What does "The Israel Lobby - US" documentary reveal about the lobby in America? - Ali Abunimah

hello I'm Janet McMann managing editor of The Washington report on Middle East affairs I'm Janet McMann managing editor of The Washington report on Middle East affairs I first became aware of our next speaker in the 1990s when I began reading his masterful letters to National Public Radio pointing out their errors of omission and Commission alike which of course were numerous journalist Ali Abunimah is the co-founder and executive director of the widely acclaimed Electronic Intifada a non-profit independent online publication focusing on Palestine he has been an active part of the movement for justice in Palestine for two decades and was the recipient of a 2013 Lenin cultural freedom fellowship a graduate of Princeton University and the University of Chicago Ali is a frequent speaker on the Middle East contributing regularly to numerous publications he is also the author of one country a bold proposal to end the israeli-palestinian impasse and the battle for justice in Palestine and he will be signing both books in the ideas fair room during the morning break immediately following our question-and-answer session the Electronic Intifada has been at the forefront in fighting censorship by obtaining releasing and contextualizing the lobby the suppressed al Jazeera documentary exposing the strategies and activities of the Israel lobby in this country today he will be addressing the question what does a censored undercover news investigation reveal about the Israel lobby in America so please join me in welcoming Ali Abunimah [Applause] thank you very much and good morning everyone and thank you to the organizers to the Institute and to the Washington report for inviting me back here for the second year in a row and it's an honor and a pleasure to see so many people here this morning and some of you were in the room last year when I stood here to talk about this documentary and at that time nobody had seen it and Grant asked me he said do you think we'll ever see it and I I don't remember exactly what I said but I think I said we will see it or I didn't know and what happened was in back in March last year our publication the Electronic Intifada was the first to publish reports of the contents of the documentary in August we were the first to publish exits video excerpts from the film and in November we along with Al Akbar in Beirut and avi event here in France actually published the entire film now for those of you who don't know anything about this film and there may be some people first let me give credit to the team at al-jazeera investigations led by Clayton Swisher and Phil Reese and their colleagues and of course the undercover reporter known as Tony who did a really fantastic historic piece of journalism a four-part documentary going undercover in the Israel lobby in the Israel Project revealing candid conversations by top israel lobbyists who did not know that they were being recorded but unfortunately this fantastic piece of journalism was suppressed and I'll say more about that in a moment but let me just ask how many of the the people in this room have actually watched the documentary or any part of it and I'm gonna say that that's maybe about 25 to 30 percent which is pretty good but really I'd like to encourage everyone to watch it and it's available online free at the Electronic Intifada and other sites and already hundreds of thousands of people if not maybe in the low millions have seen it if you were to add up all the different copies that are out there so what what does this film reveal well first a little bit of background the film was made by Al Jazeera in 2016 and was completed in 2017 but as I mentioned it was censored after petard the of course the Gulf State that funds al Jazeera came under intense pressure from the Israel lobby now this is remarkable because it's a film about the power of the Israel lobby and this same Lobby succeeded in getting Qatar to suppress this film all the while denying that the Israel lobby has any power or influence now late last year the Director General of Al Jazeera claimed at a conference in the US that the reason the film had not been shown was due to outstanding legal issues this of this was flatly contradicted by his own journalists and we know that in fact the film had been completed and it had passed through all of the usual and rigorous legal and standards review that al-jazeera does and we know how rigorous that is because in January of 2017 al-jazeera did actually broadcast a similar film focused on the Israel lobby in the UK that film revealed that a spy at the Israeli embassy called Shai Mossad was working secretly in his words to take down a British government minister who was deemed too critical of Israel and to secretly set up a pro-israel organization within the opposition Labour Party this was being run out of the Israeli embassy when this was revealed the British expelled Shai Mossad but the British government very quickly swept all this under the carpet but significantly after the film was broadcast and you can watch that film on the LG at our website because they did actually broadcast it after the film was broadcast Israel lobby groups and individuals in the UK filed a raft of complaints with Ofcom the British broadcast regulator we don't really have an equivalent in the US where you can complain about fox or CNN or MSNBC or Rachel Maddow mad conspiracies claiming Russia is going to cut off the heating of Americans in the depth of winter there's no one to complain to for that but in the UK they have a powerful broadcast regulator that can actually take away your license and Ofcom did an eight-month investigation and threw out every single complaint against the documentary there was no bias there was no misrepresentation there was no unfairness in it and the u.s. film was made to exactly the same standards by exactly the same journalists this film which I again encourage you all to watch exposes the efforts of Israel and its lobbyists to spy on smear and intimidate US citizens who support Palestinian human rights especially the boycott divestment and sanctions movement it shows that Israel is running as covert and semi covert black ops from a government agency called the Ministry of strategic affairs which is staffed by many people from Israel's intelligence agencies and that this effort is being done in collusion with an extensive network of us-based organizations who are not registered under Farah as agents of a foreign power but based on what is in the documentary they clearly should be these organizations include the Israel on campus coalition the Israel project and the foundation for defense of democracies it's more like the foundation for defensive apartheid occupation sniper murder and so on it also showed how the Israeli embassy in Washington itself was running some of these operations for example a woman called Julia Rifkin who at that time was an Israeli embassy employee but previously was an AIPAC campus activist in California described her typical daily work as quote mainly gathering Intel reporting back to Israel to report to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of strategic affairs and she discusses how the Israeli government is quote giving our support to various front groups in quote that behind-the-scenes way she also talks about using fake Facebook profiles to monitor campus and Palestine groups and again these efforts are run in direct coordination with the Ministry of strategic affairs whose director-general is a woman called Sima Vaknin Gil who was herself a former military intelligence officer and she talks about how her operation run through the ministry has mapped the universe of Palestinian rights activism globally quote not just in the United States not just campuses but campuses and intersect intersectionality and labor unions and churches and she says that this data is used for court offense activity against Palestine Act activists the film also shows Jacob a executive director of the Israel on campus coalition describing how his organization runs a multi-million dollar effort he doesn't say exactly where those millions come from but he talks about millions of dollars using corporate level enterprise-grade social media intelligence software those are his words to gather lists of Palestine related student events on campus quote generally within about 30 seconds or less of them being posted online and how this information is then filtered to this network of organizations that are working to sabotage these groups and that this effort is coordinated with the Israeli Ministry of strategic affairs jacob aim describes how the israel on campus coalition as part of this israel run or israel coordinated strategy uses anonymous web sites to target activists quote with the anti-israel people what's most effective what we found at least in the last year is you do the opposition research put up some anonymous website and then put up targeted ads on Facebook he talks about canary mission as a good example and adds its psychological warfare one of the cases in the film that's profile this professor bill Mullen at Purdue University in Indiana who found himself the target of just such an anonymous smear campaign where websites went up featuring totally false accusations of sexual harassment and anti-semitism against him even to the point where these websites mentioned his young daughter and his wife so you can imagine the psychological effect on someone of seeing web sites with that kind of false allegation other web sites targeting student leaders in Indiana included one which claimed that a young woman was a terrorist and another which claimed that a young Muslim woman activist was engaging in late night drinking and sex and other activities which were calculated to try to shame her and to you know to bring her into disrepute with her family and her community the film named convicted tax evader Adam Milstein and is who's also the chair of a lobby group called the Israeli American Council which is positioning itself to the right of AIPAC if you can believe such a thing as being the mastermind and meet and key funder of canari mission an anonymous web site that again targets students and professors I should mention that Jacob aim of the Israel on campus coalition described this strategy to smear and target and intimidate people as inspired by General Stanley McChrystal counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan for all the success that has had since the u.s. is of course now in direct negotiations with the Taliban 18 odd years after the u.s. invaded Afghanistan nonetheless it shows the mindset that Israel and its proxies in the United States are waging a war on American citizens including teenagers on college campuses who are exercising their constitutional rights to speak up about an issue they care about deeply we have it from the horse's mouth so to speak Sima Vaknin Gill the Director General of the Foreign Ministry states very explicitly we have FDD that's the foundation for defense of democracies we have FDD we have others working on projects including data gathering information analysis working on activist organizations money trail this is something that only a country with its resources can do the best so she is States on camera in the film that these groups are working with the Israeli government to carry out this operation but when we checked on the US government's foreign agents Registration Act website we did not find the foundation for defense of democracies or any of its principles registered as agents of the Israeli government one of the relations in the film that I found particularly amusing let's say is Israel's F or rather the efforts of the Israel project the Israel project is a a lobby group based here in Washington it's run by a former Clinton administration official Josh Bloch who also worked for AIPAC previously and it also works closely with the Israeli government and the Israel project actually the undercover reporter Tony as he says he's known in the film actually got a job an internship at the Israel project which is pretty amazing but the Israel project the film reveals was running a major effort in a major covert influence campaign on Facebook and this is really remarkable what they what they did is set up pages or communities on Facebook some of them have hundreds of thousands a half a million or more followers and one of them I actually I should have I don't know if we have the ability to project from the internet but I should have thought of this but one of them puts up really cute pictures of kittens and donuts here's one of the actual Israel project donuts this is a black-and-white image but it's really pink it actually looks toxic it looks like it would kill you if you ate it because no food is is naturally that shade of of you know hot pink but it actually describes itself as you know on the About section of the work of the Facebook community it's called cup of Jane and it describes itself as sugar and spice and ever nice what it tries to do is to establish progressive credibility by posting not just pictures of kittens and donuts but also photos and quotations from such black female icons as Maya Angelou and I to be wells there are also posts about the groundbreaking environmentalist Rachel Carson and even about Emma Gonzales who along with her classmates launched a national campaign for gun legislation after surviving the Parkland school massacre in Florida in Florida but woven into this stream of progressive flavored fluff our attacks on actual progressive movements and pro-israel propaganda for example a posting in October 2016 attempted to portray Israeli militarism as cute and empowering they actually posted a photo of an Israeli f-16 fighter jet painted pink pink is a very important color to the Israel project and it says and then the post said the Israeli Air Force has painted fighters in pink in aid of Breast Cancer Awareness Month how cool is that and then it adds this is fierce women by the way need an air force all their own so feminist of course at the same time that this is going on dozens of women in Gaza documented to have died in due to Israel siege denying them potentially life-saving treatment and dozens of cancer patients I should say many of them women documented by the World Health to have died because Israel would not allow them out of the Gaza ghetto to obtain life-saving a treatment but this is the propaganda that cup of Jayne is pushing and it's very clear why or the Israel project is pushing and it's it's very clear why it's because Israel's brand is toxic and you can't sell it directly especially to young people and so you have to try to mix it in with hip cool stuff that looks innocuous or even progressive and the film shows one of this the staffers at the Israel project explaining the logic behind this one Jordan a shock tell he says who we're putting together a lot of pro-israel media through various social media channels that aren't the Israel projects channels so we have a lot of side projects that we were that we are trying to influence the public debate with that's why it's a secretive thing because we don't want people to know that the side projects are associated with the Israel project and in fact these this network of pages run by the Israel project are not labeled as being run by the Israel project or they just say a project of tip t IP nobody who doesn't know what the Israel project is would have any idea what tip is so it was a covert effort now when we asked Facebook to comment on this and and to look into it their media office you know said okay we'll have a look and they got back to us and they said we asked specifically does any of this violate your Terms of Service remember this is at the same time as Facebook is taking down pages of legitimate news organizations and legitimate organization based on the claim that they're somehow agents of Russian influenced uh you know completely bogus stuff and Facebook has partnered with the Israeli government to shut down Palestinian media pages Facebook partnered with the Atlantic Council the the the NATO think-tank here in Washington funded by the US government by the European Union by the United Arab Emirates by Saudi Arabia partnered with them to supposedly identify pages that should be taken down and they took down lots of pages that were perfectly legitimate including as I mentioned pages of journalists and media organizations but Facebook's reply to us about this extensive covert Israeli influence campaign on their platform or pro-israel influenced campaign on their platform was this violates none of our rules and those pages are still operating so there's a lot more in this film in reference to the Benjamins let's say it shows it reveals again some of this is known but it's different to actually see people talking about how it's done fundraisers for political candidates where hundreds of thousands of dollars can be raised in a single night without anything being put on paper you have one of the people involved in this fundraising saying we don't even send out invitations there's nothing but these at these fundraisers people just hand over their credit cards and the organizer runs it up for the maximum twenty seven hundred dollars or whatever it is and in a single night they can erase hundreds of thousands of thousands of dollars for a political candidate who agrees to tow the Israel lobbies line and what's significant in the film I'm not an expert on campaign finance law but the the film indicates that these practices are if not outright illegal certainly come very close to skirting the campaign finance laws and we need to have a conversation about that because it is very much about the Benjamins let me conclude with a couple of comments about the the Israel lobby in general I again commend this film to you and I would like to see everyone watch it it's it's great viewing and not just watching it but sharing it telling people about it how can you find it just go on Google and search watch the film the Israel lobby didn't want you to see and it will it will it will come up because that's the headline that we we ran it under or watch the film yeah watch the film the Israel lobby didn't want you to see and and you can see it I think the bigger picture is that you know you're going to hear we heard this morning from the the extremely informative and learning presentation of Professor Hickson that this Lobby is very powerful and you're going to hear that again throughout the day and it is very powerful but there is a subtle message that that we should also not ignore which is that this Lobby is losing its power because the Israel lobby its power operates best in the dark and already what we're having even with the completely unfounded attacks on a representative Ilhan Omar is something the Israel lobby never wants which is a public discussion about it [Applause] in the film Jonathan chenza the vice president of the foundation for defense of democracies makes an admission he says personally I think the anti said that anti-semitism as a smear is not what it used to be I completely share professor Nixon's statement that we must stand against anti-semitism as any other form of racism anti-jewish bigotry of any kind has no place in a movement for Palestinian human rights that's a message that [Applause] that's a message that we as advocates for Palestinian Liberation must always be in the forefront of saying but of course there is a cynical campaign to weaponize false accusations of anti-semitism to smear and silence people and this has been done with sadly a great deal of success in the UK where for the past three or four years Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn has been the target of bogus claims that the party under his leadership is facing endemic institutional anti-semitism it's a lie it's an outright lie there have been a very few number of marginal cases which have rightly been condemned but there's no evidence that the party is institutionally anti-semitic but the warning I want to give here is that this template is now being imported from the UK directly to the US and to the Democratic Party and again it's not a sign necessarily of the strength of this Lobby but a sign of its weakness in the sense that if the Democratic Party was all solidly pro-israel as perhaps it used to be you wouldn't mean to smear people as anti-semites it's because of the growing support for Palestinian rights the grown disgust that the party establishments complicity with Israel Nancy Pelosi led the smears against Ilhan Omar and Nancy Pelosi will be at AIPAC in the coming days and proudly so it's because the base is rejecting this message from the leadership that we must all march in lockstep with Israel that this debate is happening and so I end with the words of of Eric Gallagher one of the Israel project officials featured in the film who himself used to work for APEC and he says the foundation that AIPAC sat on is rotting they used to be actual widespread public support for Israel in the United States so I don't think that AIPAC is going to remain as influential as it is that's a very optimistic note for us to end on coming straight from a former AIPAC official thank you thank you very much Ali we have some questions here that I'll read to you the first one is and I have a corollary to it so I'm going to indulge myself with that will the lobby us be available on DVD which I know you may not be able to control but I'm also thinking will it be shown on campuses where so many students are being attacked by the canary mission and are so scared about their future because of that I mean doesn't that seem like a great combination that is a great question well the first thing to say is we released we obtained a leaked copy of this film several people ask me you can explain how you got it and I hate to disappoint you but no I'm not gonna explain how we got it the important thing is we did get it and we released it but we don't claim we don't have any copyright over it and in fact in releasing this film you know arguably we took a risk because we didn't know what the reaction of al-jazeera would be because this is their film of course I believe that there was a strong public interest in releasing this film and a strong journalistic defence in doing so but I can't tell you to show it or not show it people of we've made it available and people are free to do as they wish with it if they want to burn it on DVDs or short on college campuses I think it needs to be seen but that's not something that we have the permission to say you can do it or don't do it but I do believe that there is a public interest in seeing this film and in sharing this film the only reaction we've seen from Al Jazeera as they issued a statement saying oh we're very disappointed that it's come out but we've seen no other action from them so far another question is can you expand on the relationship of collusion between the mainstream press and the lobby and don't know if it was in the Al Jazeera video but it's my impression that the Israel project works with porn bureaus of newspapers in Israel yes that is something that the film shows how the Israel project shapes coverage again you know the main the main media organizations whether it's the AP or CNN or others they have their bureaus in Tel Aviv they don't have bureaus in Gaza or even the West Bank for the most part and so they rely very much on Israeli organizations that even their Israeli government to provide them access and in the film the Israel project claims that it got the AP to actually change headlines to be more you know in accord with its with its message and it also profiles a CNN report on supposed terror tunnels from Gaza that the Israel project claimed complete credit for shaping and you actually see the CNN report and how it's just putting out completely bogus Israel lobby talking points in Israeli propaganda you know the tunnel the so-called terror tunnels from Gaza you know they presented this as if Palestinians are digging tunnels from Gaza to come up in Israeli kindergartens in Israeli bedrooms and this is a total lie there is no case ever where Palestinians have used a tunnel to do anything from Gaza other than to attack legitimate military targets and that was stated explicitly and the UN's independent commission of inquiry report on the 2014 Gaza war but you wouldn't know that from watching CNN so that's an example of the collusion that's featured in the film another question is how do you explain how we have missed the political the potential political gain brought by these documentaries how how the tide has been overturned where'd and when we fail both in the UK in the US you know I don't know what more we could do I think it's it's we're in an atmosphere where establishment media establishment politicians don't want to talk about this and we know why you look at what happened to el hanout Omar and you know the weight of the lobby is such that people are afraid people are afraid to do it more and more people are talking and that's a good thing I think things are changing as I mentioned but take just the I mentioned this before but to me it really it's really striking that leave aside the explosive content of this film just the mere fact that this film was suppressed under pressure from the same Lobby on the government of Qatar that by itself is a major story imagine if this film had been about supposed Russian interference and the Russian government had put pressure on a major international network to suppress the documentary Rachel Maddow would be shouting from the rooftops CNN Jake Tapper would be shouting from the rooftops it would be front-page news on the New York Times and The Washington Post instead total silence and another part of the story that's incredible that's not in the film but is very much in the reporting the Electronic Intifada did around it is that Israel lobby effort and Qatar's effort to court the Israel lobby which included you know hiring a lobbyist here in Washington at $50,000 a month and that lobbyist then bringing a parade of some of the most extreme right pro-israel figures from the u.s. to Qatar some of them meeting with the Emir for example Alan Dershowitz and Morton Klein the head of the Zionist Organization of America and Qatar even gave donations of hundreds of thousands of dollars to Zionists organized patience including the zionist organization of america can you I mean it's incredible no one is talking about that but it's it's nobody can deny it because it's all in the in the official disclosure documents that the lobbying firm had to do of how much money where the money came from and who it went to it came from putzi and it went to the Zionist Organization of America those relationships have to be investigated I you know the only thing I'll say is you know we the Electronic Intifada an indication we have a staff of eight we were able to do this because we're independent we because we're funded by our readers that's not a pitch but feel free to donate Electronic Intifada dotnet there's a button there donate now but that's critical that's critical is our is the fact that we're independent we do not fear the pressure of the lobby no one is going to fire us for doing this job because this is our job and it's what people support us to do [Applause] another question of you is is any pro-israel group registered as a foreign agent to your knowledge you know I'm not the expert on that that's I think Ron Smith is the expert on that I don't know if he can AIPAC is definitely not registered I don't think any of the group I know we checked the foundation for defensive democracies is not registered the Israel on campus coalition is not registered we you know we checked when we were doing the reporting and we could not find any evidence that those groups were registered I think there is at least one we found that had registered but its name escapes me now and it's a relatively small player but that's a question perhaps grant can answer when he's back up here so a final question about their film now that the documentary is at was there anything in it concerning or invoking for an agency and dual loyalty and if not was that deliberate do you think the the film does not use the term dual loyalty and you know that that sort of a trigger term that I don't like to use because I think I have heard people use it in a way that suggests that to me suggests kind of a racist or anti-semitic tone and so I don't like to use that dual loyalty in that sense the film has nothing anti-semitic in it it is strict reporting it doesn't accuse people of dual loyalty it simply reports what they're doing and nobody has disputed the reporting of course Martin Klein and the Zionist Organization of America claimed that the film was anti-semitic but you know these we can be descriptive and accurate that these groups profiled in the film are working with the Israeli government to implement the Israeli government's of agenda of shutting down support for Palestinian rights by spying on smearing and sabotaging American citizens and to me there's no dual loyalty there it seems to me that their primary our only loyalty is to the agenda of Israel it's also important it's also important to state and note that and to be very clear about this that there is no you know the the Israel lobby misfortune several organizations because those are the ones the journalists were able to get into but the Israel lobby is much bigger than than the organizations that are profiled in that film and of course the largest base of the Israel lobby in the United States and increasingly so is not Jewish Americans it is it is the the Christian Zionist component that is the mass base of the Israel lobby today in the United States and of course we know that there is a very disturbing relationship there in the sense that a large part of that pro-israel Christian evangelical base that that support for Israel is based on anti-semitic theology I think we're out of time I mean only if only if you want to take another question no no only if there's another question if there is one will given the trajectory of the lobby's development over the years and the misuse and abuse of anti-semitism what do you see as the greatest fear of real anti-semitism in America going forward that's a great question and the there is real anti-semitism in America and there is real anti-semitism in Europe and this anti-semitism is coming from the right it's coming from white nationalists it's coming from neo-nazis it's coming from the the type of ideology that drove the the shooter in the Quebec City mosque and in Christchurch mosque it's coming from the same ideology that is driving xenophobia and Islamophobia in Europe notably most of the governments that condemned the Christchurch shooting didn't mention Islamophobia because they would be naming themselves because so much of the Islamophobia that was in the the New Zealand shooters manifesto could have been talking points from practically any major political party in the West today I'm sorry to say it and I think professor Hickson also underlined that in his comments the the the not the total normalization of references to Islamic extremism and and untiring you know two billion people in the world is linked to terrorism but what whereas this real rise and real disturbing trend of lethal anti-semitism is clearly visible it's a lie is Israel let's be clear about that who is who is allied with the anti-semitic governments of Hungary of Poland of anti-semitism take racist Islamophobic movements like the the freedom party in Austria that is half of the coalition government there the alternative for Deutsche land party you find that all of these far-right parties have close ties to Israel and particularly to Benjamin Netanyahu who you'll remember after Viktor Orban the prime minister of Hungary praised miklós horthy the wartime collaborationist leader who sent half a million Hungarian Jews to their deaths in Hitler's camps after the Israeli Foreign Ministry condemned the Hungarian Prime Minister for praising horsey net and Netanyahu personally overruled the Foreign Ministry and ordered them to withdraw that statement because Viktor Orban and the anti-semitic government of Hungary are his friends and that's the service Israel provides in the world today it's a white washing and laundry service for anti-semites and racists of all kinds is if you're the freedom party in Austria and founded by former Nazis if you come to Israel and go light a candle Enya at Yad Vashem and say oh how much you love Israel then the Israeli Prime Minister is prepared to give you a Certificate of Good Conduct so Israel is a force today of anti-semitism white supremacy an extremism that is destabilizing the world thank you [Applause]

Channel: Washington Report on Middle East Affairs

Views: 23,354

Rating: 4.8534799 out of 5

Keywords: Ali Abunimah, The Israel Lobby - US, Al Jazeera, documentary

Id: 1P5FuyXn0VI

Length: 48min 24sec (2904 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 23 2019