islamozionism

The pro-Israel lobby in Britain:

2009-11-16T04:08:00.000-08:00

Peter Oborne and James Jones, 13 November 2009 : Channel 4 Dispatches

Full Text:

Every year, in a central London hotel, a very grand lunch is thrown by the Conservative Friends of Israel. It is often addressed by the Conservative leader of the day. Many members of the shadow cabinet make it their business to be there along with a very large number of Tory peers and prospective candidates, while the Conservative MPs present amount to something close to a majority of the parliamentary party. It is a formidable turnout.

This year’s event took place in June, with the main speech by Tory leader David Cameron and shadow foreign secretary William Hague in attendance. The dominant event of the previous twelve months had been the Israeli invasion of Gaza at the start of the year. So I examined Cameron’s speech with curiosity to see how he would handle that recent catastrophe.

I was shocked to see that Cameron made no reference at all to the invasion of Gaza, the massive destruction it caused, or the 1,370 deaths that had resulted. Indeed, Cameron went out of his way to praise Israel because it “strives to protect innocent life”. I found it impossible to reconcile the remarks made by the young Conservative leader with the numerous reports of human rights abuses in Gaza. Afterwards I said as much to some Tory MPs. They looked at me as if I was distressingly naive, drawing my attention to the very large number of Tory donors in the audience.

But it cannot be forgotten that so many people died in Gaza at the start of this year. To allow this terrible subject to pass by without comment suggested a failure of common humanity and decency on the part of a man most people regard as the next prime minister. To praise Israel at the same time for protecting human life showed not merely a fundamental failure of respect for the truth but also it gives the perception, rightly or wrongly, of support for the wretched events which took place in Gaza. That is not to condone or excuse the abhorrent actions of Hamas, but to overlook Israel’s culpability is undoubtedly partisan.

It is impossible to imagine any British political leader showing such equanimity and tolerance if British troops had committed even a fraction of the human rights abuses and war crimes of which Israel has been accused. So that weekend, in my weekly Daily Mail political column, I criticized Cameron’s speech to the CFI, drawing attention to his failure to mention Gaza and his speaking of Israeli respect for the sanctity of

human life. Soon I received a letter from Stuart Polak, the longstanding CFI director: “Peter, the snapshot of our lunch concentrating on the businessmen and David’s alleged comments was really unhelpful.” The CFI political director, Robert Halfon, wrote saying that my letter was ‘astonishing’ and accusing me of making a ‘moral equivalence’ between Israel and Iran. I wrote back to them citing a number of reports by international organizations such as Amnesty International highlighting breaches of codes by the Israeli army.

I resolved then to ask the question: what led David Cameron to behave in the way he did at the CFI lunch at the Dorchester Hotel last June? What are the rules of British political behaviour which cause the Tory Party leader and his mass of MPs and parliamentary candidates to flock to the Friends of Israel lunch in the year of the Gaza invasion? And what are the rules of media discourse that ensure that such an event passes without notice?

On a personal note I should say that I have known both Stuart Polak and Robert Halfon for many years and always found them fair-minded and straightforward to deal with. Indeed in the summer of 2007 I went on a CFI trip to Israel led by Stuart Polak. No pressure was put on me, at the time or later, to write anything in favour of Israel. The trip, which was paid for by the CFI, certainly enabled me to understand much better the Israeli point of view. But we were presented with a very full spectrum of Israeli intellectual and political life, ranging from disturbingly far right pro-settler MPs to liberal intellectuals consumed with doubt about the morality of the Zionist state. The trip was also balanced to a certain extent by a meeting with a leading Palestinian businessman and with the British consul in East Jerusalem.

Nevertheless, the job of a political journalist is to try and explain how politics works. Ten years ago I exposed, in an article for The Spectator headlined “The man who owns the Tory Party”, the fact that the controversial offshore financier Michael Ashcroft was personally responsible for the financial survival of William Hague’s Conservatives. I asked how legitimate Michael Ashcroft’s contribution was, how much he spent, and did my best to investigate how he used his influence. Now I want to ask a question that has never been seriously addressed in the mainstream press: is there a Pro-Israel lobby in Britain, what does it do and what influence does it wield?

Chapter One: Introduction By James Jones and Peter Oborne

In 2007 two US academics, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, published a study of what they called the US Israel lobby, exploring in particular the connection between the domestic power of the lobby in the United States and US foreign policy. The book caused controversy in the United States and even in Britain.

No comparable study has ever been made in this country. Indeed the pro-Israel lobby is an almost completely unexplored topic. In 2002 The New Statesman ran a cover story “A Kosher Conspiracy?”, in which Dennis Sewell examined the groups and individuals which comprise the pro-Israel lobby. Sewell cited instances of journalists being pressured and even being accused of antisemitism, but concluded: “the truth is that the ‘Zionist lobby’ does exist, but is a clueless bunch.” The very mild piece involved little investigation and, if anything, played down the influence of the groups.

There was a very strong reaction to the story and to the front cover depicting a gold Star of David piercing a British flag. The magazine was denounced as being guilty of the “new anti-Semitism”. A group of activists calling themselves Action Against Anti-Semitism marched into the magazine’s offices demanding it print an apology. Soon, editor, Peter Wilby, felt the need to apologise: “We (or more precisely, I) got it wrong... [we] used images and words in such a way as to create unwittingly the impression that the New Statesman was following an antisemitic tradition that sees the Jews as a conspiracy piercing the heart of the nation.” Since this time no national publication has attempted to investigate the pro-Israel lobby head-on.

Making criticisms of Israel can give rise to accusations of antisemitism - a charge which any decent or reasonable person would assiduously seek to avoid. Furthermore most British newspaper groups – for example News International, Telegraph newspapers and the Express Group - have tended to take a pro-Israel line and have not always been an hospitable environment for those taking a critical look at Israeli foreign policy and influence. Finally, media critics of Israeli foreign policy – as we will vividly demonstrate in this pamphlet – can open themselves up to coordinated campaigns and denunciation.

Whether as a result of these pressures or for some other reason, mainstream political publishing in Britain tends simply to ignore Israeli influence. Andrew Marr’s Ruling Britannia: The Failure and Future of British Democracy contains not a single mention at all of either Israel or the Israel lobby. Nor does the Alan Clark’s The Tories, or Robert Blake’s The Conservative Party from Peel to Major.

Similarly the presence of an Israel lobby as a factor in British public life is systematically ignored in British reporting. For example, a search of the newspaper database Lexis Nexis showed there have been only 154 mentions of the Conservative Friends of Israel in the British press, the first of which was apparently on 22 September 1985. By contrast The Tobacco Manufacturers Association enjoyed 1,083 citations during the same period, and the Scotch Whisky Association no fewer than 2,895. The Conservative Party donor Michael Ashcroft has been the subject of 2,239 articles over the comparable time period, and the 1922 Committee of Tory backbenchers got over 3,000. The purpose of this pamphlet is to enquire whether this paucity of public coverage is indeed a reflection of the real influence of the pro-Israel lobby in British government. In our voyage of discovery we have interviewed MPs, leading Jewish intellectuals and academics, diplomats, newspaper editors and others.

However, many people just don’t want to speak out about the Israel lobby. So making our film at times felt like an impossible task. Privately we would be met with great enthusiasm and support. Everyone had a story to tell, it seemed. Once the subject of doing an interview was raised the tone changed; “Anything at all I can do to help…” quickly became “Well, obviously I couldn’t.” or “It wouldn’t be appropriate for me to.” Many people who privately voiced concerns about the influence of the lobby simply felt they had too much to lose by confronting it. One national newspaper editor told us, “that’s one lobby I’ve never dared to take on.” From MPs, to senior BBC journalists and representatives of Britain’s largest charities, the pattern became depressingly familiar. Material would come flooding out on the phone or in a meeting, but then days later an email would arrive to say that they would not be able to take part. Either after consultation with colleagues or consideration of the potential consequences, people pulled out.

Some had more reason than others. Jonathan Dimbleby had boldly expressed criticism in a powerfully argued article for Index on Censorship of the pressure from pro-Israel groups on the BBC, which led to the BBC Trust’s report on Jeremy Bowen, and had initially been keen to be involved. Suddenly his interest evaporated. There simply wasn’t the time, he said. At first we felt baffled and let down. But in due course we discovered that his comments had brought a complaint from the very same lawyer, Jonathan Turner of the Zionist Federation, that had complained about Jeremy Bowen. Dimbleby is now going through the exact same complaints process that he criticized. Turner is arguing that Dimbleby’s comments make him unfit to host the BBC’s Any Questions. The Dimbleby experience serves as a cautionary tale for anyone approaching this subject. Others, such as Sir John Tusa, who had opposed the BBC’s refusal to broadcast the Disasters Emergency Committee Gaza appeal, were overcome with modesty, feeling that they simply didn’t have the expertise to tackle the subject.

Indeed we found it almost impossible to get anyone to come on the record when we tried to investigate the BBC’s decision not to launch the Gaza humanitarian appeal. Here is a list of the organisations which told us that to speak publicly about the BBC’s refusal to screen the DEC Gaza appeal would be too sensitive: the Disasters Emergency Committee, Amnesty, Oxfam, Christian Aid, Save the Children Fund and the Catholic agency CAFOD. Only one of the organisations involved in lobbying on behalf of Israel, the Britain Israel Research and Communications Centre (BICOM), were willing to put forward an interviewee.

It was equally hard to find a publisher for this pamphlet. One potential publisher told us: “I don’t think that our donors would like this very much.” Another fretted that his charitable status would be compromised. One MP taunted the authors that we would never “have the guts” to make a television programme about the pro-Israel lobby. It was, he told us, “the most powerful lobby by far in parliament. It’s a big story. If you have any balls you’ll make a programme about it.” When we returned to the MP later on to ask if he would talk to us on the record, he felt unable to come forward and do so. One front bench Conservative MP was so paranoid he insisted we remove the battery from our mobile phones to ensure our privacy during the conversation.

It was only senior MPs whose careers are winding down that felt able to voice what many MPs told us in private. One of them, Michael Mates, a member of the Intelligence and Security Committee and former Northern Ireland minister, told us on the record that “the pro-Israel lobby in our body politic is the most powerful political lobby. There’s nothing to touch them.” Mates added: “I think their lobbying is done very discreetly, in very high places, which may be why it is so effective.”

Some journalists we spoke to had been accused of antisemitism, and felt inevitably it had done some damage to their careers. Others, like the BBC’s Orla Guerin, against whom this very serious and damaging charge has repeatedly been made by the Israeli government, wouldn’t even talk to us off the record. It is easy enough to see why. Guerin is a brave, honest and compassionate reporter. Yet the Israeli government has repeatedly complained to the BBC that Guerin is “antisemitic” and showed “total identification with the goals and methods of Palestinian terror groups.” On one occasion, in an appalling charge, they linked her reporting from the Middle East to the rise of antisemitic incidents in Britain.1 When Guerin was based in the Middle East in 2004, she filed a report about a sixteen year-old Palestinian would-be suicide bomber. Guerin said in the report that “this is a picture that Israel wants the world to see”, implying the Israelis were exploiting the boy for propaganda purposes. Natan Sharansky, a cabinet minister at the time, wrote a formal letter to the BBC accusing her of “such a gross double standards to the Jewish state, it is difficult to see Ms Guerin’s report as anything but antisemitic”. The following year, when Guerin was awarded with an MBE for her reporting, Sharansky said: “It is very sad that something as important as antisemitism is not taken into consideration when issuing this award, especially in Britain where the incidents of antisemitism are on the rise.”2 Officially sanctioned smears like this show why so many people shy away from confronting the influence of the Israel lobby.

The former Conservative Party chairman and shadow foreign secretary, Michael Ancram, who is standing down as an MP at the next general election, did have the courage to talk to us. He told us that he had been accused of antisemitism “because I’ve been talking to Hamas and Hezbollah. I just take that with a pinch of salt.” The accusation of antisemitism even touches the least likely of people. Antony Lerman, a man steeped in Jewish culture and history, who has worked for much of his career combating antisemitism, was labelled “a nasty anti-Semite” on a website designed to expose antisemitism on The Guardian’s website, for an article he wrote during the making of the film. He told us: “I think there are people who are deliberately manipulating the use of the term antisemitism because they do see that it’s useful in defending Israel.”

We strongly believe the culture of silence that surrounds this issue allows sinister conspiracy theories and, by extension, genuine antisemitism to thrive. In making the lobbying transparent and an acceptable topic of conversation, we hope debate will be more open, and there will be less space for genuine antisemites to hide in the shadows.

Chapter Two: The Pro-Israel Lobby at Westminster

The senior Tory MP David Amess recently put down a question in the House of Commons to enquire what the British government was doing to improve British relations with Israel. The reply came from Ivan Lewis, foreign office minister with special responsibility for the Middle East: “Israel is a close ally of the United Kingdom and we have regular warm and productive exchanges at all levels… We shall continue to foster a close relationship with Israel.”

This conversation was not quite the simple public exchange that it seemed. Neither politician mentioned that both of them had very close links to pro-Israel organizations. David Amess is the secretary of the Conservative Friends of Israel, which has been described by the famous Conservative Party politician and historian Robert Rhodes James as “the largest organization in Western Europe dedicated to the cause of the people of Israel.”

Meanwhile Ivan Lewis is a former vice-chairman of the Labour Friends of Israel. The connections of both men to the pro-Israel lobby were not declared on the parliamentary record. While neither acted inappropriately, their links would have been evident only to the most well-informed parliamentarian, and entirely invisible to the average voter.

Many of the most sensitive foreign affairs, defence and intelligence posts in the House of Commons are occupied by Labour or Conservative Friends of Israel. Mike Gapes, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, is a former deputy chairman of the LFI. Kim Howells, the chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee (and another former Middle East minister) used to chair Labour Friends of Israel. James Arbuthnot, chairman of the powerful Commons Defence Select Committee, is also the serving parliamentary chairman of the CFI. There is no prohibition on parliamentarians having membership of such groups, but how many voters are aware of these links.3

If a Conservative government wins the forthcoming general election the influence of the pro-Israel lobby is likely to increase. We believe that at least half, if not more, of the members of the shadow cabinet are members of the Conservative Friends of Israel.4 Let’s try a thought experiment for a moment. Let’s suppose that over half of the members of the shadow cabinet were not Conservative Friends of Israel but Conservative Friends of Belgium, and that once a year an enormous dinner was held in central London attended by the majority of Conservative MPs.

Speculation would naturally ensue about the relationship between the Conservative Party and Belgium. Indeed the friendship between Belgium and the Conservative Party would become a matter of notoriety. Every trip made to Belgium by a Conservative would be a matter of prurient curiosity for the tabloid press. It is doubtful the Conservative Party would be able to sustain such a relationship for long.

And yet Belgium is not nearly as controversial a country as Israel. It does not illegally occupy large sections of neighbouring territory. Its soldiers are not accused of war crimes by human rights organizations. There is no question, therefore, that the connection between mainstream British political parties and the state of Israel is a matter of legitimate enquiry. We will now turn our intention to the lobby groups which act as advocates for Israel at Westminster.

Conservative Friends of Israel

The Conservative Prime Minister Harold MacMillan once remarked that “there are three bodies no sensible man ever directly challenges: the Roman Catholic Church, the Brigade of Guards and the National Union of Mineworkers.” It is tempting to speculate that today he might have added the Conservative Friends of Israel to that list.

The Conservative Friends of Israel is beyond doubt the best connected, and probably the best funded, of all Westminster lobbying groups. Eighty percent of Conservative MPs are members. The leader of the Conservative Party is often expected to appear at their events, while the shadow foreign secretary and his team are subjected to persistent pressure by the CFI.

CFI’s director, Stuart Polak, is a familiar face in Westminster and well-known to everyone in the Tory establishment. Robert Halfon, the CFI’s political director and Tory candidate for Harlow, is sometimes regarded as the brains of the operation. Both are well-liked by Tory MPs.

One Tory MP has told us that, before he stood in the 2005 election, he met Stuart Polak, who put Israel’s case to him strongly at a social event. Towards the end of the meal, Stuart Polak asked if his campaign needed more money. Sure enough, weeks later two cheques arrived in the post at the Conservative office in the constituency. Both came from businessmen closely connected to the CFI who the Tory MP says he had never met before and who had never, so far as he knew, ever stepped inside his constituency. Another parliamentary candidate fighting a marginal seat told us that he had gone to see Stuart Polak, where he was tested on his views on Israel. Within a fortnight a cheque from a businessman he had never met arrived in his constituency office.

On studying donations to Conservative Constituency offices before the 2005 election a pattern emerges. A group of donors, all with strong connections to pro-Israel groups, (almost all are on the board of the CFI) made donations of between £2,000 and £5,000 either personally or through their companies to the constituency offices of certain Conservative candidates.5

The donors involved include Trevor Pears, a property magnate, who has sat on the BICOM board, used to sit on the CFI board, and has donated to Cameron in the past; Lord Steinberg, vice-president of Conservative Friends of Israel and sponsor of Stuart Polak in parliament; Michael Lewis, a South African businessman and deputy chairman of BICOM who was formerly on the Board of CFI; three or four other prominent members of the CFI. The method of donation – medium-sized sums to constituency offices often through companies rather than personal names – means that connections to the CFI or other pro-Israel group are by no means obvious. These donors may never have met the candidates, nor stepped foot, let alone actually live, in the constituency, but were happy to make donations. All candidates in these constituencies either won the seat or came close. Interestingly, in constituencies where the Conservative candidate stood little chance, the CFI made the £2,000 donation themselves.

The Tory MPs fighting parliamentary seats in 2005 whose campaigns were funded by these donors included Ed Vaizey, shadow minister for culture, media and sport; Greg Hands, shadow treasury minister; Michael Gove, shadow education secretary; Brooks Newmark, opposition foreign affairs whip; Shailesh Vara, shadow deputy leader of the Commons; Grant Shapps, shadow minister for housing; Adam Holloway MP. Many of them then went on a CFI trip to Israel in 2006, although Michael Gove - whose polemic Celsius 7/7 comes free with CFI membership - has never been to Israel. Most have been supportive of Israel in speeches to parliament and none have been overtly critical.

There is also a suggestion that some members of the CFI target MPs who are critical of Israel. For instance Karen Buck, the Labour MP for Regent’s Park and Kensington North, has been an outspoken critic. Her Conservative opponent Joanne Cash, who works for the think tank Policy Exchange, has received cheques cumulatively worth at least £20,000.6It cannot be stressed too strongly that this pattern of donations is entirely legal. However, it is at least arguable that it contravenes one of the seven principles of public life, concerning integrity, as set out by the Committee on Standards in Public Life: "Holders of public office should not place themselves under any financial or other obligation to outside individuals or organisations that might seek to influence them in the performance of their official duties."

Over the past three years the CFI has flown over thirty Conservative parliamentary candidates to Israel on free trips.7 Sometimes MPs can take their wives on these superbly organized events. Excellent access is granted to senior members of the Israeli political and security establishments, though the trips are balanced by a meeting with a Palestinian businessman or politician.

For a junior or a prospective MP to be taken on such a trip and granted access to which they are not accustomed can be a powerful and persuasive experience MP. The CFI will often include pro-Israeli quotations from many of the Conservative candidates in its newsletter. The impression given, normally far from inaccurate, is that they have new loyal supporters. In the months following one trip in November 2007, ten candidates received small donations to their constituencies from prominent CFI sponsors. The recipients included high-profile candidates such as Margot James, vice-chairman of the Conservative Party, who has not yet declared the trip. Another, Andrew Griffiths, who had spoken about the difficulties of negotiating with people “trying to blow up your friends, family and people you care about”, received three donations, including one from CFI chairman Richard Harrington.8Often these donations are carefully targeted. In the months after William Hague was appointed shadow foreign secretary, he accepted personal donations from CFI board members totaling tens of thousands of pounds.9 However, Conservative MPs are extremely unwilling to talk publicly about CFI funding and influence inside the Party. Michael Mates told us that “no one will talk to you before the election.”

Conservative support for the Zionist cause dates back at least as far as the famous meeting between then Conservative Prime Minister AJ Balfour and the great Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann in 1905, when Weizmann convinced Balfour of the case for the state of Israel. Weizmann also converted to the cause the future Conservative statesman Winston Churchill, then a Liberal candidate, at around the same time. Indeed one of Churchill’s most ferocious attacks on the Chamberlain government came in May 1939, when it announced its decision to cut back on Jewish immigration into Palestine. Churchill told MPs that “this pledge of a home of refuge, of an asylum, was not made to the Jews in Palestine but to the Jews outside Palestine, to that vast, unhappy, mass of scattered, persecuted, wandering Jews whose intense, unchanging, unconquerable desire has been for a National Home.”

The Conservative Friends of Israel was founded in 1974 by the Conservative MP Michael Fidler.10 Since then it has emerged as a powerful lobby group. By 1984, the Conservative prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, had been prevailed on to become chairman of the CFI branch at her local Finchley constituency, a development which elicited the following denunciation on state controlled television in the strongly anti-Israel Soviet Union: “The Conservative Friends of Israel group essentially plays the role of a powerful pro-Zionist lobby within the Conservative Party.”11

No other lobbying organization – least of all one that acts in the interests of a foreign country – can virtually guarantee that the leader of the Conservative Party, his or her most senior colleagues, and scores of Tory MPs will attend such a grand annual celebratory lunch with such regularity. Most of today’s shadow cabinet are members, including the leader of the opposition, shadow foreign secretary and shadow defence secretary. As we have seen, many of the key back-bench positions are held by CFI supporters. Nevertheless, it is extremely difficult to demonstrate how much influence the CFI actually wields within the policy-making apparatus of the Conservative Party.

For example the former Conservative Party chairman and shadow foreign secretary, Michael Ancram, has long been a member of the CFI. This has not prevented him being a severe critic of Israeli foreign policy – he was seen rolling his eyes when David Cameron praised Israel for the preservation of innocent life at it’s the CFI’s Dorchester lunch last June – and an advocate of direct negotiation with Hamas. Richard Spring is another senior Conservative MP who has made trips to Israel as a guest of the CFI. Yet he is also a regular visitor to Israel’s opponent Syria and often urges the return of the Golan Heights as prelude to a peace settlement. William Hague, the shadow foreign secretary, is also a member of the CFI, but that has not stopped him from being an occasional critic of Israeli foreign policy.

Hague is an important case study. He accepted donations from Conservative Friends of Israel board members after becoming Shadow Foreign Secretary, but within months William Hague had fallen out with the CFI.12 Hague was on the receiving end of an ear-bashing, was targeted in a critical letter to The Spectator, and subject to threats to withdraw funding from Lord Kalms, a major Tory donor and member of the CFI, after he used the word “disproportionate” about Israel’s 2006 attack on Lebanon.

At the same time, rumours swirled around Westminster that Hague had been influenced by his Bosnian Muslim adviser, Arminka Helic. In the wake of this fall-out, we understand from Tory sources that Stuart Polak was able to secure a meeting with David Cameron in which the Tory leader gave what was understood as an undertaking not to use the word “disproportionate” again. Nevertheless, any effort to portray either William Hague or David Cameron merely as a passive instrument of the pro-Israel lobby is wide of the mark.

More recently, Tory sources say that the CFI played an influential role in stiffening the Conservative Party’s opposition to the UN resolution based on the Goldstone Report into the Israeli attack on Gaza. According to our sources, Hague was persuaded to sit down with David Cameron and Andrew Feldman, an influential supporter of the CFI, and produced the following quotation for the CFI newsletter setting out their opposition to the resolution: “Unless the draft resolution is redrafted to reflect the role that Hamas played in starting the conflict, we would recommend that the British Government vote to reject the resolution.” Hague had decided to take the American line of rejecting the UN resolution, unlike the Labour government, which, in effect, abstained.

To assess the influence of the CFI within the Conservative Party, it is useful to compare it to the Conservative Middle East Council (CMEC), which focuses on the wider Middle East in the Conservative Party and works hard to balance the CFI’s influence. According to its website, every year CMEC seeks to take “a series of delegations to Iran, the Arab states and Israel.” It claims that just over half of all Conservative MPs are members. Chaired by the former shadow cabinet minister Hugo Swire, CMEC has yet to establish itself as a potent serious rival to the CFI.

For the thirty-five years the CFI has existed, the Conservative Party, both in government and opposition, has taken a strongly pro-Israel stance. The CFI alone cannot take the credit for this. Indeed other factors – above all, British subordination to US foreign policy – are considerably more significant. Nevertheless, no political lobby inside the Conservative Party – and certainly no longer the Brigade of Guards – carries comparable weight.

Labour Friends of Israel (LFI)

Whereas the CFI has the luxury of working with the grain of the Conservative Party, the Labour Friends of Israel has tended to face a considerably tougher job. There is a much stronger Labour tradition of supporting Palestinian causes since the 1967 war, where Conservatives are more likely to instinctively assume that Israel is in the right. The visceral anti-Americanism of many Labour MPs also plays a role here.

The LFI was founded in 1957 at a public rally at that year’s Labour Party Conference. It describes itself as “a Westminster based lobby group working within the British Labour Party to promote the State of Israel”. It has very close ties with the Israeli Labor Party, and British Labour Party figures like Philip Gould have given training to Israeli politicians in electoral strategy. For that reason the LFI is perhaps less unquestioning in its support of the Israeli government than the CFI. The two lobby groups both work closely with the Israeli embassy and even share supporters, such as the businessmen Victor Blank and Trevor Chinn, but they work independently within their respective parties.

Labour Friends of Israel has taken more MPs on trips than any other group. Only the CFI comes close. Since 2001, the LFI has arranged more than sixty free trips for MPs. LFI and CFI trips combined account for over 13% of all funded trips for MPs and candidates. That’s more trips to Israel, a country with a population smaller than London’s, than to Europe, America or Africa. Even in America, where the pro-Israel lobby is extremely influential, trips to Israel account for only ten percent of all politicians’ foreign trips.13

The group is similarly well connected within the party, and has regular meetings with David Miliband and his Foreign Office team to make Israel’s case. Labour MPs told us that young, ambitious MPs see a role at LFI as a good way to get ahead. Chairs of the LFI very often go on to become ministers. James Purnell and Jim Murphy, the Secretary of State for Scotland, are two recent chairmen. Ivan Lewis, the foreign office minister with responsibility for the Middle East, is a former vice-chair.

One of Tony Blair’s first acts on becoming an MP in 1983 was to join Labour Friends of Israel. He remained close to the group throughout his career, regularly appearing at their events. Jon Mendelsohn, a former chairman of the LFI, and now Gordon Brown’s chief election fundraiser, speaking in 2007, described Tony Blair’s achievement in transforming the Labour Party’s position on Israel. “Blair attacked the anti-Israelism that had existed in the Labour Party. Old Labour was cowboys-and-Indians politics, picking underdogs to support, but the milieu has changed. Zionism is pervasive in New Labour. It is automatic that Blair will come to Labour Friends of Israel meetings.”

Blair succeeded in making the Labour party more attractive to donors connected with the Labour Friends of Israel. The key figure in building these relationships was, of course, Michael Levy.

Blair met Levy in 1994 at a dinner party thrown by Gideon Meir, number two at the Israeli Embassy. Blair was just back from a trip to Israel with the LFI.

The two men quickly recognised the mutual benefits offered by the relationship. By early 1995, Blair was leader of the opposition and he dropped in on his new friend for a swim and a game of tennis almost every weekend. Levy had been collecting donations to a blind trust, known as the Labour Leader’s Office Fund, raising nearly two million pounds, a sum “previously unimaginable for a Labour leader”.14 Blair maintained that he was unaware of the sources of these donations despite being in almost constant contact with Levy and even meeting some of the donors.

We now know that the secret donors included funders of pro-Israel groups such as Trevor Chinn and Emmanuel Kaye. Levy had played a crucial role in persuading donors that Labour had changed. Blair told Levy, “I am absolutely determined that we must not go into the next election financially dependent on the trade unions.”15 Instead, Blair became financially dependent on large donors, some of whom had very strong views on Israel.

According to Levy, the subject of Israel was second only to fundraising in his conversations with Tony Blair. Levy is estimated to have raised over fifteen million pounds for Blair before the “cash for peerages” affair brought Levy’s fundraising to an end in the summer of 2006.

Chapter Three- The Pro-Israel Lobby In The Media

Many supporters of Israel have come to believe that they are a beleaguered minority in Britain. They are convinced that press and politicians alike are ranged against them and that the media routinely distorts the actions and intentions of the Jewish state. This belief is sincerely held, but it is difficult to support on closer examination.

Most of the mainstream British media takes a pro-Israel line. Rupert Murdoch, whose News International media empire controls between 30-40% of the British newspaper press, makes no secret of his pro-Israeli sympathies.16 Indeed one well-regarded Times correspondent, Sam Kiley, took the extraordinary step of actually resigning from the paper because of interference with his work on the Middle East.17

In addition to the Murdoch press, the Telegraph Media Group and Express Newspapers have tended to support Israel. So has Associated Newspapers, though to a less obvious extent. There are, however, two important media organisations, which have consistently sought to report fairly from the Middle East and present the Palestinian point of view with equal force to the pro-Israeli government line. These are The Guardian and the BBC. These two organisations have been subjected to ceaseless pressure and at times harassment both from the Israeli government itself and from pressure groups.

This chapter will document some of this pressure by chronicling some of the campaigns mounted by the pro-Israel lobby against The Guardian and the BBC. We will then turn our attention to the pro-Israel media lobby groups, of which the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM) is by some distance the most important.

The Guardian

The Guardian was more closely involved in the creation of Israel than any other British newspaper. Its editor C.P. Scott was instrumental in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, introducing Chaim Weizmann, the leader of the Zionist movement and later the first President of the state of Israel, to leading members of the British government.

However, the paper now finds itself at the centre of an international campaign accusing it of anti-Zionism and even antisemitism. Through much of the last decade, The Guardian has been in dispute with the Israeli government and in particular the combative Israeli Government press office director, Danny Seaman. In 2002, Seaman publicly boasted that he had forced The Guardian to move correspondent Suzanne Goldenberg after she had been transferred to Washington. “We simply boycotted them,” claimed Seaman, “the editorial boards got the message and replaced their people.”

Seaman is well known for using tactics such as denying or delaying visas to obstruct correspondents he sees as hostile to Israel. One reporter familiar with Seaman described him as a “bully” who was “at the forefront of the general harassment. Rusbridger wrote to Seaman insisting he withdraw his comments, only to be told by Seaman: “I will happily withdraw my comments about Ms. Goldenberg when your newspaper withdraws the biased, sometimes malicious and often incorrect reports which were filed by her during her unpleasant stay here.”18 Rusbridger insists he had total faith in Goldenberg’s reporting, for which she received numerous awards, and that “only the Israelis would see a move to Washington as a demotion.”

In 2006 The Guardian was caught up in another row after publishing a controversial article by correspondent Chris McGreal comparing Israel to apartheid South Africa. The episode reveals the workings of the pro-Israel lobby with the Israeli embassy coordinating the offensive. An emergency meeting was called at the Israeli ambassador’s residence with BICOM chairman Poju Zabludowicz, board of deputies president Henry Grunwald, community security trust chairman Gerald Ronson and Lord Janner of Labour Friends of Israel to plan the response.

Ronson and Grunwald were dispatched to visit Alan Rusbridger in his office to convey their feelings. According to Rusbridger, Ronson didn’t even take his coat off: “He began by saying, I think his phrase was ‘I’ve always said opinions are like arseholes, everyone’s got one’, and then he effectively said ‘I’m in favour of free speech but there is a line which can’t be crossed and, as far as I’m concerned, you’ve crossed it, and you must stop this’.” Ronson accused The Guardian of being responsible for antisemitic attacks, a claim Rusbridger refused to accept: “I mean I didn’t want to get in a great row with Gerald Ronson, I just said I’d be interested in the evidence, I’m not sure how you make that causal connection between someone reading an article that is critical of the foreign policy of Israel and then thinking why don’t I go out and mug Jews on the streets of London. I just can’t believe that happens.”

The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), a pro-Israel media watchdog, made a complaint to the Press Complaints Commission, arguing that McGreal’s article was “based on materially false accusations”. The complaint was not upheld. Alan Rusbridger’s decision to run the Chris McGreal article was vindicated. The Guardian is not the only newspaper to come under pressure. and, according to Rusbridger, it works. He told us that “there are a lot of newspaper and broadcasting editors who have told me that they just don’t think it’s worth the hassle to challenge the Israeli line. They’ve had enough.”

The BBC and the Pro-Israel Lobby

The case of the BBC is extraordinary. The organisation has become a hate figure for pro-Israel groups, who resent its global reach and supposed sympathy for the Palestinians. We have spoken to BBC journalists and recently departed staff who say that rarely a week goes by without having to deal with complaints about their coverage of the Middle East. This year has been particularly difficult for the Corporation. The BBC refused to screen an aid appeal from Britain’s top charities for the people of Gaza, resulting in millions of pounds less money being raised. It reacted to pressure from pro-Israel pressure groups by publishing a report, which criticised its own Middle East editor, Jeremy Bowen. Finally, it refused to disclose a report by Malcolm Balen into its Middle East coverage which cost of hundreds of thousands of pounds to the licence fee payer. Through a Freedom of Information request we discovered the BBC had spent over a quarter of a million pounds on legal fees relating to the case.19

It is no surprise that at the start of the year the culture secretary, Ben Bradshaw, himself a former BBC reporter, remarked that “I’m afraid the BBC has to stand up to the Israeli authorities occasionally. Israel has a long reputation of bullying the BBC.” Bradshaw added that “I’m afraid the BBC has been cowed by this relentless and persistent pressure from the Israeli government and they should stand up against it.”20

1. The Balen Report

This report has its origins in the spring of 2003, when the BBC’s relationship with Israel completely broke down. The Israeli government imposed visa restrictions on BBC journalists and refused access to Israeli government figures after a documentary about its nuclear weapons entitled “Israel’s Secret Weapon” was shown on BBC World. The Israeli Government press officer, Danny Seaman, compared it to “the worst of Nazi propaganda”.

For a time Israel joined a small band of countries, including North Korea, Zimbabwe and Turkmenistan, which refused the BBC free access. When Ariel Sharon visited London in July 2003, BBC journalists were in the ludicrous position of being banned from attending the press conference. By the autumn, pressure on the BBC from pro-Israel groups and the Israeli government was so great that the head of BBC news Richard Sambrook felt obliged to act.

Sambrook employed Malcolm Balen, a former head of ITV News and senior BBC executive, to write the now infamous Balen Report on the BBC’s Middle East coverage during the previous four years. In October, the High Court finally ruled that the BBC does not have to publish the report, which has become an obsession for Israel’s supporters, who hold this up as the BBC trying to hide its anti-Israel bias.

This is dubious. We have spoken to one of the very few people who have read the report. He says that far from concluding the BBC’s coverage was biased against Israel, it simply finds examples where more context should have been given. If anything, our source claims, the impression given is that the BBC is sympathetic to Israel.

2. Punishing Jeremy Bowen.

In April this year, in an important success for the pro-Israel lobby, the BBC’s Middle East editor, Jeremy Bowen, was criticized by the BBC Trust for breaching their rules of accuracy and impartiality in an online piece, and their rules of accuracy in a radio piece. Bowen’s critics have seized on his humiliation, demanding that he be sacked and insisting that the episode proved the BBC’s “chronically biased reporting”. The real story behind the BBC Trust’s criticism of Bowen reports is rather different: it demonstrates the pusillanimity of the BBC Trust and the energy and opportunism of the pro-Israel lobby.

The story begins with an essay written by Bowen to mark the 40th anniversary of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War for the BBC website. Though many people viewed Bowen’s essay as a fair and balanced account, erring if anything on the side of conventional wisdom, this was not the reaction of two passionate members of the Pro-Israel lobby, Jonathan Turner of the Zionist Federation and Gilead Ini, who lobbies for CAMERA, an American pro-Israel media watchdog organization.

Turner and Ini subjected Bowen’s article to line by line scrutiny, alleging some 24 instances of bias in his online article and a further four in a later report by Bowen from a controversial Israeli settlement called Har Homa. Turner and Ini’s complaints were rejected by the BBC’s editorial complaints unit, so they duly appealed to the BBC Trust. The meeting was chaired by David Liddiment who, to quote Jonathan Dimbleby, “is admired as a TV entertainment wizard and former director of programmes at ITV but whose experience of the dilemmas posed by news and current affairs, especially in relation to the bitterly contested complexities of the Middle East is, perforce, limited.”

The BBC Trust found that Bowen had breached three accuracy and one impartiality guideline in his online report, and one accuracy guideline in his radio piece. This was a massive boost for the organizations to which Turner and Ini were attached. The Zionist Federation at once called for Bowen to be sacked, calling his position “untenable”, while adding that what they called his “biased coverage of Israel” had been a “significant contributor to the recent rise in antisemitic incidents in the UK to record levels.” Meanwhile, CAMERA claimed that the BBC Trust had exposed Bowen’s “unethical” approach to his work and insisted the BBC must now take “concrete steps” to combat its “chronically biased reporting” of the Middle East.

These powerful attacks might have been justified if the BBC Trust had found Bowen guilty of egregious bias. In fact he was condemned for what were at best matters of opinion. In a majority of the cases, the complaints were found to have no merit, and where changes were made they changed the meaning very little.21

As Dimbleby concluded, “You don’t have to search far on the web to find Zionist publications, lobby groups and bloggers all over the world using distorted versions of the report to justify their ill-founded prejudice that the BBC has a deep-seated and long-standing bias against the state of Israel. Conversely, millions of Palestinians, other Arabs and Muslims will by now have been confirmed in their — equally false — belief that the BBC is yet again running scared of Israeli propaganda…

“Not only has Bowen’s hard-won reputation been sullied, but the BBC’s international status as the best source of trustworthy news in the world has been gratuitously — if unintentionally — undermined.” The Trust’s ruling was met with dismay in BBC newsrooms. A former BBC News editor, Charlie Beckett, told us “the BBC investigated Jeremy Bowen because they were under such extraordinary pressure... it struck a chill through the actual BBC newsroom because it signaled to them that they were under assault.”

We can reveal that Jeremy Bowen had an article “Israel still bears a disastrous legacy” (31 May 2007) published a week earlier than his BBC piece (4 June 2007) in The Jewish Chronicle containing most of the contentious sentences.

Indeed, even the problematic lines that led the BBC Trust to conclude there had been a breach of accuracy and impartiality, such as “Zionism’s innate instinct to push out the frontier” and “The Israeli generals, mainly hugely self-confident sabras in their late 30s and early 40s, had been training to finish the unfinished business of 1948 for most of their careers” are still in Bowen’s article on The Jewish Chronicle’s website. Perhaps the BBC Trust’s interpretation of due impartiality is different to that of Britain’s Jewish community.

The Gaza Humanitarian appeal

The BBC has a long tradition of showing humanitarian appeals, including those that are seen as politically sensitive, such as the Lebanon appeal in 1982, and has helped raise tens of millions of pounds for people in need around the world. But in January 2009, Mark Thompson, director general of the BBC, took the unprecedented decision of breaking away from other broadcasters and refusing to broadcast the Disasters Emergency Appeal for Gaza, claiming it would compromise the BBC’s impartiality. ITV and Channel 4 screened the Gaza appeal, but Sky joined the BBC in refusing. The BBC’s decision had an undeniable impact. Brendan Gormley, Chief Executive of the DEC, told us that the appeal raised about half of the expected total: £7.5 million. In the first 48 hours of the appeal phone calls were down by 17,000 on the average.

Thompson also cast doubt on the charities’ ability to deliver aid on the ground despite assurances from the DEC and his own charitable appeals advisers that this was not the case.

We asked Charlie Beckett why the BBC had refused. He replied: “If there was no pro-Israeli lobby in this country then I don’t think [screening the appeal] would have been seen as politically problematic. I don’t think it would be a serious political issue and concern for them if they didn’t have that pressure from an extraordinarily active, sophisticated, and persuasive lobby sticking up for the Israeli viewpoint.”

The rise of BICOM

BICOM, the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre, is Britain’s major pro-Israel lobby. Founded in 2001 as an equivalent to America’s hugely influential AIPAC, it is bankrolled by its Chairman Poju Zabludowicz, a Finnish billionaire and former arms dealer. Over the past three years Zabludowicz has given over two million pounds in donations. This year, they sent thirty representatives to the AIPAC conference in America, a sign of BICOM’s growing ambition.

Incredibly, almost no one we interviewed for the film had even heard of Zabludowicz, a key player at the heart of the pro-Israel lobby in Britain. Our questions continually met with blank expressions from senior politicians and people in the Jewish community. Zabludowicz fiercely guards his privacy and does so with great success despite his wife being a renowned art collector, and counting Madonna and other A-list celebrities among close personal friends.

Zabludowicz’s father, Shlomo Zabludowicz, made his money through Israeli arms manufacturers Soltam Systems, a company, which continues to thrive and recently provided the IDF with artillery for its Gaza campaign. Poju Zabludowicz also ran Soltam, but has since moved his money from arms into property. He is now estimated to own around forty percent of downtown Las Vegas.

Far more significantly, we have discovered that he owns property in the illegal settlements in the West Bank. He has a stake in a shopping centre in Ma’ale Adumim, a settlement which is seen as strategically crucial in ensuring Jerusalem remains in Israeli hands. So much so that Netanyahu launched his election campaign in the settlement in 2005. “Starting my campaign here is not coincidental [it is] because Jerusalem is in danger.”

Zabludowicz believes Israel suffers unfairly from an image problem with Palestinian propaganda swallowed too readily by European liberals. He hoped to create one lobby that oversaw media and politics in the style of AIPAC, but met with resistance from the parliamentary Friends of Israel groups, guarding their patch. He does, however, play a role at Conservative Friends of Israel as a significant donor. He has also established a relationship with David Cameron, the man almost certain to be Britain’s next prime minister.

In September 2005 when Cameron was planning his Conservative leadership election campaign he met Zabludowicz for a coffee. Zabludowicz was suitably impressed with what he heard, and Cameron received £15,000 from Zabludowicz over the course of his election campaign.22 To ensure that the donations complied with election law, he made the donations through his British subsidiary Tamares Real Estate Investments. Despite the CFI and BICOM not formally merging there is a huge amount of co-ordination. Many of BICOM’s key figures also play roles in the CFI: Trevor Pears, Michael Lewis and Poju Zabludowicz are driving forces behind both lobbies. David Cameron also accepted £20,000 from Trevor Pears in his leadership election.23

BICOM performs a similar role to the parliamentary groups: building relationships with key journalists and editors, taking them on paid-for trips to Israel, and setting up high level meetings in Israel and the UK. They also provide journalists with daily briefings and suggest stories and angles to friendly contacts. During key periods, like Operation Cast Lead, BICOM goes into overdrive.

In its early days, BICOM received criticism from some in the Jewish community for not doing enough and in 2006 they replaced Daniel Shek, a smooth Israeli diplomat, now ambassador in France, with Lorna Fitzsimons, a former Labour MP in Rochdale. The appointment surprised some as Fitzsimons is not Jewish and has no obvious connection to Israel, but she is combative and, of course, had good contacts with the current government.

She leads a team of bright PR professionals who make Israel’s case in a sophisticated way, not resorting to accusations of anti-Semitism and simplistic explanations, instead focusing on shared values and the threat from Israel’s neighbours.

There is a question too of whether journalists should accept free trips from an organisation representing only one side in such a controversial conflict. And if they do so, then surely they should make clear in any resulting article that the trip has been funded by a pro-Israel lobby? Of the dozens of journalists that make the trips each year, only very few seem to make any reference to BICOM, giving the impression they were on a neutral fact-finding mission by default, whereas in fact it was a carefully coordinated trip. That is not to say such trips can never be useful for a journalist, just that they should declare them in the same way as MPs so their readers can take an informed view.

Two months after the end of Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, BICOM sent half a dozen journalists on a free trip to Tel Aviv to talk to Israeli defence analysts. The message BICOM wanted to get across was that they should pay more attention to Iran than to the Palestinians.

The Sunday Times wrote a piece about how the world looks from the point of view of Israel’s top generals. The News of the World contained a brief piece about Iran’s nuclear ambitions: “Psycho Doomsday is Nigh”. The Mirror’s security correspondent wrote two pieces from Israel, detailing their list of meetings. Only The Sunday Times made any reference to BICOM, acknowledging it had arranged the trip half-way through the piece. The News of the World and The Mirror made no reference to BICOM arranging and funding the visit.24

In a response to our questions, Poju Zabludowicz wrote: “BICOM is a British not-for-profit organization which produces information and provides activities that seek to explain the complexities of the issues facing Israel and the Middle East, while promoting the policy of a two-state solution with the Palestinians… There are countless numbers of journalists (broadcast and print), politicians (Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat), as well as academics and analysts with whom BICOM maintains regular contact.”

Chapter Four – Conclusion and Recommendations

A Short Summary of Recent Relations Between Britain and Israel Since 1997 there has sometimes appeared to be an assumption at the highest levels of British government that the interests of Israel and Britain are identical. For example, during Israel’s catastrophic invasion of the Lebanon in the summer of 2006, the Blair government failed even to call for a ceasefire.

The idea that British and Israeli foreign policy interests should be the same is, however, relatively new. While Britain played a famous role in the creation of the Israeli state, for a long time after World War Two it was never afraid to criticise Israeli foreign policy.

For example, the Conservative foreign secretary (and former prime minister) Sir Alec Douglas Home called at Harrogate in October 1970 for the implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 242 and for Israel to abandon the territories occupied in the aftermath of the Six Day War in June 1967. This firm sense that Britain could confidently challenge Israeli foreign policy persisted for some time afterwards.

Margaret Thatcher was an instinctive and long-standing supporter of Israel. Through connections with the large Jewish community in her Finchley constituency she was a member of the Anglo-Israel Friendship League and a founder member of the Conservative Friends of Israel. Thatcher visited Israel twice before becoming PM, and became the first serving British prime minister to visit in 1986.

However, when events warranted, she was ready to criticize Israel, far more strongly than more recent prime ministers. After Israel’s bombing of the Iraqi nuclear plant at Osirak in 1981, Thatcher described the actions as “a grave breach of international law” and a “matter of great grief ”.These were words that no government minister would use today, and certainly stand in stark contrast to William Hague’s mild comments in the summer of 2006, condemning Israeli actions as “disproportionate”, which provoked such outrage among the pro-Israel lobby at the time.

After the Lebanon war in 1982 Thatcher took an unprecedented stand by joining other European countries in imposing an arms embargo on Israel, which lasted twelve years until it was ended in 1994. Again this action contrasts with the reaction to the Lebanon war of 2006. Afterwards, British arms exports to Israel increased.

The election of Tony Blair’s New Labour government in 1997 marked the turning point in British-Israeli relations. Tony Blair soon brought Britain into line with the American position, which was significantly more supportive of Israeli policies. This change of approach can be measured by the use of Britain’s vote as a permanent member of the UN Security Council.

The United States has used its veto at the UN Security Council forty times since 1972 over resolutions concerning Israel. The resolutions have focused on the settlements, the status of Jerusalem, and Israeli military action. On Israel and Palestine, there has historically been a gap between US policy, being strongly supportive of Israel, and the other members of the Security Council. Between 1972 and 1997 inclusive, the UK and France voted the same way as China and the Soviet Union/Russia, and the opposite way to the US, on almost 80% of Middle East resolutions.

The Labour government has subtly changed Britain’s approach. Since 2003, France has continued to vote the same way as China and Russia, but the UK has abstained on every Middle East resolution, which the US has vetoed. This suggests a growing reluctance to be seen to be contradicting US and by extension Israeli policy.

Growing Importance of the Pro-Israel Lobby

Sir Richard Dalton, former British ambassador in Tehran and consul in Jerusalem, told us that when he was a young diplomat in the 1970s, Britain felt able to act purely in its own interests. Throughout his career he has seen that change as the influence of the pro-Israel lobby has grown. “One of the frustrations is that my colleagues and I are not pro-Palestinian, pro-Arab, pro-Israel, pro-anything. We want what is best for Britain. “But there is a pro-Israel lobby and it’s active in trying to define the debate in order to limit the options that British politicians can choose to options that would be acceptable to that lobby.”

He told us that increasingly politicians are afraid to express publicly what they may say in private. That means Israel is not subjected to the same public scrutiny as other countries. He cited the Lebanon war as an example: “The Israel lobbies appear to want to censor British politicians from saying that elements of the Israeli action were disproportionate and they appear to be willing to use financial pressures as a way of enforcing that decision.” Even more significantly this senior diplomat felt that his own actions when serving as Consul General in Jerusalem in the late 1990s were limited by the influence of the lobby at home in Britain.

This influence works in a variety of ways: the unceasing cultivation of British MPs; political donations; availability of research briefs; brilliant presentation of the case for Israel. The Israel lobby has enjoyed superb contacts at the very top of British politics, and never hesitated to use them. As we have shown in this pamphlet, it has used them at key moments; for instance the Israeli invasion of the Lebanon three years ago and the publication of the Goldstone Report into alleged war crimes during the invasion of Gaza earlier this year.

Beyond these specific examples of influence, there is also a wider presence. The Friends of Israel groups in the House of Commons have firmly established themselves in the interstices of British political life. Their heavy presence at party conferences is taken for granted, their lunches and dinners an ingrained part of the Westminster social scene, the donations a vital part of the political financing. An environment now exists where MPs and ministers feel cautious about criticizing the foreign policy of the Israeli state, wary of opening themselves to criticism on the home front.

Meanwhile, public discourse on Israel, as we have shown, is heavily policed. This policing takes two forms. First, critics of the Israel government policy – The Guardian and the BBC are the two most prominent examples – come under heavy and incessant attack from pro-Israel media monitoring groups. Second, journalists from key media outlets are assiduously cultivated.

The Need for Openness

The pro-Israel lobby does nothing wrong, or illegal. It is not sinister and it is not unusual. It cannot be too much stressed that British public life is populated by all kinds of interest groups, many of them extremely active at Westminster.

While this pro-Israel lobbying is lawful, it is emphatically not transparent. We have shown in this pamphlet that journalists very rarely declare their BICOM funded trips to Israel. We have also shown how patterns of donations from CFI members to Tory candidates are sometimes opaque. Indeed, the financial structure of the CFI as a whole is obscure. It does not declare its funding, the identity of its donors, or its annual turnover. Despite being composed almost entirely of MPs and Conservative party members it is registered not as a members’ association, a lobby, a company, or a charity, but as an unincorporated association. This means it does not exist as an organization, but merely as a collection of individuals.

This allows its donors to give money without being identified. This means that some of these donors could be foreign nationals, who under British electoral rules should not be allowed to fund political parties or members of parliament. For a foreign donor wanting to fund a British politician or political party, unincorporated associations offer that opportunity. This anonymity is not acceptable for any political pressure group of whatever persuasion in 21st century British politics.

A similar observation applies to other pro-Israel pressure groups. While BICOM’s work is entirely legitimate, it is by no means transparent. They never declare, for example, which journalists go on trips and who they meet. In the United States, AIPAC must register as a lobby and declare its activities. Over here, BICOM is simply a company registered at Companies House, and doesn’t make its work public.

The Pro-Israel lobby and British-Jewry

There is one final set of questions to be asked. Who does the pro-Israel lobby represent? Is it mainstream British-Jewish opinion or the state of Israel or neither? More likely, it exerts pressure for a particular set of interests within Israeli politics. Globalisation has led to a wide and welcome recognition that we all have multiple legitimate interests and identities. There are countless good reasons for the interests of Israel to have a place in UK politics and vice versa, not only because of interests of State, but also because there are many British subjects who have direct legitimate interests and concerns for what happens in Israel and vice versa. The reason we need to ask who or what is represented by the UK’s pro-Israel lobby is precisely so that we can understand what effect UK policy does actually have in Israeli politics and whether these legitimate interests are effectively being promoted.

Of course, this question is especially difficult to answer because the main pro-Israel lobbying organizations do not have a transparent financial structure. It is impossible to state with confidence that they receive all their money from British sources. Indeed we have discovered that the biggest funder for BICOM is not a British citizen, but a Finnish business tycoon with a commercial interest in a shopping centre in Ma’ale Adumim, a West Bank town regarded in international law as an illegal settlement. One of the enduring paradoxes of the discussion of Israeli foreign policy is that it is much more contested and debated inside Israel than outside.

Some Jewish interviewees told us that they were felt that the main pro-Israel organizations in Britain were less critical of Israeli foreign policy than mainstream British Jewish opinion. David Newman (who was appointed by Israel’s ministry of foreign affairs to fight the proposed academic boycott of Israel in the UK):

“There is clearly a debate, and it’s not just a debate it’s a huge debate inside Israel, whether Israel should or should not continue to control the West Bank, whether settlements are legal or illegal, moral or immoral. And what you often find is that the groups such as AIPAC or BICOM outside Israel tend to close down that sort of debate, they tend to say you have to be totally supportive of Israel full stop, whatever Israel does.”

Newman added that:

“The fact that someone, if as you say, has a major investment in Ma’ale Adumim [and] is the major investor also of BICOM, that would tend to indicate in what direction BICOM is going. It’s going to be more supportive of settlements or less critical of settlements than if someone on the left was investing their money in BICOM.”

One of the reasons for the stale debate in the UK and Europe around Israel and Palestine has little to do with the politics of the lobbies but stems from our own hang-ups and history: we resist being anti-Israeli because of the difficulty of confronting the reality of European antisemitism; and yet we resist being anti-Palestinian because of the difficulty in confronting the reality of the European colonial past. So partly the UK (and Europe more widely) needs to be prepared to confront the issues of Israel and Palestine themselves, and not the issues of its own fraught history towards them if it wants to have a mature debate and any significant influence in the region.

The UK’s pro-Israel lobby is able to take advantage of this stale debate in order to project and promote a specific view of Israel’s interests, one that is hotly debated within Israel. It is in the interest of our own democracy, and our effectiveness in promoting the legitimate interests of Israel within the British state to have more transparency here.

Summary and Conclusion

Israel is a wonderful and extraordinary country with a rich and flourishing democratic history. Founded in terrible circumstances in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust and World War Two, it has a profound right to exist. But this moral legitimacy does not mean that the foreign and internal policies of Israel should be exempt from the same kind of probing criticism that any independent state must expect. Nor does it mean that the rights of Palestinians to their own state can be ignored.

The pro-Israel lobby, in common with other lobbies, has every right to operate in Britain. But it needs to be far more open about how it is funded and what it does. This is partly because the present obscurity surrounding the funding arrangements and activities of organisations such as BICOM and the CFI can paradoxically give rise to conspiracy theories that have no basis in fact. But it is mainly because politics in a democracy should never take place behind closed doors. It should be out in the open and there for all to see.

---------------------

1 The Jerusalem Post, 25 April 2005

2 ibid

3 Robert Rhodes James, The Jerusalem Post, March 13th 1995

4 We have been unable to establish an exact number because membership is not publicly listed, but members include senior figures, such as David Cameron, George Osborne, Michael Gove, Liam Fox, and Chris Grayling.

5

6

7 Seven PPCs on November 2006 trip; twenty PPCs on November 2007 trip; Three on February 2009 trip; two on September 2009 trip. [Source: CFI newsletters]

8

10 Robert Rhodes James, The Jerusalem Post, March 13th 1995

11 Mrs Thatcher and the ‘pro-Zionist lobby’, 2nd July 1984, BBC Monitoring Service.

12 See note 10

13 Walt and Mearsheimer, The Israel Lobby

14 Michael Levy, A Question of Honour

15 Ibid

16 Murdoch’s two daily newspapers, The Sun and The Times, between them account for some 35% of the daily newspaper market. His Sunday papers, The News of the World and The Sunday Times, have between them a market share approaching 40% of Sunday papers. Additionally, Murdoch controls the extraterrestrial Sky TV.

17 Kiley recorded that The Times' foreign editor and other middle managers flew into hysterical terror every time a pro-Israel lobbying group wrote in with a quibble or complaint, and then usually took their side against their own correspondent - deleting words and phrases from the lexicon to rob its reporters of the ability to make sense of what was going on. So, I was told, I should not refer to “assassinations” of Israel’s opponents, nor to “extrajudicial killings or executions”. Evening Standard, September 5th 2001. Kiley resigned in August 2001.

18 Danny Seaman’s letter to Alan Rusbridger, 17th October 2002

19 Letter from BBC Information and Compliance, 10 November 2009

20 BBC Any Questions, 24th January 2009

21 On the grounds of 'accuracy’, Bowen’s reference to the 1967 war as a chance to “finish the unfinished business of Israel’s independence war of 1948”, was amended to define “the unfinished business” as “the capture of East Jerusalem”. On the same grounds, a reference to Zionism’s “innate instinct to push out the frontier” was amended to “the tendency with Zionism to push out the frontier”. Israel’s expansion of the settlements being “in defiance of everyone’s interpretation of international law except it own” was amended to “in defiance of almost all countries’ interpretation of international law except its own”.

The report concluded that Bowen “should have done more to explain that there were alternative views on the subject which had some weight” to protect readers from concluding that “the interpretation offered was the only sensible view of the war”. A paragraph which originally began: “The myth of the 1967 Middle East was that the Israeli David slew the Arab Goliath” was replaced with: “While historians hold different views on the 1967 war, one school of thought is that it is a myth…”

22 Through Tamares Real Estate: 17.10.05 David Cameron £5,000 03.11.05 David Cameron £10,000

23 13.10.05 David Cameron £10,000 03.11.05 David Cameron £10,000

24 Fraser Nelson’s response: “I didn’t mention BICIOM because the piece was a 110-word short – about the tenth of the size of the piece which Martin Ivens wrote up following the same trip. I was trying, in that period, to convey to readers a point that the Israelis would not want made: that for all their intent, they don’t believe that can stop Iran developing nuclear weapons.”

http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/peter-oborne-james-jones/pro-israel-lobby-in-britain-full-text

The Invention of the Jewish People

2009-10-27T16:18:00.000-07:00

"In his book, Sand manages to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that the Jewish people never existed as a ‘nation-race’, they never shared a common origin. Instead they are a colourful mix of groups that at various stages in history adopted the Jewish religion."

"It is an established fact that not a single Jewish history text had been written between the 1st century and early 19th century. The fact that Judaism is based on a religious historical myth may have something to do with it. An adequate scrutiny of the Jewish past was never a primary concern within the Rabbinical tradition. One of the reasons is probably the lack of a need of such a methodical effort. For the Jew who lived during ancient times and the Middle Ages, there was enough in the Bible to answer most relevant questions having to do with day-to-day life, Jewish meaning and fate. As Shlomo Sand puts it, “a secular chronological time was foreign to the ‘Diaspora time’ that was shaped by the anticipation for the coming of the Messiah.”"

"Though most contemporary Jews are utterly convinced that their ancestors are the Biblical Israelites who happened to be exiled brutally by the Romans, truth must be said. Contemporary Jews have nothing to do with ancient Israelites, who have never been sent to exile because such an expulsion has never taken place. The Roman Exile is just another Jewish myth."

"However, far more interesting is the logical outcome: If the people of Israel were not expelled, then the real descendants of the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Judah must be the Palestinians.

“No population remains pure over a period of thousands of years” says Sand. “But the chances that the Palestinians are descendants of the ancient Judaic people are much greater than the chances that you or I are its descendents. "

"Professor Sand leaves us with the inevitable conclusion. Contemporary Jews do not have a common origin and their Semitic origin is a myth. Jews have no origin in Palestine whatsoever and therefore, their act of so-called ‘return’ to their ‘promised land’ must be realised as an invasion executed by a tribal-ideological clan." - Gilad Atzmon

Gilad Atzmon was born in Israel and served in the Israeli military.

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Neocon Group Calls for Military Strikes on Media

2009-10-01T15:54:00.000-07:00

A new report for a leading neoconservative group that pushes a belligerent "Israel first" agenda of conquest in the Middle East suggests that in future wars the U.S. should make censorship of media official policy and advocates "military attacks on the partisan media" (via MuzzleWatch). The report for JINSA, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, was authored by retired U.S. Army Col. Ralph Peters. It appears in JINSA’s "flagship publication," The Journal of International Security Affairs. "Today, the United States and its allies will never face a lone enemy on the battlefield. There will always be a hostile third party in the fight," Peters writes, calling the media "the killers without guns."

"Of course, the media have shaped the outcome of conflicts for centuries, from the European wars of religion through Vietnam. More recently, though, the media have determined the outcomes of conflicts. While journalists and editors ultimately failed to defeat the U.S. government in Iraq, video cameras and biased reporting guaranteed that Hezbollah would survive the 2006 war with Israel and, as of this writing, they appear to have saved Hamas from destruction in Gaza. …

"Although it seems unthinkable now, future wars may require censorship, news blackouts, and, ultimately, military attacks on the partisan media. Perceiving themselves as superior beings, journalists have positioned themselves as protected-species combatants. But freedom of the press stops when its abuse kills our soldiers and strengthens our enemies. Such a view arouses disdain today, but a media establishment that has forgotten any sense of sober patriotism may find that it has become tomorrow’s conventional wisdom.

"The point of all this is simple: Win. In warfare, nothing else matters. If you cannot win clean, win dirty. But win. Our victories are ultimately in humanity’s interests, while our failures nourish monsters."

antiwar

The Neocons, the BNP and the Islamophobia Network

2009-10-01T15:47:00.000-07:00

Events in London in recent weeks have highlighted the growing collusion between American neoconservatives and the European far right in stirring up hatred of Muslims.

Richard Bartholomew has details of a meeting at the George Restaurant in east London in August attended by Jihad Watch's Robert Spencer and Douglas Murray of the Centre for Social Cohesion at the invitation of the Christian Action Network. Also invited were the English Defence League, the group responsible for a number of recent violent anti-Muslim protests.

Robert Spencer says on his blog that he and Murray refused to meet with the EDL, and cites Adrian Morgan as a witness to this version of events. But the presence of Morgan, who did meet the EDL, is itself evidence of the emerging relationship between the neocons and the far-right.

Morgan is a contributing editor to Family Security Matters, which has been described as a front for the Center for Security Policy, a Washington think-tank run by the ultra-neoconservative Frank Gaffney.

He is also the author of Western Resistance, a defunct blog on which he laid out his view of the BNP:

I am slightly ambivalent about the British National Party, on account of its racist past. Nowadays, under the leadership of Nick Griffin, a skilled politician, the racist agenda has become replaced by an agenda which is highly focused against Islam. With this aspect of its policies, I am in agreement. Islam poses a more serious threat to every aspect of British democracy than anything previously encountered. (via the Internet Archive)

Ambivalent or not, Morgan's interest in the BNP is reciprocated, according to Searchlight Magazine, which reported in 2007 on the efforts of BNP idealogue Alan Goodacre to tap support from right wing bloggers:

Goodacre also stated his intention to try and gain the help of Adrian Morgan who writes regularly for the Western Resistance website and has previously contributed to The Guardian and New Scientist and was once a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Society. Morgan also contributes to the “Islam Watch” website – “Islam under scrutiny by ex-Muslims” – which would explain Goodacre’s interest in him.

It might also be explained by Morgan's membership of the 910 Group, an offshoot of the Center for Vigilant Freedom (CVF), which ran the CounterJihad Europa conference in October 2007. Among those speaking alongside Robert Spencer at this Brussels event were representatives of European far-right parties such as Filip Dewinter of the Vlaams Belang and Ted Ekeroth of the Sweden Democrats.

The CVF's Christine Brim suggested in November 2007 that the strategy of embracing such parties could be extended to Jean-Marie Le Pen and the BNP:

We suggest looking for the possible movement of Le Pen’s political party Front National towards the center-right, as they may change their platform to pro-active support to improve the situations of European Jews and Israel. The same trend is happening in Austria, and with the BNP in the UK (also not invited and did not attend the conference). If such parties specifically state pro-Israel positions, and take real actions opposing anti-semitism and disavowing previous positions - and reach out to Jewish constituents and encourage Jewish participation in party positions - these are real actions to observe, and to approve. They have not done this yet - but are starting. (via the Internet Archive)

Indeed they were. Alan Goodacre had written to the Jewish Chronicle in 2006 (much to the bemusement of its readers):

We hope that our future behaviour may in time bring you to understand that our repudiation of antisemitism is genuine. We are the only party in Britain that is truly serious about fighting the Islamofascist threat.

Morgan, Brim and Goodacre have each employed the same sleight of hand, attempting to present the embrace of Islamophobia as some kind of atonement for anti-semitism, rather than another manifestation of the same underlying racism. If this strategy seems crude, it may yet take neo-fascist Gianfranco Fini to the Italian premiership.Time Magazine describes the process:

To fulfill his big ambitions, Fini understood in the early 1990s that he had to distance himself from his past. Eventually, he came to believe that the shortest path from marginal Mussolini nostalgic to mainstream political power was unwavering support for the state of Israel. The decisive moment came when Fini traveled to Israel in November 2003, declaring his affection for the Jewish state and his "shame" for Italy's racial laws under fascism. The following year, Silvio Berlusconi made him foreign minister, where the longtime leader of the National Alliance party stood out amongst his European partners for his pro-Israel policy.

This conversion even impressed some on the 'Decent Left'. Harry's Place wrote of Fini:

He is pro-European Union and pro-US - neither of which fit easy with the claim that he is still a fascist. After September 11, AN posters across Italy declared ‘Solidarity with the United States’ - Italian fascists despise the US for obvious historical reasons.

He is also explicitly in favour of capitalism and the free market. Again this is a break not only with old style Italian corporatist fascism but also the later post-war concept of the ’social right’ which believed in large scale state ownership and nationalisation etc.

AN also supported the liberation of Iraq, a position that I am not aware of any of Europe’s genuine fascists taking.

As Time noted "having "Israel" stamped in your passport and publicly condemning anti-Semitism cannot alone remove lingering doubts about extremist tendencies." Yet the attempt to prove otherwise has some influential backers.

In addition to being a key player in the CVF, and secretary of another counter-jihad outfit, the International Free Press Society, Christine Brim is a senior vice-president at Frank Gaffney's Washington think-tank, the Center for Security Policy (CSP), and director of its Victory Coalition Fund, an incubator for anti-Islamist projects.

The CSP is open about its involvement in political warfare and even has a vice-president for information operations who blogs on the subject. Its General Counsel David Yerushalmi heads up the Society of Americans for National Existence, whose material found its way into last year's Policy Exchange briefing against the Global Peace and Unity event in London.

Gaffney's sister Devon Cross, a member of the CSP advisory council, heads up the Policy Forum on International Security Affairs, a neoconservative briefing operation for European journalists which was run for some time out of Annabel's nightclub in Mayfair.

The CSP and the Policy Forum have been endorsed by some of America's wealthiest conservative foundations. The Philanthropy Roundtable recommended both organisations in its 2006 publication, The Struggle Against Radical Islam: A Donor's Guide (pdf) which criticised the US Government for failing to develop political warfare and public diplomacy programmes modelled on those of the Cold War, and called on private sector donors to fill the gap.

Neoconservatives had repeatedly come up against resistance in attempting to run political warfare programmes through their powerbase at the Pentagon during the Bush administration. One such proposal was leaked to the New York Times in 2004:

Pentagon and military officials directly involved in the debate say that such a secret propaganda program, for example, could include planting news stories in the foreign press or creating false documents and Web sites translated into Arabic as an effort to discredit and undermine the influence of mosques and religious schools that preach anti-American principles.

Some of those are in the Middle Eastern and South Asian countries like Pakistan, still considered a haven for operatives of Al Qaeda. But such a campaign could reach even to allied countries like Germany, for example, where some mosques have become crucibles for Islamic militancy and anti-Americanism.

A private sector version of that strategy is clearly visible in the smears and secret briefings directed at British mosques, a campaign which has now taken a step further with the recent wave of street protests by provocateurs like the BNP-connected English Defence League and the Counter-Jihad Europa affiliate Stop the Islamisation of Europe.

Communities Minister John Denham last week announced plans to address issues alienating white, working-class people at risk of being exploited by the far-right. If that approach is to succeed, the wealthy right-wing propagandists who are actively trying to set working-class communities against each other must be exposed.

Spinwatch

Islamophobia : A case study in dubious politics

2009-10-01T15:44:00.000-07:00

Investigations by Spinwatch reveal that a group of freelance terror trackers who promote stories about the threat from violent Islamists have been involved in exaggerating and even fabricating such stories, which they then comment on in the national press and on network television and radio. The group – which has now fallen apart – was centred on freelance spy Glen Jenvey and Conservative Party member Dominic Wightman, who uses the pseudonym 'Whiteman'.

The barrage of stories from official sources and from terror 'experts' suggesting that Britain is under serious and extensive threat from Islamists and that Islam as a religion is particularly prone to extremism has been boosted by some stories that have little basis in fact. These have included:

* An alleged attempt to plant a story about terrorist grannies planning to blow themselves up in British supermarkets
* An attempt to suggest – quite falsely - that campaigners against the Israeli attack on Gaza were actually planning to target British Jews
* The creation of a fake allegedly Islamist website in a bid to entrap suspects.
* Spying on Tamil activists in the UK.
* A fraudulent fundraising effort in the 1980s which was claimed to be to aid the African National Congress

The group behind these stories – Vigil – is a convenient label for a number of people who are linked on the one hand to elements of the British far right and on the other to networks of neoconservative ideologues in the US and UK seeking to exploit the genuine threat faced by UK citizens - Muslim and non Muslim alike. In this case behind the anodyne label of 'terror expert' there is a story including alleged spying, deception, fraud, assault, and a falling out over money.

The case also highlights:

* The controversial newsgathering techniques of The Sun newspaper, currently facing legal questions over its reporting of the alleged terror experts' testimony
* the ease with which alleged terror experts can gains access to the most prestigious British broadcasting outlets such as Radio Four and BBC Newsnight
* The use of the internet for employing the traditional arts of the agent provocateur including surveillance and virtual stings
* The role of the blogosphere in investigating and revealing the use of fake identities - 'sockpuppets' in internet jargon

On New Year’s Day this year, with the Israeli assault on Gaza unrelenting, Glen Jenvey was the source of stories appearing in The Sun and The Express which warned of an imminent terrorist attack in the United States. Both papers described Jenvey as a ‘top Government counter-terrorism expert’, whilst for extra gravitas, The Express added that his warning was ‘backed by the Conservative MP Patrick Mercer’[1] (who was dismissed as Shadow Homeland Security Minister in March 2007 after remarks he made about ethnic minorities in the forces, which were perceived as racist[2]). A week later, new, more prominent, claims by Jenvey appeared in The Sun. The front page declared that the entrepreneur and reality TV star Alan Sugar had become a target for terrorists. On page nine the story continued under the headline ‘HATE HIT LIST’. ‘Fears grew last night,’ the article read, ‘that hate-filled Islamic extremists are drawing up a “hit list” of Britain's leading Jews.’ According to the article it was not only Alan Sugar who was targeted; so too were Mark Ronson, David Miliband, and other prominent British Jews.[3]

The basis of the story was postings on the online forum Ummah.com, one of the most popular Muslim forums on the web, which its moderators describe as ‘a platform for Muslims and non-Muslims to engage in dialogue and discussion’,[4] but Jenvey insisted ‘are terrorist’s supporters and have [been] for years’.[5] One user on the website, Saladin1970, had asked for ‘a list of those who support Israel’, and another user calling himself Abuislam asked: ‘can someone start posting names and addresses?’ Saladin1970 then posted a link to the Jewish Chronicle’s Power 100 list of top British Jews.[6] The Sun quoted Jenvey as saying: ‘The Ummah website has been used by extremists. Those listed should treat it very seriously. Expect a hate campaign and intimidation by 20 or 30 thugs.’ The news of the threat had, The Sun remarked, ‘[brought] the Middle East conflict terrifyingly close to home.’[7]

In a press release the same day, Ummah.com pointed that Saladin1970, who initiated the thread, had in fact requested the contact details ‘so that we can write polite letters reminding them of the injustices of Israel and to stop supporting Israel.’ There was no suggestion of violence. Ummah.com complained to the Press Complaints Commission and Alan Sugar subsequently issued legal proceedings against The Sun in the High Court.[8] In its response to the Press Complaints Commission, a copy of which has been given to Spinwatch, The Sun argued that, ‘to regard Islamic extremists as being in the business of sending ‘polite letters’ is naïve and extreme. This is based on the expert opinion of Glen Jenvey, an expert in radical Islam…it is quite obviously a euphemism…’ [9] In defence of its use of Jenvey The Sun also quoted Patrick Mercer (former Shadow Homeland Security minister for the Conservative Party) as saying: ‘Glen Jenvey is an extremely capable and knowledgeable analyst of fundamentalist matters and ought to be listened to. If he says that this is a risk worth looking at, then we must take it seriously. He and I have done quite a lot of work together, and he is a source of reference for me.’[10]

The Sun’s alleged distortion was only half the story. Further discussion on Ummah.com revealed that the second user referred to in the story, ‘Abuislam’, was set up in the name of Richard Tims. There was another account on Ummah.com in the name of 'r.tims' with the same IP address as Abuislam. This user had made only one post; promoting a website called sellyourstory.org. The veteran blogger, Tim Ireland, who runs Bloggerheads, discovered another post promoting sellyourstory.org on another website, which identified the owner of sellyourstory.org as one Glen Jenvey.[11] What everyone suspected, but no one could prove, was that Abuislam and Richard Tims were both online aliases (or ‘sockpuppets’ in web jargon) used by Jenvey. If true it would mean that at best Jenvey was acting as an agent provocateur, and at worst that he had fabricated the whole story.

Jenvey denied that he had ever posted as Abuislam[12] and there the story might have hit a dead end were it not for an audio recording sent to Tim Ireland of a conversation between Jenvey and an unidentified interviewer. Remarkably Jenvey can be heard in the recording referring to ‘Richard Tims’ as one of his online aliases, all but proving that Tim Ireland’s original assumption was correct, and completely undermining Jenvey’s credibility.[13]

The story received only minor attention in the mainstream media, with brief articles in the Guardian[14] and Private Eye.[15] However, it led to an enormous amount of scrutiny – and it has to be said ridicule – of Jenvey in the blogosphere. He clearly felt disturbed by the experience and even threatened Tim Ireland with violence on one occasion.[16] Jenvey says he was particularly incensed when the Daily Mail later published details of his links to the far right. [17] These connections were first uncovered by the blogger Richard Bartholomew, who noted that Jenvey had an online ally called Paul Ray,[18] who blogs under the name ‘Lionheart’ and is currently bailed on suspicion of inciting racial hatred.[19] In January 2009 Ray appeared on an American online radio show called ‘No Compromise’. Jenvey too had been scheduled to appear but according to Ray had gone into hiding. Ray told the host that as far as he was concerned, ‘The Qur’an is a death manual, it’s a cult, Islam is a death cult. They are a religious, political military force that's seeking to take our country over.’ [20] He explained that he set up his blog after visiting Israel: ‘I had a couple of trips to Israel and a few things happened there, and I crossed paths with someone, a Jewish computer expert, and he helped me set the blog up, and I've just been writing it ever since, really.’[21] On the show Ray described British Pakistanis as ‘Paki Muslims’ and claimed that the drug problem in his home town of Luton was the result of a Muslim plot to undermine his community. A few months later Luton became a focal point for the far right after a group of Muslims protested against soldiers returning from Iraq. The right wing press were incensed and the far right reacted violently. In one attack Luton’s Islamic Centre was torched. Staff there received racist, threatening hate mail which invoked the crusades.[22] It was in reporting this violence that the Daily Mail named Jenvey as being Facebook friends with Paul Ray – who had attended a ‘protest’ in Luton in which an Asian man was assaulted.[23] Another Facebook friend of Jenvey’s was Dave Smeeton, the leader of March for England, the group that organised another Luton ‘protest’.24] His Facebook page at one stage included a mock advert for Dr. Martens boots in which three skinheads are pictured assaulting a man, with the caption ‘Kicking the fuck out of you since 1960.’[25]

Despite being a British Asian, Jenvey now felt, with some justification, that he was being labelled as a Nazi. Though Jenvey says the Daily Mail have subsequently apologised, and he considers the matter settled, he says the experience made him think about how it feels to be on the receiving end of a hate campaign.[26] After a period of quiet Jenvey declared that he would ‘not be working for any intelligence service from this date against Muslims or any other group’ and that he would help the legal teams of Abu Qatada and Abu Hamza – both prominent tabloid hate figures. Since then he says he has converted to Islam and changed his name to Omar Hamza Jenvey.[27] Jenvey's conversion to Islam is likely to be viewed with some caution given his decades long involvement in deception and fake identities.

It was in relation to Abu Hamza that Jenvey first emerged as a terrorism expert. In July 2003 The Sunday Times reported that an undercover operation by ‘Glen Jenvey, a 38-year-old freelance counterintelligence investigator from Wiltshire’ had led to ‘fresh evidence’ against Abu Hamza.[28] The ‘sophisticated sting operation,’ as the Sunday Times generously described it, began in May 2002. Jenvey had set up a fake Islamic website called Islamic News, using the alias Pervez Khan as the site’s purported Editor-in-Chief. Online and undercover, Jenvey asked Abu Hamza for materials to help with recruitment and fundraising for Kashmir. He obliged and sent him a series of audio and video tapes. According to the article, Scotland Yard confirmed that it had taken a statement from Jenvey and had passed it on to the FBI which was seeking to extradite Abu Hamza.[29]

One might assume from the Sunday Times article that the tapes Abu Hamza sent Jenvey could have formed the basis of a prosecution of Abu Hamza. In fact, by Jenvey’s own admission, the police were not particularly interested. He later lamented to The Mirror that he had tried to hand over tapes to the police but that ‘the response was heartbreaking’.[30] When Abu Hamza was finally convicted in 2006, it was in connection with material found in a raid of the Finsbury Park Mosque in January 2003.[31] It would seem that police’s indifference to Jenvey’s evidence played no small part in his subsequent disillusionment and dramatic change of heart in June 2009. He felt the police snubbed him, ignoring the evidence he provided, only to move in on Abu Hamza years later under political pressure. [32] A brief search of press records suggests why the police might be reluctant to work with Jenvey. His name first appears in print in the UK press in 1997 when he assaulted Gloucestershire’s top civilian police officer in a road rage incident. When the case came to court in 1998 Jenvey pleaded guilty, receiving a fine and a two-year conditional discharge.[33] This incident, Jenvey admits, was not his first brush with the law either. Back in the 1980s he was involved in a fraudulent fund raising operation in Reading, collecting money allegedly for the ANC, some of which was pocketed. He was arrested with a group of men and spent time in prison.[34] It was, Jenvey points out, over 20 years ago, but nevertheless it certainly calls into question his reliability as a witness.

Jenvey’s ‘sophisticated sting operation’ broke cover shortly after he received the videos he passed on to police. In September 2002 Islamic News carried a message on its homepage reading: ‘We've changed our mind about this whole terrorism thing. Jehad is Crap!’[35] The message continued: ‘Israel belongs to the Jews - because Allah gave that land to them - why, because the Philistines [meaning presumably the Palestinians] won't act like decent human beings - and only decent humans deserve their own country.’ [36] The message was signed in the name of Johnathan Galt, a pseudonym used by an American student who had set up Islamic News with Jenvey.[37] The pseudonym is taken from Atlas Shrugged, a novel by the right-wing libertarian author Ayn Rand. First published in 1957, Atlas Shrugged portrays a dystopian America where collectivist values and government regulations have wrecked the nation’s economy and crippled its intellectual and cultural life. The mysterious figure of John Galt eventually emerges to lead a revolt against the bureaucratic order, and restore laissez-faire capitalism.

Jenvey has never revealed the true identity of ‘Johnathan Galt’, but whoever he is he links Jenvey to a host of bizarre interconnected figures in the United States. One is Aaron Weisburd, a half Jewish half Irish American web designer who after September 11th set up a website called Internet Haganah, citing Johnathan Galt as his inspiration.[38] ‘Haganah’ is the name of the Zionist paramilitary forces in Palestine which were involved in expelling the Palestinians from their homes in 1948, and which formed the basis for the Israeli Defence Forces. Like Jenvey in the UK, Aaron Weisburd launched his own online campaign against the ‘global jihad’, pressurising Internet Service Providers to shut down websites deemed to be extremist. By April 2004 Weisburd claimed that he had facilitated the closure of over 420 sites by targeting the internet service providers.[39]

After it broke cover, Jenvey’s Islamic News linked to Internet Haganah. It also linked to the far right vigilante Jewish Defense Organization[40] and the website of the Israeli Defence Forces and displayed the graphic of a fluttering Israeli flag. Another link carried by Islamic News was to www.joyjunction.org, the website of a homeless charity in New Mexico run by a right-wing Christian called Jeremy Reynalds.[41] The English born, but all American, Reynalds is another of the figures who Aaron Weisburd cited as the inspiration.[42] A third is Jim Ownbey,[43] a former US Army Officer who set up the, now defunct, website bushcountry.org to ‘Promote the Ideals of Conservatism’. Jeremy Reynalds, who describes himself as ‘fundamentalist, right-wing, Bush-loving Christian’ who loves ‘Israel and the Jewish race’,[44] was a regular contributor to bushcountry.org. In fact, he claims that he was the first to tell the story of Jenvey’s online antics. In an article posted on bushcountry.org in November 2002, Reynalds told Jenvey’s ‘fascinating story of courage, determination and commitment’. He protected Jenvey’s identity by referring to him throughout the article as ‘Albert’.[45] Reynalds was at one stage going to write a book ‘chronicling his exploits fighting the online jihad’.[46] However, War of the Web, as it was to be called, was never published.[47] When asked why, the Editorial Director of WND Books – which publishes right-wing tracts like United in Hate: The Left's Romance With Tyranny and Terror – replied they could not disclose the reason.[48]

One English born ‘terrorism expert’ whose book was published was Neil Doyle. Terror Tracker: An Odyssey into Pure Fear, was published in May 2005 and included a detailed account of Jenvey’s alleged counter terrorism work.[49] A former writer for the construction magazine Contract Journal, Doyle had written a couple of flattering articles about Jenvey in the right-wing Washington Times, and had received some advanced publicity for his book during the Abu Hamza media circus of 2004.

According to Doyle’s account, Jenvey was born in the UK in 1965 to a Mauritian father and an English mother. He was placed into care when he was seven and was raised by foster parents. His foster father was an American who worked at the Greenham Common airbase. It is claimed in Terror Tracker that through his foster father’s contacts in the military and diplomatic world, Jenvey was able to set himself up as a spy.[50] The book includes some far-fetched claims about Jenvey’s past. It is claimed Jenvey ‘managed to get a job as a press officer for the [Tamil] Tigers in their London office in Katherine Road in east London’[51] and whilst undercover there, claims he may have saved the life of the Prince of Wales. Jenvey apparently believed that faxes sent to and from the office were intended to provide a ‘green light’ to military operations in Sri Lanka. Though ostensibly innocuous press releases, he believed they contained ‘coded messages’ providing information on future suicide attacks. Jenvey claimed to Doyle that by sending misinformation by fax and feeding intelligence to the Sri Lankan Embassy, he may have saved the life of the heir to the throne when he visited Sri Lanka in 1998.[52]

This undercover work was apparently carried out for an official at the Sri Lankan Embassy in London, who allegedly confirmed this arrangement to Doyle. Jenvey also claimed to Doyle that he photographed military facilities in Iran on behalf of the American Embassy, but was ‘pretty hazy on the details’. [53] Still, Doyle was convinced of Jenvey’s credentials. ‘He was a spy,’ Doyle writes in Terror Tracker, ‘no doubt about it. As a freelance operative he had ties with the intelligence services of many different countries.’[54]

Later, more details on Jenvey’s previous operations emerged on the internet, some more outlandish, some more realistic. One such article, ‘The Hidden Truth behind the Sri Lankan Peace Process’, claimed that Jenvey had initiated peace talks between the Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan government by sending an unauthorised fax to the South African government, requesting that it host negotiations. ‘Jenvey is proud,’ the article said, ‘that, from his chair in London, he opportunistically paved the way for the first steps to peace.’ [55] It is a claim which Jenvey maintains today. Indeed, Jenvey’s track record as an amateur spy seems to still be a source of pride to him even after his recent conversion and he has provided emails purporting to show contact with embassy staff in London and with law enforcement officials.[56]

Doyle says he has not spoken to Jenvey for years (the two men fell out over money[57]) but maintains that ‘the material featured in the book can be depended upon.’[58] Terror Tracker raised Jenvey to the status of a ‘terrorism expert’ or ‘freelance spy’. It also brought him into contact with another budding expert on extremism called Dominic Wightman; who was at that time working with the then Conservative Shadow Security Minister, Patrick Mercer.

Dominic Wightman, who uses the spelling Whiteman to disguise his identity, was born in the Tory heartland of rural Surrey and educated at Ampleforth College boarding school in Yorkshire.[59] He joined a security company after graduating from the London School of Economics and then went into business for himself, serving as director of several internet companies at the height of the dotcom boom. After a period living in the United States he returned to Britain shortly after the July 2005 London bombings. With time on his hands he became involved in local politics and subsequently undertook voluntary research work in Westminster for the Conservative MP Humphrey Malins. Wightman’s interest in security and terrorism and his disinterest in more mundane political issues led Malins to suggest that he should work instead for his friend Patrick Mercer. So Wightman was appointed as Mercer’s ‘intelligence advisor’. In this role Wightman, says he concentrated on developing sources of intelligence on alleged extremists in Britain. One of the many sources Wightman says he developed during this time was Glen Jenvey, whom Wightman was introduced to by Neil Doyle.[60]

Doyle also introduced a third man to Jenvey and Wightman, a university lecturer called Michael Starkey who has family connections to the Conservative Party and the diplomatic world. Starkey says his son works in military intelligence and his niece is friends with David Cameron.[61] He also has a distant cousin Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, who at that time was Ambassador to Saudi Arabia and whose name appears on a disputed list of MI6 officers. Like Wightman, Starkey had read Terror Tracker and was impressed by Jenvey’s work.[62]

These introductions led to a collaboration which gave Jenvey and Wightman their most high profile media exposure. During 2006 Jenvey, Wightman and Starkey recorded lectures given over the internet by Omar Bakri Mohammed. Omar Bakri, like Abu Hamza, had become a tabloid bogeyman, and his use of the internet to broadcast his outspoken views caused consternation in right-wing circles. These sermons had already received media attention the year before. In January 2005 The Times published the first of a number of articles on his Paltalk lectures. By the time Jenvey and Wightman began monitoring Omar Bakri’s online activities in the summer of 2006, he had already left Britain for Beirut amid calls for his prosecution, and had been banned from returning. Nevertheless his online presence in Britain was deemed to warrant recording over 100 hours of his online broadcasts and delivering them to Scotland Yard. John Steele, then the Telegraph’s crime correspondent, photographed Wightman with his boss Patrick Mercer outside New Scotland Yard delivering the recordings. ‘Let's see what Scotland Yard and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) make of all this,’ Steele commented on his blog, and encouraged readers to visit Jenvey’s website.[63]

More significant coverage was to come. On 14 November 2006 the BBC broadcast parallel stories on Newsnight and Radio 4’s File on 4 which were based substantially on Wightman and Jenvey’s research. According to Wightman it was the BBC that had approached them, not the other way round.[64] On File on 4 the BBC reporter Richard Watson referred to ‘radicalisation over the internet, on university campuses and in criminal gangs,’ and ‘alarming evidence which reveals how a minority of young British Muslims are being drawn into a life of extremism and crime.’[65] On Newsnight a stern faced Watson visited Jenvey ‘deep in the English countryside’, and was warned that Omar Bakri Mohammad was, as Jenvey put it, ‘back in the cyber sense’. Another of Jenvey's exposés which featured in the Newsnight programme was an online advert he found calling for a protest outside the Old Bailey in London. The defendant in the case was 23 year old Mizanur Rahman, who was later convicted for incitement to racial hatred for comments made during a protest at the Danish Embassy in London.[66] ‘Sure enough,’ Richard Watson commented, ‘the radicals turned up and there was a violent struggle with the police outside the court.’ What exactly was objectionable about the protest, or the advert promoting it was not made clear.

Both BBC programmes, like the Telegraph piece, referred to Jenvey and Wightman as being members of a secret organisation called Vigil. This was really a bit of artistic licence, since as Wightman has since explained, a BBC researcher had suggested that the group give themselves a name for the sake of the story and hence the myth of ‘Vigil’ was born. Still, according to Wightman at least, the branding became a reality.[67] On 19 December 2006 the Telegraph published an article describing Vigil in some detail. It referred to two wealthy financiers of the group, a former member of the Armed Forces and a City financier, who together had provided thousands of pounds. Neither was named. Neither did the article identify any other members of Vigil besides Jenvey and Wightman, but it did refer to ‘five paid staff and a further 25 workers, many with military, security, intelligence and financial experience’.[68] These five staff were Wightman and Jenvey, Michael Starkey, a former student of Starkey’s who had recently graduated and an IT person. On 13 December 2006 the group registered a website, which went live in January 2007.

Vigil was a short lived experiment which seems to have fallen apart largely because the money Wightman had promised his new colleagues failed to materialise. The young graduate who worked for Vigil for five months did not receive any wages. After continued obfuscations and evasions from Wightman, she took him to an employment tribunal in November 2006 claiming over £13,000 in unpaid wages. Court documents obtained by Spinwatch show that Wightman was ordered to pay £14,174.45 by Bedford County Court in March 2007. Other documents obtained by Spinwatch show that Wightman has a history of unpaid debts. In May 2006 a County Court judgement was awarded against him and bailiffs attempted to recover the debt from an address in South Wimbledon – the same address where Vigil's website was registered, and where Wightman had had Jenvey and Starkey to stay. The owners of the property wrote to the court saying that Wightman had moved out and that the latest address they had for him was in Islamabad. In March 2009 Wightman was declared bankrupt with debts of over £40,000. According to a Croydon County Court document, Wightman was interviewed by an official and claimed to be living and working in Venezuela.

The dispute over the unpaid wages led to a bitter exchange of email between Starkey and Wightman and an acrimonious split between Vigil’s founder members. Starkey wrote to Wightman accusing him of 'wholly unacceptable behaviour' and of betraying their trust. 'For a while we trusted you,' Starkey wrote, 'Then the difference between fact and fiction became muddled and confused.' [69] Wightman told Starkey he was glad to be rid of him, and that he'd 'been like an Old Granny almost the whole way through'. He boasted that without Starkey Vigil was ‘stronger than ever’ and would, ‘bring down as many Islamist scum as we can in as quick a time as possible.’[70]

Vigil was now without any staff and comprised simply of Dominic Wightman’s network of contacts.[71] Nevertheless, the artifice continued and a month or so later a contact of Wightman’s, an American policeman working in Iraq, received an email from Wightman requested that his colleague translate some English text into Arabic and post it on a ‘jihadi noticeboard’. The text was written as if by someone planning a terrorist attack, albeit a rather bizarre one. It suggested that an attack could be launched in Europe by planting a bomb in an elderly woman’s wheeled-basket and exploding it in a supermarket. Wightman does not deny that the attempted ‘Grandmother bomb’ hoax came from his email address. However, he claims that he had given Starkey and Jenvey the password before they left Vigil and that one of them sent the email in a deliberate attempt to undermine his reputation.[72] Starkey and Jenvey maintain that the email was characteristic of Wightman who they consider fundamentally dishonest. They also suspect that the Tory grandees Wightman said backed Vigil simply never existed. Wightman’s explanation was that his anonymous financial backers had both suddenly died.[73]

Wightman says he worked at Vigil until 2008. By that time he was involved in other pet projects. In June 2007 he had set up a website called Westminster Journal, with himself as editor. His reason for setting up the website he said was to ‘seek to expose these Islamists who lie and oil their way through to mainstream politics.’[74] Wightman also made a point of stating that he was not a neoconservative. ‘The Islamist Right,’ he wrote, ‘will not be faced down by the Free World's Political Right but by the mainstream; liberal, democratic, freedom-loving people...That is why I, as a mainstream, liberal, political individual, am proud to accept the honour of being the Editor of Westminster Journal.’[75] Wightman has protested about being labelled a ‘neocon’ on other occasions.[76] Nevertheless, his agenda is clearly right-wing and he would not be the first neoconservative to consider himself a liberal. That he is of the right is undeniable. He is a member of the Conservative Party, and since leaving Vigil has collaborated with Civitas and the Centre for Social Cohesion, two of Britain’s most right-wing think-tanks, the latter of which is run by Douglas Murray, who unusually for a Briton, proudly declares himself to be a neocon. Furthermore, some of Wightman’s writings on Westminster Journal betray some very right-wing views. He has a particularly preoccupation with good and evil, and his understanding of the latter concept is more than a little eccentric. In one article for example he describes the Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez as: ‘the worst leader of a nation the world has seen in one hundred years,’ adding that, ‘he usurps Pol Pot of Cambodia, Omar al-Bashir of Sudan and even Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe in the league of world's most rotten national leaders.’[77]

If Wightman considers himself a liberal, what can be said of Jenvey’s political outlook? Probably not much. In his previous life as a 'terror expert' Jenvey spent his time trawling internet chat rooms. He has no pretensions towards political commentary and has a form of dyslexia which means he has difficulty reading and writing. Nevertheless, as should be clear already, he exists within a network of right-wing operatives. Besides those affiliations already mentioned, he was also involved in the 2006 propaganda film Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West. Jenvey featured in the section of the film entitled, ‘Jihad in the West’ where he once again discussed Abu Hamza’s activities in the UK. The film featured footage from Jenvey’s old website, www.Glen-Jenvey.com, as well as from www.JohnathanGaltFilms.com, which despite being named after Jenvey’s American associate was in fact registered to Jenvey. Obsession also rather curiously credits the book that never was; Jeremy Reynald’s War of the Web. The film featured a host of other highly questionable ‘experts’, including Steve Emerson and Daniel Pipes; two of the leading American figures in the distortion of Middle Eastern politics and the demonisation of Islamic groups.[78] Pipes – whose father Richard Pipes performed a similar role demonising the Soviets during the Cold War – has been involved in a host of organisations which smear and intimidate academics and commentators deemed to be unfriendly towards Israel. Steve Emerson, a former journalist, made his name after collaborating with Daniel Pipes on a previous documentary film called Jihad in America, which as the title suggests, argued that Islamic extremists were threatening America from within. Emerson subsequently established an organisation called the Investigative Project on Terrorism,[79] and with a team of interns regularly briefed the U.S. Government’s chief terrorism advisor Richard Clarke in the late ‘90s.[80] Jenvey has also been involved with an organisation called the International Analyst Network, an ‘online portal’ promoting a collection of right wing terror ‘experts’ including both Pipes and Emerson and other Neoconservative and Zionist connected operatives such as Michael Ledeen, who played a key role in bolstering the case for the 2003 invasion of Iraq,[81] Meyrav Wurmser the Zionist cofounder of the controversial Middle East Media Research Institute,[82] and Clare Lopez the former Director of the Iran Policy Committee which pushed for war with Iran.[83] Jenvey remains listed on this site as of August 2009.[84]

Both Steve Emerson and Daniel Pipes and their networks are funded by the same wealthy family foundations which fund the powerful Israel lobby. To take just one example, in 2006, the Bialkin Family Foundation donated $5,000 to the Investigative Project on Terrorism and $1,000 to Pipes’s Middle East Forum. It also provided $19,000 to the Jerusalem Foundation, $25,000 to the American Israel Friendship League, $20,000 to the Anti-Defamation League,[85] $1,000 to the Friends of the Israeli Defence Forces. [86] And the list goes on.

What Wightman and Jenvey share with Emerson, Pipes and their many associates, is the portrayal of Islamic groups as the product and perpetrators of a ‘hateful’ ideology, which itself is portrayed as the root cause of violence and conflict. Though it is a completely discredited viewpoint, it is also a necessary one if one is to avoid asking uncomfortable questions about Western foreign policy. This is quite candidly explained in Obsession by another contributor - Itamar Marcus, of Palestinian Media Watch. Referring to Bush’s famous question: ‘Why do they hate us?’ Marcus was scornful of those who searched for a rational explanation: ‘There were numerous examples in American academia and media, after 9/11, that placed the blame of 9/11 on American imperialism around the world… and it is unfortunate again because it is distracting the population from the real source of the problem which is an ideology which wants to destroy the West.’ Though perhaps not of much significance on their own, Jenvey, Wightman and their associates have played a part in this ideological project.

Correction: An earlier version of this article wrongly claimed that Dave Smeeton's name appeared on the BNP membership list leaked in 2008. It did not. We apologise to Mr Smeeton and note his statement that 'I have never been a member of the BNP nor will i ever be.'

[1] ‘Terror expert warns of ‘new 9/11’’, The Express, 1 January 2009; ‘Attack on US ‘soon’’, The Sun, 1 January 2009

[2] ‘I am not racist, says sacked Tory’, BBC News Online, 9 March 2007.

[3] John Coles, Mike Sullivan, ‘HATE HIT LIST’, The Sun, 7 January 2009.

[4] Sajid Pandore, email to Tom Mills, 24 April 2009 11:47

[5] Glen Jenvey, email to Tom Mills, 04 March 2009 11:57

[6] Ummah.com, 'Compile a list of those who support israel', http://ummah.com/forum/showthread.php?p=2989677#post2989677

[7] John Coles, Mike Sullivan, ‘HATE HIT LIST’, The Sun, 7 January 2009

[8] Leigh Holmwood, ‘Alan Sugar sues Sun over terror splash’, guardian.co.uk, 24 February 2009. http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/feb/24/alan-sugar-sues-sun

[9] Letter from the Managing Editor of The Sun to the Press Complaints Commission, 27 January 2009

[10] Letter from the Managing Editor of The Sun to the Press Complaints Commission, 27 January 2009

[11] 'Glen Jenvey has some explaining to do', Bloggerheads, 8 January 2009. http://www.bloggerheads.com/archives/2009/01/glen_jenvey_has.asp

[12] Glen Jenvey, email to Tom Mills, 04 March 2009 11:57

[13] 'Somebody's really got it in for Glen Jenvey', Bloggerheads, 2 March 2009. http://www.bloggerheads.com/archives/2009/03/glen_jenvey_audio.asp

[14] Leigh Holmwood, ‘Alan Sugar sues Sun over terror splash’, guardian.co.uk, 24 February 2009 http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/feb/24/alan-sugar-sues-sun

[15] 'How Extremism Works', Private Eye, Issue 1228, 20 January 2009 p.4

[16] 'Midnight threat special', Bloggerheads, 17 March 2009. http://www.bloggerheads.com/archives/2009/03/midnight_threat.asp

[17] Phone Interview with Glen Jenvey, 8 July 2009.

[18] 'Glen Jenvey's Friend Lionheart on "Paki Muslims"', Richard Bartholomew's Notes on Religon, 17 January 2009.

[19] David James Smith, 'Fear and Hatred on the Streets of Luton', The Sunday Times, 14 June 2009; p. 18 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6487683.ece

[20]No Compromise, January 15, 2009 at 6 pm west coast time.

[21] Ibid.

[22] 'UNMASKED; The football hooligans behind last weekend's bloody protest against that Muslim war demo', Daily Mail, 30 May 2009. The article was posted on the Daily Mail's website on 29 May 2009 at the following URL: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1189639/Unmasked-The-football-hooligans-weekends-bloody-protest-Muslim-war-demo.html but has since been removed.

[23] 'UNMASKED; The football hooligans behind last weekend's bloody protest against that Muslim war demo', Daily Mail, 30 May 2009. The article was posted on the Daily Mail's website on 29 May 2009 at the following URL: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1189639/Unmasked-The-football-hooligans-weekends-bloody-protest-Muslim-war-demo.html but has since been removed.

[24] Nico Hines and Costas Pitas, 'Far-right group, the English Defence League, in disarray after Birmingham fracas', Times Online, 10 August 2009 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article6790067.ece

[25] Ibid.

[26] Phone Interview with Glen Jenvey, 8 July 2009.

[27] Glen Jenvey, email to Tom Mills, 04 August 2009 00:09:48

[28] ‘Web sting links Hamza to terror camps’, Sunday Times, 20 July 2003; p.4.

[29] ‘Web sting links Hamza to terror camps’, Sunday Times, 20 July 2003; p.4.

[30] Graham Brough, ‘How Mirror made cops take action’, Daily Mirror, 8 February 2006; p. 4.

[31] ‘Abu Hamza jailed for seven years’, BBC News Online, 7 February 2006.

[32] Phone Interview with Glen Jenvey, 8 July 2009.

[33] 'Crime: Assault Actor struck top officer', Gloucestershire Echo, 26 August 1998, p.3, see also 'Assaulted police officer wins GBP 150 compensation', Gloucester Citizen, August 27, 1998.

[34] Phone Interview with Glen Jenvey, 8 July 2009.

[35] Islamic News, 22 September 2002, accessed from the Internet Archive 15 July 2008 http://web.archive.org/web/20020922085054/http:/islamic-news.co.uk/;

[36] Ibid.

[37] Phone Interview with Glen Jenvey, 6 July 2009. See also Spinprofiles, ‘Johnathan Galt’ http://www.spinprofiles.org/index.php/Johnathan_Galt

[38] Aaron Weisburd, '100 Little Blue AKs', Internet Haganah, Posted by aaron at February 09, 2003 03:48 PM, retrieved from the Internet Archive; see also Spinprofiles, ‘Aaron Weisburd’, http://www.spinprofiles.org/index.php/Aaron_Weisburd

[39] Cam McGrath, 'Politics: Activists Crusade Against E-Jihad', Inter Press Service, 12 April 2004.

[40] See Spinprofiles ‘Jewish Defense Organization’ http://www.spinprofiles.org/index.php/Jewish_Defense_Organization

[41] www.islamic-news.co.uk, 26 October 2003, retrieved from the Internet Archive on 15 July 2008, http://web.archive.org/web/20031026163747/www.islamic-news.co.uk/

[42] Spinprofiles, ‘Jeremy Reynalds’, http://www.spinprofiles.org/index.php/Jeremy_Reynalds

[43] Aaron Weisburd, '100 Little Blue AKs', Internet Haganah, Posted by aaron at February 09, 2003 03:48 PM, retrieved from the Internet Archive. See Spinprofiles, ‘Jim Ownbey’, http://www.spinprofiles.org/index.php/Jim_Ownbey

[44] A Wired World: terror.com Something Cool News, Issue 61 - May 24, 2004 http://www.somethingcool.ca/backissues/052404/feature61.htm

[45] Jeremy Reynalds,Al Qaeda Recruitment Videos Placed on Web, bushcountry.org, 11 September 2002, retrieved from the Internet Archive.

[46] Joy Junction press release, ‘Joy Junction Director Jeremy Reynalds' New Book Chronicles His Fight Against On Line Terrorism’, 1 December 2005. http://www.joyjunction.org/ArchivedArticles/1458.htm

[47] As of August 2009 it remains listed on the Amazon website as ‘out of print’. http://www.amazon.com/War-Web-Fighting-Online-Jihad/dp/0974670170

[48] Ami Naramor, Editorial Director, WND Books email to Tom Mills, 11 May 2009 18:35.

[49] See Spinprofiles, ‘Neil Doyle’ http://www.spinprofiles.org/index.php/Neil_Doyle

[50] Neil Doyle, Terror tracker: an odyssey into pure fear (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 2004) p.157.

[51] Ibid. p.159.

[52] Ibid. p.160.

[53] Ibid. p.158.

[54] Ibid. p.159.

[55] Dominic Whiteman, ‘The Hidden Truth behind the Sri Lankan Peace Process’, Ministry of Defence Website, Sri Lanka, 14 February 2007. http://www.defence.lk/new.asp?fname=20061022_01

[56] Emails forwarded to Tom Mills, 7 and 9 July 2009.

[57] Phone Interview with Glen Jenvey, 6 July 2009.

[58] Neil Doyle, email to David Miller, 8 May 2009 12:59.

[59] See Spinprofiles, ‘Dominic Whiteman’, http://www.spinprofiles.org/index.php/Dominic_Whiteman

[60] All biographical details in this paragraph were provided by Wightman. Interview with Dominic Wightman, 3 March 2009.

[61] Phone interview with Michael Starkey, 22 May 2009

[62] Phone interview with Michael Starkey, 22 May 2009

[63] John Steele, ‘Preachers of hate online’, Telegraph.co.uk, 18 October 2006.

[64] Interview with Dominic Wightman, 3 March 2009.

[65] BBC Radio Four ‘Islamic Radicalisation’ File on 4, broadcast on Tuesday 14th November 2006 2000 - 2040, repeated Sunday 19th November 2006 1700 – 1740.

[66] Cartoons protester found guilty, BBC News Online, 9 November 2006, 23:11 GMT

[67] Interview with Dominic Wightman, 3 March 2009.

[68] Andrew Alderson, 'Working on the internet from an anonymous city office, the shadowy figures exposing Islamic extremism', Telegraph.co.uk, 19 November 2006.

[69] Michael Starkey, email to Dominic Wightman, 20 March 2007 21:54. Forwarded to Tom Mills, 22 May 2009 13:02

[70] Dominic Wightman, email to Michael Starkey, 19 March 2007 18:23. Forwarded to Tom Mills, 22 May 2009 13:02

[71] Interview with Dominic Wightman, 3 March 2009.

[72] Dominic Wightman, email to Tom Mills, 28 July 2009 21:40.

[73] Adrian Morgan, ‘Exclusive: Dominic Whiteman: Lessons in Fighting Islamism from Across the Pond’, Family Security Matters, 15 May 2008.

[74] Dominic Whiteman, ‘Message from the Editor’ Westminster Journal, 20 December 2007, http://westminsterjournal.com/content/view/30/67/

[75] Dominic Whiteman, ‘Message from the Editor’, Westminster Journal, 20 December 2007, http://westminsterjournal.com/content/view/30/67/

[76] Email from Dominic Wightman to David Miller, 2 Apr 2009.

[77] Dominic Whiteman, 'Bugblatterism: Chavez of Venezuela', Westminster Journal, 7 January 2008. http://westminsterjournal.com/content/view/64/1/

[78] Spinprofiles, ‘Steven Emerson’, http://www.spinprofiles.org/index.php/Steven_Emerson; Spinprofiles, ‘Daniel Pipes’, http://www.spinprofiles.org/index.php/Daniel_Pipes

[79] Spinprofiles, ‘Investigative Project on Terrorism’ http://www.spinprofiles.org/index.php/Investigative_Project_on_Terrorism

[80] Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball, 'Terror Watch: How Clarke 'Outsourced' Terror Intel', Newsweek Web Exclusive, 31 March 2004. http://www.newsweek.com/id/148219

[81] Spinprofiles ‘Michael Ledeen’, http://www.spinprofiles.org/index.php/Michael_Ledeen

[82] Spinprofiles, ‘Meyrav Wurmser’, http://www.spinprofiles.org/index.php/Meyrav_Wurmser; Spinprofiles, ‘MEMRI’ http://www.spinprofiles.org/index.php/MEMRI

[83] Spinprofiles, ‘Clare M. Lopez’ http://www.spinprofiles.org/index.php/Clare_M._Lopez; Spinprofiles, ‘Iran Policy Committee’, http://www.spinprofiles.org/index.php/Iran_Policy_Committee

[84] International Analyst Network ‘Profiles’, http://www.analyst-network.com/profile.php, accessed 6 August 2009.

[85] Spinprofiles, ‘Anti-Defamation League’, http://www.spinprofiles.org/index.php/Anti-Defamation_League

[86] Bialkin Family Foundation, Form 990-PF (2006)

The Subversion of Democracy

2009-09-24T17:22:00.000-07:00

The concept of “demonstration election” is a useful one for describing the elections staged by the U.S. occupation regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, with a much longer history of practice in Latin America and the Caribbean. The concept came into usage with the publication in 1984 of Demonstration Elections: U.S.-Staged Elections in the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, and El Salvador, by Professor Edward S. Herman and Frank Brodhead.

Elections have been used by the United States as an instrument of management in Third World client states since the turn of the century. The functions which they have served, however, have changed in accordance with the shifting demands placed upon the managers.

The aim in holding such elections has always been to ensure 'stability'.

In the first half of this century the threat to stability came almost exclusively from within the client states, which were subject to internal turmoil and thus threatened with a loss of 'independence.'

In recent decades, serious challenges have arisen from within the United States itself. It is this shift in functional need that has led to the emergence of elections oriented to influencing the home (U.S.) population, which we designate 'demonstration elections.'

A demonstration election depends largely on the cooperation of the mainstream media. The patriotic media's role is to include in its reporting certain information or visuals while excluding others.

For example, off the media agenda are discussions of the right of government opponents to campaign (without being killed);

the absence of large-scale financing of favored candidates by foreign governments or patrons; the presence of meaningful freedoms of speech, the press, and assembly;

the ability of voters to cast their ballots freely and safely without intimidation by domestic or foreign military forces or "death squads";

the existence of a truly secret ballot; an honest counting of the ballots;

and the assurance that the person who gets the most votes will win the election.

On the agenda for a patriotic mass media are primarily election-day items:

a large turnout (indicating voter support for the election itself and thus identifying the election with "democracy");

statements by political leaders and "ordinary people" that they are voting because they want freedom;

and ineffective opposition to the election, perhaps even military attacks, by opponents of the government.

(In an election that the United States opposes, such as the Nicaragua election in 1984, the media's priorities are reversed: on the agenda is the question of the pre-requisites of democracy; meaningless and thus off the agenda are the election-day events, the long lines of voters, etc.)

link

UN says Israel should face war-crimes

2009-09-24T17:10:00.000-07:00

link to report

link to press release

link to UN

Israel targeted "the people of Gaza as a whole" in the three-week military operation which is estimated to have killed more than 1,300 Palestinians at the beginning of this year, according to a UN-commissioned report published yesterday.

A UN fact-finding mission led by the Jewish South African former Supreme Court Judge Richard Goldstone said Israel should face prosecution by the International Criminal Court, unless it opened fully independent investigations of what the report said were repeated violations of international law, "possible war crimes and crimes against humanity" during the operation.

Using by far the strongest language of any of the numerous reports criticising Operation Cast Lead, the UN mission, which interviewed victims, witnesses and others in Gaza and Geneva this summer, says that while Israel had portrayed the war as self-defence in response to Hamas rocket attacks, it "considers the plan to have been directed, at least in part, at a different target: the people of Gaza as a whole".

"In this respect the operations were in furtherance of an overall policy aimed at punishing the Gaza population for its resilience and for its apparent support for Hamas, and possibly with the intent of forcing a change in such support," the report said. It added that some Israelis should carry "individual criminal responsibility."

The 575-page document presented to yesterday's session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva was swiftly denounced by Israel. The foreign ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor said the UN mission had "dealt a huge blow to governments seeking to defend their citizens from terror", and that its conclusions were "so disconnected with realities on the ground that one cannot but wonder on which planet was the Gaza Strip they visited".

The Gaza war began on 27 December 2008 and ended on 18 January 2009.

The UN report found that the statements of military and political leaders in Israel before and during the operation indicated the use of "disproportionate force", aimed not only at the enemy but also at the "supporting infrastructure". The mission adds: "In practice this appears to have meant the civilian population."

The mission also had harsh conclusions about Hamas and other armed groups, acknowledging that rocket and mortar attacks have caused terror in southern Israel, and saying that where launched into civilians areas, they would "constitute war crimes" and "may amount to crimes against humanity".

It also condemned the extrajudicial killings, detention and ill-treatment of Palestinian detainees by the Hamas regime in Gaza - as well as by the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank - and called for the release on humanitarian grounds of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli corporal abducted by Gaza militants in June 2006.

While the Israeli government refused to co-operate with the inquiry - or allow the UN team into Israel - on the ground that the team would be "one-sided", Cpl Shalit's father, Noam, was among those Israeli citizens who flew to Geneva to give evidence.

That said, the much greater part of the report - and its strongest language - is reserved for Israel's conduct during the operation. Apart from the unprecedented death toll, the report says that "the destruction of food supply installations, water sanitation systems, concrete factories and residential houses was the result of a systematic policy by the Israeli armed forces". The purpose was "to make the daily process of living and dignified living more difficult for the civilian population".

The report also says that vandalism of houses by some soldiers and "the graffiti on the walls, the obscenities and often racist slogans constituted an overall image of humiliation and dehumanisation of the Palestinian population". Hospitals and ambulances were "targeted by Israeli attacks."

Amid a detailed examination of most of the major incidents of the war - albeit an examinations carried out five months after the incidents took place - it says that:

* The first bombing attack on Day One of the operation when children were going home from school "appears to have been calculated to cause the greatest disruption and widespread panic".

* The deaths of 22 members of the Samouni family sheltering in a warehouse were among ones "owing to Israeli fire intentionally directed at them", in clear breach of the Geneva Convention.

* The firing of white phosphorus shells at the UN Relief and Works Agency compound was "compounded by reckless regard of the consequences", and the use of high explosive artillery at the al-Quds hospitals were violations of Articles 18 and 19 of the Geneva Convention. It says that warnings issued by Israel to the civilian population "cannot be considered as sufficiently effective" under the Convention.

* On the attack in the vicinity of the al-Fakhoura school, where at least 35 Palestinians were killed, Israeli forces launched an attack where a "reasonable commander" would have considered military advantage was outweighed by the risk to civilian life. The civilians had their right to life violated as under Article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). And while some of the 99 policemen killed in incidents surveyed by the team may have been members of armed groups, others who were not also had their right to life violated.

* The inquiry team also says that a number of Palestinians were used as human shields - itself a violation of the ICCPR - including Majdi Abed Rabbo, whose complaints about being so used were first aired in The Independent. The report asserts that the use of human shields constitutes a "war crime under the Rome statute of the International Criminal Court."

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Gaddafy UN Speech 2009 - Summary

2009-09-24T16:45:00.000-07:00

video link : http://webcast.un.org/ramgen/ondemand/ga/64/2009/ga090923am1.rm?start=01:52:40&end=03:28:40

MUAMMAR AL-QADHAFI, Leader of the Revolution of Libya, speaking also on behalf of the African Union, said he hoped this gathering would be a historic one. He also congratulated United States President Barack Obama on his first address to the General Assembly. This year’s debate was being held in the midst of many challenges and the world should unite and defeat these challenges, which included climate change, the economic crisis and the food crisis.

He said many Member States were not present when the United Nations was created by three countries years ago. They created the Charter but the Preamble was different from the provisions and articles. No one objected to the Preamble, but he rejected everything that came after. The Preamble of the United Nations Charter said nations were equal, whether large or small. The veto power bestowed upon the five permanent members of the Security Council was, therefore, against the Charter, and he neither accepted nor recognized it.

Continuing, he said the Charter’s Preamble stated that military force should not be used unless there was a common interest. But 65 wars, with millions of victims, had broken out since the creation of the United Nations. Moreover, the Preamble said if there was aggression against any country, the United Nations together would check such actions. Despite that, countries which held the veto used aggressive force against “the people”, even as the Charter said no nation had the right to intervene in the internal affairs of another.

He went on to express concern that right now, calls for reforming the Organization focused only on increasing the number of Member States. That would only make things worse. For instance, adding more Security Council seats would “give rise to more super-Powers, crush the small people and create more poverty”. Such an impractical move would also generate more competition among countries. In any case, the Council should act according to the rules of the United Nations. The solution was to close the admission of new Member States and provide equality among those already belonging to the Organization, he said.

Currently, the Assembly was like a decor without any substance. “You just make a speech and then you disappear...that’s who you are right now,” he said. Setting that right would mean that the Security Council could serve as a tool for implementing resolutions adopted by the Assembly. The Council should represent the interests of all countries, through individual seats or seats held by unions that represented each region of the world. There were equal votes in the Assembly and there should be equal votes next door in the Security Council, he declared, adding that ultimately, for a united and peaceful world, serious Organizational reform was needed. Keeping his focus squarely on Security Council dynamics, he said that the 15-member body practised “security feudalism” for those who had a protected seat. “It should be called the terror council”, he said, underscoring that terrorism could exist in many forms. The super-Powers had complicated interests and used the United Nations for their own purposes. Indeed, the Security Council did not provide the world with security, but gave it “terror and sanctions”. He was not committed to adhere to the Council’s resolutions, which were used to commit war crimes and genocides. He reiterated that the Council did not provide security and the world did not have to obey the rules or orders it decreed, especially as it was currently constituted.

Regarding Africa, the African Union deserved a permanent seat in the Security Council for the suffering it had endured for many years. This had nothing to do with reform, he said, declaring that Africa deserved compensation, amounting to some $77.7 trillion for the resources and wealth that had been stolen in the past. Colonization should be criminalized and people should be compensated for the suffering endured during the reign of colonial power.

Africans were proud and happy that a son of Africa was now governing the United States of America and it was a great thing -- it was a glimmer of light in the dark of the past eight years, he said.
However, he noted the money spent by the United States and the city to secure United Nations Headquarters during the annual Assembly. While thanking the United States for its efforts in hosting the Organization for the past 50 years, he said the United Nations should hold its annual debate in another hemisphere for the next 50 years. He complained about the trouble some diplomats and their staff had in securing visas from the United States Government.

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Ahmedinejads UN Speech - Sept. 24 2009

2009-09-24T16:15:00.000-07:00

President Ahmadinejad, who began his address thanking Almighty God for having granted him the chance to attend the “important global assembly”, said that he had already spoken to world leaders about the major challenges with which the world nations have been entangled during the past four years.

He added, “I have also referred to such problems’ roots and causes and the need for reviewing and revising the mentality of the world powers and the need for devising new strategies aimed at solving them.

“I have also reiterated the need for a drastic change in type of viewing and dealing with the human beings and the world developments and to establish new justice seeking and humane systems aimed at constructing a bright future.”
Ahmadinejad said that “today” he wished to continue that discussion.

“It goes without saying that continuation of the status quo of the world is quite impossible. The present unsatisfactory unilateral conditions are against the innate nature of the human beings and in direct contrast against the goal behind the creation of the human beings and the universe.

“It is no longer possible to increase wealth artificially by printing paper money, amounting up to tens of billion dollars without real baking for it, and to inject it into the veins of the world economy and to transfer severe budget deficits into the other countries’ economies by transferring their wealth to certain countries.

“The unleashed economy machine of capitalism that had been unjustly set has now reached the end of its way and is now out of order and this unilateral equation does not work any longer.”
….
“Time is now over for some people to present their own definitions of democracy and freedom and to consider themselves as the meter sticks for the authenticity of such definitions, under such conditions that they themselves are breaching the same norms before anyone else. They play the roles of the judge, the prosecutor and the executioner all by themselves and meanwhile they act against the countries where true democracy is observed.

“Expansion of freedoms around the globe and the awareness of the world nations will not permit them to keep on pursuing the same wrong path any longer and that is the reason why most world nations, including the Americans, are longing for drastic, deep, and real changes and welcome the change motto.”
…
“Who thinks the continuation of the inhumane policies in Palestine is still possible? Chasing away a nation from its own motherland for over 60 years and launching brutal attacks against them using the entire forbidden weapons, while blocking the path for legitimate defense for them, and more amazingly, doing so before the wide open eyes of the amazed world nations calling the aggressors ‘peace lovers’ and calling the oppressed people ‘terrorists’.
…
“It is not possible to chant friendship and cooperation mottos with the world nations and meanwhile establish larger military barracks in various parts of the world, including in Latin America.
….
“It is not acceptable that the United Nations and its Security Council that should be the representatives of the nations and the governments and decision makings at them should be based on most democratic, most egalitarian methods, would be under the reign of a few governments, serving merely their interests and obeying their orders.

“Basically, in a world where logic, culture, and public opinion count, continuation of such a status quo is impossible and emergence of a drastic evolution is an inescapable necessity.

“The second point;

“Changes and evolutions need to take place both at theoretical sphere and in practice, in structures and in methods, basically and at grass-root level.

“The hegemonic liberalist and capitalist mentalities that detach the human beings from their ethical systems and from the heaven, not only present them no salvation, but also lead them towards misery, including wars, poverty and various types of deprivation.
…
“The political and economic structures emerged from the aftermaths of World War II that are among the bodies established aimed at strengthening the foundations of hegemony over the entire world have failed in harbingering sustainable justice and security.

“Those leaders whose hearts do not beat with love for the mankind and have sacrificed the idea of justice in their souls can never be the harbingers of peace and friendship for the mankind as gifts.

“By grace of God, just like Marxism that has become a memory in the history, the expansionist capitalism, too, will soon have to be found only in history books, because based on one of the divine traditions, referred to in Glorious Qur’an as a rule, ‘trickery would float over the water like bubbles, and the only thing that would remain (after a flood) is that which would benefit the people.’
…
“The third point;

“The main secret and mystery behind the entire problems with which the global community is entangled is that a group of the world leaders have been distanced from ethical values and the teachings of divine prophets.

“Unfortunately in many major global relations instead of love and self-sacrifice aimed at saving the others, working for their well beings, and justice seeking, what is observed is selfishness, unquenchable thirst for more and more (wealth), and individuals’ (pursuing of) unlimited hedonist (objectives).
…
“The fourth point;

“I believe there are a number of important tasks before each one of us, and the UN Secretary General can be the pioneer and do the necessary planning accordingly:

1. Reforming the apparatus of the UN and changing it into an up-dated, popular, neutral, free, just and effective organ acting in global relations; reforming the structure of the Security Council and annulling the discriminatory veto right;

granting the Palestinians their denied rights fully and immediately after organizing a comprehensive, free referendum and paving the path for peaceful coexistence among the Muslim, the Christian and the Jewish citizens of Palestine, while ending interferences in the affairs of the peoples in Iraq, the Middle East, in Africa, in Latin America, in Asia and in Europe.

….
2. Reforming the global economic structure and establishing ethical, humane economic relations in the world, so that they would be at the service of the human beings based on true justice.

…
3. Reforming the international political relations; structuring the new relations based on sustainable peace and friendship, uprooting the devastating arms and political races, as well as the atomic, chemical and biological weapons, and paving the path for everyone to be benefited from peaceful advanced technologies at the service of the advancement of the entire mankind.

4. Reforming the cultural structures, respecting the indigenous cultures of nations, promoting ethical values, spirituality and the warm foundations of fortunate and sustainable families as the backbones of auspicious societies.

5. Collective endeavor for preservation of the human environment and abiding by the international rules and regulations aimed at safeguarding the non-renewable natural resources.

“The fifth point;

“The Iranian nation has left behind a very glorious, totally free election, and marked a new chapter of national blossoming and broad global interactions with their landslide votes, putting the heavy weigh of responsibility on my shoulders.

…
Long live justice and freedom!
And may Allah’s greetings and blessings be upon you all.
2329**2329

link

Charles Freeman : Israel Lobby

2009-03-24T06:59:00.000-07:00

There is a special irony in having been accused of improper regard for the opinions of foreign governments and societies by a group so clearly intent on enforcing adherence to the policies of a foreign government – in this case, the government of Israel. I believe that the inability of the American public to discuss, or the government to consider, any option for US policies in the Middle East opposed by the ruling faction in Israeli politics has allowed that faction to adopt and sustain policies that ultimately threaten the existence of the state of Israel. It is not permitted for anyone in the United States to say so. This is not just a tragedy for Israelis and their neighbors in the Middle East; it is doing widening damage to the national security of the United States.

To all who supported me or gave me words of encouragement during the controversy of the past two weeks, you have my gratitude and respect.

You will by now have seen the statement by Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair reporting that I have withdrawn my previous acceptance of his invitation to chair the National Intelligence Council.

I have concluded that the barrage of libelous distortions of my record would not cease upon my entry into office. The effort to smear me and to destroy my credibility would instead continue. I do not believe the National Intelligence Council could function effectively while its chair was under constant attack by unscrupulous people with a passionate attachment to the views of a political faction in a foreign country. I agreed to chair the NIC to strengthen it and protect it against politicization, not to introduce it to efforts by a special interest group to assert control over it through a protracted political campaign.

As those who know me are well aware, I have greatly enjoyed life since retiring from government. Nothing was further from my mind than a return to public service. When Admiral Blair asked me to chair the NIC I responded that I understood he was “asking me to give my freedom of speech, my leisure, the greater part of my income, subject myself to the mental colonoscopy of a polygraph, and resume a daily commute to a job with long working hours and a daily ration of political abuse.” I added that I wondered “whether there wasn’t some sort of downside to this offer.” I was mindful that no one is indispensable; I am not an exception. It took weeks of reflection for me to conclude that, given the unprecedentedly challenging circumstances in which our country now finds itself abroad and at home, I had no choice but accept the call to return to public service. I thereupon resigned from all positions that I had held and all activities in which I was engaged. I now look forward to returning to private life, freed of all previous obligations.

I am not so immodest as to believe that this controversy was about me rather than issues of public policy. These issues had little to do with the NIC and were not at the heart of what I hoped to contribute to the quality of analysis available to President Obama and his administration. Still, I am saddened by what the controversy and the manner in which the public vitriol of those who devoted themselves to sustaining it have revealed about the state of our civil society. It is apparent that we Americans cannot any longer conduct a serious public discussion or exercise independent judgment about matters of great importance to our country as well as to our allies and friends.

The libels on me and their easily traceable email trails show conclusively that there is a powerful lobby determined to prevent any view other than its own from being aired, still less to factor in American understanding of trends and events in the Middle East. The tactics of the Israel Lobby plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency and include character assassination, selective misquotation, the willful distortion of the record, the fabrication of falsehoods, and an utter disregard for the truth. The aim of this Lobby is control of the policy process through the exercise of a veto over the appointment of people who dispute the wisdom of its views, the substitution of political correctness for analysis, and the exclusion of any and all options for decision by Americans and our government other than those that it favors.

There is a special irony in having been accused of improper regard for the opinions of foreign governments and societies by a group so clearly intent on enforcing adherence to the policies of a foreign government – in this case, the government of Israel. I believe that the inability of the American public to discuss, or the government to consider, any option for US policies in the Middle East opposed by the ruling faction in Israeli politics has allowed that faction to adopt and sustain policies that ultimately threaten the existence of the state of Israel. It is not permitted for anyone in the United States to say so. This is not just a tragedy for Israelis and their neighbors in the Middle East; it is doing widening damage to the national security of the United States.

The outrageous agitation that followed the leak of my pending appointment will be seen by many to raise serious questions about whether the Obama administration will be able to make its own decisions about the Middle East and related issues. I regret that my willingness to serve the new administration has ended by casting doubt on its ability to consider, let alone decide what policies might best serve the interests of the United States rather than those of a Lobby intent on enforcing the will and interests of a foreign government.

In the court of public opinion, unlike a court of law, one is guilty until proven innocent. The speeches from which quotations have been lifted from their context are available for anyone interested in the truth to read. The injustice of the accusations made against me has been obvious to those with open minds. Those who have sought to impugn my character are uninterested in any rebuttal that I or anyone else might make.

Still, for the record: I have never sought to be paid or accepted payment from any foreign government, including Saudi Arabia or China, for any service, nor have I ever spoken on behalf of a foreign government, its interests, or its policies. I have never lobbied any branch of our government for any cause, foreign or domestic. I am my own man, no one else’s, and with my return to private life, I will once again – to my pleasure – serve no master other than myself. I will continue to speak out as I choose on issues of concern to me and other Americans.

I retain my respect and confidence in President Obama and DNI Blair. Our country now faces terrible challenges abroad as well as at home. Like all patriotic Americans, I continue to pray that our president can successfully lead us in surmounting them.

The Israel Lobby

2009-03-24T06:53:00.000-07:00

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt

For the past several decades, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967, the centrepiece of US Middle Eastern policy has been its relationship with Israel. The combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort to spread ‘democracy’ throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardised not only US security but that of much of the rest of the world. This situation has no equal in American political history. Why has the US been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of another state? One might assume that the bond between the two countries was based on shared strategic interests or compelling moral imperatives, but neither explanation can account for the remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the US provides.

Instead, the thrust of US policy in the region derives almost entirely from domestic politics, and especially the activities of the ‘Israel Lobby’. Other special-interest groups have managed to skew foreign policy, but no lobby has managed to divert it as far from what the national interest would suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that US interests and those of the other country – in this case, Israel – are essentially identical.

Since the October War in 1973, Washington has provided Israel with a level of support dwarfing that given to any other state. It has been the largest annual recipient of direct economic and military assistance since 1976, and is the largest recipient in total since World War Two, to the tune of well over $140 billion (in 2004 dollars). Israel receives about $3 billion in direct assistance each year, roughly one-fifth of the foreign aid budget, and worth about $500 a year for every Israeli. This largesse is especially striking since Israel is now a wealthy industrial state with a per capita income roughly equal to that of South Korea or Spain.

Other recipients get their money in quarterly installments, but Israel receives its entire appropriation at the beginning of each fiscal year and can thus earn interest on it. Most recipients of aid given for military purposes are required to spend all of it in the US, but Israel is allowed to use roughly 25 per cent of its allocation to subsidise its own defence industry. It is the only recipient that does not have to account for how the aid is spent, which makes it virtually impossible to prevent the money from being used for purposes the US opposes, such as building settlements on the West Bank. Moreover, the US has provided Israel with nearly $3 billion to develop weapons systems, and given it access to such top-drawer weaponry as Blackhawk helicopters and F-16 jets. Finally, the US gives Israel access to intelligence it denies to its Nato allies and has turned a blind eye to Israel’s acquisition of nuclear weapons.

Washington also provides Israel with consistent diplomatic support. Since 1982, the US has vetoed 32 Security Council resolutions critical of Israel, more than the total number of vetoes cast by all the other Security Council members. It blocks the efforts of Arab states to put Israel’s nuclear arsenal on the IAEA’s agenda. The US comes to the rescue in wartime and takes Israel’s side when negotiating peace. The Nixon administration protected it from the threat of Soviet intervention and resupplied it during the October War. Washington was deeply involved in the negotiations that ended that war, as well as in the lengthy ‘step-by-step’ process that followed, just as it played a key role in the negotiations that preceded and followed the 1993 Oslo Accords. In each case there was occasional friction between US and Israeli officials, but the US consistently supported the Israeli position. One American participant at Camp David in 2000 later said: ‘Far too often, we functioned . . . as Israel’s lawyer.’ Finally, the Bush administration’s ambition to transform the Middle East is at least partly aimed at improving Israel’s strategic situation.

This extraordinary generosity might be understandable if Israel were a vital strategic asset or if there were a compelling moral case for US backing. But neither explanation is convincing. One might argue that Israel was an asset during the Cold War. By serving as America’s proxy after 1967, it helped contain Soviet expansion in the region and inflicted humiliating defeats on Soviet clients like Egypt and Syria. It occasionally helped protect other US allies (like King Hussein of Jordan) and its military prowess forced Moscow to spend more on backing its own client states. It also provided useful intelligence about Soviet capabilities.

Backing Israel was not cheap, however, and it complicated America’s relations with the Arab world. For example, the decision to give $2.2 billion in emergency military aid during the October War triggered an Opec oil embargo that inflicted considerable damage on Western economies. For all that, Israel’s armed forces were not in a position to protect US interests in the region. The US could not, for example, rely on Israel when the Iranian Revolution in 1979 raised concerns about the security of oil supplies, and had to create its own Rapid Deployment Force instead.

The first Gulf War revealed the extent to which Israel was becoming a strategic burden. The US could not use Israeli bases without rupturing the anti-Iraq coalition, and had to divert resources (e.g. Patriot missile batteries) to prevent Tel Aviv doing anything that might harm the alliance against Saddam Hussein. History repeated itself in 2003: although Israel was eager for the US to attack Iraq, Bush could not ask it to help without triggering Arab opposition. So Israel stayed on the sidelines once again.

Beginning in the 1990s, and even more after 9/11, US support has been justified by the claim that both states are threatened by terrorist groups originating in the Arab and Muslim world, and by ‘rogue states’ that back these groups and seek weapons of mass destruction. This is taken to mean not only that Washington should give Israel a free hand in dealing with the Palestinians and not press it to make concessions until all Palestinian terrorists are imprisoned or dead, but that the US should go after countries like Iran and Syria. Israel is thus seen as a crucial ally in the war on terror, because its enemies are America’s enemies. In fact, Israel is a liability in the war on terror and the broader effort to deal with rogue states.

‘Terrorism’ is not a single adversary, but a tactic employed by a wide array of political groups. The terrorist organisations that threaten Israel do not threaten the United States, except when it intervenes against them (as in Lebanon in 1982). Moreover, Palestinian terrorism is not random violence directed against Israel or ‘the West’; it is largely a response to Israel’s prolonged campaign to colonise the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

More important, saying that Israel and the US are united by a shared terrorist threat has the causal relationship backwards: the US has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel, not the other way around. Support for Israel is not the only source of anti-American terrorism, but it is an important one, and it makes winning the war on terror more difficult. There is no question that many al-Qaida leaders, including Osama bin Laden, are motivated by Israel’s presence in Jerusalem and the plight of the Palestinians. Unconditional support for Israel makes it easier for extremists to rally popular support and to attract recruits.

As for so-called rogue states in the Middle East, they are not a dire threat to vital US interests, except inasmuch as they are a threat to Israel. Even if these states acquire nuclear weapons – which is obviously undesirable – neither America nor Israel could be blackmailed, because the blackmailer could not carry out the threat without suffering overwhelming retaliation. The danger of a nuclear handover to terrorists is equally remote, because a rogue state could not be sure the transfer would go undetected or that it would not be blamed and punished afterwards. The relationship with Israel actually makes it harder for the US to deal with these states. Israel’s nuclear arsenal is one reason some of its neighbours want nuclear weapons, and threatening them with regime change merely increases that desire.

A final reason to question Israel’s strategic value is that it does not behave like a loyal ally. Israeli officials frequently ignore US requests and renege on promises (including pledges to stop building settlements and to refrain from ‘targeted assassinations’ of Palestinian leaders). Israel has provided sensitive military technology to potential rivals like China, in what the State Department inspector-general called ‘a systematic and growing pattern of unauthorised transfers’. According to the General Accounting Office, Israel also ‘conducts the most aggressive espionage operations against the US of any ally’. In addition to the case of Jonathan Pollard, who gave Israel large quantities of classified material in the early 1980s (which it reportedly passed on to the Soviet Union in return for more exit visas for Soviet Jews), a new controversy erupted in 2004 when it was revealed that a key Pentagon official called Larry Franklin had passed classified information to an Israeli diplomat. Israel is hardly the only country that spies on the US, but its willingness to spy on its principal patron casts further doubt on its strategic value.

Israel’s strategic value isn’t the only issue. Its backers also argue that it deserves unqualified support because it is weak and surrounded by enemies; it is a democracy; the Jewish people have suffered from past crimes and therefore deserve special treatment; and Israel’s conduct has been morally superior to that of its adversaries. On close inspection, none of these arguments is persuasive. There is a strong moral case for supporting Israel’s existence, but that is not in jeopardy. Viewed objectively, its past and present conduct offers no moral basis for privileging it over the Palestinians.

Israel is often portrayed as David confronted by Goliath, but the converse is closer to the truth. Contrary to popular belief, the Zionists had larger, better equipped and better led forces during the 1947-49 War of Independence, and the Israel Defence Forces won quick and easy victories against Egypt in 1956 and against Egypt, Jordan and Syria in 1967 – all of this before large-scale US aid began flowing. Today, Israel is the strongest military power in the Middle East. Its conventional forces are far superior to those of its neighbours and it is the only state in the region with nuclear weapons. Egypt and Jordan have signed peace treaties with it, and Saudi Arabia has offered to do so. Syria has lost its Soviet patron, Iraq has been devastated by three disastrous wars and Iran is hundreds of miles away. The Palestinians barely have an effective police force, let alone an army that could pose a threat to Israel. According to a 2005 assessment by Tel Aviv University’s Jaffee Centre for Strategic Studies, ‘the strategic balance decidedly favours Israel, which has continued to widen the qualitative gap between its own military capability and deterrence powers and those of its neighbours.’ If backing the underdog were a compelling motive, the United States would be supporting Israel’s opponents.

That Israel is a fellow democracy surrounded by hostile dictatorships cannot account for the current level of aid: there are many democracies around the world, but none receives the same lavish support. The US has overthrown democratic governments in the past and supported dictators when this was thought to advance its interests – it has good relations with a number of dictatorships today.

Some aspects of Israeli democracy are at odds with core American values. Unlike the US, where people are supposed to enjoy equal rights irrespective of race, religion or ethnicity, Israel was explicitly founded as a Jewish state and citizenship is based on the principle of blood kinship. Given this, it is not surprising that its 1.3 million Arabs are treated as second-class citizens, or that a recent Israeli government commission found that Israel behaves in a ‘neglectful and discriminatory’ manner towards them. Its democratic status is also undermined by its refusal to grant the Palestinians a viable state of their own or full political rights.

A third justification is the history of Jewish suffering in the Christian West, especially during the Holocaust. Because Jews were persecuted for centuries and could feel safe only in a Jewish homeland, many people now believe that Israel deserves special treatment from the United States. The country’s creation was undoubtedly an appropriate response to the long record of crimes against Jews, but it also brought about fresh crimes against a largely innocent third party: the Palestinians.

This was well understood by Israel’s early leaders. David Ben-Gurion told Nahum Goldmann, the president of the World Jewish Congress:

If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country . . . We come from Israel, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?

Since then, Israeli leaders have repeatedly sought to deny the Palestinians’ national ambitions. When she was prime minister, Golda Meir famously remarked that ‘there is no such thing as a Palestinian.’ Pressure from extremist violence and Palestinian population growth has forced subsequent Israeli leaders to disengage from the Gaza Strip and consider other territorial compromises, but not even Yitzhak Rabin was willing to offer the Palestinians a viable state. Ehud Barak’s purportedly generous offer at Camp David would have given them only a disarmed set of Bantustans under de facto Israeli control. The tragic history of the Jewish people does not obligate the US to help Israel today no matter what it does.

Israel’s backers also portray it as a country that has sought peace at every turn and shown great restraint even when provoked. The Arabs, by contrast, are said to have acted with great wickedness. Yet on the ground, Israel’s record is not distinguishable from that of its opponents. Ben-Gurion acknowledged that the early Zionists were far from benevolent towards the Palestinian Arabs, who resisted their encroachments – which is hardly surprising, given that the Zionists were trying to create their own state on Arab land. In the same way, the creation of Israel in 1947-48 involved acts of ethnic cleansing, including executions, massacres and rapes by Jews, and Israel’s subsequent conduct has often been brutal, belying any claim to moral superiority. Between 1949 and 1956, for example, Israeli security forces killed between 2700 and 5000 Arab infiltrators, the overwhelming majority of them unarmed. The IDF murdered hundreds of Egyptian prisoners of war in both the 1956 and 1967 wars, while in 1967, it expelled between 100,000 and 260,000 Palestinians from the newly conquered West Bank, and drove 80,000 Syrians from the Golan Heights.

During the first intifada, the IDF distributed truncheons to its troops and encouraged them to break the bones of Palestinian protesters. The Swedish branch of Save the Children estimated that ‘23,600 to 29,900 children required medical treatment for their beating injuries in the first two years of the intifada.’ Nearly a third of them were aged ten or under. The response to the second intifada has been even more violent, leading Ha’aretz to declare that ‘the IDF . . . is turning into a killing machine whose efficiency is awe-inspiring, yet shocking.’ The IDF fired one million bullets in the first days of the uprising. Since then, for every Israeli lost, Israel has killed 3.4 Palestinians, the majority of whom have been innocent bystanders; the ratio of Palestinian to Israeli children killed is even higher (5.7:1). It is also worth bearing in mind that the Zionists relied on terrorist bombs to drive the British from Palestine, and that Yitzhak Shamir, once a terrorist and later prime minister, declared that ‘neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat.’

The Palestinian resort to terrorism is wrong but it isn’t surprising. The Palestinians believe they have no other way to force Israeli concessions. As Ehud Barak once admitted, had he been born a Palestinian, he ‘would have joined a terrorist organisation’.

So if neither strategic nor moral arguments can account for America’s support for Israel, how are we to explain it?

The explanation is the unmatched power of the Israel Lobby. We use ‘the Lobby’ as shorthand for the loose coalition of individuals and organisations who actively work to steer US foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction. This is not meant to suggest that ‘the Lobby’ is a unified movement with a central leadership, or that individuals within it do not disagree on certain issues. Not all Jewish Americans are part of the Lobby, because Israel is not a salient issue for many of them. In a 2004 survey, for example, roughly 36 per cent of American Jews said they were either ‘not very’ or ‘not at all’ emotionally attached to Israel.

Jewish Americans also differ on specific Israeli policies. Many of the key organisations in the Lobby, such as the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organisations, are run by hardliners who generally support the Likud Party’s expansionist policies, including its hostility to the Oslo peace process. The bulk of US Jewry, meanwhile, is more inclined to make concessions to the Palestinians, and a few groups – such as Jewish Voice for Peace – strongly advocate such steps. Despite these differences, moderates and hardliners both favour giving steadfast support to Israel.

Not surprisingly, American Jewish leaders often consult Israeli officials, to make sure that their actions advance Israeli goals. As one activist from a major Jewish organisation wrote, ‘it is routine for us to say: “This is our policy on a certain issue, but we must check what the Israelis think.” We as a community do it all the time.’ There is a strong prejudice against criticising Israeli policy, and putting pressure on Israel is considered out of order. Edgar Bronfman Sr, the president of the World Jewish Congress, was accused of ‘perfidy’ when he wrote a letter to President Bush in mid-2003 urging him to persuade Israel to curb construction of its controversial ‘security fence’. His critics said that ‘it would be obscene at any time for the president of the World Jewish Congress to lobby the president of the United States to resist policies being promoted by the government of Israel.’

Similarly, when the president of the Israel Policy Forum, Seymour Reich, advised Condoleezza Rice in November 2005 to ask Israel to reopen a critical border crossing in the Gaza Strip, his action was denounced as ‘irresponsible’: ‘There is,’ his critics said, ‘absolutely no room in the Jewish mainstream for actively canvassing against the security-related policies . . . of Israel.’ Recoiling from these attacks, Reich announced that ‘the word “pressure” is not in my vocabulary when it comes to Israel.’

Jewish Americans have set up an impressive array of organisations to influence American foreign policy, of which AIPAC is the most powerful and best known. In 1997, Fortune magazine asked members of Congress and their staffs to list the most powerful lobbies in Washington. AIPAC was ranked second behind the American Association of Retired People, but ahead of the AFL-CIO and the National Rifle Association. A National Journal study in March 2005 reached a similar conclusion, placing AIPAC in second place (tied with AARP) in the Washington ‘muscle rankings’.

The Lobby also includes prominent Christian evangelicals like Gary Bauer, Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed and Pat Robertson, as well as Dick Armey and Tom DeLay, former majority leaders in the House of Representatives, all of whom believe Israel’s rebirth is the fulfilment of biblical prophecy and support its expansionist agenda; to do otherwise, they believe, would be contrary to God’s will. Neo-conservative gentiles such as John Bolton; Robert Bartley, the former Wall Street Journal editor; William Bennett, the former secretary of education; Jeane Kirkpatrick, the former UN ambassador; and the influential columnist George Will are also steadfast supporters.

The US form of government offers activists many ways of influencing the policy process. Interest groups can lobby elected representatives and members of the executive branch, make campaign contributions, vote in elections, try to mould public opinion etc. They enjoy a disproportionate amount of influence when they are committed to an issue to which the bulk of the population is indifferent. Policymakers will tend to accommodate those who care about the issue, even if their numbers are small, confident that the rest of the population will not penalise them for doing so.

In its basic operations, the Israel Lobby is no different from the farm lobby, steel or textile workers’ unions, or other ethnic lobbies. There is nothing improper about American Jews and their Christian allies attempting to sway US policy: the Lobby’s activities are not a conspiracy of the sort depicted in tracts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. For the most part, the individuals and groups that comprise it are only doing what other special interest groups do, but doing it very much better. By contrast, pro-Arab interest groups, in so far as they exist at all, are weak, which makes the Israel Lobby’s task even easier.

The Lobby pursues two broad strategies. First, it wields its significant influence in Washington, pressuring both Congress and the executive branch. Whatever an individual lawmaker or policymaker’s own views may be, the Lobby tries to make supporting Israel the ‘smart’ choice. Second, it strives to ensure that public discourse portrays Israel in a positive light, by repeating myths about its founding and by promoting its point of view in policy debates. The goal is to prevent critical comments from getting a fair hearing in the political arena. Controlling the debate is essential to guaranteeing US support, because a candid discussion of US-Israeli relations might lead Americans to favour a different policy.

A key pillar of the Lobby’s effectiveness is its influence in Congress, where Israel is virtually immune from criticism. This in itself is remarkable, because Congress rarely shies away from contentious issues. Where Israel is concerned, however, potential critics fall silent. One reason is that some key members are Christian Zionists like Dick Armey, who said in September 2002: ‘My No. 1 priority in foreign policy is to protect Israel.’ One might think that the No. 1 priority for any congressman would be to protect America. There are also Jewish senators and congressmen who work to ensure that US foreign policy supports Israel’s interests.

Another source of the Lobby’s power is its use of pro-Israel congressional staffers. As Morris Amitay, a former head of AIPAC, once admitted, ‘there are a lot of guys at the working level up here’ – on Capitol Hill – ‘who happen to be Jewish, who are willing . . . to look at certain issues in terms of their Jewishness . . . These are all guys who are in a position to make the decision in these areas for those senators . . . You can get an awful lot done just at the staff level.’

AIPAC itself, however, forms the core of the Lobby’s influence in Congress. Its success is due to its ability to reward legislators and congressional candidates who support its agenda, and to punish those who challenge it. Money is critical to US elections (as the scandal over the lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s shady dealings reminds us), and AIPAC makes sure that its friends get strong financial support from the many pro-Israel political action committees. Anyone who is seen as hostile to Israel can be sure that AIPAC will direct campaign contributions to his or her political opponents. AIPAC also organises letter-writing campaigns and encourages newspaper editors to endorse pro-Israel candidates.

There is no doubt about the efficacy of these tactics. Here is one example: in the 1984 elections, AIPAC helped defeat Senator Charles Percy from Illinois, who, according to a prominent Lobby figure, had ‘displayed insensitivity and even hostility to our concerns’. Thomas Dine, the head of AIPAC at the time, explained what happened: ‘All the Jews in America, from coast to coast, gathered to oust Percy. And the American politicians – those who hold public positions now, and those who aspire – got the message.’

AIPAC’s influence on Capitol Hill goes even further. According to Douglas Bloomfield, a former AIPAC staff member, ‘it is common for members of Congress and their staffs to turn to AIPAC first when they need information, before calling the Library of Congress, the Congressional Research Service, committee staff or administration experts.’ More important, he notes that AIPAC is ‘often called on to draft speeches, work on legislation, advise on tactics, perform research, collect co-sponsors and marshal votes’.

The bottom line is that AIPAC, a de facto agent for a foreign government, has a stranglehold on Congress, with the result that US policy towards Israel is not debated there, even though that policy has important consequences for the entire world. In other words, one of the three main branches of the government is firmly committed to supporting Israel. As one former Democratic senator, Ernest Hollings, noted on leaving office, ‘you can’t have an Israeli policy other than what AIPAC gives you around here.’ Or as Ariel Sharon once told an American audience, ‘when people ask me how they can help Israel, I tell them: “Help AIPAC.”’

Thanks in part to the influence Jewish voters have on presidential elections, the Lobby also has significant leverage over the executive branch. Although they make up fewer than 3 per cent of the population, they make large campaign donations to candidates from both parties. The Washington Post once estimated that Democratic presidential candidates ‘depend on Jewish supporters to supply as much as 60 per cent of the money’. And because Jewish voters have high turn-out rates and are concentrated in key states like California, Florida, Illinois, New York and Pennsylvania, presidential candidates go to great lengths not to antagonise them.

Key organisations in the Lobby make it their business to ensure that critics of Israel do not get important foreign policy jobs. Jimmy Carter wanted to make George Ball his first secretary of state, but knew that Ball was seen as critical of Israel and that the Lobby would oppose the appointment. In this way any aspiring policymaker is encouraged to become an overt supporter of Israel, which is why public critics of Israeli policy have become an endangered species in the foreign policy establishment.

When Howard Dean called for the United States to take a more ‘even-handed role’ in the Arab-Israeli conflict, Senator Joseph Lieberman accused him of selling Israel down the river and said his statement was ‘irresponsible’. Virtually all the top Democrats in the House signed a letter criticising Dean’s remarks, and the Chicago Jewish Star reported that ‘anonymous attackers . . . are clogging the email inboxes of Jewish leaders around the country, warning – without much evidence – that Dean would somehow be bad for Israel.’

This worry was absurd; Dean is in fact quite hawkish on Israel: his campaign co-chair was a former AIPAC president, and Dean said his own views on the Middle East more closely reflected those of AIPAC than those of the more moderate Americans for Peace Now. He had merely suggested that to ‘bring the sides together’, Washington should act as an honest broker. This is hardly a radical idea, but the Lobby doesn’t tolerate even-handedness.

During the Clinton administration, Middle Eastern policy was largely shaped by officials with close ties to Israel or to prominent pro-Israel organisations; among them, Martin Indyk, the former deputy director of research at AIPAC and co-founder of the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP); Dennis Ross, who joined WINEP after leaving government in 2001; and Aaron Miller, who has lived in Israel and often visits the country. These men were among Clinton’s closest advisers at the Camp David summit in July 2000. Although all three supported the Oslo peace process and favoured the creation of a Palestinian state, they did so only within the limits of what would be acceptable to Israel. The American delegation took its cues from Ehud Barak, co-ordinated its negotiating positions with Israel in advance, and did not offer independent proposals. Not surprisingly, Palestinian negotiators complained that they were ‘negotiating with two Israeli teams – one displaying an Israeli flag, and one an American flag’.

The situation is even more pronounced in the Bush administration, whose ranks have included such fervent advocates of the Israeli cause as Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, I. Lewis (‘Scooter’) Libby, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and David Wurmser. As we shall see, these officials have consistently pushed for policies favoured by Israel and backed by organisations in the Lobby.

The Lobby doesn’t want an open debate, of course, because that might lead Americans to question the level of support they provide. Accordingly, pro-Israel organisations work hard to influence the institutions that do most to shape popular opinion.

The Lobby’s perspective prevails in the mainstream media: the debate among Middle East pundits, the journalist Eric Alterman writes, is ‘dominated by people who cannot imagine criticising Israel’. He lists 61 ‘columnists and commentators who can be counted on to support Israel reflexively and without qualification’. Conversely, he found just five pundits who consistently criticise Israeli actions or endorse Arab positions. Newspapers occasionally publish guest op-eds challenging Israeli policy, but the balance of opinion clearly favours the other side. It is hard to imagine any mainstream media outlet in the United States publishing a piece like this one.

‘Shamir, Sharon, Bibi – whatever those guys want is pretty much fine by me,’ Robert Bartley once remarked. Not surprisingly, his newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, along with other prominent papers like the Chicago Sun-Times and the Washington Times, regularly runs editorials that strongly support Israel. Magazines like Commentary, the New Republic and the Weekly Standard defend Israel at every turn.

Editorial bias is also found in papers like the New York Times, which occasionally criticises Israeli policies and sometimes concedes that the Palestinians have legitimate grievances, but is not even-handed. In his memoirs the paper’s former executive editor Max Frankel acknowledges the impact his own attitude had on his editorial decisions: ‘I was much more deeply devoted to Israel than I dared to assert . . . Fortified by my knowledge of Israel and my friendships there, I myself wrote most of our Middle East commentaries. As more Arab than Jewish readers recognised, I wrote them from a pro-Israel perspective.’

News reports are more even-handed, in part because reporters strive to be objective, but also because it is difficult to cover events in the Occupied Territories without acknowledging Israel’s actions on the ground. To discourage unfavourable reporting, the Lobby organises letter-writing campaigns, demonstrations and boycotts of news outlets whose content it considers anti-Israel. One CNN executive has said that he sometimes gets 6000 email messages in a single day complaining about a story. In May 2003, the pro-Israel Committee for Accurate Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) organised demonstrations outside National Public Radio stations in 33 cities; it also tried to persuade contributors to withhold support from NPR until its Middle East coverage becomes more sympathetic to Israel. Boston’s NPR station, WBUR, reportedly lost more than $1 million in contributions as a result of these efforts. Further pressure on NPR has come from Israel’s friends in Congress, who have asked for an internal audit of its Middle East coverage as well as more oversight.

The Israeli side also dominates the think tanks which play an important role in shaping public debate as well as actual policy. The Lobby created its own think tank in 1985, when Martin Indyk helped to found WINEP. Although WINEP plays down its links to Israel, claiming instead to provide a ‘balanced and realistic’ perspective on Middle East issues, it is funded and run by individuals deeply committed to advancing Israel’s agenda.

The Lobby’s influence extends well beyond WINEP, however. Over the past 25 years, pro-Israel forces have established a commanding presence at the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution, the Center for Security Policy, the Foreign Policy Research Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Hudson Institute, the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). These think tanks employ few, if any, critics of US support for Israel.

Take the Brookings Institution. For many years, its senior expert on the Middle East was William Quandt, a former NSC official with a well-deserved reputation for even-handedness. Today, Brookings’s coverage is conducted through the Saban Center for Middle East Studies, which is financed by Haim Saban, an Israeli-American businessman and ardent Zionist. The centre’s director is the ubiquitous Martin Indyk. What was once a non-partisan policy institute is now part of the pro-Israel chorus.

Where the Lobby has had the most difficulty is in stifling debate on university campuses. In the 1990s, when the Oslo peace process was underway, there was only mild criticism of Israel, but it grew stronger with Oslo’s collapse and Sharon’s access to power, becoming quite vociferous when the IDF reoccupied the West Bank in spring 2002 and employed massive force to subdue the second intifada.

The Lobby moved immediately to ‘take back the campuses’. New groups sprang up, like the Caravan for Democracy, which brought Israeli speakers to US colleges. Established groups like the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and Hillel joined in, and a new group, the Israel on Campus Coalition, was formed to co-ordinate the many bodies that now sought to put Israel’s case. Finally, AIPAC more than tripled its spending on programmes to monitor university activities and to train young advocates, in order to ‘vastly expand the number of students involved on campus . . . in the national pro-Israel effort’.

The Lobby also monitors what professors write and teach. In September 2002, Martin Kramer and Daniel Pipes, two passionately pro-Israel neo-conservatives, established a website (Campus Watch) that posted dossiers on suspect academics and encouraged students to report remarks or behaviour that might be considered hostile to Israel. This transparent attempt to blacklist and intimidate scholars provoked a harsh reaction and Pipes and Kramer later removed the dossiers, but the website still invites students to report ‘anti-Israel’ activity.

Groups within the Lobby put pressure on particular academics and universities. Columbia has been a frequent target, no doubt because of the presence of the late Edward Said on its faculty. ‘One can be sure that any public statement in support of the Palestinian people by the pre-eminent literary critic Edward Said will elicit hundreds of emails, letters and journalistic accounts that call on us to denounce Said and to either sanction or fire him,’ Jonathan Cole, its former provost, reported. When Columbia recruited the historian Rashid Khalidi from Chicago, the same thing happened. It was a problem Princeton also faced a few years later when it considered wooing Khalidi away from Columbia.

A classic illustration of the effort to police academia occurred towards the end of 2004, when the David Project produced a film alleging that faculty members of Columbia’s Middle East Studies programme were anti-semitic and were intimidating Jewish students who stood up for Israel. Columbia was hauled over the coals, but a faculty committee which was assigned to investigate the charges found no evidence of anti-semitism and the only incident possibly worth noting was that one professor had ‘responded heatedly’ to a student’s question. The committee also discovered that the academics in question had themselves been the target of an overt campaign of intimidation.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of all this is the efforts Jewish groups have made to push Congress into establishing mechanisms to monitor what professors say. If they manage to get this passed, universities judged to have an anti-Israel bias would be denied federal funding. Their efforts have not yet succeeded, but they are an indication of the importance placed on controlling debate.

A number of Jewish philanthropists have recently established Israel Studies programmes (in addition to the roughly 130 Jewish Studies programmes already in existence) so as to increase the number of Israel-friendly scholars on campus. In May 2003, NYU announced the establishment of the Taub Center for Israel Studies; similar programmes have been set up at Berkeley, Brandeis and Emory. Academic administrators emphasise their pedagogical value, but the truth is that they are intended in large part to promote Israel’s image. Fred Laffer, the head of the Taub Foundation, makes it clear that his foundation funded the NYU centre to help counter the ‘Arabic [sic] point of view’ that he thinks is prevalent in NYU’s Middle East programmes.

No discussion of the Lobby would be complete without an examination of one of its most powerful weapons: the charge of anti-semitism. Anyone who criticises Israel’s actions or argues that pro-Israel groups have significant influence over US Middle Eastern policy – an influence AIPAC celebrates – stands a good chance of being labelled an anti-semite. Indeed, anyone who merely claims that there is an Israel Lobby runs the risk of being charged with anti-semitism, even though the Israeli media refer to America’s ‘Jewish Lobby’. In other words, the Lobby first boasts of its influence and then attacks anyone who calls attention to it. It’s a very effective tactic: anti-semitism is something no one wants to be accused of.

Europeans have been more willing than Americans to criticise Israeli policy, which some people attribute to a resurgence of anti-semitism in Europe. We are ‘getting to a point’, the US ambassador to the EU said in early 2004, ‘where it is as bad as it was in the 1930s’. Measuring anti-semitism is a complicated matter, but the weight of evidence points in the opposite direction. In the spring of 2004, when accusations of European anti-semitism filled the air in America, separate surveys of European public opinion conducted by the US-based Anti-Defamation League and the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that it was in fact declining. In the 1930s, by contrast, anti-semitism was not only widespread among Europeans of all classes but considered quite acceptable.

The Lobby and its friends often portray France as the most anti-semitic country in Europe. But in 2003, the head of the French Jewish community said that ‘France is not more anti-semitic than America.’ According to a recent article in Ha’aretz, the French police have reported that anti-semitic incidents declined by almost 50 per cent in 2005; and this even though France has the largest Muslim population of any European country. Finally, when a French Jew was murdered in Paris last month by a Muslim gang, tens of thousands of demonstrators poured into the streets to condemn anti-semitism. Jacques Chirac and Dominique de Villepin both attended the victim’s memorial service to show their solidarity.

No one would deny that there is anti-semitism among European Muslims, some of it provoked by Israel’s conduct towards the Palestinians and some of it straightforwardly racist. But this is a separate matter with little bearing on whether or not Europe today is like Europe in the 1930s. Nor would anyone deny that there are still some virulent autochthonous anti-semites in Europe (as there are in the United States) but their numbers are small and their views are rejected by the vast majority of Europeans.

Israel’s advocates, when pressed to go beyond mere assertion, claim that there is a ‘new anti-semitism’, which they equate with criticism of Israel. In other words, criticise Israeli policy and you are by definition an anti-semite. When the synod of the Church of England recently voted to divest from Caterpillar Inc on the grounds that it manufactures the bulldozers used by the Israelis to demolish Palestinian homes, the Chief Rabbi complained that this would ‘have the most adverse repercussions on . . . Jewish-Christian relations in Britain’, while Rabbi Tony Bayfield, the head of the Reform movement, said: ‘There is a clear problem of anti-Zionist – verging on anti-semitic – attitudes emerging in the grass-roots, and even in the middle ranks of the Church.’ But the Church was guilty merely of protesting against Israeli government policy.

Critics are also accused of holding Israel to an unfair standard or questioning its right to exist. But these are bogus charges too. Western critics of Israel hardly ever question its right to exist: they question its behaviour towards the Palestinians, as do Israelis themselves. Nor is Israel being judged unfairly. Israeli treatment of the Palestinians elicits criticism because it is contrary to widely accepted notions of human rights, to international law and to the principle of national self-determination. And it is hardly the only state that has faced sharp criticism on these grounds.

In the autumn of 2001, and especially in the spring of 2002, the Bush administration tried to reduce anti-American sentiment in the Arab world and undermine support for terrorist groups like al-Qaida by halting Israel’s expansionist policies in the Occupied Territories and advocating the creation of a Palestinian state. Bush had very significant means of persuasion at his disposal. He could have threatened to reduce economic and diplomatic support for Israel, and the American people would almost certainly have supported him. A May 2003 poll reported that more than 60 per cent of Americans were willing to withhold aid if Israel resisted US pressure to settle the conflict, and that number rose to 70 per cent among the ‘politically active’. Indeed, 73 per cent said that the United States should not favour either side.

Yet the administration failed to change Israeli policy, and Washington ended up backing it. Over time, the administration also adopted Israel’s own justifications of its position, so that US rhetoric began to mimic Israeli rhetoric. By February 2003, a Washington Post headline summarised the situation: ‘Bush and Sharon Nearly Identical on Mideast Policy.’ The main reason for this switch was the Lobby.

The story begins in late September 2001, when Bush began urging Sharon to show restraint in the Occupied Territories. He also pressed him to allow Israel’s foreign minister, Shimon Peres, to meet with Yasser Arafat, even though he (Bush) was highly critical of Arafat’s leadership. Bush even said publicly that he supported the creation of a Palestinian state. Alarmed, Sharon accused him of trying ‘to appease the Arabs at our expense’, warning that Israel ‘will not be Czechoslovakia’.

Bush was reportedly furious at being compared to Chamberlain, and the White House press secretary called Sharon’s remarks ‘unacceptable’. Sharon offered a pro forma apology, but quickly joined forces with the Lobby to persuade the administration and the American people that the United States and Israel faced a common threat from terrorism. Israeli officials and Lobby representatives insisted that there was no real difference between Arafat and Osama bin Laden: the United States and Israel, they said, should isolate the Palestinians’ elected leader and have nothing to do with him.

The Lobby also went to work in Congress. On 16 November, 89 senators sent Bush a letter praising him for refusing to meet with Arafat, but also demanding that the US not restrain Israel from retaliating against the Palestinians; the administration, they wrote, must state publicly that it stood behind Israel. According to the New York Times, the letter ‘stemmed’ from a meeting two weeks before between ‘leaders of the American Jewish community and key senators’, adding that AIPAC was ‘particularly active in providing advice on the letter’.

By late November, relations between Tel Aviv and Washington had improved considerably. This was thanks in part to the Lobby’s efforts, but also to America’s initial victory in Afghanistan, which reduced the perceived need for Arab support in dealing with al-Qaida. Sharon visited the White House in early December and had a friendly meeting with Bush.

In April 2002 trouble erupted again, after the IDF launched Operation Defensive Shield and resumed control of virtually all the major Palestinian areas on the West Bank. Bush knew that Israel’s actions would damage America’s image in the Islamic world and undermine the war on terrorism, so he demanded that Sharon ‘halt the incursions and begin withdrawal’. He underscored this message two days later, saying he wanted Israel to ‘withdraw without delay’. On 7 April, Condoleezza Rice, then Bush’s national security adviser, told reporters: ‘“Without delay” means without delay. It means now.’ That same day Colin Powell set out for the Middle East to persuade all sides to stop fighting and start negotiating.

Israel and the Lobby swung into action. Pro-Israel officials in the vice-president’s office and the Pentagon, as well as neo-conservative pundits like Robert Kagan and William Kristol, put the heat on Powell. They even accused him of having ‘virtually obliterated the distinction between terrorists and those fighting terrorists’. Bush himself was being pressed by Jewish leaders and Christian evangelicals. Tom DeLay and Dick Armey were especially outspoken about the need to support Israel, and DeLay and the Senate minority leader, Trent Lott, visited the White House and warned Bush to back off.

The first sign that Bush was caving in came on 11 April – a week after he told Sharon to withdraw his forces – when the White House press secretary said that the president believed Sharon was ‘a man of peace’. Bush repeated this statement publicly on Powell’s return from his abortive mission, and told reporters that Sharon had responded satisfactorily to his call for a full and immediate withdrawal. Sharon had done no such thing, but Bush was no longer willing to make an issue of it.

Meanwhile, Congress was also moving to back Sharon. On 2 May, it overrode the administration’s objections and passed two resolutions reaffirming support for Israel. (The Senate vote was 94 to 2; the House of Representatives version passed 352 to 21.) Both resolutions held that the United States ‘stands in solidarity with Israel’ and that the two countries were, to quote the House resolution, ‘now engaged in a common struggle against terrorism’. The House version also condemned ‘the ongoing support and co-ordination of terror by Yasser Arafat’, who was portrayed as a central part of the terrorism problem. Both resolutions were drawn up with the help of the Lobby. A few days later, a bipartisan congressional delegation on a fact-finding mission to Israel stated that Sharon should resist US pressure to negotiate with Arafat. On 9 May, a House appropriations subcommittee met to consider giving Israel an extra $200 million to fight terrorism. Powell opposed the package, but the Lobby backed it and Powell lost.

In short, Sharon and the Lobby took on the president of the United States and triumphed. Hemi Shalev, a journalist on the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv, reported that Sharon’s aides ‘could not hide their satisfaction in view of Powell’s failure. Sharon saw the whites of President Bush’s eyes, they bragged, and the president blinked first.’ But it was Israel’s champions in the United States, not Sharon or Israel, that played the key role in defeating Bush.

The situation has changed little since then. The Bush administration refused ever again to have dealings with Arafat. After his death, it embraced the new Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, but has done little to help him. Sharon continued to develop his plan to impose a unilateral settlement on the Palestinians, based on ‘disengagement’ from Gaza coupled with continued expansion on the West Bank. By refusing to negotiate with Abbas and making it impossible for him to deliver tangible benefits to the Palestinian people, Sharon’s strategy contributed directly to Hamas’s electoral victory. With Hamas in power, however, Israel has another excuse not to negotiate. The US administration has supported Sharon’s actions (and those of his successor, Ehud Olmert). Bush has even endorsed unilateral Israeli annexations in the Occupied Territories, reversing the stated policy of every president since Lyndon Johnson.

US officials have offered mild criticisms of a few Israeli actions, but have done little to help create a viable Palestinian state. Sharon has Bush ‘wrapped around his little finger’, the former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft said in October 2004. If Bush tries to distance the US from Israel, or even criticises Israeli actions in the Occupied Territories, he is certain to face the wrath of the Lobby and its supporters in Congress. Democratic presidential candidates understand that these are facts of life, which is the reason John Kerry went to great lengths to display unalloyed support for Israel in 2004, and why Hillary Clinton is doing the same thing today.

Maintaining US support for Israel’s policies against the Palestinians is essential as far as the Lobby is concerned, but its ambitions do not stop there. It also wants America to help Israel remain the dominant regional power. The Israeli government and pro-Israel groups in the United States have worked together to shape the administration’s policy towards Iraq, Syria and Iran, as well as its grand scheme for reordering the Middle East.

Pressure from Israel and the Lobby was not the only factor behind the decision to attack Iraq in March 2003, but it was critical. Some Americans believe that this was a war for oil, but there is hardly any direct evidence to support this claim. Instead, the war was motivated in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure. According to Philip Zelikow, a former member of the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, and now a counsellor to Condoleezza Rice, the ‘real threat’ from Iraq was not a threat to the United States. The ‘unstated threat’ was the ‘threat against Israel’, Zelikow told an audience at the University of Virginia in September 2002. ‘The American government,’ he added, ‘doesn’t want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell.’

On 16 August 2002, 11 days before Dick Cheney kicked off the campaign for war with a hardline speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Washington Post reported that ‘Israel is urging US officials not to delay a military strike against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.’ By this point, according to Sharon, strategic co-ordination between Israel and the US had reached ‘unprecedented dimensions’, and Israeli intelligence officials had given Washington a variety of alarming reports about Iraq’s WMD programmes. As one retired Israeli general later put it, ‘Israeli intelligence was a full partner to the picture presented by American and British intelligence regarding Iraq’s non-conventional capabilities.’

Israeli leaders were deeply distressed when Bush decided to seek Security Council authorisation for war, and even more worried when Saddam agreed to let UN inspectors back in. ‘The campaign against Saddam Hussein is a must,’ Shimon Peres told reporters in September 2002. ‘Inspections and inspectors are good for decent people, but dishonest people can overcome easily inspections and inspectors.’

At the same time, Ehud Barak wrote a New York Times op-ed warning that ‘the greatest risk now lies in inaction.’ His predecessor as prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, published a similar piece in the Wall Street Journal, entitled: ‘The Case for Toppling Saddam’. ‘Today nothing less than dismantling his regime will do,’ he declared. ‘I believe I speak for the overwhelming majority of Israelis in supporting a pre-emptive strike against Saddam’s regime.’ Or as Ha’aretz reported in February 2003, ‘the military and political leadership yearns for war in Iraq.’

As Netanyahu suggested, however, the desire for war was not confined to Israel’s leaders. Apart from Kuwait, which Saddam invaded in 1990, Israel was the only country in the world where both politicians and public favoured war. As the journalist Gideon Levy observed at the time, ‘Israel is the only country in the West whose leaders support the war unreservedly and where no alternative opinion is voiced.’ In fact, Israelis were so gung-ho that their allies in America told them to damp down their rhetoric, or it would look as if the war would be fought on Israel’s behalf.

Within the US, the main driving force behind the war was a small band of neo-conservatives, many with ties to Likud. But leaders of the Lobby’s major organisations lent their voices to the campaign. ‘As President Bush attempted to sell the . . . war in Iraq,’ the Forward reported, ‘America’s most important Jewish organisations rallied as one to his defence. In statement after statement community leaders stressed the need to rid the world of Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction.’ The editorial goes on to say that ‘concern for Israel’s safety rightfully factored into the deliberations of the main Jewish groups.’

Although neo-conservatives and other Lobby leaders were eager to invade Iraq, the broader American Jewish community was not. Just after the war started, Samuel Freedman reported that ‘a compilation of nationwide opinion polls by the Pew Research Center shows that Jews are less supportive of the Iraq war than the population at large, 52 per cent to 62 per cent.’ Clearly, it would be wrong to blame the war in Iraq on ‘Jewish influence’. Rather, it was due in large part to the Lobby’s influence, especially that of the neo-conservatives within it.

The neo-conservatives had been determined to topple Saddam even before Bush became president. They caused a stir early in 1998 by publishing two open letters to Clinton, calling for Saddam’s removal from power. The signatories, many of whom had close ties to pro-Israel groups like JINSA or WINEP, and who included Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, William Kristol, Bernard Lewis, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, had little trouble persuading the Clinton administration to adopt the general goal of ousting Saddam. But they were unable to sell a war to achieve that objective. They were no more able to generate enthusiasm for invading Iraq in the early months of the Bush administration. They needed help to achieve their aim. That help arrived with 9/11. Specifically, the events of that day led Bush and Cheney to reverse course and become strong proponents of a preventive war.

At a key meeting with Bush at Camp David on 15 September, Wolfowitz advocated attacking Iraq before Afghanistan, even though there was no evidence that Saddam was involved in the attacks on the US and bin Laden was known to be in Afghanistan. Bush rejected his advice and chose to go after Afghanistan instead, but war with Iraq was now regarded as a serious possibility and on 21 November the president charged military planners with developing concrete plans for an invasion.

Other neo-conservatives were meanwhile at work in the corridors of power. We don’t have the full story yet, but scholars like Bernard Lewis of Princeton and Fouad Ajami of Johns Hopkins reportedly played important roles in persuading Cheney that war was the best option, though neo-conservatives on his staff – Eric Edelman, John Hannah and Scooter Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff and one of the most powerful individuals in the administration – also played their part. By early 2002 Cheney had persuaded Bush; and with Bush and Cheney on board, war was inevitable.

Outside the administration, neo-conservative pundits lost no time in making the case that invading Iraq was essential to winning the war on terrorism. Their efforts were designed partly to keep up the pressure on Bush, and partly to overcome opposition to the war inside and outside the government. On 20 September, a group of prominent neo-conservatives and their allies published another open letter: ‘Even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack,’ it read, ‘any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq.’ The letter also reminded Bush that ‘Israel has been and remains America’s staunchest ally against international terrorism.’ In the 1 October issue of the Weekly Standard, Robert Kagan and William Kristol called for regime change in Iraq as soon as the Taliban was defeated. That same day, Charles Krauthammer argued in the Washington Post that after the US was done with Afghanistan, Syria should be next, followed by Iran and Iraq: ‘The war on terrorism will conclude in Baghdad,’ when we finish off ‘the most dangerous terrorist regime in the world’.

This was the beginning of an unrelenting public relations campaign to win support for an invasion of Iraq, a crucial part of which was the manipulation of intelligence in such a way as to make it seem as if Saddam posed an imminent threat. For example, Libby pressured CIA analysts to find evidence supporting the case for war and helped prepare Colin Powell’s now discredited briefing to the UN Security Council. Within the Pentagon, the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group was charged with finding links between al-Qaida and Iraq that the intelligence community had supposedly missed. Its two key members were David Wurmser, a hard-core neo-conservative, and Michael Maloof, a Lebanese-American with close ties to Perle. Another Pentagon group, the so-called Office of Special Plans, was given the task of uncovering evidence that could be used to sell the war. It was headed by Abram Shulsky, a neo-conservative with long-standing ties to Wolfowitz, and its ranks included recruits from pro-Israel think tanks. Both these organisations were created after 9/11 and reported directly to Douglas Feith.

Like virtually all the neo-conservatives, Feith is deeply committed to Israel; he also has long-term ties to Likud. He wrote articles in the 1990s supporting the settlements and arguing that Israel should retain the Occupied Territories. More important, along with Perle and Wurmser, he wrote the famous ‘Clean Break’ report in June 1996 for Netanyahu, who had just become prime minister. Among other things, it recommended that Netanyahu ‘focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq – an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right’. It also called for Israel to take steps to reorder the entire Middle East. Netanyahu did not follow their advice, but Feith, Perle and Wurmser were soon urging the Bush administration to pursue those same goals. The Ha’aretz columnist Akiva Eldar warned that Feith and Perle ‘are walking a fine line between their loyalty to American governments . . . and Israeli interests’.

Wolfowitz is equally committed to Israel. The Forward once described him as ‘the most hawkishly pro-Israel voice in the administration’, and selected him in 2002 as first among 50 notables who ‘have consciously pursued Jewish activism’. At about the same time, JINSA gave Wolfowitz its Henry M. Jackson Distinguished Service Award for promoting a strong partnership between Israel and the United States; and the Jerusalem Post, describing him as ‘devoutly pro-Israel’, named him ‘Man of the Year’ in 2003.

Finally, a brief word is in order about the neo-conservatives’ prewar support of Ahmed Chalabi, the unscrupulous Iraqi exile who headed the Iraqi National Congress. They backed Chalabi because he had established close ties with Jewish-American groups and had pledged to foster good relations with Israel once he gained power. This was precisely what pro-Israel proponents of regime change wanted to hear. Matthew Berger laid out the essence of the bargain in the Jewish Journal: ‘The INC saw improved relations as a way to tap Jewish influence in Washington and Jerusalem and to drum up increased support for its cause. For their part, the Jewish groups saw an opportunity to pave the way for better relations between Israel and Iraq, if and when the INC is involved in replacing Saddam Hussein’s regime.’

Given the neo-conservatives’ devotion to Israel, their obsession with Iraq, and their influence in the Bush administration, it isn’t surprising that many Americans suspected that the war was designed to further Israeli interests. Last March, Barry Jacobs of the American Jewish Committee acknowledged that the belief that Israel and the neo-conservatives had conspired to get the US into a war in Iraq was ‘pervasive’ in the intelligence community. Yet few people would say so publicly, and most of those who did – including Senator Ernest Hollings and Representative James Moran – were condemned for raising the issue. Michael Kinsley wrote in late 2002 that ‘the lack of public discussion about the role of Israel . . . is the proverbial elephant in the room.’ The reason for the reluctance to talk about it, he observed, was fear of being labelled an anti-semite. There is little doubt that Israel and the Lobby were key factors in the decision to go to war. It’s a decision the US would have been far less likely to take without their efforts. And the war itself was intended to be only the first step. A front-page headline in the Wall Street Journal shortly after the war began says it all: ‘President’s Dream: Changing Not Just Regime but a Region: A Pro-US, Democratic Area Is a Goal that Has Israeli and Neo-Conservative Roots.’

Pro-Israel forces have long been interested in getting the US military more directly involved in the Middle East. But they had limited success during the Cold War, because America acted as an ‘off-shore balancer’ in the region. Most forces designated for the Middle East, like the Rapid Deployment Force, were kept ‘over the horizon’ and out of harm’s way. The idea was to play local powers off against each other – which is why the Reagan administration supported Saddam against revolutionary Iran during the Iran-Iraq War – in order to maintain a balance favourable to the US.

This policy changed after the first Gulf War, when the Clinton administration adopted a strategy of ‘dual containment’. Substantial US forces would be stationed in the region in order to contain both Iran and Iraq, instead of one being used to check the other. The father of dual containment was none other than Martin Indyk, who first outlined the strategy in May 1993 at WINEP and then implemented it as director for Near East and South Asian Affairs at the National Security Council.

By the mid-1990s there was considerable dissatisfaction with dual containment, because it made the United States the mortal enemy of two countries that hated each other, and forced Washington to bear the burden of containing both. But it was a strategy the Lobby favoured and worked actively in Congress to preserve. Pressed by AIPAC and other pro-Israel forces, Clinton toughened up the policy in the spring of 1995 by imposing an economic embargo on Iran. But AIPAC and the others wanted more. The result was the 1996 Iran and Libya Sanctions Act, which imposed sanctions on any foreign companies investing more than $40 million to develop petroleum resources in Iran or Libya. As Ze’ev Schiff, the military correspondent of Ha’aretz, noted at the time, ‘Israel is but a tiny element in the big scheme, but one should not conclude that it cannot influence those within the Beltway.’

By the late 1990s, however, the neo-conservatives were arguing that dual containment was not enough and that regime change in Iraq was essential. By toppling Saddam and turning Iraq into a vibrant democracy, they argued, the US would trigger a far-reaching process of change throughout the Middle East. The same line of thinking was evident in the ‘Clean Break’ study the neo-conservatives wrote for Netanyahu. By 2002, when an invasion of Iraq was on the front-burner, regional transformation was an article of faith in neo-conservative circles.

Charles Krauthammer describes this grand scheme as the brainchild of Natan Sharansky, but Israelis across the political spectrum believed that toppling Saddam would alter the Middle East to Israel’s advantage. Aluf Benn reported in Ha’aretz (17 February 2003):

Senior IDF officers and those close to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, such as National Security Adviser Ephraim Halevy, paint a rosy picture of the wonderful future Israel can expect after the war. They envision a domino effect, with the fall of Saddam Hussein followed by that of Israel’s other enemies . . . Along with these leaders will disappear terror and weapons of mass destruction.

Once Baghdad fell in mid-April 2003, Sharon and his lieutenants began urging Washington to target Damascus. On 16 April, Sharon, interviewed in Yedioth Ahronoth, called for the United States to put ‘very heavy’ pressure on Syria, while Shaul Mofaz, his defence minister, interviewed in Ma’ariv, said: ‘We have a long list of issues that we are thinking of demanding of the Syrians and it is appropriate that it should be done through the Americans.’ Ephraim Halevy told a WINEP audience that it was now important for the US to get rough with Syria, and the Washington Post reported that Israel was ‘fuelling the campaign’ against Syria by feeding the US intelligence reports about the actions of Bashar Assad, the Syrian president.

Prominent members of the Lobby made the same arguments. Wolfowitz declared that ‘there has got to be regime change in Syria,’ and Richard Perle told a journalist that ‘a short message, a two-worded message’ could be delivered to other hostile regimes in the Middle East: ‘You’re next.’ In early April, WINEP released a bipartisan report stating that Syria ‘should not miss the message that countries that pursue Saddam’s reckless, irresponsible and defiant behaviour could end up sharing his fate’. On 15 April, Yossi Klein Halevi wrote a piece in the Los Angeles Times entitled ‘Next, Turn the Screws on Syria’, while the following day Zev Chafets wrote an article for the New York Daily News entitled ‘Terror-Friendly Syria Needs a Change, Too’. Not to be outdone, Lawrence Kaplan wrote in the New Republic on 21 April that Assad was a serious threat to America.

Back on Capitol Hill, Congressman Eliot Engel had reintroduced the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act. It threatened sanctions against Syria if it did not withdraw from Lebanon, give up its WMD and stop supporting terrorism, and it also called for Syria and Lebanon to take concrete steps to make peace with Israel. This legislation was strongly endorsed by the Lobby – by AIPAC especially – and ‘framed’, according to the Jewish Telegraph Agency, ‘by some of Israel’s best friends in Congress’. The Bush administration had little enthusiasm for it, but the anti-Syrian act passed overwhelmingly (398 to 4 in the House; 89 to 4 in the Senate), and Bush signed it into law on 12 December 2003.

The administration itself was still divided about the wisdom of targeting Syria. Although the neo-conservatives were eager to pick a fight with Damascus, the CIA and the State Department were opposed to the idea. And even after Bush signed the new law, he emphasised that he would go slowly in implementing it. His ambivalence is understandable. First, the Syrian government had not only been providing important intelligence about al-Qaida since 9/11: it had also warned Washington about a planned terrorist attack in the Gulf and given CIA interrogators access to Mohammed Zammar, the alleged recruiter of some of the 9/11 hijackers. Targeting the Assad regime would jeopardise these valuable connections, and thereby undermine the larger war on terrorism.

Second, Syria had not been on bad terms with Washington before the Iraq war (it had even voted for UN Resolution 1441), and was itself no threat to the United States. Playing hardball with it would make the US look like a bully with an insatiable appetite for beating up Arab states. Third, putting Syria on the hit list would give Damascus a powerful incentive to cause trouble in Iraq. Even if one wanted to bring pressure to bear, it made good sense to finish the job in Iraq first. Yet Congress insisted on putting the screws on Damascus, largely in response to pressure from Israeli officials and groups like AIPAC. If there were no Lobby, there would have been no Syria Accountability Act, and US policy towards Damascus would have been more in line with the national interest.

Israelis tend to describe every threat in the starkest terms, but Iran is widely seen as their most dangerous enemy because it is the most likely to acquire nuclear weapons. Virtually all Israelis regard an Islamic country in the Middle East with nuclear weapons as a threat to their existence. ‘Iraq is a problem . . . But you should understand, if you ask me, today Iran is more dangerous than Iraq,’ the defence minister, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, remarked a month before the Iraq war.

Sharon began pushing the US to confront Iran in November 2002, in an interview in the Times. Describing Iran as the ‘centre of world terror’, and bent on acquiring nuclear weapons, he declared that the Bush administration should put the strong arm on Iran ‘the day after’ it conquered Iraq. In late April 2003, Ha’aretz reported that the Israeli ambassador in Washington was calling for regime change in Iran. The overthrow of Saddam, he noted, was ‘not enough’. In his words, America ‘has to follow through. We still have great threats of that magnitude coming from Syria, coming from Iran.’

The neo-conservatives, too, lost no time in making the case for regime change in Tehran. On 6 May, the AEI co-sponsored an all-day conference on Iran with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and the Hudson Institute, both champions of Israel. The speakers were all strongly pro-Israel, and many called for the US to replace the Iranian regime with a democracy. As usual, a bevy of articles by prominent neo-conservatives made the case for going after Iran. ‘The liberation of Iraq was the first great battle for the future of the Middle East . . . But the next great battle – not, we hope, a military battle – will be for Iran,’ William Kristol wrote in the Weekly Standard on 12 May.

The administration has responded to the Lobby’s pressure by working overtime to shut down Iran’s nuclear programme. But Washington has had little success, and Iran seems determined to create a nuclear arsenal. As a result, the Lobby has intensified its pressure. Op-eds and other articles now warn of imminent dangers from a nuclear Iran, caution against any appeasement of a ‘terrorist’ regime, and hint darkly of preventive action should diplomacy fail. The Lobby is pushing Congress to approve the Iran Freedom Support Act, which would expand existing sanctions. Israeli officials also warn they may take pre-emptive action should Iran continue down the nuclear road, threats partly intended to keep Washington’s attention on the issue.

One might argue that Israel and the Lobby have not had much influence on policy towards Iran, because the US has its own reasons for keeping Iran from going nuclear. There is some truth in this, but Iran’s nuclear ambitions do not pose a direct threat to the US. If Washington could live with a nuclear Soviet Union, a nuclear China or even a nuclear North Korea, it can live with a nuclear Iran. And that is why the Lobby must keep up constant pressure on politicians to confront Tehran. Iran and the US would hardly be allies if the Lobby did not exist, but US policy would be more temperate and preventive war would not be a serious option.

It is not surprising that Israel and its American supporters want the US to deal with any and all threats to Israel’s security. If their efforts to shape US policy succeed, Israel’s enemies will be weakened or overthrown, Israel will get a free hand with the Palestinians, and the US will do most of the fighting, dying, rebuilding and paying. But even if the US fails to transform the Middle East and finds itself in conflict with an increasingly radicalised Arab and Islamic world, Israel will end up protected by the world’s only superpower. This is not a perfect outcome from the Lobby’s point of view, but it is obviously preferable to Washington distancing itself, or using its leverage to force Israel to make peace with the Palestinians.

Can the Lobby’s power be curtailed? One would like to think so, given the Iraq debacle, the obvious need to rebuild America’s image in the Arab and Islamic world, and the recent revelations about AIPAC officials passing US government secrets to Israel. One might also think that Arafat’s death and the election of the more moderate Mahmoud Abbas would cause Washington to press vigorously and even-handedly for a peace agreement. In short, there are ample grounds for leaders to distance themselves from the Lobby and adopt a Middle East policy more consistent with broader US interests. In particular, using American power to achieve a just peace between Israel and the Palestinians would help advance the cause of democracy in the region.

But that is not going to happen – not soon anyway. AIPAC and its allies (including Christian Zionists) have no serious opponents in the lobbying world. They know it has become more difficult to make Israel’s case today, and they are responding by taking on staff and expanding their activities. Besides, American politicians remain acutely sensitive to campaign contributions and other forms of political pressure, and major media outlets are likely to remain sympathetic to Israel no matter what it does.

The Lobby’s influence causes trouble on several fronts. It increases the terrorist danger that all states face – including America’s European allies. It has made it impossible to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a situation that gives extremists a powerful recruiting tool, increases the pool of potential terrorists and sympathisers, and contributes to Islamic radicalism in Europe and Asia.

Equally worrying, the Lobby’s campaign for regime change in Iran and Syria could lead the US to attack those countries, with potentially disastrous effects. We don’t need another Iraq. At a minimum, the Lobby’s hostility towards Syria and Iran makes it almost impossible for Washington to enlist them in the struggle against al-Qaida and the Iraqi insurgency, where their help is badly needed.

There is a moral dimension here as well. Thanks to the Lobby, the United States has become the de facto enabler of Israeli expansion in the Occupied Territories, making it complicit in the crimes perpetrated against the Palestinians. This situation undercuts Washington’s efforts to promote democracy abroad and makes it look hypocritical when it presses other states to respect human rights. US efforts to limit nuclear proliferation appear equally hypocritical given its willingness to accept Israel’s nuclear arsenal, which only encourages Iran and others to seek a similar capability.

Besides, the Lobby’s campaign to quash debate about Israel is unhealthy for democracy. Silencing sceptics by organising blacklists and boycotts – or by suggesting that critics are anti-semites – violates the principle of open debate on which democracy depends. The inability of Congress to conduct a genuine debate on these important issues paralyses the entire process of democratic deliberation. Israel’s backers should be free to make their case and to challenge those who disagree with them, but efforts to stifle debate by intimidation must be roundly condemned.

Finally, the Lobby’s influence has been bad for Israel. Its ability to persuade Washington to support an expansionist agenda has discouraged Israel from seizing opportunities – including a peace treaty with Syria and a prompt and full implementation of the Oslo Accords – that would have saved Israeli lives and shrunk the ranks of Palestinian extremists. Denying the Palestinians their legitimate political rights certainly has not made Israel more secure, and the long campaign to kill or marginalise a generation of Palestinian leaders has empowered extremist groups like Hamas, and reduced the number of Palestinian leaders who would be willing to accept a fair settlement and able to make it work. Israel itself would probably be better off if the Lobby were less powerful and US policy more even-handed.

There is a ray of hope, however. Although the Lobby remains a powerful force, the adverse effects of its influence are increasingly difficult to hide. Powerful states can maintain flawed policies for quite some time, but reality cannot be ignored for ever. What is needed is a candid discussion of the Lobby’s influence and a more open debate about US interests in this vital region. Israel’s well-being is one of those interests, but its continued occupation of the West Bank and its broader regional agenda are not. Open debate will expose the limits of the strategic and moral case for one-sided US support and could move the US to a position more consistent with its own national interest, with the interests of the other states in the region, and with Israel’s long-term interests as well.

10 March

link

Sufi Muslim Council a Karimov/CIA Front

2009-03-24T06:34:00.000-07:00

I have been asked to provide more proof that the Sufi Muslim Council is funded by the Karimov government and the CIA. Well, to some extent you have to take my word that as British Ambassador in Uzbekistan I had my informers and sources. But let me give you some strong supporting evidence.

The Head of the Sufi Muslim Council is Sheikh Kabbani. That is not entirely acknowledged, but is pretty clear from the SMC website.
http://www.sufimuslimcouncil.org/cs.php

Kabbani is also the head of the self-styled and CIA backed Islamic Supreme Council of America, a body which devotes much of its energy to propagandising for Karimov.
http://www.islamicsupremecouncil.org/bin/site/wrappers/uzbekistan.html

Fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith, like praying five times a day, possessing a Koran at home or fasting at Ramadan, will bring you to the attention of the Uzbek security services as an "extremist". Ironically religous worship is banned in the Mosque pictured in the website! There are some eleven thousand people in prison for Islamic religous observance outside the strictly controlled and limited state Mosques. They are subject to the most vile torture and frequently killed. Yet Kabbani has made numerous evidence submissions to bodies including the UN and OSCE, denying that there is any religious persecution in Uzbekistan.

The Karimov regime is strongly pro-Israel. The Israelis run Karimov's personal security. Interestingly, Sheikh Kabbani belongs to a tiny Lebanese Muslim faction aligned to Israel and the Christian Falangists, and has been the envoy for Karimov's dealings with Israel. This article in the Jewish Daily Forward is interesting.
http://www.forward.com/articles/3544/

Now this Karimov organisation is pro-actively promoted by New Labour, and pimped by Sky News, as the way forward for British Muslims.

link: http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/03/sufi_muslim_cou.html

UK pro Zionist Israel Lobby

2009-03-03T09:03:00.000-08:00

Board of Deputies of British Jews

"The London Committee of Deputies of British Jews, which is now known as the Board of Deputies of British Jews, was established in 1760 when seven Deputies were appointed by the elders of the Spanish and Portuguese Congregations to form a standing committee to pay homage to George III on his accession to the throne.

"What began as a small body focused on the capital is now an institution of international standing. At its core remain the founding principles; the Board of Deputies retains the privilege of personal approach to the Sovereign on state occasions (most recently on the occasion of the Golden Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II); it continues an active interest in the lives of fellow Jews abroad; it seeks to protect, to promote and to represent UK Jewry."

British Israel Communications and Research Centre

BICOM's objective is to create "a more supportive environment for Israel in the UK. To achieve this objective BICOM performs the following activities:

* Operating a fully functioning media centre.
* Providing real-time briefings and high quality in-depth research
* Publishing daily and weekly briefings on media coverage of Israel with analysis.
* Organising and delivering visitor programmes for key politicians, academics and journalists.

Jewish Agency for Israel

The Jewish Agency "is a global partnership committed to the Jewish future that stands on a history-making track record. Together with the United Jewish Communities (UJC) in North America, and Keren Hayesod - United Israel Appeal around the world, our partnership has brought 3 million people to Israel; we have built a nation. Not by the daring acts of a few, but by the power of our collective commitment and action. And together, we can meet the challenges of today - and our aspirations for the future."

Jewish National Fund

"Since its founding in 1901, Jewish National Fund has been a vital part of Zionist history, achieving its goal of purchasing the land that would become the State of Israel, helping to develop that land into a thriving nation, and protecting Israel's environment.

"Over the past century, the JNF family has planted over 240 million trees, built over 180 dams and reservoirs, developed over 250,000 acres of land, created more than 1,000 parks throughout Israel and educated students around the world about Israel and the environment. Through the support of donors around the world, the JNF family was able to ensure that Israel was the only nation in the world to end the 20th century with more trees than it had at the beginning. In addition, over the past decade, JNF has increased its water resources to furnish water to more than 1.2 million Israelis.

"As a global environmental leader focusing on Israel, JNF is committed to the United Nations Millenium Developmental Goals of 2015 and its partnerships with Israel’s neighbors, improving the quality of life for all who live in the Middle East."

United Jewish Israel Appeal

Our Mission is to secure the future of the Jewish People. We pursue this mission by mobilising the UK Jewish community's support for:

* the Rescue of Jews in need throughout the world, and their absorption into Israel.
* the Renewal of Jewish life in Britain, and of our partnership with Israel

The Union of Jewish Students

The Union of Jewish Students is the only cross communal body, dedicated to the provision of meaningful Jewish experiences to Jewish students from all denominations and political views, as well as defending the rights of Jewish students on campus. UJS offers a wide range of opportunities in political, educational, cultural and leadership roles, empowering students to take up positions of responsibility, to advantage themselves and those around them.

British WIZO

Our mission is to help support and strengthen families in Israel

Our vision is that secure, fulfilled and useful citizens should emerge from nurturing, self-sufficient and supportive families. As the largest Jewish women's network in Great Britain and Ireland we pursue these goals by involving our members, through education and fundraising, in support of vital social welfare projects in Israel.

Zionist Federation

* Its function is to support, co-ordinate and facilitate the work of all its affiliates nationwide, and to continue its commitment to the Zionist youth movements.
* The Zionist Federation aims to encourage the participation of Jews in Zionist activities including education, culture, Hebrew language and Israel information, underpinned by our belief that the main goal of Zionism is Aliyah.
* The Zionist Federation is an umbrella organisation encompassing most of the Zionist organizations and individuals in the country and, as such, represents the Zionist movement in the United Kingdom.

Zionist Youth Council

To represent the Zionist Youth movements within and without the Jewish community.
To run joint campaigns on issues of common interest and concern.

Anglo-Israel Association

To support educational programmes enabling the people of both countries to deepen their
understanding of each other.
To promote a wider understanding of Israel in the UK.
To foster goodwill between the two countries.

While many of the Jewish organisations in the UK are committed to links with Israel over a variety of fields, only the AIA enjoys broad public and political backing from Jews, non-Jews and political parties alike. This breadth of support gives the Association a distinctive and objective standing. Chairman of the Executive is Sir Andrew Burns KCMG. The Israel Ambassador traditionally serves as Hon. President.

Israeli Business Club London

the IBC, which operates as a members' club, includes more than 200 members, and is growing monthly with the steady flow of new business minded Israelis who want to take advantage of what the club can offer. We work in full co-operation with the Embassy of Israel in London and keep a close relationship with the different Jewish organizations, such as the United Jewish Israel Appeal (UJIA), Spiro Ark, The British Israel Chamber of Commerce (BICC), JNF, etc. Only two similar clubs exist outside Israel, one in L.A. and the other in Geneva.

The IBC activities are held in Hebrew and include lectures on a variety of subjects, inviting politicians, businessman, professors and other professional experts to share their view with the Club members. The IBC also holds a variety of cultural events and take part in helping many Israeli organizations

Mizrachi

Mizrachi connects the community to Israel. Through a range of innovative and educational programmes, we are the UK’s leading framework for religious Zionism. Founded in 1902 our goal is to strengthen Jewish identity and support Israel where it is most needed.

Poale Zion (Workers of Zion) Party

To maintain promote Labour Zionism as the movement for self-determination of the Jewish people within the state of Israel.
To work for democratic socialism in Britain and Israel.
To maintain Jewish identity and to support the rights of Jews everywhere to lead full lives as equal citizens.
To apply Jewish ethical principles to create a society based on social justices and a sustainable environment.
To fight antisemitism, racism and all forms discrimination and racial hatred; to oppose the activities of fascist, racist and anti-Semitic groups.
To promote the importance of Israel in Jewish life and its development on the basis of freedom, social justice and equality for all its citizens.
To work for international peace and cooperation. To support economic and social development for all peoples of the Middle East.
To work with other organisations affiliated to the Labour Party in Britain and co-operate with other European Socialist Parties and members of the Socialist International.

Open Society Institute

2009-03-03T07:46:00.000-08:00

The Open Society Institute in New York, a 501(c)(3) organization, and international offices of the Open Society Institute, such as the one in Budapest, "provide administrative, financial, and technical support to the Soros foundations and also operate OSI initiatives, which address specific issues on a regional or network-wide basis, and other independent programs.OSI in New York is also the home of a series of programs that focus principally on the United States. At OSI-Brussels and OSI-Paris, much of the work involves establishing partnerships with other international donor organizations and government aid programs."

In the U.S. capital, the OSI Washington Office engages in public education on a range of domestic and international issues, including criminal and civil justice reform, women's rights, U.S. policy in Colombia, and Central Eurasia. The Open Society Policy Center, a separate organization that is incorporated as a 501(c)nonprofit, undertakes lobbying efforts on these and other public policy issues."

In his January 1998 article, "Toward a Global Open Society" published in The Atlantic magazine, George Soros writes:

"We do live in a global economy. But it is important to be clear about what we mean by that. A global economy is characterized not only by the free movement of goods and services but, more important, by the free movement of ideas and of capital. This applies to direct investments and to financial transactions. Though both have been gaining in importance since the end of the Second World War, the globalization of financial markets in particular has accelerated in recent years to the point where movements in exchange rates, interest rates, and stock prices in various countries are intimately interconnected. In this respect the character of the financial markets has changed out of all recognition during the forty years that I have been involved in them. So the global economy should really be thought of as the global capitalist system."

"Global integration has brought tremendous benefits: the benefits of the international division of labor ... But global capitalism is not without its problems, and we need to understand these better if we want the system to survive. By focusing on the problems I'm not trying to belittle the benefits that globalization has brought ... The benefits of the present global capitalist system, I believe, can be sustained only by deliberate and persistent efforts to correct and contain the system's deficiencies. That is where I am at loggerheads with laissez-faire ideology, which contends that free markets are self-sustaining and market excesses will correct themselves, provided that governments or regulators don't interfere with the self-correcting mechanism."

"Our global society contains many different customs, traditions, and religions; where can it find the shared values that would hold it together?"

"WHAT is the open society? ... The principles of the open society are admirably put forth in the Declaration of Independence. But the Declaration states, 'We hold these truths to be self-evident,' whereas the principles of the open society are anything but self-evident; they need to be established by convincing arguments."

"The goal of the Soros foundations network throughout the world is to transform closed societies into open ones and to protect and expand the values of existing open societies. The concept of open society is, at its most fundamental level, based on the recognition that people act on imperfect knowledge and that no one is in possession of the ultimate truth. In practice, an open society is characterized by the rule of law; respect for human rights, minorities, and minority opinions; democratically elected governments; a market economy in which business and government are separate; and a thriving civil society."

"During most of the 1990s, the Soros foundations network developed in the former Soviet empire, helping countries in transition from authoritarian rule build open, democratic societies. Over the past several years, we have expanded our geographical horizons to other parts of the world. Together with partners that share our principles and goals, the network is laying the foundation for a truly global alliance for open society."

"The goal of the Agency (CIA) was exactly the same as that of the Open Society Fund: to dismantle socialism. In South Africa, the CIA sought out dissidents who were anticommunist. In Hungary, Poland and the USSR, the CIA, with overt intervention from the National Endowment for Democracy, the AFL-CIO, USAID and other institutions, supported and organized anticommunists, the very type of individuals recruited by Soros' Open Society Fund. The CIA would have called them "assets."

As Soros said, "In each country I identified a group of people - some leading personalities, others less well known - who share my belief..." Soros' Open Society organized conferences with anticommunist Czechs, Serbs, Romanians, Hungarians, Croatians, Bosnians, Kosovars. His ever-expanding influence gave rise to suspicions that he was operating as part of the U.S. intelligence complex. In 1989, the Washington Post reported charges first made in 1987 by the Chinese government officials that Soros' Fund for the Reform and Opening of China had CIA connections."

"The Open Society Institute's initiatives address specific issue areas on a regional or network-wide basis around the world. Most of the initiatives are administered by OSI in New York or OSI-Budapest and implemented in cooperation with Soros foundations in various countries."

"The nearly 20 OSI initiatives cover a range of activities aimed at building free and open societies, including the strengthening of civil society; economic reform; education at all levels; human rights; legal reform and public administration; media and communications; public health; and arts and culture. OSI in New York also operates special initiatives such as the Central Eurasia Project, the Burma Project/Southeast Asia Initiative, and the European Union Accession Monitoring Program."

And Yet:

Soros said the Bush administration "violated human rights and damaged American security by invading Iraq and deposing the regime of Saddam Hussein. 'The idea that we can impose our will on the world is really just the wrong idea,'" he said, vowing "to do everything in his power to prevent Bush from winning re-election.

In a March 14, 2003, Op-Ed, Soros likened the Bush administration's "pursuit of American supremacy" to "a boom-bust process or bubble in the stock market." Both, he argued, "have a solid basis in reality but reality is distorted by misconception. In this case, the dominant position of the US is the reality, the pursuit of supremacy the misconception. Reality can reinforce the misconception but eventually the gap between reality and its false interpretation becomes unsustainable. During the self-reinforcing phase, the misconception may be tested and reinforced. This widens the gap leading to an eventual reversal. The later it comes, the more devastating the consequences."

In his book The Bubble of American Supremacy: Correcting the Misuse of American Power, Soros writes that "the Bush administration's foreign policy plans come from the same sort of 'bubble' psychology afflicting U.S. markets in the late 1990s. He says they have used a real fact, overwhelming military supremacy of the United States, to create a deluded worldview that might makes right and 'you're either with us or against us,' in the same way the recent boom used a real fact, the growth in technology, to lead to a delusion, the 'new economy.'"

Soros Foundation

2009-03-03T06:42:00.000-08:00

A Soros Foundation is one of a network of national foundations, mostly in Central and Eastern Europe, which fund volunteer socio-political activity, created by George Soros, international financier and self-proclaimed philanthropist, and coordinated since early 1994 by a management team called the Open Society Institute.

Soros foundations are autonomous institutions established in particular countries or regions. The priorities and specific activities of each Soros foundation are determined by a local board of directors and staff in consultation with George Soros and OSI boards and advisers. In addition to support from the Open Society Institute, many of the foundations receive funding from other sources.

The apparent goal of the Soros Foundation is to promote the activities of western institutions such as the National Endowment For Democracy that was set in 1983 by the then US President Ronald Reagan to promote free market pro western style democracies and viewpoints.

It is worth noting that 26 US Congressmen, merchants and leading political figures are among the Board of Directors of the Soros Foundation.

In view of the strategic geo-political significance of Caucasus and Central Asia, the Soros Foundation has become active in most of these states in the interests of international free markets. Over the recent years the Soros Foundation has made inroads in all Central Asian states to pave the way for creating influential organisations in these regions.

Certain countries like Turkmenistan have restricted its activities. The Soros Foundation is however very active in Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrghyzstan, that recently saw a change of government.

Central Asian states have become rather sensitive to the presence of the Soros Foundation , with political experts in Central Asia and Russia raising the probability of the spread of the undermining of governments on the patter of the developments in Georgia that were hailed by the western media as the Velvet Revolution.

Some believe these so-called revolutions are have been co ordinated by the US as part of its strategy to take control of the former Soviet States.

Its activities came further into limelight after the November 2003 developments in Georgia, which the media calls the Velvet Revolution.

On November 2, 2003 Georgia witnessed parliamentary elections, but the opponents of President Eduard Shevardnadze led by Michael Saakashvili alleged election fraud and after holding an organized demonstrations on November 22 they seized the parliament and forced the government to resign.

Shevardnadze after resignation disclosed the role of the Soros Foundation in the November 2003 incidents of Georgia. He said the billionaire, George Soros, injected several million dollars to fuel the November 2003 incidents.

He said he was not sure which countries supported the riots against him, but he could say with certainty that international groups such as the Soros Foundation were the main financial backers of his opponents.

Shevardnadze said: "The goal of Soros Foundation was to create conditions similar to those in Yugoslavia, a country where protestors overthrew Slobodan Milosevic."

He said: "We wonder how international institutes interfere in the internal affairs of sovereign independent countries."

Shevardnadze also castigated the US ambassador to Georgia, Richard Miles, for intensifying the riots.

A year prior to the eruption of crisis in Georgia, the US embassy in cooperation with the Soros Foundation had allegedly selected a group of supposed students and sent them to Siberia for training by CIA and Pentagon agents for stirring up riots. Two months before November 2003, this batch returned to Georgia and began training one thousand more people.

After the so-called Velvet Revolution in Georgia, Soros announced:

"I am confident with the developments in Georgia and I have funded millions of dollars for creating similar changes in Central Asian states and the other states of the Caucasus.My Charity Foundation supports reforms in all of these countries.”

Revolutions by common rules

Similarity of conditions and scenarios of the latest color revolutions (and lebanons cedar revolution) is striking indeed. Pre-election indoctrination of young voters (they went on to become the locomotive force of the revolutions afterwards) was carried out and financed everywhere by organizations like Freedom House, International Republican Institute, Soros' Open Society Institute. Moreover, it turned out that executives of these organizations moved from one country to another as "instructors of the revolution".

Soros Foundation

National divisions of the Soros Foundation operate in over 30 countries including Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Ukraine.

George Soros himself admitted assistance to "democratic processes" in these countries.

Georgia

Soros Foundation Open Society - Georgia was established in 1994. Grants to various projects have been available since 1996. They have amounted to almost $20 million since. The Foundation's annual budget for grants amounts to approximately $3 million .

Kyrgyzstan

Soros-Kyrgyzstan Foundation was established in 1993. To quote from its website, "the Foundation backs civic initiatives in the spheres of support of the media, health care, culture, education, science, law, and economy."

Ukraine

Revival International Foundation (Soros Foundation - Ukraine) was established in 1990. Official figures indicate that its expenses in 2004 (by December 15) amounted to $5,406,465.

Internews International

This is an international organization that backs media projects (headquarters in Paris, France). It makes an emphasis on support (personnel teaching included) and development of nongovernment electronic media outlets. Internews International has divisions in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus (closed by the authorities in 2003), Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Ukraine. There is no information on their financial activities in open sources.

Georgia

Internews - Georgia was established in 1995. The organization actively helps regional radio broadcasters and TV stations. To quote insiders, "Internews Georgia was established to help appearance of the independent media as the means of freedom of speech." Soros' Open Society - Georgia is one of its major partners.

Kyrgyzstan

Established in 1995, Internews - Kyrgyzstan supports nongovernment media outlets, arranges seminars for correspondents, provides law support, and organizes a TV program exchange. It has the central office in Bishkek and a bureau in Osh. Soros - Kyrgyzstan is a major partner.

Ukraine

Internews - Ukraine was established in 1993 to facilitate development of independent electronic media outlets. Its partners are the US Agency of International Development and Revival International Foundation.

Soros helped bankroll the 1989 coup d'etat that catapulted dissident playwright Vaclav Havel to the presidency of the Czech Republic. The relatively bloodless uprising acquired the nickname "Velvet Revolution."

To this day, people use the term "velvet revolution" to denote Soros-sponsored coups.

Defenders of Soros paint his velvet putsches as benevolent, arguing that Soros has freed millions from tin-pot despots such as Slobodan Milosevic. Maybe so.

How exactly does one perpetrate a velvet revolution anyway? The seven-step strategy Soros used against Milosevic provides an instructive blueprint.

Step 1: Form a Shadow Government

Step 2: Control the Air Waves

Step 3: Economic destabilisation of the state through economic sanctions and civil disobedience.

Step 4: Sow Unrest

Step 5: Provoke an Election Crisis

Step 6: Take the Streets in rallies or tent cities.

Step 7: Outlast Your Opponent

The Rose Revolution and the Rise of Saakashvilli

Funding from Soros-related organizations A significant source of funding for the Rose Revolution was the network of foundations and NGOs associated with George Soros. The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies reports the case of a former Georgian parliamentarian who alleges that in the three months prior to the Rose Revolution, "Soros spent $42 million ramping-up for the overthrow of Shevardnadze." Speaking in Tblisi in June of 2005, Soros said, "I'm very pleased and proud of the work of the foundation in preparing Georgian society for what became a Rose Revolution, but the role of the foundation and my personal has been greatly exaggerated."

Among the personalities who worked for Soros' organizations who later assumed positions in the Georgian government are:

Alexander Lomaia, Secretary of the Georgian Security Council and former Minister of Education and Science, is a former Executive Director of the Open Society Georgia Foundation (Soros Foundation,) overseeing a staff of 50 and a budget of $2,500,000.

David Darchiashvili, presently the chairman of the Committee for Eurointegration in the Georgian parliament, is also a former Executive Director of the Open Society Georgia Foundation.

Former Georgian Foreign Minister Salomé Zourabichvili wrote:

These institutions were the cradle of democratization, notably the Soros Foundation … all the NGO’s which gravitate around the Soros Foundation undeniably carried the revolution. However, one cannot end one’s analysis with the revolution and one clearly sees that, afterwards, the Soros Foundation and the NGOs were integrated into power.

– Salomé Zourabichvili, Herodote (magazine of the French Institute for Geopolitics, April, 2008

The Orange Revolution in Ukraine

Activists in each of these movements were funded and trained in tactics of political organization and nonviolent resistance by a coalition of Western pollsters and professional consultants funded by a range of Western government and non-government agencies.

According to The Guardian, these include the U.S. State Department and USAID along with the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, the International Republican Institute, the Bilderberg Group, the NGO Freedom House and George Soros's Open Society Institute.

The National Endowment for Democracy, a foundation supported by the U.S. government, has supported non-governmental democracy-building efforts in Ukraine since 1988.

Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism

2008-10-27T13:59:00.000-07:00

Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (2005; ISBN 1-4000-6317-5) is Robert Pape's analysis of suicide terrorism from a strategic, social, and psychological point of view. It is based on a database he has compiled at the University of Chicago, where he directs the Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism. The book's conclusions are based on data from 315 suicide terrorism campaigns around the world from 1980 through 2003 and 462 individual suicide terrorists.

Introduction

The Growing Threat

Pape claims to have compiled the world’s first “database of every suicide bombing and attack around the globe from 1980 through 2003 — 315 attacks in all” . “The data show that there is little connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism, or any one of the world’s religions. . . . Rather, what nearly all suicide terrorist attacks have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland” . It is important that Americans understand this growing phenomenon .

Explaining Suicide Terrorism

Caveat: the book's conclusions do not hold for terrorism in general .

Pape distinguishes among demonstrative terrorism, which seeks publicity, destructive terrorism, which seeks to exert coercion through the threat of injury and death as well as to mobilize support, and suicide terrorism, which involves an attacker’s actually killing himself or herself along with others, generally as part of a campaign .

Three historical episodes are introduced for purposes of comparison: the ancient Jewish Zealots , the 11th-12th-century Ismaili Assassins , and the Japanese kamikazes . There was no suicide terrorism from 1945 to 1980 .

Modern suicide terrorism began in Lebanon in the 1980s , followed by cases involving the Tamil Tigers (July 1990), Israel (1994), Persian Gulf (1995), Turkey (1996), Chechnya (2000), Kashmir (2000), and the U.S. (2001) .

Five campaigns were still ongoing in early 2004, when Dying to Win was being written . Traditional explanations focus on individual motives, but fail to explain the specificity of suicide terrorism . Economic explanation of this phenomenon yields “poor” results . Explanation of suicide terrorism as a form of competition between radical groups is dubious .

Pape proposes an alternative explanation of the “causal logic of suicide terrorism”: at the strategic level, suicide terrorism exerts coercive power against democratic states to cease occupation of territory terrorists consider homeland, while at the social level it depends on mass support and at the individual level it is motivated by altruism . “The bottom line, then, is that suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation” .

A Strategy for Weak Actors

The willingness of an attacker to die has strategic value (27-29). As a weapon of weak groups incapable of “denial” as a “coercive strategy,” suicide terrorism relies on punishment and, especially, “the expectation of future damage,” which provides coercive leverage (29-33).

[edit] Ch. 4: Targeting Democracies

Pape claims that his is the first complete analysis of suicide terrorism, as such revealing that not religion but “to compel democracies to withdraw military forces from the terrorists’ national homeland” is its key . Patterns of timing , nationalist goals , and the targeting of democracies reveal its logical, not irrational, nature. “At bottom, suicide terrorism is a strategy for national liberation from foreign military occupation by a democratic state” . Foreign occupation is defined in terms of control of territory (not military occupation alone) . The targets selected by suicide terrorists suggests nationalist, not religious, aims . Hamas and Al-Qaeda are analyzed in some detail. In general, the harshness of occupation does not strongly correlate with suicide terrorism .

Learning Terrorism Pays

Terrorists are predisposed to attribute success to their technique whenever plausible . Pape claims that “recent suicide terrorist campaigns . . . are associated with gains for the terrorists’ political causes about half the time” . Hamas’s success is difficult to evaluate, but Hamas spokespersons express belief in their own success . Terrorists learn from each other; the spread of the method is therefore neither irrational nor surprising . But suicide terrorism has failed “to compel target democracies to abandon goals central to national wealth or security” .

Occupation and Religious Difference

“[T]he taproot of suicide terrorism is nationalism” not religion . It is “an extreme strategy for national liberation” . This explains how the local community can be persuaded to re-define acts of suicide and murder as acts of martyrdom on behalf of the community . Pape proposes a nationalist theory of suicide terrorism, seen from the point of view of terrorists. He analyzes the notions of occupation , homeland , identity , religious difference as a contributor to a sense of “alien” occupation , foreign occupation reverses the relative importance of religion and language , and the widespread perception of the method as a “last resort” (. A statistical demonstration leads to the conclusion that a “linear” rather than “self-reinforcing spiral” explanation of suicide terrorism is best . However, different future developments of the phenomenon of suicide terrorism are very possible, and more study of the role of religion is needed .

Demystifying al-Qaeda

With increasing knowledge of al-Qaeda, we see that “the presence of American military forces for combat operations on the homeland territory of the suicide terrorists is stronger than Islamic fundamentalism in predicting whether individuals from that country will become al-Qaeda suicide terrorists” . “Al-Qaeda is less a transnational network of like-minded ideologues . . . than a cross-national military alliance of national liberation movements working together against what they see as a common imperial threat” . The nature of Salafism, a Sunni form of Islamic fundamentalism, is complex . Statistical analysis fails to corroborate Salafism-terrorism connection, but it does corroborate a connection to U.S. military policies in the Persian Gulf . Al-Qaeda propaganda emphasizes the “Crusader” theme, which is inherently related to occupation . Pape concludes that “the core features of al-Qaeda” are captured by his theory .

Suicide Terrorist Organizations around the Globe

Robert Pape examines other campaigns to see if the “dynamics that make religious difference important” are present in other terrorist campaigns, acknowledging the difficulty of the inquiry . He offers detailed analyses of Lebanon , Sri Lanka , the Sikhs in Punjab , and the Kurdish PKK in Turkey . His conclusion: “Religion plays a role in suicide terrorism, but mainly in the context of national resistance” and not Islam per se but “the dynamics of religious difference” are what matter .

Altruism and Terrorism

Pape presents a Durkheimian analysis of suicide . “Many acts of suicide terrorism are a murderous form of what Durkheim calls altruistic suicide” . Analytical difficulties are acknowledged . Pape uses suicide rates in general as points of comparison . Team suicide, which is frequent in suicide terrorism, is an indicator of altruistic suicide, he argues . Altruistic suicide is a socially constructed phenomenon : e.g. Hezbollah in Lebanon , Hamas , Tamil Tigers ; al-Qaeda . The altruistic nature of suicide terrorism suggests the number of potential terrorists is large, that suicide terrorism is capable of growing in attractiveness and appeal, and that any attempt at profiling will miss a substantial number of potential suicide terrorists .

The Demographic Profile of Suicide Terrorists

“In general, suicide attackers are rarely socially isolated, clinically insane, or economically destitute individuals, but are most often educated, socially integrated, and highly capable people who could be expected to have a good future” . Pape discusses problems of data-gathering (. He establishes 462 individuals in his “universe” of suicide terrorists available for analytical purposes . Hezbollah suicide bombers in the period 1982-1986 were 71% Communist/Socialist, 21% Islamist, 8% Christian . In general, suicide terrorists are in their early 20s . Females are fewer in Islamist groups: “Islamist fundamentalism may actually reduce the number of suicide terrorists by discouraging certain categories of individuals” . Female suicide terrorists tend to be older than male . There is no documented mental illness in any case of suicide terrorism, though there are 16 cases of personal trauma (e.g. the loss of a loved one) . Arab suicide terrorists are in general better educated than average and are from the working or middle classes . “[T]hey resemble the kind of politically conscious individuals who might join a grassroots movement more than they do wayward adolescents or religious fanatics” .

Portraits of Three Suicide Terrorists

Earlier work has tended to emphasize suicide terrorists’ irrationality, but this generalization fit 1980s data better than more recent data . Pape looks at three individual cases: Mohammed Atta ; Dhanu, a young woman from Jaffna, “the most famous Tamil Tiger suicide bomber” ; and Saeed Hotari, of Hamas .
A New Strategy for Victory

Though “we” cannot leave the Middle East altogether, Pape asserts, a “strategy for victory” is available . U.S. should define victory as the separate objectives of “defeating the current pool of terrorists” and preventing a new generation from arising . He rejects Frum-Perle view that the root of the problem is in Islam . “Rather, the taproot is American military policy” . The notion that Islamic fundamentalism is bent on world domination is “pure fantasy” . An attempt by the West to force Muslim societies to transform “is likely to dramatically increase the threat we face” . He calls for a policy of “‘off-shore’ balancing”: establishing local alliances while maintaining the capacity for rapid deployment of military forces .

logic of suicide terrorism
Conversation with History

Advice from the Quilliam Foundation, Children and "Westophobia"

2008-10-26T12:10:00.000-07:00

The Quilliam Foundation is a counter-extremism think tank created by former activists of radical Islamist organisations. Its founders are familiar with the mindset and methods of extremist groups.

The following is intended to help teachers differentiate behaviours that should not be a cause for concern and behaviours that could indicate a young person is being influenced by extremists and developing a mindset that could lead them to accept and undertake violent acts.

Political ideology

— use of political propaganda that describes political systems and countries as 'Kufr' or anti-Islamic, and expressing the need to replace them with 'The Islamic system', or Caliphate; or citing movements such as Hizb ut-Tahrir may suggest a young person is becoming influenced by extremist ideologies and be early signs that a certain mindset is being developed. There is a difference between young people who are extremists and those who are rebellious teenagers. Rebellious teenagers identify with rebellious personalities and icons. Superficial statements supporting Al Qaida and Osama Bin Laden or the expression of an anti-American sentiment would not necessarily be indicators of extremism.

Suspended morality

— development of a mindset that distorts Islam and requires the young person to suspend all independent views of morality by focusing on scripture and interpreting scripture alone, without any external guidance to what is correct and incorrect behaviour. When a young person is programmed with this dangerous way of thinking they are then susceptible to being programmed into believing that violence is a legitimate means of achieving political goals.

Conspiratorial mindset and 'westophobia'

— this refers to a tendency to view the West in general as the source of all evil and troubles in the world. This involves accepting, in most cases without a shred of evidence, bizarre conspiracy theories that absolve the Muslim world of any fault, e.g. 7/7 was an inside job. Attached to this mindset is the idea that the west is the primary cause of failures in the Muslim world resulting in anti-western sentiment.

Ultra conservative outlook

— consistently holding what can at best be described as a conservative interpretation of scripture, i.e. a literalist reading of Muslim texts without consideration for the modern world. This is only problematic in connection with the above three points

*It is important to distinguish between conservative religious traditions and political religious movements. The observing of conservative religious traditions or spiritual attachment by reciting Quran, observing Islamic dress and clothing, growing a beard, seeking religious verdicts on their behaviour or not interacting with the opposite gender is not extremism, does not reflect any political agenda or indicate any persuasion into violent acts.

It is important to note that individually these points would not be problematic; but combined would be a cause for concern that should be pursued and referred through appropriate mechanisms.

The following are suggestions for ways to engage with young people and deter them from getting drawn into extremism:

Help young people develop an understanding and respect for other faiths and an appreciation that there are many different interpretations and traditions within Islam, all of which are equally 'Islamic'. This will help to make young people more resilient to the singular, narrow-minded perspective of extremists who contend there is only one Islamically acceptable world view.

Encourage young people to have personal contact and relationships with others from different faiths or backgrounds; this can help prevent the 'dehumanising' of other peoples and cultures. Give young people the opportunity to understand different religious and lifestyle perspectives in order to encourage empathy. For example, having discussions of ethical or moral issues such as abortion or drinking alcohol in a healthy and vibrant social development setting — such as a school RE or PSHE class — can be a barrier to demonising others and having a narrow-minded perspective based on a certain interpretation of scripture.

Give young people access to positive religious guidance and role models.

Expose young people to the real life experiences of those who have been involved in Islamist extremism and now reject such approaches to deter them from taking this path. - link

It is troubling that former extremists are seen as the only people who know how to deal with extremism.

Just because you have been an inmate of a mental hospital does not mean you are an expert in clinical psychology however former extremists are being lionised because they confirm the basic tabloid prejudice that violence is a natural part of being a Muslim.

So whose ignorance is being vindicated? Certainly the potential of an open, unapologetic belief in Islam as a valuable part of British society is not on the agenda.

At every stage of dealing with extremism, the government has made the wrong choice.

First, only British-trained imams were to be promoted, though how and what they were trained in was not examined.

Then there were to be road shows at which religious scholars selected for their moderation and tractability, rather than an understanding of the problems of young British Muslims, would explain the error of extremist ways.

Then Sufism was touted as the solution, and the Sufi Muslim Council was created as the voice of moderation.

Now the way forward is with sinners who were once mouthpieces for jihadi propaganda and advocated the violent rejection of all things western.

The thing nobody has suggested is engaging the silenced and diverse majority of Muslim communities.

If the debate of the mainstream is ignored, there is nowhere for those rescued from extremism to go. The silent majority is supposed to be groomed to embrace quietism - which explains why Sufi mysticism is in vogue - and, most important, to be put off politics for life.

Islam is not an ideology, but it is no more devoid of politics than Christianity. Far from "obeying" this government, Muslims are duty-bound to challenge it. Extremism is not only a religious issue; it is also a product of our politics. And tackling extremism requires changing politics as much as changing religious outlook.

Within the British Muslim community there are pockets of underachievement, under-employment and high unemployment. There are problems of education, health and social provision. All are festering ground for extremism; all are political facts. Then there are problems, which too few Muslims are prepared to acknowledge, that they share with sections of white British society: problems of family disintegration and drugs, of an existence devoid of opportunities to share in consumer culture. An escape from this existence is gang membership and drug culture, a kind of glorying in the indignity of one's existence. These, too, are political problems.

Most of all, British foreign policy has a direct bearing on nurturing extremism. The occupation of Iraq, the by products of the "war on terror", the perpetual suffering of the Palestinians are not amenable to deprogramming techniques.

So we don't need neo con ex-extremists to define what extremism is about. They are part of the problem, not the solution.

We do need a viable politics that tackles the root cause of extremism. Whatever the joy in heaven, we cannot allow former lunatics to take over the asylum. - link

UN Observer: Group demands end to israeli infiltration of British Parliament

2008-10-01T16:07:00.000-07:00

The following is a press release followed by a letter from the group to the British Committee on Standards in Public Life urging them to uphold the Seven Principles of Public Life and banish Friends of Israel advocates from Parliament.

WILL NOBODY BRING CHRISTMAS CHEER TO BESIEGED AND STARVING GAZA?

Group urges Standards Committee to stamp out Israeli influence that paralyses heart of British government

As the twenty-one month long siege of Gaza becomes a death sentence for yet more civilians, a group in the UK with experience of the Occupied Territories is urging the Committee on Standards in Public Life to examine whether there is undue Israeli influence at the heart of British government.

The blockade stops vital medical supplies going in and prevents chronically sick patients (including children) transferring to proper hospital treatment outside Gaza. Israel’s deep penetration of our political system, says the group, is preventing Britain from taking a principled stand on Middle East matters, including the long catalogue of grotesque violations of Palestinian human rights, of which the Gaza siege is only the latest example. Conservative Friends of Israel, for example, claim the support of 80 percent of Tory MPs.

Signatories to the letter include Mona Baker, Karl Sabbagh, Derek Summerfield and Felicity Arbuthnot.

Spokesman for the group is David Halpin, a trauma surgeon, who has spent all of the last five years of his retirement standing with the Palestinians for Justice. He has seen the destruction of lives, limbs, livings and hope at first hand. He advised the Hamas government how they should investigate the use of illegal weapons by Israel. In March, he lead a team of seven UK doctors into Gaza. The Dove and Dolphin Medical Centre was opened then. This is named after the symbolic voyage he led five years ago from which the charity was named... www.doveanddolphin.co.uk

He says: "It is insufficient that humans should weep beneath the crucifixion of the Palestine people in 2007 AD. They must halt it forthwith."

Businessman Stuart Littlewood, who was in Gaza last month, remarked: "When you urge the British government to act for justice you are blocked at every turn by Friends of Israel in high places. No-one, it seems, is prepared to break the siege and land humanitarian supplies on Gaza's beach. What happened to our Christmas spirit?"

Felicity Arbuthnot campaigned for many years in Iraq. She says: "The horrors inflicted on Gaza and Iraq and threatened elsewhere in the Middle East are encapsulated for me by a young doctor. She had the skills but was denied the facilities and medications so she watched helplessly as her young patients died. 'There is a hole where my heart should be,' she said. In the name of our common humanity, as Eid, the Jewish Festival of Light and Christmas are celebrated, ENOUGH!"

The group invites readers to join them in pressing the Standards Committee to uphold the seven Principles of Public Life and banish lobby groups acting on behalf of foreign military regimes. Write to:
Mr Peter Ramsden
Secretary to the Committee
Committee on Standards in Public Life
35 Great Smith Street
London SW1P 3BQ
email: public@standards.x.gsi.gov.uk

-ends-
More information from....
David Halpin, 01364 661115
Stuart Littlewood, 01760 755349
Felicity Arbuthnot, 0208 985 0058

Castle Acre
Norfolk

19 December 2007

public@standards.x.gsi.gov.uk

Mr Peter Ramsden
Secretary to the Committee
Committee on Standards in Public Life
35 Great Smith Street
London SW1P 3BQ

Dear Mr Ramsden,

How the Israel Lobby undermines the Principles of Standards in Public Life – a Matter for Investigation

Those signing this letter know the Occupied Territories and in particular Gaza, and are deeply concerned about the appalling conditions forced on the civilian population by the Israeli blockade and sanctions imposed by Britain and the EU.

Devastating blockade

This Christmas innocent Gazans are starving. Critically ill cancer and renal failure patients die an agonising death, unable to receive treatment because Israel blocks vital drugs and other medical supplies, including dialysis machine spares, and prevents the sick crossing the border for proper hospital care. New-born babies and those just months old are dying too, denied treatment. The United Nations Declaration of the Right of the Child lies buried under the sands of Gaza.

Israel has even imposed a fishing ban on the 3000 licensed fishermen, robbing them of their livelihood and the population of a proper diet. Boats ignoring the ban are fired on. Are those not Palestinian territorial waters? Have Palestinians no rights under the UN Law of the Sea Conventions?

The Gaza siege is the latest in a very long catalogue of Israeli violations of Palestinian rights. It has been allowed to develop into a full-blown humanitarian crisis and Britain, to its shame, has a hand in it. Furthermore it is a racist outrage that Christians and Muslims are together made to suffer so horribly at the hands of the Israeli state.

A letter was delivered through Henry Bellingham MP to the Foreign Office minister responsible for the Middle East, Kim Howells, suggesting (as many others have done before, including charities such as War on Want) that Britain consider suspending the EU-Israel Association Agreement. The rules provide for this if Israel’s conduct towards its neighbours falls short of what is required under the UN Charter and other obligations.

On 11 October Mr Howells replied: “We consider that the Association Agreement is a key tool for the EU to both enhance co-operation with Israel but also to raise any concerns. We do not support suspension of that Agreement, which would limit how we could put our viewpoint across to the Israeli government.”

When the EU demanded an end to the emergency in Gaza and also the military occupation of the West Bank, Israel responded with an even tighter lockdown and another letter was sent to Mr Howells. He responded on 30 November saying: “The Government does not support calls for the suspension of the EU/Israel Association Agreement. The UK…has strong relationships with Israel on a number of fronts… We do not consider it would be in the best interests of the UK, or the European Union, to end this relationship.”

Mr Howells is a former chairman of Labour Friends of Israel. His shadow is a member of Conservative Friends of Israel.

The minister has subsequently been asked to explain what "viewpoint" Her Majesty’s Government has put to the Israeli government regarding the medieval-style siege of Gaza and the collective punishment of already impoverished civilians in flagrant breach of the UN Charter and every conceivable code of conduct.

What action have he and his Department taken to alleviate the suffering in this former British mandate? What is the status of the coastal waters off Gaza? How can Israel maintain a sea blockade lawfully and deny Gazan fishermen their livelihood?

How does continuing the Association Agreement in these cruel circumstances "enhance co-operation", and what "concerns" have been raised with the Israeli government?

No answers to these questions have yet been received.

British MPs eating out of the Israeli government’s hand

In the meantime your Committee is aware how the lobby group, Friends of Israel, has embedded itself in the British political establishment and at the very heart of government. Its stated purpose is to promote Israel's interests in our Parliament and sway British policy.

MPs are surely not at liberty to act in the interest of a foreign military power at the expense of our own national interests, or to let foreign influence cloud their judgement. Such conduct is at odds with the second of the Seven Principles of Public Life, namely Integrity – “Holders of public office should not place themselves under any financial or other obligation to outside individuals or organisations that might seek to influence them in the performance of their official duties.”

The Friends of Israel organisation goes to great lengths to influence those in power. Indeed a good many, it seems, reach positions of power with FoI help. The political director of Conservative Friends of Israel claims that with over 2,000 members and registered supporters alongside 80 percent of the Conservative MPs, CFI has become the largest affiliated group in the party.

Its website states that the CFI "strives to support the Conservative Party at all available opportunities. In the run up to the 2005 General Election… CFI supported candidates up and down the country. As candidates are now being continuously selected for target seats, CFI has developed a special programme of weekly briefings, events with speakers and a chance to participate in delegations to Israel. CFI encourages all members to help campaign for parliamentary candidates and also for local council, London and European elections."

It also has a ‘Fast Track’ group for Conservative parliamentary candidates fighting target marginal seats at the next election. The political director himself is seeking election to Parliament. If successful where will his loyalty lie?

Senior Conservatives try to justify these activities by insisting that Israel is "a force for good in the world" and "in the battle for the values that we stand for, for democracy against theocracy, for democratic liberal values against repression - Israel's enemies are our enemies and this is a battle in which we all stand together".

Such claims do not bear examination. Israel is no western-style democracy. It is an ethnocracy with racist policies and an apartheid agenda. It is a cruel oppressor, stands in breach of numerous UN resolutions, ignores International Court of Justice rulings and continues an illegal occupation, abusing its neighbours and stealing their lands and resources. It cares little for world opinion. How could anyone [of] fair mind and knowing the situation on the ground possibly support such a regime in the name of the British people, unless unduly under its influence?

Friends of Israel campaign loudly against Palestinian ‘terrorism’ without mentioning that since the start of the second Intifada in September 2000 Israelis have been slaughtering Palestinians at the rate of 4 to 1, and when it comes to children it is nearer 10 to 1 (Israeli B’Tselem figures). They never mention the ‘Matrix of Control’ and the perverse administrative procedures imposed by the Israelis in order to restrict travel, strangle the economy, bulldoze homes, confiscate lands and press ahead with their programme of ethnic displacement.

Friends of Israel repeatedly campaign for the release of a handful of Israeli soldiers like Gilad Shalit, corporal tank gunner, but ignore the 9,000+ Palestinian civilians abducted from their homes and incarcerated, often without trial, including some 300 women and 150 children. Many have been tortured, like Luwaii Ashqar whose lower lumbar spine was probably broken during 4 days of vicious, non-stop torment – see http://www.haaretz.com:80/hasen/spages/871239.htm and prepare to be sickened.

What is the basis for Britain’s decision to outlaw elected leaders (Hamas) who rightly refuse the illegal demands of an armed occupier (Israel)? And why has there been no outcry in Britain against the unlawful and inhuman siege of Gaza?

Courted, cosseted and lied to by the Israeli state, Friends of Israel present a distorted picture to their Parliamentary colleagues and the British public. Such people cannot be relied on to make balanced policy decisions concerning the Middle East. When speaking on such matters they should at least be required to declare their interest.

It is especially disconcerting to discover that at least two members of your Committee, which is pledged to uphold the Principles of Public Life, are Friends of Israel - namely Baroness Shephard, president of Conservative Friends of Israel and Alun Michael MP, a member of Labour Friends of Israel. Your website suggests that Baroness Shephard relinquished her pro-Israel position in 2005 but the CFI website contradicts this.

‘Friendship’ misplaced

The danger of inappropriate 'friendships' with foreign regimes became even more evident last week when Tzipi Livni, Israel's foreign minister, was reported to have twice asked David Miliband, our Foreign Secretary, to scrap the law that authorises magistrates to issue arrest warrants for suspected war criminals who set foot in the UK. Avi Dichter, a former director of the Shin Bet spy service and involved in the Shehadeh assassination in 2002, in which 14 Palestianian civilians (including children) were killed by an Israeli air strike, had to cancel a trip to London for fear of being arrested.

Doron Almog, an Israeli ex-general also involved in the Shehadeh affair, narrowly avoided arrest when he landed at Heathrow in 2005. Now Israel wishes the UK to change its laws to protect alleged war criminals. How can we be sure this will not happen in the name of “enhanced co-operation”, as Mr Howells puts it.

Given that Israel’s deep penetration of our political system apparently prevents Britain from taking a principled stand on Middle East matters, including the violations of Palestinian human rights, we invite your Committee – minus those with an interest – to uphold the Principles of Public Life and consider the activities of the Friends of Israel as a matter for urgent investigation.

For truth and justice,

(Signatories)

Mona Baker, Professor of Translation Studies, BA, MA, DSc

Sally FitzHarris, MA (Oxon)

Karl Sabbagh, writer

Sara T A Wood, MA (Oxon)

Derek Summerfield, Hon Senior Lecturer, Institute of Psychiatry, King's College and Teaching Associate, Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford

David Halpin, MB, BSc, FRCS,

Stuart Littlewood, BA, MInstM

Martin Birnstingl, MS FRCS, previously senior surgeon at St Bartholomew's Hospital, London

Felicity Arbuthnot

Rich Wiles, Artist

Dr.C.J.Burns-Cox, MD, FRCP

Dr Nur Masalha, Reader in Religion and Politics and Editor of Holy Land Studies: A Multidisciplinary Journal

David Seddon, MA PhD

Robert Shearer, MB BS FRCS, Consultant Urological Surgeon (retd)

Medical Director, Royal Marsden Hospital, London 1994-2000.

James Goddard, MBE and Tricia Goddard

Sue Fanous, BSc, MA

Colin Imber, formerly Reader in Turkish Studies, University of Manchester

Mary Bedforth

(Ed. Note. Addresses in the original have been deleted for obvious reasons.)

Essential information for the Committee….

PCHR Weekly Report: Israeli Human Rights Violations
http://www.pchrgaza.org/files/W_report/English/2007/13-12-2007.htm

Walt & Mearsheimer: The Israel Lobby
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/mear01_.html

John Pilger
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18904.htm

USA’s Israel Lobby http://www.redress.cc:80/global/pjballes20070917

Jeff Halper: Israel’s Strategy for Permanent Occupation
http://www.counterpunch.org/halper11272007.html

Privatising Zionism
http://www.zmag.org:80/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=107&ItemID=1451...

Uri Avnery: Talk with Hamas Now
http://www.redress.cc/palestine/uavnery20060129

Facts about the Founding Fathers of Israel
http://www.redress.cc/palestine/skabbani20040424

40 Years of House Demolitions
http://www.icahd.org/eng/news.asp?menu=5&submenu=1&item=488

Gaza: A Call for Urgent Action
http://www.icahd.org/eng/news.asp?menu=5&submenu=1&item=483

Not Only Territory but Viability
http://www.icahd.org/eng/news.asp?menu=5&submenu=1&item=480

Matrix of Control
http://www.merip.org/mer/mer216/216_halper.html

Torment and Torture http://www.redress.cc/palestine/dhalpin20071211

Finally, a quiz to test the knowledge of any Friend of Israel on the Refugee issue
http://www.personal.leeds.ac.uk:80/~eenajma/PalQuiz/quiz1/quizmaker.html

Lest we forget…..

The Seven Principles of Public Life

The Committee has set out ‘Seven Principles of Public Life’ which it believes should apply to all in the public service. These are:

Selflessness
Holders of public office should act solely in terms of the public interest. They should not do so in order to gain financial or other benefits for themselves, their family or their friends.
Integrity

Holders of public office should not place themselves under any financial or other obligation to outside individuals or organisations that might seek to influence them in the performance of their official duties.
Objectivity

In carrying out public business, including making public appointments, awarding contracts, or recommending individuals for rewards and benefits, holders of public office should make choices on merit.
Accountability

Holders of public office are accountable for their decisions and actions to the public and must submit themselves to whatever scrutiny is appropriate to their office.
Openness
Holders of public office should be as open as possible about all the decisions and actions that they take. They should give reasons for their decisions and restrict information only when the wider public interest clearly demands.
Honesty

Holders of public office have a duty to declare any private interests relating to their public duties and to take steps to resolve any conflicts arising in a way that protects the public interest.
Leadership

Holders of public office should promote and support these principles by leadership and example.

It's time to demand an end to the israeli occupation of our governments. -link

Conservative Friends of Israel

2008-10-01T15:49:00.000-07:00

Conservative Friends of Israel is one of the biggest affiliated groups to the Conservative Party with over 80% of MPs as members and over 2000 registered supporters (most of whom are Party members). CFI has activists all over the UK. CFI regularly lobbies Conservative MPs, Lords, MEPs and advisors to make the case for Israel. At CFI, we ensure Conservative politicians make Israel's case in Parliament, in the UK and Europe.

Conservative Friends of Israel is "committed to the Conservative Party and to the welfare of the State of Israel and dedicated to establishing close links between Great Britain and Israel.

The Conservative Friends of Israel is an independent, self-financing and autonomous organization. The CFI aims to foster greater understanding about and sympathy for Israel within the Conservative Party.

At the time of the iraq war vote over 80% of Conservative MPs (who carried the vote in the Commons) were in Conservative Friends of Israel.

Dr Liam Fox made the group's case for them. He is quoted on the CFoI website as saying: "...We must remember that in the battle for the values that we stand for, for democracy against theocracy, for democratic liberal values against repression - Israel’s enemies are our enemies and this is a battle in which we all stand together or we will all fall divided.”

They run six deputations to Israel a year – paid for by the organisation. They engage in intensive lobbying – (including providing briefing notes to Gordon Brown), They maintain constant contact with the Israeli embassy.

Their website is stridently anti Hezbollah and they maintain a careful vetting of all new Parliamentary candidates. “Within the Conservative Party, we actively support candidates, especially in marginal constituencies. Our programme for prospective parliamentary candidates provides weekly briefings, events with speakers, and a chance to participate in delegations to Israel. Our members give financial support and campaigning help where it matters.”

Rt Hon David Cameron MP, Leader of the Conservative Party has stated “I am proud not just to be a Conservative, but a Conservative Friend of Israel; and I am proud of the key role CFI plays within our Party.” His recent tour of Israel began with a two hour Black Hawk helicopter flight with the Israeli defence minister to see the country's borders.

He is a member of Conservative Friends of Israel as well as Anglicans for Israel. Cameron calls himself a “Zionist” (in an age in which that is not particularly popular.) David Cameron is also an unapologetic admirer of Senator McCain and he was the first Conservative Party leader in years to visit President Bush.

"There is something deep in our Party’s DNA that believes in Israel" - David Cameron

Boris Johnson:

Boris has said about a Palestinian suicide bomber: “What made him leave the Askar refugee camp near Nablus, pass through the Hawara checkpoint, and kill himself and three blameless Israelis, including Leah Levine, a Holocaust survivor? How could anyone persuade a child to do this?”

As Mayor, Johnson has said “I am delighted that one of my first acts as Mayor of London is to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the creation of Israel…I will do whatever I can to extend the hand of friendship to Israel, a nation I believe in, support and admire.”

This is a sea change in the attitude of the London mayoral position.

A finnish billionaire who inherited a fortune from the arms trade and has extensive gambling interests in Las Vegas emerged as one of David Cameron’s major financial backers.

Poju Zabludowicz, who lives in London, has donated £70,000 to the Conservative party over the past three years. He is also one of the financial supporters of the Conservative Friends of Israel, which has also given to the party.

Zabludowicz, 55, heads the Tamares Group, which has its headquarters in Liechtenstein and has an international property portfolio, which includes a number of hotels and casinos in Las Vegas. Zabludowicz is calculated by The Sunday Times Rich List to be worth more than £2 billion. Conservative Friends of Israel has given to a number of Conservative constituency associations, particularly in the run-up to the last election. The organisation, which has given £29,000 to the Tories between 2003-06, is not required to reveal its financial backers. It has targeted constituencies where sitting Labour MPs have been senior figures in Labour Friends of Israel.-link

The Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI) are a successful force, claiming a large majority of Tory MPs as members. It is frankly perverse for Charles Moore to complain in the Daily Telegraph that the Conservatives have gone awry since the good old days, when the natural Tory outlook included "a greater sympathy for Israel than for those who were trying to destroy her", since if anything the change has been the other way round.

When does he think that greater sympathy for Israel was ever a distinctively Conservative position?

In the days when I attended Tory conferences, you could be entertained one evening by the CFI, with the late Duke of Devonshire in the chair, but on the next by the Council for Arab-British Understanding and such luminaries as Ian Gilmour and Dennis Walters.

Going further back, AJ Balfour was the Tory premier and then foreign secretary who signed the eponymous declaration in 1917 favouring a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and came to favour a Jewish state (as with many gentile Zionists, his attitude to Jews was highly ambiguous; he described privately how uneasy he once felt at a dinner party where "Hebrews were in an actual majority").

And yet his successor as foreign secretary took the opposite view. That highest of high Tories Lord Curzon deplored the Balfour declaration. He thought that a Jewish homeland could only mean a grave injustice to the inhabitants of Palestine. It would inflame hundreds of millions of Muslim subjects of the British empire. And as to the Jewish people themselves and the idea of transporting them to the Levant, "I cannot think of a worse fate for an advanced and intellectual community," Curzon said.

In his day Curzon might have seemed the truer Tory than Balfour, and it's only recently that his spirit has been stifled in his old party. That is all the more so with the arrival of MPs such as Crabb, Carswell, and the egregious Michael Gove, the Times columnist and MP for Surrey Heath, a copy of whose Muslim-bashing diatribe Celsius 7/7 is given to every lucky person who joins the CFI.-link

Cameron faces revolt over Israel

link

* Stuart Polak, Director
* Robert Halfon, Political Director
* Stephanie Leven, Projects Director
* Nathalie Tamam, Research Manager
* Julie Tamir, Secretary
* Charlotte Polak, Membership Secretary

[edit]
Parliamentary Group

* Chairman: Rt Hon James Arbuthnot MP
* Vice Chairmen: Sir John Butterfill; James Clappison MP
* Secretary: David Amess MP
* Officers: Alistair Burt MP; Lee Scott MP; Theresa Villiers MP
* Chairman of CFI Europe: Timothy Kirkhope MEP

[edit]
Honorary Officers

* President: Rt Hon Baroness Shephard of Northwold
* Vice Chairmen: Jeremy Galbraith; Betty Geller; Lord Taylor of Holbeach CBE; Stanley Cohen OBE; Michael Heller
* Vice Presidents: Rt Hon Sir Timothy Sainsbury; Lord Lane of Horsell; Sir Michael Latham DL; Lord Sanderson of Bowden; The Lord Steinberg; Lord Thomas of Gwydir QC

[edit]
Executive Board

* Richard Harrington (Chairman)
* Lance Anisfeld; Lorraine da Costa; Jonathan Gough; Andrew Heller (Hon. Treasurer); Steven Kaye; Edward Lee; Howard Leigh; Stephen Massey; David Meller; Jonathan Metliss; Gary Mond; Stephan Shakespeare; Barry Welck; Hilda Worth

Center for Islamic Pluralism

2008-09-26T16:15:00.000-07:00

The times newspaper recently has introduced its readership to the Neo conservatrive sponsored Center for Islamic Pluralism CIP (USA) which has now moved into the UK.

Center for Islamic Pluralism, which was establish in 2004, describes itself as "a think tank that challenges the dominance of American Muslim life by militant Islamist groups. The CIP is a 501(c)(3) non-profit group.

One of its founders was Stephen Schwartz, who is its Executive Director and, based on its 2005 annual financial return, its only full time employee. Another of the founding members of the group is M. Zuhdi Jasser who also founded another group with the same agenda, American Islamic Forum for Democracy[16].

Daniel Pipes is working as diligently as ever to protect the United States and the Western world from the influence of radical Islamists.

He has proposed the creation of a new Anti-Islamist Institute (AII) designed to expose legal "political activities" of "Islamists," such as "prohibiting families from sending pork or pork byproducts to U.S. soldiers serving in Iraq," which nonetheless, in his view, serve the interests of radical Islam.

"In the long term...the legal activities of Islamists pose as much or even a greater set of challenges than the illegal ones," according to the draft of a grant proposal by Pipes' Middle East Forum (MEF) obtained by IPS.

Pipes is also working with Stephen Schwartz on a new Center for Islamic Pluralism (CIP) whose aims are to "promote moderate Islam in the U.S. and globally" and "to oppose the influence of militant Islam, and, in particular, the Saudi-funded Wahhabi sect of Islam, among American Muslims, in the America media, in American education … and with U.S. governmental bodies."

Stephen Schwartz, author of The Two Faces of Islam: Saudi Fundamentalism and Its Role in Terrorism, is as of today also the director of the Center for Islamic Pluralism, a Muslim anti-Islamist organization.

Schwartz, a former Trotskyite militant who became a Sufi Muslim in 1997, has received seed money from MEF, which is also accepting contributions on CIP's behalf until the government gives it tax-exempt legal status, according to another grant proposal obtained by IPS.

The CIP proposal, which says it expects to receive funding from contributors in the "American Shia community" and in "Sunni mosques once liberated from Wahhabi influence," also boasts "strong links" with Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and other notable neoconservatives, such as former Central Intelligence (CIA) director James Woolsey and the vice president for foreign policy programming at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Danielle Pletka, as well as with Pipes himself.

Pipes, who created MEF in Philadelphia in 1994, has long campaigned against "radical" Islamists in the United States, especially the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and several other national Islamic groups.

Long before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and the Pentagon, he also raised alarms about the immigration of foreign Muslims, suggesting that they constituted a serious threat to the political clout of U.S. Jews, as well as a potential "fifth column" for radical Islamists.

In addition, Pipes has been a fierce opponent of Palestinian nationalism. He told Australian television earlier this month, for example, that Israeli Prime Minister's Gaza disengagement plan and his agreement to negotiate with the new Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, were a "mistake" because 80 percent of the Palestinian population, including Abbas, still favor Israel's destruction.

In 2002, Pipes launched Campus Watch, a group dedicated to monitoring and exposing alleged anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian, and/or Islamist bias in teachers of Middle Eastern studies at U.S. colleges and universities.

The group, which invites students to report on offending professors, has been assailed as a McCarthyite tactic to stifle open discussion of Middle East issues.

Pipes' nomination by Bush in 2003 to serve as a director on the board of the quasi-governmental USIP, a government-funded think tank set up in 1984 to "promote the prevention, management, and peaceful resolution of international conflicts," moved the controversy over his work from academia into the U.S. Senate where such appointments are virtually always approved without controversy.

Pipes' nomination, however, offered a striking exception. Backed by major Muslim, Arab-American, and several academic groups, Democratic senators, led by Edward Kennedy, Christopher Dodd, and Tom Harkin, strongly opposed the nomination as inappropriate, particularly in light of some of his past writings, including one asserting that that Muslim immigrants were "brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and not exactly maintaining Germanic standards of hygiene."

Several Republican senators subsequently warned Bush that they would oppose the nomination if it came to a vote, and, in the end, the president made a "recess appointment" that gave him a limited term lasting only until the end of 2004. It appears now that, despite the enhanced Republican majority in the Senate, Bush does not intend to re-nominate him.

Indeed, both the USIP and Bush now probably regret having nominated him in the first place. During his board tenure, Pipes blasted USIP for hosting a conference with the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy, charging that it employed Muslim "radicals" on its staff.

That accusation was publicly refuted by the USIP itself, which echoed the complaints of his longtime critics, accusing him of relying on "quotes taken out of context, guilt by association, errors of fact, and innuendo."

Pipes also criticized Bush for "legitimizing" various "Islamist" groups, such as CAIR and the Arab-American Institute, by permitting their representatives to take part in White House and other government ceremonies and for failing to identify "radical Islam" as "the enemy" in the war on terror.

His own disillusionment with Bush is made clear in the AII draft which notes that "creative thinking in this war of ideas must be initiated outside the government, for the latter, due to the demands of political correctness, is not in a position to say what needs to be said."

AII's goal, it goes on, "is the delegitimation of the Islamists. We seek to have them shunned by the government, the media, the churches, the academy and the corporate world."

Pipes' complementary goal – to enhance the influence of "moderate" Muslims – is to guide the work of Schwartz's CIP, which is "headed by one born Muslim (its President) and a 'new Muslim', i.e. an American not born in the faith, as its Executive Director. This is the best combination for leading such an effort."

The "extremists," according to the CIP proposal, are mainly represented by the "Wahhabi lobby," an array of organizations consisting of CAIR, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), the Muslim Students' Association of the U.S. and Canada (MSA), the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), as well as "secular" groups, including the Arab-American Institute (AAI) and the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC).

"The first goal of CIP will be the removal of CAIR and ISNA from monopoly status in representing Muslims to the American public," the proposal goes on. "[S]o long as they retain a major foothold at the highest political level, no progress can be made for moderate American Islam."

In achieving its goal, CIP cites the help it can expect from its "strong links" to Wolfowitz, Woolsey, and Pletka; as well as Senators Charles Schumer and Sen. Jon Kyl, among others, "terrorism experts" Steven Emerson of the Investigative Project, Paul Marshall of Freedom House, and Glen Howard of the Jamestown Foundation; and journalists such as Fox News anchors David Asman, Brit Hume, and Greta van Susteren, Dale Hurd of the Christian Broadcasting Network; and editors at the New York Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Toronto Globe and Mail.

Interviewed by phone, Professor Kemal Silay, "president-designate" of the CIP who teaches Ottoman and Modern Turkish Studies at Indiana University, told IPS he was not aware that he was to be group's president, but that he had talked about the group with Schwartz and agrees with both Pipes and Schwartz about the dangers posed by Wahhabi groups in the U.S. and the world.

Ali al-Ahmed, director of the Washington-based Saudi Institute and named as CIP's research director in the grant proposal, told IPS he had also talked with Schwartz about the group and strongly supported its goals, although he thought several of the groups listed as part of the Wahhabi lobby were more independent.

He also said that he did not know that Pipes was involved with the group.

"[Pipes] sees all Arabs and Muslims the same, because he has interest in the security of the state of Israel," said al-Ahmed, who publicizes human rights abuses committed in Saudi Arabia.

Principals Center for Islamic Pluralism:

1 Kemal Silay, President; professor of Ottoman and modern Turkish culture at Indiana University.

2 Stephen Schwartz, Executive Director; associate of the Faculty of Islamic Studies, Sarajevo. Stephen Schwartz is the Executive Director of the Center for Islamic Pluralism in Washington, D.C. [1] In a 2003 article in National Review Online, Schwartz describes himself as one of three former Trotskyites who supported the war in Iraq. (The other two he identified are Christopher Hitchens and Kanan Makiya). "One thing must be observed here: We are almost alone among younger neoconservatives in boasting such credentials," he wrote.

3 A brief biographical note on the FrontPage website describes him as "a vociferous critic of Wahhabism , Schwartz is a frequent contributor to National Review, The Weekly Standard, FrontPage, and other publications." [article ref]

4 Dr Irfan al-Alawi, Europe director of the Centre for Islamic Pluralism, is ‘extremely concerned’ about the spread of Tablighi Jamaat and recently addressed a seminar at the Policy Exchange think-tank about the mosque plans. ‘Tablighi are not moderate Muslims, they are a separatist movement,’ he said. ‘If this mosque were to go ahead it will be strictly run by the Tablighis; there will be no room for moderates.’ - ref

The group of founders includes:

5 Jalal Zuberi

6 Salim Mansur, professor of political science, University of Western Ontario, and columnist, Toronto Sun.

7 Tashbih Sayyed
Khaleel Mohammed assistant professor of religious studies at San Diego State University. Tashbih Sayyed, is a neocon of Pakistani origin who works closely with the Israel lobby. He edits web based publications such as Muslim World Today, Pakistan Today (Both share a URL). He trades in the "Islamist threat".

"Tashbih Sayyed, political analyst, journalist, and writer, is Editor in Chief of Our Times, Pakistan Today, and In Review. He worked from 1967-1980 at Pakistan Television in various capacities, including writer, editor, director, producer, Controller, and General Manager.

8 Nawab Agha, American Muslim Congress

9 Ahmed Subhy Mansour former professor, Al-Azhar University, Cairo, author of Penalty of Apostasy: A Study of Islamic Law.

10 Stephen Schwartz and the Center for Islamic Pluralism ref

11 ISLAMIST WATCH, a project of Daniel Pipes, Middle East Forum ref

12 Radical Muslim doctors and what they mean for the NHS (report carried by both daily telegraph and the times)- "The disclosure that the leading alleged conspirators in last year’s bombing attempts in London and Glasgow were Muslim doctors sent a shockwave through the worldwide non-Muslim public. The same question was asked everywhere: how can those who are trained to heal turn to terrorism?

Our organisation, the Centre for Islamic Pluralism, has compiled a report, Scientific Training and Radical Islam, which we were preparing when the London and Glasgow events occurred. The report is now complete and available as a free download at www.islamicpluralism.eu. It is a distillation of field research, interpretation of major source materials in Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, and English, and collation of individual perspectives from a team of Muslim researchers. All members of the team are experienced in the observation of Islamist movements throughout the world. The report offers answers to the questions asked by personnel in the NHS, which employed three of the suspects" - Irfan Al-Alawi, international director (London)1, Stephen Schwartz, executive director (Washington, DC), schwartz@islamicpluralism.eu1 - ref

13 Our survey shows British Muslims don't want sharia - Schwartz, Stephen, Al-Alawi, Irfan - ref

14 Ken’s mega-mosque will encourage extremism - Irfan al-Alawi and Stephen Schwartz warn that the Olympic mosque has been conceived by Islamic radicals, supported by politically correct politicians, and will add to divisions in Britain - ref

15 For the Islamist doctor, terror is healing - Stephen Schwartz and Irfan Al-Alawi say that radical Islam is less the product of extreme deprivation than of the thwarted aspirations of the Muslim middle classes and professionals - ref

16 American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD) a right-wing lobby group, founded in 2003 by M. Zuhdi Jasser.

AIFD claims to battle "Islamo-facsism" and to be "a leading voice for liberty-minded Muslims in America in the war on terror." [1] In the "members" section on its website, it lists only one individual - its founder, Zuhdi Jasser [2], who is also "one of the founding members" of CIP, by his own account. [3] The emergence of groups such as AIFD, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported in January 2006, has Pipes' broad endorsement. ""I see the emergence of these new groups as vital to present an alternative view to Muslims," he said. [4]

The group seems to have no support at all beyond right wing publications such as National Review Online, or the New York Sun. AIFD's raison d'etre seems to be the targetting of mainstream Muslim organizations, such as CAIR. In his critique of CAIR, Zuhdi Jasser writes:

We need to create organizations — high-profile, well-funded national organizations and think tanks — which are not afraid to identify al Qaeda, Hamas, and Hezbollah by name, and by their mission as the enemies of America.

The conflation of al Qaeda, Hamas and Hezbollah is interesting, as two of them have nothing to do with the United States; their adversary is only Israel.Key Associations : Daniel Pipes

17 related article: Purge on Muslim clerics who turn a blind eye to the abuse of women - which is targetting deobandi ref

Domestic Propaganda, Military Analysts, and the US Media: British Disinformation Campaigns

2008-09-25T11:51:00.000-07:00

1991-2003: British Disinformation Campaign Exaggerates Iraqi WMD Threat

The British MI6 establishes Operation Mass Appeal, a British intelligence mission designed to exaggerate the threat of Iraq’s alleged arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in order to shape public opinion. [BBC, 11/21/2003] The operation plants stories in the domestic and foreign media from the 1990s through 2003. Intelligence used by Mass Appeal is said to be “single source data of dubious quality.” After the First Gulf War, the operation seeks to justify the UN sanctions policy. But after the September 11 attacks, its objective is to secure public support for an invasion of Iraq. The mission is similar to Operation Rockingham (see 1991-March 2003), another British intelligence disinformation program. [New Yorker, 3/31/2003; BBC, 11/21/2003; Press Association (London), 11/21/2003; Sunday Times (London), 12/28/2003] Former US Marine intelligence officer Scott Ritter says in late in 2003 (see November 21, 2003) that he supplied Mass Appeal with intelligence while serving as UN chief weapons inspector from the summer of 1997 until August 1998 and that he met with British agents involved in the operation several times in both New York and London. [BBC, 11/21/2003]

February 3, 2003: Britain Releases ‘Dodgy Dossier’ Plagiarized from Grad Student’s Magazine Article, Other Sources

The British government releases a dossier titled “Iraq: Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception, and Intimidation.” The government says the dossier is based on high-level intelligence and diplomatic sources and was produced with the approval of Prime Minister Tony Blair; it also wins praise from US Secretary of State Colin Powell (see February 7, 2003). Unfortunately, the dossier is almost wholly plagiarized from a September 2002 article by university student Ibrahim al-Marashi. [Middle East Review of International Affairs, 2/23/2003] Al-Marashi was doing postgraduate work at Oxford University when he wrote it. [International Policy Fellowships, 10/1/2006] The article is entitled “Iraq’s Security and Intelligence Network: A Guide and Analysis,” and was published in the Middle East Review of International Affairs Journal (MERIA). [Middle East Review of International Affairs, 2/23/2003] The British dossier plagiarizes two other articles as well, both from Jane’s Intelligence Review (see February 8, 2003), some of which were published as far back as 1997. MERIA is based in Israel, which even moderate Arabs say makes it a suspect source, and all the more reason why the origin of the information should have been cited. [Guardian, 2/7/2003] MERIA, an Internet-based magazine with about 10,000 subscribers, is edited by Jerusalem Post columnist Barry Rubin. [Jerusalem Post, 2/8/2003] Rubin will responds dryly: “We are pleased that the high quality of MERIA Journal’s articles has made them so valuable to our readers.… As noted on the masthead of each issue and all our publications, however, we do appreciate being given credit.” [Middle East Review of International Affairs, 2/23/2003] Al-Marashi, currently working at California’s Center for Nonproliferation Studies, describes himself as an opponent of Saddam Hussein’s regime: “As an Iraqi, I support regime change in Iraq,” he says. [Reuters, 2/8/2003; Associated Press, 2/7/2007]
Article Used Information from 1991 - He examined Iraq’s secret police and other, similar forces in detail, using captured Iraqi documents from the 1991 Gulf War and updating that information to be more timely. [Middle East Review of International Affairs, 9/2002] The dossier contains entire sections from al-Marashi’s article quoted almost verbatim, including typographical errors contained in the original. When asked about the plagiarism, al-Marashi says he was not approached by the British government for permission to use his work. “It was a shock to me,” he says. Chris Aaron, editor of Jane’s Intelligence Review, says he had not been asked for permission to use material from his article in the dossier. The dossier uses the three articles to detail methods used by the Iraqi government to block and misdirect UN weapons inspectors’ attempts to locate weapons stockpiles in Iraq. The dossier claims that while the UN only has 108 weapons inspectors inside Iraq, the Iraqi government has 20,000 intelligence officers “engaged in disrupting their inspections and concealing weapons of mass destruction.” The dossier claims that every hotel room and telephone used by the weapons inspectors is bugged, and that WMD-related documents are being concealed in Iraqi hospitals, mosques, and homes. Powell will cite the dossier as part of his presentation to the UN detailing evidence of Iraqi weapons programs (see February 5, 2003). [Associated Press, 2/6/2003; BBC, 2/7/2003] When the media exposes the origins of the dossier, Blair officials will concede that they should have been more honest about the source material (see February 6, 2003).
British 'Inflated' Some Numbers, Used More Extreme Language - Al-Marashi, who learns of the plagiarism from a colleague, Glen Rangwala (see February 5, 2003), says the dossier is accurate despite “a few minor cosmetic changes.” He adds: “The only inaccuracies in the [British] document were that they maybe inflated some of the numbers of these intelligence agencies. The primary documents I used for this article are a collection of two sets of documents, one taken from Kurdish rebels in the north of Iraq—around four million documents—as well as 300,000 documents left by Iraqi security services in Kuwait.” [BBC, 2/7/2003] Al-Marashi and Rangwala both note that the dossier uses more extreme language. “Being an academic paper, I tried to soften the language” al-Marashi says. “For example, in one of my documents, I said that [the Iraqi intelligence agency known as the Mukhabarat] support[s] organizations in what Iraq considers hostile regimes, whereas the [British] document refers to it as ‘supporting terrorist organizations in hostile regimes.’” [Guardian, 2/7/2003; New York Times, 2/8/2003]
Third Attempt to Pass Off Old Information as New Evidence - This is the third time in recent months that Downing Street has tried to pass off old, suspect information as damning evidence against Iraq. In September, it released a 50-page dossier, “Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Assessment of the British Government,” that used years-old information from the Foreign Office and British intelligence to make its case (see September 24, 2002); UN inspectors and British journalists visited some of the “facilities of concern” and found nothing (see September 24, 2002). In December, Downing Street released a 23-page report, “Saddam Hussein: Crimes and Human Rights Abuses,” that was heavily criticized by human rights groups, members of Parliament, and others for reusing old information. When that dossier was released, the Foreign Office put forward an Iraqi exile who had been jailed by Hussein for 11 years. The exile displayed handcuffs he said had been placed on him while in captivity. Afterwards, the exile admitted that the handcuffs were actually British in origin. [Guardian, 2/7/2003]
Dossier Product of Heated Debate - The Observer writes of the current “dodgy dossier” that discussions between Blair’s head of strategic communications, Alastair Campbell, foreign policy adviser David Manning, senior intelligence officials, and the new head of British homeland security, David Omand, resulted in a decision to “repeat a wheeze from last autumn: publishing a dossier of ‘intelligence-based evidence,’” this time focusing on Iraq’s history of deceiving weapons inspectors. The dossier had to be released before chief UN inspector Hans Blix could make his scheduled report in mid-February. The previous dossier, about Iraq’s dismal human rights record, had led to what The Observer calls “several stand-up rows between Omand and Campbell, with the former accusing the latter of sprinkling too much ‘magic dust’ over the facts to spice it up for public consumption.” That dossier left “the more sensationalist elements” in the forward, but for this dossier, “there was no time for such niceties. Led by Campbell, a team from the Coalition Information Center—the group set up by Campbell and his American counterpart during the war on the Taliban—began collecting published information that touched on useful themes.” Al-Marashi’s work became the central piece for the cut-and-pasted dossier, which The Observer says was compiled so sloppily that, in using the al-Marashi report and one of the Jane’s articles, two different organizations were confused with one another. [Observer, 2/9/2003]

February 5, 2003: Author Learns of British Government Plagiarism of His Work for ‘Dodgy Dossier’

Glen Rangwala, a lecturer in politics at Cambridge University, realizes that a just-released dossier on Iraqi WMDs released by the British government is almost wholly plagiarized from the work of his colleague, graduate student Ibrahim al-Marashi. Rangwala alerts al-Marashi to the dossier in an e-mail after being sent a copy of the online version by researchers in Sweden. A Cambridge undergraduate student forwards a copy of Rangwala’s e-mail to journalists. “I found it quite startling when I realized that I’d read most of it before,” Rangwala later tells the press. “Apart from passing this off as the work of its intelligence services, it indicates that [Britain] really does not have any independent sources of information on Iraq’s internal policies. It just draws upon publicly available data.” [Guardian, 2/7/2003; Observer, 2/9/2003] In his e-mail, posted on the discussion board of the organization Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq, Rangwala cites numerous identical passages in the dossier and in al-Marashi’s article. [Glen Rangwala, 2/5/2003] Rangwala notes that in the article al-Marashi acknowledged using 12-year old data, but “the British government, when it transplants that information into its own dossier, does not make that acknowledgment.” Al-Marashi says that when he learned his material had formed the basis for the dossier: “[I was] flattered at first, then surprised that they didn’t cite me… It was a case of cut and paste. They even left in my mistakes.” [Jerusalem Post, 2/8/2003] Al-Marashi also comments, “I’ll be more skeptical of any British intelligence I read in future.” [London Times, 2/7/2003]

February 6, 2003: Media Exposes Plagiarized ‘Dodgy Dossier,’ Notes Information Is 12 Years Old

The British media learns that a dossier entitled “Iraq: Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception, and Intimidation” that was released by the British government to bolster its case for Iraqi WMD is plagiarized from publicly available magazine articles (see February 3, 2003). Prime Minister Tony Blair’s office initially stands by the report, which becomes colloquially known as the “Dodgy Dossier” (a term apparently coined in an editorial by The Observer—see February 8, 2003), saying the dossier had been “put together by a range of government officials.” It also says, “We consider the text as published accurate.” However, Blair officials will eventually admit that the government should have credited the article. [Associated Press, 2/6/2003; BBC, 2/7/2003] A Channel 4 news report notes: “None of the sources are acknowledged, leading the reader to believe that the information is a result of direct investigative work, rather than simply copied from pre-existing internet sources.… Apart from the obvious criticism that the British government has plagiarized texts without acknowledgment, passing them off as the work of its intelligence services, there are two further serious problems. Firstly, it indicates that [Britain] at least really does not have any independent sources of information on Iraq’s internal politics—they just draw upon publicly available data. Thus any further claims to information based on ‘intelligence data’ must be treated with even more skepticism. Secondly, the information presented as being an accurate statement of the current state of Iraq’s security organizations may not be anything of the sort. [Ibrahim Al-]Marashi—the real and unwitting author of much of the document—has as his primary source the documents captured in 1991 for the Iraq Research and Documentation Project. His own focus is the activities of Iraq’s intelligence agencies in Kuwait, Aug 90-Jan 91—this is the subject of his thesis. As a result, the information presented as relevant to how Iraqi agencies are currently engaged with UNMOVIC is 12 years old.” [Channel 4 News (London), 2/6/2003]

February 7, 2003: ’Dodgy Dossier’ a ‘Cut-and-Paste Job’ By Downing Street, Coalition Information Center; Authors Instructed to Focus on Obstruction

The so-called “Dodgy Dossier,” a report on Iraqi attempts to deceive UN weapons inspectors recently released by the British government (see February 3, 2003), is discovered to be, in the words of The Guardian, a “journalistic cut-and-paste job” compiled largely from public sources, written by four junior officials in Alastair Campbell’s communications office, and published with “only cursory approval from intelligence or even Foreign Office sources.” [Guardian, 2/7/2003; London Times, 2/8/2003] A “well-placed source” tells The Guardian that the dossier is the work of Downing Street and the Coalition Information Center, the organization set up after 9/11 to push the US-British case for the war on terrorism. The source calls a key section of the dossier riddled with “silly errors.” The report was apparently not vetted by British intelligence. [Guardian, 2/7/2003] A spokesman for British Prime Minister Tony Blair says that neither he nor nor Alastair Campbell, one of his advisers, had actually seen the report before it was released, instead saying that it had been “seen by the relevant people.” Campbell’s aides told communications staffers that they wanted a report that drew together evidence “proving” Iraq was obstructing UN officials in finding Iraqi WMD; they did not want a more even-handed report acknowledging that UN weapons inspectors were nowhere near to finding a so-called “smoking gun” proving Iraq possesses such weapons. Former defense minister Peter Kilfoyle says: “It just adds to the general impression that what we have been treated to is a farrago of half-truths, assertions and over-the-top spin. I am afraid this is typical of the way in which the whole question of a potential war on Iraq is being treated.” [London Times, 2/8/2003] Responding to criticisms of the report as being propaganda, a Downing Street source says, “What we are absolutely determined is that this will not stop us sharing information with the public as and when we think we can.” [Observer, 2/9/2003]

February 7, 2003: Antiwar Group Identifies 1999 Book as Another ‘Dodgy Dossier’ Source

The so-called “Dodgy Dossier,” a report on Iraqi attempts to deceive UN weapons inspectors recently released by the British government and quickly proven to be plagiarized from out-of-date articles from publicly available sources (see February 3, 2003), has already been shown to have been compiled from a graduate thesis and several magazine articles. Now the anti-war group Voices in the Wilderness says it has identified a passage from the dossier as being lifted directly from a 1999 book, Saddam Secrets, written by Tim Trevan. [Guardian, 2/7/2003] Trevan is a former UN weapons inspector who wrote on February 4 that a war with Iraq is necessary: “When you have an advanced state of cancer, surgery becomes a better option than slow lingering death. For me, horrible though war is, it is the equivalent of surgery.” [Guardian, 2/4/2003]

February 8, 2003: Jane’s Says 1997, 2002 Articles Used for ‘Dodgy Dossier’

Jane’s Information Group, the firm that publishes the Jane’s series of journals about global military affairs, says three of its articles were used without credit in a recent dossier released by the British government on Iraq (see February 3, 2003). The articles are from July 1997, August 1997, and November 2002, according to the publishing firm. Jane’s Intelligence Review editor Chris Aaron says, “That open sources should be used to compile such a report is not in itself surprising,” noting that the dossier’s introduction acknowledged the use of some previously published material. “However, the direct copying of entire paragraphs casts some doubt on the processes used to create dossiers of this type.… [W]hen an agency produces a report for classified consumption it will usually identify the nature of the sources used. The fact that the [British] dossier does not identify the source for each bit of evidence in the report could be taken as misleading, or taken to be an effort to disguise the classified material included in the dossier. The real mistake seems to have been to copy sections wholesale, thus making it obvious which parts of the report come from open sources and which are based on information from the intelligence community.” A spokesman for Prime Minister Tony Blair says that the central argument of the dossier—that Iraq is systematically blocking the efforts of UN weapons inspectors to locate and document Iraq’s WMD programs and stockpiles—remains unchallenged. He calls the work “a pull-together of a variety of sources,” and says government officials should have specified which sections came from public material and which were from intelligence sources. [Jane's Intelligence Review, 2/2003; Associated Press, 2/8/2003] The articles from Jane’s Intelligence Review are “Can the Iraqi Security Apparatus Save Saddam?”, published in November 2002 and written by international security expert Ken Gause, and a two-part article, “Inside Iraq’s Security Network,” published in July and August 1997 and written by Sean Boyne. [Channel 4 News (London), 2/6/2003]

February 8, 2003: British Press Blasts ‘Dodgy Dossier’

The London Times pens a scathing editorial regarding the so-called “dodgy dossier,” a report on Iraqi attempts to deceive UN weapons inspectors recently released by the British government, which was quickly proven to be plagiarized from out-of-date articles from publicly available sources (see February 3, 2003). The editorial sarcastically envisions the scene in Downing Street in the weeks before the dossier’s release, with frantic staffers saying: “What do you mean, there’s no smoking gun? Haven’t MI6 [British intelligence] got anything? No photographs? No defectors? TB [Tony Blair] is expecting a dossier next week. We promised. He said the Americans liked the last one—quoted everywhere, robust stuff, saved the CIA from having to go public with any sources. So they want another one—Colin Powell’s thinking of a spot of show and tell at the UN (see February 5, 2003), and wants to point to independent work by the Brits. So, we better get something—and quick.… Well, one of you had better put something together. Get on the Internet. Just type in ricin and Iraq and see what you find on Google. 20 pages, at least. By tomorrow.” The editorial notes that while “[g]overnmental plagiarism is nothing new… plagiarising intelligence is more difficult. There isn’t much of it around. And the best is all secret—not easy for a media studies undergraduate to prise out of GCHQ overnight. But what TB wants, TB gets. A Downing Street unit is there to provide it. And as any student knows, extracts from American social anthropology dissertations add the required note of pedantic obfuscation to any jejune essay, with a provenance that is virtually undetectable. What better way to triple the value of intelligence assets with a thesis from California? It was regrettable that the author had so obvious an Arab name: far less convincing as a footnote than a reference to the trajectory of a military satellite. But perhaps the report could simply say it was a mix of private and public. Isn’t that the normal pattern nowadays?” [London Times, 2/8/2003] The Observer writes a similarly harsh editorial, noting that such “[d]eception can only corrode public trust,” and apparently coins the term “dodgy dossier.” The Observer editorial calls the dossier “an Internet cut-and-paste exercise largely lifted from a Californian post-graduate thesis focused on evidence from the invasion of Kuwait 13 years ago” and “sprinkl[ed with] unfounded exaggerations… inserted to strengthen the claims made in the thesis.” The editorial says: “Plagiarism is not the main issue. The central issue is that of public trust. At best, this episode demonstrates incompetence and the failure to oversee the most important claims which the government puts into the public domain. At worst, a deliberate attempt to hoodwink and mislead the public will undermine trust in anything the government says about the Iraqi threat at this vital time.… It is not only the government which has access to the Internet. Every claim made will be scrutinized more closely, and by more people, than ever before. Nothing will corrode trust more than to be caught out trying to insult the intelligence of the British public.” [Observer, 2/9/2003]

February 10, 2003: Labour Party Lawmaker Calls for Emergency Debate on Plagiarized Dossier

A Labour Party lawmaker storms out of the House of Commons after saying the Blair administration lied about a recent dossier it released that purported to show Iraq’s deceiving UN weapons inspectors about its presumed cache of WMD (see February 3, 2003). Tam Dalyell, the longest-serving member in the Commons and a member of Tony Blair’s Labour Party, thunders, “To plagiarize an out of date Ph.D. thesis and to present it as an official report of the latest British intelligence information, surely it reveals a lack of awareness of the disastrous consequences of such a deception.” Dalyell calls for an emergency debate on the issue. “This is not a trivial leak. It is a document on which is the basis of whether or not this country goes to war and whether or not young servicemen and servicewomen are to put their own lives at risk and indeed thousands, tens of thousands of innocent civilians.” [Associated Press, 2/10/2003]

February 7, 2007: Britain Admits It Should Have Credited Student’s Article for ‘Dodgy Dossier’

The British government admits it should have credited a postgraduate student’s article as being part of its so-called “Dodgy Dossier” on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (see February 3, 2003). “In retrospect we should have acknowledged” that sections of the document were based on an article by Ibrahim al-Marashi, says a spokesman for Prime Minister Tony Blair. Menzies Campbell, foreign affairs spokesman for the opposition Liberal Democrats, says the incident is “the intelligence equivalent of being caught stealing the spoons.… The dossier may not amount to much but this is a considerable embarrassment for a government trying still to make a case for war.” Labour leader Glenda Jackson, an outspoken opponent of war with Iraq, calls the dossier “another example of how the government is attempting to mislead the country and Parliament on the issue of a possible war with Iraq. And of course to mislead is a Parliamentary euphemism for lying.” Blair’s spokesman disputes the allegation that the government lied; instead, he says, “We all have lessons to learn.” The Blair administration insists the dossier is “solid,” no matter what its sources. “The report was put together by a range of government officials,” says a Downing Street spokesman. “As the report itself makes clear, it was drawn from a number of sources, including intelligence material. It does not identify or credit any sources, but nor does it claim any exclusivity of authorship.” Conservative Party shadow defense secretary Bernard Jenkin says his party is deeply concerned about the dossier. “The government’s reaction utterly fails to explain, deny, or excuse the allegations made in it,” he says. “This document has been cited by the prime minister and Colin Powell as the basis for a possible war. Who is responsible for such an incredible failure of judgment?” [Associated Press, 2/7/2003; BBC, 2/7/2003; Office of the Prime Minister, 2/7/2003; New York Times, 2/8/2003]

Neoconservative Think Tank Influence on US Policies: Overall US Foreign Policy

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1969: Young Neoconservatives Intern with Cold War Think Tank

Influential policy analyst Albert Wohlstetter (see 1965) sends two of his young proteges, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, to work on the staff of Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson (D-WA—see Early 1970s), a conservative hawk committed to working on behalf of the US defense industry. That summer, Wohlstetter arranges for Wolfowitz and Perle to intern for the Committee to Maintain a Prudent Defense Policy, a Cold War think tank co-founded by former Secretary of State Dean Acheson and former Secretary of the Navy Paul Nitze.

Early 1970s: Neoconservatives Coalesce around Conservative Democratic Senator

The recently formed neoconservatives, bound together by magazine publisher Irving Kristol (see 1965), react with horror to the ascendancy of the “McGovern liberals” in the Democratic Party, and turn to conservative senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson (D-WA) for leadership. Jackson calls himself a “muscular Democrat”; others call him “the Senator from Boeing” for his strong support of the US defense industry. Jackson merges a strong support of labor and civil rights groups with a harsh Cold War opposition to the Soviet Union. Jackson assembles a staff of bright, young, ideologically homogeneous staffers who will later become some of the most influential and powerful neoconservatives of their generation, including Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Elliott Abrams, Abram Shulsky, and Paul Wolfowitz. Jackson’s office—“the bunker,” to staffers—becomes a home for disaffected, ambitious young conservative ideologues with a missionary zeal for change. Jackson presides over the cadre in an almost fatherly fashion.
History of Two Dictators - Many of Jackson’s neoconservative disciples came of age either fighting two foreign dictators—Stalin and/or Hitler—or growing up with family members who fought against them. Wolfowitz’s father’s family perished in the Holocaust; he will later say that what happened to European Jews during World War II “shaped a lot of my views.” [New York Times, 4/22/2002] Feith will tell the New Yorker in 2005, “[My] family got wiped out by Hitler, and… all this stuff about working things out—well, talking to Hitler to resolve the problem didn’t make any sense.” Most neoconservatives like Feith and Wolfowitz tend to look to military solutions as a first, not a last, resort. To them, compromise means appeasement, just as Britain’s Neville Chamberlain tried to appease Hitler. Stefan Halper, a White House and State Department official in the Nixon, Ford, and Reagan administrations, will say of the neoconservatives, “It is use force first and diplomacy down the line.”
Former Trotskyites - On the other hand, many neoconservatives come to the movement from the hardline, socialist left, often from organizations that supported Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky. Trotskyites accused Stalin of betraying the purity of the Communist vision as declaimed by Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin. “I can see psychologically why it would not be difficult for them to become [conservative] hard-liners,” says Harvard Sovietologist Richard Pipes, himself a hardliner whose son, Daniel Pipes, will become an influential neoconservative. “It was in reaction to the betrayal.” Many neoconservatives like Stephen Schwartz, a writer for the Weekly Standard, still consider themselves to be loyal disciples of Trotsky. Richard Perle is a Trotskyite socialist when he joins Jackson’s staff, and will always practice what author Craig Unger calls “an insistent, uncompromising, hard-line Bolshevik style” of policy and politics. Like Trotsky, Unger writes, the neoconservatives pride themselves on being skilled bureaucratic infighters, and on trusting no one except a small cadre of like-minded believers. Disagreement is betrayal, and political struggles are always a matter of life and death.

Summer 1972 and After: Neoconservatives Work to Toughen US Policy towards Soviet Union

Neoconservatives see Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern’s floundering campaign and eventual landslide defeat (see November 7, 1972) as emblematic of, in author Craig Unger’s words, everything that is wrong with the “defeatist, isolationist policies of the liberals who had captured the Democratic Party.” If the neoconservatives had had their way, their favorite senator, Henry “Scoop” Jackson (see Early 1970s), would have won the nomination. But the Vietnam War has put hawkish Cold Warriors like Jackson in disfavor in the party, and Jackson was set aside for the disastrous McGovern candidacy. The Republicans offer little interest themselves for the neoconservatives. Richard Nixon is enamored of one of their most hated nemeses, National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, whose “realpolitik” did nothing to excite their ideological impulses. And under Nixon, the icy Cold War is slowly thawing, with summit meetings, bilateral commissions, and arms limitations agreements continually bridging the gap between the US and the neoconservatives’ implacable foe, the Soviet Union. In Nixon’s second term, the Coalition for a Democratic Majority (CDM)—populated by Democratic neoconservatives like Jackson, Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter, Daniel Patrick Moynihan (Nixon’s domestic adviser), Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ben Wattenberg, and James Woolsey, and joined by 1968 Democratic presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey, will pressure Nixon to adopt a tough “peace through strength” policy towards the Soviet Union. Although it will take time, and the formation of countless other organizations with similar memberships and goals, this group of neoconservatives and hawkish hardliners will succeed in marginalizing Congress, demonizing their enemies, and taking over the entire foreign policy apparatus of the US government.

August 15, 1974: Neoconservatives Begin Moving to Influence US Foreign Policies

Conservative Democratic senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson (D-WA) meets with President Ford as part of a discussion about the standoff with the Soviet Union over trade and emigration of Soviet Jews to Israel. Jackson—hawkish, defense-minded, and solidly pro-Israel—sees the standoff as an opportunity to undercut Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Jackson is a forerunner of what in later years will be called “neoconservatism” (see 1965), an ideology mostly espoused by a group of Democratic lawmakers and intellectuals who have abandoned their support for Rooseveltian New Deal economics and multilateralist foreign policies (see Early 1970s). Jackson and his outspoken pro-Israel aide, Richard Perle, view Kissinger as far too conciliatory and willing to negotiate with the Communist bloc. Jackson and Perle see the Soviet Union, not the Israeli-Palestine conflict, as the chief threat to US interests in the Middle East and the control of that region’s oil fields. They see a strong, powerful Israel as essential to their plans for US domination of the region. Jackson resists a proposed compromise on the number of Soviet Jews the USSR will allow to emigrate to Israel—the Soviets offer 55,000 and Jackson insists on 75,000—and many in the meeting feel that Jackson is being deliberately recalcitrant. “It made mo sense to me because it was sure to be counterproductive,” Ford later writes, “but he would not bend, and the only reason is politics.” For his part, Kissinger respects Jackson’s political abilities, but to his mind, Perle is a “ruthless… little b_stard.” Kissinger knows that Republican hawks as well as the burgeoning neoconservative movement will pressure Ford to abandon Richard Nixon’s policies of moderating relations with the Soviet Union and Communist China. But, author Barry Werth writes in 2006: “what Kissinger and now Ford would chronically underestimate was the neoconservatives’ argument that the United States should not so much seek to coexist with the Soviet system as to overthrow it through direct confrontation. Or the extent to which the neoconservatives would go to exaggerate a foreign threat and stir up fear.”

1976: Neoconservatives, Cold Warriors Revive Committee on the Present Danger; Group Heralds Ideological Split in GOP

A group of hardline Cold Warriors and neoconservatives revive the once-influential Committee on the Present Danger (CPD) in order to promote their anti-Soviet, pro-military agenda. Its members include CIA spymaster William Casey, iconic Cold War figure and “Team B” member Paul Nitze (see Late November, 1976), and rising neoconservative stars like Jeane Kirkpatrick and Richard Perle. Author Craig Unger will later write: “Ultimately, in the CPD, one could see the emerging fault lines in the Republican Party, the ideological divide that separated hardline neocons and Cold Warriors from the more moderate, pragmatic realists—i.e. practitioners of realpolitik such as Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft, George H. W. Bush, and James Baker. All of the latter were conspicuously absent from the CPD roll call.” According to a 2004 BBC documentary, the CPD will produce documentaries, publications, and provided guests for national talk shows and news reports, all designed to spread fear and encourage increases in defense spending, especially, as author Thom Hartmann will write, “for sophisticated weapons systems offered by the defense contractors for whom neocons would later become lobbyists.” [Common Dreams (.org), 12/7/2004; BBC, 1/14/2005]

Late November, 1976: Team B Breaches Security to Successfully Whip up Fears of Soviet Threat

Although the entire “Team B” intelligence analysis experiment (see Early 1976, November 1976, and November 1976) is supposed to be classified and secret, the team’s neoconservatives launch what author Craig Unger will call “a massive campaign to inflame fears of the red menace in both the general population and throughout the [foreign] policy community—thanks to strategically placed leaks to the Boston Globe and later to the New York Times.” Times reporter David Binder later says that Team B leader Richard Pipes is “jubilant” over “pok[ing] holes at the [CIA]‘s analysis” of the Soviet threat. Team B member John Vogt calls the exercise “an opportunity to even up some scores with the CIA.”
Used to Escalate Defense Spending - The experiment is far more than a dry, intellectual exercise or a chance for academics to score points against the CIA. Melvin Goodman, who heads the CIA’s Office of Soviet Affairs, will observe in 2004: “[Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld won that very intense, intense political battle that was waged in Washington in 1975 and 1976. Now, as part of that battle, Rumsfeld and others, people such as Paul Wolfowitz, wanted to get into the CIA. And their mission was to create a much more severe view of the Soviet Union, Soviet intentions, Soviet views about fighting and winning a nuclear war.” Even though Wolfowitz’s and Rumsfeld’s assertions of powerful new Soviet WMD programs are completely wrong, they use the charges to successfully push for huge escalations in military spending, a process that continues through the Ford and Reagan administrations (see 1976) [Common Dreams (.org), 12/7/2004; BBC, 1/14/2005] , and resurface in the two Bush administrations. “Finally,” Unger will write, “a band of Cold Warriors and neocon ideologues had successfully insinuated themselves in the nation’s multibillion-dollar intelligence apparatus and had managed to politicize intelligence in an effort to implement new foreign policy.”

Kicking Over the Chessboard - Former senior CIA official Richard Lehman later says that Team B members “were leaking all over the place… putting together this inflammatory document.” Author and university professor Gordon R. Mitchell will write that B’s practice of “strategically leaking incendiary bits of intelligence to journalists, before final judgments were reached in the competitive intelligence exercise,” was another method for Team B members to promulgate their arguments without actually proving any of their points. Instead of participating in the debate, they abandoned the strictures of the exercise and leaked their unsubstantiated findings to the press to “win” the argument. [Quarterly Journal of Speech, 5/2006 pdf file]
'One Long Air Raid Siren' - In 2002, defense policy reporter Fred Kaplan will sardonically label Team B the “Rumsfeld Intelligence Agency,” and write: “It was sold as an ‘exercise’ in intelligence analysis, an interesting competition—Team A (the CIA) and Team B (the critics). Yet once allowed the institutional footing, the Team B players presented their conclusions—and leaked them to friendly reporters—as the truth,” a truth, Team B alleges, the pro-detente Ford administration intends to conceal. Kaplan will continue, “The Team B report read like one long air-raid siren: The Soviets were spending practically all their GNP on the military; they were perfecting charged particle beams that could knock our warheads out of the sky; their express policy and practical goal was to fight and win a nuclear war.” Team B is flatly wrong across the board, but it still has a powerful impact on the foreign policy of the Ford administration, and gives the neoconservatives and hardliners who oppose arms control and detente a rallying point. Author Barry Werth will observe that Rumsfeld and his ideological and bureaucratic ally, White House chief of staff Dick Cheney “drove the SALT II negotiations into the sand at the Pentagon and the White House.” Ford’s primary opponent, Ronald Reagan, and the neocons’ public spokesman, Senator Henry Jackson, pillory Ford for being soft on Communism and the Soviet Union. Ford stops talking about detente with the Soviets, and breaks off discussions with the Soviets over limiting nuclear weapons. Through Team B, Rumsfeld and the neocons succeed in stalling the incipient thaw in US-Soviet relations and in weakening Ford as a presidential candidate.

1981: Italian Neofascist Organization P-2 Banned; Had Ties to American Neoconservative Ledeen

“Propaganda Due,” or P-2, an informal, parallel Secret Service in Italy led by neofascist and Freemason Licio Gelli, is banned by the Italian Parliament, though the organization continues to function. (Gelli is expelled from the Masons the same year as P-2 is banned.) It had a penchant for secret rituals and exotic covert ops against what it considered Communist-based threats. P-2 members swear to have their throats slit and tongues cut out rather than break their oaths of secrecy and loyalty. Author Craig Unger characterizes the organization as “subversive, authoritarian, and right-wing.” It was sometimes called the “P-2 Masonic Lodge” because of its ties to the Freemasons. It served as a covert intelligence agency for militant anticommunists. It was also linked to Operation Gladio, a secret paramilitary wing of NATO that supported far-right military coups in Greece and Turkey during the Cold War. P-2 is banned by the Italian Parliament after an investigation found that it had infiltrated the highest levels of Italy’s judiciary, parliament, military, and press, and was linked to assassinations, kidnappings, and illicit arms deals around the world. The critical event was the murder of Freemason and bank president Roberto Calvi, who was found hanging from a bridge in London; the investigation found that P-2 may have been involved in Calvi’s murder. American neoconservative Michael Ledeen, who has long if murky connections with both US and Italian intelligence agencies, was a part of two major international disinformation operations in conjunction with P-2 and SISMI, the Italian military intelligence agency (see October 1980 and Mid-1981 through Late 1981). [BBC, 10/16/1998; Grand Lodge of British Columbia and Yukon, 12/14/2004; ]

1991-1997: Group of Foreign Policy Analysts Recommends Interventionist Policy

Morton Abramowitz, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, establishes a number of blue-ribbon commissions, headed by a select group of foreign policy elite, to create a new post-Cold War foreign policy framework for the US. Some of the group’s members are Madeleine Albright, Henry Cisneros, John Deutch, Richard Holbrooke, Alice Rivlin, David Gergen, Admiral William Crowe, Leon Fuerth, as well as Richard Perle and James Schlesinger, the two token conservatives who quickly resign. The commission will issue a number of policy papers recommending the increased use of military force to intervene in the domestic conflicts of other countries. Some of the commission’s members are appointed to brief Democratic presidential candidates on the commission’s reports ahead of their release. [American Spectator, 6/1999]

Abramowitz is also influential in the career of counterterrorism “tsar” Richard Clarke, who refers to Abramowitz as his “boss and mentor” at the State Department.

February 1992: Former Reagan Appointee Chosen to Create Publicity Campaign for Carnegie Endowment

John B. Roberts II, a writer and television producer who worked in the Reagan administration from 1981-1985, is asked to develop a publicity campaign to create public support for the forthcoming foreign policy recommendations of the Carnegie Endowment’s blue-ribbon commissions to create a new post-Cold War foreign policy framework for the US.(see 1991-1997). Morton Abramowitz makes it clear to him that the commission’s recommendations need to play a prominent role in upcoming presidential elections. The commission’s final report will be released shortly before the Democratic National Convention. [American Spectator, 6/1999]

July 1992: Think Tank Publishes Book Proposing Policy of Unilateral Interventionism in the Name of Humanitarianism

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace publishes “Self-Determination in the New World Order” by Morton H. Halperin (head of State Department policy planning under Madeleine Albright) and David Scheffer (Albright’s special envoy for war crimes issues). The book proposes a set of criteria for the US to use in responding to the independence and separatist movements that have arisen since the break-up of the Soviet Union. The authors argue that in certain circumstances, such as when civil unrest threatens to create a humanitarian crisis, “American interests and ideals” compel the US to assume “a more active role.” Interventions “will become increasingly unavoidable,” the authors write. Foreshadowing the unabashed unilateralist foreign policy adopted by the Bush administration after the September 11 attacks, they write that “the United States should seek to build a consensus within regional and international organizations for its position, but should not sacrifice its own judgment and principles if such a consensus fails to materialize.” [Review of International Affairs, 4/2000]

July 1992: Think Tank Asserts that Interventions May Be Necessary to Avert Humanitarian Crises

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace publishes “Changing Our Ways’s Role in the New World.” The book is the final report of a commission that was asked to recommend a new post-Cold War foreign policy framework (see 1991-1997). The report calls for “a new principle of international relations” asserting that “the destruction or displacement of groups of people within states can justify international intervention.” It advises the US to “realign” NATO and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to deal with these new security problems in Europe. [American Spectator, 6/1999]

1996: Wolfowitz Argues for New Team B Exercise

Neoconservative Paul Wolfowitz, currently a professor at Johns Hopkins University, argues strenuously for the need for a second “Team B” competitive intelligence analysis (see November 1976) of the US’s foreign policies as the Cold War is ending. Wolfowitz, himself a former Team B member, writes: “The idea that somehow you are saving work for the policymaker by eliminating serious debate is wrong. Why not aim, instead, at a document that actually says there are two strongly argued positions on the issue? Here are the facts and evidence supporting one position, and here are the facts and evidence supporting the other, even though that might leave the poor policymakers to make a judgment as to which one they think is correct.” Wolfowitz does not consider the fact that the Team B procedures and findings were almost immediately discredited . [Quarterly Journal of Speech, 5/2006 pdf file]

July 1998: Rumsfeld Commission Wildly Inflates Threat from Iran, North Korea

The “Team B” intelligence analysis exercise of 1975, which so disastrously overestimated the Soviet threat (see November 1976), returns in the form of the “Rumsfeld Commission,” which issues its report this month. Conservative commentators and former participants have called for a second “Team B”-style competitive intelligence analysis ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall (see 1990, 1994, and 1996). The “Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States” (see July 15, 1998), led by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, is packed with conservative and neoconservative hardliners much as the original Team B cadre was; it includes some former Team B members such as former Pentagon official Paul Wolfowitz. Like the original Team B, the Rumsfeld Commission challenges CIA estimates of foreign military threats; like the original Team B, the Rumsfeld Commission wildly overestimates the impending threat from countries such as Iran and North Korea, both of which it judges will be capable of striking the US with nuclear weapons in five years or perhaps less. The original Team B findings impelled thirty years of full-bore military spending by the US to counter a Soviet threat that was fading, not growing; the Rumsfeld Commission’s equally alarmist findings impels a new push for spending on the so-called “Star Wars” ballistic missile defense system (see March 23, 1983). Conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly will observe that the Rumsfeld Commission’s report “provided Congress with enough talking points to win the argument [on missile defense] both in the strategic arena and in the 20-second soundbite television debates.” Former State Department intelligence analyst Greg Thielmann will later observe, “time has proven Rumsfeld’s predictions dead wrong.” Author and professor Gordon R. Mitchell will write that the second “Team B” exercise shows “that by 1998, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz had honed the art of intelligence manipulation through use of competitive intelligence analysis. Retrospective assessments revealing serious flaws in the Team B work products came long after political officials had already converted the alarmist reports into political support for favored military policies.” [Quarterly Journal of Speech, 5/2006 pdf file]

Late December 2000 and Early January 2001: Bush Transition Teams Install Neoconservatives in Key Offices

The Bush team moves into Washington. Neoconservative Zalmay Khalilzad heads the Pentagon transition team, and he ensures that plenty of his friends and colleagues move into the civilian offices of the Defense Department. Four of the most influential advocates for the US overthrow of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein—Elliott Abrams, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, and Abram Shulsky—are waiting to learn where they will serve in the department. But Vice President Cheney is still concerned with ensuring the placement of his own colleagues and cronies who will help him build what many will call the “imperial presidency.” Secretary of State Colin Powell, Cheney’s ideological rival, is working to install his friend and colleague Richard Armitage as deputy secretary of defense. For Cheney, Armitage would be a calamity—although Armitage is sufficiently hardline and in line with conservative foreign policy aims, he is far too centrist for Cheney and the neoconservatives. The neoconservative magazine the Weekly Standard alerts the faithful to the potential problem with an article entitled “The Long Arm of Colin Powell: Will the Next Secretary of State Also Run the Pentagon?” Powell does not get his wish; Armitage eventually becomes deputy secretary of state. Abrams will join the National Security Council; Khalilzad, Feith, and Shulksy will join the Defense Department; and Perle will head the Defense Policy Board, an independent group that advises the Pentagon. [Weekly Standard, 12/25/2000 pdf file; ]

December 2002: Abrams Appointed to Senior NSC Position

Elliott Abrams, a special assistant to President George W. Bush on the National Security Council [NSC] and a well-known neoconservative and former Iran-Contra figure, is appointed to senior director for Near East and North African affairs within the NSC. Neoconservatives working at the Pentagon’s Near East South Asia (NESA) desk worked hard to get Abrams appointed. “The day he got (the appointment), they were whooping and hollering, ‘We got him in, we got him in,’” Karen Kwiatkowski, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, tells Inter Press Service. Abrams, a controversial figure with close ties to Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, had been convicted of withholding information from Congress during the Iran-Contra scandal, though he was later pardoned by George W. Bush’s father. [Insight, 12/28/2002; Inter Press Service, 8/7/2003]

February 13, 2003: Neoconservative Ledeen Says Iraq Invasion Could Be ‘War to Remake the World’

At a press conference, neoconservative author and academic Michael Ledeen celebrates the imminent Iraq war, saying that now is the time for the US to “destroy [its enemies] to advance our historic mission.… I think we are going to be obliged to fight a regional war, whether we want to or not. It may turn out to be a war to remake the world.”

April 20, 2008: Neoconservative Writers Dismiss Pentagon Propaganda Operation as Business as Usual, Challenge New York Times’s Patriotism

Neoconservatives Max Boot and John Podhoretz weigh in on the New York Times story exposing the Pentagon propaganda operation (see April 20, 2008 and Early 2002 and Beyond). Boot writes that the program is nothing more than “the Pentagon tr[ying] to get out its side of the story about Iraq to the news media.” “[I]t’s no secret,” he writes, “that the Pentagon—and every other branch of government—routinely provides background briefings to journalists (including columnists and other purveyors of opinion), and tries to influence their coverage by carefully doling out access. It is hardly unheard of for cabinet members—or even the president and vice president—to woo selected journalists deemed to be friendly while cutting off those deemed hostile. Nor is it exactly a scandal for government agencies to hire public relations firms to track coverage of them and try to suggest ways in which they might be cast in a more positive light. All this is part and parcel of the daily grind of Washington journalism in which the Times is, of course, a leading participant.” Boot believes he has found “the nub of the problem” further into the article when reporter David Barstow wrote that the Pentagon’s operation “recalled other administration tactics that subverted traditional journalism.” Boot retorts, in a backhanded criticism of the Times’s patriotism: “[I]t’s one thing to subvert one’s country and another thing to subvert the MSM [mainstream media]. We can’t have that!” Boot concludes: “The implicit purpose of the Times’s article is obvious: to elevate this perfectly normal practice into a scandal in the hopes of quashing it. Thus leaving the Times and its fellow MSM organs—conveniently enough—as the dominant shapers of public opinion.” [Commentary Magazine, 4/20/2008] Writing for the influential conservative blog PowerLine, Boot’s fellow neoconservative John Podhoretz echoes Boot’s dismissal of the Times’s expose: “Barstow’s endless tale reveals nothing more than that the Pentagon treated former military personnel like VIPs, courted them and served them extremely well, in hopes of getting the kind of coverage that would counteract the nastier stuff written about the Defense Department in the media.” [Think Progress (.org), 4/20/2008]

Neoconservative Think Tank Influence on US Policies: Iran

2008-09-25T11:01:00.000-07:00

May 3, 1985: Neoconservative NSC Consultant Tells Israel that US Supports Arms Sales to Iran

Michael Ledeen, a neoconservative author who consults informally for the National Security Council, meets informally with Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres. Ledeen tells Peres that the Reagan administration will quietly support Israeli arms shipments to Iran. [New York Times, 11/19/1987]

December 9, 2001: Defense Officials Attend Secret Backchannel Meeting with Iranians

The Bush administration sends two defense officials, Harold Rhode and Larry Franklin, to meet with Iranians in Rome in response to an Iranian government offer to provide information relevant to the war on terrorism. The offer had been backchanneled by the Iranians to the White House through Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian arms trader and a central person in the Iran-Contra affair, who contacted another Iran-Contra figure, Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute. Ledeen passed the information on to his friends in the Defense Department who then relayed the offer to National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. Hadley, who expressed no reservations about the proposed meeting, informed CIA Director George Tenet and Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage. According to officials interviewed by the New York Times, the United States Embassy in Rome was not notified of the planned meeting as required by standard interagency procedures. Neither the US embassy nor the CIA station chief in Rome learns of the three-day meeting until after it happens (see December 12, 2001). When they do catch wind of the meeting, they notify CIA and State Department headquarters in Washington which complain to the administration about how the meetings were arranged. [Newsday, 8/9/2003; Washington Post, 8/9/2003; New York Times, 12/7/2003] In addition to Ghorbanifar, Ledeen, Franklin, and Rhode, the meeting is attended by Nicolo Pollari, head of SISMI, and Antonio Martino, Italy’s minister of defense. [Washington Monthly, 9/2004] According to the Boston Globe, either at this meeting, a similar one in June (see June 2002), or both, Ledeen and Ghorbanifar discuss ways to destabilize the Iranian government, possibly using the Mujahedeen-e Khalq, a US-designated terrorist group, as a US proxy. [Boston Globe, 8/31/2004] Additionally, according to an unnamed SISMI source, Pollari speaks with Ledeen about intelligence his agency has collected (see October 15, 2001) suggesting that Iraq made a deal with Niger to purchase several tons of uranium. SISMI already sent a report to Washington on the matter in mid-October (see October 15, 2001). Reportedly, Pollari has also approached CIA Station Chief Jeff Castelli about the report, but Castelli has since indicated he is not interested in the information. [La Repubblica (Rome), 10/25/2005]

December 12, 2001: Washington Learns About Secret Meeting Involving Iran-Contra Figures

The newly-installed US ambassador to Italy, Mel Sembler, learns during the course of a private dinner with Iran-Contra figure Michael Ledeen and Italian defense minister Antonio Martino about the secret backchannel meeting they attended three days before (see December 9, 2001) with US defense officials, former Iran-Contra figures, and Iranian government officials. After the dinner, Sembler immediately contacts Jeff Castelli, the CIA station chief in Rome, to find out if he knows about the meeting. But the station chief says he was also unaware of the meeting. “Soon both Sembler and the Rome station chief were sending anxious queries back to the State Department and CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., respectively, raising alarms on both sides of the Potomac” since all US government contact with foreign government intelligence agencies is supposed to be overseen by the CIA. [Washington Monthly, 9/2004 Sources: Unnamed US Government sources]

January 30, 2002: Former Iran-Contra Figure and Pentagon Officials in Douglas Feith’s Office Told to Cease Unauthorized Activities

Stephen Hadley, Condoleezza Rice’s chief deputy on the National Security Council, instructs former Iran-Contra figure Michael Ledeen and officials in Douglas Feith’s office to cease their dealings (see December 9, 2001) with Manucher Ghorbanifar. [Washington Monthly, 9/2004]

June 2002: Defense Official Secretly Attends Secret Meeting in Paris without White House Approval

In Paris, an unnamed Pentagon official (either Harold Rhode or Larry Franklin) meets with Manucher Ghorbanifar (Ghorbanifar says he did not attend this meeting [Washington Monthly, 9/2004] ), an Iranian arms trader who had been a central figure in the Iran-Contra affair. [Washington Post, 8/9/2003; New York Times, 12/7/2003] Though an unnamed senior Defense official claims the meeting resulted from “an unplanned, unscheduled encounter,” [Washington Post, 8/9/2003] Ghorbanifar later tells the Washington Monthly that “he arranged that meeting after a flurry of faxes between himself and [Defense Department] official Harold Rhode.” According to Ghorbanifar, an Egyptian and an Iraqi are present at the meeting and brief the Pentagon official about the general situation in Iraq and the Middle East, and what would happen in Iraq if the US were to invade. [Washington Monthly, 9/2004] But other reports will suggest that Ledeen and Ghorbanifar may have discussed US collaboration with the Mujahedeen-e Khalq, a US-designated terrorist group, as a means to destabilize the Iranian regime. [Boston Globe, 8/31/2004] The meeting, which took place without White House approval, was preceded by a similar meeting involving Pentagon officials and Ghorbanifar that took place seven months earlier (see December 9, 2001). [Washington Post, 8/9/2003] When Secretary of State Colin Powell learns of the meeting, he complains directly to Condoleezza Rice and the office of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. [Newsday, 8/9/2003; Washington Post, 8/9/2003]

July 2002: Michael Ledeen Attempts to Deal with Iranians, Despite Previous White House Instructions Not To

Michael Ledeen contacts Mel Sembler, the US ambassador to Italy, and informs him that he will be traveling to Rome again (see December 9, 2001) to continue “his work” with the Iranians. Sembler passes this on to Washington, and National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley sends word to Ledeen reminding him that he is not to deal with the Iranians. [Washington Monthly, 9/2004]

September 4, 2002: Neoconservative Michael Ledeen Advocates Overthrow of Iraqi, Iranian, Syrian, and Saudi Arabian Governments

Neoconservative Michael Ledeen argues in a piece published by the Wall Street Journal that the US must not limit the next military strike to Iraq alone. Rather, according to Ledeen, the US “should instead be talking about using all our political, moral, and military genius to support a vast democratic revolution to liberate all the peoples of the Middle East from tyranny.” In addition to Iraq, he says, the governments of Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia must also be overthrown. “Stability is an unworthy American mission, and a misleading concept to boot. We do not want stability in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and even Saudi Arabia; we want things to change. The real issue is not whether, but how to destabilize.” [Wall Street Journal, 9/4/2002]

Late 2002: Coalition for Democracy in Iran Formed; Advocates Regime Change

Michael Ledeen joins with Morris Amitay, vice-president of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs; ex-CIA head James Woolsey; former Reagan administration official Frank Gaffney; former senator Paul Simon; and oil consultant Rob Sobhani to set up a group called the Coalition for Democracy in Iran (CDI). [Sunday Herald (Glasgow), 6/1/2003] CDI says it “fully agrees with President Bush’s inclusion of Iran in the ‘axis of evil’ and supports congressional initiatives to bring about needed change in Iran.” [Coalition for Democracy, 1/16/2004] The group has strong ties to Reza Pahlavi, the son of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the US-backed leader of Iran who was removed from power by the 1979 Iranian Revolution. [International Herald Tribune, 6/6/2003]

June 2003: US Officials Meet Secretly for Third Time with Iranian Arms Merchant

Larry Franklin, a member of Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith’s Office of Special Plans, and Harold Rhode, a protege of neoconservative Iran “specialist” Michael Ledeen, meets with Iranian arms merchant and Iran-Contra figure Manucher Ghorbanifar in Paris. This is the third of three meetings (see December 9, 2001 and June 2002) between these figures. While no details of the discussions that took place at this meeting are available, it is likely that, like the other two, the main focus of the meeting is the manipulation of “evidence” showing Iraq has weapons of mass destruction in order to provide “proof” that the US invasion of Iraq was justified. (Franklin will later be convicted of passing classified US intelligence to Israel, and will be sentenced to 12 years in prison—see April 13, 1999-2004 and October 5, 2005). [Vanity Fair, 3/2007] Journalists Joshua Micah Marshall, Laura Rozen, and Paul Glastris later speculate that the meetings have a hidden agenda alongside the Iraq concern: the destabilization of Iran. They write, “[T]he [Defense Department]-Ghorbanifar meetings suggest the possibility that a rogue faction at the Pentagon was trying to work outside normal US foreign policy channels to advance a ‘regime change’ agenda not approved by the president’s foreign policy principals or even the president himself.” [Washington Monthly, 9/2004]

December 19, 2003: Neocon Says Bush Administration Should Work for Regime Change in Iran

Neoconservative Michael Ledeen, in an op-ed piece published by the Wall Street Journal, makes numerous charges against the Iranian government, saying it supports terrorism and is on the verge of developing a nuclear weapon. He asserts that the Bush administration must therefore act soon against Iran. He says Iran is the “ultimate litmus test of the seriousness of the Bush administration” and that the administration’s “ability to conduct an effective campaign against the mullahs in Tehran will determine the outcome of the war against the terror masters.” Ledeen asserts that the US does not need to invade Iran to “liberate it,” rather it only needs to support the “enthusiastically pro-American” people, as the US did the “Serbs against Slobodan Milosovic, the Filipinos against the Marcoses, the Poles against Soviet Communism.” [Wall Street Journal, 12/19/2003]

January 6, 2004: Khomeini Pressured Into Returning to Iran

Hossein Khomeini, grandson of Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and a leading Iranian opposition figure, returns to Iran. During 2003, he spent several months in Iraq and visited the US, speaking at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) (see September 26, 2003). Khomeini’s return to Iran is a surprise to Michael Ledeen and the AEI. According to Ledeen, sources close to the Khomeini family suggest that he was lured back with a combination of threats and promises. Ledeen says that Khomeini’s wife was recently visited by Iranian security agents who told her, “If your children suddenly die in the streets, you must know that it was not our doing.” [New York Sun, 1/26/2004]

December 4, 2007: Neoconservative Attacks NIE on Iran, Says Intelligence Community ‘Covering their Derrieres’

Neoconservative academic and intelligence figure Michael Ledeen joins his fellows Norman Podhoretz (see December 3, 2007) and John Bolton (see December 4, 2007) in attacking the recently released National Intelligence Estimate on Iran (see December 3, 2007). Ledeen excoriates the intelligence community for reversing themselves from their previous claims that Iran did indeed have an active nuclear program, and accuses its members of trying to “cover their derrieres.” Ledeen writes. “[I]ndeed, those ‘intelligence professionals’ were very happy to take off their analytical caps and gowns and put on their policy wigs.… This sort of blatant unprofessionalism is as common in today’s Washington as it is unworthy of a serious intel type, and I think it tells us a lot about the document itself.… This document will not stand up to serious criticism, but it will undoubtedly have a significant political impact, since it will be taken as confirmation of the view that we should not do anything mean to the [Iranian] mullahs. We should talk to them instead.” Ledeen concludes that the NIE is “insulting to our leaders, who should expect serious work from the [intelligence community] instead of this bit of policy advocacy masquerading as serious intelligence.” [Pajamas Media, 12/4/2007; National Review, 12/4/2007]

Neoconservative Think Tank Influence on US Policies: Mid East

2008-09-25T10:12:00.000-07:00

Autumn 1992: Influential Neoconservative Academic Advocates Breaking Up Middle Eastern Countries, Including Iraq

Princeton University professor Bernard Lewis publishes an article in the influential journal Foreign Affairs called “Rethinking the Middle East.” In it, he advocates a policy he calls “Lebanonization.” He says, “[A] possibility, which could even be precipitated by [Islamic] fundamentalism, is what has late been fashionable to call ‘Lebanonization.’ Most of the states of the Middle East—Egypt is an obvious exception—are of recent and artificial construction and are vulnerable to such a process. If the central power is sufficiently weakened, there is no real civil society to hold the polity together, no real sense of common identity.… Then state then disintegrates—as happened in Lebanon—into a chaos of squabbling, feuding, fighting sects, tribes, regions, and parties.” Lewis, a British Jew, is well known as a longtime supporter of the Israeli right wing. Since the 1950s, he has argued that the West and Islam have been engaged in a titanic “clash of civilizations” and that the US should take a hard line against all Arab countries. Lewis is considered a highly influential figure to the neoconservative movement, and some neoconservatives such as Richard Perle and Harold Rhode consider him a mentor. In 1996, Perle and others influenced by Lewis will write a paper for right wing Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu entitled “A Clean Break” that advocates the “Lebanonization” of countries like Iraq and Syria (see July 8, 1996). Lewis will remain influential after 9/11. For instance, he will have dinner with Vice President Cheney shortly before the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Some will later suspect that Cheney and others were actually implementing Lewis’s idea by invading Iraq. Chas Freeman, former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, will say in May 2003, just after the invasion, “The neoconservatives’ intention in Iraq was never to truly build democracy there. Their intention was to flatten it, to remove Iraq as a regional threat to Israel.”

Winter 1995: Article Denounces Pro-Islamist Perspectives in Academia

Academic Questions, a quarterly publication of the National Association of Scholars, publishes a piece by Col. Norvell De Atkine and Daniel Pipes denouncing leftist and pro-Islamist perspectives in academia, which they say are anti-American and sympathetic to enemies of the US. [Academic Questions, 1995]

July 8, 1996: Neoconservative Think Tank Advocates Aggressive Israeli Foreign Policy

The Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, an Israeli think tank, publishes a paper titled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.” [Washington Times, 10/7/2002; ] The paper, whose lead author is neoconservative Richard Perle, is meant to advise the new, right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Other authors include James Colbert, Charles Fairbanks, Jr., Douglas Feith, Robert Loewenberg, David Wurmser, and Meyrav Wurmser. It advocates making a complete break with past policies by adopting a strategy “based on an entirely new intellectual foundation, one that restores strategic initiative and provides the nation the room to engage every possible energy on rebuilding Zionism.…” [Guardian, 9/3/2002] Much along the lines of an earlier paper by Israeli Oded Yinon (see February 1982), the document urges the Israelis to aggressively seek the downfall of their Arab neighbors—especially Syria and Iraq—by exploiting the inherent tensions within and among the Arab States. The first step is to be the removal of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. A war with Iraq will destabilize the entire Middle East, allowing governments in Syria, Iran, Lebanon, and other countries to be replaced. “Israel will not only contain its foes; it will transcend them,” the paper says. [Studies, 7/8/1996; Guardian, 9/3/2002; Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 3/19/2003] Other suggestions for Israel include abandoning the Oslo Accords, developing a foreign policy based on a traditional balance of power strategy, reserving its right to invade the West Bank and Gaza Strip as part of a strategy of “self-defense,” abandoning any notion of “land for peace,” reestablishing a policy of preemptive strikes, forging closer ties to the US while taking steps towards self-reliance, and seeking an alternative to Yasser Arafat as leader of the PLO. [Studies, 7/8/1996] Perle will later become chairman of President Bush’s influential Defense Policy Board and will be instrumental is moving Bush’s US policy toward war with Iraq after the 9/11 attacks.

July 1998: Prominent Neoconservative Says INC Control of Northern Iraq Would Increase Israeli Security

David Wurmser says that having a region in northern Iraq controlled by the Iraqi National Congress would provide the missing piece to complete an anti-Syria, anti-Iran block. “If Ahmed [Chalabi] extends a no-fly, no-drive in northern Iraq, it puts scuds out of the range of Israel and provides the geographic beachhead between Turkey, Jordan and Israel,” Wurmser says. “This should anchor the Middle East pro-Western coalition.” [Forward, 7/31/2003]

July 1998: Rumsfeld Commission Wildly Inflates Threat from Iran, North Korea

The “Team B” intelligence analysis exercise of 1975, which so disastrously overestimated the Soviet threat (see November 1976), returns in the form of the “Rumsfeld Commission,” which issues its report this month. Conservative commentators and former participants have called for a second “Team B”-style competitive intelligence analysis ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall (see 1990, 1994, and 1996). The “Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States” (see July 15, 1998), led by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, is packed with conservative and neoconservative hardliners much as the original Team B cadre was; it includes some former Team B members such as former Pentagon official Paul Wolfowitz. Like the original Team B, the Rumsfeld Commission challenges CIA estimates of foreign military threats; like the original Team B, the Rumsfeld Commission wildly overestimates the impending threat from countries such as Iran and North Korea, both of which it judges will be capable of striking the US with nuclear weapons in five years or perhaps less. The original Team B findings impelled thirty years of full-bore military spending by the US to counter a Soviet threat that was fading, not growing; the Rumsfeld Commission’s equally alarmist findings impels a new push for spending on the so-called “Star Wars” ballistic missile defense system (see March 23, 1983). Conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly will observe that the Rumsfeld Commission’s report “provided Congress with enough talking points to win the argument [on missile defense] both in the strategic arena and in the 20-second soundbite television debates.” Former State Department intelligence analyst Greg Thielmann will later observe, “time has proven Rumsfeld’s predictions dead wrong.” Author and professor Gordon R. Mitchell will write that the second “Team B” exercise shows “that by 1998, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz had honed the art of intelligence manipulation through use of competitive intelligence analysis. Retrospective assessments revealing serious flaws in the Team B work products came long after political officials had already converted the alarmist reports into political support for favored military policies.” [Quarterly Journal of Speech, 5/2006 pdf file]

November 1, 2000: David Wurmser Urges US and Israel To ‘Strike Fatally’ Against Arab Radicalism

In an op-ed piece published by the Washington Times, David Wurmser of the American Enterprise Institute calls on the US and Israel to “broaden” the conflict in the Middle East. The US, he says, needs “to strike fatally, not merely disarm, the centers of radicalism in the region—the regimes of Damascus, Baghdad, Tripoli, Tehran, and Gaza” —in order to “reestablish the recognition that fighting with either the United States or Israel is suicidal.” This is necessary, according to Wurmser, because the policies of the US and Israel during the last decade have strengthened Arab radicalism in the Middle East. Wurmser complains that the two countries have mistakenly identified the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and their own behavior as the primary causes of anti-Israeli and anti-American violence instead of focusing on what he claims are the real sources of resentment among Arab leaders—Israeli and American values. “Few anti-American outbursts or Arab-Israeli confrontations initially have much to do with Israel’s or America’s behavior; they have more to do with what these two countries are: free societies,” Wurmser writes. “These upheavals originate in the conditions of Arab politics, specifically in the requirements of tyrannies to seek external conflict to sustain internal repression.… A regime built on opposition to freedom will view free nations, such as the United States and Israel, as mortal threats.” The US and Israeli failure to grasp this reality, along with the Clinton administration’s reluctance to remove Saddam from power, according to Wurmser, has only empowered Arab radicalism. The answer, he argues, is to forcefully reassert US and Israeli power. [Washington Times, 11/1/2000]

Shortly after January 20, 2001: Pentagon Analysts Replaced With Neoconservative Ideologues

Shortly after George W. Bush is inaugurated, “[k]ey personnel, long-time civilian professionals” at the Pentagon’s Near East South Asia (NESA) desk are moved or replaced with people from neoconservative think tanks. [American Conservative, 12/1/2003; Mother Jones, 1/2004] Joe McMillan, the Office Director, is moved to a new location outside of the Pentagon, which according to Karen Kwiatkowski, who works at the NESA desk, is odd because “the whole reason for the Office Director being a permanent civilian (occasionally military) professional is to help bring the new appointee up to speed, ensure office continuity, and act as a resource relating to regional histories and policies.” [American Conservative, 12/1/2003; Mother Jones, 1/2004; Salon, 3/10/2004] Larry Hanauer, who has long been at the Israel-Syria-Lebanon desk and who is known to be “even-handed with Israel,” is replaced by David Schenker of the Washington Institute. [American Conservative, 12/1/2003; Mother Jones, 1/2004] Other veteran NESA employees who are banished include James Russell, who has served as the country director for Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, and Marybeth McDevitt, the country director for Egypt. [Mother Jones, 1/2004]

October 29, 2001: Neoconservative Scholar: ‘This Is Total War’

Michael Ledeen, speaking at an event sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), states: “No stages. This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there. All this talk about first we are going to do Afghanistan, then we will do Iraq… this is entirely the wrong way to go about it. If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely and we don’t try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war… our children will sing great songs about us years from now.” [Institute, 10/29/2001; Village Voice, 11/21/2001] Interestingly, several sources credit fellow AEI neoconservative Richard Perle, and not Ledeen, with the quote, including John Pilger’s book The New Rulers of the World [Pilger, 2002, pp. 10] and former State Department and USAID official William Fisher. [Informed Comment, 2/1/2005] Perle is the moderator of the AEI event where Ledeen speaks. [Institute, 10/29/2001; Village Voice, 11/21/2001]

December 7, 2001: Neoconservative Michael Ledeen Argues in Favor of Perpetual War against the Muslim World

Michael Ledeen, an avid admirer of Machiavelli, argues in a piece published by National Review Online that the US must be “imperious, ruthless, and relentless” against the Muslim world until there has been “total surrender.” Any attempt on the part of the US to be “reasonable” or “evenhanded” will only empower Islamic militants, he asserts. He writes: “We will not be sated until we have had the blood of every miserable little tyrant in the Middle East, until every leader of every cell of the terror network is dead or locked securely away, and every last drooling anti-Semitic and anti-American mullah, imam, sheikh, and ayatollah is either singing the praises of the United States of America, or pumping gasoline, for a dime a gallon, on an American military base near the Arctic Circle.” [National Review, 12/7/2001] The piece is republished in the Jewish World Review four days later. [Jewish World Review, 12/11/2001]

April 2002: Neoconservatives Say War against Iraq Is about Redrawing ‘Geopolitical Map of the Middle East’

According to Arnaud de Borchgrave, the editor-at-large of the Washington Times, he learns in April 2002 from neoconservatives that the planned war against Iraq is not about WMD, but about reshaping the Middle East. In a February 2004 op-ed, he writes: “WMDs were not the principal reason for going to war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq; they were the pretext.… When this writer first heard from prominent neoconservatives in April 2002 that war was no longer a question of ‘if’ but ‘when,’ the casus belli had little to do with WMDs. The Bush administration, they explained, starkly and simply, had decided to redraw the geopolitical map of the Middle East. The Bush Doctrine of preemption had become the vehicle for driving axis-of-evil practitioners out of power.” [Washington Times, 2/10/2004]

August 6, 2002: Prominent Neoconservative Wants to Turn Middle East into ‘Cauldron’ of Violence

On August 4, 2002, retired Lt. Gen. Brent Scowcroft said that if the US invades Iraq: “I think we could have an explosion in the Middle East. It could turn the whole region into a cauldron and destroy the War on Terror” (see August 4, 2002). On August 6, neoconservative Michael Ledeen responds in the National Review by saying: “One can only hope that we turn the region into a cauldron, and faster, please. If ever there were a region that richly deserved being cauldronized, it is the Middle East today. If we wage the war effectively, we will bring down the terror regimes in Iraq, Iran, and Syria, and either bring down the Saudi monarchy or force it to abandon its global assembly line to indoctrinate young terrorists. That’s our mission in the war against terror.” [National Review, 8/6/2002] Author Craig Unger will later comment: “‘Faster, please,’ became [Ledeen’s] mantra, repeated incessantly in his National Review columns. Rhapsodizing about war week after week, in the aftermath of 9/11, seemingly intoxicated by the grandiosity of his fury, Ledeen became the chief rhetorician for neoconservative visionaries who wanted to remake the Middle East.”

September 4, 2002: Neoconservative Michael Ledeen Advocates Overthrow of Iraqi, Iranian, Syrian, and Saudi Arabian Governments

Neoconservative Michael Ledeen argues in a piece published by the Wall Street Journal that the US must not limit the next military strike to Iraq alone. Rather, according to Ledeen, the US “should instead be talking about using all our political, moral, and military genius to support a vast democratic revolution to liberate all the peoples of the Middle East from tyranny.” In addition to Iraq, he says, the governments of Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia must also be overthrown. “Stability is an unworthy American mission, and a misleading concept to boot. We do not want stability in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and even Saudi Arabia; we want things to change. The real issue is not whether, but how to destabilize.” [Wall Street Journal, 9/4/2002]

February 2003: Prominent Neoconservatives Argue Iraq War Is Really about US World Dominance

Prominent neoconservatives William Kristol and Lawrence F. Kaplan publish the book The War Over Iraq advocating a US invasion of that country. In the book’s introduction, they assert: “We stand at the cusp of a new historical era.… This is a decisive moment.… The decision about what course to take in dealing with Iraq is particularly significant because it is so clearly about more than Iraq. It is about more even than the future of the Middle East and the war on terror. It is about what sort of role the United States intends to play in the world in the twenty-first century.” [Kristol and Kaplan, 2003, pp. vii-viii]

January, 2005: Former CIA Officer Argues for Alliance with Militant Islam to Overthrow the Arab States

in January 2005 former CIA officer Reuel Marc Gerecht, now a member of the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, announces the release of his new book The Islamic Paradox, which argues that the US should ally itself with the militant Islamic right and seek the overthrow of the secular Arab governments of the Middle East. For example, he compares Ayatollah Khomeini favorably with Egyptian President Honsni Mubarak, and suggests that we should support the overthrow of the Mubarak government by the Muslim Brotherhood.

March 2007: Journalist Calls Neocon Policy Paper ‘A Playbook for US-Israel Foreign Policy During Bush-Cheney Era’

Author and journalist Craig Unger writes that the 1996 Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies policy paper, “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm” (see July 8, 1996), was “the kernel of a breathtakingly radical vision for a new Middle East. By waging wars against Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, the paper asserted, Israel and the US could stabilize the region. Later, the neoconservatives argued that this policy could democratize the Middle East.” Unger’s thoughts are echoed by neoconservative Meyrav Wurmser, an Israeli-American policy expert who co-signed the paper with her husband, David Wurmser, now a top Middle East adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney. Mrs. Wurmser (see March 2007) calls the policy paper “the seeds of a new vision.” While many of the paper’s authors eventually became powerful advisers and officials within the Bush administration, and implemented the policies advocated in the paper in the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the paper’s focus on Iran has been somewhat less noticed. Former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for whom the paper was written, has observed, “The most dangerous of these regimes [Iran, Syria, and Iraq] is Iran.” Unger writes, “Ten years later, ‘A Clean Break’ looks like nothing less than a playbook for US-Israeli foreign policy during the Bush-Cheney era. Many of the initiatives outlined in the paper have been implemented—removing Saddam [Hussein] from power, setting aside the ‘land for peace’ formula to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, attacking Hezbollah in Lebanon—all with disastrous results.” [Vanity Fair, 3/2007]