This is crazy. A front-page piece in the New York Times titled “Foreign Powers Buy Influence at Think Tanks” highlights the influence of Arab governments on programming at Brookings and a dozen other D.C. thinktanks and has not a word to say about Israel.
An accompanying graphic lists 50-some countries that seek to manipulate US policymaking and public opinion through thinktanks, but Israel is off that list too!
Haim Saban started a center at Brookings that’s all about Israel; he moved to the U.S. from Israel and is an ardent Zionist. This doesn’t count as foreign influence. From the Times:
“It is the self-censorship that really affects us over time,” the scholar said. “But the fund-raising environment is very difficult at the moment, and Brookings keeps growing and it has to support itself.”
The sensitivities are especially important when it comes to the Qatari government — the single biggest foreign donor to Brookings.
The piece notes that Michele Dunn quit at the Atlantic Council after criticizing aid for Egypt.
After she signed a petition and testified before a Senate Foreign Relations Committee urging the United States to suspend military aid to Egypt, calling Mr. Morsi’s ouster a “military coup,” Bahaa Hariri [son of the late Rafik Hariri and generous donor] called the Atlantic Council to complain, executives with direct knowledge of the events said.
Ms. Dunne declined to comment on the matter. But four months after the call, Ms. Dunne left the Atlantic Council.
Great story. Can you think what would happen to a think tank intellectual who called for cutting aid to Israel?
Of course, Israel is not on the list b/c it doesn’t buy influence, and AIPAC is not on the list b/c it is not a foreign power.
AIPAC is of course a Fifth Column, but that’s something else entirely.
Never forget Martin Indyk, either.
On the increasingly unbearable MTP, I did not hear one peep about Israel.
All of it is mind- numbing– which is exactly their scheme.
My thought in reading the article (which included Norway and Japan, not just Arab governments) was that these governments, and/or the lobbyists and think tanks serving them, all learned how to do this from Israel, AIPAC, and their various think tanks.
I saw it as a sort of threat by the establishment of the NYTimes directed at Netanyahu or Israel more generally: if you don’t clean up your government, and its policies toward the Palestinians, the lever-pulling in DC is all going to come out, and it will be very ugly. It’s too obvious an omission. Note the historical reach back to the origins of the Foreign Agents Act in the late 30s, enacted to foil Nazi propaganda efforts in DC. No one interested enough in these matters to read the whole article could possibly be unaware of the influence purchased by prominent Israeli Zionists in DC think tanks, nor to have missed Netanyahu’s bitch slap at Obama during Protective Edge (aka sheer cliff) “don’t ever second guess me,” nor to have missed Israel’s helping itself to US munitions without White House or State awareness, with Israel’s supporters in DoD saying, legally, we didn’t need to inform anyone! Obama’s cravenness in the face of this performance testifies loudly to Israeli power in DC; this article trumpets its power in the media; and the implicit message is: make peace with the Palestinians stop empowering your racist fringes, or it will all fall apart.
Shmuley’s tweeting the subject NYT article. I skimmed the article when it first came out and noticed Denmark was mentioned at lot. Couldn’t miss Israel was not once mentioned. Recall AIPAC got around the Kennedy Brothers trying to make the original Zionist organization register as an agent of a foreign government? Israel directly funded that ZOA organization. So it morphed into AIPAC, with no direct connection, especially funding connection to Israel, and set up to not give any money to US political campaigns–instead AIPAC just orchestrates the funding by a myriad of Jewish Establishment agencies across the nation–they then distribute political donations according to which candidate is viewed (by AIPAC) as the most pro-Israel. No other foreign country has such a 5th column operation with the USA.
Too AIPAC has that subsidiary; if memory serves, in the same office building as AIPAC & manned by the same people–disguised as an Educational organization; this is the agency that gives US congress folks their free trips to Israel.
These other countries have to get smart like Israel’s big supporters here. Yet, even if they try such shell games, is there enough big money and tunnel visioned Americans to support them? What other ethnic group in USA rubber-stamps and raises big funds for its “homeland?” The Danish Americans? LOL