Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Israel’s Messianic Terrorists

http://www.irmep.org/ila/moneylaunder/

Israel’s Messianic Terrorists

by Patrick Seale Apr 2010

Barely a week goes by without news of some act of violence by Jewish settlers against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. By any definition, what settlers and other religious activists do to Palestinians is terrorism. But it goes unpunished.

Time and again, Muslim graves and mosques are desecrated, harvests torched, sheep rustled, cars stoned and damaged, homes and shops forcibly occupied. Palestinians are chased off their own land by gunfire. Just last week, settlers cut down 300 olive trees.

The settlers have a new and brutal policy. They have declared that, for every attempt by the authorities to rein them in, they will exact a price in violence against the Palestinians -- a “price tag,” they call it.

In the Arab world, Islamic extremists such as al-Qaida are pursued, jailed or killed. Two of Al-Qaida’s top leaders were killed in Iraq this week. In Israel, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has no wish or will to confront his home grown terrorists. Indeed, representatives of the religious settlers sit in his government.

In the Arab world, militants who fight to create an Islamic state are generally considered the enemy. In Israel, the armed underground movement which aims to create a Torah state is treated with kid gloves. The government dares not confront it -- or is secretly complicit with it.

Unless Israel’s fanatical settlers -- both religious-nationalist and ultra-orthodox -- are confronted, and their messianic ambitions tamed, there will be no peace in the Middle East. This means halting and reversing a powerful trend in Israeli society -- and in Israel’s armed forces, where the extremists are well-entrenched and, by all accounts, are steadily gaining ground. This is the essential precondition for any serious peace negotiations. But can it be done? Or is the region doomed to suffer more violence?

In a joint article in the Washington Post on 11 April, two prominent American political figures -- Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser and Stephen Solarz, a former U.S. congressman for New York -- urged Obama to go to the region himself on a “journey of peace” and, in a series of speeches in Jerusalem and Ramallah, urge Israelis and Palestinians to start serious negotiations. Such a dramatic move, they argued, could break the logjam.

But it will take more than speeches by Obama, however eloquent they might be, to persuade Israel’s fanatics to change course. Nothing short of real pressure would do the job -- such as an American threat to withdraw from Israel its diplomatic support, weapons supply and lavish funding. But such is Israeli influence in the U.S. Congress, in Washington think-tanks and the mainstream American press that nothing is less likely.

There has been much speculation in recent weeks that U.S. President Barack Obama, impatient with the current stalemate, may be about to launch his own peace plan. He has made clear that a settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict is a vital American interest. The clear suggestion is that he will use American muscle to persuade both the Arabs and the Israelis to negotiate on the basis of his plan. Netanyahu has already publicly rejected any hint of an “imposed peace.” The question, therefore, is how much presidential muscle can Obama actually use. He has already been put on notice by the Israeli lobby, and by leading Jewish figures such as Ronald Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, not to put pressure on Israel.

A recent publication, Israel’s Religious Right and the Question of Settlements by the International Crisis Group (www.crisisgroup.org), outlines the extent of the danger which Israel’s messianic terrorists pose to the peace process. The picture is not encouraging.

The ICG reports that tens of thousands of religious Zionists inhabit illegal settlements east of the separation barrier on the West Bank. Thousands more “hilltop youth” occupy armed outposts deep in Palestinian territory. These settlements and outposts operate some 200 paramilitary squads, armed with automatic weapons (and “the best telescopic sights on the market”) and even armoured vehicles. They perpetrate violence against the Palestinians and are ready to defy any attempt by the state to stop them.

Observers predict that an even larger and better-armed force, prepared for group action, could emerge if the government dared to remove an outpost, or curtail the settlers’ thuggery in any way.

Ultra-orthodox and national-religious politicians hold over a fifth of Knesset seats, representing some forty per cent -- 26 out of 65 parliamentarians -- of Netanyahu’s ruling coalition. They control the housing ministry and the Israel Land Administration, which manages state lands. These Greater Israel ideologues suffered a “messianic shock” when the then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon dismantled the Gaza settlements in 2005. The move challenged their confidence in the state and reinforced their determination never to allow the evacuation of Jews to happen again. They are adamantly opposed to any further withdrawals and to negotiations with the Palestinians.

Some national-religious rabbis go so far as to endorse the rabbinical license for a Jew to kill any Jew who relinquishes the Land of Israel to non-Jews -- an interpretation which Yigal Amir used to justify his assassination of Prime Minister Itzhak Rabin in 1995.

The Israeli armed forces have been deeply penetrated by religious extremists. Army Torah colleges, in which conscripts mix military service with religious study over a five-year period, have mushroomed in Israel. Nearly half are on the West Bank, graduating thousands of soldiers. National-religious officers are estimated to account for up to 30 per cent of the Israeli officer corps, with a particularly high concentration in combat units. One source told the International Crisis Group that “in a few years, religious soldiers will make up the majority of brigade commanders in all areas -- from F-16 fighter jets to submarines.”

A senior officer, of national-religious beliefs, explained:

“An order to withdraw [from the West Bank] will destroy Israel. It will split the army and turn part of it against the state. I would rather give up Tel Aviv than Hebron. We are not just a state of Jews, or a Jewish majority, but a Jewish state defending the land that is promised to us by the Bible, by God. It is Jewish land. I will defend Jewish land by all legitimate means -- and if that isn’t enough -- by illegitimate means. It can be by force.”

What does the ICG recommend to check this dangerous descent into the abyss? Demarcating an agreed Israeli-Palestinian border, rather than focussing efforts on a settlement freeze; announcing a compensation package to persuade some settlers to leave the West Bank voluntarily; reaching out to religious parties, such as Shas and Agudat Israel, and including them in the diplomatic process; insisting that Israeli security agencies and courts investigate and prosecute cases of anti-Palestinian violence. None of this seems enough.

It is surely time for Israel’s secular majority to wake up to the danger or risk finding itself living in a state run by messianic terrorists, shunned by the whole world.

Sunday, April 18, 2010

“PRIMORDIALISM” AND THE DECLINE OF HUMAN CULTURE


GORDON DUFF: “PRIMORDIALISM” AND THE DECLINE OF HUMAN CULTURE

April 17, 2010 posted by Gordon Duff ·

AMERICA, ISRAEL, AFGHANISTAN, ALL THE SAME

“TAPPING THE REPTILE BRAIN”

By Gordon Duff STAFF WRITER

Any discussion that challenges how people are conditioned by repeated lies and planned mythology is doomed to fail. The human mind has been debased to the point where it no longer learns as part of survival but takes in lies like a rat eating a corpse. Nearly every assumption we are expected to build on, from the phony heroics of Rudy Giuliani or the utterly discredited 9/11 investigation to the imaginary War on Terror was created in whole or part as a fiction, to entertain, amuse or to kill. The glue that holds Washington, Kabul, Tel Aviv, London, Zurich and Geneva together is war profits, drug money and oil speculation. What makes it all possible is the lies we call news, lies, staged terrorist “events” and wars where, if we didn’t supply the enemy ourselves, we would be using cluster bombs against spears. Building an enemy is far more important than defeating one.

Every word we are bombarded with separates us, American against American, Christian and Jew against Muslim. This is the plan, dehumanize everyone to everyone, then slaughter is little more than disposing of trash. Americans looked on Red China in the 50s and 60s as a society built on hate. Albania armed its entire population, buiding bunkers for each family, half of Russia had moved underground and East and West had maneuvered half the 3rd world into killing each other, all over the insane ideas that the East was Communist and the West Capitalist, when, in fact, both were thinly veiled military dictatorships playing at politics as little more than cover.

CHILDREN AS SOLDIERS

We have over 5000 years of history, a history where organized murder under the term “war” has become the norm. I always thought the Trojan Wars, fought over Helen’s promiscuity, as the dumbest war in history until the last Bush administration. Even if 9/11 were as stated, a conspiracy done by an Arab terrorist group, something no longer in evidence, a fact suppressed in most media, were true, the two wars we are stuck in are enigmatic.

  • Bin Laden denied involvement in 9/11, accusing Israel for arranging the attack. All bin Laden admissions since have been debunked as coming from Israel itself
  • No training camp has ever been located in Afghanistan nor has there ever been evidence that one had existed.
  • There is no evidence of an Arab terrorist organization in Afghanistan or Pakistan prior to the US invasion after 9/11. In fact, there is no evidence Al Qaeda ever existed prior to 9/11.
  • The Afghanistan war has had one purpose, to end the Taliban embargo on Heroin trafficking, the industry that has helped the US and Israel gain political control of every corrupt government in the region

What we have created, is a meat grinder, turning our own sons and daughters into soldiers, not to defend America from terrorism, but indoctrinated to fight a “holy war” against the brown people of the world and the religion of Islam. Calling this war and so many others anything but race war and ethnic cleansing is a lie. That so many of our troops are black and brown, Hispanic and even Muslim is ironic. We have now had several cases where our troops have massacred their own. Is it any wonder why?

WAR IS NEVER HUMAN, NO MATTER HOW WE PACKAGE IT

The infamous 2007 Apache helicopter video depicting the moral failure of our forces in Iraq was leaked with excellent timing. With Israel facing worldwide criticism for ethnic cleansing against the Palestinian people, doing to them exactly what American did to its own native population, this video gave Israel some breathing room. I hope Israel thanks their Chinese friends for helping provide this cover.

When our own “Christian warriors” return from the Middle East, and the reality of being duped sets in, many simply can’t survive. This makes me think of the Israeli pilots sent to strafe the USS Liberty. These were decent men sent on a brutal and criminal mission. Americans died but those who took part in the murder died to. Nobody survives committing an atrocity, nobody but a sociopath. Sociopaths never make it into war, they stay in government where they belong. Those who can’t survive the rigors of government become pundits, lecturers or, worst of all, attempt to be journalists.

Odd as it may seem, the biggest victims of the siege of Gaza are the Israeli troops involved. I know dozens who have served in the IDF, good and decent people. Many are friends, close friends. You can only lie to yourself so much. How does blowing up a water treatment plant make Israel safe? Was Israel unsafe? How long can someone hate another because of race or religion and remain human?

Let’s look in our own backyard.

THE INTERNET AND “MOB MENTALITY”

In the early days of the internet, AOL, Usenet and CompuServe, internet communities sprung up overnight, discussing everything from history to genealogy. The phenomenon of the “internet troll” came about, people whose anti-social nature was sublimated by the “real world” became virtual lions, Hitleresque in nature, spewing venom and hate with every peck at the keyboard. Over the years, as internet using began to reach tens of millions in the US alone, behaviorists began to see value in exploiting this vast underbelly of psychopaths. Could they be organized and manipulated? Is the next Oswald out there?

The behaviorists, funded by “think tanks” always seek one thing, funding for research, always that magic moment when a porpoise can be trained to blow up a ship or what if a rat could carry a bomb? Where would we be without behaviors and “think tanks.” These groups recruit marginalized academics with personality disorders to produce opinions “on demand” as though they were omelets. Put a glossy enough name, like The American Enterprise Insitute, behind a few angry, confused and delusional types unable to survive in the real world, and you can begin selling any idea as long as their is a client willing to pay. The ideas almost always run to one direction, the criminal acts of the powerful against decent people must always be justified.

If a thief has looted your retirement fund or your job has been mysteriously eliminated, the “theory” justifying this came from a “think tank.”

Behaviorists and “think tanks” also advise on policy. Would people and organizations like this advise a government to stage terrorist attacks on its own people in order to pass draconian laws, create new, massive and useless agencies and start a generation of war? Could such organizations help restructure banking law to allow “pump and dump” groups to trade phony sub-prime mortgage instruments, inflating 5 dollars of real property into millions in collateral to cover billions in debt until everything exploded? Oh, you thought Acorn did this?

THE POWER OF THE PSYCHOPATHIC PERSONALITY

The biggest impact the internet has had has been to explore the depths of the human soul. More hate, more threats, more insanity is spewed on the internet in one hour than came out of Nazi Germany in 12 years. With the sick, the paranoid, the angry and the uneducated so easy to find, catalog and manipulate, manipulate using some of the best scientific minds glad to work to debase humanity for a paycheck, a subculture of minor “kooks” took on the power of a political movement.

Man’s most basic inhuman behavior is racism. Cultural differences and religious divides exacerbated by religion has brought us into the area of “primordialism,” tapping behaviors once thought to originate in the medulla. Thus, where Germany justified their war in 1914 as an attempt to spread what they thought was the world’s most advanced culture under the watchwords, “Gott Ist Mit Uns” (God is with us), we have expanded through a psyche bombarded by electronic media a descent into the primordial ooze. What we call “racism” or “hate” is, in actuality, the use by technologically advanced societies and their scientifically perfected propaganda skills, using control of every aspect of culture to dehumanize the “enemy” and barbarize their own population.

Thus, the societal norm is to look on any chosen group, be it political, racial, religious, ethnic or of alternative sexual orientation as, not only inhuman but as a threat.

“PRIMORDIALISM” GOES MAINSTREAM

In America, you could parade with a Nazi arm band or wearing a Ku Klux Klan hood, carrying a burning cross, espousing threats to the “white race” and espousing separatism and even violence. Such organizations fell into such disrepute that their behaviors became criminalized and they, themselves, were scorned. Today, groups advocating ideas far more violent, far more hate oriented than the Klan or Nazi party walk the streets with heads held high. Hiding behind such superficial concepts of “family values” and “Christian Zionism” (a cult with beliefs tied to nuclear destruction and forced conversion of Jews to Christianity) and allied with the “robber barons” of the 21st century, the military/financial/oil/drug cartels that control half the world’s governments, barbarism comparable to any era in human history, not only survives, but spreads in ways previously unimagined.

The “value added” by use of scientific methodologies in manipulating human populations through exploiting primordial fears such as sexual humiliationor loss of territory for “hunter gatherer clans,” has been to create an intellectual environment that devalues knowledge and science as “elitism” and find virtue in fear and brutality. Thus, any normal human advancement is suppressed. The result is a caricature of ourselves, as though we had been written into a Star Trek episode as an example of a race in decline generally blamed on some obscure environmental toxin or bombardment by an “evil” sub-atomic particle.

THE SIMPLIST BIOLOGICAL IMPERATIVES SET ASIDE

Humans are not supposed to eat their own young, but it is exactly what we are doing. While we mortgage the economic future of our children through worldwide empires built on corruption and debt, building a series of oligarchical societies quickly returning the world to feudalism, we similarly are raising a generation of our children to fight wars, narco-wars, oil wars, wars meant to exploit resources and maximize poverty, despair and breed another generation of extremism and fear.

Who would have thought that societies capable of unimagined technological achievements, even capable of mirroring the miracles of creation and the universe, would descend into a reptilian culture? Simply follow popular culture. Entertainment is a mixture of post-apocalyptic horrors, dramas based on examination of rotting human remains or adventure series exalting hatred and vengeance.

SYMPTOMS OF DECLINE, MY LAI OR BUCHENWALD?

Turn on your television. You will be told that in some far off land, the son of a poverty stricken shepherd is being taught to memorize the Koran. You have seen this message a thousand times. You are told this child is learning to hate and must be bombed out of existence by use of robotic drones controlled by American teenagers at a base outside Washington DC. When, day after day, we hear that a school or market has been attacked in Pakistan or that an American drone has mistaken a wedding party for a terrorist conclave are we repulsed and horrified or do we feel some hidden satisfaction than an animal, strange and threatening has been slaughtered? That feeling, the fleeting joy at the death of innocents is the reptilian brain taking charge.

In 1945, American soldiers liberated a labor camp in Germany. Hundreds of dead and thousands of dying were found, subjected in unimaginable inhumanity. General Eisenhower ordered the residents of the nearby town to be taken to the camp to view what had gone on near their homes, their town, their churches, the churches they attended without fail each Sunday. Anyone in Germany found defending those responsible, simply speaking out in public or private, is imprisoned.

In 1968, American soldiers murdered 566 Vietnamese civilians, many of them small children, even infants. One officer was said to have committed many of the murders personally, machine-gunning women with babes in arms. He was arrested. A massive outcry for his release spread across the land, the biggest single movement in American history, a request that he be freed, despite the fact that tens of millions of Americans had seen films of his crimes, seen the babies in the ditch.

Vietnam maintains a museum at My Lai, much like the one Germany keeps at Dachau. Israel, with American help, has amassed a huge nuclear arsenal and a defense industry that turns out some of the world’s most advanced weapons. American troops ride in Israeli vehicles, use Israeli UAV aircraft and Israeli military electronics. Israel, while arming to the teeth under the motto, “never again,” now stands accused of the same crimes committed against its own people decades before.

America also stands accused of these same crimes, murder, genocide, torture, just as Germany had so long ago, just as America had before, in 1968. When America chose to exalt a murderer, what door did we open?