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Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, May 2019, pp. 17-23
By Ali Abunimah
Janet McMahon: I’m Janet McMahon, managing editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. I first became aware of our next speaker in the 1990s, when I began reading his masterful letters to National Public Radio, pointing out their errors of omission and commission alike—which, of course, were numerous. Journalist Ali Abunimah is the co-founder and executive director of the widely acclaimed The Electronic Intifada, a nonprofit, independent online publication focusing on Palestine. He has been an active part of the movement for justice in Palestine for two decades and was the recipient of the 2013 Lannan Cultural Freedom Fellowship.
A graduate of Princeton University and the University of Chicago, Ali is a frequent speaker on the Middle East, contributing regularly to numerous publications. He is also the author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse, and The Battle for Justice in Palestine. And he will be signing both books in the Ideas Fair room during the morning break immediately following our question-and-answer session.
The Electronic Intifada has been at the forefront in fighting censorship by obtaining, releasing, and contextualizing “The [Israel] Lobby,” the suppressed Al Jazeera documentary exposing the strategies and activities of the Israel lobby in this country. Today, he will be addressing the question: “What does a Censored Undercover News Investigation Reveal about the Israel Lobby in America?” So please join me in welcoming Ali Abunimah.
Ali Abunimah: Thank you very much, and good morning, everyone. Thank you to the organizers, the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy and the Washington Report, for inviting me back here for the second year in a row. It’s an honor and pleasure to see so many people here this morning.
Some of you were in the room last year, when I stood here to talk about this documentary. At that time, nobody had seen it, and Grant asked me, “Do you think we’ll ever see it?” I don’t remember exactly what I said, but I think I said we will see it or I didn’t know.
What happened was, back in March of last year, our publication, The Electronic Intifada, was the first to publish reports of the contents of the documentary. In August, we were the first to publish video excerpts from the film. And in November, we, along with Al Akhbar in Beirut and Orient XXI in France, actually published the entire film.
Now, for those of you who don’t know anything about this film, and there may be some people, first let me give credit to the team at Al Jazeera investigations led by Clayton Swisher and Phil Rees and their colleagues, and, of course, the undercover reporter known as Tony, who did a really fantastic historic piece of journalism—a four-part documentary going undercover in The Israel Project, revealing candid conversations by top Israel lobbyists who did not know that they were being recorded. But, unfortunately, this fantastic piece of journalism was suppressed, and I’ll say more about that in a moment.
Let me just ask how many of the people in this room have actually watched the documentary or any part of it? I’m going to say that that’s maybe about 25 to 30 percent, which is pretty good—but really, I would like to encourage everyone to watch it. It’s available online free at The Electronic Intifada and other sites. Already hundred of thousands of people, if not maybe in the low millions, have seen it, if you are to add up all the different copies that are out there.
What does this film reveal? First, a little bit of background. The film was made by Al Jazeera in 2016 and was completed in 2017. But, as I mentioned, it was censored after Qatar—of course, the Gulf state that funds Al Jazeera—came under intense pressure from the Israel lobby. Now, this is remarkable, because it is a film about the power of the Israel lobby, and the same lobby succeeded in getting Qatar to suppress this film, all the while denying that the Israel lobby has any power or influence. [Laughter]
Now, late last year, the director general of Al Jazeera claimed at a conference in the U.S. that the reason the film had not been shown was due to outstanding legal issues. This was flatly contradicted by his own journalists. We know that, in fact, the film had been completed, and it had passed through all of the usual and rigorous legal standards review that Al Jazeera does.
We know how rigorous that is, because in January of 2017 Al Jazeera did actually broadcast a similar film focused on the Israel lobby in the UK. That film revealed that a spy at the Israeli Embassy called Shai Masot was working secretly, in his words, to take down a British government minister who was deemed too critical of Israel, and to secretly set up a pro-Israel organization within the opposition Labor Party. This was being run out of the Israeli Embassy.
When this was revealed, the British expelled Shai Masot—but the British government very quickly swept all this under the carpet. But, significantly, after the film was broadcast—and you can watch that film on the Al Jazeera website, because they did actually broadcast it—after the film was broadcast, Israel lobby groups and individuals in the UK filed a raft of complaints with Ofcom [Office of Communications], the British broadcast regulator. We don’t really have an equivalent in the U.S. where you can complain about FOX, or CNN, or MSNBC, or Rachel Maddow’s mad conspiracies claiming Russia is going to cut off the heating of Americans in the depth of winter. There’s no one to complain to for that. But in the UK they have a powerful broadcast regulator that can actually take away your license. Ofcom did an eight-month investigation and threw out every single complaint against the documentary. There was no bias. There was no misrepresentation. There was no unfairness in it. And the U.S. film was made to exactly the same standards by exactly the same journalists.
This film, which I again encourage you all to watch, exposes the efforts of Israel and its lobbyists to spy on, smear and intimidate U.S. citizens who support Palestinian human rights, especially the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement. It shows that Israel is running covert and semi-covert black ops from a government agency called the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, which is staffed by many people from Israel’s intelligence agencies, and that this effort is being done in collusion with an extensive network of U.S.-based organizations who are not registered under FARA [the Foreign Agents Registration Act] as agents of a foreign power. But based on what is in the documentary, they clearly should be.
These organizations include the Israel on Campus Coalition, The Israel Project, and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies—it’s more like the foundation for defense of apartheid, occupation, sniper murder and so on. It also showed how the Israeli Embassy in Washington itself was running some of these operations. For example, a woman called Julia Reifkind—who at the time was an Israeli Embassy employee, but previously was an AIPAC campus activist in California—described her typical daily work as “mainly gathering intel, reporting back to Israel to report to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Strategic Affairs.” She discusses how the Israeli government is “giving our support to various front groups,” in “that behind-the-scenes way.” She also talks about using fake Facebook profiles to monitor campus and pro-Palestine groups.
And, again, these efforts are run in direct coordination with the Ministry of Strategic Affairs whose director general is a woman called Sima Vaknin-Gil, who was herself a former military intelligence officer.
She talks about how her operation, run through the ministry, has mapped the universe of Palestinian rights activism globally, “not just the United States, not just campuses, but campuses and intersectionality and labor unions and churches.” And she says that this data is used for “offense activity” against Palestine activists.
These efforts are run in direct coordination with the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs.
The film also shows Jacob Baime, executive director of the Israel on Campus Coalition, describing how his organization runs a multi-million-dollar effort. He doesn’t say exactly where those millions come from, but he talks about millions of dollars using corporate-level enterprise-grade social media intelligence software—those are his words—to gather lists of Palestine-related student events on campus, “generally within about 30 seconds or less of them being posted online,” and how this information is then filtered to this network of organizations that are working to sabotage these groups, and that this effort is coordinated with the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs.
Jacob Baime describes how the Israel on Campus Coalition is part of this Israel-run or Israel-coordinated strategy. It uses anonymous websites to target activists: “With the anti-Israel people, what’s most effective, with what we found at least in the last year, is you do the opposition research, put up some anonymous website, and then put up targeted ads on Facebook.” He talks about Canary Mission as a good example, and adds, “It is psychological warfare.”
One of the cases in the film that’s profiled is Prof. Bill Mullen at Purdue University in Indiana, who found himself the target of just such an anonymous smear campaign, where websites went up featuring totally false accusations of sexual harassment and anti-Semitism against him, even to the point where these websites mentioned his young daughter and his wife. So you can imagine the psychological effect on someone of seeing websites with that kind of false allegation.
Other websites targeting student leaders in Indiana included one which claimed that a young woman was a terrorist, and another which claimed that a young Muslim woman activist was engaging in late-night drinking and sex, and other activities which were calculated to try to shame her and to bring her into disrepute with her family and her community.
The film named convicted tax evader Adam Milstein, who is also the chair of a lobby group called the Israeli-American Council—which is positioning itself to the right of AIPAC, if you can believe such a thing—as being the mastermind and key funder of Canary Mission, an anonymous website that, again, targets students and professors. I should mention that Jacob Baime of the Israel on Campus Coalition described this strategy to smear, and target and intimidate people as inspired by Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan—for all the success that it has had, since the U.S. is, of course, now in direct negotiations with the Taliban, 18-odd years after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan.
Nonetheless, it shows the mindset that Israel and its proxies in the United States are waging a war on American citizens, including teenagers on college campuses who are exercising their constitutional rights to speak up about an issue they care about deeply.
We have it from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. Sima Vaknin-Gil, the director general of the Foreign Ministry, states very explicitly, we have FDD—that’s the Foundation for Defense of Democracies—we have FDD. We have others working on projects including data gathering, information analysis, working on activist organizations, money trail. This is something that only a country, with its resources, can do the best. So she states on camera and in the film that these groups are working with the Israeli government to carry out these operations. But when we checked on the U.S. government’s Foreign Agents Registration Act website, we did not find the Foundation for Defense of Democracies or any of its principals registered as agents of the Israeli government.
One of the revelations in the film that I found particularly amusing, let’s say, is the efforts of The Israel Project. The Israel Project is a lobby group based here in Washington. It’s run by a former Clinton administration official, Josh Block, who also worked for AIPAC previously. And it also works closely with the Israeli government. And the Israel Project— actually, the undercover reporter Tony, as he’s known in the film, actually got a job, an internship, at The Israel Project, which is pretty amazing.
But The Israel Project, the film reveals, was running a major effort, a major covert influence campaign on Facebook. This is really remarkable. What they did is set up pages or communities on Facebook. Some of them have hundreds of thousands, half a million or more followers. I don’t know if we have the ability to project from the Internet, I should have thought of this—but one of them puts up really cute pictures of kittens and doughnuts. It’s one of the actual Israel Project doughnuts, it’s actually pink. It actually looks toxic. It looks like it would kill you if you ate it, because no food is naturally that shade of hot pink.
But it actually describes itself as—on the “About” section of the Facebook community, it’s called Cup of Jane. It describes itself as sugar and spice and everything nice. What it tries to do is to establish progressive credibility by posting not just pictures of kittens and doughnuts, but also photos and quotations from such black female icons as Maya Angelou and Ida B. Wells. There are also posts about the groundbreaking environmentalist Rachel Carson, and even about Emma Gonzalez, who, along with her classmates, launched a national campaign for gun legislation after surviving the Parkland school massacre in Florida. But woven into this stream of progressive-flavored fluff are attacks on actual progressive movements, and pro-Israel propaganda.
For example, a posting in October 2016 attempted to portray Israeli militarism as cute and empowering. They actually posted a photo of an Israeli F-16 fighter jet painted pink. Pink is a very important color to The Israel Project. And then the post said, “The Israeli Air Force has painted fighters in pink in aid of breast cancer awareness month. How cool is that?” And then it adds, “This is fierce. Women, by the way, need an Air Force all their own.” So feminist.
Of course, at the same time that this is going on, dozens of women in Gaza are documented to have died due to Israel’s siege, denying them potentially life-saving treatment. Dozens of cancer patients—I should say, many of them women—are documented by the World Health Organization to have died because Israel would not allow them out of the Gaza ghetto to obtain life-saving treatment. But this is the propaganda that Cup of Jane is pushing, and it’s very clear why—or The Israel Project is pushing—and it’s very clear why. It’s because Israel’s brand is toxic and you can’t sell it directly, especially to young people, and so you have to try and mix it in with hip, cool stuff that looks innocuous or even progressive.
The film shows one of the staffers at The Israel Project explaining the logic behind this. One Jordan Schachtel says, “We’re putting together a lot of pro-Israel media through various social media channels that aren’t The Israel Project’s channels. So we have a lot of side projects that we are trying to influence the public debate with. That’s why it’s a secretive thing, because we don’t want people to know that these side projects are associated with The Israel Project.”
In fact, this network of pages run by The Israel Project are not labeled as being run by The Israel Project. Or they just say project of TIP, T-I-P. Nobody who doesn’t know what The Israel Project is would have any idea what TIP is. So it was a covert effort.
Now, when we asked Facebook to comment on this and to look into it, their media office said, “OK, we’ll have a look.” They got back to us and they said—we asked specifically, does any of this violate your terms of service? Remember, this is at the same time as Facebook is taking down pages of legitimate news organizations, and legitimate organizations, based on the claim that they’re somehow agents of Russian influence. Completely bogus stuff. And Facebook has partnered with the Israeli government to shut down Palestinian media pages. Facebook partnered with the Atlantic Council—the NATO think tank here in Washington funded by the U.S. government, by the European Union, by the United Arab Emirates, by Saudi Arabia—partnered with them to supposedly identify pages that should be taken down. And they took down lots of pages that were perfectly legitimate, including, as I mentioned, pages of journalists and media organizations.
But Facebook’s reply to us about this extensive covert Israeli-influence campaign on their platform, or pro-Israel influence campaign on their platform, was, “this violates none of our rules.” And those pages are still operating.
There’s a lot more in this film in reference to the Benjamins, let’s say. It shows, it reveals—again, some of this is known, but it is different to actually see people talking about how it’s done—fund-raisers for political candidates where hundreds of thousands of dollars can be raised in a single night without anything being put on paper. You have one of the people involved in this fund-raising say, we don’t even send out invitations. There’s nothing. But at these fund-raisers, people just hand over their credits cards and the organizers run it up for the maximum $2,700, or whatever it is. In a single night, they can raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for a political candidate who agrees to toe the Israel lobby’s line.
What’s significant in the film—I’m not an expert on campaign finance law, but the film indicates that these practices are, if not outright illegal, certainly come very close to skirting the campaign finance laws. And we need to have a conversation about that, because it is very much about the Benjamins.
Let me conclude with a couple of comments about the Israel lobby in general. I again commend this film [“The Lobby”] to you, and I would like to see everyone watch it. It’s great viewing, not just watching it, but sharing it and telling people about it. How can you find it? Just go on Google and search, “Watch the film the Israel lobby didn’t want you to see,” and it will come up, because that’s the headline that we ran it under. “Watch the film the Israel lobby didn’t want you to see,” and you can see it.
I think the bigger picture is that—you know, we heard this morning from the extremely informative and learned presentation of Professor Hixson that this lobby is very powerful, and you’re going to hear that again throughout the day, and it is very powerful. But there is a subtle message that we should also not ignore, which is that this lobby is losing its power—because the Israel lobby, its power, operates best in the dark. And already, what we’re having, even with the completely unfounded attacks on Rep. Ilhan Omar, is something the Israel lobby never wants, which is a public discussion about it. [Applause]
In the film, Jonathan Schanzer, the vice president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, makes an admission. He says, “Personally, I think that anti-Semitism as a smear is not what it used to be.” I completely share Professor Hixson’s statement that we must stand against anti-Semitism, as any other form of racism. Anti-Jewish bigotry of any kind has no place in a movement for Palestinian human rights. [Applause] That’s the message that we, as advocates for Palestinian liberation, must always be in the forefront of saying.
But, of course, there is a cynical campaign to weaponize false accusations of anti-Semitism to smear and silence people. This has been done with, sadly, a great deal of success in the UK, where, for the past three or four years, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn has been the target of bogus claims that the party under his leadership is facing endemic institutional anti-Semitism. It’s a lie. It’s an outright lie. There have been a very few number of marginal cases which have rightly been condemned, but there’s no evidence that the party is institutionally anti-Semitic.
But the warning I want to give here is that this template is now being imported from the UK directly to the U.S. and to the Democratic Party. Again, it’s not a sign, necessarily, of the strength of this lobby, but a sign of its weakness, in the sense that if the Democratic Party was all solidly pro-Israel as perhaps it used to be, you wouldn’t need to smear people as anti-Semites. It’s because of the growing support for Palestinian rights, the growing disgust of the party establishments’ complicity with Israel—Nancy Pelosi led the smears against Ilhan Omar, and Nancy Pelosi will be at AIPAC in the coming days, and proudly so.
It’s because the base is rejecting this message from the leadership that we must all march in lockstep with Israel that this debate is happening. So I end with the words of Eric Gallagher, one of The Israel Project officials featured in the film, who himself used to work for AIPAC. He says, “The foundation that AIPAC sat on is rotting. There used to be actual widespread public support for Israel in the United States. So I don’t think that AIPAC is going to remain as influential as it is.”
That’s a very optimistic note for us to end on, coming straight from a former AIPAC official. Thank you.
Questions & Answers
Janet McMahon: Thank you very much, Ali. We have some questions here that I’ll read to you. The first one is—and I have a corollary too, so I’m going to indulge myself with that—will “The Lobby” U.S. be available on DVD? Which I know you may not be able to control. But I’m also thinking, will it be shown on campuses, where so many students are being attacked by the Canary Mission and are so scared about their future because of that? I mean, doesn’t that seem like a great combination?
Ali Abunimah: That is a great question. Well, the first thing to say is, we obtained a leaked copy of this film. Several people asked me, “Then explain how you got it.” I hate to disappoint you but, no, I’m not going to explain how we got it. The important thing is we did get it, and we released it. But we don’t claim—we don’t have any copyright over it. In fact, in releasing this film, arguably we took a risk, because we didn’t know what the reaction of Al Jazeera would be, because this is their film. Of course, I believe that there was a strong public interest in releasing this film, and a strong journalistic defense in doing so, but I can’t tell you to show it or not show it. We’ve made it available, and people are free to do as they wish with it, if they want to burn it on DVDs or show it on college campuses. I think it needs to be seen, but that’s not something that we have the permission to say you can do it or don’t do it. But I do believe that there is a public interest in seeing this film and in sharing this film.
The only reaction we’ve seen from Al Jazeera is that they issued a statement saying that, oh, we’re very disappointed that it’s come out. But we’ve seen no other action from them so far.
Janet McMahon: Another question is, can you expand on the relationship of collusion between the mainstream press and the lobby? I don’t know if it was in the Al Jazeera video, but it’s my impression that The Israel Project works with foreign bureaus of newspapers in Israel.
Ali Abunimah: Yes, that is something that the film shows—how The Israel Project shapes coverage. Again, the main media organizations, whether it’s the AP or CNN or others, they have their bureaus in Tel Aviv. They don’t have bureaus in Gaza, or even the West Bank, for the most part. So, they rely very much on Israeli organizations, or even the Israeli government, to provide them access. In the film, The Israel Project claims that it got the AP to actually change headlines to be more in accord with its message. And it also profiles a CNN report on supposed terror tunnels from Gaza that The Israel Project claimed complete credit for shaping. You actually see the CNN report and how it’s just putting out completely bogus Israel lobby talking points and Israeli propaganda.
The so-called terror tunnels from Gaza, they presented this as if Palestinians are digging tunnels from Gaza to come up in Israeli kindergartens and Israeli bedrooms. This is a total lie. There is no case ever where Palestinians have used a tunnel to do anything from Gaza other than to attack legitimate military targets. That was stated explicitly in the U.N.’s Independent Commission of Inquiry Report on the 2014 Gaza War, but you wouldn’t know that from watching CNN. So that’s an example of the collusion that’s featured in the film.
Janet McMahon: Another question is, how do you explain how we have missed the potential political gain brought by these documentaries, how the tide has been overturned? Where and when did we fail, both in the UK and in the U.S.?
Ali Abunimah: I don’t know what more we could do. We’re in an atmosphere where establishment media, establishment politicians don’t want to talk about this, and we know why. Look at what happened to Ilhan Omar. The weight of the lobby is such that people are afraid to do it. More and more people are talking and that’s a good thing. I think things are changing, as I mentioned. I mentioned this before but, to me, it’s really striking. Leave aside the explosive content of this film, just the mere fact that this film was suppressed under pressure from the same lobby on the government of Qatar. That by itself is a major story.
Imagine if this film had been about supposed Russian interference and the Russian government had put pressure on a major international network to suppress the documentary. Rachel Maddow would be shouting from the rooftops. CNN’s Jake Tapper would be shouting from the rooftops. It would be front page news on The New York Times and The Washington Post. Instead, total silence.
Another part of the story that’s incredible that’s not in the film, but is very much in the reporting the Electronic Intifada did around it, is that Israel lobby effort and Qatar’s effort to court the Israel lobby, which included hiring lobbyists here in Washington at $50,000 a month and that lobbyist then bringing a parade of some of the most extreme right pro-Israel figures from the U.S. to Qatar, some of them meeting with the emir. For example, Alan Dershowitz and Morton Klein, the head of the Zionist Organization of America. And Qatar even gave donations of hundreds of thousands of dollars to Zionist organizations, including the Zionist Organization of America. I mean, it’s incredible. No one is talking about that, but nobody can deny it, because it’s all in the official disclosure documents that the lobbying firm had to do, where the money came from and who it went to. It came from Qatar and it went to the Zionist Organization of America. Those relationships have to be investigated.
The only thing I’ll say is we, the Electronic Intifada—a little publication, we have a staff of eight—we were able to do this because we’re independent, because we’re funded by our readers. That’s not a pitch, but feel free to donate: <elec
tronicIntifada.net>, there’s a button there, “Donate Now.” But that’s critical. That’s critical. The fact that we’re independent, we do not fear the pressure of the lobby. No one is going to fire us for doing this job, because this is our job and it’s what people support us to do. [Applause]
Janet McMahon: Another question, Ali: Is any pro-Israel group registered as a foreign agent, to your knowledge?
Ali Abunimah: I’m not the expert on that. I think Grant Smith is the expert on that. I don’t know if he can ...
Janet McMahon: I think there had been attempts to register AIPAC in its early days.
Ali Abunimah: AIPAC is definitely not registered. I don’t think any of the groups. I know, we checked. The Foundation for Defense and Democracies is not registered. The Israel on Campus Coalition is not registered. We checked when we were doing the reporting, and we could not find any evidence that those groups were registered. I think there is at least one we found that had registered, but its name escapes me now. It’s a relatively small player. But that’s a question perhaps Grant can answer when he’s back up here.
Janet McMahon: So a final question about the film. Now that the documentary is out, was there anything in it concerning or invoking foreign agency in dual loyalty? If not, is that deliberate, do you think?
Ali Abunimah: The film does not use the term dual loyalty. That’s sort of a trigger term that I don’t like to use, because I have heard people use it in a way that to me suggests kind of a racist or anti-Semitic tone. So I don’t like to use that term dual loyalty in that sense. The film has nothing anti-Semitic in it. It is strict reporting. It doesn’t accuse people of dual loyalty. It simply reports what they’re doing and nobody has disputed the reporting.
Of course, Morton Klein and the Zionist Organization of America claimed that the film was anti-Semitic. We can be descriptive and accurate that these groups profiled in the film are working with the Israeli government to implement the Israeli government’s agenda of shutting down support for Palestinian rights by spying on, smearing, and sabotaging American citizens. To me, there’s no dual loyalty there. It seems to me that the primary or only loyalty is to the agenda of Israel.
It’s also important to state and note and to be very clear about this, that there is no—“The [Israel] Lobby,” this film, focuses on several organizations because those were the ones that journalists were able to get into. But the Israel lobby is much bigger than the organizations that are profiled in that film. And, of course, the largest base of the Israel lobby in the United States, and increasingly so, is not Jewish Americans. It is the Christian Zionist component. That is the mass base of the Israel lobby today in the United States. Of course, we know that there is a very disturbing relationship there, in the sense that a large part of that pro-Israel Christian Evangelical base, that support for Israel is based on anti-Semitic theology.
Janet McMahon: I think we’re out of time.
Ali Abunimah: We still have three minutes! I mean, only if you want to take another question. No, no, only if there’s another question. If there is one, we’ll take it.
Janet McMahon: I have a question here about anti-Semitism: Given the trajectory of the lobby’s development over the years and the misuse and abuse of anti-Semitism, what do you see as the greatest fear of real anti-Semitism in America going forward?
Ali Abunimah: That’s a great question. There is real anti-Semitism in America and there is real anti-Semitism in Europe, and this anti-Semitism is coming from the right. It’s coming from white nationalists. It’s coming from neo-Nazis. It’s coming from the type of ideology that drove the shooter in the Quebec City mosque and in the Christchurch mosque. It’s coming from the same ideology that is driving xenophobia and Islamophobia in Europe. Notably, most of the governments that condemned the Christchurch shooting didn’t mention Islamophobia, because they would be naming themselves. Because so much of the Islamophobia that was in the New Zealand shooter’s manifesto could have been talking points from practically any major political party in the West today, I’m sorry to say it. I think that Professor Hixson also underlined that in his comments. The total normalization of references to Islamic extremism and tarring two billion people in the world as linked to terrorism.
But whereas this real rise and real disturbing trend of lethal anti-Semitism is clearly visible, its ally is Israel. Let’s be clear about that. Who is allied with the anti-Semitic governments of Hungary, of Poland, of anti-Semitic racist Islamophobic movements like the Freedom Party in Austria that is half of the coalition government there? The Alternative for Deutschland Party? You’ll find that all of these far-right parties have close ties to Israel, and particularly to Binyamin Netanyahu. You’ll remember Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary, praised Miklos Horthy—the wartime collaborationist leader who sent half a million Hungarian Jews to their deaths in Hitler’s camps. After the Israeli Foreign Ministry condemned the Hungarian prime minister for praising Horthy, Netanyahu personally overruled the Foreign Ministry and ordered them to withdraw that statement because Viktor Orban and the anti-Semitic government of Hungary are his friends.
That’s the service Israel provides in the world today. It’s a whitewashing and laundry service for anti-Semites and racists of all kinds if you’re the Freedom Party in Austria and founded by former Nazis. If you come to Israel and go light a candle at Yad Vashem and say, oh, how much you love Israel, then the Israeli prime minister is prepared to give you a certificate of good conduct. So Israel is a force today of anti-Semitism, white supremacy and extremism that is destabilizing the world. Thank you.
Janet McMahon: Thank you so much, Ali Abunimah. So now we’re going to have our morning break in the Ideas Fair, and Ali will be signing his books in there. We thank him very much for being here again this year.
