النص الأصلي باللغة العربية بالاسفل

Call for all Muslims living in "Israel "

In this message, we would like to explain the view of Torah regarding non- Jewish inhabitants in Israel. Firstly, we say that all human beings were created by one God and every faithful man must be treated respectfully. Therefore, the view of Judaism is not racial nor inhumane! It is all about religion!

The gist of our religions both is the belief in God, the creator. As we both believe, God gave us Torah which contains the duties and messages that we must achieve.

As what Holy Qur'an says, there is no contrast between what Torah says and what Qur'an says. As faithful Jews, we must achieve our duties. In many parts of Torah, it is written that the land of "Israel" was promised to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and their grandsons ONLY! All the people agree that we are the grandsons of the ancient people of Israel, grandsons of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob!!

Moreover, it is written in Torah that this small land is a property of the Jewish people ONLY! And it is forbidden to let others live here permanently. It is also written in Books of Nevi'im (Books of the Prophets) that we were dismissed because we did not achieve this divine order! The Jewish people were dismissed and stayed outside their homeland for 2000 years. Now and after we have returned back to the land of Israel, as we were promised by Prophets; it is time for the Israeli people to achieve this divine order. So, we ask you to leave the land of Israel!!!

We say that in the point view of religion and to guarantee peace in Israel! We explain to you all the holy speech in both Qura'an and Torah. We think that when you understand that we do not hate you nor do we want to fight you because of your belief in Islam, you will come to understand the reason behind our determine to achieve the divine order! As Islam says, " There is no god but Allah. "

Here is the divine order. God told Moses:

Torah, 33 . 56-50

God talked to Moses on Moab regarding Jordan and Jericho saying:
Tell people of Israel that you will pass Jordan to the land of Canaanites.
So, you will dismiss all the inhabitants from there, will vanish all their statues and you will control all their heights.
You will own the land and live there because I gave you the land to possess and to divide it by lot regarding your tribes.
You should give more for the big tribes than the small tribes.
And if you did not dismiss the inhabitants, they would be thorns in your eyes and bodies and they would annoy you in the land you live on
And I will punish you the same way I wanted to punish them.

After you see the divine speech and because Islam is a religion of morals, and to avoid the Jews to possess another land, you must have no objection!! You have wide countries to live in!!! You must understand that we achieve the order written in Torah. Because it is not easy to leave millions of people without financial support, we suggest you to negotiate with "State of Israel" (which embodies the promise of prophets) to get economic aids to live wherever else!!!!

When we and you obey God, then we can live peacefully. We, you, our grandsons and your grandsons for a long time!!

As prophet Ichaaih said, " No nation holds the sword on the face of another nation and they no longer learn about war."

Regard the holiness of these pages. (End of the publication!)

*****

Translated into English
By: Shadi Y. Nassar

Please, suggest a better translation by contacting me on:

shadinassar@hotmail.com

Note: all the holy verses of Qur'an were omitted.

****************

I have made a French translation of your document: (By: Gwénaëlle Taffin)

Une copie de la traduction publiée par les habitants Israëliens de Jerusalem dans le cadre de leur sauvage campgagne de " judaisation" de Jerusalem et la partie historique de la Palestine:
النص الأصلي باللغة العربية بالاسفل

Appel aux musulmans qui vivent en "Israël"

Dans ce message, nous aimerions vous expliquer la position du Torah concernant les habitants non-juifs d´Israël.
Dans un premier temps, nous déclarons que tous les êtres humains furent crées par un seul Dieu et tout fidèle sera traité avec respect. en conséquence, le point de vue "judaique" n´est ni racial ni ihumain!!!! Il n´est question que de religion!!

L´idée essentielle de nos deux religions est la croyance en Dieu, le createur. Comme nous le savons tous deux, Dieu nous donna le Torah qui contient les tâches et messages que nous nous devons de réaliser.

Selon ce que dit le Coran, il n´y a pas de contraste entre ce que dit le Torah et ce que dit le Coran. Comme juifs croyants, nous devons réaliser nos tâches. Dans beaucoup de passages du Torah, il est écrit que la région d´Israël a été promise SEULEMENT à Abraham, Isaac, Jacob et à leurs petits enfants.

De plus, il est écrit dans le Torah que ce petit pays est la propriété UNIQUE des juifs!!!! Et il interdit de laisser d´autres (gens) y vivre en permanence. Il est également écrit dans les Livres de Neviim (Livres des Prophètes) que nous avions été reniés pour ne pas obéir cette ordre divin!!!! Les juifs ont été renvoyés et sont restés en dehors de leur patrie pendant 2000 ans. Maintenant et après être de retour sur le sol d´Israël, comme les prophètes nous avaient promis, il est temps que les Israëliens réalise cet ordre divin. Nous vous demandons donc d´abandonner le pays d´Israël!!!

Nous le disons du point de vue religieux et pour garantir la paix en Israël!!! Nous vous expliquons le discours du Coran et Torah ensembles. Nous pensons que lorsque vous comprendrez que nous ne vous haissons pas ni ne vous combattons pas pour votre croyance en l´Islam , vous arriverez à comprendre la raison à notre détermination pour réaliser cet ordre divin!!! Comme dit l´Islam , " Il ´n´y a de Dieu qu´Allah!
Voici l´ordre divin: Dieu dit à Moses

Torah, 33 . 56-50

Dieu expliqua à Moises et à Moab, en contemplant le Jordan et Jericho:
Dites aux gens d´Israël que vous allez dépasser le Jordan vers le pays de Canaanites.
Donc, vous allez renvoyer tous les habitants d´ici, vous détruirez toutes leurs statuts et contrôlerez tous leurs " évolutions" .
Vous posséderez le pays et y vivrez car je vous ai donné le pays pour le posséder et le diviser en lots selon vos tribus.
Vous devrrez donner plus aux grandes tribus qu´aux petites.
Et si vous n´aviez pas abandonné les habitants, ils auraient été des épines dans vos yeux et corps et ils auraient dérangé dans le pays dans lequel vous vivez.
Et je vous punirais de la même manière que j´ai voulu les punir.
Après avoir vue le discour divin et parce que l´Islam est une religion de morale, et afin d´éviter que les Juifs possèdent un autre pays, vous ne devez avoir aucune objection!!!! Vous avez de larges pays pour y vivre!!!

Vous devez comprendre que nous obéissons l´ordre écrit dans le Torah. Comme il n´est pas facile pour des millions de personnes de partir sans appui financier, vous vous suggérons de négocier avec "L´Etat d´Israël" (qui incarne la promesse des prophètes) afin d´obtenir des aides économiques pour vivre ailleurs!!!!

Lorsque vous comme nous ayons obéi à Dieu, nous pourrons alors vivre en paix. Nous, vous , vos petits enfants et leurs petits enfants pour longtemps.

Comme dit le prophete Ichaaih : "Aucune nation ne porte l´épée à une autre nation et ils n´apprendront pas plus sur la guerre " .
Etudiez la sainteté de ces pages (Fin de la publication)

**********

المنشور الذي وزعه الكيان الصهيوني على أبناء مدينة القدس ضمن الحملة المستمرة لتهجيرهم و تهويد القدس ومقدساتها وتفريغها من أهلها
ويبدأ البيان بآية من القرآن الكريم :

" ( ولا تجادلوا هل الكتاب إلا بالتي هي أحسن إلا الذين ظلموا منهم وقولوا أمنا بالذي انزل إلينا وانزل إليكم وإلهنا وإلهكم واحد ونحن له مسلمون).

نداء إلى جميع المسلمين الساكنين في ارض إسرائيل

نريد أن نشرح لكم هذه الرسالة رأي التوراة بالنسبة لسكن غير اليهود في ارض اسرائيل , نقول أولا انه حسب التوراة كل إنسان خلق من نفس الله , ويجب التعامل مع كل إنسان مؤمن باحترام , ولذلك نظرة الدين اليهودي ليست عنصرية أو غير إنسانية , فهو ديني فحسب.

الأصل في ديننا ودينكم هو الإيمان بالله , ملك العالم , وحسب إيماننا وإيمانكم أعطانا الله التوراة وفيها الواجبات والرسالات ويجب علينا القيام بها.
حسب مقولات القرآن الكريم لا يوجد أي تناقض بين ما أمرتنا التوراة القيام به وبين ما أمركم القرآن به , كيهود مؤمنون يجب علينا القيام بواجبات التوراة , وفي التوراة مكتوب في عدة أماكن أن ارض إسرائيل وعدت لإبراهيم واسحق ويعقوب و أحفادهم ولا غيرهم , الكل يجمعون بأننا أحفاد شعب اسرايل القديم , أحفاد إبراهيم واسحق ويعقوب.

ومكتوب في التوراة أيضا بان ارض إسرائيل , هذه الأرض الصغيرة , هي ملك الشعب اليهودي فقط , ومن الممنوع سكن غيرهم فيها بصورة دائمة.
مكتوب أيضا في أسفار الأنبياء انه بسبب عدم قيامنا بهذا الأمر الالهي , الشعب اليهودي طرد وبقي خارج بلاده 2000 سنة , ألان وبعد عودة شعب إسرائيل إلى ارض إسرائيل ,كما وعدونا الأنبياء , حان الوقت ليقوم الشعب الإسرائيلي بتنفيذ هذا الأمر الالهى , ولذلك نطلب منكم مغادرة ارض إسرائيل.

نحن نقول ذلك من وجهة النظر الدينية , لنضمن السلام في ارض إسرائيل , نحن نشرح لكم المقولات التوراتية والقرآنية , ونحن نعتقد انه حين تفهمون أننا لا نكرهكم ولا نريد محاربتكم بسبب إيمانكم بالإسلام , ستفهمون سبب إرادتنا القيام بأمر الله , كما قال الإسلام لا اله إلا الله.

هذا الأمر الرباني قاله الله لموسى :

التوراة , سفر العدد 33 . 56-50 :

كلم الرب موسى في عربات مواب على أردن أريحا قائلا
كلم بني إسرائيل وقل لهم أنكم عابرون الأردن إلى ارض كنعان
فتطردون كل سكان الأرض من أمامكم وتمحون جميع تصاويرهم وتبيدون كل أصنامهم المسبوكة وتخبربون جميع مرتفعاتهم
تملكون الأرض وتسكنون فيها لاني قد أعطيتكم الأرض لكي تملكوها
وتقتسمون الأرض بالقرعة حسب عشائركم الكثير تكثرون له نصيبه والقليل تقللون له نصيبه حيث خرجت له القرعة فهناك يكون له حسب أسباط آبائكم تقتسمون
وان لم تطردوا سكان الأرض من أمامكم يكون الذين تستبقون منهم أشواكا في أعينكم ومناخس في جوانبكم ويضايقونكم على الأرض التي انتم ساكنون فيها
فيكون أني افعل بكم كما هممت أن افعل بهم

وفي القرآن الكريم :
سورة الإسراء : ( وقلنا من بعده لبني إسرائيل اسكنوا الأرض فإذا جاء وعد الآخرة جئنا بكم لفيفا)

سورة الاحقاف : ( ومن قبله كتاب موسى إماما ورحمة وهذا كتاب مصدق لسانا عربيا لينذر الذين ظلموا وبشرى للمحسنين)

سورة المائدة : ( إنا أنزلنا التوراة فيها هدىً ونور يحكم بها النبيّون الذين اسلموا للذين هادوا والربّانيون والأحبار بما استحفظوا من كتاب الله وكانوا عليه شهداء فلا تخشوا الناس واخشون ولا تشتروا بآياتي ثمنا قليلا ومن لم يحكم بما انزل الله فاؤلئك هم الكافرون)

بعدما رايتهم الأقوال السماوية ولان الدين الإسلامي هو دين أخلاقي , ولان لا تكون بيد الشعب اليهودي أي ارض أخرى , لذلك يجب أن لا تكون لكم معارضة لهذا – ولديكم بلدان واسعة يمكنكم السكن فيها- وتفهمون بان علينا القيام بالأمر المكتوب في التوراة . ولأنه من غير السهل مغادرة ملايين الناس بدون مساعدات مالية , فإننا نقترح عليكم أن تفاوضوا دولة إسرائيل ( التي تجسد وعود الأنبياء) , على أن تحصلوا على مساعدات اقتصادية للسكن في مكان آخر.

ولما نطيع الله نحن وانتم , يمكننا العيش بسلام , نحن وانتم وأولادنا وأولادكم لسنوات طويلة , كما قال النبي يشاعيه : ( لا ترفع امة على امة سيفا ولا يتعلمون الحرب في ما بعد)

يطلب الحفظ على قدسية هذه الصفحات. (نهاية المنشور)!! "

http://www.shorouknews.com/ContentData.aspx?id=194150

Here are scanned copies of the original publication in Arabic :

http://www.qudsmedia.net/uploads/1062009-035507PM.jpg

http://www.qudsmedia.net/uploads/1062009-035555PM.jpg

http://www.qudsmedia.net/?articles=topic&topic=4371

Roberts also insults the Iraqi resistance by stating it inflicted losses on the American superpower “in their spare time” off from fighting Shi’is. Completely disregarding 1,400 years of Islamic history, a single athletic dispute leads Roberts to conclude that “Muslims cannot even play together”. This focus on an isolated event is selective, as Mr. Roberts doesn’t appear to recall that Sunnis and Shiis both celebrated the Iraqi soccer team’s victory in the 2007 Asian Cup.  Even if we were to assume Iraq’s Muslims aren’t united enough for Roberts’ taste, he seems to have ignored the USA’s critical divide-and-conquer role in Iraq. He doesn’t appear aware of the USA’s deployment of Shii and Kurdish troops to battle Sunni cities, such as Fallujah in November 2004. He ignores the USA’s political and financial support of sectarian parties, politicians and clergymen. He also neglects to mention the Israeli role in sowing the seeds of conflict in Iraq, outlined in Oded Yinon’s infamous A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties. Roberts is unaware of 17-year old Othman from A’athamiya, a young Iraqi who drowned after rescuing nearly a dozen Iraqis when the A’imma Bridge in Baghdad collapsed in 2005. He also overlooked the joint Sunni-Shii celebrations of Muntathar Zaidi’s throwing his shoes at Bush. The US corporate media, which cheerlead for the war, has every interest to blackout, marginalize and ignore stories of Iraqi unity. It is regretful that Roberts condescends Iraqis in the same manner.

One wonders whether Mr. Roberts would’ve displayed this same white man’s burden, vilifying misbehaving oppressed peoples, by admonishing Native American tribes who may have been at odds during the theft of their land by white settlers. Would Mr. Roberts have weighed in on the dispute between the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X? Would he have demonstrated moral authority to arbitrate between Martin Luther King Jr’s philosophy of nonviolence and Malcolm X’s commitment to freedom by any means necessary? Would he have appointed himself as judge between the North and South Vietnamese? Dictating derogatory suggestions to the oppressed is no business of “solidarity” activists. If Roberts is entitled to instruct Iraqis to unite, surely Iraqis are far more entitled to tell Americans, including Roberts, to put their right-wing, left-wing, class and racial divisions aside to meaningfully mobilize to end their seven-year occupation of our country (by “meaningful”, I mean more substantive than symbolic anti-war protests every anniversary of the war). When they have extra time on their hands, Iraqis could probably tell Americans to unite on their debilitating healthcare disputes.

It is frustrating enough when the operators of the US war machine and their mouthpieces in mainstream media refer to Iraqis in demeaning sectarian language. It is far more disappointing when those involved in the “anti-war” movement, who are supposedly in solidarity with Iraqis, use such divisive, disrespectful discourse. I call on Mr. Roberts to apologize to the beleaguered Iraqi people, victims of two decades of his country’s ruthless foreign policy, funded by his tax dollars, for publishing such an undeserved portrayal.

Qais Nawwaf is one of millions of displaced Iraqis. He resides on a colonized part of Indigenous territory commonly referred to as the "United States." He has a degree in a discipline invented by his ancestors: writing. He may be reached at: qnawwaf@gmail.com.

I read your article 'Why no Jewish writer can be believed' with much interest. You know, sometimes I feel like that about the Anglo Saxons. Often times, as history is evidence, especially vis a vis the East India Company and its colonial conquests whose enduring shackles of mental servitude are still felt daily in my native nation, can one really tell the difference between the Jewish white Anglo-Saxon and the Christian white Anglo-Saxon race? While the religious rituals may be different, the imperial practices aren't when the reference begins and ends with 'race'! Any conflict between them is often only the white man's burden negotiation between two ubermensch fighting over primacy!

Let me therefore, begin this response by first agreeing that every name which you have mentioned in your article, I too have similarly unraveled some aspects of their narratives which weren't entirely wholesome (to put it charitably). The last one, Gilad Atzmon's, was here:

But that website took down my comment (now why would they do that?)! Fortunately, I had saved a local copy which is cached here:

Often times, as G. Edward Griffin also puts it, the sins of the 'left' are uncovered by their enemies on the 'right', and vice versa. The in-fighting among hegemonic pigs often betrays their criminal secrets. For an astute non-bigoted seeker of truth and justice for all, that's simply the low hanging fruits of the rotten tree to be plucked for forensic analysis. Especially, if they also happen to be the type-3 of Hitler's classification of people:

"In journalistic circles it is a pleasing custom to speak of the Press as a 'Great Power' within the State. As a matter of fact its importance is immense. One cannot easily overestimate it, for the Press continues the work of education even in adult life. Generally, readers of the Press can be classified into three groups: First, those who believe everything they read; Second, those who no longer believe anything; Third, those who critically examine what they read and form their judgments accordingly." (Mein Kampf, Vol. 1, Chapter X)

Otherwise, I for one do not have the infinite resources to dig out the dirt on all the hectoring hegemon pigs on the planet. Let them dig it out on each other. I'll only use it circumspectly. I cannot permit my mind, and my guard, to take vacation for even a single moment - for the 'devil' knows no race, color, cast, or creed! Minimally I need to protect myself from being tainted by your prejudices - but I also find your views interesting, and often worth refuting lest they taint the feeble of mind too comfortable in their own adjusted worldview.

So, back to your narrative, I find the race construct disturbing no matter who uses it, the antagonist, or the protagonist.

I quite agree that the Talmud is a major tortuous source of Jews' misanthropic ambitions as god's ubermensch created on earth to lord over the Goy. But not completely. Atheism too is not an unfamiliar imperial driving force in the same vein:

By that token, I could condemn your non-beliefs the same way - couldn't I? It is just logic.

People generally do not lie, cheat, deceive, murder, become water boys or house negroes for the ubermensch, or endeavor to conquer the 'untermenschen' by way of deception, by their race or religion - the political ponerologists advocating the psychopathic view of ubermensch not withstanding. In my humble view, people do so by choice (including perverse indoctrination and the 'banality of evil').

I am unwilling to condemn such misanthropes by their race, religion, caste, or creed � because, by its logic, I would unfairly have to condemn all peoples belonging to those sets. That is guilt by association! I see no difference between that, and the crimes of Nazism, Zionism. I condemn criminals only by their acts. To the extent that misanthropic doctrines from their books, cultural heritage, or tortuous philosophies might motivate them, well, there are at least 60 million white Anglo Saxon ubermensch Christian misanthropes alone in the Bible Belt of America trying to bring on Armageddon and Jesus! I think they far surpass the Jews in sheer numbers. Therefore, should I condemn all Christians for the twisted perversion of such a large number of criminals among them who think bombing other nations will lead to some Rapturous Nirvana? Or, perhaps the entire white Anglo Saxon population by their race alone, for between Jews and Christians, that's the entire Western civilization? By your logic, why not?

I find the following recipe which was legally averred at Nuremberg by Robert H. Jackson rather defining, reasonable, equitable, and wisely applicable to all cases of misanthropic thoughts that transform into inflicting actual harm upon others, whether by bombs, or by debt-enslavement, whether in the quest of Lebensraum, Zionistan, or one-world government:

"The intellectual bankruptcy and moral perversion of the Nazi regime might have been no concern of international law had it not been utilized to goosestep the Herrenvolk across international frontiers. It is not their thoughts, it is their overt acts which we charge to be crimes." (Nuremberg, Closing Speech)

I charge as crimes against humanity, the enactment of the 1913 Federal Reserve Act. All those who crafted it, proposed it, enabled it, aided and abetted in its passage as well as in its obfuscation over the past 100 years, and benefitted from its enslaving action of the entire nation, are more appropriate candidates for being accorded the full 'enemy combatant' protocol at Guantanamo Bay than its present indigent inhabitants! For indeed, in that one enabling Act, is accumulated the combined evil of all the evil that has followed over the past 100 years, including all the wars, its 100 million victims, and entire nations entrapped in un-payable debt to steal their public commons! That first monumental crime is independent of the race - all the Congressman who signed the Bill under the stewardship of Bernard Barauch and Col. House, including the President of the United States at the time who approved it, and the vast numbers of newsmedia and PR spokespersons of both political parties who got on the Hegelian Dialectic bandwagon of sloganeering "banking reform" and filled the newspapers with their bullshit, were Christian white folks right alongside the Jewish white folks. (The blacks in America at the time only lived in their ghettos after their escape/emancipation from the clutches of their white Christian Anglo Saxon plantation owners, and therefore can't rightly be counted among the races who contributed to the hijacking of America.)

So, are all the white Anglo Saxons of America guilty of that first monumental crime against the American public, and the world's peoples? Are they all complicit in hiding it, spinning it, obfuscating it? But you have already absolved Eustace Mullins. I apologize for using an obvious truism to make the blatant point that by your criterion of guilt by association, you should have dismissed the good Samaritan Christian Mullins too without reading, just like the anti-Semitic choir does!

In a previous communication regarding another article way back in September 2009, titled: 'Jewish disinfo the specialty of popular Rense columnist', I had also noted your zeal for gross, and what I felt at the time was ignorant, generalization. In that article, you had carelessly maligned Islam in the same breadth as Christianity by asserting: "Throughout human history, the Talmud is the heart of darkness, and the Bible and the Qu'ran are complicit in concealing this fact." I had written to you:

'As a Muslim, I would only like to inquire on your statement: "Qu'ran are complicit in concealing this fact". Would you kindly let me know what you have based that assertion upon? While I might concur with anyone that the Talmud contains some really abhorrent things, nay shocking things, I also wonder who among the Jews really believes in what's in their old books…. but that's not the purpose of this letter to you. It is to only inquire the basis upon which you chose to malign Islam, by asserting that the Qur'an is deliberately complicit in concealing some abhorrence, some distortions in Judaism like its Talmudic teachings. As you surely [must] know [Islam], both Prophet Moses and Jesus are revered in the Qur'an as among the Great Prophets. Qur'an assert that God sent both Moses, and Jesus, among many other prophets, to mankind, to every people, and each time sent a new one to correct the erroneous man-made teachings that had cropped in the previous prescription over time, or to generalize the particularized teachings, as the case between Moses followed by Jesus, with Prophet Muhammad being the last one to correct all past manmade errors, and to generalize God's religion to all mankind. So, while one may not believe in Islam, or any religion [for that matter], the fact of your assertion being false [in the context of Qur'an and Islam] is plainly manifest. Thus I inquire if it was inadvertent, malicious, or merely ignorant. And if none of those, then kindly do enlighten me the reason for your statement. We can always learn from each other � no one has monopoly over knowledge.'

That moment onwards, I could easily have dismissed you on the same grounds as you have dismissed all the Jews: "[Anglo Saxon] writers inevitably [distort and prevaricate], blur and twist the contours of any argument to invariably shape it into advantage for only themselves."!But I still read your present article with care, and I am even taking the time to respond to you, once again - since it warrants a response - because I refuse to bow to the vagaries of your personal prejudices and myopia lest it infect others. You already may have a great following among the white supremacists I imagine, despite perhaps your own aversion to it - I hope.

Finally, I do thank you Mr. John Kaminski for your often provocative and bold viewpoints, whether or not one agrees with them. I think it is courageous and un-inhibited people like yourself who continually push on the acceptable envelop of thought and its public expression, and thus widen the discourse space for many more ordinary people like myself to have our tiny voice (for what little that's worth). Minimally, the brownshirt thought-police will chase you before they might chase me (or perhaps they will soon lock up all the non-conformists regardless)! Be that as it may, let's not get carried away as the self-proclaimed avantgarde in provocative thought, into realms of moral absurdity, especially in falling prey to the antagonists own vices: guilt by association, the race factor, arrogance, and ignorance.

Thank you.

Zahir Ebrahim

Project Humanbeingsfirst.org

Source URL: http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2010/02/respto-johnkaminski-jewish-writers.html

Source PDF: http://humanbeingsfirst.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/respto-johnkaminski-jewish-writers-feb282010.pdf
Kaminski article URL: http://www.johnkaminski.info/pages/the_next_chapter/too_late_for_trust.htm

Ghassan Khatib

While the Palestinian Authority (PA) seems prone to agree to "indirect talks" with Israel without the latter undertaking any meaningful freeze of Jewish settlement expansion in the West Bank, the Israeli government is making only provocations, rendering the resumption — let alone success — of peace talks more unlikely, especially in the near future.

Israel lately undertook several measures that Palestinian officials insist reveal Israel's determination to perpetuate its military occupation of Palestinian land and eliminate the possibility of establishing a viable Palestinian state. One of these measures is a decision by Israel Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu last week to add two ancient mosques, the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron and the Bilal Ibn Rabah Mosque in Bethlehem, to Israel's so-called heritage list.

The two sites are located in the Palestinian heartland, which implies that Israel intends to annex the two shrines, a prospect vehemently rejected by Palestinians.

Prior to the Israeli decision, Western officials involved in efforts to revive the peace process indicated that the resumption of talks between Israel and the PA would occur in a few weeks. Tony Blair, the Quartet's envoy to the Middle East peace process, was quoted as saying that "substantial progress" had been made in US efforts to get the two sides to restart stalled talks.

PA leader Mahmoud Abbas who has been on an extensive tour in three continents to explain Palestinian grievances to his hosts, has spoken of the consolidation of a Palestinian culture of peace, telling the European Parliament that peace could only be achieved through negotiations, not violence. He seems to have toned down his earlier insistence that the resumption of peace talks with Israel take place only after Israel agrees to freeze settlement expansion.

The latest Israeli provocations, however, with regards to the seizure of the two mosques, seem to have poisoned whatever atmosphere of optimism or modicum of goodwill US Envoy to the Middle East George Mitchell may have succeeded in fostering during his latest visit to the region. One Palestinian official intimated that Palestinian consent to resume stalled peace talks with Israel would be purely for show. "If we agreed to resume the talks under the present circumstances, we would be doing so solely to please and appease the Americans who apparently want to make an achievement of some sort, however shallow it may be."

Another official, Ghassan Khatib, who heads the Palestinian Government Press Office, voiced a similar view, saying that the resumption of talks with Israel would in no way mean that peace or justice were at hand. Speaking to Al-Ahram Weekly from his office in Ramallah, Khatib said peace talks would be "pointless" if the two sides didn't agree on three central points: a time ceiling to end the talks; the features and borders of the would-be Palestinian state; and the terms of reference — namely UN resolutions pertaining to the Palestinian issue, including the right of return guaranteed for Palestinian refugees uprooted when Israel was created more than 60 years ago.

Asked if he thought that indirect talks would be sufficient to resolve these defining issues, Khatib said that no amount of talks — direct or indirect — would be sufficient. "The problem lies not in holding more talks; the real problem has to do with Israel's refusal to end the occupation."

Khatib said the coming weeks and months would either witness more paralysis, which might precipitate violence, or a resumption of peace talks whose predictable failure would bring about the same. "My impression is that there can be no serious peace talks, let alone a peace agreement, with this rightwing [Israeli] government which, instead of facilitating the peace process, is actually poisoning the overall atmosphere by stealing more Palestinian land, seizing mosques and building more settlements."

This pessimism is shared by most — if not all — PA and Fatah officials. Ahmed Qurei, a former Palestinian prime minister and parliament speaker, told reporters recently that, "the prospects for a peace agreement with Israel are very dim," and that the "next five years will be very, very difficult." He said Israel was "still unwilling to bring itself to recognise the Palestinian people's right to freedom, independence and human dignity."

While some Palestinian leaders, including Ismail Haniyeh, the Gaza-based prime minister, are already calling for a new uprising against Israel as means of exiting the untenable present stalemate, some PA officials are entertaining a French proposal, which still needs to be refined, that would recognise an undefined Palestinian state within 18 months.

"We welcome these European declarations, especially those of France, which we consider to have adopted a new attitude amidst the current political stalemate," Nabil Shaath, a prominent PA spokesman, was quoted by the Maan News Agency as saying.

However, such a state without defined borders would, many Palestinians and their supporters contend, be a prescription for the liquidation of the Palestinian cause since it would enable Israel — perhaps under a rubric of land swapping — to consolidate its control of East Jerusalem and additional large chunks of the West Bank.

The PA has repeatedly said that it would never accept a state with temporary borders.

Photo by Gill Swain

I was 12 years old when my family forced to move from Hebron, on 1977. I don't know if I was lucky or not, as I was born in this historical holy city, which is located in the south of the West Bank (WB).

I was born in the old city, very close to the Abraham Mosque. Immediately after the WB was occupied in 1967, the occupation government established the first settlement on the Hebron citizens' land, which called Qiriat Arbaa. The majority of the settlers who are living there are American.

In the early 70s, the settlers in Hebron were less than 100. They amount to almost 8,000 in Hebron these days. They never travel without their arms and the guardianship of the Israeli Occupation Force IOF.

The obvious thing I can remember in my childhood is the settlers attacks. They used to pass by Abraham Mosque in troops under the guardianship of  the IOF, hitting any Palestinian child on the road, destroying anything they saw (windows, plants, etc.). I was struck several times by them… why??? Just because I am a Palestinian. As a child, I used to escape at the moment I would see them coming. Many families (including mine) were forced to move from this area to protect their children from the settlers' attacks. 

After the Egyptian-Israeli (peace) agreement in 1978, the Israeli government started to increase the number of the settlements and the settlers in teh WB and Gaza. It's the same policy they did after the Oslo agreement. Gradually they started to change the demographic facts in the WB, including Hebron City with focusing on the old city, mainly the vicinity of Abraham Mosque.

In the 70s and 80s, the settlers used to go to the mosque, doing their religious practices under the guardianship of the IOF until Ramadan of 1994 after Baruch Goldstein, who perpetrated the Abrahham Mosque Massacre (29 Muslims were killed and more than 125 others wounded during Al Fajr prayer). After this massacre, the Israeli occupation gifted Goldstein and the settlers by dividing the mosque to two zones, for the Muslims and the Jews. After that, it became very difficult for Muslims to enter to the mosque. It's easier to pass through an airport than to enter the mosque. The security measurements they use include ID check, physical check, passing through examination machine (the settlers are excluded).

The occupation PM, Benjamin Netanyahu announced 2 days ago that the Abraham Mosque and Bilal Mosque (in Bethlehem) are Israeli heritage sites.

Stealing the land, the history, and the heritage……. is The Israeli  key to peace in the Middle East.

Hence, I urge you to go about carrying out your mission with utmost care, wisdom, and sagacity. I also want to remind you that several American envoys to the Muslim world have effectively failed to achieve what they were supposed to achieve, namely fostering healthy relations between Muslims and America that would be based on mutual trust, respect, and friendship.

It is my firm belief though that these people, whose efforts should never be underestimated, failed in their missions, not because of the lack of trying nor the absence of good will and rectitude.

My impression, which I believe is shared by many Muslims, is that these honorable men and women did not correctly diagnose the serious ailments plaguing America's relations with the Muslim world. In truth, past American envoys to the Muslim world acted very much as Public Relations emissaries, whose central concern was that Muslims misunderstood America.

In short, they thought that America was only having an "image problem" in the Muslim world, and that if only the United States worked a little bit harder in terms of presenting itself and its policies more skillfully, that tarnished image would be rehabilitated and Muslims would fall in love with Uncle Sam.

History of Wrong Deeds

My Brother in Islam and humanity: From our vantage point, the real problem besetting America's relations with Muslims goes far beyond the image problem. We truly feel that the US government is "tormenting" Muslims in many parts of the world, such as Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq , Pakistan, Lebanon to mention some examples.

In occupied Palestine, America has been enabling and empowering Israel — a state that has much in common with Nazi Germany — to kill us, destroy our homes, steal our land, and banish us from our ancestral land. Moreover, whenever we sought to redress that bad situation at the UN Security Council, America would just veto any resolution that would have given us a modicum of justice.

This brazen alliance with the oppressors on America's part frustrated many Muslims and Arabs, prompting them occasionally to embark on doing things they probably should not have done. You know, people to whom evil is done, often do evil in return.

Even today, the United States, which was as silent as a graveyard during Israel's manifestly criminal onslaught against the helpless people of the Gaza Strip last year, is trying now to kill the Goldstone report, which exposed Israeli criminality and called for the possible prosecution of suspected Israeli war criminals.

The United States has had more than fifty years to make peace in Palestine. However, instead of forcing Israel to give up the spoils of war and grant Palestinians the right to freedom from the shackles of occupation and racism, America has always made sure to further strengthen Israeli militarily and bolster its arrogance of power.

Eventually, this unrestricted embrace of Zionism enabled Israel to irreversibly kill the two-state solution, leaving us with the ominous, but realistic alternative of open-ended conflict.

One Palestinian intellectual, Walid Khalidi, once referred to the United States as "the tormentor of the Palestinian people." Khalidi's words are not an overstatement. In fact, the opposite may well be true.

In Lebanon, a few years ago, Israel blanket-bombed Lebanon, annihilating and maiming thousands of innocent people whose only "guilt" was their weakness and military inferiority vis-à-vis Israel.

In fact, the Israeli air force dropped more than 2 million cluster-bomblets on Lebanon, enough to kill two million children, including people yet to be born. Instead of hearing the United States saying: "Stop it", we heard American officials from the president downward singing the songs of praise for Israel as if these innocent victims were children of  lesser humanity.

Iraq and Afghanistan

Moreover, In Iraq, one is really frustrated as to where to begin and where to end when talking about America's crimes and days of infamy in Iraq. America invaded, occupied and destroyed that Arab country based on the mendacious claim that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD).  True, Saddam Hussein was a tyrant, but are America's Arab puppets paragons of virtue and democracy?

A few years before the American occupation of Iraq, former secretary of state Madeline Albright made some telling remarks about the death of nearly a million Iraqi children as a result of US-led sanctions against the Arab country. She said, "If it is good for America, it is worth it."

I am sure you understand that only a human devil can reach this level of depravity and evil.

Regarding Afghanistan, American and other NATO forces are raining death on Afghan people in the Helmand province, killing many civilians. US military officials would claim it happened by mistake. Well, but mistakes are done a few times, and when made nearly on a daily basis and thousands of people are killed, it means "mistakes" are actually "the real policy".

In any case, when the number of civilian victims is so high as in Afghanistan and Palestine, even intent becomes irrelevant.

I am sure that had these unwept, helpless civilians been Jews or Christians, the NATO pilots would have been much more careful.

Dear Brother: Muslims want a relationship with America based on honesty and fairness, and above all on justice. I am saying so because the US policy toward Muslims has been almost completely devoid of honesty and fairness.

Nearly every new American administration declares from the outset that fostering democracy and human rights in the Arab world would be at the top of its agenda. However, the truth is that the policy pursued then represents the exact antithesis of America's declarations.

In the past few years, the United States actually encouraged certain Arab states to torture their own citizens by transferring "terror suspects" to these police states, where they underwent all sorts of physical and psychological torture. The so-called "renditions" were a stigma of shame at the forehead of both America and the Arab regimes.

In fact, the United States has effectively transformed several Arab regimes into agents helped by the American intelligence to serve America's illegitimate global interests.

Conflicting Interests?

These regimes do not represent the free will of the Arab-Muslim people. They are more answerable to Washington than they are to their own masses. In addition, they value the "legitimacy" that comes from America's acceptance more than that which comes from their own people's acceptance. 

For example, the American-envisaged steel wall being built along the border between Egypt and the Gaza Strip is rejected by up to 99 percent of the Egyptian people. Yet it is being imposed, thanks to America's approval of the evil structure.

Does not the United States realize that this wall amounts to passing a death penalty on more than 1.5 million innocent human beings, whose only "crime" was that they elected a political party that Israel and America did not like?

To be sure, America has the right to protect its interests. However, America has no right, moral or legal, to murder and starve people because they exercised their democratic right and elected a political party called "Hamas".

Besides, why is it that Israel has the right to elect clear-cut thugs and certified war criminals, such as Avigdor Lieberman, Ehud Barak, and Benyamin Netanyahu, just to name a few, while the Palestinian people are not supposed to elect a party like Hamas?

Do terror, criminality, and racism become kosher when assuming a Jewish face? Is Israel above the laws of God and man?

Muslims all over the world, including in Palestine, have no inherent hostility toward the people of the United States.

We have no problem with the American First Amendment and civil liberties. We are not against the United States because we hate the American life style. Our problem with the United States stems from hostile American policies that are killing us and murdering our children. 

In short, America must reconcile what it preaches with what it does, because otherwise, America cannot just keep lying to Muslims (and non-Muslims) as if  our people were blind, deaf, and dumb.

Finally, I hope and pray that you will have the courage to communicate our grievances to the White House, as I am sure you will communicate its concerns to us.

Furthermore, I would advise you to be always mindful of the Qur'an's eighth Aya (verse) of Surat Al-Ma’idah:

"O ye who believe! stand out firmly for Allah, as witnesses to fair dealing, and let not the hatred of others to you make you swerve to wrong and depart from justice. Be just: that is next to piety: and fear Allah. For Allah is well-acquainted with all that ye do." [Al-Ma’idah, 8]

I have chosen this verse because justice is not only a Muslim value; it is actually a universal value, without which life on earth is corrupted.
Once again, I call on the Almighty to help you carry out your mission in the best way.

http://www.islamonline.net/servlet/Satellite?c=Article_C&cid=1265890427629&pagename=Zone-English-Muslim_Affairs%2FMAELayout##ixzz0oUtCY5W6

This "incident" is only one episode of an ongoing series of collapses which jeopardize the safety of residents and passers-by alike in the town of Silwan and the old city of Jerusalem. 

Just last year, it was a United Nations-affiliated school in East Jerusalem that took the hit when a landslide caused one of the school's floors to collapse over the heads of the stunned students injuring 14 Palestinian schoolgirls. 

The looming menace of structural damage and hazardous cracks is omnipresent in the old city, haunting every Palestinian citizen living in that entire area; for tomorrow it could be anyone's house, commercial propriety or even mosque; and of course should any of these buildings survive the aforementioned risks, there will always be possible future land confiscations and arbitrary demolition orders. 

Now the real "smuggling" goes down through these Israeli tunnels (and contrary to the ones in Gaza; it does not involve the trafficking of canned food, milk or medicine), as according to a report issued by Al-Aqsa Foundation for Religious Endowments and Heritage; many Islamic-era artifacts and valuable antiquities are being stolen by the Israeli Occupation forces and removed from the Palestinian territories to unknown places. 

Whereas Gaza's network of underground tunnels that reach the Egyptian side of Rafah are constructed out of despair and absolute necessity by a besieged and cornered population, Jerusalem's underground mining is carried out by -and with the tight guardianship of- the Israeli military; allegedly to unearth historical evidence for the presence of King David in that area when in reality these operations are solely driven by a salivating desire to Judaize the entire city and drastically alter its Palestinian identity.  

Needless to say; these Israeli tunnels are dug freely and openly; its accelerated mining activities and daily construction go unabated and unchallenged by the international community, no one went out of his way to "think outside the box" to come up with a brilliant scheme of super steel walls and cutting-edge monitoring technologies to try and halt these illegal underground tunnels, it does not even get sufficient media coverage, and of course that makes perfect sense, because evidently nowadays unless it involves an exaggerated malicious feud over a football match or a six-year-old boy on a home-made helium balloon; stories from occupied East Jerusalem simply do not make the cut. 

And with each Israeli violation in Jerusalem; The frustratingly disjointed Arab league and the lamentable Organization of Islamic conference tend to grow a thicker callous skin, splashing around in the safe, familiar water of political pragmatism, issuing the same old recycled "strong-worded" condemnations (which by the way are a dime a dozen); never really taking any long strides outside the confines of what we have all become accustomed to over the years despite the ever-increasing existential threats to Al-Aqsa Mosque and Dome of the Rock which are both considered the oldest surviving examples of early Islamic architecture and religious heritage. 

Everything is a myth until it’s too late to face the fact that it’s reality; and sadly, that's exactly the case with our perception of what's happening right now in Jerusalem, Unfortunately, it seems we have somehow over the years mastered the art of not caring, we turn a blind eye to the Israeli Occupation Forces' daily exercises of humiliating the City’s citizens and desecrating its holy sites, we know that it is "easier" to sweep everything under the rug and pretend that we're not there yet, but make no mistake; the absolute worst of what could ever happen to Jerusalem is happening right now, warning signs are far behind us, and the fact that we have managed to fail miserably in acknowledging them does not make what’s happening any less real and frightening.

It is not the place of a plebeian living comfortably in California in the United States of America – where no one is shooting at his family, nor demolishing his home, nor subjecting him to suffer Jews only roads nor the dehumanizing checkpoints on every mile – to  critique the monumental struggle of a mighty people barely surviving a genocidal conquest of their ancestral lands, where, just to exist daily in dignity after burying one's children shot in the head is to resist, where, just to not forget without going insane is to resist, where, to fight the tanks with only stones despite the label of terrorist' is to resist.

And far be it for any mortal to critique the gentle Jew among a population of 20-60 million world Jewry who dares to courageously stand up for what is decent and moral, who bears witness for crimes against humanity against one's own tribe, who resolves to bring to her people the news of what she saw with her own two eyes in Palestine.

But to also not point out the palpably obvious is a travesty of both thought and justice. For, in order for the monumental struggle of the Palestinians to result in anything other than glossy book publishing, and Peace Prizes, one perhaps will have to incur the wrath of both the moralist as well as the tyrant. And so be it. I ain't writing this to win a popularity contest, to make a living from narrating other people's misery, to win elections by seeking representation, or to ingratiate myself with the victims or their moral champions. Effort is great – but on a treadmill it is wasting precious time on endless trail of red herrings.

Anna Baltzer, a wonderful human being, and Mustafa Barghouti, a courageous
leader of a beleaguered people, are both riding high on platitudes. It is unfortunate that they exhibit little forensic understanding of the facts of the matter beyond the Israeli military occupation which they have lived and witnessed daily. The unvarnished and hidden only in plain-sight reality which begets the golem, at least in my view, is this, this, this, and this. [1] A thorough due diligence of the cited material and some  un-emotional reflection makes the endless trail of red herrings apparent. [2] Power only respects power. Not platitudes, not appeals to morality, and not narratives.

Please keep making shocking presentations showing the brutality of the golem, keep appearing on comedy shows amidst the applause of the partisans and the curse of the zealots, it sure looks good in America. It also looks good for the Jews – one of their own angels once again boldly speaks the authentic moral voice in favor of a beleaguered humanity as “it's in line with the tradition of social justice that has been the pride of Jewish people”. Yes indeed, and as my irreverent Palestinian friend also says “We run from Jew to Jew, they create the problem, and also argue the solution, they control the full spectrum of our discourse as well as our existence.” Dismissing the Palestinian voice as being merely cynical, or irrational and requiring the Jewish authentication to have legitimacy, it's just  wonderful to make colorful presentations to universities and to appear on mainstream television in America to attempt to project Palestine's misery on the American psyche.

The purpose, one of course presumes, is to inform the ignorant Americans of what's happening in Palestine so that, one logically ventures to presume again, the newly informed public with their mighty democratic vote will finally rush to alter the destiny of the Palestinian People. [3]

Sadly so, and contrary to what most people have been led to believe, lack of knowledge isn't the chain that is anchoring the superbly conscionable American public down from bringing justice to Palestine, to Iraq, to Afghanistan, to Lebanon, to Pakistan, and to the Grand Chessboard being played for the winner takes all high stakes gambit of one-world government. [4]

This truth should be self-evident and is easily demonstrable. Simply examine what the United States has done to Iraq in the past 8 years before its own public's eyes. That isn't at all a state-secret, nor an open secret. We have Abu Ghrieb for instance whose pictures were splashed even in the mainstream news – far more than Jenin or Gaza ever were. We have the exposé which gallantly revealed how the Pentagon Generals created the message machine to fool the American public into supporting the invasion of Iraq on fabricated pretexts. [5] With all that knowledge before their eyes, one of course sees Main Street USA filled with American protesters demanding the hanging of their leaders after the disclosures of missing WMD, the horrendous torture of civilians, and the  complete devastation of even the DNA of Mesopotamia for eons to come, right?
[6]

But wait, why bother to go that far overseas searching for sympathy among the conscionable peoples of the United States of America for those untermensch 'unworthy victims' who share the same cultural baggage with the Palestinians thus automatically extending that 'unworthiness' to each other. How about their ownselves? The American protesters surely choked their nation's thoroughfares
bringing business as usual to a grinding halt when the American banksters plundered their own nation through their own elected representatives before their very eyes last October, right? [7]

None of that is particularly secret as perhaps some feel that the plight of the Palestinians is from the American public. Those among them who want to know about the reality of “imperial mobilization” can easily learn so, it's not a state
secret. And those who do already know, as in the aforementioned instances, well, they still continue to live on in their own dream states not only unfazed by the desecrated 'untermensch' humanity, but the theft of their own nation in plainsight hasn't motivate them a heck of a lot. Can any sensible analysis deny this grotesque reality?

The entire premise of if Americans only knew then they'd surely bring justice to the world and all will live happily ever after, has now empirically been proven to be entirely specious. [8] An absurdity. For Americans are no more or less moral than the rest of the spectating world. Including the 8 million Palestinians living in Diaspora. That is easily demonstrable by how many set sail with the courageous, courageous, former American Congresswoman to attempt to break the blockade of Gaza with basic medicines and supplies. [9] Imagine, instead of the lonely Dignity, there were one million Dignities? In a world's population of almost 7 billion, and West's own 2 billion comfort seeking zombies and plethora of philosophers and activists, one couldn't mobilize a civilian force of conscience of 2-10 million human beings willing to risk their discomfort in sailing to Gaza to stop the genocide going on before our very eyes? Administering a medicine below its recommended dosage for the disease at hand only makes the body immune to it having no impact on the malady in much the same way as not applying sufficient imploding force to create critical mass also does not trigger the chain reaction necessary to set off a nuclear bomb. Symbolic expression no more initiates a nuclear chain reaction than gives pause for concern to the hectoring hegemons.

The shoah of the Palestinians isn't something in the yesteryear for which the “never again” vows are repeatedly taken in the halls of the Holocaust Museum. Nor is it the indescribable genocide of centuries past which colonized the land of the Native Americans before one living today was ever born. It is happening right here, right now, in our own time, and so what of it? High minded people can't be bothered with other people's existential problems other than at best, some weekend show of bravado of the conscionable and some whispered prayers of the pious! If there was efficacy in such acts, then wishes would be horses and beggars would surely be riding. But we see that this does not happen. People continue to suffer under the jackboots of the Nazis, old and new.

What worthy moralists penning narratives and/or walking the beleaguered victims safely past checkpoints don't appear to comprehend is the notion of efficacy: the difference between applying band-aids to symptoms vs. curing the systemic illness by accurately diagnosing, and then efficaciously antidoting
the root cause. Perhaps deliberately. Perhaps thoughtlessly. Perhaps the flock is calculatingly misled by the multitude of priestdoms who lead them in the feel-good dissipation of their energies into red herrings and “focus groups” while fait
accompli is seeded in its backdrop. [10] That should be self-evident. But apparently, it isn't to many.

So, in my view, when offering narratives to the public thinking that morality, or knowledge equates to action, never mind efficacy, one is either creating or chasing endless red herrings. [11]

It has certainly worked wonders for “arguably the most important intellectual alive” in selling his narratives. [12] And so too for the two hundred other Jewish voices of dissent, or perhaps the number is two thousand? Or is it twenty  housand? How many have created tax-exempt foundations, like the nemesis does, to donate all those proceeds to the Palestinian cause; used it for purchasing a newsmedia or a mainstream newspaper; set up an AIPAC, a JINSA, and one hundred think-tanks to create competing policy proposals to counter AEI's craftsmanship? And it also works great for everyone who cheers them on – for it's soothing to the conscience to run safely on the treadmill.

When peace prizes are awarded to the victims for the superlative narratives of their own, or to their exponents among their oppressor's civilization, it's  covetously appreciated and becomes their badge of honor. [13] The fact that they are sharing it with bloody murders doesn't seem to cross their mind, nor the fact that the whiteman is in fact mocking the 'Negro'. [14] Victims trip over themselves to welcome the new whiteman as heroes. Talk show circuits naturally follow, with more narratives to boot. And the annual Nakba commemoration is of course an event to  look forward to. All the great speeches that get made there, all the slogans that are raised, and all the lofty assertions that are made.

Amidst all this energized symbolic weekend run on the treadmill for most people, and perhaps a lifestyle for a handful of others of courageously putting band-aids on visible wounds while doing little for curing the systemic disease, the only people all this wonderful dissent doesn't work for, and hasn't work for, are the bleeding Palestinians exhausting themselves out at ground Zero.

The enemy is simply far superior and far more cunning in waging a full spectrum overwhelming war by way of deception. Those on the ground see only the most overt of its instruments – the guns, the walls, but not the forces which drive them.

With no hope for any of the armed to the teeth standing armies from around the world coming to their rescue, they clutch at straws. And the Internationals, as courageous as they are in putting their own lives on the line with some like Rachel Corrie, Tom Hurndall, and so many others, paying for their personal quest for justice with their own lives, provide that bale of straw to the Palestinians. But no solutions. Those in Diaspora are already settled someplace while admittedly still holding onto the keys to their demolished homes now left behind. And those at ground Zero in Palestine continue to suffer the privilege of great loquaciousness of their brethren in Diaspora who do indeed try to serve their former family members well from the relative safety of their new homes in the West. Their weekend protest marches, the shouting and venting anger at the Caligula, the symbolic pins, T-shirts, posters, and colorful flag-waving, etceteras, and back to the pursuit of their 'American Dream' on Monday morning, 8 am.

If this depiction offends the pious, well, the reflection in the mirror is more grotesque than the reality outside. It is our silence, our apathy, our un-courage, our co-option, our lack of skill to appreciate the diabolicalness of the enemy, to understand its sources of power, to fathom its limitless deep pockets and the fount which replenishes it, to appreciate its long range Machiavellian planning with red herrings being an integral part of its vast arsenal of waging wars by way of deception, and finally, the paucity of a superior intellect to pursue the efficacious instead of the 'glamourous', all of which entirely enables and emboldens that evil among mankind.

The “pastrami sandwich” example acutely illustrates just one instance of being out-classed in all dimensions by a far more cunning and sophisticated foe. Ariel Sharon noted to Winston Churchill III in 1973, six years into Israel's military occupation of remaining Palestine: “We'll make a pastrami sandwich of them. We'll insert a strip of Jewish settlement, right across the West Bank, so that in 25 years time, neither the United Nations, nor the United States, nobody, will be able to tear it apart.” [15]

And the truth of those diabolical words is visible in the maps reproduced below. It is still on-going. But there is no evidence of that comprehension in anything the Palestinian leadership, or their moral supporters have proffered up since, neither at the Oslo Accord, nor at the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to the 'Negro' by the whiteman for his dutiful compliance with their discourse, and nor in the wonderful rehash of narratives of Anna Baltzer and Mustafa Barghouti in 2009, 36 years later. They vacuously talk of peace-peace, justice-justice, rights-rights, security-security, without betraying, at least in that appearance on American television, any understanding of the forces which drive their nemesis.

This is once again unequivocally demonstrated in these saintly closing remarks of Mustafa Barghouti, interrupting the very passionate moral voice of Anna Baltzer making the pair a fantastic must-see nourishment for the soul on American television's finest moral hour: “If I may say so, Israel has tried for sixty years the language of power, to achieve security. The only road that was not tried fully, is to have peace with Palestinians. And I am sure, this is the best guarantee for security.”

Is security what Israel wants? Yes, surely, but only after all the natives have been dispatched to their reservations or transferred out of the Holy Lands. But before then? For the past 60 years, has security been the successive Israeli governments primary quest as the learned Dr. Mustafa Barghouti played to the American audience? Or has it all along been the conquest of Palestine that every Palestinian on the ground knows as unarguable fact just as surely as the picture of their beautiful child now shot dead right through the eyes and burned alive by phosphorous bombs that puts all the Jews' hypocritical laments of Shoah to shame? [16] While Jon Stewart may be forgiven his inbred American wisdom of conveniently forgetting the parallels of how America was settled by the whiteman, all others not peering down the rabbit hole or bleating their own victimizers' mantras already know that by continually fueling conflict, taking 10 under the guise of fighting the 'barbarians' in purported self-defense, and returning 1 if the 'terrorists' behave, has been the primal modus operandi of the golem for similarly re-settling another paradise lost. [17]

The veracity of that observation too, based on the profound wisdom of David Ben Gurion: “what is inconceivable in normal times is possible in revolutionary times”, and the nonsensicalness of the premise uttered by the respected Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, are all self-evident in the maps below.

These maps depict the real unvarnished reality on the ground: “However the different party maps have nothing to do with reality, a fact well known to the people who drafted them. The maps were produced to feed addiction (a) of the populace. This is virtual reality. The actual reality on the ground has been created continuously, consistently and deliberately, since 1967, by all Israeli governments, Labor, Likud and Kadima.” [18]

That is precisely why Palestinians have continually lost their struggle to wonderful narratives, to chest beating, chest thumping, and intellectualizing their moral struggle in poetry and songs, photographs and theater, to Peace processes and Accords, to maps handed them by their victimizers, and ultimately, to even using the vocabulary and constructs of the occupiers themselves to describe their own victimhood, all of which is dutifully rewarded with more land loss, and more peace prizes for playing the fool.

One ventures to predict that Anna Baltzer's poignant book is slated for a Pulitzer Prize for sure, or at least the Orwell Prize like native Palestinian Raja Shehadeh's acute narrative 'Palestinian Walks' in 2008. [19] If this chap, Dr. Mustafa Barghouti keeps up this charade before the West, keeps selling out his own long suffering people by spewing red herrings crafted for him by the whiteman, there is surely a peace prize in it for him as well. Perhaps these accolades have already been issued, just awaiting public announcement – as the map of Israel in Palestine rapidly reaches its final completion while Eretz Yisrael continues to be worked on in parallel.

To put some real efficacy to the resistance before fait accompli entirely seals the Palestinians' fate, and it's almost there, genuinely concerned people are gonna have to bite the bullet even at this late stage of conquest and go where neither the Palestinians, nor their moral exponents have shown any inclination to go. To the very DNA of Der Judenstat's strength.

Because, as with the secret of Samson's indomitable strength, this golem's hidden source of power lies deceptively elsewhere! [20] Not in Israel. Not in the White House, and not in the U.S. Congress. We have already seen them all bow together before another higher power with our very own eyes.

And that is the real Samson Option! Want to get rid of the golem? You gonna have to pay in spades by seeking and cutting off its locks. To do so requires skills, expertise, and resources often un-possessed by the ordinary plebeians rising to support the beleaguered victims. All we can do is make speeches, write books, and appear on  talk shows. All the victims can do is to exist to resist. And all their leadership can do is to find new ways to be co-opted. That's how they live longer, more willing they are to become the 'Negro' of Martin Luther King's scorn. [21] Without taking on the DNA with resources to back up the effort in a full spectrum assault to overwhelm their senses and their resources just as they do ours, all this dissent is a wonderful waste of precious time. It only helps the victimizers.

SEE orignal article to view maps! (link at bottom)

Time once seeded to fait accompli, simply becomes impractical to reverse.
Time is Zionism's best friend. Just look at the map and one can see it. All the while one is wasting it in not effectively addressing the root of the matter, newer generation of Zionists are born on that soil claiming birth-right. And newer victims are fed to the golem, but not just in Palestine. The world has brazenly and complicitly witnessed Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, the emerging arc of crisis in the Global Zone of Percolating Violence as annotated by Zbigniew Brzezinski before any crisis had materialized way back in 1996. The People of the United States themselves are the newest victims to behold. They all share the same common enemy.

Next time you make your outstanding presentations Anna, Mustafa, go there – show How Zionistan is the banksters' private baby for which they diabolically harness both the 'left' and the 'right' from amongst the Jews. Show how the name to which the Balfour Declaration is addressed controls the world through their full spectrum control of world's finance and resources, and what its remaining agenda is.

Show in whose palace the Treaty of Versailles was signed which spelled the real beginning of end of Palestine for its indigenous peoples. Show why and how it has not been an idle boast of the godfathers: “give me control of a nation's money supply and I care not who makes its laws”. Unmask their secret role in being the real financiers of Der Judenstat, and by virtue of their full spectrum control of the West's politicians, including those in the United States, of being the real prime-movers behind the primacy of Zionism and the criminal dispossession and systematic eradication of the Palestinian populations from their own ancestral lands.

If fair punishments are ever to be awarded for their crimes against humanity for just the past 100 years in any Just court of law, Adolph Eichmann would have to be retroactively let go by resurrecting his soul from his grave with high honors and awarded multiple peace prizes plus compensation, in order to administer hanging and extraction of restitution as the graduated scale of ultimate punishment for the ultimate prime-movers of all wars and pestilence before which
their errand boys' and patsies' crimes against humanity pale in comparison. [22]

Go for the jugular of the Zionists' hidden only in plainsight source of strength today by seeking the billions, or even the paltry millions from your wealthy kin and funding multi-spectrum legal assault across the world and across the board upon the first harbingers of world's misery – just as the Zionists won Der Judenstat by legal means, even if only by a sovereign's word.

And watch your own world crumble around you for taking on the real source of Samson's power, far quicker than what Israel has done to the Palestinian people.

That's why no one of any prominence with anything to lose treads there. That's why even the heavily protected past American Presidents have had their brains blown out, or attempted to be blown out, when they tread too close to that forbidden path. But if enough people of means and worldly wherewithal go there together with wit, courage, and play like grandmasters in a team rather than shocked idealists on a moral mission chasing 1000 red herrings, then, and only then, an effective battle will finally be waged against the real power source which fuels the golem. When such an effective struggle is genuinely waged, the final outcome will surely not be scripted as it entirely is at the present time.

The battle goes to those who can best out maneuver their opponent, as in Jujitsu, as in Muhammad Ali's rope-a-dope against George Forman, rather than always to the stronger. As Patrick Henry put it: “Besides, sir, we shall not fight our battles alone. There is a just God who presides over the destinies of nations, and who will raise up friends to fight our battles for us. The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active,
the brave.” [23]

That only works for battles with real teeth in them, and before fait accompli cements the outcome. Today, no native American can do anything except live on in memory.

Thank you.

Footnotes

[1] Zahir Ebrahim, Celebrating Israel's 60th Birthday in the 60th year of the Nakba May 15, 2008 http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2008/05/celebrating-israels-60th-birthday.html 

Zahir Ebrahim, At What Cost the Israel Lobby? : It's only an 'errand boy'!
Oct. 14, 2009 http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2009/10/respto-what-cost-israel-lobby-jeffgates.html 

Zahir Ebrahim, Is Zionism a sophisticated Hegelian Dialectic? Sept. 06,
2009
http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2009/09/is-zionism-hegelian-dialectic.html 

Zahir Ebrahim, Ebook: Reclaiming Palestine 2008 Omnibus June 04, 2008
http://humanbeingsfirst.wordpress.com/files/2008/06/reclaiming-palestine-2008-omnibus-june042008.pdf

[2] Zahir Ebrahim, The endless trail of red herrings, Feb. 28, 2007
http://humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2007/03/endless-red-herrings.html

[3] Zahir Ebrahim, Not-Voting is a 'YES' vote to Reject a Corrupt System
which thrives on the facade of Elections and Democracy! Oct. 22, 2008 http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2009/01/from-genesis-to-genocide-in-palestine.html   

http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2008/10/not-voting-is-yes-vote-to-reject-system.html  

[4] Zahir Ebrahim, Response to Financial Times Gideon Rachman's 'And now
for a world government' Dec. 11, 2008
http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2008/12/responseto-ft-gideon-rachman-worldgov.html

[5] DAVID BARSTOW, NYT, Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand,
April 20, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/us/20generals.html?_r=3&hp&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

[6] Zahir Ebrahim, America’s Shame, Preface to Prisoners of the  Cave, 2003,
http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2007/12/americas-shame.html#Peoples-Guilt

[7] Zahir Ebrahim, Why Not Be An Ostrich? Feb. 13, 2009
http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2009/02/why-not-be-anostrich-feb132009.html

Zahir Ebrahim, The Wrecked Ship of Fools, April 1 2009
http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2009/04/wrecked-ship-of-fools-apr12009.html

Zahir Ebrahim, Why Bluff Martial Law? Oct. 03, 2008
http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2008/10/why-bluff-martial-law.html

[8] Zahir Ebrahim, Prisoners of the Cave, 2003, Chapter 2
http://prisonersofthecave.blogspot.com/2007/04/chapter-2.html#The-Premise-If-Only-the-Americans-Knew

Zahir Ebrahim, Prisoners of the Cave, 2003, Chapter 3 Is Democracy Inimical
To Empire Building?
http://prisonersofthecave.blogspot.com/2007/04/chapter-3.html

[9] CNN, Cynthia McKinney on Israel's Ramming of The Dignity, December
30, 2008 Quote: “Well, I wouldn't call it accosting, I would call it ramming. Let's just call it as it is”,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZeNdIGI8os  

[10] George W. Bush, Quote: “It's like deciding – well I am going to decide policy based upon a focus group”, cited in Zahir Ebrahim, Prisoners of the Cave, Chapter 7
http://prisonersofthecave.blogspot.com/2007/04/chapter-7.html

Zahir Ebrahim, Manufacturing Dissent: Weapons of Mass Deception – The
Master Social Science June 01, 2008
http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2008/06/wmd-master-social-science.html

[11] Zahir Ebrahim, The endless trail of red herrings, Feb. 28, 2007
http://humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2007/03/endless-red-herrings.html

[12] Peter Schweizer, Noam Chomsky, Closet Capitalist, 2006
http://www.hoover.org/publications/digest/2912626.html

[13] Zahir Ebrahim, Letter to Editor Guardian: 2008 Orwell Prize for the
Palestinian Narrative of Nakba May 03, 2008
http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2008/05/letter-toguardian-2008-orwellprize.html

Jeff Halper in Canada Nobel Prize Nominee and Israeli Peace Activist
Speaking on the Siege of Gaza, January 22, 2009
http://www.caiaweb.org/node/1096

[14] Zahir Ebrahim, The Answer to the Burning Question du jour: Why was
President Obama Gifted the Nobel Peace Prize? How to win the Nobel
Peace Prize October 09, 2009
http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2009/10/how-to-win-nobel-peace-prize.html

A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin
Luther King (Jr.), pg. 307
http://books.google.com/books?id=k8uPHtrU8BsC&pg=PA307

Quote:
“The white establishment is skilled in flattering and cultivating emerging leaders. It presses its own image on them and finally, from imitation of manners, dress, and style of living, a deeper strain of corruption develops. This kind of Negro leader acquires the white man's contempt for the ordinary Negro. He is often more at home with the middle-class white than he is among his own people. His language changes, his location changes, his income changes, and ultimately he changes from the representative of the Negro to the white man into the white man's representative to the Negro. The tragedy is that too often he does not recognize what has happened to him.”

[15] From George S. Hishmeh, Special to The Daily Star, July 18, 2002. Cited in 'What for?' by Victoria Buch, Occupation Magazine, 22 April 2006
http://www.kibush.co.il/show_file.asp?num=34220

Quote:
“Winston S. Churchill III, grandson of the famed British prime minister, recalled last October at the National Press Club here a telling encounter he had had in 1973 with the hawkish Ariel Sharon, now the Israeli prime minister, about Zionist objectives. “What is to become of the Palestinians?” Churchill asked. “We’ll make a pastrami sandwich of them,” Sharon said. Churchill responded, “What?” “Yes, we’ll insert a strip of Jewish settlements in between the Palestinians, and then another strip of Jewish settlements right across the West Bank, so that in 25 years’ time, neither the United Nations nor the United States, nobody, will be able to tear it apart.”

[16] Zahir Ebrahim, From Genesis to Genocide in Palestine January 16, 2009 Zahir Ebrahim, Letter to Editor Palestinians' fate worse than Shoah! Jan
09, 2009
http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2009/01/palestinians-fate-worse-than-shoah.html

[17] Zahir Ebrahim, The endless trail of red herrings, Feb. 28, 2007
http://humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2007/03/endless-red-herrings.html

Zahir Ebrahim, Celebrating Israel's 60th Birthday in the 60th year of the
Nakba May 15, 2008
http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2008/05/celebrating-israels-60th-birthday.html

[18] Victoria Buch, Occupation Magazine, 22 April 2006, Op. cit.

[19] Zahir Ebrahim, Letter to Editor Guardian: 2008 Orwell Prize for the
Palestinian Narrative of Nakba May 03, 2008
http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2008/05/letter-toguardian-2008-orwellprize.html

[20] From Genesis to Genocide in Palestine : The Golem Is Not Jewish! Nov.
19, 2009
http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2009/11/genesis-to-genocide-golem-not-jewish.html

At What Cost the Israel Lobby? : It's only an 'errand boy'!, Oct. 14, 2009
http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2009/10/respto-what-cost-israel-lobby-jeffgates.html

[21] Martin Luther King. Op. cit.

[22] Zahir Ebrahim, Who is more guilty of monumental war crimes – the prime-movers or trigger pullers? April 09, 2009
http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2009/04/vanilla-or-chocolate-icing-ondevilscake.html

[23] Patrick Henry, March 23, 1775,
http://www.law.ou.edu/ushistory/henry.shtml

Anna Baltzer's videos embedded at the beginning of this article:

Anna Baltzer: Life In Occupied Palestine November 02, 2009, in 3 parts
http://essentialdissent.blogspot.com/2009/11/anna-baltzer-life-in-occupied-palestine.html

Anna Baltzer & Dr. Mustafa Barghouti on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart -Recorded Wednesday, October 28, 2009
http://www.annainthemiddleeast.com/video/index.html

Source URL:
http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2009/11/rescuing-thestruggle-for-palestine.html     

Source PDF:
http://humanbeingsfirst.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/rescuing-thestruggle-for-palestine-nov-222009i.pdf   

Source msword:
http://humanbeingsfirst.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/rescuing-thestruggle-for-palestine-nov-222009.doc 

The author, an ordinary researcher and writer on contemporary geopolitics, a minor justice activist, grew up in Pakistan, studied EECS at MIT, engineered for a while in high-tech Silicon Valley (patents here), and retired early to pursue other responsible interests. His maiden 2003 book was rejected by six publishers and can be read on the web at http://PrisonersoftheCave.org. He may be reached at http://Humanbeingsfirst.org.
Verbatim reproduction license at http://www.humanbeingsfirst.org#Copyright.

Far from impulsive and unexpected, Hamas's shift reflects a gradual evolution occurring over the past five years. The big strategic turn occurred in 2005, when Hamas decided to participate in the January 2006 legislative elections and thus tacitly accepted the governing rules of the Palestinian Authority (PA), one of which includes recognition of Israel. Ever since, top Hamas leaders have repeatedly declared they will accept a resolution of the conflict along the 1967 borders. The Damascus-based Khaled Meshal, head of Hamas's political bureau and
considered a hardliner, acknowledged as much in 2008. "We are realists," he said, who recognize that there is "an entity called Israel." Pressed by an Australian journalist on policy changes Hamas might make, Meshal asserted that the organization has shifted on several key points: "Hamas has already changed–we accepted the national accords for a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders, and we took part in the 2006 Palestinian elections."

Another senior Hamas leader, Ghazi Hamad, was more specific than Meshal, telling journalists in January 2009 that Hamas would be satisfied with ending Israeli control over the Palestinian areas occupied in the 1967 war–the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. In other words, Hamas would not hold out for liberation of the land that currently includes Israel.

Previously Hamas moderates had called at times for a tahdia (a minor truce, or "calm") or hudna (a longer-term truce, lasting as long as fifty years), which implies some measure of recognition, if only tacit. The moderates justified their policy shift by using Islamic terms (in Islamic history hudnas sometimes develop into permanent truces). Now leaders appear to be going further; they have made a concerted effort to re-educate the rank and file about the necessity of living side by side with their Jewish neighbors, and in so doing mentally prepare them for a permanent settlement. In Gaza's mosques pro-Hamas clerics have begun to cite the example of the famed twelfth-century Muslim military commander and statesman Saladin, who after liberating Jerusalem from the Crusaders allowed them to retain a coastal state in the Levant. The point is that if Saladin could tolerate the warring, bloodthirsty Crusaders, then today's Palestinians should be willing to live peacefully with a Jewish state in their midst.

The Saladin story is important because it provides Hamas with religious legitimacy and allows it to justify the change of direction to followers. Hamas's raison d'être rests on religious legitimation; its leaders understand that they neglect this at their peril. Western leaders and students of international politics should acknowledge that Hamas can no more abandon its commitment to Islamism than the United States can abandon its commitment to liberal democracy. That does not mean Hamas is incapable of change or compromise but simply that its political identity is strongly constituted by its religious legitimation.

It should be emphasized as well that Hamas is not monolithic on the issue of peace. There are multiple, clashing viewpoints and constituencies within the movement. Over the years I have interviewed more than a dozen leaders inside and outside the occupied territories. Although on the whole Hamas's public rhetoric calls for the liberation of all of historic Palestine, not only the territories occupied in 1967, a healthy debate has grown both within and without.

Several factors have played a role in the transformation. They include the burden of governing a war-torn Gaza and the devastation from Israel's 2008-09 attack, which has caused incalculable human suffering and increasing public dissatisfaction in Gaza with Hamas rule.

Before the 2006 parliamentary elections, Hamas was known for its suicide bombers, not its bureaucrats, even though between 2002 and 2006 the organization moved from rejectionism toward participation in a political framework that is a direct product of the Oslo peace process of the 1990s. After the elections, the shift continued. "It is much more difficult to run a government than to oppose and resist Israeli occupation," a senior Hamas leader told me while on official business in Egypt in 2007. "If we do not provide the goods to our people, they'll disown us." Hamas is not just a political party. It's a social movement, and as such it has a long record of concern about and close attention to public opinion. Given the gravity of deteriorating conditions in Gaza and Hamas's weak performance during last year's fighting, it should be no surprise that the organization has undergone a period of fairly intense soul-searching and reassessment of strategic options.

Ironically, despite the West's refusal to regard the Hamas government as legitimate and despite the continuing brutal siege of Gaza, demands for democratic governance within Gaza are driving change. Yet Hamas leaders are fully aware of the danger of alienating more-hardline factions if they show weakness or water down their position and move toward de facto recognition of Israel without getting something substantive in return.

Hamas's strategic predicament lies in striking a balance between, on the one hand, a new moderating and maturing sensibility and, on the other, insistence on the right and imperative of armed resistance. This difficult balance often explains the tensions and contradictions in Hamas's public and private pronouncements.

What is striking about Hamas's shift toward the peace process is that it has come at a time of critical challenges from Al Qaeda-like jihadist groups; a low-intensity civil war with rival Fatah, the ruling party of the PA; and a deteriorating humanitarian situation in Gaza.

Last summer a militant group called Jund Ansar Allah, or the Warriors of God, one of a handful of Al Qaeda-inspired factions, declared the establishment of an Islamic emirate in Gaza–a flagrant rejection of Hamas's authority. Hamas security forces struck instantly and mercilessly at the Warriors, killing more than twenty members, including the group's leader, Abdel-Latif Moussa. In one stroke, the Hamas leadership sent a message to foes and friends alike that it will not tolerate global jihadist groups like Al Qaeda, which want to turn Gaza into a theater of transnational jihad.

Despite the crushing of Moussa's outfit, the extremist challenge persists. The Israeli siege, in place since 2006, along with the suffering and despair it has caused among Gaza's 1.4 million inhabitants, has driven hundreds of young Palestinians into the arms of small Salafist extremist factions that accuse Hamas of forfeiting the armed struggle and failing to implement Shariah law. Hamas leaders
appear to be worried about the proliferation of these factions and have instructed clerics to warn worshipers against joining such bands.

Compared with these puritanical and nihilistic groups, Hamas is well within the mainstream of Islamist politics. Operationally and ideologically, there are huge differences between Hamas and jihadi extremists such as Al Qaeda–and there's a lot of bad blood. Hamas is a broad-based religious/nationalist resistance whose focus and violence is limited to Palestine/Israel, while Al Qaeda is a small, transnational terrorist network that has carried out attacks worldwide. Al Qaeda leaders Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri have vehemently criticized Hamas for its willingness to play politics and negotiate with Israel. Hamas leaders have responded that they know what is good for their people, and they have made it crystal clear they have no interest in transnational militancy. Their overriding goal is political and nationalist rather than ideological and global: to empower Palestinians and liberate the occupied Palestinian territories.

Unlike Al Qaeda and other fringe factions, Hamas is a viable social movement with an extensive social network and a large popular base that has been estimated at several hundred thousand. Given its tradition of sensitivity and responsiveness to Palestinian public opinion, a convincing argument could be made that the recent changes in the organization's conduct can be attributed to the high levels of poverty, unemployment and isolation of Palestinians in Gaza, who fear an even greater deterioration of conditions there.

A further example of Hamas's political and social priorities is its decision to agree in principle to an Egyptian-brokered deal that sketches out a path to peace with Fatah. After two years of bitter and violent division, the warring parties came very close to agreement in October. The deal collapsed at the last moment, but talks continue. There are two points to make about the Egyptian role: first, Hamas leaders say they feel somewhat betrayed by the Egyptians because after pressure from the Americans, Cairo unilaterally revised the final agreed-upon text without consulting the Hamas negotiating team. Second, many Palestinian and Arab observers think Egypt is in no hurry to conclude the Fatah-Hamas talks. They contend that faced with regional challenges and rivals (Iran, Turkey, Syria and Saudi Arabia), the Mubarak regime views its brokering process in the Palestinian-Israeli theater as an important regional asset and a way to solidify its relationship with Washington.

Despite its frequently reactionary rhetoric, Hamas is a rational actor, a conclusion reached by former Mossad chief Ephraim Halevy, who also served as Ariel Sharon's national security adviser and who is certainly not a peacenik. The Hamas leadership has undergone a transformation "right under our very noses" by recognizing that "its ideological goal is not attainable and will not be in the foreseeable future," Halevy wrote in the Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot just before the 2008 attack on Gaza. He believes Hamas is ready and willing to accept the establishment of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders. The US
Army Strategic Studies Institute published a similar analysis just before the Israeli offensive, concluding that Hamas was considering a shift of its position and that "Israel's stance toward [Hamas]…has been a major obstacle to substantive peacemaking."

Indeed, it could be argued that Hamas has moved closer to a vision of peace consistent with international law and consensus (two separate states in historic Palestine, divided more or less along the '67 borders with East Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine, and recognition of all states in the region) than the current Israeli governing coalition. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vehemently opposes the establishment of a genuinely viable Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, and is opposed to giving up any part of Jerusalem–and Netanyahu's governing coalition is more right wing and pro-settlement than he is.

Hamas's political evolution and deepening moderation stand in stark contrast to the rejectionism of the Netanyahu government and call into question which parties are "hardline" and which are "extremist." And at the regional level, a sea change has occurred in the official Arab position toward the Jewish state (the Arab League's 2002 Beirut Declaration, subsequently reiterated, offers full recognition and diplomatic relations if Israel accepts the international consensus regarding a two-state solution), while the attitudes of the Israeli ruling elite have hardened. This marks a transformation of regional politics and a reversal of roles.

Observers might ask, If Hamas is so eager to accept a two-state solution, why doesn't it simply accept the three conditions for engagement required by the so-called diplomatic Quartet (the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations): recognition of Israel, renunciation of violence and acceptance of all previous agreements (primarily, the Oslo Accords)? In my interviews with Hamas
officials, they stress that while they have made significant concessions to the Quartet, it has not lifted the punishing sanctions against Hamas, nor has it pressed Israel to end its siege, which has caused a dire humanitarian crisis. In addition, Hamas leaders believe that recognition of Israel is the last card in their hand and are reluctant to play it before talks even begin. Their diplomatic starting point will be to demand that Israel recognize the national rights of the Palestinians and withdraw from the occupied territories–but it will not be their final position.

There can be no viable, lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians if Hamas is not consulted and if the Palestinians remain divided, with two warring authorities in the West Bank and Gaza. Hamas has the means and public support to undermine any agreement that does not address the legitimate rights and claims of the Palestinian people. Its Fatah/PA rival lacks a popular mandate and the legitimacy needed to implement a resolution of the conflict. PA President Mahmoud Abbas has been weakened by a series of blunders of his own making, and with his moral authority compromised in the eyes of a sizable Palestinian constituency, Abbas is yesterday's man–no matter how long he remains in power as a lame duck, and whether or not he competes in the upcoming presidential elections.

If the United States and Europe engaged Hamas, encouraging it to continue moderating its views instead of ignoring it or, worse yet, seeking its overthrow, the West could test the extent of Hamas's evolution. So far the strategy of isolation and military confrontation–pursued in tandem by Israel and the United States–has not appeared to weaken Hamas significantly. If anything, it has radicalized hundreds of young Palestinians, who have joined extremist factions and reinforced the culture of martyrdom and nihilism. All the while, the siege of Gaza has left a trail of untold pain and suffering.

If the Western powers don't engage Hamas, they will never know if it can evolve into an open, tolerant and peaceful social movement. The jury is still out on whether the Islamist movement can make that painful and ideologically costly transition. But the claim that engaging Hamas legitimizes it does not carry much weight; the organization derives its legitimacy from the Palestinian people, a mandate resoundingly confirmed in the free and fair elections of 2006.

To break the impasse and prevent gains by more extremist factions, the Obama administration and Congress should support a unified Palestinian government that could negotiate peace with Israel. Whatever they think of its ideology, US officials should acknowledge that Hamas is a legitimately elected representative of the Palestinian people, and that any treaty signed by a rump Fatah/PA will not withstand the test of time. And instead of twisting Cairo's arms in a rejectionist direction, Washington should encourage its Egyptian ally to broker a truce between Hamas and Fatah and thus repair the badly frayed Palestinian governing institutions. If the Obama administration continues to shun engagement with Hamas, Europe ought to take the lead in establishing an official connection. European governments have already dealt with Lebanon's Hezbollah, a group similar to Hamas in some respects, and they possess the skills, experience and political weight to help broker a viable peace settlement.

Like it or not, Hamas is the most powerful organization in the occupied territories. It is deeply entrenched in Palestinian society. Neither Israel nor the Western powers can wish it away. The good news, if my reading is correct, is that Hamas has changed, is willing to meet some of the Quartet's conditions and is making domestic political preparations for further changes. But if Hamas is not engaged, and if the siege of Gaza and Palestinian suffering continue without hope of
ending the political impasse, there is a real danger of a regional war.

This article can be found on the web at:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100125/gerges

I am not exactly sure why we like round numbers. Is it because they make valuations easy, even when the particular number is irrelevant? Some philosophers, Plato included, believed that order and symmetry are innate values in the human psyche. Perhaps. Or, perhaps, in the case of the media, numbers give us the sense, deceptively, that we have a grasp over certain truths.  We determine the order in which legacies such as Obama's should be dissected. After a decided date, the subject can be ignored until the next round number arrives, bringing with it more useless chatter. 

Of course, this is a delusion. Like much of the media's behaviour, it has no connection to reality. It's all a mind game. A lie, even. For victims of US policies in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, and elsewhere, the attention given to round numbers is wholly illogical. The drones flying over Afghanistan and Pakistan, loaded with killing technology, care little for numbers, including the number of lives they destroy daily. 

Did Gazans starve less when we "examined" Obama's (pro-Israel) legacy after 100 days of his presidency? Where they better off one year from his election victory or one year from his inauguration? 

How about 273 days from his ascendancy to the White House? Was that a particularly chaotic day in Baghdad's streets? Do soldiers take a break from killing on even days, and resume the slaughter on odd ones? 

But why should this discussion matter at all? It matters because we often buy into this folly, allowing the media to determine what is important and when a discussion is pertinent. Those involved in this charade express their views, agreeing politely and disagreeing loudly.  The next day, the media returns to a state of complacency, as if the detrimental policies of Obama's government ceased to exist; as if war was eradicated, and there was nothing left to talk about. 

But truly, do Palestinians in Gaza care much for round numbers? I doubt it. Nor do Iraqis, Afghanis, and, now, Yemenis. Misery is misery, any day, every day; war is an inferno. The smell of death, the scenes of blood in Kabul and Baghdad and Gaza, will remain the same on a Friday, or a Tuesday, 100 day into Obama's presidency or 514 days later. 

Every minute in a victim's or potential victim's life counts. Those who have lived in war zones can comprehend this truth. That's why Gaza wants to see the end of its misery now, instead of waiting for CNN's next roundtable discussion assessing the next round number in Obama's presidency. Iraqis and Afghanis similarly listen to words and judge deeds, caring little for numbers. 

Remember when Obama spoke to the "Muslim world" from Cairo on June 4th? That's the date that Muslims – many still victimized, directly or otherwise, by the Obama administration's policies - remember and recount. On that day, Obama made promises, speaking with "audacity", and much hubris. Muslims listened.  Some clapped and even cheered; others hesitated or expressed cynicism, but still hoped for change. Alas, none of those hopes have been fulfilled, as instead of change, there is only a continuation of the policies of his predecessor. 

"I have come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world; one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect," said Obama in Cairo. His deeds since then have reaped the opposite results: mistrust and disrespect. 

"Make no mistake: we do not want to keep our troops in Afghanistan," he said. Since then, he has ordered the surge of 30,000 additional soldiers to that already distraught country. The US, its allies and their drones have killed and maimed hundreds of innocent civilians since that statement was made. 

"Today, America has a dual responsibility: to help Iraq forge a better future - and to leave Iraq to Iraqis," he said. One fails to see evidence of a better future based on his administration's conduct in Iraq in the last year or so. Little progress has been made in leaving Iraq to the Iraqis. 

Even in Cairo, he had the audacity to lecture Palestinians, the very victims of Israel's brutal occupation, which is armed and funded by US money. "Palestinians must abandon violence. Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed. Now is the time for Palestinians to focus on what they can build." We must note that the US government continues to make these demands of Palestinians, ignoring the fact that Israel's reign of terror has never ceased, including Israeli violence against Palestinian non-violent resistance in the West Bank. 

Still, Obama did state that "The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements.  Israel must also live up to its obligations to ensure that Palestinians can live, and work, and develop their society." 

Alas, the Obama administration faltered on its demand of a complete Israeli freeze, and is now harassing the ineffective leadership of Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank to return to the negotiation table without conditions. 

In addition, the hope of ensuring that "Palestinians can live, and work and develop their society," is nothing but a pipedream, considering that Palestinians in Gaza teeter between chronic malnutrition and starvation. We cannot forget the fact that the siege on Gaza would not have been possible without US support. 

So before we giddily gather to discuss Obama's legacy the next time another round number is celebrated on our television screens, let's remember that for an Iraqi father, frantically searching for his son's remains in a Baghdad street, numbers matter little, whether even, odd, round or in any combination. A massacre is a massacre, and a war of choice is a crime, any day, any time. 

- Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an internationally-syndicated columnist and the editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is "My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story" (Pluto Press, London), now available on Amazon.com.

Christian Zionists are a very strange reality. Fundamentalists whose greatest desire is to see the destruction of the universe so that the Lord can sort out the good (them) from the bad (everyone who is not them), their influence is often underestimated and their mania is certainly not taken with the degree of attention it merits due to the dangerous implications it entails.

CUFI claims membership soaring above 50 million members. FIFTY MILLION people who believe that the purpose of their faith is to bring the world to the most rapid closure possible. The sooner the better, and tomorrow won't be a day too soon.

We've written about CUFI here:  http://palestinethinktank.com/2009/02/14/religious-political-cults-and-israel/  and here:  http://peacepalestine.blogspot.com/2007/12/christians-united-for-israel-summit-and.html.

But, as they say, seeing is believing, and Max lets us see a bit of what goes on at the CUFI convention… before they make him leave, that is…  "Rapture Ready" is a MUST SEE VIDEO! Max is the man!

The Turks are filling a certain psychological-strategic vacuum in the Middle East, especially the Arab region.

To be sure, this vacuum was created mostly as a result of the receding influence of traditional Arab powers, such as Egypt, which has become very much a stagnant, non-aspiring entity, thanks to its crippling subservience to the United States.

The continuing aggrandizement of Turkey's regional status is a real success story, which could be seen as a role model for other countries.

The Rising Sun of Turkey

Indeed, when the AKP came to power in 2002 through the ballot boxes — not political thuggery, as it is often the case in most Arab countries — it sought quietly and wisely to tackle a host of chronic problems besetting the Turkish republic.

Eventually, the successful treatment of these mostly economic ills produced amazing effects and aftereffects, enabling the Turkish economy not only to reel from its erstwhile chronic stagnation, but also to make phenomenal growth, especially in the production and export sectors. 

Today, Turkey is the world's 17th economic power. It is also a country that can proudly stand up and say "No" to Israel and the United States.

Internally, the Turkish government sought to quietly resolve, or at least defuse, the enduring Kurdish problem mainly by acknowledging Kurdish grievances and recognizing the legitimacy of the Kurdish people's linguistic and cultural rights.

This very much helped stabilizing the domestic arena, and enhancing internal security, an essential requirement for economic prosperity.

Under the Erdogan's leadership, Turkey succeeded in resolving old problems with Armenia, thus depriving Israel and the American Jewish lobby of a sensitive pressure card that had been used repeatedly against Turkey in order to keep it revolving in the Israeli-American orbit.

Nonetheless, the most remarkable thing about the AKP has been its adamant determination to preserve its free political will especially vis-à-vis the United States and Israel.

Seven years ago, when the United States was about to invade Iraq, the Turkish Government firmly refused to allow American warplanes to use the Incirlik Air Base to attack Iraq.

Prime Minister Erdogan defended the decision, which he said reflected the collective will of the Turkish people.

This happened while most Arab regimes were vying among themselves to please and appease the Bush Administration, which was slaughtering Iraqis in the tens of thousands.

Erdogan did not have to explain anything to the Americans. He just said "No" and that was it.

Maintaining his country's dignity in a world that looked more like a jungle and less like a civilized human community, Erdogan  did not hesitate to fly in the face of  the world's special sacrosanct state, Israel, for its manifestly murderous and Nazi-like aggressions against the helpless Palestinian people.

Eventually, while carefully maintaining relations with Israel, for certain practical necessities, Erdogan made it blatantly clear to the leaders of the Israeli regime that the future of Turkey's relations with the Jewish state would very much depend on Israeli behavior, especially toward Palestinians.

These are serious words coming from the leader of Israel's erstwhile strategic ally in the Middle East. Israel got the message, but remains at a loss as to how to internalize and come to terms with it.

It is true that non-Arab Turkey is not going to become a pro-active ally of Palestinians in the foreseeable future.

However, one can safely argue that from now on, Turkey will not play deaf and dumb, and it will look the other way if, and when, Israel decides to embark on another Nazi-like, genocidal episode against the people of Gaza or other Palestinians.

At the very least, Turkey will no longer be counted as a strategic asset for Israel as it had been the case for many years  prior to the  AKP's advent to  power.

The Stagnant Arab World

In contrast to the Turkish success story, the Arab world remains divided against itself, with many Arab states struggling to remain afloat economically while seriously and conspicuously ceding their sovereignty and national dignity to the United States, Israel's guardian ally.In fact, the collective Arab situation is probably the worst since the collapse of the Ottoman Caliphate, following the World War I. The collective Arab failure to perform a comparatively easy task, such as lifting the crushing blockade of the Gaza Strip, seems to reflect profound impotence and paralysis transcending all levels.

Similarly, the intensive preoccupation of each Arab state, or Sheikhdom, with its internal affairs, is really precluding any concerted Arab effort toward economic and political integration.

The main reason for this enduring political paralysis — this overwhelming calamity —  is the continued prevalence of tribal mentality and dynastic despotism throughout the Arab world.

One of the most solid expressions of this tribal mentality is the fact that the mostly autocratic Arab rulers, irrespective of whether they adopt the royal or republican polity, exist in order to control their people and perpetuate themselves and their sons in power, not to lead their nations and advance their interests.

For example, Egypt is a country of 80 million people that has immense human and other resources at its disposal.

This very important country, which had once been nominated to become an African tiger, has been retreating in every conceivable sphere of life, thanks to the regime's despotic policies and dismal political management.

As to rich Arab countries ruled by ignorant, decadent, and dynastic despots, they are caught in the grip of the same frustrating circle, because the ultimate strategy of the ruling Sheikhs is to remain in power at any price, including succumbing to the will of foreign powers.

Needless to say, these despots are in many instances plainly ignorant, as they have scandalously failed to translate the immense financial resources at their disposal into tangible and durable economic realities.

Some Arab Sheikhdoms are actually so stupid that they have squandered billions of dollars building ostentatious, but economically fruitless, projects, such as high towers to show off their wealth.

However, these tribal chieftains lack the primary means to shield their economies from real financial cries, as we saw recently in Dubai.

It is this destructive tribal mentality that has prevented culturally homogenous countries, such the member states of the Arab Gulf Cooperation Council, from establishing  a real common market or achieving monetary unity.

Nor has it been able to build a credible military force that would shield these countries against a possible foreign aggression.

There is no doubt that the collective Arab situation will continue to deteriorate further until the collective Arab house collapses completely.

This is unless the Arab masses wake up from their dormancy, despair, and apathy, and decide to empower themselves and restore the usurped Arab dignity and freedom.

Arabs are not stupid, and they can, if they want, learn from Turks, our brothers in faith.

However, you can lead the proverbial horse to the water place, but you cannot force it to drink.

It is really sad that in the very country where the Qur'an was revealed unto the Prophet Muhammed (peace be upon him) while wealthy billionaires are running after their beastly desires and mendaciously claiming to be upholding the rule of Shari`ah.

Well, what is the kind of Shari`ah that allows a decadent prince, for example,  to squander the Umma's resources on his prurient desires, while millions of Muslims cannot find food to feed their kids?

In the Qur'an, Allah warns such decadent people that their punishment would only be a matter of time.

[If ye turn back (from the Path), He will substitute in your stead another people; then they would not be like you!]( Muhammad, 38)

In the meanwhile, we say to our Turkish brothers, welcome back. We have long missed the Ottomans.

"Good evening, and welcome to WTFN’s inaugural Oscar preview show. I’m your host Lance Boyle coming to you from Los Angeles. The ceremony may still be weeks away but there’s a lot to talk about. Joining us in The Cutting Room is veteran movie columnist and critic Miriam Kale.”

(Lance Boyle turns to face Miriam Kale. They are sitting in high-backed upholstered chairs across from each other. A black coffee table is between them and all around are enlarged stills and posters of the nominated movies.)

Before we get into the movies themselves, Miriam, what’s your opinion on the Academy’s decision to include 10 best-picture nominees instead of the usual five.Miriam Kale: “In a word—embarrassing. It amounts to handicapping the big Hollywood studios because their movies can’t compete with the best independent and foreign films. In contrast to inventive, entertaining films like last year’s winner Slumdog Millionaire (a British film shot in India), Hollywood churns out an insipid diet of zombies, vampires, cartoonish action, angels, devils, torture, comic books, teen sex farces, sequels, prequels, remakes and bastardizations of TV shows. Recycling may be good for the planet, but in a creative medium like movies, it's an admission of intellectual bankruptcy. All the Academy did was debase the award.”LB: “Surely, you don’t think all Hollywood films are recycled dross.” 

MK: “No, of course not. Last year’s The Devil Wears Prada from 20th Century Fox was a deserving nominee, especially because of Meryl Streep’s performance as tyrannical magazine editrix Miranda Priestly. My point is that so few award-worthy movies are being made that the odds of one being nominated for, much less winning, the Best Picture Oscar are slim to none. Unfortunately, rather than rely on the studios to improve the quality of their movies, the Academy changed the rules to give the illusion that such movies are worth consideration, which is kind of fitting for an industry based on presenting illusions.”

LB: “What happened to Hollywood?”

MK: “The same thing that happened to the big U.S. automakers: it fixated on short-term profits, became afraid to take risks, and lost respect for its market. Hollywood studios still think that the average 12-year-old boy is its key demographic. On the other hand, independent and foreign filmmakers are more willing to make intelligent movies that have the grace, wit and sophistication to attract an adult audience. Such thinking does not compute in Hollywood where studios have gone to great lengths to inure filmgoers to such things as grace, wit and sophistication. Let’s face it: where else but in Hollywood could Adam Sandler have a career, or great films like Carrie, Psycho and The Manchurian Candidate be remade into inferior knockoffs?”

LB: “The Academy said the doubling of the Best Picture nominees is just an experiment. Do you think it will continue past this year?”

MK: “Sadly, yes. Once you handicap an industry it’s nearly impossible to get it to stand on its own two feet.”

LB: “Well, we’ll have to wait until 2011 to see if your prediction comes true, but right know I’d like to move on to the Academy’s newest category, one that should be getting more attention than it has so far—The Leni Riefenstahl Award for Excellence in Propaganda. First, Miriam, tell us how this award came about.”

MK: “Two years ago, the Academy came to the belated realization that holocaust movies and documentaries are getting a disproportionate amount of nominations just because of their subject matter. Moreover, many of these films are thematically repetitious, stereotypical and historically dubious. They don’t so much present historical entertainment as they do historical dogma. As such, they constitute propaganda. Of course, you can criticize any film genre, but since the U.S. movie industry is dominated by a hierarchy of Jews, many of whom support Israel, the Academy felt that holocaust movie genre was compromising the aesthetic and moral integrity of the awards. Therefore, it decided to create a special category for holocaust-themed propaganda—‘The Leni’ for short.”

LB: “Leni Riefenstahl, for those who may not remember, was a great 20th-century German filmmaker, but because she portrayed Hitler and the Nazi Party sympathetically, her movies have become scorned as fascist propaganda.

MK: “Sad, really, because her films were otherwise excellent, as evidenced by her numerous awards.”

LB: “So Miriam, what’s your pick?”

MK: “Inglourious Basterds—no contest!”

LB: “I had a feeling you’d say that, but…”

MK: “Uh, just one thing first, Lance…”

LB: “Sure, go ahead.”

MK: “The Academy created The Leni precisely to avoid the kind of tasteless spectacle we saw at the Screen Actors Guild Awards. By honouring Inglourious Basterds SAG enphasized the image of Hollywood as a holocaust propaganda factory. To all intents and purposes, SAG seems to be forcing us to respect Inglourious Basterds as a legitimate film, rather than the Grand Guignol schlock it really is. I have had to sit through scores of World War II/holocaust films in my career, and none can compare to this one’s reprehensible dishonesty. Shame on SAG!”

LB: “On the surface, it seems that Inglourious Basterds is a strange choice for The Leni, since one of the award’s defining criteria is to serve Israel by promoting sympathetic or even pathetic images of Jews. It shows Jews committing torture and dehumanizing their enemy with unapologetic, sadistic glee. Does this film not debunk the Jew-as- victim stereotype and therefore undermine its propaganda value?”

MK: “Excellent observation, Lance, and I share your ambivalence, but the needs of Israeli propaganda have changed. The Jew-as-victim shtick is still important, but Israel can no longer rely on it alone. The Internet has exploded the illusions of Israel as a poor, victimized state and bastion of democratic virtue. Israel has been forced to recognize that it can no longer pretend to be something it’s not and expect to be believed. Inglourious Basterds depicts the changing face of Israeli propaganda.”

LB: “Which is?"

MK: “A country that commits torture and dehumanizes other human beings with unapologetic, sadistic glee. This is why Inglourious Basterds is so deserving of The Leni. Even though it is yet another unnecessary remake, it normalizes Jewish cruelty to make it easier for the world to accept it in real life. I’d like to show a brief clip from early in the film that makes this point. The leader, Aldo “the Apache,” played by Brad Pitt gives orders to the basterds: (They turn to look at the film screen behind them.)

Aldo: “We will be cruel to the Germans, and through our cruelty they will know who we are. They will find the evidence of our cruelty in the disemboweled, dismembered, and disfigured bodies of their brothers we leave behind us. Every man under my command owes me 100 Nazi scalps.” (The screen retracts.)

LB: “How does depicting and celebrating Jewish cruelty aid Israeli propaganda?”

MK: “If we can feel nothing for Germans who are tortured, because we have been brought up to view them as ‘evil,’ then it is easier for us not to feel anything for Arabs who are tortured, because Israel spreads the propaganda that they are ‘evil.’ For propaganda to succeed, it must control and politicize language to make independent thought impossible. Israel cannot expect to get away with an atrocity like Cast Lead if the world persists in viewing Palestinian Arabs as human beings with inalienable human rights. Inglourious Basterds helps Israel do this by making a cruel mockery of human compassion. As it is the Western world has done virtually nothing to punish Israel for its unprovoked slaughter, or demanded that Egypt stop building a wall to prevent humanitarian aid from entering the Gaza Strip.”

LB: “Let me read to you the following statement from Quentin Tarantino: ‘When you watch all the different Nazi movies, all the TV movies, it’s sad, but isn’t it also frustrating? Did everybody walk into the boxcar? Didn’t somebody do something?’ Isn’t Tarantino trying to show compassion for the Jews who are about to be murdered?”

MK: “That’s what were supposed to think, but in fact Tarantino cares far less about the Yiddish victims of Nazi Germany than he does about slaking the atavistic bloodlust of his zionist producers. Here’s what Lawrence Bender said to Tarantino: ‘As your producing partner, I thank you, and as a member of the Jewish tribe, I thank you, motherfucker, because this movie is a fucking Jewish wet dream.’”

LB: “What a horrid, perverse thing to say! How could anyone take pleasure in torture! What did Bob and Harvey Weinstein have to say. After all, it was their production company that made the movie?”

MK: “They also got off on the Jewish revenge theme. Significantly, though, many Jews were deeply offended by it, and some even walked out of screenings! But this fact should not be seen as a failure on Tarantino’s part; rather it shows how he has evolved—or devolved, if you like—from being a self-indulgent filmmaker into a willing propagandist for Jewish fascism. Then we have to look at a possible motive for the Weinsteins. Their company is such dire financial straits that they need a major hit in the worst way. What better gold mine than a farcical Holocaust story where Jews are shown to be sadistic ‘heroes’ who go medieval on Nazis. This illustrates what I said earlier about holocaust movies getting unfair, automatic recognition.”

LB: “Clearly, this a perfect example of why The Leni is necessaary, but I’d pick up on a point you just made: How do you make the leap from Jews fighting Nazis to Jewish fascism?”

MK: “Remember Aldo’s speech? Tarantino wants us to believe that the holocaust might not have occurred if Jews has been as cruel as the Nazis. First of all, this idea monstrously stupid. You might as well say that unarmed Palestinians deserve their own fate because they aren’t as murderous and cruel as the Israeli military. Second, it is blatantly anti-Semitic, to use a pet phrase of zionist propaganda!”

LB: “You've lost me.”

MK: “If we take Tarantino’s mission statement at face value, then he declares that Jews, not Nazis, were ultimately responsible for the holocaust. He stands the Jew-as-victim image on its head to give us the Jew as moral coward.”

LB: “But this does undermine Israeli propaganda. The idea that Nazis are uniquely responsible for the holocaust is a fundamental dogma, as is the idea that all Jews were victims of the Nazis. Has Tarantino not given ammunition to those who challenge the official holocaust narrative?”

MK: “In a general sense, yes, but as Bender said, the film is ‘a Jewish wet dream.’ The orgy of cruelty overrides any such thoughtful consideration of what is actually being depicted. This was a major risk both for the Weinsteins and Tarantino, because if people do stop to analyze Inglourious Basterds, they will see that, in effect, it justifies the holocaust! And by justifying the holocaust, the film reinforces the propaganda that Israel is necessary.”

LB: “Let me see if I get this straight: In the old propaganda, Jews are depicted as victims of the holocaust, and Israeli exploits this image to blackmail the world into silence about its treatment of Palestinians; in the new propaganda, the holocaust is downplayed as a historical event and Jews are reinvented as kosher Nazis?!”

MK: “Well, not kosher, exactly. The Jews that supported Hitler were anything but!”

LB: “Jews that supported Hitler?”

MK: “Lance, the great failure of holocaust movies is that they present an absolute moral dichotomy between Nazis and Jews that didn’t exist. A tiny minority of Jews, zionist Jews, actively collaborated with the Nazis because they also wanted to rid Europe of its Jewish population. The only difference was that zionists wanted ‘their people’ to go to Palestine. In exchange for Nazi support, they abetted the suffering of other Jews: they betrayed the Jewish resistance, helped the Nazis sabotage negative press reports, and prevented the vast majority of Jews from fleeing to other lands. The more these non-zionist Jews suffered, the easier it would be for zionists to force the world to agree to a Jewish state after the war. In effect, zionist Jews needed the holocaust, which is why they helped Hitler fill and administer the concentration camps. So, yes, Jews supported Hitler—fascist Jews, that is.

LB: “Still, though, the Basterds are killing Nazis, right? They’re not helping them.”

MK: “True, but the Nazis are mere props. They don’t matter because we’re supposed to identify with the killers and their motives, not with their victims and their suffering. By making torture look slick and morally defensible, Inglourious Basterds perverts our sense of justice, and that’s how it serves Israeli propaganda. Just replace Nazi soldiers with Arab civilians and the film imitates life. Whether he intended to or not, Tarantino has equated the murderers of Jews with the victims of Jewish murder in such a way that the torture and gleeful sadism in each case are contextually identical.

LB: “It didn’t entirely work, though. As you said, many Jews walked out of the screenings. Even if the producers loved the movie, its propaganda value seems weak.”

MK: “Ironically, Jewish alienation enhances the film’s propaganda value because it reinforces the new propaganda. Israel knows that its most effective critics are Jews: Richard Goldstone, Richard Falk, Ilan Pappé, Philip Weiss, Akiva Eldar, Norman Finkelstein, just to name just a few. The film is a declaration that the fascist Jew is superior to the moral Jew, and that the moral Jew is an enemy of Israel. If Tarantino and the Weinsteins wanted to make a legitimate film about preventing the nazi persecution of Jews, here is the film they should have made. (As he says this, the movie screen behind them comes down and a movie poster is shown.)

LB: (He looks at the poster and is a little startled.) “I don’t think Hollywood is ready for that.”

MK: “Of course is isn’t. It would be an indictment of Hollywood’s role as a zionist collaborator as well as a devastating refutation of Israel’s right to exist. Nevertheless, I suspect that Israel’s defenders would find a way to gush over it.”

LB: “We’re almost out of time, Miriam. Any last words?”

MK: “Yes. Appearances to the contrary, Inglourious Basterds is the face of the new propaganda and deserves The Leni. Also, since Avatar will clean up at the Oscars, the Academy could not have picked a more preposterous year to expand the list of nominees.”

LB: “Let’s pick it up there next time. Thanks for coming.”

MK: “Always a pleasure.”

LB: (To camera) Thanks for joining us. For Miriam Kale and our crew, I’m Lance Boyle. Good night!”

“But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.”

            –Declaration of Independence

 “Once to every man and nation
Comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth and falsehood,
For the good or evil side;
And the choice goes by forever”  

            –James Russell Lowell 

In 1915 D. W. Griffith produced the movie “The Birth of a Nation” based on Thomas Dixon’s book “The Clansman”.  It was hailed as a breakthrough movie in terms of its cinematic techniques.   It became the most popular and highest grossing movie of its time among White America.  It was even screened in the White House for President Woodrow Wilson, ironically, the architect of the League of Nations as an organization to establish peace in the world after World War One.   President Wilson was quoted in the movie itself praising the heroic story of the Klu Klux Klan, a white racist supremacist group, in its valor to save a white woman from the barbaric animalistic instinct of a “negro” accused of raping and soiling the purity of the white woman.

In fact, in 1992 the United States Library of Congress deemed the film "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant film" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry.   For decades thereafter Hollywood studios, a Jewish founded and run institution, continued to portray all minorities such as Native Americans, African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, Arabs and Muslims in stereotypical roles as inferior, primitive, often barbaric peoples who serve the White Man’s racial and violent nature.  

Admittedly things have changed for the better for America’s minorities; after all we have an African American President.    But in many other ways things have not changed.    Minorities are still marginalized and under-represented in every American Institution especially in positions of power from Academia, to the Media, Television, Hollywood and local, state and federal governments, especially in Congress.   

The powerful elite in America are still white, rich, well educated, corporate barons who in effect run our financial and banking system, are the bedrock of campaign financing and thus own our politicians, and who have the media power to make or break ambitious Americans seeking a piece of the Corporate or Political Pie.   (See George Carlin’s Video below on the powerful elite)

Tragically absent from such a system and its institutions are the “forgotten” impoverished, less educated, ghetto and housing project residents, who have little to no opportunities to advance.   They are perceived by white America as lazy, violence-prone, immoral, or who survive on white taxes and welfare programs.   They are acceptable as athletes for white sports owners, as maids, servants, janitors, cooks, baggage handlers, and taxi drivers.    While the Elite are in boardrooms, hold political and economic power, are members of expensive often exclusivist clubs, live in their suburban mansions to escape the “violence and filth of inner cities” but are clueless to the marginalization and suffering of America’s minorities often ethnically profiled, hounded for their immigrant status, and who serve longer jail sentences than their white counterparts for the same crime.   There are more African Americans in jail than are in colleges and universities.   

No group has the largest political and economic influence in this country than Jewish Americans.   Although they comprise less than 1.7% of the population they are over-represented in every American institution from academia, to the financial and banking sector, politics, the media, Hollywood, in powerful highly influential special interest groups (ex. AIPAC, ADL) whose main priority is not America’s interests, such as serving the have-nots of this country, but whose true allegiance is to a foreign nation, Israel.

American Minorities must study the example and rapid rise of Jewish Americans as an example for their future role in this country.    Jewish Americans are the richest, most educated, most ambitious ethnic group in the country.    They overcame racism and flagrant discrimination to become the power house they are today through hard work and an overemphasis and appreciation of education as keys to their success.

Examples of Jewish American Success:

1.   Economic Power:

A longtime revolving door exists between officials (mainly Jewish) leading Wall Street Financial and Banking institutions and high government jobs, especially in the White House, State and Treasury Departments.   This situation has created a corrupt system whereby government policy and hundreds of billions of bailout dollars favor Wall Street where current government officials were CEO’s or Directors of such banks, financial institutions and brokerage firms.

Although the TARP tax dollar bailout was publicly reported to be less than $800 Billion a closer study reported in Mother Jones Magazine (Jan/Feb 2009) revealed the true cost to tax payers of this bailout of Wall Street, the very banks responsible for the recession and economic crisis, is actually $14 Trillion dollars.  

Where can this unimaginable money going to Wall Street be better spent?    (This excludes the $145 Billion bonuses bank executives are receiving courtesy of tax payers this year alone)

According to the same Mother Jones article this money can meet most needs of the American people. 

Just to mention a few projects this money can support:  

–$347 Billion:  Sending all 2009 US high school grads to private college
–$860 Billion:  20 years of High Quality Universal Pre School Education in US
–$878 Billion:  Buying a house for every homeless American
–$2.2 Trillion:  10 years of private health insurance for uninsured Americans
–$3.5 Trillion:  Paying off 1/3 of US home mortgages 

The extraordinary over-representation of Jewish Americans in the public–private economic and financial sectors as well as in Foreign Policy positions that primarily focus on the Middle East to the benefit of Israel’s national interest, not America’s, is incredulous.    It is the Neoconservatives, mainly Jewish, who lyingly pushed for the Iraq War for the sake of Oil and Israel’s interests.   None of these neoconservatives ever served in the U.S. military yet do not hesitate to send Americans to die for their causes, mainly for corporations and Israel. 

A few examples of Jewish Americans holding the top economic positions in the White House, Treasury, Federal Reserve and Wall Street::

White House    ↔   Treasury   ↔   Federal Reserve  ↔  Wall Street

Rahm Emmanuel                  Timothy Geithner       Benjamin Bernanke                       Goldman Sachs

Larry Summers                     Neil Wolin                                                                             Bear Stearns

Paul Volcker                          Gene Sperling                                                                     Lehman Brothers

Peter Orszag                         Kenneth Feinberg                                                                 Many CEO’s: Jewish

Jared Bernstein                    Neil Barofsky

                                               Lael Brainard

                                               Stuart Levey

An example of Jewish tribal unity and collaboration is Time Magazine’s choice for 2009 Man of the Year: Benjamin Bernanke.

Ben (Benjamin) Shalom Bernanke (Jewish), Chair of the Federal Reserve, is facing a rocky Senate confirmation for a second term as Chair of the Federal Reserve.   To assist him and support him in this confirmation process Richard Stengell (Jewish), Managing Editor of Time Magazine and who makes the final decision on Man of the Year, chose Bernanke as Time’s 2009 Man of the Year despite documented failures in his job.  Time Magazine is part of Time Warner whose CEO and Chairman is Jeffrey L. Bewkes (Jewish).   This is tribal unity and collaboration at its finest.   No one doubts his reconfirmation to his present position.

WEALTH STATISTICS: 

– Jewish Americans, 1.7% of Populations, but are 49% of American Billionaires: (TransWorldNews: 11/6/09)

As of 2008 18% of Jewish households had a net worth of $1 million plus.  Twenty of the richest 50 are Jewish. Those top 20 control some $211.8 billion in personal wealth.  In the top 20 only one African American makes the list, Oprah Winfrey. 

The Jerusalem Post, October 11, 2007 reported the following:

According to Vanity Fair’s list of the 100 of the "world's most powerful people," 51% are Jewish.  It's an exclusive, insular club, one whose influence stretches around the globe but is concentrated strategically in the highest corridors of power.

The article also states that “the list is populated by a Cohen and a Rothschild, a Bloomberg and a Perelman, the list would seem to conform to all the traditional stereotypes about areas of Jewish overrepresentation.”  

Median Income by Race/Ethnicity:

 Source:  U.S. Census 2006

*Jews:  United Jewish Communities Survey 2002

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/US-Israel/ujcpop.html  U.S. Jewish Survey

From the above information one can see the enormous gap. Disadvantage and meager representation of African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, Arab Christians and Muslims, Pacific Islanders and Native Americans in the financial and economic power corridors in our nation. 

2.  Political Representation in Congress and Federal Agencies:

–Only 6 African Americans have ever served in the Senate

Top Officials at the State Department are also Jewish Americans:

Middle East Policy at the State Department and National Security Council are usually headed by Jewish Americans

In Addition:  Jewish Americans heading powerful Government Agencies including the World Bank.

Robert Zoellick –      President of World Bank

Gary Gensler –          Chairman, Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC)

Mary Schapiro –        Chairman, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)

Sheila Bair –              Chairman, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC)

Karen Mills –              Administrator, Small Business Administration (SBA)

Jon Leibowitz –         Chairman, Federal Trade Commission (FTC)

Douglas Shulman –   Commissioner, Internal Revenue Service (I.R.S.)

3.  Foreign Aid to Israel versus Africa, Central and South America:

According to a Christian Science Monitor Article written seven years ago, since 1973, Israel has cost the United States about $1.6 trillion.   If divided by 2007’s U.S. population this amounts to each American paying $5,700 per person.  So far that’s more than double the cost of the Vietnam War.   (Christian Science Monitor: “Economist tallies swelling cost of Israel to US”, Dec. 9, 2002)

That’s not the entire story.  Israel annually requests additional loans (Israel has never paid these loans) worth anywhere from $4 to $10 Billion.   Obama just recently approved an additional $30 Billion aid to Israel over the next decade.   This amount was originally set for America’s Child Health Program (SCHIP) but was diverted to Congress’ greater priority, Israel.   The constant lie is that Israel only receives $3 Billion annually but funding to Israel is added to multiple agency appropriations.  

All this foreign aid comprising one third of total U.S. foreign aid to a nation that is only 0.001% of the world’s population and is the sixteenth richest country in the world with a higher per capita income than several European nations when our own country is facing huge deficits and where money is needed for the homeless, unemployed and hungry Americans is an outrage that Americans are unaware of.   It’s tantamount to middle class Americans sending aid to Bill Gates.  That’s the power of Israel and the Jewish Lobby in America over our government, especially Congress.

In addition, there is more than $1.5 billion in private U.S. funds that go to Israel annually in the form of $1 billion in private tax-deductible donations and $500 million in Israeli bonds, all tax deductible, which is an additional cost to American taxpayers. 

Only Israel can raise illegal funds in the U.S to build more illegal settlements in occupied Palestinian territories in direct violation of U.S. Laws, U.S.foreign policy, U.N. Resolutions, and the Fourth Geneva Convention.   But our government overlooks such violations due to the intimidation and power of the Israeli Lobby and its hold on Congress and the Media, which is mostly founded, owned or run by Jewish Americans.

Table Below: Using only the Congressionally declared annual aid to Israel and comparing it to the total aid and per capita aid to Africa, Central and South America, it’s obvious where America’s priorities are, obviously not to the poorer continents. 

 Source:- Foreign Aid
www.fas.org/asmp/profiles/index.html 2001, 02, 03 – fy2003part14.pdf 2004, 05, 06 – CBJAccountsum.pdf 

**Aid to Israel only goes to Jews, not to Israeli Arabs, plus goes to building Illegal Settlements and the illegal Apartheid Wall

–Population Reference:  United Nations 2001

Note:  2001 Stats are used to reflect Pre-9/11 aid, post 9/11 priorities changed to fight “war on terror”, “reconstruction” of Iraq and Afghanistan:  STILL IN FY 2009 Israel remained the largest nation recipient of U.S. Aid.

4.  Military Service:

According to Inforplease.com: 

2.3 million:   Number of single-race black military veterans in the United States in 2008.   More military veterans are black than any other minority group. 

While according to the jewishjournal. com; only some 3,000 out of 1.4 million active duty servicemen and women are Jewish, about two-tenths of one percent.  When it comes to Marines, the numbers are even more startling. It's one out of 1,000. One-tenth of one percent.

5.  Taxation Without Representation:

The cumulative gap and disparity on several socio-economic factors such as income, education, health indices, housing, unemployment, political and corporate representation between White America and America’s Minorities is tantamount to Taxation Without Representation.

6.  Population by Race/Ethnicity in 2008 and Projection to 2050:

Compare the above information and statistics to the actual population figures by Race/Ethnicity today and projected to 2050 to truly understand the magnitude of the power of a minority elite who monopolize the wealth, priorities and policies of this nation to the detriment of America’s minority populations.   The income gap between the rich and poor continues to expand exponentially.   At times of an economic recession as experienced today the self serving elite continue to get richer at the expense of America’s low and middle class by siphoning more government money to their institutions while cutting governmental expenditure and aid to low and middle class Americans.   America’s families, especially the children, end up sacrificing their health and welfare to the benefit of the financial barons.

2009:  U.S. Population:   308,446,627

U.S. Census Bureau 2008 and Projection of 2050

The Jewish American population has remained steady for the last fifty years and is expected to decrease markedly by the year 2050 where most Jews are expected to reside in Israel.  In contrast, the Hispanic and Asian American populations will grow in large numbers in 2050

According to the U.S. Census population demographics will change by the year 2050 whereby White Americans will become the minority and current minority groups will become the majority.   Its projection depends on immigration rates, federal immigration policies and state of the economy.

The “tipping point” whereby minorities will become the majority is projected on either “low” or “high” immigration rates.   Based on “low” immigration rates the “tipping point” arrives by 2045.   With “high” immigration rates the “tipping point” arrives by 2040.

How do American Minorities Today Prepare for National Leadership in 2050 as the Majority?

By 2050 the youth and children of today’s minorities will potentially be the future leaders of America from government, to the Private Sector, Corporate America, Academia, Media and Hollywood.  Their mission will be to truly unite this country as an indivisible nation with equality for all, human rights and due process for all, with equal opportunities for all, removing all vestiges of past, present and future injustices.     A minority baby born today can become the President of America in forty years.

Minorities will begin their revolutionary seismic journey for a new America in 2050 from a foundation of huge disadvantages established by white man’s power, wealth, historical oppression, and subjugation of America’s colored races.   But as Dr. King said; “Almost always, the creative dedicated minority has made the world better.”

First, we as Minorities must imbibe and fully understand the historic revolutionary opportunity for all Americans to reach a more perfect union by 2050 when we become the majority in our democracy.  The white man has failed in his quest to understand and establish a nation where all men are created equal, that we all are born with inalienable rights, that man is born free from birth and to enslave and deprive man from that freedom is a violation of all divine edicts.

Who better to establish justice than those who’ve experienced injustice.  Who better to understand deprivation, torture, hunger, chains and loss of life and land, than those who’ve suffered such.  Who better to understand the loss of basic human rights than those who’ve been cleansed from such rights.  Who better to understand the yearning for freedom for all men than those who’ve never possessed it.  Who better to understand what racist regimes can inflict on humanity than those who’ve lived under such racist colonial regimes. 

Who better to comprehend all such injustices than America’s Minorities who as a majority population in 2050 can seize the historic opportunity to end man’s cruelty to man, end the power of the elite and restore social justice for all Americans, and work toward ending all forms of oppression and denial of basic human rights at home and abroad.    God willing such a majority will end the monopoly of the industrial-military-media complex that exports wars for economic and ideological reasons and seek to establish peace and justice in the world.   

The path to such a bright future for America and the world begins with population figures as that determines elections and representations in government.  Thus as a first crucial step minorities must participate in the 2010 Census.

A.  Organizing   
Although the focus is on Minority Populations, All Americans must have equal opportunity to join, participate, and prepare for our national future.

Minority organizing must begin at the grass root level where a unity of all minority groups is established to prepare the path for a future of majority rule.   This is a critical step.   All past divisions and quarrels must cease for the greater good of this nation.   Priorities must be established on community outreach, education on this historic opportunity, forming community strategies to prepare and develop local minority communities that will focus on supporting families and children as they journey forward. 

B.   Education, Education, Education

There is no future without a strong educational foundation.  Minorities have the highest high school drop out rates with small percentages pursuing higher education.   This is a complex issue that is related to family structure, cultural attitudes, unemployment, educational opportunities, and socio economic status.    We must enter educational fields that impact our capitalistic society—Education, Political Science, Economics, Business, Media and Journalism, Advertising, Academia, International Relations, Medicine, Law, Sciences, Public Relations, Public Health and Movie making.

The journey to the future will rise or fall depending on educating our youth and parents as well.   It is up to community members to study and strategize to remedy this tragedy.

C.   Massive Voter Registration Campaigns.

D.   Working with Law enforcement, Faith Groups, Schools, Community Organizations, Public Health Departments, Hospitals, and the media to cleanse the community of gangs, drug and alcohol sales and use, abstinence or safe sex education to prevent out of wedlock births and sexually transmitted diseases.

E.   Fund Raising
All Americans who care about our national future where the national debt, budge and trade deficits, poor educational outcomes, a broken health care system, an almost bankrupt Social Security System and Medicare, huge income gaps between the rich and poor, a corrupt campaign financing system that favors the rich, a lost youthful generation, loss of moral priorities, dominance of special interest groups and what George Washington called a “Passionate Attachment” to foreign nations (today none more so than with Israel) due to the influence of powerful minorities, constant wars, and much more, must organize to raise the funds necessary to finance valued, well organized, led and purposeful community organizations.   If every employed and able American just donates one dollar a month that will raise over $1.5 Billion as a down payment for our future that must begin with improving our school infrastructure, hiring more qualified and well paid teachers, thus improving our educational outcomes.     Such subjects as Geography, History, Civics, World Religions and Cultures, Science, Languages, Art and Music and physical education have been sacrificed in our middle and high schools to ineffective standardized testing that emphasize reading, writing and math.

Indeed, it’s simpler to enumerate plans and strategies than to implement them.  But we either change and prepare from today for our majority role in the future or our numbers will simply be an asterisk in the history books as a people who failed themselves, their nation and the world.   Wasting this unprecedented and historic opportunity will be a sin and a crime against humanity.    We will be doomed to accept our status quo and the fault will be all ours to bear.   Our children born today will pay for our apathy and we will be directly responsible and complicit in their dismal miserable lives. 

What will we do to prepare for a more united just America?   Only you and I individually and collectively can answer this question.

As we celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday it’s important to recall his 1967 speech “A Time to Break Silence” where he outlined his opposition to the Vietnam War.   In the speech he called America “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”   For his principled stand Time magazine called the speech "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi," and the Washington Post declared that King had "diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people."

His words resonated then as it does now as it will forever.   He challenged America to commit to a revolutionary change to reclaim its present and future to a more just and peaceful cause here and abroad.

 “If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight……

Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter — but beautiful — struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message, of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.”

            –The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, “A Time to Break Silence”, April 4, 1967

Time to begin the first step, time to reclaim America for all Americans.

Sources:

Please view George Carlin’s Video as it most relevant to this article:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wV1lZMTCqf8

George Carlin’s Monologue on the Powerful Elite Manipulating America’s working class (Please forgive the expletives used, but the truth in this clip is worthy of seeing). 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wilson-quote-in-birth-of-a-nation.jpg

President Woodrow Wilson’s Quote in movie: “Birth of a Nation” 

http://www.simpletoremember.com/vitals/world-jewish-population.htm

Prof. Sergio Dellapergola, “JEWISH DEMOGRAPHY:  Facts, Outlook, Challenges”

(Extremely Important Demographic Information on World Jewry) 

http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/01/unjust-wall-street-bonus

Great Article/Charts on Bailout to Wall Street, $14 Trillion, who benefits, and what the money can be used for domestically 

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24397.htm

Massive Increase in Child Poverty Rates in 2009, Brookings Institute Report 

http://www.infoplease.com/spot/bhmcensus1.html

Source for African American Veterans in Military

http://www.jewishjournal.com/community_briefs/article/the_very_few_the_proud_20031114/ 

Source for Jewish Americans serving in Military

(Jewishjournal.com: “The (Very) Few, the Proud”, by Phil Shuman, November 13, 2003) 

http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/1209/p16s01-wmgn.html

Real Total Aid to Israel:  About $1.6 Trillion 

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1191257286817&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

Vanity Fair Article of 100 Most Powerful People in the World, 51% are Jews

How else to explain the bizarre performance yesterday by Danny Ayalon, deputy Israeli foreign minister and capo di tutti of Avigdor Lieberman, at which he brusquely summoned the Turkish ambassador for a brushing down, and in a highly unusual move summoned press photographers to record the humiliation and pointedly noted that the ambassador was sitting in a lower position than the Israelis and that the latter refused to shake his hand.  Here is how Yediot reported the story:

When the ambassador was finally asked to enter the room, his hosts instructed him to sit on a low couch opposite the higher chairs in which they were seated. The hosts, Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, Foreign Ministry Deputy Director General for Europe, Naor Gilon [ed., and suspected Steven Rosen intelligence conduit], and Ayalon’s office director, David Segal did not smile at their guest and refused to shake his hand.

When the photographers suggested a handshake, the Foreign Ministry officials refused. “That is precisely the issue,” said Ayalon. Ayalon made sure that no one could have any doubts that the humiliation of the ambassador was anything but deliberate: “The important thing is that people see that he’s low and we’re high and that there is one flag here,” he said to the photographers.

This reminds me more of the battle between Freedonia and Sylvania in the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup, than the behavior of a serious national diplomatic corps:

I have taken it upon myself to make one final effort to prevent war.

- No kidding? – I’ve talked to Ambassador Trentino, and he says Sylvania doesn’t want war either.

…I’ve taken the liberty of asking the ambassador to come over here. Because we both felt that a friendly conference would settle everything peacefully. He’ll be here any moment.

Mrs. Teasdale…I’d be only too happy to meet Ambassador Trentino and offer him on behalf of my country the right hand of good fellowship. And I feel sure he will accept this gesture in the spirit in which it is offered.

But suppose he doesn’t. A fine thing that’ll be. I hold out my hand and he refuses to accept it. That’ll add a lot to my prestige, won’t it? Me, the head of a country, snubbed by a foreign ambassador! Who does he think he is that he can come here and make a sap out of me in front of my people?

Think of it. I hold out my hand and that hyena refuses to accept it. Why, the cheap four-flushing swine! He’ll never get away with it, I tell you! He’ll never get away with it!

…So, you refuse to shake hands with me, eh?

Mrs. Teasdale, this is the last straw! There’s no turning back now!  This means war!

Then it’s war!

I wonder whether Bibi Netanyahu, when he appointed Lieberman, realized what he was getting was closer to opera buffa than real diplomacy.  Of course, this performance (which is precisely what it is) brings nothing but ridicule on Israel.  Nations of the world wonder whether the Marx Brothers are running the MFA, instead of professional diplomats.

The Bibi scandal sheet, Yisrael HaYom revels in the political grandstanding with this brazen ‘Height of Humiliation’ photo. (above)

What makes this even more buffoonish is that Lieberman is willing to create this international incident in order to score cheap domestic political points against a rival.  Ehud Barak is scheduled for a major visit to Ankara this weekend.  What better way to screw up the Labor Party leader’s efforts to get Syria-Israel negotiations back on track than to poison the well even before Barak arrives.

I’ve always felt that Israeli politics resembles an alligator wrestling pit more than anything else and this story confirms it.  I’m afraid the analogy to an alligator pit may be doing these noble ancient beasts a disservice.

Turkey’s prime minister however, is a real national leader and no fool.  He’s not playing this as opera and refuses to allow his ambassador to be publicly humiliated. Remember this is the same Erdogan who at Davos dressed down the incipiently senile Shimon Peres when the latter attempted to defend the Gaza war using the most bombastic propaganda.  Now Erdogan is kickin’ butt and takin’ down names:

Turkey demanded an apology from Israel on Tuesday over what it called the discourteous treatment of its ambassador, further souring ties between the two regional powers on the eve of a visit by Israel’s defence minister.

…”We expect an explanation and apologies from Israeli authorities for the attitude against our Tel Aviv ambassador Oguz Celikkol, and the way this attitude was reflected,” the Turkish foreign ministry said in a statement.

“We call on the Israeli Foreign Ministry, whose behaviour and attitude towards our Tel Aviv Ambassador did not comply with diplomacy, to obey courtesy rules,” it said.

The MFA seemed to enjoy the tit for tat and responded with vintage hasbara:

“The Turks are the last people who can preach morality to the State of Israel and the IDF, which is the most moral army in the world.”

UPDATE: Ayalon has “apologized” for his behavior with a statement that typically lacks any crediblity:

…”It is not my way to insult foreign ambassadors and in the future I will clarify my position by more acceptable diplomatic means.”

Source: http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun_olam/2010/01/13/lieberman-shames-turkish-ambassador-torpedoes-israel-turkish-relations/

They think that Israeli-made Gaza tragedy shouldn’t deserve all this attention and that the thoroughly tormented Gazans should suffer, starve and die as silently and as quietly as possible.

Well, to begin with, it is highly unlikely that such questions are motivated by good will or any real desire to see real problems in Somalia and Darfur and other parts of the world rectified. What is nearly certain, given consistent Israeli and Zionist behavior, is that such questions are meant first and foremost to distract attention from the shameless genocidal crimes against humanity which the children, grand-children and great grandchildren of the holocaust have been committing against the people of Palestine.

It is rather a repulsive, diversionary red-herring tactic used by the murderous thugs of Zionism to distract attention from the real Israeli Jewish holocaust against the Palestinian people.

Hence, there is not even an iota of doubt that would make people, especially those who value their conscience, think that the Israelis are really concerned about the suffering of people else where. It is actually inconceivable that the hearts of Israeli child-killers are bleeding over the civil wars in Africa. Their real aim is to isolate the Palestinians, weaken world sympathy with them, and force them to die or get killed as quietly as possible. This is how the SS behaved at Ghetto Warsaw 67 years ago. This is what the Judeo-Nazis of today are doing. It is the same, just like tweedeldee and tweedeldum.

Having said that, it is increasingly obvious that the enduring plight of the Palestinian people is the most volatile and destabilizing issue in the world today since it has the potentials of disrupting world order. It is the root-cause of instability and violence in much of the world. Its symptoms and side effects have global and instant repercussions.

Indeed, events that occurred thousands of miles away from occupied Palestine, such as 9/11 events in the US, the Bali bombing in Indonesia, the terror bombings in both London and Madrid a few years ago and the American invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan had their roots in the American and western embrace of Jewish Nazism in Palestine and the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people from their ancestral homeland.

Similarly, one exaggerates very little by saying that most of the chronic political problems in the Arab world, e.g., the American and western embrace of Arab dictatorships, and the unrelenting suppression of the forces of freedom and democracy, are directly or indirectly linked to the situation in Palestine. The current standoff over the issue of Iran’s nuclear program is very much related to the Palestinian problem. Iranian leader Ahmadinejad wouldn’t have called for the dismantlement of the Zionist infrastructure of Israel had it not been for the outrageous persecution and brutal savagery meted out to the indigenous Palestinian people by foreign Jewish invaders.

Moreover, the US, which itself is in the grip of Jewish lobbies such as AIPAC and whose Congress is widely considered an Israeli-occupied territory, has always opted to keep tyrannical, even criminal, Arab regimes in order to serve and promote Israeli interests. Needless to say, both Israel and the US realize that it is much easier to blackmail and bully dictatorial regimes that are not answerable to their masses. Such bankrupt regimes would even act against their own nations’ interests when coming under a little pressure or bullying from Washington.

To be sure, all peoples in the world have the right to survive and prosper, including the people of Somalia and Darfur as well as any other people under the sun. This has never been a contentious issue and never will. However, the Palestinian cause is unique because Palestine was until recently the exclusive homeland of the Palestinian people which a European power thousands of miles away decided to give on a silver platter to another European people. The White Ashkenazi Jews originated in the Khazar region and had nothing to do with Palestine as Professor Shlomo Sand elucidated in his recent book, Matai ve'ech humtza ha'am hayehudi? (The Invention of the Jewish People).

Today, the Palestinian people is the only people in the world whose very survival and future as a people are under threat. We, the Palestinians, are now relying more than ever before on the good-will of the international community for our very survival. This is why the international community must move decisively to prevent Israel from carrying out genocide against our people.

The Israelis have not embarked on a full-fledged genocide against us for lack of trying. The real reason has more to do with non-moral and non-ethical issues, such as would-be international reactions. The Israeli genocidal onslaught against Gaza last year should be viewed as a mere rehearsal for a much larger war of extermination against a helpless people with little or no means to protect themselves and their children.

In the latest blitzkrieg, Israel killed thousands and maimed thousands and incinerated many with the infernal white phosphorus firestorms over Gaza. In the next blitz, Israel could reenact Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen in Gaza and the West Bank. In the final analysis, there is no real difference between gassing people in closed places, e.g. concentration camps, and incinerating them en masse in open air. As far as I know, no other people under the sun is being targeted for annihilation. True, there are civil wars in several spots in the world. However, neither the Somalis nor the Darfurians are being threatened with a holocaust.

I don’t know of religious leaders in any country other than Israel routinely issuing edicts permitting the mass extermination of men, women and children “and not leaving a breathing thing alive” as many Jewish rabbis have been doing. In short, the prospect of a Jewish-Zionist holocaust or at least partial holocaust against the helpless Palestinians is not really unthinkable as Israel continues to await the opportune time to carry out its monstrous designs against the Palestinian people.

This is why international, including non-governmental, efforts to protect the Palestinian people from Israel’s genocidal urges must continue.

A few years ago, Spanish intellectual Santiago Alba-Rico eloquently argued that the Palestinian plight continued to be humanity’s bleeding wound. He wrote: “Perhaps Palestinians are not the most punished people on earth, but they are indeed the most openly punished people on earth; perhaps they are not the people who have suffered the most but they are the people whose sufferings are the most uninterruptedly visible. Paradoxically, this visibility (beyond the lies) makes the victims even more vulnerable; it confers a kind of biblical dimension to the aggression: the boisterous authority of a divine intervention, and in front of it, the objects of God’s anger, are demeaned both morally and ontologically.”

In recent months, a plethora of rabbis, with hundreds of thousands of followers, issued Nazi-like edicts justify the physical annihilation of the Palestinian people. Needless to say, the effect of these insidious edicts goes beyond the confines of the theoretical sphere as the Israeli army (now being taken over by genocidal-minded religious thugs) and paramilitary terrorists, also known as settlers, are making sure to act on these satanic edicts by murdering Peaceable Palestinian civilians without batting an eyelash.

Let us not forget that the holocaust of the mid-1900s didn’t start with genocidal mass killings; it rather started with the type of things that Israel is now doing to the Palestinians, such as a violently-racist discourse, venomous and vitriolic media attacks, the Ubermenschen vs. Untermenschen mentality and eventually a Kristallnacht. Well, the Israelis themselves say openly that the Gaza campaign was a mere “prova” for things to come. We all know the rest of the story.

The Jewish Encyclopedia describes the term as “a modern word expressing antagonism to the political and social equality of Jews,” assigning its origins to the  “ethnological theory that the Jews, as Semites, are entirely different from the Aryan, or Indo-European populations and can never be amalgamated with them” (http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?letter=A&artid=1603#4621#ixzz0b8jl7YQ3).  According to Jewish Encyclopedia, the word “Anti-Semitism” does not imply opposition on account of religion but “on account of … racial characteristics,” such as “greed, a special aptitude for money-making, aversion to hard work, clannishness and obtrusiveness, lack of social tact, and especially of patriotism” (http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?letter=A&artid=1603#4621#ixzz0b8jl7YQ3).   Outlining the history of the term, the Jewish Encyclopedia ascertains that the word was first printed in 1880 (http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?letter=A&artid=1603#4621#ixzz0b8uZ0yFX) but acknowledges the difficulty of tracing its first use.  What appeared to have been employed in a philological sense in Franz Bopp’s (1791-1867) “Comparative Grammar,” later acquired a meaning imbued with ethnic characteristics (http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?letter=A&artid=1603#4621#ixzz0b91hsaWJ).  Christian Lassen (1800-76) was the first to draw a “picture of the Semites” as distinct from the Aryans. Ernest Renan (1823-92) came up with a theory of “inferiority of the Semites” – "The two words, which have served until now as a symbol for the progress of the human mind toward truth, science, and philosophy, were foreign to them." Renan credits the Aryans with all the “great military, political, and intellectual movements in the world's history,” while the Semites are credited with “the religious movements.” “The Semites have never had any comprehension of civilization in the sense in which we understand the word; they were at no time public-spirited.  Intolerance was the natural consequence of their monotheism, which, if not imported from the Semitic world, would have remained foreign to the Aryans, who were impressed with the variety of the universe.  The Jewish people, while not progressive, claimed that the future was theirs; and this illogical position accounts for the hatred which eighteen centuries were unable to mitigate” (http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?letter=A&artid=1603#4621#ixzz0b9AA28Uz).  Renan’s influence can be felt in an article published by Hellwald in 1872:  "The Jews are not merely a different religious community, but – and this is to us the most important factor – ethnically an altogether different race. The European feels instinctively that the Jew is a stranger who immigrated from Asia. The so-called prejudice is a natural sentiment.  Civilization will overcome the antipathy against the Israelite who merely professes another religion, but never that against the racially different Jew. The Jew is cosmopolitan, and possesses a certain astuteness which makes him the master of the honest Aryan. In Eastern Europe the Jew is the cancer slowly eating into the flesh of the other nations.  Exploitation of the people is his only aim.  Selfishness and lack of personal courage are his chief characteristics; self-sacrifice and patriotism are altogether foreign to him" (http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?letter=A&artid=1603#4621#ixzz0b9HQtXQv).  

Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), the founder of modern Zionism, had experienced anti-Semitism first hand – he had seen the Parisian mob demanding the death of Dreyfus in 1895, and had heard the cheers of the middle-class Viennese that greeted the election victory of anti-Semitic Karl Lueger the same year (http://www.vho.org/aaargh/engl/zad/zad1.html).  But Herzl failed to recognize the huge Gentile support for Dreyfus:  the intellectuals of France with Emile Zola at the forefront, rallied behind Dreyfus, the right wing of the French society, the army, the clergy were discredited, and anti-Semitism was defeated.  Instead of seizing the moment and mobilizing support for Dreyfus, Herzl, the most famous journalist in Vienna, used it as an opportunity to further the idea that “anti-Semitism could not be Beaten” (http://www.vho.org/aaargh/engl/zad/zad1.html) and the World Zionist Organization did not combat it. The very first entry of Herzl’s “new Zionist Diary” contains the following statement:  “In Paris … I achieved a freer attitude toward anti-Semitism, which I now began to understand historically and to pardon.  Above all, I recognized the emptiness and futility of trying to 'combat' anti-Semitism” (http://www.vho.org/aaargh/engl/zad/zad1.html).   Karl Lueger's success in Vienna was used to develop a “pragmatic strategy of non-resistance to anti-Semitism coupled with emigration of a portion of the Jews to a Jewish state-in-the-making” (http://www.vho.org/aaargh/engl/zad/zad1.html).  While the Habsburg Emperor refused to confirm Karl Lueger in office – 8 per cent of the generals, considered the most loyal supporters of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were Jews – Herzl favoured the confirmation.  On November 3, 1895 he met the Prime Minister Count Casimir Badeni and told him to “accommodate Lueger” (http://www.vho.org/aaargh/engl/zad/zad1.html).  

A similar logic underlined the cooperation between Zionists and the new Nazi regime in mid-1930s.  The ideological similarities between the two – “the contempt for liberalism,” the racism and the strong belief that “Germany could never be the homeland of its Jews” – convinced the Zionists to solicit the patronage and support of Adolf Hitler repeatedly after 1933 (http://www.vho.org/aaargh/engl/zad/zad1.html).  Two months after Hitler’s rise to power on January 30, 1933, Baron Leopold Itz Edler von Mildenstein of the SS and Kurt Tuchler, an executive of the ZVfD visited Palestine on the condition that upon his return the Baron would write a pro-Zionist article for the Nazi press (http://www.vho.org/aaargh/engl/zad/zad1.html).  Rabbi Joachim Prinz’ comments of 1937 describe the “Zionist mood in the first months of 1933” and allude to a memorandum sent to the Nazi Party by the ZVfD on June 21, 1933: “Everyone in Germany knew that only the Zionists could responsibly represent the Jews in dealings with the Nazi government.  We all felt sure that one day the government would arrange a round table conference with the Jews, at which – after the riots and atrocities of the revolution had passed – the new status of German Jewry could be considered.  The government announced very solemnly that there was no country in the world which tried to solve the Jewish problem as seriously as did Germany.  Solution of the Jewish question?  It was our Zionist dream! We never denied the existence of the Jewish question!  Dissimilation? It was our own appeal!” (http://www.vho.org/aaargh/engl/zad/zad1.html).  

The memorandum, unknown until 1962, was printed in German in Israel.  It reveals the similarities between the Nazi and Zionist ideologies and the extent of collaboration between the two parties: “May we therefore be permitted to present our views, which, in our opinion, make possible a solution in keeping with the principles of the new German State of National Awakening and which at the same time might signify for Jews a new ordering of the conditions of their existence … An answer to the Jewish question truly satisfying to the national state can be brought about only with the collaboration of the Jewish movement that aims at a social, cultural, and moral renewal of Jewry… a rebirth of national life, such as is occurring in German life through adhesion to Christian and national values … On the foundation of the new state, which has established the principle of race, we wish so to fit our community into the total structure so that for us too, in the sphere assigned to us, fruitful activity for the Fatherland is possible… Our acknowledgement of Jewish nationality provides for a clear and sincere relationship to the German people and its national and racial realities. Precisely because we do not wish to falsify these fundamentals, because we, too, are against mixed marriage and are for maintaining the purity of the Jewish group … The national distancing which the state desires would thus be brought about easily as the result of an organic development … For its practical aims, Zionism hopes to be able to win the collaboration even of a government fundamentally hostile to Jews, because in dealing with the Jewish question no sentimentalities are involved but a real problem whose solution interests all peoples, and at the present moment especially the German people … Our observations, presented herewith, rest on the conviction that, in solving the Jewish problem according to its own lights, the German Government will have full understanding for a candid and clear Jewish posture that harmonizes with the interests of the state.” (http://www.vho.org/aaargh/engl/zad/zad1.html).  

Speaking in the name of “self-conscious Jewry,” the Zionists acknowledged sharing the Nazi ideal of the “foundation of the new state” that had established the “principle of race.”  The “principle of race” was at the heart of anti-Semitism.  Yet, this fact did not discourage collaboration.  Quite the contrary, the Zionists not only encouraged it – “we, too, are against mixed marriage and are for maintaining the purity of the Jewish group” – but offered their cooperation – “We believe in the possibility of an honest relationship of loyalty between a group-conscious Jewry and the German state …” – and full support to a “government fundamentally hostile to Jews” (http://www.vho.org/aaargh/engl/zad/zad1.html).  The memorandum, “a treason to the Jews of Germany,” emphasized the level of collaboration between the Zionists and the Nazis, all in the name of a Jewish state.   As for Hitler’s overt anti-Semitism, expressed in Mein Kampf, the Zionists had inherited Herzl’s conviction “that anti-Semitism could not be fought” (http://www.vho.org/aaargh/engl/zad/zad1.html).  Besides, given their support for the Nazi “principle of race,” one can ascertain that the Zionist ideologies were not different from those of the Nazis.   However, in recent years, dating from the 1967 Six-Day War, the term “anti-Semite” is used to discredit critics of the policies of the Zionist state (Gates, 124) and “to misdirect and intimidate” (Gates, xvi) those who seek the truth.  These charges must vehemently be denied and people who believe in the validity of the charges must be given the chance to understand how they, unwillingly as it seems, have become reluctant participants and victims of a Zionist “Nationalistic Religious Orgy” (http://www.inthesetimes.com/main/print/4755/), a brainwash and propaganda apparatus that hides the truth from the population.  Thus non-Jews who disagree with the agenda of Colonial Zionism are branded “anti-Semitic,” and dissenting Jews that deviate from the pro-Zionist “party-line” are smeared pejoratively as self-hating Jews (Gates, 124). Fuelling charges of anti-Semitism against anyone opposing Tel Aviv’s “land grab,” deemed lawful by the Jewish fundamentalists (Gates, 127), has become a strategic method of suppressing the opposition to Israel’s new colonialism.  The aggressive strategy of “discredit[ing], isolat[ing], ostraciz[ing] or marginaliz[ing] anyone critical of Tel Aviv’s expansionist policies” (Gates, 127) proves to be an “effective” method of censorship – the fear of a smear campaign keeps many quiet – undermining a fundamental right to Free Speech.   

The policy of silencing the critics follows a well-know pattern:   the attacker usually starts with mentioning the “right to free speech” while attempting to hush the critic (Gates, 127).   Norman Finkelstein’s 2005 book Beyond Chutzpah – The Misuse of Anti-Semitism caused Zionists “to hit the panic button” (Gates, 127).    A Harvard-Zionist Professor Alan Dershowitz, whose book Chutzpah was the center of an extended critique by Norman Finkelstein, in a typical Zionist manner, attempted to halt the publication of  Finkelstein’s “controversial book on Israel” (Gates, 253).  At the age of 55, after teaching for six years at Chicago’s DePaul University, Finkelstein was denied tenure. His application had been approved at the departmental and college level but the Dean of the College of the Liberal Arts and Sciences opposed it.  Finkelstein accused Dershowitz of meddling in the tenure proceedings, and Dershowitz admitted sending a letter to the DePaul Faculty members, lobbying against Finkelstein’s tenure (Chomsky on Dershowitz' "jihad" against Finkelstein Part 1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8ENawcSliA&feature=related).  At the end of the day, the University succumbed to the pressure exercised by Jewish organizations and Alan Dershowitz.  To use Noam Chomsky’s words, Dershowitz had declared a “jihad against Finkelstein (Chomsky on Dershowitz' "jihad" against Finkelstein Part 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBclWDYuoxI&feature=related) that despite the latter’s outstanding scholarly credentials, cost him a tenure.     

Jimmy Carter’s Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid published by Simon & Schuster on November 14, 2006, met with a barrage of criticism (see Carter’s defence of the book and the ideas contained therein in President Jimmy Carter Pounds Israelhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDKw0f95k7Q&feature=related).   Abraham Foxman of ADL charged Carter, a supporter of the State of Israel and the sponsor of the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace process, with anti-Semitism and Martin Peretz of the New Republic wrote:  “[Carter] will go down in history as a Jew-hater” (Gates, 127).  Similarly, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting (CAMERA), an AIPAC media watchdog, bought full-page ads in The New York Times inciting readers to complain to the publisher about the new Carter book (Gates, 127).  After the publication of the book, Alan Dershowitz made the following comment: “Jimmy Carter has literally become such an anti-Israel bigot that there’s a kind of special place in Hell reserved for somebody like that”   (Alan Dershowitz Blasts President Jimmy Carter on Shalom TV http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FscSs-_IL0&feature=related).

Judge Richard Goldstone, an internationally respected jurist that headed the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, was assaulted by various leaders of the Jewish community and labelled an anti-Semite (http://www.tikkun.org/article.php/20091002111513371) despite his impeccable credentials.  He served as chair of the commission that investigated the crimes of the security forces during the apartheid regime in South Africa.  He was the chief prosecutor of the International   Criminal Tribunals in former Yugoslavia and Rwanda (http://www.journal-online.co.uk/article/6006-gazas-goldstone-on-the-backseat).  He is a member of the governing board of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/21/war-crimes-white-wash) and a life-long supporter of Israel (http://www.journal-online.co.uk/article/6006-gazas-goldstone-on-the-backseat).  The accusation is not only inconsistent with his heritage but also with the fact that he was a member of the International Panel, established in 1997 to investigate the Activities of Nazism in Argentina (CEANA) (http://www.tikkun.org/article.php/20091002111513371).     Nevertheless, in the eyes of those who choose to turn a blind eye to the inhuman treatment of the Palestinians in the occupied territories, Goldstone is a traitor that qualifies for the label “self-hating Jew,” if not for the warn-out version: “anti-Semite.”  

Noam Chomsky, a renowned American linguist, philosopher, author, political activist and a key left-wing intellectual has been criticized for his views on Israeli policies.  Dismissing Israel’s claims of self-defence (Noam Chomsky on the Israel-Palestine Conflict http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vpw-h6WY8As&feature=related), Chomsky explained: “They [Israel] are defending themselves in the sense that any military occupier has to defend itself against the population they’re crushing … You can’t defend yourself when you’re militarily occupying somebody else’s land.  That’s not defense!  Call it what you like.  IT’S NOT DEFENCE! ” (Noam Chomsky on Israel's Policy of 'Self-Defense' – Palestine http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7SVaJLuNSo&feature=related).                                             

In an interview on October 21, 2004 Amy Goodman of Democracy Now asked: “What do you say to those who call you anti-Semitic?”  Noam Chomsky’s answer was as clear and logical as ever: “Depends who they are. If they're people like … [me] with a nice Jewish education … I’d tell them to read the Bible, where the concept is invented. It was used by King Ahab, the epitome of evil in the Bible that calls … prophet Elijah – Elijah was what we would nowadays call a dissident intellectual, like most of the prophets were, giving geo-political analysis, calling for moral behaviour. He calls for Elijah, he says ‘why you are a hater of Israel’? What does that mean? You are criticizing me. I'm the king. I'm Israel. And therefore you're a hater of Israel. And that's what the concept means” (http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/20041021.htm).  Chomsky’s logic is based upon the principle of employing identical standards of evaluation when dealing with similar situations.  Using the strategy of smearing the critics of a country’s policies would amount to charging Berlusconi’s critics with anti-Italianism, Bush’s critics with anti-Americanism, etc. “If you identify the country, the people, the culture with the rulers, accept the totalitarian doctrine, then … it's anti-Semitic to criticize the Israeli policy, and anti-American to criticize the American policy, and it was anti-Soviet when the dissidents criticized Russian policy.  You have to accept deeply totalitarian assumptions not to laugh at this” (http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/20041021.htm).   Chomsky’s critic Alan Dershowitz sees things differently.  Chomsky jokingly suggests that he, similar to Norman Finkelstein, probably is on Dershowitz’ “Hit List.” The comment has a tinge of irony but there is truth in it – for years, Chomsky admits, Dershowitz had produced “outlandish lies about him (Chomsky on Dershowitz' "jihad" against Finkelstein Part 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBclWDYuoxI&feature=related).  

Chomsky is right in his analysis of King Ahab’s equation of his rule with Israel; the story comes to us from 1Kings 18:17.  Elijah defies Ahab’s, thus also the State’s authority, but he does it in the name of God:     “[36] O Lord, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, let it be known this day that you are God in Israel, that I am your servant, and that I HAVE DONE ALL THESE THINGS AT YOUR BIDDING” (1Kings 18:36).  And just like any other terrorist extremist, Elijah kills in the name of God:  “[40] Elijah said to them [the Israelites], ‘Seize the prophets of Baal; DO NOT LET ONE OF THEM ESCAPE’.   Then they seized them; and Elijah brought them down to the Wadi Kishon, and KILLED THEM THERE” (1Kings 18:40).  

All prophets of the Old Testament speak in the name of God, and the threats they utter stand as messages from God.  Thus Hosea threatens Israel with exile:  “[17] Because they have not listened to him, my God will reject them; they shall become wanderers among the nations” (Hosea 9:17).  Jeremiah prophecies loss of land, property and servitude imposed as punishment:  “[1] The sin of Judah is written with an iron pen; with a diamond point it is engraved on the tablet of their hearts … [3] … Your wealth and all your treasures I will give for spoil as the price of your sin throughout all your territory.  [4] By your own  act you shall lose the heritage that I gave you, and I will make you serve your enemies in a land that you do not know, for in my anger a fire is kindled that shall burn forever” (Jeremiah 17:1-4).  Amos predicts disaster in the form of whole-sale massacre: “[1] Hear this word that I take up over you in lamentation, O house of Israel: [2] Fallen, no more to rise, is maiden Israel; forsaken on her land, with no one to raise her up.  [3] For thus says the Lord God: The city that marched out a thousand shall have a hundred left, and that which marched out a hundred shall have ten left” (Amos 5:1-3).  

The words of Amos, a pre-exilic prophet from the time of King Jeroboam II (788-747 BCE), a period of territorial expansion and prosperity, ring true today.  The wealthy in Amos reached prosperity through manipulation of debt and credit that gave rise to gross inequities between the ruling elite and the poor (NRSV, 1302 HB).  “[7] Ah, you that turn justice to wormwood, and bring righteousness to the ground!” (Amos 5:7).   Small farmers lost their land and personal property and in many cases even their personal liberty (NRSV, 1302 HB), while the rich got richer:   “[4] Alas for those who lie on beds of ivory, and lounge on their couches, and eat lambs from the flock, and calves from the stall; [5] who sing idle songs to the sound of the harp, and like David improvise on instruments of music; [6] who drink wine from bowls, and anoint themselves with the finest oils, but are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph! [7] Therefore they shall now be the first to go into exile, and the revelry of the loungers shall pass away” (Amos 6:4-7).   Amos’ denouncement of the decadent opulence of the Northern Kingdom (Israel) and his call to Justice is similar to the denouncement delivered by the modern critics of Israeli policies.  Predictably, the reaction towards such criticisms essentially has remained the same:  [10] They hate the one who reproves in the gate, and they abhor the one who speaks the truth” (Amos 5:10).  

The message delivered by the prophets in the name of God is ominous.  There is war: “your sons, and daughters shall fall by the sword” (Amos 7: 17), “The sword is given to be polished … to be placed in the slayer’s hand … for… it is against all Israel’s princes; they are thrown to the sword, together with my people” (Ezekiel 20:11-12),  destruction: “I will deliver up the city and all that is in it” (Amos 6:8), moral degradation: “Your wife shall become a prostitute in the city” (Amos 7:17), famine:  “I will send a famine on the land” (Amos 8:11), exile: “Israel shall surely go into exile away from its land” (Amos 7: 17),    “I will scatter them before the enemy” (Jeremiah 18:17),  “And though they go into captivity in front of their enemies, there I will command the sword, and it shall kill them; and I will fix my eyes on them for harm and not for good” (Amos 9:4).  But the promises of misfortune in Deuteronomy are graver than those of the prophets: “The Lord will send upon you disaster, panic, and frustration in everything you attempt to do, until you are destroyed and perish quickly …” (Deuteronomy 28:20).   Pestilence, consumption, fever, inflammation, ulcers, scurvy, itch, mildew, madness, confusion of mind, blindness, blight, barrenness of womb and of land, drought, hunger, thirst, siege of towns, military defeat before enemies, exile, servitude, continual abuse, robbery, nakedness, lack of everything  are the punishments designed for Israel (Deuteronomy 28:15-52).   A gruesome description of cannibalism is part of the threats: “[53] In the desperate straits to which the enemy siege reduces you, you will eat the fruit of your womb, the flesh of your own sons and daughters whom the Lord your God has given you.  [54] Even the most refined and gentle of men among you will begrudge food to his own brother, to the wife whom he embraces, and to the last of his remaining children, [55] giving to none of them any of the flesh of his children whom he is eating, because nothing else remains to him, in the desperate straits to which the enemy siege will reduce you in all your towns.  [56] She who is the most refined and gentle among you, so gentle and refined that she does not venture to set the sole of her foot on the ground, will begrudge food to the husband whom she embraces, to her own son, and to her own daughter, [57] begrudging even the afterbirth that comes out from between her thighs, and the children that she bears, because she is eating them in secret for lack of anything else, in the desperate straits to which the enemy siege will reduce you in your towns” (Deuteronomy 28: 53-57).  Cannibalism resulting from siege is God’s ultimate weapon and as such it is also referred to in Leviticus 26:29, 2Kings 6:28-32, Jeremiah 19: 9, Lamentations 4:10, Ezekiel 5:10.  In all instances God proudly displays this punishment delighting in its abhorrent nature:  “[9] AND I WILL MAKE THEM EAT THE FLESH OF THEIR SONS AND THE FLESH OF THEIR DAUGHTERS, AND ALL SHALL EAT THE FLESH OF THEIR NEIGHBOURS in the siege, and in the distress with which their enemies and those who seek their life afflict them” (Jeremiah 19:9).   

Reading these threats makes one wonder: is the God of the Hebrew Bible an anti-Semite?  Or more properly, are the priests and scribes of the Second Temple – the writers of these texts – anti-Semitic?  While because of the cultural-historical distance between the Second Temple Judaism and our own time these questions can be debated endlessly, we can affirm that the modern critics of Israeli policies are NOT anti-Semitic.  Therefore, the charges of anti-Semitism must be rejected and exposed for what they are:  “an attempt to deflect criticism from the actions of … Israeli government by declaring criticism of Israel out of bounds and invoking Europe's last great taboo – the fear of being declared an anti-Semite” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/feb/17/1).  The equation "anti-Zionism = anti-Semitism" that has become the “new orthodoxy” has produced new ways of associating anti-Israel or anti-Zionist rhetoric with anti-Semitism (http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1020490.html).  The study of serious anti-Semitism, presently “hijacked and debased by people lacking any serious expertise in the subject” (http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1020490.html), should, in reality, include the analysis of the dealing of the Zionists, who collaborated with the Nazi regime and were guilty of anti-Semitism by association.  Next, it should deal with the Zionist State that ignores the guilt of the founders of Zionism, and is as guilty of anti-Semitism as the founders themselves.   

Bibliography

Gates, Jeff.  Guilt by Association: How Deception and Self-Deceit Took America to War.  Santa Barbara: State Street Publications, 2008.

The new Oxford Annotated Bible. Augmented Third Edition.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, California, is named after the famed Austrian Nazi-hunter, Simon Wiesenthal, a connection that turns out to be appropriate in disturbing but unexpected ways. That is, both Simon Wiesenthal and the Center named after him have been accused of flagrant lying, exaggerations and half-truths. Wiesenthal’s confabulations were never a matter of published discourse among scholars, so far as this writer can determine, nor were they popular knowledge until quite recently. In any case, it is now known that Wiesenthal, a born story-teller, rarely let the facts get in the way of a good story—in fact many of the things he claimed to have done were fabrications. This recently came to light with the publication, in June of 2009, of Hunting Evil, by British Author Guy Walters, in which he characterizes Simon Wiesenthal as “a liar—and a bad one at that.” Wiesenthal, he maintains, would “concoct outrageous stories about his war years and make false claims about his academic career.” Walters found that there were “so many inconsistencies between his three main memoirs and between those memoirs and contemporaneous documents, that it is impossible to establish a reliable narrative from them. Wiesenthal’s scant regard for the truth makes it possible to doubt everything he ever wrote or said.”1

The Wiener Library, one of the world’s oldest and most reputable institutions for the study of the Holocaust, has endorsed this revaluation of Wiesenthal. That is interesting because one assumes that they, like many others in the field of Holocaust Studies, may have been aware for some time that there were problems with Wiesenthal’s resume. The Wiener Library’s Director Ben Barkow concluded that “accepting that Wiesenthal was a showman and a braggart and, yes, even a liar, can live alongside acknowledging the contribution he made.”

Daniel Finkelstein, grandson of the Wiener Library’s founder, had this to say in an August 2009 article in the London Times about Guy Walters’ Hunting Evil: “Walters’s documentary evidence on Wiesenthal’s inconsistencies and lies is impeccable. He shows how the Nazi hunter’s accounts of his wartime experiences are contradictory and implausible. He demonstrates that he had no role, contrary to his own assertion, in the capture of Adolf Eichmann. He pitilessly dissects Wiesenthal’s overblown claims about the number he brought to justice, suggesting it was not much more than a handful.”2

So what is the truth about Simon Wiesenthal? Born in 1908 in Galicia, Wiesenthal attended the Czech Technical University in Prague in 1929, where he had a reputation as a gifted raconteur. (Walters says he appeared as “a stand-up comedian,” which could be a British approximation of the cabaret theatre popular at that time.) Wiesenthal claimed to have graduated from Czech Technical, but records show that he didn’t. He also maintained that he studied at Lwow Polytechnic in Galicia in 1935, but there is no record of him ever attending classes there. Wiesenthal likewise claimed to have operated his own architectural office and built elegant villas, but again Polish records do not support this. Instead he appears to have worked as a supervisor in a Lviv furniture factory from 1935 until 1939, a somewhat more mundane occupation, and one that Wiesenthal himself acknowledged before he became a famous celebrity in Vienna.

During the Second World War, Wiesenthal was apprehended by the Nazis, and was in at least six different Nazi camps. For reasons unknown, however, he claimed later to have been in 13 of them. This raises the question that must inevitably come up when contemplating Wiesenthal’s stories about himself. Being in a single Nazi camp would clearly be a horrific, mind-blowing experience, much less being in six of them. (This writer cannot confirm which ones were death camps and which ones labor or concentration camps.) So why did Wiesenthal feel it necessary to inflate the number of camps he’d been in to 13, particularly since such claims were likely to be checked later?

Part of the answer seems to be that Wiesenthal was a natural-born confabulator and liar who had a powerful need to create the persona of a superhero. But that alone does not explain his behavior. The Holocaust raises questions about human nature, and there is a demand for accounts that can explain, rationalize, and create a moral context for it. Wiesenthal offered people a plausible narrative with a moral framework: Nazis incarcerated him; he miraculously escaped; he now tracked them down. The systemic evil of the Holocaust was so huge and so threatening that it could be successfully addressed only by a superman whose capacity to survive evil and punish transgressors was larger than life. Wiesenthal was acutely aware of this; and his heart-stopping accounts of last-minutes escapes from the Nazis played to this anxiety. And the fact that he was bringing masses of Nazi war criminals to justice was the happy ending to the success story, the kind people wanted to hear; but as Walters demonstrates in Hunting Evil, at least one of Wiesenthal’s accounts of last-minute escapes from the Nazis can be shown to be a fabrication, and others are questionable.

After the war, Wiesenthal founded two organizations that sought to collect and centralize information on Nazi war criminals at large. Sometimes these war criminals were “hiding in plain sight,” in the sense that governments knew where they were but lacked the political will to arrest them. The main function of Wiesenthal’s organizations, then, was to keep the issue current in the public eye—and he had the kind of personality, and the public relations skills, to do just that. This is the real reason for Wiesenthal’s notoriety. The organizations set up by Wiesenthal were research organizations, and had no real investigative functions, such as law enforcement might have, and no power to arrest people. Guy Walters concludes (correctly, in my opinion) that the disinterestedness of western governments in hunting down Nazi criminals was far more repugnant morally than Wiesenthal’s experiments with the truth. That said, the fact that Wiesenthal told so many unnecessary lies, and that people who might have suspected this said nothing to challenge them, is one more example of the Holocaust’s ability to corrupt.

Although Wiesenthal claimed to have brought over a thousand Nazi criminals to justice, he generated information leading to the arrest of less than a hundred at most. His most outrageous claim was that he participated in the tracking down of Adolf Eichmann. This was, and remains, a falsehood—the tracking and kidnapping of Eichmann was the work of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, and Wiesenthal’s involvement was limited to passing on whatever information he had to them. This inconvenient reality was widely known—certainly it was known to Mossad, which despised and resented Wiesenthal’s self-serving stories—but apparently few people were willing to question Wiesenthal’s many claims.

Except in Austria, that is, where Wiesenthal was for a long time a controversial figure. It the 1970s, Wiesenthal publicly berated Austrian Prime Minister Bruno Kreisky for having so many ex-Nazis in his cabinet—and in this, Wiesenthal was undoubtedly right. The controversy he stirred up was especially important because Austrians had, up to that time, generally avoided much public discussion about their own responsibility for Nazi crimes; and Wiesenthal may have welcomed the opportunity to open up this issue when he made his sensational—but accurate—accusations about Kreisky’s cabinet choices. Kreisky, a Jewish Social Democrat, hinted that Wiesenthal had survived the war only because he collaborated with the Gestapo; but Wiesenthal sued for libel and won. Wiesenthal also drew fire for emphasizing that others besides Jews died in the gas chambers, which brought him into conflict with Elie Wiesel, who took the view that the Holocaust should be seen as an exclusively Jewish event. Some of Wiesenthal’s ideas were good ones—how ironic, then, that his ideas were given serious consideration only because of the rough-and-tumble public persona that Wiesenthal had invented for himself as part of his entrepreneurial and overly-imaginative self-promotion as a swashbuckling Nazi-hunter.

Wiesenthal received practically every honor known to the 20th century, over 100 of them. Mainly because of his own self-promotion, Wiesenthal became much more than an author with some dubious and not particularly well-written books—he became a secular saint. But of what secular religion was Saint Wiesenthal the exemplar? The trouble with Wiesenthal was not his extraordinary efforts to focus public attention on Nazi criminals—the problem was, and is, that his accounts of his own experiences were never challenged by people who professed to have an interest in historical truth. His addiction to confabulation made him a prisoner of what Norman Finkelstein has called The Holocaust Industry, which we may describe as the systematic use of the Holocaust for personal and organizational gain.

We are left with the sense that perhaps some who noticed discrepancies in Wiesenthal’s books said nothing because they were afraid of being denounced as anti-Semites. Author Guy Walters refers to this in his July 2009 article in the Sunday Times. “Some may feel I am too harsh on [Wiesenthal] and that I run a professional danger in seemingly allying myself with a vile host of neo-Nazis, revisionists, Holocaust deniers and anti-Semites. I belong firmly outside any of these squalid camps and it is my intention to wrestle criticism of Wiesenthal away from their clutches. His figure is a complex and important one. If there was a motive for his duplicity, it may well have been rooted in good intentions.” Guy Walters made this caveat a month after his book came out last summer; the fact that he made it at all indicates the sensitivity with which a professional historian must approach anything having to do with the Holocaust.

In fact, the appearance of Walters’ book has some of the characteristics of a literary campaign, although not necessarily of pre-arrangement. Walters’ Hunting Evil was published in Britain on June 18, 2009, at the beginning of last summer. A month later, in July, an article by Walters appeared in the Sunday Times, which set forth his reasons for revealing Wiesenthal’s duplicities. (One might think that because something is true might be reason enough for a historian to reveal it.) In August, 2009, a month later, Daniel Finkelstein’s supportive review appears in the Jewish Chronicle, validating Walters’ research. Finkelstein’s review was pivotal, since—as the grandson of the founder of the world’s oldest library on Holocaust history—he is assumed to speak with an authority that others lack, including perhaps Guy Walters himself.

That is not to say that the above was part of a coordinated campaign. Walters wrote on his website that he does not know Finkelstein, and based on internal evidence this writer believes that to be true. It simply indicates how complicated telling the truth can become when one writes about the Holocaust, and how important it is for many historians to carefully consider the public-relations angle before revealing things that might make people uncomfortable. In Guy Walters’ case, he received support for his findings from a man whose credentials in Holocaust Studies cannot be challenged. (There is at least one new book about Wiesenthal coming out soon, which after the Walters’ revelations will almost surely be forced to deal with obvious discrepancies in Wiesenthal’s narrative.)

There is ongoing fallout to the Walters’ book in other areas. On November 26, 2009, there appeared a sensational Associated Press report (carried on Walters’ website) that 12 members of the 15 member international advisory board of the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies have resigned, apparently after a hysterical uproar about the availability of research material to scholars. (The AP report gives as the reason for the international hullabaloo certain objections by scholars “that restrictions on access to files made independent research impossible.”) Inevitably, one of those involved in the AP report warned that unrestricted access to the Institute’s files might encourage “holocaust deniers.” The opposite seems much more likely. The longer people hide the truth about Wiesenthal, the more doubts it will create about how objectively historians are able to write about the Holocaust.

Beginning with the publication in 1961 of Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews, people on the Left, political and cultural progressives, and some psychologists sought to deconstruct the Holocaust so that they could learn how systemic evil operates. If the Shoah was history’s greatest crime, why not try to understand how it happened, so such crimes could be thwarted in the future? That was the right approach to take, but it quickly led to a kind of truth that many people did not want to accept—that there is a Nazi in every person, and that any tribe, national group or country in the world could experience the same moral collapse as Germany experienced, given the right conditions. That was too threatening for many people, because they did not want to acknowledge how deep evil ran in human nature.

And it was, also, the ultimate threat to the neo-cons that were beginning to gain power in the US. If the same moral collapse that happened in Germany could happen elsewhere, such an analysis could be applied anywhere, which meant that the big neo-conservative foundations could not control discourse about the Holocaust. An objective deconstruction of the development of evil in Germany could even serve as a guide to what is happening in Israel. The neo-cons could not allow that to happen, because of their position that Israel’s government could never be criticized; and because the neo-conservatives did not want a truly objective deconstruction of the Holocaust that could teach people how to defeat systemic evil. On the contrary—they sought to create their own systemic evil in the US and in the Middle East, by using the Holocaust to arouse fear, anger, guilt and aggression, as well as religious nationalism generally.

Invoking the Holocaust in social and political discourse became a way for the powerful neo-cons and the Israel Lobby to use the unresolved trauma of the Holocaust, in some cases to generate ideas and in other cases to suppress them. The use of the Holocaust to manipulate people and societies to uncritically support Israel depends on a particularization of the Holocaust—it insists, in other words, that Nazi evil cannot be compared to any other form of systemic evil. It insists that the causes of German moral collapse (violent nationalism, fanatical identification with victim status, deep feelings of inferiority, a longing for apocalyptic solutions) cannot be applied anywhere else. That is despicable nonsense.

Not only can the causes of German moral collapse be seen in other nations and situations; such an analysis must be applied to other nations and situations, if we are to learn anything about how systemic evil works. Neo-cons generally dislike that, because they wish to discuss the Holocaust only within a context of Jewish exceptionalism. But sadly, there’s a Nazi in everybody—in fact, that’s the most important thing that the Holocaust teachers us. As Avraham Burg writes, today’s Israel feels a lot like Weimer, not because Israeli culture is so similar to central Europe’s culture, but because the decline into evil is always similar wherever it occurs. How could Israel not look like Weimer, when so much of what passes for a national consciousness in Israel is simply trauma from the Holocaust, which people do not attempt to deconstruct along universal lines but to which they cling as personal as well as national identities?

It was not until after Simon Wiesenthal died in 2005 that a British historian was able to write frankly about the duplicity in Simon Wiesenthal’s stories. Again I must ask, why did not the people who may have known about Wiesenthal’s casual relationship with the truth speak up about it? Predictably, the Simon Wiesenthal Center of Los Angeles, California, is in no hurry to accept this new historical appraisal of their namesake—their website, in fact, faithfully replicates many of Wiesenthal’s lies and inaccuracies. But that should not surprise us, because the Simon Wiesenthal Center, like Simon Wiesenthal himself, is not interested in historical truth, nor is it committed to teaching about the history of the Holocaust in all its complexity. The Simon Wiesenthal Center is, rather, committed to using the Holocaust to raise money, and using the trauma associated with it to promote the Center’s extremist political perspectives.

Lawrence Swaim is the Executive Director of the Interfaith Freedom Foundation. This article is from his upcoming book Trauma Bond–An Inquiry Into the Nature of Evil,

Source

(Thanks Ron for the forward) http://alethonews.wordpress.com/2010/01/04/deconstructing-simon-wiesenthal/