The Israel Lobby Con EXTRA! Podcast

Maria LaHood: The birth of Palestine solidarity activism at George Mason University. The Key aims of solidarity movements on U.S. college campuses and attempts to thwart growing grassroots activism.

Maria LaHood is a Deputy Legal Director at the Center for Constitutional Rights, with expertise in constitutional rights and international human rights. She works to defend the constitutional rights of Palestinian human rights advocates in the United States in cases such as Davis v. Cox, defending Olympia Food Co-op board members for boycotting Israeli goods; Salaita v. Kennedy,representing Steven Salaita, who was terminated from a tenured position for tweets critical of Israel; and CCR v. DOD, seeking U.S. government records under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) regarding Israel’s 2010 attack on the flotilla to Gaza. She works closely with Palestine Legal to support students and others whose speech is being suppressed for their Palestine advocacy around the country. She also works on the Right to Heal initiative with Iraqi civil society and Iraq Veterans seeking accountability for the lasting health effects of the Iraq war.

Her past work at CCR includes cases against United States officials, Arar v. Ashcroft, Al-Aulaqi v. Obama, and Al-Aulaqi v. Panetta; against foreign government officials, Matar v. Dichter and Belhas v. Ya’alon; and against corporations, Wiwa v. Royal Dutch/Shell and Corrie v. Caterpillar. Prior to coming to the Center for Constitutional Rights she advocated on behalf of affordable housing and civil rights in the San Francisco Bay Area, and she graduated from the University of Michigan Law School. She was named a 2010 Public Justice Trial Lawyer of the Year Finalist. 

Tareq Radi: The birth of Palestine solidarity activism at George Mason University. The Key aims of solidarity movements on U.S. college campuses and attempts to thwart growing grassroots activism.

Tareq Radi is a Palestinian-American organizer based in Washington, DC.

He is currently the Public Affairs Coordinator at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. Under the umbrella of the Arab Studies Institute,

Radi is leading an initiative to mine historical and contemporary documents related to the Palestinian solidarity movement in the United States. The work will culminate in a series of databases aimed at studying the U.S.-based movement and offering researchers and advocates alike a critical resource.

Before that, he graduated with a B.S in Finance from George Mason University (GMU), where he was a founding member of GMU’s Students Against Israeli Apartheid (SAIA).

He intends to pursue graduate school with hopes of developing and conducting research on resistance economies.

Justin Raimondo: Israel and foreign policy issues in the presidential campaign. Is America’s unconditional support for Israel finally becoming a political issue?

The following is a presentation made at the 2016 Israel Lobby Con held at the National Press Club.

Justin Raimondo is an American author and the editorial director of Antiwar.com.

In addition to his thrice-weekly column for Antiwar.com, Raimondo is a regular contributor to The American Conservative and Chronicles magazines.

Raimondo's books include Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement (Center for Libertarian Studies, 1993), reissued in 2008 with new introduction by George W. Carey by Intercollegiate Studies Institute: Into the Bosnian Quagmire: The Case Against U.S. Intervention in the Balkans (AFPAC, 1996); and Colin Powell and the Power Elite (America First Books, 1996).

Raimondo also wrote An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard, (Prometheus Books, July 2000). 

Jim Lobe: Review of the rise of neoconservatives, their role in promoting the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and the doctrinal centrality of Israel.

The following is a presentation made at the 2016 Israel Lobby Con held at the National Press Club.

Jim Lobe served as the chief of the Washington bureau of Inter Press Service (IPS) from 1980 to 1985 and again from 1989 until 2015. He has managed and produced LobeLog, a blog focused primarily on U.S. policy toward the Middle East, since 2007.

LobeLog, which features contributions by experts on the Middle East and foreign policy, received the Arthur Ross Award for Distinguished Reporting and Analysis of Foreign Affairs from the American Academy of Diplomacy in 2015.

Throughout much of his journalistic career, Lobe has followed the influence of neoconservatives on U.S. foreign policy and has lectured on the subject at various colleges and universities in the United States, as well as the Institute of American Affairs in Beijing, the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, and Sciences Pos in Reims, among other institutions overseas.

In 2004, he acted as defense attorney for the Project for the New American Century at the Brussels Tribunal in Brussels. He is also an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson: Secretary of State Colin Powell’s former chief of staff explores how Israel’s influence over the U.S. has affected America’s strategic approach toward the Middle East.

The following is a presentation made at the 2016 Israel Lobby Con held at the National Press Club.

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson's last positions in government were as Secretary of State Colin Powell's Chief of Staff (2002-05), Associate Director of the State Department's Policy Planning staff under the directorship of Ambassador Richard N. Haass, and member of that staff responsible for East Asia and the Pacific, political-military and legislative affairs (2001-02).

Before serving at the State Department, Wilkerson served 31 years in the U.S. Army. During that time, he was a member of the faculty of the U.S. Naval War College (1987-1989), Special Assistant to General Powell when he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1989-93), and Director and Deputy Director of the U.S. Marine Corps War College at Quantico, Virginia (1993-97). Wilkerson retired from active service in 1997 as a colonel, and began work as an adviser to General Powell. He has also taught national security affairs in the Honors Program at George Washington University. He is currently working on a book about the first George W. Bush administration. He currently is Distinguished Visiting Professor of Government and Public Policy at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. 

Prof. Kirk J. Beattie: How Congress shapes Middle East policy, and how AIPAC shapes Congress.

The following is a presentation made at the 2016 Israel Lobby Con held at the National Press Club.

Kirk James Beattie is the author of Congress and the Shaping of the Middle East as well as two books on Egyptian politics: Egypt During the Nasser Years and Egypt During the Sadat Years.

Beattie is a professor at Simmons College in the Political Science and International Relations Department, specializing in comparative politics with regional expertise in Middle East and West European politics.

Beattie has taught at Harvard, Wellesley, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and the University of Michigan.

He is a recipient of numerous national scholarships including a Fulbright grant, a Fulbright-Hays grant, an International Rotary Foundation Fellowship, an American Research Center in Egypt grant, and a Center for Arabic Study Abroad fellowship.

He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts, and in Wisconsin.

The conference is solely sponsored by the American Educational Trust, publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, and the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRmep). 

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Dr. Roger Mattson: Did Israel steal U.S. weapons-grade uranium, and did it have help from U.S. citizens?

The following is a presentation made at the 2016 Israel Lobby Con held at the National Press Club.

Roger J. Mattson is the author of the recently published book Stealing the Atom Bomb: How Denial and Deception Armed Israel.

Dr. Mattson has experience in engineering and management with Sandia National Laboratory, the Atomic Energy Commission, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the Environmental Protection Agency and several nuclear safety and security consultancies.

He was an adviser to the NRC commissioners on policy issues such as safety goals, risk assessment, nuclear safeguards, and Three Mile Island reforms. After leaving government service in 1984, he led two private companies that provided safety and security services for U.S. nuclear power plants, the Energy Department's nuclear facilities, and several foreign users of nuclear power. Following the Chernobyl accident in 1986, he helped develop IAEA's guidance on safety principles for the world's nuclear power plants. He oversaw nuclear safety consultancies in five foreign countries. He also served on the offsite safety committees for several nuclear power plants and several DOE nuclear facilities. In 2012, he was part of a team formed by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers to forge a new safety construct for nuclear power after the tragedy at Fukushima. He has participated in safety analysis and field reviews of nearly 150 nuclear facilities in the US, Europe, the former Soviet Union and the Far East, including the startup of the latest U.S. nuclear power plant in 2015.

The conference is solely sponsored by the American Educational Trust, publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, and the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRmep). 

Visit https://IsraelLobbyCon.org

Grant F. Smith: Ten ways the Israel lobby ‘moves’ America.

The following is a presentation made at the 2016 Israel Lobby Con held at the National Press Club.

Grant F. Smith is the author of Big Israel: How Israel's Lobby Moves America, his eighth book about the Israel lobby.

Smith is the director of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRmep), a nonprofit organization that studies U.S. Middle East policy formulation. In 2014, Smith sued the Department of Defense in federal court and won release of a detailed report, contracted in 1987, on the advanced state of Israel’s nuclear weapons program. In 2015, Smith sued the Central Intelligence Agency and won release of 131 pages of formally classified information revealing its overseas agents obtained compelling evidence that Israel stole U.S. government-owned weapons-grade uranium in the 1960s to build its first atom bombs. The CIA’s refusal to share this information thwarted two FBI investigations into the diversion. This is the subject of ongoing IRmep litigation.

In his 30 year professional career as a researcher, Smith has investigated public sector lobbying, financial services and global telecommunications industries, worked in 22countries assessing the impact of regulatory and trade regime changes, and managed multinational research teams.

The conference is solely sponsored by the American Educational Trust, publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, and the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRmep). 

Visit https://IsraelLobbyCon.org

Reza Marashi: The Iran Nuclear Deal

The following is a presentation made at the 2015 Israel Lobby Con held at the National Press Club.

Reza Marashi joined the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) in 2010 as the organization’s first research director. He came to NIAC after four years in the State Department’s Office of Iranian Affairs.

Prior to his tenure at the State Department, he was an analyst at the Institute for National Strategic Studies (INSS) covering China-Middle East issues, and a Tehran-based private strategic consultant on Iranian political and economic risk.

Marashi is frequently consulted by Western governments on Iran-related matters. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and The Atlantic, among other publications.

He has been a guest contributor to CNN, NPR, the BBC, TIME Magazine, The Washington Post, the Financial Times, and other broadcast outlets.

The conference is solely sponsored by the American Educational Trust, publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, and the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRmep). 

Gareth Porter: The Israel lobby push for war on Iran

The following is a presentation made at the 2015 Israel Lobby Con held at the National Press Club.

Gareth Porter is an investigative journalist and historian who specializes in U.S. foreign and military policy. He has written five books, including Perils of Dominance, Imbalance of Power and The Road to War in Vietnam. 

His most recent book is Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare. The book highlights the impact that the United States’ alliance with Israel had on Washington’s turning the International Atomic Energy Agency into a tool of its anti-Iran policy. He writes regularly for Inter Press Service and has also published investigative articles on Salon.com, the Nation, the American Prospect, Truthout and The Raw Story.

His blogs have been published on Huffington Post, Firedoglake, CounterPunch and many other websites. Porter was Saigon bureau chief of Dispatch News Service International in 1971 and later reported on trips to Southeast Asia for The Guardian, Asian Wall Street Journal and Pacific News Service.

In 2012 he was awarded the Martha Gelhorn Prize for Investigative Journalism by the UK-based Gelhorn Trust.

Porter currently publishes Iran policy analysis in Middle East Eye.

The conference is solely sponsored by the American Educational Trust, publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, and the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRmep).