‘US public defeats pro-Israeli lobby on anti-Iran bill’

“This [hold up] is the result of really hundreds of thousands of US citizens lobbying congressional members against the pro-Israeli lobby AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee,” William Beeman, a professor with the University of Minnesota, said in an interview.
 
The anti-Iran sanctions bill, introduced by hawkish lawmakers in mid December, has lost momentum in the US Senate after opposition from key members of the Senate Democratic leadership.
 
    “…this [failure] is I think a very good sign. It shows that the American public is actually more sensible than our legislators and certainly is not interested in having our legislators be subject to lobbying from these external groups,” the analyst pointed.
 
AIPAC, which is the most powerful pro-Israel lobby group in the US, has been lobbying on Capitol Hill to convince US senators to co-sponsor the new sanctions bill against Iran.
 
The group even launched an attack on a pro-Israel Jewish Democrat in the House of Representatives, Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, for not supporting the new anti-Iran legislation.
 
Last month, two Senate Democratic aides admitted that the sanctions legislation is already dead despite AIPAC’s efforts to derail nuclear negotiations.
 
Iran and the sextet– the US, France, Britain, Russia, China and Germany – inked an interim deal on Iran’s nuclear energy program in Geneva, Switzerland, last November. The deal came into force on January 20th.
 
Under the deal, Iran agreed to limit certain aspects of its nuclear activities as a confidence-building measure, and the world powers undertook to provide Iran with some sanctions relief and release more than $4 billion of Tehran’s oil revenues.