Moreover, how can the Walt/Mearsheimer crowd possibly explain our government’s decades-long policy of appeasing Saudi Arabia, whose citizens, officials and institutions financed and orchestrated the 9/11 atrocities? This in the face of irrefutable proof that the Saudis: finance at least 50 percent of the current operating budget of Hamas; have provided major financial support, for decades, to Palestinian terrorists; encouraged and incited violence through Saudi Arabian government-funded textbooks used both in Saudi Arabia and in North American Islamic schools and mosques (including some in the suburbs of Washington, D.C.); used “charities” to fund Al Qaeda; radicalized an estimated 80% of U.S. mosques through the advocacy of the Wahhabi form of Islam; and allowed Hamas freely to operate a command center on Saudi soil.
Despite all this, the administration has adamantly opposed all legislative efforts to hold Saudi Arabia’s feet to the fire. Chalk up yet another victory for the pro-Israel conspiracy!
And don’t think for a moment that the U.S. won’t play rough with Israel. During the first Gulf War, concerned that any Israeli retaliation for the Scud terror missile attacks would jeopardize the U.S-Arab coalition, the State Department “urged” Israel to sit it out, even though Israeli cities had been repeatedly attacked.
To bring the point home, the Americans made it clear that unless Israel played ball, they would stop sharing the crucial “friend or foe” code information (an action that would have resulted in the downing of Israeli planes going near the war zone no matter how many missiles Saddam fired at the Jewish state). That’s what I call the hardest of hardball.
There is no question that AIPAC and the pro-Israel community are highly visible and can muster impressive displays of support, most notably on Capitol Hill. And it’s no secret that pro-Israel activists are sophisticated political players who have been instrumental in election defeats of politicians who had been hostile to Israel.
But that is a far, far cry from proving that we have a “stranglehold” on American foreign policy. If we did, the above-cited examples (and there are more of them) would have ended much differently.