The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs parent organization, the American Educational Trust, and the Institute for Research: Middle East Policy organized a national conference last April in Washington D.C. The conference included several prominent speakers with vast firsthand insight on the power of the Israeli Lobby and AIPAC. It was so important that the Washington Report this week released an 80-page supplement to the August 2015 magazine issue that includes many of the presentations
By Ray Hanania
The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs is probably the most significant publication in American in terms of offering insight, facts and figures that are often excluded by the biased, racist mainstream American news media and its historic and intentional failure to cover the truth about the Middle East and Israel’s government misdeeds and war crimes.
The Washington Report was launch by the American Educational Trust, which was founded in 1982 by several retired U.S. Foreign Service officers who recognized that Americans were being denied the truth by the news media, by government officials and under the bullying of the pro-Israel lobby led by AIPAC.
Funded solely through book and magazine sales, and by donations from its readers, the Washington Report has produced a steady stream of high quality reporting that exposes the shortcomings of the bias of the mainstream American news media, much of its reporters afraid to report accurately about the Middle East knowing that their jobs and their careers in journalism would be at stake.
In April, partnering with the Institute for Research: Middle East Policy, which produces meticulously researched information on the Middle East, the two organizations hosted a conference that focused on the power and influence of the Israel Lobby.
Although there were many experienced speakers, two of the best included former legislators with firsthand knowledge of how Israel’s sinister lobby silences American voices that challenge Israel’s misdeeds and its war crimes, Virginia Congressman Nick Rahall, who left office in January ending a nearly 4 year career in Congress, and one of the first voices of Congress to challenge the censorship imposed by Israel’s powerful lobby on American free speech, former Congressman Paul Findley, the author of the powerful book “They Dare to Speak Out” three years after ending his 22 year service in the U.S. House of Represenatives representing Southern Illinois.
Rahall detailed instance after instance of how pro-Israel forces in America sought to silence him, but that he persisted and was able to overcome much of that pressure. He told the Washington D.C. conference gathering that every ethnic group “has the right to organize and petition their government for redress or their grievances.”
Rahall called lobbying a “Democratic right.” But he added, “Where my problem comes in is when those lobbies put the interest of the country, a foreign country, from which they come, ahead of the interest of the United States of America and not register as foreign agent, which is also required by our laws.”
One of the most dedicated of the American Arab political leadership, Rahall was frank in also offering this assessment of Arab lobbying efforts: “I think in the case of the Israelis, the Jewish Lobby, they are so many light years ahead of all the others. There may be disagreements within the various groups that compromise the Jewish Lobby. There are disagreements, I’m sure but the public image is presented as one unified voice. The Arab Lobby, light years behind. There’s many different groups across this town, across America, that represent various Arab groups. They have different agendas — whether it is to fight discrimination, whether to lobby to get Americans of Arab descent elected, whether it is to lobby the Congress of the United States — whatever their goal, they’re all worthy, good goals. But these disagreements and those groups often hit the press much more than disagreements within Jewish lobbying organizations.”
Rahall said he believes that many members of Congress who lobby for Israel and offer Israel unconditional support “is not in America’s national interest.”
Speakers at the conference also included American Jewish activist Seth Morrison, Illinois publisher Askia Muhammad, attorney and head of Palestine Legal Dima Khalidi, Miko Peled, Gideon Levy M.J. Rosenberg and staff members of the Washington Report including editors Janet McMahon and Delinda Hanley.
You can obtain a copy of “The Special Supplement to the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs” on The Israel Lobby by contacting the Washington Report. Their website is www.WRMEA.org.
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Hanania also writes about Middle East issues for the Arab News, and The Arab Daily News criticizing government policies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Hanania was named "Best Ethnic American Columnist" by the New America Media in November 2007, and is the 2009 recipient of the SPJ National Sigma Delta Chi Award for column writing.
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