Lobbying

There’s an interview with Stephen Walt, of Mearsheimer and Walt fame, here It’s mainly a potted version of the thesis propounded in the articles and book he wrote with Mearsheimer; that the pro-Israel lobby in the United States is inordinately powerful and that its activities are harmful to the United States and Israel.

Referring to the war between Israel and Hezbollah two years ago he says,

The [pro-Israel] lobby supported Israel’s strategy of attacking Hezbollah, instead of looking for another solution to the conflict.

So it was Israel that attacked Hezbollah. No mention of Hezbollah having gotten the ball rolling by crossing an international border to murder and kidnap and and later launching thousands of rockets at northern Israel.

With regard to Iraq, the whole idea of invading it and overthrowing Saddam was the work of the neoconservatives, of whom some are Jews and some are not, who form part of the hard line element of the pro-Israel lobby.

The invasion of Iraq was the work of a sub-group of the pro-Israel lobby. No other actors or considerations were involved. Glad to have that cleared up.

Now things get a bit weird,

They [the pro-Israel lobby] unsuccessfully pressured Clinton and Bush, during his first term, to go after Saddam. After the 11th of September they were able to persuade Bush that it was a good idea, something they hadn’t previously been able to do.

Maybe it was just a slip of the tongue, or maybe the translator screwed up but it seems to pretty odd to have a supposed expert on the USA’s foreign policy getting basic information wrong.

Referring to the role of AIPAC he says,

If a candidate [for the presidency of the United States] doesn’t get its support he’s going to find it difficult to get elected because American Jews are big contributors to campaigns.

All of them, without exception.  And no American Jew is capable of making up their own mind when it comes to making campaign contributions. They just wait for AIPAC to issue a nihil obstat for a candidate and immediately get out their cheque books.

Asked about the relationship between the pro-Israel lobby and the press he says,

There’s this long standing idea that the Jews control the press and it’s not one I agree with.

Good to hear that, Stephen.

However, there are a lot of pro-Israel people in the press and they write and comment accordingly.

Truly amazing. People writing things in accordance with what they believe.

Furthermore, there are organisations within the [pro-Israel] lobby that look at everything that’s published and exert pressure for information favourable to Israel to be put out and they get angry when anything critical is published.

If so much of the press is pro-Israeli you’d wonder why there’d be any necessity to exert pressure on anyone. And there’s also the question of what he means by ‘exerting pressure’. It sound’s pretty bad. Could it mean threats of violence? Actual violence? Throwing people out of their jobs? I suppose not but I’d like to know what he does mean. And the most amazing bit comes at the end; people who support Israel get angry when they see something in the media that they think is unfair or inaccurate. Simply astonishing.

And then he says,

It’s not that the [pro-Israel] lobby controls the press, it’s that it works very hard to make sure that Israeli affairs are correctly covered. This isn’t healthy because it means we can’t have a conversation about American foreign policy.

I suppose that that I should read this as charitably as possible and interpret ‘correctly’  as meaning ‘correctly from its point of view’. It improves matters a bit but not much as it still means that Walt thinks pro-Israel lobby has such an influence over the press as to entirely stifle public debate on foreign policy in America. If it has influence like that I wonder why he bothers saying that that he doesn’t think the pro-Israel lobby controls the press.

You could argue that I have been a bit harsh on Walt here because I have translated comments from Spanish orignially made in English and they may not precisely represent his views and you could also argue that this is a newspaper interview and it doesn’t require the interviewee to produce the same level of discursive precsion as they would in an academic article. Ok, but still…

Costs And Risks

Writing about today’s events on the Israel-Lebanon border and the start of the 2006 war,  Jonathan Steele says,

After all, three Israeli soldiers had been killed by Hizbullah in a similar raid in October 2000 and Ehud Barak, the then prime minister, had not started a war.

Indeed he didn’t and Hizbullah drew the obvious conclusion that launching raids across a UN-recognized border with the aim of capturing and killing Israeli soldiers was a tactic free from all but the most minor risks. When they tried it again in July 2006, the Israeli government decided that there had to be an end to  risk free, cross border raids and to impose heavy costs on Hizbullah.  It was right to do so.

Steele, as well as being an apologist for Omar al-Bashir, belongs to the vast tribe of minor key antimsemites who think that only acceptable way for Jews to behave when attacked is to apologise for existing and beg the aggressor not to do it again.

Does “Never Again” Mean Anything?

Asked in today’s La Nación whether his decision to seek the indictement for genocide of Omar al-Bashir, the president of Sudan, has any chance of being put into effect, Luis Moreno Ocampo replied,

The question is whether or not the international community is ready for the challenge. I’d say there were two possibilities; either the rule is that those who commit genocide are detained or  the rule is that those who commit genocide are in such a powerful position that they can keep on committing it. That is what has to be decided and it’s a very important decision, not only for the Darfuris but for all of humanity. Can humanity stop a genocide? Does “never again” mean anything?

His decision gets a strong endorsement from El País here

No Better Man

Luis Moreno Ocampo has decided enough is enough in Darfur

The action against Mr. Bashir marks the first time the prosecutor of International Criminal Court has brought genocide charges against anyone. It is also the first time the prosecutor has brought charges against a sitting head of state since it opened its doors in 2002.

The rest of the story is here

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