Patriot and author, Grant F. Smith, Director for the Institute of Research Middle East Policy publication, Foreign Agents: The American Israel Public Affairs Committee from the 1963 Fulbright Hearings to the 2005 Espionage Scandal, exposes how US Middle East policy has been formulated and thrives due to the dearth of relevant reporting on AIPAC's activities. This book should be read by every American tax payer, Congress and foreign policy maker.

It begins with Senator Fulbright's on target questions to Jewish-Agency-funded US foreign agents who did not register with the Justice Department or disclose their true financing, funding flows and covert activities and illuminates how AIPAC: the American Israel Public Affairs Committee operates "within a murky nexus regulated by four important but seldom enforced US laws." [1]


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


Smith documents how AIPAC-a constellation of individuals and organizations that make up the "Israel lobby" continue to actively steer USA foreign policy in a militant and pro-Israel only direction.

Senator Fulbright's concerns over activities of unregistered foreign agents who worked to influence public opinion and policy resulted in the 1963 Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings to investigate the Jewish Agency and uncovered the "conduit" operation run by the American Zionist Council. In 1959, The American Zionist Council was renamed AIPAC.

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

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


 
On George Washington's birth date, his Farewell Address has been read aloud in Congress ever since 1896. However, his warning has not yet seeped into the consciousness of our elected officials, to "Observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all...and passionate attachments for others should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave...a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former in the quarrels and wars of the latter, without adequate justification."



It has been said that the root of all evil is the love of money, and most nefarious are the consequences of nearly two-trillion American dollars which have reaped "special trade advantages, and preferential contracts. U.S. aid to Israel cost some 275,000 American jobs each year...Additional known items include loan guarantees-which the U.S. most probably will be forced to cover-special contracts for Israeli firms, legal and illegal transfers of marketable U.S. military technology, de facto exemption from U.S. trade protection provisions, and discounted sales or free transfers of U.S. military equipment…net purchases by U.S. parties of Israel Bonds, adds at least $40 billion to the total…U.S. jobs and exports have been affected, adding to costs and losses…As U.S. relations with Mid East countries deteriorated, trade was lost. Worsening political relations resulted in the loss of hundreds of thousands of U.S. jobs…thanks to the Israel lobby." [5]


Smith's epic public service tome also illuminates how money laundering of over 50 billion US dollars to "charitable" organizations and massive covert activities has enabled the ongoing building of the illegal and apartheid Israeli settlements which have expropriated legally owned Palestinian land. Today, a quarter of a million Jewish settlers, most all of which have no historical tie to the Holy Land, have created facts on the ground to disable a viable contiguous Palestinian state.


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


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


On July 3, 2008, former Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul stated, "I hear members of Congress saying 'if we could only nuke them' and that the atmosphere in Congress indicates that a military strike on Iran has already been condoned." [8]

Referring to House Congressional Resolution 362 Paul called the 'Virtual Iran War Resolution', "an absolute blockade of the entire country of Iran, [that will] punish any country or any business group around the world if they trade with Iran." [9]


In 1976, the Symington Amendment was adopted to fortify and extend the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It prohibited US assistance to any country trafficking in nuclear enrichment equipment or technology outside of international safeguards.

The world learned about Israel's secret underground nuclear weapons facility in 1986 due to Mordechai Vanunu's photographic evidence, but the American government ignores this elephant in the world and has refused to insist Israel allow international inspection of their nuclear weapons facilities.

The American government's double standards and Israel's negation of international law, UN resolutions, and denial of equal human rights for Palestinians have all contributed to the instability in the Middle East.


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

Many Americans see Israel as an ally and Iran and Syria as our mutual enemies. The "war on terror" has become a tactic to infuse fear while it ignores that much of the anger in the Arab world is in response to Israel's 40+ years of military occupation of Palestine and the concrete wall and electrified fence built on legally owned Palestinian property which is "financed with U.S. aid at a cost of $1.5 million per mile. The Israeli wall prevents residents from receiving health care and emergency medical services. In other areas, the barrier separates farmers from their olive groves which have been their families' sole livelihood for generations." [10]


William Fulbright warned, "The age of warrior kings and of warrior presidents has passed. The nuclear age calls for a different kind of leadership....a leadership of intellect, judgment, tolerance and rationality, a leadership committed to human values, to world peace, and to the improvement of the human condition. The attributes upon which we must draw are the human attributes of compassion and common sense, of intellect and creative imagination, and of empathy and understanding between cultures." 

Yet, America's 'leaders' continue to cower and pander to an "illegal foreign lobby that has long flouted US law and suborned the national interest as a foreign agent." [11]

 Foreign Agents: The American Israel Public Affairs Committee from the 1963 Fulbright Hearings to the 2005 Espionage Scandal could put the starch in their spine to put America first and then these United States would indeed observe good faith and justice towards all nations; [and]  cultivate peace and harmony with all.


1.    Grant F. Smith, Foreign Agents: The American Israel Public Affairs Committee from the 1963 Fulbright Hearings to the 2005 Espionage Scandal, Page 15. Published 2007 by the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy, Washington D.C.
2.    IBID
3.    Page 20, 22
4.    Page 149-150
5.    Page 150-151
6.    Page 158
7.   Page 155
8.   http://www.presstv.com/detail.aspx?id=62812&sectionid=3510201 04
9.   IBID
10. Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Page 43, Jan/Feb. 2007
11. Grant F. Smith, Page 168
 

Eileen Fleming, Reporter and Editor WAWA:
http://www.wearewideawake.org/
Author "Keep Hope Alive" and "Memoirs of a Nice Irish American 'Girl's' Life in Occupied Territory"
Producer "30 Minutes With Vanunu" and "13 Minutes with Vanunu"