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  I use plain language.   In these perilous times I must speak the truth as I believe it to be.  Since I found myself in the thicket of Middle East politics nearly forty years ago, I have done little else than seek justice for Arabs deeply aggrieved by our policy bias. This endeavor is motivated by my deep concern for America.       

  I sometimes feel old enough to have heard God’s command to Moses, as recorded in Deuteronomy:  “Seek justice, only justice.”  That command is my guide.  Despite the efforts of many brave people to bring about a just reform, the bias continues—more flagrant and costly each year.    America ignores this injustice, because misdirected, religion-based passions here at home override even vital national interests.  It begs urgently for correction.  It confronts all of us.  No one can escape.

  Our bias is sustained by extreme elements of both Christianity and Judaism.   Both have a deep-seated, passionate attachment to the State of Israel, no matter how outrageous its behavior becomes.  Both are represented powerfully in Washington and exert suffocating influence throughout America’s political system, as well as in almost every other part of our society.   Together, they burden our country year after year with an Israel-centric foreign policy that has led America into a deep abyss.

  Their influence is abetted unwittingly by suicide bombers, professed Muslims who engage in reprehensible, frantic violence delivered as a barbaric protest against foreign occupation of their land.  In doing so, they defy the rules of Islam by taking their lives and the lives of innocent people.  They frustrate the efforts of people who define Islam correctly as a generous, tolerant, loving, and peaceful religion. 

  Today, nearly one-half of the American people harbor false, ugly images of Islam.  These images, reinforced by suicide bombers and other Muslim violence, lead the same number of Americans recommend the restriction of the civil liberties of all U.S. Muslims. Most non-Muslim Americans seem oblivious to reality.  They are unaware of the flagrant bias in our policies and the price we pay for this bias.  Despite the wonders of the Information Age, few know the truth about how our flawed policies in the Middle East are established.  Among those who know the truth, almost all remain totally silent, afraid to speak out.  This self-imposed censorship is even more deadly than one ordered in a police state.  It has unwittingly led us into great trouble, even into the foolhardy decision to start wars.

  The more experienced of the two religious lobbies is headed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee [AIPAC].  It consists almost exclusively of Judaic Zionists, activists whose behavior is disapproved by the majority of those affiliated with Judaism.  They total about 100,000.  My book, They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel’s Lobby, details the origin, history and tactics of Judaic Zionists.  

  Ultra-Orthodox Zionists, the hardcore of this group, believe their messiah will not arrive until Greater Israel—Biblical Israel—comes into being.  This requires the complete take-over of the West Bank and East Jerusalem into Israel proper—the exclusion of even a tiny independent Palestine.   In both Israel and the United States, such Zionists exert great political power.  They are supported by U.S. financing, both public and private, and are a primary force that establishes, populates and expands the illegal settlements that now consign Palestinians to isolated enclaves like those that once existed in apartheid South Africa.

  Christian Zionists are not as tightly organized as AIPAC, but they are vastly more numerous.  They total 50 million Americans, perhaps more.  Although a minority of U.S. Christians, they are well disciplined on election days and have attained great political power in recent years.  They were prominent supporters of George W. Bush’s presidential campaigns.

  The two groups make strange bedfellows.  Judaic doctrine makes no mention of Jesus Christ.  In contrast, the Christian community, in a radical interpretation of the Bible’s Book of Revelation, believe that, on the second coming of Christ to earth, all people of the Judaic faith will either be instantly exterminated or converted to Christianity. 

  Today, the two groups are bound tightly together by an immediate interest—the survival of a strong, expanding Israel as an essential precondition for the arrival on earth of their separate messiahs. 

  Together, they control U.S. policy in the Middle East.  They are so powerful that Congress dutifully approves massive aid to Israel every year with no debate whatever.  No mention is made of Israel’s continuing scofflaw misbehavior--destroying Palestinian society through military conquest, assassinations, and wholesale destruction of lives, homes, and means of livelihood.  The only substantial U.S. aid to Arabs goes to Egypt, a reward for establishing full diplomatic relations with Israel years ago.

  On Capitol Hill, there is no mention of the grave harm this pro-Israel bias causes to U.S. national interests.           Year after year, unconditional U.S. support enables Israel to defy with impunity the rules of international law and the UN Charter.  Due to U.S. media bias, few Americans are aware of this conduct or U.S. complicity in it, but people elsewhere, especially Muslims, follow this abuse with mounting anti-American outrage.   The recently published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad are thought by many observers to be a spontaneous eruption of anger among Muslims toward the West.  Some of it may be spontaneous, but most is grounded in the long-festering bitterness over U.S. complicity in the plight of Palestinians and now Iraqis. 

  In President Bush’s campaign against terrorism, he has failed to recognize that 9/11’s real Ground Zero was never Manhattan or the Pentagon.   It was always Palestine and remains so today.  It was grisly payback for America’s support for Israel’s bloody assault on Arabs over the years, especially its 1982 slaughter of innocent civilians in Lebanon.  In several televised statements, Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden cited U.S. support of that slaughter as the principal motivation for 9/11.   Using U.S.-donated armor, bombs and bullets, Israeli forces killed more than 18,000 innocent Arabs in Beirut and its suburbs.   Although U.S. media gave the massacre scant attention, it provoked worldwide anti-American fury that intensified when Congress immediately voted funds to restore the inventory of munitions Israeli forces consumed in the assault.  I know.  I was a Member of Congress when the vote occurred.  Worldwide resentment against the United States, not just Israel, has grown with each passing year.   

  Our peril deepened in 2001 when President Bush received bad advice from Vice-President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, years ago my Republican colleagues in the House of Representatives.  Overreacting grossly and wrongly to 9/11, they convinced President Bush that the assault made him all-powerful as commander-in-chief, automatically arming him with the right to ignore Congress and change U.S. policies as he wished.

  Bush immediately acted the part, proclaiming his right to commit acts of war any place he alone found a threat to our security.  He rammed through a panicky Congress an unpatriotic Patriot Act, appointed himself police chief of the world, pledged to maintain U.S. military forces and foreign bases at a level sufficient for worldwide policing, and scrapped national sovereignty, the bedrock of the nation state.  Worst of all, he initiated wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and now hints at an assault on Iran.  Syria may be next.  All are Muslim countries.  Ominous lines seem to be forming for a gigantic struggle between Islam and Christendom.

  I am not an isolationist.  The world needs policing, but no single nation state should attempt that role.  It is the proper job for a multinational organization which our government should be urgently helping to create.

  The utter failure of President Bush and Congress to recognize and redress Arab grievances is the main reason for the lethal insurgency now underway against our forces in Iraq. 

  The 9/11 calamity and our costly, stumbling wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq, are the ugly off-springs of our longstanding bias in Middle East policy. 

  How did our great country get in this mess?  How do the religious lobbies maintain this tight grip on U.S. policy?

  They use America’s political system with great skill.   They vote.  They take part in political campaigns.  They contribute generously to candidates who do their bidding and against those who do not.  

  Their most powerful instrument of intimidation is the reckless charge of anti-Semitism.  I know the sting.  It works.  The fear of being charged with anti-Semitism makes most people who know the truth about our complicity in Israeli policy and our war-making cower in silence.

  Few Americans know that our governmental bureaucracy is thoroughly penetrated by Zionists.  In almost every office in the executive branch and every committee on Capitol Hill that deals with Middle East policy will be found at least one employee who feels religiously obligated to protect the interests of Israel as each piece of paper passes through his or her desk.   My book has many examples.   Our government is truly Israeli occupied territory.

  Today’s mess started a half-century ago on Capitol Hill when the lobby for Israel first promoted a heavy bias in U.S. policy in the Middle East.  By the time I became a Member of Congress in 1961, the lobby’s activities had thoroughly intimidated our political institutions and effectively stifled debate.   I witnessed the intimidation as a member for the next 22 years and have watched it closely ever since.

  By silencing dissent, the pro-Israel lobby intimidates, with very rare exceptions, the entire Congress.   Former Ambassador George W. Ball was accurate when he said that Congress behaves like trained poodles, jumping through hoops held by lobbyists for Israel.  Senators Charles Percy and Adlai Stevenson and Representatives Paul “Pete” McCloskey, Cynthia McKinney, Earl Hilliard and myself are among those defeated at the polls by candidates heavily financed by pro-Israel forces.  Only McKinney later returned to Congress.

  Nationally, not just on Capitol Hill, the State of Israel is treated as sacrosanct.  It is rare when a word critical of Israel is expressed even in private conversation.  This is also true in major media, academia, social circles and business communities.  Almost everyone can offer a lame excuse for silence.  Lobby intimidation even suffocates free speech in houses of worship. It should surprise no one that Congress, with hardly a murmur of protest, recently approved resolutions saluting the prime minister of Israel for building high walls and fences that keep Palestinians penned up on their own land like cattle.

  I believe 9/11 would not have occurred if the U.S. government had refused to support Israel’s humiliation and destruction of Palestinian society.   Any president of the past 38 years could have brought peace to the Middle East simply by suspending all aid until Israel withdrew from Arab land it seized in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

  Israel’s interests were a primary reason for Bush’s decision to invade Iraq, as noted recently by U.S. General Anthony Zinni, once Bush’s special emissary to the Middle East.  He recently said Israel and oil are the widely accepted reasons for the invasion.  I will add that almost everyone in Washington knows that Israel was the stronger of the two motivations. 

  The raging insurgency against U.S. forces in Iraq is tightly linked directly to the plight of the nearby Palestinians.  We cannot expect Arab Iraqis to trust our promise of freedom for them when a few miles away we maintain our abject, decades-long complicity in Israel’s denial of freedom for Arab Palestinians.

  Our best way out of this peril is to seek justice in U.S. policy.  We must stop being the purveyors as well as the enablers of injustice.   Financing Israel’s scofflaw conduct is wrong.  So is the unconditional character of U.S. aid.   It has lured aggressive Israeli leaders year after year into terrible brutality.  Using acts of war against Iraq insurgents is morally wrong. 

  In Israel, our president must cease unconditional aid.  He must suspend all U.S. aid until Israel vacates illegal settlements it has established throughout the West Bank and East Jerusalem and withdraws from Arab land it has held illegally since June 1967. 

  In Iraq, our president must immediately order an end to all acts of war against insurgents, most of whom are native Iraqis who distrust U.S. intentions and want our forces to leave.  War measures only deepen distrust. 

  In addition, our president must immediately pledge a total withdrawal from Iraq of U.S. military and contractor personnel by a specified date after the new government is organized, stating clearly that the only units exempt from withdrawal are those expressly requested by the new government and approved by the UN Security Council. 

  These two presidential announcements will sweep away the dark clouds of religious war and quickly dampen the Iraqi insurgency.  They will elicit worldwide rejoicing, heralding a dramatic return of U.S. policy to the high ground it once occupied. 

  Above all, we must temper these steps with understanding and good will.  We must recognize that almost everyone is hurting, not just Arabs.   Many Israelis and other adherents of Judaism are hurting.   They mourn the victims of suicide bombings and are fearful of more to come.   Many oppose Israel’s devastation of Palestinian society.  Many also agonize over the damage Israel’s misbehavior does to the reputation of Judaism itself. 

  All Americans are hurting too.  The toll of war in blood, tears and economic hardship hits us all.  All concerned with the Middle East need justice, understanding, and, yes, mercy.  Let it fall gently on us all.    

  Is the scene hopeless?  Of course not.  The peril is immediate and great, but it is never too late for justice.  Inspired by the new South Africa, a Commission of Truth and Reconciliation must soon come into being in the Holy Land, through which a new era of security, hope and even love can emerge.  Supporters of war sometimes seek justification in scripture.  Let us take our inspiration from God’s instruction:   “Seek justice, only justice.”  

  What can each of you do?  Our country is on the eve of a new election cycle.   Every one of us has the opportunity—yes, the responsibility—to speak up for justice at political gatherings, ask precise questions of candidates and demand precise answers.  We can engage directly in political campaigns and write letters to editors. 

  I am 84.  I’ve been on the front line for justice in U.S. policy in the Middle East for nearly half my life.  I do not regret a minute of that long endeavor.  I will never give up.  Will you help?               

Paul Findley, Member of Congress 1961-83, is the author of three books on the Arab-Israeli conflict, including the bestseller They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel’s lobby.  He resides in Jacksonville, Illinois.