AIPAC's Dangerous Grip on Washington

[cal04]

In early March, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) held its forty-seventh annual conference in Washington. AIPAC's executive director spent twenty-seven minutes reading the "roll call" of dignitaries present at the gala dinner, which included a majority of the Senate and a quarter of the House, along with dozens of Administration officials.

As this event illustrates, it's impossible to talk about Congress's relationship to Israel without highlighting AIPAC, the American Jewish community's most important voice on the Hill. The Congressional reaction to Hezbollah's attack on Israel and Israel's retaliatory bombing of Lebanon provide the latest example of why.

On July 18, the Senate unanimously approved a nonbinding resolution "condemning Hamas and Hezbollah and their state sponsors and supporting Israel's exercise of its right to self-defense." After House majority leader John Boehner removed language from the bill urging "all sides to protect innocent civilian life and infrastructure," the House version passed by a landslide, 410 to 8.

AIPAC not only lobbied for the resolution; it had written it. "They (Congress) were given a resolution by AIPAC," said former Carter Administration National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who addressed the House Democratic Caucus on July 19. "They didn't prepare one."

http://www.alternet.org/story/39679/

[Jim__]

1. We definitely need our government back.

From AIPAC and from all the other lobbyists. Right now our government is run by whores who will go with whoever gives them the most money.

[Botany]

2. AIPAC and Israel's fingerprints were all over our Iraq policy too.

Doug Feith & Richard Pearle help give them access to the office of "special plans"
that Cheney & Rummy set up in the Pentagon to build a case for invading
Iraq.

[leveymg]

3. Money talks.

AIPAC is the tool of a circle of American big dollar Right-wingers who also fund Likud and its spin-off party which is still in power in Israel. The same group of funders has bought both governments.

[grassfed]

4. you pay for aipac

money raised by AIPAC for Israel goes to back to the US to pay for more lobbying.

[JackNewtown]

5. Good article

Too bad the MSM will never discuss this.

--Rosenberg, himself a former AIPAC staffer, puts it another way: "This is the one issue on which liberals are permitted, even expected, by donors to be mindless hawks."--

--AIPAC not only lobbied for the resolution; it had written it. "They were given a resolution by AIPAC," said former Carter Administration National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who addressed the House Democratic Caucus on July 19. "They didn't prepare one."--

AIPAC wrote it too?

--What the region needs now, according to Brzezinski, is an American leader brave enough to say: "Either I make policy on the Middle East or AIPAC makes policy on the Middle East."--

I won't hold my breath waiting for a leader to say that...