The Strange Love Affair of the U.S. and AIPAC

Imagine you are a representative of the highest government agencies. You encounter a group that places a foreign power above your own government's interests and redirects and undermines your policies. Would you go to their convention, popularize them, obsequiously placate them and demonstrate you mean no harm to their sinister behavior? Sounds incomprehensible? U.S. State department officials and congressional leaders have been doing the incomprehensible for years.

U.S. State Department officials, senators and house representatives have regularly attended the American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC) conventions. Although the U.S. Executive Department signaled a hardening of relations with Israel, its officials spoke to and listened to AIPAC during the week that inaugurated the new spring of 2010.

Why and for what reason do government officials cater to AIPAC? Don't they know AIPAC's inglorious history and its one-sided purpose? Actually, government officials have many reasons to distance themselves from AIPAC and no reasons to associate themselves with an organization whose thrust depends upon spurious reasoning and outrageous statements.

The Dwight Eisenhower and Jack Kennedy administrations and the 1964 Fulbright Investigation Committee tried to declare groups representing Israel's interests to be foreign agents. However, deceptive maneuvers and ambiguous and modified election laws dragged charges through the courts and temporarily resolved the issue in favor of AIPAC.

Nevertheless, government officials should realize there is meaning and significance to the charges, and any support for an accused agency undermines reputable administrations.

Then we have the perception of an organization using its resources to engineer defeats of popular congressional leaders based upon an issue that usually doesn't concern the American electorate -- foreign policy.

Four of the Senate's more popular leaders, Charles H. Percy from Illinois, James Abdnor from South Dakota, Adlai Stevenson from Illinois and J. William Fulbright from Arkansas were defeated when PAC funds poured in to assist their adversarial candidates, simply because AIPAC categorized the incumbent Senators' support for Israel as insufficient. Add Representatives Paul McCloskey (1982), Paul Findley (1983), Earl Hilliard (2002), and Cynthia McKinney (2006) to those who ran afoul of AIPAC, and by coincidence, suffered defeat.

Is AIPAC a strong factor in determining elections? This is more likely true when the candidate is already in a weak position. Nevertheless, why do the national political Parties approve their candidates' attachments to the Israel-friendly PACs? Isn't the electorate more concerned with domestic issues than with foreign nations, and doesn't it abhor PACs? Nevertheless, the political Parties reinforce an organization which skews voter intentions and masks the principal issues.

Something is wrong with the voters' inability to recognize and react to candidates who benefit from accepting funds from a PAC whose only mission is to assist a foreign nation. And why does the State Department bother with AIPAC? Its officials are not elected and AIPAC is a hindrance to its mission. Strange!

Let's not forget the espionage scandal. Defense department policy analyst, Larry Franklin, was sentenced in January 2006 to 13 years of prison for passing information describing U.S. intended policy towards Iran to AIPAC employees, Steve J. Rosen, AIPAC's then-policy director, and Keith Weismann, a senior Iran analyst. Franklin's sentence was reduced to 10 months of house arrest and the two AIPAC employees were never prosecuted due to the government's inability to show their activities had harmed the United States. AIPAC as an organization was not accused.

Nevertheless, AIPAC critics, including its former policy director, the accused Steve Rosen, have claimed that AIPAC has served as a conduit for "espionage-like" efforts with near impunity. Rosen's filing asserts that, at AIPAC, he "was one of the principal officials who, along with Executive Director Howard Kohr and a few other individuals, were expected to maintain relationships with [government] agencies, receive such information and share it with AIPAC Board of Directors and to Senior Staff for possible further distribution."

AIPAC is too delicately tied to Israel and to suspicions that its members go far to assist Israel. Why would any government official demonstrate unusual approval for an organization that is circumspect and shades the line between being too friendly to a foreign nation and too inattentive to its own nation? Should AIPAC be taken seriously? It's composed, similar to the Neocons, of an assortment of persons with one-sided views who fabricate and relate fantastic stories to defend positions. Take the latest AIPAC convention. We have Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu telling a roaring crowd:

"The attempt by many to describe the Jews as foreign colonialists in their own homeland is one of the great lies of modern times. In my office, I have on display a signet ring that was loaned to me by Israel's Department of Antiquities. The ring was found next to the Western wall, but it dates back some 2,800 years ago, two hundred years after King David turned Jerusalem into our capital city. The ring is a seal of a Jewish official, and inscribed on it in Hebrew is his name: Netanyahu. His name was Netanyahu Ben-Yoash."

"Before Bibi's daddy immigrated to Palestine from Lithuania, the family name was Milikovsky. There you have it folks. If your name is Benjamin Netanyahu, what more justification do you need to expropriate land from the native Palestinians? What's all this fuss about international law and the indigenous rights of the native inhabitants of Palestine? When will the Palestinians stop ranting about their bonds to the land of their ancestors?"

"The connection between the Jewish people and Jerusalem cannot be denied. The Jewish people were building Jerusalem 3,000 year ago and the Jewish people are building Jerusalem today."

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