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The Arab Lobby: The Invisible Alliance That Undermines America's Interests in the Middle East

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Half way through the book and was surprised to see how the Arab lobby manipulated (and continues to manipulate) a number of US Presidents along the way. Gives a very telling perspective on what Jimmie Carter is about (with documented facts) and how Regan, Clinton and both Bush Presidents "danced the dance" with Arab lobbyists as well as with the Israeli lobby. Definitely worth the read so far.

This book is very readable, and presents many well-documented details about pro-Arab influence on US foreign policy. Surprisingly, this influence partly comes from bureaucrats in the US's own state department, who seem more interested in defending autocratic regimes than in representing America's interests. Also documented are the support (by both propaganda and money) of terrorism by some of these regimes.

The book also has chapters on bias in US education, that are well worth reading.

In "The Arab Lobby", Mitchell Bard, a respected expert on the Arab-Israel conflict, writes knowledgeably, with academic rigor, and passionately, without hyperventilating, about this controversial topic. Unfortunately, as he admits in his Acknowledgments, he was not able to interview many people who have been active in recent times, who declined requests for interviews. Perhaps they have something to hide. Future writers and journalists must continue to shine light into dark corners.

Bard makes the important point that, while the Israeli Lobby has been a grass-roots effort by American citizens, the Arab Lobby has mostly been a top-down lobby, mostly financed with endless Saudi petro-dollars, aimed at buying influence in government and academia. Bard is to be commended for opening up this important subject and writing in such a well-organized, readable, and comprehensive way.

This book is critical because it is not only well written but finally reveals to the world a topic that too often remains hidden. If you read other histories you will often find the presence of "Arabists" in American government, particularly the State Department, using their influence to convince the American President to change American foreign policy to become pro-Arab. This is not the only aspect of the Arab Lobby, however.

From American college campuses and their "King Faisal Chair of Middle Eastern Studies" to President Ronald Reagan's decision to sell AWACS to Saudi Arabia, Bard's book chronicles the influence (though not always success) of the Arab Lobby. If you are interested in the Middle East or American foreign policy, you owe it to yourself to give it a read.

It basically goes into how the Israeli lobby is demonized or villified which in alot of cases is true, however it goes into the topic of an arab lobby and shows how they control the oil states and oppose american-israeli ties. While I personally never beleive everything published in any book or everything said on the news, I found this to be a good insight on one side of the spectrum,some useful information, again defanitly worth the read. remember folks always two sides to a story.

Reading Mitch Bard's superb new book, "The Arab Lobby," during a time when Palestinian "negotiators" are threatening again to walk away from 'Peace Talks' if Israel refuses to collapse and give in to Arab demands, is an exercise in deja vu -- author Mitch Bard uses long-secret government memos and the horrific words of anti-Israel activists inside and outside the U.S. Government to show that today's antipathy toward the Jewish state (and the anti-semitism that underpins that anti-Israel fervor) goes back decades.

Especially shocking are Bard's revelations about the power of Saudi Arabia to manipulate U.S. policy toward the Middle East and, intertwined with the Sauds, is Bard's equally stunning expose of how oil companies have tried to exploit Middle East policies to favor Arabs and cripple the democracy in Israel. Powerfully-written in lively prose (especially remarkable given that Bard's quoting from long-dead diplomats), "The Arab Lobby" blows apart the lie (most recently proposed by Walt and Mearsheimer) that AIPAC is the lobby that Americans should worry about. A must-read for anyone who cares about peace in the Middle East. As an investigative journalist who has visited Israel several times, I have read no more disturbing book this year than "The Arab Lobby." Phenomenal.

The ever pervasive myth of an all powerful Israel lobby controlling American foreign policy has dominated public discourse on the topic. But here Mitchell Bard shows how Arab governments use their petrodollars and control of energy supplies to control American foreign policy in favour of the Anti-Israel , pro-Arab cause and to also dominate educational institutions and the media, creating a pervasive and biased pro-Palestinian public opinion.
The author demonstrates how the discourse on the Arab-Israeli conflict is distorted due to the immense financial resources of the Arab lobby. And to highlight its manipulation of American foreign policy and public opinion, usually out of public view, and in ways that have gone unnoticed and need to be exposed.
Bard highlights how the Arab lobby exerts a malignant influence on American foreign policy to ignore basic American values and American security in order to bolster and advance repressive Arab regimes and bloodthirsty terrorist organizations.
Most frighteningly it has infiltrated the education system to obscure the threats by and atrocities of radical Islam and to poison the relationship between the United States and Israel. The Arab lobby in the USA has had a long history and this traced by Bard to the 1920s with the machinations of Arabist anti-Semites in the State Department and diplomatic corps. It is ironic today when Communists and the far left, are besides Muslims, the most rabid and proactive leaders of the anti-Israel lobby, that from the 1920s up to the early 50s, a great fear expressed by the anti-Zionists in America was the fear of Jewish sympathy and potential alignment with the Soviet Union.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff stated in 1948 that The Zionist leadership "stems from the Soviet Union and its satellite states and has strong bonds of kinship in those regions, and ideologically is much closer to the Soviet Union than the United States".
At this time the Arabs violent opposition to Zionism was expressed by King Saud who
thundered violently against the Jewish presence in the Holy Land. Today anti-Israel bigots often claim to make a distinction between Jews and Zionists and that their hatred is directed only at the 'actions of the Israeli government' and not at the Jewish religion. King Saud and his successors made no secret of their hatred of Jews as shown by their statements, and the long standing policy of banning Jews from Saudi Arabia as well as any practices of the Jewish faith. King Saud told British colonel HRP Dickson on November 23, 1937: " Our hatred of the Jews stems from G-D's condemnation of them for their persecution and rejection of Isa (Jesus) and their subsequent rejection of His chosen Prophet".
After his May 1943 meeting with Saud. President Roosevelt backtracked on his support for a Jewish homeland in the Holy Land, and showed how beguiled he was by Saud telling a joint session of Congress on 1 March 1945 that " I learned about the whole problem, the Moslem problem, the Jewish problem, by talking with Ibn Saud for five minutes than I could have learned in an exchange of two or three dozen letters".
Chapter 3 shows the hostility towards the Jewish state and pro-Arab stand of the Eisenhower administration.
Bard shows us that "anyone who asserts the omnipotence of the Israeli lobby has to ignore the 1950s, when Eisenhower said that he would carry out foreign policy as though 'we didn't have a Jew in America' and Dulles said that he was determined to carry out foreign policy without seeking the approval of the Jews and characterized the Israelis as 'millstones around our necks' "

Prior to the 1973 oil embargo the Saudis had no international clout; they could only blackmail the United States. But by the late 1970s they were able to coerce other countries. For example most sub-Saharan African countries severed diplomatic ties with Israel after the Yom Kippur War, because of Arab promises of cheap oil and financial aid, and because they did not want to defy the Organization of African Unity resolution sponsored by Egypt, demanding the severing of relations with Israel.

The Saudis also used financial coercion against Canada to force them to reverse their 1979 decision to move their embassy to Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
Chapter seven of this book traces "Jimmy Carter's conversion from peacemaker to provocateur" After Carter was elected President in 1976 he began to go back on his campaign promises to support robust legislation against the Arab boycott of Israel, and reversed his predecessors position on an important arms sale to Israel. As the author puts it "Even as he helped bring about a long-dreamed of peace agreement between Israel and Egypt, he pursued policies that undermined his main objective of a comprehensive peace".
Carter made the demand for a Palestinian State in 1977, even though it was not on the table during the Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt,
Cater throughout his term made statements that alienated his Jewish constituency and and reflected the outlook of the Arab lobby, and by the time he reran for office in 1980 he had adopted policies that were a threat to Israel's security. He was so reviled in the Jewish community by then that he received the smallest proportion of the Jewish vote of any Democratic candidate since 1924. His resentment towards the Jewish community as a result of this vote may have contributed towards the hardening of his position against Israel. During the Reagan administration Carter periodically lobbied members of congress to support Arab positions on arms sales, and opposed recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital. Carter also accused Israel of human rights violations and would rely on his PLO friends for documentation of this.

In his revolting book "Palestine: Peace Nt Apartheid Carter defends the new anti-Semites and promotes the aims of the anti-Jewish hate-fest known as the 2001 UN World Conference Against Racism in Durban South Africa, which had been to link Israel to Apartheid era South Africa.

Bard painstakingly details the gargantuan network Islamic organizations sponsored by Saudi Arabia such as the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, founded in 1972. The president of WAMY was Saleh al Asheik, the Saudi Minister of Islamic Affairs. One of WAMY's employees was Sheik Saad-al Buraik who in 2001 called for the enslavement of Jewish women and the killing of their children.

Bard traces the Arab lobby in the USA from the early Arab lobby groups in the USA. While a these lobby groups are supported by sections of Arab Americans, the support received from them is not universal. For example Lebanese Christians who make up over a third of Arab Americans, have a very different attitude to the Middle EAst conflict because of their experiences with the genocide carried out by Palestinians and Lebanese Muslims against Lebanon's Maronite Christians. Many Maronite Christian Lebanese support the anti-Palestinian American Lebanese League (ALL) which has for years pressed for a tougher American stand against the PLO and Syria. At the time that the PLO had through massive bloodshed created a state within Lebanon, ALL chairman Robert Basil, referring to the pro-PLO National Association of Arab Americans (NAAA), asked 'How the hell can the NAAA have a constituency among the Lebanese when they support Syriia, which is shelling Lebanese villages, and Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, which funds the PLO".

The Arab Lobby has much success, The Palestinians receive more capita aid than any other group in the world, indeed more than all of SubSahahran Africa put together. As Bard writes : "Even as hundreds of thousands of people die in Darfur, it is the Palestinians who get the world's sympathy and donations of billions of dollars"

The Arab Lobby has adopted the terminology of the Jewish people and turned it against Israel. For example, Palestinians, like Jews now live in the 'Diaspora'. Israelis are compared to Nazis and their actions are characterized as "pogroms", "ethnic cleansing" and "genocide". Israeli s accused of creating "ghettos" and even engaging in a "holocaust". The disputed territories are now termed "occupied". The pro-Islamic Lobby has created a new term to brand all who are concerned about radical Islam, Islamization and Islamic terror, accusing them of "Islamophobia".
Chapter Twelve details the powerful influence of Christian anti-Zionists in the pro-Arab, anti-Israel lobby. The most virulently anti-Israel Christian denomination has been the Presbyterian Church which has denied the right of Israel to be validated theologically, has led sanctions and divestment campaigns against Israel (thus supporting collective punishment of the Israeli people) and called on the USA to end its support of Israel. Christian anti-Zionists object to the control of Jerusalem by Jews, engage in "replacement theology" which holds that Israel is no longer the beloved of G-D but has been replaced by the Christian Church which pro-Arab theologians then extend to Muslims. They also harp on imagined crimes by Israel against Christian Arabs in the disputed territories while ignoring the very real ethnic cleansing against Christians by the Muslim Palestinians, mainly by Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

But the more succesful than any other campaign has been the takeover by the Arab lobby of the educational system, and a massive and sinister campaign to also influence students outside the classroom. The Muslim Students Association in the USA has pushed forward the lie that "Zionism is racism" and disseminated the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, while the Palestine Solidarity Movement has supported Arab terror against Israeli civilians (including women and children) and vigorously supported the so-called Right of Return, a diabolical campaign to demographically subvert Israel's Jewish population by importing millions of Arabs into Israel.
When pro-Israel students asked the PSM at their conference at Duke University in 2004 to sign a benign statement calling for civil debate that would condemn the murder of innocent civilians and support a two state solution and "recognize the difference between disagreement and hate speech" By hosting a group that could not bring itself to object to the murder of children, Duke gave support to terror sympathizers as did other universities such as Berkely Wisconsin, Ohio State and Georgetown- by acting with moral perfidy by allowing hate events on their campuses.
In a shocking incident an Israeli student asked Professor John Massad a question at a public lecture and Massad responded by thundering "How many Palestinians did you kill?" Massad had also written that Israel is a "racist colonialist" state and that Zionists are Nazis, and demanded a 'one-state solution' to the conflict, in other words the abolition of Israel and it's replacement by an Arab ruled Palestinian State. In one of the most sickening and perverse statements, at an anti-Israel rally at Columbia University on April 17, 2002, on Israel's Independence Day, Nicholas de Genova, a Professor of Latino studies, told the crowd "The Heritage of the victims of the Holocaust belongs to the Palestinian people. The State of Israel has no claim to the heritage of the Holocaust". So a country with thousands of Holocaust survivors and hundreds of thousands of descendants of Holocaust survivors has no claim to the heritage of holocaust victims, but a people that did not suffer from the Holocaust does, according to De Genova's grotesque thinking. And these are meant to be the great minds of academia.
There is also an insidious campaign to bar all Israel academics from universities in the USA, As Alan Dershowitz pointed out "many of the people who want boycotts claim that Israeli is inflicting collective punishment on the Palestinians, but a boycott is effectively punishing every Israel academic without regard to what their views may be."
Syllabi in the humanities departments of university campuses contain powerful and hateful propaganda against Israel . One of the driving forces behind this is the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) to which the centrality of the Palestine issue at the expense of all other peoples suffering in the Middle East is apparent. In a study of the three year period following 911, Martin Kramer found that "For MESAns the Palestinians are the chosen people now more than ever. Arab financial pressure has influenced universities in more ways that one. Texas A&M University effectively pressured the PBS station to cancel a screening of the movie about abuse of women in Saudi Arabia called 'Death of a Princess"
At American University, an anthropology professor used a comic book in the vein of Der Sturmer as a text. Another professor crossed out the word 'Israel' on a students exam and wrote in the margin "Zionist entity".
The study of Israel and the Hebrew language has been marginalized. delegitimzed and demonized at universities across the USA. Furthermore there is vociferous support for Hamas and Hezbollah at these universities. An Israeli Arab who is the Palestinian Affairs correspondent for the Jerusalem Post returned from a 2009 speaking tour of American college campuses and reported that "There is more sympathy for Hamas then there is in Ramallah. Listening to some students and professors at these campuses , for a moment I thought I was sitting opposite a Hamas spokesman or would-be suicide bomber...the so called pro-Palestinian 'junta' on the campuses has nothing to offer other than hatred and delegitimization of Israel. If these folks really cared about the Palestinians they would be campaigning for good government and for the values of democracy and freedom in the West Bank and Gaza Strip"

The culture of hate fostered among the youth in America aims to put the USA on a par with Europe in terms of anti-Israel hatred and prejudice. This is done with the purpose of preparing the world for genocide of Israel's Jews. The same way that Nazi propaganda in Europe in the 1930s influenced Europeans to the point where the depopulation of Jews from Europe was no longer shocking, so anti-Israel propaganda will aim to ensure that the depopulation of Israel's Jews is no longer shocking.

It is disturbing to see a serious work of scholarship denounced by hate-mongers. The Arab Lobby is an important book that will be of interest to both students of the Middle East conflict and students of U.S. foreign policy. The research is ground-breaking, the subject matter is fascinating, and the writing is clear and accessible. If you thought that only friends of Israel are involved in shaping U.S. policy toward the Middle East, you are likely to be shocked -over and over again. Dr. Bard shows that Arab nations and the oil industry make up a motivated, sophisticated, and well-financed lobby. Their objectives are too often inimical to U.S. interests and values.

Very professionally written, presents many little -known facts about the history of the arab lobby. The book uncovers the extent of the enemy's penetration of american institutes, especially the state department. The book also may help to neutralize "anti-zionist" (actually, antisemitic) propaganda of lefties and their islamist friends.

With pseudo-sophistication, Americans just smirked when Congress was referred to a "Gucchi Gulch" because of the population of predatory lobbyists. Now we have a suitable side trip into what I call the "Caliph's Corridor".
However, as well researched as Mr. Bard's efforts are, I believe a little thinking will be required by the reader. As well as Mr. Bard's case is made, I hope the readers will pause once in a wwhile and consider the empiricals beyond the pages and, often, obscured in plain site.
Lobbying isn't confined to just the solons, but in many cases the public relations efforts to which they respond.
Now, we may find a point or two which we sense is exaggerated. Good. Stop and explore it. I find that Mr. Bard may even invite that.
Today we hear outrage about 'Islamophobia' sputted from the drool and spittle of Islamophiles. We hear charges of discrimination - which will be followed by sub-poenae in the protracted element of extremism: Lawfare.
Should one read this effort, I might suggest going the step beyond: Look closer than just congressional lobbying; local legislation, easements of municipal ordinance, education policies and even houses of worship. Pay attention to actions in one locale that might become a precedent; Federal dollar distribution.
Habeus datum.