Attacks on "Americans for Peace Now" Follow Familiar Pattern

By Richard H. Curtiss

(The smear calls to talk show hosts, letters to the editor or attacks in news columns have one thing in common. Instead of addressing the remarks of their victim about Israel, the Palestinians, or the size of U. S. aid to Israel, they challenge the victim 's motives; repeat out of context things the victim is alleged to have said or done; or impute guilt by association, no matter how remote or far-fetched. Such stealth attacks have something else in common. Virtually all originate with the same two national organizations and reach the smearers, literally, in "plain, unmarked envelopes. ")

Recent personal attacks in the Jerusalem Post and U.S. Jewish weeklies on Gail Pressberg, co-chair of Americans for Peace Now, a U.S. support group for the dovish Peace Now organization in Israel, followed a familiar pattern. She wasn't attacked for what she personally had said about Israel, or positions Americans for Peace Now had taken, because many American Jews would agree with them. Instead, she was labeled "pro-PLO" on the basis of "guilt by association."

An example is the following five paragraph excerpt from an article about Pressberg written by Morton Klein, president of the American Zionist Federation (Philadelphia), and Dr. Michael Goldblatt, vice president of the Zionist Organization of America (Philadelphia), and published in the Jerusalem Post of Feb. 23, 1993:

" . . . She then moved from one pro-PLO job to another. After leaving the American Friends Service Committee, she became executive director of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, a group that the AntiDefamation League has described as having 'a decided slant toward the anti-Israel pro-Palestinian position.'

"According to the ADL, Pressberg's boss, Foundation Chairman Merle Thorpe, is a senior partner in the Washington, DC firm of Hogan & Hartson, which has been a registered agent for Saudi Arabia. The Foundation has in the past made financial contributions to the anti-Zionist group, 'American Jewish Alternatives to Zionism, Inc.' as well as the passionately anti-Israel journal,Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

"While working for the Foundation Pressberg op-ed organize meetings between 'prominent American religious and civil rights leaders and the PLO representatives' (in 1987), according to the Arab American Institute, a pro-PLO lobby, which thanked her for doing so.

"Even after becoming a full-time staff member for the ostensibly 'moderate' Americans for Peace Now, Pressberg continues to serve as a member of the Advisory Council of the openly extremist America-Israel Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, which has repeatedly lobbied for reductions in U.S. aid to Israel.

"This year, she was named president designate of Americans for Peace Now. It was a bold move for Peace Now, considering that its application for membership in the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations is still pending—and many Conference members may look askance at admitting to their ranks a group led by a veteran pro-PLO activist. . . "

There are many errors in these five paragraphs. The AAI is not a lobby at all. And, although Hogan and Hartson, one of Washington's three largest law firms, does lobby, and its more than 300 lawyers have represented dozens of foreign countries at one time or another, there is no record that any has represented Saudi Arabia for at least the past decade, if ever. Positions of the America-Israel Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace probably are no further from the center of the Jewish mainstream than are those of either Americans for Peace Now or the ADL.

As for financial aid to the Washington Report, which certainly becomes passionate over many issues of U.S. relations with the 45 countries it covers, the Foundation for Middle East Peace has both sold and donated books it has published to the American Educational Trust, publisher of the Washington Report, for resale to the public. Getting those books to the public is the purpose of the Foundation.

On a purely personal basis, foundation President Merle Thorpe also has made small private donations to the American Educational Trust. So, too, under the name "Paul Hunt & Associates," has the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Nothing involving AAI, Saudi Arabia, Hogan and Hartson, or the Washington Report, however, has anything whatsoever to do with Gail Pressberg.

Practicing What McCarthy Preached

Although such irrelevant and error-studded attacks were easily refuted, their purpose clearly was to keep her organization from being accepted into the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. To the credit of the Conference, the attacks were unsuccessful.

It should come as no surprise that the attacks, according to the authors quoted above, originated with one of two organizations, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and B'nai B'rith's Anti-Defamation League, that still practice what the late Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy preached. If you spin off false smears faster than the victim can disprove them, the public assumption that "where there's smoke there's fire" eventually makes the victim "too hot to handle'

The writer knows the pattern from personal experience. About two years after I began to edit the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, I started to get the same question from live or radio talk show audiences. "Who pays you to do this?" the questioners would ask, in town after town. Since I was able to explain that no one was paying me anything at the time, the attacks took on a new focus after a year or two. "He spoke before an anti-Semitic organization," the callers would say, going on to name the group they alleged was anti-Semitic.

Whenever the comment was made, I was able to point out that by then I had written hundreds of articles and spoken to dozens of groups, some of them several times, yet no one seemed able to cite anything "anti-Semitic" in the record of my thousands and thousands of written or spoken words.

Whether or not the particular organization cited is "anti-Semitic" is not for me to judge. I remember distinctly, however, that I was booed by the audience cited when I described a 180-degree flip-flop on Israel by one of its icons, Sen. Jesse Helms. The North Carolina Republican once had what the Israel lobby used to call the worst voting record on Israel in the Senate. Ever since his near defeat in 1984 by an AIPAC-funded opponent, however, Helms has a virtually perfect record with AIPAC. Needless to say, after pointing that out, I haven't been invited to speak again before that populist organization.

Most recently, I was criticized by a caller on a Detroit talk show because "his organization distributes an anti-Israel bumper sticker that says 'Congress is an Israeli-Occupied Territory."' I named a prominent liberal journalist who had just been on the same show and who must have read the bumper sticker, since she repeated the statement on nationwide television.

I learned later that for an hour the following day the discussion on the same talk show revolved around not what I had discussed, which was mostly Bosnia rather than the Middle East, but my motives for discussing it.

What radio station audiences or newspaper readers don't know is that the material for the stealth attacks, most of which are not aired or printed but which are intended to intimidate station managers and publishers, originates with the two organizations named above.

AIPAC, Israel's principal Washington lobby, maintains a covert section within its research department which keeps secret files on hundreds of "enemies," about half of them Jewish like Pressberg. The name of the covert section compiling the files recently was changed from "opposition research" to "policy analysis."

It releases its information to trusted journalists or politicians for use, without attribution, against rivals. Some of the information also goes into a monthly bulletin called "Activities," printed without attribution, and mailed in envelopes without a return address to some 400 selected heads of national Jewish organizations, pro-Israel activists and journalists. All of this was detailed in the July 1992 issue of the Washington Report by a defector from AIPAC's "opposition research" staff.

The other source of such defamatory material is B'nai B'rith's Anti-Defamation League. ADL members don't wear white sheets or shave their heads, but they seem to be motivated by the same mentality of racial or religious animosities as the Ku Klux Klan and the skinheads. The reckless disregard for truth or fairness in such smear attacks as that on Pressberg reflects their hatred.

The ADL has been exposed in this and other publications for printing racist antiArab attacks in its fund-raising literature. This year, ADL also has been caught by San Francisco police in possession of federal government and local police files on American individuals and organizations it apparently deems "enemies." (See page 19 of this issue.)

You won't read much about it in the mainstream press, except in San Francisco where the police discovered in a raid on ADL offices that SFPD's own surreptitiously collected files, which they had themselves destroyed, first had been copied and possibly sold to Israel and South Africa by a renegade cop. In Los Angeles, essentially the same thing seems to have happened, but there the police haven't been so forthcoming (see story on page 67).

Nevertheless, from its two main sources, Israel's unregistered Washington lobby and America's best-organized national hate group, the ammunition for the smear attacks goes to what at first glance seem to be more respectable organizations. One, the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council, apparently makes it available to some or all of the local groups it services, which may or may not put it into more general circulation.

A rabbi once read to me (but wouldn't give me a copy because he feared it would be traced to him) a two-page file about me he said he had received from NJCRAC. When I refuted the lies it contained, he told me earnestly that I should call the organization and explain that their information was erroneous. When I called NJCRAC's Washington and New York offices, however, both assured me they do not circulate any such information on individuals.

So how did the rabbi get this slanderous "rap sheet," and how could I refute the falsehoods it contained, when no one would admit it existed? The charges in such files change from year to year, but the questions they prompt are the same from city to city because they all are being read from the "enemies" lists of the same two organizations.

The next time you hear or see such charges, call the radio station or write the newspaper and ask their source. You can be pretty sure that unless the smearer answers "the ADL" or "AIPAC," he or she will be lying, too.