SAUDIS BUYING INFLUENCE ON U.S. COLLEGE CAMPUSES

Saudis Give Big to U.S. Colleges - Julia Duin (Washington Times)
Some say the sheer size of Saudi donations to Middle East studies departments amounts to buying influence and creating bastions of noncritical pro-Islamic scholarship within academia. "There's a possibility these campuses aren't getting gifts, they're getting investments," said Clifford May, president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

There are 17 federally funded centers on American college campuses devoted solely to Middle Eastern studies and another 30 to 40 that do not receive federal aid, according to Amy Newhall, executive director of the Middle East Studies Association at the University of Arizona. Not counting several positions at Georgetown University, she estimated at least 10 chaired professorships currently funded by Saudis at major universities.

"With all the talk of the Israel lobby, no one talks about the Saudi lobby," said Winfield Myers, director of Campus Watch. "There is no counterweight to Saudi influence in American higher education."

THE REAL, SINISTER LOBBY: THE SAUDIS

Israel Lobby's Pull Pales Next to Evil Saudi Input - Youssef Ibrahim
That there is a Jewish lobby in America concerned with the well-being of Israel is a silly question. It is insane to ask whether the 6 million American Jews should be concerned about the 6 million Israeli Jews, particularly in view of the massacre of another 6 million Jews in the Holocaust. Any people who do not care for their own are not worthy of concern. And what the Israel lobby does is what all ethnic lobbies - Greek, Armenian, Latvian, Irish, Cuban, and others - do in this democracy. What everyone has missed is that all these ethnic lobbies have been built from the bottom up, with but a single exception, a sinister lobby that works from the top down: the American lobby for Saudi Arabia.

There are hardly any Saudi-Americans. Yet we have a lobby composed of American businessmen, oilmen, and academics - all borrowed, hijacked, and, indeed, bribed into filling a void. The noise made on Capitol Hill, in the Pentagon, and inside the White House on behalf of the desert kingdom can be deafening. If Saudi Arabia wants American arms, Saudi Arabia gets arms; if Saudi Arabia cries foul over the bin Laden flock being stuck here the day after their next of kin blew up the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, President Bush lets all 50 of them out, no questions asked. (New York Sun)

SUVS > JEWS

Stephen Walt's Best Reasons to Abandon Israel (CAMERA)

Photoshopped image of Stephen Walt

And the number one reason Stephen Walt thinks American should dump one of its closest and allies and the only functioning democracy in the Middle East is ... " because we all like to drive SUVs ..."

THE "ISRAEL LOBBY" MYTH

The "Israel Lobby" Myth - George P. Shultz (U.S. News)

• Israel is a free, democratic, open, and relentlessly self-analytical place. To hear harsh criticism of Israel's policies and leaders, listen to the Israelis. So questioning Israel for its actions is legitimate, but lies are something else.
• The catalog of lies about Jews is long and astonishingly crude, matched only by the suffering that has followed their promulgation. Defaming the Jews by disputing their rightful place among the peoples of the world has been a long-running, well-documented, and disgraceful series of episodes across history. Again and again a time has come when legitimate criticism slips across an invisible line into what might be called the "badlands," a place where those who should be regarded as worthy adversaries in debate are turned into scapegoats, targets, all-purpose objects of blame.
• In America, thousands of groups vie for influence. Among these are Jewish groups that have come under renewed criticism for being part of an all-powerful "Israel lobby," most notably in a book published last week by Profs. Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer. Jewish groups also largely agree that the United States should support Israel. But the notion that they have anything like a uniform agenda and that U.S. policy in Israel and the Middle East is the result of this influence is simply wrong.
• Another tried and true method for damaging the well-being and security of the Jewish people and the State of Israel is a dangerously false analogy. Witness former President Jimmy Carter's book Palestine-Peace Not Apartheid. Here the association on the one hand is between Israel's existentially threatened position and the measures it has taken to protect its population from terrorist attacks, driven by an ideology bent on the complete eradication of the State of Israel, and, on the other, the racist oppression of South Africa's black population by the white Boer regime.
• The United States supports Israel not because of favoritism based on political pressure or influence but because the American people, and their leaders, say that supporting Israel is politically sound and morally just.
• Those who blame Israel and its Jewish supporters for U.S. policies they do not support are wrong. They are wrong because support for Israel is in our best interests. They are wrong because Israel and its supporters have the right to try to influence U.S. policy. And they are wrong because the U.S. government is responsible for the policies it adopts, not any other state or any of the myriad lobbies and groups that battle daily to win America's support.

See also: California Literary Review chooses Hamas supporter to review "The Israel Lobby" (Elder of Ziyon). Who is this Hamas supporter? It's the former U.S. Senator who blames 9/11 on .... the Joooozzzzz!

See also Unfair Charge vs. Israeli Lobby - Steve Huntley
In 2003 John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago was one of nearly 1,000 American academics signing a letter suggesting Israel would exploit the U.S. invasion of Iraq to expel millions of Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip - and maybe also Arab Israelis from Israel itself! It was a preposterous notion then and looks even more ridiculous today. The view embraced by Mearsheimer displayed a profound misunderstanding and ignorance not only of Israeli society but also of the moral culture of American Jews. The notion that 5 million Jews in Israel would carry out ethnic cleansing of more than 4 million Palestinians from the West Bank, Gaza and Israel, and that Americans Jews would sanction it staggers the imagination. To believe that requires a bias against Israel so deep seated that it defies reality. Whether it spills over into anti-Semitism, I'll leave for you to judge. (Chicago Sun-Times)

See also Engel "Disappointed" by Ford Forum for Mearsheimer - Annie Karni
The Ford Foundation, which came under congressional scrutiny in 2003 for supporting groups committed to destroying Israel, is again drawing censure, this time for funding a panel at Columbia University highlighting a professor who blames Israel and its American supporters for the Iraq War and for al-Qaeda terrorism against America. Professor John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, co-author of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, is scheduled to speak at Columbia's Heyman Center for the Humanities next month on the issue of free speech in academia. The October 30 panel, titled "Freedom and the University," is funded with a $100,000 grant from the Ford Foundation.

"It's disappointing that the Ford Foundation would make Mearsheimer one of the highlights of what they're funding," said Rep. Eliot Engel, a Democrat of the Bronx. "If the Ford Foundation is going to say they've changed their attitudes, doing something like this only calls into question whether they've got the message and changed." The executive director of the NGO Monitor, Gerald Steinberg, said that by funding a panel where Mearsheimer is scheduled to speak, the Ford Foundation risks reneging on that promise by underwriting at Columbia the kind of falsehoods it was funding at Durban. "He [Mearsheimer] won't debate the assertions and the things they say," said Malcolm Hoenlein, the executive vice president of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. "They never engaged anyone from the 'lobby.' They hide behind the guise of academic freedom when they're the ones denying us free speech. It seems a little out of place for them to speak on academic freedom." (New York Sun)

IGNORING ARAB LOBBYING

Anti-Semitism and the Anti-Israel Lobby - Jeff Robbins (WSJ)
A crop of Israel's critics - most prominently Jimmy Carter and now Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer - have managed something of a feat: They express no concerns about the massive pro-Arab effort, funded in significant measure by foreign oil money, taking American Jews to task for participating in the American political process; meanwhile, they inoculate themselves against charges of anti-Jewish bias by preemptively predicting that "the Jewish lobby" will accuse them of it.

The Saudis have not been shy about supplementing their considerable leverage in the U.S. by targeting expenditures to affect the debate over Middle East policy by funding think tanks, Middle East studies programs, advocacy groups, community centers and other institutions. Just last year Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal donated $20 million each to Harvard and Georgetown Universities for programs in Islamic studies.

Walt and Mearsheimer have repackaged the "the-Jews-run-the-country" stuff which has long been the bread and butter of anti-Semites. But if anti-Semitism is too harsh a term, perhaps one can conclude that "anti-Jewish bias" fits the bill here. After all, where there is nothing wrong with foreign money from Arab countries advancing a pro-Arab agenda, in Walt's and Mearsheimer's world there is something very wrong with American citizens who are Jewish exercising their civic right to speak out on behalf of Israel and taking issue with the pro-Arab agenda.

INFLUENCE OF ARAB-AMERICANS GROWS

Opinion: The Arab lobby grows (JPost)
While on a recent lecture tour in the United States, I watched a CNN broadcast on the growth of Islam in America. While suspicion lurks about home-grown Islamist extremism, the program's main concentration was on the American Jewish community's concern that the rapid growth in the number of Muslims in the US would translate into Arab political power at Israel's expense. ....

Jewish influence has always been a bit exaggerated. As long as Israel's policies served American interests, the Jewish lobby seemed to work wonders. But whenever there was a clash of interests, no amount of Jewish activism on behalf of Israel mattered. ...

THE RELIGIOUS demographics in the United States are changing. American Muslims now almost outnumber American Jews. The rapid growth in the number of Muslims is proportionally matched by the rapid decline of Jewishly identified Americans. Interfaith marriages and assimilation, together with a decreasing birthrate, are contributing to the endangerment of the American Jewish population.

It is no longer true that American Jews vote as a bloc regarding issues related to Israel. No longer does Israel dominate their thought processes when they enter the voting booth - primarily because concepts of nation, peoplehood, ethnicity and culture play only a peripheral role in their lives.

And yet, despite their liberal tendencies - 70 percent of Jews vote for Democratic candidates - California Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger and New York Republican George Pataki were elected to governorships in states where there are large concentrations of Jews.

More so, with all the negative memories of George Bush senior, the Jews of Florida in the presidential election of 2000 could not turn the tide in that state to throw the victory to Al Gore, heir to the Jewishly beloved Bill Clinton. And, in the last mid-term elections, with the exception of Joe Lieberman, many pro-Israeli congressional representatives were put out to pasture.

ALL THIS stands in sharp contrast to the American-Arab community's voting patterns. Its loyalty to Arab and Islamic causes is unyielding. Simply put, within the American-Arab world there is no debate about Middle East politics as is the case within a very diverse Jewish world.

Pluralism is not part of the Islamic tradition. There is no such thing as a "Reform Muslim." While Arabs have gone to war against each other more often than against Israel, and while more Arabs have killed Arabs than have Israelis killed Arabs, when it comes to their overall attitude toward the Jewish state, virtually all Arabs find a ready unity.

Following the Arab world's lead, Israel sets off a chain reaction among Arab-Americans that binds them together in a singular political stance.

At any rate, Arab-Americans are still considered outsiders. Particularly after 9/11, attempts on their part to blend into the American mainstream are more difficult than ever.

The Arab-American community is also playing the oil card very effectively. For certain, with the present administration and its personal connection with Arab oil sheikhs, Middle East foreign policy is more influenced by Arabs than Jews, and Arab countries in the Middle East are calling on their brethren in the US to speak out.

Additionally, the US views Israel's inability to blunt Iran's surrogate Hizbullah as a strategic failure; and, as evidenced by Condoleezza Rice's recent courtship of Iran and Syria, America is slowly recognizing that these two entities may have a far more constructive role to play in Middle East politics than does Israel.

With the next presidential election already heating up, American Jewish influence will be further challenged. With heavy Arab-American communities in Michigan, Illinois and California - pivotal states in any national election - it will be interesting to see whether America's next president will continue to give preferential treatment to Jewish and Israel concerns.

As the American-Arab community grows in numbers and confidence, it will increasingly be American Muslims who will influence US foreign policy vis-a-vis the Middle East.

THE SECRETS OF EFFECTIVE LOBBYING

'America's Pro-Israel Lobbyists Are Light Touches' (NYSun)
"Like the Trilateral Commission and Freemasons, AIPAC gets blamed by conspiracy theorists for controlling everything from the U.S. Congress to the price of yak-fat futures. It's a bad rap, and I'm not just saying that because AIPAC controls the media. Based on my experience, it seems that America's pro-Israel lobbyists are, comparatively speaking, light touches. Just look at the competition. The last time our corporate brother at Fox News, Steve Centanni, was hosted by Palestinians in Gaza City, it was after he'd been abducted, forced to convert to Islam at gunpoint, and made to appear in a hostage video singing Allah's praises while wearing fruity pajamas," Matt Labash writes in the Weekly Standard.

By contrast, I was put up in hotels with heated pools and kosher sushi bars, given a really cool helicopter ride up the Jordan River, and taken to a Dead Sea spa where large Russian women kneaded our haunches with vise-like fingers still over- exercised from working the plow back in Kostroma.