Muhammad Idrees Ahmad

According to Salon, “on Tuesday, [AIPAC -- the main component of the Israel Lobby] deployed its army of lobbyists to push for new sanctions against Iran, which are contained in a new bill called the Iran Counter-Proliferation Act, introduced by Democrat Tom Lantos and Republican Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the ranking members of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs”.

The name of this duo appears to be behind every hard line policy that the congress has adopted towards the Middle East recently. Its about time we introduced them to the world. 

Tom Lantos,

Tom Lantos’ warmongering record goes back to the ’91 Gulf War when he played a key role in selling it through a staged hearing of the Human Rights Caucus (HRC) – a front for Hill and Knowlton, the PR firm the Kuwaiti government had hired – where a girl named Nayirah gave false testimony about Iraqi soldiers removing Kuwaiti babies from incubators and throwing them on the floor. This story was subsequently picked up by Amnesty International (it only retracted the story after the war) and subsequently propagated by the congress, Kuwaiti expats and other proponents of war (Ironically Lantos is one of the biggest critics of Amnesty and Human Rights Watch for being “overly critical of Israel”). The harrowing testimony of Nayirah — purportedly a nurse at the hospital but in reality the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S., Saud Nasir al-Sabah – played a critical role in getting congressional support for the war (The Kuwaitis donated $50,000 as thanks to HRC).

Lantos was also an enthusiastic supporter of Operation Defensive Shield, Sharon’s war of terror on the Palestinians. According to one analyst, “Lantos isn’t just a Democrat who voted for the Iraq war, he was one of its co-authors…Lantos has never met a war he didn’t like. His unblinking defense of Israeli policy gives him tunnel vision with the rest of the Middle East.” Already in 2006 he was gunning for war; he wrote an article “Now or Never to Prevent a Nuclear-Armed Iran.” Lantos was also a prominent supporter of the School of Americas, where Latin America’s military dictators and would-be torturers were trained. Lantos played a key role in building Democratic support for the Patriot Act. According to the Jeruslame Post, he represents Israel in countries with which it has no diplomatic relations. 

Presently, he is one of Hillary Clinton’s prominent supporters. While he derives some of  his prestige from being a holocaust survivors, according to Jeffrey Blankfort, “His ‘history’ as a holocaust survivor has evolved over the years and it is only in recent years that he has claimed to have been a leader of the anti-Nazi resistance in Hungary which conflicts with his earlier story that he was give a Swedish passport and a safe place to live by Raoul Wallenberg”.

Ileana Ros-Lehtinen

Ileana Ros-Lehtinen represents the nexus of two of America’s most powerful ethnic lobbies, the Israel Lobby and the anti-Cuba Lobby. As Chair of the Subcommittee on Middle East and Central Asia, she plays a key role in shaping policy towards the region. According to her House biography, she is a proponent of “increased support for Israel,” and ”continues to be a fighter for our U.S. ally, Israel, participating in the Jewish Federation’s fund-raising phone-a-thons in Miami, as well as numerous visits to Jerusalem, Tel-Aviv, and the Golan Heights”. She played the leading role, along with Tom Lantos, in enacting the embargo on the Palestinian Authority last year. As revenge for the Mecca agreement she influenced the congress to withhold $86 million in “security assistance” meant for Mahmou Abbas (which was promised in return for collaboration against Hamas with US-Israel). To preempt the Baker-Hamilton Commission’s recommendations for opening talks with the Hamas-led Palestinian government, Ros-Lehtinen, along with Tom Lantos, authored and got congressional approval for the Palestinian Anti-Terror Act of 2006, on behalf of AIPAC, which put a ban on any such talks. With Tom Lantos, she also spearheaded a resolution “that calls on the president to instruct government officials to match any reference to Palestinian refugees in international fora with a reference to Jewish and Christian refugees from Arab lands.”[1]

Notorious for openly calling for the assassination of Fidel Castro, she has also lobbied for the release and pardon of the terrorist Orlando Bosch, who was involved in the 1976 bombing of Cubana Flight 455 which killed 73 people. She helped organize an “Orlando Bosch day” to gain support for his release. She has defended former fugitive Velentin Hernández, convicted of murdering Luciano Nieves, a fellow Cuban exile who supported negotiations with the Cuban government. She also attempted to block Jimmy Carter’s visit to Cuba. 

– Notes –

[1] Regarding the figure of Jewish refugees adduced in the bill, Jeffrey Blankfort writes:

This number keeps creeping up and is based on the usual Zionist distortions of history. There was never any mass exodus and Jews, in fact, have remained in every one of  those countries except Libya which saw its last Jews leave after the 1967 war. In fact, the Zionists entreated the Jews from these countries to emigrate so as to provide a source of cheap labor. Planes were sent by Israel to both Iraq and Yemen to pick up new immigrants. Moreover, to encourage Iraqi Jews to leave, a Jewish Agency agent exploded a bomb in a Baghdad synagogue. In 1970, I visited a Jewish community of silversmiths in Beni-Yeni in the mountains of Algeria when Zionists in this country were saying that all the Jews had been kicked out of that country years earlier and they were doing very well. So much for the truth.

What is of further interest about this subject was that, with one notable exception, it was never raised by Zionists over the years since getting Jews to leave Arab countries and emigrate to Israel was their goal. It was only raised when Palestinians began demanding the right of Palestinians actually forced to leave Israel in 1948 to return to their homeland. The notable exception before that was the late unlamented racist rabbi Meir Kahane who described the situation as “an exchange of  populations.” As for the right of return of Arab Jews to their respective homeland, I support that, as well.