Anti Lobbying Quotes

During the past twenty-five years, well-meaning Christians have founded a number of evangelical activist organizations and put millions of dollars into them in an ill-conceived effort to counteract the secular undermining of American culture. They have used these groups, along with existing Christian publishing houses and broadcast networks, to lobby hard for a “Christian” political viewpoint and fight back against the prevailing anti-Christian culture. Sadly, those believers have often displayed mean-spirited attitudes and utilized the same kinds of worldly tactics as their unbelieving opponents. The problem with this overall approach should be obvious—believers become antagonistic toward the very lost people God has called them to love and reach with the gospel. LESSONS

The best way to prove the arbitrary character of these categories, and the contagion effect they produce, is to remember how frequently these clusters reverse in history. Today’s alliance between Christian fundamentalists and the Israeli lobby would certainly seem puzzling to a nineteenth-century intellectual—Christians used to be anti-Semites and Moslems were the protectors of the Jews, whom they preferred to Christians. Libertarians used to be left-wing. What

SPEAKING OF BURNING HUMANS — actual ones, as opposed to ones who existed only in Alex’s imagination — in the late 1970s, a left-wing Filipino journalist named Satur Ocampo was arrested in Manila by President Ferdinand Marcos’ soldiers. He was manacled, blindfolded and electrocuted, while soldiers poured cola on him (which apparently makes the electrocution more painful). His nipples and genitalia were burned. He survived, but thousands of Marcos’ other enemies were “salvaged,” Marcos’ term for torturing and mutilating them before dumping them on a roadside for public display. Ferdinand Marcos was a client of Paul Manafort and Roger Stone’s lobbying firm. He paid it an annual retainer of $950,000 to “tamp down concerns about [his] human rights record,” according to Politico magazine’s Kenneth P. Vogel. Anti-elitism was Alex’s thing, but all that seemed pretty elitist to me. Did Alex care about that?

MASSOUD DISPATCHED his foreign policy adviser, Abdullah, to Washington in August. Their Northern Alliance lobbyist, Otilie English, scratched together a few appointments on Capitol Hill. It was difficult to get anyone’s attention. They had to compete with Pakistan’s well-heeled, high-paid professional lobbyists and advocates, such as the former congressman Charlie Wilson, who had raised so much money for Pakistan’s government in Congress during the anti-Soviet jihad. Abdullah and English tried to link their lobbying effort with Hamid Karzai and his brother, Qayum, to show that Massoud was fighting the Taliban with multiethnic allies. But the members they met with could barely manage politeness. Guns or financial aid were out of the question. Some barely knew who Osama bin Laden was. With the Democrats they tried to press the issue of women’s rights in Afghanistan, but even that seemed to be a dying cause now that the Clintons were gone. Both Massoud’s group and the Karzais were “so disappointed, so demoralized” after a week of meetings on the Hill and at the State Department, Karzai’s lobbyist recalled.37

it is the height of incoherence to argue that solar could survive a day on the free market. It costs more — lots more — to generate power from sunshine than it does from fossil fuels. And this will remain the case even if states promote and “invest” in solar, as Dooley’s outlier of a Tea Party group is lobbying them to do. It would remain the case even if utilities were as competitive as curb brokers. Groups like this just help the larger anti-fossil fuel, anti-prosperity environmental movement.

Loach told the Workers Revolutionary Party’s newspaper, and ‘What is amazing is the strength and organisation and power of their lobby.’ The ‘Zionists’, he claimed, ‘want to leave intact … the generalised sense of guilt that everyone has about the Jews so that it remains an area that you can’t discuss’.

There was probably some kind of anti-compulsive psychiatric medication liberally added to this trucked-in gross of cookies so that people like me, who could not stop eating the cookies once they were offered, would not continuously sneak down to the lobby in the soul-slaughtering hours between two and four a.m. to steal six at a time, finishing most of them before getting back to the room.

In 1943, Kentucky banned first-cousin marriages, and the ban continues there and in most other states today. This prohibition in Kentucky was not only to prevent birth defects; it was sought for other reasons, as well. The Ku Klux Klan lobbied for the ban early and fought vigorously for the bill’s passage to keep white supremacy pure, while others wanted it to keep feuding mountain clans strong, which prevented young lovers from marrying enemy cousins and turning disloyal and increasing a clan’s numbers. Anti-miscegenation laws in Kentucky were in effect from 1866 until 1967. For anyone convicted, the penalty was a fine or imprisonment, or both.

After living more than a decade in America now, I have come to accept that most of my fellow American citizens are as powerless as I am in influencing the American foreign policy, especially in the Middle East. Even more discouraging is that, by pointing out this reality, one is immediately labeled as ‘un-American’, ‘anti-American’, or other misleading adjectives and accusations to silence any voices seeking to change this bleak reality.

I have said publicly that I will never write or speak on the subject of Israel or Palestine ever again. Here is why. The Zionist lobby in this country is malicious, implacable, mendacious and dangerous. They have caused me a great deal of lost sleep – and in the end my insomnia has not contributed anything to the resolution of the conflict over Palestine. I might as well keep my mouth shut and get some sleep. What’s more, once the expression ‘anti-Semite’ hits the air, or heaven forefend, the sacred formula ‘six million’ is uttered, then I know from bitter experience that there is not one manager or editor in the country who will defend an underling. We are thrown to the jackals. In the end the truly tolerant have no defence against intolerance. I surrender. To the Zionists I say: You win. To the Palestinians: Forgive my cowardice.

The main mass-membership advocacy organizations of American Jewry — B’nai B’rith and its Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the American Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee, the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds, the National Conference of Jewish Federations, and the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations (a kind of steering group for the major organizations), to mention only a few — are not religious organizations but ethnic ones. It is not necessary to have any Jewish religious affiliation to be a member in good standing in these organizations, and their leaderships are composed mainly of people who are not religious or Jewishly learned Jews. We need not go into foundational texts and statements of purpose on the question of origins, for the answer is simple enough: organizations like B’nai B’rith and the American Jewish Committee were created to lobby for particular Jewish interests. … In time, these and most other Jewish organizations became explicitly or implicitly Zionist, and thereafter existed to one degree or another to support, first, a Jewish home in Palestine, and then, after 1948, the security and prosperity of the State of Israel. In other words, all these organizations have depended, and still depend, on the validity of their serving parochial Jewish ethnic interests that are simultaneously distinct from the broader American interest but not related directly to religion.

Anti-sex-industry feminism makes excellent use of outrage. This is generated, quite rightly, in response to the trauma of sex industry survivors. But the telling of survivor stories works in tandem with the idea of a ‘pimp lobby’, which positions sex workers and their allies as malign. This strategy is very effective: it means that people who support decriminalisation, many of whom are sex workers and/or feminists, are not only failing to ‘listen to survivors’ but are supporting ‘pimps’ instead.

Don’t be fooled by the anti-smoking lobby, my dear,” said Sam. “Cigarette use is thriving in every corner of the world. Over five trillion are smoked each year. Do you think it would be difficult for someone with immeasurable intelligence to figure out a simple way to contaminate a majority of the world’s cigarette production lines with a hyper-contagious agent? With all the world's smokers playing the role of Typhoid Mary, it would spread to every human on the planet in no time.” He grinned. “I guess second-hand smoke isn't the biggest danger you can face from smokers, after all.

And it is not enough that Zionists control America. They have to reshape it to suitthemselves. Virtually every recent case that involves the removal of Christian symbols from society is brought and/or prosecuted by a Jew, usually with a Jewish judge presiding. For the sake of the feelings of 2.5 percent, all the rest of us must yield our cultural heritage. Removing “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance. Taking down plaques of the Ten Commandments. Removing crosses from public venues. Taking Christ out of Christmas, first, then Christmas out of the year-end holidays altogether. Hate laws are singularly Jewish inventions being foisted upon an unsuspecting public, so as to preemptively remove the possibility of criticism of themselves. Often written by the ADL, the organization that lobbies for their adoption, state by state, the laws are designed to stifle dissent and free speech. Even now, the ADL seeks to broaden their sweep to include Holocaust Revisionism, as has occurred in Canada and most of Europe, where people sit in jail for publicly stating true facts about the so-called Holocaust that Jews simply do not want publicized. Now, anti-Semitism is being added to the proscriptions of hate laws in America. It has been forgotten that the first thing the communists did after seizing power in Russia was to make anti-Semitism punishable by death. Before they were done, the Russian Jews ended up killing over 20 million white Christians, don’t forget. American borders are kept wide open to a flood of illegal immigrants, purposely, apparently to dilute the population, thereby making us more easily controlled. Yet, there is a furious struggle to jail those who criticize Jews. Contrast this policy imposed upon America with the extremely closed society of Israel, which is reserved solely for Jews. And consider the money that Israel has cost us, facilitated by their Jewish brethren. It is nothing short of breathtaking. Economist Dr. Thomas R. Stauf-fer estimates the cost of our Middle Eastern policies at over $2.5 trillion, more than the cost of the Vietnam War. Two and a half trillion dollars. Boggles the mind, doesn’t it? Let’s see now, America has a population of 290 million and about 80 million households, so that amounts to $31,250 from your family to Israel.And that doesn’t include some other items which easily could double that figure, says Dr. Stauffer. That brings us to the $64,000 question, which is approximately double the $31,250 figure just cited: Is Israel worth it to you? Or could your family have put that $62,500 taken from it to better use? What is particularly ironic is how much of that money came back from Israel for the purpose of buying off America’s elected representatives.

To teach people what a scientific concept is and how a scientific life¬ style will improve their lives, we need to go about it scientifically: we need new science-advocacy organizations that use all the same scientific marketing and fund-raising tools as the anti-scientific coalition employ. We’ll need to use many of the tools that make scientists cringe, from ads and lobbying to focus groups that identify the most effective sound bites. We won’t need to stoop all the way down to intellectual dishon¬ esty, however. Because in this battle, we have the most powerful weapon of all on our side: the facts.

To teach people what a scientific concept is and how a scientific life style will improve their lives, we need to go about it scientifically: we need new science-advocacy organizations that use all the same scientific marketing and fund-raising tools as the anti-scientific coalition employ. We’ll need to use many of the tools that make scientists cringe, from ads and lobbying to focus groups that identify the most effective sound bites. We won’t need to stoop all the way down to intellectual dishonesty, however. Because in this battle, we have the most powerful weapon of all on our side: the facts.

But the US State department officials were stonewalling, informed both by their own antisemitism and anti-foreigner outlook. They hid behind claims that refugees might include Communists and spies; the Jews could, they said, become a destabilising force within America. US consular offices in Europe, like the one in Rotterdam, denied hundreds of thousands of people who applied from 1933, when Hitler was put in power, to 1945, when the war ended. American Rabbi Stephen Wise, who oversaw lobbying efforts for immigration from within the United States’ Jewish community, called this ‘death by bureaucracy’. Mrs Frank’s brothers,

oppressed’ – the victims of Anglo-American imperialism. Labelling Israel uniquely as a ‘racist state’ was the climax of twenty-five years of lobbying started by Labour MP Peter Hain, the former student anti-apartheid campaigner, who accused Israel of oppressing the Palestinians even more than South Africa had oppressed blacks under apartheid. Over that period, and especially during the year before they met in Durban, the anti-Zionists’ language had become increasingly anti-Semitic. At the beginning of 2001, the groups that were to meet in Durban had celebrated the final collapse of the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians. To their satisfaction, the Palestinians launched a second intifada, seeking to kill as many Israelis as possible. Eight months later, at the climax of the Durban conference, thousands of activists and delegates marched through the city waving placards reading ‘Kill All Jews’ and ‘The Good Things Hitler Did’.

Ironically, his Communist counterpart in East Germany was also a former anti-Nazi. Walter Ulbricht escaped to Russia during the Hitler years and became a stalwart supporter of Joseph Stalin. He then returned to Germany in 1945 to head the new Socialist Unity Party, lobbying for reform and independence from the Soviet bloc while at the same time advocating the building of the Berlin Wall. He blamed, … the 10 million Germans who in 1932 cast their votes for Hitler in free elections, although we Communists warned that ‘He who votes for Hitler, votes for war.’ … The tragedy of the German people consists of the fact that they obeyed a band of gangsters. The Communist state ensured East Germans would not make the same mistake again by depriving them of the right to vote.

It’s hard to imagine a time when French writers were uncertain about the legitimacy and importance of their language, but that was the case in the sixteenth century. French was considered appropriate for vulgar (that is, popular) writing or for old medieval poetic forms such as rondeaux or madrigals, but not for “higher” forms of writing, higher learning or the sciences, which were still the exclusive domain of Latin. While François I didn’t regulate French in any way, his policies did legitimize the efforts of the many artists, poets, savants and printers who were trying to dump Latin and make French prestigious by inserting it into the language of state administration, universities and spheres of higher learning such as medicine and poetry. In some ways writers led the way in this movement. The most militant anti-Latin lobby in France was a group of poets originally called the Brigade who were soon to choose a more poetic name: La Pléiade. They were up-and-coming writers who wanted to position themselves as a literary avant-garde. Their manifesto, Déffence et illustration de la langue Françoyse (Defence and Illustration of the French Language), was an indictment of Latin in favour of French. It was published in 1549, ten years after the publication of the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts. Signed by the poet Joachim Du Bellay, it begged poets to use French for the new-found forms of classic Greek and Latin literature—the ode, the elegy, and comedy and tragedy (these were, of course, very old forms, but they were only just being rediscovered after having been forgotten for more than a thousand years). In a chapter titled “Exhortation to Frenchmen,” Du Bellay wonders, “Why are we so hard on ourselves? Why do we use foreign languages as if we were ashamed to use our own?…Thou must not be ashamed of writing in thy own language.” The debate is surprisingly similar to the twentieth-century one in which French musicians wondered if it was possible to make rock ’n’ roll in their own language. François I’s policies definitely added weight to the case made by Du Bellay and the Pléiade poets. While Du Bellay’s Déffence was in many ways a squabble between poets over their art, it also contained a program for the promotion of French in science and art.