RSS Feed
April 20th, 2021 
Awake Goy On Saturday former congressman Brian Baird described the ways that the Israel lobby exercises control over foreign policy in the Middle East, at the conference organized by the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. Baird’s main points:
–More Congresspeople go to the AIPAC conference than any other event besides the State of the Union address because they need money for their campaigns.
–When a congressperson dares to challenge Israeli claims, Israeli officials express condescension and disdain for the United States and say the U.S. did worse with its indigenous population so no one in the U.S. has a right to question Israeli actions even as Israel gets billions in aid.
–When Baird dared to seek an investigation of the murder of a constituent, Rachel Corrie, by the Israeli army in Gaza in 2003, his colleagues abandoned him and immediately sponsored legislation aimed at Palestinian “terrorists.” And he lost donors.
Baird represented Olympia, Washington, the hometown of Corrie, a writer-activist. He left Congress for academia in 2011 after serving six terms. Here are some of his observations.
When he sponsored a resolution seeking an investigation of Corrie’s death, “instead of support– here’s a member of Congress whose constituent has been killed by an ally and is simply requesting an investigation,” representatives “flooded” to a counter resolution to look into Americans who died due to terrorism attacks. A half dozen congresspeople signed on to Baird’s resolution for an investigation, and Israel stonewalled any investigation.
A similar pattern occurred in 2009 when Congress rushed to condemn the Goldstone Report on the Gaza slaughter of earlier that year. Baird said he had read the report and been to Gaza, unlike any of those who voted to condemn the report, but that when he sought to get Goldstone a hearing before Congress, no one responded.
The Israel lobby was against the Goldstone report, and that’s what mattered.
“You could hear people saying, AIPAC wants a yes on this vote…. People wouldn’t say, what’s in the report? what happened in Gaza… they would just nod their head once they heard that AIPAC was for it and they would vote yes on the resolution.”
Three dozen courageous congresspeople voted against the resolution, a decision “incredibly fraught with risk as an elected official in America.”
Baird told of the disdain Israeli officials and Israel lobbyists expressed when he challenged their claims with evidence of human rights violations and war crimes.
It is generally assumed that members of Congress must all support Israel without question and take what they are told at face value and accept that version of the facts and vote as we are told, or asked.
“If you begin to question, some interesting things happen. You are often looked at in a condescending or patronizing way as if you just don’t understand the issue.”
If you hold your ground, and tell of what you have seen in the occupied territories, officials and lobbyists will talk down to you: “Perhaps there are things you’re unaware of…. You’re just not informed, you’re just misguided.”
If you press hard enough on many people within the Israeli administration, you encounter something rather shocking. Disdain. Disdain not just for those of us asking the question, but disdain for the United States of America itself.
Disdain in several ways. One, Look, what Israel does is no worse than what you did. You launched a genocide against the tribes. We can do what we want to do.
Listen, you don’t understand the Holocaust, you don’t understand the neighborhood we’re in so don’t tell us what to do.
Literally the tone of voice takes the kind of tone of voice I’m using. And the rhetoric is often harsher than that. And the consistent message is implicitly, we are happy to take your money, lots of it, billions of dollars a year and we are happy to take your weapons, but don’t you dare to question anything that we do. That is the underlying tone, disdain for America. And to be honest, for a portion that disdain is justified. Because the Israeli government knows and its advocates in the United States know that they can control members of Congress and that is something possibly worthy of disdain.
Baird said the Israel lobby is able to exert such control because of Money, Mythology and Millenarian Christian beliefs. Money:
This is not something pleasant to say and I’m sorry to say this, but as an American, as a patriot, as a person who represents his country and took an oath to defend the constitution, I am profoundly sorry to say this but you can categorize some of the things that guide decisions in Congress, they all begin with M.
And the first M is money. Anybody who says that money helps influence outcomes of votes toward Israel is immediately branded anti-Israeli or anti-semitic, both or worse. That’s not true, it’s just simply reality. Enormous amounts of money come into American political campaigns. Specific events are held where members of Congress are invited to express their fealty to Israel. I’ve had it happen that I know people who supported me and on almost every major domestic issue we were consonant. How did they feel about the environment… Women’s rights and women’s health. Educational opportunities…
But for having stood up and asked for an investigation into the death/murder of my constituent at the hands of an Israeli bulldozer driver, those same people who supported me on almost every other issue then no longer supported me financially in my election campaigns. Because I had asked for an investigation of the murder of a constituent by our ally.
So the first M is money. The second M is mythology. People believe almost unquestioning the David and Goliath myth of beleaguered Israelis being besieged by all the Arab nations. First of all, the Palestinians are not all the Arab nations. On top of that there’s a wilful ignorance… an intentional myopia or intentional misunderstanding of what’s actually happening on the ground…
Another m, that’s malfeasance. If a member of Congress unquestionably accepts something a lobby asks for and part of the calculus is financial contributions from the lobby, then that’s malfeasance. Your first priority is what’s consistent with the United States constitution and what’s consistent with the values of our country, and I will tell you that the actions of Israel and the policies Susan [Abulhawa] raised earlier [minute 15:00 of same video] are not consistent with our constitution and not in our best interest.
As for millenarianism, many members of Congress subscribe to an apocalyptic belief that in Jerusalem Christians will go up into heaven and non-believers will burn in hell. Baird commented:
If you say money influences our foreign policy, that’s anathema. But if you say, our politics should lead to the end of the world, that’s perfectly fine.
He said more congresspeople go to AIPAC than almost any other event besides the State of the Union speech, and he stopped going because of racism.
One thing that is so hard to communicate is what it is like to attend the annual AIPAC conference. It is virtually mandatory to attend. There are more members of Congress at that than at any other event in the Capitol except the State of the Union address. What does that tell you– more members of Congress attend a banquet for a foreign nation! My wife and I were there once, when Netanyahu was spouting his bellicose racist putrid hate and getting standing ovations for it. My wife and I looked at each other, we were at a table of people I consider friends. They were donors, they were friends, they were good people. But here they were applauding a man whose implicit message was, Palestinians are subhumans. Nobody dares mess with Israel or our big brother the U.S. will give them what for. And my wife and I just said, I’m sorry, we’re feeling ill now, and we have to leave the room, and we never went back, that was the last time I went to an AIPAC conference….
It’s a command performance and why — to a large degree because then you’re going to get some financial contributions.
Baird said support for Israel often goes against American values and its best interests, but Israel supporters don’t see the contradiction.
I had a group once come to me and they defined themselves as a pro Israel group. They came into my office, they sat down and they were not from my district. “Congressman,” they said, “we are so happy to see you, Of course our first priority today is Israel.” I said, “Let’s pause for a second. If your first priority today is Israel then you should be in the Knesset. My first priority is the United States of America. If you talk to me about that then we have a foundation we can build on.” We’ve got to say, You don’t get a free pass just because you say Israel. You have to still be rational, fair and consistent with American values.
Related posts:
Views: 0
Posted in 
Tags: 
