On September 20, 2017, Laith K., 17, was arrested by Israeli forces. He was held in administrative detention for nearly 46 weeks. Administrative detention is a form of imprisonment without charge or trial. Learn more: https://nwttac.dci-palestine.org/
I go over some of the lesser known connections & history of accused child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. I’m hoping that there are more arrests to come after his! Many powerful people are at risk if he talks. more…
Sugar is the new tobacco and is killing millions of people worldwide.
Cancer Research UK is bang on the money to launch shock tactic posters to tell people that obesity is a major cause of cancer, and overweight people who are saying it is fat shaming need to shut their lardy cake holes.
And I say this as someone who was morbidly obese and on the fast road to an early grave and someone who is still overweight. But I have and am doing something about my situation and actually exercising more than just my jaw.
I heard one fat woman on a national radio show saying, “obesity is nothing like smoking as we can choose to smoke but we have to eat.” She is half right, we do need to eat but we can choose what we put in our mouths surely? There has to be an element of personal responsibility.
I have cut all sugar from my diet and I eat a Low Carbohydrate High Fat (LCHF) way and the weight has dropped off me and I have never felt better. In fact, this style of eating combined with gentle walking has also reversed my Type 2 diabetes, cured my gout, lifted my mood and even cured my erectile dysfunction. Now I have got your attention haven’t I lads?
But being serious, this style of eating has completely changed my life and I am now off all meds. And it is not just me, millions of people around the globe are now eating this way and, in a sense, curing themselves.
The results speak for themselves and in my case it led me to set up a website to help other people who, just like me, were essentially sugar addicts waiting to die.
It has been the most rewarding thing I have ever done in my life and it is a disgrace that Low Carb High Fat diets have not been utilised in the treatment of obesity and Type 2 diabetes.
I educated myself about nutrition via the internet; and instead of debates on TV about whether sugar taxes are sin taxes or phone ins about whether these posters are an example of fat shaming, what we actually need is for governments to start educating people in nutrition and stop being in the pay of Big Food and big sugar in particular. Governments need to be ‘fat shamed’ more than individual fatties.
But don’t hold your breath because it isn’t just Boris who has made a complete hash of this subject. His rival to be our next PM, Jeremy Hunt, when he was the Health Secretary in 2017 stood on stage at the Tory conference in Manchester and declared that childhood obesity was a “national emergency”. However, the stinking hypocrite had his conference lanyard around his neck which had the conference’s sponsors name on, which was Tate and Lyle! No wonder some journalists and broadcasters get his surname wrong!
This is the heart of the problem, the sugar lobby is too powerful not only here in the UK but around the globe. One of the main contributors to the worldwide diabesity epidemic was the invention of corn syrup in 1957 as a cheaper replacement for cane sugar.
His syrup, which is in all fizzy drinks, is almost pure glucose and is actually sweeter than sugar and it is this that fuelled the soda revolution and the large cups and free refills that helped create not only childhood obesity but the obesity epidemic we are now experiencing. This is now being added to most of the ultra-processed food that is on sale in our supermarkets and when combined with the tsunami of junk food outlets that planners have allowed to open it is no wonder we as an island are almost sinking under our own collective weight. The corn lobby is massively influential and it is said that no US President would ever take them on. Again, I ask, who should be ‘Fat shamed’?
Big Food aided and abetted by ‘corrupt’ or over ‘lobbied’ Western Governments have pushed the myth that sugary drinks, crisps and junk food, eaten as part of a well-balanced diet combined with exercise, are not really a problem.
They have sold the lie that it is all about calories in verses calories out and that exercise is the answer.
But the simple plain facts are, as Professor Tim Noakes says, “You cannot out run a bad diet” In fact, in simple terms, you would have to run 35 miles to lose a pound of body fat and that is undeniable.
This myth or pure propaganda helps support the idea that those people who are obese or Type 2 diabetic are gluttons and have brought these terrible diseases purely upon themselves.
That is why Coca Cola is allowed to sponsor the English Premier League and MacDonald’s sponsor the Olympics and the English football teams.
Do you think they sponsor out of the goodness of their hearts or do they do it to gain market share and get us hooked on their sugary, addictive products?!
They should not be allowed to get away with it any longer. If sugar really is the new tobacco these companies should not be allowed to sponsor sports, just as tobacco was removed from Formula 1 and cricket years ago.
Both sports, which despite the apocalyptic bleating of their fans and governing bodies, did not disappear as a result of this sponsorship being removed.
However, the great irony of course, is that Red Bull and Monster drinks still sponsor the Red Bull racing team and our own world champion Lewis Hamilton.
These drinks are like a sugar ‘poison’ and contain at least 21 teaspoons of sugar in a single can.
The recommended daily intake for an adult is only 7 teaspoons of sugar in a whole day!
Lewis Hamilton should hang his head in shame, does he really need the cash? And Red Bull should be banned from having a Formula one team just as Coke and Macdonald’s should be banned from sponsoring any sport. Gary Lineker is another who seems unable to survive on his £1.7 MILLION pounds off the BBC and is little better than a drugs pusher when he promotes crisps.
These are the organisations and the individuals who should be ‘Fat shamed’ as they are the ‘pushers’ who are really causing the obesity and Type 2 diabetes epidemic that is not only engulfing the UK but the whole globe.
But it also governments who should hang their heads in shame and be fat shamed too.
Why do they allow food manufacturers to put this excessive amount of sugar in their products?
If the Government is telling us, the individual, to cut sugar and recommends no more than 7 teaspoons a day why are Coca Cola and other sugary drinks manufacturers allowed to exceed that in a single can?
Now that we have evidence that excessive sugar is linked not only to Type 2 diabetes but cancers, heart diseases, strokes, high blood pressure and even dementia according to the Alzheimer’s society, why are these products still being manufactured?
Please don’t give me that ‘personal choice BS’ either because for many there is no choice. Sugar is an addictive substance and governments and manufacturers know it is and they want us hooked.
A study, published in 2017, in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, stated, “Consuming sugar produces effects similar to that of cocaine, altering mood, possibly through its ability to induce reward and pleasure, leading to the seeking out of sugar.”
Don’t believe me? Well think again, as you head to the biscuit tin at eleven after having a breakfast based on sugary cereals and sugar laden fruit juice.
That is your blood sugar spiking and crashing and you having to feed your “habit”.
As Gary Taubes says in his brilliant book, The Case against Sugar, “Sugar does induce the same responses in the region of the brain known as the “reward centre” as do nicotine, cocaine, heroin, and alcohol addiction.”
The British nutritionist, John Yudkin warned us in the sixties that sugar was killing us and he was ridiculed and ostracized by the medical establishment. He also believed in eating a Low Carbohydrate diet and that sugar was a contributor to obesity, diabetes and heart attacks.
Sugar has no nutritional value at all but according to Gary Taubes, “We now eat in two weeks the amount of sugar our ancestors of 200 years ago ate in a whole year.”
So, when politicians and columnists talk about people needing to move more or kids need to get out more and away from their computers of Play Stations it makes me want to scream. We live in an ocean of sugar.
You think I am being over the top? Well let’s look at the facts. There are 4.5 Million Type 2 diabetics and more than 6 in 10 of us Brits are obese or overweight.
In the USA the figures are that over 120 million people are either Type 2 diabetics or pre-diabetic.
This is genocide.
Governments were too slow to act on tobacco but the sugar scandal will be even bigger because this is product directly aimed at kids.
This is why Governmental intervention is essential and why shock tactics like these posters are necessary but we also need to ‘fat shame’ manufacturers, celebrity sugar pushers and indeed Governments too.
Once a sleepy farming region, Silicon Valley is now the hub of a global industry that is transforming the economy, shaping our political discourse, and changing the very nature of our society. So what happened? How did this remarkable change take place? Why is this area the epicenter of this transformation? Discover the dark secrets behind the real history of Silicon Valley and the Big Tech giants in this important edition of The Corbett Report.
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TRANSCRIPT
Silicon Valley. Nestled in the southern San Francisco Bay Area of Northern California, the Valley is not just a geographical location. It’s an idea. It’s an expression of the urge to digitize all of the information in the world, and to database, track and store that information. And as we are now beginning to learn, the result of that digitization of everything is a world without privacy. A world where our ability to participate in public debate is subject to the whims of big tech billionaires. A world where freedom is a thing of the past and no one is outside the reach of Big Brother.
For many, this is just a happy coincidence for the intelligence agencies that are seeking to capture and store every detail about every moment of our lives. It is just happenstance that the information-industrial complex now has enough information to track our every move, listen in on our every conversation, map our social networks, and, increasingly, predict our future plans. It is just a series of random events that led to the world of today.
But what the masses do not know is that Silicon Valley has a very special history. One that explains how we came to our current predicament, and one that speaks to the future that we are sleepwalking into. A future of total surveillance and total control by the Big Tech billionaires and their shadowy backers.
These are The Secrets of Silicon Valley: What Big Tech Doesn’t Want You to Know.
Once known as “The Valley of Heart’s Delight,” the Santa Clara Valley was a bucolic, agrarian area known for its mild climate and blooming fruit trees. Until the 1960s, it was the largest fruit-producing-and-packing region in the world.
Today there are few reminders of the valley’s sleepy farming past. Now dubbed “Silicon Valley,” it is home to many of the world’s largest technology and social media companies, from Google and Facebook to Apple and Oracle, from Netflix and Cisco Systems to PayPal and Hewlett-Packard. It is the hub of a global industry that is transforming the economy, shaping our political discourse, and changing the very nature of our society.
So what happened? How did this remarkable change take place? Why is Silicon Valley the epicenter of this transformation?
The answer is surprisingly simple: WWII happened.
The influx of high-tech research and industry to the region is the direct result of the advent of WWII and the actions of one man: Frederick Terman.
Frederick was the son of Lewis Terman, a pioneer of educational psychology at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. An avowed eugenicist, Lewis Terman popularized IQ testing in America, helping to conduct the first mass administration of an IQ test for the US Army during America’s entry into the First World War.
Frederick Terman attended Stanford, earning an undergraduate degree in chemistry and a master’s degree in electrical engineering before heading to MIT to earn his doctorate in electrical engineering under Vannevar Bush. This connection came into play at the outbreak of World War II, when Bush—now heading up the US Office of Research and Development, which managed nearly all research and development for the US military during wartime—asked Terman to run the top-secret Radio Research Laboratory at Harvard University. There, Terman directed 800 of the country’s top researchers in the emerging field of electronic warfare. Their work included the development of some of the earliest signals intelligence and electronic intelligence equipment, including radar detectors, radar jammers and aluminum chaff to be used as countermeasures against German anti-air defenses.
The Valley as we know it today was born in the post-World War II era when Terman returned to Stanford as dean of the School of Engineering and set about transforming the school into the “MIT of the West.”
STEVE BLANK: Terman, with his war experience, decided to build Stanford into a center of excellence on microwaves and electronics, and he was the guy to do it. The Harvard Radio Research Lab was the pinnacle in the United States of every advanced microwave transmitter and receiver you could think of. And what he does is he recruits eleven former members of the radio research lab and says, “You know, we really don’t have a lab, but congratulations! You’re all now Stanford faculty!” “Oh great, thanks.” They joined Stanford and they set up their own lab: the Electronics Research Lab for basic and unclassified research. And they get the Office of Naval Research to give them their first contract—to actually fund in the post-war Stanford research into microwaves. By 1950, Terman turns Stanford’s engineering department into the MIT of the West, basically by taking all the war innovative R&D in microwaves, by moving it to Stanford, by taking the department heads and key staff.
With the military research funds flowing into the region, Terman began transforming the San Francisco Bay Area into a high-tech research hot spot. In 1951, he spearheaded the creation of Stanford Industrial Park—now known as Stanford Research Park—a joint venture between Stanford and the City of Palo Alto to attract big technology corporations to the area. The park was a huge success, eventually luring Hewlett-Packard, General Electric, Kodak and other important technology firms, and cementing Silicon Valley as a nexus between Stanford, big tech and government-sponsored research.
And this connection was not tangential. As researcher Steve Blank writes in his own history of Silicon Valley’s military roots:
“During the 1950s Fred Terman was an advisor to every major branch of the US military. He was on the Army Signal Corps R&D Advisory Council, the Air Force Electronic Countermeasures Scientific Advisory Board, a Trustee of the Institute of Defense Analysis, the Naval Research Advisory Committee, the Defense Science Board, and a consultant to the President’s Science Advisory Committee. His commercial activities had him on the board of directors of HP, Watkins-Johnson, Ampex, and Director and Vice Chairman of SRI. It’s amazing this guy ever slept. Terman was the ultimate networking machine for Stanford and its military contracts.”
It is no secret that Silicon Valley has thrived since the very beginning on Pentagon research dollars and DoD connections. From William Shockley (a rabid eugenicist who spent WWII as a director of Columbia University’s Anti-Submarine Warfare Operations Group and who is sometimes cited as Silicon Valley’s other founding father for his work on silicon semiconductors) to the Stanford Research Institute (a key military contractor that had close ties to the Advanced Research Projects Agency [ARPA]) the US Defense Department has had a key role in shaping the development of the region.
The Stanford Research Institute (SRI) was spearheaded by Terman and created by the trustees of Stanford University in 1946. From its inception, the SRI was instructed to avoid pursuing federal contracts that might embroil Stanford in political matters. But within six months it had already broken this directive, pursuing contracts with the Office of Naval Intelligence. In the 1960s, at the same time that the institute’s Artificial Intelligence Center was creating “Shakey,” the “first mobile robot that could reason about its surroundings,” SRI was targeted by Vietnam War protesters for its contract work with ARPA, the Pentagon arm devoted to developing cutting edge technology. The pressure caused Stanford University to formally cut its ties with SRI in the 1970s, but the institute’s military-funded research did not stop there.
The Stanford Research Institute was to become the second node in the ARPANET, the Pentagon-created packet-switching network that gave birth to the modern-day internet. The first message ever sent between two computers was sent on the ARPANET between a computer at UCLA and one at SRI.
It was the head of ARPA’s command and control division, Robert Kahn, who set up the first experimental mobile network (known as “PRNET”) around Silicon Valley and formed the initial satellite network (“SATNET”) that connected the early internet internationally. In 1973, Kahn enlisted the help of Vint Cerf, an assistant professor at Stanford University, to develop—as a Department of Defense project—the TCP/IP protocol suite that would help make the internet possible.
In a recent panel discussion hosted by DARPA, the latest moniker for what was originally ARPA, Vint Cerf admitted that the entire ARPANET project was dictated by the Pentagon’s needs for a command and control system that would be responsive to military requirements:
VINT CERF: The internet was motivated by a belief that command and control could make use of computers in order to enable the Defense Department to use its resources better than an opponent. In that particular case—Bob in particular started the program at DARPA in the early 1970s—[we] realized that we had to have the computers in ships at sea, and in aircraft, and in mobile vehicles, and the ARPANET had only done dedicated, fixed . . . You know, machines that were in air-conditioned rooms connected together—you know, roughly speaking, dedicated telephone circuits. So you can’t connect the tanks together with wires because they run over them and they break, and the airplanes, they’ll never make it off the ground, you know, you can see all . . . So this led to the need for mobile radio communication and satellite communication in a networked environment.
The question about global nature here is easily answered. At least I thought we were doing this for the Defense Department, which would have to operate everywhere in the world. And so it could not be as a design that in some way was limited to CONUS, for example. And it also could not be a design that depended at all on the cooperation of other countries allocating, for example, address space. I mean, the sort of silly model of this is if we use country codes to indicate different networks . . . different network identifiers. Imagine that you’ve got to invade country B and before you do that you have to go and say, “Hi, we’re gonna invade your country in a couple of weeks and we need some address space to run another call system.” Yeah, you know, it probably wasn’t gonna work. So we knew it had to be global in scope.
One of the first demonstrations of the protocol—a 1977 test involving a van equipped with radio gear by SRI that is now dubbed the birth of the modern internet—even simulated “a mobile unit in the field, let’s say in Europe, in the middle of some kind of action trying to communicate through a satellite network to the United States.”
But while direct investment in this technological revolution suited the purposes of the Pentagon, the US intelligence community was pursuing other, more covert avenues for harnessing the incredible potential of Silicon Valley and its surveillance technologies. With the advent of the Cold War and the increased tensions between the US and the USSR in a new, highly technological game of “spy vs. spy,” the funding for research and development of cutting edge technology was placed under a cover of national security and classified.
BLANK: But in the early 1950s, the Korean War changes the game. Post-World War II—those who know your history—we basically demobilized our troops, mothballed our bombers and our fighters, and said, “We’re going to enjoy the post-war benefits.” 1949, the Soviets explode their first nuclear weapon. The Cold War, with the Korean War, becomes hot. All of a sudden, the United States realizes that the world’s changed again, and spook work comes to Stanford.
The military approaches Terman and asks him to set up the Applied Electronics Lab to do classified military programs, and doubles the size of the electronics program at Stanford. They said, “Well, we’ll keep this separate from the unclassified Electronics Research Lab.” But for the first time it made Stanford University a full partner with the military in government R&D.
The arrival of intelligence agency investment money created a new relationship between the government and the researchers in the Valley. Rather than directly hiring the technology companies to produce the technology, consumer electronics would increasingly be regulated, directed, overseen and infiltrated by government workers, who could then use that technology as the basis for a worldwide signals intelligence operation, directed not only at the militaries of foreign countries, but at the population of the world as a whole.
Now cloaked in a shroud of national security, the government’s role in the development of Big Tech has been largely obscured. But, if you know where to look, the fingerprints of the intelligence agencies are still visible on nearly every major company and technology to emerge from Silicon Valley.
Take Oracle Corporation, for instance. The third-largest software corporation in the world, Oracle is famed for its eponymous database software. What many do not know is that the “Oracle” name itself comes from the firm’s first customer: the CIA. “Project Oracle” was the CIA codename for a giant relational database that was being constructed on contract by Ampex, a Silicon Valley firm. Assigned to the project were Larry Ellison, Bob Miner and Ed Oates. Although Project Oracle “was something of a disaster” it did lead Ellison and his partners to spin off Oracle Corporation, which to this day gets 25% of its business from government contracts.
Or take Sun Microsystems. Founded in 1982, the Silicon Valley software and hardware giant’s flagship Unix workstation, the “Sun-1”, as ComputerWorld explains, “owes its origins rather directly to a half-dozen major technologies developed at multiple universities and companies, all funded by ARPA.” Sun was acquired by Oracle in 2010 for $7.4 billion.
But to an entire generation growing up today, this is ancient history. Sure, the intelligence agencies and the Defense Department were involved in the founding of these Silicon Valley stalwarts. But what about the Silicon Valley of today? What does this have to do with Google or Facebook or PayPal or the Big Tech giants that have become synonymous with computing in the age of the internet?
The modern era of Silicon Valley began in the 1990s, when the advent of the World Wide Web brought the full potential of the computing revolution into homes across America and around the globe. This was the era of the dotcom bubble, when small start-ups with no business plan and no revenue could become million-dollar companies overnight. And behind it all, steering the revolution from the shadows, were the intelligence agencies, who helped fund the core technologies and platforms of the modern internet.
One of the first problems confronting early users of the web was how to search through the dizzying array of personal web sites, corporate web pages, government sites and other content that was coming online every day. In order for the web to turn from a playground for tech geeks and hobbyists into a ubiquitous communication tool, there would need to be a way to quickly sort through the vast amount of information available and return a relevant list of websites to lead users to useful information. Early iterations of online search, including personally curated lists of interesting sites and primitive search engines that relied on simple keyword matching, failed to live up to the task.
By happy coincidence, the problem of cataloguing, indexing, sorting and querying vast troves of information was one that the intelligence agencies were also working on. As the masses of data flowing through the internet gave rise to the era of Big Data, the NSA, the CIA and other members of the US intelligence community recruited the best and the brightest young minds in the country to help them store, search and analyze this information . . . and those searching for it. And, as usual, they turned to Stanford University and the Silicon Valley whiz kids for help.
Google—as the now familiar story goes—started out as a research project of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two graduate students at Stanford University. Unsurprisingly, one does not have to dig very deep to find the connection to the Defense Department. DARPA—the current name of the oft-rebranded ARPA—was one of the seven military, civilian and law enforcement sponsors of the “Stanford Digital Libraries Project,” which helped fund Page and Brin’s research. DARPA was even thanked by name in the white paper where the idea for Google was first laid out: “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.”
Less well-known is the “Massive Digital Data Systems” project spearheaded by the US intelligence community and funded through unclassified agencies like the National Science Foundation. As an email introducing the project to researchers at major US universities in 1993 explains, it was designed to help the intelligence agencies take “a proactive role in stimulating research in the efficient management of massive databases and ensuring that I[ntelligence] C[ommunity] requirements can be incorporated or adapted into commercial products.”
As Jeff Nesbit—former director of legislative and public affairs for the National Science Foundation—detailed in a revealing 2017 article for qz.com on Google’s true origin:
“The research arms of the CIA and NSA hoped that the best computer-science minds in academia could identify what they called ‘birds of a feather:'[sic] Just as geese fly together in large V shapes, or flocks of sparrows make sudden movements together in harmony, they predicted that like-minded groups of humans would move together online.[. . .]
“Their research aim was to track digital fingerprints inside the rapidly expanding global information network, which was then known as the World Wide Web. Could an entire world of digital information be organized so that the requests humans made inside such a network be tracked and sorted? Could their queries be linked and ranked in order of importance? Could ‘birds of a feather’ be identified inside this sea of information so that communities and groups could be tracked in an organized way?”
The project dispersed more than a dozen grants of several million dollars each to help realize this goal of tracking, sorting and mining online behavior in order to identify and categorize communities and track groups in real life. And one of the first recipients of this grant money? Sergey Brin’s team at Stanford and their research into search query optimization.
From its very founding and continuing right through to the present day, Google has maintained close ties to America’s intelligence, military and law enforcement apparatuses. As with all matters of so-called “national security,” however, we only get a window into that relationship from the public and declassified record of contracts and agreements that the tech giant has left in its wake.
In 2003, Google signed a $2.1 million contract with the National Security Agency, the US intelligence community’s shadowy surveillance arm that is responsible for collecting, storing and analyzing signals intelligence in foreign intelligence and counterintelligence operations. Google built the agency a customized search tool “capable of searching 15 million documents in twenty-four languages.” So important was this relationship to Google that when the contract expired in April 2004, they extended it for another year at no cost to the government.
In 2005, it was revealed that In-Q-Tel—the CIA’s venture capital arm and itself the perfect encapsulation of the intelligence agencies’ relationship with Silicon Valley—had sold over 5,000 shares of Google stock. It is not exactly clear how the CIA’s venture capital firm ended up with 5,000 shares of Google stock, but it is believed to have come when Google bought out Keyhole Inc., the developer of the software that later become Google Earth. The company’s name, “Keyhole,” is a none-too-subtle reference to the Keyhole class of reconnaissance satellites that the US intelligence agencies have been using for decades to commit 3D imaging and mapping analysis. Keyhole, Inc. worked closely with the US intelligence community and even bragged that its technology was being used by the Pentagon to support the invasion of Iraq. To this day, the CIA itself describes Google Earth as “CIA-assisted technology” on its own page dedicated to “CIA’s Impact on Technology.”
In 2010, details of a formal NSA-Google relationship began to emerge, but both parties refused to divulge any further information about the relationship. Subsequent reporting suggested that Google had “agreed to provide information about traffic on its networks in exchange for intelligence from the NSA about what it knew of foreign hackers.” More details emerged from a Freedom of Information Act request in 2014, which revealed that Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt were not only on a first name basis with then-NSA chief General Keith Alexander, but that Google was part of a “secretive government initiative known as the Enduring Security Framework,” and that this initiative involved Silicon Valley partnering with the Pentagon and the US intelligence community to share information “at network speed.”
The Enduring Security Freedom initiative is just one window into how Big Tech can reap big dollars from their relationship with the NSA. In 2013, it emerged that the participants in the PRISM program—the illegal surveillance program which allowed the NSA backdoor access to all information and user data of all of the Big Tech companies—were reimbursed for the program’s expenses by a shadowy arm of the agency known as “Special Source Operations.”
MARINA PORTNAYA: The entire process reportedly cost PRISM participants millions of dollars to implement each successful extension, and those costs, according to US documents, were covered by an arm of the NSA known as “Special Source Operations.” According to The Guardian newspaper, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has described Special Source Operations as the “crown jewel” of the agency that handles all surveillance programs that rely on corporate partnership with telecoms and internet providers to access communication data. Now, this revelation is being considered evidence that a financial relationship between tech companies and the NSA has existed. And as The Guardian newspaper put it, the disclosure that taxpayers money was used to cover the company’s compliance costs raises new questions surrounding the relationship between Silicon Valley and the NSA.
The PRISM program itself proves that the military and intelligence agency ties to modern day Silicon Valley do not end with Google. In fact, every one of the Silicon Valley stalwarts that dominate the web today have similar ties to the shadowy world of spooks and spies.
In June 2003, the Information Processing Techniques Office—the information technology wing of DARPA that had overseen the original ARPANET project in the 1960s—quietly posted a “Broad Agency Announcement” to its website to request proposals for an ambitious new project. Labeled “BAA # 03-30,” this “proposer information pamphlet” requested proposals from developers to build an “an ontology-based (sub)system” called LifeLog that “captures, stores, and makes accessible the flow of one person’s experience in and interactions with the world.”
The idea, which seemed somewhat fantastic in 2003, was that users of LifeLog would wear a device that would capture and record all of their transactions and interactions, physical movements, email and phone calls, and a variety of other information. The LifeLog would be presented to users “as a stand-alone system to serve as a powerful automated multimedia diary and scrapbook,” but, as the announcement goes on to reveal, the data collected would be used to help DARPA create a new class of truly ‘cognitive’ systems that can reason in a variety of ways.”
If it had gone ahead, LifeLog would have been a virtual diary of everywhere that its users went, everything they did, everyone they talked to, what they talked about, what they bought, what they saw and listened to, and what they planned to do in the future. It immediately drew criticism as an obvious attempt by the government to create a tool for profiling enemies of the state, and even supporters of the plan were forced to admit that LifeLog “could raise eyebrows if [DARPA] didn’t make it clear how privacy concerns would be met.”
But then, without explanation, the announcement was withdrawn and the project was dropped. DARPA spokesman Jan Walker chalked the cancellation up to “A change in priorities” at the agency, but researchers close to the project admitted that they were baffled by the sudden stopping of the program. “I am sure that such research will continue to be funded under some other title,” wrote one MIT researcher whose colleague had spent weeks working on the proposal. “I can’t imagine DARPA ‘dropping out’ of such a key research area.”
The cancellation of LifeLog was reported by Wired.com on February 4, 2004. That very same day, a Harvard undergrad named Mark Zuckerberg officially launched “TheFacebook.com,” the first incarnation of Facebook, which collects vast amounts of data on its users, offering them the promise of “a powerful automated multimedia diary and scrapbook,” but, as has become more and more evident in recent years, using and selling that data for ulterior motives.
But it is not just this interesting coincidence that connects Facebook to DARPA. Once again, the money that helped “TheFacebook” go from a Harvard “student project” to a multi-billion user internet giant involved a relocation to Silicon Valley and copious injections of venture capital from intelligence-connected insiders. Facebook moved to Palo Alto, California, in 2004 and received its first investment of $500,000 from Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal. But the real money, and the real interest in Facebook, arrived in 2005, in the form of a $12.7 million investment from Accel Partners and an additional $1 million from Accel’s Jim Breyer. Breyer, it turns out, had some interesting connections of his own.
NARRATOR: First venture capital money totaling $500,000 came to The Facebook from venture capitalist Peter Thiel, founder and former CEO of PayPal. He also serves on the board of radical conservative group Vanguard DAC. Further funding came in the form of $12.7 million dollars from venture capital firm Accel Partners. Accel’s manager, James Breyer, was former chair of the National Venture Capital Association. Breyer served on the National Venture Capital Association’s board with Gilman Louie, CEO of In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm established by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1999. This firm works in various aspects of information technology and intelligence, including, most notably, nurturing data mining technologies. Breyer has also served on the board of BBN Technologies, a research and development firm known for spearheading the ARPANET, or what we know today as the internet.
In October of 2004, Dr. Anita Jones climbed on board BBN along with Gilman Louie, but what is most interesting is Dr. Jones’ experience prior to joining BBN. Jones herself served on the board of directors for In-Q-Tel and was previously the director of defense research and engineering for the US Department of Defense. Her responsibilities included serving as an advisor to the Secretary of Defense and overseeing the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
This goes farther than just the initial appearances. DARPA shot to national fme in 2002, when knowledge of the existence of the Information Awareness Office (IAO) came to light. The IAO stated its mission was to gather as much information as possible about everyone in a centralized location for easy perusal by the United States government, including but not limited to: internet activity; credit card purchase history; airline ticket purchases; car rentals; medical records; educational transcripts; driver’s licenses; utility bills; tax returns; and any other available data.
It should come as no surprise, then, that the ex-director of DARPA, Regina Dugan, was hired by Google in 2012 to head its Advanced Technology and Projects group, and that she was then hired by Facebook in 2016 to head their “Building 8” research group focusing on experimental technologies like brain sensors and artificial intelligence. Nor is it a surprise to learn that DARPA is already working to weaponize Facebook’s Oculus virtual reality technology for fighting cyberwar.
Nor is it a surprise that Facebook seed money investor Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, developed Palantir—a data-mining and analysis tool used by the NSA, FBI, CIA and other intelligence, counterterrorism and military agencies—from PayPal’s own fraud-detection algorithm. Or that In-Q-Tel was one of the first outside investors in the Palantir technology, which has gained notoriety in recent years for “using War on Terror tools to track American citizens.”
Nor is it a surprise to learn that Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google and current technical advisor to Google parent company Alphabet, is now the chairman of the Pentagon’s “Defense Innovation Board,” which seeks to bring the efficiency and vision of Silicon Valley to the Defense Department’s high-tech innovation initiatives.
In fact, it would be more surprising to find a major Silicon Valley company that was not connected to the US military or to the US intelligence agencies one way or another. This is not an accident of history or a mere coincidence. The very origins of the internet were in shadowy Pentagon programs for developing the perfect command and control technologies. From the earliest attempts to form electronic databases of information on counterinsurgents in Vietnam right through to today, this technology—as Yasha Levine, author of Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet, explains—was intended to be used as a tool of warfare against target populations.
YASHA LEVINE: To understand what the internet is and what the internet has become, you have to go back to the very beginning. Back to the 1960s, when the internet was being created by the Pentagon. Back then, America was a relatively new global empire facing an increasingly chaotic and violent world. There was the Vietnam War—that was central—but the US was facing insurgencies all around the world, from Latin America to Southeast Asia. It was also facing an increasingly volatile and violent domestic environment. You had the anti-war movement. You had militant black activism. You had groups like The Weather Underground that were setting off bombs seemingly daily in cities all across the country. You had race riots in major cities.
And America’s paranoid generals looked at this, right, and they saw a vast communist conspiracy, of course. They saw the Soviet Union expanding globally, underwriting insurgencies all around the world, backing countries that were opposed to America. At the same time they were underwriting opposition movements in America, and they saw this as a new kind of war that was happening. This is not a traditional war that you could fight with traditional weapons. This is not a war that you could drop a nuke on. It was not a war that you could send a tank division into, because the combatants did not wear uniforms and they did not march in formation. They were part of the civilian population of the conflict that they were taking part in.
So it was as a new kind of war and new kind of global insurgency. And in certain rarefied circles in the military, people who were familiar with the new kind of computer technology being developed, they believe that the only way to fight and win this new war was to develop new information weapons—computer technology that could: ingest data on people and political movements; that could combine opinion surveys, economic data, criminal histories, draft histories, photographs, telephone conversations intercepted by security services; and put that all into databases that could allow analysts to perform sophisticated analysis on it and run predictive surveys. The idea was you have to find out who the enemy is and isolate it from the general population, and then take that enemy out. And at the time some even dreamed of one day creating a global system of management that could watch the world in real-time and intercept threats before they happened in much the same way that America’s early warning radar defense system did for hostile aircraft.
This is the general background from which the internet emerged. Today the counterinsurgency origins of the internet have been obscured. They’ve been lost for the most part. Very few histories even mention it, even in a little bit. But at the time that it was being created in the 1960s, the origins of the internet and the origins of this technology as a tool of surveillance and as a tool of control were very obvious to people back then. At the time people did not see computers and computer networks as tools of liberation or utopian technologies, they saw them as tools of political and social control—and that specifically included the ARPANET, the network that would later grow into the internet.
The internet was never intended as a tool of liberation. It was from its very inception intended to be a tool for tracking, surveilling and, ultimately, controlling a target population. And in the volatile environment of the 1960s, that “target population” quickly morphed from the Viet Cong counterinsurgents into the American public itself and anyone else who could pose a threat to the Pentagon’s ambitions at home or abroad.
Seen in the light of this history, recent developments on the internet make more sense. Silicon Valley did not spring out of the California soil by itself. It was carefully seeded there by the military and intelligence agencies that require this technology to fight the information warfare of the 21st century.
The Department of Defense did not announce in 2003 that they were going to “fight the net” as if it were an enemy weapons system because they were afraid the internet could be weaponized by their enemies. They knew it was already a weapon because they themselves had weaponized it.
The US government is not afraid of the Russians and their ability to “undermine American democracy” by purchasing thousands of dollars of advertising on Facebook. They were the ones who envisioned a LifeLog system to observe and control the population in the first place.
The Pentagon does not fret about the security vulnerabilities of the internet. It exploits those vulnerabilities to develop some of the most destructive cyberweapons yet unleashed, including the US/Israeli-developed Stuxnet.
And, as the next generation of networking technologies threatens to add not just our Facebook data and our Google searches and our tweets and our purchases to the government’s databases, but actually to connect every object in the world directly to those databases, the military is once again at the cutting edge of the next internet revolution.
SEAN O’KEEFE: Internet of Things is penetrating an ever0wider swath of daily life and the global economy. Our good friends and helpful proliferators of information at Wikipedia define the Internet of Things as the network of physical objects—things embedded with electronics (software sensors, network connectivity)—which enables these objects to collect and exchange data. Essentially it allows objects to be sensed and control remotely, creating an integration between physical world and computer systems. Think smart grid: energy systems related to each other to maximize efficiency and all tied to that objective. Internet of Things is transforming modern business, leveraging embedded sensors, connectivity, digital analytics, and the automation to deliver greater efficiency and effectiveness on a wide range of market fronts.
The military has been a leader in developing many of the Internet of Things component technologies, but can do more to leverage the benefits of Internet of Things solutions. The broader national security establishment also faces unique challenges in adopting Internet of Things technologies ranging from security and mission assurance to infrastructure and cost constraints and cultural hurdles. Now, in September, just a couple of months ago, the CSIS Strategic Technologies Program released a report: Leveraging the Internet of Things for a More Efficient and Effective Military, which outlines how the military can adopt lessons from the private sector to take advantage of these broader benefits of Internet of Things.
From the earliest days of networked computing—when the ARPANET was still just a twinkle in its engineers’ eyes and famed ARPA computer scientist J. C. R. Licklider was writing memos to his colleagues in Palo Alto updating them on his vision for an “Intergalactic Computer Network”—to today, when DARPA scientists are plotting military uses for the Internet of Things,the technology underpinning the US government’s plans for full-spectrum dominance of the cyber world has advanced by leaps and bounds. But the vision itself remains the same.
In this vision, every person is tracked, their conversations recorded, their purchases monitored, their social networks mapped, their habits studied, and, ultimately, their behaviours predicted, so that the Pentagon and the spies of Silicon Valley can better control the human population. And, with the advent of technologies that ensure that every item we own will be spying on us and broadcasting that data through networks that are compromised by the intelligence agencies, that vision is closer than ever to a reality.
And there, helping that vision to come to reality, are the giants of Big Tech who were founded, funded, aided and, when needed, compromised by the spooks, spies and soldiers who desire complete control over the cyber world.
This is the secret of Silicon Valley. In a key sense, the Big Tech giants are the Pentagon and the intelligence community. The DoD and the intelligence agencies are the Big Tech giants. It was this way from the very dawn of modern computing, and it remains this way today.
We should not be surprised that the world of the internet—the world bequeathed to us by the ARPANET—is increasingly looking like an always-on surveillance device. That was what it was intended to be.
Yet the public, blissfully unaware of this reality (or willfully ignorant of it) continues to record their every move in their Facebook LifeLog, flock like birds of a feather to ask their most intimate questions of Google, and feed their personal data into the gaping maw of the PRISM beast.
It may be too late to pull back from the brink of this always-on, always-surveilled, wireless networked precipice . . . but until we look squarely at the facts showing that Big Tech is a front for the US government, we will never hope to escape the silicon trap that they have laid for us.
Lots of ‘trauma,’ read the article to get a flavor. This sentence pretty much sums things up:
“There’s deep grief and anxiety for what’s being lost, followed by rage at continued political inaction, and finally hope that we can indeed solve this challenge. There are definitely tears and trembling voices.”
End of civilization?
The title of the article is: “It’s the end of the world as they know it.” Some selected quotes:
“I’m tired of processing this incredible and immense decline”
” . . . knows of a looming catastrophe but must struggle to function in a world that does not comprehend what is coming and, worse, largely ignores the warnings of those who do.”
“it’s deep grief—having eyes wide open to what is playing out in our world”
“I lose sleep over climate change almost every single night”
“Climate change is its own unique trauma. It has to do with human existence.”
“I have no child and I have one dog, and thank god he’ll be dead in 10 years.”
Soooo . . . have any of these scientists read the IPCC Reports? I’m not seeing this level of ‘alarm’ anywhere in the IPCC Reports? Where the heck does this ‘end of civilization’ stuff come from?
In a tweet about the article, Lucas Bergkamp asked:
“How can these scientists produce any reliable, objective data?”
Gotta wonder. Sarah Myhre states:
“I have anxiety exacerbated by the constant background of doom and gloom of science. It’s not stopping me from doing my work, but it’s an impediment.”
Apart from ‘impediments’, what about flat-out bias in research introduced by this extreme world view?
Hardiness
Not all climate scientists are similarly ‘afflicted.’ My previous blog post included statements from Suki Manabe and Gavin Schmidt, who were not afflicted in this way. The Mother Jones article includes statements from David Grinspoon, Ken Caldeira and Michael Mann, who also do not seem to be so ‘afflicted.’
“Caldeira offers a blunt comparison: “I had a girlfriend once who was a social worker who had to deal with abused children. She had to deal with real shit every day. Climate scientists have it easy.” And Kate Marvel, a climate scientist and science writer, went even further in a tweet in January: “In a world where people have to deal with racism, inequality, and resurgent fascism, the notion that climate science is uniquely depressing is… weird.”
In my earlier blog post, i discussed the concept of psychological hardiness, excerpts provided below:
<begin quote>
And also inform yourself about psychological hardiness (something I learned from days at U. Chicago and hanging out with grad students in Salvatore Maddi’s group). Excerpt from Wikipedia:
The coping style most commonly associated with hardiness is that of transformational coping, an optimistic style of coping that transforms stressful events into less stressful ones. At the cognitive level this involves setting the event into a broader perspective in which they do not seem so terrible after all. At the level of action, individuals high in hardiness are believed to react to stressful events by increasing their interaction with them, trying to turn them into an advantage and opportunity for growth, and in the process achieve some greater understanding.
The ‘pre-traumatic stress’ thing clicked a link in my mind to my old U. of Chicago pal Colonel Paul Bartone, a military psychologist and a member of the hardiness group. The following paper seems relevant: A Model for Soldier Psychological Adaptation in Peacekeeping Operations. I think these concepts are relevant for what is going on with Parmesan et al. Seems like skeptics are more hardy?
The psychology of all this is probably pretty interesting, and worthy of more investigation. But Jeff Kiehl is right – whining scientists aren’t going to help either the science or their ’cause.’
<end quote>
Mann seems peculiarly hardy in this sense: “But Mann, who has had to contend with death threats and campaigns to have him fired from Penn State, derives motivation from being in battle.”
Antidotes
This ‘affliction’ of climate scientists seems rather trendy in some sort of ‘woke’ sense. If you do not aspire to such trendiness, what might you do to overcome this affliction?
“Professionally coping with grief is part of the job training for doctors, caregivers, and those working in humanitarian or crisis situations. But for scientists?”
To figure out how these afflicted climate scientists can become more hardy, it is useful to speculate on the reasons for their ‘affliction.’
Ignorance may play an important role. Few of the scientists interviewed are experts on attribution. They seem to blame everything on manmade climate change, and are extrapolating future consequences that are much more dire and with higher confidence than than those from the IPCC. Clearly an issue for Greta, but one would hope that actual climate scientists would dig deeper and be more curious and objective.
JC antidote: Apart from blaming anything negative on manmade climate change, take a step back and assess how the planet and the human race are actually doing. Take a look at humanprogress.org, or follow them on twitter @HumanProgress. Global life expectancy is increasing, global poverty is way down, global agricultural productivity is way up, global child mortality is way down, the planet is greening, etc. Heck, even the corals are doing really well, following the 2016 El Nino.
A lot of this affliction seems to be about ‘ego’:
“I had to face the fact that there was a veritable tidal wave of people who don’t care about climate change and who put personal interest above the body of scientific information that I had contributed to.”
“his anger was driven by the fact that his expertise—his foresight—was not broadly recognized.”
JC antidote: Try reading some literature on history, philosophy and sociology of science – you will become more humble as a scientist and less likely to believe your own hype. Read Richard Feynman. Hang out at Climate Etc. Listen seriously to a serious skeptic.
Having your ego wrapped up in having your research influence policy (frustrated policy advocates), keeping ‘score’ in a personal war against skeptics, seeking fame, generating book sales and lecture fees and political influence, etc. can all come into play in influencing how a scientist reacts to the ‘threats’ of climate change. Scientists might get ‘upset’ if they don’t think they are sufficiently successful at the above. This is something else — not pre-traumatic stress syndrome.
Roger Pielke Jr tweets:
“The whole phenomena of climate scientists identifying evil enemies who have obstructed revolution, transformation, restructuring is not reality-based, but a reflection of power fantasies & a complete lack of understanding of how political and societal change actually happens.”
JC antidote: focus more on being a scientist than being a politician. You might know what you are doing as a scientist. You are very unlikely to be effective as a politician, and your political activism will contribute to the appearance of bias in your scientific research.
“The shale revolution collapsed the prices of natural gas & coal, the two fuels that produce 70% of U.S. electricity. But electric rates haven’t gone down, rising instead 20% since 2008. Direct and indirect subsidies for solar and wind consumed those savings.”
A week doesn’t pass without a mayor, governor, policymaker or pundit joining the rush to demand, or predict, an energy future that is entirely based on wind/solar and batteries, freed from the “burden” of the hydrocarbons that have fueled societies for centuries. Regardless of one’s opinion about whether, or why, an energy “transformation” is called for, the physics and economics of energy combined with scale realities make it clear that there is no possibility of anything resembling a radically “new energy economy” in the foreseeable future. Bill Gates has said that when it comes to understanding energy realities “we need to bring math to the problem.”
He’s right. So, in my recent Manhattan Institute report, “The New Energy Economy: An Exercise in Magical Thinking,” I did just that.
Herein, then, is a summary of some of bottom-line realities from the underlying math. (See the full report for explanations, documentation and citations.)
Realities About the Scale of Energy Demand
1. Hydrocarbons supply over 80% of world energy: If all that were in the form of oil, the barrels would line up from Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles, and that entire line would grow by the height of the Washington Monument every week.
2. The small two percentage-point decline in the hydrocarbon share of world energy use entailed over $2 trillion in cumulative global spending on alternatives over that period; solar and wind today supply less than 2% of the global energy.
3. When the world’s four billion poor people increase energy use to just one-third of Europe’s per capita level, global demand rises by an amount equal to twice America’s total consumption.
4. A 100x growth in the number of electric vehicles to 400 million on the roads by 2040 would displace 5% of global oil demand.
5. Renewable energy would have to expand 90-fold to replace global hydrocarbons in two decades. It took a half-century for global petroleum production to expand “only” 10-fold.
6. Replacing U.S. hydrocarbon-based electric generation over the next 30 years would require a construction program building out the grid at a rate 14-fold greater than any time in history.
7. Eliminating hydrocarbons to make U.S. electricity (impossible soon, infeasible for decades) would leave untouched 70% of U.S. hydrocarbons use—America uses 16% of world energy.
8. Efficiency increases energy demand by making products & services cheaper: since 1990, global energy efficiency improved 33%, the economy grew 80% and global energy use is up 40%.
9. Efficiency increases energy demand: Since 1995, aviation fuel use/passenger-mile is down 70%, air traffic rose more than 10-fold, and global aviation fuel use rose over 50%.
10. Efficiency increases energy demand: since 1995, energy used per byte is down about 10,000-fold, but global data traffic rose about a million-fold; global electricity used for computing soared.
11. Since 1995, total world energy use rose by 50%, an amount equal to adding two entire United States’ worth of demand.
12. For security and reliability, an average of two months of national demand for hydrocarbons are in storage at any time. Today, barely two hours of national electricity demand can be stored in all utility-scale batteries plus all batteries in one million electric cars in America.
13. Batteries produced annually by the Tesla Gigafactory (world’s biggest battery factory) can store three minutes worth of annual U.S. electric demand.
14. To make enough batteries to store two-day’s worth of U.S. electricity demand would require 1,000 years of production by the Gigafactory (world’s biggest battery factory).
15. Every $1 billion in aircraft produced leads to some $5 billion in aviation fuel consumed over two decades to operate them. Global spending on new jets is more than $50 billion a year—and rising.
16. Every $1 billion spent on datacenters leads to $7 billion in electricity consumed over two decades. Global spending on datatcenters is more than $100 billion a year—and rising.
Realities About Energy Economics
17. Over a 30-year period, $1 million worth of utility-scale solar or wind produces 40 million and 55 million kWh respectively: $1 million worth of shale well produces enough natural gas to generate 300 million kWh over 30 years.
18. It costs about the same to build one shale well or two wind turbines: the latter, combined, produces 0.7 barrels of oil (equivalent energy) per hour, the shale rig averages 10 barrels of oil per hour.
19. It costs less than $0.50 to store a barrel of oil, or its equivalent in natural gas, but it costs $200 to store the equivalent energy of a barrel of oil in batteries.
20. Cost models for wind and solar assume, respectively, 41% and 29% capacity factors (i.e., how often they produce electricity). Real-world data reveal as much as 10 percentage points less for both. That translates into $3 million less energy produced than assumed over a 20-year life of a 2-MW $3 million wind turbine.
21. In order to compensate for episodic wind/solar output, U.S. utilities are using oil- and gas-burning reciprocating engines (big cruise-ship-like diesels); three times as many have been added to the grid since 2000 as in the 50 years prior to that.
22. Wind-farm capacity factors have been improving at about 0.7% per year; this small gain comes mainly from reducing the number of turbines per acre leading to 50% increase in average land used to produce a wind-kilowatt-hour.
23. Over 90% of America’s electricity, and 99% of the power used in transportation, comes from sources that can easily supply energy to the economy any time the market demands it.
24. Wind and solar machines produce energy an average of 25%–30% of the time, and only when nature permits. Conventional power plants can operate nearly continuously and are available when needed.
25. The shale revolution collapsed the prices of natural gas & coal, the two fuels that produce 70% of U.S. electricity. But electric rates haven’t gone down, rising instead 20% since 2008. Direct and indirect subsidies for solar and wind consumed those savings.
Energy Physics… Inconvenient Realities
26. Politicians and pundits like to invoke “moonshot” language. But transforming the energy economy is not like putting a few people on the moon a few times. It is like putting all of humanity on the moon—permanently.
27. The common cliché: an energy tech disruption will echo the digital tech disruption. But information-producing machines and energy-producing machines involve profoundly different physics; the cliché is sillier than comparing apples to bowling balls.
28. If solar power scaled like computer-tech, a single postage-stamp-size solar array would power the Empire State Building. That only happens in comic books.
29. If batteries scaled like digital tech, a battery the size of a book, costing three cents, could power a jetliner to Asia. That only happens in comic books.
30. If combustion engines scaled like computers, a car engine would shrink to the size of an ant and produce a thousand-fold more horsepower; actual ant-sized engines produce 100,000 times less power.
31. No digital-like 10x gains exist for solar tech. Physics limit for solar cells (the Shockley-Queisser limit) is a max conversion of about 33% of photons into electrons; commercial cells today are at 26%.
32. No digital-like 10x gains exist for wind tech. Physics limit for wind turbines (the Betz limit) is a max capture of 60% of energy in moving air; commercial turbines achieve 45%.
33. No digital-like 10x gains exist for batteries: maximum theoretical energy in a pound of oil is 1,500% greater than max theoretical energy in the best pound of battery chemicals.
34. About 60 pounds of batteries are needed to store the energy equivalent of one pound of hydrocarbons.
35. At least 100 pounds of materials are mined, moved and processed for every pound of battery fabricated.
36. Storing the energy equivalent of one barrel of oil, which weighs 300 pounds, requires 20,000 pounds of Tesla batteries ($200,000 worth).
37. Carrying the energy equivalent of the aviation fuel used by an aircraft flying to Asia would require $60 million worth of Tesla-type batteries weighing five times more than that aircraft.
38. It takes the energy-equivalent of 100 barrels of oil to fabricate a quantity of batteries that can store the energy equivalent of a single barrel of oil.
39. A battery-centric grid and car world means mining gigatons more of the earth to access lithium, copper, nickel, graphite, rare earths, cobalt, etc.—and using millions of tons of oil and coal both in mining and to fabricate metals and concrete.
40. China dominates global battery production with its grid 70% coal-fueled: EVs using Chinese batteries will create more carbon-dioxide than saved by replacing oil-burning engines.
41. One would no more use helicopters for regular trans-Atlantic travel—doable with elaborately expensive logistics—than employ a nuclear reactor to power a train or photovoltaic systems to power a nation.
Mark P. Mills is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a McCormick School of Engineering Faculty Fellow at Northwestern University, and author of Work in the Age of Robots, published by Encounter Books.
Bellingcat’s Iggy Ostanin, [update: who Eliot Higgins says is now ex-Bellingcat ] recently claimed to have discovered that the nomenclature of Climategate-1 emails was based on Unix timestamps and that the nomenclature proved that Russians hacked CRU from timezone +05:00. Amidst much uninformed hyperventilating. Ostanin’s assertions were swiftly retweeted by Andy Revkin, Roger Harrabin, Ken Rice and many others. However, his claims are backwards – or perhaps, in true Mannian style, upside down.
The connection of CG email nomenclature to Unix timestamps was observed as early as Dec 7, 2009 (see WUWT commenter crosspatch here)m who similarly noticed discrepancies between nomenclature and email times, but concluded that they showed that hacker used a computer set to Eastern North American time (-05:00 Standard).
I pointed the error out on Twitter with technical analysis. I also linked Ostanin to the original WUWT comment making similar point.
Ostanin responded by claiming that my (correct) replication of CG1 nomenclature was “needlessly complicated” and doubled down with his incorrect assertion that “time seen in hacked email headers is 5 hours behind – to the second – of the time in the decoded email file names”:
Ostanin challenged everyone “to try to see for themselves” – pointing to a internet utility:
After I re-iterated my technical criticism, Iggy stated that he wasn’t “sure if either of [me or Charles Wood] ever came across a Kremlin narrative they didn’t endorse”. Then, in true Mannian (and Eliot Higgins) style, Ostanin blocked me on Twitter.
While it’s a bit absurd to waste time on this trivia, Iggy’s falsehoods remain in circulation. He hasn’t conceded anything. Nor have Revkin, Harrabin, Rice or other re-tweeters conceded that Iggy’s analysis was nonsensical.
In my tweets, I observed that Iggy’s analysis was based on an email sent from GMT timezone and that the 5-hour difference between nomenclature and email time only held for emails from that time zone. What any competent analyst (and we may safely exclude Iggy from that category) would have done is to compare email timestamp to nomenclature across multiple timezones and Daylight/Standard times. I’ve done so in the table below.
Nomenclature for GMT timezone emails in winter are 5 hours ahead, but only 4 hours ahead in summer. This should have caused Iggy to pause. Nomenclature for emails sent from Eastern timezone exactly matched the email time – both in Standard (winter) and Daylight (summer) time. Nomenclature for emails sent from Mountain time (two hours behind Eastern) were – 2 hours in both winter and summer.
Ironically, the very first email in the Climategate dossier was sent from Iggy’s Ekaterinaburg (+05:00). But instead of the nomenclature exactly matching the email time, the nomenclature was 10 hours ahead.
In other words, Ostanin got everything pretty much backwards and upside down. It’s about as bad a bit of analysis as it is possible to imagine. And, instead of simply conceding that he’d made a mistake (which is easy enough to do), Ostanin got belligerent and shut his ears. Unfortunately, Ostanin’s falsehoods are now in circulation and, like Mann’s, will probably fester forever.
Iran on Friday said that the four diplomats kidnapped in northern Lebanon in 1982 are in occupied Palestine, calling on the International Committee of the Red Cross to form a fact-finding committee.
Iranian foreign ministry released on Friday a statement marking the 37th anniversary of the abduction of the four diplomats.
“As it has been mentioned over the past years, evidence indicates that the diplomats kidnapped in Lebanon have been handed over to the occupying forces of the Zionist regime and subsequently transferred to the occupied territories and now, are held in prisons of this illegitimate regime,” the statement said.
“Accordingly, and given the occupation of Lebanon at that time by the Zionist regime with the full support of the US, the Islamic Republic of Iran believes that the political and legal responsibility for the abduction and this terrorist action lies with the Zionist regime and its supporters,” the foreign ministry noted.
On July 4, 1982, the four Iranian diplomats were kidnapped by a group of Israeli-backed gunmen at an inspection post in northern Lebanon.
In September 2008, the Lebanese government sent a letter to the then UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, in which Beirut confirmed the abduction of the Iranian diplomats in the Lebanese territory and called for UN action to pursue the case.
The Zionist entity has claimed that the Iranian diplomats were abducted by a Lebanese militant group and killed shortly after their abduction.
In 2007, Associate Professor Tilman Ruff and a small group of antinuclear activists founded the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) in Melbourne. In 2017, the global nongovernmental organisation captured the first Nobel Peace Prize born in Australia after years drawing attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons and driving a historic UN prohibition treaty. In June 2019, Ruff, and fellow ICAN co-founder, Dimity Hawkins, were awarded Order of Australia Honours for their advocacy on nuclear disarmament.
Tilman Ruff’s life’s mission to help end nuclear weapons traces back to growing up in Melbourne in the 1980s living with the genuine fear that nuclear war could strike at any moment.
His family background passed on a profound awareness of the impacts of war.
“My family were German Christians living in communities in Palestine,” Professor Ruff explains. “My great grandparents married there. They were in turn displaced, imprisoned, and quite a few of them were killed in both World Wars and then brought to Australia as prisoners and locked up until 1947.
“So the indiscriminate trauma, loss, madness and horror of war and its terrible legacy across generations was something I heard from my grandmothers and my old people all the time.”
As an adolescent, several empowering experiences shaped Professor Ruff’s activism, including joining the movement to end Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War and setting up the world’s first Amnesty International high school group in 1970 to support the release of a young man imprisoned for writing a political slogan on a wall.
They made the then 15-year-old Ruff truly believe he could make a difference.
A Public Health and Infectious Diseases Physician, Professor Ruff’s diverse career has included establishing the Nossal Institute for Global Health at the University of Melbourne, where he currently teaches on public health dimensions and nuclear technology, and a longstanding position as the International Medical Advisor for Australian Red Cross.
Looking back to his early days as a medical student, he reveals the presence of nuclear weapons struck him as “the most urgent global health threat and most demanding of urgent health professional attention.
“Many of us had this daily visceral fear that nuclear war could happen at any time. It was a palpable reality in your life.”
Professor Ruff suggests the birth of his daughter in 1982 added an emotional dimension that spurred him further to want to make the world a safer place for generations to come.
Soon he joined the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 1985 for contributing to the end of the Cold War, where he became inspired by how effective and influential evidence-based advocacy imparted by health professionals could be.
Professor Ruff maintains overwhelming evidence shows nuclear war would cause catastrophic consequences and make it impossible to provide any effective health or humanitarian response.
The evidence is epitomised by the World Health Organization (WHO), which commissioned an expert group in 1983 to examine the issue and labelled nuclear war the greatest immediate threat to human health and welfare, with no health service in the world capable of responding to the devastation even a single nuclear weapon could inflict on a city.
“Nuclear weapons are different from any other weapons in two ways,” Professor Ruff says.
“One is the simple scale of the destruction. There have been single nuclear weapons built and tested that contained four times the explosive power of all explosives that have been used in all wars throughout human history.
“Of course, they’re qualitatively different too in producing radiation that transcends borders, that transcends its effects across generations, effects that can’t be undone, increasing the risk of cancer and genetic damage and chronic disease long-term for the lifetime of those exposed.”
Professor Ruff says recent scientific evidence points to nuclear weapons triggering climate disruption and a nuclear winter. Specifically, less than 1% of the world’s nuclear weapons targeted on cities would loft so much soot and smoke into the atmosphere that it would blanket the globe in darkness and cool the climate, decimating agriculture for decades and putting billions at risk of starvation across all corners of the globe.
“It doesn’t matter where they get used. It doesn’t matter whether you’re targeted by them or not. The idea that these gargantuan instruments of destruction could provide security for anybody is completely evidence free.”
The evolution of ICAN in Melbourne in 2007 was sparked by intense frustration and despair among members of IPPNW, and its Australian affiliate the Medical Association for Prevention of War (MAPW), that nuclear disarmament had fallen off the radar.
Importantly, Professor Ruff and his cofounders were encouraged by the success of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines and felt it could be replicated for nuclear weapons.
The plan was not to recreate a new organisation but instead form a coalition of existing organisations fixed on developing a treaty to ban nuclear weapons on account of their shattering humanitarian consequences.
“It’s got to be global, it’s got to engage young people, and balance horror, humour, hope and humanity,” Professor Ruff recalls of the group’s philosophy.
Fittingly, years of raising awareness about the dangers of nuclear weapons reached a pivotal point in July 2017 when the ICAN-led treaty to ban nuclear weapons was adopted by 122 countries at the United Nations in New York.
The treaty prohibits the use of nuclear weapons, their development, testing, stockpiling, production and threat of use, underlining that any use of these weapons contravenes the rules of international humanitarian law.
Unsurprisingly, the world’s nuclear-armed states – Russia, France, US, India, North Korea, UK, Pakistan, China and Israel – boycotted the treaty, as did many of their close allies like Australia. “They’re not only not disarming they’re actually investing massively in adding new capacities and modernising those weapons,” Professor Ruff says.
As the treaty negotiations unfolded at the UN General Assembly in New York, Professor Ruff says stories told in person by victims and survivors of nuclear bombings in Japan, together with survivors of nuclear testing around the world including Indigenous test survivors from Australia, exposed the reality of nuclear weapons like nothing else.
The room burst into joy when the treaty was adopted.
“It was a very emotional moment,” Professor Ruff recalls. “These are normally very formal and dry proceedings. When the vote happened, 122 to 1, the room just erupted with hugs, tears of joy. It was one of the most extraordinary moments you could ever witness.”
To date, 70 states have signed the treaty and 23 have ratified it.
It will enter into force once 50 states have signed and ratified it.
“It’s not the final perfect all-in-one solution that’s going to magically get rid of nuclear weapons overnight,” Professor Ruff concedes.
“But it’s the best thing that the rest of the world that doesn’t own the weapons could do.”
Professor Ruff is adamant the treaty marks a major step forward of historic significance, and through growing international support and an increased focus on stigmatisation, can finally help rid the world of nuclear weapons.
If anything, the fierce and bitter opposition expressed by the nuclear-armed states in the wake of the treaty has further reassured him.
“They wouldn’t do that if this didn’t matter. If this didn’t put them on notice and on the defensive.”
Professor Ruff praised the involvement of key health professional federations from around the world, such as the International Council of Nurses (ICN) and World Medical Association (WMA), in helping to reinforce how nuclear weapons pose a planetary health threat of the highest magnitude.
In this vein, he believes real change can only occur by influencing government policy and all health professionals, including nurses and midwives, should champion the power of health evidence.
“Our responsibility as health professionals is not just to alleviate suffering and try and cure diseases but to prevent illness, keep people and our communities healthy and be advocates.”
Several months after the treaty, ICAN was awarded the first Australian-born Nobel Peace Prize at a ceremony in Norway for its efforts.
“It was hugely important, humbling and just wonderful for a couple of reasons, apart from just the fact this has been blood, sweat and tears for me, endless nights and weekends, 365 days a year for more than a decade and for 20 years before that,” Professor Ruff reflects.
“It provides really important attention to the urgency of the issue and the need to make progress. It provides historic recognition for the importance of the treaty and gives enormous encouragement to civil society and governments.”
Disappointingly, Professor Ruff says the glaring lack of support and recognition from Australia’s leaders, both for the treaty and Nobel Peace Prize, remains difficult to comprehend.
“Basically, our policy is that we might need the US to use nuclear weapons on our behalf and we actually provide, through facilities and personnel assistance, for the possible use of nuclear weapons. That’s a completely immoral position. We’re part of the problem, not the solution.”
Regardless, Professor Ruff says the Nobel Peace Prize has opened doors and allowed ICAN to spread its message further.
The immediate task rests in getting as many states to sign and ratify the treaty as possible to strengthen its legal and political force. Pressure will also be ramped up on financial institutions, such as several of the big banks, invested in companies that make nuclear weapons.
In Australia, the strategy will likely focus on getting the next Labor Party government to join the treaty, given its current policy platform from 2018 which commits Labor in government to sign and ratify the Ban Treaty.
Professor Ruff says its imperative civil society organisations, including unions, band together to push for elimination.
While decades have passed since he was a youth growing up in Melbourne with the threat of nuclear war hovering Professor Ruff remains visibly determined to close the final chapter.
“Objectively, the danger of nuclear war is growing,” he declares.
“There’s no question that if these weapons are retained they will one day be used and we absolutely have to get the job done before that happens.”
THE FACTS ABOUT NUCLEAR WEAPONS
Nuclear weapons release vast amounts of energy in the form of blast, heat and radiation, with no adequate humanitarian response possible
A single nuclear bomb detonated over a large city could kill millions of people and the use of tens or hundreds of nuclear bombs would disrupt the global climate and cause widespread famine
Nuclear weapons have been used twice in warfare – on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, killing more than 210,000 innocent civilians
Nine countries possess around 15,000 nuclear weapons, with the US and Russia keeping about 1,800 of their nuclear weapons on high-alert, ready for launching within minutes.
Learn more about the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN).
JERUSALEM — In a troubling trend that continues to be overlooked by international media, the Temple Activist movement that seeks to destroy the Al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and replace it with a Third Temple continues to advance its agenda. The movement’s forward progress is largely thanks to its successful efforts in recent years to rebrand as a “civil rights” movement — securing support from secular and religious Zionists alike — as well as to growing levels of support in Israel’s executive and legislative branches of government.
As was detailed in Part I of this series, the Temple Activist movement is now more mainstream than ever before and its effort to destroy the Al-Aqsa mosque compound, the third holiest site in Islam, has advanced with great rapidity since the year began and has picked up precipitously in recent weeks. Yet this new face of the Temple Activist movement — one that claims that its quest is to wrest control of the holy site from Jordanian and Palestinian custody in the name of “equal rights” for Israeli Jews — obfuscates the troubling origins of this once-fringe yet now normalized campaign.
Beginning in earnest after the Six Day War in 1967, the Temple Activist movement within Israel was largely formed by two groups of people: 1) a small, then-fringe group of messianic religious Zionists led by Rabbi Shlomo Goren that supported the complete annexation of Palestine, particularly Jerusalem with the Al-Aqsa mosque; and 2) former members of the secular Zionist paramilitary groups Irgun and Lehi, known for their penchant for massacring Palestinian civilians for political gain, who either became religious messianists following Israel’s 1967 victory or remained secular and felt that salvation for Israeli Jews necessitated the miltiary conquest of Palestine and the destruction of its mosques and churches — particularly the site of Al-Aqsa mosque, often referred to as either the Temple Mount or Haram El-Sharif (Arabic for “the Noble Sanctuary”).
The modern “friendly” face of the Temple Activist movement — embodied by figures like Yehuda Glick, former executive director of the Temple Institute and a member of Israel’s Knesset — hides the extremist and largely secular origins of this quasi-religious movement that — as Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss of Neturei Karta, an international organization of ultra-Orthodox Jews opposed to Zionism, told MintPress in Part I — is ultimately colonial (i.e., Zionist) in nature and uses religious imagery and appeals “to excuse their occupation and to try to portray this [the occupation of Palestine] as a religious conflict.”
As this installment of this multi-part series on the current threats facing the historic Al-Aqsa Mosque compound will show, the Temple Activist movement’s extremist origins and increasing normalization in Israeli society parallels the rise of Israel’s political far-right, particularly of the Likud Party — whose roots, much like those of the Temple Activist movment, trace back to secular Zionist paramilitaries like Irgun.
Miko Peled, Israeli author and human-rights activist, described this trend to MintPress as “the resurgence of the ‘good old days’ when young zealots were the forefront of the Zionist project.” Peled pointed out that these zealots set up the foundations for actions that are later pursued and consolidated by the Israeli state, such as in the context of the settler movement where, as Peled noted:
The [Israeli political] establishment comes in and takes over and turns an ‘outpost’ [established by a small group of extremists] into a settlement and then a city. The Haram El-Sharif or Temple Mount compound will be the same. These zealots, young and old are the cutting edge of Zionist ideologues and they do the ‘dirty work.’ Now they do not seem so radical any more and soon the state will come in full force.”
For that reason, and as this report will show, there is a significant degree of overlap between the dominant parties of Israeli politics today and the Temple Activist movement, with a majority of current Israeli government ministers, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself, and a large and influential lobby of lawmakers in Israel’s Knesset openly supporting the Israeli government takeover of Al-Aqsa mosque and its destruction and replacement with a Third Temple. Subsequent installments of this series will show how such an outcome is a grave threat to peace — not just in Israel/Palestine, but the entire Middle East — and a major yet widely overlooked motivation behind the foreign policy objectives of not only Israel’s current government but the Trump administration.
Shlomo Goren: The man who lit the match
The Israeli military’s conquest of the Old City of Jerusalem in 1967 was seen by some of its soldiers as a sign from the divine that end-times prophecies were being fulfilled. Among those who were the first to arrive at the newly conquered historic district of Jerusalem were three men who — in distinct ways — would go on to lead a movement aimed at remaking this area of Jerusalem in the image of their specific, and then-fringe, interpretation of Biblical prophecy. They were Shlomo Goren, then-Rabbi of the IDF and later Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi of Israel; Geroshon Salomon, then-soldier and later founder of the Temple Mount Faithful; and Yisrael Ariel, Rabbi and founder of the Temple Institute.
Goren, center, carries a Torah and submachine gun during a 1956 Israeli assault on Gaza. Photo | AP
Shlomo Goren, euphoric after the Israeli military’s takeover of the Temple Mount, led the celebration, where both Ariel and Salomon were present. Per Ariel’s recollection, Goren’s words about the prophetic significance of the Israeli takeover of the Temple Mount gave meaning to the occasion and would go on to inspire Ariel, as well as Salomon, to found organizations devoted to Goren’s vision of a Third Temple in the place of Al-Aqsa mosque, which currently sits on the Temple Mount of Haram El-Sharif.
Soon after the celebratory mood had faded that fateful day in 1967, Goren — according to several accounts — pushed the IDF’s Chief of Central Command Uzi Narkiss to seize the opportunity to bring down the historic mosque with explosives, something Goren felt was best done under the cover of war. Narkiss’ rejection of Goren’s plea would subsequently be remembered bitterly by Goren and his allies, Ariel and Salomon among them, as a missed opportunity and, for some, an act of “treason.” Such bitter feelings were reserved, not just for Narkiss or then-Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, both secular Zionists, but also for the State’s rabbinical authorities who, following the 1967 capture and subsequent occupation of Jerusalem, maintained the centuries-old opinion that it was against Jewish religious law for Jews to ascend the Temple Mount.
While the 1967 war did not result in the destruction of the Al-Aqsa mosque or the Dome of the Rock as Goren and others had hoped, Goren dedicated much of his future career to advancing what is now often referred to as the Temple Activist movement, which aims to replace the Al-Aqsa mosque compound with a Third Temple. Goren specifically believed that the Third Temple must be built before the Messiah could be revealed, as opposed to after he is revealed, and that the conquest of the site in the 1967 war meant that the time had come to build a new temple where Al-Aqsa sits.
It is worth pointing out that Goren’s beliefs were, and remain, at odds with the rabbinical authorities both within Israel and abroad. As Motti Inbari, scholar of Jewish fundamentalism and messianism and associate professor of religion at UNC Pembroke, wrote for The Times of Israel in 2015:
According to halakha (Jewish religious law), anyone who enters the mount will be punished by karet — death sentence carried out by God. This decision has been reinforced in innumerable rulings. One was handed down by the chief rabbinate after the capture of the Mount during the Six-Day War in 1967… And this custom is followed by the vast majority of ultra-Orthodox rabbis.”
Goren’s rise to further prominence was meteoric after the 1967 war, and he became Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi of Israel, Israel’s most important state rabbinical position, just a year after retiring as the IDF’s first chief rabbi in 1972. Miko Peled, Israeli author and human rights activist, told MintPress that Goren’s role as chief Rabbi made him “a strong influence on the ‘Religious Zionist’ movement that sought to settle all of the ‘Land of Israel’” — meaning “Biblical Israel,” which includes all of occupied Palestine and large parts of territory of several neighboring countries.
Goren’s quick ascension to the most prominent position in Israel’s Rabbinate was dogged by accusations that he had cut a secret deal with the then-Prime Minister of Israel, Golda Meir, and that Goren had promised to assist Meir in finding solutions to pressing conflicts that had arisen between Israel’s actions as a state and Jewish law. As chief rabbi, Goren would adapt Jewish religious law to scientific advances and military conflicts, solving many of the problems that had concerned Meir in the early 1970s.
As chief rabbi of Israel, Goren later developed a close relationship with Menachim Begin — former leader of the Irgun paramilitary and terrorist group, and Israel’s prime minister from 1977 to 1983 — who was denounced as a fascist and a terrorist by numerous Jewish American intellectuals and public figures – including Albert Einstein. Goren became an important liaison between Begin and U.S. President Ronald Reagan at a time when Begin was actively courting the American evangelical right, specifically Christian Zionists. Begin and Goren had both long advocated for complete Israeli control over the Temple Mount and both shared a vision of a “Greater Israel,” where the state of Israel would expand through all of the occupied Palestinian territories and into several surrounding countries.
Begin, right, bows his head to receive a blessing from Shlomo Goren in 1977 at Ben-Gurion Airport. Max Nash | AP
In one example, Goren claimed that he had been sent by Begin to the White House to personally deliver Reagan a message regarding the withdrawal of Israel from the Sinai Peninsula and “to provide Reagan with a sense of the moral and spritual feeling in Israel,” which included warning against the formation of a Palestinian state, keeping Jerusalem “united,” and recognizing the city as exclusively Israeli.
As chief rabbi of Israel, Goren’s “activism” regarding the Temple Mount continued unabated and arguably grew with his growing political influence, both within Israel and abroad. Having led extremists in ascending the Temple Mount since the Old City’s conquest in 1967, Goren’s stature as chief rabbi allowed him to continue and expand his efforts to push for an increased presence of extremist religious Zionists on the Temple Mount. Following the 1967 war, Goren also created detailed maps of the Temple Mount with the intention of delineating where the Third Temple should be built and where he believed the long-lost treasures of the Ark of the Covenant were hidden beneath the Temple. Those maps are still used by Temple Activists today.
Yet Goren’s “activism” on behalf of a Third Temple was much more far-reaching during his time as chief rabbi. In 1981, Goren along with Rabbi of the Western Wall Yehuda Getz, began excavating a series of tunnels under the Temple Mount, without archaeological approval, in an alleged search for the Ark of the Covenant artifact. They believed that finding the Ark of the Covenant would signal that the time to build a Third Temple had arrived. One of the volunteers aiding Getz and Goren was Gersh Salomon, who had founded the Temple Mount Faithful a few years prior.
The tunnels — conducted without archeological supervision, as is required by Israeli law — were dug with the support of Israel’s Religious Affairs Ministry. There was also another government connection to the illegal project, owing to the intimate involvement of Rafi Eitan in the project. Eitan was an influential counterterrorism and security adviser to three Israeli prime ministers (Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir and Shimon Peres), a former officer for the Mossad and Shin Bet, and a “personal and close family friend” of current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He later gained notoriety for recruiting Jonathan Pollard, a former United States Navy intelligence analyst convicted of spying for Israel, and serving as his handler.
Goren, Getz and their group of volunteers managed to reach Warren’s Gate, an ancient subterranean passage leading to the Temple Mount. Accordig to Salomon, “We needed just two days more to come to the place where the Ark of the Covenant is located.” However, their ambitions were cut short when Palestinians guarding Al-Aqsa heard strange noises coming from below Al-Aqsa Mosque and quickly discovered the group’s excavations. A riot nearly broke out and Israeli authorities subsequently sealed the tunnel.
A few years later, in 1986, three years after leaving his position as chief rabbi, Goren, together with other prominent rabbis, issued a religious edict that called for the immediate construction of a Third Temple on the Temple Mount and for public Jewish prayers on the site, an act historically forbidden by Jewish law. Prior to the end of his life in 1994, Goren issued several other controversial religious edicts, such as one that ruled that IDF soldiers could disobey government orders in order to remove extremist settlers from the West Bank, and another stating that Jewish law compelled Jews to murder Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
The Temple Mount Faithful
Goren’s impact on the Temple Activist movement is unique, as his actions following the Israeli conquest of Jerusalem’s Old City were the spark that inspired the two other most notable forces in laying the ground for the Temple Activist movement of today: Gershon Salomon and Yisrael Ariel.
Salomon was one of the paratroopers who helped “liberate” the Temple Mount and the Western Wall in 1967 and he went on to found the Temple Mount Faithful soon after. Following the war, he “dedicated himself to the vision of consecrating the Temple Mount to the Name of G‑d, to removing the Muslim shrines placed there as a symbol of Muslim conquest, to the rebuilding of the Third Temple on the Temple Mount, and the godly redemption of the People and the Land of Israel,” according to the Temple Mount Faithful website. He worked directly with Goren for a number of years, and others who were greatly influenced by Goren, such as Ariel, later joined Salomon’s group.
Gershon Salomon, right, poses in front of al-Aqsa Mosque in 1967.
Goren participated directly with the Temple Mount Faithful on some occasions, such as in hosting a “conference” in front of the Temple Mount where Goren, Salomon and other attendees called on Israel’s government “to purify the Temple Mount from its Arab and Islamic presence and desecration,” as it was later described by Salomon.
The group attracted members from the messianic fringes of religious Zionism, as well as more secular, fascist elements that were associated with the precursors to the modern-day Likud Party. Indeed, Motti Inbari has noted that most of the Temple Mount Faithful’s membership during its “golden years” (from the late 1960s to 1987) were former members of the Irgun and Lehi Zionist paramilitary groups, both of which have deep ties to Israel’s Likud Party.
For decades, the Temple Mount Faithful’s main activities were demonstrations that Inbari, who attended several of the group’s demonstrations, states were intended to “cause provocations and riots bordering on hysteria among the [Palestinian] Muslim public.” These provocations center around the group attempting to physically place cornerstones they commissioned for a future Third Temple on the Temple Mount. One of the group’s cornerstone demonstrations led to what became known as the Al-Aqsa massacre of 1990, which resulted in rioting among Palestinian worshippers who were then at the mosque. Israeli police shot and killed over 20 Palestinians and wounded an estimated 150 more.
Yet, beginning in the mid-1980s, a rift started to emerge in the Temple Mount Faithful between the religious and secular Zionists within the group. The rift was initiated by Rabbi Yosef Elboim and saw religious Zionists, like Rabbi Yisrael Ariel, leave the Temple Mount Faithful en masse, as they felt the movement could only grow in influence if it focused more strongly on the Third Temple’s religious and ritual importance, as opposed to its importance as a nationalist and Zionist symbol, a view espoused by Salomon.
Though Salomon frequently uses religious and biblical imagery when discussing the Temple and sees the construction of the Temple as his divine mission, he ultimately viewed the Temple as a symbol of Israeli nationalism. This view of the Temple as a nationalist symbol was first articulated by members of the Zionist and fascist paramilitary group Lehi, also known as the Stern Gang. The view helped Salomon win over some influential secular Zionists to the Temple Activist movement, though it caused him to lose influence with religious Zionists. Yet this loss of support from religious Zionists led Salomon to reach out and forge ties with another group, the Christian Zionists of the West.
Temple Mount Faithful members step on a mock coffin symbolizing Palestine during a 2007 parade in Jerusalem. Alex Kolomoisky | AP
The 1987 rift with the Temple Mount Faithful resulted in the official creation of the Temple Institute, which was founded by Rabbi Ariel and has since become the most prominent organization of its type within Israel. Soon after its creation, the Institute joined an alliance of other Temple Mount Faithful splinter groups and associated groups, known collectively as the Movement for the Establishment of the Temple, but did not include the Temple Mount Faithful itself.
The Jewish Underground
While many former members of Irgun and Lehi joined the Temple Activist movement following its formation in the late 1960s, others chose an even more extreme approach than that offered by the Temple Mount Faithful. Shabtai Ben-Dov, a former member of Lehi who believed that the Third Temple and Jewish Messiah could only be achieved through violence and blood-soaked conquest, was one of the “guiding lights” of a group known as the Jewish Underground.
Ben-Dov is an obscure figure to most Israelis, but his impact on Jewish messianic groups in Israel was profound. He was an enthusiastic member of Lehi — or, as noted above, “the Stern Gang” — a Zionist paramilitary group known for its use of terrorism as well as its role in comitting several civilian massacres; the assassination of UN and British officials; its attempts to formally ally with the Nazis; and desire to create a Jewish state in Palestine based on “nationalist and totalitarian principles.”
Ben-Dov, who became increasingly more religious following the founding of the state of Israel and the dissolution of Lehi, turned to writing and argued that Lehi’s totalitarian vision for the state of Israel should be realized through the establishment of a theocracy, led by a king and the Sanhedrin, a council that served as the main political, judicial and religious force for Jews during the Roman period and was guided by the values of “conquest and holy war.” Furthermore, he believed — like Avraham Stern, who founded Lehi — that the Third Temple must be built as soon as possible and that doing so would solve all of the problems then facing the Jewish people.
Though his beliefs didn’t catch on — then, at least — Ben-Dov’s writings were dramatically inspirational to Yehuda Etzion, a settler activist who became profoundly disillusioned with the efforts to broker peace between Israel and Egypt that eventually resulted in the Camp David Accords in 1979. Shortly prior to Ben-Dov’s death and soon after the accords were formalized, Etzion sought out the former Lehi member, who successfully convinced the young Etzion to actively participate in the “messianic process.” When Etzion asked Ben-Dov if destroying the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa mosque would catalyze the “redemption” process and usher in the coming of the messiah, Ben-Dov responded, “If you want to do something that will solve all the Jew’s problems, do that.”
With that, the planning of the now infamous plot of the Jewish Underground to destroy Al-Aqsa began, a plot that was narrowly foiled just a few years later in 1984. Indeed, Etzion and his co-conspirators, all of whom were later convicted of terrorism, had raided an Israeli military outpost in the occupied Golan Heights and had managed to steal over 2,000 pounds of explosives, which were used to build at least 27 bombs with which to commit the deed. For reasons that will become more relevant in a future article in this series, Etzion and his co-conspirators also believed that destroying Al-Aqsa mosque would first lead to a war with rival Middle Eastern nations, a war from which Israel would emerge victorious — and only then could the Third Temple and a theocratic Israel take shape.
Israeli police carry Yehuda Etzion after he breached the Temple Mount in 1997. Zoom 77 | AP
After his arrest, Etzion had lamented that the plot had failed only because “the generation was not ready.” As noted in Part I, he called for the building of “a new force that grows very slowly, moving its educational and social activity into a new leadership,” a force that — as this article and Part I of this series clearly show — has been spectacularly successful.
Though a convicted terrorist and a proponent of theocracy and “holy war,” Etzion today is considered “the most revered figure among patrons of the Temple Mount,” according to Israeli newspaper Haaretz. Etzion was even the subject of a rather sympathetic New York Times article in 2015, as the rebranding of the Temple Activist movement (discussed shortly) was in full swing. That article asserted that Etzion “laments violence now used against Palestinians,” despite noting that Etzion “does not regret, exactly, helping plant bombs in the cars of Palestinian mayors and plotting to blow up the Dome of the Rock in the 1980s, nor does he express remorse.”
Though Etzion’s ideology may once have been fringe and his embrace of violence odious, it has gone increasingly mainstream, much like the Temple Activist movement itself, and there is considerable overlap. A fitting example of such overlap was seen just a few months ago when Bezalel Smotrich — now Israel’s Transportation Minister, who has openly called for the construction of a Third Temple and incited settlers to violently attack Palestinains in the occupied West Bank — called for Israel to be ruled by Jewish law and to become a theocracy at a time when he was under consideration for the position of Justice Minister.
Smotrich is but one example of how the ideas promoted by figures like Etzion have found their way into Israel’s halls of power. Indeed, Israel’s current Minister of Strategic Affairs, Internal Security, and Information Gilad Erdan, former Minister of Education Naftali Bennett, and Speaker of the Knesset Yuli Edelstein are all close associates and supporters of Etzion and his Chai Vekayam (Alive and Existing) movement.
Carmi Gillon, former head of Israel’s internal security service Shin Bet, stated last year that the former members of Jewish Underground have become so influential that they have won the battle for Israel’s future. Gillon told Haaretz:
They are more devoted to their idea. It’s exactly what you see with Hamas or Hezbollah. A religious person who believes he is commanded from on high can’t compromise on that command. A secular person is more pragmatic to begin with. But they have one goal: to turn Israel into a Jewish state governed by religious Jewish law, to perpetuate the occupation and to rescind liberal laws.”
The “Moderate” facade of the Temple Institute
Today, the Temple Institute, founded by Yisrael Ariel, is treated by many media sources as the “moderate face” of the Temple Activist movement. Yet, Ariel — much like Salomon, Etzion and other prominent figures in the Temple Activist movement — has long been an extremist, making his institute hardly “moderate.” As the saying goes, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
After following Shlomo Goren to the Western Wall the day of its conquest in 1967, Ariel became deeply involved in the settler movement and became the “unofficial” rabbi of an Israeli settlement in the Sinai Peninsula. After that settlement was dismantled as part of the Camp David Accords, which saw the Sinai returned to Egypt, Ariel returned to Jerusalem and joined one of the most radical, racist political parties in Israel’s history, Kach.
Yisrael Ariel oversees a Temple Mount Faithful enactment of rituals for a rebuilt Third Temple. Tomer Appelbaum | Haaretz
The Kach Party was founded in 1971 by American-born Rabbi Meir Kahane, a convicted terrorist known for his racist, extremist positions that advocated Jewish supremacy, the expulsion of Palestinians from the occupied territories, and prison sentences for Palestinian men accused of having intimate relations with Jewish women. In addition, an often overlooked aspect of his radical platform was complete Jewish sovereignty over the Temple Mount.
In the 1981 elections, Ariel ran as Kahane’s number two right-hand man as a member of Kach, later served as Kahane’s deputy in the Knesset, and continued to be active in the party until it was banned from participating in Israeli elections in 1988. A few years after Kahane was assassinated in 1990, Baruch Goldstein, a Kahane follower and Kach member who murdered scores of praying Palestinians in a Hebron mosque, was praised by Ariel as a “martyr” and “our advocate in Heaven,” even as Goldstein’s actions led the Kach Party and its spinoffs to be labeled terrorist organizations by Israel, the United States and several other countries.
During his lengthy association with the Kach Party and Meir Kahane, Ariel founded the Temple Institute, registering it first as an association in 1984 and then creating a more formal organization in 1987 soon after other religious Zionist elements of the Temple Mount Faithful left that group en masse.
Ariel’s reason for doing so was based on his view that the Third Temple must be pursued at all costs. Ariel’s “Holy Temple Prayerbook” as cited on the Temple Institute’s website, summarizes his beliefs in his own words:
Through the years, the more I studied the more I began to understand that we had only ourselves and our own inaction to hold accountable: God does not intend for us to wait for a day of miracles. We are expected to act. We must accomplish that with which we have been charged: to do all in our power to prepare for the rebuilding of the Holy Temple, and the renewal of the divine service.”
Furthermore, Ariel feels that the Temple lies at the heart of Israel’s future as a state and as a panacea for all of its problems. He stated the following in 2005:
The State of Israel can be only one thing — a state with a Temple at its center. Otherwise it is no different from any other state. All of today’s troubles originate in the sin of abandoning the Temple Mount and the site of the Holy Temple… The Holy Temple is the solution to all of our problems.”
This same view that held that the Temple would solve all of Israel’s problems was also voiced by Shabtai Ben-Dov, the former Lehi member who advised members of the radical Jewish Underground terrorist group to blow up Al-Aqsa mosque in the early 1980s.
While the worldview of Ariel and his ideological allies can easily be dismissed as that of an extremist, the issue is that — over the past few decades — the Temple Institute he founded has taken a central role in the Temple Activist movement and has found growing levels of support from Israel’s government, including financial support.
Since its formation, the Temple Institute has created detailed blueprints of its vision for a Third Temple, based partially on the maps first made by Shlomo Goren in 1967, as well as 3-D computer animations and physical models of that Temple. In addition, it has created several artifacts for use in a future temple, including a golden menorah, incense altars, priestly garments and a variety of ritual vessels, among others. The menorah alone is estimated to have cost 5 million NIS (about $1.3 million USD).
These artifacts and models have allowed the Temple Institute to obfuscate its extremist origins by opening a museum dedicated to the Third Temple, a museum that enjoys Israeli government sponsorship. That museum, dubbed the “Disney Land for Temple fundamentalism” by the Times of Israel, receives hundreds of thousands of visitors every year.education
Beyond its creation of artifacts and structures to be used in a future temple, the Institute has also dedicated itself to training a new generation of Levite priests with the intention that they perform ritual sacrifices in the future temple, and has also attempted to recreate a “Red Heifer” for use in a purification ritual.
Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss of Neturei Karta — an ultra-Orthodox group of Haredi Jews founded in Palestine in 1938, who believe Jews are forbidden from having their own state until the Jewish Messiah is revealed — told MintPress that these rituals cannot be performed because the red heifer, among other objects, is no longer available as these objects were when these rituals were practiced nearly two thousand years ago. Yet, the Temple Institute has made efforts to recreate a red heifer using advanced techniques in animal husbandry and artificial insemination and claimed to have produced a suitable red heifer in 2018.
Over the years, the Institute has received increasing levels of support from Israel’s government, even though the Institute’s activities run counter to official Israeli government policy in relation to the Temple Mount and also violate a 1994 peace treaty between Israel and Jordan that explicitly forbids non-Muslims from praying on Haram el-Sharif (the Temple Mount), in keeping with Islamic theological doctrine regarding its most holy sites. According to Israeli non-profit Ir Amim, the Temple Institute has been receiving direct funding from Israel’s government since at least 2008 — receiving an estimated 412,000 NIS (~$114,775) annually from Israel’s Ministry of Culture, Science and Sports, headed by Miri Regev, as well as Israel’s Ministry of Education from 2008 to 2012. In 2012 alone, the educational arm of the Temple Institute, the Midrasha, received 189,000 NIS (~$52,650) from the Ministry of Education.
Prior to obtaining direct government funding, the Temple Institute received funding from “persons in different government ministries,” according to statements made by Ariel in 1992 when thanking members of the government for helping finance the Institute and offset its debts. Notably, government funding of the Temple Institute is a small portion of its estimated $1 million annual operating budget. However, direct government funding of the organization suggests that the current Likud government led by Netanyahu is relatively supportive, at least covertly, of its mission.
This is corroborated by the fact that recent years have seen overt support for the Institute and its objectives by prominent Israeli politicians. For instance, in 2013, Nir Barkat — then-mayor of Jerusalem and member of the ruling Likud Party — presented Ariel with an award for his work at the Temple Institute. It was subsequently revealed that the Temple Institute had received a government contract from Israel’s Ministry of Education. That contract paid the Temple Institute to develop a mandatory social studies curriculum that would instill a “longing for the Temple” in children at the kindergarten level and above. Critics argued that the curriculum “could drive students to take violent actions to advance the building of the Third Temple,” according to Haaretz. The Institute’s relationship with Israel’s government is further revealed by Israel’s allowing of women to perform their mandatory national service in lieu of mandatory military service by working as tour guides in the Institute’s Museum.
A schoolbook created jointly with Israel’s Ministry of Education depicts rebuilding of the Third Temple. Credit | Ir Amim
The combination of government support for the Temple Institute and the Institute working as a government contractor in developing a national educational curriculum has resulted in growing support for the Third Temple among religious and secular Israelis alike.
Miko Peled told MintPress that the type of material being taught and normalized in schools throughout the country had been a key factor in the Temple Activist movement’s goals becoming mainstream:
The mainstreaming of these fringe [Temple Activist] groups is possible only because within the mainstream in Israel there is a desire to see the Temple ‘restored.’ The mythical narrative of King David and King Solomon and his magnificent temple are taught as history, and so even secular Israelis see this as a symbol of their identity and a right. This is taught in schools, through Israeli folk songs, etc. Furthermore, among the ‘tour’ organizers and the Temple activists there have always been non-religious Israelis.”
As the Temple Institute’s influence has grown and as it has perfected the capacity to speak to more moderate as well as extremist factions within religious Zionism, Ariel has notably felt emboldened to articulate the controversial, extremist beliefs he has long held. In a video recorded in 2015, he made overt calls for genocide and murder based on his interpretation of the works of 12th-century Jewish sage Maimonides.
In that video, publicized by Canadian journalist David Sheen, Ariel makes several outrageous statements, including claims that Jewish law compelled religious Jews to assassinate then-President of the United States Barack Obama, and calling for a Jewish army to conquer the entire Middle East, specifically Iran, and to destroy all mosques and churches.
Ariel also called for the murder of all Muslims and Christians who do not renounce their religions in order to follow the “Noahide laws,” which Ariel and other extremists believe must be imposed on all of humanity, aside from practitioners of Judaism, as a condition of their existence. A year later, Ariel again garnered attention from Israeli media for claiming that the Temple Mount must be “flattened and cleaned” of the Al-Aqsa mosque so a Third Temple could be rebuilt.
From extremist to “civil rights” movement
Though Rabbi Yisrael Ariel is often considered the face of the Institute, the Institute’s increasing prominence has been aided by a somewhat younger generation of Temple Activists who have become influential in Israeli politics.
There is no better example of such a figure than Yehuda Glick, who was the Temple Institute’s executive director for five years and became a member of Israel’s Knesset for the ruling Likud Party in 2016. Largely thanks to the “affable” face Glick and some of his contemporaries have lent to the Temple Activist movement, it has been able to rebrand from an extremist colonialist project to a “civil rights movement” promoting “equal rights” for Jewish Israelis when it comes to praying on the Temple Mount. Yet Glick differs little, in terms of ideology, from the old guard, as evidenced by his personal beliefs and his close relationships with figures such as Etzion and Ariel.
Glick, through his prominent role in the Temple Institute and the Temple Mount Heritage Foundation, had become a well-known figure in the Temple Activist movement by the time he was attacked and shot in early February 2014, almost losing his life to his assailant, who was alleged to have been a young Palestinian. Glick’s serious injuries, which he survived, became the basis for a subsequent and successful media campaign within Israel that helped paint the Temple Activist movement as a “civil rights” movement aimed merely at securing “equal rights” to pray on the Temple Mount, for both Jews and Muslims alike.
This narrative soon went beyond Israel, with prominent media outlets like the New York Times euphemistically describing Glick as an “agitator who has pushed for more Jewish access and rights at a hotly contested religious site in Jerusalem.” Left unmentioned was Glick’s history of arrests for participating in provocations at the Temple Mount, his assault of a Palestinian woman at the contested site, and the fact that he lives in an illegal West Bank settlement.
Yet, there is much to doubt about the narrative surrounding Glick’s attempted murder, leading some critics to suggest that the attempt on his life may have been a “false flag” aimed at creating enough public outrage so as to force Israel’s government to alter the current status quo on the Temple Mount. Indeed, just a week before he was nearly killed, Glick had told Haaretz that the situation on the Temple Mount would only change after a Jew was violently attacked by an Arab.
Yehuda Glick arrives to cast his vote during Likud party elections in Jerusalem, still healing from an alleged attack, Dec. 31, 2014. Oded Balilty | AP
“When will the change take place?” Glick told the Israeli newspaper, answering:
As soon as the Arabs harm someone on the Temple Mount, the prime minister will wake up and it will be too late… Violence is escalating every day, and the police are simply helpless. Police impotence leads to violence… Bibi is tying their hands and the Jordanians are tying their hands.” (emphasis added)
Soon after the murder attempt, Ali Abunimah detailed at Electronic Intifada many of the other discrepancies regarding the events that led to Glick’s injuries, including the swift extrajudicial execution of his alleged attacker before an investigation or trial could take place and some of the dubious claims made by witnesses at the scene, particularly witnesses known to be greatly involved in the Temple Activist cause. Two of the witnesses were none other than Rabbi Yisrael Ariel, founder of the Temple Institute, and Moshe Feiglin, then-Likud member of the Knesset and outspoken Temple Activist, each of whom later called the attack on Glick “inevitable” and “expected,” respectively.
A year and a half after the attack that threatened his life, Glick became a member of Israel’s Knesset for the Likud Party, occupying the post left by former Defense Minister Mosha Ya’alon, who had resigned. Though Glick had previously served a minor role in government, his ascent to the Knesset as a Likud lawmaker gave him a platform to continue to promote Temple Activism as an issue of “civil rights,” one that was received by outlets like Forward with great sympathy.
“The discrimination on the Temple Mount is obvious,” Forward quoted Glick as saying soon after he became a member of the Knesset. “[Under Jordanian control] the Temple Mount became a center of incitement and hate instead of a center of peace.”
Miko Peled described the effort to rebrand what was once a radical, fringe movement as a “civil rights” struggle that has been “very successful” and played a role in the increasingly mainstream status that the Temple Activist movement now enjoys. Peled told MintPress:
Their [the Temple Activists] entire discourse is now about their rights, and the denial of the rights of Jewish [people] to freedom of worship, etc. This works well in promoting them as more moderate and friendly and as victims of a reality that once again discriminates against Jews. They realize that what is working for the Palestinians is the fact that their narrative is framed as an injustice and they now do the same. You hear them complaining that while the world, and even the Israeli “Left,” stand for Palestinian rights, they — once again — don’t stand for the rights of Jews.”
Powerful mainstream proponents
Since the attack on Glick and the subsequent rebranding of Temple Activism as a “civil rights” movement, the decades-long effort to manufacture consensus among both secular and religious Israelis has grown dramatically. The growth of this movement, much of which is detailed in Part I of this series, has been most noticeable within Israel’s halls of power, with a large number of Israel’s most powerful politicians, and a majority of Israel’s current cabinet, now openly pushing for Israeli sovereignty over the Temple Mount and for the reconstruction of a Third Temple.
In the interest of brevity, MintPress has compiled the following list of current Israeli government ministers who have shown or expressed varying degrees of public support for the construction of a Third Temple, the destruction of Al-Aqsa, and/or complete Israeli sovereignty over the Temple Mount. Some of the individuals listed below hold multiple ministerial positions.
Current Israeli Government Ministers Supportive of Temple Activism
Ze’ev Elkin, Minister of Jerusalem, Minister of Environmental Protection
Ofir Akunis, Minister of Science, Technology and Space
Tzachi Hanegbi, Minister of Communications, Minister of Regional Communications
Those listed above account for more than half of all Israeli government ministers (11 out of 20) and nearly 60 percent of all ministerial positions (16 out of 27) that are not currently held by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, who is currently serving as the Minister of Health, Defense, and Diaspora Affairs in addition to being Prime Minister.
While it may come as a shock that more than half of all current Israeli government ministers are supportive of key aspects of Temple Activism, numerous other prominent Israeli politicians in the Knesset and other positions of political power are also strong advocates for altering the current Temple Mount status quo.
The strong presence of Temple Activist supporters in Israel’s halls of power has not been lost on leaders within the movement. Rabbi Chaim Richman, head of the Temple Institute’s International Department, told Christian Headlines in 2017 that:
Today there’s a lobby in the Knesset … many members of the Knesset that are constantly speaking about Jewish rights to pray on the Temple Mount. There are members of the Knesset that actually talk about rebuilding the Holy Temple. Do you realize that 20 years ago these people wouldn’t have been given a moment on prime time television to say these things. They would have been laughed out.”
Netanyahu’s dance
In addition to its increasingly strong hold on Israeli legislatures, the Temple Activist movement’s reach stretches all the way to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu, given his role as prime minister, has long avoided any explicit endorsements of Temple Activism, though his actions over his decades-long political career offer enough insight to conclude that he is, at the very least, supportive of the movement and some of its objectives.
Netanyahu, from his prominent political position, has publicly maintained that his government seeks to maintain the current status quo on the Temple Mount, likely to avoid stoking unrest and protests. Yet, such claims are at odds with the fact that a majority of his ministers have publicly stated that they wish to wrest control of the holy site from its current custodians.
Furthermore, Netanyahu himself in 2017 told the Knesset the following: “To you, the members of the Knesset, the citizens of Israel, and to the entire world, I want to make it clear: The Temple Mount and the Western Wall will stay under Israeli sovereignty forever.” In that same speech, Netanyahu referred to Palestinian sovereignty over Jerusalem prior to 1967 as a “black cloud” that had hung over the city.
Though Netanyahu has been relatively mum on the subject of the Third Temple specifically, his practice of remaining silent after prominent members of his government and political party promote Temple Activism has not escaped the notice of Israeli media, which has repeatedly pointed out that the claims of government officials close to Netanyahu qualify as incitement under Israeli law, a punishable offense. Such silence has been taken by some Netanyahu critics as tacit support for Temple Activists, as has Netanyahu’s recent appearances at events where Al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock have been edited out of the Jerusalem skyline, despite the compound’s iconic status.
Netanyahu attends an event back-dropped by an image of the Temple Mount with a dome-less mosque, June 13, 2019. Olivier Fitoussi | AP
Yet Netanyahu is silent not only about many of his closest political associates embracing Temple Activism, but about the considerable support that some of his most important political donors have given to Temple Activist groups. A 2015 Haaretz investigation found that top Netanyahu donor Kenneth Abramowitz — an American billionaire who also heads American Friends of Likud — had given more than $1.3 million to the Israel-based institution that funds all of Yehuda Glick’s Temple Activist organizations.
In addition to funding Netanyahu, Abramowitz has also donated to Yisrael Katz and Gilad Erdan — current Minister of Foreign Affairs and current MInister of Strategic Affairs, Internal Security and Information, respectively — both of whom support upending the current status quo on the Temple Mount. Palestinian academic and journalist Ramzy Baroud told MintPress that Gilad Erdan is “the main person advocating for this [Temple Activist] movement within Israel’s government and within Israeli politics.”
Another key financier of Netanyahu — U.S. casino magnate Sheldon Adelson — also appears to be supportive of Temple Activism. For instance, Israel Hayom — the Israeli newspaper that Adelson funds — has published numerous articles supportive of Temple Activism, including front-page stories that call for the destruction of Al-Aqsa mosque. Furthermore, Adelson has grown increasingly close to Israeli politician Naftali Bennett, who has increasingly pushed for increased Israeli control over the Temple Mount in recent years. Adelson even allegedly favored Bennett over Netanyahu for the position of prime minister at one point.
Bennett, who until recently was Education Minister, spent his tenure at that ministry inserting Temple Activist educational material into mandatory school curriculums, some of which were developed by the Temple Institute as part of a contract with the Bennett-led Education Ministry. In addition, Bennett — after failing to secure enough seats in Israel’s elections this past April — is mulling joining forces with Moshe Feiglin, one of the most pro-Third Temple Israeli politicians of all.
Beyond his close association with donors and politicians who support Temple Activism, Netanyahu’s relationship with prominent religious leaders have led to speculation that he supports the construction of a Third Temple on the Temple Mount. During a meeting in 1990 with Rabbi Mencahem Schneerson — then leader of the Chabad Lubavitch movement, an international Orthodox Jewish organization that has gained global prominence and also invited controversy — Netanyahu asked Schneerson, often referred to simply as “the Rebbe,” for advice on both personal and political matters.
Schneerson, who up until his death was a strong advocate for the religious messianic belief that physical actions could speed up the fulfillment of end-times prophecy and the coming of the Messiah, advised Netanyahu that he “do something to hasten his [the Messiah’s] coming.” Netanyahu responded, “We’re doing, We’re doing…,” at which the Rebbe interrupted him, saying “Apparently, it’s not enough,” urging him to do more still, and eventually garnering a “Yes” from Netanyahu. After that meeting, Schneerson stated that Netanyahu would later “hand his keys over to Moshiach [the Messiah],” suggesting that Netanyahu’s political career would culminate in the building of a Third Temple, a prerequisite for the appearance of the Messiah per Schneerson’s teachings.
Given that Schneerson heavily promoted the construction of a Third Temple during his lifetime and frequently received Third Temple models from devotees as offerings and gifts, this exchange has contributed to speculation that Netanyahu supports the same vein of religious messianism and vision propounded by Temple Activists.
However, leaked audio of a private meeting between Netanyahu and other Likud Party members provided evidence that Netanyahu does not personally approve of constructing a Third Temple, but turns a blind eye to those that do within his ruling coalition and among his donors purely out of political expediency. In that leaked audio, recorded in 2015, the prime minister stated that if Israel wanted to destroy Al-Aqsa “it would not require a great effort… but it goes against everything we stand for.”
Yet, in the years since that meeting took place, the prime minister has made some moves that have suggested that he may no longer think that destroying Al-Aqsa is “against everything we stand for,” especially given that Temple Activism is much more mainstream now than it was in 2015. Such claims of possession and right have increased following the beginning of the Trump administration in the United States, which — as the next installment of this series will show — also contains numerous figures who are committed to building a Third Temple on the Temple Mount, albeit for different reasons.
Netanyahu poses with Yehuda Glick, who is holding his Temple Activist “guide book” to the Temple Mount
During his speech last May at the dedication of the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem — a political move heralded by numerous Temple Activists and Netanyahu himself as having “fulfilled prophecies” related to the Third Temple — Netanyahu made numerous references to the Temple and the Temple Mount and linked Israeli sovereignty over the Temple Mount to the presence of a physical temple.
According to Miko Peled, Netanyahu’s recent ministerial appointments following Israel’s recent elections in April reveal his private support for Temple Activism. Peled told MintPress:
Recently, Netanyahu brought two new members into his cabinet — Bezalel Smotrich and Rafi Peretz. They are from the heart of the settler, religious Zionist, messianic, Temple movement. They are clear about their political goals and are not shy about stating their goals.
They talk about giving the “Arabs of Israel,” as they call the Palestinians, three options: surrender and live without rights in a Jewish state, leave, or die. They make no secret of their desire to build a temple in place of Al-Aqsa. Netanyahu brought them in only because he agrees with them, shares their vision, but cannot express it as they do for fear of losing his international standing as a ‘statesman.’”
While Netanyahu may share their vision, as Peled asserted, other political moves he has made since the April elections suggest that he is likely not ready to enact such a vision, at least in regard to the Temple Mount. For instance, while he did include Smotrich in his cabinet, Netanyahu denied the controversial politician the ministerial positions he had desired, either Defense Minister or Justice Minister, precisely because of Smotrich’s comments about and stances regarding the Temple Mount.
Mainstreaming the apocalypse
As Yehuda Etzion had hoped back in 1985, writing from his prison cell after his failed effort to destroy Al-Aqsa, the “new force that grows very slowly, moving its educational and social activity into a new leadership” in the Israeli political establishment has now clearly manifested. Thanks to the efforts of Etzion and other Temple Activists like Yisrael Ariel and Yehuda Glick, the Temple Activist movement has become more mainstream within Israeli culture and politics than ever before, largely owing to the movement’s huge success since 2014 in rebranding itself as a “civil rights” movement, despite its origins steeped in religious extremism and terrorism.
In Part I of this series, the urgency with which the Israeli political establishment and Temple Activists are pursuing their agenda targeting Al-Aqsa and the Temple Mount was detailed, revealing – as Ramzy Baroud described it – that support for the Third Temple within Israeli society is now “greater than at any time in the past.”
Yet, as the next installment of this series will show, none of this would be possible without strong support from the United States government, where powerful politicians and individuals – particularly within the Trump administration – share the vision of the Temple Activists, although many of them, being Christian Zionists, do so for radically different reasons. The combination of strong support for using political force as a driver of eschatology — among certain groups, whether of Christians or Jews — has increasingly become a common denominator between U.S. and Israeli politics in recent years, one that has colored the foreign policy of both countries.
However, far from a benign influence, the end-times prophecies that are motivating these influential individuals are stocked with future events that portend untold suffering, mass loss of life and cataclysmic wars. Given that both Christians and Jews that favor this interpretation of the end-times believe that active steps must be taken to usher in these apocalyptic scenarios by those with the capacity to do so — e.g., politicians, political donors and so on — it makes understanding this often overlooked aspect lurking behind current Israeli and U.S. foreign policy both a critical and urgent task.
Whitney Webb is a MintPress News journalist based in Chile. She has contributed to several independent media outlets including Global Research, EcoWatch, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire, among others. She has made several radio and television appearances and is the 2019 winner of the Serena Shim Award for Uncompromised Integrity in Journalism.
The UN has contributed another contradiction in its assessment of Palestinian prospects following the “Peace to Prosperity” summit. Instead of highlighting how and why the UN has failed Palestine, a recent statement from Michael Lynk, the Special Rapporteur on human rights in Palestine, emphasised the absence of an international law framework as the reason why peace plans have failed.
While reminding that the two-state compromise enjoys international consensus, Lynk stated: “Without the framework of international law, any peace plan, including the forthcoming proposal from the United States, will crash upon the shoals of political realism.”
Peace plans have failed, he declared, “because they did not seriously insist upon a rights-based approach to peace between Israelis and Palestinians.”
US President Donald Trump has clearly demonstrated he is concerned with Israeli supremacy, not Palestinians rights. Yet, the UN has also advocated and supported a similar outcome. The question, therefore, is not about the absence of an international law framework, but how that framework, when applied, has been used to divest Palestinians of their rights to land and return.
Trump’s “deal of the century” and the two-state paradigm are all about enforcing Palestinian absence from the political process. The only difference is that the latter has been normalised and accepted by the international community to the point that legitimate anti-colonial resistance, which also falls under an international law framework, is eliminated.
It is not enough to insist that Israeli settlements are illegal under international law – another 2,000 settlements have recently been authorised by Israel in the occupied West Bank. The UN must take responsibility for allowing the creation of a colonial settlement enterprise, which means directing questions of illegality at Israel itself. It is the international community which facilitated the prevailing depletion of Palestinian territory by recognising Israel over Palestinian rights. If international law allows such violations, it is unreasonable to expect Palestinians to abide by legislation that has transformed them into a perpetual humanitarian project against their own will and determination.
US Envoy Jason Greenblatt has called settlements “neighbourhoods and cities”. Is this any different to the international community’s acceptance of Israel as a state, despite it being a colonial entity established through the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population? Greenblatt’s comments are a misrepresentation that ties in directly to US policy when it comes to Israel, but the international community, as always, has laid the foundations for the Zionist narrative to thrive.
International law has failed Palestine – a look at the two-state hypothesis, declared obsolete but still considered the only purported solution by international consensus, is more than enough proof. It was also international consensus that decided the Palestinian people’s fate to be colonised in 1947 through the Partition Plan. Pointing fingers at the US, as abhorrent as its complicity with Israel is, will not be enough to undo the violence approved by the international community when it accommodated the Zionist colonial ideology. So far, international law has done nothing to stop the violations which the international community encouraged and supported. It has become a tool supporting the imposition that is the two-state compromise and any other framework that promises the continuation of Palestinian dispossession and displacement.
Donald Trump’s supposed “deal of the century”, offering the Palestinians economic bribes in return for political submission, is the endgame of western peace-making, the real goal of which has been failure, not success.
For decades, peace plans have made impossible demands of the Palestinians, forcing them to reject the terms on offer and thereby create a pretext for Israel to seize more of their homeland.
The more they have compromised, the further the diplomatic horizon has moved away – to the point now that the Trump administration expects them to forfeit any hope of statehood or a right to self-determination.
Even Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and architect of the peace plan, cannot really believe the Palestinians will be bought off with their share of the $50 billion inducement he hoped to raise in Bahrain last week.
That was why the Palestinian leadership stayed away.
But Israel’s image managers long ago coined a slogan to obscure a policy of incremental dispossession, masquerading as a peace process: “The Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”
It is worth examining what those landmark “missed opportunities” consisted of.
The first was the United Nations’ Partition Plan of late 1947. In Israel’s telling, it was Palestinian intransigence over dividing the land into separate Jewish and Arab states that triggered war, leading to the creation of a Jewish state on the ruins of most of the Palestinians’ homeland.
But the real story is rather different.
The recently formed UN was effectively under the thumb of the imperial powers of Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union. All three wanted a Jewish state as a dependent ally in the Arab-dominated Middle East.
Fueled by the dying embers of western colonialism, the Partition Plan offered the largest slice of the Palestinian homeland to a minority population of European Jews, whose recent immigration had been effectively sponsored by the British empire.
As native peoples elsewhere were being offered independence, Palestinians were required to hand over 56 per cent of their land to these new arrivals. There was no chance such terms would be accepted.
However, as Israeli scholars have noted, the Zionist leadership had no intention of abiding by the UN plan either. David Ben Gurion, Israel’s founding father, called the Jewish state proposed by the UN “tiny”. He warned that it could never accommodate the millions of Jewish immigrants he needed to attract if his new state was not rapidly to become a second Arab state because of higher Palestinian birth rates.
Ben Gurion wanted the Palestinians to reject the plan, so that he could use war as a chance to seize 78 per cent of Palestine and drive out most of the native population.
For decades, Israel was happy to entrench and, after 1967, expand its hold on historic Palestine.
In fact, it was Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat who made the biggest, unreciprocated concessions to peace. In 1988, he recognised Israel and, later, in the 1993 Olso accords, he accepted the principle of partition on even more dismal terms than the UN’s – a state on 22 per cent of historic Palestine.
Even so, the Oslo process stood no serious chance of success after Israel refused to make promised withdrawals from the occupied territories. Finally, in 2000 President Bill Clinton called together Arafat and Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak to a peace summit at Camp David.
Arafat knew Israel was unwilling to make any meaningful compromises and had to be bullied and cajoled into attending. Clinton promised the Palestinian leader he would not be blamed if the talks failed.
Israel ensured they did. According to his own advisers, Barak “blew up” the negotiations, insisting that Israel hold on to occupied East Jerusalem, including the Al Aqsa mosque, and large areas of the West Bank. Washington blamed Arafat anyway, and refashioned Israel’s intransigence as a “generous offer”.
A short time later, in 2002, Saudi Arabia’s Peace Initiative offered Israel normal relations with the Arab world in return for a minimal Palestinian state. Israel and western leaders hurriedly shunted it into the annals of forgotten history.
After Arafat’s death, secret talks through 2008-09 – revealed in the Palestine Papers leak – showed the Palestinians making unprecedented concessions. They included allowing Israel to annex large tracts of East Jerusalem, the Palestinians’ expected capital.
Negotiator Saeb Erekat was recorded saying he had agreed to “the biggest [Jerusalem] in Jewish history” as well as to only a “symbolic number of [Palestinian] refugees’ return [and a] demilitarised state … What more can I give?”
It was a good question. Tzipi Livni, Israel’s negotiator, responded, “I really appreciate it” when she saw how much the Palestinians were conceding. But still her delegation walked away.
Trump’s own doomed plan follows in the footsteps of such “peace-making”.
In a New York Times commentary last week Danny Danon, Israel’s ambassador to the UN, candidly encapsulated the thrust of this decades-long diplomatic approach. He called on the Palestinians to “surrender”, adding: “Surrender is the recognition that in a contest, staying the course will prove costlier than submission.”
The peace process was always leading to this moment. Trump has simply cut through the evasions and equivocations of the past to reveal where the West’s priorities truly lie.
It is hard to believe that Trump or Kushner ever believed the Palestinians would accept a promise of “money for quiet” in place of a state based on “land for peace”.
Once more, the West is trying to foist on the Palestinians an inequitable peace deal. The one certainty is that they will reject it – it is the only issue on which the Fatah and Hamas leaderships are united – again ensuring the Palestinians can be painted as the obstacle to progress.
The Palestinians may have refused this time to stumble into the trap, but they will find themselves the fall guys, whatever happens.
When Trump’s plan crashes, as it will, Washington will have the chance to exploit a supposed Palestinian rejection as justification for approving annexation by Israel of yet more tranches of occupied territory.
The Palestinians will be left with a shattered homeland. No self-determination, no viable state, no independent economy, just a series of aid-dependent ghettos. And decades of western diplomacy will finally have arrived at its preordained destination.
Taking a careful look at the run-up to the U.S./Israeli war on Iran exposes the inner workings of the U.S./Israeli deep state and the covert operations that the CIA and Mossad carry out around the world to lay the groundwork for war.
In this article, I will detail how the U.S. and Israel astroturfed protests in Iran, infiltrated them with rioters, and ran an atrocity propaganda campaign about Iran massacring protestors to manufacture consent for war.
This article will be an examination of the deep state’s war on Iran, prior to the full-scale U.S. invasion.
This article will be specific to Iran, but should be seen as a case study for how American, Israeli, and often British intelligence lay the groundwork for targets of empire around the world. … continue
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