More Americans are starting to understand the pro-Israel lobby in America, a lobby which does not care if its policies are anti-America.
(http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=44031)
WASHINGTON, Sep 26 (IPS) - In a significant and highly unusual defeat for the so-called “Israel Lobby”, the Democratic leadership of the House of Representatives has decided to shelve a long-pending, albeit non-binding, resolution that called for President George W. Bush to launch what critics called a blockade against Iran.
House Congressional Resolution (HR) 362, whose passage the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) had made its top legislative priority this year, had been poised to pass virtually by acclamation last summer.
But an unexpectedly strong lobbying effort by a number of grassroots Iranian-American, Jewish-American, peace, and church groups effectively derailed the initiative, although AIPAC and its supporters said they would try to revive it next year or if Congress returns to Washington for a “lame-duck” session after the November elections.
Among other provisions, the resolution declared that preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapons capacity was “vital to the national security interests of the United States” – language that is normally used to justify military action – and “demand(ed) that the President initiate an international effort to immediately and dramatically increase the economic, political and diplomatic pressure on Iran to verifiably suspend its nuclear enrichment activities…”
Among the means it called for were “prohibiting the export to Iran of all refined petroleum products; imposing stringent inspection requirements on all persons, vehicles, ships, planes, trains and cargo entering or departing Iran; and prohibiting the international movement of all Iranian officials not involved in negotiating the suspension of Iran’s nuclear programme.”
Although the resolution’s sponsors explicitly denied it – indeed, one clause stated that “nothing in this resolution shall be construed as an authorisation of the use of force against Iran” – the resolution’s critics charged that the latter passage could be used to justify a blockade against Iran, an act of war under international law.
“Ambiguity in the text of the resolution – whether intended by its drafters or not – has led some to see it as a de-facto approval for a land, air and sea blockade of Iran, any of which could be considered an act of war,” according to Deborah DeLee, president of Americans for Peace Now (APN), a Zionist group that has long urged the administration to engage in direct talks with Tehran and that lobbied against the resolution.
Two key Democratic congressmen, who had initially co-sponsored the resolution, Reps. Robert Wexler and Barney Frank, unexpectedly defected in July, insisting that its language be changed to exclude any possibility that it could be used to justify war against Iran and to include new provisions urging Washington to directly engage Tehran.
AIPAC’s failure was particularly notable given the presence at the U.N. General Assembly in New York this week of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose repeated and predictably provocative predictions about the demise of Israel and “the American empire” have been used routinely by AIPAC to rally public and elite opinion against Tehran and underline the threat it allegedly poses.