US Senator: [the Israel lobby] think they control the Senate

[Mandy]

New 1967 de-classified article : US Senator "they [the Israel lobby] think they have control of the Senate"

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=847481&contrassID=1&subContrassID=1

Closed 1967 US Senate protocols show bids to pressure Israel

Hundreds of pages released this week by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee contain protocols of
closed hearings of this committee from the seminal year of 1967, including one in which former
Senator William J. Fulbright is quoted as saying, "The trouble is they [the Israel lobby] think they
have control of the Senate and they can do as they please."

[faceless]

Not that I'm saying this isn't true, but there's always going to be people who think there's more influence in one group than actually exists - what is/was this Fulbright's political position in general?

[Mandy]

He was long before my time .. but here's his Wikipedia entry : (note he was against McCarthy, and anti-invasion of Cuba .. so can't be that bad)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._William_Fulbright


James William Fulbright (April 9, 1905–February 9, 1995) was a well-known member of the United States Senate representing Arkansas. Fulbright was a Southern Democrat and a staunch multilateralist, supported racial segregation, supported the creation of the United Nations and opposed the House Un-American Activities Committee. He is also remembered for his efforts to establish an international exchange program, which thereafter bore his name, the Fulbright Fellowships. Further, Fulbright was an outspoken critic of the organized pro-Israel community in the US, and was in turn labelled "consistently unkind to Israel and our supporters in this country" in 1974 by the Anti-Defamation League, the leading Jewish defense organization.

..

His Senate career was marked by some notable cases of dissent. In 1954 he was the only senator to vote against an appropriation for the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which was chaired by Senator Joseph McCarthy. McCarthy in turn, repeatedly called him Senator "Halfbright". In 1961, he also raised serious objections to President John F. Kennedy about the impending Bay of Pigs invasion. Future president Bill Clinton served as an intern for Fulbright.

[faceless]

[Mandy]

[faceless]

But how can we believe that if the other part is false? I've not seen a glaring error/lie like that on wiki before, but it's obviously an important point that needs to be challenged either way.

[Mandy]

Actually, it might be true. There may be a (another?) dark side to Clinton / Democrats :

http://www.mediaresearch.org/cyberalerts/2002/cyb20021211.asp
"Media Hypocrisy: Skip Clinton Praising a Segregationist"

"As noted above in item #2 today, the media are hypocritical in focusing on Trent Lott’s racially-polarizing comments while for years they rarely cared about current Democratic ties to the party’s recent segregationist one-party rule in the South. Yet that does not excuse Lott or make his comments not newsworthy.

But in a piece for National Review Online on Tuesday, Mark Levin provided an excellent case in point of the media’s hypocrisy in how they have ignored Bill Clinton’s praising of a racist, segregationist former Senator. In a moment eerily similar to Lott with Thurmond, at a 1993 birthday party for Fulbright, Clinton gushed: “The American political system produced this remarkable man, and my state did, and I'm real proud of it."

[faceless]

it seems a strange combination for sure and I'm surprised that Clinton spoke so highly of him considering this.

[DavidGig]

Fulbright (who was the senator who initiated the hearings which led to the end of the Vietnam War) was one of the first of the politicians who paid for their opposition to Israel with their careers. The list is now so long and well known that no one dares stick their heads up anymore.

"Every congressman knows the names of those critics of Israel who have been undone by the lobby. Take Senator J William Fulbright, whose 1963 testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee detailed how five million tax-deductable dollars from philanthropic Americans had been sent to Israel and then recycled back to the US for distribution to Organizations seeking to influence public opinion in favor of Israel; this cost him the chance of being Secretary of State. He was defeated in the 1974 Democratic primary after pro-Israeli money poured into the campaign funds of his rival, Governor Dale Bumpers, following a statement by the AIPAC that Fulbright was 'consistently unkind to Israel and our supporters in this country'."
A STRANGE KIND OF FREEDOM
Robert Fisk, lndependent July 9, 2002
http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0710-07.htm]

BTW, did you notice that Shmuel Rosner (intentionally?) misses the killer quote from the hearings: "They know they have control of the Senate politically, and therefore whatever the Secretary [of State] tells them, they can laugh at him."

[DavidGig]

Anybody interested in the subject of the pro-Israel lobby in the U.S. might like this documentary, which was shown on Dutch TV last week. (I believe VPRO is the Dutch national broadcasting system.)

Portrait of a Great Taboo: The Power of the Israel Lobby in the United States
VPRO
http://www.vpro.nl/programma/plaatsdesoordeels/afleveringen/33882177/

It's in English and it's pretty good. It shows how fast things are changing -- as recently as a year or two ago it was not possible to publicly discuss this topic. But even today I don't think a documentary like this could be shown on U.S. TV.

Tell me if you have trouble getting it to stream. Keep clicking around some of the different settings (in Dutch) and you can usually get it going.

[Mandy]

I believe above video can also be seen on Google [linked from http://xrl.us/vqu3 ]





Link to article mentioning Google pulled the video when previously uploaded

[harry perkins]

Do you really believe that crap, that the Jews "invented....human rights....so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong". Do you not yourself support human rights. I do, and thats why I support the Palestinians. If you do not believe in human rights, why would you support the Palestinians, just because their enemies are Jewish? Either that speech was ridiculously inconsistent or rabidly antisemitic; on second thought, it was probably both.

[Mandy]

I personally don't believe it. Most holy books espouse human rights. I think you are referring to the first few minutes of the Google video which is a speech by a former Malaysian prime minister. The posting was about the Dutch documentary which starts after the speech.

The Google video above had this introduction added to the start by god-knows-who. Skip it, and jump forward to the Dutch documentary.