All four of those European countries have contributed a very large share of
immigrants to the U.S., yet none has organized an ethnic group to lobby for U.S.
foreign aid. Instead, all four send funds and volunteers to do economic
development and emergency relief work in other less fortunate parts of the world.
The lobby that Israel and its supporters have built in the United States to make all
this aid happen, and to ban discussion of it from the national dialogue, goes far
beyond AIPAC, with its $15 million budget, its 150 employees, and its five or six
registered lobbyists who manage to visit every member of Congress individually
once or twice a year.

AIPAC, in turn, can draw upon the resources of the Conference of Presidents of
Major American Jewish Organizations, a roof group set up solely to coordinate
the efforts of some 52 national Jewish organizations on behalf of Israel.
Among them are Hadassah, the Zionist women's organization, which organizes a
steady stream of American Jewish visitors to Israel; the American Jewish
Congress, which mobilizes support for Israel among members of the traditionally
left-of-center Jewish mainstream; and the American Jewish Committee, which
plays the same role within the growing middle-of-the-road and right-of-center
Jewish community. The American Jewish Committee also publishes
Commentary,one of the Israel lobby's principal national publications.
Perhaps the most controversial of these groups is B'nai B'rith's Anti-Defamation
League. Its original highly commendable purpose was to protect the civil rights of
American Jews. Over the past generation, however, the ADL has regressed into
a conspiratorial and, with a $45 million budget, extremely well-funded hate group.
In the 1980s, during the tenure of chairman Seymour Reich, who went on to
become chairman of the Conference of Presidents, ADL was found to have
circulated two annual fund-raising letters warning Jewish parents against
allegedly negative influences on their children arising from the increasing Arab
presence on American university campuses.

More recently, FBI raids on ADL's Los Angeles and San Francisco offices
revealed that an ADL operative had purchased files stolen from the San
Francisco police department that a court had ordered destroyed because they
violated the civil rights of the individuals on whom they had been compiled. ADL,
it was shown, had added the illegally prepared and illegally obtained material to
its own secret files, compiled by planting informants among Arab-American,
African-American, anti-Apartheid and peace and justice groups.

The ADL infiltrators took notes of the names and remarks of speakers and
members of audiences at programs organized by such groups. ADL agents even
recorded the license plates of persons attending such programs and then
suborned corrupt motor vehicles department employees or renegade police
officers to identify the owners.

Although one of the principal offenders fled the United States to escape
prosecution, no significant penalties were assessed. ADL's Northern California
office was ordered to comply with requests by persons upon whom dossiers had
been prepared to see their own files, but no one went to jail and as yet no one
has paid fines.

Not surprisingly, a defecting employee revealed in an article he published in the
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs that AIPAC, too, has such "enemies"
files. They are compiled for use by pro-Israel journalists like Steven Emerson and
other so-called "terrorism experts," and also by professional, academic or
journalistic rivals of the persons described for use in black-listing, defaming, or
denouncing them. What is never revealed is that AIPAC's "opposition research"
department, under the supervision of Michael Lewis, son of famed Princeton
University Orientalist Bernard Lewis, is the source of this defamatory material.
But this is not AIPAC's most controversial activity. In the 1970s, when Congress
put a cap on the amount its members could earn from speakers' fees and book
royalties over and above their salaries, it halted AIPAC's most effective ways of
paying off members for voting according to AIPAC recommendations. Members
of AIPAC's national board of directors solved the problem by returning to their
home states and creating political action committees (PACs).

Most special interests have PACs, as do many major corporations, labor unions,
trade associations and public-interest groups. But the pro-Israel groups went
wild. To date some 126 pro-Israel PACs have been registered, and no fewer than
50 have been active in every national election over the past generation.

An individual voter can give up to $2,000 to a candidate in an election cycle, and
a PAC can give a candidate up to $10,000. However, a single special interest
with 50 PACs can give a candidate who is facing a tough opponent, and who has
voted according to its recommendations, up to half a million dollars. That's enough to buy all the television time needed to get elected in most parts of the
country.

Even candidates who don't need this kind of money certainly don't want it to
become available to a rival from their own party in a primary election, or to an
opponent from the opposing party in a general election. As a result, all but a
handful of the 535 members of the Senate and House vote as AIPAC instructs
when it comes to aid to Israel, or other aspects of U.S. Middle East policy.

There is something else very special about AIPAC's network of political action
committees. Nearly all have deceptive names. Who could possibly know that the
Delaware Valley Good Government Association in Philadelphia, San Franciscans
for Good Government in California, Cactus PAC in Arizona, Beaver PAC in
Wisconsin, and even Icepac in New York are really pro-Israel PACs under deep
cover?

Hiding AIPAC's Tracks In fact, the congressmembers know it when they list the contributions they receive on the campaign statements they have to prepare for the Federal Election Commission.
But their constituents don't know this when they read these statements. So just as no other special interest can put so much "hard money" into any candidate's election campaign as can the Israel lobby, no other special interest has gone to such elaborate lengths to hide its tracks.

Although AIPAC, Washington's most feared special-
interest lobby, can hide how it uses both carrots and sticks to bribe or intimidate members of Congress, it can't hide all of the results.
Anyone can ask one of their representatives in Congress for a chart prepared by
the Congressional Research Service, a branch of the Library of Congress, that
shows Israel received $62.5 billion in foreign aid from fiscal year 1949 through
fiscal year 1996. People in the national capital area also can visit the library of
the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in Rosslyn, Virginia, and
obtain the same information, plus charts showing how much foreign aid the U.S.
has given other countries as well.

Visitors will learn that in precisely the same 1949-1996 time frame, the total of
U.S. foreign aid to all of the countries of sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and
the Caribbean combined was $62,497,800,000--almost exactly the amount given
to tiny Israel.

According to the Population Reference Bureau of Washington, DC, in mid-1995
the sub-Saharan countries had a combined population of 568 million. The
$24,415,700,000 in foreign aid they had received by then amounted to $42.99
per sub-Saharan African.

Similarly, with a combined population of 486 million, all of the countries of Latin
America and the Caribbean together had received $38,254,400,000. This
amounted to $79 per person.
The per capita U.S. foreign aid to Israel's 5.8 million people during the same
period was $10,775.48. This meant that for every dollar the U.S. spent on an
African, it spent $250.65 on an Israeli, and for every dollar it spent on someone
from the Western Hemisphere outside the United States, it spent $214 on an
Israeli.

Shocking Comparisons
These comparisons already seem shocking, but they are far from the whole truth.
Using reports compiled by Clyde Mark of the Congressional Research Service
and other sources, freelance writer Frank Collins tallied for theWashington
Report all of the extra items for Israel buried in the budgets of the Pentagon and
other federal agencies in fiscal year 1993.Washington Report news editor Shawn
Twing did the same thing for fiscal years 1996 and 1997.
They uncovered $1.271 billion in extras in FY 1993, $355.3 million in FY 1996
and $525.8 million in FY 1997. These represent an average increase of 12.2
percent over the officially recorded foreign aid totals for the same fiscal years,
and they probably are not complete. It's reasonable to assume, therefore, that a
similar 12.2 percent hidden increase has prevailed over all of the years Israel has
received aid.

As of Oct. 31, 1997 Israel will have received $3.05 billion in U.S. foreign aid for
fiscal year 1997 and $3.08 billion in foreign aid for fiscal year 1998. Adding the
1997 and 1998 totals to those of previous years since 1949 yields a total of
$74,157,600,000 in foreign aid grants and loans. Assuming that the actual totals
from other budgets average 12.2 percent of that amount, that brings the grand
total to $83,204,827,200.

But that's not quite all. Receiving its annual foreign aid appropriation during the
first month of the fiscal year, instead of in quarterly installments as do other
recipients, is just another special privilege Congress has voted for Israel. It enables Israel to invest the money in U.S. Treasury notes. That means that the U.S., which has to borrow the money it gives to Israel, pays interest on the money it has granted to Israel in advance, while at the same time Israel is collecting interest on the money. That interest to Israel from advance payments adds another $1.650 billion to the total, making it $84,854,827,200.That's the number you should write down for total aid to Israel. And that's $14,346 each for each man, woman and child in Israel.

It's worth noting that that figure does not include U.S. government loan
guarantees to Israel, of which Israel has drawn $9.8 billion to date. They greatly
reduce the interest rate the Israeli government pays on commercial loans, and
they place additional burdens on U.S. taxpayers, especially if the Israeli
government should default on any of them. But since neither the savings to Israel
nor the costs to U.S. taxpayers can be accurately quantified, they are excluded
from consideration here.

Further, friends of Israel never tire of saying that Israel has never defaulted on
repayment of a U.S. government loan. It would be equally accurate to say Israel
has never been required to repay a U.S. government loan. The truth of the matter
is complex, and designed to be so by those who seek to conceal it from the U.S.
taxpayer.
Most U.S. loans to Israel are forgiven, and many were made with the explicit
understanding that they would be forgiven before Israel was required to repay
them. By disguising as loans what in fact were grants, cooperating members of
Congress exempted Israel from the U.S. oversight that would have accompanied
grants. On other loans, Israel was expected to pay the interest and eventually to
begin repaying the principal.

But the so-called Cranston Amendment, which has
been attached by Congress to every foreign aid appropriation since 1983,
provides that economic aid to Israel will never dip below the amount Israel is
required to pay on its outstanding loans. In short, whether U.S. aid is extended
as grants or loans to Israel, it never returns to the Treasury.
Israel enjoys other privileges. While most countries receiving U.S. military aid
funds are expected to use them for U.S. arms, ammunition and training, Israel
can spend part of these funds on weapons made by Israeli manufacturers. Also,
when it spends its U.S. military aid money on U.S. products, Israel frequently
requires the U.S. vendor to buy components or materials from Israeli
manufacturers. Thus, though Israeli politicians say that their own manufacturers
and exporters are making them progressively less dependent upon U.S. aid, in
fact those Israeli manufacturers and exporters are heavily subsidized by U.S. aid.
Although it's beyond the parameters of this study, it's worth mentioning that Israel
also receives foreign aid from some other countries. After the United States, the
principal donor of both economic and military aid to Israel is Germany.
By far the largest component of German aid has been in the form of restitution
payments to victims of Nazi atrocities. But there also has been extensive German
military assistance to Israel during and since the Gulf war, and a variety of
German educational and research grants go to Israeli institutions. The total of
German assistance in all of these categories to the Israeli government, Israeli
individuals and Israeli private institutions has been some $31 billion or $5,345 per
capita, bringing the per capita total of U.S. and German assistance combined to
almost $20,000 per Israeli. Since very little public money is spent on the more
than 20 percent of Israeli citizens who are Muslim or Christian, the actual per
capita benefits received by Israel's Jewish citizens would be considerably higher.
True Cost to U.S. Taxpayers
Generous as it is, what Israelis actually got in U.S. aid is considerably less than
what it has cost U.S. taxpayers to provide it. The principal difference is that so
long as the U.S. runs an annual budget deficit, every dollar of aid the
U.S. gives Israel has to be raised through U.S. government borrowing.
In an article in the Washington Report for December 1991/January 1992, Frank
Collins estimated the costs of this interest, based upon prevailing interest rates
for every year since 1949. I have updated this by applying a very conservative 5
percent interest rate for subsequent years, and confined the amount upon which
the interest is calculated to grants, not loans or loan guarantees.

On this basis the $84.8 billion in grants, loans and commodities Israel has
received from the U.S. since 1949 cost the U.S. an additional $49,936,880,000 in
interest. There are many other costs of Israel to U.S. taxpayers, such as most or all of the $45.6 billion in U.S. foreign aid to Egypt since
Egypt made peace with Israel in 1979 (compared to $4.2 billion in U.S. aid to Egypt for the preceding 26 years).

U.S. foreign aid to Egypt, which is pegged at two-thirds of U.S. foreign aid to
Israel, averages $2.2 billion per year.
There also have been immense political and military costs to the U.S. for its
consistent support of Israel during Israel's half-century of disputes with the
Palestinians and all of its Arab neighbors. In addition, there have been the
approximately $10 billion in U.S. loan guarantees and perhaps $20 billion in tax
-exempt contributions made to Israel by American Jews in the nearly half-
century since Israel was created.

Even excluding all of these extra costs, America's $84.8 billion in aid to Israel
from fiscal years 1949 through 1998, and the interest the U.S. paid to borrow this
money, has cost U.S. taxpayers $134.8 billion, not adjusted for inflation. Or, put
another way, the nearly $14,630 every one of 5.8 million Israelis received from
the U.S. government by Oct. 31, 1997 has cost American taxpayers $23,240 per
Israeli.

It would be interesting to know how many of those American taxpayers believe
they and their families have received as much from the U.S. Treasury as has
everyone who has chosen to become a citizen ofIsrael. But it's a question that
will never occur to the American public because, so long as America's
mainstream media, Congress and president maintain their pact of silence, few
Americans will ever know the true cost of Israel to U.S. taxpayers.---
---------------
Richard Curtiss, a retired U.S. foreign service officer, is the executive editor of
the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.
The above articles were taken from
Rense.com
http://www.rense.com/general31/rege.htm