Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Feeling the Ignorance at AIPAC 2011

--- by Max Blumenthal

On May 22, thousands of supporters of America’s most powerful pro-Israel lobbying group, the America-Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, converged on Washington for the group’s annual conference. For two days they watched Democratic and Republican congressional leaders pledge their undivided loyalty to the state of Israel, and by extension, to AIPAC’s legislative agenda. Speeches by President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu highlighted the conference, with Obama attempting to clarify his statement demanding that 1967 borders be the “starting point” for negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

I interviewed several AIPAC delegates in the streets outside the conference. While few, if any, of them were able to demonstrate the slightest degree of sophistication in their understanding of the Israel-Palestine crisis, they had been briefed inside on how to respond to critics. No one I spoke to would concede that Israel occupied any part of Palestinian territory; none would concede that Israel had committed acts of indiscriminate violence or that it had transferred Palestinians by force; one interviewee could not distinguish Palestine from Pakistan. With considerable wealth and negligible knowledge — few had spent much time inside Israel — the delegates were easily melded by the cadre of neoconservative and Israeli “experts” appearing in AIPAC’s briefing sessions.

As the day wore on, many delegates waded into confrontations with members of Code Pink and Palestine solidarity demonstrators who had set up a protest camp across the street. With conflict intensifying on the sidewalk, Code Pink’s Medea Benjamin invited AIPAC delegates to express themselves from the protest stage. There, their most visceral feelings and deeply held views about Israel-Palestine crisis were revealed. See it for yourself.


image by Steve Aufrecht

1 comment:

Geir said...

Phil,

Interesting that you should refer to Congress as the Politburo.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion may have been fiction but much of this fiction has become fact in regards to the USA and of course the old Soviet Union and now Russia.

In the collapse and chaos of the Soviet Union the Zionist Jews where able to take control of the economy, witness the Russian oligarchs.

These evil bastards are parasites on the host nation. Communist/Capitalist, Fascist/Democracy, Republican/Democrat,etc. is irrelevant, loyalty to the tribe trumps all.

Chris Wood commenting at Judeofacism.com:

"What infuriates me about this whole sick phenomenon is that it is just a repeat of the events that played themselves out in Russia and Europe in the first half of the 20th Century wherein Stalinist and Jewish Bolshevik lefties murdered tens of millions of innocents with plans to murder tens of millions more, which gave rise to Hitler and the Nazis, but then essentially got off scot free, historically speaking, with Hitler being blamed nearly entirely, and the Communists, lefties and Jewish Bolsheviks basically being given a “pass” for their mass murder, and their role in giving rise to Hitler."