AIPAC Influence?
By Michael Collins Piper
AmericanFreePress.net
March 26th, 2007
If you had been at the Washington convention Center in the nation’s capital over the weekend of March 10-12, you might have been reminded of a pig auction at an old-fashioned down-home country fair somewhere in middle America. However, the “pigs” for sale, in this case, were politicians eager to slop at the trough of some mighty powerful “farmers and ranchers” — some 6,000 of the most politically influential people in America, perhaps even on the face of the entire planet.
The “auction,” you see, was the annual conclave of the American Israel Public affairs Committee (AIPAC), the well-funded and energetic official front-line lobby for Israel. And the politicians — Democrats and Republicans alike — were on hand, eagerly pushing one another aside like swine rushing to their swill even as the AIPAC luminaries were deciding which “swine” to put their money on.
Vice President Dick Cheney was perhaps the “star” of the event, but two Democratic presidential hopefuls, Sens. Barack Obama (Ill.) And Hillary Clinton (N.Y.), made a big splash by hosting what were described as “dueling receptions” for AIPAC’s heavy hitters. It really need not be noted that both Obama and Clinton declared themselves just absolutely devoted to Israel and awfully upset about Iran.
It would be a waste of ink and print space to repeat their shamelessly sycophantic rhetoric, which is standard for every American politician who bows and scrapes before AIPAC and other illegal pro-Israel lobby groups such as the anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B’nai B’rith, the American Jewish Committee and the American Jewish Congress, to name just a few.
In the meantime, Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas, who hopes to be the GOP’s presidential candidate in 2008, also whipped up a reception for the AIPAC bigwigs.
He, too, preaches enthusiastic support for Israel and is perhaps best remembered for once having pondered legislation to set up a formal federal tribunal to investigate incidents on college campuses where professors and students were charged with making criticisms of Israel, something Brownback and pro-Israel organizations deem to be “anti-Semitism.”*
The fight between Obama and Clinton for the support of pro-Israel elements — particularly in the realm of campaign contributions — is heating up, with Mrs. Clinton recently having faced the embarrassment of several pro-Israel heavy hitters in the Hollywood motion picture community, notably producer David Geffen, who have lent their support to Obama.
Actually this is no surprise. Contrary to widespread misperception, even among some otherwise informed observers, pro-Israel big money elements (even in New York, which Clinton represents in the Senate) have never been enamored of the former first lady, especially after she once declared herself in favor of the creation of a Palestinian state.
In fact, Forward, New York’s prestigious Jewish community newspaper, revealed during Clinton’s first run for the Senate in 2000 that many traditional Jewish sources of democratic campaign money known to be major supporters of New York’s Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer were actually backing Clinton’s Republican challenger, then-Rep. Rick Lazio. In the end, Clinton barely carried a majority of the Jewish vote itself, even as democratic presidential candidate Al Gore was winning 80% of the Jewish vote statewide in New York.
At the recent AIPAC conference in Washington, Clinton went out of her way to assure the bug money folds that she is definitely in Israel’s camp.
Presidential politics aside, every year an overwhelming majority of the members of the House of Representatives and the Senate rush to AIPAC’s confab. Even if those politicians aren’t featured as speakers on the pocium, AIPAC makes a big show of herding the captive politicians together and introducing them one by one to the assembly, a loud and ostentatious way of demonstrating AIPAC’s clout.
Yes, make no mistake about it: These members of congress are eager to rub elbows with – and beg for campaign contributions from – the notably well-heeled AIPAC members and supporters who, along with other like-minded American advocates for Israel, are historically known to be those who are the chief sources of political campaign money on American soil.
As far back as 1974, writing in his book, Jews in American Politics, highly regarded Washington Post reporter Stephen Isaacs revealed that, even then, well over 50% of the Republican Party’s campaign money on a national level came from Jewish sources, somewhat less than the estimated 70% to 80% of Jewish funding for the Democratic Party. In recent years, however, top pro-Israel fundraisers have increasingly lent their support to Republicans.
This year at the AIPAC gathering, many attendees from the Jewish community loudly proclaimed that they were “against the Iraq war and that an unstable Iraq was a danger to the Middle east and particularly to little Israel. This is disingenuous. As far back as Jan 28, 1991, the eminently pro-Israel Wall Street Journal was reporting that AIPAC was a prime mover behind the first war against Iraq. And it’s no secret that Israel’s Mossad advocates were leading proponents of the more recent assault on Iraq in the spring of 2003.
In addition, it is no secret among Military tacticians and geopolitical analysts worldwide that Israel has long nurtured a not-so-secret policy of encouraging chaos and dissent inside nearby Arab and Muslim states; the theory being that an enemy divided within is the best kind of enemy to have.
*The full story of Brownback’s proposed with-hunt is told in a chapter in Michael collins Piper’s 375-page book, The Judas Goats, available at $25 per copy from First amendment Books. http://www.americanfreepress.net/FAB/html/fab.html
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