02/04/16 – Grant F. Smith – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, I'm Scott Horton here to tell you about this great new e-book by long-time future freedom author Scott McPherson, Freedom and Security, the Second Amendment and the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.
This is the definitive principled case in favor of gun rights and against gun control.
America is exceptional.
Here the people come first, and we refuse to allow the state a monopoly on firearms.
Our liberty depends on it.
Get Scott McPherson's Freedom and Security, the Second Amendment and the Right to Keep and Bear Arms on Kindle at Amazon.com today.
All right, kids, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, the Scott Horton Show.
First up on the show today is our good friend Grant F. Smith, the leader, the founder, the president of the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy.
That's I-R-M-E-P dot org, IRMEP dot org.
He is also the author of, oh, I don't know, a dozen books on the Israel lobby and their illegal activities, oh, and criminal activities in the United States of America.
The latest, I believe, is Divert about how they stole a bunch of weapons-grade uranium for their illicit nuclear weapons program.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Grant?
Hey, I'm doing great, Scott.
Thanks for having me on again.
Very happy to have you here.
I was very happy to see this thing in my email this morning announcing your upcoming conference at the National Press Club.
So go ahead and tell us all about it and I'll interrupt when I think I have to.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, the news release we put out about the conference on March 18 is all about the speakers.
So that's what interests people.
And in alphabetical order, I'll just mention them all.
Susan Abuhawa, Kirk Beatty, Rula Jibril, Maria LaHood, Gideon Levy, Jim Loeb, Roger Mattson, Tarek Rady, Justin Raimondo, me, Philip Weiss, and Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson.
So we put out just a release.
There's some really good ones there.
So should we go in order so you can tell everybody about it?
Well, first of all, no, no, no, business first.
And where and all those things so everybody can write it down and phone numbers, whatever they need.
Great.
Yeah.
Well, registration for this one is easy.
Just go to IsraelsInfluence.org.
No punctuation, just IsraelsInfluence.org.
And there's all the information about speakers, when the event starts, the fact that there's lunch, there's a reception afterwards, that there'll be book signings, et cetera, et cetera.
There's actually an exhibition hall this year.
All that information is at IsraelsInfluence.org.
The conference registration opens at 8 o'clock a.m. on Friday, March 18 at the National Press Club in the ballroom.
And it's really just, I think, phenomenal lineup of speakers.
It's an opportunity, which is not coincidentally a day before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee opens its national summit.
It's a chance to see behind the scenes and understand a lot more about Israel's influence on U.S. politics, on government, on foreign aid, on foreign policy from people who really know a lot about it, but aren't necessarily on mainstream broadcast news.
So go to IsraelsInfluence.org and you can get all the information you want.
You can go to the Twitter feed from there and follow it on Twitter to get new developments and updates, et cetera, et cetera.
Cool.
And yeah, I'm going to go ahead and get that all tweeted out at the break and everything too.
Beautiful.
And then this is, again, March the 18th in D.C. at the National Press Club.
Absolutely.
And a lot of great friends of the show and plus a lot of people that I've never heard of before.
Right.
Right.
Right.
Well, I think that's important.
Maybe we should cover some of those guys first.
Okay.
Guys and gals.
Susan Abuhawa is very interesting.
She runs an organization called Playgrounds for Palestine, which builds playgrounds in the occupied territories.
And probably most interestingly, she has filed a mandamus lawsuit with her lawyer, McMahon is his name, and a bunch of other plaintiffs suing the United States Treasury over its failure to do anything about tax-deductible charitable funding, which has been flowing from this country into illegal settlement building, they claim in violation of many criminal statutes.
So they've got this really interesting lawsuit trying to force the Treasury Department to actually do its job and focus on this issue.
So she's going to be very interesting.
Kirk Beatty is a professor at Simmons College.
He did this study based on 200 interviews of congressional staffers asking them about how Middle East issues are lobbied on Capitol Hill.
The book is called Congress and the Shaping of the Middle East.
And it really, really discloses, I think, to a level that nobody else ever has, because nobody else has ever done this type of research about what AIPAC is up to on Capitol Hill.
Rula Jibril is an award-winning journalist.
Hey, wait.
Wait, wait, wait.
Go ahead.
Go ahead.
Go ahead.
First of all, I really like that.
I agree with you that the first one there.
She sounds really interesting.
That sounds like a really interesting thing.
And I'd be willing to bet, without knowing the details of it or being a lawyer or anything like that, that she's probably right, right, that the laws in America are constructed to make donating to an illegal project like the settlements in the occupied territories illegal.
And yet it just goes unenforced.
I mean, that sounds like such a plausible case just on the face of it.
But then, so it brings the whole very important question of whether the law can trump politics or whether politics always wins or what.
It's one of those real cases that test whether we have a rule of law or not, or it sounds like it could be.
You're right.
You're right about that, because, yeah, again, there's all sorts of statutes such as not waging wars of occupation against a foreign person from the U.S., all sorts of statutes named in their lawsuit, which, you know, if they get discovery and if they actually get to plumb the depths of the U.S. Treasury Department and see, because this has been an issue for decades, I mean, they're not the first ones to raise this issue.
There have been complaints filed, you know, not necessarily legal complaints, but for decades.
So they get a chance.
I mean, this is, if this thing goes down, if they don't get any sort of standing, and they do clearly have standing, it's just going to be an indicator.
I'd say this is a canary in a coal mine type case.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Very interesting stuff.
And then the other thing about the lobby, too, the guy Kirk Beatty here, that sounds very interesting as well, because, of course, this is a subject that, you know, it does get some ink on the Internet, if you can call it that, a little bit.
There's not too many books about this, and certainly that get much attention.
But this is just such a huge issue.
I mean, this is the 800-pound gorilla and the elephant in the room and all the things that everybody, all the great cliches about just the completely distorted, I don't know how else to call it.
There's just unreasonable amount of power and influence in the hands of representatives of the Israeli government in the capital of our country.
We don't have that much influence in Jerusalem.
I know that.
No, I mean, this is, it's such an eye-opener, because he's got these just devastating quotes.
But basically, if you listen to these staffers, there's nothing, you can never do enough.
You can never do enough for AIPAC, I'll just put it that way.
So I'm not going to, I'm not going to get into, I've read his book cover to cover.
It's just, all I have to say is, I am floored by it.
So I just think that everyone should get a copy of his book, Congress and the Shaping of the Middle East.
So Rula Jibril, she was like one of the first anchor women in Italian television.
She's covered many, many events as a journalist in the Middle East.
Fascinating person.
She's great.
I've interviewed her at least once or twice.
Oh, have you?
Oh, that's great.
Yeah.
I never, okay.
I think I've listened to most of your interviews.
I never caught that one.
So I'm going to go back to the archive.
But so she is, she's fascinating.
She's going to keynote on some topics about the media.
So that should be good.
And Maria LaHood, she's done a lot of work.
She was a lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights.
She's defended a number of advocates in the U.S. for their activities.
When they get into trouble, she's going to talk a little bit about sort of that cost that's imposed on any sort of Palestinian advocacy in the U.S.
All right.
Hey, I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Grant F. Smith about this upcoming conference, Israel's Influence.
Israel'sinfluence.org.
It's March the 18th, put on by Grant Smith at the National Press Club, and we'll have more about it right after this.
Hey, y'all.
Scott here for Samurai Tech Academy at MasterSamuraiTech.com.
Modern appliance repair requires true technicians who can troubleshoot their high-tech electronics.
If you're young and looking to make some real money, or you've been at it a while and just need to keep your skills up to date, Samurai Tech Academy teaches it all, and they'll also show you the business, how to own and run your own.
Take a free sample course to see how easily you can learn appliance repair from MasterSamuraiTech.com.
Use coupon code Scott Horton for 10% off any course or set of courses at MasterSamuraiTech.com.
Hey, y'all.
Scott Horton here to tell you about this great new book by Michael Swanson, The War State.
In The War State, Swanson examines how Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy both expanded and fought to limit the rise of the new national security state after World War II.
If this nation is ever to live up to its creed of liberty and prosperity for everyone, we are going to have to abolish the empire.
Know your enemy.
Get The War State by Michael Swanson.
It's available at your local bookstore or at Amazon.com in Kindle or in paperback.
Just click the book in the right margin at ScottHorton.org or TheWarState.com.
Hey, I'm Scott.
It's my show, Scott Horton Show.
March the 18th at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., Israel's Influence, Good or Bad for America, IsraelsInfluence.org.
To find out all about it, we are on the line with Grant F. Smith from the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy who is putting this on and he's sitting here talking about all the great speakers.
And by the way, Grant's done this twice before, has put on great conferences about Israel and their influence at the National Press Club, both of which have been great successes and turned out great crowds and great speakers and at least the first one got on C-SPAN.
Is this one going to be on C-SPAN?
Do you know yet?
I have no idea, but we'll certainly make room for them.
You never know.
We'll do everything we can to promote the live stream and all that kind of thing, so people can see that if we can.
I got to mention that the American Education Trust, which has been around since the 80s and publishes the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs Magazine, is the co-organizer of this one and the last one.
So I can't let myself get all the credit for that as an organizer.
And I also wanted to mention that Maria LaHood, I was struggling for the name, Steven Salita was one of the last people she defended.
The idea is, can you get fired from a tenured position if you tweet out some stuff that donors to a college don't like?
So she's a lawyer who doesn't pretend to be a lawyer like me.
She actually files these giant cases, Arar v.
Ashcroft, Al-Awlaki v.
Obama.
She's a constitutional lawyer of the first degree, and part of this is getting a chance to talk to speakers.
We don't let most of them just run away.
No rock star treatment here.
They stay and they're available so that you can go and talk to them and ask them.
The idea is to get some presentation of content that you're not going to get anywhere else and then ask the speakers, hey, what can be done about this?
So in that sense, it really is a conference.
There's no stage managing.
We don't know what solutions they're going to offer.
It's a bona fide attempt to come and be a part of something that only being there as opposed to watching it or listening to it, that's the only, there's no substitute for that.
Right.
Yeah, that's great, man.
Yeah, I don't want to encourage everybody to stay home and watch it online.
I encourage anybody who could possibly get there to go.
I went to the first one and it was great.
I'll never forget.
Yeah.
I got to hang out with the Weiss and Karen Katowski and stuff.
Well, that was an incredible, incredible first.
That's all I have to say about it.
That last panel just blew people away.
But this is going to be as good.
The next person in the lineup is Jim Loeb and- No, wait.
No, no.
Gideon Levy.
Talk about him.
Oh, yeah.
Gideon Levy.
He's a keynote speaker.
He's a journalist from the Israeli newspaper Haaretz and he's fantastic in terms of being able to talk about the costs of occupation, what it's doing to Israeli society, what he would show an American congressperson coming to Israel on a junket as over 1,000 people have under American Israel Education Foundation trips.
His last presentation was immediately translated into Arabic and has received over 300,000 views on one Facebook page alone.
This guy has some insights and he's a person who's considered controversialized in Israel, but he's got a lot of interesting ideas and says and looks at things that nobody else does.
Yeah, I just want to say I agree.
I think he's great.
I read him all the time.
I'm sorry.
Now talk about Jim because I love Jim Loeb, man.
He's so great.
Well, Jim, yeah.
I mean, he got this major award, the Arthur Ross Award for Distinguished Reporting and Analysis of Foreign Affairs from the American Academy of Diplomacy last year.
I know antiwar.com wrote that up as soon as it happened, but one of the reasons he's such a go-to journalist in Washington is that he has been following sort of neoconservative and liberal interventionist influence on US foreign policy and just lecturing all over the place.
It's not a subject that he, you know, picks up and writes one article about.
He's just got dozens and dozens and dozens of articles.
So he's been around since the 80s at interpress service and he's finally, and we talked him into coming.
So he's coming.
But there's a guy.
Let me say about that.
Can I, can I say something about Jim?
Jim, I think is actually, I don't think there's any comparison, Jacob Helbron, or I guess there's comparison, but I think he wins outright for world's greatest expert on the neoconservative movement.
And if you go back and if you look through, if you can find the right place at IPS news, you can find articles where he's been right about Richard Pearl and his fellow sons of bitches since about 1977 or something.
And he just knows every single thing about all 75 real neocons in the world.
He's just got their number like no one else.
Yeah.
You're never going to get a snapshot view of who they are, where they came from, what they care about, unless a person like Jim Loeb.
And again, there's hardly anybody like him is there.
So he's hopefully going to give a historical overview, but it's just blow everyone away.
Then there's a guy I've never heard of, Dr. Roger Mattson, who's actually a former nuclear regulatory commission executive.
And he knows everything there is to know about civilian nuclear power and quite a bit about bombs as well.
And he's just written a book called Stealing the Atom Bomb, How Denial and Deception Armed Israel, which all I have to say, and I don't want to say much more because I've also read this thing cover to cover.
It should be available soon.
We've talked a lot about NUMEC and the diversion of U.S. weapons grade uranium, and I wrote a book about it.
All I have to say is this guy wrote the book about that case, man, and he's going to talk about it.
And it'll probably be the first time he talks about it.
And just think about that.
Former executive of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
And this is his book, Stealing the Atom Bomb, How Denial and Deception Armed Israel.
And then we got the tease from you.
He's talking about stealing from the USA.
Right.
And why the U.S. government was never able to do anything about it.
So I mean, it's if you really, you know, you don't have to listen to me anymore about this subject.
Just listen to him.
So that's going to be great.
And then Tarek Radi is a he's now locally based.
He was an organizer for Students and Justice in Palestine and working on that issue.
And he's going to be on a panel talking about, you know, what some of these peace and justice activists are facing on campus.
Justin Raimondo, I don't know if anybody knows that guy.
Oh, yeah, we know that guy because he's one of the co-creators and the editorial director of anti-war dot com.
And he's going to be there and it's going to be great.
And I don't know if if between Justin and Jim Loeb, if there will be anything left to say about liberal interventionists versus neoconservatism.
Does anyone have a real choice at the voting booth?
Is there anything to be done?
So those are some pretty interesting topics.
And I'm really looking forward to seeing Justin here in Washington again.
I'll be doing a presentation focused on a big study that I've just completed, which is called Big Israel, How Israel's Lobby Moves America.
And Philip Weiss, who runs Mondo Weiss, is going to be coming in.
And hopefully he's writing three to four columns about American media and its performance on Middle East issues.
So in terms of getting a perspective on what's good, what's bad, what's changing, hope for the future, there's nobody else who does the amount of work that Philip Weiss does.
I know he's a frequent guest of yours.
So really happy to have Phil coming down.
And then last but not least, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who last served under Secretary of State Colin Powell back during the big United Nations presentation about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
And of course, he has turned around on that and now considers it to have been a giant deception.
And he's well-positioned to talk about the use of intelligence and leaks about intelligence and intelligence in general in terms of crafting U.S. foreign policy in the region.
Yeah, he's an interesting one.
Knows a lot.
And I think, you know, as you kind of imply, they're sort of doing his penance for peace now, speaking the truth.
And of course, he's always ready to testify against Dick Cheney in the torture tribunal.
Yeah, I mean, he's basically said some things that you rarely hear from a former government official.
All right.
Now, again, talk business.
Phone numbers, addresses, dates and times and what people can do to to do this and talk really fast.
Absolutely.
You could go to W.R.M.E.A. org or I.R.M.E.P. org.
You can get all the information about the conference also at Israel's Influence.org.
If you have questions, 202-342-7325.
March 18th at the National Press Club in D.C.
Thanks very much, Grant.
Appreciate it.
Thanks, Scott.
Appreciate it.
W.R.M.E.P.
Y'all for I.R.M.E.P.
Hey, all Scott here.
You're like me.
You need coffee.
Lots of it.
You probably prefer taste good, too.
Well, let me tell you about Darren's Coffee Company at Darren's Coffee.com.
Darren Marion is a natural entrepreneur who decided to leave his corporate job and strike out on his own, making great coffee.
And Darren's Coffee is now delivering right to your door.
Darren gets his beans direct from farmers around the world, all specialty, premium grade with no filler.
Hey, the man just wants everyone to have a chance to taste this great coffee.
Darren's Coffee.com.
Use promo code Scott and get free shipping.
Darren's Coffee.com.
Hey, all.
Scott here.
First, I want to take a second to thank all the shows, listeners, sponsors, and supporters for helping make the show what it is.
I literally couldn't do it without you.
And now I want to tell you about the newest way to help support the show.
Whenever you shop at Amazon.com, stop by ScottHorton.org first.
Just click the Amazon logo on the right side of the page.
That way, the show will get a kickback from Amazon's end of the sale.
It won't cost you an extra cent.
It's not just books.
Amazon.com sells just about everything in the world except cars, I think.
So whatever you need, they've got it.
Just click the Amazon logo on the right side of the page at ScottHorton.org or go to ScottHorton.org slash Amazon.
Hey, all.
Scott Horton here for Liberty.me, the great libertarian social network.
They've got all the social media bells and whistles.
Plus, you get your own publishing site, and there are classes, shows, books, and resources of all kinds.
And I host two shows on Liberty.me, Eye on the Empire with Liberty.me's Chief Liberty Officer Jeffrey Tucker every other Tuesday, and The Future of Freedom with FFF founder and president Jacob Hornberger every Thursday night, both at 8 Eastern.
When you sign up, add me as a friend on there, ScottHorton.
Liberty.me.
Be free.
Liberty.me.