[Peace-discuss] History lesson: Durbin and AIPAC

[David Green]

I think that this is a more convincing case for the
influence of the Israel Lobby than that regarding Paul
Simon's defeat of Charles Percy. The debate will go
on. See:

http://www.aaiusa.org/wwatch_archives/081693.htm

DG


--- "Morton K. Brussel" <brussel4 at insightbb.com>
wrote:

> 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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