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PREVIEW: Under fire, Israel lobby rallies US backers

By Tony Czuczka Mar 10, 2007, 2:43 GMT

Washington - After a sustained attack by critics including former US president Jimmy Carter, the most powerful pro-Israel lobbying group in the US still boasts impressive political pull in Washington.

When the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) opens its annual conference Sunday, a high-powered group of politicians, academics and policy analysts - more than 6,000 people in all - is expected to pack the capital's glassy convention centre.

US Vice President Dick Cheney is due to give a keynote speech Monday stressing strong ties with Israel. The top four leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties will also speak, underscoring the tradition of bipartisan support for Israel in the US Congress.

'There's one issue - that is, support for the US relationship with Israel - that brings everyone together,' AIPAC spokesman Josh Block said.

AIPAC says the three-day conference will be its biggest ever - a signal of self-confidence and, in its own way, a rebuttal of unusually harsh questioning of the Israel lobby's influence.

Two US political scientists sparked a furious debate last spring with an essay that portrayed Washington as slavishly devoted to Israel and accused US President George W Bush's administration of launching the war in Iraq to help Israeli interests.

Harvard professor Stephen Walt and the University of Chicago's Walter Mearsheimer said their paper, published in the London Review of Books, aimed to bring a largely taboo topic into the open.

Critics condemned the essay as historically inaccurate and an opening for anti-Semitism. The authors insisted they were not suggesting a Jewish conspiracy to hijack US foreign policy.

The dust had barely settled when Carter, who brokered the 1978 Israel-Egypt peace deal, hit US bookstores in November with a broadside provocatively titled Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.

Carter charges that a 'free and balanced discussion' of the Arab- Israeli conflict has been impossible in the US.

'This reluctance to criticize any policies of the Israeli government is because of the extraordinary lobbying efforts of the American-Israel Political Action Committee and the absence of any significant contrary voices,' he wrote in the Los Angeles Times.

The book details 'the abominable oppression and persecution' of Palestinians, which in many ways 'is more oppressive' than apartheid was for black South Africans, Carter said.

Again, a storm erupted. Dennis Ross, a former US envoy to the Middle East, accused Carter of manipulating facts. Kenneth Stein, a Mideast scholar at Emory University's Carter Centre quit in disgust.

Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Centre, a Jewish human rights group, accused Carter of hostility to Israel.

Carter's own centre-left Democratic Party also distanced itself. Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, one of the highest elected US officials, said it was 'wrong to suggest' that Jews would support 'ethnically based oppression.'

In the White House, Bush and his Republican administration have been one of the most staunchly pro-Israel governments of recent times, partly due to a religious affinity for Israel among Christian conservatives who strongly support Bush.

But public backing for Israel is also solid. A February poll on the Middle East conflict found 58 per cent of Americans sympathize with Israel and 20 per cent with the Palestinians. The Gallup survey had a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points.

'All trends indicate that Americans ... understand quite clearly that the basic values we celebrate are reflected in only one country in the Middle East - our ally Israel,' AIPAC's Block said.

© 2007 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur


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Olive Grove BooksMar 10th, 2007 - 13:21:51

Here is an interesting article.

CLEVELAND, Ohio – THE PALESTINE CONSPIRACY, a genre spy-thriller by Robert Spirko, was fourth on the best-seller list at Atlasbooks, Inc., a national book distributor.



Spirko, a financial and geo-political analyst who has given his advice to the National Security Council, turned his attention to the Middle East in 1987, after discovering several common elements related to the Middle East question. He wrote down his analysis, and when he was finished, he not only had a solution to the quagmire, he had a story to tell. THE PALESTINE CONSPIRACY foreshadowed the Persian Gulf War by three years, and the resultant Iraq War followed by the Sept. 11 attack.



Spirko states, 'The chief threat in the region I see right now is the threat to Saudi Arabia by Al Qaeda. If Al Qaeda were to overthrow the present royal family in Saudi Arabia, cutting off the oil supply to western nations including Japan and China, it would bring down entire world economies. France and Germany would be begging us to go to war to retake those oil wells. It would be World War III.'



“If such a scenario were to occur,” he reiterates, “France and the European economies would collapse in a matter of weeks.”



“Another looming concern is Iran which wants to develop nuclear weapons to couple with their Shahab 4, 5 & 6 missiles on the drawing boards which have a range to hit London, Israel, all of Europe, southern Russia and the United States. Also, the Iranian government has said it initially had 300 centrifuges to enrich uranium to weapons grade material. They have increased that to 3,000. They will soon increase that again to 10,000 centrifuges,” Spirko says. “They have the additional capacity to add another 20,000 centrifuges in mass production techniques that will enable them to produce at least seven nuclear bombs in about a year. Where did they get these centrifuges?”



Spirko answers that question by stating an Arab proverb, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”



“Simply put,” Spirko explains, “they probably got them from Saddam Hussein before the Iraq War started and were probably smuggled out of Iraq and into Iran just like he did his air force of 600 Soviet fighter planes. In other words, he gave them to his former enemy rather than let them be destroyed on the ground.”



“Why would he have done any differently with the 30,000 centrifuges he supposedly had on a decentralized basis inside Iraq before the war?” Spirko asks. “Isn’t it strange that Iran could come up with a nuclear weapons program in about six months to a year when it took the United States six years under the Manhattan Project with 5,000 of the world’s most brilliant scientists like Robert Oppenheimer, Niels Bohr, Seaborg, Einstein, Fermi, and others working on it?”



Another point Spirko makes on the Mideast is that, “It is time for the Israelis and Palestinians to return to the Camp David Peace Talks or some other place, resume where they left off and 'freeze in place' the already-agreed-upon negotiating points,” Spirko says.



'And, it's all related to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict which I said back in 1987 was the crux of my book. It always has been, and always will be until it's settled,” Spirko says. “That linkage is exactly what Osama Bin Laden stated in a taped message aired the weekend before the election in November of 2004. Whether you believe him or not is beside the point. That's what's he told us, and we'd better take that into account.'



The novel is a mass market paperback produced by Olive Grove Publishers, and can be purchased at area bookstores through Ingram Book Group, New Leaf Distribution, and Baker and Taylor, priced at $14.99, ISBN 0-9752508-0-9. THE PALESTINE CONSPIRACY can also be ordered on the web at www.atlasbooks.com, or email orders from: order@bookmasters.com, or from Barnes & Nobles, Border's, Dalton's, efollett.com & Follett bookstores at colleges and universities, WaldenBooks, Amazon.com, Walmart.com, Target.com and other popular retail bookstores. Or, readers and store managers can call 1-800-BOOKLOG, or 800-247-6553 direct, to order.





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feroxMar 10th, 2007 - 14:53:35

“This reluctance to criticize any policies of the Israeli government is because of the extraordinary lobbying efforts of the American-Israel Political Action Committee and the absence of any significant contrary voices,' he wrote in the Los Angeles Times. The book details 'the abominable oppression and persecution' of Palestinians, which in many ways 'is more oppressive' than apartheid was for black South Africans, Carter said.

'All trends indicate that Americans ... understand quite clearly that the basic values we celebrate are reflected in only one country in the Middle East - our ally Israel,' AIPAC's Block said”.


That about says it all doesn’t it.

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