Thursday, December 16, 2010

Talmudic Mentality and Spirit of Lawlessness in the case of Rabbi Balkany

The Talmudic Mentality and the Spirit of Lawlessness
An Introduction to Allison Hoffman’s investigative report, "Tribal Allegiance"
by Michael Hoffman

In observing this trial I was not only interested in the networks of corruption, of which Talmudic Judaics are often the leaders and main players, but of the fantastic interlocking relationships with power which Judaics on all sides of the case, from the prosecution to the defense, possessed. Nearly everyone seems to be an impressively-credentially graduate of a presitgious yeshiva or law school; from those institutions it's on to an elite investment firm, a Supreme Court clerkship or some kind of White House appointment. The defendant, Rabbi Balkany, was close to Vice-President Dan Quayle and had a seat on the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Jason Furman, the brother of Balkany’s prosecutor, Jesse Furman, is deputy director of President Obama’s National Economic Council.

A critic might opine that the account of the decline and fall of Rabbi Balkany is testimony to the fact that in America we really are all equal, and that being a member of "The Tribe" is no guarantee of privilege or immunity.

My response would be say that this is incredibly naive, if not disingenous. Talmudists are prosecuted and jailed only when their crimes become so visibly outrageous they threaten the entire edifice of La Kosher Nostra. Out-of-control, avaricious renegades are put in their place so as to preserve the American operations of the enterprise itself.

The signature symbol in this stagecraft that is part Merchant of Venice and wholly Talmudic, is glimpsed at the point at which the rabbi's wife spots the garish, masonic "Great Seal of the United States" hanging on the wall of the Federal courtroom, where images of Jesus Christ and the crucifix are of course banned. She points approvingly at the hexagon (the six-pointed, misnamed "Star of David") within the Great Seal, as if to say, 'Like most everything else in America, we own this place too.'

Lastly, we are duty bound to note that we can take no credit for being related to the author of this investigative piece, Allison Hoffman.

EXCERPTS:

"As one person told me, (Rabbi) Balkany is the kind of guy who will try to find a shortcut if you tell him to cross the street at the light."

"Balkany’s brother-in-law, Sholom Rubashkin, was sentenced last summer to 27 years in prison on charges of financial fraud.”

“You know, my heart goes out, that a man like Cohen, who obviously has made it, he’s probably even a kohane because his name is Cohen.”

“...at the federal prison camp in Otisville, N.Y., an hour or so north of Manhattan...the Bureau of Prisons has tailored to suit the special dietary and other needs of Hasidic inmates. 'It’s like a bungalow colony up there in the Catskills,' joked Gary Friedman..."

One of the people who came to support Balkany in court every day was Chesed Halberstam, a long-bearded, bespectacled man who spent 17 years as a personal aide to the wife of Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson....Every morning, he took a bound copy of the Torah that had once belonged to the rebbe out of a black leather carrying case, handed it to Balkany, and then parked himself in the front row, just behind the defense table. I asked him why he took it from Balkany every time court recessed, instead of lending it to the rabbi for the duration of the trial. “It’s worth a great deal, so I don’t let it out of my sight,” explained Halberstam. He added that he hoped that the book might bring Balkany luck, even if he only held on to it a few hours each day. (Emphasis supplied by Michael Hoffman)

Courtroom 11B in the white-marble Daniel Patrick Moynihan Federal Courthouse, near City Hall, has hanging on its back wall a plaque of the Great Seal of the United States: an image of an eagle crowned by 13 tiny stars representing the original colonies, arranged in the pattern of a Star of David. On the second day of the trial, Sarah Balkany, a short, plump woman who sat through much of the trial studying her own small prayer book, spotted it, smiled, and leaned over to point it out to one of her daughters, Rosie, who smiled too and patted her mother’s hand.

Ironically, it was the government that invoked the principles of Jewish law before the jury. “Well-reputed, prominent members of his community gave praise to Rabbi Balkany, and the acknowledgment, this acknowledgment had a Hebrew name,” Marc Berger, the 36-year-old deputy head of the securities task force in the U.S. attorney’s office, explained in his closing. “It was called a 'hakorus hatov”(recognizing when someone is owed a debt of gratitude --Michael Hoffman).

Rabbi Balkany's lawyer Brafman stood up to give his defense speech:

Brafman is famous for his courtroom prowess—a performer so worth seeing that other lawyers stopped in to watch him. At five feet six inches, he barely reaches Berger’s shoulder, but as he took the podium, his barrel chest puffed out, and he seemed to fill the room. He adjusted his French cuffs and began. “Just so we’re clear, lying on those tapes, everybody lied,” he said. “There should be no question in your mind that everybody lied. Klotz lied to Balkany. Balkany lied to Klotz.” Brafman backed into the middle of the courtroom, away from his notes, speaking in increasingly outraged tones. “Are we nuts? We’re not nuts. None of us are nuts. I don’t think we’re nuts. But we’re listening to conversations that are nuts,” Brafman argued. “You can’t just convict Rabbi Balkany because he had some stupid conversations that the government has suggested to you show that he’s guilty of a crime,” he went on. “He did not act with the requisite criminal knowledge or intent that these crimes will require you to find beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Brafman paused, reaching into a repertoire that stretches back to his early days working for Robert Morgenthau in the Manhattan D.A.’s office. “Now, you have an argument with somebody, even somebody you love, whoever gets the last word, man, that’s a powerful moment, and that’s the advantage the government gets, because they have the disadvantage of having to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt,” Brafman said. “But here is my thought on that, and I think I’m right, and I hope you agree. They don’t have the last word. You do.” Let’s fight the man, was what he meant—you, me, and the rabbi against Steve Cohen and the government.

Jesse Furman got up to give the government’s response. Furman, a mild 38-year-old, is Brafman’s antithesis in almost every way: rumpled where Brafman is immaculately tailored, precisely spoken where Brafman releases Brooklyn-inflected torrents of words, an Upper West Sider who attends the traditional-egalitarian Ansche Chesed synagogue while Brafman is a trustee of Beth Sholom Synagogue in Lawrence, on Long Island. Furman’s father, Jay, is a successful real estate developer active in prominent New York and Jewish charities, while his mother, Gail, is a well-known Democratic fundraiser. His brother, Jason [29], is deputy director of President Barack Obama’s National Economic Council. Jesse Furman went from Harvard to Yale Law and clerked for Supreme Court Justice David Souter.

Tribal Allegiance
A Brooklyn rabbi thought he could swindle hedge-fund king Steven Cohen by playing on his Judaism. It was a bad bet
By Allison Hoffman | Tablet | Dec 16, 2010 

Steven A. Cohen, the billionaire [1] hedge-fund manager, doesn’t take cold calls. If you dial the headquarters of Cohen’s $12 billion fund, SAC Capital Advisors, in Stamford, Connecticut, a pleasant-voiced receptionist will kindly offer to take a message, which Cohen’s assistant will screen without disturbing her boss, who typically spends the hours of the trading day deeply engrossed in the numbers flashing across the eight screens mounted at his desk. He communicates with his fellow traders through desktop squawk boxes, and they watch him via an in-house video feed referred to as “the Steve Cam [2].”

A phone message deemed sufficiently mysterious might be passed to SAC’s general counsel, Peter Nussbaum, which is how Nussbaum wound up talking last winter to an ultra-Orthodox rabbi named Milton Balkany, who said he had information that was potentially damaging to SAC. The rabbi had, wittingly or not, called on a December day when everyone in Cohen’s orbit was on high alert. The morning’s New York Times featured a story [3] about rumors linking SAC to the government’s investigation of a rival fund, the Galleon Group—which has since blossomed into one of the largest insider-trading probes in Wall Street history. The same afternoon, Cohen’s ex-wife, Patricia, filed a sensational civil suit [4] alleging that he had traded on inside information in the 1980s, while they were still married. (Cohen has moved for dismissal.)

Balkany introduced himself as the dean of a Jewish girls’ school in Brooklyn. He may as well have been calling from another planet—one governed by shtetl values dictating that Jews should accord a high degree of loyalty to each other. The rabbi claimed that, in the course of his work counseling Jewish prisoners, he had learned that the government was pressuring an inmate to give up information about Cohen, and that, as a fellow Jew, he didn’t want to see harm befall the hedge-fund manager, even though they didn’t know each other. It quickly emerged that Balkany wanted something in return—$2 million in cash for his struggling school, Bais Yaakov of Midwood, and a $2 million loan for his former yeshiva, Mesivta Torah Vodaath, one of the oldest and largest of Brooklyn’s ultra-Orthodox high schools. And one more thing: He wanted a 20-minute meeting with Cohen for his son-in-law, an aspiring financier who dreamed of pitching his idol on an investment idea.

The conversation with Nussbaum set off a chain of events that ultimately led to Balkany, a onetime power broker known as “the Brooklyn Bundler,” being found guilty in federal court last month of extortion, blackmail, fraud, and making false statements to a government agent. His trial, in a wood-paneled courtroom in lower Manhattan, played out as a kind of Jewish commedia dell’arte. Balkany, the bearded rabbi, was dressed in customary dark suits accessorized with a black velvet yarmulke. He shared the defense table with a Brooklyn boy made good: the lawyer Benjamin Brafman, a Modern Orthodox Jew who is famous for representing high-profile celebrities like Jay-Z, Sean Combs, and Plaxico Burress. The government’s case was argued by Marc Berger and Jesse Furman, both Jewish and Ivy League-educated assistant U.S. attorneys. In the public gallery, Balkany’s wife and a rotating cast of his 13 sons and daughters made up a kind of Greek chorus, sighing and clucking as the damaging testimony added up.

In his various phone calls and meetings with SAC’s lawyers, Balkany had repeated one phrase as if it would insulate him from suspicion: “I’m not a hold-up man.” He would then invariably assert the value of the work his school was doing in the community, or his good character as a Jew. “I’m not here to threaten some—God forbid, I’m on the other side of the fence,” Balkany told Nussbaum in one taped conversation. “You know, my heart goes out, that a man like Cohen, who obviously has made it, he’s probably even a kohane because his name is Cohen.”

Cohen, the Long Island-raised son of a Seventh Avenue garmento, never met Balkany, and he never came anywhere near the courtroom during Balkany’s trial in November. The closest he got, at least publicly, was a modern art auction [5] at Christie’s, 60 blocks uptown. But the rabbi was the least of Cohen’s problems that month: The government’s insider-trading investigation was reaching fever pitch. Two weeks after the trial wrapped up, government agents served SAC and two other hedge funds with subpoenas [6] and began making arrests.

And yet, from the start, Cohen’s lawyers took the rabbi seriously. Within days of Balkany’s first call to Connecticut, SAC’s outside counsel, a former prosecutor named Martin Klotz, reported the rabbi to federal prosecutors in New York’s Southern District—the same office pursuing the insider-trading investigation against Galleon. The SAC attorneys agreed to take the step of going undercover, taping hours of conversations that were crucial to the government’s case against Balkany. The rabbi, it seems, provided an excellent opportunity for Cohen’s team to do the government “a solid,” as one lawyer who has represented clients in the insider-trading investigation into Galleon put it to me. Stephen Miller, a former federal prosecutor in Manhattan and Philadelphia, explained SAC’s decision to participate as a savvy legal move. “They could say they have a culture of compliance,” he said, “and Exhibit A is this case.”

Now Balkany, who assumed that by presenting himself as a concerned “co-religionist” he could establish a real connection to Cohen, is facing up to 20 years in prison. And it’s all because the rabbi made a simple mistake: believing that, just because he imagined they shared a special bond as Jews, Cohen would feel the same way.

On November 1, 2010, the first day of the trial, Brafman, Balkany’s lawyer, urged the jury—three men and nine women, all but two of them black or Latino—not to judge his client as a Jew. “I represent the man with the white beard and black yarmulke,” Brafman said, by way of introduction. “Look at yourselves,” he went on. “Nobody on the jury looks like Rabbi Balkany. That’s not a jury of one’s peers.” It was an effective rhetorical gesture, but it sounded almost absurd in the context of a case that turned on Balkany’s effort to trade on his and Cohen’s shared Jewish heritage. “Frankly, I, I really, I’m doing this as a Jew to a Jew,” Balkany had insisted in a taped conversation with Klotz, SAC’s outside counsel. “I’m just stepping in, really, to be of help to him.”

The plan to extort Steve Cohen appears to have originated at the federal prison camp in Otisville, N.Y., an hour or so north of Manhattan, which the Bureau of Prisons has tailored to suit the special dietary and other needs of Hasidic inmates. “It’s like a bungalow colony up there in the Catskills,” joked Gary Friedman, the executive director of Jewish Prisoner Services International [7], an organization that provides services to Jewish inmates. Balkany was a regular visitor to the camp and, in his recorded conversations with SAC’s lawyers, said it was an inmate named David Schick who provided the connection to Hayim Regensberg, the man Balkany claimed was being pressured to give information on SAC. Schick, the scion of a famous bakery dynasty in Brooklyn, is an Orthodox Jew who defrauded [8] his investors of as much as $200 million in the late 1990s.

Regensberg is serving a 100-month sentence for running a Ponzi scheme, and his lawyer, Robert Baum, told me he believes his client has information that may be of interest to the government. Indeed, some of the details that Balkany dangled in his conversations with SAC have proven to connect to real investigations—particularly concerning a healthcare fund called FrontPoint, which is embroiled [9] in its own insider-trading scandal. But prison officials testified during Balkany’s trial that the rabbi never visited Regensberg during the months he spent negotiating with SAC, and federal investigators testified that no one from the government ever spoke to him about the insider-trading investigations, let alone approached him with an offer to cut a deal in exchange for information. “They haven’t tried to follow up,” Baum told me, in late November.

In Jewish terms, Cohen made a strange target. He and his wife, Alexandra—who grew up in a Puerto Rican Catholic family in Washington Heights—do not, according to tax records filed by their family foundation, give to Jewish communal organizations or to synagogues, but choose instead to shower millions on hospitals, urban-youth programs, and the schools where their children are enrolled—including Brown University, from which Cohen’s son, Robert, graduated in 2009. Cohen also sits on the board of the Robin Hood Foundation [10], a group devoted to fighting poverty in New York. Of the millions his foundation has given away since it was set up in 2001, the only significant donation to a Jewish cause was $25,000 to a religious-outreach group called Gateways, which is based in the ultra-Orthodox enclave of Monsey, to buy a table at a gala fundraising dinner in 2004. (The group’s director, Mordechai Suchard, told me he couldn’t remember who was being honored.)

In the wake of Balkany’s arrest, and amid a wave of publicity [11] surrounding Cohen’s ex-wife Patricia, Steve and Alex Cohen earlier this year announced a $50 million gift [12] to an organization that is at least nominally Jewish: the North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System, which will use the money to expand its children’s hospital in New Hyde Park, south of Great Neck, where Cohen grew up. “Stevie Cohen is one of the most charitable people I know, and he’s done extremely well,” said his former boss Howard Silverman, who gave Cohen his start on Wall Street 30 years ago, at the boutique investment firm Gruntal & Co. “He wasn’t into his religion—he was just Jewish, like anyone else.”

As an undergraduate at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Cohen was a brother in the Jewish fraternity Zeta Beta Tau and in 2007 gave the fraternity a $2 million gift [15]. Now 54, Cohen evinces little outward connection to the Jewish Establishment—though he has been a generous political contributor to both parties and last summer reportedly hosted a dinner [16] at his Greenwich estate for Republican strategists that included the Israel advocate Dan Senor, author [17] of Start-Up Nation, who has been bruited as a possible Senate candidate in 2012. But in a city full of high-profile Jewish spenders, Cohen doesn’t engage in the antics of, say, his fellow hedge-funder Stephen Schwarzman, the New York Public Library donor who threw himself a $5 million birthday party that made the front page [18] of the Wall Street Journal, or of David Brooks, the Long Island defense contractor who threw a $10 million bat mitzvah [19]—complete with performances from Aerosmith and Tom Petty—for his daughter Elizabeth in 2005, before being charged in 2007 with insider trading and securities fraud. (Brooks was found guilty [20] at trial in September.)

Yet, from the start, Balkany attempted to establish a Jewish rapport with his interlocutors—even where there wasn’t any to be made. A few days after his first phone call, Balkany met with Klotz, SAC’s outside counsel, at his gracious red-brick home in Brooklyn. The first thing Balkany asked Klotz, as they sat down over some snacks, was whether he was a Jew. “He said, ‘Are you Jewish, or Polish, or’—and it was sort of like, ‘What?’ ” Klotz, a graying, square-faced man whose family is German but not Jewish, testified with a bemused grin. A concealed camera captured a similar conversation between Nussbaum, SAC’s in-house lawyer, and the rabbi when they met in Stamford, in early January of this year. “What is your Hebrew name, Peter?” Balkany asked. Nussbaum, whose decidedly un-Hebraic middle name is Addison, told the rabbi that his German-born Jewish grandparents in Queens had been religious, but his father had insisted on a completely secular home. “So, we have to have you have a bar mitzvah!” Balkany responded, delighted. In court, months later, when one of the prosecutors asked Nussbaum—a tall, thin-faced, WASPy-looking man with a receding cap of sandy, straight hair—whether he considered himself ethnically Jewish, he answered with a curt “Yes.”

Balkany’s case was the kind that usually doesn’t make it to trial. From the start, it was obvious that the government would be hard-pressed to lose. Everything, except for the first few phone calls Balkany made to SAC, was on tape. Over the course of the first four days of the trial, the jury heard hours of Balkany, in his distinctive lilt, wheedling and cajoling SAC representatives and undercover FBI agents he was told were SAC executives in more than 50 phone calls. The ask was simple: If Cohen gave him $4 million in checks for Bais Yaakov and Torah Vodaath, he would magically transmute it into “good will” with Regensberg, the inmate, who Balkany said he would instruct to keep quiet about “Connecticut.” “I want to tell you, this is a heavy lift,” Balkany told Klotz on the phone last January. The next day, when he met Klotz and Nussbaum in Stamford, he elaborated. “I don’t consider it a lot of money, and I’ll tell you why—not because he’s so rich,” Balkany explained. “I think, even if he was able to maintain the business, but if he had to go into this thing, you’re talking $20 million, $30 million.”

It’s impossible to know what the rabbi was thinking as he sat at the defense table listening to his own charade. He did not take the stand, and his lawyer, Brafman, declined interviews on the rabbi’s behalf. (“Talking too much and using poor judgment got him into this mess,” Brafman told me.) At 64, Balkany looks a little like a bearded Donald Sutherland, with the same bright white hair and bulbous features, always in a black or gray suit and a crisp white shirt with a black tie and a black velvet yarmulke, sometimes clutching a simple white ceramic mezuzah. As the trial progressed, he sometimes followed along with transcripts that were stacked in a three-ring binder. Other times, he stared off into space, or read from a bound copy of the Torah.

But a guy with the chutzpah to try and swindle Steve Cohen, a man legendary for his business acumen, is also the kind of person who would insist on going for broke with a jury trial rather than take a government plea offer. “Rabbi Balkany would not plead guilty because he insisted that he did not intentionally violate the law,” Brafman told me after the trial ended, when we met at his office in Midtown Manhattan—a comfortable room with cream-colored furniture, expansive views out over the East River, and walls cluttered with framed newspaper clippings and signed headshots from his celebrity clients. (Brafman reduced his normal fees for the rabbi.)

The rabbi was arrested once before, in 2003, on charges of misappropriating $700,000 in federal funds designated for paying down two school mortgages. (The New York Post dubbed him “Robbi [21].”) In that episode, Brafman convinced prosecutors to suspend their case in exchange for Balkany agreeing to return the money. This time around, Balkany clearly believed that he was tricked, over the course of two months of negotiations with Klotz, into going further than he’d ever intended at the outset. “Look, I told you from where I’m coming, you know, that I’d like him to participate in a couple of charities,” he told Klotz last December, shortly after their meeting in Brooklyn. “If, after you’ve shared the name and you’ve come back, well, it’s really of no consequence whatsoever, fine, you know, good luck and that’s it. Then I’m still happy we had our meeting.” Klotz said he understood. “You know, on the five percent chance that, you know, it could explode, there was somebody out there willing to take the time to sit down and to pass it on,” Balkany replied, “and give him the opportunity to divert, you know, this type of thing.”

As one person told me, Balkany is the kind of guy who will try to find a shortcut if you tell him to cross the street at the light. He was born in Detroit, where his father was a stock manager for General Motors and his mother worked as a typist. According to Balkany’s older brother, Louis, now a vascular surgeon in Toledo, Ohio, the family kept kosher but wasn’t Sabbath observant, until one day his brother—known to his family by his Hebrew name, Yehoshua—announced he wanted to leave his public school and go to a local yeshiva, Beth Yehuda.

Balkany won a scholarship to attend Torah Vodaath, a yeshiva in Brooklyn, and he stayed in New York after he was ordained as a rabbi in the late 1960s, eventually taking over as principal at Bais Yaakov. On a plane to Florida, he met Sarah Rubashkin, a daughter of Aaron Rubashkin, founder of Agriprocessors kosher meatpacking empire, who occupies a position of near-royalty in the Lubavitch community. They soon married, and their first child was born in 1969. (Agriprocessors was itself recently the target of a wide-ranging federal investigation; Balkany’s brother-in-law, Sholom Rubashkin, was sentenced [22] last summer to 27 years in prison on charges of financial fraud.) “The Rubashkin family, they thought it was an intermarriage,” Louis Balkany recalled to me over the phone. Milton Balkany never became a Lubavitcher, maintaining his distinct version of Hasidic observance, and making his life in Borough Park, a few miles away from the Lubavitch enclave of Crown Heights.

By the late 1980s, he had established himself as a successful political fundraiser, mainly for Republicans; according to a May 1990 report in Common Cause, Balkany bragged that lobbyists called him “the million-dollar-a-year man.” He had a seat on the National Republican Senatorial Committee and once gave an invocation during a reception thrown by Dan Quayle, then vice president. “He was quirky, in the sense that he went to minyan first thing in the morning but he wore John Lobb [23] shoes,” said a former Bush Administration staffer, referring to the bespoke brand popular with Republican heavyweights at the time.

Over the years, he developed a reputation as someone who had access not just to elected officials but to various government agencies, particularly the Bureau of Prisons, where attorneys found Balkany’s help invaluable in getting their clients’ requests addressed. “There was one case with a client who was in prison in the Midwest, and I was really at my wit’s end, and people said, ‘Call Rabbi Balkany,’ ” Brafman told me. “People who were not taking my calls took his calls, and he made inquiries and was able to convince the BOP to make the transfer.”

ndeed, by late January, as SAC continued to drag its heels on handing over the checks, Balkany himself drew on his track record with the Bureau of Prisons to take back control of the process: He called prosecutors himself and offered up Regensberg’s name in connection with a request to help other inmates get moved to halfway houses or better kosher food. “I’m just hoping by being a good Samaritan, or a good-will ambassador, to get Regensberg to cooperate,” he told an FBI investigator, unaware that the same man was investigating him.

One of the people who came to support Balkany in court every day was Chesed Halberstam, a long-bearded, bespectacled man who spent 17 years as a personal aide to the wife of Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson. He wore a yellow pin he proudly explained indicates he is awaiting the Messiah. Every morning, he took a bound copy of the Torah that had once belonged to the rebbe out of a black leather carrying case, handed it to Balkany, and then parked himself in the front row, just behind the defense table. I asked him why he took it from Balkany every time court recessed, instead of lending it to the rabbi for the duration of the trial. “It’s worth a great deal, so I don’t let it out of my sight,” explained Halberstam. He added that he hoped that the book might bring Balkany luck, even if he only held on to it a few hours each day. “He was just trying to help people, and they bring these ludicrous charges,” Halberstam said.

Courtroom 11B in the white-marble Daniel Patrick Moynihan Federal Courthouse, near City Hall, has hanging on its back wall a plaque of the Great Seal of the United States: an image of an eagle crowned by 13 tiny stars representing the original colonies, arranged in the pattern of a Star of David. On the second day of the trial, Sarah Balkany, a short, plump woman who sat through much of the trial studying her own small prayer book, spotted it, smiled, and leaned over to point it out to one of her daughters, Rosie, who smiled too and patted her mother’s hand.

Rosie, tall and blonde and pregnant, is married to the Chabad emissary in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. One of the other Balkany daughters, Nechamie, is the rabbi’s wife at the Chabad outpost in Fort Myers, Florida. They dress modestly, but they manage to look chic: long-sleeved shirts with cardigans and shawls, clingy sweater dresses, slouchy boots, sheitel wigs cut in attractive shoulder-length styles. One afternoon, I followed another of Balkany’s daughters, a blonde nutritionist named Sheva, into the ladies’ room; she was heavily pregnant, and I commented that it couldn’t be easy for her to sit all day on the hard wooden pews. She asked me if I was a juror and relaxed when I said I was not, telling me that she was overdue with her first child. “If my water breaks, I’ll just leave quietly,” she said, laughing. “This trial doesn’t need any more drama.”

The Balkany women spent much of the trial studying their prayer books, occasionally leaning toward each other to whisper animatedly about this or that piece of gossip; the effect was to give the gallery area, separated by a low wall from the well where the attorneys and lawyers sat, the atmosphere of a shul.

The first week of the trial, I sat with Tom Robbins, a chipper, white-haired former Daily News reporter, now a columnist [25] for the Village Voice, who was drawn to the case for personal reasons: He was sued by Balkany in 2004 for defamation. (The case was later dismissed.) Robbins, no stranger to the myriad stripes of Orthodox Jewry in Brooklyn, was nonetheless puzzled by the variations he had seen on display in the gallery. “Are they all Orthodox?” he asked, gesturing at two of Balkany’s younger daughters, who paraded in wearing short skirts paired with designer shoes: suede Prada peep-toes and racy black patent-leather Yves Saint Laurent platforms. Their youngest brother, Shmuel—who had his own turn in the news a couple of years ago, after being badly beaten [26] in Crown Heights—wore loafers emblazoned with the Prada logo. But even those who were less outwardly flashy are, it turns out, prone to secular adventures: The rabbi’s son Levi and his wife, Perel, had an Orthodox wedding [27] in 2004, but, according to public records, celebrated their first anniversary by getting married again in Las Vegas, at the infamous Little White Wedding Chapel [28], where Rev. Iann Schonken—who in 2004 performed the brief wedding of Britney Spears to her childhood friend Jason Alexander—officiated.

Their expensive clothes and jewelry would have been a passing curiosity had it not been for the heartbreaking testimony of one witness, called by the government: Chana Rivka Flaum, a tiny, girlish woman in flat shoes, bobbed sheitel, and heavy stockings. As the administrator at Bais Yaakov, she could explain exactly what drove Balkany to try and push his luck with Cohen: He was broke. According to state records, Balkany is carrying more than $200,000 in unpaid tax liens against his home in Borough Park. The school, which declared bankruptcy in 2005, vacated its original property—a 1960s-style building whose exterior wall still bears the ghostly outline of the name “Bais Yaakov”—and downsized into a much smaller facility a few miles east in Midwood.

Flaum was visibly anxious and overwhelmed on the witness stand. When Marc Berger, one of the prosecutors, asked her about whether the school had an endowment, she responded, “I don’t know what that means.” She described how she made payroll, or covered utilities, by cashing tuition checks from parents at a local check-cashing service; she said that in December of 2009, many of the teachers at the school had not been paid since the beginning of the school year. “How do you know that teachers had not been paid in December of 2009?” asked Berger. “Partly because I deal with payroll and partly because I had teachers asking me for money every day,” Flaum said, looking directly at Balkany, who looked down at his lap.

Ironically, it was the government that invoked the principles of Jewish law before the jury. “Well-reputed, prominent members of his community gave praise to Rabbi Balkany, and the acknowledgment, this acknowledgment had a Hebrew name,” Marc Berger, the 36-year-old deputy head of the securities task force in the U.S. attorney’s office, explained in his closing. “It was called a hakorus hatov.”

Berger, handsome, tall, and dark-haired, was the first to deliver his summation to the jury, on a Tuesday afternoon. His parents came to watch, as did his wife, Berit, who is also a lawyer. She sat at the back of the courtroom, rocking their napping newborn daughter in a car seat on the carpeted floor. “The defendant lied and used everyone around him to achieve his criminal goals,” declared Berger, who stood at a podium facing the jury, as Balkany sat behind his left shoulder, quietly clutching his Torah to his chest. “The evidence in this case really speaks for itself quite literally,” Berger went on. “Everything you need to find the defendant guilty of the crimes charged, it’s on tape.”

After a short break, Brafman got up to give his reply. Brafman is famous for his courtroom prowess—a performer so worth seeing that other lawyers stopped in to watch him. At five feet six inches, he barely reaches Berger’s shoulder, but as he took the podium, his barrel chest puffed out, and he seemed to fill the room. He adjusted his French cuffs and began. “Just so we’re clear, lying on those tapes, everybody lied,” he said. “There should be no question in your mind that everybody lied. Klotz lied to Balkany. Balkany lied to Klotz.” Brafman backed into the middle of the courtroom, away from his notes, speaking in increasingly outraged tones. “Are we nuts? We’re not nuts. None of us are nuts. I don’t think we’re nuts. But we’re listening to conversations that are nuts,” Brafman argued. “You can’t just convict Rabbi Balkany because he had some stupid conversations that the government has suggested to you show that he’s guilty of a crime,” he went on. “He did not act with the requisite criminal knowledge or intent that these crimes will require you to find beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Brafman paused, reaching into a repertoire that stretches back to his early days working for Robert Morgenthau in the Manhattan D.A.’s office. “Now, you have an argument with somebody, even somebody you love, whoever gets the last word, man, that’s a powerful moment, and that’s the advantage the government gets, because they have the disadvantage of having to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt,” Brafman said. “But here is my thought on that, and I think I’m right, and I hope you agree. They don’t have the last word. You do.” Let’s fight the man, was what he meant—you, me, and the rabbi against Steve Cohen and the government.

When he finished, after an astonishing hour and a half of high-volume exposition, Brafman collapsed into his leather seat, exhausted. Balkany turned to his family, his pale cheeks suddenly ruddy, a smile stretching beneath his beard as he surveyed them—almost all of his children present, except for Sheva, who had gone into labor. “That was wonderful, wasn’t it?” Balkany asked me, on his way out. He made his way through the crowd to the coat rack, where his black hat sat perched on the top shelf. Outside, in the white marble hallway, one of his daughters rushed to the bank of pay phones to make a phone call to the hospital; as her father came out into the hallway, she shreiked, “Sheva had her baby! Eight pounds!” Balkany’s smile grew broader.

The next morning, Jesse Furman got up to give the government’s response. Furman, a mild 38-year-old, is Brafman’s antithesis in almost every way: rumpled where Brafman is immaculately tailored, precisely spoken where Brafman releases Brooklyn-inflected torrents of words, an Upper West Sider who attends the traditional-egalitarian Ansche Chesed synagogue while Brafman is a trustee of Beth Sholom Synagogue in Lawrence, on Long Island. Furman’s father, Jay, is a successful real estate developer active in prominent New York and Jewish charities, while his mother, Gail, is a well-known Democratic fundraiser. His brother, Jason [29], is deputy director of President Barack Obama’s National Economic Council. Jesse Furman went from Harvard to Yale Law and clerked for Supreme Court Justice David Souter.

But Furman, too, could make a credible common-man plea to the jury: “We live in a country, a beautiful country, where no person, no person can be accused of a crime without the entitlement to a trial, where any person charged with a serious crime is entitled to a trial before a jury just like you.” We all came from somewhere, and we all worked hard to get from there, to where we are. “The Red Cross doesn’t use these kinds of lines to raise money,” Furman said, citing Balkany’s repeated reassurances to SAC’s representatives that if they handed over the cash he wanted, they wouldn’t have to sweat a government investigation. “This isn’t how the March of Dimes gets the money it uses for charity,” he added. “This is corruption, pure and simple.”

The jury was dispatched at just before 11 a.m., left to decide whether Balkany deserved anything from Steve Cohen, his fellow Jew. By 3:45, the jury had returned its verdict. It was a simple and definitive “no”—guilty, on all four counts.

URLs in this post:

[1] billionaire: http://www.forbes.com/lists/2010/10/billionaires-2010_Steven-Cohen_PZMO.html
[2] the Steve Cam: http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2010/06/steve-cohen-on-life-love-his-art-collection-and-those-pesky-insider-trading-rumors.html
[3] story: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/16/business/16sac.html
[4] suit: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/17/business/17hedge.html
[5] auction: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/04/nyregion/04auction.html
[6] subpoenas: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/sac-tells-investors-it-got-government-subpoena-2010-11-23
[7] Jewish Prisoner Services International: http://www.jewishprisonerservices.org/
[8] defrauded: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B04EFDC1439F935A25755C0A960958260&pagewanted=2
[9] embroiled: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-rabbi-who-blew-the-whistle-on-frontpoints-chip-skowron-insider-trading-is-the-same-rabbi-who-tried-to-blackmail-steve-cohen-2010-11
[10] Robin Hood Foundation: http://www.robinhood.org/home.aspx
[11] publicity: http://nymag.com/news/features/65126/
[12] gift: http://foundationcenter.org/pnd/news/story.jhtml?id=289300008
[13] Continue reading: http://www.tabletmag.com/news-and-politics/53532/tribal-allegiance/2/
[14] single page: http://www.tabletmag.com/news-and-politics/53532/tribal-allegiance/print/
[15] gift: http://www.zbttheta.org/brothers.php
[16] dinner: http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/people/features/12353/
[17] author: http://www.rosemontsolebury.com/investmentteam.html
[18] front page: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/29/business/yourmoney/29deal.html
[19] bat mitzvah: http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2007/10/david_brooks.html
[20] guilty: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/15/nyregion/15brooks.html
[21] Robbi: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/critics_disappear_after_rabbi_is_Cb8oPpxeBEEMj9JgWhzbwK
[22] sentenced: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/22/us/22iowa.html
[23] John Lobb: http://www.johnlobb.com/
[24] Continue reading: http://www.tabletmag.com/news-and-politics/53532/tribal-allegiance/3/
[25] columnist: http://www.villagevoice.com/columns/tom-robbins-506893/
[26] beaten: http://www.thejewishweek.com/features/crown_heights_coverup
[27] wedding: http://www.onlysimchas.com/v4/index.cfm/fuseaction:simcha.view/SimchaID:24583
[28] Little White Wedding Chapel: http://www.alittlewhitechapel.com/
[29] Jason: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/obama-announces-deputy-directors-national-economic-council
****

Friday, December 10, 2010

Media continues its amnesia over terrorist attack on Iran’s scientists

Letter to New York Times reporter David E. Sanger

Dear Mr. Sanger

Why did you omit mention of the recent, Nov. 29 assassination of Iranian nuclear scientist Majid Shahriari in your Dec. 10 report on U.S. opposition to Iranian nuclear power?

You mentioned the Stuxnet “worm” whose provenance pre-dates the assassination, but the not the assassination itself, or the murder of another scientist’s wife, Mrs. Fereydoon Abbasi, in the same attack.

Sincerely,
Michael Hoffman

Note how Sanger (below) reports that Gary Samore, an Obama administration official, is pleased that covert attacks against Iran, such as the Stuxnet worm, are in place. By omitting reference to the recent assassination of the Iranian scientist, Sanger does not have to ask the administration any embarrassing questions about whether they are pleased about that covert operation as well. Furthermore, it seems that Mr. Sanger, along with most of the US media including NPR, intends to have us forget about the terror attack against Iran’s scientists. By omission and distortion, the US propaganda system, in which Mr. Sanger is a prominent player, seeks to teach us that terror attacks worth remembering occur only against the Israelis and the West, not Muslims or Iranians.

Gary Samore represented the Obama administration on Iran at the conference of the noble-sounding “Foundation for the Defense of Democracies” ((http://www.defenddemocracy.org) which David Sanger fails to mention is actually a neocon front group whose “Leadership council” consists of Newt Gingrich, Sen. Joe Lieberman and William Kristol.

U.S. and Allies Plan More Sanctions Against Iran
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/11/world/middleeast/11nuke.html?hp

by David E. Sanger | NY Times | Dec. 10, 2010

WASHINGTON — Three days after the first nuclear talks with Iran in more than a year adjourned with no progress, President Obama’s chief nuclear adviser said on Friday that the United States and its allies planned a new round of sanctions against the country in coming weeks, part of an effort to test “how high Iran’s pain threshold is” and force the country into suspending its production of nuclear fuel.

Another session of talks with Iran is scheduled to take place next month, probably in Turkey. But at a conference on Friday held by the
Foundation for the Defense of Democracies Mr. Obama’s coordinator for weapons of mass destruction, Gary Samore, suggested that Iran may have decided to resume talks with the with the members of the United Nations Security Council and Germany “because it believes it can manipulate the appearance of negotiations to weaken existing sanctions and avoid additional measures.”

“This ploy will not work,” Mr. Samore said. “In the wake of the Geneva talks, we and our allies are determined to maintain and even increase pressure. We need to send the message to Iran that sanctions will only increase if Iran avoids serious negotiations and will not be lifted until our concerns are fully addressed.”

Mr. Samore was not specific about the sanctions now being contemplated. He also would not comment on the effects of the Stuxnet worm, which appears to have been directed at disrupting Iran’s centrifuges.

“I’m glad to hear they are having troubles with their centrifuge machines,” he said with a smile, “and the U.S. and its allies are doing everything we can to make it more complicated.” But he said nothing about who was responsible for the worm. (END QUOTE)

For further research:

(Youtube video): NPR’s Propaganda System against Iran



****

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Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Michael Hoffman exposes National Public Radio’s propaganda system



National Public Radio's pro-Israeli bias in downplaying a Nov. 29, 2010 terror bombing against Iranians and presenting Israeli agent Jeffrey Goldberg as an objective observer of Iranian and Arab affairs, is exposed by former Associated Press reporter Michael Hoffman.

Hoffman analyzes statements by Robert Siegel, Peter Kenyon and Mr. Goldberg, as heard on the "All Things Considered" broadcast of Nov. 29. Here is documentary confirmation of NPR's disinformation, betrayal of the public trust and complicity in the Zionist propaganda system.

***

Lithuanian historian Petras Stankeras and the Talmudic inquisition

The case of Lithuanian historian Petras Stankeras is a textbook example of the Talmudic inquisition at work


Petras Stankeras

by Michael Hoffman • www.RevisionistHistory.org

 Efraim Zuroff’s tirade against Lithuanian “Holocaust denial" (see below) is a textbook example of the Talmudic inquisition at work. I say “Talmudic” because the notion of a supreme level of cosmic suffering and horror far above that of any non-Judaic nation is a thoroughly Talmudic prerogative of the Master Race of Holy People. Lithuanian historian Petras Stankeras can’t question the kangaroo Nuremberg Trials because such questions offend the Master Race of Holy People. Mr. Stankeras can’t question the magical Six Million figure because such questions offend the Master Race of Holy People, and for the same reason he must not state the fact that there is no document from Hitler ordering extermination.

“Blatant Holocaust denial” is a loopy pseudo-legal term cooked up by Deborah Lipstadt and then universally imposed on the language of the world by the poor persecuted ones. This is heresy-hunting, not law or history. 

Notice how Mr. Zuroff feels free to accuse the entire nation of Lithuania (“Lithuanian society”) of deep-seated dishonesty and guilt for horrible crimes. But don’t anyone dare say such things about Israeli society! By the Talmudic standard, Judaics are the judges of the gentiles; gentiles are never fit to judge Judaics. Negative generalization about Israelis is a step on the road to another victimizing ‘Holocaust,” while negative generalization about “Lithuanian society” is a righteous corrective against a nation of “Holocaust” criminals.

This is the Talmudic double-standard that Lithuania must swallow if they want to be a "member in good standing of the European Union and Nato.” This is the reverse racism that historian  Petras Stankeras must embrace if he wants to restore his career and gain back his position in the Ministry of the Interior.

The most heinous offense of all on the part of the Lithuanians is to dare to even think for a moment that what their nation suffered under Soviet Communism, including at the hands of Christian-hating Soviet Judaics, was in any way equivalent to what the Mater Race of Holy People experienced under the Nazis. How dare any gentile for even a moment compare his or her family’s suffering to that of the Holy People! Outrageous! 

Efraim Zuroff:

"Lithuania has been the leader of a insidious campaign to try to distort the history of the Holocaust by seeking recognition that Communist crimes were just as terrible as those of the Nazis. This false equivalence would unjustly rob the Shoah of its universally-accepted uniqueness and historical significance, turning the worst case of genocide in human history into merely one of many tragedies.”

According to the Talmud, in all things, Judaics are higher, more noble, more suffering, more persecuted than non-Judaics. There can be no equality (“equivalence”) between the two, most especially in the realm of war crimes and genocide upon which Judaics have a proprietary (and lucrative) trademark.

Not to worry, however. Hannah Rosenthal, the U.S. government’s "special ambassador to combat antisemitism”  has arranged for a massive “Holocaust" education indoctrination “seminar" for Lithuanian teachers, who will be taught to know their place as inferiors and dutifully conform to the Talmudic hierarchy of victimhood.

***

US must take a tougher line on Baltic revisionism

Why has the US remained silent while European nations roundly condemn Holocaust denial by a Lithuanian government official?

Efraim Zuroff
guardian.co.uk, Monday 29 November 2010 

The resignation late last week of historian Petras Stankeras from his post as a "senior specialist" at the Lithuanian ministry of the interior received little attention in the US, but the scandal that prompted his decision to give up his job should set off a red warning light in Washington, and especially in the state department and the US embassy in Vilnius.

The story began two weeks ago with the publication in the 8 November issue of the popular news weekly Veidas of an article by Stankeras to mark the 65th anniversary of the opening of the Nuremberg Trials in which he described the proceedings as a "clearly wrong judicial investigation", and openly and unequivocally denied the Holocaust. According to the now former government official, one of the major failings of the Nuremberg trials was that they "provided a legal basis for the legend about 6 million supposedly murdered Jews, although the court did not have a single document signed by Hitler on the extermination of Jews (no one has found this document to this day, if it even exists, although a million-dollar prize has been promised).” 


 
While such a blatant assertion of Holocaust denial has never been the norm in Lithuania, a member in good standing of the European Union and Nato, anyone closely following the policies of the government on Holocaust-related issues over the years could not have failed to discern a deep-seated reluctance to honestly confront its Holocaust past and especially the extensive collaboration of local Nazi collaborators in the mass murder of Jews, primarily inside Lithuania, but outside its borders as well. From an abysmal failure to punish any of the Lithuanians who participated in the annihilation of Jews to a clear tendency in history books and textbooks to hide or minimise local complicity in Holocaust crimes, to a total failure on the issue of restitution, Lithuanian society has not even begun to tell the truth about its Holocaust history and truthfully deal with its implications.

Worse, Lithuania has been the leader of a insidious campaign to try to distort the history of the Holocaust by seeking recognition that Communist crimes were just as terrible as those of the Nazis. This false equivalence would unjustly rob the Shoah of its universally-accepted uniqueness and historical significance, turning the worst case of genocide in human history into merely one of many tragedies.


All this has been going on with increasing intensity in recent years, virtually unopposed and unchallenged, neither within the European Union nor in Nato, but Stankeras' article has now proved the catalyst for action in Europe. In a letter signed by the ambassadors to Lithuania of six EU members – Britain, Estonia, France, Finland, Netherlands, Sweden and Norway – there is not only an unequivocal and strong condemnation of the Holocaust denial and the lack of any public or official Lithuanian protest, but for the first time, there is an open denunciation of Lithuanian efforts to create a false equivalency between Nazi and Communist crimes. The letter condemns the recent decision of a court in Klaipeda to allow the use of swastikas "as a traditional Lithuanian symbol", and goes on to denounce "Spurious attempts … to equate the uniquely evil genocide of the Jews with Soviet crimes against Lithuania, which, though great in magnitude, cannot be regarded as equivalent either in their intention or their result."
 


...this week, the US embassy in Vilnius is conducting a special Holocaust education seminar for Lithuanian teachers, financed by a grant announced by Rosenthal (Hannah Rosenthal, the US "special ambassador to combat antisemitism” -Ed.) during her visit to Lithuania this past spring....

(Emphasis supplied)

Comment from a  reader:

Why on earth would anyone imply that crimes committed towards Jews by the Nazis is somehow worse than crimes committed towards other ethnic groups by the communists? Do you have any idea of the type of tactics they used? Everything ranging from execution to torture to starvation! And they killed by far many times more people than the Nazis ever did. Furthermore, they did attempt to wipe out complete ethnic groups. What about the Ukrainians in the Holodomor? Six million starved Ukrainian men, women, and children. No big deal to the person (Zuroff) who wrote this piece though right?

***

Monday, November 29, 2010

Terrorist bomb attack on Iranian scientists kills one, wounds another

Top Iranian Nuclear Scientists Attacked

NY Times online |  November 29, 2010

TEHRAN — Unidentified assailants riding motorcycles launched separate bomb attacks here on Monday against two of the country’s top nuclear scientists, killing one and prompting accusations that the United States and Israel were again trying to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program.

...The motorcycle attackers attached the bombs to the professors’ cars and then drove off, detonating them from a distance, according to Iranian media reports. Mr. Abbasi’s wife was also hurt in the blast, the reports said. Last January, a remote-controlled bomb killed a physics professor, Masoud Ali Mohammadi, outside his home....

The slain scientist, Majid Shahriari, managed a “major project” for the country’s Atomic Energy Organization, Iran’s nuclear chief, Ali Akbar Salehi, told the semiofficial IRNA news agency. His injured colleague, Fereydoon Abbasi, is believed to be even more important; he is on the United Nations Security Council’s sanctions list for ties to the Iranian nuclear effort...

Israel and the United States have often signaled that they will not tolerate a nuclear Iran. Neither has acknowledged pursuing sabotage or assassinations there, but both are widely believed to be pursuing ways to undermine the country’s nuclear program...

“They’re bad people, and the work they do is exactly what you need to design a bomb,” said a (U.S.) federal official who assesses scientific intelligence and spoke on condition of anonymity. “They’re both top scientists.”

P. J. Crowley, the State Department spokesman, did not address the Iranian accusations in detail. “All I can say is we decry acts of terrorism wherever they occur and beyond that, we do not have any information on what happened,” he said.

***

Sunday, November 21, 2010

Al Qaeda’s massacre of Christians in Iraq was timed to help Israelis

Editor’s note: Someday, probably far in the future, there will be a public revelation in the corporate media that "Al Qaeda” is a false flag operation, created, shepherded, and managed at the top, by certain western intelligence agencies.

*****

Al-Qaeda’s Christian Massacre: Aiding and Abetting the Occupation of Palestine

by Maidhc Ó Cathail / Dissident Voice | November 20th, 2010

If we are to believe the voice on those Osama bin Laden tapes, the elusive al-Qaeda leader cares deeply about Palestine. Yet the actions of the terrorist network he supposedly still directs all too often belie its statements of concern for their “brothers” under Israeli occupation.

The massacre of Iraqi Christians at Our Lady of Salvation Church in Baghdad also makes one wonder about claims that the group has “a great sense of timing.” The slaughter of Catholic Mass-goers occurred just one week after church leaders from across the Middle East had forcefully condemned Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories.

More than 200 members of 14 different churches had gathered in Rome for a papal synod to address concerns about Christian emigration from the region. However, as one commentator observed, “Time and again, they turned the discussions … towards the Palestinian question.”

In their final communiqué, the bishops urged the international community to apply UN Security Council resolutions and take “the necessary legal steps to put an end to the occupation of the different Arab territories.” Significantly, they charged the Israeli occupation with causing tensions that have led to the exodus of Christians from the Middle East.

In a follow-up news conference, the archbishop in charge of the committee that drafted the communiqué, Cyrille Salim Bustros, rejected any biblical justification for the Zionist project. “The concept of the promised land cannot be used as a base for the justification of the return of Jews to Israel and the displacement of Palestinians,” he said. “Sacred scripture should not be used to justify the occupation by Israel of Palestine.”

Not surprisingly, Tel Aviv was none too pleased with this serious challenge to the legitimacy of the self-described Jewish state. The following day, Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon issued a statement condemning the bishops. The synod, he said, had been “hijacked by an anti-Israel majority,” turning it into “a forum for political attacks on Israel in the best history of Arab propaganda.” In particular, his government was “appalled” by Archbishop Bustros’ “outrageous comments,” describing them as “a libel against the Jewish people and the State of Israel.”

One week later, the Anti-Defamation League sought to enlist Pope Benedict XVI to Israel’s side. Expressing condolences over the Baghdad killings, ADL leaders asked the pope to “join together to eliminate all terrorism in the name of religion” and “to use the Church’s moral authority to prevent Israel from being made a pariah by its enemies.”

But with the Israeli occupation under such censure from Rome, it was a rather odd time for avowed supporters of the Palestinian cause to slaughter Catholics in the Middle East. Indeed, many Iraqi Muslims harbour “suspicions” about the shadowy al-Qaeda front’s targeting of “essentially non-players” in the country’s post-invasion sectarian strife.

Indeed, if anyone benefited from the church massacre it was Israel. Reminiscent of the Zionist underground’s attacks on Iraqi Jews in the 1950s, this assault on the Christian minority was clearly designed to encourage them to flee the country where they had lived in relative peace and prosperity for two millennia.

The removal of a Christian presence from the Muslim-dominated region would eliminate the model of coexistence as a viable alternative to the “clash of civilizations” view of the world. “By focusing attention on a direct and eternal conflict between the West and Islam,” M. Shahid Alam argues in his new book, the clash thesis aims “to acquit Israel of serving as the chief source and conduit of this conflict.”

Moreover, the massacre lent plausibility to the Israeli narrative on why Christians are leaving the Middle East. In a 2006 report by the hawkishly pro-Israel Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, titled “The Christian Exodus from the Middle East,” senior fellows Jonathan Adelman and Agota Kuperman concluded: “The single greatest cause of this emigration is radical Islam.”

Ironically, it was a representative from Baghdad at the synod who had suggested a way to encourage Middle East emigrants to return to Palestine. Armenian Archbishop Emmanuel Dabbaghian proposed that every bishop should make an annual visit to the Holy Land. “The influx of pilgrims to the Holy Land,” he said, “would convince the inhabitants who have emigrated to return to their homeland.” Given the apprehension about “the Arab demographic threat,” such a development would be viewed with trepidation in Tel Aviv.

“Israel, the Jewish State, is predicated on a decisive and stable Jewish majority of at least 70 percent,” Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, wrote in a 2009 article in Commentary magazine. “Any lower than that and Israel will have to decide between being a Jewish state and a democratic state.” Still, it’s an improvement on the “at least 80 percent Jews” that David Ben-Gurion said would be necessary for “a viable and stable state” on the eve of the premeditated ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Muslims and Christians.

In contrast to al-Qaeda’s efforts to drive a wedge between Islam and Christianity, the solidarity between the world’s two largest religions in Palestine poses a real threat to the Israeli occupation.
Sabeel, an ecumenical grassroots liberation theology movement among Palestinian Christians, in its “Jerusalem Declaration on Christian Zionism,” affirms “that Palestinians are one people, both Muslim and Christian” and rejects “all attempts to subvert and fragment their unity.”

Couldn’t the Baghdad church massacre also be seen as an attempt to “subvert and fragment” Palestinian unity? With “brothers” like al-Qaeda, who needs enemies?

*****

Thursday, November 18, 2010

Wall Street Journal: U.S. Forces Allied with Drug Lord in Afghanistan

Your Tax Dollars at Work

*****

In Afghanistan, U.S. Turns 'Malignant Actor' Into Ally
Wall Street Journal | Nov. 18, 2010

EXCERPT:

...American officials in Afghanistan used to call Col. Abdul Razzik a "malignant actor" who must be sidelined. Now they hail the suspected drug lord as a hero of the new Kandahar offensive and a leader with national potential.

Col. Razzik—an illiterate 34-year-old Afghan Border Police officer who calls himself General, wears flashy Swiss watches and controls southern Afghanistan's lucrative border crossing with Pakistan—emerged over the past two months as the coalition's top choice for clearing Taliban strongholds in Kandahar province, the campaign's centerpiece and the insurgents' heartland.

His reversal of fortune reflects a departure from U.S. counterinsurgency efforts to better governance, marginalize crime-tainted power brokers and win civilians' trust. Since U.S. Gen. David Petraeus took command of coalition forces in July, the military has focused more on killing as many Taliban as possible with the help of whatever local allies can be found, including strongmen whose abuses had made the Taliban popular in the first place...

Col. Razzik, who says he has been working on some operations with the CIA but denies receiving the agency's money, is...a central actor in the crime-tainted political network that maintains a stranglehold over southern Afghanistan, allegedly rigging elections, collecting protection money and smuggling drugs...

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Wednesday, November 17, 2010

VIDEO: Talmudic Mentality in the History of World War II



Hoffman analyzes the propaganda system’s presentation of the religion of Holcaustianity as objective history, in terms of its function as the expression of the Talmudic mentality, and the dual standards which this mentality imposes on the genocide debate, with certain prerogatives and immunities reserved solely for a privileged few, denominated by Hoffman as the "Master Race of Holy People." Hoffman's point of departure is a Zionist protest over the appearance of Dr. Norman Finkelstein at Rutgers University in November, 2010.

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Tuesday, November 09, 2010

$1 trillion in war debt not an issue in election campaign

You Want War? Then Pay for It!

(also see: “Low IQ Americans” by Michael Hoffman -- immediately following Margolis’ column)


Oct. 29, 2010--I don’t ever recall seeing such an ugly, dim-witted, childish American election as this coming week’s mid-term vote.

A national frenzy has seized America. Fierce debate and name-calling has raged about job losses, the nation’s growing $12 trillion debt, mandatory health care, socialism – and even witchcraft. Sarah Palin, the patron saint of low IQ Americans, has hovered over this sordid contest like an evil Halloween wraith.

If we believe polls, the Democrats look like toast. President Barack Obama may be ready to join the ranks of the unemployed.

What did Democrats think would happen when they eagerly took over the monumental financial and military mess created by George W. Bush and the Republicans? No wonder Republicans are gleefully rubbing their hands. But now they may be next to get stuck with Bush’s Tar Baby.

Amidst all the low-brow invective, Tom Brokaw, the respected former national news host for NBC News, recently wrote a fine opinion column, “The Wars That America Forgot About.”

He (Brokaw) quite rightly asked why the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been ignored during the election race. After nine years of combat, 5,000 US dead and 35,000 seriously wounded soldiers, and expenditure of over $1 trillion – silence.

These longest and second most expensive wars in US history have dropped off the radar. Not even the latest WikiLeaks shocker, which revealed the US condoning death squads, torture and mass human rights violations in Iraq, became a campaign issue.

No one raised the scandalous fact that US-run Afghanistan and Washington’s political satraps there produce and export 94% of the world’s heroin. Russian drug authorities just claimed that Afghan heroin kills 10,000 Russians annually.

The Iraq and Afghan wars are ignored, Brokaw rightly says, because Americans are totally focused on high unemployment and economic insecurity. America’s wars have become irrelevant.

The US professional military represents less than 1% of the population, mostly working-class people from small towns in America’s rural, poorly-educated heartland. It’s not like Vietnam War days, when millions of Americans were drafted to serve in the war, creating huge public protests that eventually ended the war. The US has adopted Imperial Britain’s model of small, all-volunteer armies fighting in remote colonial wars to supposedly bring the light of Christianity and justice to benighted natives.

However, it now costs $1 million per annum to keep each of the 120,000 US troops in Afghanistan. The US has also deployed over 40,000 armed mercenaries in that nation.

Americans have become psychologically detached from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, even as the specter of stalemate or even defeat in both conflicts looms. Brokaw calls on Americans to re-engage and give their wars and politicians the public attention they urgently need. Waging stealth wars is undemocratic and unwise.

During World War II, America’s “Home Front” was engaged in the conflict by war taxes, rationing, buying war bonds, collecting clothing and metal, and accepting shortages of consumer products.

By contrast, President George W. Bush actually cut income taxes in wartime, the only time in US history this has happened. In an act of profound financial deception, instead of funding the Afghan and Iraq Wars through higher taxes, the Bush White House and subservient Congress financed the wars by “Emergency Supplement Requests,” which were supposed to be only used short-term for natural disasters and the like. Bush’s view appears to have been, “après moi, le deluge.” He raised the national debt to vertiginous levels, vastly expanded the size of government, increased military spending by 50%, on top of cutting taxes.

The first wave of the deluge came in 2007-2008, as a financial cataclysm hit America. More is on the way as the US stumbles from one financial crisis to another - the latest being bankrupt states and pension funds.

The real $1 trillion plus costs of the wars were quietly added to the $12 trillion national debt, America’s credit card. Funds to finance these huge war loans was borrowed from China and Japan, putting America ever deeper in thrall to the Asian powers, and undermining its finances. The Obama administration and Democratic-controlled Congress continued Bush’s dishonest method of war finance, hiding costs from the public.

America’s wars should be fully funded through direct taxes. History shows great powers cannot long go on waging imperial wars on credit. Look at Spain, Holland, France, Britain, and the Soviet Union. Which empire do we think will be next?

A special war tax ought to be levied on all Americans to fully cover the mounting costs of Afghanistan and Iraq. We must pay for our wars and world hegemony.

It will be interesting to see how all the flag-waving Republican “patriots” will react when asked to pay for the wars they so passionately support from the safety of their sofas, and at no apparent cost. Make Americans actually pay for Afghanistan and Iraq and these wars would be ended in short order.

But if Republicans likely retake Congress, it is most unlikely a war tax – or any major new taxes –will be implemented. Republicans have gone from being the party of balanced budgets and pay as you go to a northern version of Argentina’s wild spending Peronista Party. Right-wing Republicans will press for more war, in more places – financed, of course, by the magic of credit. Few stop to think that this manic borrowing it wrecking America.

(Emphasis supplied)

Low IQ Americans and Our Republican Future
by Michael Hoffman

The war tax is with us, but it is hidden. It appears in the form of under-funded schools and colleges, much less money for infrastructure, roads, bridges, hospitals, parks, rail and mass transit; attacks on Social Security and Medicare. Bush’s wars have drained the quality of life out of America and led to the near-collapse of the usurious banking system.

The low-IQ crowd will back Republicans stripping the American people of quality schools, high speed rail and health care while they increase spending on wars to make the world safe for Israeli terror and dispossession.

It’s expensive to take on 800 million people; supposedly we sort out the good Muslims (neutral on Israeli genocide) from the evil fanatics (“holocaust-denying” devils). The equation still leaves several hundred million “bad” people we supposedly have to fight. Low-IQers can’t seem to fathom that such a fight will continue to be exorbitantly costly and make a mockery of all talk of fiscal responsibility from Republicans, who will skin poor and working class Americans to serve their racist, Talmudic Israeli masters.

Here in Coeur d’Alene almost the entire state government of Idaho met this past weekend under the auspices of the US Chamber of Commerce —Communist China’s agent in bankrupting working class America while making super-rich traitors even wealthier. The meeting was a self-congratulatory "states rights” and “patriot” extravaganza on the part of the “conservative Republicans” who rule Idaho.

You have to have a very low IQ indeed to imagine that the Republican party of War Zionism and mass export of US jobs to Asia is going to “balance the budget” or bring us peace and prosperity.

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Sunday, November 07, 2010

“Holocaust survivor” self-mythologizing

A new book on Adolf Hitler has been published (he seems to have  as many would-be biographers as Abe Lincoln). It is titled “Hitler’s First War” by Thomas Weber and it is not the typical lurid screed. It’s actually impressive, in certain respects. It concerns both the reality of Hitler’s World War I military service and how that service was distorted by propaganda later. The author and his publisher (Oxford University) enjoy sneering at Hitler’s own account of his actions during World War I (in "Mein Kampf" and elsewhere) as “self-mythologizing.”

Hitler is of course easy to attack and critique. It takes no courage to go after Der Fuhrer anymore than it does to assail Muslims.  Both are perennial and popular targets in American media and politics. Consequently, the sneer at Hitler for "self-mythologizing," while perhaps accurate in many respects, is not particularly impressive.

I doubt that either Thomas Weber or Ann Farmer, a reporter for the New York Times, would ever ascribe that epithet to a saintly “Holocaust survivor.” Even  if the charge were true, it would take considerable audacity to make it in public and risk one’s career.

Like many World War II revisionists, this writer collects "Holocaust Survivor" Tall Tales. I have a thick file of fairy tales and tales of miracles and relics invented by the these media-canonized saints, including one about the Seven Dwarves of Auschwitz! I have another in which “Trudy, the Wonder Child of the Camps” was made to clean the entire kitchen floor of Auschwitz with her tongue! The false witness these characters spew about the Germans knows no limit — and they can always find a gullible New York Times scribe to report their tales to the world without the least tinge of skepticism.

The most devastating observation on the credibility of these yarn-spinners was made by a Judaic sociologist sixty years ago:  "...most of the memoirs and reports [of 'Holocaust survivors'] are full of preposterous verbosity, graphomanic exaggeration, dramatic effects, overestimated self-inflation, dilettante philosophizing, would-be lyricism, unchecked rumors, bias, partisan attacks...”
--Samuel Gringauz, "Jewish Social Studies" (New York), January 1950, Vol. 12, p. 65.

Just for fun, I wish to share with you the latest entry in my file. It’s about a famous and wealthy Judaic tailor now working in Brooklyn, who makes suits for presidents and movie stars, and whose life was saved in Auschwitz by the fact that he regularly wore an SS officer’s shirt around the camp!

The Magic Shirt

“He looked like a somebody"

A Meticulous Tailor, Called Upon by Designers and Politicians Alike
by Ann Farmer | New York Times | Nov. 6, 2010 [p. A18]

...for more than 60 years, Martin Greenfield has been an influential face of men's fashion in New York City...Mr. Greenfield, 82, is still old-school in his devotion to the labor-intensive, exacting and vanishing art of making tailored garments by hand...(He works) on the second floor of the factory in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where he and his two sons oversee 117 workers...

Mr. Greenfield first grasped the importance of appearances while trying to survive the Holocaust. When he was 14, he and his father, mother, two sisters and a brother were taken from their home in Pavlova, in what was then Czechoslovakia, and later delivered to Auschwitz.

He was assigned to wash clothes in the camp's alteration shop, and one day he accidentally ripped an SS officer's shirt, an affront for which he was beaten. The officer threw the shirt at Mr. Greenfield, who mended it and started wearing it instead of the uniforms the other prisoners wore. From then on, he said, the guards and prisoners began treating him with respect.

"He looked like a somebody," said Jay Greenfield, 52, Mr. Greenfield's oldest son and the executive vice president of the company, Martin Greenfield Clothiers, explaining that his father attributes his survival to that shirt.

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Thursday, October 28, 2010

Preserving the Memory and the Teaching of Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound

by Michael Hoffman | Coeur d’Alene, Idaho

"Bank-paper must be suppressed, and the circulating medium must be restored to the nation to whom it belongs." (Thomas Jefferson to John Wayles Eppes, Monticello, June 24, 1813).

"I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale." (Thomas Jefferson to John Taylor, Monticello, May 28, 1816).

“Neither he (Benito Mussolini) nor T.J. (Thomas Jefferson) was interested in, nor bamboozled by money.” (Ezra Pound, Jefferson and/or Mussolini, p. 64).

This Saturday, Oct. 30 will mark the 125th annniversary of the birth of poet/philosopher Ezra Pound in the frontier town of Hailey, in what was then the “Idaho territory” of the United States.

To honor his memory and perpetuate his campaign for justice in economics and against the authority of money in government and society, Independent History and Research is reprinting his classic text, Jefferson and/or Mussolini, which has been out of print for forty years.

Pound’s union of Jefferson, the small government populist, with Mussolini the Fascist, will certainly strike the reader as the oddest of conjunctions. Prof. Alec Marsh decodes the paradox:

“...Pound's critique of capitalism...is purely Populist, certainly not Fascist. Pound was against militarism...and had little interest in youth cults, mass spectacles or mystic Italian nationalism, which he seems to have accepted simply as the Italian way of doing things. What fundamentally interested Pound in Italian Fascism was the possibility it offered for what Emilio Gentile has called 'the conquest of modernity.' That is, Pound admired the attempt by Mussolini to overcome and control the impersonal economic forces unleashed by modernization. Volitionist economics is an attempt to formulate a practical program for those who have the will to master the forces of modernity — a will that Mussolini had in abundance....It seems clear that the man, not the party, interests Pound. And Pound is interested because he thinks that Mussolini might enact the economic reforms necessary to restore social justice...” (Money and Modernity: Pound, Williams, and the Spirit of Jefferson).

If one knows anything of the history of western civilization’s struggle against usury, from the ancient Greeks to the medieval Catholics, from William Shakespeare to C.H. Douglas, a glaring contradiction will be found not in a conjunction of an American and an Italian revolutionary, but in the appropriation of Jefferson by Glenn Beck, the Fox TV disciple of the greed-is-good Khazar-capitalist, Ayn Rand.

Beck has plenty of friends in Pound’s native state. In Idaho we have a tabloid called the Capitalist Papers which is where the Tea Party and well-intentioned patriots like Phil Hart advertise and are afforded a forum.

Raul Labrador, Idaho’s “conservative” Republican candidate for Congress, is a shill for the corporate transfer of America’s wealth to China. His campaign is against “Obamacare” and government spending (except for spending on the national police state and overseas neocon empire). Nancy Pelosi is his cuss word; Ben Bernanke gets a pass.

Jefferson and/or Mussolini is not a book we intend to distribute to Idaho ignoramuses and expect that they will have a “Eurkea!” moment after reading it. It’s not a book for the completely ignorant. Pound was old school. He dealt in what the Scholastics called “First principles.” His thought patterns and arguments are lush with profundity, paradox and poetry.

Pound was not a snob, however. Like Jefferson, he was a man of the people despite an I.Q. that was off the charts. He cared intensely for the welfare of the poor and the workers. He was big on common sense and intuition and he would cherish a vision of an Idaho mountaineer in 2010 trying to parse his prose by a wood-fired stove.

We’re not promoting Jefferson and/or Mussolini as one of those supposed “blockbuster eye-opener books!” which is guaranteed to generate instant enlightenment in the reader. Since when is education anything other than a lifetime project?

Pound’s book should be in the library of every person who aspires to be learned -- we do advance that thesis and trust that it is not hyperbole.

There is no substitute for true education. One can obtain the appearance of learning by sitting at the feet of Glenn Beck and his chalkboard. Image and appearance are what modern America is all about. Mountebanks like Beck invoke the America of the past as a front for their support for anti-American usury banking and Israeli hot and cold foreign wars; the latter now being waged against Iran, where sanctions are beginning to destabilize the economy of a nation rooted in opposition to usury, and which is a threat to no one except those who believe they have a license to murder Palestinian and Lebanese civilians.

From out of this nightmare arises the writer who gave us the Pisan Cantos, the intellectual who wrote the ABC of Reading, and the courageous campaigner for economic justice who penned Jefferson and/or Mussolini.

Reading Pound’s book is a journey into a great mind. We make no warranties concerning the degree to which it will “change your life” or “wake up your neighbors.” The extent to which this book can exalt your spirit and stimulate your mind depends on the extent of your own personal character and ennoblement.

Let’s face it, most of us are not spending our days making our way through the 100 Classic Books of Western Thought. Most of us spend our reading time on newspapers and the Internet. We haven’t read Aristotle or Augustine, Chaucer or Dickens, or if we did it was ages ago, in a stuffy classroom with a mediocre teacher, and from a motivation to pass a course rather than lift up our heart and mind.

Pound’s little volume fills a two-fold void. First, it starts us on our peregrination back to the tried and true paths and founts of our civilization which the Glenn Becks of our world have suppressed. Second, it serves as a sign of contradiction to the literati of America and Europe as they meet over the next days and weeks to celebrate the 125th birthday of a domesticated Ezra Pound, shorn of his lion’s mane. They want to forget that there was a reason he was locked up for twelve years by the U.S. government and it has to do, then as now, with the life-and-death struggle with the Money Power, the evil which underlies every other evil (Matthew 6:24; 1 Timothy 6:10).

Alas, in this economy, our own publishing enterprise is no longer what it once was, as buyers and donors drop by the wayside. Therefore, we are no longer able to order a thousand copies of a book at a time, with the resulting advantageous economy of scale that such quantity purchases afford. In our straitened circumstances, wherein we are fighting to stave off bankruptcy, we have engaged the services of the print-on-demand publishing trade. By this means we finance the printing of books based on the advance orders we receive from individual readers. If you choose to order, please allow up to four weeks for delivery. Overseas please allow up to five weeks (figuring an average of an extra week for air mail).

JEFFERSON AND/OR MUSSOLINI (quality paperback; 138 pages), $17.95 plus postage and packing. Please do not send just $17.95 or your order will be returned. You must also pay for shipping (see below).

You can order by credit card at this link

Or you can pay with a US check or US Money order, as follows:
U.S. customers send $21.00 postpaid.
Canadians send US$26.00 postpaid. Foreign/Overseas send US $28.00.
Order from: Independent History and Research, Box 849, Coeur d’Alene, Idaho 83816 USA.

Happy Birthday Ezra!
May we never forget the price you paid for telling the truth about money!

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Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Archbishop Bustros under siege for speaking the truth about Judaism

by Michael Hoffman

On Oct. 23, at the Roman Catholic synod on the Middle East in Rome, Cyril Salim Bustros, the Lebanon-born, Melkite Archbishop of Our Lady of the Annunciation in Newton, Massachusetts, made completely traditional Christian statements about Judaics and Judaism that are thoroughly consonant with the historic truths of apostolic Christianity prior to the rise of “Judeo-Christianity” and the subsequent infiltration of rabbinic ideology inside the Church.

In the current environment of near universal apostasy, Archbishop Bustros’ basic reaffirmation of fundamental New Testament teaching on Jews and Judaism has ignited the familiar firestorm of hysterical anathema and hyperbole from 1. The Israeli Foreign Minister. 2. The Chief Israeli Rabbi. 3. The ADL. 4. The Simon Wiesenthal rabbis. 5. The Israeli ambassador to the Vatican, along with a host of crypto-rabbis masquerading as “Christian” professors, pundits and periti.

Why are the truths articulated by Archbishop Bustros so explosive? Because we have for so long dwelled amid the suffocating bipartisan bonhomie of Judeo-Churchianity that when the authentic Gospel is actually preached as St. Peter and St. Paul preached it, it becomes a source of howling outrage to the New Sanhedrin, who have grown accustomed to an almost complete betrayal of Jesus Christ by “Christian” leaders.

In age when nothing is pushed harder than “equality,” we see that the declaration of equality by Archbishop Bustros that, “the Biblical promise that the Land of Israel is for Jews, as the Chosen People, was abolished by the presence of Christ... There is no longer a favored people, a chosen people; all men and women of every country have become the chosen people by virtue of believing on Jesus Christ” --wounds the modern Pharisees in their inner being, predicated as that being is in racial pride and arrogance.

A statement of Gospel fact becomes a species of evil hate speech among those whose ears are accustomed to hearing only soothing platitudes from Fundamentalist Protestant preachers and modern popes. Gospel truth is regarded by Judaism and Zionism as “a libel against the Jewish People” (Israeli Deputy Minister Danny Ayalon, Oct. 24) and an “anti-Semitic" theological position (Jerusalem Post editorial, Oct. 25).

Rabbis Marvin Hier and Abraham Cooper, dean and founder, and associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center respectively, stated that the Catholic leader’s declaration is a “political stunt, wrapped in theological garb...(which) insults every Jew..." (How it is that these two rabbis polled every “Jew” on earth and then presumed to speak for them is not disclosed).

In a telephone interview with Catholic News Service Oct. 25, the Israeli ambassador to the Vatican called Bishop Bustros' comments "outrageous" and said, "the Vatican should take a clear distance from them because it will give every Jew a reason to be suspicious of rapprochement with the Catholic Church."

“In a letter to Cardinal-elect Kurt Koch, the newly-appointed president of the Vatican’s Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, ADL national director Abe Foxman wrote: ‘By stating that God’s covenantal promise of land to the Jewish people ‘was nullified by Christ’ and that ‘there is no longer a chosen people,’ Bustros is effectively stating that Judaism should no longer exist.” (Jerusalem Post, Oct. 26, 2010).

Memo to Abe Foxman: Exactly! Christ came to replace Pharisaic Judaism, the demonic incarnation of self-worship by which the Jewish elders had subverted the Hebrew Covenant. Here was Good News from the Messiah of Israel, that all men could be saved through Him,  no longer having to observe either the ceremonial law or the much larger corpus of man-made rabbinic halacha that would soon be committed to writing in the Mishnah.

Since the 1960s, the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church has conspired with the rabbis to overthrow the mission of Israel’s Messiah and embrace, in the language of Machiavellian doublespeak, a two-way route to God: saved by Christ and saved by race. Gentiles can be saved by Christ, on that the Vatican concurs, but “Jews” can be saved on the basis of their alleged descent from Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Of course if contemporary Judaics are saved by their supposed genetic descent from the Patriarchs, then it must be concluded that Jesus Christ came only for the gentiles, which is a ludicrous falsification. In the first part of His ministry Jesus proclaimed the very opposite -- that He came only unto the lost sheep of the House of Israel (Matthew 15:24).

Jesus sought first to free the Jewish slaves of sin, and after them, all people, if they would have the grace and good will to surrender unto their Messiah. Instead, many chose to stubbornly cling to the black cloud of Babylonian superstition, eventually codified in the Talmud, that is known as Judaism. True disciples of Christ rightly ask Abe Foxman and every pompous thought cop, why a religion of Babylonian paganism deceitfully posing as a Biblical creed, need exist at all? The notion that “Jews” are exempt from conversion to Christ based on their claims to unique racial descent is a demonic lie (Matthew 3:9).

The “hate” is mostly on the side of the Zionist racists who imagine that race is the mandate whereby they may rule Palestine. The modern West rejects racism in every other nation and ideology, why do they submit to it when the rabbis rule by means of it?

The most arrogant and outlandish of all the Zionist liars who attacked Archbishop Bustros was the Israeli Chief Rabbi:

“Israel’s Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger said, “The priest doesn't have to teach us about interpreting the Bible. We don’t teach them how to interpret the New Testament,’ Rabbi Metzger told European Jewish Press Monday (Oct. 25) in Berlin where he is attending a conference of the European Council of Jewish Communities (ECJC).”

Notice with what contempt Chief Rabbi Metzger refers to Bustros, merely as “the priest,” not as archbishop. He then proceeds to say that a Christian is not to teach Judaics about the Bible. Why not? Jesus did. Christians are commanded to do as Jesus did.

The chief rabbi of counterfeit-Israel has no jurisdiction over what Christians may teach concerning the Bible, which Judaism destroys by rendering it subordinate to the anthropomorphic Talmud. Judaism undoubtedly falsifies and denigrates the authority of the Bible (see http://talmudical.blogspot.com/).

Chief Rabbi Metzger’s most risible statement comes next: “We don’t teach them how to interpret the New Testament.”

But of course you do. The Talmud teaches that Jesus worshipped a brick, led Israel into idolatry and that He deserved to be killed. Orthodox Judaism teaches that the New Testament should be burned. The Rambam (the esteemed Rabbi Moses Maimonides) taught that Christians should be killed, when possible.

Judaic academics, such as Amy Jill Levine, Professor of New Testament at Vanderbilt University and the author of “The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus,” leads a movement that seeks to portray Jesus as a rabbi who colluded with the Pharisees and taught according to rabbinic methods of epistemology and pedagogy.

Pamela Eisenbaum, professor of Biblical studies and Christian origins at Colorado’s Iliff School of Theology teaches that the Apostle Paul was not a Christian. Daniel Boyarin, professor of Talmud at the University of California at Berkeley, seconds this hogwash. He states, “Pamela Eisenbaum's (book) ‘Paul Was Not a Christian,’ is a clear and effective presentation and extension of the view... that Paul remained fully identified with Judaism and the Torah throughout his life.”

Talmudists do indeed endeavor to “teach” Christians about the New Testament. Surprise, surprise, the Israeli Chief Rabbi is a liar.

Now let’s see whether or not Archbishop Bustros is made to recant the truth and thereby absolve himself of the capital crime of insulting the Master Race and perpetuating the most damnable sin of the cosmos, “antisemitism.”

Hoffman is the author of "Judaism Discovered: A Study of the Anti-Biblical Religion of Racism, Self-Worship, Superstition and Deceit."

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