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.
You can also sign up for the podcast fee.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
Okay guys, on the line I've got Grant Smith, and of course he wrote the Israel Lobby, Interstate Government.
That thing is the most absurd book in the whole, I swear to God, you guys gotta read it.
Anyway, he wrote a whole bunch more books before that, all about the Israelis stealing their nuclear weapons supplies from the United States, and all about their stealing secret trade documents, all these things.
He's at the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy, and a whole mess of books and a whole mess of articles just like that.
We run, I think, every single bit of it at antiwar.com, and that includes the latest here, Are Christian Zionists the Largest Pro-Israel Lobby?
Welcome back, Grant, how are you doing?
Doing well, doing well, thanks for having me back.
Very happy to have you here.
Ah, big, important, controversial question here about whether it's the fact that really it's John Hagee and the Christians United for Israel and the right-wing born-again evangelical Christians who believe that it's the end of days and Jesus is about to come back, and that the Jews have to control Palestine in order to cause that to happen, and so are they really what's responsible for America's pro-Israel policy?
You say nay?
Yeah, I think that their impact is vastly overrated, and I just asked people in that article to do a very simple thought experiment, and I'm just going to rephrase it right now.
That experiment is, if you remove Kufi from the equation, does the Jerusalem embassy move from Tel Aviv still happen?
And the answer is yes.
You remove AIPAC from that equation, and they got involved back in 1995 with the Jerusalem Embassy Act, and all the years of lobbying that they did to make that happen, does it still happen?
No, it doesn't.
So the argument is really, are all of these claims that are pretty much saying that they're behind all of these recent policy moves true?
And I would say that as the lobby that matters, it's not true.
They don't matter that much.
Yeah.
Well, so now here's the thing, in Meir Scheimer and Walt's book, The Lobby, they tell the story, and some of this is in my book a little bit, about how after September 11th, Colin Powell said, hey, a 90% approval rating, now's our chance to force the Israelis to give up the West Bank and have a two-state solution thing.
And Bush seemed to be leaning that way, because he didn't know, and Colin Powell seemed to be making sense, I guess, and then Tom DeLay came down the street to the White House and told Bush, hey, remember how your dad lost his bid for reelection?
Well, would you like to lose yours?
Because I will help to lead all of the Christian evangelical vote against you if you push this two-state solution stuff on Ariel Sharon right now.
And so there was the House whip, whipping the President of the United States right into line there, and then that was the end of that.
And I'm sure there was more to it than that, but that was certainly one major facet of it.
And so how much does that count to you, do you think?
And Donald Trump sure seems to say, hey, it is the Christian Zionists who, they appreciated me moving the embassy to Jerusalem more than any Jews did, he said.
He absolutely says that.
He absolutely attributes their influence and presence as being the causal sort of, this is why I did it.
And I'm not saying to just say, well, does everything President Trump says, is that how it actually happened, or is that- Well, no, not necessarily, Grant.
I don't concede that.
Okay.
All right.
He seems to be speaking his mind a little bit there, that like, ah, geez, it seems to be like something he's noticing.
Like hardly any Jews have thanked me for that, but the born-again Christians, boy, they're enthusiastic as can be, which is true certainly of some of their leaders.
I don't want to paint too broad of a brush, because I know there's got to be a hundred different kinds of Protestants in this country or more.
Yeah, it's true.
And I just did a long, long session with Reverend Don Wagner that's posted on YouTube right now.
And he talks about Christian Zionism and settler colonialism.
And he's got a whole slide of all the different segments and why it is actually not very accurate to just say Christian evangelicals, because that's way too wide of an umbrella.
But getting back to the question and then getting back to the example, what was happening with George H.W. Bush?
George H.W. Bush said, I'm just a little lonely guy up here on Capitol Hill.
Yeah, I'm trying to freeze settlement financing by threatening loan guarantee, withholding those.
And who was on the other side, who was to his right, meeting with mainly establishment Jewish groups in New York, campaigning against him, saying, I would jump in a trench with a rifle and die for Israel.
Who was appealing for money by getting to the right of George H.W. Bush.
Was it the Christian Zionists he was talking to?
No, it wasn't.
Bill Clinton was all about getting these large establishment groups named in the article on his side as the guy who would not threaten the groups that actually lobby for things like loan guarantees to Israel.
And you know, I love that story so much, Grant, because, you know, I was in high school at the time, but I was very interested and I was not a partisan.
I was very interested in the Bush Clinton election of 1992.
And that was even right at the time where I saw the chart that like, oh, this no name governor from Arkansas is actually a member of all these elite organizations and runs around and has run around in circles of power for a very long time in this kind of deal.
So I was inoculated against supporting anyone or anything like that.
So I don't mean to say that, but, you know, I was just in high school.
So I had, you know, the best access I had to information was mostly just TV news stuff and what have you.
I just had absolutely no sense whatsoever that differences between who supports Israel more was playing into the electoral politics of that campaign season whatsoever.
And when I read Phil Weiss wrote this piece where he says even Bush senior himself blamed the Israel lobby for his loss that they had completely switched to support Bill Clinton instead of him and even switched to really opposing him and that that had really made the difference in that he himself had blamed them.
I was completely astonished to learn that.
Not exactly, but it was another, you know, huge example of just, you know, the way you really kind of have, you don't get to see who's behind the scenes.
In fact, I'm going to go off on one more.
Yeah.
In, in there's a great Bill Hicks bit about how they take you in the back room and they show once you're elected, they take you in the back room, they show you footage of the Kennedy assassination from an angle you've never seen before.
Right.
Have you heard that one?
Yeah.
But he calls him or whatever.
Yeah.
He goes, well, they take in this back room with these 12 industrialist capitalist scum, you know, bags, whatever.
But then there's an actual real story there.
Oh, and then once, and then he even does Bill Clinton, any questions?
And Clinton says, just what my agenda is.
First we bombed Baghdad.
You got it.
And he's talking about the reaction to the alleged assassination plot against HW Bush.
But there's like the real history there.
And what it really was was it was the Israelis.
It wasn't industrialist, capitalist, whatever Bill thought it was.
It was the Israel lobby that said to Bill Clinton, you can not normalize relations with Iraq or Iran.
You have to do the dual containment policy.
And it was Martin Indyk who was pushing it and his whole group that was behind it.
And once the Kuwaitis exaggerated and faked the plot against HW Bush, that was the excuse for, I guess, that was the last straw for Bill Clinton to go ahead and give in to that policy of dual containment through the 1990s and inaugurated it with the missile strike on Baghdad that killed the artist and all these other people and all that.
So it really was exactly the Bill Hicks joke, only it was the Israelis.
And as somebody who lived through that time right then, I had no idea that there was a controversy over which side of Israeli politics supports which candidate here and that it matters.
I mean, you might as well have said the Italians were fixing the election or something as far as I knew.
Well, George H.W. Bush was making some of the biggest moves that had ever been made to hold the Israelis to account.
I don't think anyone except for maybe Kennedy had ever done something that got the Israel lobby so riled up as his threat against loan guarantees tied the settlement building was just considered to be completely unacceptable to the lobby.
And so, you know, the same as when JFK was saying, we don't want Israel to go nuclear.
We don't want them to be, you know, doing anything with Dimona.
We know about it.
We know that you've been lying to us.
I mean, and also, you know, had some plans to push them on refugee return, which was just unacceptable to the Israelis.
So now in that election, Grant, was it that the Israel lobby really just threw so much weight behind Bill Clinton that that really helped him?
I mean, obviously, Perot was a major factor in this, too.
I don't know if that had anything to do with the Israelis.
I guess I wouldn't be surprised if it did.
Or, you know, was it, you know, actively working against H.W. Bush and and working to make the evangelical vote stay home and prevent him from winning and saying he's not really one of us and that kind of messaging?
Or was their turnout essentially, you know, foregone and didn't make much of a difference?
It was really just their support for Clinton rather than their kind of targeting Bush's support among rank and file Republicans or, you know, I you know, I can only I can't say this or that action was what tipped his apple cart over.
But there was immediate, heavy, coordinated negative news coverage.
And again, Clinton got right to his rights and bashed him.
And there was, you know, a serious campaign to questioning whether he was anti-Semitic and that sort of thing.
So all of the things that would typically come out of the lobby to punish a president who did something like that happens now.
Can I say that this article in this newspaper that was tangentially bashing him on the economy or something like that was really tied to displeasure over the lobby?
That's that's not something I can produce any evidence of.
But again, he attributes his loss to upsetting, you know, this group.
And he did give a relative measurement of their magnitude.
And when he was talking about doing his lonely little guy speech, right, which he said, you know, I'm just one, you know, I'm just the president.
I don't actually run this place.
There must be a thousand lobbyists up on Capitol Hill.
Well, who is he talking about?
He wasn't talking again about the moral majority or the, you know, Christian coalition, which would have existed back then and not Kofi, which didn't exist.
He was he was talking and inflating the influence, I think, of the AIPACs, the AJC, the RJC, all of these ADL, because they all came out against it and just pounded him and pounded him for trying to get a tiny, you know, a modicum of accountability.
And I think, you know, reportedly, James Baker had said, although, you know, I'm sure it was mostly in jest that he said that he said that he said, oh, is it like on TV or something?
Do you know?
Is there a video of it?
Oh, yeah.
No, but he doesn't deny it.
Oh, yeah.
No, I mean, I'm sure that it was depending on the context of who he was saying it to and the amount of laughter around it and whatever it I'd I'd be willing to give him a little bit of benefit of the doubt on the context.
But he says, if the Jews, they don't vote for us anyway.
And then he did say that that was that.
So you could see how that would motivate a lot of people to say, you know what?
That's right.
But not only that, I donate Democrat to how do you like me now?
A kind of thing.
You know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I mean, stuff like that the wrong way sometimes, you know, right.
But as as it you know, as it's argued that Tom DeLay or excuse me, the you were referring to.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Had the power to marshal a truly relevant, giant group of kind of single issue voters.
I you know, he could have definitely created some heat.
But once again, when I talk about lobbying and this comes out of my book, Big Israel, How Israel's Lobby Moves America.
What I'm talking about are people who are usually a relatively small group who are actively doing the things to write the policy, work on legislation, are spending money and disclosing their lobbying efforts.
Right.
And I'm not talking so much about people who are just interested in something because you can be interested in all sorts of things, but that doesn't mean you're a lobby.
You can be.
I mean, you can give a fair amount of credit to the Republican Party for keeping evangelicals interested on this issue and that it plays a part of their motivation to continue to vote Republican.
And that's fine.
Well, it is what it is.
But it's as you're pointing out, it's not the same thing as what is really the deciding factor here.
It's.
Yeah, it's not.
It's not really lobbying.
I mean, and there's a whole slew of issues, whether it's abortion, whether it's, you know, school prayer, whether it's flag burning, all the all of these issues.
Plus, Israel, these things all kind of come together in a giant package that they've been working on for a long time.
And it's it's interesting.
But again, in the study that I did, you know, when you look at what the Christian coalition does with its lobbying, they almost never do anything on Israel these days.
So and you look at Kofi, which is this new player, which I hope we get into a little bit.
They are so small in terms of actual lobbying, like they are going to push this legislation.
They are demand.
They're sitting down with the D.O.D. and demanding that they buy some products from this or that Israeli defense.
Well, let's just call a military contractor.
They're not doing it.
OK.
And it raises serious doubts again when we're talking about an advocacy wing of what is certainly an affinity ecosystem.
I mean, you there's there definitely they have affinity.
You know, they they talk about Israel night to honor Israel, this stuff.
But are they an effective lobbying?
Are they writing legislation?
Are they meeting with the D.O.D.?
No.
And they're not.
And even for what they are, they kind of might count as a pack anyway.
I mean, I'm sure you saw this thing.
You can't make this stuff up, man.
If you did, I would say, come on, Grant.
No, really.
It turns out that Ehud Barak's cousin ran Kofi.
Right.
So there is John Hagee is essentially the figurehead for what amounts to a Trojan horse for the Israel lobby anyway.
Essentially the cousin of the former defense minister and prime minister of Israel runs the goddamn thing.
Or ran.
I don't know if he's still there, but David Bragg is that you're talking about.
So, yeah.
So there's that.
But there's also the fact that just to start up, they took a lot of money from sources that typically only give to the Jewish establishment lobby to get set up.
And then there's this whole recent thing that they're actually taking money from the Israeli government.
That whole thing that came out in, I know you've talked about it on your show in the big Jewish Daily Forward article by Alon Pincus.
So, you know, please elaborate about that because that is such an important story, Grant.
Yeah.
And it's such a sad thing that he retired.
Aiden Pink is his name.
And he's been talking about this space for a while that Kofi actually took some money from a cutout set up by the Israeli government, which was actively funding things like passing anti BDS legislation at the state level.
So it's about as bad as it can get in terms of a foreign agents Registration Act case.
I mean, if if they were found to have been receiving money and direction, just like the Justice Department ordered AJ plus to register as a foreign agent of the Qatari government, then Kofi, if there was a sort of equal application of the law, would be required to start filing foreign agent Registration Act reports because, you know, again, alleged in the article they were lobbying on behalf of the Israeli government.
But it was well hidden.
So it's a huge story.
Probably won't go any further anymore.
And it kind of blew a bit of a hole in this whole thing that, oh, yeah, Kofi came out of, you know, the the this association of churches and Pastor Hagee, he just rubbed two sticks together and and voila, they put together this lobby.
Yeah.
No, that's not what happened.
So it is it's clearly emerging is more of a cutout than anything else.
So you've got the money, you've got the leadership, you've got the Israeli government.
It's so impressive, isn't it?
I mean, I love this.
I just I mean, it's a horrible, hateful thing.
But just the what's but to put on this scam where here's what we're going to do.
We're going to ask to turf this movement to pass laws in the states and you only need you don't need all 50 or anything, but to make a movement out of it, to pass these laws, to protect the people from being enslaved under Sharia, which is only there's only one purpose for that, which is just to pretend as though there's the threat of enslavement under Sharia that needs to be defended from, which is just a nice way of saying that you are victims of the evil Muslims, just like us Israelis are.
That's the only reason anybody hates us is because they're evil Muslims and evil Islam makes bad people, makes good people into bad people who hate other people just for being Jews or Americans or see how it goes.
And that's all it meant.
And the whole thing was just completely you could have made up a bigger bunch of hot air than that.
Yeah.
I hear Sharia is going to be ruling Montana at any time now.
And what are the people of Montana ever going to do to defend themselves from the incoming Al-Qaeda juggernaut onslaught that is overthrowing their legislature and judicial system right now?
Who will protect them before it's too late?
But they got away with this and they just pushed it and pushed it and pushed it through, I don't know, 30 states or something like that.
Eli Clifton and others have done really great work on this stuff.
Yeah.
But why did they do it?
Why did the Israeli government financing the whole thing?
But why, Scott?
Why?
Well, because they have to fool Americans into supporting them because what they do is wrong.
Oh, the real reason, the real reason, the real reason is Israel badly needs to get into a number of U.S. states and set up businesses and participate more in the U.S. military industrial complex, the food services industry.
They want to get into building all sorts of things like solar energy.
And the reason they want to come to the U.S. is their own market is so tiny.
And so this is, they made a huge push in Virginia, and this comes out of that book you just referenced, the Israel lobby interstate government, to pass an anti-BDS law.
And it's obvious now that they wanted to do that because they didn't want a quarter billion dollars worth of solar energy facilities to be jeopardized.
They didn't want anyone to start questioning all of the huge number of state funds going to subsidize the building of their headquarters in Arlington.
They didn't want people saying, why are we subsidizing Sabra Hummus?
Why are we subsidizing this, this funky Israeli bulletproof glass maker, orange safety glass in Greensville with all these state, county, and other subsidies?
They didn't want people to be able to fight that stuff.
So they said, there's not going to be any BDS in Virginia.
And you know what?
They failed because there's a very active coalition for human rights called VCHR there that said, oh no, you're not going to pass that here.
But they're still trying to build businesses because, again, the Israeli market is tiny.
They want to keep building their giant trade surplus, which they helped put into place in the 1985 trade deal.
I won't call it free trade because it's not.
It's managed trade.
And they really need the business.
So that's why the Israeli government felt it had to get involved and got caught.
Hey guys, Scott Horton here from Mike Swanson's great book, The War State.
It's about the rise of the military industrial complex and the power elite after World War II, during the administrations of Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and Jack Kennedy.
It's a very enlightening take on this definitive era on America's road to world empire.
The War State by Mike Swanson.
Find it in the right hand margin at scotthorton.org.
Hey y'all, Mike Swanson is a successful Wall Street trader with an Austrian school understanding of the markets, and therefore he has great advice to share with you.
Check out Mike's work and sign up for his list at wallstreetwindow.com.
And that's what you'll get, a window into all of Mike's trades.
He'll explain what he's buying and selling and expecting and why.
I know you'll learn and earn a lot.
Wallstreetwindow.com.
That's wallstreetwindow.com.
And listen, I'm so sorry because we talked about everything under the sun and you got, you know, the Christian Zionism right in the title here, but a huge part of this important article is you go through and you really explain who are the groups in Washington DC who really do exercise this influence.
And obviously AIPAC gets all the attention, but that ain't fair.
A lot of these other guys, I know the Israel project doesn't exist anymore, right?
But that was a really bad one exposed in those Al Jazeera documentaries about the lobby.
Yeah, but they were a PR organization.
And again, I think it helps to have some precision of language here.
I would not say that the Israel project was a lobbying organization.
They were another sort of disinfo and PR campaign.
They were like the ministry of foreign affairs PR outfit and they really functioned as a de facto one.
The things they did were really heavily involved in image creation.
That was the reason they were set up and they're gone because they were exposed as being what they were.
And they alienated a donor and goodbye the Israel project.
But it's the ZOA, the AJC, the ADL, the RGC and AIPAC.
Wait, wait, wait.
Slow down and say that all again, but in slower motion, please.
What all do these letters stand for again now?
So you have the Zionist Organization of America, which is a very hardcore, ultra, ultra conservative Israel can do no wrong group that came out.
And it's been around for decades and it was ordered six times to register as a foreign agent because of their ties to Israel.
So they're super hardcore.
They raise money and they spend most of it or a huge section of it lobbying.
The American Jewish Committee is one of these really, really old, hundred year plus old organizations that's not only been around forever, but sprouted other organizations like the Anti-Defamation League.
They account for 2% of the actual lobbying budget.
The Anti-Defamation League, its offspring, 3%, heavily, heavily involved in Israel lobbying.
Want to redefine anti-Semitism to include criticism of Israel, blah, blah, blah.
And then finally the Republican Jewish Coalition, which is a nonprofit that really works to make sure, you know, this is, this kind of proves that none of this stuff is inherent doctrine in the Republican Party, tries to keep the Republicans in line 100% behind Israel.
I remember when they disinvited Ron Paul from their debate back in 2008 or 12, I think 12, where they were terrified of what he might say.
Which if they ever Googled Ron Paul on Israel, it's always like, we ought to respect their independence to make their own decisions, but we shouldn't be on the hook for all the decisions that they make, which is a perfectly libertarian constitutionalist type point of view on the matter.
But they can't even have that inside the walls of discussion here.
No, sir.
They broke no, yeah, no, they broke no, absolutely no departure from absolute 100% support.
And then you have AIPAC, which really rolls up.
It's the designated lobby.
You know, its view is that it should be really the only one up there lobbying and that everyone else should work through them.
And so they're the ones who are, I would say responsible for this massive transfer of weapons to Israel.
And you know, it's, it's, uh, you can't, you simply cannot say that Christian Zionists have had a major hand in giving Israel more us foreign aid than was delivered in the Marshall plan to rebuild Europe after world war two.
They just weren't there.
They weren't doing that lobbying.
And it kind of argues again to the case that one of the reasons AIPAC in particular has been working since the sixties to build up Christian groups that were willing to be on its side is that they do form an extremely good foil because just like is happening now, the Christian Zionists can take all the heat.
Well, they're the ones who moved the embassy to Israel.
They're the ones who have the secretary of state talking from some rooftop of, uh, in Jerusalem for the Republican national.
It's all the Christian Zionists that have done this and these are terrible policies, but you just can't blame these large establishment organizations that write the legislation and do the real lobbying.
Okay.
Now we're over time, but just real quick, what about the role of Bernard Marcus and Sheldon Adelson?
It was in the news.
He's given a hundred million dollars the last, you know, two years ago and two years before that.
And he's going to give $50 million to Trump for the rest of the campaign season.
That's what it says in the news yesterday.
And you have Paul Singer and what it's a handful, four or five very important right wing Jewish billionaires who are putting up just an absolute ton of money.
Now how does that fit into all of this?
The way you're characterizing these are the lobbies and these are the other interests at play here.
So there's a pie divided in three parts.
There are individuals like the Christian Zionists who, you know, because they're not organized to do legislation, they don't matter.
There is a second group, wealthy elites, they move policy too.
So all those guys you mentioned, they're absolutely influential on policy, but they're not really a lobby.
They're more like coordinated contributors.
And they also give, you know, Sheldon Adelson was a big donor to AIPAC before he formed another group and backed it, the Israel American council, which as far as I can tell, doesn't lobby on Capitol Hill.
So yeah, you have the elites, they're extremely important too, but they don't write legislation.
They have to work through other groups to do that.
You know, lobbying is a very particular thing.
It's trying to get laws passed.
It's trying to get doctrines adopted.
It's trying to get officials in the Pentagon to do certain things.
And so I would say, you know, they have an impact and they come in through these groups as well.
They give through these groups, but they're a separate, separate section.
And I don't really cover them here.
I don't cover Israeli defense corporations, which also lobby.
I don't cover anything because the question at hand here was, let's talk about this meme that Christian Zionists are the biggest Israel lobby.
And you know, again, the real issue here is nobody really knows how many members Kufi has.
Nobody knows what its revenue is because it's an association of churches and has never disclosed that.
Nobody knows where it gets its money, but it's, you know, that's becoming clear too.
And nobody knows or even wrote about how much it spends lobbying through its lobbying division.
But now we know.
Is it significant?
No, it's not.
All right.
Well, I'm sorry that we're over time here, but thanks very much for your time.
Again everybody, that's Grant Smith.
He's at IRMEP, the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy, I-R-M-E-P dot org.
And he wrote Big Israel and of course the Israel Lobby Interstate Government, as well as Divert about the nuclear weapons and all of that.
And you know what?
Take 30 seconds to talk about this video series you've been doing in place of your big conference this year.
Yeah.
So we couldn't do our big conference at the National Press Club.
And so now we're doing a series with some of our speakers slated to speak there in 2021.
Others aren't.
But it's staying on the issue.
And it's called Israel Lobby Con Extra.
So if you go to IsraelLobbyCon.org, you can see all the videos we've done.
And we typically put a lot of value added into those.
And we've got some more coming up, including a fantastic one next Wednesday with Walter Hickson, who's a professor who's written books about foreign policy and the Israel Lobby and settler colonialism.
So we're going to have this sort of cross-disciplinary discussion with Walter.
He's a fascinating guy.
And so that'll be noon on Wednesday.
And going to get that link out really soon here, Scott.
Great.
Israel Lobby.
Yeah.
IsraelLobbyCon.org.
Yes.
Give me some notice.
All right.
Thanks, everybody.
The great Grant Smith.
Appreciate that.
Thanks, Scott.
The Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com, AntiWar.com, ScottHorton.org, and LibertarianInstitute.org.
