(Reviewer: Gary Selikow, Vol. 67, No. 2, Rosh Hashanah 2012)
The pervasive myth of an all-powerful Israel lobby controlling American foreign policy has long dominated public discourse. In The Arab Lobby: The Invisible Alliance that Undermines America’s Interests in the Middle East, 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. In the same way, they dominate educational institutions and the media, thereby fostering heavily one-sided proPalestinian public opinion.
Bard demonstrates how the discourse on the Arab-Israeli conflict is distorted due to the immense financial resources of the Arab lobby. His book highlights the latter’s manipulation of American foreign policy and public opinion, usually out of public view, and in ways that have gone unnoticed that need to be exposed. In Bard’s view, the Arab lobby exerts a malignant influence on American foreign policy, with the result that basic American values and American security needs are disregarded in order to bolster repressive Arab regimes and terrorist organizations.
The Arab Lobby has had much success. The Palestinians receive more capita aid than any other group in the world, indeed more than all of Sub-Saharan 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’. Israelis 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, namely ‘Islamophobia’.
The most successful of the lobby’s campaign has been its infiltration of the educational system, including a sustained and sinister campaign to also influence students outside the classroom. The Muslim Students Association has propagated the falsehood 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 and vigorously supported the so-called Right of Return, something aimed at demographically swamping Israel’s Jewish population.
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, support a two state solution and “recognize the difference between disagreement and hate speech”, they were refused. By hosting a group that could not bring itself to object to the murder of children, Duke therefore lent support to terror sympathizers, as did other universities such as Berkely Wisconsin, Ohio State and Georgetown. In one 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. He argues for a ‘one-state solution’ to the conflict (that is, the abolition of Israel and its replacement by an Arab ruled Palestinian State). 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 student’s exam and wrote in the margin “Zionist entity”. An especially perverse statement was made at an anti-Israel rally at Columbia University on 17 April, 2002, Israel’s Independence Day, by Professor of Latino Studies Nicholas de Genova: “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”. Thus, according to De Genova’s grotesque thinking, 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. So much for the great minds of academia!
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 accorded the Palestine issue at the expense of all other peoples suffering in the Middle East is due. In a study of the three-year period following 9/11, 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 than 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’”.
The study of Israel and the Hebrew language has been marginalized, delegitimized and even demonized at universities across the USA. Furthermore, there is vociferous support for Hamas and Hezbollah at such institutions. 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, “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”.
There is also an insidious campaign to bar all Israel academics from American universities. As Alan Dershowitz points out, “many of the people who want boycotts claim that Israel is inflicting collective punishment on the Palestinians, but a boycott is effectively punishing every Israel academic without regard to what their views may be.”
All this and more is exposed in Bard’s book, which provides a much-needed analysis of how deeply the US’s Arab lobby is impacting on public policy and intellectual trends regarding Israel, the Middle East and the phenomenon of radical Islam.
The Arab Lobby: The Invisible Alliance that Undermines America’s Interests in the Middle East by Mitchell Bard, Harper, 2010, 432pp
Gary Selikow is a researcher and media activist. His reviews of books of Jewish and Middle East interest appear regularly online and elsewhere.
