Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax 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, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, saying 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, introducing Ali Abunimah.
He is the director of the Electronic Intifada at electronicintifada.net.
And it's such a great site and they have such great content there.
I urge you to sign up for the morning email list like I do.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Ali?
Thanks, Scott.
It's good to be back.
Hey, listen, I'm happy to have you on the show here.
And to talk about some old news again, just because I think it's so important.
I want to make sure that everybody sees this and has a chance to hear about this.
The film, as you call it at electronicintifada.net, the Israel Lobby didn't want you to see.
And it's called the Israel Lobby USA.
It's the follow up actually to a previous documentary produced by Al Jazeera, the Israel Lobby UK, which had its own explosive content in it.
But this one was long suppressed.
And the reason it's on your site is because someone finally leaked it to you.
It never aired on Al Jazeera at all.
Can you quickly tell us the backstory there and give credit, name names to the producers and the people who put this thing together real quick before we get into the content here?
Yeah, this film, as you said, was made by Al Jazeera, particularly by the Al Jazeera Investigations Unit, which is a really small unit of really fantastic journalists headed up by Clayton Swisher.
If you look at their website, they do investigations, not just focused on Palestine or Middle East issues, but on corruption around the world.
And they've really done a great job.
And as you mentioned, they had done a previous undercover investigation where they had an undercover journalist really infiltrate the Israel Lobby in the UK.
And that documentary, which was broadcast in January 2017, revealed how an Israeli embassy spy called Shai Mossot was plotting with a British civil servant and others to bring down, quote, take down, using the words of Shai Mossot, a British government minister who was considered too critical of Israel.
And also how the Israeli embassy was trying to astroturf a pro-Israel youth group within Britain's main opposition Labour Party, which really provides crucial background to understanding the bogus smear campaign that the Labour Party headed by Jeremy Corbyn is institutionally anti-Semitic, a really outrageous lie that has been relentlessly promoted by Israel and its lobby in order to neutralize Corbyn as a potential prime minister.
So at the same time that they were running this undercover reporter in the UK, they also had an undercover reporter in the US who managed to infiltrate the Israel project, a major pro-Israel group, and to speak with really senior people in various Israel lobby groups in Washington and to record their candid admissions on tape or on camera when they didn't think they were being recorded.
And the Israel lobby groups got wind of this after the January 27 airing of the British documentary.
And they immediately, once they got wind that an undercover reporter had also been working in Washington, they began to put massive pressure on Al Jazeera and on Qatar, which of course sponsors Al Jazeera, not to broadcast the documentary.
And this involved people like Alan Dershowitz flying to Qatar, meeting with top officials, including the emir, Morton Klein of the Zionist Organization of America, actually publicly took credit for convincing the emir of Qatar to suppress the documentary.
Al Jazeera, of course, denies that this was the reason it has never aired it.
Qatar has denied that it succumbed to pressure.
But I think the evidence is pretty clear that that's exactly what happened.
And so fast forward to last summer, last August, the Electronic Intifada was the first to publish leaked clips of the film.
In March, the previous March, we had published the first written account of some of what was in it.
It's a really amazing four-part film.
So, you know, you have to see the whole thing.
So March last year, we published the first written report of what was in it.
August, we published the first clips.
And in November, when it was very clear that Al Jazeera was not going to ever air it, we released the entire film.
And we did that simultaneously with L'Orient 21, a publication in France, and with Al-Akbar, a publication in Lebanon, who, you know, they both put out the film with respectively French and Arabic subtitles.
So the whole world can see it.
All right.
So again, it's called The Lobby USA.
It's on YouTube and on electronicintifada.net.
And again, one more thing before we get into the substance of it, is we have to give credit to, quote unquote, Tony.
I guess we still don't know his name, the undercover reporter who did this undercover camera journalism, which is unparalleled in anything I've ever heard of.
I mean, if you compare it to people, you know, journalists infiltrating tobacco companies or certain government agencies or something, I mean, this is just absolutely incredible journalism.
Yeah, it is.
It is.
And we have never named Tony because he's not named in the film.
Although, you know, there have been reports of his name.
We choose not to name him because, as I said, his name isn't in the film.
But he did a spectacular job.
And Phil Reese, who also was sort of the main producer and on-camera presenter of the film, you know, the main sort of investigator, let's say, along with Tony, also did a spectacular job.
I mean, this, you know, one of the things that is so, you know, frustrating about it is that Al Jazeera, through its own journalist under the bus who had really done a spectacular, solid piece of journalism.
One thing I want to mention here is that after the British film was aired in January 2017, the various Israel lobby groups and individuals filed a whole raft of formal complaints to Ofcom.
Ofcom is the British broadcast regulator.
I would say it's something like the FCC, but it has more teeth in terms of regulating content.
British broadcasters have an obligation to be fair.
They have a fairness doctrine that is actually enforced.
And Ofcom can actually take away your license if you violate that or impose other sanctions.
And because Al Jazeera, you know, they have offices in the U.K. and they broadcast in the U.K., they are regulated, they are subject to Ofcom.
So Ofcom did an eight-month investigation after the British film came out and threw out every single complaint and upheld that this documentary was produced meticulously to Ofcom's fairness standards in terms of presenting things accurately, in terms of giving people named in the documentary an opportunity and a right to reply, and so on.
So it was solid journalism.
Ofcom supported that.
And it was after that Ofcom report in October 2017 that Al Jazeera revealed, or Clayton Swisher, the head of the investigative unit, confirmed that, yes, we also had an undercover reporter in the U.S., and that film will be broadcast very soon.
Those were his words.
He said that in October 2017.
It's now June 2019.
And Al Jazeera never broadcast the film.
That's why we had to leak it.
And again, as you said, because of the power of the Israel lobby intervening to suppress the documentary and keep it on YouTube and off of TV.
Yeah.
I mean, isn't that, I mean, that's like the irony.
It's like a hall of mirrors where the Israel lobby intervenes and successfully suppresses a film about the power and influence of the Israel lobby.
I mean, that story by itself should have been major headline news.
But did you see it in The New York Times?
Did you see it in The Washington Post?
Did you see it in CNN?
Of course you didn't.
Now, imagine if this had been a film made by a major broadcaster about, say, Russian interference.
And Russian interests had succeeded in getting NBC or CNN or even Al Jazeera to suppress this film about Russian interference.
Wouldn't that have been a massive story?
Wouldn't that have been the subject of congressional hearings and investigations?
Yeah, absolutely.
Of course.
They would have made up a thousand lies exaggerating it.
Who knows?
All right.
So now, so let's talk about some of what's in here.
I mean, the article, I mean, pardon me, the series begins with, I like, it starts very starkly with Israeli government officials in here on camera directing these American groups and through the Israeli embassy.
Right, exactly.
It's the film.
There's so much in the film.
And, you know, I really encourage people to check it out.
But it's thought, you know, it shows, I mean, the key things that I would, it's been a little while since I watched the whole thing.
But the key, but I've watched it so many times.
The key things are it shows the collusion, the direct secret coordination between U.S.-based lobby groups and the Israeli government to spy on, intimidate and sabotage the free speech work or the free speech advocacy of American citizens, including college students and professors and Black Lives Matters and others who support Palestinian rights.
And deploying, you know, multimillion dollar systems to sweep social media and detect, you know, whichever random college student is about to hold an event for Palestinian rights, reporting that back to Israel.
And, you know, using that information to sabotage people's careers, putting up websites.
The Israel on Campus Coalition, we have the director on film, Jacob Boehm, talking about putting up anonymous websites to smear people.
And in fact, websites have been put up falsely accusing people of sexual harassment.
One case is profiled in the film of Bill Mullen, a professor at Purdue University in Indiana, who was the subject of fake websites falsely accusing him of sexual harassment, of anti-Semitism and so on.
There were sites set up targeting individual students, calling them terrorists, you know, targeting Muslim women and claiming they were going out at night drinking and dancing and having sex in order to shame them and embarrass them in front of their families and communities.
It's amazing.
You know, one of the things that really stands out in that part of it is just how out of proportion it all seems.
Attacking a college sophomore, you know, to the ends of the earth, going just to the nth degree in order to persecute people for participating in pro-Palestinian activism on campus somewhere.
But then that's not really the measure, right?
The measure is it's perfectly in proportion to the amount of money spent on it.
And the money's there in apparently unlimited amounts to support these kind of efforts.
Yeah.
And of course, the film revealed for the first time, you know, who was behind the Canary Mission smear site, another one of these large scale efforts to smear and intimidate students into silence.
And it's Adam Milstein, an Israeli-American tycoon who was spent time in prison for a tax fraud around charitable contributions.
And we see also astroturfing.
We see groups like the Israel Project putting together fake protests where they have paid interns going to protest on campus for Israel.
We see a very large scale Facebook manipulation effort where, again, the Israel Project has put together pages, some with millions of followers, which are not identified with the Israel Project.
Or it's very hard to figure out that the Israel Project is behind them and whose purpose is to sort of give a general progressive worldview, but to insert pro-Israel material into that.
In other words, the goal is to try to give pro-Israel positions mainstream and progressive credibility.
And this is a clearly manipulative, dishonest and covert effort to influence people on Facebook on a massive scale.
But when we confronted Facebook with the facts as the electronic intifada and said, you know, given all this stuff you're saying about cracking down on political manipulation and lack of transparency and inauthentic behavior, because of course they're shutting down journalists for supposed inauthentic behavior and legitimate groups based on these claims.
What do you have to say about this?
Facebook said, oh, it's fine.
We don't see any violation here.
I mean, the hypocrisy is just incredible.
Right.
Especially when you look at the recent purchase on Facebook of alternative media types of all descriptions.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And those sites, those pages are still operating.
And it smacks of such desperation that, OK, here's what we're going to do.
We're going to pay you $50,000 a year to sit here and run a Facebook account where you love little kittens and you talk to people about kittens and see who else loves kittens on Facebook.
And then every once in a while you're going to throw up an Israeli flag and try to just subliminally brainwash, you know, manipulate people into somehow equating kittens with Zionism.
Exactly.
And it's and doughnuts, you know, pig doughnuts, of course, doughnuts with sparkles and.
Who doesn't like doughnuts, Ali?
What's your problem with doughnuts, man?
Exactly.
Exactly.
But it's it's the what's remarkable about it is the scale of the effort.
I mean, as you mentioned, what's known, you know, what's been sort of publicly revealed in Israeli media and other sources is that the Israeli government and allied organizations are spending tens of millions of dollars on this propaganda.
But it's likely that it's hundreds of millions of dollars and we have no public discourse about this.
I mean, there was a three year freak out, which is still going on over, like, what was it, five thousand dollars of of allegedly Russian ads on Facebook where nobody can show that it had any influence whatsoever on anything.
And the Democrats are still claiming that that's why Hillary lost the election.
But they don't want to talk about this massive multi tens of millions of dollars, dollars campaign.
And it does affect our elections directly, because another thing that is revealed in the film is how some of the campaign fundraising bundling works.
You know what bundling is, of course.
That's when, you know, you get around the individual donation limits to candidates, which I think is about twenty seven hundred dollars per donor per cycle.
And what you do is you have people called bundlers who, you know, I want to support this candidate and show the political muscle of my interest group.
So I get together ten people to give twenty seven hundred dollars, twenty seven hundred dollars each, or I get a hundred people.
Now we're talking about, you know, big money.
We're talking about two hundred and seventy thousand dollars.
And so showing how these bundlers work under the radar, they are basically directing large flows of cash to candidates who agree to be pro-Israel.
And there is no trace of it.
You actually have someone in the film saying, oh, you know, nothing goes out.
There's no email.
There's no invitation that's put out.
It's all done by word of mouth and these very low key networks.
And I'm not an expert on campaign finance law, but there is some suggestion that these things skirt or violate the law in terms of the required transparency for campaign fundraising.
Well, they talk about just how much money is available to help you if you'll toe the line.
And if you're some congressman from middle of Nevada somewhere or something, you don't have a dog in the fight either way.
Might as well do whatever they say.
Why cross them?
They're going to bankroll your primary opponent if you do.
Yeah, exactly.
And that's the thing about it, right?
And this is something that Walt and Mearsheimer point out is that, and I don't know if they phrase it exactly this way, but the vast majority of what's going on here, as unethical as it may be, is within the rules of lobbying and democracy.
It's just that everybody else who's not part of the Israel lobby needs to wake up to the fact that this is an extremely influential, special interest that has interests that are actually quite contrary to those of the rest of us.
And so it is a thing and it needs to be discussed.
And that's the power of the film.
And I think that's why it was so imperative for so much effort to be put into suppressing it.
Because it would have started the discussion.
It would have forced people to confront, you know, the, I mean, there's a debate.
People can debate how powerful is this lobby?
Is it decisive?
Is it powerful because the U.S. and Israel are aligned?
Or are the U.S. and Israel aligned because of the power of this lobby?
Those are legitimate questions we can debate.
And there are, you know, there are good reasons or good arguments on both sides of a question like that.
But if we don't have the debate, we never get to the bottom of it.
And this film would have, I think, really broken open a lot of that debate.
And it does.
But I think, you know, to give the lobby credit, I think they were successful at blunting its impact by making sure Al Jazeera didn't broadcast it.
The good thing is it is there and people need to see it and they need to talk about it and share it and get people to, you know, to do the same.
I think it's still it's still out there.
It's evergreen.
It came out and we broadcast it in November, but a lot more people need to see it.
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And thanks.
You know, I think most people have heard.
Well, I don't know most people.
People who are interested in Middle East policy, at least, have heard of AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
And then I guess even in my mind, there's kind of a hodgepodge of all these sort of different groups out there, and I can't keep them all straight.
I mean, when it comes to WINEP and the Center for Security Policy and those kind of pro-war think tanks, that's one thing.
But the overall, you know, the Israel project and the Israeli American Council and these different groups, there must be a million of them.
And I don't know much about them.
And so could you tell us about some of the most important organizations in the Israel lobby, especially the ones that seem possibly most tied to the Israeli state and that tend to go under the radar?
Yeah, I think there's a couple of things to say.
I mean, I think it's widely acknowledged that the most powerful on Capitol Hill is AIPAC.
But there are others.
You know, AIPAC, believe it or not, is being challenged from the right by something called the Israeli American Council, which is bankrolled by Adam Milstein, who is seen in the film and who also is said to be behind that Canary Mission smear site.
But there are groups that are featured in the film, not because, you know, because essentially you had to feature the ones that the reporter was able to get into.
So the Israel project, which is one of the prime organizations behind scuppering the Iran nuclear deal and inciting, you know, this is a this is, you know, a hardcore neocon organization that is pushing for, you know, Israel's positions on Iran to be adopted by the United States.
And the Israel on Campus Coalition that I mentioned and those organizations, there is direct evidence in the film that they are working in coordination, effectively working as agents of the Israeli government, yet none of them were registered as agents of a foreign government.
We checked the FARA websites very carefully, the FARA databases very carefully.
And lots of the individuals and the organizations named in this in these films as working directly with the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs are not are not named as are not registered as foreign agents.
Now, another very important thing that they demonstrate in here is just like what might be in a crazy conspiracy theory.
And I don't mean in any kind of bigoted way, but just still a speculative thing.
Maybe.
Come on.
I don't know.
It can't be really that bad.
But yeah, really, they seem to have AP and Washington Post reporters outright just owned on a leash some kind of however you say it in a metaphor where these guys will do whatever they're told.
And especially in in deliberately creating that echo chamber where we're all so worried about Iran today or this kind of thing.
And they're all just toeing this line that's handed to them by these groups.
I mean, I think, you know, I think that it's what they're doing is sort of an indication of of how you can do pretty much anything in this country if you have enough money.
And I think what they do is not that different in terms of media manipulation from other powerful lobbies.
You know, our media is lazy.
It is fast.
It is driven by the need for profits and numbers and advertising.
So you can look across media and see that a lot of what is being marketed as journalism is really prepackaged PR stuff handed to journalists by lobbies.
And that's exactly what they're doing.
I don't think it's it's anything particular to the Israel lobby.
I think they're doing the same as any other, you know, as the pharmaceutical lobby or as I don't know, the financial industry.
When you look at how much so-called financial reporting is basically bullshit pushed by the financial services industry, it's the same kind of thing.
And they're successfully doing it with with, you know, CNN and other organizations that are not going to you know, there's no incentive for a CNN reporter to challenge Israel.
There's no incentive.
There's no incentive for them to put Palestinians on all the incentives to run in the other direction.
Right.
In fact, the only time that I know of other than I guess maybe Pat Buchanan 15 years ago or something, but the only time in any kind of recent memory where TV cable news talked about Israel-Palestine in any kind of reasonable way.
It was when Obama was abstaining on that resolution in December of 2016 on the way out of the door about the West Bank.
And so there finally was an incentive for MSNBC to explain the situation in order to defend Obama's position of abstaining instead of vetoing the thing.
And so they had a couple of guys talk about it for like 10 minutes and show a map and explain the Bantu stands and the Jewish only roads and all of these things, the occupation of the West Bank and what was really at issue.
And it was so huge just for the fact that it was the first time ever and probably the only time that you'll ever see something like that again for a very long time.
Before I let you go here, Ali, please tell us a little bit about the BDS movement on campus and what is BDS and why it's so important on campuses in America and apparently so important that the Israel lobby is willing to go to such lengths as shown in this documentary to try to destroy it.
Well, the BDS movement in short stands for Boycott Divestment Sanctions.
As you know, boycott is a long part of American and global tradition to fight for social justice.
We all know about the Montgomery bus boycott, the boycott of apartheid South Africa, and Palestinians are using the same tactics now to hold Israel accountable and to hold companies and institutions that profit from and support Israel's violations of their rights accountable.
Of course, the U.S. and Israel see this as a big threat.
They don't want word to spread about the BDS movement, so they're smearing and sabotaging it.
That's what a big part of this film is about and trying to accuse nonviolent, anti-racist, Palestinian right supporters of being anti-Semitic because they call for a boycott of Israel.
All right.
Well, I sure appreciate your time on the show.
I'm sorry we're out of time, but everyone, please check out electronicintifada.net.
They've got so much great stuff on there.
And including this four-part documentary, you can find it under the title, Watch the Film, The Israel Lobby Didn't Want You to See.
It's called The Lobby, USA, four parts, undercover video investigative journalism at the highest tier and on one of the most important issues.
It's really something else.
Thank you, Eli, for your time on the show and for your part in finally getting this video out for everyone to see.
Thanks so much, Scott.
It was great to talk to you.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
