october 2004

The Spider Web

By Israel Shamir

A new discussion over future of Palestine rages in the Web. Our esteemed friend Noam Chomsky replied[1] to Noah Cohen who called his ‘soft’ position on Palestine ‘Apologetics for Injustice’[2] and was replied in turn by Steve Kowit Weigh[3]. In brief, Chomsky proposes to remove Jewish settlements and to bring forth a Palestinian state, while maintaining the Jewish state in 1967 borders. He calls this ‘the only realistic solution to the present situation’.

We could agree with the words of Steve Kowit-Weigh, “The two-state solution is neither a state nor a solution. It is a con game”. We could stress that there is no political force or will in Israel to withdraw, to remove the settlements from the West Bank and West Jerusalem or to transfer the lands to the PNA. Moreover, recent developments, including the construction works to the East of Jerusalem, make such outcome utterly fantastic (see, for instance, Letting Israel Self-Destruct by Danny Seidemann in Washington Post Fri, 27 Aug 2004). The proposed redeployment in Gaza is the best proof that removal of settlements is too hard an objective for any Israeli government.

But this argument is irrelevant, for the settlements are not the problem, the spirit is. The prevailing mood in Israel and in the Jewish communities overseas is anything but defeatist; it is Tehran and Paris that are under threat, not Ariel or Maale Adumim. Chomsky discusses the fate of Sudetenland, while Wehrmacht marches on Champs D’Elysees. Such a discussion presumes that a heavily beaten Israel seeks peace and discusses the way to arrange for peace. But Israel is not defeated; to the contrary, the Jewish state – comprising its adepts abroad – is in the Fast Forward mode. And the dangers ahead are great – for all of us.

Noam Chomsky tries to deal with the problem of Palestine as if it were West Timor or East Kurdistan. But it is not: troubles of the Holy Land often have global character. Unwise step of Caliph al Hakim had sent Crusaders to our shores. When Turks tried to rearrange hours of prayer in the Church of Nativity, it ended with the light cavalry attack on Balaclava. Meddling with its holy sites has direct influence upon minds of millions.

As long as there is a Jewish state in the Holy Land and in Jerusalem, millions of ex-Christians will be tempted to accept the Judaic narrative of history and society including theological significance of Holocaust and Jewish Ingathering; millions of Jews will fervently follow their leaders, and their super-rich leaders will proceed with their mad Zionist plans. This has dire ideological consequences for all of us, as the Zionist offensive is fully integrated with another great offensive of our days, with an attempt to impose a consumerist Totalitarianism in the Brave New World. We shall call Noam Chomsky as a witness for the Crown.

Noam Chomsky in his seminal book Manufacturing of Consent (together with Ed Herman) described well the propaganda machine creating uniform vision and compliance ‘beyond dreams of a Stalin’. In his Fateful Triangle he described the Zionist angle of this apparatus; the distortion of reality by the US media causing pro-Israeli bias in the collective consciousness of the Americans.

He should be able to notice that the same disease now engulfs West and East Europe and Russia; that the Zionist angle became a cornerstone of the new totalitarian World Order he depicted. Some 20 or 30 years ago, when these books were written, Chomsky could counterpoise Britain and Europe to the US. Not any more.

Recently, on a front page of the Sunday Times, there was a big headline ‘suicide bombers in London’ accompanied by a photo of a Palestinian youth in a headscarf sitting under the map of Palestine. Probably passers-by and superficial readers remained convinced that Palestinians are on the way to bomb them. Careful reading of the article revealed a much less troublesome thing: during their house-to-house searches, London anti-terrorist squads came across a young Palestinian who applied a year ago to the Home Office for the refugee status. He attenuated his request by claiming that back home he was asked to become a suicide bomber. The Home Office did not believe his claim and rejected his request half a year ago. This no-news was presented as the top news on the front page of the national weekly.

Is it part of a Judaic conspiracy to besmirch Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims? You bet it is. Is it a part of a totalitarian conspiracy to train Brits to love their deep-trailing anti-terrorist squads and to give up their freedoms? You bet it is. This congruence of two conspiracies makes us wonder whether they are two, or just one.

Likewise, there is a conspiracy connected with the recent wave of terror acts in Russia (the school, the planes, the Underground explosions) and in Beer Sheba in Israel. In today’s (05/09/04) Haaretz, a liberal Israeli observer Zeev Shief writes in an article Islamic Terror: from Osetia to Beer Sheba: “There is a link uniting the massacre in a school in Osetia, genocide in Sudan, bombing of a train in Madrid, terror attacks on Istanbul synagogues and explosions on Beer Sheba buses. The link is The Islamic Terror, mainly Arab Islamic Terror, the danger to the world peace’.

While we agree with Shief that there is a ‘link’ (another term for ‘conspiracy’), is it an ‘Islamic’ or ‘Judaic’ link? And I do not mean only a possibility of a False Flag operation, which is also quite possible.

There was a precedent of Achille Lauro operation, deemed a ‘Palestinian terrorist crime’. A film and an opera Death of Klinghoffer, telling of a Jewish cripple’s murder is vaguely based on the events of 1985, when Palestinian guerrillas took over the liner. But “that was, in fact, an Israeli 'black' propaganda operation to show what a deadly, cutthroat bunch the Palestinians were”, admitted Ari Ben-Menashe, a former special intelligence advisor to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, in his book, Profits of War. The operation was ordered by the Israeli secret service and organized by their Palestinian agents inside Palestinian terrorist organizations[4].

But we should consider the bigger and more dangerous Judaic conspiracy: the undue influence on discourse. A major share of the world media is concentrated in Jewish hands, well beyond wild dreams of the mythic Elders, and this share is growing daily. In Chile and Argentina, in Kazakhstan and Canada,  even in far-away Finland with its tiny Jewish community, the key media belongs to Jews. In Russia every outrage of independence-seeking Chechens is immediately compared by ubiquitous Judeophilic editors to ‘Palestinian atrocities’. In the UK, the media is cornered by a group of extreme Judeophiles from Conrad Black to Rupert Murdoch, and ethnic Jews from Michael Green to Richard Desmond. Just recently Haim Saban had bought another German TV network. As for the US, we have a good list of Jews in the media drawn by our friend Jeff Blankfort, available on the Web.

The bulk of mainstream media collaborates in both conspiracies, in the totalitarian conspiracy and in Israel-connected conspiracy. It is difficult to distinguish between prominence of Jews in the media and universities, and between their instrumentality in establishment of new totalitarianism. The ADL and SPLC, two powerful Jewish organisations, are prominent tools for establishing the police state.

ADL, another Judaic tool of ideological control, runs a network of informers, spies after activists and thinkers, and supports every oppressive undertaking of the US Government. Our friend Noel Ignatiev writes of “a recent fundraising letter from the Southern Poverty Law Center, which claims to have "the most extensive computerized files on militias and hate groups in existence," including over 11,000 photographs, reports on 14,000 individuals, and intelligence on over 3,200 groups. The SPLC boasts of having written to Attorney General Janet Reno in October 1994, before the Oklahoma City bombing, warning her of impending illegal, violent activity by white supremacist groups. It publishes Intelligence Report, which goes out regularly to over 6,000 law enforcement agencies”.

Ignatiev asks: “Does this snooping and snitching foreshadow the brave new world they seek to build?” Absolutely, professor! The new world does not appear ex nihilo, it grows in the dying body of liberal democracy, and if we want to stop it we should attend to it now.

Iran Under Attack

The case of Iran is a proof of Judaic conspiracy, or if you prefer, of Jewish positions in the discourse. There are no real pragmatic reasons for the Western media to go for jugular against Iran, as it does. Iran is a peaceful far-away land of gentle women and manly men, of stucco and ceramics at the high portals of their blue mosques, of delicate illuminations and Sufi poetry. I was captivated when I saw young girls of Shiraz placing freshly-cut roses on the tomb of Sa’di, the 13 c creator of Gulistan: people who venerate their poets can’t be wrong, in my book. Iranians do not travel much; they stay home, tend their rose gardens and produce best films of our time.

Now we witness the concerted Judaic drive to bomb Iran. The reasons are various: some want to bomb Iran because its women are forced to wear hijab, and others for they do not like religious states (if the religion is not a Judaic one), some perceive it as a threat to Israel, and others for Iran has no gay marriages; but the bottom line is one: bomb Iran. It is so unified that I am ready to propose a new definition of a true member of Jewry (as opposed to an individual and reluctant Jew) – it’s one who wants to bomb Iran. The Jewish American newspaper Forward writes:

"AIPAC is obsessed with Iran," said a Washington executive with a major Jewish organization[5].

Charles Krauthammer calls[6] for an ‘urgent pre-emptive attack’. He openly admits that this is the dear wish of the Jewish state, but, he says, ‘for Israel, attacking Iran is a far more difficult proposition. It is farther away… But there are 146,000 American troops and highly sophisticated aircraft standing by just a few miles away -- in Iraq’. America exists to take Judaic orders – that much is clear for Krauthammer and for the Washington Post, his preferred tribune.

 Haim Harari, a leading Israeli strategist, a theoretical physicist, former President (1988 to 2001) of the Weizmann Institute of Science gave recently a talk called Eye of the Storm. He says:

“Now that Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya are out, two and a half terrorist states remain: Iran, Syria and Lebanon. As a result of the conquest of Afghanistan and Iraq, both Iran and Syria are now totally surrounded by territories unfriendly to them. I do not know if the American plan was actually to encircle both Iran and Syria, but that is the resulting situation. In my humble opinion, the number one danger to the world today is Iran and its regime. It definitely has ambitions to rule vast areas and to expand in all directions. It has an ideology, which claims supremacy over Western culture. It is ruthless. It has proven that it can execute elaborate terrorist acts without leaving too many traces (read: there is no proof for this claim.- ISH). It is clearly trying to develop nuclear weapons.”

One of the most popular Jewish scribes on the web, American writer Irwin N. Graulich, whose most recent article has been posted on over 100 websites worldwide, as well as in numerous publications, writes in his Let Israel Do Iran[7]:

“Iran is a terrorist organization with a flag and an example of virtually everything that could possibly be wrong with a government--totalitarian, autocratic, religious, fundamentalist and a tyranny over its populace”.

The media of new totalitarianism, being Jewish-dominated media, follows this line. Let us consider the case of the Guardian, a newspaper with long record stretching back to Balfour declaration (they supported it). In May 2004, our relentless efforts to bring attention to the Neo-Cons, the right-wing Jewish fraction in Washington, as the engine behind the Iraqi war, bore fruit and splashed from Internet to the printed media. Reports appeared showing Perle and Wolfowitz pushing for the war in full accordance with their plans drawn for Benjamin Netanyahu and with doctrine of the wicked wizard Leo Strauss.

Immediately, the Guardian sprung into action. On May 25, 2004, the Guardian’s main headline rolled the blame on …Iran. It read: “US intelligence fears Iran duped hawks into Iraq war”. The report by Julian Borger quoted unidentified ‘some intelligence officials’ who ‘believe that Iran used the hawks in the Pentagon and the White House to get rid of a hostile neighbour’. I have no doubt that this ‘report’ originated in JINSA milieu, but the audacity of the Guardian duty editor who pushed the vague and baseless insinuation in the front page speaks volumes of the Judaic power.

Why the Jews want to bomb Iran? Why they induced the US and partly Europe with the idea that the Iranian A-bomb is so much worse than an Israeli one? Are they afraid that nuclear Iran will defend Palestinians and stop the Israeli outrage? Alas, experience does not show that Iran either any Arab or Muslim state is ready to fight for Palestine. It is well known in Tel Aviv and in New York.

There is only one eventuality when the Doomsday weapons are liable to be brandished: if and when the Jews will destroy al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem to erect their temple.

The Judaic conspiracy to bomb Iran is a sterling proof that this plan is hatched and countdown began. Mezvinsky and Shahak (Jewish fundamentalism, Pluto Press) describe the immense influence of this idea. From being an obscure thought of a few nuts, the plan of the Third Temple grew into mass obsession.

If and when it will happen, Armageddon will come into news, and it won’t stop at Euphrates. Let me quote Irwin Graulich once more:

“The world is divided into three groups. Those who would like Israel destroyed. Those who support nations (directly or indirectly), that want Israel destroyed. And the United States of America. [After destruction of Iran], the only serious problem remaining will be, "What the heck to do with Europe and Scandinavia?"

What to do? Mordechai Vanunu brought us irrefutable images of hundreds nuclear bombs in Israel’s possession. Such an amount is not needed for subjugation of the Middle East. It points to a bigger goal.

In this situation, the discussion of Israeli withdrawal is premature, to say the least. As out of place as the discussion of German withdrawal from Prague in 1941. The ‘limited option’ of rolling back the Jewish state does not exist, unless one considers creation of enclaves in Gaza and elsewhere as the way to Two States Solution. But if by some miraculous means, say by Aladdin’s Genie, it could be done, it would not solve the problem. Even a smaller Jewish state with capital in Jerusalem would act like a focus for Jewish efforts all over the world. It will still endanger its neighbours. It will still drive crazy millions of ordinary people in the US who were bewitched by the big lie of prophecies fulfilled. It will still empower the apparatus of new totalitarianism build by the media lords, unless it is, as our friend Dr Miriam Reik proposed, just a small demilitarized Jewish statelet on 10% of the Palestinian land, encircled by a wall.

The international support for Israeli withdrawal asserted by Chomsky has very little value, for none of the international bodies and/or states dares to say ‘boo’ to Jews. In the US, Bush and Kerry compete who loves Jews most. In Europe, last act of political will expressed by Germany was providing Israel with nuclear-capable submarines, by France – reciting mea culpa for Israel-organised anti-jewish actions, and by IAEA – turning blind eye to Dimona and demanding disarmament of Iran. PNA has very little authority and its popularity among Palestinians is in rapid decline. Arab states have no will to challenge Israeli dominance. Even the pro-Palestinian activists, instead of forcefully moving forward, argue endlessly what one may say without being targeted as ‘antisemite’.

Chomsky writes: “Israel would oppose it (forced democratisation) by any possible means: that includes the ultimate weapons, which Israel has available and can use”. The world can’t acquiesce in a threat of Israel’s ‘ultimate weapons’. It is too much of a danger, much more than weapons of peaceful Iran.

I totally agree with Noam, we should look for a realistic response to the danger. However, realism and pragmatism call us – not to give in to the nuclear blackmail, not to daydream about Israeli withdrawal, but to eliminate the danger inherent in the Jewish state by most humane means in our disposal. Such means are transformation of the Jewish state into a state for all its citizens. Jewishness or otherwise of the citizens should not have any bearing on their status in Palestine as elsewhere; and ‘bi-national idea’ does not conform to this rule.

For sure, Israeli elites would not like this solution: they prefer to bomb Tehran, demolish al Aqsa, establish Judaic Jerusalem as the seat of the world government. Ordinary people of Israel are ready for peace, but who asks the ordinary people’s opinion? The real dilemma we face is to give in to these demands or to dismantle the Jewish state and bring forth democracy.

However, democratisation of Palestine can’t be achieved until another realistic measure is attended to: the discourse should be taken out of the Judaic hands and their hold on media broken. Hundred years ago, Americans broke down the empire of Rockefeller, the mighty Standard Oil. Hundred fifty years ago they put paid to slavery. They can complete this task, as well.

Noam Chomsky, a great man with a wonderful record, can play an important role in this transformation. His Jewish background may help to promote the idea and bring its fruition by peaceful means. Though Suffragettes were women, their victory was granted by men in power. Though black slaves rebelled, the white abolitionists brought them freedom. Likewise, liberation of discourse from the Judaic clutches may be achieved by men like Noam Chomsky and Noah Cohen.

[1] http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=22&ItemID=6110)

[2] http://mail.onepalestine.org/mailman/listinfo/staff_onepalestine.org

[3] http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/printer_11412.shtml

[4] Read Profits of War: Inside the Secret U.S.-Israeli Arms Network
by Ari Ben-Menashe or Google: Ari Ben Menashe Achille Lauro

[5] http://www.forward.com/main/printer-friendly.php?ref=nir20040901935

[6] Axis of Evil, Part Two By Charles Krauthammer Washington Post - July 23, 2004; Page A29

[7] http://michnews.com/artman/publish/article_4191.shtml

The items published in the group can be seen on
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/shamireaders/messages

The Temple Mount Bombers

By: Uri Avnery

18.9.04

http://www.gush-shalom.org/archives/article322.html

     The Security Service is haunted by a terrible fear: that another Israeli Prime Minister will be assassinated. The extreme right-wing, which does not hide its admiration for Yigal Amir and his deed, harbors some who dream of a similar action. After all, if Amir succeeded in murdering the Oslo process, why shouldn’t another Amir succeed in murdering the process of dismantling the settlements in the Gaza Strip?

     But the Security Service also entertains an even greater fear: that a Jewish terror group will bomb the mosques on the Temple Mount.

     Years ago, a Jewish underground organization was preparing to do exactly that. It was uncovered before it could carry out its plans. Now similar plots are afoot.

     The Security Service believes that this action is intended to put an end to Ariel Sharon’s disengagement plan. Bombing the al-Aqsa Mosque and/or the Dome of the Rock would inflame the whole Arab and Muslim world. It would cause profound upheavals, bring down Arab regimes, perhaps ignite a fundamentalist revolution throughout the region. In such a situation, who would think about evacuating settlements?

     All this is true, but it does not touch the roots of the conspiracy. The bombing of the Haram al-Sharif mosques is an enterprise that goes well beyond topical issues – it is a revolutionary act that would change the Jewish religion itself. From the point of view of the potential bombers, that is the main thing.

      In Israel, Jewish history is divided into three “houses”, meaning three temples:

     The First Temple was supposedly built by King Solomon in the tenth century BC and destroyed by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar in the year 568 BC. The people of Judea were taken as captives to Babylon and about 50 years passed before they were allowed to return to Jerusalem and build the temple again.

     The building of the Second Temple was finished in 516 BC. It was renovated and expanded by King Herod around 20 BC and destroyed by the Roman general Titus in 70 AC.

     The Third Temple does not exist, but the new Jewish community that started to establish itself in Palestine in 1882 often calls itself the “Third House”. (When Moshe Dayan became hysterical at the beginning of the Yom Kippur war, he started lamenting the “Destruction of the Third House”). But this is only a symbolic term – not one of the Zionist movement’s Founding Fathers nor any of the founders of the State of Israel, dreamed of building a new temple.

     The reason for this is rooted in the events of 1,934 years ago. When the Romans besieged Jerusalem, before the town fell and was destroyed, a leading rabbi, Yokhanan Ben-Zakkai, was smuggled out in a coffin. He approached the Roman commander and succeeded in getting permission from him to establish a Jewish religious center in Yavneh, between Jaffa and Asdod.

     That was the beginning of a revol utionintheJewishreligion.spanfontbspanlang=EN-CAop>

      “The First House” was a rather insignificant edifice. Contrary to the Bible, there is no historical evidence whatsoever that the empire of David and Solomon ever existed. Jerusalem was a mere hamlet, Judea a negligible entity. The Jewish religion as we know it came into being only in the Babylonian exile, and since then two thirds of the Jews (as they have been called since then) lived outside of Palestine.

      The “Second House”, too, began as a rather insignificant affair, as attested by a contemporary prophet, but it spread in the course of time. King Herod, a great builder, tried to win the hearts of his detractors by converting the Temple into a magnificent structure.

     Even before that, a priestly aristocracy had sprung up around the Temple and established its position in the Jewish community of Judea. Its political expression was the Sadducee party. Against it an opposition party, the Pharisees, was formed. They allowed for a much wider interpretation of the holy scriptures and believed in another world. At the time of this struggle, Jewish religious creativity flourished and the Bible was written. Since the priestly establishment was in power, the Temple plays a central role in the Bible. The ritual sacrifice of animals accompanied other practices connected with the Temple, the symbolic habitation of the Almighty.

     Jesus, a Jewish revolutionary, rebelled against the commercialization of the Temple, as did many of the Pharisees. The Hasmonean dynasty, which was based on the priestly aristocracy, considered the Pharisees its enemies and executed many of them.

     All this changed when the Temple was destroyed. The structure disappeared, together with the cult of sacrifices. The Jerusalemite aristocracy was eliminated, the priests lost everything. The Jewish religion changed course.

     From then on, the rabbis, successors of the Pharisees, were dominant in the Jewish community and its religion. Long before the destruction of the Second Temple, the great majority of Jews lived outsidePalestine. After the destruction (and the futile Bar-Kokhba rebellion of 135 AC), the Jewish community in Palestine dwindled. Jerusalem became a dream, and all significant events in the development of the Jewish religion occurred far away from there.

     After the destruction of the temple, the Jewish religion became a matter of laws and commandments unconnected with any particular territory. The Land of Israel and Jerusalem became more symbols than a territorial reality. Judaism did not even demand that its believers make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, as Islam requires its believers to travel to Mecca at least once in their life.

     Until the advent of modern Zionism, Jews never once tried to return en masse to Palestine – indeed, this was explicitly forbidden by their religion. When half a million Jews were expelled from Catholic Spain in 1492, they dispersed throughout the Muslim Ottoman Empire, but only a few went to Palestine which, too, was an Ottoman province. Napoleon’s call to the Jews to set up a Jewish State in Palestine fell on deaf ears. The first proponents of the modern Zionist idea, long before the appearance of Theodor Herzl, were Englishmen and Americans motivated by Christian religious impulses.

     During the last few centuries, European-American Judaism became more and more a religion imbued with a universal moral message. Jewish thinkers believed that it was the “mission” of the Jews to bring universal ethics to the nations of the world, seeing that as the real substance of Judaism.

     Zionism came into being as a part of the nationalist revolution in Europe and as a reaction to its generally anti-Semitic character. It originated the theory that the Jews are a nation like other European nations, and that this nation must set up its own state in the country now called Palestine. Not by accident did the teachings of Herzl arouse the violent and vocal opposition of almost all the great rabbis of his time, whether Hassidim or their opponents the Mitnagdim, whether orthodox or reformist.

     But when the Zionist community in Palestine established a state, something happened to Judaism there. The connection with the territory, the soil, changed the face of the religion, as it did to all other parts of national life. It is no exaggeration to claim that the Jewish religion in Israel underwent a mutation, which has become more and more extreme in recent years.

     A religion with a universal message became a tribal cult. A religion of ethics became a religion of holy places. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, a Jew of the old kind, defined the religion of the settlers as a pagan, idolatory cult.

     The new cult of the temple is the climax of this process. The practical preparations for the destruction of the mosques and the restoration of the temple, together with animal sacrifices and other temple cults, constitute a break with the last two thousand years of Jewish religion. It is a religious revolution of historic dimensions.

     If this tendency becomes dominant in the State of Israel, it will not, I believe, lead to the building of the Third Temple but to the destruction of the “Third House”. The Second Temple, together with the Jewish people in this country, came to a violent end because a small minority of fanatical Zealots, who were very similar to today’s extremist settlers, came to power in the Jewish community and dragged it into a mad, hopeless war. That can happen again.

On the eve of Yom Kippur, something to think about.