FROM LIBYA TO PARAGUAY: ISRAEL’S LONGSTANDING GOAL OF EXPELLING PALESTINIANS FROM GAZA INCHES CLOSER TO REALITY

JANUARY 10TH, 2024

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Jessica Buxbaum is a Jerusalem-based journalist for MintPress News covering Palestine, Israel, and Syria. Her work has been featured in Middle East Eye and The New Arab and Gulf News.

Jessica Buxbaum

Once considered a fringe pipe dream, the once taboo idea of Israelis recolonizing portions of Gaza has been reinvigorated after Hamas’ October 7 attack and the subsequent Israeli war on the embattled Palestinian territory, which has killed more than 22,000 Palestinians, internally displaced more than 1.9 million, and reduced the majority of the Strip into rubble.

Just as 2024 began, Israeli politicians renewed calls to recolonize Gaza, and recent remarks from Israeli lawmakers coupled with a new settler-colonist campaign suggest that Israeli annexation of the beleaguered Palestinian territory has been adopted as official government policy.

On January 1, 2024, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir told the press and members of his Jewish Power Party that the war presents an “opportunity to concentrate on encouraging the migration of the residents of Gaza,” proclaiming,

“We cannot withdraw from any territory we are in in the Gaza Strip. Not only do I not rule out Jewish settlement there, I believe it is also an important thing“

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich echoed Ben Gvir’s remarks during his party’s faction meeting, touting,

“[the] correct solution [is]… to encourage the voluntary migration of Gaza’s residents to countries that will agree to take in the refugees“

Talking to members of his Religious Zionism Party, Smotrich predicted that “Israel will permanently control the territory of the Gaza Strip,” as well as reestablish settlements there. A few days before, in an interview with Israel’s Channel 12, Smotrich said,

“We will rule there [Gaza] security-wise, and in order to rule there security-wise for a long time, we will have to be a civilian there“

In a separate incident on Monday, Yisrael Beytenu (“Israel is our home”) party leader Avigdor Liberman advocated for Israel to reoccupy southern Lebanon. Israel occupied part of southern Lebanon from 1982 to 2000.

Liberman maintained that Israel would not annex or build settlements in Lebanon but stressed:

“[e]verything between the Litani [River] and Israel must be under the control of the IDF [Israeli military].”

“If Lebanon won’t pay in territory, we haven’t done anything,” Liberman said.

And just before the new year, on December 27, 2023, Tzivka Foghel, a member of Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Power Party, told Israeli Kan radio that Hamas “will pay the price, that we will control the area and bring Jewish settlements.” Foghel clarified he doesn’t just want to re-establish the settlements Israel withdrew from in 2005 but rather take over the entire northern section of the Gaza Strip.

Israeli lawmakers’ inflammatory rhetoric mirrors parts of Israeli society pushing for Israeli settler-colonists to return to the Gaza Strip and even colonize Lebanon. The December 1 issue of Israeli religious youth magazine, “Small World,” outlined five new Israeli settlements south of the Litani River in what would become occupied Lebanon as part of their proposal for the war’s day-after plan.

In this weekend's #Israeli religious youth magazine ('Small World') a plan for five new Israeli settlements including Tyre – in what would be occupied #Lebanon (south of the Litani River) – is presented under the title "first draft for the day-after plan." Insane. pic.twitter.com/jJycHp2BfR

— Itay Epshtain (@EpshtainItay) December 1, 2023

In line with the politicians’ comments, the Israeli government recently allocated 4.3 million shekels ($1.2 million) in November to “document” Israeli settlements in Gaza, which were withdrawn in 2005. The project is to be handled by Israel’s Minister of Heritage, Amihai Eliyahu, who made headlines in recent months after calling for dropping nuclear bombs on Gaza.

UPDATE: Overnight #Israel's government voted in favour of the 2023 budget revision, demonstrating, once again, that above all it is committed to the annexation of occupied #Palestinian territory and the dispossession of Palestinians. Israel's government disregards international…

— Itay Epshtain (@EpshtainItay) November 28, 2023

ISRAEL’S CAMPAIGN TO RESETTLE GAZA

During a meeting of hundreds of Israelis in the city of Ashdod in November, Yossi Dagan, head of the Samaria Regional Council, the government body overseeing settlements in the Israeli-occupied northern West Bank, encouraged participants to reach out to their government representatives in support of recolonizing Gaza. Dagan told the crowd,

Dagan is currently leading the Returning Home movement, a coalition of 11 organizations made up of thousands seeking to annul the core part of the 2005 Disengagement Law prohibiting an Israeli civilian presence in Gaza. The initiative has already received government support. Israeli parliamentary members from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party submitted a bill to amend the Disengagement Law to grant Israelis freedom of movement in Gaza after the war. Likud members of parliament (or Knesset) Ariel Kellner and Tally Gotliv spoke at the Returning Home inaugural event, along with Jewish Power Party MK Limor Son Har-Melech.

The “correct solution” to the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict is “to encourage the voluntary migration of Gaza’s residents to countries that will agree to take in the refugees,”“Israel will permanently control the territory of the Gaza Strip,” https://t.co/bJG9jFN0df pic.twitter.com/YxpwdAL5vO

— Abdullah Abu Shawesh (@AM_Shawesh) January 6, 2024

In March 2023, the Israeli parliament annulled part of the law forbidding Israeli settlement in the northern West Bank after Dagan lobbied for the legislative change. Dagan was evacuated from one of the four settlements in the northern West Bank in 2005. He did not respond to MintPress News requests for an interview.

A LONGSTANDING AGENDA

Israel occupied the Gaza Strip in 1967 during the Six-Day War and re-established the first settlement in 1970. In 2005, Israel evacuated around 9,000 Israeli settler-colonists from Gaza. Despite Israel dismantling the bloc of 17 settlements known as Gush Katif, human rights experts say the Gaza Strip remains occupied to this day.

“The test under international law as to whether or not a territory is being occupied and by whom is effective control,” Michael Lynk, who served as the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories from 2016 to 2022, told MintPress News.

“Hamas was ruling Gaza internally, but because Israel had this comprehensive air, sea, and land blockade over Gaza and controlled who and what got into Gaza and who and what left Gaza, it is the occupying power,” Lynk added.

Settler-colonist calls to return to Gaza began as soon as disengagement occurred, with government notions of reestablishing settlements in the Strip quietly materializing behind the scenes.

In 2018, reports revealed the Israeli military was shifting its offensive operations in Gaza from bombardment to carrying out missions that “will enter Gaza and dissect it in two, and even occupy significant parts of it.”

As a reminder, Israel has carried out several schemes throughout the decades to transfer Gaza’s population out of the Strip. Palestinian-Dutch analyst Mouin Rabbani wrote in Mondoweiss how, even before Israel occupied Gaza in 1967, it tried to push Palestinian refugees from Gaza to Libya and Iraq and, after its occupation, began encouraging emigration to the West Bank. In 1969, Israel attempted to send 60,000 Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to Paraguay with payment and the promise of citizenship. The plan was discontinued after two Palestinian transferees killed an Israeli embassy staff member in Asuncion.

After the Knesset vote last year to annul part of the 2005 Disengagement Law, Israeli lawmakers came out in support of a return to Gaza. MK Son Har-Melech urged Israelis not to fall into complacency.

Sara Malka of Crown Heights, Brooklyn protests in front of UN headquarters in New York against the removal of illegal Israeli settlers from Gaza in 2005. Mary Altaffer | AP

“We must not rest on our laurels or the euphoria of the moment,” Son Har-Melech said. “We must galvanize… the return home to the region of Gush Katif, which was abandoned [in 2005] in an act of terrible folly and has become a nest of terror.”

In a conversation with Israeli Channel 7, Minister of National Missions Orit Strock of the Religious Zionism party said, “I believe that, at the end of the day, the sin of the disengagement will be reversed.”

In response, the Israeli NGO Peace Now said, “It is clear that in addition to the judicial coup, a messianic revolution is taking place. This government will inevitably destroy our country. They will also deepen the occupation, ignite the region, and reestablish a Jewish supremacist regime from the river to the sea.”

“A HOUSE ON THE BEACH IS NOT A DREAM”

As the trend to recolonize Gaza spreads, Lynk considers the option of resettlement in Gaza — even with the state’s most right-wing government in its history — out of the question, explaining to MintPress News that:

“If the Americans have already said they’re not in favor of resettling Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip into Egypt or elsewhere in the world, you can be sure the Americans, as much as they’ve protected Israel, would be against any idea of reestablishing Israeli settlements in Gaza.”

While Netanyahu appears to have brushed off the notion of Israeli resettlement in Gaza, saying in December that “it’s not a realistic goal,” he has endorsed military control of the Strip. “Gaza will be demilitarized, and there won’t be any military threat threatening Israel from the Strip. For this to happen, control of the area is required,” Netanyahu said.

That idea was reiterated by Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant this week when he unveiled his post-war plan for Gaza, which would see Israel keeping security control of the Strip with an Israeli-guided Palestinian body carrying out administrative responsibilities.

Mairav Zonszein, an analyst at the nonprofit the International Crisis Group, doesn’t believe that top Israeli officials making the decisions on Gaza are aiming for resettlement. Still, she also doesn’t rule out the possibility.

“That’s not on their agenda, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t come to a point where that would be part of what we see, just because… it’s becoming more of a war of attrition,” Zonszein told MintPress News, emphasizing that while it might not be Netanyahu’s goal, he also hasn’t condemned politicians advocating for resettlement.

The idea of recolonizing Gaza is also gaining momentum with the Israeli public. Images of Israeli soldiers waving Gush Katif settlement flags in Gaza have circulated online. Israeli singers Hanan Ben Ari and Narkis have sung about returning to the settlements when performing for soldiers.

The renowned Israeli singer Hanan Ben Ari performed at an Israeli military base near the Gaza envelope, singing "We are returning to Gush Katif.”

Gush Katif was an Israeli settlement situated in the heart of the Gaza Strip 18 years ago.
pic.twitter.com/aGxc0gY6yX

— Younis Tirawi | يونس (@ytirawi) October 24, 2023

A Channel 12 poll in November found that 44% of Israelis favor renewing settlement in Gaza. When asked what should happen with Gaza when the war is over, 32% answered, “Israel should remain permanently and renew Jewish settlement.”

Under the banner, “A house on the beach is not a dream!” Harei Zahav, an Israeli real estate firm known for building settlements in the West Bank, advertised building Gaza settlements, writing, “We have begun clearing rubble and fending off squatters.”

Yet since sparking controversy, the company’s CEO, Zeev Epshtein, said it was simply a bad joke.

“It was a sort of satirical idea,” Epshtein told Haaretz. “We’re not building, and we have no intention of building. We want it to happen, but it’s the state’s decision. We have no influence on it.”

Despite claiming it was satire, the social media blunder illustrates how Israelis are responding in this moment.

Harei Zahav (Golden  Mountains), a settlement development enterprise is advertising for #Gaza settlements: “a house on the beach is not a dream! We have begun clearing rubble and fending off squatters.” – Itay Epshtain

“[Harei Zahav] name half a dozen reestablished and new #Israeli settlements, and show their approximate location throughout occupied #Gaza,” Israeli human rights lawyer Itay Epshtain wrote on the social media platform X. “While this is a media stunt, it captures a deep sentiment favoring territorial acquisition and colonization at the expanse [sic] of #Palestinians.”

Other events discussing Gaza resettlement have occurred since Returning Home’s November event. In December, during the Jewish festival of Hanukkah, a coalition of settler-colonist groups held the Practical Preparation for Gaza Settlement Conference in Tel Aviv. At the end of December, another group pushing for resettlement, Going Home – Returning to Gush Katif, also held a discussion featuring leaders of the Nachala settler-colonist movement, Daniella Weiss and Zvi Elimelech Sharbaf.

Going Home – Returning to Gush Katif declined to speak with MintPress News. Nachala is a prominent sponsor of the resettlement campaign, even releasing advertisements after the Tel Aviv conference stating, “Gaza is the Land of Israel! Fight. Liberate. Settle,” along with a hotline to register with the movement.

Earlier this week a coalition of settler organizations – generously funded by the state of #Israel – held the 'Practical Preparation for #Gaza Settlement Conference.' We would be mistaken to dismiss these ideas as fringe, as those are thepolitical forces that managed to colonize… pic.twitter.com/jAhzKVxg4U

— Itay Epshtain (@EpshtainItay) December 15, 2023

Nachala will hold a conference on January 28 in Jerusalem, presenting plans — including maps and the various stages — for colonizing Gaza. Nachala didn’t respond to MintPress News’ requests for comment but told Channel 12 that thousands of Israelis have expressed interest in joining the movement.

“The public demand for renewed settlement in the Gaza Strip is increasing. After the terrible massacre on October 7, there was a great call among the public that the victory of the war includes Jewish settlement in the Gaza Strip,” Nachala representatives told Channel 12.

Zonszein explained how settlement and safety often go hand-in-hand in the Israeli perspective.

“What Israel is doing in Gaza is very much in line with what it’s always done to occupied Palestinian territory,” Zonszein said. “That you need to put people on the ground — settlers and soldiers — in order to provide security has always been part of the Israeli understanding of how to do things.”

So, as the weeks turn into months and war rages, Israel’s settler-colonist fantasy could very well manifest into reality.

Netanyahu returns, but Israel’s political and military landscape has changed

Bibi is back, leading Israel’s most right-wing government but also facing unprecedented Palestinian resistance and global turmoil.

November 06 2022

Photo Credit: The Cradle

By Abdel Bari Atwan

While the Arab Summit in Algeria affirmed its adherence to the so-called ‘Arab Peace Initiative’ as a final solution to the Palestinian issue, Israel’s response came quickly and resolutely with the return to power of Benjamin Netanyahu and the anti-Arab religious Likud bloc.

In the 1 November legislative elections, Israelis voted in large numbers for the anti-Arab, racist, religious parties, which openly embrace a policy of killing and expelling Palestinians from all of occupied Palestine, and promote a solely Jewish-Zionist identity of the country.

The “Jewish Power” party, which won 15 seats, and is led by the two most racist figures in the short history of the Jewish state, Bezael H. Cherish and his deputy Itamar Ben Gvir, will be the backbone of Netanyahu’s coalition government.

The leader of this party, which will be the most prominent partner of the Arab monarchs who signed peace agreements with Israel, has called for killing Arabs, expelling them and wrapping the bodies of the martyrs in pigskin “in honor” of them.

Normalization the new norm

Nonetheless, it is likely that red carpets will be laid out for Ben Gvir and Netanyahu in Arab capitals, where they will enjoy Arab hospitality and drink from their gilded goblets. Indeed, there is no difference between the winning Israeli coalition and the defeated one (Lapid-Gantz).

Both converge on their mutual hostility and hatred of Arabs and Muslims. General Benny Gantz, the Israeli Minister of Defense in the previous government, used to boast that he was the Israeli who killed the largest number of Arabs – and this is true, as his government has killed 166 Palestinians since the beginning of this year.

There is a silver lining, however: This racist government will hasten Israel’s demise and lead to its inevitable end, not at the hands of the battered Arab armies, but at the hands of the Palestinian resistance and their regional allies, their missiles and drones.

There are three steps that the Netanyahu government and his extremist coalition may take upon assuming power:

First, a return to reviving the Trump-era ‘Deal of the Century,’ the annexation of the West Bank, and the deportation of most of its Palestinian residents to Jordan as an “alternative homeland.”

Second, the escalation of incursions into the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the consolidation of Jewish control over East Jerusalem, and the obliteration of its Arab and Islamic identity. The first step may be dividing it on the model of the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron, then demolishing it, and erecting the alleged “temple” on its ruins.

Third, the canceling or freezing of the maritime border demarcation agreement with Lebanon, similar to what happened to the Oslo Accords with Palestinians. Netanyahu announced his intent to do so openly in his election campaign.

This option appears especially likely given that extraction of gas and oil from the Karish field has already begun, while the Qana field, which was “partially” recognized as Lebanese, remains untouched, with no surveys or exploration conducted until this moment.

It is likely that the Lebanese gas fields will lay dormant for the foreseeable future. The same US mediators did not guarantee the implementation of even 1 per cent of the Oslo Accords, and they will most likely not guarantee the rights of the Lebanese people.

Renewed Palestinian armed resistance

But Netanyahu is set to assume control over a very different state of affairs, both domestically and internationally. For starters, Israel is facing an escalating internal conflict, and most importantly, a revived intifada in the form of West Bank armed resistance.

We cannot talk about West Bank resistance without discussing the phenomenon of The Lions’ Den whose political and military influence is expanding, while the Palestinian public’s embrace of the movement is growing. Not a day passes without witnessing a commando operation in various parts of the West Bank; in Nablus, Jenin and Hebron – later in Ramallah, and then in the pre-1948 occupied Palestinian territories.

Netanyahu may succeed in including one or two more Arab governments in the Abraham Accords, which was signed under his last premiership. However, such political acrobatics will have no value in light of the “awakening” of the Palestinian people and their return to armed resistance.

The returning Netanyahu will not forget the May 2021 battle of the “Sword of Jerusalem” that humiliated him, and its missiles that isolated the occupying state for more than 11 days, forcing millions of Israeli settler-colonizers into shelters and bunkers.

These missiles are still present and ready, along with hundreds of armed drones. Perhaps it is also worth reminding the incoming Israeli Prime Minister of how he ended an electoral meeting in the city of Ashdod (my ancestors’ hometown) and fled in terror from the 400 missiles launched by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) movement in retaliation for the assassination of its leader, Baha Abu al-Atta.

Just another day in the office?

The “Israel” to which Netanyahu returns is not the same Israel he left, and the world he knew when he was last in power, is not the same world today. His US supporter is mired in an unprecedented proxy war of attrition with Russia in Ukraine, where his co-religionist, Volodymyr Zelensky, has so far lost about a fifth of his country’s territory, and has plunged it into darkness and despair.

While Netanyahu is viewed as as being close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, that friendship had deepened before the Ukraine war. The situation has now changed dramatically, and he will be forced to choose between Washington and Moscow in an era of multipolarity.

As for the Lions’ Den, they have effectively changed all the equations and rules of engagement in occupied Palestine – and perhaps in the Arab world as well – and within this context will actually “welcome” the hardliner Netanyahu’s return to power.

The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.

A Forgotten Anniversary

June 12, 2022

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By Jimmie Moglia

It is a property of the past to sink into oblivion, and of unpleasant truths to fade into evanescence. To such past belongs the attack on the USS Liberty.

When to the session of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past, Israel’s 1967 war of Middle East invasion is/was for me but a negligible blip compared to other important personal events. Such as my getting ready to read the thesis for my degree in Electronic Engineering, in Genova, Italy.

Therefore, without particular consciousness I submitted to the sentences of the official media without examining the authority of the judge.

My first doubts arose not long later when I decided to visit the Eastern Orthodox Saint Catherine’s Monastery, located on the Sinai Peninsula at the very foot of Mt. Sinai. It could then only be reached from Tel Aviv via Sharm-el-Sheikh and a bus trip.

On welcoming the tourists on the bus the guide announced with pride that the Sinai was “now and forever an unalienable part of Israel.” I found the declaration irrelevant, if not odd, but I consider that moment as the beginning of my associated historical interest.

The official US line is that, on Jun 8, 1967, the Israelis mistakenly attacked by air, and torpedoed by sea, an unarmed US intelligence ship, killing 34 sailors and wounding 171 others. 2022 marks the 55th anniversary of that attack.

Following are some details of the ship, of the episode and of its aftermath. For, similar to occasions that perhaps we all have felt, a detail that uncalled-for returns to mind, rekindles fuller memories of a larger connected event, not otherwise spontaneously recalled. The detail is the inspired arrogance of the Israeli guide I mentioned. More in general, I think that the attack on the Liberty dramatically demonstrates the nature of who exercises actual power in the United States.

As in most cases involving Israel, any attempt to give a factual account of an event, fails in its promised impartiality. For in the corrupted currents of the world, the very terms ‘Jew’ or ‘Jewish,’ unless associated with praise or deference, taint their utterer with a halo of anti-Semitism.

That is, there is no neutral use of the words. The issue is very old and well explained, for example, by Jewish writer Joshua Trachtenberg in his book “The Devil and the Jews.” Where he documents how there has been a propensity at large, dating back to medieval times, to ascribe a legendary element of a biblical and obscure nature to the word ‘Jew’. That propensity has sunk into what Jung called “collective unconsciousness.”

I should also add that two men observing the same object will describe it differently, according to the point of view from which either beholds it. In the eyes of one it shall be a fair prospect, to the other a barren waste, and neither may see right. Wherefore, truth being the legitimate object of history, it is better that she should be sought-for by many than by few. Lest, for want of seekers, among the mists of prejudice and the false lights of interest, she is lost altogether.

The Liberty was first launched at the end of WW2 in Oregon and named then “Simmons Victor.” It belonged to a fleet of cargo carriers quickly built (one every 10 weeks), to replace the losses to submarine attacks during WW2.

Reconverted into a spy ship in 1964, she was renamed “Liberty”. On May 24, 1967, she was dispatched from the Ivory Coast to the Eastern Mediterranean, to monitor radio signals from both Egyptians and Israeli sources, as tensions grew between Israel and the Arab world.

While it is now acknowledged that Israel started the 1967 war, the only and univocal information channels of the time told the public that Egypt attacked and that Israel “had the right to defend itself” – a sentence now imprinted in the US collective mind, and repeated every time when Israel mounts an aggression, carpet bombs Gaza, demolishes Palestinian homes, builds Jewish “settlements” in Palestinian land, erects walls to keep the Palestinians out of the way, and kills Palestinians at large.

In May 1967, McNamara, the famous defense secretary, rendered infamous for his role in the Vietnam war, had informed Israel’s foreign minister that American intelligence showed Egypt did not plan to attack. And Johnson, then US president, had feebly called on Israel not to start a war. A call with as much effect as the “concern” of succeeding US presidents, whenever Palestinians are dispossessed of their lands and new massive Jewish colonial settlements are established on Palestinian land.

1967, in my view, is a historical milestone for the US and its vassalage to Zionist interests – for previous administrations were or seemed to be somewhat more reserved.

For example and for a time, the Jews hailed Roosevelt as a modern-day Moses, until some of his actions and unofficial records surfaced from the archives. Vice President Henry Wallace annotated in his diary a discussion between Roosevelt and Churchill (May 1943), on how to settle the “Jewish question.”

The notes say, “The President approved a plan to ‘spread the Jews thin’ all over the world. He said he had tried this experiment in the Meriweather County in Georgia (where he lived in the 1920s,) by adding only four or five Jewish families at each place. He claimed that the local population would have no objection if there were no more than that.” This was enough for the Jewish community at large to label Roosevelt a ‘traitor.’

In 1948 Truman recognized Israel but did not sell arms to the Jewish state. And in 1956, when Israel seized the Sinai Peninsula and the Suez Canal, Eisenhower threatened intervention and a halt to all foreign aid, if Israel did not withdraw.

But by 1960, President Kennedy had well understood Jewish power and its influence on domestic policies – he delivered sophisticated armaments and strengthened relations with Israel.

Johnson equaled or bettered Kennedy. After Kennedy’s assassination he said to an Israeli diplomat, “You have lost a very great friend, but you have found a better one.” And he chose and appointed a full cadre of Jewish and pro-Israel advisers to the White House.

On Jun 8, 1967, reconnaissance flights over the Liberty, sailing about 15 miles off the Egyptian coast, began at 5.15 AM, the next round at 8.50 AM and several other Israeli planes and jets circled the ship until 12.45 PM.

At 1.30 PM three Israeli Mirage jets began the attack. Completely taken by surprise, Liberty’s skipper William McGonagle ordered the only two 0.50 mm guns manned and fired – they were quickly taken out by the jets and the gunners pulverized before they could fire the first shots, however ineffective could the shots be anyway.

The attacks continued, one every 45 seconds, as the jets strafed the ship and circled back for another round. They hit with cannon and rockets. Then they aimed at the engine room below the smoke stack. Next came Napalm bombs that turned the deck into an inferno.

Six minutes into the attack, the Liberty, with whatever communication resources were left, radioed for help to the Sixth fleet located further west. “Any station, any station, this is Rockstar, we are under attack.” The operator on the aircraft carrier Saratoga could not understand the message. On the Liberty they changed transmitter. After some interminable minutes Saratoga replied “Roger” and Liberty screamed, “We are under attack and need immediate assistance.”

But now the Saratoga operator asked for the identification code. The Liberty’s operator, with cannon from three jets strafing the ship, had to retrieve the code from a book, and finally Saratoga replied reassuringly, “Authentication is correct. I am standing by for further traffic.”

Meanwhile, before the air attack began, the Liberty’s radar operator had spotted three unidentified ships approaching fast, and alerted the captain. In the confusion and carnage that followed, as the dead and wounded piled on deck, no one thought of the approaching ships. Now Captain McGonagle saw through his binoculars that the three boats, maneuvering in attack formation, were Israelis. Up to that moment he and everybody else thought that the attackers were Egyptians.

In the meantime the original mast with the US flag had been hit – and the Liberty sailors raised a new larger American flag.

The forward torpedo boat opened fire on the defenseless ship. This would provide cover for the attacking boats to get close and launch their torpedoes. Though crippled himself and with a crippled ship operating with one engine, McGonagle attempted evasive maneuvers. Of the 5 torpedoes launched by the Israelis, one hit – creating a gash 24 ft high and 39 ft wide. The Liberty listed by 8 degrees; the entire intelligence section was instantly flooded trapping and killing 20 people.

Now the torpedo boats halted fire while remaining at less than 800 yards from the Liberty. Still shocked, amazed and in disbelief, the Liberty signaled repeatedly with a hand-held Aldis lamp, “US Naval Ship.” “

Do you need any help?” signaled the Israelis. A response that, in the circumstances, was almost adding insult to injury. “No” signaled back the Liberty.

The torpedo boats had not yet departed when two oncoming Israeli helicopters circled the ship. Fearful of more attacks, McGonagle had the international flag hoisted signaling “Not Under Command.”

At 6.40 PM another Israeli helicopter arrived and dropped a bag containing a business card from the US Naval Attaché at the US Embassy in Tel Aviv, Ernest Castle. On the back of the card there was a hand-written question, “Have you any casualties?” Which seemed another insult added to injury. The Liberty’s deck was a wreck, still strewn with blood and some dead sailors… impossible to miss.

How about the call for help from the Sixth Fleet? After the signal was authenticated, the Saratoga launched some fighter jets but, moments later they were unexpectedly and inexplicably recalled, waiting for the arrival of another aircraft carrier, the America.

Eventually, the planes from the America took off and the squadron leader, while reassuring the Liberty radio operator, asked a logical question, “We are on the way, who is the enemy?” Good question. For the sailors on the Liberty, as well as Captain McGonagle could not as yet believe their eyes that the enemies were the Israelis.

At that moment, 4.14 PM, both the Saratoga and the America received a message from the US Embassy in Tel Aviv, as follows, “Israeli aircraft erroneously attacked US ship. Israel sends apologies and wants to know which other US ships are near the war zone.” The US carriers immediately recalled all air strikes.

The first US ship to reach the Liberty to carry away the dead and wounded arrived at 6.40 AM the next day. It took three days for the crippled vessel to arrive at Malta. 20 corpses had remained unreachable in the area hit by the torpedo, drenching the ship with a smell of death.

The plan was to repair the Liberty, enabling her return to the US. It was the beginning of a tortuous public relations battle.

While the ship was still en route to Malta, some White House advisers in Washington suggested sinking it, to avoid or minimize embarrassment.

In Malta, a large tarpaulin-looking cover hid the gash caused by the torpedoes. All crewmembers, injured and uninjured were ordered, under threat of punishment, not to answer any questions from the press.

Meantime in the US, the Administration struggled to find what to say or do. The US press was jubilant about Israel’s victory in the Six Day War. The Jews organized a rally in Washington to celebrate it. Placards said “Moses led us out of the land of Egypt, now Moshe Dayan has led us back.” Jewish White House aids Levinson and Wattenberg, in a memo to the President, suggested that he express his full support for Israel. David Ginsburg, a president’s friend and leader of the Jewish community even wrote the encomiastic speech that the President would later deliver at the rally.

In the jubilation for Israel’s victory, the Liberty affair appeared a minor incident. The press completely bought the idea that the Israeli attack was an error. Senator Jacob Javits, stated, “With Israel we know it was a mistake, a miscalculation could take place in any place in the world.” Incidentally, Jacob Javits is the same senator who pushed through immigration reforms intended to make Americans of European descent a minority. Today any restraint is gone. The message that Europeans and Americans of European descent should become a disposable minority has almost become mainstream.

In the meantime, Egypt had accepted the cease-fire, but Israel had opened another front in Syria, to occupy the Golan Heights. As for the Liberty, the main interest of the media was not the attack, the dead and the wounded, but why the Navy had a ship in the area. Which shows how often trifles excite an exuberance of interest, while the core of an event receives lesser or little attention.

The first official White House explanation said it was a scientific research ship doing its job, but this did not satisfy the press. If so, why not inform the Israelis of the ship’s presence?

The administration then concocted an even more unbelievable story. The Liberty was verifying if communications exchanged by bouncing signals off the moon were reliable. In scope and absurdity, the explanation parallels the answer given by the head of NIST (National Institute of Research and Technology), Shyam Sunder, while presenting the official NIST report on 9/11.

During the conference, a physics teacher, David Chandler, had clearly demonstrated with a video, that building 7 had fallen at the acceleration of gravity, the signature of a controlled demolition. Unable to challenge the basics of physics, the director said, “Gravity is the force that keeps the universe together.” (I am not making it up)

As the number of reported Liberty casualties mounted, one reporter, during a press meeting, asked what was the President’s reaction. The Whitehouse spokesman replied that the President was “deeply grieved.”

In the meantime, Israel claimed that the Liberty, when spotted, appeared to escape at high speed toward Egypt, flew no flag and looked like an Egyptian cargo ship, the “El Queseir”, which was actually half the size of the Liberty and designed to carry 400 men and 40 horses.

Though almost incredible today, the Liberty attack stirred little interest or controversy at the time. But we must remember the moment, filled with enthusiasm about Israel’s victory, which, thanks to the Jewish sponsored massive celebrations, made it almost appear as an American victory. And, more ominously, the moment was filled with concerns about the mounting problems in Vietnam.

Besides, the dead and wounded of the Liberty were less than the price paid in one day by America, in life and limb, to ‘defend democracy’ in Vietnam.

The New York Times called the attack one of the “many mistakes that invariably occur in war…. the Israeli, flushed with victory made an error in identification… accident rather than design snuffed out (sic) the lives of some and caused injuries to others of the Liberty’s crew.”

One other striking aspect of the aftermath was the almost total lack of concern for the victims, whose reported number increased each day, while many sailors faced catastrophic injuries and a life of disability, impairment and pain. Proving how everything, on this side of the grave, is regarded rather in consequence of the habit of valuing it, than from any opinion that it deserved value. For the relative indifference to the victims is proof of the relative indifference to their value.

The main objective (inside the White House and notably with Johnson and McNamara), was not to antagonize Israel, along with the fear of not appearing sufficiently pro-Israel with the cadre of Israeli-firsters that comprised advisers, consultants, aids and secretaries within the Administration.

There were multiple meetings and exchanges between Jewish members of White House and the Israeli Embassy in Washington. Cynically, some suggested that the attack on the Liberty could help weaken the accusations of American support for Israel, and gain some credibility with the Arabs.

It was now clear that the Administration had (or for that matter has) no leverage with the Jewish state. The US had urged Israel not to launch a war. Just 20 days before the attack, Johnson had affirmed America’s commitment to the “political independence and territorial integrity of all Middle Eastern nations.” Israel itself had claimed that it had no territorial ambitions. The reader can decide for himself on the value or worth of those words.

But in the fevered exchanges with the Israeli US embassy, the Administration achieved one ‘success.’ Namely, the Israeli embassy agreed to tone down and backdate an official statement, ready to be released, essentially accusing the US of being responsible for the attack on the Liberty.

The Israeli ambassador had suggested to Tel Aviv to at least hold responsible some of the attackers – suggestion fiercely rejected by Israel. The official Israeli court inquiry was, expectedly, a joke. So, for that matter, was the official inquiry conducted in the US, which mainly centered on discrepancies in the timing of the attacks as reported by the surviving sailors called to depose.

The final transcript mirrors the shallowness of the investigation. Many officers said the court seemed afraid of uncovering information that could prove that Israel deliberately attacked the Liberty. A sailor, Scott, photographed the first reconnaissance plane in the morning of the attack. He thought he had given the court a critical piece of information, but the court was uninterested. They dismissed his testimony stating that reconnaissance flights began much later. Declassified Israeli records show that the plane photographed by Scott, was indeed the first to conduct a reconnaissance flight. Nor the American government even asked Israel to let its pilots, torpedo boat skippers or commanders, testify in the US Court.

In the end, the “conspiracy theorists” of this tragic event are, officially, those who do not believe that the attack on the Liberty was a mistake. In this regard, it was almost a return to the future of 9/11 – when 19 fumbling Arabs scored a checkmate on America, and displayed unbelievable acrobatic maneuvering skills in piloting jumbo jets for the first time in their life.

In 1980 Israel paid 6 m$ to the families of the Liberty’s dead and wounded (in 3 yearly installments of 2 m$/each). This is a fraction of a fraction of what constitutes America’s yearly payments to Israel.

The final telling episode involves the wounded skipper of the Liberty, William McGonagle. He received the Medal of Honor for bravery, but Johnson refused to give it to him in person, which is the tradition – “so as not to offend the Jews”. An Admiral commented, “I am surprised they didn’t just hand it to him under the 14th Street Bridge.”

On June 8, 1997, McGonagle met the remaining survivors of the Liberty at the Arlington Cemetery. Through the years he had been publicly silent, though he did not believe in the error of identification. In what was to be his last and only related public address, he told the survivors, “It’s about time that the State of Israel and the US Government tell what happened to the crewmembers of the Liberty and the American people.” He died less than two years later.

The first terrorist attack and burning of a TWA plane on the ground occurred in 1970, when it became clear that Israel would not return the lands illegally occupied in the 1967 war.

That was the beginning of hijackings, terrorist attacks, murders, Intifadas, genocides in Gaza and Lebanon, wars and more wars. During the 1980s the new Israel’s Oded-Yinon Plan called for a greater Israel, from the Nile to the Euphrates. In the late 1990s came the call for a “New Pearl Harbor,” by the worthy husband of the equally worthy wife, Victoria Nudelman. In 2001 we had the “New Pearl Harbor”, followed by the destruction of Iraq, Libya, Syria, and countless other wars against sundry “terrorists.”

As far as we can know, the plan for a Greater Israel has not been canceled. During his administration, Obama declared that peace with the Palestinians should be achieved on the basis of returning to Palestine the lands occupied in 1967. Next day, uninvited, the Prime Minister of Israel, flew to Washington to deliver a counter-speech to the joint audience of Congress and the Senate. He received 29 standing ovations.

And how about Jewish influence? Here is a famous quote from the Los Angeles Times from Joel Stein, “I don’t care if Americans think we’re running the news media, Hollywood, Wall Street or the government. I just care that we get to keep running them.”

Jumping to current times, less known is the remarkable connection between Ukraine and the plans of Ihor Kolomoisky, governor (or now perhaps ex-governor of Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk province and citizen of Israel, Ukraine and Cyprus.) Allegedly he is currently in Israel.

Kolomoisky was a key in organizing the Odessa massacre on 2 May 2014, with his private army, the 1st Dnipro Battalion. He also hired the son of US Vice-President Joe Biden, R. Hunter Biden, plus Secretary of State John Kerry’s support committee chairman, Devon Archer, as board members of his gas holding companies.

Though some related information can be found online, Kolomoisky’s plan is/was to turn Ukraine into a ‘second Israel,’ based on alleged historic claims by Ashkenazi Jews and their more or less mythical Khazarian (Ukranian) kingdom. Allegedly, Kolomoisky has spent millions to recruit right-wing Ukrainian nationalists and neo-Nazis from other parts of Europe to fight against the Russian-speaking majority in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, and elsewhere.

Still a puzzle is the current paradoxical situation of a Ukrainian Jewish leadership linked, via an undeniable relationship, with allegedly the most militant and determined openly-Nazi section of the Ukrainian militias. Considering that Ukraine has a long history of anti-Semitism, dating at least from the treaty of Perejeslav of 1654 between the Cossacks of the legendary hetman Bohdan and the Tzar Alexis. Who, Khmelnytsky, masterminded rebellions against Jews, hated tax collectors and usurers for sundry landlords and peasant victims.

A more recent legacy of anti-Semitism is connected with the Great Ukrainian Famine of 1932-1933 led by Lazar Kaganovich, one of the Jewish Bolshevik leaders of the revolution.

Not long ago I interviewed a Ukrainian Jewish family that immigrated to America during the last years of the Soviet Union. Although I could not distinguish or identify them as Jewish, they reported being negatively commented-on by sundry passers-by who recognized them as Jewish (in Kyev).

Without entering into refined speculation behind what can be found on various media, including Israeli media, it is interesting and perhaps meaningful that the Russian leadership has been recently less cautious than usual in airing related unconventional views on the subject. Such as Hitler having Jewish blood (Lavrov) or the historic Bolshevik leadership being 95% Jewish (Putin)

In the circumstances, that the Jewish Ukrainian administration has obvious close ties with a militia that historically embodies anti-Semitism defies – I think – any rational explanation.

All in all there is as much mystery in the current Ukrainian government-military arrangement as there still is in the events surrounding the attack on the USS Liberty.

To conclude, I attempted to relate the main events of the attack on the Liberty, the related opinions of some among the victims of the attack, and of some among the managers of its aftermath. To the best of my knowledge the information is correct.

I think that much injustice has been done, and much justice left undone by the parties involved after the attack on the Liberty. Just as the Western dome of power currently exerts equal and preposterous injustice in the treatment of Russia’s “Special Military Operation,” for the benefit and befuddling of those forming the base of the pyramid of subordination.

However, I am equally aware that when truth intrudes uncalled, and brings unpleasant memories in her train, the passes of the intellect are barred against her by prejudice and passion. If sometimes, she forces her way by undisputable evidence, she seldom keeps possession of her conquests, but is ejected by some favored enemy or, at best, obtains only a nominal sovereignty, without influence and without authority.

From the inside | The Israel Lobby: Its Power, Prestige, Penetration and Control over American Society

2022-05-08

The Philosophy that drives the Chaos: Julianne Romanello & Gilad Atzmon interviewed by Jason Bosch

JULY 19, 2021 BY GILAD ATZMON

In this extended discussion Julianne Romanello and myself together with Jason Bosch delve into the ideological and spiritual thoughts that have turned our world into an open air prison. We looked into the work of Leo Strauss, Athens & Jerusalem, Noahide fundamentals, the origin of Zionism and many other crucial topics most intellectuals insist to avoid…

The Zionist Protection Racket

The Zionist infrastructure has been a racket since its inception, and politicians like John Kerry had to find that out the hard way.

Jonas E. Alexis has degrees in mathematics and philosophy. He studied education at the graduate level. His main interests include U.S. foreign policy, history of Israel/Palestine conflict, and the history of ideas. He is the author of the new book Zionism vs. the West: How Talmudic Ideology is Undermining Western Culture. He is currently working on a book tentatively titled, Kevin MacDonald’s Abject Failure: A Philosophical and Moral Critique of Evolutionary Psychology, Sociobiology, and White Identity. He teaches mathematics in South Korea.
Logoswars1@gmail.com

By Jonas E. Alexis –

March 31, 2021

…by Jonas E. Alexis, VT Editor, and Henry Makow

Henry Makow has a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Toronto in 1982 and is the author of best-selling books such as Cruel Hoax: Feminism & New World Order and Illuminati: The Cult that Hijacked the World.

JEA: The Zionist infrastructure has been a racket since its inception, and politicians like John Kerry had to find that out the hard way. At one point, Kerry was so angry at the mad man in Tel Aviv that he told him: “We’re conducting foreign policy, this isn’t a synagogue.”

Kerry moved on to say that instead of serious, logical and constructive foreign policy, America is being hoodwinked by “sandpaper like Netanyahu. Netanyahu just drove us crazy…because he was just unbelievably difficult.”[1] Netanyahu drove virtually every serious politician crazy.

This is one reason why Obama has declared in his recent book that, during his administration, Netanyahu was a problem child in the Middle East. Stephen M. Walt of Harvard and John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago noted that Obama never believed that Iran could be an existential threat to the U.S. or Israel.[2]

In any event, the Zionist power is a house built on sand, and Henry Makow has something to say about this whole racket.

HM: A “protection racket” is a scam where an aggressor instigates an attack, blames a bogeyman, and then offers to protect the victim from this bogeyman in return for money and power.

The “War on Terror” is a protection racket. The aggressor is the world financial elite known as the “Crown” based in the City of London. Their instrument is the Zionist project, specifically Israel, the Mossad and its Neo Con allies.

The victim is the people of the United States and the West in general. The goal is the overthrow of Western Civilization, and the establishment of a world police state called the “New World Order.”

“Zionism is but an incident of a far-reaching plan,” said leading American Zionist Louis Marshall, counsel for bankers Kuhn Loeb in 1917. “It is merely a convenient peg on which to hang a powerful weapon.”

The head of the Department of Homeland Security is Israeli dual citizen and Zionist Michael Chertoff. He was the New Jersey State Attorney when five Mossad agents were arrested after witnesses saw them congratulating themselves on the destruction of the World Trade Center. Their van tested positive for explosives. (See Chris Bollyn article below.) Speculators who shorted airline stocks before 9-11 have been identified as Israelis apparently.

“ANTI SEMITISM” THE ORIGINAL PROTECTION RACKET

The Jewish elite regards the Jewish rank-and-file as pawns to be manipulated. Jews had to be terrorized into setting up Israel as a “national home,” i.e. colonizing the Middle East and creating a center of world government. World Finance funded the Nazis. Zionists actively collaborated with them.

Zionist betrayal is the reason Jews went passively to their deaths, says Rabbi Moshe Shonfeld in his book “Holocaust Victims Accuse.” Non-Zionist Jews were worth more dead than alive to the Zionist leadership who, Shonfeld says, reaped the moral and financial capital from their “sacrifice.” See my “Zionism: Compulsory Suicide for Jews.”

The Jewish elite has a long history of manipulating Jews in this manner. For example, in 1950 a wave of anti-Semitism and terrorism in Iraq made Naeim Giladi, 21, join the Zionist underground. Giladi was imprisoned, tortured and sentenced to death by Iraqi authorities.

He escaped and fled to Israel only to discover that the bombings had been engineered by his fellow Zionists to dupe Iraqi Jews into going to Israel. An ancient community was deprived of its wealth and reduced to second-class citizen status in Israel, replacing Palestinian labor. See my “Zionists Double Crossed Iraqi Jews”

Israel provoked attacks from its neighbors in order to “retain its moral tension” according to the secret diary of Prime Minister Moshe Sharett. The state must “invent dangers” to start war and thereby “acquire our space,”
he wrote. See “The Zionist Roots of the War on Terror.”

“ANTI SEMITISM” BECOMES “ANTI AMERICANISM”

The pogrom on Sept. 11 2001 was designed to stampede Americans into forfeiting their civil rights and invading the Middle East.

There is a drumbeat in the media to convince Americans that they are victims of Muslim fanatics. This propaganda campaign is carried out by Neo Cons (a.k.a. Zionists.) In his book, “The New Jerusalem: Zionist Power in America,” the late Michael Collins Piper wrote:

“In the build-up to the Iraq war, Zionist propagandists and the media increasingly began touting the message to Americans that “the whole world is against us”… and the Israelis are our only real solid dependable ally …The theme that anti Americanism had run rampant was instilled in Americans for the very purpose of making them “anti” everyone who refused to support the…Iraq war…and the more broad ranging Zionist agenda.” (157)

Sound familiar? This is the tactic they use on Jews. Piper says that Zionism is being equated with Americanism. Zionist agents like Nathan Sharansky crafted the overblown and specious rhetoric of Bush’s second inaugural speech that committed the US to advancing the Zionist agenda using force.

History provides a sobering warning as to where this could be leading. In his essay, The Nature of Zionism, Russian author Vladimir Stepin writes,

“During the civil war in Russia, the Zionists also performed another task. Using some units of the Red Army – Trotsky was the chairman of the country’s Revolutionary Military Council – they organized the Jewish pogrom in Seversk.

“The result of this was the “Law on Those Involved in Pogroms” of 27 July 1918. In accordance with this law, a monstrous Zionist terror raged in Russia for ten years: a person accused of anti-Semitism was, without any argument being allowed, declared to be involved in pogroms and placed against the wall to be shot.

“Not only anti-Zionists, but the best representatives of the intelligentsia of Russia, could be accused of being anti-Semitic, and so too could anyone one felt like accusing of it. People saw who was exercising power in Russia and expressed their discontent with it. 90% of the members of the Cheka – the Soviet security organ, 1918-1922 – were Zionists.

“Apart from the law on those involved in pogroms, the Zionists practiced genocide against the ethnic groups inhabiting Russia, and they did so by accusing people of counter-revolutionary activities, sabotage, and so on, irrespective of whether or not the people in question really had conducted such activities. It was standard practice merely to put them against the wall to be shot.”

CONCLUSION

My hunch is that the central banking elite, using Masonic secret societies in the military and intelligence agencies, is responsible for 90% of terrorism. The purpose is to manipulate people into advancing the goals of the New World Order, which includes destroying true religion, nation states, democracy, ethnic identities, and family. In their mind, they have to destabilize and enslave us to protect their monopoly on government credit i.e. money creation.

They are running a protection racket to protect us from their artificial “terror.” Zionists or Americans who carry out their agenda could end up holding the bag if something goes wrong, or as I should say right.

Remember they are challenging the greatest power in the universe: God, or Truth as witnessed in the souls of all human beings. They are most vulnerable now on the 9-11 attack which they perpetrated. If we rise up as one to demand the truth about this atrocity, their obscene criminal enterprise will start to unravel.

[1]  Quoted in Gil Troy, “A History of U.S.-Israel Breakups and Makeups,” Daily Beast, March 3, 2015.

[2] Stephen M. Walt, “Bibi Blows Up the Special Relationship,” Foreign Policy, March 2, 2015.

Jon Ossoff Victory Proves That the Israel Lobby Still Has an Iron Grip on Democrats

by Jessica Buxhaum

Source

An analysis by the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs shows the pro-Israel lobby contributes significantly more money to Democrats than Republicans. And those campaign funds appear to be doing their job.

Jerusalem — Jon Ossoff’s historic win was presented as defying America’s far-right. His election to office helped flip the Senate blue and after six long years, changed Mitch McConnell’s title from majority to minority leader. He defeated Donald Trump ally Sen. David Perdue by teaming up with a Black reverend associated with the late civil rights icon, Rep. John Lewis. And he was the first Jew to win a Georgia Senate seat while a racist, anti-Semitic mob raided the U.S. Capitol.

Despite these progressive feats, Ossoff’s political experience and campaign donations reveal he’s more aligned with the Democratic establishment than meets the eye.

Ossoff’s undeniable love affair with the Israel lobby

Ossoff was one of the pro-Israel lobby’s top donation recipients for the 2019-2020 campaign cycle, ranking at number four with a total of $607,915. J Street, the Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI), New Israel Fund, and the Joint Action Committee for Political Affairs (JACPAC) all funded his campaign. Out of the Israel lobbying groups, JACPAC handed Ossoff the most money with a sum of $12,250. Pro-Israel groups J Street, DMFI, and the Jewish Democratic Council for America endorsed him as well.

Before becoming a senator, Ossoff didn’t have many political credentials to his name. According to The Forward, he handled foreign policy issues as a congressional aide for Georgia Rep. Hank Johnson. In the role, he “work[ed] on legislation improving military funding for Israel and mandating tougher inspections of Iranian nuclear facilities.”

While he supports the Iran Deal and opposes Israeli annexation of the West Bank, the senator has openly embraced Zionist views. He is opposed to the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, has supported Israeli attacks on Gaza, commended Israel’s normalization agreements with Arab countries, and supports a two-state solution. A two-state solution is a longtime Democratic Party position, but progressive public support for it is diminishing with the growing momentum for the One Democratic State Campaign.

Foreign policy wasn’t a large section of Ossoff’s campaign platform. As a state senate hopeful upholding a “Black-Jewish alliance,” he focused more on domestic race relations than geopolitics. However, Ossoff’s campaign did publish a document outlining his stance on Israel. In it, he pledged unwavering support for the state, specifically lauding his commitment to Israel’s security and his opposition to BDS as well as any legislation permitting the U.S. to divest from Israel.

“Israel’s security requires the Israel Defense Forces to maintain a Qualitative Military Edge (QME) in the region. U.S. foreign assistance ensures that Israel has the military and intelligence capabilities necessary to maintain that QME, to defend itself against missile and rocket threats, and to prevent terrorist attacks within Israel,” the statement read.

“In the Senate, I will push for strong, mutually beneficial, and mutually respectful U.S.-Israel relations, whose strength can sustain Congressional support for the appropriation of U.S. foreign assistance vital to Israel’s security,” Ossoff said.

This excerpt suggests Ossoff supports continuing U.S. military aid to Israel—an issue that received nationwide condemnation after Congress voted to give $600 to Americans amid a pandemic-spurred recession yet handed $500 million in aid to Israel.

In addition to the pro-Israel endorsements Ossoff snagged, he often touts his connections to pro-Israel politicians. His June, 2020 position paper cited his relationship to Michael Oren, the far-right Israeli ambassador he studied under at Georgetown University. Ossoff also credits his historic rise in politics to Rep. Lewis. While Lewis is remembered as a prominent civil rights activist, he was also staunchly pro-Israel. Like Ossoff, he opposed the BDS movement and was considered a friend to Israel.

The Democratic Party toeing the line with pro-Israel funds

Along with Ossoff being the first Jew elected to Georgia’s senate, Rev. Raphael Warnock also made history as the first African-American elected to Georgia’s senate. Together the Democratic pair attributed their success to having fostered a strong Black-Jewish alliance.

Despite his win, Warnock’s campaign was marred with controversy prior to the state’s highly-publicized runoff election in January. Warnock’s Republican opponent, Kelly Loeffler, targeted the reverend’s past criticism of Israel in an attack ad. Warnock signed a letter in 2019 comparing Israel to apartheid South Africa. He also criticized Trump’s decision to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and slammed Israel for shooting Gazan protesters.

Loeffler’s smears worked. His campaign was losing public support and funding was drying up. Two days after Loeffler’s attacks, Rev. Warnock immediately backtracked and released a statement “condemning” the BDS movement and declaring his support for Israel. His quick reversal earned him an endorsement from the Israel lobby group DMFI. Similar to Ossoff, Warnock was also part of the Israel lobby’s top 10 campaign donation recipients, securing funding from J Street, DMFI, and the New Israel Fund. Warnock may not have been as successful with fundraising if he had maintained his previous position on Israel.

Sut Jhally, documentary filmmaker and communications professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, was surprised at how easily Warnock caved to pro-Israel pressure.

“He was persuaded by the mainstream Democrats to win the Georgia election, so he had to make this horrible statement about Israel and BDS,” Jhally told MintPress News.

Warnock and Ossoff ran for Senate on a civil-rights-branded agenda. But for Jhally, you can’t call yourself a progressive if you ignore Palestine.

“The test of whether you’re a true progressive is your position on Israel,” Jhally said. “Because you can’t be progressive about everything else and espouse human rights for everyone else and not espouse human rights for the Palestinians.”

Warnock’s swift 180 on Palestine-Israel demonstrates just how strong of a grip the Israel lobby has on the Democratic Party. While the Trump administration’s policies favorited Israel, the Democratic Party is largely kept in check with pro-Israel funding.

An analysis by the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs shows the pro-Israel lobby contributes significantly more money to Democrats than Republicans. And those campaign funds appear to be doing their job in scratching both the Democrats’ and the lobby’s backs. The top recipient of Israel lobby donations in 2020, President Joe Biden, has made it clear he’s willing to reverse every Trump-era policy except those related to Israel.

Keeping with the status quo

Criticism of Israel is growing louder in the Democratic Party with remarks from more progressive politicians like Sen. Bernie Sanders, Rep. Ilhan Omar, and Rep. Rashida Tlaib. And while Professor Jhally agrees there’s an unprecedented divide emerging in the party over Israel, that will only generate discussion and not substantial policy reform.

“The Israel lobby is still very powerful within both the Republican and Democratic parties and their role right now is to make sure policy does not change,” Jhally said. “And that is about putting pressure on progressives and making sure BDS becomes delegitimized.”

With BDS—arguably the best international strategy available to end Israel’s occupation of Palestine—still seen as a dirty word in American politics, Democrats will likely adhere to the Israel lobby’s agenda rather than risk losing money or being perceived as anti-Israel. And that means sticking with the status quo in the Democratic establishment: condemning BDS, promising U.S. aid to Israel, and supporting Israel’s right to defend itself against “terrorists.” Just like the self-proclaimed progressive Ossoff did in cementing his election win.

A New Year’s Wish

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org

PHILIP GIRALDI • JANUARY 5, 2021 
Source: The Unz Review

Let’s remove Israel from American politics

There has been one good thing about the COVID-19 virus – for the first time many among the general public are beginning to ask why a rich country like Israel should be getting billions of dollars from the United States taxpayer at a time when many Americans are struggling. Inevitably, of course, the press coverage of the questions being asked about the cash flow failed to discuss the real magnitude of the “aid,” trade concessions, co-production projects and dicey charitable contributions that our federal and many state governments shower on the Jewish state, which easily exceed $10 billion per year.

There has been one good thing about the COVID-19 virus – for the first time many among the general public are beginning to ask why a rich country like Israel should be getting billions of dollars from the United States taxpayer at a time when many Americans are struggling. Inevitably, of course, the press coverage of the questions being asked about the cash flow failed to discuss the real magnitude of the “aid,” trade concessions, co-production projects and dicey charitable contributions that our federal and many state governments shower on the Jewish state, which easily exceed $10 billion per year.

During his 2016 campaign Donald Trump swore that he would be the best friend that Israel has ever had in the White House, a pledge that some of us viewed skeptically as Trump was also committed to bringing the troops home from “useless wars” in Asia, most of whom were in the Middle East supporting Israeli interests. More recently Trump admitted that America was in the Middle East to “protect Israel” and he has indeed proven to be the great benefactor he promised to be in responding fully to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s wish list. Trump has increased tension dramatically with Iran, moved the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, has recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Syrian Golan Heights, and has basically given Israel the green light to do whatever it wants on the Palestinian West Bank, including getting rid of the Palestinians. And as all that has played out the Israelis have attacked and killed thousands of civilians in Gaza, Syria and the West Bank with impunity, protected by the U.S. veto in the U.N. Security Council against any consequences for their actions while a subservient Congress gives Netanyahu twenty-eight standing ovations and bleats that “Israel has a right to defend itself.” Trump has made the United States completely complicit in Israeli war crimes and has committed a few of its own to include the widely condemned assassination of the senior Iranian official Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad one year ago.

Israel more-or-less openly admits that it controls the actions of the United States in its region, its leaders having boasted how the U.S. federal government is “easily moved” when it comes up against the Israeli Lobby. Nor is there any real secret to how the Lobby uses money to buy access and then exploits that access to obtain real power, which is then used to employ all the resources of the U.S. government in support of the Jewish state. The top donor to the Democratic Party, Israeli-American Haim Saban has stated that he is a one issue guy and that issue is Israel. This single-minded focus to promote Israel’s interests at the expense of those of the United States makes the Israel Lobby the most formidable foreign policy lobby in Washington and it recalls the warning once issued by George Washington in his Farewell Address, where he stated that “permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations and passionate attachments for others should be excluded, and that in place of them just and amicable feelings toward all should be cultivated. The nation which indulges toward another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave.”

The complete contempt that the Israelis and Israeli supporters in the U.S. have for other Americans and their interests was on full display last week when convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard flew “home,” meeting Netanyahu as he disembarked from a private plane that had departed from Newark New Jersey before being given a hero’s welcome.

Pollard is the most damaging spy in American history, having stolen the keys to accessing U.S. communications and information gathering systems. He was an unlikely candidate to become a U.S. Navy intelligence analyst, and one review board determined that he had been hired in the first place under pressure from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). A month after Pollard’s arrest in 1985, C.I.A director William Casey stated: “The Israelis used Pollard to obtain our war plans against the USSR – all of it: the co-ordinates, the firing locations, the sequences, and Israel sold that information to Moscow for more exit visas for Soviet Jews.” According to a C.I.A. after-the fact-damage assessment “Pollard’s operation has few parallels among known U.S. espionage cases…. his first and possibly largest delivery occurred on 23 January [1984] and consisted of five suitcases-full of classified material.”

Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger wrote a forty-six page review of the case that remains largely classified and redacted to this day, detailing what incredible damage Pollard had done. Part of the document states: “In this case, the defendant has admitted passing to his Israeli contacts an incredibly large quantity of classified information. At the outset I must state that the defendant’s disclosures far exceed the limits of any official exchange of intelligence information with Israel. That being the case, the damage to national security was complete the moment the classified information was given over. Ideally, I would detail…all the information passed by the defendant to his Israeli contacts: unfortunately, the volume of .data we know to have been passed is too great to permit that. · Moreover, the defendant admits to having passed to his Israeli handlers a quantity of documents great enough to occupy a space six feet by ten feet… The defendant has substantially harmed the United States, and in my view, his crimes demand severe punishment… My foregoing comments will, I hope, dispel any presumption that disclosures to an ally are insignificant; to the contrary, substantial and irrevocable damage has been done to this nation. Punishment, of course, must be appropriate to the crime, and in my opinion, no crime is more deserving of severe punishment than conducting espionage activities against one’s own country.”

The Pollard trip to his “home” occurred because Donald Trump had obligingly lifted the travel restrictions on him the week before, one more favor to Israel. At the airport, Pollard and his wife knelt to kiss the Israeli soil before Netanyahu handed him an Israeli citizen ID and welcomed him. The 737 luxury-fitted executive jet Pollard and his wife flew on belongs to Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, chief donor to the Republicans and to Donald Trump. Adelson is married to an Israeli and famously has said that he regrets having worn a U.S. Army uniform when he was drafted, much preferring instead that he might have done military service in the Israel Defense Force.

I should point out that permitting dual nationals with singular loyalty to a foreign nation to have such significant influence over the two leading political parties in the U.S. by virtue of money alone is a recipe for disaster, and so it has proven. What were Trump and Hillary Clinton thinking when they tied themselves to Adelson and Saban? Or were they thinking at all?

The Israeli boosters in the United States have flat out corrupted our political process to get where they are. They have bought or intimidated every politician that matters to include presidents, congressmen and even those in state and local governments. Anyone who criticizes Israel or Jewish collective behavior in support of the Israeli state is subject to character assassination and blacklisting a la Mel Gibson and Rick Sanchez. Those who persist are denounced as anti-Semites, a label that is used liberally by Zionist groups.

Anyone who is bold enough to either criticize the Israelis or defend the Palestinians is targeted, and if they happen to be in Congress like Cynthia McKinney, Pete McCloskey, Paul Findlay, James Traficant, William Fulbright and Chuck Percy they are first vilified in the media and then set up against a very well-funded candidate to drive them from office. The end result is that when Israel kills civilians and rampaging armed settlers destroy their livelihoods the United States government chooses to look the other way and shower the rogue state with money so it can continue to do its dirty work.

The corruption extends to the state level, where twenty-six governments have passed Israel lobby-promoted legislation that limits free speech rights if anyone seeks to criticize Israel. This sometimes includes forcing employees, under threat of dismissal, to sign a pro-Israel oath and promise not to support any boycott of the Jewish state. The massive interference in the internal governance of the United States by Israel and its U.S. born lackeys far exceeds that of any other country, including inappropriately vilified Russia or China.

It is well past time to get rid of the Israel parasite that feeds on the American government and people. The special relationship with Israel, sanctified in the halls of Congress and by a Jewish dominated media, does nothing good for the United States and for the American people. Israel’s constant interference in the U.S. political system and economy comes at a huge cost, both in dollars and in terms of actual American interests.

And then there are the hot buttons which, if the U.S. actually had a functional government that is responsive to the people, should have been pushed long ago. Israel is ranked by the FBI as the number one “friendly” country in terms of its spying against the United States. Pollard is an exception, but Israeli spies are routinely slapped on the wrist when caught and never face prosecution. The Mossad agents who were the “Dancing Shlomos,” celebrating while the twin towers went down on 9/11, were allowed to go home. And Israel has never truly paid any price for the horrific bombing and torpedoing of the U.S.S. Liberty fifty-three years ago, which killed 34 Americans and injured over one hundred more. The completely unprovoked attack took place in international waters and was later covered-up by President Lyndon Baines Johnson, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and Congress. May they burn in hell. The surviving crew members are still waiting for justice.

So, let’s all resolve for 2021 to do whatever we can to pull the plug on Israel. Let Israel pay its own bills and take care of its own defense. American citizens who prefer the Jewish ethno-religious state to our constitutional republic should feel free to emigrate. Lacking Washington’s backing, Israel will also be free to commit atrocities and war crimes against all of its neighbors but without the U.S. United Nations veto it will have to begin facing the consequences for its actions. But most of all, as Americans, we will no longer have to continue to carry the burden of a country that manipulates and uses us and also has a certain contempt for us while doing so. And maybe just maybe freeing the United States from Israel could lead to an end to all the wars in the Middle East that Washington has been waging in spite of the fact that we Americans are threatened by no one in the region and have no real interest whatsoever in prolonging the agony of staying there.

The ‘Israel’ Lobby at the University of Sydney

By Tim Anderson – The American Herald Tribune

Documents released under freedom of information law show that an ‘Israeli’ organization has, over many years, privately contributed millions of dollars to the University of Sydney’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences [FASS]. A sub-branch of the ‘Israeli’ World Zionist Organization [the Fund for Jewish Higher Education] contributes around half a million dollars to FASS each year, with contributions peaking at $819,000 in 2019. The WZO is committed to the ‘Israeli’ colony in Palestine, where more than half the population is denied full citizenship rights.

These amounts are way out of proportion to the nominal beneficiaries at the University: Hebrew, Biblical, Jewish and Holocaust Studies, and give the ‘Israeli’ lobby influence with University of Sydney management. This ‘Israeli’ funding is sustained while federal ‘foreign influence’ laws are trumpeted against China, and form part of a much larger private fund pool – one billion dollar plus, announced with pride in the University’s 2019 Annual Report  – at the University, for which there is little public accountability. The door is wide open for corruption, alongside secret foreign influence.

2020 data on the WZO confirms documents provided to me by a whistle-blower within the administration, back in 2018, which showed that the ‘Committee for Jewish Higher Education’ had been the largest single donor [by far] to FASS, with combined donations of $571,000 [in eight separate donations] in the first five months of 2012, all tagged for the Department of Hebrew, Biblical and Jewish Studies, including its specialty in Holocaust Studies.  With about 10 academics staff [not all full time] that department represents less than 2% of the 700 or so academic staff in the Faculty.

With all senior managers eligible for performance bonuses, at least in part based on their fund raising, these large undisclosed sums indicate a great potential for corruption, all the more so now that the Federal Court of Australia [in the case brought by the NTEU and myself] has rubber stamped management gag orders, even when they concern public academic work.

The ‘Israel’ lobby, acting through the tabloid media, pressured University of Sydney managers to expel me from my academic position in 2018-2019. The final issue was my graphic linking of one of ‘Israel’s’ Gaza massacres with the racial massacres of Nazi Germany; and my refusal to submit to secret gag orders, effectively made under pressure from the ‘Israel’ lobby. In late 2020 the Federal Court ruled that academics must follow management orders, even when it concerns their research and teaching. I have published some detail on this case and its implications; showing the vulnerability of the corporate university to outside pressures.

‘Israel’ lobby influence on the wider phenomenon of academic ‘cancel culture’ deserves attention. A recent Guardian article cites several British academics on the problem of university managers trying to “silence academics on social media.” This was said to be part of a tension between the corporate university and social media, where “on the one hand unis are pushing their staff to be more active online … but when that individual voice is in conflict with the official brand it creates a tension … it is about brand protection.” The corporate media has discovered that it can use this tension to goad management to move against certain academics.

The ‘Israel’ lobby has spent time and effort in this territory, in particular by trying to vilify as ‘racist’ public figures who criticize ‘Israel.’ The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance [IHRA] has had some success in its attempts to extend the definition of anti-Semitism “to criticism of ‘Israel’ and support for Palestinian rights.” But I am one of many who have written that there is no legitimate basis for conflating criticism of a state or government with inciting hatred against a people.

An ‘Israel’ lobby group in the USA, under the guise of ‘protecting Jewish students’ branded as ‘biased’ more than 200 academics who supported the boycott against ‘Israel.’ Academics and teachers have been hounded from their positions in the USA, the UK, Australia and New Zealand because of their comments on ‘Israel,’ including those who have raised legitimate academic questions about ethno-nationalist settler colonialism” and of “victims becoming perpetrators.”

Jewish writers have not been immune from these attacks. Some have hit back, saying that “unfounded allegations of anti-Semitism [are used to] cover up ‘Israeli’ apartheid.” Last year sixty Jewish and ‘Israeli’ academics condemned the German parliament for its attempts to equate the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement with anti-Semitism.

A 2017 letter signed by more than 200 British academics complained of the ‘Israel’ lobby’s repeated attempts to link academic criticism of ‘Israel,’ and support for the Palestinian people, with anti-Semitism. These moves were “outrageous interferences with free expression” and “direct attacks on academic freedom.” The group said “we wish to express our dismay at this attempt to silence campus discussion about ‘Israel,’ including its violation of the rights of Palestinians for more than 50 years. It is with disbelief that we witness explicit political interference in university affairs in the interests of ‘Israel’ under the thin disguise of concern about anti-Semitism.”

In the USA, President Donald Trump in 2019 signed an executive order to withhold funds from universities which did not do enough to stop “anti-Semitic practices,” which includes criticism of ‘Israel.’ Defense of the ‘Israeli’ colony in Palestine is taken seriously.

‘Israel’ and academic freedom became an issue at the University of Sydney in March 2015, after students shut down a talk by former British Army Colonel Richard Kemp, who had been invited on campus to defend the ‘Israeli’ military’s slaughter of more 2,000 Palestinian civilians in Gaza in 2014. According to the Times of ‘Israel,’ Kemp was to give a lecture about “ethical dilemmas of military tactics and dealing with non-state armed groups.” The ‘Israel’ lobby claimed the protest and student behavior was an attempt to intimidate Jews. A wider debate over the intellectual freedom afforded to visitors like Richard Kemp ensued.

At around this time I looked into the reporting of the slaughter in Gaza, preparing a graphic which showed – from relatively independent sources – that ‘Israeli’ forces had slaughtered more than 1,000 Palestinians [the final count was more than 2,000] of whom, according to UN sources, more than 75% were civilians.

The person who invited Colonel Kemp was former University of Sydney academic Dr. Suzanne Rutland. At her retirement a few months later Provost Stephen Garton praised Suzanne as a person of “moral courage” who had made “an effort to bridge the cultural and political divide, to promote tolerance and understanding … [and] we owe her a debt of gratitude.” Stephen used the occasion to backhand the students who had confronted Kemp, saying that some on campus “confuse academic freedom with the right to disrupt.”

Dr. Rutland had a high profile from her academic and community work. In 2008 she received the Order of Australia for her services to Higher Jewish Education and “interfaith dialogue.” She was also active in campaigns against anti-Semitism and Holocaust Denial. However her response to the students who confronted Colonel Kemp was not so tolerant. She denounced them as vicious racists, saying “when they stand there chanting, ‘free Palestine’ what they mean is the dismantling of the Zionist entity which means genocide against ‘Israel’s’ Jewish population.” This is an extreme view.

In fact, the better view is that ‘Israel,’ by its repeated massacres and ethnic cleansing, is engaged in a form of genocide. The US Centre for Constitutional Rights, noting a controversy over this question, wrote that:

“Prominent scholars of the international law [on the] crime of genocide and human rights authorities take the position that ‘Israel’s’ policies towards the Palestinian people could constitute a form of genocide. Those policies range from the 1948 mass killing and displacement of Palestinians to a half century of military occupation and, correspondingly, the discriminatory legal regime governing Palestinians, repeated military assaults on Gaza, and official ‘Israeli’ statements expressly favoring the elimination of Palestinians.”

Attacks on the critics of ‘Israel’ are often aimed at deflecting attention from this.

The now Emeritus Professor Suzanne Rutland was not just an academic, she was a conduit of ‘Israeli’ finance to the university.  Her online CV [now redacted online] listed her as ‘Chair of the National Advisory Committee on Jewish Education for Australia, for the World Zionist Organization.’ The WZO was founded in 1897 with the aim of creating a Jewish ‘state’ and, since the creation of ‘Israel,’ it has become an umbrella group for a range of ‘Israel’ lobbies. The WZO declares its commitment to “‘Israel’ education.”

At the political level the ‘Israel’ lobby remains influential. A 2018 study by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute [APRI] found that an ‘Israeli’ lobby group in Australia [AIJAC] was the biggest single foreign funder of Australian MPs’ overseas travel. MPs from both major parties were beneficiaries of these ‘study tours’. While the public focus of foreign influence in Australia has become China, with special new laws to criminalize ‘foreign influence,’ the APRI study showed that influence peddling from ‘Israel’ has been greater than that from China or the USA. While Australian MPs had been funded for nearly 60 trips to China and 45 to the US, AIJAC had sponsored around 100 visits to ‘Israel,’ “nearly evenly split between Labor and Liberal.”

Antisemitism Claims Mask a Reign of Political and Cultural Terror across Europe

December 14, 2020

The German Parliament passes a resolution that designates the BDS movement as antisemitic. (Photo: File)

By Jonathan Cook

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz has run a fascinating long report this week offering a disturbing snapshot of the political climate rapidly emerging across Europe on the issue of antisemitism. The article documents a kind of cultural, political and intellectual reign of terror in Germany since the parliament passed a resolution last year equating support for non-violent boycotts of Israel – in solidarity with Palestinians oppressed by Israel – with antisemitism.

The article concerns Germany but anyone reading it will see very strong parallels with what is happening in other European countries, especially the UK and France.

The same European leaders who a few years ago marched in Paris shouting “Je suis Charlie” – upholding the inalienable free speech rights of white Europeans to offend Muslims by insulting and ridiculing their Prophet – are now queuing up to outlaw free speech when it is directed against Israel, a state that refuses to end its belligerent occupation of Palestinian land. European leaders have repeatedly shown they are all too ready to crush the free speech of Palestinians, and those in solidarity with them, to avoid offending sections of the Jewish community.

The situation reduces to this: European Muslims have no right to take offense at insults about a religion they identify with, but European Jews have every right to take offense at criticism of an aggressive Middle Eastern state they identify with. Seen another way, the perverse secular priorities of European mainstream culture now place the sanctity of a militarized state, Israel, above the sanctity of a religion with a billion followers.

Guilt by Association

This isn’t even a double standard. I can’t find a word in the dictionary that conveys the scale and degree of hypocrisy and bad faith involved.

If the American Jewish scholar Norman Finkelstein wrote a follow-up to his impassioned book The Holocaust Industry – on the cynical use of the Holocaust to enrich and empower a Jewish organizational establishment at the expense of the Holocaust’s actual survivors – he might be tempted to title it The Antisemitism Industry.

In the current climate in Europe, one that rejects any critical thinking in relation to broad areas of public life, that observation alone would enough to have one denounced as an antisemite. Which is why the Haaretz article – far braver than anything you will read in a UK or US newspaper – makes no bones about what is happening in Germany. It calls it a “witch-hunt”. That is Haaretz’s way of saying that antisemitism has been politicized and weaponized – a self-evident conclusion that will currently get you expelled from the British Labour party, even if you are Jewish.

The Haaretz story highlights two important developments in the way antisemitism has been, in the words of intellectuals and cultural leaders cited by the newspaper, “instrumentalized” in Germany.

Jewish organizations and their allies in Germany, as Haaretz reports, are openly weaponizing antisemitism not only to damage the reputation of Israel’s harsher critics but also to force out of the public and cultural domain – through a kind of “antisemitism guilt by association” – anyone who dares to entertain criticism of Israel.

Cultural associations, festivals, universities, Jewish research centers, political think-tanks, museums, and libraries are being forced to scrutinize the past of those they wish to invite in case some minor transgression against Israel can be exploited by local Jewish organizations. That has created a toxic, politically paranoid atmosphere that inevitably kills trust and creativity.

But the psychosis runs deeper still. Israel, and anything related to it, has become such a combustible subject – one that can ruin careers in an instant – that most political, academic and cultural figures in Germany now choose to avoid it entirely. Israel, as its supporters intended, is rapidly becoming untouchable.

A case study noted by Haaretz is Peter Schäfer, a respected professor of ancient Judaism and Christianity studies who was forced to resign as director of Berlin’s Jewish Museum last year. Schäfer’s crime, in the eyes of Germany’s Jewish establishment, was that he staged an exhibition on Jerusalem that recognized the city’s three religious traditions, including a Muslim one.

He was immediately accused of promoting “historical distortions” and denounced as “anti-Israel”. A reporter for Israel’s right-wing Jerusalem Post, which has been actively colluding with the Israeli government to smear critics of Israel, contacted Schäfer with a series of inciteful emails. The questions included “Did you learn the wrong lesson from the Holocaust?” and “Israeli experts told me you disseminate antisemitism – is that true?”

Schäfer observes:

“The accusation of antisemitism is a club that allows one to deal a death blow, and political elements who have an interest in this are using it, without a doubt… The museum staff gradually entered a state of panic. Then of course we also started to do background checks. Increasingly it poisoned the atmosphere and our work.”

Another prominent victim of these Jewish organizations tells Haaretz:

“Sometimes one thinks, ‘To go to that conference?’ ‘To invite this colleague?’ Afterward, it means that for three weeks, I’ll have to cope with a shitstorm, whereas I need the time for other things that I get paid for as a lecturer. There is a type of ‘anticipatory obedience’ or ‘prior self-censorship.’”

Ringing off the Hook

There is nothing unusual about what is happening in Germany. Jewish organizations are stirring up these “shitstorms” – designed to paralyze political and cultural life for anyone who engages in even the mildest criticism of Israel – at the highest levels of government. Don’t believe me? Here is Barack Obama explaining in his recent autobiography his efforts as US president to curb Israel’s expansion of its illegal settlements. Early on, he was warned to back off or face the wrath of the Israel lobby:

“Members of both parties worried about crossing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Those who criticized Israeli policy too loudly risked being tagged as ‘anti-Israel’ (and possibly anti-Semitic) and confronted with a well-funded opponent in the next election.”

Corbyn, it seems, has found an unlikely ally in former US President Obama. In his new autobiography, he writes of the Israel lobby's power: 'Those who criticized Israeli policy too loudly risked being tagged as "anti-Israel" (and possibly anti-Semitic)' https://t.co/tKmy8q3Cws

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) November 26, 2020

When Obama went ahead anyway in 2009 and proposed a modest freeze on Israel’s illegal settlements:

“The White House phones started ringing off the hook, as members of my national security team fielded calls from reporters, leaders of American Jewish organizations, prominent supporters, and members of Congress, all wondering why we were picking on Israel … this sort of pressure continued for much of 2009.”

He observes further:

“The noise orchestrated by Netanyahu had the intended effect of gobbling up our time, putting us on the defensive, and reminding me that normal policy differences with an Israeli prime minister – even one who presided over a fragile coalition government – exacted a political cost that didn’t exist when I dealt with the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, Canada, or any of our other closest allies.”

Doubtless, Obama dare not put down in writing his full thoughts about Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu or the US lobbyists who worked on his behalf. But Obama’s remarks do show that, even a US president, supposedly the single most powerful person on the planet, ended up blanching in the face of this kind of relentless assault. For lesser mortals, the price is likely to be far graver.

No Free Speech on Israel

It was this same mobilization of Jewish organizational pressure – orchestrated, as Obama notes, by Israel and its partisans in the US and Europe – that ended up dominating Jeremy Corbyn’s five years as the leader of Britain’s leftwing Labour party, recasting a well-known anti-racism activist almost overnight as an antisemite.

It is the reason why his successor, Sir Keir Starmer, has outsourced part of Labour’s organizational oversight on Jewish and Israel-related matters to the very conservative Board of Deputies of British Jews, as given expression in Starmer’s signing up to the Board’s “10 Pledges”.

It is part of the reason why Starmer recently suspended Corbyn from the party, and then defied the membership’s demands that he be properly reinstated, after Corbyn expressed concerns about the way antisemitism allegations had been “overstated for political reasons” to damage him and Labour. (The rightwing Starmer, it should be noted, was also happy to use antisemitism as a pretext to eradicate the socialist agenda Corbyn had tried to revive in Labour.) It is why Starmer has imposed a blanket ban on constituency parties discussing Corbyn’s suspension. And it is why Labour’s shadow education secretary has joined the ruling Conservative party in threatening to strip universities of their funding if they allow free speech about Israel on campus.

Disturbing to learn from this article that Labour backs threatening funding to universities to bully them into adopting the IHRA re-definition of antisemitism – a definition that protects Israel from criticism and would ban most forms of solidarity with Palestinians on campus

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) December 8, 2020

Two Types of Jews

But the Haaretz article raises another issue critical to understanding how Israel and the Jewish establishment in Europe are politicizing antisemitism to protect Israel from criticism. The potential Achilles’ heel of their campaign are Jewish dissidents, those who break with the supposed “Jewish community” line and create a space for others – whether Palestinians or other non-Jews – to criticize Israel. These Jewish dissenters risk serving as a reminder that trenchant criticism of Israel should not result in one being tarred an antisemite.

Leading Palestinians warn: 'The fight against antisemitism has been increasingly instrumentalised by the Israeli government and its supporters in an effort to delegitimise the Palestinian cause and silence defenders of Palestinian rights' https://t.co/Shu1Z7XYM1

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) December 1, 2020

Israel and Jewish organizations, however, have made it their task to erode that idea by promoting a distinction – an antisemitic one, at that – between two types of Jews: good Jews (loyal to Israel), and bad Jews (disloyal to Israel).

Haaretz reports that officials in Germany, such as Felix Klein, the country’s antisemitism commissioner, and Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, are being allowed to define not only who is an antisemite, typically using support for Israel as the yardstick, but are also determining who are good Jews – those politically like them – and who are bad Jews – those who disagree with them.

Despite Germany’s horrific recent history of Jew-hatred, the German government, local authorities, the media, universities and cultural institutions have been encouraged by figures like Klein and Schuster to hound German Jews, even Israeli Jews living and working in Germany, from the country’s public and cultural space.

When, for example, a group of Israeli Jewish academics in Berlin held a series of online discussions about Zionism last year on the website of their art school, an Israeli reporter soon broke the story of a “scandal” involving boycott supporters receiving funding from the German government. Hours later the art school had pulled down the site, while the German education ministry issued a statement clarifying that it had provided no funding. The Israeli embassy officially declared the discussions held by these Israelis as “antisemitic”, and a German foundation that documents antisemitism added the group to the list of antisemitic incidents it records.

Described as ‘Kapos’

So repressive has the cultural and political atmosphere grown in Germany that there has been a small backlash among cultural leaders. Some have dared to publish a letter protesting against the role of Klein, the antisemitism commissioner. Haaretz reports:

“The antisemitism czar, the letter charged, is working ‘in synergy with the Israeli government’ in an effort ‘to discredit and silence opponents of Israel’s policies’ and is abetting the ‘instrumentalization’ that undermines the true struggle against antisemitism.

Figures like Klein have been so focused on tackling criticism of Israel from the left, including the Jewish left, that they have barely noted the “acute danger Jews in Germany face due to the surge in far-right antisemitism”, the letter argues.

Again, the same picture can be seen across Europe. In the UK, the opposition Labour party, which should be a safe space for those leading the anti-racism struggle, is purging itself of Jews critical of Israel and using antisemitism smears against prominent anti-racists, especially from other oppressed minorities.

Extraordinarily, Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, one of the founders of Jewish Voice for Labour, which supports Corbyn, recently found herself suspended by Starmer’s Labour. She had just appeared in a moving video in which she explained the ways antisemitism was being used by Jewish organizations to smear Jewish left-wingers like herself as “traitors” and “kapos” – an incendiary term of abuse, as Wimborne-Idrissi points out, that refers to “a Jewish inmate of a concentration camp who collaborated with the [Nazi] authorities, people who collaborated in the annihilation of their own people”.

In suspending her, Starmer effectively endorsed this campaign by the UK’s Jewish establishment of incitement against, and vilification of, left-wing Jews.

The aggressive purge of Jews from the Labour Party under the repressive rule of @Keir_Starmer marches on.

I haven't seen a sustained campaign of overt anti-Semitism quite like the effort of Labour centrists to create lists of Good Jews & Bad Jews and purge the latter. https://t.co/wVwnu47QJP

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) December 3, 2020

Earlier, Marc Wadsworth, a distinguished black anti-racism campaigner, found himself similarly suspended by Labour when he exposed the efforts of Ruth Smeeth, then a Labour MP and a former Jewish official in the Israel lobby group BICOM, to recruit the media to her campaign smearing political opponents on the left as antisemites.

In keeping with the rapid erosion of critical thinking in civil society organizations designed to uphold basic freedoms, Smeeth was recently appointed director of the prestigious free speech organization Index on Censorship. There she can now work on suppressing criticism of Israel – and attack “bad Jews” – under cover of fighting censorship. In the new, inverted reality, censorship refers not to the smearing and silencing of a “bad Jew” like Wimborne-Idrissi, but to criticism of Israel over its human rights abuses, which supposedly “censors” the identification of “good Jews” with Israel – now often seen as the crime of “causing offense”.

Ok, we've now officially moved from Alice Through the Looking Glass into the Twilight Zone.

Ruth Smeeth, ex-Israel lobbyist for Bicom and a key player in outlawing solidarity for Palestinians in the Labour party, is the new CEO of free speech group Index on Censorship! https://t.co/UmHXbTQETS

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) June 15, 2020

Boy Who Cried Wolf

The Haaretz article helps to contextualize Europe’s current antisemitism “witch-hunt”, which targets anyone who criticizes Israel or stands in solidarity with oppressed Palestinians, or associates with such people. It is an expansion of the earlier campaign by the Jewish establishment against “the wrong kind of Jew”, as identified by Finkelstein in The Holocaust Industry. But this time Jewish organizations are playing a much higher-stakes, and more dangerous, political game.

Haaretz rightly fears that the Jewish leadership in Europe is not only silencing ordinary Jews but degrading the meaning – the shock value – of antisemitism through the very act of politicizing it. Jewish organizations risk alienating the European left, which has historically stood with them against Jew-hatred from the right. European anti-racists suddenly find themselves equated with, and smeared as, fledgling neo-Nazis.

If those who support human rights and demand an end to the oppression of Palestinians find themselves labeled antisemitic, it will become ever harder to distinguish between bogus (weaponized) “antisemitism” on the left and real Jew-hatred from the right. The antisemitism smearers – and their fellow travelers like Keir Starmer – are likely to end up suffering their very own “boy who cried wolf” syndrome.

Or as Haaretz notes:

“The issue that is bothering the critics of the Bundestag [German parliament] resolution is whether the extension of the concept of antisemitism to encompass criticism of Israel is not actually adversely affecting the battle against antisemitism. The argument is that the ease with which the accusation is leveled could have the effect of eroding the concept itself.”

The Antisemitism Industry

It is worth noting the shared features of the new Antisemitism Industry and Finkelstein’s earlier discussions of the Holocaust Industry.

In his book, Finkelstein identifies the “wrong Jews” as people like his mother, who survived a Nazi death camp as the rest of her family perished. These surviving Jews, Finkelstein argues, were valued by the Holocaust Industry only in so far as they served as a promotional tool for the Jewish establishment to accumulate more wealth and cultural and political status. Otherwise, the victims were ignored because the actual Holocaust’s message – in contrast to the Jewish leadership’s representation of it – was universal: that we must oppose and fight all forms of racism because they lead to persecution and genocide.

Instead, the Holocaust Industry promoted a particularist, self-interested lesson that the Holocaust proves Jews are uniquely oppressed and that they, therefore, deserve a unique solution: a state, Israel, that must be given unique leeway by western states to commit crimes in violation of international law. The Holocaust Industry – very much to be distinguished from the real events of the Holocaust – is deeply entwined in, and rationalized by, the perpetuation of the racialist, colonial project of Israel.

In the case of the Antisemitism Industry, the “wrong Jew” surfaces again. This time the witch-hunt targets Jewish left-wingers, Jews critical of Israel, Jews opposed to the occupation, and Jews who support a boycott of the illegal settlements or of Israel itself. Again, the problem with these “bad Jews” is that they allude to a universal lesson, one that says Palestinians have at least as much right to self-determination, to dignity and security, in their historic homeland as Jewish immigrants who fled European persecution.

Keir Starmer needs to listen to the 'proudly pro-Israel' Americans for Peace Now. They reject the IHRA definition for 'weaponising' antisemitism and allowing 'McCarthyite witch hunts' of Israel critics. Only those living in a 'black hole' could support it https://t.co/mNCj0LqCky

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) December 6, 2020

In contrast to the “bad Jews”, the Antisemitism Industry demands that a particularist conclusion be drawn about Israel – just as a particularist conclusion was earlier drawn by the Holocaust Industry. It says that to deny Jews a state is to leave them defenceless against the eternal virus of antisemitism. In this conception, the Holocaust may be uniquely abhorrent but it is far from unique. Non-Jews, given the right circumstances, are only too capable of carrying out another Holocaust. Jews must therefore always be protected, always on guard, always have their weapons (or in Israel’s case, its nuclear bombs) to hand.

‘Get out of Jail’ Card

This view, of course, seeks to ignore, or marginalize, other victims of the Holocaust – Romanies, communists, gays – and other kinds of racism. It needs to create a hierarchy of racisms, a competition between them, in which hatred of Jews is at the pinnacle. This is how we arrived at an absurdity: that anti-Zionism – misrepresented as the rejection of a refuge for Jews, rather than the reality that it rejects an ethnic, colonial state oppressing Palestinians – is the same as antisemitism.

Extraordinarily, as the Haaretz article clarifies, German officials are oppressing “bad Jews”, at the instigation of Jewish organizations, to prevent, as they see it, the re-emergence of the far-right and neo-Nazis. The criticisms of Israel made by the “bad Jew” are thereby not just dismissed as ideologically unsound or delusions but become proof that these Jews are colluding with, or at least nourishing, the Jew-haters.

In this way, Germany, the UK and much of Europe have come to justify the exclusion of the “wrong Jew” – those who uphold universal principles for the benefit of all – from the public space. Which, of course, is exactly what Israel wants, because, rooted as it is in an ideology of ethnic exclusivity as a “Jewish state”, it necessarily rejects universal ethics.

What we see here is an illustration of a principle at the heart of Israel’s state ideology of Zionism: Israel needs antisemitism. Israel would quite literally have to invent antisemitism if it did not exist.

This is not hyperbole. The idea that the “virus of antisemitism” lies semi-dormant in every non-Jew waiting for a chance to overwhelm its host is the essential rationale for Israel. If the Holocaust was an exceptional historical event, if antisemitism was an ancient racism that in its modern incarnation followed the patterns of prejudice and hatred familiar in all racisms, from anti-black bigotry to Islamophobia, Israel would be not only redundant but an abomination – because it has been set up to dispossess and abuse another group, the Palestinians.

Antisemitism is Israel’s “get out of jail” card. Antisemitism serves to absolve Israel of the racism it structurally embodies and that would be impossible to overlook were Israel deprived of the misdirection weaponized antisemitism provides.

An Empty Space

The Haaretz article provides a genuine service by not only reminding us that “bad Jews” exist but in coming to their defense – something that European media is no longer willing to do. To defend “bad Jews” like Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi is to be contaminated with the same taint of antisemitism that justified the ejection of these Jews from the public space.

Haaretz records the effort of a few brave cultural institutions in Germany to protest, to hold the line, against this new McCarthyism. Their stand may fail. If it does, you may never become aware of it.

The fraudulent 'Labour antisemitism' controversy has empowered the most thuggish elements in the organised British Jewish community.

Case in point: the Campaign Against Antisemitism effectively calls for Professor David Feldman to keep quiet or be sacked. https://t.co/QWvNg84c2E

— JamieSW (@jsternweiner) December 4, 2020

Once, the “bad Jews” have been smeared into silence, as Palestinians and those who stand in solidarity with them largely have been already; when social media has de-platformed critics of Israel as Jew-haters; when the media and political parties enforce this silence so absolutely they no longer need to smear anyone as an antisemite because these “antisemites” have been disappeared; when the Jewish “community” speaks with one voice because its other voices have been eliminated; when the censorship is complete, you will not know it.

There will be no record of what was lost. There will be simply an empty space, a blank slate, where discussions of Israel’s crimes against Palestinians once existed. What you will hear instead is only what Israel and its partisans want you to hear. Your ignorance will be blissfully complete.

– Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). Visit his website www.jonathan-cook.net. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.

Hezbollah the Beautiful

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TAXI • NOVEMBER 24, 2020 • 3,800 WORDS

A warrior’s soul sleeps in his fist. Wakes in his fist. Till his dying breath, will exist in his fist.

No gun and no mortal danger can unfold this fist. A warrior will live and die with his fist clenched.

This is not for love of violence nor for the thrills of war. Not because of a demented passion for death either. This is because a warrior knows that even in times of peace, evil and evil-doers lurk in the shadow of peace.

Warriorship is vocational. It is non-mercenary. Non-materialistic. Non-negotiable. True warriorhood is purely defensive. It is fixated solely on the protection of a higher justice and defense of self and the meek. It is never predatory. A warrior is steeped in a culture of righteous dignity and martyrdom. Humble dignity. And a sacred martyrdom. A true warrior is not an ordinary soldier, nor a celebrated figure from either media or mythology. A true warrior is real. And rare. A true warrior is the only class of human capable of kissing death right in the eyeball. There is no fear of the infinite black void in the heart of a true warrior.

Throughout history, cultures under duress and attack by covetous enemies have produced their own brand of warrior. Native American Indians gave us the ‘Braves’. Japan gave us the ‘Samurai’. France gave us Joan of Arc. Africa gave us ‘Warrior Queen Amina’. And modern Lebanon has given us, Hezbollah.

Hezbollah: currently the world’s most successful warrior-resistor group fighting against the most malevolent of all modern abominations, otherwise known as the Axis of Evil (US, Israel, and their Western and Arab-Wahabi allies). Hezbollah is also currently the most reviled of all warriors. This is because unable to defeat Hezbollah on the battlefield, and after already spending some $11 billion on many failed coups and smear campaigns this past decade, the Axis of Evil is now reduced to merely attacking Hezbollah with malicious lies and false accusations. To demonize Hezbollah, to sully their immaculate reputation in a vast and global media campaign is about the only weapon left in the hands of the Axis of Evil. This defamation offensive may work on some uninformed people, but indeed it will not weaken Hezbollah’s phenomenal abilities on the battlefield. This agitating agitprop will not change any facts on the ground. It will be but more of your tax dollars wasted on a chimera.

Hezbollah is noble, yet not royal. Its warriors and leaders are essentially from working-class, farming communities who grouped themselves to repel a vicious, colonial and genocidal invader, otherwise known as Israel. Some thirty years after the birth of their resistance group, Hezbollah remain exceptionally humble and profoundly rooted in their modest beginnings. Even though Hezbollah has lost warriors in combat, the number of its martyrs has been relatively low, and it has yet to lose a single battle or war in its 30+ years of existence. And despite its stellar successes on the battlefield, Hezbollah remains unostentatious and merciful in victory. Most notable and impressive of all, Hezbollah’s leadership does not practice chicanery, skullduggery or monkeyshines. They simply do not lie. Not once has its leadership deceived or duped its fighters, its allies or supporters. Consistently true to their word, even Israeli Jewish citizens, according to Israeli polls, believe what Hezbollah’s leadership says above their own leaders in Tel Aviv. This is because time and time again, what Hezbollah says simply and truly ‘is’, and what it promises, it always delivers. And, indeed, it has outsmarted its bulkier enemy at every turn of the road and delivered.

All their battles have been for defensive reasons. ALL of them. They are exceptionally well-disciplined and focused on the task of righteous liberation from cruel and oppressive forces. Their training system produces no traitors and no Mammonites easily seduced by the lure of wealth, physical pleasures, or political status. They are therefore beyond blackmail. Beyond distraction from their cause. Steeped in a culture of martyrdom that’s inspired by the prophet Mohammad’s grandson Hussein and his agonizing martyrdom, a passion-cause and agony that’s parallel to the martyrdom culture of the Christian prophet Jesus, Hezbollah’s warriors are beyond the corruption of soul.

Their training is two-pronged. They are trained in agile guerilla combat, while simultaneously taught a righteous philosophy that in essence is religio-spiritual. A philosophy inspired by their fundamental belief in a just and compassionate god, a god who rewards the faithful and true. This is precisely what distinguishes them from other armies: their absolute philosophical and physical commitment to a righteous god. Although deeply religious and strictly committed to Islam, they are remarkably tolerant of other sects, other faiths and cultures, as exampled by their recent willing martyrdom in defense of Syrian Sunnis, Druze and Alawites, as well as their heroic defense of Christian villages and their ancient Churches in the Levant. Hezbollah warriors have sacrificed their own lives to liberate the very progeny of the original Christians of the world who still reside in the Levant; liberate them from Western and Israeli-backed ISISian terrorists and invaders. Worth mentioning here too, according to a Lebanese General I spoke to, is that Hezbollah are also the protectors of the last remaining Jewish synagogue and its community in Lebanon, numbered at approximately 400 Lebanese adherents. Perhaps here it’s also germane to add that during their wars against Israel, Hezbollah’s leadership have even earnestly embraced and supported the resistance efforts of godless Lebanese communist groups fighting against the invading Jewish army. They have broken bread with and befriended the godless and the godfull alike in the name of fighting and deterring a genocidal and kleptomaniac enemy. Hezbollah remains bonded and intimately close to other Lebanese resistance groups, even in times of peace. Their friendships are always genuine, devoid of exploitative and fickle realpolitik. They are interested and concerned with uniting their countryfolk, not dividing or dominating them. They support a peaceful and equitable co-existence between the 18 legally recognized religions and sects of the Lebanon, whose population count is currently at 6.825 million. It is of historic record that they have even given immunity to Lebanese traitors who colluded with Israel during its 18 year occupation of Lebanon.

Hezbollah follows strict moral rules of war that do not allow for the wanton killing of the enemy: repulsion of enemy and not massacre of enemy is their first and foremost tactic – and if this proves insufficient, then annihilating their enemy becomes a permissible and sanctified necessity. Their Islamic rules of war insist on the humanitarian treatment of POW’s and Hezbollah always obliges. They are trained to be impeccably well-mannered towards their captives: trained not just in strategic guerilla warfare, but also educated in the lofty principles of charity and mercy toward the captured and repentant. They do not abuse victory by claiming sole power: they believe in power-sharing with their compatriots, even with those who never stepped foot on the battlefield.

Hezbollah is supreme, yet evidently not supremacist.

They never break their laws of war for fear of their god. They would rather literally die than break these laws that displease their god. They follow their religio-philosophical and military protocol with absolute precision; and they practice devoted respect and trust in the righteousness of their commanders and cause. Extrajudicial executions are forbidden, and so is the unjustified assault on their enemy. They do not shoot at unarmed women, children or men either. They do not target the handicapped sitting in their wheelchairs like the Israeli army and other Jewish security apparatuses regularly do. They do not invade, they liberate. Hezbollah is a reactive and defensive resistor and not an army of usurpers and psychopaths hellbent on mass murder and the looting of what is not rightfully theirs.

Their resistance culture is humanist. Through and through.

They strive for a just and peaceful world, no matter the cost to their own lives. Indeed, they live for martyrdom; they yearn for martyrdom in the cause of a just and peaceful world. They rank martyrdom as the absolute highest achievement in life.

“We don’t fear death as our death is martyrdom. Martyrdom means eternally living close to our god. Living close to god is the ultimate point in the ascension of mankind: cannot be achieved except through martyrdom” – a Hezbollah warrior.

There is a trinity of principles contained in Hezbollah’s martyrdom philosophy. They are willing to die for three principled notions: for god, for family, and for nation. They live and die for nothing else but for god, family and nation. I can’t stress enough how important their triadic life-philosophy is for them. As faith-filled warriors, they do not ever separate from this soulful philosophy, or ever discard it while at war or even during peace time – not even momentarily, not even for a nano second. Their martyrdom philosophy is their very oxygen. Their very spine. They are consistent in their profound commitment to their divine, triangular philosophy. This is the mother of absolutes for them. This supplies them with infinite, fearless courage. This inspires their attachment and love of righteous, disciplined behavior and focused intent. This provides them with infinite determination; with boundless physical and mental legerity. During warfare training, and on the battlefield and off, they remain intimately connected to this inspirational triangle of motives. In their universe, the muscle, the moral and the divine are eternally wedded. This is the very reason behind their unbroken record of victories and their continuing and increased strength and popularity across the world.

Hezbollah reveres their god above all else – their supernal god sits atop their spiritual pyramid, directly linked below to the two sacred earthly duties of protecting family and nation. Hezbollah warriors value this triadic configuration above even their own lives. They connect their earthly duties towards family and nation directly to the service of their celestial god. Their god requires their unflinching faith and their protection of ‘tribe and land’, and Hezbollah warriors, they are willingly servants who selflessly submit to the absolute reverence of god and protection of family and nation. This noble aegis pleases their god: Hezbollah warriors live for nothing but to please their god, therefore they will never break or dissolve the divine contract they’ve undertaken with their god. Their enemy should be aware and beware: they will actively neutralize any and all threats to this divine equation – even at the cost of their own lives. This is their only mission on earth: reverence of god, defense and protection of family and land. This is Hezbollah’s manifesto in a nutshell. Nothing less than that. Nothing beyond that.

Their resistance model and system has gained much traction and spread outside of their Levantean locale: from the punishing dunes of Yemen and all the way to South America, from the Fertile Crescent and right across the continent of Asia, Hezbollah’s resistance model has spread and continues to be received with open arms, much to the chagrin of their pernicious, defeated enemies.

Hezbollah’s other unique quality is that of sober patience. They are exceptionally adept at the art of patience: their carpet-weaving Iranian friends have taught them this necessary life-skill and they’ve artfully applied this mental discipline to all their war and battle strategies. Believing their faith in their god is permanent and unbreakable, yet everything worldly is changeable, they therefore patiently play the long game against their enemy with utter confidence and evident success.

Yet, despite all the above factual and admirable qualities, their enemies and their enemies’ global media megaphones label Hezbollah as ‘narco-terrorist’ and ‘Islamic terrorist’. Accusing the Hezbollah of trafficking drugs is no different in absurdity than accusing Mother Teresa of global heroin-trading. Everyone who knows Hezbollah’s MO knows that their warriors and their leadership live a clean and sober life. They do not even drop f-bombs or cuss dirty words at their enemy. They are as clean-tongued and clean-living, as humble and ‘gracious as the morn’. Knowing the lifestyle and philosophy that Hezbollah strictly adheres to on the battlefield and off, it is simply inconceivable that Hezbollah would displease their god by running local and international drug rings that ruin people’s lives, break up families and weaken nations. This preposterous accusation belongs to the long list of perfidious lies manufactured by their enemies, who themselves, in fact, participate in international drug trading and trafficking, with the CIA running the lucrative global opium trade of Afghanistan, and the Mossad running the global Ecstasy drug trade in Europe and America.

Unable thus to find a military Achilles’s heel and character fault in their MO, Hezbollah’s enemies have produced a long litany of alleged crimes without ever providing even a single shred of evidence of wrongdoing. Hezbollah’s enemies have added Hezbollah’s good name to their infamously politicized ‘terrorist list’ without even once providing proof and irrefutable substantiation of terrorist activity. Let us here together therefore look at this list of accusations below – and please you will be mindful that if Hezbollah terrorism against the US were in fact true, that there exists actual evidence of Hezbollah terrorism against the United States, Lebanon, especially the south of Lebanon where Hezbollah is based, would have already received a decisive and fatal American ‘Shock and Awe’ treatment.

There is absolutely no proof whatsoever that Hezbollah’s leadership has ever ordered or committed the following: the 1983 truck bombing on the US embassy in Beirut; as well as the bombing of US and French barracks in the same year. The bombing of a restaurant near the US Air force base in Torrejon, Spain; the car bombing of the US embassy annex in Beirut; and the hijacking of a Kuwait Airlines plane – all in the year 1984. The hijacking of TWA flight #847 in 1985. The abduction and execution of three Lebanese Jews in 1986, under the pseudonym of the ‘Organization of the Oppressed on Earth’. The murder of three Saudi diplomats in 1988. The assassination of a Saudi secretary in Bangkok in 1989. The assassination of two more Saudi diplomats and a telex operator at the Saudi embassy in Bangkok in 1990; as well as the kidnapping and murder of a Saudi businessman in Bangkok in the same year. The murder of Ehud Sadan, a security chief at the Israeli embassy in Ankara; as well as the bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires back in 1992. The failed attempted murder of a Turkish-Jewish community leader in Istanbul in 1993. The failed attempt at car-bombing the Israeli embassy in Thailand; and the suicide bombing of the Argentine Jewish Mutual Association building in Buenos Aires – all in year 1984. The truck bombing at the US portion of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996. The assassination of former Lebanese PM, Rafic Hariri, in 2005. The attack on a bus in Bulgaria that was full of Israeli vacationers back in 2012. And many, many more ‘failed this and attempted that’ terrorism activities falsely pinned on Hezbollah by no less than its enemy Israel and its agents in the US and Europe, and by its gruesome Wahabi-Arabian foes.

A handful of the above false and politicized accusations are on a continuous rotation in the Jewish and Western media, yet not even a semblance of proof is ever provided to the reading public. Relying on Islamophobic media trends, these accusations of terrorism are published and republished over and over again, in the hope that hearsay will eventually prevail as fact in the minds of reasonable people. In other words, the above allegations are nothing but propagandistic slings and arrows aimed at demonizing an undefeated and righteous resistance group. Interestingly, despite these aggressive propaganda operations against the Hezbollah, neither its fighting skills or vigor have been damped, nor have these misinformation assaults halted the spread of its popularity around the the world. Even the military academies of its enemies, in silent admiration now include the study of Hezbollah’s supreme tactics and warfare strategies in their curriculum, thus confirming the high caliber of their fighting skills and war philosophy. One cannot separate Hezbollah’s war strategies from the foundation of their humanist philosophy. Both are always employed in tandem. Hezbollah always leave an exit passage for their enemy to retreat through during an ambush.

Hezbollah receives enthusiastic moral support from Muslim as well as non-Muslim nations. From Eastern and from some Western nations. Hezbollah is respected, loved and revered in the four corners of the world – including appreciation by some citizens in enemy nations who are mentally unmolested by their State propaganda. This is not just because humans by nature love an undefeated war hero. This is because the humble Hezbollah has successfully established itself as an army of the people, by the people, for the people. And here lies the essence of its true popularity. A Lebanese force of good that’s comprised ‘of the people, by the people, for the people’ is no different than the beloved American constitutional motto of a government ‘of the people, by the people, for the people’. What Hezbollah has achieved for its nation and for its compatriots as a resistance group, American politicians are yet to actually demonstrate and realize for the benefit of the American people.

Why is that?

This is because the Lebanese have clearly defined their enemy as Israel, whereas the American collective has yet to identify its insidious internal enemy as ‘Jewish power’. Jewish power that has risen through unsavory and un-American tribal cronyism, nepotism, blackmail and coercion. Jewish supremacy that has been blatantly dominant of American life internally and American foreign policy internationally for the past 60+ years (since the Kennedy assassination, in fact). Jewish power that has essentially been corrosive and disfiguring of American traditional life domestically, and ruinous upon its purse and reputation internationally. But, if the Lebanese can so successfully circumvent and repeatedly defeat abusive Jewish power, then so can Americans who live under the boot of an overtly anti-democratic Jewish occupation. The recent shredding of our beloved First Amendment is but the latest victim of Jewish tyranny, and an undeniable expression of their hate of our democracy.

But, for Americans to liberate themselves, they first need to overcome all the gauntlets and weapons of mass distraction, all the social-engineering and numerous other dumbing-down projects that American elite Jews and their lobby have insidiously imposed on American citizen and politician alike. For Americans to be truly free and independent, and they are a captive people at present, they need to first bypass all the Jewish-engineered and sponsored divisions inside of America. Divisions like Identitarian politics, race-baiting and race disharmony, Jewish-owned Hollywood’s demonization of traditional American values, Neoliberalism, globalism, the Federal Reserve, Wall Street, Mainstream media, most of Altmedia – and the long list goes on. They also need to discard and rebel against imposed mental pollutants like the mandatory teaching of the fake Anne Frank book in their schools; and most certainly, they also need to reject the funding of all those hideous Holocaust museums that operate to enable ongoing Jewish crimes against Americans by portraying the Jews as the ‘eternal victims with special needs’. All these holocaust museums are no more than propaganda factories paid for by your own tax dollars, not by Israeli Shekels or by private Jewish donations. It is the height of absurdity that Americans should be paying for their own brainwash and mental enslavement. Americans need to, ABOVE ALL, reclaim their First Amendment right that’s been hijacked and recently ripped to shreds by Jewish power. Americans need to regain their freedom of speech and be able to call a spade, a spade, and a Jew, a Jew.

There is no understating how many Jewish chains are already wrapped around the American mind and body. That’s your individual mind and body I speak of.

Begs the question here: where is your dignity and self-respect, dear American? Where is your honor and warriorhood? Where are the fruits of your labor that you’ve invested in your family and country year after year? It is not in your own hands, and it is not being spent on your community either. The Jewish lobby has made sure that your freedom and your tax dollars go first and foremost and directly towards serving the state of Israel. The Jewish lobby has killed your democracy, created social devastation right across the nation and fleeced your hard-earned tax dollars to benefit the klepto and oppressive state of Israel. The Jewish lobby has been treating you no different than a nation of slaves it socially engineers and owns. Presently, America is not in a state of justice and grace. Americans of all colors and stripes are not a free people. America is no longer ‘the beautiful’. America is under occupation by tribal Jewish power. And the Lebanese? The Lebanese, despite their mountain of current internal crisis, are in fact living a well-earned liberated life. The bruised Lebanese are in fact a freer people than the Americans are. A life of freedom from occupation gifted to them by the consistently vigilant and sacrificial Hezbollah. Hezbollah the patriot. Hezbollah, the beautiful.

When will citizens of the West and of America realize that Hezbollah is by far more on their side than the tax-fleecing, warmongering Zion? After all, Hezbollah exists to liberate, not to rob the Mints of Europe and America, not to warmonger for wars of choice that cost mega dollars and Euros and rivers of blood. And most certainly, Hezbollah does not in any measure oppress the Western people’s rights to freedom of speech – a right that the Israel lobbies of Europe and America are fixated on denying the people.

Where is your own Hezbollah, dear American? Where is your resistance to your occupier? Where is your resisting mind? Your resisting vote? Your resisting words? Your resisting art? Your resisting gun?

As an American expat witnessing the damage and dire divisions inflicted on our society by Jewish elites, I advise you not turn your guns against one another. This is absolutely a ruinous folly. This is what your insidious occupier is betting on. Your division emboldens and empowers them. To fleece more out of you for the sake of Israel, the enemy in your midst needs you further divided and weaker. Do not submit, but do circumvent. Circumvention through unity. You do not have to love one another to death, but you do have to unite and resist against your enemy within if a life of freedom, peace and prosperity is what you think you deserve. Unite despite your differences. Unite despite your rage. This is your key to liberation.

‘By deception thou shalt do war’. This is the Israeli motto.

‘Live free or die’. This is an American motto. It is also a Hezbollah motto.(Republished from Plato’s Guns by permission of author or representative)

Israel’s Power Is Unlimited

Source

PHILIP GIRALDI • NOVEMBER 17, 2020 

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director
of the Council for the National Interest,
a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation
(Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks
a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy
in the Middle East. Website i
s https://councilforthenationalinterest.org, 
address is P.O. Box 2157,
Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is 
inform@cnionline.org.
← Neocons Poised to Join Ne

Democrats and Republicans bow to force majeure

Even though there was virtually no debate on foreign policy during the recent presidential campaign, there has been considerable discussion of what President Joe Biden’s national security team might look like. The general consensus is that the top levels of the government will be largely drawn from officials who previously served in the Obama administration and who are likely to be hawkish.

There has also been, inevitably, some discussion of how the new administration, if it is confirmed, will deal with Israel and the Middle East in general.

Israelis would have preferred a victory by Donald Trump as they clearly understand that he was and still is willing to defer to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on nearly all issues. Indeed, that process is ongoing even though Trump might only have about nine more weeks remaining in office. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is reportedly preparing to sanction several international human rights organizations as anti-Semitic due to the fact that they criticize Israel’s brutality on the West Bank and its illegal settlement policies. The White House is also prepared to free convicted but paroled Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard from travel restrictions so he can move to Israel, where he is regarded as a hero. Pollard was the most damaging spy in U.S. history and any mitigation of his sentence has been opposed by both the Pentagon, where he worked, and also by the intelligence community.

Finally, it is widely believed that before the end of the year Trump will declare that the United States accepts the legitimacy of Israeli intentions to declare annexation of nearly all the Palestinian West Bank. The White House will actually encourage such an initiative reportedly “to sow hostility between Israel and the Biden administration.” One should note that none of the pro-Israeli measures that are likely to come out of the White House enhance U.S. security in any way and they also do nothing particularly to benefit Trump’s campaign to be re-elected through legal challenges.

If Biden does succeed in becoming president, the special place that Israel occupies in the centers of American power are unlikely to be disturbed, which is why Netanyahu was quick off the mark in congratulating the possible new chief executive. Biden has proudly declared himself to be a “Zionist” and his running mate Kamala Harris has been a featured speaker at the annual gatherings of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in Washington. Both are strongly supportive of the “special relationship” with the Israel and will make no effort to compromise America’s apparent commitment to protect and nourish the Jewish state.

Though Israel is central to how the United States conducts its foreign policy, the country was invisible in the debates and other discussions that took place among candidates during the recent campaign. American voters were therefore given the choice of one government that panders to Israel at the expense of U.S. security or another party that does exactly the same thing. To be sure, Biden did state that he would work to reinstate the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) relating to Iran’s nuclear program, which was canceled by Trump. But he also indicated that it would require some amendment, meaning that the Iranians would have to include their missile program in the monitoring while also abandoning their alleged propensity to “interfere” in the Middle East region. The Iranian government has already indicated that additional conditions are unacceptable, so the deal is dead in the water. Israel has also privately and publicly objected to any new arrangement and has already declared that it would “save the option” of working through the Republican Senate to thwart any attempts by the Biden Administration to change things.

That Israel would blatantly and openly interfere in the deliberations of Congress raises some serious questions which the mainstream media predictably is not addressing. Jewish power in America is for real and it is something that some Jews are not shy about discussing among themselves. Jewish power is unique in terms of how it functions. If you’re an American (or British) politician, you very quickly are made to appreciate that Israel owns you and nearly all of your colleagues. Indeed, the process begins in the U.S. even before your election when the little man from AIPAC shows up with the check list that he wants you to sign off on. If you behave per instructions your career path will be smooth, and you will benefit from your understanding that everything happening inn Washington that is remotely connected to the interests of the state of Israel is to be determined by the Jewish state alone, not by the U.S. Congress or White House.

And, here is the tricky part, even while you are energetically kowtowing to Netanyahu, you must strenuously deny that there is Jewish power at work if anyone ever asks you about it. You behave in that fashion because you know that your pleasant life will be destroyed, painfully, if you fail to deny the existence of an Israel Lobby or the Jewish power that supports it.

It is a bold assertion, but there is plenty of evidence to support how that power is exerted and what the consequences are. Senators William Fulbright and Chuck Percy and Congressmen Paul Findlay, Pete McCloskey and Cynthia McKinney have all experienced the wrath of the Lobby and voted out of office. Currently Reverend Raphael Warnock, who is running against Georgia Loeffler for a senate seat in Georgia demonstrates exactly how candidates are convinced to stand on their heads by the Israel Lobby. Warnock was a strong supporter of Palestinian rights and a critic of Israeli brutality. He said as recently as 2018 that the Israelis were shooting civilians and condemned the military occupation and settlement construction on the Palestinian West Bank, which he compared to apartheid South Africa. Now that he is running for the Senate, he is saying that he is opposed to the Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement due to what he calls the movement’s “anti-Semitic overtones.” He also supports continued military assistance for Israel and believes that Iran is in pursuit of a nuclear weapon, both of which are critical issues being promoted by the Zionist lobby.

There is some pushback in Washington to Israeli dominance, but not much. Recent senior Pentagon appointee Colonel Douglas Macgregor famously has pointed out that many American politicians get “very, very rich” through their support of Israel even though it means the United States being dragged into new wars. Just how Israel gains control of the U.S. political process is illustrated by the devastating insider tale of how the Obama Administration’s feeble attempts to do the right thing in the Middle East were derailed by American Jews in Congress, the media, party donors and from inside the White House itself. The story is of particularly interest as the Biden Administration will no doubt suffer the same fate if it seeks to reject or challenge Israel’s ability to manipulate and virtually control key aspects of U.S. foreign policy.

The account of Barack Obama’s struggle with Israel and the Israeli Lobby comes from a recently published memoir written by a former foreign policy adviser Ben Rhodes. It is entitled The World As It Is, and it is extremely candid about how Jewish power was able to limit the foreign policy options of a popular sitting president. Rhodes recounts, for example, how Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel once nicknamed him “Hamas” after he dared to speak up for Palestinian human rights, angrily shouting at him “Hamas over here is going to make it impossible for my kid to have his fucking bar mitzvah in Israel.”

Rhodes cites numerous instances where Obama was forced to back down when confronted by Israel and its supporters in the U.S. as well as within the Democratic Party. On several occasions, Netanyahu lecture the U.S. president as if he were an errant schoolboy. And Obama just had to take it. Rhodes sums up the situation as follows: “In Washington, where support for Israel is an imperative for members of Congress, there was a natural deference to the views of the Israeli government on issues related to Iran, and Netanyahu was unfailingly confrontational, casting himself as an Israeli Churchill…. AIPAC and other organizations exist to make sure that the views of the Israeli government are effectively disseminated and opposing views discredited in Washington, and this dynamic was a permanent part of the landscape of the Obama presidency.”

And, returning to the persistent denial of Jewish power even existing when it is running full speed and relentlessly, Rhodes notes the essential dishonesty of the Israel Lobby as it operates in Washington: “Even to acknowledge the fact that AIPAC was spending tens of millions to defeat the Iran deal [JCPOA] was anti-Semitic. To observe that the same people who supported the war in Iraq also opposed the Iran deal was similarly off limits. It was an offensive way for people to avoid accountability for their own positions.”

Many Americans long to live in a country that is at peace with the world and respectful of the sovereignty of foreign nations. Alas, as long as Israeli interests driven by overwhelming Jewish power in the United States continue to corrupt our institutions that just will not be possible. It is time for all Americans, including Jews, to accept that Israel is a foreign country that must make its own decisions and thereby suffer the consequences. The United States does not exist to bail Israel out or to provide cover for its bad behavior. The so-called “special relationship” must end and the U.S. must deal with the Israelis as they would with any other country based on America’s own self-interests. Those interests definitely do not include funding the Israeli war machine, assassinating foreign leaders, or attacking a non-threatening Iran while continuing an illegal occupation of Syria.

Social media’s erasure of Palestinians is a grim warning for our future

Jonathan Cook

26 October 2020 12:39 UTC 

Facebook, Google and Twitter are not neutral platforms. They control the digital public square to aid the powerful – and can cancel any of us overnight

Palestinian critics say Facebook has become ‘another face of occupation’ (AFP/File photo)

There is a growing unease that the decisions taken by social media corporations can have a harmful impact on our lives. These platforms, despite enjoying an effective monopoly over the virtual public square, have long avoided serious scrutiny or accountability. 

In a new Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma, former Silicon Valley executives warn of a dystopian future. Google, Facebook and Twitter have gathered vast quantities of data on us to better predict and manipulate our desires. Their products are gradually rewiring our brains to addict us to our screens and make us more pliable to advertisers. The result, as we are consigned to discrete ideological echo chambers, is ever greater social and political polarisation and turmoil.

Western publics are waking up very belatedly to the undemocratic power social media wields over them

As if to underline the ever-tightening grip these tech corporations exert on our lives, Facebook and Twitter decided this month to openly interfere in the most contentious US presidential election in living memory. They censored a story that could harm the electoral prospects of Joe Biden, the Democratic challenger to incumbent President Donald Trump. 

Given that nearly half of Americans receive their news chiefly via Facebook, the ramifications of such a decision on our political life were not hard to interpret. In excising any debate about purported corruption and influence-peddling by Biden’s son, Hunter, carried out in his father’s name, these social media platforms stepped firmly into the role of authoritarian arbiter of what we are allowed to say and know. 

‘Monopoly gatekeeper’

Western publics are waking up very belatedly to the undemocratic power social media wields over them. But if we wish to understand where this ultimately leads, there is no better case study than the very different ways Israelis and Palestinians have been treated by the tech giants. 

The treatment of Palestinians online serves as a warning that it would be foolish indeed to regard these globe-spanning corporations as politically neutral platforms, and their decisions as straightforwardly commercial. This is to doubly misunderstand their role.How Facebook threatens vulnerable Muslim communities Read More »

Social media firms are now effectively monopolistic communication grids – similar to the electricity and water grids, or the phone network of a quarter of a century ago. Their decisions are therefore no longer private matters, but instead have huge social, economic and political consequences. That is part of the reason why the US justice department launched a lawsuit last week against Google for acting as a “monopoly gatekeeper for the internet”. 

Google, Facebook and Twitter have no more a right to arbitrarily decide who and what they host on their sites than telecoms companies once had a right to decide whether a customer should be allowed a phone line. But unlike the phone company, social media corporations control not just the means of communication, but the content too. They can decide, as the Hunter Biden story shows, whether their customers get to participate in vital public debates about who leads them.

The Hunter Biden decision is as if the phone company of old not only listened in to conversations, but was able to cut the line if it did not like the politics of any particular customer. 

In fact, it is even worse than that. Social media now deliver the news to large sections of the population. Their censoring of a story is more akin to the electricity company turning off the power to everyone’s homes for the duration of a TV broadcast to ensure no one can see it.

Censorship by stealth

The tech giants are the wealthiest, most powerful corporations in human history, their riches measured in hundreds of billions, and now trillions, of dollars. But the argument that they are apolitical – aiming simply to maximise profits – was never true. 

They have every reason to promote politicians who side with them by committing not to break up their monopolies or regulate their activities, or, better still, by promising to weaken controls that might prevent them from growing even more fabulously rich and powerful. 

Social media algorithms help drive decisions on content removal (AFP/File photo)

Conversely, the tech giants also have every incentive to use the digital space to penalise and marginalise political activists who urge greater regulation either of their activities, or of the marketplace more generally. 

Unlike their explicit deletion of the Hunter Biden story, which incensed the Trump administration, social media corporations more usually censor by stealth. That power is wielded through algorithms, the secret codes that decide whether something or someone appears in a search result or on a social media feed. If they desire, these tech titans can cancel any one of us overnight. 

This is not just political paranoia. The disproportionate impact of algorithm changes on “left-leaning” websites – those most critical of the neoliberal system that has enriched social media corporations – was highlighted this month by the Wall Street Journal. 

Wrong kinds of speech

Politicians increasingly understand the power of social media, which is why they want to harness it as best they can for their own ends. Since the shock of Trump’s election victory in late 2016, Facebook, Google and Twitter executives have regularly found themselves dragged before legislative oversight committees in the US and UK.

There, they are ritually rebuked by politicians for creating a crisis of “fake news” – a crisis that, in fact, long predated social media, as the deceptions of US and UK officials in linking Saddam Hussein to 9/11 and claiming that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction” testify to only too clearly. 

The online fate of Palestinians points to a future in which the already-powerful will gain ever greater control over what we know and what we are allowed to think

Politicians have also begun holding internet corporations responsible for “foreign interference” in western elections – typically blamed on Russia – despite a dearth of serious evidence for most of their allegations. 

Political pressure is being exerted not to make the corporations more transparent and accountable, but to steer them towards enforcing even more assiduously restrictions on the wrong kinds of speech – whether it be violent racists on the right or critics of capitalism and western government policy on the left.

For that reason, social media’s original image as a neutral arena of information sharing, or as a tool for widening public debate and increasing civic engagement, or as a discourse leveller between the rich and powerful and weak and marginalised, grows ever more hollow.

Separate digital rights

Nowhere are ties between tech and state officials more evident than in their dealings with Israel. This has led to starkly different treatment of digital rights for Israelis and Palestinians. The online fate of Palestinians points to a future in which the already-powerful will gain ever greater control over what we know and what we are allowed to think, and over who is visible and who is erased from public life.

Israel was well-positioned to exploit social media before most other states had recognised its importance in manipulating popular attitudes and perceptions. For decades, Israel had, in part, outsourced an official programme of hasbara – or state propaganda – to its own citizens and supporters abroad. As new digital platforms emerged, these partisans were only too willing to expand their role.Facebook accused of censoring Palestinians under pretext of fighting hate speech Read More »

Israel had another advantage. After the 1967 occupation of the West Bank, Jerusalem and Gaza, Israel began crafting a narrative of state victimhood by redefining antisemitism to suggest it was now a particular affliction of the left, not the right. So-called “new antisemitism” did not target Jews, but related instead to criticism of Israel and support for Palestinian rights. 

This highly dubious narrative proved easy to condense into social media-friendly soundbites. 

Israel still routinely describes any Palestinian resistance to its belligerent occupation or its illegal settlements as “terrorism”, and any support from other Palestinians as “incitement”. International solidarity with Palestinians is characterised as “delegitimisation” and equated with antisemitism. 

‘Flood the internet’

As far back as 2008, it emerged that a pro-Israel media lobby group, Camera, had been orchestrating covert efforts by Israel loyalists to infiltrate the online encyclopedia Wikipedia to edit entries and “rewrite history” in ways favourable to Israel. Soon afterwards, politician Naftali Bennett helped organise courses teaching “Zionist editing” of Wikipedia. 

In 2011, the Israeli army declared social media a new “battleground” and assigned “cyber warriors” to wage combat online. In 2015, Israel’s foreign ministry set up an additional command centre to recruit young, tech-savvy former soldiers from 8200, the army’s cyber intelligence unit, to lead the battle online. Many have gone on to establish hi-tech firms whose spying software became integral to the functioning of social media.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attends a 2019 cyber industry conference in Tel Aviv (AFP)

An app launched in 2017, Act.IL, mobilised Israel partisans to “swarm” sites hosting either criticism of Israel or support for Palestinians. The initiative, supported by Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, was headed by veterans of Israeli intelligence services. 

According to the Forward, a US Jewish weekly, Israel’s intelligence services liaise closely with Act.IL and request help in getting content, including videos, removed by social media platforms. The Forward observed shortly after the app was rolled out: “Its work so far offers a startling glimpse of how it could shape the online conversations about Israel without ever showing its hand.”

Sima Vaknin-Gil, a former Israeli military censor who was then assigned to Israel’s strategic affairs ministry, said the goal was to “create a community of fighters” whose job was to “flood the internet” with Israeli propaganda. 

Willing allies

With advantages measured in personnel numbers and ideological zeal, in tech and propaganda experience, and in high-level influence in Washington and Silicon Valley, Israel was soon able to turn social media platforms into willing allies in its struggle to marginalise Palestinians online.  

In 2016, Israel’s justice ministry was boasting that Facebook, Google and YouTube were “complying with up to 95 percent of Israeli requests to delete content”, almost all of it Palestinian. The social media companies did not confirm this figure.

The Anti-Defamation League, a pro-Israel lobby group with a history of smearing Palestinian organisations and Jewish groups critical of Israel, established a “command centre” in Silicon Valley in 2017 to monitor what it termed “online hate speech”. That same year, it was appointed a “trusted flagger” organisation for YouTube, meaning its reporting of content for removal was prioritised. 

Tech corporations are now the undeclared, profit-driven arbiters of our speech rights. But their commitment is not to open and vigorous public debate

At a 2018 conference in Ramallah hosted by 7amleh, a Palestinian online advocacy group, local Google and Facebook representatives barely hid their priorities. It was important to their bottom line to avoid upsetting governments with the power to constrain their commercial activities – even if those governments were systematically violating international law and human rights. In this battle, the Palestinian Authority carries no weight at all. Israel presides over Palestinians’ communications and internet infrastructure. It controls the Palestinian economy and its key resources.

Since 2016, Israel’s justice ministry has reportedly suppressed tens of thousands of Palestinian posts. In a completely opaque process, Israel’s own algorithms detect content it deems “extremist” and then requests its removal. Hundreds of Palestinians have been arrested by Israel over social media posts, chilling online activity. 

Human Rights Watch warned late last year that Israel and Facebook were often blurring the distinction between legitimate criticism of Israel and incitement. Conversely, as Israel has shifted ever further rightwards, the Netanyahu government and social media platforms have not stemmed a surge of posts in Hebrew promoting anti-Palestinian incitement and calling for violence. 7amleh has noted that Israelis post racist or inciteful material against Palestinians roughly every minute. 

News agencies shut down

As well as excising tens of thousands of Palestinian posts, Israel has persuaded Facebook to take down the accounts of major Palestinian news agencies and leading journalists. 

By 2018, the Palestinian public had grown so incensed that a campaign of online protests and calls to boycott Facebook were led under the hashtag “FBcensorsPalestine”. In Gaza, demonstrators accused the company of being “another face of occupation”. Leila Khaled shutdown shows how corporate tech is enemy of free speechRead More »

Activism in solidarity with Palestinians in the US and Europe has been similarly targeted. Ads for films, as well as the films themselves, have been taken down and websites removed. 

Last month, Zoom, a video conferencing site that has boomed during the Covid-19 pandemic, joined YouTube and Facebook in censoring a webinar organised by San Francisco State University because it included Leila Khaled, an icon of the Palestinian resistance movement now in her seventies.

On Friday, Zoom blocked a second scheduled appearance by Khaled – this time in a University of Hawaii webinar on censorship – as well as a spate of other events across the US to protest against her cancellation by the site. A statement concerning the day of action said campuses were “joining in the campaign to resist corporate and university silencing of Palestinian narratives and Palestinian voices”.

The decision, a flagrant attack on academic freedom, was reportedly taken after the social media groups were heavily pressured by the Israeli government and anti-Palestinian lobby groups, which labelled the webinar “antisemitic”.

Wiped off the map

The degree to which the tech giants’ discrimination against Palestinians is structural and entrenched has been underscored by the years-long struggle of activists both to include Palestinian villages on online maps and GPS services, and to name the Palestinian territories as “Palestine”, in accordance with Palestine’s recognition by the United Nations. 

That campaign has largely floundered, even though more than a million people have signed a petition in protest. Both Google and Apple have proved highly resistant to these appeals; hundreds of Palestinian villages are missing from their maps of the occupied West Bank, while Israel’s illegal settlements are identified in detail, accorded the same status as the Palestinian communities that are shown. 

New houses being built in the Nokdim settlement in the occupied West Bank on 13 October (AFP)

The occupied Palestinian territories are subordinated under the name “Israel”, while Jerusalem is presented as Israel’s unified and undisputed capital, just as Israel claims – making the occupation of the Palestinian section of the city invisible. 

These are far from politically neutral decisions. Israeli governments have long pursued a Greater Israel ideology that requires driving Palestinians off their lands. This year, that dispossession programme was formalised with plans, backed by the Trump administration, to annex swathes of the West Bank. 

Google and Apple are effectively colluding in this policy by helping to erase Palestinians’ visible presence in their homeland. As two Palestinian scholars, George Zeidan and Haya Haddad, recently noted: “When Google and Apple erase Palestinian villages from their navigation, but proudly mark settlements, the effect is complicity in the Israeli nationalist narrative.” 

Out of the shadows

Israel’s ever-tightening relationship with social media corporations has played out largely behind the scenes. But these ties moved decisively out of the shadows in May, when Facebook announced that its new oversight board would include Emi Palmor, one of the architects of Israel’s online repression policy towards Palestinians. 

Palestinians know only too well how easy it is for technology to diminish and disappear the voices of the weak and oppressed, and to amplify the voices of the powerful

The board will issue precedent-setting rulings to help shape Facebook’s and Instagram’s censorship and free speech policies. But as the former director-general of the justice ministry, Palmor has shown no commitment to online free speech. Quite the reverse: she worked hand-in-hand with the tech giants to censor Palestinian posts and shut down Palestinian news websites. She oversaw the transformation of her department into what the human rights organisation Adalah has called the Orwellian “Ministry of Truth”. 

Tech corporations are now the undeclared, profit-driven arbiters of our speech rights. But their commitment is not to open and vigorous public debate, online transparency or greater civic engagement. Their only commitment is to the maintenance of a business environment in which they avoid any regulation by major governments infringing on their right to make money.

The appointment of Palmor perfectly illustrates the corrupting relationship between government and social media. Palestinians know only too well how easy it is for technology to diminish and disappear the voices of the weak and oppressed, and to amplify the voices of the powerful. 

Many more of us could soon find ourselves sharing the online fate of Palestinians.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.Jonathan CookJonathan Cook, a British journalist based in Nazareth since 2001, is the the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He is a past winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His website and blog can be found at: http://www.jonathan-cook.net

Corbyn and the Tyranny of Correctness

OCTOBER 30, 2020 BY GILAD ATZMON

By Gilad Atzmon

Liberal film maker Michael Moore, who in 2016 predicted Donald Trump’s electoral victory, is again interfering with the premature celebration over Biden’s victory.

 Yesterday, just  five days before the election, Moore sounded the alarm, strongly suggesting that the polls showing Biden with a comfortable lead over Trump are not accurate. 

In a TV interview Moore said: “The Trump vote is always being undercounted. Pollsters- when they actually call the Trump voter, the Trump voter is very suspicious of the ‘Deep State’ calling them and asking them who they’re voting for.”

 Moore is devastated by the thought that Trump may continue residing at the same address for another four years, but that does not affect the acuity of his observation. In this peculiar world, a large proportion of Americans are reluctant to admit their support for the elected president. This is not just an American phenomenon. Many Brits won’t admit that they voted Brexit and would probably vote Brexit again. Many Brits wouldn’t admit that they supported the Tories but when they voted, they served up the Labour party its biggest blow in its electoral history. The same happened in Israel’s recent elections. Netanyahu performed far better on election day than in the pollsters’ predictions. The explanation given in Israel was that his voters do not tell the truth to pollsters.

History provides us with a manifold of occasions in which the masses pretended to support the regime, the ruling party or a tyrant. What we  see in the West currently is the opposite. A large segment of the public is actually fearful of the opposition, of those who are committed to ‘liberate’ them from their ‘crypto fascist’ rulers in the name of ‘liberal values’ and ‘freedom.’

Americans aren’t fearful of Trump, his party, the intelligence services, the NSA, the FBI or the CIA.  They are actually afraid of the ‘progressive’ social media giants and their ‘community standards’. In the USA much of the mainstream media  isn’t shy of being one sided and  blatantly conceals  news that may present the presidential challenger in a negative light. It is even more disturbing that many Americans appear to be fearful of the opposition and its powers over them. This suggests that America isn’t even remotely a free place. In America, as in Britain, the opposition has evolved into a dark, authoritarian force.

What is at the core of this authoritarian shift?  The so-called Left; ‘liberals’ and ‘progressives’ are totally removed from the cultural and political core values that made the Left into a meaningful argument. The level of detachment is so severe that most Leftists, progressives and liberals don’t even remember what those values are. The so-called Left has failed to adapt to the new reality. They, evidently,  seek political  power, but they fail to provide a plan that would make the world a slightly better place. It doesn’t take a genius to point at Trump’s dysfunctional operation as much as it is easy to point at Boris Johnson’s comical cabinet but what is it that the opposition offers instead? I would have liked to say ‘not a lot,’ but the answer is actually ‘nothing at all.’

The humiliating crash of Jeremy Corbyn is probably the most useful window into the evaporation of Left and progressive politics on both sides of the Atlantic. When Corbyn was elected to lead the Labour Party in September 2015, he was regarded as a principled Left ideological icon, a man who had supported the oppressed throughout his entire political career: even those who did not support him agreed that Corbyn was Britain’s leading anti racist. Within days of  Corbyn’s nomination as the Labour PM candidate, Corbyn displayed all the traits of a rock star. Millions of young Brits and others around the world saw him as a hero of justice and offered themselves as his avant-garde in his battle for justice and against austerity.

Yesterday, the same Corbyn was subject to the final humiliating blow. He was suspended from the party he led until a few months ago. What happened between 2015 and 2020?  

As soon as Corbyn assumed the lead of Labour both he and his party were subject to relentless attacks by the Israel Lobby and British Jewish Institutions. One after another, Corbyn’s closest allies were targeted. Corbyn didn’t stand up for any of them, or if he did, he made sure to conceal his intervention. Thousands of Labour members were suspended and expelled from the Party for criticising Israel, its lobby, or noting any exceptionalist aspects of Jewish political culture. But throughout the witch hunt, Corbyn remained silent. And when it came to politics, Corbyn couldn’t take a firm position on Brexit or any other matter. It took Corbyn only four years to waste the huge support he had initially  and to reduce his party into a tragic act. In those four years, the British Labour Party explored every authoritarian method. It harassed and collected private information about its members, it even spied on its members’ social media accounts.  It operated in concert with the police and the Israel lobby against its own precious members. During all that time while Corbyn was the leader of the party,  not once did he act as a  leader and stand  up and call for a stop to the madness.  

Corbyn was suspended yesterday following his reaction to the Equalities and Human Rights Commission’s (EHRC) verdict that Labour had broken the law in its handling of antisemitism complaints during the period when Mr Corbyn was in charge.

No one in the treacherous British press dared mention it, but the meaning of this suspension is that even the ex-leader of the Labour party, a person who was a PM candidate last December, is not allowed to express his personal views. All he is allowed to do is to follow the script. Clearly it isn’t just the masses who are terrorised by tyranny of correctness, even the Labour Party and its leadership are subject to the most authoritarian proscriptions. They are commanded to follow a script. The only question that remains open  is who writes the script and who translates it into English?

But the absurdity is even greater. The EHRC was formed by the Labour government back in 2007. Its non-official task was to tackle right wing racism in an attempt to interfere with the British National Front. From its inception, the EHRC was designed to police thought and speech. Looking at Corbyn and the damage the Labour party inflicted on itself, the chickens have come home to roost. Labour has been beaten by the dictatorial machine it invented to police its political enemies.

We do not yet know who is going to win the USA presidential election. But even if Biden wins, it is impossible to deny the fact that pretty much every second American voter believes that Trump is the better man to lead the country. The same applies in Britain, even if Labour had won the last election, every second Brit believes that Brexit is the right way forward.

I believe that if there is anything left out of the Athenian spirit and Christian ethos that made the West into a precious civilization that inspired others, it is that we must  ‘love our neighbour.’  In 2020 loving your neighbour means to agree to disagree, to see a human and humanity in each other. To love your neighbour is to search for that which unites us and to stand firm against those who break us into biological identitarian segments separated by gender, skin colour, sexual orientation etc. To love your neighbour in 2020 is to seek harmony.

The Left in its current authoritarian form cannot lead us towards this goal. It is an occupied zone. The Left needs a reset, it needs to delve into its metaphysical origin: into that unifying instinct that is also universal. Corbyn was a star when people believed that he really cared for ‘the many’ and not ‘the few.’ He evaporated as a political power when the many understood that he and his party were puppeteered by the very few.  

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Cui bono from the situation in France

October 29, 2020

I won’t even bother repeating it all here, those who are interested in my views of this entire Charlie Hebdo canard can read my article “I am NOT Charlie” here: https://thesaker.is/i-am-not-charlie/

No, what I want to do is to ask a simple question: do you think the French leaders are simply stupid, suicidal or naive?  I submit that they neither stupid, nor suicidal nor naive.  In fact, they are using a well practiced technique which goes with some variation of this:

• Infiltrate some pseudo-Islamic gang of cutthroats (literally!)
• Keep them under close scrutiny ostensibly for counter-terrorism purposes
• Inside the group, try to promote your confidential informers
• Have your analysts work on the following question: “how could we best provoke these nutcases into a bloody terrorist act?“
• Once the plan is decided, simply execute it, say by organizing the posting fantastically offensive caricatures
• Once the cutthroats strike, blame Islam and double down
• By then, you have infuriated most of the immense Muslim world out there and you can rest assured that the process is launched and will continue on its own.  You can now relax and get the pop-corn
• Have your propaganda machine declare that Islam is incompatible with western civilization (whatever that means in 2020, both Descartes and Conchita Wurst I suppose…)
• Shed some crocodile tears when the cutthroats murder some completely innocent Christian bystander
• And announce a new crusade against “Islamism” (also a vague and, frankly, meaningless term!) and crack down on true Muslim communities and ideas while continuing to lovingly arm, train, finance and direct the “good terrorists” who have now become your own, personal, cutthroats.

Cui bono?

Anybody who knows anything about the political realities in France will immediately know in whose interests this all is and who is behind that: the Zionist power structure in France (CRIF, UEJF, etc. and the Israelis).  They have a total control over Macron and over the entire political class, very much including Marine LePen.

Who else could have concocted the “beautiful” term “Islamo-Fascisme“?!

This is a new phenomenon, a new ideology and a new strategy, which Alain Soral calls “National Zionism” which I discussed in some details here: https://thesaker.is/the-great-fraud-of-national-zionism/.

In its inception (from Ahad Ha’am, Theodor Herzl,  Ze’ev Jabotinsky, etc) Zionism used to be a largely secular and nationalistic, then, later, after WWII, it became very leftist and still secular ( Ben-Gurion, Shlomo Lavi, Golda Meir).  Modern Zionism, however, is both rabidly racist and religious – the perfect example would be US neocons.  It is also a ruthless and genocidal ideology which has created something truly original: God-mandated racism, something which, as far as I know, no other religion professes (so much for the ignorant and, frankly, plain stupid notions of “Abrahamic religions” or, even worse, “Judeo-Christian values”!).  National Zionism is the next phase of Zionism – it is rabidly “conservative” (in a Neocon sense only, of course!) and it parasitically feeds on whatever nationalist ideology the local patriotic goyim are inclined towards (the best example of that being the so-called “Christian Zionists” in the USA).

But here is the demonic “beauty” of it all: in a society like the French one, the Zionists don’t even need to micromanage their false flags: given enough uneducated and murderous pseudo-Muslim cutthroats and enough rabid secularists wanted to offend the faithful – some kind of violent explosion will *inevitably* happen!

Right now, between the embarrassing Yellow Vests movement, the crumbling economy, the massive influx, wave after wave, of unwanted and un-adaptable immigrants and the resulting social tensions, the French regime is in deep trouble.  Add to this the COVID pandemic which just added to the chaos and anger and finish with a total lack of foreign policy successes and you will immediately see why this regime badly needed what could be called a “patriotic reaction”.

Finally, there is the time-proven method of scaring your own population into a state of catatonic acceptance of everything and anything in the name of “security”.

We see it all in France today, we saw it in the UK before, and also in Belgium.  And, rest assured,  we will see much more such massacres in the future.  The only way to really stop these “terrorist” attacks is to show their sponsors that we know who they are and we understand what they are doing.  Short of this, these attacks will continue.

The Saker

Israeli Arms Trade, The Lobby and the Meaning of Chosenness

OCTOBER 20, 2020 BY GILAD ATZMON

Source: https://www.tehrantimes.com/

 “America is willing to sacrifice its young soldiers and national interests and even its economy for Israel,” Gilad Atzmon, who was born in a Jewish family in Israel and grew up in Jerusalem al-Quds, tells the Tehran Times. *
Atzmon, who now lives in Britain, also says, “Israeli pressure groups seem to believe that they are actually more powerful and certainly more important than the American constitution.” 
The following is the text of the interview:

Tehran Times:       Numerous rights bodies have slammed Western countries’ arms trade with Israel. What is your comment?

Gilad Atzmon: For decades, Israel has been selling killing machines to the most oppressive regimes around the world and this shouldn’t be surprising, as Israel itself is at the forefront of the list of oppressive regimes.

 Embarrassed by the Israeli government’s current arming of Azerbaijan in its war with Armenia,  Holocaust scholar Israel W. Charny penned an article for The Times of Israel titled:  Would Israel sell a used drone to a Hitler? Charny admits in his piece that Israel’s conduct is fundamentally unethical. He ends his commentary writing, “to my Armenian colleagues and friends, I can only say that as a Jew and as an Israeli, I am mortified – and angry.”

 I would think that if Israel’s leading genocide historian allows himself to admit in an Israeli nationalist outlet that the Jewish State is profiting from non-ethical arms trade, the rest of us should be entitled to engage with this topic freely and to use every possible platform to denounce Israel or anyone else from profiting from non- ethical practices.

 The issues go well beyond Israel’s arms trade. A few days ago we learned from the Jewish Press about a Bipartisan bill in America that would give Israel a say on Middle East arms sales. The bill “would require the President to consult with the Israeli government to ensure concerns are settled.” If the bill passes, the USA military industrial complex trade would be dependent on Israeli consent.  

Tehran Times:   How great is the influence of the Zionist and Jewish lobbies in the United States and how can this status quo change?

GA: The facts regarding the immense influence of Israel and the Jewish Lobby in the USA and other Western countries have been established for a while. One can refer to The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, a detailed study by two of the most influential American social scientists  (Prof. John Mersheimer & Prof. Stephen Walt). Another leading American political scientist admired by a generation of academics who also covered the topic is, of course, Prof James Petras in his book The Power of Israel in the United States.

What can be done about the well documented domination of AIPAC? I would like to believe that the most effective method to approach this topic would be to point squarely at The Lobby and its corrosive impact: this entails pointing the finger at the wars the USA fights on behalf of Israel, the sanctions that the USA mounts for Israel, the fact that America is willing to sacrifice its young soldiers and national interests and even its economy for Israel. Theoretically speaking, American citizens are entitled to voice such criticisms as freedom of speech is enshrined in the first amendment of their constitution. Israeli pressure groups seem to believe that they are actually more powerful and certainly more important than the American constitution. A few months ago we learned that Right wing activists attempted to spread new laws across Republican controlled states that would suppress criticism on public university campuses of Israel and its occupation of Palestinian territory.

By now, the USA is practically functioning as a remote and subservient Israeli satellite. I am unable to identify  any genuine political force in the USA that can change this anytime soon. I do not see anyone within American politics who is willing to tackle the matter. But the American people, like the Brits and the French are no fools, they see it all.

Tehran Times:    Though Israel is violating and defying international law on a daily basis, its Western supporters and allies continue to support these actions or at least turn a blind eye to what is taking place. How do you assess this double standard?

GA: In general, it’s a good practice not to overestimate people’s intelligence. But Israel and its Lobby make the opposite mistake; they tend to believe that people are far stupider than they are.

People do see what is going on and the general discomfort with Israel and its lobby is growing rapidly. People do notice Israeli criminality, they also notice their politicians on all levels operating as foreign agents for a criminal state.  Israel and The Lobby interpret this rise of awareness as ‘growing anti-Semitism,’ but this is hyperbole. A general mass awareness has surfaced. The Israelis and The Lobby know that once you see the full picture, you can’t just un-see it. In that respect, Israel is facing a wall of silent resistance and the consequences of this reality are unpredictable.

It is fascinating to observe the tsunami of mass protests that we see within Israel against Netanyahu and institutional corruption. The Israelis, or at least many of them, are also tired of themselves being themselves. It is very possible that in line with Jewish history, it will actually  be the Jews who bring their current empire down. As far as I can tell they are better at that battle than anyone else. 

Tehran Times:       How do the Western countries exploit Human Rights as a tool to apply their policies and how do they politicize Human Rights?

GA: Human rights issues are close to our hearts. We don’t like to see abuse of others, we hate discrimination, we are appalled by racism of any kind. Seemingly, some were clever enough to attach barcodes to these genuine universal and ethical  feelings. As things stand, human rights matters have morphed into a profitable industry. Many human rights campaigns are funded by elements who are themselves dedicated human rights abusers. 

Since the Palestinian struggle is close to my heart it took me little time to find out that while the BDS movement was receiving money from George Soros’ Open Society Institute, BDS changed its goal statement and practically gave up on the Palestinian Right of Return.

In 2012 the BDS National Committee in Ramallah made a crucial change to its goal statement. It changed the wording of its original (June 2005) mission statement from “demanding that Israel end its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands” to demanding that Israel end “its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands occupied in June 1967*” My attempt to find out who introduced this change revealed that this new wording first appeared in Omar Barghouti’s 2011 book, ‘BDS: Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: the Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights’ (page 6).

It seems that since 2011, The BDS National Committee basically abandoned the most precious Palestinian right—it drifted away from the commitment to land occupied since 1948 and limited its struggle to the liberation of lands occupied in 1967.  Further attempts to clarify who made the change and by what process revealed that this significant change was made in a clandestine manner—it appeared only in English. It has never appeared in Arabic or any other language. It is evident that the change took place behind the backs of the Palestinian people. Despite BDS’ claim to be a ‘civil society’ representing more than 170 Palestinian organizations, Palestinians were totally unaware of the BDS National Committee’s compromise of their mission.  

Further investigation revealed that BDS—like most Palestinian NGOs—was funded by George Soros’ Open Society Institute. In 2013 I was asked to review a book titled Israel/Palestine and the Queer International,by Sarah Schulman. It was Schulman who resolved the mysterious change in the  BDS goal statement. In her search for funding for a young Palestinian Queer USA tour in support of BDS, Schulman wrote  that she was advised to approach George Soros’ Open Society institute. The following account may leave you flabbergasted, as it did me:

“A former ACT UP staffer who worked for the Open Society Institute, George Soros’ foundation, suggested that I file an application there for funding for the tour. When I did so it turned out that the person on the other end had known me from when we both attended Hunter [College] High School in New York in the 1970s. He forwarded the application to the institutes’s office in Amman, Jordan, and I had an amazing one-hour conversation with Hanan Rabani, its director of the Women’s and Gender program for the Middle East region. Hanan told me that this tour would give great visibility to autonomous queer organizations in the region. That it would inspire queer Arabs—especially in Egypt and Iran…for that reason, she said, funding for the tour should come from the Amman office” (Israel/Palestine and the Queer International, by Sarah Schulman p. 108).

Here is clear and embarrassing evidence of a crude intervention made by George Soros’ institute in an attempt to shape Arab and Islamic culture and political life. We also learn about the manner in which Soros’ Open Society Institute introduces gay and queer politics to the region. Apparently money for a tour promoting Palestine and BDS is traveling from Soros’ Open Society to Jordan and then back to the USA with the hope that such a manoeuvre would “inspire” gays in Iran.

This makes it clear why  BDS had “good reason” to remain silent regarding its funding sources. After all, being funded directly or indirectly by a liberal Zionist philanthropist, a man who also funds the openly Zionist JStreet and was invested in Israeli companies in the West Bank, is indeed embarrassing. But the meaning of it is rather devastating. The discourse of the solidarity of the oppressed is shaped by the sensitivities of the oppressor who funds the movement of the oppressed. We see this in the Palestine solidarity movement, we saw the same thing in Occupy Wall Street and currently in some segments of BLM activity. Instead of genuinely caring for the oppressed, Human rights and solidarity movements often morph into policing forces that dedicate themselves to controlling the so-called opposition.

The case of the language of BDS has a good ending. Though Omar Barghouti didn’t change the words printed in his book where he bluntly compromised on occupied land demands on behalf of the Palestinian people. The BDS movement eventually changed its goal statement once again. It now resembles the original 2005 statement opposing occupation of ALL Arab Land.  

Tehran Times:      Why doesn’t Israel accept the idea of a nuclear-free zone in the region?

GA: The real meaning of thinking yourself chosen is in attributing a unique sense of impunity to yourself and to no one else. In real politics this means that your Jewish State is the only nuclear power in the region, your Air Force is the only one to fly F-35s, your army is not committed to any recognized ethical standards, your military industry trades with the darkest regimes around. Try to imagine a world where everyone believes themselves to be chosen.

• In the Interview the Iranian outlet refers to me as “a Jewish political activist.” I wrote to the Tehran Times and pointed out that I am neither an activist nor I am a Jew. However, by the time I posted this article, my request is yet to make any impact.

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More on the Anti-Semitism Scam: Jewish Students Get Protected Status

By Philip Giraldi

Source

In both the United States and Europe there has been an increase in the passage of laws that are intended to protect Jews. Indeed, one might say that one of the few growth industries in Donald Trump’s United States has been the protection of Jewish citizens and their property from a largely contrived wave of anti-Semitism that is allegedly sweeping the nation. Even while potentially catastrophic developments both in the Middle East and the United States continue to unfold, the threat of anti-Semitism continues to find its way into much of the news cycle in the mainstream media.

A survey conducted last month in all fifty states was released with the headline “First-Ever 50-State Survey On Holocaust Knowledge Of American Millennials And Gen Z Reveals Shocking Results. Disturbing Findings Reveal Significant Number Of Millennials And Gen Z Can’t Name A Single Concentration Camp Or Ghetto, Believe That Two Million Or Fewer Jews Were Killed And A Concerning Percentage Believe That Jews Caused The Holocaust.”

The survey is based on the premise that detailed knowledge of the so-called holocaust should be an essential part of everyone’s education. Currently, 12 states already require holocaust instruction in their public school curricula, though that includes five of the six biggest states, and recently passed federal legislation will eventually fund holocaust education everywhere in the U.S.  But, of course, the real back story that one must not mention is that the standard holocaust narrative is at least as much fiction as fact and it is employed regularly to create special benefits and protections for both Jews in general and also for the State of Israel. That is why the usual sources in the media become outraged whenever it seems that the propaganda is not effective.

The ignorance of the holocaust story inevitably received wide play in the mainstream media but there are a number of things that all Americans should know about the anti-Semitism hysteria that drives the process. First of all, the extent to which there is actual anti-Semitism and the background to many of the incidents has been deliberately distorted or even ignored by the press and by the government at all levels. Anti-Semitism is hatred of Jews for either their religion or their ethnicity, but many of the so-called anti-Semitic incidents are actually related to the policies advanced by the state of Israel. Organizations like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which have a vested interest in keeping the number of anti-Semitic incidents high, deliberately conflate the two issues in their reports.

In its 2018 report, ADL reported “1,879 acts,” in the United States during the course of the year. It is not a particularly large number given the size and population of the U.S. and also with respect to what is included. There were certainly some physical attacks, including two shooting incidents at synagogues in Pittsburgh and Poway, but most of the incidents were much less kinetic, including shouting and name calling on university campuses between groups supportive of and opposed to Israel’s repression of the Palestinians.

Europe is way ahead of the game when it comes to punishing so-called holocaust denial or anti-Semitism, which now includes any criticism of Jews and/or of Israel. As one critic put it, Europeans generally can exercise something like free speech, but the speech is limited by certain rules that must be observed. Three weeks ago, the French nationalist writer and critic of Jewish power Hervé Ryssen was jailed for the fifth time for the crime of “hate speech.” He faces up to 17 months in prison for having been found guilty of “…insult, provocation, and public defamation due to origin, ethnicity, nationality, race, or religion.” In 2016 he was imprisoned for 5 months, in 2017 for 6 months and in 2018 for one year on similar charges. He also had to pay a 2000 Euros fine to the National Bureau of Vigilance Against Anti-Semitism. In January 2020, Ryssen was found guilty of “contesting the existence of crimes against humanity,” i.e. questioning the so-called holocaust which labels him as a négationniste, a “holocaust denier.”

Ryssen has written numerous books on Jewish power in Europe and on Israel. His scholarship has rarely been questioned, but his willingness to speak out sometimes boldly on issues that are forbidden has put him in prison more often than not. Curiously, the French law against vilifying ethnic groups and religions has de facto only rarely been applied to protecting either Christians or Muslims. Satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo continues to “blaspheme” against both religions without any intervention from the authorities, but it is careful not to make fun of Jews.

The United States is clearly moving in the direction of France, at least insofar as the Jewish community and Israel are concerned. But it is also refreshing to note that a revived progressive wing of the Democratic Party is engaging in a bit of pushback. Three weeks ago, 162 Democratic congressmen plus one Republican and one independent actually voted against an amendment intended to “Protect Jewish Students from Antisemitism at School.”

The vote took place on Sept. 16^th, and was over a Republican proposed amendment to the  Equity and Inclusion Enforcement Act (H.R.2574). The amendment designated anti-Semitism to be a form of discrimination included in the bill and would allow private citizens to file lawsuits claiming damages under the Civil Rights Act’s Title VI, focusing particularly on education programs. In spite of the considerable level of opposition, unfortunately the amendment still passed by a vote of 255 to 164.

According to the Concerned Women for America  (CWA), a group that lobbied for the added language, “The amendment ensures that recipients of federal education funding act against anti-Semitism in our communities. The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS) on college campuses is one of the ways such discrimination is being displayed.” The bill allows suits directed against any program receiving federal money if it can be claimed that one is the victim of discriminatory practices that negatively affect a protected class more than another class. Previously, the protected classes were identified as “race, color, or national origin,” but Jews and, by extension, Israel are now also protected. The specific additional language that was inserted was: “In carrying out the responsibilities of the recipient under this title, the employee or employees designated under this section shall consider antisemitism to be discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin as prohibited by this title.”

In practice, the new legislation will mean that Jewish students or their families or proxies can use Civil Rights legislation to sue educational institutions if they are made uncomfortable by the presence of critics of Israel. The real targets are groups like BDS, which have obtained some traction on university campuses and have been targeted by both the Israeli government and domestic Israel Lobby organizations. But, of course, the real danger is that once protected status is granted to one chosen group that promotes the interests of a foreign government there is no control over how “hate speech” will be defined and the consequences for American fundamental liberties will be catastrophic, moving far closer to the European model of freedom limited by “rules.”

Gilad Atzmon on Adam Green’s Know More News

AUGUST 17, 2020 BY GILAD ATZMON

Adam Green and myself discuss questions to do with the current authoritarian shift and the centrality of Jewish sensitivities in this transition.

The Unconscious is Wiley’s Discourse

JULY 30, 2020 BY GILAD ATZMON

By Gilad Atzmon

 If Britain were a healthy society the #Wiley saga would have triggered an open discussion about race and privilege. Wiley would be invited to BBC Newsnight, he would be challenged by one of BBC’s anchors, he would be confronted by one or two representatives of the Jewish community, he would have a chance to explain where he comes from. We would be better able to understand the emerging clash between Jews and Blacks.

But Britain is not very healthy at the moment and none of the above has happened. 

What happened instead was George Floyd all over again, but with a few major and significant differences. In the case of George Floyd a few policemen engaged in a deadly brutal and insidious act. In the case of Wiley, the entire Zionist league and its allies used a collective public knee to attempt the annihilation of the Black music icon. Another difference reflects on all of us. Following the Floyd murder thousands of Brits went to the streets to loudly proclaim that Black Lives Matter. They confronted the British police, they destroyed statues of slave traders. Who took to the streets to support Wiley?  Do Black Lives Matter only so long as Blacks do not open their mouths?

Watch Wiley in action:

Wiley’s comments didn’t trigger the desirable, if heated, debate because Jewish power, as I define it, is the power to silence criticism of Jewish power. Every means that serves this cause is considered legitimate. Interestingly, the disabling of speech is so extreme that one can’t find out what  it was that Wiley said that was so offensive. His tweets were initially removed by Twitter and as his twitter account is suspended.

Every news outlet in Britain and beyond has told us that Wiley’s tweets were horrid and anti-Semitic but no one dares to provide an example. It seems we are not even allowed to know what it is that we shouldn’t say. Possibly the censorship is even more sinister, they don’t want Wiley quoted only to find out that a large number of  Brits, possibly including prominent Jewish voices,  actually agree with the gist of Wiley’s statement.    

Wiley is accused of promoting “Conspiracy Theories” about Jews and their power. This is slightly confusing because Jews often brag about their power and success. According to the Jewish site Israelunwired, Alan Dershowitz’s message to the Jews reflects a celebration of the power of Jews:  “Why is it that Jews feel they need to apologize? Why do they feel that because they are strong and have contributed so much to the world, that deserves an apology? On the contrary! Jews should feel proud that God has given them such strength. And they have used it to help others. It is crazy that the world still has such negative beliefs about the Jewish people!”

On its face, it seems as if today’s Number One  ‘Amalek,’ Wiley, a Black celebrity rapper and our prime Zionist mouthpiece, Dershowitz, agree on the significance of Jews in different domains. However, Dershowitz is entitled to brag about Jewish achievements, the Black voice Wiley is reduced to dust and declared public enemy number one.

Back in 2018 Dershowitz admitted in an  Washington Examiner article that “it is true that Jews are represented in large numbers in various professionals such as the academy, finance, and the media.” Dershowitz also believes that Jewish prominence  “is not because they are given preferential treatment. It is because they have proved to be successful at these enterprises. Should they be blamed for that?”

Like Dershowitz I believe that some Jews are gifted in certain areas, I also believe that people who work hard deserve acknowledgment. I am pretty sure that Wiley also agrees with that.  So where is the dispute? 

In both my writing and talks I keep insisting that there are no “Jewish conspiracies,” all is done in the open, whether it is AIPAC domination of  USA foreign policy or Epstein flying world leaders on his Lolita Express, but you can’t talk about it.  Dershowitz can brag about Jewish achievements: the rest of us can’t. Maybe we are tapping here into the true meaning of Jewish privilege. 

In the last two days I searched the net to find out what words Wiley said.  I found no trace, but the BBC, the failure news outlet, was proud to provide us with an extended  monologue delivered by Emma Barnett.

Tweet

Emma Barnett told her BBC listeners that she went through Wiley’s tweets and they where “straight out of the Hitler playbook of 1930s Nazi Germany.”

According to Barnett, Wiley tweeted that “Jewish people are cowards do something to me, I am waiting.” This doesn’t sound like Hitler to me.  It is crude, it is a challenge, it involves an essentialist generalization but contains nothing that echoes Hitler or Nazi Germany. However, they still came at Wiley as hard as they could.  Maybe Wiley should be recognized as the last prophet. They may want to consider integrating his tweets into the Hebrew Bible.

“They act rough,” she quotes Wiley as writing,  “but they hide behind the police” – in fact, this  sounds to me like a tweet by a Jewish pressure group bragging about its intimate “partnership”  with UK police (also look here and here).

Barnett quotes Wiley,  “who writes the laws, who changes the law, who implements the laws?”  80% of our conservative MPs are members of the Conservative Friends of Israel so the priorities of our ‘lawmakers’ are obvious.  Maybe Barnett should use this opportunity and tell us how many Conservatives are friends of Hartlepool, Liverpool or any other Pool in the Kingdom.

“Who runs the world?” Wiley asks. I guess that when Epstein, Maxwell, Wexner and Weinstein are constantly in the headlines, this question may be rhetorical.  Does Mrs. Barnett need me to introduce her to the work of Jared Kushner and his role in the Trump administration? Maybe the name Rahm Israel Emanuel rings a bell? Do I have to tell Barnett about AIPAC, CFI, LFI or the Crif?

“Who runs banking?”  Barnett quotes from Wiley’s tweet. Maybe Dershowitz could help defend Wiley as he calls upon Jews to be proud of their achievements in this domain. Barnett can also look at George Soros and Black Wednesday. She  can look at  Goldman Sachs, Greenspan, Yellen… the list is pretty endless and growing by the day.  

I guess that Barnett is sincere when she complains that  “these words play of a very deep Jewish hidden fear that anti-Semitism rises up.”  Yet, is “hidden” the right term? I ask because we are blitzed day and night by repetitions of this very specific Jewish fear. If there is anything that isn’t ‘hidden’ in Britain it must be the ‘Jewish fear of anti-Semitism.’

Emma Barnett doesn’t want us to talk about #Jewishprivilege.  I am afraid that pushing all of social media to blacklist  a Black cultural hero just  a month after George Floyd, with No 10 and Priti Patel  also pushing  on behalf of Zion, is a privilege no other ethnic minority enjoys, certainly not the bronze community of former world leaders that were toppled one after another in recent weeks.

I do partially agree with Emma Barnet when she says  “Jews don’t run the law.” Absolutely correct Emma, Jews don’t run the law,  but Jewish pressure groups do and they  boast about it 24/7.

Barnett declares, “Jews do not run the banks,”  True again Emma, but Jews are vastly over represented in every banking and investment sector as Dershowitz  boasted above.

“Jews do not run the world!” Absolutely true but AIPAC dominates American foreign policy and is proud of it. 

“Where did it get his anti-Semitic memo from?” Barnett asks. I find this question slightly perplexing since statistics confirm that a large segment of Europeans may agree with Wiley.  A  recent major survey of public attitudes for CNN found more than a fifth of the 7,000 people polled in seven countries believed Jewish people have too much influence in finance and politics. The ADL is telling us in its latest survey that 1.09 billion “People in the world harbour anti-Semitic attitudes” out of 4 billion surveyed. Once again we are talking about 25%. To answer Barnett’s question, If Wiley was really looking for an educational source he had more than a billion people to choose from. It seems as if according to the ADL, one out of four people admit to their feelings about Jews as long as they stay anonymous. This may reveal what Wiley’s ‘crime’ was. He uttered that which most people are trained to keep to themselves.   

Wiley gave us an opportunity to meet our demons, to understand what we are for real. The picture that is unfolding from that saga is grim and points to a darker future.  We are terrified of our rulers and we are tormented by our own thoughts which we are scared to admit to ourselves. We are living in a world where maintaining a social media account is way more important than our own truth. This is how far we are removed from our Athenian cultural, spiritual and intellectual ethos that made the west into a distinct civilization.  

For those who are confused by the Jewish institutional reaction to Wiley,  the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan offers an explanation. “The unconscious is the discourse of the Other,” was, I believe, Lacan’s most important insight. The unconscious is the fear that everybody out there sees you as you are and even worse, discusses you with others behind your back. The unconscious is the fear that if you fail in bed tonight; tomorrow your neighbours will refer to you as ‘the impotent.’ In Lacanian perspectives, for self identified Jews, it seems the unconscious is the discourse of the Goyim, it is the fear that those one billion identified by the ADL as ‘anti-Semites’ will start to explore their views in the open.  It is the unbearable fear that the ‘Goyim Know.’  

Lacan’s insight helps us grasp the hysteria around Wiley and anti-Semitism. Self-identified Jews are very happy to brag about their successes but the idea that the same success is scrutinized by others devastates their entire existence.

If Britain were an open space, we could openly discuss all of this and move our society forward towards harmony and reconciliation. Both Jews and gentiles would benefit from such a discourse. But Britain is an occupied zone and for more than a while. It is invaded by fear and dominated by the politics of fear. This type of politics, when it appears in other countries, is called ‘terror,’ ‘fascism,’ ‘authoritarianism,’ ‘totalitarianism,’ and ‘tyrannical conditions.’ Maybe time is overdue for Jews and Goyim alike to decide if these are the conditions they want to live in.   

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The Last Zionist

JULY 24, 2020 BY GILAD ATZMON

By Gilad Atzmon

Source: https://www.unz.com/gatzmon/the-last-zionist/

In his book Memories, the first Israeli PM and pragmatic early Zionist, David Ben Gurion writes about his early years in Płońsk, Poland.

“For many of us, anti-Semitic feeling had little to do with our (Zionist) dedication. I personally never suffered anti-Semitic persecution. Płońsk was remarkably free of it… There were three main communities: Russians, Jews and Poles. … The number of Jews and Poles in the city were roughly equal, about five thousand each. The Jews, however, formed a compact, centralized group occupying the innermost districts whilst the Poles were more scattered, living in outlying areas and shading off into the peasantry. Consequently, when a gang of Jewish boys met a Polish gang the latter would almost inevitably represent a single suburb and thus be poorer in fighting potential than the Jews who even if their numbers were initially fewer could quickly call on reinforcements from the entire quarter. Far from being afraid of them (the goyim), they were rather afraid of us (the Jews). In general, however, relations were amicable, though distant.” (Memoirs: David Ben-Gurion (1970), p. 36)

Ben Gurion is very explicit when describing the balance of power between Jews and Poles in his town in the early days of the 20th century. “Far from being afraid of them, they were rather afraid of us (the Jews).”

Jews were indeed very powerful in Poland in the first years of the 20th century. The Jewish socialist party, the Bund, was a leading political force in the 1905 Revolution particularly in the Polish areas of the Russian empire. In the early stages of that Revolution, the Bund’s military wing was the strongest revolutionary force in Western Russia.

The Vow, the Bund’s anthem didn’t leave much room for imagination, it declared war and practically sentenced to death those who didn’t fit with their political agenda:

“We swear our stalwart hate persists,
Of those who rob and kill the poor:
The Tsar, the masters, capitalists.
Our vengeance will be swift and sure.
So swear together to live or die!”

“To wage the holy war we vow,
Until right triumphs over wrong.
No Midas, master, noble now –
The humble equal to the strong.
So swear together to live or die!”

The Bund was extremely confident of its power. In the autumn of 1933 it issued a call to the Polish public to boycott goods from Germany in protest of Hitler and the NSDAP. In December 1938 and January 1939, in the last Polish municipal elections before the start of WWII, the Bund received the largest segment of the Jewish vote. In 89 towns, one-third elected Bund majorities. In Warsaw, the Bund won 61.7% of the votes cast for Jewish parties, taking 17 of the 20 municipal council seats won by Jewish parties. In Łódź the Bund won 57.4% (11 of 17 seats won by Jewish parties).

We now know that this sense of victorious Jewish empowerment ended shortly after these elections. The East European and Polish Jewish communities suffered greatly during WWII. The Bund was completely wiped out during the war. For one reason or another and, as problematic as it may be for some, at least in the early stages of the war, some Poles, Ukrainians and other East European nationalists saw the Nazis as their ‘liberators.’ They apparently weren’t blind to the reality that was depicted by Ben Gurion.

This sense of Jewish political and social empowerment that is portrayed in Ben Gurion’s Memories and in the story of the Bund created a problematic pattern, as it clearly led to some tragic consequences.

In his conclusive work on the Holocaust, Jewish historian David Cesarani delved briefly into the work of the CV, (Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens – the central association of German citizens of the Jewish faith).

It would be a crude act of denial to fail to see the overwhelming similarity between the CV that was formed in 1893 and the likes of the ADL, SPLC, CRIF, the BOD and the CAA. Cesarani writes about the CV that it was formed “to combat the lies propagated by anti-Semites and oppose them when they stood for election.” Clearly, Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders and Cynthia McKinney weren’t the first politicians to be targeted by dedicated Jewish pressure groups. The CV was using the same tactics over a century ago.

Cesarani continues: “over the next two decades, the CV proved quite effective: suing rabble rousers for defamation, funding candidates pledged to contest anti-Semitism, producing voluminous amounts of educational material about Judaism and Jewish life, and coordinating the activity of sympathetic non-Jews ashamed of prejudice within their communities.” (Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933-1949, David Cesarani pg.10)

Like the ADL and AIPAC in the USA, and the CAA in Britain, the CV saw its popularity amongst Jews grow rapidly. By 1926 more than 60.000 German Jews were amongst its members, however, there is a good reason to believe that the more popular the CV was amongst Jews, the less popular Jews and their politics were to Germans. We can observe that the ADL and CAA are not marching in virgin territory, there is historical documentation that points out that abrasive Jewish pressure politics have, in the past, helped lead to catastrophic consequences.

The Jewish Virtual Library produces a fascinating glimpse into the CV’s activity. In 1934 when the Nazi Party was already in power, the Party made no attempt to conceal its anti Jewish sentiments, yet, the CV, apparently in a state of complete denial, ignored the political shift in Germany and continued to pursue its pressure politics.

Following is a report by the CV from 26 April 1934:

“To the Regional branches:
Central Germany
Rheinland—Westfalia
Northern Germany
Hessen
Eastern Westfalia
Friends from small and middle sized towns have recently complain that songs with coarse anti-Jewish texts are being sung brazenly and provocatively. We intend to officially approach the Reich Ministry and report all these incidents and to address a letter of the board to the SA Chief and Reich Minister Roehm and to the Prussian Secret State Police. A representative of the CV will also raise this matter with the Propaganda Ministry. We therefore ask to report as soon as possible: In what localities such songs are being sung. What songs are being sung. Who is doing the singing.
(signed) Rubenstein.”

This type of a letter is familiar in its format and content from both ADL and CAA press releases targeting popular artists, musicians and politicians.

The point I am trying to make should be obvious. Harassing, terrorising and abusing one’s host nation into submission may produce some results in the short term, however, in the long run, it may not be the best way to fight anti Jewish sentiments. As Jewish history in general and the holocaust in particular prove, it may be the most dangerous path Jews can take.

‘History,’ we are told, ‘never repeats itself.’ Yet, for one reason or another, we are all expected to draw the right lessons from Jewish history. We are to vow ‘never again.’ We are to pledge to fight racism and discrimination.

Most surprising then, that the Jews, at large, never learn from their own past. One wonders, what is it about the ADL, AIPAC, BOD, Crif, CAA and other Jewish organisations that set them on a political path that has proven to be catastrophic?

One possible answer is collective ignorance. It is reasonable to assume that many Jews do not know or understand their own history and instead concentrate, if at all, on Jewish suffering (the holocaust, the inquisition, rise in Antisemitism, pogroms, etc.) rather than attempting to grasp the chain of events that led to such unfortunate consequences. In other words, they fail to see the connection between bad behaviour and antisemitism. This may imply that if things, God forbid, turn sour for American Jewry tomorrow, Jews in the future will not examine the multiple disastrous headlines associated with some prominent American Jews and leading Jewish institutions. Accordingly, they will not see the negative impact of the bad behaviour of such characters as Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell , Ehud Barak, Les Wexner, Harvey Weinstein or George Soros. They will not see the need to examine, let alone explain, the vast over-representation of Jews on NYC’s slumlord list or in America’s worst Ponzi schemes. Jews won’t look into the negative impact of the ADL or the SPLC. Nor will they dare dig into the disastrous impact of Israel and AIPAC on American Foreign Policy. Jews won’t look into these for the same reasons that Jews work hard to prevent everyone, Jews included, from understanding the role of Jews and Jewish institutions in contributing to antisemitism in the Weimar republic or in 19th century Eastern Europe.

Another possible answer is that Jewish political institutions are very sophisticated and far more strategic than we are willing to admit. Perhaps The ADL, the CAA, AIPAC and other Jewish pressure groups actually fully understand Jewish history. They do understand the possible dangerous implications of their actions. However they genuinely believe that constant tension between Jews and their host nations is actually ‘good for the Jews.’ How could it be good for the Jews? It prevents assimilation and unnecessary intermingling. It enforces Jewish identification, it evidently reinforces the importance of Israel and promotes Jewish immigration to and support for the Jewish State.

Another possible answer is more fatalistic. In this Jews do not follow a ‘strategic plan’, nor they are ‘blind to their past.’ They simply can’t do much about their destiny as they are shaped individually and collectively by a unique and persistent tribal cultural-spiritual paradigm. It is this tribal precept that sustains their clannish and exclusionist behavioural mode and also their affinity to biological determinist views.

I guess that it is this last answer that led to the birth of Zionist thought in the late 19th century. Zionism accepted that Jewish diaspora culture and attitude was deeply unhealthy. Early Zionists agreed amongst themselves that it is Jews and their cultural code, rather than the so-called ‘antisemites’ who bring disasters on the Jews. Zionism vowed to ‘civilise’ the Jews by means of a ‘homecoming’. It promised to make them “people like all other people.”

Theodor Herzl (1860 –1904) the author of political Zionism who is regarded by Jews and Israelis as Zionism’s forefather, didn’t pull his punches in his attitude to Diaspora Jewry. “The wealthy Jews” Herzl wrote, “control the world, in their hands lies the fate of governments and nations. They set governments one against the other. When the wealthy Jews play, the nations and the rulers dance. One way or the other, they get rich.” Theodor Herzl, Deutsche Zeitung 4 min’ 47 sec’ in the following Hebrew video:

Herzl didn’t refer to AIPAC, ADL, Soros or the CAA. He didn’t know about Corbyn, Dershowitz, Sanders or Epstein and his Lolita Express’ long list of passengers. Yet Herzl managed to identify a very problematic Jewish identitarian pattern which he pledged to alter by means of a ‘Zionist metamorphosis.’

A prime Labour Zionist ideologist, A.D. Gordon (1856 –1922) referred to his brethren as ‘a parasitic people’ who have “no roots in the soil.” Like Herzl, Gordon also believed that Jews could be re-invented and become proletarians.

Dov Ber Borochov (1881-1917), the leading theoretical Jewish Marxist ideologist who inspired Labour Zionism, was also disgusted by Jewish Diaspora parasitic tendencies. “The enterprising spirit of the Jew is irrepressible. He refuses to remain a proletarian. He will grab at the first opportunity to advance to a higher rung in the social ladder.” (The Economic Development of the Jewish People, Ber Borochov, 1916).

Maybe it is time to admit that early Zionism was a unique and profound instant in Jewish history. It was the only moment in time when Jews were brave enough to look in the mirror and to admit that they were repulsed by what they saw. A similar sense of self-loathing can be detected in sermons of the Biblical prophets, but early Zionism evolved into a powerful Jewish movement. By means of self-loathing it managed to achieve its objectives. It fulfilled its promise to establish a Jewish National homeland in Palestine, even if It did so at the expense of the Palestinian people whose land it plundered. On the face of it, Zionism made the Jews people like all other people, failing to see that all other people weren’t trying to be like all other people but were like themselves.

The first Israelis bought into the ideas of Herzl, Gordon and Borochov. They believed in the possibility of Jewish metamorphosis. But it didn’t take long before the Zionists realised that for Jewishness to survive, Goyim are needed. Why? Because Jewishness is basically different manifestations of choseness, and choseness cannot operate in a vacuum for the same reason that progressives need ‘reactionaries,’ and supremacists need people to look down upon. It didn’t take long for the early Zionists to make the Palestinians and Arabs their new Goyim. It didn’t take more than a few decades for Israeli Jews to give up completely on the dream of a new Hebraic civilisation. By the 1990s Benjamin Netanyahu realised that it was Jewishness that united the Israelis. Israel under his leadership drifted rapidly from the Zionist dream. It morphed safely into a ‘Jewish State.’

On a personal note I admit that, like many of my peers, in my early years I bought into the Zionist ethos. I fell in love with the idea of a Jewish nationalist rebirth. It was pretty convenient to see the Biblical kings and prophets as my ‘ancestors.’ My understanding of the Zionist revolutionary impetus was reinforced when I toured around the world as a young musician playing Jewish music in diaspora communities. I realised that I shared very little or nothing at all with those Diaspora Jews and their cultural/political ethos. I guess that I took the Zionist dream very seriously, I vowed to become a nice, ethical human being. By the time my project was more or less accomplished, I gathered that I, as a nice adult, was basically an ordinary goy like all other goyim, I was a Jew no more.

The absurdity here is that together with just a few others including: Uri Avnery, Gideon Levy, Israel Shamir, Israel Shachak, Shlomo Sand, I am probably amongst the last of the Zionists. I guess that we are the few who managed to unshackle themselves, to break out of the ghetto walls and to cross the rough sea between Jerusalem and Athens.

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