Janet McMahon, Managing Editor – Washington Report on Middle East Affairs explains the history and impact of “stealth PACs.” Why has the American Israel Public Affairs Committee spawned a network of PACs across America? Why don’t any claim affiliation to their creator or use descriptive names? Shouldn’t they be consolidated to have reduced total contribution limits like other PACs? How has the American Israel Public Affairs Committee secretly coordinated stealth PACs, and what has been done about it? Presentation panel from the Move Over AIPAC conference on May 21, 2011.
Category: Israel Lobby
Benny Morris in London: “a mob of Moslem hooligans”
Last month, Benny Morris gave a lecture in London courtesy of the LSE’s Middle East Centre. Many were unhappy at Morris being afforded such a platform, given his views on Muslims and Arabs, e.g.:
The phenomenon of the mass Muslim penetration into the West and their settlement there is creating a dangerous internal threat.
The Muslims are busy killing people, and killing people for reasons that in the West are regarded as idiotic. There is a problem here with Islam.
[T]he notion of sharing power or being a minority in a non-Muslim Arab polity is alien to the Muslim Arab mentality.
After the event, an article by Morris was published online by The National Interest, in which he relayed the hostile reception he experienced in typical fashion:
As I walked down Kingsway, a major London thoroughfare, a small mob—I don’t think any other word is appropriate—of some dozen Muslims, Arabs and their supporters, both men and women, surrounded me and, walking alongside me for several hundred yards…Several spoke in broken, obviously newly acquired, English. Violence was thick in the air though none was actually used. Passersby looked on in astonishment, and perhaps shame, but it seemed the sight of angry bearded, caftaned Muslims was sufficient to deter any intervention. To me, it felt like Brownshirts in a street scene in 1920s Berlin—though on Kingsway no one, to the best of my recall, screamed the word “Jew.”
Morris continued to talk about the questions he received from “Muslim participants” including “girls with scarves”, before concluding that “Muslim intimidation” is “cowing” the “British Christian majority” into “silence”.
But that (ahem) subtle messaging proved too much of a strain for Morris, and it now appears that he spoke in rather blunter terms to Makor Rishon, an Israeli newspaper:
As soon as they saw me I was surrounded by a mob of Moslem hooligans, screaming and cursing at me as I advanced toward the building…I had the feeling that I was surrounded by Nazis, except that instead of black shirts these were wearing Arab scarves on their heads. They were unambiguously Islamofascists. Some of them screamed in their broken foreign English that the UK should never have allowed me into the country.
This is the kind of person the Israel lobby will promote – and reminds me what a relief it was that Morris did not have the opportunity to spread his hate in Cambridge last year.
Obama’s Foreign Policy and the End of the American Era
Steve Walt, co-author of the ground-breaking The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, gave a keynote address on “Obama’s Foreign Policy and the End of the American Era” at an event is co-hosted by the IIEA and UCD’s Clinton Institute for American Studies. You can download the Post Event Notes from this event here.
Continue reading “Obama’s Foreign Policy and the End of the American Era”
Why I disrupted Benjamin Netanyahu
Rae Abileah in her own words (crossposted from Mondoweiss).
Do you know that our Congress gave 29 standing ovations to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he spoke in the Capital on Tuesday, May 24? I couldn’t watch this hero’s welcome for a man who supports the continued building of illegal settlements, won’t lift the siege of Gaza and refuses to negotiate with the new Palestinian unity government. During the talk, when Netanyahu was praising young people rising up for democracy in the Middle East, and I took my cue to stand up from my seat in the Capital Gallery, unfurl a banner, and shout, “No More Occupation! Stop Israeli War Crimes! Equal Rights for Palestinians!”
Register AIPAC as a Foreign Agent – Picket @ DOJ
May 24, 2011 Move Over AIPAC picket at the US Department of Justice.
Geoffrey Wawro on the US in the Middle East
In the following audio, Jeff Blankfort interviews Prof. Geoffrey Wawro, author of Quicksand: America’s Pursuit of Power in the Middle East, (Penguin, 2010) with a focus on US support for Israel, the pro-Israel lobby and whether Israel is a strategic asset or liability.
Geoffrey Wawro on the US in the Middle East: MP3
I knew bin Laden
Ahmad Zaidan, Al Jazeera’s Islamabad correspondent, speaks to people who knew Osama bin Laden.
The Goldstone Report: The Legacy of the Landmark Investigation of the Gaza Conflict
Our dear friends Phil Weiss and Adam Horowitz of Mondoweiss at an event organized by Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA) to launch of their new book The Goldstone Report: The Legacy of the Landmark Investigation of the Gaza Conflict, an edited version of Judge Goldstone’s U.N. report documenting war crimes during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza. It includes essays by Raji Sourani, Leila El-Haddad, Ali Abunimah, Rashid Khalidi, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Brian Baird, with a forward by Desmond Tutu and an introduction by Naomi Klein.
The event was chaired by Penny Rosenwasser of MECA. Also speaking at the event were Prof. George Bisharat of UC Hastings Law School and Barbara Lubin of MECA.
Your Taxes Fund Anti-Muslim Hatred
by Chris Hedges
News personalities, politicians, self-appointed experts on the Muslim world, and law enforcement and intelligence officials, as well as the Christian right, have successfully demonized Muslims in the United States since the attacks of 2001. It is acceptable to say things openly about Muslims that could never be said about any other ethnic group. And as the economy continues to unravel, as we face the possibility of revenge attacks by Islamic extremists, perhaps on American soil, the plight of Muslims is beginning to mirror that of targeted ethnic minority groups on the eve of the war in the former Yugoslavia, or Jews in the dying days of the Weimar Republic.
The major candidates for the Republican nomination for the presidency, including Rick Santorum, Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee, along with television personalities such as Bill Maher, routinely employ hate talk against Muslims as a way to attract votes or viewers. Right-wing radio and cable news, including Christian radio and television, along with websites such as Jihad Watch and FrontPage, spew toxic filth about Muslims over the airwaves and the Internet. But perhaps most ominously—as pointed out in “Manufacturing the Muslim Menace,” a report by Political Research Associates—a cadre of right-wing institutions that peddle themselves as counterterrorism specialists and experts on the Muslim world has been indoctrinating thousands of police, intelligence and military personnel in nationwide seminars. These seminars, run by organizations such as Security Solutions International, The Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies, and International Counter-Terrorism Officers Association, embrace gross and distorted stereotypes and propagate wild conspiracy theories. And much of this indoctrination within the law enforcement community is funded under two grant programs for training—the State Homeland Security Program and Urban Areas Security Initiative—which made $1.67 billion available to states in 2010. The seminars preach that Islam is a terrorist religion, that an Islamic “fifth column” or “stealth jihad” is subverting the United States from within, that mainstream American Muslims have ties to terrorist groups, that Muslims use litigation, free speech and other legal means (something the trainers have nicknamed “Lawfare”) to advance the subversive Muslim agenda and that the goal of Muslims in the United States is to replace the Constitution with Islamic or Shariah law.
Helen Thomas: The sin of silence
by Helen Thomas
Hats off to Richard Forer, who courageously and truthfully examines an alternate viewpoint in his book, Breakthrough: Transforming Fear Into Compassion — A New Perspective on the Israel-Palestine Conflict.
Forer, who grew up in a secular, unaffiliated Jewish home, is the identical twin of a prominent member of an ultra-Orthodox sect of Judaism, and was himself a member of AIPAC, America’s pro-Israel lobby. He knew where his allegiances used to lie — anything Israel did was justifiable in his mind.
During summer 2006, Forer visited the Middle East and underwent a profound spiritual transformation. He saw destroyed villages, displacement, land confiscation, imprisonment without trial, torture and other inhuman treatment of the Palestinians and knew he needed to share his truth.
So many Americans of Hebrew heritage cannot face the truth of the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians in the land they conquered and now occupy. Forer emerged from the struggle to realize that he could have been wrong. It takes brave people who are willing to abandon long-held beliefs that the Israelis could do no wrong. Somehow their victimhood justified their ruthless behavior toward the Palestinians.
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