Sages Rule

By Israel Shamir

Who Brought Olmert Down (and Why)

You would not envy the position of Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert. He did not have a snowball’s chance in hell. Every day the newspapers and the TV channels broadcast new accusations against him and announced fresh police investigations. Often the Israeli viewer learned of Olmert’s alleged misdeeds before the Prime Minister himself did. Police did not just leak the details of the case – they poured it out like tropical torrent. Charges landed all over Olmert like the bomblets he dropped on hapless Lebanon: small but plentiful.

The charges were petty, at best. They are summed up here <http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1007072.html> You and I have probably done similar things. Olmert was accused of charging two different organizations for the same expenses, of accepting some contributions in cash, of flying with his family to a trip abroad while not strictly observing the difference between his funds and those of contributors. Probably the Biblical injunction “Don’t muzzle the ox while he is threshing” (Deut 25:4) covers the case. But the police went after him, the Supreme Court began deliberations on private actions against Olmert, while newspapers and the TV blew it out of proportion. Thus two mighty powers of Israeli politics, the media and the legal system, united in one effort to unseat Olmert, and he caved in.

This episode may demonstrate who actually runs Israel. Though media amplifies, the judges judge. The Hidden Hand that unseated Olmert was that of the Supreme Court and its power-hungry President, Chief Justice Dorit Beinish. Beinish and her bosom friend Justice Arbel activated police and prosecution, while their special storm-troops, the fighting sorority of lesbian activists straight out of Barb Wire organised mass demonstration and intimidated the opposition. The reasons had nothing to do with Olmert’s alleged corruption or with his real failure in the 2006 Lebanon War, but were grounded in the power struggle between the weak elected government and the unassailable judges. Moreover, Olmert makes the third recent, high-placed victim of the Supreme Court’s drive to supreme power.

The Supreme Court of Israel is self-elected and self-perpetuated, like the Sanhedrin of old. Formally, the new judges are appointed by the President, who confirms the decisions of a committee led by the Justice Minister <http://elyon1.court.gov.il/eng/system/index.html> ; factually the sages elect the new sages from amongst their apprentices (“interim appointees”) and close colleagues. This system is called in Hebrew ‘haver mevi haver’, ‘a friend brings a friend’. After twenty years of the system’s strict application, the Supreme Court is a monolithic and highly influential body.

The Court is closely and personally connected with other legal authorities, with the attorney general office, the state prosecutor office, the police and the secret police. State prosecutors and attorney generals dream of joining the Court after leaving their jobs. Police bosses take the Court orders as if they were sent down from heaven. The Court is the top of the legal pyramid, and its president can manoeuvre and manipulate the whole system formally and informally. Under the flag of judicial activism, the Supreme Court has assumed control of the state, leaving Parliament and the existing government high and dry. The judges have assumed powers any dictator would envy: they can nullify any law; they can prosecute any MP or minister, they can block any government action or agreement. They rule whether the state has to build shelters for border towns, whether an army commander made a right tactical decision, whether a law can remain on the books and whether prisoners may be swapped.

Incidentally, these powers have no legal basis. The American professor of law Richard Posner noted that the Israeli judges abrogated these powers to themselves “without benefit of a constitutional or legislative provision. One is reminded of Napoleon's taking the crown out of the pope's hands and putting it on his own head.”

The man who took the crown of Israel and placed on his head was not Arik Sharon. It was the previous Chief Justice Aharon Barak, the most powerful man of Israeli politics. Posner called Barak “Enlightened despot … who created a degree of judicial power undreamed of even by the most aggressive [American] Supreme Court justices”. After he retired, sycophantic slime spewed forth from printed and electronic media alike. Barak had had to retire having reached the mandatory age, but he remained very much a moving force behind the scenes.

His succession by the highly ambitious Dorit Beinish brought the conflict between the Judicial and Executive branches to the fore. A tug-of-war ensued, with the government trying to cut the Supreme Court down to its natural size, and with the Supreme Court fighting for the top slot. Both sides wished to keep the struggle under the carpet, far away from the eyes of hoi polloi.

The wars of succession were concentrated around the Judges’ Nominations Committee, which is chaired by the Minister of Justice who is appointed by the prime minister, while the actual appointment of judges is done by the Israel’s president. Surely this was sheer coincidence that all three of these persons were politically assassinated!

In 2006, Minister of Justice Haim Ramon objected to the nomination of Dorit Beinish to the top post of chief justice. He also planned to break with the unwritten tradition of appointing to the Supreme Court only those interim candidates who had been invited there by the Supreme Court to serve on a temporary basis, and instead to bring in an outsider, a lawyer or a judge not vetted by Beinish.

Ramon was treading on a live wire, and the response was fierce. Within a month, Ramon was under investigation for sexual harassment; in July 2006 he was forbidden to appoint judges, and in January 2007 he was convicted.

The story went as follows. A soldier girl came to visit the Justice Minister Ramon; she looked at him with adoring eyes and asked to be photographed with him. Eventually Ramon kissed the girl who later claimed she had expected a kiss, but rather a fatherly and less fervent kiss than the one she got. The girl went away, expressed her dissatisfaction with the French kiss, and flew away to Latin America. A senior police officer flew to Latin America, located the girl and literally forced her to file a criminal complaint. The police woman in charge of the investigation admitted at the hearing that she had threatened the girl with prosecution unless she stuck to her complaint.

The newspapers and TV discussed the details of the case but practically nobody (but a few bloggers) dared to ask who had ordered Ramon’s head. It took an American Jewish journalist to break with the vow of silence and connect this “targeted judicial assassination” with the struggle for Court primacy. Halpern wrote in the Forward: “Many suggest that the judges and the attorney general had it in for Ramon because he opposed the appointment of Judge Dorit Beinish as chief justice of the Supreme Court. His trial prevented him from appointing someone else, while his conviction prevented him from making changes to the judicial system later. “

Meanwhile, the President of Israel, Moshe Katsav, the man who actually appoints judges, came under fire. He was also against Beinish’s rise to Fuhrership, and paid for it dearly.

A girl in his office codenamed “A” complained of sexual harassment. It appeared in the course of investigation, that she was lying. She had actually carried an affair with the President and had tried to blackmail him. Her lies were so obvious that the prosecution had to drop her, but meanwhile, the media had a field day, or rather a field month. The media harassment sparked many complainants; apparently every woman who ever worked with Katsav came forward to try her luck, and a few of the accusations could possibly stick. There were daily demonstrations by the angry feminists, the fighting sorority of Beinish and Arbel, demanding Katsav’s balls, or at least his resignation. In August 2006, he was forbidden to appoint judges, just a few days after Ramon's resignation. If that was not enough, on September 7, 2006 the Israeli Police declared they have the evidentiary basis for an indictment.

On that day, the Judges' Election Committee approved the succession of Dorit Beinisch to the presidency of the Supreme Court. Katsav refrained from attending, "to prevent dispute". He also stayed away from Beinisch's formal swearing-in ceremony, normally held in the presidential compound, now to be held in the Knesset, so she was sworn-in by another woman, the Knesset speaker.

Katsav agreed to be charged with indecent behaviour, then later changed his mind, but still had to resign and vacate the position to Shimon Peres, a smooth man very much to Beinish’ liking.
Olmert understood that not only his own career, but the very position of the legitimate government was being undermined. He harboured these heretical thoughts for a long time. In 2002, the fighting sorority attacked another male Oriental politician, Minister of Internal Security Avigdor Kahalani. Edna Arbel, then state prosecutor, indicted him and brought him to trial, but he was acquitted. Ehud Olmert, then mayor of Jerusalem, called upon Arbel to resign and said that she lacked the professional judgment to continue in her senior position. State Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein defended Arbel in his response to Olmert’s comments. Since then, Rubinstein has been rewarded with a seat in the Court, while Olmert has gained an enemy not to be trifled with.

Olmert went on the warpath by returning Ramon to his cabinet in a senior position (though not to the post of Justice Minister) and by hiring a new justice minister, Professor Daniel Friedmann, the very man who was most vocal in his objection to the rule by the Supreme Court. Friedmann made a two-pronged attack, by bringing into the Supreme Court the first external nominee and by proposing to limit the Supreme Court agenda by a law that would restrict the Supreme Court from ruling on political, security and budget matters. He was immediately attacked by the retired justices of the Supreme Court, especially by the former president of the Supreme Court Aharon Barak and his ex-deputy Mishael Cheshin, the very men who had established the present system, enthroned Dorit Beinish and kept advising her. While acting judges are precluded from speaking ex-cathedra, it is a moot point with the retired ones: they bear the title of Justice and they draw their Judge’s pension, but they certainly speak out all the time. They went to the Knesset, to newspapers and to TV channels and described Friedmann’s actions as a “putsch”.

They pled with Olmert to fire Friedmann and let the things go as usual. But Olmert wanted to return executive power to the government, to the elected legitimate body from the self-appointed usurpers. He stuck to his guns. Ehud Barak, the Labour leader and a minister in Olmert’s government, threatened Olmert with his resignation and the possible fall of government unless he fired Friedmann; but the unrelenting Olmert refused to bend and said he’d rather let Barak go than part with Friedmann.

And then they attacked Olmert personally. They found an American Jew Morris Talansky who claimed he had squeezed crumpled dollar notes into Olmert’s sweaty palm. In the course of interrogation it appeared that the man used to boast that he gave money to every Israeli PM, including Yitzhak Rabin, the very paragon of honesty. He had also threatened to bomb some Rabbis who did not want to pay him. The trustworthiness of his claims was severely undermined. But Olmert’s enemies did not stop: every day they produced a new complainant, a new accusation of corruption. If it was parried, they made a new one. With the police and the Attorney General at their disposal, their resources were practically unlimited.

Meanwhile, the retired justices were outspoken. They demanded Olmert’s resignation, completely forgetting the “innocent until found guilty” rule; just as they had in the related cases of Katsav and Ramon. Dalia Dorner, a retired justice, declared: “Olmert must resign. The public opinion should force him to resign.” But public opinion remained unconvinced despite the relentless spin, and Dorner bewailed Israeli simplicity of mind: “There is no public culture of politics in Israel, and people pay no attention to reports about misbehaving leaders”.

In the end, Olmert resigned to the supreme force of the Supreme Court. Was this a victory of Law over arbitrary and corrupt politicians? Do not be so sure.

Law or Democracy?

One may like or dislike Ehud Olmert, but he was elected by the people to do his job. We elected Olmert. One may be happy or unhappy about this result, but one should respect the decision of the majority. We did elect Olmert, Katsav and Ramon, and we did not elect Mrs Beinish and her fighting sorority, though she thinks she knows what we need better than we do. In a democracy, one should respect the people’s decision. A prime minister should rule the country, a hard enough job, instead of spending his time answering questions by the police.

Olmert has been neutralised as prime minister, because nobody is yet able to survive a media cum judiciary assault. Apparently, Israel may need a Berlusconi Law protecting its executive from police investigations and legal actions. Police investigation about whether Ehud Olmert took his wife along at government expense can wait until he completes his tour of duty.

But the problem lies deeper; the choice is whether we want democracy, or the rule of law. These two regimes are not identical, - they stand in direct opposition. In a democracy, the people rule via their elected representatives; under the rule of law, the sages (or Judges) rule supreme. Now Israeli democracy faces a serious challenge, more serious than Altalena crisis: unless we stop the police and the Court from meddling in politics, democracy will be lost.

A short detour is required. Of old, there were three branches of government, or ‘powers’: the Legislative, the Executive and the Judicial, as described by Montesquieu and as established by the US constitution in the 18th century. The 20th century ushered in a fourth power, Media[1].
The Legislative, in our case, the Knesset, is a democratic body, despite its limitations. The Executive is also elected - by the Knesset and is responsible to the Knesset.

But the Judicial power, i.e. the Court is not elected. It is a self-appointed and self-perpetuating oligarchy equipped with a vast apparatus which intervenes in matters of war and peace, labour, education, family life and even in questions of faith. This is, let us put it charitably, a Platonic rule by Sages. Yes there is the Law, but they interpret it as they see fit. They may nullify a law, or reinterpret it in an entirely different vein. Jewish history had a go at it, too, when the sages of Talmud reinterpreted the Written Law. The Rule of Halacha was actually rule by sages, and only the Enlightenment broke its iron grip. Now we have reverted all the way back to the Sanhedrin, this traditional (for Jews) but not very successful, non-democratic system of rule by Wise Elders.

This was noticed by the American law professor Robert Bork, who wrote: “[Aharon Barak’s rule of law… is in fact … the rule of judges, a trend to which he himself is the major contributor. Perhaps [Barak] believes that judges are simply intellectually and morally superior to other actors in the nation’s politics”.

The supporters of the Supreme Court supremacy deride the Ultra-Orthodox Jewry of Mea Shearim who accept rule by their sages, but they themselves actually want to return us all to the rule by sages, albeit sages of their own choosing. Karl Popper correctly stated that this is just another form of totalitarianism. In our case - liberal totalitarianism.

Some simple-minded people consider these judges to be “of the left”. A pro-family right-wing activist and blogger, while correctly noting the anti-family tendency of the Court, called them The Wicked Witches of the Left. One may agree or disagree with “the wicked witches”, but they certainly have nothing to do with the Left, and this blogger should have his eyesight checked. The Supreme Court sages, after twenty years of inbreeding and selection, belong to an almost pure strain of totalitarian liberals, and they indeed enforce liberalism in the worst meaning of the word:

Workers’ rights are frowned upon as an affront to humanity. Majority of Israeli workers are now employed by subcontractors on contract basis, thus eliminating benefits and social security. They approved of shifting the tax burden to the worker, while usurers pay no tax.
They do not protect tenants against rent rise and allow landlords to collect rent tax-free.
They are against children. That’s why abortions and gay marriages are welcomed; gay pride parades are approved, but life of families with children is getting increasingly difficult.
Even their favourite topic, gender equality, does not lead to a more equal society but rather encourages young girls to join the counter-insurgency fighting units.
They authorise torture, the kidnapping of civilians, the demolition of Palestinian homes, the confiscation of their land, and the building of settlements.
They accept the Secret Services version of everything, sight unseen.
They participate in the Assassination Committee, or the committee for “extra-legal executions”.
They support the illegal Wall.
They had no problem trying and imprisoning illegally kidnapped civilians, from Mordecai Vanunu to Marwan Barghouti.
They undermine religion because they hate anything smacking of compassion.

If that is “Left”, then what is Right? But let us be fair, they are not Right neither Left, they are the Third Kind, totalitarian liberals. Totalitarian liberals are profoundly undemocratic, for they are forever suspicious of the Majority. They use the Minority Rights in order to undermine Majority Rule. They do not act in the interests of the minorities whose name they bear in vain: rather, they use them as a ploy for seizing supreme power. Their world-view is essentially that of Leo Strauss, the godfather of neo-cons, “a man profoundly hostile to the concept of rule by the people. He believed it was the natural right of the wise and strong to lead societies to the fulfilment of their wise aims, using subterfuge when necessary”.

Such a subterfuge is a presentation of the Court as the only defence of pro-Western, ‘civilised’ society against the onslaught of crazy religious nationalists, Kahanists and unruly settlers. Without their approval, however, not a single settlement would ever have arisen, and not a single dunam of Palestinian land would ever have been confiscated. With one hand, they allow the Wall to encroach on the Palestinian lands, with another, they pretend to defend Palestinian peasants.

Actually, the leading judges of the Supreme Court, Beinish and Arbel, are personally responsible for the outbreak of the First Intifada. As state prosecutors, they came up with a nasty legal trick, the type a rabbi might describe as “kasher aval masriach” (“it is kosher, but it stinks”). Only a minority of Palestinian lands were parcellated and privatised, while the majority of lands were in public use and were called ‘the lands of the Sultan’. The two “liberal leftist” lady lawyers claimed that these lands belong now to the Jewish State as it is now the Sultan, and thus they allowed the State to seize Palestinian common lands and give them to the settlers. Aharon Barak authorised the snatch. This mass confiscation was the reason for the First Intifada.
They are also responsible for the second intifada, as they permitted Ariel Sharon his march to the Temple Mount.
They are responsible for the terror, as this was caused by their glaring injustice. When they sentenced Nahum Korman to six months of public service for the murder of a Palestinian child, they signalled to the Palestinians that they should not expect legal remedies from this Court.
They are responsible for the Second Lebanon War, as they blocked the release of Kuntar after Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon.
More than anyone else , they are responsible for creating the apartheid system in Israel.


We should not allow them to shift their guilt to the Executive or to the Legislative powers, i.e. to the government and to the Knesset. They interfere in the affairs of the state so often and so thoroughly that they should bear the responsibility themselves.

Still, they would not be able to seize supreme power without some important help from the Media. The Media are another non-democratic, non-elected power. In Israel, the media belong to five wealthy families; they appoint chief editors and journalists as they see fit, and they decide who are their friends and enemies, and whether they should attack Olmert or Beinish, nuke Iran or make inroads into Gaza. Being inherently non-democratic, mass media owners tend to support other non-democratic structures, be it the Armed Forces or the Supreme Court.

These two non-elected and non-democratic powers of Media and Judiciary entered into conspiracy against the elected parliament and government. In every newspaper you can read that the public despises the parliamentarians and does not trust the government. The media promote these feelings, thereby undermining the democratic powers. The police and the judiciary do all they can in order to confirm our suspicions. They leak their deliberations into the media and start a witch-hunt. As a result, the elected politicians appear as sinful, if not outright criminal, weaklings, and the very concept of democracy, of Majority Rule is undermined.

When the Judicial and Media powers allied and took control over the Executive and Legislative, they create a paradigm shift. This shift is universal, rather than local. Just recently, in Turkey, the High court decided to outlaw the ruling party; in Philippines, the High court blocked an accord that was concluded by the government and the Muslim rebels. In the US, the courts allowed for abortions and same-sex marriages, for dismantling trade unions and for social insecurity. This is the great success of totalitarian liberalism. People convinced that Supremacy of Law is a good thing should consider that this puts paid to democracy as decisively as any dictatorial coup. This leads to rule by anonymous ‘Wise Elders’, while ordinary people are excluded from decision-making.

The true Left and true Right should look at this shift with horror, for these movements have their basis in the people’s will. They seek the people’s approval; they try to attract the people to their side. Even the most far out political movements, from Fascists to Communists, still turn to the people for their mandate. Deep down, they are democratic, for they believe in Majority Rule. Now is the time for the Left and the Right to unite to regain democracy, while cutting the judges power down to their normal size.

The People never had much say in Israel: the country was run for years by one party and one army, with power smoothly shifting from a party boss to a general and back. Still, there was at least the occasional appearance of democracy, and a chance to extend the democratic base. Now, the Knesset and the Government have been made irrelevant by the Court’s powers; and the Court is outside of our influence.

Under the Court’s rule, Israel is entering the dark realm of faceless and nameless dictatorship. This is not the dictatorship we were taught to be afraid of, with the dictator riding a white stallion surrounded by outriders or speaking in a stadium to the enchanted masses. We have no portraits of the new dictators in our homes; we are not asked to adore them; it’s the other way around, we may not utter their names or even suspect that they exist. They do not run for public office, they do not ask for our opinion, but they decide what will be done.

They do not belong to the left or to the right. The Left and the Right are parliamentary terms, while they are against democracy. They undermine outstanding, personable and charismatic leaders; only petty and corrupt politicians are allowed to survive their purges, for such would never dare to fight these nameless dictators. With every generation, Israeli politicians grow smaller in moral stature, until they finally disappear in all but a name.

There is an urgent need to clean up the act of the police and the Court. They should stay away from state business and leave parliamentarians alone. They should take care of their job instead of hunting for mischief. This needed roll-back can’t be done without some left-and-right cooperation.

Fighting Sorority

Active and pugnacious feminism is a part of the Court agenda. The President of the Supreme Court, Dorit Beinish, and her best friend Justice Edna Arbel are fervent feminists of Gloria Steinem’s type. The rumours in Tel Aviv are divided, whether they like women, or just gratuitously hate men. Such persons are certainly needed and useful for the society, but they are entirely unsuitable to bear the dictatorial powers they assumed. This subject is rarely discussed openly for fear of being labeled ‘sexist’; likewise US Democrats are unable to effectively fight the Neocons as they can’t politically survive an accusation of antisemitism.

It would be good to roll the sorority’s advances back a notch, for being convinced of the justices’ support, lesbian and feminist organisations have sped up their drive to convert the country to their creed: they ran gay pride parades, even in Jerusalem, though this annoys the conservative and pious Jerusalemites. They noisily demonstrate against the men pointed out by Beinish. Persecution of alleged heterosexual harassers and abusers assumed the dimensions of a Salem witch hunt. Under Beinish’s guidance, a new law has been promulgated, which classified every heterosexual relationship between two co-workers as sexual abuse, if not rape. The majority, family men and women are discriminated against as they have less disposable income than gays and lesbians.

Forceful and aggressive feminists take too much of air time and wield too much influence. They are clannish, and defend each other; criticism of such a woman is perceived as an attack on women’s rights. In the Jewish state, the lesbians became the Jews of the Jews: influential, powerful, pugnacious and protected by fear of sexism label. It’s not that they have grievances: the prosperous and numerous lesbian community is well integrated into all areas of public life. From the Jewish religious point of view, lesbianism is not a sin (as opposed to male homosexuality). They are really after re-gendering of the whole society, and here they find some extremely antidemocratic allies: re-gendering is not a way to gratify sexual desires or to correct wrongs, but a most efficient form of social taming.

Under the fighting sorority’s influence, Israel has been transformed. Once, US Jews would send their kids to Israel to get married, now, Israel is the place to find a same-sex partner. Once, Israel was a country of manly men and womanly women; not anymore. Things have changed since the macho days of Six Day War, when homosexuality was banned, one-eyed Defence Minister Dayan screwed every female conscript and the Israeli army vanquished three Arab armies in a single 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. Traditionally independent, Jewish women became even more so as they now serve in the combat units, earn as much as men do, and are protected from flirtatious looks by ever-alert police.

Beinish and Arbel are representative of this group. The woman they hope will become the next Prime Minister of Israel, Tsippi Livni, the foreign minister and an ex-secret service agent, is a sorority girl, she passed millions of dollars to gay organisation led by her patriotic sisters. Her victory is almost certain.

The sorority fights especially hard against men of other, non-Ashkenazi communities, not only because of their racism, but also because they – the Oriental Jews, the Arabs, the Russians – were not tamed and re-gendered. They watch out and destroy every bright or personable public man of these communities. For this purpose, they set the police to spy after him, and eventually arrange for his downfall.

Aryeh Deri, the astute and pious founder of the Moroccan Shas (“the Jewish Hamas”) religious party, was followed for ten years, until they succeeded in building a dubious case against him and sending him to jail.
Avigdor Lieberman, a brutal but personable leader of a Russian party. The many sexist remarks around him concentrate on his, and his party members, moustaches, that clear sign of hated masculinity. Lieberman has been called to the police from time to time, and this event is well publicised with the suspicions being aired, but he has never been charged. Last week (27.7.08) frustrated Lieberman appealed to the Supreme Court against the Attorney General. He demanded to termination of the case against him, still open after 12 years of police efforts: “Charge me, or close the case”. In his words, “State Prosecutor Edna Arbel continues to hound him because he is a “friend of Aryeh Deri, Russian, sports a beard, and a settler”.
Arcadi Gaydamak, the charismatic Russian businessman and philanthropist, is rather a romantic buccaneer type of a businessman; a Henry Morgan or Cecil Rhodes. His past includes stints in the Angola jungle and in the mountains of Yugoslavia, and friendship with MPLA guerrillas and Serb militants. Now he is running for mayor of Jerusalem. He was attacked by the sorority the moment he decided to enter Israeli politics. He was accused of money-laundering in a Bank ha-Poalim Affair, which came to naught despite years of investigation and much of bad publicity. He was never charged, but his name was besmirched and many Israelis are afraid to be seen in his company. He also demanded to be charged or declared innocent, but they prefer to keep the Damocles Sword hanging over his head.

Could it be that these men were rotten, and police just fulfilled its duty by investigating reports of their misdeeds? If you go to police and complain that your house was robbed or your car stolen, you’d probably will be told that they have no time or resources for such investigations. They have more pressing things to do, like spending thousands of working hours and millions of dollars to fight the politicians. And the crosshairs were being set by the fighting sorority.

[1] It may be conceived as the rebirth of the old fourth power, the Ecclesiastic one, for Media preaches, and guides minds of people, establishing normative and forbidden behaviour, just like the Church did.

Noam Chomsky and the 9/11 Crusaders

By Israel Shamir

Walking around town, we are sometimes accosted by well-meaning people who are greatly devoted to a cause. It can be a Kurdish refugee replete with blood-curdling photos of Turkish atrocities, or an Iranian émigré with a petition to sign, or, if we are lucky, it could be Mia Farrow asking us to condemn the Chinese. These good people do not take no for an answer. They grasp your buttonhole and keep it in their sweaty hands until you sign their petition or ask them rather impolitely to buzz off. Then they explode in a fury not unlike that of a woman scorned.

Such a thing happened to the great luminary Noam Chomsky. He was accosted by one Kevin Barrett, a 9/11 enthusiast, whom he tried to reason with politely, but was eventually forced to tell to get off. An infuriated Barrett published an acrimonious attack: “Chomsky, an anemic speaker with all the charisma of a garden slug, endlessly bashes the USA in a whiney voice, phrasing his criticism in terms that only the sectarian left will agree with. Chomsky's boring, unpleasant style, and his obsessively anti-American argument, identifies anti-Empire with anti-American.”

What did Chomsky do to deserve this abuse? If one delves into Barrett’s tedious torrent of vituperation, one finds that his main objection to Chomsky is that the Boston Professor does not want to fight Barrett’s war for crediting Bush and Mossad with 9/11. And so he does not. Does he have to? Barrett tried to push Chomsky into immersing himself in the technicalities of 9/11 “Truth Movement” discourse, and refused to take no for an answer. You know these guys: anyone who does not agree with them is an agent of the Enemy. Chomsky did well to retort: “That's a curious feature of the Truth Movement … the curious ‘with us or against us’ mentality that pervades much of the movement: either you accept our claims, or you're a ‘left gatekeeper.’”

There is always a place for critique and argument -- even against Chomsky, and I have had my go at that, too. However, there are some red lines we should try to observe in friendly critique, and this one was a crude ad hominem and paranoid attack. Barrett is similar to the holocaust-obsessed Jews (and their ‘denying’ counterparts) who need your confirmation of their narrative and do not let go of your buttonhole until you respond. Let Barrett fight this war himself, without Chomsky at his disposal. This is a free country, more or less. For instance, I do not deny or confirm holocausts and massacres. Peak Oil does not pique me overmuch. And as for 9/11 whodunit, I feel that the 911 Truth Movement of Barrett et al. trivializes the event, turning it into a successful insurance swindle. I wrote about the event, at the time it took place:

“The kamikaze could be practically anybody: American Nationalists, American Communists, American Fundamentalist Christians, American Anarchists, anybody who rejects the twin gods of the dollar and the M-16, who hates the stock market and interventions overseas, who dreams of America for Americans, who does not want to support the drive for world domination. They could be Native Americans returning to Manhattan, or Afro-Americans who still have not received compensation for slavery.
They could be foreigners of practically any extraction, as Wall Street and the Pentagon ruined many lives of people all over the globe. Germans can remember the fiery holocaust of Dresden with its hundreds of thousands of peaceful refugees incinerated by the US Air Force. The Japanese will not forget the nuclear holocaust of Hiroshima. The Arab world still feels the creeping holocaust of Iraq and Palestine. Russians and East Europeans feel the shame of Belgrade. Latin Americans think of American invasions of Panama and Granada, of destroyed Nicaragua and defoliated Colombia. Asians count their dead of Vietnam War, Cambodia bombings, Laos CIA operations in millions. Even a pro-American, Russian TV broadcaster could not refrain from saying, ‘now Americans begin to understand the feelings of Baghdad and Belgrade’.

The Riders could be anybody who lost his house to the bank, who was squeezed from his work and made permanently unemployed, who was declared an Untermench by the new Herrenvolk. They could be Russians, Malaysians, Mexicans, Indonesians, Pakistanis, Congolese, Brazilians, Vietnamese, as their economy was destroyed by Wall Street and the Pentagon. They could be anybody, and they are everybody. Their identity is quite irrelevant as their message is more important than their personalities, and their message is read loud and clear in the choice of targets.”

This was also the view of the late French thinker Jean Baudrillard: “In the end it was they who did it but we who wished it. If we do not take this into account, the event loses its symbolic dimension; it becomes a purely arbitrary act. . . (A)nd in their strategic symbolism the terrorists knew they could count on this unconfessable complicity.” He saw 9/11 as “arguably the most potent symbolic event since the crucifixion of Christ”, says Bradley Butterfield.
In other words, the act of 9/11 was by far too powerful of a symbol to give it away to the Enemy. Not in vain did people all over the world rejoice when this Mammon symbol collapsed. The knowledge that the Americans may be beaten on their home ground has comforted the innumerable victims of the Empire. I do not know who did it, but it was planned and executed by people of great spirit.

I can’t accept the Mossad and/or the Jews as the perpetrators of the 9/11, not because it is an antisemitic claim. My readers know that this consideration has never stopped me before. It’s the other way around: I consider it a deeply pro-Jewish claim implying that only Jews are capable of enterprises of great pith and moment, while others prefer to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and never take arms against a sea of troubles. In a way, the Jewish perpetration theory shows how far this belief in Jewish superiority has entered the hearts of Americans and of many Muslims: “if it was done and it did not flop, it’s got to be Jews”. We Israelis are more critical; we say “if it did not flop, it can’t be the Mossad”.

This does not mean that one has to subscribe to the 19 Osama warriors’ conspiracy as presented by US officialdom. Of many kamikaze attacks, that of 9/11 towers above the rest. It cannot be compared with any other, certainly not with any Islamic suicide attack. The assault on the very symbol of Mammon and at the heart of its military might was a great, paradigmatic event. It is easier to believe that this feat was done by avenging angels, by St Michael in person, rather than by five merry Mossad agents or by Bush and Cheney’s accomplices. It is easier to agree with Baudrillard that the Twin towers had committed suicide in order not to be outdone by the pilots, than it is with Barrett et al that it was done by crafty Jew Larry Silverstein in order to collect insurance.

Baudrillard spoke of people who “try everything to discredit their actions. Thus we call them "suicidal" and "martyrs," and add immediately that such martyrdom does not prove anything. But such a moral argument can be reversed. If the voluntary martyrdom of kamikazes proves nothing, then the involuntary martyrdom of the victims cannot prove anything either, and there is something obscene in making it a moral argument.”

Unwillingly, Barrett and the Truth Movement are engaged in undermining and discrediting the supreme sacrifice of those who died to knock off the Towers. I understand Noam Chomsky, who did not want to support this effort. Nor did he want to uphold the arrogant American view of 9/11 as the worst lie and the most dreadful atrocity ever. Chomsky suggested that Barrett compare this lie with “the massacre of 4 million people in Indochina or the Reaganite terror, leaving some 200,000 tortured and mutilated bodies in Central America.”

“But qui bono?!” – I hear them calling. – “The Jews (call them Zionists, or Neocons, if you wish) profited from 9/11. Even Netanyahu said recently that 9/11 was good for Israel.”

There is no doubt that the Jews used 9/11 to its fullest extent; but they can make use of any event due to their media control. Be it a Mars landing, a victory over Germany, a defeat in Iraq, oil price rise or the dollar’s collapse – they can use it to their advantage. They do not have to fly to Mars, knock down the dollar – or the Twin Towers, themselves.

“In order to succeed, a terrorist needs dynamite and newspaper”, quipped a Jewish terrorist in 1901. In 2001, a hundred years later, a newspaper alone would suffice. With newspapers, or rather, with TV under one’s control, one can utilize others’ dynamite for one’s own benefit. One can expropriate others’ actions freely, even others’ supreme sacrifices. In such situations, qui bono? does not apply. Everything, even the most damning event will be turned for their benefit – as long as they will do the explaining.

Noam Chomsky does not fight the Truth Movement. Let these good people continue with their research of steel and concrete boiling points; let them accuse the administration, the CIA, the Jews and Mossad as much as they wish. Their struggle has some positive value: it undermines public trust in mainstream media and in good intentions of the authorities. They may try to understand that their position is not the only one possible: others may actually approve of the attack, or consider it of little importance, or just have other fish to fry.

People attach the “left gatekeeper” label to anybody who does not agree with them with great ease; but this pertinent expression should be used against pundits who fight us, not against allies and neutrals.

Our friend Jim Petras had unleashed such philippics against Chomsky: “Noam Chomsky has long been one of the great obfuscators of AIPAC and the existence of Zionist power over US Middle East policy... To continue to masquerade as ‘war critics’ while ignoring the central role of the Zionist Power Configuration makes pundits like Chomsky, Moyers and Powers and their acolytes irrelevant to the anti-war struggle. They are part of the problem, not part of the solution.”
Petras also wants Chomsky to fight his war, that is the war against Jewish establishment (he calls it ‘Zionist Power Configuration’). Yes, it would be nice, but then, Petras won’t be needed. Instead of seeing Noam Chomsky as an enemy (“part of the problem”), it is better to view him as an important ally covering an important part of the battle line. He does not cover all, he does not go to places Petras or I go, but he does not stop us from going. That is why it is ridiculous to call him “left gatekeeper”, as he keeps no gate locked.

We have many points of disagreement with Noam Chomsky. To mention a few:

(1) He supports the obsolete idea of Two States in Israel/Palestine and thus of preserving the Jewish state, while we call to undo it and replace it with One state where Jews are equal rather than superior.

(2) He considers the American support of Israel being derived from “the imperial interests”, (‘Chomsky thesis’: “Israel is good for true imperial interests of the US elites, and the Jewish Lobby is powerful exactly because its line coincides with these interests of elites”) while we think that this support is caused by the commanding heights the Jews occupy in the US discourse.

We argued for our views and against his, sine ira et studio, in many articles, both our own and those of other writers published on our site or circulated. My essay Fiesta of St. FerminRNR (included in the book The Galilee Flowers) dealt and debunked the Chomsky thesis in 2001. It caused very interesting polemics. I discussed it with Chomsky. In Spider Web, we brought up the polemics of Noah Cohen who called Chomsky’s position on Palestine "Apologetics for Injustice". We published Jeffrey Blankfort’s ‘The Israel Lobby and the Left: Uneasy Questions’ and ‘The Chomsky/Blankfort Polemic. W e published a very censorious article by Bob Finch, who described Noam Chomsky as “the chief Rabbi of the left who absolves the Jewish state of guilt and responsibility for its apartheid regime and its military belligerence against neighbouring countries.” We published harsh critique of Chomsky’s views qua the Lobby by Pappe, Blankfort and Petras in Contra Chomsky and by Mazin Qumsiyeh., see also Chomsky under Fire.


Despite many, many attacks on him, Chomsky never responded in kind. He always remained polite, even courteous. He had never ever blocked a publication. He is going his way and let us respect it. Light infantry and heavy artillery have different modes of operation. Chomsky is our heavy cannon, while Petras or Gilad Atzmon or Israel Shamir, we are light scouts, the reconnaissance unit. We should go further than he does, but he is our fallback. Let us cherish this man and his activity.

The bottom line was editorialized by Ian Buckley in his In Defence of Shamir .. and Chomsky

“I would content that Noam is basically an honest and very knowledgeable man, despite his occasional personal blind spots. It should be freely admitted that Chomsky doesn't go far enough on the Middle East. Whatever the slight defects and blind spots in this particular area, he still deserves kudos for his excellent, indeed pioneering, investigations into the distortions of the mass media and the profoundly undemocratic nature of 'democratic' societies. After a reading of Chomsky, you are inoculated for good against the foetid netherworld of the mainstream media. There is nothing wrong at all with a little criticism, but we shouldn't lose sight of who the 'good guys' really are. After all, there are so few of them around. And in my book, both Shamir and Chomsky are good guys.”

Heemeyer Rides Again

By Israel Shamir

This is a human interest story. It could have happened anywhere, but it happened in Jerusalem. Yes, we have Jews and Arabs here, but this is a story about men and women. It would make a good subject for a film, or for a novel, as it includes romantic love, beautiful young lovers separated by prejudice, severe and unjust punishment meted out in the name of law and order - and untimely death.

A few days ago, a young Jerusalemite got aboard his Caterpillar tractor, ran amok on the main street, hitting buses and cars and was finally shot dead by a vigilante. Why did it happen? For the same reason an American, Marvin Heemeyer, did his deed. When a man is pushed too far, too hard, he snaps. One weeps, another one commits suicide, and yet another one takes a gun and shoots everybody in sight – or rolls his bulldozer over cars and people.

Marvin Heemeyer was a Colorado welder who, on June 4, 2004, drove his bulldozer through the town hall, the office of the hostile local newspaper that editorialized against him, the home of a judge and others. He was pushed too hard: the municipality had blocked his access road, his livelihood had been ruined, his simple requests were being refused. The young Jerusalemite, Hosam Dwayyat was pushed much harder.

Hosam was born in Jerusalem after the Jewish takeover, and grew up in a village on the outskirts of the city. Sur Bahr, his village on the edge of the desert with its shepherds and sheep, is not a bad place: it is walking distance from both the Old City of Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Houses are nice, spacey and covered with white limestone, surrounded by small gardens.

Hosam, like all the youth of Sur Bahr lived in the twilight zone between Jews and Palestinians. He spoke Hebrew and Arabic, had Israeli and Palestinian friends, went to discos and concerts, could go to Tel Aviv or West Jerusalem like an ordinary human being, like you and me. However, on his way he would frequently be stopped, searched, ordered to present his documents, detained, beaten and released: Israeli security police, Border Guards, do this regularly in order to remind an Arab that he is an Arab. For this reason, the dwellers of East Jerusalem hesitate to venture westward, much like you’d hesitate to visit a violent South Bronx.

But Hosam was young, and youth does not surrender easily. Some eight years ago, and he was 24, he had met a young Russian girl Marina who was 19, and they fell in love. He was her first love, and she did not hide her happiness.

The Russians are a breed apart in the social mosaic of Israel. Though nominally “Jewish”, they have kept their Russian identity, and their own ways. They were not infected with Jewish chauvinism in the cradle. For Russians, Jewishness is a private thing, not a public identity. In the internationalist Soviet Union and in its successor states, boys and girls fall in love with or befriend a person without regard to his or her ethnic and religious origin, and it does not cause a ripple, let alone a storm. Upon arrival to Israel, these good-natured young people are classified by rather arrogant Israelis as “Johnnys-come-lately”. They are snubbed and socially rejected. They have little contact with youth of good social standing, while the children of poor Oriental Jewish suburbs are too foreign for them. The Russians do not share the ideals of other Israeli Jewish communities, i.e. military valour and the amassing of wealth.

The Palestinians, especially those brought up in the bigger cities of Jerusalem, Haifa, Jaffa-Tel Aviv and Ramallah, are closer to the Russians than are members of other communities: they are smarter, behave like gentlemen, and do not look down on Russians. They intermarry, or have romantic connections with them, quite often. Among my immediate friends, a young Russian girl married a boy from Batir, and now she lives in that village near Jerusalem with her new family. Another one had a Palestinian boyfriend for two years, before breaking up for personal reasons.
Hosam and Marina went steady; they lived together for a while in Tel Aviv. “Hosam liked Israelis”, Marina told the newspaper this week. But their love was crushed upon the rocks of apartheid.

Liaisons between nominal “Jews” and goys cause much alarm or outright hatred in official Israel. A few days ago, the largest Israeli newspaper, Yediot Ahronot, informed its readers that “the Kiryat Gat municipality has decided to act against … female teenagers falling in love with young Bedouins and they … presented a 10-minute film titled Sleeping with the Enemy”. In June, the Israeli army removed an Israeli girl named Melissa, 23, who married a local man named Muhammad Hamameh, 25, from the village of Husan. There is a vigilante organisation called Yad Leakhim that fights intermarriages and conversions to Christianity or Islam, and they are busy interfering with interracial happiness.

Marina’s parents received hints and odd looks from neighbours. It was explained to them that “it is not done”, that it is “sleeping with enemy”. They conveyed this pressure to their daughter, but strong-willed Marina moved to live with her boyfriend and his family. He wanted to marry her, but Russian girls rarely marry so young, and – like other Western girls – they do not necessarily want to marry their first boyfriend. They still want to flirt with others, while seriously minded sincere young men may well disapprove of it. You do not have to be a Russian and/or Arab to know about this. Moreover, you do not have to be a Moor to be aware that jealousy may cause you to slap the flighty partner, and slap he did. In a moment of anger, Marina complained to the police, and they took away her lover. Marina tried to take her complaint back; at that time she was pregnant and lived with Hosam’s parents. “He slapped me when he had reason to feel jealous”, she said last week. But even her intervention in favour of Hosam in the court did not help – he was sentenced to 20 months of jail.

Jerusalem judges are notoriously anti-Arab; they'd have to be, as they approve of so many unjust acts towards Arabs. Here they saw a chance to break a forbidden liaison of a nominally Jewish girl with a goy, of teaching the Russians and the Palestinians a lesson. But there was another reason, and it was equally relevant. In post-feminist Israel, as in many other Western countries, a woman may not withdraw her complaint against a man. The state provides for the ham-fisted over-protection to women. It is ready to do violence to real women for the sake of “Women’s Rights.” In an unrelated case, Israeli minister Hayim Ramon kissed a soldier girl. She complained, but later withdrew her complaint. Police pursued her all the way to Latin America and forced her to complain, threatening her with charges of making a false accusation. The feminists witch-hunted Ramon all the way to court, and they still refer to him as a “rapist”. So Hosam and Marina could suffer their same fate in any feminist-ridden European country.

Last week Marina, 27, still pretty, slim and blond, bewept Hosam and told a reporter that she was and still is in love with him, her first love and the father of her child she was now bringing up alone. She was angry at the vigilante, a far-right activist who kept shooting at unarmed Hosam. She shed tears for the man Israeli authorities and media had already judged to be an “evil terrorist”. For years, Marina hoped he’d forgive her momentary lapse and come back to her after his release. But he did not return. His family arranged for his marriage, and he tried to reshape his life in the Palestinian milieu after his failure in the Israeli one.

This second try was even worse. Once his family had had much land, but it was confiscated to build nearby Jewish neighbourhood. The remainder of their land was confiscated to build the Wall, a fourteen-feet-tall monster that cut them off from Bethlehem and the desert. On what was left, he built a house for his new family, for his wife and two children.

But a Palestinian may not build a house in Jerusalem, even on his own land, and he can’t ever get a permit. Hosam had been met by Israeli “justice” a second time, with equally disastrous consequences. They ordered him to demolish the house and fined him $50,000. After that, he snapped, took his front-loader tractor and ran amok in the centre of Jerusalem, ramming cars and buses. He was quickly shot dead.

There are some local specifics, and bulldozers as well as killing of an attacker are permanent fixture of the Arab-Israeli conflict: a Jewish bulldozer driver drove his armoured machine over the American peace activist Rachel Corrie who defended a Palestinian home from demolition and was never prosecuted. Another Jewish bulldozer driver shared with the world his experience of razing Jenin: “I had no mercy for anybody. I would erase anyone with the D-9, and I have demolished plenty. For three days, I just destroyed and destroyed. The whole area. I didn't see, with my own eyes, people dying under the blade of the D-9. But if there were any, I wouldn't care at all. If you knocked down a house, you buried 40 or 50 people. I had lots of satisfaction in Jenin”. While the Jewish vigilante who killed Hosam was called “hero”, Arabs who killed Jewish murderers in Hebron or in Shafa Amr were prosecuted for murder.

However, putting aside le couleur locale, such a story could happen almost anywhere, in the US or in Europe. Some prejudices are common: A young girl could get cold feet right before marriage. A jealous youngster could slap his flirty girlfriend. Feminist judges could separate a young couple. She could remain alone loving him and bearing his child. City hall could demolish anybody’s house for being built without a permit or in order to build a bypass. A man could become incensed and mete his vengeance on whoever came his way Death Wish style. And here in Israel, as in your country, we are first of all human -- men and women. This is an optimistic tragedy: normalcy creeps in through the holes in apartheid.

It is not necessary to view every event through the binary, Jew-Goy, or Jew-Arab perception. This perspective is dearest with people for whom their Jewishness is more important than their humanity. For them, denial of the “tractor terrorist murder of Jews” is “another blood libel against Jewish people”. They force their binary view onto others. Thus, Prime Minister Olmert and the Labour leader Barak immediately sent their police forces to disturb the mourning family, and, equally devoted to the Jewish paradigm, President Bush, UN chief Ban Ki-moon and sundry others condemned the “bloody terrorist”. Even good guy Seth Freedman wrote that “Israelis should be under no illusions as to why we're being targeted by terrorist killers such as Hosan Dwayyat”. Their counterparts in Hamas, Hezbollah and the mythic Galilee Liberation also claimed responsibility, or “understood” Hosam’s actions as those of resistance. The yellow press of Israel and of Jewish communities abroad invented his criminal past (“the convicted rapist, burglar and drug dealer”), his terrorist call to God and his hatred of Jews.

But this miasma of obsessive hate can’t transform the human tragedy: that of an unhappy man pushed too far, whose broken body was washed by the tears of a Russian Israeli girl named Marina.

PS. Only Gilad Atzmon, Israeli saxophonist and writer of note, wondered “why the Israelis are entirely sure that it was an act of terror. It may as well be that the man was slightly mad, he might have had a phone row with his wife or alternatively a soaring dispute with his Israeli boss that made him flip. I would assume that in order to declare an incident to be an act of terror, a terrorist motivation or a scenario must be established first. Without establishing such a motivation we are doomed to admit that we are dealing here with a criminal case that must be investigated. We should as well refrain from jumping to conclusions.”

He was right here, though, in a moment of despair, he came to the wrong conclusion continuing “However, the Israelis seem to be pretty convinced here. The Israelis are indeed united, and it is good that they are so united because it allows us to see what the Jewish state is all about. Sadly, there is no partner for peace in the Israeli society… Unfortunately, and this is indeed a tragedy, the Palestinians are at the forefront of the most crucial battle for a better world. The Palestinians have been captured in a grave encounter with a psychotic, phantasmic, bloodthirsty self-centric Jewish national identity that knows no mercy.”

Not only native Palestinians, but Israelis too, including nominal Jews, are at odds with this Jewish paradigm, or identity. Just as normal women suffer from their feminist defenders, ordinary Israelis officially classified as “Jews” do not need defence from the binary perception priests. While abroad, every man can choose whether to accept Jewish identity -- in Israel we have it forced upon us. Israeli unity is a phantasm as seem from afar; up close, you see men and women with their own preoccupations, and “professional Jews” are even rarer in Israel than elsewhere.

Like Gilad, I doubt that ‘Jews’, i.e. the people who uphold this identity, will agree by their own good will to any fair arrangement with native Palestinians. But unlike Gilad, I consider Israelis, including nominal Jews, to be capable of such an arrangement. For we do not fight Jews, we fight the Jewish identity, and we can win. If the Russians succeeded in making Jewishness a private thing, not an identity, so can we.

As long as there are Israeli girls like Marina and Israeli men like Gilad, there is a chance for peace. Better than a chance -- a certainty!

Wiki, the Chaos Controlled

By Israel Shamir

In the art of surveillance, there is a cunning ploy familiar to the readers of Le Carre: the target is followed by a clumsy gumshoe; he discovers he is being tailed, easily shakes the tail off and goes on, feeling secure and unobserved. Unbeknownst to him, there are other detectives who stick to him like glue and follow him to his perdition. Professionally it is called a “double tail”.

Apparently, some of us were duped by such a ruse in the peculiar affair of a Zionist plot to infiltrate Wikipedia. This powerful online encyclopaedia is ostensibly free and open: everyone can be an editor, can add or edit any entry. Editors remain anonymous; their true identity is hidden behind a nickname. This rule has a serious drawback: using this anonymity, a dedicated group can infiltrate the system by stealth, distort reality and create a false picture of the world in the eyes of billions. Apparently this script has been recently enacted.

Conspiracy? Yes. Jewish conspiracy? You bet! The damning email exchange was intercepted and published, revealing a radical Zionist plot to bend “Wiki.” A moderate leftist (some would call it ‘tame’) US-based pro-Palestinian site EI revealed that the radical-extremist Zionist organisation CAMERA called for “volunteers who can work as ‘editors’ to ensure” that Israel-related articles on Wikipedia agree with their right-wing-Zionist agenda. This effort was to be kept secret from the media and the public. Stealth and misrepresentation were presented as the keys to success. A CAMERA official advised the volunteers to sign up as editors for Wikipedia and afterwards to avoid editing Israel-related material for a while, in order to “avoid the appearance of being one-topic editors”. The orchestrated effort was to appear as if it were the work of unaffiliated individuals, and for this reason the editors were to avoid picking a user name that marked them as pro-Israel, or that let people know their real name. The emails taught Zionist apprentices how to act in the interests of Israel while using neutral language. The emphasis was on the long-run side of the operation: “This is a marathon not a sprint”, a Zionist instructor nicknamed ‘Zeq’ taught his apprentices in the email exchange.

The EI article about this revelation was quite sycophantic towards Wikipedia. It presented “Wiki” as an objective source at loggerheads with Zionist infiltrators, and even bordered on advertising: “Openness and good faith are among Wikipedia’s core principles. Any person in the world can write or edit articles, but Wikipedia has strict guidelines and procedures for accountability intended to ensure quality control and prevent vandalism, plagiarism or distortion. It is because of these safeguards that articles on key elements of the Palestine-Israel conflict have generally remained well-referenced, useful and objective.”

Still, it was not enough, and on the following day, 22 April 2008, EI updated this article with a triumphal and calming statement: “a plan by the pro-Israel pressure group CAMERA to skew Wikipedia in a pro-Israel direction appears to have collapsed after it was exposed by EI”. Zeq was dismissed, and anyway, fewer than a dozen of CAMERA moles were active at the time EI exposed the scheme. In short: everything is fine, Wiki is functioning well, and the Zionist scare is gone, thanks to fearless EI. And anyway, it was only a small operation by the enemies of freedom, and it is over.

Excuse me, is this an article, or a paid advertisement for Wikipedia? Did EI receive on the evening of April 21st an offer they could not refuse from the owner of Wiki? Only a Zionist can think that Wiki “articles on key elements of the Palestine-Israel conflict have generally remained well-referenced, useful and objective.” On the contrary, they are biased in the extreme; just read, for instance, the exceedingly hostile entry on Hamas, including its Talk, i.e. discussions of editors, deletions and corrections. It defines Hamas as “… best known for multiple suicide bombings and other attacks directed against civilians [best known to whom? To me it is best known as the ruling party of Palestine, and secondly, as a grassroots mutual assistance movement – ISH]… Hamas' charter calls for the destruction of the State of Israel [while all prominent Israeli parties have joined in the destruction of Palestine – ISH] … the organization is described by many as antisemitic.” Is that objective? Further the entry says, inter alia: “Hamas is considered by the US a terrorist organisation.” This is true, but not the whole truth. I personally added: “However, Russia refused to consider Hamas a terrorist organisation.” My addition was immediately removed by the ever-watchful Zionist case-officer. Hamas is terrorist, full stop.

Only a dishonest fool, or someone who never used Wikipedia, could think that plan of the Lobby “to skew Wikipedia in a pro-Israel direction appears to have collapsed”. The clumsy gumshoe was shaken off, for CAMERA is but a bunch of amateurs, extreme Jewish nationalists with some nuisance value. They do not represent the Jewish mainstream; but they do play a useful part: they make the mainstream appear moderate. Being hassled by CAMERA is like being hassled by the Klan – it proves nothing. They hassle everybody, even moderate Zionists and other fellow-philosemites whom CAMERA fanatics consider insufficiently zealous, such as Johann Hari, an English professional philosemite who recently boasted: “I have worked undercover at both the Finsbury Park mosque and among neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers to expose the Jew-hatred there; I went on the Islam Channel to challenge the anti-Semitism of Islamists, I received a rash of death threats calling me ‘a Jew-lover’’. Later he strayed farther afield and wrote about Israeli sewage pouring all over Gaza. Afterwards, he complained, “CAMERA said I am an anti-Jewish bigot akin to Joseph Goebbels.”

Now, when the amateurs are disgraced and gone, the professionals remain. Wiki is as partial to Jews as the Jewish Chronicle. The picture of the world it offers is being edited and shaped in full accordance with the general Jewish world view thanks to a group of permanent and devoted editors and arbiters.

Freedom to add and edit is just the bait attracting millions of unpaid contributors. If Wiki were truly free, provided that “ordinary people’ are in the vast majority, we could expect to find a democratic world view presented, not one not perverted by a biased minority; but the real Wikipedia does not work that way. The apparent chaos of Wiki is strictly controlled by a hierarchy of Agents Smith, who secure the Wiki matrix. They delete references to Jewish misdeeds, but emphasize every good deed by a Jew. Israel/Palestine is just one area in what is truly universal agenda. For instance, they block and remove attempts to mention the Jewish origin of the founder of the Satanist movement, one La Vey (originally Levy), though this explains his hatred towards Christianity. They insist on the inferiority of Poincare versus Einstein, of Jung versus Freud or Proudhon versus Marx. Every act against Jews is recorded; every act of Jews against goyim is blotted out from this organised memory of our generation. These editors can manage just fine, thank you very much, without amateur infiltrators.

Zeq has been banned for his indiscretions, but the man he wrote of so admiringly, whom he described as a role model to his apprentices (“work with him and learn from him”), an ideal,. effective Zionist Wikipedia editor called Jayjg, is still there. Jayjg is not just an editor; he is an arbiter -- what passes for a judge on the Wikipedia. He was appointed to that position by the site owner himself. He is an Agent Smith of the Wiki matrix. One can see his work in many, many entries: clever and unscrupulous, he is a master of the subterfuge and deceit.

Another, superior Agent Smith is Cberlet or John Foster (Chip) Berlet, the scourge of the web. He is acting under many names. He is a collaborator with the ADL, the Jewish thought police. Though he previously denied having any relationship to ADL, he admitted to Israeli Foreign Affairs that he “had had quite a cordial professional relationship with the ADL" and “had been doing research in cooperation with ADL”. The New York City Jewish newspaper "Forward" reported that Berlet transferred information from an FBI anti-Communist informer directly to ADL. Ace Hayes wrote: “John Foster “Chip” Berlet has been involved, over the past half decade, in attacking virtually every independent critic of the Imperial State that the reader can name.” His operation is financed by the Ford Foundation. Michael Collins Piper in his monumental book on the Kennedy assassination, Final Judgment, asserted that Chip Berlet is a CIA agent. Naturally, his own entry in Wiki is protected from editing. The Arbitration committee (those who hold the reigns of power on the Wiki) “admit to hero-worship of Cberlet’, I was informed by a prominent insider.

These men are discreet, they won’t babble about their devotion to the Jewish cause -- they hide it under the veil of bureaucratic expressions and abbreviations. Their supporting cast includes some Jewish “antizionists” like RolandR. This is actually British Trotskyite trade union apparatchik Roland Rance, who does not mind cooperating with convinced anti-Communist, CIA and ADL agent Berlet and with zealous Zionist Jayjg. So much for his antizionism and his socialism! He, and thousands of smaller wannabe Agents Smith do not need the starry-eyed arch-Zionists of CAMERA, they are already in.

The “revelation” by EI is nothing but a subterfuge, a “double tail” executed to increase our trust in Wiki. A similar “double tail” operation was performed last year, when Wiki announced it had found CIA-made edits on a few pages. Careful reading of that “revelation” was even more disappointing than that of EI. The worst discovered CIA edit of the President Ahmadinejad entry was an ‘added exclamation “Wahhhhhh!”, while “other changes that have been made are more innocuous, and include tweaks to the profile of former CIA chief Porter Goss and celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey.” This is ridiculous: the US secret services spend many billions per annum in their drive for domination of the Web. A recent report speaks of $30 billion allocated by the Pentagon for an “electronic Manhattan Project” in order to fight the Web. And they want us to believe that all these billions produced an exclamation “Wahhhhhh!”? Alas, it is just another “double tail” sting operation by the usual suspects.

2

The Wiki entries on Palestine/Israel are far from “well-referenced, useful and objective” as the dupes of EI claim. On the second thought, are they dupes, or willing collaborators? The top man in EI is Electronic Ali, as Ali Abunima is nicknamed, the man who began the witch hunt against “Shamir the antisemite”. He is the Arab front for various exclusively Jewish organisations for Palestine, who rather promote the Jewish cause and fight antisemitism. Such Jewish bodies like to have a compliant shabbesgoy (as Rosa Luxemburg called these guys) for a front, and Ali fits the bill perfectly. Even this article on Wiki makes some reference to ‘evil antisemites’.

In his attack on me, Electronic Ali acted together with the execrable Hussein Ibish, but since then, the thieves have fallen apart.[i] Another prominent EI person is, or was, Nigel Parry, a British antisemitism-fighter, their webmaster and probably also their case officer. Nigel Perry is an enforcer of Political Correctness and is Gatekeeper General of the permitted discourse on Palestine, keeping the line between hard Likud and the soft Peace Now. He proudly mentions many years of involvement with the Palestinian cause. Well, such guys are a good reason why the Palestinian cause looks the way it does.

Why, we could have One State, a single unified state in Israel/Palestine by now, but for these guys! Looking back, that was a possible development in 2001, sometime before 9/11, when my call for One State was heeded by many Israelis and Americans, and supported by major American newspapers. But then these men began their campaign to denigrate me and scared supporters away. “Shamir is discredited and marginalised”, they wrote with satisfaction. For them, it did not matter that together with me, they discredited and marginalised the idea of One State, the only possible peaceful solution to our conflict.

The final battle was fought on the Wikipedia site, where Ali-Ibish-Parry provided ammunition to Zionist Agent Smith Jayjg and ADL’s own Berlet, with the ADL-sponsored block of “antifascist” e-zines: British Searchlight, Norwegian Monitor, Swedish Expo, American Trotskyite Socialist Viewpoint et al. These formidable forces were counteracted by our wonderful friend Joh Domingo, a South African fighter against apartheid, and our French friend Omnivore. You can read the protocols of the battle on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Israel_Shamir. They decided to make me a Swedish neonazi impostor, instead of the Israeli writer I really am.

All the time this battle was going on, I lived in my Jaffa house, receiving endless visitors, giving numerous interviews, going to work, seeing people – but I might as well have been dead. I felt like Doc Daneeka, a character in Joseph Heller’s witty Catch-22, who was declared dead as the plane he was supposed to fly was downed. “I am alive!” he shouted. “Here we have a paper saying you are dead”, they replied. His wife “inherited” his property, he was stricken from the lists, they stopped serving him food, and even his friends and comrades looked askance when he appeared. This is the power of an official-looking document – or a webpage blue with hyperlinks. Thus I have learned the dreadful power of an encyclopaedia: it does not reflect the world, but rather creates the world. Wiki is linked to thousands of sites; whether you look at answers.com or at an Arab English-language site, you’ll be led to Wiki with its lies.

If an encyclopaedia says I am a Swedish neonazi antisemite, nothing can change it. I could scream all day long: “Look, here I am, in Jaffa” but they would reply: “Here we have an official paper saying that you are not”. I am very grateful to Joh Domingo for his superhuman efforts, but he could not overcome the Agents Smith. Neither could I. If tomorrow they decide to make you a little green man from Mars, they will succeed, too. And then, even your friends will look behind your back for your flying saucer.

A few days ago, I spoke to a group of Indian intellectuals in Delhi, and afterwards I received this touching letter from Come Carpentier, a French expat writer living in the Indian capital. He wrote: “I meant to thank you for these enlightening, balanced and always objective yet passionate words you spoke that evening...Listening to them dispels even better than reading you the reputation that you have been given by you-know-who as a firebrand defamer of Israel, holocaust denier, Nazi apologist and so on and so forth... Not to mention the rumours about your being a clandestine Swedish Far Right-winger infiltrated in the Holy Land by the international Islamo-Fascist Cabal!”

III

In a way, the pro-Jewish bias of Wiki is unavoidable bearing in mind Jewish positions in Western discourse, media and universities. Jews – even people of Jewish origin – are likely to correct discourse in a way that is flattering for them. They did it hundred years ago, they did it five hundred years ago. Provided they do it in only one direction, they constitute the only entity (besides the undermined Church and its Orders) capable of a marathon (in words of Zeq) -- capable of sustaining a long-run operation.
A hundred years ago, New York lawyer Samuel Untermeyer financed the first Scofield Reference Bible; since then, the Scofield Bibles are being republished in newer even more pro-Jewish editions and they bring in millions of Christian Zionists.

Joachim Martillo writes in his Judonia: “Jewish efforts benefit from organizational memory that does not exist in other lobbying situations. The longevity of Jewish Federation organizations can give Israel Lobbying efforts a generational aspect not seen elsewhere. For example, Israel Advocacy organizations worked for fifty years to delegitimize Arabists in the Foreign Service and State Department, and replace them with Israel-sympathetic personnel”.

Martillo erroneously connects this result with some specific pro-Israel organisation. The success of Zionism (and incidentally its crimes) is just the strawberry on top of the Jewish success cake. The Jews are engaged in the advocacy of Jews, and consequently they delegitimize Arabists, or priests, or independent historians who do not subscribe to the notion that Jews are special in a consistently beneficial way. Zionism is a result of Jewish pruning of history, and this pruned history is what we are all taught.

There are no Arab sheiks or Russian oligarchs or American oilmen ready to finance anything long-term of no immediate relevancy. They do not understand that practically every entry of an encyclopaedia, of every textbook, influences future generations. A correct entry on, say, Poincare or monotheism or the Persian invasion could save potential Zionists from their delusions of grandeur.

Wikipedia is a great idea for Jews: people of all nations from all over the world contribute their knowledge, and then this Summa is pruned in a way acceptable to the pro-Jewish gardeners. Despite its “free” image, Wikipedia is part and parcel of the immense Judaised media holding, and thus is as biased as any other publication of this group, from the New York Times (owned by Sulzberger) to Liberation (owned by Rothschild) to hundreds of Murdock papers.


Conclusion

Wikipedia is an important asset, like the New York Times, but both are in the hands of enemies of freedom. Sometimes good and truthful articles or entries are to be found in both, but these are specks of gold dust placed there to salt a dud mine. We certainly want to democratise both -- to make both really democratic and accessible. Until this is done, we should explain that both are tools of mind control not to be trusted or taken at face value. If Wiki wants to preserve some of its reliability, it must get rid of its Zionist enforcers. Not only of the CAMERA bumpkins, but of the hard men in black suits, the Agents Smith.

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.