JTA has an OK piece on the Armenian genocide vote by Ron Kampeas. Playing catchup to MJ Rosenberg at Huffington Post, who said that the lobby is sticking it to Turkey, Kampeas goes over the role of the Israel lobby in the House Foreign Affairs vote, and while he doesn’t reach Rosenberg’s conclusion, which I share, at least he’s honest about the presence of the lobby, and its effect on Jewish members:
Last time [2007 vote], the chairman of the panel, the late Tom Lantos of California, did not sponsor the bill — but he ended up voting for it, after agonizing about it in his opening remarks. So too did the other six Jews who voted to call the massacres a genocide. And some of them explicitly agonized because of Turkey’s good relations (at least then) with Israel. "This has been tough for me," Gary Ackerman of New York said then. Eliot Engel of New York voted "with a heavy heart."
This time, Lantos’ successor as chairman, Howard Berman of California, did not dither at all and, in fact, co-sponsored the bill. And despite his urgings, it passed by a much tighter margin than in 2007: 23-22 yesterday as opposed to 27-21 in 2007. (It never reached the full House in that session.) This year, [Florida’s Robert] Wexler’s out of Congress, and all seven Jews on the panel were in the "aye" column.
So what does this really tell us about the Israel lobby? It says, first of all, that its frontline — Congress’ Jewish members (and please, this is not unusual, Hispanic groups look to Hispanic members as their frontline, etc.) — will at times defy the lobby’s wishes. They did so in 2007, when pro-Israel groups lobbied very, very hard against the resolution.
Now here is the New York Times on the same subject–the passage in committee of the resolution, and the crisis it is creating in US-Turkey relations. No reference at all to the lobby. Except a bland reference to "ethnic" lobbies. And Abe Foxman is given a soapbox to applaud Turkey’s support for sanctions against Iran– without any reference to his history of denial of the Armenian genocide.
Update: Bruce Wolman points out that Foxman has swung both ways on the Armenian genocide previously.
