Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, on the line, I've got the great Grant Smith from the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy, IRMEP.
And what he does mostly is write books about the Israel lobby and sue the U.S. government to force them to release documents admitting the truth about the activities of the Israel lobby.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Grant?
Doing fine, Scott.
Thanks for having me on.
You wrote a book called Big Israel and a bunch of others.
Yep.
But I should do a better job of mentioning that when I introduce you on the show.
Get it, everybody?
Big Israel, like big tobacco or big agriculture or big pharmaceutical, what have you.
Big pharma, they call it, I guess, yeah.
Yeah, a whole audio book, too.
Oh, yeah, which I know you worked real hard on because I know how hard it is to work on those damn things.
Yeah, yeah, not easy, not fun.
It seems like it'd be easy, but yeah, no, it's not.
No, it just takes one jet airliner to ruin work.
And then you got to go back and redo it.
But whatever, it's done.
Yeah, man, good times.
All you commuters out there should be listening to Grant's book.
All right, let's talk about this thing that you wrote.
Gallup, heard of them?
Gallup quietly admits Israel versus Palestinian sympathy polls are misleading.
Oh, Grant Smith, you don't say so, huh?
I do say so.
You've been saying so for a long time, and now they say so?
Yeah, they're finally admitting.
You know, they've been putting out for 30 years definitive reports with pithy headlines saying that Americans, the majority of Americans, sympathize more with Israelis and Palestinians.
And now on March 28, they quietly announce on an obscure web page that, oh, hey, you know what?
That's not really true.
And nobody wrote anything about it.
And this is a high-stakes question.
Rewind back to the beginning of your interest in Gallup and their results on this question.
Well, my interest in Gallup was basically looking into the headlines.
So in 2017, Gallup came out with a headline that, quote, Israel maintains positive image in the U.S., unquote.
And in 2018, they said Americans remain staunchly in Israel's corner.
And they were saying things like record high, and in 2016, firmly positive.
And all of these polling results always came out right before the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee meeting in Washington.
And then AIPAC and other groups would take it to Capitol Hill and say, look, Americans love Israel, so you really need to give more foreign aid to them.
And looking into it further, I noticed that the Congressional Research Service, which publishes an annual report on USAID to Israel, mentioned these Gallup polls as being a justification and a reason that Congress is always so favorable towards giving the majority of the foreign aid budget to Israel.
So I became really interested in just one fundamental question, which is, is this question and the results given by Gallup true?
And if you'd asked that question 10 years ago, there would have been no way to really validate in a real-time basis whether it was true or not by fielding the same question to a statistically significant representative group of Americans.
Well, but what about the Zogby poll?
And I don't mean the Palestinian activist, but his brother with the poll.
And then there's Rasmussen and there's whatever other polling companies, NBC and Wall Street Journal and whoever, they commission polls all the time.
So it's not just Gallup out there.
So has there always been a discrepancy or those other companies don't ask this question?
Yeah, that's one thing.
So one of the biggest problems is that this is a high-stakes question.
And if you come out with polling results saying, hey, you know what, Americans actually don't support aid to Israel or they don't sympathize that much with them, you would get hit hard by the lobby and all of its watchdog groups.
And so all of the polling companies, and this is my opinion, I believe are walking on eggshells every time they do any sort of polling on this.
But the only other organization that has anywhere near 30 years of data on a similar question is Pew Research.
And so looking at Pew's data in 2018 in particular, over the same period of time, 30 years, I noticed that they didn't find majority American sympathy for Israelis.
And they found a lot more uncertainty with 40% of Americans saying they didn't really have an opinion.
And we'll get back to the brand new Pew poll in a second there.
Yeah, we need to do that.
But later though, because stick to this thing here about the discrepancy that you always knew that there was one here going back.
Right.
Well, and so I looked at the discrepancies and I looked at Pew, which was in 2018, also saying things like, hey, you know, we know that telephone polls to landlines is kind of going the way of door to door polls like they used to do it in the 1920s and 30s.
And we admit there could be some real issues because online polling seems to be doing a more accurate job because people are on the Internet.
They're not hanging around a landline anymore.
So I submitted the same question through Google surveys, which, again, is not just putting a form online or calling people to a website saying, hey, answer this poll.
It's actually going out to a representative sample of Internet users, adult Internet users.
That's an important point.
You're not talking about you did a poll on your website or, you know, like a Fox News poll of their own viewers.
You're talking about one where Google actually they have their own algorithm to make it as diverse an opinion sample as possible kind of thing.
Right, because they have demographic data, a lot of it volunteered by users, and they can actually go after the Southern female, you know, Internet user, adult Internet user that, you know, is relatively more rare than the, you know, Southern male Internet user, which is, you know.
Yeah.
So they managed to get representative samples and you can do a poll with, you know, a couple of thousand responses and get a statistically significant low margin of error result.
So, yeah, a lot of people discredit polls by saying, oh, you just, you know.
And now do you ask the same question or you ask the question in a different way or what's the difference there?
I asked Gallup's question.
I put out the same question.
And what I found was my results differed not only from Gallup, but also from Pew, in which 51.1 percent in 2018 said that they had no opinion and only 20.7 percent said, yeah, my sympathies lie more with the Israelis than the Palestinians.
But, you know, the impact here is, well, that's certainly not the majority of Americans.
You say 50, according to that Pew poll, 50 percent didn't have an opinion at all?
No, the 30-year average for Pew was 39 percent didn't have an opinion.
And the 30-year average for Gallup was 24.
So Gallup, you can say this about them, the people they're polling seem to be a lot more opinionated.
But then they admitted what the problem is with their process.
And that's what they did on March 28, quietly, quietly.
Well, wait.
So before you get to that point, which is the real lead here, it does kind of go to something that we've often talked about, too, which maybe just people recognize their own ignorance on the issue.
You know, TV will never show them a map and say, here's the Israelis.
Here's the Palestinians.
They're under Israeli occupation.
Now you can picture how this thing works here, sort of deal.
They never explain it.
And so I guess maybe that's big of the American people, whether it's 24 or 49 or whichever percent to say that, you know, I really don't have an opinion about that.
TV sure wants you to choose a side.
So it seems like if people are resisting choosing a side based on what they recognize as their own ignorance, and that's pretty good.
Well, yeah, you're exactly right.
That's a hugely important factor.
And there's also this thing called modal bias, which is if you have a human being on the other end of the line urging you to give you your response as a human, you're going to feel stupid if you have no opinion or if you just say, I don't know.
Or next question.
And, you know, over the phone, Americans, anyone doing this poll are going to feel pressured into giving some sort of an answer.
And they are even further primed, which we could talk about by having other questions precede this question.
So it's a huge problem that is generally much reduced over the Internet.
And to get to your point, pretty soon we'll be able to put up, you know, if we want to, that disappearing Palestine map and just say to people, these are the Palestinian areas where the population lives.
And this is where the Israelis have taken over.
Do you think that there's been a good process of, you know, apportioning land to the two populations of this particular territory?
And, you know, then then the game's going to be over.
But, you know, for now, it's all words and it's either delivered over the phone or delivered via the Internet.
You know what?
I don't know if this is going for your poll, but I had an idea about like maybe asking an audience somewhere or something, showing that map and saying, you know, when you see this map, does it look to you like the Arabs have taken this chunk out of Israel?
Because it kind of does look like that.
Right.
But or or or does it look like maybe this is what's left of Palestine that the Israelis haven't conquered yet?
You know, we're like, and do you like and have people answer that?
Because I think, you know, if you do look at Israel without the West Bank, it's a very irregular shaped country.
And then and the Hezbollah, of course, will say, look, you know, at its skinniest point, it's only nine kilometers between the sea and the West Bank.
And so it's just we're yeah.
And it makes it seem like, you know, they're the ones having the land taken from them instead of the other way around.
Right.
I just wonder, like, I don't know about a poll or audience or what, but I'd like to know about what people think about that, you know?
Yeah, it would be it would be great to have more than a poll, maybe sort of an interactive dial test, not not a Frank Luntz style test, but like more, more accurate, where you had maybe 30 minutes of differing perspectives.
And then you ask people what they think, because I agree, ignorance and brevity are kind of the enemy of valid responses.
And there are all sorts of other ways you can sort of drill down on what popular opinion might be.
Not that popular opinion has much of an impact on policy.
No, but it is important for us to understand.
Let me say one more thing before I get back to what you just mentioned about the real key to this story here, which is that when I say that they never talk about this on TV, I mean, except that one time.
The exception that proves the rule, absolutely.
And this was in December of 2016, right when Flynn was working with Israel to try to get the Russians to veto the resolution in the UN Security Council, which failed because the Russians and the Trump administration didn't have a or the Trump team didn't have ongoing relationship of any kind.
Anyway, so during that, I think the guy's name is Ari something I forget on MSNBC.
I'm not sure if it was him or not.
I think it was him and this other guy.
And they put up a big map of Israel-Palestine and they showed the West Bank.
And the whole thing was defending President Barack Obama's position here, why he's abstaining.
He didn't vote for it, but why he's abstaining on this resolution is because here's what's going on.
And they really showed Jewish only roads.
And here are the settlements.
And here's the wall that snakes all over the place, dividing people from their property and all these checkpoints and all this stuff.
And it's like, holy crap.
Wow.
We get that guy to the Pulitzer Prize or something, because one time and only when it was the most partisan interest in defending the Democrat president of the United States of America at the time in his policy, did they ever show here's who's occupying who over here and why it matters.
And it was really almost shocking kind of thing just because of the silence surrounding that same issue from anyone else.
They'll just never do it.
They'll show you a map of any country in the world, but they'll never show you a map of Israel-Palestine or certainly not in a way where they're explaining here's what the Palestinians have left on the West Bank and that kind of thing.
Sure.
The media is appalling on this topic, and it would certainly be the exception that proves the rule.
But we kind of ran with that idea you had years ago saying, well, ask Americans who occupies who.
And it turns out that in contrast to the UK, Canada and Mexico, most Americans believe that there is a Palestinian occupation of Israeli land at this point.
So, you know, one thing that polls can measure is the degree to which people have been propagandized out of all context with reality.
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Well, the has bars must be cheering at that.
You know, speaking of Frank Luntz, I love bringing this up to as long as I'm bringing up tangents all over your interview.
You mentioned him.
He's the Republican pollster.
There's a there's a hilarious episode of Penn and Teller BS there on Showtime where they're dealing with him and they're standing on a street corner and some guy just drives up and goes, you know, Frank Luntz, you know, and drives away anyway.
So he he's, you know, the Republican pollster, propagandist, and he put out a thing in 2009 or 2008 called the Global Language Dictionary.
And it's how pro Israel propagandists has barists should explain Israel-Palestine issues.
This is how to talk about this stuff.
And essentially, and just I encourage everyone to take a look at.
There's just no mistaking what's going on there.
He's concluding up front that because everything that the Israeli government is doing is wrong and is the kind of thing that Americans would never put up with in a million years.
We have to lie about everything and we have to turn everything upside down.
So now you're right.
There is apartheid in the West Bank.
Why won't the Palestinians just let the poor Jews live wherever they want?
It's such a tyranny over there, guys.
And to just lie and lie and lie.
And he says outright, it's the only way.
He goes, listen, we've been using a talking point for a long time that says that, well, this Palestinian house that was built in the 1920s is not up to code.
And so we're not stealing this property.
It's just that this great grandmother is in violation of our zoning ordinance.
And so that's why we're bulldozing her East Jerusalem home that Frank Luntz says, oh man, don't say zoning.
Don't say zoning.
Americans hate zoning.
You've got to come up with some other lie.
Call her a terrorist or something, but don't say it's zoning because what a bad – anyway, then the whole damn study reads like that.
We tested with focus groups.
The only way to get them to support Israel is to lie our asses off to their stupid stinking faces.
That's the conclusion.
Well, if you believe Luntz when whatever in 2010 he said not a single drop of oil went into the Gulf as a result of Deepwater Horizon spill, if you actually want to listen to a guy who's willing to make a blanket statement like that, then his studies are just right for you.
But I don't think he's got much mainstream credibility anymore.
I don't really see him able to access as many channels as he used to, but – Well, that's good to know.
But yeah, I mean, he was much more of a big shot in the Bush Jr. years and so forth, I guess.
Yeah.
So haven't seen him around lately, which is okay.
Now, listen, you mentioned a minute ago that what this is all about, it's not necessarily twisted wording in the question, but it's about the questions leading up to the question, and this is Gallup's admission of why they were getting skewed results for all this time, and how long is that?
Well, they've been doing that question for 30 years.
And so, yeah, the problem that they are saying the problem was – and I have my doubts that it's the full explanation.
But what they were saying on their March 28th mea culpa is that the fact that the question on sympathy was always after asking their respondents a number of questions about favorability toward individual countries, that that had a, quote, priming effect on respondents, in which they would tend to express a weakly held – opinion of favorability toward Israel that they didn't really hold as a result of being primed.
And so what they did is they conducted their own internal unpublished study between February 12 and 28, in which they just asked about sympathy, but not in the context of any larger survey.
And they found that a majority of Americans did not, in fact, have such high favorability of Israelis, and that many more were uncertain, just like Pew, and just like the survey that we put out said.
So they admitted – they didn't admit that they were purposefully skewing the results.
What they admitted was that the process was flawed.
But there are a number of problems with what they're saying.
And I think the reason that they felt the need to do this – and again, this is just my personal opinion – is not because we put out something very critical, and then the Jewish Daily Forward put out something very critical in 2018, and then we did it again this year.
I do think it was because they felt like their credibility was being impacted, and that they couldn't access the government contracts and other lines of corporate consulting.
If they had all of these stories, which were beginning to be the number one results of any search for Gallup, Sympathy, Middle East, their stuff wasn't coming up anymore.
The reports that we did, the reports that were critical of this were beginning to come up.
So they had to pivot and provide some sort of response.
And so it's kind of a mixed bag, because the whole transition away from phone polling right now, Pew finally did put out some results.
And what they're saying is essentially that they have new questions.
And so they came out with results on April 24, saying 64% of Americans have a positive view of the Israeli people, but only 41% had a favorable view of the Israeli government.
And so they're not even offering their sympathy question.
I think that they feel like they don't want to be pitted against Gallup.
That's not something pollsters, they're competitive, but they were pretty much being used as a way to go up against Gallup and say, look, this can't be true.
So I think they responded to their problem that they identified earlier in February, by saying, essentially, you know what, we're not going to ask the same questions anymore, since we can't have historical data.
And since this is a more accurate way to do it, they're doing digital online polling.
Now, we're just going to invent entirely new questions, and we'll just sort of transcend the whole issue.
And so there are two problems with Pew's result that I can see.
And number one of them, the first of them is that they have completely refused to release data of people who didn't answer, don't have any opinion.
And so this is at the heart of the problem.
Pew has released results, which may not be majority results, that 64% of Americans who believe they have positive views of the Israeli people or the other number on Palestinian people, what does that number mean if you just called out all the people who don't have an opinion?
And so that's extremely problematic.
And I guess, you know, since they toss out the no answer question, they're pretty much committing the same error, the same type of error, the same type of process error that Gallup was committing.
And I also feel that they're kind of being, you know, I think that they did actually ask the sympathy question, but they're very clear in their release that they're not releasing all of their data at this time.
So, you know, if you get back to it, the bottom line is there's a tremendous pressure out there, if you're a major pollster, not to be critical or not to release any information that's too critical of Israel.
And Pew has, I think they were really the first to show that there's an enormous and growing partisan divide over American support for Israel with the Democrats being extremely critical, or at least the, you know, the grassroots, certainly not the party bosses, and with Republicans growing ever more supportive.
And so, you know, I think they're continuing to kind of develop that theme.
I don't think it's a place they necessarily want to be.
I don't think it's a place that's necessarily comfortable for them to be the leading primary source of information that is revealing critical results.
And yeah, there's Zogby out there, who, unfortunately, his polling doesn't stand up very high in Matt Silver's ranking of pollsters.
There's Shibley Telhami, who's out there doing it through the Saban Center over at Brookings, which is problematic, whether, you know.
They certainly have an interest in stealing the poll numbers, Zionist ways.
Well, they're compromised, certainly.
And, you know, his polls come out and sometimes there's an event over at the Saban Center.
And I, you know, you'd have to wonder what the purpose of his data is.
Is it to push forward the envelope of understanding, or is it that it in some way helps the Saban Center or Brookings maintain their institutional, what I would say, institutional position that Israel is in?
Israel is, you know, this great ally, and it shouldn't be questioned too deeply.
Because they don't do, overall, they don't do a very good job as a research think tank in examining these issues.certainly not anything near anti-war or skeptical about conflict.
When Martin Indyk formed the Saban Center at Brookings, the first thing he did was start pounding the drums for war and put out an article called Lock and Load.
So, you know, I think it's extremely valuable that survey platforms are available to anyone who's willing to pay.
And if you form a valid, informed question and provide additional, you know, information, you can get a pretty good view of what Americans think about issues without having these problems of priming by overly long surveys.
And by presenting the fact that some people just don't hold any opinion.
It's valuable to know that most Americans, you really can't say that they support this or that because they don't hold an opinion.
That's as valuable as knowing anything about American opinion.
Right.
All right.
Well, listen, thanks again for your time, man.
Great to talk to you, Grant.
Hey, Scott.
Thanks.
All right, you guys, that's Grant F. Smith.
He's at the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy.
That's IRMEP, I-R-M-E-P dot org.
And you know what?
Go site colon IRMEP dot org and then just search PDF and see what you find.
And read his book, Big Israel.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com and reddit.com slash Scott Horton Show.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
