Monday, June 30, 2008

Interview with Israel Shamir

by Kim Petersen (http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m22995)

May 1, 2006

Israel Shamir is a prominent and controversial Russian-Israeli thinker, writer, and translator who lives in Jaffa. Shamir brings to his political writing a refreshing candor, sharp insight, and inspiring humanity. His principled stand supporting the Palestinian refugees’ right of return and the rebuilding of their destroyed villages led to his firing from the “progressive” Israeli newspaper Haaretz. Following Israeli attacks on Palestinians in January 2001, Shamir became dedicated to political writings in English.

For the intellectual Karl Marx, the Jewish question was an “unreal subject.” Marx was baptized a Lutheran and married to a gentile.


Shamir has renounced Judaism and embraced Christianity.

He is a strong proponent of the “One Man, One Vote, One State” solution for a united Israel-Palestine.

I interviewed the unflinching maverick writer Israel Shamir.

Kim Petersen: You wrote recently that the historian David Irving, who the corporate media reports as being sentenced for holocaust denial, was sentenced for denial of “Jewish superiority.” Could you elaborate on this and what holocaust denial means for you?

Israel Shamir: I wrote about it, in “For Whom The Bell Tolls,” and in the “Vampire Killers,” at length. No free man can agree with the proposition that Jewish death (and life) is more important than that of a goy. But the ban of Holocaust revisionism is the only legally enforced prohibition in our society. The Armenians were envious of this elevated status of Jews, and actually succeeded to protect their tragedy of 1915 by a similar law in France. The result was tragicomic. They brought an important Jewish historian (and warmonger of first degree) Bernard Lewis to the court of Paris, and he was found guilty of denying their tragedy, just like David Irving. But David Irving has got three years in jail, and now his name is always preceded with the title “discredited” (see an interview with him in the Observer), while Bernard Lewis was fined one franc and he still appears everywhere, and his name graces various petitions. He was not discredited, but the Armenians were. Apparently, Jewish blood is redder than Armenian, not to mention lesser species. I quoted an article by a Jewish American historian denying the genocide of the native Americans. He was not discredited, either. The scourge of Irving, Debora Lipstadt, denied the fiery holocaust of Dresden, and was not discredited, either. Face it, Kim: the very concept of H is a concept of Jewish superiority.

This has an important religious meaning: Christianity is the denial of Jewish superiority. Whoever believes or accepts Jewish superiority, denies Christ for He made us equal. The French Jewish filmmaker Claude Lanzman, the creator of “Shoah,” said: if you believe in holocaust, you can’t believe in Christ. I am ready to take his challenge: I believe in Christ. We can rephrase the words of Lanzman: belief in a special historical meaning of death of Jews is a sign of apostasy. Indeed, the creed of holocaust competes with the Church: we believe that Christ suffered for us and came back to life. The H believers believe that the Jewish people suffered and came back by creating the Jewish state. In this competition, the Jews win: as opposed to H, you can deny Crucifixion and Resurrection and your career won’t suffer a bit.

Thus the question of H denial is the question of apostasy: will our society stand on the rock planted by Christ, or will it worship the Jewish state. This is an important discovery of eternal religiosity of human spirit: the attempt to create a secular society did not work out. After an illusionary short break, the gods came back.

KP: Is it appropriate to use such loaded terms as "goy"?

IS: Well, I am not aware this is a loaded term. I translated some Hebrew books, from Samuel Yosef Agnon, the only Hebrew Nobel Prize winner, to the Book of Lineage by Rabbi Zacuto, a 15th century Judaeo-Iberian sage, my most recent translation into English. They all used “goy” and so do Israeli newspapers. The word "goy" has a meaning: this is a non-Jew as seen by Jews. If you think it is not a complimentary term, you mean that in your view Jews look with distaste at a goy. Maybe. But we should deal with problems, not with words. Dealing with words is easier, but brings no relief. If we were to use 'gentile', would it change the Jewish attitude to one? This is also a sign of weakness. When (in 19th century) Jews felt weak, they liked to be called Israelites, or Hebrews. Now they do not mind being called "Jews."

KP: You have described the US as a “greater Jewish state.” You laud Jeffrey Blankfort as having taken “an important next step” in rejecting the views of Noam Chomsky and others. Is the influence of the “Jewish lobby” preponderant over US corporate imperialism?

IS: I wrote about it in “A Yiddishe Medina.” The US corporate imperialism is not a bodiless spirit; it is the sum of desires and actions by the US elites. And the US elites are Jewish, to great extent, and they have accepted Jewish values and ideas, to even greater extent. A few years ago, an American Jewish writer Philip Weiss wrote in the New York Observer: “I don’t claim to know how Jewish the membership of the establishment is. Twenty percent, 50 percent? I’m guessing 30.” Jews compose at least 30% of Harvard students, reported The Forward, a Jewish American newspaper. The Hillel Society gives such numbers: Total Undergraduate Population: 6658; Jewish Undergraduate Population: 2000 (approx.); Total Graduate Population: 10351 Jewish Graduate Population: 2500 (approx.). Thus the US elites are Jewish to a great extent, in the ordinary meaning of the word. As for spirit, Karl Marx spoke of “Jewish spirit” of the Yankees. A less known Marxist, Sombart, wrote about it at length. Thus in my view it is a mistake to speak of “Jewish Lobby” -- we may refer to a takeover, a displacement of the old WASP elites. The Jews constitute some three percent of the US population. The Brits took over India with much less percentage; so did the ruling minority in Syria. Normans ruled over Britain for centuries with less than that. All Russian nobility in the Tsar’s days was 2-3% of the population, while upper castes of Hindu societies constitute some 5% at most. Now, the Jews are well integrated in the “US corporate imperialism” on many levels, and they do not have to fight it, they use it. The Jewish Lobby is an additional mechanism, consisting of hard-core Jewish nationalists. The problem is that the rest, the non-Jewish-Lobby part of the US establishment consists, as I have said, of not-so-nationalistic Jews to great extent. They reach compromise, and this compromise is the middle ground of mild-Jewish-nationalism.

KP: On the invasion of Iraq, you stated: “Too many coincidences for a purely American war.” To what extent do you see a Zionist hand behind the attack and occupation?

IS: Yes, I partly agree with the Chicago-Harvard duo, the conquest of Iraq and present threat to Iran are caused by the Zionist affiliates within the Administration. The old canard of Oil Interests was debunked by reality: oil costs more, oil companies leave Iraq, none of their executives supported the war. Probably your readers do not even think of Iraqi WMD or the silly stuff of “bringing democracy” to the Arabs. Thus the Zionist plot is the first and obvious explanation.

But the Iraqi war, as a part of War on Terror, has a second leg: this is an even more scary totalitarianism, the drive to create a caste-based oligarchy of the Iron Heel, in Jack London’s terms. Fear is its important tool; dismantling of civil freedoms and of cohesive natural society is the first goal. Without War on Terror, the US rulers wouldn’t be able to read our emails, listen to our conversations, store in their data banks every bit of information about our lives. This totalitarianism was predicted by George Orwell, an avid reader of the Protocols, and it was lauded by Leo Strauss, a guiding light of Neo-Cons. Strauss endorsed a society with dictatorial powers of elites; a follower of Hobbes, he distrusted the people. Though his views were formed before the WWII, after the war he frequently referred to the Holocaust as a phenomenon that is liable to come back unless the society is firmly kept in check. I called the supporters of this paradigm by the name “Mammonites,” mammon-worshippers. The Iraqi war, and the War on Terror in general, is a joint product of Zionists and Mammonites, while these two groups often coincide, as is the case with the leading Neo-Cons.

That is why our struggle is with Zionists and Mammonites; this is not only a laudable campaign of support of the peoples of the Middle East, but first of all the decisive battle for preservation of democracy and freedom in the US and Europe, for a chance of better life for our children, for creation of a more egalitarian and more spiritual society, against the Dark ages were are being led to.

KP: Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has taken a lot of flak from the western media for citing the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini about wiping Israel off the map. Apparently, judging by the western media’s silence, it was okay to wipe Palestine off the map though. Is the state of Israel a legitimate entity?

IS: No, it is not. We can’t consider legitimate a state that gives no rights to its inhabitants and officially belongs to World Jewry. It is in our interests to achieve full independence from the Jews, and to shift the whole lot of rights and responsibilities to the population of the country. The sovereignty should be ours, of the people of Palestine/Israel, not of the Jewish People, the extra-territorial worldwide body. I call upon my country-fellows to give up their “Jewishness” and to become adoptive Palestinians, brothers and sisters to the native folk. I hope eventually it will happen; we shall integrate and forget the overseas connection. Meanwhile we follow the colonial paradigm and exclude the natives in the name of “Jewishness.” We should follow the example of Mexico, where immigrants from Spain and Italy form one nation with the descendents of Montezuma.

KP: What does the election of Hamas mean for you? Should Hamas recognize the state of Israel?

IS: I wrote about the results. The Palestinians rejected the Fatah rule because they made too many concessions to Israel, and received nothing in return. Hamas should not recognise the state of Israel, at least until the Israeli rulers recognise the Palestinian independence, remove their armed forces and stop to interfere with the free traffic of Palestinians within and without Palestine. This is reciprocity. I can imagine an even better solution: Hamas may call for full integration of all Palestine from the River to the Sea, and for general elections on the basis of One Person-One Vote. But until it happens, Hamas should be guided by reciprocity principle: mutual recognition, inter alia.

KP: You are an ex-Jew, a convert to Christianity -- why is this? You have written of “many ex-Jews.” Is this for the same reason as you? Do you think a growing trend in Jewish apostasy would be effective in bringing about justice for Palestinians?

IS: Christianity and Judaism are strongly connected religions. A Christian, Karl Marx said: Christianity is sublime Judaism, while Judaism is sordid Christianity. A real Christian knows that a goy is not worse than a Jew; so the idea of Jewish exclusivity is not acceptable to a Christian. In our country we have many Russian Orthodox Christians (some of Jewish origin, and some not), and they pray and celebrate holidays together with our Palestinian Orthodox Christian brothers and sisters. I was baptised by the Palestinian priest, Archbishop Theodosius Attalla Hanna, and it helped me to sort out the question of identity. The important point is not to create a separate Jewish “Christian” set-up, for such an arrangement defeats its purpose. Thus I am worried that there are “Jewish Christian” churches that are devoutly Zionist. In short, yes, baptism is a solution, but only in connection with rejection of Jewishness. If it is done as an addition to Jewishness, it is void, and brings no benefit.

Kim Petersen, Co-Editor of Dissident Voice, lives in the traditional Mi'kmaq homeland colonially designated Nova Scotia, Canada. He can be reached at: http://mail.yahoo.com/config/login?/ym/Compose?To=kim@dissidentvoice.org.

Israel Shamir writings can be read at his
website. His essays are collected in three books, The Flowers of Galilee, Our Lady of Sorrow, and the Pardes.

:: Article nr. 22995 sent on 02-may-2006 02:56 ECT
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Sunday, June 29, 2008

Oops!

A response to Saree Makdisi’s The Rise of Avigdor Lieberman,

By Israel Shamir

Israeli and Palestinian politics are often misinterpreted by zealous supporters of various parties overseas. So many well-meaning American Jews and Arabs write about events and developments in our country basing their views on their Sunday school lessons or on their prejudices. But even for a man used to misunderstanding, the piece by Professor Saree Makdisi called The Rise of Israel's Avigdor Lieberman with an additional title The Ethnic Cleansing Party Outpaces Likud takes the proverbial cherry. I am sure Professor Makdisi is very knowledgeable regarding William Blake, his main field of study, but he should learn more of the area he presumes to write about. An Arab (or a Jewish) name and origin is just not a substitute of actual knowledge of Israeli politics. As a Russian Israeli writer living in Jaffa with its mixed population, and nor a supporter neither a voter of Yisrael Beiteinu (YB), I feel it is my duty to correct his most obvious errors.

Makdisi claims that “Avigdor Lieberman, leader of YB, is the real winner of the Israeli elections and a potential kingmaker”. The reality is very different: Lieberman’s party has a great difficulty to enter any coalition, neither it is sought by Olmert or Peretz, the leaders of the biggest Israeli parties. Far from being “a potential kingmaker”, Lieberman is an outsider, and there are big chances that he will squander the voices given to him by the Russian Israeli voter by remaining in fruitless opposition. The Israeli mainstream media refers to him and to his party with all the warmness usually reserved for Hamas. Being a Russian, he just does not qualify to be a serious player in Israeli politics. So much for being a winner.

Practically every word in Makdisi’s piece is misleading. He says that Lieberman’s party “outpaced Likud”. What rot! Not only YB with its 11 seats did not outpace Likud with its 12 seats, but more to the point, Likud crashed, ceased to be a major party, and became a middling party, on a par with three ethnic parties, Russian YB (11 seats), Moroccan Shas (12 seats) and the Arab block (10 seats). Thus it is not that YB overtook Likud, but rather, Likud has collapsed.[1]

Even less substantiated is Makdisi’s weird claim that YB is a “racist party” and for them, “non-Jews are not welcome”. As a matter of fact, the YB is the least Jewish nationalist party in the Knesset outside the Arab block, as it is the party of the Russian, heavily non-Jewish community in Israel. At least half of the Russians in Israel, and thus many of YB voters, are just not Jews, and do not regret it. The voters of YB stand for equality of Jews and non-Jews, for civil marriages as opposed to the religious ones, for termination of Rabbinic dictat, for non-kosher restaurants, and they intermarry with the Israeli Palestinians at least as often as with the Israeli Jews. YB does not support the mad idea of “transfer” or mass expulsion of Native Palestinians, as Makdisi claims.

Makdisi makes much of Lieberman’s plan to correct the borders of Israel and calls it “ethnic cleansing”. He writes: “Lieberman proposes that the state's borders be drawn in such a way that Jews are placed on one side of it, and as many Arabs as possible on the other. Lieberman's solution may seem a little less inhumane [than expulsion], but it is just as racist.” He is apparently unaware that this was the idea of the partition of Palestine approved by the UN on November 29, 1947. In 1948, the Jewish state seized some parts of the proposed Palestinian state, including Jerusalem Corridor, Jaffa, Western Galilee and the Wadi Ara area. Lieberman called to return the Wadi Ara area to the future Palestinian state. Mind you: he did not call to expel the Arab dwellers of the area, but to surrender the whole area with its population to the neighbouring state. This is hardly “an ethnic cleansing” idea.

Suppose an American politician will propose to return Texas or San Diego to Mexico. Would a Mexican professor call him “a racist who wants to get rid of Hispanics” or just bless this initiative? If a French politician would propose to return Alsace to Germany, should the German papers curse “a racist who wants to rid France of German-speaking Alsatians”? The answer is obvious: while ethnic cleansing, i.e. separation of people from their land (like the one perpetrated by Israel in 1948, as correctly stated by Makdisi) is unacceptable, transfer of a territory with its dwellers from one sovereignty to another one is quite a normal and standard procedure in the law of the nations.

Personally, I am not in favour of the so-called “two-states’ solution” and would prefer one state with equal rights for all the dwellers of Palestine/Israel, but meanwhile this idea has too few supporters, and Palestinian and Israeli leaders are still trying to turn our small country into two states. The borders between the twain should be established by negotiations, and the Partition Line of 1947 is certainly the most legitimate starting point for such negotiations. Instead of condemning Lieberman’s proposal we may regret its limited character. Not only Wadi Ara, but Western Galilee, from Nazareth to Acre, were supposed to belong to the Palestinian state. A friend of Palestine should support their return, not object to it. Moreover, I live in Jaffa, predestined by the UN decision to become a part of the Palestinian state, and annexed by the Jewish state in 1948. I would fully support transfer of Jaffa with all its residents (including myself) back into Palestinian sovereignty, if Lieberman were to propose such a step.

Makdisi complains that Lieberman was born in Moldova and still has all the rights in Israel, as opposed to the native population. This does not sound convincing when said by a Lebanese who lives in the US and enjoys all the rights including professorship in an American university, while the Native Americans languish in their reservations.

However, the Lebanese experience of Makdisi could help him to understand the secret of Lieberman. His party is an ethnic party of the Russians, like the Socialist Party of Lebanon is a party of the Druze, or our Communist party is (predominantly) an Arab party, or our Meretz is a party of wealthy Ashkenazis. All other features of these parties are provisory and can change with circumstances. The Russians are probably the most sympathetic to the Native Palestinians group in Israel, and there are many organisations (notably in Nazareth and Jaffa) that work to strengthen these ties.

If this is the case, why YB is described as “racist” and why, despite its electoral success, the party is kept well outside of the pinnacle of power? I can venture an explanation. The Jewish state is ruled, from its murky beginnings in 1920s until today, by a single group of Polish Jews whose recent ancestors were born between Pinsk and Minsk. This is our Mayflower. They fight off attempts of other groups to share power. They fought the German Jews and kept their Liberal Party well outside. They fought the Sephardi Jews when they formed their Shas party, and many Israelis remember 1999 elections call “Anybody but Shas”. Now they fight the Russians. In Israel, they say that the Russians are not Jews, in their propaganda abroad they say the Russians are racist (rather a racist saying, too). Demonisation of these rising groups is just a tool of the ruling elite. The solution of our problems lays in union of the oppressed groups, including Russians, Moroccans and Native Palestinians, for full equality and better power-sharing. This is regrettable that Prof Makdisi did not understand the plot behind the accusations, and supported the “divide and rule” device of the Israeli elites.

Israel Shamir,

Jaffa


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[1] According to the results, Kadima now has 29 seats, Labor has 19, Shas and Likud have 12 each, Yisrael Beiteinu has 11, National Union-National Religious Party has nine, Pensioners' Party has seven, United Torah Judaism has six, Meretz five, Ra'am-Ta'al four , Hadash three and Balad three.

Saturday, June 28, 2008

Satanic Pictures

by Israel Shamir

The West was not amused by burning embassies in Beirut and elsewhere. “Them there Muslims do not understand our sense of humour; they do not understand our idea of liberty”. - droned the newspapers. Others condemned the tactless escapade of the Danes but thought the reaction was quite out of proportion. However the flare up was anything but incidental.

A resourceful American journalist Christopher Bollyn investigated the Danish Satanic Pictures and their procurer, one Flemming Rose, and found out that Rose was not an innocent lover of freedom of speech, neither was he some quaint Scandinavian collector of smut pictures with religious connotations who kept his presentations of the Muslim prophet next to that of a Nun-with-the-Great Dane. Rose was a devotee of the Zionist Neo-Con cult, and made a pilgrimage to the pope of this persuasion -- Daniel Pipes, wrote Bollyn.

So far, so good. But the execrable Rose peddled his stuff four months ago, and that's a long time, as the media counts. The Muslims did not even notice his effort, as possibly not many of them read the Jylland Pest. Like a naughty child who multiplies his effort when his well-prepared jibe fails to annoy, eleven newspapers in seven countries republished the pictures simultaneously. It was a show of hands: behind various newspapers in various countries, beyond companies and corporations, we were allowed to see the Enemy, the Not-So-Hidden Hand, the player on the international scene across all borders. It was a convincing show, and now we know: one will, one design rules the world media empire.

Who organised it?

Who is the Enemy? Who can control media on such a scale? Sandhya Jain, an important Indian journalist of nationalist persuasion wrote: “The cartoons were an intentional act of religious disrespect by political Christianity, comprising the socio-economic-political elites of Europe and America.” Christendom was called the culprit by many other observers. But to be sure, the same people who offended Muslims do not think twice before offending believing Christians – it is enough to recall the Cross changing into a Swastika on the posters of Amen, the movie, or the crucifix in a glass of piss (an illustration to the Talmud?) in a Brooklyn [a heavily Jewish suburb of New York] Museum. There is no religious enmity between the Muslims and the Christians. Ahmad Amr was right:

“The defamatory portrayals of Islam and Mohammed by European ‘free speech advocates’ puts Muslims at a distinct disadvantage. They can’t very well retaliate by defaming Jesus Christ because they revere him as much as they revere Mohammed and consider him a prophet of God. Insulting Jesus or the Virgin Mary is considered as blasphemous as insulting Mohammed. No true Muslim would ever consider lampooning the Mother of Christ because they also believe in the Immaculate Conception. In Islamic tradition, Mary will be the first woman to enter heaven. And like the Koran, Muslims consider both the Bible and the Torah holy texts.”

Thus we have to exonerate Christians and look elsewhere.

The Western media is the exclusive domain of Judeophiles: you may have noticed it by their extensive and morbid coverage of Sharon’s demise, of Jewish fatalities while disregarding Palestinian deaths, of the Holocaust issue, of real or imagined attacks on Jews[1]. The Jews have a vested interest in promoting anti-Muslim sentiment, for it fits into their plans of subduing Palestinians and dealing with Iran. (The Iranians immediately recognised it, and turned to anti-Jewish holocaust jokes. Equally tasteless, it was a reasonable tit-for-tat.) Indeed, just now the non-Zionist World Jewish Congress officially kicked off his campaign against Iran , Haaretz informed its readers. AIPAC plans a Washington conference titled “Now is the time to stop Iran”. Kurt Nimmo correctly called the pictures “a deliberate provocation designed to outrage and incite Muslims and thus engender support in Europe and America for the manufactured “clash of civilizations” engineered by the Straussian neocons”. The Clash of Civilisations, as well as the Satanic Pictures affair fit well into the Middle Eastern strategy of organised Jewry.

A clear sign of Jewish involvement in the Satanic Pictures affair was given by many headlines: though all the Muslim nations were upset, the Jewish-controlled newspapers stressed “Palestinian attacks on Europeans”, as in 2001 they stressed “Palestinians rejoice at the collapse of the Towers”, though many people all over the world were happy at the strike that smote this symbol of arrogance and money power. The Israeli daily Haaretz wrote: the Muslim press shows Sharon and rabbis in a disrespectful light, let them try their own medicine. This amounts to an admission that the Judeophiles were behind the publication.

But our colleagues did not notice a grand plan behind this action. Much as the Pictures fit into the plan of fighting Muslims, they fit even better into the great offensive on freedom carried out now world-wide. From the US to Russia, from England to Italy, our masters promulgate the web of laws to strengthen their control and to eliminate the vestiges of freedom. In 1968, we proclaimed “Interdit d'interdire”, “It is forbidden to forbid”; but now we are entangled by many new prohibitions. We mayn’t choose to smoke or not, to fasten seat belt or ride carefree. These small annoying prohibitions are a sign of our submission to Big Brother. And do not tell me it is done for my benefit. I can list a hundred things more urgent for my well-being. Let them ban indebtedness first. If I am free to take a dangerous loan, I should be free to choose or miss the seat belt.

Our freedoms are severely curtailed. They exist on paper, but we may not use them. We may not say what we wish less our livelihood will be jeopardised. So many teachers and professors found themselves out of job for saying a word out of turn: in “democratic” Germany, a Communist could not work as a teacher. We may not elect whom we want: when the Austrians chose Heider, they were beaten until they agreed to give up. Now the Palestinians chose Hamas, and they are told they will not get their own tax money until they repent. (In a similar vein, the Bible provides for debt cancellation every seven years, but the Talmud allows the creditor to tie up and beat the debtor until he insists to pay the voided debt). Every time, be it guns for the folks in remote Montana, a cigarette in a Dublin pub, a seat belt for you, or a free vote for all of us, the great opinion-making machine of mass media enforced the prohibition. Sometimes, as in the case of the Satanic Pictures, it does not balk at deliberate provocation to make its point clear: we are not allowed to say what we want.

The media machine’s devotion to the Jewish cause allows us to guess that it is not run by oil sheiks. But let us presume (and deal with this presumption later) that the Jews and their Judaeophile supporters built up their media empire for another purpose. If you feel (as so many good people do) an urgent need to exonerate the Jews, you may believe that the Jews organised their media holding just in order to fight antisemitism, while the evil Mammonites utilised this machine for their own need of establishing the world dictatorship. You may consider the Jews as the Dwarves who wrought the Ring of Power, and it was taken by the Mammonites. They promoted the narrative of antisemitism and holocaust in order to keep the Jews fighting on their side against the people. They indoctrinate the Jews in belief that the normal humans want to devour them and only the ruling Mammonites prevent it. Indeed, as I wrote in The Third Dove, there is no antisemitism, as there are no witches, and, alas, no Santa Claus.

The media machine is good at enlisting allies, by the same means the ordinary Jews are enlisted, i.e. by propagating fear. They invented “homophobia”, so a homosexual will fear normal folks and apply for the protection of Big Brother. They invented “male chauvinism” and “battered wives”, so women will be afraid of their menfolk and seek the rulers’ shelter. They invented “racism”, so every ethnic minority would hide under the guardianship of Big Brother. They created the myth of “abused children”, so the wives will distrust their husbands. These are myths. There is no “homophobia” – we really do not give a damn what you do at your bedrooms, as long as you do not frighten horses. Men are naturally protective of children and chivalrous towards women. White folks like blacks being jolly and playing their banjo, as long as it is not all night long. I tell you: we all are minorities, and together, we are the people. We can do very well together without guardianship of Big Brother.

There is nothing to fear abroad, either. In the days of my youth, Americans were frightened by the Domino theory. After the Communist takeover of Vietnam and Cambodia, they would proceed to California, run the writ. It came to naught. The fear of Communism destroyed trillions of dollars of national product across the globe and eventually ruined the great social experiment. The victorious mice judge the slain lion: at the initiative of Poland and the Baltic states, The Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly (PACE) condemned “horrors and crimes of Communism.” Now the machine plays up the fear of Islam. Islam was provoked and its response was presented as the proof of its depravity.

The great fear-producing machine won’t stop at the Middle East, or at the narrow Jewish causes, and for a good reason. A tank can be used as a nut-cracker, but it has more functions than that. The unified and perfected Jewish media machine can be utilised for much more important tasks than fighting off holocaust jokes. Its main goal is to bring us to the Brave New World, to the new spiritless totalitarianism, while smaller tasks are incidental to the great one.

Last month there were a few important but apparently unconnected developments. The British PM, Tony Blair, made a step towards total control over his population. England introduced a new computer system that collects and stores data of car traffic. Connected to ubiquitous video cameras, it allows the Big Brother to trace your movements from your work to your girlfriend and to your home. It passed without a hitch. Then it tried to pass the Internet Terror Bill, that would have given police the power to shut down websites which “promote terrorism”. The House of Lords blocked it. Last month the Lords threw out plans for a new offence of “glorifying” acts of terrorism. The Government was also defeated when peers voted to redraft ministers' version of the offence of “intentionally” or “recklessly” disseminating a “terrorist publication”. And the best of all, the indomitable Lords blocked the bill against “religious hatred” which was supposed to close the only loophole for criticising Jews.

After that, the Adversary splashed the Satanic Pictures. The predictable and predicted reaction of the offended Muslims will force the parliaments to accept the new set of ‘anti-hate’ laws. Surely these laws will not protect the feelings of Muslims and Christians, who, after all, encompass only a few billion humans. The Jews, the preferred mascot of the Mammonites, will feel better protected (and more vulnerable), but more important, freedom of speech will receive another blow.

This great freedom was the advantage of the West over the Soviet East, for one of the less savoury features of the Soviet regime was its infamous Article 58 of the Criminal Code “Anti-Soviet propaganda”. In the early Stalin’s days, one has to express sympathy with the enemies of the Republic to be sentenced; in his heyday, a joke would suffice; in Brezhnev’s era it was used to ensure conformity in the society. Even in the very end of the Soviet days, the Damocles’ sword of Article 58 influenced all discussion and eventually allowed Gorbachev to carry out his transformation of Russia without a debate. He eliminated the social achievements of the Soviet era, surrendered Russian industry and oil to a few Jewish crooks, gave the keys of the Russian might to the CIA and broke up the country into feuding successor states. The only positive feature of Gorbachev-Yeltsin transformation was the removal of Article 58. Now it is creeping back.

Some time ago booby-trapped anti-Jewish billboards appeared in Moscow. When a passer-by tried to remove it, the explosive device went off. The government rushed an ‘anti-hate’ bill through the parliament, and lo! No more anti-Jewish billboards came to be. A month ago, there was an extremely fishy incident in a Moscow synagogue, and a new reinforced ‘anti-extremism’ bill was introduced into the Russian parliament.

Thus, under the cover of fighting extremism, terrorism and hatred, the remainder of freedom on our planet shrinks from day to day. Eugene Rostow, “a Kennedy’s Huntington”, predicted in 1960s that the two systems, Communism and Capitalism would eventually converge, and bring forth the best features of both systems. Now the Convergence has actually taken place. Once, the Red East was socially secure, but at the expense of personal freedom, while the West was free at the expense of equality and social guarantees. Now they have converged: the Russians have lost their free schools and health and have received the freedom to sleep under the bridge, while the West now has its own Gulag and its own political dissidents. East and West reinstalled Article 58 under the guise of anti-hate, anti-terrorism, anti-extremism laws.

The grand plan of world domination is unveiling. On its first stage, the power of old elites and of the church was broken. The Mammonite enemy used democracy and liberty as his weapons against the old order, and we, the Left and the Liberals, enjoyed his support. The adverse vote in the House of Lords (albeit reshuffled and remoulded) proves that the old system with all its faults had some positive qualities. But that stage is over. Now the enemy is fighting against democracy and liberty, employing fear and (anti-)racism.

The enemy has the advantage of infiltrating both left and right, of mainstream and alternative media, of interaction on the global scale. Following a defeat in England they can attack in France and provoke in Gaza. They can cause grief and feign horror at your response. As long as this machine is intact, war and fear are unavoidable for they are its products. Moreover, this is the reason why the powerful Mammonites – not Jews at all – use and support this machine. The machine produces fear, and allows them to usher in their dictatorship. But we have to win unless we want our children to live in the world of slaves and masters. You do not have to care about Muslim sensibilities or Jewish prejudices – it is your freedom at stake. We have to think globally because our enemy acts globally. We must defeat fear and discord, the main tools of the enemy.

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[1] In my essay Midas Ears I wrote: “Indeed, much of media is owned or controlled by Jews . . . Surely a coincidence? Do not bet on it. In 2004, a Jewish historian Simcha Epstein of Israel Antisemitism Institute said at the Sasson Conference in the Hebrew University:

«The pre-war anti-Semites said that the Jews of France organized a syndicate secretly bankrolling and subverting the press. And what did the Jews say at that time? They said: «Of course not! No, it’s a lie, of course not! We are not engaged in conspiracies!» And what did the historians and the Jewish historiography coming afterwards say? «Of course not! It is anti-Semitic drivel!» But we know now from Jewish sources that before the WWII the Jews of France secretly financed the press. Since the end of the 19th century, there was a secret Jewish organization, well financed, which bought and bankrolled newspapers. Sometimes it took over existing newspapers, which suddenly became pro-Dreyfus because they received Jewish subsidies. New papers were created especially by the Jews. Two very important papers of the period, one was called Les Droits de l'Homme, the Rights of Man, was financed by the Jews, and L’Humanité, which was the Socialist and then the Communist newspaper of France, was also financed by Jews. I say this on the authority of Jewish sources of course. And this brings us to a dramatic dilemma of historiography. Saying this, saying what I said, is something horrible and unacceptable, because it means that the Jews organized a conspiracy and secretly bought the media, or part of the media. That was precisely what the anti-Semites said at that time, and what they still say today. And we know now from Jewish sources that the allegations were true, that there was a Jewish clandestine activity of bankrolling the press. [Listen to this sentence ]

Some people perceive every suggestion that Jews are able to act together as a mad conspiracy theory. Let them read and re-read this report by a Jewish historian made at a Jewish conference. Do we need another fifty years to wait for another Jewish scholar to reveal to our children what we know ourselves, to wit, there is a Jewish empire of media, so vast that the sun never sets there?

Friday, June 27, 2008

Midas Ears

by Israel Shamir

A new spectre haunts America. It enters the well-protected boardrooms of newspapers and banks, shakes the deep foundations of its towers. It is the spectre of glasnost: the dark secret of Jewish power is out. Just recently it was ‘third rail’, touch-and-die, deadly dangerous to mention, certain end to a career. Just recently, Joe Public snapped his TV from an eminence with an Israeli passport to a member of a Jewish think-tank, and muttered to himself: Surely it is just a coincidence that so many important and largely unelected people in our country happen to belong to this small minority group. Surely it is just a coincidence that they belong to different parties but reach the same conclusions. Surely it is just a coincidence that ninety per cent of American foreign aid goes to their cousins in prosperous Tel Aviv. Surely it is just a coincidence that they run our newspapers, television, cinema, universities. Anyway, we are not allowed to notice this elephant in our sitting room.

Only rare desperados comment, as Edgar Steele did on Rense.com: “The silence in America concerning Jews is simply deafening, isn't it? The old adage has it that, when visiting a foreign country, to ascertain who really runs things, one need determine only who is spoken about in whispers, if at all.” Judged by this measure, the Jews rule supreme. Indeed, when I referred to ‘Jewish media lords’ during a UNESCO conference in the summer of 2001, the audience’s hearts missed a beat.

The yet-unfought War on Iraq changed this. The American Ultimatum date was set on 17 March, the Jewish feast of Purim. Purim, 1991 saw destruction of Iraqi armies and death of 200,000 Iraqis. Too many coincidences for a purely American war. The Americans peeped into the bottomless abyss of World War Three and woke up from their generation-long stupor. Thus the first victim of the Iraqi War is not truth, but the strongest taboo in the West. A Democrat member of Congress, usually a most docile specimen, one James Moran, dared to tell his supporters: "If it were not for the strong support of the Jewish community for this war with Iraq we would not be doing this."

He was immediately slapped by a Jewish overseer: "It is simply stunning to hear Representative Moran make such accusations", said National Jewish Democratic Council Executive Director, Ira N. Forman. “First, a number of the current leaders of the anti-war movement are Jewish, and Jewish organizations have clearly not been at the forefront among those groups actively and stridently supporting a war in Iraq”. Forman had spoken, and the media reported and amplified his view, and Moran duly recanted, slapped. But he is not the only one.

The secret is out, and like the secret of King Midas and his long ears, it is being sung now from coast to coast, despite the frantic efforts of the organised Jewish community to clamp the lid back on the boiling cauldron. Kathleen and Bill Christison,[i] two ex-CIA experts, exposed the link between right-wing American Jews and the Bush Administration. Edward Said, the most celebrated American thinker of Palestinian origin, stated the cause: “An immensely wealthy and powerful republic has been hijacked by a small cabal of individuals, all of them unelected and therefore unresponsive to public pressure.”[ii]

He was seconded by courageous Herman, Neumann and Blankfort. These Americans of Jewish origin object to the un-elected, anti-democratic Jewish power as they would object to any disproportionate minority power. Their presence, as they were not afraid of the anti-Semitic label, was instrumental in turning the tide and saving the intimidated majority from its browbeating.

Edward Herman, the author of Manufacturing Consent (together with Noam Chomsky), wrote of “the powerful pro-Israel lobby in the United States, which advances Israeli interests by pushing for U.S. aid and protection to Israel, and, currently, by pressing for a war against Iraq, which again will serve Israeli interests. This lobby has not only helped control media debate and made congress into `Israeli occupied territory’, it has seen to it that numerous officials with ‘dual loyalties’ occupy strategic decision-making positions in the Bush administration…”

Jeffrey Blankfort, the Californian who defeated ADL in court and made Foxman pay heaps of dollars for his espionage against activists, took an important next step and rejected the views upheld by Noam Chomsky, Joel Beinin and Stephen Zunes, for these older radicals play down the crucial importance of Jewish power. Jeff Blankfort noticed the roots of the Rupture Evangelicals’ meteoric rise in the US. This obscure sect would never have left its lair in remote Dixie, but for the Jewish media lords. Jeff noticed that when Black Entertainment Television was taken over by Viacom, whose owner, Sumner Redstone (né Murray Rothstein), was recently described in the New York Times as the world's biggest media owner, he eliminated BET's news program and began running evangelical Christian infomercials for Israel. Blankfort’s list of ‘Jews in media’[iii] enables an understanding of the secret of Jewish charm, and it can be compared with a similar extensive list by Prof. Kevin MacDonald of California State University.

The Iraqi War, and even more its linkage with Palestine, became the litmus test of Jewish power. Organised Jewry pushed for war and at the same time denied its involvement. Thus in New York City, the City Council rejected an anti-war resolution, and only 12 of its 51 members were for it. This is not strange for heavily Jewish New York. Indeed, a Democrat, Rep. Robert Jackson, said it in a most straightforward way: "New York City is the home away from home for most Jews; and many members of the Jewish community think [the war is] in the best interests of the state of Israel." According to Jackson, several of his council colleagues have been intimidated into silence by the pro-Israel crowd: “People are not talking about this."

Jackson was certainly right, but a Jewish newspaper[iv] (surprisingly or not, all newspapers in the New York area are Jewish) condemned him for … racism: “[He claimed that] not only do the Jews run New York City, but they've cowed their opponents into silence. Jackson could as well call New York Hymietown.”

This response is remarkable for its typically Jewish logic. First, the opponent’s rational argument is perverted and distorted, then it is aligned with opprobrium; and at the last stage, the opponent is destroyed forever. That is one of the secrets of Jewish might: the Jews enter a dialogue berserk-like, with great vehemence, quite foreign to the Socratic style. While sane people are satisfied with quoting their opponent and fighting his arguments, madmen (for berserk is a temporarily-mad individual) go for the jugular.

David Mamet, the Jewish American playwright, provides a good example of this vehemence as he notices a “Volvo of old, the vehicle of my brethren, the congenitally liberal. It was festooned, as are its kind, with every sort of correct exhortation: Save James Bay, Honour Diversity, and so on. A most interesting bumper sticker read: Israel Out of the Settlements … a slogan which could best be translated as Hook-nosed Jews Die”.

I wonder why Mamet stopped at this, for with equal adequacy the slogan can be translated as Torture Babies, Denounce America and Burn Apple Pie. Who cares for the form of the Jewish nose? Mel Brooks noticed long ago that Jewish girls have the cutest noses, made by the best plastic surgeons…

It is the racist Jewish policies in occupied Palestine that annoy good, ‘congenitally liberal’ people. But if Mamet were honest, he would not be Mamet.

Now, Bill Keller of the NY Times read the Riot Act to the Americans. He kindly allows that ‘most of the big Jewish organizations and many donors are backing the war’ but insists that ‘the idea that Israel's interests are driving one of the most momentous shifts in America's foreign policy is simple-minded and offensive’. Well, Keller is certainly being paid for his convictions by a Jewish media lord, and one of the nastiest, Arthur Sulzberger Jr, the owner of the NY Times, the Boston Globe and a host of other publications. This undermines the possible veracity of Keller’s words. Let something similar be written in a thoroughly non-Jewish newspaper! But alas, there are no important media outlets in the US that are not owned or controlled by Jews …

Surely a coincidence? Do not bet on it. A few days ago, in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, at the Sasson Conference on anti-Semitism, the French Jewish historian Simcha Epstein of the Antisemitism Institute dealt with the situation in pre-war France but pertained more immediately to America. This is what Epstein said:

“The pre-war anti-Semites said that the Jews of France organized a syndicate secretly bankrolling and subverting the press. And what did the Jews say at that time? They said: ‘Of course not! No, it’s a lie, of course not! We are not engaged in conspiracies!’ And what did the historians and the Jewish historiography coming afterwards say? ‘Of course not! It is anti-Semitic drivel!’ But we know now from Jewish sources that before the WWII the Jews of France secretly financed the press.

“Since the end of 19th century, there was a secret Jewish organization, well financed, which bought and bankrolled newspapers. Sometimes it took over existing newspapers, which suddenly became pro-Dreifus because they received Jewish subsidies. New papers were created especially by the Jews. Two very important papers of the period, one was called Les Droits de l'Homme, the Rights of Man, was financed by the Jews, and L’Humanité, which was the Socialist and then the Communist newspaper of France, was also financed by Jews. I say this on the authority Jewish sources of course.

“And this brings us to a dramatic dilemma of historiography. Saying this, saying what I said, is something horrible and unacceptable, because it means that the Jews organized a conspiracy and secretly bought the media, or part of the media. That was precisely what the anti-Semites said at that time, and what they still say today. And we know now from Jewish sources that the allegations were true, that there was a Jewish clandestine activity of bankrolling the press.” [Listen to this sentence ]

Some people perceive every suggestion that Jews are able to act together as a mad conspiracy theory. Let them read and re-read this report by a Jewish historian made at a Jewish conference. If it is proven now beyond any reasonable doubt that the Jews of France secretly bought and subverted French media for many years in order to distort the national discourse and eventually push unprepared France into the horrible and unneeded World War Two, is it impossible to consider that the Jews of the US have secretly taken over their national media and are now pushing the US into a horrible and unneeded World War Three?

Actually there is no need for secrecy. One of the chief Zionist ideologists, Zeev Hefetz (ex-spokesman of PM Begin), wrote in an American daily: "Disarming Iraq is only a start in Middle East" as “the Arab and Iranian (sic!) cultures” are "irrational" and that nothing can be done, short of war, to "improve the collective mental health of Arab societies". [v]Certainly this massive ‘disarmament’ will be carried out by American soldiers, though the commands will be given by the Jewish chicken-hawks roosting in Pentagon. As for reasons for the war, they were eloquently stated by a keynote speaker at a conference on anti-Semitism by Yehuda Bauer, the director of the Holocaust Memorial Institute Yad va-Shem in Jerusalem:

The Jews are not a nation, neither a religion, he said. They are a civilisation, and they have their civilising mission. They cannot tolerate the competing civilisation of Islam, as they could not tolerate Christendom or Communism. That is why the war with Islam is unavoidable.

But the war is avoidable. Even today, at minutes before H-hour, the war is avoidable. And if fire is unavoidable, let the Jewish advisers of President Bush be fired. Let this Purim see the great Exodus of the "Wolfowitz Cabal" from the Pentagon. Excluding the clinical possibility of his actual zombification, G W Bush should be able to understand that he has been misled by this powerful, un-elected minority. They cannot deliver what they promised. Moreover, their own days at the helm of the Republic are numbered. They over-estimated their abilities, and pushed too hard. As the frog of La Fontaine, they can blow up. Bush still can do a U-turn, and save himself and his country.

In a way, today’s America reminds of Russia in 1986, at the beginning of glasnost. After the Soviet citizens were allowed to learn who rules them and how, the days of the Soviet regime were counted. Glasnost gave place to perestroika. Now, for the first time in a generation, Americans are allowed to see the men in power, the toxic combination of the Right-Wing Democrats of Lieberman, the Republican neo-liberals, the Neo-Cons and plain Con-men. The Iraqi War brought them forward and presented them in clear light. Now is the time to undo their hold.

It can’t be postponed for the divisive presidency of G W Bush is perceived as the period of ‘White’ Protestant Anglo-Saxon rule, despite the prevalence of his Jewish advisers. All available contenders for the next elections - Lieberman, Kelly and even Kuchinich – claim their Jewish connections and declare their undivided loyalty to Jewry and to the state of Israel. In the present political setup of America, there will be no real alternative to Jewish ascendancy. If Bush flops, it will be construed by the media as a WASP flop. If he succeeds, it will be seen as success of his Jewish advisers.

That is why American patriot forces should not wait for the next elections, or for the end of war. They must act now, by calling the war off. They have an enemy, but he is not in Iraq. What is called for is a new American revolution, on a par with the New Deal and abolition of slavery, with de-monopolisation of the discourse; that is of media and universities, for starters. In the beginning of the Twentieth Century, Americans undid the mighty Standard Oil. They created new anti-monopoly laws and terminated the threat to democracy. This achievement could be repeated now.


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[i] Kathleen and Bill Christison, `A Rose By Another Name: The Bush Administration's Dual Loyalties’, Counterpunch, Dec. 13, 2002).

[ii] http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/628/op2.htm

[iii] Here is enough sampling to indicate that it is not:

First of all, Sumner Redstone ( né Murray Rothstein) owns $8 billion dollars worth of Viacom, which gives him the controlling interest in CBS, Viacom, MTV worldwide (Brian Graden, president), and most recently he bought Black Entertainment Television and proceeded immediately to cut down its public-affairs programming. The president of CBS is Leslie Moonves, the great nephew of David Ben-Gurion.

Michael Eisner is the major owner of Disney-Capitol Cities, which owns ABC. David Westin is the president of ABC News. Although it has lost viewers, Nightline host Ted Koppel is a strong supporter of Israel. Lloyd Braun is chair of ABC Entertainment. And there is the perennial Barbara Walters.

Neil Shapiro is the president of NBC News. Jeffrey Zucker is the head of NBC Entertainment and Jack Myers has some important post there, as well.

Although Rupert Murdoch of Fox is not Jewish, Mel Karamazin, the president of the corporation is, as is Peter Chernin, the second in command at Murdoch's News Corps.

Sandy Grushow is chairman of Fox Entertainment, and Gail Berman is president. Murtdoch has received numerous awards from various Jewish charities.

Jamie Kellner is chair and CEO of Turner Broadcasting.

Walter Issacson is the News Director of CNN which also has Wolf Blitzer, host of Late Edition, Larry King of Larry King Live, Paula Zahn, and Andrea Koppel, Ted's daughter.

Jordan Levin is chairman of Warner Bros. Entertainment.

Howard Stringer is chair of Sony Corp. of America.

Robert Sillerman is the founder of Clear Channel Communications,

Ivan Seidenberg is chair of Verizon Communications

Terry Semel, former co-chair of Warners is CEO of Yahoo.

Barry Diller, former owner of Universal Entertainment, is the chair of USA Interactive.

Joel Klein is chair and CEO of Bertelsmann's American operations, the largest publishing conglomerate in the world.

Mort Zuckerman, the Chair of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish American Organizations, owns US News and World Report and the NY Daily News.

Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. publishes the NY Times, the Boston Globe and a host of other publications.

Marty Peretz publishes the New Republic, which is unabashedly pro-Israel, as is

William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard.

Donald Graham, Jr. is the chair and CEO of Newsweek and the Washington Post.

Michael Ledeen, of Iran-Contra fame, edits National Review.

Ron Rosenthal is the Managing Editor of the SF Chronicle and Phil Bronstein is the Executive Editor.

David Schneiderman owns the Village Voice and a number of other "alternative" weeklies.

Columnist William Safire, Tom Freidman, Charles Krauthammer, Richard Cohen, Jeff Jacoby, are among the most widely syndicated columnists.

There are a number of widely syndicated talk show hosts such as Michael Savage (ABC) on more than 100 stations, Michael Medved, 124 stations, and Dennis Prager who has an Israeli flag on his website. Others include Ron Owens, Ben Wattenberg, and former ZOA official Jon Rothman, all in San Francisco on ABC.

In Hollywood, which was founded by Jews, there is of course, Stephen Spielberg, David Geffen, and Jeffrey Kranzberg of Dreamworks, Eisner of Disney, Amy Pascal, chair of Columbia, and many, many more.

For the intellectuals, we have NPR, with pundit Daniel Schorr and weekend hosts Scott Simon and Liane Hansen, Robert Segal, Susan Stanberg, Eric Weiner, Daniel Lev, Linda Gradstein (a well-known speaker at pro-Israel events) covering Jerusalem, Mike Schuster (whose soft-ball interview with Ariel Sharon after Sabra and Shatila should have brought him before the court of Hamarabi). Brook Gladstein.

And that's just for starters. From the boss to the delivery it's an impressive list. While they certainly can't be put in the same box when it comes to Israel, they more or less guarantee that there will be limits to any criticism they may make of Israel”.

[iv] NY Post 22.02.03

[v] November 12, 2002 The New Haven Register

Thursday, June 26, 2008

On the Move


By Israel Shamir

This mosaic always reminds me of our beautiful world, this delightful mosaic of small towns, green meadows, civilised megapolises, castles and cottages, rivers and streams, churches and mosques, each piece of the mosaic is fine, precious and perfect. I saw a lot of them and I love them all. The rocky low-lying islands in lucid and transparent Baltic, where yellow-haired kids wave to the passing ships from the pier. La France Profonde of Conque, a tiny hamlet in the Massif Central on the old pilgrim road to St Jacques, with a narrow chatty river skirting the hill, slated roofs, thousand years ago paved streets. Domes of Russian churches in the high grass on Oka River, where girls in flowery shawls listen to a harmony. Pretty voices of Suzhou girls reverberate in the temple courtyard among canals crisscrossing South China. Baroque houses of Trinidad tobacco factors and proud stature of Cubans dancing on its streets. Superb bodies of tattooed Masai around the bonfire at Serengeti savanna. This world is lovely and its folks are very good.


This beautiful and intricate set-up is threatened by the forthcoming hostilities, as this Third World War is not only against the Third World. This war started even before the first bomb fell on the rocky ground of Afghanistan. A million of new refugees are on the road, creating the great commotion and unsettling Asia. There is no doubt, sooner or later the refugee wave will hit Europe. Hundreds of thousands refugees already are on the move towards Europe, Russia and relatively stable countries on the rim. One can understand them: as the US promised to use nuclear weapons against their homes, the defenceless population has no choice but flee the target areas. No border controls would be able to withstand their hectic push. Pakistan will be first, but not last. As the US and Britain plan to turn their Crusade into a long war ‘against terror’, there will be more and more refugees, until, eventually, the fragile social fabric of Europe would crumble and collapse. Europe would be overrun, as Roman Empire in its day, and it will face a stark choice: to establish a system of apartheid and discrimination, or to lose its identity.

Would Europe be an incidental victim of American fury, like an innocent bystander in a Western shoot-out? It appears to me that Europe is rather one of the real targets of the forthcoming offensive. It is not what the ordinary people of the United States wish, but they are not being asked. The new ruling elites of the US and their partners and agents overseas put destruction of prosperous independent and cohesive Europe on their list. This desire has a practical short-term reason: Europe is a competitor to America, it is too independent, it started its own monetary unit that can push dollar. Europe supports more even-balanced policy in Palestine. Europe is too egalitarian: in New York, I saw a lift boy, an immigrant from devastated Panama, who actually lives in the elevator. You would not find such things in Europe, as Europe is not yet Mammonized.


II


The new ruling elites do not care much for Christ or Muhammad, it is true, but they have a lot of religious feeling towards another old Deity, Mammon. This ancient god of greed was much loved by Pharisees, some two millennia back, as we learn from the Gospel. Jesus told them: you can not serve both God and Mammon. But Pharisees sneered at him, because they loved money’[i]. This faith was pushed away by the following developments. Love of Mammon became known as Avarice, one of the Mortal Sins, it was condemned by Christian and Muslim societies alike.


But it did not disappear completely. Two thousand years later, a grandson of the Trier Rabbi, Karl Marx, came to a revolutionary conclusion: the faith of Mammon, this ‘weekday religion of Jews’, in his words, became the real religion of American elites. Marx approvingly quoted a colonel Hamilton, ‘Mammon is Yankees’ idol, they worship it not only with their lips, but with all strength of their body and soul. In their eyes, the earth is but a stock exchange, and they are convinced that they do not have other purpose on earth but to become richer than their neighbours’. Marx concluded, ‘The practical domination of Jewish spirit over the Christian world has achieved in North America its unambiguous, complete expression’.


This victorious Jewish spirit, for Marx, was based on ‘greed and egoism, its confession was business, it’s god - Money’[ii]. These words, as other ideas of Karl Marx, were known but their deep spiritual meaning was not understood in full. For a good reason: until our days, the religious features of the creed of Greed were not expressed, and one could possibly imagine a capitalist who thinks of his own interest and promotes the common good, as it was presented by Adam Smith.


Things changed with advent of ‘neo-liberalism’. Lectures of Milton Friedman manifested ‘outing’ of Mammonites, adepts of the new/old faith. They differ from ordinary greedy folks, as they elevate Greed to the level of jealous God, that does not suffer other gods. The traditional wealthy men would not dream of destroying their society. They cared about their land and community. They would like to be the first among their own kind. They still considered themselves ‘shepherds of men’. It is true, shepherds also eat sheep, but they would not sell the whole lot to the butcher just because the price is good.


The Mammonites see such consideration as a betrayal of Mammon. As Robert McChesney wrote in his Introduction to Noam Chomsky’s Profit Over People[iii], ‘they demand a religious faith in the infallibility of the unregulated market’, in other words, a faith of egoism and greed unlimited. They are devoid of compassion to the people they live amongst, they do not see the local people as ‘their own kind’. If they would be able to eliminate local folks and supplant them by poor immigrants, to optimise their profits, they would do it, as their brothers did in Palestine.


The Mammonites do not give a damn for the people of America, but use them as their tool to achieve world domination. Their ideal picture of the world is archaic, or futuristic: they dream of the world of slaves and masters. In order to achieve it, the Mammonites strive to destroy cohesiveness of social and national units.


As long as people stay on their land, speak their tongue, live among their own kith and kin, drink water of their rivers, worship in their churches and mosques, they can not be enslaved. But if their lands are flooded by masses of refugees, their social structure will collapse. They will lose their great advantage, the feeling of belonging together, the feeling of brotherhood, and they will become an easy prey for Mammonites.


II


Afghanis are wonderful folk, sturdy, independent, self-reliant. They are formed by their mountains, and as all highlanders, they are quite stubborn and conservative. Fear of American bombs would push them into the lowlands of Holland and into the cities of France, and they will unwillingly but irreversibly change the land they enter. This process is going on for quite a while. As the global policies of the Mammonites deplete the poor countries of the Third world, pump out natural resources and incomes, support the nasty quisling rulers, destroy their nature, more and more people are forced to join the stream of refugees to Europe and the US.


This threat is already felt in Europe. Oriana Fallaci, a well-known Italian journalist, published in the leading Milanese newspaper, Corriere della Sera[iv], an article bewailing the fate of Europe overrun by “Muslim hordes”. She viewed immigrants as a courtier of Romulus in Ravenna considered the Germanic warriors. Oriana says that “Somali Muslims defaced and shitted and outraged for three months the main square of my city”, that some "children of Allah" urinated on the walls of the Cathedral, that they had mattresses inside the tent "to sleep and fuck on" and poisoned the square with the smell and smoke of their cooking. Oriana goes on to say that Florence, "once the capital of art and culture and beauty" is "wounded and humiliated" by "arrogant Albanians, Sudanese, Bengalese, Tunisians, Algerians, Pakistanis and Nigerians" who "sell drugs" and pimp whores. She calls for the support of American-led Crusade and contends, "If America falls, then Europe will fall [...] instead of church bells, there will be the muezzins, instead of miniskirts, chadors, instead of cognac, camel's milk".


Before condemning her style, let us attend the faults of her logic. Ms Fallaci, an experienced and not too young journalist sees in America a possible protection, rather than the source of her – and Florence’s trouble. She should be worried by victory, not by fall of America. If America succeeds in her Afghan war, Oriana’s nightmare can become a reality.


She does not want to notice that the refugees and immigrants arrive to Italy because their lands were devastated by the US and its allies. She would not see Albanians if NATO would not ravage Balkans. She would not see Sudanese, if Clinton would not bomb Sudan. She would not see Somalis, if Somali would not be ruined by Italian colonization and American intervention. Neither she, nor America would see a Palestinian immigrant if the peasants of Saffurie would still tend their pomegranate groves.


Nobody, but nobody would leave his own land with its unique nature, lifestyle, friends and relatives, holy places and fathers’ graves for the dubious pleasure of camping by the walls of an Italian Cathedral. Like ducklings have their imprinting, men are born to love their native land. Young Telemachus compares his rocky and lean island with broad meadows and rich fields of Lacedaemon, and says to his host, ‘we’ve got hardly any grass, and still, I prefer our mountains with its goats to all your meadows suitable for horses’[v] People immigrate when their lands are ruined. The Irish would not leave the green fields of Erin for Chicago, if English government would not starve them out. My own Russians would not come to occupy Palestine if Russia would not be ruined by pro-American forces of Yeltsin and Chubais.


For host folk, immigration wave is a nuisance at the best, a disaster at the worst. It is not their fault, it is the question of numbers. Carlos Castaneda joined an Indian tribe and learned a lot of their ways. I am sure the tribe learned something from Carlos Castaneda. Now imagine, that thousand wonderful guys and gals from Yale and Berkeley would join the Indian tribe. The tribe would disappear, it would not be able to keep its ways. While a single émigré would be always welcomed, and would add some colour to the society, mass immigration is bad.


Whether immigrants come as invaders and conquerors, or as refugees, the receiving society gets a shock. If they are smart, they push local people away from interesting and important social positions, and create their own subculture. If they are violent, they can take over the land by other means. If they are humble and timid, they will bring down the price of labour. That is why in normal circumstances immigrants are not popular.


A good man and my friend, Miguel Martinez, who brought Oriana’s article to the attention of English-reading audience, was justly horrified by her racism. He is right, Ms Fallaci speaks as a racist, as Ann Coulter, this American scourge of ‘swarthy men’. But he failed to see some truth in her words. A man whose garden was overrun by buffaloes does not notice the hunter who rushes the herds his way and blames the innocent animals. He is mistaken, the blame behoves the hunter, but it does not mean the buffaloes do not ruin the garden. Mass immigration is painful for immigrant and host alike.


But it is not painful for the Mammonites. They actually like immigration, as it lowers the price of labour. A leading Mammonite magazine is the British weekly Economist. Their leader called a few weeks ago, before the ‘new Pearl Harbour’ to increase intake of immigrants from the Third World. The most dynamic, best qualified people from Africa, Asia and South America could be useful for Britain, Europe and the US, wrote the Economist. It would push down salaries of European workers and increase profits of entrepreneurs. As a side profit, the outflow of the dynamic element weakens the donor societies and makes them an easy prey for the hostile takeover. It is an improved version of slave trade, as what could be better that willing slaves competing for the board of slave ship. Naturally, the first condition of this intake was not written down in the leader: the countries of the Third World should be devastated and ruined.


Mammonites need immigrants for their own sake, as well. A cohesive and healthy society rejects men of greed instinctively, as greed is a socially destructive drive. In a healthy society, Mammonites would remain pariahs. Immigration destroys cohesiveness of the host society. Mammonites do not like their society being cohesive, they prefer it thinnish and liquescent, so it would be easier to drink it up. That is why Mammonites support immigration. Immigrants conceive them as their natural allies and fail to comprehend that the Mammonites like them as vampires like fresh blood. Because of this lack of understanding, immigrants support with their votes the Mammonite power of Tony Blair and New York Democrats. It is the Mammonites, who should be on the receiving end of Oriana’s diatribes, instead of innocent immigrants on the streets and squares of Europe.


III


A Mammonite senator for California, Diane Feinstein, imports more and more poor Mexicans into her state. They give her the vote, stay out of politics for many years, they agree to work for less, they undermine the organised labour. Ordinary Californians live worse, but she does not care. Some people consider her a Zionist by virtue of her support for Israel.


However, it would be a mistake to call her a Zionist. Historically, Zionists felt that man needs roots. They considered easy mobility of Jews to be a sign of wanting. They wanted to provide the rootless Jews with the roots in the Holy Land. Mammonites do not understand who needs roots. They want to uproot everybody. Zionists felt that Mammonite way of life is wrong. Mammonites of all backgrounds adopted the way of life discarded by Zionists.


The Zionists were wrong as they did not understand that without Palestinians, they can not achieve their goal of striking the root in the soil of Palestine. They were wrong, as a person of Jewish origin can strike his root anywhere, not only in Palestine. A Jew can become an American, an English, a Russian as well as a Palestinian. It calls for identification with his countrymen, for supreme concern with his land. Every land is a Promised Land to man who loves it. People who force America to send away billions of dollars to Israel, instead of providing for America’s poor, are not loyal to America. But they are not loyal to Israel, either. They admire Israel as the model of their world.


Many good men dislike Zionism, for it caused this massive destruction of the lovely land of Palestine and uprooted Palestinians. But Zionism is a local disease. Its big brother, Mammonitis, is a world-wide plague, that wants to turn the world into a “ Big Israel”, with shopping malls and destroyed villages, settlements for the chosen few, and many-many refugees as a source of cheap labour. Zionists ruined nature of Palestine, Mammonites ruin the world environment. Zionists uprooted Palestinians, Mammonites uproot all.


Zionists fight Christ. In modern Israel, St Paul and St Peter would be jailed for teaching Gospel. Mammonites fight every faith, every conviction, Christ and Muhammad, Nationalism and Communism. Enemies of Zionism hope Mammonites will reign the Zionists in, as too independent policy of Zionists can become an obstacle to the world-embracing plans of Mammonites. But I tell you, God tolerates the excesses of Zionists so you would notice the plans of Mammonites.


IV


It is not a cry of dye-in-the-wool Leftie. We can live with some people of wealth, we can survive some amount of privilege. Both the left and the right are good and needed for the society, as left leg and right leg are needed to stand up. Imagine a springtime meadow in the Jerusalem mountains. It is a magic carpet of flowers, that calls you to seat on it. If everybody will walk it, there will be no flowers left. If it will be fenced, it will be lost for us. These two tendencies: of access and of preservation, are the paradigms of Left and Right. Their correct combination allows many people to enjoy the meadow.


The right is the conservative force, preserving the power of traditional elites. They save the landscape, protect nature, keep the tradition. The left is a moving force of society, the guarantee of its liveliness, of ability to change, of social mobility. A society without its left would rot, a society without its right would collapse. Left provides movement, right provides stability. But Mammonites create for their purposes a pseudo-left and pseudo-right, using errors of real left and right.


One of the faults of the European ‘real’ right was its lack of compassion and racist tendency. Their knee jerk reflex was correct: immigrants destabilize the society. But it is not because they are worse men, as racists say. Immigrants could be wonderful folk, and they are still a trouble. Dutch moved to Indonesia, and plagued their land for quite a while by their presence. They ruined Indonesia heavily. Indonesians went to Holland and troubled it back. English plagued America in the heavy way: they exterminated the natives. Colonial process often leads to mutual plaguing: Brits despoiled Ireland and were troubled by Irish.


Racism is wrong, as it claims that some groups of men are inherently better or worse than others. Everybody is wonderful, Zulu and British, Russians and Chechens, Palestinians and French, Pakistanis and Turks, while at their own ground. At others’ land, these good people become a nuisance. In the days of European imperialism and colonial expansion, racist theories were necessary to justify the one-sided flow of men. Without racism, one could not exterminate natives, take their property, ban their industries, create huge landholdings, and keep people without basic human rights. But now racism is not needed anymore. As the colonial adventure of Europe is over, morally wrong and scientifically mistaken theory of racist superiority can be laid to rest.


The real left should promote interests of lower classes and it means to object to mass immigration. But, under Mammonite influence, the liberal left supports immigration for the reason of compassion. Mammonites, normally devoid of compassion, utilise this humanitarian reasoning in their own purposes. It gives them an additional profit: European and American working people are being alienated from the liberal left. For workers, the dangerous nature of immigration is obvious. Immigrants live in close quarters with the local workers, and suffer from their competition for the work places. Thus, they are forced to embrace the racist extreme right.
There is a good way out of the impasse, a way that is good for everybody but Mammonites. Stop immigration, and open money transfer line to the Third World. Africa and Sweden should have the same income. Tax money should flow to the Indians of Amazon and to the peasants of Afghanistan. Not many Pakistanis will immigrate to Britain, if they would have the same (or almost the same) income back home. The EC is a proof of it: though Swedes still earn more than Portuguese, Greek and Italians, the difference is not that big, and the lands are peaceful, so there is a very little immigration into Sweden or Germany. If you say: compassion; the true Christian compassion tells you to let people live at home, under their vine and their fig tree, as good as they would live at your land. You would not have very cheap cleaners, but you will live in a cleaner and better land. It would be just, as for hundreds of years Europe and the US pumped out the wealth of the South and the East.


The immigrant’s lot is a sad one. After all, immigration is an exile, this saddest state of man. Ovid bewailed it on the Moldavian shore, and prince Genji decried in Suma. My Palestinian friend Musa brought his elderly father from the village of Aboud to his new home in Vermont, and the old man began to build terraces, as on the slopes of Samarian hills. We are so much a part of landscape, a part and parcel of mountains and valleys. Now, when in the US, there are attacks on immigrants, probably many of them think of their homes they were forced to leave.


While I think that immigration should be stopped and supplanted by transfer of funds to the poorer lands until the incomes would level, immigrants that already came over, probably came to stay. They could become locals: Germans in Germany, French in France, Americans in America, Palestinians in Palestine. The ancestors of European and American people also migrated, and adopted to new ways. Germanic tribes of Franks overrun Romanised Celtic Gaul, and together with its old population they formed modern French. Descendents of European Crusaders still live in Palestinian village Sinjil that preserves the glorious name of the Provencal commander Raymond de St Gilles, but they became Palestinians in every way and are being besieged by Israelis as everybody else. So did the Georgians brought eight hundred years ago to the Jerusalemite village of Malcha by the orders of Queen Tamar. They became Palestinian, and shared the fate of other Palestinians when they were expelled from their houses by Zionist invaders in 1948.


Human beings are adaptable, and if the immigrants love their new land, they can become locals. I know it: a native of Siberia, I choose to become a Palestinian.


V


WWIII is a war against variety per se, initiated by the adepts of Greed. They do not like the delightful mosaic of races and cultures, they would rather homogenise the world. They have a practical reason: it is easier to sell goods to homogenised mankind. They have a moral reason: they do not want people to enjoy this beauty for free, so it has to be destroyed. They have a religious reason: the Mammon worshippers, they feel this jolly plurality is a sacrilege against their jealous god. Beautiful things of old belong in a museum, where they can charge entrance fee, after the village is destroyed.


In a beautiful adolescent movie, the Never-Ending Story, the many-coloured world of Fantasy disappears into Nowhere. The same thing happens to our marvellous world. Old and unique places are being erased and supplanted by shopping malls and scorched land. The left and the right should join forces against the Nowhere that threatens our very existence.

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

A book to be burned: The other face of Israel

by Israel Adam Shamir,

‘What demon is annoying you and leading you to slander?
So a book displeases you; who is forcing you to read it?’
Boileau


Israel Shamir’s Parisian publisher sentenced to pay €23,500 and given a three-month suspended prison sentence.

It was an absolutely staggering piece of news that came down on the wires of the Agence France-Presse at 5.34pm on the 2nd of November. We reproduce it below as is.

On Wednesday, the court in Nanterre sentenced the manager of the publishing house Al Qalam to three months in prison, suspended, and to a fine of €10,000 for having published Israel Shamir’s anti-Semitic work, L’autre visage d’Israël (The Other Face of Israel); furthermore, the sale of he book has been prohibited.

The court found Abdelila Cherifi Alaoui, the manager of the publishing house, Al Qalam, guilty of ‘incitement to discrimination, exhortation to hatred and violence’ towards the membership of a religion.

In addition to the suspended three-month prison sentence and the fine of €10,000, Al Qalam will also have to pay €12,000 in damages and €1,500 in court expenses on behalf of the plaintiff, the International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism (LICRA). Lastly, the publisher has 30 days to withdraw the book from all bookshops, under a €100 penalty for every copy remaining on the shelves at the end of that period.

The court justified its judgement by the fact that ‘the expression “juifs”(Jews) is always used in the plural’ in the book, and they are portrayed as ‘dominating the world’, within an overall framework of a ‘third world war’ currently being carried out, according to the author. As well, the court finds that ‘the author reveals himself to be a rather old-fashioned anti-Semite, particularly where he quotes from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.’

First published in 1905 in Russia, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a book announcing how the Jews intended to satisfy their hatred, destroy Christian civilisation and seize world power, went round the world, selling millions of copies.

Recognised as an obvious forgery since 1921 (it had apparently been conjured up by the secret service of the Tsar, who was opposed to any liberalisation of his rule of Russia and thus attempted to use it as proof of an alleged Zionist plot against him); it continues, however, to be widely used and presented as authentic by those wishing to justify their anti-Semitic claims. The Nazis, in particular, claimed it being authentic. In The Other Face of Israel, Israel Shamir says on page 282: “the Protocols ought to be regarded as a political pamphlet”.


Editor’s note from Quibla: This is an extremely worrisome sentence. It goes against judicial precedent with regards to criticism of religions, whatever they are. It is enough to read Shamir’s book to realise that the charges of ‘anti-Semitism’ are clearly unfounded. In the Elders of Zion and the Masters of Discourse, in 2002, Shamir tries to analyse why, one century after their first publication, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion continue to have such a success throughout the world. He concludes that it is because the Zionists behave from day to day as if they were applying the programme of domination described in this book. The publisher has been the victim of this iniquitous condemnation and will appeal. This matter is far from at an end.

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Ottoman Empire, please come back!

by Israel Shamir

On Mt Carmel, there is a pleasant townlet, slightly more than a village, called Zichron Yaakov. Now known for its robust wine and Frenchy restaurants, in the days of World War One it was a home for the Zionist pro-British espionage ring, NILI. Its members, prominent Zionist settlers and citizens of Turkey, communicated with the British troops in Egypt, delivered to them news of the Turkish forces’ disposition and contributed to the Empire’s defeat. They were connected with Haim Weitzman, who squeezed the Balfour declaration from unwilling Brits and became the first president of the Jewish state. To this day, the NILI is greatly venerated in Israel, and schoolchildren are often taken to the museum where they are indoctrinated in Jewish loyalty to the Jews only, and in their duty to betray any other power if it is called for by their loyalty as Jews.


They had a good reason to betray their country, the Ottoman Empire, for if the Empire were still intact, the Jewish State with its millions deprived natives immured beyond the high wall, its millions of equally deprived guest workers locked in shantytowns would have never come into existence. Incidentally, the US attack on defenceless Iraq with its hundreds of thousands dead and ensuing civil strife would have never materialised, either, for Iraq was a part of that powerful Empire.


And not only has the Middle East suffered from the Empire’s demise, but NATO planes would have never had the fun of bombing Belgrade, if the Empire were still with us. Even Greece, the first break-away province, now devastated by the introduction of the Euro, and reduced to the status of an hotelier for wealthy Northerners, has a good reason to regret the days when Greeks formed the elite of the Empire from Alexandria to Constantinople. The Turks, the Empire-building nation, were admired and feared in Europe, while now they are treated as unwanted competitors for dish-washing jobs in Frankfurt and London.


We, the heirs to the Byzantines and the Ottomans, have now to deal with a great new challenge, the American colonisation project. The Mammonite forces now at the helm of the US are using the dismantlement of the great continental Empires to build their world-embracing neo-liberal one. In this new Empire, Western Europe will be ‘the old country’, Greece to Rome, object of imperial benevolence and guidance; while the rest of the world will be re-colonised. Instead of trying to fit into this plan by trying to join the EU, as some Turkish leaders hope to do, a better response would be to re-establish a big civilisation-based framework. Mankind is ripe for a new stage in its development, the re-formation of civilisation blocks. By the end of this stage, there will be five super-states, five civilisations: the US, Europe, China, Latin America and ours, the Commonwealth of the East. The alternative is a world colonised by Mammonite America.
Indeed, it is the right time to give a thought to bringing the Ottoman Empire back. The Empire did not fail because it was too big and unwieldy: in its heyday it was smaller than Brazil or Russia. It failed because inexperienced local elites grasped the poisoned fruit of nationalism, offered by the western Masters of Discourse.


Nationalism, this European invention, has probably killed more people than the Black Plague of old. Worse, it has not offered a plausible alternative to the unity of the Empire, where dozens of tribes and ethnic groups felt at home, in peace with each other. None of the break-away countries has succeeded in creating a viable state, and the Western predators continue to spread strife among smaller and smaller groups, as the Kurdish rebellion in Turkey and Iraq reminds us. The Pan-Arabism of Nasser and the Ba’ath Party, the Islamism of Osama, the Pan-Turkism of Ziya Gökalp and Halide Edib Adivar have all failed to propose a viable ideology to counteract the continuing onslaught of the Mammonite forces.


We should take a leaf from the book of our brothers in the EU. Europe has succeeded in bringing back the Empire of Charlemagne, which collapsed a millennium ago; our Empire is still alive in the memories of people, and in the glorious palaces, fortresses, mosques and churches. Our reconstituted Empire may and should embrace the entire post-Byzantine expanse: the bright future of Turkey, the Middle East, and the Balkans lays in joining in with Russia, Ukraine, and the Turkic republics of Central Asia.


These two heirs to the glory of Byzantium, the Russian and the Ottoman Empires, fought each other for centuries; but the same can be said of the French and the Germans, the heirs to the Western Roman Empire. If these eternal enemies in the West could succeed in uniting, it can be done in the East, too.


This summer as I travelled in Russia and Ukraine, I noticed much in common between the Russians and the Turks (or Tatars, in Russian usage). “Scratch a Russian and you will find a Turk”, fumed Churchill, his cigar in full blast. “And the other way around”, quipped Leon Gumilev, a great and late Russian historian, the guru of the Russian pro-Eastern tendency. Indeed, Russia as a state came into being as the union of the steppe-dwelling Muslim Turks and the forest-based Orthodox Slavs. Gumilev demolished the Western myth of the ‘Tatar (Turk) Yoke’ and correctly described the Moscow Rus as the successor state to the Golden Horde founded by the Turkic Genghisid princes. “Russia is unbeatable in its union with the brave Turks”, said Gumilev who identified the West as the greatest source of danger for Russian identity.


The National Bolshevik leader and a prominent writer, Edward Limonov, wrote recently of Russia being ‘a Turkey with German coating’. Russians still prefer ‘sharovary’, baggy trousers popular among Anatolian peasants and the Ottoman nobility of old. They squat like the Turks do, noticed Limonov. This positive feeling of Russians towards the Turks is so different from the European mistrust of them. It finds its way into the cinema: the new Russian blockbuster called The Turkish Gambit describes the Russo-Turkish war for Plevna without the usual, for Hollywood, racist overtones and presents Osman Nuri Pasha as a hero.


The commonality of Turks and Slavs goes back a long way. In northern Ukraine, I visited the erstwhile capitals of Russian princedoms, Novgorod, Chernigov and Kiev. Their princes married Turkic princesses, daughters of the steppe, and Turkic warriors formed an integral part of their retinue. The Russian epic lay of the 12th century depicts a Novgorod Prince Igor war raid into Turkic steppe; the prince was defeated, but his captor Konchak Khan gave him his daughter in marriage, and he returned home to Novgorod. A sizable part of Russian nobility still has Turkic names, be it Nabokov, the author of Lolita, or Usupov, the wealthiest Russian prince at the court of Nicolas II.


In a recent book, The Eurasian Symphony by St Petersburg writer van Zaichik, an alternative history of our part of the world is proposed. What would have happened if the Turkic Golden Horde’s enlightened ruler Sartak Khan, a friend of St Alexander Nevsky, had survived an assassination attempt and, as a consequence, the Russians and the Turks had remained in one prosperous state? Van Zaichik calls this resulting empire ‘Ordus’, an amalgam of Horde and Rus, embracing the bulk of the Eurasian landmass. Ordus is a land where modernity has incorporated tradition and religion; the family has remained intact; and even though there are wealthy men, the unbridled pursuit of wealth is frowned upon.


“We work together and contain our egoism”, this is the credo of Ordus, a model suitable for the East. Mosques and churches are plentiful; however, all the citizens are united in harmony. This image of an alternative universe was so attractive to the Russians that I spotted a few cars carrying stickers “I want to live in Ordus”. By the way, Ordus includes a Jerusalem Vilayet, where many of the descendents of Jews found refuge from Hitler’s rise in Germany (yes, there was a Hitler and a Germany even in the alternative universe), but live as equals with the native inhabitants.


A fascinating new Russian historian, Fomenko, has proposed a heretical model of history: in his eyes, there was always an Empire, or rather, The Empire; and the city on the Bosporus is the natural capital of Eurasia. Whether or not it was ever the case in the past, it can certainly be the case in the future.


Instead of fighting for leadership in Eurasia, the Turks, Slavs, Arabs (and their smaller neighbours) can unite their forces and make Constantinople (‘Istanbul’ is just a corrupt reading of Constantinople) their joint capital and the seat of the Imperial government. Constantinople can be our answer to Brussels, New York and Beijing. While the centuries-long quest for hegemony in Eurasia has caused many wars, a union would satisfy all desires: the Russians will have Constantinople as their capital, without dislodging the Turks; the Turks will have lifelines to the Crimea and Tashkent, even to the far-away diamond reserves of Yakutia, the land of the Pravoslav Turks, restored without fighting a single Russian. The Middle East will once again be incorporated in Eurasia as it was; and it won’t have to listen to orders from Washington, London or Brussels. Instead of being a far-away place, Turkey will become the meeting place for the people of Baghdad and Kiev, Belgrade and Cairo, Vladivostok and Ankara.


Let us raise the twin-headed eagle of Byzantium once again as the symbol of our Eastern Civilisation’s unity of the Orthodox and the Muslims, invest our ruler with the twin crown of Caliph of Islam and Emperor of the Orthodox, bury petty nationalisms of the recent past and begin an exciting new page in our history and the history of the world. The reconstituted Commonwealth of the East, the rightful successor to the Eastern Roman, Byzantine, Russian and Ottoman Empires, will possess vast material and spiritual resources, making it a world superpower, next to a united Europe, to the US and to China.


This Commonwealth will be united by an idea, as well as by material considerations. For East and West are different, split by a metaphysical cleavage. In the West, the Mammonite heresy brought in the American troop carriers of the World War, had won the day. They accepted a brutal faith of greed, of unbridled desire for individual success, of the right and duty to grab and consume as much as possible. They rejected solidarity in the name egoism they call “absolute freedom of man”. They destroyed Woman by turning her into an imitation of man; they destroyed Man by making him compete with women. Having rejected God, their churches are empty, their cities are centred on the business quarters, while ours are centred on learning, art and prayer.


The East has retained its Christian identity, for Islam is just a form of Christianity, though as distanced from the Nicene Orthodoxy as is the Calvinism of the Swiss. The East denies Mammon for we have not rejected God; we put spirit above material considerations as we have not rejected Christ al Mesih, we adore Woman for we have not rejected His Mother, Sitt Maryam. The East still loves nature, despises the dishonest rich, believes in the value of work, and prefers harmony to success. We like manly men and womanly women. We respect tradition and family. The US-led West creates a nomad civilisation out of an open society of atomised individuals disconnected from family and soil. In the Commonwealth of the East, we shall proceed in the opposite direction. We will discourage immigration and encourage capital transfer. We shall be in favour of the autochthon, for the autochthon knows the needs and desires of his locality better.


The West has proclaimed the sanctity of private property. We respect it so long as it is small, but reject its excesses. We shall rule against greed by taxing the super-rich, confiscating their property and sending them for re-education and ‘de-greeding’ to a friendly Anatolian or Siberian village. There will be no privatisation of resources, no sale of lands to foreigners, no dispossession of peasants. We shall discourage the growth of cities and promote the countryside. The West over-regulates private life; we shall uphold the eternal liberties of the East. We shall be good friends to our neighbours, or terrible enemies, if they so choose.


This fantasy is actually the only plausible alternative to having our lands colonised by the US or by the rising superpowers of Europe and China.

Monday, June 23, 2008

Comrade Raimondo Seeks a Scapegoat

By Israel Shamir

A man accused of witchcraft at the Inquisition Court had two ways to defend oneself. One, he could laugh it off, and declare: there is no such thing as witchcraft. The problem is, the inquisition won’t approve of such a defence, and the daring Witchcraft Denier may yet end at the stake, if not for his black magic, then for his Denial. The second way was to finger a ‘real sorcerer’ and thus to demonstrate one’s obedience to the Inquisition.

This easier way out was chosen by an internet columnist Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com who was accused of variety of sins by a junior London-based inquisitor called David Aaronovitch in The Times (London). He decided to scapegoat me. I find myself in a familiar predicament: much as I sympathise with the victim of inquisition, I am not ready to serve as his fall guy.

In brief, Raimondo says: I am not an antisemite, but Shamir “of indeterminate ethnicity” is.

This is the path many good but frail guys tread before him and it made them no good at all. The Columbia University professor Joseph Massad comes to my mind: he accused late Prof Israel Shahak of being antisemite. It did not help him a jota: he was accused of the same dreadful offence by the same inquisition he tried to placate and almost lost his job. Now Raimondo goes the same path, and not the first time. (3) He even took up the line of "doubtful ethnicity": Jews use this disclaimer to imply that a pureblood Jew would never stray that far. After repeating this small slur, Raimondo may begin to check kosher certificates on his bacon and eggs.

Pity, for a long time, I have kept a warm spot in my heart for Comrade Raimondo. Much as I do not like the US right-wingers, this flamboyant Republican-against-the-war appeared to me a man who fulfils a positive function in the US body politic. He is not the man I would like “to be in bed with”, as he claims, for I do not like to be in bed with men. But he is doing a good job, opposes Zionism and the US expansion to the Middle East.

He writes, correctly: “The War Party greatly fears unity among the antiwar forces. If they can succeed in demonizing antiwar conservatives, and play on the Left's own caricaturized conception of the Right – a caricature based on ignorance and loyalty to an outmoded "left-right" paradigm – they can split opponents of America's imperial ambitions and even set them against each other.” After this, perfectly correct line, he explodes in indignation: “what I have to do with the likes of David Duke, Nick Griffin, and the founder of the Baader-Meinhoff Gang, is a mystery to me”.

A hint: all these people – as well as the Paleo-Conservatives, Nationalists, Communists and some Christian and Islamic Fundamentalists - are against the US-led war on the Third World. Strange, he does not want to see this common denominator. He has these qualities in common with other people whom I mentioned – from Duke to Mahler. I disagree with them on many positions, but approve of their antizionism and anti-imperialism. Likewise, Winston Churchill was not overtly fond of Communism, but supported Stalin in his struggle against Hitler’s Germany. Another more up-to-date example: fervent Zionist and warmonger Aaronovitch supports the ‘antizionist Jews for Peace’ in their attacks on Gilad Atzmon and myself.

The world-view difference between me and Raimondo (and Buchanan, and others) is a normal Left vs. Right difference. Raimondo’s main accusation that “Aaronovitch is formerly a Communist Party youth leader” is in my eyes the sole redeeming feature of the named Aaronovitch. Raimondo calls him ‘a Stalinist’, I reply with “alas, he is not”. But I agree wholeheartedly with Raimondo that “Aaronovitch is a worm with slime trail”. If the “left-right paradigm is outmoded” as Raimondo claims, we should look beyond differences, to the mutual convergence of interests.

Raimondo proclaims that “he is not against Jews”. Well, this is not the Jewish view of him. Google “Raimondo Jews”, and you will find that an important Jewish publication describes him as “American neo-fascist”, while the Chief of Staff of the Jewish Action Alliance writes: “what makes Justin Raimondo an especially dangerous anti-Semite is that he is too much of a coward to come out as an anti-Semite directly; instead, he uses the ruse of being anti-Israel.”

Raimondo tries to sell us his PC version of the events:

“support for that war within the administration had nothing to do with putting Jews in an "exalted position," but everything to do with putting the nation-state of Israel in such a position.” “Most American Jews opposed the Iraq war, and they continue to oppose it. Israel is not "the Jews" – it is a nation, with interests unique to itself and policies that are all too often directly counterpoised to the interests and beliefs of Jews worldwide.”

Very, very convincing. What, I pray, makes “the nation-state of Israel” so influential in the US? Why this small and far-away “nation-state” gets 90% support in the Congress and Senate and receives over 50% of all American foreign aid? Raimondo offers no answer of his own. For obvious reasons he can’t agree neither with Chomsky’s thesis that support of Israel is a real American Imperial interest nor with our view. Thus it remains a mystery in Raimondian universe.

In our view ("Shamir's thesis"), the main reason of Israel’s prominence in the US is the Jewish prominence in the US discourse. Israel indeed is not ‘the Jews’, but a part and parcel of the Jewish setup. If Raimondo were slapped by Aaronovitch, he would probably claim that he was slapped by Aaronovitch’s hand “which has nothing to do with Comrade Aaronovitch”. In my view, if Aaronovitch’s hand slaps Raimondo, probably his body and head are not too far behind.

I wonder what makes Comrade Raimondo a leading expert on “the interests and beliefs of Jews worldwide”? Jews say they support Israel (with miniscule exclusions) but he knows better. He says that “the American antiwar movement consists of a large number of Jews”. Very true, and that is why the US antiwar movement was very hesitant of ever tying the war in Iraq with the cause of Palestine. They preferred to blame the war on ‘oil interests’.

Raimondo says that “most American Jews opposed the Iraq war”. Even if it were true (and it is not) what difference would it make? He notes that “60 percent of Americans say we ought to start withdrawing from Iraq” but “the War Party is still in the driver's seat”. Isn’t it the same story? Opposition of ordinary Americans of Jewish descent to the War does not influence the policy of ‘the Jews’ (i.e. of Jewish elites) like the opposition of the ordinary Americans makes no impact of Bush’s policies.

In order to present me as “an addled brain of a nutbar”, Raimondo distorts my words. I write: “AIPAC and ADL should be registered as foreign-interests lobbyist if not banned altogether”. He writes: “Shamir's idea that the U.S. government should ban Jewish organizations is grotesque, not only by libertarian standards but by any measure of human decency.” I am not aware of the measure of ‘human decency’ which forbids banning of these two monsters for they run a (surely illegal) private political police force in the US. This is certainly not ‘grotesque’ for the country which routinely bans even philanthropic Islamic bodies. And who but Raimondo wrote in 2001: “when such groups [as AIPAC] put the interests of a country other than the US at the very top of their agenda, when nary a sliver of daylight can be found between their stance and that of a foreign power – then Americans have a right to call them on it”. Did he change his view since 2001?

He writes: “Shamir caters to his deranged constituency of Jew-haters”. Far from it: our community of shamireaders has many professors and priests, people of Left and Right, of Jewish and Gentile origin, and is probably one of the most diverse and exciting groups in cyberspace. We are still ready to listen and swap views with all anti-War people, even with Raimondo.