09/30/14 – Grant F. Smith – The Scott Horton Show

Oh, John Kerry's Mideast Peace Talks have gone nowhere.
Hey y'all, Scott Horton here for the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
U.S. military and financial support for Israel's permanent occupations of the West Bank and Gaza Strip is immoral, and it threatens national security by helping generate terrorist attacks against our country.
And face it, it's bad for Israel, too.
Without our unlimited support, they would have much more incentive to reach a lasting peace with their neighbors.
It's past time for us to make our government stop making matters worse.
U.S. military and financial support, CNI, at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
All right, you guys.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And next up is Grant Smith from the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy.
That's IRMEP.org.
IRMEP.org.
Basically what he does is he uses the Freedom of Information Act and other resources to uncover as much as he possibly can about nefarious Israeli activities in the United States of America, up to and including their stealing of weapons-grade uranium from the United States for use in their nuclear weapons program, and on and on.
He's written about, what, six or eight, ten books about it.
Find his page at Amazon.com.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Hey, Scott.
Doing great.
Can you hear me all right?
Yeah, yeah.
You're good and loud.
Maybe a little too loud.
Okay, good.
So, yeah, article today, antiwar.com.
Most Americans say U.S. gives too much aid to Israel.
Surveys are more accurate with the inclusion of key facts.
Oh, good.
Grant Smith came up with a push-pull, everybody.
Tell us all about it, Grant.
I'm not going to call it a push-pull.
Come on, Scott.
That's arch.
No, the idea here was really following up on what I used to consider to be the best poll on foreign policy and aid, which is the Chicago Council that does a comprehensive survey with 2,108 responses every two years.
And so if you go to their website and look at some of the data, they say, well, you know, Americans, they, for the most part, like the amount of foreign aid that we're giving to Israel, Taiwan, and Mexico.
They support that.
And they also support going after Iran militarily if that's what it takes.
And Jane Harman from the Woodrow Wilson Center chimed in on that one on behalf of the council.
And if you really start looking at it and thinking about it, does it really make sense to compare U.S. aid to Israel and Taiwan and Mexico?
Actually, you know, it kind of doesn't because the comparison is apples and oranges and orders of magnitude different.
So I wouldn't call it a push-pull.
But instead of sweeping it under the counter and saying nothing about the fact that Mexico gets 206 million from the U.S. while Israel gets over three billion, we just put it out there and asked Americans the straight question, which is, you know, basically the U.S. is giving away nine percent of its foreign aid budget to Israel, three billion annually.
Is that amount much too much?
Too much?
About right?
Too little?
Well, you know, if you were going to really push them in this push-pull of yours, you'd have told them the whole truth that, hey, all the aid to Jordan and Egypt counts as aid to Israel, too.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
That would have been a push-pull.
Well, I don't know who knows.
No, that would have just been the plain truth, too.
Maybe.
I don't know.
No, I'm just messing with you.
I think this is great because, no, of course you're right.
In fact, I would even suspect, I would speculate that they even kind of deliberately lump it in there with Mexico and Taiwan in a way where, hey, don't you like supporting all our friends, everybody, because they know they can get a yes for that.
If they wanted to be honest about it all, they would differentiate the way you do, or at least, you know, to some degree.
Well, in their defense, it is an incredibly comprehensive poll.
So, you know, I can see, and they make some admissions, and I mentioned those in the antiwar.com article saying, you know, they know that most Americans think we give far more aid than we do anyway.
And, you know, they admitted some other flaws in their survey.
But this is too important a question.
And the other problem is, as far as we can tell, since 1989, nobody's even bothered asking this question, which is kind of strange given the prominence of Israel in all things political here in Washington.
You know, it was time to ask, basically.
And so we also put out a survey with the same number of responses, 2,108, just to make it very accurate.
It was through Google Consumer Surveys, which has as its pool to draw from, you know, just about everybody who uses the Internet.
And, of course, with sneaky cookies and all of that, they know how much people make, they know their gender, they know where they live, you know.
And so it was a way of quickly putting out a question and asking, you know, just how much do Americans support USAID to Israel?
And a couple of other somewhat explosive questions.
So are you ready?
Yeah, hit me.
So the single highest category response was 33.9 percent of Americans said it's much too much foreign aid.
Next category was too much foreign aid, 26.8 percent.
25.9 percent said that's about right.
6.1 percent said too little and 7.3 percent said much too little.
And so in the analysis, kind of broke it down a little bit.
Younger Americans tend to be far more skeptical of aid than older Americans, although, you know, uniformly, it's about everybody said it was too much, except for those in the 65 category.
Only people making 150,000 and above said it was about right at 47.6 percent.
But within that same income bracket, 42.9 percent said it was too much.
Most Americans.
So, you know, just by this this definition, six in 10 Americans are saying, no, it's too much money.
And that is direct contradiction to what the Chicago Council is saying.
So I think it's you know, I think it's important when you're asking a question about the country getting the lion's share of U.S. aid.
And this is what we know publicly.
We also know there's a lot of secret aid, including intelligence sharing.
You've got to put that out there.
Otherwise, the question doesn't make any sense.
Right.
I like much too much as an option there.
I'm with that.
Well, it's simple language, you know.
Yeah, sure.
Well, no, I mean, that's the good way to do it.
Right.
You have two different degrees of negative, two different degrees of positive and a don't know in there kind of thing.
Right.
Is your choices.
Right.
So we all agree strongly that kind of thing.
So that's fair.
Yeah.
No, I think that's great.
And, you know, if Americans knew.
Right.
What if the American people had any idea about the shape of the occupation over there?
You know what America's relationship with Israel means?
What just how much that three billion really counts in terms of a blank check for Israel's occupations and criminal policies against the Palestinians?
That 60 would be 90.
Well, I like.
Oh, yeah.
Well, it will be 90.
It'll be 70 because you see these generations marching forward.
You know, the really only thing holding it in check are the older Americans who have some concepts about it that are embedded.
But the younger Americans, as they move on, they're going to push that curve to 70.
They're going to push it to 80 and 90.
And then we're really going to have an inflection point.
What's Congress going to do when 90 percent of Americans say, you know what?
This is much too much.
Are they going to continue to listen to their, you know, bundlers or are they going to actually start listening to their constituents?
And that's already a question.
But anyway, we also asked about why is it some Americans might feel as though they shouldn't be providing all this military aid?
And, you know, horror of horrors, despite the best intentions of all U.S. presidents, never to talk about it.
Most Americans, 64 percent, believe Israel has an arsenal of nuclear weapons.
And so it may be that this whole scam called maintaining Israel's qualitative military edge is viewed as a sham or scam by Americans who know that Israel's got nukes.
I mean, you know, the president doesn't have to talk about it.
He should.
But, you know, it doesn't matter.
They already know that.
So the question becomes, why do we have to provide all this military support to the only nuclear armed power in the Middle East?
Right.
And now I thought I saw a thing.
Now I'm trying to remember whether it was in your article or something else that talked about how a majority of Americans think Iran has nukes, too, though.
That was part of that was another question.
So I think that question, it was 58.5 percent of Americans also believe Iran.
Yeah.
Well, music's playing.
We got to go hang tight right there.
It's Grant F. Smith from the Institute for Research Middle East Policy.
We'll pick up this conversation here in a second.
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Oh, man, I'm going to have to get the archive of this thing.
Christian Amanpour is interviewing Abdel Hakim Belhaj, who you might remember as the al-Qaeda leader that Barack Obama fought a war for in 2011 to kill Gaddafi and put him and his cronies in power.
He was a veteran of the Afghan and Iraq wars where he fought against Americans and was even subject to kidnapping and torture by the CIA and the MI6.
First they brought him, I think, to Thailand and tortured him in a dungeon beneath Bangkok somewhere and then shipped him to Gaddafi to torture for a while.
Same kind of story happened to a few different people.
Anyway, he's suing now in court in the UK.
He knows there's no law in America whatsoever, no point.
But in the UK he's trying to sue the MI6 for his kidnapping and torture.
Anyway, he's being interviewed on CNN International right now and I can't hear it because I'm on the radio.
But later on I'm going to look at it and I bet you'll probably want to look at it too.
I'm talking with Grant Smith from the Institute for Research Middle East Policy and that's IRMEP.org.
His latest book is Divert, Numek, Zalman Shapiro and the Diversion of U.S. Weapons Grade Uranium into the Israeli Nuclear Weapons Program.
And as we were talking about before the break, the Israelis have nukes.
The American people in large majorities now understand that they have nukes.
And so the whole scam that America has to keep the entire Israeli state on the dole so that they can maintain their qualitative edge over their adversaries in the region is falling more and more flat.
But then hence the whole propaganda campaign about Iran and their supposed nuclear weapons program and attempt to match the Israelis, even though such an attempt doesn't really exist anywhere, never really has, as Gareth Porter and others have shown.
So you can see how in Netanyahu's strategy, this is the absurd part about the Americans, how easily moved we are.
And if he just says Iran nuke, Iran nuke over and over again, it'll work on us.
So then that's my question, Grant.
I knew I was getting to a question.
Is it going to work on us or is Barack Obama going to finally follow through and sign a nuclear deal with the Iranians that'll put this fake issue to bed once and for all?
And then we can move on to other fake issues, but I wonder if you think that they'll get this final nuclear deal.
Well, before I answer that, I would just like to expand a little bit on what you said.
All indications are that with the F-35 stealth fighter, joint development of that with Israel Aerospace Industries, the state-owned company, all these joint programs on aero and Iron Dome, if you really peel away a lot of this military aid, it really is economic aid to Israel in the form of very wasteful programs that American taxpayers are on the, well, basically footing.
And so I would say that that Israeli nuclear weapons knowledge is based on reality, again, based on all of our research, but that the belief in the Iranian program is based on reaction to hype and that they don't have a program, and yet there's this irrational fear that appears in a lot of other surveys like Chicago's, where people hate Iran because they've just been fed so much propaganda.
As far as how is that going to work out, is Obama going to get a signed agreement?
I don't think so.
I think Congress, which is responsive to this irrational fear that's being pumped up, in addition to being rewarded by the bundlers and the campaign machine behind AIPAC, will do everything they can to thwart that agreement.
It's just too much of a benefit to Israel affinity groups and lobbies to keep that thing going, and I don't think they will be able to get it signed.
So I just think that there's just too much behind this campaign, that it's visible here, it's visible in other tests of American public opinion, it's visible in the strategizing of the lobby, which has never stopped trying to overturn it.
Yeah.
Well, it's true that it sure does seem to be the president and basically no one behind him who cares what the Iranian lobby in America treated them.
It's him and nobody versus everybody with power and influence in D.C.
But also, it's such the obvious thing to do.
And one more thing, it seems like the president has really tried, and I know that it is his way to lose and back down because he's a pathetic loser and probably the worst pathetic loser to ever be the president of the United States.
But, man, it seems like he didn't have to push it this hard.
He could have backed down a year ago.
He could have, oh, geez, you know, we kind of tried, but it didn't really work a year ago.
And it seems like, you know, like Gareth Porter pointed out that the Ayatollah said something about, yeah, you know, eventually we'll have 20,000 centrifuges or some kind of thing that Kerry could have glommed right on to to make a controversy.
And instead, Kerry said, no, no, no, don't worry about that.
He's talking about 30 years from now and blah, blah, blah.
And they decided to play it down.
And that seemed like a real important indication that they really were trying to get this thing done, last little, you know, bits of controversy out of the way.
And now, I mean, that's not to discount anything that you say about all the forces allied against it, but I guess then the question is how much does Obama himself really mean to see this thing through?
And I guess I've lied to belief for the last year or so that he really is, he wants this to be the one thing that he accomplished.
If not, you know, really peace with Iran, at least a nuclear deal that he can say is an end to the nuclear weapons threat to Israel.
No?
Well, I've never, like you, I haven't really seen him, I haven't seen him as the type of president who would push that sort of thing through.
No, it makes imminent sense from an economic standpoint, from the standpoint of, you know, regional peace, from the standpoint of stabilizing oil markets, from all the things that you would think would be major levers and major incentives for a president to come through, all of those things make sense.
But if you have Congress 90% against you with this constant drumbeat of propaganda and incitement, and most Americans thinking that Iran is a mortal threat to them, you know, if you look at some of the feelings toward Iraq before the US invasion and compare that to similar feelings about Iran right now, the metrics are higher.
Americans are even more afraid of Iran.
So, you know, what can a president do against that?
Say it's all hype and watch it go away?
Presidents don't have that kind of power.
Yeah, you know, I don't know.
They have the power to lie and make people believe lies.
It seems like they could just come out once in a while, tell the truth, and especially by saying, hey, listen, I know you've heard a lot of scaremongering about this, but really it's a bunch of crap.
You know, just say it right.
I don't know.
That's what I would do.
Well, yeah, I think, you know, I don't really count on the president to carry this through, but I am very, very optimistic about one thing, and that is American public opinion is changing, and they're really not, I don't think, when they get to a critical mass going to put up with this kind of thing anymore.
So I encourage people to read the full report called American Public Opinion on U.S. Aid to Israel.
It's about a 13-pager.
But if you want some hope, you know, look at what the people are thinking right now, not what the president's saying.
Yeah, good call.
And, yeah, you can find that link, everybody, in Grant's piece that's running at Antiwar.com today.
Most Americans say U.S. gives too much aid to Israel by Grant Smith.
Thanks a lot, Grant.
Hey, man, thanks a lot.
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