Bard Explains the Arab Lobby

Mitchell Bard held fifty listeners spellbound Sunday night at the Boulder JCC, summarizing his new book, “The Arab Lobby” and then taking questions for an hour.  Some highights:

• The main movers behind the Arab Lobby are Big Oil and Saudi Arabia.
• Saudi Arabia and the US have a Faustian bargain going back 80 years or more:  Keep the Saudi Royal’s heads attached to their necks, in return for reasonably stable oil prices and supply.
• The only President to get anything else from the Saudis was Kennedy, whose pressure on the Saudis succeeded in getting them to finally outlaw slavery (100 years after the US did).
• The Saudis are paying to influence American textbooks about Middle East history and politics, even down to the K-12 level.

For more, see Stan Kreis’ review of “The Arab Lobby” in the BJN.