[Peace-discuss] History lesson: Durbin and AIPAC

[C. G. Estabrook]

This is quite disgusting -- a good reason to go after the fake
liberal Durbin.  --CGE

---- Original message ----
>Date: Fri, 9 Dec 2005 18:10:20 -0600
>From: "Morton K. Brussel" <brussel4 at insightbb.com>  
>Subject: [Peace-discuss] History lesson: Durbin and AIPAC  
>To: peace-discuss Discuss <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>
>
>   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.”
>________________