http://israelmatzav.blogspot.com/2013/02/aipacs-incredibly-foolish-designated.html#links Now, what a lone congressman opines is far less serious than the contemptible comments coming out of an incoming secretary of defense. Hagel’s broadsides against Israel are shameful and he must be called on it. American Jewry gave President Obama seventy percent of their vote. Is Hagel the reward?
In 1991 Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir requested $10 billion in loan guarantees to help settle Russian Jewish immigrants. President George H. W. Bush said Israel could only have the guarantees if it froze all settlement building and guaranteed that no Russian Jews would be resettled in the West Bank. Shamir demurred and called on the American Jewish community to mobilize in support of the loan guarantees. AIPAC drafted a letter that was signed by more than 240 members of the House and 77 senators supporting the loan guarantees. On September 12, 1991, Jewish lobbyists from all over the country descended in huge numbers on Washington. President Bush famously responded with a televised press conference in which he complained that “1000 Jewish lobbyists are on Capitol Hill against little old me.”
Then, on the very next day in a speech I will never forget and at which I was present, Tom Dine, AIPAC’s Executive Director, declared that
September 12, 1991 is a day that will live in infamy” as an American President had had the chutzpah to criticize the constitutionally guaranteed right to lobby our government, found in the very first amendment.
It was high theater and I had chills down my spine as Dine directly challenged a sitting American president. We all know the rest of the story. Months later, the loan guarantees were approved. Bush would later receive only 12 percent of the Jewish vote and was trounced by Bill Clinton. President Bush’s son would eight years later become President of the United States and would take a completely different posture toward Israel, becoming its greatest ally ever to occupy the White House.
I also remember how, the following day, Ron Brown, Chairman of the National Democratic Committee, stood up and said that this November we had to send President Bush packing from the White House. The crowd erupted with huge applause. There was no attempt to disguise the hostility to a President whose policies were simply unfair to Israel.
Maybe the difference is that Bush I was a Republican and Obama is a Democrat. Could it be that AIPAC - like nearly every other mainstream Jewish organization in the United States - is in the pocket of the Democratic party?
Read the whole thing.
http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/where-are-israels-intrepid-defenders/
Topic: AIPAC stands up against Republicans but backs down with dems (Read 397 times)