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Book Review: How the Arab Lobby Rules America

(Daily Beast) Alan M. Dershowitz - Yes Virginia, there is a big bad lobby that distorts U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East way out of proportion to its actual support by the American public. But the offending lobby is not AIPAC, which supports Israel, but rather the Arab lobby, which opposes the Jewish state. The Arab lobby is one of the strongest in America - even stronger than Israel's, says Mitchell Bard in How the Arab Lobby Rules America. Bard puts it this way: "While the Israeli lobby has hundreds of thousands of grass root members and public opinion polls consistently reveal a huge gap between support for Israel and the Arab nations/Palestinians, the Arab lobby has almost no foot soldiers or public sympathy. It's most powerful elements tend to be bureaucrats who represent only their personal views or what they believe are their institutional interests, and foreign governments that care only about their national interests, not those of the United States....[They have] almost unlimited resources to try to buy what they usually cannot win on the merits of their arguments." Saudi Arabia has virtually no support among Americans. Yet, as Bard demonstrates, the Saudi lobby has beaten the pro-Israel lobby over and over again in head to head conflicts, such as the sale of sophisticated weapons to a regime that doesn't even have the technical skills to use them, and the conflict over whether to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem.
2010-08-26 08:03:11
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