From NefeshBarYochai@3:633/280.2 to All on Sat Apr 20 13:06:41 2024
Israel's nuclear weapons render it ineligible for US aid
by Grant Smith Posted onSeptember 24, 2012
The Israel lobby’s biggest and longest-running Washington boondoggles
are the massive annual weapons and economic packages to Israel.
Tightly coordinated campaign contributors (both individuals and
political action committees) and the Israeli government’s own quiet
demands manifest themselves within AIPAC-drafted foreign aid
legislation. The U.S.-Israel Enhanced Security Cooperation Act of 2012
forces Americans to fork hard-earned tax dollars over to Israel’s
coffers on the pretext that it is in eminent danger. Yet declassified
documents reveal that even the current prime minister once worked
inside the state’s clandestine nuclear arms smuggling rings.
Transferring foreign aid to the Middle East’s sole nuclear weapons
state — which can obviously take care of itself — is not just unseemly
and unnecessary. It is illegal.
AIPAC’s publicly available tax return [.pdf] reveals it has now become
as seamlessly linked to its foreign principal as its parent
organization — the American Zionist Council — was when it was finally
ordered by the Kennedy administration to openly register as an Israeli
foreign agent in 1962. AIPAC spent $1,541,572 maintaining its
Jerusalem office. The office, led by Wendy Senor Singer, is described
as the official location for daily meetings with senior Israeli
government officials. It is also used to coordinate the visits of
supplicant U.S. politicians with funding from a mysterious captive
charity of no employees claiming to be an educational organization
[.pdf]. The Israeli government’s desires are seamlessly transcribed
into legislation at AIPAC’s headquarters in Washington — raising the
perennial question why AIPAC is not registering as Israel’s foreign
agent.
In relation to the sheer volume of American taxpayer dollars it
transfers to Israel, on paper AIPAC is a rather thinly-funded and
top-heavy organization. In its latest schedule of contributors, filed
in late April and just obtained by special request from the IRS, AIPAC
reported that only 1,949 individual contributors provided 61% of its
$64 million in total contributions and grants.* The top-tier donors
each gave on average $20,206, with the top donor chipping in an
impressive $6,610,181. Although contributions to 501(c)(4)
organizations like AIPAC are not tax-deductible, corporations and
partnerships can write off contributions as a business expense. One
AIPAC donor, an attorney in New York City whose confidential data the
IRS didn’t successfully scrub, presumably paid AIPAC with funds from
his law partnership, which AIPAC listed as the contributor’s address.
AIPAC claims in mandatory disclosures filed with the clerk of the
House of Representatives over the same time period that it spent
approximately 4% of its total budget on actual lobbying. AIPAC’s core
lobbying mission hasn’t changed much since AIPAC’s founder left his
Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs post in New York in 1951. Isaiah
Kenen’s mission was to obtain U.S.-taxpayer-funded weapons and aid by
lobbying from a Jewish Agency funded front group of “concerned
Americans” rather than working openly as Israel’s officially
registered foreign agent. In Kenen’s day, Israel first obtained
massive amounts of surplus WWII conventional weapons simply by
stealing or purchasing [.pdf] them to be scrapped and instead
smuggling them from the United States in violation of the Arms Export
Control and Neutrality Acts. The smuggling networks were established
and funded by small numbers of wealthy Zionists who were curiously
immune from criminal prosecution. When less enfranchised citizens
later demanded warranted prosecutions, the Justice Department simply
ignored them, establishing a policy that has held fast to the present
day.
The AIPAC-sponsored U.S.-Israel Enhanced Security Cooperation Act of
2012, signed into law by President Obama on July 27, 2012, makes
unprecedented demands on U.S. taxpayers and diplomats. It mandates
American economic largess to Israel via high technology, agriculture,
medicine, health, pharmaceutical, and energy transfers. It demands
funding for Israel Aerospace Industries (a corporation only recently
linked to Israeli espionage activities against the U.S.)
missile-defense programs and air-refueling tankers and munitions
Israel could use to unilaterally set off a wider war with Iran. Israel
even won a detour of used weapons from U.S. forces departing Iraq. The
aid law extends already generous loan guarantees to Israel.
However, the package also requires the U.S. president to issue to the
Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and House Committee on Foreign
Affairs a report on the status of Israel’s “qualitative military edge”
by Jan. 23, 2013. It is finally time for some hard truths. An honest presidential response to this AIPAC-mandated reporting rider would
wipe clean all current and future U.S.-taxpayer-funded obligations to
Israel. A truthful presidential assessment would finally tell the
American people the following: “Israel has deployed a clandestine
nuclear arsenal with some components and materials stolen from the
United States. Our foreign aid laws therefore make Israel ineligible
for further taxpayer dollars.”
Such a truthful declaration would turn the tables on AIPAC and its
small group of donors now pushing Americans to steal from themselves
by systematically violating the Symington and Glenn amendments to U.S.
foreign aid laws. Ending aid would disentangle unwitting Americans
from Israel’s unending conflicts, illegal settlements, systematized
abuse of Palestinians, and clandestine nuclear proliferation in the
Middle East.
*As reported in 2011, in previous years AIPAC filed contributor
schedules with the IRS that improperly listed only two donor entries.
After numerous complaints were made to the IRS, AIPAC has apparently
been forced to again file proper schedules listing every contributor
donating more than $5,000.