All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I'm 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 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, you guys, on the line, I've got the great Grant F. Smith.
He is the founder and the director of IRMEP, which is a funny name for a thing, I-R-M-E-P.
It's the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy, IRMEP.org, and mostly what he does is he sues the government for documents and then proves the nefarious motives and intentions and behaviors of the Israel lobby in the United States of America, and read his book Big Israel about the Israel lobby and divert and the rest, and he's just great.
Welcome back to the show, Grant.
How are you doing?
I'm doing well.
Thank you very much, Scott.
I'm very happy to have you here.
So, I got a real exciting email, and it was from you, and it said that the Anti-Israel Lobby Conference, which has a different name every year for some reason I still don't understand, is happening live in person at the Press Club in D.C. on March the 4th of this year.
Is that true and correct?
That is absolutely true, Scott.
We're all going to be there.
I can't wait.
Listen, this is one of the most important events of the year, if you ask me.
I call it the Anti-Israel Lobby Conference.
There's more to it than that, but what is it?
Tell us all about it.
Yeah, so it's called Transcending the Israel Lobby at Home and Abroad, and we've been doing it at the National Press Club.
Usually it takes place right before the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee meets, so it's a real key time.
They're not actually meeting this year.
They didn't meet last year either, but we're still going to do it because they're still insisting on a lot of policies and programs, and so this is a chance for experts to gather and talk about better alternatives.
So even though they're not going to be at the Convention Center, we're still going to be at the Press Club, and we've got some just incredible speakers.
Those times are what they are.
We will have Zoom tickets available this year, where people can participate more fully via Zoom, but we really are encouraging people who want to go and be there in person to come along, just as if it's any old conference.
Great.
Well, so tell us, who's going to be speaking at this thing that you know so far?
All right.
Well, so of course we have legendary rock musician Roger Waters is going to come.
He's going to be talking about what impact artist boycotts are having on Israel and its policies and how he tries and other artists try to educate their fans, so to speak.
So he's come to the conference, but he's never really spoken at it, so this time he'll actually be up at the mic and giving a presentation.
I think he's also going to talk about what's happened to a UK media outlet, and it was targeted with all sorts of smears because of the reporting it was doing on Palestine, and I was sent a video of him making a formal statement in opposition to the smear campaign, and that was pretty good.
So I think he's actually going to talk about that as well.
So that'll be really exciting.
Haaretz columnist and dean of Israeli journalism Gideon Levy's coming again.
Excellent.
Yeah.
I saw his speech there before a few years ago, and man, it was something else.
I really respect that guy.
Yeah, it's really interesting because the first time he came, his speech was translated into Arabic and French and all sorts of other languages, and it just spread across social media and the internet like wildfire.
And he kind of made a joke.
He said, yeah, people told me about this famous speech I made, and I had never heard of it before, and then he realized it was at this conference.
So very self-deprecating.
Anyway, he's going to talk about what he talks about.
His beat is human rights and democracy, and it doesn't take too much for him to throw down because he's writing about this stuff on an almost weekly basis.
We've got a senior staff attorney from Palestine Legal coming down from New York.
She's a lawyer who does work on basically all these attacks on freedom of speech across the US.
As you know, there are 32 states, soon to be 33 perhaps, states that ban businesses from boycotting Israel if they do more than a certain amount of contracts with the states.
And I think you've probably talked to Abby Martin and other people who have fallen under that anti-boycott campaign.
But anyway, Radhika Sinha is at the forefront of providing legal support to fight those unconstitutional laws whenever they're applied.
Most people just sign these waivers and sign away their free speech rights.
But there have been some interesting cases of, like a newspaper in Arkansas and other- Well, it's good that you mentioned Abby Martin.
In fact, I don't think I did interview her about that.
I should interview her because she won a case in court where they tried to make her sign one of these things.
Yeah.
It's obviously a violation of her rights as a human being and also as an American citizen.
Yeah.
It's just like attrition, war of attrition.
You've got all these unconstitutional laws.
They're slipped in.
Nobody notices.
And then suddenly you've got to put together a $10,000 or $20,000 defense team when suddenly you're supposed to sign a waiver.
So it's a pretty terrible thing.
They're trying to push one in Virginia now.
And Virginia, to its credit, has been able to defeat every single attempt to slip one of these in.
So, well, I can just skip ahead and say that Paul Norsey, who's the co-president of the Virginia Coalition for Human Rights, which is this organization that has like 16 member groups, they're the ones who've been fighting these laws and winning.
But now they're facing down with HB 1161, which is this anti-boycott law with a $10,000 threshold that's going to affect a lot of small businesses in Virginia.
Some initial test polling shows that most Virginians do not support it.
About 70 percent, in fact, of Virginians in a non-representative poll don't want to sign away their rights or have the legislature crush them with this latest law.
He's going to come and he'll be talking about how they're going to beat this latest foray, the long arm of Israel in Virginia.
Professor Joseph Massad is coming.
He's going to be talking about whether there's really any difference.
He's from Columbia University.
Any difference between AIPAC and the so-called challenger groups like J Street and Americans for Peace Now that portray themselves as more progressive, kind of anti-settlement, pro-peace, which nevertheless lobby, just like AIPAC does for military packages, these $3.8 billion packages every year.
He's really going to talk about whether it's an oxymoron for these groups to be trying to lobby on behalf of a Jewish and democratic state.
He's going to really dive into that in terms of whether there's much difference between lobbying for that or apartheid South Africa.
Some of these groups like J Street, they're really struggling to hang on to their progressive membership, which is abandoning ship for JVP and other more productive areas.
It's really worthwhile to have somebody who's written so much about the Middle East.
He's also come out with an incredible article in Middle East Eye called Why Israel Wants Permanent War.
It's really getting into the threatening war against Iran.
That's something Israel's been doing for decades.
This is from the Middle East leading state sponsor of nuclear proliferation.
Hopefully we could get him to also talk about that and whether this is really a strategy to have this constant war drum beating from the Israelis in the Middle East against the designated enemy and whether the drum beat for permanent war is something that's ever going to stop.
Very interesting.
Great author.
Great professor from Columbia.
We're having Palestinian leader Hanan Ashrawi come in.
She came here a couple of years ago and talked about what the Trump administration was doing to the Palestinian efforts for liberty and sovereignty and freedom.
I remember she's very impressive.
What is her actual title again?
She was in the PLO.
She's been involved in various nonprofit organizations.
She's been a consultant to Palestinian legislators.
She's got just an incredibly varied background.
Al Mitro was one of the organizations that she headed up.
She's not in government anymore.
She actually retired from the Palestine Liberation Organization in December of 2020.
She's not speaking for the PLO.
She was there during all the big negotiations.
She witnessed the fraud that Oslo was and all of that.
She drops names like, yeah, when we were negotiating with James Baker, there seemed to be some respect for our position, et cetera, et cetera.
She's written a bunch of books, This Side of Peace, A Personal Account, and all sorts of other things.
She's been a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council.
She accepted the post of minister of higher education and research.
She's got this incredibly varied background of advocacy and leadership for Palestinian freedom.
She's just one of the most prominent women that you could have come and speak knowledgeably about that.
Right now, we're working hard to get her here.
She's a very dynamic speaker when she does come, but hopefully we can see her and she has committed to coming.
All of these things, as you probably know, you're doing a lot of traveling, but maybe not so much international traveling.
There've been travel bans and then suddenly it's off again, on again, but it looks pretty good at this point.
Let me just put it that way.
Yeah.
Hang on just one second.
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Now we all know John Kiriakou, he's a friend of the show, former CIA officer and counterterrorism guy turned whistleblower and truth-telling type.
So what's he going to be talking about?
Well he's not going to be talking about the thing most people know about him, which was that he refused to undertake the CIA's so-called enhanced interrogation training so that they could waterboard and sleep-deprive terror suspects overseas.
He blew the whistle on that.
He allegedly revealed the identity of another agent and he went to prison for 30 months for that.
And he confirmed it to a reporter who asked him, is this right?
And they didn't even report it, I don't believe.
So he's like the only person who paid any price for the entire torture scandal that enveloped this country during the Bush administration.
But we're not asking- Hey, now that's not right.
There were some privates and specialists from the night shift, from the North Carolina National Guard who got in trouble.
Did they go to prison?
Sorry.
Yeah.
You're right.
I'm trying to be cynical and accurate at the same time.
But yeah, so we're not having him come to talk about that.
We're talking to him about some of the things he's written in his books and just sort of touched on in interviews.
So he said in one of his books, the first one, that he witnessed inside CIA a great deal of respect for the Palestinians and their cause.
And so we're going to ask him about how widespread that was and whether anyone could really hang on to their job at CIA or state if they acted upon that respect.
So we're going to ask him about that.
He also received, quote, many warnings regarding covert Israeli intelligence maneuverings within the US, unquote.
So we're going to ask him about, well, what were those warnings?
What were those maneuvers and what's being done about it?
And hopefully it's not just about Pegasus or stuff we already know about.
So if we do get into the torture program, I'll ask him for sure about sort of the importation of Israeli techniques.
There have been widespread reports that the CIA general counsel wrote that, quote, the would serve as a possible basis for their program.
So I want to see what he knows about importing.
These Israelis are very well known for, you know, detentions without any sort of warrant and that sort of treatment of prisoners.
So we're going to talk about that.
We're going to talk about the two motivations in the 9-11 report, about US bases in Saudi Arabia and US support for Israel, about whether those factors for terrorism against the US have been mitigated, and into all sorts of other things about his intelligence career.
You know, as you know, he was first an analyst and then an operative, about the sort of importation of all sorts of other practices and, you know, working off the assumptions that the Israelis and the Americans are the good guys in the region.
He wrote about that a lot in his book.
Well, I want to know about, I know this wasn't exactly his department, but he's got to know at least a little bit about American counterintelligence toward Israel, because as I know, you know, as well as anybody else, other than maybe Jeff Stein or the director of the CIA right now himself, the Israelis spy on America as much or more than any other nation in the world.
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
And there used to be, until Dianne Feinstein nixed it, there used to be an annual report from the FBI and the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community about this sort of intelligence penetration of the US and what the US is doing about it.
And now that's gone.
So great idea, Scott.
You should come along and be on the question or interview panel.
It's a great ad.
But anyway.
I can think of some questions.
Sure.
So go on.
Yes.
Because we are, we got six minutes and we still got some more personalities to describe here.
Yeah.
So Seth Jolley is going to come.
He's a former head of Amherst's communications department and runs a media study watchdog group.
He's going to come and analyze how American news organizations are doing on their quality balance and accuracy of Middle East reporting.
In addition to Paul Norrissey, Virginia Coalition for Human Rights coordinator Gene Trabalsi is going to talk about grassroots Virginia efforts to eject an Israeli company that's a major human rights violator from their state and all of the successes they've had.
That's going to be very exciting.
Don Wagner is going to talk about Christian Zionism.
He's seen it on the ground.
He's a reverend.
He's going to talk about growing backlash inside American churches and what some groups are doing to reduce the influence and spread of that.
So we've got a couple more people on deck, but that's pretty much the lineup and people can certainly go to IsraelLobbyCon.org and check out everything that's available.
There's a gala speaker dinner at Holman Lounge at the Press Club the day before on the 3rd.
So anyone who wants to come and rub elbows with Roger Waters and Gideon Levy and most of the rest of the speakers is certainly welcome to come and enjoy some fine dining and very high quality beverages, shall we say, at Holman Lounge, an intimate gathering.
There'll also be some entertainment and various...
Should I send some books ahead to your bookstore?
You can certainly do that.
You got a great bookstore there every year, don't you?
Yeah, the entire Middle East Books and More, which is down in Adams Morgan, basically imports its entire stock into one of the rooms, probably be the Bloomberg room of the Press Club.
So it's all there and you can mingle and check out some of the products.
I got to meet Jim Loeb there one time.
Ha ha, Jim Loeb, he's great.
Yeah, he's been coming back online.
I heard him do an interview a couple of weeks ago.
Yeah, we read a couple of articles.
He wrote a couple of things for Quincy.
Yeah, yeah.
So that's awesome.
That's awesome.
And yeah, so it's going to probably, in terms of the speaker dinner, I think that's probably going to be a very intimate and very interesting part of this.
We don't normally open that up to the public.
Normally it's just a bunch of the speakers hanging out in a restaurant, kind of getting to know each other and meeting their fellow panelists the day before the big event.
But this is going to be, you know, members of the public can go and...
This whole thing, we've postponed it a couple of times, but it's on this year.
So if you can possibly make it, if you want to, you know, check out the National Press Club and they've got a few COVID restrictions, they're abiding by D.C. and CDC and all the three-letter act.
Does everybody have a passport to get in?
The Press Club is checking vaccination status against an I.D.
Yeah, so they're doing that and that's not us, that's them.
But basically everywhere in D.C. is like that right now.
So it's pretty, yeah, it's pretty much of a regimen that is absolute across the non-state that we're located in here.
So yeah, there's that.
Trying to think what else is different about it.
You know, the Press Club has pretty much been coming back online.
Their calendar is starting to fill out.
You're starting to see that they're doing the same sort of presentations by government and NGOs and groups that they've done in non-COVID years.
So we're happy that we can actually proceed this year.
It's a major blow to have this thing, you know, working on it in 2019 for 2020 and then couldn't do it, couldn't do it 2021, did it virtually.
Great people like you came in, but now we're doing it.
We're not going to delay this anymore.
And we've thankfully been able to retain all these great speakers.
You know, they've hung in with us for basically a couple of years now.
And we've picked up a couple of great new people.
So hope to see everybody March 4.
And if they can make it to the speaker dinner on March 3, that'd be great as well.
Awesome.
All right, you guys, that's Grant Smith, again, working with the Washington Report on Middle Eastern Affairs.
No, Middle East Affairs, sorry, we're MIA.
It's IRMEP, the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy.
The Israel Lobby Conference here, the correct name for it, is transcending the Israel Lobby at home and abroad.
The web address is IsraelLobbyCon.org.
And it's March the 3rd and 4th, the dinner on the 3rd, the event on the 4th at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
Thank you so much, Grant.
You're the best.
Hey, Scott.
Thanks.
See you there.
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.
