AIPAC Controlled Congress vis-a vis HOUSE Reps. O’Rourke, Engel and Royce

By Eileen Fleming

On Thursday the Jewish Daily FORWARD admitted “It took only one wrong vote to teach a freshman Democrat from Texas how sensitive, and even wrathful, the Jewish community can be when it comes to Israel.

“But the real story of what happened to Rep. Beto O’Rourke did not stop with the angry reaction he got when he cast one of only eight votes in Congress against special funding for Israel’s Iron Dome rocket defense system during the recent Gaza war.

“What is notable is how quickly the carrot followed the stick…”

In September, The New Yorker magazine writer Connie Bruck recounted the reaction that rained down on the El Paso congressman which contended O’Rourke was “an anti-Israel congressman” and denounced his vote as “shameful.”
O’Rourke has no record of criticizing or voting against Israel and he did not even oppose more funding for the Iron Dome system.

What O’Rourke opposed was rushing through the large appropriation without any debate in Congress.

In a Facebook post O’Rourke wrote:

I could not in good conscience vote for borrowing $225 million more to send to Israel, without debate and without discussion, in the midst of a war that has cost more than a thousand civilian lives already, too many of them children.

Congressman O’Rourke’s represents Texas’s 16^th District, which has a population of 862,000 including 4,000 Jewish residents and a 70% Hispanic majority.

Israel receives over $3.6 billion per year ‘courtesy’ of USA taxpayers.

Since the October War in 1973, Washington has provided Israel with a level of support dwarfing the amounts provided to any other state. It has been the largest annual recipient of direct U.S. economic and military assistance since 1976 and the largest total recipient since World War ll. Total direct U.S. aid to Israel amounts to well over $140 billion in 2003 dollars. Israel receives about $3 billion in direct foreign assistance each year, which is roughly one-fifth of America’s entire foreign aid budget. In per capita terms, the United States gives each Israeli a direct subsidy worth about $500 per year. This largesse is especially striking when one realizes that Israel is now a wealthy industrial state with a per capita income roughly equal to South Korea or Spain.- John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy”

 

The El Paso Jewish federation sent out an alert to its members urging them to take action. It contained O’Rourke’s contact information and a suggested sample letter. Another email, for which no one will now take responsibility, circulated among Jewish activists urging supporters not to re-elect him.
O’Rourke responded by meeting with a group of 10 pro-Israel local leaders, key members of AIPAC, heads of local synagogues and the Jewish federation. O’Rourke also met with the Israeli consul general to the Southwest, Meir Shlomo, and invited federation leaders to meet with him in Washington when they come to the capital for the Jewish federations’ General Assembly in November.

Zionist activists were satisfied and attributed O’Rourke’s vote against Iron Dome as a “freshman’s mistake.”

O’Rourke will soon join a group of lawmakers going to Israel on a trip arranged and paid for by an AIPAC affiliated organization.

Beto O’Rourke is a fourth-generation El Paso native whose political focus has been on immigration and veteran’s affair.

 Foreign policy has never been a top priority for O’Rourke, but this author, reporter and former candidate for U.S. HOUSE contends Foreign Policy defines a leader.

Before the worn out canard of being an ‘Anti-Semite’ is hurled at me – again – I contend:

TRUE Anti-Semitism is a prejudice against or hostility towards the Jewish people and it is rooted in fear that breed’s hatred and it must be denounced and confronted!

According to Webster’s Dictionary a SEMITE is “a member of any of a number of peoples of ancient southwestern Asia including the Akkadians, Phoenicians, Hebrews, and Arabs or a descendant of these peoples” thus Palestinians are as much a Semite as any Jew!

I also contend that Thomas Paine was America’s most forward thinking of our Founding Fathers who noted:

“A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right. Reason obeys itself; and ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it.”

Foreign Agents: The American Israel Public Affairs Committee from the 1963 Fulbright Hearings to the 2005 Espionage Scandal by Grant F. Smith, Director for the Institute of Research Middle East Policy details how America’s Middle East policy has been formulated and thrives due to the dearth of relevant reporting on AIPAC’s activities – essentially because the Fourth Estate has acted more like sayanim [VOLUNTEERS] for Zionism than muckrakers – meaning investigative journalists.

Senator Fulbright asked questions regarding Jewish-Agency-funded US foreign agents who did not register with the Justice Department or disclose their true financing, funding flows or covert activities.

Smith exposes how AIPAC/American Israel Public Affairs Committee operates “within a murky nexus regulated by four important but seldom enforced US laws.” [1]

The lax enforcement of The Logan Act, The Foreign Agents Registration Act/FARA, the 1917 Espionage Act, Thompson Memorandum guidelines for prosecuting corporate crime coupled with the fear of being labeled anti-Semitic and a media who have failed at their commission to seek and report the truth have all colluded to exert an undue influence over Congress and thus; we the people of America to be “under the de facto influence of a powerful foreign interest.” [2]

Smith documents how AIPAC-a constellation of individuals and organizations that make up the “Israel lobby” –which I define as a Zionist Lobby-continues to actively steer USA foreign policy in a militant and pro-Israel only direction beginning when ‘civilized’ men in the United Nations partitioned Palestine in 1947 after the British Mandate ended.

Senator Fulbright expressed great concern over the activities of unregistered foreign agents who worked to influence public opinion and policy which resulted in the 1963 Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings which investigated and uncovered a “conduit” operation run by the American Zionist Council, which in 1959 was renamed AIPAC.

Within eight years, the American Zionist Council had received over a half a million “from the Jewish Agency to create a favorable opinion in this country for Israeli government policies. The Senate investigation closed down the conduit, but the extensive propaganda activities still go on…[and] by 1998, “US aid to Israel exceeded $3 billion a year, the highest amount of US aid given to any country.” [3]

“AIPAC’s illegal tactics harm America…[and] corporate crime inflicts far more damage on society than all street crime combined…Harvard economist Thomas Stauffer estimated the total cost of the prolonged conflict in the Middle East at $3 trillion [in 2002 USA dollars and he] lays a good deal of the blame for this at the doorstep of AIPAC.” [4]

It has been written that the root of all evil is the love of money, and most nefarious are the consequences of nearly two-trillion American tax dollars which have reaped “special trade advantages, and preferential contracts. U.S. aid to Israel cost some 275,000 American jobs each year.

“Additional known items include loan guarantees-which the U.S. most probably will be forced to cover-special contracts for Israeli firms, legal and illegal transfers of marketable U.S. military technology, de facto exemption from U.S. trade protection provisions, and discounted sales or free transfers of U.S. military equipment…net purchases by U.S. parties of Israel Bonds, adds at least $40 billion to the total.

“U.S. jobs and exports have been affected, adding to costs and losses.

“As U.S. relations with Mid East countries deteriorated, trade was lost. Worsening political relations resulted in the loss of hundreds of thousands of U.S. jobs thanks to the Israel lobby.” [5]

Smith also documents how money laundering of over 50 billion US dollars to “charitable” organizations and massive covert activities has enabled the ongoing building of the illegal and apartheid Israeli settlements which have expropriated legally owned Palestinian land.

 Today a quarter of a million Jewish settlers/colonists-most all of which have no historical tie to the Holy Land, have created ‘facts on the ground’ to disable a viable contiguous Palestinian state.

On November 21, 2005, top U.S. law enforcement officials attended a briefing organized by the Council for the National Interest regarding how charities “such as B’nai B’rith and Hadassah were in direct control of the World Zionist Organization and directly linked to a massive money-laundering operation…[and the settlements are] an indirect generator of terrorism against the United States…Israel never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty [which prohibits] U.S. assistance to any country trafficking in nuclear enrichment’s equipment or technology outside of international safeguards.” [6]

The World is well aware of Israel’s clandestine nuclear weapons development, stockpile, and launch capabilities, but due to the influence of AIPAC “it is business as usual in Washington: criminal wrongdoing continues to corrupt America’s core values, rule of law, and Middle East policy, as the Israel lobby’s crosshairs shift almost completely to Iran.” [7]

On October 2, 2014, AIPAC commended the bipartisan group of 354 House Members who signed a letter urging Secretary of State Kerry to insist on full Iranian transparency regarding its nuclear research and development activities…The letter was initiated by Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee Ed Royce (R-CA) and Ranking Democrat Eliot Engel (D-NY).

The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, October 2014 edition lists the top congressional recipients of Pro-Israel PAC Funds.

During his congressional career Eliot Engel has so far received $340,918 and Ed Royce received $43,450 between 2013-2014 from Pro-Israel PAC Funds.

Their letter to Kerry reads, “As you wrote in the Washington Post earlier this summer, if Iran’s nuclear program is truly peaceful, ‘it’s not a hard proposition to prove.’

The only reasonable conclusion for its stonewalling of international investigators is that Tehran does indeed have much to hide.”

 

 

In 1976, the Symington Amendment was adopted to fortify and extend the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

It prohibited US assistance to any country trafficking in nuclear enrichment equipment or technology outside of international safeguards.

However, not a word is heard from any American politician regarding Israel’s nuclear program – but this 2012 candidate for US HOUSE has been reporting on USA collusion in Israel’s Nuclear Deceptions since 2005, after meeting Israel’s nuclear Whistleblower, Mordechai Vanunu during my first of eight investigative trips to both sides of The Wall in the Holy Land.

The world learned about Israel’s 7-story underground nuclear weapons facility in 1986 thanks to Vanunu’s photographic evidence, but American foreign policy has colluded in Israel’s Nuclear Deceptions as well as Israel’s negation of international law, UN resolutions, and denial of equal human rights for Palestinians, which have all contributed to the instability in the Middle East.

Beginning in the 1990’s and even more so after 9/11, US politicians blind allegiance to Israel has been furthered by the claim that both states are threatened by Arab terrorist groups and rogue states bent on acquiring weapons of mass destruction.

However, America has more than enough to blow up this one small planet and is also the only state in the world to have targeted and murdered innocent ones via a Nuclear Holocaust.

Many Americans see Israel as an ally and Iran as a mutual enemy, but “We have seen the enemy and he is US!”-Pogo

 

The “war on terror” has become a tactic to infuse fear while it ignores that much of the anger in the Arab world is in response to Israel’s military occupation of Palestine, the concrete wall/electrified fence that has been built on legally owned Palestinian property, which is “financed with U.S. aid at a cost of $1.5 million per mile. The Israeli wall prevents residents from receiving health care and emergency medical services. In other areas, the barrier separates farmers from their olive groves which have been their families’ sole livelihood for generations.” [8]

William Fulbright warned, The age of warrior kings and of warrior presidents has passed. The nuclear age calls for a different kind of leadership.

A leadership of intellect, judgment, tolerance and rationality, a leadership committed to human values, to world peace, and to the improvement of the human condition.

The attributes upon which we must draw are the human attributes of compassion and common sense, of intellect and creative imagination, and of empathy and understanding between cultures.

However, America’s ‘leaders’ continue to cower and pander to an “illegal foreign lobby that has long flouted US law and suborned the national interest as a foreign agent.” [9]
For decades U.S. foreign policy and defense experts opposed even supporting the creation of Israel and the Zionist/Israel Lobby has “worked underground secretly and illegally throughout its history.”   

 In  “Against Our Better Judgment: The hidden history of how the United States was used to create Israel”, Alison Weir documents how decades of Zionist propaganda reaped massive funding and diplomatic support for Israel to “sustain the forcibly established state and provided a blank check for its aggressive expansions.”

Beginning in the early 20^th century, the roots of political Zionism in America took hold and spread as a movement “through education and infection.”

A Jewish non-Zionist labeled the movement as “foreign, un-American, racist and separatist phenomenon”.

In 1939, Ben Gurion said he was “convinced that the main arena for Zionists efforts outside of Palestine was America.”

That same year, under the leadership of Rabbi Hillel Silver, the American Zionist Emergency Council/AZEC and the United Jewish Appeal/UJA were created.

By 1948, the UJA had raised four times more than what Americans contributed to the Red Cross.

Both launched political and public relations offensives to capture the support of congress, clergy, editors, educators and labor leaders.

AZEC activists made direct contact with US reps and Senators and went “after union members, wives and parents of servicemen and Jewish veterans.”

They rallied against anti-Zionist lecture tours to shut them down before they occurred or turned out to disrupt them.

In its 48^th Annual Report the Zionist Organization of America proudly noted the “immensity of our operations and their diversity” which reaches “into every department of American life.”

Of particular interest to American Christians should be AZEC’s manipulation of clergy to support the “Christian Council on Palestine” [3,000 members by the end of WW II] and the “American Palestine Committee” [6,500].

The groups proclaimed “the tragic plight of [Jewish] refugees fleeing from persecution and finding no home” and good Americans were manipulated to favor the Zionist agenda through a Jewish refugee problem.

Weir quotes an American Christian Biblical scholar who spoke of a friend who had been living in Jerusalem who was told, “When we get control you can take your dead Christ and go home.”

Of interest to ALL Americans should be the details Weir provides regarding U.S. State Department officials who opposed the creation of Israel because it “would imperil U.S. interests and violate democratic principles.”

President Truman’s State Department also warned that America would loose moral prestige for betraying “the high principles which we ourselves have enunciated during the period of the [Second World] War.”

The Zionist agenda pushed the UN Partition Plan despite State Department warnings that its implementation “would guarantee that the Palestinian problem would be permanent and still more complicated in the future.”

Due to the dearth of political forces to counter balance the Zionist agenda this generation would do well to heed President George Washington’s warning to US:

Observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all.

Passionate attachments for others should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated.

The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave.

A passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils.– Farewell Address, 1796

 

1. Grant F. Smith, “Foreign Agents: The American Israel Public Affairs Committee from the 1963 Fulbright Hearings to the 2005 Espionage Scandal” Page 15. Published 2007 by the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy, Washington D.C.
   2.    IBID
   3.    Page 20, 22
   4.    Page 149-150
   5.    Page 150-151
   6.    Page 158
   7.   Page 155
   8.    Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Page 43, Jan/Feb. 2007
   9.    Grant F. Smith, Page 168

 

In 2005, Eileen Fleming established WeAreWideAwake.org in response to her first of 8 trips to both sides of The Wall as a public service.

In 2012, Eileen Fleming ran for US HOUSE of Representatives

Eileen is the Administrator for FREE VANUNU and TNT/Telling Nuclear Truths

Follow her at TWITTER, read her sixth book as she lives it HERE.

 Her fifth book, The Vanunu Legend Israel’s Nuclear Whistleblower’s Struggle for Freedom was published 24 September 2014 as a FREE Ebook.