Across the street from the annual policy planning convention held by the pro-Israeli lobbying group American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a band of tireless grassroots activists staged their own counter-conference the weekend of March 2-4, which they dubbed “Occupy AIPAC,” like the story of David versus Goliath. The organizers of the event hosted speakers and informational seminars, took to the streets to protest and even infiltrated and disrupted AIPAC’s gathering as more than half of Congress, the U.S. president, the top GOP presidential candidates and a host of foreign dignitaries showed up to pay homage to the most powerful lobby in America.
According to Rae Abileah, the co-director of the group CODEPINK, at one point four Occupy AIPAC activists managed to infiltrate an AIPAC policy conference panel titled “Stopping Iran,” in which Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) and Israeli Ambassador Jeremy Issacharoff were speakers. CODEPINK is among several groups that organized the weekend counter-conference.
Right in the middle of Rep. Ros-Lehtinen’s speech, the four stood up to interrupt—or “mic check” as they called it—the 10-term Cuban-American
congresswoman, shouting: “Ros-Lehtinen is pushing war based on lies,” “AIPAC supports endless war” and “Occupy Wall Street not Iran.”
As this was going on, another group unfurled a banner right inside the main hall hosting the AIPAC conference that read: “Don’t Bomb Iran.”
The activists videotaped AIPAC supporters’ violent reactions to the disruptions, posting the video to the Internet for the world to see. As this issue of AFP goes to press, the video has already received 15,000 viewings along with hundreds of comments denouncing AIPAC.
