After appearing last week for an hour, I'll be back on the Alex Jones Radio Show for two hours this Friday, May 2, from 1 to 3 pm CENTRAL time.
Check your local radio listings, or listen online at: www.infowars.com
I am hoping to discuss the roots of the Cryptocracy and the religion of Judaism, in depth with Mr. Jones.
***
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Friday, April 25, 2008
Why We Fight
by Michael A. Hoffman II | April 25, 2008
Visit our online bookstore: www.RevisionistHistory.org
Frank Capra did a movie series in the 1940s called "Why We Fight." It's dated now and his cornball "Capracorn" is no longer as compelling as it once was in the eyes of our parents' generation.
Still, there are these days many books, movies and radio and TV talk shows urging us to rise to our" patriotic duty in the fight against Islam," the "clash of civilizations."
They say that if we don't fight, we'll forfeit our freedom to the towel-headed jihadists who want to take over Europe and America and impose Sharia law. And because, as our president has told us, "they hate freedom" and that's why we in the West supposedly have so much of it.
Like all efforts to motivate us to travel to foreign nations and kill people there, the latest crusade resembles those of the past, such as Woodrow Wilson's "war to end all wars" by killing "the Hun" - the Germans, the most advanced civilized nation on earth in 1914 - cradle of philosophy, music, art and science.
We bought Wilson's line, obeyed the summons and fought the war that guaranteed an even more apocalyptic and murderous conflagration 21 years after cessation of hostilities in 1918, necessitating an obscene numbering system: World War I, World War II...
Wold War III is in the offing if we would only credit the words of Bush and Cheney, Bill Kristol and Victor Davis Hanson, and of course their zealous cheerleading squad from the fever-swamp that is Churchianity.
So why can't I get excited about fighting World War III against brown-skinned people in the Middle East? Is there something wrong with me physically? Am I "4F" as they used to say, flat footed or near-sighted?
No, actually I'm 6' 1" and a 170 lbs. and could still probably hump my way over an army obstacle course. I can still knock a squirrel out of a tree at 50 yards so I should be able to do the same to "collateral" Iranians, when "duty" calls. What about morally? How fit am I in that regard? Do I possess the martial virtues of the Greeks, the patriotism of Nathan Hale, the courage of Chesty Puller?
I can't answer that one until the Red Chinese Army lands 300 miles west of me, in Seattle. Or until a division of Taliban descend on Idaho from Vancouver, BC. In those two scenarios I would indeed be willing to fight, to defend my wife and children and north Idaho. How well I would hold up in battle will not be known until the bullets start to whiz, God forbid.
But for now, it seems rather unlikely that the Chinese - who already have all of Seattle that they want, thanks to "free trade"- would need to bring their military there too. As for the Taliban, I doubt they'd want to capture a nation that abducts more than 400 children in Texas so that the "abused" kids can experience the good life that all the rest of America's children are "blessed" with: junk food, Internet porn, dope, rap and public schools.
Most likely, if I want to fight, I'll have to do as my Dad and my uncles did and pack my bags for far-off places. "Because if we don't stop 'em there, the dominos will fall and then" ... well, you know the drill.
But the fact is, I won't fight to defend Western civilization from the Muslims because ours is no longer a civilization, it's a syphilization: Holocaust-worship, Ku Klux Judaism - these are not my gods.
The West of our forefathers is nearly dead. True, something new and great can be fertilized and grown from the decay, but until we plant the seeds, sloth, dissipation, mental incapacitation and spiritual perfidy abound.
What freedom we have left in America is a faint echo from 1776. The blood the patriots shed back then secured for us rights which we still enjoy to some degree today, though with each passing year the echo grows more faint and our rights ever more curtailed. We have done little to build on the legacy. Indeed, from the time of Abraham Lincoln onward, we have eroded our liberty.
Are our rights unique to our American heritage? Certainly not. These rights are immemorial. The founders called them inalienable. They admitted the debt they owed to Athens, Republican Rome and Christian Europe. Our liberty is God-given and throughout history, western civilization has been defined by protecting what God bestowed upon us against assaults from our own rulers and kings who would dare to usurp god, which is the theology of the Talmud and Kabbalah, man is his own deity.
"Why we fight"? The wrong questions are being asked, hence the correct answers cannot be found. The question that is not being asked is, who really is our enemy? That's a primary query that has been ruled out of order.
This American is not interested in fighting Muslim civilization. I don't believe we have a western civilization to posit against them. The god of money through the engine of usury constitutes "the West" today. Sorry, I won't kill and die for General Motors, Bank of America or John Hagee's CHK (Church of the Holy Khazar).
I am ruminating on these thoughts today because yesterday, April 24, was Ernst Zundel's birthday. Many of you who are not Canadian will not have heard of Ernst because he's been consigned to a penal hole and sentenced to oblivion by everyone from Amnesty International to the ADL.
Zundel turned 69. He has been in prison in Canada, and now in Germany, for several years (!) for publishing the book, "Did Six Million Really Die?" and for similar thought crimes.
When he was still a toddler the "forces of freedom" who waged the "good war" set his native Black Forest town of Pforzheim on fire. He survived that holocaust that none dare call a holocaust and now sits in prison, in "free and democratic" Germany, a land that is supposedly the envy of every Muslim thirsting to be free of the ayatollahs and the imams, so that they may travel west and, in return for the requisite Talmud and Israeli worship, become prosperous, if not exactly entirely free.
As long Ernst Zundel is made to rot in a dungeon, I will not be fighting on behalf of the Western venereal disease that has confined him there.
The front page story in the April 25 edition of London's "Jewish Chronicle" newspaper gloats over the firing of Dr. Nicholas Kollerstrom by University College London. His crime? He wrote an essay, "The Auschwitz 'Gas Chamber' Illusion," which was published on Bradley Smith's CODOH website.
So why are supposed to fight? To defend Germany's right to sentence Zundel to a living death? For the British repression of scientists and academics such as Dr. Kollerstrom, so that we can sleep secure, knowing that Talmudic lies have been rendered safe from overthrow?
Let the Israelis and the corporate kings of the deal fight the Muslims.
Hoffman is the author of the forthcoming book, "Judaism Discovered." Visit his website and online bookstore at www.RevisionistHistory.org
FOR FURTHER RESEARCH
Ernst Zundel JVA Mannheim Herzogenried Str. 111 68169 Mannheim, Germany
Ingrid Zundel (his wife) 3152 Parkway 13-109 Pigeon Forge, TN 37862
His 1985 show trial in Toronto: http://www.revisionisthistory.org/revisionist14.html
***
Visit our online bookstore: www.RevisionistHistory.org
Frank Capra did a movie series in the 1940s called "Why We Fight." It's dated now and his cornball "Capracorn" is no longer as compelling as it once was in the eyes of our parents' generation.
Still, there are these days many books, movies and radio and TV talk shows urging us to rise to our" patriotic duty in the fight against Islam," the "clash of civilizations."
They say that if we don't fight, we'll forfeit our freedom to the towel-headed jihadists who want to take over Europe and America and impose Sharia law. And because, as our president has told us, "they hate freedom" and that's why we in the West supposedly have so much of it.
Like all efforts to motivate us to travel to foreign nations and kill people there, the latest crusade resembles those of the past, such as Woodrow Wilson's "war to end all wars" by killing "the Hun" - the Germans, the most advanced civilized nation on earth in 1914 - cradle of philosophy, music, art and science.
We bought Wilson's line, obeyed the summons and fought the war that guaranteed an even more apocalyptic and murderous conflagration 21 years after cessation of hostilities in 1918, necessitating an obscene numbering system: World War I, World War II...
Wold War III is in the offing if we would only credit the words of Bush and Cheney, Bill Kristol and Victor Davis Hanson, and of course their zealous cheerleading squad from the fever-swamp that is Churchianity.
So why can't I get excited about fighting World War III against brown-skinned people in the Middle East? Is there something wrong with me physically? Am I "4F" as they used to say, flat footed or near-sighted?
No, actually I'm 6' 1" and a 170 lbs. and could still probably hump my way over an army obstacle course. I can still knock a squirrel out of a tree at 50 yards so I should be able to do the same to "collateral" Iranians, when "duty" calls. What about morally? How fit am I in that regard? Do I possess the martial virtues of the Greeks, the patriotism of Nathan Hale, the courage of Chesty Puller?
I can't answer that one until the Red Chinese Army lands 300 miles west of me, in Seattle. Or until a division of Taliban descend on Idaho from Vancouver, BC. In those two scenarios I would indeed be willing to fight, to defend my wife and children and north Idaho. How well I would hold up in battle will not be known until the bullets start to whiz, God forbid.
But for now, it seems rather unlikely that the Chinese - who already have all of Seattle that they want, thanks to "free trade"- would need to bring their military there too. As for the Taliban, I doubt they'd want to capture a nation that abducts more than 400 children in Texas so that the "abused" kids can experience the good life that all the rest of America's children are "blessed" with: junk food, Internet porn, dope, rap and public schools.
Most likely, if I want to fight, I'll have to do as my Dad and my uncles did and pack my bags for far-off places. "Because if we don't stop 'em there, the dominos will fall and then" ... well, you know the drill.
But the fact is, I won't fight to defend Western civilization from the Muslims because ours is no longer a civilization, it's a syphilization: Holocaust-worship, Ku Klux Judaism - these are not my gods.
The West of our forefathers is nearly dead. True, something new and great can be fertilized and grown from the decay, but until we plant the seeds, sloth, dissipation, mental incapacitation and spiritual perfidy abound.
What freedom we have left in America is a faint echo from 1776. The blood the patriots shed back then secured for us rights which we still enjoy to some degree today, though with each passing year the echo grows more faint and our rights ever more curtailed. We have done little to build on the legacy. Indeed, from the time of Abraham Lincoln onward, we have eroded our liberty.
Are our rights unique to our American heritage? Certainly not. These rights are immemorial. The founders called them inalienable. They admitted the debt they owed to Athens, Republican Rome and Christian Europe. Our liberty is God-given and throughout history, western civilization has been defined by protecting what God bestowed upon us against assaults from our own rulers and kings who would dare to usurp god, which is the theology of the Talmud and Kabbalah, man is his own deity.
"Why we fight"? The wrong questions are being asked, hence the correct answers cannot be found. The question that is not being asked is, who really is our enemy? That's a primary query that has been ruled out of order.
This American is not interested in fighting Muslim civilization. I don't believe we have a western civilization to posit against them. The god of money through the engine of usury constitutes "the West" today. Sorry, I won't kill and die for General Motors, Bank of America or John Hagee's CHK (Church of the Holy Khazar).
I am ruminating on these thoughts today because yesterday, April 24, was Ernst Zundel's birthday. Many of you who are not Canadian will not have heard of Ernst because he's been consigned to a penal hole and sentenced to oblivion by everyone from Amnesty International to the ADL.
Zundel turned 69. He has been in prison in Canada, and now in Germany, for several years (!) for publishing the book, "Did Six Million Really Die?" and for similar thought crimes.
When he was still a toddler the "forces of freedom" who waged the "good war" set his native Black Forest town of Pforzheim on fire. He survived that holocaust that none dare call a holocaust and now sits in prison, in "free and democratic" Germany, a land that is supposedly the envy of every Muslim thirsting to be free of the ayatollahs and the imams, so that they may travel west and, in return for the requisite Talmud and Israeli worship, become prosperous, if not exactly entirely free.
As long Ernst Zundel is made to rot in a dungeon, I will not be fighting on behalf of the Western venereal disease that has confined him there.
The front page story in the April 25 edition of London's "Jewish Chronicle" newspaper gloats over the firing of Dr. Nicholas Kollerstrom by University College London. His crime? He wrote an essay, "The Auschwitz 'Gas Chamber' Illusion," which was published on Bradley Smith's CODOH website.
So why are supposed to fight? To defend Germany's right to sentence Zundel to a living death? For the British repression of scientists and academics such as Dr. Kollerstrom, so that we can sleep secure, knowing that Talmudic lies have been rendered safe from overthrow?
Let the Israelis and the corporate kings of the deal fight the Muslims.
Hoffman is the author of the forthcoming book, "Judaism Discovered." Visit his website and online bookstore at www.RevisionistHistory.org
FOR FURTHER RESEARCH
Ernst Zundel JVA Mannheim Herzogenried Str. 111 68169 Mannheim, Germany
Ingrid Zundel (his wife) 3152 Parkway 13-109 Pigeon Forge, TN 37862
His 1985 show trial in Toronto: http://www.revisionisthistory.org/revisionist14.html
***
University College London Fires Gas Chamber Researcher
YET ANOTHER FREE-THINKING ACADEMIC IS REPRESSED IN THE "DEMOCRATIC" WEST
---
College rejects Shoah denier
By Daniella Peled
The Jewish Chronicle (UK) | April 25, 2008 | p. 1
A university has withdrawn a researcher’s fellowship after he published an article claiming that the gas chambers of Auschwitz never existed. Nicholas Kollerstrom, an academic specialising in astronomy, posted the article, The Auschwitz “Gas Chamber” Illusion, on the website of the revisionist Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust.
He claimed that only one million Jews died in the war and that “the only intentional mass extermination program[me] in the concentration camps of WW2 was targeted at Germans”.
Dr Kollerstrom, 61, an honorary research fellow at University College London until Tuesday, stood by the claims this week, but expressed surprise that they had caused offence. And he insisted the university “had not actually told me what’s so terrible about the article”.
He complained that he had been accused of “thought-crime” after spending months researching it. And he added: “If a smaller number were gassed, then surely the Jewish community should be pleased that it wasn’t so ghastly.”
He wrote: “Let us hope the schoolchildren visitors are properly taught about the elegant swimming-pool at Auschwitz, built by the inmates, who would sunbathe there on Saturday and Sunday afternoons while watching the water-polo matches; and shown the paintings from its art class, which still exist; and told about the camp library which had some 45,000 volumes for inmates to choose from, plus a range of periodicals; and the six camp orchestras at Auschwitz/Birkenau, its theatrical performances, including a children’s opera, the weekly camp cinema, and even the special brothel established there.”
Dr Kollerstrom, of St John’s Wood, North West London, said he prefers to call himself a revisionist rather than a denier. Revisionists, he said, “want to look at European history without quite so much hate and bitterness”.
He also claimed he was the victim of “a calumny” by bloggers who had accused him of far-right sympathies and posted on the internet an image doctored to show him in Nazi uniform.
“I have some very good Jewish friends and have never had the slightest interest in the Nazi movement,” he said. “I never go to Germany. I have always belonged to things like the Green Party, CND and Respect.”
A UCL spokesman said: “The views expressed by Dr Kollerstrom are diametrically opposed to the aims, objectives and ethos of UCL, such that we wish to have absolutely no association with them or with their originator. “We, therefore, have no choice but to terminate Dr Kollerstrom’s research fellowship with immediate effect.”
A source at the university also said that there had been concern at opinions Dr Kollerstrom had expressed regarding conspiracy theories over the July 7, 2005 London bombings and the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. His areas of research include Newtonian theory and the 19th-century British discovery of Neptune. He is also the author of a yearly guide to Gardening and Planting by the Moon, which contains chapters on “Using the Star Zodiac” and “The Moon and Crop Yield”.
Here is an extract from one of his postings on the CODOH website:
“Zyklon-B was used at Auschwitz, as an insecticide. It was vital in attempting to maintain hygiene that mattresses be deloused. Cyanide gas was absorbed on to clay-type granules, designed to make the deadly gas as ‘safe’ as it could be.
“If you go to Auschwitz today, you can’t see any authentic gas chambers. You see stone huts, and experts have testified that they could not have been used to gas people, owing to problems in sealing them up (Zyklon-B released its cyanide gas rather slowly).”
In another, he wrote:
“The verdicts of Nuremberg were made final and binding for the post-war FRG [Federal Republic of Germany]. Germany has since paid a hundred billion Deutschmarks to Israel by way of Holocaust-compensation — clearly, that needs to be refunded.
“Germany should take the advice of Iranian leader Ahmadinajad and stop paying it, because that funding provides undue motivation for holocaust ‘memories’. Germany is helping to maintain the holocaust legend, by thus aiding the state of Israel.”
***
---
College rejects Shoah denier
By Daniella Peled
The Jewish Chronicle (UK) | April 25, 2008 | p. 1
A university has withdrawn a researcher’s fellowship after he published an article claiming that the gas chambers of Auschwitz never existed. Nicholas Kollerstrom, an academic specialising in astronomy, posted the article, The Auschwitz “Gas Chamber” Illusion, on the website of the revisionist Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust.
He claimed that only one million Jews died in the war and that “the only intentional mass extermination program[me] in the concentration camps of WW2 was targeted at Germans”.
Dr Kollerstrom, 61, an honorary research fellow at University College London until Tuesday, stood by the claims this week, but expressed surprise that they had caused offence. And he insisted the university “had not actually told me what’s so terrible about the article”.
He complained that he had been accused of “thought-crime” after spending months researching it. And he added: “If a smaller number were gassed, then surely the Jewish community should be pleased that it wasn’t so ghastly.”
He wrote: “Let us hope the schoolchildren visitors are properly taught about the elegant swimming-pool at Auschwitz, built by the inmates, who would sunbathe there on Saturday and Sunday afternoons while watching the water-polo matches; and shown the paintings from its art class, which still exist; and told about the camp library which had some 45,000 volumes for inmates to choose from, plus a range of periodicals; and the six camp orchestras at Auschwitz/Birkenau, its theatrical performances, including a children’s opera, the weekly camp cinema, and even the special brothel established there.”
Dr Kollerstrom, of St John’s Wood, North West London, said he prefers to call himself a revisionist rather than a denier. Revisionists, he said, “want to look at European history without quite so much hate and bitterness”.
He also claimed he was the victim of “a calumny” by bloggers who had accused him of far-right sympathies and posted on the internet an image doctored to show him in Nazi uniform.
“I have some very good Jewish friends and have never had the slightest interest in the Nazi movement,” he said. “I never go to Germany. I have always belonged to things like the Green Party, CND and Respect.”
A UCL spokesman said: “The views expressed by Dr Kollerstrom are diametrically opposed to the aims, objectives and ethos of UCL, such that we wish to have absolutely no association with them or with their originator. “We, therefore, have no choice but to terminate Dr Kollerstrom’s research fellowship with immediate effect.”
A source at the university also said that there had been concern at opinions Dr Kollerstrom had expressed regarding conspiracy theories over the July 7, 2005 London bombings and the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. His areas of research include Newtonian theory and the 19th-century British discovery of Neptune. He is also the author of a yearly guide to Gardening and Planting by the Moon, which contains chapters on “Using the Star Zodiac” and “The Moon and Crop Yield”.
Here is an extract from one of his postings on the CODOH website:
“Zyklon-B was used at Auschwitz, as an insecticide. It was vital in attempting to maintain hygiene that mattresses be deloused. Cyanide gas was absorbed on to clay-type granules, designed to make the deadly gas as ‘safe’ as it could be.
“If you go to Auschwitz today, you can’t see any authentic gas chambers. You see stone huts, and experts have testified that they could not have been used to gas people, owing to problems in sealing them up (Zyklon-B released its cyanide gas rather slowly).”
In another, he wrote:
“The verdicts of Nuremberg were made final and binding for the post-war FRG [Federal Republic of Germany]. Germany has since paid a hundred billion Deutschmarks to Israel by way of Holocaust-compensation — clearly, that needs to be refunded.
“Germany should take the advice of Iranian leader Ahmadinajad and stop paying it, because that funding provides undue motivation for holocaust ‘memories’. Germany is helping to maintain the holocaust legend, by thus aiding the state of Israel.”
***
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
U.S. has adopted Israeli Military Tactics in Iraq
The "Israelization" of U.S. Military Doctrine and Tactics
How the U.S. is Reproducing Israel's Flawed Occupation Strategies in Iraq
By Steve Niva | April 21, 2008
Editor: Erik Leaver
Foreign Policy In Focus
http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5162
The new "surge" strategy in Iraq, led by General David Petreaus, has been heavily marketed as an example of the U.S. military's application of the "lessons of history" from previous counterinsurgencies to Iraq, foremost among them the need to win the population over from insurgents through cultivating human relationships, addressing popular grievances and providing security.
Yet one glance at the realities on the ground in Iraq today reveal that the cornerstone of current U.S. military strategy is less about cultivating human relationships than about limiting them, primarily through concrete walls and checkpoints. And it has been less about minimizing violence than containing Iraq's population and redirecting the battlefield from the streets to the skies above Iraq.
While the coffee klatches between Marine commanders and Sunni tribal sheikhs may garner all the publicity, the real story on the ground in Iraq is that from Baghdad to Mosul, the U.S. military has been busy constructing scores of concrete walls and barriers between and around Iraqi neighborhoods, which it terms "Gated Communities." In Baghdad alone, 12-foot-high walls now separate and surround at least eleven Sunni and Shiite enclaves. Broken by narrow checkpoints where soldiers monitor traffic via newly issued ID cards, these walls have turned Baghdad into dozens of replica Green Zones, dividing neighbor from neighbor and choking off normal commerce and communications. Similar walls are being erected in other Iraqi cities, while the entire city of Falluja remains surrounded by a razor-wire barrier, with only one point of entry into the city. Moreover, the U.S. military has doubled its use of unmanned aerial drones and increasingly relies upon aerial strikes to quell insurgent activities, often through bombings and targeted assassinations.
While there is no question that overall levels of violence have temporarily decreased, Iraq has become virtually caged in a carapace of concrete walls and razor wire, reinforced by an aerial occupation from the sky. Reporting from a recent visit to the Dora neighborhood of Baghdad, the seasoned journalist Nir Rosen noted in Rolling Stone (March 6, 2008) that:
Looming over the homes are twelve-foot-high security walls built by the Americans to separate warring factions and confine people to their own neighborhood. Emptied and destroyed by civil war, walled off by President Bush's much-heralded "surge," Dora feels more like a desolate, post-apocalyptic maze of concrete tunnels than a living, inhabited neighborhood.
The Israeli Laboratory
The explosion of walls and enclaves reinforced by aerial violence across Iraq suggest that the primary counterinsurgency lessons being followed by the U.S. military in Iraq today derive less from the lessons of "Lawrence of Arabia" than from Israel's experiences in the Occupied Palestinian Territories over the past decade.
Over the past decade, Israel has developed a pacification strategy against Palestinian resistance to its military occupation by erecting separation walls and checkpoints across Palestinian territory that has enclosed Palestinians within a proliferating archipelago of ethnic enclaves to separate them from each other and from illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian land. This wall and enclave strategy is maintained under a blanket of aerial Israeli surveillance and deadly unmanned drones, which target the frequent airborne assassinations and strikes. This strategy reached its apotheosis in Gaza following Israel's withdrawal of its soldiers and settlements in 2005. In Gaza, 1.5 million Palestinians are now living within an enclosed cage, while Israel controls access to the essentials of life through high-tech border terminals and unleashes "penetration raids" and airborne "targeted killings" when resistance is offered.
Iraq, it seems, is surging towards Gaza.
This fact is not missed by average Iraqis. Visiting the Sunni bastion of Amriya in Baghdad, Nir Rosen in The Nation (April 3, 2008) recounts how his Iraqi driver pointed to a gap in the concrete walls with which the U.S. occupation forces have surrounded Amriya: "We call it the Rafah Crossing." He was referring to the one gate from besieged Gaza to Egypt that the Israeli army occasionally allows to open.
The U.S. military's virtual reproduction of distinctively Israeli counterinsurgency tactics in Iraq reveals that claims about applying the "lessons of history" of counterinsurgent warfare to Iraq are largely beside the point. The actual application of counterinsurgency on the ground in Iraq has a distinctly Israeli DNA, born of very recent lessons from Israel's own urban warfare laboratory in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
This should not be surprising. The Israeli DNA in the new "surge" strategy is only the latest manifestation of a widely overlooked but unmistakable American predilection to increasingly draw from Israel's urban warfare laboratory and its flawed efforts to devise fresh tactics in the service of rebooting its own military occupation of Palestinian lands. What we are seeing in Iraq today has much less to do with the declared shift in U.S. military doctrine than with a deeper and more far-reaching "Israelization" of U.S. military strategy and tactics over the past two decades that was only heightened by America's misadventures in the Middle East after September 11, 2001. In the search for new means to confront urban insurgencies in predominately Arab and Muslim lands, there has been a complex institutional and cultural harmonization between these two militaries under the banner of fighting "the war on terror," though the traffic is mostly in one direction. In light of the real lessons of counterinsurgency history, however, mimicking Israel is a recipe for failure.
The "Israelization" of U.S. Military Doctrine and Tactics
This "Israelization" of U.S. military doctrine and tactics can be traced back to the early 1990's, especially the "Black-hawk down" debacle of 1993 in Somalia, which led U.S. military strategists to rethink their approach to fighting urban warfare in poor Third World "battle spaces." In the following years, according to urban theorist Mike Davis in his 2004 article "The Pentagon as Global Slum Lord," Israeli advisors were brought in to teach Marines, Rangers and Navy Seals the state of the art tactics against urban insurgencies that Israel was using to ruthlessly suppress Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.
This tactical "Israelization" of U.S. combat doctrine was accompanied by what Davis terms a deeper strategic "Sharonization" (referring to Israeli militarist and later Prime Minister Ariel Sharon) of the Pentagon's worldview in which U.S. military strategists began to envision the capacity of high-tech warfare to contain and possibly defeat insurgencies rooted in third world urban environments. Sharon is known to have kept by his bedside a well-thumbed Hebrew edition of Alistair's Horne's A Savage War of Peace, an account of the failed French effort to defeat the Algerian insurgency against French colonial occupation. While many viewed the French defeat as proof of the futility of military solutions to anti-colonial insurgencies, Sharon's belief was that Israel could learn from Algeria to get right what the French did not. In 2001, the journalist Robert Fisk reported, Sharon told French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac in a phone conversation that the Israelis were "like you in Algeria," the only difference being that "we [the Israelis] will stay.''
The "Israelization" of U.S. military doctrine and tactics since the attacks on September 11, 2001, has gone so far as to create what the Palestinian academic Marwan Bishara, writing in Al-Ahram Weekly (April-May, 2002), has termed a new "strategic cult" in which Israel's "asymmetrical war" against the Palestinians became seen as a continuation of the U.S. "war on terrorism" in both theory and practice. Learning from Israel's experiences centered on the need for new precision weaponry and a tactical emphasis on aerial assassinations and armored bulldozers, as well as other elements of Israel's fighting style in the new "asymmetrical" and urban battle spaces. According to The Independent's Justin Huggler (March 29, 2003) Israel's unprecedented assault on Palestinian cities and the refugee camp in Jenin during "Operation Defensive Shield" in April 2002 was keenly observed by foreign militaries, particularly the United States and UK as they geared up to invade and occupy Iraq.
But the most direct application of the Israeli tutorial took place in Iraq, particularly after the U.S. found itself mired in a growing insurgency in an occupied country, confronting urban guerilla warfare and suicide bombings in Fall, 2003. Having banished counterinsurgency doctrine from its own playbook after Vietnam, the Pentagon turned to Israel. According to the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh writing in The New Yorker (December 15, 2003),
One step the Pentagon took was to seek active and secret help in the war against the Iraqi insurgency from Israel, America's closest ally in the Middle East. According to American and Israeli military and intelligence officials, Israeli commandos and intelligence units have been working closely with their American counterparts at the Special Forces training base at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and in Israel to help them prepare for operations in Iraq. Israeli commandos are expected to serve as ad-hoc advisers — again, in secret — when full-field operations begin.
Hence, American forces increasingly used a new set of tactics that appeared to have come straight out of the Israeli playbook from the occupied Palestinians territories, including physically enclosing villages within razor-wire fences, bulldozing homes of suspected insurgents, destroying irrigation systems and agricultural fields, taking civilian hostages and using torture to extract intelligence. Seymour Hersh claims that the U.S. was told it had to "go unconventional" like the Israelis — to use harsh tactics to counter the harsh insurgency such as deploying assassination squads. As he summarized it: "The American-Israeli liaison on Iraq amounts to a tutorial on how to dismantle an insurgency."
According to Julian Borger at the Guardian (December 9, 2003) one former senior American intelligence official raised serious concerns about the dangers of adopting Israel's "hunter-killer" teams, and the political implications of such an open embrace of Israel: "It is bonkers, insane. Here we are — we're already being compared to Sharon in the Arab world and we've just confirmed it by bringing in the Israelis and setting up assassination teams."
The "Surge": Shifting Tactics in Iraq, Israeli-Style
The Israeli tutorial, as we know, was nothing less than a complete failure, as Iraq slipped into anarchy and then raging civil war in large part as a result of the destructive tactics deployed the U.S. military.
As a consequence, the failures in Iraq forced the U.S. military to reconsider the pre-eminence of harsh Israeli-style tactics. And so in late 2006, Gen. David Petraeus and his highly touted cadre of counterinsurgency (COIN) experts, fresh from a six-month command and staff course at Fort Leavenworth that according to The Independent's Robert Fisk (April 11, 2007) included at least four senior Israeli officers, ushered in a heavily marketed new counterinsurgency strategy that reduced the reliance upon brute military force in favor of creating alliances with former insurgents, building intelligence capacity, and restoring a semblance of security for the population, particularly in Baghdad.
But it would be a mistake to read this new "hearts and minds" counterinsurgency strategy as a full-scale retreat from "Israelization" in two important respects, both of which illustrate how remarkably similar American and Israeli strategic and tactical frameworks have become at this point in time.
First, it is striking how much the new U.S. approach in Iraq mirrors Israel's own tactical response to its failed attempt to use harsh and brutal tactics to crush the renewed surge of Palestinian resistance between 2001 and 2004. In 2004, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon unveiled a new strategy — what he termed "disengagement" — as a new way to "shift the narrative." This strategy included the tactical withdrawal of Israeli settlements and soldiers from the Gaza Strip to be replaced by its complete encirclement and economic strangulation, while further enclosing Palestinians in the West Bank within separation walls, barriers and checkpoints. Whereas the previous approach relied upon aggressive Israeli military incursions within Palestinian areas, the new strategy seeks to control Palestinians from beyond their walled-off enclosures by selectively controlling access to life essentials and relying on air-strikes to quell resistance.
Similarly, in response to the chaos in Iraq and the growing popular demand for a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq in late 2006, President Bush and the U.S. military adopted the "surge" strategy as its own way to "change the narrative." As in the Israeli case, the "surge" has shifted techniques of domination across Iraq from the direct application of violence against insurgents to indirect spatial incarceration, multiplying archipelagos of externally alienated and internally homogenous ethno-national enclaves through walls and checkpoints, under a blanket of aerial surveillance.
Secondly, the tactical shift towards walls, enclaves and aerial domination is still rooted in the "Sharonization" of U.S. strategic doctrine mentioned earlier; that is, the belief that one can use military force to defeat an insurgency by reformulating one's military tactics. Neither Israel nor the United States are willing to countenance a serious political solution to either occupation, which would entail addressing the core political issue that is driving each insurgency: ending the foreign occupation. As it happens, Henry Kissinger is reported to have given President Bush a copy of Horne's A Savage War of Peace to read in the winter of 2006, and the U.S. military frequently uses the Algerian case as one its primary lessons in most COIN training. They appear to have learned the same faulty lessons as Sharon.
Both Israel and the U.S. are seeking to replace direct military occupation with a form of occupation management in order to preserve the fruits of their respective occupations.
Israel has simply shifted tactics to achieve its original goal of securing its illegal settlements and land confiscations in the West Bank to maintain "greater Israel." Since it is unwilling to accept a withdrawal to the 1967 borders and allow for a fully sovereign Palestinian state, its strategy is to pacify Palestinians through ever confining walls and enclaves until Palestinians accept their fate living in splintered enclaves under complete Israeli control.
Similarly, since the U.S. is unwilling to negotiate with the insurgency or consider a timetable for withdrawal, it is clear that the new counterinsurgency plan is an effort to pacify Iraq into accepting a form of "soft partition" into ethno-political enclaves to enable the U.S. to secure its original goals of establishing permanent military bases, securing access to Iraq's vast oil fields, and installing an Iraqi central government to pass laws to ensure these aims. Like the Palestinians, Iraqis will be sequestered within walled enclaves so that the political and economic occupation can remain in place.
The Real "Lessons of History" for Iraq
Needless to say, all this amounts to trying to find new ways to do the impossible. The bottom line is that both Israel and the U.S. will be losers in their quest for military solutions to fundamentally political insurgencies against a foreign military occupation. Framing an occupation as "liberation" or "counter-terrorism" does not make it any less a foreign occupation.
One of the great ironies in all of this is the willful failure of both Israel and the United States to learn the fundamental historical lesson of the French in Algeria: that they could have negotiated a withdrawal far earlier and spared all this bloodshed and violence.
Militarily, the French army did not lose — they certainly won the Battle of Algiers and had pacified the country by late 1958. But the military victory was hollow. The French achieved pacification only, which simply meant that the number of violent incidents per month was at a tolerable level. But this came at the price of herding over a million Algerians into fortified villages, extensive torture, and millions killed. This was a situation that could not be sustained and it unraveled as open warfare broke out between settlers and Algerians with the French army caught in the middle, battling both. All of this looks very much like Iraq today with Americans caught between Shia and Sunni militias, battling both in an effort to achieve pacification on behalf of an ineffective puppet government associated with its occupation. There are also obvious parallels to Israel's predicament in the occupied Palestinian territories.
The primary reason why the French military victory was hollow was because the French offered no political solution that met the core aspirations of Algerian nationalism, which should be clear to anyone who reads the second half of A Savage War of Peace. They only offered a flimsy notion of "self-determination" and "democracy" that De Gaulle called "association," which we recognize today as a neo-colonial relationship. France sought to maintain exterritorial control through military bases and dominion over Algerian oil resources, including a permanent French settler presence. The Algerians rejected this and fought until the French were forced to leave entirely. The parallels with U.S. plans for Iraq hardly need to be elaborated.
Instead of learning from the French experience, the U.S. has naively looked to the Israeli experience as a training manual for counterinsurgency. The U.S. continues to be mesmerized by a mythical version of Israel that is based more on savvy marketing than demonstrated performance. Israel's responses to unconventional war has never been well developed or very successful; it was defeated by Hezbollah in South Lebanon not once but twice, and its attempt to crush the Palestinian uprising through force actually led to further suicide bombings, while its destruction of the Palestinian infrastructure has left the political field open to Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
Mimicking Israel is a recipe for failure. Martin Van Creveld, an Israeli military historian who had lectured U.S. military officials on Israeli military strategy in late 2003, warned in an Associated Press article (December 12, 2003) that just as Israel had been unsuccessful in eliminating militant groups and suicide bombers, the United States cannot expect to be victorious in Iraq. "The Americans are coming here to try to mimic all kinds of techniques, but it's not going to do them any good," he reportedly warned. "I don't see how on earth they (the U.S.) can win. I think this is going to end the same way Vietnam did. They are going to flee the country hanging on the strings of helicopters."
Whether or not this happens will be the subject of future "lessons of history." But by following the Israeli model rather than the actual lessons of counterinsurgency history, the U.S. appears trapped by the logic of its own image co-dependency with Israel as a state now permanently at war with much of the Arab and Muslim world, with history's lessons decidedly not on its side. Read correctly, A Savage War of Peace is less a user's manual for counterinsurgency than a warning about the futility of fighting colonial wars in the first place.
Dr. Steve Niva is a professor of Middle East Studies and International Politics at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA and is a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus. He is currently writing a book on the relationship between Israeli military violence and Palestinian suicide bombings.
***
How the U.S. is Reproducing Israel's Flawed Occupation Strategies in Iraq
By Steve Niva | April 21, 2008
Editor: Erik Leaver
Foreign Policy In Focus
http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5162
The new "surge" strategy in Iraq, led by General David Petreaus, has been heavily marketed as an example of the U.S. military's application of the "lessons of history" from previous counterinsurgencies to Iraq, foremost among them the need to win the population over from insurgents through cultivating human relationships, addressing popular grievances and providing security.
Yet one glance at the realities on the ground in Iraq today reveal that the cornerstone of current U.S. military strategy is less about cultivating human relationships than about limiting them, primarily through concrete walls and checkpoints. And it has been less about minimizing violence than containing Iraq's population and redirecting the battlefield from the streets to the skies above Iraq.
While the coffee klatches between Marine commanders and Sunni tribal sheikhs may garner all the publicity, the real story on the ground in Iraq is that from Baghdad to Mosul, the U.S. military has been busy constructing scores of concrete walls and barriers between and around Iraqi neighborhoods, which it terms "Gated Communities." In Baghdad alone, 12-foot-high walls now separate and surround at least eleven Sunni and Shiite enclaves. Broken by narrow checkpoints where soldiers monitor traffic via newly issued ID cards, these walls have turned Baghdad into dozens of replica Green Zones, dividing neighbor from neighbor and choking off normal commerce and communications. Similar walls are being erected in other Iraqi cities, while the entire city of Falluja remains surrounded by a razor-wire barrier, with only one point of entry into the city. Moreover, the U.S. military has doubled its use of unmanned aerial drones and increasingly relies upon aerial strikes to quell insurgent activities, often through bombings and targeted assassinations.
While there is no question that overall levels of violence have temporarily decreased, Iraq has become virtually caged in a carapace of concrete walls and razor wire, reinforced by an aerial occupation from the sky. Reporting from a recent visit to the Dora neighborhood of Baghdad, the seasoned journalist Nir Rosen noted in Rolling Stone (March 6, 2008) that:
Looming over the homes are twelve-foot-high security walls built by the Americans to separate warring factions and confine people to their own neighborhood. Emptied and destroyed by civil war, walled off by President Bush's much-heralded "surge," Dora feels more like a desolate, post-apocalyptic maze of concrete tunnels than a living, inhabited neighborhood.
The Israeli Laboratory
The explosion of walls and enclaves reinforced by aerial violence across Iraq suggest that the primary counterinsurgency lessons being followed by the U.S. military in Iraq today derive less from the lessons of "Lawrence of Arabia" than from Israel's experiences in the Occupied Palestinian Territories over the past decade.
Over the past decade, Israel has developed a pacification strategy against Palestinian resistance to its military occupation by erecting separation walls and checkpoints across Palestinian territory that has enclosed Palestinians within a proliferating archipelago of ethnic enclaves to separate them from each other and from illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian land. This wall and enclave strategy is maintained under a blanket of aerial Israeli surveillance and deadly unmanned drones, which target the frequent airborne assassinations and strikes. This strategy reached its apotheosis in Gaza following Israel's withdrawal of its soldiers and settlements in 2005. In Gaza, 1.5 million Palestinians are now living within an enclosed cage, while Israel controls access to the essentials of life through high-tech border terminals and unleashes "penetration raids" and airborne "targeted killings" when resistance is offered.
Iraq, it seems, is surging towards Gaza.
This fact is not missed by average Iraqis. Visiting the Sunni bastion of Amriya in Baghdad, Nir Rosen in The Nation (April 3, 2008) recounts how his Iraqi driver pointed to a gap in the concrete walls with which the U.S. occupation forces have surrounded Amriya: "We call it the Rafah Crossing." He was referring to the one gate from besieged Gaza to Egypt that the Israeli army occasionally allows to open.
The U.S. military's virtual reproduction of distinctively Israeli counterinsurgency tactics in Iraq reveals that claims about applying the "lessons of history" of counterinsurgent warfare to Iraq are largely beside the point. The actual application of counterinsurgency on the ground in Iraq has a distinctly Israeli DNA, born of very recent lessons from Israel's own urban warfare laboratory in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
This should not be surprising. The Israeli DNA in the new "surge" strategy is only the latest manifestation of a widely overlooked but unmistakable American predilection to increasingly draw from Israel's urban warfare laboratory and its flawed efforts to devise fresh tactics in the service of rebooting its own military occupation of Palestinian lands. What we are seeing in Iraq today has much less to do with the declared shift in U.S. military doctrine than with a deeper and more far-reaching "Israelization" of U.S. military strategy and tactics over the past two decades that was only heightened by America's misadventures in the Middle East after September 11, 2001. In the search for new means to confront urban insurgencies in predominately Arab and Muslim lands, there has been a complex institutional and cultural harmonization between these two militaries under the banner of fighting "the war on terror," though the traffic is mostly in one direction. In light of the real lessons of counterinsurgency history, however, mimicking Israel is a recipe for failure.
The "Israelization" of U.S. Military Doctrine and Tactics
This "Israelization" of U.S. military doctrine and tactics can be traced back to the early 1990's, especially the "Black-hawk down" debacle of 1993 in Somalia, which led U.S. military strategists to rethink their approach to fighting urban warfare in poor Third World "battle spaces." In the following years, according to urban theorist Mike Davis in his 2004 article "The Pentagon as Global Slum Lord," Israeli advisors were brought in to teach Marines, Rangers and Navy Seals the state of the art tactics against urban insurgencies that Israel was using to ruthlessly suppress Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.
This tactical "Israelization" of U.S. combat doctrine was accompanied by what Davis terms a deeper strategic "Sharonization" (referring to Israeli militarist and later Prime Minister Ariel Sharon) of the Pentagon's worldview in which U.S. military strategists began to envision the capacity of high-tech warfare to contain and possibly defeat insurgencies rooted in third world urban environments. Sharon is known to have kept by his bedside a well-thumbed Hebrew edition of Alistair's Horne's A Savage War of Peace, an account of the failed French effort to defeat the Algerian insurgency against French colonial occupation. While many viewed the French defeat as proof of the futility of military solutions to anti-colonial insurgencies, Sharon's belief was that Israel could learn from Algeria to get right what the French did not. In 2001, the journalist Robert Fisk reported, Sharon told French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac in a phone conversation that the Israelis were "like you in Algeria," the only difference being that "we [the Israelis] will stay.''
The "Israelization" of U.S. military doctrine and tactics since the attacks on September 11, 2001, has gone so far as to create what the Palestinian academic Marwan Bishara, writing in Al-Ahram Weekly (April-May, 2002), has termed a new "strategic cult" in which Israel's "asymmetrical war" against the Palestinians became seen as a continuation of the U.S. "war on terrorism" in both theory and practice. Learning from Israel's experiences centered on the need for new precision weaponry and a tactical emphasis on aerial assassinations and armored bulldozers, as well as other elements of Israel's fighting style in the new "asymmetrical" and urban battle spaces. According to The Independent's Justin Huggler (March 29, 2003) Israel's unprecedented assault on Palestinian cities and the refugee camp in Jenin during "Operation Defensive Shield" in April 2002 was keenly observed by foreign militaries, particularly the United States and UK as they geared up to invade and occupy Iraq.
But the most direct application of the Israeli tutorial took place in Iraq, particularly after the U.S. found itself mired in a growing insurgency in an occupied country, confronting urban guerilla warfare and suicide bombings in Fall, 2003. Having banished counterinsurgency doctrine from its own playbook after Vietnam, the Pentagon turned to Israel. According to the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh writing in The New Yorker (December 15, 2003),
One step the Pentagon took was to seek active and secret help in the war against the Iraqi insurgency from Israel, America's closest ally in the Middle East. According to American and Israeli military and intelligence officials, Israeli commandos and intelligence units have been working closely with their American counterparts at the Special Forces training base at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and in Israel to help them prepare for operations in Iraq. Israeli commandos are expected to serve as ad-hoc advisers — again, in secret — when full-field operations begin.
Hence, American forces increasingly used a new set of tactics that appeared to have come straight out of the Israeli playbook from the occupied Palestinians territories, including physically enclosing villages within razor-wire fences, bulldozing homes of suspected insurgents, destroying irrigation systems and agricultural fields, taking civilian hostages and using torture to extract intelligence. Seymour Hersh claims that the U.S. was told it had to "go unconventional" like the Israelis — to use harsh tactics to counter the harsh insurgency such as deploying assassination squads. As he summarized it: "The American-Israeli liaison on Iraq amounts to a tutorial on how to dismantle an insurgency."
According to Julian Borger at the Guardian (December 9, 2003) one former senior American intelligence official raised serious concerns about the dangers of adopting Israel's "hunter-killer" teams, and the political implications of such an open embrace of Israel: "It is bonkers, insane. Here we are — we're already being compared to Sharon in the Arab world and we've just confirmed it by bringing in the Israelis and setting up assassination teams."
The "Surge": Shifting Tactics in Iraq, Israeli-Style
The Israeli tutorial, as we know, was nothing less than a complete failure, as Iraq slipped into anarchy and then raging civil war in large part as a result of the destructive tactics deployed the U.S. military.
As a consequence, the failures in Iraq forced the U.S. military to reconsider the pre-eminence of harsh Israeli-style tactics. And so in late 2006, Gen. David Petraeus and his highly touted cadre of counterinsurgency (COIN) experts, fresh from a six-month command and staff course at Fort Leavenworth that according to The Independent's Robert Fisk (April 11, 2007) included at least four senior Israeli officers, ushered in a heavily marketed new counterinsurgency strategy that reduced the reliance upon brute military force in favor of creating alliances with former insurgents, building intelligence capacity, and restoring a semblance of security for the population, particularly in Baghdad.
But it would be a mistake to read this new "hearts and minds" counterinsurgency strategy as a full-scale retreat from "Israelization" in two important respects, both of which illustrate how remarkably similar American and Israeli strategic and tactical frameworks have become at this point in time.
First, it is striking how much the new U.S. approach in Iraq mirrors Israel's own tactical response to its failed attempt to use harsh and brutal tactics to crush the renewed surge of Palestinian resistance between 2001 and 2004. In 2004, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon unveiled a new strategy — what he termed "disengagement" — as a new way to "shift the narrative." This strategy included the tactical withdrawal of Israeli settlements and soldiers from the Gaza Strip to be replaced by its complete encirclement and economic strangulation, while further enclosing Palestinians in the West Bank within separation walls, barriers and checkpoints. Whereas the previous approach relied upon aggressive Israeli military incursions within Palestinian areas, the new strategy seeks to control Palestinians from beyond their walled-off enclosures by selectively controlling access to life essentials and relying on air-strikes to quell resistance.
Similarly, in response to the chaos in Iraq and the growing popular demand for a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq in late 2006, President Bush and the U.S. military adopted the "surge" strategy as its own way to "change the narrative." As in the Israeli case, the "surge" has shifted techniques of domination across Iraq from the direct application of violence against insurgents to indirect spatial incarceration, multiplying archipelagos of externally alienated and internally homogenous ethno-national enclaves through walls and checkpoints, under a blanket of aerial surveillance.
Secondly, the tactical shift towards walls, enclaves and aerial domination is still rooted in the "Sharonization" of U.S. strategic doctrine mentioned earlier; that is, the belief that one can use military force to defeat an insurgency by reformulating one's military tactics. Neither Israel nor the United States are willing to countenance a serious political solution to either occupation, which would entail addressing the core political issue that is driving each insurgency: ending the foreign occupation. As it happens, Henry Kissinger is reported to have given President Bush a copy of Horne's A Savage War of Peace to read in the winter of 2006, and the U.S. military frequently uses the Algerian case as one its primary lessons in most COIN training. They appear to have learned the same faulty lessons as Sharon.
Both Israel and the U.S. are seeking to replace direct military occupation with a form of occupation management in order to preserve the fruits of their respective occupations.
Israel has simply shifted tactics to achieve its original goal of securing its illegal settlements and land confiscations in the West Bank to maintain "greater Israel." Since it is unwilling to accept a withdrawal to the 1967 borders and allow for a fully sovereign Palestinian state, its strategy is to pacify Palestinians through ever confining walls and enclaves until Palestinians accept their fate living in splintered enclaves under complete Israeli control.
Similarly, since the U.S. is unwilling to negotiate with the insurgency or consider a timetable for withdrawal, it is clear that the new counterinsurgency plan is an effort to pacify Iraq into accepting a form of "soft partition" into ethno-political enclaves to enable the U.S. to secure its original goals of establishing permanent military bases, securing access to Iraq's vast oil fields, and installing an Iraqi central government to pass laws to ensure these aims. Like the Palestinians, Iraqis will be sequestered within walled enclaves so that the political and economic occupation can remain in place.
The Real "Lessons of History" for Iraq
Needless to say, all this amounts to trying to find new ways to do the impossible. The bottom line is that both Israel and the U.S. will be losers in their quest for military solutions to fundamentally political insurgencies against a foreign military occupation. Framing an occupation as "liberation" or "counter-terrorism" does not make it any less a foreign occupation.
One of the great ironies in all of this is the willful failure of both Israel and the United States to learn the fundamental historical lesson of the French in Algeria: that they could have negotiated a withdrawal far earlier and spared all this bloodshed and violence.
Militarily, the French army did not lose — they certainly won the Battle of Algiers and had pacified the country by late 1958. But the military victory was hollow. The French achieved pacification only, which simply meant that the number of violent incidents per month was at a tolerable level. But this came at the price of herding over a million Algerians into fortified villages, extensive torture, and millions killed. This was a situation that could not be sustained and it unraveled as open warfare broke out between settlers and Algerians with the French army caught in the middle, battling both. All of this looks very much like Iraq today with Americans caught between Shia and Sunni militias, battling both in an effort to achieve pacification on behalf of an ineffective puppet government associated with its occupation. There are also obvious parallels to Israel's predicament in the occupied Palestinian territories.
The primary reason why the French military victory was hollow was because the French offered no political solution that met the core aspirations of Algerian nationalism, which should be clear to anyone who reads the second half of A Savage War of Peace. They only offered a flimsy notion of "self-determination" and "democracy" that De Gaulle called "association," which we recognize today as a neo-colonial relationship. France sought to maintain exterritorial control through military bases and dominion over Algerian oil resources, including a permanent French settler presence. The Algerians rejected this and fought until the French were forced to leave entirely. The parallels with U.S. plans for Iraq hardly need to be elaborated.
Instead of learning from the French experience, the U.S. has naively looked to the Israeli experience as a training manual for counterinsurgency. The U.S. continues to be mesmerized by a mythical version of Israel that is based more on savvy marketing than demonstrated performance. Israel's responses to unconventional war has never been well developed or very successful; it was defeated by Hezbollah in South Lebanon not once but twice, and its attempt to crush the Palestinian uprising through force actually led to further suicide bombings, while its destruction of the Palestinian infrastructure has left the political field open to Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
Mimicking Israel is a recipe for failure. Martin Van Creveld, an Israeli military historian who had lectured U.S. military officials on Israeli military strategy in late 2003, warned in an Associated Press article (December 12, 2003) that just as Israel had been unsuccessful in eliminating militant groups and suicide bombers, the United States cannot expect to be victorious in Iraq. "The Americans are coming here to try to mimic all kinds of techniques, but it's not going to do them any good," he reportedly warned. "I don't see how on earth they (the U.S.) can win. I think this is going to end the same way Vietnam did. They are going to flee the country hanging on the strings of helicopters."
Whether or not this happens will be the subject of future "lessons of history." But by following the Israeli model rather than the actual lessons of counterinsurgency history, the U.S. appears trapped by the logic of its own image co-dependency with Israel as a state now permanently at war with much of the Arab and Muslim world, with history's lessons decidedly not on its side. Read correctly, A Savage War of Peace is less a user's manual for counterinsurgency than a warning about the futility of fighting colonial wars in the first place.
Dr. Steve Niva is a professor of Middle East Studies and International Politics at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA and is a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus. He is currently writing a book on the relationship between Israeli military violence and Palestinian suicide bombings.
***
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Clinton threatens to exterminate the Iranian people
"Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, facing a crucial primary in Pennsylvania Tuesday, said that if she were in the White House and Tehran attacked Israel with nuclear weapons, the United States would be able to 'totally obliterate' Iran."
-Haaretz, April 22, 2008
ob•lit•er•ate
verb [trans.]
destroy utterly; wipe out
ORIGIN mid 16th cent.: from Latin 'erased'
Synonyms: annihilate, eliminate, wipe out
-Oxford American Dictionary
***
-Haaretz, April 22, 2008
ob•lit•er•ate
verb [trans.]
destroy utterly; wipe out
ORIGIN mid 16th cent.: from Latin 'erased'
Synonyms: annihilate, eliminate, wipe out
-Oxford American Dictionary
***
Friday, April 18, 2008
At Synagogue Pope Tells Two Lies in Two Paragraphs
by Michael A. Hoffman II
Copyright ©2008
Pope Benedict XVI is certainly a prolific liar. During his brief speech at the luxurious New York synagogue he told two lies in the course of two paragraphs. The following is a New York Times transcript of the remarks Pope Benedict XVI made at the Park East Synagogue on April 18, as supplied by the Vatican and checked against delivery:
PARAGRAPH ONE:
"Dear Friends, Shalom! It is with joy that I come here, just a few hours before the celebration of your Pesah, to express my respect and esteem for the Jewish community in New York City. The proximity of this place of worship to my residence gives me the opportunity to greet some of you today. I find it moving to recall that Jesus, as a young boy, heard the words of Scripture and prayed in a place such as this."
LIE #1: "Jesus, as a young boy, heard the words of Scripture and prayed in a place such as this."
TRUTH: "A place like this" (a Talmudic synagogue of the religion of Orthodox Judaism) did not exist when Jesus Christ was a boy. A synagogue contains soferim (scrolls) manuscripts, and books containing the formerly Oral "Traditions of the Elders" committed to writing. The dreadful and fateful substitution of man-made laws for God's law was only institutionalized after the Jewish leadership had the Messiah of Israel crucified. The corruption of their souls resulting from the spectacular evil accruing from this act led to the formation of the new religion of "Judaism" and its basis in the Bible-nullifying Mishnah and Gemara, forming the Talmud of Babylon. As a boy, Jesus was in no such place containing any such dogma.
PARAGRAPH TWO:
"I thank Rabbi Schneier for his words of welcome and I particularly appreciate your kind gift, the spring flowers and the lovely song that the children sang for me. I know that the Jewish community make a valuable contribution to the life of the city, and I encourage all of you to continue building bridges of friendship with all the many different ethnic and religious groups present in your neighborhood. I assure you most especially of my closeness at this time, as you prepare to celebrate the great deeds of the Almighty, and to sing the praises of Him who has worked such wonders for his people. I would ask those of you who are present to pass on my greetings and good wishes to all the members of the Jewish community. Blessed be the name of the Lord!"
LIE #2: "...as you prepare to celebrate the great deeds of the Almighty..."
TRUTH: Judaism's Passover, like Judaism's Noah, Judaism's King David, Judaism's Isaiah etc. etc. is not the Biblical Passover. It is a synthesis of Babylonian superstitions on the part of latter-day Baal priests who worship themselves as greater than God. Pope Benedict does the work of the devil in deliberately giving the impression that Judaism is an Old Testament religion whose holy days give reverence and glory to God. This deceit is intentional on his part since, as a top Catholic scholar in his previous life as Vatican II theologian and cardinal, Pope Benedict is acutely aware of the Talmud and the Talmudic roots of Judaism. But as one of the gang, so to speak, he aids in deceiving the world in the manner in which the rabbis want the world to be deceived.
Fianally, you will note that Benedict concluded his oration with a generic phrase, "Blessed be the name of the Lord!" He dares not actually mention the name of God, not even God as He is named in the Old Testament ("Yahweh"), since the Mishnah superstitiously forbids the pronunciation of Yahweh's name, except once a year. You will also note that Benedict did not dare to say "Praise the Lord Jesus Christ" in that synagogue, since the invocation of the hated name of the Savior of Israel would have had a searing effect on the Pharisees present.
***
Copyright ©2008
Pope Benedict XVI is certainly a prolific liar. During his brief speech at the luxurious New York synagogue he told two lies in the course of two paragraphs. The following is a New York Times transcript of the remarks Pope Benedict XVI made at the Park East Synagogue on April 18, as supplied by the Vatican and checked against delivery:
PARAGRAPH ONE:
"Dear Friends, Shalom! It is with joy that I come here, just a few hours before the celebration of your Pesah, to express my respect and esteem for the Jewish community in New York City. The proximity of this place of worship to my residence gives me the opportunity to greet some of you today. I find it moving to recall that Jesus, as a young boy, heard the words of Scripture and prayed in a place such as this."
LIE #1: "Jesus, as a young boy, heard the words of Scripture and prayed in a place such as this."
TRUTH: "A place like this" (a Talmudic synagogue of the religion of Orthodox Judaism) did not exist when Jesus Christ was a boy. A synagogue contains soferim (scrolls) manuscripts, and books containing the formerly Oral "Traditions of the Elders" committed to writing. The dreadful and fateful substitution of man-made laws for God's law was only institutionalized after the Jewish leadership had the Messiah of Israel crucified. The corruption of their souls resulting from the spectacular evil accruing from this act led to the formation of the new religion of "Judaism" and its basis in the Bible-nullifying Mishnah and Gemara, forming the Talmud of Babylon. As a boy, Jesus was in no such place containing any such dogma.
PARAGRAPH TWO:
"I thank Rabbi Schneier for his words of welcome and I particularly appreciate your kind gift, the spring flowers and the lovely song that the children sang for me. I know that the Jewish community make a valuable contribution to the life of the city, and I encourage all of you to continue building bridges of friendship with all the many different ethnic and religious groups present in your neighborhood. I assure you most especially of my closeness at this time, as you prepare to celebrate the great deeds of the Almighty, and to sing the praises of Him who has worked such wonders for his people. I would ask those of you who are present to pass on my greetings and good wishes to all the members of the Jewish community. Blessed be the name of the Lord!"
LIE #2: "...as you prepare to celebrate the great deeds of the Almighty..."
TRUTH: Judaism's Passover, like Judaism's Noah, Judaism's King David, Judaism's Isaiah etc. etc. is not the Biblical Passover. It is a synthesis of Babylonian superstitions on the part of latter-day Baal priests who worship themselves as greater than God. Pope Benedict does the work of the devil in deliberately giving the impression that Judaism is an Old Testament religion whose holy days give reverence and glory to God. This deceit is intentional on his part since, as a top Catholic scholar in his previous life as Vatican II theologian and cardinal, Pope Benedict is acutely aware of the Talmud and the Talmudic roots of Judaism. But as one of the gang, so to speak, he aids in deceiving the world in the manner in which the rabbis want the world to be deceived.
Fianally, you will note that Benedict concluded his oration with a generic phrase, "Blessed be the name of the Lord!" He dares not actually mention the name of God, not even God as He is named in the Old Testament ("Yahweh"), since the Mishnah superstitiously forbids the pronunciation of Yahweh's name, except once a year. You will also note that Benedict did not dare to say "Praise the Lord Jesus Christ" in that synagogue, since the invocation of the hated name of the Savior of Israel would have had a searing effect on the Pharisees present.
***
Thursday, April 17, 2008
No Peace Without Hamas
By Mahmoud al-Zahar
The Washington Post, April 17, 2008; p. A23
GAZA -- President Jimmy Carter's sensible plan to visit the Hamas leadership this week brings honesty and pragmatism to the Middle East while underscoring the fact that American policy has reached its dead end. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice acts as if a few alterations here and there would make the hideous straitjacket of apartheid fit better. While Rice persuades Israeli occupation forces to cut a few dozen meaningless roadblocks from among the more than 500 West Bank control points, these forces simultaneously choke off fuel supplies to Gaza; blockade its 1.5 million people; approve illegal housing projects on West Bank land; and attack Gaza City with F-16s, killing men, women and children. Sadly, this is "business as usual" for the Palestinians.
Last week's attack on the Nahal Oz fuel depot should not surprise critics in the West. Palestinians are fighting a total war waged on us by a nation that mobilizes against our people with every means at its disposal -- from its high-tech military to its economic stranglehold, from its falsified history to its judiciary that "legalizes" the infrastructure of apartheid. Resistance remains our only option. Sixty-five years ago, the courageous Jews of the Warsaw ghetto rose in defense of their people. We Gazans, living in the world's largest open-air prison, can do no less.
The U.S.-Israeli alliance has sought to negate the results of the January 2006 elections, when the Palestinian people handed our party a mandate to rule. Hundreds of independent monitors, Carter among them, declared this the fairest election ever held in the Arab Middle East. Yet efforts to subvert our democratic experience include the American coup d'etat that created the new sectarian paradigm with Fatah and the continuing warfare against and enforced isolation of Gazans.
Now, finally, we have the welcome tonic of Carter saying what any independent, uncorrupted thinker should conclude: that no "peace plan," "road map" or "legacy" can succeed unless we are sitting at the negotiating table and without any preconditions.
Israel's escalation of violence since the staged Annapolis "peace conference" in November has been consistent with its policy of illegal, often deadly collective punishment -- in violation of international conventions. Israeli military strikes on Gaza have killed hundreds of Palestinians since then with unwavering White House approval; in 2007 alone the ratio of Palestinians to Israelis killed was 40 to 1, up from 4 to 1 during the period from 2000 to 2005.
Only three months ago I buried my son Hussam, who studied finance at college and wanted to be an accountant; he was killed by an Israeli airstrike. In 2003, I buried Khaled -- my first-born -- after an Israeli F-16 targeting me wounded my daughter and my wife and flattened the apartment building where we lived, injuring and killing many of our neighbors. Last year, my son-in-law was killed.
Hussam was only 21, but like most young men in Gaza he had grown up fast out of necessity. When I was his age, I wanted to be a surgeon; in the 1960s, we were already refugees, but there was no humiliating blockade then. But now, after decades of imprisonment, killing, statelessness and impoverishment, we ask: What peace can there be if there is no dignity first? And where does dignity come from if not from justice?
Our movement fights on because we cannot allow the foundational crime at the core of the Jewish state -- the violent expulsion from our lands and villages that made us refugees -- to slip out of world consciousness, forgotten or negotiated away. Judaism -- which gave so much to human culture in the contributions of its ancient lawgivers and modern proponents of tikkun olam -- has corrupted itself in the detour into Zionism, nationalism and apartheid.
A "peace process" with Palestinians cannot take even its first tiny step until Israel first withdraws to the borders of 1967; dismantles all settlements; removes all soldiers from Gaza and the West Bank; repudiates its illegal annexation of Jerusalem; releases all prisoners; and ends its blockade of our international borders, our coastline and our airspace permanently. This would provide the starting point for just negotiations and would lay the groundwork for the return of millions of refugees. Given what we have lost, it is the only basis by which we can start to be whole again.
I am eternally proud of my sons and miss them every day. I think of them as fathers everywhere, even in Israel, think of their sons -- as innocent boys, as curious students, as young men with limitless potential -- not as "gunmen" or "militants." But better that they were defenders of their people than parties to their ultimate dispossession; better that they were active in the Palestinian struggle for survival than passive witnesses to our subjugation.
History teaches us that everything is in flux. Our fight to redress the material crimes of 1948 is scarcely begun, and adversity has taught us patience. As for the Israeli state and its Spartan culture of permanent war, it is all too vulnerable to time, fatigue and demographics: In the end, it is always a question of our children and those who come after us.
Mahmoud al-Zahar, a surgeon, is a founder of Hamas. He is foreign minister in the government of Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, which was elected in January 2006.
***
The Washington Post, April 17, 2008; p. A23
GAZA -- President Jimmy Carter's sensible plan to visit the Hamas leadership this week brings honesty and pragmatism to the Middle East while underscoring the fact that American policy has reached its dead end. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice acts as if a few alterations here and there would make the hideous straitjacket of apartheid fit better. While Rice persuades Israeli occupation forces to cut a few dozen meaningless roadblocks from among the more than 500 West Bank control points, these forces simultaneously choke off fuel supplies to Gaza; blockade its 1.5 million people; approve illegal housing projects on West Bank land; and attack Gaza City with F-16s, killing men, women and children. Sadly, this is "business as usual" for the Palestinians.
Last week's attack on the Nahal Oz fuel depot should not surprise critics in the West. Palestinians are fighting a total war waged on us by a nation that mobilizes against our people with every means at its disposal -- from its high-tech military to its economic stranglehold, from its falsified history to its judiciary that "legalizes" the infrastructure of apartheid. Resistance remains our only option. Sixty-five years ago, the courageous Jews of the Warsaw ghetto rose in defense of their people. We Gazans, living in the world's largest open-air prison, can do no less.
The U.S.-Israeli alliance has sought to negate the results of the January 2006 elections, when the Palestinian people handed our party a mandate to rule. Hundreds of independent monitors, Carter among them, declared this the fairest election ever held in the Arab Middle East. Yet efforts to subvert our democratic experience include the American coup d'etat that created the new sectarian paradigm with Fatah and the continuing warfare against and enforced isolation of Gazans.
Now, finally, we have the welcome tonic of Carter saying what any independent, uncorrupted thinker should conclude: that no "peace plan," "road map" or "legacy" can succeed unless we are sitting at the negotiating table and without any preconditions.
Israel's escalation of violence since the staged Annapolis "peace conference" in November has been consistent with its policy of illegal, often deadly collective punishment -- in violation of international conventions. Israeli military strikes on Gaza have killed hundreds of Palestinians since then with unwavering White House approval; in 2007 alone the ratio of Palestinians to Israelis killed was 40 to 1, up from 4 to 1 during the period from 2000 to 2005.
Only three months ago I buried my son Hussam, who studied finance at college and wanted to be an accountant; he was killed by an Israeli airstrike. In 2003, I buried Khaled -- my first-born -- after an Israeli F-16 targeting me wounded my daughter and my wife and flattened the apartment building where we lived, injuring and killing many of our neighbors. Last year, my son-in-law was killed.
Hussam was only 21, but like most young men in Gaza he had grown up fast out of necessity. When I was his age, I wanted to be a surgeon; in the 1960s, we were already refugees, but there was no humiliating blockade then. But now, after decades of imprisonment, killing, statelessness and impoverishment, we ask: What peace can there be if there is no dignity first? And where does dignity come from if not from justice?
Our movement fights on because we cannot allow the foundational crime at the core of the Jewish state -- the violent expulsion from our lands and villages that made us refugees -- to slip out of world consciousness, forgotten or negotiated away. Judaism -- which gave so much to human culture in the contributions of its ancient lawgivers and modern proponents of tikkun olam -- has corrupted itself in the detour into Zionism, nationalism and apartheid.
A "peace process" with Palestinians cannot take even its first tiny step until Israel first withdraws to the borders of 1967; dismantles all settlements; removes all soldiers from Gaza and the West Bank; repudiates its illegal annexation of Jerusalem; releases all prisoners; and ends its blockade of our international borders, our coastline and our airspace permanently. This would provide the starting point for just negotiations and would lay the groundwork for the return of millions of refugees. Given what we have lost, it is the only basis by which we can start to be whole again.
I am eternally proud of my sons and miss them every day. I think of them as fathers everywhere, even in Israel, think of their sons -- as innocent boys, as curious students, as young men with limitless potential -- not as "gunmen" or "militants." But better that they were defenders of their people than parties to their ultimate dispossession; better that they were active in the Palestinian struggle for survival than passive witnesses to our subjugation.
History teaches us that everything is in flux. Our fight to redress the material crimes of 1948 is scarcely begun, and adversity has taught us patience. As for the Israeli state and its Spartan culture of permanent war, it is all too vulnerable to time, fatigue and demographics: In the end, it is always a question of our children and those who come after us.
Mahmoud al-Zahar, a surgeon, is a founder of Hamas. He is foreign minister in the government of Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, which was elected in January 2006.
***
Saturday, April 12, 2008
Europe's Talmudic double-standard on Islam
In France, Alain Finkielkraut states concerning Muslim protests against the satires of Muhammad in Europe: "What we are being asked is to forbid all criticism of Islam, which is an outrageous, exorbitant demand."
But European countries arrest and often jail those who criticize the Holocaust. The Finkielkrauts of the world do not consider the jailing of revisionist writers in Europe "outrageous" or "exorbitant." Criticism of the "Holocaust" is forbidden. Criticism of Islam is a function of freedom of thought and speech. Always this Talmudic double-standard!
***
But European countries arrest and often jail those who criticize the Holocaust. The Finkielkrauts of the world do not consider the jailing of revisionist writers in Europe "outrageous" or "exorbitant." Criticism of the "Holocaust" is forbidden. Criticism of Islam is a function of freedom of thought and speech. Always this Talmudic double-standard!
***
Wednesday, April 02, 2008
Cohen: "Yes, It Was a Good War"
THE LANGUAGE OF TALMUDIC MASTER RACE EXCLUSIVISM
By Michael A. Hoffman II
www.RevisionistHistory.org
In his Washington Post column (see below) attacking a new anti-war book, Richard Cohen writes in the language of Talmudic Master race exclusivism about THE HOLOCAUST, "the evil of which cannot possibly be argued."
Right. But which holocaust, Mr Cohen?
In your rabbinic world, the World War II holocaust against the civilian populations of all major Japanese and German cities doesn't rate as a holocaust, and even if it did, what would be the value of preserving those innocents compared with the value of preserving Judaic innocents?
There is no good war, as Nicholson Baker's crucial new book, "Human Smoke" amply demonstrates to those not tied in the binding knots, blinkers and shutters of Zionist racial supremacism (Cohen practices the liberal version, e.g. with lots of qualifications and feigned self-examination). But note the hubris of this sentence of his: "... the only way to stop the killing was to stop the killers."
Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt were not killers?
Oh yes, I almost forgot. They were the good killers. But Cohen doesn't say that. For him killing Japs and Krauts does not qualify as killing. Pest removal, perhaps; or in the current Israeli parlance, "war on Amalek."
Mr. Cohen is one among many turn-of-the-century Talmudic warlovers who advocate what has come to be known as therapeutic or humanitarian bombing of cities, whether of Dresden and Tokyo in the last century, or more recently, in Serbia, Iraq and Lebanon by the forces and frontmen of Zionism (NATO's Wesley Clark in Serbia, the Israeli air force in Lebanon; the US air force in Iraq).
The idea is to kill as many gentile civilians as necessary to preserve the "security" of the Master Race of Zionists; that's what makes the Allied incineration of countless non-Judaic women and children a "good war" in the eyes of the Cohens among us.
YES, IT WAS A GOOD WAR
By Richard Cohen
cohenr@washpost.com
The Washington Post, April 1, 2008; p. A17
Nicholson Baker, a supremely talented novelist, has written a surprising book of nonfiction titled "Human Smoke." It is composed primarily of snippets taken from contemporary newspapers in the run-up to World War II and makes the daring argument that the war -- our supposedly "good" war -- was not good at all. We shouldn't have fought it.
To my mind, the book is dead wrong and very odd. This, though, has not stopped it from getting a respectable front-page review in the Los Angeles Times Book Review -- "It may be one of the most important books you will ever read," wrote Mark Kurlansky -- or from grabbing the bottom perch (No. 15) on the New York Times's important bestseller list. Baker's a hit.
It takes a fair amount of audacity to challenge the conventional wisdom about World War II. This is especially the case since the war has become conflated with the Holocaust, the evil of which cannot possibly be argued. If you throw in the atrocities committed by the Japanese -- everything from massacres to the conscription of local women in conquered territories as sex slaves -- then World War II not only seemed right and urgent at the time but right and a bit too late now. Hitler could have been stopped earlier.
Baker, though, is a pacifist. He dedicated his book to the memory of "American and British pacifists" who, he writes, never really got their due. "They tried to save Jewish refugees, feed Europe, reconcile the United States and Japan, and stop the war from happening. They failed, but they were right."
No, they were not. But that, for the moment, is beside the point. A contemporary context for Baker's book may not be World War II but the war in Iraq. The former, of course, is the good war, and the latter is the bad one, but in Baker's view they undoubtedly are both wars that made things worse, not better. To make a further connection, countless neocons cited the pre-World War II Munich agreement -- appeasement! -- to suggest what would happen if Saddam Hussein and his regime were not confronted and brought down. Iraq was going to be yet another good war.
The parallels, strained though they may be, do not end there. Not only was the retro term "fascist" applied to Hussein, but it is now lathered on vast numbers of militant and anti-American Islamists: Islamofascists, they are called. It says something about the durability and plasticity of the term -- fascismo -- coined by Benito Mussolini in Italy in the early 20th century that it can be used to describe a goat herder in Afghanistan in the 21st.
The question, of course, is whether there is anything worth fighting for. Initially, I thought bringing down Saddam Hussein was a good cause. I was wrong -- not about the cause, but about its practicality. I still feel that anytime we can stop someone from killing someone else, we ought to try. I think, too, that such attempts help establish the expectation that the wholesale abuse of human rights will not be tolerated.
What's worrisome about the Baker book is that the attention it has gotten -- much of it critical -- is not just a testament to his reputation as a writer but also to the questions he has raised about war itself. Is any war, outside of direct self-defense, worth fighting? Baker suggests that even World War II was not -- that the Jews perished anyway and that the war consumed more lives than anyone could have imagined and that, somehow, pacifism would have worked its magic. (Gandhi, in a quote I got from another source, suggested in 1938 that Germany's Jews should commit mass suicide. That "would have aroused the world and the people of Germany to Hitler's violence.")
One casualty of a bad war such as that in Iraq is the growing feeling that no war is worth the cost. This was an important sentiment in Europe after the horrors of World War I, and it produced the supine response to Hitler and the celebrated 1933 declaration by the young debaters of the Oxford Union "that this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country." In the end, of course, they did. In the end, they had to.
The most horrible weapon in any arsenal is the madness of men. We see this time and time again, and sometimes the only way to stop them is by war. "War is an ugly thing," John Stuart Mill wrote, "but not the ugliest of things." Far uglier, he wrote, is the feeling that nothing in life is worth fighting for. World War II was fought for several reasons but above all -- and proudly -- because the only way to stop the killing was to stop the killers.
***
By Michael A. Hoffman II
www.RevisionistHistory.org
In his Washington Post column (see below) attacking a new anti-war book, Richard Cohen writes in the language of Talmudic Master race exclusivism about THE HOLOCAUST, "the evil of which cannot possibly be argued."
Right. But which holocaust, Mr Cohen?
In your rabbinic world, the World War II holocaust against the civilian populations of all major Japanese and German cities doesn't rate as a holocaust, and even if it did, what would be the value of preserving those innocents compared with the value of preserving Judaic innocents?
There is no good war, as Nicholson Baker's crucial new book, "Human Smoke" amply demonstrates to those not tied in the binding knots, blinkers and shutters of Zionist racial supremacism (Cohen practices the liberal version, e.g. with lots of qualifications and feigned self-examination). But note the hubris of this sentence of his: "... the only way to stop the killing was to stop the killers."
Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt were not killers?
Oh yes, I almost forgot. They were the good killers. But Cohen doesn't say that. For him killing Japs and Krauts does not qualify as killing. Pest removal, perhaps; or in the current Israeli parlance, "war on Amalek."
Mr. Cohen is one among many turn-of-the-century Talmudic warlovers who advocate what has come to be known as therapeutic or humanitarian bombing of cities, whether of Dresden and Tokyo in the last century, or more recently, in Serbia, Iraq and Lebanon by the forces and frontmen of Zionism (NATO's Wesley Clark in Serbia, the Israeli air force in Lebanon; the US air force in Iraq).
The idea is to kill as many gentile civilians as necessary to preserve the "security" of the Master Race of Zionists; that's what makes the Allied incineration of countless non-Judaic women and children a "good war" in the eyes of the Cohens among us.
YES, IT WAS A GOOD WAR
By Richard Cohen
cohenr@washpost.com
The Washington Post, April 1, 2008; p. A17
Nicholson Baker, a supremely talented novelist, has written a surprising book of nonfiction titled "Human Smoke." It is composed primarily of snippets taken from contemporary newspapers in the run-up to World War II and makes the daring argument that the war -- our supposedly "good" war -- was not good at all. We shouldn't have fought it.
To my mind, the book is dead wrong and very odd. This, though, has not stopped it from getting a respectable front-page review in the Los Angeles Times Book Review -- "It may be one of the most important books you will ever read," wrote Mark Kurlansky -- or from grabbing the bottom perch (No. 15) on the New York Times's important bestseller list. Baker's a hit.
It takes a fair amount of audacity to challenge the conventional wisdom about World War II. This is especially the case since the war has become conflated with the Holocaust, the evil of which cannot possibly be argued. If you throw in the atrocities committed by the Japanese -- everything from massacres to the conscription of local women in conquered territories as sex slaves -- then World War II not only seemed right and urgent at the time but right and a bit too late now. Hitler could have been stopped earlier.
Baker, though, is a pacifist. He dedicated his book to the memory of "American and British pacifists" who, he writes, never really got their due. "They tried to save Jewish refugees, feed Europe, reconcile the United States and Japan, and stop the war from happening. They failed, but they were right."
No, they were not. But that, for the moment, is beside the point. A contemporary context for Baker's book may not be World War II but the war in Iraq. The former, of course, is the good war, and the latter is the bad one, but in Baker's view they undoubtedly are both wars that made things worse, not better. To make a further connection, countless neocons cited the pre-World War II Munich agreement -- appeasement! -- to suggest what would happen if Saddam Hussein and his regime were not confronted and brought down. Iraq was going to be yet another good war.
The parallels, strained though they may be, do not end there. Not only was the retro term "fascist" applied to Hussein, but it is now lathered on vast numbers of militant and anti-American Islamists: Islamofascists, they are called. It says something about the durability and plasticity of the term -- fascismo -- coined by Benito Mussolini in Italy in the early 20th century that it can be used to describe a goat herder in Afghanistan in the 21st.
The question, of course, is whether there is anything worth fighting for. Initially, I thought bringing down Saddam Hussein was a good cause. I was wrong -- not about the cause, but about its practicality. I still feel that anytime we can stop someone from killing someone else, we ought to try. I think, too, that such attempts help establish the expectation that the wholesale abuse of human rights will not be tolerated.
What's worrisome about the Baker book is that the attention it has gotten -- much of it critical -- is not just a testament to his reputation as a writer but also to the questions he has raised about war itself. Is any war, outside of direct self-defense, worth fighting? Baker suggests that even World War II was not -- that the Jews perished anyway and that the war consumed more lives than anyone could have imagined and that, somehow, pacifism would have worked its magic. (Gandhi, in a quote I got from another source, suggested in 1938 that Germany's Jews should commit mass suicide. That "would have aroused the world and the people of Germany to Hitler's violence.")
One casualty of a bad war such as that in Iraq is the growing feeling that no war is worth the cost. This was an important sentiment in Europe after the horrors of World War I, and it produced the supine response to Hitler and the celebrated 1933 declaration by the young debaters of the Oxford Union "that this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country." In the end, of course, they did. In the end, they had to.
The most horrible weapon in any arsenal is the madness of men. We see this time and time again, and sometimes the only way to stop them is by war. "War is an ugly thing," John Stuart Mill wrote, "but not the ugliest of things." Far uglier, he wrote, is the feeling that nothing in life is worth fighting for. World War II was fought for several reasons but above all -- and proudly -- because the only way to stop the killing was to stop the killers.
***
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