Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 11/11/22 Grant F. Smith on Netanyahu, AIPAC and the ADL’s Influence on the FBI

Episode Date: November 14, 2022

Scott talks with Grant F. Smith about the work he’s doing to track the ways Israel’s government tries to affect American politics. First, they talk about the return of Benjamin Netanyahu and how this could signal a disturbing shift in Israeli politics. They then move on to the fruitful effort by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, AIPAC, to help pro-Israel candidates win elections last week. Lastly, they talk about some of the research Smith’s organization has done into the Anti-Defamation League’s influence over the FBI. Discussed on the show: site:irmep.org .pdf  How Israel Made AIPAC Podcast Grant F. Smith is the author of a number of books including Big Israel: How Israel’s Lobby Moves America, Divert!, and most recently The Israel Lobby Enters State Government: Rise of the Virginia Israel Advisory Board. He is director of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy in Washington, D.C. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; and Thc Hemp Spot. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, y'all, you should sign up for my substack. It's Scott Horton's show.substack.com. And if you do that, you'll get the interviews a day before everybody else. But not only that, they'll be free of commercials. How do you like that? Pretty good, huh? Scotthortonshow.substack.com. All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.

I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the brand new, enough already. Time to end the war on terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy, and all available for you at Scott Horton.4. You can sign up the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at YouTube.com. Slash Scott Horton's show. All right, welcome the hot seat, Grant F. Smith. No, I'm just kidding. Hey, everybody on the line. I got the great Grant Smith. He's my good buddy, and he wrote 100 books about the Israel lobby in there,

above board and below board activities in the United States of America, including stealing weapons, great uranium, and nuclear triggers and all of that. And what he is is he's the director of the Institute for Research, Middle Eastern policy, that's earmep, IRMEP, earmep.org. And what you do is just go to Google, or your favorite search engine,

and type in site, colon, irmep.org, space, dot pdf.f, and see what you get. Because what he does is he sues under the Freedom of Information Act and uses other avenues to get his hands on primary source documents to tell the true history. of the Israel lobby. And what in the hell they get away within this country, which is just about beyond belief. So welcome back to the show, my friend Grant. How are you? Hey, Scott. Great to be back. Thanks for the great intro. And it is true. We're spending a lot of time in our budget getting documents through FOIA. And it's been tough a couple years because things kind of got slow there during COVID, but we're back on track. All right. Well, good. Again, that's IRME.

p.org and also check out all of grants books at Amazon. There's a bunch of them and they're great. So listen, I've got to ask you first of all about the return of Benjamin and Yahoo to the prime ministerness over there

in Israel and especially his alliance with some of these further right parties in Israel. Can you please give us the lowdown on what has happened here and what you think it means for the near term? Well, I mean, Netanyahu has basically made common cause with one of the most

extreme politicians, Ben Gavir, who has been, you know, kind of cock party light. I'm sorry, what's his name again? Ben Gavir. Gavir. Okay, just he said it fast. I want to make sure we're clear, because this is a new character for a lot of us here yeah and he's from the what party and is what's so what about him i don't i don't know that i can name the party uh but the thing that was important to me and struck me was that he was a big supporter of the terrorists who killed a bunch of praying palestinians with a machine gun back in the 90s and was you know basically had the guy's portrait on his wall

until he was finally convinced to take it down but this this is a hardcore pro, finish the ethnic cleansing job, push all the Palestinians out of the West Bank, if you can get away with it type radical, who is going to be taking some sort of extremely important position within the Netanyahu administration. I think, you know, he's so unpalatable that even the Biden administration is trying to distance itself from him. And, you know, they've had the ambassador, Tom Nides, U.S. ambassador to Israel, basically say that they're not going to accept any sort of annexation.

They're kind of putting out some unusually strong statements for the usually completely in Israel's pockets, Joe Biden, and kind of putting up. some red flags that they don't want to see crossed. But as I was talking to Eric Garris a few days ago, we don't really follow Israeli elections as much as we follow Israel's interventions in our elections through the foreign influence operation that they set up in this country now known as APEC. So, you know, there's some great Israeli journalists who are are basically asking their Western contacts for information and sponsorship of immigrating at this

point over this. Oh, man. Well, yeah, I mean, it's really important that, you know, the party of old Rabbi Kahane, who was assassinated by Egyptian Islam jihad in New York in 1990, his party was banned. and by the Israeli Supreme Court for being, quote, fascist. And they said, like, yeah, if you guys are so far to the right that you're demanding the expulsion of the millions of Palestinians remaining on the West Bank

under Israeli control there, that's just too far. It's illegal for you to be a political party in Israel. So this guy just changed their name and has the same policy, essentially, but comes from that same spectrum. And that's really something because Israel's a pretty right-wing, society overall anyway. So, you know, politically. So when it comes to a guy like this being too distasteful, wow, he really did something wrong, you know? Exactly. And, you know, it's,

but, you know, the U.S. has kind of helped precipitate this situation by, I would say, erroneously removing the cock party from the FBI list of terrorists. organizations because they clearly were a terrorist organization. So the U.S., you know, needs to stop doing things like that if it wants to be seen as any sort of honest broker, which it's never been, but yeah, it's, you know, the U.S., I'm sure they'll find a way some modus Vivendi and this Thomas Naisal, although he's saying no annexation, was all so quick to phone Netanyahu and congratulate him and all of that. So they're, you know, both sides are going to be working overtime to paper over, what's going on.

And so I don't expect too much more other than this recent sort of, you know, red flag that's been thrown down. Yeah. Well, and, you know, that's the thing. It shouldn't obscure the real controversy, which is, oh, God, Benjamin Netanyahu is back. Right. When he was not there, now here he is again. But, you know, I did read that this guy, I guess it's not settled yet. But if he takes his presumed position, he'll have control over the Temple Mount.

Right. So it's like, oh, good, they're going to start sacrificing animals and bring on the second coming into all this now. Okay. Like Netanyahu, he sees great political sort of benefit to stirring up the Temple Mount and talking. about you know all of this replacing the dome of the rock with the temple and all of that so it's you know he's clearly a bomb thrower and clearly you know really respects some real bomb float throwers so you know that doesn't make it too different than some of Israel's former prime ministers who were basically in

terrorist organizations back in the day so you know they've kind of got a history of this and i'm sure though it'll be papered over so yeah we'll just have to see all right well anyway i know your speciality is the israel lobby in the united states but of course it's a huge part of how israel could be run by such a bunch of right wing cooks because if they just had to deal with the european union or whatever they would have insisted long ago that you guys move left or lose support and but with the americans they just got our congress completely locked stock and barrel, and I don't know how much of it is blackmail. I mean, we know from Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald and The Guardian that the NSA turns over their entire hall

to Israel every day. Yeah, that's amazing. And, you know, they're really... They don't even need Jeffrey Epstein to get everybody laid by a 17-year-old or whatever and trick them and blackmail them. They just are in everybody's cell phone in their pocket. Lots of redundancy there. And, yeah, I've already seen some stuff coming out, some sort of apologetics over the religious Zionist party being emitted by some major federation umbrella groups. So the nodes of the Israel Affinity ecosystem, as I sometimes call it, are going to be working overtime to sort of whitewash this guy and give him the history that he's going to need to survive.

but you know who knows how long to last how many elections as israel had over the past couple of years it's it's not exactly demonstrating much stability and continuity so you know maybe maybe he won't contribute to its longevity in its present form yeah well i mean the worst thing about nittanyahu is how much influence he has in dc i mean this guy bennett was never a nice guy but when he was the prime minister it was like who's bennett again which is and and he had dropped some of the worst stuff that he had at least been saying. I don't know exactly about his record, but I know that it's not the kind of thing where he comes to town and all the Republicans and Democrats line up to kiss his shoes in the way that they do for Netanyahu.

Now, I'm not sure that would happen, though. If you think about sort of the roll call that's been taking place at APEC for years and years where both parties go to the Washington Convention Center and stand to attention to, you know, any sort of, of video feed or live presentation

of Netanyahu. I don't think they could do that right now. The protests have been growing every year and you know as we talked about early in the year APAC the lead lobbying node has pivoted to strictly moving money around

and they're not even trying to do their signature public policy event and lobbying day here in Washington. We've been looking for that and it doesn't look like it's going to happen next year either. Yeah. Has some progressives on Twitter crowing that APEC had dumped millions of dollars into trying to support a Republican and defeat this Democrat woman in I think Pennsylvania and that they lost anyway. And then progressives were crowing.

Yeah, summer. Exactly. They tried pretty hard to bumper off. And I, for one, thought they were going to succeed because they've had so many successes this year. but it looks like the power of the dollar couldn't win, and Summerlee's the projected winner, if not the winner, by this time of House District 12. Interesting.

And so, well, hopefully they caused a grudge and a vendetta there. You know, I don't know. There's that one lady from the Midwest who just got reelected to. Is it Murray, who's pretty good on Israel, who, for whatever reason, they can't unelect her? Yeah, I mean, I mean, there are certain people that they don't seem to be able to, like Rashida Claib, you know, easily won. And it's because she really, you know, I think embodies what her community

is all about. So for certain districts, it doesn't matter how much APEC sort of dark money gets pumped into the election. They're going to just waste it. Patty Murray of Washington. So, yeah, there have been some pretty good wins. You know, other times, though, they clearly could have spent more and just didn't. As we talked about, you know, each one of these seats is worth around 13 to 15 million if you take the whole aid package and divide it by members of Congress. So, you know, if you look at it that way, hey, Israel can get weapons that can't get anywhere else if these congresspeople are all on board it's worth a lot to apak to make sure the right people

win and you know they they really don't take any principled stands if people are going to support the big aid package and unconditionally praise is real they're going to get apak support so it's pretty amazing but as as we talked about last time and i hate to to do this on your show there's a whole 13-part series that we put out, which is like an audio book, except it's free, called How Israel Made APEC, which really looks at all the money Israel and its proto-government, the Jewish agency, pumped into the U.S. to set up APAC. And, you know, nobody in the mainstream media is ever going to say that APAC is really a foreign influence operation.

But we certainly will and have the research to back it up, because everything, everything in that podcast is fully cited in a 350-page updated book called How Israel Made APEC. So there's just no questioning. You know, the money may be mostly American now, but APEC was not set up with U.S. funds. And the people who set it up definitely were very honest in their own never read biographies about how it all came to be. So this, to me, is the biggest foreign influence on American elections. There's just, you can talk about Russia or China all you want, but Israel has the influence, and it's definitely wielding it in this election cycle.

Sorry, hang on just one second. Hey, guys, anybody who signs up to listen to this show by way of Patreon will be invited to join the Reddit group. And I'm going to start posting stuff over there more. That's patreon.com slash Scott Horton's show. Thanks. Hey, y'all, Libertasbella.com is where you get Scott Horton's show and Libertarian Institute shirts, sweatshirts, mugs, and stickers and things, including the great top lobstas designs as well. See, that way it says on your shirt, why you're so smart. Libertas Bella, from the same great folks who bring you ammo.com for all your ammunition needs, too.

That's Libertasbella.com. You guys check it out. This is so cool. The great Mike Swanson's new book is finally out. He's been working on this thing for years. And I admit, I haven't read it yet. I'm going to get to it as soon as I can, but I know you guys are going to want to beat me to it. It's called Why the Vietnam War? Nuclear bombs and nation building in Southeast Asia, 1945 through 61. And as he explains on the back here, all of our popular culture and our retellings and our history and our movies are all about the height of the American war there in say

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look at that how Israel made APEC and you can find it on YouTube and of course at earmip.org. Now check this out. On October 24th 22, Irmip, received a trove of FBI files requested in 2019 under the Freedom of Information Act. Well, tell us all about that, Grant.

Yeah, so this is what I'm saying. It was a slow period during COVID, and we got hardly anything, and then suddenly we get this. And just to back up a little bit, you know, we've been trying to get information about the ADL ever since we found out a decade or more ago that it had this major influence on the FBI. And so, you know, the J. Edgar Hoover was resisting a lot of pressure from the ADL to share FBI files, to collaborate on joint investigations, and all these undue, utterly unacceptable things the ADL was trying to do in the 1940s. he finally collapsed and decided that he was going to have each of his field offices liaised with their anti-defamation league counterpart, in quotes, regional offices.

And so, you know, why is this important today? Well, Christopher Ray of the FBI was just presenting at the ADL's National Conference this week. And on November 10, he basically stood there and talked about how wonderful the training curriculum the ADL gives all budding agents, which has been going on for two decades. How wonderful that is and how motivated his officers were when they visited the Holocaust Museum to see a police officer standing next to a Nazi SS officer, quote, failing to protect people from harm, unquote. So the ADL has been brainwashing the FBI for two decades to really sort of adopt the world view of not only the ADL, but the Israel lobby, that basically it's a great thing for the ADL to have this law enforcement exchange where sheriffs and police and all sorts of federal officers are going for training homeland security by the Israelis who basically

function as a settler colonial police force. And so if Christopher Ray had any semblance of being balanced, he would have pulled out a picture of an Israeli police officer with his knee on the neck of a Palestinian and ask himself whether that's a great example for the training of U.S. police. But, you know, so watching Ray do his performance at the ADL conference on November 10 was kind of a reminder of how damaging this relationship is, but also how little people know about it. So this trove of documents we received was basically just an open FOIA request with the ever-present

threat of a lawsuit annexed to the bottom of it. it's saying, we want to know about all the communications between the FBI and the ADL. And essentially what we found is that, if anything, the number, the sheer number of meetings taking place between FBI enforcement people and the ADL has just skyrocketed. They're constantly meeting with each other under this program that the ADL has, has set up, which is the law enforcement liaison channel, and continually swapping information, doing training events. And basically the Law Enforcement Advisory Committee, it's called Leak, is taking up a substantial

amount of their time. One of the interesting things that we uncovered was that the ADL has created. a new category, we hadn't seen this before in any of our previous FOIAs, which is designed to trigger the FBI's legal obligation to investigate potential violations of the so-called Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which makes it unlawful for people to conspire to intimidate or hurt or threaten everybody and their privileges under the Constitution. So they've designed these reports that they pump into the FBI of threats to mainly Jewish organizations and synagogues and things like that. But this time around,

they pumped in a report which was targeting this white nationalist organization called Vanguard, and they detailed how this was sending people and unfurling banners, Vanguard America, to their website with threatening messages. And then they tacked in Friends of Sebel and the American Muslim Alliance, which are too underfunded, I would say, very humble pro-Palestinian organizations at the bottom of the report. So there's a really clear effort to conflate vanguard America with friends of Sebel, North America and the American Muslim Alliance. And even the FBI, as gullible as it is, disregarded this by saying basically that the ADL

has a political difference with these two organizations, as they put it, the ADL has an ideological disagreement with friends and civil and there is no threat reporting. So, you know, it's a, I see it as kind of something new the ADL's trying. You file this very scary looking threat report and then like a mixing bowl, you throw in some other organizations. And who knows, pretty soon, maybe the U.S. will have a law allowing the lobby in Israel Affinity Groups to recommend shuddering the U.S. headquarters of defensive children international and some of the other groups that have been shuttered in Israel as the police and other state actors basically put steel barriers on the doors of all of these organizations and shut them down.

With offensive children international, they're notorious terrorists. Hey, I mean, I think, isn't there an important lesson for the right here that you see what they do, they take actual Hitler-loven, violent Nazis who will stab some innocent black guy or massacre Jews at their synagogue or something. And then they're trying to equate that with run-of-the-mill, essentially Arab charities and Muslim groups, the same way that they can flate those extremely dangerous, dangerous, terrorist Nazi types with regular right-wingers who show up at city council meetings or show up at school board meetings and say hey i don't like the way these things are going now they go oh you sound like a domestic terrorist to me when here they are

participating in democratic politics nope not good enough um that's the same thing they do to muslims too it's the same thing they've been doing with the right wing's assent for the last 20 years now it's blowing back a little bit and you know how about we just insist on fairness for everybody this kind of thing is crazy, man. Yeah, it is crazy, and it's unbalanced, it's unhinged. And yeah, I agree completely. It's, uh, the FBI is not, I mean, they are adopting the worldview of the ADL. And the ADL is basically a transmission belt for a lot of other organizations, including

APEC, in terms of some really weird, you know, propositions. You know, just by, just by dints of longevity, you know, you have. have the FBI focusing more on things that the ADL is telling them is the sacred truth, like the bombing of the Amia Center in Argentina. It's just an article of faith now that elements within the Argentine government during the dirty war couldn't have possibly had anything to do with that, that it was definitely Hezbollah, you know, and it's, you know, these are, these are the entities that are training the FBI, and they pretty much have to swallow these things as fact, even though there's a lot of

evidence to the contrary. I think one of the best new pieces, I know Gareth Porter's been doing reporting on that for quite a while and sort of taken some of the threads apart. But it really, You know, it really alters, I think, the FBI's willingness to inflict violence on Americans when they have all of these sort of myths in their mindset and are spending so much time training with the ADL, they will, they have not released any of the training materials that the ADL has been pumping into their special agent trainees. We've asked for it year after year. They haven't released not even a single curriculum, but we do have an idea now because of this latest piece what some of the law enforcement advisory council people are doing, and we kind of put out

a little piece on that as well. So the law enforcement advisory committee actually sent special agents to go to an exhibit called Operation Finale, the capture and trial of Adolf Eichmann in Illinois. And so these agents had to traips through this exhibit honoring Raphael Aitan, the Israeli operative and long-term Mossad officer and his brilliant kidnapping of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann in Argentina so he could be taken back to Israel and tried and executed. You know, and it's kind of interesting to imagine these officers who don't know anything traipsing through the exhibit. They don't know Raphael Aiton ran Jonathan Pollard against the United States

and what was the biggest and most damaging intelligence theft in American history. They don't know Raphai Aiton was visiting the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation and Apollo, Pennsylvania, you know, the plant we've talked about before, which lost enough weapons-grade uranium to fuel 12 bombs. By the way, Grant, I was at an event recently, and I met a kid. who said, oh, yeah, I heard you talking all about that new mech stuff recently. I can't remember if it was to interview you. He was referring to her. It might have come up in something else.

But anyway, he goes, yeah, he used to mow the lawn at that site. Isn't that what he said? So, yeah, I think he was like, did the landscaping at that nuclear wasteland. Oh, man, I hope he wore a mask. Well, you know, I told him, man, I hope you got some strong chemotherapy. Yeah, no kidding. But, I mean, so these, so this is what I'm talking about. This is the brainwashing of, you know, the premier law enforcement agency.

They don't know anything about this. They don't know that the operation they're honoring at this ADL event was by somebody who probably did more harm to the U.S. than any other foreign spy. And they're just drinking this stuff up. So it really, it really twists, I think, the whole counterintelligence mission. I mean, I mentioned in the report that there used to be a National Counterintelligence Center report on economic espionage, which always put Israel in the top three offenders of stealing secrets that could be put to economic use. But I would think that any FBI special agent who was constantly going to ADL events lauding Israeli spies would probably be less interested in protecting the U.S.

that, especially when they see the political poll of these organizations, and, you know, probably looking for Hussbalah under every Bush and nook and cranny in the U.S. Yeah. Everybody, please read Grants' books. His biggest best one is Big Israel, but then there's also the Israel lobby interstate government. Divert about them stealing all the uranium and the rest of that. And the latest is this great audiobook, How Israel Made A-PAC. And just check out everything he's got at IRMEP.

I-R-M-E-M-E-M-E-M-P-D-R-G. Thank you, sir. Thanks, Scott. The Scott Horton show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on K-P-F-K-90.7 FM in L.A. A-P-S-Radio.com, anti-war.com,

scot-Horton.org, and Libertarian Institute.