JOHN DUKE ANTHONY is also in effect a Foreign Agent, but he keeps pretending otherwise.
It is true that mighty AIPAC and other Jewish and Zionist organizations are actually lobbying, as well as intelligence and p.r. conduits, for Israel and should in fact also have to register as foreign agents. Not only is that the role they play, but the history of AIPAC and some other organizations like ZOA and the Presidents Conference makes it very clear what their lobbying role in Washington is all about.
But there are others doing similar things for Arab regimes, sometimes in plain view, as John Duke, however much puny in comparison. He and the organization he founded many years ago, known as the National Council on U.S. Arab Relations, are hardly independent. Purportedly educational, both NCUSAR and John have evolved over the years to be very clearly lobbying arms of Saudi Arabia and the GCC.
I ran into John unexpectedly some months past in a break at his annual conference. We’ve known each other a long time, never been friends going to lunch or anything like that, but maintaining a kind of Washington cordiality and never saying much to each other knowing that we truly pray in different churches (political and existential, not religious). But as we literally were walking by each other it would have been even more awkward to say nothing. So I simply said, “Well John, you’ve had another ‘successful’ conference”. This was my way of being subtle and even diplomatic on the spur of the moment. John stopped for a moment as I did and said, “Well Mark, coming from you that’s very meaningful. You’ve been pretty rough on us.” With a few more nothing and seemingly innocent words both of us left it at that.
These days John is in Saudi Arabia again attending the latest GCC summit. He’s the only American he continually emphasizes who has attended every one of them in fact going back some 30 years. In advance of that John published a very extensive and elaborate review of GCC and Saudi policies which is no way can be considered academic or journalistic, it has be considered clearly paid lobbying, fairly sophisticated actually.
And yet at the same time NCUSAR, of which he is Founder and CEO, is sending out fund-raising appeals calling for supporting “Cross-cultural Understanding” with your “tax-deductible” contributions — and getting more money mostly from corporate executives beholden to the Saudis and GCC.
Now Trump wants us to believe that on the very day he was having a major dinner with the Chinese President he didn’t know a major Chinese business figure had been arrested via Canada.
