The Petro-Diplomatic Complex -- Pro-Arab Since Israel's Founding

Contrary to the false insinuations of Walt-Mearsheimer, the Petro-Diplomatic Complex that has dominated American Middle Eastern policy since before World War 2 has always --or nearly always-- been anti-Israel since before its founding. I L Kenen, founder of the America-Israel Public Affairs Committee [AIPAC], wrote this long ago. I doubt that AIPAC today would dare to say what Kenen said years ago.

From the very beginning, Israel has been opposed by the petro-diplomatic complex -- an array of oil lobbyists, Arabists, Central Intelligence Agency agents, missionaries, and diplomats.
[I L Kenen in Jewish Digest, December 1975, condensed from The Jewish Chronicle of London]

Kenen is also providing a convenient definition of the Petro-Diplomatic Complex, which we have discussed before on Emet m'Tsiyon. It seems that Zbig Brzezinski and several State Department veterans on Barack Obama's team [i.e., Daniel Kurtzer, Robert Malley (Malley's father was a Communist ideologue, just by the way), etc.] belong to this array of Israel's enemies in Washington. Kenen went on to point out that an ostensibly private, anti-Israel lobbying organization, the American Friends of the Middle East, was actually founded and funded by the CIA.

It was no coincidence that the "American Friends of the Middle East" came into existence in 1951, when the American Zionist Council was reactivated. The great difference, however, was that the AZC's lobbying budget totalled about $50,000 [per year] while the CIA was secretly putting an estimated $430,000 a year into AFME's treasury via a paper conduit. [Ibid.]

Just incidentally, the National Security Act of 1947 that set up the CIA explicitly forbids the CIA to make political propaganda within the United States itself. So much for the CIA's observance of American law.

The American Zionist Council was a forerunner of AIPAC. In the past few years, some of its officials have been prosecuted for allegedly doing something very commonly done in Washington: they received information from a government employee named Larry Franklin who worked for the Defense Department. Various circumstances and testimony at the trial indicate that Franklin was deliberately sent to set up these two officials for prosecution, since he seems to have volunteered information that they had not asked for.

Be that as it may, Israel has some enemies in official and semi-official Washington circles. The Washington embassies of Arab states also enjoy a privileged relationship with the Petro-Diplomatic Complex, and indeed Saudi Arabia has often been especially favored in Washington. Michael Moore, known as a "leftist," showed this in his movie Fahrenheit 9-11, but he seems not to have absorbed the meaning of the facts that he showed in his own movie. The "Left" that styles itself "anti-capitalist" and "anti-imperialist" seems to have trouble dealing with the special status of Arab states and their money in the capital of the United States.
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Coming: jimmy carter strikes again, Jews in Jerusalem, Hebron, and the Land of Israel, propaganda, peace follies, etc.