New York Post  |  March 4, 2010

The Arab Lobby
Racking up the victories

By Benny Avni

The legend of the Jewish lobby's influence over US policies continues to grow -- even as the Arab lobby, led by the Saudis, keeps racking up successes.

With petrodollars and tender loving care spent lavishly on universities, ex-diplomats, PR firms and gullible journalists, the Arab Lobby constantly pushes two contradictory story lines: 

*Arabs seek peace with Israel.
*There's no place for a Jewish state in the Middle East.

This week, Saudi-led Arab countries have convinced Western reporters that they're advancing the peace process with Israel. Meanwhile, universities in America, Canada, Europe and the Arab world are marking "Israeli Apartheid Week" -- a vile campaign meant to return the "Zionism is racism" equation to the top of the world's agenda.

In Cairo yesterday, the Arab League gave its nod of approval for the Palestinian Authority's president, Mahmoud Abbas, to participate in indirect talks with Israel. This is meant to show us that the Arab countries are seeking peace.

Yet, in reality, Israelis and Palestinians have publicly conducted direct talks since the early 1990s. The Palestinians broke off those talks last year under increasing pressure from leading Arab countries, which hoped President Obama would lean hard on the new government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Obama's initial plan was to pressure Israel to freeze settlements and, at the same time, convince Arab countries to make at least a symbolic gesture of normalization with the Jewish state. US emissaries flew to Riyadh to try to convince King Abdullah to let Israeli commercial planes fly over the Saudi peninsula's airspace.

In the end, the Israelis imposed a limited settlement freeze -- but the Saudis didn't move an inch.

Meanwhile, as Saudi financing of US university faculties increases, the anti-Israeli rhetoric at campuses from Berkeley to Columbia is reaching new highs (or, rather, lows). In the city, Columbia, NYU and Brooklyn College all feature Apartheid Week events.

Yet British scholar Anthony Glees had long documented the linkage between Saudi financing of faculties and growing anti-Western and anti-Israeli rhetoric at places like Harvard and Georgetown (which Prince Alaweed recently gave $20 million).

Meanwhile, the House of Saud's most accomplished princes are sent to Washington. The current ambassador, Adel al Jubeir, is a brilliant, soft-spoken PR strategist who regularly holds court with the cream of capital society.

"While pundits like to speak about the power of the Israeli lobby in Washington, they completely ignore the well-established Saudi lobby," says Dore Gold, a former Israeli UN ambassador and a veteran scholar of the Saudi ruling family. The lobby, Gold notes, finances "former American diplomats and military officers, and uses the most expensive public-relation companies that money can buy to penetrate the American media."

Only a well-oiled PR machine can explain how the Saudis manage to harness such dear liberal values as oppression of women: Even though women there aren't even permitted to vote or drive, the Saudis managed for years to get good grades from the UN Development Program, which marks "improvement" in women's status as progress.

But selling the "improvement" line -- to the United Nations or to gullible New York Times columnists -- isn't enough. They have to add insult to injury by telling the Times' Maureen Dowd that women suffer worse in Israel, thanks to "religious militants."

What? Discrimination against women is part of the Saudi state religion.

And while Saudi watchers tell me that King Abdullah is indeed taking "baby steps" to liberalize the country's society, they're extremely controversial -- obliging the king to harden his anti-Israel rhetoric and boost relations with the region's most extreme regimes, such as Syria's.

In the last decade, Riyadh sold Western peace processors its "Saudi Plan." It wasn't much of a plan, and it surely wasn't as detailed as other blueprints for peace between Arabs and Israelis. Yet Saudi lobbying was good enough to enshrine it in State Department and UN Security Council documents.

Meanwhile, the Saudi PR machine pushes accusations about Israeli apartheid, Jewish desecration of holy Muslim sites and Israeli violations of human rights. All of them are rooted in the same premise: Jewish sovereignty anywhere in the Middle East is illegitimate.

And that premise is far more harmful to future Arab-Israeli peace than anything the so-called Jewish lobby has ever been accused of.

Original article here.