Hey, I'm Scott.
It's Anti-War Radio.
Welcome back.
On the line is Grant F. Smith from the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy.
The web address there is IRMEP.org, IRMEP.org, I-R-M-E-P.org, and also he writes for AntiWar.com.
I think that's AntiWar.com/Grant F. Smith with probably dashes around the F there, something like that.
Anyway, welcome back.
Grant, how are you doing?
Hey, Scott.
I'm doing fine.
Well, I appreciate you coming on the show.
I got an email from you this morning, so first things first, we've got to address that.
You're correcting me.
This is something I've said in a couple of interviews now.
I must have heard you wrong.
No, no.
Sometimes I get high and space out.
You're giving me credit, too much credit, and I heard your excellent interview with MJ Rosenberg, and you said something to the effect of my article that AIPAC only has two major donors.
In fact, it's called, Does AIPAC Have Only Two Major Donors?
, and MJ was too polite to say, well, of course not, Scott, but Grant's wrong, he could have said, but he didn't say that.
He's too polite.
But the point of the article wasn't really that AIPAC has only two major donors.
The real point of the article is that it's now only claiming that on its IRS Form 990s, which, you know, we pay close attention to AIPAC because we think it enables a lot of bad behavior in the Middle East and that it actually has brought some of that bad behavior into the U.S. in some of the ways that it operates.
So I just wanted to make it clear that the real gist of this article, which was widely read and has led to some action with the IRS and the Office of Congressional Ethics that I hope we can talk about, wasn't really saying that they're down to two donors.
The research indicates that they don't have as many big donors, people giving more than $15,000 as they used to, and that in overall their general support has been going down and that they've made up for that by bringing in money from a captive tax-exempt organization.
So I just wanted to clarify that.
You weren't wrong.
M.J. Rosenberg was polite.
And I'm not trying to mislead people with that article.
The article is really drilling down on tax reporting.
Right.
Okay, so now explain to me again why it is that they want to do this, consolidate their donors under some umbrella where they're not named as the major donors?
It's just for having to pay less, which I could empathize with, Israel lobby or not, you know?
Sure, sure.
Nobody likes taxes.
But no, the gist of it is non-profit organizations have to give a list of donors over $5,000 to the IRS, which presumably the IRS uses to check and make sure people who are claiming big charitable donation deductions are reporting them in a straight fashion.
But it also allows watchdogs who look at Form 990s, which is the whole point of publicizing them in the first place, to look at various aspects of how organizations are run.
Now what I did with that article was say, hey, you know, AIPAC used to report about 1,600 people who were giving $15,000 a year, and within the last two years they've suddenly stopped giving all that detail and they just consolidate everything and nobody's talking about how broad their funding base is in that segment that gives the most money, which is people giving around $15,000 each.
And so the point was, you know, what's happening with their funding base, why can't we get any other information?
And then Medea Benjamin, who also reads these things, noticed that they don't even report that they're lobbying anymore.
They used to break out a specific program and say that we're a lobbying organization and explain the activities and the contributions to that, but now they hide it away on a Schedule O that's also no longer available.
So the broader point of looking at these and talking about them is really, this is such an influential organization, and yet they're becoming less and less transparent and that raises a lot of questions about how they operate.
Although, is it the case that they've stopped the actual activity of lobbying at all, or we're speaking just technicalities?
No, they have not stopped lobbying.
They have about nine to 11 registered lobbyists on the Hill any given day.
They're required to file reports with the clerk of the Congress explaining who they're talking to and what legislation they're pushing.
As you might imagine, for the past few years, a lot of it's been targeting Iran with sanctions and economic warfare type things.
And so that information is available, but the fact that they're not reporting it any longer on their regular AIPAC tax return is interesting.
It's also interesting, again, that while their general support seems to be going down, support from a captive non-profit called the American Israel Education Foundation, which sends members of Congress overseas on trips, is increasing, and that that organization is very narrowly funded with gigantic foundation supporters, such as the Saban Family Foundation and the Schusterman Foundation.
So they're undergoing some sort of transformation, which is, you know, something that different Israel lobbying organizations have done over the past.
At times, to get out of foreign agent registration requirements, subsidiary and parent relationships have been switched under, you know, when they've been pressured by the DOJ.
Organizations have shut down and reformed.
So in following a lot of these organizations, it's like a Rubik's Cube.
You have all these organizations, and at any one time, they can be reversing parent and subsidiary relationships.
They can be shutting down and opening up.
The lobbying front in a particular issue can change from one to the other.
So it's confusing, but it's important to follow.
Yeah, so I wonder, other than the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, do you include the Center for Security Policy and all the neoconservative groups in America?
Or this is, when you talk about the Israel lobby, you're talking about a smaller group of foundations and think tanks that are directly tied to Israel.
No, I wouldn't.
I would definitely include them as part of the Rubik's Cube.
I mean, you know, you have Frank Gaffney very active and running around in 2002-2003 promoting the Iraq War, and, you know, while they're...
In that case, you had a lot of subsidiary organizations, such as Martin Indyk, who used to be an AIPAC Research Director, promoting the Iraq War, except he was at the Brookings Saban Foundation, an organization set up within Brookings by Haim Saban to, at that moment, support the Iraq War.
So I would include, at times, a lot of these organizations, and I wouldn't say that Brookings, for example, the entire thing is part of the Israel lobby, but I would say that the Saban Center for Middle East Policy within Brookings is certainly lobbying for Israel.
So, you know, and all of this boils down to a bigger question, which we had a chance to discuss last week, on September 20, Medea Benjamin's organization filed a complaint with the Office of Congressional Ethics, trying to get down to this point of who's the Israel lobby, what is lobbying, and are there any congressional ethics concerns raised by this?
You know, and this is in particular because, you know, 81 members of Congress were airlifted out during recess, and rather than attend to concerns in their district, they were lobbied in Israel by an organization called the American Israel Education Foundation, and the point of her complaint was really to raise issues, since there is no staff for this organization, it's housed within AIPAC, all it does is function as a travel agency, and it's now providing more trips than any other foreign lobby, and so that was a very interesting meeting, hopefully we can talk about that.
Yeah, alright, well, yeah, you're right, we have to go out to this break, but we'll be back with Grant F. Smith to develop that line and a couple others after this break.
IRMEP.org, I-R-M-E-P.org.
Alright, so welcome back to the show.
Alright, I'm on the phone with Grant F. Smith, we're talking about the power of the Israel lobby in Washington, D.C., and we're talking specifically right before the break, you were telling us about all the congressmen, how many was it, 80-something congresspeople went to Israel during the last recess?
Yeah, the number bandied around is 81, but it could in fact be higher, they've been a little reluctant to answer constituents asking whether they went or not.
But you know, the big issue is, there were travel restrictions passed in legislation in 2007 that prohibit lobby-sponsored trips.
And so, it's interesting, again, this is probably one of the biggest junkets that has ever floated out of the U.S. to Israel, which has been a number one destination, or number two destination behind China, but, you know, although the trips were clearly orchestrated by AIPAC, the Office of Congressional Ethics has some really interesting ways of interpreting, they were flooded with mail and phone calls saying, hey, you know, isn't this a violation of the 2007 rules that are supposed to keep lobbyists from paying for Congress trips to foreign countries?
And basically the OCE's response is, well, if none of AIPAC's nine lobbyists are actually on the plane or in a taxi, it's not really a violation of the ethics laws.
One of the architects of the laws disagrees with that interpretation, but even in spite of the fact that they've been bombarded with public outrage over this, particularly during these hard economic times, the OCE's position is that they're really not going to do anything about it.
Yeah.
Well now, how is it, give us like a bigger picture here, how is it that this one foreign country's lobby in America has so much more influence than, I mean, even the British, right?
I mean, how can it be this way?
How did it get this way?
Well, I think that if you look at it again as a Rubik's Cube, a lot of the important pieces in that cube are political action committees, and if you look at the thing as a system, AIPAC is very proactive at publishing benchmarks and different scorecards of members of Congress, and so all members of Congress know that they're being scored by AIPAC and that that's going out to pro-Israel PACs and major donors.
So in other words, they just play the democracy game better than anybody else.
I wouldn't say that, because the fundamental case that we've been pushing for a couple years now is that the lineage of AIPAC goes right back to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and time and again they're caught receiving guidance, direction, and working on different types of policy and PR in the U.S., and I believe Philip Giraldi uncovered some of that when he was writing about Shemai Leibowitz and all of the things that were going on in Chicago recently that were picked up on wiretap.
So there's this ongoing foreign agency which is in fact illegal, shouldn't be happening, but the Justice Department has never been able to or never been effective at dealing with, so I would say that because, again, we've got the interconnection of a lot of different groups and a lot of them in communication, again, with a foreign principal, that's why it's so robust and can act so quickly, it's that interconnectivity.
So I frankly think it's dangerous, because again, a lot of the bad behavior and sort of disregard for rule of law that you see in Israel is present in the activities of a lot of these interlocked groups.
Well, and it seems noteworthy that Shemai Leibowitz, this Israeli-born, I think dual citizen who was working for the FBI translating their intercepts from the Israeli embassy, was so alarmed at what he was reading and so alarmed at the fact that the FBI wouldn't do a thing about it, that he went ahead and gave it to this other blogger he must have known he was risking prison time, which he got.
Yeah, I think he's a great whistleblower, he's going to be up there with the Daniel Ellsbergs and certainly Sabel Edmonds, I mean, it's a great thing, and I heard your interview with Richard Silverstein, a great thing that he decided that he was going to take action by leaking that.
The thing that we should be appalled by, of course, is the fact that the Justice Department knows all of this stuff is going on, and it never seems to be able to motivate itself to do anything about it.
And it's just a shame, there's a public interest lawyer right now going after the Justice Department saying, we want to see all of the ways that you determine groups should not be registering as foreign agents.
And they won't play ball, because basically it's so politicized and so dependent on signals from the executive at various interest groups that it's totally broken down, and so the walls between a lot of these harmful foreign interests have completely subsumed this part of the lobby.
Well, and the part that apparently really worried him, there were some specific cases of corruption, I think, but it was, really, Shemai Leibovitz's story was, in general, he was really upset at just how good the Israeli embassy was at keeping track of congressmen.
Everything they do and say, everybody else who supports them, every way, certainly, that they vote on any issue, and that they are just extremely effective about marshaling their resources against any congressman who crosses them at any time, basically.
Well, I would assume that the consulate's not doing that on their own.
I mean, that's APEC's job, so I would assume that if they had that sort of information, they weren't creating a second database that they were probably...
And they're working together with the so-called legitimate regular lobby that we ought to believe is separate from the Israeli embassy, supposedly.
Well, more and more people are beginning to say, at least in the alternative press, APEC, which lobbies for the Israeli government in the United States.
And that's...
I mean, that's true.
And we shouldn't be beating around the bush with all these artful configurations saying that they're lobbying for the interests of the U.S.
-Israel relationship.
I mean, it doesn't make any sense, and people are starting to see through it.
You know, hopefully Silverstein will turn over his notes to Justin Raimondo, and hopefully Leibowitz's notes will come out, his beautiful translations, so that the American people can say, hey, you know what?
There's definitely a foreign agency relationship going on here, why isn't the DOJ getting off the stick?
Yeah.
Well, and look, it's not like they're saying we ought to give up world empire and slash the budget and restore sound money and reinstate the Bill of Rights and whatever.
All they do is try to lie us into war with Iran all day.
All they do is make sure that people are willing to commit suicide attacks against us because of their treatment of the Palestinians on our dime and with our military equipment.
Like what happened on September 11th.
Right, if they weren't doing bad things, no one would care.
And I agree, if they were lobbying for any of those other things, I don't think anyone would care that much.
But you know, the treatment is so grossly different.
I wrote an article called Selective FARA Enforcement, Pakistan vs.
Israel, and you've got Pakistanis going to prison for violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act, lobbying for Kashmir, which is relatively benign.
Americans don't even know much about Kashmir.
Comparing and contrasting that to how AIPAC has been able to just completely, completely ignore the Foreign Agents Registration Act at our great peril.
Well, and as MJ Rosenberg was pointing out in his piece recently at the Huffington Post and Al Jazeera, Obama is sending around, and of course it was just in the New York Times that Obama's support among Jewish voters is falling, and I don't know whether that's because the propaganda that he's anti-Israel is working, or because, in fact, most American Jews are not in line with the Likud party on what ought to be done about the occupied territories or what, but he's leaking stories about, yeah, I sold bunker buster missiles to, or gave bunker buster bombs to Benjamin Netanyahu.
And hey, look, everybody, at this press release where it's a collection of quotes of Netanyahu saying that I'm a great president, and Rosenberg says this is the first time he's ever heard of a presidential campaign citing the approval of a foreign leader for why he ought to be reelected.
And it's funny, too, because you think about all the griping and complaining that everybody on the conservative side did when Obama went to Europe, and they said, oh, what's he doing giving all these speeches during his campaign trying to get the approval of the Europeans?
And this is supposed to be an American election.
But here he's sending out a press release going, look, Netanyahu likes me, I swear.
Yeah.
Well, when he does that, he's clearly targeting the big donors, and I think MJ's right.
The progressives are abandoning him for an entirely different set of reasons, which is that he's not, he hasn't been implementing their program.
So he's getting hit from both ways.
But, you know, it's going to be an interesting election, once again, seeing all candidates with one exception, you know, seeing who can out-Israel the other one.
And whether that will backfire this year remains to be seen.
Hopefully it will.
Well, the price tag's getting high.
Yeah.
No kidding.
All right.
Hey, thanks very much for your time, Grant.
I really appreciate it, as always.
Thanks a lot, Scott.
Bye.
Grant F. Smith, everybody.
Grant Smith, founder of the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy, IRMEP.org, or com or something, look it up.
He also writes for Antiwar.com.
See you all tomorrow.
Thanks for listening.
