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10 of the Most Sociopathic Washington Post Columns
By Adam Johnson | FAIR | May 2, 2018
For casually threatening economic ruin, inciting violence against entire populations, pushing for bombing faceless Muslims, or downplaying racism and child rape, there's no better outlet than long-time echo chamber of power-serving conventional wisdom, the Washington Post. In the pages of the Post opinion section, you can say the most sociopathic things and get away with it, because you are, by definition, Serious People offering Serious Solutions in a Serious Paper.
The human cost of these extreme, reactionary opinions is of little matter; what matters is packaging calls for violence, sexism and racism in a nice, official-sounding tone. Here, in no particular order, are ten of the most sociopathic columns published under the Washington Post banner:
- If You Really Want to Bomb Iran, Take the Deal: Austin Long (4/3/15)
In a too-cute-by-half spin, Austin Long, assistant professor at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, set out to convince hawkish liberals that the Iran deal was good— not because it prevented war but because it could serve to launch one, something Long had been pushing for for years in other publications (Tablet, 11/18/11; International Security, Spring/07). Supposedly, the Iran deal concentrates Iran's nuclear activity, which means any airstrikes would need to be launched at far fewer sites. The agreement is good not because it makes nuclear conflict less likely, but only insofar as it makes Iran a more vulnerable target, something Long calls "a rare win for both Iran hawks and doves." Softening up countries for future bombing campaigns: a total "win."
- Closing the Door on Crime: Richard Cohen (9/7/86)
In his now-infamous 1986 column, long-time blowhard Richard Cohen defended, without qualification or irony, racist store owners for refusing to let black men into their stores. He then went on to praise Bernhard Goetz, the so-called "subway vigilante" who shot four black men for asking for money on the subway, something Cohen insisted with confidence was "boilerplate precede to a mugging." The casual racism and matter-of-fact assertion that black males are a menace makes it a shoe-in for this list:
But then white assailants are rather hard to find in urban America. Especially in cities like Washington and New York, the menace comes from young black males. Both blacks and whites believe those young black males are the ones most likely to bop them over the head.
"A black colleague of mine thinks" it's not racism, Cohen insisted. "He, too, would turn away young blacks if he owned a jewelry store." Cohen's mysterious black friend agrees that discriminating against black people is totally fine and understandable.
- Trump Shouldn't Forget Iran's Big Achilles' Heel: Its Economy: Zalmay Khalilzad (4/25/18)
When Post columnists aren't plotting war, they're plotting the slightly more socially acceptable, liberal "alternative" to war: starving other countries' economies into submission. Calling for "crippling sanctions" is a common enough occurrence in the Post's editorial space that it would not otherwise merit a mention. But to add the unique sociopathic flavor needed to get on this elite list, Khalilzad discusses wrecking Iran's economy like Mel Kiper Jr. would break down the San Francisco 49ers' offensive strategy:
The debate over the Iranian nuclear deal has so far largely neglected a factor that potentially gives the United States leverage: the deteriorating economic and political situation in Iran. The Trump administration should integrate this factor into its strategy….
The Trump administration could, of course, opt to maintain the nuclear deal. But that would forfeit the chance to capitalize on Iran's crisis by threatening draconian new US sanctions.
Ratcheting up sanctions, Khalilzad wrote, "could further exacerbate Iran's internal problems and generate additional leverage," and "would give the United States the greatest opportunity to impose costs on Iran and exploit its economic and political difficulties."
The suffering of millions—which is what the bloodless word "costs" means in human terms—is viewed as "leverage" to be "exploited," a "crisis" in urgent need of "capitalizing on" by Trump. Not, as most normal, morally healthy humans would view it, a tragedy to be avoided.
- Snowden Case Highlights Ecuador's Double Standard: Editorial Board (6/24/13)
Sometimes the sociopathy is not the primary frame and is instead buried under a lot of Serious Policy recommendations, like this editorial from the summer of 2013, at the beginning of the Snowden affair. The piece begins with the casual racism and imperial arrogance one has come to expect from the Post:
When it comes to anti-American chutzpah, there's no beating Rafael Correa, the autocratic leader of tiny, impoverished Ecuador. Mr. Correa and his foreign minister said Monday that they were considering an asylum request by Mr. Snowden.
It's unclear how the freely elected Rafael Correa was "autocratic" (meaning "having absolute power"), but one can assume that any leader who challenges US hegemony in any meaningful way just becomes one through sheer assertion:
Some might find it awkward to be granting sanctuary to one country's self-proclaimed whistleblower while stifling their own. Not Mr. Correa, who for years has been campaigning against the United States while depending on it to prop up his economy with trade preferences. Thanks to the Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Protection Act, Ecuador — which uses the dollar as its currency — is able to export many goods to the United States duty-free, supporting roughly 400,000 jobs in a country of 14 million people.
As it happens, the preferences will expire next month unless renewed by Congress. If Mr. Correa welcomes Mr. Snowden, there will be an easy way to demonstrate that Yanqui-baiting has its price.
Here Post editors casually suggest wrecking a small and very poor country's economy for the crime of standing up to the United States. Not only does the Post internalize the needs of the most ruthless and largest empire on earth, it nudges it to be even more ruthless in defense of its already massive surveillance powers. Keeping with this theme, the Post editorial board would later argue against pardoning Edward Snowden (FAIR.org, 5/25/17), despite the paper using him as a source on more than one occasion. Democracy dies in darkness.
- Truman Was Right to Use the Bomb on Japan: Richard Cohen (8/17/15)
This piece (a response to a Nation article by Christian Appy) recycles a series of long-discredited talking points (Extra!, 4/95) about Japanese irrationality and the inevitability of using the bomb, but the real kicker is when not-at-all-racist Cohen says Japan had it coming because it lived up to racist stereotypes:
What about racism? "American wartime culture had for years drawn on a long history of 'yellow peril' racism to paint the Japanese not just as inhuman, but as subhuman," Appy writes. Yes, indeed. But at the same time, the Japanese were doing their level best to prove that the bigots were right.
See, we were animated by anti-Asian racism (just like we manifestly were in Korea and Vietnam), but it's okay because we guessed correctly and it turns out our cartoon depictions of Japanese evil were spot on. Oh well then, I guess evaporating a quarter of a million people in an instant was the right call.
- War With Iran Is Probably Our Best Option: Joshua Muravchik (3/13/15)
If there's one thing Post opinion editors love, it's columns threatening, plotting and advocating war against Iran. It's the little black dress of foreign policy punditry—never goes out of style.
Joshua Muravchik, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, argued nonchalantly that launching a war of aggression against Iran was "probably" "our" best "option." He doesn't explain who "our" refers to, or why a military attack was even an "option" to begin with. (Wars of aggression, it's worth remembering, were called "the central crime in this pattern of crimes, the kingpin which holds all [war crimes] together," by US Attorney General Robert Jackson in his closing arguments at the Nuremberg trials.) But never mind that—we have a massive act of unprovoked mechanized violence to undertake.
Muravichick asserts that Iran is uniquely irrational and cannot be compelled with material needs, asserting that "ideology is the raison d'etre of Iran's regime" and concluding, as if he were settling on a Thai food order, that a bombing campaign that would kill tens of thousands is the "best option."
Post editors even allowed Muravchik to casually throw out a material falsehood, one the Post's own editors have corrected before (FAIR.org, 3/21/14): the idea that Iran has an active nuclear weapons program. "Sanctions may have induced Iran to enter negotiations," Muravchik writes, "but they have not persuaded it to abandon its quest for nuclear weapons."
This is editorially not the position of the Washington Post, or the CIA, Mossad or the whole of US intelligence (FAIR.org, 10/17/17), but it's the entire basis of the preemptive war being lobbied for, so who cares if it's factually true or not?
- Time for an Israeli Strike?: John Bolton (7/2/09)
More bombing of Iran, you say? This time it was cartoonishly hawkish and once-fringe but now National Security Advisor John Bolton, who is so radical in his lobbying for the use of military force, he was denounced by self-identified neoconservatives and major Iraq War boosters Max Boot and William Kristol as too extreme.
Bolton—who has received large, undisclosed sums of money from the pro-regime change, Mossad-linked, fringe cult MEK—took to the pages of the Washington Post to argue the "likelihood" that diplomacy won't "make any real difference" and that there was for Obama "no point waiting for negotiations to play out." "Those who oppose Iran acquiring nuclear weapons," Bolton asserted, "are left in the near term with only the option of targeted military force against its weapons facilities."
Almost 10 years later, with neither bombing of Iran nor Iranian nuclear weapons in evidence, one might be shocked to hear that this prediction was totally incorrect.
- Hamas Could Have Chosen Peace. Instead, It Made Gaza Suffer: Dennis Ross (8/8/14)
When the columnist pages of the Post aren't used to incite violence against Iran, they can be a useful venue for victim-blaming Palestinians for Israeli bombings and sieges. This was the case when Dennis Ross of the AIPAC spinoff Washington Institute for Near East Policy held Hamas responsible for Israel's Operation Protective Edge in the summer of 2014, which killed over 1,500 Palestinian civilians. (As a point of reference, Israel lost a total of six civilians to Palestinian rockets fired in response to the Israeli bombing.)
Staring at this entirely one-sided bombing campaign, one would think Ross would set aside even a little blame for the massive body count on the party that actually did the bombing. No, he pins the blame entirely on Hamas, insisting Israel had little choice but to bomb "schools and hospitals" because that's where the militant group stores its weapons caches. The conflict is entirely decontextualized; Ross reinforces the myth the Israelis "pulled out of Gaza," which is an odd way to describe Israel's continuing control of Gaza's airspace, ports and land entrances in what is effectively a large open-air prison.
Ross peppers his piece—the ultimate purpose of which is to pin the horrific images of bloody corpses and maimed children then coming out of Gaza on the Palestinians themselves–in decades-old gaslighting cliches about "choosing arms over civilian investment and development," while painting the image of a stubborn Palestinian population rejecting "peace" and embracing some masochistic death force. Palestinians are expected to be the only population on earth to unilaterally disarm and accept their own subjection in exchange for the right to have cement and basic supplies. Somehow, 70 years on, Palestinians are always responsible for their own occupation, humiliation and bombing.
- Racism vs. Reality: Richard Cohen (7/15/13)
Another barn-burner from Cohen, this widely criticized piece begins with his usual "I'm not racist but…" defense of racism:
I don't like what George Zimmerman did, and I hate that Trayvon Martin is dead. But I also can understand why Zimmerman was suspicious and why he thought Martin was wearing a uniform we all recognize. I don't know whether Zimmerman is a racist. But I'm tired of politicians and others who have donned hoodies in solidarity with Martin and who essentially suggest that, for recognizing the reality of urban crime in the United States, I am a racist. The hoodie blinds them as much as it did Zimmerman.
People who don't think unarmed African-American teenagers should be killed for the crime of wearing a hoodie are just as bad as those who think they should! It's two sides of the same coin: opposing extrajudicial racist murder and supporting it. The piece is chock-full of this type of false equivalency, the summation of which is—like so many of Cohen's other columns throughout the years—that racism is good and necessary.
- The Outrageous Arrest of Roman Polanski: Anne Applebaum (9/27/09) / Thank You, Switzerland, for Freeing Polanski: Richard Cohen (7/13/10) [tied]
In the annals of terrible takes, few have aged more poorly than Anne Applebaum and Richard Cohen's breathless, self-righteous defense of Roman Polanski, c. 2009. The sociopathy of these arguments was shocking and direded in certain circles at the time, but in today's #MeToo era, it reads like something from 17th century Jamestown, Virginia.
Applebaum, who waxes frequently about the necessity of "rule of law" against the threat of "populism," thought Switzerland's decision to respect the US extradition treaty was "bizarre" and hinted vaguely at conspiracy, insisting there "must be some deeper story here." Arresting fleeing child rapist is such an extraordinary deviation from Western norms, clearly this is evidence of a plot of some kind.
"He did commit a crime," she handwaves. "But he has paid for the crime in many, many ways: In notoriety, in lawyers' fees, in professional stigma. He could not return to Los Angeles to receive his recent Oscar. He cannot visit Hollywood to direct or cast a film." Oh no, lawyers' fees! Applebaum, as many noted at the time, also failed to disclose the fact that her husband, then–Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, was lobbying the US government on behalf of Polanski, a Polish native.
Cohen, making his first non-racist appearance on this list, was even more callous in his reasoning, writing one of the grossest and most heartless opening paragraphs in the history of any paper:
The Swiss got it right. Their refusal to extradite film director Roman Polanski to the United States on a 33-year-old sex charge is the proper dénouement for this mess of a case. There is no doubt that Polanski did what he did, which is have sex with a 13-year-old after plying her with booze. There is no doubt also that after all these years there is something stale about the case, not to mention a "victim," Samantha Geimer, who has long ago forgiven her assailant and dearly wishes the whole thing would go away. So do I.
It's hard to say which is worse: Cohen putting "victim" in irony quotes, or referring to the rape and forcible sodomy of a 13-year-old as "sex."
May 3, 2018 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Dennis Ross, Joshua Muravchik, Richard Cohen, United States, Washington Post | 1 Comment
Philippines makes ban on work in Kuwait 'permanent'
Press TV – April 29, 2018
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte on Sunday said the temporary ban on Filipinos going to work in Kuwait is now permanent, intensifying a diplomatic standoff over the treatment of migrant workers in the Persian Gulf nation.
Duterte in February imposed a prohibition on workers heading to Kuwait following the murder of a Filipino maid, whose body was found stuffed in a freezer in the Persian Gulf state.
The crisis deepened after Kuwaiti authorities last week ordered Manila's envoy to leave the country over videos of Philippine Embassy staff helping workers in Kuwait flee allegedly abusive employers.
The two nations had been negotiating a labor deal that Philippine officials said could result in the lifting of the ban, but the recent escalation in tensions has put an agreement in doubt.
"The ban stays permanently. There will be no more recruitment for especially domestic helpers. No more," Duterte told reporters in his hometown in the southern city of Davao.
Around 262,000 Filipinos work in Kuwait, nearly 60 percent of them domestic workers, according to the Philippines' foreign department.
Last week, the Philippines apologized over the rescue videos, but Kuwaiti officials announced they were expelling Manila's ambassador and recalling their own envoy from the Southeast Asian nation.
Duterte on Sunday described the situation in Kuwait as a "calamity."
He said he would bring home Filipino maids who suffered abuse as he appealed to workers who wanted to stay in the oil-rich state.
"I would like to address to their patriotism: come home. No matter how poor we are, we will survive. The economy is doing good and we are short of our workers," he said.
About 10 million Filipinos work abroad to seek high-paying jobs they were unable to find at home, and their remittances are a major pillar of the Philippine economy.
Duterte said workers returning from Kuwait could find employment as English teachers in China, citing improved ties with Beijing.
Describing China as a "true friend," he said he would use Chinese aid to fund the workers' repatriation.
Duterte added that he was not after "vengeance" against Kuwait and did not "nurture hate."
"But if my people are considered a burden to some of them, to some government mandated to protect them and uphold their rights, then we will do our part," he said.
April 29, 2018 Posted by aletho | Economics, Supremacism, Social Darwinism | Human rights, Kuwait, Philippines | Leave a comment
Jewish Guilt is the Discourse of The Goyim
By Gilad Atzmon | April 24, 2018
For quite some time the British have accepted that British Jewish organizations have hijacked the political discourse. As has happened in other Western countries, the British political establishment has engaged is a relentless rant against antisemitsm. Sometime the focus drifts for a day or two. An alleged 'Russian nerve gas attack' provided a 48 hour pause. Occasionally we bomb Arabs in the name of 'human intervention' only to realize a day or two later that we have, once again, followed a premeditated foreign agenda. But, somehow, we always return to the antisemitism debate, as if our media and politicians are a herd of flies gravitating to a pile of poop.
Last week the BOD/JLC, two Jewish organisations that claim to 'represent' British Jews published this painful to watch video.
Judging by the number of viewers, Brits are tired of this nauseating outburst. Brits know very well that when it comes to hate crimes, Jews are not high on the victim list; Jews are far less 'victimized' than Blacks, Muslims, Roma, trans-sexuals, gays and many others.
Since Jewish community 'leaders' remain obsessed with antisemitism, I will try to help these 'leaders' understand the universal perspective on the meaning of antisemitism.
True antisemitism is when IDF snipers film themselves shooting unarmed Semite protestors* like sitting ducks while laughing their heads off!
True antisemitism is when the Jewish State legislates and enforces institutional racism against actual Semites, Blacks and Goyim in general.
The Gaza siege is an example of what common people see as real antisemitism. It is designed to humiliate and deprive Semites for being Semites and it has turned Gaza into the largest open air prison known to man.
Enough is Enough is humanity expressing collective fatigue of these barbarian actions.
I would prefer to believe that the Jewish fear of antisemitism is actually an expression of collective Jewish guilt. For obvious reasons, Jews find it hard to compartmentalize Jewish identity within the context of the Jewish State being a rogue State.
There are a few modes of dealing with collective guilt that have been recognized. Repression seems to be the most common one. Some argue, in that regard, that escapism and denial are Israel's primary belief systems.
Acknowledgment of guilt is, undoubtedly, far more painful. The Germans made it into their way of living after the last big war. Maybe Jews can actually learn from the Germans — instead of attempting to emulate 3rd Reich's racist agenda — Israel and its supporters should try to reproduce German's post WWII remorse. As it happens, there are a very few Jews and Israelis who acknowledge their responsibility for the Palestinian plight and support the Palestinian Right of Return. These rare Jews are brave enough to admit that Israel is inherently anti-Semitic and racist to the core.
However, silencing Israel's dissent is the usual Jewish political method to resolve Jewish guilt. Attributing the 'Antisemitic' slur to others is how both Zionists and the so called 'anti' kick the ball to the goyim's yard. This method was effective for a while but it doesn't work anymore: being called an anti-Semite in 2018 is a synonym for an ethically driven humanist, an anti racist, a truth teller, peace and Justice role model, a rock star. The list of 'antisemites' is growing exponentially, probably in direct proportion with the tidal rise in Jewish guilt. The more guilty (some) Jews feel, the more the rest of us are becoming antisemitic in their eyes.
"Unconscious is the discourse of the Other," was, probably Jacques Lacan's most astute psychoanalytical observation. It is the fear that the Other, in this case, the gentile, the humanist, sees you truly. It is the fear that the goy can detect your shame. Jewish Guilt as such is the unbearable fear that the Goyim know.
* the author of this piece very well knows that 'Semitic' is neither a racial nor an ethnic category. It refers instead to a group of languages. The reference to semitism is made in order to deconstruct the Judeo-centric 'antisemitic argument.'
April 24, 2018 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular, Video | Israel, Palestine, UK, Zionism | 1 Comment
Congress's "Never Again Education Act" should call for 'never again' against anyone, including Palestinians
By Alison Weir | If Americans Knew | April 10, 2018
A new bill entitled "The Never Again Education Act" is reportedly about to be introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives. According to JTA and other reports, the legislation will fund Holocaust education programs in schools. JTA reports:
A bipartisan slate of House members is set to introduce a bill that would grant money to Holocaust education in schools.
The Never Again Education Act would establish the Holocaust Education Assistance Program Fund in the U.S. Treasury. A 12-member board would disburse the money to schools.
A draft of the bill, which is to be introduced Tuesday in the U.S. House of Representatives, says the fund would be privately funded.
Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., is the lead sponsor of the measure.
"Today, those who deny that the Holocaust occurred or distort the true nature of the Holocaust continue to find forums, especially online; this denial and distortion dishonors those who were persecuted, and murdered," the draft of the bill says. "This makes it even more of a national imperative to educate students in the United States so that they may explore the lessons that the Holocaust provides for all people, sensitize communities to the circumstances that gave rise to the Holocaust, and help youth be less susceptible to the falsehood of Holocaust denial and distortion and to the destructive messages of hate that arise from Holocaust denial and distortion."
The bill would also create a website that would include Holocaust education resources.
Maloney will launch the bill on Tuesday at the Olga Lengyel Institute for Holocaust Studies and Human Rights in New York City, accompanied by representatives of Hadassah, B'nai B'rith International and the Association of Holocaust Organizations. The Anti-Defamation League endorsed the bill.
Also sponsoring the bill are Reps. Peter Roskam, R-Ill.; Ted Deutch, D-Fla.; Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla.; Eliot Engel, D-N.Y.; Kay Granger, R-Texas; Nita Lowey, D-N.Y.; and Dan Donovan, R-N.Y. Lowey and Granger are top House appropriators, which suggests the bill likely will pass.
A draft of the bill is not yet available, so we don't yet know what it contains.
I hope the new law will fund full and accurate educational programs about all holocausts that have occurred throughout human history – slavery, past and ongoing genocides aimed at diverse populations, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and many other cases of violence and cruelty around the world.
A case of oppression that has gone on for almost 70 years is acutely visible right now in Gaza.
Thousands of men, women, and children are participating in a massive "March of Return" against the theft of their homes, their virtual imprisonment in Gaza, and the periodic onslaughts against them by Israeli forces.
Israeli soldiers with "shoot to kill" orders against these unarmed marchers have shot hundreds of the demonstrators, some in the head and many in the back, including women, children, journalists, and medics.
I believe that "never again" should apply to everyone, everywhere.
I suggest that people phone their Congressional representatives (202-224-3121) and ask them if this bill addresses all instances of oppression, or just one that, thankfully, ended almost three-quarters of a century ago.
Congress has voted to give Israel over $10 million per day. Our representatives are responsible for how Israel is using this money.
Alison Weir is executive director of If Americans Knew and author of Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel.
April 10, 2018 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Supremacism, Social Darwinism | Human rights, Israel, Palestine, United States, Zionism | Leave a comment
Jeremy, Get on your Knees!
By Gilad Atzmon | March 29, 2018
In their response to Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, the Jewish Leadership Council (JLC) and the Board of Deputies of British Jews (BOD) claim to 'propose an agenda of actions for discussion' between the Labour party and those who claim to 'represent' British Jews.
In practice the two Zionist institutions have managed to produce one of the most disgusting documents in modern Jewish history. A text that is little more than an ode to the self-defamation of its own authors and to the community they claim to 'represent': it is rude, authoritarian, and disrespectful to a democratically elected leader of Europe's biggest party.
Read the BOD/JLC's public address to Corbyn here
When you read some of the extracts below, remember that despite BOD and the JLC claims to 'represent' British Jewry, these two organisations managed to pull just 1500 members of their community into their 'Enough is Enough' anti-Corbyn demonstration earlier this week. We are talking about 0.5% of British Jewry. The BOD/JLC's authoritarian document outlines a set of humiliating conditions for Corbyn to meet. The text proves how detached these Jewish institutions are from British values, specifically, and the Western ethos, in general. In fact their vision of the political arena is Orwellian in nature and tyrannical in practice.
Apparently, if Corbyn expects to meet with the demands of these self-appointed 'Jewish leaders' he must appoint a watchdog who will take care of the so called 'antisemites' in his party and, of course, under the supervision of these two ardent Zionist bodies. He must also meet a strict time-frame defined by Judea.
"Outstanding and future cases (of alleged antisemitism) are to be brought to a swift conclusion under a fixed timescale. An independent, mutually agreed upon ombudsman should be appointed to oversee performance, reporting to the Party, as well as to the Board of Deputies and the Jewish Leadership Council."
Consistent with the spirit of Talmudic herem (excommunication) and totally in contradiction to notions of British openness and Western tolerance, these Jewish institutions insist that "MPs, councillors, and other party members should not share platforms with people who have been suspended or expelled for antisemitism and CLPs should not provide them with a platform." The Jewish institutions also suggest how to penalise the sinners. "Anybody doing so should, themselves, be suspended from membership; in the case of MPs, they should lose the party whip." Maybe someone should make the effort to explain to the Jewish leaders that the labour party is an established political institution. It is not a ghetto, I mean, not as yet.
The Jewish bodies insist on dominating the language as well as boundaries of political discussion. Criticism of Israel should be completely restricted. The words 'Zio' and 'Zionist' as terms of abuse should be eradicated. I actually believe that if the BOD/JLC truly wanted 'Zionist' to not be used as a 'term of abuse,' they should simply stop abusing Corbyn in the name of Zion as their first step forward.
The British Jewish 'leaders' clearly know how to distinguish between the 'good Jews' and the bad ones. Corbyn is told to "engage with the Jewish community via its main representative groups, and not through fringe organisations who wish to obstruct the Party's efforts to tackle antisemitism." And I wonder, how exactly the BOD or the JLC are 'representatives' of British Jews. When were they elected and by whom? And if these two organisations are 'representative of British Jews,' how is it that they so selectively call upon Labour to ignore the voice of Jewish collectives they don't agree with?
The Jewish institutions talk at Corbyn as if he is a schoolboy. "These changes must be sustained and enduring." Corbyn better quickly meet the Zionist demands before a meeting with The Lobby can materialise. "We firmly believe that this must happen urgently, and certainly before we meet."
The BOD and the JLC express hope in starting a process of "constructive anti-racist" work within the Labour Party. Talking about racism, we better hear from both the BOD and the JLC how many Muslims and Blacks are members of their executive boards. I ask because, unlike those 'Jews only' institutions, the Labour party is, actually, a multi-ethnic and multi-racial political body. If Jewish institutions want to counter racism, they are more than welcome to do so. The racist 'Jewish State' is where they should start.
March 29, 2018 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Supremacism, Social Darwinism | Jeremy Corbyn, Jewish Leadership Council, UK, Zionism | 2 Comments
Enough is More Than Enough!
By Gilad Atzmon | March 27, 2018
Jewish power, as I define it, is the power to suppress criticism of Jewish power.
For the last few days the Brits have been shown a spectacular display of that power and the manner in which it is mobilised. Without any attempt to hide their behaviour, a bunch of Jewish leaders have chosen to slander Europe's biggest party and its popular leader in the name of 'Jewish sensitivities.'
This blitz attack was sparked by Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn's reaction to a mural back in 2012. The mural was painted by US street artist Kalen Ockerman. Apparently, at the time Corbyn defended the public display of the painting on the grounds of freedom of speech.
The Labour leader was heavily criticised by Jewish institutions for supporting a mural "depicting Jewish bankers playing Monopoly on the backs of the poor." The clumsy British media didn't do its homework and failed to actually examine the mural, but instead immediately delved into the hookedness of the noses of those alleged Jewish bankers.
Embarrassingly for them, Ockerman has came forward and identified the men he depicted in the mural. They are from left to right, "Rothschild, Rockefeller, Morgan, Aleister Crowley, Carnegie & Warburg." Of the six men, only Rothschild and Warburg were Jewish. In fact, Aleister Crowley was noted for his antisemitic views. The take home message for the BBC & co is that maybe capitalists of all races share similar shaped noses.
I am left wondering if the British Zionist league was offended by the mural because it is they, the Zionists, who see the capitalist as the Jew and vice versa. After all, Labour Zionism began as an avowed attempt to liberate Diaspora Jews of parasitic capitalist traits. Zionism promised to cleanse the Jew of gluttony by means of a 'homecoming.'
Yesterday 1,500 British Jews took to the streets outside Parliament. They protested Corbyn's "systematic failure to deal with antisemitism."
If you wonder what 'systematic antisemitsm' means, the Jewish Chronicle provides the answer. In his speech at the protest Jonathan Arkush, the leader of the ardent Zionist Board of Deputies of British Jews, cited Labour's failure to take proper action on the claims of antisemitism against former London mayor Ken Livingstone and other Labour Party members.
Zionists do not like Ken Livingstone. This is understandable. The man is a legendary icon of ethical thinking. Despite their protests, it is still not easy for the Labour party to expel one of its legends simply for telling the truth about Hitler's collaboration with Zionism. Maybe Arkush should just give it more time.
Arkush told the crowd that the "the Labour Party must go back to being the enemy of racists – not the refuge." Of course Corbyn doesn't have a drop of racism in his entire body, but maybe Jonathan Arkush can meet his own standards and tell us how many Blacks or Muslims are members of his own Jews-only Board of Deputies of British Jews.
The Jewish Leadership Council's chair Jonathan Goldstein said that Mr Corbyn had become the "figurehead for an antisemitic political culture based upon obsessive hatred of Israel, conspiracy theories and fake news."
Maybe the Jewish community leader could try to remember that obsession with justice is not a bad thing and also that interfering with freedom of speech can easily backfire.
It is clear why some Jews are upset by Corbyn. The Labour leader treats the Jews as ordinary people. He fails to respect their choseness and ignores their sense of exceptionalism. Perhaps he believes that Jewish politics like all other politics, ought to be subject to criticism. And now it is clear that Corbyn's approach to Jewish politics is not acceptable to Britain's Zionist Jewish establishment.
MP John Mann who has operated as a Zionist mouthpiece within the Labour party for more than a while, bemoaned to the Jewish gathering about his Labour comrades that "Some of them glory in being called anti-Zionists – racists that is the word for them."
Does Mann think that opposing a political movement is 'racism?' Is opposition to Britain or the USA, or even North Korea also to be castigated as racism? And then, in an uber-Orwellian manner Mann added "we have to drive these people (the anti Zionists) out of the Labour Party."
Maidenhead Synagogue Rabbi Dr Jonathan Romain told the JC that this 'antisemitism crisis' was Mr Corbyn's "Watergate moment." I suggest the Rabbi learn some Jewish history. This tsunami of Jewish self-love and empowerment could turn into a total disaster as it has time after time in the past.
British Jewish leadership is panicking. It has declared open war against a mainstream British political party. This is far from a reasonable move and if it is intended to oppose antisemitsm, its effect will inevitably be the opposite. Maybe gestalt psychology offers us the tools to understand such silly behavior. Jewish history teaches us that attitudes toward Jews resemble a gestalt switch. So that, for instance, once you see Israel for what it is you just can't un-see it. Once you grasp that the Jewish State is a racist oppressive force no one will be able to uproot that perception in you. Jewish Zionists do face a growing wall of resentment. Instead of dealing with it by means of self reflection, they repeat Israel's mistake and adopt the most oppressive authoritarian agenda. They are desperately trying to turn Britain into an Orwellian dystopia.
Left open is the question of how it is possible that the Jewish elite, despite its sophistication and education, never learn from the Jewish past. How is it possible that Jews keep repeating the same mistake time after time? I guess one possible answer is that Jewishness (יהודיות) is a form of severe blindness—and that this may be the dark side of choseness.
March 27, 2018 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular | UK, Zionism | 1 Comment
Gilad Atzmon Needs Your Immediate Support!
By Gilad Atzmon | March 16, 2018
I am being sued for libel in the High Court in England by Campaign Against Antisemitsm's chairman Gideon Falter. I have made the decision to fight this crucial battle for freedom of expression even though this fight poses a real risk of bankrupting me and my family.
I choose to fight their suit because I believe that the CAA and its chairman and its use of libel laws pose a danger to freedom of speech and the future of this country as an open society. Enough is enough!
Mr. Falter has sued me for comments I made on my own website.
My comments were made in the context of expressing my opinion about the situation where, last July, The British Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) attested that there had been no increase in anti-Semitism in Britain, and Gideon Falter and the CAA refused to accept the CPS's verdict. Falter and the CAA insisted that anti Semitism was on the rise. Sky news reported on the discrepancies between the findings of CPS and the CAA.
My article focused on the choice examined by Sky News between two accounts, one maintained by Falter and the CAA, an NGO that is dedicated to prosecuting antisemitism with "zero tolerance", and the judicial approach of the CPS: a public body, subject to scrutiny and committed to impartiality.
My comments about the CAA are the basis of their lawsuit. I believe that I have the right to express my opinions on my own website: freedom of political expression is at the heart of freedom of speech. Mr. Falter claims that my criticisms of him do not amount to an opinion at all, and is seeking an order that would stop me from saying anything similar about him again, as well as paying him huge sums in libel damages and legal costs.
The CAA has contacted Jazz venues, community centres, concert halls and even overseas companies demanding that my events be cancelled. They have now escalated this battle and if they win this will ruin me financially. … continue
March 16, 2018 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Supremacism, Social Darwinism | UK | 3 Comments
How Zionist is the New World Order
By Laurent Guyénot for the Saker Blog | March 6, 2018
Laurent Guyénot is the author of From Yahweh to Zion: Jealous God, Chosen People, Promised Land … Clash of Civilizations, 2018. ($30 shipping included from Sifting and Winnowing, POB 221, Lone Rock, WI 53556).
The Zionist paradox
Jewishness is full of paradoxes. For example, remarked Nahum Goldmann, founder and longtime president of the World Jewish Congress: "Even today it is hardly possible to say whether to be a Jew consists first of belonging to a people or practicing a religion, or the two together" (The Jewish Paradox, 1976)[1]. The answer has always depended on the circumstances. Another paradox is the relationship of Jewishness to both tribalism and universalism: Israelis, "the most separatist people in the world," in Goldmann's words again, "have the great weakness of thinking that the whole world revolves around them."[2]
This great weakness is, of course, a great strength, and so is the ambiguity of Jewishness. It has served Israel—a secular "Jewish state"— very well. Theodor Herzl thought of Zionism on the model of European nationalistic movements, lobbying for the right of the Jews to become a nation among nations. But everyone can see now that Israel is no ordinary nation. It never was and never will be. It is the paradoxical nation.
Part of the ambiguity comes from the very name Israel, which already had a twofold meaning before 1948: it referred to an ancient kingdom supposedly founded in the first millennium BCE, and destroyed by the Romans in the first century CE. But for the following two thousand years, Israel was also a common designation for the Jewish community worldwide, "international Jewry" as some call it. That was the meaning of "Israel", for example, when the British Daily Express of March 24, 1933 printed on its front page: "The whole of Israel throughout the world is united in declaring an economic and financial war on Germany."[3] The members of Israel were then called Israelites interchangeably with Jews. Although quite contradictory in terms, the two notions (national Israel and international Israel) have been conflated by the 1948 Law of Return, which made every Israelite of the globe a virtual Israeli.
Today, Zionism has shifted into a kind of meta-Zionism where the greatest number of the Israeli elite—including individuals with no stamped Israeli citizenship but a profound loyalty to the Jewish state—reside outside Israel. Some of them hold key positions in state administrations, particularly in the United States. As Gilad Atzmon remarks, "there is no geographical center to the Zionist endeavor. It is hard to determine where Zionist decisions are made"; "the Israelis colonize Palestine and the Jewish Diaspora is there to mobilize lobbies by recruiting international support."[4] The neoconservatives—"an intellectual movement in America to whose invention Jews can lay sole claim," as correctly assessed the Jewish Daily Forward [5] — are the most influential group of Diaspora Jews dedicated to Israel. They are no conservatives in the traditional sense, but rather crypto-Likudniks posturing as American patriots in order to align US foreign and military policies with the Greater Israel agenda—high-level sayanim, so to speak (read John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, 2008).
Their mentor Leo Strauss, in his 1962 lecture "Why We Remain Jews," declared himself an ardent supporter of the State of Israel but rejected the idea that Israel as a nation should be contained within borders; Israel, he argued, must retain her specificity, which is to be everywhere.[6] Indeed, this paradoxical nature of Israel is vital to its existence: although its stated purpose is to welcome all the Jews of the world, the state of Israel would collapse if it achieved this goal. It is unsustainable without the support of international Jewry. Therefore, Israel needs every Jew of the world to define his/her Jewishness as loyalty to Israel. Ever since 1967, the hearts of an increasing number of American Jews began to beat secretly, and then more and more openly, for Israel. Reform Judaism, which had originally declared itself to be exclusively religious and opposed to Zionism, soon rationalized this new situation by a 1976 resolution affirming: "The State of Israel and the Diaspora, in fruitful dialogue, can show how a People transcends nationalism while affirming it, thus establishing an example for humanity."[7]
How do they both affirm and transcend nationalism? The biblical way. The Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh, is the unalterable prototype of Jewish history: everything that follows the fall of the Hasmonean kingdom has to be biblical—the Holocaust, for example. Inevitably, Jewish nationalism, or patriotic love for Israel, resonates with the destiny of Israel as outlined in the Bible: "Yahweh your God will raise you higher than every other nation in the world" (Deuteronomy 28:1). Every nation is a narration, and Israel's narrative pattern is cast into the Hebrew Bible. To love Israel is to love Israel's biblical story, no matter of how mythical it is. And through biblical prophecy, the vision of the past becomes the vision the future: Solomon's empire will come to pass.
That is why Zionism was never an ordinary form of nationalism, nor can Israel ever be a "nation like others." The paradoxical nature of Israel is best embodied by its founding father Ben-Gurion: a secular Jew who saw himself as a new Joshua,[8] hoped for "the restoration of the kingdom of David and Solomon,"[9] and prophesized that Jerusalem will be "the seat of the Supreme Court of Mankind, to settle all controversies among the federated continents, as prophesied by Isaiah."[10] Let us be fair and assume that Ben-Gurion was simply referring to Isaiah's prophecy that "the Law will issue from Zion" and that Yahweh will "judge between the nations and arbitrate between many peoples" (2:3-4), not to the Second Isaiah's prophecy that Israel "will feed on the wealth of nations" (61:6), and that nations who do not serve Israel "will be utterly destroyed" (60:12).[11] Ben-Gurion's vision lives on: a 2003 "Jerusalem Summit" attended by three acting Israeli ministers including Benjamin Netanyahu and many American neoconservatives including Richard Perle, affirmed that "one of the objectives of Israel's divinely-inspired rebirth is to make it the center of the new unity of the nations, which will lead to an era of peace and prosperity, foretold by the Prophets."[12] Zionists have always been in love with the Bible.
Such are the geopolitical implications of the Jewish paradox: Zionism cannot be a mere nationalistic aspiration, as long as it claims to be Jewish, for "Jewish" means "biblical". And more than two thousand years ago, the ancient prophets had bent over the cradle of Israel to predestine it as "a nation above other nations." Israel carries in its biblical genes the plan for a world order headquartered in Jerusalem. I'm not talking about a secret conspiracy here: the Jewish plan to rule the world has been plainly outlined in the global bestseller for more than two thousand years. If most people in the Christian world don't see it, it is because it is right under their nose. Christians claim that the Jews don't read their Bible correctly, or that they got their Zionism from the Talmud or the Kabbalah. Both claims are pitiful attempts to exonerate the Old Testament from the Zionist catastrophe: the Hebrew Bible was written by Jews for the Jews, and I have never heard a Zionist quote the Talmud or the Kabbalah, whereas they quote the Bible every day.
The prophetic spirit that inspired Isaiah long ago has been very active since the beginning of the 20th century. It spoke through religious leaders like Kaufmann Kohler, a leading figure of American Reformed Judaism, who wrote in his major work on Jewish Theology (New York, 1918) that "Israel, the suffering Messiah of the centuries, shall at the end of days become the triumphant Messiah of the nations."[13] And it spoke through secular thinkers like Alfred Nossig, a Zionist who collaborated with the Gestapo in the Warsaw ghetto for the emigration of selected Jews to Palestine, who wrote in his Integrales Judentum (Berlin, 1922):
"The Jewish community is more than a people in the modern political sense of the word. It is the repository of a historically global mission, I would say even a cosmic one, entrusted to it by its founders Noah and Abraham, Jacob and Moses. [. . .] The primordial conception of our ancestors was to found not a tribe but a world order destined to guide humanity in its development."[14]
The Feuerbachan approach
The paradoxical nature of Jewishness (combining separatism and universalism), which is reflected in the ambiguous nature of Zionism (combining nationalism and internationalism), is ultimately linked to the Jewish conception of God. Is the biblical Yahweh the national god of Israel or the universal God of humankind? Let's search for an answer into the Book of Ezra, the paradigmatic episode for the Jewish colonization of Palestine. It begins with an edict of the Persian king Cyrus, which says:
"Yahweh, the God of Heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth and has appointed me to build him a Temple in Jerusalem, in Judah. […] Let [every Jew] go up to Jerusalem, in Judah, and build the Temple of Yahweh, the God of Israel, who is the God in Jerusalem" (Ezra 1:2–3).
Here Cyrus speaks in the name of "the God of Heaven" while authorizing the Judean exiles to build a temple to "the God of Israel […] the God in Jerusalem." We understand that both phrases refer to the same God, called Yahweh in both instances, but the duality is significant. It is repeated in the Persian edict authorizing the second wave of return. It is now Artaxerxes, "king of kings," who switches from the "God of Heaven" to "your God" or "the God of Israel who resides in Jerusalem" when addressing Ezra (7:12–15). The phrase "God of Heaven" appears one more time in the book of Ezra, and that is again in the edict of another Persian king: Darius confirms Cyrus's edict and recommends that the Israelites "may offer sacrifices acceptable to the God of Heaven and pray for the life of the [Persian] king and his sons" (6:10). Elsewhere the book of Ezra only refers to the "God of Israel" (four times), "Yahweh, the God of your fathers" (once), and "our God" (ten times). In other words, according to the author of the book of Ezra, only the kings of Persia see Yahweh as "the God of Heaven" (a fiction, of course: for Persians, the God of Heaven meant Ahura Mazda) while for the Jews he is primarily the "God of Israel". That is the deepest secret of Judaism, and the key to Jews' relationship to universalism and to the nations: success rests on their ability to make Gentiles believe that the national god of Israel residing in the Jerusalem Temple is the God of Heaven who happens to have a preference for Israel.
The misunderstanding led to a public scandal in 167 CE, when the Hellenistic emperor Antiochos IV dedicated the temple in Jerusalem to Zeus Olympios, the supreme God. He was simply expressing the idea that Yahweh and Zeus were two names for the supreme cosmic God, the Heavenly father of all mankind. But the Jewish Maccabees who led the rebellion against him knew better: Yahweh may be the Supreme God, but He is Jewish. Only Jews are intimate with Him, and any way the Pagans worship Him is an abomination.
So is Yahweh God, or just the god of Israel? Why should we care? Well, let's call it the Feuerbachan approach to the Jewish question. In his famous work The Essence of Christianity (1841), which was to influence greatly Karl Marx, Ludwig Feuerbach sees the universal God as "the deified and objectified spiritual essence of man": theology is anthropology in disguise, and "The consciousness of God is the self-consciousness of man." But if we regard the biblical Yahweh as a creation of Jews alone, rather than humanity at large, then we can consider him as a personification of the national character of the Jewish people—or, more correctly, a reflexion of the mentality of the Jewish elite who invented Yahweh.
It is known to biblical scholars that, in the oldest strata of the Bible, Yahweh appears as a national, ethnic god, not the supreme God of the Universe. "For all peoples go forward, each in the name of its god, while we go forward in the name of Yahweh our god for ever and ever" (Micah 4:5)[15]. "I am the god of your ancestors," Yahweh says to Moses (Exodus 3:6), who is then mandated to declare to his people, "Yahweh, the god of your ancestors, has appeared to me," urging them to talk to Pharaoh in the name of "Yahweh, the god of the Hebrews" (3:16–18). The Hebrews chant after the miracle of the Red Sea engulfing Pharaoh and his army, "Yahweh, who is like you, majestic in sanctity, among the gods?" (15:11).[16] And in Canaan, a Hebrew chief declares to an enemy king: "Will you not keep as your possession whatever Chemosh, your god, has given you? And, just the same, we shall keep as ours whatever Yahweh our god has given us, to inherit from those who were before us!" (Judges 11:24).[17] In all these verses, Yahweh is an ethnic or national god among others.
What sets him apart from other tribal gods of his kind is possessive exclusivism: "You shall have no other gods to rival me" (Exodus 20:3); "I shall set you apart from all these peoples, for you to be mine" (Leviticus 20:26). This is the justification for strict endogamy: it is forbidden to marry one's children to a non-Jew, "for your son would be seduced from following me into serving other gods" (Deuteronomy 7:4).
Yahweh is known as "the Jealous One" (Exodus 20:5 and 34:14; Deuteronomy 4:24, 5:9, and 6:15). But jealousy is an euphemism for outright sociopathy, because what Yahweh demands from his people is not just exclusivity of worship, but the destruction of their neighbors' shrines: "Tear down their altars, smash their standing-stones, cut down their sacred poles and burn their idols" (Deuteronomy 7:5). Judean kings are judged on the unique criterion of their obedience to that precept. Hezekiah, whose disastrous policy of confrontation with Assyria led to a shrinking of the country, is praised for having done "what Yahweh regards as right," namely abolishing the "high places" (2 Kings 18:3–4). His son Manasseh, whose 50-year reign is known to historians as a time of peace and prosperity, is blamed for having done "what is displeasing to Yahweh, copying the disgusting practices of the nations whom Yahweh had dispossessed for the Israelites" (2 Kings 21:2). Manasseh's son Amon is no better. Josiah, on the other hand, proved worthy of his great-great-grandfather Hezekiah, by removing from the temple "all the cult objects which had been made for Baal, Asherah and the whole array of heaven. […] He exterminated the spurious priests whom the kings of Judah had appointed and who offered sacrifice on the high places, in the towns of Judah and the neighborhood of Jerusalem; also those who offered sacrifice to Baal, to the sun, the moon, the constellations and the whole array of heaven" (2 Kings 23:4–5).
It is ironic that Yahweh, originally a minor tribal god, should compete with the great Baal for the status of supreme God, as when Elijah challenges 450 prophets of Baal in a holocaust contest, which ends up with the slaughter of them all (1Kings 18). In ancient Syria, Baal Shamem, the "Heavenly Lord," was identified as the God of Heaven and honored by all peoples except the Jews.[18] The goddess Asherah, whom Yahweh loathed even more, was the Great Divine Mother worshipped throughout the Middle East. In Mesopotamia, she went under the name of Ishtar, while in the Hellenistic era, she was assimilated to the Egyptian goddess Isis. The Hebrews themselves called her "Queen of Heaven" and turned to her in times of trouble, to the dismay of their priest and prophet Jeremiah, who threatened them with Yahweh's exterminating wrath (Jeremiah 44).
Historians of religion tell us that Yahweh was still a national god at a time when the notion of a supreme God was widespread. When and how the Levites declared the god of Israel to be the true and only God is not entirely settled, but it is generally admitted that it happened shortly before the time of Ezra, when the Book of Genesis was composed (with much borrowing from Mesopotamian and Persian myths). The process is easy to imagine, for it follows the cognitive logic of a narcissistic sociopath among the community of gods: from the commandment of exclusive worship and the destruction of other gods' shrines, it is a small step to the denial of the very existence of other gods; and if Yahweh is the only existing god, he must be "The God."
A curious story about King Hezekiah can serve as an illustration of this process. The Assyrian king threatens Hezekiah in the following manner, explicitly identifying Yahweh as the national god of Israel:
"Do not let your god on whom you are relying deceive you with the promise: 'Jerusalem will not fall into the king of Assyria's clutches' […] Did the gods of the nations whom my ancestors devastated save them?"
Hezekiah then goes up to the Temple and offers the following prayer:
"It is true, Yahweh, that the kings of Assyria have destroyed the nations, they have thrown their gods on the fire, for these were not gods but human artifacts—wood and stone—and hence they have destroyed them. But now, Yahweh our god, save us from his clutches, I beg you, and let all the kingdoms of the world know that you alone are God, Yahweh" (2 Kings 19:10–19).
So here we witness how Yahweh was promoted from the status of a national god to that of universal God by the prayer of a devout king. In response to that prayer, according to the biblical story, "the angel of Yahweh went out and struck down a hundred and eighty-five thousand men in the Assyrian camp," then struck their king by the hand of his sons (19:35–37). Pure fiction: the Assyrian annals tell us that in reality, Hezekiah paid tribute to the Assyrian king. Which proves that Hezekiah's claim was deceptive.
The exclusive monotheism demanded by Yahweh is a degraded imitation of that inclusive monotheism toward which all the wisdoms of the ancient world converged by affirming the fundamental unity of all gods. As Egyptologist Jan Assmann emphasizes, the polytheisms of the great civilizations were cosmotheisms, insofar as the gods, among other functions, form the organic body of the world. Such a conception naturally led to a form of inclusive or convergent monotheism, compatible with polytheism: all gods are one, as the cosmos is one.[19] The notion of the unity of the divine realm naturally connects with the notion of a supreme God, creator of heaven and earth, enthroned atop a hierarchy of deities emanating from him—a concept familiar to Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, and most ancient philosophers. The exclusive and revolutionary monotheism that the Yahwist priests crafted for their own benefit is of a totally different kind: it is, in fact, the exact opposite of the inclusive and evolutionary monotheism of neighboring peoples.
From the historical perspective, it is not the Creator of the Universe who decided, at some point, to become the god of Israel; rather, it is the god of Israel who, at some point, was declared the Creator of the Universe by the Levites and their scribes. The Jewish conception of Yahweh parallels that historical process: for the Jews, Yahweh is primarily the god of Jews, and secondarily the Creator of the Universe. This is what Maurice Samuel kindly tried to tell us in You Gentiles (1924): "In the heart of any pious Jew, God is a Jew." "We [Jews] and God grew up together," that is why "we need a world of our own, a God-world, which it is not in your nature to build."[20]
And so the paradoxical nature of Yahweh is, in reality, a deception. The idea that the Heavenly Father of humankind, somewhere in the second millennium BCE, chose a particular people and ordered them to dispossess and slaughter other peoples is, any way we look at it, an outrageous absurdity. The fact that billions of people have believed it for thousands of years makes no difference. Or rather, that is the problem: many peoples throughout history have believed themselves to have been chosen by God, but only the Jews have managed to convince others that they have. That has turned this outrageous absurdity into the most devastating idea in world history.
The deceptive nature of biblical monotheism is the key to understanding traditional Jewish attitude to universalism. For the Jewish conception of God is reflected in the Jewish conception of Humanity. Just like their tribal god speaks of himself—through his prophets—as the God of humankind, Jewish communitarian thinkers speak of Jewishness as the essence of humanity: Judaism constitutes a "particularism that conditions universality" so that "there is an obvious equation between Israel and the Universal"; in other words, "Israel equals humanity" (Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, 1990).[21] It is almost always in reference to their Jewishness that such opinion makers, who are often ardent Zionists, proclaim themselves universalists: see for example how Rabbi Joachim Prinz, a German Zionist who in 1934 had applauded the Nazi state for being "built upon the principle of the purity of nation and race," declared in 1963, as chairman of the American Jewish Congress, that he supported the African-American civil rights movement "as a Jew."[22] "Jewish universalism" is a contradiction in terms and therefore necessarily deceptive. It is self-deception in the case of most Jews, who believe what they have been taught by their representative elites ever since the Haskalah: that there is no contradiction in being a tribalist at home and a universalist in the street—provided that, in each of their universalist stand, they do not lose sight of the important question: "Yes, but is it good for the Jews?"[23] Of course, there are many remarkable exceptions: Jews who have broken through the mental "Jewish prison" (as Jewish journalist Jean Daniel calls it)[24] to reach for some universal truths. I call it the genius of the escapee.
Ultimately, the deceptive nature of both biblical monotheism and Jewish universalism is a key to unraveling the Zionist paradox: nationalism and internationalism go hand in hand in Israel's destiny, because Israel is, fundamentally, a biblical and therefore universal project. For the Jewish cognitive elites who determine Jewish public opinion to a large extent, the New World Order is an ancient et eternal idea. It is Israel's destiny carved in the Bible. It is inherent to Jewishness.
- Nahum Goldmann, Le Paradoxe juif. Conversations en français avec Léon Abramowicz, Stock, 1976 (archive.org), p. 9.
- Nahum Goldmann, Le Paradoxe juif, op. cit., p. 6, 31.
- Alison Weir, Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel, 2014, k. 3280–94.
- Gilad Atzmon, The Wandering Who? A Study of Jewish Identity Politics, Zero Books, 2011, pp. 21, 70.
- Gal Beckerman, Jewish Daily Forward, January 6, 2006, quoted in Stephen Sniegoski, The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel, Enigma Edition, 2008, p. 26.
- Leo Strauss, "Why We Remain Jews," in Shadia Drury, Leo Strauss and the American Right, St. Martin's Press, 1999, pp. 31–43.
- Quoted in Kevin MacDonald, Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism, Praeger, 1998, kindle edition 2013, k. 5463–68.
- Dan Kurzman, Ben-Gurion, Prophet of Fire, Touchstone, 1983, pp. 17–22.
- As he declared before the Knesset in 1956, quoted in Israel Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, Pluto Press, 1994, p. 10.
- David Ben-Gurion and Amram Duchovny, David Ben-Gurion, In His Own Words, Fleet Press Corp., 1969, p. 116
- All Bible quotes are taken from the Catholic New Jerusalem Bible, which has not altered the divine name YHWH into "the Lord," as most other English translations have done for unscholarly reasons.
- Official website: http://www.jerusalemsummit.org/eng/declaration.php.
- Kaufmnann Kohler, Jewish Theology, Systematically and Historically Considered, Macmillan, 1918 (www.gutenberg.org), p. 290.
- Alfred Nossig, Integrales Judentum, Interterritorialer Verlag, 1922, pp. 1–5 (on http://www.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de/item/DXCTNNZZ3INPTI2S3MYPGLQOFR3XSW22).
- Most translations use a uppercase for the "God of Israel", and a lowercase for other national gods, but ancient Hebrew does not distinguish between uppercase and lowercase letters, so here, and in further quotes, I have used a lowercase g for all national gods, including Israel's, and reserved the uppercase G for the One supreme God.
- See also Psalms 89:7.
- Jean Soler, Qui est Dieu?, Éditions de Fallois, 2012, pp. 12–17, 33–37.
- Norman Habel, Yahweh Versus Baal: A Conflict of Religious Cultures, Bookman Associates, 1964, p. 41.
- Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism, Harvard University Press, 1998, p. 3.
- Maurice Samuel, You Gentiles, New York, 1924 (archive.org), pp. 74–75, 155.
- Online on monoskop.org/images/6/68/Levinas_Emmanuel_Difficult_Freedom_Essays_on_Judaism_1997.pdf.
- Prinz's pro-Nazi statements from his 1934 bookWir Juden are quoted in Israel Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, Pluto Press, 1994, p. 86. Prinz' introduction to King's "I have a dream" speech on August 28, 1963, beginning with "I speak to you as an American Jew," is at http://www.joachimprinz.com/images/mow.mp3.
- Jonny Geller made this paradigmatic question the title of his humorous book Yes, But Is It Good for the Jews? Bloomsbury, 2006.
- Jean Daniel, La Prison juive. Humeurs et méditations d'un témoin, Odile Jacob, 2003.
March 13, 2018 Posted by aletho | Book Review, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular | Israel, Zionism | 1 Comment
Craig Murray: Scared of my Own Thoughts
By Craig Murray | February 11, 2018
In Doha last week I watched on TV an utterly contemptible speech by Theresa May in which she grasped for ideas to shore up the increasingly eroded Establishment control of the political zeitgeist. Yet more pressure would be put on the social media companies to curtail the circulation of unauthorised truths as "fake news". Disrespectful questioning of the political class will be a new crime of "intimidation of candidates". The government would look for new ways to boost the unwanted and failing purveyors of the official line by some potential aid to newspapers and their paid liars.
In short I did not merely disagree with what she was saying, I found it an extraordinary example of Orwellian doublespeak in which she even referenced John Stuart Mill and her commitment to freedom of speech as she outlined plans to restrict it further. I found myself viewing this dull, plodding agent of repression as representing a political philosophy which is completely alien to me.
I had a similar epiphany the week before watching the gathering at Davos. I have often been sceptical of the philosophy and motivation of the neo-liberal elite, but I have never before looked at them and seen them as the enemy. Yet after the super wealthy were rewarded for the financial collapse of 2008, by the largest diversion of ordinary people's money to the rich in human history, as bailouts and QE, the steady but unspectacular economic growth of the ensuing decade has resulted in no significant real wage increases for the working person across the entire developed world, while the wealth of the 1% has more than doubled. There has been a curious but matching phenomenon whereby even the "third sector" representatives at Davos – the heads of universities and charities or the senior presenters from the BBC, for example – are themselves on over £300,000 a year and completely divorced from the lifestyle of working people, due to the abandonment of their institutions to corporate philosophy.
In short, as with Theresa May, I found myself looking at the inhabitants of Davos with utter contempt, as people whose philosophy and lifestyle I detest.
Then a couple of days ago I watched an uncritical BBC report of alleged chemical weapons attacks in Syria based entirely on film provided by the White Helmets, which plainly had zero evidential value. Given that the origins and motivations of the White Helmets are today known to anyone with an internet connection, the continued retailing of this repetitive propaganda is extraordinary. I felt contempt for the BBC journalists who were retailing it. In the last 24 hours Israel has carried out large scale bombing attacks on Syria which are undeniably illegal, and for once has acknowledged them brazenly. There has been very little media reporting of this. In a two sentence report on BBC News as I type, the second sentence was that the attack followed the downing of an Israel fighter, without mentioning that plane was itself illegally attacking Syria. The Israeli statement was given verbatim and no balancing view from Syria was given.
I am not comfortable with thoughts of contempt, disgust or hatred towards anyone. I have always held the view that people are entitled to their political views, and having different views to mine in no way makes you a bad person. I have been known to suggest that anyone who has all the same views as me must be in dubious mental health. I have tried to acknowledge common ground with people where it exists – for example I have always admired David Davis' commitment to civil liberties. It is not the case that some of my best friends are Tories, but I do have Tory friends.
I was for most of my working life a fully paid up member of the Establishment, and reasonably comfortable with that. Even bad governments do some good. I was a Liberal and fairly well on board with the prescriptions of the party in the time of Charlie Kennedy. I am, I hope, a naturally friendly person and have always considered myself gentle and kind. It is certainly true my political views are driven more by empathy with the suffering than by rigid systems of thought.
I therefore am not comfortable being so stridently opposed to everything that is happening in the UK political mainstream. I am scared by the prospect of being the extremist nutter who mutters on about a worldview entirely at odds with the accepted narrative.
Yet I look at the world with disbelief. I see an economy that gives little opportunity for secure and fulfilling lives to millions of young people. I see the obscene lifestyle of the super rich. And I perceive that, contrary to neo-liberal propaganda, that is not the natural order of things but a direct result of the operation of institutions created by government and their use to channel the flow of wealth to a tiny minority.I marvel at the continuing Ponzi scheme of the UK property market. I see Africa plundered for its commodities and deliberately kept poor.
The panic-inducing correction in the world's stock markets this week was triggered by news that unemployment was falling rapidly in the USA. That was "bad news" for the markets because it might result in workers getting better pay. There could not be a better illustration of the madness of the system. The world is suffering from a failure of imagination. Corporate ownership structure has developed in certain ways because of social conditions prevailing in the UK and Europe from the 16th century onwards. The development consists of the overlaid accretions of accumulated accidents of history. There is nothing natural or inevitable about current stock market models. The rational alternative – worker ownership of enterprises – is, however, not on any mainstream accepted political agenda.
Jeremy Corbyn and John MacDonnell are doing their best within the awful constraints of the Labour Party they inherited, but their economic proposals are nowhere near the radical change required. In Scotland, the SNP have put in place some commendable but very modest social democratic measures to increase taxes on the wealthy. But the SNP appears to have been seized by crippling timidity on the subject of Independence. There are worrying signs that Sturgeon's evident lack of serious intent to push for Independence, is finally damping down grassroots activism, including on social media. Meanwhile virtually the entire political class of Europe has united behind the vicious suppression of Catalonia, with peaceful campaigners facing lengthy years as political prisoners. Those events, more than any, crystallise my understanding that a "liberal" political Establishment no longer exists.
In conclusion, either I am barking mad or the world is becoming a much darker place. As the position of the vast majority of people as helots to the super wealthy is further consolidated, the manufacturing of consent by the control of information becomes ever more crucial to the elite. I have never desired to stand outside society barking unheeded warnings. You have probably gathered that the last few months I have been inclined to succumb to the fact that my own life would be more comfortable if I stopped barking. But I shall continue – please feel free to warn me when I get over-bitter.
February 11, 2018 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular | BBC, European Union, Theresa May, UK | 1 Comment
Living in an Orwellian Tyranny
By Gilad Atzmon | February 9, 2018
Yesterday Nick Timothy, Theresa May's former aide, was accused of using an antisemitic slur in his article on Brexit. He co-authored a Telegraph report titled, George Soros, the man who 'broke the Bank of England', backing secret plot to thwart Brexit.
Not only did Timothy not criticise Soros as a Jew, he didn't even refer to him as a Jew. But it seems the fact that Soros is a Jew was enough to censure Timothy as an 'antisemite.' It took no more.
Stephen Bush wrote in The New Statesman , "The reason that many find the Telegraph's treatment so disturbing is that Soros, who is Jewish, has been at the centre of a series of anti-Semitic conspiracies by the increasingly authoritarian governments in Poland, Hungary and Turkey." It is mildly amusing that the banal Stephen Bush can't see that he himself employs an authoritarian manner of thought. Unless guilt by association has become Britain's press' MO, the fact that some regimes not approved of by Bush or The New Statesman decided to cleanse themselves of Soros' infiltration has little relevance to Timothy or his argument.
Bush adds that "Timothy was the author of that 'citizens of nowhere' speech only adds to feeling among many that the original speech was a coded way of talking about "rootless cosmopolitans"; aka the Jewish people." This passage describes a kosherly coded minefield that we can not possibly navigate unless Bush and The New Statesman provide us with the complete newspeak lexicon.
Stephen Pollard, editor of the JC, a funny looking character who routinely squirts freedom of speech advocacy articles, explained in a tweet why Timothy is anti-Semitic. "Telegraph story is disturbing because of the use of the idea it's a 'secret plot.' Soros is incredibly open about what he does. Say it's wrong; fine. But idea it's a secret plot is exactly the line being used in Hungary and elsewhere precisely because he is Jewish."
I agree with Pollard that there are no Jewish conspiracies and secret plots. Jews organisations and individuals tend to do it all in the open. In the open AIPAC dominates American foreign policy. In the open the Conservative Friends of Israel do the same on this side of the pond. In the open Zionist organisations smear the British Labour Party and its leadership. In the open Daniel Janner QC, the son of alleged sex predator Lord Greville Janner, insists that he be allowed to question "fantasists" who accused his father of abuse. Finally, in the open Stephen Pollard himself describes Timothy's legitimate argument as 'disturbing' because the latter refers to Soros' 'secret plot.' So I wonder, would Pollard be less disturbed if The Telegraph's title read: "George Soros, The Man who 'broke the Bank of England' is now thwarting Brexit." ?
Their message for fellow journalists, commentators, academics and the rest of the Brits is clear: Jews are somehow beyond criticism. Any attempt to look into the actions of the Jewish lobby, finance, politics, Zionism and individuals will necessarily lead to some severe consequences such as accusations of anti-Semitism, bigotry and racism. But ask yourself, if Soros were gay, would Timothy's criticism be castigated as homophobic? Were Soros a woman, would Timothy's reference to a 'secret plot' make him a 'male chauvinist pig' or an ordinary misogynist? And what if Soros were Black? Would an accusation that he was thwarting Brexit in a clandestine manner lead us to assume that Timothy is a 'white supremacist'? We know the answers to these questions. It seems it is the fact that Soros is Jewish that leads to the ludicrous accusation that Timothy is an 'antisemite' who is engaged in 'racially charged' rhetoric as decided by The New Statesman's Stephen Bush.
Britain is now an Orwellian Tyranny and, as in 1984, we have our Emmanuel Goldsteins — controlled opposition apparatuses set to dominate the dissent. As we see freedom of speech evaporating, it is Stephen Pollard who takes care of the so-called 'opposition' that advocates freedom of speech. Similarly, it is Jewish Voice for Labour, a racially oriented Jews only body, that is set to 'break up' any Zionist monopoly. We also have Free Speech on Israel, again a Jewish body, that was formed to dominate the boundaries of the discourse on anti Zionism. The mission is clear. 'In the open,' Jewish organisations and individuals are set to dominate both poles of any debate that is relevant to Jewish existence.
It is frightening to witness how quickly Britain surrendered its precious liberal values of openness and freedom. It is even more frightening to watch the vast approval granted the growing tyrannical conditions. It is fascinating that Orwell predicted it all. As I argue in my recent book Being in Time, Orwell saw it coming. He located 1984 in Britain, he identified the Left as a potentially tyrannical realm. He illustrated the deceptive role played by Emmanuel Goldstein. The only question that remains open is whether Britain can save itself and reinstate its values or whether it is doomed.
February 9, 2018 Posted by aletho | Full Spectrum Dominance, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular | George Soros, UK, Zionism | 2 Comments
Davos 2018: Elites to save the world at cocktail party schmooze-fest
© Ruben Sprich / Reuters
RT | January 23, 2018
It's that time of year again when the elite gather at Davos by day to tackle the many problems plaguing the planet. And then by night it's back to hitting the slopes, sipping champagne and networking again.
Since its first gathering in 1971, the scenic Alpine town of Davos, Switzerland – home to over 200 miles of breathtaking ski slopes – has played perfect host to the world's financial and political elite, who spend three days attending panel discussions on a variety of topics.
Thanks to the natural edifices of the Swiss Alps, Mother Nature's most effective security apparatus, not to mention 4,500 police and many miles of security fencing, the Masters of the Universe will be at liberty to discuss momentous global issues without being rudely interrupted by the dissenting voices of the global village far below.
"The skies over Switzerland are choked with private planes and helicopters as Davos gets underway,"CNN reported. "Security is tight, and rooftop sharpshooters watch over attendees as they parade through metal detectors and then swap snow boots for dress shoes."
And then there is the price of membership in the world's swankiest club: corporations don't blink when they are asked to pay $60,000 to purchase base membership to the World Economic Forum; premier corporate partnerships are up to 10 times that amount. The cost alone makes the event prohibitive for your average person, in the highly-unlikely event he or she awoke one morning to find an invitation to this event in his or her mailbox.
In the insulated, discreet world of the elite, this is what seems to pass for 'democracy in action'. But in reality, the real importance of these annual forums is the golden networking opportunities they offer attendees during "informal talks and…deal-making which takes place elsewhere in the conference centre and in hotel lobbies."
Meanwhile, with the vast majority of the mainstream media literally in their pockets, Davos – formally known as the World Economic Forum – is rarely on the receiving end of negative publicity. Indeed, it is usually described in one monotonous, uncritical voice as some kind of "high-minded gathering" that aims to "hash out the world's most intractable problems," to quote an article from USA Today.
The rationale behind these high-profile meetings is that the corporate elite – due to their lofty position, influence and wealth – are the best-equipped to cure the world's ills. And judging by the annual theme at these events (Davos 2018's is 'Creating a Shared Future in a Fractured World'), mankind is always presented as teetering on the edge of disaster. There is good reason for that. This creates the impression that the only thing required to abolish poverty, fix the environment and end global wars, for example, is for 'Davos Man' to sit through a few more dry seminars before hitting the piste.
However, since this brave new dawn for mankind always sits temptingly over the horizon, just out of our grasp, the elite always have the perfect excuse for planning next year's cocktail party. For some, that may sound like an overly cynical view of this annual event, but it is difficult to see what has changed for the average consumer/citizen since the launch of Davos almost half a century ago.
On the very eve of Davos, the world was greeted with some sobering news: the world's richest 1 percent received 82 percent of the wealth pie from last year, while the poorest half of the population got exactly nothing, Oxfam said Monday. At the same time, the wealth of billionaires has surged six-times faster than that of ordinary workers since 2010. Finally, a new billionaire was born every two days between March 2016 and March 2017, the charity added.
"The billionaire boom is not a sign of a thriving economy, but a symptom of a failing economic system," Oxfam executive director Winnie Byanyima said in a statement.
Yet, according to Byanyima, the world's political and business elite – the same individuals who will be rubbing shoulders in Davos this week – are making things worse for everyone else by "slashing taxes and scrapping labour rights."
Despite many decades of Davos members getting together for the purpose of improving the economic lot of the world's citizens, it is painfully apparent they are failing on a grand scale. In fact, the situation is only getting worse.
In 1999, as resistance to globalization was on the rise, then-UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote an impassioned plea to that year's Davos members, calling for a "global compact of shared values and principles, which will give a human face to the global market."
"Globalization is a fact of life,"Annan wrote. "But I believe we have underestimated its fragility…The spread of markets outpaces the ability of societies and their political systems to adjust to them, let alone to guide the course they take."
"History teaches us that such an imbalance between the economic, social and political realms can never be sustained for very long."
Once again, however, another Davos forum passed with the elite delivering a lot of empty words – not action – to address the problem of global inequality. Then, in November 1999, echoing Kofi Annan's warning to the elite, Seattle erupted in massive anti-globalization demonstrations made up of tens of thousands of protesters. The protests were aimed at the World Trade Organization that had convened in the state of Washington to launch a new round of controversial neoliberal trade negotiations.
Today, the mixed feelings for globalization have not changed and, as the British vote for Brexit proved, has only really intensified.
Since its inception in 1971, Davos has been devoted to the liberal economic principles of open borders. This anti-national stance witnessed at Davos was described by the academic Samuel Huntington, who argued that the global elite (which Huntington famously labeled 'Davos Man') "…have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the elite's global operations."
This year, with US President Donald 'Make America Great Again' Trump expected to grace the Davos forum with his weighty presence (assuming his trip does not get canceled due to the shut-down of the US government), the Davos elite will be forced to defend their increasingly untenable position – based on raw statistics – that globalization is a force for the wellbeing of the world's citizens.
It may well be the first time that 'Davos Man' will be forced to defend its position from a top politician who is far more motivated by the interests of the nation-state.
It's too bad more representatives of the people don't have a ticket to this event, which promises to be quite a show.
For a comprehensive list of Davos participants since 2013, click here.
Robert Bridge is an American writer and journalist. He is author of the book, 'Midnight in the American Empire,' released in 2013. firstname.lastname@example.com
January 23, 2018 Posted by aletho | Economics, Supremacism, Social Darwinism | European Union | Leave a comment
Harvey Weinstein Hired Ex-Mossad Agents to Spy On and Intimidate Accusers
Sputnik – November 7, 2107
Disgraced film producer Harvey Weinstein hired a veritable army of spies, including former Mossad agents, to suppress publication of allegations that he sexually harassed and assaulted dozens of women for decades, The New Yorker magazine has uncovered.
The New Yorker, which broke the initial story, revealed the web of intrigue and deceit. It commenced in earnest in the latter months of 2016, as reporters began digging into his misconduct.
Learning of their investigations, he enlisted the help of several private security agencies to collect information on the women accusing him of sexual transgressions, and the journalists trying to expose his serial assaults.
According to dozens of pages of documents, and seven people directly involved in the effort itself, firms hired by Weinstein included Kroll, one of the world's largest corporate-intelligence companies, and Black Cube, an enterprise run largely by former officers of Mossad and other Israeli intelligence agencies, which has branches in Tel Aviv, London, and Paris.
The firm offers clients the skills of a "select group of veterans from the Israeli elite intelligence units that specializes in tailored solutions to complex business and litigation challenges."
The contract Weinstein signed with Black Cube explicitly stated the agency's mission — which it chose to accept — was to stop publication of the abuse allegations. Over the course of the next year, the firm targeted dozens of individuals to collect personal information on them, including their sexual histories, to attempt to stop them from coming forward.
Weinstein even went so far as to ask his former employees to join the effort, collecting names and placing calls that, according to those who received them, were of an intimidating nature.
Private Meetings
Two private investigators from Black Cube, using false identities, met with actress Rose McGowan, who had accused Weinstein of rape, to extract information from her.
One pretended to be a women's-rights advocate and secretly recorded at least four meetings with McGowan — and also, using a different identity, met twice with a journalist to find out which women were talking to the press.
In the latter case, the agent falsely implied she had been abused by Weinstein. Any information gleaned was then fed back directly to the shamed Hollywood mogul, and used to create psychological profiles of the victims.
McGowan was ensnared by the ruse after receiving an email in May 2017, which claimed to hail from literary agent "Diana Filip" — in actuality, a Black Cube agent. "Filip" told McGowan she was launching an initiative to combat discrimination against women in the workplace, and asked her to speak at a gala kickoff event later in the year, for a handsome fee of U$60,000.
Over the following months, the two women met on at least four occasions across the US. The two talked at length about issues relating to women's empowerment, and "Filip" repeatedly wanted to make a significant investment in McGowan's production company. She also pressed McGowan for information."Filip" also met Ben Wallace, a journalist at New York magazine pursuing the Weinstein story, on two separate occasions. Identifying herself as "Anna," she suggested she herself had been abused, and wished to make the story public.
Personal Impeachment
The agent's efforts with Wallace were less successful than her gaming of McGowan however, and over the course of their meetings, Wallace grew increasingly suspicious of her motives, and felt she was pushing him for information about the status and scope of his inquiry, and who he was talking to, without providing any meaningful information.
During their second meeting, "Anna" requested they sit close together, leading Wallace to suspect she might be recording the exchange, and her recounted experiences felt to the reporter like "soap-opera acting." On top of his prescience in spotting the scam, Wallace was also lucky in that his personal history was bereft of blemishes or scandal — in a series of e-mails sent in the weeks before Wallace met with the undercover agent, Kroll representatives sent Weinstein preliminary background information on Wallace and other journalists targeted by his legion of private investigators.
Much to their chagrin, the investigators could find no "adverse information" on any of the targets, such as libel and defamation cases, court judgments, outstanding debts, and the like. As such, there were no "promising avenues for personal impeachment" of the journalists.
Ultimately, despite a year of expensive, concerted effort, Weinstein's campaign to track and silence his accusers failed. Nonetheless, several of his victims have spoken of how the use of private security agencies made speaking out even more challenging, and intimidating.
November 7, 2017 Posted by aletho | Corruption, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Supremacism, Social Darwinism | Black Cube, United States | 2 Comments
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