AIPAC ‘deeply disappointed’ in Robinson selection

The drumbeat of criticism on the Mary Robinson selection for the Presidential Medal of Freedom just got a lot louder. AIPAC released a statement this afternoon saying it was "deeply disappointed" by the choice of Robinson, and calling on the Obama administration to "firmly, fully and publicly repudiate her views on Israel and her long public record of hostility and one-sided bias against the Jewish state."

The statement is particularly significant because the pro-Israel lobby, in contrast to most other Jewish organizations, is generally sparing in its release of public statements, particularly on issues not directly related to legislation before Congress.

The full statement is after the jump::

AIPAC is deeply disappointed by the Obama administration’s choice to award a Presidential Medal of Freedom to Mary Robinson. AIPAC respectfully calls on the administration to firmly, fully and publicly repudiate her views on Israel and her long public record of hostility and one-sided bias against the Jewish state.

Robinson is widely known for the high-profile role she played in leading the deeply flawed U.N. Human Rights Commission and for presiding over the U.N.’s Durban Conference on Racism, which the United States boycotted for its unprecedented hostility to Israel and its final outcome document that equated Zionism with racism.

In a BBC interview following the passage of the “Zionism = Racism” Durban text, Robinson described the outcome as “remarkably good, including on the issues of the Middle East.”

As one of America’s greatest statesman, the late Tom Lantos – a former Congressman, Holocaust survivor, global champion of human rights and chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee – observed, “Much of the responsibility for the debacle [at Durban] rests on the shoulders of U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson.”

In his extensive report about the Durban Conference, and about the years of effort on the part of Congress and both Clinton and Bush administrations to support the Conference and its goal of promoting human rights and ending racism and intolerance, Congressman Lantos continues:

Mrs. Robinson’s conduct “left our delegation deeply shocked and saddened. In her remarks, she advocated precisely the opposite course to the one Secretary Powell and I had urged her to take. Namely, she refused to reject the twisted notion that the wrong done to the Jews in the Holocaust was equivalent to the pain suffered by the Palestinians in the Middle East…Instead of condemning the attempt to usurp the conference, she legitimized it.” continues here

Washington's elders of anti-Zion

AIPAC's annual conference opened this week to the auspicious news that the US Justice Department will drop its case against two former AIPAC employees on espionage-related charges based on a 90-year-old statute. But the original charges brought against Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman left some friends of Israel uneasy over the calumny of American Jews' "dual loyalty." In recent weeks, the case escalated with accusations that Congresswoman Jane Harman, a strong congressional friend of Israel, attempted to influence the case.

In March the queasiness was widespread in the pro-Israel community after Charles "Chas" Freeman claimed that the Israel lobby torpedoed his appointment to head the US National Intelligence Council. "The aim of this lobby," Freeman told reporters, "is control of the policy process through the exercise of a veto over the appointment of people who dispute the wisdom of its views." One result, he continued, is "the inability of the American public to discuss, or the government to consider, any option for US policies in the Middle East opposed by the ruling faction in Israeli politics."

Freeman's complaints echo the widely-criticized 2007 book, The Israel Lobby by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, in which the authors claim that the Israel lobby's core consists of "American Jews who make a significant effort in their daily lives to bend US foreign policy so that it advances Israel's interests."

And all this came after former president Jimmy Carter published his anti-Israel screed, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid in 2006.

BY NO MEANS should anyone ignore or minimize the Washington leaks and attacks against AIPAC, the American Jewish community or Israel. But it should be understood that these actions are part of a historic, decades-long, beneath-the-surface low-intensity war in Washington to weaken US-Israel relations. Not much has changed since an Arab propagandist in the US, Muhammad Mehdi, proclaimed some 40 years ago, "The road to the liberation of Palestine leads through Washington."

In more than 35 years of my involvement in US-Israeli relations, I have seen the ebbs and surges of various anti-Israel campaigns. Once the anti-Israel crusade was led or conducted by senator J. William Fulbright and congressman Paul Findley, assisted by Jewish anti-Zionists like Elmer Berger and the apostate Alfred Lilienthal, and supported by Arab propagandists and oil interests. In the 1960s and '70s the legislators charged that American policy in the Middle East was too pro-Israel and that Congress was corrupted.

In 1962 Fulbright launched an investigation of foreign lobbyists in Washington, attempting to force AIPAC to register as an agent of Israel rather than a domestic American lobby. His chief investigator was a journalist named Walter Pincus. (Today, Pincus, The Washington Post's veteran national security reporter, helps cover the Jane Harman story and the Rosen-Weissman trial.)

"Israel controls the United States Senate," Fulbright told Face the Nation in 1973. "Around 80 percent are completely in support of Israel; anything Israel wants it gets. Jewish influence in the House of Representatives is even greater." (Years later, after retiring from the Senate, Fulbright registered as a foreign agent for Saudi Arabia.)

Freeman, Walt, and Mearsheimer are but parrots of Fulbright and under secretary of state George Ball who wrote a 1977 Foreign Affairs article, "How to Save Israel in Spite of Itself." Ball declared more than 30 years ago, "How far should we go in continuing to subsidize a policy shaped to accommodate understandable Israeli compulsions which do not accord with the best interests - as we see it - either of Israel or the United States, but are a threat to world peace?... Because many articulate Americans are passionately committed to Israel, the slightest challenge to any aspect of current Israeli policy is likely to provoke a shrill ad hominem response. To suggest that America should take a stronger and more assertive line in the search for Middle East peace is to risk being attacked as a servant either of Arab interests or of the oil companies, or being denounced as anti-Israel, or, by a careless confusion of language, even condemned as anti-Semitic."

In the mid-1970s, secretary of state Henry Kissinger, frustrated by Israel's tough negotiating position and encouraged by Ball, pushed president Gerald Ford to conduct a "reassessment" of relations with Israel. After AIPAC rallied strong congressional opposition to the administration's proposed policy change, AIPAC was investigated by the Justice Department to see if it should register as a foreign agent of Israel. The investigators concluded, "There is not one shred of evidence that AIPAC should be registered as a foreign agent."

AS RONALD REAGAN's vice president, George H. Bush reportedly led the efforts to embargo F-16 aircraft shipments to Israel after the bombing of the Iraqi reactor in 1981. In 1991 as president, Bush went toe-to-toe with the American Jewish community when he sought to tie loan guarantees, which Israel needed to provide housing for the massive aliya of Soviet Jews, to restrictions on the building of settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. When Jewish organizations went up to Capitol Hill to lobby for the aid, Bush went on national TV, pounded his fists and declared that he was "up against some powerful political forces... I heard today, there were something like a thousand lobbyists on the Hill working the other side of the question. We've got one lonely little guy [the president] down here doing it."

Bush went on to chip away at public support for Israel by claiming that American soldiers had "risked their lives to defend Israelis" in the Gulf War and that "despite our own economic problems the United States provided Israel with more than $4 billion in economic and military aid, nearly $1,000 for every Israeli man, woman and child." continues here

Jewish groups want answers in ex-AIPAC staffers’ case

U.S. Jewish leaders are praising the move to drop criminal charges against two former AIPAC officials, but say serious questions must be answered about why Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman were targeted for investigation in the first place.

“I'm relieved and happy” for Rosen and Weissman and “happy for the community,” said Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of President of Major American Jewish Organizations, but “I think there are a lot of questions that need to be addressed."

Hoenlein questioned “the justification” for the case and the decision to bring charges under a law that had barely been used in more than 90 years.

“You don't want to reopen the whole case, but you have to look at the damage that was done,” Hoenlein said.

Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, said “I think there are bona fide questions that need to be asked here.”

In addition to raising questions about the substance of the charges, Jewish communal leaders also criticized the waves of government leaks in the case that they say were aimed at discreding the defendants and other pro-Israel figures.

Hoenlein pointed to last week's revelation of the wiretap of U.S. Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) as part of the government's investigation, saying it was just another example of the unfair “besmirching” of those who were involved.

Saperstein said information that has been revealed in the pre-trial process has “raised grave concerns that a serious injustice and abuse of power was involved in this case.”

Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld, vice president of AMCHA-The Coalition for Jewish Concerns, says his organization will file a Freedom of Information Act on Monday in an effort to “get some answers” to questions such as “who approved the investigation.”

“We are very, very happy this has been dismissed,” said Herzfeld, but “for us this is not over, this is the beginning.”

“The government should not be able to get away with this,” he said.

AMCHA was the only Jewish group that filed an amicus, or friend of the court, brief in the case. The 2007 submission, in response to a government request that the trial be closed to the public, argued that it was in the interest of the U.S. Jewish community for the trial to be open and compared the case to the Dreyfus affair.

Herzfeld called the failure of many in the Jewish community to speak out on Rosen and Weissman's behalf until recently “disappointing,” but said the focus should now be on the government.

Saperstein raised questions about the government's prosecution in media interviews, but his organization did not put out a formal statement on the case. He said it is difficult for organizations to publicly take a position on a case like this one, particularly when the charges were initially brought, because they don't know all the facts and thus are naturally going to be cautious.

In recent months, as more about the case became known, organizations became more willing to publicly criticize the prosecution. Both the Anti-Defamation League, last fall, and the American Jewish Committee, in March, urged the Justice Department in letters to review the prosecution of the case. Both organizations applauded the news of its pending dismissal.

The ADL in a statement said the case “should never have been brought.” The group said it “endangered core First Amendment protections not just for AIPAC, but for the media and anyone, who in the course of their work, discusses with government officials something that a prosecutor later decides was protected national defense information.”

The AJC's executive director, David Harris, said the “Department of Justice has now reaffirmed that the law of the United States protects citizens who engage in the everyday and essential work of political advocacy.”

Hoenlein lamented that even though the case has been dropped, the government “can't give back” Rosen and Weissman the four years of their lives they lost or “repair the damage” their reputations suffered.

Saperstein hoped, though, that the two men could return to their careers of serving the Jewish community.

“Both of them made significant contributions to the security and well-being of Israel,”said Saperstein, who added that while he sometimes had “respectful differences” with Rosen over policy, “I always had real respect for him.”

Both Rosen and Weissman, he said, “certainly have expertise that will benefit Jewish organizations.”

In recent months Rosen has been writing for the Middle East Forum think tank, playing a lead role in sinking the effort to install Charles "Chas" Freeman, a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia who has been critical of Israell and supportive of the kingdom, in a top U.S. intelligence post. continues here

US moves to dismiss case against 2 former AIPAC lobbyists

US moves to dismiss case against 2 former AIPAC lobbyists In a statement Friday, the acting US attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia said restrictions on the government's case imposed by Judge T.S. Ellis III made conviction unlikely. "Given the diminished likelihood the government will prevail at trial under the additional intent requirements imposed by the court and the inevitable disclosure of classified information that would occur at any trial in this matter, we have asked the court to dismiss the indictment," Dana Boente said.
 
The motion all but guarantees a dismissal. 

"Intent requirements" refers to an earlier Ellis ruling that the government must prove that Keith Weissman, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee's former Iran analyst, and Steve Rosen, its former foreign policy chief, intended not only to assist Israel but to harm the United States. 

Weissman and Rosen were charged under a rarely used section of the 1917 Espionage Act that makes it a crime for civilians to receive and distribute closely held defense information. Both men were later dismissed by AIPAC, with the organization claiming the two had violated its rules; Rosen has filed a multimillion dollar lawsuit against AIPAC. 
 
Reached by phone, Rosen told JTA he was "ecstatic" and was "still absorbing a life-changing moment." He said he had been on the phone Friday morning nonstop with family and friends. 

"There was a great injustice here, but thank God we live in a country where the courts can correct this kind of injustice," he said. 

For the immediate future, Rosen said, he would focus on a book he was writing on government leaks. 

Baruch Weiss, Weissman's lawyer, told JTA that the decision was a "great victory for the First Amendment and for the pro-Israel community continues here