Friday, November 27, 2009

Court appeal for men imprisoned for distributing Hoffman's satire

Court hears appeal for two men imprisoned for distributing Hoffman's "Holohoax" satire

In Britain, in Leeds Crown Court, on July 10, 2009, Simon Sheppard received a sentence of 4 years and 10 months and Stephen Whittle two years and four months. Mr. Sheppard's sentence comprised 12 months concurrent on three counts relating to distribution of Tales of the Holohoax, a satirical comic book by Michael Hoffman.

On July 14 the Court of Appeal gave leave to appeal against conviction on all the Internet counts, but refused leave to appeal with respect to the hard copy counts. The full appeal before three British judges commenced on November 26, 2009 at the Law Courts, Strand, London, and runs through Nov. 27.

An appeal will also be made to the European Court of Human Rights over the decision by the Leeds Appeal Court judge not to review the notorious decision in Reg. v. Birdwood when Judge Pownall's decision that "the truth is no defense" - was upheld.

Friends of freedom of the press can can write the imprisoned men as follows:

Simon Sheppard, A8042AA, Wing B3-25, HMP Leeds, 2 Gloucester Terrace, Stanningley Road, Leeds, LS12 2TJ, United Kingdom.

Stephen Whittle, A8041AA, Everthorpe Prison, Beck Road, Everthorpe, Brough, East Yorkshire, HU15 1RB, United Kingdom.

Michael Hoffman comments

Several years ago I decided to withdraw Tales of the Holohoax from circulation because it was being pirated without the inclusion of my explanatory essay on satire, which had been published at the end of the comic, and because the comic book itself had become a source of misunderstanding concerning the nature of my scholarship.

Mr. Sheppard did not abide by my request to halt his copying of Tales of the Holohoax. He even sent it to a British synagogue, which was very foolish. Nevertheless, I have considerable sympathy for the plight of these two free press activists, and great respect for Mr. Sheppard’s refusal to “repent.”

Meanwhile, Kurt Westergaard, the artist who drew the most inflammatory of the anti-Muslim cartoons in Denmark is today a wealthy, free man. According to the Huffington Post of April 8, 2009:

“Prints of the Danish cartoon depicting Islam's Prophet Mohammed as a suicide bomber in 2005...will now be sold by the Denmark Free Press Society for $250 each. One thousand copies are to be printed and sold, with each having a designated number and signature by the artist, Kurt Westergaard...The image won Westergaard international fame....he has never apologized or expressed regret for the drawings...(or) for being a ‘free artist’...he enjoys the backing of free speech and free press advocates around the globe in this regard. A notable example of one such advocate...is NATO Secretary General and Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who defended the drawings in 2006”

Prison for those who distribute a satire of wildly exaggerated "Holocaust" fairy tales, and $250,000, international fame, and accolades from the media and the Secretary General of NATO to the author of anti-Mohammed satire.

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Monday, November 09, 2009

Trial by Media: Major Hasan is declared guilty

Rush to Judgment fits a Familiar Pattern

by Michael Hoffman | Nov. 9, 2009 | www.RevisionistHistory.org

On Nov. 8 the Sunday New York Times declared Nidal Malik Hasan guilty of the Fort Hood shootings (James C. McKinley Jr. and James Dao:"Fort Hood Gunman Gave Signals Before His Rampage"). This is the familiar trial by media accompanied by the equally familiar "lone nut" imputation.

David Berkowitz was declared solely guilty of the "Son of Sam" murders in New York in 1977, on the day of his arrest.

Ted Kaczynski was declared solely guilty of the "Unabomber" killings on the day of his arrest.

How do the media and the government know that an alleged perpetrator is indeed guilty and is indeed solely guilty in the first few days after the apprehension of the suspect, unless the media and the government are in on the crime itself?

Criminology 101 tells us that the day of the arrest is the day the investigation begins in earnest. The Constitution tell us that a suspect is innocent until proven guilty.

Cryptocracy May Choose to Substitute Lone Nut Profile with Islamic Terror Plot

In all government conspiracies wherein a mouthpiece media is instrumental in supporting the official script, a declaration of guilt is infallibly promulgated, concerning a suspect who is often then branded a "lone nut," though in Major Hasan's case there may be an effort to implicate Muslim theologians as indirectly responsible. There is also a move to create a 9/11 link with Hasan. (A truly outrageous version is here).

 If the Cryptocracy chooses to drop the lone imputation, then it will do so in order to fabricate a 9/11-style Islamic terror conspiracy. Such a move would likely not entail a focus on the two other gunmen seen by eyewitnesses in Fort Hood, since these shooters are probably government agents and not Muslim extremists. Anything is possible however, since we have already seen Major Hasan resurrected from the dead, with nary a peep from the media over that remarkable act of prestidigitation.

If the Fort Hoodwink shootings were not a government conspiracy but an actual criminal investigation,  the investigators would be much more circumspect and tentative in their statements and would be actively engaged in a deep and time-consuming investigation of the crime from all angles, without pre-conceived notions, including the investigation of the numerous anomalies in this case which we have already stated (see: "The Hoodwink in Texas").

An investigation that focuses this early in the case exclusively on a "Muslim terror conspiracy" is an indication of a script being in place, otherwise investigative journalists would seriously consider all leads, including those that lead to the government itself. These would begin with Virginia Tech, Hasan's alma mater and the scene of another shooting-spree slaughter where initially it was stated that two shooters were involved. (See Revisionist History newsletter no. 44, "Certain Anomalies in the Case of 33 Deaths at Virginia Tech").

Those who are skeptical of the degree to which spectacular crimes are initiated and then exploited by the Cryptocracy's technology of mass mind control for processing the Group Mind of America, should consider the following information, leaked to us by a correspondent. He writes, "There is another blog that I keep up with, though it can only be viewed by registered members, so I can't link you to it directly, but I thought you would appreciate this little kernal of information that the author revealed in a recent post about a tie-in between the (Fort Hood) shooting and the V-tech massacre":

"Just two days before the Virginia Tech shootings which took place on April 16, 2007, "Saturday Night Live" (SNL) did a rather strange 'Digital Short' skit in which ordinary people just started shooting at each other with a hypnotic song playing in the background carefully synced to each and every shooting in the skit....And now, more than 2 years later, the same song (or at least a song liberally sampling the chorus of the song, 'Hide and Seek', now renamed 'Whacha Say') is back, playing constantly on the radio. In fact, the song is, right now, #1 on the charts! I mean, it even looks as though it just became #1 within the last few days!"



You will note that there is a proliferation of movies (here and here), books and television specials about "secret societies," including their influence --both real and imagined -- on the founding of America and in the rise of the CIA. These productions are generally popular and lucrative for the corporations that produce them.

But pondering involvement of a secret society inside our contemporary US government and its possible involvement in current events like Fort Hoodwink becomes a risible proposition for most of the very same consumers of the media's secret societies narratives.

In other words, when the sheeple are cued to believe in the activities of "secret societies" in American history, they do so, on cue, and when cued to believe the story of the Fort Hood shootings exactly as described by the government and its media mouthpieces, they also believe on cue -- refusing to countenance any possible role for a secret society in the Texas attack. This phenomenon would appear to indicate a serious bipolar malaise in the American people.

If we had genuine investigative journalism in this country from even one organ of Big Media, the Cryptocracy might be thwarted and the actual string-pullers in Texas brought to justice. But what we have in fact is a vile government-mouthpiece media which, from the 9/11 terror attacks to the shootings at the army base, are despicable partners in the hoodwink.

The New York Times makes a point of stating Hasan's nationality in the opening paragraphs of its Nov. 8 report: "Major Hasan was born in Arlington, Va., on Sept. 8, 1970. His parents, Palestinians who had immigrated from the West Bank in the 1960s, moved the family to Roanoke when he was a youth.

We can discern the direction the Fort Hoodwink attack is going to take by the following remark from a teenager said to be casually acquainted with Hasan, and which the New York Times regarded as nonetheless sufficiently worthy of publication in the already cited Sunday, Nov. 8 edition:

...(According to Duane Reasoner Jr., an 18-year-old alleged friend of Hasan): "In the Koran, it says you are not supposed to have alliances with Jews or Christians, and if you are killed in the military fighting against Muslims, you will go to hell."

"Jew and Christians vs. Muslims" is precisely the dogmatic equation the Cryptocracy has already successfully seeded throughout the conservative Right wing. (This phenomenon was the subject of our cover story in Revisionist History newsletter no. 48).

Fort Hoodwink will help spread this meme deeper in American society. The war of civilizations must go on, with HBO's Larry David and other Zionists like him on "our" side, and the Palestinians on the other. Joseph I. Lieberman, the Orthodox Judaic Senator from Connecticut, announced on Sunday that "he would hold hearings to explore whether Major Hasan's actions constituted terrorism." Hasan has not yet even had a trial!

And wouldn't you know it? Fort Hoodwink occurs just at the time the "Goldstone Report" had made the Palestinians into victims of Israeli mass murder in the Group Mind. At the very least, the shootings mitigate that impression and may perhaps even cancel and reverse it.

Copyright ©2009. All Rights Reserved.

Hoffman is the author of Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare.

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Thursday, November 05, 2009

The Hoodwink in Texas

UPDATED NOV. 7

In addition to the Nov. 5 - Nov. 7 reports herein, there are numerous additional remarks in the "Comments" section [see bottom of this post] by readers and by Mr. Hoffman.




WELCOME TO THE ALCHEMICAL CAULDRON...


From Salon.com, 19:26 Pacific Time

"Remember, remember the fifth of November 
Gunpowder, treason and plot.
 I see no reason why gunpowder treason should ever be forgot."

SCRIPT CHANGE: The dead lone nut gunman has been resurrected and so have the eyewitnesses who saw more than one shooter.

The story here on the West coast at circa 5:35 pm Pacific Time from ABC, CBS and NBC on their nightly newscasts had been that Dr. Hasan had been killed and that he was the lone gunman (contrary to earlier reports of eyewitnesses seeing more than one shooter).

Now the gunman is said to be alive and the story of eyewitnesses and another shooter is being circulated again.

What does this signify? It signifies that a ceremony is underway in the Manchurian candidate's laboratory of mind control and mind games. They're showing us how fake is their facade, how thin their storyline is, how much they lie and masquerade and yet..and yet...we still believe them.



Nov. 5 symbol: V for Vendetta; also here



 Copyright ©Michael Hoffman • All Rights Reserved

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Salon.com Nov. 5, 2009

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12 Dead, 31 Wounded in Base Shootings
By Maria Newman
Published online NY Times | November 5, 2009 18:49 Pacific Time
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/06/us/06forthood.html?hp

Note: The NY Times article originally posted at the preceding URL has been radically altered with no note to that effect. The Times censored the following statement: "several eyewitness reports of more than one shooter." The Times added the statement: "...In the confusion of a day of wild and misleading reports..." This amounts to falsification of a news report. Why the need to do so? Here below are excerpts from the article as it originally appeared online on Nov. 5 at: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/06/us/06forthood.html?hp

An Army psychiatrist about to be deployed to combat zones overseas killed 12 soldiers and wounded 31 others on Thursday afternoon at Fort Hood in Texas, the authorities said. The gunman, who was identified as Major Nidal Malik Hasan, was shot by police forces and is being treated at a local hospital and in stable conditionEarlier reports that the suspect had been killed turned out to be wrong, said Lt. Gen. Robert W. Cone, the commanding officer at Fort Hood.

Mr. Hasan, 39, who had been promoted in May and previously worked at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, was about to be deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, according to Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison. Her spokesman, Jeff Sadoski, said Major Hasan was upset about his pending deployment. Carrying two guns, one a semiautomatic weapon, Mr. Hasan began firing around 1:30 p.m. central time at a deployment center where soldiers received last-minute medical attention and instructions before being shipped out overseas, Mr. Cone said.

Mr. Hasan “opened fire, and due to the quick response of the police forces, he was killed,” the general said. “There were several eyewitness accounts that there was more than one shooter,” he said.
(Emphasis supplied; end quote from the New York Times online, Nov. 5, 2009 and subsequently censored by the Times).
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Nov. 6 UPDATE

Ft. Hood Investigators Focus on Motive
By Clifford Krauss and Jack Healy
NY Times website | November 6, 2009 | 12:53 pm Pacific Time
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/07/us/07forthood.html?_r=1&hp

He's a Muslim Militant (Auto-Suggestion):

"...suggested soldiers may have heard him shout...Allahu Akbar"

(Is that like "...several eyewitness accounts of more than one shooter..."?)

NY Times:  Reports suggested that soldiers may have heard him shout something like “Allahu Akbar” — Arabic for “God is great!” — just before he fired two automatic handguns.

A Costume for the Charade:

NY Times: He was shown on a security video tape from a local convenience store wearing religious garb just hours before the shooting.

How could one shooter do so much damage? Explanation: government agents killed some of the victims:

NY Times: It may take some days or more to untangle ballistics evidence to conclude whether a single gunman was able to discharge so many bullets or whether multiple casualties were caused by single bullets. Local radio reports have also raised the possibility that some people were shot in a cross fire between Major Hasan and several military and civilian police officers.

Why did US Army General Cone declare that the alleged shooter, Hasan, was dead? 
Answer: The general's disinformation was due to the "hospitalization process."

At his Thursday night press conference, Cone attributed the mistaken report about Hasan being dead to "confusion at the hospital."...The alleged shooter has been in custody "throughout the hospitalization process," Cone said.


Source: http://www.salon.com/news/fort_hood_shooting/index.html?story=/politics/war_room/2009/11/05/army_presser

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Nov. 7 Update
Feds refuse to answer questions:

"...military and federal investigators pointedly refused to release further details on how the shootings happened, why there were initial reports of multiple attackers and why officials took several hours to correct news media reports that Major Hasan had been killed."

Source: "Big Questions on Gunman; Few Details," NY Times website, Nov. 7, 2009 | 2300 Pacific Time | http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/07/us/07forthood.html?_r=1&hp


Additional updates are here




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Monday, November 02, 2009

Larry David's Talmudic mentality and urinating on an image of Christ

Where is the exposure of Larry David's Talmudic Mentality?

Orthodox Judaism's Talmudic mentality of pornographic denigration of Jesus and Mary, which has cultivated a culture of disrespect for centuries, is studiously ignored as the source of Mr. David's scatology.

This writer has been asked to comment on the Oct. 25, 2009 episode of HBO's "Curb Your Enthusiasm," in which Larry David urinated on an image of Jesus Christ.


First, permit me first to present an article from the New York Daily News.  I direct your attention to the fact that even the headline is a light-hearted reference to urination ("p.o.'d"), which is intended to tip readers to just how serious the New York newspaper takes this act of televised desecration, which is to say, it's just a big joke for them:


Catholic League p.o.'d at Larry David after 'Curb Your Enthusiasm' character urinates on Jesus 


By Leah Chernikoff | New York Daily News | October 29th 2009


Not everyone is a fan of Larry David. Last Sunday's episode of HBO's "Curb Your Enthusiasm" featured Larry David's character unintentionally spraying a painting of Jesus that was hanging next to the toilet in a bathroom as relieved himself. A drop of urine hits the portrait of Jesus right below his eye, resembling a tear, in a joke characteristic of the show's satiric style.


Only the Catholic League didn't find it so funny. In a statement titled "Urinating on Jesus," Catholic League president Bill Donahue says, "At one point in the show, David goes to the bathroom in a Catholic home and splatters urine on a picture of Jesus; he doesn't clean it off. Then a Catholic woman goes to the bathroom, sees the picture and concludes that Jesus is crying. She then summons her equally stupid mother and the two of them fall to their knees in prayer. Was Larry David always this crude? Would he think it comedic if someone urinated on a picture of his mother?" the statement continues. "This might be fun to watch, but since HBO only likes to dump on Catholics (it was just a couple of weeks ago that Sarah Silverman insulted Catholics on "Real Time with Bill Maher"), and David is Jewish, we'll never know."


HBO issued the following statement in response: "Anyone who follows Curb Your Enthusiasm knows that the show is full of parody and satire. Larry David makes fun of everyone, most especially himself. The humor is always playful and certainly never malicious."



(End quote from the NY Daily News)

One can glean from this article in the Daily News that the Zionist establishment is not all worried about an offense to Jesus Christ that fifty years ago would have resulted in tens of thousands of people marching on HBO headquarters, boycotts and the bankruptcy of HBO. No such magnitude of outrage exists today. It has been neutralized by Churchianity's focus on Islam as the numero uno evil religion on planet earth, with the Koran starring as the world's most wicked book. Orthodox Judaism's Talmudic mentality of pornographic denigration of Jesus and Mary, which has cultivated a culture of disrespect for centuries, is studiously ignored as the source of David's scatology.


Prior to circa 1930, all general condemnation by the historic Christian churches and major Christian theologians, both Protestant and Catholic, of Islam were usually issued in the same sentence or paragraph or page, as exposures and anathemas against Judaism and the Talmud; the latter book being widely regarded throughout Christendom as far more sinister than the Koran.


Today the situation is quite different. We read mission statements from conservative churches that state: "We oppose Islam, atheism, paganism, abortion and secularism."


Why has Judaism been excluded from the list?


Scripture tells us to fear those who attack our souls. Islam, at its most fundamental extremist variant, attacks our bodies, it does not attack Jesus Christ or blessed Mary. It does not control our television networks and Hollywood movie industry that recently came out overwhelmingly in support of freedom for convicted child molester Roman Polanski, their bosom buddy.


I wrote an 1100 page study of the rabbis and their unholy book (Judaism Discovered), which most of you haven't bothered to buy or read, and of those who have read it, most haven't bothered to distribute it, or challenge their local pastor, priest or favorite talk show host with it.


The facts on ritual Talmudic and rabbinic denigration are in Judaism Discovered. The facts on the rabbinic laws on "how to urinate in a  holy way" will also be found in that book, which is the antidote to the demonic Antichrist filth peddled over America's broadcasting airwaves. I refuse to distill this information down to three paragraphs. It is not amenable to distillation. Distillation creates misunderstanding and an easy opening for ill-willed critics to distort and take out of context. Read the book.


If you have the time to sit on your can for four nights watching 16 hours of World Series baseball games, then you have the time to read several hundred (or more) pages of Judaism Discovered. If not, not. See you on Judgment Day, when you can explain your priorities to the Supreme Judge.


Face facts: the "Christian" crusaders against Islam have nothing to say about the Talmudic Christ-desecration that is marketed for children and adults by the millions on American television networks like HBO. How many souls will go to hell because of shows like "Curb Your Enthusiasm"?


The myopic "Christian" Muslim-hunters are partners with Zionists like Mr. Larry David in the public, ritual, premeditated urination on an image of the precious face of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. This is so enormous a criminal act as to defy words! If a Muslim had committed such a foul and despicable act, the howls of outrage would erupt from the throats of Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck, and a collective thunder would be heard throughout the West.


But because the urination occurred on the image of the face of Jesus Christ, and because the urinator was a member of the Talmudic Master Race of Holy People, the blabbermouths who say "Lord, Lord" from their pulpits and "Gospel TV" programs, are silent about the source of this spiritual disease: the 'sacred' rabbinic holy book that is the Babylonian Talmud.


 Churchianity has three main enemies it is targeting: Islam, Islam, and Islam. In such an historic betrayal of the Christianity of our forefathers, of the saints and the patriarchs, how can it be otherwise than that Jesus Christ will be urinated on for the (dare I say it?) entertainment of millions, and the Churches do nothing to uncover the root of the toxin, so that it can be exposed for all to see: this is the mentality of Orthdox Judaism in action.


But how could the Churches perform such an exposure, when they are the allies and partners of Orthodox Judaism? How can your pastor or priest expose the deep-rooted inspiration for Larry David when your priest or pastor is himself a crypto-rabbi?


This is why I have said and I continue to believe that 99% of those who say they are Christians are not. If America was a Christian nation, then HBO would be out of business the way Assemblyman Dov Hikind in New York moved to put historian David Irving out of business by shutting down his American Express card account.


Dov Hikind is a more worthy human being than millions of so-called Christians, because Mr. Hikind has the courage of his convictions and fights for what he believes in. Meanwhile, pretend Christians are paralyzed by a pre-Pentecost "fear of the Jews."But we are living after Pentecost. Do not Christians have the gifts of the Spirit, whereby we are no longer possessed by man-fear?


One need not be a prophet to see that the omission of the Talmud and Orthodox Judaism from the conservative churches' enemies list is the rotten seed that has been sown. The devastating loss of respect for Jesus Christ is the horrifying harvest we are now reaping.


What about Bill Donahue and the Catholic League? Well, has Mr. Donahue ever once dared to utter the words "Talmudic mentality" in connection with a sick spectacle like "Curb Your Enthusiasm"?


The word "Koran" is invoked in every possible situation involving negative Arab actions, why the cowardice when it comes to invoking the Talmud with regard to Hollywood's perennial, ceremonial debasement of Jesus?


You can have Bill Donahue and his half measures, which have rendered him little more than an impotent wraith haunting the sidelines of media degeneracy, waving a withered finger in spectral indignation. He acts as a safety valve who helps to channel anger in directions that do not threaten the System at its foundation.


God requires that we speak radical truth without regard to human respect. I will respect Mr. Donahue when he respects the Word of God, without which the "Catholic League" will forever remain in the "loyal opposition" category, that can be counted on not to cross certain prescribed bounds of rabbinic decorum. That kind of timidity disgusts and repulses me, particularly when it results in more accursed attacks on Christ executed with brazen insouciance.


In his press release on "Curb Your Enthusiasm," Mr. Donahue praises the "Seinfeld" television program of yesteryear, which made a jest out of all sorts of squalid sexual situations and featured an entire program that made a joke out of masturbation. Is Mr. Donahue out of his mind, praising "Seinfeld"?


"Mention Larry David in a word association game and 'Seinfeld' rolls off the lips. That show, which David created, wrote and produced, was brilliant." -William Donaue, Oct. 26.


If any high profile commentator with a national following, such as Mr. Donahue, wants to effectively defend the Lord Jesus Christ and begin a real campaign to punch a giant hole in the evil New York and Hollywood entertainment sewer, they can say in public, "I recommend a book by Michael Hoffman, Judaism Discovered."


Until someone does, we will continue to see respect for the Holy Name and sacred image of the only Son of God degraded and disrespected on national television as casually as a rabbi enters a urinal.


I have one message for conservative, supposed Christians: you cowards!



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Information on the purchase of multiple copies of Judaism Discovered is here:

http://www.revisionisthistory.org/page1/page4/page4.html

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Monday, October 19, 2009

The Politics of Rabbinic Child Rape

Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights
catalyst@catholicleague.org

Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on a front page story in the New York Times on the problem of child sexual abuse:

Reporter Paul Vitello shows the shocking extent of child sexual abuse in Brooklyn’s Orthodox Jewish community. He also details the cover-ups that have long been aided and abetted by law enforcement.

Where have all the church-and-state advocates been all these years when Orthodox rabbis were allowed by the D.A.’s office to settle these cases “internally”? Where have all the professional victims’ groups been in staging protests outside synagogues? Where have all the sue-happy lawyers been seeking to plunder the Orthodox? Where have all the comedians and late-night entertainers been in cracking jokes about rabbis raping kids?

It’s not just Orthodox Jews who have been given a pass: no group has gotten away easier than public school employees. Consider this. Because public school students have only 90 days to file suit, it is already too late to prosecute a teacher—in virtually every state—who molested a minor as recently as last spring. But if the offense took place in a Catholic school, the student has years to file suit. Not only that, molesting teachers are still shuffled from one school district to another; it’s called “passing the trash.”

Orthodox Jews try cases of child rape in rabbinical courts. Imagine if the Catholic Church failed to report abuse cases to the authorities and decided instead to institute its own ecclesial courts? Today’s article quotes a Jewish attorney urging law enforcement to recognize “religious sensitivities” for the guilty by seeking alternatives to prison. Allow a Catholic attorney to advise the same and it’s called corruption.

Last year, 40 minors in this small Jewish community said they were abused. Last year, there were 10 such allegations in the entire Catholic Church in all 50 states. Catholics are fed up with the duplicity. It’s not just Roman Polanski who can rape and run with impunity these days. The politics of child rape is sickening. [End quote]

Afterword: Mr. Donahue should take the next step and research the Talmudic permission for the molestation of children. In Catholicism such molestation is an abuse of power by a corrupt bureaucracy. In Judaism such molestation is institutionalized and legally permissible. See the documentation in Judaism Discovered, by Michael Hoffman: pp. 424-427; 698-705.

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Saturday, October 17, 2009

Israelis murdered 29 members of the same family in Gaza

Family who lost 29 members in Gaza war: We envy the dead

By Amira Hass | Haaretz (Israeli newspaper) | Oct. 18, 2009

Richard Goldstone visited the Gaza City neighborhood of Zaytoun in late June to tour the compound of the extended Samouni family, the subject of coverage here in recent weeks ("'I fed him like a baby bird,'" September 17; "Death in the Samouni compound," September 25). Twenty-nine members of the family, all of them civilians, were killed in the Israel Defense Force's winter assault - 21 during the shelling of a house where IDF soldiers had gathered some 100 members of the family a day earlier.

Salah Samouni and the owner of the house that was shelled - Wael Samouni - took Goldstone around the farming neighborhood, showing him its devastated homes and uprooted orchards. In a telephone conversation this week, Salah described how he had shown Goldstone a picture of his father, Talal, among the 21 killed in the house. He told the Jewish South African judge and head of the United Nations inquiry team into Operation Cast Lead, that his father "had been employed by Jews" for nearly 40 years and that whenever he was sick, "the employer would call, ask after his health, and forbid him to come to work before he had recovered."

The Samounis were always confident that, in the event of any military invasions into Gaza, they could always manage to get along with the Israeli army. Until 2005, before Israel's disengagement from the Strip, the Jewish settlement of Netzarim was located right next door, and several family members worked there from time to time. When the joint Israeli-Palestinian patrols were active, Israeli soldiers and Palestinian security officials sometimes asked the Samounis to "lend" them a tractor to flatten a patch of land or repair the Salah al-Din Road (for example, when a diplomatic convoy needed to pass through). While Samouni family members worked on their tractors, gathering sand, the soldiers would watch them.

"When the soldiers wanted us to leave, they would fire above our heads. That's what experience taught me," recalls Salah Samouni, who lost a 2-year-old daughter in the IDF attack, along with uncles and both of his parents. The older men of the family, among them his father and two uncles who were killed by IDF soldiers on January 4 and 5, worked in Israel until the 1990s in different localities, including Bat Yam, Moshav Asseret (near Gedera) and the "Glicksman Plant." They all believed that the Hebrew they had learned would assist and if necessary save them during encounters with soldiers.

As was reported here last month - on January 4, under orders from the army, Salah Samouni and the rest of the family left their home, which had been turned into a military position, and moved to the other, the home of Wael, located on the southern side of the street. The fact that it was the soldiers who had relocated them, had seen the faces of the children and the older women, and the fact that the soldiers were positioned in locations surrounding the house just tens of meters away, instilled in the family a certain amount of confidence - despite the IDF fire from the air, from the sea and from the land, despite the hunger and the thirst.

On the morning of Monday, January 5, Salah Samouni walked out of the house and shouted in the direction of another house in the compound that he thought other family members were still in. He wanted them to join him, to be in a safer place, closer to the soldiers. Nothing prepared him for the three shells and the rockets the IDF fired a short time later.

"My daughter Azza, my only daughter, two and a half years old, was injured in the first hit on the house," Salah told Haaretz. "She managed to say, 'Daddy, it hurts.' And then, in the second hit, she died. And I'm praying. Everything is dust and I can't see anything. I thought I was dead. I found myself getting up, all bloody, and I found my mother sitting by the hall with her head tilted downward. I moved her face a little, and I found that the right half of her face was gone. I looked at my father, whose eye was gone. He was still breathing a little, and then he stopped."

When they exited the house - injured, confused, dazed, fearing the fourth shell or rocket would soon land - determined to get themselves to Gaza despite the soldiers' shouts from nearby positions to go back, they believed only corpses remained in the house. They did not know that under the dust and rubble in one large room, nine family members remained alive: the elderly matriarch and five of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren - the youngest of whom was three years old, the eldest 16 - along with another kinsman and his son. They had passed out, some of them beneath corpses.

When they regained consciousness, 16-year-old Ahmad Ibrahim and his 10-year-old brother Yakub saw the corpses of their mother, four of their brothers and their nephew. Mahmoud Tallal, 16, had lost his toes; bleeding, he saw that his parents - Tallal and Rahma - had been killed. Three-year-old Omar, Salah's son, was buried unconscious under 24-year-old Saffa's dead body, explaining why they hadn't found him during the terrible moment of panic as they left the house. Ahmad Nafez, 15, recalled how when little Omar woke up and pulled himself out from under the corpse, he spotted his grandfather Tallal and started shaking him, crying: "Grandpa, Grandpa, wake up."

The previous day Amal, a nine-year-old girl, had witnessed soldiers bursting into her home and killing her father, Atiyeh. She had taken shelter in her Uncle Tallal's home and together with other family members was moved to Wael's house. She did not know that her brother Ahmad was bleeding to death in his mother's arms, in another house in the neighborhood.

The children found some scraps of food in the kitchen and ate. Later, Ahmad Nafez told his relatives how Ahmad Ibrahim had gone from corpse to corpse - his mother, his four brothers and his nephew among them - shaking them, hitting them, telling them to get up. Perhaps from the blows, Amal regained consciousness, her head bloody and her eyes rolling in their sockets. She kept crying out "water, water," said she wanted her mother and father, and beat her head on the floor, her eyes rolling the whole time.

It is too dangerous to remove the shrapnel embedded in her head - that is even what the doctors at a Tel Aviv hospital say. Now everything hurts her and will continue to hurt her: when it's cold, when it's hot, when she's in the sun. She will not be able to concentrate on her studies.

No one can reconstruct how the hours passed for them in Wael's bombarded house; some remained in a state of exhaustion and apathy. The first to recover was actually Shiffa, the 71-year-old grandmother. On the morning of Tuesday, January 6, she realized that no one was coming to rescue them anytime soon. Not the soldiers positioned just meters away, not the Red Cross nor the Red Crescent nor other relatives. Perhaps they didn't even know they were alive, she concluded. Her walker had been bent and buried in the house, but she managed to leave with two of her grandchildren - Mahmoud (his legs bleeding) and little Omar.

They hobbled out and started walking - along the silent street, among the vacated houses, realizing some were occupied by soldiers. "The Jews saw us from above and shouted to us to go into the house," related Shiffa. That was when they were walking down the street and passed by her sister's home. They went inside, but didn't find a living soul. The soldiers - firing into the air - came in after them. "We begged them to let us go home. 'Where is your home?'" they asked. She told them "over there" and pointed east, toward the home of one of her sons, Arafat, located closer to Salah al-Din Road. The soldiers let them continue on. "We saw people coming out of Arafat's house and Hijjeh's house. Everyone was a bit injured and the soldiers were shooting overhead."

At Hijjeh's house she found everyone crying, each with his own story of those dead or wounded. "I told them what had happened to us, how everyone had fallen on everyone else, in heaps, the dead and the wounded." She remained there with the rest of the injured for another night. Omar remembers this house fondly: He was given chocolate there.

Only on Wednesday, January 7, did the IDF allow Red Cross and Red Crescent crews to enter the neighborhood. They attest that they'd been asking to enter since January 4, but the IDF would not let them - whether by shooting in the direction of the ambulances that tried to get closer or by refusing to approve coordination. The medical teams, which were allowed to go in on foot and had to leave the ambulances a kilometer or a kilometer and a half away, thought they were going to rescue the injured from Hijjeh's house. But then the grandmother told them about the wounded children who remained behind, among the dead, in Wael's house. The medical team set out to rescue them, totally unprepared for the sight they found.

On January 18, after the IDF left the Gaza Strip, the rescue teams returned to the neighborhood. Wael's house was found in ruins: IDF bulldozers had demolished it entirely - with the corpses inside.

In a general reply to questions from Haaretz regarding the behavior of the military forces in the Samouni family's neighborhood, the IDF Spokesman said that all of the claims have been examined. "Upon completion of the examination, the findings will be taken to the military advocate general, who will decide about the need to take additional steps," the spokesman said.

Salah Samouni, during the telephone conversation, said: "I asked [Richard] Goldstone to find out just one thing: Why did the army do this to us? Why did they take us out of the house one at a time, and the officer who spoke Hebrew with my father verified that we were all civilians - [so] why did they then shell us, kill us? This is what we want to know."

He feels that Goldstone, in his report, lent the victims a voice. He did not expound on his frustration upon learning that the debate on the report had been postponed, but sought a way to describe how he feels nine months after the fact. "We feel [we are] in an exile, even though we are in our homeland, on our land. We sit and envy the dead. They are the ones who are at rest."

***

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Nietzsche and the revisionist and nationalist movements

Just a note to say that I have been working on Revisionist History Newsletter no. 49.  I am using Nietzsche's methodology, particularly his concept of "resssentiment" to analyze the current state of the "Holocaust" revisionist and "white nationalist" movements. The article will be titled, "Nietzsche, the 'Jews' and the Goyim." It should be printed and mailed to subscribers in about a week.

One more item: as a Fortean and a revisionist historian I often encounter "far-out" thinkers and propositions that run contrary to received opinion and for which I am sometimes accused of being crazy for seriously considering. This delightful quote, from the eminent physicist Niels Bohr, is very satisfying as a riposte:

"We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct."

***

Friday, October 09, 2009

Toronto Sun columnist: We should nuke Iran (Wall St. Journal agrees)


Coren

Editor's Note: In the following article Michael Coren, columnist for the Toronto Sun, exhibits the inhuman genocidal Talmudic mentality that inspires Sen. John McCain, most Republicans and some Democrats (like Sen. Schumer). Coren's column has disappeared from the The Toronto Sun's website (it used to be online here). 


The Talmudic mentality often leads those infected with it to gruesome public advocacy of pain and destruction for non-Judaic civilians who commit the "crime" of obstructing either Zionism (Arabs and Iranians), or NATO's New World Order (Serbs and other Orthodox Christians). Thomas Friedman of the New York Times shares Coren's monstrous advocacy of pain and destruction for the "unchosen." Both are columnists in good standing with major "progressive-humanitarian" newspapers who see fit to lecture Muslims on their "barbarity." Mr. Friedman is considered by many in the American intelligentsia to be a sage.


We follow up Coren's cold-blooded warrant for genocide with one from Neocon godfather Norman Podhoretz. The religious component is made plain by the blood-thirsty Podhoretz, whose like-minded son John was President Ronald Reagan's speech-writer. Podhoretz declares that he "prays" that the president will bomb Iran. Praying for war? Is this what Judaic supremacy has come to for our once peace-oriented nation? The god of the Talmud wants Iran's families incinerated. America must obey. Podhoretz' ghastly plan was published not in some obscure bulletin of militant Orthodox rabbis, but in The Wall Street Journal (which may, after all, amount to the same thing). 


We hear and see so much about "The Holocaust" from these very same people. It is shoved down our throats on the pretext of preventing another holocaust anywhere in the world. Yet here are these same Holocaust-cultists advocating holocausts against marginalized peoples. Irony is too tepid a word to describe their murderous insanity.


 Both Coren's column and Podhoretz's essay are sufficiently appalling and self-indicting as to require no rebuttal from thinking persons who should be able to grasp the savagery of their ideology and see through the fallacies of their arguments without much difficulty.

We Should Nuke Iran
Toronto Sun | Saturday, September 2, 2006

By Michael Coren

It is surely obvious now to anybody with even a basic understanding of history, politics and the nature of fascism that something revolutionary has to be done within months -- if not weeks -- if we are to preserve world peace.

Put boldly and simply, we have to drop a nuclear bomb on Iran.

Not, of course, the unleashing of full-scale thermo-nuclear war on the Persian people, but a limited and tactical use of nuclear weapons to destroy Iran's military facilities and its potential nuclear arsenal. It is, sadly, the only response that this repugnant and acutely dangerous political entity will understand.

The tragedy is that innocent people will die. But not many. Iran's missiles and rockets of mass destruction are guarded and maintained by men with the highest of security clearance and thus supportive of the Tehran regime. They are dedicated to war and, thus, will die in war.

Frankly, it would be churlish of the civilized world to deny martyrdom to those who seem so intent on its pursuance. Most important, a limited nuclear attack on Iran will save thousands if not millions of lives.

The spasm of reaction from many will be that this is barbaric and unacceptable. Yet a better response would be to ask if there is any sensible alternative.

Diplomacy, kindness and compromise have failed and the Iranian leadership is still obsessed with all-out war against anybody it considers an enemy.

Its motives are beyond question, its capability equally so. It is spending billions of dollars on a whole range of anti-ship, anti-aircraft and anti-personnel missiles, rockets and ballistic weapons:

The Shahab 3ER missile, with a range of more than 2,000 km, and the BM25 and accompanying launchers, which are so powerful that they can hit targets in Europe. Raad missiles with a range of 350km. The Misaq anti-aircraft missile, which can be fired from the shoulder. The Fajar 3 radar-evading missile and the Ajdar underwater missile, which travels at an extraordinarily high speed and is almost impossible to intercept. The Zaltal and the Fatah 110 rocket, the Scud B and Scud C and the BM25 with a range of 3,500 kms.

Iran is also developing enormous propellant ballistic missiles and began a space program almost a decade ago that will enable it to bomb the United States. It is also assumed in intelligence circles that Tehran has Russian Kh55 cruise missiles stolen from Ukraine which are now being copied in large numbers by Iranian scientists.

Comparisons to the Nazis in the 1930s are unfair -- to the Nazis. Hitler had the French army, the largest in Europe, on his border and millions of Soviet infantry just a few hours march away. Iran has no aggressive enemies in the region.

Its fanatical leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, controls a brutal police state, finances international terror and provokes bloody wars in foreign countries. It is unimaginably wealthy because of its oil revenues and is committed, in its leader's words, to "rolling back 300 years of Western ascendancy" and wiping another nation, Israel, from the face of the earth.

A conventional attack would be insufficient because Iran and its allies seem only to listen to power and threat. Better limited pain now than universal suffering in five years.

The usual suspects will complain. The post-Christian churches, the Marxists, the fellow travelers and fifth columnists. But then, the same sort of people moaned and condemned in 1938. They were clearly wrong then.

They would be just as wrong now.
***

The Case for Bombing Iran
I hope and pray that President Bush will do it.

By Norman Podhoretz
Wall Street Journal, May 30, 2007

Although many persist in denying it, I continue to believe that what Sept 11, 2001, did was to plunge us headlong into nothing less than another world war. I call this new war World War IV, because I also believe that what is generally known as the Cold War was actually World War III, and that this one bears a closer resemblance to that great conflict than it does to World War II. Like the Cold War, as the military historian Eliot Cohen was the first to recognize, the one we are now in has ideological roots, pitting us against Islamofascism, yet another mutation of the totalitarian disease we defeated first in the shape of Nazism and fascism and then in the shape of communism; it is global in scope; it is being fought with a variety of weapons, not all of them military; and it is likely to go on for decades.

What follows from this way of looking at the last five years is that the military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq cannot be understood if they are regarded as self-contained wars in their own right. Instead we have to see them as fronts or theaters that have been opened up in the early stages of a protracted global struggle. The same thing is true of Iran. As the currently main center of the Islamofascist ideology against which we have been fighting since 9/11, and as (according to the State Department's latest annual report on the subject) the main sponsor of the terrorism that is Islamofascism's weapon of choice, Iran too is a front in World War IV. Moreover, its effort to build a nuclear arsenal makes it the potentially most dangerous one of all.

The Iranians, of course, never cease denying that they intend to build a nuclear arsenal, and yet in the same breath they openly tell us what they intend to do with it. Their first priority, as repeatedly and unequivocally announced by their president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is to "wipe Israel off the map"--a feat that could not be accomplished by conventional weapons alone.

But Ahmadinejad's ambitions are not confined to the destruction of Israel. He also wishes to dominate the greater Middle East, and thereby to control the oilfields of the region and the flow of oil out of it through the Persian Gulf. If he acquired a nuclear capability, he would not even have to use it in order to put all this within his reach. Intimidation and blackmail by themselves would do the trick.

Nor are Ahmadinejad's ambitions merely regional in scope. He has a larger dream of extending the power and influence of Islam throughout Europe, and this too he hopes to accomplish by playing on the fear that resistance to Iran would lead to a nuclear war. And then, finally, comes the largest dream of all: what Ahmadinejad does not shrink from describing as "a world without America." Demented though he may be, I doubt that Ahmadinejad is so crazy as to imagine that he could wipe America off the map even if he had nuclear weapons. But what he probably does envisage is a diminution of the American will to oppose him: that is, if not a world without America, he will settle, at least in the short run, for a world without much American influence.

Not surprisingly, the old American foreign-policy establishment and many others say that these dreams are nothing more than the fantasies of a madman. They also dismiss those who think otherwise as neoconservative alarmists trying to drag this country into another senseless war that is in the interest not of the United States but only of Israel. But the irony is that Ahmadinejad's dreams are more realistic than the dismissal of those dreams as merely insane delusions. To understand why, an analogy with World War III may help.

At certain points in that earlier war, some of us feared that the Soviets might seize control of the oil fields of the Middle East, and that the West, faced with a choice between surrendering to their dominance or trying to stop them at the risk of a nuclear exchange, would choose surrender. In that case, we thought, the result would be what in those days went by the name of Finlandization.

In Europe, where there were large Communist parties, Finlandization would take the form of bringing these parties to power so that they could establish "red Vichy" regimes like the one already in place in Finland--regimes whose subservience to the Soviet will in all things, domestic and foreign alike, would make military occupation unnecessary and would therefore preserve a minimal degree of national independence.

In the United States, where there was no Communist Party to speak of, we speculated that Finlandization would take a subtler form. In the realm of foreign affairs, politicians and pundits would arise to celebrate the arrival of a new era of peace and friendship in which the Cold War policy of containment would be scrapped, thus giving the Soviets complete freedom to expand without encountering any significant obstacles. And in the realm of domestic affairs, Finlandization would mean that the only candidates running for office with a prayer of being elected would be those who promised to work toward a sociopolitical system more in harmony with the Soviet model than the unjust capitalist plutocracy under which we had been living.

Of course, by the grace of God, the dissidents behind the Iron Curtain and Ronald Reagan, we won World War III and were therefore spared the depredations that Finlandization would have brought. Alas, we are far from knowing what the outcome of World War IV will be. But in the meantime, looking at Europe today, we already see the unfolding of a process analogous to Finlandization: it has been called, rightly, Islamization. Consider, for example, what happened when, only a few weeks ago, the Iranians captured 15 British sailors and marines and held them hostage. Did the Royal Navy, which once boasted that it ruled the waves, immediately retaliate against this blatant act of aggression, or even threaten to do so unless the captives were immediately released? Not by any stretch of the imagination. Indeed, using force was the last thing in the world the British contemplated doing, as they made sure to announce. Instead they relied on the "soft power" so beloved of "sophisticated" Europeans and their American fellow travelers.

But then, as if this show of impotence were not humiliating enough, the British were unable even to mobilize any of that soft power. The European Union, of which they are a member, turned down their request to threaten Iran with a freeze of imports. As for the U.N., under whose very auspices they were patrolling the international waters in which the sailors were kidnapped, it once again showed its true colors by refusing even to condemn the Iranians. The most the Security Council could bring itself to do was to express "grave concern." Meanwhile, a member of the British cabinet was going the Security Council one better. While registering no objection to propaganda pictures of the one female hostage, who had been forced to shed her uniform and dress for the cameras in Muslim clothing, Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt pronounced it "deplorable" that she should have permitted herself to be photographed with a cigarette in her mouth. "This," said Hewitt, "sends completely the wrong message to our young people."

According to John Bolton, our former ambassador to the U.N., the Iranians were testing the British to see if there would be any price to pay for committing what would once have been considered an act of war. Having received his answer, Ahmadinejad could now reap the additional benefit of, as the British commentator Daniel Johnson puts it, "posing as a benefactor" by releasing the hostages, even while ordering more attacks in Iraq and even while continuing to arm terrorist organizations, whether Shiite (Hezbollah) or Sunni (Hamas). For fanatical Shiites though Ahmadinejad and his ilk assuredly are, they are obviously willing to set sectarian differences aside when it comes to forging jihadist alliances against the infidels.

If, then, under present circumstances Ahmadinejad could bring about the extraordinary degree of kowtowing that resulted from the kidnapping of the British sailors, what might he not accomplish with a nuclear arsenal behind him--nuclear bombs that could be fitted on missiles capable of reaching Europe? As to such a capability, Robert G. Joseph, the U.S. Special Envoy for Nuclear Non-Proliferation, tells us that Iran is "expanding what is already the largest offensive missile force in the region. Moreover, it is reported to be working closely with North Korea, the world's No. 1 missile proliferator, to develop even more capable ballistic missiles." This, Joseph goes on, is why "analysts agree that in the foreseeable future Iran will be armed with medium- and long-range ballistic missiles," and it is also why "we could wake up one morning to find that Iran is holding Berlin, Paris or London hostage to whatever its demands are then."

As with Finlandization, Islamization extends to the domestic realm, too. In one recent illustration of this process, as reported in the British press, "schools in England are dropping the Holocaust from history lessons to avoid offending Muslim pupils . . . whose beliefs include Holocaust denial." But this is an equal-opportunity capitulation, since the schools are also eliminating lessons about the Crusades because "such lessons often contradict what is taught in local mosques."

But why single out England? If anything, much more, and worse, has been going on in other European countries, including France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Denmark and the Netherlands. All of these countries have large and growing Muslim populations demanding that their religious values and sensibilities be accommodated at the expense of the traditional values of the West, and even in some instances of the law. Yet rather than insisting that, like all immigrant groups before them, they assimilate to Western norms, almost all European politicians have been cravenly giving in to the Muslims' outrageous demands.

As in the realm of foreign affairs, if this much can be accomplished under present circumstances, what might not be done if the process were being backed by Iranian nuclear blackmail? Already some observers are warning that by the end of the 21st century the whole of Europe will be transformed into a place to which they give the name Eurabia. Whatever chance there may still be of heading off this eventuality would surely be lessened by the menacing shadow of an Iran armed with nuclear weapons, and only too ready to put them into the hands of the terrorist groups to whom it is even now supplying rockets and other explosive devices.

And the United States? As would have been the case with Finlandization, we would experience a milder form of Islamization here at home. But not in the area of foreign policy. Like the Europeans, confronted by Islamofascists armed by Iran with nuclear weapons, we would become more and more hesitant to risk resisting the emergence of a world shaped by their will and tailored to their wishes. For even if Ahmadinejad did not yet have missiles with a long enough range to hit the United States, he would certainly be able to unleash a wave of nuclear terror against us. If he did, he would in all likelihood act through proxies, for whom he would with characteristic brazenness disclaim any responsibility even if the weapons used by the terrorists were to bear telltale markings identifying them as of Iranian origin. At the same time, the opponents of retaliation and other antiwar forces would rush to point out that there was good reason to accept this disclaimer and, markings or no markings (could they not have been forged?), no really solid evidence to refute it.

In any event, in these same centers of opinion, such a scenario is regarded as utter nonsense. In their view, none of the things it envisages would follow even if Ahmadinejad should get the bomb, because the fear of retaliation would deter him from attacking us just as it deterred the Soviets in World War III. For our part, moreover, the knowledge that we were safe from attack would preclude any danger of our falling into anything like Islamization.

But listen to what Bernard Lewis, the greatest authority of our time on the Islamic world, has to say in this context on the subject of deterrence:

MAD, mutual assured destruction, [was effective] right through the cold war. Both sides had nuclear weapons. Neither side used them, because both sides knew the other would retaliate in kind. This will not work with a religious fanatic [like Ahmadinejad]. For him, mutual assured destruction is not a deterrent, it is an inducement. We know already that [Iran's leaders] do not give a damn about killing their own people in great numbers. We have seen it again and again. In the final scenario, and this applies all the more strongly if they kill large numbers of their own people, they are doing them a favor. They are giving them a quick free pass to heaven and all its delights
.
Nor are they inhibited by a love of country: "We do not worship Iran, we worship Allah. For patriotism is another name for paganism. I say let this land [Iran] burn. I say let this land go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world." These were the words of the Ayatollah Khomeini, who ruled Iran from 1979 to 1989, and there is no reason to suppose that his disciple Ahmadinejad feels any differently.

Still less would deterrence work where Israel was concerned. For as the Ayatollah Rafsanjani (who is supposedly a "pragmatic conservative") has declared:

If a day comes when the world of Islam is duly equipped with the arms Israel has in possession...application of an atomic bomb would not leave anything in Israel, but the same thing would just produce damages in the Muslim world.

In other words, Israel would be destroyed in a nuclear exchange, but Iran would survive.
In spite of all this, we keep hearing that all would be well if only we agreed--in the currently fashionable lingo--to "engage" with Iran, and that even if the worst came to the worst we could--to revert to the same lingo--"live" with a nuclear Iran. It is when such things are being said that, alongside the resemblance between now and World War III, a parallel also becomes evident between now and the eve of World War II.

By 1938, Germany under Adolf Hitler had for some years been rearming in defiance of its obligations under the Versailles treaty and other international agreements. Yet even though Hitler in :"Mein Kampf" had explicitly spelled out the goals he was now preparing to pursue, scarcely anyone took him seriously. To the imminent victims of the war he was soon to start, Hitler's book and his inflammatory speeches were nothing more than braggadocio or, to use the more colorful word Hannah Arendt once applied to Adolf Eichmann, rodomontade: the kind of red meat any politician might throw to his constituents at home. Hitler might sound at times like a madman, but in reality he was a shrewd operator with whom one could--in the notorious term coined by the London Times--"do business." The business that was done under this assumption was the Munich Agreement of 1938, which the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain declared had brought "peace in our time."

It was thanks to Munich that "appeasement" became one of the dirtiest words in the whole of our political vocabulary. Yet appeasement had always been an important and entirely respectable tool of diplomacy, signifying the avoidance of war through the alleviation of the other side's grievances. If Hitler had been what his eventual victims imagined he was--that is, a conventional statesman pursuing limited aims and using the threat of war only as a way of strengthening his bargaining position--it would indeed have been possible to appease him and thereby to head off the outbreak of another war.

But Hitler was not a conventional statesman and, although for tactical reasons he would sometimes pretend otherwise, he did not have limited aims. He was a revolutionary seeking to overturn the going international system and to replace it with a new order dominated by Germany, which also meant the political culture of Nazism. As such, he offered only two choices: resistance or submission. Finding this reality unbearable, the world persuaded itself that there was a way out, a third alternative, in negotiations. But given Hitler's objectives, and his barely concealed lust for war, negotiating with him could not conceivably have led to peace. It could have had only one outcome, which was to buy him more time to start a war under more favorable conditions. As most historians now agree, if he had been taken at his own word about his true intentions, he could have been stopped earlier and defeated at an infinitely lower cost.

Which brings us back to Ahmadinejad. Like Hitler, he is a revolutionary whose objective is to overturn the going international system and to replace it in the fullness of time with a new order dominated by Iran and ruled by the religio-political culture of Islamofascism. Like Hitler, too, he is entirely open about his intentions, although--again like Hitler--he sometimes pretends that he wants nothing more than his country's just due. In the case of Hitler in 1938, this pretense took the form of claiming that no further demands would be made if sovereignty over the Sudetenland were transferred from Czechoslovakia to Germany. In the case of Ahmadinejad, the pretense takes the form of claiming that Iran is building nuclear facilities only for peaceful purposes and not for the production of bombs.

But here we come upon an interesting difference between then and now. Whereas in the late 1930s almost everyone believed, or talked himself into believing, that Hitler was telling the truth when he said he had no further demands to make after Munich, no one believes that Ahmadinejad is telling the truth when he says that Iran has no wish to develop a nuclear arsenal. In addition, virtually everyone agrees that it would be best if he were stopped, only not, God forbid, with military force--not now, and not ever.

But if military force is ruled out, what is supposed to do the job? Well, to begin with, there is that good old standby, diplomacy. And so, for 3 1/2 years, even predating the accession of Ahmadinejad to the presidency, the diplomatic gavotte has been danced with Iran, in negotiations whose carrot-and-stick details no one can remember--not even, I suspect, the parties involved. But since, to say it again, Ahmadinejad is a revolutionary with unlimited aims and not a statesman with whom we can "do business," all this negotiating has had the same result as Munich had with Hitler. That is, it has bought the Iranians more time in which they have moved closer and closer to developing nuclear weapons.

Then there are sanctions. As it happens, sanctions have very rarely worked in the past. Worse yet, they have usually ended up hurting the hapless people of the targeted country while leaving the leadership unscathed. Nevertheless, much hope has been invested in them as a way of bringing Ahmadinejad to heel. Yet thanks to the resistance of Russia and China, both of which have reasons of their own to go easy on Iran, it has proved enormously difficult for the Security Council to impose sanctions that could even conceivably be effective. At first, the only measures to which Russia and China would agree were much too limited even to bite. Then, as Iran continued to defy Security Council resolutions and to block inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency that it was bound by treaty to permit, not even the Russians and the Chinese were able to hold out against stronger sanctions. Once more, however, these have had little or no effect on the progress Iran is making toward the development of a nuclear arsenal. On the contrary: they, too, have bought the Iranians additional time in which to move ahead.

Since hope springs eternal, some now believe that the answer lies in more punishing sanctions. This time, however, their purpose would be not to force Iran into compliance, but to provoke an internal uprising against Ahmadinejad and the regime as a whole. Those who advocate this course tell us that the "mullocracy" is very unpopular, especially with young people, who make up a majority of Iran's population. They tell us that these young people would like nothing better than to get rid of the oppressive and repressive and corrupt regime under which they now live and to replace it with a democratic system. And they tell us, finally, that if Iran were so transformed, we would have nothing to fear from it even if it were to acquire nuclear weapons.

Once upon a time, under the influence of Bernard Lewis and others I respect, I too subscribed to this school of thought. But after three years and more of waiting for the insurrection they assured us back then was on the verge of erupting, I have lost confidence in their prediction. Some of them blame the Bush administration for not doing enough to encourage an uprising, which is why they have now transferred their hopes to sanctions that would inflict so much damage on the Iranian economy that the entire populace would rise up against the rulers. Yet whether or not this might happen under such circumstances, there is simply no chance of getting Russia and China, or the Europeans for that matter, to agree to the kind of sanctions that are the necessary precondition.

At the outset I stipulated that the weapons with which we are fighting World War IV are not all military--that they also include economic, diplomatic, and other nonmilitary instruments of power. In exerting pressure for reform on countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, these nonmilitary instruments are the right ones to use. But it should be clear by now to any observer not in denial that Iran is not such a country. As we know from Iran's defiance of the Security Council and the IAEA even while the United States has been warning Ahmadinejad that "all options" remain on the table, ultimatums and threats of force can no more stop him than negotiations and sanctions have managed to do. Like them, all they accomplish is to buy him more time.

In short, the plain and brutal truth is that if Iran is to be prevented from developing a nuclear arsenal, there is no alternative to the actual use of military force--any more than there was an alternative to force if Hitler was to be stopped in 1938.

Since a ground invasion of Iran must be ruled out for many different reasons, the job would have to be done, if it is to be done at all, by a campaign of air strikes. Furthermore, because Iran's nuclear facilities are dispersed, and because some of them are underground, many sorties and bunker-busting munitions would be required. And because such a campaign is beyond the capabilities of Israel, and the will, let alone the courage, of any of our other allies, it could be carried out only by the United States. Even then, we would probably be unable to get at all the underground facilities, which means that, if Iran were still intent on going nuclear, it would not have to start over again from scratch. But a bombing campaign would without question set back its nuclear program for years to come, and might even lead to the overthrow of the mullahs.

The opponents of bombing--not just the usual suspects but many both here and in Israel who have no illusions about the nature and intentions and potential capabilities of the Iranian regime--disagree that it might end in the overthrow of the mullocracy. On the contrary, they are certain that all Iranians, even the democratic dissidents, would be impelled to rally around the flag. And this is only one of the worst-case scenarios they envisage. To wit: Iran would retaliate by increasing the trouble it is already making for us in Iraq. It would attack Israel with missiles armed with nonnuclear warheads but possibly containing biological or chemical weapons. There would be a vast increase in the price of oil, with catastrophic consequences for every economy in the world, very much including our own. The worldwide outcry against the inevitable civilian casualties would make the anti-Americanism of today look like a lovefest.

I readily admit that it would be foolish to discount any or all of these scenarios. Each of them is, alas, only too plausible. Nevertheless, there is a good response to them, and it is the one given by John McCain. The only thing worse than bombing Iran, McCain has declared, is allowing Iran to get the bomb.

And yet those of us who agree with McCain are left with the question of whether there is still time. If we believe the Iranians, the answer is no. In early April, at Iran's Nuclear Day festivities, Ahmadinejad announced that the point of no return in the nuclearization process had been reached. If this is true, it means that Iran is only a small step away from producing nuclear weapons. But even supposing that Ahmadinejad is bluffing, in order to convince the world that it is already too late to stop him, how long will it take before he actually turns out to have a winning hand?

If we believe the CIA, perhaps as much as 10 years. But CIA estimates have so often been wrong that they are hardly more credible than the boasts of Ahmadinejad. Other estimates by other experts fall within the range of a few months to six years. Which is to say that no one really knows. And because no one really knows, the only prudent--indeed, the only responsible--course is to assume that Ahmadinejad may not be bluffing, or may only be exaggerating a bit, and to strike at him as soon as it is logistically possible.

In his 2002 State of the Union address, President Bush made a promise:
We'll be deliberate, yet time is not on our side. I will not wait on events, while dangers gather. I will not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer. The United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons.

In that speech, the president was referring to Iraq, but he has made it clear on a number of subsequent occasions that the same principle applies to Iran. Indeed, he has gone so far as to say that if we permit Iran to build a nuclear arsenal, people 50 years from now will look back and wonder how we of this generation could have allowed such a thing to happen, and they will rightly judge us as harshly as we today judge the British and the French for what they did and what they failed to do at Munich in 1938. I find it hard to understand why George W. Bush would have put himself so squarely in the dock of history on this issue if he were resigned to leaving office with Iran in possession of nuclear weapons, or with the ability to build them. Accordingly, my guess is that he intends, within the next 21 months, to order air strikes against the Iranian nuclear facilities from the three U.S. aircraft carriers already sitting nearby.

But if that is what he has in mind, why is he spending all this time doing the diplomatic dance and wasting so much energy on getting the Russians and the Chinese to sign on to sanctions? The reason, I suspect, is that--to borrow a phrase from Robert Kagan--he has been "giving futility its chance." Not that this is necessarily a cynical ploy. For it may well be that he has entertained the remote possibility of a diplomatic solution under which Iran would follow the example of Libya in voluntarily giving up its nuclear program. Besides, once having played out the diplomatic string, and thereby having demonstrated that to him force is truly a last resort, Mr. Bush would be in a stronger political position to endorse John McCain's formula that the only thing worse than bombing Iran would be allowing Iran to build a nuclear bomb--and not just to endorse that assessment, but to act on it.

If this is what Mr. Bush intends to do, it goes, or should go, without saying that his overriding purpose is to ensure the security of this country in accordance with the vow he took upon becoming president, and in line with his pledge not to stand by while one of the world's most dangerous regimes threatens us with one of the world's most dangerous weapons.

But there is, it has been reported, another consideration that is driving Mr. Bush. According to a recent news story in the New York Times, for example, Bush has taken to heart what "officials from 21 governments in and around the Middle East warned at a meeting of Arab leaders in March"--namely, "that Iran's drive for atomic technology could result in the beginning of 'a grave and destructive nuclear arms race in the region.' " Which is to say that he fears that local resistance to Iran's bid for hegemony in the greater Middle East through the acquisition of nuclear weapons could have even more dangerous consequences than a passive capitulation to that bid by the Arab countries. For resistance would spell the doom of all efforts to stop the spread of nuclear weapons, and it would vastly increase the chances of their use.

I have no doubt that this ominous prospect figures prominently in the president's calculations. But it seems evident to me that the survival of Israel, a country to which George W. Bush has been friendlier than any president before him, is also of major concern to him--a concern fully coincident with his worries over a Middle Eastern arms race.

Much of the world has greeted Ahmadinejad's promise to wipe Israel off the map with something close to insouciance. In fact, it could almost be said of the Europeans that they have been more upset by Ahmadinejad's denial that a Holocaust took place 60 years ago than by his determination to set off one of his own as soon as he acquires the means to do so. In some of European countries, Holocaust denial is a crime, and the European Union only recently endorsed that position. Yet for all their retrospective remorse over the wholesale slaughter of Jews back then, the Europeans seem no readier to lift a finger to prevent a second Holocaust than they were the first time around.

Not so George W. Bush, a man who knows evil when he sees it and who has demonstrated an unfailingly courageous willingness to endure vilification and contumely in setting his face against it. It now remains to be seen whether this president, battered more mercilessly and with less justification than any other in living memory, and weakened politically by the enemies of his policy in the Middle East in general and Iraq in particular, will find it possible to take the only action that can stop Iran from following through on its evil intentions both toward us and toward Israel. As an American and as a Jew, I pray with all my heart that he will.

Mr. Podhoretz is editor-at-large of Commentary. His new book, World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism, will be released by Doubleday on Sept. 11. This essay, in somewhat different form, was delivered as an address at a conference, "Is It 1938 Again?," held by the Center for Jewish Studies at Queens College, City University of New York, in April.

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Wednesday, September 30, 2009

'Sleeping with the Enemy': Israeli ban on Judaic-Arab miscegenation

In "Israel" there is a "state-sanctioned anti-miscegenation program" and an "Anti-Assimilation Department" which "works to prevent Jewish girls from dating Muslim men." 
The program "enjoys the support of the municipality and the police."
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Israel's vile anti-miscegenation squads

When the police lend support to vigilante groups hounding Jewish-Arab couples, what hope is there for coexistence?

Seth Freedman | The Guardian (UK)  |29 September 2009

While the proliferation of ultra-orthodox "vigilante police" is a stain on Israeli society, their Taliban-esque actions can at least be contextualised as the inevitable consequence of religious fundamentalism gone wild. Such communities are dominated by leaders who refuse to accommodate any form of modernization or freedom of thought into their archaic systems of governance, and the emergence of "modesty squads" is simply a manifestation of such primitive and patriarchal thinking. Regardless of the reasons behind their appearance, the groups should not be tolerated by Israel's leaders, as they contravene the most basic human rights of the state's citizens.

Israeli lawmakers have a duty to clamp down hard on the mobs' extrajudicial activities, in order to prevent a localized problem spreading from isolated religious strongholds into the rest of the country's towns and cities. Yet the ultra-orthodox (rabbinic) enforcers have good reason to challenge any efforts to rein in their sheriff's posses, given that the example set by several Israeli municipalities implies that what is sauce for the religious goose is sauce for the secular gander.

While the local authorities in Petah Tikva, Kiryat Gat and elsewhere aren't sanctioning all-out violence against girls deemed behaving inappropriately, their modus operandi is no different in intent – and the targets of their self-righteous rage no more deserving of punishment – than the girls in Meah Shearim opting out of the ultra-restrictive dress code.

According to reports in the Israeli press: "A special team in the youth department of the Petah Tikva municipality will locate [Jewish] girls in the habit of meeting with men from minorities and will assist them … 'The problem of minority men is well-known,' said the chief of the youth department, Moshe Spektor. 'Our attempts to deal with this problem are real and sincere. The municipality is making an effort to examine the matter in co-operation with the police."

Of course, the "minority" in question is the Arab community – rather than any of the Jewish minorities in Israel such as those hailing from Ethiopia, Russia or South America – since it is the spectre of intermarriage between Jews and gentiles which is the cause of such abject fear among diehard Israeli nationalists, both religious and secular alike.

As reported in Ha'aretz, Kiryat Gat's state-sanctioned anti-miscegenation program's sole aim is preventing Jewish girls from becoming romantically involved with Israeli Bedouin (Arabs): The program enjoys the support of the municipality and the police, and is headed by Kiryat Gat's welfare representative, who goes to schools to warn girls of the "exploitative Arabs."

The program uses a video entitled "Sleeping with the Enemy," which features a local police officer and a woman from the Anti-Assimilation Department, a wing of the religious organisation Yad L'ahim, which works to prevent Jewish girls from dating Muslim men.

Many Jews in Israel and the diaspora frown upon the idea of their children marrying out of the flock, some even going as far as cutting their children out of their wills and mourning them as though they had died should they take a non-Jewish partner for a spouse.

While this is by no means restricted to the Jewish faith, the idea of such proscriptions being incorporated at state level – whether against Jews, Muslims or any other category of "undesirables" – is racism reminiscent of the dark days of segregationist America and pre-enlightened European states.

This week, the Times (of London) carried an illustrative and disturbing feature on the Israeli phenomenon, demonstrating the unabashed bigotry of those behind the purity patrols... That the (Israeli) police would even deign to co-operate with such poisonous and prejudiced characters and their fantasies of racial purity is indicative of the malaise gripping certain sectors of Israeli society, both at street and state level.

Whatever the more blinkered supporters of Israel's sectarianism say, day after day more evidence piles up attesting to the shocking reality behind Israel's mask of being a tolerant, equitable and democratic "country of all its citizens."

The likes of the modesty patrols and the anti-miscegenation squads belong in the furthest recesses of history, yet apparently the Israeli authorities are not only happy to tolerate their presence, but to actively support their work as well.

Were the shoe to be on the other foot, with Jews singled out for such base racial discrimination, the same people supporting such behavior now against Arabs would rightly be up in arms and demanding justice in the name of the persecuted.

But, of course, this is Israel, and therefore somehow "different" and "unique" – the standard retorts of those unable to defend Israeli crimes with any semblance of rational debate.

And while they continue banging their drums to drown out any criticism of the Israeli state, at ground level the divisive and destructive behavior continues, and another nail is driven into the coffin of coexistence in the Holy Land. (Emphasis supplied).

Israeli vigilantes target young Arab-Jewish couples
Sheera Frenkel in Pisgat Ze’ev | Times (London, UK) | Sept. 28, 2009

It’s past 10 p.m, but work has just begun for the group of vigilantes in a small white hatchback patrolling the streets of Pisgat Ze’ev — a Jewish settlement on the outskirts of east Jerusalem.

As the car crawls through the nearly empty streets, the men peer out at couples. They say they are experts at spotting those that don’t "match."

“Stop, right there. Stop the car. Is he an Arab? That dark guy...If they are both Jewish, keep the car moving!” yells out "David," a 31-year-old Jewish settler who does not use his real name. For more than a decade, David has considered it his unofficial job to patrol the streets looking for mixed Arab-Jewish couples.

“We are protecting the Jewish people, our traditions, our heritage. Some people just get mixed up. We talk to them, explain why it’s important for Jews to be with Jews,” he said.

His group, which works with police, goes by several names, including "Fire for Judaism," is composed of up to 45 men and funded by private donations. Members say they are fighting a “growing epidemic” of Arab-Jewish dating and spend as many hours as they can on patrol.

Similar groups have formed across the country, including in the southern Negev city of Beersheba, and northern port of Haifa. In Petah Tikva, a blue-collar city in the center of Israel, the municipality has formed a unit to discourage Arab-Jewish relationships. In Pisgat Ze’ev, the growing number of Arab-Jewish couples is seen as the result of more Jewish settlements in Arab east Jerusalem.

“The problem is always with Jewish girls dating Arab men. The Arab guy comes and buys them things, treats them well. They fall for it. They can’t see what they are doing,” says David.

Sarah, who asked not to use her real name, said it is men like David who are the problem, not her Arab boyfriend, Zadar. “I’m not stupid, or gullible or looking for trouble. I’m a Jewish girl who happened to meet a guy I like, who happens to be Arab. It’s my business. We have to go other places to go on dates, places where these guys won’t find us,” she said.

In Petah Tikva, municipal workers said they only sought out under-age Arab-Jewish couples when asked to intervene by parents. “This is not a racist thing. Statistically, these girls wind up in trouble. We try to step in before real harm can be done by talking to the teens, making social workers available to them. We never use force,” a spokesman said.

David says that he too, will not use force but on a recent night out, it became clear that he was prepared to do just about anything else. At the start of his patrol he caught sight of a “known problem couple." It was a young woman, stepping into a vehicle that he said was full of Arab men.

A car chase ensued through the windy mountain roads before the vehicle got away. David took down a licence plate number and called in the incident to the police. “I am doing this for her own good. She doesn’t know what she is getting into. It’s not like these guys are offering her a future.” (Emphasis supplied).
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