Netanyahu's re-election uncovers his record in deception

Netanyahu's re-election uncovers his long record in deception

by Sean Jobst

March 28, 2015

Benjamin Netanyahu won the election by rallying and galvanizing the most extremist elements of Israeli society. Eyewitnesses have attested to the reality of the religious Zionist current and its role in the election. "A week ago I was in Rabin Square for a rally by the Netanyahu forces, and they were terrifying," writes Philip Weiss on March 23rd. "The people I met in the street said racist and foolish things about Arabs, both Netanyahu and Naftali Bennett made religious statements bordering on lunacy about the Jewish right to the land."

Netanyahu knows he can do whatever he wants, due to the full complicity of the same U.S. Congress which adulates him whenever he appears before them. Its unprecedented that a body elected by their constituents to uphold the sovereign laws of the U.S., will assume such a self-deprecating posture towards the leader of a foreign country, giving him more standing ovations than they give even to the President of their own country! The whole rabble from both political parties have generally sold out lock, stock and barrel to AIPAC. They are eager to receive their "master" Netanyahu whenever he graces his underlings with his presence. A former AIPAC member has exposed the game:

"On all matters relating to Israel and the Middle East in general, AIPAC writes the legislation (or letters, resolutions, etc.) which are then handed over to legislators to drop in the hopper, gather cosponsors, and get it passed or sent. Not only that, the ideas for these initiatives come out of AIPAC rather than (as is usually the case with lobbies) starting with the Member of Congress who then asks the lobby for help with drafting. AIPAC does it all, from soup to nuts." (MJ Rosenberg, "How We Know AIPAC Wrote The GOP’s 'Treason' Letter To Iran," March 9, 2015).

Netanyahu: Master of Deception

"Bibi" Netanyahu is a master of deception, who has a PhD. in deceiving the world with his policies and intentions, knowing full well that much of the world's media and governments will be complicit through their silence. He has been leading a propaganda campaign to drum up support against Iran, speaking about an inflated threat which even the Mossad discounts as exaggerated and fabricated. He has been working overtime, exploiting the international environment after 9/11 to Israel's benefit.

Netanyahu is reaping the fruits from a long record of lies and propaganda that dates back even before the founding of Israel. From the time when he was still the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, it was Netanyahu who led a propaganda campaign against UN Secretary-General (and later President of Austria) Kurt Waldheim, defaming him since Waldheim criticized Israel's invasion of Lebanon and atrocities against Palestinians and Lebanese. As former Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky writes:

"There was growing dissatisfaction in the Mossad and in the right-wing elements of the Israeli government regarding the behavior of Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who was defying direct Israeli warnings regarding his relationship with the Austrian leader Kurt Waldheim, who'd been branded a Nazi. (The branding was done by a field unity of Al that entered a UN building on Park Avenue South in New York and placed several incriminating documents that had been removed from other files into Waldheim’s file and the files of a few other individuals-for future use. The falsified documents were then 'discovered' by Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Benjamin Netanyahu, as part of a smear campaign against Waldheim, who was critical of Israeli activities in southern Lebanon.)" (Victor Ostrovsky, The Other Side of Deception: A Rogue Agent Exposes the Mossad's Secret Agenda, New York: HarperCollins, 1994, pp. 228-229).

Habitual Liar: Twenty years later, different lies but same liar

"A Clean Break"

Netanyahu was Prime Minister when a group of American Neocons led by Richard Perle presented him with a policy document in 1996. Entitled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," it foreshadowed certain policies pursued by the same individuals who would later become the leading architects of the Iraq War. Let us be clear what this was: A group of American citizens collectively calling themselves "Neoconservatives," operate think-tanks and among themselves write up a document which they present to a foreign head of state.

Most of the proposals have already been followed, foremost being the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, an action which was greeted by many Israelis as "This war is for us!" However, other proposals shed light on the ongoing devastation in Syria. As part of the "containment" of Syria, it advocates stirring up civil war within that country through the use of proxies.

Now, with Israeli Rabbi Nir Ben Artzi's curious statement that "God has sent ISIS against nations that want to destroy Israel," we can connect the dots between the 1996 Clean Break document, the modern ISIS/Daesh terror in Syria and Iraq, and Netanyahu's reaction to 9/11 and the Iraq war: "We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq."

Rabbi Nir Ben Artzi

Netanyahu steals nuclear triggers from U.S.

As I documented in my earlier article, "Nuking 'Amalek'?", Israel is a nuclear-armed state which has not signed any anti-proliferation treaties. It is one whose leaders have frequently invoked the threat of nuclear weapons to strike fear into its neighbors and to blackmail its "allies" into giving into its every whim and demand. There is a certain hate ideology behind this entire debate, and it is one that can be easily discerned not only by Netanyahu's actions but also by looking at his friends and connections - a topic for a future blog post.

On July 27, 2012, the FBI partially declassified and released documents pertaining to its 1985-2002 investigation into the activities of Richard Kelly Smyth, who was convicted of running a U.S. front company that illegally smuggled nuclear triggers out of the U.S. into Israel. Through his contact, the Hollywood director Arnon Milchan, Smyth was put in contact with Netanyahu, who then worked at Heli Trading Company. According to the FBI report, "Smyth and [Netanyahu] would meet in restaurants in Tel Aviv and in [Netanyahu’s] home and/or business. It was not uncommon for [Netanyahu] to ask Smyth for unclassified material."

How has Netanyahu reacted to the revelations? As noted by the authors of a book on the subject, "Hollywood mega-producer and former secret agent Arnon Milchan has been asked directly by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres to avoid any public discussion of the book Confidential, asserting that the matter is too sensitive at this time." Given the dictates of his war-propaganda, it should be little surprise Netanyahu would want nothing more than to sweep his inconvenient record of lies, deception and crimes against the U.S. under the rug!

How Big Pharma suppresses real alternatives to its "final revolution"

How Big Pharma suppresses real alternatives to its "final revolution"

by Sean Jobst
March 27, 2015

A guiding principle in my life is nothing in this world happens by accident, not even the smallest occurrence. It is with that view in mind that two pieces of information recently came to my attention. One pissed me off, while the other gives me some further hope in humanity's future. On the one hand, I know that justice and truth will ultimately prevail in the end, but in the meantime the arrogance of the elites knows no bounds.

Growing up, I always took it for granted that homeopathic medicine is a legitimate and even better form of medical treatment, due to its use of holistic and metaphysical understandings that go to the root of an illness, rather than alleviating the symptoms like a band-aid approach that only sees the materialistic. Biology demonstrates the various elements that make up our body, elements that exist within nature. To me it goes without saying the same illnesses within our body, can be cured by the various elements that can be found within nature and correspond to our bodies.

One of the great contemporary medical minds to have come to this realization is the French Professor Luc Montagnier. In 2008, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for having discovered the HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) in the early 1980s. He followed this up with ground-breaking research in 2009, which concluded that diluted DNA from pathogenic bacteria and viral species can emit specific radio waves associated with 'nanostructures'. If understood correctly, these radio waves could recreate the same pathogen and thereby heal the illness.

Scientific terminology is not my forte, but more light on the significance was shone so that even a scientific novice like me could understand. The research "verified that electromagnetic signals of the original medicine remains in the water and has dramatic biological effects," as leading American homeopathy advocate Dana Ullman observed, citing Montagnier's "experimental research that confirms one of the controversial features of homeopathic medicine that uses doses of substances that undergo sequential dilution with vigorous shaking in-between each dilution."

Montagnier expressed support for the basic homeopathic approach, in an interview published in Science magazine on December 24, 2010: "I can’t say that homeopathy is right in everything. What I can say now is that the high dilutions (used in homeopathy) are right. High dilutions of something are not nothing. They are water structures which mimic the original molecules." Referring to the typical claims made by the dominant medical community, he said about homeopathy: "it’s not pseudoscience. It’s not quackery. These are real phenomena which deserve further study."

The assumptions of modern science are often taken as dogma, to be accepted without question and if you doubt them, then you will be consigned to the margins of debate where only tin-foil hat-wearing "kooks" reside. Anything that challenges this scientific orthodoxy is simply ignored, no matter how much evidence challenges their dominant assumptions. In 2011, the Swiss government commissioned a massive study that showed homeopathy is more cost-effective than any other forms of medicine. It concluded: "Homeopathy is so well trusted that 300 million patients in more than 80 nations use it."

It is time to challenge this materialist reductionism which reduces everything to the strictly biological and ignores the fact that we are multi-faceted individuals. Their assumptions are anti-historical, as the assumptions are relatively new in history while challenging everything that ancient cultures and the various faith-traditions knew about the human being: that he/she is made with both body and soul. To deny this is only a product of the Enlightenment which has made certain economic and scientific assumptions into dogma, to replace the old religious orders.

"Tyranny begins with the abuse of language," George Orwell warns us. We can learn a lot about the world through studying language. This is certainly very true of medicine. The same "mind-inducing" drugs that are prescribed and sold to an already over-medicated populace, are known under the term "pharmacology." The origin is the Greek term "pharmakeia (φαρμακεία)", another meaning of which is "sorcery"! Which leads me to the second piece of information I mentioned earlier.

Aldous Huxley was a writer well-connected with certain Globalist power-elites (i.e. his brother, Julian Huxley, was a eugenicist and UNESCO founder who advocated population control, etc.), who accurately described many features of modern society, such as mass production, consumerism and "man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." Perhaps he was also alluding to the modern role of Big Pharma, when he gave a remarkable speech in Berkeley, California, in 1962:

"There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution."

Keeping the Greek origins of the word "pharmacology" in mind, we can clearly see the stupor and dependency that the corporate drug cartels (Big Pharma) have caused to an overmedicated populace. A populace that is overmedicated, dependent upon these man-made medicines to treat symptoms but not heal or cure, will continuously be one too weak to resist. It will be one that has to continuously spend money it doesn't have, which keeps the debt machine of the big bankers fueled. This cycle keeps going, breeding and in turn leading to more social control not only over the body but the mind - a "pharmalogical" control in every sense of the word. Who will resist distractions and take notice?

Bryan Fischer, the Racist Dominion Heresy, and Genocide of Native Americans

Bryan Fischer, the Racist Dominion Heresy, and Genocide of Native Americans

by Sean Jobst

March 21, 2015

A nine-day trip which took 60 Republican National Committee members to Israel beginning January 31, 2015, was funded by the American Family Association. Although coming from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) - a group with its own hypocritical political agenda - nevertheless the record of hate preached by this group raises serious questions about the links between "Christian" Zionists and a general racist ideology that extols the "superiority" of Anglo-Saxon Americans over all others, built around both a perverse reading of the Old Testament and American history.

Meet Bryan Fischer, a fanatical Zionist with close links to certain Tea Party groups. He gave up his own position as a spokesman of the American Family Association, although he continues as a daily radio host for its American Family Radio. Greeting news that the United States would sign a non-binding United Nations declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples in 2010, Fischer warned that President Obama "wants Indian tribes to be our new overlords," where he "will be the new chief over this revived Indian empire."

Fischer, 19th-century genocide advocate in 21st-century business suit

It goes without saying these bizarre fears were utterly unfounded. Obama had merely said the U.S. would "lend its support" to the declaration, vague verbiage that is clearly not an endorsement. In his blissful myopia ill-informed of history, Fischer failed to explain how the same federal government that has consistently ignored its own treaties with sovereign Native American nations, will suddenly find it in its heart not only to honor its own treaties with the limited land given to nations which are a miniscule fraction of what was promised, but actually yield its own power in some master conspiracy to cede land.

Fischer clearly has no knowledge about which he speaks. The sad reality is he expresses an ignorance of Native Americans and treaty obligations which is appallingly too common among Americans, as I experienced first-hand from my own two weeks learning experience on the Pine Ridge (Oglala Lakota) reservation and from the "schooling" I received from my Native American activist friends. I learned a very simple reality: The typical Native American knows far more about non-Native society than the non-Native American knows about Indian Country.

The history of these treaties is crucial to understanding the entire colonial structure that continues to obscure and rewrite history. "The people who are citizens of the U.S., these are your treaties. They aren't just the Indians' treaties," says Native activist Suzan Shown Harjo (Cheyenne/Hodulgee Muscogee). "No one gave us anything. No one was dragging any land behind them when they came here. This was our land."

A genocidal revision of history

In February 2011, Bryan Fischer wrote a hateful screed entitled “Native Americans Morally Disqualified Themselves From the Land.” It is filled with the same sort of racist, colonial assertions one would think more representative of the 19th-century frontier than the 21st-century world-wide web. Initially appearing on the website of the American Family Association, in a sloppy attempt to hide the racism of their beloved, the AFA took down the article, but not before it had already spread like wildfire among a vigilant web-public.

We will examine this screed, and compare it with the actual facts of history and the present. Fischer asserts "the role that the superstition, savagery and sexual immorality of native Americans played in making them morally disqualified from sovereign control of American soil."

There was no such thing as "America" but that was a term given to the continent by later conquerors. Before that, it was known by other names, including to many indigenous nations as "Turtle Island" such as the Lenape (Delaware), Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), Anishinabe (Ojibwa/Chippewa), and Lakota peoples. The name arose because of the shape of the "North American" continent, which resembled a turtle. This folklore was recorded by Dutch traveler Jaspar Danckaerts during his visit among the Lenape people between 1678 and 1680.

The fact that there was such legends that transcended different nations (I prefer this term over the colonial-ridden "tribes", which ignores the multi-faceted structure of peoples who also included clans and other forms), demonstrates a certain historical reality that refutes Fischer's portrayals of Native peoples as those "steeped in the basest forms of superstition, had been guilty of savagery in warfare for hundreds of years, and practiced the most debased forms of sexuality."

With his Anglo-Saxon Protestant exceptionalism, Fischer and those of his ilk similarly ignore how even their own term "American" includes an entire continent outside of only the United States and Canada. The various foods, resources and landscape of the continents had Indigenous names before Europeans "discovered" the continent. "Later on, the grandchildren of the Pilgrims seized the name and everything else. Now they are the Americans. And those of us who live in the other Americas, who are we?" (Eduardo Galeano, Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone, New York: Nation Books, 2009, p. 130)

On what basis does Fischer speak about the Native peoples' "superstition, savagery and sexual immorality"? Judging by savagery alone, the brutal conquest of an entire conquest and wiping out entire nations to make room for this alleged "superior" culture that Fischer extols is the very essence of savagery. The least he can do is to acknowledge it, rather than cowardly mitigating responsibility and hiding behind racist assertions about their "superstition" and "sexual immorality." The tragedy here is the re-definition of "property" into tools of conquest and annihilation on the old frontier:

"White Americans saw the acquisition of property as a cultural imperative, manifestly the right way to go about things. There was one appropriate way to treat the land - divide it, distribute it, register it. This relationship to physical matter seems to us so commonplace that we must struggle to avoid taking it for granted, to grasp instead the vastness of the continent and the enormous project of measuring, allocating, and record keeping involved in turning the open expanses of North America into transferable parcels of real estate. Like the settlers themselves we steadfastly believe in the social fiction that lines on the map and signatures on a deed legitimately divide the earth. Of all the persistent qualities in American history, the values attached to property retain the most power." (Patricia Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West, New York: W.W. Norton, 1987, p. 56).

Dehumanization

Colonizers dehumanize the conquered people, in order to portray them as less than human, cheapen the sanctity of their lives, and thereby to justify any resulting oppression or genocide. This can often be done by simply denying the separate identity of the victimized people, such as the repeated Israeli-Zionist denials of a distinct Palestinian Arab identity. The Zionist Fischer himself makes a linkage of the two with his own "Christian" heresy based more on a literalist and selective reading of the Old Testament. One can be forgiven for forgetting that Fischer pays lip-service to the ethics of Jesus the Christ, rather than being an extremist rabbi on a West Bank settlement.

"The Amorites, or Canaanite peoples, practiced one moral abomination after another, whether it was incest, adultery, sexual immorality, homosexuality, bestiality or child sacrifice, and God finally said 'Enough!'," Fischer asserts. "By the time he brought the nascent nation of Israel to the borders of the land flowing with milk and honey, he had already been patient with the native tribes for 400 years, waiting for them to come to the place of repentance for their socially and spiritually degrading practices."

It lies beyond both my expertise or the scope of this article, to examine the truth of his claims. But what is most apparent is the selective hypocrisy engaged in by Fischer, who ignores the existence of these same things among the Israelites of the Old Testament. Incest was clearly practiced among the Hebrews (Genesis 29:16-28, Exodus 6:20, 2 Samuel 13:7-14, Ezekiel 22:10-11). Also to be found among the Hebrews was adultery (Genesis 38:13-24, 2 Samuel 11:3-5), bestiality (Ezekiel 23:20), and homosexuality (1 Kings 14:24, 15:12, 22:46, 2 Kings 23:7). Human sacrifice among even the ancient Hebrews abound throughout the Old Testament (2 Kings 3:27, 16:3, 21:6, 2 Chronicles 28:3, 2 Samuel 21:4-9, Psalms 106:37-38, Ezekiel 20:30-31). Thus, the very same things for which Fischer castigates the "heathen" peoples was exhibited among the "chosen" Israelites as well.

Old Testament perversion

Fischer's ideas represent a perversion of religious ethics, in service of a political ideology of conquest, dominion and brutality. That is, the very purpose of faith in One God and an Afterlife, are replaced with a Statist concern with the here-and-now of land and settlement. "Whatever Fischer’s profession of faith and doctrinal views, the religion he promotes and practices is the worship of the American Imperium," notes the Christian individualist William Grigg. "This is a heresy far deadlier than any of the indigenous forms of superstition it suppressed."

Invoking the Israelite annihilations of entire peoples recorded in the Old Testament, Fischer was preceded by the Puritans and other settlers, who did the same exact thing in their sermons and calls for "Manifest Destiny". Literal interpretation of these stories led to justifications for their own genocide and expulsions of the Native Americans. In their utter pursuit to grab the land for themselves, the Puritan settlers invoked Joshua and the "sacred" exterminations of the Amorites and Philistines. (Thomas Nelson, "The Puritans of Massachusetts," Judaism, Vol. 16, no. 2, 1967).

"Colonists of all epochs and all nations have always sought a 'justification' for their annexations, robberies and dominations. The pretext was usually found in an alleged 'superiority' of culture which endowed the invader with a 'civilising mission' for his 'race' in relation to others. A religious pretext offered a precious additional aid to such colonial conquests - or, more generally, to any domination of one social group over another." (Roger Garaudy, The Case of Israel: A Study of Political Zionism, London: Shorouk International, 1983, p. 70).

The genocidal process of precedence and history repeating itself has turned full-circle in the modern experience of the Israeli occupation and killing of Palestinians, as noted by Gary Fields, Associate Professor of Communication at the University of California-San Diego: "What is occurring on the Palestinian landscape has antecedents in the landscapes of enclosure and dispossession in England and the Anglo-American colonial frontier." (Fields, "'This is our land': collective violence, property law, and imagining the geography of Palestine," in Journal of Cultural Geography, 2012, p. 20)

Native American writer Steven Newcomb (Shawnee/Lenape) is co-founder and co-director of the Indigenous Law Institute. He writes in an expose of the current subject: "Fischer’s Old Testament views deserve our pity and contempt. Perhaps, though, one ought to thank him for being so open and forthright with the kind of extreme thinking Christian fundamentalists accuse elements of the Muslim world of exhibiting. He has opened up for scrutiny the kind of thinking that has been foundational to the building of American society. We find it most evident in the Doctrine of Christian Discovery that exists in U.S. federal Indian law, as expressed in Supreme Court ruling Johnson v. M’Intosh (1823), whereby the Court said that the first 'Christian people' to 'discover' lands inhabited by 'heathens' had assumed the 'ultimate dominion' to be 'in themselves.'"

Trail of Tears, 1838

The early British colonists initially conceded Indian ownership of land, but once their law redefined Indians as transient occupants, the culture of intolerance toward Indian property rights and presence on the landscape was inevitable. The landmark "Johnson v. M'Intosh" decision abrogated notions of Indian property ownership and transformed Indians into a new legal status as "tenants at will" (Fields, op. cit., p. 2). "By the early 19th century, ideologues for the new American nation, colonists and political leaders alike, conceived of the American landscape as a westward-expanding grid of property owners committed to improving land through cultivation and hard work." (ibid., p. 21).

When "Might-is-Right' philosophy becomes theological

Proving he subscribes to a materialist Social-Darwinist ethic couched in an Old Testament literalism, Fischer openly subscribes to the "Might-Is-Right" philosophy which has absolutely no place in the mind of one who allegedly follows the same Jesus who honored the meek (Matthew 5:5), was himself humble and meek (Matthew 11:29-30), counseled the Golden Rule (Matthew 7:12), wept for the dead (John 11:33-35), healed people (Matthew 14:14, Mark 1:40-41), and associated with the Samaritans (John 4:4-42) - but who was unyielding against those (like Fischer) who pervert the scriptures to suit their own agenda, such as the Pharisees (John 8:44-45, Matthew 3:7, 23:13-15,23-29, Mark 8:15, Luke 11:39, Revelations 2:9, 3:9) and usurers or money-changers (Luke 6:34-35, Matthew 21:12-13).

Conquest is actually one of the ways that Fischer believes leads to this dominion theory of land, based on a might-is-right philosophy that gave the settlers "a legitimate claim on American soil." He further asserted, "And the Europeans proved superior in battle, taking possession of contested lands through right of conquest. So in all respects, Europeans gained rightful and legal sovereign control of American soil." Would Fischer similarly lament, given this "legal right" of conquest, over the Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian and Roman conquests of his beloved "chosen people" the Israelites? Similarly, how would he respond to a potential "conquest" of America by another nation? I suspect he would quickly change his tune in such an instance!

Rounding up (settled) Cherokee people, prior to the Trail of Tears

The way people live seems to be one of Fischer's obsessions, such as when he compares how the settlers lived in contrast to the Native Americans: "They established permanent settlements on the land, moving gradually from east to west, while Indian tribes remained relentlessly nomadic." This assertion is patently anti-historical, given that most of the Native American tribes lived a settled, sedentary lifestyle, and even had their own towns and cities. Even though some tribes (especially on the Plains) were nomadic or semi-nomadic, I fail to see how this makes them somehow "inferior" to a "superior" settled people. It also doesn't square away with his own veneration of the ancient Hebrews, who themselves lived a nomadic lifestyle, a nomadic experience crucial to understanding their culture and religion, their nomadic 40 years "wandering in the wilderness" (Numbers 32:13), and the same Bible that actually spoke spiritual positive about a nomadic existence (Hebrews 11:38).

Evangelism and the Plight of Modern Native Americans

The rest of his article is devoted to actually praising the racism that U.S. founders such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson had towards Native Americans. The crux of the matter is simply his own interpretation of a religion that Native Americans did not possess, lamenting about how "missionaries were murdered in cold blood," while not even blinking an eyelid about the same massacres and slaughter of Native Americans that he justifies and praises as fulfilling "God's work"! The hypocrite Fischer thus reveals his Orwellian forked tongue through the cold-blooded shivering fingers he used to type such a hateful screed!

Fischer laments how the "savages of the wilderness" held onto their "superstition and occult practices" rather than abandon these for "the light of Christianity and civilization." His evangelical bigotry extends even to the modern-day Native Americans: "Many of the tribal reservations today remain mired in poverty and alcoholism because many native Americans continue to cling to the darkness of indigenous superstition instead of coming into the light of Christianity and assimilating into Christian culture."

From: Bill Nye, History of The United States, 1894, p. 74

I have personally stood at the front-lines of this battle against alcoholism on the reservation, during my stay on the Pine Ridge Oglala Lakota reservation and blockade of the border city of Whiteclay, Nebraska. I doubt Fischer has ever been there, but even if he would've I suspect his racism is such that he would simply gloss over the truth:

Contrary to the laws on the Pine Ridge reservation and the Federal government's own treaty promises to the Lakota people, the whole town of Whiteclay is set up solely for the purpose of selling alcohol to Native Americans. The reality is that the liquor store owners exploiting the poverty and selling alcohol to Lakota people, are white "Christians"! This crime is being committed in plain sight of the same authorities who invoke scriptures when it suits them for political purposes.

On the other hand, the alcoholism of Whiteclay is being opposed and actively fought against by a group of non-Christian, traditional Lakota activists and elders, inspired by their own spirituality and a deep love for their people! I had the good fortune to meet and know these individuals, and my own European heritage makes me feel far more affinity towards them than to the Pharisaic-inspired, Old Testament-perverting, evangelical Zionism of such cretins as Bryan Fischer.

The Geography of Emotions: Love from a Spatial Perspective

The Geography of Emotions: Love from a Spatial Perspective

by Sean Jobst
February 9, 2015

Love is an inherent human emotion that is expressed in various ways, depending on the person and the context. If love is the relation of individuals to other people (whether part of their group or not) or to something higher than themselves (such as notions of nations or homelands), we should expect some correlation with human geography, which examines the relationship of people and space. This correlation was examined by Carey-Ann Morrison, Professor of Geography at the University of Waikato in Aotearoa, New Zealand. By "paying attention to the way people think about love, desire love and imagine love could offer new insights into how they/we love ourselves, others, places and nations" (Morrison, 513).

On the one hand, "we may (as individuals, as communities, as nations) no longer believe in love, but we still fall for it" (Stacey and Pearce, 12). Perhaps for this reason, there has generally been a reluctance on the part of geographers to speak about love. However, in recent decades there has been an upsurge in geographies of emotion and affect. Part of this apparent apprehension speaks to our own human expressions of love. While most people admit that love is vitally important, there is a "lack of public discussion" about love, which is associated in their minds with "private" spaces and feelings (Hooks, xvii).

Acknowledgement of the role of love from a spatial perspective is not new, such that there is actually a word for it: topophilia, meaning "love of place." It was defined by the philosopher Alan Watts as "a special love for peculiar places." One of its earliest proponents was Yi-Fu Tuan, a Chinese-American geographer who said his love of geography countered personal feelings of emptiness within his own life. Topophilia is viewed by Morrison as "a useful concept which allows for the exploration of emotional connections between physical environments and humans" (Morrison, 506), by recognizing "the depth of human attachment to the 'natural' world."

While love is often treated "as a given, essential and buried deep within us," from a geographical view "feelings of love change and manifest differently in different spaces and places" (ibid., 512). But what is love? "Across the social sciences, scholars, geographers included, have had difficulty locating a language of love" (ibid., 507). With the possible exception of English where love is reduced to a general reductionist term, other languages and cultures have a more nuanced vocabulary of love that expands and enriches our human understanding. The various stages and degrees of love in various cultures and traditions reflect their attitudes toward romantic love, the love between parents and children, spiritual love in how people relate to the Divine or the Divine relates to them, and several other ways that love manifests in human experience (Eck, xxiii-xxiv).

Geographers have been increasingly looking at love from various aspects, translating it into concepts like care, labor, trust, commitment, and the relationships between self and others. "This opens up the way for questions such as 'what does it mean to do something in the name of love?' and 'how does love form subjectivities, boundaries, spaces and places?' to be at the centre of academic inquiry" (Morrison, 508). The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard has analyzed the "poetics of space," observing how the inside of a home "acquires a sense of intimacy, secrecy, security, real or imagined, because of the experiences that come to seem appropriate for it" (Said, 54-55).

Each of these terms denote an emotional "feeling" of love in one form or another. It can often become expressed in folklore and expressions in the language. I can draw from my own ethnic background as an example, being of Swabian German and Castilian Spanish ancestry. Swabians, who inhabit southwest Germany, have a simple yet profound saying that expresses how such emotions can carry into a spatial realm - "Schaffe, schaffe, Häusle baue" (work, work, build a home). This expressed a feeling of security through working to inhabit one's own space (Kollewe). "The objective space of a house - its corners, corridors, cellar, rooms - is far less important than what poetically it is endowed with, which is usually a quality with an imaginative or figurative value we can name and feel: thus a house may be haunted, or homelike, or prisonlike, or magical" (Said, 55).

Human beings occupy a specific place within time and space, so logically our human experiences would similarly reflect a spatial perspective. These different cultural concepts of love have a direct effect on geography. Within the Hindu tradition, "vatsalya" refers to the unconditional love of the parent for their children. The etymology of the word relates to "vatsa" (calf), so "vasalya" literally means "mother-cow love," the spontaneous love that flows whenever the calf is near (Eck, xxiv). The Hindu reverence for cows and prohibition of their consumption has shaped the human geography of India. This includes shaping the diet, determining what is used for medicinal purposes, fuel or fertilizer, and professions that religious minorities gravitate towards compared to the Hindu majority (Hobbs, 294).

Symbolically, love can relate to the body, with metaphors of the female body in particular being related to the land. One might think this is to be expected, given that bodies cannot be separated from the spaces and places in which they are constituted (Longhurst). In his 100 Love Sonnets, the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda symbolized the physical contours of his Chilean homeland with the female body; he extrapolated upon this by saying that homeland is not only a matter of geography but also a sense of belonging to a community - nation and nationhood (Ouyang, 120). He was thus using the metaphor to demonstrate the importance of human notions of community to geography.

Specific places often are determined by the actions of human beings, such as the formation of many boundaries. Yet, at the same time there are also physical boundaries. Human geography is then to be experienced as both "real" and the imaginary. "Space is experienced through the loved and loving body, and the body is situated in space. Sometimes spaces are 'real', sometimes discursive, sometimes psychoanalytic and imaginary. The ways in which people 'play out' scenes of love in their thoughts, fantasies and dreams play an important role in shaping desires in 'real' world situations" (Morrison, 513). From a psychoanalytic view, love is crucial to forming individual subjectivities, social groupings and notions of culture.

Love becomes a "form of dependence on what is 'not me', and is linked profoundly to the anxiety of boundary formation, whereby what is 'not me' is also part of me," making them "exposed to, and dependent upon another, who in 'not being myself', threatens to take away the possibility of love" (Ahmed, 125). In this sense, a "homeland" is then formed over a specific territory to which an ethnic group possesses a deep historical and cultural association. This is the formation of a particular national identity. The concept of love plays an important role here, as love symbolizes a sense of community that is "inclusionary" toward others forming that identity.

Just as languages and cultural traditions have various nuanced concepts of love, so too do they often possess expressions of a melancholic or restless "yearning" that can also carry over into geography. The fact that one has to "feel" it to really understand, epitomizes how hard such notions are to translate into other languages. Novelist Henriette Lazaridis-Power has spoken about the painful longing for an absent home, expressed in words where value is assigned on the basis of a physical ability to "get home" or an emotional ability to "find home", which can sometimes be elusive. "So space acquires emotional and even rational sense by a kind of poetic process, whereby the vacant or anonymous reaches of distance are converted into meaning for us here" (Said, 55).

In my opinion, one of the most profound expressions of this "yearning" translated to a spatial context is the Portuguese concept of saudade. This can be loosely translated as "homesickness", a nostalgia where there is longing for a past state of well being that is connected not only to emotions but space. Portuguese ethnologists and poets often spoke of this saudade as the formative element in Portuguese national identity. This made a "special inclination towards overseas exploration" (Leal, 43). If love is to express feelings of relations to others, saudade nurtured local networks as "safe havens of kinship, and friendship within neighborhood communities known as bairrismo" (Leutzsch, 186). As love can sometimes be a personal feeling that is closely guarded, "to say that one has saudade is also to convey that there is some element of the feeling that cannot be fully described because it is too personal" (Giorgi, 75).

This longing for a space can also be for a lost homeland, with an analogy to the heart-broken "lover" who has lost their "love" (in this case, their homeland). This duality of "what is 'not me' is also part of me," is expressed in Palestinian culture, through art, poetry and folktales which express the love for the land. Palestinian national identity is expressed through metaphors of land. One of the most common Palestinian proverbs is "al-Ard mithl al-'Ird" (the land is honor). The word for land (ard) is linguistically close to that for honor ('ird), which emphasizes "the interconnectedness of land, honor, nation, and rights" (Faier, 150). The loss of land - and, hence, of honor - is expressed through Palestinian Land Day, which is commemorated every March 30th. Just as the Chilean Neruda used the metaphor of the contours of the female body, many Palestinian cities have feminine names since "women figuratively give birth to the nation as place and people" (ibid., 148). "Owning land thus allows the farmer a sense of security, belonging, honor, and pride of place. Lack of land ownership, as experienced among tenant farmers or sharecroppers, brings none of these. To lose land, a fact of life for Palestinians since al-Nakba in 1948 (continuing today via land confiscation for Israeli settlements, military bases, and roads), represents a sense of being uprooted, losing one's livelihood, insecurity, and defeat" (Farsoun, 25-26).

While metaphors of love are rife within geography, we should beware of "a narrow, idealized and limited version of love as only associated with spaces and subjectivities of traditional romantic love," according to Morrison. "This is despite recent suggestions that modes of love and loving in late-modern detraditionalized societies have undergone fundamental changes with new patterns and forms of intimacy emerging" (Morrison, 508). If the "modern" world arose from the rise of colonialism, we can connect changing patterns to knowledge of geography that was stolen from the Indigenous nations by colonizers. "They transferred knowledge across large cultural and linguistic divides separating those who saw America as a New World from those Indigenous peoples who were very much at home in their own Old Worlds," says Canadian professor Anthony Hall. "By replacing narratives of discovery with narratives of encounters between different peoples, the way is gradually being opened to a wider understanding of the crucial role of Aboriginal groups and individuals in the transformation of the continent throughout the post-Columbian era" (Hall, 289).

Thus we see in the encounters between different cultures and peoples the need to consider love as a factor in geography. Morrison calls for "geographers who are invested in understanding discourses of the Other," for "how, where and what one loves is deeply political" (Morrison, 506). It has always been political, from the very moment land was separated into boundaries that was inclusive towards some while exclusive toward others. "In other words, this universal practice of designating in one's mind a familiar space which is 'ours' and an unfamiliar space beyond 'ours' which is 'theirs' is a way of making geographical distinctions that can be entirely arbitrary" (Said, 54). This is arbitrary because its only necessary for one of the people to even acknowledge the distinction. "All kinds of suppositions, associations, and fictions appear to crowd the unfamiliar space outside one's own" (ibid.).

Morrison makes a profound case for examining the role of love in geography, but although a fresh perspective it does not mean there are no flaws of its own. "I am concerned that in trying to unpack love while critiquing social science for an 'uncritical, placeless and essentialist account of bodies that love' we may risk falling into the same essentialist trap" (Inwood, 721). To reduce the subject to "the amorphous and singular 'Other' we flatten out difference - and its sociospatial consequences - and arguably reproduce the exclusions that a politicization of love would/could potentially counter" (ibid., 722).

One does not need to embrace the whole Freudian apparatus and its attendant assumptions about sexuality and family to suggest projection (205). The Indian philosopher Homi K. Bhabha has coined the concept of a "third space" where two or more cultures interact with each other in expressions of ambiguity. This dialectic of division can often collapse in crises which are themselves symptoms of how "the ambivalent identifications of love and hate occupy the same psychic space," where "paranoid projections 'outwards' return to haunt and split the space from which they are made" (Bhabha, 149). But "as long as the boundary is retained between the territories, and the narcissistic wound is contained, the aggressivity will be projected on to the Other or the Outside" (ibid.). Love is truly complicated and complex at times, not always straight-forward but very much ambivalent. In a like vein, so too is how we relate to others and therefore perceive geography.

SOURCES:

Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. New York: Orion Press, 1964.

Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.

Eck, Diana L., "Foreword," in Encyclopedia of Love in World Religions, ed. Yudit Kornberg Greenberg, Vol. 2: J-Z, Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, Inc., 2008, pp. xxiii-xxv.

Faier, Elizabeth. Organizations, Gender, and the Culture of Palestinian Activism in Haifa, Israel. New York: Routledge, 2005.

Farsoun, Samih K. Culture and Customs of the Palestinians. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004.

Giorgi, Kyra. Emotions, Languages and Identity on the Margins of Europe. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

Hall, Anthony J. Earth Into Property: Colonization, Decolonization, and Capitalism. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2010.

Hobbs, Joseph J. World Regional Geography, 6th Edition. Belmont, CA: Brooks/Cole, 2009.

Hooks, Bell. All About Love: New Visions. New York: William Morrow, 2000.

Inwood, Joshua, "Love and the Other: A response to Morrison et al.(2012)," in Human Geography, vol. 37, no. 5, 2013, pp. 721-723.

Kollewe, Julia, "Angela Merkel's austerity postergirl, the thrifty Swabian housewife," The Guardian, London, 17 September 2012.

Lazaridis-Power, Henriette. The Closer House: A Novel. New York: Ballantine Books, 2013.

Leal, João, "The Hidden Empire: Peasants, Nation Building, and the Empire in Portuguese Anthropology," in Recasting Culture and Space in Iberian Contexts, eds. Sharon R. Roseman and Shawn S. Parkhurst. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2008, pp. 35-54.

Leutzsch, Andreas, "Portugal: A Future's Past between Land and Sea," in European National Identities: Elements, Transitions, Conflicts. eds. Roland Vogt, Wayne Cristaudo and Andreas Leutzsch. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2014, pp. 173-196.

Morrison, Carey-Ann, "Critical geographies of love as spatial, relational and political," Progress in Human Geography, 2012, Vol. 37, No. 4, pp. 505-521.

Ouyang, Wen-chin. Poetics of Love in the Arabic Novel: Nation-state, Modernity and Tradition. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press, 2012.

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.

Stacey, Jackie, and Pearce, Lynne, eds. Romance Revisited. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1995.

Nuking "Amalek"?: The Israeli nuclear threat and evoking Iranians, Germans as "Amalekites" in religious Zionism

Nuking "Amalek"?: The Israeli nuclear threat and evoking Iranians, Germans as "Amalekites" in religious Zionism

by Sean Jobst

March 17, 2015

In the midst of all the fear-mongering about a "nuclear-armed" Iran - brought to us by the very same people who warned about "Weapons of Mass Destruction" in Iraq - lost in the entire debate is that Israel itself possesses over 200 nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. Also lost in the debate is the fact that Israel and its "amen-corner" in the U.S., U.K. and other governments and media have been fear-mongering about a nuclear Iran, but each one of their fears has never materialized.

Although Israel has neither confirmed or denied it, leading some to call it "Israel's Worst-Kept Secret", the history of Israel's weapons program makes for an interesting read of intrigue, duplicity and complicity. They haven't been able to hide this secret - despite the complicit silence of the pro-Israel media and the double-standard of Western politicians - because news just keeps popping up. Such as when Israel gave nuclear secrets to China. Or when Israel purchased German-made nuclear submarines. Or even Israel's plans to build an "ethnic bomb", that would be aimed against Iraqis.

Along the way, we meet such figures as Hollywood director Arnon Milchan, who worked to secure centrifuges for Israel's nuclear site of Dimona; media mogul Robert Maxwell, who as chairman of the London Sunday Times worked for MOSSAD and was complicit in the capture of Israeli nuclear whistle-blower Mordechai Vanunu in Rome in 1986; and Democratic Party fundraiser Abraham Feinberg's early role in stealing nuclear secrets for Israel, a story within a story that actually ties into the little-publicized story of the IRS's probing of links between certain American Jewish non-profit organizations and West Bank settlements.

Israeli editorial calls for nuking Iran and Germany

In a recent editorial written in Hebrew for the right-wing Israel National News, author Chen Ben-Eliyahu called on Israel to use nuclear weapons "to assure the job gets done." In an editorial written on March 10th, Ben-Eliyahu wrote: "If Israel does not walk in the ways of God's Bible, it will receive a heavy punishment of near complete destruction and doom and only a few will be saved."

Chen Ben-Eliyahu

Evoking the Old Testament tradition of the Amalekites (see Genesis 36:9-12), which according to the Talmud (Sanhedrin 20b) obliges Jews to "utterly destroy the seed of Amalek," Eliyahu identifies this Amalek with the Iranians and even named Iranian leaders Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and current President Hassan Rouhani as direct descendants of Amalek.

So who exactly are the "Amalekites" and what is their role within the Talmud? It certainly portrays a collective hatred exhibited throughout that book, but has certain murderous connotations as cited by the courageous anti-Zionist, Jewish writer Dr. Israel Shahak: "Talmudic ruling: 'It is forbidden to multiply the seed of Amalek'....Amalekites, meaning that one is permitted to murder them until their remembrance is blotted out from under heaven.'" (Dr. Israel Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of 3,000 Years, London: Pluto Press, 1994, pp. 77, 84)

Eliyahu's Orwellian double-speak is not lost on honest observers, asserting "They don’t miss an opportunity to discuss the need for the annihilation of Israel," while he demands Israel "destroy" Iran: "We must make it clear to the Iranians that Israel will wipe out their nuclear program and Tehran and Isfahan as well. If [an Amalekite enemy] rises up to destroy you, rise earlier to destroy him: twenty, thirty nuclear bombs will do to assure the job gets done."

As if the ink from his blood-soaked mind wasn't sadistic enough, he went on to demand that Israel also destroy the country which it has milked out of "reparations" since the 1950s and whose current Chancellor is one of the most pro-Israeli in its history: Germany. "Twenty, thirty atomic bombs on Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Nuremberg, Cologne, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Dresden, Dortmund and so on to assure the job gets done," Eliyahu writes. "And the land will be quiet for a thousand years."

A record of hate-speech

Alarming as Eliyahu's editorial may seem, he is merely continuing a tradition of a long tradition of certain orthodox Jewish rabbis and Zionist leaders, in identifying Germans as "Amalekites" whom should be hated "collectively", a claim certainly manifested in many anti-German racist theories, such as those of American-Jewish writer Daniel Goldhagen. While researching this issue, I found a debate within orthodox Jewish circles, with some saying the biblical Amalek have already been "wiped out," while others make various efforts identifying them with modern-day nations - including the Germans.

The latter efforts particularly proliferate among the most extreme fanatical sects, including the followers of Rabbi Meir Kahane or those who believe in the cabbalistic "Bible-Code," which has even given rise to some anti-German conspiracy theories, such as by Hebrew University's Dr. Moshe Katz, or even racist efforts to identify Germans (particularly my own southern German people) with biblical bogeymen. This trend actually preceded Hitler and the National Socialists.

In 1898, German Kaiser Wilhelm II visited Palestine, where the leading Haredi Hasidic leader, Rabbi Yosef Chaim Sonnenfeld (1849-1932) refused to meet him based on a tradition he cited from his teachers, that Germans were descended from the ancient Amalekites. ("The First Word: Are Jews still commanded to blot out Amalek?," The Jerusalem Post, March 16, 2006).

Rabbi Chaim Sonnenfeld

 

Rabbi Sonnefeld cited his authority as the 18th-century Talmudist and kabbalist Gaon of Vilna, who identified Germans with Amalekites based on the linguistic similarities with the Talmud's description of "Germamia" as a nation descended from Amalekites (Megillah 6b). (Elliott S. Horowitz, Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006, p. 79)

"In the early 1900s Rabbi Hayim Soloveitchik of Brisk argued that there was a possibility of contemporary war against Amalek....Rabbi Yosef Dov Soloveitchik used this position in the early 1940s to contend that the Allied war against Nazi Germany could be understood in Jewish law as a war against Amalek." (Alastair G. Hunter, "Denominating Amalek: Racist stereotyping in the Bible and the Justification of Discrimination," in Sanctified Aggression: Legacies of Biblical and Post Biblical Vocabularies of Violence, eds. Jonneke BekkenKamp and Yvonne Sherwood, London: T&T International/Continuum International Publishing Group, 2003, pp. 92-108)

Gaon of Vilna

 

This tradition of evoking "Amalekites" to describe the entire German nation exists as an undercurrent among holocaust discourse. In The Hague, Netherlands, appears a memorial by Dick Stins entitled "Davidster" which carries - in Hebrew and Dutch - the verse: "Remember what Amalek has done to you....do not forget." (Deuteronomy 25:17,19). Another verse (Samuel 1:15,33) was cited by Israeli President Itzhak Ben-Zvi in his own handwritten letter to Adolf Eichmann's wife, denying her requests for clemency. (Yoseph Carmel, Itzchak Ben Zvi from his Diary in the President's office, Ramat Gan: Masada, p. 179)

Germans as "Amalekites" in contemporary Zionist thought

In March 1986, the Israeli army's chief rabbi on the occupied West Bank, Rabbi Shmuel Derlich - who was tied to the army leadership's general hate ideology against the Palestinians - distributed a 1,000-word pastoral letter to religious soldiers, calling for the total extermination of Amalek:

"Derlich wrote that it is the duty of 'a king in Israel....to eradicate Amalek without leaving any trace....one must show no pity for any creature from the nation of Amalek - man, woman, child....There is no doubt that in the last generation we met the Amalekite enemy....in the form of the German nation,' he wrote." (Jerusalem Post, May 17, 1986)

Why doesn't the media ever show us images like this?

Rabbi Meir Kahane (1932-1990), the extremist New York-turned-Israeli rabbi who founded the terrorist group Jewish Defense League and the Israeli Kach Party, who - contrary to those who tout Israel as a "democratic" country - asserted that democracy was incompatible with his interpretation of Judaism, and inspired a whole ideology of hate among Jewish fundamentalist settlers on the West Bank, wrote shortly before his death:

"When it comes to the Amalek of our times, Germany, there is an on-going war, a never-ending war, a war for generations....There can never be forgiveness or contact or relations or anything to do with them. They are beyond the pale and daily, the Jew must pray for the ultimate destruction of a German people that never received an iota of the punishment they deserved....If the Almighty ever allows me to become Prime Minister of Israel....there will be nothing but an Amalek whose memory we will blot out as much as possible until the great day when the Almighty finishes the mitzvah of vengeance." (Rabbi Meir Kahane, "Halachic Overview," The Jewish Press, October 12, 1990, p. 49)

Rabbi Meir Kahane

Israeli nuclear threats

In the mid-1960s, Israeli leaders coined "the Samson Option" to refer to their willingness to pursue a nuclear option. This threat was effectively used by Prime Minister Golda Meir and Defense Minister Moshe Dayan in 1973, to get U.S. President Richard Nixon to send more military supplies to Israel. In 1998, Yossi Ben-Aharon made similar threats against Iraq, threatening that "it should be made absolutely clear to the Iraqi dictator from the outset that any attempt against Israel will trigger, at the very least, a devastation of Iraq's western provinces." (Yossi Ben-Aharon, "Repeat Performance," Jerusalem Post, February 9, 1998).

Israel's nuclear reactor at Dimona

Ariel Sharon threatened: "Arabs may have the oil, but we have the matches." (Quoted in Mark Gaffney, Dimona: The Third Temple? The Story Behind the Vanunu Revelation, Brattleboro, VT: Amana Books, 1989, p. 165). Sharon's political opponent, the Labor Party's Yitzhak Rabin (who received the Nobel "Peace" Prize in 1994), threatened Syria in a 1991 Knesset speech:

"What had we told them? If you send missiles on Tel Aviv, Damascus will be turned into a ruin. If you send missiles also on Haifa, not only Damascus but also Aleppo will cease to exist. They will be destroyed root and branch. Without dealing only with missile launchers, we will devastate Damascus." (Quoted in Israel Shahak, Open Secrets: Israeli Foreign and Nuclear Policies, London: Pluto Press, 1997, p. 46)

An increasing threat

The threats are not limited to neighboring Arab countries, but extends to elsewhere as Mordechai Vanunu has warned about Israeli blackmail to "bombard any city all over the world, and not only those in Europe but also those in the United States." Zionist narratives are based on a paranoid fear that the whole world is "hateful anti-Semites," such as when author Moshe Holczler threatened that the world will only be saved "if the world were to acknowledge its collective guilt against the Jewish people." (Moshe Holczler, "Open Your Eyes, World," The Jewish Press, November 23, 1990, p. 12)

"Israel must be like a mad dog"

After 9/11, Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer - who warned of "genocidal radical Jewish nationalists" - advocated bombing the German city of Hamburg: "As someone said to me, if they wanted to destroy militarily the centre of al-Qaeda, the best way probably would be to destroy Hamburg."  (Australian Jewish News, March 7, 2003, p. 17). In an interview with a Dutch weekly in 2002, Martin van Creveld, Dutch-born Israeli professor of military history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, threatened:

"We possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can launch them at targets in all directions, perhaps even at Rome. Most European capitals are targets for our air force. Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: 'Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother.' Our armed forces are not the thirtieth strongest in the world, but the second or third. We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that that will happen before Israel goes under." (Elsevier, Amsterdam, no. 17, April 27, 2002, pp. 52-53; cited in David Hirst, "The war game," The Guardian, September 20, 2003)

Martin van Creveld

Nuclear threats from...or against Iran?

In the same interview, van Creveld admitted there was no REAL Iranian nuclear threat, even to Israel: "We are in no danger at all of having an Iranian nuclear weapon dropped on us. We cannot say so too openly, however, because we have a history of using any threat in order to get weapons … thanks to the Iranian threat, we are getting weapons from the U.S. and Germany."

Reviewing the Israeli media, Dr. Shahak explained: "Provoking Iran into responding with war or measures just stopping short of war, is also elaborated by many other commentators." He elaborates: "Since the spring of 1992 public opinion in Israel is being prepared for the prospect of a war with Iran, to be fought to bring about Iran's total military and political defeat. In one version, Israel would attack Iran alone, in another it would `persuade' the West to do the job. The indoctrination campaign to this effect is gaining in intensity." (Israel Shahak, Open Secrets: Israeli Foreign and Nuclear Policies, London: Pluto Press, 1997, p. 54)

He cites an interview with Daniel Leshem, retired senior officer in Israeli Military Intelligence and member of the Center for Strategic Research at Tel Aviv University, published under the title "Iran needs to be treated just as Iraq had been" (Al Hamishmar, February 19, 1993). In the interview, Leshem advocates provoking a war between Iran and its Gulf Arabian neighbors:

"Hence Leshem believes that Israel should make Iran fear Israeli nuclear weapons, but without hoping that it might deter it from developing their own; he proposes `to create the situation which would appear similar to that with Iraq before the Gulf crisis'. He believes this could `stop the Ayatollahs, if this is what the world really wants'. How to do it? `Iran claims sovereignty over three strategically located islands in the Gulf. Domination over those islands is capable of assuring domination not only over all the already active oilfields of the area, but also over all the natural gas sources not yet exploited. We should hope that, emulating Iraq, Iran would contest the Gulf Emirates and Saudi Arabia over these islands and, repeating Saddam Hussein's mistake in Kuwait, start a war. This may lead to an imposition of controls over Iranian nuclear developments the way it did in Iraq." (Israel Shahak, Open Secrets: Israeli Foreign and Nuclear Policies, London: Pluto Press, 1997, pp. 54-55)

That same issue also printed an interview with a "hawkish" Tel Aviv University professor named Shlomo Aharonson, who links Israeli threats against Iran to efforts to prevent a Palestinian state. Aharonson concludes, "We should see to it that no Palestinian state ever comes into being, even if Iranians threaten us with nuclear weapons. And we should also see to it that Iran lives in permanent fear of Israeli nuclear weapons being used against it." (Quoted in ibid., p. 57)

Warmonger Benjamin Netanyahu

Conclusion

We are left with a clear pattern of Israeli threats and a willingness to use nuclear weapons. This has coincided with its own propaganda efforts to inflame the world against Iran, whom they regard as the foremost enemy of Israel. To achieve this, they are helped by certain American neoconservatives and others, who place the interests of Israel over their own country. Netanyahu has employed numerous tactics to sabotage any negotiations between the United States and Iran.

The truth behind all the saber-rattling is that Iran has not attacked any other country in over 200 years. Israel certainly cannot say the same! Through a media campaign of vitriolic hatred of Iran, they mask the reality of a beautiful country where the vast majority of people are peaceful, with the same basic concerns in life as other people. This same campaign lies against Iranian leaders, falsely claiming they want "to wipe Israel off the map", a direct mistranslation of the original Farsi, even while masking their own activities wiping out the Palestinian people!

Yet, we should have serious concerns of our own about the hate-ideology that has been nurtured within the Zionist state. This is an ideology that seeks and advocates war with its neighbors, that uses a twisting of the Torah to pursue a racist agenda towards other peoples - Palestinians, Iranians, Germans. While various extremists who ascribe themselves to other religions - particularly Islam and Christianity - receive the disdain, opposition, condemnation and attention of the world, this fundamentalist element of Judaism remains ignored for fear of being labelled "anti-Semitic."

Does opposition to the extremist elements of other faith-traditions automatically translate into a hatred of the entire religion? It would seem that all of us - Gentiles and anti-Zionist Jews alike - are forced to adopt the Zionist narrative of nationhood. This fundamentalism in service of a political ideology, manifesting in a hateful warmongering agenda, will lead to the abyss and very well take the world down with it, if we don't speak out against it.