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Comment by some-guy | Hacker News Reader

Not the point here: Israel is our "greatest ally" and the target is our lawmakers.

I think you would be surprised by the list of countries the US IC believes are our most important intelligence "adversaries"; the list includes many of our allies.

"greatest ally" according to whose claim? that reads like propaganda, just plain nonsense. perhaps a contender for greatest external funding liability? not sure how the hard data would rank such numerically.

I believe this was sarcarsm, since American politicians like to always pitch Israel as "America's Greatest Ally", thus making it a common target of sarcasm

ahhh....that makes sense then.

as i think of it, it's strange that the US supposedly has a separation of religion from state, in the constitution+amendments, yet funds an external country based on a religion. i wonder what fraction of donations to Israel come back as lobbyists paying politicians to fund the next round of donations. there must be datasets recorded somewhere, but i have no idea where to look.

> American politicians like to always pitch Israel as "America's Greatest Ally"

In the Middle East. Which is sort of true. (Cairo, Riyadh and Doha aren’t as reliable.)

Our traditional greatest ally is the U.K.

France and Poland from the revolutionary war, too, perhaps.

> France and Poland from the revolutionary war

France is our oldest ally. But it (and Poland) are weaker and have been less reliably at our side than Britain has been.

As far as I can tell "greatest ally" is just something these accounts say.

Jordan seems to be a much stronger friend to us in the region.

Jordan never sunk a US Navy ship and then machine-gunned the sailors trying to escape in lifeboats. But if they did, they wouldn't have painted over the jet's markings first.

Yeah, AIPAC really opened my eyes to how deep the ties go. They spend tons of money to put their preferred lawmakers in place, and openly brag on Twitter about how much they spend and their extremely successful track record. It just -feels- like it should be illegal, seeing as it's a foreign country.

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