Well, if you (unlike talk show host Mike Smerconish) remained in doubt even after the experts recommended by Osama Bin Laden, Walt and Mearsheimer and Michael Scheuer, so brilliantly demonstrated the power of the Jewish lobby, the current visit of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to “Jewtown” New York should eliminate your doubts. After all, how else can you explain such a complete shunning of the president of such a respected world leader by the Jewish controlled media and academia than his refusal to accept the “holocaust myth” and the right of the Jewish state to exist?
Judith Klinghoffer notes that if they couldn’t even keep a Holocaust denier and existential enemy of Israel from playing Columbia University like a fiddle, maybe the Jewish lobby isn’t quite the 800 pound gorilla so many people claim.
Now, the Saudi lobby, writes Youssef Ibrahim, is something else:
And what the Israel lobby does is what all ethnic lobbies — Greek, Armenian, Latvian, Irish, Cuban, and others — do in this democracy. It is a natural outgrowth of the melting pot that makes this country what it is and helps to provide us with a bridge to our origins.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.
Maybe now several more books could look into how such a huge lobby exists, even though, unlike the other communities that lobby, there are hardly any Saudi-Americans. Yet we have a lobby composed of American businessmen, oilmen, and academics — as well as Arab-Americans from Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and elsewhere — all borrowed, hijacked, and, indeed, bribed into filling a void.
To be sure, maybe a handful of Saudis have dual citizenship, but a genuine lobby they do not make. But 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. What gives?
The mighty Saudi lobby is made up of concentric circles that emanate from a Saudi Embassy in Washington that acts as a checking account. The dollars flow to Saudi-funded mosques and theological enterprises, to America’s academic institutions, which are panting for Saudi dollars, to the American oil and arms industries, and to Arab-Americans in need. Whether those communities of interest have any familial, social, or immigrant ties to Saudi Arabia is totally beside the point. This is how a lobby is built from the top down.
You may wish to read the rest.
David, aka, Soccer Dad reminds me that in 1985 Steve Emerson did write about The American House of Saud: The Secret Petrodollar Connection. Interestingly, Amazon carries no image of the book and the NYT was forced to re-review it after Emerson revealed the bias of the first reviewer (see bellow). Dan Pipes, of course, has also written on the subject. Still, the surface has barely been scratched.
