How the U.S. Navy Sold the Vietnam War
Dr. Tom Dooley. (YouTube screen shot)
By Gareth Porter | TruthDig | March 27, 2019
Dr. Tom Dooley, whose best-selling book “Deliver Us From Evil” helped create a favorable climate of opinion for U.S. intervention in South Vietnam, has long been linked to legendary CIA officer Edward G. Lansdale and his black operations in Vietnam between 1954 and 1955. But the real story about Dooley’s influential book, which has finally emerged from more recent scholarly research, is that it was engineered by an official of the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Command, Capt. William Lederer.
Lederer is best known as the co-author, with Eugene Burdick, of the 1958 novel “The Ugly American,” which was turned into a 1963 movie starring Marlon Brando. Far more important, however, is the fact that from 1951 through 1957 Capt. Lederer was on the staff of the commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet (CINCPAC), Adm. Felix Stump.
The Pacific Command was intensely interested in Dooley, because the U.S. Navy had the greatest stake of all the military services in the outcome of the conflict between the communists and U.S.-backed anti-communist regimes in Vietnam and China during the mid-1950s. And the Pacific Command was directly involved in the military planning for war in both cases.
Adm. Arthur Radford, the former CINCPAC and then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, led the senior officials pressing President Dwight D. Eisenhower to approve a massive U.S. airstrike against the Viet Minh at Dien Bien Phu in April 1954. And between 1954 and 1955, Adm. Stump called for increasing the size of the Nationalist Chinese raids on the Chinese mainland from offshore islands. He also pushed for a U.S. attack on the mainland, including the use of nuclear weapons, if necessary, to defend those same offshore islands.
Capt. Lederer met Dooley in Haiphong, Vietnam, in 1954 after the Navy launched “Operation Passage to Freedom” to help transport more than 300,000 Vietnamese civilians, soldiers and members of the French Army from the French-controlled North to Saigon. A CIA psychological warfare team led by Lansdale had slipped into Hanoi and Haiphong to sabotage the Ho Chi Minh government takeover and to spread propaganda to provoke fear among Catholics and other residents.
The key tactic of the Lansdale team was to print a series of “black propaganda” leaflets—designed to appear as though they came from the Viet Minh—to frighten residents of the North into leaving for South Vietnam. The most dramatic such deception involved spreading the rumor that the U.S. military was going to bomb Hanoi, a story that was further promoted by leaflets showing concentric circles of destruction of the city by an atomic bomb.
Lt. Tom Dooley, a young Irish Catholic Navy doctor, was “loaned” by the U.S. Navy to Lansdale for the operation, although Dooley apparently thought the team’s function was to gather intelligence. Dooley’s job was ostensibly to manage medical supplies needed for the movement of North Vietnamese to the South, but in fact Dooley functioned as the team’s propagandist, briefing visiting news media and sending out out reports through Catholic media in the United States that supported the CIA’s anti-Viet Minh mission.
Lederer quickly recognized Dooley as a potentially valuable propaganda asset because of his connection with Vietnamese Catholics and his penchant for telling tales of Viet Minh atrocities. It was Lederer who suggested that Dooley write a book about his experiences with North Vietnamese refugees who wanted to move to the South. The Navy gave him a leave of absence to write it, and Lederer became Dooley’s handler for the project. Dooley was a charismatic public speaker but needed Lederer’s help with writing. Lederer also introduced Dooley to Reader’s Digest—by far the most popular magazine in America, with 20 million readers. Chief of Naval Operations Arleigh Burke officially embraced the book and even wrote the introduction to it.
Reader’s Digest published a highly condensed 27-page version of the book in its April 1956 edition, and Farrar, Straus and Cudahy immediately published the full-length version. It became a runaway bestseller, going through twelve printings.
The constantly reiterated theme of Dooley’s book “Deliver Us From Evil” was that the Ho Chi Minh government was determined to suppress the Catholic faith in Vietnam and used torture and other atrocities to terrorize Catholics into submission. That was a grotesque distortion of actual Viet Minh policy. The Ho Chi Minh government had worked hard from the beginning of the war to ensure that there was no interference with Catholics’ exercise of their faith, even establishing severe legal penalties on any infringement of that freedom.
But Dooley’s book was full of lurid descriptions of North Vietnamese Communist atrocities against Catholics that Dooley claimed to have known about from treating the victims. It told of the Viet Minh having partially torn off the ears of several teenagers with pliers and left them dangling—supposedly as punishment for their having listened to the Lord’s Prayer.
And he described the Viet Minh taking seven youths out of their classroom and forcing wooden chopsticks through their eardrums. The children, he wrote, had been accused of “treason” for having attended a religious class at night. As for the teacher, Dooley claimed the Viet Minh had used pliers to pull out his tongue, as punishment for having taught the religious class.
But it was widely recognized within the U.S. government that these stories were false. Six U.S. Information Agency officials who had been in North Vietnam during that period, as well as former Navy corpsmen who had worked in the Haiphong camp with Dooley, all said they had never heard of any such events. And in 1992 Lederer himself, who had made 25 fact-finding trips to Vietnam since 1951, told an interviewer, “[T]hose things never happened. … I traveled all over the country and never saw anything like them.”
Many years later, in an interview with scholar Edward Palm, Lederer disclaimed any significant influence on the content or tone of Dooley’s book, even though Dooley had credited Lederer with helping put the book in final form. Lederer also told Palm he didn’t remember any such stories appearing in the first draft of the book he read.
But Palm, who obtained the first draft of the manuscript from Dooley’s papers, confirmed to this writer that the first draft did contain those stories of atrocities. And Palm’s monograph documented the fact that the last draft chapter was dated the end of July 1955 and that communications from both men at the time indicated that Lederer had met repeatedly with Dooley during June and July to help him finish the draft.
Palm also quoted from Dooley’s first draft to show that it concluded with a call for Americans to be ready for a U.S. war against communism. If negotiations with the Soviet Union failed to bring “lasting peace,” Dooley’s draft warned, “Communism will have to be fought with arms … it must be annihilated….” Dooley concluded, “[T]here can be no concessions, no compromise and no coexistence.”
Palm pointed out that the published version of the book dropped that rabidly warlike rhetoric and instead introduced a new character named “Ensign Potts” to represent the view that America must be ready to fight a war to destroy communism. The role of the “Potts” character was to be converted to Dooley’s argument that service to the ordinary Vietnamese would be the most effective way to prevail in the Cold War—after Dooley’s tearful recounting of the story of the Viet Minh puncturing the Catholic youths’ ears with chopsticks, reduced “Potts” to tears as well.
Lederer and Burdick popularized the idea that personal kindness to the people of Southeast Asia from American could help defeat Communism in “The Ugly American” and that same idea infused Lederer’s own March 1955 Reader’s Digest article on the interactions between U.S. sailors and Vietnamese aboard a U.S. Navy ship. Lederer told Palm in a 1996 interview that he had suggested that Dooley model his book on that article.
Palm wrote that he didn’t believes Lederer’s personal preference was to promote a U.S. war in Vietnam. But Lederer had obviously approved Dooley’s portrayal of the Vietnamese Communists as an alien horde terrorizing the Catholics. Catholics were the fastest-growing religious denomination in America from 1940 to 1960, during which time their numbers doubled, and Dooley’s message was an obvious way of mobilizing American Catholics to support Adm. Stump and the Navy’s agenda for Vietnam.
Marine Lt. Col. William Corson, who was detailed to the CIA during much of his career and knew Dooley during the writing of his book, told fellow former Marine Edward Palm in a 1997 telephone interview, “Dooley was programmed toward a particular end.” He did not say specifically what that end was, but he appeared to mean building popular support for U.S. intervention in Vietnam.
While on a nationwide book tour, Dooley was one of the featured speakers at the first conference of The American Friends of Vietnam—later known as the “Vietnam Lobby”—in Washington, D.C., on June 1, 1956. The meeting was held at a crucial moment in U.S. Vietnam policy. Eisenhower was still supporting the election for a government throughout Vietnam as called for by the 1954 Geneva Agreement, with strict conditions for a free vote. Meanwhile, hardliners in the administration were pushing for opposing that election outright on the ground that Ho Chi Minh would certainly win it, regardless of conditions.
Dooley’s contribution was to describe “Communism” as an “evil, driving, malicious ogre” and recount the “hideous atrocities that we witnessed in our camps every single day.” And he retold the story of the Viet Minh punishing the schoolchildren by puncturing their eardrums.
A few weeks after the meeting, Eisenhower reversed his previous position of supporting the all-Vietnamese Vietnamese, opening the path to deeper U.S. political and military intervention in Vietnam.
Dooley had just learned that his secret life as a gay man in the Navy had been discovered by Naval intelligence, and he was forced to quietly resign. At Lansdale’s suggestion, Leo Cherne of the International Rescue Committee helped Dooley establish a primitive medical clinic near the Chinese border in northern Laos. But Dooley had to agree to cooperate with CIA in Laos by allowing it to smuggle arms into the site of the clinic to eventually be distributed to local anti-Communist militiamen.
The Dooley Clinic in Laos helped make him a hugely popular celebrity, with two more best-selling books, feature stories in popular magazines and network television appearances. By the time Dooley died of cancer in 1961, a Gallup Poll found that Americans viewed him as the third most admired person in the world, after Eisenhower and the pope. But his role in the larger tragedy of U.S. war in Indochina was to serve as the instrument of a highly successful campaign by the U.S. Navy to create the first false propaganda narrative of the conflict—one that has endured for most of Dooley’s fans for decades.
But Dooley’s popularity and saintly image increased the power of his tales of Viet Minh atrocities against Catholics that represented the first major false U.S. propaganda narrative of the Vietnam conflict—one that helped build public support for the U.S. military intervention in Vietnam that began under President John F Kennedy in 1962.
Gradually Re-establishing Historical Truth about Jeju Uprising
By Konstantin Asmolov – New Eastern Outlook – 14.04.2019
On 3 April, 2019 a commemoration ceremony to honor victims of a bloody suppression by government forces of the people’s uprising in 1948-1954 was held on the island of Jeju. More than 10,000 people, including representatives of the government and the National Assembly, revolt participants and offspring of the victims of its clampdown, took part in the memorial. South Korea’s Prime Minister, Lee Nak-yeon, gave a speech at the ceremony. He proposed to honor the memory of all those lost and expressed his deepest condolences to their families. The minister also referred to the incident in Jeju as the worst event in South Korea’s modern history. Lee Nak-yeon emphasized that Moon Jae-in’s administration has undertaken the monumental task of uncovering the truth behind the Jeju massacre, and of restoring the victims’ dignity.
The head of South Korea’s National Police Agency, Min Gap-Ryong, participated in a commemoration ceremony in Seoul. He wrote the following words in the visitor’s book: “I humbly share my condolences before the spirits of all those innocent people who were killed during Jeju April 3, and I respectfully share my wishes that they rest in peace.” Vice Minister of National Defense Seo Joo-seok, who made the aforementioned statement, was also in attendance. He highlighted that the army was fully committed “to the government investigation efforts going forward” and would “take part in healing the wounds and suffering of the family members while restoring the honor of those who were slain”. This was the first comment about the incident made by a South Korean military agency.
Officially, at least 10,000 Jeju residents were killed and almost 3,600 went missing, as a result of the tragedy that stemmed from Korea’s ideological split following its emancipation from Japanese colonial rule, which lasted from 1910 to 1945. In reality, the situation was even more complex. Propaganda from both North and South Koreas portray the uprising as a communist revolt against elections, which were to take place in the South on dividing the peninsula. However, in reality, the uprising was instigated by actions of the police and agitators from so-called “youth groups”, who used racketeering and violence to bring the region, with a powerful left-wing movement, under control.
South Korea’s current strategic policy has its origins at the start of the rebellion, 1 March 1947, when a child who suffered a blow from a police horse’s hoof died during a street protest in celebration of May Day. This led to a confrontation with the police and the crowd was fired on. In response, the Workers’ Party of South Korea declared a general strike. Instead of calming people down, the government made a decision to destroy the left-wing forces once and for all, which led to an even tougher response from the people.
On 3 April 1948, more than 350 armed civilians simultaneously attacked 12 police precincts and homes of representatives of legislative bodies, in order to free detained relatives and force the government to reconsider its policy. The leadership reacted even more violently in turn. Death squads mercilessly dealt with protesters and local residents who helped them. On 17 October 1948, a ban on movement in inner and mountainous regions of the island, with the exception of its 5-km coast line, was introduced. All the villages outside this perimeter were completely destroyed and so were their residents if they refused to leave these territories. 2,500 islanders were imprisoned although there were no charges against them or any written verdicts.
The bloodshed continued during the Korean War too. The truth is, however, in 1953 armed units had only approximately 60 people in them, and by the beginning of 1954, this number decreased to 5. 21 September 1954 is viewed as the last day of the uprising, when the ban on movement was finally lifted. The last guerrilla member was arrested on 2 April 1957.
Since a substantial portion of the population was massacred, and their bodies were often submerged or burned, the number of estimated victims ranges from 14,000 to 30,000 people. And if those who were indirectly affected by the government’s crackdown (i.e. victims of hunger or subsequent social cleansing) are added to the total, the number is even higher. Incidentally, only 14% of protesters were killed.
For decades after the uprising, memories of this event and the atrocities committed during the rule of Syngman Rhee were hidden from the public by means of censorship and repression. And only on 12 January 2000, a Special Act was decreed, in accordance with which a truth committee was established to investigate the Jeju massacre and to exonerate its victims. Approximately 14,000 people applied to have the status of a victim of those events. On 28 August of the same year, the special committee for investigating causes of death of the residents and their exoneration began their work.
In 2006, Roh Moo-hyun’s government issued an official apology for its role in the massacre. The leadership also promised reparations for the victims, but by the end of 2018 nothing had been done to this end.
On the plus side, a lot of work is being done to clear the good name of people, who, during the uprising, were preemptively jailed and tortured, without a single charge brought against them. Those who were released had to live under the umbrella of suspicion. And, finally, in January 2019, the Jeju District Court dismissed military court’s rulings with regard to the 18 plaintiffs, who survived, and recognized them as victims instead. The accusations levelled against them were deemed unsubstantiated since the military court did not follow prescribed legal procedures. This conclusion, in the opinion of those who issued the verdict, is supported by the fact that the plaintiffs were not aware of the criminal charges against them. Also the sheer number of people brought before the military courts-martial within a short period of time indicated relevant investigations were unlikely to have been carried out.
The plaintiffs demanded that their cases be reviewed as far back as 2017, as they claimed to have been arrested and jailed for a period of up to 20 years without as much as a fair trial. Since that time not a single court record has been found to indicate why the plaintiffs received such harsh sentences. Even after researchers had travelled to the peninsula and accessed central archives, they were unable to find any existing records about the investigation at that time. It turns out that people were detained and tortured without being charged for any crimes , which is consistent with the practice of preemptive arrests.
The court decided to retry the case in September 2018 due to renewed interest in the incident following the commemoration of its 70th anniversary and the official apology issued by President Moon Jae-in.
A few months later, on 17 January 2019, the Jeju court exonerated all the participants of the people’s uprising on 3 April 1948, who had served the sentences handed down to them by the military courts-martial.
This policy, exercised by Moon Jae-in’s government towards residents of Jeju, is part of a common trend. As part of this new shift, “a former police investigation building in Namyeong-dong, Seoul”, where intelligence agents “tortured hundreds of pro-democracy” and anti-government “activists in the 1970s and 1980s, has been turned into a memorial hall for human rights and democracy.” The Ministry of the Interior and Safety plans to outsource the building’s “operation to the Korea Democracy Foundation”. Prime Minister Lee Nak-yon participated in the transfer ceremony, along with Minister of the Interior and Safety Kim Boo-kyum; Seoul Mayor Park Won-soon; Commissioner General of the Korean National Police Agency Min Gap-Ryong, and victims of torture and their family members.
In 1976, the anti-communism investigation division office was located where the current facility stands now. During both the Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan administrations, the building was used to detain, interrogate and torture anti-government activists. Over a period of approximately 30 years, a combined total of 391 activists were tortured there. Their ranks included Seoul National University student Park Jong-chul, whose death resulted in mass protests that led to the fall of the Fifth Republic of South Korea.
In response to criticism, in 2005 the National Police Agency closed the Namyeong-dong division and transformed it into a human rights police center. However, civic groups demanded that the police stop operating this facility. This process began in earnest in June 2018, when Moon Jae-in promised to convert the building into a memorial for human rights and democracy.
In his speech, Prime Minister Lee Nak-yon said that Namyeong-dong “will forever contribute to the people and history as a place to warn against the state’s abuse of power”.
A similar policy is being used with respect to persecuted members of the Bodo League. This political organization was comprised of “re-educated” left-wing activists. But once the Korean War began, most of its members were subject to repression (as a preventative measure), and the majority were executed by firing squads. Groups, such as the Korean War Bereaved Family Members’ Association, claim that after this war 200,000 members of the League were killed throughout the country.
Numerous testimonies from family members of victims paint a grim picture: activists were gathered together under the pretense of going on an excursion to the mountains or to a ceremony. They were then transported out of town or city, executed by a firing squad and buried in unmarked graves.
Only in June 2014, did a number of residents gather enough courage to corroborate evidence of a civilian massacre, which local witnesses remembered. They carried out an excavation and unearthed burial sites, but there have not been any official exhumations so far.
On 22 June 2016, a testimony by prosecutor Song Jung-won (1918-2014), who is viewed as the founder of the Bodo League, became public knowledge. On 18 October 2007, he testified in front of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and said that many members of the League were not partisans and, in fact, did not even know what a communist party was. As a rule, these were simple peasants or intellectuals, who wished to expunge the “Red Menace” label from their family name.
Civilian activists think this testimony may be viewed as proof of the fact that the government massacred countless numbers of innocent people knowing full well that they were not members of the Communist Party.
In addition, as far back as 2009, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission confirmed mass killings of at least 3,400 civilians and inmates held in prisons in Busan, Masan and Jinju from July to September 1950. Jail employees, police officers and members of counterintelligence services took part in these reprisals. Victims were either killed inside prisons or taken to the mountains, executed, and their bodies were disposed of in the sea. Only in a few cases were executions carried out after an official sentence was handed down by a military tribunal. Incidentally, most of these victims were prisoners sentenced to less than three years in jail, and they were killed only because of concerns that they would collaborate with DPRC.
Most investigations of this nature were conducted in the course of the work performed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It was established in December 2005 and tasked with researching information connected with the anti-Japanese independence movement; mass killings of civilians during the Korean War, and violation of human rights by government forces during the military dictatorship. During a fairly short 5-year period, the commission uncovered the truth about 8,468 cases by concluding that extrajudicial massacres had taken place during the Korean War and earlier. In addition, the commission ascertained that evidence in a number of espionage cases from the 1980s was either distorted or completely fabricated.
However, during Lee Myung-bak’s presidency the work conducted by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was discontinued. The final report highlighted the fact that both sides were responsible for atrocities, but failed to mention the fact that there were twice as many victims of the “White Terror”, and many culprits were absolved of responsibility. “As a result, true reconciliation and reckoning with the past ended up being put off until another day.”
And now, possibly, this day has arrived. Although old political myths often have a tendency to transform into new ones during Moon Jae-in’s presidency, hope remains that the final picture will be an accurate reflection of the historical truth.
Konstantin Asmolov, Ph.D. in History, is a leading research fellow at the Center for Korean Studies of the Institute of the Far East at the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Roméo Dallaire and the Toronto Star’s distortion of Rwanda’s tragedy
By Yves Engler · April 11, 2019
The Toronto Star should get its facts straight and stop distorting Rwanda’s tragedy.
A day after the 25th anniversary of when two Hutu presidents were blown out of the sky, the Star’s editorial board published “There’s no excuse for ignoring lessons of Rwanda’s genocide”. It claims, “on Jan. 11, 1994, Canadian Maj.-Gen. Roméo Dallaire, at the time force commander with the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda, sent a chilling and urgent cable to UN Headquarters in New York. He had been informed of the details of a plan for the ‘extermination’ of ethnic Tutsis by Hutus.” After stringing together a few hundred more humane-sounding, though meaningless, words Star editorialists returned to their core liberal interventionist Canadian hero theme: “In his cable of January 1994 he urged UN leaders to act by telling them the obvious: Where there’s a will to prevent mass killing, there is a way.”
The Star should check Dallaire’s fax more closely. Revealingly, the much-celebrated “genocide fax” the editorialists reference is not titled “‘genocide’ or ‘killing’ but an innocuous ‘Request for Protection of Informant’”, reports International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) lawyer Christopher Black in a 2005 story titled “View from Rwanda: The Dallaire Genocide Fax: A Fabrication”. The two-page “genocide fax”, as New Yorker reporter Philip Gourevitch dubbed it in 1998, was probably doctored a year after the mass killings in Rwanda ended. In a chapter devoted to the fax in Enduring Lies: The Rwandan Genocide in the Propaganda System, 20 Years Later Edward S. Herman and David Peterson argue two paragraphs were added to a cable Dallaire sent to Canadian General Maurice Baril at the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations in New York about a weapons cache and protecting an informant (Dallaire never personally met the informant). The added paragraphs said the informant was asked to compile a list of Tutsi for possible extermination in Kigali and mentioned a plan to assassinate select political leaders and Belgian peacekeepers.
At the ICTR former Cameroon foreign minister and overall head of the UN mission in Rwanda, Jacques-Roger Booh-Booh, denied seeing this information and there’s no evidence Dallaire warned the Belgians of a plan to attack them, which later transpired. Finally, a response to the cable from UN headquarters the next day ignores the (probably) added paragraphs. Herman and Peterson make a compelling case that a doctored version of the initial cable was placed in the UN file on November 27, 1995, by British Colonel Richard M. Connaughton as part of a Kigali-London-Washington effort to prove the existence of a plan by the Hutu government to exterminate Tutsi.
Even if the final two paragraphs were in the original version, the credibility of the information would be suspect. Informant “Jean-Pierre” was not a highly placed official in the defeated Hutu government, reports Robin Philpott in Rwanda and the New Scramble for Africa: From Tragedy to Useful Imperial Fiction. Instead, “Jean-Pierre” was a driver for the MRDN political party who later died fighting with the Rwandan Patriotic Front.
Incredibly, the “genocide fax” is the primary source of any documentary record demonstrating UN foreknowledge of a Hutu “conspiracy” to exterminate Tutsi, a charge even the victor’s justice at the ICTR failed to convict anyone of. According to Herman and Peterson, “when finding all four defendants not guilty of the ‘conspiracy to commit genocide’ charge, the [ICTR] trial chamber also dismissed the evidence provided by ‘informant Jean-Pierre’ due to ‘lingering questions concerning [his] reliability.’”
Tellingly, Dallaire didn’t even initially adhere to the “conspiracy to commit genocide” version of the Rwandan tragedy. Just after leaving his post as UNAMIR force commander Dallaire replied to a September 14, 1994, Radio Canada Le Point question by saying, “the plan was more political. The aim was to eliminate the coalition of moderates. … I think that the excesses that we saw were beyond people’s ability to plan and organize. There was a process to destroy the political elements in the moderate camp. There was a breakdown and hysteria absolutely. … But nobody could have foreseen or planned the magnitude of the destruction we saw.”
Doctoring a fax to make it appear the UN had foreknowledge of a plot to exterminate Tutsi may sound outlandish, but it’s more believable than many other elements of the dominant narrative of the Rwandan genocide. The day after their editorial, for instance, the Star published a story titled “25 years after genocide, Rwanda rebuilds” which included a photo of President Paul Kagame leading a walk to commemorate the mass killings. But, Kagame is the individual most responsible for unleashing the hundred days of genocidal violence by downing a plane carrying two Hutu presidents and much of the Rwandan military high command.
Even the Star has reported as much. A year ago they published a story titled “Did Rwanda’s Paul Kagame trigger the genocide of his own people?” For its part, the Globe and Mail has published a series of front-page reports in recent years confirming Kagame’s responsibility for blowing up the plane carrying Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana, which triggered mass killings in April 1994. In an October story titled “New information supports claims Kagame forces were involved in assassination that sparked Rwandan genocide” the Globe all but confirmed that the surface-to-air missiles used to assassinate the Rwandan and Burundian Hutu presidents on April 6, 1994, came from Uganda, which backed the RPF’s bid to conquer its smaller neighbour. (A few thousand exiled Tutsi Ugandan troops, including the deputy minister of defence, “deserted” to invade Rwanda in 1990.) These revelations strengthen the case of those who argue that responsibility for the mass killings in spring 1994 largely rests with the Ugandan/RPF aggressors and their US/British/Canadian backers.
By presenting the individual most culpable for the mass killings at the head of a commemoration for said violence the Star is flipping the facts on their head. The same might be said for their depiction of the Canadian general. At the end of their chapter tracing the history of the “genocide fax” Herman and Peterson write, “if all of this is true,” then “we would suggest that Dallaire should be regarded as a war criminal for positively facilitating the actual mass killings of April-July, rather than taken as a hero for giving allegedly disregarded warnings that might have stopped them.”
Unaccountable Media Faced with Dilemma in Next Phase of Deep State-gate
By Ray McGovern | Consortium News | April 10, 2019
Readers of The Washington Post on Monday were treated to more of the same from editorial page chief Fred Hiatt. Hiatt, who won his spurs by promoting misleading “intelligence” about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and suffered no consequences, is at it again.
This time he is trying to adjust to the fading prospect of a Deus ex Mueller to lessen Hiatt’s disgrace for being among the most shameless in promoting the Trump-Russia collusion narrative.
He is not giving up. When you are confident you will not lose your job so long as you adhere to the agenda of the growing Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank complex (MICIMATT if you will), you need not worry about being a vanguard for the corporate media. It is almost as though Hiatt is a tenured professor in an endowed chair honoring Judith Miller, the New York Times reporter who perhaps did most to bring us Iraqi WMD.
In his Monday column Hiatt warned: “Trump was elected with the assistance of Russian spies and trolls, which he openly sought and celebrated. But he did not (or so we are told) secretly conspire with them.” In effect, Hiatt is saying, soto voce: “Fie on former (now-de-canonized) Saint Robert of Mueller; we at the Post and our colleagues at The New York Times, CNN et al. know better, just because we’ve been saying so for more than two years.”
Times executive editor Dean Baquet said, about the backlash to the Times‘ “collusion” coverage: “I have no regrets. It’s not our job to determine whether or not there was illegality.” CNN President Jeff Zucker said: “We are not investigators. We are journalists.” (One wonders what investigative journalist Bob Parry, who uncovered much of Iran-Contra and founded this site, would have thought of that last one.)
Going in Circles
Hiatt’s circular reasoning is all too familiar. It is the kind a former director of national intelligence excels at when he’s not lying, sometimes under oath. For instance, James Clapper was hawking his memoir at the Carnegie Endowment last year when he was confronted by unexpectedly direct questions from the audience.
Asked about the misleadingly labeled, rump “Intelligence Community Assessment” (ICA) of Jan. 6, 2017, which he orchestrated, and which blamed Russia for interfering in the 2016 election, Clapper gave an ipse dixit response: The ICA simply had to be correct because that’s what he had told President Barack Obama and President-elect Donald Trump.
In fact, that “Intelligence Community Assessment” stands out as the most irresponsible, evidence-free and at the same time consequential crock of intelligence analysis since the National Intelligence Estimate of Oct. 2001 claimed there was WMD in Iraq. Recall that that one was shaped by out-and-out fraudulent intelligence to “justify” an attack on Iraq six months later.
Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), as chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, described the main thrust of the committee’s five-year bipartisan report, stating, “In making the case for war, the [Bush] Administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent.”
Hiatt was one of the media’s major offenders, feeding on what the Cheney/Bush folks told him. When no “weapons of mass destruction” were found in Iraq, Hiatt conceded during an interview with The Columbia Journalism Review that, “If you look at the editorials we write running up [to the war], we state as flat fact that he [Saddam Hussein] has weapons of mass destruction … If that’s not true, it would have been better not to say it.” [CJR, March/April 2004] As Parry wryly observed at the time in a piece calling for Hiatt’s dismissal, “Yes, that is a common principle of journalism, that if something isn’t real, we’re not supposed to confidently declare that it is.”
The Morning After
Clapper: After WMD failure, promoted by Obama. (White House Photo/ Pete Souza)
The media set the prevailing tone the day after the ICA was published. The banner headline atop page one of the Times read: “Putin Led Scheme to Aid Trump, Report Says.” That put in motion more than two years of Dick Cheney-like chicanery in the media.
Buried inside the Times that same day was a cautionary paragraph written by staff reporter Scott Shane who noted, “What is missing from the public report is what many Americans most eagerly anticipated: hard evidence to back up the [three] agencies’ claims that the Russian government engineered the election attack. That is a significant omission.” Indeed it was; and remains so.
(Sadly, Shane was then given his marching orders and fell in line with many other formerly reputable journalists in what has been the most miserable performance by the mainstream media since they helped pave the way for war on Iraq.)
Clapper and Hiatt are kindred souls when it comes to the “profound effect” of Russian election interference. In his column, Hiatt asserted as flat fact that: “Trump was elected with the assistance of Russian spies and trolls …” At the Carnegie event in November, Clapper opined:
“As a private citizen, understanding the magnitude of what the Russians did and the number of citizens in our country they reached and the different mechanisms that, by which they reached them, to me it stretches credulity to think they didn’t have a profound impact on election on the outcome of the election.”
Hiatt: Captain of Cheerleaders
Hiatt emulated peppy, preppy cheerleader George W. Bush in leading Americans to believe that war on Iraq was necessary. Appointed Washington Post editorial page editor in 2000, he still runs the page — having not been held accountable for gross misfeasance, if not malfeasance, on Iraq. Shades of Clapper, whom President Obama allowed to stay on as director of national intelligence for three and a half years after Clapper lied under oath to the Senate Intelligence Committee about NSA surveillance of U.S. persons.
That Obama appointed Clapper to lead the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election speaks volumes. Clapper claims to have expertise on Russia and has made no effort to disguise his views on “the Russians.” Two years ago, he told Chuck Todd on Meet the Press:
“… in context with everything else we knew the Russians were doing to interfere with the election, and just the historical practices of the Russians, who are typically, almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique … we were concerned.”
It beggars belief that Obama could have been unaware of Clapper’s bizarre views on “the Russians.” Clearly, Obama was bowing yet again to pressure from powerful Deep State actors arguing that Clapper was the ideal man for the job.
And there is now documentary evidence that, from the Deep State point of view, indeed he was. In the text exchanges between discredited FBI sleuth Peter Strzok and his girlfriend, Lisa Page, a lawyer working for the FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, it seems clear that Obama wanted to be kept apprised of the FBI’s behind-the-scenes machinations. In a Sept. 2, 2016 text to Strzok, Page writes that she was preparing talking points because the president “wants to know everything we’re doing.”
A Sweaty Pate?
Clapper is aware now that he is going to have to sweat it out. He may believe he can ignore White House press secretary Sarah Sanders, who has said that he and other former intelligence officials should be investigated after special counsel Mueller did not establish collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
Strzok: Will he be on Nunes’s list? (Wikipedia)
But recent statements by members of the House and Senate intelligence committees cannot be dismissed so easily. In his media appearances, the supremely confident, hero-of-many-liberals Clapper has been replaced by a squirming (but-Obama-made-me-do-it) massager of facts. He may find it harder this time to avoid being held accountable.
Devin Nunes (R-CA), the House Intelligence Committee ranking member, has gone on the offensive, writing Friday that committee Republicans “will soon be submitting criminal referrals on numerous individuals involved … in the abuse of intelligence for political purposes. These people must be held to account to prevent similar abuses from occurring in the future.”
On Sunday, Nunes told Fox News he’s preparing to send eight criminal referrals to the Department of Justice this week concerning alleged misconduct during the Trump-Russia investigation. This will include leaks of “highly classified material” and conspiracies to lie to Congress and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court. It’s no-holds-barred for Nunes, who has begun to talk publicly about prison for those whom DOJ might indict and bring to trial.
Nunes’s full-speed-ahead offensive is being widely ignored in “mainstream” media (with the exception of Fox), giving the media the quality of “The Dog That Did Not Bark in the Night.” The media has put its ducks in a row, such as they are, to try to rip Attorney General William Barr apart this coming week when he releases the redacted text of the Mueller report that so disappointed the Democratic Party/media coalition.
But how will they cover criminal referrals of the “heroes” who have leaked so much to them, providing grist for their Russia-gate mill? They will likely find a way, eventually, but the media silence about Nunes is depriving oxygen to the story.
On Sunday, Nunes said,
“They [the Democrats] have lied multiple times to the American people. All you have to do is look at their phony memos. They have had the full support of the media, 90 percent of the media in this country. They all have egg on their face. And so the fact of the matter remains, is there going to be — is justice going to be served or is justice going to be denied? And that’s why we’re sending over these criminal referrals.”
Nunes is, of course, trying to project an image of confidence, but he knows he is fighting uphill. There is no more formidable foe than the MICIMATT, with the media playing the crucial role in these circumstances. How will the American people be able to see egg on anyone’s face if the “mainstream media” find ways to wipe it off and turn the tables on Nunes, as they have successfully done in the past?
Though the Democrats now control the House, they have lost some key inside-the-Deep-State allies.
By all appearances, House Democrats still seem to be banking on help from the usual suspects still on duty in the FBI, CIA, and the Justice Department. Lacking that they seem ready to go down with the Schiff—Rep. Adam Schiff of California, perhaps the most virulent Russia-gater that there’s been.
Clapper is no longer in a position to help from the inside, and there’s no knowing how his sleepy replacement, Dan Coates, will react, if and when he wakes up long enough to learn chapter and verse about the machinations and dramatic personae of 2016.
Of course, there is a new sheriff in town running the Department of Justice. Attorney General William Barr, for better or ill, is a far cry from Jeff Sessions, who let himself be diddled into recusing himself. He’s not Rod Rosenstein either, whose involvement in this affair may have already earned him a prominent place on Nunes’s list of referrals.
What Did Obama Know, and When Did He Know It?
On top of this, Sen. Rand Paul (R, KY) has called for an investigation into the origins of Mueller’s probe, including on the dicey question of how witting President Obama was of the Deep State chicanery during the last months of his administration. Page did tell Strzok in that Sept. 2, 2016 text that the president “wants to know everything we’re doing.”
Sen. Paul has also tweeted information from “a high-level source” that it was former CIA Director John Brennan who “insisted that the unverified and fake Steele dossier be included in the Intelligence Report… Brennan should be asked to testify under oath in Congress ASAP.”
Vying for Media Attention
If, as expected, Nunes discloses the names of those being criminally referred to DOJ, and Barr releases a redacted text of the Mueller report, the “mainstream” media will have a fresh challenge on their hands. The odds would seem to favor the media covering the Democrats’ predictable criticism of Barr — and perhaps even of Mueller, now that he has been defrocked.
The Post’s Hiatt should be counted on, as always, to play a leading role.
At the same time, there are signs the America people are tired of this. It would be difficult though for the media to avoid reporting on criminal referrals of very senior law enforcement and intelligence officials. Given the media’s obvious preference for siding with the intelligence agencies and reporting on Russia-gate rather than Deep-State-gate, it would be even harder for the media to explain why these officials would be in trouble.
Things appear to be unraveling but, as always, much will depend on whether the media opts to remain the “dog that didn’t bark,” and succeeds again in hoodwinking too many people.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He was a CIA analyst for 27 years and prepared the President’s Daily Brief for Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Reagan. He is on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
Zionism, Crypto-Judaism, and the Biblical Hoax
By Laurent Guyénot • Unz Review • April 8, 2019
“What’s a neocon?” clueless George W. Bush once asked his father in 2003. “Do you want names, or a description?” answered Bush 41. “Description.” “Well,” said 41, “I’ll give it to you in one word: Israel.” True or not, that exchange quoted by Andrew Cockburn[1] sums it up: the neoconservatives are crypto-Israelis. Their true loyalty goes to Israel — Israel as defined by their mentor Leo Strauss in his 1962 lecture “Why We Remain Jews,” that is, including an indispensable Diaspora.[2]
In his volume Cultural Insurrections, Kevin MacDonald has accurately described neoconservatism as “a complex interlocking professional and family network centered around Jewish publicists and organizers flexibly deployed to recruit the sympathies of both Jews and non-Jews in harnessing the wealth and power of the United States in the service of Israel.”[3] The proof of the neocons’ crypto-Israelism is their U.S. foreign policy:
“The confluence of their interests as Jews in promoting the policies of the Israeli right wing and their construction of American interests allows them to submerge or even deny the relevance of their Jewish identity while posing as American patriots. […] Indeed, since neoconservative Zionism of the Likud Party variety is well known for promoting a confrontation between the United States and the entire Muslim world, their policy recommendations best fit a pattern of loyalty to their ethnic group, not to America.”[4]
The neocons’ U.S. foreign policy has always coincided with the best interest of Israel as they see it. Before 1967, Israel’s interest rested heavily on Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe. From 1967, when Moscow closed Jewish emigration to protest Israel’s annexation of Arab territories, Israel’s interest included the U.S. winning the Cold War. That is when the editorial board of Commentary, the monthly magazine of the American Jewish Committee, experienced their conversion to “neoconservatism,” and Commentary became, in the words of Benjamin Balint, “the contentious magazine that transformed the Jewish left into the neoconservative right .”[5] Irving Kristol explained to the American Jewish Congress in 1973 why anti-war activism was no longer good for Israel: “it is now an interest of the Jews to have a large and powerful military establishment in the United States. […] American Jews who care about the survival of the state of Israel have to say, no, we don’t want to cut the military budget, it is important to keep that military budget big, so that we can defend Israel.”[6] This tells us what “reality” Kristol was referring to, when he famously defined a neoconservative as “a liberal who has been mugged by reality” (Neoconservatism: the Autobiography of an Idea, 1995).
With the end of the Cold War, the national interest of Israel changed once again. The primary objective became the destruction of Israel’s enemies in the Middle East by dragging the U.S. into a third world war. The neoconservatives underwent their second conversion, from anti-communist Cold Warriors to Islamophobic “Clashers of Civilizations” and crusaders in the “War on Terror.”
In September 2001, they got the “New Pearl Harbor” that they had been wishing for in a PNAC report a year before.[7] Two dozens neoconservatives had by then been introduced by Dick Cheney into key positions, including Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith at the Pentagon, David Wurmser at the State Department, and Philip Zelikow and Elliott Abrams at the National Security Council. Abrams had written three years earlier that Diaspora Jews “are to stand apart from the nation in which they live. It is the very nature of being Jewish to be apart — except in Israel — from the rest of the population.”[8] Perle, Feith and Wurmser had co-signed in 1996 a secret Israeli report entitled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, urging Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to break with the Oslo Accords of 1993 and reaffirm Israel’s right of preemption on Arab territories. They also argued for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein as “an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right.” As Patrick Buchanan famously remarked, the 2003 Iraq war proves that the plan “has now been imposed by Perle, Feith, Wurmser & Co. on the United States.”[9]
How these neocon artists managed to bully Secretary of State Colin Powell into submission is unclear, but, according to his biographer Karen DeYoung, Powell privately rallied against this “separate little government” composed of “Wolfowitz, Libby, Feith, and Feith’s ‘Gestapo Office’.”[10] His chief of staff, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, declared in 2006 on PBS that he had “participated in a hoax on the American people, the international community and the United Nations Security Council,”[11] and in 2011, he openly denounced the duplicity of neoconservatives such as Wurmser and Feith, whom he considered “card-carrying members of the Likud party.” “I often wondered,” he said, “if their primary allegiance was to their own country or to Israel.”[12] Something doesn’t quite ring true when neocons say “we Americans,” for example Paul Wolfowitz declaring: “Since September 11th, we Americans have one thing more in common with Israelis.”[13]
The neocons’ capacity to deceive the American public by posturing as American rather than Israeli patriots required that their Jewishness be taboo, and Carl Bernstein, though a Jew himself, provoked a scandal by citing on national television the responsibility of “Jewish neocons” for the Iraq war.[14] But the fact that the destruction of Iraq was carried out on behalf of Israel is now widely accepted, thanks in particular to the 2007 book by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. And even the best liars betray themselves sometimes. Philip Zelikow briefly dropped the mask during a conference at the University of Virginia on September 10, 2002:
“Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us? I’ll tell you what I think the real threat is and actually has been since 1990: it’s the threat against Israel. And this is the threat that dare not speak its name, because the Europeans don’t care deeply about that threat, I will tell you frankly. And the American government doesn’t want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell.”[15]
From crypto-Judaism to crypto-Zionism
Norman Podhoretz, editor-in-chief of Commentary (and father-in-law of Elliott Abrams), said that after June 1967, Israel became “the religion of the American Jews.”[16] That is, at least, what he started working at. But, naturally, such religion had better remain discreet outside the Jewish community, if possible even secret, and disguised as American patriotism. The neocons have perfected this fake American patriotism wholly profitable to Israel, and ultimately disastrous for Americans — a pseudo-Americanism that is really a crypto-Israelism or crypto-Zionism.
This quasi-religious crypto-Zionism is comparable to the crypto-Judaism that has played a determining role in Christendom in the late Middle Ages. From the end of the 14th century, sermons, threats of expulsion, and opportunism made over a hundred thousand Jewish converts to Catholicism in Spain and Portugal, many of whom continued to “Judaize” secretly. Freed from the restrictions imposed on Jews, these “New Christians,” called Conversos or Marranos, experienced a meteoric socio-economic ascension. In the words of historian of Marranism Yirmiyahu Yovel:
“Conversos rushed into Christian society and infiltrated most of its interstices. After one or two generations, they were in the councils of Castile and Aragon, exercising the functions of royal counselors and administrators, commanding the army and navy, and occupying all ecclesiastical offices from parish priest to bishop and cardinal. […] The Conversos were priests and soldiers, politicians and professors, judges and theologians, writers, poets and legal advisors—and of course, as in the past, doctors, accountants and high-flying merchants. Some allied themselves by marriage to the greatest families of Spanish nobility […] Their ascent and penetration in society were of astonishing magnitude and speed.”[17]
Not all these Conversos were crypto-Jews, that is, insincere Christians, but most remained proudly ethnic Jews, and continued to marry among themselves. Solomon Halevi, chief rabbi of Burgos, converted in 1390, took the name of Pablo de Santa Maria, became Bishop of Burgos in 1416, and was succeeded by his son Alonso Cartagena. Both father and son saw no contradiction between the Torah and the Gospel, and believed that Jews made better Christians, as being from the chosen people and of the race of the Messiah.[18]
A new situation was created after the Alhambra Decree (1492) that forced Spanish Jews to choose between conversion and expulsion. Four years later, those who had stayed loyal to their faith and migrated to Portugal were given the choice between conversion and death, with no possibility of leaving the country. Portugal now had a population of about 12 percent so-called New Christians, deeply resentful of Catholicism. They learned and perfected the art of leading a double life. When they were eventually allowed to leave the country and engage in international trade in 1507, they “soon began to rise to the forefront of international trade, virtually monopolizing the market for certain commodities, such as sugar, to participate to a lesser degree in trading spices, rare woods, tea, coffee, and the transportation of slaves.”[19] When in 1540, the new Portuguese king introduced the Inquisition following the Spanish model, tracking down Portuguese Judaizers all over Europe and even in the New World, Marranos became more intensely resentful of the Catholic faith they had to fake, and more secretive. They would play an important role in the Calvinist or Puritan movement which, after undermining Spanish domination on the Netherlands, conquered England and ultimately formed the religious bedrock of the United States.
Catholic monarchs are to blame for having drafted by force into Christendom an army of enemies that would largely contribute to the ruin of the Catholic empire. By and large, the Roman Church has done much to foster the Jewish culture of crypsis. However, segregation and forced conversions were not the only factor. Crypto-Jews could find justification in their Hebrew Bible, in which they read:
“Rebekah took her elder son Esau’s best clothes, which she had at home, and dressed her younger son Jacob in them. […] Jacob said to his father, ‘I am Esau your first-born’” (Genesis 27:15–19).
If Jacob cheated his brother Esau of his birthright by impersonating him, why would they not do the same (Jacob being, of course, Israel, and Esau or Edom being codenames for the Catholic Church among medieval Jews)? Crypto-Jews also found comfort and justification in the biblical figure of Esther, the clandestine Jewess who, in the Persian king’s bed, inclined him favorably toward her people. For generations, Spanish and Portuguese Marranos prayed to “saint Esther.”[20] This is significant because the legend of Esther is a cornerstone of Jewish culture: every year the Jews celebrate its happy ending (the massacre of 75,000 Persians by the Jews) by the feast of Purim.[21] Another factor to consider is the ritual prayer of Kol Nidre recited before Yom Kippur at least since the 12th century, by which Jews absolved themselves in advance of “all vows, obligations, oaths or anathemas, pledges of all names,” including, of course, baptism .
Marranos and their descendants had a deep and lasting influence in economic, cultural and political world history, and their culture of crypsis survived the Inquisition. A case in point is the family of Benjamin Disraeli, Queen Victoria’s prime minister from 1868 to 1869, and again from 1874 to 1880, who defined himself as “Anglican of Jewish race.”[22] His grandfather was born from Portuguese Marranos converted back to Judaism in Venice, and had moved to London in 1748. Benjamin’s father, Isaac D’Israeli was the author of a book on The Genius of Judaism, but had his whole family baptized when Benjamin was thirteen, because administrative careers were then closed to the Jews in England.
Benjamin Disraeli has been called the true inventor of British imperialism, for having Queen Victoria proclaimed Empress of India in 1876. He orchestrated the British takeover of the Suez Canal in 1875, thanks to funding from his friend Lionel Rothschild (an operation that also consolidated the Rothschilds’ control over the Bank of England). But Disraeli can also be considered a major forerunner of Zionism; well before Theodor Herzl, he tried to introduce the “restoration of Israel” into the Berlin Congress agenda, hoping to convince the Ottoman Sultan to concede Palestine as an autonomous province.
What was Disraeli’s motivation behind his British imperial foreign policy? Did he believe in Britain’s destiny to control the Middle East? Or did he see the British Empire as the tool for the fulfillment of Israel’s own destiny? In mooring the Suez Canal to British interests, did he just seek to outdo the French, or was he laying the foundation for the future alliance between Israel and the Anglo-American Empire? No one can answer these questions with certainty. But Disraeli’s contemporaries pondered them. William Gladstone, his longtime competitor for the prime ministry, accused him of “holding British foreign policy hostage to his Jewish sympathies.”[23] So we see that the neoconservatives’ loyalty to Israel, and their control of the Empire’s foreign policy, is not a new issue. The case of Disraeli highlights the legacy between pre-modern crypto-Judaism and modern crypto-Zionism.
The dialectic of nation and religion
From his Darwinian perspective, Kevin MacDonald sees crypto-Judaism as “an authentic case of crypsis quite analogous to cases of mimetic camouflage in the natural world.”[24] But Judaism itself, in its modern form, falls into the same category, according to MacDonald. In the 18th century, by claiming to be adepts of a religious confession, Jews gained full citizenship in European nations, while remaining ethnically endogamic and suspiciously uninterested in converting anyone. Gilad Atzmon points out that the Haskalah motto, “Be a Jew at home and a man in the street” is fundamentally dishonest:
“The Haskalah Jew is deceiving his or her God when at home, and misleading the goy once in the street. In fact, it is this duality of tribalism and universalism that is at the very heart of the collective secular Jewish identity. This duality has never been properly resolved.”[25]
Zionism was an attempt to resolve it. Moses Hess wrote in his influential book Rome and Jerusalem (1862):
“Those of our brethren who, for purposes of obtaining emancipation, endeavor to persuade themselves, as well as others, that modern Jews possess no trace of a national feeling, have really lost their heads.”
For him, a Jew is a Jew “by virtue of his racial origin, even though his ancestors may have become apostates.”[26] Addressing his fellow Jews, Hess defended the national character of Judaism and denounced the assimilationist Jew’s “beautiful phrases about humanity and enlightenment which he employs as a cloak to hide his treason.”[27]
In return, Reformed Judaism opposed the nationalist version of Jewishness which would become Zionism. On the occasion of their 1885 Pittsburgh Conference, American reformed rabbis issued the following statement:
“We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religion community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor the restoration of a sacrificial worship under the Sons of Aaron, or of any of the laws concerning the Jewish State.”[28]
Yet Reformed Judaism promoted a messianic theory that continued to ascribe an exalted role to Israel as chosen people, nation or race. German-American rabbi Kaufmann Kohler, a star of the Pittsburgh Conference, argued in his Jewish Theology (1918) for the recycling of the messianic hope into “the belief that Israel, the suffering Messiah of the centuries, shall at the end of days become the triumphant Messiah of the nations.”
“Israel is the champion of the Lord, chosen to battle and suffer for the supreme values of mankind, for freedom and justice, truth and humanity; the man of woe and grief, whose blood is to fertilize the soil with the seeds of righteousness and love for mankind. […] Accordingly, modern Judaism proclaims more insistently than ever that the Jewish people is the Servant of the Lord, the suffering Messiah of the nations, who offered his life as an atoning sacrifice for humanity and furnished his blood as the cement with which to build the divine kingdom of truth and justice.”[29]
It is easy to recognize here an imitation of Christianity: the crucifixion of Christ (by the Jews, as Christians used to say) is turned into a symbol of the martyrdom of the Jews (by Christians). Interestingly, the theme of the “crucifixion of the Jews” was also widely used by secular Zionist Jews as a diplomatic argument.
But what is more important to understand is that Reformed Judaism rejected traditional nationalism (the quest for statehood) only to profess a superior, metaphysical kind of nationalism. In this way, Reformed Judaism and Zionism, while affirming their mutual incompatibility and competing for the hearts of Jews, dovetailed perfectly: Zionism played the rhetoric of European nationalist movements to claim “a nation like others” (for Israelis), while Reformed Judaism aimed at empowering a nation like no other and without borders (for Israelites). That explains why in 1976, American Reformed rabbis crafted a new resolution affirming: “The State of Israel and the Diaspora, in fruitful dialogue, can show how a People transcends nationalism while affirming it, thus establishing an example for humanity.”[30] In a marvelous example of Hegelian dialectical synthesis, both the religious and the national faces of Jewishness contributed to the end result: a nation with both a national territory and an international citizenry, exactly what Leo Strauss had in mind. Except for a few orthodox Jews, most Jews today see no contradiction between Judaism as a religion and Zionism as a nationalist project.
The question of whether such dialectical machinery was engineered by Yahweh or by B’nai B’rith is open to debate. But it can be seen as an inherent dynamic of Jewishness: the Jewish cognitive elites may find themselves divided on many issues, but since their choices are ultimately subordinated to the great metaphysical question, “Is it good for Jews?” there always comes a point when their oppositions are resolved in a way that reinforces their global position.
With “what is good for the Jews” in mind, contradictions are easily resolved. Jewish intellectuals, for example, can be ethnic nationalists in Israel, and pro-immigration multiculturalists everywhere else. A paragon of this contradiction was Israel Zangwill, the successful author of the play The Melting Pot (1908), whose title has become a metaphor for American society, and whose Jewish hero makes himself the bard of assimilation by mixed marriages: “America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and reforming.” The paradox is that when he was writing this, Zangwill was a leading figure of Zionism, that is, a movement affirming the impossibility of Jews living among Gentiles, and demanding that they be ethnically separated. (Zangwill is the author of another famous formula: “Palestine is a land without people for a people without land.”)
Although it appears to be contradictory for non-Jews, this dual standard is not necessarily so from the point of view of Jewish intellectuals. They may sincerely believe in their universalistic message addressed to the Goyim, while simultaneously believing sincerely that Jews should remain a separate people. The implicit logic is that it is good that Jews remain Jews in order to teach the rest of mankind to be universal, tolerant, anti-racists, immigrationnists, and caring for minorities (specially Jews). This logic falls under the “mission theory”, the secular version of the “messianic nation” theory: Jews, who have invented monotheism, the Ten Commandments and so on, have a moral obligation to keep educating the rest of humankind. What the “mission” entails is open to reversible interpretations. Rabbi Daniel Gordis, in Does the World Need Jews? claims that “Jews need to be different in order that they might play a quasi-subversive role in society [. . .] the goal is to be a contributing and respectful ‘thorn in the side’ of society.”[31] That naturally tends to upset the Goyim, but it is for their good. It is to free them from their “false gods” that Jews are “a corrosive force”, also insists Douglas Rushkoff, author of Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism.
Preaching universalism to the Goyim in the street while emphasizing ethnic nationalism at home is the great deception. It is the essence of crypto-Judaism and of its modern form, crypto-Zionism. It is so deeply ingrained that it has become a kind of collective instinct among many Jews. It can be observed in many situations. The following remark by historian Daniel Lindenberg illustrates that Jewish internationalists’ relation to Israel in the 20th century strongly resembled the Marranos’ relation to Judaism in pre-modern times:
“Anyone who has known Communist Jews, ex-Kominternists, or even some prominent representatives of the 1968 generation will know what frustrated crypto-Jewishness means: Here are men and women who, in principle, according to the ‘internationalist’ dogma, have stifled in themselves all traces of ‘particularism’ and ‘petty-bourgeois Jewish chauvinism,’ who are nauseated by Zionism, support Arab nationalism and the great Soviet Union—yet who secretly rejoice in Israel’s military victories, tell anti-Soviet jokes, and weep while listening to a Yiddish song. This goes on until the day when, like a Leopold Trepper, they can bring out their repressed Jewishness, sometimes becoming, like the Marranos of the past, the most intransigent of neophytes.”[32]
If Jews can be alternatively or even simultaneously nationalists (Zionists) and internationalists (communists, globalists, etc.), it is, in the last analysis, because this duality is inherent to the paradoxical nature of Israel. Let us not forget that until the foundation of the “Jewish state”, “Israel” was a common designation for the international Jewish community, for example when on March 24, 1933, the British Daily Express printed on its front-page: “The whole of Israel throughout the world is united in declaring an economic and financial war on Germany.”[33] Until 1947, most American and European Jews were satisfied of being “Israelites”, members of a worldwide Israel. They saw the advantage of being a nation dispersed among nations. International Jewish organizations such as B’nai B’rith (Hebrew for “Children of the Covenant”) founded in New York in 1843, or the Alliance Israélite Universelle, founded in Paris in 1860, had no claim on Palestine.
Even after 1947, most American Jews remained ambivalent about the new State of Israel, knowing perfectly well that to support it would make them vulnerable to the accusation of dual loyalty. It was only after the Six-Day War that American Jews began to support Israel more actively and openly. There were two reasons for this. First, Zionist control of the press had become such that American public opinion was easily persuaded that Israel had been the victim and not the aggressor in the war that led Israel to triple its territory. Secondly, after 1967, the crushing deployment of Israeli power against Egypt, a nation supported diplomatically by the USSR, enabled the Johnson administration to elevate Israel to a strategic asset in the Cold War. Norman Finkelstein explains:
“For American Jewish elites, Israel’s subordination to US power was a windfall. Jews now stood on the front lines defending America—indeed, ‘Western civilization’—against the retrograde Arab hordes. Whereas before 1967 Israel conjured the bogey of dual loyalty, it now connoted super-loyalty. […] After the 1967 war, Israel’s military élan could be celebrated because its guns pointed in the right direction—against America’s enemies. Its martial prowess might even facilitate entry into the inner sanctums of American power.”[34]
Israeli leaders, for their part, stopped blaming American Jews for not settling in Israel, and recognized the legitimacy of serving Israel while residing in the United States. In very revealing terms, Benjamin Ginsberg writes that already in the 1950s, “an accommodation was reached between the Jewish state in Israel and the Jewish state in America”; but it was after 1967 that the compromise became a consensus, as anti-Zionist Jews were marginalized and silenced.[35] Thus was born a new Israel, whose capital was no longer only Tel Aviv but also New York; a transatlantic Israel, a nation without borders, delocalized. It was not really a novelty, but rather a new balance between two inseparable realities: the international Diaspora of Israelites, and the national State of Israelis.
Thanks to this powerful diaspora of virtual Israelis now entrenched in all levels of power in the US, France and many other nations, Israel is a very special nation indeed. And everyone can see that it has no intention of being an ordinary nation. Israel is destined to be an Empire. If Zionism is defined as the movement for the foundation of a Jewish State in Palestine, then what we see at work today may be called meta-Zionism, or super-Zionism. But there is no real need for such a new term, for Zionism, in fact, had always been about a new world order, under the mask of “nationalism”.
David Ben-Gurion, the “father of the nation”, was a firm believer in the mission theory, declaring: “I believe in our moral and intellectual superiority, in our capacity to serve as a model for the redemption of the human race.”[36] In a statement published in the magazine Look on January 16, 1962, he predicted for the next 25 years:
“All armies will be abolished, and there will be no more wars. In Jerusalem, the United Nations (a truly United Nations) will build a Shrine of the Prophets to serve the federated union of all continents; this will be the seat of the Supreme Court of Mankind, to settle all controversies among the federated continents, as prophesied by Isaiah.”[37]
That vision was passed on to the next generation. In October 2003, the highly symbolic King David Hotel hosted a “Jerusalem Summit”, whose participants comprised three acting Israeli ministers, including Benjamin Netanyahu, and Richard Perle as guest of honor. They signed a declaration that recognized Jerusalem’s “special authority to become a center of world’s unity,” and professed:
“We believe that one of the objectives of Israel’s divinely-inspired rebirth is to make it the center of the new unity of the nations, which will lead to an era of peace and prosperity, foretold by the Prophets.”[38]
Both Ben-Gurion’s prophecy and the Jerusalem Declaration highlight the fact that Zionism is an international project based on the Bible. That Zionism is biblical doesn’t mean it is religious; to Zionists, the Bible is both a “national narrative” and a geopolitical program rather than a religious book (there is actually no word for “religion” in ancient Hebrew). Ben-Gurion was not religious; he never went to the synagogue and ate pork for breakfast. Yet he was intensely biblical. Dan Kurzman, who calls him “the personification of the Zionist dream,” titles each chapter of his biography (Ben-Gurion, Prophet of Fire, 1983) with a Bible quote. The preface begins like this:
“The life of David Ben-Gurion is more than the story of an extraordinary man. It is the story of a biblical prophecy, an eternal dream. […] Ben-Gurion was, in a modern sense, Moses, Joshua, Isaiah, a messiah who felt he was destined to create an exemplary Jewish state, a ‘light unto the nations’ that would help to redeem all mankind.”
For Ben-Gurion, writes Kurzman, the rebirth of Israel in 1948 “paralleled the Exodus from Egypt, the conquest of the land by Joshua, the Maccabean revolt.” Ben-Gurion himself emphasized: “There can be no worthwhile political or military education about Israel without profound knowledge of the Bible.”[39] Ten days after declaring Israel’s independence, he wrote in his diary : “We will break Transjordan [Jordan], bomb Amman and destroy its army, and then Syria falls, and if Egypt will still continue to fight—we will bombard Port Said, Alexandria and Cairo.” Then he adds: “This will be in revenge for what they (the Egyptians, the Aramis and Assyrians) did to our forefathers during biblical times.”[40] Can you be more biblical than that ? Ben-Gurion was in no way a special case. His infatuation with the Bible was shared by almost every Zionist leader of his generation and the next. Moshe Dayan, the military hero of the Six-Day War, wrote a book entitled Living with the Bible (1978) in which he biblically justified Israel’s annexation of Arab territories. Naftali Bennet, Israeli minister of Education, has also recently justified the annexation of the West Bank by the Bible.
Christian will say that Zionists don’t read their Bible correctly. Obviously, they don’t read it with the pink Christian glasses. In Isaiah, for example, Christians find hope that, one day, people “will hammer their swords into plowshares and their spears into sickles” (Isaiah 2:4). But Zionists correctly start with the previous verses, which describe these messianic times as a Pax Judaica, when “all the nations” will pay tribute “to the mountain of Yahweh, to the house of the god of Jacob,” when “the Law will issue from Zion and the word of Yahweh from Jerusalem,” so that Yahweh will “judge between the nations and arbitrate between many peoples.” Further down in the same book, they read:
“The riches of the sea will flow to you, the wealth of the nations come to you” (60:5); “For the nation and kingdom that will not serve you will perish, and the nations will be utterly destroyed” (60:12); “You will suck the milk of nations, you will suck the wealth of kings” (60:16); “You will feed on the wealth of nations, you will supplant them in their glory” (61:5-6);
Zionism cannot be a nationalist movement like other, because it resonates with the destiny of Israel as outlined in the Bible: “Yahweh your God will raise you higher than every other nation in the world” (Deuteronomy 28:1). Only by taking into account the biblical roots of Zionism can one understand that Zionism has always carried within it a hidden imperialist agenda. It may be true that Theodor Herzl and Max Nordau sincerely wished Israel to be “a nation like others,” as Gilad Atzmon explains.[41] But still, when they called their movement “Zionism”, they used Jerusalem’s biblical name borrowed from the most imperialistic prophecies, and most notably Isaiah 2:3 quoted above.
Biblical prophecies outline Israel’s ultimate destiny, or meta-Zionism, whereas the historical books, and particularly the Book of Joshua, set the pattern for the first stage, the conquest of Palestine, or Zionism. As wrote Avigail Abarbanel in “Why I left the Cult,” the Zionist conquerors of Palestine “have been following quite closely the biblical dictate to Joshua to just walk in and take everything. […] For a supposedly non-religious movement it’s extraordinary how closely Zionism […] has followed the Bible.”[42] In the same mood, Kim Chernin writes:
“I can’t count the number of times I read the story of Joshua as a tale of our people coming into their rightful possession of their promised land without stopping to say to myself, ‘but this is a history of rape, plunder, slaughter, invasion, and destruction of other peoples.’”[43]
A “history of genocide” would not be exaggerated, if we consider the treatment reserved to Canaanites: In Jericho, “They enforced the curse of destruction on everyone in the city: men and women, young and old, including the oxen, the sheep and the donkeys, slaughtering them all” (Joshua 6:21). The city of Ai met the same fate. Its inhabitants were all slaughtered, twelve thousand of them, “until not one was left alive and none to flee. […] When Israel had finished killing all the inhabitants of Ai in the open ground, and in the desert where they had pursued them, and when every single one had fallen to the sword, all Israel returned to Ai and slaughtered its remaining population” (8:22–25). Women were not spared. “For booty, Israel took only the cattle and the spoils of this town” (8:27). Then came to turn of the cities of Makkedah, Libnah, Lachish, Eglon, Hebron, Debir, and Hazor. In the whole land, Joshua “left not one survivor and put every living thing under the curse of destruction, as Yahweh, god of Israel, had commanded” (10:40).
It certainly helps to understand the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians to know that the Book of Joshua is considered a glorious chapter of Israel’s national narrative. And when Israeli leaders claim that their vision of the global future is based on the Hebrew Bible, we should take them seriously and study the Bible. It is helpful, for example, to be aware that Yahweh has designated to Israel “seven nations greater and mightier than you,” that “you must utterly destroy,” and “show no mercy to them.” As for their kings, “you shall make their name perish from under heaven” (Deuteronomy 7:1-2, 24). The destruction of the “Seven Nations,” also mentioned in Joshua 24:11, is considered a mitzvah in rabbinic Judaism, and by the great Maimonides in his Book of Commandments,[44] and it has remained a popular motif in Jewish culture. Knowing this will help to understand the neocon agenda for World War IV (as Norman Podhoretz names the current global conflict).[45] General Wesley Clark, former Supreme Commander for NATO in Europe (he led the NATO agression against Serbia twenty years ago), wrote, and repeated in numerous occasions, that one month after September 11, 2001, a Pentagon general showed him a memo “that describes how we’re gonna take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia and Sudan and finishing off with Iran.”[46] Wesley Clark has managed to pass as a whistleblower, but I believe he belongs to what Gilad Atzmon sees as the Jewish controlled opposition, together with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now who interviewed him.[47] Only in 1999 has he revealed being the son of Benjamin Jacob Kanne and the proud descendant of a lineage of Kohen rabbis. It is hard to believe that he has never heard about the Bible’s “seven nations”. Is Clark a crypto-Zionist trying to write history in biblical terms, while blaming these wars on WASP Pentagon warmongers? Interestingly, in his September 20, 2001 speech, President Bush also cited seven “rogue states” for their support of global terrorism, but in his list, Cuba and North Korea replaced Lebanon and Somalia. It is because part of Bush’s entourage refused to include Lebanon and Somalia, while his neocon handlers insisted on keeping the number seven for its symbolic value? Whatever the explanation, I suspect that the importance of targeting exactly “seven nations” after 9/11 stems from the same biblical obsession as the need to have ten Nazis hanged on Purim day 1946 to match the ten sons of Haman hanged in the Book of Esther. Just like Rabbi Bernhard Rosenberg can now marvel at how prophetic the Book of Esther is,[48] the idea is to “realize,” a few decades from now, that World War IV fulfilled Deuteronomy 7: the destruction of Israel’s seven enemy nations. Christian Zionists will be in extasy and praise “the Lord” (as their Bible translates YHWH). Of course, fulfilling prophecies does not always come easy: Isaiah 17:1, “Behold, Damascus will soon cease to be a city, it will become a heap of ruins,” is not quite done, yet.
I believe that Gilad Atzmon is making a very important point when emphasizing:
“Israel defines itself as the Jewish state. In order to grasp Israel, its politics, its policies and the intrusive nature of its lobby, we must understand the nature of Jewishness.”
And I believe that Jewishness is, at the core, the ideology of the Tanakh. There was no Jewishness before the Tanakh, and the Tanakh is the single ultimate root connecting all expressions of Jewishness, whether religious or secular—for what that distinction is worth. Jewishness would simply wither without the Tanakh.
Zionism is an expression of Jewishness. As we have seen, it is inherently imperialistic because it is biblical. I will now argue that it is also inherently deceptive because it is biblical. There are two aspects to the deceptive nature of the Tanakh: historical and metaphysical. To understand them, we need to know the context of its writing. The greatest part of the Tanakh, including the historical books, was edited during the exilic period, and reached its near-final form after Babylon had fallen under Persian rule in 539 BCE. That thesis, first put forward by Baruch Spinoza in 1670,[49] has always met with fierce opposition from the Christian world, but it was accepted by the great British historian of civilizations Arnold J. Toynbee,[50] and it is now getting the high ground.[51] The Judean exiles, after having helped the Persians conquer Babylon, were rewarded by high offices at the Persian court, and obtained the right to return to Jerusalem and set up a government subject to Persia. The manner by which these Judeo-Babylonian Levites maneuvered the Persians’ imperial policy in support of their theocratic project for Palestine is unknown, but we can imagine it similar to the way the Zionists have hijacked the Anglo-American empire’s foreign policy in recent times; the edict of Cyrus the Great presented at the beginning of the Book of Ezra is comparable to the Balfour Declaration. In 458 BCE, eighty years after the return of the first exiles, Ezra, proud descendant of a line of Aaronite priests, went from Babylon to Jerusalem, mandated by the king of Persia and accompanied by some 1,500 followers. He was soon joined by Nehemiah, a Persian court official of Judean origin. As “Secretary of the Law,” Ezra carried with him the newly redacted Torah, and Spinoza plausibly suggested that he was the head of the scribal school that had compiled and edited most of the Tanakh.
The history of Israel and Judea that we have today was written as justification for that proto-Zionist enterprise, which implied the usurpation of the name and heritage of the ancient kingdom of Israel by the Judeans. Of course, not everything in the historical books is pure invention: ancient materials were used, but the main narrative that aggregates them is built on a post-exilic ideological construct. The central piece of that narrative is the glorious kingdom of Solomon, reaching from the Euphrates to the Nile (1Kings 5:1), with its magnificent temple and its lavish royal palace in Jerusalem (described in detail in 1Kings 5-8). Solomon had “seven hundred wives of royal rank and three hundred concubines” (11:3) and “received gifts from all the kings in the world, who had heard of his wisdom” (5:14). We know today that Solomon’s kingdom is a complete fabrication, a mythical past projected as the mirror image of a desired future, a fictitious justification for the prophecy of its “restoration”. Even the idea that Jerusalem, located in Judea, was once the capital of Israel is blatantly false: Israel never had any other capital than Samaria. Twentieth-century archeology has definitively exposed the fallacy: there is no trace whatsoever of Solomon and his “united kingdom”.[52]
The scam is quite evident from the way the authors of the Books of Kings, aware of the absolute baselessness of their story, back it with the grotesque testimony of a totally spurious Queen of Sheba:
“The report I heard in my own country about your wisdom in handling your affairs was true then! Until I came and saw for myself, I did not believe the reports, but clearly I was told less than half: for wisdom and prosperity, you surpass what was reported to me. How fortunate your wives are! How fortunate these courtiers of yours, continually in attendance on you and listening to your wisdom! Blessed be Yahweh your God who has shown you his favour by setting you on the throne of Israel! Because of Yahweh’s everlasting love for Israel, he has made you king to administer law and justice.” (1 Kings 10:6-9)[53]
When Ben-Gurion declared before the Knesset three days after invading the Sinai in 1956, that what was at stake was “the restoration of the kingdom of David and Solomon,”[54] and when Israeli leaders continue to dream of a “Greater Israel” of biblical proportions, they are simply perpetuating a two-thousand-year-old deception—self-deception perhaps, but deception all the same.
Deeper than the historical deception, at the very core of the Bible, lies a more essential metaphysical deception which goes a long way towards explaining the ambivalence of tribalism and universalism so typical of Jewishness. Biblical historian Philip Davies wrote that “the ideological structure of the biblical literature can only be explained in the last analysis as a product of the Persian period,”[55] and the central idea of that “ideological structure” is biblical monotheism. In the pre-exilic strata of the Bible, Yahweh is a national god among others: “For all peoples go forward, each in the name of its god, while we go forward in the name of Yahweh our god for ever and ever,” says pre-exilic prophet Micah (4:5). What sets Yahweh apart from other national gods is his jealousy, which supposes the existence of other gods: “You shall have no other gods to rival me” (Exodus 20:3). Only in the Persian period does Yahweh really become the only existing God, and, by logical consequence, the creator of the Universe—Genesis 1 being demonstrably taken from Mesopotamian myths.
That transformation of national Yahweh into the “God of heaven and earth” is a case of crypsis, an imitation of Persian religion, for the purpose of political and cultural ascendency. The Persians were predominantly monotheistic under the Achaemenids, worshipers of the Supreme God Ahura Mazda, whose representations and invocations can be seen on royal inscriptions. Herodotus—who, by the way, travelled through Syria-Palestine around 450 BCE without hearing about Jews—wrote about the Persians’ customs:
“they have no images of the gods, no temples nor altars, and consider the use of them a sign of folly. [….] Their wont, however, is to ascend the summits of the loftiest mountains, and there to offer sacrifice to Zeus, which is the name they give to the whole circuit of the firmament.” (Histories, I.131)
Persian monotheism was remarkably tolerant of other cults. In contrast, Judean monotheism is exclusivist because, although Yahweh now claims to be the universal God, he remains the ethnocentric, jealous god of Israel. And so Persian influence was not the only factor in the development of biblical monotheism, that is, the claim that “the god of Israel” is the One and Only God: Yahweh’s sociopathic jealousy, his murderous hatred of all other gods and goddesses, was an important ingredient from pre-exilic times: being the only god worthy of worship is tantamount to being the only god, and therefore God. In 1Kings 18, we see Yahweh compete with the great Syrian Baal Shamem (“Lord of Heaven”) for the title of True God, by means of a holocaust contest ending with the slaughter of four hundred prophets of Baal. Later on we read of the Judean general Jehu who, having overthrown and slaughtered Israel’s dynasty of King Omri, summoned all the priests of Baal for “a great sacrifice to Baal,” and, as sacrifice, massacred them all. “Thus Jehu rid Israel of Baal” (2Kings 10,18-28). This informs us on how Yahweh supposedly became Supreme God instead of Baal: by the physical elimination of all the priests of Baal, that is, exactly the same way that Jehu became king of Israel by exterminating the family of the legitimate king, as well as “all his leading men, his close friends, his priests; he did not leave a single one alive” (2Kings 10:11).
Yet these legendary stories have come to us in a post-exilic redaction, and although they may reflect an earlier competition between Yahweh and Baal, the metaphysical claim that Yahweh is the supreme God, the Creator of Heaven and Earth, only became an explicit creed and a cornerstone of Judaism from the Persian period. It was a means of assimilation-dissimulation into the Persian commonwealth, comparable to the way Reformed Judaism mimicked Christianity in the 19th century.
The Book of Ezra and the prostitute of Jericho
The process of how Yahweh was transformed from national to universal god, while remaining intensely chauvinistic, can actually be documented from the Book of Ezra. It contains extracts from several edicts attributed to succeeding Persian kings. All are fake, but their content is indicative of the politico-religious strategy deployed by the Judean exiles for their proto-Zionist lobbying. In the first edict, Cyrus the Great declares that “Yahweh, the God of Heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth and has appointed me to build him a Temple in Jerusalem,” then goes on to allow “his [Yahweh’s] people to “go up to Jerusalem, in Judah, and build the Temple of Yahweh, the god of Israel, who is the god in Jerusalem” (Ezra 1:2–3). We understand that both phrases refer to the same entity, but the duality is significant. We find the same paradoxical designation of Yahweh as both “God of Heaven” and “god of Israel in Jerusalem” in the Persian edict authorizing the second wave of return. It is now King Artaxerxes who asks “the priest Ezra, Secretary of the Law of the God of Heaven,” to offer a gigantic holocaust to “the god of Israel who resides in Jerusalem” (7:12-15). We later find twice the same expression “God of Heaven” (Elah Shemaiya) interspersed with seven references to “your god,” that is, “the god of Israel” (keep in mind that capitalization is irrelevant here, being a convention of modern translators). “God of Heaven” appears one more time in the book of Ezra, and it is, again, in an edict signed by the Persian king: Darius confirms Cyrus’s edict and recommends that the Israelites “offer sacrifices acceptable to the God of Heaven and pray for the life of the king and his sons” (6:10). Everywhere else the book of Ezra only refers to the “god of Israel” (four times), “Yahweh, the god of your fathers” (once), and “our god” (ten times). In other words, according to the author of the book of Ezra, only the kings of Persia imagine that Yahweh is “the God of Heaven”—a common title of the universal Ahura Mazda—while for the Jews, Yahweh is merely their god, the “god of Israel,” the god of their fathers, in short, a national god. Indeed, imperial authorities are told that the Jerusalem Temple is dedicated to the God of Heaven, although the idea seems irrelevant to the Judeans themselves: when the Judeans are challenged the right to (re)build their temple by the local Persian governor, they tell him: “We are the servants of the God of Heaven and Earth” (5:11) and refer to Cyrus’s edict. And when Nehemiah wants to convince the Persian king let him go to Judea to oversee the rebuilding of Jerusalem, he offers a prayer “to the God of Heaven” (Nehemiah 2:4); but once in Jerusalem, he asks his fellow Jews to swear allegiance to “Yahweh our god” (10:30).
This unmistakable pattern in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah may be taken as a clue of the deepest secret of Judaism, and a key to understanding the real nature of “Jewish universalism”: for the Jews, Yahweh is the god of the Jews, whereas Gentiles must be told that he is the supreme and only God. “In the heart of any pious Jew, God is a Jew,” writes Maurice Samuel in You Gentiles (1924), while to Gentiles, Yahweh must be presented as the universal God who happens to prefer Jews.[56] The pattern is repeated in the book of Daniel when Nebuchadnezzar, impressed by Daniel’s oracle, prostrates himself and exclaims: “Your god is indeed the God of gods, the Master of kings” (Daniel 2:47).
The hypothesis that the dual nature of Yahweh (god of Israel for the Jews, God of the Universe for Gentiles) was intentionally encrypted into the Hebrew Bible becomes more plausible when we find the same pattern in the Book of Joshua. The book was probably written before the Exile, possibly under king Josiah (639-609 BCE). Its original author never refers to Yahweh simply as “God,” and never implies that he is anything but “the god of Israel” (9:18, 13:14, 13:33, 14:14, 22:16). Even Yahweh calls himself “the god of Israel” (7:13). When Joshua speaks to the Israelites, he speaks of “Yahweh your god” (1:11, 1:12, 1:15, 3:3, 3:9, 4:5, 4:23-24, 8:7, 22:3-4, 22:5, 23:3,5,8,11, 24:2). The Israelites collectively refer to “Yahweh our god” (22:19), or individually as “Yahweh my god” (14:8). Israel’s enemies speak to Joshua about “Yahweh your god” (9:9), and he tells them about “Yahweh my god” (9:23). Yahweh is once called “lord of the whole earth” by Joshua (3:13), and once “the god of gods” by enthusiastic Israelites (22:22), but none of this can be considered to contain any explicit theological claim that Yahweh is the Creator: it is more like the Persian king calling himself king of kings and ruler of the world. Neither can the mention of an altar built by the Israelites as “a witness between us that Yahweh is god” (22:34) be taken to mean anything more than “Yahweh is god between us.” If the Yahwist scribe of the Book of Joshua had believed Yahweh to be the universal God, he would have written of whole cities being converted rather than exterminated for the glory of Yahweh.
The only explicit profession of faith that Yahweh is the supreme God, in the whole Book of Joshua, is coming from a foreigner, just like in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. Not a king, this time, but a prostitute. Rahab is a prostitute in Jericho, who infiltrates the invading Israelites into the city. As justification for betraying her own people, she tells the Israelites that “Yahweh your god is God both in Heaven above and on Earth beneath” (2:11), something that neither the narrator, nor Yahweh, nor any Israelite in the book ever claims. Rahab’s profession of faith is likely to be a post-exilic addition to the book, for it actually conflicts with her more prosaic motivation:
“we are afraid of you and everyone living in this country has been seized with terror at your approach. […] give me a sure sign of this: that you will spare the lives of my father and mother, my brothers and sisters and all who belong to them, and will preserve us from death.” (2:9-12).
In the final redaction, the pattern is the same as in the Book of Ezra, and reveals the secret of post-exilic Judaism: To the Jews, Yahweh is their national god, but it is good for the Jews that Gentiles (whether kings or prostitutes) regard Yahweh as the “God of Heaven”. It has worked wonderfully: Christians today believe that the God of humankind decided to manifest himself as the jealous “god of Israel” from the time of Moses, whereas the real historical process is the reverse: it is the tribal “god of Israel” who impersonated the God of humankind at the time of Ezra—while continuing to prefer Jews.
Worshipping a national god with imperialistic ambitions, while pretending to the Gentiles that they are worshipping the One True God, is manufacturing a catastrophic misunderstanding. A public scandal emerged in 167 CE, when the Hellenistic emperor Antiochos IV dedicated the temple in Jerusalem to Zeus Olympios, the Greek name of the supreme God. He had been led to understand that Yahweh and Zeus were two names for the same cosmic God, the Heavenly Father of all mankind. But the Jewish Maccabees who led the rebellion knew better: Yahweh may be the Supreme God, but only Jews are intimate with Him, and any way the Pagans worship Him is an abomination. Moreover, although the Israelites claimed that their Temple was dedicated to the God of all mankind, they also firmly believed that any non-Jew entering it should be put to death. This fact alone betrays the true nature of Hebrew monotheism: it was a deception from the beginning, the ultimate metaphysical crypsis. Only when that biblical hoax is exposed to the world will Zion start to lose its symbolic power. For it is the original source of the psychopathic bond by which Israel controls the world.
Notes
[1] Andrew Cockburn, Rumsfeld: His Rise, His fall, and Catastrophic Legacy, Scribner, 2011, p. 219. Cockburn claims to have heard this repeated by “friends of the family.”
[2] Leo Strauss, “Why we Remain Jews”, quoted in Shadia Drury, Leo Strauss and the American Right, St. Martin’s Press, 1999 (on archive.org), p. 31-43.
[3] Kevin MacDonald, Cultural Insurrections: Essays on Western Civilizations, Jewish Influence, and Anti-Semitism, The Occidental Press, 2007, p. 122.
[4] Kevin McDonald, Cultural Insurrection, op. cit., p. 66.
[5] Benjamin Balint, Running Commentary: The Contentious Magazine That Transformed the Jewish Left into the Neoconservative Right, Public Affairs, 2010.
[6] Congress Bi-Weekly, quoted by Philip Weiss, “30 Years Ago, Neocons Were More Candid About Their Israel-Centered Views,” Mondoweiss.net, May 23, 2007: mondoweiss.net/2007/05/30_years_ago_ne.html
[7] http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/pdf/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf
[8] Elliott Abrams, Faith or Fear: How Jews Can Survive in a Christian America, Simon & Schuster, 1997, p. 181.
[9] Patrick J. Buchanan, “Whose War? A neoconservative clique seeks to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America’s interest,” The American Conservative, March 24, 2003, www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/whose-war/
[10] Stephen Sniegoski, The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel, Enigma Edition, 2008, p. 156.
[11] http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/wilkerson.html
[12] Stephen Sniegoski, The Transparent Cabal, op. cit., p. 120.
[13] April 11, 2002, quoted in Justin Raimondo, The Terror Enigma: 9/11 and the Israeli Connection, iUniverse, 2003, p. 19.
[14] April 26, 2013, on MSNBC, watch on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRlatDWqh0o.
[15] Noted by Inter-Press Service on March 29, 2004, under the title “U.S.: Iraq war is to protect Israel, says 9/11 panel chief,” and repeated by United Press International the next day, on www.upi.com.
[16] Norman Podhoretz, Breaking Ranks: A Political Memoir, Harper & Row , 1979, p. 335.
[17] Translated from the French edition, Yirmiyahu Yovel, L’Aventure marrane. Judaïsme et modernité, Seuil, 2011, pp. 119-120, 149–151.
[18] Yirmiyahu Yovel, L’Aventure marrane, op. cit., pp. 96–98, 141–143; Nathan Wachtel, Entre Moïse et Jésus. Études marranes (XVe-XIXe siècle), CNRS éditions, 2013, pp. 54–65.
[19] Yirmiyahu Yovel, L’Aventure marrane, op. cit., pp. 483, 347.
[20] Yirmiyahu Yovel, L’Aventure marrane, op. cit., pp. 149–151.
[21] Elliott Horowitz, Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence, Princeton University Press, 2006.
[22] Hannah Arendt calls him a “race fanatic” in The Origins of Totalitarianism, vol. 1: Antisemitism, Meridian Books, 1958, pp. 309–310.
[23] Stanley Weintraub, Disraeli: A Biography, Hamish Hamilton, 1993, p. 579.
[24] Kevin MacDonald, Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism, Praeger, 1998, kindle 2013, k. 5876–82.
[25] Gilad Atzmon, The Wandering Who? A Study of Jewish Identity Politics, Zero Books, 2011, pp. 55–56.
[26] Moses Hess, Rome and Jerusalem: A Study in Jewish Nationalism, 1918 (on archive.org), pp. 71, 27.
[27] Moses Hess, Rome and Jerusalem, op. cit., p. 74.
[28] Quoted in Alfred Lilienthal, What Price Israel? (1953), 50th Anniversary Edition, Infinity Publishing, 2003, p. 14.
[29] Kaufmann Kohler, Jewish Theology, Systematically and Historically Considered, Macmillan, 1918 (on http://www.gutenberg.org), pp. 290, 378–380.
[30] Quoted in Kevin MacDonald, Separation and Its Discontents, op. cit., k. 5463–68.
[31] Daniel Gordis, Does the World Need Jews? Rethinking Chosenness and American Jewish Identity, Scribner, 1997, p. 177.
[32] Daniel Lindenberg, Figures d’Israël. L’identité juive entre marranisme et sionisme (1649–1998), Fayard, 2014, p. 10.
[33] Alison Weir, Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel, 2014, k. 3280–94.
[34] Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, Verso, 2014, p. 6.
[35] Benjamin Ginsberg, Jews in American Politics: Essays, dir. Sandy Maisel, Rowman & Littlefield, 2004, p. 22.
[36] Arthur Hertzberg, The Zionist State, Jewish Publication Society, 1997, p. 94.
[37] David Ben-Gurion and Amram Duchovny, David Ben-Gurion, In His Own Words, Fleet Press Corp., 1969, p. 116
[38] Official website: http://www.jerusalemsummit.org/eng/declaration.php.
[39] Dan Kurzman, Ben-Gurion, Prophet of Fire, Touchstone, 1983, pp. 17–18, 22, 26–28.
[40] Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Oneworld Publications, 2007, p. 144.
[41] Gilad Atzmon, Being in Time: A Post-Political Manifesto, Skyscraper, 2017, pp. 66-67.
[42] Avigail Abarbanel, “Why I left the Cult,” October 8, 2016, on mondoweiss.net
[43] Kim Chernin, “The Seven Pillars of Jewish Denial.” Tikkun, Sept./Oct. 2002, quoted in MacDonald, Cultural Insurrections, op. cit., pp. 27-28.
[44] http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/961561/jewish/Positive-Commandment-187.htm
[45] Norman Podhoretz, World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism, Vintage Books, 2008.
[46] Wesley Clark, Winning Modern Wars, Public Affairs, 2003, p. 130.
[47] Gilad Atzmon, Being in Time: A Post-Political Manifesto, Skyscraper, 2017, p. 187-209.
[48] Another example: Bernard Benyamin, Le Code d’Esther. Si tout était écrit…, First Editions, 2012.
[49] Benedict de Spinoza, Theological-political treatise, chapter 8, §11, Cambridge UP, 2007, pp. 126-128.
[50] Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, volume XII, Reconsiderations, Oxford University Press, 1961, p. 486, quoted on http://mailstar.net/toynbee.html
[51] Thomas Romer, The Invention of God, Harvard University Press, 2016.
[52] Read for example Israel Finkelstein and Neil Adher Silberman, David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible’s Sacred Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition, S&S International, 2007.
[53] All Bible quotes are from the Catholic New Jerusalem Bible, which has the advantage of not altering YHWH into “the Lord,” as most other English translations have done for unscholarly reasons.
[54] Israel Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, Pluto Press, 1994, p. 10 .
[55] Philip Davies, In Search of “Ancient Israel”: A Study in Biblical Origins, Journal of the Study of the Old Testament, 1992, p. 94.
[56] Maurice Samuel, You Gentiles, New York, 1924 (on archive.org), pp. 74–75.
Canada’s Carbon Tax Will Kill People
‘Winter mortality is lower when the price of heating is lower’: new research report.
source: page 33 of this 2009 UK govt report
By Donna Laframboise | Big Picture News | April 8, 2019
Last month, the National Bureau of Economic Research released a dramatic working paper. Its conclusion: when US home heating costs fell, fewer people died.
In the authors’ words, we’ve known for decades that “mortality peaks in winter and that cold weather is associated with higher mortality.” When home heating gets expensive, many people – especially the poorest members of our community – turn down the thermostat. But lower indoor temperatures are associated with an uptick in fatal strokes, heart attacks, and infections.
After collecting reams of data, and performing careful calculations, the researchers conclude that US heating bills declined noticeably between 2005 and 2010 “due to the boom in shale production of natural gas.”
That price decline, they write, “caused a 1.6% decrease in the winter mortality rate for households using natural gas for heating.”
Only 58% of American households heat with natural gas, so the drop in the death rate for the US population as a whole over a full calendar year works out to about half a percentage point. The bottom line: lower energy prices saved 11,000 lives annually.
Which brings us to the carbon tax recently imposed on all sources of home heating here in more northerly Canada. Enbridge, the company which supplies natural gas to Ontario homes, says it needs to raise the price it charges households by 11% just to pay for this carbon tax.
If deaths drop when heating costs decline, they’ll surely increase when heating costs spike. So let’s not beat around the bush: Canada’s carbon tax is going to kill people.
Extrapolating from those US numbers, 1,100 Canadians will die unnecessarily next winter. And the winter after that. And the one after that. As the size of the carbon tax increases, the number of annual victims may well rise in tandem.
Certain categories of people are at higher risk of death-by-carbon-tax. People whose health is already compromised. People who are already struggling to pay their bills. (Seniors, of course, are over-represented amongst both groups.)
There’s nothing heroic about a policy that consigns old people to shivering in the dark. That’s an attack on our most vulnerable. That’s a betrayal.
When people die from opioid overdoses, our Prime Minister rightly calls it a ‘crisis.’ He calls it “devastating. Families ripped apart. Communities forever altered. Loved ones lost too soon.” Yet his carbon tax has set into motion a wave of similar tragedy and sorrow.
Where global carbon dioxide emissions are concerned, Canada’s 1.6% contribution is so trivial that nothing we do can possibly make a difference. We’re a rounding error, simply irrelevant to the big picture.
Which means that Canada’s carbon-tax-induced deaths won’t just be premature, they’ll be utterly meaningless.
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From the Archives
The run up to the Iran war exposes inner workings of the US/Israeli deep state
By Justin K.P. | The Dissident | June 9, 2026
Taking a careful look at the run-up to the U.S./Israeli war on Iran exposes the inner workings of the U.S./Israeli deep state and the covert operations that the CIA and Mossad carry out around the world to lay the groundwork for war.
In this article, I will detail how the U.S. and Israel astroturfed protests in Iran, infiltrated them with rioters, and ran an atrocity propaganda campaign about Iran massacring protestors to manufacture consent for war.
This article will be an examination of the deep state’s war on Iran, prior to the full-scale U.S. invasion.
This article will be specific to Iran, but should be seen as a case study for how American, Israeli, and often British intelligence lay the groundwork for targets of empire around the world. … continue
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