“The Israel lobby in the U.S. has recently taken it on the chin four times in a row, without so much as getting a punch in edgewise: it started with the arrest and indictment of two top AIPAC officials, Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, for espionage. They are charged with funneling classified information, some of it high-level stuff, to Israeli embassy officials. Then there was the Harvard University research paper authored by professors John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, documenting and decrying what they called “the Lobby” and its distorting effect on American foreign policy. Now there’s the Baker-Hamilton commission linking the Palestinian question to our “grave and deteriorating” prospects in Iraq, and, to top it off, the Jimmy Carter book.

“The Lobby is reeling. For the first time since the Eisenhower era, our Israeli-centric policy in the Middle East is being openly and successfully challenged. In the past, Israel’s amen corner in the U.S. has been able to effectively neutralize all critics by smearing them, and the charge of “anti-Semitism” has been applied with an absurdly broad brush to everyone from Gore Vidal to Pat Buchanan and all points in between. However, this case is getting increasingly hard to make. Are we now to believe that the U.S. Department of Justice, Harvard University, Baker and the Bush I crowd, and Jimmy Carter are all part of a vast anti-Semitic conspiracy?”

excerpt from “Israel, Alone” by Justin Raimondo, 12/13/06, published by antiwar.com

Cheers!

As for James Abourezk’s comments, having read them, are we to be suprised? It is certain that he will come under attack from the lobby and be asked to deliver a retraction.

Nothing will change.

Additionally, it is not as simple as pinning congressional support on fear. Check the balance sheets of most congressional campaigns and you’ll find AIPAC. Check the joint military ventures of the U.S. and Israel, and the subsequent use of experimental weapons on the Palestinians and Lebanese. Check the flow of American goods into Israel, and Israeli goods into America.

Blaming it on fear merely tells us that either Congress is a herd of cowards that won’t stand up to the lobby, or a greater herd of cowards that won’t tell the truth about the fiscal relationship between Israel and U.S. Please spare us the drama.