israel a haven for international scammers

Is Israel Turning a Blind Eye as Israeli Scammers Swindle Victims in France, US, Elsewhere?

Alison Weir

Investigations reveal a pattern of Israeli officials stone-walling efforts to stop the perpetrators of massive financial swindles in various countries, from Europe to the US to the Philippines… While some Israeli reporters work to expose the scams, a new one is already underway

French and Israeli media report that a group largely made up of Israelis scammed 3,000 French citizens out of approximately $20 million. Most of the stolen money is in Israel, but Israeli authorities are reportedly failing to cooperate with France in prosecuting the scammers and retrieving the money.

This is the latest of numerous examples of Israeli officials stone-walling international efforts against the perpetrators of massive financial swindles around the world, according to Israeli investigative journalists and others. These scams have brought estimated billions into the Israeli economy, propping up a regime widely condemned for human rights abuses and ethnic cleansing against indigenous Palestinians. Together, the stories paint a picture of a government that seems to be turning a blind eye to – and even protecting – scammers.

A Finance Magnates analysis reports that one of the swindles alone has brought in over a billion dollars and employs 5,000 people. And a new scam, described below, may help what is predicted to be “the next major driver of the Israeli economy.”

A former IRS expert on international crime notes that “fraudulent industries are often major economic drivers, and that can translate into political clout.”

Some Israeli journalists have been working to expose the situation in Israeli newspapers, publishing exposés like “As Israel turns blind eye to vast binary options fraud, French investigators step in” and “Are French Jewish criminals using Israel as a get-out-of-jail card?” (Short answer: yes.)

Victimizing French business owners & churches

The victims of the recent scam against French citizens included churches and the owners of small businesses – delicatessens, car repair shops, hair salons, plumbers, etc. Some lost their life savings and describe being threatened and intimidated by the scammers.

Israeli scammers swindled more than 3,000 French merchants all over France, like this Valenciennes florist

The masterminds of the scam reportedly were Antoine Ilan Frau (aka Ilan Frau) and Michael Nedjar, both of whom resided in Israel at the time. French police arrested the two at the Paris airport in 2016 as they were about to return to Israel. While they and 25 others were subsequently found guilty in a French court, other alleged co-conspirators have not yet been arrested and are believed to be in Israel.

The Times of Israel (TOI) reports that most of the money was channeled to Israel and has not yet been recovered. The newspaper reports that Israeli law enforcement authorities “have been unhelpful in enabling further investigation of the scam and in recovering the stolen funds.”

TOI, which obtained the full French verdict statement, reports: “In 200 pages of matter-of-fact legal prose, the verdict paints a picture of Israeli authorities unwilling to cooperate with their French counterparts.”

Another Times of Israel article reports: “The exact number of French citizens thought to be evading authorities in Israel is unknown, but France has sent to Israel at least 70 formal requests for judicial assistance with cases involving suspected fraud by dual nationals residing in the Jewish state.”

Below are some of the other Israeli-connected scams victimizing people around the world that observers accuse the Israeli government of largely ignoring.

Gilbert Chikli, “the world’s greatest con artist”

In 2016 Ha’aretz reported on an Israeli con artist named Gilbert Chikli, who boasts of pioneering a multi-million dollar scam that also targeted people in France. The New York Post has called him “the world’s greatest con artist.”

The scam targeted banks and business, cost French companies an estimated 7.9 million euros. Approximately 52 employees of the companies taken in by him were subsequently fired.

Despite French extradition requests, Ha’aretz reported in 2016 that Chikli “mysteriously remains a free man, living in luxury in his villa in a seaside Israeli city as French authorities try to bring him to justice over a massive con for which he was previously convicted.”

Although a French court sentenced Chikli to a seven-year prison sentence, Ha’aretz reported that instead of being incarcerated, Chikli was “hanging out at his private swimming pool.” Israeli officials refused to explain why Chikli was allowed to live freely in Israel.

Gilbert Chikli poses on March 28, 2016 for a photo at his luxury, high-security residence in Israel, despite an international warrant for his arrest

Far from disputing the French conviction, Chikli bragged on Israeli TV about his technique: “You get off on it. Because you’re 5,000 kilometers from Paris with a telephone and a 100-euro calling card and you can make 10 million euros” [over $11 million].

Chikli boasted that he had a good life in Israel, where he dealt in real estate (in addition, it appears, to continuing his scams). He also made an estimated several thousand euros for “consultancy services” to a director who made a film based on Chikli’s story.

The film generated unprecedented attention in France, as it depicted “an Israeli-French underworld out of reach of French authorities,” in the words of TOI, “because of the complications in extraditing suspects from Israel.”

Chikli remained free in Israel from 2009 until he traveled to the Ukraine in 2017, where he and another Israeli (also wanted by French authorities) were finally arrested, and Chikli was extradited to France. He was jailed and indicted for an additional scam perpetrated while he was at large.

A French report states that during his time in Ukrainian detention, Chikli was “filmed drinking vodka in his cell, toasting his wealth, swearing never to return to France, and abusing the French judicial system.” (See below)

A French report states that during his time in Ukrainian detention, Chikli was “filmed drinking vodka in his cell, toasting his wealth, swearing never to return to France, and abusing the French judicial system.” (See below)

Binary Options brings in billion/year to Israel

Another international scam is Israel’s notorious binary options industry, which has brought in $10 billion a year. While the Israeli legislature made it illegal to sell the fraudulent options to Israelis, the Israeli legislature only belatedly (and partially) began to crack down on sales abroad. Millions of people around the world have been victimized by the scam, some committing suicide as a result.

An investigative report on the industry was aired on the French prime-time television magazine “Envoyé Spécial” in 2016: “La ruine à portée de clic” (“Financial ruin at the click of a mouse”). According to the report, tens of thousands of French citizens had been victimized by binary options and similar frauds.

The TV report calls Israel a “safe house” for fraudsters and shows undercover video of one of the Israeli call centers. Young French speakers — many of them new immigrants to Israel — are seen calling people in France and Europe, persuading them to “invest” in the scam. As they work to dupe people, the video shows employees dancing and laughing. When a bell rings announcing that they’ve succeeded and someone has given them money, they cheer.

Deborah Abitbol, a French-Israeli lawyer who acts on behalf of French forex and binary options victims, says that Israeli police “could raid these companies tomorrow if they wanted to… They could easily locate them and confiscate their computers.”

Abitbol points out: “These are the savings of people’s entire lives that are lost, gone with a click of a mouse. When you don’t have money left, the damage is irreparable.”

While Israeli law enforcement has sometimes gone after scammers, most often it seems to have left them alone.

A 2015 Israeli position paper by the Israel Securities Authority stated: “Our position is that a platform that solicits customers solely outside of Israel, and does not allow access to customers in Israel is not subject to the law, even if it is fully or partially run from Israel.”

Numerous people in Israel and abroad called for Israel to crack down on the call centers, but for years little was done. TOI reported that a senior Israeli police superintendent said that Israeli crime kingpins were behind the binary options industry and that “organized crime in the country had been massively enriched and strengthened.”

The scam caused ruin to people throughout the world, some committing suicide after their losses.

Fred Turbide, who committed suicide after he was fleeced by an Israeli binary options firm, with his wife

Finally, Israeli legislation against swindling people in other countries was finally proposed when the Israeli government became sufficiently worried that the scam was hurting Israel’s image abroad.

Notes on behalf of the proposed legislation warned that Israeli binary option companies risked damaging the country’s reputation and “could foment anti-Semitism.” The Israeli Knesset member who introduced the bill said: “We worry about the BDS movement. This industry has a huge impact on how Israel is viewed throughout the world.”

The Times of Israel reported that the legislation was catalyzed by an outcry “among overseas law enforcement agencies, with the FBI at the forefront, that Israel was allowing this ‘monstrous’ fraud to flourish year after year.”

Even that law, however, was watered down and seemed to leave the door wide open for continued swindles. Some charged that it would allow scammers to simply relocate and/or move into similar scams. The concern was merited.

A 2018 TOI article reports: “In the absence of effective law enforcement, Israel’s boiler room industries have proven resilient. Many have simply changed their product before or since the Knesset banned binary options and continued with business as usual.”

In June 2018 Israeli-operated boiler rooms in Asia and Eastern Europe were raided by local police. According to TOI, it was “one of hundreds of Israeli-run boiler rooms operating worldwide in a global plague that, to the mounting dismay and incomprehension of international law enforcement bodies, is being left unchecked by Israeli law enforcement.”

TOI reports: “Israeli law enforcement has yet to indict a single operative from an industry that has stolen billions.”

Philippine National Police arrest Israeli nationals following a raid on a fraudulent Israeli call center operating in the Philippines, one of hundreds of Israeli-run boiler rooms operating worldwide.” (Videos and additional photos below.)

The call center at IBD Marketing Inc in the Philippines before the June 6 raid. (Videos and additional photos below.)

In absence of Israeli action, FBI steps in

Finally, the FBI announced in September 2017 that the U.S. was going to start going after binary options scammers. FBI agents arrested an Israeli CEO when she landed at JFK airport. The woman, Lee Elbaz of Yukom Communications, currently awaits trial in the U.S. for operations that are believed to have victimized thousands of people.

The Israeli police refused to answer TOI‘s questions about where Israeli law enforcement had been during the years that these actions had been perpetrated.

A few months later the FBI pursued additional suspects in Israel. An Israeli lawyer who represents victims of binary options fraud said that the FBI raids were “a direct result of Israel’s failure to enforce the law.”

The attorney told TOI that he had been trying for years to alert Israeli law enforcement to financial frauds, with no result:

“I provided the police with the names of the Israeli companies that are behind the binary options websites, the addresses in Israel of their offices, and the names of the Israelis behind these companies. At least once, I gave the police the phone number of a former employee who was willing to give evidence, and another time I gave the police concrete information on one of the main issues that the FBI is now investigating. As far as I know, the police have done nothing with all these complaints and information.”

In January FBI agents raided at least one Israeli company and questioned the owner of some other Israeli companies that are accused of targeting Americans. No further arrests seem to have yet been made.

While the Bureau would not comment on the raids, a former senior FBI official told TOIthat transnational organized crime networks are attracted to Israel because “they identify corruption and lax law enforcement.”

Israeli “Nigerian” scams

Some of the often inaccurately termed “Nigerian” scams have also been connected to Israel.

In 2010 seven Israelis were charged with scamming tens of millions of dollars from U.S. pensioners in a so-called “Nigerian scam,” according to Ha’aretz. Eventually, 12 Israelis were charged in the scheme to swindle elderly Americans.

The Israeli “Nigerian scam” suspects in an Israeli courtroom. (Photo by Moti Kimche)

The Israelis were extradited to the U.S., where the prosecutor described them as “a predatory group that targeted elderly people in the U.S., conning them into believing they were lottery winners. Preying on their victims’ dreams of financial comfort, [they] bilked them out of substantial portions of their life savings.”

According to the U.S. Attorney’s office:

“The defendants operated multiple boiler rooms that used the names of various sham law firms purportedly located in New York, including law firms named ‘Abrahams Kline,’ ‘Bernstein Schwartz,’ ‘Steiner, Van Allen, and Colt,’ ‘Bloomberg and Associates,” and ‘Meyer Stevens.’ The defendants further used various aliases and call forwarding telephone numbers to mask the fact that the defendants were located in Israel. The defendants also possessed bank accounts in Israel, Cyprus, and Uganda, to which illegal proceeds were wired.”

The ringleaders, Avi Ayache and Yaron Bar, were eventually convicted, and the U.S. prosecutor announced that they would “spend a substantial portion of their lives in prison.” Ayache was sentenced in 2014 to 13 years in prison and Bar to 12. Yet, prison records indicate the two were released the next year. Other members of the ring also appear to have been released after extraordinarily little time.

If these men did serve only a tiny portion of their U.S. sentences, as public records and phone calls and emails to the Bureau of Prisons indicate, this may be due to the fact that Israelis are allowed to be imprisoned in Israel instead of in the U.S. Their sentences then are determined by Israel and, as we will see below, are often far shorter than they would be in the U.S.

Gery Shalon – hundreds of millions of dollars

In 2015 Gery Shalon and two other Israelis were charged with utilizing hacked data for 100 million people to spam them with “pump and dump” penny stocks, netting hundreds of millions of dollars.

The money was then laundered through an illegal bitcoin exchange allegedly owned by Shalon (more on bitcoin below). Shalon was considered the ringleader of what U.S. prosecutors called a “sprawling criminal enterprise.” He faced decades behind bars.

However, he was instead given a plea deal in which he escaped any prison sentence whatsoever. Worth $2 billion, Shalon was to pay a $403 million fine.

U.S.Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara speaks next to a chart during a news conference New York November 10, 2015.

Dov Engel – 5 million swindle

Israel has a history of shielding Israelis charged with crimes against Americans from U.S. penalties. Even when fraudsters are extradited to the U.S. and convicted of major crimes, they sometimes serve little time in prison.

In 2001 a Brooklyn businessman named Dov Engel fled to Israel in the face of criminal charges for a $115 million bank swindle that carried a potential sentence of 30 years in prison.

He was eventually extradited to the U.S., where Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Alonso called Engel’s scam “one of the most thoroughly corrupt operations I’ve seen as a white-collar crime prosecutor.”

A New York court convicted Engel of the charges, but he was not imprisoned in the U.S. because Israeli citizens were allowed to serve prison terms in Israel – under Israeli sentencing guidelines. This meant that Engel would only serve five years, at most, in prison; and Alonso predicted it would most likely be about two years. (Information doesn’t appear to be available about how much time Engel ended up serving in prison in Israel, if any.)

Engel was one of the first criminals to be extradited to the U.S. from Israel.

Before that time, Israel had often refused to extradite Americans who had fled to Israel to escape diverse criminal charges, including the dismemberment slaying of an American teen. Even in recent years, Israelis are often not extradited to the U.S. and other countries. In some cases, U.S. law enforcement officials don’t even bother to pursue this option.

Most recently, the Israeli who perpetrated 2,000 bomb threat hoaxes was tried in Israel instead of in the United States – even though most of his threats were against Americans, he held U.S. dual citizenship, and the FBI had been instrumental in finding him.

In the U.S. he would have potentially faced many decades in prison. While an Israeli court found the perpetrator, Michael Kadar, guilty in June 2018, there is no record that he has yet been sentenced. Kadar’s actions are reported to have earned him millions of shekels that he kept in a secret bitcoin account.

On to (non-existent) diamonds

In January, not long after Israel’s legislation against binary options, TOI published an exposé entitled: “Diamonds are a scammer’s best friend: Undeterred by the new binary options ban, Israel’s boiler rooms are doing brisk business. An ex-employee describes how his company shifted to hawking diamonds.”

It turns out that Israeli scammers were now “selling diamonds online and over the phone with promises of a healthy profit, though the promised profits, and even the existence of the stones themselves, are often a matter of conjecture.”

The article reports that this had become “an Israeli cottage industry, mainly involving French speakers.” France’s financial markets regulator, the Autorité des Marchés Financiers (AMF), blacklists about 80 diamond-sales websites, and it is believed that many have links to Israel.

A UK judge said evaluations of diamonds by Israeli Noam Lenzini’s company were “contrived.” An Israeli newspaper called diamond scams, one of many such frauds, an “Israeli cottage industry.”

One former binary options employee said the company he worked for had simply removed the old logo and replaced it with one for a diamond investment: “The offices, staff, computers all stayed in place.”

Once again, Israeli law enforcement seems lax. The employee said that his manager told salespeople: “We are accustomed to the Israeli justice system, and we know how to proceed.”

As successful as the diamond racket was, there were quickly plans to branch out to an even more lucrative racket. People interviewing for jobs at the company were told that while the diamond scam would continue for awhile longer, it was on its way out. The company had begun selling a new product: bitcoin.

Bitcoin: “The Next Big thing”

Image from Cointelegraph article, “Israel is at the ‘Leading Edge’ for Bitcoin Startups.”

A June 2018 TOI article reports that experts have been touting cryptocurrency and blockchain as “the next major driver of the Israeli economy.”

This would be a highly questionable driver. As TOI reports, “It is unclear how much of the activity in this new high-tech field is legitimate, how much is mere hype, and how much is outright fraud perpetrated by malevolent actors, including transnational criminal organizations.”

In December, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) published an article announcing: “Bitcoin Fraud Could Be the Next Big Thing for Swindlers in Israel.” The article, published in Israel’s Jerusalem Post, reported: “According to fraud experts, Israel is shaping up to be a hub for cryptocurrency swindling.”

“Fraudsters,” JTA said, “have begun to take advantage of a cryptocurrency bonanza with a variety of nefarious schemes.”

A former IRS special agent who focused on international fraud predicts that this will mushroom and that Israeli binary options swindlers will spearhead a “massive cryptocurrency fraud.”

Experts estimate that there are more than 100 fraudulent forex, CFDs, cryptocurrency, insurance, locksmith and Green Card lottery boiler rooms in Israel. (Image from Medium)

An Israeli expert who helps victims of financial scams says: “More or less every binary options company we know of now has a cryptocurrency platform as well. I’m already getting calls from victims, but most people have yet to even realize they’ve been defrauded.”

An Israeli analyst on threat intelligence reports that “not a day goes by without our hearing about a new ICO [initial coin offering] scam or mining attack.” On November 8th, Ha’aretz reported: “Despite complaints to the authorities, users haven’t been warned about cybercriminals who swindle sellers of bitcoin using popular payment apps.”

According to Tel Aviv University Economics professor Neil Gandal, “It’s possible for a small number of actors to manipulate things,” TOI reports. Gandel says that Bitcoin’s first major price spike was likely caused by a single person, and a recent University of Texas paper found that Bitcoin’s more recent price spike was also caused by price manipulation.

TOI reports: “Thousands of Israeli binary options operatives have been looking for new work, and the cryptocurrency field, with its lack of regulation, potential for easy money and libertarian ethos, is a magnet for such individuals.”

According to TOI, “Experts estimate that there are more than 100 fraudulent forex, CFDs, cryptocurrency, insurance, locksmith and Green Card lottery boiler rooms in the country.”

There have been massive demonstrations in Israel against corruption at high levels of government, and two police probes have targeted Prime Minister Netanyahu. A reformer warned of “a foul tsunami rising up in an ocean of corruption that threatens to drown the state of Israel. This is organized crime; crime families and Israeli mafia who are gaining control of local government and from there gradually taking over the central government and the nerve centers of Israeli society.”

In December, the Israeli legislature proposed regulation to ban companies trading in bitcoin from operating on the Tel Aviv stock exchange, suggesting that Israeli citizens will eventually be protected from the scam, as they were from binary options swindlers.

However, It is not known when or if Israel will take action against Israeli cryptocurrency scams that target people in other countries.

For now, events create an impression that the Israeli government is tolerating, and thus perhaps even tacitly encouraging, financial swindles that originate within its borders and devastate individual savings and lives around the world.

The fact that the U.S. government gives Israel over $10 million per day, and that this is about to go even higher, doesn’t seem to protect Americans from being targeted by Israeli financial rackets.

For how much longer?

Alison Weir is the executive director of If Americans Knew and author of Against Our Better Judgment: The hidden history of how the U.S. was used to create Israel. She is also president of the Council for the National Interest.

Additional information:

Videos and photos of Israelis arrested in the Philippines and charged with operating a fraudulent call center.

On June 6, 2018 Philippine police arrested 474 employees of a trading company in Pampanga for their alleged involvement in cybercrime – eight Israeli nationals were alleged to be operating the business, which was said to be engaged in fraudulent financial transactions worth around $1 million daily. Video of the arrest is below:

In the Video below, posted by Philippine National Police, two Australian women describe how the company scammed them out of their life savings: “They are doing something bad for the whole world… they created agony in other people’s lives…”:

 

Photos of some of the Israelis said to have scammed people from the call center:

Israeli David Freifeld is among the suspects in a Filipino police probe into an allegedly fraudulent Israeli-run call center. Police raided IBD Marketing Inc. on June 6, 2018 (Facebook screenshot)

Israelis Noa Hofman and Gal Manobla are among reported suspects in a Filipino police probe into an allegedly fraudulent Israeli-run call center. Police raided IBD Marketing Inc. on June 6, 2018

Israeli Ohad Elias is among reported suspects in a Filipino police probe into an allegedly fraudulent Israeli-run call center. Police raided IBD Marketing Inc. on June 6, 2018

Israeli Eliav Lugassi is among reported suspects in a Filipino police probe into an allegedly fraudulent Israeli-run call center. Police raided IBD Marketing Inc. on June 6, 2018.

(Republished from If Americans Knew by permission of author or representative)

History suppressed: Censorship in israel’s (apartheid state) archives

History suppressed: Censorship in Israel’s archives

Troves of looted Palestinian books, documents, photographs and films are sealed in Israel’s archives and libraries.

Written by Al Jazeera

 

Sealed in Israel‘s archives and libraries are troves of Palestinian books, documents, photographs and films that were looted from Palestinian institutions and personal archives by Jewish militias and later, the Israeli military.

“This confiscation is a kind of daily struggle that Palestinians face,” says Sherene Seikaly, a scholar of Middle Eastern history. “One of the reasons, that these archives are a target, that they’re threatening, is because they’re really a record of Palestinian social life, and Palestine more broadly.”

Israeli historian Rona Sela has spent 20 years uncovering Palestinian visual history that has been kept in the dark in Israel’s state and military archives. She says the methodical plunder of Palestinians‘ cultural assets predates the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, what Palestinians call the ‘Nakba‘ or ‘catastrophe.’

“The looting and seizure, as far as I found, started in the 1930s in a systematic and organised manner … by Haganah forces [Zionist paramilitary group]. The seizure intensified, of course, with the Nakba in 1948. I found materials taken in 1967, 1982, 1991 and … in the last few years.”

What begins with looting and appropriation, continues with a system of censorship and historical revisionism in the archives. The origin of Palestinian material is often erased and replaced with terminology that fits the archivist’s world view.

“I saw photos with comments and notes written on them by the censors and archivists. For example, Palestinians are described as ‘terrorists’, as ‘gangs’. Seeing all of that taught me about how the materials go through a process of rewriting to aid or benefit the Zionist narrative,” says Sela. “You see a place where the materials are being censored and erased from the public sphere.”

The suppression of history doesn’t only extend to Palestinian material. The Israeli archives also guard state secrets that could reveal details about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.

Historians and journalists say the policy of censoring incriminating material in the archives exposes the deep insecurity Israel has about its past, with archivists employed as the ‘gatekeepers’ of history.

“Israel is terrified of the contents of its own archives, and doesn’t want its history to be exposed,” says Mahmoud Yazbak, a professor at the University of Haifa. “The government’s … aim is to hide the past from researchers in order to prevent it from being part of the present and the future.”

Palestinians see the censorship as part of a wider trend of physical and cultural erasure that began in 1948 and has continued ever since. Concealing the archival record denies them the tools to communicate their own history, what the Palestinian intellectual and literary theorist Edward Said called “permission to narrate.”

“The fact that these documents have been taken away from Palestinian hands is a sign of contempt for Palestinian history,” says Yazbak. “It’s an attempt to suggest Palestinians have no history, no documents, no belongings.”

The Listening Post‘s Tariq Nafi looks at the silencing of Palestinian history in Israel’s archives.

Contributors

Sherene Seikaly – associate professor, UC Santa Barbara
Rona Sela – Israeli researcher on visual history and lecturer
Mahmoud Yazbak – professor, University of Haifa

Source: Al Jazeera

The Dishonesty, Hypocrisy, Hatred of Others, and Subterfuge in the Jewish Religion

Source

By Ron Unz

THE JEWISH QUESTION

The author is the founder and editor of The Unz Review, a leading conservative American political website. He is also a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, and a one-time candidate for the governor of California. He was once described as ‘the smartest guy in his class’ at Harvard (Class of 2004). His biography on Wikipedia is interesting.

He is Jewish, raised in a Yiddish speaking household, and writes frequently on the Jewish Question.

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Editor’s comment:

This article is so extraordinary, that we felt it best to provide some representative quotes, to give the reader a sense of what is coming. We recommend taking the time to read the whole thing. It is well worth it.

“Throughout my entire life, there have been very, very few times I have ever been so totally astonished as I was after I digested Jewish History, Jewish Religion (by Israel Shahak)”

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” … until very recent times, the lives of religious Jews were often dominated by all sorts of highly superstitious practices, including magical charms, potions, spells, incantations, hexes, curses, and sacred talismans, with rabbis often having an important secondary role as sorcerers, and this even remains entirely true today among the enormously influential rabbis of Israel and the New York City area.”

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” … (Judaism teaches that) Jews have divine souls and goyim do not, being merely beasts in the shape of men. Indeed, the primary reason for the existence of non-Jews is to serve as the slaves of Jews, with some very high-ranking rabbis occasionally stating this well-known fact. … Jewish lives have infinite value, and non-Jewish ones none at all, which has obvious policy implications.”

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” … according to the Jewish Talmud, Jesus is perhaps the vilest being who ever lived, condemned to spend eternity in the bottommost pit of Hell, immersed in a boiling vat of excrement. Religious Jews regard the Muslim Quran as just another book, though a totally mistaken one, but the Christian Bible represents purest evil, and if circumstances permit, burning Bibles is a very praiseworthy act.”

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“Pious Jews are also enjoined to always spit three times at any cross or church they encounter, and direct a curse at all Christian cemeteries. Indeed, many deeply religious Jews utter a prayer each and every day for the immediate extermination of all Christians.”

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“If the Gentile population became aware of these Jewish religious beliefs and the behaviors they promote, major problems for Jews might develop, so an elaborate methodology of subterfuge, concealment, and dissimulation has come into being over the many centuries to minimize this possibility.”

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“Jews (were) more likely to extract every last penny of value from the peasants they controlled for the benefit of their local king or lords, their notorious antipathy for all non-Jews ensuring that such behavior was minimally tempered by any human sympathy.”

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“… in 1991 the Black Nationalists of The Nation of Islam published The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, Volume One, which seemed to persuasively document the enormous role Jews had played in the American slave-trade.”

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” … according to mainstream Talmudic doctrine, black Africans are traditionally placed somewhere between people and monkeys in their intrinsic nature, and surely all rabbis, even liberal ones, would be aware of this religious doctrine.”

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” … our dominant media organs of news and entertainment have successfully conditioned most Americans to suffer a sort of mental allergic reaction to topics sensitive to Jews, which leads to all sorts of issues being considered absolutely out of bounds. And with America’s very powerful Jewish elites thereby insulated from almost all public scrutiny, Jewish arrogance and misbehavior remain largely unchecked and can increase completely without limit.”

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” … It appears that a considerable number of Ashkenazi Jews traditionally regarded Christian blood as having powerful magical properties and considered it a very valuable component of certain important ritual observances at particular religious holidays.”

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“Most of these disheartening facts that have so completely upended my understanding of reality over the last decade could not possibly have come to my attention until the rise of the Internet, … But many other people surely must have known large portions of this important story long before that, and recognized the very serious consequences these matters might have for the future of our society. Why has there been so little public discussion?”

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About a decade ago, I happened to be talking with an eminent academic scholar who had become known for his sharp criticism of Israeli policies in the Middle East and America’s strong support for them.

I mentioned that I myself had come to very similar conclusions some time before, and he asked when that had happened. I told him it had been in 1982, and I think he found my answer quite surprising. I got the sense that date was decades earlier than would have been given by almost anyone else he knew.

Sometimes it is quite difficult to pinpoint when one’s world view on a contentious topic undergoes sharp transformation, but at other times it is quite easy. My own perceptions of the Middle East conflict drastically shifted during Fall 1982, and they have subsequently changed only to a far smaller extent.

As some might remember, that period marked the first Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and culminated in the notorious Sabra-Shatila Massacre during which hundreds or even thousands of Palestinians were slaughtered in their refugee camps. But although those events were certainly major factors in my ideological realignment, the crucial trigger was actually a certain letter to the editor published around that same time.

A few years earlier, I had discovered The London Economist, as it was then called, and it had quickly become my favorite publication, which I religiously devoured cover-to-cover every week.

And as I read the various articles about the Middle East conflict in that publication, or others such as the New York Times, the journalists occasionally included quotes from some particularly fanatic and irrational Israeli Communist named Israel Shahak, whose views seemed totally at odds with those of everyone else, and who was consequently treated as a fringe figure. Opinions that seem totally divorced from reality tend to stick in one’s mind, and it took only one or two appearances from that apparently die-hard and delusional Stalinist for me to guess that he would always take an entirely contrary position on every given issue.

In 1982 Israel Defense Minister Ariel Sharon launched his massive invasion of Lebanon using the pretext of the wounding of an Israeli diplomat in Europe at the hands of a Palestinian attacker, and the extreme nature of his action was widely condemned in the media outlets I read at the time.

His motive was obviously to root out the PLO’s political and military infrastructure, which had taken hold in many of Lebanon’s large Palestinian refugee camps. But back in those days invasions of Middle Eastern countries on dubious prospects were much less common than they have subsequently become, after our recent American wars killed or displaced so many millions, and most observers were horrified by the utterly disproportionate nature of his attack and the severe destruction he was inflicted upon Israel’s neighbor, which he seemed eager to reduce to puppet status.

From what I recall from that time, he made several entirely false assurances to top Reagan officials about his invasion plans, such that they afterward called him the worst sort of liar, and he ended up besieging the Lebanese capital of Beirut even though he had originally promised to limit his assault to a mere border incursion.

The Israeli siege of the PLO-controlled areas of Beirut lasted some time, and negotiations eventually resulted in the departure of the Palestinian fighters to some other Arab country.

Shortly afterward, the Israelis declared that they were moving into West Beirut in order to better assure the safety of the Palestinian women and children left behind and protect them from any retribution at the hands of their Christian Falangist enemies. And around that same time, I noticed a long letter in The Economist by Shahak which seemed to me the final proof of his insanity. He claimed that it was obvious that Sharon had marched to Beirut with the intent of organizing a massacre of the Palestinians, and that this would shortly take place.

When the slaughter indeed occurred not long afterward, apparently with heavy Israeli involvement and complicity, I concluded that if a crazy Communist fanatic like Shahak had been right, while apparently every mainstream journalist had been so completely wrong, my understanding of the world and the Middle East required total recalibration. Or at least that’s how I’ve always remembered those events from a distance of over thirty-five years.

During the years that followed, I still periodically saw Shahak’s statements quoted in my mainstream publications, which sometimes suggested that he was a Communist and sometimes not. Naturally enough, his ideological extremism made him a prominent opponent of the 1991 Oslo Peace Agreement between Israel and the occupied Palestinians, which was supported by every sensible person, though since Oslo ended up being entirely a failure, I couldn’t hold it too strongly against him.

I stopped paying much attention to foreign policy issues during the 1990s, but I still read my New York Times every morning and would occasionally see his quotes, inevitably contrarian and irredentist.

Then the 9/11 attacks returned foreign policy and the Middle East to the absolute center of our national agenda, and I eventually read somewhere or other that Shahak had died at age 68 only a few months earlier, though I hadn’t noticed any obituary. Over the years, I’d seen some vague mention that during the previous decade he’d published a couple of stridently anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist books, just as might be expected from a hard-line Communist fanatic, and during the early 2000s I started seeing more and more references to these works, ironically coming from fringe sources of the anti-Semitic Far Right, thereby once again proving that extremists flock together.

Finally, about a decade ago, my curiosity got the better of me and clicking a few buttons on Amazon.com, I ordered copies of his books, all of which were quite short.

My first surprise was that Shahak’s writings included introductions or glowing blurbs by some of America’s most prominent public intellectuals, including Christopher Hitchens, Gore Vidal, Noam Chomsky, and Edward Said. Praise also came from quite respectable publications such as The London Review of Books, Middle East International, and Catholic New Times while Allan Brownfeld of The American Council for Judaism had published a very long and laudatory obituary. And I discovered that Shahak’s background was very different than I had always imagined. He had spent many years as an award-winning Chemistry professor at Hebrew University, and was actually anything but a Communist.

Whereas for decades, Israel’s ruling political parties had been Socialist or Marxist, his personal doubts about Socialism had left him politically in the wilderness, while his relationship with Israel’s tiny Communist Party was solely because they were the only group willing to stand up for the basic human rights issues that were his own central focus. My casual assumptions about his views and background had been entirely in error.

Once I actually began reading his books, and considering his claims, my shock increased fifty-fold. Throughout my entire life, there have been very, very few times I have ever been so totally astonished as I was after I digested Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, whose text runs barely a hundred pages.

In fact, despite his solid background in the academic sciences and the glowing testaments provided by prominent figures, I found it quite difficult to accept the reality of what I was reading. As a consequence, I paid a considerable sum to a young graduate student I knew, tasking him to verify the claims in Shahak’s books, and as far as he could tell, all of the hundreds of references he checked seemed to be accurate or at least found in other sources.

Even with all of that due diligence, I must emphasize that I cannot directly vouch for Shahak’s claims about Judaism. My own knowledge of that religion is absolutely negligible, mostly being limited to my childhood, when my grandmother occasionally managed to drag me down to services at the local synagogue, where I was seated among a mass of elderly men praying and chanting in some strange language while wearing various ritualistic cloths and religious talismans, an experience that I always found much less enjoyable than my usual Saturday morning cartoons.

Although Shahak’s books are quite short, they contain such a density of astonishing material, it would take many, many thousands of words to begin to summarize them. Essentially almost everything I had known—or thought I had known—about the religion of Judaism, at least in its zealously Orthodox traditional form, was utterly wrong.
For example, traditionally religious Jews pay little attention to most of the Old Testament, and even very learned rabbis or students who have devoted many years to intensive study may remain largely ignorant of its contents. Instead, the center of their religious world view is the Talmud, an enormously large, complex, and somewhat contradictory mass of secondary writings and commentary built up over many centuries, which is why their religious doctrine is sometimes called “Talmudic Judaism.”

Among large portions of the faithful, the Talmud is supplemented by the Kabala, another large collection of accumulated writings, mostly focused on mysticism and all sorts of magic. Since these commentaries and interpretations represent the core of the religion, much of what everyone takes for granted in the Bible is considered in a very different manner.

Given the nature of the Talmudic basis of traditional Judaism and my total previous ignorance of the subject, any attempt on my part of summarize some of the more surprising aspects of Shahak’s description may be partially garbled, and is certainly worthy of correction by someone better versed in that dogma. And given that so many parts of the Talmud are highly contradictory and infused with complex mysticism, it would be impossible for someone like me to attempt to disentangle the seeming inconsistencies that I am merely repeating.

I should note that although Shahak’s description of the beliefs and practices of Talmudic Judaism evoked a fire-storm of denunciations, few of those harsh critics seem to have denied his very specific claims, including the most astonishing ones, which would seem to strengthen his credibility.

On the most basic level, the religion of most traditional Jews is actually not at all monotheistic, but instead contains a wide variety of different male and female gods, having quite complex relations to each other, with these entities and their properties varying enormously among the numerous different Jewish sub-sects, depending upon which portions of the Talmud and the Kabala they place uppermost. For example, the traditional Jewish religious cry “The Lord Is One” has always been interpreted by most people to be an monotheistic affirmation, and indeed, many Jews take exactly this same view.
But large numbers of other Jews believe this declaration instead refers to achievement of sexual union between the primary male and female divine entities. And most bizarrely, Jews having such radically different views see absolutely no difficulty in praying side by side, and merely interpreting their identical chants in very different fashion.

Furthermore, religious Jews apparently pray to Satan almost as readily as they pray to God, and depending upon the various rabbinical schools, the particular rituals and sacrifices they practice may be aimed at enlisting the support of the one or the other. Once again, so long as the rituals are properly followed, the Satan-worshippers and the God-worshippers get along perfectly well and consider each other equally pious Jews, merely of a slightly different tradition.
One point that Shahak repeatedly emphasizes is that in traditional Judaism the nature of the ritual itself is absolutely uppermost, while the interpretation of the ritual is rather secondary. So perhaps a Jew who washes his hands three times clockwise might be horrified by another who follows a counter-clockwise direction, but whether the hand-washing were meant to honor God or to honor Satan would be hardly be a matter of much consequence.

Strangely enough, many of the traditional rituals are explicitly intended to fool or trick God or His angels or sometimes Satan, much like the mortal heroes of some Greek legend might seek to trick Zeus or Aphrodite. For example, certain prayers must be uttered in Aramaic rather than Hebrew on the grounds that holy angels apparently don’t understand the former language, and their confusion allows those verses to slip by unimpeded and take effect without divine interference.

Furthermore, since the Talmud represents a massive accretion of published commentary built up over more than a millennium, even the most explicit mandates have sometimes been transformed into their opposites. As an example, Maimonides, one of the highest rabbinical authorities, absolutely prohibited rabbis from being paid for their religious teaching, declaring that any rabbi who received a salary was an evil robber condemned to everlasting torment; yet later rabbis eventually “reinterpreted” this statement to mean something entirely different, and today almost all rabbis collect salaries.

Another fascinating aspect is that up until very recent times, the lives of religious Jews were often dominated by all sorts of highly superstitious practices, including magical charms, potions, spells, incantations, hexes, curses, and sacred talismans, with rabbis often having an important secondary role as sorcerers, and this even remains entirely true today among the enormously influential rabbis of Israel and the New York City area.

Shahak’s writings had not endeared him to many of these individuals, and for years they constantly attacked him with all sorts of spells and fearful curses aimed at achieving his death or illness. Many of these traditional Jewish practices seem not entirely dissimilar to those we typically associate with African witch-doctors or Voodoo priests, and indeed, the famous legend of the Golem of Prague described the successful use of rabbinical magic to animate a giant creature built of clay.

If these ritualistic issues constituted the central features of traditional religious Judaism, we might regard it as a rather colorful and eccentric survival of ancient times. But unfortunately, there is also a far darker side, primarily involving the relationship between Jews and non-Jews, with the highly derogatory term goyimfrequently used to describe the latter.

To put it bluntly, Jews have divine souls and goyim do not, being merely beasts in the shape of men. Indeed, the primary reason for the existence of non-Jews is to serve as the slaves of Jews, with some very high-ranking rabbis occasionally stating this well-known fact. In 2010, Israel’s top Sephardic rabbi used his weekly sermon to declare that the only reason for the existence of non-Jews is to serve Jews and do work for them. The enslavement or extermination of all non-Jews seems an ultimate implied goal of the religion.

Jewish lives have infinite value, and non-Jewish ones none at all, which has obvious policy implications. For example, in a published article a prominent Israeli rabbi explained that if a Jew needed a liver, it would be perfectly fine, and indeed obligatory, to kill an innocent Gentile and take his. Perhaps we should not be too surprised that today Israel is widely regarded as one of the world centers of organ-trafficking.

As a further illustration of the seething hatred traditional Judaism radiates towards all those of a different background, saving the life of a non-Jew is generally considered improper or even prohibited, and taking any such action on the Sabbath would be an absolute violation of religious edict. Such dogmas are certainly ironic given the widespread presence of Jews in the medical profession during recent centuries, but they came to the fore in Israel when a religiously-minded military doctor took them to heart and his position was supported by the country’s highest religious authorities.

And while religious Judaism has a decidedly negative view towards all non-Jews, Christianity in particular is regarded as a total abomination, which must be wiped from the face of the earth.

Whereas pious Muslims consider Jesus the holy prophet of God and Muhammed’s immediate predecessor, according to the Jewish Talmud, Jesus is perhaps the vilest being who ever lived, condemned to spend eternity in the bottommost pit of Hell, immersed in a boiling vat of excrement. Religious Jews regard the Muslim Quran as just another book, though a totally mistaken one, but the Christian Bible represents purest evil, and if circumstances permit, burning Bibles is a very praiseworthy act. Pious Jews are also enjoined to always spit three times at any cross or church they encounter, and direct a curse at all Christian cemeteries. Indeed, many deeply religious Jews utter a prayer each and every day for the immediate extermination of all Christians.

Over the years prominent Israeli rabbis have sometimes publicly debated whether Jewish power has now become sufficiently great that all the Christian churches of Jerusalem, Bethleham, and other nearby areas can finally be destroyed, and the entire Holy Land completely cleansed of all traces of its Christian contamination. Some have taken this position, but most have urged prudence, arguing that Jews needed to gain some additional strength before they should take such a risky step.

These days, many tens of millions of zealous Christians and especially Christian Zionists are enthusiastic advocates for Jews, Judaism, and Israel, and I strongly suspect that at least some of that enthusiasm is based upon ignorance.

For the last two thousand years, Jews have almost invariably existed as small, relatively weak minorities living in the lands of others, whether Christian or Muslim, so a religious doctrine so unswervingly hostile to outsiders has naturally presented considerable obstacles for peaceful co-existence. The solution to this dilemma has been based on the divine mandate to preserve Jewish life and well-being above all else, superseding almost all other religious considerations. Thus, if any of the behaviors discussed above are considered likely to stir up resentment from powerful Gentile groups and put Jews at risk, they must be avoided.

For example, the prohibition against Jewish physicians treating the illnesses of non-Jews is waived in the case of powerful non-Jews, especially national leaders, whose favor might provide benefits to the Jewish community. And even ordinary non-Jews may be aided unless some persuasive excuse can be found to explain such lack of assistance since otherwise the vengeful hostility of their friends and relatives might cause difficulties for other Jews. Similarly, it is permissible to exchange gifts with non-Jews but only if such behavior can be justified in strictly utilitarian terms, with any simple expression of friendship towards a non-Jew being a violation of holy principles.

If the Gentile population became aware of these Jewish religious beliefs and the behaviors they promote, major problems for Jews might develop, so an elaborate methodology of subterfuge, concealment, and dissimulation has come into being over the many centuries to minimize this possibility, especially including the mistranslation of sacred texts or the complete exclusion of crucial sections. Meanwhile, the traditional penalty for any Jew who “informs” to the authorities on any matter regarding the Jewish community has always been death, often preceded by hideous torture.

Much of this dishonesty obviously continues down to recent times since it seems very unlikely that Jewish rabbis, except perhaps for those of the most avant gardedisposition, would remain totally unaware of the fundamental tenets of the religion that they claim to lead, and Shahak is scathing toward their apparent self-serving hypocrisy, especially those who publicly express strongly liberal views. For example, according to mainstream Talmudic doctrine, black Africans are traditionally placed somewhere between people and monkeys in their intrinsic nature, and surely all rabbis, even liberal ones, would be aware of this religious doctrine.

But Shahak notes that the numerous American rabbis who so eagerly worked with Martin Luther King, Jr. and other black Civil Rights leaders during the 1950s and 1960s strictly concealed their religious beliefs while denouncing American society for its cruel racism, presumably seeking to achieve a political quid pro quo beneficial to Jewish interests from America’s substantial black population.

Shahak also emphasizes the utterly totalitarian nature of traditional Jewish society, in which rabbis held the power of life and death over their congregants, and often sought to punish ideological deviation or heresy using those means. They were often outraged that this became difficult as states grew stronger and increasingly prohibited such private executions. Liberalizing rabbis were sometimes murdered and Baruch Spinoza, the famous Jewish philosopher of the Age of Reason, only survived because the Dutch authorities refused to allow his fellow Jews to kill him.

Given the complexity and exceptionally controversial nature of this subject matter, I would urge readers who find this topic of interest to spend three or four hours reading Shahak’s very short book, and then decide for themselves whether his claims seem plausible and whether I may have inadvertently misunderstood them. Aside from the copies on Amazon, the work may also be found at Archive.org and also a very convenient HTML copy is freely available on the Internet.

My encounter a decade ago with Shahak’s candid description of the true doctrines of traditional Judaism was certainly one of the most world-altering revelations of my entire life. But as I gradually digested the full implications, all sorts of puzzles and disconnected facts suddenly became much more clear. There were also some remarkable ironies, and not long afterward I joked to a (Jewish) friend of mine that I’d suddenly discovered that Naziism could best be described as “Judaism for Wimps” or perhaps Judaism as practiced by Mother Teresa of Calcutta.

There may actually be a deeper historical truth behind that irony. I think I’ve read here and there that some scholars believe that Hitler may have modeled certain aspects of his racially-focused National Socialist doctrine upon the Jewish example, which really makes perfect sense.

After all, he saw that despite their small numbers Jews had gained enormous power in the Soviet Union, Weimar Germany, and numerous other countries throughout Europe, partly due to their extremely strong ethnic cohesion, and he probably reasoned that his own Germanic people, being far greater in numbers and historical achievements could do even better if they adopted similar practices.

It’s also interesting to note that quite a number of the leading racialist pioneers of 19th century Europe came from a particular ethnic background. For example, my history books had always disapprovingly mentioned Germany’s Max Nordau and Italy’s Cesare Lombroso as two of the founding figures of European racism and eugenics theories, but it was only very recently that I also discovered that Nordau had also been the joint founder with Theodor Herzl of the world Zionist movement, while his major racialist treatise Degeneration, was dedicated to Lombroso, his Jewish mentor.

Even as late as the 1930s and afterward, international Zionist groups closely cooperated with the Third Reich on international economic projects, and during the world war itself one of the smaller rightwing factions, led by future Israeli Prime Minister Yizhak Shamir, actually offered a military alliance to the Axis Powers, denouncing the decadent Western democracies and hoping to cooperate against their mutual British enemies. ‘The Transfer Agreement by Edwin Black, 51 Documents by Lenni Brenner, and other writings have documented all these facts in detail, though for obvious reasons they have generally been ignored or mischaracterized by most of our media outlets.
Obviously the Talmud is hardly regular reading among ordinary Jews these days, and I would suspect that except for the strongly Orthodox and perhaps most rabbis, barely a sliver are aware of its highly controversial teachings.

But it is important to keep in mind that until just a few generations ago, almost all European Jews were deeply Orthodox, and even today I would guess that the overwhelming majority of Jewish adults had Orthodox grand-parents. Highly distinctive cultural patterns and social attitudes can easily seep into a considerably wider population, especially one that remains ignorant of the origin of those sentiments, a condition enhancing their unrecognized influence.

A religion based upon the principal of “Love Thy Neighbor” may or may not be workable in practice, but a religion based upon “Hate Thy Neighbor” may be expected to have long-term cultural ripple effects that extend far beyond the direct community of the deeply pious. If nearly all Jews for a thousand or two thousand years were taught to feel a seething hatred toward all non-Jews and also developed an enormous infrastructure of cultural dishonesty to mask that attitude, it is difficult to believe that such an unfortunate history has had absolutely no consequences for our present-day world, or that of the relatively recent past.

Furthermore, Jewish hostility toward non-Jews may have often served the interests of others, and helped determine the economic role they played, especially in European countries, with this factor having been obscured by widespread ignorance of the underlying religious tenets. As most of us know from our history books, political rulers with little sympathy for their subjects sometimes restrict military power to a relatively small group of well-rewarded mercenaries, often of foreign origins so that they will have little sympathy for the population they harshly repress.

I strongly suspect that some of the most common traditional economic niches of European Jews, such as tax-farming and the arrenda estate-management system of Eastern Europe, should be best understood in a similar light, with Jews being more likely to extract every last penny of value from the peasants they controlled for the benefit of their local king or lords, and their notorious antipathy for all non-Jews ensuring that such behavior was minimally tempered by any human sympathy. Thus, we should not be surprised that Jews first entered England in the train of William the Conqueror, in order to help him and his victorious Norman lords effectively exploit the subjugated Anglo-Saxon population they now ruled.

But states in which the vast majority of the population is oppressed and dominated by a thin slice of rulers and their mercenary enforcers tend to be much weaker and more brittle than those in which rulers and ruled share common interests, and I believe this is just as true for economic enforcers as for military ones. In many cases, lands reliant upon Jewish economic intermediaries, notably Poland, never successfully developed a native middle class, and often later fared quite poorly against their nationally-unified competitors.

Spain was actually one of the last countries in Europe to expel its Jews, and over the next century or two reached the peak of its military and political glory. Prof. Kevin MacDonald’s controversial books on Judaism have also extensively argued that rulers who seem to have been more concerned for the well-being of their subjects also tend to be the ones more likely to be labeled “anti-Semitic” in modern history books, and his volumes are now easily available in my selection of HTML Books:

A People That Shall Dwell Alone

Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy

KEVIN MACDONALD • 1994 • 168,000 WORDS

Separation and Its Discontents

Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism

KEVIN MACDONALD • 1998 • 168,000 WORDS

In 2009, Gene Expression blogger Razib Khan interviewed eminent evolutionary theorist David Sloan Wilson on the group selection ideas that have been his major focus. During this hour-long discussion, the theories of MacDonald became a major topic, with Wilson seeming to take them quite seriously, and pointing out that within the scientific framework “parasitism” has a simple technical definition, namely the exploitation of the large by the small. Unsurprisingly, the video record of such extremely touchy subject matter was quickly truncated to just the first 11 minutes, and eventually completely removed from both YouTube and BloggingHeadsTV. But it still at least partially survives in archived form:

In recent years, the history of Jewish expulsions from various European societies over the last thousand years has received considerable attention. The total number is somewhat disputed but almost certainly in excess of 100, with the 1930s policies of Hitler’s Germany being merely the most recent example, and Wired Magazineprovided an interesting graphical presentation of this large dataset in 2013. Given these unfortunate facts, it may be difficult to point to any other group so consistently at bitter odds with its local neighbors, and the religious details provided by Shahak certainly make this remarkable historical pattern far less inexplicable.

A very even-handed but candid description of the behavior pattern of Jewish newcomers to America was provided in a chapter of a 1914 book on immigration groups by E.A. Ross, one of America’s greatest early sociologists. Ross had been one of the towering Progressive intellectuals of his era, widely quoted by Lothrop Stoddard on the Right while still so highly regarded by the Left that he was named to the Dewey Commission to adjudicate the conflicting accusations of Trotsky and Stalin and also received glowing praise in the pages of the Communist New Masses.

His dismissal on political grounds from Stanford University led to the formation of the American Association of University Professors. Yet his name had so totally vanished from our history books I had never even encountered it until beginning work on my content-archiving project, and I would not be surprised if that single chapter from one of his many books played a major role in his disappearance.

The Old World in the New

The Eastern European Hebrews

E.A. ROSS • 1914 • 5,000 WORDS

Jews spent two thousand years living as a diaspora people, and their tightly-bound trans-national colonies provided them with a uniquely effective international trading network. Since their religious traditions regarded slavery as the natural and appropriate lot of all non-Jews, both ideological and practical factors combined to apparently make them some of the leading slave-traders of Medieval Europe, though this is hardly emphasized in our histories.
Closer to home, in 1991 the Black Nationalists of The Nation of Islam published The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, Volume One, which seemed to persuasively document the enormous role Jews had played in the American slave-trade. In 1994, Harold Brackman published a short attempted rebuttal entitled Ministry of Lies under the auspices of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, but I found his denials much less compelling. I very much doubt that most Americans are aware of these historical facts.

Throughout most of my life, Nobel Laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn was generally regarded as the greatest Russian literary figure of our modern era, and after reading all of his works, including The First Circle, Cancer Ward, and The Gulag Archipelago, I certainly concurred with this assertion, and eagerly absorbed Michael Scammel’s brilliant thousand page biography.

Although Russian himself, many of his closest friends were Jewish, but during the 1980s and 1990s, whispers of his supposed anti-Semitism began floating around, probably because he had sometimes hinted at the very prominent role of Jews in both financing and leading the Bolshevik Revolution, and afterward staffing the NKVD and administering the Gulag labor camps.

Late in his life, he wrote a massive two-volume history of the tangled relationship between Jews and Russians under the title Two Hundred Years Together, and although that work soon appeared in Russian, French, and German, nearly two decades later, no English translation has ever been authorized. His literary star seems also to greatly waned in America since that time, and I only very rarely see his name mentioned these days in any of my regular newspapers.

Samizdat versions of major sections of his final work may easily be located on the Internet, and a few years ago Amazon temporarily sold a 750 page hard copy edition, which I ordered and lightly skimmed.

Everything seemed quite innocuous and factual, and nothing new jumped out at me, but perhaps the documentation of very heavy Jewish role in Communism was considered inappropriate for American audiences, as was the discussion of the extremely exploitative relationship between Jews and Slavic peasants in pre-revolutionary times, based on liquor-dealing and money-lending, which the Czars had often sought to mitigate.

When a ruling elite has limited connection to the population it controls, benevolent behavior is far less likely to occur, and those problems are magnified when that elite has a long tradition of ruthlessly extractive behavior. Enormous numbers of Russians suffered and died in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, and given the overwhelmingly Jewish composition of the top leadership during much of that period, it is hardly surprising that “anti-Semitism” was deemed a capital offense. Kevin MacDonald may have been the one who coined the term “hostile elite,” and discussed the unfortunate consequences when a country comes under such control.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, reborn Russia soon fell under the overwhelming domination of a small group of Oligarchs, almost entirely of Jewish background, and a decade of total misery and impoverishment for the general Russian population soon followed. But once an actual Russian named Vladimir Putin regained control, these trends reversed and the lives of Russians have enormously improved since that time.

America’s media organs were overwhelmingly friendly toward Russia when it was under Jewish Oligarchic rule, while Putin has been demonized in the press more ferociously than any world leader since Hitler. Indeed, our media pundits regularly identify Putin as “the new Hitler” and I actually think the analogy might be a reasonable one, but just not in the way they intend.

https://russia-insider.com/en/politics/dishonesty-hypocrisy-hatred-…

Jewish Lesson on Racism

October 03, 2018  /  Gilad Atzmon

Text analysis by Gilad Atzmon

The JVL (Jewish Voice for Labour), a pro Corbyn racially exclusive Jews-only cell that does not accept non Jews into its ranks, is attempting to teach us about racism and anti Semitism.

Instead of opposing all forms of racism and bigotry on a universal basis, the Jews only ‘left’ group has adopted the ‘anti Semitism’ cry. Together with FSoI (Free Speech on Israel), a ‘predominantly Jewish campaign group,’ it has published a disturbing document that confirms that their primary concern is Jewish suffering.

The document: https://freespeechonisrael.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/definitionBooklet.pdf

“We,” the Jewish bodies unanimously state,” believe that the following comments will be helpful to those drawing up Labour’s disciplinary code, and perhaps more widely.”

I will review each of the JVL/FSoI’s comments.

Implications of taking this view of antisemitism

1.  Stereotypes

Racism commonly stereotypes groups as inferior in ways that enable discrimination against them. Such stereotypes function by scapegoating a targeted group, deflecting blame for society’s problems from their real causes. Antisemitic stereotyping has historically been used to dehumanise Jewish people, giving license to treat them in ways not otherwise acceptable. Use of such stereotypes is unarguably antisemitic conduct.

Gilad: It has been a while since the Jews have been treated as an ‘inferior’ collective. On the contrary, it is the hegemony of Jews in certain domains that is often criticised.  Much has been written, for instance, about Jewish lobby groups dominating American and British foreign affairs. Jewish pressure groups have imposed the IHRA definition of antisemitism on governments, political parties and institutions. Prominent Jews such as Alan Dershowitz boast about “Jews contributing disproportionally..” raising the question of whether JVL would allow goyim to do the same: to point at the very power Jews often brag about.  

 

2.  Expressions of antisemitism

Certain words and phrases that refer to Jews in a derogatory way are unquestionably antisemitic. Terms which associate Jews with malevolent social forces clearly fall into this category. Extreme examples are the blood libel (that Jews kill Christian children to use their blood in religious ceremonies), and the claimed existence of a powerful but secret Jewish cabal that controls the world.
Seemingly neutral or positive terms can also be used in antisemitic ways. For example, assertions that Jews are unusually clever or especially ‘good with money’ make the unwarranted assumption that all Jews share similar characteristics. Commonly, there is a negative, antisemitic edge to such views.

 Gilad: Not surprisingly and consistent with their Zionist brethren, the JVL and the so called ‘Free’ Speech on Israel attempt to impose a Jerusalemite regime of correctness to suppress any attempt to look into Jews, their culture and their political settings. Is it racist to acknowledge that Blacks are great jazz musicians, or often superb at sports? If it isn’t, why is it anti-Semitic to discuss Jews as being powerful, clever or even influential? 

3.  Terminology

Jews, Israelis and Zionists are separate categories that are too frequently conflated by both supporters and critics of Israel. This conflation can be antisemitic. Holding all Jews responsible for the actions of the Israeli government is antisemitic. Many Jews are not Zionist. The majority of Zionists are not Jewish but fundamentalist Christian Zionists. Over 20 percent of Israeli citizens are not Jewish.

Gilad: Although not all Jews are Zionists, Israel defines itself as ‘The Jewish State’ and Israel is racist and abusive entity. Sadly, the racially exclusive JVL in accepting gentiles only as ‘solidarity members’ and not as full members, is actually more racist than Israel. In Israel, Arabs can be citizens and their politicians can be proper members of the Israeli Knesset. How many Arabs or Goyim are included in JVL’s steering body? Not one…

4.  Political discourse

Free speech is legally protected. Within these legal limits political discourse can be robust and may cause offence. There is no right not to be offended. The fact that some people or groups are offended does not in itself mean that a statement is antisemitic or racist. A statement is only antisemitic if it shows prejudice, hostility or hatred against Jews as Jews.
The terms ‘Zionism’ and ‘Zionist’ describe a political ideology and its adherents. They are key concepts in the discussion of Israel/Palestine. They are routinely used, approvingly, by supporters of Israel, but critically by campaigners for Palestinian rights, who identify Zionist ideology and the Zionist movement as responsible for Palestinian dispossession. Criticising Zionism or Israel as a state does not constitute criticising Jews as individuals or as a people and is not evidence of antisemitism.
There have been claims that any comparison between aspects of Israel and features of pre-war Nazi Germany is inherently antisemitic. Similar objections have been raised to likening Israel’s internal practices to those of apartheid South Africa. Drawing such parallels can undoubtedly cause offence; but potent historical events and experiences are always key reference points in political debate. Such comparisons are only antisemitic if they show prejudice, hostility or hatred against Jews as Jews.

Gilad: Here a Jewish group is dictating the terminology that may be used to criticise Jewish power, history or culture. This is a classic example of a Jewish controlled opposition in which the discourse of the oppressed is defined by the sensitivities of the oppressor. JVL & Co kindly allow us to compare Zionism and Nazism but may we dig into the Jewish nature of the self- defined “Jewish State”? What about comparing the Nazi Party and JVL?  Both are racially exclusive: the former Aryans–only, the latter Jews-only.   

5.  Boycott, divestment and sanctions

A common focus for allegations of antisemitism is the campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) targeted on Israel. The three elements of BDS are internationally recognized as legitimate and non-violent strategies for securing political change. So, advocating for BDS would only be antisemitic if accompanied by evidence that it is motivated not by this purpose but by racially-based hostility towards Jews.

Gilad: it is predictable that the JVL is keen on BDS. While the Palestinians are primarily seeking the ‘Right of Return,’ the Jewish solidarity project is dedicated to replacing the right of return with the ‘right to BDS.’ This agenda is, practically, a back door legitimisation of the Jewish State with the 1967 borders.

6.  When Antisemitism Is Alleged

As with any allegations of racism, accusations of antisemitism must be taken seriously and investigated. But principles of natural justice and due process must be respected and applied: the person accused should be accorded the normal presumption of innocence until the case is resolved. Allegations do not constitute proof.
Antisemitic attitudes may be more or less intense.* Some people are deeply antisemitic, others less so. Yet others whom it would be unreasonable to class as antisemitic may nevertheless hold some attitudes, in dilute form, which will make some Jews uncomfortable. Following a finding of antisemitism there remains a decision to be made about whether discussion and education, rather than a formal disciplinary approach, is more appropriate.
Indirect discrimination could inadvertently occur, where actions have the effect of selectively disadvantaging Jewish people even though no hostile motive towards Jews is present.  Once a case of such discrimination comes to light, those responsible should take all reasonable steps possible to eliminate the problem.  Unwillingness to take such steps would be evidence of antisemitism.
The systematic murder of millions of Jews (and so many others) is exhaustively documented. It is therefore inconceivable that Holocaust denial or expressions of doubt over its scale could be motivated by genuine investigatory scepticism. The implication of antisemitic intent is, for practical purposes, inescapable.

* See Institute of Jewish Policy Research report Antisemitism in Contemporary Great Britain, 2017

 

Gilad: It took the JVL/FSoI only a few lines before they produced a blanket rejection of WWII historical revisionism. This is not a convincing definition of anti Semitism. I wonder if the JVL or FSoI could explain how exploring the past and drawing whatever conclusions, can be interpreted as ‘discrimination of the Jews for being Jews.’ As we can see, the ‘predominantly  Jewish’ Free Speech on Israel isn’t about freedom of speech in general. Quite the opposite It is actually set to define the boundaries of freedom.

 Overview

The understanding of antisemitism on which this analysis is based reaffirms the traditional meaning of the term. This is important in the light of attempts to extend its meaning to apply to criticisms often made of the state of Israel, or to non-violent campaigns such as BDS. A charge of antisemitism carries exceptional moral force because of the negative connotations rightly attaching to the term. It is illegitimate to make such claims to discredit or deter criticism, or to achieve sectional advantage. To do so is to devalue the term.

To be clear: conduct is antisemitic only if it manifests ‘prejudice, hostility or hatred against Jews as Jews’.

 Gilad: This removes any doubt that JVL/FSoI are not committed to a universal fight against bigotry. Racial bigotry is ‘hatred or discrimination against X for being X.’ The JVL/FSoI are committed to the fight against (alleged) Jew hatred. The JVL is an exclusive Jewish body focused on the primacy of Jewish suffering. As such, the difference between JVL and Zionist bodies is marginal. We are dealing with a crypto Zionist body.

Left open are questions of: 1. How does this racially driven body fit with Labour’s values? And, 2. How Labour’s leader, a man who genuinely opposes all forms of racism, agrees to count such a bluntly racist group amongst its supporters?

Sukkot

October 03, 2018  /  Gilad Atzmon

by Devon Nola

Sukkot (Hebrew) is a biblical Jewish festival translated as Feast of Tabernacles and occurs in the fall. It has both agricultural and historical origins. According to the book of Exodus ( 34:22), it marks the end of the harvest time and the agricultural year in the Land of Israel. In the Book of Leviticus (23 :42-43), it commemorates the forty-year period during which the Jews were wandering in the desert, living in temporary shelters.

During the eight-day holiday (seven in Israel), temporary enclosed structures, called sukkahs, are erected and this is where the meals are eaten.   I live 8 blocks from the very large Ashkenazi, Zionist Hasidic community, Chabad Lubavitch. This holiday brings the otherwise secluded Lubivitchers up to my end, in droves, where they approach everyone they pass and ask, “are you Joyeesh?”  If someone is, they wish them “Chag Sameach” or ‘happy holiday’. If the answer is no, they keep it movin’. Nothing to wish to the goyim.

What is impressive about this holiday is the work that goes into its preparation.  I watch sukkot being constructed throughout their community, which involves large trucks bringing in tall panels of wood and Hasidic men directing labourers on where to make the piles and even doing the actual construction.  These structures are somewhat of an eyesore as they litter a community that is multicultural, but they’ll only be up for 8 days so everyone just accepts it. Mitzvah tanks covered in Hebrew letters and images of rabbis are out in full force blasting klezmer music from their speakers. The celebration of the ancient nomadic Jews and the reaping of their harvest is underway. Ironically, some 5700 miles away, Jews in Israel are doing the same thing, while simultaneously destroying actual nomadic Palestinian Arab communities.  Bedouins construct temporary structures and move from place to place with their livestock, but are being forced off their own land into a sedentary lifestyle in permanent structures by the Israeli government.  The Israeli government actually forces the Bedouins to demolish their own shelters.

Sukkot can be seen throughout NYC.  Typically, there is a small one in Union Square and young Hasidic men are all too happy to tell the tale of this joyous, Joyeesh  festival.  The Upper East Side is also home to a sukkah, however, this one ran into a bit of controversy.  A “vandal” allegedly spray-painted the tent with the slogan, “Free Gaza”.  Its being qualified as a hate crime.  I don’t see how a message to free a viciously oppressed people can be misconstrued as hate.  It’s the most loving, selfless message on earth. According to The Times Of Israel, “Free Gaza” is an anti-Israel slogan.  So, they are unapologetically stating that the freedom of the Palestinians is the current price to be paid for Jewish liberation.  Is it any wonder Israelis project the notion that it is the Palestinians calling for destruction of the Jews?  The ADL qualified the incident as “beyond the pale”.  How dare anyone interfere with the Jewish celebration of an ancient tribe by drawing attention to the crimes against humanity being carried out by their modern-day kin?

The Yom Kippur Syndrome

September 18, 2018  /  Gilad Atzmon

A message to Jews from Gilad Atzmon

When the Yom Kippur War broke out 45 years ago I was ten years old.  I recall a lot of fear all around me. Israel was my home and it was about to be wiped out. This is what I believed at the time, and this is what everyone around me repeated. We were all certainly caught unprepared.

My father was called up by the Air Force in the early hours of Yom Kippur (October 6th 1973). We didn’t hear from him for a few weeks. We didn’t know whether he was alive. In fact, we had good reason to believe he wasn’t. We were very worried.  For the adults around me, the first days of the war were a reminder of the Shoah. Israeli leaders, Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan as well as the top Israeli military command appeared perplexed and hesitant on TV. Their message was: ‘the future isn’t clear, we may even witness the destruction of the 3rd temple.’

Years later, when I became an avid reader of history and military texts, it became clear to me that the collective Shoah dread into which we immersed ourselves was a manifestation of Jewish pre traumatic stress disorder (Pre TSD). We were tormented by a phantasmic fear. Neither the Syrians nor the Egyptian armies had plans to ‘destroy Israel,’ wipe out the Jewish state or ‘throw the Jews into the sea’. Their military objectives were, in fact, very limited. Neither the Egyptians nor the Syrians wished to expand their military ground operation beyond a few miles into the Sinai and the Golan Heights. Both Arab armies were dependent on Soviet ground to air missiles that severely limited Israeli air superiority above the battlefield. The Soviet missile umbrella provided about 10 miles of anti air cover and the Arab armies had no intent to proceed beyond that ‘safe’ zone.

It took me years to grasp that Israel’s panic during the first few days of the war led to some serious military blunders (such as the IDF’s disastrous counter offensive on the 8th of October). This panic was fuelled by projection.  Believing that the Arabs were ‘about to throw the Jews into the sea’, Israeli generals and cabinet members reacted irrationally and wasted their limited reserve forces in a  counter offensive that failed and cost many Israeli lives.

But why did the Israelis believe that the Arabs were about to throw them into the sea? Why did they assume the Arab armies were murderous or possibly genocidal? Why did PM Golda Meir and Defense Minister Moshe Dayan believe that the ‘3rd temple’ was about to be annihilated?  Simple, because the Israelis were and still are driven by lethal inclinations towards their neighbours. It was the Israelis who literally pushed the Palestinians into the sea in 1948 into the sea. Israelis were panicking because they were projecting their own symptoms onto the Arabs. 

In ‘The Wandering Who’ I elaborate on projection in the context of Jewish ‘pre traumatic stress.’ The principle is simple. The more murderous and sinister one is, the more fearful one becomes of others. Humans tend to attribute their own reasoning and symptoms onto others. Accordingly, the more menacing one is, the more sinister one believes the other to be.

Israelis consistently attribute their own racist and barbarian symptoms onto the Palestinians. The possibility that a Palestinian or an Arab would be as merciless as the IDF causes real and total panic for the Israeli. The thought that the Palestinians, for instance, would want to displace a quarter of Israeli citizens and massacre Israelis as the IDF has done to Gaza numerous times must evoke terror amongst Israelis and for a good reason.

But this state of collective anxiety is not unique to Israelis; it is embedded in Jewish culture. Basically, Jews are tormented by anti Semitism because they assume that their own ‘goy hatred’ is echoed by ‘Jew hatred’ from their gentile neighbours. As Martin Heidegger noted in the 1930s, the Jews opposed in the Nazis the racism which they recognized from themselves. Heidegger wrote in his Black Notebooks: the Jewish people, with their talent for calculation, were so vehemently opposed to the Nazi’s racial theories because

“they themselves have lived according to the race principle for longest.”

In 1973 Israel believed that that the Arabs were out to eradicate them because this is exactly what the Israelis would have liked to do to the Arabs.

The Syndrome

Projection is just one aspect of the Yom Kippur war. I guess that, at least from a philosophical perspective, the most interesting aspect of the 73 War was that it marked a sudden switch from Judeo centric manic ‘hubris’ to melancholia, apathy and depression.

Following their outstanding 1967 military victory, the Israelis developed an arrogant disrespectful attitude toward Arabs and their military capability. Israeli intelligence predicted that it would take years for Arab armies to recover. The Israeli military didn’t believe that the Arab soldier had the ability to fight, let alone score a victory.

But on 6 October 1973, the Israelis had a devastating surprise. This time the Arab soldier was very different. The Israeli military strategy that was built on air superiority and fast ground maneuvers supported by tanks was crushed in only a few hours. The Egyptians and Syrians helped by new Soviet antitank and ground to air missiles managed to dismantle Israeli’s might. In the first days of the war Israel suffered heavy casualties and, as mentioned above, the Israeli leadership and high command were in a state of despair. This type of crisis wasn’t new to the Jews. It is consistently symptomatic of Jewish culture to be ‘surprised’ and overwhelmed by the Goyim’s fierce resilience.

The Israeli military fiasco at the first stage of the war was a repetition of a tragic syndrome that is as old as the Jews themselves. Jewish hubris that is driven by a strong sense of choseness and that repeatedly leads to horrific consequences is what I call ‘The Yom Kippur Syndrome.’  The syndrome can be defined as a repeated chain of events that drive Jewish societies towards an extreme irrational sense of pride, arrogance, self-confidence and blindness toward others and the tragedy that inevitably follows.

On October 6th, the Israelis realised that they had grossly underestimated their enemies.  But it wasn’t the first time such a mistake occurred in Jewish history. Every Jewish disaster is, to a certain extent, a repetition of the Yom Kippur Syndrome. In 1920s Berlin the Jewish elite boasted of its power. Some rich Jews were convinced that Germany and its capital were Jewish occupied territories. At the time, a few German Jews dominated banking and influenced Germany’s politics and media. In addition, the Frankfurt School as well as other Jewish school of thoughts were openly dedicated to the cultural uprooting of Germans, all in the name of, ‘progress,’ ‘working class politics,’ phenomenology and cultural Marxism. Then, almost from nowhere, as far as German Jews were concerned, a tidal wave of resentment appeared. And the rest is known.

But was there really a sudden shift in German consciousness? Should German ‘anti Semitism’ have come as a surprise? Not at all. All necessary signs had been present for some time. In fact, Early Zionists such as Herzl and Nordau correctly predicted the inevitable rise of European anti Jewish sentiments. But Jewish hubris prevented Berlin’s Jewish elite from evaluating the growing opposition around them. The Yom Kippur Syndrome.

The same could be said of the Jewish Lobby, AIPAC, Friends of Israel clubs in Britain, the BOD, the three British Jewish papers that, in the name of British Jewry, declared war on Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party.  These Jewish lobbies and institutions that relentlessly seek influence over Western foreign affairs and the Labour Party in particular: do they grasp the level of resentment and the potential disaster they are bringing on their fellow Jews?

Can the Jew recover from the Yom Kippur Syndrome? Can the Jew somehow detect resentment as it grows and amend his or her ways?  All it takes is drifting away from choseness. But once stripped of choseness what is left of the Jew or for the Jew?

This may be the most devastating question and the true meaning of the existential Yom Kippur Syndrome; there is no Jewish collective ideological escape for the Jew. Zionism failed to provide the goods and the so called ‘anti Zionists’ have done little other than form their own racially exclusive enclaves of chosenness within the so called ‘Left over.’

The only escape route from the Yom Kippur Syndrome is personal and individual. Try leaving the tribe late in the night, crawl under the ghetto fence, dig a tunnel under the ‘separation wall’ if necessary and then once on land of the free, proceed quietly and modestly towards the humane and the universal.

Good luck

Weekly report on israel’s terrorism against Palestinians (06 – 12 September 2018)

PCHR Weekly Report 

Israeli forces continued with systematic crimes in the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt) for the weeks of 06 – 12 September, 2018

Israeli forces continued to use excessive force against Palestinian protestors in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. Two children were killed, and a civilian succumbed to his previous wounds in the Gaza Strip. 171 civilians, including 36 children, 4 journalists and 5 paramedics, were wounded in the Gaza Strip. 12 civilians, including 4 children, were wounded in the West Bank.

Shooting:

 

Israeli forces continued to use lethal force against Palestinian civilians, who participated in peaceful demonstrations organized within the activities of the “Great March of Return and Breaking the Siege” in the Gaza Strip, which witnessed for the 24^th week in a row peaceful demonstrations along the eastern and northern Gaza Strip border area. During the reporting period, the Israeli forces killed 3 Palestinian civilians, including 2 children, while a fourth civilian succumbed to previous wounds in the Gaza Strip.  Moreover, 171 civilians, including 36 children, 4 journalists, and 5 paramedics, were wounded.  In the West Bank, the Israeli forces wounded 12 civilians, including 4 children.

 

In the Gaza Strip, the Israeli forces killed 2 Palestinian children during the peaceful protest. On 07 September 2018, Belal Mustafa Mohammed Khafajah (17) from Rafah City was killed after being shot with a bullet to the chest.

 

On the same day, Ahmed Musbah Ahmed Abu Tyour (16) was wounded with a bullet to the right knee during his participation in the Return and Breaking the Siege in eastern Rafah City.  His death was declared the next day after succumbing to his wounds.  A video showed Abu Tyour being shot with a bullet while jumping and making the victory sign around 20 meters away from the Israeli snipers who directly shot him without posing any threat to them.

 

On 07 September 2018, medical sources at al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza declared the death of Amjad Hamadonah (19) from Jabalia refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip after succumbing to wounds he sustained during his participation in the Return and Breaking the Siege March on 13 July 2018 in eastern Abu Safiyah Hill in eastern Jabalia.  He was wounded with a bullet to the left knee, cutting the main artery, and at that time, his condition was described as serious.

 

In a different crime, 09 September 2018, Israeli forces killed ‘Etaf Mohammed Musleh (29) from al-Nuzha Street in Jabalia.  The Israeli forces opened fire at him when he along with other civilians approached the border fence in eastern Abu Safiyah Hill, northeast of Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip.  An Israeli force then moved into the area to evacuate the body of the above-mentioned civilian.  His death was later declared while his body is so far under the Israeli custody.

 

 

Injuries in the Gaza Strip during this Week

 

Governorate	Injuries
	Total	Children	Women	Journalists	Paramedics	Critical Injuries
Northern Gaza Strip	60	16	0	2	4	6
Gaza City	51	4	0	0	0	0
Central Gaza Strip	16	5	0	0	0	0
Khan Younis	26	4	0	0	1	0
Rafah	18	7	0	2	0	5
Total	171	36	0	4	5	11

 

 

As part of targeting Palestinian fishermen in the Gaza Sea, the Israeli forces continued to escalate their attacks against the Palestinian fishermen, pointing out to the ongoing Israeli policy of targeting their livelihoods.  During the reporting period, PCHR documented 2 shooting incidents at the fishing boats.

 

In the West Bank, during the reporting period, the Israeli forces wounded 12 Palestinian civilians, including 4 children, in addition to dozens suffering tear gas inhalation.  Three of those wounded were wounded during the peaceful protests against settlements.

Incursions:

 

During the reporting period, Israeli forces conducted at least 47 military incursions into Palestinian communities in the West Bank and 2 similar ones into Jerusalem and its suburbs. During those incursions, Israeli forces arrested at least 19 Palestinians, including 3 children in the West Bank.  Meanwhile, five other civilians were arrested in Jerusalem and its suburbs.  Only one of them, a child, is so far under arrest while the rest were released, including an Islamic Endowments Officer, girl, her aunt and the latter’s husband after denying them the entry into al-Aqsa mosque for various periods.

 

Israeli Forces continued their settlement activities, and the settlers continued their attacks against Palestinian civilians and their property

 

As part of demolitions, on 06 September 2018, the Israeli forces levelled a 300-square-meter land near Deiristiya village entrance, north of Salfit, in a prelude to confiscate it, noting that its owner was about to build a commercial facility on it as he had obtained a license for this upon a letter he sent to the Palestinian Military Liaison and in coordination with the Israeli Liaison.  It should be noted that the land is adjacent to his house.

 

As part of the Israeli settlers’ attacks against Palestinian civilians and their property, on 06 September 2018, a group of settlers set fire to a big batch of construction wood boards in Khelet al-Wusta area between the villages of Qasrah and Jaloud in Nablus.

 

On 08 September 2018, a number of settlers living in the settlement outposts of Hebron’s Old City closed al-Sahlah Road in front of a PRCS ambulances that was carrying a patient on the closed Shuhadaa’ Street and threw stones at it.  As a result, the lights and rear window were damaged and the sides were affected as well.

 

On 09 September 2018, a number of settlers damaged and broke the branches of 18 ancient trees using saws in al-Hamrah area, east of Kherbet Tawanah to the east of Yata in southern Hebron.  It should be noted that the village has been subject to repeated attacks by settlers, including their attempts to intimidate students and deny them access to their schools in the village in addition to attacking the shepherds.

Use of Force against Demonstrations in Protest against the U.S. President’s Decision to Recognize Jerusalem as the Capital of Israel:

 

Israeli forces continued its excessive use of lethal force against peaceful demonstration organized by Palestinian civilians in in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and it was named as “The Great March of Return and Breaking Siege.” The demonstration was in protest against the U.S. President Donald Trump’s declaration to move the U.S. Embassy to it. The demonstration was as follows during the reporting period:

 

Gaza Strip:

 

• At approximately 07:00 on Friday, 07 August 2018, medical sources at al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City announced the death of Amjad Fayez Ahmed Hamadonah (19) from Jabalia refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip, succumbing to wounds he sustained during his participation in the March of Return and Breaking Siege on 13 July 2018, east of Abu Safiyah Hill, northeast of Jabalia. Amjad was hit with a live bullet to the left knee, cutting the main artery. He had received medical treatment at al-Shifa Hospital until his death was announced on the abovementioned day.

 

• At approximately 16:30 on the same day, thousands of civilians, including women, children and entire families, started swarming to the 5 encampments established by the Supreme National Authority for the Great March of Return and Breaking Siege along the border fence, east of the Gaza Strip governorates. They raised flags and chanted national songs and slogans against Trump’s decision to cut US funding for UNRWA. Hundreds, including children and women, approached the border fence with Israel, set fire to tires and gathered 300 meters away from the main border fence.  Some of them attempted to throw stones at the Israeli forces and pulled parts of the barbed-wire fence established inside the Palestinian territories.

 

The Israeli snipers stationed behind sand barriers along the border fence deliberately and selectively opened fire at the protestors, who were 300 meters away from the main border fence, and fired tear gas canisters. As a result, several casualties were reported.

 

The incidents were as follows in the following areas:

 

• The Northern Gaza Strip: clashes, which erupted in eastern Jabalia, resulted in the injury of 27 civilians, including 8 children and 3 paramedics. Twenty one of those wounded, including 7 children, were hit with live bullets and their shrapnel in addition to Nabil Mahmoud Mohamed Abu Saqer (38), a paramedic at the Military Medical Services, who was hit with a live bullet to the left leg. Moreover, 6 civilians, including a child, were hit with tear gas canisters. In addition, Mohammed Zeyad al-‘Abed Abu Foul (26), a paramedic at PRCS, was hit with a tear gas canister to the left shoulder, and Fadi Osamah Abdul Rahim ‘Ali (23), a paramedic at PRCS, was hit with a tear gas canister to the left foot. The wounded civilians were transferred to the Indonesian and al-‘Awda Hospitals. Doctors classified the injuries of 4 civilians as serious while other civilians’ injuries were between minor and moderate.

 

• Gaza City: clashes, which erupted in eastern al-Sheja’eyah neighborhood, resulted in the injury of 51 civilians, including 4 children.

 

• The Central Gaza Strip: clashes erupted in 3 points: the school gate, Um Hasaniyah Hill and then the young men moved into Abu Qatroun area in the north. As a result, 16 civilians, including 5 children, were hit with live bullets and their shrapnel. The wounded civilians were transferred via PRCS ambulances to al-Aqsa Hospital. Doctors classified the civilians’ injuries between minor and moderate. Moreover, dozens of civilians suffered tear gas inhalation. Some of them were transferred to the hospital while other received medical treatment on the spot.

 

• Khan Younis: clashes, which erupted in the east of Khuza’ah, resulted in the injury of 26 civilians, including 8 children and a Civil Defense paramedic, were wounded. Seventeen of them were hit with live bullets and 9 others were hit with tear gas canisters. Moreover, dozens of civilians suffered tear gas inhalation. The wounded civilians were taken to the field hospital and then transferred to Nasser, Gaza European and al-‘Awda Hospitals in the city.

 

According to observations by PCHR’s fieldworker, the Israeli forces heavily deployed in the border area amidst heavily firing of live bullets and tear gas canisters. As a result, the number of casualties increased comparing with the last weeks, despite the peaceful nature of most of the demonstrations.

 

• Rafah City: clashes, which erupted in the east of the city, resulted in the killing of Bilal Mustafa Mohammed Khafajah (17) after he was hit with a live bullet to the chest at approximately 17:45 on the same day, when he was among the demonstrators around 100-150 meters away from the western side of the border fence between the Gaza Strip. Bilal died upon arrival at Gaza European Hospital in Khan Younis. Moreover, 18 civilians, including 7 children, were hit with live bullets and their shrapnel. One of them was a person with a disability in addition to a young man who was wounded in the same leg that was wounded and a platinum rod fixed. Moreover, 2 paramedics were wounded and they were identified as:

 

1. Mahmoud Mohammed Sa’ed Shata (25), a reporter at “Rowad Al-Haqiqa” Network from Rafah, was hit with a live bullet to the left thigh.
2. Nash’at Nasim Khalil Na’im (20), a reporter at Barq Gaza Network from Beit Hanoun in the northern Gaza Strip, was hit with a live bullet to the left arm.

 

The wounded civilians were taken to the medical point in the Return encampment, east of Rafah and then transferred to Abu Yusuf al-Najjar hospital in Rafah and Gaza European Hospital in Khan Younis. Doctors classified 5 civilians’ injuries as serious. One of them namely Ahmed Mesbah Ahmed Abu Toyour (16)died at approximately 10:15 on Saturday, 08 September 2018 at Gaza European Hospital in Khan Younis, succumbing to wounds he sustained after he was hit with a live bullet to the right knee. Ahmed was wounded when he was in front of a site belonging to the Israeli snipers, 20 meters into the west of the border fence between the Gaza Strip and Israel Ahmed threw a stone at the soldiers’ site, raised the victory sign and jumped and exclaimed before them. after his injury, Ahmed underwent 2 surgeries that continued for 6 hours and he received 30 blood units. He was then admitted to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) until his death was announced.

 

• At approximately 16:00 on Monday, 19 September 2018, dozens of Palestinian civilians gathered near the coastline between the Gaza Strip and Israel upon calls from the Supreme National Authority for the Great March of Return and Breaking Siege in which they called for participation in the Return coastal camp, which was established on Monday morning, adjacent to “Zikim” military base , northwest of Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip. It should be noted that this is the seventh time for Palestinian boats to sail for Breaking the Siege from Gaza Seaport towards the northern Gaza Strip coastline adjacent to the abovementioned camp.

The Israeli gunboats heavily opened fire and fired a number of  sound bombs at the boats of Breaking the Siege that approached the water barrier established by the Israeli forces and extends to the border fence. The Israeli forces claimed that they established the border fence fearing of naval infiltration.

Meanwhile, Israeli soldiers stationed behind sand barriers and cement cubes heavily opened fire and fried a large number of tear gas canisters at Palestinian civilians participating in the demonstration and approached the coastline. As a result, 33 civilians, including 8 children, a paramedic and a journalist, were wounded. The injuries were classified as follows:

Fifteen civilians, including 3 children, were hit with live bullets and its shrapnel. Among those wounded was ‘Atiyah Nasser Ahmed Hejazi (28), a photojournalist at al-Manarah News Agency from Sheikh Redwan neighborhood in Gaza City, was hit with a live bullet to the right knee.

Moreover, 18 civilians, including 5 children, were hit with tear gas canisters. Among those wounded was Hasan Rateb Hasan al-‘Esawi (41), a volunteer paramedic at the Palestinian Ministry of Health from Khan Younis, was hit with a tear gas canister to the head, and HuseinJamal Mohammed Mansour (26), a photo journalist at Shams News  and the Guardian News Agency from al-Buraij refugee camp, was hit with a tear gas canister to the head.

The wounded civilians  were transferred via ambulances belonging to PRCS and Medical Services to the Indonesian and al-‘Awda Hospitals. Doctors classified 2 civilians” injuries as serious while the other civilians’ injuries were between minor and moderate.

 

West Bank:

 

• Following the Friday Prayer on 07 September 2018, dozens of Palestinian civilians and international human rights defenders gathered on agricultural lands of al-Resan Mount area, west of Ras Karkar village, west of Ramallah in protest against the Israeli settlers’ attempt to seize and confiscate the land. When the civilians arrived at the abovementioned area, the Israeli soldiers fired live and rubber bullets, sound bombs and tear gas canisters at the protestors. As a result, a 22-year-old civilian was hit with a rubber bullet to the right hand sustained wounds to the right foot, a 19-year-old civilian sustained wounds to the right foot and a 29-year-old civilian sustained wounds to the foot. The wounded civilians were taken via a PRCS ambulance to Palestine Medical Complex to receive medical treatment. Doctors classified their injuries as minor. Moreover, dozens of civilians suffered tear gas inhalations while others sustained bruises throughout their bodies due to being heavily beaten by the Israeli soldiers. The Israeli forces also arrested ‘Amr Rajeh ‘Obaidah (17), and Abdul Hakim Mohammed Abu ‘Adi (14).

 

• Around the same time, dozens of Palestinian civilians and international and Israeli human rights defenders organized peaceful demonstrations in protests against the annexation wall and settlement activity in Ni’lin and Bil’in villages, west of Ramallah. Israeli forces used force to disperse the protestors by firing live and rubber bullets, sound bombs and tear gas canisters at them. They also chased them into olive fields and between houses. As a result, dozens of civilians suffered tear gas inhalation while others sustained bruises after Israeli soldiers beat and pushed them.

 

• Around the same time, dozens of Palestinian civilians from Kherbat Qalqas, south of Hebron, and international and Israeli human rights defenders organized a peaceful demonstration at the entrance to Kherbat Qalqas, which has been closed for 19 years. The protestors demanded to open the entrance. They raised flags and chanted slogans. Large Israeli forces arrived at the area and prevented the civilians from reaching the Bypass Road (60), which connects the village. After half an hour, the soldiers fired sound bombs at the participants, forced them to leave the area and announced it a military closed zone. As a result, a number of civilians suffered tear gas inhalation. It should be noted that Kherbat Qalqas is inhabited with around 3000 persons is separated from the other neighborhoods of Hebron by Road (60). In addition, all life forms are connected with Hebron as the inhabitants receive medical services and many of them work at Hebron, Moreover, about 100 high school and university students daily go to educational institutions in the city.

Settlement activities and attacks by settlers against Palestinian civilians and property

 

Israeli forces’ attack:

 

• At approximately 06:20 on Thursday, 06 September 2018, Israeli forces leveled a 400-square-meter land near the entrance to Dirsitiyia village, north of Salfit, in a prelude to confiscate it. The plot of land belongs to Ibrahim Mostafa Abu Zaid and was leveled under the pretext of being within Area C that is under the Israeli control. The land’s owner was intending to build a commercial facility on it as he had obtained a construction license to build it after sending a letter to the Palestinian Military Liaison which coordinated with the Israeli Liaison in this regard. It should be noted that the abovementioned land was adjacent to his house.

 

Israeli settlers’ attack:

 

• On Thursday morning, 06 September 2018, a group of Israeli settlers from “Isch Kudz“ settlement outpost established on Jaloud village’s lands from the eastern side, southeast of Nablus, set fire to a big batch of construction wood boards belonging to Dawwoud ‘Obaid al-‘Issawiy in Khelit al-Wusta area between Qasrah and Jaloud villages. This new attack in the abovementioned area came to be listed within the series of ongoing attacks by the Israeli settlers against Palestinian civilians and their property in “Isch Kudz “settlement outpost in the outskirts of Jaloud village.

 

• At approximately 16:00 on Saturday, 08 September 2018, a number of Israeli settlers from settlement outposts in Hebron’s Old City, closed al-Sahlah Street in front of a PRCS ambulance. The PRCS arrived to take a patient from the closed al-Shuhadah Street. The settlers threw stones at the ambulance, causing material damage to it. The Israeli forces stationed in the Old City’s neighborhoods arrived at the area and allowed the PRCS ambulance to leave without chasing the settlers involved in the incident.

 

• On Sunday, 09 September 2018, a group of Israeli settlers from “Havat Maon“ settlement established on Kherbit Towanah lands, east of Yatta, south of Hebron, damaged and cut with electric saws the branches of around 18 ancient trees belong to al-Rab’I Family in al-Hamrah area, east of al-Kherbah. When farmers arrived at the area, the Israeli police came to the area, opened an investigation and asked the affected persons to submit a complaint in “Kiryat Arba“ Police Station. It should be noted that Kherbit Towanah is exposed to ongoing attacks by the Israeli settlers who attempt to intimidate students and deny them access to their schools in the village in addition to attacking shepherds.

 

Recommendations to the International Community

 

PCHR warns of the escalating settlement construction in the West Bank, the attempts to legitimize settlement outposts established on Palestinian lands in the West Bank and the continued summary executions of Palestinian civilians under the pretext that they pose a security threat to the Israeli forces. PCHR reminds the international community that thousands of Palestinian civilians have been rendered homeless and lived in caravans under tragic circumstances due to the latest Israeli offensive on the Gaza Strip that has been under a tight closure for almost 11 years. PCHR welcomes the UN Security Council’s Resolution No. 2334, which states that settlements are a blatant violation of the Geneva Conventions and calls upon Israel to stop them and not to recognize any demographic change in the oPt since 1967.  PCHR hopes this resolution will pave the way for eliminating the settlement crime and bring to justice those responsible for it. PCHR further reiterates that the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, are still under Israeli occupation in spite of Israel’s unilateral disengagement plan of 2005.  PCHR emphasizes that there is international recognition of Israel’s obligation to respect international human rights instruments and international humanitarian law.  Israel is bound to apply international human rights law and the law of war, sometimes reciprocally and other times in parallel, in a way that achieves the best protection for civilians and remedy for the victims.

1. PCHR calls upon the international community to respect the Security Council’s Resolution No. 2334 and to ensure that Israel respects it as well, in particular point 5 which obliges Israel not to deal with settlements as if they were part of Israel.
2. PCHR calls upon the ICC this year to open an investigation into Israeli crimes committed in the oPt, particularly the settlement crimes and the 2014 offensive on the Gaza Strip.
3. PCHR Calls upon the European Union (EU) and all international bodies to boycott settlements and ban working and investing in them in application of their obligations according to international human rights law and international humanitarian law considering settlements as a war crime.
4. PCHR calls upon the international community to use all available means to allow the Palestinian people to enjoy their right to self-determination through the establishment of the Palestinian State, which was recognized by the UN General Assembly with a vast majority, using all international legal mechanisms, including sanctions to end the occupation of the State of Palestine.
5. PCHR calls upon the international community and United Nations to take all necessary measures to stop Israeli policies aimed at creating a Jewish demographic majority in Jerusalem and at voiding Palestine from its original inhabitants through deportations and house demolitions as a collective punishment, which violates international humanitarian law, amounting to a crime against humanity.
6. PCHR calls upon the international community to condemn summary executions carried out by Israeli forces against Palestinians and to pressurize Israel to stop them.
7. PCHR calls upon the States Parties to the Rome Statute of the ICC to work hard to hold Israeli war criminals accountable.
8. PCHR calls upon the High Contracting Parties to the Geneva Conventions to fulfill their obligations under article (1) of the Convention to ensure respect for the Conventions under all circumstances, and under articles (146) and (147) to search for and prosecute those responsible for committing grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions to ensure justice and remedy for Palestinian victims, especially in light of the almost complete denial of justice for them before the Israeli judiciary.
9. PCHR calls upon the international community to speed up the reconstruction process necessary because of the destruction inflicted by the Israeli offensive on Gaza.
10. PCHR calls for a prompt intervention to compel the Israeli authorities to lift the closure that obstructs the freedom of movement of goods and 1.8 million civilians that experience unprecedented economic, social, political and cultural hardships due to collective punishment policies and retaliatory action against civilians.
11. PCHR calls upon the European Union to apply human rights standards embedded in the EU-Israel Association Agreement and to respect its obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights when dealing with Israel.
12. PCHR calls upon the international community, especially states that import Israeli weapons and military services, to meet their moral and legal responsibility not to allow Israel to use the offensive in Gaza to test new weapons and not accept training services based on the field experience in Gaza in order to avoid turning Palestinian civilians in Gaza into testing objects for Israeli weapons and military tactics.
13. PCHR calls upon the parties to international human rights instruments, especially the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), to pressurize Israel to comply with its provisions in the oPt and to compel it to incorporate the human rights situation in the oPt in its reports submitted to the relevant committees.
14. PCHR calls upon the EU and international human rights bodies to pressurize the Israeli forces to stop their attacks against Palestinian fishermen and farmers, mainly in the border area.

Fully detailed document available at the official website of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR).

israel (apartheid state) NGO: Settlers (terrorists) and soldiers conduct ‘joint assaults’ on Palestinian village

Israel NGO: Settlers and soldiers conduct ‘joint assaults’ on Palestinian village

Israeli soldiers are joining settlers in attacks on a Palestinian village in the occupied West Bank, according to human rights NGO B’Tselem.

The village of ‘Urif, which is located near Nablus, lies in close proximity to the notorious settlement of Yitzhar, established in 1983.

All Israeli settlements are illegal under international law, and described by international human rights groups as part of an inherently discriminatory regime.

According to B’Tselem, the Palestinian residents of ‘Urif “have been suffering for years from repeated attacks by settlers”, with most attacks taking place “in farmland close to the village water tower, which is situated some 500 metres from its easternmost homes”.

Read: Jewish extremist Rabbi among 117 settlers storming Al-Aqsa Mosque

In recent months, moreover, the Israeli human rights group “has documented three attacks by settlers in the area, some of which included the active participation of soldiers”.

In March, “settlers assaulted residents of the village”, while the Israeli occupation forces “who accompanied them shot and killed one resident and injured a boy aged 14”. In April, settlers cut down 57 trees on ‘Urif’s land and vandalised vehicles.

In June, “settlers injured a shepherd and assaulted other residents, while soldiers joined in the attack, injuring another resident,” B’Tselem added.

Since then, the NGO continued, there have been four more documented incidents of settlers and soldiers assaulting ‘Urif residents, torching fruit trees and vandalising cars.

Read: Israeli Jewish settlers raze Palestinian lands near Ramallah

These repeated attacks “are intended to usurp ever-increasing areas of Palestinian land and to annex the land de facto to the settlements”, said B’Tselem, with the result that Palestinians “lose not only their land but also their livelihood.”

In addition, the conduct of Israeli forces, “providing guarding services for the assailants and actively participating in attacks”, part of what B’Tselem describes as a “violent routine”, sends Palestinians “a message of complete disregard for their lives, safety and property”.

B’Tselem added that the violence experienced by Palestinians in ‘Urif, and other communities, “is part of an integrated policy which sees the state, through the military and the settlers – engaging in continued efforts, over time, to dispossess as many Palestinians as possible, driving them to leave their land ‘voluntarily’ so that it can be seized.”

israel (apartheid state) an Enemy of Freedom-Loving People Everywhere

August 23, 2018

by Eric Zuesse for The Saker Blog

Israel is fighting constantly not only against Gazans, and against Palestinians generally; it is fighting constantly against freedom-loving people everywhere, who oppose dictatorship of any type, and in any country, on principle, irrespective of nationality.

Here’s an example showing how much of a dictatorship and enemy of democrats it is:

Anna Dressler was a ship-hand on a flotilla of two small boats launched from Palermo Italy that were manned by 34 people from 12 countries in international waters and that were seized — stolen — by Israel’s military, on 29 July 2018. They became seized because these boats were carrying medical supplies in violation of Israel’s internationally illegal blockade against food and medicine reaching the residents of Gaza. She was on the boat “Al-Awda,” which was 42 miles from Gaza at the time of seizure-theft. Israel’s troops seizing it were masked, and were armed with machine-guns.

The first video of this incident was released on August 20th.

A “Legal and Welfare Update and Appeal” dated August 14th by the Freedom Flotilla, stated that,

The two boats ‘Al Awda’ (The Return) and ‘Freedom’ were hijacked by the Israeli Occupation Forces in international waters 42 and 49 nautical miles respectively off the coast of Gaza. During their unlawful detention, crew, participants and journalists were subjected to a range of physical and emotional violence.

The captain of Al Awda was threatened with execution, 4 people were tasered, 3 people had ribs broken by the Israeli military and one person had his foot broken.

They were all taken against their will to Israel, unlawfully imprisoned and ultimately deported. The Israeli authorities have stolen the boats and the 13,000 Euros worth of medical supplies that we were carrying as gifts, as well as many of the participants’ personal belongings (including clothes, a Bible, credit cards, IDs and mobile phones). Incredibly, they have begun to take legal action to attempt to confiscate the boats.

These people had been in constant communication with their colleagues on land; so, if they’d been killed by the Israelis, it would immediately have become an international incident, enraging 12 countries. They had to be released, and thus they were. These people weren’t Palestinians; they had rights that were cared-about in other countries. Though a gangster-state, Israel recognized that these people couldn’t be simply discarded, like trash — as Palestinians are treated by Israel.

—

So, here’s how the journey got to that stage:

On June 27th, Ms. Dressler, writing in the third person as “she,” had posted, as “Deckhand on Freedom”, her personal background, and presented an explanation, written as impersonally as she could, as to why she was participating in this flotilla (which, though she didn’t note the fact, was manned entirely by volunteers who knew that they were placing themselves in severe jeopardy for doing this):

Anna was born in Germany and is now living in Sweden, but mostly she is out on travels and ‘projects’ around the globe. She is an activist and problem solver – a person with a diversity of professions. In 2012, she was the Project Leader for an anti-money laundering campaign. In 2015-2016, she participated in a private project working with refugees near the Macedonian border and along the Balkan route. She enjoys her freedom wholeheartedly and wants others to have the same opportunity.

On July 18th was posted, by the Freedom Flotilla, the following “Leaving For Gaza – Media Release”:

Four boats from the ‘Right to a Just Future for Palestine’ Freedom Flotilla Coalition are scheduled to leave Palermo, Sicily, to break the illegal Israeli blockade of Gaza, and to assert the Palestinian people’s right to freedom of movement and their right to a just future. …

As always, our boats carry representatives from across the world and messages of love and solidarity for those living under the inhumane, decade-old blockade – the collective punishment on the civilian Palestinian population of Gaza. Given the dire situation in Palestinian hospitals, we are also transporting some urgently needed medical supplies (#Gauze4Gaza).

This need is even more critical given the thousands of people severely wounded by Israeli snipers and tear gas in the past few months during the Great March of Return protests (see 10 July UN report on serious injuries). …

It is also encouraging to see the local welcomes we are being given, including by the Mayor of Palermo who rightly connects our campaign with the Caravana Abriendo Fronteras, who have just arrived from Spain, and similar demands for the opening of borders and freedom of movement from the City Council of Cádiz (Spain) and Naples (Italy).

Spokesperson for the International Committee for Breaking the Siege of Gaza, James Godfrey said: “This Flotilla is necessary to highlight the international community’s failure and its ongoing complicity in the illegal blockade of over two million Palestinians in Gaza, more than half of them children.”

On July 23rd, was posted “Freedom Flotilla Coalition sets sail for a just future for Palestine”, and it reported:

Freedom Flotilla leaves Palermo to break the illegal Israeli blockade of Gaza.

Three boats are sailing with boxes of medical supplies: Al Awda (The Return), a large converted fishing vessel; Freedom to Gaza, a large sailing vessel; and Falestine, a smaller sailing vessel. A fourth boat, Mairead, will not sail at this time. Another Sicilian port Messina, opened its open arms as usual with a series of wonderful community events, and we are grateful for their solidarity.

All three boats making their way to Gaza will be donated to the Union of Agricultural Work Committees, that includes a fisherman’s union that will use the boats to fish in order to feed their families.

Spokesperson for the Swedish Ship to Gaza campaign, Jeannette Escanilla, said the boats would provide important economic and training opportunities for Palestinians trapped in Gaza.

“The illegal Israeli naval blockade has devastated the Palestinian economy, and in particular has hurt the fishing industry in Gaza so these boats will provide important economic opportunities for Palestinians in Gaza, and also training opportunities in sailing, to enable them to gain better qualifications. Currently, the Israeli Occupying Force prevent Palestinians in Gaza from sailing more than a few nautical miles from shore, and routinely attack fishing and other boats from Gaza.”

On July 26th, Dressler posted “ON THE WAY TO GAZA WITH FREEDOM – ANNA DRESSLER (UNITED KINGDOM/GERMANY)”. She said:

Gaza is a zone in the world where human rights seem to be forgotten. I believe that every person can change the world, on their own way, wherever they are and in which way they can. Let’s start here, with a blockade that should never have existed, and continues, along with everyone else, man-made, disasters.

On August 4th was posted to youtube “ANNA DRESSLER – SOS”, in which, six days after the seizure, theft, and assault, by Israel, against these people and their vessels, Anna, speaking in Swedish, publicly demanded that her Government in Stockholm enforce her rights as a Swede, against the Government of Israel, and that the ships and their supplies be at least returned to their owners.

On that same date, August 4th, the Freedom Flotilla itself headlined “SOS – Just Future for Palestine”, and officially notified the foreign ministers of the 12 involved countries whose nationals’ rights had been violated by Israel in this incident. These 12 countries were: Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Malaysia, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, UK, and U.S.

The following day, August 5th, Jeannette Escanilla wrote, for the Steering Committee, Ship to Gaza Sweden (her official title being “Spokesperson for the Swedish Ship to Gaza campaign”), addressed as follows:

To the Foreign Minister of Sweden; Margot Wallström

To the Prime Minister of Sweden; Stefan Löfven

Ship to Gaza’s sailing ketch “Freedom for Gaza” was approaching the coast of Gaza when it was boarded by Israeli militants on Friday 3 August on international waters, a gross violation of international law. The last reported position of the vessel before boarding was about 40 nautical miles from coast of Gaza at 20:06 (CET).

The Swedish flagged ship and its cargo of medical supplies were seized by Israel and the 12 persons onboard were abducted and led to Israel, a country they did not intend to visit.

Ship to Gaza demands that the captured crew, the ship and its and cargo will be returned to the position where they were boarded and allowed to continue their voyage on international and Palestinian waters without being interupted, in accordance with international law. In this way we can complete the purpose of the journey, which is to hand over “Freedom” as a gift to Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC)*, as well as 18 boxes of medical supplies, gauzes and sutures, to the organization My Care in Gaza. The lack of healthcare in the Gaza strip is appalling.

Our long term demands are also that the eleven-year illegal and destructive blockade of the Gaza Strip is finally lifted. The Swedish government has repeatedly backed the requirement of a lifting of the blockade. We now expect that the same government, whose flag is worn by the attacked ship, will also support our specific requirements regarding crew, cargo and ships. Ship to Gaza calls on Israel and Egypt to now meet the demands of large parts of the world community, that the illegitimate and destructive blockade of the Gaza Strip will be lifted after eleven years of isolation and aggression.

There is an obvious discrepancy between that “Friday 3 August” date, which she wrote on 5 August, versus the subsequent claim in the August 20th released video, of “29 July 2018,” as being the date on which their boats were stolen. An explanation is thus needed from them, regarding that discrepancy. However, in any case, the Swedish Ship to Gaza has made public that,

Ship to Gaza has now received an answer to the open letter that we, through our chairman Jeanette Escanilla, have sent to the Swedish Minister for Foreign Affairs, Margot Wallström on August 5th.

The Minister writes:

**

Thank you for your letter dated 5th of August 2018. 

The situation in Gaza is very critical. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has described the situation as a humanitarian crisis. Furthermore, as you wrote, the lack of medical supplies is disastrous, not least since so many people have been injured as Israeli military has been deployed in connection with demonstrations along Gaza’s border in recent months.

Sweden upholds the principle of freedom of the seas and freedom of navigation. The government has been in contact with the Israeli authorities regarding Ship to Gaza, and has expressed that the actions of the Israeli authorities in relation to the Swedish-flagged vessel Freedom and the persons onboard constitutes a breach of international law. The government has also demanded that the ship, its cargo and the persons who were aboard be released. The Swedish Embassy in Tel Aviv is monitoring the imprisoned Swedish citizens’ consular rights and visited all of them on Sunday, August the 5th. 

The Swedish government will continue to work towards an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and towards a fair and sustainable two-state solution in which the two states can co-exist, peacefully, side by side. Ending the isolation of Gaza and providing humanitarian aid to its people are two critical, urgent steps towards that end. 

(Translated by Ship to Gaza)

The Swedish Ship to Gaza commented on that statement:

Ship to Gaza wishes to emphasize that the wording … in principle corresponds with our own demands that the crew, cargo and boat should be returned to the place where they were boarded and be allowed to continue their journey to Gaza. We are now being notified that the activists and crew is being deported from Israel. This is not in agreement with our demands or with the requests of the Swedish government.

We also want to know what the Swedish government is doing now to enforce the demands regarding our ships, cargo and crew, but even more importantly, also with regards to the blockade of the Gaza Strip.

On August 8th, Ms. Dressler posted:

Anna arrived last night at Berlin airport. Read her preliminary report of the cruel and inhumane treatment that the Israeli authorities meted out to her despite having a German passport. “…Can you then imagine how few rights Palestinians have…”

Anna’s resolve is strengthened and she declared that “We will continue to fight for freedom…”.

Please continue to demand the release of all of the Political Prisoners.

On August 13th, the Freedom Flotilla posted “SECOND MEDIA RELEASE ON MEDICAL SUPPLIES NOT REACHING GAZA” and listed, and linked, to the international laws that Israel had violated in this incident.

On August 17th, UK’s Stuart Littlewood headlined at American Herald Tribune “The UK’s Prime Minister-in-Waiting Must Zap the Circling Sharks”, and he reported on the extreme pressure that the progressive UK politician Jeremy Corbyn was facing for his not clearly taking a stand favoring Israel against the Palestinians, and he reported Corbyn’s being accused by Israel of “anti-Semitism” for that (as if it were wrong to recognize that Israel is an enemy nation; as if to recognize this is somehow against Jews or Judaism, instead of being against racist fascism in any nation, and against apartheid in any nation, and against theocracy in any nation, and against the imposition by any nation, of dictatorship — all of which presumptions are clearly lies). Littlewood noted that,

While the mainstream, including the BBC, have been sticking the knife into Corbyn, none of them (as far as I’m aware) reported a much more serious outrage – the hijacking by Israeli Occupation Forces of two vessels heading for Gaza and the violent assault, abduction and imprisonment of the 34 people from 12 countries who were on board – one of them a British consultant from the famous ‘Barts’ Hospital in London.

That is basically where things currently stand on this matter. The other governments involved (among the 12, besides Sweden), have been silent. Only Dressler’s nation has not. But no indication exists that even Sweden is following up with any demand against Israel. The underlying assumption seems to be that governments in The West (including the Sauds and their friends — all also “Western”) will continue simply to side with Israel against the Palestinians, even when their own citizens’ rights have been violated by Israel’s illegal imposition and enforcement of this illegal blockade.

Among the Governments that refused to enforce its citizens’ rights in this matter is the United States. Refusing to enforce its citizens rights that have been illegally violated by Israel, is routine for the U.S. Government to do. Ever since 1967, Israel has been supported by America, though America’s enemy, at war against Americans, and Israel has stayed that way, but the U.S. Government itself (and its news-media) has been keeping that fact, of Israel’s war against Americans — Israel’s being an enemy — a bipartisan secret from the American people (who are required, furthermore, by their Government, to pay to Israel’s Government, $3.8 billion per year, so that it can buy U.S.-made weapons from Lockheed Martin and other politically top-connected American companies — Eisenhower’s “military-industrial complex” — which are the intended beneficiaries of this coercion, by America’s Government, against America’s citizens). It’s the proven and incontrovertible reality, of the U.S. Government’s tyranny, against its own people.

Without such lies as that Israel is America’s friend instead of America’s enemy, and without such hiding of crucial facts from the public (for ‘national-security’ purposes, of course — not for billionaires’ profits), none of this could happen, and could be even credibly called ‘democracy’. This is actually a ‘democracy’ based on lies. But is that really possible, or is it instead just another lie, one to cover-up all the others? If that’s the case, then the problem is, obviously, much deeper than merely Israel versus the Palestinians, and nothing that the mainstream press publishes in The West regarding international relations can be trusted, at all, for its keeping this secret throughout the decades.

Certainly, what you are now reading, on this site, isn’t mainstream in The West. So, you are here reading Western samizdat, forbidden truths — truths that are forbidden to be published in The West. Nonetheless, all of this article is documented to be true. Just click onto a link anywhere that you doubt it. You will find that it’s all true — not just “maybe true” (like mainstream ‘news’ often is) — it is all unequivocally true. And, yet, what politician can say it? What would they be implying if they did say it? Can they say it? Apparently not.

What you’ve read here is, therefore, exposing just the visible tip, of an iceberg, of lies.

—————

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

Now, This is Racism!

August 22, 2018  /  Gilad Atzmon

This is what happens to JVL’s ‘principle statement’ once  you replace the word ‘Jewish’ with ‘Aryan.’ 

By Gilad Atzmon

What do you call an exclusively Aryan club that welcomes support from ALL members of society but only allows Aryans in as members?

Nazis I guess.

What would you call a white nationalist campaign organisation that welcomes support from people of ALL colours who agree with their ‘statement of principles’ but only allows nonwhites in as ‘solidarity members’?

I think that ‘white supremacist’ is the term the  Left uses to refer to such groups.

Would Jeremy Corbyn accept support from groups that name themselves ‘Aryan Voice for Labour’ or ‘Whites for Corbyn’? Would the Labour party allow any such groups in its proximity?  I don’t think so, they would be booted out in seconds. The Labour leader would be very quick to disassociate himself from such racially exclusive bodies. But neither Labour nor Corbyn have ever contemplated denouncing the Jews only, racially exclusive enthusiasts at Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL).

One finds the following statement on their front page.

“We welcome support from ALL members of the Labour Party who agree with our statement of principles.  If you are not Jewish you can join us as a solidarity member.” (jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk)

This means that even if you are not racially qualified as a Jew, you can still ‘support’ the Jews only group. You can make a donation, you may even be able to join their miniature protests but you will never be a proper member of the clan, you can only be a class B ‘solidarity member,’ like the Druze in Israel.

This is very revealing: first, it positively confirms that Corbyn isn’t an anti-Semite. He may even embrace Jewish racism when it is executed to support him. A less positive observation is that Jewish racism may be attached to most if not all forms of Jewish politics. Without Jews being a race or forming  a racial continuum, Jewish politics is, unfortunately, racially oriented. Every political Jewish activity seems to adhere to a certain type of Jewish tribal biologism. Shockingly, it seems that Israel is slightly less racist (for the time being) than the JVL. While in Israel the 3rd biggest party in the Knesset is an Arab Party, in Jewish Voice for Labour, Arabs and Goyim can only participate as ‘solidarity members.’

Since JVL accepts support from Goyim who agree with their Statement of Principles I decided to examine how unprincipled their statement is.

“Jewish Voice for Labour is a network for Jewish members of the Labour Party.”

What qualifies one as a Jew, is it the mother’s blood or is it merely the sustained consumption of chicken soup? The JVL doesn’t provide an answer. We can assume that for JVL, Jews are those who fit biological criteria, otherwise they would provide a chicken soup recipe for those who insist upon joining their ranks as equal members.

“Our political priorities are universal human rights and dignity; justice for all; freedom of expression; and democracy in the Labour Party.” 

This sounds spectacularly good, but begs the question of how they claim to adhere to universality when they don’t even accept Goyim as equal participants in their club. Apparently the ‘solidarity members’ do not enjoy voting rights as the JVL’s constitution specifies that the organisation is led by Jewish people. The inevitable answer is that the JVL’s statement is duplicitous at its core.

And the lies continues:

“Our mission is to contribute to making the Labour Party an open, democratic and inclusive party, encouraging all ethnic groups and cultures to join and participate freely.”  

The Labour Party should be an ‘open space,’ but the JVL is clearly not. It is a tribal, racially exclusive setting that operates in total contradiction of every Labour Party value.

And again, 

“we (JVL) aim to strengthen the party in its opposition to all forms of racism including anti-Semitism.” 

The JVL is against all forms of racism except their own. I am pretty sure that the JVL would oppose groups called ‘Aryans for Jeremy’ or ‘White Voices for Labour’ but for some reason they fail to see that they themselves engage in identical racist activities.

The JVL opposes Israeli criminality and this is a good thing.

“We stand for rights and justice for Jewish people everywhere, and against wrongs and injustice to Palestinians and other oppressed people anywhere.”

A welcome statement, but if you are against Zionist injustice, why do you repeat the Zionist procedure by making non-Jewish Labour members into class B members of your ranks?

I agree with many of JVL’s ideas. The Jewish   group opposes

“attempts to widen the definition of antisemitism beyond its meaning of hostility towards or discrimination against Jews as Jews.”

Yet, I wonder why these Jews feel the need to do it while celebrating their Jewish privilege in Jews only political cells? If, as they claim, they uphold a universal ethical stand, then surely they should operate as ordinary humans as the universalist Labour standard would dictate.

My answer is this: they do it because: 1. they are not the most sophisticated amongst people, 2. in total contradiction to their statement, they actually enjoy celebrating their Jewish privilege and operating in racially exclusive political cells, and 3. the Jewish activism in support of Jeremy Corbyn reduces any questions regarding Corbyn’s electability into an internal Jewish affair. Once again, the Goyim are excluded from the debate over the prospects of their own futures.

The only question left open for the time being is why Jeremy Corbyn allows all of this to happen within the Labour Party.

Read my books so you understand the dystopia around you…

http://www.gilad.co.uk/books/

Jewish morality: IDF Colonel Eyal Karim “Jewish soldiers may rape ‘comely’ Gentile women”

IDF Colonel Eyal Karim–Prohibitions against ‘immorality’ are removed during war, Jewish soldiers may rape ‘comely’ Gentile women

 

‘The wars of Israel are mitzvah wars, and as such differ from the rest of the wars that Gentile nations wage among themselves and therefore the value of the individual is erased for the benefit of the whole, and even though fraternizing with a gentile woman is a very serious matter, it is permitted during wartime due to the hardship endured by the warriors…’

Yossi Gurvitz for 972mag

Answering a question from a concerned reader regarding the Torah’s position on rape during war, Colonel Eyal Karim of the Military Rabbinate wrote nine years ago  that ‘prohibitions against immorality’ are removed during war.

Is it permitted for a Jewish soldier therefore to rape a gentile woman during wartime? This question – based on the biblical mitzvah of Eshet Yefat Toar (“a comely woman”) – was referred to nine years ago by Rabbi Eyal Karim. The questioning party seemed anxious and worried, and wanted to know whether the iron-age mitzvah (religious deed) is applicable to IDF soldiers today.

UPDATE: Following comments doubting whether rape was the issue of the Rabbi’s answer, I post here the question that he was asked:

‘Is it allowed in our days [sic] for an IDF soldier, for example, to rape girls during a fight, or is such a thing forbidden?’

Rabbi Karim answered thus:

‘The wars of Israel are mitzvah wars, and as such they differ from the rest of the wars that Gentile nations wage among themselves. Since essentially a war is not an individual matter, but rather nations wage war as a whole, there are cases in which the value of the individual is “erased” for the benefit of the whole. And vice versa: sometimes you risk a large unit for the saving of an individual, when it is essential for purposes of morale. One of the important and critical values during war is maintaining the army’s fighting ability […]

As in war the prohibition against risking your life is broken for the benefit of others, so are the prohibitions against immorality and of kashrut. Wine touched by gentiles, consumption of which is prohibited in peacetime, is allowed at war, to maintain the good spirit of the warriors. Consumption of prohibited foods is permitted at war (and some say, even when kosher food is available), to maintain the fitness of the warriors, even though they are prohibited during peacetime. Just so, war removes some of the prohibitions on sexual relations (gilui arayot in the original – YZG), and even though fraternizing with a gentile woman is a very serious matter, it is permitted during wartime due to the hardship endured by the warriors. And since the success of the whole at war is our goal, the Torah permits the individual to satisfy the evil urge (yetzer ha’ra in the original  -YZG), under the conditions mentioned, for the purpose of the success of the whole.”

Wow. Herein lies a hornet’s nest. The first is that according to Karim, the rape of female prisoners is not just permitted, it is also essential to war; the success of the whole at war relies on it. Even Genghis Khan, who (according to tradition) said that the best thing in the world is “to crush your enemies, to see them fall at your feet — to take their horses and goods and hear the lamentation of their women. That is best” – even he, who excelled at rape, did not see it as essential to warfare, just a satisfactory outcome. Stalin, likewise, dismissed complaints about rapes carried out massively by the Red Army by saying “a soldier has urges,” but he did not see it as an essential element of military life.

Karim came up with a new military doctrine, which replaces Napoleon’s–An army marches on its phallus. According to this logic, perhaps the IDF should appoint to each unit not just a supply officer, but also a Comely Woman Officer (CWO), to make certain no soldier is left unsatisfied.

Another problem is that Karim invokes here the usual apologetics of those who speak of “Jewish morality”: he claims war is a conflict between nations, not individuals, and that the individual has no importance at war. The raped woman is not a woman, is not a person, has no feelings and if she feels pain it is unimportant: she is not a woman or a person, just an individual of an enemy tribe whose misfortune was to be captured. Furthermore, Karim says that rape during wartime is immoral if carried out by a rival tribe – but all Jewish wars are, by definition, mitzvah wars. If the rape of the defenseless is part and parcel of “Jewish morality,” it’s not hard to reach the conclusion it is inferior to all modern morality systems. It is also worth noting (Hebrew) that “Jewish morality” is a by-product of German blood and iron romanticism.

Yet a third problem is that, essentially, Karim says there is nothing which may be prohibited in war, if it is done “for the success of the whole.” We know that the killing of armed combatants is permitted (this is, after all, the essence of war), and we now learn that, for His Blessed Name, the rape of women is also permitted. Then we must ask ourselves whether it is also permitted, for the sake of victory, to also kill unarmed people. Children, for instance, who we have good reason to think may seek one day vengeance for the death of their fathers and brothers and the torturing of their mothers and sisters. The notorious book “Torat Ha’Melekh” answered in the affirmative; it would be interesting to know what Karim thinks, and whether there is anything he thinks a Jewish soldier ought not to do for victory.

But the real problem here is that Eyal Karim is an IDF colonel (Aluf Mishneh), and is a senior officer in the Military Rabbinate, i.e. is in a senior position in the IDF religious edicts apparatus. I’ve sent the following questions to the IDF Spokesman:

1. Is the rape of women during wartime agreeable to the IDF Ethics Code?
2. If not, why does a prominent military rabbi promote it?
3. If not, does the IDF intend to end the service of Col. Karim, or bring charges against him?
4. How does the IDF Spokesman intend to deal with the anticipated damage to its image in the international arena, resulting from Col. Karim’s ruling?

Frankly, I did not expect an answer, but surprisingly enough an enraged officer from IDF Spokesman New Media Unit called me. His official response was that Karim was not an officer in active service when he wrote that ruling, and furthermore that my question “disrespects the IDF, the State of Israel and the Jewish religion,” and hence his unit will no longer answer my questions.

I told him that, as an Israeli citizen, I considered Col. Karim to be a ticking time bomb, which will blow up in the IDF’s face should a soldier rape an enemy woman: it would automatically be seen as official policy. I told him this happened in the past. He vehemently denied it, and wouldn’t listen.

I think that the fact that Karim was on hiatus at the time – earlier he was the religious officer of a crack unit, Sayeret Matkal (commando unit) – is unimportant. What is important is that the Military Rabbinate chose to re-call an officer who wrote such a ruling to active service. Karim was briefly considered a candidate for the position of the Chief Military Rabbi. This is the face of the IDF in 2012, and this is the face of the rabbis it chooses to employ. There are certainly more humane rabbis than Karim; yet somehow these are not the rabbis who are promoted.

Jews, Logic and Corbyn

August 18, 2018  /  Gilad Atzmon

By Gilad Atzmomn

According to the Transitive Axiom if A=B and B=C then A = C (If any two items are equal to the same third item then the two are equal to each other).

I mention the Transitive Axiom because it is a straightforward way to understand that if Corbyn (A) = existential threat to Jews (B) and Hitler (C) = existential threat to Jews (B) then Corbyn (A) = Hitler (C).

Every day British Jewish community leaders tell us that it will pose an “existential threat” to British Jews if Corbyn ends up in 10 Downing Street. It seems some British Jewish leaders are either delusional or stupid enough to believe that Corbyn and Hitler are one and the same. A few weeks ago, the three main British Jewish papers joined forces to deliver this humorous message in a single voice: ‘Corbyn poses an existential threat to our community.’

Today, Jonathan Goldstein, head of the Jewish Leadership Council repeated the same message in an interview with the Times of Israel.

“We are nervous about this man (Corbyn) becoming prime minister. We see the possibility of a Labour government led by this group as an existential threat to our community. These are unprecedented times.”

Jewish religion and culture are saturated with purported ‘existential threats.’ Jews are advised to “remember Amalek” the archetypical Biblical existential threat. Purim, the most joyous Jewish holiday, is a celebration of the Jewish victory over Haman, who was another existential threat. The holiday commemorates the killing  of Haman as well as the massacre of 75.000 of his associates. Even Jesus is perceived by some rabbinical sects as not only an arch enemy but an existential threat as well. Yeshu, the Hebrew name used for Christ , is an acronym for the formula Y’mach Sh’mo V’Zichro meaning ‘may his name and memory be obliterated’– a term reserved for the bitterest enemies of the Jews (Hitler, Amalek, etc.).  A few years back, yours truly was an existential threat in the eyes of the delusional Alan Dershowitz  

I hope that the Zionist campaign against Corbyn is not going to mature into a jubilant Jewish holiday or, God forbid, a Purim spirited lethal attack on his many supporters. I point at the absurdity of the Zionist zeal because judging by the language used by British Jewish community leaders, they see Corbyn as up there with Amalek, Haman and Hitler.

This is probably the right time to remind ourselves and British Jewish leaders of another fundamental mathematical axiom, namely the Symmetric one — If a = b then b = a.

If Corbyn = Hitler then we can assume that Hitler = Corbyn.  This could be a dangerous path for British Jews, especially considering the fact that despite the relentless Zionist campaign against him, Corbyn is still leading in the polls. In other words, if Hitler = Corbyn and Corbyn is supported by a majority of Brits who see him as an anti-racist and a humanist, some Brits may begin to  entertain the possibility that maybe Hitler was only just as bad as Corbyn. I guess that this is what many Jews regard a ‘holocaust denial.’ But, as things stand, they have only themselves to blame — it is the British Jewish leadership that introduced this absurd equation and has foolishly continued to push it on a daily basis.

American Pravda: Jews and Nazis

Source

Ron Unz •

Around 35 years ago, I was sitting in my college dorm-room closely reading the New York Times as I did each and every morning when I noticed an astonishing article about the controversial new Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir.

Back in those long-gone days, the Gray Lady was strictly a black-and-white print publication, lacking the large color photographs of rap stars and long stories about dieting techniques that fill so much of today’s news coverage, and it also seemed to have a far harder edge in its Middle East reporting. A year or so earlier, Shamir’s predecessor Menacham Begin had allowed his Defense Minister Ariel Sharon to talk him into invading Lebanon and besieging Beirut, and the subsequent massacre of Palestinian women and children in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps had outraged the world and angered America’s government. This eventually led to Begin’s resignation, with Shamir, his Foreign Minister, taking his place.

Prior to his surprising 1977 election victory, Begin had spent decades in the political wilderness as an unacceptable right-winger, and Shamir had an even more extreme background, with the American mainstream media freely reporting his long involvement in all sorts of high-profile assassinations and terrorist attacks during the 1940s, painting him as a very bad man indeed.

Given Shamir’s notorious activities, few revelations would have shocked me, but this one did. Apparently, during the late 1930s, Shamir and his small Zionist faction had become great admirers of the Italian Fascists and German Nazis, and after World War II broke out, they had made repeated attempts to contact Mussolini and the German leadership in 1940 and 1941, hoping to enlist in the Axis Powers as their Palestine affiliate, and undertake a campaign of attacks and espionage against the local British forces, then share in the political booty after Hitler’s inevitable triumph.

Now the Times clearly viewed Shamir in a very negative light, but it seemed extremely unlikely to me that they would have published such a remarkable story without being absolutely sure of their facts. Among other things, there were long excerpts from the official letters sent to Mussolini ferociously denouncing the “decadent” democratic systems of Britain and France that he was opposing, and assuring Il Duce that such ridiculous political notions would have no future place in the totalitarian Jewish client state they hoped to establish under his auspices in Palestine.

As it happens, both Germany and Italy were preoccupied with larger geopolitical issues at the time, and given the small size of Shamir’s Zionist faction, not much seems to have ever come of those efforts. But the idea of the sitting Prime Minister of the Jewish State having spent his early wartime years as an unrequited Nazi ally was certainly something that sticks in one’s mind, not quite conforming to the traditional narrative of that era which I had always accepted.

Most remarkably, the revelation of Shamir’s pro-Axis past seems to have had only a relatively minor impact upon his political standing within Israeli society. I would think that any American political figure found to have supported a military alliance with Nazi Germany during the Second World War would have had a very difficult time surviving the resulting political scandal, and the same would surely be true for politicians in Britain, France, or most other western nations. But although there was certainly some embarrassment in the Israeli press, especially after the shocking story reached the international headlines, apparently most Israelis took the whole matter in stride, and Shamir stayed in office for another year, then later served a second, much longer term as Prime Minister during 1986-1992. The Jews of Israel apparently regarded Nazi Germany quite differently than did most Americans, let alone most American Jews.

 

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Around that same time, a second intriguing example of this quite different Israeli perspective towards the Nazis also came to my attention. In 1983, Amoz Oz, often described as Israel’s greatest novelist, had published In the Land of Israel to glowing reviews. This book was a collection of lengthy interviews with various representative figures in Israeli society, both moderate and extreme, as well as some coverage of the Palestinians who also lived among them.

Of these ideological profiles, one of the shortest but most widely discussed was that of an especially hard-line political figure, unnamed but almost universally believed to be Ariel Sharon, a conclusion certainly supported by the personal details and physical description provided. Near the very beginning, that figure mentioned that people of his ideological ilk had recently been denounced as “Judeo-Nazis” by a prominent liberal Israeli academic, but rather than reject that label, he fully welcomed it. So the subject generally became known in public discussions as the “Judeo-Nazi.”

That he described himself in such terms was hardly an exaggeration, since he rather gleefully advocated the slaughter of millions of Israel’s enemies, and the vast expansion of Israeli territory by conquest of neighboring lands and expulsion of their populations, along with the free use of nuclear weapons if they or anyone else too strongly resisted such efforts. In his bold opinion, the Israelis and Jews in general were just too soft and meek, and needed to regain their place in the world by once again becoming a conquering people, probably hated but definitely feared. To him, the large recent massacre of Palestinian women and children at Sabra and Shatila was of no consequence whatsoever, and the most unfortunate aspect of the incident was that the killers had been Israel’s Christian Phalangist allies rather than Israeli soldiers themselves.

Now rhetorical excess is quite common among politicians and a shroud of pledged anonymity will obviously loosen many tongues. But can anyone imagine an American or other Western public figure talking in such terms, let alone someone who moves in higher political circles? These days, Donald Trump sometimes Tweets out a crude misspelled insult at 2am, and the American media is aghast in horror. But given that his administration leaks like a sieve, if he routinely boasted to his confidants about possibly slaughtering millions, we surely would have heard about it. For that matter, there seems not the slightest evidence that the original German Nazis ever spoke in such ways privately, let alone while a journalist was carefully taking notes. But the “Judeo-Nazis” of Israel are another story.

As near as I can recall, the last even slightly prominent figure in American public life who declared himself a “Nazi” was George Lincoln Rockwell during the 1960s, and he was much more of a political performance artist than an actual political leader. Even as marginalized a figure as David Duke has always hotly denied such an accusation. But apparently politics in Israel is played by different rules.

In any event, Sharon’s purported utterances seem to have had little negative impact upon his subsequent political career, and after spending some time in the political wilderness after the Lebanon disaster, he eventually served five years as Prime Minister during 2001-2006, although by that later date his views were regularly denounced as too soft and compromising due to the steady rightward drift of the Israeli political spectrum.

 

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Over the years I’ve occasionally made half-hearted attempts to locate the Times article about Shamir that had long stuck in my memory, but have had no success, either because it was removed from the Times archives or more likely because my mediocre search skills proved inadequate. But I’m almost certain that the piece had been prompted by the 1983 publication of Zionism in the Age of the Dictators by Lenni Brenner, an anti-Zionist of the Trotskyite persuasion and Jewish origins. I only very recently discovered that book, which really tells an extremely interesting story.

Brenner, born in 1937, has spent his entire life as an unreconstructed hard-core leftist, with his enthusiasms ranging from Marxist revolution to the Black Panthers, and he is obviously a captive of his views and his ideology. At times, this background impairs the flow of his text, and the periodic allusions to “proletarian,” “bourgeoisie,” and “capitalist classes” sometimes grow a little wearisome, as does his unthinking acceptance of all the shared beliefs common to his political circle. But surely only someone with that sort of fervent ideological commitment would have been willing to devote so much time and effort to investigating that controversial subject and ignoring the endless denunciations that resulted, which even included physical assaults by Zionist partisans.

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In any event, his documentation seems completely airtight, and some years after the original appearance of his book, he published a companion volume entitled 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis, which simply provides English translations of all the raw evidence behind his analytical framework, allowing interested parties to read the material and draw their own conclusions.

Among other things, Brenner provides considerable evidence that the larger and somewhat more mainstream right-wing Zionist faction later led by Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin was almost invariably regarded as a Fascist movement during the 1930s, even apart from its warm admiration for Mussolini’s Italian regime. This was hardly such a dark secret in that period given that its main Palestine newspaper carried a regular column by a top ideological leader entitled “Diary of a Fascist.” During one of the major international Zionist conferences, factional leader Vladimir Zabotinsky entered the hall with his brown-shirted followers in full military formation, leading the chair to ban the wearing of uniforms in order to avoid a riot, and his faction was soon defeated politically and eventually expelled from the Zionist umbrella organization. This major setback was largely due to the widespread hostility the group had aroused after two of its members were arrested by British police for the recent assassination of Chaim Arlosoroff, one of the highest-ranking Zionist officials based in Palestine.

Indeed, the inclination of the more right-wing Zionist factions toward assassination, terrorism, and other forms of essentially criminal behavior was really quite remarkable. For example, in 1943 Shamir had arranged the assassination of his factional rival, a year after the two men had escaped together from imprisonment for a bank robbery in which bystanders had been killed, and he claimed he had acted to avert the planned assassination of David Ben-Gurion, the top Zionist leader and Israel’s future founding-premier. Shamir and his faction certainly continued this sort of behavior into the 1940s, successfully assassinating Lord Moyne, the British Minister for the Middle East, and Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN Peace Negotiator, though they failed in their other attempts to kill American President Harry Truman and British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin, and their plans to assassinate Winston Churchill apparently never moved past the discussion stage. His group also pioneered the use of terrorist car-bombs and other explosive attacks against innocent civilian targets, all long before any Arabs or Muslims had ever thought of using similar tactics; and Begin’s larger and more “moderate” Zionist faction did much the same. Given that background, it was hardly surprising that Shamir later served as director of assassinations at the Israeli Mossad during 1955-1965, so if the Mossad did indeed play a major role in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, he was very likely involved.

 

The cover of the 2014 paperback edition of Brenner’s book displays the commemorative medal struck by Nazi Germany to mark its Zionist alliance, with a Star-of-David on the front face and a Swastika on the obverse. But oddly enough, this symbolic medallion actually had absolutely no connection with the unsuccessful attempts by Shamir’s small faction to arrange a Nazi military alliance during World War II.

Although the Germans paid little attention to the entreaties of that minor organization, the far larger and more influential mainstream Zionist movement of Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion was something else entirely. And during most of the 1930s, these other Zionists had formed an important economic partnership with Nazi Germany, based upon an obvious commonality of interests. After all, Hitler regarded Germany’s one percent Jewish population as a disruptive and potentially dangerous element which he wanted gone, and the Middle East seemed as good a destination for them as any other. Meanwhile, the Zionists had very similar objectives, and the creation of their new national homeland in Palestine obviously required both Jewish immigrants and Jewish financial investment.

After Hitler had been named Chancellor in 1933, outraged Jews worldwide had quickly launched an economic boycott, hoping to bring Germany to its knees, with London’s Daily Express famously running the banner headline “Judea Declares War on Germany.” Jewish political and economic influence, then just like now, was very considerable, and in the depths of the Great Depression, impoverished Germany needed to export or die, so a large scale boycott in major German markets posed a potentially serious threat. But this exact situation provided Zionist groups with an excellent opportunity to offer the Germans a means of breaking that trade embargo, and they demanded favorable terms for the export of high-quality German manufactured goods to Palestine, together with accompanying German Jews. Once word of this major Ha’avara or “Transfer Agreement” with the Nazis came out at a 1933 Zionist Convention, many Jews and Zionists were outraged, and it led to various splits and controversies. But the economic deal was too good to resist, and it went forward and quickly grew.

The importance of the Nazi-Zionist pact for Israel’s establishment is difficult to overstate. According to a 1974 analysis in Jewish Frontier cited by Brenner, between 1933 and 1939 over 60% of all the investment in Jewish Palestine came from Nazi Germany. The worldwide impoverishment of the Great Depression had drastically reduced ongoing Jewish financial support from all other sources, and Brenner reasonably suggests that without Hitler’s financial backing, the nascent Jewish colony, so tiny and fragile, might easily have shriveled up and died during that difficult period.

Such a conclusion leads to fascinating hypotheticals. When I first stumbled across references to the Ha’avara Agreement on websites here and there, one of the commenters mentioning the issue half-jokingly suggested that if Hitler had won the war, statues would surely have been built to him throughout Israel and he would today be recognized by Jews everywhere as the heroic Gentile leader who had played the central role in reestablishing a national homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine after almost 2000 years of bitter exile.

This sort of astonishing counter-factual possibility is not nearly as totally absurd as it might sound to our present-day ears. We must recognize that our historical understanding of reality is shaped by the media, and media organs are controlled by the winners of major wars and their allies, with inconvenient details often excluded to avoid confusing the public. It is undeniably true that in his 1924 book Mein Kampf, Hitler had written all sorts of hostile and nasty things about Jews, especially those who were recent immigrants from Eastern Europe, but when I read the book back in high school, I was a little surprised to discover that these anti-Jewish sentiments hardly seemed central to his text. Furthermore, just a couple of years earlier, a vastly more prominent public figure such as British Minister Winston Churchill had published sentiments nearly as hostile and nasty, focusing on the monstrous crimes being committed by Bolshevik Jews. In Albert Lindemann’s Esau’s Tears, I was surprised to discover that the author of the famous Balfour Declaration, the foundation of the Zionist project, was apparently also quite hostile to Jews, with an element of his motivation probably being his desire to exclude them from Britain.

Once Hitler consolidated power in Germany, he quickly outlawed all other political organizations for the German people, with only the Nazi Party and Nazi political symbols being legally permitted. But a special exception was made for German Jews, and Germany’s local Zionist Party was accorded complete legal status, with Zionist marches, Zionist uniforms, and Zionist flags all fully permitted. Under Hitler, there was strict censorship of all German publications, but the weekly Zionist newspaper was freely sold at all newsstands and street corners. The clear notion seemed to be that a German National Socialist Party was the proper political home for the country’s 99% German majority, while Zionist National Socialism would fill the same role for the tiny Jewish minority.

In 1934, Zionist leaders invited an important SS official to spend six months visiting the Jewish settlement in Palestine, and upon his return, his very favorable impressions of the growing Zionist enterprise were published as a massive 12-part-series in Joseph Goebbel’s Der Angriff, the flagship media organ of the Nazi Party, bearing the descriptive title “A Nazi Goes to Palestine.” In his very angry 1920 critique of Jewish Bolshevik activity, Churchill had argued that Zionism was locked in a fierce battle with Bolshevism for the soul of European Jewry, and only its victory might ensure amicable future relations between Jew and Gentile. Based on available evidence, Hitler and many of the other Nazi leaders seemed to have reached a somewhat similar conclusion by the mid-1930s.

During that era extremely harsh sentiments regarding Diaspora Jewry were sometimes found in rather surprising quarters. After the controversy surrounding Shamir’s Nazi ties erupted into the headlines, Brenner’s material became the grist for an important article by Edward Mortimer, the longtime Middle East expert at the august Times of London, and the 2014 edition of the book includes some choice extracts from Mortimer’s February 11, 1984 Times piece:

Who told a Berlin audience in March 1912 that “each country can absorb only a limited number of Jews, if she doesn’t want disorders in her stomach. Germany already has too many Jews”?

No, not Adolf Hitler but Chaim Weizmann, later president of the World Zionist Organization and later still the first president of the state of Israel.

And where might you find the following assertion, originally composed in 1917 but republished as late as 1936: “The Jew is a caricature of a normal, natural human being, both physically and spiritually. As an individual in society he revolts and throws off the harness of social obligation, knows no order nor discipline”?

Not in Der Sturmer but in the organ of the Zionist youth organization, Hashomer Hatzair.

As the above quoted statement reveals, Zionism itself encouraged and exploited self-hatred in the Diaspora. It started from the assumption that anti-Semitism was inevitable and even in a sense justified so long as Jews were outside the land of Israel.

It is true that only an extreme lunatic fringe of Zionism went so far as to offer to join the war on Germany’s side in 1941, in the hope of establishing “the historical Jewish state on a national and totalitarian basis, and bound by a treaty with the German Reich.” Unfortunately this was the group which the present Prime Minister of Israel chose to join.

The very uncomfortable truth is that the harsh characterizations of Diaspora Jewry found in the pages of Mein Kampf were not all that different from what was voiced by Zionism’s founding fathers and its subsequent leaders, so the cooperation of those two ideological movements was not really so totally surprising.

However, uncomfortable truths do remain uncomfortable. Mortimer had spent nineteen years at the Times, the last dozen of them as the foreign specialist and leader-writer on Middle Eastern affairs. But the year after he wrote that article including those controversial quotations, his career at that newspaper ended, leading to an unusual gap in his employment history, and that development may or may not be purely coincidental.

Also quite ironic was the role of Adolf Eichmann, whose name today probably ranks as one of the most famous half-dozen Nazis in history, due to his postwar 1960 kidnapping by Israeli agents, followed by his public show-trial and execution as a war-criminal. As it happens, Eichmann had been a central Nazi figure in the Zionist alliance, even studying Hebrew and apparently becoming something of a philo-Semite during the years of his close collaboration with top Zionist leaders.

Brenner is a captive of his ideology and his beliefs, accepting without question the historical narrative with which he was raised. He seems to find nothing so strange about Eichmann being a philo-Semitic partner of the Jewish Zionists during the late 1930s and then suddenly being transformed into a mass-murderer of the European Jews in the early 1940s, willingly committing the monstrous crimes for which the Israelis later justly put him to death.

This is certainly possible, but I really wonder. A more cynical observer might find it a very odd coincidence that the first prominent Nazi the Israelis made such an effort to track down and kill had been their closest former political ally and collaborator. After Germany’s defeat, Eichmann had fled to Argentina and lived there quietly for a number of years until his name resurfaced in a celebrated mid-1950s controversy surrounding one of his leading Zionist partners, then living in Israel as a respected government official, who was denounced as a Nazi collaborator, eventually ruled innocent after a celebrated trial, but later assassinated by former members of Shamir’s faction.

Following that controversy in Israel, Eichmann supposedly gave a long personal interview to a Dutch Nazi journalist, and although it wasn’t published at the time, perhaps word of its existence may have gotten into circulation. The new state of Israel was just a few years old at that time, and very politically and economically fragile, desperately dependent upon the goodwill and support of America and Jewish donors worldwide. Their remarkable former Nazi alliance was a deeply-suppressed secret, whose public release might have had absolutely disastrous consequences.

According to the version of the interview later published as a two-part story in Life Magazine, Eichmann’s statements seemingly did not touch on the deadly topic of the 1930s Nazi-Zionist partnership. But surely Israeli leaders must have been terrified that they might not be so lucky the next time, so we may speculate that Eichmann’s elimination suddenly became a top national priority, and he was tracked down and captured in 1960. Presumably, harsh means were employed to persuade him not to reveal any of these dangerous pre-war secrets at his Jerusalem trial, and one might wonder if the reason he was famously kept in an enclosed glass booth was to ensure that the sound could quickly be cut off if he started to stray from the agreed upon script. All of this analysis is totally speculative, but Eichmann’s role as a central figure in the 1930s Nazi-Zionist partnership is undeniable historical fact.

 

Just as we might imagine, America’s overwhelmingly pro-Israel publishing industry was hardly eager to serve as a public conduit for Brenner’s shocking revelations of a close Nazi-Zionist economic partnership, and he mentions that his book agent uniformly received rejections from each firm he approached, based on a wide variety of different excuses. However, he finally managed to locate an extremely obscure publisher in Britain willing to take on the project, and his book was released in 1983, initially receiving no reviews other than a couple of harsh and perfunctory denunciations, though Soviet Izvestia took some interest in his findings until they discovered that he was a hated Trotskyite.

His big break came when Shamir suddenly became Israel’s Prime Minister, and he brought his evidence of former Nazi ties to the English-language Palestinian press, which put it into general circulation. Various British Marxists, including the notorious “Red Ken” Livingstone of London, organized a speaking tour for him, and when a group of right-wing Zionist militants attacked one of the events and inflicted injuries, the story of the brawl caught the attention of the mainstream newspapers. Soon afterward the discussion of Brenner’s astonishing discoveries appeared in the Times of London and entered the international media. Presumably, the New York Times article that had originally caught my eye ran sometime during this period.

Public relations professionals are quite skilled at minimizing the impact of damaging revelations, and pro-Israel organizations have no shortage of such individuals. Just before the 1983 release of his remarkable book, Brenner suddenly discovered that a young pro-Zionist author named Edwin Black was furiously working on a similar project, apparently backed by sufficient financial resources that he was employing an army of fifty researchers to allow him to complete his project in record time.

Since the entire embarrassing subject of a Nazi-Zionist partnership had been kept away from the public eye for almost five decades, this timing surely seems more than merely coincidental. Presumably word of Brenner’s numerous unsuccessful efforts at securing a mainstream publisher during 1982 had gotten around, as had as his eventual success in locating a tiny one in Britain. Having failed to prevent publication of such explosive material, pro-Israel groups quietly decided that their next best option was trying to seize control of the topic themselves, allowing disclosure of those parts of the story that could not be concealed but excluding items of greatest danger, while portraying the sordid history in the best possible light.

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Black’s book, The Transfer Agreement, may have arrived a year later than Brenner’s but was clearly backed by vastly greater publicity and resources. It was released by Macmillan, a leading publisher, ran nearly twice the length of Brenner’s short book, and carried powerful endorsements by leading figures from the firmament of Jewish activism, including the Simon Weisenthal Center, the Israel Holocaust Memorial, and the American Jewish Archives. As a consequence, it received long if not necessarily favorable reviews in influential publications such as The New Republic and Commentary.

In all fairness, I should mention that in the Foreword to his book, Black claims that his research efforts had been totally discouraged by nearly everyone he approached, and as a consequence, he had been working on the project with solitary intensity for many years. This implies the near-simultaneous release of the two books was purely due to chance. But such a picture is hardly consistent with his glowing testimonials from so many prominent Jewish leaders, and personally I find Brenner’s claim that Black was assisted by fifty researchers far more convincing.

Since both Black and Brenner were describing the same basic reality and relying upon many of the same documents, in most respects the stories they tell are generally similar. But Black carefully excludes any mention of offers of Zionist military cooperation with the Nazis, let alone the repeated attempts by Shamir’s Zionist faction to officially join the Axis Powers after the war had broken out, as well as numerous other details of a particularly embarrassing nature.

Assuming Black’s book was published for the reasons I suggested, I think that the strategy of the pro-Israel groups largely succeeded, with his version of the history seeming to have quickly supplanted Brenner’s except perhaps in strongly leftist or anti-Zionist circles. Googling each combination of the title and author, Black’s book gets eight times as many hits, and his Amazon sales ranks and numbers of reviews are also larger by roughly that same factor. Most notably, neither the Wikipedia articles on “The Transfer Agreement” and “The Ha’avara Agreement” contain any mention of Brenner’s research whatsoever, even though his book was published earlier, was far broader, and only he provided the underlying documentary evidence. As a personal example of the current situation, I was quite unaware of the entire Ha’avara history until just a few years ago when I encountered some website comments mentioning Black’s book, leading me to purchase and read it. But even then, Brenner’s far more wide-ranging and explosive volume remained totally unknown to me until very recently.

 

Once World War II began, this Nazi-Zionist partnership quickly lapsed for obvious reasons. Germany was now at war with the British Empire, and financial transfers to British-run Palestine were no longer possible. Furthermore, the Arab Palestinians had grown quite hostile to the Jewish immigrants whom they rightfully feared might eventually displace them, and once the Germans were forced to choose between maintaining their relationship with a relatively small Zionist movement or winning the political sympathy of a vast sea of Middle Eastern Arabs and Muslims, their decision was a natural one. The Zionists faced a similar choice, and especially once wartime propaganda began so heavily blackening the German and Italian governments, their long previous partnership was not something they wanted widely known.

However, at exactly this same moment a somewhat different and equally long-forgotten connection between Jews and Nazi Germany suddenly moved to the fore.

Like most people everywhere, the average German, whether Jewish or Gentile, was probably not all that political, and although Zionism had for years been accorded a privileged place in German society, it is not entirely clear how many ordinary German Jews paid much attention to it. The tens of thousands who emigrated to Palestine during that period were probably motivated as much by economic pressures as by ideological commitment. But wartime changed matters in other ways.

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This was even more true for the German government. The outbreak of a world war against a powerful coalition of the British and French empires, later augmented by both Soviet Russia and the United States, imposed the sorts of enormous pressures that could often overcome ideological scruples. A few years ago, I discovered a fascinating 2002 book by Bryan Mark Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, a scholarly treatment of exactly what the title implies. The quality of this controversial historical analysis is indicated by the glowing jacket-blurbs from numerous academic experts and an extremely favorable treatment by an eminent scholar in The American Historical Review.

Obviously, Nazi ideology was overwhelmingly centered upon race and considered racial purity a crucial factor in national cohesion. Individuals possessing substantial non-German ancestry were regarded with considerable suspicion, and this concern was greatly amplified if that admixture was Jewish. But in a military struggle against an opposing coalition possessing many times Germany’s population and industrial resources, such ideological factors might be overcome by practical considerations, and Rigg persuasively argues that some 150,000 half-Jews or quarter-Jews served in the armed forces of the Third Reich, a percentage probably not much different than their share of the general military-age population.

Germany’s long-integrated and assimilated Jewish population had always been disproportionately urban, affluent, and well-educated. As a consequence it is not entirely surprising that a large proportion of these part-Jewish soldiers who served Hitler were actually combat officers rather than merely rank-and-file conscripts, and they included at least 15 half-Jewish generals and admirals, and another dozen quarter-Jews holding those same high ranks. The most notable example was Field Marshal Erhard Milch, Hermann Goering’s powerful second-in-command, who played such an important operational role in creating the Luftwaffe. Milch certainly had a Jewish father, and according to some much less substantiated claims, perhaps even a Jewish mother as well, while his sister was married to an SS general.

Admittedly, the racially-elite SS itself generally had far stricter ancestry standards, with even a trace of non-Aryan parentage normally seen as disqualifying an individual from membership. But even here, the situation was sometimes complicated, since there were widespread rumors that Reinhard Heydrich, the second-ranking figure in that very powerful organization, actually had considerable Jewish ancestry. Rigg investigates that claim without coming to any clear conclusions, though he does seem to think that the circumstantial evidence involved may have been used by other high-ranking Nazi figures as a point of leverage or blackmail against Heydrich, who stood as one of the most important figures in the Third Reich.

As a further irony, most of these individuals traced their Jewish ancestry through their father rather than their mother, so although they were not Jewish according to rabbinical law, their family names often reflected their partly Semitic origins, though in many cases Nazi authorities attempted to studiously overlook this glaringly obvious situation. As an extreme example noted by an academic reviewer of the book, a half-Jew bearing the distinctly non-Aryan name of Werner Goldberg actually had his photograph prominently featured in a 1939 Nazi propaganda newspaper, with the caption describing him as the “The Ideal German Soldier.”

The author conducted more than 400 personal interviews of the surviving part-Jews and their relatives, and these painted a very mixed picture of the difficulties they had encountered under the Nazi regime, which varied enormously depending upon particular circumstances and the personalities of those in authority over them. One important source of complaint was that because of their status, part-Jews were often denied the military honors or promotions they had rightfully earned. However, under especially favorable conditions, they might also be legally reclassified as being of “German Blood,” which officially eliminated any taint on their status.

Even official policy seems to have been quite contradictory and vacillating. For example, when the civilian humiliations sometimes inflicted upon the fully Jewish parents of serving half-Jews were brought to Hitler’s attention, he regarded that situation as intolerable, declaring that either such parents must be fully protected against such indignities or all the half-Jews must be discharged, and eventually in April 1940 he issued a decree requiring the latter. However, this order was largely ignored by many commanders, or implemented through a honor-system that almost amounted to “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” so a considerable fraction of half-Jews remained in the military if they so wished. And then in July 1941, Hitler somewhat reversed himself, issuing a new decree that allowed “worthy” half-Jews who had been discharged to return to the military as officers, while also announcing that after the war, all quarter-Jews would be reclassified as fully “German Blood” Aryan citizens.

It has been said that after questions were raised about the Jewish ancestry of some of his subordinates, Goring once angrily responded “I will decide who is a Jew!” and that attitude seems to reasonably capture some of the complexity and subjective nature of the social situation.

Interestingly enough, many of part-Jews interviewed by Rigg recalled that prior to Hitler’s rise to power, the intermarriage of their parents had often provoked much greater hostility from the Jewish rather than the Gentile side of their families, suggesting that even in heavily-assimilated Germany, the traditional Jewish tendency toward ethnic exclusivity had still remained a powerful factor in that community.

Although the part-Jews in German military service were certainly subject to various forms of mistreatment and discrimination, perhaps we should compare this against the analogous situation in our own military in those same years with regard to America’s Japanese or black minorities. During that era, racial intermarriage was legally prohibited across a large portion of the US, so the mixed-race population of those groups was either almost non-existent or very different in origin. But when Japanese-Americans were allowed to leave their wartime concentration camps and enlist in the military, they were entirely restricted to segregated all-Japanese units, but with the officers generally being white. Meanwhile, blacks were almost entirely barred from combat service, though they sometimes served in strictly-segregated support roles. The notion that an American with any appreciable trace of African, Japanese, or for that matter Chinese ancestry might serve as a general or even an officer in the U.S. military and thereby exercise command authority over white American troops would have been almost unthinkable. The contrast with the practice in Hitler’s own military is quite different than what Americans might naively assume.

 

This paradox is not nearly as surprising as one might assume. The non-economic divisions in European societies had almost always been along lines of religion, language, and culture rather than racial ancestry, and the social tradition of more than a millennium could not easily be swept away by merely a half-dozen years of National Socialist ideology. During all those earlier centuries, a sincerely-baptized Jew, whether in Germany or elsewhere, was usually considered just as good a Christian as any other. For example, Tomas de Torquemada, the most fearsome figure of the dreaded Spanish Inquisition, actually came from a family of Jewish converts.

Even wider racial differences were hardly considered of crucial importance. Some of the greatest heroes of particular national cultures, such as Russia’s Alexander Pushkin and France’s Alexandre Dumas, had been individuals with significant black African ancestry, and this was certainly not considered any sort of disqualifying characteristic.

By contrast, American society from its inception had always been sharply divided by race, with other differences generally constituting far smaller impediments to intermarriage and amalgamation. I’ve seen widespread claims that when the Third Reich devised its 1935 Nuremberg Laws restricting marriage and other social arrangements between Aryans, non-Aryans, and part-Aryans, its experts drew upon some of America’s long legal experience in similar matters, and this seems quite plausible. Under that new Nazi statute, pre-existing mixed-marriages received some legal protection, but henceforth Jews and half-Jews could only marry each other, while quarter-Jews could only marry regular Aryans. The obvious intent was to absorb that latter group into mainstream German society, while isolating the more heavily-Jewish population.

Ironically enough, Israel today is one of very few countries with a similar sort of strictly racially-based criteria for citizenship status and other privileges, with the Jewish-only immigration policy now often determined by DNA testing, and marriages between Jews and non-Jews legally prohibited. A few years ago, the world media also carried the remarkable story of a Palestinian Arab sentenced to prison for rape because he had consensual sexual relations with a Jewish woman by passing himself off as a fellow Jew.

Since Orthodox Judaism is strictly matrilineal and controls Israeli law, even Jews of other branches can experience unexpected difficulties due to conflicts between personal ethnic identity and official legal status. The vast majority of the wealthier and more influential Jewish families worldwide do not follow Orthodox religious traditions, and over the generations, they have often taken Gentile wives. However, even if the latter had converted to Judaism, their conversions are considered invalid by the Orthodox Rabbinate, and none of their resulting descendants are considered Jewish. So if some members of these families later develop a deep commitment to their Jewish heritage and immigrate to Israel, they are sometimes outraged to discover that they are officially classified as “goyim” under Orthodox law and legally prohibited from marrying Jews. These major political controversies periodically erupt and sometimes reach the international media.

Now it seems to me that any American official who proposed racial DNA tests to decide upon the admission or exclusion of prospective immigrants would have a very difficult time remaining in office, with the Jewish-activists of organizations like the ADL probably leading the attack. And the same would surely be true for any prosecutor or judge who sent non-whites to prison for the crime of “passing” as whites and thereby managing to seduce women from that latter group. A similar fate would befall advocates of such policies in Britain, France, or most other Western nations, with the local ADL-type organization certainly playing an important role. Yet in Israel, such existing laws merely occasion a little temporary embarrassment when they are covered in the international media, and then invariably remain in place after the commotion has died down and been forgotten. These sorts of issues are considered of little more importance than were the past wartime Nazi ties of the Israeli prime minister throughout most of the 1980s.

But perhaps the solution to this puzzling difference in public reaction lies in an old joke. A leftist wit once claimed that the reason America has never had a military coup is that it is the only country in the world that lacks an American embassy to organize such activities. And unlike the U.S., Britain, France, and many other predominately-white countries, Israel has no domestic Jewish-activist organization filling the powerful role of the ADL.

 

Over the last few years, many outside observers have noted a seemingly very odd political situation in Ukraine. That unfortunate country possesses powerful militant groups, whose public symbols, stated ideology, and political ancestry all unmistakably mark them as Neo-Nazis. Yet those violent Neo-Nazi elements are all being bankrolled and controlled by a Jewish Oligarch who holds dual Israeli citizenship. Furthermore, that peculiar alliance had been mid-wifed and blessed by some of America’s leading Jewish Neocon figures, such as Victoria Nuland, who have successfully used their media influence to keep such explosive facts away from the American public.

At first glance, a close relationship between Jewish Israelis and European Neo-Nazis seems as grotesque and bizarre a misalliance as one could imagine, but after recently reading Brenner’s fascinating book, my perspective quickly shifted. Indeed, the main difference between then and now is that during the 1930s, Zionist factions represented a very insignificant junior partner to a powerful Third Reich, while these days it is the Nazis who occupy the role of eager suppliants to the formidable power of International Zionism, which now so heavily dominates the American political system and through it, much of the world.

Lest We Forget–The ‘difference’ between Judaism and Zionism

Source

‘When the Lord your God brings you into the land he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, he will give you a land filled with large, flourishing cities that you did not build, houses filled with wealth you did not earn, wells you did not dig, and vineyards and olive groves you did not plant…

…And when the LORD your God brings you into the land you are to possess and casts out the many peoples living there…

You shall then slaughter them all and utterly destroy them…

… You shall save nothing alive that breathes…

 

 

…You shall make no agreements with them…

 

…nor show them any mercy…

…You shall destroy their altars…

 

…Break down their images…

 

…Cut down their groves…

 

…And burn their graven images with fire…

And therefore their goods shall become your plunder…

…While their houses become a desolation…

…They shall build houses, but not inhabit them…

…And they shall plant vineyards, but not drink the

wine thereof…

…Foreigners will build your walls…

…And their kings will serve you…

…The gates of your cities will always remain open, day and night, so that the Gentiles may bring you the wealth of their nations…

 

…And their kings led in triumphal procession before you…

…For the nation or kingdom that will not serve you will perish; it will be utterly destroyed…

…For you are a holy people unto the LORD thy God…

…And He has chosen you to be a special people above all others upon the face of the earth…”

Ed note–these are just a small sampling of the various verses found in the Old Testament, called by the Jews the Torah. They are not the words of Netanyahu, Herzl, Ariel Sharon or any of the modern founders of the Jewish state.

Rather, they are the words of the Old Testament ‘prophets’ such as Moses, Zephaniah, Isaiah and others who preached the supremacist, violent basis of Jewish behavior that is on clear display right now before the world.

These verses, and the many more just like them, are the basic building blocks of both Judaism and Zionism and are the religious justification used by the Jews and their supporters worldwide for the types of human sacrifice we are seeing take place in killing fields such as Gaza, Syria, Iraq, Libya, etc.

Despite the noise deliberately created by those out to confuse Gentiles concerning the violent, psycopathic nature of Torah Judaism and who claim that this ‘Holy’ religion is distinct and different from Zionism, nothing could be further from the truth, and until the world begins to deal with this spiritual sickness in a rational, moral way, the holocaust of the Gentile world will continue.

Is it Zionism or Jewishness? You decide

July 30, 2018  /  Gilad Atzmon

Greenstein vs. Atzmon – a radio debate moderated by Tony Gosling

In the early 2000s I realised that if Israel defines itself as the Jewish State, we must first ask who are the Jews, what is Zionism, what is Jewishness and how these notions relate to each other and affect Israeli politics, Jewish political lobbying, Jewish pressure groups and so on.

No one in Israel has ever criticized my argument. Israelis are naturally intimately familiar with the above notions. Israelis know that Jewishness and Jewish culture are at the core of Israeli politics. But the Jewish so-called  ‘anti’ Zionists were rather upset by my observation. It interfered with their delusional and largely deceptive dichotomies between Jews and Zionists, Zionism and Judaism, Israel and the Diaspora etc. Rather than saying that Jews and Zionism are opposites (Jewish anti Zionists) or that they are identical (messianic Zionism), I have been arguing that we are dealing with a complex continuum that can only be realised within the context of Jewishness and Jewish ID politics. Israel is what it is because Jewishness is driven by choseness – a Judeo-centric expetionalist doctrine.

Since 2005 Tony Greenstein has been my arch anti Zionist nemesis. He worked day and night trying to stop my concerts, my talks. He contacted venues and festivals and the many humanists who praised and endorsed my work. I offered Tony many times to share a platform with me so we could discuss that which we disagree upon. It never happened. Even when Tony was willing to do it, his ‘comrades,’ according to him, begged him not to do so.

Things clearly changed recently for Tony.  He was expelled from the Labour Party. He was a victim of the Zionist witch-hunt. He was accused of anti semitsm and had a chance to taste his own poison. Tony didn’t have any excuse. He had to face the man he vowed to eradicate yet failed.

In this radio program moderated by the great Tony Gosling, Tony Greenstein and myself debate what I believe to be the most crucial question  to do with Israel and Zionism. Is it Zionism or actually Jewish ideology that drives the barbarism of the state that calls itself  “the Jewish State”?

 

Understanding the ‘Hebrew prophet’ from Palestine: Gilad Atzmon and His Philosophy

The G-d of israel (apartheid state) Is a Bloodthirsty, Vindictive Sociopath – Does This Explain the Misanthropy of the Jews?

 

The God of ‘Israel’ Is a Bloodthirsty?

The God of Israel Is a Bloodthirsty, Vindictive Sociopath – Does This Explain the Misanthropy of the Jews?

‘“The finest trick of the devil, Charles Baudelaire wrote, is to persuade you that he does not exist”. Perhaps he was mistaken. His finest trick, I believe, is to convince the world that he is God.’

Laurent Guyénot 

Introduction

This article follows and concludes a series of four articles I wrote recently for the Saker blog. In the first one, “How Biblical is Zionism?” (reproduced under a different title on Russia Insider), I wrote: “When Israeli leaders claim that their vision of the global future is based on the (Hebrew) Bible, we should take them seriously and study the (Hebrew) Bible.” In the second one, “How Zionist is the New Word Order?”

I explained that Zionism was never a nationalist movement like others; insofar as it is rooted in the biblical narrative, it contained from the outset a plan for world domination. In the third article, “Who the Hell is the Prince of this World?” I contended that the core characteristic of the biblical ideology—and the best-kept secret of Judaism—is its materialistic anthropology, best summarized by American rabbi Harry Waton: “the only immortality there is for the Jew is the immortality in the Jewish people.” In the fourth article, “Is Israel a Psychopath?”

I argued that “Israel is the psychopath among nations, and that means a tremendous capacity to manipulate, intimidate, corrupt morally, and get what they want.” In this fifth and final part, I wish to address once again the issue of the biblical root of Jewishness, by arguing that the psychopathic behavior of Israel—understood both as a national state and as an international organized community—is the end result of the psychopathic “personality” of the Jewish God portrayed in the Bible.

Let me first state that I take no pleasure in offending anybody’s religious faith. Some Christians tell me that I do not read the Old Testament correctly, through New Testament glasses. My answer is: read it as you like, and convert the Jews to your reading if you can.

My purpose is to explain how the Jews, by whom and for whom it was written, have been reading it for more than a hundred generations, and how it has shaped their worldview, and continues to shape the worldview of many elite Jews. I understand and even empathize with Christians’ difficulty to engage in this effort, but I believe there will be no lasting cure from the corrupting influence of international Jewry without unprejudiced etiological inquiry.

To assess correctly the underlying ideology of the Hebrew Tanakh and its influence on those who hold it as their “roman national”, requires that we put aside the notion that it was inspired by “God” in any way, for this notion induces a cognitive dissonance which impairs our rational and moral judgment.

In fact, we should perhaps renounce looking at the Hebrew Bible as a religious book, because the category of “religion” fails to account for its strong influence on non-religious Jews. As I have shown in “How Biblical is Zionism?” most Israeli leaders, from Ben-Gurion to Netanyahu, are non-religious, but their worldview is profoundly biblical nonetheless.

The biblical outlook is the essence of Jewishness, of which Nahum Goldman said that it is impossible to decide if it “consists first of belonging to a people or practicing a religion, or the two together.”ⁱ This ambivalence is strategic: it is used by organized Jewry to ward off criticism by qualifying it either as anti-Semitic or as an assault on religious freedom, depending on the circumstance.

We should not fall into this trap. What I am dealing here is biblical ideology. Whether this ideology should be categorized as religious is irrelevant. Any idea, any ideology may be criticized, no matter how sacred or ancient it is held to be. And since the first victims of a toxic idea are the men and women who believe it, they are the first who need to be enlightened on its toxicity.

The most appropriate category to understand both the Torah and Jewishness is not “religion” but “covenant” (berit in Hebrew, meaning also treaty or oath of allegiance). The foundation of Jewishness is the Mosaic Covenant. While religious Jews consider it a covenant of Jews with God, non-religious elite Jews such as members of the B’nai B’rith (“Children of the Covenant”) or the Alliance Israélite Universelle, regard it as simply a covenant between the Jews themselves. That is why Jewishness could so easily shift from being defined as an oath of allegiance to Yahweh, to being today indistinguishable from an oath of allegiance to Israel.

The Jealous One

Ancient Egyptians believed that “the gods are social beings, living and acting in ‘constellations,’” wrote German Egyptologist Jan Assmann.ⁱⁱ Yahweh, on the other hand, is “the Jealous One” (Exodus 34:14). He is a solitary god who manifests toward all other gods an implacable intolerance that characterizes him as a sociopath among his peers. Egyptians tried to explain this aggressive exclusiveness of Jewish religion by identifying the Jewish god with Seth, the evil god of the desert, famine, disorder and war, who had been banished by the council of the gods after having murdered his elder brother Osiris out of jealousy.ⁱⁱⁱ

From the third millennium BCE onward, nations founded their diplomacy and foreign trade on their capacity to match their gods, thus acknowledging that they were living not only on the same earth, but under the same heavens. “Contracts with other states,” explains Jan Assmann, “had to be sealed by oath, and the gods to whom this oath was sworn had to be compatible.

Tables of divine equivalences were thus drawn up that eventually correlated up to six different pantheons.” But Yahweh could not be matched up with any other god; his priests forbade doing so. “Whereas polytheism, or rather ‘cosmotheism,’ rendered different cultures mutually transparent and compatible, the new counter-religion [Yahwism] blocked intercultural translatability.”^iv And when Yahweh directed his people, “You will make no pact with them or with their gods” (Exodus 23:32), or “Do not utter the names of their gods, do not swear by them, do not serve them and do not bow down to them” (Joshua 23:7), he was in effect preventing any relationship of trust and fairness with the neighboring peoples.

Yahweh taught the Hebrews contempt for the deities of their neighbors, making them, in the eyes of these neighbors, a “race hated by the gods” (Tacitus), and therefore a threat to the cosmic and social order. For, wrote Tacitus (and that was long before the Talmud), the Jews show a “stubborn loyalty and ready benevolence towards brother Jews. But the rest of the world they confront with the hatred reserved for enemies” (Histories V.3–5).

Not other nation, in fact, treated its enemies as are said to have done the Hebrews in biblical times. The war code of Deuteronomy 20, which commands to exterminate “any living thing” in nearby conquered cities, and which was applied to the people of Jericho (Joshua 6:21) and to the Amalekites (1Samuel 15:3)—whereas among the Midianites were spared, as booty, the “young girls who have never slept with a man” (Numbers 31:18)—is unheard of in other nations’ archives.

The Assyrians, whose god Assur was no angel, did not slaughter the Israelites, but deported and resettled them, and the Babylonians did the same to the Judeans, who were even allowed to keep their tradition and their cohesion, and to prosper on the riverbanks of the Euphrates.

Yahweh is the most cruel of all national and military gods, even by the standards of biblical time. But Yahweh would have us believe that all other gods, not him, are abominations that need to be eradicated from the face of the earth. It all started with Assur. Yahweh’s jealousy really became pathological after the destruction of Israel by Assyria. In the oldest strata of the book of Isaiah, composed around that time, we hear Yahweh unable to cope with the frustration and humiliation, and consumed with the lust of vengeance:

“Yahweh Sabaoth has sworn it, ‘Yes, what I have planned will take place, what I have decided will be so: I shall break Assyria [Assur] in my country, I shall trample on him on my mountains. Then his yoke will slip off them, his burden will slip from their shoulders. This is the decision taken in defiance of the whole world; this, the hand outstretched in defiance of all nations. Once Yahweh Sabaoth has decided, who will stop him? Once he stretches out his hand, who can withdraw it?’” (14:24–27).

Listen to Yahweh raging after his defeat, and you hear a narcissistic megalomaniac:

“By my own self I swear it; what comes from my mouth is saving justice, it is an irrevocable word: All shall bend the knee to me, by me every tongue shall swear.” (Isaiah 45:23)

Children of the sociopathic god

In the Bible, the fate of the Jewish people is linked exclusively to the criterion of their obedience to Yahweh’s covenant, which includes prohibition of any alliance with the people inhabiting the promised land, and the destruction of their sanctuaries (Exodus 34:12-13). Every reversal of fortune is explained by a breach of contract on the part of the people, and serves to strengthen the submission of the people. When a hostile people attacks the Hebrews, it is never because of what the Hebrews did to them, but because of the Hebrews’ infidelity to Yahweh. In Kevin MacDonald’s words:

“The idea that Jewish suffering results from Jews straying from their own law occurs almost like a constant drumbeat throughout the Tanakh—a constant reminder that the persecution of Jews is not the result of their own behavior vis-à-vis Gentiles but rather the result of their behavior vis-à-vis God.”^v

It is important to recognize that, in the Bible, the first victims of Yahweh’s violence are the Jews themselves. Deuteronomy orders the stoning of any parent, son, brother, or wife who “tries secretly to seduce you, saying, ‘Let us go and serve other gods,’ […] since he has tried to divert you from Yahweh your God.” Worse still, Yahweh orders the complete slaughter and burning of any town where such “scoundrels from your own stock […] have led their fellow-citizens astray, saying, ‘Let us go and serve other gods.’” For that is “what is right in the eyes of Yahweh your God” (Deuteronomy 13:7–19).

When some Israelites married Moabite women, who “invited them to the sacrifices of their gods,” “Yahweh said to Moses, ‘Take all the leaders of the people. Impale them facing the sun, for Yahweh’” (Numbers 25:1-4).

Those Jews who socialized with their neighbors rather than slaughtering them, who ate with them, who intermarried with them, and who, while doing all this, showed respect to their gods, are the dregs of the Jewish people, according to the Bible. This is how Jews have been taught to see things for a hundred generations (and Christians too, for that matter).

The biblical message is, in essence: “Do not socialize with idolaters (non-Jews), despise their traditions, and—if possible—exploit them, enslave them, and exterminate them. If, after that, they violate you, it is your fault: you have not obeyed scrupulously enough.” Such is the insane cognitive logic, internalized over 25 centuries, that encloses the Jews in the infernal dilemma of election and persecution.

This mode of thinking is based on the denial of the other’s humanity, which is indeed the essence of psychopathy. It does not occur to the psychopath to question the feelings of the other in order to try to understand his anger, because the other is fundamentally an object and not a person: his motivations are irrelevant. Never does the Jewish community take into account the grievances of its persecutors. Its elites forbid it.

To his chosen people, the biblical Yahweh is behaving as a psychopath preventing his only son from building nurturing bonds with others, in order to keep total control over him and make him an extension of himself. If such a psychopath father succeeds, his son will find no comfort, no substitute parent figure, and therefore no lever of resilience.

He will be trained to perceive all generous attention as a threat, any gesture of sympathy as an aggression. All around him he will learn to see only potential enemies. Yahweh convinces the Jews that all non-Jews who wish to be their friends are in fact their worst enemies; that any confidence in Gentiles leads only to disaster. The cultic and food prohibitions are there to prevent any socialization outside the tribe. “I shall set you apart from all these peoples, for you to be mine” (Leviticus 20:26).

Strict endogamy is the central command, and it is directly linked to Yahweh’s demand for exclusive worship. After the conquest of Canaan, it was forbidden to marry one’s children to the natives, “for your son would be seduced from following me into serving other gods; the wrath of Yahweh would blaze out against you and he would instantly destroy you” (Deuteronomy 7:3-4).

In the ancient world, marriage required the mutual adoption of each other’s gods, or at least their cohabitation in the same household. This does not pose a problem to the extent that the gods are social beings who accept each other. But the god of the Hebrews is a jealous god, who tolerates no other. Although most Zionists pretend to be atheists, the fundamental rule has not changed, because it is the essence of Jewishness. To intermarry is, according to Benzion Netanyahu, father of the Israeli prime minister, equivalent to “an act of suicide.”^vi What better proof do we need that the Israeli elite think biblically?

We need a revisionist approach to biblical history. It portrays all other nations than Israel as repulsive idolaters. But they were not. The abominable Egyptians had built the first great civilization; they had introduced wheat growing to the world. They were a peaceful and highly spiritual people. So were the Canaanites. Whenever the biblical Israelites resisted Yahweh’s antisocial order to keep separate from them, they are called “stiff-necked.”

But should we not feel sympathy for those rebellious Jews, who tried to befriend their neighbors, and assimilate into the civilizations that hosted them? What about those Jews who resist Yahweh’s orders to kill men, women and children indiscriminately? How should we judge King Saul, who was deposed for sparing one man? If we insist that Yahweh is God, how can we criticize the Jews of today for their strong communitarian loyalty? They learned it from the Bible!

Are Yahweh and Molech the same?

A quick look at Yahweh’s unauthorized biography by biblical scholars will enlighten us on his personality. Long before he claimed to be the Creator of the Universe—that is, long before Genesis was written—Yahweh was a local and tribal god attached to Mound Sinai (also called Horeb), located in Midian, north-west Arabia, according to Exodus 2 (and not in Egypt, as the Roman church would locate it in the 4^th century, despite the fact that even saint Paul knew that “Mount Sinai is in Arabia” Galatians 4:25).

This region is volcanic, with eruptions recorded up to the Middle Ages, and Mount Sinai is clearly a volcano: when Yahweh spoke to Moses on the mountain, others only perceived “peals of thunder and flashes of lightning, dense cloud on the mountain and a very loud trumpet blast. […] Mount Sinai was entirely wrapped in smoke, because Yahweh had descended on it in the form of fire.

The smoke rose like smoke from a furnace and the whole mountain shook violently. Louder and louder grew the trumpeting. Moses spoke, and God answered him in the thunder” (Exodus 19:16-19).^vii Yahweh would never totally forget his volcanic background. He remained “a consuming fire” (Deuteronomy 4:24), especially in apocalyptic literature: in the Last Days, “glowing like a furnace,” Yahweh will “set ablaze” all evil-doers, “leaving them neither root nor branch” (Malachi 3:19).

Yahweh retained other primitive traits. He is known as the God who ordered Abraham to sacrifice his son, but then held back his hand and satisfied himself with a ram (Genesis 22). He has therefore been compared favorably with the Canaanite god Molech, to whom firstborn infants were said to be ritually sacrificed. But biblical scholars like Thomas Römer believe that Molech was in fact none other than Yahweh himself.

The name mlk, vocalized as Molech in the Masoretic text (the 9^th century Tanakh which first introduced vowels into the Hebrew script), but Melech in the Greek Septuagint, is identical to the Hebrew word for “king”, applied more than fifty times to Yahweh and used to form such Hebrew names as Abimelech (“Melech is my father”) in Genesis 20:2 or Elimelech (“Melech is my god”) in Ruth 1:2.

Some psalms contain the acclamation Yahweh melech, “Yahweh is king,” still in use in Jewish religious songs. The Leviticus verses which prohibit infant sacrifice indirectly testify that they were done in Yahweh’s name and in Yahweh’s sanctuary: “You will not allow any of your children to be sacrificed to Molech, thus profaning the name of your God. I am Yahweh” (18:21); “Anyone, be he Israelite or alien resident in Israel, who gives any of his children to Molech, will be put to death. […] for by giving a child of his to Molech he has defiled my sanctuary and profaned my holy name” (20:2-5). Jeremiah 7:30-31 confirms that “the people of Judah” continued “to burn their sons and daughters […] in the Temple that bears my name, to defile it.”

Although Yahweh declares it to be “a thing I never ordered, that had never entered my thoughts,” the very fact that a scribe wrote this indicates, according to Thomas Römer, that the people who sacrificed their children did claim it was required by Yahweh. It is only in the Persian era that human sacrifices became taboo, and that they were dissociated from the cult of Yahweh.^viii Nevertheless, Israelites are portrayed as believing in their efficiency, for when the Moabites (Israelites’ relatives as descendants of Abraham’s nephew) were besieged by the Israelites, the king of Moab “took his eldest son who was to succeed him and offered him as a sacrifice on the city wall. Alarmed at this, the Israelites withdrew and retired to their own territory” (2 Kings 3:26-27).

Is the Mosaic Alliance satanic?

The Exodus story probably reflects a very ancient and sacred tradition regarding the origin of the Mosaic covenant. This covenant, or alliance, was sealed with a ritual sacrifice: altars were built at the foot of Mount Horeb, and oxen were killed as “communion sacrifices”. “Moses then took half the blood and put it into basins, and the other half he sprinkled on the altar.” After reading the “Book of the Covenant,” he “took the blood and sprinkled it over the people, saying, ‘This is the blood of the covenant which Yahweh has made with you, entailing all these stipulations’” (Exodus 24:4-8). As orientalist William Robertson Smith has shown, this manner of sealing in blood an alliance between tribes, or an oath of loyalty to a chief, was common in pre-Islamic Arabia.^ix

The “Book of the Covenant” mentioned in Exodus refers to the complex code of laws that the Hebrews are to follow, which is detailed in the rest of the Torah (Pentateuch). Moses’s speeches in Deuteronomy give us the basic terms of the covenant. When reading it, we should keep in mind that, at this stage of the story, Yahweh is not believed to be God; he has only introduced himself to Moses as “the god of your ancestors” (Exodus 3:6).

“Today you have obtained this declaration from Yahweh: that he will be your god, but only if you follow his ways, keep his statutes, his commandments, his customs, and listen to his voice. And today Yahweh has obtained this declaration from you: that you will be his own people—as he has said—but only if you keep all his commandments; then for praise and renown and honour, he will raise you higher than every other nation he has made, and you will be a people consecrated to Yahweh, as he has promised.” (26:17-19)

“Yahweh will make you abound in possessions: in the offspring of your body, in the yield of your cattle and in the yield of your soil, in the country which he swore to your ancestors that he would give you. For you Yahweh will open his treasury of rain, the heavens, to give your country its rain at the right time, and to bless all your labours. You will make many nations your subjects, yet you will be subject to none.” (28:11-12)

What Yahweh promises is material prosperity, to the detriment of other peoples. On this point, the Tanakh is remarkably consistent: “You will suck the milk of nations, you will suck the wealth of kings” (Isaiah 60:16); “the wealth of all the surrounding nations will be heaped together: gold, silver, clothing, in vast quantity” (Zechariah 14:14). Spiritual rewards are not part of the bargain.

In fact, if we remember that Yahweh taught the Jews that they have no individual souls (read my article “Who the Hell is the Prince of this World?”), which is tantamount to claiming their souls for himself, we can say that the Mosaic covenant has the nature of a Faustian pact: Israel will obtain every worldly success in exchange of his soul: “you, out of all peoples, shall be my personal possession” (Exodus 19:5).

It is instructive to compare Yahweh’s promise to his people that they will rule over “every other nation in the world” if only they “faithfully obey the voice of Yahweh your God, by keeping and observing all his commandments” (Deuteronomy 28:1), with Satan’s bargain with Jesus in Matthew 4:8-10: “the devil showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. And he said to him, ‘I will give you all these, if you fall at my feet and do me homage.’”

At the least, it is hard to see what distinguishes Yahweh from Mammon (a personification of Wealth in Matthew 6:24), when he shows himself possessed by greed for precious metals: “I shall shake all the nations, and the treasures of all the nations will flow in, and I shall fill this Temple with glory, says Yahweh Sabaoth. Mine is the silver, mine the gold! Yahweh Sabaoth declares” (Haggai 2:7–8). This can be contrasted with Jesus’s admonition “store up treasures in heaven” (Matthew 6:20–21), which is totally foreign to Yahwism.

Yahweh against Baal

Yahweh alone is the true god, he says, whereas all other gods are demons. This is called blame shifting and is typical of psychopaths. We need to see through it and break the spell.

Let us take an unprejudiced look at Baal, Yahweh’s most formidable rival in the Bible. In the Books of Kings, Baal is presented as a foreign god imported by Jezebel, the Phoenician wife of Ahab (1Kings 16:31–32). But Baal was actually worshipped all over Syria long before Yahweh was imported from the semi-desert lands south of Judah.^xBaal Shamem, the “Heavenly Lord,” was identified as the God of Heaven and his worship transcended ethnic boundaries.^xi So it is ironic that Yahweh, the god of the Jews exclusively, should compete with him for the status of supreme God.

The Cycle of Elijah (from 1 Kings17 to 2 Kings 13) admits that the cult of Baal received royal support in the powerful kingdom of Israel under the Omrid dynasty (9^th century BCE). The priests of Yahweh condemned Baal worship, and the biblical tale shows Elijah challenging 450 prophets of Baal to conjure lightning upon the burnt offering of a bull: “You must call on the name of your god, and I shall call on the name of Yahweh; the god who answers with fire, is God indeed.” The prophets of Baal exhaust themselves by shouting to their god, performing “their hobbling dance” and gashing themselves with swords and spears, with no result, while Yahweh sets fire to Elijah’s bull after Elijah has drenched it with twelve jars of water to spice up the challenge.

People then fall on their faces and scream “Yahweh is God!” Then they seize all the prophets of Baal, and Elijah slaughters them (1Kings 18). Thus was proven Yahweh’s superiority, in a showdown worthy of Hollywood. Elijah, however, had to flee retaliation and walked 40 days to Mount Horeb, where after a hurricane, an earthquake and a fire eruption, he received the word of Yahweh. He was to go back to Israel and anoint the general Jehu who, after a coup against the Omrid king in 842 BCE, would first promote the cult of Yahweh in the kingdom of Israel.

Baal was for the Syrians what Osiris was for the Egyptians: both god of fertility and lord of the dead. So Baal worship was associated with the afterlife and what is presented pejoratively as necromancy.^xii Such religious beliefs and practices had also strong connections with the symbol of the serpent, associated to the ambivalent nature of death. We are told that the Israelites worshiped and offered sacrifices to a bronze serpent called Nehushtan, supposedly built by Moses, until the great king Hezekiah “smashed” it (2 Kings 18:4).

In Genesis, the serpent has undergone an inversion, as part of the campaign to demonize other religions: when the serpent offers to the first humans the means of “having their eyes opened and be like gods” (Genesis 3:5), it borrows the language of initiatory mysteries meant to acquire immortality; but the Yahwist scribes present him as a liar. As a result, the idea of trying to become like gods passes today as Luciferian, although the Greek fathers of the Christian Church stressed man’s potential for deification (theosis) under the logic that “God became man so that man might become a god.”^xiii

The Queen of Heaven

Yahweh’s hatred for Baal is matched only by his repulsion for Asherah, the Great Goddess worshipped throughout the Mediterranean world under many names. Under the name of Ishtar, she was the “Queen of all the inhabited places, who keeps the people in order,” according to a Mesopotamian anthem.^xiv Asherah and Ishtar were also identified to the Egyptian Isis, sister-spouse of Osiris, the “myrionyme” goddess (“of ten thousand names”), who calls herself the “Queen of Heaven” in Apuleius’s novel The Golden Ass, and declares: “My name, my divinity is adored throughout all the world in diverse manners, in variable customs and in many names.”^xv More than Baal, the Queen of Heaven (a title which would later be inherited by Christ’s mother) was a truly universal deity, with no “chosen people”, and that is perhaps the deeper reason of Yahweh’s hatred towards her.

In chapter 44 of the Book of Jeremiah, Yahweh declared to the Judeans who had fled to Egypt, that the destruction of Jerusalem was his punishment for their “wicked deeds […] committed to provoke my anger, by going and offering incense and serving other gods” (44:2-3). Yahweh, said his spokesman Jeremiah, could not bear the smell of incense offered to other gods (what he liked is the “pleasing smell” of carbonized animal offerings called holocausts, as we know from Genesis 8:21). Yahweh threatens the Judeans exiles in Egypt with complete extermination if they persist.

Unimpressed, they responded to Jeremiah: “We have no intention of listening to the word you have just spoken to us in Yahweh’s name, but intend to go on doing all we have vowed to do: offering incense to the Queen of Heaven and pouring libations in her honour, as we used to do, we and our ancestors, our kings and our chief men, in the towns of Judah and the streets of Jerusalem: we had food in plenty then, we lived well, we suffered no disasters. But since we gave up offering incense to the Queen of Heaven and pouring libations in her honour, we have been destitute and have perished either by sword or by famine” (44:16-18).

Why not lend a friendly ear to those Judeans’ alternative interpretation of the fall of Jerusalem: it is not because they worshipped other gods than Yahweh that their plight started, but on the contrary because, since the reform of Josiah, they gave up worshipping the Queen of Heaven. For what reason, other than ancestral habit, should we believe Jeremiah and his Deuteronomistic scribes?

In fact, we know they were wrong. Josiah’s grandfather Manasseh is loathed for having done “what is displeasing to Yahweh, copying the disgusting practices of the nations whom Yahweh had dispossessed for the Israelites. He rebuilt the high places that his father Hezekiah had destroyed, he set up altars to Baal and made a sacred pole [an Ashera], as Ahab king of Israel had done, he worshiped the whole array of heaven and served it. […]

He built altars to the whole array of heaven in the two courts of the Temple of Yahweh” (2 Kings 21:2–5). But historians tell us today that Manasseh’s 55-year reign, when the Queen of Heaven was worshipped inside the Jerusalem temple, was a time of peace and prosperity.

It is Josiah, Manasseh’s grandson, who brought disaster to Judea, by removing from the temple “all the cult objects which had been made for Baal, Asherah and the whole array of heaven. […] He exterminated the spurious priests whom the kings of Judah had appointed and who offered sacrifice on the high places, in the towns of Judah and the neighborhood of Jerusalem; also those who offered sacrifice to Baal, to the sun, the moon, the constellations and the whole array of heaven” (2Kings 23:4–5). In Samaria, over which he regained partial control, Josiah ordered the sanctuary of Bethel destroyed, and “All the priests of the high places who were there he slaughtered on the altars, and on those altars burned human bones” (2 Kings 23:20). It was Josiah’s reign that was to provoke Babylonian anger and the ultimate destruction of Jerusalem.

The Jewish Question is the Biblical Question

According to the biblical paradigm, the Creator of the Universe became the God of Israel when he chose the Hebrews. But according to biblical scholarship, the historical process was the reverse: it is the god of Israel who became the Creator of the Universe. This process, which was only completed during the Persian period, was not so much due to a progress in metaphysical thought as to a political cunning. The book of Ezra betrays a calculated effort from the Levites to confuse, in the mind of the Persians, “the god of Israel who resides in Jerusalem” (7:12–15) with the “God of heaven” whom the Persians also called Ahura Mazda, with the aim of obtaining the support of the Persian king for their theocratic project in Palestine.

In Ezra, only the kings of Persia, in the various edicts attributed to them, recognize Yahweh as “the God of Heaven,” while in the rest of the text, Yahweh is merely “the god of Israel”. The same can be observed in the book of Daniel, when Nebuchadnezzar, impressed by the gifts of Daniel’s oracle, prostrates himself and exclaims: “Your god is indeed the God of gods, the Master of kings” (Daniel 2:47). Such passages give away, for those willing to see it, the deepest secret of Judaism, which is the key to understanding the relationship of Judaism to universalism: Yahweh is really the god of the Jews, while Gentiles are led to believe that he is the supreme and only God. “In the heart of any pious Jew, God is a Jew,” confirms Maurice Samuel in You Gentiles(1924).^xvi

This secret is not a fully conscious thought for most Jews, it is more like a family secret running unconsciously through generations. Nevertheless, it is the binding force of the Jewish people, and I am reminded of Carl Jung’s remark that secrets “are of vital importance on the primitive level, for the shared secret serves as a cement binding the tribe together. Secrets on the tribal level constitute a helpful compensation for lack of cohesion in the individual personality.”^xvii

As he usurped the majesty of the Heavenly Father of all mankind, Yahweh in no way lost his character as a military god bent on looting and slaughtering the enemies of his only chosen people. Against the Babylonians, his sword is expected to “devour until gorged, until drunk with their blood” (Jeremiah 46:10). Against the Edomites, “it is greasy with fat” (Isaiah 34:6).

If Yahweh had remained a tribal god from the desert, he would simply be recognized as particularly primitive and cruel, perhaps a demon escaped from hell though an Arabian volcano. But his successful claim to be honored as the true and only God is the biggest sham in human history, and a civilizational disaster of incomparable magnitude.

It is ultimately responsible for the spread of atheism in the West. As long as Christians were discouraged from reading the Old Testament, they were not much disturbed by it. As soon as it became widely available, it started corroding Christianity. Philosophers like Voltaire had an easy job denigrating Christianity by quoting the Old Testament: “Never was common sense attacked with so much indecency and fury” (Sermon of the Fifty). Rather without God than with such a God, became the logical and morally decent thinking.

“The finest trick of the devil, Charles Baudelaire wrote, is to persuade you that he does not exist” (Paris Spleen). Perhaps he was mistaken. His finest trick, I believe, is to convince the world that he is God.

---

i Nahum Goldmann, Le Paradoxe juif. Conversations en français avec Léon Abramowicz, Stock, 1976 (archive.org), p. 9.

ii Jan Assmann, Of God and Gods: Egypt, Israel, and the Rise of Monotheism, University of Wisconsin Press, 2008, p. 47.

iii According to an Egyptian legend recorded by Plutarch (Isis and Osiris), Seth wandered in Palestine where he fathered two sons, Hierosolymos and Youdaios, that is, “Jerusalem” and “Judah”. Tacitus and other historians also mention rumors that the Jerusalem Temple harbored a golden donkey’s head, the donkey being the symbol of Seth.

iv Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism, Harvard University Press, 1998, p. 3.

v Kevin MacDonald, Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism, Praeger, 1998, kindle 2013, e. 6187–89.

vi Benzion Netanyahu, The Founding Fathers of Zionism (1938), Balfour Books, 2012, k. 2203–7.

vii The volcanic nature of Mount Sinai and its location in Arabia were first argued by Charles Beke in Mount Sinai a Volcano (1873) and in Sinai in Arabia and of Midian(1878). It is today largely accepted by biblical scholars, and has been popularized in books and films by adventurers such as Bob Cornuke and Larry Williams. Read also Howard Blum The Gold of Exodus: The Discovery of the True Mount Sinai, Simon & Schuster, 1998.

viii Thomas Römer, The Invention of God, Harvard UP, 2015. I read the original French version, L’Invention de Dieu, Seuil, 2017, pp. 181-183.

ix William Robertson Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites: The Fundametal Institutions, A&C Black, 3^rd ed., 1927, p. 314, quoted in Thomas Römer, L’Invention de Dieu, op. cit., p. 112.

x Thomas Römer, L’invention de Dieu, op; cit., pp. 71-93.

xi Norman Habel, Yahweh Versus Baal: A Conflict of Religious Cultures, Bookman Associates, 1964, p. 41.

xii Klass Spronk, Beatific Afterlife in Ancient Israel and in the Ancient Near East, Verlag Butzon & Bercker, 1986, pp. 344–345.

xiii John Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes, Fordham University Press, 1974.

xiv Gérard Chaliand, Les Voix du Sacré, Robert Laffont, 1992, p. 32.

xv Françoise Dunand, Isis, mère des dieux, Actes Sud, 2008, p. 232.

xvi Maurice Samuel, You Gentiles, New York, 1924 (archive.org), pp. 74–75.

xvii Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflexions, Pantheon Books, 1963, p. 342.

israel’s (apartheid state) Bolshevik heritage, Italian Painters Detained for Painting Ahed #Tamimi’s Image on Apartheid Wall

Italian Painters Detained for Painting Ahed Tamimi’s Image on Apartheid Wall

28 Jul

9:03 PM

Israeli forces, on Saturday, detained the Italian painters who painted a mural depicting jailed Palestinian teenager Ahed al-Tamimi, on the Israeli separation wall, to the north of the southern West Bank district of Bethlehem, said Munther Amira, a Palestinian Social Worker, activist and human rights defender.

The activist said, according to WAFA, that Israeli soldiers detained the two Italian painters while they were adding the last finishing touches to the painting that depicts Ahmed al-Tamimi. Forces also seized the painters’ equipment and supplies, and detained Palestinian activist, Mustafa al-Araj.

The painters reportedly came from Italy specifically to draw the painting ahead of Tamimi’s expected release from prison, tomorrow.

Ahed Tamimi was detained for confronting Israeli soldiers who had forced their way into her family’s yard, in Nabi Saleh village, to the north of Ramallah, occupied West Bank, soon after soldiers shot and critically injured her 15-year-old cousin, who was hit in the face. Her trial is still ongoing.

Tamimi’s story has garnered global attention, and both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have called for her release.

To be noted, some 85% of the wall’s route runs inside the West Bank, rather than along the Green Line; if completed as planned, the barrier will isolate 9.4% of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, said the United Nations OCHA.

Zuckerberg On Denial and Being Wrong

July 20, 2018  /  Gilad Atzmon

By Gilad Atzmon

In an interview with technology website Recode, Mark Facebook  Zuckerberg stated that posts from Holocaust deniers should be allowed on Facebook.

In response to a question on Facebook’s policy on fake news, Mr. Zuckerberg offered, without prompting, the example of posts by Holocaust deniers.

“I’m Jewish and there’s a set of people who deny that the Holocaust happened,” he told reporter Kara Swisher. “I find it deeply offensive. But at the end of the day, I don’t believe that our platform should take that down because I think there are things that different people get wrong. I don’t think that they’re intentionally getting it wrong.”

He added, “everyone gets things wrong and if we were taking down people’s accounts when they got a few things wrong, then that would be a hard world for giving people a voice and saying that you care about that.”

Despite the fact that FB has earned itself a reputation as a tyrannical Zionist force and an enemy of elementary freedoms, Zuckerberg expressed a clear position consistent with whatever is left of the true American spirit and the 1st Amendment.

The Jewish press is totally upset by Zuckerberg’s policy.  Israeli commentators denounced his remarks.  Here in Britain, the editor of the so called ‘anti-fascist’ magazine Searchlight, Gerry Gable, told the BBC that  “Because of his financial powers, he [Zuckerberg] just does a bit of tinkering without understanding how this material could inspire crazy people to firebomb synagogues, mosques or churches.” I can’t see how comments about the past incite violence against “synagogues, mosques or churches.” But of course, “crazy people” can firebomb anything at anytime, regardless of Zuckerberg’s recent intervention. I’d advise the Gable that the perception of Facebook as a tyrannical Zionist power that silences differing viewpoints may be far more dangerous for Jews and others.

I probably should have finished today’s article here. But I just can’t stop myself from taking this discussion at least one step further.

Here is a point to ponder: with Zuckerberg presenting a reasonable and tolerant attitude to historical debate, WWII, history revisionism and the Holocaust can easily be reduced to an internal Jewish debate. This is the point I make in my recent book, ‘Being in Time.’ I contend that when Jews accept that something about their culture, ideology or politics is perceived as a ‘Jewish problem,’ some Jews are quick to form a satellite opposition.

When it became clear that the criminality of the State that defines itself as the ‘Jewish State’ had become a Jewish problem, Jews for Palestine was created. The Palestine solidarity movement was rapidly reduced to an internal debate among Jews. Here in Britain, some Jews grasped that the Jewish campaign against Jeremy Corbyn is very dangerous for the Jews.  Jews for Corbyn was formed. At the moment, the future of the Labour party has become an internal Jewish debate between the Zionist Jewish Labour Movement and the so called ‘anti’ Jewish Voice for Labour. Neocon wars are now an internal Jewish debate between Sam Harris and Noam Chomsky. In his brave essay, ‘On The Jewish Question,’ Karl Marx comes to the conclusion that Capitalism is a ‘Jewish symptom’. Not surprisingly, many of his followers were of Jewish origin and the battle of capitalism (for and against) became an internal Jewish discourse. It is possible that Zuckerberg, who is not stupid, can sense the growing resentment to FB’s Zio-centrism and he is clever enough to present a new more liberal principled view. He even kindly allows the rest of us to be wrong.

In ‘Being in Time’ I note that the emergence of a Jewish satellite opposition is not necessarily a conspiratorial maneuver. It is only natural for Jews to oppose the crimes committed in their name by the Jewish State. It is equally natural for Jews to oppose Zio-con global wars. It is also reasonable for Zuckerberg to try to amend the negative impression his company bought itself in recent years and to decide to promote basic freedom of speech. The outcome, however, could be problematic. The entire debate on elementary rights and freedoms can easily become an internal Jewish discourse.

To understand ID politics read

Being in Time – A Post Political Manifesto, 

Amazon.co.uk , Amazon.com and  here (gilad.co.uk).

On Jewish controlled opposition:

The God of israel Is a Bloodthirsty, Vindictive Sociopath

Source

Does This Explain the Misanthropy of the Jews?

Laurent Guyénot — Russia Insider July 22, 2018

Laurent Guyénot is the author of From Yahweh to Zion: Jealous God, Chosen People, Promised Land … Clash of Civilizations, 2018  ($30 shipping included from Sifting and Winnowing, PO 221, Lone Rock, WI 53556). RI published a review of it in June, 2018: Small Minority of Jews Are the Real ‘Jewish Question’ – Laurent Guyenot’s Important New Book

Introduction

This article follows and concludes a series of four articles I wrote recently for the Saker blog. In the first one, “How Biblical is Zionism?” (reproduced under a different title on Russia Insider), I wrote: “When Israeli leaders claim that their vision of the global future is based on the (Hebrew) Bible, we should take them seriously and study the (Hebrew) Bible.” In the second one, “How Zionist is the New Word Order?”

I explained that Zionism was never a nationalist movement like others; insofar as it is rooted in the biblical narrative, it contained from the outset a plan for world domination. In the third article, “Who the Hell is the Prince of this World?” I contended that the core characteristic of the biblical ideology—and the best-kept secret of Judaism—is its materialistic anthropology, best summarized by American rabbi Harry Waton: “the only immortality there is for the Jew is the immortality in the Jewish people.” In the fourth article, “Is Israel a Psychopath?”

I argued that “Israel is the psychopath among nations, and that means a tremendous capacity to manipulate, intimidate, corrupt morally, and get what they want.” In this fifth and final part, I wish to address once again the issue of the biblical root of Jewishness, by arguing that the psychopathic behavior of Israel—understood both as a national state and as an international organized community—is the end result of the psychopathic “personality” of the Jewish God portrayed in the Bible.

Let me first state that I take no pleasure in offending anybody’s religious faith. Some Christians tell me that I do not read the Old Testament correctly, through New Testament glasses. My answer is: read it as you like, and convert the Jews to your reading if you can.

My purpose is to explain how the Jews, by whom and for whom it was written, have been reading it for more than a hundred generations, and how it has shaped their worldview, and continues to shape the worldview of many elite Jews. I understand and even empathize with Christians’ difficulty to engage in this effort, but I believe there will be no lasting cure from the corrupting influence of international Jewry without unprejudiced etiological inquiry.

To assess correctly the underlying ideology of the Hebrew Tanakh and its influence on those who hold it as their “roman national”, requires that we put aside the notion that it was inspired by “God” in any way, for this notion induces a cognitive dissonance which impairs our rational and moral judgment.

In fact, we should perhaps renounce looking at the Hebrew Bible as a religious book, because the category of “religion” fails to account for its strong influence on non-religious Jews. As I have shown in “How Biblical is Zionism?” most Israeli leaders, from Ben-Gurion to Netanyahu, are non-religious, but their worldview is profoundly biblical nonetheless.

The biblical outlook is the essence of Jewishness, of which Nahum Goldman said that it is impossible to decide if it “consists first of belonging to a people or practicing a religion, or the two together.”ⁱ This ambivalence is strategic: it is used by organized Jewry to ward off criticism by qualifying it either as anti-Semitic or as an assault on religious freedom, depending on the circumstance.

We should not fall into this trap. What I am dealing here is biblical ideology. Whether this ideology should be categorized as religious is irrelevant. Any idea, any ideology may be criticized, no matter how sacred or ancient it is held to be. And since the first victims of a toxic idea are the men and women who believe it, they are the first who need to be enlightened on its toxicity.

The most appropriate category to understand both the Torah and Jewishness is not “religion” but “covenant” (berit in Hebrew, meaning also treaty or oath of allegiance). The foundation of Jewishness is the Mosaic Covenant. While religious Jews consider it a covenant of Jews with God, non-religious elite Jews such as members of the B’nai B’rith (“Children of the Covenant”) or the Alliance Israélite Universelle, regard it as simply a covenant between the Jews themselves. That is why Jewishness could so easily shift from being defined as an oath of allegiance to Yahweh, to being today indistinguishable from an oath of allegiance to Israel.

The Jealous One

Ancient Egyptians believed that “the gods are social beings, living and acting in ‘constellations,’” wrote German Egyptologist Jan Assmann.ⁱⁱ Yahweh, on the other hand, is “the Jealous One” (Exodus 34:14). He is a solitary god who manifests toward all other gods an implacable intolerance that characterizes him as a sociopath among his peers. Egyptians tried to explain this aggressive exclusiveness of Jewish religion by identifying the Jewish god with Seth, the evil god of the desert, famine, disorder and war, who had been banished by the council of the gods after having murdered his elder brother Osiris out of jealousy.ⁱⁱⁱ

From the third millennium BCE onward, nations founded their diplomacy and foreign trade on their capacity to match their gods, thus acknowledging that they were living not only on the same earth but under the same heavens. “Contracts with other states,” explains Jan Assmann, “had to be sealed by oath, and the gods to whom this oath was sworn had to be compatible.

Tables of divine equivalences were thus drawn up that eventually correlated up to six different pantheons.” But Yahweh could not be matched up with any other god; his priests forbade doing so. “Whereas polytheism, or rather ‘cosmotheism,’ rendered different cultures mutually transparent and compatible, the new counter-religion [Yahwism] blocked intercultural translatability.”^iv And when Yahweh directed his people, “You will make no pact with them or with their gods” (Exodus 23:32), or “Do not utter the names of their gods, do not swear by them, do not serve them and do not bow down to them” (Joshua 23:7), he was in effect preventing any relationship of trust and fairness with the neighboring peoples.

Yahweh taught the Hebrews contempt for the deities of their neighbors, making them, in the eyes of these neighbors, a “race hated by the gods” (Tacitus), and therefore a threat to the cosmic and social order. For, wrote Tacitus (and that was long before the Talmud), the Jews show a “stubborn loyalty and ready benevolence towards brother Jews. But the rest of the world they confront with the hatred reserved for enemies” (Histories V.3–5).

No other nation, in fact, treated its enemies as are said to have done the Hebrews in biblical times. The war code of Deuteronomy 20, which commands to exterminate “any living thing” in nearby conquered cities, and which was applied to the people of Jericho (Joshua 6:21) and to the Amalekites (1Samuel 15:3)—whereas among the Midianites were spared, as booty, the “young girls who have never slept with a man” (Numbers 31:18)—is unheard of in other nations’ archives.

The Assyrians, whose god Assur was no angel, did not slaughter the Israelites, but deported and resettled them, and the Babylonians did the same to the Judeans, who were even allowed to keep their tradition and their cohesion, and to prosper on the riverbanks of the Euphrates.

Yahweh is the most cruel of all national and military gods, even by the standards of biblical time. But Yahweh would have us believe that all other gods, not him, are abominations that need to be eradicated from the face of the earth. It all started with Assur. Yahweh’s jealousy really became pathological after the destruction of Israel by Assyria. In the oldest strata of the book of Isaiah, composed around that time, we hear Yahweh unable to cope with the frustration and humiliation, and consumed with the lust of vengeance:

“Yahweh Sabaoth has sworn it, ‘Yes, what I have planned will take place, what I have decided will be so: I shall break Assyria [Assur] in my country, I shall trample on him on my mountains. Then his yoke will slip off them, his burden will slip from their shoulders. This is the decision taken in defiance of the whole world; this, the hand outstretched in defiance of all nations. Once Yahweh Sabaoth has decided, who will stop him? Once he stretches out his hand, who can withdraw it?’” (14:24–27).

Listen to Yahweh raging after his defeat, and you hear a narcissistic megalomaniac:

“By my own self I swear it; what comes from my mouth is saving justice, it is an irrevocable word: All shall bend the knee to me, by me every tongue shall swear.” (Isaiah 45:23)

Children of the sociopathic god

In the Bible, the fate of the Jewish people is linked exclusively to the criterion of their obedience to Yahweh’s covenant, which includes prohibition of any alliance with the people inhabiting the promised land, and the destruction of their sanctuaries (Exodus 34:12-13). Every reversal of fortune is explained by a breach of contract on the part of the people and serves to strengthen the submission of the people. When a hostile people attacks the Hebrews, it is never because of what the Hebrews did to them, but because of the Hebrews’ infidelity to Yahweh. In Kevin MacDonald’s words:

“The idea that Jewish suffering results from Jews straying from their own law occurs almost like a constant drumbeat throughout the Tanakh—a constant reminder that the persecution of Jews is not the result of their own behavior vis-à-vis Gentiles but rather the result of their behavior vis-à-vis God.”^v

It is important to recognize that, in the Bible, the first victims of Yahweh’s violence are the Jews themselves. Deuteronomy orders the stoning of any parent, son, brother, or wife who “tries secretly to seduce you, saying, ‘Let us go and serve other gods,’ […] since he has tried to divert you from Yahweh your God.” Worse still, Yahweh orders the complete slaughter and burning of any town where such “scoundrels from your own stock […] have led their fellow-citizens astray, saying, ‘Let us go and serve other gods.’” For that is “what is right in the eyes of Yahweh your God” (Deuteronomy 13:7–19).

When some Israelites married Moabite women, who “invited them to the sacrifices of their gods,” “Yahweh said to Moses, ‘Take all the leaders of the people. Impale them facing the sun, for Yahweh’” (Numbers 25:1-4).

Those Jews who socialized with their neighbors rather than slaughtering them, who ate with them, who intermarried with them, and who, while doing all this, showed respect to their gods, are the dregs of the Jewish people, according to the Bible. This is how Jews have been taught to see things for a hundred generations (and Christians too, for that matter).

The biblical message is, in essence: “Do not socialize with idolaters (non-Jews), despise their traditions, and—if possible—exploit them, enslave them, and exterminate them. If, after that, they violate you, it is your fault: you have not obeyed scrupulously enough.” Such is the insane cognitive logic, internalized over 25 centuries, that encloses the Jews in the infernal dilemma of election and persecution.

This mode of thinking is based on the denial of the other’s humanity, which is indeed the essence of psychopathy. It does not occur to the psychopath to question the feelings of the other in order to try to understand his anger, because the other is fundamentally an object and not a person: his motivations are irrelevant. Never does the Jewish community take into account the grievances of its persecutors. Its elites forbid it.

To his chosen people, the biblical Yahweh is behaving as a psychopath preventing his only son from building nurturing bonds with others, in order to keep total control over him and make him an extension of himself. If such a psychopath father succeeds, his son will find no comfort, no substitute parent figure, and therefore no level of resilience.

He will be trained to perceive all generous attention as a threat, any gesture of sympathy as an aggression. All around him he will learn to see only potential enemies. Yahweh convinces the Jews that all non-Jews who wish to be their friends are in fact their worst enemies; that any confidence in Gentiles leads only to disaster. The cultic and food prohibitions are there to prevent any socialization outside the tribe. “I shall set you apart from all these peoples, for you to be mine” (Leviticus 20:26).

Strict endogamy is the central command, and it is directly linked to Yahweh’s demand for exclusive worship. After the conquest of Canaan, it was forbidden to marry one’s children to the natives, “for your son would be seduced from following me into serving other gods; the wrath of Yahweh would blaze out against you and he would instantly destroy you” (Deuteronomy 7:3-4).

In the ancient world, marriage required the mutual adoption of each other’s gods, or at least their cohabitation in the same household. This does not pose a problem to the extent that the gods are social beings who accept each other. But the god of the Hebrews is a jealous god, who tolerates no other. Although most Zionists pretend to be atheists, the fundamental rule has not changed, because it is the essence of Jewishness. To intermarry is, according to Benzion Netanyahu, father of the Israeli prime minister, equivalent to “an act of suicide.” ^vi What better proof do we need that the Israeli elite think biblically?

We need a revisionist approach to biblical history. It portrays all other nations than Israel as repulsive idolaters. But they were not. The abominable Egyptians had built the first great civilization; they had introduced wheat growing to the world. They were a peaceful and highly spiritual people. So were the Canaanites. Whenever the biblical Israelites resisted Yahweh’s antisocial order to keep separate from them, they are called “stiff-necked.”

But should we not feel sympathy for those rebellious Jews, who tried to befriend their neighbors, and assimilate into the civilizations that hosted them? What about those Jews who resist Yahweh’s orders to kill men, women and children indiscriminately? How should we judge King Saul, who was deposed for sparing one man? If we insist that Yahweh is God, how can we criticize the Jews of today for their strong communitarian loyalty? They learned it from the Bible!

Are Yahweh and Molech the same?

A quick look at Yahweh’s unauthorized biography by biblical scholars will enlighten us on his personality. Long before he claimed to be the Creator of the Universe—that is, long before Genesis was written—Yahweh was a local and tribal god attached to Mount Sinai (also called Horeb), located in Midian, north-west Arabia, according to Exodus 2 (and not in Egypt, as the Roman church would locate it in the 4^th century, despite the fact that even Saint Paul knew that “Mount Sinai is in Arabia” Galatians 4:25).

This region is volcanic, with eruptions recorded up to the Middle Ages, and Mount Sinai is clearly a volcano: when Yahweh spoke to Moses on the mountain, others only perceived “peals of thunder and flashes of lightning, dense cloud on the mountain and a very loud trumpet blast. […] Mount Sinai was entirely wrapped in smoke because Yahweh had descended on it in the form of fire.

The smoke rose like smoke from a furnace and the whole mountain shook violently. Louder and louder grew the trumpeting. Moses spoke, and God answered him in the thunder” (Exodus 19:16-19).^vii Yahweh would never totally forget his volcanic background. He remained “a consuming fire” (Deuteronomy 4:24), especially in apocalyptic literature: in the Last Days, “glowing like a furnace,” Yahweh will “set ablaze” all evil-doers, “leaving them neither root nor branch” (Malachi 3:19).

Yahweh retained other primitive traits. He is known as the God who ordered Abraham to sacrifice his son, but then held back his hand and satisfied himself with a ram (Genesis 22). He has therefore been compared favorably with the Canaanite god Molech, to whom firstborn infants were said to be ritually sacrificed. But biblical scholars like Thomas Römer believe that Molech was in fact none other than Yahweh himself.

The name mlk, vocalized as Molech in the Masoretic text (the 9^th century Tanakh which first introduced vowels into the Hebrew script), but Melech in the Greek Septuagint, is identical to the Hebrew word for “king”, applied more than fifty times to Yahweh and used to form such Hebrew names as Abimelech (“Melech is my father”) in Genesis 20:2 or Elimelech (“Melech is my god”) in Ruth 1:2.

Some psalms contain the acclamation Yahweh melech, “Yahweh is king,” still in use in Jewish religious songs. The Leviticus verses which prohibit infant sacrifice indirectly testify that they were done in Yahweh’s name and in Yahweh’s sanctuary: “You will not allow any of your children to be sacrificed to Molech, thus profaning the name of your God. I am Yahweh” (18:21); “Anyone, be he Israelite or alien resident in Israel, who gives any of his children to Molech, will be put to death. […] for by giving a child of his to Molech he has defiled my sanctuary and profaned my holy name” (20:2-5). Jeremiah 7:30-31 confirms that “the people of Judah” continued “to burn their sons and daughters […] in the Temple that bears my name, to defile it.”

Although Yahweh declares it to be “a thing I never ordered, that had never entered my thoughts,” the very fact that a scribe wrote this indicates, according to Thomas Römer, that the people who sacrificed their children did claim it was required by Yahweh. It is only in the Persian era that human sacrifices became taboo, and that they were dissociated from the cult of Yahweh. ^viii Nevertheless, Israelites are portrayed as believing in their efficiency, for when the Moabites (Israelites’ relatives as descendants of Abraham’s nephew) were besieged by the Israelites, the king of Moab “took his eldest son who was to succeed him and offered him as a sacrifice on the city wall. Alarmed at this, the Israelites withdrew and retired to their own territory” (2 Kings 3:26-27).

Is the Mosaic Alliance satanic?

The Exodus story probably reflects a very ancient and sacred tradition regarding the origin of the Mosaic covenant. This covenant, or alliance, was sealed with a ritual sacrifice: altars were built at the foot of Mount Horeb, and oxen were killed as “communion sacrifices”. “Moses then took half the blood and put it into basins, and the other half he sprinkled on the altar.” After reading the “Book of the Covenant,” he “took the blood and sprinkled it over the people, saying, ‘This is the blood of the covenant which Yahweh has made with you, entailing all these stipulations’” (Exodus 24:4-8). As orientalist William Robertson Smith has shown, this manner of sealing in blood an alliance between tribes, or an oath of loyalty to a chief, was common in pre-Islamic Arabia.^ix

The “Book of the Covenant” mentioned in Exodus refers to the complex code of laws that the Hebrews are to follow, which is detailed in the rest of the Torah (Pentateuch). Moses’s speeches in Deuteronomy give us the basic terms of the covenant. When reading it, we should keep in mind that, at this stage of the story, Yahweh is not believed to be God; he has only introduced himself to Moses as “the god of your ancestors” (Exodus 3:6).

“Today you have obtained this declaration from Yahweh: that he will be your god, but only if you follow his ways, keep his statutes, his commandments, his customs, and listen to his voice. And today Yahweh has obtained this declaration from you: that you will be his own people—as he has said—but only if you keep all his commandments; then for praise and renown and honour, he will raise you higher than every other nation he has made, and you will be a people consecrated to Yahweh, as he has promised.” (26:17-19)

“Yahweh will make you abound in possessions: in the offspring of your body, in the yield of your cattle and in the yield of your soil, in the country which he swore to your ancestors that he would give you. For you Yahweh will open his treasury of rain, the heavens, to give your country its rain at the right time, and to bless all your labours. You will make many nations your subjects, yet you will be subject to none.” (28:11-12)

What Yahweh promises is material prosperity, to the detriment of other peoples. On this point, the Tanakh is remarkably consistent: “You will suck the milk of nations, you will suck the wealth of kings” (Isaiah 60:16); “the wealth of all the surrounding nations will be heaped together: gold, silver, clothing, in vast quantity” (Zechariah 14:14). Spiritual rewards are not part of the bargain.

In fact, if we remember that Yahweh taught the Jews that they have no individual souls (read my article “Who the Hell is the Prince of this World?”), which is tantamount to claiming their souls for himself, we can say that the Mosaic covenant has the nature of a Faustian pact: Israel will obtain every worldly success in exchange for his soul: “you, out of all peoples, shall be my personal possession” (Exodus 19:5).

It is instructive to compare Yahweh’s promise to his people that they will rule over “every other nation in the world” if only they “faithfully obey the voice of Yahweh your God, by keeping and observing all his commandments” (Deuteronomy 28:1), with Satan’s bargain with Jesus in Matthew 4:8-10: “the devil showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. And he said to him, ‘I will give you all these if you fall at my feet and do me homage.’”

At the least, it is hard to see what distinguishes Yahweh from Mammon (a personification of Wealth in Matthew 6:24), when he shows himself possessed by greed for precious metals: “I shall shake all the nations, and the treasures of all the nations will flow in, and I shall fill this Temple with glory, says Yahweh Sabaoth. Mine is the silver, mine the gold! Yahweh Sabaoth declares” (Haggai 2:7–8). This can be contrasted with Jesus’s admonition “store up treasures in heaven” (Matthew 6:20–21), which is totally foreign to Yahwism.

Yahweh against Baal

Yahweh alone is the true God, he says, whereas all other gods are demons. This is called blame shifting and is typical of psychopaths. We need to see through it and break the spell.

Let us take an unprejudiced look at Baal, Yahweh’s most formidable rival in the Bible. In the Books of Kings, Baal is presented as a foreign god imported by Jezebel, the Phoenician wife of Ahab (1Kings 16:31–32). But Baal was actually worshipped all over Syria long before Yahweh was imported from the semi-desert lands south of Judah.^x Baal Shamem, the “Heavenly Lord,” was identified as the God of Heaven and his worship transcended ethnic boundaries.^xi So it is ironic that Yahweh, the god of the Jews exclusively, should compete with him for the status of supreme God.

The Cycle of Elijah (from 1 Kings17 to 2 Kings 13) admits that the cult of Baal received royal support in the powerful kingdom of Israel under the Omrid dynasty (9^th century BCE). The priests of Yahweh condemned Baal worship, and the biblical tale shows Elijah challenging 450 prophets of Baal to conjure lightning upon the burnt offering of a bull: “You must call on the name of your god, and I shall call on the name of Yahweh; the god who answers with fire, is God indeed.” The prophets of Baal exhaust themselves by shouting to their god, performing “their hobbling dance” and gashing themselves with swords and spears, with no result, while Yahweh sets fire to Elijah’s bull after Elijah has drenched it with twelve jars of water to spice up the challenge.

People then fall on their faces and scream “Yahweh is God!” Then they seize all the prophets of Baal, and Elijah slaughters them (1Kings 18). Thus was proven Yahweh’s superiority, in a showdown worthy of Hollywood. Elijah, however, had to flee retaliation and walked 40 days to Mount Horeb, where after a hurricane, an earthquake and a fiery eruption, he received the word of Yahweh. He was to go back to Israel and anoint the general Jehu who, after a coup against the Omrid king in 842 BCE, would first promote the cult of Yahweh in the kingdom of Israel.

Baal was for the Syrians what Osiris was for the Egyptians: both god of fertility and lord of the dead. So Baal worship was associated with the afterlife and what is presented pejoratively as necromancy.^xii Such religious beliefs and practices had also strong connections with the symbol of the serpent, associated with the ambivalent nature of death. We are told that the Israelites worshipped and offered sacrifices to a bronze serpent called Nehushtan, supposedly built by Moses until the great king Hezekiah “smashed” it (2 Kings 18:4).

In Genesis, the serpent has undergone an inversion, as part of the campaign to demonize other religions: when the serpent offers to the first humans the means of “having their eyes opened and be like gods” (Genesis 3:5), it borrows the language of initiatory mysteries meant to acquire immortality; but the Yahwist scribes present him as a liar. As a result, the idea of trying to become like gods passes today as Luciferian, although the Greek fathers of the Christian Church stressed man’s potential for deification (theosis) under the logic that “God became man so that man might become a god.”^xiii

The Queen of Heaven

Yahweh’s hatred for Baal is matched only by his repulsion for Asherah, the Great Goddess worshipped throughout the Mediterranean world under many names. Under the name of Ishtar, she was the “Queen of all the inhabited places, who keeps the people in order,” according to a Mesopotamian anthem.^xiv Asherah and Ishtar were also identified to the Egyptian Isis, sister-spouse of Osiris, the “myrionyme” goddess (“of ten thousand names”), who calls herself the “Queen of Heaven” in Apuleius’s novel The Golden Ass, and declares: “My name, my divinity is adored throughout all the world in diverse manners, in variable customs and in many names.”^xv More than Baal, the Queen of Heaven (a title which would later be inherited by Christ’s mother) was a truly universal deity, with no “chosen people”, and that is perhaps the deeper reason for Yahweh’s hatred towards her.

In chapter 44 of the Book of Jeremiah, Yahweh declared to the Judeans who had fled to Egypt, that the destruction of Jerusalem was his punishment for their “wicked deeds […] committed to provoke my anger, by going and offering incense and serving other gods” (44:2-3). Yahweh, said his spokesman Jeremiah, could not bear the smell of incense offered to other gods (what he liked is the “pleasing smell” of carbonized animal offerings called holocausts, as we know from Genesis 8:21). Yahweh threatens the Judeans exiles in Egypt with complete extermination if they persist.

Unimpressed, they responded to Jeremiah: “We have no intention of listening to the word you have just spoken to us in Yahweh’s name, but intend to go on doing all we have vowed to do: offering incense to the Queen of Heaven and pouring libations in her honour, as we used to do, we and our ancestors, our kings and our chief men, in the towns of Judah and the streets of Jerusalem: we had food in plenty then, we lived well, we suffered no disasters. But since we gave up offering incense to the Queen of Heaven and pouring libations in her honour, we have been destitute and have perished either by sword or by famine” (44:16-18).

Why not lend a friendly ear to those Judeans’ alternative interpretation of the fall of Jerusalem: it is not because they worshipped other gods than Yahweh that their plight started, but on the contrary because, since the reform of Josiah, they gave up worshipping the Queen of Heaven. For what reason, other than ancestral habit, should we believe Jeremiah and his Deuteronomistic scribes?

In fact, we know they were wrong. Josiah’s grandfather Manasseh is loathed for having done “what is displeasing to Yahweh, copying the disgusting practices of the nations whom Yahweh had dispossessed for the Israelites. He rebuilt the high places that his father Hezekiah had destroyed, he set up altars to Baal and made a sacred pole [an Ashera], as Ahab king of Israel had done, he worshipped the whole array of heaven and served it. […]

He built altars to the whole array of heaven in the two courts of the Temple of Yahweh” (2 Kings 21:2–5). But historians tell us today that Manasseh’s 55-year reign, when the Queen of Heaven was worshipped inside the Jerusalem temple, was a time of peace and prosperity.

It is Josiah, Manasseh’s grandson, who brought disaster to Judea, by removing from the temple “all the cult objects which had been made for Baal, Asherah and the whole array of heaven. […] He exterminated the spurious priests whom the kings of Judah had appointed and who offered sacrifice on the high places, in the towns of Judah and the neighborhood of Jerusalem; also those who offered sacrifice to Baal, to the sun, the moon, the constellations and the whole array of heaven” (2Kings 23:4–5). In Samaria, over which he regained partial control, Josiah ordered the sanctuary of Bethel destroyed, and “All the priests of the high places who were there he slaughtered on the altars, and on those altars burned human bones” (2 Kings 23:20). It was Josiah’s reign that was to provoke Babylonian anger and the ultimate destruction of Jerusalem.

The Jewish Question is the Biblical Question

According to the biblical paradigm, the Creator of the Universe became the God of Israel when he chose the Hebrews. But according to biblical scholarship, the historical process was the reverse: it is the god of Israel who became the Creator of the Universe. This process, which was only completed during the Persian period, was not so much due to a progress in metaphysical thought as to a political cunning. The book of Ezra betrays a calculated effort from the Levites to confuse, in the mind of the Persians, “the god of Israel who resides in Jerusalem” (7:12–15) with the “God of heaven” whom the Persians also called Ahura Mazda, with the aim of obtaining the support of the Persian king for their theocratic project in Palestine.

In Ezra, only the kings of Persia, in the various edicts attributed to them, recognize Yahweh as “the God of Heaven,” while in the rest of the text, Yahweh is merely “the god of Israel”. The same can be observed in the book of Daniel, when Nebuchadnezzar, impressed by the gifts of Daniel’s oracle, prostrates himself and exclaims: “Your god is indeed the God of gods, the Master of kings” (Daniel 2:47). Such passages give away, for those willing to see it, the deepest secret of Judaism, which is the key to understanding the relationship of Judaism to universalism: Yahweh is really the god of the Jews, while Gentiles are led to believe that he is the supreme and only God. “In the heart of any pious Jew, God is a Jew,” confirms Maurice Samuel in You Gentiles (1924).^xvi

This secret is not a fully conscious thought for most Jews, it is more like a family secret running unconsciously through generations. Nevertheless, it is the binding force of the Jewish people, and I am reminded of Carl Jung’s remark that secrets “are of vital importance on the primitive level, for the shared secret serves as a cement binding the tribe together. Secrets on the tribal level constitute a helpful compensation for lack of cohesion in the individual personality.”^xvii

As he usurped the majesty of the Heavenly Father of all mankind, Yahweh in no way lost his character as a military god bent on looting and slaughtering the enemies of his only chosen people. Against the Babylonians, his sword is expected to “devour until gorged, until drunk with their blood” (Jeremiah 46:10). Against the Edomites, “it is greasy with fat” (Isaiah 34:6).

If Yahweh had remained a tribal god from the desert, he would simply be recognized as particularly primitive and cruel, perhaps a demon escaped from hell through an Arabian volcano. But his successful claim to be honored as the true and only God is the biggest sham in human history and a civilizational disaster of incomparable magnitude.

It is ultimately responsible for the spread of atheism in the West. As long as Christians were discouraged from reading the Old Testament, they were not much disturbed by it. As soon as it became widely available, it started corroding Christianity. Philosophers like Voltaire had an easy job denigrating Christianity by quoting the Old Testament: “Never was common sense attacked with so much indecency and fury” (Sermon of the Fifty). Rather without God than with such a God, became the logical and morally decent thinking.

“The finest trick of the devil, Charles Baudelaire wrote, is to persuade you that he does not exist” (Paris Spleen). Perhaps he was mistaken. His finest trick, I believe, is to convince the world that he is God.

i Nahum Goldmann, Le Paradoxe juif. Conversations en français avec Léon Abramowicz, Stock, 1976 (archive.org), p. 9.

ii Jan Assmann, Of God and Gods: Egypt, Israel, and the Rise of Monotheism, University of Wisconsin Press, 2008, p. 47.

iii According to an Egyptian legend recorded by Plutarch (Isis and Osiris), Seth wandered in Palestine where he fathered two sons, Hierosolymos and Youdaios, that is, “Jerusalem” and “Judah”. Tacitus and other historians also mention rumors that the Jerusalem Temple harbored a golden donkey’s head, the donkey is the symbol of Seth.

iv Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism, Harvard University Press, 1998, p. 3.

v Kevin MacDonald, Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism, Praeger, 1998, kindle 2013, e. 6187–89.

vi Benzion Netanyahu, The Founding Fathers of Zionism (1938), Balfour Books, 2012, k. 2203–7.

vii The volcanic nature of Mount Sinai and its location in Arabia were first argued by Charles Beke in Mount Sinai a Volcano (1873) and in Sinai in Arabia and of Midian (1878). It is today largely accepted by biblical scholars and has been popularized in books and films by adventurers such as Bob Cornuke and Larry Williams. Read also Howard Blum The Gold of Exodus: The Discovery of the True Mount Sinai, Simon & Schuster, 1998.

viii Thomas Römer, The Invention of God, Harvard UP, 2015. I read the original French version, L’Invention de Dieu, Seuil, 2017, pp. 181-183.

ix William Robertson Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites: The Fundametal Institutions, A&C Black, 3^rd ed., 1927, p. 314, quoted in Thomas Römer, L’Invention de Dieu, op. cit., p. 112.

x Thomas Römer, L’invention de Dieu, op; cit., pp. 71-93.

xi Norman Habel, Yahweh Versus Baal: A Conflict of Religious Cultures, Bookman Associates, 1964, p. 41.

xii Klass Spronk, Beatific Afterlife in Ancient Israel and in the Ancient Near East, Verlag Butzon & Bercker, 1986, pp. 344–345.

xiii John Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes, Fordham University Press, 1974.

xiv Gérard Chaliand, Les Voix du Sacré, Robert Laffont, 1992, p. 32.

xv Françoise Dunand, Isis, mère des dieux, Actes Sud, 2008, p. 232.

xvi Maurice Samuel, You Gentiles, New York, 1924 (archive.org), pp. 74–75.

xvii Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflexions, Pantheon Books, 1963, p. 342.

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