Update on 'The Israel Lobby'
(from The New York Times, September 30, 2007)
Freedoms Watch, a deep-pocketed conservative group led by two former senior White House officials, made an audacious debut in late August when it began a $15 million advertising campaign designed to maintain Congressional support for President Bushs troop increase in Iraq.
Bradley Blakeman, the president of Freedoms Watch, who left the Bush administration as an assistant deputy to the president.
Founded this summer by a dozen wealthy conservatives, the nonprofit group is set apart from most advocacy groups by the immense wealth of its core group of benefactors, its intention to far outspend its rivals and its ambition to pursue a wide-ranging agenda.
Its next target: Iran policy.
Next month, Freedoms Watch will sponsor a private forum of 20 experts on radical Islam that is expected to make the case that Iran poses a direct threat to the security of the United States, according to several benefactors of the group.
Although the group declined to identify the experts, several were invited from the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington research group with close ties to the White House.
. . . Freedoms Watch has quickly emerged from the crowded field of nonprofit advocacy groups as a conservative answer to the 9-year-old liberal MoveOn.org, which vehemently opposes the Iraq war.
=======================================
September 25, 2007
I.N.N. World Report
**Exclusive TV interview with Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer
Authors of “The Israel Lobby & U.S. Foreign Policy”
**by Claire Brown
In an exclusive, and sometimes controversial, interview with I.N.N. World Report, Professor Stephen Walt of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, and Professor John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, discuss their groundbreaking book, “The Israel Lobby & U.S. Foreign Policy.”
After being asked about which 2008 Presidential candidate would stand up to the Israel Lobby, Stephen Walt responded, “It’s obvious already that all of the major candidates have gone through enormous lengths to demonstrate their personal devotion to Israel, and that they will do nothing to change the U.S. – Israel relationship.”