PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER-ANTI-SEMITE

Events are leading us in an ever more bizarre dance with unreality and fantasy. Dark and sinister forces make every effort to paint white as black and truth as falsehood.

The big guns have been called out and their muzzles are trained on a former United States President.

Jimmy Carter is just the latest victim of those forces, which are now making an intense effort to destroy him, as they have destroyed so many before him.

The victim list is long and illustrious and includes former U.S. Senator William Fullbright, whose name graces the world’s most presitigious political science and history scholarship.

As for Carter- well-  he wrote a book  called  "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid".

As a result, the former he has been labelled an antiSemite, a liar and a bigot.

Like others before him, including  former U.S. Senator Charles Percy of Illinois, Carter has called for justice for the Palestinian people. And like Percy, Fullbright and many others, he has been vilified and objectified as an enemy of Israel.

The following column was originally published on August 1st, 2006, one of the last pieces I wrote for cbc.ca. and it helps to explain why Carter is now suffering a series of vicious attacks.

JIM REED

IT’S THE LOBBY STUPID!

Many people wonder how it is that Israel has such influence with the U.S. Congress and why it enjoys such favour with the American government. Ask anyone in Washington, D.C., that question and you will get a four-word answer, often in hushed tones and a bit of a quizzical look: "It’s the Lobby, stupid."

"The Lobby" they mean is a group of Americans who represent the interests of Israel on Capital Hill.

Few members of the U.S. House or Senate want to talk about the subject on the record, because, on the one hand they respect this lobby group and on the other, they fear it.

Two well-known American academics, Stephen Walt, former academic dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and John Mearsheimer from the University of Chicago, recently published a lengthy essay titled The Israel Lobby. Professors Walt and Mearsheimer write that American foreign policy has been "unduly influenced and even distorted by this U.S. domestic pressure group."

The lobby’s driving force is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC. Associated with it are many national Jewish organizations across the United States and some members of the U.S. civil service. While AIPAC does not raise money to finance candidates, it holds information workshops, sponsors paid trips to Israel and provides advice and assistance to pro Israel Political Action Committees (PACs) throughout the U.S.

PACs are a common feature of U.S. politics. They’re usually groups of private individuals organized to raise election campaign funds. They then use the money to support or oppose electoral candidates.

Powerful political force

In the case of AIPAC, it evaluates the contenders based on how friendly they are to Israel and how supportive they are of Israeli government policy.

All PACs attempt to influence congressional voting patterns and they promote or discourage the passage of certain legislation. According to Washington insiders, the Israel lobby and the PACs they influence, make up the most powerful political force of its kind in the country. There’s nothing illegal or even morally wrong about this lobby. It’s just very good at getting results. Critics, however, suggest that it has become too powerful.

It’s powerful enough in fact, according to those who have experienced its pressure first-hand, to influence — some say dictate, U.S. foreign policy.

The Walt/Mearsheimer essay is controversial and not many in the mainstream media have dared touch it for fear of being labelled anti-Semitic.

In his comments on the essay, Tony Judt of New York University agrees that the lobby does indeed affect U.S. foreign policy and he suggests it has been very successful. Judt points out, for example, that "Israel is the largest recipient of American foreign aid" and, he says, "American responses to Israeli behavior have been overwhelmingly supportive."

Foreign policy and foreign aid have always been the lobby’s primary targets. Even some AIPAC supporters express surprise at just how effective its lobbying efforts have been.

Special treatment

Israel receives about one-fifth of all the foreign aid that the U.S. dispenses to needy countries. All countries with one exception receive their aid in instalments. Israel, however, gets special treatment. Its money is delivered each year in a lump-sum payment, up front. (Congressional critics point out that Israel can thus earn interest on free money.)

Moreover, Israel is the only aid recipient that does not have to account in detail for the ways in which the money is spent. It is even allowed to use 25 per cent of its annual allocation of approximately $3 billion to subsidize its own defence industry. These unusually generous terms are the direct result of intense lobbying by AIPAC and its friends.

Of course there are many strong reasons why AIPAC is first among equals. Not least among those, according to insiders, is Jewish/American history.

While Jews were being interned in concentration camps prior to the Second World War, the U.S. continued to invest heavily in German (read Nazi) industry.

The U.S., like Canada, had severe limits on Jewish immigration, even though these two governments were well aware of the persecution Jews were suffering. AIPAC has always believed that aid and policy support for Israel are one way of atoning for that astonishing behaviour by North Americans.

There is also the strong belief that Israel is in the forefront of the War on Terror and that in a way serves as a Middle Eastern security barrier for the United States.

These days, few in the U.S. Congress venture to criticize Israeli actions or policies; when a politician is critical, he or she is reminded — vigorously — of the American commitment to the survival of the Israeli state, that it’s the only democracy in the region and that more than 50,000 Americans have dual U.S./Israeli citizenship and reside in that country. Most often, the potentially critical lawmaker stays silent and votes the party line.

But once in a rare while, someone refuses to go along.

Decorated for bravery

Such was the case of Republican Congressman Paul McCloskey, an ex-U.S. marine who won purple hearts and other medals for bravery fighting in Korea. He was a popular member of the House of Representatives elected by landslide votes in northern California.

By the early 1970s, McCloskey had gained a reputation as a proponent of human rights, and, as a critic of the war in Vietnam, he was the first politician to call for Richard Nixon’s impeachment. His record was widely respected.

While his opposition to the Vietnam War was never a liability for him, another position he took proved to be his downfall. From his own personal experience, McCloskey had seen that war was an ineffective and inefficient method of solving international problems.

That meant that one of the items on his agenda was the Middle East. McCloskey’s position was essentially that Palestinian militancy, and use of terrorist action to get attention, was fed and nurtured by the policies of the very government that complained about it — Israel.

He called for a halt to Israel’s expansion into territory that had been intended by the United Nations as land for a Palestinian state.

He advocated the implementation of UN resolutions, which defined Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory as illegal and he called for their removal.

A cardinal political sin

McCloskey believed that he was being consistent with his own government’s position, which was that the settlements were illegal, provocative and impediments to peace. They would, he contended, only provoke more terror in the future. But he soon realized that he had committed the cardinal political sin. He had offended AIPAC.

He sealed his fate by putting his money where his mouth was.

To pressure Israel to comply with the United Nations resolutions, McCloskey put forward a controversial resolution. He moved that the United States withhold $150 million in aid to Israel.

That was the amount that Israel was spending to subsidize the settlement activity. While many Congressmen agreed with him, including many Jewish American members, it was to be Pete McCloskey’s last political hurrah. Under pressure, he withdrew his amendment.

Nevertheless, AIPAC mobilized against him and accused him of fostering anti-Semitism; AIPAC had lobbied hard and successfully to make sure the amendment never saw the light of day. It then poured resources and funds into his opponents’ election campaigns and Pete McCloskey, marine hero, on the right side of every other issue, was consigned to the history books.

McCloskey’s fate was to be an object lesson for all other American politicians and even those in some other countries.

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