ignorant, the U.S. government would be walking in lockstep.
But one of the reasons presidents are pursued by reporters like Sam Husseini, who's aggressive as a bulldog, and even Thomas, who asked Obama before she died if there's any state in the Middle East that had nukes, and he said he didn't want to speculate, is if they admit that while in office, not like Carter, who admitted after he left office, they formally admit they have nukes, then it raises the questions why they're violating this law.
And so it's a great reminder of how corrupt many things having to do with the aid are.
And this is the single biggest portion of the U.S. foreign aid budget going to Israel.
No real reason to continue it.
You know, it's been just billions and billions of dollars since the limitations were passed in the Symington and Glenn amendments.
And yet here we are with, you know, the issue surfacing once in a while.
Another thing that came out earlier was Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote a piece in, I think it was The Guardian earlier this year, in which he made basically the same argument.
He said, look, as this state becomes increasingly an apartheid state, you know, just like South Africa and has nuclear weapons just like South Africa, it's time for you to come clean on both of these issues.
It was just basically a letter to Biden.
And so, you know, it's it's not just one or two voices asking for this accountability.
But of course, that didn't have any impact.
So it's interesting times here.
All right.
Now, Grant, I got this clip here from your YouTube channel, Sam Husseini going after Chuck Schumer.
And it's just a short clip, three quarters of a minute.
Let's listen.
Yeah, let's roll it.
Yeah, I didn't get your question.
Do you acknowledge that Israel has nuclear weapons?
I'm not.
You can go read the newspapers about that.
Do you stand to acknowledge that Israel has nuclear weapons?
It is a well-known fact that Israel has nuclear weapons, but the Israeli government doesn't officially talk about what kinds of weapons and where, etc.
Should the U.S. government be more polite?
Okay, we'll move on.
James?
You talked about working families.
Pelosi had no comment.
No, she's standing there like a statue.
And you know, he tried to keep it going.
He tried to.
He knew where to go with that line of questions, but that might be the most honest clip of Chuck Schumer I've ever seen.
Yeah, it's it's pretty honest, but, you know, so I mean, he was forced into it.
I'm not trying to give him too much credit, but yeah, I mean, go read it in the newspapers.
That was pretty rude.
But, you know, what's supposed to happen is and this is the amazing thing, because it kind of reveals how, you know, you think that there are dissidents and people wanting to see accountability in government like Bernie Sanders or the Squad or, you know, Rand Paul who talk about foreign aid as a problem in many respects and any one of them could put a hold on the funding of Israel foreign aid, you know, the three point eight billion dollars they get per year of public and the covert funding as well.
But they don't.
They could, but they don't.
And I asked the rep from D.C. where I live, who has no power, can't cast votes, but she knows what's going on on the Hill.
If anyone had ever filed a waiver letter saying, yeah, we're going to provide this aid, even though we know Israel has nuclear weapons, just like the CIA says.
And all these reports are ultimately declassified.
And she said, nope, nobody's ever done that.
So it it's kind of refreshing to know just how corrupt things really are, that there is a major law that should be creating accountability and everyone just ignores it.
It's a, you know, refreshing to look at the top of the show there.
Oh, there's a law.
Huh?
And they just never apply it ever.
Oh, OK.
Why they even bother amending the damn thing then?
Yeah, I don't know.
Well, there have been I think Marco Rubio made a couple of attempts in some legislation to kind of erase the impact of it, kind of like when, you know, all the telecom companies were caught illegally wiretapping the the main backbone of the Internet and they all got sort of retroactive immunity for that after 9-11.
I'm not unrealistic in thinking this is like the magic bullet that could create accountability.
If there was any movement toward accountability, we would see something, I'm sure, along the lines of retroactive immunity that would completely undercut the Symington and Glenn amendments.
But, you know, the thing is, they've been on the books for so long and they've obviously had such a great impact in maintaining strategic ambiguity to the extent that Obama even passed a gag order on contractors and federal agency employees never to talk about Israeli nuclear weapons that, you know, it's it would be somewhat stunning to see the final grift that makes all of the aid legal retroactively.
I mean, completely expected.
But you know, the kind of corruption that I guess Americans are just growing increasingly inured to, I don't have to tell you after, you know, finally seeing the government and every every complicit agency is now leaving Afghanistan, as per your book recommended years ago.
I don't have to tell you about waste, fraud, abuse and dumping money into a rat hole.
But this is a very interesting case because of that.
And the other thing that was in the article talks about how we can never really get the story straight because strategic ambiguity is impacting document releases.
The Freedom of Information Act, since Covid broke out, has been almost impossible to use because a lot of federal agency employees weren't near anywhere near the physical files they needed to search.
And a lot of the stuff I asked for is actually paper.
So as bad as it was before, it's been basically inoperable.
And that includes MDR appeals to ISCAP and other, you know, intelligence circles that can actually release stuff.
So I I use this as an example of something we got before Covid, which was asking for Rafael Rafi Itan, the spy who handled Jonathan Pollard's file from the CIA.
And I figured I could get something because I asked for it a couple of days after he died.
And I was thinking, well, you know, for for once in a while, the CIA releases more information on older issues.
And Rafael Itan led a four man team of covert operators into the NUMEC facility at the height of its uranium 235 losses in 1968.
So I thought, well, I should be able to get at least something that acknowledges that from the Central Intelligence Agency, since they were the ones who first raised the alarm bells back in the day.
And lo and behold, they released to us under FOIA a curiously redacted profile of Itan, which it goes into his kidnapping of Adolf Eichmann from Argentina.
And then you can see there's a lot more information about his exploits in the 60s.
All that's redacted.
And then it's his retirement from the Mossad.
So it's like, you know, I know what's in that paragraph and I could probably write it and it would be about 95 percent accurate, especially since I bet, you know, John Haddon.
You know what?
I'm sorry, because I should have really stopped you at the beginning the first time you mentioned NUMEC there.
There's a lot of people who have been listening to the show for a very long time who know exactly what you're talking about.
And there are a lot of people who have no idea what that even is or where or what happened there.
Can you elaborate on that part of the story?
Yeah.
NUMEC is a Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation.
And it was a facility that was initiated by an Israeli smuggler from World War II by the name of David Lowenthal.
He put together the funding for it.
And this was a guy who's very much in touch with Israeli secret services and intelligence services since his smuggling day.
But they put together the plant in the late 1950s.
And then Zalman Shapiro, who was a chemist, became president of the operation.
And his claim to fame was solving key issues on naval propulsion systems so you could put a nuclear reactor on a ship or submarine.
So when he left the services of a Navy contractor, he started making fuel for the Navy, which involved receiving large quantities of weapons-grade uranium hexafluoride, which he could manufacture into pellets, but he could also divert to Israel to build gun-type bombs or to fuel a plutonium-based nuclear weapons facility.
And so the conclusion of two high CIA officials was that he was involved in the diversion of nuclear material to Israel.
The CIA did some checking around Dimona for samples and found the same signature of the relatively rare U-235 that was being processed, so to speak, at NUMAC around Dimona.
They wrote numerous reports.
Carl Duckett, who was their technology guy, and John Haddon, who was the CIA Tel Aviv station chief, were both unequivocal that a diversion took place, but there was just never any accountability for it.
Instead of charging Shapiro with the Atomic Energy Act espionage that he should have been charged with, he instead was shuffled away from NUMAC through a buyout and then through various jobs.
He only really had an accountability moment when he tried to apply for a presidential technology award during the Obama administration, but even though he had a bunch of people trying to give him accolades for his service in solving Nautilus problems for the first nuclear submarine, they wouldn't do it because the Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission didn't go along with the effort to whitewash his records.
So he died with no exoneration of his espionage, which, by the way, had eyewitness accounts on file and all sorts of other proof beyond the transmission of the sample.
So NUMAC is a lingering problem because it's still a toxic site.
It was such a ramshackle, underfunded smuggling front that they wound up polluting large sections of the environment around Parks Township and Apollo, Pennsylvania, which I visited and spoken to residents and government people about that they can't really move forward.
There's this on-again, off-again, quarter-billion-dollar toxic cleanup, and the town just can't re-emerge.
It can't sell the site.
It can't develop this big place right in the middle of town that was torn down.
So it's a lingering issue, and it really is a phenomenal story of the type that should at least have a Hulu or Netflix documentary.
But the culprits are the wrong type, and the outcome is too embarrassing.
And we had three separate officials who were high officials in the Zionist Organization of America working at the plant, some of the most rabid Zionist lobbyists in the United States in terms of their activities.
You have the fact that Shapiro, who was running the plant, refused to live in Apollo.
He lived in a leafy suburb of Pittsburgh.
And so it's a really terrible story, and it's buttressed by FBI wiretaps of spills and Shapiro exposing people to harmful chemicals and radioactivity and then firing them.
It's just an incredible, incredible story, but nobody will touch it.
I wrote a book about it.
Roger Mattson wrote a book about it.
He also spoke at our annual Israel LobbyCon at the National Press Club.
You can watch him on C-SPAN.
He's probably the most polished presentation of the issue because he worked at the Atomic Energy Commission and Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
It's like the open secret of Israel's nuclear weapons.
The fact that they helped pollute a portion of the United States to get some of their materials that they couldn't get from any other source has never been, there's never been any accountability for it.
OK, hang on just one second.
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So you also wrote this book, Big Israel, like big tobacco or big whatever the hell lobby.
So how come the Israel lobby is so influential in Washington, D.C. if, as you're constantly documenting, their interests and ours are so divergent on so many important issues?
Yeah, it really boils down to campaign contributions.
So the Israel lobby in terms of the amount of money that it is able to raise for a huge number of different organizations, this year it'll be, by our calculations, around $6.3 billion.
And that's to subsidize colleges and universities in Israel, to provide for advocacy organizations to lobby for Israel, like AIPAC and the Zionist Organization of America.
So it's this giant, giant entity in the United States, which although it doesn't have that many employees, it's only about 14,000 across the ecosystem.
There are a lot of supporters.
And the amount of money that's raised and put into these organizations, there was a Blackbaud study not too long ago that kind of did some correlation coefficients to, well, if these guys are donating a million dollars to a charity, what's their likely political action on the same cause to get things done on Capitol Hill?
And it was a pretty high correlation.
So if there's about whatever, $6 billion being devoted to sort of 501c3 or ostensibly charitable activity, I would estimate in terms of dark money PAC operations, contributions to candidates, commercials that are funded for and against candidates, like you saw in the recent case of a race between two potential members of Congress, but one of them was pro Israel and the other wasn't.
And of course, who won because she got so many last minute campaign contributions and dark money behind her.
So there's this vast infrastructure that's mostly invisible of channeled stealth PACs, individual contributions going to candidates that if you believe a lot of the people who raise money for a living here in Washington, these are the first people you go to for a campaign and the last people in terms of finishing up a political campaign.
They're just absolutely key in terms of getting your campaign off the ground.
The first thing you do is write a paper and circulate it and say, look, my platform is going to be pro Israel than anything.
I'm going to accept the move of the embassy to Jerusalem.
I'm going to lobby hard for US attacks on Iran.
I'm going to do this.
I'm going to do that.
I want troops to be in Syria forever.
Anytime Israel wants to use US weapons and ammunition preposition there, I want them to get that and not have to pay for it.
I'm almost surprised, and I know you had some comments on this, that the best equipment wasn't just trans shipped out of Afghanistan to Israel so it could repair and sell it.
But, you know, that that's happened in other cases.
So I believe with Iraq or some other war, that's that was a big benefit that some Congress people managed to find.
So the influence is is total.
And it's a reason why, despite being on the right in terms of the law, you can't even get, you know, the squad or anybody else who who apparently is trying to make a name for being, you know, more even handed with Israel to do anything real about the aid.
It's just a tsunami of campaign contributions and extremely savvy direction to maximize the impact.
I mean, they lose a few, you know, they lost their head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to upstart Jamal Bowman.
But for the most part, they're very successful in getting in candidates who have already promised that they will forward the cause of Israel from within government.
And once you have that, it really doesn't matter much how people feel, what public opinion polls say about increasing support for the Palestinian view of the conflict.
You know, people who hate corruption in government, people who hate forever wars.
You can pretty much over overwhelm all of that if you have a campaign contribution network that is finely tuned to rope in U.S. elected officials.
Yeah, so and I know there is a lot of it.
You just described the smuggling of weapons, great uranium and all this stuff.
But besides any kind of black ops or any kind of blackmail or anything, it sounds like your answer is they play the game of American democracy better than anybody.
Right.
That's it.
Yeah, like big tobacco or big.
Yeah, that's the ARP.
They get what they want to.
Right.
And Stephen Walt.
Yeah, I don't think that's a fair assessment.
And no, because, you know, again, I mean, that's kind of what you just said, right, that they're just organized as hell and they donate like crazy.
And I don't I think I was the first one to mention blackmail in the conversation.
Right.
Right.
Like Jeffrey Epstein stuff or anything like that.
You're just saying.
I think what I heard was they play the game of American democracy extremely well.
Yeah, and that's that's absolutely something I would never say.
Other people have said it.
Again, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt say that.
But my point is this.
And again, this is getting back into a history that I just keep repeating.
In 1962, after discovering that money came in from overseas to set up APAC and to set up the Near East Reports and to fund Isaiah Kennan to lobby for foreign aid packages for Israel, all of that money was foreign.
And there was a lot of coordinations of messaging and goals with the Israelis.
That's why the umbrella organization for the Zionist Organization of America and APAC and several others were ordered by the Justice Department to register as Israeli foreign agents.
Now, this is being done.
This was done by the Kennedy administration because they had the lobby cold and they had the money, they had the vouchers.
I put up a lot of those vouchers on the Internet.
And that's what back the order saying you guys have to start registering as Israeli foreign agents.
You can't just keep pretending that this is a completely arm's length domestic operation.
And I note that today before meeting with President Biden yesterday, Naftali Bennett spent his first and key meetings with Harold Kor, the head of APAC, to get everything set up and get their story straight.
And that is the type of relation it is.
It's like, OK, I'm going to go meet with my proxies and surrogates in the U.S. and we're going to figure out how we can get everything we need before I even go talk to the president.
That's not a normal arm's length relationship.
And I still think that APAC should be registering as an Israeli foreign agent, filing reports every six months, disclosing what it's doing, even if it raises all of its money domestically.
Why?
Because it was set up with foreign money and it was set up in collaboration with the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
That's where its founder worked for years and years and years.
And he was ordered to continue registering as their agent, but just simply refused to do it.
So I don't I don't agree that this is all legit.
I don't agree.
It's as American as apple pie because it's just got too many foreign nexuses.
And APAC, as we've noted on other shows, has been investigated for espionage three times.
And, you know, for however much you like the American Association of Retired People or the American Rifle Association, they don't tend to be investigated because of serious allegations and evidence of espionage in collaboration with foreign powers.
And yet APAC has been three times.
So how do you compare their power to, say, the Saudi lobby, which they at least do have to register, correct?
The Saudi has some D.C. lobbying for.
Well, so does Israel, though, but they have some D.C. lobbying firms that do a lot more work and register a lot more than any Israeli entity does.
But their main lobbying power is their economy.
I mean, they almost don't have to lobby because every American company, particularly in the energy sector, wants a piece of their projects.
They want to be over there.
They want to build the petrochemical plants.
They want to transport the petroleum.
You know, the Treasury Department wants all the oil sales to be based in dollars.
So their economy and their energy reserves are their lobby.
And so they don't actually have to do a whole lot to get the United States to, for example, get behind their genocidal attacks on Yemen and to funnel them with the best weapons and to, you know, side with them against Iran.
It's not because they have these assiduous lobbying groups.
It's just because the entire U.S. economy depends on their economy.
So Israel has nothing like that.
It's managed to rope in Andy Grove from Intel to set up a chip fab on occupied territory.
It's managed to rope in Microsoft to do some things there.
It doesn't have any inherent economic powerhouse, absolutely have to have it, attributes for the United States that Saudi Arabia does.
So I'm not defending the Saudis.
I think that relationship is crooked, too.
There's no accountability over there anyway, or either, in terms of the, you know, the families are trying to unearth whatever connections there may have been between the royal family and the massive support for the hijackers.
But it's completely different.
I mean, and if they stopped all of their relationships with D.C. lobbying firms, that that would continue because they have such valuable resources that the United States simply cannot do without.
Yeah, well, I'm not so sure about that part, but certainly we get nothing out of our relationship with Israel unless, you know, you actually own stock in Lockheed and get to cash those dividend checks or whatever.
Then I guess you're on the American dole by way of Israel that way.
But otherwise.
Well, yeah, you know, in terms of sales, though, if you look at Lockheed, Boeing and all the big contractors, they really, you know, despite Israel being the leading beneficiary and having everything paid for by the U.S. taxpayer, it's nothing.
It's a drop in the bucket compared to U.S. arms sales to other clients.
So I you know, I get the feeling that many of them would be happy not to have to have anything to do with the Israelis, because, again, three point three, three point eight billion dollars is really not that much.
And they'll turn over all the secret high tech to the Chinese for a song, too.
Well, and that's the other thing.
If you you know, when I go through the lobbying reports, I don't see a ton of Saudi firm lobbying Congress, but APAC is lobbying on absolutely everything with a goal toward forcing U.S. innovators to form joint ventures with Israeli entities or counterparts, as they call them.
And it's a pretty much a one way transfer, whether it's working on vaccines, working on water development, working on other projects.
The U.S. is always the funder of these associations and partnerships, and the Israelis are always the beneficiaries of the technology.
And so if you go through APAC's lobbying disclosures, it's this constant entwining and embedding of Israeli interests into the U.S. economy by force of the U.S. government.
There's nothing like that on the Saudi side.
I mean, they build their own petrochemical and gas crackers and all this other stuff, but they don't lobby Congress to form joint virology studies and other programs like the Israelis do because they're in a different position.
Again, they could probably pretty easily negatively impact the U.S. Treasury by saying, you know, hey, we really we're getting sick of trading petroleum in dollars.
We'd rather trade it all in a different currency.
You know, that's the kind of power that doesn't need to lobby very much.
But, you know, Israel doesn't have anything like that.
It doesn't have the power to make, you know, the U.S. Department of Treasury sweat.
So that's where a lot of the deference comes from.
It doesn't come from lobbying.
It just comes from a wholly different economic, I would say, might and configuration in terms of wealth and their energy reserves.
You know, I was just thinking, I guess I could actually claim to report to you that the Israelis got nukes because I got it from Mordecai Venunu himself in a conversation on Twitter back, I don't know, five or eight years ago or some kind of thing.
When I was asking him how many and he said, just read the London Times story, I stand by that, which good enough for me.
And he said that right to me.
Yeah, that meant 200 nukes.
What do you know about that?
How many?
I actually see reports.
Recent reports had it.
I forgot who it was.
Federation of American Scientists or somebody like that said they only have 50.
What do you know?
Yeah, I saw that, too.
Jimmy Carter says 150.
Was it FAS?
Did I get that right?
My foggy footnote there?
Yeah, the Federation of American Scientists.
Yeah, they they try and get a lot of stuff declassified.
Sometimes I get it first.
Sometimes I get it first.
But the bottom line is it doesn't matter that Mordecai Venunu said that or that, you know, Jimmy Carter said it after he left office, because you'll recall we tried to sue one time to block the aid package on the basis that it had already been officially recognized that Israel was a nuclear weapons power.
And that actually was something that went to not only, you know, the D.C. circuit, but to the Court of Appeals.
And the standard here, though, is official recognition.
And that means by the president.
And that's why when again, Helen Thomas asked Barack Obama, do you know of any nation in the Middle East that has nuclear weapons?
He had to shift from one foot to the other and hem and haw.
And he gave this bloviated, long winded answer about an unrelated topic before finally saying he didn't want to speculate.
If he had said, yes, we've known that since the mid 1960s when they stole our uranium, then that would be acknowledgement and official recognition.
But the court wouldn't even accept CIA assessments from 1974 saying that the Israelis had nuclear weapons.
They wouldn't take a Department of Defense analysis of all the work on hydrogen bombs and attempts to use SOREC and other U.S. donated facilities for nuclear weapons development.
They wouldn't take that as acknowledgement.
The way the Symington and Glenn Amendment is written firmly places the recognition duty in the executive branch.
So it's got to be a president.
It's got to be a president who's in office.
And this is why the Israelis always rush the president at the beginning of the administration, demanding a letter saying that they are not going to go into that during their administration.
And there's a great piece in The New Yorker about that that was written a couple of years ago and helped us with our lawsuit against the National Archives.
But it's embarrassing.
I mean, it really is.
It's like, you know, the first thing a president have to and Trump, the Trump administration was actually irritated by the thing.
So they had other priorities when they came in, and yet they were just being bum rushed by the Israelis and some U.S. entities to sign off on this letter on the basis that everyone else had signed off on it and that Israel needed to keep a copy on file.
So, you know, it's it's it really kind of shows a power dynamic in kind of the way I explained about the Saudis because of their lobby, not because of their inherent value.
Israel is able to pressure a president into saying, yeah, OK, all right, all right.
I'm not going to ever mention your nuclear arsenal.
And the reason they don't do that, which, again, Peter Barr in there didn't appear to know about, is because if a president does officially recognize it, the game is kind of up as far as Symington and Glenn.
And it will be more work for the lobby to unwind that.
Right.
So the other major consequences, if, say, Biden said, look at me, I'm senile.
I hereby officially recognize that Israel has nukes and that everybody knows that.
Take that to court.
Everybody said the president of the United States and quote, then what all would change besides what happened?
That's a big deal.
Ending aid there.
Would that end all military aid?
Well, I mean, you would have the option of signing a waiver that said, but because that's such a valued ally.
And they did that with Pakistan.
You know, they were trying to get Pakistan to to behave.
And they're not a signatory either.
And they also have.
So they did sign a waiver for Pakistan.
But what would happen, I think, in Israel's case, given its disproportionate and undue influence over the Congress, is you'd see Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer doing a back flip to accept a Rubio style, retroactive immunity and just take that out of U.S. code in some must pass piece of legislation.
They would work day and night, probably set aside this entire bailout and, you know, infrastructure plan and prioritize that until it was passed.
And if there was a veto, they would override the veto.
I mean, I'm not trying to be cynical, but that's the way things work when it comes to Israel.
Yeah, sure.
Seems like you're right about that.
OK, guys, that's Grant F. Smith.
And he wrote the book on it.
New Meck Divert is all about New Meck and Big Israel is all about the Israel lobby.
And remind me the name of the one about the Israel lobby in Virginia there.
Yeah, that's super important.
It's called The Israel Lobby.
Enter state government.
Right.
Rise of the Virginia Israel Advisory Board.
Man, that thing is amazing.
That is such a great story.
Everybody.
Yeah, I don't want to spoil it for you, but I'll just say you'll laugh and you'll cry and you'll have a lot of fun being outraged at what you cannot believe is right.
But yeah, of course it is, because it's Grant documenting it all for you.
Also available in audiobook.
Yeah, the audiobook is good, too.
It's short.
You know, it's exciting.
Rad.
I might like to listen to that.
I already read the thing and I really enjoy The Israel Lobby.
Enter state government.
Yeah, that sounds about right.
All right.
Yeah, it's it's it's it's quite an eye opener.
All right.
Well, thank you, Grant.
Appreciate it.
Appreciate it, Scott.
Talk to you soon.
The Scott Horton Show, anti-war radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
APSradio.com Antiwar.com ScottHorton.org and LibertarianInstitute.org
