Israel Shamir

The great slaughter of innocents is imminent. Very soon, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of our brothers by Adam and Eve will be strafed, napalmed, and nuked. Boys and girls, unborn babes and old men will be brought to the altar of Vengeance and ritually slaughtered by the High Priest of that God, President George W. Bush. The time is aptly chosen, and it is hardly a coincidence. The ten days after Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, are called the Days of Trepidation, all the way to the tenth day, Yom HaDin, the Doomsday.

President Bush called his enterprise, Crusade. This title invokes in our memory the dour knights of Aquitaine and pious Frankish warriors, who took Cross and with the name of Our Lady on their lips ventured into a long and hard pilgrimage. Reality was worse. The Crusade was a Western Jihad and it caused a lot of bloodshed. The Crusaders were wild and unruly, they sacked the most beautiful Christian city on earth, Constantinople, and they drenched in blood the holy ground of Jerusalem. A Crusader chronicler Radulf of Caen, wrote of his comrades-at-arms, in the Syrian city of Maarra, ‘they impaled babies on spits, grilled and devoured them’. They were rough folk, and still I would like to save the name of these killers and cannibals from being besmirched by association with G.W. Bush’ Crusade. They never went after revenge, this most un-Christian, even anti-Christian feeling.

The very essence of Christ’s Gospel was the rejection of revenge. That was the great difference between the Church and the Synagogue, these two sisters born two thousand years ago. This difference is built in, it is the inherent most prominent feature of the gap between the two faiths: while Christians are called to pray for their enemies, Jews dream of vengeance.

In the intended ideological confusion of last century, Christians are taught to think that the Jews wait for Messiah who is Christ. Christianity teaches that He came and will come again, while Judaism considers the Messiah did not come yet, that is all the difference according to the teaching of Judeo-Christianity. But reality is vastly different: Christ came to save, while Messiah comes to take revenge. It was proven by the brilliant Israeli scholar, Prof. Israel Jacob Yuval of Hebrew University in his new book, Two Nations In Your Womb[i]. ‘Vengeful salvation’, as Yuval called it, was adopted by the European Jews from the old Pharisee sources and became the prevailing doctrine of the Synagogue.

When Dr Israel Yuval published his insightful book on theology of vengeance in Judaism, it was accepted with great enthusiasm by his Israeli colleagues, but the American Jewish scholars hated it. Dr Ezra Fleischer wrote a vehement critique, concluding it with the words: ‘it would be better if such a book would not be printed, but if it was printed, it should be sentenced to oblivion’.

Prof. Yuval quotes many ancient Jewish texts proving this point. “In the End of the days (when the Messiah comes) God will destroy, kill and exterminate all the nations but the sons of Israel”, written in the Sefer Nitzahon Yashan, written by a German Jew in 13^th c. A liturgical poet Klonimus b. Judah had a vision of ‘God’s hands full of Goys’ corpses’. Even more dreadful dreams of blood and destruction precede the first attacks on Jews in the end of 11^th century. A hundred years before the Crusaders’ onslaught on Jews, R. Simon b. Yitzhak calls on God ‘to take His sword and slaughter the Gentiles’. In order to hasten the destruction of Gentiles, the sages of Europe adopted curses against Christians and Christ, and introduced them into liturgy of Passover, Doomsday and even the daily prayer.

That is why the decision of President Bush to embark of the campaign of revenge is not a Christian act. One could argue that the President and his administration are manipulated by the Jews, who dream of vengeance. Not in vain, immediately after Wall Street was hit by kamikaze, Bibi Nataniyahu said ‘it is very good for us’[ii]. Not in vain, Ariel Sharon tried to compare Palestinians to Osama b. Laden. Not in vain, Israelis demand destruction of Baghdad and Teheran, of Korea and Sudan, of everybody who is not taking orders from Tel Aviv or Washington.

A mystic would not call it ‘manipulation’, but would accept for its face value the arrival of Messiah of Vengeance in the unlikely figure of G.W. Bush. The Messiah of Vengeance has actually a different name in Christian theology. He is called Antichrist.

The Christian theologians tried to delve in the qualities of this apocalyptic figure. St John of Damascus prophesied, ‘Antichrist will come to Jews and for Jews, against Christ and Christians’. (John the Damascene was a friend of Islam and he explained Muslim dogma of eternal Koran as a form of the Christian teaching of Logos). Church Fathers considered the Rise of Antichrist as the rise and temporary triumph of Judaism. In 10 c., St Andrew the Byzantine prophesied, ‘The kingdom of Israel will be restored and it will become the launching pad of Antichrist’.

This proximity of Israel to Apocalypse is felt by millions of devout Christians in the United States. They learned that the rise of Antichrist is the stage on the way to the Second Coming. But, being misled by their pastors, they draw a paradoxical conclusion and decided to side with Antichrist. They forgot the words, ‘the Son of Man will go as it has been decreed, but woe to that man’ who sides with Antichrist.

There are two days of the Jewish calendar especially suitable for the vengeance. One of them is Purim, the day, when according to Esther, the Jews slaughtered 75,000 Gentiles in Persia. On Purim, Dr Baruch Goldstein of Brooklyn and Hebron massacred the devout Muslims on the Tomb of Abraham. On Purim, the ministers of Germany were executed in Nuremberg. On Purim, two hundred thousand Iraqis were immolated by the US Air Force in 1991. Purim is auspicious, but Doomsday is even more appropriate for the vengeance on the grand scale, for the massacre of Messianic proportions. Soon afterwards, there is the feast of Succoth, when the Messiah could be revealed.

Just one minute before we declare Bush as the Antichrist and/or Messiah, there is one circumstance that calls for investigation. We know now of some inside trading in insurance and airline shares that imply a previous knowledge of the forthcoming attack. We know of some advance warnings in the Jewish-owned investment banking system. I can not imagine a Muslim terrorist who would try and fit the schedule of the Jewish High Holidays. Even less I could imagine the apocalyptic Antichrist and his Jewish Cabbalist advisers buy futures on the stock exchange. It is easier to seek some bad guys, not necessarily diabolic. Prudence demands we should account for mundane factors before going to the celestial ones. That was the preferred method of Father Brown, the hero of G.K. Chesterton: before applying for a miracle, check material sources.

Indeed, there is no certainty that President Bush is manipulated by the Jews. Such presumption is based on idea that there is a non-Jewish United States, ‘America stand-alone’, manipulated and subverted by Jews. If it would be the case, by miraculously excluding the Jews from public discourse, this original America would be regained. Actually, the recent post-terror discourse in the US is a hesitant proof to the contrary.

Many American public figures, Jews and non-Jews alike, called for revenge. “There is only one way to begin to deal with people like this, and that is you have to kill some of them even if they are not immediately directly involved in this thing”, said the former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger[iii], who heads the Jewish organisation for claims to Germany, at USD 300,000 per annum.

‘The response to this unimaginable 21st-century Pearl Harbor should be as simple as it is swift - kill the bastards. A gunshot between the eyes, blow them to smithereens, poison them if you have to. As for cities or countries that host these worms, bomb them into basketball courts’ said Steve Dunleavy in New York Post[iv]. In Washington Post, Rich Lowry proposed, ‘If we flatten part of Damascus or Tehran or whatever it takes, that is part of the solution[v]

The best quote goes to Ann Coulter, ‘This is no time to be precious about locating the exact individuals directly involved in this particular terrorist attack.... We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity (!?). We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war’. She wrote it in New York Daily News[vi], the newspaper of Mortimer Zuckerman, the current Head of the Presidents’ Conference of American Jewish Organizations.

This vengeful spirit of the American press is an aberration of the Western discourse. If you sift the world literature of the Christian and Muslim lands, you would discover that revenge appears rarely as the main subject of an important book. Nikolai Gogol wrote a Gothic short story called The Terrible Revenge, Prosper Mérimée wrote a novelette Colomba on Corsican vendetta. C’est tout. Brits always considered revenge a very un-English trend, certainly not cricket. ‘Vengeful’ is a negative word in every Christian and Muslim culture. The Jewish culture, au contraire, is saturated with the idea of vengeance, as it draws straight from the Old Testament, without the redeeming filter of the New Testament or Koran.

We Jews know it better than anybody. A brilliant American Jewish journalist, John Sack noticed it in his Eye for Eye, a chilling book about horrible revenge exacted by Jews from the German civilians after WWII. This book tells of tortures, ‘extra-judicial killings’, mass poison and other horrors. You are not likely to get this book, as the Jewish establishment succeeded to suppress it and keep it out of bookshops.

Not surprisingly, Israel promoted vengeance into its daily policy. Its attacks on Palestinians were called peulot tagmul, the acts of vengeance. One of these acts was perpetrated by the Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 14 of October, 1953, when he and his soldiers murdered some sixty peasants, women and children in the village of Qibya. The invasion of Lebanon in 1982 with its 20,000 murdered Lebanese and Palestinians, Christians and Muslims, was an act of revenge for the attempt to assassinate Israeli ambassador in London. During last intifada, every act of Israeli terror is called ‘retribution’ or ‘retaliation’ by Israelis and by American Jewish-owned media.

This Jewish infatuation with vengeance survived the hazardous crossing of the Atlantic. The American Jews created Hollywood, and Hollywood made vengeance its main subject. In a way, American cinema is an expression of the Jewish collective subconscious, and it was the main factor in creation of the American psyche. From Hollywood, vengefulness flew all over the earth, and certainly helped to create the world we inhabit. In other words, there was no need for a conspiracy. Rather immature America could not withstand the impact of Jewish mentality, and she became a Jewish State, the big sister of Israel. A grandson of Trier Rabbi, who grew in the Church, Karl Marx actually prophesied in the 1840s (!) that America will become a Jewish state, and will embrace the Jewish ideology of greed and alienation. It explains successes of Jews: it is just natural that in the Jewish state, Jews succeed more.

This explanation allows us to answer the question we posted previously, does America support Israel because of the Jewish lobby or because of the ‘true interest of American corporations’. The answer is, the Jewish lobby is a superfluous body supportive of Israeli right-wing, while America as a whole is a grander Jewish state with interests outside the Middle East as well.

This presumption explains away a lot of queries. It explains incredible 99 per cent vote for support of Israel. It explains endless Holocaust museums, Holocaust studies and Holocaust films. It explains centrality of Jews in American life, as now America views world events from a traditional Jewish position, ‘whether it is good for Jews?’

It explains the US walkout at Durban. JW Bush did not mind to quarrel with Europe and Japan and went back on Kyoto treaty. He did not give a damn to annoy Russia and China with his unilateral decision to drop Strategic Arms Treaty. But here he heard His Master’s Voice. This haughty rejection of Africa and Asia, this insulting dismissal of the Afro-American community, this rejection of the great cause of struggle against racism was an additional proof that the US became a sister state to Israel.

Recently, President Vladimir Putin tried to justify his onslaught on Chechens in an interview to Newsweek[vii]. He said, the Chechen leaders ‘publicly called for the extermination of Jews’, relegating critics of his war to the ranks of anti-Semites. Now, Chechnya has no Jews, and Chechen leaders’ opinion on Jews would be irrelevant, if anti-Semitism would still preserve its original meaning, i.e. anti-Jewish prejudice or racism. In this form, it does not exist anymore, as we proved elsewhere[viii], but the word received a new meaning. It became an equivalent of anti-Americanism in the days of McCarthy, or as anti-Sovietism in Brezhnev’s Soviet Union.

Whoever rejects new American paradigm, in America or elsewhere, is an anti-Semite by definition. That is why good persons of Jewish origin, whether Noam Chomsky or Woody Allen, St Paul or Karl Marx are called ‘anti-Semites’. They are usually rejected by the Jewish community, but their names are used to defend the structure they attacked.

An offence to the Jewish community is not considered a form of racism, as ordinary racism is tolerated with great ease, especially if it is directed towards Arabs (new enemies of Jews) or Blacks (old enemies of Jews). It is treated as a ‘lese majesté’ (in the years of Jewish ascendancy in the Soviet Union (1917 – 1937), people were shot for an anti-Jewish remark). Manfred Stricker of Strasbourg campaigned to name the local university after Dr Schweitzer, while the Jewish community preferred the name of a Jewish scholar with a loose connection to the city. As the result, Manfred Stricker was sentenced to six months of jail.

While speaking to students in Harvard, Emory and other Ivy League universities, I noticed that they do not know the name of Arnold Toynbee. The greatest British philosopher of history in 20^th century made an error: he spoke of the tragedy of Palestinians. He also mentioned the African slavery as a tragedy on a par with the Jewish holocaust. As a result, he was erased and disappeared from American conscience. This totality of control over public discourse explains obedience of American (and European) intellectuals. For an intellectual, it is better to be called a paedophile, but not an anti-Semite.

In the Jewish American state, the Jews form its ‘Church’, its ideological establishment. I feel about this ‘church’ as Voltaire, who said, “Destroy the infamy” of the Catholic Church he was born into.

In the Jewish American state, the Jews are the most successful group of society. This sudden rise to glory and riches should not be a cause for vertigo and self adulation. Other way around. Following the line of thought of this great American philosopher, Immanuel Wallerstein, I shall say: material success in our days is a sign of moral failure. ‘Success’ and riches is not a sign of God’s benevolence. Anyway, not of God who blessed the poor. A man who succeeds in the robbers’ gang, fails in the eyes of God. Our world with its starving millions and over-prosperous minority is immoral and anti-Christian, as anti-Christian as the ‘Crusade’ of President Bush.

[i]Publisher: Alma/Am Oved, Tel Aviv, 2000, ISBN 965-13-1428-1

[ii] NY Times, 12.9.01

[iii] CNN, 9/11/01

[iv] 9/12/01

[v] --Rich Lowry, National Review editor, to Howard Kurtz (Washington Post, 9/13/01)

[vi] 9/12/01

[vii] 2.7.01

[viii] The Third Dove

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Reproduced From: mediamonitors.net

GALILEE FLOWERS

By Israel Shamir

When in 1543, the typhoon-blown Portuguese schooners approached the shores of Japan, the astonished sailors could not believe their eyes: on a warm spring day, the tropical island ahoy was buried under snow. They were witness to one of the real Seven Wonders of the World, the flowers of sakura, the wild cherry of Japan. As soon as the benevolent heaven bestows this seasonal gift to earth, the Japanese forget their wives and kids, their duties, employers and bills; they just sit under the trees, drink sake wine and write poems, short and sharp as swords.

That is why, these days, leaving behind our man-made troubles, I sit under the white cloud of a tree and watch the beautiful white and pink blossoms of almond trees covering the hills of Galilee. These lovely blossoms are our version of the Japanese sakura, and a chance to indulge in the custom of flower viewing. A honey aroma wafts through the air; the skies are crystal blue. Yellow daisies dance on the lush green grass at the base of these almond wonders, interspersed by violet cyclamen and red anemones. The glorious backdrop is provided by the huge snow mass of Jebel al Sheikh (Mt Hermon). Palestine is a sister to Japan. These two hilly lands are home to stubborn mountain folk, devoted to their customs and ways.

For all the similarities in the landscape, there are differences. The hill we sit on, all white like Jaffa sea surf, is the ruin of a village. If we were in Japan, it would be alive and humming. The village of Birim has been dead for fifty years. It is beautiful even in death, like Ophelia floating down the stream in the pre-Raphaelite painting of Millais. It was not ruined by war. Its Christian inhabitants were expelled from their houses well after the 1948 war. They were told to leave for a week or two, for ‘security’ reasons. They had no option but to believe the Israeli officers and move out. Their village was dynamited, their church surrounded by barbed wire. They went to Israeli court, they went to the government, commissions were appointed and petitions signed. Nothing helped. Ever since, for 50 years, they have lived in the nearby villages and on Sundays they continue to visit their church. Their lands were seized by their Jewish neighbors, but they still bring their dead to be buried in the church graveyard, under the sign of the cross.

Until the arrival of the Israeli army, this ruined village with its orphaned church was the home of the rural Christians of Birim who, for centuries of Moslem rule, lived in peace with their Moslem neighbors of Nebi Yosha and with the old Sephardi Jewish community of nearby Safed. This little Guernica in the Galillee can single-handedly undermine the myth of a ‘Judeo-Christian’ civilization opposing a ‘monstrous’ Islam. This myth lays at the foundation of the Christian Zionist movement; among its fervent supporters, one can find a friend of Mark Rich and a newly minted New York citizen, W. J. Clinton.

The problems of the Middle East are ugly enough without the current Moslem-bashing. The pro-Israeli pundits of the New York Times quote the blood-curling verses on Jihad, retell the old traditions of religious wars and persecutions, to ‘prove’ Islam’s cruelty and intolerance. They are repeated by a pleasant upper-class Jewish lady from London, Barbra Amiel. In a sotto voce, she writes about ‘exclusivist’ Islam and Jewish ‘moderation’. In order to incite hatred, Israel’s lobby works all the ropes. Before the rise of Israel, Arab sheiks were depicted as romantic heroes in movies acted by Rudolf Valentino. Nowadays, the pro-Israel producers of Hollywood turn out propaganda films on ill-shaven Moslem terrorists with the subtlety of Edward D. Wood, Jr. This new prejudice is amplified a hundredfold by the Christian Zionist Congress, claiming ‘protection for Christians of Palestine from the Moslem (?!) persecution’. These people obviously have not walked among the ruins of Birim.

Another email comes into my laptop, this time from Gaza. An American girl, Alison Weir from San Francisco evades Israeli bullets, comforts the scared Palestinian kids, and writes: “The problem is when you know the truth, it is far too cruel, far too diametrically opposite what we used to think and what everyone still thinks to express. The lie is too big, the repression too complete, the Palestinians' lives too horrible to write about reasonably”.

Well, Alison is right. We face a huge lie, an anti-Moslem blood libel, and it is time to stop it. I do not think that the problems of Middle East have anything to do with religion. But if the supporters of Israel want to wake up the sleeping ghost of religious intolerance, to incite Christians against Moslems, let us audit their balance.

If these Christian Zionists care for Christ, not only for Zion, let them learn what Jews and Moslems feel towards Christ. Rami Rozen expressed the Jewish tradition in a long feature in a major Israeli newspaper Haaretz[i]: “Jews feel towards Jesus today what they felt in 4 c or in the Middle Ages… It is not fear, it is hatred and despise”. “For centuries, Jews concealed from Christians their hate to Jesus, and this tradition continues even now”. “He is revolting and repulsive”, said an important modern religious Jewish thinker. Rozen writes that this “repulsion passed from the observant Jews to the general Israeli public”.

On Christmas Eve, according to a report in the Jerusalem local paper, Kol Ha-Ir[ii], Hassids customarily do not read holy books, as it could save Jesus from eternal punishment (the Talmud teaches that Jesus boils in hell[iii]). This custom was dying out, but Hassids of Habad, the fervent nationalists, brought it back to life. I still remember old Jews spitting while passing by a church, and cursing the dead, while passing by a Christian cemetery. Last year in Jerusalem, a Jew decided to refresh the tradition. He spat at Holy Cross, carried in the procession along the city. Police saved him from further trouble, but the court fined him $50, despite his claim that he just fulfilled his religious duty.

Last year, the biggest Israeli tabloid Yedioth Aharonoth reprinted in its library the Jewish anti-Gospel, Toledoth Eshu, compiled in the Middle Ages. It is the third recent reprint, including one in a newspaper. If the Gospel is the book of love, Toledoth is the book of hate for Christ. The hero of the book is Judas. He captures Jesus by polluting his purity. According to Toledoth, the conception of Christ was in sin, the miracles of Jesus were witchcraft, his resurrection but a trick.

Joseph Dan, a Professor of Jewish mysticism in Hebrew University in Jerusalem, writing on the death of Jesus stated: “The modern Jewish apologists, hesitantly adopted by the church, preferred to put the blame on Romans. But the medieval Jew did not wish to pass the buck. He tried to prove that Jesus had to be killed, and he was proud of killing Him. The Jews hated and despised Christ and Christians”. Actually, adds Prof. Dan, there is little place to doubt that the Jewish enemies of Jesus caused his execution.

Even today, Jews in Israel refer to Jesus by the demeaning word Yeshu (instead of Yeshua), meaning ‘Perish his name’. There is an ongoing argument, whether His name was turned into a swear word, or other way around. In a similar pun, the Gospel is called ‘Avon Gilaion’, the booklet of Sin. These are the endearing feeling of the friends of Christian Zionists towards Christ.

What about Moslems? The Moslems venerate Christ. He is called ‘The Word of God”, “Logos”, Messiah, the Prophet and is considered “a Messenger of God”, along with Abraham, Moses and Muhammad. Many chapters of the Kor’an tell the story of Christ, his virgin birth and his persecution by Jews. His saintly mother is admired, and the Immaculate Conception is one of the tenets of Islam. The name of Christ glorifies the golden edifice of Haram a-Sharif. According to the Moslem faith, it was there that the founder of Islam met Jesus, and they prayed together. The Hadith, the Moslem tradition, says in the name of the prophet, ‘We do not forbid you to believe in Christ, we order you to”. Moslems identify their prophet with Paracletes, the Helper (Jn 14:16) whose coming was predicted by Jesus. They venerate places associated with the life of Jesus: the place of Ascension, the Tomb of Lazarus, the Holy Sepulchre are adjacent to a mosque and perfectly accessible by Christians.

While Moslems do not consider Jesus – God, they proclaim him as the Messiah, the Anointed one, the Paradise Dweller. This religious idea, familiar to Nestorians and other early churches, but rejected by mainstream Christianity, opened the gates for those Jews, who could not part with the notion of strict monotheism. That is why many Palestinian Jews and Christians of the 7th century accepted Islam and became Palestinian Moslems. They remained in their villages, they did not depart for Poland or England, they did not learn Yiddish, they did not study the Talmud, but they continued to shepherd their flocks and plant almond trees, they remained faithful to their land and to the great idea of the fraternity of men.

In the south of Hebron, in the ruins of Susiah, one can see how in the course of two centuries a synagogue slowly evolved into a mosque, as the population of nearby caves abandoned the exclusionary faith of Babylonian wizards and adopted Islam. These shepherds still live there, in the same caves. In the last year, the Israeli army has twice tried to expel them to provide more room for new settlers from Brooklyn.

Why, in this season of blossoming almond trees, do I brood on the sensitive subject of Jewish and Moslem attitudes towards Christ? Because one has to stop the mills of hatred operated by Israel’s supporters. Because the “Judeo-Christian” code language is being used to justify the barbed wire around Birim’s Church and the tanks around Bethlehem. Because there is a duty to remove an obstacle from the path of the blind.

The majority of the Christian Zionists are simple misled souls, people of good intentions but little knowledge. They think they ‘support Jews’, but they promote the Christ-hating spirit among the Jews. It was not in vain that a hero of the Zionist Bible, Exodus by Leon Uris, kept a poster in his room saying ‘We crucified Christ’. It was not in vain that an Israeli soldier on the roadblock of Bethlehem told me yesterday, ‘We starve the beasts’, referring to the native Christians of the city of Nativity. It was not in vain that the Gospel was burned on a stake in Israel, while anti-Gospel literature is widely spread; that new immigrant Jews embracing Christianity are persecuted and deported; that every preacher of the Christian faith in Israel can be sent to jail according to new anti-Christian laws; that Israeli archaeologists erase the Christian holy sites and memories off the face of the Holy Land.

To the leaders of the Christian Zionists, who surely know these facts, but lead their innocent flock on the path of the Anti-Christ, I say, “Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Christ to sin, it would be better for him to have a large millstone tied round his neck and be drowned in the deep sea” (Mt 18:6).

To my Jewish brothers I say: the opinions of medieval Jews do not bind us. Every Jew can decide for himself, whether to pray for the destruction of the Gentiles or to share the blessing of the Holy Land with the villagers of Birim and Bethlehem. Within the Jewish people, there were always spiritual descendants of the prophets who wished to bring peace and blessing to all the children of Adam. As true as this almond blossom, in you the prophecy will be fulfilled: ‘All the nations of the earth will bless you’ (Deut. 7).

Israel Shamir is one of the best-known and respected Russian Israeli writers and journalists. He wrote for Haaretz, BBC, Pravda and translated Agnon, Joyce and Chandler into Russian. His articles The Rape of Dulcinea, Kid Sister and The Test Failed could be found on many Internet sites, http://www.thestruggle.org/ , http://www.antiwar/ , http://www.nilemedia/ etc. He can be reached at shamiri_@netvision.net.il , or write P.O.B. 23714 Tel Aviv 61236

Reproduced From: http://www.al-bushra.org/ecu-inter/zionist.htm

“The Jewish lobby wants to keep the Palestinian struggle in the politically correct boundaries, where it is as harmful as a kitten.”

CHICAGO POWWOW

By Israel Shamir

A response to the Kugel Eaters from a good friend caused me to have second thoughts. “Don't go picking on people trying to do good work. My friend Sara is not for separatism, but she does feel like a minority among American Jews and she is right. They need to get together to powwow (an old American Indian word) against Mega”. It is probably true, we Jews-for-Palestine need a bit of mutual mental support, like gays leaving the closet. If that was the idea, the conference was justified. Its participants met with similarly minded folks, and it gave them strength and new friends.

It is with organizers of the conference that I found myself at odds, as they were behind the broad personal attack on me. Steven Feuerstein and Mitchell Plitnick, the chief organizers of Junity, disapprove of the idea of pluralistic democratic state in Palestine. It is a perfectly legitimate position, quite natural for men who value Jewish unity and identity as highly as they do. But instead of just saying so, and engaging in the political dispute, they preferred a devious way.

Feuerstein sent forward his friend Abunimah, as he wrote in his rather corny confession: “I know Abunimah well. He is one of the smartest and more principled human beings I have, in fact, ever met. I am some 13 years older than him, but every time we are together I think to myself: "I want to be like him when I grow up”.

Abunimah wrote his letter, accusing me of … anti-Semitism. He was duly rewarded by the prime appearance at Junity and a joint walk in the park. I think this “smartest human being” manifested his political naïveté. He thought it will make him and the Palestinian cause many new Jewish allies. As a matter of fact, he just supported another branch of the Lobby. He also scared away some potential allies: who would like to enter the fray where stab in the back is considered ‘a realization of First Amendment’?

Together with Feuerstein, Abunimah employed the classic weapon of the Jewish lobby, guilt by association. I quoted[i] Christopher Bollyn, a Spotlight journalist, who wrote an explication of my article. Immediately Steven Feuerstein made an observation: “I am astonished that Shamir would rely on a reference from a journalist at Liberty Lobby's Spotlight to support his views and reputation. Liberty Lobby is an extreme right-wing organization with fascist and neo-nazi inclinations. Any friend of Liberty Lobby is no friend of mine”.

I certainly do not seek friendship of Mr. Feuerstein. As a matter of fact, I do not know whether I wish to befriend Liberty Lobby, or whether the Liberty Lobby wishes to befriend me. We did not swap cigars and small mauve billet-doux yet. All I did was quote a forum communication of a journalist from the Spotlight. In the best of his smear tactics, Mr. Feuerstein builds a syllogism: you quote a man who writes for a newspaper. Ergo, you support all this newspaper ever published.

Socrates would reject this crooked logic and say: one may quote even a New York Times journalist, and it does not imply support for bombing Iraq and the strangling of Palestine. But lesser folk fall into the trap and begin to discuss the newspaper of Mr. Bollyn. Abunimah ‘finds’ the goods: “there is a prominent link on the Spotlight site to a periodical called The Barnes Review”. This Barnes Review is up to no good, he continues for a couple of pages. We would not follow him for a simple reason that you can access practically every site on the Web via a couple of links. You can even access Abunimah’s site from my site[ii] via two links. So, the discussion of virtues and faults of the Barnes Review is as relevant to our subject, as kings to cabbages in the Lewis Carroll droll passage. It shows profound lack of sincerity of the Abunimah - Feuerstein team.

Nigel Perry, another friend of Feuerstein, imported wholesale personal accusations from right-wing Zionist Camera site and the revisionist site of Dr David Irving. He is not afraid of the guilt by association. He goes even further, and exclaims: [Shamir’s words are] “insulting to the genuine friends of Palestinians from Israel: the Allegra Pachecos, the Lea Tsemels, and the Andre Rosenthals who struggle in the Israel legal system on behalf of Palestinian rights; or the Gila Svirskys, the Uri Avnerys, the Uri Davis', the Roni Ben-Efrats, and the Mikado Warshawskis who struggle among the Israeli public and in front of Israeli bulldozers on behalf of Palestinian rights; or the Amira Hass' and the Gideon Levys who struggle in the Israeli media on behalf of Palestinian rights”.

In the Zionist discourse it is a standard rhetoric figure, to speak on behalf of the ‘millions murdered by Nazis’ or ‘all victims of Arab terror’. But even a Zionist usually chooses to speak on behalf of dead. In order to speak on behalf of live persons, you are supposed to ask for their instructions. Amira Haas, Gideon Levy and the rest are able to write for themselves, and if they would feel insulted, they would surely voice it. Barmy Brit just used their names in vain. I loved his plurals and struggles. As we say in Israel, ‘it sounds better in Yiddish’, as in English it sounds quite awful.

Perry would not recognize sincerity even if he would stumble into it by chance. He boldly claims, that “Christopher Bollyn of The SPOTLIGHT informs us that "Christ killers" was a perfectly acceptable characterization of Jews’. Naturally Christopher Bollyn said nothing of the sort, but Perry knows, repeat a lie often enough, it will become accepted for its face value. He does not desist from making a Nazi-style remark, “Shamir might not be strictly Jewish in all the senses of the word”. There are not many Jews ‘strictly Jewish in all the senses of the word’ found in the Oxford or Webster dictionaries (mean, greedy etc). I hope I am not one of them, either.

The purpose of the attack orchestrated by Feuerstein, was twofold. First, to rush the Jewish supporters back into the fold of Jewish Unity, where they would be guided by Feuerstein and saved from anti-Semitism by his tame Palestinian, Abunimah. Harry Clark characterized it: “The JUNITY agenda begins with a presentation on how Jewish traditions inform peace activism, and the balance of the program is much concerned with Jewish outreach and education. Its favored mode of interaction is the "Arab-Jewish dialogue", which it enters from a position of moral equivalence, or even superiority, e.g., " 'We' have suffered, you have suffered, let's talk." (See Edward Said's scathing account of "dialogue" in "Peace and Its Discontents"). Jewish Unity invites a favored Arab-American, Ali Abunimah ("Working With Our Allies") to certify its presentation.

“Jewish Unity's language and program are recycled from similar impulses during the first intifada 10+ yrs ago, and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon 10 yrs before that. Here we are in 2001, Sharon is PM, Palestine is getting the Warsaw Ghetto treatment, and the announcements only refer discreetly to a "variety of views" and propose a lowest common denominator of "completely ending occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip," all the while disingenuously protesting "mainstream" Jewish organizational and media views. "Jewish Unity" means Jewish consensus, Jewish limits, the pale of acceptable opinion, beyond which one cannot go”. (http://www-personal.umich.edu/~hfc/mideast/iscritic.htm).

Stan Heller, whom I like and respect, made in my opinion an error of judgment, by placing a call starting ‘If you are Jewish…’ I do not think it is good to enforce Jewish identity, it will surely please our adversaries.

There is a second reason for the attack, as well. The Jewish lobby wants to keep the Palestinian struggle in the politically correct boundaries, where it is as harmful as a kitten. By following the guidelines of Feuerstein-Abunimah-Perry, Palestinians get as an ally, such person as Naomi Jaffe of Troy NY (she refers to herself thus: ‘I am a Jew who has been active for 40 years in feminist, anti-racist, and anti-imperialist movements in the United States. I am currently chair of the Free Mumia Committee of Albany, NY.”)

I do not write for Trotskyite Feminists, as I am not worried they will embrace Sharon, or that he will embrace them. I write for the general warm-blooded audience, and the following response provides full proof it works:

Dear Mr. Shamir, I am a Christian living in the Midwest, USA. I read your article, The Third Dove. It absolutely blew me away. I firmly accept the Holy Scriptures as the authoritative words of God. Raised as a Baptist, I accept the Bible figuratively, historically, symbolically AND literally. Having read the prophecies I know that God has promised Israel a domain far more expansive than the thin strip of beach currently in her possession. I have not wavered in my faith in God and His words, and still believe this shall come to pass.”

“As an American, I've spent most of my mature life subconsciously trying to "help" God complete His plan, thinking that politics could fulfill scripture. My special faith in God and God's special people (the Hebrews) somehow justified the deaths of nearly 500 Palestinians this year alone, including women and children. If I die and learn from God Himself that He accomplished His special plans using tear gas, rubber bullets and propaganda I should think I'll be disappointed.”

“Your words and perspectives have helped me change the attitude that allowed me to morally and consciously accept a terrible injustice. God doesn't need me to fulfill His words. And Israel can take care of herself the same as Sweden or Pakistan. I may not know what IS the peaceful solution, but I now know what it IS NOT. Best regards and thanks, Spencer Warren”.

This is a proof that the so-called Christian Zionists are the soft underbelly of the beast, and one can cause their disengagement. Probably that is the second important reason why the Jewish Lobby went into battle. The Junity leaders could never influence the American audience, as they are too nationalistic. Perry writes with arrogance: "Speaking as someone who has been steeped, boiled, and occasionally roasted in Christianity for over a decade now....." I think it is quite offensive for the Christian audience, but then, he cares for the Jewish one.

Mitchell Plitnick of Junity, responding to Mamilla Pool, justified the holocaust of Palestinian Christians in the 7th century with the Sharonesque 'retaliation' rhetoric, so familiar to us. He wrote: "Jews clearly, and quite justifiably, supported the Persian invasion, and they did let loose with intense vengeance which did have to be reigned in by the conquering Persians, but this was clearly the result of the treatment Jews had received from Christians for decades before". I doubt a man of such views could sincerely support a just peace in Palestine.

If some of the attackers got into the fray in the spur of the moment, let them desist. The world is big enough for all of us. Let them write for people who like their style, and I shall write for the folks who prefer my writing. Yes, ‘Don't go picking on people trying to do good work’ is quite true... and if they would not pick on me any longer I shall not pick on them.

Israel Shamir is an Israeli writer and journalist, living in Jaffa. His other articles can be found on his site http://shamir.mediamonitors.net/ or email shamiri_@netvision.net.il

On Shamir Controversy see http://www-personal.umich.edu/~hfc/mideast/iscritic.htm

If you do not wish to receive his articles, email back with subject ‘remove’.

If you are interested in the Together Network, please reply with subject ‘sawa’.

THE NEW COMPLAINT OF PORTNOY

By Israel Shamir
March 18, 2001

The Viennese Jewish shrinks decided to disinvite the American Palestinian Professor Edward Said, who had been called to lecture them in memory of Sigmund Freud. The Professor had been seen throwing a stone towards an Israeli border. The psychiatrists said it speaks a lot about his subconscious. They would never throw a rock, as the wild Arab from Columbia University; they prefer Sharon’s missiles.

I think it is a right approach, and it should be applied not only to professor Said. In the far-away 1969, Phillip Roth decided to probe the subconscious of his contemporary American Jew. In the novel, Portnoy’s Complaint, Roth’s hero, Alexander Portnoy, lies on the psychiatrist’s couch and tells of his inner feelings, domineering mother and adolescent sex. What would a modern Portnoy blubber on the newest reclining couch model 2001?

We can find this out by turning towards the press. Philip Weiss[i] in the New York Observer noted that the Jews are to politics and media what the blacks are to basketball. The leading media powerhouses like the New York Times Corporation and the Washington Post are fully kosher, owned by Jews and a substantial majority of the editorials and the op-eds are written by Jews. They are representative of the Jewish American opinion. With a very few exceptions, they are supportive of Israel, its policies towards the Palestinians and its brave ruler, general Sharon.

The situation in our land is well known. The Jews rule supreme. The local non-Jewish inhabitants have few rights. The majority of them is disenfranchised. Their property is seized at will and their sources of independent livelihood are destroyed. Their cities are besieged, activists assassinated, women and children starved. They have no access to public media, to welfare; they are not allowed to even go to the beach. None of this is secret. It is freely discussed in the Israeli media.

It would be a gross exaggeration to say that the Jews of Israel hate goys and wish them all gone. To borrow the expression of Conrad Black, the owner of British and Canadian newspapers, it would be ‘a lie worthy of Goebbels’. Israel imports hundreds of thousands of goys and shiksas: Chinese, Thai, Romanians, Ukrainians, Russians and Africans. In just the last few months, the Israeli Ministry of Labour issued thousands of new permits for guest workers. The Jews of Israel welcome goys, as long as they have no rights, make no demands and agree to work for minimal wage. At the first objection, they are taken by force to the first plane back home.

That is the country adored by William Safire, Tom Friedman and other Jews in the mainstream media. ‘Tell me what you like, and I’ll tell you what you are’, goes the Latin adage. The pro-Israel position of the American Jews in the media is a good indication of their subconscious feelings towards the world at large.

Their favourite neo-liberal globalist trend is but a tendency to turn the whole world, including the United States, into a Palestine with a small ruling class, big security machine and voiceless impoverished natives. But let us give their due to the gentlemen of the press. They could be worse. The more vocal part of American Jewry considers them rather soft. The US correspondent of Haaretz in Washington, Nitzan Horovitz, writes in today’s edition (March 16, 2001), “The Israeli lobby in the US (AIPAC) is more intransigent[ii] than any government of Israel, including that of Sharon.” It is a Jewish supremacist organisation, according to Yossi Beilin, an Israeli ex-minister who is not much of a liberal himself.

What do they hate in Palestinians? The Palestinians have roots, they are living in harmony with their environment, they love their villages, they stick to their land, they can live without Jewish guidance. The Jewish supremacists wish to destroy their society, to confiscate their land and turn them into slaves sweating in the Jewish factories. If that is what Portnoy-2001 feels about Palestinians, why would he feel any different about other goys? A good Viennese shrink would pronounce him sick and possibly dangerous to his neighbours. He is as sick as any bigot of Ku Klux Klan, but much more influential due to his control over the media.

What is the source of Portnoy’s influence? Why did he change so much since 1969? Phillip Weiss explains it by the success of the Jews to break through the barriers, to enrich themselves and to occupy the commanding positions in the establishment. He writes, “I don’t claim to know how Jewish the membership of the establishment is. Twenty percent, 50 percent? I’m guessing 30”. Even 30% would be sufficient to promote any idea, if the other 70% have no interest in the subject. In many financial companies, a 10% controlling share is as good as total ownership, as the rest is divided among small shareholders.

In the absence of solid statistics for the US, it is instructive to consider the economy of Apartheid-era South Africa. The Economist, hardly a ‘hate publication’, estimated that the Jews who constituted 0.03% of the population owned sixty percent of that rich country’s market capitalization. All other players, Anglos, Boers, Indians and native Africans competed for the remaining 40%.

The power of money is translated into the rule over the minds by the feudal structure of the media. At the peak, there are media lords, the proprietors. They delegate authority to their faithful retainers, the chief editors, who in turn, choose loyal soldiers. The structure does not stand alone, but links to the financial and trading structures, the main ad-suppliers. The ad-suppliers are more important than the readers. In England, the Daily Herald, a newspaper targeted at a working class constituency, went bankrupt. Although it had five times as many readers as The Times, it only attracted half the advertising revenues. Advertisements account for approximately 75% of the revenue of an average newspaper. In the case of Radio and TV broadcasters, that figure leaps to almost 100%. It is no wonder that the media is accountable to its ‘paying’ patrons, the privileged few who are members of an elite club.

Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the media is not the message. The media is not a line of business, either. Lev Chernoi, a Russian-Israeli billionaire who sold his vast media empire to another Jewish tycoon, Mr. Berezovsky, put it concisely in a recent interview: “Media is politics”. The media is a means of shaping public consensus; of swaying the consciousness of a nation. Once, the readership provided a feedback, not anymore. Ordinary people still own most of the body parts of America and they are the muscle, but the nerve system and the brain have been taken over by the club of media lords and the managers of finance and trade, a new dominant power in the world. They decide what Americans think. Americans enforce their decision how we should manage our planet, from the rain forests of the Amazon to the last besieged Palestinian village.

The Club disposed with the pretence of the pluralism in press. Russian politicians and journalists visiting the US often express amazement at how in this huge and heterogeneous country the scope of expressed opinions is so narrow. “You succeeded where the communists failed”, is a frequent refrain. Indeed, the differences between American newspaper coverage and TV News have all but disappeared.

Noam Chomsky recently wrote, “the editors of the NY Times, and their brethren, have refused - not "missed," but refused to publish a single word about the sending of unprecedented numbers of military helicopters to Israel. Last week, the latest $.5 billion deal was struck between the Pentagon and the IDF for more advanced Apaches. They recognize how the (US) population is likely to react. To date, the total coverage of this massive transfer of public funds has been one opinion piece in a newspaper in Raleigh, North Carolina. I've actually attempted to personally contact editors I've known for years. No use. The discipline, and uniformity, are really impressive. People who thought that Stalin had reached the limits of totalitarianism are quite wrong”.

Well, Joseph Stalin had no such compliant media machine or the modern technology at his disposal. Its potential is not fully realized yet, as the three major networks plan to launch one united and unified news programme every night, to spread its message to every house in America. A painter Diane Harvey wrote in despair: “its main technique is through feeding the public an entire world-view made out of toxic substitutes for information and truth. The 360-degree, surround-sound World Lie most people believe is built and sustained by the non-stop flow of highly purposeful, integrated and carefully directed fabrications. The spirit of truth has departed, an upgraded version of global totalitarianism has been coalescing into a new death-grip on human freedom”[iii].

Paradoxically, this machine is vulnerable as it is too formidable. Subjugation and destruction of Palestine is but one of its applications. Do not ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for you, as no man is an island, said the Elizabethan poet, John Donne, proclaiming the common humanity of Man. These words sent Ernest Hemingway to fight for freedom in Spain in 1936, as freedom is indivisible. We repeated these words in 1968, we should repeat it now. The struggle for freedom in the US and the battle for Palestine are but one war.

Whenever the Almighty sends a malaise, says a Jewish wisdom, He sends the cure for it. The cure lies in democracy. The media should be returned to people, taken out of the rich men’s hands. Israel/Palestine should be democratised, equal rights provided to Jew and Gentile alike. It would cure the New Complaint of Portnoy.

[i] New York Observer, 22.01.01

[ii] In Israeli parlance, the Jewish supremacists are called ‘right-wing’, while national moderates are called ‘left-wing’, though this division has no connection to their social positions.

[iii] http://www.rense.com/general8/harv.htm

Israel Shamir is an Israeli writer and journalist. His articles The Rape of Dulcinea, The Test Failed, Galilee Flowers could be found on many Internet sites, http://www.thestruggle.org/ , http://www.antiwar/, http://www.nilemedia/ etc. He can be reached at shamiri_@netvision.net.il, or write P.O.B. 23714 Tel Aviv 61236

Israeli Leadership Blasted by One of its Own

An Israeli Jew is warning of a "flood of fire" if the Israeli occupation and apartheid regime is not replaced with equal rights for Palestinians and an end to "Jewish supremacy."

Exclusive to The SPOTLIGHT

By Christopher Bollyn

Israel Shamir, a Russian-born Israeli writer, is touring the United States calling for a secular, democratic and unified na tion comprising Israel and the Pales tinian territories to bring an end to the Middle East conflict.

A former Israeli soldier, Shamir fought in the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Today, Shamir fights with words and says there is a "winnable language" in the war against "the evil idea of Jewish supremacy." Shamir calls Israel a "Ku Klux Klan state run by madmen."

Shamir calls for the "right of return" for Palestinian refugees, restoration or compensation for property lost, and uni versal suffrage based on the principle of "one man-one vote."

Shamir has presented his one-state peace plan at Harvard, Columbia, Emory, Tufts, Georgetown, and Berkeley, as well as to numerous smaller groups. But a media blackout on Shamir is imposed in the United States and Israel.

Shamir is no stranger to censorship. While reporting from Moscow in the early '90s, a major Israeli newspaper, Ha'aretz, sacked him for calling for the return of the Palestinian refugees and the rebuilding of their ruined villages.

Shamir turned to the Internet to spread his message to Americans, who he considers essential to resolving the conflict. Shamir has penned more than a dozen widely-acclaimed political essays circulated on the California-based Media Monitors Network web site.

Although Shamir's essays reveal a deep understanding of history, religion, and literature, his straightforward style has led to accusations of anti-Semitism and the use of "inflammatory" language. Shamir says his mission is to "speak the truth frankly."

Shamir says "the idea of an exclusive Jewish state is as wrong as the idea of an exclusive Ary an or white state" and that a democratic solution providing "equality under the law" for all the people of Pales tine is the only solution.

"It is in the interest of Americans, Jews and gentiles alike, to start with a full em bargo of Israel," he says.

"Israelis are brainwashed from kindergarten, they are taught they belong to the Chosen People," Shamir says, "they are indoctrinated in the belief that the gentiles are not fully human, and therefore they can be killed and expropriated at will."

Palestinian Christians and Moslems must have the same rights as Jews, Shamir says. "If Jewish property is sacred, gentile property must be sacred as well. If a Jewish life is sacred, so must be a life of a gentile. If a Jew is free to move, so must be a gentile. Jerusalem needs to be re stored to its inhabitants," he says.

"What do [Jewish supremacists] hate in Palestinians?" Shamir asks. "The Pales tinians have roots, they are living in harmony with their environment, they love their villages, they stick to their land, they can live without Jewish guidance."

Shamir says the notion of creating two states in Palestine is part of a conquest strategy that would only lead to impoverished bantustans, to provide captive slave labor for Israeli factories.

"We have a simple way to undo the Gordian knot of endless negotiations, and that is—giving the Palestinians the right to vote, to give the natives of the land full rights of citizenship." Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon should act on this principle, Shamir says, or face the Hague tribunal on war crimes.

"If support for the occupation and for apartheid continues, the wave of retribution . . . we Jews may have to face one day is dreadful to contemplate," Shamir says.

The "machine of the official Jewish establishment" and the behavior of Israel "nauseates many Jews," Shamir says, while the Israeli government is led by "a certified mass murderer" and commits "war crimes on a day-to-day basis."

BRIBE AND EMBEZZLE

The Israeli occupation is funded by overseas supporters who act "like a giant Hoover machine, sucking out money and sweat from all over the world," Shamir wrote in his essay, Kid Sister. "Every dollar invested by the Israeli lobby into senators and congressmen has been returned a hundred fold. Since 1967, we have re ceived $170 billion from the people of the U.S. This money could be used to feed and school all the underprivileged kids of America.

"Innocent outsiders must question how Israel can get off scot-free with war crimes and receive the blessings of the U.S. Congress."

Christian supporters of Israel "are people of good intentions but little knowledge," Shamir says. "They think they 'support Jews,' but they promote the Christ-hating spirit among the Jews."

HATRED AND SPITE

Rami Rozen expressed the Jewish attitude in Ha'aretz: "Jews feel toward Jesus today what they felt in the 4th Century or in the Middle Ages: It is not fear, it is hatred and spite. For centuries, Jews concealed from Christians their hate of Jesus, and this tradition continues even now."

"The U.S. is at the heart of the Pales tinian problem," Shamir says. "The U.S. and Israel are practically one state."

He said Americans are grossly misinformed because of intentional distortion by the media elite.

The media lords' "favorite neo-liberal globalist trend is but a tendency to turn the whole world, including the United States, into a Palestine with a small ruling class, big security machine and voiceless impoverished natives," Shamir says.

(Shamir's vision is reminiscent of the late Haviv Schieber who, in many SPOTLIGHT interviews, advocated similar views, calling his plan the "Holy Land State." He was hounded and imprisoned by the U.S. Justice Department.—Ed.)

By Israel Shamir
May 17, 2001

Dear friends, on the day Israeli F-16 jets bomb Ramallah and Nablus, I would like to introduce you to Zavtra Russian weekly, published in Moscow, where I have an honor to place my articles from time to time. It is a fighting newspaper, standing steadfast for independent Russia, and for Palestine. It prints both left and right-wing opinions of wide range, as long as they oppose the neo-liberal globalization. It is definitely not a politically correct tribune, its writers do not form a selected club. On its pages, some rather extreme and disturbing ideas could be found, as well. That is the price for freedom of speech, and Zavtra is free, much freer than any American newspaper. It is edited by Alexandre Prohanov, who wrote the editorial (below) in his highly opinionated ringing prose reminiscent of Gibbon and Hugo. It is a moving eulogy to the people of Palestine, and to the man who personifies Palestine for Russians, Yasser Arafat. It could be compared to Pablo Neruda and Eluard eulogies of Stalin in the days of Stalingrad. Prohanov stays clear of inter-Palestinian party politics, he accepts the choice of Palestinians and supports them. Let it be a voice of cheer in the time of gloom.

ISRAEL IS DOOMED

The nations whose step once shook the earth, who endeavored revolutions of great magnitude, populated new continents, conceived and inspired faiths and religions, now drowsily stare with groggy eyes at the shepherds who have brought them into the sties of the new global order, who drip dross from the table of America into their mangers, pour Circe’s potions from the IMF, and titillate them with the distant sight of the synthetic heifer, the American dream.

The nation that dares to moan and pull at its chains is flogged by the electronic scourges of CNN, its skin pierced by the sharp edges of Tomahawks, its mouth gagged by the ‘holocaust victims’ stopper. The Russian people forget the language of Pushkin and victories of marshal Zhukov. Latin Americans do not recollect Sandino and Che Guevara; they twist their lithe bodies on the carnival, push drugs and provide a cheap labor force on the building sites of California. The Americans disregard the pioneers’ drive and John Brown’s body; bleary-eyed, they stare at their TV screens, pay tribute and docilely send their sons to kill Serbs and Iraqis.

Only from a solitary point of sky does a beam from Space burn through the dead shell that seals mankind. This plasma beam, as God’s finger, points to the people of Palestine. Wherever the beam reaches the earth, wherever it shines over Gaza, Jerusalem and Hebron, History Alive is created before our eyes. As in the days of the prophets, the nation prays, shoots, bleeds, sings the songs of struggle, faces the Jewish tanks, tears with naked hands their steely caterpillars, stops up the flaming mouths of guns with bodies of their own children, demonstrates to the fuzzy emasculated world the meaning of the words Freedom, Homeland, God.

Israel is doomed. She is disgusting to the Arabs, the French, the English, even to herself. The red-hot intifada is the fiery river, into which melts and sinks to the bottom another myth of the 20th century — the theory of Zionism. According to designs of Herzl and Jabotinsky, a small geopolitical monstrosity was created on Arab lands. Its settlers have imposed on America and Germany the annual tribute of five billions dollars. They pour napalm on the mosques and transform whole nations into homeless refugees. They brainwash the whole world by their ‘ashes of Auschwitz’.

In the place of Israel, the Arabs will plant many fig trees and Lebanese cedars, they will create a national park. It will be the home of a large, pretty Hebrew-speaking parrot. The sad Jews will move elsewhere, to another place on earth. Even to Brooklyn. If they will repeat their mistakes, let Americans arrange for them a new intifada.

Yasser Arafat is the last national leader of the fin-de-siècle. The Great Palestinian, who was reared by his people professing the faith in freedom where the division between the mundane and the divine struggle vanishes together with distinction between Life and Death. God came to His people incarnated as a wise, fearless, tireless, incorruptible leader. He mourns the fallen fedayeen, embraces the orphan, wipes the tears of widows, departs from burning Beirut with his warriors, enters the Beast’s lair at Camp David, reads the incinerated Qur’an of Sabra and Shatila, kisses the hot earth of his native Palestine. Arafat the Palestinian walks with his olive branch and his Kalashnikov into the immortality of history.

“Tell me, O bough of Palestine: where did you grow, where did you blossom...?” asked the Russian poet, Lermontov. And the bough replied: “I grew in the Garden of Eden of our Lord the God. The handgrip and the stock of the machinegun are made of my strong wood. My fiery leaves, like the drops of a Molotov cocktail, fly on the armor of the Israeli tanks. My blossoms decorate the bullet-perforated banner of the PLO. My fruit is sweet for the heroes and martyrs, as sweet as Freedom... "

Ode to Farris

By Israel Shamir
May 18, 2001

Nobody is allowed to enter or leave the Gaza strip. It is surrounded by barbed wire, its gates are locked, and even with the proper documents, one cannot visit the largest high security prison on earth, home to over one million Palestinians. The Israeli army, once a fabled fighting force, have become mere prison guards. The IDFs tactics were formulated back in 1930s, ‘you do not have to kill a million, kill the best, and the rest will be cowed’. This method was first applied by the British with the help of their Jewish allies during the Palestinian uprising of 1936. Since then, thousands of the best sons and daughters of this land, the potential elite of the Palestinians, have been exterminated. Once again, the Israeli army is being used to implement the same master plan, to ‘cool the restive natives’ by routinely shooting potential rebels.

Their job is easy: the strongest and biggest army in the Middle East, a major nuclear power, has all the weapons in the world, while the jailed Palestinians have only light guns. Recently, Israelis intercepted a boatload of weapons on the way to Gaza. The Army boasted of a major victory, but expressed ‘concern’. They have a reason for concern. Since 1973, the Israeli army has rarely had to worry about return fire. The Jewish soldiers got used to soft jobs. They prefer to shoot unarmed kids.

Gaza is a sci-fi reality, reminiscent of some Prison Planet B-movie. Its barbed wire fence guards a secret: the unbroken will of its people. It is a B-movie set, but its men and women are first grade.

This secret message came out of Palestine embodied in a 13-years boy, Farris Ode. He was the youthful Palestinian David we saw confronting the Jewish Goliath on the outskirts of Gaza in the immortal photo by AP photographer Laurent Rebours. Farris the Fearless threw his stones on the armoured monster with the grace of St George, the beloved saint of Palestine. He confronted the enemy with the nonchalance of a village boy chasing away a ferocious dog. The picture was taken on the 29th of October, and a few days later, on 8th of November, a Jewish sniper murdered him in cold blood.

He leaves behind a picture of a hero, a poster to be placed next to Che Guevara’s, a name to be spoken in the same breath with the name of Gavroche, the brave rebel kid from the barricades of Paris in Victor Hugo’s novel Les Misérables, a symbol of the unvanquished irreducible human spirit. He emerged from a different time, the time when heroism was not a dirty word, when men went to war ready to fight and die for a noble cause. This spirit is totally foreign to the cheap commercial hedonism, the main ideology of our days, abundantly supplied by American pop-culture. Farris legacy is a sign of the failure of Israel’s master plan. This young rebel was born under Israeli military occupation and he died defying the soldiers of the IDF.

This message of hope was not immediately understood by friends of Palestine, as we have become accustomed to the idea of Palestinian suffering and martyrdom. In our writing, we unconsciously copycat the somewhat effeminate approach of presenting ‘our side’ as unfortunate victims deserving of compassion and pity. The last thing we should feel towards the Palestinians is pity. Admiration, love, solidarity, hero-worship, even envy, but no pity. If you pity them, you might as well pity the 300 warriors of King Leonidas, who fell defending Thermopilae, or the Russian soldiers who stopped Guderian’s tanks with their bodies, or even Gary Cooper in High Noon. Heroes should not be pitied, they are an uplifting example for us.

At first, we failed to correctly place the image of Faris. The narrative of suffering called for the picture of a crouching Muhammad Dorra, dying in front of our eyes, a child companion to the little naked Vietnamese girl running out of the fiery hell of napalm.

The image of Faris Ode belongs to a different set of icons: that of a hero. Its place is next to that of the Marines on Iwo Jima, or in a church next to his countryman, St George. After all, the warrior saint was martyred and buried in the Palestinian soil, not far from Faris, in the crypt of the old Byzantine church in Lydda.

The adversaries of the Palestinians understood this reality better than their pals in New York. The American Jewish-dominated press spared no effort to erase the memory of Faris, as they were unable to find a hero of their own to compete with the Gaza boy. The networks ran a silly contest for the most important Picture of the Year, with a choice between Dorrah the Martyr and a flower. The really important picture, the icon of Faris, was not offered to the public.

But that was not enough, and the Washington Post sent its correspondent in Palestine, Lee Hockstader, to debunk the fallen kid’s memory. This AIPAC-run rag could depend on Hockstader. His reports should be studied in schools of journalism, in the course on disinformation. When the Israeli army tanks and gun ships blasted defenseless Bethlehem, Hockstader wrote: “In the Biblical (he would not mention Nativity, would he?) town of Bethlehem, Israeli soldiers and Palestinians fought with tanks, missiles, helicopters, machineguns and stones[i]”. I suspect that Hockstader’s history of WWII, would narrate a tale where the US and Japan fought with nuclear bombs, or Jews and Germans killed each other with concentration camp gas canisters.

Hockstader duly justified Israeli raids on civilian population, writing: “Israeli army spokesmen say that the raids are limited and essentially defensive. But the Israeli government takes a broader view, noting that the raids give local military commanders flexibility against an elusive enemy». If he takes “a broader view” of Israeli actions, the Palestinians in his reports are just mad terrorists: “The Palestinians have been threatening to exact a price for what they regard as a war of aggression. A representative of the Islamic Resistance Movement known as Hamas, called for further suicide bombings and mortar fire against Israel.”

A fellow Hockstader-watcher, Francois Smith, wrote on the Web: “I am offended that this guy thinks I'm dumb enough to believe him. Watch out for Lee Hockstader. I think he has an agenda”.

Well, he certainly has; the agenda of enforcing Jewish supremacy and smearing Palestinians. Debunking Faris fits this agenda perfectly. Hockstader went to Gaza, and reported, that Faris was a bad boy who did not obey his mommy and daddy, that he played truant at school, he was an ‘adolescent daredevil’, who actually wanted to be killed, and a merciful Jewish sniper just fulfilled his wish. Hockstader missed nothing: the kid was shot while lifting a stone, and therefore had to be killed; his posthumous fame was ‘the hullabaloo over his death’; and anyway, his mother received ‘a $10,000 check from President Saddam Hussein of Iraq’.

Hockstader played safe. If he had dared to infer that the settler parents of the killed infant in Hebron wished their child dead, if he would refer to the Israeli reaction as ‘hullabaloo’, or just mention a fat check her parents received from the hands of the butcher of Sabra and Shatila – Hockstader would not have made it out of Israel alive, and Katherine Graham, the Washington Post’s owner, would be repenting it to her last day.

Jews have succeeded in cowering their enemies, and not only by the magic of words. Lord Mountbatten, the viceroy of Palestine, dozens of British soldiers and officers and hundreds of Palestinian leaders were assassinated by Jews in their drive for supremacy in the Holy Land in 1940s, until the terrorized Brits sailed away from Haifa Bay on May 15, 1948. Even today, two peace activists and men of the cloth in San Francisco, a Catholic priest Labib Kobti and a Jewish Rabbi Michael Lerner, receive death threats from Jewish terrorist groups and take them very seriously.

The Palestinians are rather peaceful peasants and city folk. They know how to tend olives and vine, how to make a zir, a jar that keeps water cool even in the hottest hamsin. Their beautiful stone masonry adorns every corner of Palestine. They write poetry and venerate their holy tombs. They are no warriors, certainly no killers. With astonishment and disbelief they stare in the mirror of a Jewish dominated press and see themselves dressed in the mask of a bloody terrorist. But these peasants are still able give us all a lesson about heroism, whenever an enemy tries to snatch their land. Palestinians proved it many centuries ago, in the legendary days of Judges, when their ancestors battled with overseas invader.

In 1930s, a fervent Russian Jewish nationalist and founder of Sharon’s political party, Vladimir Zeev Jabotinsky wrote (in his native Russian) a historical novel, Samson, elaborating on the Bible story of the suicide bomber who killed three thousand men and women (Judges, 18:27) and died with the enemies. A few years ago, this novel was published in Israel in a modern Hebrew translation, and a Davar newspaper reviewer noted an interesting aberration.

For Jabotinsky, the Brits were the modern Philistines, while the Israelites became the Jews. But for a modern Israeli reader, the novel reads as a glorification of the Palestinian fight against Israeli rule. The highly civilized Philistines with their superior military technology, invaders from overseas, hedonistic dwellers of the Coastal Plain and belligerent intruders in the Highlands reminded the reviewer of modern Israeli Jews. While Samson’s people, Banu Israel, the natives of the Highlands, certain of their deep roots, confident of the inevitable victory of their attachment to the soil over the military might of the invader, reminded him of modern Palestinian Highlanders.

It makes sense, as the Palestinians are the true descendants of Biblical Israel, of the indigenous people who embraced the faith of Christ and Muhammad, and remained in the Holy Land forever. The Israelis know it. In the genetic labs of Tel Aviv, the scholars of the ‘Jewish DNA’ proudly produce every result, tenuously confirming the blood relation of Jews and Palestinians. They know that our Jewish claim to the proud name of Israel is at least dubious. Like Richard III, we seized the title and crown, and, like Richard III, we feel insecure while the legitimate heirs are still alive. That is the psychological explanation of our inexplicably cruel treatment of the native Palestinians.

The Israelis want to be Palestinians. We adopted their cuisine, and serve their falafel and hummus as our own ethnic food. We adopted the native cactus, sabra, growing at the site of their villages, as the name of our local-born sons and daughters. Our revived Hebrew language, came back to life with hundreds of Palestinian words. We just need to ask their forgiveness, embrace them as long lost brothers and learn from them. That is the one ray of hope coming out of the present darkness.

As modern Israeli archaeology studies have made clear, three thousand years ago the Highland tribes (Banu Israel of Bible) eventually achieved a modus vivendi with the Coastal ‘people of the sea’, and together, these sons of Samson and Delilah, became progenitors of the Bible composers, of Christ’s apostles and of modern Palestinians. The advanced Philistine technology and the Highlanders’ love of our parched land combined to achieve the spiritual miracle of ancient Palestine. It is not impossible, and it is highly desirous, that history will repeat itself, and the glorious image of young Faris, fighting the tank, will blend with images of king David and St George in the minds and schoolbooks of our Palestinian children.

Israel Shamir is an Israeli writer and journalist, living in Jaffa. His other articles can be found on his site http://shamir.mediamonitors.net/ or email shamiri_@netvision.net.il

Palestine never was the deserted land the first Zionists claimed they found at their arrival. But it surely will become one, unless we stop these machines."

Olives of Aboud - Israel Shamir June 18, 2001

As the CIA-brokered cease fire went into effect, I received an anxious call from a village of Aboud, on the western slopes of Samarian hills. The village was raided by the army, and two men were shot. Today I went there, to see the village and to feel the cease fire.

Aboud is surrounded by the new Jewish settlements from all sides. A good new Jewish road leads to the area. It forks off to Aboud some three miles away from the village, and there the road is blocked by cyclopean heaps of earth. We try our luck at the other end, with the same result. Eventually we found a narrow dirt track the peasants broke in this morning, and drive in.

Aboud is one of the prettiest Palestinian villages, strongly reminiscent of Toscana. Its time-mellowed stone houses grow on the gentle hills. Vine climbs up their balconies, leafy fig trees provide shadow to its streets. The prosperity of a well-established village is seen in the spaciousness of the mansions, in the meticulously clean roads. The old men sit in a small and shady walled enclosure, on the stone benches, as the aldermen of Ithaca gathered by young Telemachus. That is the biblical ‘gate of the city’, or a diwan. Kids bring them coffee and fresh fruits. Local people are not the refugees of Gaza and Deheishe; here, as in a time warp, one can see the Holy Land as it should and could be.

Three millennia old Aboud received the faith of Christ from Christ himself, says the local tradition, and there is the church ready to prove it, one of the oldest on earth, built in the days of Constantine in the 4th century, or maybe even older, as some archaeologists claim. The church is a dainty thing, carefully restored and well taken care of. The Byzantine capitols of its columns bear the image of cross and palm branches. Recently discovered plaque in old Aramaic script immured in the southern wall of the church.

Aboud has more than one church: there is a Catholic, a Greek Orthodox and an American-built Church of God. There is also a new mosque, as Christians and Moslems of the Holy Land live together in great harmony. On 17th of December all of them, the Moslems and the Christians, go to venerate the village patron saint, St Barbara. She was a local girl who fell in love with a young Christian and was baptized. It happened in the rough days of Roman emperor Diocletian, and she was martyred in the persecutions. The ruins of the oldest Byzantine church of St Barbara are still seen on a hill a mile away from the village. At the foothill, there is her burial cave, and there the peasants lit their candles and ask their wishes to be fulfilled.

It is a good place to understand the complete lunacy of the prevailing Jewish narrative, of the ‘land without people’ sparsely inhabited by the Arab nomads who came in the 7th century. Archaeologists proved this village was never destroyed or abandoned since the times immemorial, and our eyes agree with it. Age-old olive trees cover the hills, confirming the deep roots of Aboud and providing it with olive oil, its main staple food and source of livelihood.

Just outside a village, there were two giant American-built Caterpillar bulldozers slowly devouring the olive trees. They were huge, covered from every side by armour plates. They appeared impregnable, like moving fortresses. They towered above the landscape as the mechanical monsters of Evil Empire attacking Ewocks in the Star Wars.

The peasants stood on the heaps of earth blocking the entrance to the village and looked at the machines destroying their livelihood. They could not walk towards them, as they were not allowed to leave their village, their prison. There was a tent, and a few soldiers with a machinegun on the hill above the entrance, and they were there to keep the people in. Last night, on Sabbath eve, they opened fire on the villagers who ventured out, and wounded two men. The rest run back in for safety. Then the army went in, in their jeeps, driving through the village, met by stones of the kids. The Jewish settlers and soldiers sprayed windows and roofs with their bullets and drove away, apparently feeling their Shabbat duty fulfilled.

I could cross the invisible line, as it was for the Palestinians only. There was an Israeli officer in a jeep, a wide American Hummer, who oversaw the devastation. Why do you do it, I asked, don’t you know there is the cease fire? Say it to Arik (Sharon), he replied, we are just following orders. But he, and the other soldiers, and the bulldozer drivers were not despondent about these orders. These age-old trees meant nothing to them, as the village and two millennia old Church, and the people meant nothing to them, just something to be destroyed.

Palestine never was the deserted land the first Zionists claimed they found at their arrival. But it surely will become one, unless we stop these machines.

From Israel Shamir

Subj: BBC Sharon by Amr

Date: 6/19/01 4:06:40 AM Pacific Daylight Time
From: shamir@home.se (Israel Shamir)

Dear fiends, I want to introduce you to my good friend, colleague and editor Ahmed Amr of Seattle. He has a powerful pen, keen eye, warm heart, good style. Here is what he published on his website in connection with the BBC programme.
Sharon’s Willing Media Collaborators

By Ahmed Amr

Editor

www.NileMedia.com

The BBC just aired a documentary about Sabra and Shatila that should have been made two decades ago. Not surprisingly, the conclusion is that Ariel Sharon should be indicted for war crimes. In London, the Israeli press attache, David Schneeweiss, protested. "We've been in touch with the BBC at all levels to find out what the programme's about. One has to question why they are focusing on old news. These events happened 20 years ago." (Brian Whitaker, The Guardian, Friday June 15, 2001).

Predictably, The BBC has come under a full frontal assault by pro-Israeli apologists for a Panorama program, The Accused, that aired on Sunday, June 17, 2001. There is good reason for panic among Israeli officials and their international public relations support team, which includes blunt instruments like the New York Times and CNN. This could be the start of the final chapter in the long struggle to bring Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to justice for his war crimes in Sabra and Shatila and Qibya. It comes at a time when a Belgian court is diligently probing into Sharon’s criminal past. Europe has had enough of this monster act. It will not be long before Americans get wind of how deranged this man really is.

It is worth noting, for the benefit of Israeli press attaches, that the Associated Press was awarded the Pulitzer Prize (2000) for a series of reports that uncovered details of mass killing by U.S. soldiers of hundreds of Korean civilians at No Gun Ri in July 1950. In accepting the prize the AP reporters offered praised to “the Korean survivors who would not let their quest for truth die." Just a few months ago the New York Times made a big splash by revealing that in 1969 Ex-Senator Bob Kerrey was involved in atrocities against civilians in the Village of Thanh Phong. Kerrey, In a CBS interview was candid enough to say that "to describe it as an atrocity, I would say, is pretty close to being right, because that's how it felt, and that's why I feel guilt and shame for it.”

To this day, the Israelis and their mass media pals waste no effort to sanitize Sharon’s bloody resume. Details of the war crimes committed by this serial mass murderer are buried in the ‘old news’ archives. Well, Kerrey’s news was a decade older than Sabra and Shatila and the slaughter of Koreans at No Gun Ri took place half a century ago, three years prior to Qibya. As any high school kid can tell any Israeli press attaché, Nazi war criminals, many in their nineties, are still liable for crimes committed during World War II. When it comes to war crimes there are no statutes of limitations and there are no exemptions for Israeli nationals, even Prime Ministers.

Perhaps due to the magnitude of the slaughter, this BBC Panorama documentary focused on Sabra and Shatila. But the details of the war crime at Qibya make an even stronger case for indicting Ariel Sharon. At Qibya, Sharon was on site supervising the Israeli soldiers who did the killing.

To quote from an earlier article: “The slaughter at Qibya, a West Bank village outside Jerusalem, took place on October 14, 1953. A contingent of 600 Israeli troops, led by Ariel Sharon, using explosives, blew up a whole village, killing every single Palestinian inhabitant. Every man, every woman and every child was murdered in cold blood. There were other similar incidents involving Sharon's notorious "Unit 101" through out the 1950s..… The thing about the slaughter at Qibya, is Sharon has no alibis. Israeli Forces under his command, in his presence and with his explicit orders carried out the massacre. He slaughtered those innocent villagers with malicious intent as part of Israel's long-standing policy to sanction massive acts of vengeance against unarmed 'enemy' civilians. His work at Qibya was deliberately and callously calibrated to insure the highest possible number of casualties.”

While the details of the atrocities at No Gun Ri and Thanh Phong were known to only a select few and had to be ‘dug’ up by investigative journalists, any New York Times or Washington Post journalist can find out about Sharon by tuning in to see the BBC. Not likely. The ethnics at Sulzberger’s daily ruse are not about to rehash the past of their favorite war criminal. A search of their vaunted archives, going all the way back to 1996, turns up one reference to Qibya. Not surprisingly it was a white wash by William A. Orme Jr (Warrior Who Confounds – Ariel Sharon, NYT. 2/7/2001). In a previous article, ‘The Stain On the Press’, we exposed Orme’s public relations work for his Qibya client. The boys on 43rd street are used to getting away with this kind of nonsense. Covering up Israeli war crimes is just another day’s work for the gray lady, which is currently celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of going to court to publish the Pentagon papers. Bob Kerrey must be eating his heart out and wishing he was Yiddish too.

Sharon’s past is catching up with him. It will be interesting to see how long the mass media in America can continue to ignore the BBC and Belgian tribunals. As usual the only defense available to the Israel Firsters is that the BBC is anti-Semitic. To their credit, the BBC has not backed out of airing the program. Ted Turner’s ‘Global Minute’, a new CNN feature that should be called ’60 Seconds’, will no doubt have time constraints that prevent including ‘old news’ of Sharon’s crimes. Expect The New York Times to stick to a tradition of exposing ex-Senators while continuing to worship at the altar of sacred Israeli mass murderers.

Sharon needs to be brought to justice and soon. We should all applaud the efforts of the BBC and the Belgian courts for doing their part to expose the bloody record of this Israeli Prime Minister. Aside from Qibya and Sabra and Shatila, he should also be tried for the indiscriminate bombardment of Beirut in 1982, resulting in tens of thousands of innocent civilian casualties, his campaign against Gaza in 1971, the murder of Egyptian POWs in 1956 and the use of collective punishment against the Palestinians in the occupied territories. His most recent war crime, the attack by an F16 against a prison in occupied Nablus that resulted in eleven fatalities, is just one additional entry in a rap sheet that is a mile long,

Sharon’s indictment would serve a number of purposes. It would deliver justice to his victims and prevent him from committing additional crimes. Getting Sharon’s record out in the open might even persuade the Israelis to re-examine their compulsive habit of voting for war criminals. For Americans, it will expose the incredible deception the mass media machine is capable of in the name of Israel. As an additional benefit, the Congressmen and Senators who have heaped praise on Sharon will be seen for what they are; a breed of men who would dine with a mass murderer, so long as he reaches for the check after the meal.

Sharon’s apologists should be exposed along with Sharon. The American journalists and politicians who openly embrace him should have to answer the question: “what did you know about Qibya and when did you know it? It is not enough to worry about Sharon, it is time to seriously worry about the mass media machine that markets war criminals as ‘Grand Pa Sharon’ just waiting to rock Colin Powell on his knees. One needs to worry about an American Jewish community that coddles war criminals; even as they demand compensation for German war crimes. That Israelis elected Sharon because of his ‘talents’, should also raise serious concerns about the racist and belligerent attitudes of an Israel that has drifted from the right to the extreme right. Those journalists, like Deborah Sontag, Thomas Friedman and William Safire, who have collaborated in the project to sanitize Sharon, should be held in contempt. Their collaboration was no simple passive act; given that they were well aware of Sharon’s past. Delaying justice for those who suffered at Sharon’s hands at Qibya has allowed other innocents to fall into his murderous clutches. Sharon is a repeat offender because of repeat cover-ups by a complicit group of American ‘journalists’ who seem to relish the prospect of more Palestinian victims. Justice demands that they explain their motives for collaborating with this monster.

Up To The Point

July 20, 2001

Dear friends,

I had the honour to be invited to speak in the high international forum of UNESCO in Paris on the question of the media's coverage of the Israeli/Palestine conflict. It was an interesting gathering of upper-middle level politicians and journalists.

The key speaker was UN Coordinator for the Middle East, the suave Scandinavian Terje Roed-Larsen. His idea was gradualism, back to Oslo, step-by-step and shwaye-shwaye. One felt he learned well the terrible lesson of his predecessor Count Folke Bernadotte, who was assassinated on orders of the Israeli Prime Minister and my namesake, Yitzhak Shamir. Bernadotte was rash enough to think he could tell Jews what to do. Terje Larsen was very diplomatic, very pro-peace process, now and for ever. After all, he does not have to stay in the Khan Yunis refugee camp to wait for gradualism to bring fruit from a barren tree.

The Palestinian National Authority was represented by that eloquent teddy-bear, the round-faced Nabil Shaath and the witty and dignified elder ambassador Nasser al Kidwa. Nabil Shaath provided the journalists with a much needed headline, when he said that in Taba they almost made peace. My headline would be ‘A miss is as good as a mile’. The invited Palestinian journalists were prevented by Israeli authorities from going to the conference, while Israeli ones promised to come but failed to appear. There was a loud-mouthed French Jew in the audience, who claimed to represent an Israeli paper. He even tried to speak Hebrew to me, but his Sunday school lessons were not up to it. Anyway, he denounced me as a communist, and thus unfit to speak in such distinguished company.

Israel sent two ex-ministers, a youthful and good-looking devotee of Barak, Professor Yuli Tamir of Peace Now, and General Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, the ex-Chief of Staff for the IDF and a one-time candidate for Prime minister from the now defunct Centre Party. Yuli Tamir spoke of Barak’s largesse in Camp David, and of importance to keep ‘the Jewish character of the Jewish state’. One wanted to ask ‘What about the importance of keeping the Aryan character of the Aryan state?’ In the mind of an average Jew, these two men probably exemplify the Israeli Left. This alone speaks volumes about Israel. If that is Israel's ‘Left’, you can imagine the Israeli Right. The late lamented Israel Shahak used to say that the Israeli Left is worse than the Israeli Right. These two ex-ministers, taken as a sample, served to remind us of Shahak's maxim.

Of the ladies and gentlemen of the press who attended the conference, I must mention the incredibly tall and pleasant Scot, Sir Ian Gilmour, the British ex-Minister of Defence and a media personality, one time owner of The Spectator, a exuberant and feisty magazine that fell into evil clutches of Conrad Black. And the dynamic Phyllis Bennis of Washington IPS called for Israeli withdrawal from occupied territories. I think I heard this notion before, but she was very convincing anyway.

It was an important occasion, made possible thanks to the Palestinian organizer of the conference, Dr Saleem Fahmawi, a man who grew in a refugee camp, made it all the way to the UN, but never forgot the village of his ancestors. There was also a chance to meet some friends of Palestine. Some hundred of them gathered at night to hear my call for the new strategy, i.e. ‘one man – one vote’ solution. It was a heated discussion, with many young people present, and I left comforted by the general response. The following is the gist of my speech at the UNESCO conference on Getting the Facts Right.

UP TO A POINT

The media world was well described in the brilliant novel by Evelyn Waugh, The Scoop. Though the main plot of the book unfolds in Africa, the relevant scene takes place on Fleet Street, at the office of the Daily Beast owner, lord Copper. The media baron asked his foreign editor from time to time, is Yokohama the capital of Japan? Or Does Hong Kong belongs to us? The editor had two 'safe' answers. When lord Copper was right, he said, Definitely, lord Copper. When he was wrong, he said, Up to a point, lord Copper. That is the fork, from definitely to up to a point, of the permissible borders of mainstream media discourse. We journalists are dependent creatures. We would like to be honest and sincere, but we have to think of our mortgages, and of our vocation. If we step over the borders established by the media owners, we would have to look for a different occupation altogether.

Speaking of Palestine, the borders are quite narrow. I would say they run parallel to the borders of internal Jewish Israeli mainstream discourse, from Meretz to Sharon. If we compare it with pre-Mandela South Africa, it is similar to the White mainstream discourse, from Nationalist to Progressive, not including ANC. In my view, this discourse is exclusivist, even supremacist. It is based on sustaining Jewish supremacy in Palestine. It does not offer equality or even a safe future to the local inhabitants. But that is all you are allowed to say. You may support the creation of Palestinian reservations which puts you firmly in the Israeli ‘liberal’ camp, or you can back mass expulsion and ethnic cleansing, and you will be called a hardliner or a hawk. These are the firm borders of the discourse. Whoever crosses the borders, and speaks for equality of a Jew and Gentile in the Holy Land, finds himself in the wilderness. His voice will be silenced, maybe for good.

I know this first hand. I live in Jaffa, a town with a mixed population. There are Palestinians, Moroccans, Israeli Ashkenazi Jews, Russians, and we all live together rather harmoniously. But a lot of people who were born in Jaffa live in refugee camps and they are forbidden to return just because of their religion or ethnicity. I find it morally impossible, that a Jew from New York, Paris or Novosibirsk, like me, can come and live in Jaffa, while a local man, born in Jaffa, may not come back home. I called for the return of the Palestinian refugees and immediately lost my job with Haaretz. That is the most liberal Israeli newspaper.

The case of Palestine coverage in the media is special for one reason. We have a peculiar vocabulary, developed for the local coverage. If I kill Ahmad, it would be reported that ‘Ahmad was killed by an Israeli’. But if, God forbid, Ahmad would kill me, you would learn that ‘a Jew was murdered’.

As in Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde, an Israeli may kill; but if an Israeli is killed, he turns into a Jew. It is absolutely forbidden to speak about Jewish atrocities and murders. The Jews are forever victims. It often appears we have three nations in Palestine: Jews, Israelis and Palestinians. Israelis may commit crimes, but it is innocent – always innocent – Jews that are murdered. If you confuse these two words, and refer to a murderer as ‘a Jew’, you will be called an anti-Semite, and probably you will lose your job.

It should not be too complicated to cover our story. It is not even as complicated as other places of world concern. The right of national self-determination inclusive of autonomy or independence isn’t an easy right to realize, as Corsicans can tell you. Palestine should be easier to cover: it is not the question of national self determination, but of basic human rights. Kosovo? In Kosovo, Albanians were discriminated against and tormented by Serb authorities, but they always had the technical right to vote and the Yugoslav government never withdrew their citizenship. They were distant second-class citizens, but still citizens. Kurds in Turkey? They also can vote.

The coverage of Palestine should be easier, but it is not. A journalist may write and speak about marginal problems, like the Jewish settlers beyond the Green Line. But the basic power structure of Jewish dominance in Palestine may not be questioned. We may not say that the Palestinians have no right to vote; no right to move to other parts of their country and no right to return to their homes in the only country they have ever known.

In my opinion, the source of the media bias in covering the Palestinians is tremendously important. For it speaks volumes about the power structure of the US and Europe. It gives us unique feedback from the obscure world of media lords. And, it goes without saying, that 'establishment' journalists are not given much leeway on reporting on this valuable feedback. They are always too busy writing ‘definitely’.

The reason is obvious. Too many of our media lords subscribe to the notion of Jewish supremacy, and they are spread around the globe. In England, there is Conrad Black, he actually owns many papers in Canada, the US, and in Israel. In our country, he owns The Jerusalem Post. When he bought this paper, he dismissed the staff and hired people of his opinions. He is a right wing Zionist, a zealous supporter of Jewish supremacy.

In the US, there are too many of them to count. But allow us to mention Mortimer Zuckerman, a media lord and the current Head of the Presidents’ Conference of American Jewish Organizations, the big daddy of all Jewish groups in America. He is one of the richest men in America, he made his fortune speculating in real estate and owns the third largest 'serious' American weekly magazine, US News and World Report. He also owns the popular plebeian tabloid, The Daily News, a major circulation in the New York and New Jersey market. His newspapers generally advocate the brutal rule of market forces. With one exception; they call for generous annual subsidy of Israel by American tax payers. Two ex-Prime Ministers of Israel, Netanyahu of the war-mongering Likud and Barak of the slightly less hawkish Labour party supported Zuckerman in his quest for the leadership of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations. This side of the Ku Klux Klan, this association of 52 heads of American Jewish organizations is the most bigoted body of men in American politics. Haaretz recently reported, that Mortimer Zuckerman had dismissed his shiksa wife, in order to get this coveted chair. As long as he stayed married to a non-Jewish woman, his colleagues, Jewish billionaires, would not trust him. And he is one of the most influential publishers in the US.

On the other end of the planet, in Russia, the TV stations and newspapers also are under the ownership of Israeli citizens. One of them, Vladimir Gusinsky, was forced to part with his TV station. But his extremely pro-Israeli staff was quickly hired by another channel, belonging to another Israeli citizen, Mr Chernoi. In 1985, he was an accountant living on a salary of 100 dollars a month. Today he is worth 5 billion dollars, owns virtually all the aluminium plants in Russia, and lives in a nice suburb of Tel Aviv. Currently, he is under investigation for 34 murders, money laundering and membership in the Russian mafia. In a recent quip, he was quoted as saying that ‘the media is not business. the media is politics and influence’. He uses his media empire to stifle all criticism of Israel in Russia.

I spoke recently to a young Russian military attaché in one of the Western capitals. He told me: your Israeli situation is similar to ours, but we have Chechnya a thousand miles away, while you have it next door. I asked him: do you want to say that Chechens have no right of vote? He was amazed. He did not know that the Palestinians have no right to vote. The media of Gusinsky, Chernoi, and Berezovsky, that is three powerful media lords, all of them Israeli citizens, took care to cultivate his ignorance.

Even in Sweden, traditionally supportive of the Palestinian cause, since the national newspapers were bought by Jewish entrepreneurs, the coverage of Palestine became more and more lopsided. I do not know whether the new owners had to ask for it explicitly, or their chief editors just guessed their desires, but the results were the same.

This international group of Jewish media lords, from Washington to Moscow, is not subservient to the interests of Israel. But support of Israel is a part of their agenda. On the top of the list, is globalisation and neo-liberalism; what they call ‘freedom of market forces’. On political matters, they tend to distrust democracy and personal freedoms while making constant demands for corporate liberties.

Mutual support is also high on their list of priorities. When Gusinsky was under investigation for embezzling funds, the New York Times and the Washington Post, that is the late Mrs Kathryn Graham and Mr Sultzberger, both published virtually identical lead stories and editorials supporting the ‘Independent Russian Press’. Independent, appears to be a code word for ‘Jewish-owned’.

This should be a serious cause for concern. When an Egyptian businessman bought Harrods in London, the newspapers went into a fury. The headlines blared 'our national heritage is being taken away by foreigners'. In Israel, no outsider is allowed to own a newspaper. There was a rich Russian Jew, Gregory Lerner, who tried to buy a newspaper in Israel. He was sent to jail for six years for various mafia-related crimes. It is worth noting that, before he made his rush into the media, nobody cared about his offences. An Iraqi Jew took over a newspaper, and very soon he found himself in jail. Because the media is not a business, it is the nerve system of a country.

In my opinion, the case of Palestine is much more important for you, for Europeans and Americans, than just another case of injustice. Because it proves that this international group of Jewish media lords have become a mite too powerful. In my experience, Jewish journalists can be as objective as any. Actually, the best coverage of Palestine is done by Jewish journalists, from Susanne Goldenberg of the Guardian to Gideon Levy of Haaretz. But it is easier to squeeze a camel through the needle’s eye than to find an objective media lord. This problem can be solved without actually removing media from the hands of individual proprietors if newspapers would be treated like precious water sources and other all-important public utilities. That is, unless we want to delegate all these newspapers to the murky realm of ethnic press, and build from scratch a new network of free press.

Israel Shamir is an Israeli journalist based in Jaffa. His articles appear on his site http://www.israelshamir.com/ or write to shamiri_@netvision.net.il All his articles are in public domain and can be distributed freely, but hard copy publications must ask for a permission.

Fiesta of St Fermin

By Israel Shamir
July 26, 2001