[Peace-discuss] FW: AIPAC is suddenly getting a lot of bad press, in Jewish papers and ‘Washington Post’

[Boyle, Francis A]

And since Israel has been warmongering against Iran for quite some time, according to the President of the World Jewish Congress himself, "...The leadership of the Jewish world...acts in concert with
Israel's...government" mongering for war against Iran for quite some time. A Fifth Column indeed. More loyal to Israel than they are to the United States.
fab
Francis A. Boyle
Law Building
504 E. Pennsylvania Ave.
Champaign, IL 61820 USA
217-333-7954 (phone)
217-244-1478 (fax)
(personal comments only)


-----Original Message-----
From: Boyle, Francis A 
Sent: Monday, March 19, 2018 10:55 AM
To: 'C G Estabrook' <cgestabrook at gmail.com>; 'peace' <peace at lists.chambana.net>
Cc: 'David Johnson' <davidjohnson1451 at comcast.net>; 'Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net)' <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>
Subject: RE: [Peace-discuss] FW: AIPAC is suddenly getting a lot of bad press, in Jewish papers and ‘Washington Post’

From today's NYT by Ronald Lauder, President of the World Jewish Congress:
"...The leadership of the Jewish world always honors the choices made by the Israeli voter and acts in concert with Israel's democratically elected {Sic!} government ..." As I was saying, more loyal to Israel than to the United States. A Fifth Column indeed. QED.
Fab
D in BDS.

Francis A. Boyle
Law Building
504 E. Pennsylvania Ave.
Champaign, IL 61820 USA
217-333-7954 (phone)
217-244-1478 (fax)
(personal comments only)


-----Original Message-----
From: Boyle, Francis A 
Sent: Sunday, March 18, 2018 10:42 AM
To: C G Estabrook <cgestabrook at gmail.com>; peace <peace at lists.chambana.net>
Cc: David Johnson <davidjohnson1451 at comcast.net>; Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>
Subject: RE: [Peace-discuss] FW: AIPAC is suddenly getting a lot of bad press, in Jewish papers and ‘Washington Post’

And the University of Illinois is so notoriously anti-Palestinian that they illegally fired Steve Salaita, put him, his wife and their  baby out into the street with no visible means of support, destroyed his entire academic career and neutered our Native American Studies Program that was set up in order to partially compensate for Chief Illiniwak. The University of Illiniwaks  are just a Gang of Die-Hard Bigots and Racists against Palestinians and American Indians.
Fab.
D in BDS.

Francis A. Boyle
Law Building
504 E. Pennsylvania Ave.
Champaign IL 61820 USA
217-333-7954 (phone)
217-244-1478 (fax)
(personal comments only)


-----Original Message-----
From: Boyle, Francis A 
Sent: Sunday, March 18, 2018 10:19 AM
To: 'C G Estabrook' <cgestabrook at gmail.com>; 'peace' <peace at lists.chambana.net>
Cc: 'David Johnson' <davidjohnson1451 at comcast.net>; 'Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net)' <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>
Subject: RE: [Peace-discuss] FW: AIPAC is suddenly getting a lot of bad press, in Jewish papers and ‘Washington Post’

And Killeen can stick his slur   of "anti-Semitism" against the BDS Movement where the sun don't shine--just like Larry Summers.
Fab.
D in BDS
Subject: The Common Ills: Prof Boyle Schools Harvard President Faust About Prejudice

http://thecommonills.blogspot.com/2013/12/prof-boyle-schools-harvard-president.html


Sunday, December 29, 2013



   
Prof Boyle Schools Harvard President Faust About Prejudice 



Francis A. Boyle is an attorney and a professor of international law.  He's also the author of many books including, most recently, United Ireland, Human Rights and International Law. 


Professor Boyle Schools Harvard President Faust About Prejudice



 Dec. 27, 2013 


 Dear President Faust: 


 I notice your condemnation of the ASA Boycott against Israel in  today's New York Times. I note for the record that Harvard has never once apologized to those of us Harvard Alums who participated in good faith in the Harvard Divestment/Disinvestment Campaign against Israel when your predecessor Larry Summers accused us of being anti-Semitic-- a charge which he refused to defend against me as related below. As a matter of fact, Harvard is so notoriously anti-Palestinian that the late, great Edward Said refused to accept Harvard's top chair in Comparative Literature when Harvard offered it to him. As a loyal Harvard alum I spent an entire evening with Edward at a Chinese Restaurant in Manhattan trying to convince Edward to take this Chair. I thought it would be good for Harvard to have Edward teaching there. As a lawyer and a law professor, I can be quite persuasive. But Edward would have none of my arguments. As Edward saw it, Harvard was so anti-Palestinian that Harvard would have thwarted his intellectual creativity to move there. So Edward stayed at Columbia. Of course Edward was right. And the anti-Palestinian tenor and orientation of Harvard has certainly gotten far worse since when Edward and I were both students at Harvard. Harvard should be doing something about its own longstanding bigotry and racism against the Palestinians. Not criticizing those of us trying to help the Palestinians suffering from Israeli persecution, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and outright genocide. 




Yours very truly,



Francis A. Boyle
 Professor of Law 




Harvard: JDMCL, AM, PHD, CFIA, Teaching Fellow 




Francis A. Boyle
 Law Building
 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave.
 Champaign, IL 61820 USA


 ************************************ 

 sent by Francis Boyle - Jul 30, 2007 


The Cowardice of Harvard's Larry Summers 




I'm not going to go through the subsequent history of the divestment/disinvestment movement, except to say that in the late summer of 2002 the President of Harvard, Larry Summers accused those of us Harvard alumni involved in the Harvard divestment campaign of being anti-Semitic. 

 After he made these charges, WBUR Radio Station in Boston, which is a National Public Radio affiliate, called me up and said: "We would like you to debate Summers for one hour on these charges, live." And I said, "I'd be happy to do so." They then called up Summers and he refused to debate me. 

 Summers did not have the courage, the integrity, or the principles to back up his scurrilous charges. Eventually Harvard fired Summers because of his attempt to impose his Neo-Conservative agenda on Harvard, and in particular his other scurrilous charge that women are dumber than men when it comes to math and science. Well as a Harvard alumnus I say: Good riddance to Larry Summers! (laughter). 

Debating Dershowitz 

 WBUR then called me back and said, "Well, since Summers won't debate you, would you debate Alan Dershowitz?" And I said, "Sure." So we had a debate for one hour, live on the radio. And there is a link that you can hear this debate if you want to. I still think it's the best debate out there on this whole issue of Israeli apartheid. Again that would be WBUR Radio Station, Boston, 25 September 2002. 

 The problem with the debate, of course, is that Dershowitz knows nothing about international law and human rights. So he immediately started out by saying "well, there's nothing similar to the apartheid regime in South Africa and what Israel is doing to the Palestinians." 

 Well the problem with that is that Dershowitz did not know anything at all about even the existence of the Apartheid Convention. That is our second Handout for tonight. [See Handout 2 reprinted below.] 

 The definition of apartheid is set out in the Apartheid Convention of 1973. 

 And this is taken from my book Defending Civil Resistance Under International Law, Trial Materials on South Africa, published in 1987, that we used successfully to defend anti-apartheid resistors in the United States. If you take a look at the definition of apartheid here found in Article 2, you will see that Israel has inflicted each and every act of apartheid set out in Article 2 on the Palestinians, except an outright ban on marriages between Israelis and Palestinians. But even there they have barred Palestinians living in occupied Palestine who marry Israeli citizens from moving into Israel, and thus defeat the right of family reunification that of course the world supported when Jews were emigrating from the Soviet Union. 

 Israel: An Apartheid State 

 Again you don't have to take my word for it. There's an excellent essay today on Counterpunch.org by the leading Israeli human rights advocate Shulamit Aloni saying basically: "Yes we have an apartheid state in Israel." Indeed, there are roads in the West Bank for Jews only. 

 Palestinians can't ride there and now they're introducing new legislation that Jews cannot even ride Palestinians in their cars. 

 This lead my colleague and friend Professor John Dugard who is the U.N. Special rapporteur for human rights in Palestine to write an essay earlier this fall that you can get on Google, saying that in fact Israeli apartheid against the Palestinians is worse than the apartheid that the Afrikaners inflicted on the Blacks in South Africa. Professor Duguard should know. 

 He was one of a handful of courageous, white, international lawyers living in South Africa at the time who publicly and internationally condemned apartheid against Blacks at risk to his own life. Indeed, when I was litigating anti-apartheid cases on South Africa, we used Professor Duguard's book on Human Rights and the South African Legal Order as the definitive work explaining what apartheid is all about. 

 So Professor Duguard has recently made this statement. Of course President Carter has recently made this statement in his book that Israel is an apartheid state. And certainly if you look at that definition of the Apartheid Convention, right there in front of you, it's clear - there are objective criteria. Indeed if you read my Palestinian book I have a Bibliography at the end with the facts right there based on reputable human rights reports, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, etc. Many of them were also compiled and discussed by my friend Professor Norman Finklestein in his book Beyond Chutzpah, which I'd encourage you to read. 

 Francis A. Boyle 

 ********************************** 

On Point Radio - Sep 25, 2007 broadcast 

 Across the country, the push for divestment has spread to more than 40 campuses. The movement condemns Israel for human rights abuses against the Palestinians. Hundreds of big-name academics have signed on, but so far no university has moved to divest. 

 The current debate isn't the first time divestment has been used on college campuses as a means to effect social and political change. In the 1980s, the South African divestment campaign helped end apartheid. 

 Do you see parallels with the apartheid debate? Has Israel become a trendy target? 

 Guests: 

 Francis Boyle, professor of international law at The University of Illinois College of Law 

 Alan Dershowitz, professor at Harvard Law School 

 Taufiq Rahim, student at Princeton University 



francis a. boyle





 Posted by  Common Ills     at  1:30 PM        

 

 

 


Francis A. Boyle
Law Building
504 E. Pennsylvania Ave.
Champaign IL 61820 USA
217-333-7954 (phone)
217-244-1478 (fax)
(personal comments only)


-----Original Message-----
From: Boyle, Francis A 
Sent: Sunday, March 18, 2018 10:04 AM
To: 'C G Estabrook' <cgestabrook at gmail.com>; peace <peace at lists.chambana.net>
Cc: David Johnson <davidjohnson1451 at comcast.net>; Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>
Subject: RE: [Peace-discuss] FW: AIPAC is suddenly getting a lot of bad press, in Jewish papers and ‘Washington Post’

AIPAC and ADL put me on their Enemies Lists for Blackballing and Blacklisting years ago when I helped a Jewish Professor Friend of mine free of charge who had been blackballed and blacklisted by AIPAC and ADL in order to get tenure. AIPAC and ADL still maintain and enforce those Enemies Lists Nationwide against professors--witness Norman Finkelstein at DePaul and Steven Salaita here. But AIPAC and ADL et al. can be defeated. I have done it myself--repeatedly. Just Two Gangs of Thugs.
Fab.
D in BDS.

Francis A. Boyle
Law Building
504 E. Pennsylvania Ave.
Champaign IL 61820 USA
217-333-7954 (phone)
217-244-1478 (fax)
(personal comments only)


-----Original Message-----
From: C G Estabrook [mailto:cgestabrook at gmail.com] 
Sent: Sunday, March 18, 2018 9:48 AM
To: Boyle, Francis A <fboyle at illinois.edu>; peace <peace at lists.chambana.net>
Cc: David Johnson <davidjohnson1451 at comcast.net>; Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>
Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: AIPAC is suddenly getting a lot of bad press, in Jewish papers and ‘Washington Post’

<http://mondoweiss.net/2018/03/getting-jewish-washington/>:

…Gershon Baskin reports in the Jerusalem Post that a Maryland insurgent Democrat, Dr. Jerome Segal, is taking on Senator Ben Cardin, who voted against the Iran deal, because he is so pro-AIPAC. Baskin paints AIPAC as the NRA.

"An interesting aspect of [Jerome] Segal’s candidacy is not only that he is challenging Senator Cardin, but that he is taking on AIPAC. Cardin is a kind of AIPAC “poster boy,” not only representing what AIPAC wants, but being on the front line of acting on behalf of AIPAC in the Senate. Segal believes that he will take the votes that supported Bernie Sanders (35% of the Democratic voters) and gain many other votes because the broad flow of American Jewish opinion is toward his Jewish Peace Lobby’s ideas and away from AIPAC’s blind support of Israel….

"Segal presents himself as David to Cardin and AIPAC’s Goliath. Segal’s slogan is 'if we beat AIPAC in Maryland, we can beat the NRA [National Rifle Association] in America'…"

Baskin is frank about AIPAC’s power (though he says, mistakenly imho, that the NRA is more powerful (Dems run against the NRA)):

"Many members of Congress are simply afraid to ever challenge AIPAC, not because AIPAC puts so much money in the campaigns of everyone it supports, but because AIPAC’s strategy is also to target candidates that it doesn’t like and put huge amounts of money into their challengers’ campaigns. The candidates that AIPAC wants out usually don’t stand a chance."

And AIPAC is vulnerable because it has become the Trump lobby.

"The AIPAC show of last week does not reflect the majority view of American Jewry. I believe that most of the thousands of participants at AIPAC were in fact Trump supporters."

Peter Beinart also says AIPAC is vulnerable, in a piece at the Atlantic site saying that AIPAC faces a “struggle to avoid the fate of the NRA.” Beinart says young Dems are alienated by AIPAC’s achievement: blocking criticism of the occupation. While rightwing Republicans are alienated by its lip service to the two-state solution.

"AIPAC is conducting a remarkable experiment. It’s doubling down on bipartisanship and ideological diversity even as tectonic shifts in American politics and culture make that harder and harder…

"It’s fascinating to watch, and it’s likely to fail…. It will fail because the thing about Israel that young liberals admire least is its half-century long policy of denying Palestinians in the  West Bank basic rights like free movement, due process, and citizenship in the country in which they live—and entrenching that denial by building settlements where Jews enjoy rights that their Palestinian neighbors are denied. [AIPAC CEO Howard] Kohr’s endorsement of the two-state solution notwithstanding, AIPAC remains the most powerful force in American politics opposing pressure on Israel to end the occupation. Thus, young liberals can only embrace AIPAC if they place their support for Israel ahead of their opposition to its occupation."

There’s more of the NRA theme at Truthdig. Maj. Danny Sjursen, a former West Point instructor, laments on the death of the antiwar Democratic liberal congressperson, and rightly sees the lobby’s role in that transformation.

"I nearly spit up my food the other day. Watching on C-SPAN as Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., gleefully attended a panel at the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) conference, I couldn’t help but wonder what has happened to the Democratic Party. The worst part is I like her, mostly. Look, I agree with Sen. Klobuchar on most domestic issues: health care, taxes and more. But she—a supposed liberal—and her mainstream Democratic colleagues are complicit in the perpetuation of America’s warfare state and neo-imperial interventionism. Sen. Klobuchar and other Democrats’ reflexive support for Israel is but a symptom of a larger disease in the party—tacit militarism.

“AIPAC is a lobbying clique almost as savvy and definitely as effective as the NRA. Its meetings—well attended by mainstream Democrats and Republicans alike—serve as little more than an opportunity for Washington pols to kiss Benjamin Netanyahu’s ring and swear fealty to Israel. Most of the time, participants don’t dare utter the word “Palestinian.” That’d be untoward—Palestinians are the unacknowledged elephants in the room."

Sjursen laments Israel’s shadow over the U.S. image in the world.

"The far right-wing Israeli government of Netanyahu, who is little more than a co-conspirator and enabler for America’s failed project in the Middle East, should be the last group “liberals” pander to…. For 50 years now, the Israeli military has divided, occupied and enabled the illegal settlement of sovereign Palestinian territory, keeping Arabs in limbo without citizenship or meaningful civil rights.

"This is, so far as international law is concerned, a war crime. As such, unflinching American support for Israeli policy irreversibly damages the U.S. military’s reputation on the “Arab street.” I’ve seen it firsthand. In Iraq and Afghanistan, hundreds and thousands of miles away from Jerusalem, captured prisoners and hospitable families alike constantly pointed to unfettered U.S. support for Israel and the plight of Palestinians when answering that naive and ubiquitous American question: 'Why do they hate us?’"

Speaking of war crimes, The Washington Post published an important piece on “The dark roots” of AIPAC, by Doug Rossinow, a teacher of history at the University of Oslo. Rossinow says that AIPAC has its origins in the 1953 effort by American Jews to explain away a massacre of Palestinians.

Rossinow describes AIPAC as “a huge factor in U.S. policy” and endorses Gideon Levy’s picture of the group as a “Jewish lobby” — it “welded a united front of American Jews in support of Israel, a unity that politicians have had to respect.”

The original leader of the lobby group, I.L. “Si” Kenen, found most of his political friends among liberal Democrats, Rossinow writes. Truman had of course endorsed the Jewish state, pushed by major Zionist donors; but Eisenhower bucked Israel on several occasions, including during the famous Qibya massacre in the West Bank in 1953 — when Ariel Sharon’s troops killed “more than 60 civilians indiscriminately in retaliation for the murder of a Jewish woman and her two children in Israel.”

Back then, Israel didn’t get away with human rights violations.

"The outcry was sharp and wide.

"Time magazine carried a shocking account of deliberate, even casual mass murder by Israeli soldiers at Qibya — “slouching . . . smoking and joking.” The New York Times ran extensive excerpts from a U.N. commission that refuted Israeli lies about the incident.

Qibya was the genesis of AIPAC, Rossinow asserts, as Israel supporters prepared “for any future shocks coming out of Israel.”

"Aware Israel’s reputation in the United States had been tarnished, American Jewish supporters of Israel scrambled to mount a damage-control effort in late 1953 and early 1954."

And Jewish solidarity was key. Stalinist orthodoxy needed to be enforced. AIPAC’s predecessor did what the lobby does today, redlines the Jewish community (and even Americans for Peace Now marches along with its mouth shut).

"Even before AZCPA [AIPAC predecessor, American Zionist Council for Public Affairs] appeared, Kenen and others labored to construct a united front among American Jewish groups in support of Israel amid the Qibya controversy. AZCPA strengthened that Jewish united front, which was impressively broad. ..

"It showed that there was nothing Israel might do that would jeopardize American Jewish support. Indeed, to some in the Jewish community, the more disturbing Israeli behavior was, the more Israel needed their ardent advocacy….

"The perception that AIPAC represents a consensus among American Jews has always been a key to its political influence, which explains the group’s sometimes seemingly outsized opposition to Jewish dissent from its line. 'America’s Pro-Israel Lobby,' born in awful knowledge, has always existed to make Israeli realities and priorities palatable to Americans."

The worse things got, the louder were the Jewish voices. Denying “awful knowledge.” Imagine, that was in the Washington Post!

More dissent. The editors of the Jewish Week, angered by AIPAC’s stiffnecked policy on the press attending the most interesting sessions at the policy conference, refused to attend the conference. From “Why We Won’t Be at the AIPAC conference.”

"Lobby leaders said that speakers and panelists at the conference may feel inhibited in expressing their views if members of the press were in the room. We countered that a conference with 20,000 attendees, and dozens of sessions with many hundreds of delegates, is by nature not conducive to keeping secrets, especially in the age of instant tweets and texts. If members of the press agreed to the ground rules of attending 'off the record' sessions, it would allow the media to get a sense of the important give-and-take that takes place in these informative sessions without violating journalistic or AIPAC boundaries….

"AIPAC has a long history of being wary of and less than friendly toward the press. Members of the press enter the AIPAC convention through a separate entrance and must be accompanied by staff to proceed to the main area where sessions are held — and even accompanied to the rest rooms at times. Such treatment doesn’t foster trust and mutual respect. AIPAC officials say the press is overly critical in its coverage of the lobby…"

"The editors also say that Israel is under fire, and so “AIPAC’s mandate of promoting bipartisan support for Israel is more vital than ever.” But the press policies are hurting that goal.

The Atlanta Jewish Times chimes in, deploring AIPAC’s policy and saying it was unable to cover an AIPAC gathering in Atlanta because it was off the record.

"The perfect image of AIPAC’s wrongheaded attitude emerged Sunday, March 4, the first day of the Washington conference. Outside a session titled 'Free Speech and Freedom of the Press in Israel' was this sign: 'THIS SESSION IS OFF THE RECORD AND CLOSED TO THE PRESS.'

"…AIPAC recently held its annual Atlanta community event at Mercedes-Benz Stadium with Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Bret Stephens of The New York Times speaking. But you didn’t see any coverage in the AJT because everything AIPAC does locally is off the record.

"It’s particularly aggravating when the speaker is a fellow member of the press, such as Stephens…

"We suspect AIPAC just likes to maintain a sense of mystery that brings an aura of power and perhaps increases people’s desire to pay to see what’s inside."

In sum, the atmosphere is changing for AIPAC. People are more willing to criticize it in the press. A sea change in establishment attitudes is under way, I believe, though it will take a while…

###