Jerusalem Women Speak
“Jerusalem Women Speak,” a lecture tour organized by the group Partners for Peace, just concluded a tour across New England.
It is worth remembering, then, what Partners for Peace is.
After a “Jerusalem Women Speak” tour several years ago, a student contributor to CAMERA’s On Campus magazine noted that
Partners for Peace was formed after the government rejected a tax-exempt status application from the Council for the National Interest (CNI). Afterward, CNI members created Partners for Peace as an outlet to pursue its activities. According to AIPAC’s Near East Report newsletter, CNI members were urged to support Partners as an alternative. Like Partners for Peace, CNI was built on avowed hostility to Israel and a tendency to espouse conspiracy theories. CNI Foundation Chairman Paul McCloskey went so far as to refer to Israel as “an ugly little nation” and “a potential enemy of the United States.” In addition, CNI Chairman Paul Findley has accused the Mossad (Israeli intelligence) of playing a role in the JFK assassination and attempting to kill President George Bush.
Partners for Peace’s ties to CNI do not end there, however. Not only do the two organizations share an office, but they are also joined by marriage (Bird’s husband, Eugene, serves as CNI president).
CNI, in turn, grew out of the American Educational Trust (AET), which publishes The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. To characterize the publication as biased against Israel would be a serious understatement. The Washington Report has slapped a string of caustic labels on Israel’s defenders, among them “fifth columnists,” “Israel-firsters,” “viruses,” “bacteria,” “cancer,” and an “alien intrusion” operating “against the interests of the United States.” Furthermore, the White House, the State Department, Congress, and the media have been defined by the publication as “Israeli occupied territory.”
In the past, Washington Report publisher Andrew Killgore and editor Richard Curtiss, as well as former CNI Executive Director David Bowen, have delivered speeches at meetings of the Liberty Lobby, which the Anti-Defamation League has called “the most influential and active anti-Semitic propaganda organization in the United States.”
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