Senator J. William Fulbright (1905-1995) Great Anti-Israel Hero

People often forget that US foreign policy wasn’t always completely controlled by puppets of the Israeli Lobby. There was a time when America First politicians held some sway in America. One of them was J. William Fulbright, who served in the US Senate representing Arkansas from 1945 to 1974. Fulbright was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for 15 years and stoutly opposed US support for the Zionist entity. Many think that Pat Buchanan’s statement that Congress was “Israeli occupied territory” was his original formulation, but Pat actually borrowed the term from Senator Fulbright.

Born in Missouri, he moved to Arkansas as an infant. He attained his undergraduate degree in Political Science from the University of Arkansas in 1925. He then went on to Pembroke College, Oxford for his masters and a law degree from George Washington University in 1934. He went on to teach law for a couple of years at the University of Arkansas and became president of the university in 1939, making him one of the youngest college presidents in the country. He was elected to Congress for one two-year term in 1942. In 1944 he won the Democrat primary for the US Senate, defeating a sitting Senator, Hattie Caraway and the sitting governor, Homer Adkins. A remarkable achievement. He went on to serve five terms.

As far as his foreign policy views, Fulbright initially supported the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, expanding US involvement in the Vietnam War in 1964. He privately quizzed Johnson on the matter and only reluctantly went along with the president. A year later, after research on his part, he turned against the war completely.

The Arkansas senator was very convinced that the US bias toward Israel soured relations with the Arab world and that it would eventually limit access to middle-eastern oil. In 1962 and 1963, he initiated hearings before his committee on Israeli influence operations in the United States. He was one of the first people to bring up the fact that as a foreign lobby AIPAC should have been registered as a foreign lobby under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which in recent years has been a staple position of anti-Zionism in the US. He also exposed how allegedly tax-free charitable monies given to non-profits somehow magically ended up in Israeli government coffers, a dubious method known as “fund recycling.” He had sharp questions about how the American Zionist Council used its funds.

In 1960, Fulbright fought against an anti-boycott measure added to US legislation which prohibited giving cash to Arab nations that were boycotting Israeli goods. The senator lambasted the Israelis in the wake of the USS Liberty incident, when an American naval ship was attacked by the Israeli Air Force killing our sailors. Fulbright also demanded that the US government force the Israelis to sign the Nuclear non-proliferation treaty, which, of course, never happened.

Fulbright’s activities were, of course, noticed by the Israeli Lobby. In the 1974 race for the senate, huge amounts of Jewish money went to his opponent in the Democrat primary Dale Bumpers, defeating him handily. Bumper’s campaign manager even bragged in public about the infusion of jewish money. Fulbright’s political career was over.

People can be forgiven in thinking that until recent years there was no opposition in the US to jewish supremacism and fanatical Zionism until a couple of years ago. We actually had a brave and intelligent head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that opposed the Zionist steamroller in the sixties and seventies. J. William Fulbright passed away in 1995, but he deserves to be remembered for putting principle over politics and we should honor his memory.