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<a href="http://www.aljazeerah.info/Opinion%20editorials/2006%20Opinion%20Editorials/August/29%20o/AIPAC,%20the%20Religious%20Right,%20and%20American%20Foreign%20Policy%20By%20Rodrigue%20Tremblay.htm" eudora="autourl">
http://www.aljazeerah.info/Opinion%20editorials/2006%20Opinion%20Editorials/August/29%20o/AIPAC,%20the%20Religious%20Right,%20and%20American%20Foreign%20Policy%20By%20Rodrigue%20Tremblay.htm<br>
<br>
</a></font><font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=5>AIPAC, the Religious
Right, and American Foreign
Policy</font><font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=3> <br><br>
By Rodrigue Tremblay<br><br>
onlinejournal.com, August 29, 2006<br><br>
"Most citizens are unaware of the startling fact that for years our
U.S. Middle East policy has not been crafted by seasoned experts who are
committed to America's basic national interests." -Paul Findley,
U.S. Republican Congressman (1961-83) <br><br>
“Thank God we have AIPAC, the greatest supporter and friend we have in
the whole world.” -Ehud Olmert, Israel’s Prime Minister <br><br>
"Either I make policy on the Middle East or AIPAC makes policy on
the Middle East." -Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter Administration
National Security Adviser (1977-80) <br><br>
Nobody can understand what's going on politically in the United States
without being aware that a political coalition of major pro-Likud groups,
pro-Israel neoconservative intellectuals and Christian Zionists is
exerting a tremendously powerful influence on the American government and
its policies. Over time, this large pro-Israel Lobby, spearheaded by the
American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) [1], has extended its
comprehensive grasp over large segments of the U.S. government, including
the Vice President's office, the Pentagon and the State Department,
besides controlling the legislative apparatus of Congress. It is being
assisted in this task by powerful allies in the two main political
parties, in major corporate media and by some richly financed so-called
"think-tanks", such as the American Enterprise Institute [2],
the Heritage Foundation [3], or the Washington Institute for Near East
Policy [4]. AIPAC is the centerpiece of this co-ordinated system. For
example, it keeps voting statistics on each congressional representative
and senator, which are then transmitted to political donors to act
accordingly. AIPAC also organizes regular all-expense-paid trips to
Israel and meetings with Israeli ministers and personalities for
congressmen and their staffs, and for other state and local American
politicians. Not receiving this imprimatur is a major handicap for any
ambitious American politician, even if he can rely on a personal fortune.
In Washington, in order to have a better access to decision makers, the
Lobby even has developed the habit of recruiting personnel for Senators'
and House members' offices. And, when elections come, the Lobby makes
sure that lukewarm, independent-minded, or dissenting politicians are
punished and defeated. It is a source of such political power, campaign
financing and media propaganda that no U.S. politician can dare ignore
its demands without fear of being destroyed. As veteran columnist Robert
Novak recently pointed out [5], thanks to the influence of AIPAC and the
Lobby, "Washington remains largely a bipartisan, criticism-free zone
for Israel." <br><br>
This is understandable. AIPAC's techniques [6] are so efficient that one
can easily have the impression that it is a 'parallel government' in
Washington D.C. In the words of its president, Howard Friedman, it relies
on two techniques in particular: <br><br>
1. "AIPAC meets with every candidate running for Congress. These
candidates receive in-depth briefings to help them completely understand
the complexities of Israel's predicament and that of the Middle East as a
whole. We even ask each candidate to author a 'position paper' on their
views of the U.S.-Israel relationship, -so it's clear where they stand on
the subject." <br><br>
2. "Members of Congress, staffers and administration officials have
come to rely on AIPACs memos. They are very busy people and they know
that they can count on AIPAC for clear-eyed analysis. We present this
information in concise form to elected officials. The information and
analyses are impeccable, -after all our reputation is at stake. This
results in policy and legislation that make up Israel's lifeline." I
doubt that there is any other democratic country in the entire world
where candidates have to pass an ideological litmus test, if they want to
have a chance of being chosen candidates and being elected. Thus, who
could blame AIPAC for being convinced that it has the U.S. Congress on a
very short leash? If AIPAC were a company, it could be subject to a
Federal Trade Commission (FTC) federal antitrust and anti-cartel
investigation for cornering the market. <br><br>
Therefore, it should be no surprise that, on Capitol Hill, 'The Lobby'
seems to be in charge, so much so that its near complete control of U.S.
foreign policy and other policies, such as defense, has become the
equivalent of a joke. We are not witnessing consensus here, but rather a
situation tantamount to unanimity in the desire to align American
policies to Israeli policies, each time Israel's interests in the Middle
East are on the line. A totalitarian country would not function
differently. AIPAC has such a grip on Washington that sometimes one can
be forgiven to confuse Tel Aviv and Washington D.C. A recent example:
AIPAC penned a resolution of support for Israel in its savage and illegal
bombings of Lebanon. On July 20, 2006, the resolution was voted
unanimously by the 100-member Senate and the vote in the House was 410 to
8. Case closed. <br><br>
For many years, the influence of 'The Lobby' remained under the radar,
being ignored or concealed by the media it controlled and by most
commentators. On March 10, 2006, however, two respected American
scholars, Professors Stephen Walt from Harvard University and John
Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, published a study in The London
Review of Books, entitled 'The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy' [7],
about the disproportionate influence that this special-interest Lobby has
on American foreign policy. It said that AIPAC was "the most
powerful and best known" organization in a pro-Israel lobby that
systematically distorts American foreign policy. The study concluded that
Israel played a major role in pushing the Bush administration toward a
war with Iraq, and it argued that the pro-Israel lobby's influence on
U.S. foreign policy was bad both for Israel and for the U.S. Thereafter,
nobody could feign ignoring the corrosive influence of this powerful
lobby on U.S. foreign policy. <br><br>
An other example of the type of power 'the Lobby' carries these days in
Washington, D.C., is its success in establishing within the State
Department, with taxpayers' money, a special interest agency, called the
'Office of Global Anti-Semitism' [8]. In a move reminiscent of what
happened during past centuries under totalitarian regimes, this new
'agency' is totally devoted to monitoring around the world instances,
among other things, of criticism of Israel or of American pro-Israel
policies. The creation of this new department of Inquisition [9] was
mandated by a law, H.R. 4230, that President George W. Bush signed On
October 16, 2004. Who says that reality is not stranger than fiction!
<br><br>
So-called Christian Zionists [10] have also a significant influence on
American foreign policy, especially as it relates to the Middle East.
Their propaganda has been so successful that today, forty per cent of
Americans believe that Israel was directly given to the Jewish people by
'God'. One third of Americans even believe that the creation of the state
of Israel, in 1948, after a terrorist campaign against Great Britain, was
a step towards the 'Second Coming of Jesus Christ' and the 'End the
world'. For the most fanatical ones among them, the 'war on terrorism',
whatever it means, is a war of religion [11] between Christianity and
Islam. With such thinking, the world is thrown back four centuries, since
the last war of religion was the 1618-1648 Thirty Years' War [12] between
European Protestants and Catholics. <br><br>
These days, the American Religious Right has its own special interest
office within the State Department. It is called the 'Office of
International Religious Freedom' [13] whose principal mission is to
meddle in the domestic affairs of other countries. Such a state agency
would seem to run contrary to the "wall of separation" [14]
between church and state that President Thomas Jefferson [15] thought he
had erected with the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Such
governmental forays in religious matters are in addition to the
state-financed 'Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives' [16]
that the Bush administration created soon after it took office. Since the
current occupant of the White House is a born-again Christian [17] who
harbors ideas which are close to those advanced by the American Christian
Right [18], it should not be too surprising if the Bush administration's
policy in the Middle East has very strong religious overtones. <br><br>
In any government, one has to look behind the curtains to see who is
really pulling the strings and who is steering the policies. In the case
of the Bush-Cheney administration, one has to know about 'The Lobby' and
the 'Religious Right'. Without that knowledge, one is in the dark when it
comes to understanding the direction taken by certain policies. -DR.
RODRIGUE TREMBLAY<br><br>
SOURCE: Published 8/24/06 by Online Journal (in English) and Tlaxcala (in
French). ENGLISH:
<a href="http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_1135.shtml">
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_1135.shtml</a>
FRENCH:
<a href="http://www.tlaxcala.es/pp.asp?reference=999&lg=fr">
http://www.tlaxcala.es/pp.asp?reference=999&lg=fr</a> <br><br>
<b>ENDNOTES: <br><br>
</b>[1]
</font><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIPAC">
<font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=3 color="#0000FF"><u>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIPAC</a><br><br>
</u></font><font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=3>[2]
</font>
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Enterprise_Institute" eudora="autourl">
<font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=3 color="#0000FF"><u>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Enterprise_Institute<br><br>
</a></u></font><font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=3>[3]
</font><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritage_Foundation">
<font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=3 color="#0000FF"><u>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritage_Foundation</a><br><br>
</u></font><font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=3>[4]
</font>
<a href="http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/templateI01.php" eudora="autourl">
<font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=3 color="#0000FF"><u>
http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/templateI01.php<br><br>
</a></u></font><font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=3>[5]
</font>
<a href="http://www.suntimes.com/output/novak/cst-edt-novak07.html">
<font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=3 color="#0000FF"><u>
http://www.suntimes.com/output/novak/cst-edt-novak07.html</a><br><br>
</u></font><font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=3>[6] John Walsh's 8/16/06
CounterPunch essay, "AIPAC Congratulates Itself On <br><br>
The Slaughter In Lebanon":
</font><a href="http://www.counterpunch.com/walsh08162006.html">
<font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=3 color="#0000FF"><u>
http://www.counterpunch.com/walsh08162006.html</a><br><br>
</u></font><font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=3>[7]
</font>
<a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/print/mear01_.html" eudora="autourl">
<font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=3 color="#0000FF"><u>
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/print/mear01_.html<br><br>
</a></u></font><font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=3>[8]
</font>
<a href="http://www.truthtellers.org/alerts/jewishheaddepartofantisemitsm.html">
<font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=3 color="#0000FF"><u>
http://www.truthtellers.org/alerts/jewishheaddepartofantisemitsm.html</a>
<br><br>
</u></font><font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=3>[9]
</font>
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inquisition" eudora="autourl">
<font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=3 color="#0000FF"><u>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inquisition<br><br>
</a></u></font><font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=3>[10]
</font><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Zionism">
<font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=3 color="#0000FF"><u>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Zionism</a><br><br>
</u></font><font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=3>[11] Alec Russell's
8/5/06 Telegraph article, "US Evangelist Leads The <br><br>
Millions Seeking A Battle With Islam":
</font>
<a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/08/05/wmid105.xml">
<font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=3 color="#0000FF"><u>
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/08/05/wmid105.xml</a>
<br><br>
</u></font><font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=3>[12]
</font>
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years'_War" eudora="autourl">
<font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=3 color="#0000FF"><u>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years'_War<br><br>
</a></u></font><font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=3>[13]
</font><a href="http://www.state.gov/g/drl/irf/">
<font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=3 color="#0000FF"><u>
http://www.state.gov/g/drl/irf/</a><br><br>
</u></font><font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=3>[14]
</font>
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_of_separation" eudora="autourl">
<font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=3 color="#0000FF"><u>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_of_separation<br><br>
</a></u></font><font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=3>[15]
</font><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson">
<font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=3 color="#0000FF"><u>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson</a><br><br>
</u></font><font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=3>[16] <br><br>
</font><font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=3 color="#0000FF"><u>
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_House_Office_of_Faith-Based_and_Community_Initiatives" eudora="autourl">
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_House_Office_of_Faith-Based_and_Community_Initiatives<br>
<br>
</a></u></font><font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=3>[17]
</font><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush,_George_W">
<font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=3 color="#0000FF"><u>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush,_George_W</a></u></font>
<font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=3>.<br><br>
[18]
</font>
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_right" eudora="autourl">
<font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=3 color="#0000FF"><u>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_right<br><br>
</a></u></font><font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=3>ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
<br><br>
Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay is Emeritus Professor of Economics at the
University of Montreal. He can be reached by e-mail at:
<a href="mailto:rodrigue.tremblay@yahoo.com">
rodrigue.tremblay@yahoo.com</a> He is the author of the book
"The New American Empire" (Infinity Publishing, <br><br>
2004).<br><br>
Visit his blog site at: <br><br>
</font><font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=3 color="#0000FF"><u>
<a href="http://www.thenewamericanempire.com/blog">
http://www.thenewamericanempire.com/blog</a></u></font>
<font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=3> <br><br>
This article also appears on his blog site at:<br><br>
</font><font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=3 color="#0000FF"><u>
<a href="http://www.TheNewAmericanEmpire.com/tremblay=1033">
http://www.TheNewAmericanEmpire.com/tremblay=1033</a><br><br>
</u></font><x-sigsep><p></x-sigsep>
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