Hoffman Talks About Usury

Our new book, Usury in Christendom: The Mortal Sin That Was and Now is Not, has been published and is in print. If you purchased a copy in advance of publication, your book is either in transit or may have already arrived. If your copy has not yet arrived, please be patient. Books to US residents ship by US Postal Service "Media Mail," which can be slow at this time of the year. Shipments to Canada and overseas are sent by air mail but are subject to the vicissitudes of a foreign nation's particular customs office. While supplies last (there is no guarantee of a second printing), Usury in Christendom may be purchased from our online store here, or from Amazon.com here. We are also offering a new DVD:

MICHAEL HOFFMAN TALKS ABOUT USURY (DVD) 

The author of the book Usury in Christendom gives a passionate talk in a private home on interest on debt in light of Biblical doctrine and western history. Production values are not high on this DVD, but the content is! 34 minutes. $16.95 plus shipping. The DVD may be purchased online here.

It is too early to offer an assessment of how Usury in Christendom is being received. Preliminary reactions have ranged from hostility (including, from former friends and supporters, promises of economic retribution and revenge against the author), to appreciation. We have yet to receive enough feedback, however, to offer an accurate and representative spectrum of reaction. It would be a mistake to draw any conclusions at this stage.

We have not managed to raise the funds for an advertising budget for the book, but we did set aside a batch of review copies which are being mailed to a broad swath of newspaper, magazine and newsletter editors, economics professors, theologians, philosophers and anti-debt activists, in the hope that one or more of them will rescue Usury in Christendom from obscurity and publicize or review it; otherwise, until our circumstances change, we are wholly dependent on word-of-mouth and the publicity we ourselves generate in our Hoffman Wire column, at our website (www.revisionisthistory.org), on Twitter (@HoffmanMichaelA), in our blog (http://revisionistreview.blogspot.com) and to our mailing list, via the Post Office.

The book was written Soli Deo Gloria. In our straitened circumstances, my attitude toward its promotion is the same attitude I have taken toward the basic needs of my children when I was pressed for resources. I went to God in the knowledge that ultimately they were His children; asking, on that basis, would He please provide for them. He never failed to do so. It is my opinion (I grant that I may be deluded in this respect) that God wanted Usury in Christendom written, and while any mistakes in its pages are my responsibility alone, it is His book, and He will move those He needs to move to assist in its dissemination, according to His will.

The Money Power in the Middle East

Everywhere I turn I see the Money Power obstructing revival and restoration. We learned last week that Obama and Romney each spent the staggering sum of approximately one billion dollars in seeking the presidency. We find that even the heavens are being merchandized: a private corporation is endeavoring to offer flights to the moon, including a walk on its surface, for $750 million per passenger.

Our fellow Americans are slaving under an immense debt burden, both personal and national. The Republicans who are eager to cut the social safety net out from under the poor, sick and elderly, don't emphasize that a considerable portion of the Federal deficit is due to America's role as world policemen, with the military-industrial complex reaping the profits. One of our friends is a low-ranking, frontline grunt in the U.S. military. Men such as this man -- the proverbial cannon fodder -- are most certainly not enriching themselves from America's endless foreign wars, which are so lucrative to the upper echelon of the Cryptocracy, which has turned a blind eye toward the operations of the Nusra Front ("Jabhat al-Nusra”) of  Syrian rebels  — an arm of Al Qaeda in Iraq -- which has killed American troops. If this Nusra Front organization had been linked to Iran we would be hunting it with drones and sanctioning their sponsors. But Al Qaeda's Nusra Front in Syria is part of the ordained overthrow of the Assad government, as protected, funded and armed by the fabulously wealthy kingdoms of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. In the wake of this outrage, there are few if any saber-rattling howls of indignation from the Right wing members of Congress who are based in the Deep South.

The killers of American troops are seizing power in Syria, and this suits the Israeli network that seeks perpetual war by building up enemies which they then shape and secretly control at the highest levels (it was the Israelis who helped to found Hamas).

Only after these enemies are in power, Senators like Lindsay Graham and John McCain will call for a multi-billion dollar military crusade to dislodge them -- only after elements of Al Qaeda are part of the new ruling coalition in Syria. A similar scenario unfolded in Libya with the "Allies" helping to put Al Qaeda type elements in power and now screeching about the assault on our embassy and the death of our ambassador.

From whence comes this cowardice, treason and duplicity, and the apathy of our people in the face of it? There are many symptoms, yet only one root: the love of money, and the power that comes to those who control oil, the greatest material prize of our age, or the Money Power's core power plant: compound interest on debt.

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Ghost of Bin Laden summoned to Gaza

It has been reported that the tortured and brainwashed "accused masterminds" of the 9/11 terror attacks will go on trial at Gitmo on the last day of George W. Bulls**t's presidency, Jan. 19. How's that for a "coincidence"?

And here's another one: a "tape" recording (not a CD, because Bin Laden's ghost has not caught up with modern technology), of the voice of none other than Osama himself hit the air waves of the dumbed down and infantilized American media today, wherein we were told that Santa Claus/Tooth fairy Bin Laden is alive and well, and issuing press releases from his cave somewhere in the armpit of western Asia.

If you accept this malarkey at face value you need read no further. For the rest of you: what do you think this latest covert-op by the western intelligence agency that operates "Al Qaeda" signifies? My hunch is that it signifies desperation, when even CNN is broadcasting reports on counterfeit-Israel's white phosphorus burning of civilians in Gaza, accompanied by graphic footage of child victims of this "nasty" incendiary, which CNN was airing yesterday.

As the justification for the Israeli holocaust in Gaza skates on ice that daily grows as thin as Paris Hilton's waistline, the white male Republican base in the US needs to be reassured that the Fox Noose fairy tale is true, the rabbis and Zionists of counterfeit-Israel really are "fighting for the West." Consequently, the spectre of Osama is summoned to the seance and made to mouth a Gaza script which implies that Hamas is an arm of the same Muslim crazies who, we are told, "masterminded" the Sept. 11 attacks.

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Israeli alibi for school attack: a lie you weren't supposed to believe

By Richard Seymour

Author of The Liberal Defense of Murder

Let's be clear about this. On 6 January, three UN-run schools in Gaza were attacked by Israeli forces, not just one. What is more, the previous day an Israeli bombing of a UN school had killed three members of the same family. This sort of killing can usually be dealth with in a perfunctory fashion ('we regret all loss of innocent life, but the responsibility belongs to those who use terror and hide among civilians...'). However, the massacre of 43 people in a UN school bearing flags and insignia and housing some 350 refugees from the fighting (many of whom had fled on orders from IDF leaflets dropped on the towns and cities), demanded a more considered explanation and justification. I just want to take a quick look at the explanations offered by Israeli spokespeople and its military.

The IDF's initial justification for the attack on the Al-Fakhura school was that Hamas had used the building to fire mortars from, and its tanks had responded. Implicit in this was an admission that they had targeted the school on purpose. The tank shells, presumably shot from quite nearby, were fired by soldiers operating under orders from command centres equipped with detailed targeting intelligence. As is now known, the Israeli military had the GPS coordinates not only of this UN school but of the other UN schools that it attacked. And the first thing the IDF let us know is that it was done on purpose. Their excuse was barbaric, of course. The idea that an invading force may attack a building filled with hundreds of terrorised civilians just in order to kill two of those resisting the invasion is nothing short of grotesque. 

But the fact that it was barbaric was part of the point: rather than bluntly condemning a war crime, you were invited to focus on whether Hamas would be so evil as to attack Israel's brave boys from within a civilian building. Because it is so frequently repeated you might be predisposed to assume that Hamas did indeed position its 'infrastructure of terror' among unsuspecting citizens but, whether you are so predisposed or not, you are already drawn into the macabre calculus of the murderer if you even get involved in that argument. You have tacitly accepted the logic in which war crimes are not merely acceptable, but actually appropriate, if the enemy really is as evil as Israel says. 

The usual suspects, of course, immediately embraced Israel's excuse: Israel's killing, they expostulated, merely demonstrates the ruthless, diabolical genius of Hamas. If anything, they added, the IDF was admirably restrained in its action. But it is doubtful that many others were taken in.

The second thing that the IDF claimed was that there were Hamas troops hiding inside the building, nestling among the refugees, thereby forcing the Israelis to slaughter the innocent. This is quite a different claim, and the first thing that would occur to any reasonable observer would be that the sudden embellishment reflected some sort of dishonesty ('the elaborations of a bad liar', as Hannibal Lecter would put it). Or perhaps there had been a failure by everyone to get their stories straight and stick to them. At any rate, the logic of the astounding claim that Israel acted in self-defense remained as tortuous as it had been. But Israel claimed to have identified the bodies of Hamas members, and even fed two names to the media, (so once again you were invited to get bogged down in the merits of Israel's claim rather than decide on an appropriate response to the slaughter).

The next part of the story is the most interesting. In order to get around the absurd idea that Hamas military operatives had sneaked into the building and launched mortars without anyone in the school noticing, Israel's spokespeople claimed that Hamas gunmen had taken over the UN building, taken the civilians hostage and used the base to fire mortars at Israeli soldiers. Mark Regev said it was a "very extreme example of how Hamas operates". Such a claim was obviously checkable in a matter of minutes. Any UN personnel present in the school at the time could easily say whether in fact they had all been suffering under Hamas captivity until Israel 'liberated' the building. 

The UN produced an emphatic denial, based on its own investigations, that there was ever any Hamas fighter in the building. By now, the fact that Israel has never provided any real evidence for its claims, which continue to shapeshift, comes into sharp focus. Moreover, since Israeli troops didn't visit the building or have access to the records of the deceased, it would be highly improbable that they would be able to not only name two of the dead, but also gather intelligence that proved they were members of Hamas' military wing, within such a short space of time.

So, the Israeli government topped that brazenness with a stroke of effrontery that is somehow not adequately captured by the word 'chutzpah'. Israel announced that as it was lodging a complaint with the UN for allowing the building to be secretly used by Hamas. Now it appears that Israeli diplomats admit that no rockets were fired from the school. They are now briefing that there was some mortar fire, but that it came from outside the school. Now, there is no evidence that there was any mortar fire at all, but perhaps you aren't really supposed to believe it. Actually, you were never supposed to believe any of it. There was no way that you were ever expected to be taken in by this pitiful subterfuge. They didn't even present a very convincing lie, or a very good case. 

What they did was tell you up front that they attacked a clearly marked UN school building filled with civilians on purpose, and then follow it up with a flimsy cover-story followed by an even more flimsy revised cover story and an outlandish allegation against the UN that they have dropped in a matter of hours in such a way as to undermine their previous cover-stories. This is obviously contemptuous, but it isn't just a sensational flip-off to 'world opinion'. They are saying they killed civilians on purpose, that nowhere in Gaza is safe, and that they reserve their right to do it again and offer the same risible mitigations and alibis as before.

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The futility of force in "generational" conflicts

Far from an exercise in precision fire power and deterrence, Israel's bombardment of Gaza simply fuels the flames of conflict

by Robert Fox | Guardian (UK) Jan. 2, 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/02/israelandthepalestinians-middleeast

...Four years ago General Rupert Smith produced a ground-breaking book called The Utility of Force about the future of warfare. He suggested that warfare is undergoing a paradigm shift from the industrial hi-tech conflicts which run from the age of Napoleon to the end of the last century. We will now see less formal "generational" conflicts which are not constricted by time, and are fought by ragbag militias and guerrilla gangs tooted in the civilian community. These are ingredients of what he calls (borrowing a Maoist phrase) "wars among the people".

This kind of thinking proved pretty unpalatable to a lot of the old and bold of the military class, among them most of the current British top brass. Inevitably the cynics in the ranks rechristened the book "The Futility of Force."

Smith himself would agree with them. His prime example of the open-ended "war among the people" is the contest between the Israelis and the Palestinians where he sees the Israelis always resorting to tactical short-term fixes while ignoring the needs for a long-term strategy.

The notion of the futility of force is an epitaph and awful warning on the past decade, the years of the military adventures of Tony Blair and George W Bush, from Kosovo to Iraq and Afghanistan. Force in itself can deliver very little, as the campaigns in Gaza and Afghanistan seem to prove. Force only works if the aim is destruction and occupation of whole countries and communities. It cannot win the epidemic of drug production and consumption, nor change at a stroke the hearts and aspirations of tribes, villages and nations.

The addiction to force, whether against Hamas in Gaza or the Taliban in Afghanistan, results in the opposite to its perpetrators' intentions. It is the fuel to an open-ended conflict which threatens to outrun the lives of most of the current leadership.

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Israelis kill five sisters: Tahrir, Ikram, Samur, Dina & Ayah

Family Mourns 5 Daughters as Civilian Death Toll Mounts

By Sudarsan Raghavan and Islam Abdel Kareem
Washington Post | December 30, 2008

JERUSALEM, Dec. 29 -- Trapped in the rubble, Iman Balousha, dressed in her green pajamas, said she could hear her sisters' cries. "Mother! Mother! Where is my mother? Pull me out!" Their muffled voices slipped through the toppled bricks.

Early Monday, an Israeli airstrike on the Jabalya refugee camp in the Gaza Strip destroyed the family's house, located next to the Emad Aqeel mosque, the intended target, which was also flattened. Rescuers tried frantically to save the girls. Iman was lucky: She was half-buried in the debris.

One by one, the cries stopped, Iman recalled in an interview. She could see the leg of her 4-year-old sister, Jawaher, whom her family called Ayah. She could touch her hair. But minutes later, Ayah stopped breathing.

"I've lost five sisters," Iman, 16, said at a relative's house Monday evening, her soft voice fading. Tears slid down her face. Her mother, Samira, held her 16-month-old son, whose face was bruised and specked with dried blood.

"Does my 12-days-old baby have a rocket with her?" Samira demanded. "Or my son, does he have a missile with him? Or did my daughters have AK-47s beside them? Why did they target them?" The five daughters who died were ages 4 to 17.

Concerns mounted over the growing toll on civilians in the Gaza Strip as Israeli jets carried out airstrikes for the third straight day. Many of the casualties have been civilians who live around targets in the densely populated strip. The United Nations on Monday said at least 57 Palestinian civilians have been killed since the Israeli offensive began Saturday, based on visits to hospitals and medical facilities. Officials described that number as conservative.

In total, over three days, 364 Palestinians have been killed and hundreds more wounded, said Gaza medical officials, in the deadliest wave of attacks in Gaza since Israel captured control of the seaside territory from Egypt in 1967. Hamas has retaliated, firing a barrage of rockets into southern Israel that has killed four Israelis.

"The Israelis say they are targeting Hamas, but they are targeting the innocent kids who are sleeping," Samira said.

On Monday, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency said an Israeli missile targeted policemen standing near a Gaza government building, across the street from a U.N. training center. Eight students, ages 18 to 20, were killed while waiting for a U.N. bus to take them home, and 19 were injured. Eight remained in critical condition Monday, the agency said in a statement.

"They are tragic illustrations of how civilians are so vulnerable in this conflict, when such overwhelming means of force is used in such a tight and densely populated part of the world," said Christopher Gunness, a U.N. spokesman, referring to the deaths of the students and Iman's sisters.

On Monday, U.N. officials complained to the Israeli government after a U.N. building was severely damaged by two missiles targeting an adjacent guesthouse used by the Hamas government in Gaza.

Human rights groups demanded that Israel and Egypt open up humanitarian corridors into the Gaza Strip for the delivery of aid. Gazans are facing shortages of medical personnel, medicine, food, electricity and water, aid workers said.

"The horrific death toll risks growing due to the unavailability of adequate medical care for the hundreds of injured," Amnesty International said in a statement, appealing to Israel and Egypt to allow the Palestinian wounded to be treated in their countries. "It is utterly unacceptable for Israel to continue to purposefully deprive 1.5 million people of food and other basic necessities."

Seeking Comfort in Their House

When the airstrikes began Saturday, Samira and her nine children were at her father's house. They decided to return to their own house because "there was no difference anywhere in Gaza," Samira said. Her eldest daughter, Tahrir, she said, remarked that she would "rather live all together or die all together."

So they returned to their house. They felt some comfort living next to a mosque, which would not be targeted, they thought.

At 10 p.m. Sunday, Samira said goodnight to her seven daughters. They all slept in the same bedroom in the tiny house without electricity in this sprawling refugee camp. Before she left the room, she doused the kerosene lamp. "I was worried that an airstrike would rattle the house and the lamp would fall and burn down the room," Samira said.

Then she and her husband, Anwar, took their son, Muhammed, and baby daughter, Bara, to their room.

The mosque next door was an Israeli target. It was named after Emad Aqeel, a Hamas member who died fighting Israel. Hamas controls many mosques across Gaza, which serve as key venues for winning popular support.

Samira and Anwar recalled waking up to Bara and Muhammed's screams. They were covered in rubble. Some bricks had struck the boy's face; the girl had been tossed from the bed. Anwar remembers telling his wife to utter shehada, the prayer Muslims say before they die.

Somehow they managed to push away the rubble and move through the darkness. Neighbors were trying to remove the debris. Samira grabbed Muhammed and handed him to a rescuer; Anwar picked up Bara and stumbled outside to the street. Samira went to her daughters' room.

"I found a mountain of concrete over my daughters," Samira said. "I could do nothing. So I ran out in the street, screaming."

" 'There are seven girls in the room,' I yelled. 'Please go and bring them out.' " Neighbors took her to a hospital. A relative told her all the girls were alive.

Inside the room, Iman struggled to escape. She cried for help. Finally the rescuers heard her and pulled her out. "Where is my father? Where is my mother?" she asked. A few minutes later, her sister Samah, 10, also emerged.

"I didn't see my other sisters until I was saying goodbye to them at the morgue," Iman said, sobbing.

As she spoke in her relatives' house, Samira looked at her baby son's bruised face and shooed away the flies around his head. "I hope the Israelis' heart will be harmed like they hurt my heart," she said.

Iman's grandmother was there. Suddenly, another airstrike hit nearby, the sounds crashing through the house.

"Please, God, save our children," the grandmother screamed.

'Why Me? Why My Family?'

Anwar Balousha entered his shattered house Monday evening. Bruises covered his face. His head was wrapped in a bandage. He could barely walk. With the help of his relatives, he hobbled around the rubble. Water dripped from a still-intact ceiling.

In his daughters' room, he found a framed verse from the Koran. It read: "Nothing will happen to us but the things that God wrought for us."

It used to hang above his daughters' bed.

Standing there, Anwar remembered how Tahrir excelled at her studies. He struggled to understand how a poor unemployed day laborer could suffer so much in one night.

"I don't have anything to do with any Palestinian faction. I have nothing to do with Hamas or anyone. I am just an ordinary person."

"Why me? Why my family?" he asked no one in particular. He sobbed. "I have lost Tahrir, Ikram, Samur, Dina and Ayah. I have lost five daughters. I loved them all." He looked around.

"I am ready to die 100 times to bring back my daughters."

Kareem reported from the Jabalya refugee camp.

***

Gaza: the logic of colonial power

As so often, the term 'terrorism' has proved a rhetorical smokescreen under cover of which the strong crush the weak

by Nir Rosen
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/dec/29/gaza-hamas-israel

December 29, 2008 

Once again, the Israelis bomb the starving and imprisoned population of Gaza. The world watches the plight of 1.5 million Gazans live on TV and online; the western media largely justify the Israeli action...

The powerful – whether Israel, America, Russia or China – will always describe their victims' struggle as terrorism, but the destruction of Chechnya, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the slow slaughter of the remaining Palestinians, the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan – with the tens of thousands of civilians it has killed … these will never earn the title of terrorism, though civilians were the target and terrorising them was the purpose.

Counterinsurgency, now popular again among in the Pentagon, is another way of saying the suppression of national liberation struggles. Terror and intimidation are as essential to it as is winning hearts and minds.

Normative rules are determined by power relations. Those with power determine what is legal and illegal. They besiege the weak in legal prohibitions to prevent the weak from resisting. For the weak to resist is illegal by definition. Concepts like terrorism are invented and used normatively as if a neutral court had produced them, instead of the oppressors. The danger in this excessive use of legality actually undermines legality, diminishing the credibility of international institutions such as the United Nations. It becomes apparent that the powerful, those who make the rules, insist on legality merely to preserve the power relations that serve them or to maintain their occupation and colonialism.

Attacking civilians is the last, most desperate and basic method of resistance when confronting overwhelming odds and imminent eradication. The Palestinians do not attack Israeli civilians with the expectation that they will destroy Israel. The land of Palestine is being stolen day after day; the Palestinian people is being eradicated day after day. As a result, they respond in whatever way they can to apply pressure on Israel. 

Colonial powers use civilians strategically, settling them to claim land and dispossess the native population, be they Indians in North America or Palestinians in what is now Israel and the Occupied Territories. When the native population sees that there is an irreversible dynamic that is taking away their land and identity with the support of an overwhelming power, then they are forced to resort to whatever methods of resistance they can.

Not long ago, 19-year-old Qassem al-Mughrabi, a Palestinian man from Jerusalem drove his car into a group of soldiers at an intersection. "The terrorist", as the Israeli newspaper Haaretz called him, was shot and killed. In two separate incidents last July, Palestinians from Jerusalem also used vehicles to attack Israelis. The attackers were not part of an organisation. Although those Palestinian men were also killed, senior Israeli officials called for their homes to be demolished. 

In a separate incident, Haaretz reported that a Palestinian woman blinded an Israeli soldier in one eye..."The terrorist was arrested by security forces," the paper said. An occupied citizen attacks an occupying soldier, and she is the terrorist?

In September, Bush spoke at the United Nations. No cause could justify the deliberate taking of human life, he said. Yet the US has killed thousands of civilians in airstrikes on populated areas. When you drop bombs on populated areas knowing there will be some "collateral" civilian damage, but accepting it as worth it, then it is deliberate. When you impose sanctions, as the US did on Saddam era Iraq, that kill hundreds of thousands, and then say their deaths were worth it, as secretary of state Albright did, then you are deliberately killing people for a political goal. When you seek to "shock and awe", as president Bush did, when he bombed Iraq, you are engaging in terrorism.

Just as the traditional American cowboy film presented white Americans under siege, with Indians as the aggressors, which was the opposite of reality, so, too, have Palestinians become the aggressors and not the victims. Beginning in 1948, 750,000 Palestinians were deliberately cleansed and expelled from their homes, and hundreds of their villages were destroyed, and their land was settled by colonists, who went on to deny their very existence and wage a 60-year war against the remaining natives and the national liberation movements the Palestinians established around the world. 

Every day, more of Palestine is stolen, more Palestinians are killed. To call oneself an Israeli Zionist is to engage in the dispossession of entire people. It is not that, qua Palestinians, they have the right to use any means necessary, it is because they are weak. The weak have much less power than the strong, and can do much less damage. The Palestinians would not have ever bombed cafes or used home-made missiles if they had tanks and airplanes. It is only in the current context that their actions are justified, and there are obvious limits....Can an Iraqi be justified in attacking the United States? After all, his country was attacked without provocation, and destroyed, with millions of refugees created, hundreds of thousands of dead. And this, after 12 years of bombings and sanctions, which killed many and destroyed the lives of many others.

I could argue that all Americans are benefiting from their country's exploits without having to pay the price, and that, in today's world, the imperial machine is not merely the military but a military-civilian network. And I could also say that Americans elected the Bush administration twice and elected representatives who did nothing to stop the war, and the American people themselves did nothing. From the perspective of an American, or an Israeli, or other powerful aggressors, if you are strong, everything you do is justifiable, and nothing the weak do is legitimate. It's merely a question of what side you choose: the side of the strong or the side of the weak.

Israel and its allies in the west and in Arab regimes such as Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia have managed to corrupt the PLO leadership, to suborn them with the promise of power at the expense of liberty for their people, creating a first – a liberation movement that collaborated with the occupier. Israeli elections are coming up and, as usual, these elections are accompanied by war to bolster the candidates. You cannot be prime minister of Israel without enough Arab blood on your hands. 

An Israeli general has threatened to set Gaza back decades, just as they threatened to set Lebanon back decades in 2006. As if strangling Gaza and denying its people fuel, power or food had not set it back decades already.

The democratically elected Hamas government was targeted for destruction from the day it won the elections in 2006. The world told the Palestinians that they cannot have democracy, as if the goal was to radicalise them further and as if that would not have a consequence. Israel claims it is targeting Hamas's military forces. This is not true. It is targeting Palestinian police forces and killing them, including some such as the chief of police, Tawfiq Jaber, who was actually a former Fatah official who stayed on in his post after Hamas took control of Gaza. What will happen to a society with no security forces? What do the Israelis expect to happen when forces more radical than Hamas gain power?

A Zionist Israel is not a viable long-term project and Israeli settlements, land expropriation and separation barriers have long since made a two state solution impossible. There can be only one state in historic Palestine. In coming decades, Israelis will be confronted with two options. Will they peacefully transition towards an equal society, where Palestinians are given the same rights, à la post-apartheid South Africa? Or will they continue to view democracy as a threat? If so, one of the peoples will be forced to leave. Colonialism has only worked when most of the natives have been exterminated. But often, as in occupied Algeria, it is the settlers who flee. Eventually, the Palestinians will not be willing to compromise and seek one state for both people. Does the world want to further radicalise them?

Do not be deceived: the persistence of the Palestine problem is the main motive for every anti-American militant in the Arab world and beyond. But now the Bush administration has added Iraq and Afghanistan as additional grievances. America has lost its influence on the Arab masses, even if it can still apply pressure on Arab regimes. But reformists and elites in the Arab world want nothing to do with America...

(Emphasis supplied)

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Egyptian regime tricked Hamas into not evacuating

Editor's note:  Egypt is a dictatorship. "Democracy" is a joke there, yet it enjoys full US support and American taxpayer largesse because the Egyptian regime - despite much official safety valve hot air to the contrary - is a satrapy of the Israeli state. The Bush regime's talk of encouraging "democracy" in the Middle East is a farce. No matter how tyrannical an Arab state (Jordan, Saudi Arabia), if it covertly cooperates with Zionism, that is the sole criterion for a US buttress of a corrupt regime. 

 

Egypt stabbed Hamas in back

Egypt collaborated with Israel by deliberately misleading Hamas and allowing Tel Aviv to deal a blow to the movement, a report claims.  Citing diplomatic sources, the London-based daily al-Quds al-Arabi reported Sunday [Dec. 28] that Egyptian Intelligence Minister Omar Suleiman had deceived Hamas into believing that Israel would not launch an attack on the Gaza Strip in the near future.  According to the report, the misinformation lured Hamas into not evacuating its security compounds and headquarters.

Suleiman convinced a number of Arab leaders that Israel was intending to launch only limited operations into the Gaza Strip to mount pressure on Hamas ahead of signing a new ceasefire agreement, the report added.  Egypt told Hamas on Friday evening that Israel had agreed to begin talks on a ceasefire and would not attack Gaza before Cairo ended its diplomatic efforts, the daily quoted Hamas sources close to former Palestinian Foreign Minister Mahmoud al-Zahar as saying.  The report added that Egypt's assurance persuaded Hamas not to evacuate its security compounds in accordance with routine procedures in place after any threats by Israel.

http://www.presstv.ir/ detail.asp...ionid=351020202 [Ken Waldron]

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The Israeli Nazis and the Palestinian Allies

The latest Israeli slaughter in Gaza and the rockets of Hamas in the context of Allied "Good War" morality

by Michael Hoffman

Copyright©2008. All Rights Reserved

www.RevisionistHistory.org

The latest Israeli war crime in Gaza reminds me of a central idea of a book I hope to one day complete on the Cryptocracy's great game with Islam, in this case pertaining to the morality message of World War II.

In World War II the Allies conducted themselves, as Franklin Roosevelt stated, as though the entire German people were collectively involved in a conspiracy against civilization. With this rationale in hand, the Allies proceeded to terrorize the German people as no people have ever been terrorized by a state. Every instrument of the terrorist was employed: assassination, bombing and mass murder. Rather than being condemned or prosecuted, the Allied terrorism was characterized as history's one, certain "Good War" and I will not exhaust you with a litany of the other sterling sobriquets with which moralists and alleged humanitarians have laurel-wreathed the Allied bloodbath.

The Muslims, along with the rest of the world, observed the Allied morality play and in the midst of the West's media blitz have had a center seat at all of the movies, documentaries and official commemorations of the heroism and goodness of the Allied attacks on civilians, on the basis that the Germans, including German women, children, infants and the unborn of pregnant German mothers, were occupiers, colonizers, aggressors and exterminators who got what they deserved.

I have witnessed no serious attempt anywhere across the spectrum of western public opinion to overthrow World War II Allied morality. If anything, it has become more extravagant in its claims of moral purity and ethical crusading.

The Palestinians, having learned the lesson of World War II as perpetually imparted by Hollywood and New York, identify the Israelis as Nazis who colonize, occupy and yes, exterminate -- in so far as they are able in a media age where little is done in secret that escapes hand-held video cameras and Internet blogs.

For example, in the Gaza ghetto, for years the Israelis have forced 1.5 million people to go without food, medical care, heating fuel, electricity, clean water and facilities and infrastructure necessary to life or even a half-way decent standard of living. In response to these Nazi-like actions by the Zionists, Hamas fires primitive rockets at Zionist civilians. The West tends to see only the Hamas rockets, not the record of Israeli mass murder, dispossession and occupation which led to the rocket fire.

According to the Allied logic of World War II, Hamas is completely in the right and nothing Hamas does to the Nazi-Israelis is wrong; in fact, the Hamas rocket fire must be classed, by Allied logic, as a step on the path toward civilization and against barbarism.

This writer believes that attacks on civilians are always wrong, whether they be German, Palestinian or Israeli. But the West can't have it both ways: it can't teach, as it has for generations, that one may burn and slaughter German civilians righteously, without restraint of any kind, and then celebrate that terrible carnage for the next six decades in every possible forum, while telling Hamas and the Palestinians that they dare not imitate the Allied/World War II example. Muslims have no regard for western hypocrisy and they will hurl themselves at the Israelis as the Allies hurled themselves at the Germans and this will probably continue for as long as the Allied slaughter of Germans is held to be the gold standard of ethical conduct in war.

Those who uphold the myth of Allied morality ought to uphold Palestinian resistance to Israeli conquest and slaughter. In view of this, the Israeli-Nazi attacks today in Gaza will only further enflame the resolve of Arabs and Muslims throughout the world to resist by any means -- including guns and bombs -- the "collectively guilty" 21st century Israeli people, just as the Allies murdered, burned and bombed the "collectively guilty" German people of the 1940s. Few in the West today view the Allies as terrorists and few in Islamic countries view Hamas as terrorist.

The next "Good War" has only just begun.

Hoffman is co-author of The Israeli Holocaust Against the Palestinians. His latest work is Judaism Discovered: A Study of the Anti-Biblical Religion of Racism, Self-Worship, Superstition and Deceit, now in its second printing, in spite of having been banned by Amazon.com (the only book about Judaism which has that distinction). Ordering information is here: http://www.revisionisthistory.org/page1/news.html

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