Are We Losing Free Speech in America?
Israel is the catalyst for a major loss of freedom
BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • JANUARY 4, 2024
There is little appreciation inside the United States for the grave damage being inflicted on our country by President Joe Biden’s foreign policy being conducted through the mechanism of starting or sustaining a new war every year. The justifications provided by the White House, State Department and Pentagon are so vacuous that they have succeeded in creating a new low standard for the art of government lying. The country is burdened by unsustainable debt yet we have the so-called Secretary of the Treasury Janice Yellen declaring in October that another war beyond Ukraine, presumably to directly intervene supporting Israel in destroying Gaza, can “certainly” be afforded. And with the current US military build-ups near China and in the Middle East to confront Iran there presumably is enough gas in the tank to pick up on another conflict or two before Genocide Joe stands for reelection later this year.
But in spite of the damage to our economy, which is quite real, some of the gravest threats come from within, from the attacks delivered by special interest groups directed against our fundamental liberties. The most significant assaults have of late been directed against the First Amendment, freedom of speech, which is the bedrock of all the rights and which is currently being assailed continuously by that most protected of all protected groups, America’s Jewish and Israeli Lobby.
Hardly a minute of the day passes without a new article in the mainstream media about “surging antisemitism.” The journalists involved, most of whom are Jewish, hardly ever observe that Israel’s slaughtering of 30,000 Gazans, mostly women and children, just might have something to do with how the public is beginning to regard the behavior of the Jewish state and its leaders. What actually fuels public outrage that groups like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) choose to regard as antisemitism is Israel slaughtering ten thousand children under a flag displaying the Star of David and stating its intention to continue the massacre until all the Palestinians have fled to other countries or been killed. We are talking of 2 million plus people but Israel’s friends in the US regard them as little more than “sub-humans” or “terrorists.”
The Jewish/Israel lobby in America does not forgive and forget. Witness the continuing attacks on America’s universities for not rolling over and purging all suspected antisemites among faculty and students. Liz Magill, the President of the University of Pennsylvania, resigned almost immediately after being interrogated by the US Congress and the multiple attacks began. Poor Claudine Gay, president of Harvard, hung on but eventually also resigned after she was subjected to near continuous harassment by Israel’s friends, including in the US Congress, because she, like her presidential colleagues, had not accepted that nearly all criticism of Israel in the context of Gaza is based on Jew-hatred, which she was apparently expected to assert. To no one’s surprise, in her resignation letter she was not even honest about who had brought her down, blaming it instead mostly on racism. The letter did not even include the words “Congress” or “Gaza” or “antisemitism” or even “Israel.” To be sure, Gay is not a top level academic and probably was an affirmative action hire but has anyone ever heard of a Congressional committee going after an academic for the sin of plagiarism before? The involvement of the phony claims of antisemitism and the desire to protect Israel are what has made the difference in this case and led to the intensity and persistence of the attacks.
Indeed, the ADL’s revolting director Jonathan Greenblatt is demanding that there be more “consequences” for “antisemites on campus” and the media is hot on the story. Sally Kornbluth, President of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who has not resigned after the ridiculous encounter of the three presidents with Congress is still being hotly pursued by that body. Also engaged in the hunt are the many US Government entities whose sole task is to root out antisemites and holocaust deniers. The Department of Justice, headed of course by Jewish Attorney General Merrick Garland nee Garfinkel, is reportedly investigating a number of leading universities including Tulane and Rutgers for failure to “protect the civil rights of Jewish students.” It is a typical pattern where Jewish officials investigate alleged crimes against other Jews and come up with a predictable conclusion.
The universities are scrambling to comply with the government demands to get tough with alleged antisemites. At Columbia University, for example, certain slogans and chants used by Palestinian students have been banned and blocked, but there is no corresponding interference with Jewish student activities. Professor Rashid Khalidi has written a response to the university administration saying:
“Our deans state that the Columbia community should acknowledge ‘that hearing chanted phrases such as ‘by any means necessary,’ ‘from the river to the sea,’ or calls for an ‘intifada’—irrespective of intentions and provenance—is experienced by many Jewish, Israeli, and other members of our community as antisemitic and deeply hurtful. They have thus unilaterally decided that no one should rise up [the actual meaning of ‘intifada’] against 56 years of illegal military occupation; that Palestine should remain unfree from the river to the sea; and that the oppressed should take permission from the oppressor as to the means to relieve their oppression. They have come to this decision because hearing otherwise is ‘antisemitic and deeply hurtful’ to some. This statement amounts to a new norm that prohibits using or learning about these terms and their histories, in favor of the privileging of a politics of feeling. While perhaps appropriate to a kindergarten, it is hard to imagine an approach more contrary to the most basic idea of a university. This statement is characteristic of a university that picks a task force nearly devoid of expertise on antisemitism and on Palestine/Israel (much of which exists among the faculty), but packed with outspoken advocates for Israel, a university that has decided that faculty expertise on freedom of speech or on language to be proscribed should be rigorously excluded from deliberations on such issues. With complete disregard for the principle of faculty governance, crucial matters like these are being decided upon by administrators, presumably with hefty input from trustees, donors and politicians, who have negligible expertise, but robust and one-sided opinions.”
Khalidi might also have observed how pro-Israel groups at colleges are compiling and blacklisting names of student-critics of the Gaza situation so they can be denied jobs after they graduate. And beyond the damage done to freedom of speech and critical thinking at the universities there are already plenty of other possible consequences for those who are choosing to speak up about the atrocities that are underway but they only appear to apply to Palestinian and antiwar groups that are demonstrating against Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Gazans. Ambitious politician wannabe Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida was one of the first to respond, banning Palestinian groups at all state universities due to their alleged “antisemitism.” He did not ban or even criticize a single Jewish group for cheerleading the slaughter of the Palestinians. And this has been the pattern elsewhere with the banning or denying of facilities to Palestinian and antiwar groups, but leaving Hillel and other Jewish groups alone no matter what they do. Is that freedom of speech? Of course not, but it is a measure of who has power in the United States and who does not. Speak ill of whomever you choose but leave Israel alone or you will be in real trouble!
And protecting Israel also extends to the punishing of supporters of completely nonviolent action, like boycotting or divesting from Israeli products to put pressure on the Benjamin Netanyahu regime. If you belong to a group that opposes Israeli policies you could be denied goods and services for that fact alone. In more than thirty states one can be compelled, for example, to sign an agreement not to support any action against Israel if one wants a job or government services. This special arrangement is unique to Israel and there are also special trade missions often manned by American Jews or Israelis, including in my state Virginia, which create special investment opportunities for Israel that do not exist for any other country.
But perhaps the most insidious attempt to complete America’s falling under the control of Israel-thinks is what is taking place in lower-to-mid level public education. Many school districts and even state educational boards require courses in the horrors of antisemitism and the so-called holocaust. The courses are, of course, being pushed most ardently by Jews and by select Evangelicals who are sitting around waiting for the Second Coming, a prophecy that involves in their minds the return of Jews to the Holy Land as a prerequisite. Senator Jacky Rosen of Nevada, who is, of course, Jewish, has just introduced legislation called the “Never Again Education Act,” which has an impact nationwide. The “Never Again Education Act” was first introduced in July of 2019 before passing in the House in January 2020 with 300 co-sponsors and in the Senate in May 2020. As it is set to expire in 2025, Senator Rosen is looking to have the Act reapproved to extend it to 2030 to “provide funding for training and lessons on the ethnic cleansing of Jews.”
The problem with the Act is that it rests on a contrived narrative that is essentially political in nature, including as it does many non-historical and even fabricated assertions about what took place in the 1930s and 1940s. The Act is intended to bestow on Jews a special victimhood that in turn conveys on them and on Israel exemption from normal rules regarding their behavior. It, of course, is part of the narrative that is giving Netanyahu and his rogues a more-or-less free pass from the US for their crimes against humanity against the Palestinians.
So the America we once knew is under siege. Free speech is being eroded and will soon be subject to criminal penalties if one says the wrong thing about Israel. This is intolerable and one prays that the American people will have its own “intifada” and wake up to the new infamy and put an end to it.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
Israeli family of key case in NY Times report refutes story of alleged rape by Hamas fighters
Press TV – January 4, 2024
The Israeli family of a key case in the New York Times report on alleged sexual violence by Hamas fighters on October 7 renounces the published story, saying reporters have manipulated them.
On December 28, the New York Times published a story, claiming that fighters of the Palestinian Hamas resistance group allegedly committed a pattern of gender-based violence against Israeli women when the group carried out the surprise Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the occupying entity on October 7.
Authors of the report – Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Jeffrey Gettleman, along with Anat Schwartz and Adam Sella – claimed that they had compiled the story based on over 150 interviews they conducted with purported victims or their families, mainly repeating October 7 testimonies that have been previously published and already debunked and discredited.
A third of the report, however, was devoted to the Abdush family, a working-class Mizrahi Jewish family who lost their daughter, Gal, known as “the woman in the black dress”, back then and how she was allegedly raped during the Hamas attack.
The report focused on footage that was captured on October 8 by a woman called Eden Wessely, who published it on her social media accounts. According to the report by the New York Times, “The video went viral, with thousands of people responding, desperate to know if the woman in the black dress was their missing friend, sister or daughter.”
A day after the report was published, the Israeli Ynet news site conducted an interview with Gal’s parents, who stressed that there is no proof she was raped, and that the paper’s reporters interviewed them under false pretenses, saying that they knew nothing about the sexual assault issue until the piece in the American daily was published. Furthermore, Gal’s sisters also strongly denied allegations of rape.
On January 1, Nissim Abdush, Nagi’s brother-in-law, repeatedly denied that his sister-in-law was raped in an interview with Israeli Channel 13.
Hamas has strongly rejected Israel’s allegations of rape and sexual assaults against its fighters, saying the regime is striving to demonize the resistance by such fabricated stories.
“We reject the Israeli lies about raping, which aim to distort the resistance and tarnish our humane and moral treatment of captives,” Hamas said in a statement in early December.
The Israeli regime waged the war on Gaza on October 7 after Hamas launched its operation against the occupying entity in response to the Israeli regime’s atrocities against Palestinians.
Since the start of the US-backed offensive, the Israeli regime has killed at least 22,300 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injured over 57,000 others. Thousands more are also missing and presumed dead under the rubble.
Israel’s Gaza withdrawal, a prelude to full-out war
By Hasan Illaik | The Cradle | January 4, 2024
At the start of the new year, Israel’s occupation army began implementing the withdrawal of a large portion of its forces from the northern Gaza Strip.
This withdrawal did not mean the end of the war on Gaza, and it certainly did not suggest calm on the Lebanese-Israeli front. On the contrary, reducing the pace of the war in the Gaza Strip increases the possibilities of an Israeli war on Lebanon.
The battles taking place between the occupation army and Hezbollah along the southern Lebanese border since 8 October, in support of the resistance in Gaza, have been increasing in intensity day after day.
Washington and Tel Aviv have sought to maximize pressure on Hezbollah by warning of the possibility of a large-scale war between Israeli forces and the Lebanese resistance. These tactics were in effect long before the assassination of Hamas’ Deputy Head of the Political Bureau Saleh Al-Arouri on 2 January by an Israeli air strike in Dahiyeh, the southern suburb of Beirut. The killing of Al-Arouri now increases the chance of the war expanding.
The third stage is coming
The first stage of Tel Aviv’s war was the mass destruction and occupation of northern Gaza; the second stage is the occupation of key points in the south of the Gaza Strip, where Palestinian civilians have flocked for safety. The current troop withdrawal from the territory’s north means that the Israelis are cementing their southern plans and preparing to move on to phase three: the long, low-intensity war.
As it enters the third stage, the occupation army intends to maintain a geographical buffer surrounding the northern Gaza Strip. It also plans to continue occupying the Gaza Valley area (central Gaza), while completing its operations in Khan Yunis in the south.
The fate of the Philadelphia axis – or Salah ad-Din Axis – a strip of land on the border between Gaza and Egypt which Israel wants to control, will be left to deliberations between Tel Aviv and Cairo. This is to ensure that incidents do not occur that lead to tension between the two parties, as well as to guarantee that refugees do not flow from the south of the Gaza Strip towards Sinai.
Israel’s ground withdrawal from northern Gaza is taking place primarily because the occupation army’s target bank has been depleted. All targets prior to the start of the war have been destroyed, and all new operational targets have been bombed.
Despite this, the Palestinian resistance continues to carry out operations against Israeli forces. These organizations remain relatively unscathed in the entire area of the northern Gaza Strip, which will increase the ability of the resistance to inflict losses on occupation ranks, now and in the future.
This clear Israeli loss – in terms of Tel Aviv’s stated war objectives – has been made evident by two basic factors: First, that the occupation army cannot ‘cleanse’ the northern Gaza Strip house by house or tunnel by tunnel, because this process will take years, expose more of its soldiers to danger, and cannot be implemented without further displacing the entire population of northern Gaza or massacring them. It should be noted, despite Israeli attempts to portray matters otherwise, that hundreds of thousands of civilians are still present in the north.
Second, the Israeli government needs to gradually re-inject reserve soldiers into the country’s economy to jump-start it, and to ensure that the productive sectors are not exposed to damage from which recovery will take a long time. This, despite the fact that the US and much of Europe appear ready to assist Israel’s economy, if necessary.
These measures are being taken because Israel has patently failed to achieve the two main goals of its war, namely, eliminating the Hamas-led resistance in Gaza, and liberating the Israeli prisoners captured by the resistance on 7 October.
There remains a basic motive that must be noted: The Israeli army is currently putting all its efforts into implementing a US decision to push the war from its first and second phases into the third phase before the end of January 2024. This requires the war to be managed at a slower boil, drawing less attention to Israeli carnage and the mass suffering of Palestinians.
After three months of brutalities, Washington has assessed the Israeli army as unable to eliminate the resistance or the possibilities of regional escalation, and has noted the significant harm caused to the US administration of Joe Biden as he enters the presidential primary season.
An escalation with Lebanon
As the Israeli occupation army moves to focus its operations on the southern Gaza Strip, the intensity of military operations along the Lebanese border between Hezbollah and the Israeli army has also been ratcheted up.
Hezbollah increased its targeting of occupation soldiers, both in their visible locations and inside the settlements of northern Palestine.
The information capabilities of Hezbollah have developed in both sophistication and accuracy during the past months. The Lebanese resistance fighters have employed missile types not previously utilized, which have a greater range and better destructive capacity than previous generations.
On the other hand, Tel Aviv has doubled the firepower it used in southern Lebanon. The Israelis continue to limit their operations to the area south of the Litani River, and are not expanding their scope except to target resistance groups that carry out strikes across the border. In recent weeks, the occupation army’s destructive power has risen dramatically since the early days of the battle.
By increasing its strikes, Israel’s leadership seeks to inflict the greatest possible number of losses among the ranks of the resistance fighters, as well as to spread panic among southern Lebanese residents – displacing more of them, and destroying the largest possible number of homes. This places a burden on both Hezbollah and the Lebanese state in the reconstruction process after the end of hostilities.
But there is a longer-term goal to this Israeli military performance. The government in Tel Aviv, according to its official statements, wants Hezbollah to withdraw from the south of the Litani, to ensure the security of Israeli settlers in northern Palestine who abandoned their homes, either voluntarily or under evacuation orders from their army. By some estimates, the number of Israelis fleeing their settlements in occupied north Palestine has reached more than 230,000 people.
In parallel with the public statements, messages began arriving in Beirut, from the US and from European capitals, demanding what they call ‘the implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1701,’ meaning Hezbollah’s withdrawal from the south of the Litani River.
According to emerging information, Tel Aviv is betting that Hezbollah will be deterred, as the 2019 economic collapse from which Lebanon has not yet recovered and the country’s long-running internal tensions are factors that will ultimately prevent Hezbollah from waging war.
Israel is therefore hoping that Hezbollah will yield to pressure and meet its demands regarding the withdrawal of its fighters from the border area with occupied Palestine.
The Israeli assessment of Lebanese affairs preceded its assassination of Al-Arouri in Beirut on 2 January. But in the same way that Israel military commanders and politicians have under-estimated and dismissed armed Palestinian resistance initiatives within occupied lands prior to 7 October, they continue to cling to a dated Israeli calculus that Hezbollah will never fully retaliate, or that it will only do so in a way that stops short of war.
Granted, Hezbollah does genuinely seek to limit the scope of the military confrontation, and has often pushed for a Gaza ceasefire to end hostilities throughout the region. Hezbollah is equally concerned about not disrupting the lives and livelihood of southern residents.
But while Hezbollah takes into account the complex political and economic Lebanese reality, it is not prepared to make concessions. Sources in the resistance axis say that Israel, as Hezbollah sees it, is not in a position to go to war with Lebanon when it cannot even compensate or digest the massive strategic losses it has incurred from Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.
Despite its desire to not expand the war, Hezbollah has already begun to prepare for it. Hezbollah’s party statement, issued after the assassination of Al-Arouri, indicates this, and field measures and developments will begin to appear in time.
What Israel was unable to achieve in Gaza (restoring deterrence) while facing the tight ranks of the region’s Axis of Resistance, it will most certainly not be allowed to gain in Lebanon.
The first signs of this will appear in the plans that Hezbollah is expected to carry out in response to Israel’s 2 January raid on Dahiyeh to assassinate Al-Arouri – the first of its kind since August 2006 – and to which its Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah had previously threatened he would respond.
The bottom line is that Tel Aviv’s assessment of a war with Lebanon is based on its reading that Hezbollah wishes to prevent a major confrontation at any cost. Not only is this calculus wrong, but it has also muddled Israeli minds to the point where this may itself lead to the outbreak of a destructive war between the two sides.
A Lesser “Grade” of Human
Will the more than 100 Iranians killed by terrorist bombs today be mourned in the West as victims of terrorism? Certainly not.
By Michael Hoffman | Revelation of the Method | January 3, 2024
Will the more than 100 Iranians killed by terrorist bombs today be mourned in the West as victims of terrorism? Certainly not. Allied doctrine has it that the killing of Israeli or American civilians is a crime of cosmic proportions, while shedding the blood of “enemy” women and children is perfectly acceptable; indeed commendable.
The West does not memorialize the hundreds of thousands of civilians bombed by the U.S. in Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan and every major German city 1943-1945. America’s fire-bombing of the city of Tokyo by General Curtis LeMay in March 1945 was followed by Harry Truman’s atomic incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of that year. Truman never had a moment of doubt or regret over the murder of more than a 100,000 Asian children, mothers and non-combatant boys and men. It was business as usual for the “noble” Allies during the “Good War.”
In the West human rights signifies passionate concern only for civilians designated as truly human: Israelis first, then Americans and British, followed by their satraps.
This inhumanity is the legacy of Talmudic ideology, beginning with tractate Sanhedrin 57a from 400 A.D., concerning liability for capital punishment: “If a Jew murders a gentile, he is exempt.”
This teaching of contempt was reiterated in the dogma of Chabad Lubavitch founder Rabbi Shneur Zalman in the 18th century:
“In the Tanya of Zalman we encounter the doctrine that the souls of the gentiles contain no good whatsoever: Tanya Likutei Amarim I: ‘This law is taught: in the case of Israel, this soul of the kelipah is derived from kelipat nogah, which also contains good, as it originates in the esoteric ‘Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.’ The souls of the nations of the world (gentiles) however, emanate from the other, unclean kelipot which contain no good whatever.”
The unbroken chain of this dogmatic hate speech was continued by the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook in the 1920s. Kook weaponized the Talmud by uniting it with war-Zionism. He took the racism of the Talmud and “married” it to the Herzl/Ben Gurion ideology. Kook reiterated the Talmud’s ancient hostility to gentiles. He declared:
“The difference between the Israelite soul… and the souls of all the nations (gentiles), in their various grades, is greater and deeper than the difference between the soul…of man and the soul of animals. For between the latter there is only a quantitative difference, while between the former there exists a qualitative, essential difference.”
[Source: David Dishon,“The Beauty of Yefet in the Tents of Shem-Gentiles and Jews in the Thought of Rav Kook,” in Havruta: A Journal of Jewish Conversation. Shalom Hartman Institute. 1 (2): 80–89.]
Talmudic Zionist delegation to New York, 1924. Jerusalem Chief Rabbi Kook is on the right. Mayor John Hylan is at center.
The Cryptocracy clandestinely reverences the Talmud and the Kabbalah as the holiest books of Western civilization. This esteem has emerged in public in “Conservative” circles in the US and Britain, where Talmudism is hailed as an integral pillar of western civilization, an assertion which is unsustainable from the point of view of historiography, but a fervent article of faith on the Right, in that the Right wing believes that its agenda can’t prevail against the winds of woke without swearing fealty to this myth.
Influential Conservative Pastor Douglas Wilson advances his pro-nationalist views on the coattails of Talmudist philosopher Yoram Hazony of the Jerusalem Herzl Institute. I’m probably on safe ground in supposing that Rev. Wilson would never do the same partnered with an exponent of the Quran. Wilson, in spite of being acutely aware of the hate speech and blasphemous contents of the Talmud, offers a qualified “two cheers” for it in his new book, American Milk and Honey.
The august Acton Society, which bills itself as a paladin in the revival and restoration of our civilization, last month virtually canonized Lord Jonathan Sacks, the late Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the British Commonwealth. Their gushing paean, brimming with rapture for Sacks’ life work, cited his mentor, the late Zionist Grand Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson of Chabad-Lubavitch, disciple of the aforementioned racist Shneur Zalman.
“It was the Lubavitcher Rebbe, as Schneerson is known, who inspired Sacks to pursue his rabbinic ordination and dedicate himself to the Jewish people. These encounters would influence Sacks’ intellectual sensibility and approach to Jewish institutional leadership for the rest of his career.
“… Sacks delivered the Erasmus Lecture, hosted by First Things magazine in New York… under the auspices of Pope Francis, Sacks delivered the keynote address at the Vatican’s International Colloquium on ‘The Complementarity of Man and Woman.”
The Talmudic content of Rabbi Sacks’ teaching is not mentioned by the Acton institute. In a review of Jonathan Rosen’s book, The Talmud and the Internet, Chief Rabbi Sacks wrote:
“Rosen loves, as I do, the extraordinary moment in the Talmud in which God is outvoted on a point of Jewish law and celebrates the fact that his children have defeated him. In the world of the rabbis not only do men study the Word of God, God studies the word of men.”
Rabbi Lord Sacks was referring to tractate BT Bava Metzia 59b in which Rabbi Yehoshua contradicts God by declaring that the law is rightfully decided on earth by the rabbis, not in heaven. The Talmud has God admit he was wrong. It puts these words into God’s mouth: “My sons have defeated me! “My sons have defeated me!”
This is what Sacks “loves.” What does Mr. Sacks’ rabbinic megalomania have to do with the gospel of Jesus, or the literature of Augustine, Aquinas or Shakespeare? Nothing. In fact, it is profoundly inimical to it: the Talmudic mentality boasts of contradicting God. The Talmud of Mystery Babyon is an occult dictatorship emanating from the Torah sheBeal peh (the counterfeit “Torah” founded upon “the traditions of men” — cf. Mark 7 and Matthew 15).
The grandaddy of the farcical campaign to associate Talmudism with Christian law and society was Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, an ardent promoter of the “Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University.” Scalia worked to apply Talmudic halacha to the American judicial system. (Cf. “A Supremely Talmudic Supreme Court Justice,” in The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome [2017], pp. 352-353 and 588-593).
The bipolar contradictions evident in the promotion of the demonstrably false legend of the West’s civilizational debt to Orthodox rabbinic theology carry the seeds of the downfall of the Conservative movement.
Meanwhile, Muslims in Iran today, and Arab civilians both Muslim and Christian in Gaza, die under the bombs of Western-enabled terrorists. This bloodshed is privately applauded in the salons and think tanks of America and Britain, given that the victims have been judged “qualitatively” and “essentially” to be a lesser “grade” of human.
Michael Hoffman manages the podcast, Revisionist History®. He is the author of the banned 2008 textbook Judaism Discovered (1,102 pages), and nine other volumes of history and literature, as well as 122 issues of the periodical, Revisionist History®. He is a former reporter for the New York bureau of the Associated Press and a former consultant to the news department of the New York Times. His books have been published in translation in Japan and France. He resides with his family in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.
Revisionist History® is a registered trademark of Independent History and Research, Box 849, Coeur d’Alene, Idaho 83816. All Rights Reserved.
Copyright©2023 by Independent History and Research
Israel, settlers commit 146 violations against Bedouin communities in December
MEMO | January 3, 2024
The Israeli occupation and its settlers committed 146 violations against the Bedouin communities in the occupied West Bank last month, Al-Baydar Organisation for the Defense of Bedouin Rights said.
The violations include physical assaults on citizens, demolition of homes and confiscation of land, uprooting and destruction of crops, seizure of property, the establishment of new illegal settlement outposts, physical injuries, demolition notices for citizens’ homes, setting up ambushes at night to terrorise citizens and preventing shepherds from accessing pastures.
The governorate of Hebron suffered the highest number of attacks, 53 , followed by Bethlehem governorate with 26 attacks.
The General Supervisor of Al-Baydar Organisation for Defending Bedouin Rights, Hassan Malihat, said Bedouin communities suffered from a number of major attacks at the hands of Israeli occupation forces and illegal settlers in December, which reflects a clear policy of ethnic cleansing.
He added that the occupation authorities and settlers are exploiting the war on Gaza to carry out the largest collective displacement operation against Bedouin communities.
Israel forces violently beat Palestinian before demolishing home in Jabal Al-Mukhaber
MEMO | January 3, 2024
Who else was killed by Israel alongside Al-Arouri in Beirut?
Hamas office in Beirut, Lebanon following Israeli drone attack in which Hamas deputy leader Saleh Arouri was killed on Jan. 3, 2024. [Houssam Shbaro – Anadolu Agency]
MEMO | January 3, 2024
The deputy head of the Hamas political bureau, Saleh Al-Arouri, was not alone when he was martyred on Tuesday in an Israeli missile strike on an office in the southern suburb of the Lebanese capital, Beirut. The Hamas movement mourned him as well as the others, who included two of the most prominent commanders of the movement’s armed wing, Al-Qassam Brigades.
Among the seven killed by Israel was Azzam Al-Aqraa, Abu Abdullah, known as Ammar, who was the head of Al-Qassam outside Palestine. He was from the town of Qabalan in Nablus Governorate in the occupied West Bank. As one of the 400+ Palestinian men exiled to Marj Al-Zuhur by Israel in 1992, he was a former prisoner.
Another of those martyred by Israel in Beirut yesterday was Samir Fandi, known as Abu Amer, who was in charge of Al-Qassam operations in Lebanon. Fighters from Al-Qassam Brigades in Lebanon participated in Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on the border between 1948-occupied Palestine and Lebanon, when several were martyred. Israel’s Channel 14 revealed last July that Israel’s Shin Bet security agency had placed Fandi on the assassination list.
Al-Aqraa’s name appeared in the Israeli media several times, most recently in October 2022, when the apartheid state accused one of the Palestinian detainees in prison of having met him in Turkey and planned to work on infiltrating the Israeli Cellcom communications network.
A source told Arabi 21 that the other martyrs who were accompanying the senior officials and were killed in the Israeli raid were Ahmed Hammoud, Mahmoud Shaheen, Muhammad Al-Rayes, and Muhammad Bashasha.
Immediately after the news of the martyrdom of Al-Arouri and his companions was announced, marches took place in all of the refugee camps in Lebanon, including the Rashidieh camp in Tyre, from which Samir Fandi hailed.
Two terrorist blasts in Iran’s Kerman leave at least 103 dead, 188 injured
Press TV – January 3, 2024
Hundreds of people have been killed and injured in two terrorist blasts near the burial site of Iran’s General Qassem Soleimani in the city of Kerman during a ceremony marking his fourth martyrdom anniversary.
Iran’s emergency organization said that the explosions left 103 people dead and 188 more injured.
Medical services said the death toll is expected to rise as ambulances were taking the wounded to hospitals, with Babak Yektaparast, deputy head of Iran’s Emergency Organization, saying that some of the injured are in critical condition.
According to IRNA, the first explosion occurred some 700 meters from the grave of General Soleimani and the second one about one kilometer away.
Tasnim news agency cited unnamed sources as saying that two bags loaded with explosives which were remotely detonated caused the explosions. IRNA also quoted an informed source as saying two bombed bags detonated by remote control caused the explosions.
The first explosion occurred at 14:50 local time. The second one took place 10 minutes later, according Kerman Mayor Saeed Tabrizi, ISNA reported.
Iran’s Red Crescent Society said three rescuers were killed by the second blast.
Some people were injured during a crowd crush following the first explosion. Officials say all the injured have been transferred to hospitals and the situation is under control.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack.
Meanwhile, the Iranian cabinet of ministers has announced a day of national mourning on Thursday.
Iran’s Interior Minister Ahmad Vahidi told the Islamic Republic of Iran’s News Network that a crushing response will soon be given to the culprits.
He said the bombing attacks were a continuation of various plots to kill innocent civilians at ceremonies across the country, many of which had been foiled by Iranian security services.
He said the situation is now under the control of security forces.
According to the minister, most of the fatalities were caused by the second blast. The blast is under investigation and further details will be announced by officials as soon as possible.
Iran’s Judiciary Chief Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei vowed the perpetrators and those responsible for the attack will be swiftly hunted down and brought to justice.
He blamed the attacks on terrorists backed by the world arrogance who harbor deep grudges against General Soleimani, saying they’ve chosen to take revenge on the people after their various plots against the country’s security were foiled.
General Soleimani, commander of the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC), and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the second-in-command of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Units (PMU), and their companions were assassinated in a US drone strike authorized by then-US President Donald Trump near Baghdad International Airport on January 3, 2020.
Both commanders were highly revered across the Middle East because of their key role in fighting the Daesh Takfiri terrorist group in the region, particularly in Iraq and Syria.
In less than a week after the attack, Iraqi lawmakers approved a bill that required the government to expel all US-led foreign forces from the country.
The IRGC also targeted the US-run Ain al-Asad base in Iraq’s western province of Anbar with a wave of missile attacks in retaliation for the assassination of General Soleimani.
Ukraine and Palestine: A double threat to US hegemony
The outcome of US-led conflicts in Ukraine and West Asia will have a profound impact on the developing world order
By MK Bhadrakumar | The Cradle | January 2, 2024
Geopolitical analysts broadly agree that the war in Ukraine and the West Asian crisis will dictate the trajectory of world politics in 2024. But a reductionist thesis appears alongside that views the Israel-Palestine conflict narrowly in terms of what it entails for the resilience of the US proxy war in Ukraine – the assumption being that the locus of world politics lies in Eurasia.
The reality is more complex. Each of these two conflicts has a raison d’être and dynamics of its own, while at the same time also being intertwined.
Washington’s neck-deep involvement in the current phase of the West Asian crisis can turn into a quagmire, since it is also tangled up with domestic politics in a way that the Ukraine war never has been. But then, the outcome of the Ukraine war is already a foregone conclusion, and the US and its allies have realized that Russia cannot be defeated militarily; the endgame narrows down to an agreement to end the conflict on Russia’s terms.
To be sure, the outcome of the Ukraine war and the denouement of the Israel-Palestine conflict, which is at the root of the West Asian crisis, will have a profound impact on the new world order, and the two processes reinforce each other.
Russia realizes this fully. President Vladimir Putin’s stunning ‘year-enders’ in the run-up to the New Year speak for themselves: daylong visits to Abu Dhabi and Riyadh (watched by a shell-shocked US President Joe Biden), followed by talks with Iran’s president and rounded off with a telephone conversation with the Egyptian president.
In the space of 48 hours or so, Putin touched base with his Emirati, Saudi, Iranian, and Egyptian colleagues who officially entered the portals of the BRICS on 1 January.
The evolving US intervention in the West Asian crisis can be understood from a geopolitical perspective only by factoring in Biden’s visceral hostility toward Russia. BRICS is in Washington’s crosshairs. The US understands perfectly well that the extra large presence of West Asian and Arab nations in BRICS — four out of ten member states — is central to Putin’s grand project to re-structure the world order and bury US exceptionalism and hegemony.
Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Iran are major oil producing countries. Russia has been rather explicit that during its 2024 chairmanship of BRICS, it will push for the creation of a currency to challenge the petrodollar. Without doubt, the BRICS currency will be at the center stage of the grouping’s summit due to be hosted by Putin in Kazan, Russia in October.
In a special address on 1 January, marking the start of Russia’s BRICS Chairmanship, Putin stated his commitment to “enhancing the role of BRICS in the international monetary system, expanding both interbank cooperation and the use of national currencies in mutual trade.”
If a BRICS currency is used instead of the dollar, there could be significant impact on several financial sectors of the US economy, such as energy and commodity markets, international trade and investment, capital markets, technology and fintech, consumer goods and retail, travel and tourism, and so on.
The banking sector could take the first hit that might eventually spill over to the markets. And if Washington fails to fund its mammoth deficit, prices of all commodities could skyrocket or even reach hyperinflation triggering a crash of the US economy.
Meanwhile, the eruption of the Israel-Palestine conflict has given the US an alibi — ‘Israel’s self-defense’ — to claw its way back on the greasy pole of West Asian politics. Washington has multiple concerns, but at its core are the twin objectives of resuscitating the Abraham Accords (anchored on Saudi-Israeli proximity) and the concurrent sabotage of the Beijing-mediated Saudi-Iranian rapprochement.
The Biden administration was counting on the fact that an Israeli-Saudi deal would provide legitimacy to Tel Aviv and proclaim to the Islamic world that there was no religious justification for hostility towards Israel. But Washington senses that post-7 October it would not be able to secure a Saudi-Israel deal during this Biden term, and all that could be coaxed out of Riyadh is a door left ajar for future discussion on the topic. No doubt, it is a major blow to the US strategy to liquidate the Palestinian question.
In a medium term perspective, if the Russian-Saudi mechanism known as OPEC+ liberates the world oil market from US control, BRICS drives a dagger into the heart of US hegemony which is anchored on the dollar being the ‘world currency.’
Saudi Arabia recently signed a currency swap deal worth $7 billion with China in an attempt to shift more of their trade away from the dollar. The People’s Bank of China said in a statement that the swap arrangement will “help strengthen financial cooperation” and “facilitate more convenient trade and investment” between the countries.
Going forward, sensitive Saudi-Chinese transactions in strategic areas such as defense, nuclear technology, among others, will henceforth take place below the US radar. From a Chinese perspective, if its strategic trade is sufficiently insulated from any US-led program of anti-China sanctions, Beijing can position itself confidently to confront US power in the Indo-Pacific. This is a telling example of how the US strategy for the Indo-Pacific will lose traction as a result of its waning influence in West Asia.
The conventional wisdom is that preoccupation in volatile West Asia distracts Washington from paying attention to the Indo-Pacific and China. In reality, though, the waning influence in West Asia is complicating the capacity of the US to counter China both in the region as well as in the Indo-Pacific. The developments are moving in a direction where the credentials of the US as a great power are at an inflection point in West Asia – and that realization has leaked into other geographic regions around the world.
Way back in 2007, the distinguished political scientists John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, wrote with great prescience in their famous 34,000-word essay entitled The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy that Israel has become a ‘strategic liability’ for the United States, but retains its strong support because of a wealthy, well-organized, and bewitching lobby that has a ‘stranglehold’ on Congress and US elites.
The authors warned that Israel and its lobby bear outsized their responsibility for persuading the Bush Administration to invade Iraq and, perhaps one day soon, to attack the nuclear facilities of Iran.
Interestingly, on New Year’s Eve, in a special report based on extensive briefing by top US officials, the New York Times highlighted that “No other episode [as the war in Gaza] in the past half-century has tested the ties between the United States and Israel in such an intense and consequential way.”
Clearly, even as Israel’s barbaric actions in Gaza and its colonial project in the occupied West Bank are exposed and laid bare, and the Israeli state’s campaign to force Palestinian population migration are in full view, two of the US strategic objectives in the region are unravelling: first, the restoration of Israel’s military superiority in the balance of forces regionally and vis-a-vis the Axis of Resistance, in particular; and second, the resuscitation of the Abraham Accords where the crown jewels would have been a Saudi-Israeli treaty.
Viewed from another angle, the directions in which West Asia’s crisis unfolds are being keenly watched by the world community, especially those in the Asia-Pacific region. Most notable here is that Russia and China have given the US a free hand to navigate its military moves – unchallenged, so far, in the Red Sea. This means that any conflagration in the region will be synonymous with a catastrophic breakdown of US strategy.
Soon after the US defeat in Afghanistan in Central Asia, and coinciding with an ignominious ending of the US-led proxy war by NATO against Russia in Eurasia, a violent, grotesque setback in West Asia will send a resounding message across all of Asia that the US-led bandwagon has run out of steam. Among the end users of this startling message, the countries of ASEAN stand at the forefront. The bottom line is that the overlapping tumultuous events in Eurasia and West Asia are poised to coalesce into a climactic moment for world politics.
Deputy head of Hamas politburo assassinated in Israeli strike
Press TV – January 2, 2024
The deputy head of the political bureau of the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas has been assassinated in an Israeli drone attack in the southern suburb of the Lebanese capital of Beirut.
Lebanon’s al-Mayadeen television network reported on Tuesday that Saleh al-Arouri was killed as a result of an explosion in a building in al-Musharrafieh district in southern Beirut.
Arouri was killed in a “treacherous Zionist strike,” the television network said, adding that the blast took place after an Israeli drone bombed the building with three missiles, killing six people and wounding several others.
Hamas confirmed the martyrdom of Arouri as the chief of staff of the resistance movement in the occupied West Bank and the besieged Gaza Strip, praising him as the “architect” of Operation al-Aqsa Storm.
Hamas vowed in a statement that the killing of the resistance movement’s deputy will not “undermine the continued brave resistance” in Gaza.
“It proves once more the utter failure of the enemy to achieve any of its aggressive goals in the Gaza Strip,” Izzat al-Rishq, a member of the political bureau of Hamas, said in the statement.
The Israeli regime launched its devastating war on the Gaza Strip on October 7 after the territory’s Hamas-led Palestinian resistance groups carried out a surprise retaliatory attack, dubbed Operation Al-Aqsa Storm, against the occupying entity.
The Israeli military has also been carrying out attacks against the Lebanese territory since then, prompting retaliatory strikes from Lebanon’s resistance movement Hezbollah in support of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip.
The movement has vowed to keep up its retaliatory operations as long as the regime continues its onslaught on Gaza.
The relentless Israeli military campaign against Gaza has killed more than 22,000 people, most of them women and children. At least 57,000 individuals have also been wounded.
The regime has largely cut off access to water, food and power supplies to Gaza.
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“Democratic Institutions?” – 10 Lessons from history that will destroy your trust in the CIA
By Kit | OffGuardian | July 20, 2018
… At every corner, we are urged to simply believe what we are told. Whether it is about believing Porton Down and MI6 about “novichok”, or believing the White Helmets about Sarin, or believing the FBI about “collusion”, we are presented with no facts, just assertions from authority. Those who question those assertions are deemed “bots” at best or “traitors” at worst.
Well here, fellow traitors, are the Top Ten reasons to question anything and everything the CIA – or any intelligence agency – has ever told you. … Read full article
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