All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am 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 I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
We can also sign up for the podcast feed.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, introducing the great Grant Smith.
He is the founder and director of IRMEP.
That's the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy, I-R-M-E-P, IRMEP.org.
He's written a whole bunch of books about the Israel lobby and their crimes, legal and illegal, in the United States.
The latest book is The Israel Lobby Enters State Government, which is just unbelievable.
You'll really enjoy it in the absurdity and the outrageousness of it all.
That's the same for the rest of them.
Before that was Big Israel, and then there's Divert, how the Israelis stole their original nuclear weapons materials from the United States, and on and on and on like that.
Anyway, welcome back.
How are you doing, Grant?
Hey, I'm doing well, Scott.
Thanks for having me on again.
Yeah, very happy to have you here.
I read this headline from this thing that you wrote that we put on the blog at antiwar.com.
Israel lobby orgs grab COVID-19 CARES Act funds for itself, IDF facilities, and sketchy Israeli companies.
Then I thought, well, that's not surprising, and then I thought, I should interview you about that.
So this is that.
Why don't you tell us all about what you learned when you went through the documents to see who's collecting welfare in the name of the germ?
Well, that's one way of putting it.
The PPP program, the Paycheck Protection Program loans amount to $700 billion that's been printed and shoved out the door through mainly the SBA, the Small Business Administration.
So I heard about the fact that they released the database of all the loans, which are more than $150,000 on Monday.
And so 87% of the loans are much smaller than that.
So it is just a slice, but it's the big money.
It's the money that companies that are applying to their banks, mainly through established banking relationships are doing to get at this money.
And a big percentage of it is not really a loan because you can have it forgiven for using it for things like payroll, mortgage interest, rents, utilities.
So it's kind of a big pile of free money.
But I thought it would be interesting to compare the database from the prior book you just mentioned, Big Israel, How Israel's Lobby Moves America, to see how many of these organizations that have as one of their top objectives moving the U.S. to be more favorable to Israel as one of their top policy agendas, whether they're a lobbying group, an education group, any of the other two categories in that book.
And a lot of them popped up.
And so that was the genesis of that little post that went out earlier in the week that you guys reposted.
So interesting stuff.
Yeah.
Well, so biggest point right there.
Loans gets an ironic, silly elbow in the ribs kind of a quote unquote there, right?
They're not really loans.
But you say they can have maybe the entire thing forgiven if they can figure out how to categorize it correctly.
That's right.
So I think every article about these should have the word loans in quotation marks.
And there's kind of, I've looked at a lot of reporting, tons of reporters have jumped on this to see what's going on with the free money and who's actually getting it.
The interesting thing is if you're applying for this money, you have to represent in the loan documents that you really have no other choices, that you really need this to keep your operation going and that this is absolutely 100% key to your survival.
And I don't think that's the case for a lot of the organizations, whether they're in this Israel affinity ecosystem or not.
I think a lot more of them may be compelled to repay the money.
But who knows about that?
It is a massive government program.
There's very little control over what's actually going out the door.
I've seen the loan documents, they're not very stringent.
You do have to have a pretty well-established banking relationship.
Another thing that the whole exercise of releasing the data involved is just seeing the kind of banking that a lot of organizations are doing, which is probably an unintended consequence.
And in the case of the Israel affinity organizations we profiled in that little post, it was extremely curious that a bank, which in February was listed by the UN Human Rights Commission as operating and extending massive numbers of loans for building in the occupied West Bank, popped up as a top lender and that the same bank had settled in 2014 with the Justice Department and paid a $270 million penalty for helping its customers shelter income from the IRS in Swiss bank accounts from one of its branches.
And this is a bank with 13,000 employees operating in seven countries.
And they may be lending up to half a billion dollars through this program.
We don't know for sure.
It's definitely more than a quarter billion dollars, but it could be as much as half a billion dollars.
And that makes it an extremely big player in the PPP world.
And are you ready for the name of that bank?
Yeah, man.
Bank Leumi L'Israel.
And yeah, it's an interesting story.
I guess nobody should be surprised with all of the announcements and the tons of reports coming out over your show on the pending annexation that, of course, a bank that's heavily involved in the West Bank and has these problems would be lending up to half a billion dollars to various organizations in the Israel lobby.
Why wouldn't it?
But so that was interesting.
And the other key finding, I guess, is just the number of Israel lobby organizations that stepped forward and said, hey, we need this money to survive, to continue our vital operations.
And to me, the interesting thing is not that they stepped up and grabbed big chunks of the money, but what it is they do in the United States and their past.
And some of them are scrambling right now, for example, to kind of paper over their reputations in the midst of these huge human rights protests, because they're kind of involved in some of the practices that are under scrutiny right now.
So just to go through the list, we put at the top of the list the Jewish Institute for National Security America, which, you know, it's been around since 1976.
They changed the name.
It was the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs back in the days when they were the ones who lied us into Iraq War II.
That's true.
That is true.
They changed their name.
The National Security Affairs America.
That's weird.
Okay.
Well, these are the guys.
They're big on sending American cops to Israel to train, right?
That's one of them.
That's right.
And one of their spokesperson had to make a little announcement because there's so much pressure from JVP's deadly exchange program saying, hey, look at all these pictures of Israeli cops with their necks on, you know, protesters and Palestinians.
And he had to step forward and explain, oh, no, no, no, no.
We're in the security business and blah, blah, blah.
So they're under extreme scrutiny and they are the JINZA crowd that you're referring to, the ones who lobbied hard for the, you know, Iraq invasion.
I think the curious thing about JINZA, though, is that a lot of their earlier work looks like, you know, bringing over top officials to Israel, particularly right after they retire, and then debriefing them, like having conferences where they can kind of spill their guts about which direction the U.S. military industry is going.
It's almost like an open sort of debriefing operation.
But it really formed kind of in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War when they were publicly, the people who formed this organization, publicly wringing their hands about whether the U.S. would step up and supply the mountains of military equipment Israel needed on a, you know, emergency short term basis.
So that's why they came into existence.
In fact, I think I saw a press release from them just a week ago, maybe two, I think one week ago saying, oh, no, the American forward stockpile in Israel is getting low and needs to be replenished.
They're still in that business, still in that business.
You know, Scott, basically, the stockpile of U.S. weapons in Israel can't be, there's never enough, you know.
How could it be running low?
What are they using it all?
I thought that was our forward, you know, in case we needed it.
Maybe the country needs to expand because they just can't hold all these weapons stockpiles.
Who knows?
They're going to have to confiscate some more land so they can fit them all in there.
I just want to mention real quick that people ought to Google and you'll find it in the show notes because Sam is so good at that.
The great article, the men from Ginza by Jason Vest.
And that's from Mother Jones back in, say, 2003.
And it's all about how the neocons lied us into war.
It's just one little part of it.
But that's their part of it.
Yeah.
It's this organization for Bamford's book to a pretext for war.
It's very good.
I'm the Ginza guys.
They're good.
And, you know, for a long time, they just flew completely under the radar.
But now I think they're finding that they can't really do that anymore.
It's just too much out there.
But so Ginza, right, Ginza got between one hundred fifty thousand to three hundred fifty thousand.
So, you know, just kind of looking at their employees and whatnot, they're probably going to keep all that as payroll.
My favorite recipient is the Zionist Organization of America, which intensely lobbies.
It didn't accept the big deal that all lobbying would kind of roll up through AIPAC because AIPAC isn't hard line enough.
And so ZOA, you know, back in the 50s and 60s, it was ordered to register as an Israeli foreign agent seven times.
So it even beat AIPAC's orders from the Justice Department just because of the way it was funded and the way it was operating.
They've always been smaller than AIPAC, but they got three hundred fifty thousand to a million dollars and they've got their guys up on Capitol Hill pushing, pushing for basically whatever the Israeli government wants to be done.
And so right now, of course, that's immediate recognition and support for annexation.
Another really interesting group is Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, which is growing.
It's a charity for a foreign army.
For those for those poor occupying forces.
Yeah.
Everybody, listen, you know, you can donate to the Israeli army and write it off on your taxes.
Right.
I don't think there's I mean, I've never spent a week looking, but I don't think there's an organization like this that's managed to get tax exempt status for any other country in the U.S., which is, you know, typical for virtually all of these Israel affinity organizations.
But it's crazy.
They've got 15 regional offices.
They raise about seventy five million a year.
Oh yeah.
They have big Hollywood parties with all little starlets come out to raise money for the occupation.
Like for the might live in a sitcom.
Well, to build they do a lot of things like building recreation facilities on air bases and things like that, which, you know, raises the question, well, if you build the rec facilities and put in the ping pong tables, aren't you really just sort of offsetting the costs of the IDF?
Aren't you basically, you know, funding the IDF?
But they would never they would never say that they were.
So they they got one of the bigger chunks, two to five million.
I'm suspecting it's closer to five than two.
Another really interesting one, again, to me and kind of comparing databases was the Israeli American Council, which was launched in 2007 by Sheldon Adelson.
And this strategy was to mobilize because they weren't mobilized enough.
The estimated half million Israeli Americans who reside in the U.S. to be more active on behalf of Israel, he he thought this was like a unused strategic asset that could be mobilized with a little bit more money and better databases and whatnot.
They got one to two million dollars.
The Israel Emergency Alliance, which is one of these promoting Israel on campus organizations.
They got one to two million.
They have a program called Peace Takes Two, which is basically explaining all the way ways on campus that Israel has been perpetually seeking peace against Palestinian intransigence.
That's the type of organization that is.
They got one to two million because that's the kind of operation you need to keep up during bad times.
Let's see.
The Jewish National Fund, which is one of these older organizations, which has been around forever collecting funds to purchase land to put into the states.
And then after the states, it became heavily involved in tree planting and all sorts of land acquisition.
They got two to five million dollars.
So that's another one of the big recipients.
And again, one of my favorites, because it deals with the Israeli nuclear program, is the American Society for Technion, Israel Institute for Technology.
This is kind of Israel's MIT.
And in doing research for some of the books about Israel's nuclear program, this is a program or this is a university that's credibly been alleged in FBI reports and other documents to be a participant in the Israeli nuclear weapons program.
So they got one to two million dollars because, you know, you can't just let that nuclear weapons program that never has any impact on public policy discussions, can't allow that to languish.
So they picked up, you know, up to a cool two million dollars from the program.
So that's kind of the lineup.
I think, you know, one of the things about this report is I kind of thought we'd be beat to the punch.
It's so obvious when you scan through the names that these are some, you know, most of the organizations look like a lot of them anyway, Mom and Pop and larger corporations based in the U.S. doing things for the U.S.
Not with these.
And I think there would be more reporting from the sort of nonprofit public watchdog ecosystem, except a lot of them are going for the money, too.
So they can't do it.
And they'd be compromised, I think, in pointing this out.
So I don't know, maybe we'll be the only one saying this is this is not a good use of the money.
I mean, you can argue about whether the program should even exist in this form.
And I'm not going to go there.
But very curious, curious times.
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I don't know why, you know, people who usually don't mind criticizing Israel would be silent on this just because they're taking the money, because as you're saying, this really is an entirely separate issue.
I mean, these are agents of a foreign power, at least in reality, if not technically under the law, because they just simply refuse to register as such.
And the government will never enforce it, but that is what they are and what they're doing.
And it's something else entirely.
Also, to me, there's a great lesson here in marginal utility and income taxation.
When I think of all of the money they have extorted out of me, which is just, you know, in my lifetime is probably only tens of thousands of dollars because I don't really make money.
But that's meant so much to me.
What that what that money was to me is nothing but nickels on the chump change on the remainder of the welfare that they gave to the group that helped smuggle nuclear technology out of the country for Israel.
Right.
Right.
You know, it's just, yeah, it's it's it's kind of chafing.
And that would be, you know, that would be in the new book.
I noticed and this is something that was original research in the book about Newmeck called Divert, was that every single really key high official in the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation was a major ZOA official.
And you know, that whole organization was basically based in Pittsburgh.
And here this this nuclear smuggling operation was just outside of town.
And yeah, they've they've never really suffered any consequences.
You know, here they are sucking up funds for this.
And the whole question of the toxic nuclear pollution they left in Parks Township in Apollo, Pennsylvania, continues to go unaddressed.
I mean, people died because of that operation.
Right.
And if they ever do clean it up, it will never be the responsible ones forced to pay for it.
No.
Then that's just it.
You know, half billion dollar cleanup there.
You know, these these a lot of these organizations just leave in their wake death and destruction.
And whether it's overseas or even in this country, in the case of ZOA and its minions at Newmeck, never any consequences, never any real reporting.
Any reporting you see on Newmeck in Pennsylvania is strictly about the latest U.S. Army Corps of Engineers briefing.
And anybody who stands up in one of their public meetings and wants to talk about this stuff gets shut down because, you know, they don't want to jeopardize the funding.
They want to clean up.
They don't want to talk about whether should it be deducted from the, you know, 38 billion dollar 10 year package to Israel.
That's not on the table.
It should be on the table because there's the money right there.
But this whole cleanup continues.
And it's something I follow carefully, continues to start and stop over lack of funding, additional complexities in not polluting the groundwater and other engineering problems with the sites.
And if you go up there, it's it's beautiful on the surface.
But they've got just massive problems with pollution because of this smuggling operation that nobody can talk about.
Yeah, a little bit of radiation never hurt nobody.
Now listen, time is short and we got to cover a couple of things.
The first one is at the blog entry here at Antiwar.com slash blog.
There's this great clip of you call on the Washington Journal in the morning to talk with the bureaucrat who I don't know who she is exactly, the inspector general over who's getting this money.
And you're pointing all this stuff out and she's like, right, right.
That's why we have to begin to look at it, which I just thought was funny.
Everybody could take a look at that.
You can comment on that if you want.
But the real reason that the last thing I want you to address, though, is what you alluded to there about why it's so important that they get this money now.
And that's because they have a full court press on their agenda to try to cover for the atrocity of the annexation of the West Bank.
Absolutely.
And so that is the major agenda item.
And, you know, that is item number one, you know, on ZOA's agenda, Jens's agenda.
You know, if you look at at the op eds in the in Google News for any of these organizations, you know, they all call it extending sovereignty.
Doesn't that sound nice?
But there is a huge push, you know, and this did not wonder how much of our money they spent on the focus groups to test that one.
Right.
Well, and this is the thing that really got me interested in the beginning with all of these Israel lobby organizations is basically they receive in many ways lavish public funding and tax breaks to basically lobby on behalf of a foreign government in ways that indisputably hurts the average American.
You know, when I first looked into corrupt lobbying, it was in Minnesota in 1989, you know, way back when.
And it was because of public bodies that were using a significant amount of their catch from the state government to lobby for more money.
There was a whole Citizens League study on that sort of thing.
And it really stank.
But it was it was small, small, small, small change compared to what's going on at this level.
This is massive.
It's ongoing.
It absolutely is unresponsive to any sort of public outing or public shaming.
There's just no shame here.
What's the big deal about the West Bank anyway, that they have to work so hard to cover for what's going on now?
Oh, well, the big deal is everybody who even looks at it says it's illegal, that the U.S. shouldn't be involved with it.
If you look at any of the public opinion polls that we've put out, you know, most Americans are opposed to it.
They're not only opposed to granting U.S. approval for the formal annexation.
And of course, on your program, it's already clear, Ramsey Baroud and others have made it clear that, you know, that the territory that matters has already been taken.
This is really a legal maneuver at this point.
And, you know, it's absolutely critical to get this done quickly under the most favorable circumstances, which they believe is the Trump administration, which is already working with them on maps and has been doing that for a long time, getting it done now before the elections.
So there's a huge push to get it done now against American popular opinion, against these pesky people signing letters in Congress, against all of the public opposition and world opposition, including, you know, Europe, which is sending signs that they're not going to support it either.
They've got to get it done in the next couple of months or it's not going to happen.
So I mean, to me, that's that's the reason why they've got to keep going.
They've got to keep going strong.
It's all tied together, obviously.
But, you know, in the last poll that we did back in May, for the most part, if you if you ask, there's a plurality of Americans who say, you know, 37.3 percent, we should not recognize the annexation.
There are 34 percent of Americans who say we should as a country, but most people don't know enough about it to, well, 28.5 percent don't know enough about it to have an opinion.
But so, you know, again, this has to be done.
It has to be done against any identifiable U.S. interests, against public opinion, against what's happening in the members of Congress who are breaking away from AIPAC and the other pressure groups to state their opposition.
And there's that all important demographic, the American liberal, not always Jewish, but sometimes Jewish Zionist.
And as we discussed in that interview with Ramzi Baroud that you talked about there, how this is two state solution illusion has been for the Palestinians, but they've seen right through it all along.
It's really been for Peter Beinart all along.
Right.
It's really the American liberal Zionist to say, well, one day it'll be OK.
But now the game is up.
And now Beinart's written a thing for Jewish Currents where he's an editor.
But especially for The New York Times, it's the spotlight today on Antiwar.com saying that's it.
The game is up.
I can't lie to myself anymore.
It's time for one state with equal rights for all people.
And I wonder whether you think that that really signifies a major change or, you know, would you based on that, would you predict that there's going to be more like that coming?
Yeah, I think it's great that he made his, you know, apology or whatever you want to call it.
I personally don't follow these parts of it.
I leave that to Mondo Weiss and others.
I frankly try to focus on the rest of the U.S. and what's in public opinion about war, what's in public opinion about occupation, militarism, the huge waste that goes into all of this, the just absolute destruction of resources.
So, you know, whether that makes a difference or not, I don't know if you notice, but Peter Beinart's, you know, he's not Sheldon Adelson.
There are, for every Peter Beinart, it seems, 10 billionaires who have real power, the kind of power he doesn't have that are trying to make this happen.
And they hold so much more influence than your average Peter Beinart.
So I guess that remains to be seen.
I mean, it's, it's comforting for people who have been following this for decades, but I guess the real question is, this hasn't just all suddenly arrived now, where was Peter Beinart 10 years ago?
You know?
Hey, no question about that.
But I just wonder if, well, again, you know, it was always an illusion, but now the illusion is over.
And now, as Ramsey put it, the facts have caught up to the narrative in such a way that the game is up.
Not the most, you know, self-deluded liar can continue to pretend there's going to be an independent state on the West Bank ever.
There's just not.
So now that there's not, now what?
And so I wonder, you're certainly right about the money and the power, but I wonder about if you had most important liberal Zionist writers start to take Beinart's side and say that actually, yeah, apartheid or expulsion are both absolutely intolerable.
And so the only other choice, as he determined, is equal rights for Palestinians.
That's it.
It's the only choice, obviously.
Yeah.
Well, if you look, though, there have been academic studies done about when you really look at who influences public policies, it's well-funded special interest groups, right, and billionaires and public sentiment.
If you look by policy over a span of years, integrating public opinion into a model, public opinion and what's right and good have very, very little impact on what will eventually happen.
I would say that, you know, the most probable thing, even if a thousand more Peter Beinart's pop out with their limited media platforms, is they are going to drive this thing forward.
I think everyone thinks that this is a done deal.
They're going to get their sign off, just like they got a sign off on moving the embassy, like they got a sign off on Golan.
I mean, that's the way it works.
The billionaires want that.
And the most radical, again, should have been registered as Israeli foreign agents decades ago groups, the interest groups that matter.
They're all behind it.
They're not publicly trumpeting APAC, which said that, you know, because they love their business of pretending to be peace processors, they've loved that game and it's been so good for them, briefly allowed Congress through announcements to criticize the Israeli annexation.
But now they're swinging back into their normal mode, which is that how dare you even speak of tying the military aid package to annexation and any sort of offsets.
So they're back in their regular mode.
And it really is a great time for them because, you know, people are scrambling to survive.
So, you know, I, I think documenting the corruption and writing about it, that's, that's going to continue for a while yet.
I don't, I don't see any great turning point here.
I think the people who believe that the fact that July one came and went without an announcement.
So what this is on the program.
It's kind of like the Jerusalem embassy act of 1995, right?
Yeah.
It took a while, but the program was active.
It was funded.
It was always on the table behind the scenes.
You couldn't always see, you know, you could see the dorsal fin breaking the water once in a while, but you couldn't always see the beast below that was working constantly for it.
But someone reminded me of the, in the Reddit room, someone was talking about bin Laden's open letter from 2002, where he talks about that, the Jerusalem embassy act and how we know you're going to move your embassy there.
Right?
Yeah.
I mean, that's, that's a sad thing.
It really is predictable at this point.
If you add up, do just a little tiny, kind of like the way Steve Rosen used to say, I can get all these senators on a napkin in half an hour.
If I want, you know, AIPAC pressure to be bought to where you can put numbers on a napkin with the groups, their position, the billionaires, and what their rancid policies are, and then stack it up against alternative media, again, Peter Beinart, plus fellow travelers and American public opinion.
And guess which side's going to win 99% of the time.
Yeah.
Well, it's still interesting to talk about grant.
Thanks for writing.
Yeah.
Appreciate you coming on the show.
Thanks for the pep talk.
Yeah, man.
Appreciate it, man.
Thanks again.
Got to go.
All right.
I'm way over, actually.
Thanks.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org, and LibertarianInstitute.org.
