A Book Review of Grant Smith’s ‘Foreign Agents’

A Book Review of Grant F. Smith, 2007, ‘Foreign Agents: The American Israel Public Affairs Committee from the 1963 Fulbright Hearings to the 2005 Espionage Scandal’, 1st edition, Institute for Research: Washington D.C.

I re-read the work of the Institute of Research’s Grant Smith fairly recently: I had been meaning to do so for some time, but I always put it back as yet another thing to be done when I had sufficient leisure to do so. However, upon finally making time to re-read his ‘Foreign Agents’ from 2007: I was surprised and somewhat annoyed that I had not made the time earlier.

The reason for this is that ‘Foreign Agents’ is packed full of useful tit bits of information about the Israel Lobby in the United States: like, for example, the structural and financial links between AIPAC, the Washington Institute for Near Eastern Policy (WINEP), the American Israel Education Foundation (AIEF), the Brookings Institute’s Saban Center and many others. You also find such information about how surprisingly small AIPAC’s annual revenue submission is to the IRS (circa $50 million) as well as detail about events that you will rarely hear about even in other books on the Israel Lobby: such as the Israel American Free Trade Agreement, which is - as we speak - costing the United States over a billion dollars a year in trade deficit (as opposed to a few million in surplus previous to the agreement) in contrast to the Lobby’s claims that it would lead to balanced trade for both parties.

What however you should really read this book for is three things that Smith focuses on.

The first is his discussion of the transition and creation of AIPAC from the American Zionist Council and how the 1963 Fulbright Hearings disclosed that the American Zionist Council was being directly funded by Israel and was dispersing the money from the Israeli government to various jewish/Zionist entities, which then operated without any oversight from the US government at all because they were not officially registered as foreign agents (i.e., they were money laundering as Smith adroitly points out).

Now while I think that Smith could have done a lot more with his lengthy chapter on the Fulbright Hearings (as all he does is reproduce bits of the transcript and then comment on them) as it would (obviously) pay significant dividends to look into the evolution and activities of the American Zionist Council before Fulbright investigated them and how they connected to other jewish organizations. Smith’s point is clear from what he does reproduce: that the beginnings of AIPAC were as a way of circumventing further investigation of Israeli political lobbying activities in the United States. So that never again would any branch of the federal government be able to find direct Israeli funding of the lobby and thus be given a simple pretext to imprison its members and shut it down.

The second is Smith’s discussion of the pro-Israeli espionage activities of the Lobby, which occurs throughout this work and contains such wonderfully obscure tit-bits as the Israeli government acquiring a copy of confidential business data of a slew of major American industries as well as the US government’s negotiating position in relation to the Israel American Free Trade Agreement. This confidential data was then passed onto Israeli competitors so they could wrong-foot their American competitors and increase their market share (and in so doing strength the Israeli economy at the expense of America).

The third is Smith’s discussion of the way that the Lobby itself operates, which I think it not unreasonable to describe as an octopus. The Lobby has many heads (AIPAC is the best known) but that each of these heads have many tentacles (for example AIEF in the case of AIPAC), which in turn focus their attentions on propagating their views and silencing dissenting opinions in different ways. AIEF focuses on effectively bribing law-makers and opinion-formers (although as Smith notes this latter category of individual are not so much a focus anymore with the unstated point that this is down to the near-terminal decline of the main-stream media and the rapid rise of fast-paced, free and almost uncontrollable internet media sources) with free trips to Israel disguised as ‘fact-finding trips’.

The heads in my analogy are linked by the same individuals sitting on their boards (for example - as Smith points out - 23% of AIPAC’s board members are also board members of WINEP) as well as their (in its way admirable) uncompromising allegiance to the Israeli state and its interests. This is ironically an idea that could have been lifted from the English translation of the Protocols of Zion and probably was, as a way of running a deliberate conspiracy that works to the same end while controlling all sides of the debate.

Yet when it is uncovered the conspiracy does the same as the Protocols recommends be done: it seeks to marginalize and eliminate its opponents by spreading counter-propaganda about their motives and/or seek to have them removed from positions of influence (in both commercial/educational organizations and governments) or charged under ‘hate crime’ and ‘anti-discrimination’ statutes that jews were instrumental in putting into place ‘for their own protection’.

While concomitantly seeking to emphasize the credentials of its hirelings and zealots by making sure they are awarded desirable appointments and also get their claims published in prestigious journals so that they can assert that these claims are ‘established’ or ‘majority’ opinions.

This modus operandi probably was lifted from the Protocols themselves and is a kind of neat twist on the jewish obsession with the Protocols, but also that the jews - like others throughout history - have sought to imitate the things said about them so that they discredit their opponents by claiming they are propounding the same old same old (and thus the arguments ‘must’ be lies). Essentially the jews have taken cover in what they perceive to be a lie and have built that lie up in modernized form to be a reality, while necessarily always referring to the idea it could be true as a ‘lie’ or a ‘canard’ in order to protect what they have themselves created using it.

This is the true link between modern Zionist diaspora activities and the Protocols: in that the jews copied and updated the methods outlined in the Protocols (as well as having continued to do so) in order to dominate Western society, while at the same time having their seriously oversubscribed presence in the higher echelons of society claimed to be ‘accidental’ or ‘irrelevant’ (since ‘aren’t we all individuals’ etc ad infinitum).

Smith naturally doesn’t realise this link - or possibly does but doesn’t talk about it since it is beyond the scope of his work (and is obviously highly controversial) - but if we do realise this intellectual connection between the Protocols and the modern Israel Lobby: it is not difficult to see where the structures that Smith outlines in summary actually derive their inspiration.

All in all: both the seasoned observer of the jews and those starting out in trying to comprehend the jewish question will find much of value in Smith’s work. It has plenty of solid information is written in readable - if a bit staid - prose and forces the reader to think more broadly about the power and scope of the Israel Lobby than other comparable works on the subject.

It is a definite must have for the library of any critic of Israel and/or the jews.