Here is one plastered on the front page of the Ideas section of the New York Times-owned Boston Globe:
I was lobbied by the 'Israel lobby'; A dispatch from inside the soft sell" by Elaine McArdle/Boston Globe October 7, 2007
AN IMPASSIONED DEBATE over the tight alliance between America and Israel is roiling political circles, sparked by a new book that accuses a powerful "Israel lobby" of distorting American policy and endangering our national security. Building on an article they published last year, John J. Mearsheimer at the University of Chicago and Stephen M. Walt at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard argue in "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" that Israel exerts far more influence than it should on American politics.
They paint a picture of a potent coalition of neoconservatives, Christian fundamentalists, Jewish organizations, and, most strikingly, a richly coffered and extremely influential lobbying group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which courts both Democrats and Republicans in order to promote Israel. The authors' claims have been attacked by a broad base of critics, seized upon by anti-Semites, and applauded by some who believe this discussion is long overdue.
I wasn't around at the time the controversy ignited. I happened to be in Israel with eight other American journalists, on a first-class, all-expenses-paid tour funded entirely by AIPAC.
Among AIPAC's many lobbying activities - it has a 200-person staff and an annual budget of $47 million - are the well-known tours it organizes to Israel three or four times a year, not just for journalists but for politicians, too. This summer, it hosted 40 US congressmen from both parties. And although mainstream news organizations still bar their staff reporters from taking paid junkets, others aren't shy at all. Recent tours have included staff from "The Daily Show" and reporters from Spanish and African-American media. "There's hardly a journalist left in D.C. who hasn't taken this trip," one AIPAC representative told us, with only some sense of overstatement.
AIPAC is far from alone in providing high-end tours to those whose favor it courts. Political junkets have been a staple of Washington lobbying for years. And free media trips, once unheard of, are now flourishing. Last year, a friend accepted an all-expenses-paid trip from the city of Hamburg, Germany, to cover a music festival; another friend is going to the Philippines later this month. Other nations and tourist bureaus offer the same.
I've never written about foreign policy, and despite Mearsheimer and Walt's book, I don't have any reason to think of AIPAC as different than any other lobbying group. Still, after a friend gave them my name and the invitation came, I struggled over whether to accept such a lavish gift from an organization with something to sell. I consulted with other journalists, most of whom asked only one question: How could they get on the next AIPAC trip?
I decided to use the junket as an immersion tutorial on the Middle East, the kind of trip I had neither the contacts nor financial resources to arrange for myself. My goal was to become much better informed without being swayed by a particular viewpoint. If AIPAC tried to strong-arm its agenda, I wasn't worried. I was an experienced journalist: the harder someone pushes, the more skeptical I am.
With more than 100,000 members, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, formed in the 1950s, is one of the most powerful special interest groups in the United States, able to quickly muster passionate grass-roots supporters to put pressure on politicians. Washington insiders count it as one of the best-organized and successful lobbying groups today, and other special interest groups use it as a model.
AIPAC organizes junkets to Israel through its educational wing, the American Israel Education Foundation. The goal is to show influential people the real-world situation that American policy is addressing in the Middle East and let them see "a wide diversity of opinions with their own eyes," says AIPAC spokesman Josh Block.
Our weeklong tour would cost AIPAC around $5,000 per person, including six nights in first-class hotels, Block told me. AIPAC was asking nothing of us in return. No one in our group - mainly freelance writers like me, with little experience in foreign policy - had assignments to write about Israel.
And there was no hard sell in sight.
Flying business class meant free cocktails in the elite-passenger lounges at Logan and in Newark, hot towels and cold drinks fetched by the flight attendant, and a seat that folded into a bed. I slept the nine-hour flight to Tel Aviv. AIPAC handlers met us at the airport to smooth our passage through customs. A luxury bus drove us through the stunning countryside to Jerusalem, where we checked into the five-star Inbal Hotel in the heart of the city.
Over the next seven days, led by a renowned archeologist, we toured the desert by bus and the Old City in Jerusalem by foot. We lay on the beach in Tel Aviv, a city as vibrant and sophisticated as Manhattan. We saw the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial and played with Ethiopian toddlers in an immigrant absorption center. On our first night in Jerusalem, we sat at an outdoor cafe smoking tobacco through an enormous hookah pipe as nearby tables of young men and women - many in army uniforms and carrying M-16s - laughed and flirted in the cool night air.
I'd been to Israel before, on a brief visit while in college, and the intensity of the place was just as I remembered. With its stark beauty and pervasive sense of urgency, Israel runs at a high pitch: nonstop political debates among strangers, discos and bars open all night in Tel Aviv. In one club, a couple unabashedly smoked a joint. Was marijuana legal in Israel? I asked. "They have bigger things to worry about," a colleague answered.
Our trip gave us access to experiences average tourists just don't get, including meetings with top government officials and intimate conversations with ordinary Israeli families.
There's an army post near the town of Metulla on the Israel-Lebanon border, its perimeter so nondescript that our military guide kept missing the entrance, to the bemusement of a family picnicking nearby. The base commander was out on urgent business (we later learned there'd been an incident between Israel and Syria), and the 23-year-old left in charge handled the surprise arrival of a group of American journalists with aplomb. Behind him, teenage soldiers in uniform played pickup basketball in the afternoon sun, their M-16s arrayed on the cement. I thought of my own 17-year-old son, also hoops-obsessed.
That night our group dined on fresh olives and grilled fish in a grove of trees next to a stream. Last summer, over a two-day period, this area was hit with 256 Hezbollah rockets fired from Lebanon, and families huddled in bomb shelters. Children today, we were told, still wet their beds in fear. I talked at length with a farmer who spoke highly of the Lebanese workers he'd hired before the borders were closed; now, he told me, he feels heartbroken. He smiled broadly every time he mentioned his infant granddaughter, and I wondered how long I, in his place, could tolerate the omnipresence of danger.
On Friday, our group squeezed into a tiny Jerusalem apartment to share an intimate Shabbat dinner with a happy family, the mother a Chicago-born woman who'd made her aliyah 21 years ago and now has four children, including a son in the army. She generously offered to host my son should he ever visit Israel.
We were exposed to the spectrum of Israeli political discourse, from a table-thumping, American-born Likudnik to speakers who described themselves as former leftists now politically adrift after the disastrous victory of Hamas in the Palestinian Authority elections.
But we didn't hear everything.
When I'd stayed in Jerusalem years ago, a college friend and I met a young Israeli Arab who showed us around the Old City without proselytizing. He had brothers in California and was eager to reach out to Americans. I yearned to talk with someone like him.
Even more glaring was the omission of the Palestinian point of view. We met with dozens of Israelis with a range of political views but only one Palestinian, Dr. Saeb Erakat, chief negotiator for the Palestine Liberation Organization. While this could have been an important moment in our trip, Erakat talked in circles for 45 minutes, and none of us had any idea what points - if any - he was trying to make.
With some effort - and stamina, given our breakneck schedule - we could have arranged to hear the other side. One colleague and I determined that, after a scheduled dinner toward the end of the week, we would take a cab to Ramallah in the West Bank. But dinner ended close to midnight and our bus was leaving for the Dead Sea the next morning at 8 a.m. We headed back to our hotel instead.
When I returned to Boston, I had a new store of knowledge and a profound fascination with the Middle East. What else had I brought home?
In January 2003, Justice Antonin Scalia went on a duck-hunting trip to Louisiana with Vice President Dick Cheney, a litigant in a case before the US Supreme Court. In the ensuing uproar, Scalia was indignant. "I do not think my impartiality could reasonably be questioned," he insisted.
Not by him, anyway. Because one of the things psychologists tell us about persuasion is that we have a very hard time knowing if it's happened to us.
I was well aware that I had heard only one side of the story on my trip. So how could I be susceptible to persuasion? But I also knew that any lobbying group that drops thousands of dollars on someone expects to get something in return.
I called John A. Bargh, a Yale psychology professor who studies nonconscious influences on behavior, and walked him through the details of my junket. Did he think I was swayed by the experience? "Of course you are," he said. "You'd almost have to be. And you can't know it."
A key tool in the subtle art of persuasion, he said, is reciprocity: offer someone a pleasant experience or gift and they feel an almost irresistible obligation to return the favor. The norm of reciprocity cuts across every culture, and the value of the gift is irrelevant: a cup of coffee is as effective as an extravagant trip. Another tool is to provide friendship and human connection - it's inevitable that a bond will develop when you spend substantial time with someone, especially in a foreign place, where you depend on them.
In the case of the AIPAC junket, it was a one-two punch: an unforgettable and emotionally charged week with warm, likable people - generous hosts and tour guides whom I worried about after returning to the safety of life in Massachusetts.
Emily Pronin, an assistant professor of psychology at Princeton who studies how bias works in the human mind, told me that she and others have found that although we are quick to spot bias in others, bias in ourselves operates almost entirely on a subconscious level. She calls it the "bias blind spot." Scalia's cozy weekend was innocent in his own eyes. Doctors who worry about the sway of pharmaceutical companies over their colleagues insist that their own medical judgment would never be affected. Journalists think they're too savvy to be hustled by lobbyists. We're all operating under a fundamental misperception about the soft sell: that we'll see it happening and avoid it.
"It's a perception of bias as conscious, evil, corrupt behavior," she told me. "As long as we think that's how it goes, we'll continue to say it doesn't affect us."
Since we're all deeply invested in our own sense of integrity - and being accused of bias is an affront - we are primed to deny it. Because bias is subconscious, Bargh said, when our opinion does change we'll convince ourselves that it's because objective reality has changed, or that we didn't have enough facts before.
Armed with this new appreciation for the subtleties of influence, I've found myself picking over the question: how much has my opinion on Israel been moved?
It's not hard for me to acknowledge that I'm much more sympathetic to the predicament of Israel than I was before I saw the place so extensively with my own eyes. Traveling the countryside has given me a much clearer picture of its precarious state, with a mere 9 miles separating the West Bank from Tel Aviv - less than from Boston to Concord, and easy distance for rockets. You can certainly see why Israel wouldn't give up the West Bank until it has a partner it can trust. Its existence - and the lives of the people we met - are at risk.
Before the junket, I would have described myself as admiring of Israel but increasingly disturbed by its human rights violations.
Now I would say I find myself aligned with a growing group of former Israeli leftists, those who once believed a peaceful solution was imminent but after the debacle of Gaza have, with heavy hearts, lost their bearings and moved toward the center.
Is this a seismic shift? No. But I also have no way of knowing where I would stand had I paid for the trip with my own money, organized my own interviews, and gotten equal access to the Palestinian point of view.
Our guides, to their credit, showed us the separation wall at its most formidable and depressing. But what life is like on the other side of that wall - whether families are eating olives and grilled fish, what their hopes and dreams for the future are, whether they dream of a nonviolent resolution to the conflict - of this, I have no personal experience.
At the end of a week, what had AIPAC gotten for its investment in me? Did I come back rabidly pro-Israel? No. Did I come back significantly better informed and far more interested in the Middle East? Absolutely. I am reading a daily newspaper, Haaretz, online and hope to return to the region.
Was I swayed by AIPAC? It is hard for me to say. I don't think so. Of course I don't.
Elaine McArdle is a Cambridge-based writer.
Tools, and they DON'T EVEN KNOW IT!
It's called rationalization and delusion in the "psychiatric" world.
Zionist toadies are NUTS!!!!!
Better WAKE UP, Amurka!!
Better WAKE UP QUICK or we gonna be in WWIII!!!!!
"Dissenting at Your Own Risk" by CECILIE SURASKY Counterpunch Friday October 05, 2007
Last year, I agreed to speak to a Jewish youth group about my organization, Jewish Voice for Peace, and our opposition to Israel's occupation. My talk was to follow one from a member of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which calls itself "America's pro-Israel Lobby."
A week before, a shaken program leader said the AIPAC staffer had threatened to get the entire youth program's funding canceled if I was allowed in the door. The threat worked, and in disgust, they canceled the whole talk.
Pundits will surely argue for years about professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer's explosive new book, The Israel Lobby, which blames poor U.S. policy in the Middle East on a loose network of individuals and pro-Israel advocacy groups.
But the book, and the response to it, opens up another controversy: the stifling of debate about unconditional U.S. support for Israeli policies.
Why is Israel's increasingly brutal 40-year occupation of Palestinian land regularly debated in the mainstream media abroad, including in Israel, but not here? And why is there an almost total lack of discussion among presidential candidates about the dollars that subsidize this occupation and the American diplomatic support that makes it possible?
In a society built on the free exchange of ideas, as Walt and Mearsheimer point out, one answer can be found by looking at the many self-appointed gatekeepers, such as Abraham Foxman and the Anti-Defamation League, or Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, who use their Jewish identity as both a shield and cudgel. They work diligently to silence those who question ill-conceived policies of the Israeli and U.S. governments.
Non-Jewish critics, even former President Carter, are denounced as anti-Semites. Special ire is reserved for Jewish dissenters, who are branded as "self-hating" or "marginal," while Muslim and Arab-Americans are easily smeared and even criminalized with charges of supporting terrorism.
Stunned by the stifling of dissent, we decided to start a Web site, Muzzlewatch, to track the incidents. Just as we launched, Stanford Middle East Studies Professor Joel Beinin was disinvited from a speaking engagement at a high school with just 24 hours' notice.
After an unprecedented campaign of outside interference waged by Dershowitz, Professor Norman Finkelstein was refused tenure by DePaul University because of his criticism of U.S.-Israeli policy. Palestinian-American anthropologist Nadia Abu El-Haj is fighting a political campaign to deny her tenure at Barnard.
Even Walt and Mearsheimer, who are getting plenty of exposure, couldn't have asked for better proof of their point that the lobby works to stifle dissent when an embarrassed head of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs told them that their scheduled speech was canceled. (They did speak before the World Affairs Council of Dallas/Fort Worth on Sept. 17.) This was apparently because Foxman was not available that day to "balance" their talk.
(They had initially been booked by themselves. The talk was not rescheduled.)
Many groups that started with the important work of fighting real anti-Semitism now rely on anti-Semitism to insist that to show one's love of Jews, one must offer uncritical support to Israel. They are especially displeased by Jews who believe that enabling Israeli violations of Palestinian human rights is not good for anyone.
Unless this atmosphere of intimidation is confronted, Americans will continue to lack access to information and perspectives necessary to formulate effective Middle East policies, virtually ensuring that Israel and the United States will be at war for many years to come.
Copyright © Infowars.net All rights reserved.
Printed from: http://infowars.net/articles/october2007/051007Dissenting.htm
That's the WHOLE POINT!!!
"AIPAC, Israel, and the United States, oh my
Thursday, October 4, 2007 by Mary MacElveen
As it pertains to the use of nuclear weapons or our concern whether or not a country does have them or our belief that a country is trying to build one, I often wonder if we even have the moral standing when it pertains to this weaponry. We are the only country that has used this weapon of Armageddon in war time.
In days of each other we dropped the bomb on
I came across a wonderful article titled, Science Hero: Albert Einstein written by Richard V. Duffy. Within this piece, Mr. Duffy writes, “Einstein surrendered his lifelong pacifism in 1939, when he wrote a letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt encouraging the President to begin atomic weapon research. He felt uneasy about the rise in power of Nazi Germany and was told that German physicists had split the uranium atom.” History will prove beyond a shadow of a doubt his words were paid attention to.
In March of 1945 as you will read, he sent a second letter to President Roosevelt warning him of the cataclysmic results should such a bomb actually be used. In April of 1945, President Roosevelt died and that second letter went unopened.
In totality by dropping these bombs, 200,000 Japanese were killed. As written by Duffy, upon learning that these bombs were used by the
I often wonder what Einstein would opine if alive concerning
Many do feel we will launch a preemptive strike on
In my daily news alerts, this article blazed out at me, Clinton backs bill on Congress OK for Iran war. The Democratic presidential front-runner, Sen. Hillary Clinton had this to say, "Any military action against Iran will have an immediate impact on our troops serving in Iraq , our allies in the region as well as long-term U.S.
But, it is this one that is the most frightening and calls into question our sovereignty, “AIPAC advocates are keeping all options on the table as a means of pressuring Iran
I am going to get two things off my chest right off the bat. First of all, that statement in which AIPAC wishes to keep all options on the table, notice the operative word, “suspected”? Where is the verifiable proof? Secondly, exactly whose interests does Senator Clinton have in mind as she rushes towards the White House? I fully believe that she is being unduly influenced by AIPAC and as far as I am concerned, their interests should not be our interests.
In reading this article In Aipac Talk, Clinton Offers Up Red Meat Before Calling for Engagement With Iran where she addressed 1,700 members this quote coming from Clinton jumped out at me,“At 5:00 we got a call — not from my Senate leadership or my colleagues — but from Aipac, saying that the vote would be at 5:30,” Clinton recounted, chuckling. “Your intelligence sources are certainly beyond anything we have in
This article goes onto report, “to Aipac’s recent legal troubles, involving two former staffers accused of passing classified information to the Israelis. And they cheered as
Just yesterday, CNN reported where
In speaking of verifiable proof as it pertains to nuclear weaponry, I am urging all to watch this feed,Dimona - Israeli Nuclear reactor. According to this feed, no plane is allowed to fly within its air space. We demand compliance from
AIPAC does have power and you will be shocked in reading this article, The Lobby on Trial. Please pay close attention to this passage from it, “More than three years ago, the news that Rosen, the number-one lobbyist for Israel in Washington, and his sidekick Weissman had been indicted for violating the Espionage Act, for handing over top-secret intelligence to Israeli embassy officials, broke like a thunderclap over official Washington. Today, its echoes have petered out almost entirely,”
In reading this frightening article originally reported by Time magazine, “Larry Franklin, an analyst for the Defense Department in Washington” as one reads, “began cooperating with the FBI after agents first confronted him with evidence that he had given classified material to AIPAC, one of Washington's most powerful lobbying organizations.
As you will read, Condoleezza Rice then the NSA director and her deputy, Steven Hadley became aware of this FBI probe into AIPAC, Pres. Bush while attending an AIPAC conference, “thanked the organization for "serving the cause of
What precipitated our invasion into
In further addressing Israel’s nuclear capabilities, it will frighten you to read, “
There is pure lunacy on
A while back Israel’s Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert got into a bit of trouble with the slip of the tongue that Israel did in fact have nuclear weapons. I found this passage very note worthy, “Since 1969, the
When this slip of the tongue by Olmert was first reported, I did write of it in this article, Note to Prime Minister Olmert: We already knew that Israel had a nuclear stockpile. Interestingly enough, when I clicked on the link that formed my editorial, the originating article is gone. Thankfully, the SF Gate’s article is still there for all to read. By the way according the research done for my article,
All of this should be of great concern to every single American. Our national security demands that we hold
I will leave you to ponder what Albert Einstein had to say concerning the use of nuclear weapons, “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
And AmeriKa has an Anti-Christ at the helm!
Lord, send the Jesus/Mahdi quickly!!!!!
