By Israel Shamir
Even a broken clock is right twice a day. Abe Foxman, the head of the Jewish-Masonic thought police misnamed ADL, easily one of the most repulsive men in American public life, is not as good as a clock, but he can be right once in a while; and this time is now.
The US Congress, this modern areopagus of saints and sages, the highest moral authority of our planet, is about to condemn the Turks for massacring Armenians almost a century ago. 1915 was a long time ago, and the American legislators probably do not know where Armenia is and where it was then. This issue is a veritable can of worms, where nothing is as it appears.
The reasons are anything but moral. Its American promoters wish to punish Turkey for staying out of the Iraq War and to scare this great country back into obedience. The Neocon plan for the New Middle East calls for the creation of a Greater Kurdistan including some parts of Eastern Anatolia, and the condemnation of Turkey may lead to a new attempt to tear the requisite lands away from Ankara.
The Armenians, always keen to copycat the Jews, want to have a holocaust registered to their name, replete with compensations, museums and a permit to massacre their neighbors Azeris. Why should the events of 1915 legitimize their atrocities against the Azeris, who actually allowed the Armenian refugees to settle in their land? Here again, the Armenians borrowed a leaf from the Jewish book: if the Jews can kill innocent Palestinians on whose land they found refuge after being expelled by Germans, the Armenians may do the same to the equally innocent Azeris.
This decision is likely to antagonize Turkey, and thus it is not to be undertaken lightly; on the other hand, it is good to keep ‘em on tiptoes, so they won’t be too cocksure. In addition, Armenians have a small but efficient lobby, a little brother to the mighty Jewish one, and their desire has some weight.
Now, in questions of importance an Italian consults with his priest, a Swiss – with his banker, a German with his policeman, while an American goes to the Jews who happily unite a financial and religious institution with a secret police function. This time, Abe Foxman gave a correct reply: “A congressional action will not help reconcile the issue. The resolution takes a position; it comes to a judgment. The Turks and Armenians may need to revisit their past. The Jewish community shouldn't be the arbiter of that history, nor should the U.S. Congress.” Afterwards, the ADL and three other powerful Jewish organizations—the American Jewish Committee, the Masonic B'nai Brith International, and the Jewish Institute of National Security Affairs — asked Congress to stay away from the trouble.
The reasons of Foxman were as hard-nosed as those of the Armenian apologists. Turkey is traditionally friendly to the Jews, and a decision of the American congress is usually considered to be taken, or at least approved by the Jews. A hostile resolution is going to cause some ill feeling of Turks to the Jews and to the Jewish state; while the Armenians are traditional enemies of the Jews anyway.
Foxman was attacked and almost lynched by many members of his community who had dreamed for years for a politically correct opportunity. [See http://www.jewcy.com/feature/2007-07-09/fire_foxman ] It’s hard to regret his possible political demise; but this time he was right. The U.S. Congress and the Jewish community shouldn't be the arbiter of history.
If the Americans feel they must condemn mass killings, they should begin with themselves. Let them begin with mass killing of Iraqis and Afghanis, instead of paying for its surge. Afterwards, they may condemn the massacres done by their fathers and grandfathers – be it Dresden or Hiroshima, Vietnam or Cambodia, Philippines or Mexico, Atlanta or Wounded Knee – and compensate the sufferers, and all other nations they bombed and robbed. In such a way they will obtain some moral right to express their view, if not to sit in judgment.
The Jews should get off their high horse, while they continue to suffocate and starve Gaza. Let them pay for the horrors of Al Nakba, the Palestinian holocaust, for 60 years, before voicing any view on genocides, whether in Turkey or in Sudan. But it is not likely they will. They do not know where to stop. This extremism will eventually cause their defeat. They had to take a good Communist idea to its Trotskyite extreme, and now, taking Holocaustism to its extreme, they launched a “kNOw (cute!?) Genocide, a new multi-ethnic, non-partisan coalition formed to combat the ongoing denial of known cases of genocide, such as the Darfur, Cambodian, Jewish, Rwandan, and the Armenian genocides.”
I wonder why they stop at that. What about the Sack of Troy and ensuing genocide? Do not deny it, the Trojans are extinct but for computers! And let us consider the oldest genocide, that of the Neanderthals. They were exterminated by Homo sapiens. Our ancestors killed them all. We should not forget nor forgive this crime.
Speaking of Armenians, the US Congress may recognise and condemn the massacre of Cypriot Greeks by Armenians in the 13th century when they practically depopulated the island, or the massacre of Azeris in 1918 in Baku (over 30,000 slain) and in 1992 over Karabagh by Armenians. On the other hand, provided that the Armenians are the descendents of the Amalek tribe, Congress should recognise their genocide by King Saul and demand of the Jews that they pay for it…
I do have strong doubt about many new inventions, and genocide, a concept invented in 1945, is one of them. There is nothing new in killing since it was practiced by Cain on Abel; why would they need a brand new concept? The inventor, a Polish Jew named Raphael Lemkin, served as a US adviser; he felt that killing a Jew is much worse a crime than killing a goy. Indeed, he studied the Talmud, and the Talmud makes this important contradistinction. In order to convince the American goyim, he invented the concept of genocide. So, genocide is just a new word for the Talmud-defined special offence of killing, or threatening a Jew. Genocide is not the same as “killing civilians”, otherwise the victims of Leningrad siege and Dresden bombing would qualify.
The ‘genocide’ concept was invented by Jews, and Jewish inventions work well only for Jews. For instance, Jewish siege of Gaza fits the definition of genocide, but try and say that; you will be called Nazi and excluded from a polite society. On the other hand, when Ahmadinejad calls for undoing the Jewish racist state, this is “genocide;” when a Hezbollah missile killed ten Israeli soldiers last August, this was a case of “genocide,” for “they were killed only because they were Jews”. The killing of a goy does not qualify: when the Germans starved Leningrad, Americans nuked Hiroshima, or Jews bombed Gaza and Beirut, this was not genocide because the perpetrators were indifferent to the ethnic-religious orientation of their victims, claims the PC legalist. The Yankees could not exclude that Hiroshima is populated by Scots; the Germans could think Leningrad is mainly Zulu; while the Jews thought only murderous terrorists lived in Beirut and Gaza. This explanation is so forced that it calls for Ockham's Razor. My explanation “genocide is killing of Jews” is easier.
Later, mass killing of Jews was promoted to the “Holocaust,” while the genocide concept was downgraded and used for branding the general enemy: Communists, Muslims, disobedient rulers. The killing of a few dozen Albanian brigands in Kosovo was “genocide,” and Serbia was bombed for this crime, while its President died in a Hague jail. A civil war in Rwanda became ‘genocide’, though the Tutsi population actually increased. It is now ascribed to Muslims. Cambodia was “genocide”, while Vietnam (where Americans killed five million) was not. In short, “genocide” is a politically motivated label of little importance.
Listen, war is hell, and killing civilians is a crime, or should be crime; whatever their ethnic background is. This simple rule is better than genocide innovations. The problem is, it eliminates the high moral ground of the Allies over the Axis, for both sides killed a lot of civilians. But it should not bother us. Let us get rid of the genocide invention – anyway it does not help us, and it helps our enemy.
Joachim Martillo discovered that the Save Darfur Genocide PR campaign was arranged and orchestrated by the American Jewish network “David Project” and its affiliates in order to demonise Muslims and Arabs and to recruit non-Jews [See his revelations on http://eaazi.blogspot.com/ and http://karinfriedemann.blogspot.com/ ] Have no doubt: the Armenian Lobby signed on every dotted line; without that they won’t get far.
So, what happened with the Armenians? Armenians suffered during the WWI because they fought against the Ottoman Empire – and lost. They sided with its enemy. They were promised almost the whole of Anatolia by the Allies, and Turks could experience the grim fate of Azeris but for the sword of Mustafa Kemal. Armenians made a good try to ethnically cleanse the Turks and the Kurds, but failed. They were interned or deported by the Imperial government. Likewise, the Japanese were interned by Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Germans were deported by Britain, the Palestinians were deported by Israel, the Turks were deported by Greece - and many perished.
Since then, the world has changed. The Ottoman Empire is gone; and Turkey is just one of many successor-states, among them Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Greece etc. This is unfair and outright racist plan to single out Turkey, especially if the Armenian deportees were killed by their neighbours, the Kurds. Now there is an (almost) independent Kurdistan with a lot of oil. If some Armenians are spoiling for compensation, they may try the Kurds. If however some Armenians want to return to the Lake Van, they may be allowed to come back while fully recognising Turkish sovereignty.
The dissolution of empires is a painful event, with succession wars a permanent feature. Still, India does not claim that England owes it compensation for the Hindu – Muslim massacres and wars of 1948. A community is likely to suffer from the wrong choice in case of war. Armenians surely suffered, but the Turks are not to be blamed. We should reject the racist concept of inherited guilt: whoever was in the wrong in 1915 is certainly dead.
Nowadays, the Armenians live in modern Turkey in peace; they are not looking for condemnations. The recently assassinated Armenian journalist was adamantly against such a foreign condemnation – he thought this is an internal Turkish affair. He was right: every nation may do its soul-searching and guilt-attributing. But the holier-than-thou attitude promoted by the Western well-wishers should be limited to a minimum.
Even in the case of our beloved Palestine we do not call for the US Congress to condemn the Nakba: we call on them to give equal rights to the Palestinians living in Palestine, and to allow the return of refugees. Let the past to take care of itself; while we may take care of our present.
The Armenians are advised to take care of their present as well. Because of their obsession with the past, their republic is in dire straits. Whoever can emigrate does so. There are more Armenians in Moscow than in Yerevan. Playing into neocon hands won’t improve their situation. Instead of aggravating the situation and dreaming of redrawing maps, they should cool it and make peace with their Turk, Azeri and Kurd neighbours.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Our Congratulations to the People of Turkey
from Israel Shamir
Our congratulations to the people of Turkey on the election victory of the Islamic Party! This is a fateful event: the East returns to God, and finds its own way. Istanbul has followed Gaza: the AKP-ruled Turkey will be a friend to Hamas-ruled Palestine, to Islamic Iran, to Orthodox Greece and Russia, to the religious anti-occupation forces of nearby Iraq. She will again take her place of pride as the centerpiece of the Eastern mosaic, while its pro-American and God-hating generals, the Turkish Dahlans, will creep back to their barracks. Faith in God unites us, while the nationalists had divided us.
The legacy of Ataturk, this overlong infatuation with nationalist doctrines, overstayed its welcome. This founder of rump-Turkey came to power in a country decimated by the results of the WWI. Turkey suffered the fate of Austria: both countries were dismembered by the victorious Anglo-Americans. Both gave birth to ferociously nationalist leaders: Adolf Hitler was as anti-religious and as nationalist as Kemal Ataturk. They were not alone: equally anti-religious regimes came to power in Russia and Mexico. Ataturk was prone to drink his fiery raki at Ramadan in the public places to show his disdain of the faith, while Lenin spoke scornfully of ‘bozhenka’, goddie (almost doggie). At the other end of the world, Japanese and Chinese revolted against Buddha.
Today, it is easy to blame Ataturk and his predecessors, the Young Turks. They liaised with the dark forces, with Zionists, with Western imperialists, even with the then-strong Masons. They destroyed the centuries-long base of the Turkish Empire. They destroyed the language and the culture of Turkey. Instead of historic Arab graphics, they enforced the use of Latin letters and made millions of Turks illiterate. Their new way of spelling created a chasm with the old literature and with neighboring Islamic cultures. They privatized the lands and created a new landless class. But this account-taking is not needed now.
Moreover, one can understand them. The old regimes failed to protect the East from the Western onslaught, and in a way, people punished their God for this failure, even coming to prefer the more effective Western God of cash-and-carry. There was an urgent need to modernize the administration and the army, and to find a new language more suited to Western ideas. The faith was considered a pillar of the old regime, so it had to go. Still, let us be fair: by withstanding the Armenian, Greek and British offensives, Ataturk saved some of what could be saved, though he lost much of what needed to be preserved.
This development was a tragic but mercifully a short-lived one. The people of the East had a run of unbridled freedom, like schoolchildren when the teacher leaves the classroom. Very soon they discovered that the place of the strict teacher was taken by the strongest ruffian, and their freedom was just a temporary illusion. Under the followers of Ataturk, Turkey was colonized by the US; NATO bases sprung up on its shore and the Sixth Fleet found a home away from home in its harbors. Turkey became a close friend of the Zionist state, even though Zionists contributed greatly to the destruction of the Ottoman Empire. This part of history was forgotten, while the story of ‘the Arab betrayal’ was artificially promoted and spread.
Persecution of the faithful in Turkey lasted longer than anywhere on earth. The Russians repaired their churches, and the Japanese went back to their jinjas, but the Turks still could not grow a beard or wear national dress. Chomsky’s translator (and mine, too), our friend Fatima, could wear her chador only on a visit in the US, if not in the privacy of her home. Now hopefully this remnant of the old repression will disappear, and the Turks will be able to grow beards like Che Guevara.
The bigger problem of the nationalist regime was its lack of solidarity. The national elites did not care enough for the people, whether in Turkey or in Palestine – they were more interested in securing free access to Europe’s playground than in promoting the ordinary people’s wellbeing. The believers, the ordinary people of Turkey and Palestine, had to form their own grass-roots associations to protect their vital interests. Out of these associations, the Islamic parties spread forth. They are the true expression of the people’s will, and hopefully they will remain uncorrupted.
This victory is very important for Palestine, where the freely elected government of Hamas was made impotent by Israel and by docile Americans and Europeans. Now there is a chance of breaking the Zionist blockade. This is an important victory for the whole world, for an Islamic Turkey won’t help the US in its impending attack on Iran. Hopefully the Turks will forbid the US to use its bases and harbors, thereby squashing the invasion plans.
The nationalist parties failed in a big way: they blocked the legally elected Islamic party from rightfully nominating a new President, and went complaining to Europe, thus severely undermining the main achievement of Kemal Ataturk. Before causing more harm, they should look at the example of their brethren, the FLN generals in Algeria and the Fatah warlords in Palestine, who denied rightfully won electoral victory to godly parties, caused civil wars and earned much hate from the people by totally embezzling the their moral assets. There are Western forces that are ready to support any bloodthirsty general on condition that he will not allow people’s will to be realized, but a wise man won’t take this bait.
The Islamic Party AKP is not homogeneous – there are pro-American and pro-Eastern elements, so its victory is just a beginning, rather than the end. Our friends in the Party may be certain of mass support, if they stick to their independent line: warm friendship with Palestine, Iran and Russia, full cooperation with neighbouring Greece and Syria, firm protection of Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan, wholehearted rejection of the occupation regime in Iraq including its Kurdish proxy, generous support of friendly Islamic movements in the ex-Ottoman Empire, including Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood. They will belie the Judaeo-American claim of “tyrannical Islam” by creating a solidarist, just, human and tolerant society.
There will be many changes in the East. If our enemies win, the East will disintegrate into a jigsaw puzzle of warlords and ganglands. This is what they did with the Ottoman Empire, this is what they did with Iraq, this is what they do in Palestine and plan to do in Iran. But today, after these elections, this development is not the only possible one. The AKP victory is a turning point, away from West-forced disintegration towards a new integration of the East.
Our congratulations to the people of Turkey on the election victory of the Islamic Party! This is a fateful event: the East returns to God, and finds its own way. Istanbul has followed Gaza: the AKP-ruled Turkey will be a friend to Hamas-ruled Palestine, to Islamic Iran, to Orthodox Greece and Russia, to the religious anti-occupation forces of nearby Iraq. She will again take her place of pride as the centerpiece of the Eastern mosaic, while its pro-American and God-hating generals, the Turkish Dahlans, will creep back to their barracks. Faith in God unites us, while the nationalists had divided us.
The legacy of Ataturk, this overlong infatuation with nationalist doctrines, overstayed its welcome. This founder of rump-Turkey came to power in a country decimated by the results of the WWI. Turkey suffered the fate of Austria: both countries were dismembered by the victorious Anglo-Americans. Both gave birth to ferociously nationalist leaders: Adolf Hitler was as anti-religious and as nationalist as Kemal Ataturk. They were not alone: equally anti-religious regimes came to power in Russia and Mexico. Ataturk was prone to drink his fiery raki at Ramadan in the public places to show his disdain of the faith, while Lenin spoke scornfully of ‘bozhenka’, goddie (almost doggie). At the other end of the world, Japanese and Chinese revolted against Buddha.
Today, it is easy to blame Ataturk and his predecessors, the Young Turks. They liaised with the dark forces, with Zionists, with Western imperialists, even with the then-strong Masons. They destroyed the centuries-long base of the Turkish Empire. They destroyed the language and the culture of Turkey. Instead of historic Arab graphics, they enforced the use of Latin letters and made millions of Turks illiterate. Their new way of spelling created a chasm with the old literature and with neighboring Islamic cultures. They privatized the lands and created a new landless class. But this account-taking is not needed now.
Moreover, one can understand them. The old regimes failed to protect the East from the Western onslaught, and in a way, people punished their God for this failure, even coming to prefer the more effective Western God of cash-and-carry. There was an urgent need to modernize the administration and the army, and to find a new language more suited to Western ideas. The faith was considered a pillar of the old regime, so it had to go. Still, let us be fair: by withstanding the Armenian, Greek and British offensives, Ataturk saved some of what could be saved, though he lost much of what needed to be preserved.
This development was a tragic but mercifully a short-lived one. The people of the East had a run of unbridled freedom, like schoolchildren when the teacher leaves the classroom. Very soon they discovered that the place of the strict teacher was taken by the strongest ruffian, and their freedom was just a temporary illusion. Under the followers of Ataturk, Turkey was colonized by the US; NATO bases sprung up on its shore and the Sixth Fleet found a home away from home in its harbors. Turkey became a close friend of the Zionist state, even though Zionists contributed greatly to the destruction of the Ottoman Empire. This part of history was forgotten, while the story of ‘the Arab betrayal’ was artificially promoted and spread.
Persecution of the faithful in Turkey lasted longer than anywhere on earth. The Russians repaired their churches, and the Japanese went back to their jinjas, but the Turks still could not grow a beard or wear national dress. Chomsky’s translator (and mine, too), our friend Fatima, could wear her chador only on a visit in the US, if not in the privacy of her home. Now hopefully this remnant of the old repression will disappear, and the Turks will be able to grow beards like Che Guevara.
The bigger problem of the nationalist regime was its lack of solidarity. The national elites did not care enough for the people, whether in Turkey or in Palestine – they were more interested in securing free access to Europe’s playground than in promoting the ordinary people’s wellbeing. The believers, the ordinary people of Turkey and Palestine, had to form their own grass-roots associations to protect their vital interests. Out of these associations, the Islamic parties spread forth. They are the true expression of the people’s will, and hopefully they will remain uncorrupted.
This victory is very important for Palestine, where the freely elected government of Hamas was made impotent by Israel and by docile Americans and Europeans. Now there is a chance of breaking the Zionist blockade. This is an important victory for the whole world, for an Islamic Turkey won’t help the US in its impending attack on Iran. Hopefully the Turks will forbid the US to use its bases and harbors, thereby squashing the invasion plans.
The nationalist parties failed in a big way: they blocked the legally elected Islamic party from rightfully nominating a new President, and went complaining to Europe, thus severely undermining the main achievement of Kemal Ataturk. Before causing more harm, they should look at the example of their brethren, the FLN generals in Algeria and the Fatah warlords in Palestine, who denied rightfully won electoral victory to godly parties, caused civil wars and earned much hate from the people by totally embezzling the their moral assets. There are Western forces that are ready to support any bloodthirsty general on condition that he will not allow people’s will to be realized, but a wise man won’t take this bait.
The Islamic Party AKP is not homogeneous – there are pro-American and pro-Eastern elements, so its victory is just a beginning, rather than the end. Our friends in the Party may be certain of mass support, if they stick to their independent line: warm friendship with Palestine, Iran and Russia, full cooperation with neighbouring Greece and Syria, firm protection of Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan, wholehearted rejection of the occupation regime in Iraq including its Kurdish proxy, generous support of friendly Islamic movements in the ex-Ottoman Empire, including Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood. They will belie the Judaeo-American claim of “tyrannical Islam” by creating a solidarist, just, human and tolerant society.
There will be many changes in the East. If our enemies win, the East will disintegrate into a jigsaw puzzle of warlords and ganglands. This is what they did with the Ottoman Empire, this is what they did with Iraq, this is what they do in Palestine and plan to do in Iran. But today, after these elections, this development is not the only possible one. The AKP victory is a turning point, away from West-forced disintegration towards a new integration of the East.
Saturday, July 26, 2008
Darkness from the West
By Israel Shamir
The Catholic Church, the biggest apostolic church in the US, is under heavy attack. The plotters had united media effort and legal machinery, utilized American obsession with money, and given the Church the treatment they gave tobacco industry, that is, suing it to oblivion. For their chance to get thirty pieces of silver (over a million dollars, in present prices), hundreds of American Catholics denounced their church.
This attack, followed by the ill-considered surrender of Los Angeles Catholic bishops in the ‘abusing priests’ campaign, is a clear sign of forthcoming war. This soap opera had a good run in the US media before the Iraq invasion. It actually started while Sharon was besieging Bethlehem and destroying Palestine in 2002. Then, all of a sudden, hundreds of men and women in their forties had remembered that they were abused some twenty years ago. It rose to a hysterical shriek in advance of the Iraq invasion in 2003, and now it is playing again as a harbinger of new hostilities. Whenever the forces of darkness prepare a new attack on mankind, they use their considerable artillery to shut up the potential resistance forces, starting with their avowed enemy, the Church. This was the practice of the Third Reich as well: before starting the war, they began their campaign of ‘priests as sex fiends’, to force the church’s silence. Now this is the turn of the Fourth Reich: the Church was against the war in Iraq; the Church was steadfast in her defence of Palestine; the Church is certainly against the impending attack on Iran; so she has to be put on defence. The same people who control the US media call for war with Iran, and they are behind this campaign against the Church.
Our enemies and the enemies of the Church concocted, through their control of the media, a phantom of “abusive priests” and succeeded in convincing the LA Bishops to take the bait of “final settlement”. Very soon the bishops will discover that nothing is final when you submit to their wishes. Surrender gets you nowhere. They could learn from the Germans, who agreed to settle all Jewish claims for $1 billion (as described by the chief Jewish negotiator Nahum Goldmann in his book The Jewish Paradox, New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978), eventually paid $60 billion to find out that they still own $180 billion, and now there is a new suit to provide the children of the wartime sufferers with full coverage of their shrink sessions. If there is a sucker who agrees to pay, he won’t get a break from these fellows.
The very construction of the claim is faulty, to say the least. If a man abused a boy, while being a priest, this is still his crime, and he should bear responsibility – if and when the crime is proven by criminal court beyond any reasonable doubt. Likewise, if a man abused a boy while serving in the army, or working in the fire brigade, the responsibility is his, not of the army, nor of the fire prevention services. The bishops had no right to agree to such a suit; if an anti-Christian judge accepted such a suit, the church should rather disband than agree. The bishops are not the church, nor are the clergy: the Church is the mystic body of all worshippers, the Bride of Christ, and she is not a subject to any suit for misdeeds of individual believers. The Church is always right, though her bishops, priests or laymen may be wrong individually.
On the second thought, this model can be useful. If one can sue the Catholic Church, certainly one should be able to sue her traditional competitor, the Jews. If the Church pays for “abusing priests”, maybe Jewry should pay for “cheating Jews”? A full list of claims by people cheated by Jewish financiers, real estate developers, bankers, insurance agents would run to trillions. One Enron case (a clear-cut case of Jewish cheating) would be enough to offset the “abusive priests” bounty. Let them sue Jewry in the same court where the Church is sued; there are enough assets to seize from the Jewish organizations. Maybe that will leave them with less money to pour into bribing politicians and killing Palestinians.
A little bird told me that the Jews would never agree to accept collective responsibility. They are ready to act as a collective in order to collect, but not to pay. And until they agree to accept collective responsibility, the Church should not either. If the Pope in Rome still holds some sway over his LA bishops, he should retire them, void the settlement, proclaim that the church will never agree to be hold responsible for any individual’s misdeed and excommunicate and anathemise everyone who participated in this circus. Greed should not be encouraged: however right or wrong originally, by trying to destroy the church for their pecuniary gain, the claimants are totally in the wrong.
The odd custom of the late Pope John Paul II - asking forgiveness for historical sins - was liable to cause this sort of event: he was not entitled to ask such forgiveness for this would imply that every Catholic, even a five year old Brazilian girl, was guilty of mistreating the church’s enemies of some 500 years ago. The church should be mightily happy if she is not sued for the damages incurred in all the cases where her titular head has asked for forgiveness, including the Crusades, the Sack of Constantinople and the blood libel cases.
New claims will surely pour in. This is human nature: show one man of a way to get a million by saying he was fondled by a priest, and hordes will queue up with their claims. Some will be outright liars and cheats. The name of Lori Haigh comes to mind. This lady collected a $1.2 million abuse payment from the Los Angeles and Orange County Catholic archdioceses in 2002, alleging that she was abused by a clergyman while being driven to and from music practices more than 20 years earlier. Afterwards, she tried to play an abuse victim on several other occasions, until she was stopped by police as a liar and impostor.
Others will use their false memory to make it up. False memory is a very real thing: I have noticed that I ‘remember’ events I never witnessed because I was told of them so many times. It calls for quite an effort to regain one’s true memory and to dismiss the false one. Every Jerusalemite will tell you of horrors of 1948 siege of the city, but the newspapers of the time witness that there was no siege at all, as an Israeli historian Dr Uri Milstein recently proved.
Sex cases generate a lot of claimants. A few years ago, a Sephardic Jew, General Itzik Mordechai got close to receiving the crown of Israel’s Prime Ministership. The ruling Ashkenazi elite did not cherish the idea. They found a girl who claimed that she was raped by the lusty General. After the claim was publicized, dozens of women came up with similar claims. The claims came to naught, but there was enough dirt to bury Mordechai’s chances to govern. The trick was repeated against the Sephardi President Moshe Katzav and worked: the first claimant failed, but the police could find some positive evidence out of the dozens who came to claim. In the US, the waves of would-be claimants rise to tsunami heights, with hundreds and thousands coming to claim they were abused – in average, 20 years ago, in some cases 40 years ago.
I do not feel sorry for these late claimants. Why did they wait for 20 years? If a boy or a girl is being attacked, he or she may scream and run to parents or to police. If they did not do it, just forget it. Consider it a clumsy pass, an unpleasant experience, a result of misunderstanding. Blame yourself for indecisiveness. Proceed with your life. Join mankind: every one of us, even your mommy and daddy, suffered an unwanted kiss or an undesired embrace. The laws should be reasonable, - allowing 20-year old claims for such events is not reasonable. Only an immediate complaint should be considered valid, and 24 hours is as long as should be allowed, in some extreme cases.
If a crime occurred, the criminal should be punished, but the denouncer may not profit by his report of the crime. This is the necessary rule of justice. Otherwise we are back at the time when a denouncer could claim a third of denounced man’s property. An honest abuse victim should kick the temptation offered by the US legal system which encourages suing for huge sums of money, and return his winnings to the church. Anyway only the lawyers, the Dershowitzes, win. Out of billions collected by the Jewish lawyers on behalf of the holocaust survivors, hardly a drop reached actual ex-prisoners, while the rest remained in the lawyers’ coffers.
Expensive damage suits are immoral and counterproductive. A woman collecting a million for being burned by hot coffee in McDonalds, a man collecting a million for smoking too much, - this is just an incitement to litigate. Lawyers’ fees should be capped to the extent of a working man’s salary, so they could not turn justice into roulette. The Americans may consider revamping their legal system for it is a travesty of justice: the US judges have refused every claim by tortured Palestinians, but have awarded Israel and American Jews with billions of Palestinian or Iranian moneys.
The rest of the world lives well without these enormous damage suits. Money is only money, and this pursuit of dollars is extremely unattractive. Freud considered money to be the psychological equivalent of shit. Babies do show their feces with the same pride grown-ups flash their gold ringlets. An Arab book of seventh century tells of shit competition between two tribes, where the winner is one who produces the biggest pile. This is probably a better and a saner way of competing than the one offered by the Forbes.
II
The Americans over-simplify the question of sex with minors, when they present it as something monstrous. This is not so. Are you revolted by Romeo and Juliet? As a good American citizen, you should be; Juliet was 14, and thus Romeo today would be tried and locked up as a “paedophile”, together with his accomplice the good Friar Laurence, in the United States. Friar Laurence would surely be considered as an “abusing priest”, and a Dershowitz would collect a million from the Verona diocese for his sin of arranging the lovers’ tryst. Not only the lovers from Verona: Edgar Allan Poe married a 14-year old; and if the present laws were in force, the American poet would hearken to his Raven’s “nevermore” in jail. Prophet Muhammad married a nine year old Aisha, but Jacob, a Biblical patriarch, bettered him and married Rachel who was 7. In modern world, Jacob and Muhammad would be hunted down, extradited and jailed. It is possible that even better placed persons would not fare well facing our most enlightened justice: the Mother of our Saviour was just 14 at Annunciation…
Mature women ready to share their experience with young boys were always approved. In the Greek classic book Daphnis and Chloe, two young shepherds find love (they would be imprisoned in the US), but before that, an experienced and mature lady Lycaenion taught young Daphnis how to attend to his girlfriend – to their mutual satisfaction. Nowadays, in England, a 26-year old woman teacher was persecuted for having sex with her 15-year old pupil. Even the prosecutor admitted that it’s “every schoolboy’s fantasy to have that kind of attention from a young, attractive member of staff”, but pushed for conviction all the same. In the US, Pamela Rogers was sentenced to many years of jail for having sex with a young boy as tall as you and me, who was full 13 at the act – the age my great-grandfather was successfully married. If Mrs Rogers would rather abuse and humiliate the boy, she could have a successful career in the school. Who knows, she could become even a State Secretary…
A man who maims or kills a child will go to jail, serve his time and go out a free man. A man who had sex with a 14-year-old girl will serve his time and will be placed on a roll of sex offenders; his name and address are made available to every Internet user. In the UK and the US, these neo-liberal transatlantic twins, a special service allows you to locate every sex offender in your vicinity. The state in these super-liberal countries is a Peeping Tom who allows the pursuit of happiness in the stock market only.
The Americans and the Brits invented a silly concept of “statutory rape” as if a state prosecutor knows better than boys and girls what they want. The great French thinkers Sartre and Derrida, Foucault and de Beauvoir, called in 1977 for skipping this legal invention altogether. Wise Spaniards established the age of consent at 13, while the even wiser Muslims have no such age limit for marriage at all, while disapproving of extramarital relations. Equally wise Jews were guided by the Talmud which stipulates the permitted age of marriage for girls at ‘three years and one day’ (though the safer age of nine was preferred), while strictly forbidding sodomy.
Indeed, almost all cases of alleged abuse are homosexual; the alleged victims should sue the gay rights organizations rather than the Church. But the Church is not allowed even to utter these words. They can’t say “pederasty”, they should pretend this is “paedophilia”. They may not defrock a homosexual priest, for they would be attacked for their “homophobia”. In the US, the strong defence of homosexuality is inbuilt into their official dogma. The taboo on “being less than fond of homosexuals” (homophobia) may stand next to the taboo on “being less than fond of Jews” (antisemitism). These two taboos are so well entrenched in the US, that even mentioning them became a taboo, and two secondary offences have been created, “racism”, an antisemitism spill-off, and “paedophilia”, a homophobia spill-off.
In Israel we feel there is no better way to show allegiance to American democracy and liberalism than to emasculate the man and de-womanise the woman. In our smaller Jewish state, in Israel, things have changed since the macho days of Six Day War, when homosexuality was banned, the one-eyed Defence Minister Dayan screwed every female conscript and the Israeli army kicked three Arab armies in a week. Now the gay tendency is no snag, ministers are sued for kissing a girl, and the army is beaten up by a few bearded Lebanese. Once Israeli girls served in the army as non-combatants. Their main job was to look smart and cheerful, and thus encourage the boys to fight well. Now they follow the example of Judith and Jael, don helmets, do combat duty and look like East German swimmers on anabolic steroids.
After ending her tour of duty, with scalps of Palestinians at her belt (instead of their foreskins, as was Samson’s wont) this new breed of a female sabra is unsuitable for normal mating; and she ends up in the growing lesbian colony of Tel Aviv. While male homosexuals are often meek, the females have a drive for leadership and they lead the majority of gay organisations. Tsippi Livni, the Foreign Minister and an ex-Secret Service agent, allegedly has some lesbian background, and thus she passed millions of dollars to gay organisation led by her patriotic sisters. Traditionally over-independent, Jewish women became even more so as they now serve in the combat units, earn as much as men do, are protected from a flirtatious look by ever-alert police. They grew balls and became like men but even more so, encouraged by the movies showing decisive executive women and wimpy, obedient, good-for-nothing and admiring men.
The men got the message. If the girls are as hard as boys, but more demanding and more likely to sue – who needs them? Some statistics claim 20% of Tel Aviv is homosexual, others quote even higher numbers. Gays and lesbians have full rights: they adopt children, their “marriage” is recognised if performed abroad, they inherit, they are positively discriminated in favour of as employees and tenants, for they have more disposable income and do not become pregnant. They are quite patriotic: a leading gay poet of Tel Aviv called on Israel to erase Gaza and Beirut, and break Arab skulls. They insist on their right to serve in the occupation army. They derive an extra benefit from the occupation: cheap young Arab bodies. Well-to-do gays shack up with a boy who escapes the blockade and deprivation of refugee camp, and the authorities do tolerate this breach of apartheid, though an across-the-barriers union of man and woman is not tolerated.
A similar process takes place in the larger Jewish state, the US. Girls are being pushed into military service, they become hard as nails; and as a result, more and more men turn to other men, and naturally to younger men, or boys. Priests are probably no exception. The ultimate guilt is not that of the church, but of the feminist and lesbian movement which supports women’s military service; and of the media that promotes this attitude.
Now, sexual violence towards a small boy or girl by an adult man is a repulsive and criminal act, but this is extremely infrequent. One can stretch it a bit and agree that this is quite a repulsive act even if no violence is used, though one should be aware that this is a question of culture rather than an invariably correct judgement.
III
We can’t remain indifferent to the travail of the Church for she has a potential to change the US from the predatory neo-Judaic state it is today into a peace-loving Christian one. Her bishops went too far trying to accommodate their enemy, but they have discovered now that this way leads to perdition. Next time they may be braver, if there ever is a next time. We should defend her against these attacks whether in the “abusive priests” cases, or in the insinuations regarding the late pope Pius and the German Reich. Only the innocent and gullible will try to ponder the hard facts behind the setup, for there are none relevant. This is all hype, as Philip Jenkins, an Episcopalian Professor of History and Religious Studies at Penn State University, proved in his book Pedophiles and Priests, while the name of Pope Pius was exonerated many times over.
The latter accusation is a mirror image, or a parody of the accusation of Caiaphas just as the Holocaust religion is a parody of the Christian faith. In the Christian dogma, Caiaphas gave Christ into the hands of the Romans to be crucified, and this implied the inherent hostility of the Judaic leadership and priesthood to the Christ. In the Holocaust dogma, Pope Pius surrendered the Jews to the Germans, affirming the eternal enmity of the Holocaustians to the Church. It does not matter that on a factual level, the accusations have been refuted many times over. Our tenacious enemy never gives up, never acknowledges his defeat, never accepts the facts unless they suit him.
Who is the enemy? Some people refer to the Israel Lobby with their great control over media. In the famed tract, they were called the Elders of Zion. Others call them Illuminati. I called them the Masters of Discourse, the operators of the integrated machine of public disinformation and indoctrination, from the Wall Street Journal to the Wikipedia. Thousands of networks, newspapers, journals, books, films and ideas are being united and guided by their invisible hand, while free thought still survives in the far reaches of the web. The fearsome AIPAC is just the visible tip of the iceberg, below which are miles and miles of solid ice: media lords, chief editors, their pundits – in short, the Masters of Discourse. Their power base is in the media, in their ability to create a false presentation of reality and mislead people. Recently John Pilger described it as The Invisible Government.
When the Masters of Discourse fought against Communism, they had a few faked ‘facts’ they were never tired of brushing up. They played with stupefying numbers: Communists killed thirty, no, fifty, no, sixty million, though the freely available demographic figures of the Soviet Union made it as miraculous as feeding of the multitudes by five loaves. They invented Soviet anti-Semitism, though Soviet government and security always had a lot of Jews in high places. They invented Soviet totalitarianism, though the Soviet people freely supported their government. Instead of the Holy Grail, they had Raul Wallenberg, who was supposed to have survived miraculously and to have been kept in some far-away jail. No research would ever move them to recognize their inventions for being what they were, namely, lies.
Now they want to destroy Iran and cripple Russia, for these lands did not forget God. They do fight against the Church, against every church, be it Communism or Islam or Orthodox Judaism, or their traditional enemy, the Apostolic Church, for every church defends its flock against their robbery and resists their dark drive for domination. The church affirms the primacy of spirit, and of the godlike nature of man; this is anathema to the Masters. On a deeper level, the Church is their main adversary, for they are a competing church of sorts, the church of darkness, and they will not suffer a competitor.
Dominant as they are, they are not omnipotent. We should not be afraid of them. There is no magic in their incantations. They have no divine powers behind them. They are impostors. They exploit the old myths of mankind, forgetting that nothing works without God. The Masters are twins to Zionists; the Zionists decided to arrange for Israel’s return to the Promised Land as it was promised to their fathers. However, that return was to be done by God; while humans trying to do God’s work are necessarily rebels. Wannabe demiurges, they created their hellish regime ruled by their security forces, and destroyed the lovely land of Palestine. The result was so miserable, that Zionist prince Avrum Burg recently advised his countrymen to obtain a foreign passport and emigrate.
The Masters of Discourse are trying to create a pseudo-Judaic universe on a planetary scale. Their vision was grotesquely presented by the authors of the Protocols, but the reality they brought in is as unsuccessful as the one their brethren established in Palestine. The same rule of security forces, the same fear-mongering, the same ideological vise, the same destruction of nature, the same impoverishment of spirit, the same uprooting, the same discrimination, the same endless wars, - all quite removed from the Prophetic promises they tried to emulate.
As rebels against God, they will be defeated. As charlatans they will be dismantled. Their fall is imminent. But it won’t happen without our hard work, without our understanding being widely spread and generally understood. We should reject them completely, as completely as we are called to in our confession of faith.
IV
The Church is the mightiest tool for peace. The Church may yet lead us to peace – if we would vocally support her. With massive support of people united around the Church, the Middle East wars would become history. The Americans may look eastward for an example. While the biggest apostolic church of America is being bled for money, in the East there is a great upheaval of spirit. In Turkey, after 80 years of materialist dictatorship, people turned to God and voted for a party of faith. The same thing happened in Palestine, in the Lord’s Land, where Hamas won the elections. Everywhere in the East, from Cairo to Moscow, the East sheds the pragmatic cold shackles of godless regimes and turns to God.
The Americans may emulate this current. The Church – the Catholic one and her Orthodox sister – is the Islam of the West, and it is meant to be a compliment. There is positively a place for a Catholic Hamas rising in the US and changing the rules of the game, taking away the rule from the laic twins of Republicans and Democrats. If Islam succeeded in regaining its place of respect and glory in the recently and violently anti-religious society of Ataturk, if the Orthodoxy made it in Lenin’s land, the Christian Church may achieve the same in the US, by siding with people, and the people can defeat their enemy, by siding with the church.
The abusing priests’ case may eliminate the Catholic Church in the US altogether as an independent force: already five dioceses have declared bankruptcy. But the Church still may overcome: she can divest of all its property and transfer it to the local parishes, remove the collaborationists and survive -- poor, lean and fighting, as she did in the days of the Apostles. She should not surrender but meet the challenge. She can lead America to peace and prosperity as the great positive moral force, she can demand from the Bush administration that America get out of Iraq now. If the church will become more active in the struggle for peace, she would attract more people. Yet, a new independent and autocephalous Church of America could spring forth from the American Apostolic Churches, the Orthodox and the Catholic, and her light would defeat the darkness of apostasy.
Alas, some of our friends fail to understand it and join in the attack on the Church. It is as if an infantry soldier were to join in the enemy attack on his tanks, just because he hates tankers.
The flagship of pro-Palestinian media is Counterpunch. This is one of the biggest friendly sites, and they do publish many articles produced by our friends. But in Counterpunch, one can’t say a good word about the Church, and for sure one can’t mention Christ. A Google search for “church” on their site shows that they are as harsh to the Church as the Jerusalem Post. (See for instance www.counterpunch.org/sexabuse.html , www.counterpunch.org/jensen09282006.html , www.counterpunch.org/smith03092004.html etc)
Recently they published a piece by a Badruddin Khan who did not stop at repeating brazen lies: “These hoary tactics were applied by Christians against Jews barely a century ago. The Catholic Church issues circulars that condemned Jews for using the blood of Christian children for Passover rites. All Jews (whether secular, converts, or intermarried) were marked and identified as sinister and worthy of apartheid. This state of apartheid allowed the organized evil of the Holocaust to be implemented.”
This is a lie and calumny one finds only in the cheapest Zionist textbooks. As a matter of fact, the Jewish converts were invariably well received by the church, and some of them rose within its ranks. The list would be too long, from St Paul and St Peter to St John of Cross and St Teresa of Avila to the leading bishops in the French church and elsewhere. The church indeed condemned those Jews who used the blood of Christian children for Passover rites or for any other purpose; would Badruddin Khan prefer her to approve of this unorthodox practice? And finally, the reference to the holocaust is absurd. Hitler’s regime was as violently anti-Catholic as any. They actually pioneered the “abusive priests” line copycatted by today’s American media. I have no doubt that Counterpunch would never dare to publish similar offensive lies about the Jews, but the Church may be attacked freely.
Our good combatants Bill and Kathy Christison went to demonstrate in front of a Catholic cathedral because of Prof Finkelstein’s refused tenure, as they wrote in the Counterpunch. I asked them, why they didn’t go to demonstrate in front of a Jewish institution, be it a synagogue or a Bnai Brith lodge or the ADL. They replied that “You are quite correct when you say that in the US it’s possible to be anti-anything except anti-Jewish or anti-Israel. The Israel lobby is so very strong and wields so very much political power that no politician, no commentator dares criticize Israel without fear of being labeled anti-Semitic and excluded from mainstream discourse. In the wake of the Holocaust (about which the lobby constantly reminds us), few people want to risk being thought anti-Jewish, so this is a powerful weapon, and becomes more and more powerful as time goes on.”
Demonstrating in front of a Catholic church is like looking under the lamp post for lost coin, which you have actually lost in the dark. It’s dark in front of the Jewish establishments, but we should venture into darkness to bring light. This is the way of our organisation, Deir Yassin Remembered who regularly demonstrate in front of synagogues. And in front of the cathedrals, we should demonstrate in support of the Church, not against her.
The Catholic Church is one of the greatest champions of Palestine. They have a Palestinian Patriarch, they do defend Palestine. All established churches support Palestine; with the apostolic churches taking the leading role, and the Catholics often lead them all. During the 2002 Bethlehem siege by the Jews, the Catholic Church led the actions and I participated in them (read http://www.israelshamir.net/English/Convoy.htm ) I am not a Catholic, actually I belong to the competing native sister, the Orthodox Church of Holy Land, but in some ways, the Catholic Church is even more supportive of Palestine than our own.
Bill and Kathy disagreed: “The Catholic Church has certainly done some good things for the Palestinians, but not nearly enough. Where has the church been while Israel oppresses Christians, including Catholics, in Palestine? Have we heard any protests from this Pope over the walling in and devastation of Bethlehem, or from the last Pope when Israel besieged the Church of the Nativity during the 2002 reinvasion of the West Bank? Where was the Church when Israel ethnically cleansed numerous Christian Palestinian villages in 1948? And indeed, where has the Church been as Israel has oppressed members of another faith, Muslims, for 60 years, desecrating Muslim places of worship and killing and ethnically cleansing Muslim people--for the sole reason that they are not Jews?”
I replied: The Catholic Church is doing as much as she can, but she can’t do much, two hundred years after Voltaire. You ask, “Where has the church been while Israel oppresses Christians, including Catholics, in Palestine?” Forgive me, but it reminds me the standard Jewish line of “Where has the church been during the holocaust?” Stalin was more realistic when he noticed that the Pope has not too many divisions. Actually, the Church protested every Israeli crime. The Church could do more if she were not constantly attacked by the Jewish Lobby - and by the well-meaning people who do not understand that they undermine this defence of Palestine.
Once, the Church led the Crusade to liberate the Holy Land. Now, she can lead the Crusade of Peace for the same purpose.
The Catholic Church, the biggest apostolic church in the US, is under heavy attack. The plotters had united media effort and legal machinery, utilized American obsession with money, and given the Church the treatment they gave tobacco industry, that is, suing it to oblivion. For their chance to get thirty pieces of silver (over a million dollars, in present prices), hundreds of American Catholics denounced their church.
This attack, followed by the ill-considered surrender of Los Angeles Catholic bishops in the ‘abusing priests’ campaign, is a clear sign of forthcoming war. This soap opera had a good run in the US media before the Iraq invasion. It actually started while Sharon was besieging Bethlehem and destroying Palestine in 2002. Then, all of a sudden, hundreds of men and women in their forties had remembered that they were abused some twenty years ago. It rose to a hysterical shriek in advance of the Iraq invasion in 2003, and now it is playing again as a harbinger of new hostilities. Whenever the forces of darkness prepare a new attack on mankind, they use their considerable artillery to shut up the potential resistance forces, starting with their avowed enemy, the Church. This was the practice of the Third Reich as well: before starting the war, they began their campaign of ‘priests as sex fiends’, to force the church’s silence. Now this is the turn of the Fourth Reich: the Church was against the war in Iraq; the Church was steadfast in her defence of Palestine; the Church is certainly against the impending attack on Iran; so she has to be put on defence. The same people who control the US media call for war with Iran, and they are behind this campaign against the Church.
Our enemies and the enemies of the Church concocted, through their control of the media, a phantom of “abusive priests” and succeeded in convincing the LA Bishops to take the bait of “final settlement”. Very soon the bishops will discover that nothing is final when you submit to their wishes. Surrender gets you nowhere. They could learn from the Germans, who agreed to settle all Jewish claims for $1 billion (as described by the chief Jewish negotiator Nahum Goldmann in his book The Jewish Paradox, New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978), eventually paid $60 billion to find out that they still own $180 billion, and now there is a new suit to provide the children of the wartime sufferers with full coverage of their shrink sessions. If there is a sucker who agrees to pay, he won’t get a break from these fellows.
The very construction of the claim is faulty, to say the least. If a man abused a boy, while being a priest, this is still his crime, and he should bear responsibility – if and when the crime is proven by criminal court beyond any reasonable doubt. Likewise, if a man abused a boy while serving in the army, or working in the fire brigade, the responsibility is his, not of the army, nor of the fire prevention services. The bishops had no right to agree to such a suit; if an anti-Christian judge accepted such a suit, the church should rather disband than agree. The bishops are not the church, nor are the clergy: the Church is the mystic body of all worshippers, the Bride of Christ, and she is not a subject to any suit for misdeeds of individual believers. The Church is always right, though her bishops, priests or laymen may be wrong individually.
On the second thought, this model can be useful. If one can sue the Catholic Church, certainly one should be able to sue her traditional competitor, the Jews. If the Church pays for “abusing priests”, maybe Jewry should pay for “cheating Jews”? A full list of claims by people cheated by Jewish financiers, real estate developers, bankers, insurance agents would run to trillions. One Enron case (a clear-cut case of Jewish cheating) would be enough to offset the “abusive priests” bounty. Let them sue Jewry in the same court where the Church is sued; there are enough assets to seize from the Jewish organizations. Maybe that will leave them with less money to pour into bribing politicians and killing Palestinians.
A little bird told me that the Jews would never agree to accept collective responsibility. They are ready to act as a collective in order to collect, but not to pay. And until they agree to accept collective responsibility, the Church should not either. If the Pope in Rome still holds some sway over his LA bishops, he should retire them, void the settlement, proclaim that the church will never agree to be hold responsible for any individual’s misdeed and excommunicate and anathemise everyone who participated in this circus. Greed should not be encouraged: however right or wrong originally, by trying to destroy the church for their pecuniary gain, the claimants are totally in the wrong.
The odd custom of the late Pope John Paul II - asking forgiveness for historical sins - was liable to cause this sort of event: he was not entitled to ask such forgiveness for this would imply that every Catholic, even a five year old Brazilian girl, was guilty of mistreating the church’s enemies of some 500 years ago. The church should be mightily happy if she is not sued for the damages incurred in all the cases where her titular head has asked for forgiveness, including the Crusades, the Sack of Constantinople and the blood libel cases.
New claims will surely pour in. This is human nature: show one man of a way to get a million by saying he was fondled by a priest, and hordes will queue up with their claims. Some will be outright liars and cheats. The name of Lori Haigh comes to mind. This lady collected a $1.2 million abuse payment from the Los Angeles and Orange County Catholic archdioceses in 2002, alleging that she was abused by a clergyman while being driven to and from music practices more than 20 years earlier. Afterwards, she tried to play an abuse victim on several other occasions, until she was stopped by police as a liar and impostor.
Others will use their false memory to make it up. False memory is a very real thing: I have noticed that I ‘remember’ events I never witnessed because I was told of them so many times. It calls for quite an effort to regain one’s true memory and to dismiss the false one. Every Jerusalemite will tell you of horrors of 1948 siege of the city, but the newspapers of the time witness that there was no siege at all, as an Israeli historian Dr Uri Milstein recently proved.
Sex cases generate a lot of claimants. A few years ago, a Sephardic Jew, General Itzik Mordechai got close to receiving the crown of Israel’s Prime Ministership. The ruling Ashkenazi elite did not cherish the idea. They found a girl who claimed that she was raped by the lusty General. After the claim was publicized, dozens of women came up with similar claims. The claims came to naught, but there was enough dirt to bury Mordechai’s chances to govern. The trick was repeated against the Sephardi President Moshe Katzav and worked: the first claimant failed, but the police could find some positive evidence out of the dozens who came to claim. In the US, the waves of would-be claimants rise to tsunami heights, with hundreds and thousands coming to claim they were abused – in average, 20 years ago, in some cases 40 years ago.
I do not feel sorry for these late claimants. Why did they wait for 20 years? If a boy or a girl is being attacked, he or she may scream and run to parents or to police. If they did not do it, just forget it. Consider it a clumsy pass, an unpleasant experience, a result of misunderstanding. Blame yourself for indecisiveness. Proceed with your life. Join mankind: every one of us, even your mommy and daddy, suffered an unwanted kiss or an undesired embrace. The laws should be reasonable, - allowing 20-year old claims for such events is not reasonable. Only an immediate complaint should be considered valid, and 24 hours is as long as should be allowed, in some extreme cases.
If a crime occurred, the criminal should be punished, but the denouncer may not profit by his report of the crime. This is the necessary rule of justice. Otherwise we are back at the time when a denouncer could claim a third of denounced man’s property. An honest abuse victim should kick the temptation offered by the US legal system which encourages suing for huge sums of money, and return his winnings to the church. Anyway only the lawyers, the Dershowitzes, win. Out of billions collected by the Jewish lawyers on behalf of the holocaust survivors, hardly a drop reached actual ex-prisoners, while the rest remained in the lawyers’ coffers.
Expensive damage suits are immoral and counterproductive. A woman collecting a million for being burned by hot coffee in McDonalds, a man collecting a million for smoking too much, - this is just an incitement to litigate. Lawyers’ fees should be capped to the extent of a working man’s salary, so they could not turn justice into roulette. The Americans may consider revamping their legal system for it is a travesty of justice: the US judges have refused every claim by tortured Palestinians, but have awarded Israel and American Jews with billions of Palestinian or Iranian moneys.
The rest of the world lives well without these enormous damage suits. Money is only money, and this pursuit of dollars is extremely unattractive. Freud considered money to be the psychological equivalent of shit. Babies do show their feces with the same pride grown-ups flash their gold ringlets. An Arab book of seventh century tells of shit competition between two tribes, where the winner is one who produces the biggest pile. This is probably a better and a saner way of competing than the one offered by the Forbes.
II
The Americans over-simplify the question of sex with minors, when they present it as something monstrous. This is not so. Are you revolted by Romeo and Juliet? As a good American citizen, you should be; Juliet was 14, and thus Romeo today would be tried and locked up as a “paedophile”, together with his accomplice the good Friar Laurence, in the United States. Friar Laurence would surely be considered as an “abusing priest”, and a Dershowitz would collect a million from the Verona diocese for his sin of arranging the lovers’ tryst. Not only the lovers from Verona: Edgar Allan Poe married a 14-year old; and if the present laws were in force, the American poet would hearken to his Raven’s “nevermore” in jail. Prophet Muhammad married a nine year old Aisha, but Jacob, a Biblical patriarch, bettered him and married Rachel who was 7. In modern world, Jacob and Muhammad would be hunted down, extradited and jailed. It is possible that even better placed persons would not fare well facing our most enlightened justice: the Mother of our Saviour was just 14 at Annunciation…
Mature women ready to share their experience with young boys were always approved. In the Greek classic book Daphnis and Chloe, two young shepherds find love (they would be imprisoned in the US), but before that, an experienced and mature lady Lycaenion taught young Daphnis how to attend to his girlfriend – to their mutual satisfaction. Nowadays, in England, a 26-year old woman teacher was persecuted for having sex with her 15-year old pupil. Even the prosecutor admitted that it’s “every schoolboy’s fantasy to have that kind of attention from a young, attractive member of staff”, but pushed for conviction all the same. In the US, Pamela Rogers was sentenced to many years of jail for having sex with a young boy as tall as you and me, who was full 13 at the act – the age my great-grandfather was successfully married. If Mrs Rogers would rather abuse and humiliate the boy, she could have a successful career in the school. Who knows, she could become even a State Secretary…
A man who maims or kills a child will go to jail, serve his time and go out a free man. A man who had sex with a 14-year-old girl will serve his time and will be placed on a roll of sex offenders; his name and address are made available to every Internet user. In the UK and the US, these neo-liberal transatlantic twins, a special service allows you to locate every sex offender in your vicinity. The state in these super-liberal countries is a Peeping Tom who allows the pursuit of happiness in the stock market only.
The Americans and the Brits invented a silly concept of “statutory rape” as if a state prosecutor knows better than boys and girls what they want. The great French thinkers Sartre and Derrida, Foucault and de Beauvoir, called in 1977 for skipping this legal invention altogether. Wise Spaniards established the age of consent at 13, while the even wiser Muslims have no such age limit for marriage at all, while disapproving of extramarital relations. Equally wise Jews were guided by the Talmud which stipulates the permitted age of marriage for girls at ‘three years and one day’ (though the safer age of nine was preferred), while strictly forbidding sodomy.
Indeed, almost all cases of alleged abuse are homosexual; the alleged victims should sue the gay rights organizations rather than the Church. But the Church is not allowed even to utter these words. They can’t say “pederasty”, they should pretend this is “paedophilia”. They may not defrock a homosexual priest, for they would be attacked for their “homophobia”. In the US, the strong defence of homosexuality is inbuilt into their official dogma. The taboo on “being less than fond of homosexuals” (homophobia) may stand next to the taboo on “being less than fond of Jews” (antisemitism). These two taboos are so well entrenched in the US, that even mentioning them became a taboo, and two secondary offences have been created, “racism”, an antisemitism spill-off, and “paedophilia”, a homophobia spill-off.
In Israel we feel there is no better way to show allegiance to American democracy and liberalism than to emasculate the man and de-womanise the woman. In our smaller Jewish state, in Israel, things have changed since the macho days of Six Day War, when homosexuality was banned, the one-eyed Defence Minister Dayan screwed every female conscript and the Israeli army kicked three Arab armies in a week. Now the gay tendency is no snag, ministers are sued for kissing a girl, and the army is beaten up by a few bearded Lebanese. Once Israeli girls served in the army as non-combatants. Their main job was to look smart and cheerful, and thus encourage the boys to fight well. Now they follow the example of Judith and Jael, don helmets, do combat duty and look like East German swimmers on anabolic steroids.
After ending her tour of duty, with scalps of Palestinians at her belt (instead of their foreskins, as was Samson’s wont) this new breed of a female sabra is unsuitable for normal mating; and she ends up in the growing lesbian colony of Tel Aviv. While male homosexuals are often meek, the females have a drive for leadership and they lead the majority of gay organisations. Tsippi Livni, the Foreign Minister and an ex-Secret Service agent, allegedly has some lesbian background, and thus she passed millions of dollars to gay organisation led by her patriotic sisters. Traditionally over-independent, Jewish women became even more so as they now serve in the combat units, earn as much as men do, are protected from a flirtatious look by ever-alert police. They grew balls and became like men but even more so, encouraged by the movies showing decisive executive women and wimpy, obedient, good-for-nothing and admiring men.
The men got the message. If the girls are as hard as boys, but more demanding and more likely to sue – who needs them? Some statistics claim 20% of Tel Aviv is homosexual, others quote even higher numbers. Gays and lesbians have full rights: they adopt children, their “marriage” is recognised if performed abroad, they inherit, they are positively discriminated in favour of as employees and tenants, for they have more disposable income and do not become pregnant. They are quite patriotic: a leading gay poet of Tel Aviv called on Israel to erase Gaza and Beirut, and break Arab skulls. They insist on their right to serve in the occupation army. They derive an extra benefit from the occupation: cheap young Arab bodies. Well-to-do gays shack up with a boy who escapes the blockade and deprivation of refugee camp, and the authorities do tolerate this breach of apartheid, though an across-the-barriers union of man and woman is not tolerated.
A similar process takes place in the larger Jewish state, the US. Girls are being pushed into military service, they become hard as nails; and as a result, more and more men turn to other men, and naturally to younger men, or boys. Priests are probably no exception. The ultimate guilt is not that of the church, but of the feminist and lesbian movement which supports women’s military service; and of the media that promotes this attitude.
Now, sexual violence towards a small boy or girl by an adult man is a repulsive and criminal act, but this is extremely infrequent. One can stretch it a bit and agree that this is quite a repulsive act even if no violence is used, though one should be aware that this is a question of culture rather than an invariably correct judgement.
III
We can’t remain indifferent to the travail of the Church for she has a potential to change the US from the predatory neo-Judaic state it is today into a peace-loving Christian one. Her bishops went too far trying to accommodate their enemy, but they have discovered now that this way leads to perdition. Next time they may be braver, if there ever is a next time. We should defend her against these attacks whether in the “abusive priests” cases, or in the insinuations regarding the late pope Pius and the German Reich. Only the innocent and gullible will try to ponder the hard facts behind the setup, for there are none relevant. This is all hype, as Philip Jenkins, an Episcopalian Professor of History and Religious Studies at Penn State University, proved in his book Pedophiles and Priests, while the name of Pope Pius was exonerated many times over.
The latter accusation is a mirror image, or a parody of the accusation of Caiaphas just as the Holocaust religion is a parody of the Christian faith. In the Christian dogma, Caiaphas gave Christ into the hands of the Romans to be crucified, and this implied the inherent hostility of the Judaic leadership and priesthood to the Christ. In the Holocaust dogma, Pope Pius surrendered the Jews to the Germans, affirming the eternal enmity of the Holocaustians to the Church. It does not matter that on a factual level, the accusations have been refuted many times over. Our tenacious enemy never gives up, never acknowledges his defeat, never accepts the facts unless they suit him.
Who is the enemy? Some people refer to the Israel Lobby with their great control over media. In the famed tract, they were called the Elders of Zion. Others call them Illuminati. I called them the Masters of Discourse, the operators of the integrated machine of public disinformation and indoctrination, from the Wall Street Journal to the Wikipedia. Thousands of networks, newspapers, journals, books, films and ideas are being united and guided by their invisible hand, while free thought still survives in the far reaches of the web. The fearsome AIPAC is just the visible tip of the iceberg, below which are miles and miles of solid ice: media lords, chief editors, their pundits – in short, the Masters of Discourse. Their power base is in the media, in their ability to create a false presentation of reality and mislead people. Recently John Pilger described it as The Invisible Government.
When the Masters of Discourse fought against Communism, they had a few faked ‘facts’ they were never tired of brushing up. They played with stupefying numbers: Communists killed thirty, no, fifty, no, sixty million, though the freely available demographic figures of the Soviet Union made it as miraculous as feeding of the multitudes by five loaves. They invented Soviet anti-Semitism, though Soviet government and security always had a lot of Jews in high places. They invented Soviet totalitarianism, though the Soviet people freely supported their government. Instead of the Holy Grail, they had Raul Wallenberg, who was supposed to have survived miraculously and to have been kept in some far-away jail. No research would ever move them to recognize their inventions for being what they were, namely, lies.
Now they want to destroy Iran and cripple Russia, for these lands did not forget God. They do fight against the Church, against every church, be it Communism or Islam or Orthodox Judaism, or their traditional enemy, the Apostolic Church, for every church defends its flock against their robbery and resists their dark drive for domination. The church affirms the primacy of spirit, and of the godlike nature of man; this is anathema to the Masters. On a deeper level, the Church is their main adversary, for they are a competing church of sorts, the church of darkness, and they will not suffer a competitor.
Dominant as they are, they are not omnipotent. We should not be afraid of them. There is no magic in their incantations. They have no divine powers behind them. They are impostors. They exploit the old myths of mankind, forgetting that nothing works without God. The Masters are twins to Zionists; the Zionists decided to arrange for Israel’s return to the Promised Land as it was promised to their fathers. However, that return was to be done by God; while humans trying to do God’s work are necessarily rebels. Wannabe demiurges, they created their hellish regime ruled by their security forces, and destroyed the lovely land of Palestine. The result was so miserable, that Zionist prince Avrum Burg recently advised his countrymen to obtain a foreign passport and emigrate.
The Masters of Discourse are trying to create a pseudo-Judaic universe on a planetary scale. Their vision was grotesquely presented by the authors of the Protocols, but the reality they brought in is as unsuccessful as the one their brethren established in Palestine. The same rule of security forces, the same fear-mongering, the same ideological vise, the same destruction of nature, the same impoverishment of spirit, the same uprooting, the same discrimination, the same endless wars, - all quite removed from the Prophetic promises they tried to emulate.
As rebels against God, they will be defeated. As charlatans they will be dismantled. Their fall is imminent. But it won’t happen without our hard work, without our understanding being widely spread and generally understood. We should reject them completely, as completely as we are called to in our confession of faith.
IV
The Church is the mightiest tool for peace. The Church may yet lead us to peace – if we would vocally support her. With massive support of people united around the Church, the Middle East wars would become history. The Americans may look eastward for an example. While the biggest apostolic church of America is being bled for money, in the East there is a great upheaval of spirit. In Turkey, after 80 years of materialist dictatorship, people turned to God and voted for a party of faith. The same thing happened in Palestine, in the Lord’s Land, where Hamas won the elections. Everywhere in the East, from Cairo to Moscow, the East sheds the pragmatic cold shackles of godless regimes and turns to God.
The Americans may emulate this current. The Church – the Catholic one and her Orthodox sister – is the Islam of the West, and it is meant to be a compliment. There is positively a place for a Catholic Hamas rising in the US and changing the rules of the game, taking away the rule from the laic twins of Republicans and Democrats. If Islam succeeded in regaining its place of respect and glory in the recently and violently anti-religious society of Ataturk, if the Orthodoxy made it in Lenin’s land, the Christian Church may achieve the same in the US, by siding with people, and the people can defeat their enemy, by siding with the church.
The abusing priests’ case may eliminate the Catholic Church in the US altogether as an independent force: already five dioceses have declared bankruptcy. But the Church still may overcome: she can divest of all its property and transfer it to the local parishes, remove the collaborationists and survive -- poor, lean and fighting, as she did in the days of the Apostles. She should not surrender but meet the challenge. She can lead America to peace and prosperity as the great positive moral force, she can demand from the Bush administration that America get out of Iraq now. If the church will become more active in the struggle for peace, she would attract more people. Yet, a new independent and autocephalous Church of America could spring forth from the American Apostolic Churches, the Orthodox and the Catholic, and her light would defeat the darkness of apostasy.
Alas, some of our friends fail to understand it and join in the attack on the Church. It is as if an infantry soldier were to join in the enemy attack on his tanks, just because he hates tankers.
The flagship of pro-Palestinian media is Counterpunch. This is one of the biggest friendly sites, and they do publish many articles produced by our friends. But in Counterpunch, one can’t say a good word about the Church, and for sure one can’t mention Christ. A Google search for “church” on their site shows that they are as harsh to the Church as the Jerusalem Post. (See for instance www.counterpunch.org/sexabuse.html , www.counterpunch.org/jensen09282006.html , www.counterpunch.org/smith03092004.html etc)
Recently they published a piece by a Badruddin Khan who did not stop at repeating brazen lies: “These hoary tactics were applied by Christians against Jews barely a century ago. The Catholic Church issues circulars that condemned Jews for using the blood of Christian children for Passover rites. All Jews (whether secular, converts, or intermarried) were marked and identified as sinister and worthy of apartheid. This state of apartheid allowed the organized evil of the Holocaust to be implemented.”
This is a lie and calumny one finds only in the cheapest Zionist textbooks. As a matter of fact, the Jewish converts were invariably well received by the church, and some of them rose within its ranks. The list would be too long, from St Paul and St Peter to St John of Cross and St Teresa of Avila to the leading bishops in the French church and elsewhere. The church indeed condemned those Jews who used the blood of Christian children for Passover rites or for any other purpose; would Badruddin Khan prefer her to approve of this unorthodox practice? And finally, the reference to the holocaust is absurd. Hitler’s regime was as violently anti-Catholic as any. They actually pioneered the “abusive priests” line copycatted by today’s American media. I have no doubt that Counterpunch would never dare to publish similar offensive lies about the Jews, but the Church may be attacked freely.
Our good combatants Bill and Kathy Christison went to demonstrate in front of a Catholic cathedral because of Prof Finkelstein’s refused tenure, as they wrote in the Counterpunch. I asked them, why they didn’t go to demonstrate in front of a Jewish institution, be it a synagogue or a Bnai Brith lodge or the ADL. They replied that “You are quite correct when you say that in the US it’s possible to be anti-anything except anti-Jewish or anti-Israel. The Israel lobby is so very strong and wields so very much political power that no politician, no commentator dares criticize Israel without fear of being labeled anti-Semitic and excluded from mainstream discourse. In the wake of the Holocaust (about which the lobby constantly reminds us), few people want to risk being thought anti-Jewish, so this is a powerful weapon, and becomes more and more powerful as time goes on.”
Demonstrating in front of a Catholic church is like looking under the lamp post for lost coin, which you have actually lost in the dark. It’s dark in front of the Jewish establishments, but we should venture into darkness to bring light. This is the way of our organisation, Deir Yassin Remembered who regularly demonstrate in front of synagogues. And in front of the cathedrals, we should demonstrate in support of the Church, not against her.
The Catholic Church is one of the greatest champions of Palestine. They have a Palestinian Patriarch, they do defend Palestine. All established churches support Palestine; with the apostolic churches taking the leading role, and the Catholics often lead them all. During the 2002 Bethlehem siege by the Jews, the Catholic Church led the actions and I participated in them (read http://www.israelshamir.net/English/Convoy.htm ) I am not a Catholic, actually I belong to the competing native sister, the Orthodox Church of Holy Land, but in some ways, the Catholic Church is even more supportive of Palestine than our own.
Bill and Kathy disagreed: “The Catholic Church has certainly done some good things for the Palestinians, but not nearly enough. Where has the church been while Israel oppresses Christians, including Catholics, in Palestine? Have we heard any protests from this Pope over the walling in and devastation of Bethlehem, or from the last Pope when Israel besieged the Church of the Nativity during the 2002 reinvasion of the West Bank? Where was the Church when Israel ethnically cleansed numerous Christian Palestinian villages in 1948? And indeed, where has the Church been as Israel has oppressed members of another faith, Muslims, for 60 years, desecrating Muslim places of worship and killing and ethnically cleansing Muslim people--for the sole reason that they are not Jews?”
I replied: The Catholic Church is doing as much as she can, but she can’t do much, two hundred years after Voltaire. You ask, “Where has the church been while Israel oppresses Christians, including Catholics, in Palestine?” Forgive me, but it reminds me the standard Jewish line of “Where has the church been during the holocaust?” Stalin was more realistic when he noticed that the Pope has not too many divisions. Actually, the Church protested every Israeli crime. The Church could do more if she were not constantly attacked by the Jewish Lobby - and by the well-meaning people who do not understand that they undermine this defence of Palestine.
Once, the Church led the Crusade to liberate the Holy Land. Now, she can lead the Crusade of Peace for the same purpose.
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Say Not Fatah
By Israel Shamir
Palestinians are the freest people on Earth. They proved it again this June, when they broke open the infamous torture chambers of Dahlan and released the prisoners; when they sent the CIA-trained thugs packing back to their Jewish masters. I feel proud of their unique victory: Americans can’t get rid of Guantanamo and their plentiful other jails with millions of prisoners (more than in Uncle Joe’s Gulag); Brits can’t dismantle their surveillance cameras; Saudis can’t throw away their CIA-bound rulers. Not many people succeeded in removing the machine of fear and oppression, in smashing these Gestapo-clones of security police mushrooming around the globe. In future Palestine, the fall of the Gaza Preventive Security Prison will be celebrated like the French celebrate the Fall of Bastille.
This is the people’s victory over oppression. Moreover, this is victory of law against lawlessness, for Palestine had and still has its legitimate government, while the rogue security apparatus tried to place itself above the law. A true people’s victory, for it succeeded without vengeance and unnecessary bloodshed. Israeli media got a lot of mileage out of the 60 security men who asked for Israeli protection, but actually even out of this (tiny by any measure) amount more than half asked to return to Gaza. They knew there would be no revenge, no head-hunting, no Night of the Long Knives, no Moscow trials for the fighters of Fatah: the people won, there is no civil war, no major bloodshed; the security thugs lost, and now they have a chance to try to become men again.
Magnanimity, largesse, fraternal feelings were the hallmarks of this people’s revolution. Trying to saw discord as they always do, the mainstream media presented this glorious revolution as a victory of Hamas over Fatah. This is an exaggeration. The people of Gaza fought against Dahlan Gangs, against lawless criminals who tried to establish their rule of force and violence over the Strip. Tolkien readers may think of the Battle of Bywater, where free hobbits smashed and expelled the thugs of Sharkey from the Shire. These gangs were leftovers from a sinister previous rule; they were placed in charge by the Israeli Saruman, and their defeat was just a question of time. But Dahlan is not Fatah; nor is Mahmud Abbas, crowned by the US and Israel as the king of the Ramallah Bantustan. Real Fatah is Marwan Barghouti still caged in the Jewish Gulag, and other wonderful men and good fighters who carried the name of Palestine from the battle of Karame to the Intifada. They are true Fatah, and their place is preserved for them in the Hall of Glory of the Palestinian Revolution.
I know Fatah fighters; I’ve met them in their villages in the hills of Palestine, taking a short rest after many years of exile and jail. Great people, who were as upset by Abu Mazen’s shameful submission to the Israeli-American diktat as anybody. The Gaza people’s victory may mobilize them into a proper house cleaning, into returning to their own revolutionary traditions. Dahlan and Rajoub, these security thugs and their political allies Abu Mazen and Saeb Erekat stole, nay, they privatized the name of Fatah, just as KGB bosses privatized communism and the Judaeo-Mammonite elites privatized the free enterprise of America’s founding fathers. Let no Fatah fighter feel upset by Dahlan’s defeat. Moreover, they can follow the lead and get rid of the werewolves who abused the name of Fatah in the service of Shin Bet.
Jonathan Steele correctly reminded us that “arming insurgents against elected governments has a long US pedigree, and it is no accident that Elliott Abrams, the deputy national security adviser and apparent architect of the anti-Hamas subversion, was a key player in Ronald Reagan's supply of weapons to the Contras who fought Nicaragua's elected government in the 1980s.” But those Contras, ubiquitously present at every revolution, the Chouans of the Vendée, the Contras of French revolution, the Cossacks of Don, the Contras of the Russian revolution, Savimbi’s Unita, the Contras of the Angolan revolution, did have some truth on their side, and expressed some legitimate interests. That is why we approve and support the merciful character of the Hamas revolution: Hamas' readiness to work together with healthier elements of Fatah for the Palestinian cause.
However, some lessons can and should be learned: Fatah leadership succumbed to the Israeli-American temptation because of its faulty ideology. Nationalism, this weapon of mass disintegration, was brought eastwards by the Western colonizers in order to divide and conquer. Until the 19th century, the East knew nothing of nationalism, for it was then united by faith and governed by their traditional rulers, the successors of Constantine the Great and Suleiman the Magnificent. T.E. Lawrence delivered the bacilli of nationalism to Hejaz in his Intelligence Service-packed saddle bag, and undermined this Eastern unity. He promised Arabs independence from the “hateful Ottomans”, but nothing good came out of their betrayal: British, American and later Zionist colonizers shared the spoils, while the natives became even more oppressed.
Nationalism is necessarily a particularist, “do it alone” sort of ideology. In Palestine, Egypt, Syria this was compensated for by a universalist socialism, but with the evaporation of this socialist element, Fatah remained with its faulty nationalism, doomed to failure. “They are nationalists like us”, say the Zionists from Sharon to Avnery about Fatah. “They will be happy with a flag, an anthem, a Swiss bank account -- like us. They will be content with a Bantustan or two”.
But Palestinians are not likely to betray Palestine for the illusion of independence. All Palestinians, that is, all dwellers of Palestine, native and immigrant, need all of it, not just two percent of Gaza and ten percent of a Ramallah enclave, but all 100%. We may have all of it together, not by dividing, but by sharing. Islam is a universal faith, like Christianity, and the its religious foundations are better suited for our universal state than yesterday’s nationalism, Arab or Zionist. A similar process is taking place in Turkey, where Kemalist nationalism has become an American ally propped up by soldiers’ bayonets, while the Islamic party is the choice of people.
People of the East believe in God; that is why Ex Oriente Lux. They also know from their experience that godless ones have nor scruples neither compassion, while we need compassionate leaders. Disregard the scarecrow of “Islamofascism” or “Islamic danger”. This is myth, created by Podhoretz and his ilk, an invented threat like Yellow Peril, Panslavism, Communism. We are not afraid of followers of Islam, because we live with them all our life, and it is good to balance love to one’s land by love to God.
The nation-building process in Palestine is far from over. A new paradigm should be found to unite its tribes and groups into one society, dismantling the Palestinian National Authority - and the Jewish state, as correctly stated by Avrum Burg. Separation and the drive for independence of this or any other part of Palestine turned out to be a bankrupt strategy. Palestine can’t be divided. Friends of Palestine and friends of Israel must work together to unify, not to separate.
Palestinians are the freest people on Earth. They proved it again this June, when they broke open the infamous torture chambers of Dahlan and released the prisoners; when they sent the CIA-trained thugs packing back to their Jewish masters. I feel proud of their unique victory: Americans can’t get rid of Guantanamo and their plentiful other jails with millions of prisoners (more than in Uncle Joe’s Gulag); Brits can’t dismantle their surveillance cameras; Saudis can’t throw away their CIA-bound rulers. Not many people succeeded in removing the machine of fear and oppression, in smashing these Gestapo-clones of security police mushrooming around the globe. In future Palestine, the fall of the Gaza Preventive Security Prison will be celebrated like the French celebrate the Fall of Bastille.
This is the people’s victory over oppression. Moreover, this is victory of law against lawlessness, for Palestine had and still has its legitimate government, while the rogue security apparatus tried to place itself above the law. A true people’s victory, for it succeeded without vengeance and unnecessary bloodshed. Israeli media got a lot of mileage out of the 60 security men who asked for Israeli protection, but actually even out of this (tiny by any measure) amount more than half asked to return to Gaza. They knew there would be no revenge, no head-hunting, no Night of the Long Knives, no Moscow trials for the fighters of Fatah: the people won, there is no civil war, no major bloodshed; the security thugs lost, and now they have a chance to try to become men again.
Magnanimity, largesse, fraternal feelings were the hallmarks of this people’s revolution. Trying to saw discord as they always do, the mainstream media presented this glorious revolution as a victory of Hamas over Fatah. This is an exaggeration. The people of Gaza fought against Dahlan Gangs, against lawless criminals who tried to establish their rule of force and violence over the Strip. Tolkien readers may think of the Battle of Bywater, where free hobbits smashed and expelled the thugs of Sharkey from the Shire. These gangs were leftovers from a sinister previous rule; they were placed in charge by the Israeli Saruman, and their defeat was just a question of time. But Dahlan is not Fatah; nor is Mahmud Abbas, crowned by the US and Israel as the king of the Ramallah Bantustan. Real Fatah is Marwan Barghouti still caged in the Jewish Gulag, and other wonderful men and good fighters who carried the name of Palestine from the battle of Karame to the Intifada. They are true Fatah, and their place is preserved for them in the Hall of Glory of the Palestinian Revolution.
I know Fatah fighters; I’ve met them in their villages in the hills of Palestine, taking a short rest after many years of exile and jail. Great people, who were as upset by Abu Mazen’s shameful submission to the Israeli-American diktat as anybody. The Gaza people’s victory may mobilize them into a proper house cleaning, into returning to their own revolutionary traditions. Dahlan and Rajoub, these security thugs and their political allies Abu Mazen and Saeb Erekat stole, nay, they privatized the name of Fatah, just as KGB bosses privatized communism and the Judaeo-Mammonite elites privatized the free enterprise of America’s founding fathers. Let no Fatah fighter feel upset by Dahlan’s defeat. Moreover, they can follow the lead and get rid of the werewolves who abused the name of Fatah in the service of Shin Bet.
Jonathan Steele correctly reminded us that “arming insurgents against elected governments has a long US pedigree, and it is no accident that Elliott Abrams, the deputy national security adviser and apparent architect of the anti-Hamas subversion, was a key player in Ronald Reagan's supply of weapons to the Contras who fought Nicaragua's elected government in the 1980s.” But those Contras, ubiquitously present at every revolution, the Chouans of the Vendée, the Contras of French revolution, the Cossacks of Don, the Contras of the Russian revolution, Savimbi’s Unita, the Contras of the Angolan revolution, did have some truth on their side, and expressed some legitimate interests. That is why we approve and support the merciful character of the Hamas revolution: Hamas' readiness to work together with healthier elements of Fatah for the Palestinian cause.
However, some lessons can and should be learned: Fatah leadership succumbed to the Israeli-American temptation because of its faulty ideology. Nationalism, this weapon of mass disintegration, was brought eastwards by the Western colonizers in order to divide and conquer. Until the 19th century, the East knew nothing of nationalism, for it was then united by faith and governed by their traditional rulers, the successors of Constantine the Great and Suleiman the Magnificent. T.E. Lawrence delivered the bacilli of nationalism to Hejaz in his Intelligence Service-packed saddle bag, and undermined this Eastern unity. He promised Arabs independence from the “hateful Ottomans”, but nothing good came out of their betrayal: British, American and later Zionist colonizers shared the spoils, while the natives became even more oppressed.
Nationalism is necessarily a particularist, “do it alone” sort of ideology. In Palestine, Egypt, Syria this was compensated for by a universalist socialism, but with the evaporation of this socialist element, Fatah remained with its faulty nationalism, doomed to failure. “They are nationalists like us”, say the Zionists from Sharon to Avnery about Fatah. “They will be happy with a flag, an anthem, a Swiss bank account -- like us. They will be content with a Bantustan or two”.
But Palestinians are not likely to betray Palestine for the illusion of independence. All Palestinians, that is, all dwellers of Palestine, native and immigrant, need all of it, not just two percent of Gaza and ten percent of a Ramallah enclave, but all 100%. We may have all of it together, not by dividing, but by sharing. Islam is a universal faith, like Christianity, and the its religious foundations are better suited for our universal state than yesterday’s nationalism, Arab or Zionist. A similar process is taking place in Turkey, where Kemalist nationalism has become an American ally propped up by soldiers’ bayonets, while the Islamic party is the choice of people.
People of the East believe in God; that is why Ex Oriente Lux. They also know from their experience that godless ones have nor scruples neither compassion, while we need compassionate leaders. Disregard the scarecrow of “Islamofascism” or “Islamic danger”. This is myth, created by Podhoretz and his ilk, an invented threat like Yellow Peril, Panslavism, Communism. We are not afraid of followers of Islam, because we live with them all our life, and it is good to balance love to one’s land by love to God.
The nation-building process in Palestine is far from over. A new paradigm should be found to unite its tribes and groups into one society, dismantling the Palestinian National Authority - and the Jewish state, as correctly stated by Avrum Burg. Separation and the drive for independence of this or any other part of Palestine turned out to be a bankrupt strategy. Palestine can’t be divided. Friends of Palestine and friends of Israel must work together to unify, not to separate.
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Russian Intifada
By Israel Shamir
The decision by the Estonian nationalist Prime Minister, Andrus Ansip, to uproot the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Tallinn brought this small Baltic state to the verge of civil war and severely disturbed peace in the region. The usually tranquil and delightful, Hansa-built Old Tallinn, surrounded by its long city wall with “Long Hermann” and “Fat Margaret,” two 15th century towers, is now full of heavily armed police, hundreds of detainees locked up and beaten up in Terminal D of the harbour, burned-down shops, torture and mistreatment, open ethnic conflict, vocal support of neocons – not what one expects to find in this pleasant country with its peaceful folks. The Eestlanes, the aborigines of the land -- tall, quiet and blue-eyed peasant folk -- were supposed to be so calm that “a red-hot Estonian lad” is a synonym for slow-wit among their neighbours. On the other hand, these good craftsmen and fishermen, fond of taking their coffee with the sweet liqueur Vana Tallinn, volunteered en masse for Nazi SS divisions and were prominent in ethnic cleansing campaigns.
For an Israeli, these Tallinn events had a strong touch of déjà vu. Uprooting of the Unknown Soldier Tomb was done by the nationalist government in a pointedly insulting and arrogant way. This triggered the Russian Intifada, the spontaneous uprising of the unprivileged. In a like manner, the provocative and arrogant visit of Ariel Sharon to the al-Aksa Mosque in the fateful September of 2000 had jumpstarted the Palestinian Intifada. In both cases a provocation was initiated by extreme nationalists of the ruling ethnic group keen on spoiling fragile inter-communal relations, for they feed on strife. In both cases, they claimed their unlimited right to do whatever they wish. In both cases, the media attention was concentrated on the response to provocation, rather than on its causes. For sure, the violent response of Palestinians in 2000 and Russians in 2007 -- their rioting, stone-throwing and shop-burning -- was obvious, visible and unpleasant. What is less visible is that each was a result of provocation, and of a long sequence of injustices leading to the outbreak of violence.
Estonia is notorious for coming as close to apartheid as any country in Europe since 1945. The Columbia Encyclopaedia tells us that “Estonians (Eestlanes) make up about 65% of the population; Russians constitute almost 30%, and there are Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Finnish minorities. Since independence (1991), citizenship has generally been limited to ethnic Estonians, a practice widely criticized because it denies political and civil rights to the many Russian-speaking inhabitants. In 1993 ethnic Russians were officially declared foreigners, raising even stronger objections.” The “Russians” of Estonia are of various origins – ethnic Ukrainian, Georgian, German, Armenian, Jewish, Russian – all non-aborigines are called “Russians”. The Russians were stripped of their citizenship, their ID cards are now stamped “Alien”, while in private, they are called ‘Negroes’ – an abbreviation of Ne-Gr, non-citizen.
This is not your ordinary immigrants-versus-natives conflict. The non-Eestlanes are no more “immigrants” in Estonia than Parisians are immigrants in Corsica, or Londoners in Wales. Estonia became Russian in 1721, before Corsica became French (in 1768), and remained in union with Russia until 1991, except for a short break (1921-1940). Non-aboriginal Estonians would be considered equal and ordinary citizens in every European country but new Estonia. Even “recent immigrants” moved to what became Estonia over fifty years ago in a perfectly legal way.
Estonia had all the preconditions for peaceful co-existence between its communities. The Russians had a positive attitude towards the native Eestlanes, their culture and their language in keeping with their tradition: indeed, the Eesti language survived and flourished, while the tongues of peoples with comparable territory and population, such as Breton, Cornish or Sorb (residing in the UK, France and Germany respectively) have all but vanished. Russian writers and poets were attracted by Tallinn’s Baltic charm, and made it a setting for many novels. While neighbouring Swedes considered Eestlanes uncouth and clumsy (“Estonian ballet” is a Swedish synonym for heavy and clumsy gait), the Russians nourished a flattering image of an Estonian as a silent, pipe-smoking he-man.
There is no clear racial divide, either: ethnic Russians are a fusion of Slav and Finnish tribes (like the French are a fusion of Celtic and Germanic ones), and they can’t be distinguished from the ethnic Estonians by their facial features. In the present conflict over the monument, Jurgen Ligi, Estonian ex-minister of defence, called for the removal of “the idol with monstrous Russian face”. The ignorant racist did not know that the “monstrous Russian face of the idol” was an Estonian face, sculpted after a known Estonian sportsman by Estonian artist Enn Roos.
The local Russians were extremely pro-Estonian: they liked the Estonians, they supported Estonian independence in 1991 and expected to remain citizens with full rights in new Estonia. “When the Eestlanes demanded independence, the Russian Estonian intelligentsia [the educated classes] not only supported them, but were in the forefront of the struggle” – writes Lara Larson, a Russian Estonian, whose blog http://laralarsen.livejournal.com/ is extremely popular these days. “Now we understand that the reasons were different: Eestlanes fought for their separate isolated life, while the Russians fought for democracy. The newly independent Estonia fitted the Eestlanes’ vision, while the democracy we looked for did not materialise. Non-Eestlanes were stripped of their civil rights. That was the first blow. There were many insults, we were habitually slighted. At first, we hoped it was a temporary development; and that soon, equality and fraternity would blossom. Indeed, there were improvements, but two years ago, an extreme nationalist government made things worse.”
“The Russian-speaking community is discriminated against. Officially, they just have no right to vote for the Parliament. But unofficial discrimination is much worse. The Russians suffer from heavy unemployment, they earn less; there are practically no Russians at the top. There are no Russians in the beefed-up state organisations. The Eestlanes practice full segregation in the working places. Does it mean that the Russians are less able, can’t be taught, are doomed to sweep streets? Probably not. The Language Laws provided the perfect machinery for discrimination, for they made it almost impossible for the Russians to become citizens: one has to show such a proficiency in the Eestlane language that an ordinary Eestlane can’t pass it. For instance, one has to pen a long essay extolling the advantages of investments in Estonia.”
“You could not get any job, even a verbally-non-demanding one, unless you pass the exam. The exams became more demanding every year; one has to be an extraordinary well-read and well-educated person to pass the test. Now they introduced a new measure: the language commission can check you anytime and void your exams if they would decide your knowledge of Eesti is not up to scratch. But even Estonian citizens of Russian origin were kept out of jobs and were discriminated against in many subtle and not-so-subtle ways.”
“The Tomb’s demolition was a trigger, rather. The discriminated part of population did not agree to take it laying down. Such sustained pressure and mistreatment could not last forever. Masses of people went out to the streets in protests, they had no leaders, no organisers, but they were fed up with discrimination. This is not a political conflict; this is a movement for civil rights, for equality.”
The strange idea of stripping natives of their citizenship because their fathers were born just across the present border seems out of place in Europe. In neighbouring Sweden every immigrant obtains Swedish citizenship, and becomes as much a Swede as the king (who is a descendent of immigrants himself, from France on his father’s side and from Germany on his mother’s). It is not necessary to master Swedish, though one may learn it at the state’s expense – as opposed to Estonia. An immigrant may take exams, get his driver’s license and fill out applications in his native tongue. In Finland, a small Swedish minority has full rights, and can freely use their language everywhere. There are no problems between the native majority and ethnic minorities in these countries.
The outbreak of the Russian Intifada should sound an alarm for Estonians. Instead of bewailing the burnt shops and writing offensive letters to their newspapers, they should give thought to what caused the riots, and change the situation to fit Swedish and Finnish model. They should void their language laws, give citizenship to their Russian-speaking minority and forbid discrimination. They should strive for equality, and elect a Russian for president, as the Indians elected a Muslim. Follow the Human Rights declaration. In short, they should get off the tree and enter 21st century.
The problem is, Estonians are the least believing, most godless folk in Europe, tells the Answers.com: according to the most recent Eurostat "Eurobarometer" poll, in 2005 [4], only 16% of Estonian citizens responded that "they believe there is a God". This, according to the survey, would have made Estonians the least religious people in Europe”, while the Russians of Estonia believe in Christ. So, though there are twice as many Eestlanes than Russians, Lutherans are 39% while the Orthodox are 28%. Godless population is easily trapped by nationalist myths. That is why they erect monuments to their SS fighters, foam about Russian occupation and Stalin’s repressions and publish racist attacks on “Slavic degenerates”. Forget Haider, forget Le Pen – these guys are liberals and democrats in comparison with the present Estonian leaders.
While Germany was severely punished and fully denazified, Estonia was considered a Nazi victim, rather than a willing collaborator with the Nazis. The Jerusalem Post noted “the active participation of numerous Estonians in WWII era crimes and the support of much of the local population for the Nazi occupation. There was no anti-Nazi underground or resistance movement of any kind in Estonia.” “Stalin’s repressions” were a form of de-Nazification less severe than that carried out by the Americans in occupied Germany. While Anglo-Americans caused the death of millions of Germans, while the French killed probably some 50,000 of their collaborators, Stalin’s denazification was not thorough enough. After 1991, the Nazi elements in Estonia made their come-back.
Ephraim Zurov of the Jerusalem Post writes: “The Estonian judicial authorities have invested much effort in prosecuting Communist criminals, mostly Russians, at least 10 of whom have already been convicted in Estonia. The same cannot be said, however, of the investigations carried out regarding Estonians who collaborated with the Nazis in the crimes of the Holocaust.
Not a single Estonian citizen who participated in the persecution and/or murder of Jews during WWII has been brought to trial by the Estonians, despite the existence of abundant incriminatory evidence”.
I have now spent a few days in Estonian Internet and it has been a shocking experience. Their writing oozes with hate and racism, much of it aimed at Russia. An official guide to Tallinn says that a Russian Tsar had built the beautiful Alexander Nevsky Cathedral “to obliterate the grave of Kalev, the Estonian hero”. It refers to destruction caused by the Red Army while taking Tallinn in 1944 in a most dramatic manner: not even the neo-Nazis in Germany speak in such terms.
This is one of the reasons for the trouble between the Eestlanes and the local Russians: the latter celebrate the V-day, while for the former this is a day of mourning. Surely there were native Estonians in the Red Army, but now their sons and daughters apologise that “they were forced to join”.
The pro-Nazi apartheid regime of Estonia is tolerated and supported by the West because the US and NATO needs an anti-Russian Estonia. The neocon flagship, the Wall Street Journal (30 April 2007, Estonia and the Bear), encouraged the Eestlanes to escalate their conflict with their Eastern neighbour. Once this newspaper pushed the Iraqi WMD threat, now, it decries “Russian involvement”: “Some of the 1,000 rioters arrested arrived only in recent days from Russia”, “The real inspiration was Moscow”.
This is far from true. Russia is doing good business with Estonia. Independent Estonia is rather useful for Russia, as a nearby banking centre, a good place for transhipping, for small import-export operations, for popular tourism. Russian businessmen send their oil via Estonian harbours and develop its infrastructure, use Estonian airline connections and build tourist projects. Russia does not want trouble in Estonia.
The Wall Street Journal and its neocons have no moral considerations; they preach human rights when it suits them, and ignore their breach when it fits their plans. They write: “[Estonians] insist, not unreasonably, that Russians learn a few words of their language to gain citizenship.” This is a lie. All inhabitants of Estonia know enough of the native language, but they can’t pass the test as its purpose is to deny equality to non-purebred Eestlanes. “And the majority of Latvian and Estonian Russians have gotten their citizenship”, says the WSJ, and this is another lie. Estonian apartheid is real, and it is obvious, but the neocons ignore it.
The Estonian PM Ansip explained his actions by the urgent need to rid central Tallinn of the graves of “marauders, drunkards and occupants”. His actions were applauded by the Wall Street Journal: “The Estonian government transferred the bronze statue of a Red Army soldier and exhumed remains of Soviet troops to a military cemetery near the capital. Estonians are generous to keep them at all: France doesn't have a memorial to the Nazi occupation.”
Who was buried there? The Unknown Soldier’s Tomb was a common grave of 12 Soviet soldiers who perished while taking Tallinn from the Germans. One of the twelve was a twenty-year-old Jewish girl soldier, Nurse Elena Warshawsky, born in Ukraine. Her revolutionary father Moses called her Lenina, but she preferred her less exotic name. She was killed in action on September 23, 1944. She was not an occupant; she was a young woman who died fighting the Nazis. Now her remains and the remains of her eleven comrades-in-arms have been removed by a tender Estonian bulldozer, while she is compared to the Nazis by the neocon WSJ.
The neocons are notorious for their lack of scruples, but this case takes the cake. A comparison of Israeli Jewish soldiers with Nazis is usually met with an outcry of condemnation by Israel and by its American friends including the WSJ. But no one objected when the WSJ compared Elena Warshawsky to the Nazis. Israel kept mum. Jewish organisations were silent as fish. The Jewish-owned and edited WSJ usually is quite vocal, and rightly so, when a Jewish grave is vandalised. But in this case, they applauded vandals.
Indeed why should they care about the dead Jewish girl, when they have bigger fish to fry: they try to cause confrontation between Estonia and Russia, they try to convince the Eestlanes that they may pull the bear’s whiskers under protection of the NATO shield: “the Kremlin can still stir the Baltic pot. Fortunately, as a NATO member, little Estonia doesn't fear for its life, circa 1940.”
Wrong again. In the 1930s, the predecessors of NATO, England and France, enticed Poland and Czechoslovakia in similar way to confront Russia and Germany. The Poles and the Czechs fell for the trick, they did all they could to provoke Russia and Germany believing that the West would help them. But in their time of need, the West dropped them like a hot brick. Tomorrow the West will repeat this manoeuvre with Estonia.
Estonians may learn much from their neighbour, Finland. In the 1930s, the Finns embraced an ambitious anti-Russian policy, to the great pleasure of the neocons’ spiritual fathers. They paid for it with two lost wars and a chunk of lost territory. After this painful lesson, Finland swapped its Mannerheim’s Line of confrontation with Russia for the Paasikivi Line of friendship with Russia. Finland has never had reason to regret it. The country flourished, prospered on its transit trade with the USSR, and afterwards with the new Russia. Finland stayed out of NATO, out of anti-Russian blocs, and remained perfectly independent, free and prosperous.
The external anti-Russian course of the present Estonian leadership is inherently connected with their internal apartheid. Unless Estonians change both, the days of their independence are numbered. One fine day, when the US tanks move in to establish “democracy” in Teheran, a Russian airborne division may provide an asymmetric answer by removing the apartheid regime in Tallinn. Great countries have their ways, and Russia may learn from the US treatment of independent and hostile Panama. The passage to the Gulf of Finland is no less important for the Russian fleet than the passage through the Panama Canal is for the American Navy. Unless the Estonian leadership wants to share the fate of President Manuel Noriega they should give thought to whether the US will fight for them. The Eestlanes will always have the Russians for their neighbours, unless they plan a great trek to Manitoba. The elimination of apartheid and the establishment of a Paasikivi Line of friendship with their great Eastern neighbour will guarantee Estonian independence better than NATO and the WSJ neocons.
The decision by the Estonian nationalist Prime Minister, Andrus Ansip, to uproot the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Tallinn brought this small Baltic state to the verge of civil war and severely disturbed peace in the region. The usually tranquil and delightful, Hansa-built Old Tallinn, surrounded by its long city wall with “Long Hermann” and “Fat Margaret,” two 15th century towers, is now full of heavily armed police, hundreds of detainees locked up and beaten up in Terminal D of the harbour, burned-down shops, torture and mistreatment, open ethnic conflict, vocal support of neocons – not what one expects to find in this pleasant country with its peaceful folks. The Eestlanes, the aborigines of the land -- tall, quiet and blue-eyed peasant folk -- were supposed to be so calm that “a red-hot Estonian lad” is a synonym for slow-wit among their neighbours. On the other hand, these good craftsmen and fishermen, fond of taking their coffee with the sweet liqueur Vana Tallinn, volunteered en masse for Nazi SS divisions and were prominent in ethnic cleansing campaigns.
For an Israeli, these Tallinn events had a strong touch of déjà vu. Uprooting of the Unknown Soldier Tomb was done by the nationalist government in a pointedly insulting and arrogant way. This triggered the Russian Intifada, the spontaneous uprising of the unprivileged. In a like manner, the provocative and arrogant visit of Ariel Sharon to the al-Aksa Mosque in the fateful September of 2000 had jumpstarted the Palestinian Intifada. In both cases a provocation was initiated by extreme nationalists of the ruling ethnic group keen on spoiling fragile inter-communal relations, for they feed on strife. In both cases, they claimed their unlimited right to do whatever they wish. In both cases, the media attention was concentrated on the response to provocation, rather than on its causes. For sure, the violent response of Palestinians in 2000 and Russians in 2007 -- their rioting, stone-throwing and shop-burning -- was obvious, visible and unpleasant. What is less visible is that each was a result of provocation, and of a long sequence of injustices leading to the outbreak of violence.
Estonia is notorious for coming as close to apartheid as any country in Europe since 1945. The Columbia Encyclopaedia tells us that “Estonians (Eestlanes) make up about 65% of the population; Russians constitute almost 30%, and there are Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Finnish minorities. Since independence (1991), citizenship has generally been limited to ethnic Estonians, a practice widely criticized because it denies political and civil rights to the many Russian-speaking inhabitants. In 1993 ethnic Russians were officially declared foreigners, raising even stronger objections.” The “Russians” of Estonia are of various origins – ethnic Ukrainian, Georgian, German, Armenian, Jewish, Russian – all non-aborigines are called “Russians”. The Russians were stripped of their citizenship, their ID cards are now stamped “Alien”, while in private, they are called ‘Negroes’ – an abbreviation of Ne-Gr, non-citizen.
This is not your ordinary immigrants-versus-natives conflict. The non-Eestlanes are no more “immigrants” in Estonia than Parisians are immigrants in Corsica, or Londoners in Wales. Estonia became Russian in 1721, before Corsica became French (in 1768), and remained in union with Russia until 1991, except for a short break (1921-1940). Non-aboriginal Estonians would be considered equal and ordinary citizens in every European country but new Estonia. Even “recent immigrants” moved to what became Estonia over fifty years ago in a perfectly legal way.
Estonia had all the preconditions for peaceful co-existence between its communities. The Russians had a positive attitude towards the native Eestlanes, their culture and their language in keeping with their tradition: indeed, the Eesti language survived and flourished, while the tongues of peoples with comparable territory and population, such as Breton, Cornish or Sorb (residing in the UK, France and Germany respectively) have all but vanished. Russian writers and poets were attracted by Tallinn’s Baltic charm, and made it a setting for many novels. While neighbouring Swedes considered Eestlanes uncouth and clumsy (“Estonian ballet” is a Swedish synonym for heavy and clumsy gait), the Russians nourished a flattering image of an Estonian as a silent, pipe-smoking he-man.
There is no clear racial divide, either: ethnic Russians are a fusion of Slav and Finnish tribes (like the French are a fusion of Celtic and Germanic ones), and they can’t be distinguished from the ethnic Estonians by their facial features. In the present conflict over the monument, Jurgen Ligi, Estonian ex-minister of defence, called for the removal of “the idol with monstrous Russian face”. The ignorant racist did not know that the “monstrous Russian face of the idol” was an Estonian face, sculpted after a known Estonian sportsman by Estonian artist Enn Roos.
The local Russians were extremely pro-Estonian: they liked the Estonians, they supported Estonian independence in 1991 and expected to remain citizens with full rights in new Estonia. “When the Eestlanes demanded independence, the Russian Estonian intelligentsia [the educated classes] not only supported them, but were in the forefront of the struggle” – writes Lara Larson, a Russian Estonian, whose blog http://laralarsen.livejournal.com/ is extremely popular these days. “Now we understand that the reasons were different: Eestlanes fought for their separate isolated life, while the Russians fought for democracy. The newly independent Estonia fitted the Eestlanes’ vision, while the democracy we looked for did not materialise. Non-Eestlanes were stripped of their civil rights. That was the first blow. There were many insults, we were habitually slighted. At first, we hoped it was a temporary development; and that soon, equality and fraternity would blossom. Indeed, there were improvements, but two years ago, an extreme nationalist government made things worse.”
“The Russian-speaking community is discriminated against. Officially, they just have no right to vote for the Parliament. But unofficial discrimination is much worse. The Russians suffer from heavy unemployment, they earn less; there are practically no Russians at the top. There are no Russians in the beefed-up state organisations. The Eestlanes practice full segregation in the working places. Does it mean that the Russians are less able, can’t be taught, are doomed to sweep streets? Probably not. The Language Laws provided the perfect machinery for discrimination, for they made it almost impossible for the Russians to become citizens: one has to show such a proficiency in the Eestlane language that an ordinary Eestlane can’t pass it. For instance, one has to pen a long essay extolling the advantages of investments in Estonia.”
“You could not get any job, even a verbally-non-demanding one, unless you pass the exam. The exams became more demanding every year; one has to be an extraordinary well-read and well-educated person to pass the test. Now they introduced a new measure: the language commission can check you anytime and void your exams if they would decide your knowledge of Eesti is not up to scratch. But even Estonian citizens of Russian origin were kept out of jobs and were discriminated against in many subtle and not-so-subtle ways.”
“The Tomb’s demolition was a trigger, rather. The discriminated part of population did not agree to take it laying down. Such sustained pressure and mistreatment could not last forever. Masses of people went out to the streets in protests, they had no leaders, no organisers, but they were fed up with discrimination. This is not a political conflict; this is a movement for civil rights, for equality.”
The strange idea of stripping natives of their citizenship because their fathers were born just across the present border seems out of place in Europe. In neighbouring Sweden every immigrant obtains Swedish citizenship, and becomes as much a Swede as the king (who is a descendent of immigrants himself, from France on his father’s side and from Germany on his mother’s). It is not necessary to master Swedish, though one may learn it at the state’s expense – as opposed to Estonia. An immigrant may take exams, get his driver’s license and fill out applications in his native tongue. In Finland, a small Swedish minority has full rights, and can freely use their language everywhere. There are no problems between the native majority and ethnic minorities in these countries.
The outbreak of the Russian Intifada should sound an alarm for Estonians. Instead of bewailing the burnt shops and writing offensive letters to their newspapers, they should give thought to what caused the riots, and change the situation to fit Swedish and Finnish model. They should void their language laws, give citizenship to their Russian-speaking minority and forbid discrimination. They should strive for equality, and elect a Russian for president, as the Indians elected a Muslim. Follow the Human Rights declaration. In short, they should get off the tree and enter 21st century.
The problem is, Estonians are the least believing, most godless folk in Europe, tells the Answers.com: according to the most recent Eurostat "Eurobarometer" poll, in 2005 [4], only 16% of Estonian citizens responded that "they believe there is a God". This, according to the survey, would have made Estonians the least religious people in Europe”, while the Russians of Estonia believe in Christ. So, though there are twice as many Eestlanes than Russians, Lutherans are 39% while the Orthodox are 28%. Godless population is easily trapped by nationalist myths. That is why they erect monuments to their SS fighters, foam about Russian occupation and Stalin’s repressions and publish racist attacks on “Slavic degenerates”. Forget Haider, forget Le Pen – these guys are liberals and democrats in comparison with the present Estonian leaders.
While Germany was severely punished and fully denazified, Estonia was considered a Nazi victim, rather than a willing collaborator with the Nazis. The Jerusalem Post noted “the active participation of numerous Estonians in WWII era crimes and the support of much of the local population for the Nazi occupation. There was no anti-Nazi underground or resistance movement of any kind in Estonia.” “Stalin’s repressions” were a form of de-Nazification less severe than that carried out by the Americans in occupied Germany. While Anglo-Americans caused the death of millions of Germans, while the French killed probably some 50,000 of their collaborators, Stalin’s denazification was not thorough enough. After 1991, the Nazi elements in Estonia made their come-back.
Ephraim Zurov of the Jerusalem Post writes: “The Estonian judicial authorities have invested much effort in prosecuting Communist criminals, mostly Russians, at least 10 of whom have already been convicted in Estonia. The same cannot be said, however, of the investigations carried out regarding Estonians who collaborated with the Nazis in the crimes of the Holocaust.
Not a single Estonian citizen who participated in the persecution and/or murder of Jews during WWII has been brought to trial by the Estonians, despite the existence of abundant incriminatory evidence”.
I have now spent a few days in Estonian Internet and it has been a shocking experience. Their writing oozes with hate and racism, much of it aimed at Russia. An official guide to Tallinn says that a Russian Tsar had built the beautiful Alexander Nevsky Cathedral “to obliterate the grave of Kalev, the Estonian hero”. It refers to destruction caused by the Red Army while taking Tallinn in 1944 in a most dramatic manner: not even the neo-Nazis in Germany speak in such terms.
This is one of the reasons for the trouble between the Eestlanes and the local Russians: the latter celebrate the V-day, while for the former this is a day of mourning. Surely there were native Estonians in the Red Army, but now their sons and daughters apologise that “they were forced to join”.
The pro-Nazi apartheid regime of Estonia is tolerated and supported by the West because the US and NATO needs an anti-Russian Estonia. The neocon flagship, the Wall Street Journal (30 April 2007, Estonia and the Bear), encouraged the Eestlanes to escalate their conflict with their Eastern neighbour. Once this newspaper pushed the Iraqi WMD threat, now, it decries “Russian involvement”: “Some of the 1,000 rioters arrested arrived only in recent days from Russia”, “The real inspiration was Moscow”.
This is far from true. Russia is doing good business with Estonia. Independent Estonia is rather useful for Russia, as a nearby banking centre, a good place for transhipping, for small import-export operations, for popular tourism. Russian businessmen send their oil via Estonian harbours and develop its infrastructure, use Estonian airline connections and build tourist projects. Russia does not want trouble in Estonia.
The Wall Street Journal and its neocons have no moral considerations; they preach human rights when it suits them, and ignore their breach when it fits their plans. They write: “[Estonians] insist, not unreasonably, that Russians learn a few words of their language to gain citizenship.” This is a lie. All inhabitants of Estonia know enough of the native language, but they can’t pass the test as its purpose is to deny equality to non-purebred Eestlanes. “And the majority of Latvian and Estonian Russians have gotten their citizenship”, says the WSJ, and this is another lie. Estonian apartheid is real, and it is obvious, but the neocons ignore it.
The Estonian PM Ansip explained his actions by the urgent need to rid central Tallinn of the graves of “marauders, drunkards and occupants”. His actions were applauded by the Wall Street Journal: “The Estonian government transferred the bronze statue of a Red Army soldier and exhumed remains of Soviet troops to a military cemetery near the capital. Estonians are generous to keep them at all: France doesn't have a memorial to the Nazi occupation.”
Who was buried there? The Unknown Soldier’s Tomb was a common grave of 12 Soviet soldiers who perished while taking Tallinn from the Germans. One of the twelve was a twenty-year-old Jewish girl soldier, Nurse Elena Warshawsky, born in Ukraine. Her revolutionary father Moses called her Lenina, but she preferred her less exotic name. She was killed in action on September 23, 1944. She was not an occupant; she was a young woman who died fighting the Nazis. Now her remains and the remains of her eleven comrades-in-arms have been removed by a tender Estonian bulldozer, while she is compared to the Nazis by the neocon WSJ.
The neocons are notorious for their lack of scruples, but this case takes the cake. A comparison of Israeli Jewish soldiers with Nazis is usually met with an outcry of condemnation by Israel and by its American friends including the WSJ. But no one objected when the WSJ compared Elena Warshawsky to the Nazis. Israel kept mum. Jewish organisations were silent as fish. The Jewish-owned and edited WSJ usually is quite vocal, and rightly so, when a Jewish grave is vandalised. But in this case, they applauded vandals.
Indeed why should they care about the dead Jewish girl, when they have bigger fish to fry: they try to cause confrontation between Estonia and Russia, they try to convince the Eestlanes that they may pull the bear’s whiskers under protection of the NATO shield: “the Kremlin can still stir the Baltic pot. Fortunately, as a NATO member, little Estonia doesn't fear for its life, circa 1940.”
Wrong again. In the 1930s, the predecessors of NATO, England and France, enticed Poland and Czechoslovakia in similar way to confront Russia and Germany. The Poles and the Czechs fell for the trick, they did all they could to provoke Russia and Germany believing that the West would help them. But in their time of need, the West dropped them like a hot brick. Tomorrow the West will repeat this manoeuvre with Estonia.
Estonians may learn much from their neighbour, Finland. In the 1930s, the Finns embraced an ambitious anti-Russian policy, to the great pleasure of the neocons’ spiritual fathers. They paid for it with two lost wars and a chunk of lost territory. After this painful lesson, Finland swapped its Mannerheim’s Line of confrontation with Russia for the Paasikivi Line of friendship with Russia. Finland has never had reason to regret it. The country flourished, prospered on its transit trade with the USSR, and afterwards with the new Russia. Finland stayed out of NATO, out of anti-Russian blocs, and remained perfectly independent, free and prosperous.
The external anti-Russian course of the present Estonian leadership is inherently connected with their internal apartheid. Unless Estonians change both, the days of their independence are numbered. One fine day, when the US tanks move in to establish “democracy” in Teheran, a Russian airborne division may provide an asymmetric answer by removing the apartheid regime in Tallinn. Great countries have their ways, and Russia may learn from the US treatment of independent and hostile Panama. The passage to the Gulf of Finland is no less important for the Russian fleet than the passage through the Panama Canal is for the American Navy. Unless the Estonian leadership wants to share the fate of President Manuel Noriega they should give thought to whether the US will fight for them. The Eestlanes will always have the Russians for their neighbours, unless they plan a great trek to Manitoba. The elimination of apartheid and the establishment of a Paasikivi Line of friendship with their great Eastern neighbour will guarantee Estonian independence better than NATO and the WSJ neocons.
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Clio Gagged
By Israel Shamir
Dear Reader,
Italy is glorious this time of year, with lush green grass covering valleys, with first figs breaking out, and cherry blossoms already being blown away by spring rains. I was there at a conference on Holocaust and the Middle East: the Gagged History, organised by the great Professor Claudio Moffa, a Paul Newman look-alike; a tall, lanky, noble-looking and blue-eyed Italian who excels in charging into one-way lanes the wrong way. His dislike for prohibitions is not limited to traffic signs: it seems it is enough to put a No Entry sign anywhere, even in some historical discussion, and the man will charge head on. He found the hottest and most tabooed part of European discourse and organised a conference, well attended by history professors, - from the Universities of Siena and Calabria, Torino and Napoli, Rome and Urbino, by writers and journalists from all over Italy, me being the only foreigner. The conference took place in Moffa’s university of Teramo, a charming, quaint medieval town in the Abruzzi Mountains, in the shade of Gran Sasso's snow peaks. Among many attendees and speakers I’d mention Prof Mauro Manno, whose articles you can find on my site, and Dr Tiberio Graziani, the editor of Eurasia Magazine. You can read about the conference, and the talks given there on Prof Moffa’s site http://www.mastermatteimedioriente.it/ , while here I offer you my talk:
(A Talk given in Teramo University, Italy, at the Conference on Holocaust and the Middle East: the Gagged History, on April 18, 2007)
One should not be amazed that the gentle muse of history, Clio, finds herself gagged. History is not a peaceful collection of facts and trivia. History is a perpetual tug-of-war, for its re-writing may change the world. One can’t change the past, so goes the old adage, and it is true. But if we are dissatisfied with our present, we may change our understanding of past, and this will change our future. This has been known since time immemorial, and this is why history was given into custody of sacred keepers, to ensure the power structure and some continuity. Whoever controls the past determines the future. The subject of this conference deals exactly with this topic: we are dissatisfied with present, we turn to the past, and by re-assessing it we plan to influence future. If some parts of the historical narrative are strongly defended, or perverted outright, the more reason we have to attack it.
By no means is the Holocaust the only vigorously defended domain of history, where an offender may find himself in deep water. The old case of Jewish human sacrifices re-emerged recently in Italy, with the publication of Professor Ariel Toaff’s book, Passovers of Blood. As you may already know, Prof Toaff proved that some Jews accused of kidnapping and killing Christian children in the Middle Ages were actually guilty as charged. They were executed for brutal murder, and they weren’t victims of alleged Christian prejudice or primordial antisemitism. One may think it would be a reason for celebration: the criminals were not libelled but properly punished; justice was carried out, and modern Jews should be happy that the medieval anti-Jewish prejudice is but a myth, akin to the myth of Germans turning Jews into soap.
But the Jewish organisations were not happy at all. They attacked the Jewish Professor of Medieval Jewish studies in an Israeli University; the mentally tortured, almost crucified professor Toaff withdrew and destroyed the book (mercifully in our days it is not that easy, and the book can be read on the web on http://www.vho.org/aaargh/fran/livres7/pasque.pdf ), surrendered the small amount of money he got from the publisher to the Jewish inquisition of ADL, and was forced to a new act of repentance.
The Israeli parliament (Knesset) plans to send Dr Toaff to jail, others intend to sue him for all it is worth, and see that he dies a pauper and an outcast. Here in Italy, it is natural to compare Dr Toaff with Galileo, this great Italian scholar, who was persecuted for his scientific discovery, and preferred repentance to a fiery death.
But the actual achievement of Dr Toaff is best compared to that of his Italian Jewish colleague, Dr Carlo Ginzburg, the author of The Witches’ Sabbath. Ginzburg proved that the Friulians, that is people of Friuli, neighbours of Venice, were dabbling in Black Magic, growing out of its ancient fertility ritual. Toaff achieved a similar result for the Jews, that they were dabbling in Black Magic and that it grew out of their ancient cult of vengeance and salvation-through-blood. But the Friulians remained calm, while the Jews almost lynched the Professor, thus proving that the Friulians are open-minded folk that can look with mild curiosity at the misdeeds of their ancestors, while the Jews still cannot come to terms with their non-exclusivity, their non-Chosenness, and their non-sacrality.
Together with Dr Ginzburg, Dr Toaff had completed the process of reassessment of the Middle Ages which was well described by Mircea Eliade in his Occultism, Witchcraft, and Cultural Fashions. Eliade wrote: “Some 80 years ago, prominent scholars Joseph Hansen and Henry Charles Lee considered the black magic an invention of inquisition, not of the sorcerers. They considered the stories of witches’ Sabbath, of Satanist rites, orgies and crimes to be a whim of imagination or a result of torture-induced confessions. Now we know, - writes Eliade, - that black magic was not invented by inquisition”. Nor, we may add, the Jewish human sacrifices that were proven beyond reasonable doubt.
Toaff dealt with the case of Simon of Trent, a child ritually murdered by the Jewish black magicians. The guilt of a few Jews was established by the best court of law anybody could have those days, and the innocent Jews did not suffer more than innocent Muslims have suffered in the US after 9/11. Another case was that of Hugh of Lincoln, a child ritually murdered in 1255: out of 90 Jews detained in the aftermath of the crime, over 70 were released unharmed as their innocence was established, while those found guilty were hanged: hardly a case of “mob justice”!
In a blatant case of ethnic bias, the Jewish-edited Wikipedia described Hugh of Lincoln as “allegedly murdered”, while the proven accusation is termed “blood libel”. “Blood libel” is a standard definition of these cases, implying that always-innocent Jews were libelled by prejudiced Christians. But, if a moral lesson can be extracted from these old criminal cases, then it is that the European sense of justice and fairness invariably prevailed; while guilty Jews were punished, innocent Jews lived and prospered as the only non-Christian community in Europe.
Muslim justice was not worse, either: in an 1840 Damascus case, a Catholic friar was murdered by a few Jews who confessed to the crime and were punished. But this did not interfere with prosperity of their brethren, and Farkhi, a Jew of Acre, was considered the richest man in Syria after the affair as well. This case was investigated by the great Orientalist, Sir Richard Burton, the British consul in Damascus, who began as an avowed philosemite (“'Had I choice of race there is none to which I would more willingly have belonged than the Jewish”) but accepted the guilty verdict in this case, and wrote a full exposition of the affair. The London Jews paid good money to buy the Burton manuscript from his heirs, and it has never been published to this very day, being kept in the cellars of the Board of Deputies of British Jews. A British Jewish journalist Aaronovitch chided Syria for a Syrian minister daring to write about it; Aaronovitch never mentioned the Burton investigation, just exclaimed “blood libel” as if this explains everything.
Indeed, before there was the Holocaust, there was blood libel. When one reads Jewish and Judeophile pre-WWII texts, one notices that the place currently occupied by the Holocaust dogma in the Judeocentric universe was not vacant; it was taken by pogroms in Russia, by the Dreyfus trial, by the Inquisition, by the expulsion from Spain, by the destruction of the Temple and to a great extent by the “blood libel”. They carried the same message: they proclaimed eternal, unique, reasonless and baseless suffering of Jews caused by the irrational hate of Gentiles; they united and mobilized Jews against the Gentiles; they deflated some envy, hostility and distrust into pity, even engendering guilt feelings among the best of goyim.
The case of Dr Toaff may help our friends who are over-involved with the Holocaust narrative to see the point. I respect the dissidents/deniers for their going against the stream, but I do not share their enthusiasm. Yes, these tales of undeserved and unique suffering could be argued against on the factual grounds. This is what Dr Serge Thion did in connection to the Holocaust, noting that Elie Wiesel, the great narrator of Holocaust, preferred to stick to his Nazi persecutors rather than stay with his Russian liberators. This is what Dr Toaff and Sir Richard Burton did with respect to blood sacrifices, proving that the authorities’ response was measured and legitimate.
The Russian historian Kozhinov dealt with the Russian pogroms proving that more non-Jews than Jews were killed in these violent encounters. The greatest and the bloodiest pogrom, that of Kishinev, was described by Bialik, the national Jewish poet, as the greatest of massacres with blood flooding the streets, and in recent issue of Haaretz, an Israeli journalist wrote that “no one doubts the Russian nation's right to exist because Christians in Kishinev at the beginning of the 20th century stuck nails into the eyes of Jewish children.” However, as opposed to the cases of the Italian and English babies tortured to death by Jewish black magicians, the allegations of “nails into the eyes etc” were a flight of fantasy disproved almost instantly, while the total loss of life in Kishinev amounted to 45, a quarter of Deir Yassin, a month's harvest of the Intifada.
So all these stories of unprovoked suffering can be deconstructed, but why bother, if the only thing the producers of the narratives wish to convey is that Jews are unique and special, have suffered more than anybody else and that is why they are entitled to have their way, are the best there is, while whoever doubts it is obsessed by mystic antisemitism. These narratives are brought forth to wake Jewish fury against their alleged persecutors, c’est tout.
I take great dislike to these victimhood stories, and not only because they are factually weak. The victimhood stories are not the result, but a cause of suffering. Whenever these stories of unprovoked persecution are being delivered, have no doubt: their promoters are preparing a beastly atrocity of their own. Jews brandished the story of the holocaust and erased the peaceful Palestinian population in 1948. Armenians recited the story of their unique unprovoked suffering, and massacred innocent Azeri civilians in Qarabag in 1991-94 war, sending hundreds thousands of refugees to Baku. Poles and Czechs inflamed by stories of their suffering under the Reich expelled millions of ethnic Germans from their ancestral lands, while Ukrainians who told the stories of their suffering in Rzecz Pospolita slaughtered the Poles of Volyn by the thousands.
National politics parallel gender politics, as it was outlined by Otto Weininger: thus, the feminists promoted a narrative of women’s suffering under their eternal male oppressor, and caused the breakdown of many families, the impoverishment of women and the emasculation of men. A narrative of this kind may be balanced by a counter-narrative. While it is true that men lead in physical violence, women are much more efficient in verbal aggression. The lashing tongue of Lady Macbeth was no less guilty than Macbeth’s piercing knife. Women do know how to provoke a man; and men respond – sometimes with a kiss, sometimes with a blow, sometimes with a bullet. Jose killed, but Carmen provoked. Despite the much promoted myth of the muscular Barb Wire type of girl, women are less successful when it comes to physical blows, so they tend to forbid physical violence but allow the verbal one and outlaw the very concept of provocation.
Coming back to the subject, if Turks killed, the Armenians provoked; and whenever there were actions against Jews they were caused by actions of Jews. Indeed, a through-and-through denier, I deny the very existence of antisemitism, the “irrational hate towards Jews”. It does not exist. Jewry was fought against, as every power, from Roman Catholic Church to Standard Oil Co was. Jews are not lambs, but quite an active factor of ideological and economic life. One may be for or against them. But “hate”? Surely not. Non-Jews have usually been fairer to Jews than the other way around. Even the “blood libel” turned out to be not a libel but a regular criminal case.
Were there anti-Jewish actions, in Europe and in the Middle East? Surely they were. But were they caused by “irrational hate”? Hate my foot! In 1911, the US government undid the mighty empire of John D. Rockefeller. Not being a Jew, Rockefeller could not claim it was due to antisemitism. He did not say that it was because they did not like his looks, race, breed, manners, or that’s divine punishment for his sins. They broke up the Standard Oil Company because it became too powerful. For the same good reason, Russian President Vladimir Putin broke up the oil company of his unruly oligarchs. Not because they were Jews, or because they supported democracy. Power creates the demand for a countering power, force calls for counterforce, and Jews were and are a power.
Jewry is stronger than the Catholic Church, as we learn from the fate of an Italian scientist we can compare Dr Toaff with. Yesterday, just off the main square, I saw a plaque commemorating Giordano Bruno, the martyr of science. It said: “He was killed by the Catholic Church, the enemy of science.” Go over hundreds of books, crawl all over Internet, you will read that the Church is guilty of this crime. You can say it freely, and nobody will scream at you hysterically: “ALL the Church? All billion of Catholics from Brazil to Poland are guilty? Shame on you! You are anti-Catholic!” Actually, the late Pope even apologised for it, as was his wont.
In vain you’ll look for a plaque commemorating a Jewish philosopher, scientist and sceptic Rabbi Samuel Ibn Zarza, the author of Miklal Yofi, who expressed his doubt about Creation, and was burned at the stake in Valencia – by order of the Jews. Now, I wait to hear the shout “All the Jews? Antisemite!” What, nobody says it? Good, we may proceed. In the Book of Lineage, a 15th century Jewish book I had pleasure of translating (into English), there is a gloss saying “When the Rabbis read ‘The year such and such since creation of the world’ this Zarza fellow placed his hand on his beard and alluded to the world’s pre-existence by holding the hairs of his beard. The Chief Rabbi Isaac Campanton stood up in his place and said, ‘Why is the bush not being burnt? Let the bush burn!’ (Zarza is a sort of bush in the Castilian; so this pun alludes to Exodus 3:3) The Rabbis led him to the tribunal and had him sentenced to death by burning for confessing pre-existence of the world.”
So there are two scientists, both burned, but one was sent to the stake by the Church, while another one by the Jews. If you go into the details, you can find even more similarities. Samuel Ibn Zarza was executed by the tribunal at the instigation of the Jews. There are some hints that the Jews were active behind the scenes in sending Giordano Bruno to his death as well, for he was strongly anti-Jewish. Giordano Bruno called the Jews 'such a pestilential, leprous, and publicly dangerous race that they deserved to be rooted out and destroyed even before their birth.' (Giordano Bruno, Spacio della Bestis Trionfante (1584). This opinion contributed to his execution, for even then, the Jews could access the authorities’ ears, and there were always enough officials ready to follow their orders. But in the case of Bruno, there are no visible traces, thus his case remains known, while the case of Samuel Ibn Zarza is forgotten or denied.
If you open the Jewish-edited Wikipedia, you’ll read: “though Samuel Shalom (a 16th century Jewish sage) states that Zarza was burned at the stake by the tribunal of Valencia on the denunciation of Rabbi Isaac Campanton, who accused him of denying the creation of the world, historians have proved this assertion a mere legend.” Thus, the Jewish history-making and vetting Ministry of Truth still can decide and rule what happened and what was and remains a “mere legend”. The Catholic Church can’t even dream of such power.
Can one quantify Jewish power? Some months ago, the British weekly Economist published an unusual map of the world: a country’s territory was represented in proportion to its GNP. This is a revealing map: India was smaller than Holland, all of Latin America was only as big as Italy; Israel was bigger than all its Arab neighbours. This map was not exactly the map of power: in order to draw the true map of the world one should consider other parameters as well: gun power, nuclear and conventional capability, discursive influence connected with output of films, books, newspapers, university cathedras, international positions. On such a power map, Jewry would look impressive enough. The Jews are an important power in the world we live in. It is a first-rate power, stronger than the Catholic Church, surely stronger than Italy or any single European state, stronger than Shell and Agip or any trans-national corporation.
In space studies, there is a phenomenon called the black hole: a very dense and heavy star changes the geometry of surrounding space, and rays of light can’t escape the gravitation trap it creates. Such a black hole star is invisible because it is very powerful. Likewise, Jewry is a black hole. It is so powerful that it is not seen. One is not allowed to see it. This is the strongest taboo of our day. The famous “tail wags the dog” discussion about the Jewish Lobby in the US, is an attempt to go around the taboo without actually breaking it. For sure, a small Middle Eastern country called Israel can’t possibly “wag the US dog”. The Israel Lobby of AIPAC and sundry can’t influence much, despite its efforts. But the Israel Lobby and the state of Israel are perceived as manifestations of the Black hole, of the great unmentionable: of Jewry.
In a recent debate between James Petras and Norman Finkelstein, Dr Petras comes very close to real thing as he describes the pro-Israel lobby as “a whole string of pro-Zionist think tanks from the American Enterprise Institute on down, and … a whole power configuration, which not only involves AIPAC, but also the Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations, which number 52… and individuals occupying crucial positions in the government (Elliott Abrams and Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and others), … the army of op-ed writers who have access to the major newspapers… the super-rich contributors to the Democratic Party, Media moguls with the leverage in Congress and in the Executive”. It is not a lobby, it is Jewry.
Why is Jewry so powerful now? In my book, Pardes, I give an explanation: historically an alternative church, Jewry had a traditional enemy in the Apostolic church. When the Roman Catholic church’s hold was broken, the alternative one spurted forth. But if this explanation is too complicated, or unacceptable to strict materialists, one can translate it into dollars and pounds.
Recently, Jewish pundit Zev Chafets rose in defence of American sportsman Richardson who was suspended for saying that the Jews are powerful and crafty. He said: “The Jews have got the best security system in the world. Have you ever been to an airport in Tel Aviv? They're real crafty. Listen, they are hated all over the world, so they've got to be crafty. They got a lot of power in this world, you know what I mean? Which I think is great. I don't think there's nothing wrong with it. If you look in most professional sports, they're run by Jewish people. If you look at a lot of most successful corporations and stuff, more businesses, they're run by Jewish [sic]. It's not a knock, but they are some crafty people."
Chafets retorted: “Excuse me, but Richardson didn't say anything offensive. In fact, Jews, as a people, are smart, in my experience. And they're proud of it (especially the dumb ones). What other hurtful things did Richardson supposedly say? That Israel has the best airport security in the world? This is both true and something Israel itself brags about. That Jews are hated and need to protect themselves? That's the founding premise of the Anti-Defamation League itself. Sure, Richardson exaggerates when he says that Jews own most sports teams. As far as I can tell, Jews (about 1% of the population) only own about half the teams in the NBA (and a pretty fair proportion in baseball and football too). So what? As to the observation that Jews run a lot of successful businesses, no kidding. Jews are very likely the most economically successful ethnic group in the U.S. What's the matter with that?”
This question (“What's the matter with that?”) was answered by David C. Johnston in the New York Times. He wrote: “Income inequality [in the US] grew significantly in 2005, with the top 1 percent of Americans - those with incomes that year of more than $348,000 - receiving their largest share of national income since 1928, analysis of newly released tax data shows. The new data also shows that the top 300,000 Americans collectively enjoyed almost as much income as the bottom 150 million Americans. Per person, the top group received 440 times as much as the average person in the bottom half earned, nearly doubling the gap from 1980.”
A question Johnston does not answer (nor even posits) is: out of “the top 300,000 Americans who collectively enjoyed almost as much income as the bottom 150 million Americans” how many belong to “the most economically successful ethnic group in the U.S”? Isn’t it to be expected that – in absence of a national church or other non-economical limiters - their influence on the US politics would be roughly proportional to their joint income?
“Democracy” is an ideal political system where each person has one vote and all votes are equal. This ideal can hardly be realised even in the absence of economic inequality, for there are more and less influential people by their very abilities. In the conditions described by Johnston, when one member of elite has the income of 500 ordinary people, democracy is severely undermined. But this ideal is betrayed outright if these elite people own mass media and thus have an ability to shape the world view of others. If these media lords pool their resources as happens in the US, democracy loses its meaning. I agree wholeheartedly with Frau Merkel who said: “A free press is the cornerstone of our society and the basis for all freedoms." But I can’t even guess why she considers the press as being free if it is owned by Jewish and Judeophile media lords, like Alfred Neven DuMont, owner of one of Germany's oldest publishing houses and part-owner of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, (she spoke at his birthday party) or your own Berlusconi? Why is this press freer than a state-controlled press, as in Putin’s Russia? A State can anyway claim to represent all its citizens.
Why do I stress “Jewish and Judeophile media lords”? Surely “media lords” would suffice? Not really. A DuMont-owned Haaretz may run a piece called Confessions of an anti-German racist, but a DuMont-owned German newspaper would never run a piece by a man who dislikes Jews. Judeophilia integrates the media lords and their holdings into one totalitarian machine, like Communist ideology integrated all Soviet media into one totalitarian (and boring) device. This comparison may be developed: in the US and in the West in general, Jewry occupies the controlling heights once kept by the Communist Party in the USSR: practically unmentioned in the Constitution, formally not a part of state apparatus, this opaque body controls all processes and is not controlled by external forces. Joe Public is not represented at the board of Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations, just as Ivan Publicoff was not represented in the Politburo.
Once, this position was occupied by the Church. Anticlerical campaigns consumed much of people’s energy and thought in the end of 19th and beginning of 20th century. The major complaint was that the church controlled society, but was not controlled by society. The Communist party in Russia (or the fascist one in your country, with all the difference recognized and acknowledged) faced the same complaint. Now is the time to address the latest usurper, for the majority did not appoint Jewry to guide and control its thinking process. The excessive influence of Jewry is an indicator of lack of democracy: in a truly democratic country, Jewry would have an influence proportional to its numbers. But history is not over yet, and freedom can be ushered in by sending Jewry the way the Church and the Party went, i.e. into a modest niche of our dynamic society.
Holocaust revisionists believe that the Jewish power will collapse if the Holocaust narrative is undermined. They believe that “Jewish power is founded upon the lie”. I disagree. The power of Jewry is quite real, it is based on money, ideology and everything a power could be established upon. This real power could and should be undone, and then the Holocaust narrative will be of no interest to anyone but the next-of-kin.
Led by love of freedom and by compassion, this solution will be good for individual Jews. What is the position of an individual Jew versus Jewry? It is the same as of an individual Party member versus the Party. In the last days of the Soviet Union, there were 16 million Party members; it was profitable to be a member; but when the Party membership ceased to bring benefits, the membership shrunk down to a few hundred thousand. See it not as a tragedy: yesterday’s Communists regained freedom. Some of them (like Yeltsin) became anticommunists, others dropped politics and went into faith, or trade, or business. Those that remained Communists do not regret the collapse either: they parted with hypocrites and do not have to try and please millions of petit bourgeois; they may proclaim their true belief.
Likewise, undoing of Jewry by bringing its influence into proportion to its numbers will cause mass ideological exodus. Out of 16 million Jews, probably a few hundred thousand believers will remain faithful to the Mosaic Law and to Talmud and Cabbala study (God bless them!), while the rest will find other interests and allegiances (God bless them, too). All of them will be grateful to dissidents like Dr Toaff who buried the myth of antisemitism and helped them to regain freedom.
Can’t they be free within this framework of Jewry? In the 1970s-80s, a similar discussion went on regarding freedom and pluralism within the Communist Party. Eventually, it did not work out. Jewry is not less monolithic than the Party, it also allows for some spread of opinions, but the spread is not wide enough. On the right end, there is Gilad Sharon, who wants to strip non-Jews of their Israeli citizenship, on the left end, there is Uri Avnery, who actually proposes the same. We may and should help Jews to regain freedom, like the Party members, and before them, Church attendees, were helped to recover their freedom of choice.
Dear Reader,
Italy is glorious this time of year, with lush green grass covering valleys, with first figs breaking out, and cherry blossoms already being blown away by spring rains. I was there at a conference on Holocaust and the Middle East: the Gagged History, organised by the great Professor Claudio Moffa, a Paul Newman look-alike; a tall, lanky, noble-looking and blue-eyed Italian who excels in charging into one-way lanes the wrong way. His dislike for prohibitions is not limited to traffic signs: it seems it is enough to put a No Entry sign anywhere, even in some historical discussion, and the man will charge head on. He found the hottest and most tabooed part of European discourse and organised a conference, well attended by history professors, - from the Universities of Siena and Calabria, Torino and Napoli, Rome and Urbino, by writers and journalists from all over Italy, me being the only foreigner. The conference took place in Moffa’s university of Teramo, a charming, quaint medieval town in the Abruzzi Mountains, in the shade of Gran Sasso's snow peaks. Among many attendees and speakers I’d mention Prof Mauro Manno, whose articles you can find on my site, and Dr Tiberio Graziani, the editor of Eurasia Magazine. You can read about the conference, and the talks given there on Prof Moffa’s site http://www.mastermatteimedioriente.it/ , while here I offer you my talk:
(A Talk given in Teramo University, Italy, at the Conference on Holocaust and the Middle East: the Gagged History, on April 18, 2007)
One should not be amazed that the gentle muse of history, Clio, finds herself gagged. History is not a peaceful collection of facts and trivia. History is a perpetual tug-of-war, for its re-writing may change the world. One can’t change the past, so goes the old adage, and it is true. But if we are dissatisfied with our present, we may change our understanding of past, and this will change our future. This has been known since time immemorial, and this is why history was given into custody of sacred keepers, to ensure the power structure and some continuity. Whoever controls the past determines the future. The subject of this conference deals exactly with this topic: we are dissatisfied with present, we turn to the past, and by re-assessing it we plan to influence future. If some parts of the historical narrative are strongly defended, or perverted outright, the more reason we have to attack it.
By no means is the Holocaust the only vigorously defended domain of history, where an offender may find himself in deep water. The old case of Jewish human sacrifices re-emerged recently in Italy, with the publication of Professor Ariel Toaff’s book, Passovers of Blood. As you may already know, Prof Toaff proved that some Jews accused of kidnapping and killing Christian children in the Middle Ages were actually guilty as charged. They were executed for brutal murder, and they weren’t victims of alleged Christian prejudice or primordial antisemitism. One may think it would be a reason for celebration: the criminals were not libelled but properly punished; justice was carried out, and modern Jews should be happy that the medieval anti-Jewish prejudice is but a myth, akin to the myth of Germans turning Jews into soap.
But the Jewish organisations were not happy at all. They attacked the Jewish Professor of Medieval Jewish studies in an Israeli University; the mentally tortured, almost crucified professor Toaff withdrew and destroyed the book (mercifully in our days it is not that easy, and the book can be read on the web on http://www.vho.org/aaargh/fran/livres7/pasque.pdf ), surrendered the small amount of money he got from the publisher to the Jewish inquisition of ADL, and was forced to a new act of repentance.
The Israeli parliament (Knesset) plans to send Dr Toaff to jail, others intend to sue him for all it is worth, and see that he dies a pauper and an outcast. Here in Italy, it is natural to compare Dr Toaff with Galileo, this great Italian scholar, who was persecuted for his scientific discovery, and preferred repentance to a fiery death.
But the actual achievement of Dr Toaff is best compared to that of his Italian Jewish colleague, Dr Carlo Ginzburg, the author of The Witches’ Sabbath. Ginzburg proved that the Friulians, that is people of Friuli, neighbours of Venice, were dabbling in Black Magic, growing out of its ancient fertility ritual. Toaff achieved a similar result for the Jews, that they were dabbling in Black Magic and that it grew out of their ancient cult of vengeance and salvation-through-blood. But the Friulians remained calm, while the Jews almost lynched the Professor, thus proving that the Friulians are open-minded folk that can look with mild curiosity at the misdeeds of their ancestors, while the Jews still cannot come to terms with their non-exclusivity, their non-Chosenness, and their non-sacrality.
Together with Dr Ginzburg, Dr Toaff had completed the process of reassessment of the Middle Ages which was well described by Mircea Eliade in his Occultism, Witchcraft, and Cultural Fashions. Eliade wrote: “Some 80 years ago, prominent scholars Joseph Hansen and Henry Charles Lee considered the black magic an invention of inquisition, not of the sorcerers. They considered the stories of witches’ Sabbath, of Satanist rites, orgies and crimes to be a whim of imagination or a result of torture-induced confessions. Now we know, - writes Eliade, - that black magic was not invented by inquisition”. Nor, we may add, the Jewish human sacrifices that were proven beyond reasonable doubt.
Toaff dealt with the case of Simon of Trent, a child ritually murdered by the Jewish black magicians. The guilt of a few Jews was established by the best court of law anybody could have those days, and the innocent Jews did not suffer more than innocent Muslims have suffered in the US after 9/11. Another case was that of Hugh of Lincoln, a child ritually murdered in 1255: out of 90 Jews detained in the aftermath of the crime, over 70 were released unharmed as their innocence was established, while those found guilty were hanged: hardly a case of “mob justice”!
In a blatant case of ethnic bias, the Jewish-edited Wikipedia described Hugh of Lincoln as “allegedly murdered”, while the proven accusation is termed “blood libel”. “Blood libel” is a standard definition of these cases, implying that always-innocent Jews were libelled by prejudiced Christians. But, if a moral lesson can be extracted from these old criminal cases, then it is that the European sense of justice and fairness invariably prevailed; while guilty Jews were punished, innocent Jews lived and prospered as the only non-Christian community in Europe.
Muslim justice was not worse, either: in an 1840 Damascus case, a Catholic friar was murdered by a few Jews who confessed to the crime and were punished. But this did not interfere with prosperity of their brethren, and Farkhi, a Jew of Acre, was considered the richest man in Syria after the affair as well. This case was investigated by the great Orientalist, Sir Richard Burton, the British consul in Damascus, who began as an avowed philosemite (“'Had I choice of race there is none to which I would more willingly have belonged than the Jewish”) but accepted the guilty verdict in this case, and wrote a full exposition of the affair. The London Jews paid good money to buy the Burton manuscript from his heirs, and it has never been published to this very day, being kept in the cellars of the Board of Deputies of British Jews. A British Jewish journalist Aaronovitch chided Syria for a Syrian minister daring to write about it; Aaronovitch never mentioned the Burton investigation, just exclaimed “blood libel” as if this explains everything.
Indeed, before there was the Holocaust, there was blood libel. When one reads Jewish and Judeophile pre-WWII texts, one notices that the place currently occupied by the Holocaust dogma in the Judeocentric universe was not vacant; it was taken by pogroms in Russia, by the Dreyfus trial, by the Inquisition, by the expulsion from Spain, by the destruction of the Temple and to a great extent by the “blood libel”. They carried the same message: they proclaimed eternal, unique, reasonless and baseless suffering of Jews caused by the irrational hate of Gentiles; they united and mobilized Jews against the Gentiles; they deflated some envy, hostility and distrust into pity, even engendering guilt feelings among the best of goyim.
The case of Dr Toaff may help our friends who are over-involved with the Holocaust narrative to see the point. I respect the dissidents/deniers for their going against the stream, but I do not share their enthusiasm. Yes, these tales of undeserved and unique suffering could be argued against on the factual grounds. This is what Dr Serge Thion did in connection to the Holocaust, noting that Elie Wiesel, the great narrator of Holocaust, preferred to stick to his Nazi persecutors rather than stay with his Russian liberators. This is what Dr Toaff and Sir Richard Burton did with respect to blood sacrifices, proving that the authorities’ response was measured and legitimate.
The Russian historian Kozhinov dealt with the Russian pogroms proving that more non-Jews than Jews were killed in these violent encounters. The greatest and the bloodiest pogrom, that of Kishinev, was described by Bialik, the national Jewish poet, as the greatest of massacres with blood flooding the streets, and in recent issue of Haaretz, an Israeli journalist wrote that “no one doubts the Russian nation's right to exist because Christians in Kishinev at the beginning of the 20th century stuck nails into the eyes of Jewish children.” However, as opposed to the cases of the Italian and English babies tortured to death by Jewish black magicians, the allegations of “nails into the eyes etc” were a flight of fantasy disproved almost instantly, while the total loss of life in Kishinev amounted to 45, a quarter of Deir Yassin, a month's harvest of the Intifada.
So all these stories of unprovoked suffering can be deconstructed, but why bother, if the only thing the producers of the narratives wish to convey is that Jews are unique and special, have suffered more than anybody else and that is why they are entitled to have their way, are the best there is, while whoever doubts it is obsessed by mystic antisemitism. These narratives are brought forth to wake Jewish fury against their alleged persecutors, c’est tout.
I take great dislike to these victimhood stories, and not only because they are factually weak. The victimhood stories are not the result, but a cause of suffering. Whenever these stories of unprovoked persecution are being delivered, have no doubt: their promoters are preparing a beastly atrocity of their own. Jews brandished the story of the holocaust and erased the peaceful Palestinian population in 1948. Armenians recited the story of their unique unprovoked suffering, and massacred innocent Azeri civilians in Qarabag in 1991-94 war, sending hundreds thousands of refugees to Baku. Poles and Czechs inflamed by stories of their suffering under the Reich expelled millions of ethnic Germans from their ancestral lands, while Ukrainians who told the stories of their suffering in Rzecz Pospolita slaughtered the Poles of Volyn by the thousands.
National politics parallel gender politics, as it was outlined by Otto Weininger: thus, the feminists promoted a narrative of women’s suffering under their eternal male oppressor, and caused the breakdown of many families, the impoverishment of women and the emasculation of men. A narrative of this kind may be balanced by a counter-narrative. While it is true that men lead in physical violence, women are much more efficient in verbal aggression. The lashing tongue of Lady Macbeth was no less guilty than Macbeth’s piercing knife. Women do know how to provoke a man; and men respond – sometimes with a kiss, sometimes with a blow, sometimes with a bullet. Jose killed, but Carmen provoked. Despite the much promoted myth of the muscular Barb Wire type of girl, women are less successful when it comes to physical blows, so they tend to forbid physical violence but allow the verbal one and outlaw the very concept of provocation.
Coming back to the subject, if Turks killed, the Armenians provoked; and whenever there were actions against Jews they were caused by actions of Jews. Indeed, a through-and-through denier, I deny the very existence of antisemitism, the “irrational hate towards Jews”. It does not exist. Jewry was fought against, as every power, from Roman Catholic Church to Standard Oil Co was. Jews are not lambs, but quite an active factor of ideological and economic life. One may be for or against them. But “hate”? Surely not. Non-Jews have usually been fairer to Jews than the other way around. Even the “blood libel” turned out to be not a libel but a regular criminal case.
Were there anti-Jewish actions, in Europe and in the Middle East? Surely they were. But were they caused by “irrational hate”? Hate my foot! In 1911, the US government undid the mighty empire of John D. Rockefeller. Not being a Jew, Rockefeller could not claim it was due to antisemitism. He did not say that it was because they did not like his looks, race, breed, manners, or that’s divine punishment for his sins. They broke up the Standard Oil Company because it became too powerful. For the same good reason, Russian President Vladimir Putin broke up the oil company of his unruly oligarchs. Not because they were Jews, or because they supported democracy. Power creates the demand for a countering power, force calls for counterforce, and Jews were and are a power.
Jewry is stronger than the Catholic Church, as we learn from the fate of an Italian scientist we can compare Dr Toaff with. Yesterday, just off the main square, I saw a plaque commemorating Giordano Bruno, the martyr of science. It said: “He was killed by the Catholic Church, the enemy of science.” Go over hundreds of books, crawl all over Internet, you will read that the Church is guilty of this crime. You can say it freely, and nobody will scream at you hysterically: “ALL the Church? All billion of Catholics from Brazil to Poland are guilty? Shame on you! You are anti-Catholic!” Actually, the late Pope even apologised for it, as was his wont.
In vain you’ll look for a plaque commemorating a Jewish philosopher, scientist and sceptic Rabbi Samuel Ibn Zarza, the author of Miklal Yofi, who expressed his doubt about Creation, and was burned at the stake in Valencia – by order of the Jews. Now, I wait to hear the shout “All the Jews? Antisemite!” What, nobody says it? Good, we may proceed. In the Book of Lineage, a 15th century Jewish book I had pleasure of translating (into English), there is a gloss saying “When the Rabbis read ‘The year such and such since creation of the world’ this Zarza fellow placed his hand on his beard and alluded to the world’s pre-existence by holding the hairs of his beard. The Chief Rabbi Isaac Campanton stood up in his place and said, ‘Why is the bush not being burnt? Let the bush burn!’ (Zarza is a sort of bush in the Castilian; so this pun alludes to Exodus 3:3) The Rabbis led him to the tribunal and had him sentenced to death by burning for confessing pre-existence of the world.”
So there are two scientists, both burned, but one was sent to the stake by the Church, while another one by the Jews. If you go into the details, you can find even more similarities. Samuel Ibn Zarza was executed by the tribunal at the instigation of the Jews. There are some hints that the Jews were active behind the scenes in sending Giordano Bruno to his death as well, for he was strongly anti-Jewish. Giordano Bruno called the Jews 'such a pestilential, leprous, and publicly dangerous race that they deserved to be rooted out and destroyed even before their birth.' (Giordano Bruno, Spacio della Bestis Trionfante (1584). This opinion contributed to his execution, for even then, the Jews could access the authorities’ ears, and there were always enough officials ready to follow their orders. But in the case of Bruno, there are no visible traces, thus his case remains known, while the case of Samuel Ibn Zarza is forgotten or denied.
If you open the Jewish-edited Wikipedia, you’ll read: “though Samuel Shalom (a 16th century Jewish sage) states that Zarza was burned at the stake by the tribunal of Valencia on the denunciation of Rabbi Isaac Campanton, who accused him of denying the creation of the world, historians have proved this assertion a mere legend.” Thus, the Jewish history-making and vetting Ministry of Truth still can decide and rule what happened and what was and remains a “mere legend”. The Catholic Church can’t even dream of such power.
Can one quantify Jewish power? Some months ago, the British weekly Economist published an unusual map of the world: a country’s territory was represented in proportion to its GNP. This is a revealing map: India was smaller than Holland, all of Latin America was only as big as Italy; Israel was bigger than all its Arab neighbours. This map was not exactly the map of power: in order to draw the true map of the world one should consider other parameters as well: gun power, nuclear and conventional capability, discursive influence connected with output of films, books, newspapers, university cathedras, international positions. On such a power map, Jewry would look impressive enough. The Jews are an important power in the world we live in. It is a first-rate power, stronger than the Catholic Church, surely stronger than Italy or any single European state, stronger than Shell and Agip or any trans-national corporation.
In space studies, there is a phenomenon called the black hole: a very dense and heavy star changes the geometry of surrounding space, and rays of light can’t escape the gravitation trap it creates. Such a black hole star is invisible because it is very powerful. Likewise, Jewry is a black hole. It is so powerful that it is not seen. One is not allowed to see it. This is the strongest taboo of our day. The famous “tail wags the dog” discussion about the Jewish Lobby in the US, is an attempt to go around the taboo without actually breaking it. For sure, a small Middle Eastern country called Israel can’t possibly “wag the US dog”. The Israel Lobby of AIPAC and sundry can’t influence much, despite its efforts. But the Israel Lobby and the state of Israel are perceived as manifestations of the Black hole, of the great unmentionable: of Jewry.
In a recent debate between James Petras and Norman Finkelstein, Dr Petras comes very close to real thing as he describes the pro-Israel lobby as “a whole string of pro-Zionist think tanks from the American Enterprise Institute on down, and … a whole power configuration, which not only involves AIPAC, but also the Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations, which number 52… and individuals occupying crucial positions in the government (Elliott Abrams and Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and others), … the army of op-ed writers who have access to the major newspapers… the super-rich contributors to the Democratic Party, Media moguls with the leverage in Congress and in the Executive”. It is not a lobby, it is Jewry.
Why is Jewry so powerful now? In my book, Pardes, I give an explanation: historically an alternative church, Jewry had a traditional enemy in the Apostolic church. When the Roman Catholic church’s hold was broken, the alternative one spurted forth. But if this explanation is too complicated, or unacceptable to strict materialists, one can translate it into dollars and pounds.
Recently, Jewish pundit Zev Chafets rose in defence of American sportsman Richardson who was suspended for saying that the Jews are powerful and crafty. He said: “The Jews have got the best security system in the world. Have you ever been to an airport in Tel Aviv? They're real crafty. Listen, they are hated all over the world, so they've got to be crafty. They got a lot of power in this world, you know what I mean? Which I think is great. I don't think there's nothing wrong with it. If you look in most professional sports, they're run by Jewish people. If you look at a lot of most successful corporations and stuff, more businesses, they're run by Jewish [sic]. It's not a knock, but they are some crafty people."
Chafets retorted: “Excuse me, but Richardson didn't say anything offensive. In fact, Jews, as a people, are smart, in my experience. And they're proud of it (especially the dumb ones). What other hurtful things did Richardson supposedly say? That Israel has the best airport security in the world? This is both true and something Israel itself brags about. That Jews are hated and need to protect themselves? That's the founding premise of the Anti-Defamation League itself. Sure, Richardson exaggerates when he says that Jews own most sports teams. As far as I can tell, Jews (about 1% of the population) only own about half the teams in the NBA (and a pretty fair proportion in baseball and football too). So what? As to the observation that Jews run a lot of successful businesses, no kidding. Jews are very likely the most economically successful ethnic group in the U.S. What's the matter with that?”
This question (“What's the matter with that?”) was answered by David C. Johnston in the New York Times. He wrote: “Income inequality [in the US] grew significantly in 2005, with the top 1 percent of Americans - those with incomes that year of more than $348,000 - receiving their largest share of national income since 1928, analysis of newly released tax data shows. The new data also shows that the top 300,000 Americans collectively enjoyed almost as much income as the bottom 150 million Americans. Per person, the top group received 440 times as much as the average person in the bottom half earned, nearly doubling the gap from 1980.”
A question Johnston does not answer (nor even posits) is: out of “the top 300,000 Americans who collectively enjoyed almost as much income as the bottom 150 million Americans” how many belong to “the most economically successful ethnic group in the U.S”? Isn’t it to be expected that – in absence of a national church or other non-economical limiters - their influence on the US politics would be roughly proportional to their joint income?
“Democracy” is an ideal political system where each person has one vote and all votes are equal. This ideal can hardly be realised even in the absence of economic inequality, for there are more and less influential people by their very abilities. In the conditions described by Johnston, when one member of elite has the income of 500 ordinary people, democracy is severely undermined. But this ideal is betrayed outright if these elite people own mass media and thus have an ability to shape the world view of others. If these media lords pool their resources as happens in the US, democracy loses its meaning. I agree wholeheartedly with Frau Merkel who said: “A free press is the cornerstone of our society and the basis for all freedoms." But I can’t even guess why she considers the press as being free if it is owned by Jewish and Judeophile media lords, like Alfred Neven DuMont, owner of one of Germany's oldest publishing houses and part-owner of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, (she spoke at his birthday party) or your own Berlusconi? Why is this press freer than a state-controlled press, as in Putin’s Russia? A State can anyway claim to represent all its citizens.
Why do I stress “Jewish and Judeophile media lords”? Surely “media lords” would suffice? Not really. A DuMont-owned Haaretz may run a piece called Confessions of an anti-German racist, but a DuMont-owned German newspaper would never run a piece by a man who dislikes Jews. Judeophilia integrates the media lords and their holdings into one totalitarian machine, like Communist ideology integrated all Soviet media into one totalitarian (and boring) device. This comparison may be developed: in the US and in the West in general, Jewry occupies the controlling heights once kept by the Communist Party in the USSR: practically unmentioned in the Constitution, formally not a part of state apparatus, this opaque body controls all processes and is not controlled by external forces. Joe Public is not represented at the board of Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations, just as Ivan Publicoff was not represented in the Politburo.
Once, this position was occupied by the Church. Anticlerical campaigns consumed much of people’s energy and thought in the end of 19th and beginning of 20th century. The major complaint was that the church controlled society, but was not controlled by society. The Communist party in Russia (or the fascist one in your country, with all the difference recognized and acknowledged) faced the same complaint. Now is the time to address the latest usurper, for the majority did not appoint Jewry to guide and control its thinking process. The excessive influence of Jewry is an indicator of lack of democracy: in a truly democratic country, Jewry would have an influence proportional to its numbers. But history is not over yet, and freedom can be ushered in by sending Jewry the way the Church and the Party went, i.e. into a modest niche of our dynamic society.
Holocaust revisionists believe that the Jewish power will collapse if the Holocaust narrative is undermined. They believe that “Jewish power is founded upon the lie”. I disagree. The power of Jewry is quite real, it is based on money, ideology and everything a power could be established upon. This real power could and should be undone, and then the Holocaust narrative will be of no interest to anyone but the next-of-kin.
Led by love of freedom and by compassion, this solution will be good for individual Jews. What is the position of an individual Jew versus Jewry? It is the same as of an individual Party member versus the Party. In the last days of the Soviet Union, there were 16 million Party members; it was profitable to be a member; but when the Party membership ceased to bring benefits, the membership shrunk down to a few hundred thousand. See it not as a tragedy: yesterday’s Communists regained freedom. Some of them (like Yeltsin) became anticommunists, others dropped politics and went into faith, or trade, or business. Those that remained Communists do not regret the collapse either: they parted with hypocrites and do not have to try and please millions of petit bourgeois; they may proclaim their true belief.
Likewise, undoing of Jewry by bringing its influence into proportion to its numbers will cause mass ideological exodus. Out of 16 million Jews, probably a few hundred thousand believers will remain faithful to the Mosaic Law and to Talmud and Cabbala study (God bless them!), while the rest will find other interests and allegiances (God bless them, too). All of them will be grateful to dissidents like Dr Toaff who buried the myth of antisemitism and helped them to regain freedom.
Can’t they be free within this framework of Jewry? In the 1970s-80s, a similar discussion went on regarding freedom and pluralism within the Communist Party. Eventually, it did not work out. Jewry is not less monolithic than the Party, it also allows for some spread of opinions, but the spread is not wide enough. On the right end, there is Gilad Sharon, who wants to strip non-Jews of their Israeli citizenship, on the left end, there is Uri Avnery, who actually proposes the same. We may and should help Jews to regain freedom, like the Party members, and before them, Church attendees, were helped to recover their freedom of choice.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)