By Tim Murphy * | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

American TV personality and evangelical Christian leader Pat Robertson, backed by an Israeli flag, delivers a speech on a pilgrimage to Israel. AP Photo/Brennan Linsley

Robertson: I was thinking, you know, if you oppose Muslims, what is said? Well, you're a bigot, right? Terrible bigotry. I wonder what were people who opposed the Nazis. Were they bigots?

Co-host: Well, in that day I think they were looked down upon and frowned upon.

Robertson: Why can't we speak out against an institution that is intent on dominating us and imposing Sharia law and making us all part of a universal caliphate? That's the goal of some of these people. Why is that bigoted? Why is it bigoted to resist Adolf Hitler and the Nazis and to say we don't want to live under Nazi Germany?

Watch:

Video link: http://youtu.be/mQOujxM585w

Not to nitpick here, but people who opposed the Nazis were not "looked down upon and frowned upon" as bigots. This was a few decades ago, so it's understandably a little obscure, but the United States actually went to war with Nazi Germany. There was a movie about it and everything.

As you'd probably guess, this is hardly the first time Robertson has compared a large and diverse group of people to Nazis:

Here's Robertson in 1995:

"Since the advent of the head of the Justice Department, Janet Reno, things have gotten out of control. Something is going on that is just very unwholesome in this nation....this is a shocking abuse of federal power. It is reminiscent of the Nazis. Something has got to be done."

And in 1993:

"Just like what Nazi Germany did to the Jews, so liberal America is now doing to the evangelical Christians. It's no different. It is the same thing. It is happening all over again. It is the Democratic Congress, the liberal-based media and the homosexuals who want to destroy the Christians."

Also in 1993:

"When lawlessness is abroad in the land, the same thing will happen here that happened in Nazi Germany. Many of those people involved in Adolph Hitler were Satanists. Many of them were homosexuals. The two things seem to go together."

And in 1990:

"[T]he liberal media and the screenwriters...are the spiritual descendants of Goebbels and the Nazis. They're not just talking about kikes and Jews; they're not talking about, quote, 'n-----s.' They're talking about Christians now."

And in 1984:

"The state is steadily attempting to do something that a few states other than the Soviets and the Nazis have attempted to do, namely, to take the children away from the parents and educate them in a philosophy that is amoral, anti-Christian and humanistic and to show them a collectivist philosophy that will ultimately lead to Marxism, socialism, and a communistic type of ideology."

So as you can see, Muslims are the new gays are the new Clinton Justice Department are the new gays (again) are the new screenwriters are the new public schools are the new Nazis; it's worse than we thought.

* Tim Murphy is a reporter at Mother Jones. Email him with tips and insights at tmurphy [at] motherjones [dot] com.

Source: Mother Jones

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By Gordon Duff* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

Politics, Religion And The Military, A Recipe For Disaster

A Trophy For The Mighty Victors

A dozen American soldiers are under arrest, five for murder, in crimes that we may never know the full extent of. The accusations, killing for sport, collecting fingers as trophies, is "meat" for the media. It will sell papers, it will bring TV viewers and, combined with the threatened Koran burning and the "hatefest" over the Manhattan Islamic Center, everything imaginable is being done to make certain that terrorism is alive and well and aimed at the United States.

The Koran burning is cancelled but we can't undo the murders, not this set, not the last nor the decade long nightmare beginning, not with 9/11 but the election of George W. Bush, or more honestly, Dick Cheney.

Today's killers, accused killers, alleged killers, are they serial killers, criminal psychopaths, or "boys out for a good time and things got a bit out of hand?" Do we blame them or the America's failed attempt to build a permanent wartime standing army, replacing traditions with cheap politics and "revival tent" religion?

A normal argument that "liberals" make is that it wasn't them but their environment that was responsible. That's just an excuse and we all know it. We also know that this isn't the first time this has happened. The stories, all verified, of kidnapping and rape as with Dr. Aafia or dragging detainees behind vehicles, torturing them with power tools or flying them to the ends of the earth, Egypt, Bulgaria, Poland, "one way trips" that no "detainee" has ever returned from or has ever survived, are no different than these new crimes.

We also can no longer ignore the fact that, thus far, over 75% of our "terrorist detainees" are the wrong people, simply "mistaken identity." The remaining 25% are waiting for court dates for release. Estimates that as low as 5% of those captured, detained, really kidnapped, during the Bush administration were ever involved in anything.

These are the facts, not published but real, the results of court records open to every American.

When Attorney General Alberto Gonzales issued opinions that kidnapping, torture and indefinite detention of anyone, American citizen or not was, in his opinion "legal" he knew where this would go.

Were Nuremberg type trials to begin today, they could go on for years, the defendants filling the dock making up a "who's who" of America's political, economic, religious and media elite. Oh, and more than a few from our military would be there too. It would almost be as though we had "flushed" the Pentagon. At one point, we could claim that, even where there were parallels between the "War on Terror" and Hitler's "Blitzkreig" and "Final Solution," we could always claim our scale was so much smaller.

We aren't so certain of even that anymore, how could we be when nothing can be trusted, nothing from any source under control by the corporations that tell us what they want us to believe. How many secret prisons is America running? Where are they? How many have been held there for how long? How many have been killed?

The people of Nazi Germany, when asked these same questions didn't know.

How many are we killing each day in Afghanistan? Hitler sent special military groups, a Nazi "Special Forces" into the Ukraine and Belarus, to wipe out the local population. Are our Predator unmanned aircraft doing the same thing, randomly wiping out Afghanistan and sections of Pakistan, village by village? Much of the world thinks so and nobody has been able to prove them wrong.

Five or ten years from now, how many countries will be exhuming mass graves, sites of victims of America's psychopaths?

There is no difference between these five recently arrested and the Special Forces squads doing exactly the same thing. The only difference is using known unreliable intelligence, let me correct that, known "gossip" as a basis for executing civilians or doing it for entertainment.

What we have seen is that, inside our military, the pride of our nation, where our sons and daughters risk their lives in what they have been told is honorable service of mankind, we are harboring criminal psychopaths who murder the innocent at the orders of the Pentagon's "grocery clerks." From the 1979 film by Francis Ford Coppola, Apocalypse Now:

Marlin Brando As Colonel Kurtz, Apolcalypse Now (1979)

Colonel Kurtz: I expected someone like you. What did you expect? Are you an assassin?
Captain Willard: I'm a soldier.
Colonel Kurtz: You're neither. You're an errand boy, sent by grocery clerks, to collect a bill.

I am supposed to say these men are not guilty. I don't believe it for an instant, nobody does. They are only doing what they were taught. Murder and hate became "policy" for the military when Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, an ignorant extremist bigot, was chosen by President Bush to head our armed forces.

He and Vice President Dick Cheney, retreads from the disastrous Nixon years, petty political functionaries, saw the opportunity to recreate the military as a political and religious organization modeled on Himmler's infamous SS. It isn't just forcing religious instruction on the troops or the selective screening at the service academies with special preference given to Evangelical, read "Christian Zionist" applicants, giving us the "dumbed down" officer corps that has overseen the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Will the last real warrior resigning in disgust please turn out the lights

It wasn't just in the training, constant talk about "the conflict of civilization," Christianity versus Islam. The normal "pep talks" about military tradition were replaced by political vitriolic, partisanship and playing on racial and ethnic fears, class envy and cheap propaganda. They Nazi's never tried anything like this, the educational level of their military was much higher than that of typical American recruits. Their professional officer corps, taken from the Junker class, sons of the noble houses, were replaced by political hacks from the Nazi party. Some, like Erwin Rommel, were great commanders.

Those more like the neo-con underclass that, in Iraq and Afghanistan, has overseen the torture and rendition programs and political buffoonery and continual prayer sessions, products of the service academies and ROTC programs, were killed by their own men.

The problem isn't just the training or the wars or PTSD or "bad recruits" or even incompetent leadership. When General George C. Marshall, Army Chief of Staff assessed the officer corps in 1941, just after the Pearl Harbor attack, he was shocked. Over 10,000 officers in what was a relatively small military force were removed as unfit for command.

President George W. Bush went the other direction entirely. Our first Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was General Omar Bradley, possibly America's finest military leader. On October 1, 2001, while the rubble of the World Trade Center was till smouldering after 9/11, Bush appointed General Richard B. Myers, a "neo-con" dandy, tasked with building a force better suited for a 3rd world dictatorship than a modern democracy. Myers turned to religious extremists, political hacks and any officer willing to trade honor for a career.

This is how America conquered Iraq, won a war, accomplished a mission and destroyed itself at the same time. It was always Cheney and Rumsfeld, it had been for years, in one administration after another. Myers was just "small potatoes," a small man for a small job working for grocery clerks, collecting a bill.

Bush friend and ally, Saddam Hussein paid with his life. Was Osama bin Laden a Bush friend and ally also? History says yes.

When it came time for Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld to explain to the 9/11 Commission why the United States Air Force was on a "stand down" under his personal command on 9/11, it was General Myers holding his hand. Bad as these moments were, humiliating or worse, they may have been the high point of General Myers career.

Four years later, we had been beaten in two wars by forces one tenth our number, had worn our military down to a shadow of our most basic security requirements but one thing for sure, they would all vote Republican. It became a military of bloated waistlines, berets, dickeys, and medals for any and all. The American military became the most "thanked" and "congratulated" force in history.

With all the medals and fancy uniforms and 6000 calorie a day meals, or so the Pentagon loves telling journalists, something seemed to be very wrong.

Volunteers from the "all volunteer army" began "unvolunteering" in droves with 400,000, nearly a third of America's entire military pool, active duty, reserve and National Guard, filing for service connected disability from the Department of Veterans Affairs. The majority submitted documentation, medical findings, indicating severe lifelong disabilities. The majority of filings support the fact that soldiers leaving the military after repeated deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq will never be able to work, support a family or, in many cases, manage their own affairs.

25% of those who remain in the military are on anti-psychotic medications with thousands of those serving in Iraq and Afghanistan diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, a medical problem that precludes, not just combat deployment but any active duty.

Battalions of "disinformation" specialists spewed press releases by the dozen while military broadcasting parroted the neo-con and extremist Christian right, read "extremist-white supremist" Christian Zionist right message 24 hours a day to any member of the armed forces unfortunate to have access to a television. You couldn't watch a rerun of Gomer Pyle without the inane blithering of Vice President Cheney, real leader of "Bush America," another of a long list of American military experts without, not only one second of combat experience, but in Cheney's case, as with so many, not a minute in uniform of any kind.

Yesterday, America was panicked because two minor religious leaders have publicly planned to desecrate a Koran. Similar leaders had been burning American flags at the funerals of soldiers fallen in battle. Were Bush still in office, these two manics would be having lunch at the White House.

Secretary Rumsfeld would have named them honorary military chaplains.

Today, five Americans are under arrest as serial killers in uniform. They and their friends and who knows how many others have been hunting the people of Afghanistan for sport, killing them like animals and taking trophies, or so the representatives of the military justice system allege.

Anyone paying attention for the past decade should know. All these five Americans, five or a hundred and five or a thousand and five have done is exactly what they were told to do. If you can torture, you can kill. If you can kidnap, you can kill. If rape is "interrogation" can murder be wrong?

Who do we blame? We blame the Commander in Chief. He knew what he had inherited, a sick and dysfunctional institution of bottom-feeders, fanatics and fools, morally bankrupt cowards and bullies hiding behind a uniform and a bible.

We all knew it, every one of us.

* Gordon Duff is senior editor of Veterans Today.

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Illustration by Pete Pasho: www.dollopsofirony.com

By Gordon Duff* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

Whistleblower Or "Kapo Queen," American Censorship In High Gear

"I am in favor of the Zionist state. I would gladly kill Arabs, even slaughter them. I can't allow Arab lovers to ruin the perfect life I lead."....Eden Abergil

A "Kapo" was a Jew who served the Nazis, sometimes as administrators, but more often as thuggish camp police, even more brutal than the Nazi's themselves. Though over a million living in Israel claim to be "holocaust survivors," in reality only a few thousand survived the camps, many of them "Kapos." To help understand the absurdity of these "survivor" claims, we can examine another group from that era, American war veterans.

16 million Americans served in uniform during World War II. 292,000 were killed in the war. About one million survive today. The total Jewish population of countries controlled by Nazi Germany, prior to the holocaust according to the Jewish Virtual Library was 5, 811, 900. About one million survive today, we are told.

With so many Nobel Prize winners, mathematics is no longer Israel's strong suit. Neither is truth.

Whether discussing how many Palestinians were expelled, "liquidated" or imprisoned or how many tens of thousands of rockets Hamas has rained on Tel Aviv, with so few casualties, Israeli credibility is at an all time low. Eden Abergil has done as much as any Israeli citizen to bring that fact before the world, a young girl assigned to work as a Kapo in the Israeli "camp system." Is Abergil a victim, a humanitarian whistle-blower or a sociopathic Kapo torturer?

Oliver Lustig writes, in his Dictionary of the Camps:

"The Häftling (inmate) who was wearing on the left arm a black band on which it was written -KAPO- in Gothic letters of immaculate whiteness, was a chief...he could strike, beat, kill any Häftling who did not belong to the inner hierarchy of the camp...

Kapos were recruited from among sadists, from among the unscrupulous ones, who forgot they belonged to the human species, from among those who, faced with the alternative die or kill, preferred to kill. In order to prove their servility and to maintain their position as chiefs, they tried to surpass the SS-men in ferocity. The Kapos kit, beat, killed out of sadism or envy, out of the desire to assert themselves as chiefs or out fear of losing their function, out of hate of man or out of the mere pleasure to trample underfoot and torment the fellow men."

When CNN's Paula Hancocks reported the story, as is so often the case, both sides of the story were Israel. Hancock never asked why prisoners were blindfolded or about their fate. Hancock never asked what the job of camp "Kapo," how Eden Abergil and tens of thousands of other Israeli youths spend their national service, was like, the beatings, the humiliation and its obvious dehumanizing effect as was made clear by Abergil.

Was Eden Abergil a whistle-blower?

Was Abergil attempting to focus world attention on the 300,000 Palestinians who have "disappeared" over the past 60 years? Was she exposing the Israeli "gulag" system that may be holding up to 100,000 Palestinians prisoner? If this was her goal, CNN wasn't having any part of it. Not one question was asked about what her job was in the camps, how she felt about non-Jewish Israeli citizens. That came out later.

Eden Abergil, a 24 year old Israeli who recently finished her national service in the IDF, posted photographs on Facebook of herself with Palestinian torture victims. We have seen things like this before, of course, but last time it was Americans. We don't know how many photos we have or what acts they portray as CNN chose to show us only one, a depiction of Abergil mugging for the camera before a backdrop of blindfolded and "tie-wrapped" elderly Palestinian civilians.

When questioned by the Haaretz News Service in Israel, Abergail said:

I am in favor of the Zionist state. I would gladly kill Arabs, even slaughter them. I can't allow Arab lovers to ruin the perfect life I lead.

Abergil told CNN that she has received numerous death threats, many from her neighbors in Israel and has requested police protection. The question is, did Eden Abergil go on worldwide media proclaiming to be a murderous sociopath out of bad judgement or is this a clever attempt at depicting the IDF as torturers and war criminals? Now we have hundreds of similar photos going up from dozens of former IDF "kapos."

Abergil's photos are the first to come out of the camp system in Israel, known for its torture, summary executions, starvation and daily brutality. Little is known or has been reported in the west about the 60 year program of ethnic cleansing or the nature of Israel's apartheid state and system of racial and religious laws that openly discriminate against Christians and Muslims.

Comments by fellow Israeli's made on Abergil's Facebook page referred to photographs of the "chunky" former IDF "Kapo Queen" taken with torture victims as "sexy."

Abergil has raised, not only the ire of fellow Israeli's but military officials in Israel as well. With Israel's role in pushing America into a war with Iran coming under increasing attack and their role in falsifying intelligence leading to the disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq by the United States and Britain, the legitimacy of the "Jewish only" Zionist state in Israel has never been under wider pressure around the world.

With Israeli terrorist and serial killer, Elias Abuelazam being pulled off a flight from Atlanta to Tel Aviv and the recent failure by Israel to address the killing of between 9 and 16 unarmed civilians on the Mavi Marmara, the theft of millions in personal items and the illegal detention of up to two dozen peace activists seized in international waters, Israel's credibility, even while exercising "veto power" over unfavorable stories in the British and American press, is at an all time low.

In Britain, a website has been established, British Propaganda Corporation, not only spoofing the BBC, but highly critical of what is said to be virtual total Israeli control of all media outlets in Britain, including and especially the state run news service, the British Broadcasting Corporation.

Current population estimates put the number of displaced Palestinians at 6 million with those in temporary camps estimated by Israel at 400,000 and by other sources at between 700,000 and 980,000. Each year, new Israeli condominium projects displace thousands more, adding to the figures given. To this mix, we add nearly 1 million "guest workers" who, with their families, are also virtual refugees, "stateless persons" subject to expulsion at any time as with Palestinian citizens of Israel.

Managing this process, the destruction of tens of thousands of homes, a vast camp system, surveillance of not only Muslims in Palestine but the entire Jewish population as well, is a vast bureaucracy largely financed by the United States. Young Jews, many of them Americans, serve in the IDF, some of them as part of this system. Some of the daily tasks performed are not only inhumane and demeaning but, technically, criminal acts subject to punishment according to international convention.

Perhaps what we are told is right, all Muslims are extremists and must be cleansed from Israel in order to maintain the purity of the Jewish race, as touted in recent scientific studies quoted in the New York Times.

"The surveys provide rich data about genetic ancestry that is of great interest to historians. "I'm constantly impressed by the manner in which the geneticists keep moving ahead with new projects and illuminating what we know of history," said Lawrence H. Schiffman, a professor of Judaic studies at New York University.

One of the surveys was conducted by Gil Atzmon of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Harry Ostrer of New York University and appears in the current American Journal of Human Genetics. The other, led by Doron M. Behar of the Rambam Health Care Campusin Haifa and Richard Villems of the University of Tartu in Estonia, is published in Thursday's edition of Nature."

The studies along with extensive and continual mathematical documentary proof of 6 million Jewish deaths during the holocaust are used as justification for Israel's "junkyard dog" foreign policy, arms dealings with rogue states like Libya, South Africa and North Korea and their policies of ethnic cleansing. Much of the impetus for "revisionist" history, those advocating a reassessment of the holocaust after declassified documents have brought some traditionally accepted dogma into doubt, has been the desire to "disarm" Israels dependence on the holocaust to justify policies against the Palestinians that parallel many aspects of Germany's persecution of the Jews under Hitler.

Thus, we may have Eden Abergil, not as a Zionist "nutcase" but exposing, perhaps unsuccessfully, what no media organization will speak of. Those men on the bench, those prisoners, so many thousands arrested, detained, questioned, worse, and none ever released.

Where do they go?

* Gordon Duff is senior editor of Veterans Today.

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By Stuart Littlewood* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

In the five years since I became interested in the Palestinians, only two things of positive note have happened in the occupied territories.

The Palestinians held full and fair elections in 2006 to establish themselves as a democracy - and much good it did them.

And in Gaza these amazing people have resolutely survived a vicious land and sea blockade imposed by Israel and aided and abetted by the Western powers as soon as those elections put Hamas into government. They have resisted almost daily air strikes and armed intrusions for four years and courageously withstood the cowardly Israeli blitzkrieg of 20 months ago.

And during all that time they have endured unending barbarity and betrayal, which would have brought a lesser nation to its knees. They have come through.

I often wonder if the British could have clung on through the London blitz, which my family lived under, if they'd had nothing to fight with and nowhere to run and, in addition, they'd had to contend with Nazi tanks in the streets, thousands of checkpoints, Nazi rifle butts smashing down their front doors, and the foul stench of Nazi stormtroopers in their jackboots ransacking their homes and dragging off family members.

Palestinians have been put through that sort of mangle for decades. Death and misery still stalk their daily lives thanks to piss-poor Palestinian leadership and the international community's moral bankruptcy.

When Palestinians elected Hamas, sore losers Fatah set out to cause maximum trouble. The relentless pressures of occupation and bribery succeed in causing internal divisions and self-destruction. When an attempted coup was beaten off there were claims that Hamas "seized control" when it simply acted to enforce its legitimate authority.

With Palestine's internal squabbles continuing - even now - Yasser Arafat would be spinning under his mausoleum slab if he could see the depths to which his party has sunk.

Meanwhile, Israel's propaganda machine, unchallenged, churns out the lies that Western politicians and Western media feed on and broadcast in order to sustain the racist entity.

"Impossible to reach agreement with Israel"

Khalid Amayreh, writing in Desert Peace, describes how the Palestinian Authority's President Mahmoud Abbas is being pressed yet again by Washington to resume "seemingly futile" peace talks, while two of Fatah's veteran heavyweights speak out against any more concessions to the Obama administration.

Ahmed Qurei, a one-time aide to Arafat and a former prime minister of the PA, argued that, in view of Israel's refusal to give up the spoils of the 1967 war, it was pointless to keep talking just for the sake of it. Nineteen years of talks had achieved nothing. "It seems utterly impossible to reach an agreement with Israel. Therefore, the Palestinian people must seek alternatives... Israel is not willing to end its occupation and allow for the creation of a viable Palestinian state."

He didn't say what the "alternatives" might be, which is a little unhelpful.

At the same time Nabil Amr, former Palestine Liberation Organization ambassador in Cairo, condemned the Abbas leadership as "vacillating, inconsistent, and unable to withstand external pressure". He also had harsh words for "the mantra of American pressure", which was designed to push the Palestinian people into submission or capitulation. "There are those among us who are trying to portray American pressure as if it were expedient to our interests," said Amr. Actually, Obama is no friend. He has become a coercer, even a bully, while Netanyahu is given a free hand to dictate the rules of the game.

OK, so not all Fatah people are useless.

But there's a gaping hole at the heart of the Palestinian Authority's battered credibility - quite apart from a sickening lack of integrity. It's their failure to understand that the war of words, if conducted effectively, is more important than the war of bullets. Israeli spin doctor Mark Regev and his team of lie-mongers would be easy meat for a Palestinian media outfit that was properly trained, alert and reasonably well resourced.

Alas, the Palestinian Authority refuses to gear up to meet the challenge. So the Israelis run rings round their victim - though not as much as they used to. The Zionist regime's "crapaganda" effort has been significantly blunted not by the Palestinian Authority, which remains paralytic, but the actions of student groups and other pro-Palestinian activists around the world, who are beginning to put the Israelis in their place.

It is hugely disappointing to friends and supporters that Ramallah's hot-shots have failed to put a coherent message across, supposing they actually had one. When I was writing my book (in 2006) I tried several times through London and Ramallah to arrange a meeting with Fatah bosses. They wouldn't even give me the time of day. They simply didn't care about communicating with the outside world. So I joined the growing multitude who wrote them off as a waste of space. Their antics since then have confirmed my assessment.

It is vitally important for Palestinian embassies in London and other key capitals to become a ready source of newsworthy material, and to proactively set the news agenda with spokespeople speaking clear and faultless English. Until this happens it will not be possible to engage the interest of mainstream media, and Palestinians will continue to lose the propaganda battle even though truth and justice are on their side.

Yes, we all know the British media are biased. But editors say they receive press releases from the London embassy "once in a blue moon", while the Israelis take the initiative on the news front and fall over backwards to make a reporter's life easy.

"We are not trained like the Israelis," I heard one senior PA man say. Exactly. That's the problem. The PA was offered media skills training some four years ago and turned it down. There may be murky reasons. It has been suggested that the PA, in its game of "footsie" with the US, was made to promise not to embarrass Israel publicly. This has given rise to suspicions that Palestinian ambassadors around the world are gagged by the regime in Ramallah and prevented from crossing swords with their blood-thirsty opponents. Why else would headquarters have left its London office, in particular, so woefully lacking in the skills and resources needed to make a proper impact at this important time?

I don't believe they are batting for Palestine at all. But that's just a personal opinion.

The wreckage of Gaza, the great suffering and the day-to-day air-strikes against its civilians - these ongoing crimes are allowed to be lost in the smoke and mirrors of Netanyahu's scheme to divert attention towards Iran.

Netanyahu briefs Western journalists on his outrageous programme of conquest, implying that Palestinians must accept settlements declared illegal under international law and insisting that Israeli "sovereignty" over Jerusalem cannot be questioned. The PA's media experts - if they had any - could make mincemeat of Israel's preposterous claims and reframe the occupation in a way that told the world the truth.

"A house divided cannot stand"

Ordinary working people from countries far away, who put their hands in their own pockets and bravely drove with Free-Gaza convoys or sailed with mercy-mission ships, have done far more for the Palestinian cause than the internationally-funded, natty-suited poseurs who have no democratic mandate but strut the international stage achieving - well, achieving what?

Fatah have done themselves (and others) irreparable damage. They have shot their bolt. How will they command respect in the foreseeable future?

Meanwhile, it is four-and-a-half years since the fateful day Hamas was elected to power. They may have been surprised and unprepared then, but there is no excuse for squandering such a heaven-sent opportunity now. If, as the Islamic resistance movement has said before, it is prepared to accept the reality of Israel behind the internationally-recognized pre-1967 borders, its much criticized Charter no longer has a place in Hamas diplomacy. Why hasn't it been consigned to the wastepaper basket of Palestinian history and replaced with something more constructive?

Hamas must do (within chosen limits, of course) whatever it takes to abolish its sinister image and make the rest of the world feel comfortable. It must erase its 'terrorist' reputation, whether justified or not.

It must remove obstacles to cooperation. It must take the wind out of Israel's and America's sails. In short, it must reinvent itself as a matter of urgency.

It must re-brand, open the door and make itself more approachable.

This wouldn't be difficult. Hamas's government team are well educated and competent. They have been tested like no other. Some are described as hardliners but they are not generally seen as Islamic extremists, and I heard no serious complaints from the Christian community when I was there. There is every reason to believe that the tradition of getting along together is still cherished despite the best efforts of "Christian" warmongers of the West to drive a wedge between Muslim and Christian.

It seems to me that if Western politicians can enthusiastically hobnob with rabid Zionists, ignore their war crimes and persistent lawlessness, and even wave the Israeli flag for them back in London and Washington, they should find it perfectly agreeable to sit down with not-so-rabid Islamists.

But how do we get to that point?

Two years ago a Palestine strategy group produced a report called "Regaining the Initiative - Palestinian Strategic Options to End Israeli Occupation" (PDF). Besides reminding Palestinians what their strategic objectives should be, it urged them "to seize their destiny in their own hands" by refusing to enter into peace negotiations unless the international community dealt first with issues relating to national self-determination, liberation from occupation, individual and collective rights, and enforcement of international law.

Only when these priorities were met could peacemaking and state-building begin.

First things first, right?

Secondly it spelled out the need for national unity. "A house divided against itself
cannot stand... Palestinian strategic action is impossible if the Palestinian nation is unable to speak with one voice or to act with one will."

Right again. Well-wishers like me shake their heads in disbelief at the ongoing disunity.

The report, which was funded by the EU, concluded by saying:

What Palestinians must be prepared to undertake is nothing less than a final and conclusive strategic battle with Israel... The main conclusion of the strategic review conducted by the Palestine Strategy Study Group is that Palestinians have more strategic cards than they think - and Israel has fewer.

If that's the case, the authors might consider turning their report into a fully-fledged action plan taking into account what has happened in the last two years and what might happen next if the paralysis continues, and making it a working document for the international community as well as the PA and Hamas to study.

Perhaps they have already done so.

But whoever rules in Palestine will never win any battles with Israel or the US without a proper media set-up and an effective communications strategy.

* Stuart Littlewood is author of the book Radio Free Palestine, which tells the plight of the Palestinians under occupation. Read other articles by Stuart, or visit Stuart's website.

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By Lawrence Davidson* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

The Bedouin village of al-Arakib

Palestinian children and women sleep in the shade after Israel ethnically cleansed them from their village.

On 26 July 2010 Israeli police armed with tear gas, a water canon and two helicopters forced the 200 Bedouin residents of the southern Israeli village of al-Arakib out of their homes. Most of the furniture was then removed from the village's 45 buildings, which were flattened using bulldozers. It is to be noted that the victims of this act are not residents of the Palestinian occupied territories. They are non-Jewish citizens of the State of Israel.

The news of these home demolitions made it to CNN in a short report entitled "Bedouins evicted from village in southern Israel". The Bedouin families explained that this was ancestral land on which they had lived for generations going back to the days of the Ottoman Empire. They even have their original land deeds. Israeli government officials retorted they did not care because they chose not to recognize the Bedouin claim. Why not? Well, all the land of Israel is reserved for the Jewish people and these folks are not Jewish. As far as police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld was concerned, that meant they were living there "illegally". The government expects the Bedouin to move to "reservations" that have been set aside for them.

This sort of thing happens all the time in "the only democracy in the Middle East". According to the Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions, over 24,000 Palestinian homes have been torn down or blown up in the occupied territories alone. The vast majority of similarly destroyed homes in Israel proper are also those of Palestinians, making Israel's law of eminent domain a racist weapon. In the case of al-Arakib, the Israeli government says it will be turning the village land into part of a new "Jewish National Fund forest". But there is every indication that the area will eventually be opened to Jewish settlement, with preference given to "young couples in the army". Sometimes the Bedouin serve in the Israeli armed forces, but they won't qualify for this future perk.

So far this is a story that can be replicated thousands of times and thus just another day in the life of Israel's segregated non-Jews. So why draw attention to the quite ordinary fate of the 200 people from al-Arakib? The answer to this question comes from the following line in the CNN report, "the Israeli forces arrived in the village accompanied by busloads of civilians who cheered as the dwellings were demolished". This makes the whole incident a "sit up and take notice" kind of event.

Israel's teenage police volunteers

This sentence in the CNN report caught the eye of members of Ta'ayush, a small movement within Israel that organizes joint Palestinian-Jewish resistance to the Israeli occupation. They wanted to identify who the "cheering civilians" might be and so sent a delegation to al-Arakib soon after the demolitions took place. There they interviewed the village leaders and others, all of whom are now camped out in tents at the site of their demolished homes. The report of what they learned, accompanied by pictures, is now posted on the web. Here is some of what it says:

1. The cheering civilians were all Israeli Jewish high school students who had volunteered as "police civilian guards" to take part in this assault.

2. These teenagers did more then cheer. "Prior to the demolitions, the student volunteers were sent into the villagers' homes to extract their furniture and belongings." In the process they vandalized the sites, "smashing windows and mirrors ... and defacing family photographs." With the furniture piled up outside, the students "lounged around" on it while waiting for the bulldozers. This was done "in plain sight of the owners."

3. While the bulldozers were doing their work, the teenagers "celebrated".

What does it all mean?

The incorporation of Jewish youth into the racist and destructive pattern of behaviour exhibited in this incident is almost inevitable. You simply cannot raise up generation after generation within an environment of officially sanctioned racism and not get many of the young seeking confirmation of their place in the community through unjust sociopolitical actions. We can expect to hear more about this sort of officially organized youth thuggery in Israel. It is a logical tactic for the state to use, particularly at a time when the country is becoming increasingly criticized and isolated.

Nor is this sort of thing historically unique. Reading about this incident one can see intimations of the youth organizations of fascist Italy and Spain, Nazi Germany and Communist China during the Cultural Revolution. More explicitly though, one can see in this two more immediate precedents. The first is Vladimir Jabotinsky's youth movement Betar. Up until his death in 1940 Jobotinsky was the leader of the Zionist Revisionsts, the most militant, and often most terror prone, of pre-1948 Zionists. Likud and its kin are successors of the Revisionist movement. As part of this history, Betar was founded in 1923 in order to "educate its members with a military and nationalistic spirit". The teenagers at al-Arakib are a good match. The second precedent, and one noted in the Ta'ayush report, are the youth involved in the violent Israeli settler movement. The Ta'ayush investigators observed that the behaviour of the teenage volunteers at al-Arakib was "strikingly reminiscent of the behavior of settler youth in Hebron who pelt Palestinian shopkeepers in the old city with eggs, rocks and human waste. If there is a distinction between the two cases, it is that the Hebron settlers act as vigilantes while the teenagers of the Israeli civilian guard vandalize Arab property as agents of the state."

I will end this analysis on a personal note. I grew up in a liberal and secular Jewish American household that adhered to the values of equity and justice in their idealized American forms. At the time we all thought that these were perfectly compatible with Jewish teachings. Following from those values, as a teenager I involved myself in the civil rights movement and the resistance against war in Vietnam. It seemed not only the right thing, but also the natural thing to do. On rare occasion some of my adult relatives used negative Yiddish terms to refer to African-Americans, but that was the closest I ever came to experiencing illiberal sentiments among Jews. Then in 1972, as part of a wider visit to the Middle East, I spent 10 days in Israel. It was a real culture shock mainly because for the first time I met openly racist Jews, many of them Americans of my own age.

The shock of those 10 days has worn off long ago. But it was replaced by a lasting conviction that Zionism is bad for the Jews in exact proportion to its negative impact on the Palestinians. As the Zionists ethnically cleanse and otherwise destroy Palestinians and their society, they destroy Judaism and mutate themselves, and all others who support them, into barbarians. That includes those teenagers at al-Arakib. It is a matter of ends equalling means and so cannot be otherwise. That is why all Jews would do well to heed the words of Booker T. Washington (1856-1915), an emancipated American slave and fighter for African American dignity, "You can't hold a man down without staying down with him."

* Lawrence Davidson is professor of history at West Chester University. He is the author of numerous books, including Islamic Fundamentalism and America's Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood.

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By Dr. Sami Alrabaa* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

The Holocaust Hypocrisy

Undoubtedly, the "Holocaust" which was inflicted on the Jews before the II World War was a crime against humanity; it was an egregious genocide, like several other genocides inflicted on the Native Americans, African Americans, and the Armenians, for instance. But as far the Jews are concerned the Holocaust is a "unique" crime, incomparable with any other crime. Day in and day out, the Jews across the globe insist that comparing the Holocaust with other crimes is politically incorrect and impermissible.

You can question the severity of any crime, but not the Holocaust, otherwise you are branded as anti-Semitic and one of those right-wing populists.

This is reminiscent of the racial discrimination in the US until the 1960s. Racial discrimination was "politically correct" at least in the America. Critics of racial discrimination were portrayed as "anti-American" and "communists".

Every chapter in the human history was dominated by a certain mindset, regardless how irrational and inhumane it was. What was politically correct proved later to be incorrect. Over more than three centuries, racial discrimination against African Americans was politically correct, at least in America.

After the II World War, the Jews have set out to single out their "Holocaust" as the WORST atrocity ever inflicted on a religious minority. They have insisted that any description short of that is improper and anti-Semitic. This implies a perverse discrimination against victims of other genocides. This mindset dominates the media and political life at least in the West and handled as politically correct per excellence. But, like other mindsets, sooner or later, this prevailing mindset will disappear and the Holocaust will be treated as not superior to other crimes against humanity. Many field studies, which have not been published for fear of provoking the Jewish lobby, prove without any shred of doubt that ordinary people view the Holocaust as a crime like any other crime.

In Germany and in the West at large, you are not allowed to compare any crime to the Holocaust. For the German establishment (media and politics across the board), controlled by an influential Jewish lobby, the Holocaust is a "UNIQUE" crime in the history of mankind. If someone slips and compares the Holocaust, even metaphorically, to any crime anywhere in the world, they are immediately urged to withdraw their comparison. The Holocaust is more "sacred" than the Bible and the Koran. Most recently, the Pope's secretary compared the media campaign about child abuse in Catholic institutions to the hate campaign against Jews under the Nazis before the II World War. The Jewish lobby rushed to muzzle him and ordered him to apologize, which he did.

Discrimination of any kind is politically incorrect. But it seems that Jews insist that discrimination against other victims of atrocities is "legitimate". It also seems that Jewish blood is more precious than other bloods.

By the way, denying the "Holocaust" is illegal and punishable in Germany and Austria. Think of the British David Irving who was jailed in Austria for simply saying that the 6 million Jews who were burned to death by the Nazis is exaggerated. Recently, a German court ruled that the British bishop, Richard Williamson had to pay a fine of € 10 million for claiming that the Holocaust never took place.

Likewise, if the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinajad happens to visit Austria or Germany, he would be persecuted and jailed, although he never denied the Holocaust. He simply criticized the number of Jews killed by the Nazis; Ahmedinajad believes that the 6 million is an exaggerated figure.

However, when you talk in private to Germans, they tell you, this is absurd. Nobody dare to compare the Holocaust to other crimes and genocides in the history of mankind. If you criticize that then you are branded as "anti-Semitic"!

By the way, the political establishment in Germany avoids conducting surveys about sensitive issues like the Holocaust and Islamism, for example, constructing minarets. More often than not, the public thinks differently than the political establishment and main stream media preach.

Jewish history is omnipresent in contemporary Germany. No day passes by without a Jewish story. All kinds of stories are told in newspapers, radios, and TVs, short, long, true, and fictitious stories are told.

How about crimes committed against the Native Americans and African Americans, just to name a few? For the Jewish lobby and mainstream media, you are comparing apples to oranges.

According to the British Encyclopedia, the Belgium King Leopold II (1835-1909) ordered the killing of 12 million Africans in Congo. This is real Holocaust. But this fact is as dead as Leopold himself. African Americans, Congolese, and Native Americans never received any kind of compensation, but the Jews received huge sums of money.

Along their history until now, the Jews have always marketed themselves as victims in the Diaspora; in Spain, Europe, and the Middle East.

The Iranian nuclear program which Israel blasts, day in and day out, is a welcome opportunity to play the victim. But how about the Israeli nuclear arsenal? Neither the West nor the IAEA dare check out this arsenal.

Further, Israel in not interested in peace. Peace with its Arab neighbors would mean an end to the "victim theory".

The Media Hypocrisy

I have been living in Germany for the past 30 years working as a sociology and communication professor. Hence, I know what I am talking about. I could fill up volumes about the hypocrisy and contradictions reproduced by the German media and German politics.

The German mainstream media and political establishment divide the world into democratic countries and dictatorships. Countries of the so called Third World which hold elections and have a parliament are branded as democratic, provided of course they are friendly to the West. It does not matter whether these countries introduce political and socio-economic reforms or not. Despotic Arab regimes with dismal human rights records are rarely criticized. They are branded as "moderate" and allegedly play a "geo-strategic role in the Middle East".

The truth of the matter, the West benefits from the Saudi billions of petrodollars. These huge sums of money are largely invested in the West. In addition, introducing real democracy in the Arab world would leave the West without stooge allies.

Democratic countries, like Iran, Bolivia, and Venezuela, for instance, which have introduced huge economic reforms and narrowed the gap between the rich and poor, are arbitrarily depicted by the Western media and political establishment as "dictatorships".

Also, the West accuses Third World countries of being corrupt. But how about the West? Isn't it also corrupt and greedy? Siemens and Mercedes, for example, have spent and still spend billions of dollars in corrupt channels in countries of the Third World. They bribe officials in these countries to gain bids. Siemens spent in the 1990s one and a half billions of dollars in corrupt transactions in Saudi Arabia alone. This was confirmed to me by a Siemens manager. Most recently, Mercedes agreed to settle corruption charges in a US court by paying a fine of 200 million dollars. Tony Blair, the former British Prime Minster ordered British courts and legislation NOT to investigate corruption charges in an arms deal of $ 20 billion instigated by the Saudi Bandar Bin Sultan. Blair argued at the time, "an investigation into the corruption charges" is not in British national interests and would harm the deal and damage thousands of jobs in the British arms industry.

Having said that, you can see that the West freezes democracy and human rights principles when their interests are in jeopardy. They use these principles when they conveniently suit them.

In the 1990s I used to teach at King Saud University and once in a while I was asked by the German Embassy to translate for German politicians visiting Saudi Arabia. In one of those visits by Juergen Moellemann, former chairman of the German Free Democratic Party (FDP), he received a gift check of 40 million dollars from Prince Salman, the governor of Riyadh. What for is the money? Moellemann distributed part of the money among influential journalists in Germany so that they keep silent as far as Saudi Arabia is concerned.

When the money, which Moellemann deposited in a secret account in Switzerland, was discovered he committed suicide in 2003.

Germany is celebrating the 20th anniversary of the fall of Berlin wall and the unification of east and west Germany. The German media brag: East Germany is now free. However, when you talk to people from East Germany, they tell you: "yes we are free now, we can travel wherever we want, but we do not have the money to do so. 40% of East Germans are jobless.

In contrast, it is big business in Germany which has benefited most from the unification. Whole state-owned industries and agricultural cooperatives were sold for peanuts.

Since the riots in Teheran after the latest presidential elections, the German correspondent of ARD TV, Peter Mezger has reported from Iran. He still reports from Teheran and concocts lies. He interviews "dissidents", but he never interviews supporters of the Iranian government.

If I were the Ambassador of Iran in Berlin, I would sue Mr. Mezger and his ilk for spreading lies. Certainly, the Ambassador would not win the case, where the German constitution, at least in theory, guarantees freedom of speech. But the case would instigate a debate on fair reporting.

In view of the fact that fewer people buy and subscribe daily papers and increasingly turn to the Internet for information, and in order to save costs and keep managing editors' salaries up, many of these German papers have withdrawn their correspondents from overseas. These journalists sit now in their cozy offices and concoct distorted reports about Iran, Venezuela, Bolivia, China, and Syria, for example. Insiders have confirmed this practice.

German TV stations, radio, and newspapers interview dissidents in Germany pretending that they were interviewed in their own home countries. People, who support their governments in the aforementioned countries and elsewhere, are sparsely interviewed. Their views seem not to be important for the German public.

I get sick when I see or read in German media that Mr./Ms. so and so is described as an expert in Iranian and Afghan affairs, for instance. When you check out their qualifications, you find out that they neither speak the language of these countries nor have studied their culture. Besides, they have never been to Iran or Afghanistan. They have read a couple of articles about these countries and hence have become "experts".

The German media condemn violence when Germany is not involved. As the American marines attacked an American ship, kidnapped by Somali pirates and freed the crew last year, the German media rushed to condemn the attack. When recently the Dutch marines attacked a German vessel and freed its crew from Somali pirates, the German media jubilated and approved of the attack.

Democracy and Human Rights Hypocrisy

How honest/dishonest is the West with regard to human rights?

The West claims that human rights are universal and must be respected everywhere in the world.

But does the West really support human rights activists equally across the world?

The answer is a big NO. The West supports human rights activists selectively as long as they suit them and serve their political and economic interests. The West blasts dismal human rights records in countries that are not friendly to the West and turns a blind eye to lack of these rights in "friendly" states.

While the West awards the Sacharov prize to Chinese dissidents, it ignores human rights activists in the Arab world.

Most recently, in his latest visit to Saudi Arabia, the German foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle ignored addressing the dismal human rights record of the Al Saud. Later as he was visiting China, he loudly urged the Chinese government in a press conference to respect human rights.

As far as Westerwelle is concerned, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt play a "vital strategic economic and political role". China is an economic and political adversary.

Obviously, the Cold War is not completely dead. Western propaganda is still active towards those countries which do not submit to the will of Western establishments. Western media and political establishments operate according to the motto: If you are friendly to us, we let you do whatever you want. If you are not friendly to us, then you are our enemy, and we will do everything in our power to topple you.

In general, Western Europe has always looked down at East European countries and has never recognized Turkey as part of the European continent.

During the Cold War Turkey was a member of the NATO. After the Cold War and collapse of the Soviet Union, Western Europe rushed to admit East European countries in the European Union (EU) and in the NATO. Turkey's wish to join the EU has so far been rejected, especially by Germany, Austria, and France. The EU argues Turkey is still backward and not European enough, although Turkey is not less developed than Bulgaria, Rumania, and Poland. All these countries, including Turkey have the same level of development in all walks of life. Why is this so?

Turkey has never been a "friend" of Russia (the core left of the Soviet Union) and would never ally itself with Russia. But East European countries could become allies of Russia if they were left outside the EU and NATO. Therefore, the EU was strategically more than happy to admit East European countries before they ally themselves with Russia, the old and new adversary of the West. Turkey was left out. It is politically insignificant in this equation.

The German media and the Western media at large come up with headlines like, "Tibet in Flames" and demand independence for this integral part of China. They allege that the natives of Tibet are oppressed and not allowed to practice their culture, language, and religion.

The truth of the matter is Tibet has been part of China for the past three centuries and its people are free to exercise their religion and culture. And Tibetans are not discriminated against as the Western media allege.

But how about Palestine and Kurdistan? For decades, the people of these countries have been fighting for independence. Until now, the West has ignored the basic rights of the Kurds for independence although they constitute an ethnic and cultural entity living in Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran. Yet, until recently, the Kurds in Turkey have been forbidden to use their own language and practice their own culture. In Syria, the Kurds are not recognized as an ethnic minority.

Viva Western rationale of democracy and human rights!

* Dr.ٍ Sami Alrabaa is a 60-year old retired sociology professor. Among other universities, he taught at Michigan State University, King Saud University, Kuwait University. He also published extensively in academia and print media. His latest book is "Veiled Atrocities" published by Prometheus Books, New York, 2010.

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By Anait Brutian* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

"Deep down, I believe that a little anti-Semitism is a good thing for the Jews – reminds them who they are ... Anti-Semitism means oppressing Jews even more than they deserve" (New York Times Magazine, February 12, 1995 p. 65). These comments were made by Jay Lefkowitz, an Orthodox Jewish American politician and lawyer, who served as President Bush's Special Envoy for Human Rights in North Korea ⁽¹⁾. The fact that the comments originated with a lawyer is uncanny, but even more so because of his background in Orthodox Judaism and his status as a Special Envoy for Human Rights in North Korea. What the comments really demonstrate is that a desirable amount of anti-Semitism – Mr. Lefkowitz needs "a little anti-Semitism, not a lot – whenever absent, can and must be induced by provocation to perpetuate the cause of Zionism.

Mr. Lefkowitz shares this thought with Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, who witnessed anti-Semitism but instead of combating it, openly declared: "In Paris ... I achieved a freer attitude toward anti-Semitism, which I now began to understand historically and to pardon. Above all, I recognized the emptiness and futility of trying to 'combat' anti-Semitism" ⁽²⁾. The Dreyfus affair of 1890s that ended with his exoneration and reinstatement, largely through the efforts of French intellectuals headed by Émile Zola, did not meet Herzl's support as much as other political events of the time, notably the election victory of anti-Semitic Karl Lueger in 1895. Lueger's success in Vienna was used by Herzl to develop "a pragmatic strategy of non-resistance to anti-Semitism coupled with emigration of a portion of the Jews to a Jewish state in-the-making" ⁽³⁾. While the Habsburg Emperor refused to confirm Karl Lueger in office – 8 percent of the generals, considered the most loyal supporters of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were Jews – Herzl favoured the confirmation. On November 3, 1895 he met the Prime Minister Count Casimir Badeni and told him to "accommodate Lueger" ⁽⁴⁾.

A similar attitude underlies the events of 1965-1966 described in Rhonda Spivak's Jerusalem Post article of June 19, 2009. In 1965 Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC) hired an ex-cop, John Garrity to "infiltrate the Canadian Nazi Party" ⁽⁵⁾. According to Ezra Levant, the event was more than "infiltration" – the CJC "helped organize the fledgling Canadian Nazi Party." Originally, made up of a dozen members with no political agenda, the party was puffed up to fake the status of "a national menace" ⁽⁶⁾. Rabbi Reuven Bulka of CJC dismissed the story: "all the CJC did for the Nazis was buy them a bottle of rum" ⁽⁷⁾. But Garrity did much more than "buy them a bottle of rum." Hired by CJC in September 1965, Garrity was in their employ for 13 months until his article was published in McLean's on October 1, 1966. His "duties," apart from supplying CJC with information on the names of party members and donors ⁽⁸⁾, included among other things, Beattie's personal security: "I'd often have to dash across to wherever Beattie was living to inspect a caller he'd refused to admit to his apartment, to make sure the man wasn't a potential assassin" ⁽⁹⁾.

Before spying for CJC, Garrity had sleuthed on John Beattie for another Jewish group N3, who felt that CJC "was not doing enough to confront the Nazi threat" ⁽¹⁰⁾. Garrity's evaluation of Beattie and his Nazi group does not fit the description of "Nazi threat." "There was just Beattie and a couple of teenagers ... in the Nazi business ... only a dozen active members, plus perhaps 100 unseen supporters ..." ⁽¹¹⁾. He called the group "harmless misfits," which one may assume, was the evaluation he transmitted to his bosses at CJC. CJC was aware of the status of John Beattie, a 24-year-old unemployed clerk that had been "evicted from his fifth apartment in a year for not paying his rent" ⁽¹²⁾. Even if the CJC had not obtained the information through N3, Garrity's characterization of the group and its leader – his testimony should have carried some weight because he acted as bodyguard and chauffeur that paid for Beattie's drinks for more than a year – should have made it sufficiently clear that there was real "Nazi threat." John Beattie's own statement: "I had no car ... Garrity drove me everywhere and Garrity fed me. He bought me lunches and snacks all the time, every day ... and sometimes he'd buy me groceries ... He bought me lots of drinks ... " ⁽¹³⁾ also supports this view.

According to Ezra Levant, CJC paid $200 per month for 13 consecutive months in fees plus expenditure that included food, transportation and security for Beattie. Describing the bizarre affair, Levant said: "The Canadian Nazi Party was often a party of one ... It wasn't even an organization in any legal sense. It didn't have a bank account. It didn't have a newsletter. It didn't have any formal organization – no bylaws, no constitution." ⁽¹⁴⁾.The source of Levant's information is the report of Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which described Beattie as "a poor leader and organizer" having no more than "50 followers" and "no membership." "It is not believed that Beattie could exert adverse influence on any person other than some supporters of the party and this would only be to a degree" ⁽¹⁵⁾. This profile is substantiated by Beattie's own statement. Explaining the photo of Garrity with a box, referred to as "correspondence" in McLean's article of October 1, 1966, Beattie said: "That box was filled with all of the newspaper clippings about me ... I craved all of the media attention ... I loved it ... " "It wasn't much of a Nazi Party ... There were a few characters who were anti-Jewish maybe four or five who where anti-Semitic. They liked to blame the Jews for everything" ⁽¹⁶⁾.

Even without the RCMP report, ex-cop John Garrity should have known the real rag-tag nature of this "organization." Indeed, one other important role that he played was to ensure that the Canadian Nazi Party would never rise to become a real organization: "I was chosen secret-service chief, with the job of checking applicants for membership. ... I did check about 15 prospective members, and turned down those who seemed intelligent and therefore dangerous" ⁽¹⁷⁾. Ellen Scheinberg of Ontario Jewish Archives acknowledged that Garrity's work in fact destroyed the Nazi Party by eliminating those who would have been useful to the party. To ensure the full trust and cooperation of Beattie, Garrity, on occasion, acted against his former employer N3, whose plan to disrupt a meeting with stink bombs was tipped off to the police by CJC. ⁽¹⁸⁾. Knowing full well that Beattie and his Nazis had never "even contemplated doing anything illegal and all of the violence he witnessed was directed at Beattie, usually by Jewish vigilantes, Garrity helped CJC to turn the Nazi Party into a media sensation: "Sadly, it is the ... anti-Nazi extremists who, in their attempts to destroy Beattie, provide him with most of the publicity he craves. If it weren't for the riots and the assaults and the public protest meetings they hold, there'd be no real news in Beattie" ⁽¹⁹⁾.

Garrity's claim is substantiated through an event involving a rally at Allan Gardens in Toronto on May 30, 1965, where, according to prior announcement, Beattie's supporters would wear swastika armbands. According to Ezra Levant, on May 28, just two days before the planned event, CJC issued a statement that read: "Toronto apparently faces the gross provocation of public Nazi demonstration ... The Canadian Jewish Congress feels that the very threat of attempting such a demonstration ... is insulting and provocative to the great majority of citizens of this city. It indeed poses a threat to the peace and good order of the community ... For the citizens of Toronto, there can be only one response: to condemn completely and unreservedly the acts of the self-styled Nazis, and to bring to bear the weight of an outraged public opinion against the provocations they plan" ⁽²⁰⁾. This statement was issued despite the fact that both CJC and N3 were aware of the fact that Beattie did not have a permit from the City Hall that would allow him to hold a demonstration and give speeches – Beattie had asked Garrity, who had "conveniently forgotten" to obtain the permit. Just as the self-proclaimed "Heinrich Himmler" had "forgotten" all about the permit, so had the CJC and N3 "forgotten" to mention this very important fact to the Jewish community: "The demonstration could have been averted had community leaders, from both Congress and the anti-Nazi organizations, informed the community in advance that Beattie did not have a permit" ⁽²¹⁾.

Ezra Levant claims that CJC "didn't inform the Jewish public of Beattie's not having a permit because it wanted an enraged citizenry to help it in its push for anti-hate laws." "They managed to parlay a second-rate carnival act into the raison d'etre for censorship laws that would otherwise have likely failed to become laws" ⁽²²⁾. Popping-up Beattie with his Nazi Party and creating media frenzy suited CJC, contributing to "convincing the Parliament to give them more 'hate' laws." Beattie's proposed Nazi rally, cunningly anticipated by CJC's May 28 statement, created the "much needed proof" that without censorship laws, public disturbance was unavoidable and law and order could be jeopardized. A crowd made up of 4000 Jewish demonstrators, a riot with violence and eight arrests were the finishing touch to the well-planned CJC masquerade.

Almost half a century ago, in 1952, the then Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, proposed to send a team of saboteurs "to help redeem Jews" in countries where they were "absorbed in sinful self-satisfaction" ⁽²³⁾. The task of these saboteurs "would be to disguise themselves as non-Jews," and plague their targets with anti-Semitic slogans such as "Bloody Jews," "Jews go to Palestine," and so on ⁽²⁴⁾. A similar plot was adopted by Israeli government to force Iraqi Jews to move to Israel. "The rescue" of 125,000, in early 1950s involved "terrorizing the Jews" with planted bombs in the U.S. Information Service library and synagogues, followed by leaflets that urged Jews to "flee to Israel" ⁽²⁵⁾. To combat the perceived anti-Semitism in Iraq, Naeim Giladi joined the Zionist underground. He was caught, tortured and sentenced to death by the authorities. Giladi escaped, fled to Israel and later found out that the anti-Semitism and terrorism that plagued the Iraqi Jews were engineered by the Zionists to trick them to go to Israel ⁽²⁶⁾. While all of these nauseating revelations explain the Zionist mindset, they also demonstrate that their methods haven't changed in time. Today there is a growing Human Rights Industry in Canada, and Ezra Levant's Shakedown takes a deep look at it from its inception to its present-day abuses. Garrity's inflating of the importance of Canadian Nazis, with an explicit purpose of ensuring the censorship laws, established the pattern that was imitated in relation to another rag-tag group, the white supremacist Heritage Front ⁽²⁷⁾.

According to June 29, 2009 editorial of the Montreal Gazette, the Canadian Human Rights Commission defends its "authority to police the Internet – or any other electronic medium – for opinions that are 'likely to' expose people to hatred or contempt" ⁽²⁸⁾. An assault on Free Speech, Section 13 of the Human Rights Act is a censorship provision that prohibits transmissions deemed "offensive" to bureaucratic manipulators. Run by the "fanatical thought police at the Canadian Human Rights Commission" ⁽²⁹⁾, it has been used to attack writers, newspaper columnists, website owners, magazine publishers that have demonstrated the audacity to write on such "contentious issues" as the Israeli aggression, the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians and the criminal insanity of Israeli leaders. William A. Cook's article, Anti-Semitism: Silencing the Messenger of Truth with Canada's "Hate Provisions," details the author's "encounter" with "hate crime" – Mr. Cook was "charged before the Council of Human Rights with anti-Semitism by Mr. Harry Abrams with the support of B'nai B'rith of Canada ⁽³⁰⁾. In this and most other cases, the perpetrator of the real crime is the party filing the complaint. To put it differently, there is a real crime but it is directed at the individual who dares SPEAK THE TRUTH.

Since its first enactment, the law sustained two major changes that altered its original intent and turned Section 13 into an instrument for punishing "politically incorrect views." Today this legislation enables the Canadian Human Rights Commission to censor the Internet and harass the public for views that the Thought Police disagrees with ⁽³¹⁾. Unless the public wakes up to the real implications of the law, and challenges its constitutionality, we will see our most cherished FREEDOM OF SPEECH erode in the hands of vindictive manipulators and "social engineers that staff the Human Rights Commission" ⁽³²⁾ and work for the backroom politics of special interest groups that aspire to eradicate FREE THOUGHT and silence FREE SPEECH.

References:
(1) Jay Lefkowitz
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Lefkowitz

(2), (3), (4) Lenni Brenner Zionism in the Age of Dictators
http://www.vho.org/aaargh/engl/zad/zad1.htm

(5), (9), (10), (11), (12), (13), (14), (15), (16), (17), (18), (20), (21), (22) Several Spies and a Bottle of Rum
http://www.jpost.com /servlet/Satellite?cid=1245184864673&pagename=JPArticle%2FShowFull

(6), (7), (8), (19), (27) Ezra Levant
http://ezralevant.com/2009/04/why-did-the-jewish-congress-bu.html

(23), (24), (25) Anti-Semitism: Zionism's Indispensable Alibi
http://sabbah.biz/mt/archives/2010/03/15/anti-semitism-zionisms-indispensable-alibi/

(26) The Zionist Protection Racket
http://www.savethemales.ca/000889.html

(28) Rights Commission Threatens our Liberty
http://www2.canada.com/montrealgazette/features/viewpoints/story.html?id=b084ee2b-ed22-4e08-a689-f1c7dc989a51

(29) Stop Section 13
http://www.stopsection13.com/

(30) Anti-Semitism: Silencing the Messenger of Truth with Canada's "Hate Provisions"
http://sabbah.biz/mt/archives/2010/03/15/silencing-the-messenger-of-truth-with-canadas-hate-provisions/

(31), (32) History of Section 13
http://www.stopsection13.com/history_of_sec13.html

* Anait Brutian (B. Mus. with Honours in Theory, McGill University; M. A. in Music Theory, McGill University) is a student in the Faculty of Religious Studies at McGill. Her previous research includes a self-published book entitled: Reconciling Geometry, Rhetoric and Harmony: A Fresh Look at C. P. E. Bach. She is currently working on another book on mathematical paradigms in literature (Old and New Testaments), art, architecture, and music. She can be contacted at anaitbrutian@videotron.ca

No related posts.

By Alan Hart* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

That U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had the courage to tell AIPAC's conference that Israel's continued construction of Jewish housing on occupied territory is undermining both the prospect for peace and America's credibility and own best interests was good news. The bad news is that this and other Obama administration expressions of concern are 42 years too late.

There's no mystery about when the U.S. should have taken the lead through the UN Security Council in putting Israel on notice that it would not be permitted to settle any of the Arab land it grabbed in the 1967 war. Security Council Resolution 242 of 22 November 1967 ought to have contained a diplomatic reading of the riot act to the Zionist state on the matter of settlements.

As I have noted in a number of previous articles and my book ZIONISM: THE REAL ENEMY OF THE JEWS, Resolution 242 was, actually, a disaster for all who were seriously interested in working for a just and lasting peace. By stating that Israeli armed forces were required to withdraw "from territories" occupied in the conflict – i.e. not the territories or better still all territories – Resolution 242 put the Israelis in the diplomatic driving seat, leaving them free to be the ones, and the only ones, who would determine (on a take it leave it basis backed by brute force) the extent of any Israeli withdrawals. This fatal flaw in 242 effectively gave Israel's leaders a veto over any peace process.

Despite that, Resolution 242 need not have been a complete disaster for peacemakers if a statement had been inserted into its text to this effect... That Israel should not seek to settle or colonise the occupied territories, and that if it did the Security Council would enforce international law and take whatever action was necessary to stop the illegal developments.

Question: Why did the text of Resolution 242 not contain such a statement of Security Council intent? The answer I give in the forthcoming Volume 3 of the American edition of my book (www.claritypress.com), is this.

Those responsible for framing Resolution 242 were very much aware that Israel's hawks were going to proceed with their colonial venture come what may – in determined defiance of international law and no matter what the organised international community said or wanted. And some if not all of those responsible for framing 242 were resigned to the fact that, because of the history of the Jews and the Nazi holocaust, Israel was not and never would or could be a normal state. As a consequence, there was no point in seeking to oblige it to behave like a normal state – i.e. in accordance with international law and its obligations as a member of the UN. Like it or not, and whatever it might mean for the fate of humankind, the world was going to have to live with the fact that there were two sets of rules – one for Israel and one for all other nations. Because of the way Israel was created – without legitimacy in international law – The System now had a double standard built into it, and because the political will to confront Zionism did not exist, there was nothing anybody could do to change that reality.

In my view a conclusion invited is that Zionism's in-Israel leaders are not the main villains in the story. They, the main villains, are successive American and other Western leaders who lacked the will and the courage not only to call and hold Zionism's monster child to account, but to do what was in the best longer term interests of their own countries.

I have the impression (of course I could be wrong!) that President Obama would like to break this mould. I even think there's a possibility that, in the privacy of his own mind, he might already have told himself that he will do so in a second term, if he has one. (Though Obama signalled his displeasure at having to meet with Netanyahu by insisting on no photographs, I thought it was a mistake for the President to meet with him. As with Biden's arrival in Israel, Netanyahu's arrival at the White House was preceded by the announcement of the go-ahead for more illegal Jewish construction in occupied Arab East Jerusalem. There could not have been a more pointed "Up Yours, Mr. President!" Israeli gesture). But what if President Obama tried and was not allowed by the Zionist lobby and its stooges in Congress to succeed? Would that necessarily mean that the Zionist state was and would remain a monster beyond control, with catastrophic consequences for the region and the whole world, including the Jews of the world?

Perhaps not.

There is today a new factor in the equation. It is the concern being raised in public by some of America's top military men.

The United States Central Command, Centcom, is the military headquarters responsible for US security interests in 20 countries across the greater Middle East.

On 16 March, Centcom's head, General David H. Petraeus, appeared before the Senate Armed-Services with a prepared testimony. It included this: "The enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbours present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of US partnerships with governments and peoples in the Middle East and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world."

Petraeus also briefed Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, and apparently told him, among other things, that Washington's "impotence" in the face of Israel's ongoing colonisation of the occupied West Bank was the greatest cause of Arab anger.

As noted by Paul Rogers in an article for OpenDemocracy published on 18 March, America and Israel: a historic choice, "the very arm of the United States federal government which has the closest links with Israel – namely, the military – is now suggesting that Israel is the source of some of its own key problems in the middle east."

The significance of what Petraeus said was, as Rogers also noted, heightened by the fact that the criticism came not from retired generals, not remote from the strategic frontline; "but from the very US military command that has been fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for most of the decade... This elite forms a core element of the US military-industrial complex which in five decades of close cooperation with Israel has furnished its ally with sophisticated weapons-systems, undertaken many joint exercises, provided huge amounts of aid; and in turn depended on Israel for crucial assistance in its war in Iraq."

This military intervention in the "What to do about Israel?" debate now gathering momentum in America, made me wonder if the stage is being set for a showdown, at some point, between the Zionist lobby in its many manifestations and the occupant of the White House, whoever he is, with the military on his side.

So perhaps, even after 42 years, coming up for 43, it's not too late.

* Alan Hart is a former ITN and BBC Panorama foreign correspondent who covered wars and conflicts wherever they were taking place in the world and specialized in the Middle East. Author of Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews. He blogs on www.alanhart.net and tweets on www.twitter.com/alanauthor

Related posts:

• Grant Smith – Israel’s Illegal Settlements in America
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• Against ‘Pro-Israel’

By Maidhc Ó Cathail* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

Chutzpah, a Yiddish word meaning "shameless audacity," has been famously defined as "that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan." Considering Israel's increasingly outrageous behaviour, perhaps it's time for a new definition. The one that springs to mind is "that quality enshrined in a state, which having induced its 'allies' into a disastrous invasion of Iraq, then urges them to attack Iran."

At a recent dinner in honour of visiting Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took yet another rhetorical swipe at Tehran. "Humanity stands before one of its most difficult tests since World War II," Netanyahu intoned. "The radical Islamic regime threats [sic] the well-being of the state of Israel, the region, and all of humanity."

Sounding more like an Israeli envoy than the head of a sovereign nation, Berlusconi responded, "My job is to make sure that world leaders do not commit the same error of the past, the error of indifference that brought about the greatest tragedy in history."

In Defamation, a highly revealing 2009 documentary on anti-Semitism by Israeli filmmaker Yoav Shamir, Professor Norman Finkelstein noted this strategy of invoking past Jewish suffering to justify future wars. "The irony is that the Nazi holocaust has now become the main ideological weapon for launching wars of aggression," said Finkelstein, the author of The Holocaust Industry. "Every time you want to launch a war of aggression, drag in the Nazi holocaust."

Or, to be more precise, every time Israel wants other countries to launch a war of aggression on its behalf, it drags in the Nazi holocaust. In the build-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Netanyahu was one of many Zionists who did just that. In a September 20, 2002 Wall Street Journal op-ed titled "The Case for Toppling Saddam," Netanyahu laid on the guilt trip: "We now know that had the democracies taken pre-emptive action to bring down Hitler's regime in the 1930s, the worst horrors in history could have been avoided."

And as he and other Zionists are now doing with Iran, Netanyahu was in 2002 hyping a non-existent Iraqi nuclear threat. Saddam Hussein, he claimed, was "feverishly trying to acquire nuclear weapons." Moreover, "the deadly material necessary for atomic bombs," the then former Israeli Prime Minister speculated, could be produced "in centrifuges the size of washing machines that can be hidden throughout the country-and Iraq is a very big country." To uncover Saddam's hypothetical "portable manufacturing sites of mass death," Netanyahu warned that "nothing less than dismantling his regime will do."

One might think that with over a million people dead and almost five million others displaced in Iraq-and not a weapon of mass destruction to be found-that Netanyahu might be showing some remorse. Instead, he's beating the drums loudest for an even more catastrophic war with Iran.

That should tell us a lot not only about the man but about the nature of the ideology that drives him. Zionism, like the fictional Jewish parenticide, shamelessly attempts to turn reality on its head.

Instead of acknowledging that it is the only nuclear-armed state in the Middle East, Israel and its supporters focus the world's attention on imaginary threats from its regional rivals.

Rather than apologizing for their crimes against humanity-most notably, the dispossession and virtual imprisonment of the Palestinian people- Zionists arrogantly portray themselves as the defenders of humanity against Islamic aggression.

And instead of admitting that they lied about Iraqi WMD, Iraqi ties to al-Qaeda, Iraqi mobile biological weapons laboratories, Iraqi yellowcake uranium from Niger, and Iraqi meetings in Prague, Zionist propagandists are busy concocting similarly brazen lies about Iran.

If world leaders are indeed committing an "error of indifference," it is hardly their supposed resistance to Zionist scaremongering. Rather, it is their indifference to the suffering of Arab and Muslim peoples. Foremost among them are the Palestinians-the ultimate victims of the shameless audacity of Zionism.

* Maidhc Ó Cathail is a widely published writer based in Japan.

Related posts:

• Maidhc Ó Cathail – Zionism’s un-Christian Bible
• Jeff Gates – ZIONISM UNMASKED: End of Zionism = Peace
• Alan Hart – ZIONISM UNMASKED: A fairy tale that’s become a terrifying nightmare

By Alan Hart* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

Most Jews of the world (and probably many Gentiles) believe that Zionism is the return of Jews to the land promised to them by God. At the risk of offending some readers of all faiths for saying so, I must confess, and do so cheerfully, that I don't buy this concept because the Gentile me does not believe in the God of organized, institutional religions. So, I say to myself, no God, no promise to Jews (or anybody else). In my perception of the scheme of things, God is the potential for good inside each and every one of us. God so defined is a prisoner within each of us and our prime task is to liberate this prisoner. But let's put that to one side.

The Jews who "returned" in answer to Zionism's call had no biological connection to the ancient Hebrews. They were converts to Judaism long after the end of the Hebrew conquest and short-lived domination of much of Canaan, the name as in the Bible by which Palestine was first known to the world. They therefore had no legitimate claim on the land.

The Jews who did have a legitimate claim, probably not more than about 10,000 at the time of Zionism's first dishonest mission statement in 1897, were the direct descendants of the Israelites who stayed in place on the land through time. They regarded themselves as Palestinians, and they were fiercely opposed to Zionism's colonial enterprise because they feared it would make them as well as the incoming alien Jews enemies of the Palestinian Arabs.

Also true is that prior to the obscenity of the Nazi holocaust, most Jews of the world were not at all interested in Zionism's colonial enterprise and many were opposed to it. The most informed and thoughtful of those who did express their opposition believed that Zionism was morally wrong. They also feared that Zionism's colonial enterprise would lead to unending conflict. But most of all they feared that Zionism, if it was allowed by the major powers to have its way, would one day provoke anti-Semitism. Which is precisely what is happening today. (Hence the title of my book, ZIONISM: THE REAL ENEMY OF THE JEWS).

In reality it is how the Zionists created their state - a Zionist not a Jewish state - that best defines what Zionism actually is.

Israel was created, mainly, by Zionist terrorism and ethnic cleansing - a pre-planned process that saw three-quarters of the indigenous Arab inhabitants of Palestine dispossessed of their homes, their land and their rights.

Zionism asserts that its state was given its birth certificate and thus legitimacy by the UN Partition Resolution of 29 November 1947. That is propaganda nonsense. The truth can be summarized as follows.

• In the first place the UN without the consent of the majority of the people of Palestine did not have the right to decide to partition Palestine or assign any part of its territory to a minority of alien immigrants in order for them to establish a state of their own.
• By the narrowest of margins, and only after a rigged vote, the UN General Assembly did pass a resolution to partition Palestine and create two states, one Arab, one Jewish, with Jerusalem not part of either. But the General Assembly resolution was only a recommendation - meaning that it could have no effect, would not become policy, unless approved by the Security Council.
• The General Assembly's recommendation never went to the Security Council for consideration because the U.S. knew that, if approved, it could only be implemented by force given the extent of Arab and other Muslim opposition to it; and President Truman was not prepared to use force to partition Palestine.
• So the partition plan was vitiated (became invalid) and the question of what the hell to do about Palestine - after Britain had made a mess of it and walked away, effectively surrendering to Zionist terrorism - was taken back to the General Assembly for more discussion. The option favoured and proposed by the U.S. was temporary UN Trusteeship. It was while the General Assembly was debating what do that Israel unilaterally declared itself to be in existence - actually in defiance of the will of the organised international community, including the Truman administration.

The truth of the time was that the Zionist state had no right to exist and, more to the point, could have no right to exist UNLESS ... Unless it was recognised and legitimized by those Zionism had dispossessed of their land and their rights. In international law only the Palestinians could give Israel the legitimacy it craved.

What is a Zionist today?

Short answer: One, not necessarily a Jew, who (to quote Balfour) supports the Zionist state of Israel "right or wrong" and who cannot or will not admit that a terrible wrong was done to the Palestinians by Zionism - a wrong that must be acknowledged and then corrected on terms acceptable to the Palestinians if there is ever to be peace and the countdown to catastrophe for all is to be stopped. The Arab word for the catastrophe of the original dispossession of the Palestinians is Nakba. In my view, Zionism's Nakba denial is as obscene and as evil as denial of the Nazi holocaust.

One thing nobody can deny is the effectiveness of Zionism's propaganda machine. Zionism's spin doctors probably learned from the Nazis that the bigger the lies and the more frequently they are told, the more likely it is that they will be believed in the mainly Gentile, Judeo-Christian or Western world; and all the more so when the mainstream media is terrified of offending Zionism either too much or at all.

The biggest of all of Zionism's propaganda lies is the one which asserts that Israel has lived in constant danger of annihilation, the "driving into the sea" of its Jews. As I document in detail in my book, Israel's existence has never, ever, been in danger from any combination of Arab force. Not in 1948. Not in 1967. And not even in 1973. Zionism's assertion to the contrary was the cover which allowed Israel to get away where it mattered most, in North America and Western Europe, with presenting its aggression (often state terrorism) as self-defense, and itself as the victim when actually it was, and is, the oppressor.

The companion propaganda lie is that Israel never had Arab partners for peace.

Zionism has two hallmarks.

One is self-righteousness of a most extraordinary kind. In 1986 this self-righteousness was described by Yehoshafat Harkabi, a former Director of Israeli Military Intelligence, as "the biggest real danger" to the Jewish state.

The other hallmark is a shocking and awesome arrogance of military and economic power and the influence the latter buys, most critically in the U.S. Congress where what passes for democracy is for sale to the highest bidders.

On the matter of truth as it relates to the making and sustaining of conflict in and over Palestine that became Israel, I hope the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) is right: "All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." If that's true, Zionism not only can be defeated but will be.

* Alan Hart is a former ITN and BBC Panorama foreign correspondent who covered wars and conflicts wherever they were taking place in the world and specialized in the Middle East. Author of Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews. He blogs on www.alanhart.net and tweets on www.twitter.com/alanauthor

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Illustration By Carlos Latuff

By Karin Friedemann *

The debate over the Goldstone Report is a huge distraction from the real problem: the Report's inadequacy and the futility of bringing the case to the International Criminal Court. The Report itself, written by a Zionist Jew, is extremely flawed and biased in favor of Israel. Richard Goldstone's daughter Nicole told Israeli Army Radio (in Hebrew) that her father, as head of the UN Fact Finding Commission on the Gaza Conflict, had actually softened accusations against Israel. Goldstone's Report creates a fictional equality of power and obligation between Hamas and the State of Israel. In addition, it incorrectly tries to fit both within the same legal framework, as Goldstone misapplies the Geneva Conventions to Hamas.

The Geneva Conventions apply to Israel because Israel is a state and a signatory while post-WW2 Nuremberg Law provides the appropriate legal framework for resistance movements like Hamas. The Nuremberg indictment of the Nationalist Socialist Government concerning German conquests and the Sudetenland, which was annexed to the Reich under international agreement, charges (International Military Tribunal, vol. 1, p. 63):

"In certain occupied territories purportedly annexed to Germany the defendants methodically and pursuant to plan endeavored to assimilate these territories politically, culturally, socially, and economically into the German Reich. They endeavored to obliterate the former national character of these territories. In pursuance of their plans, the defendants forcibly deported inhabitants who were predominantly non-German and replaced them by thousands of German colonists."

If State of Israel replaces Germany, Zionist State replaces German Reich, and Jewish replaces German, the Nuremberg accusation precisely describes Zionist goals from the start of the Zionist movement until the present day. Until Israel negotiates an agreement with the resistance, all Jewish colonists today just like German colonists back then are legitimate targets for the resistance anywhere throughout the occupied lands of Historical Palestine.

The Palestinian-Jewish conflict has existed since before I was born. The UN essentially caused the conflict and has not solved it. Current UN actions show no evidence of bringing any improvement. Albert Einstein once said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting to get different results. Maybe we should try something else besides asking for UN help.

Furthermore, why waste time with the ICC? Even if it ruled against Israel, the ICC does not possess the power to enforce its decisions. One can only conclude that the Arabs are so traumatized by perpetual injustice that they confuse ineffective posturing with effective legal tactics.

Few Americans would ever argue that Jewish and Arab Americans should receive unequal treatment under US law. Yet the Department of Justice is unconstitutionally selectively targeting and prosecuting individuals and organizations. Jews file terror victim lawsuits against Palestinian organizations; for example a US judge ordered the PLO to pay $116 million to a Jewish American family; but no one files lawsuits on behalf of non-Jewish American citizens, who like Rachel Corrie and Suraideh Gharbieh have been victims of IDF terrorism.

In the American legal and political process, Jews seem privileged over non-Jews, thanks to efforts of the Israel Lobby, which is actively engaged in Conspiracy Against Rights (US Code Title18, 241). Yet no one in government or media discusses the situation. Obama administration Zionists want to bury the Goldstone Report because it provides specific evidence under US law that the IDF is a terrorist organization (e.g., paragraph 798):

"With regard to the shooting of Muhammad Hekmat Abu Halima and Matar Abu Halima, the Mission notes that the Israeli soldiers had ordered the tractor on which they were transporting the wounded to stop and had ordered the two cousins (aged 16 and 17) to come down. They had complied with those instructions and were standing next to the tractor, when the Israeli soldiers standing on the roof of a nearby house opened fire on them."

US anti-terrorism law is clear with regard to aiding and abetting, material aid, and conspiracy to aid terrorism. Practically all Israel advocates should be arrested forthwith, and their assets should also be seized. Such is the current US practice whenever Jewish Zionist groups or individuals accuse Arab or Muslim organizations of terrorist ties under flimsy, ridiculous or counterfactual evidence.

Because Treasury Undersecretary Stuart Levey is clearly not applying US law to American Jews in the same way that he applies it to American Arabs and Muslims, he is preventing enforcement of US law in time of war and should face immediate charges for Seditious Conspiracy (US Code Title 18, 2384).

Criminal complaints should be filed with US law enforcement officials in order to bring charges against all Zionists violating US law or subverting the US government. If some number of Arab or Muslim American lawyers started to work on the project, US-based legal processes could start within a matter of weeks.

* Karin Friedemann is a Boston-based writer on Middle East affairs and US politics. She is Director of the Division on Muslim Civil Rights and Liberties for the National Association of Muslim American Women. Joachim Martillo contributed to this article.

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The video is self explanatory:

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By Nicholas Lyssson

1. ROLE OF JEWS IN UKRAINIAN FAMINE

One might think the worst holocaust deniers—at least the only ones who command serious attention—are those who insist the Nazi holocaust, as it involved the Jews only, was without parallel.

Guenter Lewy argues for example in The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies (Oxford University Press, 2000) that while the Gypsies were gassed, shot and otherwise exterminated in great numbers, right alongside the Jews, they were not true victims of “the” Holocaust (capital “H”) but only of something collateral. Lewy even suggests the Gypsies invited their own destruction with certain cultural traits—in particular, sharply divergent moral standards for dealing among their own and with outsiders.

But pre- or anti-Enlightenment Judaism is hardly a less ethnocentric or hostile moral system. As Edward Gibbon correctly notes in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 1, ch. 15 (1776), “the wise, the humane Maimonides openly teaches [in The Book of Torts, 5:11] that, if an idolator fall into the water, a Jew ought not to save him from instant death.” See also Rabbi Simeon ben Yohai’s remarkable second-century exercise in ejusdem generis: “The best of the heathen merits death; the best of serpents should have its head crushed; and the most pious of women is prone to sorcery” (Yer. Kid. iv. 66c; Massek. Soferim xv. 10; comp. Mek., Beshallah, Wayehi, 1, and Tan., Wayera, 20, all as cited by JewishEncyclopedia.com). For “heathen” some translators simply write “goyim”; for “prone to sorcery” they write “a witch.” Rabbi Simeon is mentioned more than 700 times in the Talmud.

Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky, in Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel (2d ed. 2004), say (p. 1) “that in the usual English translations of talmudic literature some of the most sensitive passages are usually toned down or falsified,” and indeed (pp. 150-51) that “the great majority of books on Judaism and Israel, published in English especially, falsify their subject matter,” in part by omitting or obscuring such teachings. For a fuller discussion of the point, see Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, esp. ch. 2 (1994), available online. As to Jews, Gypsies or anyone else, of course, ethnocentrism or even outright cultural hostility as a rationale for genocide is obscene.

A particularly relevant parallel to the Nazi holocaust is the Ukrainian holodomor of 1932-33, a state-created famine—not a crop failure—that killed an estimated five million people in the Ukraine, one million in the Caucasus, and one million elsewhere after the Soviet state confiscated the harvest at gunpoint. Throughout the famine, the state continued to export grain to pay for industrialization. See Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow (Oxford University Press, 1987). Norman Davies gives the following description in Europe: A History, p. 965 (Oxford University Press, 1996). His first paragraph assembles quotations from Conquest; the bracketed phrase is his own:

“A quarter of the rural population, men, women and children, lay dead or dying” in “a great stretch of territory with some forty million inhabitants,” “like one vast Belsen.” “The rest, in various stages of debilitation,” “had no strength to bury their families or neighbours.” “[As at Belsen] well-fed squads of police or party officials supervised the victims.”

. . . All food stocks were forcibly requisitioned; a military cordon prevented all supplies from entering; and the people were left to die. The aim was to kill Ukrainian nationhood, and with it the “class enemy.” The death toll reached some 7 million. The world has seen many terrible famines. . . . But a famine organized as a genocidal act of state policy must be considered unique.

See also Oksana Procyk, Leonid Heretz and James E. Mace, Famine in the Soviet Ukraine, 1932-33 (Harvard University Press, 1986); Nicolas Werth, “The Great Famine,” in Stephane Courtois, et al., The Black Book of Communism, pp. 159-68 (Harvard University Press, 1999); Edvard Radzinsky, Stalin, pp. 257-59 (1996); Miron Dolot, Execution by Hunger (1985); Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, pp. 84-85 (2003); and the Commission on the Ukrainian Famine, Report to Congress (1988). That report, at pp. 6-7, cites estimates of the number killed that range as high as 8 million in the Ukraine and 9 million overall.

Piers Brendon, The Dark Valley, pp. 248-49 (2000) gives this description, drawn from still further sources, all cited in his notes:

A population of “walking corpses” . . . even ate horse-manure for the whole grains of seed it contained. . . . Cannibalism became so common-place that. . . local authorities issued hundreds of posters announcing that “EATING DEAD CHILDREN IS BARBARISM.”. . .

They staggered into towns and collapsed in the squares. . . . Haunting the railway stations these “swollen human shadows, full of rubbish, alive with lice,” followed passengers with mute appeals. . . . [They] “dragged themselves along, begging for bread or searching for scraps in garbage heaps, frozen and filthy. Each morning wagons rolled along the streets picking up the remains of the dead.” Some were picked up before they died and buried in pits so extensive that they resembled sand dunes and so shallow that bodies were dug up and devoured by wolves.

Boris Pasternak says “what I saw could not be expressed in words. . . . There was such inhuman, unimaginable misery, such a terrible disaster, that it began to seem almost abstract, it would not fit within the bounds of consciousness.” See Brian Moynahan, The Russian Century, p. 130 (1994). Nikita Khrushchev, in Khrushchev Remembers: The Final Testament, p. 120 (1976), says “I can’t give an exact figure because no one was keeping count. All we knew was that people were dying in enormous numbers.”

According to S. J. Taylor, Stalin’s Apologist: Walter Duranty, The New York Times’s Man in Moscow, p. 202 (Oxford University Press 1990), “. . .Soviet authorities

. . . require[d] that the shades of all windows be pulled down on trains traveling through the North Caucasus, the Ukraine and the Volga basin.” At pp. 239-40, Taylor says this famine “remains the greatest man-made disaster ever recorded, exceeding in scale even the Jewish Holocaust of the next decade.”

In September 1933, Duranty—who cultivated his relationship with Stalin, and is remembered today for his public denials that any such thing was happening—privately told fellow journalists Eugene Lyons (United Press) and Anne O’Hare McCormick (herself from the New York Times) that the death toll was 7 million, but that the dead were “only Russians.” (Sic: mostly Ukrainians; and note the word “only.”) See Lyons, Assignment in Utopia, pp. 579-80 (1937). Duranty’s number is described in Lyons’s book only as “the most startling I had. . . heard,” but is revealed in Lyons’s “Memo for Malcolm Muggeridge” (Dec. 9, 1937), quoted by Marco Carynnyk in “The New York Times and the Great Famine, Part III,” available online.

Several days after giving the 7-million number to Lyons and McCormick, Duranty told the assembled staff at the British chancery in Moscow that the toll for the Soviet Union as a whole might be as high as 10 million. See the report of William Strang, the charge d’affaires (Sept. 26, 1933), quoted by Carynnyk in the text accompanying n. 46. The British government referred publicly to the ongoing situation as an “illegal famine.” Id., n. 46.

Duranty’s 10-million number may have come from Stalin himself. It’s reputedly the same number Stalin gave Winston Churchill a decade later; see, e.g., Eric Margolis, “Remembering Ukraine’s Unknown Holocaust,” Toronto Sun, Dec. 13, 1998 (available online).

According to Arthur Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine, pp. 261-62 (1967):

In 1932-3, the years of the great famine which followed the forced collectivisation of the land, I travelled widely in the Soviet Union, writing a book which was never published. I saw entire villages deserted, railway stations blocked by crowds of begging families, and the proverbial starving infants. . . . [T]hey were quite real, with stick-like arms, puffed up bellies and cadaverous heads. I reacted to the brutal impact of reality on illusion in a manner typical of the true believer. I was surprised and bewildered—but the elastic shock-absorbers of my [Communist] Party training began to operate at once. I had eyes to see, and a mind conditioned to explain away what they saw. This “inner censor” is more reliable and effective than any official censorship. . . .

Some Ukrainian accounts, and that of Muggeridge, who covered the holodomor for the Manchester Guardian, take the trouble to say that this mass starvation was imposed largely by Jews. Lazar M. Kaganovich is often identified as an architect of the policy. A photograph in Montefiore, Red Tsar, above, shows him personally searching a farm for concealed food. In Muggeridge’s novel Winter in Moscow (1934) he appears as Kokoshkin, “a Jew” and “Stalin’s chief lieutenant.”

In 2003 Levko Lukyanenko, the first Ukrainian ambassador to Canada, was said to have made an anti-Semitic embarrassment of himself on this subject. But see Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History, p. 363 (2d ed. 1994)(“Jews were . . . disproportionately prominent among the Bolsheviks, notably in their leadership, among their tax- and grain-gathering officials, and especially in the despised and feared. . . secret police [emphasis added]”); Montefiore, Red Tsar, above, p. 305 (as late as 1937, Jews accounted for only 5.7 percent of Soviet party members, but “formed a majority in the government” [emphasis added]); Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century, p. 254 (Princeton University Press, 2004)(the secret police was “one of the most Jewish of all Soviet institutions”); and Arno J. Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?, p. 60 (1988)(“As of the late twenties . . . [a] disproportionate number of Jews came to hold high posts in the secret police and to serve as political commissars in the armed services. They. . . were. . . appointed to high-level and conspicuous positions which called for unimpeach-able political loyalty. . . ”). Mayer, a professor emeritus of history at Princeton, is himself Jewish, and had to flee the Nazis as a refugee.

The Israeli writer Boas Evron says the leaders of the Soviet revolution were scarcely less Jewish than the Zionists. See his book Jewish State or Israeli Nation?, p. 107 (English tr., Indiana University Press, 1995): “The backgrounds of the two groups were much the same. . . . Only differences of chance and temperament caused the one [individual] to be a Zionist and the other a revolutionary socialist.”

On February 8, 1920, Winston Churchill published an article, “Zionism Versus Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People,” in the Illustrated Sunday Herald (London), reprinted in Lenni Brenner, ed., 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis, p. 23 (2002). Among other things, Churchill said (pp. 25-26):

There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshe-vism. . . by. . . international and for the most part atheistical Jews. . . . [I]t probably outweighs all others. With the notable exception of Lenin [who had a Jewish grandfather and by some accounts a Jewish wife], the majority of leading figures are Jews. Moreover, the principal inspiration and driving power comes from the Jewish leaders. . . . And the prominent, if not indeed the principal, part in the system of terrorism. . . has been taken by Jews. . . . The same evil prominence was obtained by Jews in the brief period of terror during which Bela Kun ruled in Hungary. The same phenomenon has been presented in Germany (especially in Bavaria), so far as this madness has been allowed to prey on the temporary prostration of the German people.

Churchill’s views, as expressed here, resemble those of the Times of London’s correspondent in Russia, Robert Wilton. See George Gustav Telberg and Robert Wilton, The Last Days of the Romanovs (1920), esp. pp. 222-30, 391 (“[t]aken according to numbers of population, the Jews represented one in ten; among the komisars that rule Bolshevik Russia they are nine in ten—if anything, the proportion of Jews is still higher”), 392-93 and 400. The French version of the book, Les Derniers Jours des Romanofs, also published in 1920, contains a list of 556 top figures in the Bolshevik regime, classified by ethnicity. The Jewish proportion is a bit over eight in ten, including two-thirds of the leadership of the secret police.

The non-Jews are divided among various small categories—Russian, Lett, Armenian, German, Georgian, etc. The list is absent from the slightly later English and American editions, but is available online. See also John F. O’Conor, The Sokolov Investigation (1971)(a translation, with commentary, of sections of Nikolai Sokolov’s Enquête judiciaire sur l'assassinat de la famille impériale Russe), especially for the comments of O’Conor and his sources on Wilton.[i]

Jews among the Bolsheviks who imposed the holodomor of 1932-33 would have relished settling scores after the 40 years of bloody pogroms that followed Czar Alexander II’s assassination in 1881—especially the still-recent massacre of 50,000 to 100,000 Jews, mostly in the Ukraine, during the Russian civil war of 1918-21. (Far greater numbers of gentiles, of course, also perished in that war; estimates run well into the millions.)

Albert S. Lindemann, Esau’s Tears, pp. 442-43 (Cambridge University Press, 1997) says that “[i]n. . . the Ukraine, the Cheka leadership was overwhelmingly Jewish”; that “the high percentage of Jews in the secret police continued well into the 1930s”; and that “[c]omparisons to the secret police in Nazi Germany have tempted many observers.

. . . [T]he extent to which both. . . prided themselves in being. . . willing to carry out the most stomach-turning atrocities in the name of an ideal. . . is striking.” Lindemann adds that:

George Leggett, the most recent and authoritative historian of the Russian secret police, speculates that the use of [non-Slavic ethnic minorities in the secret police] may have been a conscious policy, since such ‘detached elements could be better trusted not to sympathise with the repressed local population’.[ii] Of course, in the Ukrainian case that population had the reputation of being especially anti-Semitic, further diminishing the potential sympathies of Jewish Chekists in dealing with it. [Citing Leggett, The Cheka, Lenin’s Political Police, p. 263 (Oxford University Press, 1981).] . . . . Cheka personnel regarded themselves as a class apart. . . with a power of life or death over lesser mortals. (Emphases added.)

Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century, above, illustrates the attitude of Jewish Bolsheviks toward dying Ukrainians. See Kevin MacDonald’s review of Slezkine, entitled “Stalin’s Willing Executioners?”, www.vdare. com/ misc/051105 /macdonald _stalin.htm (a much fuller version of which appears in the Occidental Quarterly, fall 2005, also available online):

Lev Kopelev, a Jewish writer who witnessed and rationalized the Ukrainian famine in which millions died horrible deaths of starvation and disease as an “historical necessity,” is quoted [on p. 230 as] saying “You mustn’t give in to debilitating pity. We are the agents of historical necessity. We are fulfilling our revolutionary duty.” On the next page, Slezkine describes the life of the largely Jewish elite in Moscow and Leningrad where they attended the theater, sent their children to the best schools, [and] had peasant women (whose families were often the victims of mass murder) for nannies. . . .

Kopelev did not offer his opinions from a distance. In his words, “I saw women and children with distended bellies, turning blue, with vacant, lifeless eyes. And corpses. . . . I saw all this and did not go out of my mind or commit suicide. . . .” Moynahan, The Russian Century, above, p. 149. Moynahan, by the way, gives a high-end estimate of the death toll as “probably. . . 14 million.” Id. at 130.

Kopelev was then in his early 20s. (Koestler was six-and-a-half years older.) Kopelev believed without question that “we were warriors on an invisible front, fighting against kulak sabotage for the grain that was needed by the country, by the five-year plan.” See vol. 1 of his memoirs, The Education of a True Believer, p. 226 (1980). He gave speeches to starving peasants at “several meetings a day,” telling them how much more the state needed their grain than they did themselves. Id. at 229. The peasants most often responded, “chop off my head”; they had nothing left to give. Id. at 231.

Fifteen years later, Kopelev himself was in the Butyrka prison in Moscow, where his fellow inmates, the writers Dmitri Panin[iii] and Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, challenged his denial of his own Jewishness, and the Jewishness of the revolution. See vol. 3 of Kopelev’s memoirs, Ease My Sorrows, p. 18 (1983):

When I told Solzhenitsyn the history of the various parties and reached the Socialist Revolutionaries, recalling the leaders, Gorovits, Gershuni, Gots, he interrupted in astonishment, almost in disbelief: how can that be— Jewish surnames, when the SRs were a Russian peasant party?

* * *

Panin reproached me for the sinful rejection of my people—for not wanting to avow myself “first and foremost a Jew. . . . But it’s clearer to an outsider.” . . . Solzhenitsyn seconded him. . . . He could not agree with. . . my self-definition: “A Russian intellectual of Jewish descent.”

Notwithstanding Kopelev’s self-definition, he was incontestably Jewish for purposes of the Israeli Law of Return, which came into effect well within his lifetime.[iv] Moreover, while he became a man of far more humane views as he grew older, there would be some irony in excusing his “true believer” phase as a mere youthful folly. Compare the unsparing treatment recently given Günter Grass, concerning service in the Waffen SS that involved no complicity in atrocities, and ended in his late teens.

The phrase “Stalin’s willing executioners”—with its echo of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen—is Slezkine’s (p. 130). At pp. 183-84, translating from the Russian, Slezkine quotes Ia. A. Bromberg (1931) on what Stalinism brought out in its Jewish servitors:

The convinced and unconditional opponent of the death penalty. . . , who could not, as it were, watch a chicken being killed, has been transformed outwardly into a leather-clad person with a revolver and [has], in fact, lost all human likeness. . . , standing in a Cheka basement doing “bloody but honorable revolutionary work.”

II. PEASANT-JEWISH RELATIONS: "ARENDARS"

Shahak, in Three Thousand Years, above, ch. 4, traces Jewish “hatred and contempt” for peasants— “a hatred of which I know no parallel in other societies”—back to the great Ukrainian uprising of 1648-54, in which tens of thousands of “the accursed Jews” (to quote the Ukrainian Cossack leader Bohdan Khmelnytsky) were killed. Some say the number is more accurately stated in the hundreds of thousands. Heinrich Graetz says the number “may well be. . . a quarter of a million.” See his History of the Jews, vol. 5, p. 15 (1856-70, English tr., Jewish Publication Society of America ed., 1956).

The Jews at the time of the massacres were serving the Polish szlachta (nobility) and Roman Catholic clergy on their Ukrainian latifundia as arendars—toll-, rent- and tax-farmers, enforcers of corvee obligations, licensees of feudal monopolies (e.g., on banking, milling, storekeeping, and distillation and sale of alcohol), and as anti-Christian scourges who even collected tithes at the doors of the peasants’ Greek Orthodox churches and exacted fees to open those doors for weddings, christenings and funerals. They had life and death powers over the local population (the typical form of execution being impalement), and no law above them to which that population had recourse. See Graetz, vol. 5, pp. 3-6; Subtelny, pp. 123-38; Norman Davies, God’s Playground: A History of Poland, vol. 1, p. 444 (Oxford University Press, 1982); and Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski, Jews in Poland, pp. 68-79, 283 (1993). According to the last three of these sources, the arendars leased estates for terms of only two or three years and had every incentive to wring the peasants mercilessly, without regard to long-term consequences.

As Shahak points out in Three Thousand Years, chs. 3 and 5, a non-Jew, in traditional Judaism, was never “thy neighbor” for purposes of Leviticus 19:18—which was doubtless an advantage in such taxing work as an arendar’s. Shahak has much to say about rabbinical pronouncements, abundant in Israel even now, that gentile souls are closer to the souls of animals than to those of Jews. Those pronouncements are grounded, at least in part, on Ezekiel 23:20 (“[their] flesh [i.e., penises] is as the flesh of asses and [their] issue [i.e., semen] is like the issue of horses”).[v]

Norman Cantor comments in The Sacred Chain, p. 184 (1994) that “perhaps the Jews [of the arenda period] were so moved by racist contempt for the Ukrainian and Polish peasantry as to regard them as subhuman. . . . There is a parallel with the recent attitude of the West Bank Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox toward the Palestinians. Judaism can be in its Halakhic form an extremely restrictive and blinding faith.”

According to Chaim Bermant, The Jews, p. 26 (1977):

. . . [O]ne cannot see the events of [1648-49] as entirely the result of crazed fanaticism or mindless superstition. . . . [I]f the nobility were. . . the ultimate exploiters,the Jews were the visible ones and aroused the most immediate hostility. Rabbis warned that Jews were sowing a terrible harvest of hatred, but while the revenues rolled in the warnings were ignored. Moreover, the rabbis themselves were beneficiaries of the system.

Those rabbinical forebodings are also mentioned in Jacob Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance, p. 152 (Oxford University Press, 1961). Graetz (vol. 5, pp. 5-6) says of the Jewish arendars that they had lost “integrity and right-mindedness. . . as completely as simplicity and the sense of truth. They found pleasure and a sort of triumphant delight in deception and cheating.” He adds that they “advised the [Polish noble and ecclesiast-ical] possessors of the Cossack colonies how most completely to humiliate, oppress, torment, and ill-use [those colonies]. . . . No wonder that the enslaved Cossacks hated the Jews. . . . The Jews were not without warning what would be their lot, if these embittered enemies once got the upper hand.”

Graetz (vol. 5, p. 7) also says Khmelnytsky had personal reasons for leading the revolt: “A Jew, Zachariah Sabilenki, had played him a trick, by which he was robbed of his wife and property.” It says everything, of course, that it was possible by trickery to rob a Cossack of his wife.

The best-known contemporaneous account of the revolt is Nathan (Nata) ben Moses Hannover, Yewen Mesulah, which appeared in Venice in 1653. An English translation was published three centuries later as The Abyss of Despair (1950). Hannover was well aware of the peasants’ grievances (see pp. 27-30 of The Abyss). He described the massacres in the grimmest of terms, full of biblical allusions. He then gave the rest of his life to the holy mysteries of Lurianic cabbalism. As Graetz puts it (vol. 5, pp. 21-22), “that book of falsehoods, the Zohar, [had] declared that in the year of the world 5408 (1648) the era of redemption would dawn, and precisely in that year Sabbathai [Ze’evi] revealed himself. . . as the messianic redeemer.”

Sabbathai was a manic-depressive one of whose followers, Samuel Primo, preached that “your lament and sorrow must be changed into joy.” Spinoza and other rationalists were not amused. Thousands of Sabbathai’s flock even followed him into “holy apostasy” when he converted to Islam in 1666. His own conversion was under duress; theirs was not. Graetz’s highly-readable account of the fervor (vol. 5, pp. 121-67) is similar in style and tone to Gibbon’s account of the early Christian Church.

Arendas did not disappear after the Khmelnytsky uprising. See Jewish FamilyHistory. org/ Grand_ Duchy_of_Lithuania. htm (“During the 18th century, up to 80 percent of Jewish heads of households in rural areas [of what are now Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine and parts of Poland] were arendars, that is, holders of an arenda”). Pogonowski, p. 72, describes the return of the Jews to the Ukraine after 1648-54. Similarly, see Simon M. Dubnow, History of the Jews in Russia and Poland, vol. 1, p. 158 (1916).

Shahak (Three Thousand Years, ch. 4) says that under the arenda system, “the full weight of the Jewish religious laws against gentiles fell upon the peasants.” As to the nature of those laws, see id., ch. 5, especially under the heading “Abuse.” See also such passages as Psalm 2:8-9 (“. . . I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance. . . . Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel”); Psalm 21:8-10 (“[T]hy right hand shall find out those that hate thee. Thou shalt make them as a fiery oven in the time of thine anger: the Lord shall swallow them up. . .”); Psalm 79:6-7 (“Pour out thy wrath upon the heathen. . . [f]or they have devoured Jacob [i.e., Israel], and laid waste his dwelling place”); Jeremiah 10:25 (al-most identical); Psalm 137:8-9 (“O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed, . . . [h]appy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones”); Psalm 149:7-8; Isaiah 45:14 (“Thus saith the Lord, . . . in chains. . . they shall fall down unto [Israel]. . .”); Isaiah 60:12 (“. . .[T]he nation and kingdom that will not serve [Israel] shall perish; yea, those nations shall be utterly wasted” ); Isaiah 61:5-6 (“. . .[S]trangers shall stand and feed your flocks. . . : [Y]e shall eat the riches of the Gentiles. . .”); and of course Esther 8:11 through 10:3. As to the last, and the feast of Purim, celebrated yearly then as now, see Elliott Horowitz, Reckless Rites (Princeton University Press, 2006).

III. JEWISH ATTITUDE TO NON-JEWS, i.e. "ESAU AND EDOM"

The Babylonian Talmud, cabbalist treatises, and other rabbinical writings extant during the arenda period were even harder on the gentiles, particularly Christians. See Johann Andreas Eisenmenger’s hugely controversial Entdektes Judenthum (1700), translated as Rabbinical Literature: Or the Traditions of the Jews (1748). At p. 253 of that translation we read that:

The [cabbalist] Treatise Emek hammelech, in the Part entitled Shaar shiashue hammelech, gives us the following Passage. “Our Rabbins, of Blessed Memory, have said, Ye Jews are stiled Men; because of the Soul ye have from the Supreme Man (i.e., God; whom the Cabalists call Adam Ahelion; that is, the Supreme Man). But the Nations of the World are not stiled Men, because they have not, from the Holy and Supreme Man, the Neshama (or glorious Soul). But they have the Nephesh (i.e. the Soul) from Adam Belial; that is, the malicious and unnecessary Man, called Sammael, the Supreme Devil.”

The next seven pages are filled with further such quotations. Eisenmenger also discloses a rabbinical obsession with Esau and his nation Edom, themselves deemed satanic (as to which see more from scholars discussed below).

Jacob Katz, the author of Exclusiveness and Tolerance, above, and a professor of Jewish history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, is hardly an admirer of Eisen-menger. Very much the contrary. But in From Prejudice to Destruction, pp. 14-15, 21, passim (Harvard University Press, 1980), Katz admits some important points:

[Eisenmenger’s] book was impressive both on account of its size—some 2,120 pages in two volumes—and its tremendous erudition. . . . [He] was acquainted with all the literature a Jewish scholar of standing would have known. . . . Contrary to accusations that have been made against him, he does not falsify his sources. He quotes them in full and translates them literally. . . . The question is how did Eisenmenger arrive at so darkly a negative picture of Judaism while quoting its sources unadulteratedly?

* * * There was a nucleus of truth in all his claims: the Jews lived in a world of. . . ethical duality—following different standards in their internal and external relationships. . . . (Emphases added.)[vi]

The anthropologist John Hartung comments, in an essay entitled “Love Thy Neighbor: The Evolution of In-Group Morality” (1995, available online), that “the half-life and penetrance of such cultural legacies are often under-appreciated.” To illustrate Hartung’s point, “Pour out thy wrath upon our enemies” (“shfoch hamatcha al hagoyim”) is even now a prayer at the Passover seder.

David M. Weinberg, director of public affairs at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies of the Orthodox Bar Ilan University near Tel Aviv, defends it as being “part of the Haggada text for a reason: to purposefully exclude and ward off the placid, falsely high-minded thinking that has overtaken so much of today’s Western world.” See Weinberg’s essay in the Jerusalem Post, April 21, 2003 (available online). The English translation “upon our enemies”—not “upon thine enemies,” or even “upon the heathen”—is taken here directly from Weinberg. All those renditions seem interchangeable in any event. The actual word, of course, is goyim.

According to Davies (God’s Playground, vol. 1, p. 444) the oppressiveness of the Jews as arendars “provided the most important single cause of the terrible retribution that would descend on them on several occasions in the future. . . .” In 1986 the Stanford history department voted 12-11 against offering tenure to Davies, then a professor visiting from the University of London. Davies sued unsuccessfully for defamation, which suggests the tenor of the discussion. Davies is now a fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. The queen awarded him a CMG in 2001.

Actually, the Jewish “hatred and contempt” that Shahak remarks on can be traced back to times well before the events of 1648-54. Such attitudes can be seen, for example, in medieval traditions in which Esau—portrayed in Isaiah 63 and Obadiah as one with whom God himself is at war—came to stand for agricultural Christian Europe. See Rabbi Tzvi Weinberg, “Esau-Edom: Profile of a People” (Dec. 16, 2000), at http://www .biu.ac.il/ JH/Parasha/ eng/ vayishlach/ wei.html. See also Exclusiveness and Tolerance, above, p. 6, which says that in medieval Jewish poetry Edom was synonymous with Christianity. In Malachi 1:4 “the Lord hath indignation for ever” against Edom; see also Jeremiah 49:7-8, Lamentations 4:21-22, Ezekiel 35, and Amos 1:11.

IV. SLAVE TRADE

Edom was never geographically fixed. It followed the Jews wherever they went—the nation allotted to Israel’s dehumanized twin, as ripe for righteous predation as the original Esau.[vii] Edom’s presence in Europe helped rationalize the Jewish role in the immensely profitable slave trade of the eighth through the 10^th centuries. European boys—mostly in the East, but in the West as well—were kidnapped and castrated by Vikings, sold to Jews, taken south down the major rivers, and sold again as eunuchs in Muslim lands from Persia to Spain. See H.R. Trevor-Roper, The Rise of Christian Europe, pp. 92-93 (1965). As Trevor-Roper points out, the words for slave and Slav come from the same root in every European language, a reminder of a commerce whose memory has faded away in the West. The Arabic word for eunuch is from the same root. Some trace this trade as far back as the fifth century. .

A related matter is Ashkenazic—though not Sephardic—eschatological doctrine, which in the “late antique” period followed Jeremiah 46:28 (“Fear thou not, O Jacob [i.e., Israel], my servant, saith the Lord: . . . for I will make a full end of all the nations whither I have driven thee: but I will not make a full end of thee. . .” ) and Psalms 110:6 and 94:1. See Adiel Schremer, of Bar Ilan University, “Eschatology, Violence and Suicide: An Early Rabbinic Theme and its Influence in the Middle Ages,” at research. yale.edu/ ycias/database/Files/MESV6-2.pdf: At p. 4, Schremer says:

[T]he construction of the eschatological redemption in terms of the total eradication of the nations, or at least in association with such an expectation, has a potential of shaping a violent personality and might contribute to. . . a violent mind-setting. For if one is hoping for God’s redemption soon to come, and is inspired by the idea of a total vanquish-ing of Israel’s enemies as an essential part of that redemption, one’s violent inclinations are not entirely suppressed and in a sense they are being fostered. (Emphasis added.)

Schremer’s paper was presented on May 5, 2002 at the Yale Divinity School. The reference in his title to suicide concerns the year 1096, when large numbers of Jews in the Rhineland killed themselves and their own children, siblings and parents, rather than submit to Crusaders’ efforts to convert them by force. By way of explanation, Schremer quotes Sigmund Freud: “No neurotic harbors thoughts of suicide which he has not turned back upon himself from murderous impulses against others.” Schremer cites many biblical passages and rabbinical exegeses that might feed such impulses.

For a much fuller discussion of this whole set of issues, see Israel Jacob Yuval, Two Nations in Your Womb (English tr., University of California Press, 2006). At pp. 120-21 Yuval tells of prayers that:

. . . demonstrate the abyss of hostility and hatred felt by medieval Jews toward Christians. And we have here not only hatred, but an appeal to God to kill indiscriminately and ruthlessly, alongside a vivid description of the anticipated horrors to be brought down upon the Gentiles. These pleas are formulated in a series of verbs—“swallow them, shoot them, lop them off, make them bleed, crush them, strike them, curse them, and ban them. . . destroy them, kill them, smite them. . . crush them [again], abandon them, parch them”—and in the best alphabetical tradition, the string of disasters the poet wishes for the Gentiles goes on and on.

Yuval collects an abundance of such material, from both before and after the events of 1096. In agreement with Schremer, he says (p. 123) that “we are dealing here with a comprehensive religious ideology that sees vengeance as a central component in its messianic doctrine.” He repeats (p. 125) that this vengeance was to be “against the Gentiles”—most of whom, it seems safe to say, were peasants—and that the vengeance stood “at the very heart of the messianic process.” He says tellingly (p. 134) that “the Christians were not unaware of the Jewish desire to see their destruction.”[viii]

The ethnocentric hostility of the Jews—consistently commented on by the peoples who have encountered them over the millennia—can be traced ultimately to the origins of Judaism as set forth in the Torah, e.g., Genesis 9:25 (“Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren”); Exodus 17:14-16 and 34:12-13 ; Numbers 24:8 (“God. . . shall eat up the nations his enemies, and shall break their bones, and pierce them through with his arrows”), 25:6-13 (wherein God commends Phineas for his initia-tive in running a javelin through both parties to a marriage of Jew and gentile), 31:7-19 and 33:50-56; and Deuteronomy 2:33-35 (“[on God’s command] we. . . utterly destroyed the men, and the women, and the little ones, of every city, we left none to remain”), 3:4-7, 7:1-5 (“thou shalt. . . utterly destroy them”), 7:14-26 (“thine eye shall have no pity”), 20:10-17 (“thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth”) and 25:19. Disdain for ordinary labor—to be performed by Esau and Edom, but to be exploited by Israel—appears as early as Genesis 25:23-27, as discussed in note vii below.

Ethnocentric hostility has lent itself to Jewish tax-farming. This can be traced back to very early times, and has sometimes involved copious use of deadly force, put at the disposal of the tax-farmers by their noble clients. See Flavius Josephus, The Antiquities of the Jews, bk. 12, ch. 4 (1^st c.), available online (Syria violently stripped to its “bones” for Ptolemy III); and Elias Bickerman, The Jews in the Greek Age, p. 120 (Harvard University Press, 1988).

See also Rabbi Simeon’s lumping of gentiles with serpents, above; Cornelius Tacitus, The Histories, bk. 5.5 (c. 109 A.D.) (“[the Jews] regard the rest of mankind with all the hatred of enemies”); Gibbon, ch. 15 (“the[ir] sullen obstinacy. . . and unsocial manners seemed to mark them out a distinct species of men, who boldly professed, or who faintly disguised, their implacable hatred to the rest of humankind”); and Emilio Gabba, “The Growth of Anti-Judaism or the Greek Attitude Toward the Jews,” in W.D. Davies and Louis Finkelstein, eds., The Cambridge History of Judaism, vol. 2 (Cam-bridge University Press, 1990). At p. 629 Gabba attributes to Hecataeus of Abdera (early 3d c. B.C.) an observation about the hostility of the Jews. Gabba excuses that hostility, saying the Jews’ “misanthropic reserve” was understandable in light of the exodus from Egypt. But the exodus—thought by Hecataeus to have been an expulsion, and by Tacitus to have been an expulsion of lepers—was perhaps a thousand years past even when Hecataeus wrote. At p. 645 Gabba cites Posidonius (134 B.C.) on the advice given to his contemporary, King Antiochus Sidetes, to destroy the Jews, “for they alone among all peoples refused all relations with other races and saw everyone as their enemy. . . .”

Almost identical advice was given to King Ahasuerus (Xerxes I, 485-465 B.C.) in Esther 3:8-9. Some two-and-a-half millennia after Ahasuerus, the Jews still celebrate on their most joyous holiday the vengeance he allowed them: “sl[aughter] of their foes seventy and five thousand,” including “both little ones and women,” and hanging not just of the man who gave the advice, but of all ten of his sons. It was an occasion of “light, and. . . joy, and honour,” and of “gladness and feasting.” Id., 8:11-17, 9:13-28.

Martin Luther’s comments on this story, in The Jews and Their Lies (1543), fit with Yuval’s account of “a comprehensive [Jewish] religious ideology that sees vengeance as a central component in its messianic doctrine,” and Schremer’s account of Jewish hopes for “eschatological redemption in terms of the total eradication of the nations”:

Oh how [the Jews] love the Book of Esther, which so nicely agrees with their bloodthirsty, revengeful and murderous desire and hope. The sun never did shine on a more bloodthirsty and revengeful people than they, who imagine themselves to be the people of God, and who desire to, and think they must, murder and crush the heathen. And the foremost undertaking which they expect of their Messiah is that he should slay and murder the whole world with the sword.

This passage—indeed, the whole 64-page essay—is often cited as evidence of Luther’s pathological anti-Semitism, but Yuval and Schremer show that at least on this point he knew whereof he spoke. As Yuval says, “the Christians were not unaware of the Jewish desire to see their destruction.” Luther’s comments also fit with the descriptions of Jewish arendars given above—men who “found pleasure and a sort of triumphant delight in deception and cheating” (Graetz); who sowed “a terrible harvest of hatred” (Bermant); and who may have been “so moved by racist contempt for the Ukrainian and Polish peasantry as to regard them as subhuman” (Cantor).

V. THE NEED TO HATE AND TO BE HATED

Even in the 21^st century, Israeli children are taught to sing “The Whole World is Against Us”(“Ha’olam Ku’lo heg’denu”). We have not only David M. Weinberg’s defense of the “shfoch hamatcha” prayer, but even Rabbi Meir Y. Soloveichik, “The Virtue of Hate,” First Things, Feb. 2003 (available online) (“When hate is appropriate, then it is not only virtuous, but essential for Jewish well-being”). Soloveichik is not a fringe figure. He is a member of an exceedingly eminent Orthodox rabbinical family. When he wrote the article he was resident scholar at the Jewish Center in Manhattan and a Beren fellow at Yeshiva University, and was studying the philosophy of religion at the Yale Divinity School.

Note the words “essential for Jewish well-being.” The “virtue of hate” seems to come of a positive need to be hated. The widely-published Rabbi Dr. Dan Cohn-Sher-bok, professor of Jewish history at the University of Wales (Lampeter) and author of The Paradox of Anti-Semitism (2006), says in an interview with the Independent (U.K.), March 19, 2006 (available online) that: “Jews need enemies in order to survive. . . . [I]n the absence of Jew-hatred, Judaism is undergoing a slow death. . . . We want to be loved, and we want Judaism to survive intact. . . . [T]hese are incompatible desires. . . . Why do we endure? Because we’re hated.” (Emphases added.)

Cohn-Sherbok says of a founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl: “He warned that if our Christian hosts were to leave us in peace for two generations, the Jews would merge entirely into surrounding races.” Id. Herzl also wrote in his conclusion to Der Judenstaat (1896): “Universal brotherhood is not even a beautiful dream. Antagonism is essential to man’s greatest efforts.”

In his book (p. 209) Cohn-Sherbok says that “in the past ultra-Orthodox Jewish leaders were profoundly aware of this dynamic.” One of his examples is Schneur Zalman of Lyady, the first Lubavitch Rebbe and author of the Tanya (1796), the fundamental book of the Habbad movement, whose first chapter famously concludes by saying gentile souls “contain no good whatever.” [ix] In 1812, Zalman worked with the anti-Semitic Czar Alexander I to defeat Napoleon. He feared Napoleon would liberate the Jews, who might expect to benefit materially—although that’s a much-disputed calculation—but whose souls would be lost to assimilation and intermarriage.

Similarly, according to Ha’aretz, June 3, 2004 (available online), “in the mid-19th century, Rabbi [Samson Raphael] Hirsch, the leader of Germany’s Orthodox Jews, wrote that anti-Semitism is the tool through which the God of Israel preserves his people.” In 1958, Rabbi Dr. Nahum Goldmann, then president of the World Jewish Congress, com-plained that the “current decline of overt anti-Semitism might constitute a new danger to Jewish survival,” one that “has had a very negative effect on our internal life.” In 1957, Leo Pfeffer, then counsel to the same organization, said much the same. As to both, see Alfred M. Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection II, p. 412 (1982). See also Charles E. Silberman, A Certain People, p. 165 (1985):

“For all that we are preoccupied by the damage once done to us by our enemies, we are still more concerned by the curse of friendship we now encounter,” Leonard Fein, editor and publisher of Moment magazine, told the Conference of Jewish Communal Service in 1980. . . . “Deep down—and sometimes not so very deep—we still believe that we depended on the pogroms and persecutions to keep us a people, that we have not the fiber to withstand the lures of a genuinely open society.” (Emphasis added.)

Hannah Arendt says of this whole line of thinking, in The Origins of Totali-tarianism, p. 7 (1973 ed.), that “. . . eternal anti-Semitism would imply an eternal guarantee of Jewish [corporate] existence. This superstition is a secularized travesty of the idea of eternity inherent in a faith in chosenness.”

VI. PROVOKING ANTI SEMITISM

It follows from this “superstition” (or psychological insight) that where anti-Semitism is inadequate to prevent an erosion of Jewish identity, it has to be fabricated or provoked. A seemingly encyclopedic survey of such fabrication—at least as it’s appeared in recent years—can be found in Norman Finkelstein, Beyond Chutzpah, pp. 21-85 (University of California Press, 2005).[x] As to the other technique, provocation, see Yuval, Two Nations; Shahak, Three Thousand Years; Lindemann, Esau’s Tears; some of the other material discussed above; and the private diary of Moshe Sharett, then prime minister of Israel, for May 26, 1955.

That diary entry records the view of Sharett’s colleague Moshe Dayan that only by a strategy of endless “provocation and revenge” toward its neighbors can Israel survive. Israel, says Sharett (paraphrasing Dayan), “must. . . invent dangers” to “keep its morale high and to retain its moral tension.” Sharett even quotes David Ben Gurion: “It would be worth while to pay an Arab a million pounds to start a war.” See the extended quotation from Sharett’s diary in Livia Rokach, Israel’s Sacred Terrorism, p. 44 (1980) (available online; emphasis in original). Rokach, whose father was Sharett’s minister of the Interior, says (id., p. 8 ) that by the mid ‘50s, if not before:

Terrorism and “revenge” were. . . to be glorified as the “moral . . . and even sacred” values of Israeli society. . . . [T]he military symbol was now Unit 101, led by Arik Sharon. . . . The lives of Jewish victims. . . had to be sacrificed to create provocations justifying subsequent reprisals. . . . A hammering, daily propaganda, controlled by the censors, was directed to feed the Israeli population with images of the monstrosity of the Enemy. (Emphasis added.)

Meanwhile, she says, Israel’s leaders never believed in any external threat to Israel’s survival. What they wanted was regional hegemony, and of course internal cohesion. In 1984, after her book had ceased to be news, Rokach was found dead in a Rome hotel room.

Boas Evron makes some of the same points as Rokach, in Jewish State or Israeli Nation?, above. At p. 251 he says: “In the absence of a positive national bond, Ben Gurion deliberately sought to base the national consciousness on the negative foundation of terror and nightmare. . . .” According to two books by the Mossad defector Victor Ostrovsky, By Way of Deception (1990) and The Other Side of Deception (1994), Mossad doctrine is squarely in accord with the views of Dayan and Ben Gurion, as recorded by Sharett and amplified by Rokach and Evron.[xi]

For more on hostile solidarity as an essential element of Judaism, see three books by Kevin MacDonald, A People That Shall Dwell Alone (1994), Separation and its Discontents (1998), and The Culture of Critique (1998); and John Hartung’s essay “Love Thy Neighbor,” above. Hartung begins with an epigraph from Blaise Pascal’s Pensees (1670): “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.”

MacDonald and Hartung see Judaism as an economic strategy for competing with host populations, from whom the sharpest self-differentiation has to be maintained. One might infer from their work—as from such passages as Deuteronomy 7:14-26—a system designed to suppress the recognition of fellow humanity across ethnic and religious lines, a system still functioning millennia after its inception. Of course, any such analysis is taken as purest anti-Semitism, an occasion of “terror and nightmare” call-ing for (of all things) hostile solidarity.[xii]

See also Moses Hadas, Hellenistic Culture: Fusion and Diffusion, chs. 7 and 20 (Columbia University Press, 1959) as to the influence, via Plato, of closed, totalitarian Sparta on Judaism as far back as the Maccabean period (142-63 B.C.).[xiii]

Then there’s the widely-reprinted article that Rabbi Israel Hess, campus rabbi at Bar-Ilan University, wrote for its student magazine, Bat Kol, entitled “Genocide: A Commandment of the Torah” (Feb. 26, 1980). Rabbi Hess took as his text Deuteronomy 25:17-19 (“[T]hou shalt blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven; thou shalt not forget [to do] it”). Amalek, he said, is any people that declares war on Israel. The Israeli state rabbinate has never taken direct issue with Rabbi Hess—as it has for example with Reform Judaism.[xiv]

In 2001, Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef, formerly Sephardi chief rabbi, and founder and leader of Israel’s third largest political party, Shas, called sweepingly for “extermination of the Arabs,” saying “it is forbidden to be merciful to them.” Shas M.K. Eli Yishay (later Ehud Olmert’s vice prime minister) said Rabbi Yosef was merely echoing Ariel Sharon. BBC News, April 10 and 11, 2001, available online.

Desire to escape the Jewish condition—with its ethical double standards, its “virtue of hate,” its abhorrence of “the curse of friendship,” its obsession with “total eradication of the nations,” and the consequent esotericism of the rabbinical literature—motivated those early secular Zionists who longed for direct labor on the land and disparaged intellectual and commercial occupations reminiscent of the arendar role. Lenni Brenner discusses such attitudes in Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, ch. 2 (1983), available online. See also Slezkine, The Jewish Century, above, pp. 327-28. That group of Zionists hoped to make Israel a “normal” nation.

But their religious successors, returning to Judaism’s roots, have countered that normality is precisely what Israel can never have, because of its unique relationship with God. See Shahak and Mezvinsky, Jewish Fundamentalism, above, p. 71:

The Gush Emunim [Bloc of the Faithful] argument is that secular Zionists measured. . . “normality” by applying non-Jewish standards that are satan-ic. . . . [According to] one of the group’s leaders, Rabbi [Shlomo] Avner: “While God requires. . . normal nations to abide by abstract codes of justice and righteousness, such laws do not apply to Jews.” . . . Relying upon the Code of Maimonides and the Halakha, Rabbi [Israel] Ariel [of Gush Emunim] stated: “A Jew who kill[s] a non-Jew is exempt from human judgment and has not violated the [religious] prohibition of murder.”[xv] (Emphases added.)

On the other hand Shahak and Mezvinsky say (id.) that “the murder of a Jew, particularly by a non-Jew, is in Jewish law the worst possible crime.”

Such contemptuous attitudes and narcissistic double standards were very much alive at the time of the holodomor. In 1932, the first year of the famine, the great Eastern European Hebrew poet Chaim Nachman Bialik published the poem “My Father,” which Shahak (Three Thousand Years, ch. 4 n.9) says is still “taught in all Israeli schools.” The poem depicts Bialik’s “righteous and upright” father dispensing vodka in a “den of pigs like men,” to Slavic peasants “rolling in vomit” with “faces of monstrous corruption.”

Bialik calls them “scorpions” for good measure. The father’s “whispered syllables,” meanwhile, audible only to his adoring son, are “pure prayer and law, the words of the living God.” The poem nowhere acknowledges the common complaint that the Jews encouraged Slavic alcoholism, which brought in revenue, exposed peasants’ remaining assets to foreclosure, and made them easier to control.

The poem is missing from Bialik’s supposedly Complete Poetic Works (1948) published in English 14 years after his death. That brings us back to Shahak and Mezvinsky’s point, above, about books and translations that falsify by omission.

VI. SUPPRESSION OF CAUSES OF ANTI SEMITISM

A related point: A search of the Library of Congress catalog under the keyword “arenda” brings up 37 apparently relevant items, not one of which is in English. By way of comparison, a search under the combination of “United States” and “slavery” brings up more than 10,000. A search under “Ukrainian famine” brings up all of ten items. A search under “holocaust” brings up more than 10,000.

More evidence of ineradicable attitudes (“. . . I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance. . . . Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel”) was recently seen on Israeli television in the series “The Oligarchs.” The series was most definitely not shown in the U.S. Uri Avnery describes it in an article entitled “How the Virgin Became a Whore” (2004), available online:

Some of its episodes are simply unbelievable—or would have been, if they had not come straight from the horses’ mouths: the heroes of the story, who gleefully boast about their despicable exploits. The series was produced by Israeli immigrants from Russia.

* * *

[The oligarchs] exploited the disintegration of the Soviet system to loot the treasures of the state and to amass plunder amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars. In order to safeguard the perpetuation of their business, they took control of the state. Six of the seven are Jews. . . . [Boris] Berezovsky boasts that he caused the war in Chechnya, in which tens of thousands have been killed and a whole country devastated. He was interested in the mineral resources and a prospective [oil] pipeline there.

. . . In the end there was a reaction: Vladimir Putin, the taciturn and tough ex-KGB operative, assumed power, took control of the media, put one of the oligarchs (Mikhail Khodorkovsky) in prison, [and] caused the others to flee (Berezovsky is in England, Vladimir Gusinsky is in Israel, [and] another, Mikhail Chernoy, is assumed to be hiding here [in Israel]).

In short, then, the history of Jewish relations with Slavic peasants—together with the much longer history of Jewish attitudes toward “the nations”—has enormous rele-vance in explaining why hereditarily-Jewish Bolsheviks in the 1930s, using supposedly scientific Marxist terminology, defined the Ukrainian peasantry as the “class enemy” and carried out a policy of genocidal starvation. In The Jewish Experience, p. 364 (1996), Norman Cantor freely admits as much:

The Bolshevik Revolution and some of its aftermath represented, from one perspective, Jewish revenge. . . . During the heyday of the Cold War, American Jewish publicists spent a lot of time denying that—as 1930s anti-Semites claimed—Jews played a disproportionately important role in Soviet and world Communism. The truth is until the early 1950s Jews did play such a role, and there is nothing to be ashamed of. In time Jews will learn to take pride in the record of the Jewish Communists in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. It was a species of striking back. (Emphases added.)

These words are part of Cantor’s introduction to a chapter by the Russian Jewish writer Arkady Vaksberg, entitled “Stalin’s Jews.” It is most unlikely that Cantor, a professor of history at New York University and a former Rhodes scholar, wrote in ignorance of the scope of Soviet state homicide. Leaving aside issues of pride, shame, and ethnic or religious loyalties, this passage puts Cantor in full agreement with Churchill, Robert Wilton, and Ambassador Levko Lukyanenko, all above.

Edwin Schoonmaker, Democracy and World Dominion, p. 211 (1939) confirms Cantor’s point:

Fifteen years after the Bolshevist Revolution was launched to carry out the Marxist program, the editor of the American Hebrew could write: “According to such information [as] the writer could secure while in Russia a few weeks ago, not one Jewish synagogue has been torn down, as have hundreds—perhaps thousands—of the Greek Catholic churches. . . .” (American Hebrew, Nov. 18, 1932, p. 12.) Apostate Jews, leading a revolution that was to destroy religion as the “opiate of the people,” had somehow spared the synagogues of Russia.[xvi] (Emphasis added.)

Thus the long cycle of violence: (a) throughout the middle ages, the Ashkenazim prayed for divine extermination of the goyim, as described in Two Nations; (b) the atti-tudes reflected in such prayers were reflected as well in speech, conduct and demeanor, plainly intelligible to the goyim themselves, as described both in Two Nations and at greater length in Three Thousand Years; (c) Jews as slave-traders and arendars, in Chaim Bermant’s words, “sow[ed] a terrible harvest of hatred”; (d) peasants responded by killing Jews in great numbers in revolts and pogroms over the centuries; and (e) Jews as Bolsheviks ultimately responded, in Cantor’s phrase, with “Jewish revenge.” That revenge consisted of mass murder on a scale far beyond any theretofore imposed on Jews by Christians, or on the civilians of any European nation by their own government.

Apart from war as such, there has there been no terror on that scale since, either, at least in Europe. (Asia, and particularly Asian Communism, is another matter.) See the numerical estimates in The Black Book of Communism, p. 4, and in Harvest of Sorrow, p. 306. The former set of estimates puts the overall number of deaths from Communist “crimes against civilians” in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe at 21 million. Martin Malia of the University of California at Berkeley, in his foreword to the Black Book, p. xx, says “. . . it is at last becoming clear that our current qualitative judgments are scandalously out of line with the [20^th] century’s real balance sheet of political crime.”

There has been little Jewish willingness to accept responsibility for any part of the long cycle. Cantor “learn[ed] to take pride in. . . a species of striking back,” and Shahak (Three Thousand Years, ch. 4) says of the Khmelnytsky rebellion that:

This typical peasant uprising against extreme oppression, an uprising accompanied not only by massacres committed by the rebels but also by even more horrible atrocities and “counter-terror” of the Polish magnates’ private armies, has remained emblazoned in the consciousness of east-European Jews to this very day—not, however, as a peasant uprising, a revolt of the oppressed, of the real wretched of the earth, nor even as a vengeance visited upon all the servants of the Polish nobility, but as an act of gratuitous antisemitism directed against Jews as such.

An example demonstrating Shahak’s point is Louis Finkelstein, ed., The Jews: Their History, Culture and Religion (3d ed., 2 vol., 1960), which tells of the massacres of 1648-49 (pp. 250-51, 388-89), but says nothing of the arenda system. Finkelstein’s index has no entry under that word. Nor, for that matter, does Geoffrey Wigoder, ed., The New Encyclopedia of Judaism (2d. ed., New York University Press, 2002). The essay on Khmelnytsky in the Encyclopedia Judaica (1972), ignoring even Graetz and Nata Hannover, actually denies the existence of evidence the Jewish arendars were oppressive. None of these recent works, of course, says so much as a word about the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33 or its perpetrators.

In The Sacred Chain, pp. 14-16, passim, Cantor says that “. . . rabbinical Judaism prefers silence on history,” and that after the intense historical emphasis of the Bible:

Judaism [swung] radically to become a religion without history by not later than the second century A.D. . . . By and large the Jewish blackout on historical writing continued into the nineteenth century. . . . What was not blotted out was diminished and narcotized into a recital of unprovoked victimization [of Jews]. . . .

To similar effect, see Three Thousand Years, ch. 2, esp. notes 8-14 and accompanying text; and Samuel Grayzel’s preface to The Abyss, above, at p. ix. Even today, Cantor says (p. 15), “realistic, truth-telling history of the Jews is not welcome in the ruling circles of the American and Israeli Jewish communities, among the rabbis, the billionaire patriarchs. . . and the prominent politicians.”[xvii]

See also chapter 8 of Separation and Its Discontents, above (“Self Deception as an Aspect of Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy”). MacDonald begins that chapter with a quotation from Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, above, pp. vii-viii. Arendt notes the “strong polemical and apologetic bias” in Jewish historiography (a matter that also interests Cantor, and especially Shahak), and then says:

When [the] Jewish tradition of an often violent antagonism to Christians and Gentiles came to light “the general Jewish public was not only outraged but genuinely astonished,” so well had its spokesmen succeeded in convincing themselves and everybody else of the non-fact that Jewish separateness was due exclusively to Gentile hostility and lack of enlight-enment. . . . [T]his self-deceiving theory. . . actually amounted to a prolongation and modernization of the old myth of chosenness. . . .[xviii]

Arendt’s interior quotation in this passage is from Jacob Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance, above, p. 196. Compare chs. 11 (“Ghetto Segregation”) and 12 (“The Attitude of Estrangement”) in that book. Such self-persuasion as to non-facts may be why Guenter Lewy, above, can argue that the Gypsies brought down genocidal wrath on their own heads with their moral and ethical double standards. Lewy has apparently repressed all awareness that Judaism has, in Katz’s words, its own “ethical duality—following different standards in . . . internal and external relationships.”[xix]

VII. TREATMENT OF JEWISH 'INFORMERS'/INTELLECTUAL TERRORISM

The preference for silence about Jewish history may be also be a corollary of din moser, the law—rooted in Deuteronomy 17:8-12 and openly enforced in the Pale of Settlement through most of the 19^th century—under which those suspected of betraying Jewish information to gentile authorities were subject to death without notice, by order of the rabbis and other community leaders. See Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, above, pp. 140-47. At pp. 146-47 Shahak and Mezvinsky say that:

The new Israeli historians have presented evidence showing that until the 1880s the killings of Jewish informers by Jews in the Tsarist Empire were numerous. . . . [T]he writer Shaul Ginzberg. . . wrote in his autobiography that during the nineteenth century hundreds of Jewish informers were drowned in the Dnieper, the largest river in the “Pale.” These informers were charged and convicted under the law of the informers simply because they were suspected of informing the authorities about something. * * * [A] Jewish informer was condemned to death in secret without being able to say anything in his own defense. This mode of execution was employed for hundreds of years until the recent time.

Again, as Hartung says, “the half-life and penetrance of such cultural legacies are often under-appreciated.” Shahak and Mezvinsky discuss din moser in the context of Prime MinisterYitzhak Rabin’s assassination by a religious zealot, heartily encouraged by othodox rabbis, only a few years short of the 21^st century. Also as to the Rabin case, see Allan C. Brownfeld, “Growth of Religious Extremism in Israel,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Aug.-Sept. 2000, available online. Din moser may have some-thing to do with the enormous antipathy with which some regard Shahak himself, and with the death of Livia Rokach. It may also illuminate some of the matters discussed in the endnotes below.

While truth-telling is silenced, ad hominem vilification is amplified. David Horowitz of FrontPageMag. com, to pick just one example, calls former President Jimmy Carter a “Jew-hater, genocide-enabler and liar” for saying Israel imposes “apartheid” on the Palestinians in the West Bank. He also accuses Carter of “blood libel.” But Horowitz surely knows that Ariel Sharon told former Italian Premier Massimo D’Alema—at length, according to D’Alema—that Israel means to force the Palestinians into “Bantu-stans.” Ha’aretz, May 13, 2003 (available online). See also Shulamit Aloni (formerly Israeli minister of Education), “Indeed There is Apartheid in Israel,” Jan. 5, 2007 (avail-able online):

On one occasion I witnessed an encounter between a [Palestinian] driver and [an Israeli] soldier who was taking down the details before confisca-ting the vehicle and sending its owner away. “Why?” I asked the soldier. “It’s an order—this is a Jews-only road,” he replied. I inquired as to where was the sign. . . instructing [non-Jewish] drivers not to use it. His answer was. . .: “It is his responsibility to know it, and besides, what do you want us to do, put up a sign. . . and let some anti-Semitic reporter. . . take a photo so he can show the world that apartheid exists here?” (Emphases added.)

Horowitz’s invective is aimed, of course, not so much at Carter as at politicians and others still worried about their jobs. It’s meant to intimidate—which it does—and its style is not new. Esau’s Tears, above, reports complaints of such “intellectual terrorism” (Franz Mehring’s words) from the early 1880s. See p. 136; compare pp. 138-39, 193. There’s no reason to suppose such character-assassination began only then, or that it’s unrelated to the essential, unifying cycle of provocation and revenge discussed above.

VIII. THE NAZIS AND THE HOLODOMOR

The Nazis, no less than the Bolsheviks, regarded Slavic peasants with murderous contempt, an attitude not traditional in the army general staff, but brought to exceedingly full flower in the SS. See, e.g., H.R. Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler, pp. 5-8 (1947). Arendt says the Nazi plan, on which time blessedly ran out, “aimed at the extermination of the Polish and Ukrainian people, . . . 170 million Russians [and] the intelligentsia of Western Europe.” The Origins of Totalitarianism, above, p. 411. The Ukrainians learned what the Nazis meant to do with them after they initially greeted the Wehrmacht as liberators in 1941—a greeting the holodomor goes far to explain.

It would be interesting to know what the Nazis made of the holodomor, which was still very much in progress when they came to power in 1933.

They surely knew about it. The German intelligence services, even on the unlikely assumption that they had no sources of their own, could hardly have missed the story in the British press as reported by Muggeridge, by former Prime Minister David Lloyd George’s heroic protégé Gareth Jones, and by A.T. Cholerton of the News-Telegraph and the Sunday Times; in the American press as reported by Lyons, by Ralph Barnes of the New York Herald-Tribune, by W.H. Chamberlin of the Christian Science Monitor, by William Stoneman of the Chicago Daily News, by Harry Lang and Richard M. Sanger of the New York Journal, and by Adam J. Tawdul of the New York American; in the French press as reported by Suzanne Bertillon of Le Matin; and in the German press as reported by the liberal (and Jewish) Paul Scheffer of the Berliner Tageblatt, and by Otto Auhagen in the scholarly journal Osteuropa, VII (Aug. 1932). Even at that early date, Auhagen said Ukrainian peasants were reduced to eating the cadavers of horses, from which they contracted infectious diseases.

The Nazis could hardly have failed to notice, moreover, when Theodor Cardinal Innitzer of Vienna called in August 1933 for relief efforts, stating that the Ukrainian famine was claiming lives “likely. . . numbered. . . by the millions” and driving those still alive to infanticide and cannibalism. See the New York Times, Aug. 20, 1933, reporting both Innitzer’s charge and the official denial (“in the Soviet Union we have neither cannibals nor cardinals”). The next day, the Times added Duranty’s own denial.

Other sources can be found by searching on the combination of “Innitzer” and “Ukraine” and “famine.” Also, P.C. Hiebert and the Rev. Charles H. Hagus tried to organize relief efforts on behalf of the German Mennonite community. None of the proposed relief operations had any significant success.

Most likely, the lesson the Nazis drew was how safe, easy, even acceptable it was to murder whole populations. That was demonstrably Hitler’s own conclusion about the early-20^th-century Armenian genocide at the hands of the Turks (“Who speaks any more [of that]?”)[xx] and the annihilation of the American Indians (“Treat them like redskins”). Likewise, the Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky actually spoke of the “good name” Hitler himself had supposedly given to forced “mass migrations.”

Just before his death in 1940, Jabotinsky justified “transferring” the Palestinian people out of their homes on the ground that “the world has become accustomed to the idea of mass migrations and has become fond of them. . . . Hitler—as odious as he is to us—has given this idea a good name in the world.” Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete, p. 406-07 (2000); see generally Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948 (1992). Twenty-one years after Jabotinsky’s back-handed compliment to Hitler, Adolf Eichmann was put on trial in Israel. Two of the counts on which he was convicted alleged mass forcible expulsion of people—non-Jews at that—from their homes. Those counts (nos. 9 and 10) both carried the death penalty. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 245 (1963).

Israel is now concerned both to cultivate its relations with Turkey and to preserve the claim of Jewish exclusivity for “the” Holocaust (capital “H”). There is also a Jewish tradition in which the Armenians, for obscure reasons, are equated with the Amalekites; see Reckless Rites, above, pp. 10, 122-25. Accordingly Israel not only maintains a diplomatic silence about the slaughter of the Armenians but also lobbies against its commemoration in the U.S. See Larry Derfner in the Jerusalem Post, April 21, 2005 (“[O]n the subject of the Armenian genocide, Israel and some U.S. Jewish organizations, notably the American Jewish Committee, have for many years acted aggressively as silencers”); and Jon Wiener in the Nation, July 12, 1999 (“Lucy Dawidowicz, a leading Holocaust historian, argued that the Turks had ‘a rational reason’ for killing Armenians, unlike the Germans, who had no rational reason for killing Jews”).

Note carefully Dawidowicz’s “rational reason” for killing 1.5 million human beings; Kopelev’s “historical necessity” and “revolutionary duty” to kill 7 (or perhaps even 10) million; Koestler’s “mind conditioned to explain away what [he] saw”; and Cantor’s mature judgment that “there is nothing to be ashamed of.” Bernard Lewis, by the way, a Zionist professor emeritus at Princeton, actually has the distinction of having been convicted in a French court of “holocaust-denial” as to the Armenians. See Norman Finkelstein, Beyond Chutzpah, p. 59n, above.

The late David Roth, national ethnic liaison of the American Jewish Committee, once testified before Congress—in 1966, when Israel was describing itself as a bastion against Soviet influence in the Middle East, rather than as a magnet drawing it in—that “it is outrageous to think that the death of 7 million Ukrainians is somehow less important than the death of 6 million Jews.” We should, he said, “deny the Soviets the ultimate victory of our silence.”

Nicholas Lysson

1. In 1920 Wilton and Churchill both expressed hope that through Zionism, Jewish energies could be channeled constructively (that is, one is tempted to say, against non-Europeans) rather than destructively (that is, on the same interpretation, against fellow Europeans, their social and economic order, and their royal houses). Hence the title of Churchill’s article. Churchill’s views evolved as Britain descended what Robert Fisk calls “the bloody staircase”—as to which see my companion essay, “On the Origins of the Balfour Declaration.” Note in that essay threats made by both Chaim Weizmann and his protégé Samuel Landman about the destruction Jews might wreak if frustrated as to Palestine. Weizmann wrote of “overthrow[ing] the world,” and Landman of “pull[ing] down the pillars of civilisation,” a metaphor obviously inspired by Judges 16:21-31. Whence came these ferocious energies? Part of the answer involves traditional eschatological doctrines and attitudes toward gentiles, as discussed in the present essay. Another part involves the Jewish population explosion in the Ukraine during the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. It swamped the occupations traditionally thought suitable and—together with the pogroms that followed the czar’s assassination in 1881—led to massive emigration, heightened revolutionary activity, and other attempts to recover those occupational niches. See, e.g., Subtelny, above, p. 276:

   Throughout the nineteenth century, especially in its latter part, the Jews experienced a tremendous rise in population. Between 1820 and 1880, while the general population of the [Russian] empire rose by 87%, the number of Jews increased by 150%. On the Right Bank [of the Dnieper] this rise was even more dramatic: between 1844 and 1913 the number of its inhabitants rose by 265% while the Jewish population increased by 844%! Religious sanctions of large families, less exposure to famine, war, and epidemics, and a low mortality rate because of communal self-help and the availability of doctors largely accounted for this extraordinary increase. back

2. Similarly, the Soviet Union put Jews in charge of camps for German POWs in the immediate aftermath of World War II. For the torture and killing that ensued, see John Sack, An Eye for an Eye (1993). Sack’s book was denounced by Elan Steinberg of the World Jewish Congress on the CBS program “Sixty Minutes,” Nov. 24, 1993. Steinberg accused Sack of “blackening history,” as if such a thing were possible.back

3. For more on Dmitri Panin, see, e.g., David Remnick, “Seasons in Hell: How the Gulag Grew,” the New Yorker, April 14, 2003. A search on his name, in quotation marks, also brings up considerable material. back

4. The Law of Return is based on heredity and ethnic affiliation, and ignores issues of religious belief and practice (or lack of either) so long as no other religion has been willingly adopted in lieu of Judaism. Sec. 4A(a) and (b), enacted by Amendment No. 2 (1970) permits qualification through certain Jewish relatives by blood or marriage. Some have suggested connections through which Lenin, and even Stalin, might have qualified. See Dmitri Volkogonov, Lenin, pp. 8-9 (1994) as to Stalin’s suppression of information about Lenin’s Jewish antecedents; compare Robert Service, Lenin: A Biography, pp. 17-21, 28-29 (Harvard University Press, 2000). Stuart Kahan, The Wolf of the Kremlin, pp. 169-71 (1987), alleges that Stalin was married at one point to Rosa Kaganovich, Lazar’s sister. As befits a regime that regularly “blot[ted] out the remembrance of [inconvenient people] from under heaven,” the record is unclear. Some have denied even that Lazar had such a sister. She is depicted, though, in Robert Payne, The Rise and Fall of Stalin, pp. 410-12 (1965), in connection with the apparent suicide of Stalin’s second wife.back

5. See, e.g., Shahak and Mezvinsky, Jewish Fundamentalism, p. xix, discussing the centrality of this theme in Lurianic Cabbalism and in the views of its recent followers, including particularly Avracham Yitzhak Hacohen Kook, chief rabbi of Palestine, 1920-35. They quote him: “The difference between a Jewish soul and the souls of non-Jews—all of them in all different levels—is greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle.” They add that “according to the Lurianic Cabbala, the world was created solely for the sake of Jews; the existence of non-Jews was subsidiary.” Such tribal narcissism pervades the various teachings discussed by Johann Eisenmenger (p. 9, above), by Shahak in Three Thousand Years, and by Israel Jacob Yuval in Two Nations in Your Womb (pp. 11-12, above). Biblical passages quoted herein, by the way, are taken from the King James Version, but the bracketed reference to penises in Ezekiel 23:20 is based on the Revised Standard Version, where the word is “members.” back

6. See also Elisheva Carlebach, liided Souls: Converts From Judaism in Germany, 1500-1750, pp. 212-13 (Yale University Press, 2001)(“Eisenmenger did not fabricate. . .; he quoted accurately and translated literally. . .”); and Henry Hart Milman, The History of the Jews, vol. 3, p. 49 (1871 ed.)(“[Eisenmenger’s] reading was vast, his industry indefatigable. . . . I have never heard his accuracy seriously impeached”). Having granted those points, Katz and Carlebach are left to argue—most indignantly—that Eisenmenger errs by assuming Jews are aware of rabbinical writings and take them to mean what they say. On publica-tion, Eisenmenger’s book was suppressed by official decree; influential Jews had complained that it might lead to the sort of massacres seen just 50 years before in the Ukraine. The English-language version even now has a habit of disappearing from libraries (see, e.g., the online catalogue of the New York Public Library) and is available in many university libraries only online, with access restricted. It is, however, available for purchase in a facsimile edition published in 2006. back

7. See Genesis 25:31-34 (Jacob’s taking advantage of Esau’s mortal distress to acquire his birthright—“I am at the point to die,” answered with “swear to me this day”), and the immediately following verse, 26:1, about “famine in the land”; and 27:15-44 (Jacob’s theft of Esau’s blessing by outright fraud). Note the grandiosity of the blessing (Genesis 27:29): “Let people serve thee and nations bow down to thee: be lord over thy brethren, and let thy mother’s sons bow down to thee; cursed be every one that curseth thee, and blessed be he that blesseth thee.” In Genesis 32:28 and 35:10 Jacob is renamed Israel. In Genesis 33:1-13 Esau good-heartedly forgives his twin. Jacob (Israel), though, retains Esau’s birthright and blessing. Esau remains eternally in liine disfavor (see the sources just cited in the text). This continues the subservient status God ordained not just for him, but also for his “nation” or “manner of people,” even before his birth (Genesis 25:23). Esau’s murderous but transitory rage at being defrauded (Genesis 27:41) puts him afoul of the stolen blessing: “[C]ursed be every one that curseth [Jacob!].” Apart from that, Esau’s only obvious fault is naïve trust in his own mother and his own twin. Esau’s “manner of people,” i.e., mere “m[e]n of the field” (Genesis 25:23, 27) can expect little from that twin, who prefers to stay in his tent (id.), “flee[s],” at the mother’s direction, from the victim of his fraud (Genesis 27:43), and deals underhandedly with Laban, the uncle who gives him refuge (Genesis 30:31-43). Jacob is to be “lord over [his] brethren,” and to him even “nations [are called to] bow down.” This foundational myth may be the earliest record of the “hatred and contempt” referred to by Shahak (see p. 7, above). Later Pharisaic contempt for men of the field is discussed in Evron, Jewish State or Israeli Nation?, above, pp. 29-30. Evron thinks the reaction came in the form of Christianity and its spread among the disfavored. For talmudic vilification of Esau, a metaphor for Rome, then Christianity, see http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view_friendly.jsp?artid= 457&letter=E. And see Alastair G. Hunter, “(De)nominating Amalek: Racist Stereotyping in the Bible and the Justification of Discrimination,” in Jonneke Bekkenkamp and Yvonne Sherwood, eds., Sanctified Aggression, p. 92 (2003). Hunter writes of the expropriator’s invariable dehumanization—not to say demonization—of those he expropriates. back

8. Yuval is a professor of Jewish history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and was a visiting fellow in the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University in the spring of 2004. His ventilation of the matters covered in Two Nations has not been uniformly well received. His introduction (p. xiii) quotes Ezra Fleischer’s reaction to an earlier article Yuval wrote on the same themes: “This article is of the type that it would have been better had it never been written; and once written—it would have been better had it never been published; and once published—it would have been better had it been forgotten as quickly as possible.” Another version of those last five words is “sentenced to oblivion.” See Israel Shamir, “A Yiddishe Medina,” available online. Compare the discussion of din moser at p. 20, above.back

9. This is one of the milder translations. Others include “totally impure and evil” and “totally satanic.” (See generally Eisenmenger as to such matters.) Yisrael Meyerowitz, “Hasidic Primary Works in English Translation” (2004, available online) says that “due to the difficult homiletic style of most primary Hasidic works, a mere translation will not properly convey the author’s intent.” (Emphasis added.) Three Thousand Years (esp. chs. 2 and 5) might suggest that the supposed futility of “mere translation” is quite intentional, allowing simultaneous (a) practice of the “virtue of hate,” (b) denial to outsiders—especially gentile authorities—that any such thing is actually meant, and (c) assertion that any outsider who perceives hostility does so only because of the anti-Semitism imputed to all gentiles. back

10. See also, e.g., BBC News, July 18, 2004 (“[Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon said that his advice to French Jews was that moving to Israel was ‘a must and they have to move immediately.’ * * * A week ago, President Jacques Chirac rushed to condemn an apparently anti-Semitic attack on a Paris train that turned out to be a hoax”); Jewish News Weekly of Northern Calif., July 23, 2004 (“Three months after an arson fire that their son has admitted to igniting charred their home, Rabbi Yosef and Hinda Langer are turning their lives right side up again”); Agence France Presse, Aug. 30, 2004 (“French police confirmed that a man arrested in connection with what was first believed to be an anti-Semitic arson attack on a Jewish social center a week ago was a Jewish man who had worked there. . . ”); Associated Press, Sept. 19, 2004 (reporting that Kerri Dunn, a professor at Claremont McKenna College in California, was convicted of attempted insurance fraud after spray-painting her own car with anti-Semitic slurs); cbsnewyork.com, Oct. 19, 2004 (reporting that Olga Abramovich was caught after a spree of painting swastikas through Jewish sections of Queens and Brooklyn, and that her motives were not as might appear); and an FBI notice issued in mid-Sept. 2005 for Adam Pearlman, a/k/a Abu Suhayb Al-Amriki, Abu Suhayb, and Yihya Majadin Adams, wanted for questioning about “Al Qaeda” terrorist threats against the U.S. Pearlman’s grandfather, with whom he had lived, was Carl K. Pearlman, M.D., a prominent Orange County, Calif. urologist and Anti-Defamation League board member. See also note xi, below.back

11. As to Zionist false-flag terrorism, designed to look like the work of others and (generally) to create the appearance of external threats, see, e.g., By Way of Deception and The Other Side of Deception (including plot to assassinate Pres. George H.W. Bush and frame Palestinians for the crime after Bush froze loan guarantees for Israel); Ari Ben Menashe, Profits of War:Inside the Secret U.S.-Israeli Arms Network (1992)(S.S. Achille Lauro attack, successfully blamed on Palestinians, and an attempt to blow up an El Al airliner in England, successfully blamed on Syria, after which “Margaret Thatcher closed down the Syrian embassy in London”); Patrick Seale, Abu Nidal: A Gun for Hire (1992)(City of Poros ferry attack, successfully blamed on Palestinians, assassinations of Palestinian moderates, shooting of Israeli ambassador Shlomo Argov in London in 1982 to provide pretext for invasion of Lebanon); Naeim Giladi, Ben Gurion’s Scandals: How the Haganah and the Mossad Eliminated Jews (1992, available online) (Israeli bombing of synagogues and libraries in Baghdad in the early 1950s to stampede Iraqi Jews into moving to Israel, and a scheme to paint an airplane in Egyptian colors and use it to bomb Israel); Abbas Shiblak, The Lure of Zion (1986)(bombing of Iraqi Jews); Wilbur Crane Eveland, Ropes of Sand: America’s Failure in the Middle East (1980)(same, also Israeli sinking of U.S.S. Liberty in June 1967: Eveland was a high-level CIA official in the region); Cdr. Elmo H. Hutchison, Violent Truce (1956) (Hutchison was the American chairman of the Israeli-Jordanian Joint Armistice Commission, which the Israelis walked out of in 1954, taking as their pretext killings that appear to have been false-flag); Stephen Green, Taking Sides: America’s Secret Relations With a Militant Israel (1984), and Living by the Sword (1988); Rabbi Moshe Shonfeld, The Holocaust Victims Accuse: Documents and Testimony on Jewish War Criminals (1977)(Haganah’s blowing up of S.S. Patria in Haifa harbor in 1940 to embarrass British over policy on Jewish immigration to Palestine, falsely blamed on Masada-style mass suicide of passengers, who would otherwise have been taken to safety in Mauritius); Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Nov. 2002 (Israeli false-flag attempt to assassinate John Gunther Dean, once himself a Jewish refugee, and by then U.S. ambassador to Lebanon, in 1980); Barbara Crossette, “Who Killed Zia?” World Policy Journal, fall 2005 (Dean’s accusation in 1988, when he was U.S. ambassador to India, that Israel assassinated Pres. Zia ul-Haq of Pakistan and Arnold Raphel, then U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, by sabotaging their plane—following which Dean was declared mentally unstable and relieved of his office); Procuraduria General de la Republica de Mexico, Boletin No. 697/01 (Oct. 12, 2001)(attempt by Israeli agents to bomb the Mexican legislative palace a month after 9/11); Alfred M. Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection II, ch. 10 (1982, available online) (Lilienthal, a lawyer who advised the U.S. delegation at the founding of the UN, is mostly concerned with overt Israeli terrorism that the American and European media refuse to acknowledge as such, but also describes letter bomb campaigns that he thinks were false-flag); Margaret Truman, Harry S. Truman (1973)(reporting Zionist attempts to assassinate Pres. Truman, various of his aides, and British politicians such as Anthony Eden and Ernest Bevin with letter bombs); Robert I. Friedman, The False Prophet (1990) (Israeli plan to use Rabbi Meir Kahane’s Jewish Defense League to embarrass U.S.- Soviet relations by assassinating Soviet diplomats in the U.S.); George W. and Douglas Ball, The Passionate Attachment (1992)(same: the senior Ball was undersecretary of State in the 1960s); many sources on the blowing up of the King David Hotel on July 26, 1946 by Irgun Zvai Leumi agents disguised as Arabs; and Rokach herself, above, on such subjects as the 1954 Lavon Affair, in which Israeli agents bombed USIS libraries, theaters and other sites associated with the U.S. and U.K. in Cairo. This list is hardly exhaustive; nor perhaps could the subject ever be exhausted.back

12. At the same time, of course, it’s perfectly acceptable—no evidence whatever of bigotry—to use terms like “Islamofascism,” or to trace problems to the very nature of some religion (so long as it’s not Judaism), e.g., the supposed anti-Semitism of such passages as John 8:37-44 and Revelation 2:9—even Luke 10:29-37!—or “jihadist” exhortations in the Koran. Many have remarked on the explosive reaction that would ensue if anyone spoke of Jews in the terms the Talmud uses for gentiles, to say nothing of the terms Maimonides uses for blacks. As to the former, see Eisenmenger. As to the latter, see A Guide for the Perplexed, bk. III, ch. 51 (12^th c.); cf. the Talmud tractate Sanhedrin, which as quoted by Eisenmenger (Eng. tr., pp. 105-06) teaches that:

    . . .Three different Kinds mingled carnally in the Ark of Noah: And . . . they were all branded and punish’d for it: Namely the Dog, the Raven, and Shem. The Dog (in Coition) is linked to the Bitch. The Raven emits his Seed by the Mouth. And Shem was punish’d on his Skin; for from him has sprung the Black Cus [i.e., Cushite; compare the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, Numbers 12:1, using that word, with the same verse in the King James Version, which more forthrightly—not contemplating sales in the American South—says “Ethiopian”]. back

13. Hadas, pp. 81-82, quotes a well-known passage from Plato, Laws 942ab (360 B.C.?), which he says provided a model for both Maccabean and then talmudic Judaism:

    The principal thing is that none, man or woman, should ever be without an officer set over him, and that none should get the mental habit of taking any step, whether in earnest or in jest, on his inliidual responsibility. In peace as in war he must live always with his eyes on his superior officer, following his lead and guided by him in his smallest actions. In a word, we must train the mind not to even consider acting as an inliidual or know how to do it.

    Hadas says Jewish religious leaders, unlike Plato and his “Nocturnal Council,” have genuinely believed in liine revelation as a basis for this model. (For Plato, the claim of liine authority was only a necessary lie.) For Shahak’s comments on Hadas, see Three Thousand Years, in the concluding paragraphs of ch. 1. Shahak sees Israel, unless it changes course in a most unlikely way, as becoming “a fully closed and warlike ghetto, a Jewish Sparta, supported by the labour of Arab helots.” The resemblance of the Spartan model to Soviet Communism is also obvious. Some have noticed a similarity between Israel and the Soviet Union of the 1930s in terms of the ideologically-blindered style of their respective apologists, particularly in excusing state terrorism—e.g., Arthur Koestler and Lev Kopelev in their days of hope and illusion, Daniel Pipes and Alan Dershowitz today. That seems understandable in terms of Boas Evron’s point, above, that “the backgrounds of the two groups were much the same.”back

14. Not only have the rabbis reacted indulgently to such verbal expressions. They have also endorsed mass killing directly after the fact, a time when sober second thoughts might be expected. See David Hirst in the Nation, Feb. 2, 2004 (online only) on Dr. Baruch Goldstein’s Purim 1994 massacre of 29 Palestinians and wounding of scores more, children included, by machine-gunning them in the back as they bent heads-to-ground in prayer (whereupon Israeli troops killed 25 more as the survivors rose to retaliate):

    Many were the rabbis who praised this “act,” “event” or “occurrence,” as they delicately called it. Within two days the walls of Jerusalem’s religious neighborhoods were covered with posters extolling Goldstein’s virtues and lamenting that the toll of dead Palestinians had not been higher. In fact, the satisfaction extended well beyond the religious camp. . . ; polls said that 50 percent of the Israeli people, and especially the young, more or less approved of it. back

15. See id. at p. 43 for a similar statement by the head of a yeshiva near Nablus, Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh, that a Jew’s killing non-Jews does not constitute murder in the Jewish religion. Ginsburgh wrote this in his contribution to a book of essays praising Baruch Goldstein. The interesting point is that “[n]o influential Israeli rabbi has publicly opposed Ginsburgh’s statements.” At p. 63, Shahak and Mezvinsky quote Rabbi Yehuda Amital—whom Shimon Peres considered a moderate and appointed to his cabinet in 1995—as saying “our war is directed against the impurity of Western culture and against rationality as such.” (Emphasis added.) back

16. The term “Greek Catholic” refers to the Ukrainian Greek Catholic (or “Uniate”) church formed in 1596 under the rule of Roman Catholic Poland. The rite is Greek Orthodox, but the church recognizes the pope. At the time of the Bolshevik Revolution it included a substantial proportion of the peasantry at which the holodomor was directed, especially in the western Ukraine. back

17. Power is spoken to truth. See Noam Chomsky, “The Fate of an Honest Intellectual,” available online, on how Norman Finkelstein, then a Princeton doctoral candidate, became a non-person there after he exposed as fraudulent Joan Peters’s hugely successful From Time Immemorial (1984), a purported proof that there had been no significant indigenous population in Palestine prior to Zionist settlement. See also Tony Martin, The Jewish Onslaught: Despatches From the Wellesley Battlefront (1993) on what happened when Martin, using Jewish sources, tried to explore the Jewish role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade that arose more or less contemporaneously with the arenda system. Search on the combination of “Mark Roberts” and “Columbia University” as to the ongoing Zionist “witch hunt” at that institution. Search on the combinations of “Juan Cole” and “Yale,” and “Rashid Khalidi” and “Princeton” for Zionist vetoes over faculty appointments. See Paul Findley, They Dare to Speak Out (1985 and subsequent editions) on other academic and political freezeouts. Findley’s first edition also has stories about how Jewish professionals—doctors, lawyers, accountants, etc.—risk destruction of their livelihood if they oppose the official line (as might be predicted by the observations of Moses Hadas in note xiii and the accompanying text, above). Something similar happened to the New York Times, threatening to put it out of business, when Arthur Hays Sulzberger refused in 1947 to run an advertisement by an alter ego of Menachem Begin’s terrorist organization Irgun Zvai Leumi. See Alfred M. Lilienthal, “Book on New York Times Editor [A.M. Rosen-thal] Helps Explain Media Bias for Israel,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June 1989 (avail-able online). See also Victor Ostrovsky, “First-Hand Accounts of Pro-Israel McCarthyism [sic],” Washing-ton Report, Nov. 1997 (available online). Ostrovsky reports threats to the safety of a Montreal law firm’s employees, which forced it to abandon a lawsuit. The suit was based on an Israeli request, televised in Canada, that some “decent” Canadian Jew assassinate Ostrovsky. Ostrovsky also tells of arson that suc-ceeded in burning to the ground his house in an Ottawa suburb. In fairness to the unlamented Joe Mc-Carthy, he never did things quite like those. Again, compare the discussion of din moser at p. 20, above.back

18. Such moral inversions are pervasive and seem to form with automatic ease. Three examples: First, Sholem Aleichem’s “Tevye der Milkhiker” (1895) and its adaptations (most notably Fiddler on the Roof) present Jews in the highly anomalous role of lovable Ukrainian peasants. (Compare Subtelny, above, p. 276: “Traditionally the Jews were an urban people. Tsarist restrictions against their movement into the countryside reinforced this condition”). Second, the movie version (1960) of Leon Uris’s novel Exodus (1958) has Jews, per Lee J. Cobb, “beseech[ing]” Palestinians in 1948 to remain on their land—whereupon the Palestinians depart of their own volition, presumably out of gratuitous anti-Semitism. (Compare p. 577 of the novel: “If the Arabs of Palestine loved their land, they could not have been forced from it. . . . The Arabs had little to live for. . . . This [departure] is not the reaction of a man who loves his land.”) Third, rabbinical involvement in the American civil rights struggle of the 1960s presents baffling anomalies. As Shahak puts it in ch. 2 of Three Thousand Years:

    Surely one is driven to the hypothesis that quite a few of Martin Luther King’s rabbinical supporters were either anti-black racists who supported him for tactical reasons of “Jewish interest” (wishing to win black support for American Jewry and for Israel’s policies) or were accomplished hypocrites, to the point of schizophrenia, capable of passing very rapidly from a hidden enjoyment of rabid racism to a proclaimed attachment to an anti-racist struggle—and back—and back again.

    At present, Israel’s closest non-Jewish ally is exactly the white “Christian Zionist” element in the Old Confederacy against which much of the civil rights struggle was waged. The alliance is based on shared fear of repressed populations seeking to gain or assert rights. See, e.g., Michael Lind, Made in Texas, p. 156 (2003). Lind also reports (id.) Benjamin Netanyahu’s “contemptuous comparison,” before a Dallas audience in 2002, “between Palestinian Arabs and Mexicans.”back

19. Norman Finkelstein gives some examples of that duality at pp. 2-3 of Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict (2d ed. 2003), where he describes the progress of the philosopher Michael Walzer, of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, from (a) defending Israel on the basis of a universal ethic, in Just and Unjust Wars (1977), to (b) defending it, once that became impossible, on the basis that there is no universal ethic, in Spheres of Justice (1983) and Exodus and Revolution (1985), to (c) arguing, in The Company of Critics (1988), that even if there were a universal ethic, a “connected” social critic would still privilege his “own” people. Finkelstein comments that “for Israel’s ‘friends,’ the ring of Walzer’s message is as welcome as it is familiar: to be ‘connected’ is to ask, ‘Is it good for the Jews?’” Compari-sons, of course, run not just to the Gypsy double standards described by Guenter Lewy, but also to the NSDAP slogan “Think with your blood.” The latter parallel has plainly occurred to Finkelstein. He compares Walzer, in the second and third stages of his metamorphosis, to “the fascist ideologues that Julien Benda chastised in The Treason of the Intellectuals” (1969). As to denial of a universal ethic by another prominent defender of Israel, see Hadley Arkes, “The Rights and Wrongs of Alan Dershowitz,” Claremont Review of Books, fall 2005 (available online)(“Dershowitz has insisted that ‘reason’ has no truths to disclose in the realm of morals”). See also Jewish Fundamentalism and Three Thousand Years, both above, for rabbinical pronouncements, not otherwise translated from the Hebrew, that could easily pass as expressions of Nazi ideology if certain proper nouns were changed. It appears, by the way, that the comparison between Jews and Gypsies has occasionally intruded on Jewish consciousness, and that the subject is a sensitive one. See Graetz, vol. 5, p. 197. The comparison with the Nazis, of course, is absolutely forbidden, as became clear when the Israeli politician Yosef (Tommy) Lapid told the cabinet that a picture of a suffering Palestinian woman reminded him of his own grandmother. See “Gaza Political Storm Hits Israel,” BBC News, May 23, 2004 (available online)(“referring to the TV picture, Mr. Lapid said he was ‘talking about an old woman crouching on all fours, searching for her medicines in the ruins of her house and that she made me think of my grandmother. I said that if we carry on like this, we will be expelled from the United Nations and those responsible will stand trial at The Hague’ . . .”). Lapid’s remarks produced an uproar. He was reprimanded by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, and had to deny publicly that he’d intended a comparison of Israel with Nazi Germany. More recently, however, he has returned to the theme. See his article “Stop the Jewish Barbarians in Hebron,” Jerusalem Post, Jan. 17, 2007 (available online)(“[L]iving here among us are Jews that behave toward Palestinians exactly the way that German, Hungarian, Polish and other anti-Semites behaved toward Jews”).back

20. For an excellent—and thoroughly disgusted—account of the Armenian genocide and the general present-day reluctance to discuss it, see Robert Fisk, The Great War For Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East, pp. 316-55 (2005).back

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By Carlos Latuff

"The Israeli Defense Force is the most moral army in the World!"
--Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert

Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany bombed, invaded and annexed countries and territories as a prelude to their quest for World Empire. Israel's drive for regional dominance has followed in their footsteps, imitating their style: Indiscriminate aerial bombings of civilian and military facilities, a savage blitzkrieg led by armored vehicles, disdain and repudiation of all criticism from international agencies was accompanied by an open, military buildup for a new and bigger war against Iran. Like the Nazi leadership, who played on the 'Bolshevik threat', the Israeli high command has set in motion a vast world-wide propaganda campaign led by its world Zionist network, raising the specter of 'Islamic terror' to justify its preparations for a military assault on seventy-four million Iranians. Just as Nazi Germany interpreted the passivity, sympathy and impotence of the West when confronted by 'facts on the ground' as license for aggression, the Israeli military machine receives a powerful impetus for new wars by the Western governments' inaction and flaccid response to its invasion of Lebanon, the bombing of Syria and now its Nazi style blitz and conquest of Gaza. For the Israeli high command, the impotence and complicity of the Western states, marks the way to bigger and bloodier wars to establish Israel's supremacy and dominance of the Middle East, from the Red Sea to the Persian Gulf.

Gaza Blitz: Dress Rehearsal for an Assault on Iran

Israel's military victory in Gaza is a dress rehearsal for a full-scale military assault on Iran. In the course of their Gaza extermination campaign, Israeli political and military strategists gained a great deal of vital information about: (1) the levels of complicity and impotence of European, North American and Arab states; (2) the high degree and depth of material and political support obtainable from the United States government in pulverizing adversaries; (3) the high degree of internal support among the Jewish electorate for even the most brutal killing fields; (4) the massive unquestioning backing of an offensive war from all the biggest and most politically influential and wealthiest Jewish-Zionist organizations in the US and Western Europe; (5) the weakness and ineffectiveness of the United Nations and the incapacity of the entire range of humanitarian organizations to limit Israel's extermination campaign directed at destroying the very existence of an entire people; (6) the unconditional backing of the entire mass media and news agencies in the US and most of the mass media in Europe and the rest of the world; (7) the willingness of the liberal critics to equally blame the victims of extermination and the exterminators for the 'violence', thus neutralizing any effective consequential condemnation of the Israeli state; and (8) the adaptation of practically all the journalists, writers, academics and politicians to the entire euphemistic vocabulary of the Israeli propaganda office.

For example, sustained total war is called an 'incursion'. Ten thousand aerial assaults by hundreds of Israeli helicopters and fighter-bombers are equated with sporadic harmless homemade rocket attacks as 'violence'. Israeli targeting of thousands of civilian homes, hospitals and basic infrastructure are labeled 'terrorist' targets. Resistance fighters are labeled 'Hamas terrorists'. The bombing of the Red Cross, the United Nations relief facilities, hospitals, mosques are called 'mistakes' or justified as 'launching sites for Hamas terrorists.

Israeli political leaders have drawn the lesson from their dirty little 'war' that they can totally destroy a nation, decimate a society and murder and maim 7000 civilians with impunity. Israeli leaders learned they can carry out an offensive genocidal war without suffering breaks in diplomatic relations (except Mauritania, Qatar, Bolivia and Venezuela). The Israelis have successfully tested the loyalty and submissiveness of the major Arab regimes in the region and secured cooperation and acquiescence from Egypt, the 'Palestinian Authority', Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Israeli civilian-military leaders calculate that with this high degree of governmental complicity, combined with support from all the major Zionist leaders and mass media moguls, they can dismiss even large-scale street protests, repeated calls for boycotts and United Nations denunciations. Israeli leaders know that the criticism of major religious leaders and the growing number of Jewish dissidents, critical intellectuals and activists will have no consequential impact on Western governments nor lessen the fervor and loyalty of the major Jewish organizations.

Invisible Threats and Visible Impunity

The two potential threats to Israel's genocidal offensive wars, namely, economic boycotts by important trading and investing countries and a cut-off of military aid, did not materialize. In North American the leading Zionist organizations ensured that the issue of a boycott was never even raised in the legislature and executive branches. In the US, AIPAC wrote resolutions and secured near unanimous passage (100% in the Senate, 90% in the Congress) of an AIPAC dictated resolution endorsing Israel's invasion and slaughter. Moreover the Zionist colonized Pentagon authorized massive new shipments of missiles and 1000 pound bombs to re-supply Israel in the midst of its massacres of the Palestinians. Israel's leaders gloated over the fact that Jewish Zionist Lobbies control over US policy went un-contested by the anti-war protestors. Few, if any, of the demonstrators around the world identified and denounced the role of the Zionist organizations in their own countries in making US, Canadian and European policy toward the Middle East.

Nothing exemplifies the total and blind subordination of the 51 Major American Jewish Organizations (see appendix #1) to Israeli foreign policy goals as two incidents during the Gaza Genocide. When the '51' got wind that Secretary of State Condeleeza Rice was working to come up with a Security Council resolution calling for a cease fire in Gaza, to stop Israeli genocide, every major Jewish organization mobilized their entire membership to oppose her. As the Jewish weekly magazine, Forward, reports: "During a January 5 (2009) conference call with Jewish activists, Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of President of Major American Jewish Organizations, gave special priority to blocking the international body from taking a stand on the Gaza issue. 'We need to work hard to ensure the Security Council doesn't pass the resolution, Hoenlein said.'" (Forward January 15, 2009)

The second example of Zionist belief in Israeli supremacy over US Middle East policy and Presidential servility came in response to Israeli Prime Minister Olmert's boast that he successfully dictated and imposed White House policy in the United Nation. According to the Forward: "Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert didn't do anything wrong but he should have kept his mouth shut. That was the reaction of several Jewish leaders...'I have no problem with what Olmert did', said Abraham Foxman, National Director of the Anti-Defamation League." (Forward, January 15, 2009) Former AIPAC chief lobbyist Douglas Bloomfield, stated that he (an American citizen) had no problem with Israel dictating US policies but 'it is a mistake to talk about it.' (Forward, January 15, 2009). By talking about Israel's power in Washington, it exposes the role of the Zionist Power Configuration in deciding US policies.

These examples demonstrate once again the indivisible links between Israel and its US-Zionist Fifth Column and their power to make US policy - even when it is a question of supporting genocide. These cases also illustrate the fact that the major American Jewish organizations will not tolerate the smallest White House deviation from any Israeli policy, even if it involves mass murder. It wasn't enough that for 8 years, President Bush slavishly followed and funded Israel's war machine: For US Jewish leaders it is 100% subservience up to and including his last day in office. As the Forward writes, "That tough words from Israel and the Jewish groups...serve as a message to the incoming (Obama) administrations..." (ibid).

In addition to capturing positions of political power, one of the highest priorities of all the major Zionist Jewish organizations in the US is to propagandize, apologize and fabricate stories on behalf of Israel. Even in the face of Israel's most blatant violent crimes against Palestinians, condemned by the UN General Assembly, the International Red Cross and every humanitarian group, the principle American Jewish religious institutions and lobbies have demonstrated their loyalty to the state of Israel. The modus operendi as documented by their internal memos is to dominate the mass media through 'plants' - pro-Zionist journalist, academics, 'experts' and editors - who write and broadcast justifications and apologies for Israeli war crimes (parroting the line of the Israeli state) in the mass media. The Zionist propagandists then circulate the planted articles by their colleagues, giving the impression of broad public support when in fact they are reproducing prepared Israeli-Zionist propaganda. The style and substance of the Zionist propaganda operation is evident in its defense of Israel's Gaza bloodbath. The style is the Big Lie, reminiscent of totalitarian regimes. It is worthwhile to sample a few examples from the main mouthpiece of the 51 Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations (PMAJO):

1. Denying Israeli war crimes and fabricating accounts minimizing the Jewish State's killings. The Daily Alert (January 22, 2009) claimed that Israel killed only 600 Palestinians and "most were fighters." The Daily Alert denied on site reports by major human rights workers, Red Cross officials, Palestinian and international doctors and medical workers and journalists, who risked their lives (and some died) documenting the nearly 1,400 deaths, over 2/3 of which were children, women and non-combatants.

2. Repeating Israeli propaganda justifying the bombing of the United Nations-run schools by claiming the schools were 'infiltrated by Palestinian terrorists' among the thousands of refugees (The Daily Alert, January 22, 2009). There was not a single armed resistance fighter found among the 40 bodies recovered from the rubble by the United Nations workers, International Red Cross and Palestinian medical crews at the girls' elementary school; all were children, teachers and refugees. Every organization and individual eyewitness refutes the Zionist-American apology of the Israeli bombing of the school, including the entire European Union. The most bizarre fabrication printed in the Daily Alert is a headline, which read: "Hamas Shot from Civilian Neighborhoods" over an article by Rod Nordland (Newsweek), which, in fact, reports the opposite, "Everyone of the residents interviewed in eastern Jabeliya insisted that there had been no provocation from the area, no resistance fighters and no rocket launchings."

3. The third lie is a whopper: "Israel Doing its Best to Help Gazans", (Daily Alert, January 16, 2009). In fact, Israel blocked all medicine and medical equipment from entering Gaza, bombed hospitals, shot up ambulances, murdered doctors and medical aid workers and blocked all shipment of water, food and fuel. The Israelis bombed the main United Nations food and medical supply warehouse, destroying its entire contents. The US Zionists defended this bombing by citing Olmert's blood libel that the destruction of thousands of tons of food was a "response to fire coming from the building." The United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon was outraged by this barefaced lie as he visited the still smoldering UN warehouse to view the destruction while the US Secretary of State Rice crawled before the Israelis, begging them to "avoid (a repeat of) such incidents." (Daily Alert, January 16, 2009)

4. "Saving Gaza by Destroying the Heart of Terror" (Daily Alert, January 16, 2009). The Jewish propaganda sheet reproduces an article by the ultra-nationalist Natan Sharansky, who advocates expelling all Palestinian Arabs from 'Greater Israel'. In an article published in Bloomberg, Sharansky defended the destruction of over 10,000 houses, damaging over 40,000 homes, roads, hospitals, power installations, water and sewage installations, 121 industries and commercial workshops, 30 mosques, 29 educational institutions, farms, poultries, dairies, small fishing vessels and the fishing port (according to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights and cited in Stephen Lendman's essay, "Israel Killed Everything but the Will to Resist", January 25, 2009).

5. The Fifth Big Lie: "Israeli Pilot Tries to Avoid Hitting Civilians", (Daily Alert, January 14, 2009). Photos published in all the international mass media refute this Zionist propaganda claim. The ghostly rubble of whole apartment blocks resembles a nuclear strike or an earthquake, according to the BBC reporters who finally made it into Gaza. Numerous European Parliamentary representatives and other on site visitors from throughout the world were shocked by the devastation. Not only did Israeli pilots target all civilian targets, but their ground troops assassinated unarmed civilians holding white flags and in some cases even small children attempting to flee. Surviving Palestinian children tell of their fathers executed in front of their families.

The Big Lie promoted by the leading Zionist organizations resonates from the Rabbinical pulpits, to their members and beyond: Informal phone surveys with rank and file members of local Zionists groups echoes the same lies and apologies, almost verbatim. In a word, neither facts, nor reports, nor universal condemnation, nor challenges by dissident rabbis, Jewish notables, writers and activists have made a dent on the major Jewish organizations and their agents in influential positions in the new Obama administration. They are the willing accomplices to mass murder in Gaza. They are active promoters of a pre-emptive aerial assault on Iran. They will unconditionally apologize for any crime against humanity that Israel perpetrates. Their academic apologists at Harvard defend Israeli Genocide as part of a 'Just War'. In the face of universal condemnation they continue to cite the Holocaust and claim that they and their State are the only Moral People entitled to decide and judge, what is just and what is sacred Truth.

The Israeli leaders are perfectly aware of the 'free hand' with which their 'Fifth Column' operates, up to and including their prominent role in defense of genocide. Israeli leaders are assured that even when they launch a bigger, bolder and more destructive war (including the possibility of pre-emptive nuclear strike) against Iran or Syria/Lebanon, they can count on the million-member US Zionist lobby securing White House and US Congressional support. Israeli leaders now know for a fact that the anti-war movement will once again engage in inconsequential protests against the 'shadows of power' and not the real power wielders embedded in the Zionist Power Configuration.

Gaza: Testing the Subservience of the US Congress and the White House

By savaging Gaza with extreme brutality, Israel is testing the waters of US support for more offensive wars. Gaza allowed the Jewish leaders to measure the depth and scope of US Zionist political influence and their willingness to 'go all the way' when Israel decides to bomb 74 million Iranians in to the stone age. Or as the famous Israeli Zionist historian, Benny Morris, suggested in the New York Times July 18,2008, turn Iran "into a nuclear wasteland".

Prime Minister Olmert's public boasting that he pulled President Bush off the stage from an official public appearance and successfully ordered him to instruct the Secretary of State Condaleeza Rice to abstain from voting on her own authored resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza before the Security Council has many profound meanings. On the most obvious level Olmert's revelation confirms the power of Israeli leaders over the White House. Secondly, the public nature of the exercise of power, tells the world that Israel can openly flaunt its capacity to humiliate and ridicule the President of the United States and later brag before Israeli officials with no adverse consequences. Thirdly it tells us that Israel has a greater say in US foreign policy than the American Secretary of State (or Foreign Minister). Fourthly it tells us that Israel decides how the US behaves, votes, vetoes and abstains in the Security Council, subject to Israeli approval.

Israel, the Zionist Fifth Column and Iran

Israel exercises power in the Middle East through its military weaponry. Its repeated threats and aerial and ground assaults on neighboring countries is a deliberate strategy to assert its regional supremacy. In recent years, Israel's regional power has been enhanced by the Zionist Power Configuration in the US and Canada, who use the armed forces in their own countries to destroy any country that contests Israeli military supremacy. The classic case was the run-up to the US invasion of Iraq and the follow-up occupation, in which long-term Israel Firsters in the US Government played a deadly role in promoting the war.

From the late 1980's to the present, the US Zionist Power Configuration has been in the forefront of a campaign to promote a US military confrontation with Iran in collaboration with Israel. The Zionist military proposals gained tremendous momentum during the 8 years of the Bush Administration. The ZPC mounted an unrelenting mass media propaganda campaign demonizing Iran, fabricating and disseminating falsified accounts of its nuclear programs, infiltrating and occupying key positions in the US Treasury Department (led by Stuart Levey) aggressively bludgeoning other governments, industries, banks and investors to boycott Iran. Zionist Treasury Department officials hope to strangle and weaken Iran's economy in order to soften it up for a military strike. No other single or combined force in North America, or, for that matter, any place in the world (except Israel) has played as big a role in promoting an offensive war against Iran as the Zionist politicians and officials in the US government. They were aided and abetted by Jewish lobbies, Zionist propaganda centers, multi-billionaires and hundreds of Jewish community organizations.

Major Jewish religious organizations play a very influential role as conduits of Israeli propaganda and are an important force within the principle Zionist umbrella organizations (e.g. Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations or CPMAJO). Fully one-fifth of the Conference (see appendix for a full list)1 is made up of clerical-Zionist organizations, whose principle function is promoting Israeli goals through direct intervention in US politics at all levels. A memo from one group, the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, issued on January 3, 2009, outlines their detailed strategy in defense of Israel's Gaza massacre: "Every congregation should issue a statement supporting Israel. Solicit statements from elected officials at the city, state or provincial, or federal levels. Solicit statements from local religious, ethnic and other prominent personalities. Monitor and respond to media coverage. Whenever possible, enlist non-Jews as well as public officials and prominent spokespeople to demonstrate their support for Israel." The memo then proposes a series of "talking points on the situation in the Gaza Strip" that repeats verbatim the identical propaganda fabrications of the Israeli political-military high command: Affirming Israel's peaceful intentions, blaming Hamas as the aggressor and claiming that "Israel, as always, is doing everything within its powers to limit non-combatant casualties in Gaza." The Jewish clerics in the United Synagogues tell their faithful congregants to ignore the more than 5000 civilian casualties and the 1,300 deaths, of which three quarters are women, children and unarmed civilians, the sixty schools and the tens of thousands of homes and the dozen mosques demolished, the condemnations of war crimes by the United Nations, Red Cross and every Israeli and Palestinian human rights groups.

The strategy paper issued by the religious Conservative Jews is very similar to that followed by the entire network of 51 religious and secular groups affiliated with the 'Presidents'. This highlights the way in which a highly disciplined, well-financed minority captures and multiplies its power far beyond its own membership, 'leveraging' influential Gentiles, the mass media at all levels and public figures into a powerful juggernaut in defense of Israeli genocide in Gaza today and for war against Iran tomorrow.

Israel's Military Threat to Iran

Israel, contrary to some leftist skeptics, had advanced operational plans to launch a massive aerial assault on Iran. On several occasions in the recent past, Israel has planned several aerial attacks on Iran, only to be thwarted by the Bush White House. The Jewish state has publicly announced that it will unilaterally strike Iran if it continues its legal, internationally recognized, right to enrich uranium. The most likely winner in this February's national elections, Binyamin Netanyahu, has publicly stated that a military attack on Iran is at the top of his agenda - a message which has activated all the major Zionist-Jewish organizations in the US to redouble their efforts to secure US compliance, support and active collaboration. On January 7, 2009 The London Sunday Times, quoting several high level Israeli military sources, reported that, "Israel has drawn up secret plans to destroy Iran's uranium enrichment facilities with tactical nuclear weapons. Two Israeli Air Force squadrons are training to blow up an Iranian facility using low-yield nuclear 'bunker-buster'...Robert Gates, the new (sic) US Defense Secretary, has described military action against Iran as a 'last resort' leading Israeli officials to conclude that it will be left to them to strike. The preparations have been overseen by Major General Eliezar Shkedi, Commander of the Israeli Air Force." (Times on Line, January 7, 2009). A subsequent article in the pro-Israel New York Times (January 11, 2009) by David Sanger, a prominent Zionist sympathizer, reported that "President Bush deflected a secret request by Israel last year (2008) for specialized bunker-busting bombs it wanted for an attack on Iran's main nuclear complex...the Bush administration was particularly alarmed by an Israeli request to fly over Iraq to reach Iran's major nuclear complex...The White House denied that request outright." Sanger goes on to claim that the Israelis were furious at a detailed report by 16 US intelligence agencies (The National Intelligence Estimate) which demonstrated that Iran had halted development of a nuclear warhead in 2003 because it undermined Israeli efforts to secure US collaborations for a military attack on Iran. Sanger spends several paragraphs trying to bolster the Israeli unsubstantiated claims regarding Iran's nuclear program framing the case for a unilateral Israeli attack...which he dates began "early 2008" but was stalled by opposition from the US military.

The forthcoming Israeli national elections (February 10, 2009) promise to accelerate Israeli plans for a massive military assault on Iran, as the polls indicate that the majority of Jewish voters will elect the ultra-militarist Zionist Binyamin Netanyahu, a favorite of the most influential Zionist-American organizations. In a very recent interview with the Wall Street Journal (January 24, 2009), Netanyahu speaks of Iran as the 'terrorist mother base" and "that Israel cannot accept an Iranian terror base (Gaza) next to its major cities." He then goes on to justify the Israeli murder of civilians because, he claims, the Palestinian resistance ("terrorists") "hide behind civilians". The Wall Street journalist, one Brett Stephens, in complete awe and wonder at the feet of the Israeli leader, writes approvingly of Netanyahu's justifications for an attack on Iran, "the threat of a nuclear Iran poses a much greater danger to the world than the economic crises...this poses an existential threat to Israel directly..." Stephens goes on to sum up Netanyahu's position toward Obama: "If diplomacy fails and the US does not resort to military force, Israel will decide to go it alone..."

Israeli leaders have temporarily backed off attacking Iran - launching, instead, the Gaza assault to weaken any possible resistance among Palestinians to an Israeli war against their Muslim ally in Teheran. The Israeli war plans toward Iran will be reinforced with the new Obama Presidency. With the rise to power of the ultra-Zionist Dennis Ross as Chief Adviser on to President Obama on Iran and Hillary ("We will obliterate Iran") Clinton as Secretary of State, the question of a US backed Israeli preemptive attack on Iran looms closer to becoming a reality. As late as two months ago Ross signed on to a document, which provided a 'roadmap' to war with Iran. Zionist infestation of the entire policy-making apparatus of the Obama regime means that any official military or intelligence opposition to an Israeli attack on Iran will be blunted and their spokespersons marginalized.

The Obama Regime and Israel

The Obama regime is, if anything, even more penetrated from the top to bottom and from Executive offices to Congress with Zionists in positions to influence every strategic decision having any relation to Middle East policy.

The Jewish Telegraph Agency (January 20, 2009), the principle news agency of American Jewish-Zionist publications, provides a detailed list of the 'pro-Israel' Zionists in strategic Middle East positions in the Obama regime. The evidence of Zionist control is overwhelming and the consequences are deadly to any 'balanced' peace negotiations and extremely promising for Israel's war ambitions in the regions:

1. Dennis Ross will be an influential adviser on Iran policy. Ross is an advocate of intensifying sanctions to undermine negotiations and force the military option.

2. Richard Holbrooke, appointed as Obama's envoy to Afghanistan, is a prominent Zionist who served as UN envoy under Clinton. He has recently headed an ad hoc group called United Against a Nuclear Iran, which advocates military action against Iran if it does not submit to an Israeli-dictated cessation of its legal nuclear energy program.

3. George Mitchell, Obama's envoy to the Palestine-Israel conflict, is one of the four co-chairs of the Zionist front group, Bipartisan Policy Center, which propose a step by step approach, from sanctions to embargo to naval blockade to a military strike on Iran.

4. Dan Shapiro and Puneet Talwar will collaborate on Middle East policy at the National Security Council. Shapiro, in consultation with Israel, was "key in shepherding the Syrian Accountability Act through the Senate (a measure that imposed tough sanctions on Syria). Shapiro drafted Obama's cringing, belly crawling speech to the AIPAC conference in Washington on May 2008. Puneet Talwar will handle Persian Gulf issues - including Iran. He was a staffer of former Senator and current Vice President Joe Biden and was a close collaborator and conduit for AIPAC.

5. Eric Lynn is heading for a White House Middle East policy job. He started his career as an AIPAC intern in 1998 and continued as a staff person for Congressman Peter Deutsch, "one of the most committed pro-Israel figures in Congress." Lynn spent a year in Israel, imbibing Zionist military culture and learning Hebrew.

6. James Steinberg and Jacob 'Jack' Lew have been named as Clinton's deputies at the State Department. Steinberg has been in a 'strong relation with the pro-Israel community' and was a conduit for Israeli pressure on Arafat to capitulate to Israeli demands. Jack Law will direct economic stimulus overseas. He is an orthodox-Zionist, who will use American economic resources to back Israeli militarism and reward or punish its adversaries. A former head of a Citigroup investment unit, he holds between $50,000 to $100,000 in Israel State Bonds.

7. Samantha Power, once a critic of Israeli war crimes in 2002 for which the Zionist Power Configuration had her removed from the Obama campaign in March 2008. She was 'rehabilitated' and re-incorporated as a member of the Clinton transition team after an 'abject apology' to Israel.

8. Cass Sunstein, a lifetime Zion-Lib, is head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs - a key propaganda arm of the Obama regime.

9. Rand Beers was lead national security adviser to Senator Kerry during his presidential campaign of 2004 and 'built close relations' with the pro-Israel political apparatus. As adviser to Homeland Security, he will 'likely be a linchpin as Israel and the US forge a closer alliance' (Jewish Telegraph Agency January 20, 2009).

10. Lee Feinstein and Mara Rudman are Zionist veterans from the Clinton Administrations. Feinstein is a lead adviser of Secretary of State Clinton and Rudman is Senior Foreign Policy Adviser of President Obama.

11. Susan Rice, UN Ambassador appointed by Obama, signed on to a Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) paper last summer calling for greater Israeli-US coordination for an embargo and military attack on Iran. WINEP is a well-known propaganda mill for Israel's most fanatical, bellicose and unconditional supporters. In her Senate testimony, Rice denounced the United Nation General Assembly's criticism of Israel's Gaza bloodbath.

At the head of Obama's foreign policy regime, Vice Presiden Biden ("I am a Zionist"), Secretary of State Clinton ("demolish Iran") and Secretary of Defense Gates (a holdover from the Israeli-dominated Bush Administration) have put in place the most Zionist-infested Middle East policy regime in US history. This regime is neither by background, loyalties or commitments prepared to open serious negotiations with Iran, or to 'broker' an end of Israeli occupation of Palestine. On the contrary, their close ties with the Zionist Power Configuration and long-term commitment to Israeli militarism and expansionist policies ensure that the Obama regime will proceed toward collaboration with the Jewish State in a military confrontation with Iran. Everyone on Obama's team supported the Israeli carnage in Gaza and endorsed Israel's efforts to destroy the democratically elected Hamas government and prop up the discredited and corrupt quisling clique headed by Abbas.

The Obama Presidency has achieved what many observers thought impossible: It has placed more Zionist in more strategic power positions with a greater commitment to war with Iran than even the Bush Administration. Given Obama's appointments and his own personal subservience to Israeli leaders it is difficult to imagine the 16 major intelligence services issuing a report refuting Israel's fabrications about Iran's nuclear program, as happened under Bush. Even more egregious, given the Zionist stranglehold on the White House, it is unlikely that Obama would block a proposed Israeli air assault on Iran as Bush is reputed to have done.

The Israeli war strategy toward Iran follows the 'salami tactics' of its Nazi forerunner: Attacks are designed for maximum destructiveness against civilian infrastructure, against countries and leaders opposed to any Israeli aggression toward Iran. Israel bombed and invaded Lebanon. It bombed Syria. Israel savaged Gaza. Its 'lobby' has extended and enforced global economic sanctions through the forceful intervention of a Zionist infested Treasury Department. Obama's top economic adviser, the ultra-Zionist Lawrence Summers, promotes tighter sanctions, boycotts and embargoes against the designated enemies of Israel: policies pointing toward war.

'Peace' Negotiations Geared Toward War

The likelihood that the Obama regime will move the world closer to an offensive war with Iran is not based on idle speculation or selected quotes from his presidential campaign. No one can take serious President Obama or his Secretary of State Clinton's advocacy of 'negotiations with Iran', when they are accompanied by conditions unacceptable to Iran's sovereignty or national interests. The Obama regime openly threatens war if Iran does not accept unilateral disarmament with intrusive inspection of its strategic defense installations, allowing Israel and the US a unique opportunity for pinpointing vital targets for their first wave of attack.

What conclusively demonstrates Obama's drive to war with Iran is his appointment of the most zealous Zionist militarist, Dennis Ross, to the key strategic position dealing with Iran.

Obama appointed Ross to the post of 'Special Envoy to Iran'. He will act as Czar of Middle East policy. George Mitchell is his envoy on Israel-Palestine negotiations, a typical 'good cop' (Mitchell) strategy to counter the 'bad cop' (Ross). Ross, who is often called 'Israel's Lawyer', is the ultimate Zionist, a crown prince of the US Zionist Jewish Lobby in all of its major undertakings regarding Iran. Ross is a founding leader of AIPAC, the principle and most powerful Israel First Lobby in Washington. He has been a lifelong and influential ZionCon ideologue, who successfully led the campaign in favor of the invasion of Iraq. He is among the most prolific and influential writers and propagandists at the Zionist-financed propaganda mill, WINEP (Washington Institute for Near East Policy), which has produced the most bellicose position papers pushing US military intervention in favor of Israel's expansionist ambitions. During the Clinton years, Ross was appointed head of the US 'mediation' committee during the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations (1999-2000). In that position, he acted as 'Israel's lawyer' according to a fellow US Zionist diplomat. He scuttled all possibility of any acceptable compromise by "following Israel's lead." He set up the conditions, which made Palestinian rejection inevitable while placing the blame on that embittered people. Ross has a profound influence on Obama's politics to Israel.

Ross is a leader in a relatively new Zionist front group, known as the 'Bipartisan Policy Center'. The 'Center' recently published a report entitled, "Meeting the Challenge: US Policy Toward Iranian Nuclear Development." This roadmap for war with Iran was produced by a task force, which included Ross and two other extremist Zioncons, the dual-Israel-US citizen Michal Makovsky and Michael Rubin. Ross' endorsement of the 'Report' reflects his rejection of any possibility of a negotiated agreement with Iran, which would accept Iran's legal right to a uranium enrichment program as recognized by international treaty.

A recently reported wrinkle in Dennis Ross' appointment to the Obama Cabinet is his role as current Chairman of the Jerusalem-based Jewish People Policy Planning Institute, under the Jewish Agency, which is an official part of the Israeli Government. His current work for an Israeli government agency could place Ross at odds with the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), a Federal statute that requires individuals working on behalf of a foreign government to register as such - something Ross has never done.

The 'Report' advocates a preemptive Israeli aerial bombing and missile campaign against Iran should the US and Europe fail to strike first. This Dennis Ross-endorsed 'Report' proposes a total naval and air blockade and embargo of Iran as a prelude to a US attack on Iran's vital infrastructure. This document called on Obama to 'bring in troops and material to the region under the cover of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, thus maintaining a degree of strategic and tactical surprise.' In other words, Obama's forthcoming appointment of Ross to head his regime's Middle East Policy Advisory Group places an unconditional advocate and promoter of genocidal war with Iran in a key strategic foreign policy position.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Dennis Ross will do everything in their power to promote and justify a US-Israeli joint attack on Iran. Ross and Clinton will begin with phony negotiations based on unacceptable ultimatums. This will be followed by acts of war in the form of Gaza style embargos designed to starve and impoverish the people of Iran, and conclude with a Gaza-style aerial blitzkrieg. Given the extraordinary number of Zionists appointed by Obama in every key level of his government, the possibility of any internal debate or dissent over the Ross roadmap for war in Israel's interest is minimal. Obama has put together a policy-making elite so closely linked and loyal to the Israeli military that it precludes any type of meaningful negotiations with Iran.

Possible External Constraints on Zionist-Israeli-US War on Iran

The only effective deterrent to a Gaza style Israeli assault on Iran is Teheran's capacity for military retaliation, especially accurate long-range missiles capable of reaching Israel's principle military sites, infrastructure and related support systems. Given the Israeli leaders lack of any moral constraints and their immersion in a militarist ideology, in which brutal force and widespread violence are the primary means of projecting power and securing Israeli public support, a costly massive military counter-attack is probably the most effective deterrent to force its leaders to reconsider Israel's military-driven foreign policy.

While Israeli militarists adopt a 'defensive' rhetoric, their strategy is to weaken Iran's defense capability and make it more vulnerable to military threats and diplomatic pressure in a lead-up to a pre-emptive aerial assault. International inspections by United Nation agencies are only carried out of Iranian sites but not of US regional military instillations, including their nuclear-armed war ships and submarines, or of Israel's nuclear weapons sites and nuclear weapon laboratories. The one-sided inspections provide a wealth of information on Iranian military capacity and defense locations and of advanced strategic research laboratories. UN inspections prior to the US invasion of Iraq identified key defense installations and Iraqi scientists, their places of work and homes, which were used in bombing missions and the subsequent assassination campaign against top Iraqi scientists. This kind of information was crucial in guiding Israel's bombing and missile assaults and assassination of leaders and their families during its invasions of Lebanon and Gaza.

The Israeli dictated and US Zionist implemented economic boycott of Iran is clearly directed toward undermining both Iranian living standards and the performance of their economy, similar to what the Jewish state imposed on Gaza. It is part of the 'softening up' campaign prior to its all out attack.

To day however, despite a sustained effort by all top Zionist functionaries in the US government and the intense pressures of its lobbies on US pension fund managers, the embargo has not crippled the Iranian economy. Especially with the onset of the recession, the decline of world markets and the growing energy demands of China, there are numerous Western and Asian multinationals eager to trade with Iran and to ignore Israeli and US Zionist pressures.

Israel's genocidal war on Gaza has finally forced important cracks in the overseas Zionist monopoly over Jewish opinion. The leading Jewish communal organizations and their spiritual spokespeople continue to support each and every crime from the bombing of Red Cross ambulances and clinic to United Nations schools, food and medical supplies warehouses and refugee centers. This has finally provoked vigorous opposition among leading Jewish intellectuals, writers and other professionals.

New organizations and personalities have emerged within the Jewish community, which have forcibly repudiated Israel's genocide. Some Jewish activists have taken bold direct actions, occupying Israeli consular offices in a few major cities and calling for a total boycott of Israeli goods and academic exchanges. Others have confronted Zionist apologists in public forums and press conferences. While the number and influence of Jewish critics of Zionist war crimes is small, their importance is found in giving legitimacy and encouraging millions of otherwise intimidated and silent Gentiles to 'come out'. As a result, an unprecedented number of people in the West have voiced their horror and opposition to the Zionist military juggernaut and expressed their support for economic boycotts against Israel. While Jewish and Gentile mass opposition neither stopped or weakened Israel's massacre of Gazan civilians, it has laid the political and organizational basis to launch a massive campaign against the US Zionist war plans against Iran.

Israel's military successes have created an irrational triumphalist war fever among all of its leaders and their enthusiastic supporters in the million member Jewish-Zionist organizations in the US. This has led them to underestimate the catastrophic costs of a war with Iran. An Israeli-US sneak attack on Iran will unleash major military and political retaliatory action throughout the Middle East. This will certainly inflict major human, military, political and economic losses on many US military installations in the Gulf region. This is especially the case in Iraq and the adjoining client Gulf States, where US military forces are highly vulnerable. An Israeli assault might lead to the destabilization or overthrow of Arab client states. Moreover, Iran may retaliate by successfully launching accurate long-range missiles, which will target major Israeli military complexes and adjoining population centers.

Given the enormous worldwide disgust and horror at Israel's war crimes in Gaza and the hatred evoked by the prospect of new aerial assaults on millions of Iranians, Tehran's reprisals against Israel and the US are not likely to raise much condemnation. More likely, most people will feel a sense of righteous vindication, that finally the arrogant bully is finally getting paid back for its assaults on unarmed, imprisoned civilians in Gaza. Just as the British survivors of Nazi V-2 rocket attacks on English population centers cheered the firebombing of Dresden, vast sections of public opinion may greet an Iranian retaliatory strike on Israel as a valid deterrent for its serial atrocities against humanity.

One of the most effective threats to Israel's genocidal war drive is the launching of investigations into Israeli war crimes, the establishment of tribunals to try Israeli military and political leaders for their crimes against humanity (Financial Times, January 16, 2009 page 5). Israeli leaders have advised their soldier-criminals they will be provided with legal protection. The leaders have expressed concern that they themselves may be subject to citizen arrests and tried by overseas courts. Several governments are filing war crimes charges before the International Criminal Court in The Hague. The problem with laying charges on Israeli war criminals is where to draw the line between military-political leaders who directed the war crimes and the field officers, who implemented the policies violating the Geneva Conventions. For example, identifying the officials who specifically barred medical and emergency workers for over four days from evacuating wounded and starving civilians, including small children, from the site of a horrific Israeli massacre of Gazan civilians. What about the great masses of Israeli Jewish citizens who were so elated by the bombing of whole civilian neighborhoods that some Israelis set up observation posts with picnic baskets to survey the ongoing carnage? The same Israelis "delighted in the images, splashed across the front pages, of smiling Israeli soldiers riding homes on tanks in victory post." (Financial Times, January 26, 2009). Mass Israeli elation, political intoxication and embrace of the perpetrators of the killing of unarmed people may be repugnant to world opinion, but it is nor a sufficient offense to merit an international tribunal. However it is subject to the same moral repudiation, which many of us felt toward the German people who celebrated Hitler's savage bombing of Soviet, Polish and Balkan cities. Even if the Zionist-controlled White House succeeds in using its veto on the United Nations Security Council to prevent a war crimes investigation of Israeli leaders, the presentation of charges and possible arrests in several European countries will force the Israeli leaders to reflect on their pariah status and might inhibit their push for a murderous war with Iran. We have included a list (see Appendix #2) of the names of Israeli military leaders, their rank and operational role and responsibility for war crimes in Gaza.

Israelis currently dismiss out of hand the opprobrium of world opinion as irrelevant to its ongoing military offensive. This causes the Jewish state to overlook the importance of world opinion in eroding strategic political support in the future. Many observers believe hundreds of millions of Arab citizens and multitudes of non-Arabs and non-Muslims are coming to believe that Israel and its overseas Zionist Fifth column will only understand the language of force since they routinely practice state terrorism to impose their interests on captive, impoverished people. As a result, many analysts argue that it is understandable that the weapons of choice for the victims of Israel will inevitably rely on sustained, organized and militarized people's resistance. In these circumstances the current crop of anemic, impotent, collaborationist Arab leaders and regimes may be overthrown and a new combative and consequential leadership could emerge, one which consults and draws its mass support from the deepest feelings of national dignity and profound hatred of Zionist imposed humiliations.

Conclusions

Israel's Gaza war is leading its leaders and its strategically placed overseas agents in the US political system to overreach and to pursue a new war with Iran, as part of a regional strategy to secure imperial power. The Obama Administration and the newly elected Israeli prime minister share more than overlapping policy-makers and long-term commitments to military-driven empire building. They have made it clear that they will proceed in setting in motion a series of diplomatic and economic moves destined to prepare the stage for launching a genocidal war against Iran. This will be in line with Obama's rhetoric of recreating a Jewish-Afro-American alliance, one based on Israeli interests and American lives! The only deterrent to new wars of extermination is mass action, which increases the political, economic and military costs for Israeli aggression. Only when Israeli casualties mount, when Zionist exploiters and bankers suffer losses, when its academics and tourist sites are boycotted, then and only then will the Israelis and their US acolytes begin to rethink their blind adherence to militarist policies. It is only then that they will rethink their irrational Judeo-centric vision of a world made by and for the one Chosen People living in the Only Moral State in the world.

Unfortunately it may take some military shocks to dispel these tribal fantasies. History teaches us that there is nothing like a bloody defeat to end the Superman Complex.

Appendix #1

This a partial and growing list of potential war criminals compiled by a group of Israeli activists, despite Israeli government censorship, and as a challenge to the Israeli Attorney General Menachem Mazuz and his military counterpart, Judge Advocate General Brigadier General Avihai Mandelblit:

51 Member Organizations of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations:

1. Ameinu

2. American Friends of Likud

3. American Gathering/Federation of Jewish Holocaust Survivors

4. American-Israel Friendship League

5. American Israel Public Affairs Committee

6. American Jewish Committee

7. American Jewish Congress

8. American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee

9. American Sephardi Federation

10. American Zionist Movement

11. Americans for Peace Now

12. AMIT

13. Anti-Defamation League

14. Association of Reform Zionist of America

15. B'nai B'rith International

16. Bnai Zion

17. Central Committee of American Rabbis

18. Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America

19. Development Corporation for Israel/State of Israel Bonds

20. Emunah of America

21. Friends of Israel Defense Forces

22. Hadassah, Women's Zionist Organization of America

23. Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society

24. Hillel: The Foundation of Jewish Campus Life

25. Jewish Community Centers Association

26. Jewish Council for Public Affairs

27. Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs

28. Jewish Labor Committee

29. Jewish National Fund

30. Jewish Reconstructionist Federation

31. Jewish War Veterans of the USA

32. Jewish Women International

33. MERCAZ USA, Zionist Organization of the Conservative Movement

34. NA'AMAT USA

35. NCSJ: Advocates on behalf of Jews in Russia, Ukraine, the Baltic States and Eurasia

36. National Council of Jewish Women

37. National Council of Young Israel

38. ORT America

39. Rabbinical Assembly

40. Rabbinical Council of America

41. Religious Zionist of America

42. Union for Reform Judaism

43. Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America

44. United Jewish Communities

45. United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism

46. WIZO

47. Women's League for Conservative Judaism

48. Women of Reform Judaism

49. Workmen's Circle

50. World Zionist Executive, US

51. Zionist Organization of America

Appendix #2 List of Israeli Officials involved in War Crimes during the Gaza Invasion.

1. Ehud Olmert, the Israeli Prime Minster

2. Ehud Barak, Israeli War Minister

3. Tzipi Livni, Foreign Minister of Israel

4. Yuval Diskin, Shin Bet security service chief

5. Lieutenant-General Gabi Ashkenazi, IOF Chief of Staff

6. Colonel Hartzi Halevi, Paratroops Brigade Commander

7. Commander of the 401st Brigade Colonel Yigal Slovik

8. Brig Gen Jonathan Locker, head of Israeli air forces

9. Maj. Gen. Ido Nehushtan, Israeli air forces

10. Colonel Ron Ashrov, Commander of the Northern Gaza

11. Brigadier-General Eyal Eisenberg - Commander of all the IOF

12. Colonel Yigal Slovik, commander of 401st Armored Corps Brigade convoy

13. Sho'alay Marom, Brigadier (res.)

14. Lt. Col. Yoav Mordechai, Golani infantry brigade's 13th Battalion in Gaza

15. Lt. Col. Oren Cohen, Battalion 13 in the Golani Brigade

16. Lt. Col. Avi Blot 101st Battalion Paratrooper Brigade

17. Lieutenant-Colonel Yehuda Cohen, Givati infantry Brigade's Rotem Regiment

18. Lieutenant-Colonel Ronen Dagmi, deputy commander of the 401st Armored Brigade

19. Col. Avi Peled, commander brigade in Battalion 51

20. Brig.-Gen.( res.) Zvika Fogel former deputy OC Southern Command

21. Brigadier-General Yuval Halamish, Chief IOF Intelligence Officer

22. Paratrooper Brigade commander, Hartzi Halevi

23. Col. Hertzi Halevy, brigade commander

24. Col. Tomer Tsiter, participated in the massacre in Gaza during "Operation Cast Lead", and previously he participated in the massacre "Operation Defensive Shield" in the Jeninrefugee camp in 2002.

25. Gur Rosenblatt, infantry reserve officer

26. Guy Ohaion, infantry reserve officer

27. Lt. Col. Erez

28. Maj. Nimrod Aloni

29. Lieutenant Colonel (res.) Shlomo Saban

30. Capt. Ron Vardi ,

31. Col. Pnina Sharvit-Baruch, head of the International Law Department, Military Advocate General's Office,

32. Major-General Yoav Galant, southern command chief

33. Richard Awizrat, Senior Warrant Officer,

34. Major General Amos Yadlin, Military Intelligence chief

* James Petras is a retired Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University, SUNY, New York, U.S., and adjunct professor at Saint Mary's University, Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is the author of 62 books and over 560 articles. He has published over 2000 articles in nonprofessional journals such as the New York Times, the Guardian, the Nation, Christian Science Monitor, Foreign Policy, New Left Review, Temps Moderne, Le Monde Diplomatique, and his commentary is widely carried on the internet. He is winner of a Life Time Career Award of the American Sociology Association, Marxist Section.

Note: James Petras' latest books, Global Depression and Regional Wars (Atlanta, Clarity Press, 2009) is the third in a series, including Zionism, Militarism and the Decline of US Power (Atlanta, Clarity Press 2008) and The Power of Israel in the United States (Atlanta, Clarity Press 2006), analyzing the influence of militarism and Zionism in American foreign policy.

Related posts:

• Podcast: AIPAC & US Foreign Policy – Debate between James Petras & Norman Finkelstein
• US Empire and the Middle East: Zionism, Puppet Regimes and Political Allies
• Uncensored News Reports From Across The Middle East

On 16 January 2009 the UK Jewish Member of Parliament, Sir Gerald Kaufman, spoke in the House of Lords on "Israel acting like Nazis in Gaza".

His full speech:

[Hat tip: Ann]

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