Jonathan Cook, Foreign Correspondent

• Last Updated: October 06. 2008 10:38PM UAE / October 6. 2008 6:38PM GMT

TEL AVIV // No one is more surprised than Shlomo Sand that his latest academic work has spent 19 weeks on Israel’s bestseller list – and that success has come to the history professor despite his book challenging Israel’s biggest taboo.

Dr Sand argues that the idea of a Jewish nation – whose need for a safe haven was originally used to justify the founding of the state of Israel – is a myth invented little more than a century ago.

An expert on European history at Tel Aviv University, Dr Sand drew on extensive historical and archaeological research to support not only this claim but several more – all equally controversial.

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Meet the next set of bankers that will be given the task of saving the American economy, the International Monetary Fund.

When America has been completely looted by Wall Street and the economy has collapsed, this group will be put in charge of resurrecting the American economy.

Using the same methods they have around the world, by selling off America to investors.

Just like they hosed Argentina and Russia.

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* LRB
* 9 October 2008

Short Cuts
Adam Shatz

If you live in an American swing state you may have received a copy of ‘Obsession’ in your Sunday paper. ‘Obsession’ isn’t a perfume: it’s a documentary about ‘radical Islam’s war against the West’. In the last two weeks of September, 28 million copies of the film were enclosed as an advertising supplement in 74 newspapers, including the New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education. ‘The threat of Radical Islam is the most important issue facing us today,’ the sleeve announces. ‘It’s our responsibility to ensure we can make an informed vote in November.’ The Clarion Fund, the supplement’s sponsor, doesn’t explicitly endorse McCain, so as not to jeopardise its tax-exempt status, but the message is clear enough, and its circulation just happened to coincide with Obama’s leap in the polls.

The Clarion Fund is a front for neoconservative and Israeli pressure groups. It has an office, or at least an address, in Manhattan at Grace Corporate Park Executive Suites, which rents out ‘virtual office identity packages’ for $75 a month. Its website, clarionfund.org, provides neither a list of staff nor a board of directors, and the group still hasn’t disclosed where it gets its money, as required by the IRS. Who paid to make ‘Obsession’ isn’t clear – it cost $400,000. According to Rabbi Raphael Shore, the film’s Canadian-Israeli producer, 80 per cent of the money came from the executive producer ‘Peter Mier’, but that’s just an alias, as is the name of the film’s production manager, ‘Brett Halperin’. Shore claims ‘Mier’ and ‘Halperin’, whoever they are, are simply taking precautions, though it isn’t clear against what. The danger (whatever it is) hasn’t stopped Shore – or the director, Wayne Kopping, a South African neocon – from going on television to promote their work.

The 60-minute film was first released in 2006 and shown during the mid-term elections on Fox News. Since then it has received top billing at ‘Islamo-Fascism Awareness’ week on American campuses, at Christian-Zionist conferences and at events organised by Republican politicians in Florida. It has found a powerful backer in the real estate magnate Sheldon Adelson, who describes himself as ‘the world’s richest Jew’. The Endowment for Middle East Truth, a neoconservative think tank in Washington DC which recently hosted a series of seminars named after Adelson and his wife, arranged distribution of ‘Obsession’, at a cost in the tens of millions.

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Shattered dreams

The full-blown Zionist project is over. Even Israel's prime minister admits it, writes Abdallah El-Ashaal*

At a meeting of the Israeli cabinet on 15 September, Ehud Olmert, the prime minister who soon afterwards stepped down, made an earth- shattering announcement. The long-held Zionist dream of a Greater Israel, a country running from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, was no longer feasible, Olmert admitted.

In the Arab world, two interpretations have long persisted of the Arab-Israeli conflict. One is that the Zionist scheme is making inroads inside and outside Palestine, with the full backing of Washington, the endorsement of Europe, and the compliance of Arab governments. This interpretation accounts, at least partly, for the gushing forth of resentment in the region over the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Gaza. But one mustn't forget that many Europeans, and even some Israelis, expressed sympathy for the suffering of Gaza, an area that is on the verge of becoming a collective grave by the admission of UN reports.

The other interpretation is that despite Israel's tight grip on the land of Palestine, the Zionist dream is running into major hurdles both on the international and regional levels. Israel's war on Lebanon in 2006, in particular, has left it a host of internal and external problems. Even in the US there are signs that US policy in the Middle East, and especially its relations with Israel, are going to be subject to closer scrutiny than in the past.

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Graffiti and Israel
By Marc Sapir
Thursday October 02, 2008

Riya Bhattachargjee’s Sept. 25 article “Anti-Israel Graffiti Found Near Campus” is poor journalism. The title is fine, but the article leads with an erroneous use of the term “anti-Semitism,” which then serves as a justification for the outrage of Birgeneau and various Zionist student organizations. The UC chancellor seems to know that the graffiti was “hurtful to…members of the Jewish community.” That’s a half truth (many will agree with him of course) because many Jews, myself included, find nothing hurtful in this act aimed at countering deceptive Zionist propaganda.

In July, I spent 17 days inside Israel-Palestine. If you visit both sides of the green line extensively, there’s no way around the fact that Zionism has established a state that is fundamentally racist and that Israel today is a segregated and segregationist society, every bit as vicious as the Deep South before 1960. Israel intends to stay that way. Though many Israelis profess to differ, most do absolutely nothing about it. That there are some examples of incorporation of Palestinians into Israeli Jewish society and social life, such as the use of the soccer star Sowan Abbas, should not be surprising. I do not need to remind fellow Jews that the Nazi’s had their model Jews—eg the model Jewish community in Aushwitz Birkenau, symphony orchestras in most death camps and the people portrayed in the movie the Counterfeiters—who they used to advantage either as a propaganda screen to conceal what was going on or for other purposes.

“Israel is very progressive when it comes to things like gay rights, women and the environment…,” said Pini Altman of Blue StarPR the public relations firm that is promoting Israel’s positive image. This too is interesting to me because it is true that Israel is progressive on gay rights and women’s rights (we met with an ethnically integrated LGBT group who told us it is much more dangerous to be a Palestinian Arab in Israel than it is to be gay). However, much of the blather about the environment has been used as a cover to drive Palestinians from their own lands (both within the 1948 borders and in the 1967 conquered-occupied areas) under a pretense of reforestation and reclamation. After a while the seized land is usually given over to settlement cities and Israeli farmers and business concerns, by the thousands and thousands of acres.

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Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Zionism is one of the most contentious ideas, freighted with emotion by both partisans and detractors. Now some Jews are speaking out, breaking a long self-censorship

A Time to Speak Out: Independent Jewish Voices on Israel, Zionism and Jewish Identity

Edited by Anne Karpf, Brian Klug, Jacqueline Rose and Barbara Rosenbaum

Verso, 310pp, £9.99

Journey to Nowhere: One Woman Looks for the Promised Land

Eva Figes

Granta Books, 184pp, £14.99

Plowshares Into Swords: From Zionism to Israel

Arno J Mayer

Verso, 432pp, £19.99

The Returns of Zionism: Myths, Politics and Scholarship in Israel

Gabriel Piterberg

Verso, 298pp, £16.99

On the Other Hand

Chaim Bermant

Vallentine Mitchell, 352pp, £17.95

Before Edward Gibbon began The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, he had thought of writing another - a history of England in his own time. But he shrank with terror from a subject where every reader is a friend or enemy, "where a writer is expected to hoist a flag of party, and is devoted to damnation by the adverse faction". Gibbon's words will haunt anyone who writes about Zionism, and they are brought to mind by a group of new books. The whole topic of Zionism, its causes and consequences, is a minefield. No other subject is so fraught emotionally, as well as intellectually, so rarely discussed sine ira et studio.

This is explained in part by the bullying which tells non-Jewish critics of Israel that they are anti-Semitic, and Jewish critics that they are self-hating, but there is more to it. Given the circumstances in which the Jewish state was born, in the shadow of the most horrible catastrophe in Jewish history, it was difficult - if not morally impossible - for most Jews to disown the newborn state. History was rewritten to evade the inconvenient fact that when Theodor Herzl wrote The Jewish State in 1896 and launched his audacious project, most of the Jewish people were either indifferent to political Zionism and such a state, or fiercely hostile.

In recent years there has been a significant turn in opinion. Younger readers may not remember that there was once a time when Israel was deeply admired in the west. Since the 1967 Six Day War there has been a reaction, slow at first and then accelerating, which has found eloquent expression among Jews themselves, as various as the "independent Jewish voices" collected in A Time to Speak Out, or Eva Figes's memoir, which is also a polemic against Israel, or the Israeli scholar Gabriel Piterberg, or the American historian Arno Mayer, or the late and much-missed Chaim Bermant.

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The writer responds to the editor's comment on,"Credit Crunch or rather Zio Punch?,"


Oct. 2nd, 2008

re accidently

They (Zios) were planing to keep exploiting America and Americans forever.

Gilad

Link
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Please forgive me. I mistook you.

Solidarity,

Marc

Updated
The Zios were planing to keep exploiting America and Americans forever ---

By Gilad Atzmon • Sep 30th, 2008 at 20:27 • Category: Analysis, Gilad Atzmon, Gilad's Choice, Israel, Newswire, Our Authors, War, Zionism

John Reynolds ends his latest Observer commentary on the ethical implications of the current economic disaster with the following words:

“Above all we need more individuals to make a stand. The Archbishops of Canterbury and York should go further and call for more Christians to work in the city.” (John Reynolds, chief executive of Reynolds Partners, and chairman of the Ethical Investment Advisory Group, The Observer 28.9.08).

One may wonder what Reynolds refers to when calling for more ‘Christians to work in the City’. I tend to believe that more than just a few people out there do understand pretty well what Reynolds is suggesting. Reynolds, the chairman of the Ethical Investment Advisory Group protests against the non-ethical spirit that has been abundant in the City for more than a while. By pleading the Archbishops of Canterbury and York to send more Christians to the City he may try to suggest to us that our financial world must be spiritually de-Judified. I must admit that it took me by complete surprise to read such a suggestion in the politically correct Guardian. I wonder how it happened that such an idea filtered through.

Two weeks ago I took the task of elaborating on this very issue in front of the Cambridge Forum. The following presentation is an effort to disentangle the horrifying tribal plot that accidentally [?] led towards the destruction of the American Empire and Western financial hegemony.

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"Accidentally," Gilad? You have given up a lot for justice, good friend. One more illusion to let go of...

Readers, this article packs a punch. Enjoy.

Related

GILAD ATZMON

GILAD ATZMON > POLITICS

Gilad Atzmon - Wikipedia

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By Stuart Littlewood

27 September 2008

Stuart Littlewood considers the lack of ethics or any kind of moral principle in British government policy towards Israel as Britain considers relocating its embassy in Israel to a building occupied mostly by Israeli government departments and owned by controversial arch-Zionist and illegal settlement financier Lev Leviev.

The pantomime season will soon be upon us and the British government can always be relied on for amusement. This year a Foolish Fairy in the Foreign Office plans to move the British embassy in Tel Aviv from a decent spot on the seafront to a brooding tower block owned by Africa-Israel Investments and occupied mostly by Israeli government departments.

The British Foreign Office is evidently so in love with the Israeli regime that it wants to “shack up”, and never mind the gossip. Here in London the same Fairy is making the Foreign Office’s magnificent Locarno Suite available to the Zionist Federation for “a Champagne Reception and Commemorative Lecture at the Foreign Office in honour of the 91st anniversary of the Balfour Declaration of 1917”.

What sane person would dream of commemorating an individual who wrote, in all seriousness,

In Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country. The four powers are committed to Zionism and Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now occupy that land?

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"Meanwhile, the Inter Press Service reported that another organization, the Endowment for Middle East Truth, was also responsible for the DVD distribution. In March, the Endowment hosted a showing of "Obsession" on Capitol Hill.

Leading the Endowment is Sarah Stern, a former lobbyist for the Zionist Organization of America. She takes a hard line in defense of Israel, arguing against Israeli concessions such as land withdrawals and prisoner releases. In a recent open letter to the "next president," she warned that if tough diplomatic measures against Iran fail by the time he is inaugurated, "Mr. President, you may inherit the difficult task of easing the way for a preemptive strike."


Clarion Responds, As New Details Emerge About "Radical Islam" DVD

We had a story on the air this morning about the mass distribution of an inflamatory DVD on radical Islam, which critics say is intended to help John McCain's presidential bid. The video documentary was blasted out by the Clarion Fund, an obscure New York-based charity.

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with one comment

Written by detainthis

September 13, 2008

America focuses on the worsening economy while Congress focuses on Jewish cemeteries and Kristallnacht.

Related
Top Ten 2008 and Career Recipients of Pro-Israel PAC Funds


11 hours ago

CLEARWATER, Florida (AFP) — Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama on Tuesday condemned Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's anti-Zionist and anti-US remarks in his speech at the UN General Assembly.
"I strongly condemn President Ahmadinejad's outrageous remarks at the United Nations, and am disappointed that he had a platform to air his hateful and anti-Semitic views," Obama said in a statement.

"The threat from Iran's nuclear program is grave. Now is the time for Americans to unite on behalf of the strong sanctions that are needed to increase pressure on the Iranian regime," Obama said.

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Monday, September 22

BONNIE J. KAVOUSSI

Anthropology professor J. Lorand Matory ’82, a leading scholar on the African diaspora who is known for his strong criticisms of Israel and his opposition to former University President Lawrence H. Summers, will leave Harvard next fall to chair Duke’s African and African-American studies department.

Matory said that Harvard did not respond to Duke’s offer with a comparable position or salary. “The letter of reply was polite but acknowledged only what is favorable about my leaving,” Matory said of the counter-offer from Dean of the Faculty Michael D. Smith.

Matory’s colleagues within the anthropology and African and African-American studies departments say that they are sorry to see him go. This fall he will give the University of Rochester’s Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture series, which he called “the most important lectures in anthropology.”

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By Mary Rizzo • Sep 22nd, 2008 at 20:06 • Category: Analysis, Counter-terrorism, No thanks!, Israel, Mary's Choice, Newswire, War, Zionism

WRITTEN BY RON ANDREAS

Unlike the Western oil majors, the militant Zionist proponents of greater Israel view stability and peace in the Middle East as inimical to their goals. Chaos and strife create the “revolutionary atmosphere” (as Ben Gurion one of the key founders of the state of Israel put it) in which more land and water resources can be taken under their control. This fact explains the motive behind the ceaseless provocations and destabilization that the Israeli military and secret services perpetrate.

The “iron wall” policy established by Ze’ev Jabotinsky prior to the founding of the Jewish state requires the expulsion of Christian and Muslim Arabs from Palestine. Such a goal requires war or other violent means. David Ben Gurion stated, “What is inconceivable in normal times is possible in revolutionary times; and if at this time the opportunity is missed and what is possible in such great hours is not carried out . . . a whole world is lost.” This reality, of the necessity for violent upheaval to achieve Zionist aims, exposes which party is the true aggressor in the Middle East.

Ralph Schoenman writes that the goal of capturing the “promised land” requires “Israel to bring about the dissolution and fragmentation of the Arab states into a mosaic of ethnic groupings.” This strategy has been put forward by Oded Yinon (an Israeli journalist with links to the Israeli Foreign Ministry) in 1982 in the World Zionist Organization’s publication Kivunim. Here’s what Oded Yinon had to say on Iraq:

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September 22, 2008

By ROBERT WEITZEL

Mention 9/11 to most Americans and the two numbers are considered sufficient to give meaning to that day. But mention 9/12, the day after when “terror” became our national mantra and the “smoking gun” brandished by a neocon-infested administration for its devilish designs in the Middle East and the numbers are meaningless beyond the platitudinous, “they hate our freedoms” and “God Bless America.”

Such platitudes, hawked ad nauseam by TV “faith-healers” and political snake oil peddlers, may act as a balm to soothe a body politic traumatized by the attacks on 9/11, but they do not explain—only obfuscate—the real causes that brought terror to our “blessed shores.”

Like many Americans on the seventh anniversary of 9/11, I turned to the Bible for an answer, a problematic move for an atheist such as myself. Predictably, I went straight to verse 9:11 in the Book of Revelation—the Bible’s most terror filled text—and found a short blurb about Abaddon the Destroyer; admittedly, an interesting coincidence, but not a “big picture” explanation.

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Monday, September 22, 2008

WASHINGTON: Millions of voters in US states crucial to this fall's presidential election received DVD copies of a controversial documentary film as advertising inserts in their morning newspapers last week, with more sent out over the weekend.

The 2006 film, "Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West," which has been accused by critics of encouraging Islamophobia, was reportedly delivered, or slated for delivery this weekend, into tens of millions of households in states such as Ohio, Michigan, Florida, Colorado, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Missouri and other "swing states" that don't vote consistently for either party and usually decide elections.

Republicans and their candidate, Senator John McCain, have made battling the threat posed by radical Islamists a central platform of their campaign, while presenting their Democratic rival, Senator Barack Obama, as being weak on the issue. Obama has also fought off persistent smear campaigns, particularly aimed at Jewish voters, that he is a "closet Muslim."

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09/21/08

Khalid Amayreh

Influential Zionist circles around the world have been bullying western governments to promulgate legislations that would incriminate critics of Israel on the ground that anti-Zionism is actually anti-Semitism in disguise.

The Zionist efforts have not been a complete failure as some western politicians and lawmakers are shamelessly parroting the Zionist canard, ignoring the huge chasm between the pathological hatred of Jews, commonly known as anti-Semitism or Judeophobia, and the moral rejection of Israel’s manifestly criminal policies toward the Palestinian people.

In recent years, a famous French author was found guilty of displaying “anti-Semitism” for writing a book on Zionist mythology with regard to Palestine.

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Gilad Atzmon - Messing with the Zohan

By Gilad Atzmon • Sep 18th, 2008 at 21:27 • Category: Gilad Atzmon, Gilad's Choice, Israel, Newswire, Our Authors, Palestine, Religion, Zionism

“You Don’t Mess with the Zohan” is a new American comedy film. It tells the story of Zohan Dvir (Adam Sandler), the IDF’s Number 1 counter-terrorism killing machine who has simply grown tired of his military murderous engagement. At a certain stage, he fakes his own death while in action in order to pursue his real dream: that of becoming a hairstylist in NYC.

 

 

The film was anything but praised by the critics. The Sun gave the film one star and wrote: “the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine isn’t exactly the obvious choice of topic for a comedy – which is perhaps why this film is about as funny as a suicide bombing.” “By the end,” wrote Christopher Tookey of the Daily Mail, “I felt as though I had been carpet-bombed by comedy’s answer to Vladimir Putin. But, on second thought, Putin is funnier.”
 

 

These are pretty harsh words for critics to write about a film. However, unlike the devastated critic, who didn’t hold back from putting the film down, I regard the film as an important document and another step towards a comprehensive understanding of the Jewish world, Jewish identity, Jewish tribal operation and Jewish power. As much as ‘You Don’t Mess With The Zohan’ seems to be a sloppy infantile film, it is also a pretty interesting take on Jewish Diaspora identity, its vision of Israel and itself.

 

The Peace Seeking People

 

The plot of the film is rather simple, it has two main focal points. One is engaged with the exposure of the ‘vulnerable human being’ behind the Israeli military killing machine. Zohan, the Israeli counter-terrorism expert, once left to be himself, is transformed into a peace loving feigale (a derogatory Yiddish term for gay male) hairstylist. This line of thought is there to reassure us that Israeli crudeness and brutality is just a manifestation, deep inside they really are ‘softies’. This fits nicely into the ‘Sabra narrative’. Israeli natives tend to associate themselves with the Sabra cactus fruit; spikes on the outside but soft and sweet inside. Considering the fact that Adam Sandler, the main person behind this film, is a devoted Zionist fundraiser, the very intention of presenting the Israelis in such a light shouldn’t take us by surprise.

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