Comment: Conflict between Angl0-American Establishment, Conservatism and Zionism continues...So many wanting a piece of the pie...I doubt that AIPAC is going to be too severely blunted anytime soon.
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WASHINGTON — The last time the nation’s most potent pro-Israel
lobbying group lost a major showdown with the White House was when
President Ronald Reagan agreed to sell Awacs surveillance planes to
Saudi Arabia over the group’s bitter objections.
Since then, the group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee,
has run up an impressive record of legislative victories in its quest
to rally American support for Israel, using a robust network of
grass-roots supporters and a rich donor base to push a raft of bills
through Congress. Typically, they pass by unanimous votes.
But
now Aipac, as the group is known, once again finds itself in a very
public standoff with the White House. Its top priority, a Senate bill to
impose new sanctions on Iran, has stalled after stiff resistance from President Obama, and in what amounts to a tacit retreat, Aipac has stopped pressuring Senate Democrats to vote for the bill.
Officials
at the group insist it never called for an immediate vote and say the
legislation may yet pass if Mr. Obama’s effort to negotiate a nuclear
agreement with Iran fails or if Iran reneges on its interim deal with
the West. But for the moment, Mr. Obama has successfully made the case
that passing new sanctions against Tehran now could scuttle the nuclear
talks and put America on the road to another war.
In
doing so, the president has raised questions about the effectiveness of
Aipac’s tactics and even its role as the unchallenged voice of the
pro-Israel lobby in Washington. Jewish leaders say that pro-Israel
groups disagreed on how aggressively to push the legislation, even if
all the groups favor additional sanctions.
“Some
of us see the object as being to target Iran,” said Abraham H. Foxman,
the national director of the Anti-Defamation League. “We’re not out
there to target the president; we’re out there to target Iran.”
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