Israel’s strategy from past decades will continue with its hope of achieving some Chimeric transformative “de-radicalisation” of Palestinians that will make ‘Israel safe’.
(This paper is the basis of a talk to be given at the 25th Yasin (April) International Academic Event on Economic and Social Development, HSE University, Moscow, April 2024)
In the summer following Israel’s 2006 (unsuccessful) war on Hizbullah, Dick Cheney sat in his office loudly bemoaning Hizbullah’s continuing strength; and worse still, that it seemed to him that Iran had been the primary beneficiary from the U.S. 2003 Iraq war.
Cheney’s guest – the then Saudi Intelligence Chief, Prince Bandar – vigorously concurred (as chronicled by John Hannah, who participated in the meeting) and, to general surprise, Prince Bandar proclaimed that Iran yet could be cut to size: Syria was the ‘weak’ link between Iran and Hizbullah that could be collapsed via an Islamist insurgency, Bandar proposed. Cheney’s initial scepticism turned to elation as Bandar said that U.S. involvement would be unnecessary: He, Prince Bandar, would orchestrate and manage the project. ‘Leave it to me’, he said.
Bandar separately told John Hannah: “The King knows that other than the collapse of the Islamic Republic itself, nothing would weaken Iran more than losing Syria”.
Thus began a new phase of attrition on Iran. The regional balance of power was to be decisively shifted towards Sunni Islam – and the region’s monarchies.
That old balance from the Shah’s time in which Persia enjoyed regional primacy was to be ended: conclusively, the U.S., Israel and the Saudi King hoped.
Iran – already badly bruised by the ‘imposed’ Iran-Iraq war – resolved never again to be so vulnerable. Iran aimed to find a path to strategic deterrence in the context of a region dominated by the overwhelming air dominance enjoyed by its adversaries.
What occurred this Saturday 14 April – some 18 years later – therefore was of utmost importance.
Despite the bruhaha and distraction following Iran’s attack, Israel and the U.S. know the truth: Iran’s missiles were able to penetrate directly into Israel’s two most sensitive and highly defended air bases and sites. Behind the whooping western rhetoric lies Israeli shock and fear. Their bases are no longer ‘untouchable’.
Israel also knows – but cannot admit – that the so-called ‘assault’ was no assault but an Iranian message to assert the new strategic equation: That any Israeli attack on Iran or its personnel will result in retribution from Iran into Israel.
This act of setting the new ‘balance of power equation’ unites the diverse Fronts against the U.S.’ “connivance with Israeli actions in the Middle East, that are at the core of Washington’s policy – and in many ways the root-cause of new tragedies” – in the words of Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Ryabkov.
The equation represents a key ‘Front’ – together with Russia’s war against NATO in Ukraine – for persuading the West that its exceptionalist and redemptive myth has proved to be a fatal conceit; that it must be discarded; and that deep cultural change in the West needs to happen.
The roots to this wider cultural conflict are deep – but finally have been made explicit.
Prince Bandar’s post-2006 playing of the Sunni ‘card’ was a flop (in no small part thanks to Russia’s intervention in Syria). And Iran, has come in from the cold and is firmly anchored as a primary regional power. It is the strategic partner to Russia and China. And Gulf States today have switched focus instead to money, ‘business’ and Tech, rather than Salafist jurisprudence.
Syria, then targeted by the West and ostracised, has not only survived all that the West could ‘throw at it’ but has been warmly embraced by the Arab League and rehabilitated. And Syria is now slowly finding its way to being itself again.
Yet even during the Syrian crisis, unforeseen dynamics to Prince Bandar’s playing of Islamist identity versus Arab socialist secular identity were playing out:
I wrote then in 2012:
“Over recent years we have heard the Israelis emphasise their demand for recognition of a specifically Jewish nation-state, rather than for an Israeli State, per se”;
– a state that would enshrine Jewish political, legal, and military exceptional rights.
“[At that time] … Muslim nations [were] seeking the ‘undoing’ of the last remnants of the colonial era. Will we see the struggle increasingly epitomised as a primordial struggle between Jewish and Islamic religious symbols – between al-Aqsa and the Temple Mount?”
To be plain, what was apparent even then – in 2012 – was “that both Israel and its surrounding terrain are marching in step toward language which takes them far away from the underlying, largely secular concepts by which this conflict traditionally has been conceptualised. What [would] be the consequence – as the conflict, by its own logic, becomes a clash of religious poles?”
If, twelve years ago, the protagonists were explicitly moving away from the underlying secular concepts by which the West conceptualised the conflict, we, by contrast, are still trying to understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the lens of secular, rationalist concepts – even as Israel quite evidently is seized by an increasingly Apocalyptic frenzy.
And by extension, we are stuck in trying to address the conflict through our habitual utilitarian, rationalist policy tool-set. And we wonder why it is not working. It is not working because all parties have moved beyond mechanical rationalism to a different plane.
The Conflict Becomes Eschatalogical
Last year’s election in Israel saw a revolutionary change: The Mizrahim walked into the Prime Minister’s office. These Jews coming from the Arab and North African sphere – now possibly the majority – and, with their political allies on the right, embraced a radical agenda: To complete the founding of Israel on the Land of Israel (i.e. no Palestinian State); to build the Third Temple (in place of Al-Aqsa); and to institute Halachic Law (in place of secular law).
None of this is what might be termed ‘secular’ or liberal. It was intended as the revolutionary overthrow of the Ashkenazi élite. It was Begin who tied the Mizrahi firstly to the Irgun and then to Likud. The Mizrahim now in power have a vision of themselves as the true representatives of Judaism, with the Old Testament as their blueprint. And condescend to the European Ashkenazi liberals.
If we think we can put Biblical myths and injunctions behind us in our secular age – where much of contemporary western thinking makes a point of ignoring such dimensions, dismissing them as either confused, or irrelevant – we would be mistaken.
“At every turn, political figures in Israel now soak their proclamations in Biblical reference and allegory. The foremost of which [is] Netanyahu … You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible, and we do remember – and we are fighting…“Here [Netanyahu] not only invokes the prophecy of Isaiah, but frames the conflict as that of “light” versus “darkness” and good versus evil, painting the Palestinians as the Children of Darkness to be vanquished by the Chosen Ones: The Lord ordered King Saul to destroy the enemy and all his people: “Now go and defeat Amalek and destroy all that he has; and give him no mercy; but put to death both husband and wife; from youth to infant; from ox to sheep; from camel to donkey” (15:3)”.
We might term this ‘hot eschatology’ – a mode that is running wild amongst the young Israeli military cadres, to the point that the Israeli high command is losing control on the ground (lacking any mid-layer NCO (Non-Commissioned Officer) class).
On the other hand –
The uprising launched from Gaza is not called Al-Aqsa Flood for nothing. Al-Aqsa is both a symbol of a storied Islamic civlisation, and it is also the bulwark against the building of the Third Temple, for which preparations are underway. The point here is that Al-Aqsa represents Islam in aggregate — neither Shi’i, nor Sunni, nor ideological Islam.
Then, at another level, we have, as it were, ‘dispassionate eschatology’: When Yahyah Sinwar writes of ‘Victory or Martyrdom’ for his people in Gaza; when Hizbullah speaks of sacrifice; and when the Iranian Supreme Leader speaks of Hussain bin Ali (the grandson of the Prophet) and some 70 companions in 680 CE, standing before inexorable slaughter against an 1,000 strong army, in the name of Justice, these sentiments simply are beyond the reach of western Utilitarian comprehension.
We cannot easily rationalise the latter ‘way of being’ in western modes of thought. However, as Hubert Védrine, France’s former Foreign Minister, observes – though titularly secular – the West nonetheless is “consumed by the spirit of proselytism”. That Saint Paul’s “go and evangelize all nations” has become “go and spread human rights to all the world”… And that this proselytism is extremely deep in [western DNA]: “Even the very least religious, totally atheists, they still have this in mind, [even though] they don’t know where it comes from”.
We might term this secular eschatology, as it were. It is certainly consequential.
A Military Revolution: We’re Ready Now
Iran, through all the West’s attrition, has pursued its astute strategy of ‘strategic patience’ – keeping conflicts away from its borders. A strategy that focused heavily on diplomacy and trade; and soft power to engage positively with near and far neighbors alike.
Behind this quietist front of stage, however, lay the evolution to ‘active deterrence’ which required long military preparation and the nurturing of allies.
Our understanding of the world became antiquated
Just occasionally, very occasionally, a military revolution can upend the prevailing strategic paradigm. This was Qasem Suleimani’s key insight. This is what ‘active deterrence’ implies. The switch to a strategy that could upend prevailing paradigms.
Both Israel and the U.S. have armies that are conventionally far more powerful than their adversaries which are mostly composed of small non-state rebels or revolutionaries. The latter are treated more as mutineers within the traditionalist colonial framing, and for whom a whiff of firepower generally is considered sufficient.
The West, however, has not fully assimilated the military revolutions now underway. There has been a radical shift in the balance of power between low-tech improvisation and expensive complex (and less robust) weapons platforms.
The Additional Ingredients
What makes Iran’s new military approach truly transformative have been two additional factors: One was the appearance of an outstanding military strategist (now assassinated); and secondly, his ability to mix and apply these new tools in a wholly novel matrix. The fusion of these two factors – together with low-tech drones and cruise missiles – completed the revolution.
The philosophy driving this military strategy is clear: the West is over-invested in air dominance and in its carpet fire power. It prioritises ‘shock and awe’ thrusts, but quickly exhausts itself early in the encounter. This rarely can be sustained for long. The Resistance aim is to exhaust the enemy.
The second key principle driving this new military approach concerns the careful calibration of the intensity of conflict, upping and lowering the flames as appropriate; and, at the same time, keeping escalatory dominance within the Resistance’s control.
In Lebanon, in 2006, Hizbullah remained deep underground whilst the Israeli air assault swept across overhead. The physical surface damage was huge, yet their forces were unaffected and emerged from deep tunnels – only afterwards. Then came the 33 days of Hizbullah’s missile barrage – until Israel called it quits.
So, is there any strategic point to an Israeli military response to Iran?
Israelis widely believe that without deterrence – without the world fearing them – they cannot survive. October 7 set this existential fear burning through Israeli society. Hezbollah’s very presence only exacerbates it – and now Iran has rained missiles down into Israel directly.
The opening of the Iranian front, in a certain way, initially may have benefited Netanyahu: the IDF defeat in the Gaza war; the hostage release impasse; the continuing displacement of Israelis from the north; and even the murder of the World Kitchen aid workers – all are temporarily forgotten. The West has grouped at Israel’s – and Netanyahu’s – side again. Arab states are again co-operating. And attention has moved from Gaza to Iran.
So far, so good (from Netanyahu’s perspective, no doubt). Netanyahu has been angling to draw the U.S. into war with Israel against Iran for two decades (albeit with successive U.S. Presidents declining the dangerous prospect).
But to cut Iran down to size would require U.S. military assistance.
Netanyahu senses Biden’s weakness and has the tools and knowhow by which he can manipulate U.S. politics: Indeed, worked in this way, Netanyahu might force Biden to continue to arm Israel, and even to embrace his widening of the war to Hizbullah in Lebanon.
Conclusion
Israel’s strategy from past decades will continue with its hope of achieving some Chimeric transformative “de-radicalisation” of Palestinians that will make ‘Israel safe’.
A former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. argues that Israel can have no peace without such ‘transformative de-radicalisation’. “If we do it right”, Ron Dermer insists, “it will make Israel stronger – and the U.S. too”. It is in this context that the War Cabinet’s insistence on retaliation against Iran should be understood.
Rational argument advocating moderation is read as inviting defeat.
All of which is to say that Israelis are psychologically very far from being able to reconsider the content to the Zionist project of Jewish special rights. For now, they are on a completely different path, trusting to a Biblical reading that many Israelis have come to view as mandatory injunctions under Halachic Law.
Hubert Védrine asks us the supplementary question: “Can we imagine a West that manages to preserve the societies it has birthed – and yet “is not proselytizing, not-interventionist? In other words, a West that can accept alterity, that can live with others – and accept them for who they are”.
Védrine says this “is not a problem of the diplomatic machines: it’s a question of profound soul-searching, a deep cultural change that needs to happen in western society”.
A ‘trial of strength’ between Israel and the Resistance Fronts ranged against it likely cannot be avoided.
The die has been deliberately cast this way.
Netanyahu is gambling big with Israel’s – and America’s – future. And he may lose.
If there is a regional war, and Israel suffers defeat, then what?
When exhaustion (and defeat) finally settles in, and the parties ‘scrabble in the drawer’ for new solutions to their strategic distress, the truly transformative solution would be for an Israeli leader to think the ‘unthinkable’ – to think of one state between the River and the Sea.
And, for Israel – tasting the bitter herbs of ‘things fallen apart’ – to talk directly with Iran.
Genocides in Palestine & Plotted Pandemic for Lethal Vaccines
Fabio Giuseppe Carlo Carisio, born on 24/2/1967 in Borgosesia, started working as a reporter when he was only 19 years old in the alpine area of Valsesia, Piedmont, his birth region in Italy. After studying literature and history at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, he became director of the local newspaper Notizia Oggi Vercelli and specialized in judicial reporting. For about 15 years he is a correspondent from Northern Italy for the Italian newspapers Libero and Il Giornale, also writing important revelations on the Ustica massacre, a report on Freemasonry and organized crime. With independent investigations, he collaborates with Carabinieri and Guardia di Finanza in important investigations that conclude with the arrest of Camorra entrepreneurs or corrupt politicians. In July 2018 he found the counter-information web media Gospa News focused on geopolitics, terrorism, Middle East, and military intelligence. In 2020 published the book, in Italian only, WUHAN-GATES – The New World Order Plot on SARS-Cov-2 manmade focused on the cycle of investigations Wuhan-Gates His investigations was quoted also by The Gateway Pundit, Tasnim and others He worked for many years for the magazine Art & Wine as an art critic and curator.
“To the angel of the church in Smyrna write: These are the words of him who is the First and the Last, who died and came to life again.I know your afflictions and your poverty—yet you are rich! I know about the slander of those who say they are Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan”. Saint John Apostle and Evangelist – Book of the Revelation (Rev. 2, 8-10)
In the cover image the prime minister of the Israeli Zionist Regime Benjamin Nethanyau and the “Pope of Freemasonry” Albert Pike
NB – some quotes of American persons have been translated from sources in Italian so forgive any stylistic errors or differences with the original ones
«The revelation from Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place. He made it known by sending his angel to his servant John, who testifies to everything he saw—that is, the word of God and the testimony of Jesus Christ. Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy, andblessed are those who hear it and take to heart what is written in it, because the time is near».
This Prologue to the Book of the Revelation (Apocalypse) of Saint John the Evangelist, the only Apostle who died without martyrdom as a reward for his loyalty to Jesus under the cross of Golgotha, reread in recent days, after almost a million deaths caused in recent years by the wars in Ukraine, Syria. Iraq and Libya (to name the best known) and after the genocide of the Israeli army in Palestine in which over 8 thousand children were massacred by bombs in a few weeks together with around 22 thousand adults, we should be inspired by a profound spiritual reflection also by virtue of the prophecy on Armageddon, the final battle of the armies foretold in the Holy Land in the same text on the Apocalypse which in Greek, it is good to remember it only means “revelation”, “prophecy” and not “catastrophe”.
They take on an equally tragic meaning if we think of the holocaust of millions of victims caused both by the pandemic triggered by a SARS-Cov-2 built in the laboratory and by the killer vaccines with which unscrupulous Big Pharma is testing the world population like a massive human guinea-pig to reach the transhumanist goal of eugenic health culture: denial of Nature and the Almighty God of the Judeo-Christian tradition, which has survived 7 thousand years of attempts at annihilation.
THE GENOCIDE OF THE PALESTINIANS AND THE HOLOCAUST OF THE VACCINATED
Therefore, the biblical reference in the Book of Revelation to “those who proclaim themselves Jews and are not, but belong to the synagogue of Satan” does not appear in vain in the case of the Zionist leader Netanyahu who is carrying out a genocide of Palestinians after having mass vaccinated his fellow Israelis for a gigantic transversal business between the Weapons Lobby and Big Pharma with American President Joesph Biden.
Modern telecommunications means – where not blocked as in Gaza to prevent reckless reporters from documenting the war crimes ordered by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu already renamed “the Hitler of the 21st Century” by Turkish lawyers who demand his indictment – have made the bloody genocide tacitly legalized by the West and carried out in the churches and hospitals of Palestine terrifying, bringing before the eyes and ears cries that implore revenge and make the sense of forgiveness waver even in Christians, all this satanic torment appears comparable screams from the silence imploded in the hearts of children torn by lethal myocarditis or in the brains devoured by turbo-cancer of the victims of adverse reactions to the mRNA Covid vaccines.
Precisely because their roar against death is silent, broken in the throat by a sudden illness of which political, health and judicial authorities too often do not want to detect and reveal traces of the FAILURE OF A SYSTEM. Precisely that of the New World Order which is seeking God’s mercy with the merciless human reason capable of killing an 8-month-old baby girl, Indi Gregory, although she had a concrete hope of being assisted.
THE CATACLYSM FORECAST BY THE “POPE” OF AMERICAN FREEMASONRY
If all this happening is not a coincidence but appears to be an international and historical conspiracy foreseen in very remote times by the American “Pope of Freemasonry”, a Southern general, about whom we have already written, who was among the Confederate supporters of the Civil War but also among the founders of the KuKluxKlan and among the followers of satanic rites: Albert Pike.
We have already mentioned his extensive correspondence with the 33rd degree Freemason of the Supreme Council of the Ancient Accepted Scottish Rite Giuseppe Mazzini who, thanks to the financing of the hooded friends of the London lodges ready to host him even though he was a fugitive terrorist in Europe, planned the Expedition of the Thousand of Masonic guerrilla Giuseppe Garibaldi with whom the Kingdom of Italy wrested a part of Rome from the Papal State in the gigantic and crude plot against Christianity and the Catholic Church, partly attenuated only by the faith of the Ruling Savoy Dynasty.
But we had missed some passages which in the light of today’s events take on monstrous relevance, furthermore proving the imprint of Freemasonry, like a Mark of the Beast, in every religious and political conflictual drift, prodigiously foreseen in detail by General Pike.
In these first episodes we will analyze the conspiratorial complicity of Freemasonry with Zionism. In the next one with Nazism and Jihadist Islamism, where in a previous investigation we have analyzed the role of hooded men between Capitalism and Communism.
«The Third World War will have to be fomented by taking advantage of the differences stirred up by the agents of the Illuminati between political Zionism and the leaders of the Islamic world. The war will have to be oriented so that Islam (including the State of Israel) destroy each other, while at the same time the remaining nations, once again divided and opposed to each other, will then be forced to fight each other until to complete physical, mental, spiritual and economic exhaustion».
This is what Pike wrote to Mazzini on 15 August 1871 in a letter according to the revelations made by the commodore of the Canadian navy William Guy Carr which he later reported in his famous 1954 book Pawns in the Game. He stated that he learned about the letter from the anti-Mason, Cardinal José María Caro Rodríguez of Santiago, Chile, the author of The Mystery of Freemasonry Unveiled (Hawthorne, California, Christian Book Club of America, 1971).
The Navy official can be considered very reliable as worked also for the Canadian Intelligence Service during World War II, and in 1944 he published Checkmate in the North, a book about an invasion by the Axis forces to take place in the area of the CFB Goose Bay (Canadian Forces Base Goose Bay).
Carr’s books often discuss a Luciferian conspiracy by what he called the “World Revolutionary Movement,” but he later attributed the conspiracy more specifically to the “Synagogue of Satan.”
The term was not a reference to Judaism as he wrote: “I wish to make it clearly and emphatically known that I do not believe the Synagogue of Satan (S.O.S.) is Jewish, but, as Christ told us for a definite purpose, it is comprised of ‘I know the blasphemy of them which say they are Jews, and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan.’ (Rev. 2:9 and 3:9)
Albert Pike, the Pope of American Freemasonry
The Canadian commodore reported what we had already mentioned in the previous investigation on Pike and which we will try to contextualize both in the biblical, esoteric and historical context in the following lines.
«The First World War had to be fought to allow the “Illuminati” to overthrow the power of the czars in Russia and transform this country into the fortress of atheist communism. The differences stirred up by “Illuminati” agents between the British and German Empires were used to foment this war. After the war was over, communism had to be built and used to destroy other governments and weaken religions».
Citing Confederate General Pike who was Grand Master of the Mother Lodge of Charleston (but also, in all probability, the only Southerner to have had, until recently, a statue in his memory in the USA sculpted by an Italian but recently destroyed by vandals), the commodore added:
«The Second World War had to be fomented by taking advantage of the difference between fascists and political Zionists. The war had to be fought in order to destroy Nazism and increase the power of political Zionism, in order to allow the establishment of the sovereign state of Israel in Palestine. During the Second World War, a Communist International had to be established as strong as the whole of Christianity. At this point the latter had to be contained and kept under control until required for the final social cataclysm».
On 15 August 1871, as revealed by Carr, the Pope of American Freemasonry Pike revealed to Mazzini that at the end of the Third World War those who aspire to World Government would cause the greatest social cataclysm ever seen.
«We will unleash the nihilists and atheists and provoke a formidable social cataclysm which will clearly show, in all its horror, to the nations, the effect of absolute atheism, the origin of barbarism and bloody subversion».
And then again:
«Then everywhere citizens, forced to defend themselves against a world minority of revolutionaries, these destroyers of civilization, and the multitude disillusioned by Christianity, whose worshipers will be devoid of orientation in search of an ideal, will receive the true light through the universal manifestation of pure doctrine of Lucifer finally revealed to the public eye, a manifestation which will be followed by the destruction of Christianity and atheism conquered and crushed at the same time».
GEOPOLITICAL ANALYSIS OF THE THIRD WORLD WAR IN FRAGMENTS
If we carefully analyze what has happened in the last twenty years, rereading them with the lens of a geopolitical intelligence analysis, we can put together these dramatic events that prove the gradual increase of the Third World War “in a patchy pattern, in fragments, or in small pieces” as defined several times by Pope Francis.
September 11, 2001 – From the World Trade Center to the War in Afghanistan
Avoidable massacre of the attacks on the Twin Towers facilitated by the obstacles posed by the American counter-espionage of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to the investigations of the director of anti-terrorism of the FBI John O’Neill (who died in the World Trade Center where he was hired after being fired following sabotage of his professional activity). The hidden role of the Israeli counter-intelligence Mossad came to light immediately, recently with the disconcerting confirmation that two of the hijackers were collaborating with the CIA.
Palestinian President Abbas issued a decree outlawing the Hamas militias who defeated Fatah (a Palestinian political and paramilitary organization, part of the PLO, of which Yasser Arafat was leader) and therefore removed the Gaza Strip from the control of the Authority Palestinian national authority.
According to various intelligence experts including a former CIA director, Hamas, linked to the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood (sons of another Masonic history…), was financed by the USA and Israel precisely to lead to the Palestinian exodus plan that was configured in recent days after the attacks of 7 October which took the highly expert Israeli secret services (Shin Bet, Mossad and the military Aman) by surprise.
In 2014, ISIS founded by Caliph Al Baghdadi entered the war shortly after his liberation from Camp Bucca where he was detained by the US Army for terrorist activity in Iraq. He was believed to be a Mossad and CIA agent
February 20, 2014 – Start of the War in Ukraine
The second Orange Revolution financed by the Zionist Soros in Kiev explodes in all its violence due to the shooting of mysterious mercenary snipers on Ukrainian policemen and the crowd. It seems like a repeat of what the CIA hatched in 2002 in Caracas. The coup financed by NATO countries materializes with the escape of the legitimately elected president Viktor Fedorovyč Yanukovych to friendly Russia.
From there begins the Donbass Civil War which became a Global Conflict after the start of Moscow’s military operation to protect the pro-Russian victims of genocide by the neo-Nazi guerrillas of the Azov Battalion led by the Kiev Regime and also armed by Israel in an apparent, crazy paradox …
In July, however, the Israelis launched Operation Protective Edge to destroy clandestine tunnels into their country, triggering a resurgence of military clashes. Only on 28 August was a ceasefire declared by both sides but the electoral consultations were postponed and never agreed upon again.
October 2023 – Genocide Planned and Legalized in Gaza
Hamas captures hostages from an Israeli Rave Party and several kibbutz settlers in the illegally occupied territories. Israel responds disproportionately by bombing everyone, women, children, hospitals, churches, UN officials. Few Western politicians denounce a GENOCIDE which instead appears LEGALIZED by almost all NATO countries.
If we correlate the recurring subjects of these events it is easy to deduce that the Third World War in fragments has already been implemented for at least two decades with an enormous occult direction of that NATO evoked by Soros to embody the New World Order.
ANALYSIS OF THE SOCIAL CATALYSM: MANMADE VIRUS PANDEMIC
Let’s go back to the tired “forecasts” of the Freemason Albert Pike and reread a significant phrase:
«We will unleash the nihilists and atheists and provoke a formidable social cataclysm which will clearly show, in all its horror, to the nations, the effect of absolute atheism, the origin of barbarism and bloody subversion».
In 2004 the European Commission chaired by Romano Prodi, a Soros associate, financed the Wuhan Institute of Virology strengthened by the son of President Jiang Zemin, the Executioner of Tiananmen, also in light of an agreement on collaborations for research in the bacteriological field signed with the American president Bill Clinton in 1999.
Now even many US politicians admit their nation’s role in building the laboratory virus. This is denied by the National Intelligence Directorate led by Avril Haines who was deputy CIA director expert in bio-weapons when Fauci was carrying out experiments on Coronaviruses on behalf of the Obama-Biden administration together in Wuhan.
Even the Catholic Church genuflects to the Vaccine GOD.
Let’s reread Pike’s prophecy again, a truly disturbing name when associated with the almost homonymous Covid-19 protein.
«Then everywhere citizens, forced to defend themselves against a world minority of revolutionaries, these destroyers of civilization, and the multitude disillusioned by Christianity, whose worshipers will be devoid of orientation in search of an ideal, will receive the true light through the universal manifestation of pure doctrine of Lucifer finally revealed to the public eye, a manifestation which will be followed by the destruction of Christianity and atheism conquered and crushed at the same Time»
HISTORICAL ANALYSIS OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN FREEMASONRY AND ZIONISM
The detractors of the military geopolitical analyst and writer William Guy Carr who refers to the diabolical plan of the Pope of American Freemasonry are based on the fact that Albert Pike in 1871 could not have known about the birth of Communism, nor of Nazism, nor of Zionism.
Nor even knowing about the two world wars. Unless you were among those who designed them.
This observation can easily be refuted by citing some historical references already mentioned and which we will highlight.
«In July 1782 the Order of the Illuminati allied itself with Freemasonry during the Congress of Wilhelmsbad, which the historian Freemason Albert Mackey defined as ‘the most important Masonic Congress of the eighteenth century’ – we read on the website Freemasonry Unmasked, full of anecdotes and authoritative historical sources – The participants in that Congress had to swear not to reveal the decisions they had made to anyone (see Nesta H. Webster, World Revolution, 1921, page 31)».
Wilhelmsbad Castle was owned by the Ashkenazi Jewish banker (of Khazar-European origins) Mayer Amschel Rothschild who, according to various historians, in 1777 brought together twelve of his most influential friends and convinced them that if they pooled their resources they could dominate the world: this is how the Bavarian Illuminati was born.
The French Revolution confirms their success with the annihilation of the first important Catholic Monarchy. It will be the experience of the Paris Commune of 1871, the regurgitation of the regime of terror, that will inspire Lenin in his plan for the subsequent Bolshevik and Communist revolution.
So Pike was not only still alive at the time but knew the details.
The Independent Order B’nai B’rith or Bené Berith (Hebrew: בני ברית, “sons of the covenant”) is a Jewish lodge founded in 1843 during the presidency of John Tyler and still existing and active. It was founded at the Sinsheimer Café, in the Wall Street neighborhood of New York, by Henry Jones and eleven other people on October 13, 1843. The original name was in German “Bundes-Brueder” (which means “League of Brothers”), in the current one which retains the initials (“BB”).
Most of the founders were German-Jews: that is, Ashkenazi like Mayer Amschel Rothschild but also like his descendant Walter Rothschild, eldest son and heir of the banker Nathan Mayer Rothschild, the first Jewish baron of England.
Walter Rothschild was among the promoters of the declaration for the formation of the Jewish state in Palestine, later earning the merit of becoming president of the Council of Deputies of British Jews from 1925 to 1926.
From these seeds we arrived at 1917 when a letter from the British Foreign Minister Arthur Balfour, addressed to the “Dear Lord Rothschild”, sanctioned Balfour’s declaration which committed the British government to supporting the creation in Palestine of a home for the Jews in respect for the rights of other resident minorities.
How did Albert Pike know all these things before they happened?
Very simple because he was among those who concerted them in 1860 when the Southern general through Young America planned the American Civil War to defend the right to slavery, Mazzini with Young Italy committed himself to the Expedition of the Thousand and Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount of Palmerston, British Secretary of State and exponent of the Grand Lodge of England guaranteed all financial and political support.
The first expressions of proto-Zionism took shape, for example, in the foundation of the Universal Israelite Alliance in 1860, an organization aimed at the emancipation of the Jewish communities in the Middle East and North Africa, and in the publication of various works, including Rome and Jerusalem, written in 1862 by the German Jewish philosopher Moses Hess, Derishat Zion by the Polish-Prussian rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer, and the hymn Hatikvah, whose lyrics were written by Naftali Herz Imber and which later became the anthem of the State of Israel.
Zionism draws its roots from the new cultural environment generated in the context of the emancipation of European Jews starting from the French Revolution and throughout the 19th century and from the Haskalah.
The haskalah, with a small delay compared to other Enlightenment movements, arose in Germany and then spread throughout much of Europe and to a small extent also across the Atlantic. The father and inspirer of the movement was Moses Mendelssohn, close to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, a free thinker of Protestant extraction and an energetic defender of the Jews in Germany. The latter introduced Mendelssohn into the world of Berlin intellectuals where he dedicated himself to the composition of philosophical essays and dissertations.
A varied and open movement, the haskalah probably did not close its doors even to exponents of the Frankist heresy, a sort of tail of the messianic movement of Shabatai Zevi which had long been in opposition to official Judaism, perhaps linked to lodges of freemasonry, another force of the times, definitely in relation to the Enlightenment philosophy.
Many Jews influenced by the haskalah and the closeness it brought with European culture were seduced by the possibility of assimilation by embracing Christianity. Just think of the family of Karl Marx, descended from rabbis who converted to Protestantism, as did Mendelssohn’s own daughters. Others, however, laid the foundations of the new science of Judaism, the Wissenschaft des Judentums.
THE LODGES INSPIRED BY THE SON OF THE BIBLICAL MURDERER CAIN
Today we add another detail by recalling the figure of John Theophilus Desaguliers (La Rochelle, 12 March 1683 – Covent Garden, 29 February 1744) who was an English scientist, religious and Freemason of French origins.
Desaguliers emigrated to England in 1694, due to the Edict of Fontainebleau, which revoked the freedom of worship of Protestants. He approached Freemasonry, becoming Grand Master of the First Grand Lodge of England in 1718, and Deputy Grand Master in 1723 and 1725. Under his leadership, the Grand Lodge of London and Freemasonry developed in an “astonishing” way in the islands British, to the point that «in 1740 there were already more than 180 lodges».
Each of the earliest Masonic texts contains some sort of history of the craft, or guild, of Freemasonry. The oldest work of this type, the Royal Manuscript, dating from 1390 to 1425, has a brief history in the introduction, which states that the “craft of Freemasonry” began with Euclid in Egypt, and arrived in England during the reign of ruler Æðelstan.
A little later, the Cooke Manuscript traces Freemasonry to Jabal, son of Lamech (Genesis 4, 20-22), and tells how this knowledge reached Euclid, from him to the children of Israel when they were in Egypt, and so on for an elaborate route to Æðelstan. This myth formed the basis for later manuscript foundations, all of which claim that Freemasonry dates back to Biblical times, and pegs its institutional consolidation in England during the reign of Æðelstan (927-939).
Shortly after the formation of the first Grand Lodge of England, James Anderson was commissioned to summarize these “Gothic constitutions” into a pleasing modern form. The constitutions produced by his work have a more widespread historical introduction than any previous one, and once again connect the history of what Freemasonry had become to its biblical roots, always inserting Euclid into the chain of narrative.
The first question that a connoisseur of Judeo-Christian history should ask is almost banal.
Why do the Freemasons, due to fabulous legendary and historical beliefs, trace Freemasonry to one of the descendants of the murderer Cain and not to the third son of Adam named Set from whom the Semitic culture was born?
In France, Chevalier (Knight) Ramsay’s 1737 conference added Crusader Freemasons to the family tree claiming that they had revived the craft with secrets recovered in the Holy Land, under the patronage of the Knights Hospitaller. At this point, the “history” of the profession of continental Freemasonry separated from that of Freemasonry in England which in the meantime had published its “charter”.
THE SCHSM ON THE GREAT ARCHITECT OF THE UNIVERSE
The Constitutions of the Free-Masons, “for the use of the lodges” in London and Westminster, was published in 1723. It was edited by the Presbyterian clergyman James Anderson, by order of John Theophilus Desaguliers, and approved by a committee of the grand lodge under its control. The work was reprinted in Philadelphia in 1734 by Benjamin Franklin, who in that year became Grand Master of the Pennsylvania Freemasons. It was also translated into Dutch (1736), German (1741) and French (1745).
Anderson was minister of the Presbyterian church in Swallow Street, London, which had formerly been a Huguenot church, and whose pastor in the 1690s was Desaguliers’ father. At the time of his meeting with Desaguliers, he appears to have presented himself as a Talmudic scholar.
In various historical testimonies that we summarize for brevity, Anderson himself seems to imply the existence of an Italian Grand Lodge.
In Naples in 1728 he saw the light of the first regular Masonic lodge established in Italy, La Perfetta Unione. Raised by the will of the Prince of San Severo, it had Egyptian symbols such as the pyramid, the Sphinx and the radiant sun in its emblem. Subsequently, the English lodge (“La Loggia degli Inglesi”) was established in Florence, founded in 1731 and Freemasonry spread rapidly, despite a series of papal prohibitions.
But already ahead the so-called Great Schism occurred. According to a widespread opinion, the schism between French and English Freemasonry originates from the general assembly of the Grand Orient of France in September 1877. Accepting the recommendation contained in a report by the Protestant pastor (and Freemason) Frédéric Desmons, the assembly decided by a majority of amend its constitutions by inserting the formula “its principles are absolute freedom of conscience and human solidarity”. This replaced the previous statement “its principles are the existence of God, the immortality of the soul and human solidarity”.
The reaction of the United Grand Lodge of England (UGLE) was the resolution of March 1878 which reiterated “That the Grand Lodge, while anxious to welcome in the most fraternal spirit the Brethren of any foreign Grand Lodge whose proceedings are conducted according to the Ancient cornerstones of the Order, among which the first and most important is the faith in T. G. A. O. T. U. [“the great Architect of the universe”, in English acronym], cannot recognize as ‘true and genuine’ Brothers all those who have been initiated in lodges that deny or ignore that faith.”
FREEMASONRY SIMILAR TO THE BEAST OF THE APOCALYPSE
Having concluded this long but necessary historical digression on Freemasonry implemented with various Wikipedia sources, let’s return to the beginning. To the book of the Apocalypse of Saint John and the disturbing esoteric symbolisms.
If we summarize the historical notes above we can easily conclude that the first promoters of Zionism in the USA were the founders of the B’nai B’rith Lodge composed of Ashkenazi Jews (as Adolph Hitler is also believed to be) that the historians of Jewish culture they define the “13th Tribe of Israel” as they derive from the diaspora of the Khazars who had converted to Judaism
While in Europe it spread thanks to the Rothschild Dynasty (Red Shield) which was the first to weave subversive plots with an anti-Catholic vocation from the birth of the Bavarian Illuminati up to the pact of terror for the French Revolution from which the liberation of the proto- Zionism together with that Masonic concept of “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité” imposed by guillotining even the elderly nobles of the Catholic Vendée French region.
«Then everywhere citizens, forced to defend themselves against a world minority of revolutionaries, these destroyers of civilization, and the multitude disillusioned by Christianity, whose worshipers will be devoid of orientation in search of an ideal, will receive the true light through the universal manifestation of pure doctrine of Lucifer finally revealed to the public eye, a manifestation which will be followed by the destruction of Christianity and atheism conquered and crushed at the same time».
But following this hermeneutical path to the Book of the Apocalypse, one of the most important allegories comes to mind with disconcerting and terrifying impetus:
«The dragon stood on the shore of the sea. And I saw a beast coming out of the sea. It had ten horns and seven heads, with ten crowns on its horns, and on each head a blasphemous name. The beast I saw resembled a leopard, but had feet like those of a bear and a mouth like that of a lion. The dragon gave the beast his power and his throne and great authority. One of the heads of the beast seemed to have had a fatal wound, but the fatal wound had been healed. The whole world was filled with wonder and followed the beast. People worshiped the dragon because he had given authority to the beast, and they also worshiped the beast and asked, “Who is like the beast? Who can wage war against it?» (Rev. 13, 1-4)
The prophet Saint John the Apostle and Evangelist delves into the concept with an aura vision
«Then I saw a second beast, coming out of the earth. It had two horns like a lamb, but it spoke like a dragon.It exercised all the authority of the first beast on its behalf, and made the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast, whose fatal wound had been healed» (Rev. 13, 11-12)
It is not really scary to note how traditional esoteric Freemasonry became manifest thanks to the Anglican political schism of the Protestants and allowed Pharisaic Judaism, defeated by the Diaspora after the Crucifixion of the Messiah awaited by the Jews, to be reborn in its Talmudic form with Judaism then became with Zionism the most powerful component of the New World Order?
We have historical clues that help identify Freemasonry as one of the two apocalyptic Beasts. But this theme will be explored in greater depth if and when we receive from the Holy Spirit the gift of the wisdom necessary to interpret it. Therefore today we cannot help but insinuate doubt…
POWER OF CHRIST IN THE PROPHECY OF SAINT JOHN THE APOSTLE
But it is precisely Chapter 12 of the Book of the Apocalypse (Rev. 12, 7-12) which comes to illuminate with a radiant dawn of hope the dangers of all of us Christians who strive to be among those “who listen to the words of this prophecy and put into practice the things that are written in it”:
«Then war broke out in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven. The great dragon was hurled down—that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him».
“Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God, and the authority of his Messiah. For the accuser of our brothers and sisters, who accuses them before our God day and night, has been hurled down. They triumphed over him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony; they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death. Therefore rejoice, you heavens and you who dwell in them! But woe to the earth and the sea, because the devil has gone down to you! He is filled with fury, because he knows that his time is short.”
Since Saint John was the only Apostle who died without martyrdom for his loyalty to Jesus Christ under the cross and also survived the hell of imprisonment on Patmos (where he received the visions and locutions collected in the Apocalypse), it is probably very useful to start believing him…
Fabio Giuseppe Carlo Carisio, born on 24/2/1967 in Borgosesia, started working as a reporter when he was only 19 years old in the alpine area of Valsesia, Piedmont, his birth region in Italy. After studying literature and history at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, he became director of the local newspaper Notizia Oggi Vercelli and specialized in judicial reporting.
For about 15 years he is a correspondent from Northern Italy for the Italian newspapers Libero and Il Giornale, also writing important revelations on the Ustica massacre, a report on Freemasonry and organized crime.
With independent investigations, he collaborates with Carabinieri and Guardia di Finanza in important investigations that conclude with the arrest of Camorra entrepreneurs or corrupt politicians.
In July 2018 he found the counter-information web media Gospa News focused on geopolitics, terrorism, Middle East, and military intelligence.
In 2020 published the book, in Italian only, WUHAN-GATES – The New World Order Plot on SARS-Cov-2 manmade focused on the cycle of investigations Wuhan-Gates
His investigations was quoted also by The Gateway Pundit, Tasnim and others
He worked for many years for the magazine Art & Wine as an art critic and curator.
Western capitals no longer treat Israel like a state, a political actor capable of slaughtering children, but rather as a sacred cause. So any opposition has to be a blasphemy
If you read the establishment media, you might conclude that a serious battle is being waged by Israel and its most ardent supporters to tackle an apparent new wave of antisemitism in the West.
In article after article, we are told how Israel and western Jewish leadership bodies are demanding our concern, and outrage, at a rise in anti-Jewish hate incidents. Organisations such as the Community Security Trust in the UK and the Anti-Defamation League in the US produce lengthy reports on the relentless increase in antisemitism, especially since 7 October, and warn that action is urgently required.
Undoubtedly, there is a real threat of antisemitism and, as ever, it comes largely from the far right. Israel’s actions – and its false claim to be representing all Jews – only help to stoke it.
This moral panic is transparently self-serving. It directs our attention away from the pressing, all-too-concrete evidence that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza – one that has slaughtered and maimed many tens of thousands of innocents.
It redirects our attention instead towards tenuous claims of a deepening antisemitism crisis, one whose tangible effects appear limited and for which the evidence is all too clearly exaggerated.
After all, a rise in “Jew hatred” is all but inevitable if you redefine antisemitism, as western officials have recently done via the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s new definition, to include antipathy towards Israel – and at the moment when Israel appears, even to the World Court, to be carrying out a genocide.
The logic of Israel and its supporters runs something like this:
Many more people than usual are expressing hatred of Israel, the self-declared state of the Jewish people. There is no reason to hate Israel unless you hate what it represents, which is Jews. Therefore, antisemitism is on the rise.
This argument makes sense to most Israelis, to its partisans, and to the overwhelming majority of western politicians and career-minded establishment journalists. That is: the very same people who interpret calls for equality in historic Palestine – “from the river to the sea” – as a demand for a genocide against Jews.
The singer Charlotte Church, for example, found herself accused of antisemitism by the entire establishment media after a “pro-Palestinian chant” to raise money for Gaza’s children being starved by an Israeli aid blockade. The offending song had included the lyric “From the river to the sea”, calling for the liberation of Palestinians from decades of Israeli oppression.
At the weekend, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt once again suggested marches calling for a ceasefire were antisemitic because they supposedly “intimidated” Jews. In fact, Jews are prominent at those marches. He was referring to Zionists who excuse the slaughter in Gaza.
A BBC News correspondent tried to stop me from calling Israel’s onslaught on Gaza a genocide because it might “offend” people.
Since when did we worry about “offending” génocidaires? I will never accept such attempts at censorship. pic.twitter.com/RLkIRU4Zmz
Similarly, in the wake of George Galloway’s overwhelming byelection win “for Gaza” in Rochdale last week, a BBC reporter berated former Labour MP Chris Williamson for using the word “genocide” to describe Israel’s actions.
The reporter was worried that the term “might offend some people”, despite the World Court finding the accusation of genocide plausible.
A ghoulish phenomenon
But the ambition of these Israel zealots runs much deeper than mere deflection. Israel’s leaders and most of its citizens are not ashamed of their genocide, it seems, and neither are their overseas backers.
If my social media feeds are any guide, the slaughter in Gaza is not discomfiting these apologists, or even giving them pause for thought. They appear to revel in their support for Israel as the world looks on in horror.
Every Palestinian child’s bloodied body, and the outrage it provokes from onlookers, fuels their self-righteousness. They entrench, they do not retreat.
They appear to be finding a strange reassurance – comfort even – in the wider public’s anger and indignation at the extinguishing of so many young lives.
It mirrors very precisely Israeli officials’ own reaction to the International Court of Justice’s verdict that there is a plausible case Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
Many observers assumed that Israel would seek to placate the judges and world opinion by toning down its atrocities. They could not have been more wrong. In defying the court, Israel became even more brazen, as attested to by its horrifying assault on the Nasser hospital last month and its lethal attack on Palestinians scrambling to reach an aid convoy last week.
This phenomenon needs explaining. It looks ghoulish. But it has an internal logic that shines a light on why Israel has become an emotional crutch for many Jewish people, both inside the country and abroad, as well as for others.
It is not just that Jews and non-Jews who strongly subscribe to the ideology of Zionism identify with Israel. It runs deeper still. They are utterly dependent on a worldview – long cultivated in them by Israel and by their own community leaders, as well as by oil-grabbing western establishments – that places Israel at the centre of the moral universe.
They have been drawn into what looks more like a cult – and a very dangerous one at that, as the horrors of Gaza are revealing.
Albatross, not sanctuary
The claim they have internalised – that Israel is a necessary sanctuary in a future time of trouble from the supposedly innate, genocidal impulses of non-Jews – should have come crashing down on their heads over the past five months.
If the price of reassurance – of having a “just-in-case” bolthole – is the slaughter and maiming of many tens of thousands of Palestinian children, and the slow starvation of hundreds of thousands more, then that bolthole is not worth preserving.
It is not a sanctuary; it is an albatross. It is a stain. It must go, to be replaced by something better for Jews and Palestinians in the region – “from the river to the sea”.
So why have these Israel partisans not been able to reach a conclusion so morally self-evident to everyone else – or at least those not suborned to the interests of western establishments?
Because like all cult members, hardcore Zionists are immune to self-reflection. Not only that, but their reasoning is inherently circular.
Israel, Zionism’s creation, is not in the least concerned with providing a solution to antisemitism, as it professes. Quite the reverse. It feeds on antisemitism and needs it.
Antisemitism is its lifeblood, the very reason for Israel’s existence. Without antisemitism, Israel would be redundant, there would be no need for it as a sanctuary.
The cult would be over, and so would the endless military aid, the special trading status with the West, the jobs, the land grabs, the privileges and the sense of importance and ultimate victimhood that allows for the dehumanisation of others, not least the Palestinians.
Like all true believers, Israel’s partisans overseas – who proudly call themselves “Zionists” but are now pressuring social media platforms to ban the term as antisemitic, as the movement’s goals become more transparent – have too much to lose from self- and communal doubt.
The fight against antisemitism means nothing else can take priority – not even genocide. Which, in turn, means no greater evil can be acknowledged, not even the mass murder of children. No bigger threat, however pressing, however urgent, can be allowed to come to the fore.
And to keep the doubt at bay, more antisemitism – more supposed existential threats – must be generated.
Racism in new garb
In recent years, the biggest difficulty facing Zionism has been that the true racists – on the right, often in power in western capitals – have also served as Israel’s strongest allies. They have dressed up their traditional racist ideologies – that once fed antisemitism, and could again – in new garb: as Islamophobia.
In Europe and the United States, Muslims are the new Jews.
Which is ideal for Israel and its partisans. A supposed “global, civilisational war” – ideological cover to justify continuing western domination of the oil-rich Middle East – always places Israel, the regional attack dog, on the side of the angels, firmly alongside the white nationalists.
Because Israel and its apologists cannot expose the true racists and antisemites in power, they must create new ones. And that has required changing antisemitism’s definition beyond recognition, to refer to those who oppose the colonial domination project into which Israel is profoundly integrated.
In this upside-down worldview, one that prevails not only among Israel partisans but in western capitals, we have arrived at a nonsense: to reject Israel’s oppression of Palestinians – and now even its genocide of them – is supposedly to reveal oneself as antisemitic.
Palestinians dehumanised
This was precisely the position in which Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, found herself last month after she criticised French President Emmanuel Macron.
Israel has, as a consequence, declared it is banning her from entry to the occupied territories to record its human rights abuses.
But notably, as Albanese pointed out, nothing has changed in practice. Israel has excluded all UN rapporteurs from the occupied territories for the past 16 years, during its siege of Gaza, so they cannot witness the crimes that foregrounded the attack on 7 October.
Last month, Macron made a patently preposterous statement, though one promoted by Israel and treated seriously by the western media. He described Hamas’ attack on Israel as the “biggest antisemitic massacre of our century” – that is, he claimed it was driven by hatred of Jews.
One can criticise Hamas for how it carried out its attack, as Albanese has done: undoubtedly, its fighters committed many violations of international law that day in killing civilians and taking them hostage.
Exactly the same kind of violations, we should note in the interests of balance, that Israel has committed day in, day out for decades against the Palestinians forced to live under its military occupation.
Palestinian prisoners, seized by an occupying Israeli army in the middle of the night, held in military jails and denied proper trials, are no less hostages.
But to ascribe antisemitism as Hamas’ motivation is intended to scrub out those many decades of oppression. It airbrushes out the very abuses faced by the Palestinians that Hamas and the other Palestinian militant factions were established to resist.
That right of resistance to belligerent military occupation is enshrined in international law, even if the West rarely acknowledges the fact.
Or as Albanese put it: “The victims in the October 7 massacre were not killed because of their Judaism, but in response to Israeli oppression.”
Macron’s ridiculous remark also wiped out the past 17 years of the siege of Gaza – a slow-motion genocide that Israel has now put on steroids.
And he did so precisely because western colonial interests – just like Israel’s interests – must rationalise the dehumanisation of Palestinians and their supporters as racists and barbarians, in the West’s pursuit of domination and old-fashioned resource control in the Middle East.
But it is Albanese, not Macron, now fighting to save her reputation. She is the one being smeared as a racist and antisemite. By whom? By Israel and the genocide-supporting leaders of Europe.
Sacred cause
Israel needs antisemitism. And armed with a ludicrous redefinition adopted by western allies that classifies as Jew hatred any opposition to its crimes – any rejection of its bogus claims of “self-defence” as it crushes resistance to its occupation and its oppression of Palestinians – Israel has every incentive to commit more crimes.
Every atrocity produces more outrage, more resentment, more “antisemitism”. And the more resentment, the more outrage, the more “antisemitism”, the more Israel and its supporters can present the self-declared Jewish state as a sanctuary from that “antisemitism”.
Israel is no longer treated as a state, as a political actor capable of committing crimes and slaughtering children, but as an article of faith. It is transformed into a belief system, one immune to criticism or scrutiny. It transcends politics to become a sacred cause. And any opposition must be damned as wicked, as blasphemy.
Which is precisely the state to which western politics has devolved.
This battle against “antisemitism” – or rather, the battle being waged by Israel and its partisans – is to turn the meaning of words, and the values they represent, on their head. It is a fight to crush solidarity with the Palestinian people, and leave them friendless and naked before Israel’s campaign of genocide.
It is a moral duty to defeat these “antisemitism” warriors and assert our shared humanity – and the right of all to live in peace and dignity – before Israel and its apologists pave the way to an even greater slaughter.
Although winning the social media information battle since 7 October, Palestinians and their supporters must work to gut the persistent language parameters that Israel has long cultivated to establish itself as victim, terrorized, and righteous.
He mobilized English language and sent it to the field.
So declared British Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax about British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s speech in the House of Commons at the time, after he managed to convince his Conservative Party opposition to enter the war against Hitler.
The information warfare at play, for decades dominated by the western axis and its vast, global media reach, seeks to shape our opinions of the geopolitical chess board. It is a fight that became visible to all in the battlefields of Syria, then intensified over Ukraine, and is now collapsing over Israel’s stunningly brutal military assault on Gaza and its 2.4 million civilians.
Israel has the right to defend itself.
This ubiquitous phrase used by Israel during its 75+ years of oppression and occupation of Palestine often serves as a thinly veiled justification for its indefensible actions. This shield against accountability for human rights abuses has not only been wielded by the Israeli government but has also found resonance among western leaders.
This rhetoric gained renewed traction following the Hamas-led resistance operation, Al-Aqsa Flood, on 7 October 2023. In its immediate aftermath, US President Joe Biden promised to ensure that Israel has “what it needs to defend itself,” declaring from his highly visible White House pulpit that he has assured Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: “Israel has the right to defend itself and its people, full stop.”
Similar sentiments were parroted by British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak after 7 October, who posted on X that Israel has “an absolute right” to defend itself, followed by a spate of EU leaders clambering to assure “their support for Israel’s right to defend itself, in line with humanitarian and international law.”
During his visit to the occupation state in November, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken not only reiterated Washington’s support for “Israel’s right to self-defense” but went as far as to say, “It is obligated to do so.”
The right to commit genocide
This assertion of the “right to defend itself” serves as a key component of the linguistic and conceptual arsenal employed by the US-backed Israeli government within occupied Palestine and the broader West Asian region.
In a world where narratives vie for dominance in shaping public opinion, the significance of terminology cannot be overstated. Israel has adeptly utilized linguistic nuances and strategic ambiguity to advance its narrative on the Palestinian issue, whether through historical revisionism, past conflicts, or contemporary events like the Al-Aqsa Flood.
The Cradle columnist Sharmine Narwani wrote about this in 2012, emphasizing the significance of “public diplomacy” as a crucial tool in geopolitics. “Anything that invokes the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, and the myths about historic Jewish rights to the land bequeathed to them by the Almighty” all serve to preserve Israel’s right to exist and to defend itself.
However, such narratives obscure the reality of the situation: a powerful occupying force supported by a superpower pitted against an indigenous population without a conventional army to defend them.
A war of words
Gustave Le Bon, the founder of mass psychology, begins in his book The Psychology of the Masses, what he calls “images, words and phrases” as one of the direct factors that contribute to the formation of the opinions of the masses:
The masses fascinate their imagination and are aroused by the intelligent and correct use of appropriate words and phrases, and if we use them artistically and tactfully, then they can possess secret power. It evokes in the soul of many masses the most powerful hurricane, but it also knows how to calm them. Words whose meanings are difficult to determine precisely are the ones that sometimes have the greatest ability to influence and act.
Following the 2008 Israeli offensive on Gaza, Republican pollster and political strategist Dr Frank Luntz authored a study titled “The Israel Project’s 2009 Global Language Dictionary,” commissioned by a group called The Israel Project for use by those “who are on the front lines of fighting the media war for Israel.”
In the second chapter, titled “Glossary of Words That Work,” Luntz presents “For the first time in our communication effort … an A–Z glossary of specific words, phrases, and concepts that should form the core of any pro-Israeli communication effort.” The following are just a few examples from his glossary of terms:
Humanize Rockets: Paint a vivid picture of what life is like in Israeli communities that are vulnerable to attack. Yes, cite the number of rocket attacks that have occurred. But immediately follow that up with what it is like to make the nightly trek to the bomb shelter.
‘Peace before political boundaries’: This is the best phrase for talking about why a two-state solution isn’t realistic right now. First the rockets and the war need to stop. Then both peoples can talk about political boundaries.
‘The RIGHT to’: This is a stronger phrase than ‘deserves.’ Use the phrase frequently, including: the rights that both Israelis and Arabs enjoy in Israel, the right to peace that Israelis and Palestinians are entitled to, and Israel’s right to defend its civilians against rocket attacks.
Narrative manipulation and linguistic tactics
Understanding the historical efforts to control the narrative surrounding the ‘Arab–Israeli conflict’ begins with the absence of a clear definition or identification of its parties. This ambiguity allows for manipulation and flexibility in defining the issue. Consequently, a selection of vocabulary and terms has been identified that shapes the discourse surrounding the Palestinian cause.
Major international media outlets and political leaders have progressively framed the resistance against the occupation from its historical portrayal as an Arab–Israeli conflict to a Palestinian–Israeli one, then further narrowing it to a confrontation between Hamas/Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Israel. The western press and major media outlets also favor the usage of terms like “clash” rather than “Israeli aggression” and seek to frame the murder of Palestinians as people who “died” rather than “killed” by Israel.
This reductionist approach diminishes the complexity of the conflict and emphasizes Israel’s role while minimizing the opposing side’s agency. Additionally, overused terminology such as “conflict” replaces more nuanced terms, further simplifying the narrative.
In line with Israel’s perpetual portrayal of itself as a victim, it garners sympathy by weaponizing the Holocaust and gains support globally by positioning itself as such and asserting its “legitimate right to self-defense.”
Israel and the US have also conflated anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, equating criticism of its policies with bigotry against Jews. This conflation has led to accusations of anti-Semitism against individuals who critique Israel, such as university presidents, perpetuating a narrative that stifles intellectual dissent.
Israeli media employs “harrowing” terms like “neutralization” to describe the killing of resistance fighters in Gaza and the West Bank, employing language that minimizes the emotional impact on Palestinians and presents a sanitized version of events while also dehumanizing them.
Writing and fighting back
It is crucial to recognize that the lexicon surrounding the Palestinian issue and the wider resistance in the West Asian region against Israel plays a significant role in shaping narratives and collective consciousness. This linguistic battleground, often overlooked, is integral to understanding the current war’s dynamics and the framing of events.
For instance, in the aftermath of Al-Aqsa Flood, Israel strategically utilized its Hasbara apparatus to propagate a specific narrative. This narrative included the assertion of Israel’s “right of self-defense,” which framed Israel as a victim justifying its actions.
Additionally, Israel referred to individuals held by Hamas as “hostages” rather than “detainees” or “prisoners,” implying their potential use as human shields and justifying lethal responses. The forced displacement of Palestinians in Gaza was labeled as “repositioning” or “transfer,” a euphemism aimed at downplaying the severity of the situation.
While Israel initially referred to its military actions as “ground maneuvers” to mitigate media and legal ramifications, it later framed its indiscriminate aggression as a “war on terror” to garner international support. This framing aimed to portray Hamas as a terrorist entity akin to ISIS, appealing to western sentiments and seeking to eliminate the notion that there were innocents in Gaza.
As the Axis of Resistance has often repeated, this war is being fought on multiple fronts – not just in the physical realm but prominently in the online realm of propaganda. Redressing the imbalance of power in the information war, however, is no easy task. The battle of words and ideas is an essential one for Palestinian resistance movements and pro-Palestine voices to fight. The opportunity to completely flip the narrative – now that Israel has revealed Zionism’s ugliest face in Gaza – has fully arrived, and the myth of Israeli victimhood must be put to rest forever.
The information warfare at play, for decades dominated by the western axis and its vast, global media reach, seeks to shape our opinions of the geopolitical chess board. It is a fight that became visible to all in the battlefields of Syria, then intensified over Ukraine, and is now collapsing over Israel’s stunningly brutal military assault on Gaza and its 2.4 million civilians.
So declared British Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax about British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s speech in the House of Commons at the time, after he managed to convince his Conservative Party opposition to enter the war against Hitler.
Israel has the right to defend itself.
This ubiquitous phrase used by Israel during its 75+ years of oppression and occupation of Palestine often serves as a thinly veiled justification for its indefensible actions. This shield against accountability for human rights abuses has not only been wielded by the Israeli government but has also found resonance among western leaders.
This rhetoric gained renewed traction following the Hamas-led resistance operation, Al-Aqsa Flood, on 7 October 2023. In its immediate aftermath, US President Joe Biden promised to ensure that Israel has “what it needs to defend itself,” declaring from his highly visible White House pulpit that he has assured Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: “Israel has the right to defend itself and its people, full stop.”
Similar sentiments were parroted by British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak after 7 October, who posted on X that Israel has “an absolute right” to defend itself, followed by a spate of EU leaders clambering to assure “their support for Israel’s right to defend itself, in line with humanitarian and international law.”
During his visit to the occupation state in November, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken not only reiterated Washington’s support for “Israel’s right to self-defense” but went as far as to say, “It is obligated to do so.”
The right to commit genocide
This assertion of the “right to defend itself” serves as a key component of the linguistic and conceptual arsenal employed by the US-backed Israeli government within occupied Palestine and the broader West Asian region.
In a world where narratives vie for dominance in shaping public opinion, the significance of terminology cannot be overstated. Israel has adeptly utilized linguistic nuances and strategic ambiguity to advance its narrative on the Palestinian issue, whether through historical revisionism, past conflicts, or contemporary events like the Al-Aqsa Flood.
The Cradle columnist Sharmine Narwani wrote about this in 2012, emphasizing the significance of “public diplomacy” as a crucial tool in geopolitics. “Anything that invokes the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, and the myths about historic Jewish rights to the land bequeathed to them by the Almighty” all serve to preserve Israel’s right to exist and to defend itself.
However, such narratives obscure the reality of the situation: a powerful occupying force supported by a superpower pitted against an indigenous population without a conventional army to defend them.
A war of words
Gustave Le Bon, the founder of mass psychology, begins in his book The Psychology of the Masses, what he calls “images, words and phrases” as one of the direct factors that contribute to the formation of the opinions of the masses:
The masses fascinate their imagination and are aroused by the intelligent and correct use of appropriate words and phrases, and if we use them artistically and tactfully, then they can possess secret power. It evokes in the soul of many masses the most powerful hurricane, but it also knows how to calm them. Words whose meanings are difficult to determine precisely are the ones that sometimes have the greatest ability to influence and act.
Following the 2008 Israeli offensive on Gaza, Republican pollster and political strategist Dr Frank Luntz authored a study titled “The Israel Project’s 2009 Global Language Dictionary,” commissioned by a group called The Israel Project for use by those “who are on the front lines of fighting the media war for Israel.”
In the second chapter, titled “Glossary of Words That Work,” Luntz presents “For the first time in our communication effort … an A–Z glossary of specific words, phrases, and concepts that should form the core of any pro-Israeli communication effort.” The following are just a few examples from his glossary of terms:
Humanize Rockets: Paint a vivid picture of what life is like in Israeli communities that are vulnerable to attack. Yes, cite the number of rocket attacks that have occurred. But immediately follow that up with what it is like to make the nightly trek to the bomb shelter.
‘Peace before political boundaries’: This is the best phrase for talking about why a two-state solution isn’t realistic right now. First the rockets and the war need to stop. Then both peoples can talk about political boundaries.
‘The RIGHT to’: This is a stronger phrase than ‘deserves.’ Use the phrase frequently, including: the rights that both Israelis and Arabs enjoy in Israel, the right to peace that Israelis and Palestinians are entitled to, and Israel’s right to defend its civilians against rocket attacks.
Narrative manipulation and linguistic tactics
Understanding the historical efforts to control the narrative surrounding the ‘Arab–Israeli conflict’ begins with the absence of a clear definition or identification of its parties. This ambiguity allows for manipulation and flexibility in defining the issue. Consequently, a selection of vocabulary and terms has been identified that shapes the discourse surrounding the Palestinian cause.
Major international media outlets and political leaders have progressively framed the resistance against the occupation from its historical portrayal as an Arab–Israeli conflict to a Palestinian–Israeli one, then further narrowing it to a confrontation between Hamas/Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Israel. The western press and major media outlets also favor the usage of terms like “clash” rather than “Israeli aggression” and seek to frame the murder of Palestinians as people who “died” rather than “killed” by Israel.
This reductionist approach diminishes the complexity of the conflict and emphasizes Israel’s role while minimizing the opposing side’s agency. Additionally, overused terminology such as “conflict” replaces more nuanced terms, further simplifying the narrative.
In line with Israel’s perpetual portrayal of itself as a victim, it garners sympathy by weaponizing the Holocaust and gains support globally by positioning itself as such and asserting its “legitimate right to self-defense.”
Israel and the US have also conflated anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, equating criticism of its policies with bigotry against Jews. This conflation has led to accusations of anti-Semitism against individuals who critique Israel, such as university presidents, perpetuating a narrative that stifles intellectual dissent.
Israeli media employs “harrowing” terms like “neutralization” to describe the killing of resistance fighters in Gaza and the West Bank, employing language that minimizes the emotional impact on Palestinians and presents a sanitized version of events while also dehumanizing them.
Writing and fighting back
It is crucial to recognize that the lexicon surrounding the Palestinian issue and the wider resistance in the West Asian region against Israel plays a significant role in shaping narratives and collective consciousness. This linguistic battleground, often overlooked, is integral to understanding the current war’s dynamics and the framing of events.
For instance, in the aftermath of Al-Aqsa Flood, Israel strategically utilized its Hasbara apparatus to propagate a specific narrative. This narrative included the assertion of Israel’s “right of self-defense,” which framed Israel as a victim justifying its actions.
Additionally, Israel referred to individuals held by Hamas as “hostages” rather than “detainees” or “prisoners,” implying their potential use as human shields and justifying lethal responses. The forced displacement of Palestinians in Gaza was labeled as “repositioning” or “transfer,” a euphemism aimed at downplaying the severity of the situation.
While Israel initially referred to its military actions as “ground maneuvers” to mitigate media and legal ramifications, it later framed its indiscriminate aggression as a “war on terror” to garner international support. This framing aimed to portray Hamas as a terrorist entity akin to ISIS, appealing to western sentiments and seeking to eliminate the notion that there were innocents in Gaza.
As the Axis of Resistance has often repeated, this war is being fought on multiple fronts – not just in the physical realm but prominently in the online realm of propaganda. Redressing the imbalance of power in the information war, however, is no easy task. The battle of words and ideas is an essential one for Palestinian resistance movements and pro-Palestine voices to fight. The opportunity to completely flip the narrative – now that Israel has revealed Zionism’s ugliest face in Gaza – has fully arrived, and the myth of Israeli victimhood must be put to rest forever.
The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.
Since the establishment of a Zionist home in Palestine in the early 20th century, Jewish settlers have massacred tens of thousands of Palestinians – mainly women, children and the elderly – whose lands and homes they have plundered and robbed with impunity.
Never in the history of mankind has a race of people gone so quickly from being exceptional victims to exceptional murderers determined to exterminate the Palestinians under the pretext of recreating their homeland, the biblical Israel.
But Palestine was never the homeland of the Jews. Biblical accounts are not supported by historical or archaeological discoveries. “It’s a romantic fantasy,” admits Jewish historian Norman F. Cantor in his book on Jewish history, The Sacred Chain. “The whole notion of Israel and its history is a literary fiction,” says Professor Thomas Thompson in his book The Mythic Past: Biblical Archeology and the Myth of Israel.
The glorious kingdom of David and Solomon, the promised land stretching from the Euphrates to the Nile that Zionists claim to want to recreate, is a total fabrication. Solomon and his kingdom never existed. Jerusalem was never the capital of Israel. Modern archaeology has completely demolished these myths.As Laurent Guyénot says in his book Our God is your God too, but he Has chosen us. Essays on Jewish Power,
When Ben-Gurion declared before the Knesset, three days after invading the Sinai in 1956, that what was at stake was “the restoration of the kingdom of David and Solomon,” and when Israeli leaders continue to dream of a Greater Israel of biblical proportions, they are merely perpetuating a two-thousand-year-old deception – a self-deception perhaps, but a deception nonetheless.
Under the mantle of religion and the false biblical prophecy of a Greater Israel stretching from the Euphrates to the Nile, the Zionists are constantly seeking to expand their territory – Israel being the only country in the world with no fixed borders. They follow and respect no convention, no treaty, no resolution; lie about everything and nothing; do whatever they please; practice torture, apartheid, racial nationalism, terrorism, slavery, and genocide; kill babies, pregnant women, the elderly, rape young girls, break the bones of kids with an obvious pleasure, in front of the whole world; start color revolutions and wars in neighboring countries in order to expand their territory; commit false-flag attacks; accumulate nuclear warheads which they threaten to use against the whole world if their Zionist project fails.
And if anyone dares to complain, they use the Holocaust and anti-Semitism arguments to shut them down. But make no mistake about it, according to Shulamit Aloni, a former member of the Israeli government, these all-purpose accusations which are the keystones of their hegemonic ambitions are a ruse:
When someone in Europe criticizes Israel, we bring up the Holocaust. When someone in this country [the United States] criticizes Israel, they are anti-Semites… We use the Holocaust, anti-Semitism and Jewish suffering to justify everything we do to the Palestinians.
Wherever you are on this earth, beware! if you don’t believe in the Holocaust, you will be chastised, crushed, ostracized, and even jailed. In fact, at the end of July 2004, “Israel’s parliament (the Knesset) unanimously passed a law making it possible to demand the extradition to Israel of anyone guilty, anywhere in the world, of Holocaust denial”.
To add insult to injury, on January 20, 2022, the United Nations (UN) adopted a resolution tabled by Israel and Germany calling on all nations of the world to take active steps to combat all unwanted skeptical research into the National Socialist persecution of the Jews, and the popular social chatter that ensues. After a propaganda speech by Gilad Erdon, Israel’s representative at the UN, the UN passed the resolution without a vote.
Teaching about the Holocaust is now compulsory in almost all Western schools. Everyone is obliged not only to learn, but also to believe, on pain of prosecution, the official account of the Holocaust.
It’s a rather strange situation. Eighty years on, we should be able to discuss the subject freely, seeking contradiction as we do with the great Judeo-Bolshevik terror of 1937-1938, the Judeo-Bolshevik gulags and the Judeo-Bolshevik famine of the Holodomor, three crimes against humanity that caused the death of some 66 million Russians, according to Nobel Prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn, author of one of the most censored books in modern history, Two Hundred Years Together.
Why should the suffering of the Jews be more important than that of others? “Jewish death and suffering,” says Marc Weber of the Institute of Historical Revision “do not deserve to be venerated more than the death and suffering of non-Jews.” Human history has witnessed many genocides far more serious in scale than the Jewish genocide. Why is the Jewish genocide the only one that counts? Well, according to historian of religion Youssef Hindi:
The ongoing sacralization of the Hebrew state required the prior sacralization of the Jewish people. In contemporary times, when atheism reigns, at least in appearance, it was necessary to invent a “profane” cult, or more precisely, a cult devoid of transcendence, in order to make Western goyim (non-Jews) accept the idea of the sacredness of the Jews.
Why make the Jews and the State of Israel sacred? In order to achieve what many Jewish and non-Jewish authors, journalists, historians and philosophers have identified as the ultimate Jewish domination of the Earth and its peoples, it is vital that Jews and the State of Israel are protected from criticism and given preferential treatment.
Jews are a tiny minority, the scum of the earth according to some, expelled from 109 countries since the year 250. Their predominant role in numerous crimes against humanity is an existential threat to them. How can they find friends if they fail to erase their role in these abominable crimes with alacrity and firmness?
In other words, how can they conquer the world if they fail to restore their image as the powerless innocent victims of human vindictiveness and jealousy? No one would cooperate with them if they were seen for what they really are, the greatest criminals of the 20th century, according to Ron Unz, the Jewish editor and owner of one of America’s leading conservative websites, The Unz Review:
But add to this the relatively small size of the world’s Jewish community, some 16 million before the Second World War, and the conclusion is that, per capita, Jews were the greatest mass murderers of the 20th century. And by a huge margin, with no other nationality even remotely close. And yet, through the astonishing alchemy of Hollywood, the greatest killers of the last hundred years have been magically transformed into the greatest victims, a transformation so seemingly implausible that future generations will surely be left speechless.
The cult of the Holocaust, along with accusations of anti-Semitism and incitement to hatred, are both the sword and the shield with which the Jews and the State of Israel, with the help of their non-Jewish allies such as Elon Musk and their insufferable thought police – in France, the Ligue internationale contre le racisme et l’antisémitisme (International League Against Racism and Antisemitism) (LICRA) and in the USA, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) – obtain financial reparations, censor and persecute their opponents, protect themselves from all criticism, unite and mobilize their community and realize their hegemonic ambitions over the world.
“It’s an instrument that we use a lot,” points out Israeli historian Moshe Zimmerman; “in a cynical way, you could say that the Holocaust is one of the objects that lends itself best to manipulating the public, the Jewish people in particular, in Israel and abroad.” Indeed, as Jewish writer Philip Roth puts it,
Auschwitz is one of the reasons why Israel is pushing back its borders. It is Auschwitz that justifies the bombing of civilians in neighboring countries. It is Auschwitz that justifies the breaking of Palestinian children’s bones and the mutilation of Arab mothers. Power-mad Jews, that’s what they are, no different from any other power-mad of their kind, except that they use the myth of the Shoah to justify their mad desire for power and the fact that they victimize us.
It’s also Auschwitz that justifies freedom-destroying laws worthy of the worst dystopian novels. It is Auschwitz that is blocking the resurgence of nationalism everywhere in the West, except in Israel. Ultimately, Auschwitz is the cornerstone of the borderless world that the globalists are trying to impose on the whole world through lies, manipulation. and force. As Ian Kagedan, spokesman for the Canadian Jewish Congress and the Canadian branch of B’nai B’rith, puts it: “The memory of the Holocaust is at the heart of the new world order.“
In short, the Holocaust has evolved over the years to become the national myth not only of the Jewish people, but of the globalists in general. It now has all the characteristics of a religion, with its own Satan, Hitler, and its own saint, the Jewish nation.
In this version of things, Christ crucified on the cross is replaced by the Jewish nation crucified in the gas chambers. Through this substitution, this “martyred” people is trying to plagiarize Christian Christology and to appropriate the title of Messiah for itself, in order to push Catholics and Christians in general to “Judaize” and accept their globalist project without reluctance. This religion of the Holocaust is also the glue that holds the Jewish people together as a distinct nationality, because there’s nothing like persecution and victimization to rally your troops.
It is for these reasons above all that Jews and their non-Jewish allies maintain and protect it so carefully.
Without the Holocaust, there would be no anti-racism, no replacement immigration, no positive discrimination, no egalitarianism, no borderless world, no plutocracy, no censorship, no take-over of X, no world government, no consumerism, no sexual dystopia, no critical race theory, and no Gaza genocide.
In the end, whether the Holocaust is true or not matters quite a bit. If it did not exist, like many people believe, the whole castle of cards just described would come tumbling down in no time.
In the end, even if the holocaust was true, and there are plenty of reasons to think it is not true, Israel should not think for one second that the suffering of the Jews during the Second World War gives them every right, “especially with regard to the hostilities in Gaza,” says Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. The Russians, for example, lost 27 million people in the Second World War, two-thirds of them civilians, many of them Jews, but that doesn’t give them the right to do as they please, says Lavrov.
In the wake of the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) landmark ruling in a case brought by South Africa against Israel, which found the Jewish state could be committing genocide in Gaza and must immediately cease its indiscriminate, industrial-scale slaughter of unarmed, innocent Palestinians of all ages, many Western journalists, politicians, pundits and influencers have changed their tune on the savagery. Or at least gone eerily silent, having previously whitewashed, legitimized, or even outright endorsed a twenty-first-century Holocaust.
This abrupt volte-face cannot be attributed to any moral qualms about Zionist actions since October 7. A far more likely explanation is that, given numerous statements of Israeli officials that the ICJ has found to indicate genocidal intent, they are worried their past advocacy and amplification of as yet unindicted war criminals could, in the future, be in itself legally actionable. Yet, some Zionist propagandists and apologists have not been deterred by the ruling’s ramifications.
Among the most vocal figures continuing to celebrate and encourage the Gaza genocide is Lee Kern, a self-described comedian who served as the lead writer for numerous high-profile cinema and TV projects led by Sacha Baron Cohen, including the sequel to “Borat,” and “Who Is America?” On a daily basis, since the Israeli Occupation Force carnage erupted, he has posted disgustingly Islamophobic statements while cheering and justifying Zionist bloodshed.
An Instagram post by Lee Kern, lead writer for multiple Sacha Baron Cohen films during his “Israel we F*cking Love You,” tour
At the end of 2023, Kern also visited Tel Aviv to co-host an event, “Israel we F*cking Love You,” alongside Michael Rapaport, a failed actor and convicted harasser turned wannabe culture warrior. The Zionist entity has attracted numerous Z-list celebrities to its stolen land in recent months, including unrepentant pedophile Jerry Seinfeld, in a lame attempt to boost its PR. Given Cohen’s ardent Zionism, it is rather conspicuous he has not made the journey.
Nonetheless, Cohen has been playing an active role behind the scenes in the genocide. In November 2023, he was among several high-profile figures who lobbied TikTok in private to block content and comments critical of Israel. He had good reason to believe this intervention would be decisive. In September 2020, he suspended his Instagram account to protest purported “hate speech” on the platform and Facebook. The Anti-Defamation League-sponsored action prompted over 1,000 businesses to suspend their Facebook ads for a month.
Cohen has, in recent years, significantly upped the ante of his public Zionist activism under the aegis of fighting anti-Semitism. He has claimed his “comedy” output, often coordinated with the CIA and Pentagon, is concerned with the same objective. This work almost universally features racist, crude stereotypes of Muslims, whom he portrays wearing makeup and wigs reminiscent of blackface. One might reasonably ask whether his true purpose all along has been to dehumanize Muslims everywhere in order to justify Israel’s genocide.
‘KAZAKH CENSORS’
Perhaps the most well-known – or infamous – segment of Cohen’s 2006 smash hit movie Borat is a scene very early on, in which he and a vast crowd spectate “the running of the Jew,” a purported annual Kazakhstan tradition. Easily the movie’s most impactful and memorable visual setpiece, standalone clips have garnered millions of views online since 2006. A virtually unique example of the film not featuring an “undercover” stunt, who were Cohen’s ultimate intended victims and audience here?
Giant, grotesque constructions of a Jewish man and woman replete with green skin, claws, devil horns, and pronounced hooked noses race down a dirt track after Kazakhs waving wads of money. When the female “Jew” stops mid-chase to spawn a gigantic “Jew egg,” Borat cheers on a gaggle of children who abruptly arrive to “crush that Jew chick before it hatches!” This scene is central to the film’s plot – if one can even refer to it as such.
A scene from “Borat” portrays a Muslim caricature cheering on a crowd at a fictional “A Running of the Jew” festival
Innate Kazakh anti-Semitism is the very inspiration for Borat’s “cultural learnings” tour around the U.S. As he explains immediately after the scene, his country faces three major problems – “social, economic, and Jew.” Throughout the movie, Borat invokes numerous hideous anti-Semitic tropes – Jews are greedy, secretly control international finance, governments and the media, and were responsible for 9/11. At one point, he even sings a supposedly popular Kazakh folk song titled “Throw the Jew down the Well.”
In all of Cohen’s in-character public appearances at the time, Borat made his visceral loathing of Jews abundantly clear. In November 2006, he was a guest on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno,” an interview subsequently included on the film’s DVD edition. When asked by the host whether he thought his film was homophobic and anti-Semitic, Borat gleefully replied, “Thank you very much!” Meanwhile, at an advance screening of the movie in Manhattan, he declared to the assembled press and paparazzi:
At first, Kazakh censors wouldn’t let me release this movie because of anti-Semitism. But then they decided that there was just enough.”
The Amazon-produced “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” in 2020 dialed up the main character’s rabid anti-Semitism even further. In one scene, he attends a synagogue dressed in anti-Semitic clothing, including a giant fake nose, and announces he saw a Facebook post claiming the Holocaust never happened. Judith Dim Evans, a Holocaust survivor present, greets him warmly, invites him to touch her own “Jewish nose,” and then proceeds to politely educate him about the realities of Nazi genocide while highlighting her personal history.
Understandably, many viewers effusively praised Evans’ dignity and grace. Cohen has claimed that before filming the scene, he broke character in private with her to explain he was himself Jewish, and his objective was to highlight anti-Semitic attitudes and the correct way of challenging them – supposedly the very first time one of his “victims” had been in on the gag all along. Evans herself was unable to confirm this version of events, as she sadly passed away before the film’s release.
Her daughter begged to differ, however, and filed a lawsuit against Amazon, seeking an injunction to remove the scene from the film. She contended her mother was duped into appearing in the movie and pointed to a release form allegedly signed by Evans featuring a “scribbled line” that did not match her actual signature. Amazon’s lawyers successfully argued this was a simple accident and that her signing of the document had been independently witnessed.
‘VIBRANT JEWISH COMMUNITY’
Whatever the truth of the matter, clearly, Cohen is extremely keen for his creation to be perceived by the everyday people he meets and global film audiences alike as a raging anti-Semite. This has prompted some observers to question whether, in attempting to highlight and challenge anti-Semitism, Borat might, in fact, inadvertently reinforce anti-Semitic public attitudes. A far more prescient question is whether Borat consciously legitimizes Islamophobic perspectives globally in service of the Zionist cause.
The release of the first “Borat” movie sparked public and state-level outrage in Kazakhstan for its portrayal of the country and its people. Ironically enough, a common grievance was the character’s anti-Semitism – for Kazakh Jews have a long and rich history, and Almaty has no record of religious strife or discrimination towards Jews whatsoever. During World War II, Joseph Stalin created a haven for Jews there, evacuating thousands from other parts of the Soviet Union to prevent their slaughter by the Nazis.
While Kazakhstan’s Jewish population was much reduced by emigration following the Soviet Union’s collapse, thousands still live in peace and harmony there today. A Hasidic synagogue in Almaty, named after widely respected Rabbi Levi Yitzchak Schneerson, buried at a nearby cemetery, attracts Jewish visitors from all over the world, who come to pray at his grave. Anti-Semitic incidents of any kind are vanishingly rare; the country is home to over a dozen Jewish schools, and the government electively provides land and buildings for creating new synagogues.
As a National Coalition Supporting Eurasian Jewry factsheet notes, “Kazakhstan has long embraced its Jewish community.” During “Borat’s” year of release alone, a new synagogue big enough to accommodate the capital’s entire Jewish population – and also Central Asia’s largest – was opened, Almaty’s first-ever Association for Hebrew Speakers formed, and the Kazakh government issued a postage stamp featuring a historic local synagogue. The factsheet went on to record:
In the wake of the widely released and successful 2006 comedy film Borat, which portrays Kazakhstan as a hot-bed of anti-Semitism, Kazakh officials are expanding outreach efforts to explain to the world that Kazakhs are in fact very tolerant of Jews.
As part of these “outreach efforts,” prior to the release of “Borat,” the government of Kazakhstan took out full-page ads in major U.S. newspapers such as The New York Times, and placed commercials on CNN and other mainstream news channels, at some expense. They sought to challenge and debunk the movie’s misrepresentations of Kazakhs, and Borat’s anti-Semitism loomed large. As a spokesperson for Almaty’s Washington D.C. embassy said at the time:
[Borat] claims the Kazakhs are very anti-Semitic people and running of the Jews is the famous pastime. That is, of course, ridiculous. Kazakhstan has a very vibrant Jewish community.”
AN ‘ALREADY ISLAMOPHOBIC CLIMATE’
The lack of wider pushback against Borat from the world’s Islamic community almost two decades ago surely reflects how the film was released at a time when Islamophobia was rife in the West due to the then-ongoing War on Terror. Systematic, institutionalized discrimination against and demonization of Muslims was unashamedly and openly normalized, advocated, and practiced by European and North American governments under the aegis of battling “extremism.” Muslim civil society voices were thus very effectively silenced in the mainstream.
Fast forward to the sequel’s release, and Cohen’s victims were finally positioned to fight back. In November 2020, the Council on American-Islamic Relations and Kazakh American Association fired off strongly worded letters to the Directors Guild of America, Oscars, Golden Globes, and British Academy of Film and Television Arts, demanding they bar Cohen, his movie and its cast and crew, from consideration for awards that year.
Sacha Baron Cohen dressed as a Gaddafi-esque caricature in the film, “The Dictator”
Commenting, Kazakh-American film professional and Hollywood Film Academy CEO Gia Noortas said:
“The Kazakh community worldwide is underrepresented and inherently vulnerable. Sacha Baron Cohen understands this fact and exploits the Kazakh people by hijacking our ethnic identity, whitewashing us, and inciting harassment toward us. Considering today’s socially aware political climate and the new diversity policies adopted by film associations worldwide, it is unbelievable that a film which openly berates, bullies, and traumatizes a nation of people of color is still an acceptable form of entertainment.“
As a fiery contemporary op-ed in The New Arab noted via “Borat,” “Cohen racially abuses, culturally appropriates, and mocks the Kazakh culture, traditions, and people for the purpose of crude laughter and monetary gain” – actions “not only offensive,” but directly harmful, as “Kazakhs know from personal experience.” It went on to record how since the release of the first movie:
“Many Kazakhs have experienced psychological turmoil and ethnic-based humiliation. Many Kazakhs have had to explain to others that Cohen’s portrayal of Kazakhstan and its people as bigoted and backwards is a vile misrepresentation. Many Kazakh children have been bullied at school, and Kazakh women have been exposed to distasteful sexual jokes or harassment.“
Again, we are left to ponder if Cohen explicitly intended these dire consequences. A 2016 academic paper published by Brunel University explored how audiences perceived the portrayal of Muslims across his oeuvre based on an extensive focus group study. Overwhelmingly, respondents expressed dismay at the content and volunteered their view that the assorted movies and TV shows Cohen produced throughout his three-decade-long career are, universally, intensely Islamophobic.
For example, one respondent asked to comment on the “Running of the Jew” clip, said it “enforces this opinion that Muslims are anti-Semites.” The study noted that “The Dictator” was “replete with signifiers that are stereotypic of Islam and Muslims – from the name ‘Aladeen,’ his long beard, misogyny, anti-Semitism, and anti-Americanism,” and “the film also displays minarets and thus typical Islamic architecture.” Another respondent observed:
“If you look at all his movies, he does portray himself as a Muslim. So, I think there is an element of Islamophobia. The Dictator, Ali G, these are all Muslims and so he’s portraying them in a bad light, in an already Islamophobic climate.”
AN UNSAFE SPACE
Such adverse reactions are striking, for they would be music to the proverbial ears of Israel and the international Zionist lobby’s countless assorted components. Perpetuating the narrative that all Muslims worldwide are possessed of virulent anti-Jewish hatred has been a core Zionist propaganda objective since before Israel’s 1948 founding.
The purpose is to frame Palestinian opposition to Zionist oppression, and anyone Muslim or otherwise united in solidarity with them, as motivated by surging anti-Semitism rather than reasonable and legitimate condemnation of oppression, brutality, and mass slaughter in service of a fundamentally colonialist, genocidal, and deeply anti-Semitic endeavor. Accordingly, Israel has, ever since its founding, actively sought to create a hostile environment for Jews elsewhere in order to cynically cement itself as the world’s exclusive safe space for Jews.
Following Israel’s creation, a Mephistophelian feat achieved by murderous conquest, land theft, and the clandestine use of chemical and biological weapons, Zionists engaged in wide-ranging efforts to compel Jews elsewhere to migrate to Tel Aviv. This effort included covertly bombing synagogues throughout West Asia, encouraging anti-Semitism the world over through a variety of means, and infiltrating and funding Amnesty International to amplify and exaggerate anti-Semitism in Muslim lands from the 1970s onwards while concealing its criminal erasure of Palestine and its indigenous people.
The necessity of such actions from Israel’s perspective couldn’t be clearer. It is barely known today that a majority of world Jewish opinion actively opposed Israel’s creation. The 1917 Balfour Declaration, which pledged London’s commitment to creating a “national home for the Jewish people” and is widely considered the Zionist state’s foundational document, was vigorously condemned by Edwin Montagu, the only Jew in a senior British government position at the time:
“The policy of His Majesty’s Government is anti-Semitic in result and will prove a rallying ground for anti-Semites in every country of the world.”
Montagu’s concerns were well-founded. Zionists, professing to be inspired by ubiquitous Western anti-Semitism, were and remain committed to building an ethnonationalist homeland for Jews in the Arab and Muslim world – the one place on Earth where Jews have always been safest. It is widely unknown that the only European country, bar Britain, to boast a bigger Jewish population following World War II than before was Muslim-majority Albania. It provided a sanctuary for Jews fleeing the Holocaust elsewhere in Europe.
Many Albanians are considered “Righteous Among Nations” for risking their lives to protect Jews during the genocidal Axis occupation of the Balkans, 1941 – 1944. A great many Jews had for centuries resided in the region by that point, having been invited to relocate there under Ottoman Sultan Bayezid II’s personal protection following the fall of Al Andalus to Christian crusaders in 1492. They flourished, free from the routine pogroms, discrimination, and punitive taxes inflicted upon them everywhere else in Europe.
Since the Gaza genocide began, shocking scenes reminiscent of 1930s Germany, in which Israeli security forces storm areas of Jerusalem, physically attacking Hasidic Jews and tearing down Palestine flags, have spread like wildfire on social media. Meanwhile, Jews can consistently be found in profusion at every major anti-Israel protest in Europe and North America, very vocally denouncing not only Tel Aviv’s relentless atrocities but the entire “Godless and merciless” ideology of Zionism.
Sacha Baron Cohen’s canon should be viewed as a modern-day manifestation of the perpetual Zionist drive to distort and conceal reality and turn Jews and Muslims, natural and historic comrades, against one another. Now that he and close collaborator Lee Kern have so amply exposed their guiding mission quite so publicly, a liberal media apparatus that enthusiastically promoted them and their repulsively racist, genocidal output must not be forgiven or trusted ever again.
Pretoria’s genocide case against Israel is crucial, not just to stop Tel Aviv’s carnage in Gaza, but to plant the first flag of multipolarism in the globe’s courtrooms: this is the first case of many that will seek to halt western impunity and restore international law as envisioned in the UN Charter.
Nothing less than the full concept of international law will be on trial this week in The Hague. The whole world is watching.
It took an African nation, not an Arab or Muslim nation, but significantly a BRICS member, to try to break the iron chains deployed by Zionism via fear, financial might, and non-stop threats, enslaving not only Palestine but substantial swathes of the planet.
By a twist of historical poetic justice, South Africa, a nation that knows one or two things about apartheid, had to take the moral high ground and be the first to file a suit against apartheid Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
The 84-page lawsuit,exhaustively argued, fully documented, and filed on 29 December 2023, details all the ongoing horrors perpetrated in the occupied Gaza Strip and followed by everyone with a smartphone around the planet.
South Africa asks the ICJ – a UN mechanism – something quite straightforward: Declare that the state of Israel has breached all its responsibilities under international law since 7 October.
And that, crucially, includes a violation of the 1948 Genocide Convention, according to which genocide consists of “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”
South Africa is supported by Jordan, Bolivia, Turkiye, Malaysia, and significantly the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), which combines the lands of Islam, and constitutes 57 member states, 48 of these harboring a Muslim majority. It’s as if these nations were representing the overwhelming majority of the Global South.
Whatever happens at The Hague could go way beyond a possible condemnation of Israeli for genocide. Both Pretoria and Tel Aviv are members of the ICJ – so the rulings are binding. The ICJ, in theory, carries more weight than the UN Security Council, where the US vetoes any hard facts that tarnish Israel’s carefully constructed self-image.
The only problem is that the ICJ does not have enforcement power.
What South Africa, in practical terms, is aiming to achieve is to have the ICJ impose on Israel an order to stop the invasion – and the genocide – right away. That should be the first priority.
A specific intent to destroy
Reading the full South African application is a horrifying exercise. This is literally history in the making, right in front of us living in the young, tech-addicted, 21st century, and not a science fiction account of a genocide taking place in some distant universe.
Pretoria’s application carries the merit of drawing The Big Picture, “in the broader context of Israel’s conduct towards Palestinians during its 75-year-long apartheid, its 56-year-long belligerent occupation of Palestinian territory, and its 16-year-long blockade of Gaza.”
Cause, effect, and intent are clearly delineated, transcending the horrors that have been perpetrated since the Palestinian resistance’s Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on 7 October, 2023.
Then there are “acts and omissions by Israel which are capable of amounting to other violations of international law.” South Africa lists them as “genocidal in character, as they are committed with the requisite specific intent (dolus specialis) to destroy Palestinians in Gaza as a part of the broader Palestinian national, racial and ethnic group.”
‘The Facts,’ introduced from page 9 of the application, are brutal – ranging from the indiscriminate massacre of civilians to mass expulsion: “It is estimated that over 1.9 million Palestinians out of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million people – approximately 85 percent of the population – have been forced from their homes. There is nowhere safe for them to flee to, those who cannot leave or refuse to be displaced have been killed or are at extreme risk of being killed in their homes.”
And there will be no turning back: “As noted by the Special Rapporteur on the human rights of internally displaced persons, Gaza’s housing and civilian infrastructure have been razed to the ground, frustrating any realistic prospects for displaced Gazans to return home, repeating a long history of mass forced displacement of Palestinians by Israel.”
The complicit Hegemon
Item 142 of the application may encapsulate the whole drama: “The entire population is facing starvation: 93 percent of the population in Gaza is facing crisis levels of hunger, with more than one in four facing catastrophic condition” – with death imminent.
Against this backdrop, on 25 December – Christmas day – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu doubled down on his genocidal rhetoric, promising: ‘We are not stopping, we are continuing to fight and we are deepening the fighting in the coming days, and this will be a long battle and it is not close to being over.”
So, “as a matter of extreme urgency,” and “pending the Court’s determination of this case on the merits,” South Africa is asking for provisional measures, the first of which will be for “the state of Israel to immediately suspend its military operations in and against Gaza.”
This amounts to a permanent ceasefire. Every grain of sand from the Negev to Arabia knows that the neocon psychos in charge of US foreign policy, including their pet, remote-controlled, senile occupant of the White House are not only complicit in the Israeli genocide but oppose any possibility of a ceasefire.
Incidentally, such complicity is also punishable by law, according to the Genocide Convention.
Hence, it is a given that Washington and Tel Aviv will go no-holds-barred to block a fair trial by the ICJ, using every means of pressure and threat available. That dovetails with the extremely limited power exercised by any international court to impose the rule of international law on the exceptionalist Washington–Tel Aviv combo.
While an alarmed Global South is moved to action against Israel’s unprecedented military assault on Gaza, where over 1 percent of the population has been murdered in less than three months, the Israeli Foreign Ministry has regimented its embassies to arm-twist host country diplomats and politicians to swiftly issue an “immediate and unequivocal statement along the following lines: To publicly and clearly state that your country rejects the outrageous, absurd, and baseless allegations made against Israel.”
It will be quite enlightening to see which nations will abide by the order.
Whether Pretoria’s current efforts succeed or not, this case is likely to be only the first of its kind filed in courts around the world in the months and even years ahead. The BRICS – of which South Africa is a crucial member state – are part of the new swell of international organizations challenging western hegemony and its ‘rules-based order.’ These rules mean nothing; nobody has even seen them.
In part, multipolarism has emerged to redress the decades-long shift away from the UN Charter and rush toward the lawlessness embodied in these illusory ‘rules.’ The nation-state system that underpins the global order cannot function without the international law that secures it. Without the law, we face war, war, and more war; the Hegemon’s ideal universe of endless war, in fact.
South Africa’s genocide case against Israel is blatantly necessary to reverse these flagrant violations of the international system, and will almost certainly be the first of many such litigations against both Israel and its allies to shift the world back to stability, security, and common sense.
The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.
Once viewed as a fringe group, Israel’s messianic settler movement holds the reins of power today. Their plans for the ethnic cleansing and resettlement of Gaza needed only two things: a big war and an extremist government.
Almost three weeks into Israel’s bloody ground invasion of Gaza, an Israeli soldier filmed a video from inside the bombed and besieged enclave exclaiming, “We will complete the mission we have been assigned. Conquer, expel and settle. You hear that, Bibi?”
Two months into Tel Aviv’s aerial assault of Gaza, its end goals are still unclear. CNNhas revealed that Israel’s “original plan” for the war was to “level Gaza.” And Israeli minister Ron Dermer proposed a plan to “thin out” the Gaza population by forcing civilians to flee to Egypt by land, or to other parts of Africa and Europe by boat, because the “sea is open to them.”
What is certain is that this is like no other Israeli bombing spree on Gaza. In past campaigns, the Israelis sought out international mediators “from the first day” to broker a ceasefire within days or weeks.
This time, however, the Israelis and their American supporters most decidedly do not want a ceasefire. While their end goals for Gaza have shifted in this conflict, it is equally important to note that Tel Aviv’s plans for that future may be entirely different from Washington’s. Simply, Israel has never had a government as right-wing as the current one cobbled together by its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; a cabinet heaving with religious fundamentalists and messianic fervor.
Plans to ‘reclaim’ Gaza
The roots of Israel’s current campaign to conquer Gaza and ethnically cleanse its 2.3 million Palestinian inhabitants trace back almost two decades, originating with the evacuation of the Gush Katif settlement bloc in 2005.
This move, orchestrated by then-prime minister Ariel Sharon, aimed at continued Jewish settlement and military occupation in the occupied West Bank, but was deemed treacherous by Israel’s uber right-wing, religious settler movement.
It was Ariel Sharon, “the father of settlements,” who designed the Gaza disengagement to ensure continued Jewish settlement and military occupation of the West Bank, but the religious settler movement viewed him as a traitor for giving up “Jewish land,” just as they viewed former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin as a traitor for signing the Oslo Accords to eventually establish a Palestinian state.
Rabin was murdered by Jewish extremist Yigal Amir in 1995, in an act publicly encouraged by a young but prominent religious settler activist, Itamar Ben Gvir.
Another young religious settler, Bezalel Smotrich, was arrested for opposing Sharon’s disengagement policy. To stop Gaza disengagement, Smotrich wanted to blow up cars on the Ayalon highway, at rush hour, using 700 liters of gasoline.
Both men are today allies and prominent ideologues in Netanyahu’s extremist coalition government.
Over the next 18 years, the Likud Party and the religious settler movement, led by figures such as Ben Gvir and Smotrich, harbored dreams of reconquering Gaza to reconstruct Gush Katif. This undertaking would entail completing the expulsion initiated by Zionist militias in 1948, as noted by Israeli historian Benny Morris, by forcing Gazans into exile and preventing their return.
In 2010, then Prime Minister Netanyahu and Knesset member (MK) Gila Gamliel, both Likud members, proposed to the late Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak the settlement of Palestinians in the Sinai peninsula as part of a peace deal-related land swap.
After insisting, “I’m not even willing to listen to those kinds of proposals,” Mubarak was toppled in a US-orchestrated color revolution, part of the region-wide ‘Arab Spring,’ as it was known.
Netanyahu proposed a similar deal to Mubarak’s successor Mohammad Morsi in 2012, and to Morsi’s successor, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi in 2014, but these yielded the same outcomes.
In 2014, during Israel’s brutal 51-day assault on Gaza, Netanyahu sought US intervention with Sisi to propose settling Palestinians in Sinai, but got nowhere. Over 2,300 civilians were killed in that military operation – yet another of Israel’s “mowing the grass” campaigns to inflict setbacks for the resistance, without making any meaningful gains against Hamas.
The plan takes shape
By June 2018, reports surfaced of a new Israeli army plan to “create a considerable change in the situation if it is required to launch a major campaign in Gaza.” This would involve moving beyond temporary bombardment to offensive missions involving elite units who “will enter Gaza and dissect it in two, and even occupy significant parts of it.”
Meanwhile, in 2019, fundamentalist settlers like Ben Gvir continued to express a fervent desire to level Gaza and return to rebuild Gush Katif.
Ahead of the 2022 Knesset elections, three extreme right-wing political parties united to form the Religious Zionism Coalition. These included the Religious Zionism party, headed by Smotrich, the Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) party, headed by Ben Gvir, and Noam, a small ultra-orthodox party.
In July 2022, Religious Zionist candidate Arnon Segal wrote during his campaign announcement: “It is time to begin to plan a return to Gush Katif.”
“Yes,” he wrote, “to physically return and rebuild it.”
That September, as the elections drew closer, i24 News, an outlet close to Netanyahu, addressed the issue of Gush Katif, calling it a “lingering wound,” one still open and fresh for Israelis.
“It’s a trauma,” an Israeli named Hillel quoted by i24 News said. “The whole country was hurting.”
The ‘legality’ of the settlers’ return
The effort to rebuild Gush Katif converged with a significant shift in the situation in Gaza when Netanyahu became prime minister for the sixth time after the December 2022 elections. Following a year out of power, Netanyahu formed a coalition between his Likud party and the Religious Zionism Coalition.
The deal with Netanyahu allowed Ben Gvir to become national security minister, while Smotrich was made both finance minister and a minister in Israel’s Defense Ministry, responsible for civil administration in the occupied West Bank.
Under their direction, the occupation state quickly stepped-up military raids against Palestinian resistance groups, accelerated Jewish settlement building, and issued calls for annexing the West Bank.
As violence intensified in March 2023, the Likud-Religious Zionism coalition quietly reversed a crucial aspect of the 2005 Gaza Disengagement. Sharon’s original withdrawal plan involved abandoning four small settlements in the northern West Bank due to security challenges.
However, the Knesset passed an amendment to the disengagement legislation on 21 March, which enabled Jewish settlers to return to these evacuated settlements and paved the way for their reconstruction.
Following the vote, MK Limor Son Har-Melech of the Jewish Power party stated: “We must not rest on our laurels or the euphoria of the moment.” We must also galvanize to “return home to the region of Gush Katif, which was abandoned [in 2005] in an act of terrible folly.”
Minister of National Missions Orit Strock of the Religious Zionism party made a similar call, telling Israel’s Channel 7:
“I believe that, at the end of the day, the sin of the disengagement will be reversed.”
She suggested this would require going to war, adding that “Sadly, a return to the Gaza Strip will nvolve many casualties.” In response, the left-wing Peace Now NGO warned that:
“A messianic revolution is taking place. This government will inevitably destroy our country. They will also deepen the occupation, ignite the region, and establish a Jewish supremacist regime from the river to the sea.”
The Gazan Nakba
In the aftermath of the Palestinian resistance operation of Al-Aqsa Flood on 7 October, a slew of propaganda and fake news created the public outrage needed to justify using overwhelming violence against not only Hamas, but all Gazans, and to implement plans to return to Gush Katif.
Public calls to commit genocide against Gazans became widespread among Israeli politicians, journalists and celebrities.
Israel seized the opportunity and initiated a massive bombing campaign on Gaza, accompanied by demands that Palestinians evacuate the northern half of the besieged enclave, a region home to 1.1 million people — about half of the territory’s population — within 24 hours.
Ex-Israeli Deputy Foreign minister and senior diplomat Danny Ayalon wrote on social media that Gazans must not only go to southern Gaza, but flee to Egypt:
“We don’t tell Gazans to go to the beaches or drown themselves … No God forbid … Go to the Sinai Desert … the international community will build them cities and give them food … Egypt ought to play ball with it.”
Israeli demands that Palestinians flee to Egypt were accompanied by the release on 13 October of a report from Israel’s Ministry of Intelligence, led by Likud MK Gamliel.
Clearly prepared before the events of 7 October, the report recommended the occupation of Gaza and total transfer of its 2.3 million inhabitants to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, while insisting they never be allowed to return.
Further, the plan stated the government should launch a public relations campaign directed toward the west that will promote the ethnic cleansing in a way that does not foster international hostility to Israel or damage its already tarnished reputation.
The mass deportation of the population from Gaza must be presented as a necessary humanitarian measure to receive international support, the report stated. Such a deportation could be justified if it will lead to “fewer casualties among the civilian population compared to the expected number of casualties if they remain.”
Israel’s horrific bombing campaign continued, ensuring that the number of casualties would indeed be massive.
On 27 October, after 7,028 Palestinians – including 2,913 children – had been killed, Israel launched its long-anticipated ground invasion of Gaza.
A week later, the rabbi of an Israeli army unit gave a rousing speech to the troops declaring:
“This land is ours … the entire land, including Gaza, including Lebanon, including all of the promised land! … Gush Katif is tiny compared to what we will achieve with God’s help!”
As outlined in the 2018 plan by the military leadership, invading Israeli troops quickly cut the Gaza strip in two, while also invading from the north along the coast.
After planting an Israeli flag in the sand on Gaza’s beach, one Israeli commander told his troops: “We returned, we were expelled from here almost 20 years ago … This is our land! And that is the victory, to return to our lands.”
As Israeli soldiers were celebrating in Gaza, MKs from the Likud party submitted a bill on 8 November to again amend the 2005 Disengagement Law – this time to “repeal the law that bars Jews from entering the Gaza Strip.”
Three days later, Danny Danon, Israel’s former ambassador to the UN, and Ram Ben Barak, a former deputy director of the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, published an article in the Wall Street Journal advocating the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza, while feigning humanitarian motivations, as outlined in the ministry of intelligence plan.
Sensing that his dream of ethnically cleansing Gaza and rebuilding Gush Katif on the corpses of dead Palestinian children was about to be realized, Bezalel Smotrich welcomed the proposal, stating that “this is the humanitarian solution.”
Former Minister of Justice Ayelet Shaked also welcomed the move, but was less diplomatic, exclaiming on Israeli TV:
“After we turn Khan Yunis into a soccer field … we need to take advantage of the destruction [to tell] the countries that each of them should take a quota, it can be 20,000 or 50,000 … We need 2 million to leave. That’s the solution for Gaza.”
Faced with the monumental task of resistance against US-backed occupation forces, the onus is on Hamas and the other Palestinian resistance factions to thwart any progress made on Israel’s “messianic revolution” in Gaza.
The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.
The US-Israeli strategy of attempting to tie the destiny of the Arab world with Tel Aviv and to crush the idea of Palestinian resistance to occupation failed on October 7.
There are some governments that are so cruel and unjust that people have no choice but to resist by force. After 16 years, the steel and concrete wall constructed by Israel to imprison Palestinians in Gaza was breached by Palestinian resistance forces on October 7.
The current challenge is to break through the wall of US-Israeli myths and lies that have been carefully constructed over the decades to maintain Israel’s long history of oppression and injustice against the Palestinians; fabrications that have been used to sustain US-Israeli hegemony in West Asia.
Eleven minutes after Zionist leaders declared, without UN Security Council approval, “independence” on 14 May 1948, President Harry S. Truman became the first world leader to officially recognize the self-proclaimed “Jewish” state. The lies that began on that date have never ceased; nor has Palestinian resistance to the racist, settler-colonial “state” being built on their land.
There has also been no break in America’s complicity in financing, protecting, and sustaining the Zionist colonial project in the heart of the Muslim world – a relationship that has exacted an unimaginable price on the Palestinians and on all the people of the region.
The United States sees itself in Israel. For it too was founded on racism and built on indigenous land. US history is replete with examples of resistance and rebellion that mirror the attack of that fateful day.
The indigenous people have never ceased resisting US policies of expansion, removal, and extermination. And the more than 250 acts of resistance by enslaved blacks have been well documented. The most violent of these slave rebellions took place on 21 August 1831 in Southampton, Virginia. The Nat Turner Revolt and the reaction to it are uncannily similar to October 7 in terms of the causes and reaction.
Today, historians look back on that August day differently. The slaughter of over 55 white enslavers, their wives, and children is called a rebellion, insurrection, or revolt. Although the insurrection gave northerner abolitionists a black hero and a martyr for the movement, most newspapers of that era, especially in the South, denounced Turner’s revolt as a massacre. The event further radicalized American politics and moved the country closer to civil war.
Like the corporate media of today which has accepted Israel’s narrative as fact, editors in 1831 rushed to report news, merely reprinting articles that appeared in Virginia newspapers. And analogous to events unfolding currently, the failure to check facts led to the publication of inaccurate, prejudicial, and harmful misinformation.
Akin to the Israeli regime, which has been conducting genocide in Gaza and the West Bank under the guise of eliminating Hamas, revenge-minded white vigilantes lynched blacks who played no part in the uprising. Southern writers talked of retaliation, calling for ethnic cleansing and pogroms against the enslaved and free blacks of Southampton County, expressing a willingness to conduct a “final solution” for Virginia’s black population.
There were few, especially in the South, willing to accept that slavery was the root cause of Turner’s revolt. Similarly, in 2023 the corporate media has drowned out the voices of those contending that the attack by Hamas was inevitable, that it was an act of resistance to 75 years of settler-colonialist violence and Israel’s never-ending war against Palestinians. The media have instead eschewed context, either ignoring or discounting the severity of the Israeli apartheid regime.
The regimes in Washington and Tel Aviv believe they can crush Palestinian resistance by exterminating the Palestinian political and military organization, Hamas (Harakah al-Muqawamah al-Islamiyyah), an Arabic phrase meaning Islamic Resistance Movement. It looks as if Israel’s objective is to kill as many Palestinians as they can until the moral conscience of the Western world is stirred.
Israel has never observed international and humanitarian laws demanded of an occupying power. Its occupation of Palestine is illegal. Therefore, all Israelis living on Palestinian land are colonizers, regardless of whether they live in Tel Aviv or in the occupied West Bank. Also, all Israeli citizens over the age of 18 have been soldiers, since national military service is mandatory (Palestinian citizens of Israel are exempt).
Under international law, Palestinian resistance, even armed resistance, to occupation is legitimate. Conversely, Israel’s claim that it has a “right to defend itself” is illegitimate. According to international law, it does not have that right as long as it illegally occupies Palestine.
Not only does Israel not have the right to defend itself, Miko Peled, Israeli-American peace and human rights activist, has made the case that Israel as an apartheid state—which it is—does not have the right to exist. And that dismantling the apartheid state and replacing it with a true democracy, one person-one vote, is the only path to peace and security in the region.
In the midst of the current tragedy, it is important to know that before the introduction of Zionism by the imperial powers following World War I, Palestinian Jews lived peacefully with their Muslims and Christian neighbors; harmony that was shaped by a millennium of openness and coexistence.
Continuing the Muslim tradition of tolerance, Muslims, Christians and Jews lived and thrived together under Ottoman rule (1516-1918). In the 1500s, the gates of Palestine were opened to Jews fleeing persecution in Spain and other parts of Christendom. The inscription on the Jaffa Gate (the main western gate into the Old City) reflects that spirit, reads: “There is no God but God, and Abraham is his friend.”
The forceful importation of European Zionist ideology and settler-colonialism into Palestine destabilized Palestinian life and the region. The current tragedy in Gaza can be traced directly to the arbitrary partition of West Asia and the British mandate of Palestine (and Iraq) at the end of the war. In November 1917, the British government, with no regard for the indigenous population, publicly stated its support for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” on Palestinian land. The Balfour Declaration, as it came to be known, set in motion Israel’s 75-year genocidal war against the Palestinians. And since 1948, the United States has financed and abetted Israel’s war.
Washington’s hegemonic plans for the region, dependent on its garrison regime in Tel Aviv, have begun to fall apart and pretenses of “honest broker” exposed. From all appearances, the United States has lost control of the Frankenstein monster it helped create.
On October 7, Palestinian freedom fighters did what the United States and Israel thought unimaginable, they dared to leave the “reservation,” to escape their imprisonment. Until that pivotal event, Washington and Tel Aviv believed they were on a clear path to controlling the region and erasing the Palestinian cause by brokering normalization agreements between Israel and authoritarian Arab Gulf regimes.
Resistance movements in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and Iran were considered marginalized and contained. The US-Israeli strategy of attempting to tie the destiny of the Arab world with Tel Aviv and to crush the idea of Palestinian resistance to occupation failed on October 7.
At present, the Biden administration has made Israel’s war on Palestinians its war. Without the consent of the Congress, it has given the Netanyahu regime the green light to continue bombing, slaughtering and starving the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza and murdering, imprisoning and terrorizing the over 2 million Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank.
The Biden administration has also refused to support life-saving UN Security Council resolutions calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. From 1954 to the present, the United States has used its veto power 34 times to block Security Council resolutions critical of Israel and that have attempted to hold it accountable for its violations of international law in Palestine. Israel has consistently ignored all resolutions pertaining to its crimes against Palestinians and keeps bombing UN institutions and personnel in Gaza today.
Additionally, President Biden has submitted a request to Congress for additional military aid for Israel amounting to $14.3 billion to complete its genocide in Gaza (and the West Bank), a request that is in violation of US law. Twenty percent of Israel’s military budget is currently financed by US taxpayers. The Leahy Law, named after its sponsor, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and first enacted in 1997, prohibits the US government from providing military assistance to foreign security forces when there is credible information of human rights violations.
Like Israel, Washington is not playing by the “rules-based order” it demands of others and it is not observing the international laws it helped established. The United States is on the wrong side of history, and its decisions are jeopardizing America’s national security and what is left of its standing worldwide, endangering Muslims and Jews in the United States and in every country, fueling violence at home and in West Asia.
History is replete with acts of violent resistance to oppression. Apartheid is violent, and resistance to it is morally required. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. reminded us that “To accept passively an unjust system is to cooperate with that system; thereby the oppressed become as evil as the oppressor. Non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. The oppressed must never allow the conscience of the oppressor to slumber.”
– Dr. M. Reza Behnam is a political scientist specializing in the history, politics and governments of the Middle East. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
Calling the “Israeli” entity an apartheid regime has nothing to do with anti-Semitism but is the description of what is happening in reality, according to an “Israeli” university professor.
Amos Goldberg, a leading professor of the Holocaust at Hebrew University in the occupied al-Quds [Jerusalem], made the comment in response to an earlier statement by Germany’s anti-Semitism commissioner Felix Klein, who said applying the framework of apartheid to discuss the “Israeli” entity’s treatment of Palestinians is “an anti-Semitic narrative.”
In an interview with the German daily newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung [FAZ], Goldberg rejected Klein’s remarks and said, “Accusing ‘Israel’ of apartheid is not anti-Semitic – it’s describing reality.”
In a veiled reference to Klein, Goldberg added, “All decent people must decide which side of history they want to be on.”
The “Israeli” university professor also warned against the conflation of anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism, describing the issue as a “disturbing” phenomenon as he argued that some of the harshest opponents of Zionism were Jews.
“These identifications are serious because they are derived from alleged lessons of the Holocaust,” he added. “And so it appears that any substantial criticism of ‘Israel’ and Zionism is perceived in public opinion, and especially among national and international political and cultural institutions, as an ideological continuation of the Holocaust.”
“From the moment Zionism appeared on the stage of history at the end of the 19th century, opposition to it was born within the Jewish world.”
In an open letter earlier in the month, hundreds of academics and public figures from across occupied Palestine and other nations equated the “Israeli” regime’s decades-long occupation of Palestinian territories with apartheid.
The signatories complained that the Palestinian people “lack almost all basic rights, including the right to vote and protest. They face constant violence: this year alone, ‘Israeli’ forces have killed over 190 Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and demolished over 590 structures. Settler vigilantes burn, loot, and kill with impunity.”
The “Israeli” oppression of Palestinians has witnessed a sharp rise under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s extremist coalition cabinet, which is composed of far-right Zionist parties that oppose Palestinian statehood and support the expansion of illegal settlements in the occupied lands.
Over the past months, the usurping regime has intensified attacks against Palestinian towns. As a result of these attacks, dozens of Palestinians have lost their lives and many others have been arrested.
According to the United Nations, 2023 is already the deadliest year for Palestinians in the West Bank since it began recording fatalities in 2005. The previous year, 2022, had been the most lethal year with 150 Palestinians martyred, of whom 33 were minors, as reported by the United Nations.
The most well-known Israeli national symbol, Jerusalem, was not the City of David. In fact, it was built 3000 years before David’s birth, and was dedicated to the Canaanite god of dusk, Shalem. “Israel’s” other symbols were also, very similarly, simply appropriated.
The absence of an authentic Israeli national memory made it crucial for political Zionism to construct a convoluted web of deception by appropriating national symbols and imbuing alternative facts that have become ingrained in Western national discourse.
is the author of “Children of Catastrophe,” Journey from a Palestinian Refugee Camp to America, and other books. He writes frequently on Arab world issues for various national and international commentaries
If a random group of highly educated individuals were asked who established the city of Jerusalem (Al-Quds), some might plead ignorance, but most would likely answer King David. After all, it’s ostensibly known as the City of David.
This example demonstrates how unchallenged legends, originating from non-historical documents like religious texts, can shape the sophistical historical narratives. This article will delve into like major Zionist’s wonted myths that are accepted at face value in the West.
The organic development of nations relies on several factors: mainly national symbols that form an important part of the national memory, distinct cultural heritage, belonging, territory, values, customs, traditions, language, and social behaviors. These elements evolve gradually and are transmitted over generations, forming the foundation of nationhood.
However, the development of the “State of Israel” followed an unconventional path. The political Zionist movement took a reverse approach by occupying the territory, first, bypassing the natural process of generational development and appropriating various aspects of the local surface culture, including national symbols.
Israeli leaders often assert, for instance, that Jerusalem has been the Jewish capital for 3000 years. In the West, the veracity of such a claim is not questioned, either out of ignorance, religious accommodation, or outright fear of being accused of “anti-Semitism” for challenging Zionist narratives. This organized intimidation is the primary reason why critical thinking in the West often fails to challenge Israeli accounts.
As a result, only a few are aware that the city of Jerusalem served as the capital of the original Palestinians for over 6000 years, long before it was occupied by Jewish tribes from Mesopotamia. Historical and archaeological evidence points to the Phoenician Canaanites, the ancestors of today’s Palestinians, as the first human settlement in Jerusalem in the 4th millennium BCE. The Jebusites, a Canaanite tribe, referred to the small town on the hill as “Urushalim.” The name is a portmanteau term blending the words “uru,” meaning “founded by,” and “shalem,” the Phoenician Canaanite god of dusk, hence, “Urushalim.”
Consequently, the most well-known Israeli national symbol, Jerusalem, was not the City of David. In fact, it was built 3000 years before David’s birth, and was dedicated to the Canaanite god of dusk, Shalem, not Avraham’s Elohim. “Israel” and Zionism adopted a variation from the Canaanite lexicon, calling the city “Yerushaláyim,” implying a Hebrew association with the original name.
The Zionist appropriation of national symbols is so pervasive that I, too, once fell for this misconception, mistakenly believing that “Urushalim” had a Hebrew origin. I recall hearing a Christian priest in Lebanon refer to Jerusalem as “Urushalim,” instead of its Arabic name, “Al-Quds.” At the time, I failed to realize that the priest was using the original Canaanite name, reminding us that modern Zionists appropriated the name “Urushalim” when the city was occupied in the 10th century BC and again in the 20th century AD.
In addition to the historically forged claim of being the “eternal capital,” another iconic national symbol that has been falsely portrayed as exclusively “Jewish” is the six-pointed star in the Israeli flag. Contrary to popular belief, the hexagram in the Israeli flag is not solely a Jewish symbol. Prior to its association with Judaism in 17th-century Eastern Europe, the earliest Jewish usage of the symbol was inherited from medieval Arabic literature by Kabbalists for use in talismanic protective amulets. The symbol was also used in Christian churches as a decorative motif many centuries before its first known use in a Jewish synagogue… Israeli historian Shlomo Sand’s book, “The Invention of The Land of Israel,” explains that the Star of David is not an ancient Jewish symbol but has its origins in the Indian subcontinent, where it was extensively used by various religious and military cultures.
The two equilateral triangles can still be found today in the stunningly intricate mother-of-pearl inlay work featuring hexagrams as part of mosaic designs on walnut chairs, tables, and wooden boxes in present-day Syria. This exquisite art form dates back thousands of years in the city of Damascus, the world’s oldest continuously inhabited city.
Another symbol that lacks inherent religious significance in history is the so-called “Western Wall.” The wall is not an internal structure and cannot be part of a building. Rather, it is an exterior embankment supporting higher ground (Haram el Sharif/ Noble Sanctuary) and an extension of the defensive exterior wall surrounding the Old City, which predates the Jewish presence in the city. The approximately 2.5-mile-long and 40-feet-high fortification wall was reconstructed between 1537 and 1541 under Ottoman Sultan Suleiman I.
Jews who assimilated within Palestinian culture but maintained their religious beliefs lived in Palestine, including Jerusalem, alongside their Muslim and Christian compatriots for centuries. Throughout history, before the advent of the Western Christian Messianic movement and the birth of political Zionism, there are no historical records indicating that the western fortification wall was used as a prayer site. The west side of the wall only became a religious attraction in the seventeenth century, driven by Christian religious devotees who wanted to hasten the return of the messiah.
In an attempt to validate their delusional fantasies, successive Israeli governments have conducted extensive excavations beneath the Noble Sanctuary for over sixty years. However, they have yet to produce any archeological evidence pointing to a religious Jewish site.
In more recent history, it is little-known that the melody of the Israeli national anthem, “Hatikvah,” originally belonged to the World Zionist movement’s anthem and was adapted from the famous tune “Vltava” (My Homeland) by Czech composer Bedřich Smetana.
The absence of an authentic Israeli national memory made it crucial for political Zionism to construct a convoluted web of deception by appropriating national symbols and imbuing alternative facts that have become ingrained in Western national discourse. By inculcating false narratives, legends, and fables into the mainstream, a new reality is shaped, or as Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels famously said, “A lie told once remains a lie, but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth.”
The latter could possibly explain the mutual adulation between Donald Trump, and his Hebrew version, Benjamin Netanyahu.
The opinions mentioned in this article do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Al mayadeen, but rather express the opinion of its writer exclusively.
is the author of “Children of Catastrophe,” Journey from a Palestinian Refugee Camp to America, and other books. He writes frequently on Arab world issues for various national and international commentaries
On 25 May 2023, the Biden administration released a 60 page plan for combating domestic antisemitism. Generally, antisemitism is but one, albeit an historically significant one, of many violent racial and ethnic biases. In recent decades there has been an outburst of such hate and bias that is doing harm to many groups worldwide. It appears to be part of a resurgent fascism which, in turn, appears to be a backlash against liberal trends. This reactionary process has hit the United States and no one should doubt the seriousness of the problem of ethic hatred here in the “land of the free.” Every minority group in the country suffers from it. Jewish Voice for Peace has correctly contextualized the struggle against antisemitism when it tells us that “at a time when the dangers of white nationalism, including racism, antisemitism and Islamophobia, are all too apparent, the need to build safety for all people has never been greater.” The safety of the Jews is linked to the safety of others.
Nonetheless, antisemitism in the U.S. has earned special attention from the federal government because (1) Jews can muster the horrors of the past along with the hate-filled outbursts of the present, and (2) bring to bear the political clout of a well-honed lobby—hence the recent report that calls for a full-court press against antisemitism at just about every level of society.
It may therefore come as a surprise that the main controversy flowing from the Biden plan is just how to define antisemitism. For instance, though addressing the issue in only one paragraph, the administration report acknowledges that the definition is in dispute. “There are several definitions of antisemitism ….The most prominent is the non-legally binding ‘working definition’ of antisemitism adopted in 2016 by the 31-member states of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), which the United States has embraced. In addition, the Administration welcomes and appreciates the Nexus Document and notes other such efforts.”
To clarify the issue, the IHRA definition of antisemitism reads as follows: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.” This is standard as far as it goes. Problems start to appear when the Alliance lists examples that it considers antisemitic—specifically, “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.” Not coincidentally, most older, established Jewish organizations with close ties to Israel have latched on to this example and used it as a weapon against those critical of the policies and practices of the Zionist state toward non-Jewish citizens and subjects, particularly Palestinians.
Mentioning the IHRA document on antisemitism, much less calling it “the most prominent” and the one that the U.S. “has embraced” was a mistake on the part of the Biden administration. This is so for several reasons: (1) It immediately shifted attention from the report and its goals to the controversy over definition. (2) It confirmed that the government had taken sides in this controversy. (3) It complicated the fight against antisemitism by publicly announcing that the administration was willing to ignore the prima facie fact that Israel has been documented to in fact be “a racist endeavor.” Every well respected human rights organization in the West such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the United Nations Office of Human Rights, and B’Tselem, among many others, has laid out this indictment in detail.
It is probable that the Biden administration made this mistake with eyes wide-open. And, it is probably President Biden’s own self-confessed Zionism that dictated it doing so. Yet, as a bone thrown to those who own the facts, the administration also mentioned that there exists other definitions of antisemitism that it “welcomes and appreciates” such as the Nexus definition. This definition reads, “Antisemitism consists of anti-Jewish beliefs, attitudes, actions or systemic conditions. It includes negative beliefs and feelings about Jews, hostile behavior directed against Jews (because they are Jews), and conditions that discriminate against Jews and significantly impede their ability to participate as equals in political, religious, cultural, economic, or social life.” The Nexus document recognizes that those who hate Jews “because they are Jews” may well hate Israel too. However, it contains a list of actions which cannot be judged antisemitic. For instance, “criticism of Zionism and Israel, opposition to Israel’s policies, or nonviolent political action directed at the State of Israel and/or its policies should not, as such, be deemed antisemitic.” This approach is nuanced to fit well within U.S. principle of free speech and avoids the problem at the heart of the IHRA statement.
Part II — The IHRA’s Category Mistake
The controversy over definition has focused not on traditional sociopathic traits such as hatred of Jews. Everyone agrees that such an outlook and its associated behavior is antisemitic. Rather, the debate focuses on what is, in essence, a political question: whether there can be such a thing as legitimate criticism of Israel’s Zionist project. If you think this might reflect a category mistake, you are right.
Israel is a nationstate (one category) whose leaders have made an arbitrary claim to represent all the Jews worldwide (a qualitatively different category). For instance, the published aims of the Permanent Mission of Israel to the United Nations says it “represents the State of Israel, its citizens and the Jewish people on the global stage.” This claim cannot be substantiated for two reasons (1) there are tens of thousands (the number is growing all the time) of Jews outsider of Israel who do not want to be represented by that state. Many are neutral as regards Israel and many others are appalled by Israel’s Zionist ideology and the racist behavior it has generated, and (2) the claim of representation is called into question by the positions taken by the rabbinical officialdom controlling religious practices in Israel. These are orthodox and ultra-orthodox rabbis who believe that Jews who do not practice the religion as they do—which happens to be most Jews in the U.S. and Europe—are not real Jews. Thus, Israeli leaders are caught in a dilemma. They claim to represent a diaspora community of Jews, many of whom their “official” rabbis say are not really Jews.
Leaving aside the “who is a Jew” problem, Israel implements policies and practices that have produced institutional and legal discrimination against non-Jews. This is perhaps an inevitable result of designing a state for one group in territory awash with many groups. The effort has progressed so far that it is now factually accurate to call Israel an apartheid state. Is criticism of such policies and practices the same as antisemitism? Do those critical of Israel’s official racism hate Jews? Again, part of the problem with the Zionist argument is that many of the critics are Jews (despite what antiquarian Rabbis might say). In response, the boosters of Israel, the descriptive term here is “political Zionists,” have, once more arbitrarily, invented a class of people they call the self-hating Jew—this is suppose to account for Jewish opposition to Zionist Israel.
Part III —The Case of Jonathan Greenblatt
One such political Zionist, who claims that he and his organization had a lot to do with the Biden Plan, is Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Greenblatt asserts that the administration’s effort draws “heavily from our plans and our recommendations. My team was collaborating actively with the interagency policy committee that staffed and led this.” This might be the case, for there has been no public recognition by the U.S. government of just how radical the ADL and most other traditional Jewish American organizations have become in defense of Israel. Thus, Greenblatt is convinced that the Biden administration is now fully on board with the IHRA definition of antisemitism. “The White House plan elevates and embraces IHRA as the preeminent definition that it is now using to understand antisemitism in all its forms.” He dismisses the Nexus paper as a “supplementary document.”
One should be very suspicious of Greenblatt’s ability to access, much less analyze, the rapidly evolving American culture and politics as regards Zionist Israel. As I noted in an earlier analysis (17 November 2022), he offers a remarkably inaccurate picture of Israel’s official ideology. He tells us “Zionism isn’t just a light for the Jewish people, it’s a liberation movement for all people. We should take strength in it, we should find inspiration in it, and we should share it with the world.” This same skewed argument was used by the Zionists in the mid-1940s— while they promoted a colonial-settler project during a period marked by decolonization. Somehow, Greenblatt has also got it into his head that “Palestinians should embrace Zionism.” As utterly delusional as this sounds, Greenblatt is again reviving an earlier ploy. The New York Times reported in early April of 1921 that Winston Churchill (then Colonial Secretary) had travelled to Jerusalem and met with local Palestinian leaders. He told them that creating a Jewish national home in Palestine would be “good for the Arabs dwelling in Palestine” because they would “share in the benefits and progress of Zionism.” At the time this was known as “the full-belly theory of imperialism.” In 1921, the real impact of Zionism in Palestine was in the future. Today, Greenblatt’s apparent disregard of that history is unforgivable.
Nonetheless, that ignorance, real or fabricated, is necessary if one is to adopt the IHRA statement as the “preeminent definition that is now used to understand antisemitism in all its forms.” What is the dark logic in all of this? The progressive Israeli news site +972 explains, “what the IHRA definition does is provide Israel and the wider hasbara apparatus with a highly effective tool for bashing Palestinians and the Palestinian liberation movement, and grant the global far right an equally effective tool for whitewashing its own antisemitism .… allowing antisemites to propose that the absence of criticism of Israel indicates a lack of animus toward Jews …. lobbying for the universal adoption of a definition of antisemitism based on this inner logic is terribly bad for Jews around the world.”
Part IV — Conclusion
On 5 June 2023, the European Legal Support Center (ELSC) released a report on the impact of the IHRA definition of antisemitism on the rights of free speech and assembly in the European Union and United Kingdom. It came as no great surprise that this case-based assessment showed that the IHRA definition was quickly weaponized in order to stifle criticism of Zionist Israel. The ELSC report documents 53 such cases. All of them targeted groups or individuals expressing criticism of Israeli policies and practices toward Palestinians.
There can be little doubt that this weaponization of the IHRA definition is what Jonathan Greenblatt and the ADL have in mind. Likewise, it is probably a safe bet that many in the Biden administration, including the president himself, will go along with this distorting practice unless they are confronted both in the streets and the courts to the point that they are publicly embarrassed by their own hypocrisy. It is only by ending this illegitimate misdirection that any real fight against antisemitism can progress. The struggle to do so is already ongoing.
The following is an updated version of the article originally published on 17 June 2017 by Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network. The living legacy of Fouad Hijazi, Atta al-Zeer, Mohammed Jamjoum and the Buraq Revolution is deeply relevant today, especially as the Zionist regime seeks to target Palestinian prisoners for execution in an official manner, even as the policy of slow death, targeted assassination and murderous raids on the Palestinian resistance continues.
This anniversary also comes as Zionist forces continue to engage in “flag marches” designed to declare full colonial control over all of Palestinian Ara Jerusalem; it was a very similar march that sparked the uprising of 1929. The close ties between Zionism and British colonialism – which would eventually imprison 900 Palestinians and execute 20 for participating in the revolt – today mirrors the strategic partnership between the Zionist state and U.S. and other Western imperialist powers. Over 93 years later, the Palestinian revolution continues, until liberation and return.
17 June marks the anniversary of the execution of three of the earliest martyrs of the Palestinian prisoners’ movement – Fouad Hijazi, Atta al-Zeer and Mohammed Khalil Jamjoum – by British colonial occupiers, in Akka prison. Today, on 17 June 2023, we salute these martyrs and pledge to struggle for the freedom of all prisoners of Zionism and imperialism.
Hijazi, al-Zeer and Jamjoum were seized by the British colonizers for their role in Al-Buraq Revolution of 1929, named for the al-Buraq Wall in Jerusalem. The uprising was sparked by Zionist groups coming to the wall to plant Zionist flags, declaring that “This wall is ours.”
In Jerusalem, Haifa, Yafa and Safad, Palestinians rose up against British colonization and the declared Zionist plans to colonize Palestine and declare it a “Jewish state,” with the support of Britain as expressed in the notorious Balfour Declaration. Hundreds of Palestinians were seized by British forces and 26 sentenced to death by hanging; there was such an outcry by the Palestinian people that most of these sentences were converted to life imprisonment, with the exception of Hijazi, Jamjoum and al-Zeer.
Photo from the 1929 Buraq Revolution
Fouad Hijazi was 26 years old, from Safad; Mohammed Jamjoum was 28, from al-Khalil, as was Atta al-Zeer, 35.
Born in Safad in 1904, Fouad Hijazi received his primary education in his hometown; his university education was completed at the American University of Beirut. He actively participated in the Buraq Revolution. and wrote a message to his family the day before his execution, which was published in the newspaper on 18 June 1930. In the message, he said, “On 17 June of each year, this should be a historic day in which speeches are made and songs are sung in the memory of our blood spilled for the sake of Palestine and the Arab cause.”
The execution of these Palestinian strugglers has remained for years an ongoing story of resistance that continues to inspire strugglers through over 100 years of resistance to colonization and occupation. Indeed, the song written to commemorate Hijazi, al-Zeer and Jamjoum, “From Akka Prison,” today remains one of the most well-known and powerful poems of the Palestinian prisoners’ movement.
Mohammed Khalil Jamjoum was born in 1902 in al-Khalil; like Hijazi he attended university at the American University of Beirut.
Atta al-Zeer was born in al-Khalil also, in 1895. Throughout his life he worked as a farmer and a manual laborer and was known from his earliest days for his courage and physical strength.
On the day of their execution, the 3 Palestinian martyrs of the Akka prison: Fuad Hijazi, Mohammad Jamjoum and Ata Al-Zeir wrote letters to their families, friends, the Palestinians and the Arabs nations. In one letter they said:
“Now we are at the doors of eternity, offering our lives to save the sacred homeland , for dear Palestine, we plead to all Palestinians not to forget our spilled blood and our souls that will fly in the sky of this beloved country, and to remember that we have willingly given ourselves and our skulls to be a basis for building our nation’s independence and freedom, and that the nation remain persistent in its union and its struggle for the salvation of Palestine from the enemies, and to keep its lands and not to sell one inch of it to the enemies, and that its determination not be wavered and not be weakened by threat and intimidation, and to strive until it gains victory… The Arabs in all Arab countries and Muslims have to save Palestine from its suffering and assist it with all their strength… Now, after we have seen from our nation and our country and our people this national spirit and national enthusiasm, we welcome death with complete pleasure and joy and willingly place the rope of the gallows, the swing of the champions, around our necks in sacrifice to you, Palestine, and finally, please write on our graves:
“to the Arab nation full independence or callous death and in the name of the Arabs we live and in the name of Arabs we die.”
On 17 June 1930, Palestinians organized a general strike throughout Palestine as large crowds gathered in major Palestinian cities across the country – in Yafa, Haifa, al-Khalil and Nablus. After the executions, their bodies were handed to the men’s families, who had been denied the right to bury them in their home cities. Thousands of Palestinians streamed through the streets of Akka in honor of Jamjoum, Hijazi and al-Zeer, figures and symbols of Palestinian resistance to British and Zionist colonization. The three revolutionaries were executed on that day, but their anti-colonial message and commitment has continued to resonate through generations of Palestinian struggle for national liberation.
Abu Maher al-Yamani, co-founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Palestinian labor leader and historical leader of the Palestinian national movement, left his village of Suhmata for the first time at the age of six with his father. There, he “was surprised to encounter the execution of three Palestinian martyrs by British colonial authorities on that day, June 17, 1930 – Fouad Hijazi, Mohammed Jamjoum and Atta al-Zeer. The awareness of the child Ahmed al-Yamani was awakened, viewing the executions and the bodies of the martyrs in the gallows of the courtyard of Akka central prison; this incident greatly affected him and remained an image in his mind that could not be forgotten.”
Their story has been embedded as well in the Palestinian culture of resistance. Palestinian poet Ibrahim Tuqan’s poem, “Red Tuesday,” commemorates the three, noting “their bodies in the homeland’s graves/their souls in the reaches of heaven.”
The popular song, “Min Sijjin Akka,” or “From Akka Prison,” continues to be sung and celebrated throughout Palestine. The origin of the poem is not precisely clear; some say that it was written on the walls of Akka prison by a revolutionary named ‘Awad, himself awaiting execution by the British colonial rulers. Other scholars note that the poem was likely composed by a working-class popular poet and in Haifa, Nuh Ibrahim, perhaps the most famous Palestinian poet of his time and carrying his own legacy of resistance. “He was not a poet of the elite and he did not write poetry for social occasions or holidays. Instead Ibrahim is known for composing for the 1936-1939 Palestinian Revolt and to peasants working their grapevines, orchards and wheat fields. He spoke and wrote in everyday language, as a provocateur and broadcaster for the revolt, in which he also participated as a fighter,” wrote Samih Shabeeb.
The lyrics of the song are known today throughout Palestine and continue to be sung at national events, weddings and cultural celebrations. Ibrahim himself died struggling for Palestine eight years later, as a fighter in the movement of Izzedine al-Qassam in the 1936-39 revolution in Palestine. After being imprisoned in Akka prison himself, he was killed by the British colonial army in a battle in the Westen Galilee.
Today, over 220 Palestinian prisoners have died in Israeli occupation prisons since 1967. 72 of them were killed as a result of Israeli torture, including three hunger strikers, Izhak Maragha, Ali Ja’afari and Rasim Halawa, killed by torturous forced feeding in 1980. Over 40 days ago, long-term hunger striker Khader Adnan’s life was taken after 86 days of hunger strike; the occupation continues to imprison his body after his death. The Israeli state constantly threatens the reimposition of the death penalty, and extremist minister Itamar Ben Gvir and allies promote the killing of Palestinian prisoners as a tool to win elections. In the meantime, this practice is a daily reality, with escalating extrajudicial executions – particularly against Palestinian youth; “arrest raids” that are in fact assassination raids, from Basil al-Araj and Moataz Washaha to Ibrahim al-Nabulsi and Abdel-Fattah Kharousheh; and the policy of “slow death” of medical neglect and mistreatment inside occupation prisons, exemplified by the killing of Khader Adnan and the ongoing medical mistreatment of Walid Daqqah, amounting to an execution.
On this anniversary, Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network remembers and honors the martyrs of 1930 and their ongoing legacy and role as a symbol of resistance and anti-colonial revolution that reverberates through generations to defend Palestinian land and Palestinian rights, in Jerusalem and throughout occupied Palestine, from Zionism, imperialism and colonization.
British-Israeli historian Avi Shlaim cites ‘incontrovertible evidence’ from former Jewish agent showing Zionists bombed sites to encourage migration to Israel
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A police report and an interview with a former Zionist operative form the basis of Avi Shlaim’s claim that he has uncovered “undeniable proof” of Israeli involvement in bombings which drove Jews out of Iraq in the early 1950s, the British-Israeli historian told Middle East Eye.
Shlaim’s autobiography Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew, published earlier this month, details his childhood as an Iraqi Jew and subsequent exile to Israel.
It also includes research about a number of bombings in Iraq which prompted a mass exodus of Jews from the country between 1950 and 1951, most of whom, like he and his family, ended up in Israel.
On Sunday, Shlaim told Middle East Eye that he had uncovered “incontrovertible evidence of Zionist underground involvement in the bombs”.
As part of the evidence, the historian cited an extensive interview he carried out with Yaakov Karkoukli, a former member of the Zionist underground in Baghdad in the 1950s.
Karkoukli – who was aged 89 when he spoke to Shlaim for the book – was an associate of Yusef Basri, a Zionist intelligence operative in Iraq who was convicted by Iraqi authorities of having carried out bombings targeting Iraqi Jews.
‘Terrorise and not kill’
The bombings at the time included attacks on a coffee shop, a car dealership and a synagogue, among other attacks on Jewish communities and businesses.
Karkoukli said that Basri carried out three of those attacks on Jewish sites upon the orders of Meir Max Bineth, an Israeli intelligence officer who supplied Basri with grenades and TNT explosives.
As well as weapons, Bineth allegedly provided Basri with maps, intelligence and instructions, which included an order “to terrorise and not to kill”.
Basri, along with another Zionist underground operative, Shalom Salih Shalom, were convicted and executed by Iraqi authorities over the bombings.
A third underground operative, Yusef Khabaza, was also sentenced to death in absentia, but escaped Iraq.
Karkoukli insists that an attack on the Masuda Shemtov synagogue in Baghdad in January 1951 – the only bombing at the time to result in Jewish deaths – was not directly carried about by Zionist operatives, but by a Muslim Arab.
Bineth, who allegedly gave Basri orders, would later commit suicide after being arrested by Egyptian authorities over his suspected involvement in the Lavon Affair, a failed Israeli false flag operation to plant bombs in Egypt and blame them on the Muslim Brotherhood and leftists.
Israeli officials have long rejected any Zionist underground or official Israeli involvement in attacks on Iraqi Jews, and instead blamed them on Iraqi nationalists.
“This is not a second-hand but a first-hand testimony by a participant,” Shlaim told MEE, referring to his interview with Karkoukli.
“True, this is oral history and therefore not conclusive, though it is inconceivable that Karkoukli would have made up the whole story.”
But the historian added that Karkoukli had provided more conclusive evidence than just his own testimony, in the form of a police report.
Police report
Shlaim received a copy of the Baghdad police report on the trial of Basri and his associates, which Karkoukli had obtained from a retired Iraqi police officer.
The report, a translation of which is included in the book and has been sent to MEE, includes details of confessions from both Shalom and Basri, where they admit to throwing bombs at Iraqi Jewish targets. Shalom also implicates Khabaza in his confession.
“No one except the police investigators could have had all the details contained in this report,” Shlaim said. “This report is clearly not a fabrication but I took one more step to authenticate it.”
The historian explained that he confirmed the veracity of the police report through Iraqi journalist Shamil Abdul Qadir, who was in possession of a 258-page Baghdad police dossier on the interrogation of alleged Zionist agents.
Abdul Qadir verified the police report, and said that it was based on the dossier he was in possesion of. An image of the cover page of the dossier was seen by MEE.
“The police report which I reprint in my book is thus incontrovertible evidence of Zionist underground involvement in the bombs,” Shlaim said. “If you wish, this is the smoking gun.”
Synagogue attack
The attack on the Masuda Shemtov synagogue, which killed four Jews, was carried out by a Muslim man of Syrian origin called Salih al-Haidari, according to Karkoukli.
Karkoukli claimed to be “the only person in the world” who knew who had carried out that attack.
He said that Haidari was put up to the attack by a corrupt Iraqi police officer who had received a bribe from the Zionist underground. Shlaim said there was no further corroborating evidence to back the claim up.
Around 110,000 Jews fled Iraq following the bombings, most of them settling in the nascent state of Israel.
Over 800,000 Jews either left or were expelled from countries in the Middle East and North Africa between 1948 and the early 1980s.
As of 2005, 61 percent of Israeli Jews were of full or partial Mizrahi ancestry – the sociological term coined to refer to Jews from the region following the creation of Israel.
The attacks on Iraqi Jews came less than two years after the ethnic cleansing that took place in what Palestinians call the Nakba (catastrophe), which led to the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.
Zionist forces killed 13,000 Palestinians, destroyed and depopulated around 530 villages and towns, committed at least 30 massacres, and expelled 750,000 people during the Nakba.
More than 6,000 Israeli Jews, including 4,000 soldiers and 2,000 civilians, were killed, as well as around 2,000 troops from Arab countries.
Shlaim states in the book that Iraqi Jews did not face antisemitism until the 1940s, when they were suspected of being complicit in the British invasion of Iraq in 1941 and in the Nakba.
He adds that the Zionist project led to Jews from all across Arab countries going from respected fellow citizens to akin to a fifth column allied with the new Jewish state.
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Featured image: Displaced Iraqi Jews arrive in Israel in 1951 (Wikimedia/Public domain)
The founder of political Zionism, Theodore Herzl. (Photo: E.M. Lilien, via Wikimedia Commons)
– Jamal Kanj is the author of “Children of Catastrophe,” Journey from a Palestinian Refugee Camp to America, and other books. He writes frequently on Arab world issues for various national and international commentaries. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle
The phrase “fairytale” belongs to the founder of political Zionism, Theodore Herzl, when he used it to urge his fellow Zionists in 1897 to pursue their “dreams” in Palestine, stating “If you really want it, then it is no fairytale. “
It can be argued that much of what political Zionism professes about “Jewish” history and culture in Palestine is a “fairytale”?
The phrase “fairytale” belongs to the founder of political Zionism, Theodore Herzl, when he used it to urge his fellow Zionists in 1897 to pursue their “dreams” in Palestine, stating “If you really want it, then it is no fairytale. ”
Undeniably, Judaism has strong spiritual ties to the Holy Land, but that does not exculpate Herzl’s malicious “fairytale” dreams. Similarly, recognizing the Christian divine connection to the land of birth and the crucifixion of Christ does not excuse the crusades’ invasions. Likewise, the Islamic attachment to the land where the Prophet ascended to the heavens, does not make Palestine exclusively Muslim.
Throughout history, the land of Palestine experienced untold numbers of invaders, religious conversions, rise and fall of emperors and empires. To name but a few, not in any order: Akkadians, Egyptians, Hebrews, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Muslims, European Crusades, Ottomans, British etc. Withal, the indefatigable Palestinians have endured as steadfast witnesses to battles, carnages, victories, defeats, and retreats.
Within the context of national history, transient conquerors morphed like seasonal yellow leaves, while the original people of Palestine have remained the only historical constant deeply rooted next to their olive trees. Through it all, the indigenous Palestinians could have taken a new religion or converted to another, adopted new customs, or learned a new language, some of the invaders could’ve assumed local traditions or assimilated in their new home. Eventually, creating a unique collective national identity while staying true to their proven Philistines, Canaanites, and Jebusites genetic ancestors.
In 1948, a political movement predominantly comprised of descendants from East European Khazar Jewish converts claimed lineage to the ancient Hebrew Kingdom―which was one among more than a dozen historical invaders of Palestine. The European political Zionist movement sought an alliance with the British colonists to displace the original inhabitants, for the first time in their long history, by transplanting a racialist group of persecuted European refugees. The West absolved its sin against European Jews by inflicting the crime of uprooting the non-European Palestinians of their homes.
Historians hold differing opinions regarding the duration of the Hebrew Kingdom’s reign in the land of Canaan. However, there is some consensus that the United Hebrew Kingdom lasted approximately 80 years before splitting into two separate entities. Nevertheless, there is no disagreement that the original Hebrews were not indigenous to the land. In the book of Genesis 17:8 God addressed Abraham regarding the land of Canaan “where you now live a as a foreigner . . .”
Presumably, and according to the book of Genesis, God promised the “foreigner” the possession of the land of Canaan. While I prefer to steer away from discussing abstract or entertaining metaphysical powers, there is a convincing hypothesis told by Jewish, Christian, and Muslim religious authorities alike, that God’s promise was fulfilled in the united Hebrew Kingdom and ended by disobeying God when it split into two hostile “God’s chosen” people.
Until the late 19th century, when political Zionism emerged in response to Western Jewish hate, spiritual Zionists held to their beliefs that the “Jewish Kingdom” would be re-established by the Messiah. Christians and Muslims share with Judaism varying nuanced versions regarding the signs of the apocalypse.
Setting aside the theological aspects, there is no genetic relation between the original Hebrews who immigrated to Palestine from Mesopotamia, present-day Iraq roughly 4000 years ago, and the children of the East European Khazar converts. To allege lineage to a land basis religion, is similar to an Indonesian Muslim claiming a right to Saudi Arabia because it’s the birthplace of their religion. Nationality is determined not by a spiritual affinity to a place, but by people who possess a distinct cultural identity and have a continuous historical presence in a defined region.
Unfortunately, whenever “God” ostensibly communicates with Homo sapiens, it often leads to death and destruction. Examples such as Jim Jones and David Koresh come to mind in our lifetime. On a larger scale, many might remember when the 43rd US president, George W. Bush, told televangelist James Robison he had a “premonition” that led him to seek the presidency because God wanted him “to do it.” Whatever or whoever influenced Bush “to do it,” was neither omnipotent nor omniscient, as the false “premonition” resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis and more than 4,000 Americans. Such is the continued suffering of Palestinians.
Lastly, even if today’s Jewish European converts were indeed the descendants of the ancient Hebrews from 3000 years ago, under accepted international law, they would have no admissible claim to an earlier unlawful occupation. Inasmuch as Arabs today have no right to inherit the past occupation of Spain, which lasted for 700 years, more than three times the overall Hebrew reign in Palestine.
In addition to the supernatural connection, political Zionism presents a seemingly benign assertion by arguing that there is only “one” Jewish state in the world, attempting to imply that it is comparable to other countries. This, however, is akin to defending apartheid South Africa because it was the only white nation in Africa, or advocating for only “one” Aryan state in Europe. Furthermore, there is no “one” Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Baháʼí, Zoroastrianism, Rastafari, Yazidi, etc., state either. Even in countries with an absolute religious majority, affinity to a faith does not transcend the national identity of citizens, where nationhood is not a spiritual trait, but shared cultural values within demarcated national boundaries.
If anything, the 8th-century East European converts might have a stronger legal case, based on their proven genetics, to reclaim the Khazar Jewish empire that lasted for 500 years, significantly longer than the “fairytale” connection to the non-indigenous Hebrew Kingdom in the land of Canaan.
This is the second of a series of articles that will explore Zionist myths, artificial history, and made-up culture. For the first article, click here.
he Israel lobby is working directly with the Canadian government and with Silicon Valley corporations to quash the voices of those critical of its expansionist policies and systematic oppression of its indigenous population.
One clear example of this came last September when an international parliamentary committee met in Congress in Washington, DC, to demand that Twitter remove the account of Palestinian-Canadian Laith Marouf. Marouf is a multimedia producer who currently serves as a senior consultant at the Community Media Advocacy Centre and the coordinator of ICTV, a project to secure a national multi-ethnic news television station in Canada. He also has a long record of active support for Palestinian rights.
As such, Marouf – whose Community Media Advocacy Centre is funded by the Canadian government – faced official consequences for comments he made critiquing Israel. But the Trudeau administration went further to secure his erasure from social media, which should concern all those who believe in free speech.
Marouf’s case is just one in an endless stream of such acts happening all over social media and beyond. Marouf, in other words, was not the first and certainly will not be the last. Furthermore, his case opens the floodgates for the stream of suspensions to become a torrent.
As a major human rights abuser engaged in apartheid and military occupation of Palestinian land, Israel’s working relationship with big tech and the Canadian government is showcasing how antisemitism is being weaponized to target, flag and now vanish accounts critical of the apartheid state.
Marouf’s case also highlights the existence of a nearly fifty-year alliance between a Canadian national and a former Soviet dissident – a relationship that began as part of an Israeli intelligence operation. This history directly ties what happened to Marouf to Israel’s foreign policy strategies developed between 2000 and 2016.
A BIASED GROUP
The Interparliamentary Task Force To Combat Online Antisemitism is, as the name suggests, an international grouping of parliamentarians. Launched in September 2020, the task force is focused on increasing awareness of and developing responses and solutions to allegedly growing online antisemitism. Its first hearing was held on September 16, and the committee called executives from Twitter, YouTube, Meta, and TikTok to testify and explain how and why accounts like those of Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, were still in existence. Khamenei’s English Twitter account has nearly a million followers. At the time of writing, it and its Russian, Spanish, Arabic and Farsi alternative accounts remain live.
Former Canadian member of parliament (MP) Michael Levitt went over his five allotted minutes in his enthusiasm to denounce Marouf’s tweets. Another member of the task force devoted some of her time to arguing that “Zionism as an identity” should be included as a “protected characteristic.” She elaborated, “Zionist is an integral part of the identity of the majority of Jews and many non-Jews who self-define as Zionists.”
But who is on this committee, and why would they make such an argument? Answering this question accurately involves peeling back several layers of the onion and tracing back the origin story of this latest assault on online Palestinian speech.
An exhausted Laith Marouf and his CUTV crew report live from the ground in Montreal, May 20, 2012. Alexis Gravel | Flickr
It is claimed that the committee consists of “bipartisan legislators” and parliamentarians from Israel, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the United Kingdom. Yet this claim of “bipartisanship” is quickly scotched. The task force’s four South African members identify as Zionists and are part of the controversial Democratic Alliance, the party for whom most White South Africans vote. No African National Congress (ANC) members are involved in the group. At the hearing, one MP denounced the ANC, reportedly claiming, “The greatest proponents of antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment comes from our government.”
Members of the Task Force from the US include Democratic Congresspersons Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who has visited Israel on an AIPAC-sponsored tour, and Ted Deutch, the newly-appointed CEO of the Zionist lobby group, the American Jewish Committee.
Among the British representatives is Andrew Percy, the Conservative MP who converted to Judaism in 2017 partly because of “a wholehearted commitment to support of Israel.” The other British representative is Alex Sobel, a longtime supporter of the Zionist affiliate of the Labor Party, the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM). The Canadian representatives included the former MP Michael Levitt, who is now President-CEO of the Zionist Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Also from Canada was Anthony Housefather, who in 2019 wrote, “I have always been and will continue to be a huge supporter of Israel.”
Along with two Members of the Israeli Knesset (MK) was the former MK Michal Cotler-Wunsh. Widely respected journalist Gideon Levy has described Cotler-Wunsh as both “an expert on human rights, an enlightened intellectual” and “nationalist, racist, cruel.”
At the hearing itself, three more Zionists were present. The first was the Israeli special representative for antisemitism, Noa Tishby. Recently Tishby denounced Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Bella Hadid – all Muslim women – as anti-Semites for condemning the killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh by Israeli soldiers. Tishby reportedly “singled out only criticism of Israel from Muslim Americans,” showing an apparent “effort to cast their anger as the product of ethnic or religious bigotry.” Another Zionist at the hearing was Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, the State Department’s Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, appointed in March 2022. According to Ismail Allison of CAIR, Lipstadt has a “history of using bigoted rhetoric, including Islamophobic … talking points.”
Well-known Canadian politician and jurist Irwin Cotler was also in attendance. He is Canada’s Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism, a position receiving CA$ 5.6 million over five years beginning in 2022. He is also the stepfather of Michal Cotler-Wunsh MK, mentioned above. As it turns out, Cotler is the most significant actor in this story, being deeply embedded in Zionist lobby networks.
Unsurprisingly, no representative of Arab or Palestinian origin is involved in the task force.
20 YEARS OF CLASHES
Marouf claims that “in 2021, I began to be stalked and harassed online by Zionists in the Broadcasting sector in Canada.” These efforts led to his Twitter account being shut down for “hateful conduct” and promoting “violence against or directly attacking” people with protected characteristics like race, ethnicity or national origin.
In fact, Marouf has spent much of the past two decades years combatting Zionist efforts to censor him. The first such instance happened at Concordia University in 2001 when he was the first Arab candidate to be elected to a student union executive in Canada. Within months of his appointment, he was “expelled summarily … for writing that ‘Zionism is Jewish Supremacy’”. He won an ensuing six-month court battle with the university. After that, however, the attacks continued; the next was from the Chair of the Department of History, who, as Marouf noted, was also the chair of a Zionist lobby group.
Among the interlocutors back in 2002 was then-MP Irwin Cotler. Cotler’s reputation was at that stage not nearly as great as it is now. Perhaps this is why Marouf’s comrades were able to occupy his office, following which the police were called. Marouf has confirmed to Mintpress that he was “part of the organizing of the occupation” but was not present in the office.
At the time of Marouf’s clashes with Cotler, Cotler’s wife, Ariela, was also involved in the events. She was President of the board of Montreal Hillel in 2001 during the most heated period at Concordia. Hillel is the Zionist student organization on campus in Canada and the US. She “played a major role in the pro-Israeli activity” at that time, according to the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, an Israeli think tank.
Before that, Ariela had been parliamentary secretary for Menachem Begin. As can be imagined from this, Ariela is a hardline Zionist and claims to have been involved “at the cradle” with the creation of the so-called Birthright program, which takes young Jews to “Israel” despite there being no “birthright” for Jews in Canada or elsewhere to colonize Palestine.
Ariela Cotler has also been involved in a wide range of other Zionist lobby groups, including the Canada Israel Committee and the Federation Combined Jewish Appeal, the largest Zionist fundraiser in Canada. The Federation CJA, as it is known, has promoted Canadians joining the Israeli army.
IRWIN COTLER – ZIONIST REGIME ASSET
Cotler’s public persona is that he has some sympathy for the underdog. At the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, he notes he has been described as “Counsel for the Oppressed” and as “Freedom’s Counsel.” His 600-word profile does not use the words “Israel,” “Zionism,” “Jewish,” or “antisemitism”; his decades-long advocacy for the crimes of the State of Israel are not even hinted at.
Born in 1940, he took degrees at McGill University and then secured a Law postgraduate degree at Yale in 1966. In 1968 he was hired as a speechwriter for the then Justice Minister for four years. In 1970 he was appointed as an associate professor at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto before being appointed Professor at McGill in 1973. That same year he helped found and became President of the pro-Israel Canadian Professors for Peace in the Middle East, and he then “spent his summers travelling the Middle East.”
By the late 1970s, he was already heavily involved in Zionist advocacy, being the lawyer for Anatoli Shcharansky. A Ukrainian Zionist activist, Shcharansky was active in agitation as part of an operation run by a secret Israeli intelligence organization, Nativ, to access new settlers from the Soviet Union. Was Cotler aware that he was involved in an intelligence operation?
Cotler is welcomed by Benjamin Netanyahu during a 2014 visit to Israel. Photo | Israeli GPO
In 1978 while working with Shcharansky, he was living in the Jewish quarter of Damascus and, not surprisingly – given his Zionist contacts – drew the attention of Syrian officials. He also spent time in Egypt in 1975, 1976 and 1977, making contact with the political elite, including the foreign minister, and was introduced to President Anwar Sadat. Knowing that Cotler would later visit Israel, Sadat “asked him to deliver a message to … prime minister Menachem Begin.”
Cotler claims he said “he didn’t know” Begin “particularly well.” But when he arrived in Israel, he was “invited to lunch with members of the Knesset.” There he met a Begin staffer named Ariela Zeevi, who took him to meet her boss. The message was, “Egypt was prepared to enter into peace negotiations with Israel.” Cotler later married the staffer in 1979 and became a “close personal friend” of Begin.
ZIONIST LOBBY STALWART
In 1980, Irwin Cotler was appointed President of the Canadian Jewish Congress. Four years later, he participated in a Jerusalem conference entitled “Hasbara: Israel’s Public Image.” (Hasbara is a Hebrew word meaning “explanation,” which is used as a synonym for “propaganda” in English). The American Jewish Congress ran the event, a group with a history of working directly with the Israeli intelligence agency Nativ, a campaign to recruit new settlers from the Soviet Union. Though referred to only as a professor of law at McGill, Cotler made it clear that he was a committed partisan of Israeli hasbara, complaining that “hasbara efforts are discriminated against” and that “Israel itself has become some kind of illegitimate entity.”
Since this public declaration of commitment to the cause of Zionism, he has taken up a dizzying number of appointments in Zionist organizations. He is or has been affiliated with a wide range of Zionist groups on three continents, including,
All of these groups are closely related to the State of Israel, some with intelligence connections, some in receipt of funds, or created by Tel Aviv. None of these roles are listed in his biography at the Wallenberg Center, to which he is currently attached. Nor are Cotler’s interesting links with the far right in Ukraine; he is reportedly on the advisory board of “Ukrainian-Jewish Encounter,” which honored Ukrainian Nazis who collaborated with Nazi Germany and massacred Jews in the 1940s.
ENTER THE MOSSAD
But it is in the policy planning process of the state of Israel that Cotler seems to have made the most significant impact. Cotler has been, as British writer Antony Lerman puts it, “probably the most significant and influential international figure in the propagation of the concept of the ‘new antisemitism.’” As codified and finally published in its current form in 2016 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Association, the “working definition” of antisemitism is the weapon of choice of the Zionist movement to intimidate and bully supporters of the Palestinians.
While the idea of the new antisemitism has roots back to the 1940s and was a subject of renewed interest from the early 1970s, the administrative infrastructure to redefine antisemitism flourished from the late 1980s when Mossad was given the lead in the coordination of the strategy. As Lerman has noted, the Monitoring Forum on Antisemitism, established in 1988, “aimed at establishing Israeli hegemony over the monitoring and combating of antisemitism by Jewish groups worldwide.” It “was coordinated and mostly implemented by Mossad representatives” working in Israeli embassies.
A key step in the process was the first Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust in January 2000. The resulting Stockholm Declaration “became the founding document” of the International Holocaust Remembrance Association. Cotler headed the Canadian delegation to that event. He was also a key figure in responding to the 2001 Durban World Conference Against Racism, which concluded that Zionism is racism. In a hyperbolic reply for the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, he denounced “what was supposed to be a conference against racism” [emphasis in original], saying it “turned into a conference of racism against Israel and the Jewish people.” He also decried what he called a new “genocidal antisemitism – the public call for the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people.
Cotler was engaged directly with the state of Israel’s response to Durban in co-founding the Inter-Parliamentary Coalition for Combating Antisemitism (ICCA) in 2002 “in collaboration with Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Rabbi Michael Melchior.” This venture, however, collapsed, its main problem being that it was obviously an instrument of Israeli foreign policy. Even an arch-Zionist like Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League observed: “If a lot of its strategy and implementation is coming from Israel, I won’t be supportive of it.”
In 2003 a new body, the Global Forum for Combatting Antisemitism, was created by Melchior and Cotler’s friend and former “client” Natan Sharansky (formerly known as Anatoli Shcharansky, he changed his name to Zionise it, as do many incoming settlers). Sharansky was also – as an Israeli government minister in charge of antisemitism —chair of the Coordination Forum for Countering Antisemitism, which had been set up in the 1990s. “The State of Israel has decided to take the gloves off and implement a coordinated counteroffensive against antisemitism,” Sharansky said.
Sharansky right, holds the Congressional Gold Medal presented to him by President Reagan, center, as President-elect Bush looks on, Jan. 11, 1989. Barry Thumma | AP
In his “3D test of antisemitism,” Sharansky took up the idea of discrimination against a nation-state, trialed by Cotler. It focused only on the occasions where it was claimed that criticism of Israel became antisemitism:
“demonization” is “when Israel’s actions are blown out of all sensible proportion”;
“double standards,” when criticism of Israel is “applied selectively”;
“delegitimization” when Israel’s “fundamental right to exist” is denied.
These are tendentious arguments. Who is to judge what is “sensible” or “selective”? No regime or even state has a “fundamental” right to exist.
Cotler and Sharansky would frequently connect again over the course of the ensuing decade. For example, they both attended the February 2008 Global Forum for Combating Antisemitism. It was here that the plan to extend the event around the globe was announced. Though it has been claimed that the subsequent London event was independent, the 2008 event it was seen as simply another GFCA (Ministry of Foreign Affairs) event. Minister Tzipi Livni personally thanked British MOP John Mann for ‘volunteering to host the Global Forum next year.’
Tellingly, the new body used the identical name to the previous 2002 effort: the Inter-parliamentary Coalition for Combating Antisemitism (ICCA). Sharansky was an advisor.
In 2009, Cotler was on the steering committee of the ICCA. Also, there was Fiamma Nirenstein, an Italian writer and politician who has lived in an illegal settlement in East Jerusalem since 1998. Cotler led a delegation of 11 Canadian MPs to the event. Together, they decided to form a Canadian coalition. Thus was the Israeli network extended to Canada: the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition for Combating Antisemitism. It met in November 2010 and produced a final report the following year. Canadian groups which were critical of the redefinition of antisemitism to equate it with anti-Zionism responded to the consultation, but their submissions were “excluded from the hearings.”
The ICCA would host conferences in London in February 2009, Ottawa in November 2010, Brussels in June 2012 and Berlin in March 2016. A “task force” report on “internet hate” was published in 2013. In addition, an Italian parliamentary report was published in 2011, having reportedly taken “inspiration” from the ICCA. Similar German parliamentary reports came out in 2011 and 2017. These reports, commissions and groupings laid the groundwork for the American hearing late last year that removed Marouf from social media.
ZIONIST INFLUENCES EMBEDDED IN TWITTER
As the State of Israel developed its strategy to redefine antisemitism as opposition to Israeli government policy, it embedded a number of Zionist lobby groups in the process. For example, advisors on the Coordination Forum for Countering Antisemitism included the following: The U.S.-based Anti-Defamation League (ADL), B’nai B’rith International (BBI), the World Jewish Congress (WJC), and the U.K.-based Community Security Trust (CST). Some of these advisors to the state of Israel were carried over as advisors to the European Union Monitoring Center, which first introduced the “working definition” of antisemitism in 2005. Both the ADL and BBI were there, as was the EU branch of the WJC, the European Jewish Congress and the UK-based CST.
When Twitter started to appoint advisors on content, these same groups were again in the frame, with no indication that they were essentially assets of the Israeli government. In 2015, Twitter launched a safety center and listed a number of ‘trusted partners’ in the US, Australia, and Europe.
In the area of offensive speech, it listed both the ADL and CST as concerned with antisemitism. Twitter executives have referred to the CST as “empowering” Twitter to “take action.” The big tech platform takes advice from precisely zero Palestinian organizations or grassroots Muslim groups on how to regulate its content.
From 2018, the list of groups working with Twitter evolved. In addition to the ADL, two new European groups were added: the Board of Deputies of British Jews in the UK and the Centre Européen Juif d’Information [European Jewish Information Center] (CEJI) in Brussels. Both these groups are strongly pro-Israel. The Board of Deputies unblushingly admits in its 2020 Trustees report that it enjoys a “[C]lose working relationship with the Embassy of Israel in the UK, including with the Ambassador, diplomats, and professional staff, and strengthened links to the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs and the IDF Spokesperson Department.”
The CEJI is a Zionist organization that advertises working closely with a range of other Zionist groups as “partners,” including B’nai B’rith Europe and the CST. Scandalously, amongst its funders are a host of social media firms, including Twitter itself. So Twitter funds a Zionist lobby group to lobby Twitter on issues relating to the question of Palestine. It is not surprising, therefore, that when pressure is brought to bear from apparently bipartisan lawmakers, and Twitter turns to its trusted advisors, pro-Israel decisions are routinely made. The whole process of both pressure and response is entirely corrupted by Zionist influence.
Israel’s government is also heavily involved in censoring pro-Palestinian content online. According to 7amleh – The Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media, the Israeli Ministry of Justice Cyber Unit sends requests to remove Palestinian content to tech giants. Through Israel’s access to information law, the government said requests to social media companies led to the deletion of 27,000 posts from Facebook, Twitter, and Google from 2017-2018.
CONCLUSIONS
After all these years, Cotler continues to spearhead illegitimate attempts to subvert solidarity with Palestine under the guise of fighting antisemitism. Shored up by a constantly evolving Zionist movement with its front groups, lobby initiatives and covert operatives (many of whom are embedded in Twitter’s own editorial structures), it is not a surprise that Twitter censored Laith Marouf’s account.
The Israel lobby’s cancel culture depends on the decades of work done by Cotler as an Israeli asset and by his close co-conspirator, the former Soviet prisoner and Israeli government minister Sharansky. Both have been central to forging the “criticism of Israel is antisemitism” weapon which is put to daily use by the lobby through their operatives on the ground, via inter-parliamentary front groups or via the editorial structures of Twitter itself, to do the bidding of a foreign state.
Thou shalt not be a victim. Thou shalt not be a perpetrator. And above all, Thou shalt not be a bystander. Yehuda Bauer
Globalize the Intifada! Lowkey
Intro – were do we really live?
Each society, each country has at least two foundational bases: an official ideology and a number of foundational myths (and these myths can be very close to the historical truth or not). In the case of the West (roughly Zone A), the official ideology is “western liberal democracy” (itself based on a lionization of capitalism and “free market values”). However, once we look “under the hood”, so to speak, we see that since its birth in the Middle-Ages the foundational myth of the West has been exceptionalism and its inevitable by-product, imperialism. And it does not matter one bit what verbiage this myth has been wrapped it. It can be the demented claims of universal authority the Papacy, or the so-called “universal values” (aka human rights) of Freemasonry, the racial superiority of the Nazis or globalist agenda of the transnational financiers. The past two decades or so have, however, seen a very interesting phenomenon: the wholesale abandonment of any “pious” ideology other than the minimal lip-service needed to show a (totally non-existing) loyalty to any values. That is, however, not to say that no ideology currently exists. It does, very much so, but it is one *openly* based on hatred of the “other”. I am talking, of course, of the Woke ideology which is so powerfully expressed by the actions of the “Biden” Administration.
The Woke ideology is not different from its predecessors by its underlying hatred of the “other” (all the previous western ideologies were also based on that hatred of the “other”), but by its unapologetic proclamation of this hatred. You could say that the Woke ideology is following Dubya’s “you are either with us or with the terrorists“, but on steroids. And like all western ideologies, the Woke ideology demands that you not only accept a lie (many lies, in fact), but that you also loudly proclaim it. And, of course, the bigger the lie, the more vociferously it is proclaimed urbi et orbi.
Again, this is hardly anything new but, as Hegelian dialectics affirms, quantity can have a quality of its own. We clearly see this today in the post-Christian society all of Zone A lives in: not only are falsehoods proclaimed as “secular dogma”, but the very notion of “truth” has lost any meaning. To repeat, while in the past the rulers of the West did proclaim and even impose ideologies based on lies, today these same rulers have basically retired the very *concept* of “truth” in any other meaning than “in agreement with the official party line/narrative”.
Furthermore, while in the past violence had to be justified in various ways (be it the White Man’s burden, or Trotsky’s apology of Red Terror, or Roosevelt‘s “day of infamy” or Dubya’s GWOT), now violence has become accepted simply under the heading “because we can” and “what are you going to do about it?”. The genocidal wars in Iraq or the terrorist attack on North Stream 2 are good examples of the “kuz we can” ideology.
In other words, we are now living in a society openly based on:
Lies or even the repudiation of the concept of “truth” and
Violence/terrorism
The first corollary of this is that facts simply don’t matter anymore. Neither does logical analysis.
Second, in a way very reminiscent of Trotsky’s apology for Red Terror (if you have not, read his absolutely brilliant, if profoundly demonic, defense of Red Terror in this article!), the current ideology openly proclaims that “it’s okay if we do it, and it is not okay if you do it“. That, of course, implies a qualitative superiority of the “we” over the “you”. This type of “situational ethics” has some rather interesting characteristics and implications including:
It is profoundly narcissistic in its mindset (hence why the “we” has “rights” that the “other” does not).
It measures loyalty by how big a lie a person is willing to loudly proclaim and affirm
You could say that the bigger the lie you affirm and proclaim (virtue signaling) the “better” a person you are, at least by modern standards. And if the lie is truly self-evidently ridiculous and counter-factual (Srebrenica, 9/11, MH-17, Skripals, etc. etc. etc.) then you are a loyal and enlightened member of society. Conversely, if you reject a lie because it is simply obviously counter-factual, then you are not “just” wrong, you are the enemy.
This western infatuation with lies, ideology and violence has its roots in the heresies of the Papacy, but it has since long metastasized into every and all facets of our society and now it has openly become the main ideological pillar upon which everything else is built.
[Sidebar: in my personal observation, the northern European countries are, in that sense, far worse than the southern European ones. That is also where, predictably, where you will find the most rabid russophobes. The southern European countries, having more complex and stronger historical roots, seem to be less gullible and hateful than their northern counterparts. The UK, of course, stands alone and above all others in terms of racist hatred for the “other”; as for the rest of the Anglosphere, it is run by Neocons and Globalists whose hatred for the other is based on centuries of racist mythologizing, to the degree that this type of racism (externally; internally they proclaim to be categorically opposed to any racist notions which is, of course, yet another lie, except that in this case their – internal and external – racism is directed at any group upholding traditional values) has become a core pillar of their worldview, even if most brainwashed subjects are utterly unaware of it (or don’t even care anymore)].
The above is crucial to the understanding of the world we now all live in. But before we continue, we need to address another issue: what is Zionism?
Let’s take the (hyper politically correct) Wikipedia definition of what the word “Zionism” means: it is “a nationalist movement of Jews and Jewish culture that supports the creation of a Jewish homeland in the territory defined as the Land of Israel“. Apparently, no link to the US, the Ukraine or Timbuktu, right? But think again. Why would Jews – whether defined as a religion or an ethnicity – need a homeland anyway? Why can’t they just live wherever they are born, just like Buddhist (a religion) or the African Bushmen (ethnicity) who live in many different countries? The canonical answer is that Jews have been persecuted everywhere and that therefore they need their own homeland to serve as a safe haven in case of persecutions. Without going into the issue of why Jews were persecuted everywhere and, apparently, in all times, this rationale clearly implies if not the inevitability of more persecutions or, at the very least, a high risk thereof. Let’s accept that for demonstration sake and see what this, in turn, implies. First, that implies that Jews are inherently threatened by non-Jews who are all at least potential anti-Semites. The threat is so severe that a separate Gentile-free homeland must be created as the only, best and last way to protect Jews worldwide. This, in turn, implies that the continued existence of this homeland should become an vital and irreplaceable priority of all Jews worldwide lest a persecution suddenly breaks out and they have nowhere to go. Furthermore, until all Jews finally “move up” to Israel, they better be very, very careful as all the goyim around them could literally come down with a sudden case of genocidal anti-Semitism at any moment. Hence all the anti-anti-Semitic organizations a la ADL or UEJF, the Betar clubs, the network of sayanim, etc. In other words, far from being a local “dealing with Israel only” phenomenon, Zionism is a worldwide movement whose aim is to protect Jews from the apparently incurable anti-Semitism of the rest of the planet. As Israel Shahak correctly identified it, Zionism postulates that Jews should “think locally and act globally” and when given a choice of policies always ask THE crucial question: “But is it good for Jews?“. So far from being only focused on Israel, Zionism is really a global, planetary, ideology which unequivocally split up all of mankind into two groups (Jews and Gentiles), which assumes that the latter are all potential genocidal maniacs (which is racist) and believes that saving Jewish lives is qualitatively different and more important than saving Gentile lives (which is racist again). Anyone doubting the ferocity of this determination should either ask a Palestinian or study the holiday of Purim, or both. Even better, read Gilad Atzmon and look up his definition of what is brilliantly called “pre-traumatic stress disorder”
Now let’s be clear: while Zionism itself is based or the ideology and worldview of rabbinical (Pharisaic) “Judaism”, it is not an ethnicity, but an ideology. This is why I wrote the following in that same article:
By the way, there are non-Jewish Zionists (Biden, in his own words) and there are (plenty of) anti-Zionist Jews. Likewise, there are non-Anglo imperialists and there are (plenty of) anti-imperialists Anglos. To speak of “Nazi Germany” or “Soviet Russia” does in now way imply that all Germans were Nazis or all Russian s Communists. All this means it that the predominant ideology of these nations at that specific moment in time was National-Socialism and Marxism, that’s all.
[Sidebar: I want to add one more thing here, especially for those who hate Jews: every time a Jew is unfairly denounced as the perpetrator of some evil deed, it is not only one innocent person which is unfairly condemned, but there is some non-Jewish SOB who is happily slipping away. Is that something which you really want? Just think about this, carefully, and understand the consequences of such a worldview! I suggest that you don’t have to like Jews, or approve of what some of them do, to not want an outcome where any real investigation into the fact of the matter becomes impossible. Finally, please realize that blaming “the Jews” for something require no knowledge, no expertise of any kind and no brains. This is therefore something which the dumbest members of our society will be very strongly drawn towards. Again, just think about it carefully. ]
By the way, while (Pharisaic) “Judaism” is clearly religious and while most original Zionist were not religious, over time Zionism adopted all the man-hating assumptions of (Pharisaic) “Judaism” while, at the same time, secularizing them. You could say that (Pharisaic) “Judaism” is “God ordained racism” while Zionism is “secular racism”. More fundamentally, both (Pharisaic) “Judaism” and secular Zionism are virulently anti-Christian and want to eradicate even the tiny remnants of a completely defeated Christianity in the West. Finally, in the modern state of “Israel”, we now see a new phenomenon becoming very important: religious Zionism, that is a bland of Haredi (Pharisaic) “Judaism” with the type of secular Fascism cum Apetheid modern “Israel” embodies.
If you want to see the kind of freaks which this ideology produces, just see my articles “A crash course on the true causes of “antisemitism”” and “A Crash Course on the True Causes of “Anti-Semitism”, part II: the hunt for anti-Semites“. If you read those (please do!) you will discover what I can only call “God ordained racism” which is quite unique as most religions are, by their very nature, universalist, including, of course, both Christianity and Islam (after returning from his trip to Mecca, Malcolm X totally dropped his “blue eyed white devils” nonsense; Islam cured him from Elijah Muhammad’s crude racism!).
What happened after WWII?
Simply put, the end of WWII saw an ideological alliance between Anglos and Zionists. Why? Mainly for two very different reasons:
Their common hatred and fear of Stalin (who is always and *wrongly* accused of hostility towards Jews)
A recognition of very similar worldviews (exceptionalism, supremacism)
Basically, the racist worldview of (Pharisaic) “Judaism” blended with the historical racist worldview of the leaders of the Anglosphere to create the modern Anglo-Zionism.
Do I even need to mention that both worldviews are not only based on lies, they use lies as their primary, go-to, “weapon” against anybody dares who oppose them. You could say that the following verse by Saint John the Apostle, Evangelist and Theologian are the best description of the ideological cornerstone of both wordviews: “Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it” (John 8:44). Notice how closely Saint John connects lies and homicidal violence – these always go hand in hand!
During the Cold War, most of that hatred was directed at Communism, at least officially (after 1991 it became pretty clear that even without Communism the leaders of the West hated the Russian people). After the 9/11 false flag, that hatred was directed at any state which would defy the West and Israel, and at any form of real, traditional, Islam.
I often smile when I hear the endless discussion about whether the dog is wagging its tail or the tail wag the dog. In reality, this does not matter because the dog and the tail are one and the same organism, fully united in their purposes and goals. And the point is, therefore, not who wags whom, but what the entire animal wants to achieve.
Originally, of course, the Anglos had mostly disdain for their up and coming Jewish counterparts, but money is much more powerful than any other consideration (at least in the West) and soon the part of the Anglo elites which was willing to adopt Zionism’s core values/reflexes easily out-competed the Anglo “old guard” which did not want to yield any real power to what they saw as their Jewish competitors. And that is how AngloZionism was born.
What about “Israel” in all this?
The USA is probably the first and only country on the planet created by members of a demonic secret cult, that is Freemasonry (the fact that this Freemasonry had some external features of pseudo-Christianity does not change this). “Israel” might well be the only country in history built purely on lies, also a sure sign of the “father of all lies”. From the infamous “country without people for a people without country” to a complete ban on honest investigation into WWII or into the other founding myths of the state of Israel, to the endless “right” of this country to exist – “Israel’s” entire existence is predicated on the usual demonic pair: lies and violence. In fact, while there were, and still are, plenty of states out there ruled by racists, Israeli is the only OPENLY racist state on the planet. And this is why, for example, any Jew on the planet has the “right” to “return” to the state of “Israel” while a refugee born in Palestine has no right to return to his own home. In “Israel” some are simply more equal than others! Officially.
Is “Israel” unique in its systematic use of lies and violence? No, not at all. But it is unique in its unapologetic use of lies and violence to not only to achieve some specific geopolitical goals, but also to feed its cult of self-worship and sense of racial superiority above the “goyim” who, as we all know, “only understand violence”.
Yes, “Israel” is an abomination which no civilized person or society can accept, nevermind endorse. But “Israel” is far more than that – it is also the litmus test of obedience to ruling classes of the West. You can think of it as an Asch Conformity Experiment, but on a planetary scale, and one which you are asked not to only reject what your senses tell you, but one which shows how much you are willing to suppress you own conscience and embrace pure evil.
Those who embrace this lie become bound not only by a common worldview, but they become accomplices in something unspeakably evil and false. Such people are much more than just bystanders to a slow-motion genocide, but they are also experts at Orwell’s doublethink: when told to, they will gladly proclaim that right is wrong, white is black and reality whatever the ruling elites decree it to be.
For these people, neither “truth” nor “reality” make any difference. None!
Such people are authoritarians not only because they love to give orders and impose their lies upon others, they are also authoritarians because they love to get orders and execute them (see here for an interesting discussion of this type of person).
Having said all that, we can we observe today?
Simply put, what we observe is a shameful and disgraceful attitude by almost every country out there. And I will begin my denunciation of this state of affairs with Russia.
No, Russia is not “in cahoots” with “Israel” or Netanyahu! This kind of crap is spread by infantiles who don’t understand how true complexity of the competition between states and by people who are paid (in money or recognition) to spread FUD (fear uncertainty and doubt) about Putin and Russia.
However, Russian leaders are showing an ice-cold indifference to the plight of the Palestinian people. Oh sure, Russia officially supports all the relevant UNSC Resolutions about “Israel” and the Palestinians, but other than paying them lip-service, Russia does absolutely nothing against the “Israelis” as long as Russian interests are not directly affected or threatened. I guess you can call it “Realpolitik” but I call it immoral and criminal indifference and I find is shameful. Russia will never be come a truly Orthodox country again until it renounces such ugly forms of “pragmatism” and until moral/ethics return to the center state of the core values of Russian society and Russian policies.
In sharp contrast, and in spite of being much weaker than Russia while living its entire existence under the threat of attack by the AngloZionist, the Iranians have steadfastly placed morals over so-called “pragmatism” when dealing with the issue of “Israel” and the Palestinian people. Of sure, of course, not all Iranians are that pure and noble, enough to see how Rafsanjani’s “Gucci Revolution” was backed to the hilt by Zionists to see that not everything is perfect in Iran. But humans are the same everywhere. What makes Iran so dramatically different is not that Iranians are “better” people, but that Iran officially places moral, ethical and even religious values at the cornerstone of its worldview and policies! That is quite remarkable, and unique, and puts the shame the rest of the planet.
What about the current war in the Ukraine?
Today we are all fixated on the war between NATO and Russia in the Ukraine, and this is quite logical. After all there is a fair chance that the freaks who run the Empire will prefer the destruction of the entire northern hemisphere to a (now quite inevitable) Russian victory. However, we should not kid ourselves, this war is not, repeat, NOT about the Ukraine or even the future of the EU. This is a war which will decide whether the AngloZionist will take full control of our planet or whether the last empire in history will be replaced by a multi-polar, multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-cultural, multi-political international order regulated by the rule of law. Thus “Israel” has a HUGE stake in it, and no, *not* because the “(((Khazarians)))” wand to create a new state in the Ukraine or Crimea, but because if the AngloZionist Empire falls, the Zionist regime in “Israel” will have to either renounce its worldview of “God given racism” or, indeed, face its demise as predicted by Imam Khomeini when he said: “this regime that is occupying Qods [Jerusalem] must be eliminated from the pages of history“.
In the case of the Nazi run Banderastan, we saw the Ukrainian Nazis and the Israeli Nazis work hand in hand, while at the same time the Israelis pretended to maintain equidistance between the two belligerents. Yes, the Ukronazis and the Israelis do hate each other too, but much less than they hate Russia and everything Russian. What better example of the Zionist moral flexibility then to see “Israelis” sending weapons and “volunteer” instructors to the Bandera-worshipping Nazis in Kiev and against the people who liberated Jew from the Nazi camps! Ditto for the so-called (and much misrepresented, see here, here or here) “pogroms” which were all located in what is today’s Ukraine and not in Russia. As for the infamous (and also much misrepresented, see here, here or here) Pale of Settlement, how is is different from the wall the “Israelis” built to prevent Palestinians from freely loving across their own land? In fact, any serious comparison of the two would immediately show that the latter is infinitely worse than the former.
And yet.
The truth is that the rabbinical/Pharisaic hatred of Russia is not based on history or any past wrongs, but on purely religious reasons: rabbinical/Pharisaic “Judaism” is an anti-Christianity just in the same was as the Latin Papacy is an anti-Orthodoxy! Why? Because Christians claim to the the “real Jews” (in spiritual terms) and Orthodox Christians claim to be the “true Church”. In other words, Orthodox Christianity challenges and debunks both the Judaic claim to the Old Testament and the Latin claim to the New Testament.
Does it really surprise anyone to see the Latins working hand in hand with their “elder brothers in the faith” who “await the same messiah”?
There is also the fact that the Russian society today, while not truly Christian by a long stretch, is yet unwilling to give up the moral/ethical values of true Christianity. Even “worse” is the real possibility that Russia might return to her true Christian roots, especially after the conclusion of the NATO war against Russia (assuming it does not end in a nuclear apocalypse, which it well might).
And no, it is no coincidence at all that the key actors (Nuland, Kagan, Blinken, etc.) are all Zionist Jews. There are objective reasons for that. Yet, we must always remember the words of Saint Paul who wrote “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (Eph 6:12). We must remember these words not only because innocent people have no nationality, including innocent victims, or because there is no such thing as “collective guilt”, but because we – unlike the Latins – cannot defend true Christianity while ignoring its key teachings! It is as wrong to deny the nature of this warfare as it is wrong to deny its spiritual, and not ethnic, nature. At the very core, we are dealing with a stark choice:
Do we accept the common humanity of all people or
Do we reject it
If the latter, than your place with with the Nazis, be them German or Israelis. If accept that common humanity – then act on it and never allow yourself to be brought down by the fact that our enemies do not share this key value. It is really that simple!
Conclusion
Ever since the 2014 coup in Kiev I have been almost exclusively focused on the Ukrainian civil war and, after 2022, on the US/NATO war against Russia. Only rarely did I mention Zionism or Israel. Primarily because I simply did not have the time. And this is why today, in what shall be my last posted analysis on the Saker blog I wanted to revisit that topic again. At over 4000 words, the above is not indented as an exhaustive discussion of the topic. My hope is that what I wrote above my seen enticing enough for you, the reader, to pursue your own research into this immense and complex topic. I think you could do worse than reading the various texts I have mentioned above. But the choice is yours.
I want to conclude this post with the words of Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his famous text “Live not by the lie“. I hope that they will inspire you.
When violence bursts onto the peaceful human condition, its face is flush with self-assurance, it displays on its banner and proclaims: “I am Violence! Make way, step aside, I will crush you!” But violence ages swiftly, a few years pass—and it is no longer sure of itself. To prop itself up, to appear decent, it will without fail call forth its ally—Lies. For violence has nothing to cover itself with but lies, and lies can only persist through violence. And it is not every day and not on every shoulder that violence brings down its heavy hand: It demands of us only a submission to lies, a daily participation in deceit—and this suffices as our fealty. And therein we find, neglected by us, the simplest, the most accessible key to our liberation: a personal nonparticipation in lies! Even if all is covered by lies, even if all is under their rule, let us resist in the smallest way: Let their rule hold through me! We are not called upon to step out onto the square and shout out the truth, to say out loud what we think—this is scary, we are not ready. But let us at least refuse to say what we do not think! This is the way, then, the easiest and most accessible for us given our deep-seated organic cowardice, much easier than (it’s scary even to utter the words) civil disobedience à la Gandhi. Our way must be: Never knowingly support lies! Having understood where the lies begin (and many see this line differently)—step back from that gangrenous edge! Let us not glue back the flaking scales of the Ideology, not gather back its crumbling bones, nor patch together its decomposing garb, and we will be amazed how swiftly and helplessly the lies will fall away, and that which is destined to be naked will be exposed as such to the world. And thus, overcoming our temerity, let each man choose: Will he remain a witting servant of the lies (needless to say, not due to natural predisposition, but in order to provide a living for the family, to rear the children in the spirit of lies!), or has the time come for him to stand straight as an honest man, worthy of the respect of his children and contemporaries?
Protest against the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of Antisemitism in London. (Photo: Video Grab)
– Jamal Kanj is the author of “Children of Catastrophe,” Journey from a Palestinian Refugee Camp to America, and other books. He writes frequently on Arab world issues for various national and international commentaries. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle
Imagine in post-apartheid South Africa if blacks practiced racism against whites, and then African American rights groups defended those policies under the pretext of slavery and past oppression of Africans.
There’s no need to imagine, that is exactly what major Jewish rights organizations, such as the Anti -Defamation League (ADL) had done to normalize Israel’s depopulation of Palestine since 1948, and continue to defend Israel’s apartheid practices against Palestinians, today. Not because of Jewish historical grievances against Palestinians, Arabs, or Muslims, but rather for the maltreatment of Jews in Europe.
To ensure the hegemony of the Zionist narratives, ADL, American Jewish Committee, Jewish Congress, AIPAC, etc., used the antisemitism label as an intellectual terror tool to silence critics of Israel equating them with Jewish haters. To the point where Jewish rights organizations’ adherence to the political Zionist project, Israel, is evident in their willingness to whitewash anti-Jewish tropes so long as the Jewish hater is inexplicably a friend of Israel. Conversely, they’d eagerly defile proven anti-racist civil rights pundits, including Jews, and international rights organizations if they dare to challenge Israeli policies.
The term, anti-Jewish hatred, is applied here instead of the sweeping antisemite political label so as not to clump Jewish haters with well-established Israeli and international rights groups such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem, …etc. This is particularly important when supposed Jewish rights organizations purposefully convolute Jewish hate with fact-based political criticism of Israel.
Furthermore, the term Semite is often misused when ascribed to Jews with no proven genetic connections to the original Semites of Mesopotamia, and with an implicit racist intent to exclude non-Jewish Semitic people.
I’m cognizant of the sensitivity when comparing political Zionism to supremacist groups like the Nazis. However, as a Palestinian victim of the Zionist political project, who grew up in a refugee camp, and the son of parents who were refused the right of return to their own homes, simply because they were not Jewish, I understand the ills of dehumanization just like European Jews who suffered under the Nazi program.
To contextualize my proposition, I watched with disgust the appointment of the Jewish racist, Bezalel Smotrich, as a minister in the current Israeli government. The Ukrainian Jewish descendant once addressed a native Palestinian (Israeli) lawmaker stating: “You’re here by accident because (David) Ben-Gurion didn’t finish the job.”
The “job” the most likely Khazar Jewish convert refers to is Ben-Gurion’s order to forcefully evict my parents, along with 780,000 other Palestinians from their homes in 1948, and razing more than 500 villages to the ground. The Palestinian (Israeli) lawmaker was an offspring of the 150,000 natives who managed to stay under the newly imposed state.
In juxtaposing the quintessential racist nature of the maligned oppressors, I am in no way comparing historical Jewish suffering to Palestinians’ pain. Just as I wouldn’t draw any comparison between the slavery of Africans and the ordeal of Aboriginals in the new world. Rather than competing on the scale of grief and victimhood, it would be more productive for all of us to acknowledge that pain is distinctive, individualistic, and real.
Equally, and in order to draw the appropriate conclusions, those experiences should be introduced within a contemporary context. For example, within roughly 15 years, WWII crimes against Jews were recognized, the new Germany acknowledged the harrowing atrocities of the Nazis, compensated victims or their progeny, and restituted their right to go back to their homes.
In contrast, 75 years later, the people of Palestine continue to endure Israeli apartheid occupation, and the expelled population or their descendants are refused the right of return to their original homes.
According to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), when I demand justice for my expelled parents or when I contrast the sins of the Nazi attempts to depopulate Europe of Jews, and the Zionist depopulation of Palestine, IHRA characterizes this as “Anti-Semite.”
ADL, IHRA and others use the “antisemitic” political label as a blanket defense to censor public discourse, more so when they fail to argue facts and deeds regarding indefensible Israeli malevolent policies. For them, Israel is a sacred cow, and unlike other political entities they’d give themselves the right to criticize, Israel is untouchable, and above all, is immune from reproach by a Jew or gentile.
Additionally, they fail to provide empirical evidence that criticizing Israeli policies leads to Jewish hatred, nor is there any validation that revering Israel―the Anglicans and Trump’s veneration are just examples―curbs the rise of hate. To the contrary, there are reasons to believe that observed spikes of anti-Jewish incidents are linked to Jewish rights groups’ efforts to conflate Jewish values with Israel’s immoral policies more than anything else.
ADL, IHRA et al. have no monopoly on grief. Having been a victim of past injustice does not exonerate any group from inflecting future injustice. To quote the prominent Palestinian scholar, Edward Said, in his book Culture and Resistance, “there is a great difference between acknowledging Jewish oppression and using that as a cover for the oppression of another people.”
Exploiting the “antisemite” political label to blackmail critics of Israel is a cover for oppression, and it does not advance the fight against Jewish hatred. Instead, it exposes the hypocrisy of the tribal organizations, such as the ADL, and normalizes Israeli (Jewish) apartheid practices against Palestinians.
Israeli forces raided Jenin and killed nine people. (Photo: via ActiveStills.org)
– Benay Blend earned her doctorate in American Studies from the University of New Mexico. Her scholarly works include Douglas Vakoch and Sam Mickey, Eds. (2017), “’Neither Homeland Nor Exile are Words’: ‘Situated Knowledge’ in the Works of Palestinian and Native American Writers”. She contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
In the past few days, Palestine has witnessed heightened aggression by the Zionist government, while in the United States, five Memphis policemen brutally beat a young man to death after a routine traffic stop.
On the surface, these events are not related. A closer look at mainstream news coverage as well as systemic problems embedded in each society reveals how much they have in common.
On January 26, 2023, an article by Samidoun: Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network led with the headline “Massacre in Jenin: Resistance Continues Amid Occupation Killing of at Least 9 Palestinians,” followed by a photo of grieving women. The caption reads “Jenin bleeds but resists,” which is why Israel chose to murder 9 Palestinians that day, including a 61-year-old woman.
When CNN covered the same event it quoted no Palestinians, except for the Palestinian Authority (PA), but merely repeated justifications for the massacre from Israeli security forces, specifically that they were after a “terror squad [operating in Jenin] belonging to the Islamic Jihad terror organization.”
In this way, mainstream news turns resistance fighters into “terrorists” by quoting the perpetrators of the violence. “The Islamic Jihad terror operatives were heavily involved in executing and planning multiple major terror attacks, including shooting attacks on IDF soldiers and Israeli civilians,” the joint statement from the Israel Defense Forces, Israel Security Agency and Border Police said, thereby defending a preemptive massacre based on what might or might not happen.
On January 7, 2023, five Memphis police stopped Tyre Nichols, a young black man, for alleged “reckless driving.” In early reporting, CNN said that “a confrontation occurred” between the driver and police, after which he “fled on foot.” When the police apprehended him “another confrontation occurred” followed by his arrest.
After the release of bodycam footage and a surveillance camera mounted to a pole, the media changed its story. What the recordings showed was not a “confrontation,” but five black policemen viciously using their fists and a baton to beat a young, handcuffed man to death. The initial reaction is important, though, because it illustrated the ways that mainstream media listened only to the police in much the same way that they accepted as truth what Zionist officials held as their version of the massacre in Jenin.
In both cases, there is no effort to analyze cause and effect. Events are portrayed as singular in form, as if the occupation had not been abusing the occupied since 1948 as if there had never been a black person murdered by the police before Tyre Nichols.
In the foreword to Ramzy Baroud’s The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story (2018), Ilan Pappé describes Al-Nakba al-Mustamera, the ongoing Nakba (catastrophe), which he writes is “a common Palestinian reference to the age and time they have been living in during the last seventy years” (p. xi). In other words, the Nakba of 1948 is not merely a historical event but rather it comprises all of the oppression that they have been living under to this day.
“And indeed,” continues Pappé, “examining the history of the Zionist movement in Palestine, it transpires clearly that the settler colonial project that commenced in the late nineteenth century is not over yet; as is the struggle against it” (p. xi).
Yet Western media seldom looks back at the Zionist entity’s actions that resulted in a response, so consequently, resistance fighters are portrayed as terrorists whose deaths are justified in this light. Since the massacre at Jenin, there have been several reprisals on the part of the resistance, the first, the shooting of several Israelis in a Jerusalem synagogue, portrayed by police chief Yaakov Shabtai as “one of the worst terror attacks in the past few years.”
There is very little mention of what promoted the shooting, not only the massacre in Jenin but also the 75 years that came before it. In her recent book Imagining Palestine: Cultures of Exile and National Identity (2023), Tahrir Hamdi explains that “the violence of the colonizer is aimed at dehumanization and repression, but the violence of the colonized is meant to end that repression and to rehumanize the oppressed” (p. 146.) In this way, she continues, the colonized undergoes a transformation of the colonized into an “empowered being who is able to create the kind of fear in the colonizer that the colonizer created in the colonized” (p. 147).
This lack of context carries over to the United States each time a person of color, but also the poor of any race, are murdered by the police. “This is not just a professional failing,” Police Chief Cerelyn “CJ” Davis said. “This is a failing of basic humanity toward another individual. This incident was heinous, reckless and inhumane. And in the vein of transparency, when the video is released in the coming days, you will see this for yourselves.”
In this way, the murder of Tyre Nichols by the police is treated as a lone event committed by a couple of individuals who lacked humanity. Nevertheless, as activist/journalist Jon Jeter notes, the goal of the news and entertainment industry is to “decontextualize violence such as that visited upon this young brotha in Memphis and depict it as an isolated, aberrant occurrence.”
The reality is more “grotesque,” he adds, than the horrible scenes witnessed on the tapes. “America is an apartheid state,” he concludes (and here Jeter might include “Israel” as it is much the same). “It is organized around the principle of white supremacy.” So when it “terrorizes 42 million black people on the streets, in the schools, and courtrooms and workplaces,” the goal is to convince their targets that they are a “defeated people, and that any effort to resist is futile.”
As grass-roots organizer Bree Newsome Bass stated on Twitter: “How can it be racist if the police are Black? Because the institution of policing itself is racist.” Dating back to the days when Black people worked on the slave patrols, there as always been racism embedded in the system, so no amount of promoting diversity on the force will help. What is important is that people of color and the poor are most often victims of the system.
There are other similarities between the Zionist state and this culture of violence in the United States. When asked if the five police, in this case, will likely be indicted for their crimes, Ajama Baraka replied:
“They are scheduled to be sacrificed for the system – so yeah. Even if it is on lesser charges. That is why the Feds are around also. They will prosecute also if the state charges don’t stick. This is way beyond Memphis now. It is an ideological issue for the settler state globally so they are toast.”
Indeed, policing in the United States is a global issue. Palestine is Here, a website that tracks various exchanges with the Zionist state has documented that the Memphis police department has long sent its officers to Israel for training. In 2002, shortly after 911, the first training expedition took place under the guise of learning about “counter-terrorism,” which translated to mean how to deal with the unruly populations in your country. “Rather than promoting security for all, these programs facilitate an exchange of methods of state violence and control, including mass surveillance, racial profiling, and suppression of protest and dissent.”
Considering that policing began as a method to catch enslaved people who had run away from their masters, the force would still be racist even without the benefit of learning from their Israeli counterparts. Still, it links both settler colonial states in a common purpose: to control the oppressed in both countries.
“Jenin is bleeding and resisting,” concludes Samidoun, yet it is “refusing security coordination with the occupation and continuing to struggle, despite massacre after massacre, with the entire Palestinian people for the liberation of Palestine.” Despite all efforts to erase, intimidate, and invoke fear in the beleaguered population in Palestine and the US as well, the struggle for liberation goes on invoking all of us to support the occupied in their struggle for liberation and justice around the world.
UPROOTED PALESTINIANS: SALAM ALQUDS ALAYKUM 