Mccain is considered a certainty to win the safe majority of the Jewish vote this election- his opponent is willing to actually talk to the President of iran, and his middle name is Husein.
So he did not disappoint in his speech to AIPAC:-
WASHINGTON - In a major address on Middle East policy on Monday, Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican candidate for president, pledged to maintain the George W Bush administration's hard line against Iran and expressed strong skepticism about the ability of the current Palestinian leadership to reach a peace accord with Israel.
McCain, who was speaking at the opening session of the annual policy conference of the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), called for much tougher international sanctions against Iran, including a "severe limit on Iranian imports of gasoline" and a "worldwide divestment campaign" directed against companies doing business with the Islamic Republic, as a means of forcing it to freeze its alleged nuclear weapons program.
And he ridiculed his likely Democratic rival in the November elections, Senator Barack Obama, for proposing unconditional talks with the Iranian leadership on a range of issues,
despite the fact that a new poll just released by the Gallup organization found that nearly six in 10 US voters, including nearly half of all Republican respondents, believe a US-Iranian summit would be a "good idea"....
After two and a half days of speeches, including by Obama and Senator Hillary Clinton, as well as the top leadership of both parties in Congress, as many as 7,000 members of the group from all over the country will trek to Capitol Hill to press their lawmakers to quickly approve pending bills in Congress that, if approved, would impose a new set of sweeping unilateral sanctions against Iran and companies that do business with it.
AIPAC includes a wide range of national Jewish groups, such as Americans for Peace Now and Israel Policy forum, that favor engagement by the US - directly or indirectly - with a number of Israel's regional foes, including the Palestinian Hamas, Lebanon's Hezbollah, Syria, and even Iran itself.
However, its neo-conservative leadership remains, for the most part, strongly opposed to such a strategy - in defiance of the current Israeli government, which has itself become increasingly involved in recent weeks in indirect talks with Hamas, Hezbollah and Damascus.
Full Article-
Asia Times Online :: Middle East News, Iraq, Iran current affairs
Now if you have read the above, it is pretty obvious that the leadership of AIPAC is considerably more hawkish on ME Issues than:-
The US public
Many of the Jewish organisations that are a part of AIPAC
The Israeli government
The Israeli people (who are less hawkish than the Israeli government)
What is going on here then? The leadership of the worlds most powerful lobby group have apparently hijacked it's rather broad charter, to concentrate on their own Zionist, neo-Conservative viewpoints. I am curious to know actually why there is not more publicity about this- Jewish interest groups would not typically remain silent if another minority faction was steamrolling their own interests.
