Editor's Note: How often do we hear that religion is the central villain in all of history's wars and holocausts. If only mankind could jettison God, how much better off would we be, runs this line of malarkey which ignores the atheist-Communist holocausts in China, Russia and Eastern Europe that collectively killed more than 100 million people. In 18th century France the masonic French revolutionaries committed a little-known genocide against Catholics in the Vendée region. Here is a rare account of this secularist holocaust.
Vendée French call for revolutionary massacre to be termed 'genocide'
It was one of the most infamous episodes of the bloody French Revolution.
By Henry Samuel in Paris
Dec. 26, 2008 | Telegraph (UK)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/3964724/Vende-French-call-for-revolution-massacre-to-be-termed-genocide.html
In early 1794 – at the height of the Reign of Terror – French soldiers marched to the Atlantic Vendée, where peasants had risen up against the Revolutionary government in Paris.
Twelve "infernal columns" commanded by General Louis-Marie Turreau were ordered to kill everyone and everything they saw. Thousands of people – including women and children – were massacred in cold blood, and farms and villages torched.
In the city of Nantes, the Revolutionary commander Jean-Baptiste Carrier disposed of Vendéean prisoners-of-war in a horrifically efficient form of mass execution. In the so-called "noyades" –mass drownings – naked men, women, and children were tied together in specially constructed boats, towed out to the middle of the river Loire and then sunk.
Now Vendée, a coastal department in western France, is calling for the incident to be remembered as the first genocide in modern history. Residents claim the massacre has been downplayed so as not to sully the story of the French Revolution.
Historians believe that around 170,000 Vendéeans were killed in the peasant war and the subsequent massacres – and around 5,000 in the noyades.
When it was over, French General Francois Joseph Westermann penned a letter to the Committee of Public Safety stating: "There is no more Vendée... According to the orders that you gave me, I crushed the children under the feet of the horses, massacred the women who, at least for these, will not give birth to any more brigands. I do not have a prisoner to reproach me. I have exterminated all."
Two centuries on, growing calls from local politicians to have it declared a "genocide" have sparked intellectual debate.
"There was in the Revolution a clearly stated programme to wipe out the Vendéean race," said Philippe de Villiers, European deputy and former presidential candidate for the right-wing traditionalist Movement for France (MPF) party.
"Why did it take place? Because a people was chosen to be liquidated on account of their religious faith. Today we demand a law officially declaring it as a genocide; we demand a statement from the president; and recognition by the United Nations."
Mr de Villiers – who opposes Turkish entry into the EU – was in Armenia last month, where he compared the Vendée of 1794 to the 1915 massacres of Armenians. In neither case, he said, "have the perpetrators admitted their fault or asked forgiveness of the victims".
The bloody events of the Vendée were long absent from French history books, because of the evil light they shed on the Revolutionaries. However, they were well known in the Soviet bloc. Lenin himself had studied the war there and drew inspiration for his policies towards the peasantry.
According to the historian Alain Gérard, of the Vendéean Centre for Historical Research, "In other parts of France the revolutionaries killed the nobles or the rich bourgeoisie. But in Vendée they killed the people.
"It was the Revolution turning against the very people from whom it claimed legitimacy. It proved the faithlessness of the Revolution to its own principles. That's why it was wiped out of the historical memory," he said.
While today nobody denies that massacres took place, some historians argue they cannot be called "genocide" as there were excesses on both sides in what was a civil war, and they do not fit the UN criteria of killings based on ethnic or religious identity. "The Vendéeans were no more blameless than were the republicans. The use of the word genocide is wholly inaccurate and inappropriate," said Timothy Tackett of the University of California.
For Mr Gérard, the massacres were clearly "a deliberate policy on the part of the authorities".
For Mr de Villiers, an aristocrat whose family seat is in the Vendée, genocide does indeed apply as his forebears were killed for religious reasons: they had rebelled to protect their priests, who refused to swear an oath to the new constitution.
"It's the rare case of a people rising up for religious reasons. They did not rebel because they were hungry, but because their priests were being killed," he said.
"It is my burden – and my great honour – to defend the Vendée to the end of my days. The Vendée is not just a province of France, it is a province of the spirit. If today we enjoy the freedom to worship the way we choose, it is largely down to the sacrifice of those who died here."
FOR THE OTHER SIDE OF HISTORY: www.RevisionistHistory.org
***
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Israeli child-killing strategy; also: casualty figures fiddled
From Richard Seymour, author of The Liberal Defense of Murder:
Amira Hass, in a powerful Dec. 31 article for Ha'aretz, writes: "This isn't the time to speak of ethics, but of precise intelligence. Whoever gave the instructions to send 100 of our planes, piloted by the best of our boys, to bomb and strafe enemy targets in Gaza is familiar with the many schools adjacent to those targets - especially police stations. He also knew that at exactly 11:30 A.M. on Saturday, during the surprise assault on the enemy, all the children of the Strip would be in the streets - half just having finished the morning shift at school, the others en route to the afternoon shift." [http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1051028.html]
This is an important insight. Israel's control of the situation is immense. They have detailed intelligence, sattelite imagery (which they like to show off at press conferences), sophisticated guidance technology, etc. It has planned this assault for months in advance, and its leadership is ostentatiously proud of how all the branches of military and intelligence, from Shin Bet to the Southern Command, have gelled in this attack. If an assault on major public facilities is timed to coincide with children being in the streets, this is not accidental: it is intended to leave a number of children lying in their own blood, and terrorise others.
So far, we have been given the impression in media reports that the majority of those killed have been in some sense not civilians. The UN has suggested that of its estimate of 320 deaths, about 62 are civilians... I had assumed that this was because the majority of those killed were policemen and, for some reason, we are all going along with Tel Aviv in not considering this a civilian profession. However! Apparently, I was under-estimating the creativity of the statisticians, for here's a weird thing: the UN's tally of the civilian dead "does not include civilian casualties who are men." [ABC News, Dec. 30, 2008; http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/12/30/2456334.htm]
There is no such thing as a civilian adult male in Gaza! According to this supposed scourge of Israel, any Gazan male with a bit of size on him is fair game.
Israeli power is, of course, extremely creative in determining the fields of law, morality and knowledge within which it operates. After all, when the IDF (Israeli military) slaughtered women outside a mosque in plain view not only of the public but of the cameras, it was immediately explained by Israeli spokespeople and their apologists that the women were in fact part of a cunning Hamas military operation to stop morally upright Israeli men from killing morally degenerate Palestinian men. So, they were a legitimate target.
Amira Hass, in a powerful Dec. 31 article for Ha'aretz, writes: "This isn't the time to speak of ethics, but of precise intelligence. Whoever gave the instructions to send 100 of our planes, piloted by the best of our boys, to bomb and strafe enemy targets in Gaza is familiar with the many schools adjacent to those targets - especially police stations. He also knew that at exactly 11:30 A.M. on Saturday, during the surprise assault on the enemy, all the children of the Strip would be in the streets - half just having finished the morning shift at school, the others en route to the afternoon shift." [http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1051028.html]
This is an important insight. Israel's control of the situation is immense. They have detailed intelligence, sattelite imagery (which they like to show off at press conferences), sophisticated guidance technology, etc. It has planned this assault for months in advance, and its leadership is ostentatiously proud of how all the branches of military and intelligence, from Shin Bet to the Southern Command, have gelled in this attack. If an assault on major public facilities is timed to coincide with children being in the streets, this is not accidental: it is intended to leave a number of children lying in their own blood, and terrorise others.
Palestinian men not counted as civilian casualties
So far, we have been given the impression in media reports that the majority of those killed have been in some sense not civilians. The UN has suggested that of its estimate of 320 deaths, about 62 are civilians... I had assumed that this was because the majority of those killed were policemen and, for some reason, we are all going along with Tel Aviv in not considering this a civilian profession. However! Apparently, I was under-estimating the creativity of the statisticians, for here's a weird thing: the UN's tally of the civilian dead "does not include civilian casualties who are men." [ABC News, Dec. 30, 2008; http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/12/30/2456334.htm]
There is no such thing as a civilian adult male in Gaza! According to this supposed scourge of Israel, any Gazan male with a bit of size on him is fair game.
Israeli power is, of course, extremely creative in determining the fields of law, morality and knowledge within which it operates. After all, when the IDF (Israeli military) slaughtered women outside a mosque in plain view not only of the public but of the cameras, it was immediately explained by Israeli spokespeople and their apologists that the women were in fact part of a cunning Hamas military operation to stop morally upright Israeli men from killing morally degenerate Palestinian men. So, they were a legitimate target.
And besides, it was hinted, why do they get to wear the veil? What are they hiding? So, if needs must, the very category of civilian, adult or child, male or female, can be conjured out of existence. And then Lt Gen Ashkenazi can come out to the podium and explain: "our intelligence shows that 1.5 million terrorists were eliminated today..."
***
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Israeli onslaught on Gaza: a crime that cannot succeed
The US-backed attempt to bring Hamas to heel by overwhelming force is in fact more likely to boost the movement's appeal
by Seumas Milne
by Seumas Milne
s.milne@guardian.co.uk
The Guardian (UK) | December 30, 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/dec/30/israel-and-the-palestinians-middle-east
Israel's decision to launch its devastating attack on Gaza on a Saturday was a "stroke of brilliance", the country's biggest selling paper Yediot Aharonot crowed: "the element of surprise increased the number of people who were killed." The daily Ma'ariv agreed: "We left them in shock and awe."
Of the ferocity of the assault on one of the most overcrowded and destitute corners of the earth, there is at least no question. In the bloodiest onslaught on blockaded Gaza since it was captured and occupied by Israel 41 years ago, at least 310 people were killed and more than a thousand reported injured in the first 48 hours alone.
As well as scores of ordinary police officers incinerated in a passing-out parade, at least 56 civilians were said by the UN to have died as Israel used American-supplied F-16s and Apache helicopters to attack a string of civilian targets it linked to Hamas, including a mosque, private homes and the Islamic university. Hamas military and political facilities were mostly deserted, while police stations in residential areas were teeming as they were pulverised.
As Israeli journalist Amos Harel wrote in Ha'aretz at the weekend, "little or no weight was apparently devoted to the question of harming innocent civilians", as in US operations in Iraq. Among those killed in the first wave of strikes were eight teenage students waiting for a bus and four girls from the same family in Jabaliya, aged one to 12 years old.
Anyone who doubts the impact of these atrocities among Arabs and Muslims worldwide should switch on the satellite television stations that are watched avidly across the Middle East and which - unlike their western counterparts - do not habitually sanitise the barbarity meted out in the name of multiple wars on terror.
Then, having seen a child dying in her parent's arms live on TV, consider what sort of western response there would have been to an attack on Israel, or the US or Britain for that matter, which left more than 300 dead in a couple of days.
You can be certain it would be met with the most sweeping condemnation, that the US president-elect would do a great deal more than "monitor" the situation and the British prime minister go much further than simply call for "restraint" on both sides.
But that is in fact all they did do, though the British government has since joined the call for a ceasefire. There has, of course, been no western denunciation of the Israeli slaughter - such aerial destruction is, after all, routinely called in by the US and Britain in occupied Iraq and Afghanistan.
Instead, Hamas and the Palestinians of Gaza are held responsible for what has been visited upon them. How could any government not respond with overwhelming force to the constant firing of rockets into its territory, the Israelis demand, echoed by western governments and media.
But that is to turn reality on its head. Like the West Bank, the Gaza Strip has been - and continues to be - illegally occupied by Israel since 1967. Despite the withdrawal of troops and settlements three years ago, Israel maintains complete control of the territory by sea, air and land. And since Hamas won the Palestinian elections in 2006, Israel has punished its 1.5 million people with an inhuman blockade of essential supplies, backed by the US and the European Union.
Like any occupied people, the Palestinians have the right to resist, whether they choose to exercise it or not. But there is no right of defence for an illegal occupation - there is an obligation to withdraw comprehensively. During the last seven years, 14 Israelis have been killed by mostly homemade rockets fired from the Gaza Strip, while more than 5,000 Palestinians were killed by Israel with some of the most advanced US-supplied armaments in the world. And while no rockets are fired from the West Bank, 45 Palestinians have died there at Israel's hands this year alone. The issue is of course not just the vast disparity in weapons and power, but that one side is the occupier, the other the occupied.
Hamas is likewise blamed for last month's breakdown of the six-month tahdi'a, or lull. But, in a weary reprise of past ceasefires, it was in fact sunk by Israel's assassination of six Hamas fighters in Gaza on November 5 and its refusal to lift its siege of the embattled territory as expected under an Egyptian-brokered deal. The truth is that Israel and its western sponsors have set their face against an accommodation with the Palestinians' democratic choice and have instead thrown their political weight, cash and arms behind a sustained attempt to overthrow it.
The complete failure of that approach has brought us to this week's horrific pass. Israeli leaders believe they can bomb Hamas into submission with a "decisive blow" that will establish a "new security environment" - and boost their electoral fortunes in the process before Barack Obama comes to office.
But as with Israel's disastrous assault on Lebanon two years ago - or its earlier siege of Yasser Arafat's PLO in Beirut in 1982 - it is a strategy that cannot succeed. Even more than Hezbollah, Hamas's appeal among Palestinians and beyond doesn't derive from its puny infrastructure, or even its Islamist ideology, but its spirit of resistance to decades of injustice. So long as it remains standing in the face of this onslaught, its influence will only be strengthened. And if it is not with rockets, its retaliation is bound to take other forms, as Hamas's leader Khalid Mish'al made clear at the weekend.
Meanwhile, the US and Israeli-backed Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas has been further diminished by being seen as having colluded in the Israeli assault on his own people - as has the already rock-bottom credibility of the Egyptian regime. What is now taking place in the Palestinian territories is a futile crime in which the US and its allies are deeply complicit - and unless Obama is prepared to change course, it is likely to have bitter consequences that will touch us all.
The Guardian (UK) | December 30, 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/dec/30/israel-and-the-palestinians-middle-east
Israel's decision to launch its devastating attack on Gaza on a Saturday was a "stroke of brilliance", the country's biggest selling paper Yediot Aharonot crowed: "the element of surprise increased the number of people who were killed." The daily Ma'ariv agreed: "We left them in shock and awe."
Of the ferocity of the assault on one of the most overcrowded and destitute corners of the earth, there is at least no question. In the bloodiest onslaught on blockaded Gaza since it was captured and occupied by Israel 41 years ago, at least 310 people were killed and more than a thousand reported injured in the first 48 hours alone.
As well as scores of ordinary police officers incinerated in a passing-out parade, at least 56 civilians were said by the UN to have died as Israel used American-supplied F-16s and Apache helicopters to attack a string of civilian targets it linked to Hamas, including a mosque, private homes and the Islamic university. Hamas military and political facilities were mostly deserted, while police stations in residential areas were teeming as they were pulverised.
As Israeli journalist Amos Harel wrote in Ha'aretz at the weekend, "little or no weight was apparently devoted to the question of harming innocent civilians", as in US operations in Iraq. Among those killed in the first wave of strikes were eight teenage students waiting for a bus and four girls from the same family in Jabaliya, aged one to 12 years old.
Anyone who doubts the impact of these atrocities among Arabs and Muslims worldwide should switch on the satellite television stations that are watched avidly across the Middle East and which - unlike their western counterparts - do not habitually sanitise the barbarity meted out in the name of multiple wars on terror.
Then, having seen a child dying in her parent's arms live on TV, consider what sort of western response there would have been to an attack on Israel, or the US or Britain for that matter, which left more than 300 dead in a couple of days.
You can be certain it would be met with the most sweeping condemnation, that the US president-elect would do a great deal more than "monitor" the situation and the British prime minister go much further than simply call for "restraint" on both sides.
But that is in fact all they did do, though the British government has since joined the call for a ceasefire. There has, of course, been no western denunciation of the Israeli slaughter - such aerial destruction is, after all, routinely called in by the US and Britain in occupied Iraq and Afghanistan.
Instead, Hamas and the Palestinians of Gaza are held responsible for what has been visited upon them. How could any government not respond with overwhelming force to the constant firing of rockets into its territory, the Israelis demand, echoed by western governments and media.
But that is to turn reality on its head. Like the West Bank, the Gaza Strip has been - and continues to be - illegally occupied by Israel since 1967. Despite the withdrawal of troops and settlements three years ago, Israel maintains complete control of the territory by sea, air and land. And since Hamas won the Palestinian elections in 2006, Israel has punished its 1.5 million people with an inhuman blockade of essential supplies, backed by the US and the European Union.
Like any occupied people, the Palestinians have the right to resist, whether they choose to exercise it or not. But there is no right of defence for an illegal occupation - there is an obligation to withdraw comprehensively. During the last seven years, 14 Israelis have been killed by mostly homemade rockets fired from the Gaza Strip, while more than 5,000 Palestinians were killed by Israel with some of the most advanced US-supplied armaments in the world. And while no rockets are fired from the West Bank, 45 Palestinians have died there at Israel's hands this year alone. The issue is of course not just the vast disparity in weapons and power, but that one side is the occupier, the other the occupied.
Hamas is likewise blamed for last month's breakdown of the six-month tahdi'a, or lull. But, in a weary reprise of past ceasefires, it was in fact sunk by Israel's assassination of six Hamas fighters in Gaza on November 5 and its refusal to lift its siege of the embattled territory as expected under an Egyptian-brokered deal. The truth is that Israel and its western sponsors have set their face against an accommodation with the Palestinians' democratic choice and have instead thrown their political weight, cash and arms behind a sustained attempt to overthrow it.
The complete failure of that approach has brought us to this week's horrific pass. Israeli leaders believe they can bomb Hamas into submission with a "decisive blow" that will establish a "new security environment" - and boost their electoral fortunes in the process before Barack Obama comes to office.
But as with Israel's disastrous assault on Lebanon two years ago - or its earlier siege of Yasser Arafat's PLO in Beirut in 1982 - it is a strategy that cannot succeed. Even more than Hezbollah, Hamas's appeal among Palestinians and beyond doesn't derive from its puny infrastructure, or even its Islamist ideology, but its spirit of resistance to decades of injustice. So long as it remains standing in the face of this onslaught, its influence will only be strengthened. And if it is not with rockets, its retaliation is bound to take other forms, as Hamas's leader Khalid Mish'al made clear at the weekend.
Meanwhile, the US and Israeli-backed Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas has been further diminished by being seen as having colluded in the Israeli assault on his own people - as has the already rock-bottom credibility of the Egyptian regime. What is now taking place in the Palestinian territories is a futile crime in which the US and its allies are deeply complicit - and unless Obama is prepared to change course, it is likely to have bitter consequences that will touch us all.
***
Israelis kill five sisters: Tahrir, Ikram, Samur, Dina & Ayah
Family Mourns 5 Daughters as Civilian Death Toll Mounts
When the airstrikes began Saturday, Samira and her nine children were at her father's house. They decided to return to their own house because "there was no difference anywhere in Gaza," Samira said. Her eldest daughter, Tahrir, she said, remarked that she would "rather live all together or die all together."
So they returned to their house. They felt some comfort living next to a mosque, which would not be targeted, they thought.
At 10 p.m. Sunday, Samira said goodnight to her seven daughters. They all slept in the same bedroom in the tiny house without electricity in this sprawling refugee camp. Before she left the room, she doused the kerosene lamp. "I was worried that an airstrike would rattle the house and the lamp would fall and burn down the room," Samira said.
Then she and her husband, Anwar, took their son, Muhammed, and baby daughter, Bara, to their room.
The mosque next door was an Israeli target. It was named after Emad Aqeel, a Hamas member who died fighting Israel. Hamas controls many mosques across Gaza, which serve as key venues for winning popular support.
Samira and Anwar recalled waking up to Bara and Muhammed's screams. They were covered in rubble. Some bricks had struck the boy's face; the girl had been tossed from the bed. Anwar remembers telling his wife to utter shehada, the prayer Muslims say before they die.
Somehow they managed to push away the rubble and move through the darkness. Neighbors were trying to remove the debris. Samira grabbed Muhammed and handed him to a rescuer; Anwar picked up Bara and stumbled outside to the street. Samira went to her daughters' room.
"I found a mountain of concrete over my daughters," Samira said. "I could do nothing. So I ran out in the street, screaming."
" 'There are seven girls in the room,' I yelled. 'Please go and bring them out.' " Neighbors took her to a hospital. A relative told her all the girls were alive.
Inside the room, Iman struggled to escape. She cried for help. Finally the rescuers heard her and pulled her out. "Where is my father? Where is my mother?" she asked. A few minutes later, her sister Samah, 10, also emerged.
"I didn't see my other sisters until I was saying goodbye to them at the morgue," Iman said, sobbing.
As she spoke in her relatives' house, Samira looked at her baby son's bruised face and shooed away the flies around his head. "I hope the Israelis' heart will be harmed like they hurt my heart," she said.
Iman's grandmother was there. Suddenly, another airstrike hit nearby, the sounds crashing through the house.
"Please, God, save our children," the grandmother screamed.
'Why Me? Why My Family?'
Anwar Balousha entered his shattered house Monday evening. Bruises covered his face. His head was wrapped in a bandage. He could barely walk. With the help of his relatives, he hobbled around the rubble. Water dripped from a still-intact ceiling.
In his daughters' room, he found a framed verse from the Koran. It read: "Nothing will happen to us but the things that God wrought for us."
It used to hang above his daughters' bed.
Standing there, Anwar remembered how Tahrir excelled at her studies. He struggled to understand how a poor unemployed day laborer could suffer so much in one night.
"I don't have anything to do with any Palestinian faction. I have nothing to do with Hamas or anyone. I am just an ordinary person."
"Why me? Why my family?" he asked no one in particular. He sobbed. "I have lost Tahrir, Ikram, Samur, Dina and Ayah. I have lost five daughters. I loved them all." He looked around.
"I am ready to die 100 times to bring back my daughters."
Kareem reported from the Jabalya refugee camp.
***
By Sudarsan Raghavan and Islam Abdel Kareem
Washington Post | December 30, 2008
JERUSALEM, Dec. 29 -- Trapped in the rubble, Iman Balousha, dressed in her green pajamas, said she could hear her sisters' cries. "Mother! Mother! Where is my mother? Pull me out!" Their muffled voices slipped through the toppled bricks.
Early Monday, an Israeli airstrike on the Jabalya refugee camp in the Gaza Strip destroyed the family's house, located next to the Emad Aqeel mosque, the intended target, which was also flattened. Rescuers tried frantically to save the girls. Iman was lucky: She was half-buried in the debris.
One by one, the cries stopped, Iman recalled in an interview. She could see the leg of her 4-year-old sister, Jawaher, whom her family called Ayah. She could touch her hair. But minutes later, Ayah stopped breathing.
"I've lost five sisters," Iman, 16, said at a relative's house Monday evening, her soft voice fading. Tears slid down her face. Her mother, Samira, held her 16-month-old son, whose face was bruised and specked with dried blood.
"Does my 12-days-old baby have a rocket with her?" Samira demanded. "Or my son, does he have a missile with him? Or did my daughters have AK-47s beside them? Why did they target them?" The five daughters who died were ages 4 to 17.
Concerns mounted over the growing toll on civilians in the Gaza Strip as Israeli jets carried out airstrikes for the third straight day. Many of the casualties have been civilians who live around targets in the densely populated strip. The United Nations on Monday said at least 57 Palestinian civilians have been killed since the Israeli offensive began Saturday, based on visits to hospitals and medical facilities. Officials described that number as conservative.
In total, over three days, 364 Palestinians have been killed and hundreds more wounded, said Gaza medical officials, in the deadliest wave of attacks in Gaza since Israel captured control of the seaside territory from Egypt in 1967. Hamas has retaliated, firing a barrage of rockets into southern Israel that has killed four Israelis.
"The Israelis say they are targeting Hamas, but they are targeting the innocent kids who are sleeping," Samira said.
On Monday, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency said an Israeli missile targeted policemen standing near a Gaza government building, across the street from a U.N. training center. Eight students, ages 18 to 20, were killed while waiting for a U.N. bus to take them home, and 19 were injured. Eight remained in critical condition Monday, the agency said in a statement.
"They are tragic illustrations of how civilians are so vulnerable in this conflict, when such overwhelming means of force is used in such a tight and densely populated part of the world," said Christopher Gunness, a U.N. spokesman, referring to the deaths of the students and Iman's sisters.
On Monday, U.N. officials complained to the Israeli government after a U.N. building was severely damaged by two missiles targeting an adjacent guesthouse used by the Hamas government in Gaza.
Human rights groups demanded that Israel and Egypt open up humanitarian corridors into the Gaza Strip for the delivery of aid. Gazans are facing shortages of medical personnel, medicine, food, electricity and water, aid workers said.
"The horrific death toll risks growing due to the unavailability of adequate medical care for the hundreds of injured," Amnesty International said in a statement, appealing to Israel and Egypt to allow the Palestinian wounded to be treated in their countries. "It is utterly unacceptable for Israel to continue to purposefully deprive 1.5 million people of food and other basic necessities."
Seeking Comfort in Their House
Washington Post | December 30, 2008
JERUSALEM, Dec. 29 -- Trapped in the rubble, Iman Balousha, dressed in her green pajamas, said she could hear her sisters' cries. "Mother! Mother! Where is my mother? Pull me out!" Their muffled voices slipped through the toppled bricks.
Early Monday, an Israeli airstrike on the Jabalya refugee camp in the Gaza Strip destroyed the family's house, located next to the Emad Aqeel mosque, the intended target, which was also flattened. Rescuers tried frantically to save the girls. Iman was lucky: She was half-buried in the debris.
One by one, the cries stopped, Iman recalled in an interview. She could see the leg of her 4-year-old sister, Jawaher, whom her family called Ayah. She could touch her hair. But minutes later, Ayah stopped breathing.
"I've lost five sisters," Iman, 16, said at a relative's house Monday evening, her soft voice fading. Tears slid down her face. Her mother, Samira, held her 16-month-old son, whose face was bruised and specked with dried blood.
"Does my 12-days-old baby have a rocket with her?" Samira demanded. "Or my son, does he have a missile with him? Or did my daughters have AK-47s beside them? Why did they target them?" The five daughters who died were ages 4 to 17.
Concerns mounted over the growing toll on civilians in the Gaza Strip as Israeli jets carried out airstrikes for the third straight day. Many of the casualties have been civilians who live around targets in the densely populated strip. The United Nations on Monday said at least 57 Palestinian civilians have been killed since the Israeli offensive began Saturday, based on visits to hospitals and medical facilities. Officials described that number as conservative.
In total, over three days, 364 Palestinians have been killed and hundreds more wounded, said Gaza medical officials, in the deadliest wave of attacks in Gaza since Israel captured control of the seaside territory from Egypt in 1967. Hamas has retaliated, firing a barrage of rockets into southern Israel that has killed four Israelis.
"The Israelis say they are targeting Hamas, but they are targeting the innocent kids who are sleeping," Samira said.
On Monday, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency said an Israeli missile targeted policemen standing near a Gaza government building, across the street from a U.N. training center. Eight students, ages 18 to 20, were killed while waiting for a U.N. bus to take them home, and 19 were injured. Eight remained in critical condition Monday, the agency said in a statement.
"They are tragic illustrations of how civilians are so vulnerable in this conflict, when such overwhelming means of force is used in such a tight and densely populated part of the world," said Christopher Gunness, a U.N. spokesman, referring to the deaths of the students and Iman's sisters.
On Monday, U.N. officials complained to the Israeli government after a U.N. building was severely damaged by two missiles targeting an adjacent guesthouse used by the Hamas government in Gaza.
Human rights groups demanded that Israel and Egypt open up humanitarian corridors into the Gaza Strip for the delivery of aid. Gazans are facing shortages of medical personnel, medicine, food, electricity and water, aid workers said.
"The horrific death toll risks growing due to the unavailability of adequate medical care for the hundreds of injured," Amnesty International said in a statement, appealing to Israel and Egypt to allow the Palestinian wounded to be treated in their countries. "It is utterly unacceptable for Israel to continue to purposefully deprive 1.5 million people of food and other basic necessities."
Seeking Comfort in Their House
When the airstrikes began Saturday, Samira and her nine children were at her father's house. They decided to return to their own house because "there was no difference anywhere in Gaza," Samira said. Her eldest daughter, Tahrir, she said, remarked that she would "rather live all together or die all together."
So they returned to their house. They felt some comfort living next to a mosque, which would not be targeted, they thought.
At 10 p.m. Sunday, Samira said goodnight to her seven daughters. They all slept in the same bedroom in the tiny house without electricity in this sprawling refugee camp. Before she left the room, she doused the kerosene lamp. "I was worried that an airstrike would rattle the house and the lamp would fall and burn down the room," Samira said.
Then she and her husband, Anwar, took their son, Muhammed, and baby daughter, Bara, to their room.
The mosque next door was an Israeli target. It was named after Emad Aqeel, a Hamas member who died fighting Israel. Hamas controls many mosques across Gaza, which serve as key venues for winning popular support.
Samira and Anwar recalled waking up to Bara and Muhammed's screams. They were covered in rubble. Some bricks had struck the boy's face; the girl had been tossed from the bed. Anwar remembers telling his wife to utter shehada, the prayer Muslims say before they die.
Somehow they managed to push away the rubble and move through the darkness. Neighbors were trying to remove the debris. Samira grabbed Muhammed and handed him to a rescuer; Anwar picked up Bara and stumbled outside to the street. Samira went to her daughters' room.
"I found a mountain of concrete over my daughters," Samira said. "I could do nothing. So I ran out in the street, screaming."
" 'There are seven girls in the room,' I yelled. 'Please go and bring them out.' " Neighbors took her to a hospital. A relative told her all the girls were alive.
Inside the room, Iman struggled to escape. She cried for help. Finally the rescuers heard her and pulled her out. "Where is my father? Where is my mother?" she asked. A few minutes later, her sister Samah, 10, also emerged.
"I didn't see my other sisters until I was saying goodbye to them at the morgue," Iman said, sobbing.
As she spoke in her relatives' house, Samira looked at her baby son's bruised face and shooed away the flies around his head. "I hope the Israelis' heart will be harmed like they hurt my heart," she said.
Iman's grandmother was there. Suddenly, another airstrike hit nearby, the sounds crashing through the house.
"Please, God, save our children," the grandmother screamed.
'Why Me? Why My Family?'
Anwar Balousha entered his shattered house Monday evening. Bruises covered his face. His head was wrapped in a bandage. He could barely walk. With the help of his relatives, he hobbled around the rubble. Water dripped from a still-intact ceiling.
In his daughters' room, he found a framed verse from the Koran. It read: "Nothing will happen to us but the things that God wrought for us."
It used to hang above his daughters' bed.
Standing there, Anwar remembered how Tahrir excelled at her studies. He struggled to understand how a poor unemployed day laborer could suffer so much in one night.
"I don't have anything to do with any Palestinian faction. I have nothing to do with Hamas or anyone. I am just an ordinary person."
"Why me? Why my family?" he asked no one in particular. He sobbed. "I have lost Tahrir, Ikram, Samur, Dina and Ayah. I have lost five daughters. I loved them all." He looked around.
"I am ready to die 100 times to bring back my daughters."
Kareem reported from the Jabalya refugee camp.
***
Monday, December 29, 2008
The Talmud's Pharisee Model of"Modesty"
Halachas of Tznius
These posters appear in the streets of Crown Heights, New York under the auspices of Chabad-Lubavitch.
Gaza: the logic of colonial power
As so often, the term 'terrorism' has proved a rhetorical smokescreen under cover of which the strong crush the weak
by Nir Rosen
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/dec/29/gaza-hamas-israel
by Nir Rosen
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/dec/29/gaza-hamas-israel
December 29, 2008
Once again, the Israelis bomb the starving and imprisoned population of Gaza. The world watches the plight of 1.5 million Gazans live on TV and online; the western media largely justify the Israeli action...
The powerful – whether Israel, America, Russia or China – will always describe their victims' struggle as terrorism, but the destruction of Chechnya, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the slow slaughter of the remaining Palestinians, the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan – with the tens of thousands of civilians it has killed … these will never earn the title of terrorism, though civilians were the target and terrorising them was the purpose.
Once again, the Israelis bomb the starving and imprisoned population of Gaza. The world watches the plight of 1.5 million Gazans live on TV and online; the western media largely justify the Israeli action...
The powerful – whether Israel, America, Russia or China – will always describe their victims' struggle as terrorism, but the destruction of Chechnya, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the slow slaughter of the remaining Palestinians, the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan – with the tens of thousands of civilians it has killed … these will never earn the title of terrorism, though civilians were the target and terrorising them was the purpose.
Counterinsurgency, now popular again among in the Pentagon, is another way of saying the suppression of national liberation struggles. Terror and intimidation are as essential to it as is winning hearts and minds.
Normative rules are determined by power relations. Those with power determine what is legal and illegal. They besiege the weak in legal prohibitions to prevent the weak from resisting. For the weak to resist is illegal by definition. Concepts like terrorism are invented and used normatively as if a neutral court had produced them, instead of the oppressors. The danger in this excessive use of legality actually undermines legality, diminishing the credibility of international institutions such as the United Nations. It becomes apparent that the powerful, those who make the rules, insist on legality merely to preserve the power relations that serve them or to maintain their occupation and colonialism.
Attacking civilians is the last, most desperate and basic method of resistance when confronting overwhelming odds and imminent eradication. The Palestinians do not attack Israeli civilians with the expectation that they will destroy Israel. The land of Palestine is being stolen day after day; the Palestinian people is being eradicated day after day. As a result, they respond in whatever way they can to apply pressure on Israel.
Colonial powers use civilians strategically, settling them to claim land and dispossess the native population, be they Indians in North America or Palestinians in what is now Israel and the Occupied Territories. When the native population sees that there is an irreversible dynamic that is taking away their land and identity with the support of an overwhelming power, then they are forced to resort to whatever methods of resistance they can.
Not long ago, 19-year-old Qassem al-Mughrabi, a Palestinian man from Jerusalem drove his car into a group of soldiers at an intersection. "The terrorist", as the Israeli newspaper Haaretz called him, was shot and killed. In two separate incidents last July, Palestinians from Jerusalem also used vehicles to attack Israelis. The attackers were not part of an organisation. Although those Palestinian men were also killed, senior Israeli officials called for their homes to be demolished.
In a separate incident, Haaretz reported that a Palestinian woman blinded an Israeli soldier in one eye..."The terrorist was arrested by security forces," the paper said. An occupied citizen attacks an occupying soldier, and she is the terrorist?
In September, Bush spoke at the United Nations. No cause could justify the deliberate taking of human life, he said. Yet the US has killed thousands of civilians in airstrikes on populated areas. When you drop bombs on populated areas knowing there will be some "collateral" civilian damage, but accepting it as worth it, then it is deliberate. When you impose sanctions, as the US did on Saddam era Iraq, that kill hundreds of thousands, and then say their deaths were worth it, as secretary of state Albright did, then you are deliberately killing people for a political goal. When you seek to "shock and awe", as president Bush did, when he bombed Iraq, you are engaging in terrorism.
Just as the traditional American cowboy film presented white Americans under siege, with Indians as the aggressors, which was the opposite of reality, so, too, have Palestinians become the aggressors and not the victims. Beginning in 1948, 750,000 Palestinians were deliberately cleansed and expelled from their homes, and hundreds of their villages were destroyed, and their land was settled by colonists, who went on to deny their very existence and wage a 60-year war against the remaining natives and the national liberation movements the Palestinians established around the world.
Every day, more of Palestine is stolen, more Palestinians are killed. To call oneself an Israeli Zionist is to engage in the dispossession of entire people. It is not that, qua Palestinians, they have the right to use any means necessary, it is because they are weak. The weak have much less power than the strong, and can do much less damage. The Palestinians would not have ever bombed cafes or used home-made missiles if they had tanks and airplanes. It is only in the current context that their actions are justified, and there are obvious limits....Can an Iraqi be justified in attacking the United States? After all, his country was attacked without provocation, and destroyed, with millions of refugees created, hundreds of thousands of dead. And this, after 12 years of bombings and sanctions, which killed many and destroyed the lives of many others.
I could argue that all Americans are benefiting from their country's exploits without having to pay the price, and that, in today's world, the imperial machine is not merely the military but a military-civilian network. And I could also say that Americans elected the Bush administration twice and elected representatives who did nothing to stop the war, and the American people themselves did nothing. From the perspective of an American, or an Israeli, or other powerful aggressors, if you are strong, everything you do is justifiable, and nothing the weak do is legitimate. It's merely a question of what side you choose: the side of the strong or the side of the weak.
Israel and its allies in the west and in Arab regimes such as Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia have managed to corrupt the PLO leadership, to suborn them with the promise of power at the expense of liberty for their people, creating a first – a liberation movement that collaborated with the occupier. Israeli elections are coming up and, as usual, these elections are accompanied by war to bolster the candidates. You cannot be prime minister of Israel without enough Arab blood on your hands.
An Israeli general has threatened to set Gaza back decades, just as they threatened to set Lebanon back decades in 2006. As if strangling Gaza and denying its people fuel, power or food had not set it back decades already.
The democratically elected Hamas government was targeted for destruction from the day it won the elections in 2006. The world told the Palestinians that they cannot have democracy, as if the goal was to radicalise them further and as if that would not have a consequence. Israel claims it is targeting Hamas's military forces. This is not true. It is targeting Palestinian police forces and killing them, including some such as the chief of police, Tawfiq Jaber, who was actually a former Fatah official who stayed on in his post after Hamas took control of Gaza. What will happen to a society with no security forces? What do the Israelis expect to happen when forces more radical than Hamas gain power?
A Zionist Israel is not a viable long-term project and Israeli settlements, land expropriation and separation barriers have long since made a two state solution impossible. There can be only one state in historic Palestine. In coming decades, Israelis will be confronted with two options. Will they peacefully transition towards an equal society, where Palestinians are given the same rights, à la post-apartheid South Africa? Or will they continue to view democracy as a threat? If so, one of the peoples will be forced to leave. Colonialism has only worked when most of the natives have been exterminated. But often, as in occupied Algeria, it is the settlers who flee. Eventually, the Palestinians will not be willing to compromise and seek one state for both people. Does the world want to further radicalise them?
Do not be deceived: the persistence of the Palestine problem is the main motive for every anti-American militant in the Arab world and beyond. But now the Bush administration has added Iraq and Afghanistan as additional grievances. America has lost its influence on the Arab masses, even if it can still apply pressure on Arab regimes. But reformists and elites in the Arab world want nothing to do with America...
(Emphasis supplied)
***
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Egyptian regime tricked Hamas into not evacuating
Editor's note: Egypt is a dictatorship. "Democracy" is a joke there, yet it enjoys full US support and American taxpayer largesse because the Egyptian regime - despite much official safety valve hot air to the contrary - is a satrapy of the Israeli state. The Bush regime's talk of encouraging "democracy" in the Middle East is a farce. No matter how tyrannical an Arab state (Jordan, Saudi Arabia), if it covertly cooperates with Zionism, that is the sole criterion for a US buttress of a corrupt regime.
Egypt collaborated with Israel by deliberately misleading Hamas and allowing Tel Aviv to deal a blow to the movement, a report claims. Citing diplomatic sources, the London-based daily al-Quds al-Arabi reported Sunday [Dec. 28] that Egyptian Intelligence Minister Omar Suleiman had deceived Hamas into believing that Israel would not launch an attack on the Gaza Strip in the near future. According to the report, the misinformation lured Hamas into not evacuating its security compounds and headquarters.
Suleiman convinced a number of Arab leaders that Israel was intending to launch only limited operations into the Gaza Strip to mount pressure on Hamas ahead of signing a new ceasefire agreement, the report added. Egypt told Hamas on Friday evening that Israel had agreed to begin talks on a ceasefire and would not attack Gaza before Cairo ended its diplomatic efforts, the daily quoted Hamas sources close to former Palestinian Foreign Minister Mahmoud al-Zahar as saying. The report added that Egypt's assurance persuaded Hamas not to evacuate its security compounds in accordance with routine procedures in place after any threats by Israel.
http://www.presstv.ir/ detail.asp...ionid=351020202 [Ken Waldron]
http://www.presstv.ir/ detail.asp...ionid=351020202 [Ken Waldron]
***
Talmudic arithmetic in Gaza
"Today... the essential calculation... has been blatantly revealed.... One Israeli life is worth a hundred Palestinian lives."
By John Berger
12.27.2008 | http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org
"We are now spectators of the latest - and perhaps penultimate - chapter of the 60 year old conflict between Israel and the Palestinian people. About the complexities of this tragic conflict billions of words have been pronounced, defending one side or the other.
Today, in face of the Israeli attacks on Gaza, the essential calculation, which was always covertly there, behind this conflict, has been blatantly revealed. The death of one Israeli victim justifies the killing of a hundred Palestinians. One Israeli life is worth a hundred Palestinian lives.
This is what the Israeli State and the world media more or less - with marginal questioning - mindlessly repeat. And this claim, which has accompanied and justified the longest Occupation of foreign territories in 20th C. European history, is viscerally racist. That the Jewish people should accept this, that the world should concur, that the Palestinians should submit to it - is one of history's ironic jokes. There's no laughter anywhere. We can, however, refute it, more and more vocally. Let's do so."
John Berger is an English art critic, painter, and novelist. Two years ago, he launched an appeal for worldwide cultural boycott against the Israeli state: John Berger, "We Must Speak Out," Guardian, 15 December 2006; and "John Berger and 93 Other Authors, Film-makers, Musicians and Performers Call for a Cultural Boycott of Israel," Ramallah, 15 December 2006.
***
By John Berger
12.27.2008 | http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org
"We are now spectators of the latest - and perhaps penultimate - chapter of the 60 year old conflict between Israel and the Palestinian people. About the complexities of this tragic conflict billions of words have been pronounced, defending one side or the other.
Today, in face of the Israeli attacks on Gaza, the essential calculation, which was always covertly there, behind this conflict, has been blatantly revealed. The death of one Israeli victim justifies the killing of a hundred Palestinians. One Israeli life is worth a hundred Palestinian lives.
This is what the Israeli State and the world media more or less - with marginal questioning - mindlessly repeat. And this claim, which has accompanied and justified the longest Occupation of foreign territories in 20th C. European history, is viscerally racist. That the Jewish people should accept this, that the world should concur, that the Palestinians should submit to it - is one of history's ironic jokes. There's no laughter anywhere. We can, however, refute it, more and more vocally. Let's do so."
John Berger is an English art critic, painter, and novelist. Two years ago, he launched an appeal for worldwide cultural boycott against the Israeli state: John Berger, "We Must Speak Out," Guardian, 15 December 2006; and "John Berger and 93 Other Authors, Film-makers, Musicians and Performers Call for a Cultural Boycott of Israel," Ramallah, 15 December 2006.
***
Saturday, December 27, 2008
The Israeli Nazis and the Palestinian Allies
The latest Israeli slaughter in Gaza and the rockets of Hamas in the context of Allied "Good War" morality
by Michael Hoffman
Copyright©2008. All Rights Reserved
www.RevisionistHistory.org
The latest Israeli war crime in Gaza reminds me of a central idea of a book I hope to one day complete on the Cryptocracy's great game with Islam, in this case pertaining to the morality message of World War II.
In World War II the Allies conducted themselves, as Franklin Roosevelt stated, as though the entire German people were collectively involved in a conspiracy against civilization. With this rationale in hand, the Allies proceeded to terrorize the German people as no people have ever been terrorized by a state. Every instrument of the terrorist was employed: assassination, bombing and mass murder. Rather than being condemned or prosecuted, the Allied terrorism was characterized as history's one, certain "Good War" and I will not exhaust you with a litany of the other sterling sobriquets with which moralists and alleged humanitarians have laurel-wreathed the Allied bloodbath.
The Muslims, along with the rest of the world, observed the Allied morality play and in the midst of the West's media blitz have had a center seat at all of the movies, documentaries and official commemorations of the heroism and goodness of the Allied attacks on civilians, on the basis that the Germans, including German women, children, infants and the unborn of pregnant German mothers, were occupiers, colonizers, aggressors and exterminators who got what they deserved.
I have witnessed no serious attempt anywhere across the spectrum of western public opinion to overthrow World War II Allied morality. If anything, it has become more extravagant in its claims of moral purity and ethical crusading.
The Palestinians, having learned the lesson of World War II as perpetually imparted by Hollywood and New York, identify the Israelis as Nazis who colonize, occupy and yes, exterminate -- in so far as they are able in a media age where little is done in secret that escapes hand-held video cameras and Internet blogs.
For example, in the Gaza ghetto, for years the Israelis have forced 1.5 million people to go without food, medical care, heating fuel, electricity, clean water and facilities and infrastructure necessary to life or even a half-way decent standard of living. In response to these Nazi-like actions by the Zionists, Hamas fires primitive rockets at Zionist civilians. The West tends to see only the Hamas rockets, not the record of Israeli mass murder, dispossession and occupation which led to the rocket fire.
According to the Allied logic of World War II, Hamas is completely in the right and nothing Hamas does to the Nazi-Israelis is wrong; in fact, the Hamas rocket fire must be classed, by Allied logic, as a step on the path toward civilization and against barbarism.
This writer believes that attacks on civilians are always wrong, whether they be German, Palestinian or Israeli. But the West can't have it both ways: it can't teach, as it has for generations, that one may burn and slaughter German civilians righteously, without restraint of any kind, and then celebrate that terrible carnage for the next six decades in every possible forum, while telling Hamas and the Palestinians that they dare not imitate the Allied/World War II example. Muslims have no regard for western hypocrisy and they will hurl themselves at the Israelis as the Allies hurled themselves at the Germans and this will probably continue for as long as the Allied slaughter of Germans is held to be the gold standard of ethical conduct in war.
Those who uphold the myth of Allied morality ought to uphold Palestinian resistance to Israeli conquest and slaughter. In view of this, the Israeli-Nazi attacks today in Gaza will only further enflame the resolve of Arabs and Muslims throughout the world to resist by any means -- including guns and bombs -- the "collectively guilty" 21st century Israeli people, just as the Allies murdered, burned and bombed the "collectively guilty" German people of the 1940s. Few in the West today view the Allies as terrorists and few in Islamic countries view Hamas as terrorist.
The next "Good War" has only just begun.
The latest Israeli war crime in Gaza reminds me of a central idea of a book I hope to one day complete on the Cryptocracy's great game with Islam, in this case pertaining to the morality message of World War II.
In World War II the Allies conducted themselves, as Franklin Roosevelt stated, as though the entire German people were collectively involved in a conspiracy against civilization. With this rationale in hand, the Allies proceeded to terrorize the German people as no people have ever been terrorized by a state. Every instrument of the terrorist was employed: assassination, bombing and mass murder. Rather than being condemned or prosecuted, the Allied terrorism was characterized as history's one, certain "Good War" and I will not exhaust you with a litany of the other sterling sobriquets with which moralists and alleged humanitarians have laurel-wreathed the Allied bloodbath.
The Muslims, along with the rest of the world, observed the Allied morality play and in the midst of the West's media blitz have had a center seat at all of the movies, documentaries and official commemorations of the heroism and goodness of the Allied attacks on civilians, on the basis that the Germans, including German women, children, infants and the unborn of pregnant German mothers, were occupiers, colonizers, aggressors and exterminators who got what they deserved.
I have witnessed no serious attempt anywhere across the spectrum of western public opinion to overthrow World War II Allied morality. If anything, it has become more extravagant in its claims of moral purity and ethical crusading.
The Palestinians, having learned the lesson of World War II as perpetually imparted by Hollywood and New York, identify the Israelis as Nazis who colonize, occupy and yes, exterminate -- in so far as they are able in a media age where little is done in secret that escapes hand-held video cameras and Internet blogs.
For example, in the Gaza ghetto, for years the Israelis have forced 1.5 million people to go without food, medical care, heating fuel, electricity, clean water and facilities and infrastructure necessary to life or even a half-way decent standard of living. In response to these Nazi-like actions by the Zionists, Hamas fires primitive rockets at Zionist civilians. The West tends to see only the Hamas rockets, not the record of Israeli mass murder, dispossession and occupation which led to the rocket fire.
According to the Allied logic of World War II, Hamas is completely in the right and nothing Hamas does to the Nazi-Israelis is wrong; in fact, the Hamas rocket fire must be classed, by Allied logic, as a step on the path toward civilization and against barbarism.
This writer believes that attacks on civilians are always wrong, whether they be German, Palestinian or Israeli. But the West can't have it both ways: it can't teach, as it has for generations, that one may burn and slaughter German civilians righteously, without restraint of any kind, and then celebrate that terrible carnage for the next six decades in every possible forum, while telling Hamas and the Palestinians that they dare not imitate the Allied/World War II example. Muslims have no regard for western hypocrisy and they will hurl themselves at the Israelis as the Allies hurled themselves at the Germans and this will probably continue for as long as the Allied slaughter of Germans is held to be the gold standard of ethical conduct in war.
Those who uphold the myth of Allied morality ought to uphold Palestinian resistance to Israeli conquest and slaughter. In view of this, the Israeli-Nazi attacks today in Gaza will only further enflame the resolve of Arabs and Muslims throughout the world to resist by any means -- including guns and bombs -- the "collectively guilty" 21st century Israeli people, just as the Allies murdered, burned and bombed the "collectively guilty" German people of the 1940s. Few in the West today view the Allies as terrorists and few in Islamic countries view Hamas as terrorist.
The next "Good War" has only just begun.
Hoffman is co-author of The Israeli Holocaust Against the Palestinians. His latest work is Judaism Discovered: A Study of the Anti-Biblical Religion of Racism, Self-Worship, Superstition and Deceit, now in its second printing, in spite of having been banned by Amazon.com (the only book about Judaism which has that distinction). Ordering information is here: http://www.revisionisthistory.org/page1/news.html
***
Monday, December 22, 2008
Hasidic rabbis assault and beat three Israeli girls
This column was updated on Dec. 23 and Dec. 24.
On the march: the rabbinic modesty police of Beit Shemesh
Please note: this is false modesty on the ostentatious and deceiving Pharisaic model. There is no "sanctity" in an Orthodox Judaic ghetto where women and children can be sodomized with impunity. Neither are they "committed to...Torah" (Old Testament). When they say "Torah" they mean the Torah Shebeal Peh (man-made oral law condemned by Jesus). It's all an occult show.
Haredi, religious residents clash in Beit Shemesh
Ynet News
Dec. 21, 2008
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3641737,00.html
Growing tensions between ultra-Orthodox and religious residents in the town of Beit Shemesh, near Jerusalem, have recently escalated into violence as three teen girls were beaten up by haredim who claimed they were "immodestly" dressed.
The incident was the last in a series of reported attacks by members of the Haredi Community faction on their religious neighbors, prompted by the latter's' alleged "promiscuity" and negative influence on haredi children.
According to reports, the three 15-year-old girls went for a walk after the Shabbat dinner last Friday, and passed through a haredi neighborhood. At some point they noticed that they were being followed by several men. A Few minutes later the men entered one of the buildings and then came back outside accompanied by dozens of people who then stormed the girls.
They kicked them until they fell on the ground, and started hitting them and throwing eggs at them while shouting, "Nazis, get out of here."
Two of the girls managed to escape, while the third got away only after a passerby protested the attack and drew the attention of the crowd. A haredi woman from one of the nearby buildings hid the girl at her apartment and later helped her sneak outside covered in a long haredi-style robe.
The police were called to the place only after the incident had already been over and the attackers long gone.
"My daughter was completely hysterical," said the girl's father. "She came home all beaten up and filthy." He added that he was shocked to discover that the attack was not perpetuated by "bored deprived youth but by adults over 40.
"They kept shouting that girls and boys walking together is promiscuity that spoils their children, but the girls were no way near any boys and the three of them were modestly dressed," he claimed.
Meanwhile the members of the Haredi Community stream in Beit Shemesh present a different version for the state of affairs in town. Moshe, a haredi resident, said that young religious boys and girls often pass through the haredi neighborhood together, and that on occasion yeshiva students have to "drive them away by force."
"Boys and girls laughing together is forbidden. This shouldn't happen in a secular neighborhood, let alone an ultra-Orthodox one," Moshe stated.
Following the recent weeks' events, members of the Zionist religious community have approached the mayor and their local council representatives and have also filed a complaint with the police. Meanwhile, negotiations have also been ongoing between members of both publics in an effort to reach an understanding that would enable coexistence in the mixed town. (End quote)
Dec. 23 Update
New York Times suppresses story while promoting Hasidic entertainer
(In spite of the dateline provided by the Times, the article below was actually available on the newspaper's website from the evening of Dec. 22 onward, with a prominent link appearing on the front page of the website for more than 12 hours).
This is how apologists for the Orthodox rabbis operate. Three Israeli girls are beaten by the Hasidic rabbis. The NY Times does not report it. Instead, the Times lavishes adoring publicity on an Orthodox Judaic Hasidic singer, while blithely ignoring his racism, hatred and misogyny. Note the tag line by the newspaper's veteran rock critic and sophisticated hipster, Jon Pareles: "It’s music for believers, with a groove for everyone else."
Obviously then, if you believe what the Talmud believes about women, as Matisyahu does, it's acceptable and no grounds for protest. It's only a "belief." At the critical juncture where American pop culture intersects rabbinic culture, it has always been the task of the establishment media to seamlessly integrate the two. Consequently, Talmudic values, such as those on display in Beit Shemesh, become American values through the vehicle of entertainment. No Muslim-American rock singer who was part of an Islamic fundamentalist group would ever be granted the kind of approbation the Times bestows upon Matisyahu, until the Muslim had totally abjured his Islamic fundamentalist beliefs. Matisyahu undergoes no such demand to renounce his Hasidic-Judaic fundamentalism, because rabbinic evil is one that the NY Times accepts as holy and valid. Here we have a front-row seat at how American perception is molded and minds are controlled: first, suppress the bad news about Orthodox Hasidic Judaism. Second, promote Orthodox Hasidic Judaics as a "groove for everyone..." Beating women? When rabbis do it, it's just part of the American groove. Now let's dance! -- to the music of a member of the women-beaters' group.
Matisyahu welcomes Hanukkah with his Festival of Light concert at Webster Hall in New York's East Village, Dec. 21.
Hanukkah Receives Kosher Pop Welcome
NY Times | December 23, 2008
By Jon Pareles
Matisyahu deployed what may be the only large, mirrored, rotating dreidel in show business — a Jewish answer to a disco ball — at Webster Hall on Sunday night, the first night of Hanukkah. It was also the first of eight New York City shows for Matisyahu in his third annual Festival of Lights series, bringing different opening acts and guests each night. A large menorah was set up for a mid-concert lighting ceremony, with the blessings declaimed in Hebrew by an audience volunteer.
Matisyahu, who was born Matthew Miller, sings explicitly devotional songs about God, Moshiach (the Messiah) and Orthodox Jewish identity. By setting them to reggae, rock and hip-hop beats, and after working his way up the jam-band circuit, he also reaches listeners with their minds on more secular pursuits, like dancing and drugs. Simcha Levenberg, the M.C. who introduced him, drew big laughs with jokes about marijuana and LSD, although Matisyahu’s song “King Without a Crown” insisted, “If you’re trying to stay high, then you’re bound to be low.”
Matisyahu has built a career on analogies between Rastafarian roots reggae and Hasidic songs. Both are concerned with faith and survival struggles and have lyrics phrased in Biblical allusions; both draw on modal scales and melismatic vocal lines that can sound Middle Eastern. Near the end of the concert Matisyahu sang long, cantorial phrases while rocking back and forth, as if davening, or praying. Yet if his lyrics weren’t so clear about their references to Jewish history and the majesty of God, most of the time Matisyahu would simply be one more reggae-loving rocker.
In “Jerusalem,” which drew heartfelt singalongs, he worries about assimilation, singing, “Cut off the roots of your family tree/Don’t you know that’s not the way to be.” But the roots of his music are Afro-Caribbean and African-American. He uses Jamaican reggae and dancehall toasting, sometimes delivered with a Jamaican accent; he also uses hip-hop cadences and showed off his vocal beatboxing.
His band also segues into rock, for chiming marches that borrow their idealistic sound from U2. Matisyahu is less concerned with a musical heritage than with a religious one.
Album by album Matisyahu has expanded his music. Along with basic roots reggae he now uses faster, tongue-twisting dancehall toasting and the electronic beats and brooding chords of hip-hop. And he’s looking farther: Matisyahu joined Crystal Method, the thumping, rock-tinged electronica duo that opened the show, to sing and rap on a song from their next album, due in March.
Matisyahu rarely improves on his sources. His voice is thin and sometimes nasal, closer to Jack Johnson than to Bob Marley or Sting; his rhymes can be as awkward as they are earnest. But his band — which was augmented, for a few songs, by an Israeli oud player — carries simple vamps through multiple transformations, from meditations to shredding guitar solos. It’s music for believers, with a groove for everyone else.
Matisyahu is at Webster Hall, 125 East 11th Street, East Village, Tuesday and Thursday, and at the Music Hall of Williamsburg, 66 North Sixth Street, at Wythe Avenue, Saturday through Dec. 30. Tickets: (212) 307-7171 or ticketmaster.com (End Quote)
Dec. 24 update
"...on a Friday evening, the group of three girls was traversing Ramat Beit Shemesh Bet when they were surrounded by a group of men and pelted with eggs and kicked. The local Haredim allege that the girls were improperly dressed and were escorted by boys. No arrests were made.
"...Ilana, the schoolteacher mother of one of the victims of the attack, said that her daughter was rescued from the mob by a local resident who took them into her apartment. After cleaning the girls up from the eggs, they were dressed in ultra-Orthodox women’s clothes, given a stroller and escorted out of the neighborhood. The daughter was later treated at a hospital for scratches and bruises.
“Someone kicked her from behind, and then she fell to the ground. Then she was kicked again,' Ilana said of her daughter. 'They were shouting at them, ‘Get out of here!’ and ‘You should be ashamed of yourself!’ It was very traumatic. She was hysterical when she came home.'
"...There are some people that only understand force. You have to understand that one egg on one girl can deter dozens,” said Yosef Bruen, a 25-year-old ultra-Orthodox man. 'We came here to establish a neighborhood...We won’t allow anyone to disturb that, whoever it may be.”
The Jewish Week, Dec. 24, 2008
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Michael Hoffman is the author of the underground bestseller, Judaism Discovered: A Study of the Anti-Biblical Religion of Racism, Self-Worship, Superstition and Deceit, now in its second printing, in spite having been banned by Amazon.com (the only book about Judaism which has that distinction). Ordering information is here: http://www.revisionisthistory.org/page1/news.html
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Saturday, December 20, 2008
Judaic Hollywood: No longer in denial of the facts
Editor's note: The technology that made movies possible was invented by Thomas Edison. Cinema was created and raised to an art by D.W. Griffith. Both men were gentiles. They quickly lost control over their invention/art form, however.
by Joel Stein
jstein@latimescolumnists.com
Los Angeles Times, December 19, 2008
I have never been so upset by a poll in my life. Only 22% of Americans now believe "the movie and television industries are pretty much run by Jews," down from nearly 50% in 1964. The Anti-Defamation League, which released the poll results last month, sees in these numbers a victory against stereotyping. Actually, it just shows how dumb America has gotten. Jews totally run Hollywood.
How deeply Jewish is Hollywood? When the studio chiefs took out a full-page ad in the Los Angeles Times a few weeks ago to demand that the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) settle its contract, the open letter was signed by: News Corp. President Peter Chernin (Jewish), Paramount Pictures Chairman Brad Grey (Jewish), Walt Disney Co. Chief Executive Robert Iger (Jewish), Sony Pictures Chairman Michael Lynton (surprise, Dutch Jew), Warner Bros. Chairman Barry Meyer (Jewish), CBS Corp. Chief Executive Leslie Moonves (so Jewish his great uncle was the first prime minister of Israel), MGM Chairman Harry Sloan (Jewish) and NBC Universal Chief Executive Jeff Zucker (mega-Jewish)...SAG President is Alan Rosenberg (take a guess)....entertainment super-agent Ari Emanuel (Jew with Israeli parents) ...AMC President Charlie Collier, turned out to be Jewish.
...As a proud Jew, I want America to know about our accomplishment. Yes, we control Hollywood. Without us, you'd be flipping between "The 700 Club" and "Davey and Goliath" on TV all day... I don't care if Americans think we're running the news media, Hollywood, Wall Street or the government. I just care that we get to keep running them.
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Hannukah: A Nonsensical Talmudic Holiday
Hannukah is a typical rabbinic charade. It takes the Biblical story of the Maccabees and embroiders it with fantasy. After their victory in 165 B.C., the Jews retook control of the remains of the temple, but it had been defiled. They wanted to rekindle its eternal flame, but they found only one small flask of consecrated oil. According to the Talmud, that small supply, enough for only one day, miraculously lasted for eight, which gave the Jews time to prepare new oil. And which gave the world Hanukkah, meaning "dedication" or "consecration" in Hebrew.
There is no oil that lasted eight days in the Biblical text. This story first appeared in the Talmud, which was concocted by rabbis who lived in Babylon after the destruction of the Temple.
The nonsensical miracle of the oil hoax has led to the rabbinic custom of eating foods fried in oil for Hanukkah. In the United States, the most popular is latkes, (potato pancakes).
The pagan/Babylonian root of Hannukah can be glimpsed in the fact that during Hannukah Talmudic children play a gambling game with a dreidel, a spinning top. Each side has a Hebrew letter. In most places, the letters spell "A Great Miracle Happened There."
In San Francisco for several years a huge Hannukah menorah was displayed in Union Square while the square had no Christian Nativity scene.
Traditionally in Judaism, Hannukah was a very minor observance. The contemporary emphasis on Hannukah was created as a rival to Christmas observances.
***
There is no oil that lasted eight days in the Biblical text. This story first appeared in the Talmud, which was concocted by rabbis who lived in Babylon after the destruction of the Temple.
The nonsensical miracle of the oil hoax has led to the rabbinic custom of eating foods fried in oil for Hanukkah. In the United States, the most popular is latkes, (potato pancakes).
The pagan/Babylonian root of Hannukah can be glimpsed in the fact that during Hannukah Talmudic children play a gambling game with a dreidel, a spinning top. Each side has a Hebrew letter. In most places, the letters spell "A Great Miracle Happened There."
In San Francisco for several years a huge Hannukah menorah was displayed in Union Square while the square had no Christian Nativity scene.
Traditionally in Judaism, Hannukah was a very minor observance. The contemporary emphasis on Hannukah was created as a rival to Christmas observances.
***
Hoffman is the author of the underground bestseller, Judaism Discovered: A Study of the Anti-Biblical Religion of Racism, Self-Worship, Superstition and Deceit, now in its second printing, in spite having been banned by Amazon.com (the only book about Judaism which has that distinction). Ordering information is here: http://www.revisionisthistory.org/page1/news.html
***
Friday, December 19, 2008
The Secret Motivation of "Deep Throat"
Also: The rationale for the lies and deceit of the New York Times
It's not hard to see that W. Mark Felt, the "Deep Throat" informer who passed away yesterday and who helped blow the cover off Watergate, was motivated not by noble Constitutional motives (in 1980 Felt was convicted of violating the Constitutional rights of Americans), but by rage at President Richard Nixon for failing to nominate him to head the FBI.
At Felt's trial, Nixon, who knew that Felt had informed to some degree but did not suspect that he was "Deep Throat," testified on behalf of the man who had betrayed him.
Felt then spent the next twenty-five years denying that he was "Deep Throat." Observe the Talmudic device by which the New York Times exculpates' Felt's decades of lies:
"Mr. Felt then disappeared from public view for a quarter of a century, denying unequivocally, time and again, that he had been Deep Throat. It was a lie he told to serve what he believed to be a higher truth."
Like Mr. Felt, the Zionist-Talmudic New York Times lies by omission or commission when the lie will "serve a higher truth."
***
By Tim Weiner, NY Times, December 19, 2008
W. Mark Felt, who was the No. 2 official at the F.B.I. when he helped bring down President Richard M. Nixon by resisting the Watergate cover-up and becoming Deep Throat, the most famous anonymous source in American history, died Thursday Dec. 18. He was 95 and lived in Santa Rosa, Calif....In 2005, Mr. Felt revealed that he was the one who had secretly supplied Bob Woodward of The Washington Post with crucial leads in the Watergate affair in the early 1970s. His decision to unmask himself, in an article in Vanity Fair, ended a guessing game that had gone on for more than 30 years....Without Mr. Felt, there might not have been a Watergate...
Like Nixon, Mr. Felt authorized illegal break-ins in the name of national security and then received the absolution of a presidential pardon. Their lives were intertwined in ways only they and a few others knew. Nixon cursed his name when he learned early on that Mr. Felt was providing aid to the enemy in the wars of Watergate. The conversation was recorded in the Oval Office and later made public. “We know what’s leaked, and we know who leaked it,” Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, told the president on Oct. 19, 1972, four months after a team of washed-up Central Intelligence Agency personnel hired by the White House was caught trying to wiretap the Democratic Party’s national offices at the Watergate complex.
“Somebody in the F.B.I.?” Nixon asked.
“Yes, sir,” Mr. Haldeman replied. Who? the president asked. “Mark Felt,” Mr. Haldeman said.
“Now why the hell would he do that?” the president asked in a wounded tone.
No one, including Mr. Felt, ever answered that question in full...Mr. Felt had expected to be named to succeed J. Edgar Hoover, who had run the bureau for 48 years and died in May 1972. The president instead chose a politically loyal Justice Department official, L. Patrick Gray III...The choice infuriated Mr. Felt...On July 1, 1971, Hoover promoted Mr. Felt to deputy associate director, the third in command at the headquarters, beneath Hoover’s right-hand man and longtime companion, Clyde A. Tolson. With both of his superiors in poor health, Mr. Felt increasingly took effective command of the daily work of the F.B.I. When Mr. Hoover died and Mr. Tolson retired, he saw his path to power cleared....But Nixon denied him, and he seethed with frustrated ambition in the summer of 1972. One evening that summer, a few weeks after the Watergate break-in, Mr. Woodward, then a neophyte newspaperman, knocked on Mr. Felt’s door in pursuit of the story. Mr. Felt decided to co-operate with him and set up an elaborate system of espionage techniques for clandestine meetings with Mr. Woodward....
Within weeks, Mr. Felt steered The (Washington) Post to a story establishing that the Watergate break-in was part of “a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage” directed by the White House. For the next eight months, he did his best to keep the newspaper on the trail, largely by providing, on “deep background,” anonymous confirmation of facts reporters had gathered from others. The Post’s managing editor, Howard Simons, gave him his famous pseudonym, taken from the pornographic movie then in vogue...
While Watergate was seething, Mr. Felt authorized nine illegal break-ins at the homes of friends and relatives of members of the Weather Underground, a violent left-wing splinter group. The people he chose as targets had committed no crimes. The F.B.I. had no search warrants. He later said he ordered the break-ins because national security required it.
In a criminal trial, Mr. Felt was convicted in November 1980 of conspiring to violate the constitutional rights of Americans. Nixon, who had denounced him in private for leaking Watergate secrets, testified on his behalf. Called by the prosecution, he told the jury that presidents and by extension their officers had an inherent right to conduct illegal searches in the name of national security.
“As Deep Throat, Felt helped establish the principle that our highest government officials are subject to the Constitution and the laws of the land,” the prosecutor, John W. Nields, wrote in The Washington Post in 2005. “Yet when it came to the Weather Underground bag jobs, he seems not to have been aware that this same principle applied to him.”
Seven months after the conviction, President Ronald Reagan pardoned Mr. Felt. Then 67, Mr. Felt celebrated the decision as one of great symbolic value. “This is going to be the biggest shot in the arm for the intelligence community for a long time,” he said. After the pardon, Nixon sent him a congratulatory bottle of Champagne.
...By June 1973, Mr. Felt was forced out of the F.B.I. Soon he came under investigation by some of the same agents he had supervised...
Mr. Felt then disappeared from public view for a quarter of a century, denying unequivocally, time and again, that he had been Deep Throat. It was a lie he told to serve what he believed to be a higher truth...
***
Ordering information is here: http://www.revisionisthistory.org/page1/news.html
***
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Judaic Columnist Urges: "Kill the Muslims"
Excerpt: "Any and all collateral damage in the form of casualties to friends, relatives, or anyone connected to the lives of these terrorists should be swiftly ignored...In terms of Jewish law, I think that the issue is probably clear. While no army should go out of its way to harm a civilian population in times of war, during the legitimate pursuit of an enemy that has instigated an attack against its people, a nation may defend itself with whatever means necessary, even if it includes causing death to civilians.."
The Appropriate Response To Islamic Terror
By Lawrence Kulak
Published December 11, 2008
The Five Towns Jewish Times, pp. 59-61
http://209.85.173.132/search?q=cache:-Jz30rqwkNUJ:www.5tjt.com/news/read.asp%3FId%3D3539+5+towns+jewish+times&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=us
Some of the greatest discoveries of medical science, most notably penicillin, have been made by sheer accident. It is a signal tragedy of our times that, in the all too conspicuous absence of competent statesmanship among the leadership of democracies around the world... the solutions to certain international security issues must also be discovered by accident.
About six months ago, there was an article published in the New York Times about an incident in Afghanistan where the U.S. military, while attempting to take out a certain Taliban terrorist, dropped a bomb on a tent that was occupied by members of his extended family, killing several women and children. The particular terrorist that was being hunted was not home at the time, although there were several others that were part of the same terrorist network who were also killed.
This story ostensibly was published for the purpose of demonstrating the “horrors” of warfare, focusing primarily on the women and children in the tent who were killed, by all accounts of the U.S. military spokespeople, unintentionally. In our dangerous age of political tentativeness and compromised militaries, however, there is an overwhelming probability that even top-ranking U.S. military commanders were unaware that they may have accidentally stumbled upon the solution to international terror.
I’ll never forget how, during the last Lebanon war with Hezbollah, an Orthodox Jewish Russian immigrant who had survived Stalin approached me, gesturing with his hand while repeating the word “tzetlach” (“notes” or “letters” in Yiddish). He was referring to the pieces of paper which were dropped by the Israeli Air Force over Lebanon warning civilians of the bombs that were about to be dropped. In the process, the Hezbollah terrorists were also warned, which may have allowed them to escape to the north in large numbers and ultimately force Israel to belatedly engage its ground troops, leading to numerous casualties and the loss of the war.
“Did Stalin drop tzetlach when he bombed Berlin during the Second World War?” my Russian immigrant friend asked, obviously comparing the militant, pro-Hezbollah Lebanese civilians to the citizens of Germany during the Holocaust. The United States, it seems, did in fact originally institute the practice of dropping leaflets over an enemy population, as it did before it bombed Dresden and Berlin, but apparently Stalin had his own ideas. Israel was apparently afraid to stray from the U.S. precedent even if it meant risking the loss of a war.
In terms of Jewish law, I think that the issue is probably clear. While no army should go out of its way to harm a civilian population in times of war, during the legitimate pursuit of an enemy that has instigated an attack against its people, a nation may defend itself with whatever means necessary, even if it includes causing death to civilians. Those who are inclined to issue knee-jerk gasps to this common sense state of affairs that is etched in the Mosaic law are probably easily forgetful of the fact that Muslim countries are routinely targeting innocent civilians via their terrorist proxies and leaving the standing armies of nations alone. This is more or less what recently occurred in Mumbai, India.
Although the attack had all the hallmarks of Al Qaeda penetration into local Pakistani Muslim terror groups, there is ample evidence of complicity by the Pakistani Intelligence Service (known as the ISI.) which has a long and well-known history of facilitating acts of terror in Indian-held Kashmir. Reports indicate that a rogue element of the ISI recently forged a link with a local terrorist commander linked to Al Qaeda, which then embarked upon a plan to target Westerners in Mumbai.
The Mumbai attack signifies a change of course for Al Qaeda, which until this point had refrained from attacking India because of India’s prior course of neutrality vis-à-vis Islam’s conflicts with the West, and because of the need for its use of India as a transfer point to fly undetected in and out of Pakistan and the Afghan regions. This perhaps explains in part why India’s naval security was in such a state of low awareness and why there was not a perceived need to update their police department’s anti-terrorist training. (The Jewish Center was allegedly targeted specifically for attack for reasons stemming from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.)
Whatever the level or degree of the Pakistani government’s complicity in the attack that is ultimately proven to have taken place, the fact is that this operation could not have been accomplished without assistance from Pakistani Intelligence. This factor makes the Mumbai attack as much of an attack on India’s sovereignty as it was an attack on its civilians and foreign visitors. As such, it cries out for some type of retaliatory attack by the Indian government.
Aside from India, however, the attack on the foreign nationals of Israel, the United States, and Great Britain by proxy also constitutes an act of war against these countries and therefore legitimizes the infiltration of Pakistani territory for the purpose of pursuing the aggressors. While a generalized war with Pakistan should not be contemplated or pursued, it may be unavoidable, depending upon the vigilance with which Pakistan seeks to defend the terrorists within its borders.
The retaliation that is undertaken should strike hard at the training bases, madrassa schools, and homes of all the properly identified terrorist commanders and fellow terrorists of those identified in the attack, in a series of sustained surprise attacks over a period of time that is aimed at total eradication of the entire network that coordinated this attack. Any and all collateral damage in the form of casualties to friends, relatives, or anyone connected to the lives of these terrorists should be swiftly ignored. Public opinion and what is written in the newspapers should also be ignored by nations seeking to avenge the death of its innocent civilians.
When terrorists undertake to hide behind a sovereign government and to attempt to hide within its borders, it becomes the responsibility of that government to take swift action to flush them out and to neutralize them. Pakistan has obviously not done this, and is itself responsible for failing to purge itself of rogue commanders who facilitated the carnage in Mumbai. It must now step aside and let the foreign governments whose citizens have been mercilessly attacked take the proper course of action. George W. Bush certainly knows how to do it, and if his heart will be in the right place, so does Barack Obama.
As for the Islamic terrorists themselves, there has been a universal ineptitude in understanding their mentalities and how they work. Primarily because of leftist leaders and public sympathy with revolutionary mindsets, which have in cancerous fashion infiltrated the efficient workings of Western governments and Israel, the tactics that are necessary to defeat Islamic terror have been suppressed and discarded as politically incorrect. Many will remember how before Shimon Peres encouraged Prime Minister Rabin to embark on his infamous peace process with Arafat, the latter advocated “breaking the bones” of Arab rioters in the West Bank and Gaza as a means of putting down the intifada. Those means were apparently used for a period of time by Rabin, with much success, until his government decided to embark on a seriously unwise course of conciliation with premeditated and avowed murderers.
President Bush also delivered a setback to his own war on terror when, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, he labeled Islam a peaceful religion that had been hijacked by radical elements. By making that statement, the president all but rejected the possibility of taking drastic action to eliminate entire terrorist networks that would of necessity cause the mass deaths of other potential operatives, and those others clandestinely associated with the actual terrorists, who provide means of support.
Contrary to all attention that has been given to the Muslim shaheed’s pursuit of the 72 virgins, the idea of martyrdom in Islam is really more of an exaggerated spin-off of good old fashioned American machismo and hero worship. A Muslim will seek martyrdom in order to bring honor to himself and to his family, just as a Muslim will kill others even within his own family to prevent or offset a similar association with dishonor or shame. If he knows that his family will all be killed, and there will be nobody left after him to claim that honor, he will be left with little reason to pursue his murderous mission.
One of the main daggers which Israel has thrust into its own heart was the government’s decision to abort the practice of demolishing the homes of terrorists. The prospect of rendering his own family homeless and desperate served to deter a potential terrorist from killing himself and anybody else by reducing the honor and machismo associated with the act. The notion of the 72 virgins is only a reward for the achievement of an act that brings honor to himself and his family, but there is nothing honorable in Islam about bringing harm to one’s family.
Perhaps this is the underlying reason why, since the war of terror has begun, we have been unsuccessful in tracking down Bin Laden. And if, as many feared before the presidential election, Barack Obama is really sympathetic to the Muslims radicals, it might also explain why his main promise in continuing Bush’s war on terror was to pursue this archterrorist through the hills of Pakistan. If Bin Laden is killed and hence martyred, it will only bring honor to himself and his family, who will be very much intact and alive. That will only give rise to more militant imams and more terrorist leaders.
Moreover, the only way to deal with Islamic terrorists is the same way in which they deal with their victims. Muslims believe in the literal interpretation of the Biblical doctrine of an eye for an eye, and they do not have respect for anything perceived as a lesser standard of justice. They killed our innocents, and unless we kill theirs, they will go on killing ours. The Torah, however, preaches a doctrine which, if implemented by the West, could finally put an end to all Islamic terror: If somebody is coming to kill you, rise up and kill him first. [End quote]
Lawrence Kulak can be reached at Craniumcrust@yahoo.com
CAIR Asks NY Jewish Leaders to Repudiate Call to Kill Muslims
12/12/2008 2:39:00 PM
(NEW YORK, NY, 12/12/08) - The New York chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-NY) today called on leaders of the Jewish community in that state to repudiate a columnist for a Jewish newspaper who called for the killing of “innocent” Muslims.
In a commentary in the December 12 issue of the 5 Towns Jewish Times, titled, “The Appropriate Response to Islamic Terror,” Lawrence Kulak wrote:
“Moreover, the only way to deal with Islamic terrorists is the same way in which they deal with their victims. Muslims believe in the literal interpretation of the Biblical doctrine of an eye for an eye, and they do not have respect for anything perceived as a lesser standard of justice. They killed our innocents, and unless we kill theirs, they will go on killing ours.”
SEE: The Appropriate Response to Islamic Terror (Pages 59-61)
“Such inflammatory comments have no place in reasoned public discourse,” said CAIR-NY Community Affairs Director Faiza N. Ali. “Calls for violence against innocent civilians of any faith should face universal rejection and repudiation by religious leaders.”
CAIR-NY and the Muslim Public Affairs Council, New York City office (MPAC-NYC) recently recommended that interfaith exchanges take place between Indian Hindus and Muslims in the wake of the Mumbai attacks.
CONTACT: CAIR-NY Community Affairs Director Faiza N. Ali, 212-870-2002, 718-724-3041, fali@cair.com; CAIR-NY Civil Rights Director Aliya Latif, 212-870-2002, 732-429-4268, alatif@cair.com; CAIR National Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper, 202 488-8787 or 202-744-7726, E-Mail: ihooper@cair.com
***
12/12/2008 2:39:00 PM
(NEW YORK, NY, 12/12/08) - The New York chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-NY) today called on leaders of the Jewish community in that state to repudiate a columnist for a Jewish newspaper who called for the killing of “innocent” Muslims.
In a commentary in the December 12 issue of the 5 Towns Jewish Times, titled, “The Appropriate Response to Islamic Terror,” Lawrence Kulak wrote:
“Moreover, the only way to deal with Islamic terrorists is the same way in which they deal with their victims. Muslims believe in the literal interpretation of the Biblical doctrine of an eye for an eye, and they do not have respect for anything perceived as a lesser standard of justice. They killed our innocents, and unless we kill theirs, they will go on killing ours.”
SEE: The Appropriate Response to Islamic Terror (Pages 59-61)
“Such inflammatory comments have no place in reasoned public discourse,” said CAIR-NY Community Affairs Director Faiza N. Ali. “Calls for violence against innocent civilians of any faith should face universal rejection and repudiation by religious leaders.”
CAIR-NY and the Muslim Public Affairs Council, New York City office (MPAC-NYC) recently recommended that interfaith exchanges take place between Indian Hindus and Muslims in the wake of the Mumbai attacks.
CONTACT: CAIR-NY Community Affairs Director Faiza N. Ali, 212-870-2002, 718-724-3041, fali@cair.com; CAIR-NY Civil Rights Director Aliya Latif, 212-870-2002, 732-429-4268, alatif@cair.com; CAIR National Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper, 202 488-8787 or 202-744-7726, E-Mail: ihooper@cair.com
***
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
The Talmud, the Stock Market and Bernie the Goniff
by Michael Hoffman
Copyright © 2008. All Rights Reserved
Bernard L. Madoff has run off with the store so to speak -- the store of cash that is, which Judaics from Steven Spielberg to Elie Wiesel had stashed with this agent of of the world's second oldest profession, whose patron is that hoary old rascal who Shakespeare dubbed Shylock and the am-haaretz on the Lower East Side call the goniff.
I hesitated writing this column because the acolytes of Wilhelm Marr are coming out of the woodwork pointing to the Judaic ethnicity of Madoff, as if there are not a legion of gentile crooks and con-men running amok in the stock market these days, fleecing peasantry and gentry from coast to coast. A crook is a crook, whether Catholic, Hindu or Talmudic, and in my view they should all be hanged with an equal length of rope.
Madoff's enormous heist (do my eyes deceive me when I grok the sum of $50 billion?!), interests this newshound precisely because it undercuts a stereotype of the Jew-haters: that Judaics are always the "smart money," evincing a fiduciary adhesion surpassing the strongest bonding agents in Das Kapital's marketplace: always robbing gentiles and profiting communally from the rip-off.
This sub-cellar stereotype is actually misdirection emanating from a resonance of rabbinic propaganda that has been covertly seeded in right wing ranks ever since Hitler chose the Protocols over Entdecktes Judenthum as his movement's signature reference work.
Contemporary professional anti-semites push a post-modern version of this disinformation when they maintain that Judaism, or its potent offshoots, Judaic culture and tribalism, always defraud gentiles while enriching Judaics. This is sheerest ignorance reflecting a sound-bite knowledge --of the little bit is dangerous variety -- of the posek's sacred Torah SheBeal Peh.
Contrary to the received opinion, Judaism is not good for Judaics. Any religion that inculcates cheating God is going to end up having its followers cheat each other. They may cheat the gentiles first, but sooner or later they'll give each other a haircut too, and not just on Lag B'omer.
Judaism runs the gamut from one-upmanship over God to the enslavement of married couples by the torturous and labyrinthine halachos of Niddah (laws on menstruation). S'iz shver tsu zayn a yid ("It's no fun being a Judaic" --my translation).
It is certainly true that Orthodox Judaism teaches that under certain circumstances, the Neshama HaElyonah-deficient subhumanity otherwise known as the goyim are fair game for every imaginable theft and deception.
Furthermore, Orthodox Judaism holds that even God can be fooled through the superior brain-power of the lawyer-like posek ha-dor. Kol Nidrei is but one of many institutionalized examples of a lawyer's loophole created so as to defraud God of promises that were made to be broken.
Business ethics are equally compromised. Honesty is not highly prized in Judaism if it threatens the standing of the rabbis or the fortunes of the tribe. The creepy Khazars who ran the kashrut slaughterhouse in Iowa are only the most recent example of this praxis.
In William N. Grimstad's magisterial, book-length flight of Celinean prose, Talk About Hate, (Colorado, 1994), he offers the world-historic insight that Judaism's "officially sanctioned covert practice" and "contempt for us gullible marks" leads to the "inevitable moral abasement that this sort of treachery fosters in its practitioners."
Judaism does not entail only deceiving non-Judaics; at its core it is deeply enmeshed in a gigantic web of self-deception. Shoel U'Meishiv: a Judaic defendant bribes a gentile judge not for the sake of evading a just sentence but only where a judge would otherwise pronounce "an incorrect ruling." BT Sanhedrin 54b and BT Ketubot 11b: when a Judaic male has intercourse with a little boy under the age of nine, it's not sodomy, because it's not a "significant" act since, by the Gemara's own definition, sodomy with a boy under the age of nine cannot be sodomy. Mishnah Nedarim 3:1: "He who desires that none of his vows made during the year shall be valid, let him stand at Rosh haShanah and declare, 'Every vow which I make in the future shall be cancelled."
The goniff Bernie Madoff is not a renegade. He is the terminal Talmudic man that the Jewish self-haters who created Judaism have constructed from the golden calf which they have worshipped in preference to Yahweh, for more than 3,000 years. Bernie's prodigious swindle proves a point which this writer has been making against intense opposition from the Henry Ford wing of the Right: the biggest victims of Judaism are not gentiles but Judaics themselves. That's why the world's most virulent Judaic-haters, the Protestant fundamentalists and the modern Vatican pontiffs, encourage Judaics to remain in their synagogues, while exalting Orthodox Judaism as truly representative of a divine and eternal covenant.
As a function of Judaism itself, Madoff has brought misery down upon the heads of his fellow Judaics. For those who have eyes to see: "anti-semitism" was borrowed from Wilhelm Marr in order to disguise the long history of this communitarian torment.
To understand this paradox will require a paradigm-shift away from everything the agents of the rabbis have seeded in our ranks for hundreds of years. The words of truth are often paradoxical: those who would save Judaics from the Madoffs of the world must necessarily save them from Judaism itself.
Contrary to the bubbe meises told to the bochurim, the Esau who hates Jacob for all eternity ("Halacha hi beyoduah she'Eisav soneh l'Yaakov"), is not the authentic follower of Yeshua the Nazarene; rather he is the authentic exponent of the Misheh Torah and the Mishneh Berurah.
Ethical behavior ("mitzvos bei Adam L'Chavero") is so often found lacking in Talmudic business practices contracted even between Talmudists. The man who will cheat God and the gentiles who sustain the nation that harbors him, will cheat his co-religionists with equal impunity, as Yeshiva University, the Elie Wisel Foundation for Humanity, Norman Levy, the UJA, Mortimer Zuckerman, the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington, the North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System, Rabbi Haskel Lookstein's Ramaz School, the Jewish Community Centers Association of North America, the Carl and Ruth Shapiro Family Foundation, the Jewish Federation of Palm Beach, SAR Academy, and Spielberg's Wunderkinder Foundation, are all learning to their dismay.
A ready means of destroying Judaics would be to suppress any violence or vandalism against them and leave them to rabbinic Judaism. Without an "anti-semitic" alibi to distract them from their religiously-institutionalized penchant for self-destruction, the Bernie Madoffs of their world would channel their inner-Esaus and reduce Judaism's adherents to a collection of feuding bankrupts.
Only a lover of Judaics would endeavor to dissuade them from their toxic and self-annihilating theology, society and culture which generates predators possessed of the dizzying manipulative skill, remorseless mercantilism and "inevitable moral abasement that this sort of treachery fosters in its practitioners" of a Bernard L. Madoff.
Michael Hoffman is a former reporter for the New York bureau of the Associated Press and the author of the underground bestseller, Judaism Discovered: A Study of the Anti-Biblical Religion of Racism, Self-Worship, Superstition and Deceit, now in its second printing, in spite having been banned by Amazon.com (the only book about Judaism which has that distinction). Ordering information is here:
http://www.revisionisthistory.org/page1/news.html
Copyright © 2008. All Rights Reserved
Bernard L. Madoff has run off with the store so to speak -- the store of cash that is, which Judaics from Steven Spielberg to Elie Wiesel had stashed with this agent of of the world's second oldest profession, whose patron is that hoary old rascal who Shakespeare dubbed Shylock and the am-haaretz on the Lower East Side call the goniff.
I hesitated writing this column because the acolytes of Wilhelm Marr are coming out of the woodwork pointing to the Judaic ethnicity of Madoff, as if there are not a legion of gentile crooks and con-men running amok in the stock market these days, fleecing peasantry and gentry from coast to coast. A crook is a crook, whether Catholic, Hindu or Talmudic, and in my view they should all be hanged with an equal length of rope.
Madoff's enormous heist (do my eyes deceive me when I grok the sum of $50 billion?!), interests this newshound precisely because it undercuts a stereotype of the Jew-haters: that Judaics are always the "smart money," evincing a fiduciary adhesion surpassing the strongest bonding agents in Das Kapital's marketplace: always robbing gentiles and profiting communally from the rip-off.
This sub-cellar stereotype is actually misdirection emanating from a resonance of rabbinic propaganda that has been covertly seeded in right wing ranks ever since Hitler chose the Protocols over Entdecktes Judenthum as his movement's signature reference work.
Contemporary professional anti-semites push a post-modern version of this disinformation when they maintain that Judaism, or its potent offshoots, Judaic culture and tribalism, always defraud gentiles while enriching Judaics. This is sheerest ignorance reflecting a sound-bite knowledge --of the little bit is dangerous variety -- of the posek's sacred Torah SheBeal Peh.
Contrary to the received opinion, Judaism is not good for Judaics. Any religion that inculcates cheating God is going to end up having its followers cheat each other. They may cheat the gentiles first, but sooner or later they'll give each other a haircut too, and not just on Lag B'omer.
Judaism runs the gamut from one-upmanship over God to the enslavement of married couples by the torturous and labyrinthine halachos of Niddah (laws on menstruation). S'iz shver tsu zayn a yid ("It's no fun being a Judaic" --my translation).
It is certainly true that Orthodox Judaism teaches that under certain circumstances, the Neshama HaElyonah-deficient subhumanity otherwise known as the goyim are fair game for every imaginable theft and deception.
Furthermore, Orthodox Judaism holds that even God can be fooled through the superior brain-power of the lawyer-like posek ha-dor. Kol Nidrei is but one of many institutionalized examples of a lawyer's loophole created so as to defraud God of promises that were made to be broken.
Business ethics are equally compromised. Honesty is not highly prized in Judaism if it threatens the standing of the rabbis or the fortunes of the tribe. The creepy Khazars who ran the kashrut slaughterhouse in Iowa are only the most recent example of this praxis.
In William N. Grimstad's magisterial, book-length flight of Celinean prose, Talk About Hate, (Colorado, 1994), he offers the world-historic insight that Judaism's "officially sanctioned covert practice" and "contempt for us gullible marks" leads to the "inevitable moral abasement that this sort of treachery fosters in its practitioners."
Judaism does not entail only deceiving non-Judaics; at its core it is deeply enmeshed in a gigantic web of self-deception. Shoel U'Meishiv: a Judaic defendant bribes a gentile judge not for the sake of evading a just sentence but only where a judge would otherwise pronounce "an incorrect ruling." BT Sanhedrin 54b and BT Ketubot 11b: when a Judaic male has intercourse with a little boy under the age of nine, it's not sodomy, because it's not a "significant" act since, by the Gemara's own definition, sodomy with a boy under the age of nine cannot be sodomy. Mishnah Nedarim 3:1: "He who desires that none of his vows made during the year shall be valid, let him stand at Rosh haShanah and declare, 'Every vow which I make in the future shall be cancelled."
The goniff Bernie Madoff is not a renegade. He is the terminal Talmudic man that the Jewish self-haters who created Judaism have constructed from the golden calf which they have worshipped in preference to Yahweh, for more than 3,000 years. Bernie's prodigious swindle proves a point which this writer has been making against intense opposition from the Henry Ford wing of the Right: the biggest victims of Judaism are not gentiles but Judaics themselves. That's why the world's most virulent Judaic-haters, the Protestant fundamentalists and the modern Vatican pontiffs, encourage Judaics to remain in their synagogues, while exalting Orthodox Judaism as truly representative of a divine and eternal covenant.
As a function of Judaism itself, Madoff has brought misery down upon the heads of his fellow Judaics. For those who have eyes to see: "anti-semitism" was borrowed from Wilhelm Marr in order to disguise the long history of this communitarian torment.
To understand this paradox will require a paradigm-shift away from everything the agents of the rabbis have seeded in our ranks for hundreds of years. The words of truth are often paradoxical: those who would save Judaics from the Madoffs of the world must necessarily save them from Judaism itself.
Contrary to the bubbe meises told to the bochurim, the Esau who hates Jacob for all eternity ("Halacha hi beyoduah she'Eisav soneh l'Yaakov"), is not the authentic follower of Yeshua the Nazarene; rather he is the authentic exponent of the Misheh Torah and the Mishneh Berurah.
Ethical behavior ("mitzvos bei Adam L'Chavero") is so often found lacking in Talmudic business practices contracted even between Talmudists. The man who will cheat God and the gentiles who sustain the nation that harbors him, will cheat his co-religionists with equal impunity, as Yeshiva University, the Elie Wisel Foundation for Humanity, Norman Levy, the UJA, Mortimer Zuckerman, the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington, the North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System, Rabbi Haskel Lookstein's Ramaz School, the Jewish Community Centers Association of North America, the Carl and Ruth Shapiro Family Foundation, the Jewish Federation of Palm Beach, SAR Academy, and Spielberg's Wunderkinder Foundation, are all learning to their dismay.
A ready means of destroying Judaics would be to suppress any violence or vandalism against them and leave them to rabbinic Judaism. Without an "anti-semitic" alibi to distract them from their religiously-institutionalized penchant for self-destruction, the Bernie Madoffs of their world would channel their inner-Esaus and reduce Judaism's adherents to a collection of feuding bankrupts.
Only a lover of Judaics would endeavor to dissuade them from their toxic and self-annihilating theology, society and culture which generates predators possessed of the dizzying manipulative skill, remorseless mercantilism and "inevitable moral abasement that this sort of treachery fosters in its practitioners" of a Bernard L. Madoff.
Michael Hoffman is a former reporter for the New York bureau of the Associated Press and the author of the underground bestseller, Judaism Discovered: A Study of the Anti-Biblical Religion of Racism, Self-Worship, Superstition and Deceit, now in its second printing, in spite having been banned by Amazon.com (the only book about Judaism which has that distinction). Ordering information is here:
http://www.revisionisthistory.org/page1/news.html
***
Monday, December 15, 2008
Revisionist Christmas Carols (as Israeli tanks go by)
O LITTLE TOWN OF BETHLEHEM
O little town of Bethlehem ,
How still we see thee lie!
A wall is laid where tourists stayed,
And tanks go rolling by.
And in thy dark streets shineth
No cheerful Christmas light;
The grief and fears of four sad years
Are met in thee tonight.
How silently, how silently
The world regards it all,
As now thy heart is torn apart
By Israel's ghetto wall.
They terrorize a people -
A war crime and a sin;
Their winding "fence" can make no sense;
Revenge can still get in.
O promised child of Bethlehem,
Cast down the iron cage,
The walls of hate that separate
And harden and enrage;
Bring justice and make equal;
Come down from far above;
And come to birth upon this earth,
As hope and peace and love.
ONCE IN ROYAL DAVID'S CITY
Once in royal David's city
Stood some big Israeli tanks;
Mothers giving birth to babies
Met with checkpoints and roadbanks.
Holy land was all defiled
As a bullet killed a child.
Round the ancient tomb of Rachel
They have built a ghetto wall;
Rachel's weeping for her children,
And "her children" means us all.
But this city's strangulated,
Rachel's children segregated.
David's people once instructed
All the world in righteousness;
Once they spoke of truth and justice,
Now they ravage and oppress.
Nations, look at Bethlehem ,
And speak out the truth to them.
THE TWELVE DAYS OF CHRISTMAS
On the first day of Christmas, Arik Sharon sent me
An uprooted olive tree.
On the second day of Christmas, Arik Sharon sent me
Two trampled doves
And an uprooted olive tree.
On the third day of Christmas, Arik Sharon sent me
Three trench guns,
Two trampled doves,
And an uprooted olive tree.
On the fourth day of Christmas, Arik Sharon sent me
Four falling bombs,
Three trench guns,
Two trampled doves,
And an uprooted olive tree.
On the fifth day of Christmas, Arik Sharon sent me
Five settlement rings.
Four falling bombs,
Three trench guns,
Two trampled doves,
And an uprooted olive tree.
On the sixth day of Christmas, Arik Sharon sent me
Six tanks a-rolling,
Five settlement rings.
Four falling bombs,
Three trench guns,
Two trampled doves,
And an uprooted olive tree.
On the seventh day of Christmas, Arik Sharon sent me
Seven checkpoints blocking,
Six tanks a-rolling,
Five settlement rings.
Four falling bombs,
Three trench guns,
Two trampled doves,
And an uprooted olive tree.
On the eighth day of Christmas, Arik Sharon sent me
Eight gunships firing,
Seven checkpoints blocking,
Six tanks a-rolling,
Five settlement rings.
Four falling bombs,
Three trench guns,
Two trampled doves,
And an uprooted olive tree.
On the ninth day of Christmas, Arik Sharon sent me
Nine smashed computers,
Eight gunships firing,
Seven checkpoints blocking,
Six tanks a-rolling,
Five settlement rings.
Four falling bombs,
Three trench guns,
Two trampled doves,
And an uprooted olive tree.
On the tenth day of Christmas, Arik Sharon sent me
Ten wells obstructed,
Nine smashed computers,
Eight gunships firing,
Seven checkpoints blocking,
Six tanks a-rolling,
Five settlement rings.
Four falling bombs,
Three trench guns,
Two trampled doves,
And an uprooted olive tree.
On the eleventh day of Christmas, Arik Sharon sent me
Eleven homes demolished,
Ten wells obstructed,
Nine smashed computers,
Eight gunships firing,
Seven checkpoints blocking,
Six tanks a-rolling,
Five settlement rings,
Four falling bombs,
Three trench guns,
Two trampled doves,
And an uprooted olive tree.
On the twelfth day of Christmas, Arik Sharon sent me
Twelve assassinations,
Eleven homes demolished,
Ten wells obstructed,
Nine smashed computers,
Eight gunships firing,
Seven checkpoints blocking,
Six tanks a-rolling,
Five settlement rings.
Four falling bombs,
Three trench guns,
Two trampled doves,
And an uprooted olive tree.
O COME ALL YE FAITHFUL
O come all ye faithful,
All who care for justice,
O look ye, O look ye at Bethlehem ;
Come and behold it
Under occupation.
O come, let's not ignore it,
O come, let's not ignore it,
O come, let's not ignore it,
Tell the world.
Sing, all ye people,
Sing in indignation,
Be with the citizens of Bethlehem ;
Sing out for justice,
Freedom from oppression.
O come, let's not ignore it,
O come, let's not ignore it,
O come, let's not ignore it,
Tell the world.
IN THE BLEAK MIDWINTER
In the bleak midwinter,
Refugees made moan;
Sharon stood like iron,
Bush was like a stone.
Tanks were rolling, tank on tank,
Tank on tank,
Through the camps of Gaza
And the West Bank .
How can we stop him,
Ariel Sharon?
Silence of the nations
Lets him carry on.
Where is there a wise man
Who could do his part?
Tell the world to stop him
With its heart.
THE OLIVE AND THE IDF (Israeli Army)
The olive and the IDF
When they are both full-grown,
Every olive tree on the West Bank
The IDF cuts down.
O the rampaging of settlers
And the rolling of the tanks;
The grinding of the bulldozers
As the olives fall in ranks.
The olive bears a berry
As green as any grass;
When the owners go to pick the fruit
They're not allowed to pass.
O the rampaging of settlers
And the rolling of the tanks;
The grinding of the bulldozers
As the olives fall in ranks.
This oppression bears a berry
As red as any blood,
As the owners see their livelihoods
All trampled into mud.
O the rampaging of settlers,
And the rolling of the tanks;
The grinding of the bulldozers
As the olives fall in ranks.
If you want to buy the olives,
You'll find it very hard;
To those that make it to checkpoints
The way outside is barred.
O the rampaging of settlers,
And the rolling of the tanks;
The grinding of the bulldozers
As the olives fall in ranks.
The olive and the IDF,
When they are both full-grown,
Every olive tree on the West Bank
The IDF cuts down.
WE FOUR KINGS
FOUR KINGS TOGETHER
We four kings, we're called the Quartet;
With a roadmap off we all set,
No-one knowing where we're going,
Or how far we can get.
CHORUS
O, map of wonder, map of light,
Map of promises so bright,
In three phases, through the mazes
Guide us with no end in sight.
1ST KING
I'm King George, the USA man;
And it goes according to plan;
Fighting terror, righting error;
After Iraq, Iran .
CHORUS
O, map of wonder, etc.
2ND KING
I this year am King of EU;
My name's known to more than a few -
Sarkozy; I and Tony
Take from King George our cue.
CHORUS
O map of wonder, etc.
3RD KING
I'm King Putin, Muscovite Tzar,
With this map I travel afar;
I'm partaking in peace-making,
Just like in Chechnya .
CHORUS
O map of wonder, etc.
4TH KING
I'm Ban Ki-Moon, head of UN;
It makes laws again and again,
But ignored is, for the sword is
Mightier than the pen.
CHORUS
O map of wonder, etc..
FOUR KINGS TOGETHER
We four kings, we're all in a flap,
For we've got ourselves in a trap -
Stopped by trenches, walls and fences,
Not marked upon the map.
CHORUS
O map of wonder, etc.
FOUR KINGS TOGETHER
We four kings, bewildered we are,
For this map's not getting us far,
Nowhere leading - for we're needing
Not a map but a star.
CHORUS
O star of freedom, star of light,
Star of peace with justice bright,
Shining ever, they can never
Target-bomb thy perfect light.
Israeli ambassador blasts London church
December 11, 2008 LONDON (JTA) -- Israel's ambassador to London added a diplomatic dimension to a row over anti-Israel carol singers at a central London church.
Two weeks ago, a group called “Jews for boycotting Israeli goods” performed at St. James's Church in Piccadilly with its own version of Christmas carols, in which it changed the words of the familiar carols to lyrics referring to Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank.
The performance drew huge criticism, and on Wednesday, the Ambassador Ron Prosor told the Times: “It was appalling to see a church allow one of its most endearing seasonal traditions to be hijacked by hatred.”
He also attacked the lack of strong condemnation by the Church of England leadership. "Only the 'merry gentlemen' of Hamas and its fellow extremists will take any 'tidings of comfort and joy' from this event," he said. "In Bethlehem, even if Santa Claus is coming to town, when he gets there, he’ll be met with a frosty reception by Islamic extremists."
He added: “Unfortunately, the criticism from within the Church of England, that should have echoed with bold moral clarity, has instead sounded like a silent night, but far from holy.”
Prosor went on to attack the head of St. James's Church, saying, “It is saddening that Rev. Charles Hedley should have allowed the beautiful acoustics of his church to be abused to create such discord. If Hedley’s aim was to create harmony, he might have expressed a modicum of concern for the Israeli victims of terrorist violence.”
He also discussed the wider implications of the event. "Hedley's decision undermines the hard work that has taken place to improve relations between Christians, Muslims and Jews. He should understand that interfaith dialogue, tolerance and open-mindedness are the way forward to brotherly love, and not the interfaith ranting and raving of the 'carol service' at St. James's Piccadilly."
***
O little town of Bethlehem ,
How still we see thee lie!
A wall is laid where tourists stayed,
And tanks go rolling by.
And in thy dark streets shineth
No cheerful Christmas light;
The grief and fears of four sad years
Are met in thee tonight.
How silently, how silently
The world regards it all,
As now thy heart is torn apart
By Israel's ghetto wall.
They terrorize a people -
A war crime and a sin;
Their winding "fence" can make no sense;
Revenge can still get in.
O promised child of Bethlehem,
Cast down the iron cage,
The walls of hate that separate
And harden and enrage;
Bring justice and make equal;
Come down from far above;
And come to birth upon this earth,
As hope and peace and love.
ONCE IN ROYAL DAVID'S CITY
Once in royal David's city
Stood some big Israeli tanks;
Mothers giving birth to babies
Met with checkpoints and roadbanks.
Holy land was all defiled
As a bullet killed a child.
Round the ancient tomb of Rachel
They have built a ghetto wall;
Rachel's weeping for her children,
And "her children" means us all.
But this city's strangulated,
Rachel's children segregated.
David's people once instructed
All the world in righteousness;
Once they spoke of truth and justice,
Now they ravage and oppress.
Nations, look at Bethlehem ,
And speak out the truth to them.
THE TWELVE DAYS OF CHRISTMAS
On the first day of Christmas, Arik Sharon sent me
An uprooted olive tree.
On the second day of Christmas, Arik Sharon sent me
Two trampled doves
And an uprooted olive tree.
On the third day of Christmas, Arik Sharon sent me
Three trench guns,
Two trampled doves,
And an uprooted olive tree.
On the fourth day of Christmas, Arik Sharon sent me
Four falling bombs,
Three trench guns,
Two trampled doves,
And an uprooted olive tree.
On the fifth day of Christmas, Arik Sharon sent me
Five settlement rings.
Four falling bombs,
Three trench guns,
Two trampled doves,
And an uprooted olive tree.
On the sixth day of Christmas, Arik Sharon sent me
Six tanks a-rolling,
Five settlement rings.
Four falling bombs,
Three trench guns,
Two trampled doves,
And an uprooted olive tree.
On the seventh day of Christmas, Arik Sharon sent me
Seven checkpoints blocking,
Six tanks a-rolling,
Five settlement rings.
Four falling bombs,
Three trench guns,
Two trampled doves,
And an uprooted olive tree.
On the eighth day of Christmas, Arik Sharon sent me
Eight gunships firing,
Seven checkpoints blocking,
Six tanks a-rolling,
Five settlement rings.
Four falling bombs,
Three trench guns,
Two trampled doves,
And an uprooted olive tree.
On the ninth day of Christmas, Arik Sharon sent me
Nine smashed computers,
Eight gunships firing,
Seven checkpoints blocking,
Six tanks a-rolling,
Five settlement rings.
Four falling bombs,
Three trench guns,
Two trampled doves,
And an uprooted olive tree.
On the tenth day of Christmas, Arik Sharon sent me
Ten wells obstructed,
Nine smashed computers,
Eight gunships firing,
Seven checkpoints blocking,
Six tanks a-rolling,
Five settlement rings.
Four falling bombs,
Three trench guns,
Two trampled doves,
And an uprooted olive tree.
On the eleventh day of Christmas, Arik Sharon sent me
Eleven homes demolished,
Ten wells obstructed,
Nine smashed computers,
Eight gunships firing,
Seven checkpoints blocking,
Six tanks a-rolling,
Five settlement rings,
Four falling bombs,
Three trench guns,
Two trampled doves,
And an uprooted olive tree.
On the twelfth day of Christmas, Arik Sharon sent me
Twelve assassinations,
Eleven homes demolished,
Ten wells obstructed,
Nine smashed computers,
Eight gunships firing,
Seven checkpoints blocking,
Six tanks a-rolling,
Five settlement rings.
Four falling bombs,
Three trench guns,
Two trampled doves,
And an uprooted olive tree.
O COME ALL YE FAITHFUL
O come all ye faithful,
All who care for justice,
O look ye, O look ye at Bethlehem ;
Come and behold it
Under occupation.
O come, let's not ignore it,
O come, let's not ignore it,
O come, let's not ignore it,
Tell the world.
Sing, all ye people,
Sing in indignation,
Be with the citizens of Bethlehem ;
Sing out for justice,
Freedom from oppression.
O come, let's not ignore it,
O come, let's not ignore it,
O come, let's not ignore it,
Tell the world.
IN THE BLEAK MIDWINTER
In the bleak midwinter,
Refugees made moan;
Sharon stood like iron,
Bush was like a stone.
Tanks were rolling, tank on tank,
Tank on tank,
Through the camps of Gaza
And the West Bank .
How can we stop him,
Ariel Sharon?
Silence of the nations
Lets him carry on.
Where is there a wise man
Who could do his part?
Tell the world to stop him
With its heart.
THE OLIVE AND THE IDF (Israeli Army)
The olive and the IDF
When they are both full-grown,
Every olive tree on the West Bank
The IDF cuts down.
O the rampaging of settlers
And the rolling of the tanks;
The grinding of the bulldozers
As the olives fall in ranks.
The olive bears a berry
As green as any grass;
When the owners go to pick the fruit
They're not allowed to pass.
O the rampaging of settlers
And the rolling of the tanks;
The grinding of the bulldozers
As the olives fall in ranks.
This oppression bears a berry
As red as any blood,
As the owners see their livelihoods
All trampled into mud.
O the rampaging of settlers,
And the rolling of the tanks;
The grinding of the bulldozers
As the olives fall in ranks.
If you want to buy the olives,
You'll find it very hard;
To those that make it to checkpoints
The way outside is barred.
O the rampaging of settlers,
And the rolling of the tanks;
The grinding of the bulldozers
As the olives fall in ranks.
The olive and the IDF,
When they are both full-grown,
Every olive tree on the West Bank
The IDF cuts down.
WE FOUR KINGS
FOUR KINGS TOGETHER
We four kings, we're called the Quartet;
With a roadmap off we all set,
No-one knowing where we're going,
Or how far we can get.
CHORUS
O, map of wonder, map of light,
Map of promises so bright,
In three phases, through the mazes
Guide us with no end in sight.
1ST KING
I'm King George, the USA man;
And it goes according to plan;
Fighting terror, righting error;
After Iraq, Iran .
CHORUS
O, map of wonder, etc.
2ND KING
I this year am King of EU;
My name's known to more than a few -
Sarkozy; I and Tony
Take from King George our cue.
CHORUS
O map of wonder, etc.
3RD KING
I'm King Putin, Muscovite Tzar,
With this map I travel afar;
I'm partaking in peace-making,
Just like in Chechnya .
CHORUS
O map of wonder, etc.
4TH KING
I'm Ban Ki-Moon, head of UN;
It makes laws again and again,
But ignored is, for the sword is
Mightier than the pen.
CHORUS
O map of wonder, etc..
FOUR KINGS TOGETHER
We four kings, we're all in a flap,
For we've got ourselves in a trap -
Stopped by trenches, walls and fences,
Not marked upon the map.
CHORUS
O map of wonder, etc.
FOUR KINGS TOGETHER
We four kings, bewildered we are,
For this map's not getting us far,
Nowhere leading - for we're needing
Not a map but a star.
CHORUS
O star of freedom, star of light,
Star of peace with justice bright,
Shining ever, they can never
Target-bomb thy perfect light.
Israeli ambassador blasts London church
December 11, 2008 LONDON (JTA) -- Israel's ambassador to London added a diplomatic dimension to a row over anti-Israel carol singers at a central London church.
Two weeks ago, a group called “Jews for boycotting Israeli goods” performed at St. James's Church in Piccadilly with its own version of Christmas carols, in which it changed the words of the familiar carols to lyrics referring to Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank.
The performance drew huge criticism, and on Wednesday, the Ambassador Ron Prosor told the Times: “It was appalling to see a church allow one of its most endearing seasonal traditions to be hijacked by hatred.”
He also attacked the lack of strong condemnation by the Church of England leadership. "Only the 'merry gentlemen' of Hamas and its fellow extremists will take any 'tidings of comfort and joy' from this event," he said. "In Bethlehem, even if Santa Claus is coming to town, when he gets there, he’ll be met with a frosty reception by Islamic extremists."
He added: “Unfortunately, the criticism from within the Church of England, that should have echoed with bold moral clarity, has instead sounded like a silent night, but far from holy.”
Prosor went on to attack the head of St. James's Church, saying, “It is saddening that Rev. Charles Hedley should have allowed the beautiful acoustics of his church to be abused to create such discord. If Hedley’s aim was to create harmony, he might have expressed a modicum of concern for the Israeli victims of terrorist violence.”
He also discussed the wider implications of the event. "Hedley's decision undermines the hard work that has taken place to improve relations between Christians, Muslims and Jews. He should understand that interfaith dialogue, tolerance and open-mindedness are the way forward to brotherly love, and not the interfaith ranting and raving of the 'carol service' at St. James's Piccadilly."
***
Support for the Journalist Who Threw Shoes at Bush
From the NY Times, Dec. 15, 2008BAGHDAD — An American military patrol in Najaf on Monday was pelted by shoes... In Tikrit, journalists demonstrated in support of an Iraqi reporter who threw his shoes at President Bush during a news conference yesterday...Hitting someone with a shoe is a strong insult in Iraq. It means the person is as low as the dirt underneath the sole of a shoe, and the actions of Muntader al-Zaidi, a correspondent for an independent Iraqi television station, were condemned by Prime Minister al-Maliki, the Iraqi government and other reporters at the Sunday news conference. Mr. Bush was unhurt and made a joke afterward, but the shoes have overshadowed other news coverage of the trip, including an attempt to showcase the new security agreement.
Here are reactions from around Iraq:
Samarra– The ancient city of Samarra, home of the Askariya Shrine explosion which set off a wave of sectarian bloodletting across Iraq, had a number of residents speak out in support of Mr. al-Zaidi.
Tawfeeq Qais, a 31-year-old barber, said: “Muntader expressed his opinion about freedom and democracy brought to Iraq by Bush. So Bush has to take the responsibility of it and this action is considered as a kind of democracy.”
Um Mohammad, a 36-year-old housewife, said: “Long live your right hand Muntader . This is what the American president deserves. I am calling to release Muntader Zaidi.”
Abu Ali, a 55-year-old laborer, said: “It is a wedding of all Iraqis. Muntader’s action is less than Bush deserves for killing, displacing and bloodletting Iraqis. I will blame the Iraqi government and American forces if anything wrong happens to Muntader.”
Mohammed Ibrahim, 51, said: “Bush deserves more than that because his soldiers have killed Iraqis. If Saddam had occupied America and kill the American people, then what would be their reactions? What we do expect Muntadhar to do when he watched the American forces killed Iraqis according to Bush’s order? Long live for your hand Muntadhar.”
Dr. Qutaiba Rajaa, 58, said: “Although that action was not expressed in a civilized manner, it showed the Iraqi feelings which refuse American occupation. Muntadhar expressed the real Iraqi feelings.”
Muntader al-Zaidi (also spelled Montadar al-Zaydi)
Najaf – In the holy Shiite city of Najaf, 100 miles south of Baghdad, demonstrators chanted: “Bush, Bush, is a cow, your farewell was by a shoe,” and, “The shoe got its goal straightly, but Maliki turned it away.”
“These demonstrators are refusing the president of evil as well as renewing their refusal of the [security] pact,” said a man named Hazim Araji. “And we have coordinated such demonstrations in the whole of Iraq.”
Mosul — In Mosul, the largely Sunni Arab capital of Nineveh Province, residents said they supported the shoe-tossing Iraqi journalist.
Mohammad Zaki, a 27-year-old lawyer, said: “I appreciate the heroic position of Muntader al-Zaidi. I appreciate his love to home and his challenge to the occupier. I will blame Maliki if anything wrong happen to him or to his family.”
Jasim Mohammed, a 24-year-old laborer, said: “Muntader’s action got back the Iraqi dignity. He got back part of our gravity. God bless you Muntader. We are demanding the Iraqi forces to release him.”
Adnan Majwari, a 44-year-old Kurdish journalist, said: “It was a historical moment and if there are organizations who care about human rights and journalists freedom in Iraq then Muntader al-Zaidi has to be released immediately.”
Dr. Amal al-Annaz, a 48-year-old professor, said: “These are the real Iraqis who are well known for their magnanimity. Throwing a shoe on Bush was not a random action, but it is the result of every wound caused by the American president to the Iraqi people, women and children.”
Ahmad Sameer, a 22-year-old student, said: “It was the moment of the age because Bush will never forget it and it was a reminder to Bush about his wars and causalities in Iraq, but in an Iraqi way.”
“I swear by God that this man has freely expressed all Iraqis’ opinions and brought their wishes to reality,” said Mudhar Adeeb, an engineer.
Fawaz Ahmad, a 45-year-old day laborer, said: “He performed an excellent job and a great challenge. Bush deserves more than that.”
“He has done what the whole world could not,” said another man, Hazim Edress.
From The Times of London (Dec. 15):
Al-Zaidi worked for the independent Iraqi television station al-Baghdadia, which is based in Cairo. ..."Al-Baghdadia television demands that the Iraqi authorities immediately release their stringer Muntazer al-Zaidi, in line with the democracy and freedom of expression that the American authorities promised the Iraqi people," it said in a statement. "Any measures against Muntazer will be considered the acts of a dictatorial regime."
From Michael Hoffman:
Sic semper tyrannis.
***
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Monday, December 08, 2008
New York Times Personnel (continued)
Constance Rosenblum, City Editor
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/08/business/media/08askthetimes.html?hp
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/08/business/media/08askthetimes.html?hp
***
Molly Birnbaum, Reporter
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/07/nyregion/thecity/07smel.html?ref=thecity
***
Wednesday, December 03, 2008
Update on NY Times' relationship with hate group
As noted in previous posts, the New York Times serves as a public relations agent for the Chabad-Lubavitch hate group, whose rabbis advocate the extermination of the Palestinians, teach the racial superiority of Judaics over gentiles, and follow a deceased rabbi who they claim is the messiah and who was, according to Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer, an admirer of Hitler (cf. Judaism Discovered, pp. 59-60).
In the Dec. 3, 2008 print edition of the Times, p. A12, the newspaper recommends the hate group's website by publishing its URL in the course of an article by Isabel Kershner entitled, "Orphaned Boy is Focus at hostages' Funeral."
Chabad-Lubavitch or its adherents are pictured or featured a grand total of three times in the Dec. 3 issue: on the front page (in a color photograph), on p. A4 in a squib, and on most of the top half of the aforementioned p. A12, with an article and another even larger photo than the one that appeared on the front page.
Adhering to its usual policy of cosmetic promotion of Chabad-Lubavitch, in its Dec. 3 issue the New York Times is careful to omit all reference to the violence and racist hatred of this rabbinic-Zionist cult, presenting it strictly in flattering and benign terms as a generic Orthodox religious society whose web address the Times is pleased to advertise to the world.
Also see: New York Times, December 1, 2008, "Chabad Movement Vows to Continue Work of Couple Killed in Attack" By Cara Buckley: "For many Jews, they are homes away from home: Chabad Houses, welcoming outposts in foreign lands or across the United States, places to drop in to celebrate Hanukkah, Passover or weekly Shabbat dinners. Almost always, the Chabad Houses are run by young couples, emissaries of the Chabad-Lubavitch denomination, a Hasidic faith with its headquarters in Crown Heights, Brooklyn..."
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