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Thursday, Oct. 29th, 9:00am, Pacific Time (12:-1:00pm, Eastern Time)!



Alison Weir will host the Council for the National Interest's new call-in radio show, "CNI: Jerusalem Calling" .

Her featured guest will be JEFFREY BLANKFORT.

For more information on the program (and archives), see:

http://www.wsradio.com/internet-talk-radio.cfm/shows/CNI:-Jerusalem-Calling.html

To call in with questions or comments: 877-474-3302



JEFFREY BLANKFORT

Longtime journalist, photographer, and radio host Jeffrey Blankfort is one of today's most penetrating analysts on Israel-Palestine. Blankfort reported on the power of the Israel Lobby for decades before the Walt-Mearsheimer book, even challenging Noam Chomsky to a debate on the subject (Chomsky refused).

Blankfort was raised in a Jewish non-Zionist family. His father had originally raised money for Israel, but when he then visited the new nation to see it first-hand, he was horrified at what he discovered, raising his children in full awareness of the 1947-49 ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the oppression that followed. Blankfort's first trip to the Middle East was to Lebanon in 1970.

Over the years Blankfort, formerly the editor of the Middle East Labor Bulletin and co-founder of the Labor Committee of the Middle East, tried to expose the facts about Israel, only to find numerous progressive leaders in Berkeley and beyond working to cover up the facts. As a result of his work on Palestine, Blankfort was marginalized for many years, until the internet made his work available to the larger population. If Americans Knew was one of the first organizations to disseminate his articles widely.

In February 2002, Blankfort won a lawsuit against the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which was found to have had a vast spying operation directed against American citizens opposed to Israel’s policies in the Occupied West Bank and Gaza and to the apartheid policies of the government of South Africa and passing on information to both governments.

Today Blankfort produces radio programs on three California stations and is working on a book on the Middle East. His photographs of the Anti-Vietnam War and Black Panthers Movements have appeared in numerous books and magazines.



Some of his articles are:



A War for Israel

http://www.ifamericansknew.org/us_ints/warforisrael.html



The Israel Lobby and the Left: Uneasy Questions

http://www.ifamericansknew.org/us_ints/pg-blankfort.html



The Chomsky/Blankfort Polemic

http://www.ifamericansknew.org/us_ints/nc-blankfort.html



The Debate that never Happened: Blankfort vs. Plitnick on the Israel Lobby

http://www.ifamericansknew.org/us_ints/iraq-pal-israel.html#debate



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