Feeding the Israel Lobby
Congress gives the Jewish state whatever it wants
By Philip Giraldi • Unz Review • August 6, 2019
If you have been wondering when the twenty Democratic aspirants for the presidency will begin a serious discussion of American foreign policy in the Middle East, where Washington has been bogged down in both current and impending wars, you are not alone. With the honorable exception of Tulsi Gabbard, no one seems keen to touch that particular live wire.
Part of the problem is the journalists who are asking the questions in the debates. To be sure, the publication of “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” by professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt back in 2007 opened the door to a frank discussion of why the United States is involved in unresolvable conflicts on behalf of a tiny client state. But unfortunately, while it is now possible to find in the mainstream media some honest analysis of Israel’s ability to corrupt policy formulation in Washington, in general the Jewish state continues to get a pass from both the press and politicians on all issues that matter.
And then there is the problem of Congress itself, which is precisely the institution that has been most corrupted by Israel and Jewish money. Almost thirty years ago, American politician Pat Buchanan described Congress as “Israeli occupied territory.” As a result, he was viciously attacked by the mainstream media and the political leadership of both parties, demonstrating beyond all doubt that he was correct in his observation. Today the Israel Lobby in the United States is far more powerful than it was in 1990, so much so that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu actually boasts to his voters that he directs U.S. policy.
The hypocrisy inherent in the Israel-philia of America’s political leadership is such that it sometimes produces comic results. The whiney head of the House Intelligence Committee Congressman Adam Schiff, Democrat of California, was beside himself prior to the Robert Mueller testimony before Congress on July 24th, denouncing Russia and President Donald Trump, saying that the president’s actions amounted to “Disloyalty to country… Those are strong words… But disloyalty to country violates the very obligation of citizenship, our devotion to a core principle on which our nation was founded, that we, the people, not some foreign power that wishes us ill, we decide, who shall govern, us.”
Strong words indeed, but Adam Schiff knows perfectly well that Moscow’s alleged involvement in the 2016 election, which was relatively insignificant, had no measurable impact on the result. And both he and Mueller have been coy about presenting any real evidence that Russia is gearing up to do major damage in 2020, which is what they claim to be the case. By way of contrast, everyone in Washington knows very clearly but will never admit that Israel has seriously corrupted the United States government and its elected officials at all levels. But Schiff did not mention Israel, nor did he express concern that Israel’s clearly unsavory involvement with Trump transition team members General Michael Flynn and Jared Kushner was never thoroughly investigated or included in the final Mueller report. One might assume that a deliberate decision was made by some parties in power to avoid embarrassing Israel. Those parties almost certainly included Schiff.
Schiff, who is Jewish, frequently tells audiences about his love for Israel, sometimes complaining that it is treated unfairly. It might be suggested that if anyone in the government is partial to a foreign power it is Schiff, and that foreign power is Israel, not Russia.
Unfortunately, Schiff is far from unique. Perhaps he and a number of other Congressmen should register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, as required by law. Congressmen are not exempt when they work to benefit a foreign nation, though they frequently believe themselves to be not subject to the very laws that they pass. In May a letter was sent to the White House with the signatures of 400 congressmen, purely to express America’s legislature’s solidarity with Israel and to give it a green light to do whatever it wishes vis-à-vis its neighbors. The letter cites some questionable American interests relating to Syria, but it also mentions Israel no less than 13 times.
If that does not convince one that Congress has always been and continues to be Israeli occupied territory, check out some bills that have been working their way through the legislature. The House voted overwhelmingly on July 23rd to formally oppose the Palestinian-backed nonviolent movement to boycott Israel. The measure, H.Res.246 opposes “efforts to delegitimize the State of Israel and the Global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement [BDS] targeting Israel.” The bill had 349 co-sponsors and passed by a 398–17 vote. Sixteen Democrats and only one Republican opposed the bill. The bill is not a law but is rather intended to express the will of congress, which is perhaps the only good thing to say about it.
Other bills have not yet been voted on, presumably because friends of the Jewish state are looking for more goodies to add in. The pending legislative action includes the aid to Israel bill H.R.1837 the “United States-Israel Cooperation Enhancement and Regional Security Act”, which has 279 cosponsors. When the bill is approved, which it will be, it will increase the amount of aid given to Israel over ten years to $38 billion, though this is now regarded as a minimum figure which will be supplemented to meet the Jewish state’s expressed needs. And the aid is now unconditional, meaning that Israel will receive the money no matter how it behaves, while the Jewish state will also be able to use the U.S. taxpayer provided money to buy weapons from its own arms industry, cutting American defense contractors out of the loop and costing jobs in the United States.
Another bill to benefit Israel is also pending: H.R. 1850, the “Palestinian International Terrorism Support Prevention Act of 2019,” a law that would authorize and encourage financially sanctioning any foreign organization or individual that provides “support” to any group, organization or individual considered to be part of the Palestinian resistance. Interestingly, the bill does not even pretend to be based on U.S. national security: it is all about and for Israel. It could mean that foreign supporters of BDS, which is now considered a hostile entity by “the will of” Congress, could be subject to sanctions even though they are non-violent and threaten no one.
One final bit of bipartisan legislation best described as a pander to both Israel and the Jewish community is a bill that has appeared recently in the Senate that will prioritize and pay for health care and nutrition services for those who claim to be holocaust survivors. The bill is entitled the “Trauma-Informed Modernization of Eldercare for Holocaust Survivors Act” or “TIME for Holocaust Survivors Act.” It is intended to “increase the chances that survivors could age in their own homes” and also “to ensure that holocaust survivors have care and services tailored to their needs.”
Sponsor Senator Ben Cardin of Maryland, who is of course Jewish, elaborated: “Holocaust survivors came to the United States seeking refuge from unimaginable horrors. They have lived their lives here and enriched our nation. With an average age of 85, we have an obligation to provide Holocaust survivors the community support and special services they need to live out their final days,”
WE have an obligation? How about you and your co-religionists Ben as you seem to have a lot of money to spend on lobbying for Israel and corrupting our government? Special services? Why do they need help? Because, the bill states, “institutionalized settings, with confined spaces or restrictions on food, can induce panic, anxiety, and re-traumatization due to their holocaust experiences.”
What about other elderly Americans who have problems with “institutionalized settings” or “confined spaces” or “restrictions on food?” How the Senate will justify special benefits for a small group of self-described victims drawn from the wealthiest demographic in the U.S. remains to be seen. If there is anyone who actually needs help, it is the U.S. taxpayer, who has to bear the burden of this utter nonsense, which sets up Jews as a special privileged group within our social services network. So-called holocaust survivors are identified in the bill’s “Findings” as “(2) More than 200,000 Jews fleeing from Nazi occupied territory found refuge in the United States from 1933 through 1945, and approximately 137,000 additional Jewish refugees settled in the United States from 1945 through 1952. (3) Hundreds of thousands of additional Jewish refugees continued to immigrate to the United States from Europe and countries of the former Soviet Union during the subsequent decades. (4) The number of Holocaust survivors living in the United States at the end of 2018 was approximately 80,000 individuals, down from an estimated 127,000 in 2010.”
Thus, holocaust survivors who will benefit from the bill are inevitably and by intention only Jews – no Christians who went through 1933-1945 in Europe need apply. That one highly privileged group should deserve special benefits from government that other retirees cannot have is a disgrace. So, is the United States Congress Israeli and also, by extension, Jewish occupied territory? I think the question answers itself.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org
Finally Time for DNC Email Evidence
By Patrick Lawrence | Consortium News | August 5, 2019
Three years after the narrative we call Russiagate was framed and incessantly promoted, it crumbles into rubble as we speak. The mini-empire of allegations, presuppositions, fallacious syllogisms, leaps of logic, imagined connections and mis– and disinformation marshaled to support charges of Russian interference in the 2016 elections is more or less a ruin.
The total collapse of the Russiagate orthodoxy now appears within reach — this for the first time since the Democratic National Committee set the narrative in motion after its email servers were compromised during the Trump–Clinton presidential contest. There is a good chance — though this is not a certainty — that Attorney General William Barr’s just-launched investigation will fully expose the numerous charges of Russian intervention as fabrications. Evidence of these fabrications, long available but ignored in a remarkably prevalent case of willful blindness, continues to grow such that it may be difficult to obscure it much longer.
It is now officially acknowledged that there is no credible evidence that Donald Trump colluded with Russia to defeat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. At this point, the demonstrably bogus assertion that Russian intelligence hacked into the DNC’s email system in mid–2016 is the one remaining feature of the Russiagate orthodoxy that is commonly considered rock solid.
The mythology on this question remains deeply embedded, the absence of any supporting evidence notwithstanding. Press and broadcast reports rarely miss an opportunity to cast Russian responsibility for the DNC email intrusion as a foregone conclusion. But this, too, is a tower built on sand. To put Russiagate decisively in the past now comes to demolishing this last, unsound edifice. The rest is already too discredited for anyone but naïve liberals, wishful-thinking “progressives” and the most committed ideologues to take seriously.
This focuses attention on the evidence — considerable and accumulating — that Russian intelligence agencies, officially charged with intrusion into the DNC’s servers, had nothing to do with it. It is now two years since technically qualified intelligence professionals of long experience reported via Consortium News that the theft of Democratic Party email in 2016 was neither a hack nor a Russian intelligence operation. In July 2017 Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity presented persuasive evidence that the DNC’s servers had been compromised by someone with direct access to them.
The email messages subsequently posted by WikiLeaks had been pilfered by an insider of unknown identity: This was the conclusion VIPS drew in VIPS50, the group’s report on the mail incident, on the basis of the evidence it had gathered while working with other independent forensic investigators. The “hack,” in short, was not a hack. It was a leak.
A cacophony of objections erupted after Consortium posted VIPS50. Much — vastly too much — has been made of a group of “dissenters” within the VIPS organization who did not endorse the report. But neither these dissenters nor the many others attempting to discredit VIPS50 have succeeded in doing so. No countervailing evidence from any quarter has been presented. Based on continuing research, VIPS subsequently altered some of its initial conclusions, as noted in this space a year ago. But its principal findings stand.
VIPS50
This puts VIPS50, while still officially excluded from the record, among the most consequential documents to be published since the Russiagate narrative took shape three years ago. If we are to recover from the destructive, divisive nightmare Russiagate has become, VIPS50 will be key to the process. There are indications now that its findings, based on impartially conducted data analysis and forensic science, will soon get the consideration they have deserved from the first. My sources suggest Barr’s office is making use of VIPS report and subsequent findings as it begins its investigation into the genesis of the Russiagate allegations.
Much anticipation preceded the publication in mid–April of the report on Russian interference completed in the office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Contrary to prevalent expectations, however, the 448–page document failed to confirm the case for Russiagate and did much to weaken it. Not only did the report conclude that neither President Trump nor anyone in his campaign colluded with Russia as he fought the 2016 election; it also made clear that the special counsel’s office did not undertake a credible investigation of the charge that Russian intelligence hacked the DNC’s mail servers.
Mueller failed to call numerous key witnesses, among them Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder and publisher, and Bill Binney, formerly a technical director at the National Security Agency and one of several technical experts in the VIPS group. He also failed to pursue alternative theories in the email-theft case; a duty of any investigator in Mueller’s position. Only the willfully blind can accept these irregularities as legitimate conduct.
Remarkably enough, Mueller’s investigation appears to have conducted no forensic tests of its own to verify allegations of a Russian hacking operation. It relied instead on the patently faulty findings of Crowdstrike, the disreputable cyber-security firm that was working for the DNC by mid–2016. Critically, the special counsel also appears to have neglected to consult the NSA for evidence pertaining to the DNC incident. Had the intrusion been a hack conducted over the internet, by Russians or anyone else, the agency would have a fully detailed digital record of the operation and the means to trace the intervention to its perpetrators. Why, it is perfectly logical to ask, was such a record not cited prominently in the Mueller report?
Mueller’s testimony before two congressional committees on July 24 was a further blow to the Russiagate thesis. The special counsel came over as a detached, out-of-touch figurehead with a very loose grip on his own investigation and poor knowledge of the report bearing his signature. Soon afterward, even Trump’s adversaries in the Democratic camp began to give up the ghost. “In the hours and days after Mr. Mueller gave his opening statement before the House Judiciary Committee,” wrote Samuel Moyn, a Yale law professor, “it became clear how tenaciously many liberals and progressives are clinging to fantasy.” Moyn’s piece appeared in The New York Times. The headline reads, “The Mueller Fantasy Comes Crashing Down.”
Despite the stunningly anticlimactic outcome of the Mueller report and his subsequent appearance on Capitol Hill — which was intended from the first to be a matter of spectacle rather than substance — new allegations of Russian interference continue to arrive on front pages and in news broadcasts. The latest came the day after Mueller’s testimony, when the Senate Intelligence Committee reported that Russia intruded into the election systems of all 50 states during the 2016 campaigns. The report offered no supporting evidence, per usual. It was heavily redacted at the request of the relevant intelligence agencies, again per usual.
Question of Evidence
This brings us to the question of evidence. To go back to the initial allegations of Russian interference three years ago, at no point since have any of these commonly accepted charges been accompanied by hard, legally and logically sound evidence to back them up. This astonishing lacuna, while intently papered over in the media, on Capitol Hill, at the Justice Department, in the intelligence apparatus, and among law-enforcement agencies, has rendered the Russiagate orthodoxy vulnerable from the first. It now emerges that the evidence problem is worse than even the most committed critics of the Russiagate narrative had thought.
This came to light this spring, during the pre-trial discovery phase of the case against Roger Stone, the onetime Trump aide charged with obstructing justice and misleading Congress. When Stone’s attorneys requested Crowdstrike’s final report on the DNC email theft, which they said was relevant to his defense, prosecutors returned with the stunning revelation that Crowdstrike, the DNC’s cyber-security firm, never submitted a final report. “The government does not possess the information the defendant seeks,” the Justice Department responded via a court filing.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s failure to take possession of the DNC’s email servers from Crowdstrike after the mid–2016 intrusion, a shocking case of official malfeasance, has long been dismissed as an unimportant detail. We now know that the FBI, the Justice Department and the Mueller investigation relied on nothing more than three Crowdstrike drafts — all of them redacted by Crowdstrike — to build the case for Russia’s culpability in the theft of the DNC’s email.
Not only did the FBI fail to establish a proper chain of evidentiary custody after the incident at the DNC; it is now clear the bureau knows of the email theft only what Crowdstrike chose to tell it. There is no evidence that the FBI asked the NSA for its records of the incident. Nor is there any indication that Crowdstrike has ever given the FBI or prosecutors in the Stone case the data it used to produce its never-completed report. “Crowdstrike appears to have destroyed evidence or is hiding it,” Bill Binney said in a telephone interview.
The corporate media continue to pretend in their press reports and news broadcasts that the official investigation of the DNC email incident was conducted according to the highest standard of legitimacy. Democrats on Capitol Hill, still pursuing their own investigations, never question the validity of the officially constructed case alleging Russia’s responsibility. The revelation of negligence the Stone trial brings to light, which amounts to corruption, could hardly expose this prolonged charade more starkly.
Forensic investigators, meantime, continue to gather evidence supporting the leak-not-hack case made in VIPS50. The gap thus widens between the official story of the DNC mail incident and the case supported by forensic research done by VIPS and other independent investigators working in association with it.
Last February these investigators discovered that email pilfered in 2016 and subsequently conveyed to WikiLeaks had been stored according to a system called File Allocation Table, or FAT. The FAT system time-stamps data according to their last modifications and, because it is less precise than other storage systems, it rounds up time stamps to the next even number. If the FAT system is used to store data, it is a strong indication that the data were stored on a memory key or another such portable device.
In the 35, 816 email messages investigators examined, the FAT system assigned even-numbered time stamps to all of them. Binney, a mathematician by training, puts the chance of this occurring without the use of a portable storage device at 1 in 2 to the 35,816thpower — meaning it is a virtual impossibility.
The FAT numbering pattern detected in the email messages tested does not indicate at what stage or where a portable device was used. It shows only that such a device was used at some point in the handling of the data; a portable device may or may not have been used to execute the initial download. But the presence of the FAT system in the metadata of the emails tested adds another layer of circumstantial evidence supporting the VIPS case that the theft of DNC mail was a leak executed locally via a portable device and not a remote hack conducted through the internet. At the very least, it is an additional line of inquiry the FBI, the intelligence agencies, and the Mueller investigation have left unexamined.
VIPS Dissenters
Among the critics of VIPS50, none has influenced public opinion as much as the dissenters within the group’s membership. The presence of these dissenters has been evident since VIPS50 went through repeated drafts over a period of nearly two weeks. This is a group of honorable, in many cases brave people. But they advanced no coherent objections to the VIPS document prior to its publication, and this remained the case for some time after Consortium News posted it on July 24, 2017. Having begun reporting on VIPS50 shortly after that date, I found — and continue to find — the dissenters’ position heavily inflected with personal animosities and political leanings having no bearing on the validity of the VIPS50 findings.
A number of dissenters signed a contribution to a forum The Nation hosted after the magazine published a piece I wrote on VIPS50 in August 2017. This was the first time the dissenters publicly presented substantive objections to VIPS50, and they focused on the core of the VIPS case. This case continues to rest primarily on the speed at which a mail theft could be executed in mid–2016. The transfer speed, identified by an analysis of metadata found on documents stolen at that time, was considerably faster than the rate possible over the internet at the time of the intrusion, indicating a leak by someone using a portable storage device and with direct access to the DNC’s servers.
The dissenting group took specific issue with these findings. “Data-transfer speeds across networks and the Internet measured in megabits per second (or megabytes per second) can easily achieve rates that greatly exceed the cited reference in the VIPS memo,” the dissidents wrote.
It was at this point the dissenters repeated the failures of the intelligence apparatus and the Mueller investigation: They produced no evidence. There is no indication the dissenters conducted tests to support their assertion on the speed question. The VIPS memo applied scientific method to the DNC mail theft for the first time and was intended as an “evidence to date” document. This marked a transformative advance in how the DNC incident can be understood: The imperative since has been to bring countervailing evidence to the investigative process, which continues. No one —not the dissenters, not the DNC, not the “intelligence community,” not Mueller, not the press — has done so.
The dissenters have been silent since their contribution to The Nation’s forum. Members have declined invitations to work with VIPS50 signatories to develop further the evidence presented in the memo. When I queried a number of dissenters for this commentary, one replied. This person did not address the findings of forensic investigators while reproducing what VIPS50 signatories term the “emotional arguments” that have characterized the dissenters’ response to the memo since the drafting phase two summers ago. These continuing difficulties appear partly to reflect a desire not to be seen defending either Trump or the Russians.
Barr’s Investigation
The NSA, the CIA, the FBI, the Mueller investigation, the press — none has shown the slightest interest in the findings outlined in VIPS50. This can come as no surprise, given the heavy investments all of these entities have made in the Russians-did-it explanation of the DNC email incident. But this omission is nonetheless negligent when one considers the contradicting evidence VIPS and those associated with it continue to amass. A key question now arises: Will the Barr investigation into the genesis of allegations of Russian interference, begun three months ago, transcend this politically inspired ignorance to expose official accounts of the mid–2016 mail theft as fallacies?
The early signs were that Barr’s investigators would at last explode the Russiagate narrative. Trump was unmistakably determined to do so when he urged Barr to “investigate the investigators” last spring. In mid–May Barr appointed John Durham, a federal prosecutor, to direct this effort. Ten days later Trump gave Barr “full and complete authority to declassify information” related to the conduct of the intelligence agencies, the FBI, and the Justice Department.
It was clear very early that Trump was aware of VIPS50 and entertained a lively interest in its findings. In September 2017, two months after Consortiumpublished the memo, he ordered Mike Pompeo, then director of the CIA, to interview Bill Binney, the leading technical expert within the VIPS group. Pompeo did so in October 2017, but by Binney’s account he flinched: Pompeo heard Binney out at the president’s insistence, but he never pursued the forensic findings the former NSA technical director walked him through.
This was an early sign, it is now plain, that even efforts to unearth the truth of the allegations against Russia that emanate from the White House would meet political resistance. Another came last Friday, when Trump was forced to drop John Ratcliffe, a Texas Republican who pledged to support a full investigation of Russiagate, as his nominee to replace Dan Coats as director of national intelligence. While Ratcliffe considered the orthodox Russiagate narrative bogus, Coats was vigorous in his promotion of it.
This makes political will another key question to ask of the Barr investigation: Full exposure of the travesty of Russiagate is almost certainly within Barr’s power to achieve. Will he do so?
Whether Trump will remain consistent in his backing of Barr is another such question. While Trump habitually terms Russiagate “a hoax,” he has also indicated on a number of occasions that his true objective is simply to escape the charge that he colluded with Russians to win the 2016 election. “I never said Russia did not meddle in the election,” Trump tweeted earlier this year. “I said, ‘It may be Russia, or China, or another country or group, or it may be a 400–pound genius sitting in bed and playing with his computer.’ The Russian ‘hoax’ was that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia—it never did!”
A president who slips and slides, an administrative state — the Deep State if you like — thoroughly committed to defending falsified accounts of the mid–2016 intrusions into the DNC’s email servers, a supine press: It is impossible to say when or whether the truth of the events of three years ago will emerge. The evidence is there, sufficient now to conclude the Russigate case. The greatest remaining obstacle is the willful ignorance that incubated the Russiagate narrative and now prolongs it. We reach a point when evidence and more evidence, along with political integrity, are the only effective replies to this cynical, foolish, and costly recalcitrance.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, author and lecturer. His most recent book is “Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century” (Yale). Follow him on Twitter @thefloutist. His website is Patrick Lawrence.
How Many Germans Died under RAF Bombs at Dresden in 1945?
By John Wear | Inconvenient History, Vol. 11, No. 1 (3-25-2019)
Introduction
The bombing of Dresden remains one of the deadliest and morally most-problematic raids of World War II. Three factors make the bombing of Dresden unique: 1) a huge firestorm developed that engulfed much of the city; 2) the firestorm engulfed a population swollen by refugees; and 3) defenses and shelters even for the original Dresden population were minimal.[1] The result was a high death toll and the destruction of one of Europe’s most beautiful and cultural cities.
Many conflicting estimates have been made concerning the number of deaths during the raids of Dresden on February 13-14, 1945. Historian Richard J. Evans estimates that approximately 25,000 people died during these bombings.[2] Frederick Taylor estimates that from 25,000 to 40,000 people died as a result of the Dresden bombings.[3] A distinguished commission of German historians titled “Dresden Commission of Historians for the Ascertainment of the Number of Victims of the Air Raids on the City of Dresden on 13/14 February 1945” estimates the likely death toll in Dresden at around 18,000 and definitely not more than 25,000.[4] This later estimate is considered authoritative by many sources.
While exact figures of deaths in the Dresden bombings can never be obtained, some Revisionist historians estimate a death toll at Dresden as high as 250,000 people. Most establishment historians state that a death toll at Dresden of 250,000 is an absolute impossibility. For example, Richard Evans states:
Even allowing for the unique circumstances of Dresden, a figure of 250,000 dead would have meant that 20% to 30% of the population was killed, a figure so grossly out of proportion to other comparable attacks as to have raised the eyebrows of anyone familiar with the statistics of bombing raids…even if the population had been inflated by an influx of refugees fleeing the advance of the Red Army.[5]
Population of Dresden
Historians generally agree that a large number of German refugees were in Dresden during the night of February 13-14, 1945. However, the estimate of refugees in Dresden that night varies widely. This is a major reason for the discrepancies in the death toll estimates in the Dresden bombings.
Marshall De Bruhl states in his book Firestorm: Allied Airpower and the Destruction of Dresden:
Nearly every apartment and house [in Dresden] was crammed with relatives or friends from the east; many other residents had been ordered to take in strangers. There were makeshift campsites everywhere. Some 200,000 Silesians and East Prussians were living in tents or shacks in the Grosser Garten. The city’s population was more than double its prewar size. Some estimates have put the number as high as 1.4 million.
Unlike other major German cities, Dresden had an exceptionally low population density, due to the large proportion of single houses surrounded by gardens. Even the built-up areas did not have the congestion of Berlin and Munich. However, in February 1945, the open spaces, gardens, and parks were filled with people.
The Reich provided rail transport from the east for hundreds of thousands of the fleeing easterners, but the last train out of the city had run on February 12. Transport further west was scheduled to resume in a few days; until then, the refugees were stranded in the Saxon capital.[6]
David Irving states in The Destruction of Dresden:
Silesians represented probably 80% of the displaced people crowding into Dresden on the night of the triple blow; the city which in peacetime had a population of 630,000 citizens was by the eve of the air attack so crowded with Silesians, East Prussians and Pomeranians from the Eastern Front, with Berliners and Rhinelanders from the west, with Allied and Russian prisoners of war, with evacuated children’s settlement, with forced laborers of many nationalities, that the increased population was now between 1,200,000 and 1,400,000 citizens, of whom, not surprisingly, several hundred thousand had no proper home and of whom none could seek the protection of an air-raid shelter.[7]
A woman living on the outskirts of Dresden at the time of the bombings stated: “At the time my mother and I had train-station duty here in the city. The refugees! They all came from everywhere! The city was stuffed full!”[8]
Frederick Taylor states in his book Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945 that Dresden had been accepting refugees from the devastated cities of the Ruhr, and from Hamburg and Berlin, ever since the British bombing campaign began in earnest. By late 1943 Dresden was already overstretched and finding it hard to accept more outsiders. By the winter of 1944-1945, hundreds of thousands of German refugees were traveling from the east in an attempt to escape the Russian army.[9]
The German government regarded the acceptance of Germans from the east as an essential duty. Der Freiheitskampf, the official German organ for Saxony, urged citizens to offer temporary accommodation:
There is still room everywhere. No family should remain without guests! Whether or not your habits of life are compatible, whether the coziness of your domestic situation is disturbed, none of these things should matter! At our doors stand people who for the moment have no home—not even to mention the loss of their possessions.[10]
However, Taylor states that it was general policy in Dresden to have refugees on their way to the west to continue onwards within 24 hours. Fleeing the Russians was not a valid justification for seeking and maintaining residence in Dresden. Taylor states that the best estimate by Götz Bergander, who spent time on fire-watching duties and on refugee-relief work in Dresden, was that approximately 200,000 nonresidents were in Dresden on the night of February 13-14, 1945. Many of these refugees would have been living in quarters away from the targeted center of Dresden.[11]
The Dresden historian Friedrich Reichert estimates that only 567,000 residents and 100,000 refugees were in Dresden on the night of the bombings. Reichert quotes witnesses who state that no refugees were billeted in Dresden houses and that no billeting took place in Dresden’s parks or squares. Thus, Reichert estimates that the number of people in Dresden on the night of the bombings was not much greater than the official figure of Dresden’s population before the war.[12]
Reichert’s estimate of Dresden’s population during the bombings is almost certainly too low. As a RAF memo analyzed it before the attack:
Dresden, the seventh largest city in Germany and not much smaller than Manchester is also [by] far the largest unbombed built-up area the enemy has got. In the midst of winter with refugees pouring westwards and troops to be rested, roofs are at a premium, not only to give shelter to workers, refugees and troops alike, but also to house the administrative services displaced from other areas…[13]
Alexander McKee states in regard to Dresden:
Every household had its large quota of refugees, and many more had arrived in Dresden that day, so that the pavements were blocked by them, as they struggled onwards or simply sat exhausted on their suitcases and rucksacks. For these reasons, no one has been able to put a positive figure to the numbers of the dead, and no doubt no one ever will.[14]
The report prepared by the USAF Historical Division Research Studies Institute Air University states that “there may probably have been about 1,000,000 people in Dresden on the night of the 13/14 February RAF attack.”[15] I think the 1 million population figure cited in this report constitutes a realistic and conservative minimum estimate of Dresden’s population during the Allied bombings of February 13-14, 1945.
Did Only 25,000 People Die?
If the 25,000 death-toll estimate in Dresden is accurate, we are left with the odd result that Allied air power, employed for textbook purposes to its full measure and with no restrictions, over an especially vulnerable large city near the end of the war, when Allied air superiority was absolute and German defenses nearly nonexistent, was less effective than Allied air power had been in previous more-difficult operations such as Hamburg or Berlin. I think the extensive ruins left in Dresden suggest a degree of complete destruction not seen before in Germany.
The Dresden bombings created a massive firestorm of epic proportions, and were in no way a failed mission with only a fraction of the intended results. The fires from the first raid alone had been visible more than 100 miles from Dresden.[16] The Dresden raid was the perfect execution of the Bomber Command theory of the double blow: two waves of bombers, three hours apart, followed the next day by a massive daylight raid by more bombers and escort fighters. Only a handful of raids ever actually conformed to this double-strike theory, and those that did were cataclysmic.[17]
Dresden also lacked an effective network of air-raid shelters to protect its inhabitants. Hitler had ordered that over 3,000 air-raid bunkers be built in 80 German towns and cities. However, not one was built in Dresden because the city was not regarded as being in danger of air attack. Instead, the civil air defense in Dresden devoted most of its efforts to creating tunnels between the cellars of the housing blocks so that people could escape from one building to another. These tunnels exacerbated the effects of the Dresden firestorm by channeling smoke and fumes from one basement to the next and sucking out the oxygen from a network of interconnected cellars.[18]
The vast majority of the population of Dresden did not have access to proper air-raid shelters. When the British RAF attacked Dresden that night, all the residents and refugees in Dresden could do was take refuge in their cellars. These cellars proved to be death traps in many cases. People who managed to escape from their cellars were often sucked into the firestorm as they struggled to flee the city.[19]
Dresden was all but defenseless against air attack, and the people on the ground in Dresden suffered the consequences. The bombers in the Dresden raids were able to conduct their attacks relatively free from fear of harassment by German defenses. The master bombers ordered the bombers to descend to lower altitudes, and the crews felt confident in doing so and in maintaining a steady altitude and heading during the bombing runs. This ensured that the Dresden raids were particularly concentrated and thus particularly effective.[20] The RAF conducted a technically perfect fire-raising attack on Dresden.[21]
The British were fully aware that mass death and destruction could result from the bombing of Germany’s cities. The Directorate of Bombing Operations predicted the following consequences from Operation Thunderclap:
If we assume that the daytime population of the area attacked is 300,000, we may expect 220,000 casualties. Fifty per cent of these or 110,000 may expect to be killed. It is suggested that such an attack resulting in so many deaths, the great proportion of which will be key personnel, cannot help but have a shattering effect on political and civilian morale all over Germany.”[22]
The destruction of Dresden was so complete that major companies were reporting fewer than 50% of their workforce present two weeks after the raids.[23] By the end of February 1945, only 369,000 inhabitants remained in the city. Dresden was subject to further American attacks by 406 B-17s on March 2 and 580 B-17s on April 17, leaving an additional 453 dead.[24]
Comparison to Pforzheim Bombing
A raid that closely resembles that on Dresden was carried out 10 days later on February 23, 1945 at Pforzheim. Since neither Dresden nor Pforzheim had suffered much damage earlier in the war, the flammability of both cities had been preserved.[25] A perfect firestorm was created in both of these defenseless cities. These cities also lacked sufficient air-raid shelters for their citizens.
The area of destruction at Pforzheim comprised approximately 83% of the city, and 20,277 out of 65,000 people died according to official estimates.[26] Sönke Neitzel also estimates that approximately 20,000 out of a total population of 65,000 died in the raid at Pforzheim.[27] This means that over 30% of the residents of Pforzheim died in one bombing attack.
The question is: If more than 30% of the residents of Pforzheim died in one bombing attack, why would only approximately 2.5% of Dresdeners die in similar raids 10 days earlier? The second wave of bombers in the Dresden raid appeared over Dresden at the very time that the maximum number of fire brigades and rescue teams were in the streets of the burning city. This second wave of bombers compounded the earlier destruction many times, and by design killed the firemen and rescue workers so that the destruction in Dresden could rage on unchecked.[28] The raid on Pforzheim, by contrast, consisted of only one bombing attack. Also, Pforzheim was a much smaller target, so that it would have been easier for the people on the ground to escape from the blaze.
The only reason why the death-rate percentage would be higher at Pforzheim versus Dresden is that a higher percentage of Pforzheim was destroyed in the bombings. Alan Russell estimates that 83% of Pforzheim’s city center was destroyed versus only 59% of Dresden’s.[29] This would, however, account for only a portion of the percentage difference in the death tolls. Based on the death toll in the Pforzheim raid, it is reasonable to assume that a minimum of 20% of Dresdeners died in the British and American attacks on the city. The 2.5% death rate figure of Dresdeners estimated by establishment historians is an unrealistically low figure.
If a 20% death rate figure times an estimated population in Dresden of 1 million is used, the death-toll figure in Dresden would be 200,000. If a 25% death-rate figure times an estimated population of 1.2 million is used, the death toll figure in Dresden would be 300,000. Thus, death-toll estimates in Dresden of 250,000 people are quite plausible when compared to the Pforzheim bombing.
How Were the Dead Disposed Of?
Historian Richard Evans asks:
And how was it imaginable that 200,000 bodies could have been recovered from out of the ruins in less than a month? It would have required a veritable army of people to undertake such work, and hundreds of sorely needed vehicles to transport the bodies. The effort actually undertaken to recover bodies was considerable, but there was no evidence that it reached the levels required to remove this number.[30]
Richard Evans does not recognize that the incineration of corpses on the Dresden market square, the Altmarkt, was not the only means of disposing of bodies at Dresden. A British sergeant reported on the disposal of bodies at Dresden:
They had to pitchfork shriveled bodies onto trucks and wagons and cart them to shallow graves on the outskirts of the city. But after two weeks of work the job became too much to cope with and they found other means to gather up the dead. They burned bodies in a great heap in the center of the city, but the most effective way, for sanitary reasons, was to take flamethrowers and burn the dead as they lay in the ruins. They would just turn the flamethrowers into the houses, burn the dead and then close off the entire area. The whole city is flattened. They were unable to clean up the dead lying beside roads for several weeks.[31]
Historians also differ on whether or not large numbers of bodies in Dresden were so incinerated in the bombing that they could no longer be recognized as bodies. Frederick Taylor mentions Walter Weidauer, the high burgomaster of Dresden in the postwar period, as stating
[T]here is no substance to the reports that tens of thousands of victims were so thoroughly incinerated that no individual traces could be found. Not all were identified, but—especially as most victims died of asphyxiation or physical injuries—the overwhelming majority of individuals’ bodies could at least be distinguished as such.”[32]
Other historians cite evidence that bodies were incinerated beyond recognition. Alexander McKee quotes Hildegarde Prasse on what she saw at the Altmarkt after the Dresden bombings:
What I saw at the Altmarkt was cruel. I could not believe my eyes. A few of the men who had been left over [from the Front] were busy shoveling corpse after corpse on top of the other. Some were completely carbonized and buried in this pyre, but nevertheless they were all burnt here because of the danger of an epidemic. In any case, what was left of them was hardly recognizable. They were buried later in a mass grave on the Dresdner Heide.[33]
Marshall De Bruhl cites a report found in an urn by a gravedigger in 1975 written on March 12, 1945, by a young soldier identified only as Gottfried. This report states:
I saw the most painful scene ever…. Several persons were near the entrance, others at the flight of steps and many others further back in the cellar. The shapes suggested human corpses. The body structure was recognizable and the shape of the skulls, but they had no clothes. Eyes and hair carbonized but not shrunk. When touched, they disintegrated into ashes, totally, no skeleton or separate bones.
I recognized a male corpse as that of my father. His arm had been jammed between two stones, where shreds of his grey suit remained. What sat not far from him was no doubt mother. The slim build and shape of the head left no doubt. I found a tin and put their ashes in it. Never had I been so sad, so alone and full of despair. Carrying my treasure and crying I left the gruesome scene. I was trembling all over and my heart threatened to burst. My helpers stood there, mute under the impact.[34]
The incineration of large numbers of people in Dresden is also indicated by estimates of the extreme temperature reached in Dresden during the firestorm. While no survivor has ever reported the actual temperature reached during the Dresden firestorm, many historians estimate that temperatures reached 1,500° Centigrade (2,732° Fahrenheit).[35] Since temperatures in a cremation chamber normally reach only 1,400 degrees to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit[36], large numbers of people in Dresden would have been incinerated from the extreme heat generated in the firestorm.
Historians also differ on whether or not bodies are still being recovered in Dresden. For example, Frederick Taylor states: “Since 1989—even with the extensive excavation and rebuilding that followed the fall of communism in Dresden—no bodies have been recovered at all, even though careful archaeological investigations have accompanied the redevelopment.”[37]
Marshall De Bruhl does not agree with Taylor’s statement. De Bruhl notes that numerous other skeletons of victims were discovered in the ruins of Dresden as rubble was removed or foundations for new buildings were dug. De Bruhl states:
One particularly poignant discovery was made when the ruins adjacent to the Altmarkt were being excavated in the 1990s. The workmen found the skeletons of a dozen young women who had been recruited from the countryside to come into Dresden and help run the trams during the war. They had taken shelter from the rain of bombs in an ancient vaulted subbasement, where their remains lay undisturbed for almost 50 years.[38]
Conclusion
The destruction from the Dresden bombings was so massive that exact figures of deaths will never be obtainable. However, the statement from the Dresden Commission of Historians that “definitely no more than 25,000” died in the Dresden bombings is probably inaccurate. An objective analysis of the evidence indicates that almost certainly far more than 25,000 people died from the bombings of Dresden. Based on a comparison to the Pforzheim bombing and the other similar bombing attacks, a death toll in Dresden of 250,000 people is easily possible.
ENDNOTES
[1] McKee, Alexander, Dresden 1945: The Devil’s Tinderbox, New York: E.P. Dutton, Inc., 1984, p. 275.
[2] Evans, Richard J., Lying about Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial, New York: Basic Books, 2001, p. 177.
[3] Taylor, Frederick, Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945, New York: HarperCollins, 2004, p. 354.
[5] Evans, Richard J., Lying about Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial, New York: Basic Books, 2001, p. 158.
[6] DeBruhl, Marshall, Firestorm: Allied Airpower and the Destruction of Dresden, New York: Random House, Inc., 2006, p. 200.
[7] Irving, David, The Destruction of Dresden, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964, p. 98.
[8] Ten Dyke, Elizabeth A., Dresden: Paradoxes of Memory in History, London and New York: Routledge, 2001, p. 82.
[9] Taylor, Frederick, Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945, New York: HarperCollins, 2004, pp. 134, 227-228.
[10] Ibid., p. 227.
[11] Ibid., pp. 229, 232.
[12] Evans, Richard J., Lying about Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial, New York: Basic Books, 2001, p. 174.
[13] Taylor, Frederick, Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945, New York: HarperCollins, 2004, pp. 3, 406. See also River, Charles Editors, The Firebombing of Dresden: The History and Legacy of the Allies’ Most Controversial Attack on Germany, Introduction, p. 2.
[14] McKee, Alexander, Dresden 1945: The Devil’s Tinderbox, New York: E.P. Dutton, Inc., 1984, p. 177.
[16] Cox, Sebastian, “The Dresden Raids: Why and How,” in Addison, Paul and Crang, Jeremy A., (eds.), Firestorm: The Bombing of Dresden, 1945, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006, pp. 44, 46.
[17] DeBruhl, Marshall, Firestorm: Allied Airpower and the Destruction of Dresden, New York: Random House, Inc., 2006, pp. 204-205.
[18] Neitzel, Sönke, “The City under Attack,” in Addison, Paul and Crang, Jeremy A., (eds.), Firestorm: The Bombing of Dresden, 1945, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006, pp. 68-69.
[19] Ibid., pp. 69, 72, 76.
[20] Cox, Sebastian, “The Dresden Raids: Why and How,” in Addison, Paul and Crang, Jeremy A., (eds.), Firestorm: The Bombing of Dresden, 1945, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006, pp. 52-53.
[21] Davis, Richard G., Carl A. Spaatz and the Air War in Europe, Washington, D.C.: Center for Air Force History, 1993, p. 557.
[22] Hastings, Max, Bomber Command, New York: The Dial Press, 1979, pp. 347-348.
[23] Cox, Sebastian, “The Dresden Raids: Why and How,” in Addison, Paul and Crang, Jeremy A., (eds.), Firestorm: The Bombing of Dresden, 1945, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006, p. 57.
[24] Overy, Richard, The Bombers and the Bombed: Allied Air War over Europe, 1940-1945, New York: Viking Penguin, 2014, p. 314.
[25] Friedrich, Jörg, The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, New York, Columbia University Press, 2006, p. 94.
[26] Ibid., p. 91. See also DeBruhl, Marshall, Firestorm: Allied Airpower and the Destruction of Dresden, New York: Random House, Inc., 2006, p. 255.
[27] Neitzel, Sönke, “The City under Attack,” in Addison, Paul and Crang, Jeremy A., (eds.), Firestorm: The Bombing of Dresden, 1945, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006, p. 77.
[28] DeBruhl, Marshall, Firestorm: Allied Airpower and the Destruction of Dresden, New York: Random House, Inc., 2006, p. 210. See also McKee, Alexander, Dresden 1945: The Devil’s Tinderbox, New York: E.P. Dutton, Inc., 1984, p. 112.
[29] Russell, Alan, “Why Dresden Matters,” in Addison, Paul and Crang, Jeremy A., (eds.), Firestorm: The Bombing of Dresden, 1945, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006, p. 162.
[30] Evans, Richard J., Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial, New York: Basic Books, 2001, p. 158.
[31] Regan, Dan, Stars and Stripes London edition, Saturday, May 5, 1945, Vol. 5, No. 156.
[32] Taylor, Frederick, Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945, New York: HarperCollins, 2004, p. 448.
[33] McKee, Alexander, Dresden 1945: The Devil’s Tinderbox, New York: E.P. Dutton, Inc., 1984, p. 248.
[34] DeBruhl, Marshall, Firestorm: Allied Airpower and the Destruction of Dresden, New York: Random House, Inc., 2006, pp. 253-254.
[35] Alexander McKee cites estimates of 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit (McKee, Alexander, Dresden 1945: The Devil’s Tinderbox, New York: E.P. Dutton, Inc., 1984, p. 176).
[37] Taylor, Frederick, Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945, New York: HarperCollins, 2004, p. 448.
[38] DeBruhl, Marshall, Firestorm: Allied Airpower and the Destruction of Dresden, New York: Random House, Inc., 2006, p. 254.
Predators United
By Gilad Atzmon • Unz Review • August 4, 2019
In this part study I intend to delve into a deeply troublesome topic. Due to the growing sensitivity concerning ‘anti-Semitism’ and new legislation designed to restrict discussion of topics related to Jewish politics, culture and history, I have limited myself to sources that are Jewish, Israeli or mainstream news.
From Weinstein to Epstein and Beyond
“Not Just Weinstein: The Year #MeToo Rocked and Shocked the Jewish World” was the title of a 2018 Haaretz article that reviewed the large number of Jews involved in sex scandals that year. “Over the past year,” Haartez wrote, “a high number of powerful Jewish men have been accused of sexual misconduct. While it has provided fodder for anti-Semites, activists say addressing the problem is vital.”
Haaretz listed some of the prominent Jewish men accused of predatory sexual behaviour. “In addition to (Harvey) Weinstein and (Leon) Wieseltier, the list of Jewish men implicated in #MeToo over the past 12 months includes former Democratic senator Al Franken; ousted CBS chief Les Moonves; actors Dustin Hoffman, Jeffrey Tambor and Jeremy Piven; directors Woody Allen, James Toback and Brett Ratner; playwright Israel Horowitz; journalists Mark Halperin and Michael Oreskes; conductor James Levine; and radio show hosts Leonard Lopate and Jonathan Schwartz.”
Apparently someone decided to ‘clean the swamp’. Harvey Weinstein was just an early bird. In 2018 we also learned about the Nxivm sex cult and the role of Clare Bronfman at its centre. The Jewish Forward wrote that Nxivm’s leader attracted “several prominent figures to his group, including heiress Clare Bronfman, who pleaded guilty in April to credit card fraud and harbouring an undocumented immigrant who provided unpaid “labor and services.” Bronfman is the daughter of the legendary ultra Zionist billionaire Edgar Bronfman (1929 –2013) who was president of the World Jewish Congress. In his obituary, Edgar Bronfman was described by Haaretz as “prince of the Jews.” His daughter has been ordered to pay a penalty of $6 million out of her $200 million fortune, and she faces up to two years in prison.
In November 2017, genius comedian Larry David admitted on Saturday Night Live that he was uncomfortable with the fact that so many of those accused of sexual harassment in Hollywood are Jewish. David allowed he would much prefer Jews to be associated with the theory of relativity and the cure for polio.
When it seemed the Jewish universe couldn’t cope with any more scandals involving predatory sexual behaviour, the Epstein affair resurfaced. The Jeffrey Epstein spectacle is one of the biggest of its kind in the history of America ensnaring presidents and prime ministers. Some of the world’s most influential men in cultural, financial and academic fields are allegedly implicated in predatory behaviour with underage girls. And it doesn’t take a genius to observe that the Epstein drama is, unfortunately, a ‘Jewish drama.’
Bloomberg, not exactly an ‘anti-Semitic’ outlet, dug into The Complicated Orbit of Jeffrey Epstein. Zionist enthusiast Leslie Wexner was identified as Epstein’s ‘patron’. The Jewish virtual library informs us that Wexner “often support[s] … Jewish projects. He serves as Honorary Vice Chairman of the Board of Congregation Aguda Achim… [And] established the Wexner Foundation, which runs both a Graduate Fellowship and an Israel Fellowship Program.”
Bloomberg lists the following as amongst Epstein’s ‘business partners’: Harvey Weinstein, Mort Zuckerman, Donny Deutsch, Nelson Peltz, Ehud Barak and Ponzi aficionado Steven Hoffenberg.
Ghislaine Maxwell, the daughter of notorious Zionist pension plunderer Robert Maxwell, is described by Bloomberg as Epstein’s ‘Inner Circle.’ And then there is Alan Dershowitz who has been labouring tirelessly to try to convince the American media and anyone else willing to listen that he didn’t have sex with underage girls.
Again I find myself admitting that the list of Jewish names surrounding an unsavoury character, this time Epstein, resembles my Bar Mitzvah’s guest list: a lot of Jewish names with just a few goyim at the margin.
This raises critical questions, the most elementary of which is, why? Why are so many Jewish men currently in the news in connection with sexually predatory behaviour? What is it about these rich and influential people that pushes them over the edge?
And there are deeper questions that beg attention. Why is it that with so many Jews in academia and media ordinarily so clever in explaining in a ‘professorial manner’ the psychology and sociology behind every world development and political shift, not one has volunteered to explain the cultural, ideological and spiritual continuum between Weinstein and Epstein and beyond? How is it that the academics and think tanks that are so adept in analysing ‘cultural clashes’ and, as they call it, ‘Islamofascism,’ are unwilling to analyse the roots of the cultural crisis at the core of the Epstein saga? And I must extend this inquiry just one step further, why does the Jewish solidarity industry that cares so much for Palestine, Immigrants, the Civil Rights Movement and LGBT issues remain silent when it comes to the crimes committed, and on a mass scale, against underage girls just a few blocks from JVP’s New York headquarters?
I tend to think that it is just a question of time before we see the formation of ‘Jews against Epstein’ or some other racially exclusive ‘Jews only’ group of that sort. Dominating the dissent is a Jewish survival instinct. ‘As Jews’ they will protest against Epstein, Maxwell, Barak, Weinstein and Dershowitz just to make sure that the boundaries of criticism are kept within the safety zone. If this happens, the battle against pedophilia will slowly evolve into an internal Jewish dispute. Gentiles will be assured that Jews can safely take care of their problems.
Some may argue that the sickening stories to do with Weinstein, Epstein et al have nothing to do with Jewishness, Judaism or the Jews. It is a legitimate contention that what we are actually dealing with are the predatory symptoms that can be associated with money and power. The argument is that capitalism and greed corrupts the rich and the powerful and that because Jewish men are over represented in these circles, they only appear to be disproportionately prone to such predatory symptoms. I could easily buy into such a theory. It certainly explains why sex crimes are prevalent within the Jewish elite as Haaretz was brave enough to admit. But it fails to explain the widely spread predatory behaviour within Rabbinical communities. It is even less successful in explaining why a bunch of Israelis were caught recently in Columbia apparently running a human trafficking network that specialised in marketing underage sex tourism packages for Israelis.
Not just the Rich and the Influential
In March 2017 Israeli police arrested 22 ultra-Orthodox Jews for sex crimes against minors and women. In April 2019 Haaretz admitted that “There’s a Hole in the System. Israel Became a Haven for Suspected Jewish Sex Offenders.” The Israeli paper reported that “65 suspected sexual offenders [are] allegedly seeking refuge in Israel.”
In July 2019 The Times of Israel reported that “Deputy Health Minister Yaakov Litzman was alleged to have improperly intervened to aid at least 10 sex offenders from Israel’s ultra-Orthodox community.” Litzman, who is himself ultra-Orthodox and the leader of the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism Party, “had been questioned by police over suspicions that he had attempted to prevent the extradition of accused child molester Malka Leifer to Australia.”
Malka Leifer was formerly the principal of an orthodox Jewish girls school in Melbourne and has been charged with as many as 74 assaults against minors. The extradition battle over Malka Leifer, who fled Melbourne in 2008 with the help of some in the local ultra-Orthodox community, has dragged on for several years, frustrating her accusers.
In 2015 Michael Lesher, an orthodox Jewish attorney, published a book titled “Sexual Abuse, Shonda and Concealment in Orthodox Jewish Communities.” In the introduction Lesher writes that his book isn’t “about sexual abuse per se but on the dismal history of how far too many of those cases have been assiduously concealed both from the public and from the police: how influential rabbis and community leaders have sided with the alleged abusers against their victims; how victims and witnesses of sexual abuse have been pressured, even threatened, not to turn to secular law enforcement for help; how autonomous Jewish ‘patrols,’ displacing the role of official police in some large and heavily religious Jewish neighbourhoods, have played an inglorious part in the history of cover-ups; … how some Jewish (orthodox) communities have even succeeded in manipulating law enforcement officials to protect suspected abusers.”
Lesher finds the Jewish media culpable. Jewish media outlets steer clear of stories about such predatory behaviour or at most publish them only sparingly. It would be reasonable to postulate that we are dealing with an institutional operation to conceal sex crimes that concern the ‘Jewish orthodox ghetto.’
Far away from the Jewish orthodox ghetto, in Ayia Nap, Cyprus, next to the sunny Mediterranean Sea, a bunch of young Israelis described by the Israeli press as ‘the salt of the Jewish earth,’ were falsely accused this month of a brutal gang rape of a young British citizen. The Israeli youngsters were eventually cleared and sent home. The 19 old British woman is now facing charges for falsifying a rape account.
Unlike Orthodox Jewry whom Lesher claims conceal sex crimes and often take the side of the predator, as did Israeli Deputy Health Minister Litzman, the alleged Israeli gang rape was a headline article in every Israeli media outlet for almost two weeks. Israel didn’t attempt to conceal the story. Israelis were discomfited by the saga and engaged in soul searching. In fact, the Israeli press was alone amongst the media to follow this horrible story closely.
The Daily Mail was probably the only British paper to produce a detailed account of the alleged gang rape. The British tabloid described the attitude of Israeli tourists to others on the Mediterranean island as beyond unacceptable. “Other girls living at the Pambos Napa Rock hotel have told how they were constantly pestered for sex by Israeli men staying at the budget hotel. ‘One of my friends was asleep in her room an Israeli came in and demanded sex. She screamed at him to get out, but the management do not seem to care.’ Another male worker said a friend of his was followed into the ladies toilet and proposition for sex. ‘He just held out some Euros and said he wanted sex. It is disgusting.’ ‘The Israeli men come up behind you and just stand there. Not many of them speak English and it is creepy. I had no idea what it was like here. I do not feel safe.”
Many in Israel were relieved to read that the young Israelis were cleared of the serious allegations. And others may claim that the Daily Mail’s description of the behaviour of young Israelis in Ayia Napa is not representative of Israel or of Jewish culture. After all, the Ayia Napa saga shares little in common with the Epstein/Weinstein continuum. The Israeli suspects were not particularly rich or influential. The British woman who claimed she was raped wasn’t underage. Yet the Ayia Napa story shares a peculiar similarity to the Epstein saga. When the Cypriot police examined the mobile phones of the Israeli suspects, they found a large number of videos of the event.
One may wonder what people video themselves engaged in intimate intercourse and even share such footage with others? Is it possible that they believe that the world surrounding them is a porn set? What kind of gratification is found in such images? Is it romantic memorabilia, libidinal enthusiasm or does it provide some other type of ‘self assurance’? Harvey Weinstein allegedly insisted that his victims watch him indulging himself. We may be tapping here into one of the most intimate aspects of narcissism. The Daily Mail wrote that Epstein is “believed to have used the cameras to tape his famous friends in sex acts with underage girls for blackmail purposes.” And I wonder. Does this explanation also apply to the cinematic enthusiasm of the young Israelis?
In December 2018, law enforcement authorities in Colombia suspected 12 Israelis of running a sex-trafficking network. Haaretz reported that the “alleged sex trafficking ring provided Israeli travellers with ‘tourism packages’ that included prostitutes, some of whom were minors, who received between 200,000 pesos ($63) to 400,000 pesos ($126) in return for sexual services.” Ynet revealed that the Israeli “suspects reportedly scouted local schools, recruiting underage girls as sex workers for drug-fuelled parties, attended largely by Israeli businessmen and discharged IDF soldiers.”
These Israelis are alleged to specialise in the wide scale exploitation of minors. The consumers of these ‘tour packages’ are ordinary Israelis not Wall Street’s financiers or Harvard professors.
Here we may be detecting a significant and disturbing similarity among Epstein, the Israelis at Ayia Napa and their brethren in Columbia. While orthodox Jewish sex criminals target members of their own community, Epstein, the boys at Ayia Napa (as described by the Daily Mail ) and the alleged criminals in Columbia prey on others. These others aren’t necessarily Jewish or more likely, aren’t Jewish at all.
This may be the right point to introduce the problematic notion of the Shikse.
Shikse is a derogatory term for a gentile woman or girl. The word, which is of Yiddish origin, is widely used by Jews and others many of whom do not speak Yiddish. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word came into English usage in the late 19th century. It is derived from the Hebrew word sheqeṣ (שקץ ) meaning ‘a detested thing.’ In fact, the Oxford Dictionary is taking a light approach to the pejorative term. Sheqes is a Biblical Hebraic term that expresses abomination and disgust, especially towards a small animal that is unclean.
The notion of the Shikse and the way in which it is utilised in reference to non-Jewish woman is as revealing as it is devastating. You might ask what crime non-Jewish women have committed to be labelled with such a horrendous and disrespectful term.
Once again it is the genius work of Larry David who together with Jerry Seinfeld, brought to light the embarrassing as well as irritating fact that at least culturally, the Shikse is basically a Jewish sex object. It is a subject of Jewish male fascination and libidinal phantasy. The Shikse is an ideal date, a one night stand, a mistress, but not a wife. As you will notice in this short video, this applies to thirteen years old Bar Mitzvah boys, their fathers and even the local Rabbi. Sometime Jewish humour tells us more than we should know.
Also watch this reaction of a gentile woman to being called shikse.
Genital Utopia from Shabbatai Zvi to Jeffrey Epstein
Jews didn’t invent predatory sexual behaviour nor do they collect royalties for pedophilia. Most Jews are likely embarrassed and disgusted by Epstein, Maxwell, Weinstein and Malka Leifer. And despite Israel’s notorious record of human trafficking in the 1990s, the country is now one of the leaders in the battle against human trafficking. As I noted in Part 1, the Israeli media published clear and reliable accounts of the Ayia Napa saga as well as all the other embarrassing stories of predatory sex scandals involving Israelis and Jews. On top of that, Tel Aviv is a gay capital, famous for its liberal approach to gender and LGBTQ.
Yet, in contradiction to the openness described above, in the Jewish State women are segregated and essentially barred from certain streets for ‘religious reasons.’ In the Jewish State women are segregated on public transport for the same ‘religious reasons.’ Haaretz writes “In the ultra-Orthodox community today, not only do men and women not sit together at celebrations, there are even separate entrances to the places where the events are held.” Haaretz explains the Jewish orthodox community is fearful of the corrupting powers of women and continues, “there is this fear they (male orthodox Jews) will not be able to withstand the temptation of being near women, and therefore they must remove even the smallest doubt – lest the evil urge cause them to commit a sin.”
Jews are amongst the leading advocates on issues to do with women’s rights yet Harvey Weinstein is at the centre of the #MeToo scandal. Many Jews claim to uphold the most precious universal humanist values yet prominent Jewish characters such as Wexner, Maxwell, Barak and Dershowitz are regularly in the news for their association with the Epstein sex trafficking affair.
How can we encapsulate the contradictions presented by humane, progressive and liberal attitudes towards gender, rabbinical dark religious morbidity and the current chain of spectacular predatory criminal affairs with so many famous Jews at their centre?
The issues to do with Jews, sexuality and abuse are confusing, ambivalent and multi layered. Although in the Jewish orthodox home it is the mother who has the dominant and most significant educational and spiritual role, rabbinical Judaism treats women as walking menaces. How are we to interpret that fact that the Judaic morning blessing includes a praise to God “who has not made me a woman”?
Jewishness and Judaism can be realised as existing on fierce dialectical battle grounds. Jews are people distinguished by their relentless inclination towards self-negation. Some have observed that Jews can be defined (politically and culturally) as people who strive to stop being themselves while continuing to be themselves. Early Zionism promised to fix Diaspora Jews by means of a homecoming. It promised Diaspora Jews that it could heal their symptoms and make them ‘people like all other people’ and still stay Jews. Bolshevism promised to fix the Jews by proletarianization, it promised the Jews they could integrate into the working class, be proletarians like all other proletarians and still sustain their Jewishness. Haskala (Jewish Enlightenment) and Assimilation gave Jews the ability to look like goyim in the street while sustaining their Jewish identity behind doors. Judah Leib Gordon illustrated this idea with a simple problematic mantra: “Be a Jew in your home and a man outside it.” Liberalism and progressivism offer similar promises. Jewishness can be realised as a rebellious form of self-rejection, whose revolutionary inclinations are set in measured terms and restricted by overarching tribal interests and agendas.
This radical trait of self-rejection is as old as the Jews. The Biblical prophets’ harsh critiques, guided by their thorough self-reflection, offer us a glimpse into Judaic revolutionary dialectics. Judaism and Jewishness can be realised as the medium of the battle between those who adhere to the religion, the politics, the culture, the primacy of the tribe, the spirit of Judaism and Jewish revolutionary dissenters who oppose the above. This Biblical dialectic and rebellious spirit is embedded in Jewishness and Judaism and has never faded.
Shabbtai Zvi was born in Izmir, Turkey in 1625 and became a Muslim in the 1660s. In between he managed to become a Jewish messiah and attracted the admiration of the vast majority of Jews around the globe.
The movement that developed around Shabbetai Zvi became known as Shabbetaianism. It evolved into a secret yet influential sect of Muslim Jewish converts called the Donme. The Shabbetains and the Donme embraced the theory of “sacred sin.” They believed that the Torah could be fulfilled only by amoral acts representing its seeming annulment.
Zvi replaced the Ten Commandments with a new religious order based on 18 precepts that the Donme called ‘Las Incommendensas.’ Las Incommendensas included the Ten Commandments although the formulation of the prohibition on adultery is ambiguous, resembling a suggestion of prudence.
One of the Donme’s distinctive rituals was the Festival of the Lamb, celebrated in the spring. At least two married couples and often many more participated in the ceremony. For the first time that year, they ate the meat of spring’s newly born lambs. After the meal, the lights were extinguished and couples made love without distinguishing among their partners. Children born from these encounters were considered sacred. The practice had its roots in pagan beliefs and orgiastic rituals known from other ancient cultures of the Middle East. The analogy between this practice and messianic rebirth after the days of the apocalypse is clear: the existing order will be abolished and instinctive needs will be freely enjoyed.
The primary concept of Sabbatean theology was that when Zvi entered the Jewish arena, the messianic era had begun. In this new world, everything was turned upside down: the old law was cancelled, all the ‘do not’ commandments, including the strong prohibitions against incest, became ‘do’ mitzvahs.
Jacob Frank was born in Podolia in 1726 to a wealthy Jewish Sabbatean family. Around the year 1755 it dawned on Frank that he was the true successor of Shabbetai Zvi. He gathered a sect of believers who were attracted by his charismatic personality. Frank formed a new, improved Sabbatean theology based on radical mystical symbols that were infused with destruction and nihilism. Frank addressed his followers: “I came not to elevate your spirits, but to humiliate you to the bottom of the abyss…” By ‘abyss’ he meant sexual rituals that included sacred orgies with just a touch of incest.
Both Zvi and Frank’s theology, history and influence deserve deeper analysis. I touch upon them briefly to illustrate the dialectic force within Judaism. It was the rebellious Judaic spirit that opposed rabbinical rigidity. It was the detachment from nature, the human body and soil that brought about its counter movement and the obscene theology promulgated by Zvi and Frank. Zvi managed to excite the majority of his contemporaneous Jews. He offered them the opportunity to emancipate themselves from themselves while being themselves.
The revisionist populist messianic Shabbetianism that arose in opposition to rabbinical Judaism’s prudish obsession with sex and gender central didn’t disappear after Jewish secularization and emancipation in the 19th century, quite the opposite. It morphed into a set of authoritarian pseudo scientific discourses.
The ‘Oedipal Complex,’ a notion introduced by Freud, was at least as sick as it was revolutionary. The idea that love between mother and son involves an ‘oedipal complex,’ an erotically driven murderous intent on the infant’s part, is deeply troubling and has never been scientifically verified. Freud’s theoretical attempt to reduce love, intimacy and compassion to mere (sexual) ‘drives’ suggests that Freud and his cult of avid disciples may have had severe deficits on the human side.
Freud didn’t resolve the complex Jewish relationship to sex and gender, he opened a Pandora’s Box, and at least for a while, inflicted his own morbidity on the entire West.
When Wilhelm Reich was ten years old, his parents allegedly hired tutors to prepare him for the gymnasium entrance exams. According to Reich, his mother had an affair with one of his tutors and the young Reich became jealous. Reich later claimed that he briefly thought of blackmailing his mother to have sex with him by threatening to tell his father about the affair. Eventually, Reich confided in his father, who reacted harshly. In 1910, after a protracted period of beatings from his father, his mother committed suicide, a consequence for which Reich blamed himself.
That an influential man such as Wilhelm Reich, one who rightly claimed a major role in the sexual liberation of western women and children, had such a problematic ‘beginning’ interested me and led me to look into the origin of his ‘Oedipal’ confession.
In Being in Time I wrote that the person who brought attention to this disturbing incident was Wilhelm Reich’s biographer, Myron Sharaf, an American psychotherapist and a Harvard academic. Sharaf was a student, patient, and colleague of Reich’s from 1948 to 1954, and his book, Fury on Earth is widely regarded as the definitive biography of Wilhelm Reich.
After reading Sharaf’s account of Reich’s ‘blackmail’ fantasy, I realized that it raised issues far more disturbing than the alleged incest incident (which I doubt actually occurred).
The manner by which the affair came to light is itself rather peculiar. In late 1919 or early 1920, when Reich was about twenty-three and already a practicing analyst within Freud’s circle, Reich wrote his first published article , The Breakthrough of the Incest Taboo in Puberty. In this article, Reich reported on ‘a patient’ who displayed certain ‘Oedipal patterns.’ The ‘patient’ was attracted to his mother, he was jealous of a visiting tutor who slept with his mother so he informed his father about his mother’s affair, his mother was beaten and eventually committed suicide. According to Sharaf, there is little doubt that the ‘patient’ was Reich himself. Many years later Reich “told his elder daughter that the article was a self-analysis.” (Myron Sharaf: Fury on Earth, pg. 40)
This is a disturbing revelation. First, young Reich published a fabricated patient account in a scientific magazine. This alone is enough to discredit him, and there is more. Reich was under the spell of Sigmund Freud when he penned his ‘revelation.’ This suggests that Reich might have fabricated a patient’s story in order to verify or validate his master’s ‘Oedipal complex.’ Were fabricated tales of incest the path to gaining a position within the Freud academic orbit? Scientists and academics attempt to form theories that correspond with reality and facts: Reich, then a member of the cult of Freud, apparently reversed the scientific method, contriving ‘facts’ to correspond with a theory.
In the 1930s when things turned sour for German and Austrian Jews, the Jewish ‘left’ was quick to diagnose what was wrong with ‘the Germans.’ Wilhelm Reich claimed it was their ‘repressed sexuality.’
Reich posited that sexual liberation on a mass scale would save Marxist dogma and the working people as well. In chapter five of The Mass Psychology of Fascism, he declared war on the traditional patriarchal family which he saw as maintaining the core of mass conservatism: “From the standpoint of social development,” Reich wrote, “the family cannot be considered the basis of the authoritarian state, only as one of the most important institutions which support it.” The traditional family is a “central reactionary germ cell, the most important place of reproduction of the reactionary and conservative individual. Being itself caused by the authoritarian system, the family becomes the most important institution for its conservation.”
Reich, a neo-Marxist, found both romanticism and traditional family values obstacles to socialist reform. Reich’s vehicle towards the new world order was ‘orgasm’! In his 1927 study, The Function of the Orgasm, he reached the conclusion that: “there is only one thing wrong with neurotic patients: the lack of full and repeated sexual satisfaction.” In the hands of Reich, the Marx-Freud hybrid led to what some critical cynics dubbed “genital utopia.” And isn’t ‘genital utopia’ a fair description of the universe Weinstein and Epstein built around themselves?
Reich’s ideas evolved and spread rapidly in America and the West. Probably the most prominent proponent of such liberal ideas was the Frankfurt School and its primary star as of 1968, Herbert Marcuse.
Marcuse focused on resolving the Freudian conflict between the Reality Principle (work orientated and leisure-less) and the Pleasure Principle (Eros). According to him, the conflict was between alienated labour and Eros. Sex, he declared, was freely accessible to those in power, namely the capitalists, but was available to workers only when it did not disturb their performance. Marcuse contended that in a proper socialist world we will manage without the labour of the “poor” and without the suppression of sexual drives. He predicted that “non-alienated libidinal work” would replace “alienated labour.” Marcuse’s theories offered a post Marxist interpretation of Reich’s genital utopia.
Of course, both Marcuse and Reich were totally delusional. As we know, sex and sexualization didn’t liberate the working class. It did the opposite. Pornography is a distraction that helps blind the workless class from detecting the root cause of their plight. In reference to Marx’s most misinterpreted adage, I allow myself to say, that at least in the post political era in which we live, “pornography is the actual opium of the people.”
I doubt college dropout Jeffrey Epstein has read Marcuse, Reich, Zvi or Frank but he certainly put Reich-Marcuse’s philosophy into practice. As it now seems, Epstein wasn’t really a ‘financier.’ He hardly engaged in labour in any form and was totally consumed by the ‘pleasure principle.’ According to recent reporting, Epstein was dedicated to Eros except when he was amassing footage of his best friends fiddling with underage girls.
The centrality of prominent Jewish names in the current predatory scandals can’t be denied, but I do not at all contend that predatory behaviour or sexual morbidity is a Jewish trait or even something predominantly Jewish. Instead these incidents are consistent with a Jewish as well as Judaic revolutionary continuum driven by sexual obsession. This continuum includes Zvi, Frank, Freud, Reich, the Frankfurt School, Marcuse and many contemporary gender activists such as Jonathan ‘Jessica’ Yaniv who made the state of his/her hairy testicles into main stream news. This continuum may well also include Epstein, Weinstein and the many other Jewish celebrities implicated in these far too many nasty predatory acts.
Jewishness, as I see it, is a dynamic dialectical morphing spirit. It contains a bold critical attitude that often evolves into a sense of empowerment, grandeur, impunity and narcissism. This self-confidence often produces sensational scientific and social revolutions as well as spectacular artistic achievement. But it can equally help cause global disasters, social-disorder, financial meltdowns, spiritual confusion and spectacular criminal endeavours.
Is Bernie Sanders Planning to Use Climate Catastrophism to Accelerate Agenda 21 and Global Governance?
By Barbara McKenzie | October 10, 2018
Bernie Sanders, who is on the campaign trail, has just released a video, Why Is There a Climate Change “Debate” in Washington?
Bernie Sanders utters one great truth in this broadcast and makes one portentous announcement.
The Great Truth
‘The debate over climate change in Washington really has nothing to do with science.’
The debate on ‘climate change’ never had anything to do with climate change, at least on the part of climate alarmists. The purpose of the narrative was always to fulfill a political agenda, to divert more and more wealth to the already rich and powerful, and to divest more and more power away from nation states and their citizens to the bloated and corrupt United Nations bureaucracy, which is essentially controlled by the rich and powerful.
The global warming idea is a project of the (very) elitist Club of Rome, whose members have included Al Gore, Ted Warner, George Soros, Bill Gates and members of the Rockefeller and Rothschild families. The Club of Rome is the active division of a group of entities serving a globalist agenda, which have played the major part in the establishment of the United Nations, the European Union and NATO. They include the Bilderberg Group, the Committee on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Trilateral Commission (see Robert Galyon Ross on the ‘Elite Conspiracy’).
(Windows on the World, Climate Catastrophobia – The Big Lie)
The global warming project enables further enrichment of the already very wealthy, through the carbon trading scheme (Al Gore was projected to become the first carbon millionaire). However, United Nations publications such as Agenda 21 make it very clear that climate alarmism has another purpose: to enable and justify expansion ofUN bureaucracy, the empowerment of NGOs, inevitably controlled by the globalists, and to control and contain the populace, all in the name of the Earth and the ill-defined ‘sustainability’.
‘The Global Warming debate […] is a concept by the New World Order to justify the dismantling the industrial society and returning the mass of humanity to obedient serfdom.’ (The Great Climate and Global Warming Fraud invented by the Club of Rome)
Bernie Sanders usefully lays out the false, fallacious, or intellectually dishonest arguments for eco-catastrophism.
- ‘99% of scientists agree that climate change is real and man-made and that it is already causing devastating harm.’ Scientists do indeed agree that climate change is real, but careful analysis by Lord Monkton and others has shown that while claims of 97% or 99% of support for the Club of Rome’s alarmist narrative are certainly made, the reality is more like 0.3%.
- ‘The scientific debate is over’: Scientific debate is never over – that’s the thing about science – but moving on
- ‘The real issue is politics’: Yes.
- ‘… and the power of the fossil fuel industry’. Rather than cater to the wealthy and powerful special interests in the fossil fuel industry ….’ Well, no. The empirical evidence shows that wealthy and powerful interests associated with the Club of Rome, such as Ted Warner, the Rockefellers, Rothschilds and Bill Gates, have successfully invested in controlling the climate debate, far beyond anything Big Oil has even attempted.
- ‘A group of internationally renowned scientists, the IPCC ….’ Back in 2007, New Zealander Dr Vincent Gray, a long-time IPCC reviewer, declared that the IPCC was too blinkered and corrupt to save. His assessment has only been confirmed with time, see this from 2014. The latest report has been slammed by top climate scientists who have trashed the methods, findings and claims of the IPCC. The climate data set they used has turned out to be an embarrassment, using freezing tropical islands, boiling towns and boats on land. As regards the scientists themselves, it has been observed that amongst the authors, ‘there are very few of what could be described as “climate scientists, but lots of geographers, energy analysts, economists, sociologists, engineers, sustainability experts and the odd Eco-Psychologist thrown in for good measure, together with considerable UN and World Bank affiliations’.
- ‘We have 12 years […] to stop the worst impacts of climate change’: The UN and climate catastrophists have been giving us points of no return for decades, but all the ridicule in the world makes no difference. Given that the world still has not recovered sufficiently from the Little Ice Age to regreen Greenland, highly fertile back in the Medieval Warm Period, projecting only 12 years to bring the world past that point to dangerously hot seems pessimistic.
- ‘Increase in extreme weather disturbances’: Even the IPCC agrees that there has been no increase in extreme weather events.
- ‘More acidification of the oceans’: Scientists have found that higher Co2 and lowered pH levels (acidification) have little to no effect on ocean-dwelling organisms.
- ‘More rising sea levels‘: Vincent Gray reported in 2007 that in response to Gore’s warnings about the island of Tuvalu sinking below the waves, scientists at Flinders University, Adelaide, were asked to check whether this was true. They set up new, modern, tide-gauges in 12 Pacific islands, including Tuvalu, confident that they would show that all of them are sinking. ‘Recently, the whole project was abandoned as there was no sign of a change in sea level at any of the 12 islands for the past 16 years. In 2006, Tuvalu even rose.’ There was a similar story with the Maldives which have, however, recently built another sea-level airfield. Sanders makes no specific mention of global warming per se – very wise, as warming leveled out around 1998, and in fact the climate appears to be cooling, leading to dire predictions of a new ice-age, so what actually is causing these rising sea levels is unclear.
- ‘Hundreds of millions of people [will be] forced to leave own communities, in order to find the food and water they need to survive:” Given the above, it is not quite clear why.
- ‘We have a President and a Republican leadership who reject science’: Trump’s crime was to say, in answer to the accusation that the climate is changing, ‘it will change back’. Which shows a better grasp of science than almost any other Western politician.
- ‘Trump is a conspiracy theorist’: Trump has said that alarmists have a very big political agenda.
- ‘They do not have a political agenda’: Yes, they do.
The Portentous Announcement: an action plan to address this fictional problem – flagged, not specified
- ‘Unless we take bold and drastic action …’
- ‘The action we need to take has no historic precedent.’
- ‘In the coming months I will be working with fellow senators to bring forth the most sweeping climate change legislation ever introduced in the senate.’
- ‘We need unprecedented legislation …’
Bernie Sanders is clearly in tune with the globalist agenda. Of course the legislation he has in mind here may simply be to raise fuel taxes and build more bird-killing windmills, in which case this is a lot of hype. On the other hand he may be planning moves in accordance with Agendas 21 and 30, to give more power to the UN and NGOs, and to accelerate the Wildlands Project, forcing people increasingly out of the countryside and into the ‘more sustainable’ cities.
Sanders’ sweetener is that renewable energy, he says, creates more jobs than fossil fuel industries, and is actually cheaper, claims which require more analysis to say the least. Even so, Bernie Sanders supporters could be turkeys voting for Christmas.
American Pravda: John McCain, Jeffrey Epstein, and Pizzagate
Our Reigning Political Puppets, Jerked by Invisible Strings
By Ron Unz • Unz Review • July 29, 2019
The death of Sen. John McCain last August revealed some important truths about the nature of our establishment media.
McCain’s family had released word of his incurable brain cancer many months earlier and his passing at age 84 was long expected, so media outlets great and small had possessed all the time necessary for producing and polishing the packages they eventually published, and that was readily apparent from the voluminous nature of the tributes that they ran. The New York Times, still our national newspaper of record, allocated more than three full pages of its printed edition to the primary obituary, and this was supplemented by a considerable number of other articles and sidebars. I cannot recall any political figure other than an American president whose passing had ever received such an enormous wealth of coverage, and perhaps even some former residents of the Oval Office might have fallen short of that standard. Although I certainly didn’t bother reading all of the tens of thousands of words in the Times or my other newspapers, the coverage of McCain’s life and career seemed exceptionally laudatory across the mainstream media, liberal and conservative alike, with scarcely a negative word appearing anywhere outside the political fringe.
On the face of it, such undiluted political love for McCain might seem a bit odd to those who have followed his activities over the last couple of decades. After all, the Times and most of the other leading lights of our media firmament are purportedly liberal and claim to have become vehement critics of our disastrous Iraq War and other military adventures, let alone the calamitous possibility of an attack upon Iran. Meanwhile, McCain was universally regarded as the leading figure in America’s “War Party,” eagerly supporting all prospective and retrospective military endeavors with gleeful fury, and even making his chant of “Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran” the most widely remembered detail of his unsuccessful 2008 presidential campaign. So either our major media outlets somehow overlooked such striking differences on an absolutely central issue, or perhaps their true positions on certain matters are not exactly what they seem to be, and merely constitute elements of a Kabuki-performance aimed at deceiving their more naive readers.
Even more remarkable were the discordant facts airbrushed out of McCain’s history.
As the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and two George Polk awards, the late Sydney Schanberg was widely regarded as one of the greatest American war correspondents of the twentieth century. His exploits during our ill-fated Indo-Chinese War had become the basis of the Oscar-winning film The Killing Fields, which probably established him as the most famous journalist in America after Woodward and Bernstein of Watergate fame, and he had also served as a top editor at The New York Times. A decade ago, he published his greatest expose, providing a mountain of evidence that America had deliberately left behind hundreds of POWs in Vietnam and he fingered then-presidential candidate John McCain as the central figure in the later official cover-up of that monstrous betrayal. The Arizona senator had traded on his national reputation as our best-known former POW to bury the story of those abandoned prisoners, permitting America’s political establishment to escape serious embarrassment. As a result, Sen. McCain earned the lush rewards of our generous ruling elites, much like his own father Admiral John S. McCain, Sr., who had led the cover-up of the deliberate 1967 Israeli attack on the U.S.S. Liberty, which killed or wounded over 200 American servicemen.
As publisher of The American Conservative, I ran Schanberg’s remarkable piece as a cover story, and across several websites over the years it has surely been read many hundreds of thousands of times, including a huge spike around the time of McCain’s death. I therefore find it rather difficult to believe that the many journalists investigating McCain’s background might have remained unaware of this material. Yet not a hint of these facts were provided in any of the articles appearing in any remotely prominent media outlets as can be seen by searching for web pages containing “McCain and Schanberg” dated around the time of the Senator’s passing.
Schanberg’s journalistic stature had hardly been forgotten by his former colleagues. Upon his death a couple of years ago, the Times ran a very long and glowing obituary, and a few months later I attended the memorial tribute to his life and career held at the New York Times headquarters building, which drew a couple of hundred prominent journalists mostly from his same generation, including those of the highest rank. Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. gave a speech describing how as a young man he had always so greatly admired Schanberg and had been mortified by the unfortunate circumstances of his departure from the family’s newspaper. Former Executive Editor Joseph Lelyveld recounted the many years he had worked closely with the man he had long considered his closest friend and colleague, someone whom he almost seemed to regard as his older brother. But during the two hours of praise and remembrance scarcely a single word was uttered in public about the gigantic story that had occupied the last two decades of Schanberg’s celebrated career.
This same blanket of media silence also enveloped the very serious accusations regarding McCain’s own Vietnam War record. A few years ago, I drew upon the Times and other fully mainstream sources to strongly suggest that McCain’s stories of his torture as a POW were probably fictional, invented to serve as a cover and an excuse for the very real record of his wartime collaboration with his Communist captors. Indeed, at the time our American media reported his activities as one of the leading propagandists of our North Vietnamese foes, but these facts were later flushed down the memory-hole. McCain’s father was then ranked as one of America’s top military officers, and it seems likely that his personal political intervention ensured that the official narrative of his son’s wartime record was transmuted from traitor to war-hero, thereby allowing the younger McCain to later embark upon his celebrated political career.
The story of the abandoned Vietnam POWs and McCain’s own Communist propaganda broadcasts hardly exhaust the catalog of the major skeletons in the late Senator’s closet. McCain was regularly described by reporters as being remarkably hot-headed and having a violent temper, but the national press left it to the alternative media to investigate the real-life implications of those rather suggestive phrases.
In a September 1, 2008 Counterpunch expose later published online, Alexander Cockburn reported that interviews with two emergency room physicians in Phoenix revealed that around the time that McCain was sucked into the political maelstrom of the Keating Five Scandal, his wife Cindy was admitted to her local hospital suffering from a black eye, facial bruises, and scratches consistent with physical violence, and this same situation occurred two additional times over the next few years. Cockburn also noted several other highly suspicious marital incidents during the years that followed, including the Senator’s wife appearing with a bandaged wrist and her arm in a sling not long after she joined her husband on the 2008 campaign trail, an injury reported by our strangely incurious political journalists as being due to “excessive hand-shaking.” It’s an odd situation when a tiny leftist newsletter can easily uncover facts that so totally eluded the vast resources of our entire national press corps. If there were credible reports that Melania Trump had been repeatedly admitted to local emergency rooms suffering from black eyes and facial bruises, would our corporate media have remained so uninterested in any further investigation?
McCain had first won his Arizona Congressional seat in 1982, not long after he moved into the state, with his campaign bankrolled by his father-in-law’s beer-distributorship fortune, and that inheritance eventually elevated the McCain household into one of the wealthiest in the Senate. But although the Senator spent the next quarter-century in public life, even nearly upsetting George W. Bush for the 2000 Republican presidential nomination, only in late 2008 did I learn from the Times that the Phoenix beer-monopoly in question, then valued at around $200 million, had accrued to a man whose lifelong business partner Kemper Marley had long been deeply linked to organized crime. Indeed, close associates of that latter individual had been convicted by a jury of the car-bomb assassination of a Phoenix investigative crime reporter just a few years before McCain’s sudden triumphal entrance into Arizona politics. Perhaps such guilt-by-association is improper, but would our national press-corps have remained silent if the personal fortune of our current president were only a step or two removed from the car-bomb assassins of a nosy journalist who died while investigating mobsters.
As I gradually became aware of these enormities casually hidden in McCain’s background, my initial reaction was disbelief that someone whose record was so deeply tarnished in so many different ways could ever have reached such a pinnacle of American political power. But as the media continued to avert its eyes from these newly revealed facts, even those disclosed in the pages of the Times itself, I gradually began to consider matters in a different light. Perhaps McCain’s elevation to great American political power was not in spite of the devastating facts littering his personal past, but because of them. As I wrote a few years ago:
Today when we consider the major countries of the world we see that in many cases the official leaders are also the leaders in actuality: Vladimir Putin calls the shots in Russia, Xi Jinping and his top Politburo colleagues do the same in China, and so forth. However, in America and in some other Western countries, this seems to be less and less the case, with top national figures merely being attractive front-men selected for their popular appeal and their political malleability, a development that may eventually have dire consequences for the nations they lead. As an extreme example, a drunken Boris Yeltsin freely allowed the looting of Russia’s entire national wealth by the handful of oligarchs who pulled his strings, and the result was the total impoverishment of the Russian people and a demographic collapse almost unprecedented in modern peacetime history.
An obvious problem with installing puppet rulers is the risk that they will attempt to cut their strings, much like Putin soon outmaneuvered and exiled his oligarch patron Boris Berezovsky. One means of minimizing such risk is to select puppets who are so deeply compromised that they can never break free, knowing that the political self-destruct charges buried deep within their pasts could easily be triggered if they sought independence. I have sometimes joked with my friends that perhaps the best career move for an ambitious young politician would be to secretly commit some monstrous crime and then make sure that the hard evidence of his guilt ended up in the hands of certain powerful people, thereby assuring his rapid political rise.
In physics, when an object deviates from its expected trajectory for inexplicable reasons, we assume that some unknown force has been at work, and tracing the record of such deviations may help to determine the characteristic properties of the latter. Over the years, I’ve increasingly become aware of such strange ideological deviations in public policy, and although some are readily explained, others suggest the existence of hidden forces far beneath the surface of our regular political world. This same situation may have occurred throughout our history, and sometimes the political decisions that so baffled contemporaries eventually came to light decades later.
In The Dark Side of Camelot, famed investigative reporter Seymour Hersh claimed that secret blackmail evidence of JFK’s extra-marital affairs probably played a crucial role in having his administration overrule the unanimous verdict of all top Pentagon advisors and award the largest military procurement contract in U.S. history to General Dynamics instead of Boeing, thereby saving the former company from likely bankruptcy and its major organized-crime shareholders from devastating financial losses. Hersh also suggests that a similar factor likely explains JFK’s last-minute reversal in the choice of his Vice President, a decision that landed Lyndon Johnson on the 1960 ticket and placed him in the White House after Kennedy’s 1963 assassination.
As I recently mentioned, in the 1950s Sen. Estes Kefauver shifted the focus of his Organized Crime Hearings after the Chicago Syndicate confronted him with the photographs of his sexual encounter with two mob-supplied women. A decade later, California Attorney-General Stanley Mosk suffered much the same fate, with the facts remaining hidden for over twenty years.
Similar rumors swirl around events much farther back in history as well, sometimes with enormous consequences. Well-placed contemporary sources have claimed that Samuel Untermyer, a wealthy Jewish lawyer, purchased the secret correspondence between Woodrow Wilson and his longtime mistress, and that the existence of that powerful leverage may have been an important factor behind Wilson’s astonishingly rapid rise from president of Princeton in 1910 to governor of New Jersey in 1911 to president of the United States in 1912. Once in office, Wilson signed the controversial legislation establishing the Federal Reserve system in 1913 and also named Louis Brandeis as the first Jewish member of the U.S. Supreme Court despite the public opposition of nearly our entire legal establishment. Wilson’s swiftly changing views on American involvement in the First World War may also have been influenced by such personal pressures rather than solely determined by his perceptions of the national interest.
Without naming any names, since 2001 it has been difficult to avoid noticing that one of the most zealous and committed supporters of the Neocon party-line on all Middle Eastern foreign policy matters has been a leading Republican senator from one of the most socially-conservative Southern states, a man whose rumored personal inclinations have long circulated on the Internet. The strikingly-sudden reversal of this individual on a major policy question certainly supports these suspicions. There have also been several other such examples involving prominent Republicans.
But consider the far different situation of Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts, who in 1987 became the first member of the Congress to voluntarily admit that he was gay. Not long afterward, a notorious scandal erupted when it was revealed that his own DC townhouse had been used by a former boyfriend as headquarters for a male-prostitution ring. Frank claimed to have had no knowledge of that sordid situation, and his liberal Massachusetts constituents apparently accepted that, since he was resoundingly reelected and went on to serve another 24 years in Congress. But surely if Frank had been a Republican from a socially-conservative district, anyone possessing such evidence would have totally controlled his political survival, and with Frank spending several years as Chairman of the very powerful House Financial Services Committee, the value of such a powerful hold would have been enormous.
This demonstrates the undeniable reality that what constitutes effective blackmail material may vary tremendously across different eras and regions. Today, it is widely accepted that longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover lived his life as a deeply-closeted homosexual and there seem to be serious claims that he also had some black ancestry, with the secret evidence of these facts probably helping to explain why for decades he stubbornly refused to admit the existence of American organized crime or focus his G-men on efforts to uproot it. But in today’s America, he would surely have proudly declared his sexuality and racial ancestry in an New York Times Magazine cover-story, rightly believing that they would have enhanced his political invulnerability on the national stage. There are lurid rumors that the Syndicate possessed secret photos of Hoover wearing a dress and high-heels, but just a few years ago Rep. Mike Honda of San Jose desperately placed his eight-year-old transgendered grand-daughter front-and-center in his unsuccessful attempt to win reelection.
The decades have certainly softened the effectiveness of many forms of blackmail, but pedophilia still ranks as an extremely powerful taboo. There seems to be a great deal of evidence that powerful organizations and individuals have successfully managed to suppress credible accusations of that practice for very long periods of time so long as no group with substantial media influence had chosen to target the offenders for unmasking.
The most obvious example is the Catholic Church, and the failings of its American and international hierarchy in that regard have regularly made the front pages of our leading newspapers. But until the early 2000s and the breakthrough reporting of the Boston Globe as recounted in the Oscar-winning film Spotlight, the Church had routinely fended off such scandals.
Consider also the remarkable case of British television personality Sir Jimmy Savile, one of his country’s most admired celebrities, eventually knighted for his public service. Only shortly after his death at age 84 did the press begin revealing that he had probably molested many hundreds of children during his long career. Accusations by his young victims had stretched back across forty years, but his criminal activities had seemingly been protected by his wealth and celebrity, along with his numerous supporters in the media.
There is also the intriguing example of Dennis Hastert. As the longest serving Republican Speaker of the House in U.S. history, holding office during 1999-2007, Hastert was third in line to the Presidency and even ranked as our nation’s top Republican elected official during some of that period. Based upon my newspaper readings, he had always struck me as a rather bland and ordinary individual, with journalists sometimes even strongly hinting at his mediocrity, so that I occasionally wondered just how someone so unimpressive could have risen to such extremely high national office.
Then a few years ago, he was suddenly thrust back into the headlines, arrested by the FBI and charged with financial crimes relating to what apparently had been his past history of abusing young boys, at least one of whom had committed suicide, with the federal judge who sent him to prison denouncing him as “a serial child molester” at sentencing. Perhaps I’ve led an overly sheltered life, but my impression is that only a tiny sliver of Americans have had a long record of child molestation, and all things being equal, it seems rather unlikely that someone of such a background but who possesses no other great talents or skills would rise to near the absolute top of our political heap. So perhaps not all things were otherwise equal. If some powerful elements possessed the hard evidence that placed a particular elected official under their total control, working very hard to elevate him to Speaker of the House would be a very shrewd investment.
At times the unwillingness of our national media to see major stories in front of their very noses reaches ridiculous extremes. During the summer of 2007, the Internet was ablaze with claims that Sen. John Edwards, a runner-up in the 2004 Democratic presidential primaries, had just fathered a child with his mistress, and those reports were backed by seemingly-credible visual evidence, including photos showing the married senator holding his new-born baby. Yet as the days and even the weeks went by, not a whiff of this salacious scandal ever reached the pages of any of my morning newspapers or the rest of the mainstream media although it was a top conversation topic everywhere else. Eventually, the National Enquirer, a notorious gossip tabloid, scored a journalistic first, receiving a Pulitzer Prize nomination for breaking the story that no other outlet seemed willing to cover. Would our media have similarly averted its eyes from a newborn baby Trump coming from the wrong side of the bed?
Over the years, it became increasingly obvious to me that nearly all elements of our national media were often quite willing to enlist in a “conspiracy of silence” to minimize or entirely ignore stories of tremendous potential interest to their readership and major public importance. I could easily have doubled or tripled the number of such notable examples I provided above without much effort. Moreover, it is quite intriguing that so many of these cases involve the sort of criminal or sexual misbehavior that would be ideally suited for blackmailing powerful individuals who are less likely to be vulnerable to other influences. So perhaps many of the elected officials situated at the top of our democratic system merely reign as political puppets, jerked by invisible strings.
Given my awareness of this remarkable track-record of major media cover-ups, I’m ashamed to admit that I had paid almost no attention to the Jeffrey Epstein case until it exploded across our national headlines earlier this month, suddenly becoming one of the biggest news stories in our country.
For many years, reports about Epstein and his illegal sex-ring had regularly circulated on the fringes of the Internet, with agitated commenters citing the case as proof of the dark and malevolent forces that secretly controlled our corrupted political system. But I almost entirely ignored these discussions, and I’m not sure that I ever once clicked on a single link.
Probably one reason I paid so little attention to the topic was the exceptionally lurid nature of the claims being made. Epstein was supposedly an enormously wealthy Wall Street financier of rather mysterious personal background and source of funds, who owned a private island and an immense New York City mansion, both regularly stocked with harems of underage girls provided for sexual purposes. He allegedly hobnobbed on a regular basis with Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew, Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz, and numerous other figures in the international elite, as well as a gaggle of ordinary billionaires, frequently transporting those individuals on his personal jet known as “the Lolita Express” for the role it played in facilitating illegal secret orgies with young girls. When right-wing bloggers on obscure websites claimed that former President Clinton and the British Royals were being sexually serviced by the underage girls of a James Bond super-villain brought to life, I just assumed those accusations were the wildest sort of Internet exaggeration.
Moreover, these angry writers did occasionally let slip that the fiendish target of their wrath had already been charged in a Florida courtroom, eventually pleading guilty to a single sexual offense and receiving a thirteen month jail sentence, mitigated by very generous work-release provisions. This hardly seemed like the sort of judicial punishment that would lend credence to the fantastical accusations against him. If Epstein had already been investigated by law enforcement authorities and given the sort of sentence one might expect for writing a bad check, I found it quite unlikely that he was actually the Goldfinger or Dr. No that deluded Internet activists made him out to be.
Then these same wild, implausible claims previously found only on anonymous comment-threads were suddenly repeated as solid fact on the front pages of the Times and all my other morning newspapers, and the former federal prosecutor who had signed off on Epstein’s legal slap-on-the-wrist was forced to resign from the Trump Cabinet. Epstein’s safe had been found to contain a huge cache of child-pornography and other highly suspicious material, and he was quickly rearrested on charges that could send him to federal prison for decades. Prestigious media outlets described Epstein as the mastermind of a huge sex-trafficking ring, and numerous underage victims began coming forward, telling their stories of how he had molested, raped, and pimped them. The author of a long 2003 Epstein profile that had appeared in Vanity Fair explained that she had personally spoken to some of his victims and included their highly-credible accounts in her article, but that those portions had been censored and removed by her timorous editors.
As presented by these media outlets, Epstein’s personal rise also seemed rather inexplicable unless he had benefited from some powerful network or similar organization. Lacking any college degree or credentials, he had somehow gotten a job teaching at one of New York City’s most elite prep schools, then quickly jumped to working at a top investment bank, rising to become partner with astonishing speed until he was fired a few years later for illegal activity. Despite such a scanty and doubtful record, he was soon managing money for some of America’s wealthiest individuals, and keeping so much of it for himself that he was regularly described as a billionaire. According to newspaper accounts, his great specialty was “making connections for people.”
Obviously, Epstein was a ruthlessly opportunistic financial hustler. But extremely wealthy individuals must surely be surrounded by great swarms of ruthlessly opportunistic financial hustlers, and why would he have been so much more successful than all those others? Perhaps a clue comes from the offhand remark of Epstein’s now-disgraced prosecutor, saying that he had been told to go very easy on the sex-trafficker because he “belonged to intelligence.” The vague phrasing of that statement raises questions about whether the intelligence service may not have been one controlled by the U.S. government.
Philip Giraldi, a highly-regarded former CIA officer, put things very plainly when he suggested that Epstein had probably been working for the Israeli Mossad, operating “honey traps” to obtain blackmail information on all the wealthy and powerful individuals whom he regularly plied with underage girls. Indeed, longtime Canadian journalist Eric Margolis recounted his early 1990s visit to Epstein’s enormous NYC mansion, in which he had barely crossed the threshold before he was offered an “intimate massage” by one of the many young girls there, presumably in a bedroom well-stocked with hidden cameras.
Given my personal lack of interest in the Epstein case, then or now, perhaps a few of these details may be garbled, but it seems undeniable that he was exactly the sort of remarkable renegade typically faced by Agent 007 of the movies, and the true facts will presumably come out at his trial. Or perhaps not. Whether he lives to see trial is not entirely clear given the considerable number of powerful individuals who might prefer that hidden facts remain hidden, and the Friday newspapers reported that Epstein had been found injured and unconscious in his prison cell.
When one seemingly implausible pedophilia scandal has suddenly jumped from obscure corners of the Internet to the front pages of our leading newspapers, we must naturally begin to wonder whether others might not eventually do the same. And a very likely candidate comes to mind, one that seemed to me far better documented than the vague accusations being thrown about over the last few years against a wealthy financier given a thirteen-month jail sentence in Florida a decade earlier.
I don’t use Social Media myself, but near the end of the 2016 presidential campaign, I gradually began seeing more and more Trump supporters referring to something called “Pizzagate,” a burgeoning sexual scandal that they claimed would bring down Hillary Clinton and many of the top leaders of her party, with the chatter actually increasing after Trump was elected. As near as I could tell, the whole bizarre theory had grown up on the far-right fringe of the Internet, with the utterly fantastical plot having something to do with stolen secret emails, DC pizza parlors, and a ring of pedophiles situated near the top of the Democratic Party. But given all the other strange and unlikely things I’d gradually discovered about our history, it didn’t seem like something I could necessarily dismiss out of hand.
At the beginning of December, a right-wing blogger produced a lengthy exposition of the Pizzagate charges, which finally gave me some understanding of what was actually under discussion, and I soon made arrangements to republish his article. It quickly attracted a great deal of interest, and some websites pointed to it as the best single introduction to the scandal for a general audience.
A couple of weeks later, I republished an additional article by the same writer, describing a long list of previous pedophilia scandals that had occurred in elite American and European political circles. Although many of these seemed to be solidly documented, nearly all of them had received minimal coverage by our mainstream media outlets. And if such political pedophile rings had existed in the relatively recent past, was it so totally implausible that there might be another one simmering beneath the surface of today’s Washington DC?
Those interested in the details of the Pizzagate Hypothesis are advised to read these articles, especially the first one, but I might was well provide a brief summary.
John Podesta had been a longtime fixture in DC political circles, becoming chief of staff to President Bill Clinton in 1998, and afterward remaining one of the most powerful figures in the Democratic Party establishment. While serving as as chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, his apparent carelessness with the password security of his Gmail account allowed it to easily be hacked, and tens of thousands of his personal emails were soon published on WikiLeaks. A swarm of young anti-Clinton activists began scouring this treasure-trove of semi-confidential information, seeking evidence of mundane bribery and corruption, but instead they came across some quite odd exchanges, seemingly written in coded language.
Now use of coded language in a supposedly secure private email account raises all sorts of natural suspicions regarding what might have been under discussion, with the most likely possibilities being illegal drugs or sex. But most of the references didn’t seem to fit the former category, and in our remarkably libertine era, in which political candidates compete for the right to be Grand Marshal at an annual Gay Pride Parade, one of the few sexual activities still discussed only in whispers would seem to be pedophilia, with some of the very strange remarks possibly hinting at this.
The researchers also soon discovered that his brother Tony Podesta, one of the wealthiest and most successful lobbyists in DC, had extremely odd taste in art. Major items of his very extensive personal collection seemed to represent tortured or murdered bodies, and one of his favorite artists was best known for paintings depicting young children being held captive, lying dead, or suffering under severe distress. Such peculiar artwork obviously isn’t illegal, but it might naturally arouse some suspicions. And oddly enough, arch-Democrat Podesta had long been a close personal friend of former Republican Speaker and convicted child-molester Dennis Hastert, welcoming him back into DC society after his release from prison.
Furthermore, some of the rather suspiciously-worded Podesta emails referred to events held at a local DC pizza parlor, greatly favored by the Democratic Party elite, whose owner was the gay former boyfriend of David Brock, a leading Democratic activist. The public Instagram account of that pizza-entrepreneur apparently contained numerous images of young children, sometimes tied or bound, with those images frequently labeled by hashtags using the traditional gay slang for underage sexual targets. Some photos showed the fellow wearing a tee-shirt bearing the statement “I Love Children” in French, and by a very odd coincidence, his possibly assumed name was phonetically identical to that very same French phrase, thus proclaiming to the world that he was “a lover of children.” Closely connected Instagram accounts also included pictures of young children, sometimes shown amid piles of high-value currency, with queries about how much those particular children might be worth. None of this seemed illegal, but surely any reasonable person would regard the material as extremely suspicious.
DC is sometimes described as “Powertown,” being the seat of the individuals who make America’s laws and govern our society, with local political journalists being closely attuned to the relative status of such individuals. And oddly enough, GQ Magazine had ranked that gay pizza parlor owner with a strange focus on young children as being one of the 50 most powerful people in our national capital, placing him far ahead of many Cabinet members, Senators, Congressional Chairmen, Supreme Court justices, and top lobbyists. Was his pizza really that delicious?
These few paragraphs provide merely a sliver of the large quantity of highly-suspicious material surrounding various powerful figures at the apex of the DC political world. A vast cloud of billowing smoke is certainly no proof of any fire, but only a fool would completely ignore it without attempting further investigation.
I usually regard videos as a poor means of imparting serious information, far less effective and meaningful than the simple printed word. But the overwhelming bulk of the evidence supporting the Pizzagate Hypothesis consists of visual images and screen shots, and these are naturally suited to a video presentation.
Some of the best summaries of the Pizzagate case were produced by a young British YouTuber named Tara McCarthy, whose work was published under the name of “Reality Calls,” and her videos were viewed hundreds of thousands of times. Although her channel was eventually banned and her videos purged, copies were later reloaded to other accounts, both on YouTube and BitChute. Some of the evidence she presents seemed rather innocuous or speculative to me and other elements were probably based upon her unfamiliarity with American society and culture. But a great deal of extremely suspicious material remains, and I would suggest that people watch the videos and decide for themselves.
See also instagram video at Unz Review [disturbing]
Around the same time that I first became familiar with the details of the Pizzagate controversy, the topic also started reaching the pages of my morning newspapers, but in an rather strange manner. Political stories began giving a sentence or two to the “Pizzagate hoax,” describing it as a ridiculous right-wing “conspiracy theory” but excluding all relevant details. I had an eerie feeling that some unseen hand had suddenly flipped a switch and caused the entire mainstream media to begin displaying identical signs reading “Pizzagate Is False—Nothing To See There!” in brightly flashing neon. I couldn’t recall any previous example of such a strange media reaction to some obscure controversy on the Internet.
Articles in the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times also suddenly appeared denouncing the entirety of the alternative media—Left, Right, and Libertarian—as “fake news” websites promoting Russian propaganda, while urging that their content be blocked by all patriotic Internet giants such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google. Prior to that moment, I’d never even heard the term “fake news” but suddenly it was ubiquitous across the media, once again almost as if some unseen hand had suddenly flipped a switch.
I naturally began to wonder whether the timing of these two strange developments was entirely coincidental. Perhaps Pizzagate was indeed true and struck so deeply at the core of our hugely corrupted political system that the media efforts to suppress it were approaching the point of hysteria.
Not long afterward, Tara McCarthy’s fine Pizzagate videos were purged from YouTube. This was among the very first instances of video content being banned despite fully conforming to all existing YouTube guidelines, another deeply suspicious development.
I also noticed that mere mention of Pizzagate had become politically lethal. Donald Trump had selected Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, as his National Security Advisor, and Flynn’s son served as the latter’s chief of staff. The younger Flynn happened to Tweet out a couple of links to Pizzagate stories, pointing out that the accusations hadn’t yet been actually investigated let alone disproven, and very soon afterward, he was purged from the Trump transition team, foreshadowing his father’s fall a few weeks later. It seemed astonishing to me that a few simple Tweets about an Internet controversy could have such huge real-life impact near the top of our government.
The media continued its uniform drumbeat of “Pizzagate Has Been Disproven!” but we were never explained how or by whom, and I was not the only individual to notice the hollowness of such denunciations. An award-winning investigative journalist named Ben Swann at a CBS station in Atlanta broadcast a short television segment summarizing the Pizzagate controversy and noting that contrary to widespread media claims, Pizzagate had neither been investigated nor debunked. Swann was almost immediately purged by CBS but a copy of his television segment remains available for viewing on the Internet.
There is an old wartime proverb that enemy flak is always heaviest over the most important target, and the remarkably ferocious wave of attacks and censorship against anyone broaching the subject of Pizzagate seems to raise all sorts of dark suspicions. Indeed, the simultaneous waves of attacks against all alternative media outlets as “Russian propaganda outlets” laid the basis for the continuing regime of Social Media censorship that has become a central aspect of today’s world.
Pizzagate may or may not turn out to be true, but the ongoing Internet crackdown has similarly engulfed topics of a somewhat similar nature but with vastly stronger documentation. Although I don’t use Twitter myself, I encountered the obvious implications of this new censorship policy following McCain’s death last August. The senator had died on a Saturday afternoon, and readership of Sydney Schanberg’s long 2008 expose quickly exploded, with numerous individuals Tweeting out the story and a large fraction of our incoming traffic therefore coming from Twitter. This continued until the following morning, at which point the huge flood of Tweets continued to grow, but all incoming Twitter traffic suddenly and permanently vanished, presumably because “shadow banning” had rendered all such Tweets invisible. My own article on McCain’s very doubtful war record simultaneously suffered the same fate, as did numerous other articles of a controversial nature that we published later that same week.
Perhaps that censorship decision was made by some ignorant young intern at Twitter, casually choosing to ban as “hate speech” or “fake news” a massively-documented 8,400 word expose by one of America’s most distinguished journalists, a Pulitzer-prize winning former top editor at The New York Times.
Or perhaps certain political-puppeteers who had spent decades controlling that late Arizona senator sought to ensure that their political puppet-strings remained invisible even after his death.
Related Reading:
- John McCain and the POW Cover-Up by Sydney Schanberg
- John McCain: When “Tokyo Rose” Ran for President
- Pizzagate by Aedon Cassiel
- What We Know About Pizzagate So Far by Tara McCarthy
- Precedents for Pizzagate by Aedon Cassiel
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New Book
The Vaccine Mafia: Pfizer’s Former Chief Toxicologist Proves How Toxic Substances Were Unlawfully Sold to Us as a Solution for COVID-19
By Helmut Sterz
Former Pfizer chief toxicologist Helmut Sterz presents a critical examination of the development, approval, and global rollout of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines—particularly those produced by Pfizer/BioNTech. The Vaccine Mafia details the failure of pharmaceutical companies, regulatory authorities, politicians, and international organizations to follow established scientific and ethical standards during the pandemic. Drawing on the author’s decades of experience in pharmaceutical toxicology, Sterz reveals the many ways the vaccines’ inadequate or omitted preclinical safety testing put the world’s population at risk.
Sterz demonstrates how “emergency” approvals allowed manufacturers to bypass long-standing international guidelines governing toxicity testing, especially with regard to reproductive and cancer risks. They also allowed governments and health authorities to ignore or conceal evidence of serious adverse effects that occurred, including myocarditis, reproductive harm, and other long-term health risks.
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- New Study: The Net Fossil Fuel Contribution To Rising Atmospheric CO2 Has Been Zero For 500 Years
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