Muhammad Idrees Ahmad

It was once said about Tom Lantos that he has never met a war he didn’t like. For years he has used his position in the US congress to use the American military as Israel’s gurkha Army. Here is what I wrote about him earlier:

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.

While it is understandable that Morris Amitay, the former head of the Israel Lobby group AIPAC, should pay tribute to the guy who served his cause so well, the following would merely boggle the mind if it weren’t for the fact that this clown had similar words for known racist genocidaire Jesse Helms, and is equally comfortable in the arms of a Vladimir Putin, a George Bush or a Tony Blair.

More on Lantos from Jeffrey Blankfort.

Lantos represents South San Francisco and San Mateo County. He is white, Jewish, Hungarian born and portrays himself as “the only Holocaust survivor ever elected to Congress.” He is an unabashed supporter of Israel. That makes him, of course, an “untouchable.”

He is also the ranking Democrat on the powerful House International Relations Committee, which provides him with unusual opportunities to help Israel. He sponsors repressive legislation targeting the Palestinians and Israel’s Middle East adversaries and, when called upon by Israel, he represents it in countries where Israel has no diplomatic relations, a questionable activity by a member of the U.S. Congress.

“He’s true blue and white” – the colors of the Israeli flag – a former leader of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, Israel’s official lobby, told the Jerusalem Post, referring to Lantos’ devotion to Israel. Lantos made his first trip to the Jewish state in 1956 and has been there nearly 60 times since.

And all along you thought his first concern was the voters in his district.

In 1991, in an effort to convince Congress and the world that Iraq needed to be forcibly removed from Kuwait, Lantos helped stage a hearing before his private Congressional Human Rights Caucus at which the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador, pretending she was a nurse who had been working in a Kuwaiti hospital at the time of Iraq’s invasion, testified that she had witnessed Iraqi soldiers throwing babies out of scores of incubators on to the hospital floor in order to take the incubators back to Iraq.

The story was a total fabrication, but the outrage it engendered was enough to get reluctant members of Congress to change their minds and vote for the war. Despite articles about the fraud in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and Harper’s, Lantos was never criticized on the House floor, let alone censured.