The Kosher Nostra is trapped at last

The Scotsman | 25 July 2009
By Chris Stephen in New York

MONEY laundering, organ smuggling, racketeering and $97,000 hidden in a cornflakes box – all allegations levelled this week when the FBI announced one of its biggest-ever organised crime busts in New Jersey.

But this bust came with a difference: the ring-leaders are orthodox rabbis.

The five Sephardic rabbis, all from orthodox Syrian Jewish communities in New Jersey and Brooklyn, are accused of selling kidneys and laundering tens of millions of dollars through fake charities.

"These complaints paint a disgraceful picture of religious leaders leading money-laundering crews, acting as crime bosses," said federal prosecutor Ralph Marra.

"These rings were international in scope, they trafficked in the cleaning of dirty money all across the world."

Mr Marra singled out Brooklyn Rabbi Levy Izhak Rosenbaum as operator of a kidney smuggling operation: "Mr Rosenbaum, who we refer to as our kidney salesman – his business was to entice vulnerable people to give up a kidney for $10,000 that he would sell for $160,000."

The arrests sent shockwaves across the orthodox Jewish community where the rabbis had a reputation for working hard for children and the elderly.

"Shock and disbelief," said Dov Hikind, a Brooklyn assemblyman. "People do not believe it."

More than 300 FBI agents fanned out across the state this week to make simultaneous arrests, in one case storming into a synagogue to arrest a rabbi in the middle of a service.

The arrests came after the rabbi network was infiltrated by Solomon Dwek, a real estate developer and Sephardic Jew arrested in May 2006 on fraud charges.

Facing a 30-year-sentence for attempting to bounce a cheque for $25 million (£15m), Mr Dwek turned informer, penetrating the rabbi network and recording hundreds of hours of tapes revealing the extent of an operation that seems lifted from the pages of The Godfather.

"Solomon Dwek – isn't that the government's co-operator?" said Robert Stahl, an attorney for Rabbi Saul Kassin, 87, of Brooklyn, one of those arrested. Mr Stahl said it was a shame the rabbi had been "caught up in this misunderstanding" and that he "remained confident".

Michael Bachner, representing Brooklyn Rabbi Mordchai Fish, said: "Our belief is that Mr. Dwek used his closeness and the sterling reputation of his family to manipulate individuals who trusted that he would never be involved in illegal conduct."

Mr Marra said: "Parking lots, restaurants, luncheonettes, diners, offices, basement boiler rooms and bathrooms. Hundreds of thousands of dollars were paid in these places.

"For these defendants, corruption was a way of life, they existed in an ethics-free zone."

The laundering case boomeranged when Mr Zwek found state officials attending the money drops, leading to three mayors and two public officials being among the 44 suspects – so many that they were taken to court not by squad cars but by bus.

Others arrested included building and fire inspectors, city planning officials and utilities officials, all accused of using their positions to further the corruption by accepting bribes to pass consent on building projects.

Prosecutors say Rabbi Rosenbaum was caught in a sting after an FBI officer posed as someone wanting a kidney for her uncle. "I've been doing this a long time," Rosenbaum is alleged to say on tapes, adding that for $160,000 he could find a donor in Israel and smuggle the kidney to the United States. "I am what you call a match-maker," he allegedly said. "I've never had a failure."

This is the second shock to New York's Jewish community, still reeling from the arrest in January of financier Bernie Madoff who used his connections among Jewish philanthropists and investors to fleece them in a $50 billion scam.

Prosecutors say the money was laundered from Switzerland, through Israel to New York in the guise of charity payments. Officials have yet to reveal where the money originated.

Some of the allegations, meanwhile, seem lifted from The Sopranos, the TV series following the lives of a fictional New Jersey crime family. In one conversation presented by prosecutors, Zwek was given a box of Apple Jack cereal stuffed with $97,000.

In another, the mayor of Hoboken, Peter Cammarano, allegedly says that corruption is so accepted in New Jersey that it would not harm his election chances if he was discovered. "Right now the Italians, the Hispanics, the seniors are locked down," he says. "I could be, uh, indicted, and I'm still going to win 85 to 95 per cent of those people."

Not everyone agrees. Four years ago, Jon Corzine was elected New Jersey governor on the promise to be the sheriff sent to clean up Dodge, and his prosecutors have arrested more than 300 people in a chain of corruption investigations.

"The scale of the corruption we're seeing as this unfolds is simply beyond any pale," he said. "I still believe that government can play a positive role in people's lives, but our institutions must have people of integrity."

Serpent that lurks in the heart of the Garden State

THE arrest of 44 suspects – including a clutch of state officials – for corruption seems to many Americans to cement New Jersey's reputation as one of the worst states for corruption and cronyism.

Over the past eight years, 130 state officials have been jailed for corruption, including three former mayors and a former state senator.

It has led some from other states to joke that the state's nickname, the Garden State, should be replaced with the Corruption State.

The corruption dates from the 1930s, when New Jersey towns across the Hudson River from New York City became home to the Mafia, as depicted in the contemporary television drama series The Sopranos.

"New Jersey's corruption problem is one of the worst, if not the worst, in the nation," said Ed Kahrer, who heads the FBI's white-collar and public corruption division. "Corruption is a cancer that is destroying the core values of this state."

But many state residents say they are being unfairly tarnished by the corruption investigations in a few isolated cities.

"They have the wrong idea about New Jersey," Ed McLaughlin – owner of the Blue Sunsets property business in the coastal town of Spring Lake – told The Scotsman.

"The character of New Jersey is of a state with good-hearted, hard-working people. We get painted with a brush because of the action in one of our largest cities."

***

Mirroring the anti-Islamic bigotry of the NY Times

Holding a Mirror to the anti-Islamic bigotry of the NY Times

The best way to illustrate the extent to which the Talmudic mentality predominates at the New York Times is to mirror a recent book review published in the Times, by reversing its subject, as follows:

BOOKS OF THE TIMES

A Turning Tide in Europe as Judaism Gains Ground

New York Times July 29, 2009

Christopher Caldwell's Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Judaism, and the West is a hot book presented under a cool, scholarly title. To observe that Mr. Caldwell's rhetoric is hot is not to say that it is aggrieved or unruly. On the contrary, Mr. Caldwell, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard and a columnist for The Financial Times, compiles his arguments patiently, twig by twig, and mostly with lucidity and intellectual grace and even wit.

But they are arguments one is not used to hearing put so baldly, at least from the West's leading political journalists. Primary among them are these: Through decades of mass immigration to Europes hospitable cities and because of a strong disinclination to assimilate, Jews are changing the face of Europe, perhaps decisively. These Jewish immigrants are not so much enhancing European culture as they are supplanting it.

The products of an adversarial culture, these immigrants and their religion, Judaism, are patiently infiltrating Europes cities.

Mr. Caldwell is a vivid writer, and like an action-movie hero he walks calmly away from his own detonations while fire swirls behind him. Imagine that the West, at the height of the Cold War, had received a mass inflow of immigrants from Communist countries who were ambivalent about which side they supported, he writes. Something similar is taking place now.

Jewish cultures have historically been Europe's enemies, its overlords, or its underlings, he deposes. Europe is wagering that attitudes handed down over the centuries, on both sides, have disappeared, or can be made to disappear. That is probably not a wise wager.

...Mr. Caldwell's book is the most rigorous and plainspoken examination of Jewish immigration in Europe to date, a sobering book that walks right up to, if never quite crossing, the line between being alarming and being alarmist.

There are many strains to Mr. Caldwell's argument, too many to fully tease out here. Suffice it to say, up front, that Mr. Caldwell is not anti-immigration. He traces the historical movements of various peoples across continents and nationalities and notes both successes and failures. But there has been nothing, he suggests, quite like the recent influx of Jews into Europe he refers to it as a rupture in its history.

In the middle of the 16th century, there were virtually no Jews in England France and only ghettos in Germany, Mr. Caldwell writes. At the turn of the 21st, there were between 2 and 3 million Jews in Western Europe, including 1 million in France, 2 million in Germany, and half-a-million million in Britain.

Ultra-Orthodox immigrants are further swamping Europe demographically, he adds, because of their high fertility rates. The problem, in Mr. Caldwell's view, is less about sheer numbers than cultural divergence. Whats happening in Europe is not the creation of an American-style melting pot, he writes, because Orthodox Jews are not melting in. They are instead forming what he calls a parallel society. Newcomers to England now listen to rabbinic CDs, not the BBC. They are hesitant to serve in their adopted country's militaries. (As of 2007, Mr. Caldwell notes, there were only 330 Jews in Britain's armed forces.) Worse, these immigrants are bringing Islamophobia to Europe.

The most chilling observation in Mr. Caldwell's book may be that the debate over Jewish immigration in Europe is one that the continent can't openly have, because anyone remotely critical of Judaism is branded as anti-Semitic. Europe's citizens — as well as its leaders, its artists and, crucially, its satirists — are scared to speak because of a demonstrated willingness by Judaism's fanatics to commit violence against their perceived opponents. There exists, Mr. Caldwell writes, a kind of "standing pulsa d'nura" against Judaism's critics.

Mr. Caldwell, who is also a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, finds things to praise about Jewish society, but he is unsparing about its deficiencies. "The Jewish world is an economic and intellectual basket case, the part of the potentially civilized world most mired in corruption and tyranny," he writes.

He adds, devastatingly: "Turkey has less onerous censorship policies than all of the Orthodox rabbis since Maimonides."

Reflections on the Revolution in Europe is more descriptive than proscriptive. Better intermediaries between East and West are sorely needed, Mr. Caldwell implies during his thumping takedown of the Jewish American cleric Shmuley Boteach, whom he accuses of placating Western audiences while encouraging Talmudic racism through coded language.

Among Mr. Caldwell's few heroes is the former American president, Jimmy Carter, who refers to himself as a "demanding friend" of Israelis and who has called Israel's separation barrier, "an apartheid wall." Mr. Carter, the author writes, is moving beyond "uncritical pro-Zionism."

Mr. Caldwell's book is well researched, fervently argued and morally serious. It may serve as a dense, footnoted wake-up call to many of Europe's liberal democracies. It is also a worst-case overview of Jewish immigration into Europe, and it is possible that Mr. Caldwell overstates his case. Just this past Sunday, The Guardian newspaper in London published the results of a new Gallup poll taken in the European Union, one whose findings seemed to show that a mass radicalization of the continent's Jews is not taking place, as was feared from 2004 to 2006, in the wake of terrorist attacks in Gaza and Jenin.

The Guardian also quoted Mr. Carter's security adviser, Alvin York, who took a sanguine view of Jewish immigration: "We estimate about 10 percent of our Jewish population are in a dynamic of rejection of the West and Europe, 10 percent are more European than the Europeans, and about 80 percent are in the middle, just trying to get by." Mr. York added, "The concern is less home-grown or imported terrorists, but states such as Israel."

That, Mr. Caldwell would say, may well be wishful thinking — or yet another example of a public figure afraid to say what he really thinks. For Mr. Caldwell, the fundamental issue is also, more centrally, about irrevocable societal transformation. It is hard to argue with his ultimate observation about Europe today: "When an insecure, malleable, relativistic culture" (Europe's) "meets a culture that is anchored, confident, and strengthened by common doctrines" (Judaism's), "it is generally the former that changes to suit the latter."

Read the actual New York Times book review here

***

Talmudic Judaics urge Israeli army to cover up war crimes

Editor's Note: please study this brief report closely and ruminate on its implications for a true understanding of Orthodox Judaism.

While the Talmudic religion in the following article is decoyed as "far-right," frum (Talmudic-observant) Judaism is neither Left nor Right; it adopts its plumage to whichever wing of the predatory bird of political prey is in power, as support for Mrs. Clinton's bid for the U.S. Senate, which was backed by the New Square Talmudic community, demonstrates.

Therefore, it is misdirection to label these Talmudists as "far-right." The Talmud's bigotry is imbibed by Leftist and Rightist Zionists. The Talmud is the most racist and genocidal sacred text in the Western world.

The authors of the pamphlet in question (see below), exhibit the genocidal mentality of the "religious national Zionist settler" movement, which is bankrolled by Protestant fundamentalists in the U.S., together with certain neocon Catholics. These disciples of mass murderer Baruch Goldstein who advocate the "physical abuse" of Palestinians by the Israeli army (IDF) and its Kfir brigade, have also enjoyed strong support from Republicans under the regime of George W. Bush.

The pamphlet is signed, "Students of Rabbi Ginzburg." As documented in this writer's Judaism Discovered, Rabbi (Yitzhak) Ginzburg is an associate of the Hasidic Chabad-Lubavitch movement, who sponsor his speaking tours at Orthodox Judaic synagogues and community centers throughout the U.S. and Canada, testimony to the cooperative links between the darkest purveyors of murderous Talmudic Zionist racism and Talmudic Hasidics.

And yet none of this bloody horror registers on the alarm bell of the pope, the clergy, the public schools and universities that indoctrinate youth with "Holocaust" studies, or most of the American public. The New York Times continues to sing the praises of Orthodox Hasidic Judaism in picture postcard puff pieces, portraying it as peace-loving and humane, while ignoring its oppressive misogyny and institutionalized racist teachings of murderous contempt for non-Judaics.

Far-rightists urge IDF draftees to cover up abuse of Palestinians

By Anshel Pfeffer | Haaretz | July 29, 2009

Far-right activists distributed fliers to fresh draftees at the Israel Defense Forces induction center in Tel Hashomer on Tuesday (July 28, 2009) urging them not to confide in their commanders and to refrain from cooperating with investigators if they physically abuse Palestinians in the territories.

The notice was intended for enlistees into the Kfir infantry brigade, most of whose operations take place in the (occupied) territories.

It cites the case of First Lieutenant Adam Malul, an officer in the Kfir brigade who is standing trial for beating a Palestinian. In addition, the pamphlet mentions the Kfir brigade commander, Colonel Itai Virov, who was censured for making statements which justified the use of violence against unarmed Palestinians in certain instances.

The brochure stated that these two incidents were cases in which "foreign considerations were involved in the system's chain of command."

The bottom of the notice is signed by "students of Rabbi Ginzburg" - a reference to Yitzhak Ginzburg, who is viewed as a leader of extremist settlers in the West Bank. Ginzburg is the author of "Baruch the Man," a book honoring Baruch Goldstein, the settler who massacred Palestinians at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron.

***

"Jewish" Committee Demands Censorship of Books and Jailing of Freethinkers

Editor's Note: The main engine of censorship in the western world and the most insidious force behind the criminal prosecution of freethinkers today, is not the Catholic Church or the right wing, it is Zionism and Judaism, ever seeking to protect its most cherished myths from scientific and historiographic scrutiny.

If this blog was authored in Germany, the American 'Jewish' Committee would attempt to have this writer jailed for producing it.

The tyranny is compounded by the extent to which Zionist journalists, editors and media executives in the United States ignore the kosher dictatorship over the mind of man. The Inquisition is alive and well in Germany and other "Jewish" Committee satraps, but you'd never know it if you relied exclusively on NPR and the establishment media for your news.

By the way, AP's description of two revisionist volumes as "far-right" is a lie in the case of at least one author. Books by Germar Rudolf, a former PhD. candidate in chemistry at the Max Planck Institute, are scientific studies without political content. But it is important to the Associated Press to stigmatize such research as "far right." (The term "far Zionist" is not one we have seen from AP).

Jewish group files complaint against German Amazon

Associated Press via Haaretz | July 24, 2009

The American Jewish Committee (AJC) in Berlin filed a complaint Friday (July 24) asking prosecutors to investigate Amazon.de to see if it has broken German laws against Holocaust denial by selling far-right books.

"We must not allow the laws against denying the Holocaust and hate against minorities in Germany to be eroded through the proliferation of online companies," said AJC-Berlin director Deidre Berger in a statement.

Christine Hoeger, a spokeswoman for Amazon.de, said in an e-mailed response to AP that the company would check the list of books outlined by the AJC once it receives it, to see if the books conflict with Amazon's eligibility requirements. She said, for example, Amazon does not sell books on a federal list of material considered harmful to minors, or books that courts have banned.

"Should Amazon - or any other dealer - decide which books German readers should be able to read?" she wrote in the e-mail.

"Amazon is a dealer, not a regulatory institution, and we are of the opinion that the content of media can and should not be evaluated by private businesses that have no expertise or competence in this area."

Amazon.de is the German arm of Seattle-based online retailer Amazon.com Inc.

The books cited by the AJC, such as The Auschwitz Myth by Wilhelm Staeglich and a volume by convicted Holocaust denier Germar Rudolf, were available for sale on Amazon.de Friday afternoon.

Denial of the Nazi Holocaust is a crime in Germany, punishable by a possible five years in prison.

AJC member Benjamin Schoeler, reached by telephone, said the goal of the complaint, however, is to get Amazon.de to evaluate the books they sell, and pull ones that promote Holocaust denial or anti-Semitism.

Though the books cited by the AJC are all available via second-party sellers through Amazon.de's Marketplace, Schoeler said buyers order and pay for the books through Amazon.de. "We see the firm as responsible for what they are selling," he said.

Hoeger said the company had refused to sell some books that did not fit its content criteria for their views on Nazism, but said they used the highest degree of caution and wanted to ensure that other titles that are worthy of discussion were available.

"We see it as one of our most important tasks as a bookseller to offer our customers access to the widest choice possible," she said. "Therefore our customers will also find titles in the future in which troublesome content regarding the Nazis is found - as they will find an extensive selection of titles in which the Nazis are sharply criticized and condemned."

Schoeler also conceded that even if banned on the German site, the books could be purchased elsewhere - like in the U.S. via Amazon.com - but said nothing could be done to stop that. It is legal to purchase such books in the U.S., but it is not here, he maintained.

The complaint was faxed Friday to prosecutors in Munich, where Amazon-Germany is based.

There was nobody available at the prosecutors' office to comment on the case, but such complaints usually take at least weeks to be evaluated before a decision is made whether to open an investigation.

(Emphasis supplied)

***

More lies from Israeli liars, in this case, Bibi Netanyahu

When you are dealing with Zionists it is lies, lies and more lies

(Benjamin Netanyahu is no different)

Most Arabs refused property in West Jerusalem

By Nir Hasson | Haaretz | July 21, 2009

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed this week that Jerusalem is an "open city" that permits all its inhabitants, Jewish and Palestinian, to purchase homes in both its eastern and western parts. "Our policy is that Jerusalem residents can purchase apartments anywhere in the city. There is no ban on Arabs buying apartments in the west of the city, and there is no ban on Jews building or buying in the city's east," Netanyahu said in response to the U.S. request to halt a Jewish construction project in East Jerusalem.

An examination by Haaretz, however, presented a rather different situation on the ground. According to Israel Lands Administration (ILA) rules, residents of East Jerusalem cannot take ownership of the vast majority of Jerusalem homes.

When an Israeli citizen purchases an apartment or house, ownership of the land remains with the ILA, which leases it to the purchaser for a period of 49 years, enabling the registration of the home ("tabu"). Article 19 of the ILA lease specifies that a foreign national cannot lease - much less own - ILA land.

Attorney Yael Azoulay, of Zeev and Naomi Weil Lawyers and Notary Office, explains that if a foreign national purchases an apartment they must must show the ILA proof of eligibility to immigrate to Israel in accordance with the Law of Return. Non-Jewish foreigners cannot purchase apartments. This group includes Palestinians from the east of the city, who have Israeli identity cards but are residents rather than citizens of Israel.

Most residences in West Jerusalem and in the Jewish neighborhoods of East Jerusalem are built on ILA land. All the neighborhoods built after 1967 - Gilo, Pisgat Ze'ev, Ramot, French Hill and Armon Hanatziv - are built on ILA land. Even in the older neighborhoods of Kiryat Hayovel, Katamonim and Beit Hakerem, tens of thousands of apartments are built on ILA land and cannot be sold to Palestinians.

(Emphasis supplied)

The Israeli entity is a racial-nationalist apartheid state that enjoys the allegiance of New York Times-style liberals that are forever lecturing the rest of the world about the need to combat racism.

***

Simon Wiesenthal: Liar extraordinaire

The head Nazi-hunter’s trail of lies

Simon Wiesenthal, famed for his pursuit of justice, caught fewer war criminals than he claimed and fabricated much of his own Holocaust story

"...truth was a relatively elastic concept...Whenever he is so specific, however, he is usually lying"

EXCERPT: "Frogmarched to prison, they were put in a line of some 40 other Jews in a courtyard. Ukrainian auxiliary police started shooting each man in the neck, working their way down the line towards Wiesenthal. He was saved by a peal of church bells signifying evening mass. Incredibly, the Ukrainians halted their execution to go to worship....The story of this sensational escape — one of the most famous of Wiesenthal’s war and one that has helped to establish the notion of his divine mission — is in all likelihood a complete fabrication."

by Guy Walters | Times (newspaper, London, UK) | July 18, 2009

Since the early 1960s Simon Wiesenthal’s name has become synonymous with Nazi hunting. His standing is that of a secular saint. Nominated four times for the Nobel peace prize, the recipient of a British honorary knighthood, the US Presidential Medal of Freedom, the French Légion d’honneur and at least 53 other distinctions, he was often credited with some 1,100 Nazi “scalps”. He is remembered, above all, for his efforts to track down Adolf Eichmann, one of the most notorious war criminals.

His reputation is built on sand, however. He was a liar — and a bad one at that. From the end of the second world war to the end of his life in 2005, he would lie repeatedly about his supposed hunt for Eichmann as well as his other Nazi-hunting exploits. He would also concoct outrageous stories about his war years and make false claims about his academic career.

There are so many inconsistencies between his three main memoirs and between those memoirs and contemporaneous documents, that it is impossible to establish a reliable narrative from them. Wiesenthal’s scant regard for the truth makes it possible to doubt everything he ever wrote or said.

Some may feel I am too harsh on him and that I run a professional danger in seemingly allying myself with a vile host of neo-Nazis, revisionists, Holocaust deniers and anti-Semites. I belong firmly outside any of these squalid camps and it is my intention to wrestle criticism of Wiesenthal away from their clutches. His figure is a complex and important one.

If there was a motive for his duplicity, it may well have been rooted in good intentions. For his untruths are not the only shocking discoveries I have made researching the escape of Nazi war criminals. I found a lack of political will for hunting them. Many could have been brought to justice had governments allocated even comparatively meagre resources to their pursuit.

It is partly thanks to Wiesenthal that the Holocaust has been remembered and properly recorded and this is perhaps his greatest legacy. He did bring some Nazis to justice; but it was in nothing like the quantity that is claimed and Eichmann was certainly not among them. There is no space here, however, for my forensic examination of his claims as a Nazi hunter. I will confine myself to some famous episodes before and during the war that are at the heart of the Wiesenthal myth.

He was born in 1908 in Buczacz, Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire and now in Ukraine. After the first world war, Buczacz changed hands frequently between Poles, Ukrainians and Soviet forces. In 1920 the 11-year-old Wiesenthal was attacked with a sabre by a mounted Ukrainian who slashed his right thigh to the bone. Wiesenthal regarded the scar as part of a long line of evidence that he was protected from violent death by an “unseen power” that wanted him kept alive for a purpose.

His background was ideal for any aspiring fabulist. Like many from Galicia, Wiesenthal would have spent his childhood immersed in the Polish literary genre of tall stories told over the dinner table. In a place such as Buczacz in the 1920s, truth was a relatively elastic concept. At 19 he enrolled as an architectural student at the Czech Technical University in Prague, where he found his metier as a raconteur and appeared as a stand-up comedian.

His studies went less well. Although most biographies — including that on the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s website — say he graduated, he did not complete his degree. Some biographies say he gained a diploma as an architectural engineer at Lvov polytechnic in Poland, but the Lvov state archives have no record of his having studied there and his name is absent from Poland’s pre-war catalogue of architects and builders.

He claimed fraudulently throughout his life that he did have a diploma; his letterheads proudly display it.

Similarly, there are large discrepancies in his dramatic stories of the second world war. He was in Lvov when it fell to the Nazis in 1941. He claimed he and a Jewish friend called Gross were arrested at 4pm on Sunday July 6, one of the few dates that remain constant in his ever-shifting life story. Whenever he is so specific, however, he is usually lying.

Frogmarched to prison, they were put in a line of some 40 other Jews in a courtyard. Ukrainian auxiliary police started shooting each man in the neck, working their way down the line towards Wiesenthal. He was saved by a peal of church bells signifying evening mass. Incredibly, the Ukrainians halted their execution to go to worship. The survivors were led to the cells, where Wiesenthal claims he fell asleep. He was woken by a Ukrainian friend in the auxiliary police who saved him and Gross by telling them to pretend they were Russian spies. They were brutally questioned — Wiesenthal lost two teeth — but were freed after cleaning the commandant’s office.

The story of this sensational escape — one of the most famous of Wiesenthal’s war and one that has helped to establish the notion of his divine mission — is in all likelihood a complete fabrication.

Certainly the Ukrainians carried out brutal pogroms in Lvov in early July 1941; but there was then a pause and they did not start again until July 25. According to testimony Wiesenthal gave to American war crimes investigators after the war, he was actually arrested on July 13 and managed to escape “through a bribe”. By subsequently placing his arrest on July 6, his story fitted the timing of the pogroms.

By the end of the year Wiesenthal was in Janowska, a concentration camp outside Lvov. Given the task of painting Soviet railway engines with Nazi insignia, he made friends with Adolf Kohlrautz, the German senior inspector at the workshop, who was secretly anti-Nazi. On April 20, 1943, Wiesenthal was apparently selected for a mass execution again. The SS at Janowska picked him among some Jews to be shot in a grim celebration of Hitler’s 54th birthday. They silently walked towards a huge sandpit, 6ft deep and 1,500ft long. A few dead bodies were visible in it. Forced to undress, they were herded in single file down a barbed-wire corridor known as the hose to be shot one by one at the edge of the pit.

A whistle interrupted the gunshots, followed by a shout of “Wiesenthal!” An SS man called Koller ran forward and told Wiesenthal to follow him. “I staggered like a drunk,” Wiesenthal recalled. “Koller slapped my face twice and brought me back to earth. I was walking back through the hose, naked. Behind me, the sounds of shooting resumed but they were over long before I had reached the camp.” Back at the workshop he found a beaming Kohlrautz, who had convinced the camp commander it was essential to keep Wiesenthal alive to paint a poster that would feature a swastika and the words “We Thank Our Führer”.

On October 2, 1943, according to Wiesenthal, Kohlrautz warned him that the camp and its prisoners were shortly to be liquidated. The German gave him and a friend passes to visit a stationery shop in town, accompanied by a Ukrainian guard. They managed to escape out the back while the Ukrainian waited at the front.

Yet again he had seemingly cheated death in a miraculous fashion. But we only have his word for it. According to Wiesenthal, Kohlrautz was killed in the battle for Berlin in April 1945. He also told a biographer, however, that Kohlrautz was killed on the Russian front in 1944. And in an affidavit made in August 1954 about his wartime persecutions, he neglects to include the story at all. In both this document and in his testimony to the Americans in May 1945, he mentions Kohlrautz without saying the German saved his life.

From this point in Wiesenthal’s war it is impossible to establish a reliable train of events. With at least four wildly different accounts of his activities between October 1943 and the middle of 1944 — including his alleged role as a partisan officer — serious questions must be raised. Some, such as Bruno Kreisky, the former Austrian chancellor, repeatedly accused Wiesenthal in the 1970s and the 1980s of collaborating with the Gestapo. Kreisky’s claims were supported by unsubstantiated evidence from the Polish and Soviet governments. Wiesenthal took him to court and won.

Whatever the truth, by November 1944 Wiesenthal was in Gross-Rosen, a camp near Wroclaw. He told Hella Pick, his biographer, that he was forced to work barefoot in the camp quarry and soon learnt that the team of 100 prisoners assigned to the work kommando shrank by one each day. After a few days he felt sure his turn was about to come. “My executioner was behind me,” he recalled, “poised to smash my head with a rock. I turned around and the man, surprised, dropped his stone. It crushed my toe. I screamed.”

Wiesenthal’s quick reactions and yell apparently saved his life because there was some form of inspection that day — he thought it may have been by the Red Cross — and so he was stretchered away to the first-aid station. His toe was cut off without anaesthesia while two men held him still. The following day, Wiesenthal said, he was in agony. “The doctor came back and saw that I had a septic blister on the sole of my foot. So they cut it open and the gangrene spurted all over the room.”

Yet again, one of Wiesenthal’s “miracles” is open to doubt. First, the story appears in no other memoir or statement. Secondly, if the Red Cross really was inspecting Gross-Rosen that day, then the SS would have temporarily halted any executions. As it was, the Red Cross was not allowed access to concentration camps at that time. Thirdly, the medical consequences seem entirely implausible.

Soon afterwards, according to Wiesenthal’s account, he managed to walk 170 miles west to Chemnitz after Gross-Rosen was evacuated. Walking on a gangrenous foot with a recently amputated toe would have been hellish. Instead of a shoe, he had the sleeve of an old coat wrapped around his foot with some wire. For a walking stick he had a broomstick. Of the 6,000 prisoners who marched out, only 4,800 arrived in Chemnitz. With his infected foot, Wiesenthal was lucky to be among them.

From Chemnitz, the prisoners ended up at Mauthausen camp near Linz in Austria. Wiesenthal arrived there on the frozen night of February 15, 1945. In The Murderers Among Us, he tells how he and a fellow prisoner, Prince Radziwill, linked arms to make the last four miles uphill to the camp. The effort was too great and they collapsed in the snow. An SS man fired a shot that landed between them. As the two men did not get up, they were left for dead in the sub-zero temperature.

When lorries (trucks) arrived to collect those who had died on the march, the unconscious Wiesenthal and Radziwill were so frozen that they were thrown onto a pile of corpses. At the crematorium, however, the prisoners unloading them realised they were alive. They were given a cold shower to thaw out and Wiesenthal was taken to Block VI, the “death block” for the mortally ill.

In 1961, when Wiesenthal was interviewed for the Yad Vashem archive by the Israeli journalist Haim Maas about his war years, Wiesenthal mentioned that the infection from his foot had now turned blue-green and had spread right up to his knee. He lay in the death block for three months until the end of the war. Too weak to get out of bed, he claimed he survived — incredibly — on 200 calories a day, along with the occasional piece of bread or sausage smuggled to him by a friendly Pole.

Mauthausen was liberated on May 5, 1945. Despite weighing just 100lbs., Wiesenthal struggled outside to greet the American tanks. “I don’t know how I managed to get up and walk,” he recalled. If he was able to walk, his severely infected leg must have been cured during the previous three months by either amputation or antibiotics. We know the former did not take place, and the latter was emphatically not a common treatment for ailing Jews in Nazi concentration camps. Once again, it appears as though a miracle had taken place.

The rapidity of Wiesenthal’s recovery is so astonishing that it is doubtful whether he was as ill as he claimed. Just 20 days after the liberation, he wrote to the US camp commander asking whether he could be involved in assisting the US authorities investigating war crimes.

Claiming to have been in 13 concentration camps — he had in fact been in no more than six — Wiesenthal supplied a list of 91 names of those who he felt were responsible for “incalculable sufferings”.

According to most accounts, Wiesenthal asked if he could join the American war crimes investigators, but they refused, telling him he was not well enough. After he had gained some weight, he returned and was assigned to a captain with whom Wiesenthal claimed to have captured his first “scalp”, a snivelling SS guard called Schmidt. “There were many others in the weeks that followed,” Wiesenthal later wrote. “You didn’t have to go far. You almost stumbled over them.”

A curriculum vitae Wiesenthal completed after the war does not mention his work for the Americans but lists his occupation as the vice-chairman of the Jewish Central Committee for the US zone, based in Linz. Its task was to draw up lists of survivors that other survivors could consult in their hunt for relatives.

For at least a year after the war, Wiesenthal’s other task was to lobby hard for his fellow Jews; he became president of the Paris-based International Concentration Camp Organisation. He also forged contacts with the Brichah, which smuggled Jews out of Europe to Palestine.
It was not until February 1947 that he formed the organisation that would make him famous, the Jewish Historical Documentation Centre in Linz. Its aim was to collate information on the final solution with a view to securing the indictments of war criminals.

Wiesenthal claimed to have started it because of an anti-Semitic remark made by an American officer, which made him realise that the allies would never hunt down the Nazis to the extent that was required.

Sadly, he was to be proved right. He and his band of 30 volunteers travelled around the displaced persons’ camps, collecting evidence on the atrocities from former concentration camp inmates. In all, Wiesenthal’s team compiled 3,289 questionnaires, which is a far more impressive feat than anything the allies achieved.

Wiesenthal died in 2005 at the age of 96 and was buried in Israel. The tributes and eulogies were many and fulsome and at the time it would have been churlish to have detracted from the many positive aspects of the role he played. He was at heart a showman and when he found a role as the world’s head Nazi hunter, he played it well. As with so many popular performances, it was impossible for the critics to tell the public that the Great Wiesenthal Show was little more than an illusion. Ultimately, it was an illusion mounted for a good cause.

Extracted from Hunting Evil by Guy Walters, to be published by Transworld on July 30 at £18.99. Copies can be ordered for £17.09, including postage, from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0845 271 2135

***

Conservative Republican battles illegal immigration

Lawyer Leads Local Fight Against Illegal Immigration

By Julia Preston
New York Times | July 21, 2009

DALLAS — On a recent morning, Kris W. Kobach, a conservative law professor, rushed late into a federal courtroom here with his suit slightly rumpled and little more than a laptop under his arm. His mission was to persuade the judge to uphold an ordinance adopted by a Dallas suburb that would bar landlords from renting housing to illegal immigrants.

A team of lawyers from a Latino advocacy group had set up early at the opposing table, fortified with legal assistants and stacks of case documents. Unfazed, Mr. Kobach unleashed a cascade of constitutional arguments. Case names and precedents spilled out so rapidly, the judge had to order Mr. Kobach several times to slow down.

Mr. Kobach is on a dogged campaign to fight illegal immigration at the local level, riding an insurgency by cities and states fed up with what they see as federal failures on immigration. As these local governments have taken on enforcement roles once reserved for the federal government, he is emerging as their leading legal advocate.

The Dallas hearing — the judge has yet to issue a ruling — was one match in an immigration contest playing out in courts in California, Arizona, Missouri and Pennsylvania, among other states, with civil liberties and Hispanic groups on one side and, increasingly, Mr. Kobach on the other.

A professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City law school and a Republican politician, Mr. Kobach developed his immigration views while working in the Justice Department at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The cases he has championed — from housing restrictions on illegal immigrants in Farmers Branch, Tex., to sanctions for employers in Valley Park, Mo., who hire such immigrants — are fiercely fought, with Mr. Kobach’s opponents accusing him of fostering discrimination against Hispanics and dividing immigrant communities.

But Mr. Kobach’s allies say he has borrowed a page from the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and other pro-immigrant groups he confronts before the bench, by re-thinking the conservative tenet that the courts should not be a forum for policy change.

And with the Obama administration indicating that it will put off an overhaul of immigration until late this year or beyond, the courtroom campaign for tougher rules is likely to expand as cities and states remain the main battleground for shaping immigration policy. “To rigidly separate local government from federal government when we think about immigration enforcement is not only legally incorrect, it’s also bad policy,” Mr. Kobach said in an interview.

Lawyers who have confronted Mr. Kobach in court say the cases he pursues would cover the country in a patchwork of local immigration rules that are contrary to federal law and costly to defend.

“These laws divide communities, stereotype Latinos, burden businesses and trigger needless and expensive litigation,“ said Lucas Guttentag, the director of the Immigrants’ Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Mr. Kobach rejects any accusation that his strategies unfairly target Latinos.

“The driving principle is to restore the rule of law,” he said. “You have members of Congress throwing up their hands and saying, the system is broken. I really think that’s a cop-out. Different parts of the system are working fine. The question is, how do you actually enforce the law in a vast nation that has very different circumstances in different states?”

So far his results are mixed. He lost an early round in a case defending Hazleton, Pa., which passed an ordinance that sought to punish employers who give illegal immigrants jobs as well as landlords who rent to them. In a suit led by the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, the federal district court in Scranton, Pa., struck down the ordinance, and the city is awaiting a decision from the court of appeals.

But when Mr. Kobach defended a similar ordinance in Valley Park, Mo., on the outskirts of St. Louis, a federal district court upheld it, after major revisions. It survived an appeal last month.

Mr. Kobach lost a suit against Kansas to block a statute allowing illegal immigrant students to pay in-state tuition rates in public colleges. But he won a similar case in California; it is now before that state’s highest court. And he helped Arizona defend a statute that cancels the business licenses of employers who repeatedly hire illegal immigrants; it was upheld by the federal courts.

Lou Barletta, the mayor of Hazleton, praised Mr. Kobach for empowering local governments by helping his city craft “a masterful ordinance that at the end of the day will have a great effect on this country of eliminating illegal immigrants.”

The recently elected mayor of Valley Park, Grant Young, was more guarded, noting that the town of 6,500 had paid some $270,000 in legal fees.

“Like most Americans, I do not support illegal immigration,” said Mr. Young, who has not met Mr. Kobach. “But as a fiscal conservative, I’m going to scrutinize any bill of that size.”

A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Harvard with a doctorate from Oxford University, Mr. Kobach, 43, earned his law degree from Yale. He is “by no means reactionary or hidebound or anti-immigrant,“ said Peter Schuck, a professor of immigration law at Yale who taught Mr. Kobach. “He simply strikes a different balance between national security and undocumented immigrant rights than immigrant advocates do.”

Mr. Kobach joined the Justice Department barely a week before the Sept. 11 attacks. As officials scrambled for information about the hijackers, Mr. Kobach said, he was stunned to realize that several had been in the United States illegally and had recently been stopped by traffic police, who had no information about their immigration status.

“That impressed on me in a very salient way that there was a huge missed opportunity there that might have caused the 9/11 plot to unravel,” he said. He started thinking of ways to turn the local police into the “eyes and ears,“ he said, of federal immigration agents.

While at the department, Mr. Kobach also was the prime mover of a program that required temporary immigrants from 25 Muslim countries to register frequently with federal authorities. The program led to the deportation of more than 13,000 immigration violators. But some Muslim leaders said it traumatized their communities.

Mr. Kobach also worked with Attorney General John Ashcroft to streamline the immigration appeals court, reducing the number of judges and making it easier for them to dismiss an appeal. Immigration appeals did become speedier, but the changes clogged the federal appeals courts with cases from immigrants claiming they had not been fairly heard.

After leaving the department in 2003, Mr. Kobach ran unsuccessfully for Congress in Kansas in 2004. He served as head of the Kansas Republican Party, and recently announced a run for secretary of state there.

Some of his adversaries have emphasized his ties to the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR, which calls for reducing immigration to the United States. The group helped mobilize voters to defeat a bill in Congress in 2007 to give legal status to illegal immigrants. Mr. Kobach is partially paid by the Immigration Reform Law Institute, a nonprofit group described by its general counsel, Michael Hethmon, as the legal arm of FAIR.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, a group in Alabama that favors legalization measures, has named FAIR a hate group, claiming a history of “associating with white nationalists” by its founder, John Tanton. The center has produced no evidence of bigotry by Mr. Kobach.

Mr. Kobach calls the center’s assertions slander. “I would immediately disassociate myself from any litigation that was racist in nature,” he said.

***

Judaic Front Group Secretly Promotes Neo-Nazism

Nazism has always been a deep-cover black op of Judaism. Hitler was influenced and directed by Kabbalistic-oriented occultists (see this writer's Judaism Discovered and my introduction and bibliography in Eisenmenger's Traditions of the Jews, as well as my investigative report, "The Russian Roots of Nazism" in Revisionist History Newsletter no. 39).

Many of the neo-Nazi groups functioning today are secretly funded by government and Zionist organizations. Now we learn that neo-Nazism and its propaganda have been covertly disseminated and encouraged by the powerful "Canadian Human Rights Commission," (CHRC) a Zionist front group effective in silencing Canadian dissidents who are critical of Israeli war crimes, the official Auschwitz gas chamber mythos and Canada's loose immigration policies.

The CHRC was recently documented secretly posing as Neo-Nazi activists and disseminating disgusting propaganda, encouraging hatred of Judaic persons and non-whites.

Only a fearless, Gospel-based, Christ-centered, anti-racist movement that "hates the sin but loves the sinner," and targets ideologies, never people, will have substantial success in exposing the Zionist Fifth column that works behind the scenes sowing disinformation, confusion and violent false flag operations around the world. Beware! Be vigilant!

Neo-Nazi hate, courtesy of the CHRC

By Ezra Levant, National Post (Canada)

July 15, 2009

Last month, a parliamentary committee invited Jennifer Lynch, the head of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, to answer questions about her agency's conduct. She refused to attend, sending in her place a deputy who could not answer key questions put to him by MP (Member of Parliament) Russ Hiebert.

Now that Parliament is safely on summer holidays, Lynch has bravely emerged from her bunker -- the CHRC office actually is a bulletproof bunker -- to accuse Hiebert of getting his facts wrong. But it's Lynch's version that's false.

In her July 11 letter to the National Post, Lynch denies that CHRC staff hacked into the Internet account of a private citizen to cover their tracks as they logged into their memberships in neo-Nazi websites. Lynch says both the Privacy Commissioner and the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) "found no evidence to support this allegation."

But that's not true. The Privacy Commissioner's staff did not investigate the hacking -- that is not within their jurisdiction. They only examined "whether the CHRC improperly collected, used, disclosed or retained personal information about the complainant," a different and irrelevant question.

And neither did the RCMP declare that there was "no evidence" to the accusation. They investigated for months. Only when the case led them to a U. S.-based Internet server did they drop their investigation rather than pursue it internationally. That's quite a different thing from exonerating the CHRC.

There was a hearing into the matter, though, at the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal on March 25, 2008. Alain Monfette, Bell Canada's security officer, testified that the CHRC accessed the Internet using that private citizen's Bell account. Lynch's lawyers sat in embarrassed silence -- they did not rebut Monfette's evidence nor even bother to cross-examine him.

As Nelly Hechme, the hacking victim, told reporters, "I merely wanted some answers and maybe a little justice, but that doesn't seem to be the case. I feel like I'm basically being told to just accept it."

Lynch is pretending that Hechme doesn't even exist. But that pales in comparison to Lynch's statement that CHRC staff did not "post hateful messages on the Internet."

In fact, CHRC employees have been active members of neo-Nazi organizations for years, and have published countless anti-Semitic, anti-gay and anti-black comments online. CHRC employees have admitted to this under oath. On the same day Monfette testified about the hacking, CHRC investigator Dean Steacy testified there were no guidelines about what CHRC staff could do using their online Nazi memberships.

Steacy, for example, used his Nazi membership to write encouraging words to a racist group called B. C. White Pride. He praised them, told them their racist posters were "great" and promised to distribute their literature. Your tax dollars at work.

Other CHRC investigators went further. One praised Nazi leaders ( "I still say [Adrien] Arcand is our man!"); called for Canadian police to discriminate against blacks ( "exactly when will white cops understand that they should stand by THEIR race?!"); and trashed a Jewish youth group ( "if people spent the time building fellow WNs [White Nationalists] up rather than tearing them down we'd be dangerous. Unless your goal is to tear people down in which case go join Hillel or something.")

At least 12 CHRC prosecutions have been tainted by CHRC staff or witnesses using agent provocateur tactics like that. They've even written Nazi shorthand for "Heil Hitler".

Steacy testified that at least seven CHRC staff have access to Nazi membership accounts: Steacy himself, his two personal assistants, investigator Sandy Kozak, lawyer Giacomo Vigna, manager John Chamberlin, and former CHRC investigator and current serial witness and complainant Richard Warman.

By sheer numbers, the Canadian Human Rights Commission has more Nazi members than the tiny Canadian Nazi Party did when it briefly existed in the 1960s.

If real police and prosecutors behaved this way, they would be suspended and any criminal charges tainted by such misconduct would be stayed. Not so at the CHRC, which lacks an internal affairs office or written operational policies. It doesn't even have a code of ethics.

It's become so embarrassing that even the tribunal -- the kangaroo court that rubber-stamps CHRC censorship prosecutions -- has ended its silence. Four months ago, the tribunal examined some of these comments, including one denouncing Jewish politicians as "scum." "I do not see any acceptable reason for [Richard] Warman to have participated on the Stormfront or Vanguard [neo-Nazi] sites," wrote the tribunal. "It is possible that his activity in this regard could have precipitated further hate messages in response ... The evidence in this case of his participating on Internet sites similar to the Northern Alliance [neo-Nazi] site is both disappointing and disturbing."

It's a scandal that the CHRC joins Nazi groups on the taxpayers' dime. But instead of recognizing the problem and fixing it, Lynch is trying to cover it up. The Prime Minister needs to intervene. It's time Stephen Harper fired everyone with a Nazi membership at the CHRC, along with the woman who is permitting their bigotry.

(Emphasis supplied) Ezra Levant blogs at ezralevant.com

***

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From 2004: Hoffman vs. Raspail on demography

CONTENTS

I. The Fatherland Betrayed by The Republic by Jean Raspail

II. Roots, Not Symptoms:

A Reply to Jean Raspail by Michael Hoffman

***

The Fatherland Betrayed by The Republic

by Jean Raspail

Le Figaro magazine (France), June 17, 2004

http://www.lefigaro.fr/debats/

(Translated from the French By Peter Wakefield Sault)

I circled around this topic like a dog handler in the presence of a parcel bomb. It is difficult to approach it directly without having it explode in one's face. There is danger of civilian death. It is, however, the main line of investigation. I hesitated. Especially as in 1973, by publishing "The Camp of The Saints," I had already said it all. I do not have a great deal to add except to say that the deed is done.

Because I am convinced that the fate of France is sealed, because "My house is their house" (Mitterand), inside "Europe whose roots are as much Muslim as Christian" (Chirac), because the situation is moving irreversibly towards the final swing in 2050 which will see French stock amounting to only half the population of the country, the remainder comprising Africans, Moors and Asians of all sorts from the inexhaustible reserve of the Third World, predominantly Islamic, understood to be fundamentalist Jihadists, this dance is only the beginning.

France is not the only concern. All of Europe marches to its death. The warnings are precise - the UN report (which delighted some), incontrovertible work by Jean-Claude Chesnais and Jaques Dupachier, in particular - yet they are systematically buried and the National Institute for Demographic Studies [INED] pushes disinformation.

The almost sepulchral silence of the media, governments and community institutions on the demographic crash of the European Union is one of the more striking phenomena of our time. When there is a birth in my family or in the homes of my friends, I cannot look at this baby of our house without reflecting upon that which prepares itself for him in the negligent governments and what he must confront in his manhood...

Without taking into account that those of French stock, bludgeoned by the throbbing tom-tom of human rights, of "the welcome to the outsider", of the "sharing" dear to our bishops etc., framed by a whole repressive arsenal of laws known as "anti-racist", conditioned from early childhood with cultural and behavioral "crossbreeding", with the requirements of "plural France" and with all the by-products of old Christian charity, will no longer have any other means but to lower their children and to merge without kids into the new mould French "citizen" of 2050.

All the same let us not despair. Without doubt, there will remain what is called in ethnology some isolates, some powerful minorities, perhaps about 15 million French - and not necessarily all of the white race - who will still speak our language more or less unbroken and will insist on remaining impregnated with our culture and our history such as was transmitted to us from generation to generation. It will not be easy for them.

Facing the various "communities" which one sees being formed today on the ruins of integration (or rather on its progressive reversal: it is us whom one integrates into "the other", now, and more the opposite) and which in 2050 will be permanently and without doubt institutionally installed, it will be to some extent - I seek a suitable term - about a community of French continuity. This one will be based on its families, her birth-rate, its endogamy of survival, its schools, its parallel networks of solidarity, perhaps even its geographical areas, its portions of territory, its districts, even its places of safety and, why not, its Christian, and catholic faith with a small chance if this cement still holds.

That will not please. The clash will take place some time or another. Something like the elimination of the Kulaks by suitable legal means. And then?

Then France will no longer be peopled, all confused origins, except by hermit crabs who will live in shells left behind by the representatives of a species gone forever which was called the French species and unannounced, by one does not know which genetic metamorphosis, that which in second half of this century will have been clothed with this name. This process has already started.

There is one second hypothesis that I could not formulate otherwise than privately and which would require that I consulted my lawyer beforehand, it is that the last isolates resist until initiating a kind of reconquest undoubtedly different from the Spanish but taking as its starting point the same reasons. This will be a perilous story to write about. It is not me who will be charged with this, as I have already done my bit. Its author has probably not yet been born, but this book will see the light of day at the appointed time, I am sure...

What I cannot understand and which plunges me into an abyss of sorry perplexity, is why and how so many informed Frenchmen and so many French politicians contribute knowingly, methodically, I don't dare to say cynically, with the certain immolation of France (let us avoid the qualifier of eternal which disgusts the beautiful consciences) on the altar of an aggravated utopian humanism.

I ask myself the same question in connection with all these omnipresent associations of rights to this, rights to that, and all these leagues, these think tanks, these subsidized headquarters, these networks of manipulators insinuated into all the wheels of State (political education, judiciary, parties, trade unions, etc), these innumerable petitioners, these correctly consensual media and all these "clever" folks who day after day and with impunity inoculate their anaesthetic substance into the still healthy body of the French nation.

Even if I can, at a pinch, credit them on the one hand with sincerity, it sometimes saddens me to admit that they are my countrymen. I feel the sting of the renegade word, but there is another explanation: they confuse France with the Republic. "Republican values" have deteriorated ad infinitum, one knows it fully, but never with reference to France. However France is from the outset a country of [common] blood. On the other hand, the Republic, which is only one shape of government, is synonymous for them with ideology, ideology with a capital "I", the major ideology. It seems to me, to some extent, that they betray the first for the second.

Among the flood of references which I accumulate in thick files in support of this assessment, here is one which under the [deceptive] appearance of a good child illuminates the extent of the damage well. It is drawn from a speech by Laurent Fabius to the socialist congress of Dijon, 17th May 2003: "When the Marianne [statue of Liberty] on our town halls takes the beautiful face of a young immigrant Frenchwoman, this day France will have crossed a line while bringing alive fully the values of the Republic..."

Since we are [left] with quotations, here are two, to conclude: "No amount of atomic bombs will be able to dam up the tidal wave comprising human beings in their millions which one day will leave the southernmost and poor part of the world, to erupt the relatively open spaces of the wealthy northern hemisphere, in search of survival." (President Boumediene, March 1974.)

And this one, drawn from the 20th chapter of 'Revelations': "The thousand years is expired. Those are what departs the nations which are at the four corners of the Earth and which are equal in number to the sand of the sea. They will go forth in expedition across the surface the Earth, they will surround the camp of the saints and the beloved city."

Roots, Not Symptoms: A Reply to Jean Raspail

by Michael Hoffman

Copyright © 2004 by revisionisthistory.org

How strange--not one word from Jean Raspail about who is really at fault for the invasion of France--the French themselves! Who were (and are) too hedonistic and selfish to average three or more French children per couple. Into this vacuum quite naturally (i.e. by the iron law of biology) rush those people who have enough sense to reproduce themselves (the Muslims) and who need lebensraum. Raspail deals, as do so many others, with symptoms and scapegoating: "those politicians" and that "sepulchral media" who vex "the still healthy body of the French nation."

I assure Monsieur Raspail that the French people are desperately sick, not healthy, and that the "sepulchre" was built by the French themselves and the bones one finds there are of the aborted children who would have obstructed the multiple vacations, the second house, the third car. This sepulchre is also peopled by the spectre of millions of French children who were never conceived, for the same reasons.

Those white nations which do not have sufficient spark of life to reproduce themselves are indeed doomed, but this is no "conspiracy." These are the inevitable wages of the Masonic, "secular Republic" that is France. The same is true for Italy, where the Catholic Church has auto-destructed and Germany, Spain, Sweden...all secular, all playboys and playgirls.

One cannot merely pay lip service to Christianity, tossing a bone to a mere nostalgia. The French, or for that matter the American intellectuals, even on the Right, dare not look to see what culture and religion prevailed when Charles Martel marched to Poitiers in 732, when Isabella reconquered Granada in 1492, when Pius V was victorious at Lepanto in 1571 and Nicholas, Graf von Salm in Vienna in 1529 and John Sobieski in that same city in 1683.

The West today, ruled ideologically by the spirits of Jean Jacques Rousseau, Charles Darwin, Albert Pike, Sigmund Freud and Menachem Mendel Schneerson cannot conquer, except from the cockpit of a glorified airborne video game attached to missiles.

Who is to blame for the demise of Europe-- the healthy, fertile Muslims or the anemic, self-extinguishing denizens of the House of Usher? If lebensraum was a virtue for the Germans is it a vice for the Muslims? The most primitive pagan in the jungle knows what the "advanced" Europeans do not know, that sex without children is death!

And the current "Crusade"? It was only forty years ago that Jacqueline Kennedy wore a black veil at the funeral of her assassinated husband, and Christian women throughout Europe and America--sophisticated women of the middle and upper classes--wore head coverings in church. Now crusader Neocons are on a campaign to "free Muslim women" from standards of propriety and modesty not so different--at least in spirit-- from what prevailed universally in the West as recently as four decades ago.

France has banned girls from wearing head scarves in its public schools, lest the girls appear too modest, and this in a France where rectums and genitals are on display on every street-corner kiosk, yet there is a morbid fear of the least display of chastity.

The Muslims rightly despise us because we have lost all self-respect; because we are not the people of the West any longer, but the people of the alchemical crucible of constant, ruinous transvaluation.

The West cannot turn its back on God and retain any territory anywhere, and when I say God I am not speaking of the god of the rabbis.

Roots, not symptoms, Monsieur Raspail.

***

Israeli war criminal: General Yoav Gallant

Editor's Note: Mass murderer Yoav Gallant is not being sought as a war crime suspect anywhere in the West and he is hardly even known outside of Palestine.

Man responsible for Israel's cruelest wars only attracts praise

By Gideon Levy | Haaretz | July 16, 2009

A huge weight has been lifted off our chests: Maj. Gen. Yoav Gallant will stay in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Although Gallant was not named deputy chief of staff, Defense Minister Ehud Barak publicly declared that he views him as a candidate to succeed Gabi Ashkenazi as chief of staff. The military correspondents, those who only spoke glowingly of Gallant during the entire appointments commotion, put their minds at ease. And the brainwashed public, which shows no interest in learning what our soldiers did in Gaza, were also put at ease.

The fact that this feted general is directly responsible for two brutal military operations in Gaza which have no equal - Summer Rains and Cast Lead - did not even warrant a mention in the public forum. While more and more suspicions and well-founded allegations over the IDF's behavior in Gaza, especially during Operation Cast Lead (December 2008 - January, 2009), surface all over the world, here a general of this "war" - really a brutal assault on a helpless population - only attracts praise.

Suspected war crimes? Violations of High Court rulings? No mention of those at all. Gallant has always been in favor of large operations in Gaza. He kept pushing for more strikes and more destruction, as much as possible. In the summer of 2006, his wish was granted and he took command of Operation Summer Rains. The result was 394 Palestinian deaths and a thousand wounded. The lone power station in Gaza was bombed along with the university and a number of bridges. A grand success.

At the time, nobody wondered why all this killing was necessary and who benefited from all this destruction. What was the reason for bombing a power station, except for meting out collective punishment, which has long proven to not only be a criminal act, but also a foolish one? Gallant emerged from "Summer Rains" unblemished.

He had the same success following Cast Lead. A war with almost no Israeli deaths is always a success, without commissions of inquiry and with no questions asked. To hell with the horrible price exacted from the other side, including the hundreds of women and children killed and the thousands of homes destroyed. Gallant commanded the most cruel war in Israel's history. In order to understand what happened in Gaza, it is worthwhile to read the report issued Wednesday (July 15) by the (army) reservist group "Breaking the Silence." The group recorded 54 testimonials of 30 combat troops that should come to represent the dark period in history that was this war, a war over which a blacker-than-black flag flies.

From the "neighbor procedure" of using people as human shields, which is a gross violation of a High Court ruling, a public scandal in itself; to the spirit of words uttered by a commander who is quoted by a number of the soldiers as saying that was preferable to harm bystanders than to hesitate in hurting the enemy. "If you are not sure, shoot," one of the soldiers quoted him as saying. The soldier added, "The firepower was insane ... In urban warfare, everyone is an enemy. There is no difference between innocent civilians and enemies."

It is for this that Gallant is responsible. He orchestrated a war in which there were almost no instances of combat, all the while inculcating an awful attitude within the IDF, one that says it is permissible for us to do anything: to drop thousands of bombs, shells, and missiles in addition to phosphorus shells and flechettes; to kill whole families and to sow destruction on a horrific scale while considering it all a success.

"They didn't set a goal for us," one of the combat soldiers said in the report, which recounts the destruction the soldiers wreaked just for its own sake. "I don't know what the objective of the war was."

Our Southern Command chief is a hero against the weak. While he rose through the ranks at sea, where his resumé is full of top-secret missions, his stint on land is nothing to write home about. He always makes sure to be photographed wearing dark sunglasses, his personal weapon while "on duty." In the meantime, the deep baritone voices of the military correspondents on television shower praise upon him in light of his grand achievements. But the truth is that this is a joke, a sad military joke that is drenched in blood. It was one of the most advanced arsenals of weapons in the world against those who launch empty pipes; hundreds of tons of smart and stupid bombs against factories and schools; precision-guided unmanned aerial vehicles that killed children; the tiny few of our dead, many from friendly fire incidents. In summation: military heroism on the cheap.

All these factors will not hold up Gallant's promotion. They will be credited to him as sparkling successes on his way to the top. And it is only the soldier who gave the 54th testimonial in the "Breaking the Silence" report who understood what the general who is a candidate for chief of staff did not: "I didn't leave there with a feeling of heroism or great sacrifice. Just plain disgusted, bored and stupid. I did not feel I did anything significant. I convinced myself, 'Okay, I was in Gaza, I can tell my buddies.'" Like him, Galant also told his buddies, and the buddies bought it with giddiness and blind admiration.

***

Letter from a Supporter

Editor's note: I sometimes get discouraged that Judaism Discovered has received almost no publicity in print or much of any wholesale distribution (except by the courageous author and bookseller Texe Marrs). Ads and publicity for the book are banned by The Nation, the New York Review of Books, The Remnant, Catholic Family News and Ted Pike, and assorted publications Right and Left. Angelus Press was urged to distribute it and rejected it in no uncertain terms. For all that, Judaism Discovered has managed to sell 3800 copies, thanks be to God, mostly by word-of-mouth and plugs from activists Jeff Rense, Henry Makow, Willis Carto, Maurice Pinay and Herman Otten.

Every now and then someone lifts my spirits, however, and this is one such occasion:

Dear Michael

...I do daily battle with Zionist shills on the local newspaper's forum. Actually, there are no more than three individuals who oppose me, but each of them uses a half a dozen screen names in order to promote the appearance of popular support for 'Israel.' I am rather uncompromising in my attacks. Bearing in mind that my town is stuffed full of poorly-educated, charismatic 'Zionist Christian' preachers, it is notable that none but the three Zio-shills take exception to my pronouncements.

Since I acquired Judaism Discovered, it is particularly effortless to shut down the shills. Thank you again for a tremendous piece of work...Judaism Discovered will certainly, finally, be recognized as a reference equal to or better than Eisenmenger's work.

It is my hope that I help to educate people reading the forums. No matter how weird things get, I fully understand and accept the folk wisdom of 'better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.' One never knows who one is influencing. Particularly in the case of young people, one cannot know which among the youth will grow up to be great leaders.

As I observe comment on all corners of the Internet, I am impressed with how seemingly widespread is solid knowledge of the fraudulent nature of rabbinic Judaism. Such was not the case ten years ago. You have been massively influential, even though you have received scarcely any honor from the people you are seeking to protect.

I am truly optimistic, looking ahead twenty years or so.

All the best,

Stan

Louisiana, USA

***

Israeli Nazi Occupation Troops Police Segregation Fence

This video, filmed July 10, 2009 near the Palestinian West Bank village of Nilin, in six brief, horrifying minutes shows what daily life is like for Palestinian patriots protesting the segregation wall which the Israeli Nazis maintain to keep occupied territory Palestinian-free. You will see the daily routine of physical assaults, guns drawn and armored personnel carriers.

If any other nation on earth was using these means to enforce racial and religious segregation they would be targets of universal boycotts and utter revulsion. Instead, the Israeli occupation enjoys the support of President Obama, Pope Benedict and the heads of Europe, Australia and Canada. All the West's chatter against "racism and bigotry" is suspended in the special case of the Israeli occupation. This suspension reflects the degree to which Talmudic ethics and morality have penetrated the West.

Zionist media executives at the New York Times and elsewhere have ruled that the ugly Israeli fences and walls must be called by the politically correct term, "separation barriers," rather than segregation fences or apartheid walls. By this twisted logic, the Jim Crow American South should have been known as the "separated South." But of course because the American South was Christian it is permissible to term their policies "segregation," while the morally superior Israeli policies are afforded the cosmetic "separation" euphemism. The Talmud's exalted view of Zionists is, once again, adopted as a journalistic standard by the supposedly secular American media.

We wish to acknowledge the fact that this video is made possible by the courage of dissident Israelis, including Sarit Michaeli, who operate the cameras. We also wish to recall that the Israeli-Nazi occupation also harms the occupiers who, by engaging in the dehumanization of Palestinians, diminish themselves in the process. A very important fact to remember: We hate Zionism, we do not hate Zionists. We pity them for the psychic wounds they inflict on themselves.

Letter to the New York Times: "Cue the folks who bring up 'rocket launchers and suicide bombers' in order to excuse the Israeli government's unending oppression of Palestinians, while ignoring the absolute power, strength, and cynicism of the Israeli War Machine. I don't condone violence of any sort, but the stark injustice and disproportionality of Israel's violent treatment of Palestinians makes Palestinian pea shooters and home-made rockets a joke. Too bad it gives the Israelis and their cheerleaders in the U.S. yet another easy excuse for continued occupation of Palestinian lands and the dehumanizing treatment of the Palestinians, purely based on race." — Nestor

***

War Criminals who are professors at Tel Aviv University

Asa Kasher: Academic Ethics, Censorship, and Assassination – Philosopher of pragmatics and ethics, Kasher is an Israel Prize winner (2000) and the Laura Schwarz-Kipp Chair In Professional Ethics and Philosophy of Practice at Tel Aviv University (TAU).

Kasher combines his work at TAU with instruction at the National Security College and has written the ethical codes for scores of state sectors, including the Police, the National Bank, and for Knesset Members. Notably, he is the author of the military's ethical code: The Spirit of the IDF: Values and Basic Norms (1994). Kasher has developed the rationale and justification for military doctrines including the use of anti-personnel munitions, assassinations, and torture.

From TAU he co-headed the army team which composed Israel's revisionist "Doctrine of Just War" defining "terrorism" as all armed activity 'not on behalf of any state', something 'always morally unjustified'. Kasher thereby produced Israel's "Doctrine of the Just War of Fighting Terror" where 'from the point of view of Military Ethics, a terrorist is a terrorist is a terrorist', and must be met with overwhelming force. This includes torture, assassination ("preventive killing"), and pre-emptive violence. Kasher is a member of the Military Censorship Committee, has served on the National Security Council, and is Head of the Inter-University Committee on Academic Ethics.

Yitzhak Ben-Israel: Weapons Design & Deployment: Former head of the Israeli air force's R&D program and the military's overall R&D Directorate (MAFAT), and is a double Israel Prize winner for security contributions.

As Chair of the Defense Industry Lobby Ben-Israel is one of the most powerful figures in Israel's arms industry – a status reflected in his additional post as Chair of the Israel-India Parliamentary Friendship League (India is Israel's largest weapons client). A TAU professor since 2002, Ben-Israel is the key figure responsible for bringing together each of the academic, industrial, political, and military components of Israel's arms industry, with TAU providing both venue and resources.

Since mid-2006, Ben-Israel has been linked with the live "testing" of so-called "DIME" (Dense Inert Metal Explosive) munitions (delivered by unmanned aerial vehicles) in Gaza; and since early 2007, Ben-Israel has been advocating a major ground and air assault on the Gaza Strip...With the commencement of the Gaza campaign, Ben-Israel threw his weight behind (Defense Minister) Barak, praising his leadership in the offensive and encouraging greater force: 'If we hit them hard enough, they might come to the conclusion that they shouldn't fire any more rockets.'

Following the ceasefire, Ben-Israel heralded the advent of a 'a milestone that would be etched in the historic memory of the Middle East for many years' –foremost amongst the gains of the conflict he perceived was the shift in the army's approach to targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure: 'the recent operation showed that even mosques [...] are no longer an obstacle in the face of Israel using its military power' he wrote, arguing that the civilian losses meant that for Palestinians 'the path of resistance has failed, big time.'

Commissioning War Crimes: TAU and the Doctrine of Disproportionality

War Crimes and TAU's INSS Dept. - In the wake of the Lebanon War, in which Israel introduced various new weapons technologies as well as doctrinal innovations, high-ranking officers and senior planners set about developing a strategy to remedy the perceived damage done to Israel's 'balance of deterrence.' The "Dahiya Doctrine", named for the Shi'ite residential quarter of Beirut reduced to rubble in the war, was first articulated regarding Lebanese civilian populations.

In late 2008, Giora Eiland, ex-chair of the National Security Council and now INSS senior research fellow, produced a strategic document at TAU's INSS in which he argued the 'impossibility of defeating Hizbullah' meant Israeli forces were henceforth to plan for a war 'between Israel and Lebanon and not between Israel and Hizbollah.'

This, Eiland argued, would 'lead to the elimination of the Lebanese military, the destruction of the national infrastructure, and intense suffering among the population,' ends he justified by arguing 'the suffering of hundreds of thousands of people are consequences that can influence Hizbollah's behavior more than anything else.'Acknowledging that such a doctrine 'may damage Israel's legitimacy, incur international pressure, and even prompt a clear directive from the United States to stop the destruction', Eiland concluded by advocating 'high level professional military dialogue between Israel and [...] military leaders in these countries' in order to foster 'the requisite support.'

Eiland's TAU colleague and head of the INSS's "IDF Force Structure" unit, Gabriel Siboni, expanded on the new doctrine in an October 2008 INSS Insight bulletin entitled "Disproportionate Force:

"Israel's Concept of Response in Light of the Second Lebanon War."In it, he made explicit the need for the military to target civilian over and above military targets: The army, he wrote, must 'refrain from the cat and mouse games of searching for Qassam rocket launchers [... and] not be expected to stop the rocket and missile fire against the Israeli home front through attacks on the launchers themselves.' Instead, Israel was to:

'[...] act immediately, decisively, and with force that is disproportionate to the enemy's actions and the threat it poses. Such a response aims at inflicting damage and meting out punishment to an extent that will demand long and expensive reconstruction processes. The strike must be carried out as quickly as possible, and must prioritize damaging assets over seeking out each and every launcher.'

Siboni's paper identified Syria and Lebanon, while noting that the 'approach is applicable to the Gaza Strip as well'; he concluded by positing the army's 'primary goal' as now being to 'leave the enemy floundering in expensive, long term processes of reconstruction.'

This doctrine of disproportionality and civilian infrastructure targeting developed at TAU by its preeminent strategic planners and military officers is clearly in extreme violation of international law, not least Articles 52 and 54 of Protocol 1 of the Geneva Conventions which govern the protection of civilian infrastructure in war. The principle of distinction between civilian and military objects and populations in war is a foundational precept of International Humanitarian Law and failure to abide by this principle constitutes one of the most serious war crimes. To do so as part of an explicitly premeditated strategy is rare in its wilful contempt for international law.

Less than two months after the TAU scholars' documents were made public Israel's assault on the Gaza Strip began. At its end, three weeks later, preliminary assessments confirmed an overwhelming civilian death toll, with 895 of more than 1300 dead classified as civilian and an estimated 43% of all fatalities made up of women and children. Following their preliminary investigations, Amnesty International wrote to outgoing Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on January 16th 2009, asking her to impress upon her Israeli counterpart the need for Israel to allow investigations of war crimes. The letter, apparently written without knowledge of the doctrinal debates covered above, observed 'there is growing evidence that Israel has failed to adhere to the principles of distinction and proportionality in its military action'; Amnesty noted that '[e]vidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity is mounting daily'.

The UN's Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Palestine stressed the apparent premeditative character of these crimes when he described the carnage in Gaza as raising 'the spectre of systematic war crimes.' The civilian focus of Israel's offensive was indeed neither accidental nor mysterious; it was – in good part – designed and enabled by generals, scholars, scientists working out of Tel Aviv University.

The same week, Tel Aviv University announced the appointment of the army's Col. Pnina Sharvit-Baruch to teach international law.

Sharvit-Baruch is the army's principal international law counsel and was responsible for green-lighting the decision to target civilian infrastructure and for a 'relaxing of the rules of engagement' regarding civilians on the part of the army's International Law Division. Col Pnina Sharvit-Baruch provided legal cover for war crimes during the Gaza invasion.

Col. Sharvit-Baruch and her staff manipulated standard interpretations of international law to expand the scope of army operations to include civilian targets. Haim Ganz has called Col. Sharvit-Baruch's approach to international law "devious jurisprudence that permits mass killing". According to the Israeli media, she personally approved the first wave of air strikes in Gaza that targeted a police graduation ceremony, killing at least 40 cadets. Although police forces have civilian status in international law, and are therefore protected from military reprisal, Col Sharvit-Baruch is reported to have revised her opinion of the attack's legality during the many months of planning.

In addition, she is said to have "relaxed" the rules of engagement, approved widespread house demolitions and the uprooting of farmland, and sanctioned the use of incendiary weapons such as white phosphorus over the densely populated enclave.

She also offered legal justification for the targeting of buildings in which civilians were known to be located as long as they had been warned first to leave. Schools, mosques and a university were among the many civilian buildings shelled by the Israeli army during the 22-day operation.

Her decisions have been widely criticized by international human rights organisations as well as by international law experts in Israel. Professor Yuval Shany, who teaches public international law at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, stated regarding the strike against the police cadets: "If you follow that line, there is not much that differentiates [the cadets] from [Israeli] reservists or even from 16-year-olds who will be drafted [into the Israeli army] in two years."

Col Sharvit-Baruch's predecessor, Daniel Reisner, noted that her staff had stretched the accepted meanings of international law. The army's operating principle, he added, was: "If you do something for long enough, the world will accept it."

Orna Ben-Naftali, the dean of law at the College of Management in Rishon Letzion, said the army's conduct in Gaza had made international law "bankrupt". "A situation is created in which the majority of the adult men in Gaza and the majority of the buildings can be treated as legitimate targets. The law has actually been stood on its head."

Most academic staff in Israel supported Col. Sharvit-Baruch's appointment, said Daphna Golan, a program director at the Minerva Center for Human Rights at Hebrew University.

Adi Ophir, Jan. 12, 2009: "...In order to save one Jewish child, one is ready to sacrifice the lives of 100,000 of theirs. The number may vary of course; 100,000 is the figure I heard this morning with exactly this formulation from a colleague, a distinguished professor of Hebrew and Yiddish literature (at Tel Aviv University). He was speaking in public, very conscious of and proud in his position...."

***

Hundreds of Muslim Prisoners Killed by CIA Agent in '01

U.S. Said to Have Averted Inquiry Into ’01 Afghan Killings

By James Risen

New York Times | July 11 (but online July 10) 2009

WASHINGTON — After a mass killing of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Taliban prisoners of war by the forces of an American-backed warlord during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, Bush administration officials repeatedly discouraged efforts to investigate the episode, according to government officials and human rights organizations.

American officials had been reluctant to pursue an investigation — sought by officials from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the State Department, the Red Cross and other human rights groups — because the warlord, Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, was on the payroll of the Central Intelligence Agency and his militia worked closely with United States Special Forces in 2001, several officials said. They said the United States also worried about undermining the American-supported Karzai government, in which General Dostum has served as a defense official.

“At the White House, nobody said ‘no’ to an investigation, but nobody ever said ‘yes,’ either,” said Pierre Prosper, the former war crimes ambassador for the United States. “The first reaction of everybody there was ‘Oh, this is a sensitive issue. This is a touchy issue politically.’ ”

It is not clear how — or if — the Obama administration will address the issue. But in recent weeks, State Department officials have quietly tried to thwart General Dostum’s reappointment as military chief of staff to the president, according to several senior officials, and suggested that the administration may not be hostile to an inquiry.

The question of culpability for the prisoner deaths — which may have been the most significant war crime in Afghanistan since the 2001 American-led invasion — has taken on new urgency since the general, an important ally of President Hamid Karzai, was reinstated to his government post last month. He had been suspended last year and living in exile in Turkey after he was accused of threatening a political rival at gunpoint.

“If you bring Dostum back, it will impact the progress of democracy and the trust people have in the government,” Mr. Prosper said. Arguing that the Obama administration should investigate the 2001 killings, he added, “There is always a time and place for justice.”

While President Obama has deepened the United States’ commitment to Afghanistan, sending 21,000 more American troops there to combat the growing Taliban insurgency, his administration has also tried to distance itself from Mr. Karzai, whose government is deeply unpopular and widely viewed as corrupt... (Emphasis supplied)

Hoffman's afterword: The CIA's Dostum perpetrated a gruesome mass murder and thousands more of his "Taliban" prisoners died of disease, starvation and mistreatment in appalling conditions in dungeons. The Afghan people want an honest government. As long as Afghanistan is ruled by warlords like Dostum and Karzai's corrupt joke of a government, America will send the finest special operations troops in the world there to no avail. We will not conquer the Taliban under such circumstances.

***

The Bastard epithet in Talmudic Judaism

The habitual liars sometimes claim that they don't take the Talmud seriously, or "it's just a series of debates," or quotes from it are an "anti-semitic fabrication" which are "taken out of context," and "we don't follow the Talmud."

Strange how reality collides with disinformation. Jesus is a "bastard" according to the filthy Talmud and -- wonder of wonders -- He is a "bastard" to the Gur Hassidim of counterfeit-"Israel" --

From the July 2, 2009 Jerusalem Post: ‘Watch out, missionaries!"

Excerpt: ...They (the Talmudists) curse (Christian missionaries) in English, usually accented. The police keep the (threatening Talmudic) crowd a short distance away from the (Christian) club; otherwise they do nothing.

The term “bastard” is also popular with the Gur Hassidim seen in the video, but it’s usually in reference to Jesus. “They took some bastard and they believe he rose from the grave,” says one haredi (Hasid) filmed last year taunting the Messianics who were giving away second-hand clothes outside the chess club.

“Where is your bastard?” the man demands, laughing quietly.

About two months after the video was taken, the club, near the entrance to the town’s market, was burned down in the middle of the night. (Rebuilt, it now has bars over the rear entrance.)

Some time later, dozens of liters of gasoline were poured around the club’s perimeter in the daytime, when several elderly Russian immigrants were playing chess inside, say local Messianics.

Members of the Arad congregation, which numbers about 50, say they’ve had their tires slashed dozens of times. They’ve been surrounded, threatened and cursed by Gur Hassidim in the market, on the streets or in their homes for about five years. In all this time they can only recall one arrest of a suspect, and he was released immediately.

I tried three times, in person and by phone, to speak to Yuval Paz, Arad’s police chief, and he was never available, nor did he call me back.

(End quote. The video can be obtained here)

Research note

Consider the modern Vatican's texts on Judaism, Christianity and Jesus in light of this material from a Judaic source:

"David Friedlander, one of the leaders of early Reform (Judaism), advocated conversion to Christianity, and asked the Christian church to allow the Jews to convert to Christianity, with the proviso that the Jews wouldn't have to believe in Jesus. See The New Paths by Rabbi Dr. J. H. Hertz for more details." (Emphasis supplied)

***

Talmudic Zionists soak female reporter in spit

Talmudic mob in Jerusalem: they spit on the Cross and they spit on women

***

Reporter feels mob's hate in the Holy City

By Anne Barker

ABC News July 6, 2009 (updated July 7)

'Humiliated and degraded': ABC Middle East correspondent Anne Barker

JERUSALEM -- ABC's Middle East correspondent Anne Barker became caught in violent street protests involving ultra-Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem at the weekend. This is her graphic account of her ordeal.

As a journalist I've covered more than my share of protests. Political protests in Canberra (Australia). Unions protesting for better conditions. Angry, loud protests against governments, or against perceived abuses of human rights.

I've been at violent rallies in East Timor. I've had rocks and metal darts thrown my way. I've come up against riot police.

But I have to admit no protest - indeed no story in my career - has distressed me in the way I was distressed at a protest in Jerusalem on Saturday (July 4) involving several hundred ultra-Orthodox Jews. This particular protest has been going on for weeks.

Orthodox Jews are angry at the local council's decision to open a municipal carpark on Saturdays - or Shabbat, the day of rest for Jews.

It's a day when Jews are not supposed to do anything resembling work, which can include something as simple as flicking a switch, turning on a light or driving.

So even opening a simple carpark to accommodate the increasing number of tourists visiting Jerusalem's Old City is highly offensive to Orthodox Jews because it's seen as a desecration of the Shabbat, by encouraging people to drive.

I was aware that earlier protests had erupted into violence on previous weekends - Orthodox Jews throwing rocks at police, or setting rubbish bins alight, even throwing dirty diapers or rotting rubbish at anyone they perceive to be desecrating the Shabbat.

But I never expected their anger would be directed at me.

I was mindful I would need to dress conservatively and keep out of harm's way. But I made my mistake when I parked the car and started walking towards the protest, not fully sure which street was which. By the time I realised I'd come up the wrong street it was too late.

I suddenly found myself in the thick of the protest - in the midst of hundreds of ultra-Orthodox Jews in their long coats and sable-fur hats. They might be supremely religious, but their behavior - to me - was far from charitable or benevolent.

As the protest became noisier and the crowd began yelling, I took my recorder and microphone out of my bag to record the sound. Suddenly the crowd turned on me, screaming in my face. Dozens of angry men began spitting on me.

Spit like rain

I found myself herded against a brick wall as they kept on spitting - on my face, my hair, my clothes, my arms.

It was like rain, coming at me from all directions - hitting my recorder, my bag, my shoes, even my glasses.

Big gobs of spit landed on me like heavy raindrops. I could even smell it as it fell on my face.
Somewhere behind me - I didn't see him - a man on a stairway either kicked me in the head or knocked something heavy against me.

I wasn't even sure why the mob was angry with me. Was it because I was a journalist? Or a woman? Because I wasn't Jewish in an Orthodox area? Was I not dressed conservatively enough?

In fact, I was later told, it was because using a tape-recorder is itself a desecration of the Shabbat even though I'm not Jewish and don't observe the Sabbath.

It was lucky that I don't speak Yiddish. At least I was spared the knowledge of whatever filth they were screaming at me.

The Holy People practice their religion of peace, love and tolerance in Jerusalem

As I tried to get away I found myself up against the line of riot police blocking the crowd from going any further.

Israeli police in their flak jackets and helmets, with rifles and shields, were yelling just as loudly back at the protesting crowd. I found them something of a reassurance against the angry, spitting mob.

I was allowed through, away from the main protest, although there were still Orthodox Jews on the other side, some of whom also yelled at me, in English, to take my recorder away.

Normally I should have stayed on the sidelines to watch the protest develop.

But when you've suffered the humiliation and degradation of being spat on so many times - and you're covered in other people's spit - it's not easy to put it to the back of your mind and get on with the job. I left down a side street and walked the long way back to the car, struggling to hold back the tears.

***

They hate the sound of a woman's voice in song

Wow, this one is really going to blow the circuits of a Jesuit priest I know of who is fond of giving sermons about the warm fuzzies he derives from the allegedly loving, kind and mystical humanism of Talmudic-Kabbalistic rabbis. This Jesuit thinks that is a good description of Judaism in general, as well.

The truth is that Orthodox Judaism is misogyny personified. It is the religion of women-hating. Most Westerners, when they think of religious misogyny, react like Pavlov's dog, in other words, as they have been trained in behavior modification laboratories known as western "education" and western "democratic" media --they immediately conjure Islam in this regard. Because there is so much cowardice in our society most dare not countenance the failings of Judaism in this regard, even if they are aware of those failings. For those who did not know, after you read this you will know and that knowledge puts you under obligation to respond.

From today's Jerusalem Post:

'Opt for prison over hearing girls sing'

Former Sephardi chief rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu has called on religious IDF (Israeli army) soldiers to choose imprisonment over hearing a woman singing during military events and ceremonies, an Israeli paper revealed on Tuesday.

The influential national-religious rabbi said that he was asked by soldiers what they should do when their commanders order them to stay at an event in which a woman was singing. Orthodox Jewish law prohibits men from hearing a woman sing on modesty grounds.

"I told them - what should you do? The Talmud tells you… It is better you go to jail, disregard your commander and don't hear the voice of a woman singing," Eliyahu said in a recorded sermon broadcast Monday night (July 6) and carried by the newspaper Ma'ariv.

The IDF's Chief of Staff's Office recently issued a prohibition on (Talmud-)observant soldiers walking out of military assemblies to avoid hearing women singing. Chief education officer Brig. Gen. Eli Shermeister said that incidents of religious soldiers walking out of ceremonies to avoid the religious transgression were a "worrisome phenomenon," as they were liable to weaken group cohesion. (End quote; emphasis supplied).

Hoffman's afterword:

Observe the mendacious alibi the Jerusalem Post concocts to explain away rabbinic Judaism's insane hatred for the melody of a song from a mother, sister, daughter or female friend: it is prohibited on the grounds of modesty.

False! This psychotic prohibition is consonant with all of the Talmud's other miserably low and insane estimations of women (as witches, meat from a butcher shop and other filthy imprecations against the female sex). Modesty has nothing to do with it. A holy song, a mournful song, a beautiful song does not incite lust, except in Talmudically-minded (i.e. dirty-minded) bochurim and Talmidim. They hate women and since the song of a woman humanizes her, therefore singing by women is banned. The Zionist hasbara organ, Jerusalem Post, does not dare admit this documented fact.

Read my book Judaism Discovered for the relevant documentation and elaboration.

The effect of Israeli war crimes in Gaza six months later

Editor's note: Here is more testimony of the ongoing Israeli holocaust against the Palestinians, war crimes by the so-called "Jewish state," which most of the rulers, intelligentsia, media, and human rights mavens of the West deny. Consequently, they are all holocaust deniers. The Zionists claim that Pope Pius XII was "silent" about the Nazi "Holocaust" and this is a major issue in the western media confronting the Catholic Church. But how much of an issue is the silence regarding the Israeli holocaust -- a holocaust which continues to this day? Are you silent about --and therefore complicit in-- Israeli mass murder of the Palestinian people?

online slideshow of Israeli war crimes in Gaza

A life in Ruins

In the immediate aftermath of Israel's bloody three-week war with Hamas in January, Peter Beaumont travelled to Gaza and met the Palestinians devasted by the death of their families and the destruction of their neighborhoods. Six months later he returns to find they are still waiting - to rebuild both their homes and their lives

by Peter Beaumont • The Observer, July 5, 2009

Shifa Salman, in the ruins of her family home, which was destroyed by the Israeli incursion into the Gaza Strip in January 2009. Photographs: Antonio Olmos

The force of the explosion that destroyed Shifa Salman's house in the northern Gaza district of Jabal al-Rayas folded floor into floor as easily as pastry. It pushed pillars through concrete, reconfiguring her home into a bristling dome. The tail-fin of one of the Israeli bombs responsible still sits on top of the rubble, innocuous as a child's discarded toy. These days, pigeons and sparrows nest in the cave-like space carved out by the detonation inside the ruins where mattresses and bags of flour are stored, the latter stencilled with the initials of the World Food Programme. Sleek, aggressive cockerels patrol the floor, flying at intruders.
Six months after Israel's war against Gaza, Shifa, a 20-year-old student, sleeps with her family behind the fallen house. A trodden path leads through the rubble to a row of cramped, ramshackle shelters open to the elements and roofed with hessian sacks. They are identical to the cattle pens that stand beside them.

On closer examination I can see that the frames have been constructed out of cast-off sections of wood and metal lashed together. What walls that exist are fashioned out of old pallets and branches woven into crude wicker. Or more sacking, staked into the soil to make rudimentary windbreaks.

Shifa's family are Bedouin. Until recently they farmed this land close to the barrier, in an area once used for missile launches against the Jewish communities on the far side. This was one of Gaza's limited areas of agricultural production in a densely crowded urban area, home to 1.4 million people. Because of the missiles, this neighbourhood of farms and little factories was treated to a scorched earth policy.

Inside Shifa's own tiny, dirt-floored "compound" a fire pit has been scooped out of the earth and filled with twigs. On it sits the blackened pan in which Shifa and her mother make stews of molokhiya - spinach-like greens - with chicken, garlic and onions. "This is my kitchen," says Shifa shyly, in English. A piece of broken board is propped on two drums to function as table. Here a jam jar sits, holding a pestle and a solitary sharp knife.

I first came to this house in January, in the immediate aftermath of Israel's war against Gaza, visiting the Salman family almost every day. The family were sleeping in the ruins to shelter from the rain, surrounded by the stinking bodies of their sheep, killed during the assault. Then, Shifa complained that the frightened younger children were kept awake at night by the sound of packs of dogs scavenging among the carrion outside.

A slight and pretty woman with dark brows, Shifa is walking along a road where the ruined houses of her neighbourhood stand on each side like stone-piled graves in a desert. It is 7am and she is on her way to meet the bus that will take her to university. She is wearing a black abaya, the head-to-ankle veil that is the uniform of the university, and carrying a pile of her books. Both books and the veil were donated by the college after Shifa's family lost most of what it owned. "There used to be a factory here," says Shifa, pointing at a collapsed, blue-painted metal structure. I am reminded of the last time I saw this building. A herd of cows lay slaughtered in the field outside.

"My life used to be so good when we had a home. Now it is awful." She wipes a tear away, trying to hide what she is doing. "This street used to be full of cars," Shifa explains. "It was easy to get to university. Now I have to walk for half an hour before I can get a ride. There used to be houses here, but everyone fled after the F-16s attacked. After the tanks attacked. Only a few of us have stayed."

So few, in fact, I quickly learn their names. There is the Khader family, who have built a complex cloth-walled shelter on top of the ruins of one of their houses, a structure that has expanded over the months as new rooms have been added. One day I find the men of the family crawling into a dark hole beneath the house to chip out tiles from what was once their ground floor to sell for food, disturbing a nest of pinkly squirming newborn mice.

There is the owner of the dairy parlor, Mohammed al-Fayoun, whose cattle were killed. He has set up business again beneath the bent and twisted rafters of his metal roof, where he sits daily in a plastic chair. He complains his customers are still too scared to visit him this close to the border with Israel.

While her fathers and uncles work the land, Shifa is representative of a new generation - the first from her family to go to university. She says she wants to be a geography teacher and has an exam today. "I used to have a television in my room," she says, passing the house of Nabil Nasser Hassan, once one of her neighbours, whose demolished home is now surrounded by a stockade of corrugated metal sheeting to keep out looters hunting for pipes and wire to recycle. "At the beginning, people came to give us coupons and blankets. But no one has come to see us for a long time. No one has spoken to us about rebuilding our home. I'm scared living where we live. All of the family is, especially my sister Safa when she hears the [Israeli] jets."

It is not only Shifa's daily walk at 7am through the ruins to reach the Islamic University that is a mark of her changed life. Before the destruction visited by the bombs, tanks and bulldozers, Shifa says, she would sit up after dark, reading her books in her own room, which was decorated with posters of animals. Now when the light fades, she must cease her studying. "I used to spend all night working. I'm good," she says with confidence. "But now I'm struggling. And I know if I can succeed, I can make life better for my family."

Israel's Operation Cast Lead began on 27 December 2008. By the time of its conclusion on 18 January, with the declaration by both Israel and Hamas - which governs Gaza - of their own unilateral ceasefires, more than 1,300 Palestinians had been killed, many of them civilians. They had perished under an Israeli rain of bombs, bullets, missiles and artillery fire, including white phosphorous munitions.

While Israel insisted the war was designed to bring a halt to the launching of home-made missiles out of the Gaza Strip, its targets suggested wider aims, not least the dismantling of Palestinian institutions. Police stations, ministries, schools and hospitals were hit. Orange groves and tunnel tents for growing strawberries and vegetables were uprooted. And thousands of houses were damaged.

On my return, I scour Gaza for evidence that anything has changed for the better in the months since the war ended. But houses and other buildings destroyed during the conflict remain as hollowed-out and dusty monuments to violence. In places, some owners have experimented with repairing buildings with an adobe made of mud and straw baked in the sun. But it is a very temporary solution.

In the office of Dr Ibrahim Radwan, the man appointed by the Hamas government to record the damage done in Israel's three-week war, I jot down the numbers that describe what happened. Some 3,800 homes and businesses badly damaged in one way or another - although he admits this includes some damaged in previous Israeli attacks. In addition, 80 government buildings were hit. Radwan has his own categories to describe the degrees of destruction, but after a week driving around Gaza, the damage conforms to its own types. The big metal walls of the workshops on Salahadeen Road, where the heaviest fighting took place, now leak light through hundreds of bullet perforations; other walls are splashed with the shrapnel of missiles fired from drones; blocks of flats hit by artillery fire show scorched holes. And across the north of the Gaza Strip stand the weird igloos of the bomb-flattened houses.

There are changes that I do register in the six months since the war ended. The bodies of dead animals have been removed and cleared away; the ruins have been sifted for human remains. It has expunged the odour of decay that was once tangy with the chemical flavour of explosives and spent phosphorous. The tangled remnants of an orange grove I drove past every day, tipped over and torn by military bull-dozers, has disappeared, razed for firewood.

And without concrete and steel, aluminium and glass, without tiles for roofs and cladding for stairs and bathrooms - all prevented from entering Gaza by Israel's continuing economic blockade - no rebuilding has begun. For those who suffered most, the war continues.

I run into Shifa's father by chance one day at Gaza City's flea market, in the Yarmouk district. He tells me he comes once every fortnight to look through stalls selling broken and unwanted things in the hope of finding something that might alleviate their circumstances. He shows me the contents of his white plastic shopping bag: two plastic joints for connecting water pipes. Bought in the hope that he might one day have a use for them.

It is not only the physical symptoms that persist as a reminder of what happened in Gaza. Sana al-Ar's family live in a light but sparsely furnished fifth-floor flat in a tower block in Shujaiya. There are photographs on the wall of 16-year-old Sana's younger brothers, Rakan and Ibrahim, and her father Mohammed - all killed during Israel's attack. Missing are pictures of her 18-year-old sister, Fida, and her brother's wife, Iman, who also perished. In a room decorated with gold curtains and floor cushions, Malak, the youngest surviving child, plays on the carpet, in a T-shirt printed with the slogan "Daddy's Little Tiger". But Daddy is gone.

Holocaust survivor Sana al-Ar

On 3 January, Israeli tanks attacked the area where Sana and her family lived. Their house - like Shifa's - was located close to the border, not far from a pretty, gold-domed mosque and a graveyard. Shifa Salman's family managed to flee. But Sana's family - her mother says - were blown to "pieces of meat". It is left to Sana's grandmother to recount the story, while the girl and her mother listen. She tells how a rocket hit the house, injuring Fida with shrapnel. She quickly bled to death. The father told the family to flee in their donkey cart, but a second missile exploded, fatally injuring him, too. I listen as Sana's grandmother describes how in the smoke from the explosion the weeping mother found her son Ibrahim "missing half his face". The family gathered what they could of their dead in a blanket and took them to a neighbour's house, where they were trapped, sitting with the bodies, for five days.

I had heard about Sana in January, from Dr Fadel Abu Hein at Gaza City's Community Training Center and Crisis Management. Fadel was sending teams of social workers and therapists to run workshops for the most badly affected children, even working with them as they sat on blankets in the rubble. As we talked about the types of trauma suffered by children during the conflict, he mentioned a girl who had seen most of her family die and had spent days trapped with their bodies. I had met her the following day, at the house of an uncle she was staying with. And I had tried to talk to Sana then. But sitting on a bed in a cold, bare basement room, she had been withdrawn behind a wall of grief, managing to speak barely a handful of words. Instead, it was the other relatives who had crowded the room who supplied answers to my questions. The only thing I learned was that she liked to paint, and so I had bought her pens and paper, since all of hers were lost.

Sitting in her new flat, Sana fetches the only drawing she says she has done since the killing of her brothers - in charcoal grey, against a shaded blue background, are the names of the boys. A day later, I learn from Nahid Hanrarah, the social worker who has worked most closely with Sana, that she has done other paintings, paintings of her family drenched in blood.

"Painting their names is an improvement," Nahid says. He adds that Sana is much improved, but when I ask her questions, she answers in fragmented sentences: "Things aren't too much better. Everything is still... I feel things are separate. The anger and the sadness. The one who could make us happy [Sana's father] is the one we've lost."

There are long pauses when Sana looks away. "People have tried to help me. There have been people at school ... " Sana mentions her irritation at those among her friends who insist on trying to talk to her about what happened on 3 January and in the days that followed. "I feel I can't concentrate at school like I used to," Sana explains. "I hate it because people at school keep asking how my family died. They think if I talk then it will help me. That is why I went to see Nahid. Because it makes me so upset.

I don't want to talk about it." Sana is also scared to go to the bathroom alone and, she tells me, she suffers with nightmares. I learn from talking to Nahid that Sana was suicidal when she was first referred to him. "She didn't want to live. She had no hope," he explains quietly.

It has not only been at school where Sana has been confronted by what happened. At home, too, she has had to deal with constant reminders of her loss from her mother, Laila, whose grief is even more debilitating.

"I think," Nahid suggests, "that Sana is the only one in the immediate family who really understands what happened to them, and who can help the family. Her mother can't do anything, really. So the responsibility has fallen on Sana. Sana is growing [as a person] from the knowledge of all the things that she passed through, which is helping her to overcome. But it is a process that is far from complete. They were a family of nine, now only four are left."

There are moments when you see an echo of how this family must once have been. Before the Israeli soldiers came. Before the war. Malak crawls on to her mother's knee with her doll and squeals loudly: "Bite her! Bite her!" Suddenly I realise that Sana is smiling at her mother. It is the first time in five visits to this family that I have seen her smile. And when she does, another girl is briefly visible.

And Sana is smiling again when I next see her. We are talking about ordinary things other than the horror that befell her; about the films she likes to watch - Bollywood and action films, X-Men - about her new computer, and the internet connection she is waiting for with excitement: "Before, we didn't have a computer. I've had it two weeks." Then the pain is in the room again. "The first thing I'm going to do is put pictures on it of my father and my sister and my brothers."

She seems sad, but not unreachable. I ask Sana if she will be going to the beach in the holidays, but it is her mother who answers: "We used to go to the sea, all of us together. We don't go any more ... " There are ghosts in the room that Laila cannot ignore. And because Laila cannot ignore them, Sana is also bound to observe them, and to mirror her mother's grief.

Laila says she has nothing left, and I remind her of Sana and Malak. She looks up at the pictures above her. "Rakan was the most beautiful," she sobs, as Sana begins to cry, quietly. "He was only four and a half. He was a very naughty boy. People kept saying to his father: 'This boy will be someone.'" When his sister went to carry him, I did not recognise him. He had come to pieces."

In Dr Fadel's office, decorated with pictures of dead Palestinian fighters, he tries to assess what has changed and what has not. Some people have begun to rebuild their lives, while others living in tents, or displaced, or living - like Shifa's family - among the ruins remain largely in the circumstances they were in when the war ended. "The biggest obstacle that we are facing is among those people whose problems have not ended - who live in a continuing war atmosphere. Nothing is happening about the destroyed homes, because we live in a continuing state of economic siege. So there are people still living in tents, or in the rubble."

Visiting his office one day I am confronted with evidence of how those dealing with damage from the conflict can progress. Hanging on one wall are pictures drawn by trauma-affected children, before-and-after images whose real subject is the effects of exposure to violence, and how it can be mediated. The "before" pictures show soldiers with guns, tanks and jets, images of destruction and death. The "after" pictures show the ordinary stuff of childhood: flying kites and images of family and friends and flowers, produced after lengthy work with the centre's social workers.

I mistakenly believe that they come from the recent conflict. I am informed that they pre-date the war - describing the experience of Israeli military incursions and air strikes. When I ask to see drawings produced after the January war I am led to another series of sketches that depict - so far - only fighting. And examining them, I am reminded of another picture I had seen a few days before in Khan Younis, in Gaza's south, in a child's bedroom.

I had first encountered Rewa'a Omer, aged 30, in the Nasser Hospital, standing between the beds of her two children, her daughter Ola and her son Yahya. It was a few days after the ceasefire and Rewa'a was clutching a bloody piece of clothing. An hour or so before, 10-year-old Ola, and Yahya, nine, had been standing close to their school gates with a group of other primary school children, waiting for a lift to take them home. As they stood chatting, an Israeli drone had fired a missile at a passing Hamas fighter on a motorbike three metres from the children. The blast had driven shrapnel into the legs of the children and a sliver into Yahya's eye.

Until I see the poster in Ola's bedroom, I think she has recovered better than her brother. It depicts a baby's smiling face. But someone has drawn trickles of blood coming from the nose and mouth, and added small scarlet cuts. Rewa'a tells me it was Ola who had disfigured it. I notice, too, that she has shaded around the baby's eyes so that the skin appears yellow. I think of how her brother's face was in his hospital bed, bruised under the bandages and stained with something like iodine.

Rewa'a's family are what passes for middle class in Gaza. Her husband was a police captain in the Palestinian National Authority before Hamas's assumption of full executive power in 2007, at the end of the most violent period of the so-called "internal fighting" between Fatah and Hamas. He does not work now but still receives his salary. Well-educated, Rewa'a speaks excellent English.

The family asks me for a copy of the photograph I took on the day the children were injured, and Rewa'a shows me an image saved on her phone, given to her by a neighbour, that shows her son being carried from the scene in someone's arms, his head limp and bloody. "It was on the television. And I was not there to protect them."

There are still some marks on her daughter's legs, like dark bruises. "My son was injured worse," she says. "He is still shy about wearing shorts because of the scarring. There was shrapnel in his eye that we did not know about. He had to go to Egypt to be operated on. They have recovered physically," Rewa'a adds, "but emotionally my daughter is more damaged than my son. That first time that she saw her brother bleeding has stuck with her. I think it will always be inside. She talks about what happened and her grades at school have suffered. It was a month and a half before she was ready to go back to school."

Rewa'a says that Ola is still frightened to go to the bus stop, and "the children are always fighting now. I worry all the time about them, waiting for them to come home from school."

Ola wants to tell the story of what happened to her. "The car was late. There was a sound and I woke up and everything was black. Things were broken and bleeding. Then people came to rescue my brother. Someone took my hand. I said: 'My brother! My brother!'" I ask Ola what she would like most. She does not have to think about it: "I would like to live somewhere safe."

Yahya wants to talk about Egypt, where he went to have the shrapnel taken from his eye.

"I went to the zoo and saw the pyramids!"

"I feel that there is nowhere safe in Gaza any more," adds Rewa'a. "I used to think before that ... you know, we are ordinary people. This [the violence] had nothing to do with me."

When I visit Rewa'a again we climb up on to the flat roof of their building. Fading home-made kites are propped in tangles of string against the balustrade. Rewa'a seems oppressed by the thought of what has happened. "I wish that they could have a normal childhood. I didn't grow up in Gaza, I grew up in Saudi Arabia. I came back to Gaza when I was 16. I had a beautiful childhood. I want the same for them. Not this.

"Every time the summer holidays come round I wish there was something that they could do. Hobbies that could help them grow. But there is nothing here like that." I remind her of something that Yahya told me when I asked what he wanted to be when he grew up. He replied that he wanted to be a fighter. "Yahya says that. But it is just an idea in his head."

As we are leaving I ask Rewa'a if she has any hope that things might change in Gaza. She seems sad. "Nothing ever changes. There is no rebuilding. Everything becomes worse.

Nothing here ever changes for the better."

Child survivors of the Israeli Holocaust in Gaza

The Secret Life of War: Journeys Through Modern Conflict by Peter Beaumont will be published in the U.S. on Sept. 1, 2009.

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Palin the Quitter

“Good point guards don’t quit and walk off the floor if the going gets tough. Today’s move (by Palin) falls further into the weirdness category; people don’t like a quitter.”

-John Weaver, July 3

Sarah Palin's announcement on July 3 of her intention to quit the Alaska governor's office is the action of a quitter and does not embody the virtues that have made our people great.

Her statements are often ill-informed and downright bizarre, even schizophrenic, as for example her advocacy of our government's trillion dollar Neo-Con/Zionist wars in Afghanistan and Iraq on one hand, with fiery demands for fiscal responsibility from government, on the other.

She takes the typical Republican position that it is very immoral to spend tax dollars on the welfare of the American people, but noble and just to spend it on foreign wars that kill more innocent people, make America more hated and win nothing except lucrative defense industry contracts for the Carlyle Group, the Bush family's investment firm. This is not Christian, it is not Biblical and Sarah Palin does not know what she is talking about. She mirrors the confusion of fundamentalist Protestant-Zionists rather than providing leadership based on a truly Biblical standard.

I viewed a brief video clip of her speech at her lakefront home with her husband Todd standing next to her. He was wearing a pair of wrinkled jeans, clearly visible to the camera. Such attire on so public an occasion of state is a symptom of decay, not the restoration of civilization or high standards of deportment. His choice of clothing sets a poor example for young people, as well as undercutting the Palin family's claims to being traditional. Mr. Palin's attire would have been unthinkable and regarded as disgraceful or mentally defective just a few decades ago.

It is my hope that Mrs. Palin stays out of politics and undertakes a great deal of prayer and personal reflection. Her best contribution to the nation and the world is to be a mother to her children.

She is not tough enough to take on the national media. She clearly wilted under their fire and was even whining when she spoke of the cost of her legal bills.

She can misquote Gen. MacArthur all she wants (he did not make the statement she attributed to him about retreat), Sarah Palin has combat fatigue and post-traumatic stress. She needs a long rest. I have zero faith in her as a leader of anything other than the local Wasila chapter of the League of Israeli Wars.

Sarah Palin, July 3, 2009:

"My decision was also fortified during this most recent trip to Kosovo and Landstuhl to visit our wounded soldiers overseas, those who truly sacrifice themselves in war for our freedom and our security....These troops and their important missions now, there is where truly the worthy causes are in this world and that’s where our public resources should be our public priority with time and resources...

"...the obscene national debt that we’re forcing our children to pay because of today’s big government spending. It is immoral..."

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Today's Talmud Lesson: Heretics and Thought Police

by Michael Hoffman

The almost constant harangue from the rabbinic world and its obedient mass media is centered on the theme of Christian and gentile heresy-hunting, with Zionists always cast as the persecuted victims and Christians and others portrayed as the torch-lit, lynch mob.

Absent from this ugly stereotype is any awareness of the extent to which the rabbis themselves violently persecute errant members of their own fold, especially Judaics who dare to criticize Orthodox rabbis or Talmud scholars ("Talmedei Chachomim").

The same principle of thought policing which the ADL, the Southern Poverty Law Center, Agudath Israel and similar repressive Zionist groups apply to revisionist historians and pro-Palestinian freethinkers, is applied inside Judaism to dissenters in their own ranks.

There is no legacy of freedom of speech or inquiry in Judaism. That heritage is the gift of the West, of ancient Greece and Rome and the ecclesia founded on the gospel of Jesus Christ. Mental freedom is a totally alien concept in Judaism, but it is the Catholic Church, which gave us the Magna Carta, which has the reputation for the suppression of liberty (thanks to books by Dan Brown and movies by Ron Howard), while Judaism is most often portrayed as a fount of humane learning and scholarship.

The Babylonian Talmud in tractate Sanhedrin specifies that anyone who disparages a Talmudist is a heretic ("apikorus"). In Judaism's authoritative legal code, the Shulchan Aruch (YD vol. 2), a category of heretics is given and defined. One such definition is "one who is Mevaze Talmedei Chachamim" (an opponent of the Talmud scholars). Criticism of a Talmudist ("Bizuy Talmedei Chachomim") is a terrible crime in Orthodox Judaism, punishable by destruction of the heretic's reputation, imprisonment, flogging, ritual curses, book-burning and in some cases, death.

His reputation is destroyed by disqualifying the "heretic" from being a witness to anything, from testifying about the commission of a crime, to serving as a witness to a "simcha" (witness to a wedding).

Hence, the rabbinic "halacha" (law) on heresy is applied to revisionist historians and intellectual critics of Judaism by our supposedly non-partisan media: the reputation of critics and revisionists is destroyed in the media, they are beaten by terror groups such as the JDL and Betar, they are cursed publicly as "race haters," their books are censored or destroyed, they are imprisoned and some even suffer death.

Because Hollywood and the New York media take no interest in filming or otherwise recording and publicizing rabbinic repression against dissenters within and outside of Judaism, the long history of Judaism's hatred for freethinkers and the Talmudic case law that supports this heresy-hunting is mostly unknown.

Copyright ©2009. All Rights Reserved

To learn more read Judaism Discovered by Michael Hoffman

Other Talmud Lessons by Michael Hoffman in this series:

Why Hollywood is so sex-obsessed

The Evil Eye

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