A Canadian Jewish organisation has been stripped of its charity status for supporting the Israeli army. The discovery – which has come as a shock to many well-meaning donors – was made following a government audit of the Toronto based group whose revenue is in the region of tens of millions.
Federal regulators found that some of the activities of Beth Oloth Charitable Organisation were not charitable under Canadian law, such as “increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of the Israeli armed forces,” Canadian news agency Global News reported.
The pro-Israeli charity group, established in 1962, describes itself as “having reached out to thousands of newly-arrived immigrants and under-privileged Israeli girls – young victims of terror, sickness, turmoil, poverty and family strife.”
The group promotes its work saying: “the devoted staff at Beth Oloth receives these girls at the tender age of nine. The next ten years are marked with one continuous chain of love, warmth and nurturing, alongside a quality education.”
Beth Oloth’s charity work has now come under scrutiny after Canada’s Revenue Agency (CRA) discovered that it has been supporting “foreign armed forces”. Almost all the money raised by the pro-Israeli charity group went abroad. Beth Oloth was not only found to be aiding the Israeli military, it was also undermining Canada’s own foreign policy in the Israeli-Palestine conflict by funding projects in the occupied territories.
Investigation by the Canadian government discovered that the pro-Israeli charity group lacked “direction and control” over the use of its funds, and had funded non-charitable activity. Global News said that this included educational programs called “mechinot” that prepared high school students for Israeli military service.
The program is said to have provided weapons, physical and martial arts training, mentoring by Israel Defence Forces officers and visits to army bases and sites of historical battles.
The revocation was announced in the 12 January edition of the government’s Canada Gazette. Some 94 pages of evidence were released to expose the pro-Israeli group’s non charitable work. Beth Oloth has received vast donations in recent years – $61 million in 2017, $45 million in 2016 and $42 million in 2015 – but it’s not clear how much of that was spent on charity and how much went towards funding the Israeli army; programs for preparing kids for military training or towards projects in illegal settlements in occupied West Bank.
Beth Oloth responded to the allegations by insisting that its work involved providing “stipends to the poor for the observance of religious life” and that it had funded teachers to provide religious training at mechinot schools.” CRA refuted their claim saying: “Providing assistance to Israeli settlements in the occupied territories serves to encourage and enhance the permanency of the infrastructure and settlements and therefore is contrary to Canada’s public policy and international law on this issue.”
According to Canada’s tax agency, Beth Oloth’s revenue was relatively small; raising a mere $21,000 in 2008, a year before the Israeli military carried out one of the deadliest assault on the Palestinians in Gaza during “Operation Cast Lead”, killing 1,400 people. The pro-Israeli group enjoyed a rapid growth after that period but it’s not clear why its revenue went from mere thousands to over $60 million in such a short period of time.
Beth Oloth’s non-charitable activities have come as a shock. Jewish leaders accused the pro-Israeli group of abusing their generosity. “Well-meaning donors to Jewish community foundations may be surprised to learn that they have been funding illegal Israeli settlement activity,” said Rabbi David Mivasair of Hamilton, Ontario. “The CRA doing its job and removing Beth Oloth’s illegitimate charitable status strengthens our confidence that our generosity is not being abused.”
Beth Oloth isn’t the only pro-Israeli charity group whose work has raised the suspicion of the Canadian government. Audits carried out during the same week by the CRA found that the Jewish National Fund of Canada (JNF), one of the country’s long-established charities, funded infrastructure projects for the Israeli army, air and naval bases.
Complaints are said to have been raised against JNF for years. The pro-Israeli charity claims to run reforestation efforts in areas hit by wildfires, but an 85 page document has been submitted listing the many ways in which it has been violating Canadian tax law for over 50 years.
A study by a Toronto-based consulting and research company has revealed that over the past fifty years mainstream reporting about Israel has been distorted to portray the Jewish state in positive terms while ignoring the plight of the Palestinians under Israeli occupation. The media study, based on a computer analysis of 50 years of data, found that major U.S. newspapers have provided consistently skewed, pro-Israel reporting on Israel-Palestine. The slanting in news coverage included subtle manipulations like using word associations favorable to Israel and derogatory to Palestinians as well as persistent publication of stories praising Israel while also avoiding reporting anything supportive of the dispossessed Arab point of view.
The researchers from 416Labs were able to evaluate headlines and articles derived from five major U.S. newspapers: the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal during the time period 1967 to 2017. June 1967 was selected as the starting point to include coverage of the Six Day War and its aftermath, when Israel attacked Jordan, Egypt and Syria to begin its military occupation of Palestinian territory on the West Bank and Gaza.
No one should be surprised by media bias in favor of Israel given the dominance of Jewish owners and editors in the major media, but the study just might have gone one step farther and noted, as did Congressman Paul Findley in his book They Dare to Speak Out back in 1985, that much of the bias stems from the overseas correspondents covering the Middle East for the U.S. and European media also being overwhelmingly Jewish. And a review of the Israel-philia might have gone back even further in time to the foundation of the state in 1948 to find similar favorable coverage.
Shaping the favorable perception of Israel has also involved the efforts of Zionist-dominated Hollywood movies and television to portray Jewish heroism while also at the same time ignoring the Zionist terrorism directed against both the indigenous Palestinian population and the British Mandate authorities prior to Israel’s statehood. The movie Exodus shaped many Americans’ perceptions of what had occurred in the Middle East, while the steady stream of films related to the so-called holocaust, which ignore the many problems with that standard narrative, perpetuate Jewish suffering and victimhood.
In truth, no one should believe any country’s creation narrative, which, since the time of Virgil’s Aeneid, has been intended to present an idealized portrait that is largely fact-free. Nationalists will inevitably distort the tale to reflect their own vision of what their homeland represents and how it came to be, but Israel’s story is unusual in that it is packed with lies from start to finish. Even before the creation of a Jewish state, Zionists encouraged Jewish emigration from Europe to the then Turkish-controlled Palestine. They coined the expression “a land without people for people without a land,” a flat out lie as Palestine was fully inhabited by Muslim and Christian Palestinian Arabs plus a small Jewish minority. This expression has been more recently replaced with another one, i.e. how Israel “made the desert bloom,” as if the land were not being cultivated before large numbers of Jews arrived, making it another lie. And it is, by the way, an expression favored by Zionist presidential aspirant Kamala Harris, a prime example of “progressive except for Israel.”
Israel was founded as a product of terrorism, some would say the “first modern” style terrorism, to include bombings of non-military targets and random massacres of civilians. In a notorious attack on the village of Deir Yassin on April 9, 1948, more than two hundred Palestinians may have been slaughtered by Jewish terrorists affiliated with the Irgun and Lehi groups. The exact count of the victims is unknown because a subsequent Zionist clean-up team systematically destroyed many of the bodies.
Given the turmoil in Palestine and the agitation by British Jews, the U.K. was eager to cut its losses, and Harry Truman, a U.S. president who benefited from Jewish financial and political support in his reelection bid, was equally willing to support the creation of a Jewish state as a quid pro quo. Even though Jews were a distinct minority in the new Israel-Palestine, they obtained nearly half of the land in spite of the United Nations mandate that the rights of the indigenous population should not be compromised by the new arrivals.
But the new arrivals from Europe and America disagreed with that even-handed approach. They assassinated the U.N. mediator Count Folke Bernadotte, who had himself saved many Jews in Nazi occupied Europe, and started to attack their Arab neighbors, intentionally driving 700,000 from their homes and killing many in the process. By that act of terror and a subsequent war fought against its neighbors, Israel obtained more land before the green line was eventually established as part of a 1949 Armistice Agreement managed by the U.N. to divide Israel from the West Bank and Gaza, which were under the jurisdiction of Jordan and Egypt respectively.
And then there came the miraculous Six Day War of June 1967, regarding which glowing media accounts described how Israel was attacked by Jordan, Syria and Egypt simultaneously but fought back hard and won a decisive victory, occupying in the process the parts of Jerusalem it did not already control as well as the Golan Heights, the West Bank and Gaza. The only problem with that story is that Israel started the war, attacking and destroying the Arab air forces without a declaration of war while their planes were on the ground. Denied air cover, the Arab ground forces could not win.
Israel also included in its Six Day War triumph the attempted sinking of the American intelligence gathering ship the U.S.S. Liberty, which was in international waters when it was attacked on June 8th. Thirty-four crewmen were killed and 171 wounded in the only attack on a U.S. Naval vessel in peace time that was never fully investigated by the Pentagon due to President Lyndon B. Johnson’s unwillingness to offend American Jews. The Israelis and their apologists have claimed the attack was a case of either “fog of war” or “a mistake,” both of which were completely self-serving lies exposed by compelling National Security Agency collected evidence that has surfaced recently. And, by the way, the Israelis continue to receive military assistance from Washington in spite of the killing of American service members, $3.8 billion per annum guaranteed for the next ten years plus special appropriations as needed.
Even when the Israelis are clearly telling lies, much of the media and chattering class has been willing to forgive them their trespasses no matter what they do or say. The whopper level lies about Israel are that it is a democracy and America’s best friend and ally. It is neither. It has more than 50 laws that discriminate against Arabs, is now self-defined as a “Jewish state,” and it has recently legalized banning non-Jews from residential areas and towns. It also occupies Palestinian territories where the original inhabitants have no rights but martial law. And the Jewish state has never been an American ally in practical terms as it is under no obligation to support Washington under any circumstances even though a U.S. Air Force general has declared that his troops are prepared to die for Israel.
Some other recent lies include the propagation of a narrative that the Palestinians do not exist as a people, that Palestine has never been a country and therefore should never become one, and that there is no peace in the Middle East because the Arabs have never accepted the generous offers made by the Israelis to settle problems with the Palestinians, who are, by the way, solely responsible for their unfortunate situation since the expanding Israeli settlements on their land are no obstacle to peace. All lies.
And another big lie concerns how Israel spies on the United States. Israel is the number one “friendly” country when it comes to stealing American secrets, both commercial and military. When Jonathan Pollard stole more U.S. classified information than any spy in history, Israel’s friends rushed to explain that it was all a mistake, that Pollard was just a one-off oddball. And the Israel government agreed to return what he had stolen but did not do so and instead used it to barter with America’s then enemy the Soviet Union in a deal to permit Jews to emigrate.
Another espionage related development which produced a whole battery of Israeli lies and evasions relates to 9/11, where Mossad almost certainly had at a minimum inside knowledge regarding what was about to occur through their illegal massive spying program inside the United States. Remember the cheering Israeli movers in New Jersey as the twin towers went down? Or the hundreds of “art students” selling their work all across the U.S., which was both a scam and part of an espionage network?
More recent lies include repeated assertions that the Iranians have a secret nuclear program, which will produce a bomb in “six months,” something Benjamin Netanyahu has been promising since 1993. And those wily Persians are also developing ballistic missiles that can be used to attack Europe and America, a particularly dangerous lie as it has been picked up and repeated ad nauseam by the buffoonish triumvirate in Washington consisting of Bolton, Pompeo and Pence, which passes for the deep thinking in U.S. foreign policy these days. That allegation could easily lead to United States involvement in a war fought for Israel that it might reasonably avoid as it is not threatened by Iran and has no vital interests supportive of going to war against it.
But the greatest lie of all is the current claim that anti-Semitism is surging all around the world, requiring still more protection of and deference to diaspora Jews as well as to the state of Israel. It is based on a fundamental lie, that criticism of Israel is ipso facto anti-Semitic and ignores the fact that the push-back is based overwhelmingly on how Israel and Netanyahu behave. Israel, whatever its pretensions, is a country and Judaism is a religion. It is in fact particularly dangerous, and damaging to the religion, to combine the two deliberately as is being done by Netanyahu and the many American Jews who are serial apologists for Israel.
Indeed, Israel and its partisans are now using lies to change the way the public views the issue of anti-Semitism and are willing to do so by legislating to enforce how people think, to include the use of legal sanctions consisting of fines and imprisonment to silence critics. If legislation currently in congress is ever implemented fully, it will be the death of freedom of speech in the U.S. That such nonsense has gained currency at all is due to the Israeli corruption of both America’s government and its news media, which is not a lie, but the absolute truth that you won’t find discussed anywhere in your newspaper or on television reporting.
This trend to criminalize criticism of Israel has led Jewish groups and some governments to work together to promulgate “hate crime” statutes and other legal barriers to protect the Israeli wrongdoing. But Israel is not and should not be protected against criticism. It is a country that behaves very badly, and, one might add, dangerously, not only to its neighbors but also to the world as it has the potential in its hands to escalate its involvement in Syria to initiate a nuclear conflagration between the U.S. and Russia. Israel’s lies should be recognized for what they are and it should be boycotted and sanctioned until it comes to its senses or, if it does not, it should be completely shunned.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is www.councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
The Canadian BDS Coalition sent an Open Letter to the Government of Canada, regarding their involvement in the upcoming CanaDanse Festival in Israel. (Photo: via Social Media)
On January 15, 2019, Canadian PM Justin Trudeau further embellished his “trash talk” on BDS by responding to a questioner at a town hall meeting with announcing he will “continue to condemn the BDS movement”. The prime minister also repeated the claim that BDS is “anti-Semitic” and alleged that Jewish students are fearful and targeted on campuses “because of their religion” due to BDS-linked intimidation.
Trudeau is now fully exposed to all, especially those who might have been previously swayed by his slick image and marketing; the lines are clear, if you support Palestinian rights, you can no longer pretend that Trudeau is anything but a continuation of the Stephen Harper legacy.
He does not represent the majority of people in Canada on BDS or Palestine, or on any indigenous issues for that matter. A national survey done almost two years ago in Canada as to how people felt about boycotts found that seventy-eight percent of Canadians said they believe the Palestinians’ call for a boycott is “reasonable”. The disconnect by Trudeau and his government on this issue is intentional and politically motivated. His collaboration with the Zionist lobby is well-documented but let’s suffice by saying that none other than Gilan Erdan, the Israeli BDS-busting cabinet minister, personally congratulated Trudeau on his most recent condemnations of BDS.
Against this backdrop, you might think that BDS activism in Canada would suffer a setback. Not so! In the last 3 months, activists in Vancouver and across the country have been engaged in a campaign against 3 different ballet companies, as well as several levels of government, that were involved in the CanaDanse Festival in Israel.
The initiators of the campaign, BDS Vancouver, were truly inspired by the immediate and overwhelming public reaction and the sense of outrage at the involvement of Ballet BC (and the other participants/sponsors) in this art-washing of Israeli war crimes. It clearly showed that people both within Canada (and globally as the campaign spread) are more than ready to embrace BDS and have strong feelings about why Israeli government policies require sanctions from all sectors of society, both institutional and civic.
The first focal point of the campaign was the petition to Ballet BC, which has now gotten more than 10,300 signatures. However, the campaign went far beyond just the petition and emphasized gathering support from activist groups across Canada as well as from within Israel itself (Boycott from Within). It also included leafleting Ballet BC performances, and extensive outreach through social media and other avenues.
Why did Ballet BC make this first ever trip to perform in Israel? Why now, with all the horrific things happening on the ground? Was it just part of the increasing moves by the Israeli government to emphasize cultural ties to whitewash its image?
Curiously, Ballet BC lists 11 choreographers for its 2018-19 season, and 4 of those 11 are Israeli, with 3 of them citing strong ties with the Israeli Batsheva dance company on their public profiles. Batsheva has a long history of flaunting the BDS call and is often touted as a cultural ambassador for Israel.
Activists were also shocked to find that the Israeli consulate in Canada back in May 2017 was a sponsor for one of Ballet BC’s performances by Ohad Naharin, probably the best known of the 4 mentioned choreographers. They had hoped that Naharin, who recently stepped down as Artistic Director at Batsheva after 30 years, might seize this moment and this change of company to act upon his professed support for Palestinians. They were disappointed.
As they were disappointed by the Georgia Straight, Vancouver’s leading “progressive” newspaper and also one of Ballet BC’s most ardent media supporters. Despite many attempts to contact Georgia Straight with press releases and other information, the paper never covered the campaign calling out Ballet BC for performing in Israel. In contrast, one of the 2 corporate media sponsors of Ballet BC, City (CityNews ), ran an extensive article early in the campaign presenting both the activists’ demands and Ballet BC’s response. Given the Georgia Straight’s history as an “anti-establishment alternative to Vancouver’s conservative daily newspapers”, and some good coverage in the past of Palestinian events, activists were baffled (and still are) as to why this story was so “off bounds”.
Despite the herculean efforts of the Israeli government to tarnish and smear the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement as “racist and divisive”, even “terrorist”, BDS campaigns continue to increase in popularity with an expanding breadth of support. And the Ballet BC campaign is just one example of that. The more the Israeli government rants about BDS, the more it seems to grow in strength. 2018 was a pivotal year in exposing the brutality of the Israeli government towards Palestinians, especially in the Great Return March, and we may have reached a watershed moment for BDS that can only intensify.
– Marion Kawas is a member of the Canada Palestine Association and co-host of Voice of Palestine. Visit: www.cpavancouver.org.
On January 17, IRmep filed a 59-page brief (PDFHTML) in a lawsuit demanding release of a series of secret presidential letters promising not to force Israel to sign the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) or publicly discuss Israel’s nuclear weapons program.
The brief contextualizes a formerly top-secret 1969 cross-agency study about what U.S. policy toward Israel’s nuclear weapons should be. Unanimous consensus between the Departments of Defense, State and intelligence community was that Israel should be compelled to sign the NPT in order to be allowed to purchase conventional U.S. military weapons. Government agencies correctly believed that if Israel was allowed to possess nuclear weapons there would never be peace in the Middle East. National security adviser Henry Kissinger also grudgingly revealed intelligence in the summary that Israelis had stolen U.S. government nuclear material to build their arsenal atomic weapons. (1969 NSC papers on the Israeli nuclear weapons program filed as Exhibit A PDF)
Going against the consensus advice, on September 26, 1969, President Nixon adopted the Israeli policy of “ambiguity” (never confirming or denying Israel’s nuclear weapons program) in a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. US presidents through Donald Trump have continued the Israeli “ambiguity” policy in a series of letters written under intense lobbying by the Israeli government.
According to the IRmep legal filing, this policy has perpetuated a $222.8 billion dollar fraud against U.S. taxpayers through non-enforcement of Arms Export Control Act bans on U.S. foreign aid—absent specific waivers—to known foreign nuclear powers that have not signed the NPT. The IRmep filing also debunks a series of assertions and disinformation filed in an affidavit by the National Security Council
On January 18, 2019 the Department of Justice filed a motion to indefinitely stop the lawsuit from proceeding until the end of the government shutdown, citing lack of funds to mount a legal defense. (PDF)
Listen to a discussion about next steps for this critical IRmep litigation and our other lawsuits on the Scott Horton Show (MP3).
With April’s elections looming, Benjamin Netanyahu has good reason to fear Benny Gantz, his former army chief. Gantz has launched a new party, named Israeli Resilience, just as the net of corruption indictments is closing around the prime minister.
Already, at this early stage of campaigning, some 31 per cent of the Israeli public prefer Gantz to head the next government over Netanyahu, who is only months away from becoming the longest-serving leader in Israel’s history.
Gantz is being feted as the new hope, a chance to change direction after a series of governments under Netanyahu’s leadership have over the past decade shifted Israel ever further to the right.
Like Israel’s former politician generals, from Yitzhak Rabin to Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon, Gantz is being portrayed – and portraying himself – as a battle-hardened warrior, able to make peace from a position of strength.
Before he had issued a single policy statement, polls showed him winning 15 of the 120 parliamentary seats, a welcome sign for those hoping that a centre-left coalition can triumph this time.
But the reality of what Gantz stands for – revealed this week in his first election videos – is far from reassuring.
In 2014, he led Israel into its longest and most savage military operation in living memory: 50 days in which the tiny coastal enclave of Gaza was bombarded relentlessly.
By the end, one of the most densely populated areas on earth – its two million inhabitants already trapped by a lengthy Israeli blockade – lay in ruins. More than 2,200 Palestinians were killed in the onslaught, a quarter of them children, while tens of thousands were left homeless.
The world watched, appalled. Investigations by human rights groups such as Amnesty International concluded that Israel had committed war crimes.
One might have assumed that during the election campaign Gantz would wish to draw a veil over this troubling period in his military career. Not a bit of it.
One of his campaign videos soars over the rubble of Gaza, proudly declaring that Gantz was responsible for destroying many thousands of buildings. “Parts of Gaza have been returned to the Stone Age,” the video boasts.
This is a reference to the Dahiya doctrine, a strategy devised by the Israeli military command of which Gantz was a core member. The aim is to lay waste to the modern infrastructure of Israel’s neighbours, forcing survivors to eke out a bare existence rather than resist Israel.
The collective punishment inherent in the apocalyptic Dahiya doctrine is an undoubted war crime.
More particularly, the video exults in the destruction of Rafah, a city in Gaza that suffered the most intense bout of bombing after an Israeli soldier was seized by Hamas. In minutes, Israel’s indiscriminate bombardment killed at least 135 Palestinian civilians and wrecked a hospital.
According to investigations, Israel had invoked the Hannibal Procedure, the code name for an order allowing the army to use any means to stop one of its soldiers being taken. That includes killing civilians as “collateral damage” and, more controversially for Israelis, the soldier himself.
Gantz’s video flashes up a grand total of “1,364 terrorists killed”, in return for “three-and-a-half years of quiet”. As Israel’s liberal Haaretz daily observed, the video “celebrates a body count as if this were just some computer game”.
But the casualty figure cited by Gantz exceeds even the Israel army’s self-serving assessment – as well, of course, as dehumanising those “terrorists” fighting for their freedom.
A more impartial observer, Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, estimates that the Palestinian fighters killed by Israel amounted to 765. By their reckoning, and that of other bodies such as the United Nations, almost two-thirds of Gazans killed in Israel’s 2014 operation were civilians.
Further, the “quiet” Gantz credits himself with was enjoyed chiefly by Israel.
In Gaza, Palestinians faced regular military attacks, a continuing siege choking off essential supplies and destroying their export industries, and a policy of executions by Israeli snipers firing on unarmed demonstrators at the perimeter fence imprisoning the enclave.
Gantz’s campaign slogans “Only the Strong Wins” and “Israel Before Everything” are telling. Everything, for Gantz, clearly includes human rights.
It is shameful enough that he believes his track record of war crimes will win over voters. But the same approach has been voiced by Israel’s new military chief of staff.
Aviv Kochavi, nicknamed the Philosopher Officer for his university studies, was inaugurated this month as the army’s latest head. In a major speech, he promised to reinvent the fabled “most moral army in the world” into a “deadly, efficient” one.
In Kochavi’s view, the rampaging military once overseen by Gantz needs to step up its game. And he is a proven expert in destruction.
In the early stages of the Palestinian uprising that erupted in 2000, the Israeli army struggled to find a way to crush Palestinian fighters concealed in densely crowded cities under occupation.
Kochavi came up with an ingenious solution in Nablus, where he was brigade commander. The army would invade a Palestinian home, then smash through its walls, moving from house to house, burrowing through the city unseen. Palestinian space was not only usurped, but destroyed inside-out.
Gantz, the former general hoping to lead the government, and Kochavi, the general leading its army, are symptoms of just how complete the militaristic logic that has overtaken Israel really is. An Israel determined to become a modern-day Sparta.
Should he bring about Netanyahu’s downfall, Gantz, like his predecessor politician-generals, will turn out to be a hollow peace-maker. He was trained to understand only strength, zero-sum strategies, conquest and destruction, not compassion or compromise.
More dangerously, Gantz’s glorification of his military past is likely to reinforce in Israelis’ minds the need not for peace but for more of the same: support for an ultranationalist right that bathes itself in an ethnic supremacist philosophy and dismisses any recognition of the Palestinians as human beings with rights.
The religion of “the Holocaust” is a secular one: it belongs to the lay world; it is profane; in actuality, it has at its disposal the secular arm, that is a temporal authority with dreaded power. It has its dogma, its commandments, its decrees, its prophets and its high priests. As one revisionist has observed, it has its circle of saints, male and female, amongst whom, for example, Saint Anne (Frank), Saint Simon (Wiesenthal) and Saint Elie (Wiesel). It has its holy places, its rituals and its pilgrimages. It has its sacred (and macabre) buildings and its relics (in the form of cakes of soap, shoes, toothbrushes, …). It has its martyrs, its heroes, its miracles and its miraculous survivors (in the millions), its golden legend and its righteous ones. Auschwitz is its Golgotha. For it, God is called Yahweh, protector of his chosen people, who, as said in one of the psalms of David (number 120), recently invoked by a female public prosecutor, Anne de Fontette, during the trial in Paris of a French revisionist, punishes “lying lips” (by, incidentally, sending them the “sharp arrows of the mighty, with coals of juniper”). For this religion, Satan is called Hitler, condemned, like Jesus in the Talmud, to boil for eternity in excrement. It knows neither mercy, nor forgiveness, nor clemency but only the duty of vengeance. It amasses fortunes through blackmail and extortion and acquires unheard-of privileges. It dictates its law to the nations. Its heart beats in Jerusalem, at the Yad Vashem monument, in a land taken over from the natives; in the shelter of a 26-foot high wall built to protect a people who are the salt of the earth, the companions of the “Holocaust” faith rule over the goy with a system that is the purest expression of militarism, racism and colonialism.
A quite recent religion whose growth has been meteoric
Although it is largely an avatar of the Hebraic religion, the new religion is quite recent and has exhibited meteoric growth. For the historian, the phenomenon is exceptional. Most often a religion of universal scope has its origins in remote and obscure times, a fact that makes the task of historians of religious ideas and institutions rather arduous. However, as luck would have it for that type of historian, in the space of fifty-odd years (1945-2000), right before our eyes, a new religion, that of “the Holocaust”, has suddenly come into being and proceeded to develop with astonishing speed, spreading nearly everywhere. It has conquered the West and intends to impose itself on the rest of the world. Any researcher interested in the historical phenomenon made up by the birth, life and death of religions ought therefore to seize the occasion, never so much as hoped for, thus offered to study from up close the birth and life of this new religion, then calculate its chances of survival and the possibility of its demise. Any specialist of war watching out for indications of a coming conflagration would owe it to himself to survey the risks of a warlike crusade such as the one into which this conquering religion may take us.
A religion that embraces consumerism
As a rule, consumer society places religions and ideologies in difficulty or danger. Each year, growth in both industrial production and business activity creates in peoples’ minds new needs and desires, truly concrete ones, lessening their thirst for the absolute or their aspiration towards an ideal, factors that religions and ideologies feed on. Besides, the progress of scientific thinking makes people more and more sceptical as to the truth of religion’s stories and the promises it gives them. Paradoxically, the only religion to prosper today is the “Holocaust” religion, ruling, so to speak, supreme and having those sceptics who are openly active cast out from the rest of mankind: it labels them “deniers”, whilst they call themselves “revisionists”.
These days the ideas of homeland, nationalism or race, as well as those of communism or even socialism, are in crisis or even on their way to extinction. Equally in crisis are the religions of the Western world, including the Jewish religion, and in their turn but in a less visible manner, so are the non-Western religions, themselves confronted by consumerism’s force of attraction; whatever one may think, the Moslem religion is no exception: the bazaar attracts bigger crowds than the mosque and, in certain oil-rich kingdoms, consumerism in its most outlandish forms poses an ever more insolent challenge to the rules for living laid down by Islam.
Roman Catholicism, for its part, is stricken with anaemia: to use Céline’s phrase, it has become “christianaemic”. Amongst the Catholics whom Benedict XVI addresses, how many still believe in the virginity of Mary, the miracles of Jesus, the physical resurrection of the dead, everlasting life, in heaven, purgatory and hell? The churchmen’s talk is usually limited to trotting out the word that “God is love”. The Protestant religions and those akin to them are diluted, along with their doctrines, in an infinity of sects and variants. The Jewish religion sees its members, more and more reluctant to observe so many peculiar rules and prohibitions, deserting the synagogue and, in ever greater numbers, marrying outside the community.
But whereas Western beliefs or convictions have lost much of their substance, faith in “the Holocaust” has strengthened; it has ended up creating a link – a religion, according to standard etymology at any rate, is a link (religat religio) – that enables disparate sets of communities and nations to share a common faith. All in all, Christians and Jews today cooperate heartily in propagating the holocaustic faith. Even a fair number of agnostics or atheists can be seen lining up with enthusiasm under the “Holocaust” banner. “Auschwitz” is achieving the union of all.
The fact is that this new religion, born in the era where consumerism expanded so rapidly, bears all the hallmarks of consumerism. It has its vigour, cleverness and inventiveness. It exploits all the resources of marketing and communication. The vilest products of Shoah Business are but the secondary effects of a religion that, intrinsically, is itself a sheer fabrication. From a few scraps of a given historical reality, things that were, after all, commonplace in wartime (like the internment of a good part of the European Jews in ghettos or camps), its promoters have built a gigantic historical imposture: the imposture, all at once, of the alleged extermination of the Jews of Europe, of camps allegedly equipped with homicidal gas chambers and, finally, of an alleged six million Jewish victims.
A religion that seems to have found the solution to the Jewish question
Throughout the millennia, the Jews, at first generally well received in the lands that have taken them in, have ended up arousing a phenomenon of rejection leading to their expulsion but, quite often, after leaving through one door, they have re-entered through another door. In several nations of continental Europe, in the late 19th and early 20th century, the phenomenon appeared once more. “The Jewish question” was especially put in Russia, Poland, Romania, Austria-Hungary, Germany and France. Everyone, beginning with the Jews themselves, then set about looking for “a solution” to this “Jewish question”. For the Zionists, long a minority amongst their coreligionists, the solution could only be territorial. The thing to do was to find, with the accord of the imperial powers, a territory that Jewish colonists could settle. This colony might be located, for example, in Palestine, Madagascar, Uganda, South America, Siberia, … Poland and France envisaged the Madagascar solution whilst the Soviet Union created in southern Siberia the autonomous Jewish sector of Birobijan. As for National Socialist Germany, she was to study the possibility of settling the Jews in Palestine but wound up realising, from 1937, the unrealistic nature of the idea and the great wrong to the Palestinians that such a project would entail. Subsequently the 3rd Reich wanted to create a Jewish colony in a part of Poland (the Judenreservat of Nisko, south of Lublin), then in its turn, in 1940, it seriously considered creating a colony in Madagascar (the Madagascar Projekt). Two years later, beset by the necessities of a war to wage on land, sea and in the air and taken up with the more and more distressing concerns of having to save German cities from a deluge of fire, to safeguard the very life of his people, to keep the economy of a whole continent running, a continent so poor in raw materials, Chancellor Hitler made it known to his entourage, notably in the presence of Reichsminister and head of the Reichskanzlerei Hans-Heinrich Lammers, that he intended to “put off solving the Jewish question till after the war”. Constituting within her a population necessarily hostile to a Germany at war, the Jews – in any case a large portion of them – had to be deported and interned. Those able to work were made to do so, the others were confined in concentration camps or transit camps. Never did Hitler either desire or authorise the massacre of Jews and his courts martial went so far as to order the death penalty, even in Soviet territory, for soldiers found guilty of excesses against Jews. Never did the German State envisage anything else, as concerned the Jews, than “a final territorial solution of the Jewish question” (eine territoriale Endlösung der Judenfrage) and it takes all the dishonesty of our orthodox historians to evoke incessantly “the final solution of the Jewish question” and deliberately evade the adjective “territorial”, so important here. Up to the end of the war, Germany kept on offering to deliver interned Jews to the western Allies, but on condition that they then stay in Britain, for example, and not go and invade Palestine to torment “the noble and valiant Arab people”. There was nothing exceptional about the fate of Europe’s Jews in the general blaze of war. It would have deserved just a mention in the great book of Second World War history. One may therefore quite rightly be astonished that today the fate of the Jews should be considered the essential feature of that war.
After the war it was in the land of Palestine and to the detriment of the Palestinians that the upholders of the “Holocaust” religion found – or believed they’d found – the final territorial solution to the Jewish question.
A religion that, previously, groped along with its sales methods
(Raul Hilberg’s recantation)
I suggest that sociologists undertake a history of the new religion by examining the extremely varied techniques in line with which this “product” was created, launched and sold over the years 1945-2000. They can thus measure the distance between the often clumsy procedures of the beginning and the sophistication, at the end, of the packagings designed by our present-day spin doctors (crooked “com” experts) for their presentations of “the Holocaust”, henceforth a compulsory and kosher mass-consumer product.
In 1961, Raul Hilberg, first of the “Holocaust” historians, “the pope” of exterminationist science, published the first version of his major work, The Destruction of the European Jews. He expressed in doctoral manner the following thesis: Hitler had given orders for an organised massacre of the Jews and all was explained as somehow coming of those orders. This way of displaying the merchandise was to end in a fiasco. With the revisionists asking to see the Hitler orders, Hilberg was compelled to admit that they had never existed. From 1982 to 1985, under the pressure of the same revisionists asking to see just what the magical homicidal gas chambers, in technical reality, looked like, he was led to revise his presentation of the holocaustic product. In 1985, in the “revised and definitive” edition of the same book, instead of taking an assertive, curt stance with the reader-customer, he sought to get round him with all sorts of convoluted phrases, appealing to a supposed taste for the mysteries of parapsychology or the paranormal. He expounded on the history of the destruction of the European Jews without in the least bringing up any order, from Hitler or anyone else, to exterminate the said Jews. He explained everything by a kind of diabolical mystery through which, spontaneously, the German bureaucrats told themselves to kill the Jews to the very last.“Countless decision makers in a far-flung bureaucratic machine” took part in the extermination enterprise by virtue of a “mechanism”, and did so without any “basic plan” (p. 53); these bureaucrats “created an atmosphere in which the formal, written word could gradually be abandoned as a modus operandi” (p. 54); there were “basic understandings of officials resulting in decisions not requiring orders or explanations”; “it was a matter of spirit, of shared comprehension, of consonance and synchronization”; “no one agency was charged with the whole operation”; “no single organization directed or coordinated the entire process” (p. 55). In short, according to Hilberg, this concerted extermination had indeed taken place but there was no possibility of actually demonstrating it with the aid of specific documents. Two years previously, in February 1983, during a conference at Avery Fischer Hall in New York, he had presented this strange and woolly thesis as follows: “What began in 1941 was a process of destruction not planned in advance, not organized centrally by any agency. There was no blueprint and there was no budget for destructive measures. They were taken step by step, one step at a time. Thus came about not so much a plan being carried out, but an incredible meeting of minds, a consensus-mind reading by a far-flung bureaucracy”. To sum up, that vast project of destruction was executed, magically, by telepathy and by the diabolical workings of the “Nazi” bureaucratic genius. It can be said that with Hilberg, historical science has thus turned cabalistic or religious.
Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, at their end, wanted to set off on the same road of fake science when they called upon French pharmacist Jean-Claude Pressac for assistance. For several years the poor Pressac strove to sell the tainted product in a pseudo-scientific form but, realising the imposture, in 1995 he did a complete turnaround and admitted that, all things considered, the dossier of “the Holocaust” was “rotten” and fit only “for the rubbish bins of history”; such were his own words. The news of his change of heart was to be kept hidden for five years, emerging only in 2000 at the end of a long book by Valérie Igounet, another Shoah peddler, entitled Histoire du négationnisme en France (Seuil, p. 652).
A religion that has at last discovered the up to date sales techniques
It was then that the spin doctors came onto the scene. What with the product having become suspect and potential customers starting to ask questions, the “Holocaust” religion’s management had to steer an altogether different course and give up defending the merchandise with ostensibly scientific arguments: their new approach would be a resolutely “modern” one. It was decided to set only the very least store by efforts at logical argumentation and to replace serious research with appeals to sentiment and emotion, in other words with art: the cinema, theatre, historical novels, shows, story telling (the contemporary art of throwing together an account or framing a “testimony”), the media circus, stage designs in museums, public ceremonies, pilgrimages, worshiping of (false) relics and (false) symbols (symbolic gas chambers, symbolic numbers, symbolic witnesses), incantations, music and even kitsch, the whole thing matched with assorted ways of forcing people to buy it, including various kinds of threats. The filmmaker Steven Spielberg, a specialist in dishevelled and extraterrestrial fiction, has become the leading instigator for holocaustic films as well as for the casting of 50,000 witnesses. In order to sell their tainted product better in the long term, our fake historians and real junk dealers have sought and obtained the primary school “franchise”, with which they instil a taste for “the Holocaust” in the very youngest clientele: for it’s in the earliest years that appetites are acquired, making so that, later on, the customer need hardly be enticed: he’ll demand on his own what he enjoyed as a child, be it sweets or poison. Thus has it come to be that no one involved could care less about history: all serve the sole cause of a certain Remembrance, that is a jumble of legends and slanders that give the public the pleasure of feeling good andrighteous, ready tosing the virtues of the poor Jew and curse the intrinsically wicked “Nazis”, to call for vengeance and spit on the graves of the defeated. At the end it only remains to collect a flood of cold hard cash and receive new privileges. Pierre Vidal-Naquet was but an amateur: in 1979, he had shown himself from the outset to be too basic, too rough in his “Holocaust” promotion. For example, when asked by the revisionists to explain how in blazes, after a gassing operation with hydrogen cyanide (the active ingredient in the insecticide “Zyklon B”), a squad of Jews (Sonderkommando) could enter unharmed into a room still full of that terrible gas, then handle and remove up to a few thousand corpses infused with poison, he, along with 33 other academics, replied that he simply need not provide any explanation. Spielberg, a more skilful man, was to show in a screen drama a “gas chamber” wherein, for once, “by a miracle”, the showerheads sprayed… water and not gas. Subsequently, in his turn, Vidal-Naquet had, quite awkwardly, attempted to answer the revisionists on the scientific level and made a fool of himself. Claude Lanzmann, for his part, in the film Shoah, sought to produce testimonies or confessions, but his result was clumsy, inept and hardly convincing; that said, at least he’d grasped that the main point was to “make movies” and occupy the public forum. Today there is no longer a single “historian” of “the Holocaust” who makes it his business to prove the reality of “the Holocaust” and its magical gas chambers. All of them do like Saul Friedländer in his latest book (L’Allemagne nazie et les juifs / Les années d’extermination, Seuil, 2008): they leave it as understood that it all existed. With them history becomes axiomatic, although their axioms aren’t even drawn up. These new historians proceed with such self-assurance that the reader, taken aback, doesn’t realise the trick being played on him: the smooth talkers go on endlessly about an event whose reality they haven’t established in the first place. And so it is that the customer, believing that he’s bought some goods, has actually bought the smooth talk of the one giving him the sales pitch. Today’s world champion of holocaustic bluff is a shabbos goy, Father Patrick Desbois, one hell of a trickster whose various productions dedicated to “the Holocaust by bullets”, notably in the Ukraine, seem to have reached the very peaks of Judeo-Christian media hype.
A success story of the great powers
A veritable success story in the art of selling, the holocaustic enterprise has acquired the status of an international lobby. This lobby has blended with the American Jewish lobby (whose flagship organisation is the AIPAC) which itself defends, tooth and nail, the interests of the State of Israel, of which “the Holocaust” is the sword and shield. The mightiest nations in the world can hardly allow themselves to annoy such a network of pressure groups which, under a religious veneer, was at first a commercial concern only to become later on military-commercial, constantly pushing for new military adventures. It follows that if other countries, called “emerging”, want to be in good graces with a certain more powerful one, then they would be well advised to bend to its wishes. Without necessarily professing their faith in “the Holocaust”, they will contribute, if need be, to the propagation of “the Holocaust” and to the repression of those who dispute its reality. The Chinese, for example, although they have no use at all for such nonsense themselves, keep well away from any calling into question of the “Jewish Holocaust”; this enables them to pose as the “Jews” of the Japanese during the last war and so point out that they too have been victims of genocide, a formula which, they think, may open the way to financial reparations and political profits, as it has done for the Jews.
A particularly mortal religion
The future trouble for the religion of “the Holocaust” lies in the fact that it is too secular. Here one may well think of the Papacy, which, in centuries past, drew its political and military strength from a temporal power that, in the final analysis, ended up causing its downfall. The new religion is hand in glove with, all together, the State of Israel, the United States, the European Union, NATO, Russia, the big banks (which, as in the case of the Swiss banks, it can force to knuckle under if they show unwillingness to pay out), international racketeering and the arms merchants’ lobbies. This being the case, who can guarantee it a solid base in the future? It has made itself vulnerable by endorsing, de facto, the policies of nations or groups with inordinate appetites, whose spirit of worldwide crusade, as may be particularly noted in the Near and Middle East, has become adventurist.
It has come to pass that religions disappear with the empires where they used to reign. This is because religions, like civilisations, are mortal. That of “the Holocaust” is doubly mortal: it spurs countries to go on warlike crusades and it is rushing to its doom. It will rush to its doom even if, in the last instance, the Jewish State vanishes from the land of Palestine. The Jews then dispersed throughout the world will have only one last resort, that of bewailing this “Second Holocaust”.
***
Translator’s note: The italicised English words are in English in the original.
NB: Already in 1980, in my book Mémoire en défense contre ceux qui m’accusent de falsifier l’histoire (“Statement of case against those who accuse me of falsifying history”, La Vieille Taupe, Paris), I dealt with “the new religion” of “the Holocaust” (p. 261-263). In 2006 I wrote two articles on the subject: “La ‘Mémoire juive’ contre l’Histoire ou l’aversion juive pour toute recherche approfondie sur la Shoah” (“‘Jewish Remembrance’ versus History, or the Jewish aversion to any thorough research on the Shoah”) and “Le prétendu ‘Holocauste’ des juifs se révèle de plus en plus dangereux” (“The Alleged ‘Holocaust’ of the Jews is proving ever more dangerous”).
The second may be found here in English translation.
Three Florida state lawmakers have introduced a bipartisan bill that uses a new, Israel-centric definition of “anti-Semitism” that experts say would censor information about Israel-Palestine in Florida public schools and colleges.
The bill’s sponsor is Republican Mike Caruso of Palm County. The co-sponsors are Democrat Michael Grieco of Miami Beach and Republican Anthony Sabatini of Lake County.
Israel partisans are promoting such bills around the United States at both the state and federal level. The bills are part of an international effort to use an Israeli created redefinition of anti-Semitism to prohibit and even at times criminalize the dissemination of negative facts about Israel.
Legislation using using the same Israel-centric definition has been introduced in the U.S. Congress.
Section #7 of the Florida bill states that “a public K-20 educational institution must take into consideration anti-Semitism when determining if a practice or act was discrimination on the basis of religion. For purposes of this section, the term ‘anti-Semitism’ means all of the following…” The bill then lists 13 actions that are “anti-Semitic.” Nine of them concern Israel.
The standard, dictionary definition of anti-Semitism, discrimination or hostility against Jews, says nothing about Israel.
The new, Israel-centric definition of anti-Semitism was first formulated by an Israeli government minister in 2004. The official then assisted in procuring the adoption of this formulation in the United States. Israel partisan Hannah Rosenthal adopted it in the U.S. State Department in 2010.
‘Poses threat to free speech’
Numerous analysts oppose the bills on the basis that they violate freedom of speech and academic inquiry.
The Miami New Times reports that the ACLU of Florida plans to track the bill’s progress to ensure that it doesn’t silence political speech. An ACLU Florida spokesperson said that addressing anti-Semitism and all forms of religious discrimination “is crucial, but it does not justify silencing constitutionally protected speech. All Floridians have the right to free speech without the threat of government interference.”
The national American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has a record of opposing such legislation, stating that it poses “a serious threat to the First Amendment free speech rights of those on campus who may hold certain political views.”
In a letter of opposition to the federal bill, the ACLU stated: “The First Amendment prevents the federal government from using its great weight to impose severe penalties on a person simply for sharing a political viewpoint critical of Israel.”
An ACLU analysis points out that “anti-Semitic harassment is already illegal under federal law.” The new legislation “does not change that fact, but its overbreadth makes it likely that it will instead silence criticism of Israel that is protected by the First Amendment.”
The article, entitled “The Latest Attack on Free Speech in the Israel-Palestine Debate,” states that there is a “disturbing surge of government-led attempts to suppress the speech of people on only one side of the Israel-Palestine debate. The trend manifests on college campuses, in state contracts, and even in bills to change federal criminal law, but the impact is the same: Those who seek to protest, boycott, or otherwise criticize the Israeli government are being silenced.”
The authors conclude: “These efforts to censor criticism of the Israeli government and advocacy for Palestinian rights do a disservice to the real problem of anti-Semitism in the United States.”
‘Affront to academic freedom’
One of the individuals who helped write the Israel-centric definition, attorney Kenneth Stern, has written that imposing it on campuses is “unconstitutional and unwise.” According to Stein, applying the definition to colleges “is a direct affront to academic freedom.”
Mike Caruso, sponsor of the Florida bill, is serving his first term in the Florida legislature after an extremely close election, winning with a 32-vote margin out of about 80,000 votes cast.
He represents Palm Beach County, known as a particularly pro-Israel area of Florida; approximately one third of the residents are Jewish and there are frequent pro-Israel events in the area. The local Jewish Federation website features a prominent announcement for the 2019 convention of the Israeli American Council, which advocates for Israel.
Recent related legislation
The U.S. House of Representatives earlier this month passed a bill that would force President Trump to appoint a special envoy who would monitor criticism of Israel.
The position was created in 2005 as part of the effort for the U.S. to adopt the Israel-centric definition. The bill has not yet gone to the Senate.
The first Senate bill of 2019, S.1, would finalize a $38 billion package to Israel, the largest military aid package in U.S. history. Attempts to move the bill to a quick vote have stalled while Congress debates the government shutdown.
The bill is sponsored by Florida Senator Marco Rubio, whose major backers include pro-Israel advocates Norman Braman, a Florida businessman, Paul Singer, and casino magnate Sheldon Adelson.
A companion bill, H.R.336, has been introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Israel has warned Ireland over passing a bill to ban imports of West Bank settlement products, saying the legislation, if adopted, would have “severe ramifications” on mutual relations, AP reported.
Israel’s Foreign Ministry said Friday it summoned Irish Ambassador Alison Kelly to the headquarters in Jerusalem and made Israel’s stance on the matter clear to her.
The ministry says the bill, which was advanced in Ireland’s lower house of parliament on Thursday, is “hypocritical and anti-Semitic.”
The law envisions prison terms and high fines for Irish businesses trading with goods originating from illegal settlements on occupied land.
If the bill becomes law, Ireland would become the first European country to ban settlement goods and would apply to illegal occupations anywhere in the world, not just Palestine and Israel.
The EU in 2015 issued guidelines on labeling settlement products. Palestinians see the West Bank as part of their future state.
The attempt by some in Israel to link the escalation on the Gaza border with external factors and Iranian orders was not successful. According to Haaretz newspaper’s military correspondent, Yaniv Kubovich, some security circles in Israel are claiming that the reason for the escalation was the hunger strike organised by the Islamic Jihad prisoners in Ofer Prison. However, the more accurate reason is that security agencies with narrow interests in Erdan’s interior ministry and the prison authorities attacked Palestinian prisoners, beginning with the Islamic jihad prisoners and then extended to the rest of the Palestinian prisoners.
These hostile parties believe that the Palestinian prisoners are living in a vacuum and that the attacks on them will not have any repercussions. They seem to have forgotten the hunger strike by the administrative prisoners, which led to a domino effect that resulted in a war that shook Israel for 51 days in 2014.
The security and political level in Israel can learn a valuable lesson from the escalation in Gaza occurring on January 22nd. The experience is that any attack or assault on prisoners in a barbaric manner is considered an attack on the region’s security and specifically Israel’s security. Based on this, the decision-making rules regarding the prisoners could change in a manner that does not allow those with narrow interests to make decisions that implications and consequences on Israel’s interests and security.
It is unclear whether the sniper bullet that hit the helmet of a secret commander in the Israeli army, almost killing him on January 22nd is in line with the rules of fire and understandings reached by the Palestinian resistance factions in the Gaza Strip with the Israeli occupation authorities mediated by Egypt. However, it is apparent that the Palestinian prisoners are highly regarded and respected, especially among the Palestinian people and all the Palestinian resistance factions, especially in this case the Al-Quds Brigades and Islamic Jihad. This has reached the extent of Islamic Jihad fighters targeting an Israeli officer and exposing the area to escalation. This may be because they are aware that the increase would be limited, and it may be useful to respond to the series of Israeli attacks and delays in all matters relating to understandings regarding prisoners and Gaza.
Yesterday’s incident was followed by Israeli responses, which were exaggerated as usual, in the form of attacking the resistance’s sites, leading to the death of wounding of several Palestinians. This was then followed by Netanyahu’s decision to stop the entry of Qatari funds into Gaza. These actions indicate the extent of national concern, especially in the case of the prisoners, firmly and proudly endured by the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. This is at a time when many Arabs and Palestinians, especially in the leadership, abandoned the issues and concerns of their people to serve personal, narrow, or mistaken interests.
Hence, the escalation incident yesterday highlighted the fact that the prisoner issue is a matter of Palestinian national security, and that the abuse of prisoners inside the prisons and the unjust attacks on them, such as that taking place in Ofer two days ago, will also affect the Israeli national security. Many Israeli leaders and influential figures have acknowledged this, but will Minister Erdan and those like him realise this?
Image of a demonstration against Elor Azarya, the Israeli soldier charged with manslaughter after shooting a wounded Palestinian in the head [Wisam Hashlamoun/Apaimages]
An Israeli deputy minister has recruited former soldier and convicted killer Elor Azaria in a campaign video ahead of Likud party primaries scheduled for 5 February, reported the Jerusalem Post.
Deputy Environmental Protection Minister Yaron Mazuz posted a video on his Facebook page yesterday showing him seated next to Azaria.
“I am sitting next to my friend Elor Azaria, whom we enlisted to our primaries campaign, and with God’s help, together with him, we will succeed,” Mazuz tells the camera.
According to the report, the video ends “with a picture of Mazuz and Azaria, who appeared to be laughing together”.
Israel’s Channel 12 reported that Mazuz gave Azaria a paid position on his campaign, and called him “intelligent and diligent”.
“We have to support our soldiers and let them act according to the threats they face in the battlefield,” Mazuz told Channel 12. “We cannot tie their hands and neuter them when facing vile murderers.”
In March 2016, Azaria shot wounded Palestinian Abdel Fatah Al-Sharif in the head in Hebron, in the occupied West Bank. He eventually served just 14 months of an 18-month manslaughter sentence.
Azaria became a popular cause for a number of right-wing Israeli politicians and groups, with rallies in support of the soldier.
In late January Aiia al Maasarwe, initially described in the Australian media as an ‘Israeli student’, then as an ‘Arab Israeli’ but never as a Palestinian, the correct description, was murdered in Melbourne.
Aiia, a student of Chinese and English, was in Melbourne as an exchange student, had traveled home by tram after watching a comedy show and was talking to her sister in Palestine when she was attacked, raped and killed while walking a kilometer home late at night.
It was a shocking crime and Melbourne was appalled. The tram she had taken, no. 86, stopped at all stops so people could get on with bundles of flowers to be delivered to the crime scene. Government officials, including the Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, made statements expressing their horror.
Compare this with Israel where, to quote The Times of Israel,
“While the murder is major news in Australia, it is not in Israel despite the fact that the two countries have comparable murder rates … no Israeli official has said anything of substance about the killing … while the murder is on the front page of leading Australian newspapers it merits merely a blip on the front page of Israel’s dailies, as will most killings of a not-terror nature.”
In the week after her death, the Israeli embassy in Canberra made contact with the family in Aiia’s home town, Baqa al Gharbiyya, but there was no personal contact from anyone in the government until President Reuven Rivlin wrote to the family.
Baqa al Gharbiyya is not ‘mostly Arab’ as the Australian media, genuflecting to Israel as always, reported but wholly Palestinian. Until Israel began building its apartheid wall in 2000, there was one Baqa: now the wall cuts it into two, Baqa al Gharbiyya (western Baqa), inside pre-1967 Israel, and Baqa al Sharqiyya (eastern Baqa), inside the territories taken in 1967.
Writing in the Guardian, Jennine Khalik, a Sydney-based Palestinian, wrote that while it should not matter where the murdered young woman came from, it did. Either through ignorance or through deliberate suppression, the Australian media insisted that this young Palestinian was an ‘Arab Israeli,’ the official Israeli description of its Palestinian population, and a term rejected by almost all Palestinians.
In keeping with its drive to eradicate Palestine from the map, in every way and at every level, the government of Israel refuses to call its Palestinian population ‘Palestinian.’ It prefers the generic ‘Arab’ which means they come anywhere and could belong anywhere in the Middle East, except in their homeland.
Haifa University professor Sami Smooha carried out a survey in 2017 which showed that only 16 percent of Palestinians living within pre-1967 Israel was willing to be called ‘Arab Israelis.’
They have exactly the same attitude to their Palestinian identity as Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank, occupied Jerusalem and the occupied Gaza Strip. The Palestinians inside pre-1967 Israel are not living in a state of its citizens like other states but a state for and of the Jewish people. By legal definition they are second class, a status deliberately created by discriminatory laws at every level and now reinforced by the passage last year of the nation-state law.
This law, declaring that Israel is a Jewish nation-state, automatically excludes the Palestinian 17.5 per of the population, Sunni or Christian, plus all others (including the Druze who serve in the armed forces) who are not Jewish.
The law is the inevitable product of a racist ideology which never intended Jews to live peacefully with the Palestinians but to live in Palestine instead of them. The consequence has been an endless round of wars with and on neighboring states, plus deepening oppression of the Palestinian people in the further territories stolen in 1967, as well as oppression of Syrians in the occupied Golan. For Israel to survive as a Jewish state on stolen land this is as it must be.
By and large, this process is supported by the Israeli Jewish population, amongst whom racism has been deliberately inculcated by religious and political leaders to the level of hatred of Palestinians, delight in their suffering and endless justification when they are killed.
Let’s get straight to a central issue here. Had the young woman murdered in Melbourne been Jewish, the media would have reported it entirely differently. The story would have been headlines, it would have run for days and there would have been interviews with the family plus phone calls and visits from senior members of the government.
As it was, little attention was paid to the murder in the media and nothing came to the family from the government until Reuven Rivlin sent his letter. From Netanyahu and senior members of the government, there still has been no personal word of condolence for Aiia’s family.
The killing of Aiia can be contrasted with the response to the murder last October of Aisha al-Rabi. Ayesha, from the Nablus district village of Biddya, was in a car with her husband and a daughter when it was pelted with rocks thrown by youths from a nearby settlement.
These twisted youths, the young Zionist pioneers of the present generation, carrying forward the process of occupation and colonization, are hate-filled fanatics. They glory in the death or discomfort of Palestinians. They terrorize, they scrawl anti-Arab graffiti (not anti-Palestinian as they scarcely recognize the Palestinians as human beings let alone as Palestinian) on walls, they harass women and children, they destroy crops and olive trees, they commit acts of arson, they beat and occasionally they murder.
Violence of this nature has tripled in the past year, with 482 ‘incidents’ reported during the 12 months to December compared to 140 for the previous year.
Time to take a stand, one would think, but not in Israel. Even in the most extreme circumstances the violence every excuse is found for the lenient treatment of these settler youths.
Take for example the stoning of the car which killed Ayesha Rabi’a, the mother of eight children. Many stones were thrown, near the Tapuah checkpoint, not just one, and five youths from the nearby settlement yeshiva – a religious seminary where hatred of ‘Arabs’ seems to be high on the agenda – were arrested.
In a state of its citizens, one might expect messages of sympathy to flow towards the family of the murdered woman from senior members of the government. One might expect assurances that justice would be done and the killers punished to the full extent of the law but in an ostensible Jewish state the sympathy flowed in the other direction, towards the families of the youths accused of killing Ayesha.
They were visited by Ayelet Shaked, the so-called ‘justice minister’ in Netanyahu’s coalition government, a vicious racist by any definition.
In 2015 Shaked paid a similar visit to the families of the youths accused of firebombing a Palestinian home at Douma in July, killing three members of the Dawabshe family, husband, and wife and their 18-month-old son Ali, with only five-year-old Ahmad surviving.
Shaked expressed her sympathy with the families’ plight and encouraged one mother to ‘stay strong.’
There was no visit by Shaked or anyone else in the Israeli government to the relatives of the murdered Palestinian family. While public outrage was expressed in demonstrations, settlers continued to celebrate the murders. At a Jewish wedding in Jerusalem in late 2015, guests brandishing Molotov cocktails, knives and guns danced around holding photos above their heads of Ali Dawabsheh which they then proceeded to stab and burn. The persecution of the Dawabsheh family by settlers continued, with a family house being destroyed in May 2018.
In June 2018 the ‘Lod’ (Lydda – ethnically cleansed in 1948) district court ruled out some of the confessions of the accused youths on the grounds that they had been obtained under torture. One of the defendants who had confessed to previous acts of arson, vandalism and the scrawling of hate graffiti on walls was released to house arrest.
Outside the court several dozen ‘hilltop youth’ celebrated, taunting the Dawabsheh grandfather with cries of ‘Where’s Ali? There’s no Ali. Ali is on the grill.’ When Reuven Rivlin condemned Jewish terror he received a spate of death threats. The case against the main defendant continues.
Ayalet Shaked was a member of the Jewish Home party until she broke away recently and founded, along with Naftali Bennett, who also split from the Jewish Home, the Heyemin Hehadash (New Right) party.
This new grouping is being misleadingly defined as ‘conservative’. In fact, it is violently rightwing and racist, effectively a Jewish fascist party. Bennett has boasted of killing ‘Arabs’, while Shaked, like many Zionist racists before her, has compared the Palestinians to snakes.
In the meantime, while all of this goes on inside occupied Palestine, the retiring Israeli army chief, Gadi Eisenkot, has boasted that Israel has carried out thousands of air attacks on Syria in recent years, attacking, in fact, almost on a daily basis.
Many of these attacks have been carried out from Lebanese air space. Some have been made behind the radar shield of civilian aircraft, once behind a Russian military aircraft which was then shot down by Syrian air defenses. A frequent target has been installations around Damascus international airport, prompting the Syrian ambassador at the UN, Bashar al Ja’afiri, to warn that if the UN does not intervene, Syria might be forced to retaliate against Tel Aviv airport.
Eisenkot was the author of the ‘Dahiye doctrine’ according to which the aerial destruction visited on the Beirut suburb of Dahiya – the political headquarters of Hizbullah – in 2006 will be carried out across Lebanon in the next war.
Israel is also campaigning again for war on Iran, if it does not start one by its attacks on Syria. Internally and externally, this racist and violent state, a time bomb planted in the Middle East by the British a century ago, is destined to erupt cataclysmically at some point in the future.
– Jeremy Salt taught at the University of Melbourne, at Bosporus University in Istanbul and Bilkent University in Ankara for many years, specializing in the modern history of the Middle East. Among his recent publications is his 2008 book, The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (University of California Press).
Statement of the Permanent Representative of Syria at the UN, Dr. Bashar Ja’fari, during the Security Council devoted to the situation in the Middle East, including the Palestinian question, January 22nd, 2019.
Transcript:
Thank you, Mr. President.
In the beginning, I congratulate your country [Dominican Republic] for your non-permanent membership in the Security Council, and I congratulate you personally for presiding over the work of this Council during this month. I welcome the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Indonesia, Mrs. Marsudi, and I congratulate Palestine, the State of Palestine for presiding over the G77 + China.
Mr. President,
Yesterday, the Israeli occupation forces once again committed a series of aggression using missiles targeting the Syrian Arab Republic territories from above Lebanese territories – it was mentioned by my colleague, the representative of Lebanon in great detail. They attacked us from above the Lebanese territories, from the occupied Palestinian territories and from the See of Galilee in the occupied Syrian Golan. This was a gross violation of international law, of the UN Charter and of the relevant UN Security Council Resolutions, as well as the 1974 Disengagement Agreement (between Israel and Syria).
These acts of aggression would not have been committed if the Security Council hadn’t failed in compelling the implementation of Security Council Resolutions relevant to the Israeli-Arab conflict over long decades, and were it not for the unlimited support provided by some permanent members of this Security Council to this rogue entity. This encouraged Israel to increase their frequent crimes, violations and State terrorism, away from any kind of accountability, even purely formal. This was demonstrated by the repeated acts of aggression against my country carried out by Israel, and the multifaceted support they provided for years to terrorist organizations.
These acts were not condemned, nor was there any call by the Security Council to stop such acts, in light of the position of the US, Britain and France, who are accomplices and supporters of Israel in such acts of aggression. The policies of these 3 countries and their stances in the UN run counter, in the letter and spirit, to the responsibility they are supposed to shoulder in maintaining international peace and security in line with the international law and the UN Charter’s provisions. The fact that these countries continue to play the role of false witnesses and prevent the Security Council from undertaking its responsibilities will not stop us from exercising our legitimate right of self-defense and work on retaking the occupied Syrian Golan by all means possible.
Mr. President,
Recovering the Syrian Golan is an established right for the Syrian Arab Republic. This imprescriptible right is not subject to negotiations, concessions or expiration. The full withdrawal of the Israeli occupying forces from the Golan, to the June 4th, 1967 line is an obligation that shall be fulfilled. It is an unwavering demand based on the principles of international law and the binding UN International Resolutions, including your own resolutions 242, 338 and 497.
Israel feverishly strives to alter this reality, as we have seen today in the Israeli representative’s intervention – he talked about everything, except the Palestinian cause and the Israeli-Arab conflict. Israel feverishly strives to alter this reality, and keeps uttering aggressive statements and undertaking criminal acts, but they are doomed to fail, and will never lead in any form whatsoever to any prejudice against the legal or sovereign rights of my country.
Certain countries have invested heavily in the terrorist war waged against my country, and counted on the situation of some countries in the region to overshadow Arab rights and choke the voices calling to implement the binding UN International Resolutions imposing the end of the Israeli occupation of Arab land. Moreover, these countries tried to achieve gains for the occupation and promote some suspicious deal to liquidate the Palestinian cause and the established and unwavering rights of the peoples and countries in the region.
They tried to ignite artificial strife and stir surrealist conflicts between countries of the region, in order to deviate their attention from the fundamental cause of what’s happening in the Middle East. All this lack of stability, prosperity and development is because of the continued Israeli occupation, Israeli settlements and Israeli massacre of the Palestinian cause.
Mr. President,
The past period has witnessed many dangerous and systematic Israeli practices, through which the occupying forces tempted to consolidate their control and impose their will on the occupied Syrian Golan. Let us mention for example: holding meetings of the Israeli government in the occupied Syrian Golan; striving to organize illegitimate local elections there; signing deals and issuing permits to loot the natural resources of the Golan; just recently, looting the properties of Syrians and displacing them to establish a project for wind power generation over around 6000 dunams of land, in some of the surrounding sites around the cities of Magd al-Chams, Ayn Qania, Buqata and Massada; and the continuous settlement activity as well as crimes and daily repression against Syrian citizens under the yoke of the occupation. They arrest them and throw them in Israeli prisons arbitrarily, as is still the case of the activist Sedqi al-Maqet, Syria’s Nelson Mandela, and Amal Abu Saleh. They also subject other Syrians to house arrest. The Israeli officials have also issued repeated aggressive statements, which stress that the occupying power cares neither about international law nor about the Resolutions of your Council, and intends to continue its occupation.
Unfortunately, all these issues and their rejection by our people in the Golan did not catch the attention of the Special Coordinator, Mr. Mladinov, so that they could be included in his monthly briefing to you. Worse, he avoided on purpose to call things by their names. He talked to us about about the side “Alpha” and the side “Bravo”, as if each of you knew what means Alpha and what means Bravo [1], instead of issuing a clear condemnation of the almost daily Israeli aggression against the territories of the Syrian Arab Republic, including the continuous aggression against the Damascus International Civil Airport, which is, I repeat, a civilian airport. Such blatant disregard is a political and moral failure to undertake his mandate in a way that turns counter to the principles and rules applicable in the UN, and thus deprives him of any legitimacy.
Mr President, isn’t it high time for this Council to take the necessary measures to stop the repeated Israeli aggression against the territories of my country? Or should we attract the attention of the war makers of this Council by exercising our legitimate right for self-defense and respond to the Israeli aggression against the Damascus International Civil Airport in kind by striking Tel-Aviv Airport?
Mr. President,
We are pragmatic and we know the differences in the political stances of the members of this Council. However, we call upon you to focus on the common ground that joins us, that is the international law, the UN Charter and the Resolutions of this Council of yours. Thus, we stress the necessity for the countries supporting Israel, its policies and stances to review their approach, to stick to that common ground that I have touched upon now, and to work towards the restoration of the legitimate rights to their true owners in line with the binding UN International Resolutions and the internationally recognized bodies. Otherwise, the destiny of this international organization will be just a repeat of the failure of the League of Nations for the same reasons.
Let us remember that many of the calamities suffered by our country came due to the violation of international law and of the UN Charter, through the constitution of illegitimate coalitions like the ones which targeted Irak, Libya, Yemen, Syria and others, and due to call for meetings that bypass the Security Council, like this Warsaw Meeting [called by the US against Iran], or the Middle East Strategic Coalition known among intelligence experts as the NATO of the Middle East. All these coalitions are made outside the UN Security Council.
This begs the question : from where do such coalitions and meetings gain their legitimacy? Are international relations governed by international law and the UN Charter upon which the founding fathers strove to agree? Or are they governed by the will and the destructive agendas of some countries? Are we not correct, Mr. President, to warn that this organization might end up just like the League of Nations if we do not hold a stance against the policies of these countries? The absence of a UN sponsoring of the Warsaw meeting clearly shows that such an approach will not manage to resolve anything, and won’t realize what was announced by the organizers themselves, namingly the drafting of a common strategy on the Middle East. They said themselves that the Warsaw meeting meant to draft a common strategy on the Middle East.
Mr. President,
My country expresses its firm and principled position supporting the rights of the Palestinian people for self-determination and independent statehood over all its territories with Al-Quds (Jerusalem) as its capital, and the right of return of the refugees in line with Resolution 194 of 1948. We renew and stress that any measures that would prejudice those rights are null, void and rejected, and will only escalate tensions and threaten peace and security in the region and in the world.
To conclude, Mr. President, I tell those who are trying to redraw the maps of our region along their own whims that our people, who stood against the unprecedented international terrorist war imposed on us, will also stand against such evil plans, and will thwart them just as he thwarted others over decades.
Thank you, Mr. President
[1]Here is how Nickolay Mladenov, UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, briefed the Security Council on the Israeli aggression, at the beginning of the session:
“On the occupied Golan, the ceasefire between Israel and Syria has been maintained with relative calm and low levels of military activity in the areas of separation and limitation on the Bravo side. UNDOF attributes this activity to controlled detonations of explosive ordnance as part of clearance conducted by Syrian security forces. The relative calm in the UNDOF area of operation was interrupted by events that occurred on 25 December and most recently on 20 and 21 January.
On 25 December, UNDOF observed a helicopter on the Alpha side fire four rockets that impacted on the Bravo side. On that day, UNDOF also heard and observed surface-to-air missiles, anti-aircraft defense guns, rockets and heavy machine guns fired on the Bravo side but could not observe the points of origin or impact.
On 20 and 21 January, UNDOF observed and heard an increase in air activity over, and firing of missiles into, the areas of separation and limitation on the Bravo side. UNDOF liaised with both sides to de-escalate the situation. The observations of military activity coincided with open source reports of Israel’s confirming that it had conducted a series of airstrikes on targets in Syria in response to a missile fired from Syria intercepted by Israel.
Such events demonstrate the volatility of the area and risk jeopardizing the long-standing ceasefire between the two countries. It is critical that both parties to the 1974 Disengagement of Forces Agreement respect the Agreement at all times to prevent escalation across the ceasefire line and actions that undermine progress towards stability in the area.”
The ruthless businessman who financed coups in Central America and shaped Israeli statehood
José Niño Unfiltered | May 7, 2026
Leftist commentators consistently push a shallow and economically reductive narrative that frames American foreign policy as the sole domain of greedy White capitalists while choosing to ignore the obvious Jewish power structure directing these events. When the veneer of this supposed corporate imperialism is stripped away, it becomes clear that the United States has often served as a vehicle for the specific goals of organized Jewry. The life of Samuel Zemurray stands as prime evidence of this hidden mechanism.
Few figures in American business history wielded power as ruthlessly or as secretly as Zemurray. Born Schmiel Zmurri on January 18, 1877, to a poor Jewish family in Imperial Russia, this teenage immigrant would rise from peddling rotting bananas off railroad cars in Alabama to become the controlling force behind the United Fruit Company, the most powerful agricultural corporation on earth. Along the way he overthrew governments, bribed presidents, hired mercenaries, and played a pivotal behind-the-scenes role in the creation of the State of Israel. … continue
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The attempt by some in Israel to link the escalation on the Gaza border with external factors and Iranian orders was not successful. According to Haaretz newspaper’s military correspondent, Yaniv Kubovich, some security circles in Israel are claiming that the reason for the escalation was the hunger strike organised by the Islamic Jihad prisoners in Ofer Prison. However, the more accurate reason is that security agencies with narrow interests in Erdan’s interior ministry and the prison authorities attacked Palestinian prisoners, beginning with the Islamic jihad prisoners and then extended to the rest of the Palestinian prisoners.
Leftist commentators consistently push a shallow and economically reductive narrative that frames American foreign policy as the sole domain of greedy White capitalists while choosing to ignore the obvious Jewish power structure directing these events. When the veneer of this supposed corporate imperialism is stripped away, it becomes clear that the United States has often served as a vehicle for the specific goals of organized Jewry. The life of Samuel Zemurray stands as prime evidence of this hidden mechanism.
Aletho News
Aletho News 