When is a war not a war? Apparently in the minds of some folks in Washington if it is a “single strike” or a “limited attack” it is really okay, with or without the consent of Congress as required by Article 1, Section 8, of the Constitution of the United States. The Founders had wanted to take away from the chief executive the ability to go to war, a power which the kings in Europe had abused, but the current rulers of America have chosen to ignore the wisdom of the framers of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. They have done so by wordsmithing what they are doing and somehow attacking another country has become generally regarded as not really war at all, just a reminder to bad guys of what Washington might be capable of if it really gets angry.
Even accepting that under the War Powers Act the president has the authority to respond to an imminent threat, the U.S. was hardly threatened by the Syrians on the two occasions when Trump has ordered drone strikes. Nor was Iran a threat two weeks ago when an attack on Iranian military installations was called off within minutes of being launched.
Laws or rules of war are, in reality, pretty much a fiction. Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War includes the observation that “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” The recent Iranian shoot-down of a U.S. navy reconnaissance drone brought out the worst in all-American chest thumping chauvinism. The New York Times’ leading Zionist columnist Bret Stephens called for an attack by U.S. forces to sink the Iranian navy. Senator Tom Cotton, a Trump ally, urged a “retaliatory military strike,” while Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warned that any killing of an American soldier or sailor in Syria or Iraq will be blamed on Iran and a U.S. military response will follow.
Bernie Sanders, in an interview with Margaret Brennan of CBS’s Face the Nation, had an interesting confrontation with Brennan over the language used to describe the aborted Iran attack. When Sanders correctly described the planned action as “war” Brennan objected, leading to the following exchange:
MARGARET BRENNAN: He was just doing a limited strike.
SEN. SANDERS: Oh, just a limited strike – well, I’m sor-ry. I just didn’t know that it’s okay to simply attack another country with bombs with just a limited strike – that’s an act of warfare.
On the day after the attack was called off, Eliot Engel, Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, spoke with Jake Tapper of CNN saying:
JAKE TAPPER: “You think the President needs to come to Congress to get the authority to strike Iran if he wants to?”
ELIOT ENGEL: “Oh, absolutely. I think the President needs to come to Congress if … going to war with Iran. I mean, individual strike, we don’t want to tie the President’s hands. But in terms of going to war, we’re a co-equal branch of government, it’s very important that Congress have a say in it.”
Engel’s ignorance of the Constitution of the United States and the War Powers Act is profound. He is saying that an “individual strike” using the military is not war while also conceding that the president can start an armed conflict just because he got up on the wrong side of bed one morning. Eliot would not want to tie the president’s hands, perhaps recalling the heroic exploits of his own president Barack Obama, who destroyed Libya just because he felt it was the right thing to do.
Engel is, perhaps not coincidentally, a hard-core Zionist who tends to look at the Middle East through an Israeli prism. In opposition to most other Democratic congressmen, he voted for the Iraq war and against Obama’s Iran deal, both of which votes were in line with the Israeli government’s lobbying of Congress. For Engel, the first question is always “Is it good for Israel?”
And when it comes to going to war against the Muslim world, there is no one more up front than former Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. Joe was interviewed by Israeli Army radio on the day after Trump canceled the Iran attack. He was troubled by Trump’s backing off from hitting Iran and advocated striking targets in the country that are both “visible and public.” He also expressed his hope that Donald Trump would quickly return to his policy of maintaining a hard line with Iran. Joe was not at all troubled about a retaliatory attack killing an estimated 150 people on the ground because “in war unfortunately people are killed, that’s just the way of the world.” Joe would, of course, prefer that non-Jews do the dying.
Perhaps the most bizarre summation of the case for America’s right to initiate what amounts to perpetual warfare came from James Jeffrey, the noticeably demented U.S. Special Representative for Syria Engagement and Special Envoy to the Global Coalition. Viewing with disdain some of the Democratic presidential candidates’ calls for moving away from “endless wars,” he pounded the table while declaring “I get terribly worried. Because this shows total ignorance of what’s going on in the world today.”
He went on to opine in an interview with Defense One: “All of those candidates, in fact to a degree even more than most presidential candidates, embrace American values such as democracy, rule of law, divided government, free press, all of these great things. But let me tell you what I’ve learned in 50 years of experience. All those democratic values that we have done a great deal as a country to promote and to support around the world – and that’s a good thing, was a good thing – rest on a foundation. That foundation is an American-led global collective security system to fend off the predators that want to tear the system apart. Not just the military coalition, but the values that stand behind it.”
Jeffrey is perhaps a student of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who is uniquely convinced that the U.S. has been a force for good over the past twenty years. By that logic, the United States must accept the burden of being the global policeman to maintain wonderful democratic values. Interestingly, Jeffrey cites “rule of law” and “democracy” which are, of course, the first victims in any nation that believes itself to have a right to start a war whenever it sees fit.
What is more disturbing than Jeffrey, however, is the casualness displayed by media stars and politicians alike regarding what constitutes war by virtue of the broad acceptance of euphemisms like “limited attack” or “individual strike.” One recalls the euphemism frequently cited by the Pentagon during the Vietnam War when American bombers were blowing up villages, that the U.S. was invariably “exercising the inherent right of self-defense.” Rather than citing self-defense, it would be far better seeing Washington exercising some self-restraint for a change.
Comedian George Carlin is known as one of the most controversial and outspoken entertainers of his time, and as far as the government is concerned, he could have possibly been a terrorist.
Carlin was not a violent or criminal person in any way, but he said things during his routines that struck at the root of the problems in our society. He went into great detail about corruption in government and business.
During the 1978 Supreme Court case, FCC v Pacifica Foundation, the government cited Carlin’s work as an example of profanity. They used his “Seven Dirty Words” segment to show the type of language that was being used in records and broadcasts. However, the government’s interest in his work did not stop there.
Just after his 1969 appearance on the Jackie Gleason show, Carlin caught the attention of the FBI because he made jokes about then-FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover. According to the government, Carlin had “referred to the Bureau and the Director in a satirical vein.”
They added that his act was “considered to be in very poor taste” and “it was obvious that he was using the prestige of the Bureau and Mr. Hoover to enhance his performance.”
After Carlin’s appearance on the show, the staff of Jackie Gleason received a number of anonymous letters — allegedly from fans but possibly from the FBI — condemning Carlin for speaking about the government in the critical way that he did. It has been proven that the FBI has indeed sent threatening letters to public figures in the past, pretending to be concerned colleagues or a member of the public, including to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Anyone that speaks out against the injustices of the world, whether they are a dangerous terrorist or a harmless comedian, will receive unwanted attention from government.
Below is a video showing Carlin’s deep political analysis in action:
Read the 12 pages of FBI documents on Carlin here.
A section of the mural at George Washington High School in San Francisco, painted by Russian-American artist Victor Arnautoff, shows a dead Native American. Credit Jim Wilson/NYT
The decision of the San Francisco school board to obliterate the historic murals in George Washington High School is not just another instance of Identity Politics foolishness. It is also a terrifying illustration of the drastic mental decline of what is called “the Left”.
Back in the 1930s there was a Left that had brains. You could agree or disagree with it, you could love it or hate it, but it had ideas, purpose, talent, and a sense of common humanity. It was working for a just society that would end exploitation and benefit humanity as a whole.
As an example, there were the artistic projects of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the principal New Deal program to combat the Depression, which extended from creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority to artistic enhancement of public buildings. A beneficiary of this enhancement was George Washington High School in San Francisco, which was blessed with a striking set of murals by a leading artist, Victor Arnautoff, a Russian immigrant who had worked with the Mexican master of socially conscience mural art, Diego Rivera. One would expect that the presence of these powerful murals would be a lasting cause of pride in their school for staff and students.
The WPA, not least in its art projects, was animated by leftists, and even downright Communists, like Arnautoff, who chose to depart from the sterilized “I cannot tell a lie” cherry tree myth and the crossing of the Delaware glorification of George Washington to introduce reminders of the forgotten victims of the foundation of the United States – the exploitation of African slaves and the violent expropriation of Native American lands. The murals were clearly part of the leftwing WPA intellectuals’ endeavor to raise social consciousness, a step toward the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s.
In the age of the House Un-American Activities Committee and Joe McCarthy’s drunken rampage, such red-tinged WPA projects exposing the less glorious side of the birth of the republic aroused hostile suspicion. And yet, the Arnautoff murals survived Nixon, HUAC and McCarthy witch hunts. It took Identity Politics to call for their destruction.
What is most shocking is that the African-American president of the San Francisco Board of Education, Stevon Cook, supports this destruction of the murals on grounds that they include “violent images that are offensive to certain communities.” Joely Proudfit, director of the California Indian Culture and Sovereignty Center in San Marcos, said it was not worth saving the art if one native student “is triggered by that”.
Everything is wrong with such a position. Education should include teaching people to analyze what they see rather than simply “be triggered”. The contemporary world is crammed with images that are deeply offensive. When a student can have an historic mural torn down because she or he is “triggered” by it, what sort of preparation is this for the future? School should not be a “safe place” for emotions but a preparation for using reason to master those emotions as one goes through life. The protesters have chosen the worst possible way of interpreting the murals instead of using their reason to understand them and place them in their context. Yes, slavery happened and yes, American Indians were slaughtered, and their descendants can think of the strength they needed to resist and survive, and draw from their tragic history a sense of compassion for all who suffer from comparable injustice today. The attack on the mural is a gesture of impotent spite.
What are the hurt feelings of a San Francisco high school student compared to the pain and hunger of a Yemeni child living under U.S.-supported bombing? George Washington is dead, but in the city named after him, American leaders are sponsoring the massacre of innocent civilians all around the world. Why don’t these super-sensitive American students use their sensitivity to oppose such ongoing crimes and develop their intelligence to figure out how to join with others in fighting to end the Permanent War State in Washington?
But the snowflake trend has no use for real strength, the strength of courage to overcome obstacles, and draws an artificial moral strength from perpetual emotional weakness. Instead of gaining strength from increased knowledge, a certain tendency of young persons who have NOT suffered as their forebears did cling to their victimhood as the key to their own privileges. This may bring a few momentary advantages but is disastrous in the long run.
A healthy society is based on a balance between respect for the individual, regardless of identity or origins, and awareness of belonging to humanity as a whole, with all its sufferings, joys, tragedies and aspirations. Closing oneself into a limited identity group denies both respect for individuals and awareness of universal humanity. It can only be a basis for endless conflict, “my people are better than your people”, “no, my people are better than your people”. Those who “win” a momentary victory by imposing on others a destructive act of iconoclasm are only confirming their identification as “losers” as their sole key to success.
With such divisions, the American people will be absorbed in tribal skirmishes, while their criminal rulers continue to spread devastation around the world.
The following table is taken from Mark Curtis’ book, Unpeople: Britain’s Secret Human Rights Abuses, published in 2004. It gives figures on the estimated number of deaths for which Britain bears ‘significant responsibility’. There are four categories of British responsibility:
‘Direct responsibility’ is where British military and/or covert forces have played a direct role.
‘Indirect responsibility’ is where Britain has provided strong support (through trade, arms exports, aid and/or diplomatic support) for allies engaged in aggression or killing.
‘Active inaction’ is where Britain has specifically helped to block international action to halt killings (Note that this and the second category are different than merely ‘turning a blind eye’, which would include many other cases).
The ‘others’ category contains a solitary case, that of the Idi Amin regime’s state terror, a description of which is provided below.
Estimates on the number of deaths in any conflict always vary, often very widely. Where there is no footnote below, I have used the most commonly cited estimate. For others I have generally sourced the varying estimates. The overall figure is between 8.6 million and 13.5 million – or ‘around 10 million’. Of these, Britain bears ‘direct responsibility’ for between 4 million to nearly 6 million deaths.
Note that this figure is if anything likely to be an underestimate. For one thing, not all British interventions have been included, such as those in Oman in 1957-9 and in 1964-74 owing to lack of available on the scale of deaths. In the category of ‘indirect responsibility’, I have excluded many repressive regimes that Britain has backed throughout the postwar period; I have tended to include those cases on which I have focused in this and previous books. I have also not included US backing of the Guatemala regime from the 1960s to the 1980s, responsible for around 200,000 deaths. The reason is that while Britain strongly backed US policy in Central America, there is not as much direct and specific support for US policy in Guatemala as there was in the case of El Salvador and Nicaragua, explained in the third column.
The figures generally refer to the number of ‘enemy’ deaths rather than total deaths, where it has been possible to disaggregate the estimates.
Finally, I do not pretend this is a fully scientific analysis – the exclusion of certain episodes, the extent of British responsibility and the estimates on numbers of deaths are of course all open to interpretation, as in any table of this kind. Nevertheless, it gives a reasonably accurate reflection of British responsibility for a very large number of deaths in the postwar world.
Britain privately backed US strongly, regularly supported it publicly but also played several direct roles: providing military and ‘counter-insurgency’ advice to South Vietnam; British covert forces took part in the war; intelligence was passed to US military. The British role was therefore more ‘direct’ than ‘indirect’ (see Unpeople, chapter 12)
1962-70 – war in Yemen
100,000 – 200,000
British secret operation involving covert action and arms supplies (see Unpeople, chapter 16)
British governments gave strong backing to Iraq in various ways (see Unpeople, chapter 5)
SUB-TOTAL
3.32m – 6.20m
Active inaction
1990s – Yugoslav civil wars
200,000 – 250,000
Major government played key role to prevent international action against Milosevic regime[37]
1994 – Rwanda genocide
800,000 – 1 million
Major government played key role at the UN to prevent international action to prevent or stop genocide[38]
SUB-TOTAL
1m – 1.25m
Others
1971-9 – Ugandan state terror (Idi Amin era)
300,000
Heath government welcomed and supported Amin’s rule in its first year. Most atrocities were committed after this period but Britain bears significant responsibility in enabling Amin regime to consolidate its rule.
SUB-TOTAL
300,000
TOTAL
8.65m – 13.47m
REFERENCES (See Unpeople book for full references)
[2] Figures vary widely. The Guardian estimated 10,000-20,000 civilian deaths as an indirect result of the bombing. Estimates of the military deaths are usually in the 3,000-6,000 range. Web of Deceit, p.49
[3] Human Rights Watch estimates 500 civilian deaths (‘Civilian deaths in the NATO air campaign’, February 2000, www.hrw.org). Some estimates, which include military deaths, are often over 1,000. 20th Century Atlas: Alphabetical list of war, massacre, tyranny and genocide, www.users.erols.com
[5] Figures vary very widely; see 20th Century Atlas. Immediately after the war the US government estimated 100,000 deaths. Other independent estimates are much lower, others much higher.
[6] Figures vary very widely, from hundreds of thousands to 4 million. Most deaths were those of Vietnamese, with figures usually ranging from 1 – 3 million. Hundreds of thousands were also killed in Cambodia and Laos.
[7] Some estimates are as low as 300,000 but most credible figures are much higher and some estimate over a million.
[9] estimated number of deaths due principally to the brutal ‘resettlement’ operations. Estimates of number of Mau Mau killed in actual fighting vary from 10,000-13,000.
[17] Figures vary very widely. This is approximate figure for North Korean and Chinese deaths
[18] This is approximate figure for deaths on the rebels (ie, EAM/ELAS) side.
[19] Figures vary extremely widely. See 20th Century Atlas
[20] Figure from September 2000 (beginning of second intifada) to March 2004; Palestinian Red Crescent Society, http://www.palestinercs.org
[21] Nigerian police and army are complicit in many of these killings; See chapter 10
[22] Russia provided an official number of 15,000 Chechen deaths by August 2003 (AFP, ‘Russia underplays Chechnya deaths’, 8 August 2003). This is likely to be a severe underestimate, especially in light of the ferocious attack on Grozny in 1999/2000.
[23] Number of deaths by government forces from 1996-2002; Web of Deceit, p.81
[24] Figures vary. 35,000 – 40,000 is a commonly cited figure since 1990; some current estimates, however, state 15,000 in the past 10 years.
[25] The UN estimated half a million deaths of children under five as a result of the 1991 war and sanctions. Former UN Coordinator for Iraq, Denis Halliday, has given a figure, including adults, of over a million. Web of Deceit, p.29
[31] The Central American Human Rights Commission estimates 2,000-3,000; Physicians for Human Rights estimates 300 civilian deaths and 50 military deaths (‘Panama: Operation Just Cause’, December 1990)
‘Yeshayahu Leibowitz, the philosopher who was an observant Orthodox Jew, told me once: “The Jewish religion died 200 years ago. Now there is nothing that unifies the Jews around the world apart from the Holocaust.”’ Remember What? Remember How? – Uri Avnery
The Labour Party is now a comedy act. Even when it does the right thing, it is quick to admit it occurred by mistake. Three days ago the Party decided to let MP Chris Williamson back into its ranks, a decision that seemed to convince some that Corbyn finally grew a pair. Apparently, it didn’t take more than 72 hours for the party to humiliatingly reverse its decision and bow in to pressure mounted on its leadership by the Jewish Lobby, Labour Friends of Israel and, believe it or not, a bunch of party staffers who “demanded,” no more no less, an “immediate review” of the decision regarding Chris Williamson.
The signatories, whom according to the Jewish News included the “vast majority of remaining Jewish party staff,” wished “to remain anonymous for fear of losing their employment.” Once again we are provided with an unprecedented glimpse into the unethical nature of the Zionist operation. Our ‘anonymous’ staffers signed on a letter demanding that the party suspends an elected MP and let him practically lose his job, yet asked to remain anonymous so that they can keep their own.
On my part, I have been entertained in the last few days seeing some of the most horrendous Labour politicians lying about me in an attempt to smear MP Williamson. Two days ago I posted a video deconstructing unfounded nonsense that MP Margaret Hodge attributed to me and also challenged the ignoramus Lord Falconer’s drivel concerning my work. Yet, I was surprised to find out that the anonymous Labour staffers actually described me accurately. The staffers demanded MP Williamson to be ejected from the party, with one reason being that “he backed a petition in support of Gilad Atzmon, who has denounced the ‘holocaust religion’ and suggested that there is a Zionist plan for world domination.”
I am here to admit that only rarely do I see my detractors referring to my words and work genuinely. However, I would like to point out to the anonymous staffers that Zionist world domination is not ‘a plan’ anymore, it is the reality in which we live. With the Zionist LFI terrorising the Labour Leadership on a daily basis, with 80% of Tory MPs being members of the Zionist CFI, with AIPAC dominating American foreign policy, with the USA and Britain launching criminal wars following Zio-con immoral interventionist mantras, Zionism dominating world politics is not an abstract ‘plan.’ It is mainstream news!
But the staffers were also genuine describing me as a person who denounces the holocaust religion.
In my work I pay great respect to the Israeli philosopher Prof. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who coined the notion “Holocaust religion” back in the 1970s. Leibowitz detected that Jews believe in many different things: Judaism, Bolshevism, Human Rights, Zionism, ‘anti-Zionism’ but all Jews believe in the Holocaust. Leibowitz, himself an orthodox Jew, opposed the Holocaust Religion. He stated occasionally that all historical events, no matter how catastrophic, are religiously insignificant.
In 1987 Adi Ophir, another prominent Israeli philosopher, offered his own criticism of the Holocaust religion. In his paper On Sanctifying the Holocaust: An Anti-Theological Treatise, Ophir admitted that “a religious consciousness built around the Holocaust may become the central aspect of a new religion.”
Ophir listed the four commandments of the new religion:
1. “Thou shalt have no other holocaust.”
2. “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image or likeness.” …
3. “Thou shalt not take the name in vain.”
4. “Remember the day of the Holocaust to keep it holy, in memory of the destruction of the Jews of Europe.”
Though Ophir’s formulations are understandably dated, my work on Holocaust Religion is consistent with the critical discourse offered by the two Israeli philosophers. In The Wandering Who I argue that the Holocaust discourse in its current form contains numerous essential religious elements. It has priests and prophets. It has commandments and dogmas (e.g. ‘Never Again’) and rituals (memorial days, pilgrimage to Auschwitz, etc.). It has an established, esoteric symbolic order (good, evil, death, liberation). It also has a temple, Yad Vashem, and shrines – Holocaust museums in capital cities worldwide. The Holocaust religion is also maintained by a massive global financial network, what Norman Finkelstein terms the ‘Holocaust industry’. This new religion is coherent enough to define its ‘antichrists’ (i.e. Holocaust deniers), and powerful enough to persecute them (through Holocaust-denial and hate-speech laws).
I also argue that the Holocaust religion is the conclusive and final stage in the Jewish dialectic; it is the end of Jewish history. The new religion allocates to Jews a central role within their own universe. In the new religion: the ‘sufferer’ and the ‘innocent’ march toward ‘redemption’ and ‘empowerment.’ God is out of the game and has been sacked, having failed in his historic mission. He wasn’t there to save the Jews, after all. In the new religion ‘the Jew’, as the new Jewish God, redeems himself or herself.
I indeed denounce the new religion and for the obvious ethical and humanist reasons. The holocaust religion adheres to the primacy of one people. It is an anti-universal precept that offers no hope, mercy or compassion. It instead produces a rationale for more oppression, global conflicts and havoc. It is hardly a surprise that the many people who adhere to the holocaust are engaged in the destruction of Palestine and its indigenous people. As far as I can say, the Holocaust religion is a blind, non-empathic precept. If the Holocaust is the new global religion all I ask is for the British Labour Party, its staffers and councilors to respect my right to be agnostic, a non-believer, an atheist.
And if MP Williamson is expelled from the Labour party for me upholding such views, maybe MP Williamson should consider giving me a call and thanking me for liberating him from his reactionary Zionised party.
“It made no difference which Palestinians we killed… They either were terrorists or would become terrorists or they gave birth to terrorists.” – former IDF commander, Rafael “ Raful” Eitan.
Spies,Femme fatale, deadly plots, killings, bombs, knives, guns, and an array of unique murderous weaponry that would make James Bond and “Q” envious. All this, combined with dozens of unapologetic and brutal cloak and dagger assassinations in foreign locales worldwide? Sounds like the makings of a great spy thriller.
Indeed. But, despite decades of Israeli denial… this story is true.
Ronen Bergman’s book, “Rise and Kill First,” was released in late 2018 to what, considering the inflammatory subject, was relatively little fanfare. While this might seem surprising, on reading this important chronological documentary of the inception and development of Israel’s worldwide assassination program it becomes clear that this book does provide a unique, very detailed and accurate history of Israel’s hundreds of extrajudicial killings over the past fifty plus years.
However, when read with just the right eyes, other far more important and separate timelines of history appear within the book to the reader already wary of the definition and rise of modern Zionism. Of these other unmentioned chronologies within the 530 pages, the author fails miserably in connecting these dots of his own excellent, but thus too superficial, presentation of fact.
What this book does more importantly reveal is a multi-faceted unmasking of Israel’s steady descent from the moral to the immoral tactics of war; the myth that it’s past Prime Ministers were not also barbaric terrorists and sacrosanct;the ongoing descent of other world leaders willing to give up their own conscience into the same mental abyss; the ever-increasing control of Israel over the minds of the American military, the CIA , its media and its politicians; and that Israel has never truly embraced peace as a foreign policy, preferring war and genocide instead.
Worse, “Rise and Kill First” reveals the true mind of the modern Israeli that has been infected by the rise of orthodox Jewish Likud party: An aberration of conscience that has no value for non-Jewish life worldwide whatsoever in its pursuit of its singular goal: Greater Israel.
***
“If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first!”– The Babylonian Talmud.
“An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” has been embraced in the routine alternative to turning the other cheek by Israel as foreign policy since its inception. This implies violent retaliation and retribution. But this book, when taken in totality, more accurately redefines this age-old Israeli mantra to its current Zionist definition, “Rise-up and kill first!”
The author’s failures in connecting the dots of his own excellently researched chronology are what makes this book a must-read. For observers of Israeli / Zionist hegemony of territory- and of mind- what Ronen omits are the many other chronologies that well illustrate, by his own documentation, why Israeli Zionism is indeed a threat that must be vanquished. These connections are obvious, yet omitted.
We need not wonder why.
In documenting Israel’s unknown – and always denied- program of targeted killings, Ronen’s work appears exceptional. What he presents is the result of seven years of his ongoing interviews of the scores of military and later political players who were the controllers of this seventy-five-year history of Israeli military development of domination and increased hegemony by assassination. The chronology begins with the killing of Tom Wilkin as far back as 1944because of his role in very effectively infiltrating and disrupting the Jewish underground in Palestine as it forced the way for eventual Israel. At that time long ago before Zionism prevailed in establishing for the first time a Jewish nation, the assassination was not yet a sanctified national military program. That would change.
While the reader must take the details as presented since independent corroboration from these witnesses is nigh on impossible, the book is extensively footnoted and on very few occasions does Ronen fail to directly identify the names of his sources which he professionally cross-references against each other for validity. The credibility of the facts he presents seems evident.
His prima facie chronology of a book is a rollicking ride. Ronen is a good storyteller and he takes the reader through the details of the book from killing after killing and the planning and execution of each orchestrated plot. Loaded with salacious details aplenty, the author uses dozens of case studies from past Israeli hits to show the ongoing development and inception of the many new Israeli military and intelligence services, ongoing improvement in the tactics of the kill and the year-by-year increase in the willingness of Israel and its leaders to kill beyond their own borders while ever descending from the existing human conscience. His subject well in hand, Ronen treats the reader to a real page-turner of a spy novel.
The book picks up the modern era of Zionist expansion and assassination as WWII draws to a close with the Nuremberg trials and the flight of Nazi war criminals to other countries. Retribution is the key to these many stories as Israeli operatives systematically track down and arrest or kill those they accuse, such as Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
As is the case with most books from Israeli authors on the subject of Israel, Ronen falls too conveniently upon the hyperbole of the Holocaust as reason for this initial killing and rendition program, but without proper examination. These killings first occur during the inception of the post-war development of Israel, the fact of which Ronen is far too brief and equally serving of the Israeli narratives since the historical slaughter and expropriation of Palestinians is glossed over.
As the author proceeds with his chronology, the reader is treated to a very fine and detailed description of many such major world events like the Munich Olympics kidnappings of 1972, the raid on Entebbe, Uganda and many, many more. Ronen does a very good job of cross-referencing the details of these many events with a plethora of interviews and quotes from the operatives directly involved at the time. What he reveals each time is quite likely the best examination of these events so far provided in print. Regarding Munich, he delves in great detail into the full rescue effort that includes the involvement of the German government which was at loggerheads with the Israelis and the IDF in the attempted and failed rescue.
Ronen’s effectiveness and credibility are challenged, however, by his almost constant insistence – by reference- that the Israeli actions he presents are invariably only retaliatory for a specific act of aggression by pro-Palestinian factions against Israelis. Ronen too routinely demonizes the Palestinian and Arab players’ actions and uses them too often as a fait a compli for their own eventual demise while rarely looking at the Israeli atrocity that preceded a Palestinian attack which led to yet another Israeli targeted killing.
During this period of the book, Ronen does a very good job documenting the change in the policy of the Israeli assassinations from executions only within Palestinian territories to the eventual decision to perform these assassinations globally.Ronen, although predominantly showing successful operations, does not shy away from Israel’s many failures as well.
He presents as almost comical the Manchurian Candidate-like attempt to brainwash, month after month, a Palestinian prisoner code-named “Fatkhi,”who is deemed to be mentally susceptible to these techniques and who, it was intended, would next be sent back to Palestine to assassinate PLO president Yasser Arafat. The results of this humorous vignette, after month’s of careful mental revision of the test subject assassin, are that the prisoner is finally freed on Dec. 19, 1969, by allowing him to cross the Jordanriver. Due to equally poor planning, is swept down river and left clinging to a mid-river rock. When finally making it to shore Fatkhi immediately runs to the PLO police headquarters and then informs Arafat of all that he had endured at Israeli hands during his nine months of obviously unsuccessful programming.
When it comes to Arafat, the book shows the absolute hatred of Israel towards him personally due to his effectiveness as PLO chairman, a hatred that grows almost maniacally in the hearts of every Prime Minister and IDF commander as Arafat, again and again, evades their seemingly well planned and very numerous attempts to bump him off. This hatred is only made worse by the rising worldwide respect for Arafat and the PLO cause after each failed attempt.
It is at this stage in the book that, beyond the demand for Arafat’s blood, Israel crosses the mental Rubicon from respect for human life- other than the target- to allowing for and condoning the innocent to also be killed as a matter of convenience to each plot. The assassinations of a foreign scientist involved in the burgeoning nuclear programs in Iraq, Iran and Egypt began this slope downward.
Although Ronen fails to bring this point to the reader’s attention, he unwittingly documents in exceptional detail this change in conscience and therefore terror tactics which he best illustrates in the example of the Ashkelon murders.
***
“I do not remember an event of similar gravity in the history of the state of Israel” – Yehudit Karp, Israeli Deputy Attorney General for special duties
In understanding the change of the Israeli military and political mind towards that of proactive and routine utilization of terror by assassination, the Ashkelon affair is a seminal point in the book. This connection should not have been overlooked by Ronen; for what this case actually meant to subsequent Israeli war tactics was a complete change in morals of its leaders and that this change would devolve within leaders in other countries as well, particularly America.
On April 12, 1984, four Palestinian youths, three of whom were teenagers- the other twenty years of age- hijacked a bus heading en route from Tel Aviv to Ashkelon with forty Israelis aboard. Taking the passengers hostage with one knife and a fake bomb made of an old suitcase with wires dangling out from its seams for effect, they intended to get the bus to Palestine and next negotiate the release of 500 Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails.
When IDF troops eventually disabled the bus a stand-off ensues and negotiations for surrender begin with optimism for a peaceful resolution since, as future PM, Ehud Barak, who was on scene at the time assessed, “the hijackers would [likely] agree to let the hostages go in exchange for a few sandwiches.” But at 4:43 AM Sayeret Matkal (one of the many Israeli military factions) soldiers open fire killing two of the hijackers immediately and an Israeli woman instead.
Apprehended, the two remaining Palestinians are taken by Shin Bet (Israeli Intelligence Service similar to the American CIA) operatives under direction of the infamous Avraham (Avrum) Shalom, the longtime head of Shin Bet who, as Ronen showcases during previous killings, is a man predisposed of secretly sanctioned powers to kill with impunity and without authorization. As Ronen quotes Yuval Diskin, an eventual Shin Bet chief, “ We feared him… He was a strong man, brutal, clever, very stubborn, uncompromising, a real ass kicker.”
And so, since Shalom was not in favor of live terrorists being tried in court, hours later after first ordering the two Palestinians moved away from witnesses to a dank Shin Bet interrogation basement cell, next he allows/orders the soldiers transporting them to stop by the roadside en route and bludgeon them to death with rocks and iron bars to make it look like Israeli settlers had performed a different vendetta.
Then Shalom relaxes, safe in the knowledge that his personal barbarity was sanctioned from the top all the way to then PM Yitzhak Shamir, who had formerly been in charge of the same killing unit when so many innocent foreign scientists were put to death-secretly- at his whim as well. This was confirmed by Carmi Gillon, head of Shin Bet in the ’90s who assessed, “… he [Shalom] felt as if he could do whatever he wanted to do.” Within this subject, Ronen exposes the secret killing program know as “Weights” that was created by Shalom. Assesses the author:
“They were officially sanctioned extrajudicial killings, proposed to the head of Shin Bet by his senior commanders, approved by him and then the Prime Minister, first Rabin and then Begin and Shamir.”
What next transpires is what Ronen very accurately refers to as a “coup.”This was Shalom’s government-sanctioned barbarity vs. existing military and civil law: Laws that at that time favoured a proper conscience of man in wartime and therefore respect for human life. When the dust would settle several years later, the rule of law and its strictures would no longer functionally exist. And the mind of the modern Zionist would instead be set free to roam the earth.
Shalom would have, as so many times before escaped scrutiny, except for fate, a very inconvenient camera and that three senior Shit Bet officers would not lower their own moral values in kind.
Israeli press photographer Alex Levac had taken pictures of the arrest of the two remaining live Palestinians and managed to stash the film before being searched by a Birds soldier (another IDF special ops sub-set) for doing so.
When Levac’s final few shots disproved the IDF narrative that all four Palestinians had been killed at the scene of the bus incident, his editor’s at Hadashot tried to go with the story but were hit by IDF censors. However, someone leaked the story to Stern and the NYT along with the photo. When the story blew up, then PM Shamir and Shalom did all they could to stop the subsequent formal inquiry in its tracks.
In preparation for this coup, ten of Shalom’s men and co-conspirators meet in a distant orange grove under the direction of Gen. Yossi Ginosser, to ironically avoid Shin Bet listening devices and surveillance. Here they effect their plan which includes taking down their comrade, Brigadier General Yitzhak Mordechai, a man of impeccable reputation-and a personal friend of Ginnoser- who had commanded the troops at the scene of the bus- as the patsy.
When next Ginosser, with the full knowledge of Shalom, weaves a web of deceit designed to thwart the inquiry, they also seek to shift their crime to Mordechai by testifying that, due to their observations that day it was Mordechai who had given the order to kill the Palestinians. The court conveniently certifies their plot by clearing Shalom and company and next Mordechai is charged with manslaughter in their stead.
But fate then smiles on Mordechai when a military advocate, Menahem Finkelstein, who was on the first inquiry panel subsequently is involved in the decision on whether Mordechai is to be indicted for manslaughter, notices many inconsistencies in testimony and facts. Despite this, Shin Bet and the Justice Ministry insist – for obvious reasons – that Mordechai be prosecuted. Thanks to Finkelstein, however, Mordechai is, after being indicted, finally acquitted.
If this had been the end of the story it would have been relatively insignificant. But, during this lengthy saga three senior Shit Bet officials including Reuven Hazak, (Ronen does not name the other two) who was already tapped as Shalom’s successor to head the IDF, were having trouble sleeping. They concluded that justice would only be served by the collective resignations of all the conspirators including Shalom.
Shalom refuses and Hazak next goes directly to then PM Shimon Peres, who had replaced Shamir a year before. What Hazak does not know is that Shalom had already launched a preemptive strike of his own with Perez, who, after placating Hazak, next allows Shalom to sack all three whistleblowers. As the author notes:
“They departed in disgrace from the service they had given their lives to, estranged from their colleagues, who were given to believe that they were traitors.”
However, the three are undaunted, collectively showing up unannounced in the dead of night to the office of Israel’s Attorney General, Yitzhak Zamir, whom himself has previously signed off on many an Israeli hit. After spilling their guts for many hours about the true story of the Palestinians of Ashkelon and the frame-up of Mordechai, Deputy attorney general Yehudit Karp years later recalled to Ronen:
“I felt as if the sky had fallen. It is not possible to exaggerate what happened there. It was a gross undermining of the rule of law and corruption of all the systems. I do not remember an event of similar gravity in the history of the State of Israel.”
When Attorney General Zamir immediately calls for a new inquiry and Israel police launched a second concurrent investigation, Shalom refuses to yield. He and his other Shit Bet conspirators next begin direct intimidation of their own against Israel Judicial officials that was so extreme that Attorney General Zamir and others within the prosecution were assigned 24-hour police protection. From Shin Bet!
Shalom and company now appear to be cornered on all sides with the power of the full Justice Ministry now steaming directly at them. But Shalom has one last card to play. A trump card as it turned out.
Shalom, Ginosser and the others involved produce what Ginosser termed, The Skulls Dossier: A list of the secret and never revealed skeletons in the closet of not only the Shit Bet and Weights but, worse, of the former leaders who became Israeli Prime Ministers themselves afterwards. Ronen sums up:
“In reality, it was pure blackmail, an implicit threat that if Shalom and his allies were indicted, they would take others with them, including Prime Ministers.”
The denouement of this end to the power of the civilian Israel courts over the military came quickly in a final move by former PM Shamir (who had full knowledge of the plot), then current PM Shimon Peres (who had approved Shalom’s plot) and future PM Yitzhak Rabin who was at the time defense minister. They convince then Israeli president Chaim Herzog to hand down “all-encompassing pardons to the implicated Shit bet personnel, covering all proceedings against them. Eleven men were thus exonerated before they’d even been indicted.”
When challenged by the media about his own complicity in covering up the Ashkelon affair and covert operations Herzog was unabashed, stating, “That way [a trial] perhaps sixty to eighty affairs from the past would have emerged. Would that have been good for the country?”
As of this last day of the Ashkelon affair, Israeli respect for law, morality and the proper conscience of man would begin its steady descent towards the gates of hell where the souls of men like Shalom, Shamir, Begin and Netanyahu and their other Zionist ilk still seek mental refuge today.
***
“The attacks on 9/11 gave our own war international legitimacy. We were able to completely untie the ropes that had bound us.”– Shin Bet chief, Yuval Diskin.
While the aforementioned brief synopsis of the Ashkelon Affair does not do justice to Ronen’s much better and very detailed and footnoted portrayal, it is this parable that shows the inherent value of “Rise and Kill First” that is not garnered at the hands of the author. For, to theZiologist- those predisposed to understanding the post-1967 worldwide threat of Israeli inspired Zionism- this one parable should ring true as a much too close parallel to what we see in today’s Israel and it’s American vassal.
Few observers of current American foreign policy would argue against the premise that its operations are today controlled by the Zionist elements on the rise in Israel due to a directly proportional rise of the Jewish orthodox influenced Likud Party. What is also important to note is that the Ashkelon affair took place more than thirty-five years ago: Before America eventually followed this example in lock-step.
It would, thus, be easy to substitute the names Bolton, Pompeo or Abrams for that of Shalom, or that of Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange or William Binney for the three Shin Bet officers who also took a moral stand that was brutally put down by a Zionist mentality revolted by inconvenient truth and the demands of correct conscience. It would also be easy to substitute the CIA for Shin Bet as the likely leaders of American extrajudicial killings currently sanctioned worldwide by an administration whose cajones are obviously in the fists of a Zionist controlled cadre transplanted into Langley, VA.
But should the reader of this review not yet see the value of this book as the narration of a chronology and history of the ongoing and increasing control over foreign and American governments alike, perhaps Ronen’s documentation of Israel’s “Red Pages” might help with one’s proper epiphany.
Red Pages are the death sentences for extrajudicial killings, once signed by Israeli Prime Ministers prior to the assassination of the victim. This began more than fifty years ago. Readers capable of objective historical understanding of the Obama administration should well know that it was during this time in American history that America followed the Israeli model and began the Tuesday Morning Briefings where, under America’s Nubian president in black-face, American foreign policy succumbed to CIA pressure and to the Zionist military business model wholesale and began allowing the extrajudicial killings of anyone offered up weekly for sacrifice by the CIA, including the innocent… and American citizens as well.
Within the book we follow these many Red Pages- named for the color of the document- as they morph from close civilian scrutiny within established law, to Israel changing the law for convenience in John Woo fashion under Bush II and eventually signing the equivalent Red Pages each week in secret in Washington and without concern whatsoever for Law or conscience. Or US judicial oversight.
The use of Red Pages by Israel began under Golda Meir who had already approved many assassinations and was predisposed to do the same to Black September leader Mahmoud Hamshari. Meir, however, was uncomfortable shouldering full responsibility and instead convened a panel of civilian leaders to formally approve the Red Page. At this time in history, the early ’70s, Israel had just begun assassinations outside of Israel, Palestine and Lebanon, but was not willing to hurt the innocent in the crossfire. As Meir told Mike Harari, former Mossad boss, before approving the hit, which would see Hamshari taken out in France, “be sure not a hair falls from the head of a French citizen.”
But by 1977, Israel under PM Menachem Begin saw him merely signing off all Red Page requests without reservation or committee and upon request and “Begin signed off on operations face-to-face, without a stenographer and without his military aid.”
In 1983 Israel next began approving targeted killings of foreign diplomats. First to go down wasIranian ambassador to Syria,Ali Akbar Mohtashamipur. At this point, targeted killing was routinely justified to stop likely future terrorist acts or as the Israelis called it, “negative treatment.” Still, these had to be approved at the highest level, but this proved far too restrictive to developing Israeli tactics. The next step was to re-brand the killings as an “interception” which conveniently no longer required authorization from the PM. As Ronen quotes a Northern Command officer,
“ … a precedent was created by which an assassination operation was called something else… in order to enable a lower echelon to approve it. Killing a man no longer required the prime minister’s approval.”
A different precedent was also created at the same time: that of killing retroactively as well as proactively.
By the time the US began using drones for its own targeted killings Israel – the first to use drones for this purpose had been doing so for years with a precursor drone program of its own. Here the Red Page definition for approval was further lowered. Using the new term, “illegal combatant” the forerunner of Donald Rumsfeld infamous, “enemy combatant,” after protracted debate the Israeli judiciary sided with the military in broadening the right to kill the innocent. As Ronen points out after laying out the details:
“The term allowed [killing]anyone active in a terrorist organization; even if his activity was marginal… he could be considered as a combatant-even when asleep in his bed-unlike a soldier on leave who had taken off his uniform.”
The culmination of this step-by-step decline in the value for human life was best exemplified in Ronen’s description of the killing of Hamas political leader, Mahmoud al-Zahar. He was not considered to be an imminent threat and was, as described by Israeli General Giora Eiland ”an elderly, pitiable, half-blind cripple in a wheelchair.” Further advanced planning predicted that the operation to kill al-Zahar ” would have implications as far as hurting uninvolved persons…”
Ariel Sharon, who as detailed repeatedly in the book is the embodiment of the barbaric tactics within themodern Zionist soul, approves the killing in an operation titled, ” Picking Anemones.”
The result is that al- Zahar dies from a hell Fire missile fired through his apartment window and many men women and children in the building join him in the rubble of what is left of Israel’s former allusion of adherence to humanity.
As Ronen takes the reader through the decades, what becomes clear, besides Israel’s descent from conscience, is the effect this full chronology has had on the world, particularly America. A single footnote on page 702 reveals the tight editorial control that likely allowed for the publishing of his book only by deliberate omission of the obvious connections, but also unwelcome facts. Following an interview with General Giora Eiland who assessed correctly, “The American approach to targeted killings has changed from one end to the other,” he follows up by quoting former US Home Land Security boss Michael Chertoff, who adds, regarding American targeted killings worldwide, ”I think they are very much better than non-targeted killings.”
But the many connections missed by Ronen but showcased non-the-less in his book go beyond his detailed story of the ongoing military take over of Israel judiciary and political institutions and the ever-changing definitions of Red Pages and therefore the value of human life.
For the Ziologist interested in adding Ronen’s history to his memory texts, one will also find within a similar descent of other world leaders and the United Nations; the rise of the Likud party under the influence of Jewish orthodoxy as spearhead to these changes; the rolling over of the media against examining Israeli atrocities; the steady insertion of ” dual loyalty” Zionists into the intelligence services of America, Britain, France and Europe; and Israel’s eventual utter disregard for world opinion and outrage primarily because of its infection into the aforementioned facet of world society.
Although Ronen fails, again and again, to make these connections, his excellent research, interviews and cross-referencing within the scores of assassinations he documents make these connections, however, irrefutable. This leaves the Ziologist -or the casually concerned reader of Israeli modern history- to draw one encompassing conclusion: Israeli Zionism is the singular cancer that has been forcefully injected into the minds of world leaders across the globe; a cancer that these similarly affected leaders would wantonly force upon what little remains of the moral, civilized and correct conscience of man.
Ronen failed to make any of these many and all too obvious connections. If he had, the book would have been a bombshell.
His failures are also why the reader has not likely heard of his book, and… why it managed to be published at all.
“For as long as I can remember, I always wanted to make a film about libraries,” explains Ben Lewis, the director of Google and the World Brain (2013). About libraries, he says, “they are my favourite places to be. Serene, beautiful repositories of the best thoughts that men and women have ever had”. Political economy, and the rights of citizens in a democracy, also loom large in Lewis’ estimation of the importance of libraries. As he states, libraries are: “Free to use. Far from the din of modern capitalism, libraries are the epitome of the public institution. There is simply nothing bad about a library. It is my paradise”. While praising the value of the Internet, Lewis warns, “the Internet also takes things from us, without asking”. Marrying the Internet and libraries raises hugely problematic issues, especially in the case of Google’s book-scanning project—problems surrounding copyright, national cultures and surveillance.
The political economy of knowledge production is one of the central areas of research interest that constitute the Zero Anthropology Project. This documentary was a good match for that interest, especially as it provokes a number of “big questions”: What are the social and political consequences of knowledge centralization? How, or when, is the digitization of knowledge problematic, and for whom? What role do libraries play in contemporary society? Does copyright protect much more than just authors’ rights and publishers’ profit-making activities? How is the digitization of knowledge linked to surveillance and governance? Should private corporations play any part in creating and/or controlling a universal library? Is a universal library even possible?
Google and the World Brain (2013)
If you were looking for a documentary that was not just another evangelical tract about how “information wants to be free,” spoken by wide-eyed zealots of “open access,” then this is the film for you. While beginning with enthusiasm for open access, for nearly a decade now Zero Anthropology has been warning about the dangers of open access, especially when it comes to facilitating the flow of information to the imperialist military of the US, or bolstering US academic hegemony. Ben Lewis’ Google and the World Brain shows us that we are on the right track. Yet some will argue that there are questionable aspects of Lewis’ critiques and the way they are presented in the film.
Directed by Ben Lewis, Google and the World Brain (2013) runs for 89 minutes. A trailer is included below, but the film in its entirety can be seen online, for free, on Archive.org and on the website of Polar Star Films. If you have 89 minutes to spare, please view it and then let us know if the following analysis was either flawed or unfair.
A trailer for the film is available below:
Polar Star Films, which produced Google and the World Brain, provided a detailed synopsis of the film which forms the basis for the following overview of the film.
Overview
Google and the World Brain is the story of “the most ambitious project ever attempted on the Internet: Google’s project to scan every book in the world and create not just a giant digital global library, but a higher form of intelligence”. The film’s critique draws from the dystopian warnings of H.G. Wells who in his 1937 essay “World Brain” predicted the creation of a universal library that contained all of humanity’s written knowledge, and which would be accessible to all of humanity. However, this would not just be a library in the sense of a static holding of inventoried contents, rather it would form the foundation for an all-knowing entity that would eliminate the need for nation-states and governments. With every increase in the quantity of information that it possessed, the globalist World Brain would be better able to rule over all of humanity, and would thus monitor every human being on the planet.
Supposedly Wells’ dystopian vision of technological progress (has progress ever really produced anything other than a succession of dystopias?) was just science fiction. However, this film shows how a World Brain is being brought into existence on the Internet: “Wikipedia, Facebook, Baidu in China and other search engines around the world are all trying to build their own world brains—but none had a plan as bold, far-reaching and transformative as Google did with its Google Books project”.
Starting in 2002, Google began its project of scanning the world’s books. To do so, they entered into legal agreements with major university libraries in the US, most notably those of Harvard, Stanford, and Michigan, and then expanded to include deals with the Bodleian Library at Oxford in the UK and the Catalonian National Library in Spain. The goal was not simply the collection of all books—instead, as Lewis’ film argues, there was “a higher and more secretive purpose” which was to develop a new form of Artificial Intelligence.
Of the 10 million books scanned by Google by the time this documentary was made, six million of them were under copyright. This fact provoked authors, publishers, and some librarians around the world to not only protest Google, but also to take legal and political action against it. In the fall of 2005 the Authors Guild of America and the Association of American Publishers filed lawsuits against Google. That resulted in a 350-page agreement negotiated with Google, which was unveiled in October of 2008.
However, that agreement which involved Google paying a settlement of $125 million, also granted Google Books huge new powers. The result was that Google would become the world’s biggest bookstore and commercialized library. Google now had the exclusive right to sell scans of all out-of-print books that were still in copyright. What this meant is that Google had a monopoly over the majority of books published in the 20th-century.
Reacting against this settlement, Harvard University withdrew its support for Google’s project. Authors in Japan and China joined a worldwide opposition to Google’s book-scanning. The governments of France and Germany also condemned the agreement. In the US, the Department of Justice launched an anti-trust investigation. Starting in late 2009, US Judge Denny Chin held hearings in New York to assess the validity of the 2008 Google Book Settlement, and in March of 2011 he struck it down.
Google altered its plan in order to continue with a version of its book-scanning project. Google signed deals with many individual publishers that would allow Google to show parts of their books online. Google also continued to scan books out-of-copyright. What Google was not able to do was carry out its master plan for an exclusive library that it controlled alone. The Authors Guild also persevered with suing Google for up to $2 billion in damages for scanning copyrighted books.
In this documentary, Google occupies the spotlight. Issues of copyright, privacy, data-mining, downloading, surveillance, and freedom come to the fore as a result.
The key figures interviewed in this film include some of the leading Internet analysts such as Evgeny Morozov, Jaron Lanier, Kevin Kelly, Clay Shirky, and Pamela Samuelson. Librarians in charge of some of the world’s leading libraries are also interviewed, including Robert Darnton (Harvard), Reginald Carr and Richard Ovendon (Bodleian), Jean-Noel Jeanneney (French National Library). In addition, authors involved in the struggle against Google Books such as Charles Seife, Roland Reuss, and Mian Mian (a best-selling Chinese author), are also key figures in the film.
The filmmakers challenge utopian visions of the Internet as the hoped for means of spreading democracy, freedom, and culture around the globe. Instead, the film argues that the Internet has enabled practices contrary to those ideals by, “undermining our civil liberties, free markets and human rights, while concentrating power and wealth in the hands of powerful new monopolies over which we have little influence”.
Polar Star Films ends its synopsis with this very important warning and urgent call for action:
“Humanity now stands at a crossroads. We can either take action to ensure that all the information and knowledge that the Internet is providing serves us, or we can remain passive consumers, and wait for all that information to take control over us. Whatever we do in the next few years will shape society for centuries to come”.
Contemporary Globalization as Science Fiction
H.G. Wells has to be one of the most prescient thinkers of the past two centuries. It is astounding just how far his supposed science “fiction” was in fact an outline discerning what would soon become reality. He had a particularly keen sense of the patterns taking shape around him, and just as keen a vision of the direction in which forces would move the world.
This is not the first time that we resort to the work of H.G. Wells which, under the guise of “fiction,” seemed to provide what global leaders would then adopt as a plan of action. In “The Shape of Things to Come in Libya,” we witnessed the applicability of Wells’ The Shape of Things to Come with its domineering figures, the “United Airmen”—progressivist autocrats who proclaimed themselves “freemasons of science”. Precursors to the neoliberal globalist mode of governance, the United Airmen came to vanquish local warlords and end all national governments, declaring independent sovereign states at an end, even if it meant war to erase them from the face of the earth.
Google and the World Brain opens with these words from the 1937 essay, “World Brain,” by H.G. Wells:
“There is no practical obstacle whatever now to the creation of an efficient index to all human knowledge, ideas and achievements. To the creation, that is, of a complete planetary memory for all mankind”.
Wells’ depiction of the World Brain was of a new kind of empire: a global dictatorship of technologists and intellectuals. Managers would become the new de facto politicians. This tyranny of expertise sits very well with the current neoliberal world order which sees its future in jeopardy.
It is a peculiar way to start, accompanied by an eerie soundtrack, since one might think that there is nothing especially scary about an “index,” about efficient organization of information, or a complete memory. However, given the mood of the film’s opening, we are immediately invited by the filmmaker to consider these aims in a different light—a much dimmer one.
The film also ends with Wells—all is bad that ends Wells. Quoting from his 1945 book, Mind at the End of its Tether, Wells predicted that this progressivist new world order would come crashing down:
“It is like a convoy lost in darkness along an unknown rocky coast with quarrelling pirates in the chart room and savages clambering up the sides of the ship to plunder and do evil as the whim may take them. That is the rough outline of the more and more jumbled movie on the screen before us. There is no way out. Or round. Or through”.
What is at Stake?
Wells also seemed to predict the Internet as making this world brain possible—this complete database of all human knowledge, past and present, could “be reproduced exactly and fully in Peru, China, Iceland, Central Africa or wherever else”. One of the analysts interviewed in the film, Kevin Kelly, is of the opinion that having instantaneous access to all human knowledge, “changes your idea of who you are”. Some will inevitably ask: “Is that a bad thing?” Kelly himself seems to think not, and he appears in this film as an evangelist for AI, the Internet, and the wonders of the screen.
The film thus turns its attention to the Google book-scanning operation, described by one analyst as, “clearly the most ambitious World Brain scheme that has ever been invented”. Still, some will wonder, what is the problem? How is the scanning of books something that should alarm anyone?
The film focuses further, and becomes a story about Google trying to achieve a monopoly over the digitization of books. Some will ask: “Is the real problem the total digitization of printed knowledge (which is quite distinct, and often separate from all knowledge as such, since not all human knowledge is published), or is the problem that of corporate monopoly?” In its early minutes, the documentary can be confusing about its intended aims.
The third focus comes next: the argument becomes that Google could track everything, and as Pamela Samuelson (law professor, Berkeley) explains, Google “could hold the whole world hostage”. Some viewers might balk: “this is just alarmism”.
Robert Darnton, Director, Harvard Library
What are the stakes? Speaking of the continued importance of libraries, Robert Darnton (Director, Harvard University Library) says in the film that libraries are, “nerve centres, centres of intellectual energy”. Lewis Hyde adds: “Libraries stand for an ideal, which is an educated public. And to the degree that knowledge is power, they also stand there for the idea that power should be disseminated and not centralised”. Are centralization and dissemination opposed and mutually exclusive? Even as he calls for dissemination, Darnton himself utilizes the concept of “centres”.
(Ironically, Darnton calls for the knowledge held by libraries to be opened up and shared—yet when I tried to gain access to some of Harvard’s library collections myself during research visits in 2004 and 2005, I required special written permission just to gain entry into the buildings.)
Expanding and Centralizing the Control of Knowledge
Google was initially successful in seducing a few of the world’s largest libraries, including those of Harvard and Oxford, whose chief librarians interpreted Google’s book-scanning project as a logical extension of a long history of attempts at centralizing knowledge. Among the earlier attempts were encyclopaedias; plans for a catalogue of all knowledge; and, microfilming.
More recently, and since the advent of the World Wide Web, Project Gutenberg became the first digital library, one which scholars have used and will continue to use regularly. Project Gutenberg, founded by Michael Hart, actually started in the early 1970s with the simple act of typing and distributing the Declaration of Independence.
Ray Kurzweil’s invention of the scanner clearly represented the one key advance needed to proceed towards digitizing knowledge. In 1975, Kurzweil created the first omni-font optical character recognition device, which went commercial in 1978. As Kurzweil admits, “we talked about how you could ultimately scan all books and all printed material”.
In the late 1990s the book, the scanner, and the Internet were combined in an effort to create what was hoped would be gigantic digital libraries. The Internet Archive, an indispensable tool for both myself and likely many readers of this review, was established in 1996. Significantly, the director of the Internet Archive, Brewster Kahle, speaks in this film and indicates that he refused collaboration with Google because of the secrecy surrounding the nature of its agreements with libraries, and the fact that Google appeared to be on track to create something exclusive and separate.
Wikipedia, and arguably YouTube, are also massive attempts at acquiring and centralizing knowledge.
Google = Hegemony
Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google with Larry Page, says that Page first conceived of Google Books in 1999. Google Books was then initiated in 2004. In “A Library to Last Forever,” published in The New York Times on October 9, 2009, Brin explained that Google’s digitization effort would be history’s largest-scale effort, primarily because Google invested significantly in the resources needed for the project. In that article, Brin also is clear that Google was zeroing in on out-of-print but in-copyright books, and commercializing them, while also seeking to create new regulations that would allegedly serve the interests of rights holders. Brin argues that Google’s motivation was to preserve “orphan books” against physical destruction and disappearance. Commenting on Google’s supposedly lofty goals, Evgeny Morozov says the following in this film:
“I don’t think that Google is aware of the fact that it’s a corporation. I think Google does think of itself as an NGO that just happens to make a lot of money. And they think of themselves as social reformers who just happen to have their stock traded on stock exchanges and who just happen to have investors and shareholders, but they do think of themselves as ultimately being in the business of making the world better”.
Google, while claiming to be laying the path for others to follow and which says it has aided other digitization efforts, is highly secretive about its scanning operation. It refused the filmmakers access to any of its (secret) scanning locations, and the film thus relies on six seconds of footage—the only such footage in existence—that was leaked out. Google’s secrecy extends to the total number of books it has scanned, and to how much it costs to scan them on average (one estimate is between $30 and $100 per book). Google also worked to prevent any one of its partner libraries from communicating with other partner libraries about the nature of their individual contracts with Google. According to Sidney Verba, former director of Harvard Library, Google “bent over backwards” to make sure that each library would not tell the others what kind of contract they had and how they were working with Google.
How did Google benefit from book-scanning? Five explanations are offered by interviewees in the film.
(1) Lawrence Lessig introduces the point that one of the benefits of massive book-scanning, is that it pumps information into Google’s core, allowing it to develop more sophisticated algorithms that depend on knowing more and more.
(2) Sidney Verba offers a different explanation: by having lots of information in Google, more people would use Google, which would increase the prospective advertising landscape, thus enriching Google by selling advertising space.
(3) Pamela Samuelson, narrowing Google down to a search engine, offers a third viewpoint: having more data (from books, for example), allows Google to perfect its search technology.
(4) Jaron Lanier argues that there is a competition between all sectors of the modern economy (whether healthcare, information and communications technology, finance, criminality, etc.) for more and more data, because data—and specifically data differentials—is a measure of power. Then the data hoarders can in some cases claim that their work is for the common good, by increasing efficiency.
(5) Lanier, Lessig, and Kevin Kelly together make the point that feeding all these books into Google’s servers leads to the creation of something akin to a life-form, a transformative force, a mass of memories that empowers an artificial intelligence system. As the reader will have noted, there is nothing about these five theories that renders them mutually exclusive—they can all be true, at the same time.
The head of Google Books Spain, Luis Collado, the only company official willing to speak to the filmmakers about Google Books, offered a comparatively milder and more innocent explanation. Collado says that Google’s motivation was to amplify the richness of online knowledge. Until it started adding books to the Internet’s offerings, the Internet only consisted of materials that were specifically created for it. For example, in late 1994 in the SUNY-Cortland library I surfed the entire World Wide Web as it then existed, in just one afternoon (at the time I rushed to the conclusion that the Internet was “useless”). For a few years, it was actually practical for me to print everything I found interesting online, because there was so little worth printing. So Collado has a point, even if it does not exhaust the range of plausible explanations.
For Father Damià Roure, Library Director at the Monastery of Montserrat in Spain, Google’s book-scanning was a means of “diffusing our culture” to the rest of the world, while helping to preserve the knowledge contained in its vast library. What he was simply unable to answer was why the monastery had not asked Google to pay for the privilege of scanning the monastery’s collection. As Google turned its operation into a business, from which it would profit, was it fair to get the materials for free? Father Roure went completely silent at this point in the film, in one of the longest, most awkward silences I have ever seen on the screen. He brought it to an end by saying that he was not in a position to comment on anything other than digitization. Reginald Carr, former director of the Oxford’s Bodleian Library, simply downplayed the point: Google, in his view, was fully entitled to make a profit—having invested so much in the scanning—even if the Bodleian’s ethos was to make knowledge available for free.
These two library directors serve a useful purpose: they are a reminder to us that willing collaboration on the part of intermediary local elites is often essential to any grant project of hegemony-building. When it comes to the Internet, and Google in particular, readers of this article are also collaborators—collaborators that, at a minimum, feed Google with content with each search they perform. By continuing to use Google, you make it more powerful.
Assisted Intelligence or Artificial Intelligence?
Jaron Lanier
Speaking of collaboration, the film specifically addresses how Internet users are themselves used. To the extent that this is done unknowingly, unthinkingly, and without compensation, we move from collaboration to exploitation. Jaron Lanier makes this argument forcefully:
“AI is just a religion. It doesn’t matter. What’s really happening is real world examples from real people who entered their answers, their trivia, their experiences into some online database. It’s actually just a giant puppet theatre repackaging inputs from real people who are forgotten. We are pretending they aren’t there. This is something I really want people to see. The insane structure of modern finance is exactly the same as the insane structure of modern culture on the Internet. They’re precisely the same. It’s an attempt to gather all the information into a high castle, optimise the world and pretend that all the people the information came from don’t deserve anything. It’s all the same mistake”.
An absolutely unctuous and all too precious spokesperson for Google, Amit Singhal, actually confirms Lanier’s point when he says the following in the film:
“Google Search is going to be assisted intelligence and not artificial intelligence. In my mind I think of Search as this beautiful symphony between the user and the search engine and we make music together”.
Singhal confirms what Lanier argued, that Google is powered by its users, but then makes the false analogy to a symphony. Musicians performing in an orchestra are clearly instructed on their roles, they perform willingly, and they perform in accordance with known rules and by reading codified music sheets. In other words, the musicians are willing, aware, and informed. Most of Google’s users do not know they are performing in any “symphony”. Google emphasizes harmony where there is in fact concealment, deceit, and exploitation. If there is any music, it is music only to Google’s ears.
Google and Copyright: The Essence of the Confrontation
The film takes a turn into questions of copyright at this stage, when Harvard’s library director, Robert Darnton, points out that its agreement with Google only allowed for the scanning of books in the public domain. However, Google’s agreements with other libraries allowed it to scan all books, including those in copyright. Mary Sue Coleman, president of Michigan University, openly stated that her university allowed Google to scan copyrighted books, claiming that it was “legal, ethical, and noble” to do so (meanwhile universities warn students not to photocopy more than 10% of any given work). Copyright violation is where the legal problems exploded in Google’s face.
However, one of the outcomes of the lawsuits against Google was that the settlement agreement allowed Google to become the world’s biggest bookstore, specializing in out-of-print but in-copyright books. The settlement in fact granted Google an exclusive right to sell such books, without sharing the profits with authors. Google would also not respect the privacy of readers: the company would instead track what readers read, and for how long they read it.
One of the features of copyright that stands out in this film, is that copyright on the Internet takes the place of national borders. Thus we hear from Angela Merkel in this film, asserting that the German government would defend the rights of German authors, by making sure that copyright had a place on the Internet. Likewise, the former President of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, declares in footage shown in this film that France would not allow a large private corporation to seize control of French national heritage, “no matter how nice, important, or American it may be”. Standing against the imperial ambitions of Google therefore was the seemingly old-fashioned principle of copyright. It reached the extent that when the Google book settlement was taken to court in 2009, representatives of foreign authors and foreign governments, accused the US of violating various treaty obligations which could force foreign parties to go to the WTO—and in the likely event of the US losing a case before the WTO, other nations would then have a right to impose trade sanctions on the US.
The outcome is that Google remains the target of publishers’ and authors’ lawsuits, while it continues to scan both out-of-copyright books as well as in-copyright books (in agreement with major libraries, and then offering only “snippets” of the book online). Rivalling Google, various governments and major libraries have undertaken their own library digitization, thus defeating Google’s attempt at becoming an exclusive monopoly. The Digital Public Library of America is one such example of a project that took off in response to the threat posed by Google, as is the case of Europeana.
Google as Empire
The film quotes from William Gibson’s 2010 article in The New York Times, “Google’s Earth,” as part of its argument that Google is building an artificial intelligence entity of a grander scale and sophistication than was even imagined in science fiction. As Gibson explains in that article, Google is “a central and evolving structural unit not only of the architecture of cyberspace, but of the world,” and he adds that this was, “the sort of thing that empires and nation-states did, before,” only now Google’s empire is one that also becomes an organ of “global human perception”. In Google, we are citizens, but without rights.
French National Library
Jean-Noël Jeanneney
Jean-Noël Jeanneney, the former director of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (the French National Library), represents the voice of the library of the nation-state, that which Google ultimately seeks to erase. He recounts in the film his first encounter with two young Google representatives who came to meet him—he points out that what struck him was their “arrogance” and “brutal commercialism”. These “salesmen,” as he calls them, badly miscalculated his psychology when they brought as a gift a thermo-flask, for which he had no use and which he cast aside. Following his meeting with Google’s representatives, and the company’s announcement that it alone would build a universal digital library, Jeanneney announced to his staff a plan for what he emphatically calls a “counter-offensive”. He criticized the Google book-scanning project as incorporating an Anglo-American cultural bias, and in a noteworthy critique published by Le Monde in 2005 titled “When Google Challenges Europe,” he argued that, “what I don’t want is everything reflected in an American mirror. When it comes to presenting digitized books on the Web, we want to make our choice with our own criteria”. Jeanneney pointed to “the risk of a crushing domination by America in the definition of the idea that future generations will have of the world”. Google suddenly appears not so much as a “new” empire, as in Gibson’s piece, but rather a part of the American empire in a new extension of itself. We are thus back to the familiar problems of Americanization and cultural imperialism.
As Sidney Verba explains in the film, there were two additional sides to the French critique of Google: one had to with the dominant language of Google search results—English—which thus acted as a force undermining French, and the second had to do with who got to decide what would be digitized, its order of priority, and who would get to do the digitization. Who are the Americans at Google who get to digitize France’s books?
Conclusion
While sometimes striking an alarmist tone that was not warranted by the empirical substance that was presented, one could also conclude that the film is only guilty of erring on the side of caution. When dealing with Google in particular, we are well past the point of being cautious: it is a monopolistic entity that for years had a large revolving door between itself and the State Department and the Democratic Party, while also striking deals with the Pentagon and engaging in political censorship. There is nothing innocent about Google, and to the extent that it swallows the Internet, there is little about the Internet that is innocent.
One of the possible lapses of the film is that it does not direct as much attention to China’s Baidu, which has its own extensive book-scanning project that might even rival Google’s. The film presents an interview with Baidu’s communications director, and provides some useful statistics from Baidu employees about the extent of its own book-scanning project—but the bulk of the criticism is reserved for Google.
A book scanning unit in China
However, it has to be said that Ben Lewis does us all an essential service with this film that, ostensibly, appears to be about the simple act of scanning library books, and becomes instead a much larger story about democracy, rights, nation-states, cultures, corporatization, political economy, international law, and the future of globalization.
It was not surprising to see that, once again, one of the top documentaries we have had the privilege of reviewing was produced by Europe’s Arte television company.
This documentary, with all of its thought-provoking questions and careful detail, would be suitable for a wide range of courses in fields such as Information and Communication Studies, Librarianship, Media Studies, Sociology, Anthropology, and Political Science. The film earns a score of 8.75/10.
(This documentary review forms part of the cyberwar series of reviews on Zero Anthropology. This film was viewed four times before the written review was published.)
Donald Trump’s son-in-law and advisor Jared Kushner represents Jewish interests in the United States that basically caused the US president to withdraw Washington from the Iran nuclear agreement, says an American writer and former professor.
E Michael Jones, the current editor of Culture Wars magazine, made the remarks in an interview with Press TV on Friday while commenting on a statement by former US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson who said that Kushner conducted diplomacy without his knowledge when he was in the administration, leading to several embarrassing incidents.
Tillerson, who was fired by Trump in March 2018, recounted the incidents during a testimony last month at the US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, according to a transcript of a congressional hearing released on Thursday.
The former top US diplomat and CEO of ExxonMobil described his frustration with Kushner conducting his own diplomacy from the White House, at times without informing the US State Department and the Pentagon.
“This is illegal according to American political system. It violates – I believe – a Logan Act. But in this instance it is going to go unpunished because the part of the story that’s not reported here is Jared Kushner is representing Jewish interests here,” Jones said.
“And no one is allowed to question Jewish interests, if you bring it up you will be called an anti-Semite. There are Jewish interests. It is obvious but no one is allowed to talk about them,” he added.
“So the real significance of the story will be covered over by the mainstream media who were limited to the two areas of insignificance. This of course has direct relevance to Iran because it was Jewish interests that basically caused Donald Trump to abandon the Iran nuclear agreement,” the analyst noted.
“It’s Jewish interests that are once again pushing America into war in the Middle East this time with Iran,” he said.
“Donald Trump I think — recent events have shown – that he does not want war with Iran. He is using the military power to threaten Iran,” Jones noted.
During a conference hosted on Tuesday by the Mossad-linked Shurat HaDin or Israel Law Center (ILC), Israel’s Public Security and Strategic Affairs Minister Gilad Erdan demanded that international laws on warfare be amended because current international law pertaining to warfare “serves terrorists.”
Erdan claimed that groups like Lebanon’s Hezbollah use existing international laws of war “to destabilize the ability of democracies to defend their citizens” and “force [democracies] to fight against terrorists with their hand chained behind their backs.” The ILC’s director, Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, seconded Erdan’s claim but argued that changing international law is difficult, thus making it more practical to change how existing laws of war are interpreted, a task she suggested be performed by military prosecutors.
According to the Jerusalem Post, the laws currently governing international warfare are aimed specifically at reducing the suffering of civilians and, as the Post article suggested, Erdan wanted to change these measures aimed at protecting civilians prior to the “next war” between Israel and Lebanon because in that war “Israel will have no choice but to harm Hezbollah rocket sites and Lebanese infrastructure.” Erdan’s argument hinges on the commonly repeated accusation by Israeli officials that Hezbollah uses civilians as cover for military operations, but a comprehensive 249-page study by Human Rights Watch found that not to be the case. In fact, the study found that even “a simple movement of vehicles or persons – such as attempting to buy bread or moving about private homes – could be enough to cause a deadly Israeli airstrike that would kill civilians.”
Bolstering diplomatic cover for a coming war
As MintPresspreviously reported, Israel’s government has been preparing for an imminent war with Lebanon and specifically Hezbollah — which is a strong political force in Lebanon, with the coalition of which it is part holding a legislative majority in Lebanon’s parliament — for well over a year. It has warned prominent U.S. Senators not only that it planned for a “bloody” war against Lebanon, but that the Israeli military planned specifically to target Lebanese civilians and civilian infrastructure, including residential areas.
During a visit to Israel last March, U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), a close ally of the Trump administration, stated that Israel’s Likud-led government was requesting “ammunition, ammunition, ammunition” from the U.S. government, as well as diplomatic support for when Israel strikes civilian targets — such as “civilian apartment buildings, hospitals, and schools” — because Hezbollah has become “integrated” into these structures.
A school building destroyed by Israeli bombs in the southern Lebanese town of Bint Jbeil, Aug. 27, 2006. Sergey Ponomarev | AP
Prominent Israeli politicians have also made the case for targeting Lebanese civilians in the coming war between Israel and Lebanon. For instance, Naftali Bennett, who until recently was Israel’s minister of education, told Haaretz in 2017 that civilians “must” be targeted the next time Israel and Lebanon go to war:
The Lebanese institutions, its infrastructure, airport, power stations, traffic junctions, Lebanese Army bases –- they should all be legitimate targets if a war breaks out… This will mean sending Lebanon back to the Middle Ages.”
Past impunity expands to cover new atrocities
Under existing international law, the bombing of residential buildings, hospitals and schools is a clear war crime, though this hasn’t stopped Israel’s government from bombingthese same structuresin Gaza with regularity in recent years. In addition, during the 2006 war between Israel and Lebanon, Israel’s military killed at least 1,109 civilians, injured over 4,000 and displaced an estimated 1 million according to figures compiled by Human Rights Watch. The staggering civilian death toll sparked condemnation from international human-rights groups.
Thus, Erdan’s recent comments suggest that Israel’s government, in a war against Lebanon it plans to instigate under the guise of “preventative” defense, is planning to commit war crimes on a much larger scale than what was done in 2006 and is thus pushing for international law to be changed to accommodate those plans. However, Israel has long been able to avoid accountability for war crimes, especially following the U.S. adoption of the “Negroponte doctrine” to protect Israel from criticism as well as any punitive action taken by the U.N. Security Council in relation to war crimes committed by Israel.
This makes it more likely that this current push led by Erdan to alter international law is aimed more at global public opinion, by redefining international law so that Israel could avoid being accused of war crimes for such attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure in a future war.
A man repairs a home, in the background buildings destroyed by Israeli airstrikes in the southern suburbs of Beirut, Lebanon, Aug. 27, 2006. Photo | AP
Part of the strategy in targeting Lebanese civilians specifically appears to be Israel’s strong desire to win a “decisive victory” against Hezbollah in this future war, as opposed to the humiliating defeat its military suffered in 2006. It appears that key figures in Israel’s government believe that the grand scale of planned attacks on Lebanese civilians and civilian infrastructure will result in so much destruction and death that it will help to ensure an Israeli victory.
Though it is unlikely Israel’s effort will succeed in changing international law, it may change how its government interprets such laws — as Darshan-Leitner recently suggested — and use such interpretations to secure even more robust diplomatic cover from its more influential allies such as the United States and to more easily avoid the war crime label from international media outlets and foreign governments. Such a move may also prompt the Trump administration in the U.S. to do the same, particularly given the slew of recent pardons given to accused and convicted U.S. war criminals by President Donald Trump.
US troops “prepared to die for the Jewish state”
In addition, the U.S. military itself is likely to quickly become embroiled in this coming Israel-Lebanon war, given that head of U.S. Central Command (CentCom), Lt. Gen. Richard Clark, told the Jerusalem Post last year that IDF leadership (as opposed to American military leadership) would “probably” have the last word as to whether U.S. forces would join the IDF during a future war and that U.S. troops were “prepared to die for the Jewish state.” IDF Brigadier General Zvika Haimovitch responded to Clark’s comments by stating: “I am sure once the order comes we will find here U.S. troops on the ground to be part of our deployment and team to defend the state of Israel.”
While much media attention has focused on the possibility of an imminent U.S. war with Iran, it is important to point out — especially in light of Israel’s comments — that Israel has been planning for over a year to go to war with Lebanon. Indeed, last year, Israeli officials told U.S. Senators Lindsey Graham and Chris Coons (D-DE) that “Southern Lebanon is where the next war is coming.”
Yet, the push for war with Iran and the planned war against Lebanon may be related, given that Hezbollah’s Secretary-General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah stated the following late last month:
Any attack on Iran will not remain confined to Iran’s borders. The entire region will burn, leading to all U.S. forces and interests in the region being annihilated.”
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 iconic golden dome of the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa mosque, located on the Temple Mount or Haram el-Sharif, is the third holiest site in Islam and is recognized throughout the world as a symbol of the city of Jerusalem. Yet, this ancient site that dates back to the year 705 C.E. is being targeted for destruction by increasingly influential extremist groups that seek to erase Jerusalem’s Muslim heritage in pursuit of colonial ambitions and the fulfillment of end-times prophecy.
Some observers may have noticed the growing effort by some Israeli government and religious officials to remove the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa mosque from the Jerusalem skyline, not only erasing the holy site in official posters, banners and educational material but also physically removing the building itself. For instance, current Knesset member of the ruling Likud Party, American-born Yehuda Glick, was also the director of the government-funded Temple Institute, which has created relics and detailed architectural plans for a temple that they hope will soon replace Al-Aqsa. Glick is also close friends with Yehuda Etzion, who was part of a failed plot in 1984 to blow up Al-Aqsa mosque and served prison time as a result.
“In the end we’ll build the temple and it will be a house of prayer for all nations,” Glick told Israeli newspaper Maariv in 2012. A year later, Israel’s Agriculture Minister Uri Ariel stated that “[w]e’ve built many little, little temples… but we need to build a real Temple on the Temple Mount.” Ariel stated that the new Jewish Temple must be built on the site where Al-Aqsa currently sits “as it is at the forefront of Jewish salvation.” Since then, prominent Israeli politicians have become more and more overt in their support for the end of Jordanian-Palestinian sovereignty over the mosque compound, leading many prominent Palestinians to warn in recent years of plans to destroy the mosque.
In recent years, a centuries-old effort by what was once a small group of extremists has gone increasingly mainstream in Israel, with prominent politicians, religious figures and political parties advocating for the destruction of the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa mosque in order to fulfill a specific interpretation of an end-times prophecy that was once considered fringe among practitioners of Judaism.
As Miko Peled, Israeli author and human-rights activist, told MintPress, the movement to destroy Al-Aqsa and replace it with a reimagined Temple “became notable after the 1967 war,” and has since grown into “a massive colonial project that uses religious, biblical mythology and symbols to justify its actions” — a project now garnering support from both religious and secular Israelis.
While the push to destroy Al-Aqsa and replace it with a physical Third Temple has gained traction in Israel in recent years, this effort has advanced at a remarkably fast pace in just the past few weeks, owing to a confluence of factors. These factors, as this report will show, include the upcoming revelation of the so-called “Deal of the Century,” the push for a war with Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, and the Trump administration’s dramatic lenience in regards to the activity of Jewish extremist groups and extremist settlements in Israel.
These factors correlate with a quickening of efforts to destroy Al-Aqsa and the very real danger the centuries-old holy site faces. While the U.S. press has occasionally mentioned the role of religious extremism in dictating the foreign policy of prominent U.S. politicians like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, it has rarely shone a light on the role of Jewish extremism in directing Israel’s foreign policy — foreign policy that, in turn, is well-known to influence American policies.
When taken together, the threats to Al-Aqsa are clearly revealed to be much greater than the loss of a physical building, though that itself would be a grave loss for the world’s Muslim community, which includes over 1.8 billion people. In addition, the site’s destruction would very likely result in a regional and perhaps even global war with clear religious dimensions.
To prevent such an outcome, it is essential to highlight the role that extremist, apocalyptic interpretations of both the Jewish and Christian faiths are playing in trends that, if left unchecked, could have truly terrifying consequences. Both of these extremist groups are heavily influenced by colonial ambitions that often supersede their religious underpinning.
In Part I of this two-part series, MintPress examines the growth of extremist movements in Israel that openly promote the destruction of Al-Aqsa, from a relatively isolated fringe movement within Zionism to mainstream prominence in Israel today; as well as how threats to the historic mosque have grown precipitously in just the past month. MintPress interviewed Israeli author and activist Miko Peled; Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss of Neturei Karta in New York; Imam and scholar of Shia Islam, Sayed Hassan Al-Qazwini, of the Islamic Institute of America; and Palestinian journalist and academic Ramzy Baroud for their perspectives on these extremist groups, their growing popularity, and the increasing threats to the current status quo at Haram El-Sharif/Temple Mount.
The second part of this series will detail the influence of this extremist movement in Israeli politics as well as American politics, particularly among Christian Zionist politicians in the United States. The ways in which this movement’s goal have also influenced Israeli and U.S. policy — particularly in relation to the so-called “Deal of the Century,” President Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and the push for war against Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah — will also be examined.
Two centuries in the cross-hairs
Though efforts to wrest the contested holy site from Jordanian and Palestinian control have picked up dramatically in recent weeks, the Al-Aqsa mosque compound had long been targeted prior to Israel’s founding and even prior to the formation of the modern Zionist movement.
For instance, Rabbi Zvi Hirsh Kalisher — who promoted the European Jewish colonization of Palestine from a religious perspective well before Zionism became a movement — expounded on an early form of what would later be labeled “religious Zionism” and was particularly interested in the acquisition of Haram el-Sharif (i.e., the Temple Mount) as a means of fulfilling prophecy.
As noted in the essay “Proto-Zionism and its Proto-Herzl: The Philosophy and Efforts of Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalisher” by Sam Lehman-Wilzig, Professor of Israeli Politics and Judaic Studies at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, Kalisher sought to court wealthy European Jews to finance the purchase of Israel for the purpose of resettlement, particularly the Temple Mount. In an 1836 letter to Baron Amschel Rothschild, Kalisher suggested that the eldest brother of the wealthy banker family use his abundant funds to bring Jewish sovereignty to Palestine, specifically Jerusalem and the Temple Mount:
[E]specially at a time like this, when the Land of Israel is under the dominion of the Pasha… perhaps if his most noble Excellency pays him a handsome sum and purchases for him some other country (in Africa) in exchange for the Holy Land, which is presently small in quantity but great in quality… this money would certainly not be wasted… for when the leaders of Israel are gathered from every corner of the world… and transform it into an inhabited country, the many G-d-fearing and charitable Jews will travel there to take up their residency in the Holy Land under Jewish sovereignty… and be worthy to take up their portion in the offering upon the altar. And if the master (Ibrahim Pasha) does not desire to sell the entire land, then at least he should sell Jerusalem and its environs… or at least the Temple Mount and surrounding areas.” (emphasis added)
Kalisher’s request was met with a noncommittal response from Baron Rothschild, leading Kalisher to pursue other wealthy European Jewish families, like the Montefiores, with the same goal in mind. And, though Kalisher was initially unsuccessful in winning the support of the Rothschild family, other notable members of the wealthy European banking dynasty eventually did become enthusiastic supporters of Zionism in the decades that followed.
Kalisher was also influential in another way, as he was arguably the first modern Rabbi to reject the idea of patiently waiting for God to fulfill prophecy and proposed instead that man should take concrete steps that would lead to the fulfillment of such prophecies, a belief that Kalisher described as “self help.” For Kalisher, settling European Jews in Palestine was but the first step, to be followed by other steps that would form an active as opposed to a passive approach towards Jewish Messianism. These subsequent steps included the construction of a Third Temple, to replace the Second Temple destroyed by the Romans around the year 70 C.E., and the reinitiation of ritual animal sacrifices in that Temple, which Kalisher believed could only be placed on the Temple Mount, where Al-Aqsa then sat and still sits.
Kalisher wasn’t alone in his views, as his contemporary, Rabbi Judah Alkalai, wrote the following in his book Shalom Yerushalayim:
It is obvious that the Mashiach ben David [Messiah of the House of David] will not appear out of thin air in a fiery chariot with fiery horses, but will come if the Children of Israel bend to the task of preparing themselves for him.”
Though Kalisher wasn’t the lone voice promoting these ideas, his beliefs — aside from promoting the physical settlement of European Jews in Palestine — remained relatively fringe for decades, if not more than a century, as secular Jews were hugely influential in the Zionist movement after its official formation. However, prominent religious Zionists did influence the Zionist movement in key ways prior to Israel’s founding. One such figure was Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, who sought to reconcile Zionism and Orthodox Judaism as the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Palestine, a position he assumed in 1924.
Yet, Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss of Neturei Karta, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish group based in New York that opposes Zionism, told MintPress that many religious Zionists have since latched onto Kalisher’s ideas, which were widely rejected during his lifetime, in order to justify neocolonial actions sought by secular Zionists. “This rabbi, at the time, other rabbis ‘roared’ against him and his beliefs weren’t accepted,” Rabbi Weiss stated, “But now, the ones who are talking about building this Third Temple…. these are Zionists and they have found some rabbi whose ideas benefit them that they have been using to justify Zionist acts” that are not aligned with Judaism “and make them kosher.”
Weiss further expanded on this point, noting that the participants of the modern religious Zionism movement that seek to build a new Jewish temple where Al-Aqsa currently stands are, at their core, Zionists who have used religious imagery and specific interpretations of religious texts as cover for neo-colonial acts, such as the complete re-making of the Temple Mount.
“It’s like a wolf in a sheepskin… These people who want to incorporate the teachings of this rabbi [Rabbi Kalisher] are proudly saying that they are Jewish, but are doing things Jews are forbidden from doing,” such as ascending to and standing upon the Temple Mount, which Rabbi Weiss stated was “a breach of Jewish law,” long forbidden by that law according to a consensus among Jewish scholars and rabbis around the world that continued well beyond the formation of the Zionist movement in the 19th century.
Weiss also told MintPress:
There are only a few sins in Judaism — which has many, many laws, that lead to a Jew being cut off from God — and to go up to the Temple Mount is one of them… This is because you need a certain level of holiness to ascend and… the process to attain that level of holiness and purity cannot be done today, because [aspects of and the items required by] the necessary purity rituals no longer exist today.”
Rabbi Weiss noted that, for this reason, the Muslim community that has historically governed the area where Al-Aqsa mosque stands never had any problems with the Jewish community in relation to the Temple Mount, as it has been known for centuries that Jews cannot ascend to the area where the mosque currently sits and instead prayed only at the Western Wall. He also stated that the prophetic idea of a Third Temple was, prior to Zionism, understood as indicating not a change in physical structures on the Temple Mount, but a metaphysical, spiritual change that would unite all of mankind to worship and serve God in unison.
Rabbi Weiss asserted that the conflict regarding Al-Aqsa mosque started only with the advent of Zionism and the associated neo-colonial ambition to fundamentally alter the status quo and structures present at the site as a means of erasing key parts (i.e., Palestinian parts) of its heritage. “This [the use of religion to justify ascending to and taking control of the Temple Mount] is a trap for conning other people into supporting them,” concluded the Rabbi.
Nonetheless, Kalisher’s impact can be seen in today’s Israel more than ever, thanks to the rise and mainstream acceptance within Israel of once-fringe elements of religious Zionism, which were deeply influenced by the ideas of rabbis like Kalisher and have served in recent decades as an incubator for some of Israel’s most radical political elements.
Meanwhile, as the debate within Judaism over the Temple Mount has changed dramatically since the 19th century, its significance in Islam has remained steadfast. According to Imam Sayed Hassan Al-Qazwini, “Al-Aqsa is the third holiest mosque in Islam… it is considered to be the place where the Prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven and has been mentioned in the Qoran, which glorifies that mosque and identifies it as a blessed mosque. All Muslims, whether they are Sunni or Shia, revere that mosque” — a fact that has remained unchanged for over a millennium and continues to today.
Religious Zionism gains political force
The modern rise of the religious Zionist movements that promote the destruction of Al-Aqsa mosque and its replacement with a Third Jewish Temple is most often traced back to the Six Day War of 1967. According to Miko Peled, who recently wrote a piece for MintPress News regarding the threats facing Al-Aqsa, “religious Zionism” as a political force became more noticeable following the 1967 war. Peled told MintPress:
After the ‘heartland’ of Biblical Israel came under Israeli control, the religious Zionists, who before then were marginalized, saw it as their mission to settle those newly conquered lands, and to be the new pioneers, so to speak. They took on the job that the socialist Zionist ideologues had in settling Palestine and ridding it of its native Arab population in the years leading up to Israel’s establishment and up to the early 1950s. They saw the “return” of Hebron, Bethlehem, Nablus, or Shchem and, of course, the Old City of Jerusalem as divine intervention and now it was their turn to make their mark.
It began with a small group of Messianic fanatics who forced the government – who at that point, after 1967, was still secular Zionist – to accept their existence in the highly populated areas within the West Bank. That was how the city of Kiryat Arba [illegal settlement in the occupied West Bank] was established. The government, it is worth noting, was happy to be forced into this. From a small group that people thought were fringe lunatics to a Jewish city in the heart of Hebron region.”
Peled further noted that this model, employed by the religious extremist groups that founded illegal West Bank settlements like Kiryat Arba, “has been used successfully since then and it is now used by the groups that are promoting the new Temple in place of Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.” He continued, pointing out that “whereas 20-30 years ago they were considered a fringe group, this year they expect more than 50,000 people to enter the compound to support the group and their goals. Religious Israeli youth who opt out of military service and choose national service instead may work with the [Third] Temple building organizations.”
Extremist settlers escorted by Israeli after they stormed the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound on July 22, 2018. Mostafa Alkharouf | Anadolu
Dr. Ramzy Baroud — journalist, academic and founder of The Palestine Chronicle — agreed with Peled’s sense that the Third Temple movement or Temple Activist movement has grown dramatically in recent years and has become increasingly mainstream in Israel. Baroud told MintPress:
There has been a massive increase in the number of Israeli Jews who force their way into the Al-Aqsa mosque compound to pray and practice various rituals… In 2017 alone, over 25,000 Jews who visited the compound — accompanied by thousands of soldiers and police officers and provoking many clashes that resulted in the death and wounding of many Palestinians. Since 2017, the increase in Jews visiting the compound has been very significant if compared to the previous year when around 14,000 Jews made that same journey.”
Baroud also noted:
[The Temple Activist movement] has achieved a great deal in appealing to mainstream Israeli Jewish society in recent years. At one point, it was a marginal movement, but with the rise of the far right in Israel, their ideas and ideologies and religious aspirations have also become part of the Israeli mainstream.”
As a result, Baroud asserted:
[There is] an increasing degree of enthusiasm among Israeli Jews that is definitely not happening at the margins [of society], but is very much a part of the mainstream, more so than at any time in the past, to take over the Al-Aqsa mosque, demolish the mosque in order to rebuild the so-called Third Temple.”
However, Rabbi Weiss disagreed with Peled and Baroud that this faction presents a real threat to the mosque, given that the mosque’s destruction is widely rejected by Diaspora Jewry (i.e., Jews living outside of Israel) and that destroying it would not only cause conflicts with the global Muslim community but also numerous Jewish communities outside of Israel.
As Rabbi Weiss told MintPress:
Some of the largest and most religious [i.e. ultra-orthodox] Jewish communities outside of Israel, like the second largest community of religious [ultra-orthodox] Jews in Williamsburg, Brooklyn [in New York], and also in Israel … are opposed to this concept of taking over the Temple Mount and other related ideas.”
Weiss argued that many of these religious Zionists in Israel that are pushing for a new Temple “do not follow Jewish law to the letter and don’t come from the very religious communities, including the settlers…They don’t go to expressly religious schools, they go to Zionist schools. Their whole view is built on Zionism and [secondarily] incorporates the religion,” as opposed to the reverse. As a result, the destruction of the Al-Aqsa mosque, in Weiss’ view, could greatly alienate the state of Israel from these more religious and ultra-orthodox communities.
In addition, Rabbi Weiss felt that many Jewish and secular Israelis would also reject such a move because it would create even more conflicts, which many Israelis do not want. He described the Temple Activists as “a vocal minority” that represented a “fringe” among adherents to Judaism and a group within Zionism that has tried to use the Temple Mount “in order to be able to excuse their occupation and to try to portray this [the occupation of Palestine] as a religious conflict,” with the conflict surrounding the Temple Mount being an extension of that.
Weiss believed that the push to take over the Temple Mount was a “scare tactic” aimed at securing the indefinite nature of the occupation, and noted that many Israelis did not want a spike in or renewal of conflict that would inevitably result if the mosque were to be destroyed. He also added that he did not think there was a “real threat” of the mosque being targeted because international rabbinical authorities have stood fast in their opposition to the project promoted by the Temple Activists.
“Tomorrow might be too late”
It is hardly a coincidence that the growth of Temple Activism and associated movements like “neo-Zionism” have paralleled the growth in threats to the Al-Aqsa mosque itself. Many of these threats can be understood through the doctrine developed by Rabbi Kalisher and others in the mid-19th century — the idea that “active” steps must be taken to bring about the reconstruction of a Jewish Temple at Haram El-Sharif in order to bring about the Messianic Age.
Indeed, during the 1967 war, General Shlomo Goren, the chief rabbi of the IDF, had told Chief of Central Command Uzi Narkiss that, shortly after Israel’s conquest of Jerusalem’s Old City, the moment had come to blow up the Al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock. “Do this and you will go down in history,” Goren told Narkiss. According to Tom Segev’s book 1967, Goren felt that the site’s destruction could only be done under the cover of war: “Tomorrow might be too late.”
Goren was among the first Israelis to arrive at the then-recently conquered Old City in Jerusalem and was joined at the newly “liberated” Al-Aqsa compound by a young Yisrael Ariel, who now is a major leader in the Temple Activist movement and head of the Temple Institute, which is dedicated to constructing a Third Temple where Al-Asqa mosque currently stands.
Narkiss rejected Goren’s request, but did approve the razing of Jerusalem’s Moroccan quarter. According to Mondoweiss, the destruction of the nearly seven centuries old Jerusalem neighborhood was done for the “holy purpose” of making the Western Wall more accessible to Jewish Israelis. Some 135 homes were flattened, along with several mosques, and over 700 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed as part of that operation.
Following the occupation of East Jerusalem, Al-Aqsa has come under increasing threat, just as extremist movements who seek to destroy the site have grown. In 1969, a Christian extremist from Australia, Daniel Rohan, set fire to the mosque. Rohan had been studying in Israel and, prior to committing arson, had told American theology student Arthur Jones, who was studying with Rohan, that he had become convinced that a new temple had to be built where Al-Aqsa stood.
Then, in 1984, a group of messianic extremists known as the Jewish Underground was arrested for plotting to use explosives to destroy Al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock. Ehud Yatom, who was a security official and commander of the operation that foiled the plot, told Israel’s Channel 2 in 2004 that the planned destruction of the site would have been “horrible, terrible,” adding that it could provoke “the entire Muslim world [into a war] against the state of Israel and against the Western world, a war of religions.”
One of those arrested in 1984 in connection with the bomb plot, former Jewish Underground member Yehuda Etzion, subsequently wrote from prison that his group’s mistake was not in targeting the historic mosque, which he called an “abomination,” but in acting before Israeli society would accept such an act. “The generation was not ready,” Etzion wrote, adding that those sympathetic to the Jewish Underground movement “must build a new force that grows very slowly, moving its educational and social activity into a new leadership.”
“Of course I cannot predict whether the Dome of the Rock will be removed from the Mount while the new body is developing or after it actually leads the people,” Etzion stated, “but the clear fact is that the Mount will be purified [from Islamic shrines] with certainty…”
Upon his release from prison, Etzion founded the Chai Vekayam (Alive and Existing) movement, a group that Al Jazeera’s Mersiha Gadzo described as aimed at “shaping public opinion as a prerequisite for building a Third Temple in the religious complex in Jerusalem’s Old City where Al Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock are located.” Gadzo also notes that “according to messianic belief, building the Third Temple at the Al Aqsa compound — where the First and Second Temples stood some 2,000 years ago — would usher the coming of the Messiah.”
Six years later, another group called the Temple Mount Faithful, which is dedicated to building the Third Temple, provoked what became known as the Al-Aqsa massacre in 1990 after its members attempted to place a cornerstone for the Third Temple on the Temple Mount / Haram El-Sharif, leading to riots that saw Israeli police shoot and kill over 20 Palestinians and wound an estimated 150 more.
This was followed by the riots in 1996 after Israel opened up a series of tunnels that had been dug under Al-Aqsa mosque that many Palestinians worried would be used to damage or destroy the mosque. Those concerns may have been well-founded, given the involvement of then- and current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Third Temple activist groups in creating the tunnels and in subsequent excavations near the holy site, which were and continue to be officially described as “archaeological” in nature. During the 1996 incident, 80 Palestinians and 14 Israeli police officers were killed.
Some Israeli archaeologists have argued that these tunnels have not been built for archaeological or scientific purposes and are highly unlikely to result in any new discoveries. One such Israeli archaeologist, Yoram Tseverir, told Middle East Monitor in 2014 that “the claims that these excavations aim at finding scientific information are marginal” and called the still-ongoing government-sponsored excavations under Al-Aqsa “wrong.” When those “archaeological” excavations at Al-Aqsa resulted in damage to the Western Wall near Al-Aqsa last year, a chorus of prominent Palestinians, including the spokesman for the Fatah Party, claimed that Israel’s government had devised a plan to destroy the mosque.
Since 2000, Al-Aqsa mosque has been the site of incidents that have resulted in new state crackdowns by Israel against Palestinians both within and well outside of Jerusalem. Indeed, the Second Intifada was largely provoked by the visit of the then-Likud candidate for prime minister, Ariel Sharon, who entered Al-Aqsa mosque under heavy guard. Then-spokesman for Likud, Ofir Akounis, was later quoted by CNN as saying that the reason for Sharon’s visit was “to show that under a Likud government it [the Temple Mount] will remain under Israeli sovereignty.”
That single visit by Sharon led to five years of heightened tensions, more than three thousand dead Palestinians and an estimated thousand dead Israelis, as well as a massive and still continuing crackdown on Palestinians living under Israeli occupation and in the blockaded Gaza Strip.
Dr. Ramzy Baroud told MintPress that Sharon’s provocation in particular, and subsequent provocations, are often planned and used by Israeli politicians in order to justify crackdowns and restrictions on Palestinians. He argued:
[Some powerful Israeli politicians] use these regular provocations at Al Aqsa to create the kind of tensions that increase violence in the West Bank and to [then] carry out whatever policies they have in mind. They know exaclty how to provoke Palestinians and there is no other issue that is as sensitive and unifying in the Palestinian psyche as Al-Aqsa mosque.
Not only do we need to be aware of the fact that [provocations at] Al-Aqsa mosque are being used to implement archaic, destructive plans [i.e., destruction of Al-Aqsa and construction of a Third Temple] by certain elements that are now very much at the core of Israeli politics, but also the fact that this type of provocation is also used to implement broader policies pertaining to Palestinians elsewhere.”
Drums beating loud
While there have long been efforts to destroy the historic Al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock, recent weeks have seen a disturbing and dramatic uptick in incidents that suggest that the influential groups in Israel that have long pushed for the mosque’ s destruction may soon get their way. This reflects what Ramzy Baroud described to MintPress as how support for the construction of the Third Temple where Al-Aqsa currently sits is now “greater than at any time in the past” within Israeli society.
Earlier this month on June 2, a religious adviser to the Palestinian Authority (PA), Mahmoud Al-Habbash, took to social media to warn of an “Israeli plot against the Al-Aqsa Mosque,” adding that “If the Muslims don’t act now [to save the site]… the entire world will pay dearly.”
Al-Habbash’s statement was likely influenced by a disturbing event that occurred that same day at the revered compound when Israeli police provided cover for extremist Israeli settlers who illegally entered the compound during the final days of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. Israeli police used pepper spray and rubber bullets to disperse Palestinian worshippers who had gathered at the mosque during one of Islam’s most important holidays while allowing over a thousand Israeli Jews to enter the compound. Forty-five Palestinians were wounded and several were arrested.
Though such provocative visits by Jewish Israelis to Al-Aqsa have occurred with increasing frequency in recent years, this event was different because it up-ended a long-standing agreement between Jordan’s government, which manages the site, and Israel that no such visits take place during important Islamic holidays. As a consequence, Jordan accused Israel’s government of “flagrant violations” of that agreement by allowing visits from religious nationalists, which Jordan described as “provocative intrusions by extremists.”
Less than a week after the incident, Israel’s Culture and Sports Minister, Miri Regev, a member of the Netanyahu-led Likud Party, called for more settler extremists to storm the compound, stating: “We should do everything to keep ascending to the Temple Mount … And hopefully, soon we will pray in the Temple Mount, our sacred place.” In addition, Regev also thanked Israel’s Interior Security Minister, Gilad Erdan, and Jerusalem’s police chief for guarding the settler extremists who had entered the compound.
In 2013, then-member of the Likud Party Moshe Feiglin told the Knesset that allowing Jewish Israelis to enter the compound is “not about prayer.” “Arabs don’t mind that Jews pray to God. Why should they care? We all believe in God,” Feiglin — who now heads the Zehut, or Identity, Party — stated, adding, “The struggle is about sovereignty. That’s the true story here. The story is about one thing only: sovereignty.”
In other words, Likud and its ideological allies view granting Jewish Israelis entrance to “pray” at the site of the mosque as a strategy aimed at reducing Palestinian-Jordanian control over the site. Feiglin’s past comments give credibility to Rabbi Weiss’ claim, referenced earlier on in this report, that the religious underpinnings and religious appeals of the Temple Activists are secondary to the settler-colonial (i.e., Zionist) aspect of the movement, which seeks to remove Palestinian and Muslim heritage from the Temple Mount as part of the ongoing Zionist project.
Feiglin, earlier this year in April, called for the immediate construction of the Third Temple, telling a Tel Aviv conference, “I don’t want to build a [Third] Temple in one or two years, I want to build it now.” The Times of Israel, reporting on Feiglin’s comments, noted that the Israeli politician is “enjoying growing popularity.”
Earlier this month, and not long after Miri Regev’s controversial comments, an event attended by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli mayor of Jerusalem, Moshe Leon, used a banner that depicted the Jerusalem skyline with the Dome of the Rock noticeably absent. Though some may write off such creative photo editing as a fluke, it is but the latest in a series of similar incidents where official events or materials have edited out the iconic building and, in some cases, have replaced it with a reconstructed Jewish temple.
US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman poses with a picture of the ‘Third Temple,’ May 22, 2018. Israel Cohen | Kikar Hashabat
The day before that event, Israeli police had arrested three members of the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound’s Reconstruction Committee, which is overseen by the government of Jordan. Those arrested included the committee’s head and its deputy head, and the three men were arrested while performing minor restoration work in an Al-Aqsa courtyard. The Jordan-run authority condemned the arrests, for which no official reason was given, and called the move by Israeli police “an intervention in their [the men’s] reconstruction work.” According to Palestinian news agency Safa, Israeli police have also prevented the entry of tools necessary for restoration work to the site and have restricted members of the authority from performing critical maintenance work.
In addition, another important figure at Al-Aqsa, Hanadi Al-Halawani, who teaches at the mosque school and has long watched over the site to prevent its occupation by Israeli forces, was arrested late last month.
Arrests of other key Al-Aqsa personnel have continued in recent days, such as the arrest of seven Palestinian residents of Jerusalem, including guards of the mosque, and their subsequent ban from entering the site. The Palestinians were arrested at their homes last Sunday night in early morning raids and the official reason for their arrest remains unclear. So many arrests in such a short period have raised concerns that, should the spate of arrests of important Al-Aqsa personnel continue, future incidents at the site, such as the mysterious fire that broke out last April at Al-Aqsa while France’s Notre Dame was also ablaze, may not be handled as effectively owing to staff shortages.
Soon after those arrests, 60 members of a settler extremist group entered the al-Aqsa compound under heavy guard from Israeli police. Safa news agency reported that these settlers have recently been accompanied by Israeli intelligence officials in their incursions at the site.
All of these recent provocations and arrests in connection with the mosque come soon after the King of Jordan, Abdullah II, publicly stated in late March that he had recently come under great pressure to relinquish Jordan’s custodianship of the mosque and the contested holy site upon which it is built. Abdullah II vowed to continue custodianship over Christian and Muslim sites in Jerusalem, including Al-Aqsa, and declined to say who was pressuring him over the site. However, his comments about this pressure to cede control over the mosque came just days after he had visited the U.S. and met with American Vice President Mike Pence, a Christian Zionist who believes that a Jewish Temple must replace Al-Aqsa to fulfill an end times prophecy.
In May, an Israeli government-linked research institute, the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, wrote that Abdullah II had nearly been toppled in mid-April, just weeks after publicly discussing external pressure to relinquish control over Al-Aqsa. The report stated that Abdullah II had been a target of a “plot undermining his rule,” which led him to replace several senior members of his government. That report further claimed that the plot had been aimed at removing obstacles to the Trump administration’s “Deal of the Century,” which is supported by Israel’s government.
Last year, some Israeli politicians sought to push for a transfer of the site’s custodianship to Saudi Arabia, sparking concern that this could be connected to plans by some Third Temple activists to remove Al-Aqsa from Jerusalem and transfer it piece-by-piece to the Saudi city of Mecca. On Thursday, the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs published an article asserting that “tectonic shifts” were taking place in relation to who controls Al-Aqsa, with a Saudi-funded political group making dramatic inroads that could soon alter which country controls the historic mosque compound.
Sayyed Hassan Al-Qazwini told MintPress that, in his view, the current custodianship involving Jordan’s government is not ideal, as control over the Al-Aqsa mosque “should lie in the hands of its people, [and] Al-Aqsa mosque belongs Palestine;” if not, at the very least, a committee of Muslim majority nations should be formed to govern the holy site because of its importance. As for Saudi Arabia potentially receiving control over the site, Al-Qazwini told MintPress that “the Saudis are not qualified as they are not even capable of running the holy sites in Saudi Arabia itself. Every year, there has been a tragedy and many pilgrims have died during hajj time [annual Islamic pilgrimage].”
Once fringe, now approaching consensus
The threat to Al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock compound, the third holiest site in Islam and of key importance to three major world religions, is the result of the dramatic growth of what was once a fringe movement of extremists. After the Six Day War, these fringe elements have fought to become more mainstream within Israel and have sought to gain international support for their religious-colonialist vision, particularly in the United States. As this article has shown, the threats to Al-Aqsa have grown significantly in the past decades, spiking in just the past few weeks.
As former Jewish Underground member Yehuda Etzion had called for decades ago, an educational and social movement aimed at gaining influence with Israeli government leadership has been hugely successful in its goal of engineering consent for a Third Temple among many religious and secular Israelis. So successful has this movement been that numerous powerful and influential Israeli politicians, particularly since the 1990s, have not only openly promoted these beliefs, and the destruction of Al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock, but have also diverted significant amounts of government funding to organizations dedicated to replacing the historic mosque with a new temple.
As the second and final installment of this series will show, this movement has gained powerful allies, not just in Israel’s government, but among many evangelical Christians in the United States, including top figures in the Trump administration who also feel that the destruction of Al-Aqsa and the reconstruction of a Jewish Temple are prerequisites for the fulfillment of prophecy, albeit a different one. Furthermore, given the influence of such movements on the Israeli and U.S. governments, these beliefs of active Messianism are also informing key policies of these same governments and, in doing so, are pushing the world towards a dangerous war.
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
Head of Hamas’ political bureau Ismail Haniyeh has said that the Manama workshop “secures economic cover for a political attempt to liquidate the Palestinian cause.”
Haniyeh’s statement came in a speech during a conference organised by Palestinian factions on Tuesday, entitled the Palestinian National Conference to face the Deal of the Century and Reject the Manama Workshop held in Gaza.
He added: “We are witnessing a crucial historical moment. Our position is clear: Palestine is not for sale. No for deals which consecrate the occupier’s hegemony over our land.”
He continued: “The Palestinian people stand today in the face of the Manama workshop in a renewed uprising and political revolution, as Palestinians have sensed the unprecedented strategic threat facing the Palestinian cause.”
Haniyeh pointed out that the Manama workshop “grants Israel the green light to expand its occupation efforts and control over the entire West Bank, in addition to paving the way for normalisation with Arab countries and the integration of the occupier in the region.”
He stressed that the workshop “was born dead and frustrated. The Palestinian people today stand unified in the face of these deals.”
Haniyeh continued that “all Arab people stand today to emphasise the significance of the Palestinian cause and that Jerusalem is the compass of the nation.”
On Tuesday evening the Manama Peace to Prosperity Workshop began in Bahrain, looking at the economic aspects of the Middle East peace settlement plan, known as the deal of century, according to US media.
Haniyeh demanded all factions “insist on steadfast adherence to the Palestinian cause, primarily Jerusalem, the right of return and a sovereign state with Jerusalem as its capital on the entire national territory.”
Haniyeh said: “We, Hamas, are ready now to meet with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Gaza, in Cairo or anywhere.”
Haniyeh called for “the formation of a government of national accord to run our affairs, and prepare for the presidential and legislative elections as well as the Palestinian National Council.”
The movement’s leader also called for “the reconstruction of the Palestine Liberation Organisation to include all factions under one single leadership.”
On 9 August 1945, a US bomber dropped a 21-kiloton atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Nagasaki, killing approximately 70,000 people and leaving thousands of others injured. Earlier that month, about 140,000 people died following the US dropping a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.
In a statement on Wednesday, European Council President Donald Tusk warned G20 members not to lose control over global developments, also calling for joint efforts to resolve crises.
“Even such a short visit has made me forcefully aware of how tragic the lesson of Nagasaki is, and yet, how full of hope it is. Today, two days before the meeting of world leaders in Osaka, it should also be a lesson of responsibility for our common future”, Tusk said after his trip to the Atomic Bomb Museum and the National Peace Memorial in Nagasaki.
Urging G20 participants “to wake up before it is too late”, Tusk stressed that the international stage should not “become an arena where the stronger will dictate their conditions to the weaker without any reservations” and “where nationalistic emotions will dominate over common sense”.
“You should understand: you take responsibility not only for your own interests, but above all, for peace and a safe, fair world order”, Tusk pointed out.
He singled out unstable situations in “dozens of places on all continents” which Tusk claimed indicates “how close to the brink the world has come”.
“We continue to pretend that we are in full control of the dynamics of events and changes, but this is an illusion. The awareness of those risks should guide discussions in Osaka.
“It is you, the leaders of world superpowers, who are responsible for the fact that the lesson of Nagasaki will not be in vain”, he concluded.
The statement comes in the run-up to a two-day G20 summit that will kick off in the Japanese city of Osaka on 27 June.
The final stage of the Second World War saw the US detonate two nuclear weapons in the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945, respectively. The bombings killed about 214,000 people.
Around 200,000 people were exposed to radiation and either died of or suffered from related diseases for the rest of their lives, raising the casualties to almost half a million, according to some estimates.
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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Ronen Bergman’s book, “Rise and Kill First,” was released in late 2018 to what, considering the inflammatory subject, was relatively little fanfare. While this might seem surprising, on reading this important chronological documentary of the inception and development of Israel’s worldwide assassination program it becomes clear that this book does provide a unique, very detailed and accurate history of Israel’s hundreds of extrajudicial killings over the past fifty plus years.
Aletho News 