Wednesday, January 28, 2009

The Truth About the Talmud

A Documented Exposé of Supremacist 

Rabbinic Hate Literature


By Warrant of John 18:37, Galatians 4:16


Introduction

The Talmud is Judaism's holiest book (actually a collection of books). Its authority takes precedence over the Old Testament in Judaism. Evidence of this may be found in the Talmud itself, Erubin 21b (Soncino edition): "My son, be more careful in the observance of the words of the Scribes than in the words of the Torah (Old Testament)."

The supremacy of the Talmud over the Bible in the Israeli state may also be seen in the case of the black Ethiopian Jews. Ethiopians are very knowledgeable of the Old Testament. However, their religion is so ancient it pre-dates the Scribes' Talmud, of which the Ethiopians have no knowledge. According to the N.Y. Times of Sept. 29, 1992, p.4:

"The problem is that Ethiopian Jewish tradition goes no further than the Bible or Torah; the later Talmud and other commentaries that form the basis of modern traditions never came their way."

Because they are not traffickers in Talmudic tradition, the black Ethiopian Jews are discriminated against and have been forbidden by the Zionists to perform marriages, funerals and other services in the Israeli state.

Rabbi Joseph D. Soloveitchik is regarded as one of the most influential rabbis of the 20th century, the "unchallenged leader" of Orthodox Judaism and the top international authority on halakha (Jewish religious law). Soloveitchik was responsible for instructing and ordaining more than 2,000 rabbis, "an entire generation" of Jewish leadership.

N.Y. Times religion reporter Ari Goldman described the basis of the rabbi's authority:

"Soloveitchik came from a long line of distinguished Talmudic scholars...Until his early 20s, he devoted himself almost exclusively to the study of the Talmud...He came to Yeshiva University's Elchanan Theological Seminary where he remained the pre-eminent teacher in the Talmud...He held the title of Leib Merkin professor of Talmud...sitting with his feet crossed in front of a table bearing an open volume of the Talmud." (N.Y. Times, April 10, 1993, p. 38).

Nowhere does Goldman refer to Soloveitchik's knowledge of the Bible as the basis for being one of the leading authorities on Jewish law.

The rabbi's credentials are all predicated upon his mastery of the Talmud. Other studies are clearly secondary. Britain's Jewish Chronicle of March 26, 1993 states that in religious school (yeshiva), Jews are "devoted to the Talmud to the exclusion of everything else."

The Talmud Nullifies the Bible

The Jewish Scribes claim the Talmud is partly a collection of traditions Moses gave them in oral form. These had not yet been written down in Jesus' time. Christ condemned the traditions of the Mishnah (early Talmud) and those who taught it (Scribes and Pharisees), because the Talmud nullifies the teachings of the Holy Bible.

Shmuel Safrai in The Literature of the Sages Part One (p.164), points out that in chapters 4 and 5 of the Talmud's Gittin Tractate, the Talmud nullifies the Biblical teaching concerning money-lending: "Hillel decreed the prozbul for the betterment of the world. Theprozbul is a legal fiction which allows debts to be collected after the Sabbatical year and it was Hillel's intention thereby to overcome the fear that money-lenders had of losing their money."

The famous warning of Jesus Christ about the tradition of men that voids Scripture (Mark 7:1-13), is in fact, a direct reference to the Talmud, or more specifically, the forerunner of the first part of it, the Mishnah, which existed in oral form during Christ's lifetime, before being committed to writing. Mark chapter 7, from verse one through thirteen, represents Our Lord's pointed condemnation of the Mishnah.

Unfortunately, due to the abysmal ignorance of our day, the widespread "Judeo-Christian" notion is that the Old Testament is the supreme book of Judaism. But this is not so. The Pharisees teach for doctrine the commandments of rabbis, not God.

The Talmudic commentary on the Bible is their supreme law, and not the Bible itself. That commentary does indeed, as Jesus said, void the laws of God, not uphold them. As students of the Talmud, we know this to be true.

Jewish scholar Hyam Maccoby, in Judaism on Trial, quotes Rabbi Yehiel ben Joseph: "Further, without the Talmud, we would not be able to understand passages in the Bible...God has handed this authority to the sages and tradition is a necessity as well as scripture. The Sages also made enactments of their own...anyone who does not study the Talmud cannot understand Scripture."

There is a tiny Jewish sect which makes considerable effort to eschew Talmud and adhere to the Old Testament alone. These are the Karaites, a group which, historically, has been most hated and severely persecuted by orthodox Jewish rabbinate.

To the Mishnah the rabbis later added the Gemara (rabbinical commentaries). Together these comprise the Talmud. There are two versions, the Jerusalem Talmud and the Babylonian Talmud.

The Babylonian Talmud is regarded as the authoritative version: "The authority of the Babylonian Talmud is also greater than that of the Jerusalem Talmud. In cases of doubt the former is decisive." (R.C. Musaph-Andriesse, From Torah to Kabbalah: A Basic Introduction to the Writings of Judaism, p. 40).

This study is based on the Jewish-authorized Babylonian Talmud. We have published herein the authenticated sayings of the Jewish Talmud. Look them up for yourself.

We publish the following irrefutable documentation in the hope of liberating all people, including Jewish people, from the corrosive delusions and racism of this Talmudic hate literature, which is the manual of Orthodox and Hasidic Jews the world over.

The implementation by Jewish supremacists of Talmudic hate literature has caused untold suffering throughout history and now, in occupied Palestine, it is used as a justification for the mass murder of Palestinian civilians. The Talmud specifically defines all who are not Jews as non-human animals.

Some Teachings of the Jewish Talmud

Where a Jew Should Do Evil

Moed Kattan 17a: If a Jew is tempted to do evil he should go to a city where he is not known and do the evil there.

Penalty for Disobeying Rabbis

Erubin 21b. Whosoever disobeys the rabbis deserves death and will be punished by being boiled in hot excrement in hell.

Hitting a Jew is the same as hitting God

Sanhedrin 58b. If a heathen (gentile) hits a Jew, the gentile must be killed.

O.K. to Cheat Non-Jews

Sanhedrin 57a . A Jew need not pay a gentile ("Cuthean") the wages owed him for work.

Jews Have Superior Legal Status

Baba Kamma 37b. "If an ox of an Israelite gores an ox of a Canaanite there is no liability; but if an ox of a Canaanite gores an ox of an Israelite...the payment is to be in full."

Jews May Steal from Non-Jews

Baba Mezia 24a . If a Jew finds an object lost by a gentile ("heathen") it does not have to be returned. (Affirmed also in Baba Kamma 113b). Sanhedrin 76a. God will not spare a Jew who "marries his daughter to an old man or takes a wife for his infant son or returns a lost article to a Cuthean..."

Jews May Rob and Kill Non-Jews

Sanhedrin 57a . When a Jew murders a gentile ("Cuthean"), there will be no death penalty. What a Jew steals from a gentile he may keep.

Baba Kamma 37b. The gentiles are outside the protection of the law and God has "exposed their money to Israel."

Jews May Lie to Non-Jews

Baba Kamma 113a. Jews may use lies ("subterfuges") to circumvent a Gentile.

Non-Jewish Children are Sub-Human

Yebamoth 98a. All gentile children are animals.

Abodah Zarah 36b. Gentile girls are in a state of niddah (filth) from birth.

Abodah Zarah 22a-22b . Gentiles prefer sex with cows.

Insults Against Blessed Mary

Sanhedrin 106a . Says Jesus' mother was a whore: "She who was the descendant of princes and governors played the harlot with carpenters." Also in footnote #2 to Shabbath 104b of the Soncino edition, it is stated that in the "uncensored" text of the Talmud it is written that Jesus mother, "Miriam the hairdresser," had sex with many men.

Gloats over Christ Dying Young

A passage from Sanhedrin 106 gloats over the early age at which Jesus died: "Hast thou heard how old Balaam (Jesus) was?--He replied: It is not actually stated but since it is written, Bloody and deceitful men shall not live out half their days it follows that he was thirty-three or thirty-four years old."

Jesus in the Talmud:

Horrible Blasphemies Against Jesus Christ

While it is the standard disinformation practice of apologists for the Talmud to deny that it contains any scurrilous references to Jesus Christ, certain Orthodox Jewish organizations are more forthcoming and admit that the Talmud not only mentions Jesus but disparages him (as a sorcerer and a demented sex freak). These orthodox Jewish organizations make this admission perhaps out of the belief that Jewish supremacy is so well-established in the modern world that they need not concern themselves with adverse reactions.

For example, on the website of the Orthodox Jewish Hasidic Lubavitch group--one of the largest in the world--we find the following statement, complete with Talmudic citations:

"The Talmud (Babylonian edition) records other sins of 'Jesus the Nazarene':

1) He and his disciples practiced sorcery and black magic, led Jews astray into idolatry, and were sponsored by foreign, gentile powers for the purpose of subverting Jewish worship (Sanhedrin 43a).

2) He was sexually immoral, worshipped statues of stone (a brick is mentioned), was cut off from the Jewish people for his wickedness, and refused to repent (Sanhedrin 107b; Sotah 47a).

3) He learned witchcraft in Egypt and, to perform miracles, used procedures that involved cutting his flesh, which is also explicitly banned in the Bible (Shabbos 104b).

End quote from http://www.noahide.com/yeshu.htm (Lubavitch website) June 20, 2000.

[Note: we have printed and preserved in our files a hard copy of this statement from the Lubavitch"Noah's Covenant Website," as it appeared on their website at http://www.noahide.com on June 20, 2000, in the event that denials are later issued and the statement itself suppressed].

Let us examine further some of these anti-Christ Talmud passages:

Gittin 57a. Says Jesus is in hell, being boiled in "hot excrement."

Sanhedrin 43a. Says Jesus ("Yeshu" and in Soncino footnote #6, Yeshu "the Nazarene") was executed because he practiced sorcery: "It is taught that on the eve of Passover Jesus was hung, and forty days before this the proclamation was made: Jesus is to be stoned to death because he has practiced sorcery and has lured the people to idolatry...He was an enticer and of such thou shalt not pity or condone."

Kallah 51a."The elders were once sitting in the gate when two young lads passed by; one covered his head and the other uncovered his head. Of him who uncovered his head Rabbi Eliezer remarked that he is a bastard. Rabbi Joshua remarked that he is the son of a niddah (a child conceived during a woman's menstrual period). Rabbi Akiba said that he is both a bastard and a son of a niddah.

"They said, 'What induced you to contradict the opinion of your colleagues?' He replied, "I will prove it concerning him." He went to the lad's mother and found her sitting in the market selling beans.

"He said to her, 'My daughter, if you will answer the question I will put to you, I will bring you to the world to come.' (eternal life). She said to him, 'Swear it to me.'

"Rabbi Akiba, taking the oath with his lips but annulling it in his heart, said to her, 'What is the status of your son?' She replied, 'When I entered the bridal chamber I was niddah (menstruating) and my husband kept away from me; but my best man had intercourse with me and this son was born to me.' Consequently the child was both a bastard and the son of a niddah.

"It was declared, '..Blessed be the God of Israel Who Revealed His Secret to Rabbi Akiba..."

In addition to the theme that God rewards clever liars, the preceding Talmud discussion is actually about Jesus Christ (the bastard boy who "uncovered his head" and was conceived in the filth of menstruation). The boy's adulterous mother in this Talmud story is the mother of Christ, Blessed Mary (called Miriam and sometimes, Miriam the hairdresser, in the Talmud).

"The Editio Princeps of the complete Code of Talmudic Law, Maimonides' Mishneh Torah -- replete not only with the most offensive precepts against all Gentiles but also with explicit attacks on Christianity and on Jesus (after whose name the author adds piously, 'May the name of the wicked perish')... --Dr. Israel Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion, p. 21.

"The Talmud contains a few explicit references to Jesus...These references are certainly not complimentary...There seems little doubt that the account of the execution of Jesus on the eve of Passover does refer to the Christian Jesus...The passage in which Jesus' punishment in hell is described also seems to refer to the Christian Jesus. It is a piece of anti-Christian polemic dating from the post-70 CE period..." --Hyam Maccoby, Judaism on Trial, pp. 26-27.

"According to the Talmud, Jesus was executed by a proper rabbinical court for idolatry, inciting other Jews to idolatry, and contempt of rabbinical authority. All classical Jewish sources which mention his execution are quite happy to take responsibility for it; in the talmudic account the Romans are not even mentioned.

"The more popular accounts--which were nevertheless taken quite seriously--such as the notorious Toldot Yeshu are even worse, for in addition to the above crimes they accuse him of witchcraft. The very name 'Jesus' was for Jews a symbol of all that is abominable and this popular tradition still persists...

"The Hebrew form of the name Jesus--Yeshu--was interpreted as an acronym for the curse, 'may his name and memory be wiped out,' which is used as an extreme form of abuse. In fact, anti-zionist Orthodox Jews (such as Neturey Qarta) sometimes refer to Herzl as 'Herzl Jesus' and I have found in religious zionist writings expressions such as "Nasser Jesus" and more recently 'Arafat Jesus." --Dr. Israel Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion, pp. 97- 98, 118.

Talmud Attacks Christians and Christian Books

Rosh Hashanah 17a. Christians (minnim) and others who reject the Talmud will go to hell and be punished there for all generations.

Sanhedrin 90a. Those who read the New Testament ("uncanonical books") will have no portion in the world to come.

Shabbath 116a. Jews must destroy the books of the Christians, i.e. the New Testament.

Dr. Israel Shahak of Hebrew University reports that the Israelis burned hundreds of New Testament Bibles in occupied Palestine on March 23, 1980 (cf. Jewish History, Jewish Religion, p. 21).

Sick and Insane Teachings of the Talmud

Gittin 69a . To heal his flesh a Jew should take dust that lies within the shadow of an outdoor toilet, mix with honey and eat it.

Shabbath 41a. The law regulating the rule for how to urinate in a holy way is given.

Yebamoth 63a. States that Adam had sexual intercourse with all the animals in the Garden of Eden.

Yebamoth 63a. Declares that agriculture is the lowest of occupations.

Sanhedrin 55b. A Jew may marry a three year old girl (specifically, three years "and a day" old).

Sanhedrin 54b. A Jew may have sex with a child as long as the child is less than nine years old.

Kethuboth 11b. "When a grown-up man has intercourse with a little girl it is nothing."

Yebamoth 59b. A woman who had intercourse with a beast is eligible to marry a Jewish priest. A woman who has sex with a demon is also eligible to marry a Jewish priest.

Abodah Zarah 17a. States that there is not a whore in the world that the Talmudic sage Rabbi Eleazar has not had sex with. On one of his whorehouse romps, Rabbi Eleazar leanred that there was one particular prostitute residing in a whorehouse near the sea, who would receive a bag of money for her services. He took a bag of money and went to her, crossing seven rivers to do so. During their intercourse the prostitute farted. After this the whore told Rabbi Eleazar: "Just as this gas will never return to my anus, Rabbi Eleazar will never get to heaven."

Hagigah 27a. States that no rabbi can ever go to hell.

Baba Mezia 59b. A rabbi debates God and defeats Him. God admits the rabbi won the debate.

Gittin 70a. The Rabbis taught: "On coming from a privy (outdoor toilet) a man should not have sexual intercourse till he has waited long enough to walk half a mile, because the demon of the privy is with him for that time; if he does, his children will be epileptic."

Gittin 69b. To heal the disease of pleurisy ("catarrh") a Jew should "take the excrement of a white dog and knead it with balsam, but if he can possibly avoid it he should not eat the dog's excrement as it loosens the limbs."

Pesahim 111a. It is forbidden for dogs, women or palm trees to pass between two men, nor may others walk between dogs, women or palm trees. Special dangers are involved if the women are menstruating or sitting at a crossroads.

Menahoth 43b-44a. A Jewish man is obligated to say the following prayer every day: Thank you God for not making me a gentile, a woman or a slave.

Tall Tales of a Roman Holocaust

Here are two early "Holocaust" tales from the Talmud: Gittin 57b. Claims that four billion Jews were killed by the Romans in the city of Bethar. Gittin 58a claims that 16 million Jewish children were wrapped in scrolls and burned alive by the Romans. (Ancient demography indicates that there were not 16 million Jews in the entire world at that time, much less 16 million Jewish children or four billion Jews).

A Revealing Admission

Abodah Zarah 70a. The question was asked of the rabbi whether wine stolen in Pumbeditha might be used or if it was defiled, due to the fact that the thieves might have been gentiles (a gentile touching wine would make the wine unclean). The rabbi says not to worry, that the wine is permissible for Jewish use because the majority of the thieves in Pumbeditha, the place where the wine was stolen, are Jews. (Also cf. Gemara Rosh Hashanah 25b).

Pharisaic Rituals

Erubin 21b. "Rabbi Akiba said to him, "Give me some water to wash my hands."

"It will not suffice for drinking," the other complained, "will it suffice for washing your hands?"

"What can I do?' the former replied, "when for neglecting the words of the Rabbis one deserves death? It is better that I myself should die than that I transgress against the opinion of my colleagues." [This is the ritual hand washing condemned by Jesus in Matthew 15: 1-9].

Genocide Advocated by the Talmud

Minor Tractates. Soferim 15, Rule 10. This is the saying of Rabbi Simon ben Yohai: Tob shebe goyyim harog ("Even the best of the gentiles should all be killed").

This passage is from the original Hebrew of the Babylonian Talmud as quoted by the 1907 Jewish Encyclopedia, published by Funk and Wagnalls and compiled by Isidore Singer, under the entry, "Gentile," (p. 617).

This original Talmud passage has been concealed in translation. The Jewish Encyclopedia states that, "...in the various versions the reading has been altered, 'The best among the Egyptians' being generally substituted." In the Soncino version: "the best of the heathens" (Minor Tractates, Soferim 41a-b].

Israelis annually take part in a national pilgrimage to the grave of Simon ben Yohai, to honor this rabbi who advocated the extermination of non-Jews. (Jewish Press, June 9, 1989, p. 56B).

On Purim, Feb. 25, 1994, Israeli army officer Baruch Goldstein, an orthodox Jew from Brooklyn, massacred 40 Palestinian civilians, including children, while they knelt in prayer in a mosque. Goldstein was a disciple of the late Brooklyn Rabbi Meir Kahane, who told CBS News that his teaching that Arabs are "dogs" is derived "from the Talmud." (CBS 60 Minutes, "Kahane").

University of Jerusalem Prof. Ehud Sprinzak described Kahane and Goldstein's philosophy: "They believe it's God's will that they commit violence against goyim, a Hebrew term for non-Jews." (NY Daily News, Feb. 26, 1994, p. 5).

Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburg declared, "We have to recognize that Jewish blood and the blood of a goy are not the same thing." (NY Times, June 6, 1989, p.5).

Rabbi Yaacov Perrin said, "One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail." (NY Daily News, Feb. 28, 1994, p.6).

Talmudic Doctrine: Non-Jews are not Human

The Talmud specifically defines all who are not Jews as non-human animals, and specifically dehumanizes Gentiles as not being descendants of Adam. Here are some of the Talmud passages which relate to this topic.

Kerithoth 6b: Uses of Oil of Anointing. "Our Rabbis have taught: He who pours the oil of anointing over cattle or vessels is not guilty; if over gentiles (goyim) or the dead, he is not guilty. The law relating to cattle and vessels is right, for it is written: "Upon the flesh of man (Adam), shall it not be poured (Exodus 30:32]); and cattle and vessels are not man (Adam).

"Also with regard to the dead, [it is plausible] that he is exempt, since after death one is called corpse and not a man (Adam). But why is one exempt in the case of gentiles (goyim); are they not in the category of man (Adam)? No, it is written: 'And ye my sheep, the sheep of my pasture, are man" (Adam); [Ezekiel 34:31]: Ye are called man (Adam) but gentiles (goyim) are not called man (Adam)."

In the preceding passage, the rabbis are discussing the portion of the Mosaic law which forbids applying the holy oil to men.

The Talmud states that it is not a sin to apply the holy oil to Gentiles, because Gentiles are not human beings (i.e. are not of Adam).

Another example from tractate Yebamoth 61a: "It was taught: And so did R. Simeon ben Yohai state (61a) that the graves of gentiles (goyim) do not impart levitical uncleanness by an ohel [standing or bending over a grave], for it is said, 'And ye my sheep the sheep of my pasture, are men (Adam), [Ezekiel 34:31]; you are called men (Adam) but the idolaters are not called men (Adam)."

The Old Testament Mosaic law states that touching a human corpse or the grave of a human imparts uncleanness to those who touch it. But the Talmud teaches that if a Jew touches the grave of a Gentile, the Jew is not rendered unclean, since Gentiles are not human (not of Adam).

From Baba Mezia 114b: ""A Jewish priest was standing in a graveyard. When asked why he was standing there in apparent violation of the Mosaic law, he replied that it was permissible, since the law only prohibits Jews from coming into contact with the graves of humans (Adamites), and he was standing in a gentile graveyard. For it has been taught by Rabbi Simon ben Yohai: 'The graves of gentiles [goyim] do not defile. For it is written, 'And ye my flock, the flock of my pastures, are men (Adam)' (Ezekiel 34:31); only ye are designated men (Adam)."

Ezekiel 34:31 is the alleged Biblical proof text repeatedly cited in the preceding three Talmud passages. But Ezekiel 34:31 does not in fact support the Talmudic notion that only Israelites are human. What these rabbinical, anti-Gentile racists and ideologues have done in asserting the preceding absurdities about Gentiles is distort an Old Testament passage in order to justify their bigotry.

In Berakoth 58a the Talmud uses Ezekiel 23:20 as proof of the sub-human status of gentiles. It also teaches that anyone (even a Jewish man) who reveals this Talmudic teaching about non-Jews deserves death, since revealing it makes Gentiles wrathful and causes the repression of Judaism.

The Talmudic citation of this scripture from Ezekiel as a "proof-text" is specious, since the passage does not prove that Gentiles are animals. The passage from Ezekiel only says that some Egyptians had large genital organs and copious emissions. This does not in any way prove or even connote that the Egyptians being referred to in the Bible were considered animals. Once again, the Talmud has falsified the Bible by means of distorted interpretation.

Other Talmud passages which expound on Ezekiel 23:20 in this racist fashion are: Arakin 19b, Berakoth 25b, Niddah 45a, Shabbath 150a, Yebamoth 98a. Moreover, the original text of Sanhedrin 37a applies God's approval only to the saving of Jewish lives (cf. theHesronot Ha-shas, Cracow, 1894).

Moses Maimonides: Advocate of Extermination

We will now examine the post-Talmudic commentator Rambam (Moses Maimonides). This revered "sage" taught that Christians should be exterminated. He has the highest stature in Judaism:

"Moses Maimonides is considered the greatest codifier and philosopher in Jewish history. He is often affectionately referred to as the Rambam, after the initials of his name and title, Rabenu Moshe Ben Maimon, "Our Rabbi, Moses son of Maimon." [Maimonides' Principles, edited by Aryeh Kaplan, Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America,, p. 3].

Here is what Maimonides (Rambam) taught concerning saving people's lives, especially concerning saving the lives of gentiles and Christians, or even Jews who dared to deny the "divine inspiration" of the Talmud:

Maimonides, Mishnah Torah, (Moznaim Publishing Corporation, Brooklyn, New York, 1990, Chapter 10, English Translation), p. 184: "Accordingly, if we see an idolater (gentile) being swept away or drowning in the river, we should not help him. If we see that his life is in danger, we should not save him." The Hebrew text of the Feldheim 1981 edition of Mishnah Torah states this as well.

Immediately after Maimonides' admonition that it is a duty for Jews not to save a drowning or perishing gentile, he informs us of the Talmudic duty of Jews towards Christians, and also towards Jews who deny the Talmud. Maimonides, Mishnah Torah, (Chapter 10), p. 184:

"It is a mitzvah [religious duty], however, to eradicate Jewish traitors, minnim, and apikorsim, and to cause them to descend to the pit of destruction, since they cause difficulty to the Jews and sway the people away from God, as did Jesus of Nazareth and his students, and Tzadok, Baithos, and their students. May the name of the wicked rot."

The Jewish publisher's commentary accompanying the preceding statement of Maimonides states that Jesus was an example of amin (plural: minnim).

The commentary also states that the students of Tzadok were defined as those Jews who deny the truth of the Talmud and who uphold only the written law (i.e. the Old Testament).

According to Maimonides' Principles, p. 5, Maimonides "spent twelve years extracting every decision and law from the Talmud, and arranging them all into 14 systematic volumes. The work was finally completed in 1180, and was called Mishnah Torah, or "Code of the Torah."

Maimonides taught in another part of the Mishnah Torah that gentiles are not human: "Man alone, and not vessels, can contract uncleanness by carriage. ...The corpse of a gentile, however, does not convey uncleanness by overshadowing. ...a gentile does not contract corpse uncleanness; and if a gentile touches, carries, or overshadows a corpse he is as one who did not touch it.

"To what is this like? It is like a beast which touches a corpse or overshadows it. And this applies not to corpse uncleanness only but to any other kind of uncleanness: neither gentiles nor cattle are susceptible to any uncleanness." (The Code of Maimonides, vol. 10, translated by Herbert Danby, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1954, pp. 8-9).

Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Rotze'ach 2:11: "A Jew who killed a righteous gentile is not executed in a court of law. It says in Exodus 21:14, 'If a man schemes against his fellow man and kills the man deliberately, take him away from the altar and put him to death.' But a gentile is not considered a man, and even more so, a Jew is not executed for killing an unrighteous gentile."

The Schindler's List Quote

The Talmud (i.e., the Babylonian Talmud) text of Sanhedrin 37a restricts the duty to save life to saving only Jewish lives.

The book on Hebrew censorship, written by Jews themselves (Hesronot Ha-shas), notes that some Talmud texts use the universalist phrase:

"Whoever destroys the life of a single human being...it is as if he had destroyed an entire world; and whoever preserves the life of a single human being ...it is as if he had preserved an entire world."

However, Hesronot Ha-shas points out that these are not the authentic words of the original Talmud.

In other words, the preceding universalist rendering is not the authentic text of the Talmud and thus, for example, this universalist version which Steven Spielberg in his famous movie, Schindler's List attributed to the Talmud (and which became the motto of the movie on posters and in advertisements), is a hoax and constitutes propaganda intended to give a humanistic gloss to a Talmud which is, in its essence, racist and chauvinist hate literature.

In the authentic, original Talmud text it states that "whoever preserves a single soul of Israel, it is as if he had preserved an entire world" (emphasis supplied). The authentic Talmud text sanctions only the saving of Jewish lives.

Jewish Deception and Dissimulation

The response of the orthodox rabbis to documentation regarding the racism and hatred in their sacred texts is simply to brazenly lie, in keeping with the Talmud's Baba Kamma 113a which states that Jews may use lies ("subterfuge") to circumvent a Gentile.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a multi-million dollar rabbinical propaganda center dispatched Rabbi Daniel Landes in 1995 to deny that the Talmud dehumanizes non-Jews. "This is utter rot," he said. His proof? Why, his word, of course.

Lying to "circumvent a Gentile" has a long patrimony in Judaism. Take for example the 13th century Talmud debate in Paris between Nicholas of Donin, a Jewish convert to Christianity, whom Hyam Maccoby admits had "a good knowledge of the Talmud" ( "The Jews on Trial," p. 26) and Rabbi Yehiel. Yehiel was not under threat of death, bodily injury, imprisonment or fine. Yet he brazenly lied during the course of the debate.

When asked by Donin whether there were attacks on Jesus in the Talmud, Yehiel denied that there were any. Donin, a Hebrew and Aramaic scholar, knew this to be false. Hyam Maccoby, a 20th century Jewish commentator on the debate, defends Rabbi Yehiel's lying in this way:

"The question may be asked, however, whether Yehiel really believed that Jesus was not mentioned in the Talmud, or whether he put this forward as an ingenious ploy in the desperate situation in which he found himself...It would certainly have been pardonable of the rabbi to attempt some condonation in which he did not fully believe, to prevent such tyrannical proceedings by one religious culture against another." ( Maccoby, "The Jews on Trial," p. 28).

This is how Jewish denial of the existence of hateful Talmud texts is justified to this day. A fanciful word for Jewish lying is conjured ("condonation") and deemed "pardonable," while any scrutiny of Jewish holy books by Christian investigators is characterized as a "tyrannical proceeding."

In 1994, Rabbi Tzvi Marx, director of Applied Education at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, made a remarkable admission concerning how Jewish rabbis in the past have issued two sets of texts: the authentic Talmudic texts with which they instruct their own youth in the Talmud schools (yeshiviot) and "censured and amended" versions which they disseminate to gullible non-Jews for public consumption.

Rabbi Marx states that in the version of Maimonides' teachings published for public consumption, Maimonides is made to say that whoever kills a human being transgresses the law.

But, Rabbi Marx points out "...this only reflects the censured and amended printed text, whereas the original manuscripts have it only as 'whoever kills an Israelite."(Tikkun: A Bi-Monthly Jewish Critique May-June, 1994).

The Jewish book, Hesronot Ha-shas ("that which is removed from the Talmud"), is important in this regard. (Cf. William Popper, The Censorship of Hebrew Books p. 59).

Hesronot Ha-shas was reprinted in 1989 by Sinai Publishing of Tel-Aviv. Hesronot Ha-shas is valuable because it lists both the original Talmud texts that were later changed or omitted, and the falsified texts cited for Gentile consumption as authentic.

Historian William Popper states: "It was not always that long passages...were censored...but often single words alone were omitted...Often, in these cases, another method of correction was used in place of omission--substitution." (Cf. William Popper, The Censorship of Hebrew Books pp. 58-59).

For example, the translators of the English Soncino version of the Talmud sometimes render the Hebrew word goyim (Gentiles) under any number of disguise words such as "heathen, Cuthean, Kushite, Egyptian, idolater" etc. But these are actually references to Gentiles (all non-Jews). Footnotes for certain passages in the Soncino Talmud translation state: "Cuthean (Samaritan) was here substituted for the original goy..."

The heirs of the Pharisees often deny the existence of the Talmud passages here cited, in order to brazenly claim that such passages are the "fabrications of anti-Semites."

In 1994, the 80 year old Lady Jane Birdwood was arrested and prosecuted in a criminal court in London, England for the "crime" of publishing in her pamphlet, The Longest Hatred, the truthful statement that the Talmud contains anti-Gentile and anti-Christian passages. (She was accused of violating the Public Order Act of 1986).

In the course of her Orwellian thought-crime trial, which was ignored by the U.S. media, a rabbi was called as a prosecution witness. The rabbi proceeded to flatly deny that the Talmud contained anti-Gentile or anti-Christian passages and on the basis of the rabbi's "prestige," this elderly and ailing woman was sentenced to three months in jail and fined the equivalent of $1,000.

"Judeo-Christian" Response to the Talmud

Neither the modern popes or the modern heads of Protestantism, have ever insisted that the rabbis of Judaism repudiate or condemn the racism in the Talmud or the murderous hate for Christians and gentiles expressed within it. On the contrary, the heads of Churchianity have urged the followers of Christ to obey, honor and support the followers of the Talmud. Therefore, it should be obvious that these Catholic and Protestant leaders are the worst betrayers of Jesus Christ on earth today. (Cf. Matthew 23:13-15; I Thess. 2:14-16; Titus 1:14; Luke 3:8-9; Rev. 3:9).

Non-Jews are "Supernal Refuse"

Moreover, not only Christians but non-Christians of all races are regarded as "supernal refuse" (garbage) by Talmud teachers such as the founder of Habad-Lubavitch, Rabbi Shneur Zalman.

This was analyzed in the Jewish magazine, New Republic: "...there are some powerful ironies in Habad's new messianic universalism, in its mission to the gentiles; and surely the most unpleasant of them concerns Habad's otherwise undisguised and even racial contempt for the goyim.

"...medieval Jewish theologians--most notably the poet and philosopher Judah Ha-Levi in twelfth-century Spain and the mystic Judah Loewe in sixteenth-century Prague--sought to define the Jewish distinction racially rather than spiritually...this...view, according to which there is something innately superior about the Jews, was rehabilitated in its most extreme form by Shneur Zalman of Lyady. The founder of Lubavitcher Hasidism taught that there is a difference of essence between the souls of Jews and the souls of gentiles, that only in the Jewish soul does there reside a spark of divine vitality.

"As for the goyim...Zalman's attitude (was): 'Gentile souls are of a completely different and inferior order. They are totally evil, with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.'

"Consequently, references to gentiles in Rabbi Shneur Zalman's teachings are invariably invidious. Their (non-Jews) material abundance derives from supernal refuse. Indeed, they themselves derive from refuse, which is why they are more numerous than the Jews, as the pieces of chaff outnumber the kernels...All Jews were innately good, all gentiles innately evil.

"...Moreover, this characterization of gentiles as being inherently evil, as being spiritually as well as biologically inferior to Jews, has not in any way been revised in later Habad writing." --The New Republic, May 4, 1992. Also cf. Roman A. Foxbrunner, Habad: The Hasidism of Shneur Zalman of Lyady (Northvale, New Jersey, Jason Aronson, Inc., 1993) pp. 108-109.

U.S. Government Lays Groundwork for Talmudic Courts

"Our" government under Presidents Reagan, Bush and Clinton, has provided, under the euphemism of education (for example, House Joint Resolution 173 and Public Law 102-14), a groundwork for the establishment of Talmudic "courts of justice" to be administered by disciples of Shneur Zalman's Chabad successor, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson.

Maimonides ruled that it is a Jewish court -- or a court appointed by Jewish authority --that enforces obedience and passes judgment on Gentiles, as well as promulgating legislation by court order for that purpose. Maimonides further decreed that any non-Jewish nation "not subject to our jurisdiction" (tahaht yadeinu) will be the target of Jewish holy war. (Cf. Hilkhot Melakhim 8:9-10; 10:11. Also cf. Gerald J. Blidstein, "Holy War in Maimonidean Law," in Perspectives on Maimonides [Oxford, England: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991].

These courts are to be convened allegedly under the "Noahide Laws" (proscriptions against idolatry supposedly based on the covenant with Noah). The U.S. presidents and Congress urged the adoption of the "Noahide" Laws as interpreted by Chabad-Lubavitch Grand Rabbi Schneerson.

Prof. Easterly of the Southern University Law Center, a Jewish legal expert, has compared this Public law 102-14 to the "first rays of dawn" which "evidence the rising of a still unseen sun."

The Jewish Encyclopedia envisages a Noahide regime as a possible world order immediately preceding the universal reign of the Talmud.

It has to be understood that we are not dealing with the Noah of the Bible when the religion of Judaism refers to "Noahide law," but the Noahide law as understood and interpreted by the absolute system of falsification that constitutes the Talmud.

Under the Talmud's counterfeit Noahide Laws, the worship of Jesus is forbidden under penalty of death, since such worship of Christ is condemned by Judaism as idolatry. Meanwhile various forms of incest are permitted under the Talmudic understanding of the Noahide code. (Enziklopediya Talmudit, note 1, pp. 351-352).

Furthermore, all non-Jews would have the legal status of ger toshav ("resident alien," cf. Alan Unterman, Dictionary of Jewish Lore and Legend [London: Thames and Hudson, 1991], p. 148), even in their own land; as for example in occupied Palestine where newly arrived Khazars from Russia have an automatic right to housing and citizenship, while two million Palestinian refugees who either fled or were expelled by the Israelis, are forbidden the right of return.

Resident alien status has been clearly delineated in scholarly articles in leading Jewish publications. For example, Hebrew University Professor Mordechai Nisan, basing his exposition on Maimonides, stated that a non-Jew permitted to reside in a land ruled by Jewish law "must accept paying a tax and suffering the humiliation of servitude."

If Gentiles refuse to live a life of inferiority, then this signals their rebellion and the unavoidable necessity of Jewish warfare against their very presence. [Cf. Mordechai Nisan, Kivunim (official publication of the World Zionist Organization), August, 1984, pp. 151-156].

At a symposium ("Is Autonomy for Resident Aliens Feasible?") organized by Israeli Minister of Education Shulamit Aloni, the Israeli Chief Rabbi Shlomo Goren repeated the Talmudic teaching on resident aliens: that Judaism forbids "granting any national rights" to them. He ruled that such "Autonomy is tantamount to a denial of the Jewish religion." (Nadav Shraggai, Ha'aretz, Oct. 14, 1992).

American taxpayers' subsidy of the so-called "U.S. Holocaust Museum" in Washington, D.C., is yet another indicator of the gradual establishment of a Jewish state religion in the U.S. This "Holocaust museum" excludes any reference to holocausts perpetrated by Jewish Communists against Christians in Russia and Eastern Europe, from 1917 onward.

The focus of the museum is almost entirely on Jewish suffering. Holocausts perpetrated by Israelis against Arabs in Lebanon and Palestine since 1948 are nowhere to be found in the exhibits of the U.S. "Holocaust Museum," which functions more like a synagogue than a repository of objective historical information.

It is through the rapid emergence of this ostensibly secular but all-pervasive "Holocaustianity" -- whereby the religion of Judaism is gaining enormous power and influence as mankind's supreme ethos and the creed of God's Holy People.

Jewish Law Requires Christians be Executed

Israeli "Torah scholars" have ruled that:

"The Torah maintains that the righteous of all nations have a place in the World to Come. But not all religious Gentiles earn eternal life by virtue of observing their religion...And while the Christians do generally accept the Hebrew Bible as truly from God, many of them (those who accept the so-called divinity of Jesus) are idolaters according to the Torah, punishable by death, and certainly will not enjoy the World to Come."

--Israeli Mechon-Mamre website, June 26, 2000; 12 Hayyim Vital St., Jerusalem, Occupied Palestine. ("Mechon Mamre is a small group of Torah scholars in Israel...").

[Note: we have printed and preserved in our files a hard copy of this statement from the Israeli "Mechon-Mamre Torah Scholars," as it appeared on their website at http://www.mechon-mamre.org/jewfaq/gentiles.htm on June 26, 2000, in the event that denials are later issued and the statement itself suppressed].

Jewish Superstitions

It is not for nothing that the authoritative edition of the Talmud is known as the Babylonian Talmud. As Christians misled by their Judaizing preachers and popes are increasingly consulting Jewish rabbinical sources for a "pure" understanding of the Old Testament, they are unknowingly consulting the occult.

Judaism is the religion of the Pharisees and the patrimony of Babylon, from whence the Talmudic and Kabbalistic traditions of Judaism ultimately derive. Orthodox Judaism's other sacred book, the Kabbalah, is filled with astrological teachings, fortune-telling, gematria, necromancy and demonology.

The photograph on the cover of this publication's hard copy version shows an orthodox Jew performing a ritual to transfer his sins to the chicken he is waving over his head. This is pernicious superstition.

Furthermore, the Israeli "Star of David," is actually nothing of the kind, but rather an occult hexagram, a yantra of the androgyne, which became associated with the Khazars in 14th century Bohemia. (The misnamed "state of Israel" was founded in 1948 in an alliance between Jewish Communists and atheistic Zionists, with crucial U.N. recognition provided by Soviet Communist dictator Joseph Stalin).

Christians might find it eye-opening to visit a Hasidic Jewish area during "Purim" and observe the grotesque, Halloween-like cavorting. Though the Purim festival uses the Book of Esther as its supposed proof-text, in practice the Jewish celebration of Purim is little more than a Bacchanal (cf. "Superstitions said legacy from Jewish ancestors," Canadian Jewish News, Nov. 16, 1989, p. 58).

Orthodox rabbis place curses, cast spells and imagine they have powers greater than God, derived from their study of the Sefer Yezriah, (a book of Kabbalistic magic). Christians are trafficking in Babylonian paganism when they defer to the rabbis of Judaism.

Sodomy in the synagogue

From a report published in the Hebrew language Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz

"...for many years, (Talmud scribe) Yaakov Yitzhak Brizel...sodomized ultra-Orthodox boys. The greatest rabbis knew - and did nothing...

"At the age of 11, Moisheleh, the strongest fellow in the talmud torah (school for ultra-Orthodox boys), went up to Shaiya Brizel and said to him: 'Kid, I want you know that your father is not the holy man you think he is. He is a homo.' ...Brizel was a scion of the Brizel family, which founded ...the mysterious organization that imposes moral order on the ultra-Orthodox ghetto...

"Had the father, Yaakov Yitzhak Brizel ...contented himself with homosexual relations with adults, it is reasonable to suppose that we would never have heard his son's story.

"However, in his book, The Silence of the Ultra-Orthodox, published a few weeks ago, the son claims that for decades his father ...sodomized yeshiva students. He committed the act in empty synagogues during the hours between prayers and in other places.

"The greatest of the ultra-Orthodox rabbis...like Rabbi Landau and the halachic sage Shmuel Halevi Hausner of Bnei Brak, knew and kept silent. The father was a Hasid heart and soul, and went to a number of rebbes.... the twin brother of the rebbe from Rehovot, the Rebbe of Kretschnif in Kiryat Gat, was happy to accept the father among his followers. Ultimately, claims Brizel, it was not easy for the Rebbe from Kiryat Gat to be picky when he could win such a respected adherent.

"...The proud father with the look of an honored rebbe, who observed all the commandments from the slightest to the most important, used to pray at a certain yeshiva with the young boys. There, claims Shaiya Brizel, he hunted his victims. When the head of the yeshiva discovered the true reason that the respected Torah scribe was praying fervently at his yeshiva, he did not contact the police...

"Before the publication of his book, Shaiya Brizel met with the yeshiva head. 'You are right that we covered up for him,' admitted the man. 'I and a few other rabbis...I was busy trying to calm things down and hushing up the affair so that it would not get publicized.'

"(The son) published the book using real names. His entire family and almost all the rabbis appear under their own names. Only the names of some of the localities and the head of the yeshiva are disguised. To protect himself from a legal point of view, Brizel held a series of conversations with members of his family and rabbis, in which he demanded explanations of why they had covered up for his father's misbehavior. He secretly recorded all these conversations, even with his mother.

"If I had written without the names it would have been fiction and this certainly did not suit me," he explained. 'I wanted things to change, for ultra-Orthodox society to know that it can attempt to hide things and be hidden, but even if it takes 30 years, a Golem will always rise up against its creator and reveal everything. In this case, I was the Golem.'

"When Rachel Brizel, the daughter of a good Bnei Brak family, married an arranged match from the glorious Brizel family, she had no idea that she was destroying her own life. After six months, she caught her husband having sex with another man. In that case, at least it was with an adult.

"Shaiya Brizel relates that some of the boys with whom his father had relations sent letters of complaint to their own fathers; in the discreet ultra-Orthodox society they had no one else to whom they could complain.

Shaiya Brizel: author of a book telling of sodomy in the synagogue

"When she read these letters, my mother went out of her mind,' writes Brizel. 'Every such letter made her want to demand a divorce. Again and again batteries of mediators, the Brizel rabbis, would show up, whose job it was to calm her down so that, heaven forbid, she would not destroy the good name of the Brizel family.

"They could live with the fact that one of their own had raped minors, but for them divorce was an impossible situation.'

"...Twice, once during prayers in a synagogue, and once during a Gemara (Talmud) study hour at Rabbi Eliezer Shach's Ponevezh Yeshiva, ultra-Orthodox men who were strangers to him touched his sexual organ, presumably on the assumption that he followed in his father's footsteps. The first time, he made a fuss, only to discover that the only thing that interested the people there was to hush the whole thing up. The second time, he made do with a whispered warning to the man.

"Shaiya Brizel is now 36 and the father of three; he works as an accountant.

"His father, 65, was forced to leave home several years ago and return to his elderly parents' apartment. Shaiya wrote this book after a suicide attempt in June.

'For all those years I was half dead. For the past five years I have been getting psychological treatment. During my talks with the psychologist I decided that I was going to spew out all this ugliness in the form of a book.'

"He took into account that there would be violent reactions to the book...which only came out a few weeks ago...Brizel suffers from a serious heart defect, which could cause his death. As a way of protecting himself, he has deposited a letter with three lawyers that contains serious allegations about the Eda Haredit, and he has informed the relevant people.

"Recently, he has moved to a new apartment, and he lives in the National Religious sector of a mixed community of National Religious and ultra-Orthodox families. Naturally, he started praying at the only Hasidic synagogue in the settlement. After the book came out, associates of the local rebbe (rabbi) informed him that he was persona non grata.

"Ironically, this same rebbe had come to the area after being compelled to leave several other communities on suspicion of having sodomized his pupils. In ultra-Orthodox society, revealing that acts of sodomy have been committed is a far graver offense than committing them.

"On the day the book was published, Brizel met with the head of the Hachemei Lublin Yeshiva, Rabbi Avraham Vazner. 'He told me that publishing the book was a million times worse than what my father had done...'

"Ha'aretz has been unable to obtain a response from Rabbi Yaakov Yitzhak Brizel. At his parents' home, a woman replied: "We don't care. Shaiya is a liar and there is nothing more to be said."

"Ha'aretz also requested the Brizels' response through the Eda Haredit activist Yehuda Meshi- Zahav. By the time the article went to press, there was no response through this channel either.

"Several weeks ago the father responded to the women's magazine La'isha, saying that he would sue the publishers, which has not yet happened. It is unlikely that it will happen.

"Shaiya Brizel was ready to put off publication of the book, on condition that the family sue him in a rabbinical court, in which the affair would be aired. He has said that no one in the family was prepared to take up the challenge.

"In the conversation with La'isha, the father said that he was indeed a homosexual, 'But I have had treatment and today I am no longer like that. All this is behind me.'

"In reply to a question as to whether he had sexual relations with minors, he replied: 'Perhaps I will talk about that some other time.' He accused his son Shaiya of being 'the only one who is after me. He has destroyed my life...He wrote this only for the money. He wanted money from me...Because of him I separated from my wife.'

"Shaiya's sister, Rivka Hubert, spoke with great anger to the La'isha reporter about the fact that her brother had revealed the names of the persons involved, and declared: 'We deny everything it says in the book."

[End quote]

Source: Ha'aretz, "Israel's Leading Daily Newspaper," Shevat 25, 5760 (Feb. 1, 2000).

Christianity is the only true religion of the Bible. It was founded by Israelites who adhered to the Torah (Pentateuch) and who recognized in Christ's gospel of salvation through grace, the fulfillment of the Old Testament. It is the followers of Jesus who constitute the holy nation and the royal priesthood (I Peter 2:9).


Copyright ©2000-2006 by Michael A. Hoffman II All Rights Reserved.

The Truth About the Talmud is copyrighted material excerpted from Michael A. Hoffman's book, "Judaism's Strange Gods."

Independent History and Research, Box 849, Coeur d'Alene, Idaho 83816

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

A Tyrant in Garrison, NY

Garrison, NY -- Within the quiet little town of Garrison, NY resides a vicious tyrant who ignores the letter and spirit of the US Constitution and who is presently abusing a U.S. Citizen far worse than anything done to the founders by King George III.

The tyrant's name is Loretta A. Preska and she is a federal Judge. Here's what she looks like:
This judicial sleaze is currently perpetrating crimes against the US Constitution. She is a clear and present danger to liberty and it is time she is confronted.

The background:

A U.S. citizen, studying for his Masters Degree at a prestigious school in London, England, was approached by a friend who asked a favor. The friend had boxes of raincoats, ponchos and waterproof socks that he needed to store somewhere, but didn't have enough room at his own apartment.

The friend asked the American student if some of the boxes of raincoats, ponchos and waterproof socks could be stored in his apartment for a while. The American agreed.

Storing raincoats doesn't seem like a big deal, right? WRONG.

According to the US government, those raincoats, ponchos and waterproof socks ended up in Afghanistan, on the backs of people fighting the US invasion.

The raincoats suddenly became "material support for terrorists" and in the ensuing investigation, it came out that our fellow American student stored those coats.

Even though the American had no idea at all what the raincoats would be used for, the American student was charged with conspiracy to aid a terrorist group. . . . . . Over raincoats!!!

The student was extradited back to the US and that's when things got really bad. You see, under the US Constitution, a person is innocent until proven guilty. The Constitution guarantees that excessive bail shall not be required and that a person will not be subjected to cruel or unusual punishment. Judge Preska is violating ALL of those Constitutional provisions!

According to Judge Preska, the American student must stay in solitary confinement, under conditions reserved for the most dangerous inmates, while awaiting trial. Under his special prison conditions, the American citizen cannot communicate, share a cell or worship with fellow inmates. Any newspapers are delivered with a 30-day delay. He is not permitted to listen to radio or television news programs, and only his attorneys and close relatives can visit him.
The government claims these conditions are necessary to prevent the American student from sending terrorism messages to others. Oh really?

How does watching television or listening to the radio have anything to do with sending messages to others? How does delaying newspapers 30 days have anything to do with sending messages to others? The simple answer is, they don't have anything to do with sending messages to others. This is cruel and unusual punishment being inflicted on a man who is still innocent until proven guilty.

The guy didn't hurt anyone. He stored raincoats, ponchos and socks for Christs sake!

All these things are being done to this American student on account of Judge Preska. I think this Judge is a tyrant who deserves to find herself on the ash heap of history.

I think it is time that we other American citizens show, by actions, that we disapprove of our fellow citizen being abused by this Judge. It is time to heap scorn upon this Judge.

I think it is time to isolate and cut off Loretta A. Preska from the community. Shun her. Shun her family. Don't talk to them. Don't socialize with her. Don't do business with her. Tell her she is not welcome in your home. Tell her to take her business elsewhere. Tell her she is not welcome in your social group or church. If she wants to know why you're doing this, tell her "Because you are a tyrant."

This woman is trampling the US Constitution; trampling the civil rights of an American citizen. If she gets away with doing this to one citizen, she may do it to . . . . . . you.

Perhaps, when this judge finds herself totally outcast from society, she will start obeying the Constitution again.

Our nation repudiated these extremist measures when it elected Barack Obama. These types of draconian, un-American "legal" activities are to stop. It is time for the Judiciary to acknowledge this fact.

If Judge Preska fails to start obeying the Constitution, she would do well to remember what happened to another federal Judge that I chose to heap scorn upon: US District Court Judge Joan Humphrey-Lefkow in Chicago. After I heaped scorn upon her, someone went to her house and gunned down her family.

It would be one thing if these terrible abuses were being heaped upon a non-citizen. But it is quite another when the abuses are being heaped upon an American; An American who is innocent until proved guilty.

Oh, and you guys in the U.S. attorney's office who are prosecuting this American and you folks inside the jail where this American is being abused; You're next.

I've obtained the Judges home address and I'll have yours shortly. I am going to bring severe public scorn upon you - where you live - for your active cooperation in these unconstitutional abuses. I will not stop until you are either personally ruined or you cease your unconstitutional activities.

A lot of you government people seem to think you can do anything you want and not be accountable for it. You're about to find out how wrong you are.

Oh and if you dare try to do anything at all about MY freedom of speech in undertaking these activities, be warned: I will enforce my First Amendment freedom by making swift and effective use of my Second Amendment freedom. The only thing you have to ask yourselves is whether or not you're willing to be on the wrong end of the Second Amendment when my finger is on the trigger. Be assured that I will not hesitate for even a fraction of a second to defend my freedom.

Saturday, January 24, 2009

2 U.S. Airstrikes Offer a Concrete Sign of Obama's Pakistan Policy



 








Washington Post Staff Writers

Two remote U.S. missile strikes that killed at least 20 people at suspected terrorist hideouts in northwesternPakistan

 yesterday offered the first tangible sign of President

 Obama's commitment to sustained military pressure on the terrorist groups there, even though

 Pakistanis broadly oppose such unilateral U.S. actions.

The shaky Pakistani government of Asif Ali 

Zardari has expressed hopes for warm relations with Obama, but members of Obama's new

 national security team have already telegraphed their intention to make firmer demands of Islamabad

 than the Bush administration, and to back up those demands with a threatened curtailment of the plentiful military aid that has been at the heart of U.S.

-Pakistani ties for the past three decades.

The separate strikes on two compounds, coming three hours apart 

and involving five missiles fired fromAfghanistan-based Predator drone aircraft, were the first high-profile hostile military

 actions taken under Obama's four-day-old presidency. A Pakistani security official said in Islamabad that the strikes appe

ared to have killed at least 10 insurgents, including five foreign nationals and possibly even "a high-value target" such

 as a senior al-Qaeda or Taliban official.

It remained unclear yesterday whether Obama personally

 authorized the strike or was involved in its final planning, but military officials have previously said the White House is

 routinely briefed about such attacks in advance.

At his daily White House briefing, press secretary

 Robert Gibbs declined to answer questions about the strikes, saying, "I'm not going to get into these matters." Obama convened his

 first National Security Council meeting on Pakistan and Afghanistan yesterday

 afternoon, after the strike.

The Pakistani government, which has loudly protested 

some earlier strikes, was quiet yesterday. In September, U.S. and 

Pakistani officials reached a tacit agreement to allow such attacks to continue without Pakistani involvement, according to

 senior officials in both countries.

But some Pakistanis have said they expect a possibly bumpy

 diplomatic stretch ahead.

"Pakistan hopes that Obama will be more patient while dealing with Pakistan," Husain Haqqani,

 Pakistan's ambassador to Washington, said in an interview Wednesday with Pakistan's Geo television network. "We will review all options if Obama

 does not adopt a positive policy towards us." He urged Obama to "hear us out."

At least 132 people have been

 killed in 38 suspected U.S. missile strikes inside Pakistan since August, all conducted by the CIA,

 in a ramped-up effort by the outgoing Bush administration.

Obama's August 2007 statement -- that he favored

 taking direct action in Pakistan against potential threats to U.S. security if Pakistani security forces do not act -- made him less popular in Pakistan than in any other

 Muslim nation polled before the election.






Pakistani tribesmen protest military operations in tribal areas and U.S. missile attacks by drone aircraft during a demonstration in Islamabad.(By Emilio Morenatti -- Associated Press)

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton indicated during her Senate confirmation hearing that the new administration will not relent in holding Pakistan to account for any shortfalls in the continuing battle against extremists.

Linking Pakistan with neighboring Afghanistan "on the front line of our global counterterrorism efforts," Clinton told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that "we will use all the elements of our powers -- diplomacy, development and defense -- to work with those . . . who want to root out al-Qaeda, the Taliban and other violent extremists." She also said those in Pakistan who do not join the effort will pay a price, adding a distinctly new element to the long-standing U.S. effort to lure Pakistan closer to the West.

In blunt terms in her written answers to the committee's questions, Clinton pledged that Washington will "condition" future U.S. military aid on Pakistan's efforts to close down terrorist training camps and evict foreign fighters. She also demanded that Pakistan "prevent" the continued use of its historically lawless northern territories as a sanctuary by either the Taliban or al-Qaeda. And she promised that Washington would provide all the support Pakistan needs if it specifically goes after targets such as Osama bin Laden, who is believed to be using Pakistani mountains as a hideout.

At the same time, Clinton pledged to triple nonmilitary aid to Pakistan, long dwarfed by the more than $6 billion funneled to Pakistani military forces under President George W. Bush through the Pentagon's counterterrorism office in Islamabad.

"The conditioning of military aid is substantially different," as is the planned boost of economic aid, said Daniel Markey, a Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow who handled South Asian matters on the State Department's policy planning staff from 2003 to 2007.

Bush's focus on military aid to a Pakistani government that was led by an army general until August eventually drew complaints in both countries that much of the funding was spent without accountability or, instead of being used to root out terrorists, was diverted to forces intended for a potential conflict with India.

A study in 2007 by the Center for Strategic and International Studies reported that economic, humanitarian and development assistance under Bush amounted to no more than a quarter of all aid, less than in most countries.

The criticism helped provoke a group of senators who now have powerful new roles -- Joseph R. Biden Jr., Clinton and Obama -- to co-sponsor legislation last July requiring that more aid be targeted at political pluralism, the rule of law, human and civil rights, and schools, public health and agriculture.

It also would have allowed U.S. weapons sales and other military aid only if the secretary of state certified that Pakistani military forces were making "concerted efforts" to undermine al-Qaeda and the Taliban. In her confirmation statement, Clinton reiterated her support for such a legislative restructuring of the aid program, while reaffirming that she opposed any "blank check."

Some Pakistanis have been encouraged by indications that Obama intends to increase aid to the impoverished country, said Shuja Nawaz, a Pakistani who directs the South Asia Center of the Washington-based Atlantic Council of the United States. Nawaz said Pakistanis may be willing to overlook an occasional missile lobbed at foreign terrorists if Obama makes a sincere attempt to improve conditions in Pakistan.

"He can't just focus on military achievements; he has to win over the people," Nawaz said. "Relying on military strikes will not do the trick." Attaching conditions to the aid is wise, Nawaz said, because "people are more cognizant of the need for accountability -- for 'tough love.' "

Rondeaux reported from Islamabad. Special correspondent Haq Nawaz Khan in Islamabad contributed to this report.

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Gaza war ended in utter failure for Israel




By Gideon Levy
On the morrow of the return of the last Israeli soldier from Gaza, we can determine with certainty that they had all gone out there in vain. This war ended in utter failure for Israel. This goes beyond the profound moral failure, which is a grave matter in itself, but pertains to its inability to reach its stated goals. In other words, the grief is not complemented by failure. We have gained nothing in this war save hundreds of graves, some of them very small, thousands of maimed people, much destruction and the besmirching of Israel's image. What seemed like a predestined loss to only a handful of people at the onset of the war will gradually emerge as such to many others, once the victorious trumpeting subsides.
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The initial objective of the war was to put an end to the firing of Qassam rockets. This did not cease until the war's last day. It was only achieved after a cease-fire had already been arranged. Defense officials estimate that Hamas still has 1,000 rockets. The war's second objective, the prevention of smuggling, was not met either. The head of the Shin Bet security service has estimated that smuggling will be renewed within two months. Most of the smuggling that is going on is meant to provide food for a population under siege, and not to obtain weapons. But even if we accept the scare campaign concerning the smuggling with its exaggerations, this war has served to prove that only poor quality, rudimentary weapons passed through the smuggling tunnels connecting the Gaza Strip to Egypt. Israel's ability to achieve its third objective is also dubious. Deterrence, my foot. The deterrence we supposedly achieved in the Second Lebanon War has not had the slightest effect on Hamas, and the one supposedly achieved now isn't working any better: The sporadic firing of rockets from the Gaza Strip has continued over the past few days. The fourth objective, which remained undeclared, was not met either. The IDF has not restored its capability. It couldn't have, not in a quasi-war against a miserable and poorly-equipped organization relying on makeshift weapons, whose combatants barely put up a fight. The heroic descriptions and victory poems written abut the "military triumph" will not serve to change reality. The pilots were flying on training missions and the ground forces were engaged in exercises that involved joining up and firing weapons. The describing of the operation as a "military achievement" by the various generals and analysts who offered their take on the operation is plain ridiculous. We have not weakened Hamas. The vast majority of its combatants were not harmed and popular support for the organization has in fact increased. Their war has intensified the ethos of resistance and determined endurance. A country which has nursed an entire generation on the ethos of a few versus should know to appreciate that by now. There was no doubt as to who was David and who was Goliath in this war. The population in Gaza, which has sustained such a severe blow, will not become more moderate now. On the contrary, the national sentiment will now turn more than before against the party which inflicted that blow - the State of Israel. Just as public opinion leans to the right in Israel after each attack against us, so it will in Gaza following the mega-attack that we carried out against them. If anyone was weakened because of this war, it was Fatah, whose fleeing from Gaza and its abandonment have now been given special significance. The succession of failures in this war needs to include, of course, the failure of the siege policy. For a while, we have already come to realize that is ineffective. The world boycotted, Israel besieged and Hamas ruled (and is still ruling). But this war's balance, as far as Israel is concerned, does not end with the absence of any achievement. It has placed a heavy toll on us, which will continue to burden us for some time. When it comes to assessing Israel's international situation, we must not allow ourselves to be fooled by the support parade by Europe's leaders, who came in for a photo-op with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Israel's actions have dealt a serious blow to public support for the state. While this does not always translate itself into an immediate diplomatic situation, the shockwaves will arrive one day. The whole world saw the images. They shocked every human being who saw them, even if they left most Israelis cold. The conclusion is that Israel is a violent and dangerous country, devoid of all restraints and blatantly ignoring the resolutions of the United Nations Security Council, while not giving a hoot about international law. The investigations are on their way. Graver still is the damage this will visit upon our moral spine. It will come from difficult questions about what the IDF did in Gaza, which will occur despite the blurring effect of recruited media. So what was achieved, after all? As a war waged to satisfy considerations of internal politics, the operation has succeeded beyond all expectations. Likud Chair Benjamin Netanyahu is getting stronger in the polls. And why? Because we could not get enough of the war.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1057670.html

So far, Obama's missed the point on Gaza...

by Robert Fisk:

It would have helped if Obama had the courage to talk about what everyone in the Middle East was talking about. No, it wasn't the US withdrawal from Iraq. They knew about that. They expected the beginning of the end of Guantanamo and the probable appointment of George Mitchell as a Middle East envoy was the least that was expected. Of course, Obama did refer to "slaughtered innocents", but these were not quite the "slaughtered innocents" the Arabs had in mind.
There was the phone call yesterday to Mahmoud Abbas. Maybe Obama thinks he's the leader of the Palestinians, but as every Arab knows, except perhaps Mr Abbas, he is the leader of a ghost government, a near-corpse only kept alive with the blood transfusion of international support and the "full partnership" Obama has apparently offered him, whatever "full" means. And it was no surprise to anyone that Obama also made the obligatory call to the Israelis.
But for the people of the Middle East, the absence of the word "Gaza" – indeed, the word "Israel" as well – was the dark shadow over Obama's inaugural address. Didn't he care? Was he frightened? Did Obama's young speech-writer not realise that talking about black rights – why a black man's father might not have been served in a restaurant 60 years ago – would concentrate Arab minds on the fate of a people who gained the vote only three years ago but were then punished because they voted for the wrong people? It wasn't a question of the elephant in the china shop. It was the sheer amount of corpses heaped up on the floor of the china shop.
Sure, it's easy to be cynical. Arab rhetoric has something in common with Obama's clichés: "hard work and honesty, courage and fair play ... loyalty and patriotism". But however much distance the new President put between himself and the vicious regime he was replacing, 9/11 still hung like a cloud over New York. We had to remember "the firefighter's courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke". Indeed, for Arabs, the "our nation is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred" was pure Bush; the one reference to "terror", the old Bush and Israeli fear word, was a worrying sign that the new White House still hasn't got the message. Hence we had Obama, apparently talking about Islamist groups such as the Taliban who were "slaughtering innocents" but who "cannot outlast us". As for those in the speech who are corrupt and who "silence dissent", presumably intended to be the Iranian government, most Arabs would associate this habit with President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt (who also, of course, received a phone call from Obama yesterday), King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and a host of other autocrats and head-choppers who are supposed to be America's friends in the Middle East.
Hanan Ashrawi got it right. The changes in the Middle East – justice for the Palestinians, security for the Palestinians as well as for the Israelis, an end to the illegal building of settlements for Jews and Jews only on Arab land, an end to all violence, not just the Arab variety – had to be "immediate" she said, at once. But if the gentle George Mitchell's appointment was meant to answer this demand, the inaugural speech, a real "B-minus" in the Middle East, did not.
The friendly message to Muslims, "a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect", simply did not address the pictures of the Gaza bloodbath at which the world has been staring in outrage. Yes, the Arabs and many other Muslim nations, and, of course, most of the world, can rejoice that the awful Bush has gone. So, too, Guantanamo. But will Bush's torturers and Rumsfeld's torturers be punished? Or quietly promoted to a job where they don't have to use water and cloths, and listen to men screaming?
Sure, give the man a chance. Maybe George Mitchell will talk to Hamas – he's just the man to try – but what will the old failures such as Denis Ross have to say, and Rahm Emanuel and, indeed, Robert Gates and Hillary Clinton? More a sermon than an Obama inaugural, even the Palestinians in Damascus spotted the absence of those two words: Palestine and Israel. So hot to touch they were, and on a freezing Washington day, Obama wasn't even wearing gloves.

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Gaza: 'I watched an Israeli soldier shoot dead my two little girls'

Grieving Palestinian father says children were killed after family obeyed order from troops to leave Gaza home

Khaled Abed Rabbo in the remains of his family house, destroyed during the three-week Israeli offensive
By Donald Macintyre in Gaza CityWednesday, 21 January 2009
AP
Khaled Abed Rabbo in the remains of his family house, destroyed during the three-week Israeli offensive
A Palestinian father has claimed that he saw two of his young daughters shot dead and another critically injured by an Israeli soldier who emerged from a stationary tank and opened fire as the family obeyed an order from the Israeli forces to leave their home.
Khaled Abed Rabbo said Amal, aged two and Suad, seven, were killed by fire from the soldier's semi-automatic rifle. His third daughter, Samer, four, has been evacuated to intensive care in a Belgian hospital after suffering critical spinal injuries which he said were inflicted in the attack early in Israel's ground offensive.
Mr Abed Rabbo stood near the wreckage off his subsequently destroyed home on the eastern edge of the northern Gaza town of Jabalya yesterday and described how a tank had parked outside the building at 12.50pm on 7 January and ordered the family in Arabic through a megaphone to leave building. He said his 60-year-old mother had also been shot at as she left waving her white headscarf with her son, daughter in law and her three grandchildren.
"Two soldiers were on the tank eating chips, then one man came out of the tank with a rifle and started shooting the kids," Mr Abed Rabbo, who receives a salary as a policeman from the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority in Ramallah said. The family say they think the weapon used by the soldier was an M16 and that the first to be shot was Amal. Mr Abed Rabbo said that Suad was then shot with what he claimed were 12 bullets, and then Samer.
The soldier who fired the rifle had what Mr Abed Rabbo thought were ringlets visible below his helmet, he said. The small minority of ultra-Orthodox Jews who serve in the army are in a unit which did not take part in the Gaza offensive and only a very small number of settlers who also favour that hairstyle serve in other units.
It has so far been impossible independently to verify Mr Abed Rabbo's claim and the military said last night Israeli Defence Forces "does not target civilians, only Hamas terrorists and infrastructure". It added: "The IDF is investigating various claims made with regard to Operation Cast Lead and at the end of its investigation will respond accordingly."
The district is named Abed Rabbo after the clan who live in most of it. The dense concrete roof of the house now hangs at more at more than a 45-degree angle, and at least three other substantial buildings have been flattened in the agricultural, semi-rural immediate neighbourhood. Khaled Abed Rabbo said that there had been a delay before the ambulance could reach the building because the road from the west had been made impassable by the churning of the tanks.
The soldiers had in the end let the family leave on foot, he said. He added that they walked two kilometres before finding a vehicle to take them to Kamal Adwan Hospital. He said: "I carried Suad, who was dead, my wife carried Amal and my brother Ibrahim carried Samer."
He added: "We are not Hamas. My children were not Hamas. And if they were going to shoot anyone it should have been me." He added: "I want the international community and the International Red Cross to ask Israel why it has done this to us. They talk about democracy but is it democracy to kill children? What did the kids do to them? What did my house do to them? They destroyed my life?
Gaza City is showing signs of returning to a form of normality as more shops reopen. The offices of the main Palestinian telephone company Jawwal reopened though this has not eased severe problems of connectivity on the Palestinian mobile network.
Some Hamas policemen were back directing traffic, though in smaller numbers than before the offensive. Unconfirmed figures are that 270 Hamas policemen were killed, mainly in the air attacks during the first week. In a victory rally in Gaza city yesterday, Hamas supporters converged on a square near the remains of the bombed parliament building..
'Heartbreaking': The ugly face of war
The UN secretary general, looking distressed, described the devastation of Gaza as "heartbreaking" on a visit to the area yesterday after the 22-day Israeli assault.
"I have seen only a fraction of the destruction," said Ban Ki-moon, as he stood in front of a UN warehouse set on fire by Israeli shells last Thursday. "This is shocking and alarming. These are heartbreaking scenes I have seen and I am deeply grieved by what I have seen today." he said.
Mr Ban demanded a full investigation into the Israeli shelling of the UN Relief and Works Agency compound. UN officials say the compound, still smouldering yesterday, was targeted by white phosphorus munitions which are not supposed to be used in densely populated areas because of the harm to civilians. Mr Ban said the Israeli attacks on UNRWA headquarters and two UN schools in Gaza, one of which killed 40 sheltering Palestinians, were "outrageous".
Amnesty International said Israel's repeated use of the munitions despite evidence of their indiscriminate effects and harm to civilians "is a war crime". The Israeli army has launched an investigation but says Hamas fighters operate from densely populated areas, and used UN buildings as cover for attacks.
Mr Ban said: "It has been especially troubling and heartbreaking for me as secretary general that I couldn't end this faster," he said. He urged Israel and Hamas to "exercise maximum restraint and nurture the ceasefire".
Anne Penketh
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/gaza-i-watched-an-israeli-soldier-shoot-dead-my-two-little-girls-1452294.html

Obama's Inauguration

Beware of Obama's Groundhog Day

In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger reckons 'Groundhog Day', the black comedy about time repeating itself, might be a parable for the Age of Obama - as the president-elect's major appointments turn out to be almost totally retro, without a single figure representing those who voted for him.One of the cleverest films I have seen is Groundhog Day, in which Bill Murray plays a TV weatherman who finds himself stuck in time. At first he deludes himself that the same day and the same people and the same circumstances offer new opportunities. Finally, his naivety and false hope desert him and he realises the truth of his predicament and escapes. Is this a parable for the age of Obama?Having campaigned with “Change you can believe in”, President-elect Barack Obama has named his A-team. They include Hillary Clinton, who voted to attack Iraq without reading the intelligence assessment and has since threatened to “totally obliterate” Iran on behalf of a foreign power, Israel. During his primary campaign, Obama referred repeatedly to Clinton’s lies about her political record. When he appointed her secretary of state, he called her “my dear friend”.Obama’s slogan is now “continuity”. His secretary of defence will be Robert Gates, who serves the lawless, blood-soaked Bush regime as secretary of defence, which means secretary of war (America last had to defend itself when the British invaded in 1812). Gates wants no date set for an Iraq withdrawal and “well north of 20,000” troops to be sent to Afghanistan. He also wants America to build a completely new nuclear arsenal, including “tactical” nuclear weapons that blur the distinction with conventional weapons.Another product of “continuity” is Obama’s first choice for CIA chief, John Brennan, who shares responsibility for the systematic kidnapping and torturing of people, known as “extraordinary rendition”. Obama has assigned Madeleine Albright to report on how to “strengthen US leadership in responding to genocide”. Albright, as secretary of state, was largely responsible for the siege of Iraq in the 1990s, described by the UN’s Denis Halliday as genocide.There is more continuity in Obama’s appointment of officials who will deal with the economic piracy that brought down Wall Street and impoverished millions. As in Bill Murray’s nightmare, they are the same officials who caused it. For example, Lawrence Summers will run the National Economic Council. As treasury secretary, according to the New York Times, he “championed the law that deregulated derivatives, the... instruments – aka toxic assets – that have spread financial losses [and] refused to heed critics who warned of dangers to come”.There is logic here. Contrary to myth, Obama’s campaign was funded largely by rapacious capital, such as Citigroup and others responsible for the sub-prime mortgage scandal, whose victims were mostly African Americans and other poor people.Is this a grand betrayal? Obama has never hidden his record as a man of a system described by Martin Luther King as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today”. Obama’s dalliance as a soft critic of the disaster in Iraq was in line with most Establishment opinion that it was “dumb”. His fans include the war criminals Tony Blair, who has “hailed” his appointments, and Henry Kissinger, who describes the appointment of Hillary Clinton as “outstanding”. One of John McCain’s principal advisers, Max Boot, who is on the Republican Party’s far right, said: “I am “gobsmacked by these appointments. [They] could just as easily have come from a President McCain.”Obama’s victory is historic, not only because he will be the first black president, but because he tapped in to a great popular movement among America’s minorities and the young outside the Democratic Party. In 2006 Latinos, the country’s largest minority, took America by surprise when they poured into the cities to protest against George W Bush’s draconian immigration laws. They chanted: “Si, se puede!” (“Yes we can!”), a slogan Obama later claimed as his own. His secretary for homeland security is Janet Napolitano who, as governor of Arizona, made her name by stoking hostility against Latino immigrants. She has militarised her state’s border with Mexico and supported the building of a hideous wall, similar to the one dividing occupied Palestine.On election eve, reported Gallup, most Obama supporters were “engaged” but “deeply pessimistic about the country’s future direction”. My guess is that many people knew what was coming, but hoped for the best. In exploiting this hope, Obama has all but neutered the anti-war movement that is historically allied to the Democrats. After all, who can argue with the symbol of the first black president in this country of slavery, regardless of whether he is a warmonger? As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, Obama is a “brand” like none other, having won the highest advertising campaign accolade and attracted unprecedented sums of money. The brand will sell for a while. He will close Guantanamo Bay, whose inmates represent less than one per cent of America’s 27,000 “ghost prisoners”. He will continue to make stirring, platitudinous speeches, but the tears will dry as people understand that President Obama is the latest manager of an ideological machine that transcends electoral power. Asked what his supporters would do when reality intruded, Stephen Walt, an Obama adviser, said: “They have nowhere else to go.”Not yet. If there is a happy ending to the Groundhog Day of repeated wars and plunder, it may well be found in the very mass movement whose enthusiasts registered voters and knocked on doors and brought Obama to power. Will they now be satisfied as spectators to the cynicism of “continuity”? In less than three months, millions of angry Americans have been politicised by the spectacle of billions of dollars of handouts to Wall Street as they struggle to save their jobs and homes. It as if seeds have begun to sprout beneath the political snow. And history, like Groundhog Day, can repeat itself. Few predicted the epoch-making events of the 1960s and the speed with which they happened. As a beneficiary of that time, Obama should know that when the blinkers are removed, anything is possible.
John Pilger
John PilgerHe is a world-renowned journalist, author and documentary filmmaker, who began his career in 1958 in his homeland, Australia, before moving to London in the 1960s.

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

THE ISRAELIS PRACTICE THE SAME TACTICS

The classic propaganda machine - you will find the picture in black and white in all American and some other western countries' history books, encyclopedias, libraries and museums. This photo depicts a young Jewish boy with his hands up while Nazi troops point their guns at him an his family in order to expel them from their homes. (It's meant to make you sympathise with the victims and support their cause for justice and homeland.


BUILDING WALLS & FENCES TO KEEP PEOPLE IN PRISONS













































































CHECK POINTS NOT TO ALLOW PEOPLE BASIC
FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT








































































ARRESTS & HARASSMENTS



























































DESTROYING HOMES & LIVELIHOODS






GIFTS (WITH LOVE) FROM THE CHILDREN OF
PEACE-LOVING & CIVILIZED COUNTRIES













THE ISRAELIS PRACTICE THE SAME TACTICS


Monday, January 19, 2009

Isn't it time for a war crimes tribunal?




Robert Fisk: So, I asked the UN secretary general, isn't it time for a war crimes tribunal?
Mr Ban said it would not be up to him to launch a war crimes tribunal. It was pathetic


It's a wrap, a doddle, an Israeli ceasefire just in time for Barack Obama to have a squeaky-clean inauguration with all the world looking at the streets of Washington rather than the rubble of Gaza. Condi and Ms Livni thought their new arms-monitoring agreement – reached without a single Arab being involved – would work. Ban Ki-moon welcomed the unilateral truce. The great and the good gathered for a Sharm el-Sheikh summit. Only Hamas itself was not consulted. Which led, of course, to a few wrinkles in the plan. First, before declaring its own ceasefire, Hamas fired off more rockets at Israel, proving that Israel's primary war aim – to stop the missiles – had failed. Then Cairo shrugged off the deal because no one was going to set up electronic surveillance equipment on Egyptian soil. And not one European leader travelling to the region suggested the survivors might be helped if Israel, the EU and the US ended the food and fuel siege of Gaza.
After killing hundreds of women and children, Israel was the good guy again, by declaring a unilateral ceasefire that Hamas was certain to break. But Obama will be smiling on Tuesday. Was not this the reason, after all, why Israel suddenly wanted a truce?
Egypt's objections may be theatre – the US spent £18m last year training Egyptian security men to stop arms smuggling into Gaza and since the US bails out Egypt's economy, ignores the corruption of its regime and goes on backing Hosni Mubarak, there's sure to be a "compromise" very soon.
And Hamas has had its claws cut. Israel's informers in Gaza handed over the locations of its homes and hideouts and the government of Gaza must be wondering if they can ever close down the spy rings. Hamas thought its militia was the Hizbollah – a serious error – and that the world would eventually come to its aid. The world (although not its pompous leaders) felt enormous pity for the Palestinians, but not for the cynical men of Hamas who staged a coup in Gaza in 2007 which killed 151 Palestinians. As usual, the European statesmen appeared hopelessly out of touch with what their own electorates thought.
And history was quite forgotten. The Hamas rockets were the result of the food and fuel siege; Israel broke Hamas's own truce on 4 and 17 November. Forgotten is the fact Hamas won the 2006 elections, although Israel has killed a clutch of the victors.
And there'll be little time for the peacemakers of Sharm el-Sheikh to reflect on the three UN schools targeted by the Israelis and the slaughter of the civilians inside. Poor old Ban Ki-moon. He tried to make his voice heard just before the ceasefire, saying Israel's troops had acted "outrageously" and should be "punished" for the third school killing. Some hope. At a Beirut press conference, he admitted he had failed to get a call through to Israel's Foreign Minister to complain.
It was pathetic. When I asked Mr Ban if he would consider a UN war crimes tribunal in Gaza, he said this would not be for him to "determine". But only a few journalists bothered to listen to him and his officials were quickly folding up the UN flag on the table. About time too. Bring back the League of Nations. All is forgiven.
What no one noticed yesterday – not the Arabs nor the Israelis nor the portentous men from Europe – was that the Sharm el-Sheikh meeting last night was opening on the 90th anniversary – to the day – of the opening of the 1919 Paris peace conference which created the modern Middle East. One of its main topics was "the borders of Palestine". There followed the Versailles Treaty. And we know what happened then. The rest really is history. Bring on the ghosts.

Sunday, January 18, 2009

Is Ehud's Poodle Acting Up?

by Patrick J. Buchanan
As Israel entered the third week of its Gaza blitz, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert regaled a crowd in Ashkelon with an astonishing tale.
He had, said Olmert, whistled up George Bush, interrupted him in the middle of a speech and told him to instruct Condi Rice not to vote for a U.N. resolution Condi herself had written. Bush did as told, said Olmert.
The crowd loved it. Here is the background.
After intense negotiations with Britain and France, Secretary of State Rice had persuaded the Security Council to agree on a resolution calling for a cease-fire. But Olmert wanted more time to kill Hamas.
So, here, in Olmert's words, is what happened next.
"In the night between Thursday and Friday, when the secretary of state wanted to lead the vote on a cease-fire at the Security Council, we did not want her to vote in favor.
"I said, 'Get me President Bush on the phone.' They said he was in the middle of giving a speech in Philadelphia. I said I didn't care. 'I need to talk to him now.' He got off the podium and spoke to me."
According to Olmert, Bush was clueless.
"He said: 'Listen. I don't know about it. I didn't see it. I'm not familiar with the phrasing.'
"I told him the United States could not vote in favor. It cannot vote in favor of such a resolution. He immediately called the secretary of state and told her not to vote in favor."
The UN diplomatic corps was astonished when the United States abstained on the 14-0 resolution Rice had crafted and claimed her country supported. Arab diplomats say Rice promised them she would vote for it.
State Department spokesman Sean McCormack, with Rice at the United Nations during the debate on the resolution, said Olmert's remarks were "just 100 percent, totally, completely untrue."
But the White House cut Rice off at the knees, saying only that there were "inaccuracies" in the Olmert story. The video does not show Bush interrupting his speech to take any call.
Yet, the substance rings true and is widely believed, and Olmert is happily describing the egg on Rice's face:
"He [Bush] gave an order to the secretary of state, and she did not vote in favor of it – a resolution she cooked up, phrased, organized and maneuvered for. She was left pretty shamed. ..."
With Bush and Rice leaving office in hours, and Olmert in weeks, the story may seem to lack significance.
Yet, public gloating by an Israeli prime minister that he can order a U.S. president off a podium and instruct him to reverse and humiliate his secretary of state may cause even Ehud's poodle to rise up on its hind legs one day and bite its master.
Taking such liberties with a superpower that, for Israel's benefit, has shoveled out $150 billion and subordinated its own interests in the Arab and Islamic world would seem a hubristic and stupid thing to do.
And there are straws in the wind that, despite congressional resolutions giving full-throated approval to all that Israel is doing in Gaza, this is becoming a troubled relationship.
Two weeks ago, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, in opposing any truce, assured the world there "is no humanitarian crisis in the (Gaza) Strip," and the humanitarian situation there "is completely as it should be."
Not so to Hillary Clinton. In her confirmation hearings, the secretary of state-designate, reports the New York Times, "struck a sharper tone toward Israel on violence in the Middle East."
Clinton "seemed to part from the tone set by the Bush administration in calling attention to what she described as the 'tragic humanitarian costs' borne by Palestinians, as well as Israelis."
More dramatic was a weekend report by the Times' David Sanger that the White House had rebuffed Olmert's request for new U.S. bunker-buster bombs and denied Israel permission to overfly Iraq in any strike on Iran's nuclear enrichment plant at Natanz.
Sanger described these U.S.-Israeli talks as "tense."
Repeatedly, Israel has warned that Iran is close to a bomb and threatened to attack unilaterally. Indeed, Israel simulated such an attack in an air exercise of 100 planes that went as far as Greece.
Bush both blocked and vetoed that attack, says Sanger. But he did assure Olmert that America is engaged in the sabotage of Iran's nuclear program by helping provide Tehran with defective parts.
This would seem a stunning breach of security secrets, but no outrage has been heard from the White House, nor has any charge come that the Times compromised national security.
With Olmert, Rice and Bush departing, and Obama and Hillary taking charge committed to talking to Iran, can the old intimacy survive the new friction and colliding agendas?

Thursday, January 15, 2009

Eradicating Hamas



by Eric Margolisby Eric Margolis

It now seems clear the last disastrous act of the Bush administration was giving Israel a green light to launch its final solution campaign against the Hamas government in Gaza.
Just when we thought it was impossible for this calamitous president and Svengali Dick Cheney to do any more damage to the world or to America’s interests, they loosed one final Parthian shaft into the heart of the Mideast.
Another, earlier fool, Secretary of State Alexander Haig, gave Israel’s Ariel Sharon a green light in 1982 to invade Lebanon and crush the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Israel’s guns and bombs pounded large parts of besieged Beirut to rubble. The invasion was a disaster and led to the deaths of 18,000 to 20,000 Lebanese and Palestinians, and the massacres of 2,000 Palestinians at Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps by Israel’s neo-fascist Lebanese allies, and the death of 247 US servicemen.
Osama bin Laden noted a few years ago that the 9/11 attacks on New York were in direct retaliation for Israel’s brutal bombardment and destruction of downtown Beirut. Not surprisingly, the US media ignored this story.
In 2006, the Bush administration worked out a plan with Israel to again invade Lebanon, crush Hezbullah, then go on to attack Syria and Iran. This plan, like other American-Israeli machinations, collapsed in ignominy. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, struggled to prevent the UN and world powers from ending Israel’s attack on Lebanon, which killed over 1,000 civilians and inflicted billions of dollars in damage on Lebanon. But Hezbullah’s unexpectedly effective resistance turned the invasion into a US-Israeli defeat.
Now, she has been at it again in Gaza, attempting to thwart efforts by the UN, EU and other powers to end the massacre there. Once again, America has covered itself with shame and hypocrisy. Shame and hypocrisy only exceeded by America and Israel’s co-conspirator in the Gaza siege, Egypt, which has barred the only escape route from the hell of besieged, starved Gaza.
President-elect Barack Obama, who is regarded by many around the globe as a savior, has only issued a few platitudes about the Gaza massacre. He did not hesitate to comment on the attack on Mumbai and other world issues, but his lack of response to the savaging of Gaza could be a dismaying portent of more of the bloody same in the Mideast.
So far, over 900 Palestinians have been killed and 3,500 seriously wounded. Three Israeli civilians are dead. The psychic wounds inflicted on 1.5 million cowering civilians subjected to 1,000 and 2,000 lb bombs, 155mm artillery shells, cluster munitions, heavy mortar fire, air to ground missiles, white phosphorus, and high power tank shells cannot be described.
Gaza has very few basements. Its people cower in apartments and buildings, never knowing when a bomb will crash through the roof or a tank shell through the wall. According to the UN, before the latest crisis, 70% of Palestinian children in Gaza suffered from emotional disorders as well as malnutrition.
Israel’s goal remains to eradicate Hamas and kill many of its members before world outrage finally forces a cease-fire. Once Hamas is crushed, the lapdog Fatah organization, which is financed by the US and Israel, will remain the sole voice of Palestinians. Fatah’s yes-men will then agree to the US-Israeli plan for the West Bank, which recognizes Israel’s retention of its useful parts, and leaves millions of Palestinians squeezed into Israeli-policed tribal enclaves, or Bantustans. In short, little versions of Gaza. Hamas kept refusing to recognize Israel until Israel recognized the rights of millions of Palestinian refugees.
The strategy of Hamas is simply to survive and continue to defy Israel and its allies. The homemade rockets still being fired by Hamas are an act of foolhardy but determined defiance.
The US-Israeli-Egyptian-British plan to eradicate Hamas, which is the Arab world’s only democratically elected government, has another important objective. Hamas was founded in 1987 by a group of Islamic charities linked to Egypt’s venerable Muslim Brotherhood movement. The new Hamas movement gained widespread popular support by promising to defend Palestinian rights to their lost lands and by providing a broad range of social welfare to destitute Palestinian refugees subsisting in squalid slums.
Hamas, in essence, is a democratic revolutionary movement that threatens all of the Mideast’s US-backed dictatorships and monarchies. Its biggest threat is to Egypt, where the Muslim Brotherhood remains the unofficial opposition to the regime of President Husni Mubarak, who has ruled his nation with an iron fist for 28 years.
Mubarak’s dictatorship is the keystone of US domination of the Mideast. Egypt holds almost a third of the Arab world’s total population. Gen. Mubarak is now 81. Egypt faces regime change soon. The last thing Washington wants is for Hamas’ revolutionary ideas and zeal to infect Egypt’s quiescent, nonviolent Muslim Brotherhood, the main opposition to Mubarak, and risk seeing the US-backed Cairo regime replaced by a nationalist or Islamist government.
So it was essential, in the US-Israeli-Egyptian view, to once and for all crush the Hamas movement and keep Gaza’s Palestinians – who were ethnically cleansed from their homes in what became Israel in 1948 – safely penned up in the Gaza prison. A high-ranking Vatican official just called Gaza a "concentration camp."
Israel has been remarkably successful in barring the world’s eyes from the carnage in Gaza. But when journalists and cameras finally do get in, there will be even more international outrage against Israel’s brutality. No matter. The world, including the ineffectual regimes running so many Arab states, have proven helpless in the face of Israeli ruthlessness and US interference to end the agony of the Gaza Palestinians. Contrast the UN’s helplessness over Gaza to its condemnations against Iraq’s late, lynched Saddam Hussein.
As I said last week, Israel is handing a "fait accompli" to President Barack Obama. Its squabbling politicians primarily launched this war to boost their chances in upcoming elections, but also to destroy Hamas while their protector, George Bush, was still in the White House.
A short-term success, perhaps. But these Israeli politicians will pay a heavy price in the long term for this slash-and-burn policy. The world will turn further against Israel and see it, as too many critics claim, as a brutal oppressor. Comparisons with the Warsaw ghetto uprising will inevitably be made. More important, any hope for a real peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors has been set back for years.
Equally, America will be blamed for the carnage in Gaza. In my latest book, American Raj, I try to explain why there is so much anger and hatred directed in there against the United States. Gaza is now exhibit "A."
While our media mostly repeats Israel’s side of the argument, people across the Muslim world hear nightly of Gaza’s agony and horror – and will soon see TV footage. Everyone knows the F-16’s, helicopter gunships, and self-propelled heavy artillery raining death on Gaza come from the US courtesy of American taxpayers. Everyone knows the White House has been blocking action to succor the Palestinians and ordering its Arab satrap regimes to stay quiet – or, as in the case of Egypt, keep the prison gates locked.
If 9/11 was payback for Beirut, 1982, then the next attack on the US or its citizens abroad will likely be labeled, "Gaza."




Eric Margolis [send him mail], contributing foreign editor for Sun National Media Canada. He is the author of War at the Top of the World and the new book, American Raj: Liberation or Domination?: Resolving the Conflict Between the West and the Muslim World. See his website.
Copyright © 2009 Eric Margolis
Eric Margolis Archives

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Israel Doesn't Get 4GW

by William S. Lind
So far, Israel's assault on the Gaza Strip has produced no surprises. On the physical level of war, the IDF is triumphing. The Palestinians are suffering about one hundred people dead for every dead Israeli. To a 2GW military, which is what Israel's formerly Third Generation army has become, that is the main measure of victory.
On the moral level, the picture is reversed. Hamas is almost assured of victory. As Martin van Creveld has observed, all it has to do to claim victory is survive, which it will. That claim will not just be propaganda: for Hamas to survive everything a modern state military can throw at it is a legitimate victory. In fact, it will not only survive but be strengthened by a worldwide flood of sympathy, which will translate in part into new recruits and more money.
In the end, if Israel wants to stop Hamas' rockets, it will only be able to do so by making a deal with Hamas. Since that was equally true before the war, the question of why it was fought will soon present itself. The real reason is a tad sordid: the current Israeli government is trying to split the "get tough" vote to prevent Likud from winning the next election. The same motivation lay behind last weekend's "discovery" that Olmert asked the U.S. for permission to attack Iran. The parties in the current Israeli coalition government are in effect saying to Israeli voters, "Why vote for an oaf like Bibi Netanyahu when you can get the same thing from us without the endless embarrassments?"
What all Israeli parties and the IDF seem to share is that they don't get 4GW. They have repeatedly been defeated by Fourth Generation forces, but they do not learn.
The problem goes beyond John Boyd's framework of moral-mental-physical, with the moral the most powerful level of war and the physical the weakest. What Israel cannot grasp is that in the face of 4GW, all states should be seen as allies.
The most dangerous opponent of any Fourth Generation entity is a local state. The state must be local: interventions against 4GW forces by outside states are doomed to failure. But local states can sometimes win. It does not matter whether the state in question is a democracy or not. It does not matter whether it is a friend or enemy of Israel. By its inherent nature as a state, it will view Fourth Generation forces as threats.
A state may or may not be strong enough to suppress 4GW entities on its soil. It is in Israel's most vital interest that neighboring states be strong enough – morally as well as physically – to do so.
In concrete terms, what does that suggest? First, it means Israel should be very concerned about the strength and solidity of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq (Lebanon is a state in name only). The Israeli assault on Gaza has seriously undermined the legitimacy of three of those four, with Syria the only exception. Egypt and Jordan have diplomatic relations with Israel, and Egypt has been an all-too-obvious partner of Israel in besieging Gaza. Iraq's government (still a government without a state) is an American creation, and the U.S. is seen as Israel's main enabler. On the moral level, every Israeli bomb dropped on Gaza has also landed on Cairo, Amman, and Baghdad.
One Israeli party, Likud, is so oblivious to 4GW that its proposed grand strategy for Israel, largely written by American neocons, calls for the destruction of every Arab state. Iraq was the first victim of that strategy, thanks to the neocons' influence on the Bush administration. If Likud wins the coming Israeli elections, there is every reason to think it will put its strategy into practice, pushing Israel into the maelstrom.
Israel's dependence on strong neighboring states is equally true with regard to the Palestinians. That means Israel needs a strong Palestinian state in the West Bank. But the effect of the war in Gaza is to undermine Fatah in favor of Hamas on the West Bank, which also has elections coming up. So Israel has in effect shot itself in both feet.
What of Gaza itself? Here, Israel should have taken advantage of a blunder by Hamas. By winning an election in Gaza and then defeating Fatah in a short civil war, Hamas became a state. On balance, that was not to its benefit. Israel could and should have dealt with Hamas in Gaza as a state. It should have opened the border crossings, avoided raids (an Israeli raid into Gaza first broke what had been a fairly effective cease-fire), and let Hamas become immersed in all the problems of governance. It should have sought a Hamas state in Gaza that was strong enough to prevent rocket-firings and other acts of "terrorism" by other 4GW groups. As a state, Hamas would have gradually "normalized," even if it did not want to and even though in theory it would have remained devoted to Israel's destruction.
Now, by its invasion, Israel may have reduced Gaza to ungovernable chaos. It may think it can reinstall Fatah as the government there. But if Fatah were so foolish as to try to ride into power on the backs of Israeli tanks, it would destroy its legitimacy both in Gaza and on the West Bank, with no hope of recovery.
Ironically, the best hope Israel now has in Gaza is that when the dust settles, Hamas is still in charge. At that point, if Israel wants to stop the rocket fire, it will have to make a deal with Hamas. That deal should include what Israel ought have done in the first place, namely help Hamas make Gaza a functioning, gradually normalizing state. Again, Israel's most vital interest is that it be bordered by strong states, not the stateless chaos that is 4GW's natural breeding ground.
I visited Israel a few years ago. I liked the country and its people. I wish Israel well. But wishing it well does not mean supporting it in actions that undermine its own security. Until Israel comes to think in 4GW terms, everything it does is likely to undermine its own security, as the assault on Gaza has undermined it.
Can Israel learn? If not, apartment buildings in Miami will prove a great investment.
--------------------------------------------
Note: William Lind is Director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism at the Free Congress Foundation. He is a former Congressional Aide and the author of many books and articles on military strategy and war.

How Many Divisions?

NEARLY SEVENTY YEARS ago, in the course of World War II, a heinous crime was committed in the city of Leningrad. For more than a thousand days, a gang of extremists called "the Red Army" held the millions of the town's inhabitants hostage and provoked retaliation from the German Wehrmacht from inside the population centers. The Germans had no alternative but to bomb and shell the population and to impose a total blockade, which caused the death of hundreds of thousands.

Some time before that, a similar crime was committed in England. The Churchill gang hid among the population of London, misusing the millions of citizens as a human shield. The Germans were compelled to send their Luftwaffe and reluctantly reduce the city to ruins. They called it the Blitz.

This is the description that would now appear in the history books – if the Germans had won the war.

Absurd? No more than the daily descriptions in our media, which are being repeated ad nauseam: the Hamas terrorists use the inhabitants of Gaza as "hostages" and exploit the women and children as "human shields", they leave us no alternative but to carry out massive bombardments, in which, to our deep sorrow, thousands of women, children and unarmed men are killed and injured.


IN THIS WAR, as in any modern war, propaganda plays a major role. The disparity between the forces, between the Israeli army - with its airplanes, gunships, drones, warships, artillery and tanks - and the few thousand lightly armed Hamas fighters, is one to a thousand, perhaps one to a million. In the political arena the gap between them is even wider. But in the propaganda war, the gap is almost infinite.

Almost all the Western media initially repeated the official Israeli propaganda line. They almost entirely ignored the Palestinian side of the story, not to mention the daily demonstrations of the Israeli peace camp. The rationale of the Israeli government ("The state must defend its citizens against the Qassam rockets") has been accepted as the whole truth. The view from the other side, that the Qassams are a retaliation for the siege that starves the one and a half million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, was not mentioned at all.

Only when the horrible scenes from Gaza started to appear on Western TV screens, did world public opinion gradually begin to change.

True, Western and Israeli TV channels showed only a tiny fraction of the dreadful events that appear 24 hours every day on Aljazeera's Arabic channel, but one picture of a dead baby in the arms of its terrified father is more powerful than a thousand elegantly constructed sentences from the Israeli army spokesman. And that is what is decisive, in the end.

War – every war – is the realm of lies. Whether called propaganda or psychological warfare, everybody accepts that it is right to lie for one's country. Anyone who speaks the truth runs the risk of being branded a traitor.

The trouble is that propaganda is most convincing for the propagandist himself. And after you convince yourself that a lie is the truth and falsification reality, you can no longer make rational decisions.

An example of this process surrounds the most shocking atrocity of this war so far: the shelling of the UN Fakhura school in Jabaliya refugee camp.

Immediately after the incident became known throughout the world, the army "revealed" that Hamas fighters had been firing mortars from near the school entrance. As proof they released an aerial photo which indeed showed the school and the mortar. But within a short time the official army liar had to admit that the photo was more than a year old. In brief: a falsification.

Later the official liar claimed that "our soldiers were shot at from inside the school". Barely a day passed before the army had to admit to UN personnel that that was a lie, too. Nobody had shot from inside the school, no Hamas fighters were inside the school, which was full of terrified refugees.

But the admission made hardly any difference anymore. By that time, the Israeli public was completely convinced that "they shot from inside the school", and TV announcers stated this as a simple fact.

So it went with the other atrocities. Every baby metamorphosed, in the act of dying, into a Hamas terrorist. Every bombed mosque instantly became a Hamas base, every apartment building an arms cache, every school a terror command post, every civilian government building a "symbol of Hamas rule". Thus the Israeli army retained its purity as the "most moral army in the world".


THE TRUTH is that the atrocities are a direct result of the war plan. This reflects the personality of Ehud Barak – a man whose way of thinking and actions are clear evidence of what is called "moral insanity", a sociopathic disorder.

The real aim (apart from gaining seats in the coming elections) is to terminate the rule of Hamas in the Gaza Strip. In the imagination of the planners, Hamas is an invader which has gained control of a foreign country. The reality is, of course, entirely different.

The Hamas movement won the majority of the votes in the eminently democratic elections that took place in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip. It won because the Palestinians had come to the conclusion that Fatah's peaceful approach had gained precisely nothing from Israel - neither a freeze of the settlements, nor release of the prisoners, nor any significant steps toward ending the occupation and creating the Palestinian state. Hamas is deeply rooted in the population – not only as a resistance movement fighting the foreign occupier, like the Irgun and the Stern Group in the past – but also as a political and religious body that provides social, educational and medical services.

From the point of view of the population, the Hamas fighters are not a foreign body, but the sons of every family in the Strip and the other Palestinian regions. They do not "hide behind the population", the population views them as their only defenders.

Therefore, the whole operation is based on erroneous assumptions. Turning life into living hell does not cause the population to rise up against Hamas, but on the contrary, it unites behind Hamas and reinforces its determination not to surrender. The population of Leningrad did not rise up against Stalin, any more than the Londoners rose up against Churchill.

He who gives the order for such a war with such methods in a densely populated area knows that it will cause dreadful slaughter of civilians. Apparently that did not touch him. Or he believed that "they will change their ways" and "it will sear their consciousness", so that in future they will not dare to resist Israel.

A top priority for the planners was the need to minimize casualties among the soldiers, knowing that the mood of a large part of the pro-war public would change if reports of such casualties came in. That is what happened in Lebanon Wars I and II.

This consideration played an especially important role because the entire war is a part of the election campaign. Ehud Barak, who gained in the polls in the first days of the war, knew that his ratings would collapse if pictures of dead soldiers filled the TV screens.

Therefore, a new doctrine was applied: to avoid losses among our soldiers by the total destruction of everything in their path. The planners were not only ready to kill 80 Palestinians to save one Israeli soldier, as has happened, but also 800. The avoidance of casualties on our side is the overriding commandment, which is causing record numbers of civilian casualties on the other side.

That means the conscious choice of an especially cruel kind of warfare – and that has been its Achilles heel.

A person without imagination, like Barak (his election slogan: "Not a Nice Guy, but a Leader") cannot imagine how decent people around the world react to actions like the killing of whole extended families, the destruction of houses over the heads of their inhabitants, the rows of boys and girls in white shrouds ready for burial, the reports about people bleeding to death over days because ambulances are not allowed to reach them, the killing of doctors and medics on their way to save lives, the killing of UN drivers bringing in food. The pictures of the hospitals, with the dead, the dying and the injured lying together on the floor for lack of space, have shocked the world. No argument has any force next to an image of a wounded little girl lying on the floor, twisting with pain and crying out: "Mama! Mama!"

The planners thought that they could stop the world from seeing these images by forcibly preventing press coverage. The Israeli journalists, to their shame, agreed to be satisfied with the reports and photos provided by the Army Spokesman, as if they were authentic news, while they themselves remained miles away from the events. Foreign journalists were not allowed in either, until they protested and were taken for quick tours in selected and supervised groups. But in a modern war, such a sterile manufactured view cannot completely exclude all others – the cameras are inside the strip, in the middle of the hell, and cannot be controlled. Aljazeera broadcasts the pictures around the clock and reaches every home.


THE BATTLE for the TV screen is one of the decisive battles of the war.

Hundreds of millions of Arabs from Mauritania to Iraq, more than a billion Muslims from Nigeria to Indonesia see the pictures and are horrified. This has a strong impact on the war. Many of the viewers see the rulers of Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority as collaborators with Israel in carrying out these atrocities against their Palestinian brothers.

The security services of the Arab regimes are registering a dangerous ferment among the peoples. Hosny Mubarak, the most exposed Arab leader because of his closing of the Rafah crossing in the face of terrified refugees, started to pressure the decision-makers in Washington, who until that time had blocked all calls for a cease-fire. These began to understand the menace to vital American interests in the Arab world and suddenly changed their attitude – causing consternation among the complacent Israeli diplomats.

People with moral insanity cannot really understand the motives of normal people and must guess their reactions. "How many divisions has the Pope?" Stalin sneered. "How many divisions have people of conscience?" Ehud Barak may well be asking.

As it turns out, they do have some. Not numerous. Not very quick to react. Not very strong and organized. But at a certain moment, when the atrocities overflow and masses of protesters come together, that can decide a war.


THE FAILURE to grasp the nature of Hamas has caused a failure to grasp the predictable results. Not only is Israel unable to win the war, Hamas cannot lose it.

Even if the Israeli army were to succeed in killing every Hamas fighter to the last man, even then Hamas would win. The Hamas fighters would be seen as the paragons of the Arab nation, the heroes of the Palestinian people, models for emulation by every youngster in the Arab world. The West Bank would fall into the hands of Hamas like a ripe fruit, Fatah would drown in a sea of contempt, the Arab regimes would be threatened with collapse.

If the war ends with Hamas still standing, bloodied but unvanquished, in face of the mighty Israeli military machine, it will look like a fantastic victory, a victory of mind over matter.

What will be seared into the consciousness of the world will be the image of Israel as a blood-stained monster, ready at any moment to commit war crimes and not prepared to abide by any moral restraints. This will have severe consequences for our long-term future, our standing in the world, our chance of achieving peace and quiet.

In the end, this war is a crime against ourselves too, a crime against the State of Israel.

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How Israel's Propaganda Machine Works


Because it recognizes the importance of the propaganda war, Israel fights on this front as vigorously and disproportionately as it engages on the battlefield, notes James Zogby.
As in past Mideast conflicts, both the media story line and political commentary here in the US has closely followed Israel's talking points on the war. This has been an essential component in Israel's early success and in its ability to prolong fighting without US pushback. Because it recognizes the importance of the propaganda war, Israel fights on this front as vigorously and disproportionately as it engages on the battlefield.
Here's how they have done it:
1) Define the terms of debate, and you win the debate. Early on, the Israelis work to define the context, the starting point, and the story line that will shape understanding of the war. In this instance, for example, they succeeded by constant repetition, in establishing the notion that the starting point of the conflict was December 19th, the end of the six-month ceasefire (which Israel described as "unilaterally ended by Hamas"). In doing so, they ignored, of course, their own early November violations, and their failure to honor their commitment in the ceasefire to open Gaza's borders. They also ignored their having reduced Gaza into a dependency, a process which began long before and continued after their withdrawal in 2005. Because they know that most Americans do not closely follow the conflict and are inclined to believe, as the line goes, "what they hear over and over again," this tactic of preemptive definition and repetition succeeds.
2) Recognize that stereotypes work. Because, for generations, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been defined with positive cultural images of Israel and negative stereotypes of Palestinians, Israel's propagandists have an advantage here that is easy to exploit. Because the story has long been seen as "Israeli humanity confronting the Palestinian problem," media coverage of any conflict begins with how "the problem" is affecting the Israeli people. As Golda Meir once put it, "We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children, but we can never forgive them for making us kill their children." And so, it was not surprising that, despite the disproportionate suffering of the Palestinians, media coverage attempted to "balance" the story, giving an extensive treatment, with photos of anguished and fearful Israelis and the impact the war was having on them. Early on, when media treatment mattered most, Palestinians were reduced, as always, to mere numbers or objectified as "collateral damage."
3) Anticipate and count on your opponent's blunders. Hamas' stupidity played into Israel's strategy. From the outset, Israel could count on the fact that Hamas would launch rockets and issue the kind of threats that Israel could then parley into sympathy in the West. Knowing that these would most certainly come, and could be exploited, was an advantage in their propaganda war.
4) Be everywhere, and say the same thing -- and make sure your opponents remain as invisible as possible. Israel begins each war with a host of English-speaking spokespersons (many born in the West) available at any time for every media outlet (it's no accident, for example, that Israel has an "Arab" Consul General in Atlanta - that's where CNN is). The work of their propaganda operation, which spreads multiple spokespersons in venues across the United States with consistent talking points, guarantees success. At the same time, they are able to deny media access to Gaza, only allowing the Western reporters to operate near the war zone under IDF supervision, guaranteeing Israel the opportunity to shape every aspect of the story while removing the possibility of independent verification of the horror unfolding in Gaza.
5) Give no ground. Since half of the story will be determined by what political leaders say and do, the political apparatus in Washington is also pressed into service, ensuring that White House and Congressional leadership will "toe the line." Statements issued by Congress, therefore, reflect the talking points and, together, the Israeli spokespersons, the political commentators, and the Congressional statements serve as echoes of one another
6) Deny, deny, deny. When events and reality break through, contradicting the Israeli-established narrative, creating stories that run counter to the imposed story line, the propaganda machine works overtime to deny, deny, deny (saying quite boldly, "Who do you believe, me or your lying eyes?"), and/or concoct a counter-narrative that shifts the blame ("We didn't do it, they made us"). In this instance, that means asserting that the death of Palestinian civilians is always the fault of someone else, or that reporters or their opponents are staging the photos of grief (as if to say, "Arabs don't really grieve like we do").
7) The last refuge.... When all else fails, point to a few examples of outrageous anti-Semitism, generalize them, suggesting that that is what motivates critics. It stings, and may be over-used, but it can silence or put critics on the defensive.



Dr. James J. Zogby is founder and president of the Arab American Institute (AAI), a Washington, D.C.-based organization which serves as the political and policy research arm of the Arab American community. Since 1985, Dr. Zogby and AAI have led Arab American efforts to secure political empowerment in the U.S. Through voter registration, education and mobilization, AAI has moved Arab Americans into the political mainstream.
For the past three decades, Dr. Zogby has been involved in a full range of Arab American issues. A co-founder and chairman of the Palestine Human Rights Campaign in the late 1970s, he later co-founded and served as the Executive Director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. In 1982, he co-founded Save Lebanon, Inc., a private non-profit, humanitarian and non-sectarian relief organization which funds health care for Palestinian and Lebanese victims of war, and other social welfare projects in Lebanon. In 1985, Zogby founded AAI. In 1993, following the signing of the Israeli

For comments or information, contact James Zogby

Friday, January 9, 2009

The Facts About Hamas and the War on Gaza

Seeing Through the Lies

By NORMAN FINKELSTEIN
The record is fairly clear. You can find it on the Israeli website, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs website. Israel broke the ceasefire by going into the Gaza and killing six or seven Palestinian militants. At that point—and now I’m quoting the official Israeli website—Hamas retaliated or, in retaliation for the Israeli attack, then launched the missiles.
Now, as to the reason why, the record is fairly clear as well. According to Ha’aretz, Defense Minister Barak began plans for this invasion before the ceasefire even began. In fact, according to yesterday’s Ha’aretz, the plans for the invasion began in March. And the main reasons for the invasion, I think, are twofold. Number one; to enhance what Israel calls its deterrence capacity, which in layman’s language basically means Israel’s capacity to terrorize the region into submission. After their defeat in July 2006 in Lebanon, they felt it important to transmit the message that Israel is still a fighting force, still capable of terrorizing those who dare defy its word.
And the second main reason for the attack is because Hamas was signaling that it wanted a diplomatic settlement of the conflict along the June 1967 border. That is to say, Hamas was signaling they had joined the international consensus, they had joined most of the international community, overwhelmingly the international community, in seeking a diplomatic settlement. And at that point, Israel was faced with what Israelis call a Palestinian peace offensive. And in order to defeat the peace offensive, they sought to dismantle Hamas.
As was documented in the April 2008 issue of Vanity Fair by the writer David Rose, basing himself on internal US documents, it was the United States in cahoots with the Palestinian Authority and Israel which were attempting a putsch on Hamas, and Hamas preempted the putsch. That, too, is no longer debatable or no longer a controversial claim.
The issue is can it rule in Gaza if Israel maintains a blockade and prevents economic activity among the Palestinians. The blockade, incidentally, was implemented before Hamas came to power. The blockade doesn’t even have anything to do with Hamas. The blockade came to—there were Americans who were sent over, in particular James Wolfensohn, to try to break the blockade after Israel redeployed its troops in Gaza.
The problem all along has been that Israel doesn’t want Gaza to develop, and Israel doesn’t want to resolve diplomatically the conflict, both the leadership in Damascus and the leadership in the Gaza have repeatedly made statements they’re willing to settle the conflict in the June 1967 border. The record is fairly clear. In fact, it’s unambiguously clear.
Every year, the United Nations General Assembly votes on a resolution entitled “Peaceful Settlement of the Palestine Question.” And every year the vote is the same: it’s the whole world on one side; Israel, the United States and some South Sea atolls and Australia on the other side. The vote this past year was 164-to-7. Every year since 1989—in 1989, the vote was 151-to-3, the whole world on one side, the United States, Israel and the island state of Dominica on the other side.
We have the Arab League, all twenty-two members of the Arab League, favoring a two-state settlement on the June 1967 border. We have the Palestinian Authority favoring that two-state settlement on the June 1967 border. We now have Hamas favoring that two-state settlement on the June 1967 border. The one and only obstacle is Israel, backed by the United States. That’s the problem.
Well, the record shows that Hamas wanted to continue the ceasefire, but only on condition that Israel eases the blockade. Long before Hamas began the retaliatory rocket attacks on Israel, Palestinians were facing a humanitarian crisis in Gaza because of the blockade. The former High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, described what was going on in Gaza as a destruction of a civilization. This was during the ceasefire period.
What does the record show? The record shows for the past twenty or more years, the entire international community has sought to settle the conflict in the June 1967 border with a just resolution of the refugee question. Are all 164 nations of the United Nations the rejectionists? And are the only people in favor of peace the United States, Israel, Nauru, Palau, Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and Australia? Who are the rejectionists? Who’s opposing a peace?
The record shows that in every crucial issue raised at Camp David, then under the Clinton parameters, and then in Taba, at every single point, all the concessions came from the Palestinians. Israel didn’t make any concessions. Every concession came from the Palestinians. The Palestinians have repeatedly expressed a willingness to settle the conflict in accordance with international law.
The law is very clear. July 2004, the highest judicial body in the world, the International Court of Justice, ruled Israel has no title to any of the West Bank and any of Gaza. They have no title to Jerusalem. Arab East Jerusalem, according to the highest judicial body in the world, is occupied Palestinian territory. The International Court of Justice ruled all the settlements, all the settlements in the West Bank, are illegal under international law.
Now, the important point is, on all those questions, the Palestinians were willing to make concessions. They made all the concessions. Israel didn’t make any concessions.
I think it’s fairly clear what needs to happen. Number one, the United States and Israel have to join the rest of the international community, have to abide by international law. I don’t think international law should be trivialized. I think it’s a serious issue. If Israel is in defiance of international law, it should be called into account, just like any other state in the world.
Mr. Obama has to level with the American people. He has to be honest about what is the main obstacle to resolving the conflict. It’s not Palestinian rejectionism. It’s the refusal of Israel, backed by the United States government, to abide by international law, to abide by the opinion of the international community.
And the main challenge for all of us as Americans is to see through the lies. Norman Finkelstein is author of five books, including Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, Beyond Chutzpah and The Holocaust Industry, which have been translated into more than 40 foreign editions. He is the son of Holocaust survivors. This article is an edited extract of the views of Finkelstein given at DemocracyNow.org. His website is http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/

Thursday, January 8, 2009

Holocaust denied: the lying silence of those who know

Writing in the New Statesman, John Pilger calls on 40 years of reporting the Middle East to describe the 'why' of Israel's bloody onslaught on the besieged people of Gaza - an attack that has little to do with Hamas or Israel's right to exist

“When the truth is replaced by silence,” the Soviet dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko said, “the silence is a lie.” It may appear the silence is broken on Gaza. The cocoons of murdered children, wrapped in green, together with boxes containing their dismembered parents and the cries of grief and rage of everyone in that death camp by the sea, can be viewed on al-Jazeera and YouTube, even glimpsed on the BBC. But Russia’s incorrigible poet was not referring to the ephemeral we call news; he was asking why those who knew the why never spoke it and so denied it. Among the Anglo-American intelligentsia, this is especially striking. It is they who hold the keys to the great storehouses of knowledge: the historiographies and archives that lead us to the why.They know that the horror now raining on Gaza has little to do with Hamas or, absurdly, “Israel’s right to exist”. They know the opposite to be true: that Palestine’s right to exist was cancelled 61 years ago and the expulsion and, if necessary, extinction of the indigenous people was planned and executed by the founders of Israel. They know, for example, that the infamous “Plan D” resulted in the murderous de-population of 369 Palestinian towns and villages by the Haganah (Jewish army) and that massacre upon massacre of Palestinian civilians in such places as Deir Yassin, al-Dawayima, Eilaboun, Jish, Ramle and Lydda are referred to in official records as “ethnic cleansing”. Arriving at a scene of this carnage, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, was asked by a general, Yigal Allon, “What shall we do with the Arabs?” Ben-Gurion, reported the Israeli historian Benny Morris, “made a dismissive, energetic gesture with his hand and said, ‘Expel them’. The order to expel an entire population “without attention to age” was signed by Yitzhak Rabin, a future prime minister promoted by the world’s most efficient propaganda as a peacemaker. The terrible irony of this was addressed only in passing, such as when the Mapan Party co-leader Meir Ya’ari noted “how easily” Israel’s leaders spoke of how it was “possible and permissible to take women, children and old men and to fill the roads with them because such is the imperative of strategy … who remembers who used this means against our people during the [Second World] war... we are appalled.”Every subsequent “war” Israel has waged has had the same objective: the expulsion of the native people and the theft of more and more land. The lie of David and Goliath, of perennial victim, reached its apogee in 1967 when the propaganda became a righteous fury that claimed the Arab states had struck first. Since then, mostly Jewish truth-tellers such as Avi Schlaim, Noam Chomsky, the late Tanya Reinhart, Neve Gordon, Tom Segev, Uri Avnery, Ilan Pappe and Norman Finklestein have dispatched this and other myths and revealed a state shorn of the humane traditions of Judaism, whose unrelenting militarism is the sum of an expansionist, lawless and racist ideology called zionism. “It seems,” wrote the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe on 2 January, “that even the most horrendous crimes, such as the genocide in Gaza, are treated as desperate events, unconnected to anything that happened in the past and not associated with any ideology or system... Very much as the apartheid ideology explained the oppressive policies of the South African government , this ideology – in its most consensual and simplistic variety – has allowed all the Israeli governments in the past and the present to dehumanise the Palestinians wherever they are and strive to destroy them. The means altered from period to period, from location to location, as did the narrative covering up these atrocities. But there is a clear pattern [of genocide].”In Gaza, the enforced starvation and denial of humanitarian aid, the piracy of life-giving resources such as fuel and water, the denial of medicines and treatment, the systematic destruction of infrastructure and the killing and maiming of the civilian population, 50 per cent of whom are children, meet the international standard of the Genocide Convention. “Is it an irresponsible overstatement,” asked Richard Falk, the United Nations Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and international law authority at Princeton University, “to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not.”In describing a “holocaust-in-the making”, Falk was alluding to the Nazis’ establishment of Jewish ghettos in Poland. For one month in 1943, the captive Polish Jews led by Mordechaj Anielewiz fought off the German army and the SS, but their resistance was finally crushed and the Nazis exacted their final revenge. Falk is also a Jew. Today’s holocaust-in-the-making, which began with Ben-Gurion’s Plan D, is in its final stages. The difference today is that it is a joint US-Israeli project. The F-16 jet fighters, the 250-pound “smart” GBU-39 bombs supplied on the eve of the attack on Gaza, having been approved by a Congress dominated by the Democratic Party, plus the annual $2.4 billion in war-making “aid”, give Washington de facto control. It beggars belief that President-elect Obama was not informed. Outspoken on Russia’s war in Georgia and the terrorism in Mumbai, Obama’s silence on Palestine marks his approval, which is to be expected, given his obsequiousness to the Tel Aviv regime and its lobbyists during the presidential campaign and his appointment of Zionists as his secretary of state, chief of staff and principal Middle East advisers. When Aretha Franklin sings “Think”, her wonderful 1960s anthem to freedom, at Obama’s inauguration on 21 January, I trust someone with the brave heart of Muntadar al-Zaidi, the shoe-thrower, will shout: “Gaza!”The asymmetry of conquest and terror is clear. Plan D is now “Operation Cast Lead”, which is the unfinished “Operation Justified Vengeance”. The latter was launched by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2001 when, with Bush’s approval, he used F-16s against Palestinian towns and villages for the first time. In the same year, the authoritative Jane’s Foreign Report disclosed that the Blair government had given Israel the “green light” to attack the West Bank after it was shown Israel’s secret designs for a bloodbath. It was typical of New Labour Party’s enduring, cringing complicity in Palestine’s agony. However, the 2001 Israeli plan, reported Jane’s, needed the “trigger” of a suicide bombing which would cause “numerous deaths and injuries [because] the ‘revenge’ factor is crucial”. This would “motivate Israeli soldiers to demolish the Palestinians”. What alarmed Sharon and the author of the plan, General Shaul Mofaz, the Israeli Chief of Staff, was a secret agreement between Yasser Arafat and Hamas to ban suicide attacks. On 23 November, 2001, Israeli agents assassinated the Hamas leader, Mahmud Abu Hunud, and got their “trigger”; the suicide attacks resumed in response to his killing.Something uncannily similar happened on 5 November last, when Israeli special forces attacked Gaza, killing six people. Once again, they got their propaganda “trigger”. A ceasefire initiated and sustained by the Hamas government – which had imprisoned its violators - was shattered by the Israeli attack and home-made rockets were fired into what used to be Palestine before its Arab occupants were “cleansed”. The On 23 December, Hamas offered to renew the ceasefire, but Israel’s charade was such that its all-out assault on Gaza had been planned six months earlier, according to the Israeli daily Ha’aretz.Behind this sordid game is the “Dagan Plan”, named after General Meir Dagan, who served with Sharon in his bloody invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Now head of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence organisation, Dagan is the author of a “solution” that has seen the imprisonment of Palestinians behind a ghetto wall snaking across the West Bank and in Gaza, effectively a concentration camp. The establishment of a quisling government in Ramallah under Mohammed Abbas is Dagan’s achievement, together with a hasbara (propaganda) campaign relayed through a mostly supine, if intimidated western media, notably in America, that says Hamas is a terrorist organisation devoted to Israel’s destruction and to “blame” for the massacres and siege of its own people over two generations, long before its creation. “We have never had it so good,” said the Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Gideon Meir in 2006. “The hasbara effort is a well-oiled machine.” In fact, Hamas’s real threat is its example as the Arab world’s only democratically elected government, drawing its popularity from its resistance to the Palestinians’ oppressor and tormentor. This was demonstrated when Hamas foiled a CIA coup in 2007, an event ordained in the western media as “Hamas’s seizure of power”. Likewise, Hamas is never described as a government, let alone democratic. Neither is its proposal of a ten-year truce as a historic recognition of the “reality” of Israel and support for a two-state solution with just one condition: that the Israelis obey international law and end their illegal occupation beyond the 1967 borders. As every annual vote in the UN General Assembly demonstrates, 99 per cent of humanity concurs. On 4 January, the president of the General Assembly, Miguel d’Escoto, described the Israeli attack on Gaza as a “monstrosity”.When the monstrosity is done and the people of Gaza are even more stricken, the Dagan Plan foresees what Sharon called a “1948-style solution” – the destruction of all Palestinian leadership and authority followed by mass expulsions into smaller and smaller “cantonments” and perhaps finally into Jordan. This demolition of institutional and educational life in Gaza is designed to produce, wrote Karma Nabulsi, a Palestinian exile in Britain, “a Hobbesian vision of an anarchic society: truncated, violent, powerless, destroyed, cowed... Look to the Iraq of today: that is what [Sharon] had in store for us, and he has nearly achieved it.”Dr. Dahlia Wasfi is an American writer on Palestine. She has a Jewish mother and an Iraqi Muslim father. “Holocaust denial is anti-Semitic,” she wrote on 31 December. “But I’m not talking about World War Two, Mahmoud Ahmedinijad (the president of Iran) or Ashkenazi Jews. What I’m referring to is the holocaust we are all witnessing and responsible for in Gaza today and in Palestine over the past 60 years... Since Arabs are Semites, US-Israeli policy doesn’t get more anti-Semitic than this.” She quoted Rachel Corrie, the young American who went to Palestine to defend Palestinians and was crushed by an Israeli bulldozer. “I am in the midst of a genocide,” wrote Corrie, “which I am also indirectly supporting and for which my government is largely responsible.”Reading the words of both, I am struck by the use of “responsibility”. Breaking the lie of silence is not an esoteric abstraction but an urgent responsibility that falls to those with the privilege of a platform. With the BBC cowed, so too is much of journalism, merely allowing vigorous debate within unmovable invisible boundaries, ever fearful of the smear of anti-Semitism. The unreported news, meanwhile, is that the death toll in Gaza is the equivalent of 18,000 dead in Britain. Imagine, if you can.Then there are the academics, the deans and teachers and researchers. Why are they silent as they watch a university bombed and hear the Association of University Teachers in Gaza plea for help? Are British universities now, as Terry Eagleton believes, no more than “intellectual Tescos, churning out a commodity known as graduates rather than greengroceries”?Then there are the writers. In the dark year of 1939, the Third Writers’ Congress was held at Carnegie Hall in New York and the likes of Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein sent messages and spoke up to ensure the lie of silence was broken. By one account, 3,500 jammed the auditorium and a thousand were turned away. Today, this mighty voice of realism and morality is said to be obsolete; the literary review pages affect an ironic hauteur of irrelevance; false symbolism is all. As for the readers, their moral and political imagination is to be pacified, not primed. The anti-Muslim Martin Amis expressed this well in Visiting Mrs Nabokov: “The dominance of the self is not a flaw, it is an evolutionary characteristic; it is just how things are.”If that is how things are, we are diminished as a civilised society. For what happens in Gaza is the defining moment of our time, which either grants the impunity of war criminals the immunity of our silence, while we contort our own intellect and morality, or gives us the power to speak out. For the moment I prefer my own memory of Gaza: of the people’s courage and resistance and their “luminous humanity”, as Karma Nabulsi put it. On my last trip there, I was rewarded with a spectacle of Palestinian flags fluttering in unlikely places. It was dusk and children had done this. No one told them to do it. They made flagpoles out of sticks tied together, and a few of them climbed on to a wall and held the flag between them, some silently, others crying out. They do this every day when they know foreigners are leaving, believing the world will not forget them.

Wednesday, January 7, 2009

How Israel brought Gaza to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe

Oxford professor of international relations Avi Shlaim served in the Israeli army and has never questioned the state's legitimacy. But its merciless assault on Gaza has led him to devastating conclusions
Avi Shlaim



A wounded Palestinian policeman gestures while lying on the ground outside Hamas police headquarters following an Israeli air strike in Gaza City. Photograph: Mohammed Abed/AFP/Getty Images
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The only way to make sense of Israel's senseless war in Gaza is through understanding the historical context. Establishing the state of Israel in May 1948 involved a monumental injustice to the Palestinians. British officials bitterly resented American partisanship on behalf of the infant state. On 2 June 1948, Sir John Troutbeck wrote to the foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, that the Americans were responsible for the creation of a gangster state headed by "an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders". I used to think that this judgment was too harsh but Israel's vicious assault on the people of Gaza, and the Bush administration's complicity in this assault, have reopened the question.
I write as someone who served loyally in the Israeli army in the mid-1960s and who has never questioned the legitimacy of the state of Israel within its pre-1967 borders. What I utterly reject is the Zionist colonial project beyond the Green Line. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the aftermath of the June 1967 war had very little to do with security and everything to do with territorial expansionism. The aim was to establish Greater Israel through permanent political, economic and military control over the Palestinian territories. And the result has been one of the most prolonged and brutal military occupations of modern times.
Four decades of Israeli control did incalculable damage to the economy of the Gaza Strip. With a large population of 1948 refugees crammed into a tiny strip of land, with no infrastructure or natural resources, Gaza's prospects were never bright. Gaza, however, is not simply a case of economic under-development but a uniquely cruel case of deliberate de-development. To use the Biblical phrase, Israel turned the people of Gaza into the hewers of wood and the drawers of water, into a source of cheap labour and a captive market for Israeli goods. The development of local industry was actively impeded so as to make it impossible for the Palestinians to end their subordination to Israel and to establish the economic underpinnings essential for real political independence.
Gaza is a classic case of colonial exploitation in the post-colonial era. Jewish settlements in occupied territories are immoral, illegal and an insurmountable obstacle to peace. They are at once the instrument of exploitation and the symbol of the hated occupation. In Gaza, the Jewish settlers numbered only 8,000 in 2005 compared with 1.4 million local residents. Yet the settlers controlled 25% of the territory, 40% of the arable land and the lion's share of the scarce water resources. Cheek by jowl with these foreign intruders, the majority of the local population lived in abject poverty and unimaginable misery. Eighty per cent of them still subsist on less than $2 a day. The living conditions in the strip remain an affront to civilised values, a powerful precipitant to resistance and a fertile breeding ground for political extremism.
In August 2005 a Likud government headed by Ariel Sharon staged a unilateral Israeli pullout from Gaza, withdrawing all 8,000 settlers and destroying the houses and farms they had left behind. Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement, conducted an effective campaign to drive the Israelis out of Gaza. The withdrawal was a humiliation for the Israeli Defence Forces. To the world, Sharon presented the withdrawal from Gaza as a contribution to peace based on a two-state solution. But in the year after, another 12,000 Israelis settled on the West Bank, further reducing the scope for an independent Palestinian state. Land-grabbing and peace-making are simply incompatible. Israel had a choice and it chose land over peace.
The real purpose behind the move was to redraw unilaterally the borders of Greater Israel by incorporating the main settlement blocs on the West Bank to the state of Israel. Withdrawal from Gaza was thus not a prelude to a peace deal with the Palestinian Authority but a prelude to further Zionist expansion on the West Bank. It was a unilateral Israeli move undertaken in what was seen, mistakenly in my view, as an Israeli national interest. Anchored in a fundamental rejection of the Palestinian national identity, the withdrawal from Gaza was part of a long-term effort to deny the Palestinian people any independent political existence on their land.
Israel's settlers were withdrawn but Israeli soldiers continued to control all access to the Gaza Strip by land, sea and air. Gaza was converted overnight into an open-air prison. From this point on, the Israeli air force enjoyed unrestricted freedom to drop bombs, to make sonic booms by flying low and breaking the sound barrier, and to terrorise the hapless inhabitants of this prison.
Israel likes to portray itself as an island of democracy in a sea of authoritarianism. Yet Israel has never in its entire history done anything to promote democracy on the Arab side and has done a great deal to undermine it. Israel has a long history of secret collaboration with reactionary Arab regimes to suppress Palestinian nationalism. Despite all the handicaps, the Palestinian people succeeded in building the only genuine democracy in the Arab world with the possible exception of Lebanon. In January 2006, free and fair elections for the Legislative Council of the Palestinian Authority brought to power a Hamas-led government. Israel, however, refused to recognise the democratically elected government, claiming that Hamas is purely and simply a terrorist organisation.
America and the EU shamelessly joined Israel in ostracising and demonising the Hamas government and in trying to bring it down by withholding tax revenues and foreign aid. A surreal situation thus developed with a significant part of the international community imposing economic sanctions not against the occupier but against the occupied, not against the oppressor but against the oppressed.
As so often in the tragic history of Palestine, the victims were blamed for their own misfortunes. Israel's propaganda machine persistently purveyed the notion that the Palestinians are terrorists, that they reject coexistence with the Jewish state, that their nationalism is little more than antisemitism, that Hamas is just a bunch of religious fanatics and that Islam is incompatible with democracy. But the simple truth is that the Palestinian people are a normal people with normal aspirations. They are no better but they are no worse than any other national group. What they aspire to, above all, is a piece of land to call their own on which to live in freedom and dignity.
Like other radical movements, Hamas began to moderate its political programme following its rise to power. From the ideological rejectionism of its charter, it began to move towards pragmatic accommodation of a two-state solution. In March 2007, Hamas and Fatah formed a national unity government that was ready to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with Israel. Israel, however, refused to negotiate with a government that included Hamas.
It continued to play the old game of divide and rule between rival Palestinian factions. In the late 1980s, Israel had supported the nascent Hamas in order to weaken Fatah, the secular nationalist movement led by Yasser Arafat. Now Israel began to encourage the corrupt and pliant Fatah leaders to overthrow their religious political rivals and recapture power. Aggressive American neoconservatives participated in the sinister plot to instigate a Palestinian civil war. Their meddling was a major factor in the collapse of the national unity government and in driving Hamas to seize power in Gaza in June 2007 to pre-empt a Fatah coup.
The war unleashed by Israel on Gaza on 27 December was the culmination of a series of clashes and confrontations with the Hamas government. In a broader sense, however, it is a war between Israel and the Palestinian people, because the people had elected the party to power. The declared aim of the war is to weaken Hamas and to intensify the pressure until its leaders agree to a new ceasefire on Israel's terms. The undeclared aim is to ensure that the Palestinians in Gaza are seen by the world simply as a humanitarian problem and thus to derail their struggle for independence and statehood.
The timing of the war was determined by political expediency. A general election is scheduled for 10 February and, in the lead-up to the election, all the main contenders are looking for an opportunity to prove their toughness. The army top brass had been champing at the bit to deliver a crushing blow to Hamas in order to remove the stain left on their reputation by the failure of the war against Hezbollah in Lebanon in July 2006. Israel's cynical leaders could also count on apathy and impotence of the pro-western Arab regimes and on blind support from President Bush in the twilight of his term in the White House. Bush readily obliged by putting all the blame for the crisis on Hamas, vetoing proposals at the UN Security Council for an immediate ceasefire and issuing Israel with a free pass to mount a ground invasion of Gaza.
As always, mighty Israel claims to be the victim of Palestinian aggression but the sheer asymmetry of power between the two sides leaves little room for doubt as to who is the real victim. This is indeed a conflict between David and Goliath but the Biblical image has been inverted - a small and defenceless Palestinian David faces a heavily armed, merciless and overbearing Israeli Goliath. The resort to brute military force is accompanied, as always, by the shrill rhetoric of victimhood and a farrago of self-pity overlaid with self-righteousness. In Hebrew this is known as the syndrome of bokhim ve-yorim, "crying and shooting".
To be sure, Hamas is not an entirely innocent party in this conflict. Denied the fruit of its electoral victory and confronted with an unscrupulous adversary, it has resorted to the weapon of the weak - terror. Militants from Hamas and Islamic Jihad kept launching Qassam rocket attacks against Israeli settlements near the border with Gaza until Egypt brokered a six-month ceasefire last June. The damage caused by these primitive rockets is minimal but the psychological impact is immense, prompting the public to demand protection from its government. Under the circumstances, Israel had the right to act in self-defence but its response to the pinpricks of rocket attacks was totally disproportionate. The figures speak for themselves. In the three years after the withdrawal from Gaza, 11 Israelis were killed by rocket fire. On the other hand, in 2005-7 alone, the IDF killed 1,290 Palestinians in Gaza, including 222 children.
Whatever the numbers, killing civilians is wrong. This rule applies to Israel as much as it does to Hamas, but Israel's entire record is one of unbridled and unremitting brutality towards the inhabitants of Gaza. Israel also maintained the blockade of Gaza after the ceasefire came into force which, in the view of the Hamas leaders, amounted to a violation of the agreement. During the ceasefire, Israel prevented any exports from leaving the strip in clear violation of a 2005 accord, leading to a sharp drop in employment opportunities. Officially, 49.1% of the population is unemployed. At the same time, Israel restricted drastically the number of trucks carrying food, fuel, cooking-gas canisters, spare parts for water and sanitation plants, and medical supplies to Gaza. It is difficult to see how starving and freezing the civilians of Gaza could protect the people on the Israeli side of the border. But even if it did, it would still be immoral, a form of collective punishment that is strictly forbidden by international humanitarian law.
The brutality of Israel's soldiers is fully matched by the mendacity of its spokesmen. Eight months before launching the current war on Gaza, Israel established a National Information Directorate. The core messages of this directorate to the media are that Hamas broke the ceasefire agreements; that Israel's objective is the defence of its population; and that Israel's forces are taking the utmost care not to hurt innocent civilians. Israel's spin doctors have been remarkably successful in getting this message across. But, in essence, their propaganda is a pack of lies.
A wide gap separates the reality of Israel's actions from the rhetoric of its spokesmen. It was not Hamas but the IDF that broke the ceasefire. It di d so by a raid into Gaza on 4 November that killed six Hamas men. Israel's objective is not just the defence of its population but the eventual overthrow of the Hamas government in Gaza by turning the people against their rulers. And far from taking care to spare civilians, Israel is guilty of indiscriminate bombing and of a three-year-old blockade that has brought the inhabitants of Gaza, now 1.5 million, to the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe.
The Biblical injunction of an eye for an eye is savage enough. But Israel's insane offensive against Gaza seems to follow the logic of an eye for an eyelash. After eight days of bombing, with a death toll of more than 400 Palestinians and four Israelis, the gung-ho cabinet ordered a land invasion of Gaza the consequences of which are incalculable.
No amount of military escalation can buy Israel immunity from rocket attacks from the military wing of Hamas. Despite all the death and destruction that Israel has inflicted on them, they kept up their resistance and they kept firing their rockets. This is a movement that glorifies victimhood and martyrdom. There is simply no military solution to the conflict between the two communities. The problem with Israel's concept of security is that it denies even the most elementary security to the other community. The only way for Israel to achieve security is not through shooting but through talks with Hamas, which has repeatedly declared its readiness to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with the Jewish state within its pre-1967 borders for 20, 30, or even 50 years. Israel has rejected this offer for the same reason it spurned the Arab League peace plan of 2002, which is still on the table: it involves concessions and compromises.
This brief review of Israel's record over the past four decades makes it difficult to resist the conclusion that it has become a rogue state with "an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders". A rogue state habitually violates international law, possesses weapons of mass destruction and practises terrorism - the use of violence against civilians for political purposes. Israel fulfils all of these three criteria; the cap fits and it must wear it. Israel's real aim is not peaceful coexistence with its Palestinian neighbours but military domination. It keeps compounding the mistakes of the past with new and more disastrous ones. Politicians, like everyone else, are of course free to repeat the lies and mistakes of the past. But it is not mandatory to do so.
• Avi Shlaim is a professor of international relations at the University of Oxford and the author of The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World and of Lion of Jordan: King Hussein's Life in War and Peace.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/07/gaza-israel-palestine

Thursday, January 1, 2009

Evaporating Palestinian border


TheLittleOnes

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1h5W2Tp-O0