[Peace-discuss] History lesson: Durbin and AIPAC

[Morton K. Brussel]

This is extracted from:

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/050704fa_fact


AIPAC, Asher explained, is loyal to its friends and merciless to its  
enemies. In 1982, Asher led a campaign to defeat Paul Findley, a  
Republican congressman from Springfield, Illinois, who once referred  
to himself as “Yasir Arafat’s best friend in Congress,” and who later  
compared Arafat to Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.
“There was a real desire to help Findley out of Congress,” Asher  
said. He identified an obscure Democratic lawyer in Springfield,  
Richard Durbin, as someone who could defeat Findley. “We met at my  
apartment in Chicago, and I recruited him to run for Congress,” he  
recalled. “I probed his views and I explained things that I had  
learned mostly from AIPAC. I wanted to make sure we were supporting  
someone who was not only against Paul Findley but also a friend of  
Israel.”
Asher went on, “He beat Findley with a lot of help from Jews, in- 
state and out-of-state. Now, how did the Jewish money find him? I  
travelled around the country talking about how we had the opportunity  
to defeat someone unfriendly to Israel. And the gates opened.”  
Durbin, who went on to win a Senate seat, is now the Democratic whip.  
He is a fierce critic of Bush’s Iraq policy but, like AIPAC,  
generally supports the Administration’s approach to the Israeli- 
Palestinian conflict. Durbin says that he considers Asher to be his  
“most loyal friend in the Jewish community.”
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