For the Conference on the Israel Lobby—Press Blackout at the
Press Club
By Ralph Nader
April 18, 2015 "ICH"
- Following the heavy coverage of AIPAC’s
(the virulently pro-Israeli government
lobby) multi-day annual Washington
convention in March, the mainstream media
might have been interested for once in
covering alternative viewpoints like those
discussed at the April 10th conference “The
Israel Lobby: Is it Good for the US? Is it
Good for Israel?” (Israellobbyus.org).
Fairness and balance in reporting should
produce at least some coverage of such an
event.
Organized by the Washington
Report on Middle East Affairs, which
was launched about thirty years ago by a
British Army Officer who served in World War
II and two retired U.S. Ambassadors to
countries in the Middle East (wrmea.org),
the day-long program at the prestigious
National Press Club should have been
intriguing to reporters. After all, are they
not interested in important,
taboo-challenging presentations on a
critical dimension of U.S. foreign and
military policy?
The presenters were much
more newsworthy than most of the speakers at
the AIPAC convention who redundantly
restated the predictable AIPAC line. “The
Israel Lobby: Is it Good for the US? Is it
Good for Israel?” had presenters ranging
from the courageous, principled columnist,
Gideon Levy of Israel’s best and most
serious newspaper, Haaretz;
Princeton Professor emeritus of
international law and the former UN Special
Rapporteur for Palestinian territories,
Richard Falk; former members of Congress,
Paul Findley (R-IL) and Nick Rahall (D-WV);
author and an Israeli general’s son, Miko
Peled; Dr. Jack Shaheen, the award-winning
author documenting stereotypes of Arabs and
Arab-Americans in Hollywood and the U.S.
media; and even a former AIPAC supporter M.
J. Rosenberg (mjrosenberg.net)
who witnessed the power of AIPAC money as
both a congressional staffer and later an
AIPAC senior staffer in the nineteen
eighties.
Gideon Levy, the dean of
Israeli Journalists, who knows first-hand
the situation on the ground in Israel and
occupied Palestine, referred to Israel’s
intensely intrusive pressure on the U.S.
during Iranian nuclear negotiations. He
offered the phrase: “United States of
Israel,” and said, “many times when someone
looks at the relations between Israel and
the United States, one might ask, who is
really the superpower between the two?”
Mr. Levy described Israel
as a society that “lives in denial, totally
disconnected from reality” that “lost
connection with the reality in its backyard,
it totally lost connection with the
international environment.”
The veteran journalist
stunned the packed audience when he said
that “the two state solution is dead.” With
the Israeli occupation going “deeper and
deeper,” he pointed to the “systematic
dehumanization of the Palestinians,”
Israelis presenting themselves as occupying
victims and the belief by many Israelis that
they “are the chosen people” and “have the
right to do what we want,” as the basis for
the occupation.
The serious, continuing
breaches over decades of international law
by Israel and its backer, the U.S.
government, were described by Richard Falk
who felt the brunt of these powers during
his six-year term as the UN Rapporteur just
for connecting the facts to the laws, and
noting widely acknowledged continuing
violations of UN resolutions and the Geneva
Conventions.
Former Congressman Paul
Findley spoke of politicians cowering before
AIPAC because of the “anxiety over being
accused of anti-Semitism.” AIPAC is a
leading anti-Semitic organization against
the Arab peoples and the thousands of
innocent civilian Palestinians and Lebanese
children and adults slaughtered by the
U.S.-armed Israeli armed forces. (See Doctor
James Zogby’s remarks about ‘The Other
Anti-Semitism’, delivered Hebrew University
in Israel in 1994.)
AIPAC, knowing that the
Israeli military was engaged daily as
brutalizing occupiers, has never openly
disavowed its support for such destruction
of innocent humans and human rights even
when the videotaped devastation horrified
the civilized world. AIPAC was conspicuously
silent during the illegal U.S. invasion and
violent sociocide of Iraq—a nation that did
not threaten the U.S.
A surprise speaker was the
just defeated 38-year veteran of the House
of Representatives, former Congressman Nick
Joe Rahall. Apparently, now extricated from
AIPAC’s Congressional clutches, he is now
free to stand tall for human rights and
speak freely and describe the congressional
obeisance to the Israel lobby from the
inside.
Unfortunately, there was
no panel representing either U.S. taxpayers,
who foot the bill for the billions of
dollars spent yearly, nor the U.S. soldiers
who have been sent to kill or be killed in
military invasions and other attacks backed
by this self-defeating Israeli-U.S.
government alliance that just worsens the
insecurities in the Middle East, spreads
into savage sectarian struggles and portends
more boomerangs against peace and justice in
the world.
So, where were the
reporters of the mainstream media? Where was
C-SPAN during a week when Congress was on a
holiday and their cameras were not
preoccupied by Capitol Hill activities—its
foremost priority? Apparently, the American
people were only to see and hear the extreme
views of AIPAC that do not even command the
support of a majority of American Jews who
do favor a two-state solution, along with a
majority of Arab-Americans.
It is true that a few
members of the mainstream media RSVP’d to
attend this conference, but they did not
show up or write anything about it before or
after.
In the meantime, how about
a little retrospective evaluation, by those
so authorized, in the New York Times, Washington
Post, Wall Street Journal, Associated
Press and Reuters to make
better judgements about providing balanced
news the next time around. As for the
absentee “fair and balanced” Fox News—well,
what do you expect?
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