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Erekat: Oslo agreement is dead and we will not abide by it

MEMO | September 14, 2018

Palestinian chief negotiator and a member of the Fatah Central Committee Saeb Erekat has acknowledged that the Oslo agreement signed 25 years ago between Israel and the PLO “has died on the ground because of Israel’s practices”.

Speaking to Al-Khaleej Online, Erekat said: “The Palestinian side has fully complied with all the provisions of the agreement and implemented it on the ground without any failure, but the Israeli side has procrastinated and put obstacles, which lost the agreement its value and its consequences on the Palestinian cause.”

“The Israeli government, headed by Benjamin Netanyahu, has completely destroyed the Oslo agreement and the dream of the two states, and officially announced its death through its racist and arbitrary steps against the Palestinians that continued over the past years. We will not abide by this agreement. We will suspend the recognition of Israel until the Palestinian right to a state and rights are respected.”

Erekat admitted that the fundamental mistake in the Oslo agreement was “the absence of mutual official recognition between the State of Palestine and Israel on the 1967 borders”.

“Israel is fully responsible for the agreement’s failure by disrespecting its provisions as well as occupying the Palestinian territories, expanding the settlements and its aggression against the Palestinians and their rights, properties and sanctities,” he said.

September 14, 2018 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation | , , | Leave a comment

On the Censorship of Michael Hoffman’s Books by Amazon

The Saker • Unz Review • September 13, 2018

A couple of months ago I did an interview with one of the foremost scholars of rabbinical Judaism, Michael Hoffman. The occasion was the release of his latest book “The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome”. At the time I did not expect to have to ask for a follow-up interview with him, but when I learned that Amazon had censored his books (please see Hoffman’s own account of this here). Specifically, the ban is on three of his books. A complete ban (Kindle + printed book) on Judaism’s Strange Gods: Revised and Expanded, as well as The Great Holocaust Trial: Revised and Expanded, while his textbook, Judaism Discovered, has been removed from the Kindle. I felt that I had to talk to him again and he kindly agreed to reply to my questions. I submit to you the full text of our Q&A which I will follow-up with a short commentary.

* * *

The Saker: Please summarize what happened to your books and Amazon and tells us what specific explanations were given to you. Did Amazon ever offer you a “page and paragraph” list of “offending” passages? Do you have any means of knowing exactly what your book is being banned for?

Hoffman: Whether it is Facebook, Google or Amazon, the excuse most often cited for suppression is “content guidelines’ violation.” Amazon notified us on August 13 that two of our titles, which they have been selling for years and in thousands of copies, Judaism Discovered, our 1100 page textbook published in 2008, and Judaism’s Strange Gods: Revised and Expanded, published in 2010 — were being permanently removed after “review” by the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) unit of Amazon. A facsimile of the KDP notice can be viewed here:

https://www.revisionisthistory.org/page8/page8.html

In their e-mail they told us that “… we found that this content is in violation of content guidelines.” In studying their content guidelines one encounters a vague, generic statement about not permitting that which is “offensive.” There is no guidance as to what “offense” has suddenly arisen after these books were sold on Amazon for several years. Like the Red Queen in Wonderland who declared to Alice that, “A word is anything I say it is!” — that which “offends” is anything Amazon says it is. A third book, The Great Holocaust Trial: The Landmark Battle for the Right to Doubt the West’s Most Sacred Relic, was also forbidden.

Does Amazon have the chutzpah to publicly categorize these books as “hate speech” or some other alibi for censorship that could be contested? No, they do not. They leave authors and publishers twisting in the wind, making it more difficult to appeal the decision and report to the public on the tyranny. Although since they allow no appeal, it’s a moot point. Personally, I have no doubt concerning why my books were censored.

The Saker: What is, in your opinion, the true intent behind the ban on the sales of your book? What is Amazon’s interest in this?

Hoffman: I don’t believe Amazon has much interest in this. It is more likely that the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is the interested party. Last August 7 the New York Times online published a revealing piece by David French in which he wrote: “We live in a world where the Southern Poverty Law Center, a formerly respected civil-rights organization, abuses its past trust to label a host of mainstream organizations (including my former employer, the Alliance Defending Freedom) and individuals as ‘hate groups,… based sometimes on… outright misreadings and misrepresentations of an individual’s beliefs and views… Amazon recently booted Alliance Defending Freedom from its AmazonSmile charity program because of the center’s designation.”

At around the time in 2017 that the SPLC was trying to interfere with the business operations of people such as myself, by intimidating banks and credit card processors into refusing to process payments for books, Paypal notified us that due to the contents of our website (www.RevisionistHistory.org) we were an embarrassment to their brand and they were terminating our account. As long as Paypal was owned by libertarians, all was well and we had a high customer satisfaction rating for our integrity and dependability. The original Paypal mainly cared about whether you were a responsible seller. A politicized administration eventually took over Paypal and in 2017 we were terminated, very likely on the “advice” of the SPLC.

To return to Amazon, CEO Jeff Bezos founded it in 1994. It was very much a libertarian book operation from the start. From 1994 until a year or two ago, Amazon only refused to sell hard core pornography and books that constituted direct appeals to violence or law-breaking, which is how it should be. Every other type of book was sold, without censorship, which is one reason for Amazon’s early success and increasing market share. Then last year, after Mr. Bezos had reached the status of one of the world’s wealthiest persons, and Amazon’s total value was beginning to approach that of Apple and Google, Amazon staged a huge purge and eliminated more than a hundred World War II revisionist history books published by Germar Rudolf’s CODOH organization (books smeared as “Holocaust denial”). This year it was my turn. Next year it might be any author not part of the university press syndicates or the major houses. Such is the heedless power and immunity of Amazon.

It’s important to note that the thought police who removed three of my books were based in the digital division of Amazon, where the electronic Kindle books are marketed and managed. A Kindle permits anyone connected to the Amazon website to read approximately the first thirty pages of any Kindle book free of charge. Consequently, my Judaica scholarship was on display around the world and therefore it was much harder to lie about me and mischaracterize my Talmud and Kabbalah research under those circumstances.

We were also beginning to sell ever increasing numbers of these Kindle books to people in Asia, particularly India and Japan. It’s my hunch that Big Brother is not half so worried about printed books as the digital kind. Removing the three books from the Kindle was the primary objective.

To be banned by Amazon is not equivalent to being banned by any other private business. Most publishers will admit that Amazon has replaced Bowker Books in Print as the industry’s authoritative guide to what books in English have been printed in the past and what is in print now. Amazon is currently the reference source. For a book to be forbidden by Amazon renders it largely invisible. It is equivalent to burning the book. So this is not a matter of Amazon exercising the prerogative of private enterprise. Amazon is a monopoly. It has no rival. If your book doesn’t exist on Amazon, then for most people who are not research specialists, your book doesn’t exist. The consequences for the pursuit of knowledge are ominous.

There is a problem here for Amazon as well. The more Amazon excludes books that embody facts and ideas that constitute radical dissent, the more it becomes a narrow censor’s aperture rather than a reliable bridge to the entire range of the Republic of Letters.

Apologists for censorship of radicals and authentic conservatives often claim that no First Amendment rights are violated when Amazon bans books, therefore it is not a civil rights issue, merely an inconvenience of the capitalist system. In the 1950s however, when the privately-owned movie studios banned certain directors, actors and screen-writers judged to be Leftists or Communists, that action on the part of private enterprise was inscribed in the rolls of the culture wars as the infamous “Blacklist,” and we are still reading and weeping over it sixty-five years later. So it depends on whose ox is being gored.

My Judaica studies are free of “Jew hate,” as anyone who peruses the sections in both books titled “To the Judaic Reader” knows. There we state that the books are dedicated to pidyon shevyuim (redemption of the captive), i.e. rescuing those Judaic persons who are in bondage to the Talmud and the Kabbalah.

Our enemies easily turn to their advantage books containing hatred of “The Jews.” What they absolutely have no credible answer to is a critique predicated, as our books are, on a sincere foundation of true Christian love. Boundary-breaking scholarship united to compassionate concern for the welfare of Judaic people is almost unprecedented in this field. This approach makes my studies of Judaism among the most powerful and effective because they are free of the “hate speech” which is the pivot upon which turns the machinery of liberal-approved censorship. For that reason, making Judaism’s Strange Gods: Revised and Expanded, and Judaism Discovered available on the Kindle undercut decades of hatred and libel. Therefore those volumes had to be suppressed.

The Saker: Since this ban was put in place – what reactions have you heard? who has spoken in defense of your scholarship and right to be heard? has anybody taken your defense or spoken up for you?

Hoffman: Ron Unz allowed me to publish a note on the ban at unz.com and you, the Saker, have taken an interest. Our many friends, readers and subscribers have expressed outrage on Twitter and in e-mail. Meanwhile we have contacted everyone from a columnist for Taki’s website to the legacy media, to no discernible effect thus far. The Washington Post, which is owned by Mr. Bezos, has as its motto, “Democracy dies in darkness.” Yet it is in that very darkness where Amazon’s book-banning dwells, due to the apathy of the media and the American Library Association. To ban books by a vulnerable independent scholar is not exactly a daring move in this age where “hate speech” is anything that offends someone’s cherished myth. The definition is so loose it functions as an inquisitor’s sword.

On the positive side, we have seen an uptick in orders to our own online store for the printed books which Amazon has banned [https://truthfulhistory.blogspot.com/2016/02/judaica-books-and-resources.html]. There is no replacement for the banned Kindle editions, however.

The Saker: What do you believe could be done to resist this state of affairs? What can we all do to put a stop to this kind of censorship?

Hoffman: In general, the supporters of the lies of the Overlords wage spiritual and psychological warfare with far more dedication, commitment and self-sacrifice than the purported allies of God’s truth. The Cryptocracy’s defenders are 24/7 militants resolved to contend with their perceived foes with every ounce of their being. Whereas on the side of Christian conservative renewal, with honorable exceptions, I find mainly armchair warriors and folks so enormously distracted by the choices offered by the Internet’s deluge of words and images, that they are nearly paralyzed by the spectacle.

Compare the reception Judge Kavanaugh received in the Senate hearings with that of recent Supreme Court nominees Kagan and Ginsburg. The Republicans were too cowed to seriously confront those ladies. Maintaining decorum was the chief concern of the timid GOP at the time, while Kavanaugh faced a near riot in the visitor’s gallery and extremes of withering interrogation and contempt from defiant Democratic senators.

When CODOH’s books were banned we reported the case extensively online and in our printed newsletter. We contacted an executive with the American Library Association to elicit his response and express our outrage. We did what we could even though we have almost no relationship with CODOH. We would do the same for any person of good will who is denied the right to advance human learning with suppressed facts and ideas. This was formerly a truism in America, up until the rise of the punks of social media who seem to be more like a branch of Antifa than an intellectual class invested in discovery and enlightenment.

Advances in human knowledge are achieved on the basis that “error has rights,” for the reason that enshrined dogmas are often wrong and demonized dissidents are sometimes the bearers of rare discoveries. But the epigram of our time is “Error has no rights,” which was the doctrine of the fiery Inquisition, of the head-chopping French Revolution and of the Bolsheviks and Maoists. If error has no rights then neither does truth, in that what is denounced as hateful error by the mob is sometimes a destabilizing, necessary and even cosmic truth.

* * *

Reading Hoffman’s words I thought that what happened to him is so typical of the Orwellian world we live in where the what I call the “Skripal rules of evidence” (aka “highly likely”) have replaced even basic evidentiary notions, a world in which false flag attacks are announced weeks in advance, a world in which the Planetary Hegemon has declared urbi et orbi that nothing in the body of international law applies to the “indispensable nation” (or to the parasitic host feeding off it) and where “might makes right” has become the motto by which everybody lives. Of course, the censorship of a book cannot be compared to the initiation of a war of aggression (which is the “supreme international crime” under international law: this was the conclusion of the Nuremberg Trial on this topic: To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole ). Still, there is something uniquely devious and evil about the censorship of Hoffman’s books by Amazon, several things in fact:

  1. What is attacked in not a person or even a group, but ideas, arguably the most precious attribute of mankind. This is therefore not only an attack on a human being, but an attack on the very notion of humanity as such
  2. While the method is different, the intention here is no different from the book burnings of the Nazis or the Papacy except that in these latter cases it was obvious who ordered the burning of putatively “degenerate” or “heretical” books. Thus the ideological motive of the Nazis and Papists was always clear whereas in the case of Hoffman this ideological motive is hidden (even if obvious with anybody with a modicum of intelligence).
  3. The ultimate hypocrisy lies in the fact that most so-called libertarians (from the Left to the Right) have nothing to say about this because this is not a case of censorship by government but the action of a corporation which has the “right” to do as it wishes, never mind that the result is still a clear de-facto infringement of Hoffman’s First Amendment rights and the freedom of academic scholarship.
  4. The US government and Congress, by allowing monopolistic corporations such as Amazon to have that kind of power are basically engaging in what I would call “censorship by proxy” which is to be expected from a deep state which now does almost everything by proxy in order to bypass fundamental US and international laws (“extraordinary renditions” anybody?).
  5. Unlike the government which does have to produce at least some evidence before it can censor an individual or organization, a US corporation does not even have to justify itself by a single word. This is viewed as a triumph of deregulation by mindless libertarians who would gladly surrender all their freedoms as long as it is not to the state. In the real world, of course, they still end up handing over their freedoms to the state, except that the state is hiding behind their beloved corporations.

It is also pretty obvious that those who might, at least in theory, have something to say about this kind of censorship by proxy remain silent because, at least according to them, Hoffman is an “anti-Semite” (which, having read many of his books, I can attest is a total falsehood; by way of evidence here are sample pages from his book:

and thus he is undeserving of support. So-called “anti-Semites” are, along with the pedophiles, the “consensus villains” of the day (I explain that in detail here) but what the anti-anti-Semites fail to realize is that each time a “consensus villain” is deprived from his rights, this sets a precedent for everybody else. This is why Yehuda Bauer warned us when he wrote: “Thou shalt not be a victim, Thou shalt not be a perpetrator, And above all, Thou shalt not be a bystander”. To no avail, alas: we live in society of silent bystanders apparently! And when YouTube decides to silence all the Syrian state channels to better prepare for a false flag chemical attack, everybody looks away – “ain’t my problem”…

We all know that in Europe (and in Russia) you can be jailed and your books banned if a court finds them to be “revisionist” or “anti-Semitic” or “hateful” and the like. But at least in Europe (and in Russia), you get your day in court and you can defend yourself against accusations which the state has to prove. In Russia, just last week, a man accused of “rehabilitating National-Socialism” (for reprinting an article by another author!) was found non guilty by a majority of jurors (5 to 3) (the punishment he was facing was a fine and several years in jail). Thank God, in the “home of the brave” no such thing could happen, right?!

True, Hoffman does not risk jail (yet!). But in terms of crushing crimethink, I submit that the US system is much more effective because it allows the deep state to hide behind the veil of corporate malfeasance. There have been plenty of revolutions against a state, but I don’t know of any revolutions against the corporate dictatorship.

You tell me: which is worse, the absence of freedom or the illusion of freedom?

Personally, I find the latter much worse.

I never expected the corporate presstitutes to really care about our freedoms, ditto for the libertarians and the progressive Left. They are all too busy with their narrow ideological agenda. As for the US academic world, it has shown its true face when it allowed the persecution of Professor Norman Finkenstein. But I have to say that I am shocked by the fact that the blogosphere and the so-called “alternative media” has remained so silent in the face of such a blatant censorship by proxy by the deep state against one of the foremost US historians.

I urge all those reading these lines to speak up on Hoffman’s behalf and to support him by purchasing his superb and censored books. This is how every one of us can resist the Hegemon and his rule!

September 13, 2018 Posted by | Book Review, Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Lebanon rejects alleged plan to ‘resettle’ Palestinians

MEMO | September 13, 2018

Lebanese Foreign Minister Jebran Bassil has slammed an alleged US plan to “resettle” Palestinian refugees in neighboring Arab states, Lebanese daily Al-Joumhouria reported Thursday.

Bassil’s remarks came in response to a tweet two days earlier by Israeli Intelligence Minister Yisrael Katz, in which the latter welcomed an alleged plan by US President Donald Trump to “resettle Palestinian refugees in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq”.

In his tweet, Katz did not provide any additional details regarding the alleged US proposal.

Speaking to Al-Joumhouria on Thursday, Bassil stressed his country’s rejection of any such plan.

“Even if the entire world accepted resettlement [of Palestinian refugees], we would reject it,” he was quoted as saying.

“Like we defeated Israel by expelling its occupation [from Southern Lebanon in 2000], we will defeat its resettlement project,” the foreign minister asserted.

“The ‘right of return’ is sacrosanct,” Bassil added, referring to the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes in historical Palestine from which they were driven in 1948 to make way for the new state of Israel.

Lebanon is currently home to roughly 590,000 Palestinian refugees (out of some five million worldwide), according to official Lebanese figures.

September 13, 2018 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , | Leave a comment

French Online Payment Service Provider HelloAsso Refuses to Close Accounts Belonging to BDS Activists

Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee / France (BNC) 09-12-18

HelloAsso, a French company that provides online payment services, has rejected pressure by Israel lobby groups to shut down the accounts of two French groups which support the BDS movement for Palestinian human rights. HelloAsso will continue to provide services to both Association France Palestine Solidarity (AFPS) and BDS-France.

HelloAsso publicized its decision in a tweet explaining that it supports the right of citizens to call for BDS as part of freedom of expression.

In 2016, the European Union stated:

“The EU stands firm in protecting freedom of expression and freedom of association in line with the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, which is applicable on EU Member States’ territory, including with regard to BDS actions carried out on this territory.”

Translation of HelloAsso tweet from French original:

[…] “HelloAsso is an apolitical platform that does not take any position regarding the claims of the BDS movement. HelloAsso nevertheless considers this movement as within the realm of free expression and not as discriminatory or antisemitic.

HelloAsso’s position is supported  by the European Union, which has clearly stated it favours protecting freedom of expression and association, including the right to advocate for BDS .

Therefore, the HelloAsso account of AFPS (Association France Palestine Solidarity) will not be removed.

To all those who criticize  us for hosting these organizations, we respond that the conflation that allows attacks on these organizations is dangerous because it conflates antisemitism, which we condemn without ambiguity, and criticism of the state of Israel, which is a political opinion. This freedom of expression is a fundamental right.

Since its creation, HelloAsso has striven to support freedom of association and to protect the right to freedom of speech because we are a platform that is committed to the model of [non-profit] association and at the same time apolitical, open and enriched by differences of opinion, a reflection of our society.”

The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) is the largest coalition in Palestinian civil society. It leads and supports the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement for Palestinian rights.

September 12, 2018 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Veiled Danger of the ‘Dead’ Oslo Accords

By Ramzy Baroud | Palestine Chronicle | September 12, 2018

Yossi Beilin is back. This unrepentant Israeli ‘peacemaker’ is like the mythical phoenix, continually resurrecting from its ashes. In a recent article in Al-Monitor, Beilin wrote in support of the idea of a confederation between Israel and Palestine.

A confederation “could prevent the need to evacuate settlers and allow those interested to live in Palestine as Israeli citizens, just as a similar number of Palestinian citizens could live in Israel,” he wrote.

Bizarrely, Beilin is promoting a version of an idea that was pushed by Israel’s extremist Defense Minister, Avigdor Lieberman.

The difference between Beilin and Lieberman is in how we choose to perceive them: the former was the godfather of the Oslo Accords 25 years ago, a well-known political ‘dove’ and the former Chairman of the ‘left-leaning’ Meretz party. Lieberman, on the other hand, is purportedly the exact opposite.

When Lieberman suggested population transfer and territorial swaps, all hell broke loose. When Beilin did it, his efforts were perceived as an honest attempt at reviving the dormant ‘peace process.’

That is the brilliance of Beilin, his followers and the whole ‘peace process’ that culminated in the Oslo Accords and the famous White House handshake between the late PLO Chairman, Yasser Arafat, and the late Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, in September 1993. They successfully branded this hideous infringement on international law as a sincere effort at achieving peace between two conflicting parties.

The Donald Trump Administration has long surpassed Oslo and its tired clichés of ‘peace process’, ‘painful compromises’ and ‘trust building’ exercises, etc., as it is promoting something else entirely, the so-called ‘Deal of the Century’.

But Oslo will not go away. It remains a problem because the intellectual foundation that led to its conception is still firmly in place – where only Israel matters and the aspirations of the Palestinian people are still inconsequential.

While Beilin is no longer an influential politician, there are many Yossi Beilins who are still lurking, playing the role of ‘peacemakers‘, meeting behind closed doors, on the sideline of conferences, offering their services as interlocutors, wheelers and dealers, and saviors.

The late Palestinian Professor, Edward Said, was not prophesying when he warned of the disastrous future consequences of Oslo as it was being signed. He was dismissed by mainstream media and pundits as radical, lumped with the other ‘enemies of peace’ on ‘both sides’. But, he, like many other Palestinians, was right.

“Labor and Likud leaders alike made no secret of the fact that Oslo was designed to segregate the Palestinians in noncontiguous, economically unviable enclaves, surrounded by Israeli-controlled borders, with settlements and settlement roads punctuating and essentially violating the territories’ integrity,” he wrote in the Nation.

The colonization of Palestine, for the first time, was accelerating with the consent of the Palestinian leadership. The PLO was turned into a local body with the inception of the Palestinian Authority in 1994. The rights of millions of Palestinian refugees in the diaspora were relegated. The West Bank was divided into areas A, B, and C, each governed by different rules, mostly under the control of the Israeli military.

The ‘Palestinian revolution’ turned into an agonizing process of ‘state-building’, but without state or even contiguous territories. Palestinians who rejected the horrific outcomes of Oslo – protracted expansion of Jewish colonies, continued violent Occupation, normalized through ‘security coordination’ between Israel and the PA – were often abused and deemed extremists.

Meanwhile, successive US administrations continued to fund and defend Israel, unconcerned about its self-tailored job title as the ‘honest peace broker.’

The PA played along because the perks were far too lucrative to be abandoned on principle. A new class of Palestinians had risen, dependent on Oslo for its wealth and affluence.

Even when the Trump Administration cut off the Palestinian Refugees Agency, UNRWA, of all funds, and scrapped the $200 million in humanitarian aid to the PA, the US still released 61 million dollars to the PA to maintain its ‘security cooperation’ with Israel. ‘Israel’s security’ is just too sacred a bond to be broken.

This is why Oslo remains dangerous. It is not the agreement itself that matters, but the mindset behind it – the political and diplomatic discourse that is wholly manufactured to serve Israel exclusively.

In January 2017, Daniel Pipes of the pro-Israel Middle East Forum came up with what seemed like a puerile idea: a ‘way to peace’ between Israel and the Palestinians, based on the simple declaration that Israel has won.

The new strategy requires little by way of negotiations. It merely entails that Israel declares ‘victory’, which Pipes defined as “imposing one’s will on the enemy, compelling him through loss to give up his war ambitions.’

As unconscionable as Pipes’ logic was, a few months later, Congressional Republicans in the US launched the “Israel Victory Caucus.” The co-Chair of the Caucus, Rep. Bill Johnson, ‘predicted’ in April 2017 that Trump would soon be heading to Israel to announce the relocation of the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Since then, the US is following a blueprint of a strategy in which the US advances Israel’s ‘victory’ while imposing conditions of surrender on defeated Palestinians. Despite its more diplomatic and legal language, that was also the essence of Oslo.

Trump, to the satisfaction of Israel’s right-wing Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, may think that he has single-handedly destroyed the Oslo Accords or whatever remained of it. However, judging by his words and actions, Trump has indicated that the spirit of Oslo remains alive: the bribes, the bullying and the fighting for that coveted and final Israeli ‘victory.’

Oslo is not a specific legal document that can be implemented or rejected. It is a spectrum in which the likes of Beilin, Lieberman, and Pipes have more in common than they may think, and in which the fate of the Palestinian people is left to inept leaders, incapable of thinking outside the permissible space allocated to them by the Israelis and the Americans.

Unfortunately, Abbas and his Authority are still reveling at the expense of the space that is Oslo, not the ‘accords’ – provisions, stipulations and heaps of paper – but the corrupt culture – money, perks and unmitigated defeat.

September 12, 2018 Posted by | Corruption, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

Congress today sneaking through $38 billion to Israel

If Americans Knew | September 12, 2018

Israel partisans are sneaking through 2 Congressional bills today! Voters need to phone Congress about them now!

  • The largest aid package in U.S. history.
  • A bill for a special envoy who will monitor criticism of Israel world wide.

Phone the Congressional switchboard at 202-224-3121 and ask for your Congressional rep. (If you don’t know who that is, put your zip code in here.)

1) VOTE NO ON S.2497

S. 2497 – Ileana Ros-Lehtinen United States-Israel Security Assistance Authorization Act of 2018. The House number is H.R.5141

This gives Israel $33 billion on top of the $5 billion that was recently voted.

It also mandates that NASA work with the Israeli space agency, despite accusations that Israel stole classified information.

More information  here.

2) VOTE NO ON H.R. 1911 

“Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism Act of 2018”

This “special envoy” works to monitor criticism of Israel.

More information here.

PDFs of the bills that are before Congress today are here and here.

By the way, U.S. media have not informed American citizens about these current bills – while groups like AIPAC have told their members to pressure Congress for them.

September 12, 2018 Posted by | Corruption, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , | Leave a comment

John Bolton versus the International Criminal Court: A Simple Solution

By Thomas L. Knapp | William Lloyd Garrison Center | September 11, 2018

In a September 10 speech to the Federalist Society, National Security Advisor John Bolton offered “a major announcement on US policy toward the International Criminal Court.” The US government, per Bolton, considers the court “fundamentally illegitimate. … We will not cooperate with the ICC. We will provide no assistance to the ICC. We will not join the ICC.”

Bolton threatened sanctions against the court and those who resort to it or cooperate with it in investigations of war crimes involving the United States or Israel. He also announced the first such sanction, closure of a Palestine Liberation Organization office in Washington in retaliation for the state of Palestine’s referral of charges against Israel for actions in the West Bank and Gaza.

What’s with this sudden interest in the court and its jurisdiction?

Why is Bolton suddenly so concerned with protecting notions of “sovereignty” (he uses the word nine times) that the US government itself routinely ignores at its convenience, claiming global jurisdiction over individuals and organizations outside its own borders in matters ranging from the 17-year “war on terror” to its financial regulation and sanctions schemes?

The answer, in a word: Afghanistan. The regime installed by the US after its 2001 invasion of that country, and maintained in power by the US since then, ratified the Rome Statute in 2003. Crimes committed in Afghanistan since then, regardless of the perpetrators’ nationalities, therefore fall under the ICC’s jurisdiction.

Bolton finds it unconscionable that an American — in particular an American soldier, sailor, airman, Marine, or politician — accused of crimes committed in Afghanistan might be tried in a court Afghanistan’s government has duly accepted the authority of. So much for “sovereignty.”

Bolton wants it both ways. On one hand, the long arm of US law must reach everywhere, be it to a bank in Switzerland, to a hacker’s keyboard in the United Kingdom, or to a battlefield in the Middle East. On the other hand, no foreign arm of law must ever reach a US citizen, regardless of the alleged crime or where it was committed.

Pretty messed up, but there’s a simple solution. All the US government has to do is close its embassies and consulates in, withdraw its troops from, and advise its citizens not to travel to, any of the 120-odd countries which recognize the International Criminal Court as their judicial authority for war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity.

Starting with Afghanistan.

Problem solved.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org).

September 12, 2018 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

A New Capital? Palestinians say Abu Dis is No Substitute for East Jerusalem

By Jonathon Cook | The National | September 11, 2018

From the offputting concrete edifice that confronts a visitor to Abu Dis, the significance of this West Bank town – past and present – is not immediately obvious.

The eight metre-high grey slabs of Israel’s separation wall silently attest to a divided land and a quarter-century of a failed Middle East peace process.

The entrance to Abu Dis could not be more disconcerting, given reports that Donald Trump’s administration intends it to be the capital of a future Palestinian state, in place of Jerusalem.

The wall, and the security cameras lining the top of it, are the legacy of battles for control of Jerusalem’s borders. Sections of concrete remain charred black by fires residents set years ago in the forlorn hope of weakening the structure and bringing it down.

Before the wall was erected more than a decade ago, Abu Dis had a spectacular view across the valley to Jerusalem’s Old City and the iconic golden-topped Dome of the Rock, less than three kilometres away. It was a few minutes’ drive – or an hour’s hike – to Al Aqsa mosque, the third holiest site in Islam, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the reputed location of Jesus’s crucifixion.

Now, for many of the 13,000 inhabitants, Jerusalem might as well as be on another planet. They can no longer reach its holy places, markets, schools or hospitals.

Abu Dis, say its residents, is hemmed in on all sides – by Israel’s oppressive wall; by illegal Jewish settlements encroaching relentlessly on what is left of its lands; and by a large, Israeli-run landfill site that, according to experts, is a threat to human health.

The Palestinian authorities do not even control Abu Dis. The Israeli security cameras watch over it and armoured jeeps full of Israeli soldiers make forays at will into its crowded streets.

Perhaps fittingly, given the Palestinians’ current plight, Abu Dis feels more like it is being gradually turned into one wing of a dystopian open-air prison than a capital-in-waiting.

Abu Dis repackaged

Nonetheless, the town has been thrust into the spotlight. Rumours have intensified that US President Trump’s promised peace plan – what he terms the “deal of the century” – is nearing completion. His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has been drafting it for more than a year.

Back in January Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader, confirmed for the first time that the White House was leaning on him to accept Abu Dis as his capital.

The issue has become highly charged for Palestinians since May, when Mr Trump overturned decades of diplomatic consensus by moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

That appeared to overturn a once widely shared assumption that Israel would be required to withdraw from East Jerusalem, which it occupied in 1967, and allow the Palestinians to declare it their capital.

Instead Mr Kushner and his team appear to believe they can repackage Abu Dis, just outside the city limits, as a substitute capital.

How plausible is it that the Palestinians can accept a ghettoised, anonymous community like Abu Dis for such a pivotal role in their nation-building project?

Symbolic power

Ghassan Khatib, a former Palestinian cabinet minister, said Mr Trump would find no takers among the Palestinian leadership.

“A Palestinian state without Jerusalem as its capital simply won’t work. It’s not credible,” he said. “It’s not just Jerusalem’s religious and historic significance. It also has strategic, economic and geographic importance to Palestinians.”

The people of Abu Dis appear to feel the same way, with many pointing to Jerusalem’s enormous symbolic power, as well as the potential role of international tourism in developing the Palestinian economy.

Abu Dis, however, is unlikely ever to attract visitors, even should it get a dramatic makeover.

The approach road, skirting the massive settlement of Maale Adumim, home to 40,000 Jews, is adorned with red signs warning that it is dangerous for Israelis to enter the area.

The section of wall at the entrance to Abu Dis alludes to the residents’ growing anger and frustration – not only with Israel but some of their own leaders.

Artists have spray-painted a giant image of Marwan Barghouti, a Palestinian resistance leader imprisoned by Israel for the past 16 years. It shows him lifting his handcuffed hands to make a V-for-victory sign.

But noticeably, next to him is a much smaller image of Mr Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, whose face has been painted out. He has come under mounting domestic criticism for maintaining Palestinian “security cooperation” with Israel’s occupation forces.

Resentment at such cooperation is felt especially keenly in Abu Dis. Large iron gates in the wall give the Israeli army ready access in and out of the town.

An orphaned town

Under the Oslo accords signed in the mid-1990s, all of Abu Dis was placed temporarily under Israeli military control, and most of it under Israel’s civil control also. That temporary status appears to have become permanent, leaving residents at the whim of hostile Israeli authorities who deny building permits and readily issue demolition orders.

The restrictions mean Abu Dis lacks most of the infrastructure one would associate with a city, let alone a capital.

Abdulwahab Sabbah, a local community activist, said: “We are now a small island of territory controlled by the Israeli army.

“Not only have we lost our schools, the hospitals we once used, our holy places, the job opportunities that the city offered. Families have been split apart too, unable to visit their relatives in Jerusalem.

“We have been orphaned. We have lost Jerusalem, our mother.”

A short drive into Abu Dis and the shell of a huge building comes into view, a reminder that the idea of an Abu Dis upgrade is not the Trump administration’s alone.

In fact, noted Mr Khatib, Israel began rebranding Abu Dis as a second “Al Quds” – the Holy City, the Arabic name for Jerusalem – in the late 1990s, after the Oslo agreement allowed Palestinian leaders to return to Gaza and limited parts of the West Bank.

The Palestinian leadership, desperate to get a foothold closer to the densely populated neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem, played along. They expected that Israel would eventually relinquish Abu Dis to full Palestinian control, allowing it to be annexed to East Jerusalem in a future peace deal.

View of al-Aqsa

In 1996 the Palestinians began work building a $4 million parliament on the side of Abu Dis closest to Jerusalem. The location was selected so that the office of the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat would have a view of Al Aqsa.

Reports from that time talk of Abu Dis becoming a gateway, or “safe corridor”, for West Bank Palestinians to reach the mosque. One proposal was to build a tunnel between Abu Dis and the Old City.

However, with the outbreak of hostilities in 2000 – a Palestinian intifada – work on the parliament came to a halt. The interior was never finished, and there is now no view of Al Aqsa. The parliament too is sealed off from Jerusalem by the wall.

Since then Israel has barred the Palestinian Authority from having any role in East Jerusalem.

Khalil Erekat, a caretaker, holds the key to the unused parliament. Once visitors could inspect the building, including its glass-domed central chamber. Now, he said, only pigeons and the odd stray dog or snake ventured inside.

“No one comes any more,” he added. “The place has been forgotten.”

And that, it seems, is the way Palestinian officials would prefer it. With the Trump administration mooting the town as a substitute capital, the parliament is now an embarrassing white elephant.

Requests from The National to the Palestinian authorities to visit the building were rejected on the grounds that it was no longer structurally safe.

Eyesore ghetto

Evidence of how quickly Israel has transformed Abu Dis from a rural suburb of Jerusalem into an eyesore ghetto are evident in the homes around the parliament.

A once-palatial four-storey home next door would be more in place in war-ravaged Gaza than an impending capital. Its collapsed top floors sit precariously above the rest of the structure.

Mohammed Anati, a retired carpenter aged 64, is a tenant occupying the bottom floor with his wife and three sons.

He said the destruction was carried out by the Jerusalem municipality several years ago, apparently because the upper floors were built in violation of planning rules Israeli military authorities imposed after 1967.

Neighbours speculate that, in fact, Israel was more concerned that the top of the building provided views over the wall.

Mr Anati said that, paradoxically, the Jerusalem municipality treated this small neighbourhood next to the wall as within its jurisdiction. “We have to pay council taxes to Jerusalem even though we are cut off from the city and receive no services,” he said.

Asked whether he thought Abu Dis could be a Palestinian capital, Mr Anati scoffed. “Trump will offer us the worst deal of the century,” he said. “Jerusalem has to be the capital. There is nothing of Jerusalem here since Israel built the wall.”

Only pigeons still free

Nearby, Ghassan Abu Hillel’s two-storey home presses up against the grey slabs of concrete. He said cameras on the top of the wall monitored his and his neighbours’ activities around the clock.

His family moved to this house in 1967, when he was 14 years old, and shortly before Israel occupied Abu Dis, along with the rest of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Until the wall was constructed, he spent his time herding sheep and goats on the surrounding hills.

Now he has had to corral them into a corner of the wall. Their improvised pen is daubed with graffiti: “Take an axe to the prison wall. Escape.”

His herd of what was once more than 200 sheep is down to barely a dozen. The animals can no longer graze out on the hills, and he cannot afford the cost of feeding them.

Unlike Mr Abu Hillel and the sheep, his pigeons still enjoy their freedom. “They can fly over the wall and reach Jerusalem whenever they want,” he said.

His family owned much of the land surrounding Abu Dis before 1967, he added, but almost all of it had been taken by Israel – originally on the pretext that it was needed for military purposes.

Since then, Israel has built a series of Jewish settlements on the surrounding land, including Maale Adumim, Kfar Adumim and Kedar.

In the early 1980s it also opened a landfill site to cope with the region’s waste. In 2009 the United Nations warned that toxic fumes from waste-burning and leakage into the groundwater posed a threat to local inhabitants’ health.

A bluff from Israel

Some residents are actively finding ways to break out of the isolation imposed on Abu Dis by Israel.

Mr Sabbah is a founder of the Friendship Association, which encourages exchange programmes with European students, teachers and youth clubs. His most successful project is the twinning of Abu Dis with the London borough of Camden.

Mr Sabbah’s prominent political activities may be one reason why his home – along with the local mayor’s – was one of 10 invaded in the middle of the night on September 4.

The operation had the hallmarks of what former Israeli soldiers from the whistleblowing group Breaking the Silence have termed “establishing presence” – military training exercises designed to disrupt the lives of Palestinian communities and spread fear.

Mr Sabbah is sceptical that the Abu Dis proposal by the Trump administration has been made in good faith.

“It’s a bluff,” he said. “Israel has shown through all its actions that it does not want any Palestinian state – and that means no capital, even in Abu Dis.

“It is being offered only because Israel knows no Palestinian leader could ever accept it as a capital. And that way Israel can again blame us for being the ones to reject their version of ‘peace’.”

An oasis of normality

Amid its confinement, however, Abu Dis does have one asset – a university – that now attracts thousands of young Palestinians, though it adds to overcrowding.

The main campus of the Palestinian-run Al Quds university has been operating in Abu Dis since the 1980s.

Sitting on the crossroads between the Palestinian cities of Bethlehem and Nablus to the south, Jericho to the east, and Ramallah to the north, the Abu Dis campus has grown rapidly. It has profited from the fact that West Bank Palestinians cannot access another campus of Al Quds university in East Jerusalem.

The university is enclosed and security is tight. Inside, students enjoy spacious grounds with shaded gardens, a small oasis of normality where it is possible briefly to forget the situation outside.

Nonetheless, the university is not immune from Israeli military operations either. On September 5, soldiers shut down the campus and nearby schools, as they reportedly fired tear gas, stun grenades and rubber bullets at youths.

Omar Mahmoud, aged 23, a medical student from Nablus, raised his eyebrows at the suggestion that Abu Dis could serve as the Palestinians’ capital.

“It’s fully under Israeli control,” he said. “One side there is the wall and on the other side there are Israeli settlements. There are no services and it just gets more crowded by the year.”

He has shared an apartment with other students in Abu Dis for five years. He said: “To be honest, I can’t wait to get out of here.”

September 11, 2018 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

US announces closure of Palestinian mission in Washington

Press TV – Sep 10, 2018

The US State Department has announced it is ordering the closure of the Washington mission of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), a move that has drawn strong reaction from Palestinians.

“We have permitted the PLO office to conduct operations that support the objective of achieving a lasting, comprehensive peace between Israelis and the Palestinians since the expiration of a previous waiver in November 2017,” State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said on Monday.

“However, the PLO has not taken steps to advance the start of direct and meaningful negotiations with Israel,” she stated.

The statement accused PLO leaders of failing to engage with American efforts to establish peace between Palestinians and Israelis and attempting to prompt an investigation of Israel by the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Meanwhile in a speech on Monday, White House National Security Adviser John Bolton announced punitive measures against any anti-Israeli action by the ICC.

Bolton threatened imposing harsh sanctions against the ICC in case it decides to move ahead with requests to investigate the US and Israel.

“The United States will always stand with our friend and ally, Israel,” Bolton told members of the conservative Federalist Society gathered at a hotel in Washington, DC. “We will not allow the ICC, or any other organization, to constrain Israel’s right to self-defense.”

‘Palestinians won’t succumb to US bullying’

A senior Palestinian official called the decision a “dangerous escalation.”

“We reiterate that the rights of the Palestinian people are not for sale, that we will not succumb to US threats and bullying,” Palestinian diplomat Saeb Erekat said in a statement to news organizations in advance of Bolton’s speech.

“Accordingly, we continue to call upon the International Criminal Court to open its immediate investigation into Israeli crimes,” he stated.

The PLO office in Washington has long been a source of tension.

In November last year, the Trump administration warned that it might close the office in reaction to a call by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas for probing and prosecuting Israeli officials at the ICC and other international organizations.

Erekat responded back then that such a move would undermine prospects of resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The PLO warned to cut all ties with the US in case its mission was shuttered. The organization opened the office in 1994 and went on to join the ICC after receiving observer state status at the UN in 2012.

Earlier this year, Palestine asked the ICC to probe human rights violations linked to the Israeli regime’s illegal settlement activities on occupied Palestinian territories.

September 10, 2018 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Aoun: UNRWA funding cut to settle refugees in Lebanon

MEMO | September 10, 2018

Lebanese President Michel Aoun said Monday that the US decision to cut funding for the UN refugee agency UNRWA was the beginning to settle Palestinian refugees in Lebanon.

Speaking to reporters during his flight from Lebanon to France, Aoun said he will discuss the UNRWA issue during his visit to the European Parliament.

“This issue could form the start for settling (refugees in Lebanon), which is banned by the Lebanese Constitution and rejected by the Lebanese people,” he said.

Aoun arrived in Strasbourg on Monday for a three-day visit upon an invitation by Antonio Tajani, President of the European Parliament.

During the visit, Aoun will discuss relations between Lebanon and the EU as well as a host of regional and international issues.

Last month, the US State Department said Washington would “no longer commit funding” to the UNRWA.

The US had been UNRWA’s largest contributor by far, providing it with $350 million annually — roughly a quarter of the agency’s overall budget.

Established in 1949, UNRWA provides critical aid to Palestinian refugees in the blockaded Gaza Strip, the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.

September 10, 2018 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , | Leave a comment

Jews and Gentiles

By Gilad Atzmon | September 10, 2018

Early Zionism was a significant and glorious moment in Jewish history; a moment of dramatic epiphany fueled by self-loathing. The early Zionists promised to save the Jews from the Jew and to liberate the Jew from the Jews. They were disgusted by the Diaspora non-proletarian urban Jewish culture which they regarded as parasitic. They promised to bond the new Hebrews with labour and soil. They were convinced that they could transform what they saw as a greedy capitalist into a new ‘Israelite hard working peasant.’ They believed that they could make the ‘international cosmopolitan’ into a nationalist patriot, they believed that they knew how to convert Soros into a kibbutznik: they were certain that it was within their capacity to make Alan Dershowitz into a Uri Avneri and Abe Foxman into a peacenik. They promised to make Jews into people like all other people while failing to realize that no other people really want to resemble others.

Zionism has been successful on many fronts. It managed to form a Jewish state at the expense of the indigenous people of Palestine. The Jewish state is a wealthy ghetto and one which is internationally supported. But Israel is a state like no other. It is institutionally racist and murderous. It begs for American taxpayers’ money despite being filthy rich. Sadly, Zionism didn’t solve the Jewish problem, it just moved it to a new location. More significantly, not only did Zionism fail to heal the Jews as it had promised to do, it actually amplified the symptoms it had vowed to obliterate.

Accordingly, the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitsm should be regarded as a Zionist admission that the task of making Jews people like all other people has been a complete failure. No other people have so intensely and institutionally engaged in the suppression of other people’s freedom of speech. Jewish and Zionist bodies work openly and in concert to silence every possible criticism of their state. The real reason for the fight to make the IHRA definition law is that the Zionist position on antisemitism is indefensible.  If the Jews need a special definition of hatred against them (as opposed to a definition of hatred that includes hatred of any people based on race or religion) it proves that, at least in the eyes of the Zionists who push for the definition, Jews are somehow different.

In addition, and for quite some time, history laws and regimes of correctness have been employed to block our access to the Jewish past. This is paradoxical given the fact that the Zionist project is a historically driven adventure: while Zionists often claim their right to self determination on their so-called ‘historical land,’ no one else is allowed to critically examine the Jewish historical past. The Jewish past is, instead, what Jews consider to be their past at a given moment, and as the Israeli historian Shlomo Sand suggests, this so called ‘narrative’ is often an ‘invention.’ No one is permitted to look into the validity of claims made about Jewish participation  in the slave trade. Gentiles are not entitled to look into the role of Jewish Bolsheviks in some colossal communist crimes. The Nakba is legally isolated by walls of Israeli legislation. And it is axiomatic that no one may freely engage in critical thinking on any topic that is even tangentially related to the holocaust. For my suggestion that Jews should self reflect and attempt to understand what it was that led to the animosity against them in the 1930s, I am castigated by some Jewish ethnic activists as a holocaust denier.

French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard taught us that history claims to tell us ‘what happened’ but in most cases it actually does the opposite: it is there to conceal our collective shame. To suppress their shame, Americans build holocaust museums in every American city rather than explore their own slave holding past. Rather than deal with their dark imperial history, the Brits allocated a large part of their Imperial Wars Museum to a Holocaust Memorial. Both American and British holocaust museums fail to address the shameful fact that both countries largely blocked their gates to European Jewish refugees fleeing the holocaust. According to Lyotard, the role of the true historian is to unveil the shame, removing layer after layer of suppression. This painful process is where history matures into ethical awareness. And then, there is no examination of responsibility for historical wrongs in the Zionist narrative, for the notion of shame, that instigated the Early Zionist ideology, is totally foreign to Zionist culture and politics.

Israel not only couldn’t be bothered to build a Nakba museum: it does not even acknowledge the Nakba. Zionists didn’t express remorse that their Jewish state deployed snipers to hunt Palestinian protestors, killing hundreds and wounding thousands of them.

Neither Zionists nor Israelis feel the need to find excuses for the fact that their laws are racist: Palestinian Israeli citizens are 7th class citizens and the rest of the Palestinians who live in Israeli controlled territories are locked up in open air prisons. Zionism doesn’t have to deal with shame because shame involves uncanny introspection, it entails humility, ordinariness.  Unlike the Americans and the Brits who made other people’s suffering into their empathy pets, the Zionists, the Israelis and Jews in general are clearly happy to celebrate the primacy of Jewish suffering while making sure everyone else adheres to this principle.  Zionism skillfully put into play the means that suppress criticism all together. But by doing so, Zionism essentially blinded its followers to its own crimes, and it put an end to the dream to become people like all other people.

Although Zionism was an apparatus invented to fix the Jews, to make them ordinary, it had the opposite effect. It made it impossible for its followers to integrate into the rest of the nations as a people amongst people. While Zionism was born to obliterate choseness, as it was practiced it was hijacked by the most problematic form of  Jewish exceptionalism. Interestingly enough, today, just ahead of the Jewish new year, Haaretz revealed that 56% of Israeli Jews see themselves as chosen. I guess the rest see themselves as exceptional.

 56% of Israeli Jews see themselves as chosens.

56% of Israeli Jews see themselves as chosen.

If some Zionists out there are still committed to the original Zionist dream, then owning the shame that is attached to the Zionist sin is probably the way forward. Because as things stand at the moment, the only public figure who insists upon seeing Jews as people like all other people and actually act upon it is, believe it or not, Jeremy Corbyn.

September 10, 2018 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Kamikaze from California

Israel Shamir • Unz Review • September 10, 2018

There are worse, more dangerous endeavours. Ride a tiger, steal cubs from she-bear, walk a high voltage wire. Doubting the Holocaust is slightly less perilous. The doubters found themselves invariably out of job, oftentimes in jail, rarely killed. This is the dogma-Mother-of-all-dogmas, and Jews, the priesthood of New World, are attending to its pristine inviolability.

Nowadays, one may openly doubt the Crucifixion and Resurrection or (maybe) challenge the founding myths of Israel. Yet the cult of the Holocaust retains a unique, court-enforced prohibition against any investigation that might cast a doubt on its sacred dogma. Dogmas have a way of attracting critical minds. And critical minds step forward, despite the inherent danger.

Ron Unz, this kamikaze of critical mind from California, has stepped on the third rail knowingly, in full awareness of the consequences. He did not stop at doubting the established mantra, he also published and made available to readers and internet users some more important books on the subject.

H dogma, discovered Unz, came into existence years after WWII, when people with first hand knowledge of the events were already dead or retired. While the memory was still fresh and pristine, the Jewish Holocaust was unknown, and the very word Holocaust was used in reference to the fiery death of Dresden and Hiroshima, the ultimate Anglo-American crimes.

Unz provides some historical meat to the fearless group of H deniers. Indeed, the H denial had been formed in France, under influence of a French communist and a survivor of Nazi camps Prof Paul Rassinier.

Some deniers were men of Right, some favoured Nazis, like Ernst Zundel and his spouse Ingrid Zundel, the great Prof Robert Faurisson was a Vichy sympathiser, but otherwise H denial had been formed by the Leftists.

This is a good time and place to mention the recently deceased Prof Serge Thion, whom I knew personally. Tall and handsome, a successful man with strong scientific and Leftist credentials, Thion supported the Vietnamese and the Algerians who fought against French colonialism; he occupied a prominent place in French academe and administration, but sacrificed it all and became a refugee and a fugitive from ‘justice’ for his strong position on H denial. He was always on the run from France to Italy to SE Asia, but while running, he also managed a site full of forbidden stuff.

My good friend and an important French and Spanish poet Mme Maria Poumier was/is a Communist, and she lived for some ten years in Cuba. She introduced me to Roger Garaudy, an old Communist, a friend of Arabs and Muslims, the man who tried to bring together Christianity and Communism, and embraced Islam in his endless religious search. Garaudy connected the Holocaust cult with Zionism in his book.

The great stand-up black artist, the funniest French comedian Dieudonne M’bala M’bala, a giant son of a Cameroonian and a Bretonese, has made fun of the Holocaust. A political maverick, he ran for Parliament for Marine Le Pen’s Front National, and formed its far-left-and-right wing together with Alain Soral.

The established French MSM prefers to call all these people “Nazis”, but actually they are the real still unbroken Left. Even I was called a Nazi and a H denier, though I never denied (or affirmed) its historical veracity. It is forbidden to deny H under fear of imprisonment, so it is not an option for a law-abiding citizen. And I was never interested in facts, just in their interpretation.

I do deny its religious salvific significance implied in the very term ‘Holocaust’; I do deny its metaphysical uniqueness, I do deny the morbid cult of Holocaust and I think every God-fearing man, a Jew, a Christian or a Muslim should reject it as Abraham rejected and smashed idols. I deny that it is good to remember or immortalise such traumatic events, and I wrote many articles against modern obsession with massacres, be it the Jewish holocaust of 1940s, the Armenian massacre of 1915, the Ukrainian “holodomor”, Polish Katyn, Khmer Rouge etc. This is not forbidden yet.

Unz wisely avoided discussion of gruesome details, for the calculation of bodies, stoves and bullets is too awful for a modern reader. It is a meta-narrative, dealing with discussion of the topic without entering the topic, and it was a clever and calculated choice. It is not necessary to overburden the reader with macabre specifics of the events. The details and facts are not really all that important. So many people were killed by their fellow-humans in the course of history, for a lot of reasons. Who cares?

The most important question Unz’s essay leads us to, is not ‘whether six million Jews were killed by Germans just because they were Jews’ but: Why the Holocaust cult became so popular, with its temples, perversely called “Holocaust museums” or “Places of Tolerance” sprung up everywhere from Nebraska to Fiji? There are differing and mutually-non-exclusive answers to this question.

The first and obvious answer is “It is good for rich and powerful Jews”. It solved the eternal problem of the rich and influential, warding off the envy and hate of the poor and exploited. It allowed Madoff and other Jewish swindlers to cheat and steal. It covers asses of the three Jews, the lawyer-fixer Cohen, the smut-dealing publisher Pecker and the numbers whiz Weisselberg who set up Donald Trump. The Jewish oligarchs of Russia and Ukraine use it whenever they are accused of stealing their countries’ wealth.

The second answer is “It is good for Israel”. It allowed the Israeli army to murder children and starve women with impunity. Ari Shavit of Haaretz said in 1996, when the Israeli Army killed over a hundred civilian refugees in Kana, Lebanon: “We may murder with impunity, because the Holocaust museum is on our side”. Now a Holocaust organisation cooked up a definition of antisemitism, explicitly forbidding any criticism of Israel, and forced the Labour Party to accept it, despite objections of the Party leader Jeremy Corbyn.

The third answer is “Because it is profitable”. Jewish organisations claiming to represent the H survivors, reap billions of dollars from Germany, Switzerland and other countries, even from Poland and Estonia; they pay themselves five- or six digit salaries, while giving out some peanuts for real survivors. Norman Finkelstein covered this angle in his book, mentioned by Ron Unz.

These three answers cover the Jewish position, but they do not fully explain the almost universal acceptance of the H dogma by the ruling classes all over the West. And here comes the fourth answer: “The H cult is good as a discursive tool of the Deep State against the majority”.

The H priests preach that the majority of Germans approved of Hitler and approved of the Holocaust, so one can’t accept democracy and shouldn’t trust the majority, unless the majority votes as ordered by those who know better. Now this idea is being enforced by the New York Times and its sisters against the Deplorables and against Trump who was elected by Deplorables but hasn’t been confirmed by the Deep State. In England, they use it to overturn the people’s vote for Brexit; and before that, they used it to re-run plebiscites until obtaining the desired result in the Netherlands and Sweden.

The fifth answer is “It is good for the US providing it with a licence to be the World Sheriff”.

The H priests teach that the US won the war and restored Germany to the free world, despite its population’s wishes. It means that the US is the force to check and control whatever people or even elites in other countries decide. This is the logic behind American interventions from Grenada and Panama to Afghanistan and Syria. If tomorrow they will invade Italy or Hungary, they will still refer to Auschwitz and Nuremberg.

This also helps to make American occupation of Germany a permanent fixture. Undermined by the H cult, Germans agree they can’t take their fate into their hands, and they have to be firmly guided by the US.

The sixth answer, “It is good for justifying unlimited migration and open borders”. Whenever a government in the US or in Italy tarries with receiving the endless flow of migrants, the Holocaust is immediately mentioned. Every Mexican agricultural worker or an African looking for a better life has to be accepted for the Jews were threatened with the Holocaust.

The seventh answer will lead us into deep waters, and you can skip it if it is too deep for you. “It is good to replace Christ”. The H dogma is a parody of Christian teaching, with Jews being brought as a sacrifice, with Auschwitz replacing Golgotha, and with creation of the State of Israel as a new Resurrection. Jews are essential Christ Deniers, and for them the H is an occasion to downgrade Christianity as “irrelevant after Auschwitz”. The alternative answer is that Auschwitz is irrelevant after the Resurrection, but there aren’t many (or any) Christian theologians daring to say that. Enemies of Christ (Gentile as well as Jewish) are likely to support H cult for its anti-Christian core.

The H cult is not the last word in Jewish fight against Christian faith; there is a the Noahide Project. It starts where the H cult ends. “The Noahides are a theological phenomenon of very recent vintage. It’s a form of Zionist mission, which seeks to create a world religion whose believers adore the Jewish people and the State of Israel – without belonging to either. The believers are required to accept the supremacy of Judaism but are not accepted into the Jewish people and are even barred from upholding such commandments as Sabbath observance. Anyone who wishes to be a Noahide is called upon mainly to recognize the Jewish people and its state.”

Chabad Rabbis hope there will be 7 billion of Noahide believers; adepts of H cult are well on their way to joining the Noahides for they already believe that the death of a Jew is more important than a Gentile death.

These are important points that call for discussion, and hopefully one day we should mount a round table discussing the cardinal question: why H is so popular, and what does it mean for us?

Unz’s essay is a new link in his American Pravda series, where Unz dismantles the web of old worn lies woven by the mainstream media, undermining the whole narrative modern America is based on. ‘The Slaughter of Sacred Cows’, he could call it. Every society needs a dash of revisionism in order to free its spirit from old tenets.

(In Israel, they were called New Historians, who slaughtered the sacred cows of “the Arabs voluntarily had left their homes in 1948” and “the Jews always sought peace, and the Arabs refused their offers”. Benny Morris and Tom Segev, Avi Shlaim and Ilan Pappe undid the myth of 1948, of ethically pure Israel fighting for its survival against the genocide-bent Arabs. The change they brought to the narrative allowed Yitzhak Rabin to sign peace treaty with Yasser Arafat; though this achievement had been erased by the following leaders after Rabin’s assassination.)

Moreover, our society is a result of Sacred Cows’ wholesale slaughter undertaken by previous generation. The cows of Family, Marriage, Normal life, of Boys and Girls, of Womanhood and Manhood, of Going to Church, of trying to keep fit, so many established truths had been slaughtered in the last fifty years. Upon their bones, new cows had been grown: of gender minorities, of toxic white male patriarchy, of bodyshaming, and indeed the Holocaust is one of the fattest cows.

It is a bout of poetic justice that these cows will be slaughtered too. H priests hoped that their narrative, that of Holocaust, will last forever, smoothly flowing into Noahide utopia. But nothing is forever, not even their dogma.

In order to defend their cows, they brought in ‘hate laws’. But the seven reasons we listed above do not include hate of any sorts. You do not have to hate anybody to disprove of crooks, to support Palestinians, to condemn officials milking countries for their personal gain in the name of dead victims, to love democracy, to respect majority, to withdraw soldiers from Germany, to stop mass migration, to reject “invite the world, invade the world” imperial paradigm, and to love Christ.

We come to unexpected conclusion: whether the Holocaust narrative is based on sterling facts or on exaggerations, it is good to reject it. Even if the ‘deniers’ are factually wrong (let us presume it for the sake of argument), they are still right with their conclusions. And Ron Unz had made an important contribution for the benefit of mankind by his publication.

There is a minor fault in his excellent piece, for this self-taught man knows little about Russia. While he has bravely demolished the myths of American and European history, Unz swallowed the Russia-related myths hook, line and sinker. He accepted wholesale every lie that was ever invented by the Western ideologists to regain their control over Russia and eventually over their own workers. This subject will be discussed in our following piece.

P.S. In my previous piece, I wrote about the first ever trial for Holocaust Denial in Russia. The accused was Prof Roman Yushkov of Perm. And now for good news. The Russian jury dismissed the charges against Yushkov and thus confirmed that H denial is not a crime in Russia. Nor in the US, I hasten to add. Neither USSR nor Russia had ever accepted the peculiar idea of uniqueness of Jewish deaths, perhaps because the Russians had lost so many people at the same war.

Shamir on the Holocaust Denial:

Vampire Killers 2001

For Whom The Bell Tolls 2006

September 10, 2018 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , | Leave a comment