Why Does J Street Attract the Friends of Saudi Arabia?
Getting back to Barnett, she also set up her own consulting firm and affiliated with the international PA Consulting Group, where she worked for the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Trade. Barnett’s activities are described in the Center for Public Integrity’s 2004 article titled “Saudis Drop Big Bucks for Washington Influence.”
- State Department official Lewis Elbinger, who served in Saudi Arabia, donates to J Street PAC. He provided an interesting address in the FEC files: 6300 Riyadh Place, Dulles, Virginia.
- Small donations are also provided to the PAC by at least two Saudi students, one in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, and the other from Dhahran but residing in Texas.
- There’s also a tangential Saudi-J Street PAC tie through the recently discredited Human Rights Watch, which, according to a recent exposé, raises funds in Saudi Arabia. A senior HRW board member and member of J Street’s Advisory Council, Kathleen Peratis, is one of the largest donors to the PAC.
- But perhaps the most intriguing J Street PAC supporter is Ray Close, listed on the PAC’s latest FEC filings with a political contribution earmarked for J Street’s favorite congresswoman, Donna Edwards. Who is Close?
Ray Close served as CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia for more than 20 years. And then in 1977, he “went native.”
“On the day he retired from the CIA,” wrote reporter Eli Lake, “Ray walked across the street and joined Kamal Adham [the head of Saudi Arabia’s intelligence service] in a business relationship.” A former senior CIA official, Duane Clarridge, told Lake, “To many officers in the CIA this seemed untoward because as a government official, he had an official relationship with Kamal Adham. Now he was in a commercial relationship which over the years reportedly made Close a very wealthy man.”
The Saudis became the Close family business. Ray’s son, Kenneth, registered with the U.S. Justice Department as a foreign agent for the Saudis. According to Close Jr., he served as “senior policy advisor to HRH Prince Turki Al-Faisal while he was the Kingdom’s Ambassador to the United States. Ken Close continues to work closely with His Royal Highness on questions of policy, strategic investment, and Saudi-American business relations.”
Turki Al-Faisal is the author of the Saudi peace plan, which he restated in a New York Times column on September 12 without a hint of compromise or the peaceful confidence-building gestures toward Israel requested by President Obama. J Street, by the way, believes that “U.S. leadership can be deployed to normalize relations between Israel and the Arab world, utilizing the Arab Peace Initiative [Turki’s plan].”
Ray Close was an advisor to the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Commission in 2006 where he served on the “Expert Working Group.” [Yes, that Baker -- former Secretary of State James Baker, author of the quote, “F*** the Jews. They don’t vote for us anyway.”] Beneath Close’s name on the Commission report is a short nondescript biography: “Freelance Analyst and Commentator on Middle East Politics.” In a memo to the Commission, Ray Close endorsed the Arab Peace Initiative as well as Hamas’ ascension to power in the Palestinian Authority: “There is nothing in those sensible and reasonable proposals that is nearly as threatening to the safety and security of Israel as is the fresh hostility generated by Israeli and American treatment of the struggling Palestinian administration [HAMAS] that was chosen in free and democratic elections last year. The Arab Initiative is a positive and constructive starting-point.”
The Commission and J Street have many points of agreement. The Baker-Hamilton recommendations provided the Obama administration with an excuse to jettison policies of the Bush administration: “Given the ability of Iran and Syria to influence events within Iraq,” the report stated, “the United States should try to engage them constructively. … The U.S. cannot achieve its goals in the Middle East unless it deals directly with the Arab-Israeli conflict and regional instability. There must be a renewed and sustained commitment by the United States to a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace on all fronts: Lebanon, Syria, and President Bush’s June 2002 commitment to a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine.”
As an inducement to Syria, Ray Close suggested in his private memo to the commission: “Perhaps the U.S. will have to put pressure on Israel to make territorial concessions in the Golan.”
When the Chas Freeman controversy blew up earlier this year (the controversial former ambassador to Saudi Arabia was nominated to serve as President Obama’s chairman of the National Intelligence Council), Ray Close jumped to his friend’s defense.
Presumably, J Street’s defense of Freeman was purely coincidental. “It was only a matter of time,” wrote James Kirchick in Commentary, “before J Street — the self-proclaimed ‘pro-Israel, pro-peace’ organization that is neither — came to the defense of Tiananmen Square Massacre enthusiast Charles “Chas” Freeman. … Ben-Ami propagates the meme that it was Freeman’s statements on Israel — awful as they were — that ultimately ended his career, despite all the evidence to the contrary.”
Five years ago, well before the Freemen affair, Close was warning of a “neo-con cabal” in Washington.
Paranoid conspiracy theorists believe in Washington cabals, and this article does not suggest that a Saudi cabal lies behind J Street. But the article does scream the question: Why are so many Saudi-affiliated individuals — as well as Iranian lobby supporters, Arab American leaders, Palestinian and Islamic activists — attracted to J Street like a magnet?
Progressive American supporters of Israel deserve organizations that are transparent and reveal their financial supporters and decision-makers. An indulgent media — in the U.S., Israel, and the Jewish press — so far has avoided probing these points.
Calling J-Street pro-Israel is a joke – these people are traitors in every sense of the word. They are not Jews, they are far-Left ideologues who are not only anti-Israel but anti-American as well. And, they represent the disgusting alliance of the far Left with Islamists, they aren’t even ”useful idiots” but rather fellow-travellers, cynically disguising their true goals behind a lot of BS peace rhetoric. In effect, they are no different than the Jewish Communists of Eastern Europe, often the worst anti-Semites. I won’t get into their psychological motivations, how can anyone understand the twisted psyche of a Jewish anti-Semite?
Some of these J-Streeters are former Israelis, their anti-Israel positions rejected & despised in their own country. Since they cannot sell their poison to those who are far better informed, they go to America or Britain to sell this crap to the much less informed. Many are proponants of a complete elimination of Israel as a Jewish state. I have to add that our universities in Israel have become nests of traitors & crackpots, a situation not unlike that in many American universities infested with America-haters.
J Street is pro Israel like Hitler’s brownshirts were pro Jewish. Same difference.
The Daniel explanation to Belshazzar Mene-Mene-Tekel, Upharsin was wrong in Daniel 5:25 book of bible.The correct meaning was that Menetekel was menstraution period of a woman and Parsin is sperm.
I cannot explain the whys, wherefores, or hows of J Street and their seeming affinity for Saudi Arabian money. I do however have at least some idea as to why some American Jews both lead and give their support to such a group like J Street which appears to have such a hostility towards Israel. Although I have lived in Israel for almost thirty years I enjoyed my life in America and the Jewish Community there for quite some time. One of the aspects I noticed there, and here in Israel too, is the burning desire of most Jews to lead something, in fact anything, the Sisterhood, the Shul itself, a political party, an NGO, you know what I mean. As near as I can tell, the leadership of J Street is really bush league, mostly assimilated Left wing Jews, they know almost nothing about the dynamics of the Middle East, shockingly little about Israel or Israelis, and are largely ignorant about Judaism itself. But they set up a group they can now lead, and if financing is a problem, well anyone, even the most radical anti Semites, are welcome to contribute.
That said, Israel has not been particularly reliable as a representative of the Jewish People during several important periods of our recent history. The drunken sot Rabin and his lethal Oslo Accords bringing Arafat and his PLO terrorist army into the heart of Israel to ravage and murder us, the weak and vacillating Ehud Barak who surrendered all of Israel to Arafat and got hundreds of us killed by PLO and Hamas terrorists, and of course, last but not least, soon to be indicted Ariel Sharon who ethnically cleansed the Gaza Strip and the Northern Shomron of Israeli Jews, abandoned them to their fate, and left the Gaza area in the hands of Palestinian terrorist gunmen, rockets, and missiles in his effort to avoid arrest, trial, and imprisonment.
What is even worse, Lenny, all three of these misguided or criminally motivated Israeli Jewish “leaders” demanded that the American Jewish Community support their depraved programs, even though most Americans and especially American Jews realized how dangerous these plans were. You know, Lenny, I won’t even mention the damage to Israel’s Jewish reputation that was done by our very own Supreme Court, a court which most Israelis refer to as the High Court of Palestine. I won’t even mention how the Israeli Army, the so call People’s Army, forbids our soldiers to fraternize with Jewish settlers in the territories. Because of these sorts of behviors a lot of American Jews have lost faith in Israel, our leaders, our lawmakers, our judges, and our IDF and who can really blame them? Some American Jews became indifferent, others more radicalized in favor of Israel, and some joined J Street out of a sense of disgust.
Israel has a lot to atone for in the way that we have abused the Jewish People, Zionism, and Judaism, but I doubt that even Netanyahu much less any of our other political, military, legal, or religious leaders have gotten to that point yet. Yes J Street and anti Israel groups like it represent a serious problem, but they also represent a serious symptom of Israel’s failures.
Saudi Arabia like every other country plays for its own best interests; sometimes these work with Israel and the US, and sometimes not. Even Iran at times over the past 30 years has worked with US interests.
J street are the modern day kapos.
In August, the Jerusalem Post revealed that J Street’s political action committee received contributions from Arab-, Iranian-, and Muslim Americans. State Department officials, a Palestinian billionaire, and board members of the discredited Human Rights Watch and the Iranian lobby were also listed in the files of the Federal Election Commission.
Paragraphs like this remind me of the golden age of Yellow Journalism, when you only needed to call someone a “Jew”. That was criticism enough. The fact that the Palestinian bottler of Coca Colar invests in anything is hardly a matter that means something to rational people. Luckily for you, your audience is unable to tell fantasy from reality. Certainly, in their world, anyone who is Palestinian is already an evil person. Luckily, the majority of people in this nation have actually met Palestinians–they know that to be Palestinian has no more to do with one’s ideas than being Jewish. Unluckily for the rest of us, there’s a virulent little minority of crazed and unhappy people who can’t survive without accusing other people of what they themselves are guilty of.
….not just the ‘Tip’ but J-Streets entire foundation is a Total Fraud. It’s a front organization that masquerades as an American Jewish Israel political action group and serves this administration by falsifying data from phony polls to promote agendas that are fundamentally opposite of all American, Jewish & Israeli interests.
“Unluckily for the rest of us, there’s a virulent little minority of crazed and unhappy people who can’t survive without accusing other people of what they themselves are guilty of.”
That would be quite true if the accusations you talk about were lies. It seems that the article also makes lie of your characterization of accusers as virulent and unhappy persons. And really, Iranian lobby (which supported politics of Iranian government) would hardly go against their own and Iranian government interest, wouldn’t it?
All that said, as a person with not much knowledge of American internal politics I am astounded by the breadth and width of lobbying in America. Lobbyists for all kind of causes, businesses and countries can, in fact, buy your politicians. Do you think it is really healthy for your country? Don’t you think it should stop, at least most of it?
“Do you think it is really healthy for your country? Don’t you think it should stop, at least most of it?”
ella, what “is” has always been independent of what we “think”
“the golden age of Yellow Journalism, when you only needed to call someone a “Jew”.”
I guess it’s still the “golden age” in the Arab world.
Scratch an Arab liar and you will find a Muslim thief. Steal your enemies storyboard and claim the narrative as your own. Follow your enemy around and stand in their way, that way your public symbolism overshadows theirs. Just as the Muslims stole the Jewish Prophets, the Christian Jesus, and Byzantium history, so they intend to erase Israel’s memory from the world.