A Holocaust of Biblical Proportions
By Laurent Guyénot • Unz Review • November 11, 2019
Jewish blood for Zion
Holocaust is term taken from the Hebrew Bible (in the Greek translation), designating the religious sacrifice of animals that are burned completely on an altar. The first holocaust recorded in the Bible is performed by Noah in Genesis 8. In a fit of rage, Yahweh has said to himself: “I shall rid the surface of the earth of the human beings whom I created, […] for I regret having made them.” But after drowning almost all his creatures in a flood, Yahweh regrets having regretted, when Noah offers him a huge holocaust. “Yahweh smelt the pleasing smell and said to himself, ‘Never again will I curse the earth because of human beings, because their heart contrives evil from their infancy.” Yahweh has been addicted to the “sweet smell” of carbonized flesh ever since. According to the Book of Ezra, a gigantic holocaust was offered to Yahweh by the Judeo-Babylonians who (re)colonized Palestine, in preparation for the (re)building of the Temple (7:12-15).
Why, then, was the name “Holocaust” chosen to designate the destruction of “six millions” European Jews during World War II? Everything of importance in the history of Israel gets a biblical name, even Israel’s nuclear deterrence policy, the “Samson Option”. But why “holocaust”? In what sense is the Holocaust a holocaust? The obvious implication is that the death of millions of European Jews pleased Yahweh, and, by consequence, hastened the fulfillment of his messianic promise. As evident as it is, that implication is of course unspeakable in explicite terms. It will only be whispered cryptically among initiates (read for example about Irving Greenberg’s controversial statements on Wikipedia). At best, it can be veiled in religious terms: “The State of Israel is God’s answer to Auschwitz,” in Abraham Herschel’s Trinitarian formula linking Yahweh (the Father), Israel (the Son), and the Holocaust (the Holy Ghost?).[1]
But in his book The Holocaust Victims Accuse, anti-Zionist rabbi Moshe Shonfeld comes close to the outrageous claim that the Zionists needed six millions cremated Jews for the foundation of the Jewish State: “The Zionist leaders saw the spilt Jewish blood of the holocaust as grease for the wheels of the Jewish national state.” (Read a review of Moshe Shonfeld’s book here, and get the book on pdf here.)
Are there any facts to back the theory that the Zionist elites willingly sacrificed the German Jews on the altar of Zionism? I think there are. We can start with the declaration of war published on the front page of the British Daily Express, March 24, 1933, at the initiative of Zionist Wall Street lawyer Samuel Untermeyer: “the Israeli people around the world declare economic and financial war against Germany.” The words were carefully chosen to implicate the 400,000 Jews living in Germany among the conspirators against the German State and the German people: “Jews of All the World Unite in Action,” read the headline, while the article insisted: “Fourteen million Jews dispersed throughout the world have banded as one man … to stand by the 600,000 Jews of Germany.” This declaration, heard loud and clear in Germany, was a provocation meant to put the German Jews in extreme danger, at a time when “not a hair on a Jew’s head had been touched,” as Goebbels protested.
Many Jews, it must be said, protested at the irresponsibility of the Jewish financial elites’ call for boycott. American rabbi Harry Waton would write in 1939 in his in Program for the Jews:
“by this stupid boycott they aggravate the position of the Jews in Germany. In their vanity and stupidity the Jews in this country do not realize how inhuman and cruel it is to sacrifice the Jews in Germany in order to satisfy a stupid, and insane vanity. […] Six years passed since the Jews outside of Germany declared war against Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. The Jews will never admit that the recent pogroms had much to do with their stupid boycott.”[2]
Neither would they admit, of course, that the pogroms were the intended outcome of the boycott, as the necessary pretext needed to escalate the economic war into a military one, which would in turn bring hell down upon the German Jews.
How Hitler was trapped by his own prophecy
Predictably, five days after the declaration of the boycott, Hitler announced a counter-boycott of Jewish businesses in Germany as “defensive measure.” At the same time, he warned that, “Jewry must recognize that a Jewish war against Germany will lead to sharp measures against Jewry in Germany.”[3]
On January 30, 1939, in an ultimate attempt to deter England from declaring war on Germany, Hitler sent her a warning from the Reichstag tribune. After recalling that he had often been a prophet, as when he predicted his own rise to power, Hitler added:
“I want once again to be a prophet. If the international Finance-Jewry inside and outside of Europe should succeed in plunging the peoples of the earth once again into a world war, the result will be not the Bolshevization of earth, and thus a Jewish victory, but the annihilation [Vernichtung] of the Jewish race in Europe.”
This “prophetic warning to Jewry!” as the headline of Völkische Beobachter put it the following day, was widely distributed and discussed. As if in response to it, England declared war on September 3, 1939. The World Jewish Congress (founded in 1936 to rally world Jewry against Hitler) immediately stated that it stood wholeheartedly by Britain.
Hitler repeated his prophecy on January 30, 1941, this time at the address of the United States. The New York Times responded with an article that was tantamount to challenging him to act on his word:
“there is not a single precedent to prove he will either keep a promise or fulfill a threat. If there is any guarantee in his record, in fact, it is that the one thing he will not do is the thing he says he will do.”[4]
The United States entered the war in December 1941. A few days later, during the Reich Chancellery meeting of 12 December 1941, according to Goebbels’ diary, Hitler declared that his prophecy “was not just a phrase. The world war is here, and the annihilation [Vernichtung] of the Jews must be the necessary consequence.” Again, Hitler should have considered the obvious: he was being pushed to act on his prophecy.
That same year of 1941, in response to a plea for rescuing the Jews of Europe, Nathan Schwalb, head of the Jewish Agency in Switzerland, declined with the following justification:
“if we do not bring sacrifices, with what will we achieve the right to sit at the table when they make the distribution of nations and territories after the war? […] only through blood will the land be ours.”[5]
Already in 1938, the Anglo-American Zionists had sabotaged the Evian International Conference on Political and Economic Problems Caused by the Expulsion of Jews from the Reich, and the resolution of Western democracies to open their borders to the Jews that Germany would be happy to get rid of, because, said David Ben-Gurion, this “will endanger the existence of Zionism.”[6] German Jews were either to be forcibly converted to Zionism and emigrate to Palestine—but the British only allowed limited quotas—or be left to die in Nazi concentration camps—in both case, for the ultimate benefit of Zionism. When war broke out, there remained in Germany about 275,000 Jews who, for want of a visa granted by a foreign country, were unable to emigrate. This had been planned by the Anglo-American Zionists.
Everything possible was done to intensify German rage against Jews. In early 1941 appeared the 96–page booklet by Jewish American businessman Theodore Kaufman, Germany Must Perish, advocating “the extinction of the German nation and the total eradication from the earth, of all her people,” by sterilizing all German males under sixty, and females under forty-five, which could be done in less than a month by about twenty thousand surgeons. “Accordingly in the span of two generations, […] the elimination of Germanism and its carriers, will have been an accomplished fact.”[7] Interviewed by the Canadian Jewish Chronicle, Kaufman speaks of the Jews’ “mission” to guide humankind toward “perpetual peace”; thanks to them, “slowly but surely the world will develop into a paradise”; but for the moment, “let us sterilize all Germans and wars of world domination will come to an end!”[8] Kaufman’s book was reviewed positively in the New York Times and the Washington Post. In 1944, it would be commented upon by Louis Nizer in his influential book What to Do with Germany? (highly praised by Harry Truman). Nizer rejected Kaufman’s solution as exaggerated, but recommended the death penalty for 150,000 Germans, and “labor battalions” for hundreds of thousands more.[9]
Louis Marschalko, in The World Conquerors: The Real War Criminals (1958), cites a few more well-published Jewish authors advocating a “final solution” for the “German question”: Leon Dodd, who in How Many World Wars (New York, 1942), proclaims that no Germany and no German race must be left after the war; Charles Heartman, who in There Must Be No Germany After This War (New York, 1942), also demands the physical extermination of the German people; Einzig Palil, who in Can We Win the Peace? (London, 1942), demanded the dismembering of Germany and the total demolition of German industry; Ivor Duncan, who in the March, 1942, issue of Zentral Europa Observer, demanded the sterilization of forty million Germans, estimating the total cost at five million pounds sterling.[10]
Shortly after the Normandy landings, Roosevelt and Churchill discussed the future of Germany at the Second Quebec Conference of September 11, 1944, and signed a project developed under the leadership of Jewish-Americans Henry Morgenthau Jr., the Secretary of the Treasury, and his assistant Harry Dexter White. This Suggested Post-Surrender Program for Germany, or Program to Prevent Germany from Starting a World War III, “is looking forward to converting Germany into a country primarily agricultural and pastoral in its character,” by dismantling and transporting to Allied nations “all industrial plants and equipment not destroyed by military action,” while calling for “forced German labor outside Germany.” The revelation of this insane “Morgenthau Plan” by the Wall Street Journal (September 23) pushed the Nazis into a desperate fight-to-the-death mentality, and further rage against Jews.[11]
Meanwhile, in 1944, a new effort by the Roosevelt administration for opening the borders of allied countries to Jewish refugees was again aborted by American Zionists. When Morris Ernst, sent by Roosevelt to London to discuss the project, returned with British agreement to welcome 150,000 refugees, Roosevelt was satisfied: “150,000 to England—150,000 to match that in the United States—pick up 200,000 or 300,000 elsewhere and we can start with half a million of these oppressed people.” But a week later, Roosevelt announced to Ernst the abandonment of the project “because the dominant vocal Jewish leadership of America won’t stand for it.” The Zionists, said Roosevelt, “know they can raise vast sums for Palestine by saying to donors, ‘There is no other place for this poor Jew to go.’ But if there is a world political asylum, they cannot raise their money.” Incredulous, Ernst made the rounds of his Jewish contacts. He wrote in his memoirs that, “active Jewish leaders decried, sneered and then attacked me as if I were a traitor. At one dinner party I was openly accused of furthering this plan of freer immigration [into the US] in order to undermine political Zionism.”[12]
The same Jews who had lobbied so hard until the 1930s in favor of unrestricted Jewish immigration in the US now wanted Jews to remain trapped in Germany, until the survivors could be forced into Palestine.
How, otherwise, could they be able to capitalize on a death toll of six million Jews? Six million is the number they had settled on long ago for Israel’s founding holocaust, it seems (read “Two hundred ‘Six million Jews’ allegations from 1900-1945” or watch “Six million Jews 1915-1938”). On October 31, 1919, for example, in an article titled “The Crucifixion of Jews Must Stop!” The American Hebrew had warned of “this threatened holocaust of human life” on “six millions” European Jews (a figure repeated seven times in one page) who “are being whirled toward the grave … through the awful tyranny of war and a bigoted lust for Jewish blood,” and concluded that “Israel is entitled to a place in the sun.” “Jewish blood” referred in this case to the pogroms by Russian and Ukrainian counter-revolutionaries, which made 6,000 victims that year—a disappointing number.
Ever since Theodor Herzl used the Dreyfus Affair as a springboard for Zionism, it was understood that “Anti-Semitism is a propelling force which, like the wave of the future, will bring Jews into the promised land,” as Herzl wrote in his dairy. “Anti-Semitism has grown and continues to grow—and so do I.”[13] Logically, the propelling force will be proportional to the violence of the anti-Semitism, that is, to the reported number of its victims and the graphic horror of their doom.
The Nazis’ good Jews
The Jews who suffered the most under Nazi Germany were not the Zionist Jews. The Zionist Jews were regarded by the Nazis as the good Jews.[14] And for good reasons: they applauded the 1933 Nuremberg laws, and they protested against the economic boycott imposed by American Jews. The Zionist Federation of Germany addressed a memorandum to “the New German State” (dated June, 21) condemning the boycott, and expressing sympathy for the Nazi ideology:
“Our acknowledgment of Jewish nationality provides for a clear and sincere relationship to the German people and its national and racial realities. Precisely because we do not wish to falsify these fundamentals, because we, too, are against mixed marriage and are for maintaining the purity of the Jewish group and reject any trespasses in the cultural domain.” “The realization of Zionism could only be hurt by resentment of Jews abroad against the German development. Boycott propaganda—such as is currently being carried on against Germany in many ways—is in essence un-Zionist.”[15]
A prominent leader of German Jewry, Joachim Prinz, future president of the American Jewish Congress, wrote in his book Wir Juden (“We the Jews”) published in Berlin in 1934:
“We want assimilation to be replaced by a new law: the declaration of belonging to the Jewish nation and the Jewish race. A state built upon the principle of the purity of nation and race can only be honored and respected by a Jew who declares his belonging to his own kind.”[16]
This was not just opportunism. There had always been sympathy between Jewish and German racialism, to the point that rabbi Waton (quoted above) claimed that, “Nazism is an imitation of Judaism.”[17] It was not Hitler, but Zeev Jabotinsky who wrote in his Letter on Autonomy, some twenty years before Mein Kampf:
“A Jew brought up among Germans may assume German custom, German words. He may be wholly imbued with that German fluid but the nucleus of his spiritual structure will always remain Jewish, because his blood, his body, his physical-racial type are Jewish. […] A preservation of national integrity is impossible except by a preservation of racial purity.”[18]
So it was very logically that Reinhardt Heydrich, chief of the SS Security Service, wrote in 1935 in Das Schwarze Korps, the SS journal:
“We must separate Jewry into two categories: the Zionists and those who favour being assimilated. The Zionists adhere to a strict racial position and by emigrating to Palestine they are helping to build their own Jewish state. […] The time cannot be far distant when Palestine will again be able to accept its sons who have been lost to it for over a thousand years. Our good wishes together with our official good will go with them.”[19]
Sixty thousand wealthy German Zionists were allowed to settle with their fortune in Palestine under the Haavara Agreement, a decisive contribution to the Jewish colonization of Palestine.[20] As Hannah Arendt reminded in 1963, “all leading positions in the Nazi-appointed ‘Reichsvereinigung’ [compulsory organization of all Jews in Nazi Germany, who selected Jews for emigration] were held by Zionists.” This created “a situation in which the non-selected majority of Jews inevitably found themselves confronted with two enemies—the Nazi authorities and the Jewish authorities.”[21] The Zionists and the Nazis were united against the very notion of assimilation and the abomination of intermarriage.
To say that Hitler was a Zionist would be exaggerated, for he wrote in 1923:
“For while Zionism tries to make the other part of the world believe that the national self-consciousness of the Jew finds satisfaction in the creation of a Palestinian State, the Jews again most slyly dupe the stupid goyim. They have no thought of building up a Jewish State in Palestine, so that they might inhabit it, but they only want a central organization of their international world cheating, endowed with prerogatives, withdrawn from the seizure of others: a refuge for convicted rascals and a high school for future rogues.”[22]
Yet from 1933 to 1938, Hitler regarded German Zionists as ideological and strategic allies in his desire to rid Germany of its Jews. And there is no question that most Jews who died under Nazism were among the assimilationist Jews, those who had no sympathy for Zionism, and whom Zionists regarded as apostates and traitors to their race.
That, I believe, explains why the Holocaust is called the Holocaust: the idea that assimilationist Jews must perish is consistently biblical. The notion comes straight from Deuteronomy:
“If your brother, the son of your father or of your mother, or your son or daughter, or the spouse whom you embrace, or your most intimate friend, tries secretly to seduce you, saying, ‘Let us go and serve other gods,’ […], you must stone him to death, since he has tried to divert you from Yahweh your God. […] All Israel, hearing of this, will be afraid, and none of you will do such a wicked thing again” (Deuteronomy 13:7-12).[23]
And if in one town, “scoundrels from your own stock […] have led their fellow-citizens astray, saying, ‘Let us go and serve other gods,’” then
“you must put the inhabitants of that town to the sword; you must lay it under the curse of destruction—the town and everything in it. You must pile up all its loot in the public square and burn the town and all its loot, offering it all to Yahweh your God. It is to be a ruin for all time, and never rebuilt” (Deuteronomy 13:13-17).
Or, according to another translation: “the entire town must be put to the torch as a burnt offering to Yahweh your God.”
The Levites’ rule of terror
In biblical terms, assimilation means “serving other gods.” The Jews who seek assimilation deserve death, and their death will serve as an example to the rest. When, in the second century BC, some Israelites said, “let us ally ourselves with the gentiles surrounding us, for since we separated ourselves from them many misfortunes have overtaken us,” the Maccabees “organized themselves into an armed force, striking down the sinners in their anger, and the renegades in their fury” (1Maccabees 1-2), and established their Hasmonean theocracy.[24]
Terrorizing the Jews into submission to strict separateness and endogamy is the essence of the Yahwist covenant. The Torah shows that Yahweh’s rule of terror rests on the sacrifice of assimilationist and rebellious Jews. In the Book of Numbers, when an Israelite had the gall to appear before Moses with his Midianite wife, Phinehas, grandson of Aaron, “seized a lance, followed the Israelite into the alcove, and there ran them both through, the Israelite and the woman, through the stomach.” Yahweh congratulated Phinehas for having “the same zeal as I have,” and, as a reward, gave “to him and his descendants after him, […] the priesthood for ever” that is, “the right to perform the ritual of expiation for the Israelites” (Numbers 25:11-13). Let us ponder the fact that, according to the Bible, the Aaronite priesthood was a reward for the double murder of an assimilationist Israelite and his non-Jewish wife.
Even more revealing is the story in Exodus 32. After the episode of the Golden Calf, Moses conspires with the sons of Levy who rallied around him:
“He said to them, ‘Yahweh, god of Israel, says this, ‘Buckle on your sword, each of you, and go up and down the camp from gate to gate, every man of you slaughtering brother, friend and neighbour.’ The Levites did as Moses said, and of the people about three thousand men perished that day. ‘Today’, Moses said, ‘you have consecrated yourselves to Yahweh, one at the cost of his son, another of his brother; and so he bestows a blessing on you today’” (Exodus 32:27-29).
As a reward for having slaughtered 30,000 Israelite “apostates”, the Levites receive their privilege as the hereditary sacerdotal class, an oligarchy sustained by the other tribes. Here is how the biblical scholar Karl Budde paraphrases this episode, the founding story of the institution of the Levites:
“Here we have, in fact, the very moment of Levi’s origin, and this is how it must be understood. At Moses’ call the faithful from all the tribes hasten to him and lend him their arm even against their own kindred. Those thus tested and proved remained from this time on united, and formed a new tribe, ‘Levi.’ […] Levy is thus, as it were, the bodyguard, the pick of those faithful to Yahweh who gather about Moses, renouncing the old ties of tribe and family.”[25]
In Numbers 16-17, a group of two hundred and fifty Levites, led by Korah, are themselves exterminated for having rebelled against Moses and Aaron. “I am going to destroy them here and now,” said Yahweh, and “Fire then shot out from Yahweh and consumed the two hundred and fifty men offering incense” (16:20-35). “On the following day, the whole community of Israelites were muttering against Moses and Aaron and saying, ‘You are responsible for killing Yahweh’s people!’” Then Yahweh said “I am going to destroy them here and now,” and a plague decimated fourteen thousand seven hundred of them (17:6-14).
What these episodes highlight is that the authority of Yahweh and of his elite cast of Levites is entirely founded on violence and terror against the Israelites themselves. It also shows that the Covenant is based on the permanent threat of destruction. Jews who challenge their representative elites and who socialize with their non-Jewish neighbors, who eat with them, who intermarry with them, and who, while doing all this, show respect to their gods, are the dregs of the Jewish people, traitors to Yahweh and to their race. They deserve to be eliminated without mercy, especially since they endanger the whole community by attracting Yahweh’s wrath.
Yahweh teaches the Jewish people that friendship with non-Jews is a betrayal of the covenant, and will be punished by disaster, possibly extermination. Joshua, Moses’ successor, said to the Israelites who had taken possession of Canaan:
“Never mix with the peoples who are still left beside you. Do not utter the names of their gods, do not swear by them, do not serve them and do not bow down to them. […] if you make friends with the remnant of these nations still living beside you, if you intermarry with them, if you mix with them and they with you, then know for certain that Yahweh your god will stop dispossessing these nations before you, and for you they will be a snare, a pitfall, thorns in your sides and thistles in your eyes, until you vanish from this fine country given you by Yahweh your god. […] For if you violate the covenant which Yahweh your god has imposed on you, if you go and serve other gods and bow down to them, then Yahweh’s anger will be roused against you and you will quickly vanish from the fine country which he has given you.” (Joshua 23:6-16)
Joshua’s conquest of the Promised Land is the blueprint for the Zionist colonization, and the mentality has not changed. Zionism, the founding ideology of the Jewish State, is a secularized version of Yahwism. Its concept of Jewish nationhood is strictly biblical, and therefore intensely ethnocentric and xenophobic. And so it is natural that a Zionist like Benzion Netanyahu (Benjamin’s father) would consider that for a Jew to marry a non-Jew is “even from a biological point of view, an act of suicide.”[26] Golda Meir, prime minister of Israel from 1969 to 1974, reportedly formulated the same idea in more evocative terms: “To marry a non-Jew is to join the six million [exterminated Jews].”[27] In other words, those assimilationist Jews who break the endogamic covenant might as well be holocausted, as far as Israel is concerned. That is so biblical!
The psychopathic biblical paradigm
In the World War II Holocaust, Jews were not killed by other Jews, as in the biblical passages mentioned above. But from the biblical point of view, it makes no difference, because it is always Yahweh who hits the Israelites, whether he is using Moses (a murderer on the run from the beginning), or sending them plagues, stones from heaven or foreign armies. To punish David for having ordered a national census (counting dead Jews in OK, but living Jews is not), Yahweh gives him the choice: “Which do you prefer: to have three years of famine befall your country; to flee for three months before a pursuing army; or to have three days of epidemic in your country?” David chose the epidemic, which made seventy thousand dead (2Samuel 24:13), but Yahweh could just as well use a foreign army.
Whenever Israelites are attacked, it is because Yahweh wants to punish them for their rebelliousness and their idolatry. It is Yahweh who sent the Assyrians to destroy the Northern kingdom of Israel to punish the Israelites for their “idolatry” (2Kings 17; Amos 3:14), and it is Yahweh who moved the Babylonian army to destroy the towns of Judah, “because of the wicked deeds they committed to provoke my anger, by going and offering incense and serving other gods” (Jeremiah 44:3).
The real cause-effect relationship between religious pluralism and the Babylonian campaign against Jerusalem was, in fact, exactly the opposite of what the Bible claims. In the ancient world, international diplomacy was closely related to religious tolerance: nations showed respect to each other by respecting each other’s gods. The Judean king Manasseh is blamed by the biblical scribes for having done “what is displeasing to Yahweh, copying the disgusting practices of the nations whom Yahweh had dispossessed for the Israelites” by worshipping “the whole array of heaven” (2 Kings 21:2-3). But his 55-year-long reign was a period of exceptional peace and prosperity. By contrast, his grandson Josiah, who is praised for removing from the temple “all the cult objects which had been made for Baal, Asherah and the whole array of heaven,” and exterminating all the priests “who offered sacrifice to Baal, to the sun, the moon, the constellations and the whole array of heaven” (2Kings 23:4-5), brought disaster to his kingdom by his arrogant policy of exclusivism and provocation toward Babylon.
But the lessons of history are lost on the biblical scribes. Their teaching is not only historically deceptive; it is an insult to common sense and moral sense, which teaches that conviviality (sharing meals, occasionally intermarrying…) fosters trust and civil peace, while separateness creates mistrust and conflict. Yahweh’s message is a recipe for catastrophe (shoah in Hebrew). It amounts to telling the Jews: “Do not socialize with your neighbors, but despise their traditions, and, if possible, dispossess them or exterminate them. If, after that, they violate you, it is your fault: you have not obeyed scrupulously enough.” Such is the insane “wisdom” internalized by Jews for a hundred generations.
With their minds framed by the biblical paradigm, Jews are not easily persuaded that they may bear some collective responsibility for the persecution that befalls them. After all, even Gentiles now tell them that, “the Jew, that object of so much hatred, is perfectly innocent, nay harmless” (Jean-Paul Sartre, Réflexions sur la question juive, 1946).[28] Assured by their tradition and their leadership of the perfect innocence of their community, Jews naturally view their critics as irrational and pathological. It is, it seems to them, in the nature of non-Jews to hate Jews. “Judeophobia is a variety of demonopathy,” wrote Leon Pinsker (a medical doctor). “As a psychic aberration it is hereditary, and as a disease transmitted for two thousand years it is incurable.”[29] What the Jews have to do, then, is to protect themselves, even preventively, from the hatred of non-Jews, and whatever form of deception or coercion they have to employ in doing so is mere self-defense. “For the Jew the world is a cage filled with wild beasts,” wrote Henry Miller.[30]
Like most traits of Jewish collective psychology, this is a cognitive pattern learned from the Bible. A good illustration of it is the black-out in the causal chain of events between, on the one hand, the end of Genesis, when Joseph ruined the peasants of Egypt, forced them into debt and finally into bondage, while enriching his tribesmen, and, on the other hand, the beginning of Exodus, when a king of Egypt “who had never heard of Joseph”, seeing that the Israelites had become “more numerous and stronger than we are,” decided to take measures “to stop them from increasing any further, or if war should break out, they might join the ranks of our enemies” (Exodus 1:9-10). Considering the parasitic activity of Jacob’s tribe, the king’s worries and his decision to tax the Israelites with forced labor may seem entirely justified; but because Joseph the stockjobber is Yahweh’s saint, acting for the prosperity of Yahweh’s chosen people, his behavior is beyond reproach, and Pharaoh is therefore presented as irredeemably evil. Come to think of it, it is perfectly appropriate that Pharaoh be seen as the biblical prototype of Hitler, who wanted to curtail Jewish influence in Germany and had reasons to fear that Jews might “join the ranks of his enemies.”
Another symbolic illustration of the way the Torah inhibits any consideration of the responsibility of Israel in the nations’ hostility, is found in the short prophetic book of Obadiah: Esau is blamed by Yahweh for his resentment against his brother Jacob (aka Israel), without a reminder that Esau has been cheated of his birthright by Jacob:
“For the violence done to your brother Jacob, shame will cover you and you will be annihilated forever! […] The House of Jacob will be a fire, the House of Joseph a flame, and the House of Esau like stubble. They will set it alight and burn it up, and no one of the House of Esau will survive.” (Obadiah 10-18)
We have here, actually, a nice prophecy of a holocaust for the House of Esau (symbolizing the nations, and, in later rabbinic tradition, specifically Christian nations).
Holocausts of Gentiles for Yahweh and Zion
Obviously, Yahweh can use holocausts of Gentiles too. After all, there is little difference between Gentiles and animals. The first reported case appears in Numbers 31, after the slaughter of the Midianites, save their flocks and 32,000 virgin girls. The booty was divided in two: half for the combatants, half for the rest. From the combatants’ half, Yahweh required as his own “portion”, “one out of every five hundred persons, oxen, donkeys and sheep.” Yahweh’s portion included 32 girls, all entrusted to the priest Eleazar for him to offer them to Yahweh. How were they offered to Yahweh? The Good Book doesn’t say. But we know that animals were always served to Yahweh as holocausts, and the wording of Numbers 31 makes no distinction between human and animal spoils, but rather insists on putting them in the same bag. So there is no reason to suppose that “Yahweh’s portion” of virgin girls were offered to Yahweh in any other way than Yahweh’s portion of oxen, donkeys and sheep.
King David’s treatment of the inhabitants of the city of Rabba also qualifies as a holocaust: David gathered all the prisoners, and “cut them with saws, and with harrows of iron, and with axes,” and “made them pass through the brick kiln: and thus did he unto all the cities of the children of Ammon” (2Samuel 12:3 and 1Chronicles 20:3).[31] Although it is not made explicit that dismembering and cremating the Ammonites in brick kilns was meant as a “burnt offering” to Yahweh, we are given to understand that he approved of it; we guess he liked the smell.
The complete extermination of the Canaanites (“men and women, young and old”) in the towns of Jericho, Makkedah, Libnah, Lachish, Eglon, Hebron, Debir, and Hazor in the Book of Joshua, chapters 6 to 12, and the same fate reserved for the Amalekites in 1Samuel 15, are also holocausts that obviously pleased Yahweh.
From the Zionist viewpoint, the First and the Second World Wars can be interpreted as holocausts for Zion, since they brought blessings upon Israel. In my first article for unz.com, I suggested that even the Vietnam War could be considered a Holocaust for Zion, because it was willed by the Zionist agent Lyndon Johnson and his National Security Advisor Walt Rostow, and provided the favorable international context for Israel to launch its 1967 war of annexation. This was remarked by French President Charles De Gaulle who, in a famous press conference (November 27, 1967), called for an international settlement on the basis of Israel’s withdrawal from the occupied territories, but added:
“But one cannot see how such an agreement could be reached as long as one of the greatest among the four will not withdraw from the heinous war that they are waging elsewhere. Without the tragedy of Vietnam, the conflict between Israel and the Arabs would not have become what it has become.”[32]
The Holocaust cult
History is a study of causes and effects in human decisions and actions. But Israel sees its own history through the biblical prism of its chosenness, which makes it blind to its own responsibility in Gentile hostility. History is replaced by memory, the substance of legends and myths. That is why Yosef Yerushalmi argues in his book Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, that Israel “chose myth over history.” That applies to the Holocaust: “its image is being shaped, not at the historian’s anvil, but in the novelist’s crucible.”[33]
When a historical tragedy cannot be put into a cause-effect perspective, it enters the realm of mythology. If it cannot be analyzed on a rational mode, it is fantasized on a religious mode. And so Elie Wiesel can declare that the Holocaust “defies both knowledge and description,” “cannot be explained nor visualized,” is “never to be comprehended or transmitted,” is ‘”noncommunicable”.[34] “Whoever has not lived through the event can never know it. And whoever has lived through the event can never fully reveal it.”[35]
Those who control Jewish public discourse forbid anyone to voice the possibility that Nazi persecution may have some causes in Jewish deeds (such as pushing England and America into war). Since the Jews are, by definition, blameless, Nazi violence against them is gratuitous and therefore a manifestation of pure, metaphysical evil: Hitler’s hair lock and his moustache have replaced the devil’s horns and tail in popular iconography.
In the realm of mythology, everything is possible. The mythographs’ imagination is the limit. With the Holocaust, even the unimaginable, the absurd, the impossible, the miraculous must be believed. Here is, for example, how renowned professor Simon Baron-Cohen—a serious man compared to his cousin, actor Sacha Baron Cohen—starts his book The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty, published in 2011 by Basic Books:
“When I was seven years old, my father told me the Nazis had turned Jews into lampshades. Just one of those comments that you hear once, and the thought never goes away. To a child’s mind (even to an adult’s) these two types of things just don’t belong together. He also told me the Nazis turned Jews into bars of soap. It sounds so unbelievable, yet it is actually true. I knew our family was Jewish, so this image of turning people into objects felt a bit close to home. My father also told me about one of his former girlfriends, Ruth Goldblatt, whose mother had survived a concentration camp. He had been introduced to the mother and was shocked to discover that her hands were reversed. Nazi scientists had severed Mrs. Goldblatt’s hands, switched them around, and sewn them on again so that if she put her hands out palms down, her thumbs were on the outside and her little fingers were on the inside. Just one of the many ‘experiments’ they had conducted. I realized there was a paradox at the heart of human nature—people could objectify others—that my young mind was not yet ready to figure out. […] Today, almost half a century after my father’s revelations to me about the extremes of human behavior, my mind is still exercised by the same, single question: How can we understand human cruelty?”[36]
Against those who dare raise issues of credibility, Primo Levi, whose memoir If this is a man (1947) is “considered a pillar of Holocaust literature, alongside Elie Wiesel’s Night and Anne Frank’s Diary” (French Wikipedia), has provided an unbeatable answer. He wrote in The Drowned and the Saved (1988) how “The SS militiamen cynically enjoyed admonishing the prisoners” with such cynicism:
“However this war may end, we have won the war against you; none of you will be left to bear witness, but even if someone were to survive, the world would not believe him. There will perhaps be suspicions, discussions, research by historians, but there will be no certainties, because we will destroy the evidence together with you. And even if some proof should remain and some of you survive, people will say that the events you describe are too monstrous to be believed: they will say that they are the exaggerations of Allied propaganda and will believe us, who will deny everything, and not you. We will be the ones to dictate the history of the Lagers.”[37]
The Holocaust is now a religion, requiring faith and banning critical inquiry. For the Jews, it is an efficient substitute for the cult of Yahweh. “The Jewish religion died 200 years ago. Now there is nothing that unifies the Jews around the world apart from the Holocaust,” once remarked Yeshayahu Leibowitz.[38] A 2013 Pew Research poll on the theme “A Portrait of Jewish Americans” shows that, to the question “What’s essential to being Jewish?”, “Remembering the Holocaust” comes first for 73 percent of respondents, before “Caring about Israel,” and “Observing Jewish laws.”[39]
The Holocaust is a jealous god. They is no museum of the Vietnam War in the United States. To the Ukrainians who wished to commemorate “Holodomor”—the death of 7 to 8 millions of them in 1932–1933 by a deliberately provoked famine against the kulaks resisting collectivization—Israeli president Shimon Peres advised, during a visit to Kiev on November 25, 2010: “Forget History.”[40]
The Holocaust is eternal. “Today we are facing, plain and simple, a danger of annihilation. […] People think that the Shoah [Holocaust] is over but it’s not. It is continuing all the time,” proclaimed Benzion Netanyahu, father of the Israeli Prime minister.[41] In Israel, explains Idith Zertal, “Auschwitz is not a past event but a threatening present and a constant option.”[42]
The Holocaust is not just a religion for the Jews. In some European countries like France, it is becoming a State religion: worship is compulsory at school, and blasphemy is severely punished. But even though the whole world is now “remembering the Holocaust” almost daily, not all men are equal in this cult. Just as Yahweh separated the chosen people from the rest of humankind, the Holocaust draws a line between the victims—“the people chosen for universal hatred,” in Pinsker’s words[43]—and their tormentors—virtually the rest of the world. And so the Holocaust cult turns out to be functionally interchangeable with ancient Yahwism: its primary function is to alienate the Jews from humankind, exile them into their morbid exceptionality, and at the same time terrorize them into submission to their elites. While Jews were told in the Tanakh to “fear Yahweh,” they are now urged to fear the Holocaust.
Notes
[1] Abraham Herschel, Israel: An Echo of Eternity, Doubleday, 1969, p. 115.
[2] Harry Waton, A Program for the Jews and an Answer to All Anti-Semites, 1939 (archive.org), p. 48.
[3] Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust, Harvard UP, 2006 , p. 39.
[4] Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy, op. cit., p. 78.
[5] Reb Moshe Shonfeld, The Holocaust Victims Accuse: Documents and Testimony of Jewish War Criminals, Bnei Yeshivos, 1977, p. 24.
[6] Alan Hart, Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, vol. 1: The False Messiah, Clarity Press, 2009, p. 164.
[7] Theodore Kaufman, Germany Must Perish, Argyle Press, 1941 (archive.org), p. 30.
[8] “‘Hitler Will Be Nothing But a Rosebud,’ Says the Author of ‘Germany Must Perish,’” The Canadian Jewish Chronicle, September 26, 1941, quoted in Brandon Martinez, Grand Deceptions: Zionist Intrigue in the 20th and 21st Centuries, Progressive Press, 2014, kindle, k. 226.
[9] Louis Nizer, What to do with Germany?, Brentano’s, 1944 (archive.org), pp. 98–107.
[10] Louis Marschalko, The World Conquerors: The Real War Criminals, 1958 (archive.org), p. 105.
[11] Quoted in David Irving, Nuremberg: The Last Battle, Focal Point, 1996, p. 20.
[12] John Mulhall, America and the Founding of Israel: An Investigation of the Morality of America’s Role, Deshon, 1995, p. 109.
[13] Complete Diaries of Theodore Herzl (1960), vol. 2, p. 581, quoted in Alan Hart, Zionism, The Real Ennemies of the Jews, vol. 1, The False Messiah, Clarity Press, 2009, p. 163. The full 5 volumes of Herzl’s diairies are on archive.org
[14] Lenni Brenner, Zionism in the Age of Dictators, Lawrence Hill & Co., 1983.
[15] Lucy Dawidowicz, A Holocaust Reader, Behrman House, 1976, pp. 150–155.
[16] Quoted in Israel Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, Pluto Press, 1994, p. 86.
[17] Harry Waton, A Program for the Jews, op. cit., p. 54.
[18] Lenni Brenner, 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis, Barricade Books , 2002, pp. 7–20.
[19] Quoted in Heinz Höhne, The Order of the Death’s Head: The Story of Hitler’s SS, Penguin Books, 2001, p. 133.
[20] Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, Hill and Wang, 1993 .
[21] Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Penguin, 2006, pp. 136–138.
[22] Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Reynal & Hitchcock, 1941 (archive.org), pp. 447–448.
[23] All Bible quotes from the New Jerusalem Bible, www.catholic.org/bible
[24] Norman Cantor, The Sacred Chain: The History of the Jews, Harper Perennial, 1995 , pp. 55–61.
[25] Karl Budde, Religion of Israel to the Exile, New York, 1899 (archive.org), p. 82.
[26] Benzion Netanyahu, The Founding Fathers of Zionism (1938), Balfour Books, 2012 , kindle 2203–7.
[27] Quoted in Edgar Morin, Le Monde moderne et la question juive, Seuil, 2006.
[28] Jean-Paul Sartre, Réflexions sur la question juive (1946), Gallimard, 1985, p. 183.
[29] Leon Pinsker, Auto-Emancipation: An Appeal to His People by a Russian Jew (1882), on www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Zionism/pinsker.html.
[30] Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, quoted in Josh Lambert, Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture, New York UP, 2013 , p. 125.
[31] I have conflated the two almost identical accounts of the same episode in 2Samuel 12:31 and 1Chronicles 20:3.
[32] Video on www.youtube.com/watch?v=03if1QnA5MI ; text on http://akadem.org/medias/documents/3-conference-degaulle.pdf
[33] Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (1982), University of Washington Press, 2011, kindle 530-35 and 1846-78.
[34] Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, Verso, 2014 , p. 47.
[35] Quoted in Tim Cole , Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler: How History is Bought, Packaged, and Sold, Routledge, 1999, p. 16.
[36] Simon Baron-Cohen, The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty, Basic Books, 2011. This passage is from the kindle édition (108-150), and can also be read on the online edition on archive.org, or by “looking inside” on Amazon the edition retitled Zero Degrees of Empathy by Penguin. But, as I had a hard time believing what I read, I also “checked inside” other editions Amazon, and had the surprise to see that the author has modified this passage in a 2012 new edition by Basic Books, deleting the sentence “it sounds so unbelievable, yet it is actually true”, and requalifying the soap and lampshade stories as “rumors”. Yet he sticks to his belief in the surgical miracle of the reversed hands. This passage is even reproduced, in a slightly altered form, in the New York Times.
[37] Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (1988), 2013, Abacus, p. 2.
[38] Reported by Uri Avnery in 2005, quoted in Gilad Atzmon, The Wandering Who? A Study of Jewish Identity Politics, Zero Books, 2011, pp. 161–162.
[39] “A Portrait of Jewish Americans,” on www.pewforum.org.
[40] Alexander Motyl, “Ukrainians and Jews…,” April 15, 2011, worldaffairsjournal.org.
[41] Quoted in Alan Hart, Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, vol. 3: Conflict Without End? Clarity Press, 2010, p. 364.
[42] Idith Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood, Cambridge University Press, 2010, p. 4.
[43] Leon Pinsker, Auto-Emancipation, op. cit., on www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Zionism/pinsker.html.
Laurent Guyénot, Ph.D., is the author of From Yahweh to Zion: Jealous God, Chosen People, Promised Land … Clash of Civilizations, 2018, and JFK-9/11: 50 years of Deep State, Progressive Press, 2014
Audios Containing Details of Alleged Coup Plan & US Involvement Emerge Amid Bolivian Crisis – Report
Sputnik – November 11, 2019
Bolivian President Evo Morales announced his resignation on 10 November after the heads of Bolivia’s armed forces and police urged him to step down amid ongoing violent protest in the country which erupted in the wake of the recent presidential election.
As Evo Morales stepped down as the President of Bolivia amid ongoing anti-government protests and the military urging him to resign, a series of audio recordings which allegedly feature opposition leaders calling for a coup against him were leaked via social media, El Periodico reports.
According to the media outlet, efforts aimed at destabilising Bolivia were to be coordinated from the US embassy, with one of the tapes allegedly mentioning that US senators Ted Cruz, Bob Menendez and Marco Rubio were committed to this agenda.
The plan outlined by the audios called for establishing a “civil-military transitional government” if Morales were to win the 20 October presidential election, which he did, and to not recognise his victory, citing alleged electoral fraud.
The opposition leaders featured in the recordings also allegedly called for a general strike across the country, to burn structures affiliated with the “government party” and to attack the Cuban embassy.
On 10 November, Bolivian President Evo Morales resigned after the national armed forces sided with demonstrators who opposed his serving a fourth term. The protests erupted after international observers found “grave irregularities” in the 20 October election.
The Houthis Are Preparing for a Planned Israeli Attack on Yemen
By Ahmed Abdulkareem | MintPress News | November 11, 2019
SANA’A, YEMEN — As the war in Yemen nears the end of its fifth year, the situation in the country seems to be escalating. There are strong indications that Israel is planning to launch airstrikes against the country under the pretext of preventing an Iranian military presence from taking hold, a move that is likely to open the door for further escalation.
On Saturday, Ansar Allah, the political wing of Yemen’s Houthis, announced that Yemeni forces would not hesitate to “deal a stinging blow” to Israel in the case Tel Aviv decides to launch attacks in Yemen. The Houthis reaffirmed that their anti-Israel position is based on a principled, humanitarian, moral, and religious commitment. Historically, neither the Yemeni Army nor the Houthis themselves, have ever targeted Israel directly.
The threat from Israel is not without precedent. Israel has used claims of alleged Iranian military attachments in countries like Syria and Iraq as justification for airstrikes and bombings against those nations. Now, Israel appears to be using Iran’s alleged presence in Yemen, an allegation that both Tehran and the Houthis deny, as a pretext for military action in the country despite no evidence indicating that there are any Iranian forces present there.
Ansar Allah leader Abdulmalik al-Houthi said in televised speech marking the anniversary of the Prophet Muhammad, “Our people will not hesitate to declare jihad (holy war) against the Israeli enemy, and to launch the most severe strikes against sensitive targets in the occupied territories if the enemy engages in any folly against our people.” The occasion marks the largest festival held by the Houthis during which they reveal their domestic and foreign policies for the coming year.
The Houthis also called on the Saudi regime to stop the war and siege on Yemen, warning that there would be risks and consequences for the Kingdom should they continue their attacks. Al-Houthi also confirmed that Yemenis will continue to develop their military capability, adding that, “Anyone who uses the war and siege to control us and subjugate us is seeking the impossible, and the consequence is failure.”
Al-Houthi also pointed to the ongoing mass protest movements in Lebanon and Iraq, advising nations in the Middle East to resolve their issues vigilantly. He asked those nations to exercise vigilance in the face of what he called Israeli plots to gain a political, military, and cultural foothold in their respective countries.
On Saturday, massive demonstrations took place across Yemen’s major cities to commemorate the Prophet Mohammed’s birth, an occasion known to Muslims as Maulud Nabi. While the occasion is a religious one, it is a public holiday in Yemen and is marked with the singing of the national anthem and the waving of green flags. Many protesters told MintPress News that any attack by Israeli would not cause the Yemeni people any more suffering than they have already endured, but would push them to join a “holy war” against Israel.
According to three government officials in Sana’a that spoke to MintPress on the condition of anonymity, the Houthi’s warnings are both serious and well-placed. Those officials said that the government in Sana’a has already confirmed information that Israel is preparing to launch airstrikes on both military sites and civil targets in Yemen, especially on the country’s west coast and along the Saudi-Yemen border in coordination with the Saudi-led Coalition.
Ansar Allah’s announcement also comes in the wake of a number of recent statements made by a number of Israeli officials claiming that Yemen has become a threat to Israel. Speaking during a visit by U.S. Secretary of Treasury Steven Mnuchin and White House aid Jared Kushner, Netanyahu claimed that Iran has supplied missiles to the Houthis that could hit Israel. The Houthis regard these statements as a justification and prelude to strikes on the country, similar to those that Israel unilaterally carried out against sites in Syria and Iraq.
In August, Kuwaiti newspaper al-Jarida released a report saying that Israel is planning on striking sensitive positions on the Bab al-Mandab strait which links the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, to target “Houthis” in the area. The newspaper, which cited an anonymous informed source, said Israeli intelligence agency Mossad has been monitoring activities in the Yemeni strait.
Israel’s entry into the Yemen war could indeed open the door for further escalation, a prospect made more likely by both the increased strength of Ansar Allah forces and by Israel’s increasingly cozy relationship with the Gulf Arab countries of the coalition. The fact that Saudi Arabia and the UAE recently sought negotiations with Houthis after they were unable to win the war militarily, despite their superior firepower and funding, only increases the likelihood of Israel’s entry into Yemen.
In fact, Israel is alleged to have already participated in the war against Yemen on behalf of the Saudi-led coalition as a part of a series of covert interventions involving mercenary forces, the reported launching of dozens of airstrikes in the country and even the dropping of a neutron bomb on Nuqm Mountain in the middle the capital Sana’a in May of 2015.
Kicking the hornet’s nest
Like Saudi Arabia and the UAE, there is a problem with the Israeli assessment of the situation in Yemen, as the Houthis have never threatened to hit an Israeli target and Houthi attacks on Saudi-led Coalition countries have always been retaliatory, not preemptive. There are no vital targets to be bombed in Yemen as the Saudi-led coalition has already destroyed nearly every potential target, including civilian infrastructure. Moreover, any attack by Israel against Yemen will gain the Houthis even more popular support both inside of Yemen and across the Islamic and Arab world.
Furthermore, there is no evidence that Iran has any military sites or experts in Yemen, and Yemen’s Army, loyal to Ansar Allah, are not the “Iran proxy fighters” that international media so often claims them to be. Indeed, the U.S. State Department even admitted in leaked cables that the Houthis were not an Iran proxy and that they received neither funding nor weapons from Iran.
There are a convergence of interests between the Houthis and Iran, including opposition to Israel’s internationally-recognized theft of Palestinian land, but if Israel involves itself directly in the conflict in Yemen, it is likely that the Houthi alliance with Iran will grow and may actually spur Tehran into providing precise and sophisticated weapons to Ansar Allah, turning the fears of Israel into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Meanwhile, many Israeli activists and media pundits are expressing concerns over what they consider serious threats from Yemen, pointing out that these threats “should not be underestimated by the Israelis.” The Israeli security parliament said that Israeli intelligence must strictly monitor Yemen and take necessary steps to secure Israeli ships sailing in the Bab Al-Mandab area, describing the statements made by Abdulmalik al-Houthi as serious.
A well-stocked arsenal
Indeed the threats of Ansar Allah, a group known to strike sensitive targets without hesitation, are not without precedent. On September 14, Ansar Allah hit two of Saudi Arabia’s oil facilities in Abqaiq and Khurais, an attack that led to a suspension of about 50 percent of the Arab Kingdom’s crude and gas production.
Prior to that, they targeted vital facilities deep inside of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, including the Barakah Nuclear Power Station in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the UAE, as well as the King Khalid International Airport near Riyadh, more than 800 km from Yemen’s northern border. Now, they have developed their arsenal of ballistic missiles and drones even further and experts say are likely capable of hitting vital targets inside of Israel. Yemen’s Army is ready to launch those missiles if Ansar Allah’s leader asks it to do, one high-ranking military officer told MintPress.
Yemen’s Army, loyal to the Houthis, is equipped with the Quds 1 winged missile which was used in an attack on the Barakah Nuclear Power Station in Abu Dhabi in December of 2017. This year, several generations of the Quds 1 were reworked to provide the “ability to hit its targets and to bypass enemy interceptor systems,” according to Ansar Allah.
The Borkan 3 (Volcano 3), whose predecessors were used by the Houthis to strike targets inside of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, is capable of traveling even further than the Borkan 1 and 2. The Borkan is a modified Scud missile and was used in a strike on the King Khalid International Airport near Riyadh, more than 800 km from Yemen’s northern border. The missile was able to evade U.S. Patriot missile air-defense systems.
Yemen’s Army also posses the Samad 3 reconnaissance drone and the Qasef 2K drone. Both were used in strikes against the Abu Dhabi and Dubai airports. The Samad 3 has an estimated range of 1,500 to 1,700 km. Moreover, the Yemen Army recently unveiled a new drone with a range exceeding 1,700 km and equipped with advanced technology that would render it difficult for air defense systems to detect.
One Ansar Allah military source told MintPress that mines would also be deployed against Israeli battleships and watercraft in the Red Sea if Israel decides to launch attacks against Yemen. Indeed, Yemen’s military recently revealed its domestically-manufactured marine mines dubbed the “Mersad,” and is reportedly “actively developing its naval forces and naval anti-ship missiles.”
Despite the well-established precedent, many still doubt that the Houthis are capable of carrying out attacks on the scale and range of the attack that struck an Aramco facility in Saudi Arabia earlier this year — instead, accusing Iran of orchestrating the attacks. Yet repeatedly underestimating the Houthis was one of the major mistakes made by the Saudi-led coalition, who has failed to defeat the group after nearly five years of fierce battles against them, despite being equipped with the latest U.S.-supplied weaponry — everything from M1A2 Abrams tanks and M2 Bradley fighting vehicles to AH-64D Apache helicopters, as well as having an air force equipped with a high-tech arsenal.
However, it would be difficult for the Yemeni Army to prevent aerial attacks by Israel. Yemeni airspace has been open to the coalition and to American drones since the war broke out in 2015. Any attack by the Yemen army would likely come in retaliation to an Israeli attack and would hit Israeli military bases in Eritrea, Israeli ships in the Red Sea as well as hit vital targets deep inside of Israel, according to Yemeni military sources.
An already dire situation
The war, which began in March 2015, has led to the world’s worst humanitarian crisis resulting from the bombing and a blockade which has led to mass starvation and history’s largest cholera outbreak, among other dire consequences.
The coalition, backed by the United States, has killed tens of thousands of Yemeni civilians since the war began. Moreover, the coalition’s blockade of food and medicine has plagued the country with an unprecedented famine and has triggered a deadly outbreak of preventable diseases that have cost thousands of people their lives.
Last week, the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project revealed that Yemen’s death toll rose to a shocking 100,000 since 2015. The database shows approximately 20,000 people have been killed this year, already making 2019 the second-deadliest year on record after 2018, with 30,800 dead. Those numbers do not include those who have died in the humanitarian disasters caused by the war, particularly starvation.
Given the nature of Israel’s recent wars against Gaza and Lebanon, it is unlikely that Israel would feel constrained by any moral dilemma should they chose to launch airstrikes against civilians in Yemen.
Ahmed AbdulKareem is a Yemeni journalist. He covers the war in Yemen for MintPress News as well as local Yemeni media.
A lesson for the Palestinian leadership: Real reasons behind Israel’s arrest and release of Labadi, Mi’ri
Jordanian citizen Heba Al-Labadi (C), following detention by Israeli forces, was released from prison and returned to Jordan on 6 November 2019
By Ramzy Baroud | MEMO | November 11, 2019
The release on November 6 of two Jordanian nationals, Heba al-Labadi and Abdul Rahman Mi’ri from Israeli prisons was a bittersweet moment. The pair were finally reunited with their families after harrowing experiences in Israel. Sadly, thousands of Palestinian prisoners are still denied their freedom, still subjected to all sorts of hardships at the hands of their Israeli jailers.
Despite the jubilant return of the two prisoners, celebrated in Jordan, Palestine and throughout the Arab world, several compelling questions remain unanswered: why were they held in the first place? Why were they released and what can their experience teach Palestinians under Israeli occupation?
Throughout the whole ordeal, Israel failed to produce any evidence to indict Labadi and Mi’ri for any wrongdoing. In fact, it was this lack of evidence that made Israel hold the two Jordanian nationals in Administrative Detention, without any judicial process whatsoever.
Oddly, days before the release of the two Jordanians, an official Israeli government statement praised the special relationship between Amman and Tel Aviv, describing it as “a cornerstone of stability in the Middle East”.
The reality is that the relationship between the two countries has hit rock bottom in recent years, especially following US President Donald Trump’s advent to the White House and the subsequent, systematic dismantling of the “peace process” by Trump and the Israeli government.
Not only did Washington and Tel Aviv demolish the region’s political status quo, one in which Jordan featured as a key player, top US diplomats also tried to barter with King Abdullah II so that Jordan would settle millions of Palestinian refugees in the country in exchange for large sums of money.
Jordan vehemently rejected US offers and attempts at isolating the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah.
On October 21, 2018, Jordan went even further, by rejecting an Israeli offer to renew a 25-year lease on two enclaves in the Jordan Valley, Al-Baqura and Al-Ghamar. The government’s decision was a response to protests by Jordanians and elected parliamentarians, who insist on Jordan’s complete sovereignty over all of its territories.
This particular issue goes back years. Jordan and Israel signed a peace treaty in 1994. An additional annex in the treaty allowed Israel to lease part of the Jordan Valley for 25 years. A quarter of a century later, the Jordan-Israel Peace Treaty failed to achieve any degree of meaningful normalization between both countries, especially as neighboring Palestine remains under Israeli occupation. The stumbling block of that coveted normalization was – and remains – the Jordanian people, who strongly rejected a renewed Israeli lease over Jordanian territories.
Israeli negotiators must have been surprised by Jordan’s refusal to accommodate Israeli interests. With the US removing itself, at least publicly, from the brewing conflict, Israel resorted to its typical bullying, by holding two Jordanians hostage, hoping to force the government to reconsider its decision regarding the Jordan Valley.
![Palestinians stage a demonstration in support of Palestinian-Jordanian woman Hiba Al-Labadi, who stages a hunger strike after she was arrested by Israeli forces, in East Jerusalem on 31 October 2019. [Mostafa Alkharouf - Anadolu Agency]](https://i0.wp.com/www.middleeastmonitor.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/20191031_2_39089439_49038745.jpg?resize=933.5%2C622&quality=85&strip=all&ssl=1)
Palestinians demonstrate in support of hunger striking Hiba Al-Labadi, after her arrest by Israeli forces, in East Jerusalem on 31 October 2019. [Mostafa Alkharouf – Anadolu Agency ]
The Israeli strategy backfired. The arrest of Labadi – who started a hunger strike that lasted for over 40 days – and Mi’ri, a cancer survivor, was a major PR disaster for Israel. Not only did the tactic fail to deliver any results, it further galvanized the Jordanian people, and government regarding the decision to reclaim Al-Baqura and al-Ghamar.
Labadi and Mi’ri were released on November 6. The following day, the Jordanian government informed Israel that its farmers will be banned from entering Al-Baqura area. This way, Jordan retrieved its citizens and its territories within the course of 24 hours.
Three main reasons allowed Jordan to prevail in its confrontation with Israel. First, the steadfastness of the prisoners themselves; second, the unity and mobilization of the Jordanian street, civil society organizations and elected legislators; and third, the Jordanian government responding positively to the unified voice of the street.
This compels the question: what is the Palestinian strategy regarding the nearly 5,000 Palestinian prisoners held unlawfully in Israel?
While the prisoners themselves continue to serve as a model of unity and courage, the other factors fundamental to any meaningful strategy aimed at releasing all Palestinian prisoners remain absent.
Although factionalism continues to undermine the Palestinian fight for freedom, prisoners are fighting the same common enemy. The famed “National Conciliation Document”, composed by the unified leadership of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails in 2006, is considered the most articulate vision for Palestinian unity and liberation.
For ordinary Palestinians, the prisoners remain an emotive subject, but political disunity is making it nearly impossible for the energies of the Palestinian street to be harnessed in a politically meaningful way. Despite much lip service paid to freeing the prisoners, efforts aimed at achieving this goal are hopelessly splintered and agonizingly factionalized.
As for the Palestinian leadership, the strategy championed by Palestinian Authority leader, Mahmoud Abbas, is more focused on propping up Abbas’ own image than alleviating the suffering of the prisoners and their families. Brazenly, Abbas exploits the emotional aspect of the prisoners’ tragedy to gain political capital, while punishing the families of Palestinian prisoners in order to pursue his own self-serving political agenda.
Jordanian citizen Heba Al-Labadi (C) was released from an Israeli prison and has returned to Jordan on 6 November 2019
“Even if I had only one penny, I would’ve given it to the families of the martyrs, prisoners and heroes,” Abbas said in a theatrical way during his United Nations General Assembly speech last September.
Abbas, of course, has more than one penny. In fact, he has withheld badly needed funds from the families of the “martyrs, prisoners and heroes.” On April 2018, Abbas cut the salaries of government employees in Gaza, along with the money received by the families of Gaza prisoners held inside Israeli jails.
Heba al-Labadi and Abdul Rahman Mi’ri were released because of their own resolve, coupled with strong solidarity exhibited by ordinary Jordanians. These two factors allowed the Jordanian government to publicly challenge Israel, leading to the unconditional release of the two Jordanian prisoners.
Meanwhile, thousands of Palestinian prisoners, including 500 administrative detainees continue to languish in Israeli prisons. Without united and sustained popular, non-factional mobilization, along with the full backing of the Palestinian leadership, the prisoners are likely to carry on with their fight, alone and unaided.
See also:
Israel and the PA: security relations have never been better
Israel is silencing the last voices trying to prevent abuse of Palestinians
By Jonathan Cook – The National – November 11, 2019
It has been a week of appalling abuses committed by Israeli soldiers in the West Bank – little different from the other 2,670 weeks endured by Palestinians since the occupation began in 1967.
The difference this past week was that several entirely unexceptional human rights violations that had been caught on film went viral on social media.
One shows a Palestinian father in the West Bank city of Hebron leading his son by the hand to kindergarten. The pair are stopped by two heavily armed soldiers, there to help enforce the rule of a few hundred illegal Jewish settlers over the city’s Palestinian population.
The soldiers scream at the father, repeatedly and violently push him and then grab his throat as they accuse his small son of throwing stones. As the father tries to shield his son from the frightening confrontation, one soldier pulls out his rifle and sticks it in the father’s face.
It is a minor incident by the standards of Israel’s long-running belligerent occupation. But it powerfully symbolises the unpredictable, humiliating, terrifying and sometimes deadly experiences faced daily by millions of Palestinians.
A video of another such incident emerged last week. A Palestinian man is ordered to leave an area by an armed Israeli policewoman. He turns and walks slowly away, his hands in the air. Moments later she shoots a sponge-tipped bullet into his back. He falls to the ground, writhing in agony.
It is unclear whether the man was being used for target practice or simply for entertainment.
The reason such abuses are so commonplace is that they are almost never investigated – and even less often are those responsible punished.
It is not simply that Israeli soldiers become inured to the suffering they inflict on Palestinians daily. It is the soldiers’ very duty to crush the Palestinians’ will for freedom, to leave them utterly hopeless. That is what is required of an army policing a population permanently under occupation.
The message is only underscored by the impunity the soldiers enjoy. Whatever they do, they have the backing not only of their commanders but of the government and courts.
Just that point was underlined late last month. An unnamed Israeli army sniper was convicted of shooting dead a 14-year-old boy in Gaza last year. The Palestinian child had been participating in one of the weekly protests at the perimeter fence.
Such trials and convictions are a great rarity. Despite damning evidence showing that Uthman Hillis was shot in the chest with a live round while posing no threat, the court sentenced the sniper to the equivalent of a month’s community service.
In Israel’s warped scales of justice, the cost of a Palestinian child’s life amounts to no more than a month of extra kitchen duties for his killer.
But the overwhelming majority of the 220 Palestinian deaths at the Gaza fence over the past 20 months will never be investigated. Nor will the wounding of tens of thousands more Palestinians, many of them now permanently disabled.
There is an equally disturbing trend. The Israeli public have become so used to seeing YouTube videos of soldiers – their sons and daughters – abuse Palestinians that they now automatically come to the soldiers’ defence, however egregious the abuses.
The video of the father and son threatened in Hebron elicited few denunciations. Most Israelis rallied behind the soldiers. Amos Harel, a military analyst for the liberal Haaretz newspaper, observed that an “irreversible process” was under way among Israelis: “The soldiers are pure and any criticism of them is completely forbidden.”
When the Israeli state offers impunity to its soldiers, the only deterrence is the knowledge that such abuses are being monitored and recorded for posterity – and that one day these soldiers may face real accountability, in a trial for war crimes.
But Israel is working hard to shut down those doing the investigating – human rights groups.
For many years Israel has been denying United Nations monitors – including international law experts like Richard Falk and Michael Lynk – entry to the occupied territories in a blatant bid to stymie their human rights work.
Last week Human Rights Watch, headquartered in New York, also felt the backlash. The Israeli supreme court approved the deportation of Omar Shakir, its Israel-Palestine director.
Before his appointment by HRW, Mr Shakir had called for a boycott of the businesses in illegal Jewish settlements. The judges accepted the state’s argument: he broke Israeli legislation that treats Israel and the settlements as indistinguishable and forbids support for any kind of boycott.
But Mr Shakir rightly understands that the main reason Israel needs soldiers in the West Bank – and has kept them there oppressing Palestinians for more than half a century – is to protect settlers who were sent there in violation of international law.
The collective punishment of Palestinians, such as restrictions on movement and the theft of resources, was inevitable the moment Israel moved the first settlers into the West Bank. That is precisely why it is a war crime for a state to transfer its population into occupied territory.
But Mr Shakir had no hope of a fair hearing. One of the three judges in his case, Noam Sohlberg, is himself just such a lawbreaker. He lives in Alon Shvut, a settlement near Hebron.
Israel’s treatment of Mr Shakir is part of a pattern. In recent days other human rights groups have faced the brunt of Israel’s vindictiveness.
Laith Abu Zeyad, a Palestinian field worker for Amnesty International, was recently issued a travel ban, denying him the right to attend a relative’s funeral in Jordan. Earlier he was refused the right to accompany his mother for chemotherapy in occupied East Jerusalem.
And last week Arif Daraghmeh, a Palestinian field worker for B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, was seized at a checkpoint and questioned about his photographing of the army’s handling of Palestinian protests. Mr Daraghmeh had to be taken to hospital after being forced to wait in the sun.
It is a sign of Israel’s overweening confidence in its own impunity that it so openly violates the rights of those whose job it is to monitor human rights.
Palestinians, meanwhile, are rapidly losing the very last voices prepared to stand up and defend them against the systematic abuses associated with Israel’s occupation. Unless reversed, the outcome is preordained: the rule of the settlers and soldiers will grow ever more ruthless, the repression ever more ugly.
Lula’s Release Will Only Reinvigorate the Pink Tide Against U.S. Hegemony in Latin America
By Paul Antonopoulos | November 11, 2019
The Workers Party (PT) ruled Brazil, mostly under the leadership of the charismatic Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, or simply known as Lula, from 2003 until his successor’s impeachment in 2016. This period saw Brazil undergo major changes and advancements with an emphasis on educating the poor, providing access to healthcare for all Brazilians, poverty reduction and Latin American integration. Although the PT did not challenge the capitalist system entirely, there was an emphasis on reducing the neoliberal model that has exploited South America since Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet allowed his country to be economically ruled by this U.S.-endorsed system since the 1970’s.
The progress made by Lula saw a great reversal after his controversial arrest for allegedly engaging in corrupt practices. However, after only 580 days of incarceration in what was supposed to be a near decade long sentence, the Federal Supreme Court released the former president on Thursday from prison. His release, although initially a joyful event for progressives into South America, was quickly overshadowed by the coup taking place in Bolivia that has seen Evo Morales resign as president.
The successful coup against Morales is a setback for the re-emergence of the socialist Pink Tide order in Latin America. However, the release of Lula is likely to re-energize the entire cultural space against U.S. hegemony that has nearly completely dominated region since the mid-2010’s when the “Blue Tide” (Conservative Wave) took over Brazil, Argentina, Peru and other Latin American states in the aftermath of the Pink Tide.
There is little doubt that the news has become not only the political event of the year in Brazil, but in all of Latin America. The second half of 2019 has seen major changes and polarizations occur with major revolts in Ecuador and Chile against the ruling governments, Mauricio Macri’s failure to be re-elected in Argentina, and the likelihood of a Leftist election victory in Uruguay later this month.
The majority of analysts who believe Lula is innocent claim the reason he was imprisoned was to prevent his election victory in 2018. Lula often claims that he is more than a man, but “an idea.” However, if Lula is “an idea,” this also begs the question on why the “idea” was not successful when represented by Fernando Haddad, the PT presidential candidate who failed against Jair Bolsonaro in last year’s election.
Rather, people are more likely to follow people than ideologies. Lula is incorrect to call himself “an idea,” and rather he is an icon or a symbol. The symbol of Lula is one of hope for the poorest and progressives of Latin America, and his “idea” can only be continued through him since he has built a symbology behind his persona. Therefore, the meaning behind his release, many years earlier than originally sentenced, has a tremendous meaning across the region. Even Bolsonaro had to resign to the fact that he “would not be here” as president if Lula had not been imprisoned by then judge Sérgio Moro – Brazil’s current Minister of Justice.
Lula’s freedom is without a doubt a major shock to the reactionary forces operating in Brazil with full encouragement and endorsement by Bolsonaro. It is for this reason that former U.S. President Donald Trump’s strategist and adviser Steve Bannon criticized the release of Lula, calling him “one of the most cynical and corrupt politicians in the world,” claiming the release of Lula will bring a return of corruption to Brazil. Although Bannon is a former adviser to U.S. President Donald Trump, he still wields a great amount of influence and power in Washington DC and recently even cancelled trips to Brazil, England, Italy and Australia to structure a task force to fight against the impeachment process against Trump.
And of course, the “return of corruption” to Brazil is a ludicrous claim made by Bannon, especially when considering he has been a staunch defender and endorser of Bolsonaro and has elevated Eduardo Bolsonaro, a son of the Brazilian president, to the main representative of South America in “The Movement,” a consortium of European representatives who support right-wing nationalist populism while defending exploitative economic policies. Bannon’s ideological extremism defends “economic nationalism,” but it is not confused with neoliberalism or globalism. His extremist economic nationalism conceptually cannot cross the borders of the American empire, but as mere rhetoric, as it is incompatible with economic policies that promote the economic and social development of any other state. However, Bannon of course did not mention that Bolsonaro, his sons and his aides have been involved in endless scandals and corruption cases since January this year.
Although Bannon may not be involved with the Trump administration at an official level, there is little doubt that he has always been the bridge between Trump and the Bolsonaro family. Therefore, Bannon quickly coming out to denounce Lula after his release from prison can suggest that his release will be a major concern for Washington.
Why?
Lula certainly did not wait long before firing shots at the defenders of U.S. unilateralism in Latin America after his release from prison, stating: “The so-called Left that Bolsonaro fears so much will defeat the extreme Right – Brazil does not deserve the government it has,” citing unemployment rates, attacks on education and the poor, and the “lies” by Bolsonaro. He also had a look at the Latin American situation, praising Chile’s protests and called for solidarity with the Chilean people, while also showing his support for Evo Morales and denouncing Trump.
This was the Lula that Brazilians had fallen in love with. They fell in love with a leader who had no fear to speak his mind. It is not the destructive Bolsonaro’s way that attacks Brazil’s minorities and most vulnerable, but Lula’s way that attacks the forces that kept Brazil poor and subservient to Washington, and those who also prevent efforts for Latin American cooperation and integration.
It is for this reason that Lula also immediately addressed the Puebla Group, a regional body that brings together 32 progressive leaders from twelve countries that held its second meeting in Buenos Aires over the weekend.
In his message to the Puebla Group, Lula was firm in announcing that he will fight “the rotten side of the Judiciary, the rotten side of the Federal Police, the Public Ministry and Brazilian companies,” and that “It is important that we have courage and face them, because the Latin American elite is a very conservative elite and does not accept the idea of a poor people up the ladder of social conquests.”
However, his most startling revelation was that he has “the objective of constituting a very strong Latin American regional integration […] with the dream of building our great Latin America.”
It is this very goal of uniting Latin America to ensure the regions sovereignty and economic independence that has U.S. puppets like Bolsonaro and international populists like Bannon critically worried about Lula’s release. With Bolsonaro and Bannon worried by Lula, it can only be a matter of time until we see efforts to put Lula back in prison, potentially with Trump’s endorsement.
Although there are real efforts in maintaining the Blue Tide in Latin America, especially with the latest coup against Morales, it appears that the path towards Pink Tide 2.0 is still firmly paved, especially with Lula’s release from prison. Not only was he a symbol in Brazil, but he was a symbol of unity and integration across Latin American, alongside the equally charismatic Hugo Chávez of Venezuela. There can be little doubt that Lula’s release from prison will not only embolden progressive leaders in Latin America, but it will help reduce U.S. hegemony in the region.
Paul Antonopoulos is a Research Fellow at the Center for Syncretic Studies.
Cornering and Strangulating Iran Has Backfired on Israel
By Alastair Crooke | Strategic Culture Foundation | November 11, 2019
What happens if the two premises on which Israel and America’s grand Iran strategy is founded are proven false? ‘What if’ maximum pressure fails either to implode the Iranian state politically, nor brings Iran to its knees, begging for a new ‘hairshirt’ nuclear deal? Well …? Well, it seems that Netanyahu and Mossad were so cocksure of their initial premise, that they neglected to think beyond first move on the chess board. It was to be checkmate in one. And this neglect is the cause of the strategic bind in which Israel now finds itself.
Lately, these lacunae in strategic thinking are being noticed. Iran is doing just fine, writes Henry Rome in Foreign Affairs:
“Some analysts predicted that Iran’s friends in Europe and Asia would defy the United States to lend Iran economic help. Others reckoned that the sanctions would send Iran’s economy into a “death spiral,” leaving Tehran the choice to either surrender or collapse. Neither of these predictions came to pass.
“Rather, Iran now enters its second year under maximum pressure strikingly confident in its economic stability and regional position. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and other hard-liners are therefore likely to continue on their current course: Iran will go on tormenting the oil market, while bolstering its non-oil economy—and it will continue expanding its nuclear program while refusing to talk with Washington.”
Similarly, the (US) Crisis Group reports that on the eve of the US oil sanctions snapback in November 2018, Secretary Pompeo was asked if Iran might restart its nuclear program. He responded: “we’re confident that the Iranians will not make that decision”. But, Iran did just that: In April 2019 – after the US revoked the sanction waivers that had previously allowed eight countries to import Iranian oil – the Iranian leadership started pushing back.
They are still doing it. “Iran’s responses on the nuclear and regional fronts call into question the core premises of the U.S. “maximum pressure” campaign … Tehran [effectively] has broken the binary outcome of concession or collapse by instead adopting what it touts as “maximum resistance”. As a result … there can be little doubt that the [US] strategy has fallen short, delivering impact without effect and rather than blunting Iran’s capabilities only sharpening its willingness to step up its [push-back]”, the Crisis Group report concludes.
So here we are: Iran’s “fourth step” in its incremental lessening of compliance with the JCPOA (injecting nuclear gas into the – hitherto empty – centrifuges at Fordo; augmenting enrichment to 5% and unveiling substantially improved centrifuges), effectively tests the very core to the Obama JCPOA strategy.
The Accord was built around a framework that meant Iran would remain at least 12 months away from break-out capacity (the moment when a state can transition into a nuclear weapons’ state). Iran – in these de-compliance steps is inching under that limit, if it is not already under it. (This does not, however, imply that Iran is seeking weapons, but rather that it is seeking a change in western behaviour.)
Yes, Israel – which pushed hard its assessment (albeit, onto a Trump team wholly receptive to this Israeli analysis) of an Iran entering into a death-spiral within one year, under Trump’s maximum pressure – can plead reasonably that its grand strategy was struck by two ‘black swans’. The double ‘punch’ quite evidently has knocked Israel – it is now all at sixes and sevens.
One was the 14 September strikes on the two Aramco plants in Saudi Arabia (claimed by the Houthis), but demonstrating a level of sophistication which Israelis explicitly admit took them wholly by surprise. And the second was the accumulated evidence that the US is in the process of quitting the Middle East. Again, Israel – or at least Netanyahu – never believed this could happen under Trump’s ‘watch’. Indeed, he had built a political platform on his claim of intimate rapport with the US President. Indeed, that did seem at the time to be perfectly true.
Israeli historian, Gilad Atzmon observes, “it now seems totally unrealistic to expect America to act militarily against Iran on behalf of Israel. Trump’s always unpredictable actions have convinced the Israeli defense establishment that the country has been left alone to deal with the Iranian threat. The American administration is only willing to act against Iran through sanctions”.
And the former Israeli Ambassador to Washington put the consequences yet more bluntly under the rubric of The Coming Middle East Conflagration: “Israel is bracing itself for war with Iranian proxies … But what will the United States do if conflict comes?” — by this Oren implies the US might do little, or nothing.
Yes. This is precisely the dilemma to which the Israeli policy of demonising Iran, and instigating ‘the world’ against Iran, has brought Israel. Israeli officials and commentators now see war as inevitable (see here and here) – and they are not happy.
War is not inevitable. It would not be inevitable if Trump could put aside his Art of the Deal pride, and contemplated a remedy of de-escalating sanctions – especially oil export sanctions – on Iran. But he has not done that. After a quick (and wholly unrealistic) ‘fling’ at having a reality-TV photo-op with President Rouhani, his Administration has doubled down by imposing further, new sanctions on Iran. (Friends might try to tell their American counterparts that it is well time they got over the 1979 Tehran Embassy siege.)
And war is not inevitable if Israel could assimilate the reality that the Middle East is in profound flux – and that Israel no longer enjoys the freedom to strike wherever, and whomsoever it choses, at will (and at no cost to itself). Those days are not wholly gone, but they are a rapidly diminishing asset.
Will Israel shift posture? It seems not. In the context of the Lebanon protests, the local banks are becoming vulnerable, as capital inflows and remittances dry up. Israeli, plus some American officials, are favouring withholding external financial assistance to the banks – thus making the banking system’s survival contingent on any new government agreeing to contain and disarm Hizbullah (something which, incidentally, no Lebanese government, of whatever ‘colour’, can do).
That is to say, US and Israeli policy is that of pushing Lebanon to the brink of financial collapse in order to leverage a blow at Iran. Never mind that it will be the demonstrators – and not Hizbullah – who will pay the heaviest price for pushing the crisis to the brink – in terms of a devalued pound, rising prices and austerity. (Hizbullah, in any case, exited the Lebanese banking system, long time past).
Iran, on the other hand, faced with maximum pressure, has little choice: It will not succumb to slow-strangulation by the US. Its riposte of calibrated counter-pressure to US max-pressure, however, does entail risks: It is predicated on the judgement that Trump does not want a major regional war (especially in the lead up to US elections), and also predicated (though less certainly) on the US President’s ability to avoid being cornered by his hawks into taking responsive military action (i.e. were another US drone to be shot down).
So, what do all these various geo-political ‘tea-leaves’ portend? Well, look at Lebanon and Iraq through the geo-political spectacles of Iran: On the one hand, it is well understood in Tehran that there is justified, deep popular anger in these states towards corruption, the iron sectarian structures and hopeless governance — but that is only one part of the story. The other is the long-standing geo-strategic war that is being waged against Iran.
Maximum pressure has not produced a chastened, and repentant Iran? So, now Iranians see the US and Israel resorting to ‘Euromaidan warfare’ (Ukrainian protests of 2013) against Iran’s Lebanese and Iraqi allies. (It was, after all, during President Aoun’s visit to Washington in March, that Trump first warned Aoun of what was coming – and presented his ultimatum: Contain Hezbollah, or expect unprecedented consequences, including sanctions and the loss of US aid).
Fresh sanctions, plus an Euromaidan-type assault on Iranian allies (Hizballah and Hash’d A-Shaabi)? Might we then expect another ‘Gulf surprise’ – in coming weeks?
This tit-for-tat of pressure and counter-pressure is set to continue — Michael Oren, the former Israeli Ambassador to the US, lays it out:
“The conflagration, like so many in the Middle East, could be ignited by a single spark. Israeli fighter jets have already conducted hundreds of bombing raids against Iranian targets in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq. Preferring to deter rather than embarrass Tehran, Israel rarely comments on such actions. But perhaps Israel miscalculates, hitting a particularly sensitive target; or perhaps politicians cannot resist taking credit. The result could be a counterstrike by Iran, using cruise missiles that penetrate Israel’s air defenses and smash into targets like the Kiryah, Tel Aviv’s equivalent of the Pentagon. Israel would retaliate massively against Hezbollah’s headquarters in Beirut as well as dozens of its emplacements along the Lebanese border. And then, after a day of large-scale exchanges, the real war would begin.
“Rockets, many carrying tons of TNT, would rain on Israel; drones armed with payloads would crash into crucial facilities, military and civilian. During the Second Lebanon War, in 2006, the rate of such fire reached between 200 and 300 projectiles a day. Today, it might reach as high as 4,000. The majority of the weapons in Hezbollah’s arsenal are standoff missiles with fixed trajectories that can be tracked and intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome system. But Iron Dome is 90 percent effective on average, meaning that for every 100 rockets, 10 get through, and the seven operational batteries are incapable of covering the entire country. All of Israel, from Metulla in the north to the southern port city of Eilat, would be in range of enemy fire.”
Of course, the claim that Israeli air defences are 90% effective is ‘for the birds’ (Israeli officials would not be in such a panic if it were true). But Oren sets out the course to a region-wide war plainly enough. This is the end to which their Iran strategy has brought them.
And just to recall, this strategy was always a ‘strategy of choice’ – taken for domestic political purposes. Israel’s demonization of Iran did not begin with the Iranian Revolution. Israel initially had good relations with the revolutionary republic. The relationship transformed because an incoming Israeli Labour government needed it to transform: It wanted to upend the earlier political consensus, and to make peace with the ‘near enemy’ (i.e. its Arab neighbours). But Israel then required a ‘new’ villain threatening ‘plucky little Israel’ to keep unstinting US Congressional support coming through: Iran became that villain. And then, subsequently, Netanyahu made his twenty-year career out of the Iranian (nuclear) bogeyman.
Reaping what a long-term strategy of threats and incitement sows …? In one of the most detailed assessments of Iran’s strategy and doctrine across Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen, the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) concludes that Iran’s “third party capability” has become Tehran’s weapon of choice: “Iran now has an effective military advantage over the US and its allies in the Middle East, because of its ability to wage war using third parties such as Shia militias and insurgents”, the report concludes. It has the military edge? Well, well …
And doesn’t this fact help explain what is happening in Iraq and Lebanon today?
Tulsi Gabbard Demands Clinton Retract ‘Defamatory’ Russia Smear
By Tyler Durden – Zero Hedge – 11/11/2019
Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) on Monday demanded that Hillary Clinton retract ‘defamatory’ comments alleging that the 2020 presidential candidate is a favorite of the Russians, according to The Hill.
“Your statement is defamatory, and we demand that you retract it immediately,” wrote Gabbard’s attorneys in a letter, demanding that Clinton do so both verbally and via Twitter.
Last month Clinton peddled the conspiracy theory that Gabbard is being ‘groomed’ to split the Democratic party as a third party candidate, and that she’s the Kremlin’s top pick in 2020.
Speaking with former Obama 2008 campaign manager David Plouffe on his podcast, “Campaign HQ with David Plouffe,” Clinton said – without mentioning Gabbard by name: “I’m not making any predictions but I think they’ve got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate. She’s the favorite of the Russians.”
Of course, that’s “assuming Jill Stein will give it up – because she’s also a Russian asset,” Clinton continued.
“It appears you may now be claiming that this statement is about Republicans (not Russians) grooming Gabbard,” Gabbard’s lawyer wrote in the letter. “But this makes no sense in light of what you actually said. After you made the statement linking Congresswoman Gabbard to the Russians, you (through your spokesman) doubled down on it with the Russian nesting dolls remark,” referring to comments by Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill.
These people are sick pic.twitter.com/zQ9EGDEW2t
— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) October 18, 2019
Gabbard has repeatedly denied that she will run in a third party bid for the White House.
Ex-Ecuador leader Correa: Bolivia’s Morales was forced out in ‘coup’, OAS is ‘an instrument of US domination’
RT | November 11, 2019
Former leader of Ecuador Rafael Correa said the resignation of Bolivian President Evo Morales was the result of a coup d’etat and that events could have ended in worse violence, if the socialist leader had not resigned.
“Of course there was a coup d’etat,” Correa told RT Spanish in an exclusive interview on Monday, explaining that such an insubordination of the country’s armed forces “cannot exist in a constitutional state of law” or democracy. “If Evo Morales did not resign, there would have been a bloodbath because there was no public order,” he said.
Morales resigned on Sunday at the demands of Bolivia’s military chief, following weeks of protests and only hours after he had promised fresh elections. Morales previously proclaimed he had won the October 20 general election with a 10-point lead, a result which was quickly contested by the opposition, who accused him of tampering with the vote.
There can be no true democracy until the arbitrators are the citizens and “not the uniformed,” Correa said, adding that he would not be surprised if there were foreign forces behind the efforts to oust Morales.
Correa said that the Organization of American States (OAS), which encouraged Morales to call for new elections, did not condemn events in socialist Bolivia because democracy is only valid when it serves the interests of the right.
“You can see the double standards that exist in all this. For the right, democracy is valid as long as it meets its interests,” Correa said. When those interests stop being fulfilled, suddenly democracy is not enough and “the situation must be changed to blood and fire, as we are seeing in Bolivia.”
Correa said the Bolivian people have experienced dignity and prosperity under Morales’ leadership and that after recent events, people across Latin America will soon be convinced that the OAS is “useless” and nothing but “an instrument of US domination.”
He said that the OAS wants elections in Bolivia but only without Morales because they know that he was democratically elected by the people already. “They have just forcibly removed a president who has won the election widely, with more than 10 points,” he said, insisting that Morales is the rightful leader of Bolivia.
Morales called for new elections on Sunday with the aim of “seeking peace” in Bolivia — yet the opposition would not accept Morales’ participation in the new elections and urged protesters to continue mobilizing in the streets until he resigned. On Twitter, Morales said the coup attempt “destroys the rule of law.”
Rouhani: Iran to stay in JCPOA, reap benefits when UN arms embargo ends next year
Press TV – November 11, 2019
President Hassan Rouhani says Iran intends to stay in the 2015 nuclear deal despite US violations, arguing that the accord will be put to good use next year when a long-running arms embargo against Tehran comes to an end.
Rouhani said Monday Iran could respond to America’s exit from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in different manners, including leaving the deal altogether or keeping it at any price, but it decided to take the middle-ground option.
“By continuing the JCPOA, we will fulfill a major objective in terms of politics, security and defense,” he told a large crowd of people during a visit to the eastern province of Kerman.
Noting that for years Iran has been banned by the United Nations from buying and selling any kinds of weapons, Rouhani said the arms embargo will end next year according to the deal and the UN Security Council Resolution 2231, which endorses it.
“This is one of the important effects of this deal. Otherwise, we could leave the deal today but the kind of benefit we stand to reap next year will no longer exist,” he said.
“We can leave now but then the UNSC resolutions [that were revoked under the deal] will return,” the president said, adding “We need to think where do the country’s interests lie.”
Iran, he said, did not want to stay fully committed to the deal while the others “sit on their hands” and do nothing.
“Therefore we took the middle ground to keep the JCPOA and preserve it while cutting back on what we had agreed to do under the agreement step by step,” he said.
Since May, Iran has been scaling down its nuclear deal commitments in retaliation for Washington’s 2018 pullout from the deal and the failure of three European signatories — the UK, France and Germany — to protect bilateral trade against American sanctions.
In the first three stages of its measured response, Iran enriched uranium beyond the 300kg limit set by the deal and ramped up enrichment to levels upon the pre-defined 3.67-percent cap. It also expanded nuclear research to areas banned in the agreement.
The fourth step, which was unleashed last week, was the injection of uranium hexafluoride (UF6) gas into centrifuges at the Fordow underground enrichment facility.
Tehran says its reciprocal measures do not violate the JCPOA and are based on Articles 26 and 36 of the agreement itself, which detail mechanisms to deal with non-compliance.
Iranian authorities have suggested that the measures will be reversible as soon as Europe finds practical ways to shield the Iranian economy from the sanctions.
Rouhani said Monday Iran’s nuclear capability is “better than ever,” noting that Iranian nuclear experts have never stopped research and development work since the JCPOA was first signed in 2015.
“We will stand up to our enemies with full power. We haven’t done anything illegal and we are not willing to bow to your orders,” he said.
Touching on disparaging statements by Western countries, Rouhani said, “Are you mad we restarted Fordow? Are you mad with the resumption of nuclear enrichment? Are you mad at us for speeding up the Arak heavy water [facility]? Then you should fulfill your commitments as well.”
Germany, France and Britain were to meet in Paris on Monday to discuss how to respond to Iran stepping back from its commitments under the accord, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said.
“We are very concerned to see that there are other uranium enrichments that Iran has not only announced, but is also carrying out,” Maas said as he arrived for talks with fellow EU foreign ministers in Brussels.
“We want to preserve the JCPOA but Iran will have to return to his obligations and comply with them. Otherwise we will reserve for ourselves all the mechanisms laid down in the agreement,” he said.
Maas was apparently threatening to trigger a dispute mechanism in the 2015 nuclear deal, which could open the way to renewed UN sanctions.
‘Thousands’ of newly-created generic Twitter accounts defend ‘right-wing coup’ in Bolivia
RT | November 11, 2019
Evo Morales’ resignation has apparently sparked an information battle on social media, with one journalist alleging that countless Twitter bots are spreading right-wing talking points about Bolivia’s recent political upheaval.
“There are thousands of what are obviously bot accounts trolling anyone who tweets about the right-wing coup in Bolivia… There’s a big operation going on here,” tweeted Ben Norton, a journalist and assistant editor of the Grayzone Project. He noted that the accounts have formulaic handles consisting of a common name followed by a series of numbers. Screenshots show anti-Morales messages being posted by new accounts with only a handful of tweets.
Incredibly, his observation was bombarded by denials… from generic Twitter accounts created in November.
One user flagged by Norton had only four tweets – all of them attacking the journalist for sounding the alarm over the suspicious Twitter activity. The account was only three hours old.
Morales announced his resignation on Sunday, following protests and violence in the capital, La Paz. The Bolivian leader had called for new elections in hopes of appeasing protesters, but he stepped down hours later after being urged to do so by the country’s military chief. The political turmoil has been labeled as a military coup by Morales’ supporters, including UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
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Book Excerpt
World War Two Was Not a Just War
By David Swanson | September 20, 2016
Excerpted from the just released book War Is Never Just.
World War II is often called “the good war,” and has been since the U.S. war on Vietnam to which it was then contrasted. World War II so dominates U.S. and therefore Western entertainment and education, that “good” often comes to mean something more than “just.” The winner of the “Miss Italy” beauty pageant earlier this year got herself into a bit of a scandal by declaring that she would have liked to live through World War II. While she was mocked, she was clearly not alone. Many would like to be part of something widely depicted as noble, heroic, and exciting. Should they actually find a time machine, I recommend they read the statements of some actual WWII veterans and survivors before they head back to join the fun.[i] For purposes of this book, however, I am going to look only at the claim that WWII was morally just. … continue
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- Hamas slams Biden for linking Gaza cease-fire to hostage release
- Gideon Falter, Campaign Against Antisemitism instruments of the Zionist entity
- How hawks in US are trying to demonize students protesting Israeli genocide
- Calling out UK for its brazen protection of pro-occupation forces
- Israel carpet bombs Gaza with no goal in sight
- Kiev conducts ‘terrorist attack’ against Belgorod – MoD
- The 17th Amendment Allowed Empire
- If Americans Knew
- Israeli airstrikes in southern Gaza, invasion in central Gaza, carpet bombing in north – Day 217
- Strapped down, blindfolded, held in diapers: Israeli whistleblowers detail abuse of Palestinians in shadowy detention center
- Fighter jets, attack drones hammer Rafah; catastrophe looms – Day 217
- What it’s like to be used as a human shield by the Israeli army
- Detailed study finds 99% of pro-Palestine protests at US universities are peaceful
- VIDEO: Armenian Christians under siege by Israel
- Ex-Israeli special forces agent says he went ‘undercover’ at UCLA protest encampment
- The mainstream media distorted our anti-Vietnam War protests 50 years ago. They’re following the same strategy today
- Pete McCloskey, longtime supporter of Palestinians and USS Liberty veterans, has passed away
- Israel will kill Palestinians just fine without US heavy payload weapons; humanitarian crisis spirals – Day 216
- International Solidarity Movement
- The Right to Resist Genocide by Land and By Sea
- Women Support Center in Nablus empowers women and girls, resists gendered violence and the Occupation
- Palestinian Family at Um Darit Harassed and Isolated
- Occupation Forces Targeted Series of Strikes Kills 7 Aid Workers in Gaza
- Israeli army and police escalate repression of human rights volunteers following Knesset hearing.
- Illegal Israeli Settlers Continue Attacks on Shepherds in Masafer Yatta
- Second Friday of Ramadan at Qalandia Checkpoint
- Deceptively “quiet” first week of Ramadan in Jerusalem: a result of restrictions at Qalandia checkpoint
- Masafer Yatta: Israeli Settlers Burn a Family Car in Um Dhorit
- Violent arrest of Palestinian women in Susiya, Masafer Yatta
- Richie Allen
- The Richie Allen Show Returns Tomorrow Wednesday April 24th
- Call Richie Today Monday March 11th From 4.30pm
- Connect To The Richie Allen Show WhatsApp Today
- NHS Asks Patients To Choose From 12 Genders, 10 sexual Preferences & 159 Religions
- The Richie Allen Show Moves To A New Time Slot From Monday Nov 20th
- Starmer Will Sack Shadow Ministers Who Vote For Gaza Ceasefire
- AI Tool Can Predict Heart Attacks Years In Advance
- Nepal Bans TikTok To Preserve Social Harmony
- Bloke Appointed Boss Of Womb Health Charity
- WHO – “Gaza’s Biggest Hospital Becoming A Cemetery”
- No Tricks Zone
- New Paper: Global Warming Leading To HIMALAYAN COOLING, Preventing Glacial Melt!
- DNA Evidence Reveals Domestic Cats, Dogs, African Wildcats, Frogs Lived In The Arctic 9000 Years Ago
- -80°C: Antarctic Vostok Station Records “Extreme Winter Cold”…Not Even Winter Yet!
- The German E-Vehicle Nightmare, 2024 Q1 Sales Plummet 14%… “Graveyard” For Unsold Cars
- Newly Discovered 90,000-Year-Old Human Footprints Reveal How Much Higher Sea Levels Used To Be
- Germany’s Economic Bloodbath Worsens As Green Revolution Causes Economy To Bleed To Death
- Water Vapor Absorbs 84 Times More Radiation Than CO2 … Clouds Drove 89% Of 1982-2018 Warming
- The 97% Consensus Claim Is In Fact 97% Bogus
- Post-1980s Increases In Shortwave Radiation Explains Europe’s Warming Trends Far Better Than CO2
- “A Thing Where Every Part Of Your Life Just Confirms What It Is That You Want To Believe”
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