Bill Gertz
A long-running FBI espionage probe of the pro-Israel lobby in Washington appears to have been motivated in part by anti-Semitism, Larry Franklin, a former Pentagon official, told the Washington Times. Franklin said he had cooperated for ten weeks with federal agents conducting the probe, taping his conversations with officials of AIPAC and the Israeli Embassy. "One agent said to me, 'How can an Irish Catholic from the Bronx get mixed up with all these...,' and I finished the sentence for him: 'Jews?' And I proceeded to tell him that Christ and all the Apostles and even his mom were Jewish," Franklin said in an interview. "That [anti-Semitism] dimension was part of this investigation and may have been an initial incitement of this investigation," he said.
Franklin said he is a "practicing Catholic." "I guess I embraced Pope John Paul II's view that the Jewish people are our elder brothers, and there was never any prejudice in my family and should not be in my faith," he said.
(Washington Times)
