Goodbye Anti-Semitism. Hello Israelophobia, the New and Improved Zionist Scarecrow

The Telegraph (a.k.a. the Daily Telegraph, and nicknamed the Torygraph) is a deeply conservative British tabloid with sympathy for the Germans during World War I. It later tried to suppress Winston Churchill's anti-Nazi posture at the onset of World War II. The Nazi and anti-Jewish ideology was very pervasive in British society, mostly within the conservative elements of society, including all the way up to the British Royal family who, let us remember, were and remain of German aristocratic stock.

According to Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daily_Telegraph_Affair], the "Daily Telegraph Affair" was the uproar that followed the 28 October 1908 publication in the British newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, of comments by German Emperor Wilhelm II. The affair was a major diplomatic blunder that worsened relations and badly hurt the Kaiser's reputation. The Telegraph had fraudulently published notes by a British Army officer Edward Montagu-Stuart-Wortley as an interview with the German Emperor that included wild statements and diplomatically damaging remarks, the most infamous of which was directed at the English people.  

 

The Daily Telegraph logo next to you-know-whose logo

 

 

 

 

Just like all conservatives at the time, as well as those of today, the British conservative movement has in the very least deep sympathies for Fascism and anti-Jewish ideas. Their blind support for Israel is due to their refusal to admit to themselves not only the failure, but the abhorrent duplicity of their British colonial mandate in Palestine, and also to compensate for their own hatred of Jews by a boundless fake support to their colony Israel. They did it with South Africa, why would it be any different with Palestine? See appended to this piece a comprehensive list of 20th century British Fascist and Nazi parties and organizations. Their sheer number suggests that British conservative society remains viciously Anti-Semitic. 

The Telegraph seems to have realized that the term "anti-Semitic" no longer scares people who criticize Israel as an apartheid state. Their affinity and nostalgia for their lost South African Apartheid colony makes them feel closer to their still extant Apartheid colony of Israel. They lost South Africa and are trying their best not to lose Israel. So they have now come up with a new term they seem determined to implant in their readers' minds to replace the worn out "anti-Semitic" and become the new scarecrow against criticizing Israel. Now keep in mind that the Telegraph is a deeply conservative British rag with roots in the Imperialism, Colonialism, Fascism and Anti-Semitism of 18th-20th century Britain. Their desperate efforts at redeeming themselves is at the very least laughable. 

The fact is that in every colonized country it tormented and pilfered for hundreds of years, British colonialism invariably left behind it a divided land, wars, mass massacres, and shattered lives: Israel-Palestine, India-Pakistan, South Africa, US-Canada, etc.

One Jake Wallis Simons wrote a piece recently in the Telegraph (August 27, 2023) entitled "Israelophobia is the one hatred that polite society embraces", whose purpose is to promote a book he wrote on the subject that is apparently not selling very well. Now in British racist parlance, "polite" implies conservative. Thus, The Telegraph, through Simons, makes the following asinine arguments:

Israel is only 1 per cent of the Middle East (the Middle East being a western colonial concept to describe a geography with ambiguous boundaries and that is based on dubious linguistic and religious criteria). Israel is also only 75 years old. Therefore, Israel is like a child and should not matter that much given its size and age. A small child that kills is not like an adult that kills, and should be let loose to continue killing. Strange argument.

Another lie often propagated by Zionist apologists is that Israel is the only liberal democracy in the region, notwithstanding the fact that it is an ultra-religious fundamentalist state fabricated around the fictional garbage of the bible, namely that God chose the Hebrews as his pet people, ordered them to commit the First Nakba against the Canaanites, the Palestinians' ancestors, specifically ordering Joshua to murder every child, woman, man AND beast, and seize their land, the land He in his racist Bronze Age wisdom granted the Hebrews as their "promised land". 

Either of two things: The whole "promised land" fantasy is in all likelihood a fictional fabrication typical of biblical bullshit, and therefore this fable cannot reasonably be used to justify the barbaric existence of Israel today as a so-called homeland for the returning Jews. Now, if we assume it to be true, this macabre event constitutes one of the first recorded genocides in human history, one carried out by the Hebrews (ancestors of the Jews) against the Canaanites (ancestors of the Palestinians), a genocide for which modern Israel represents a second installment. I wonder whether Yahweh should evolve out of his Bronze Age hideout into the modern world and recant this murderous command to his pet people to genocide an entire people (the Canaanites) and dispossess them of their land. At the very least, He should be tried in a criminal court for crimes against humanity and war crimes.

Then Mr. Simons says that Israel is "not particularly violent". How sweet of his propaganda. It is only a tiny bit violent, not that much. That he admits that Israel is "sort of" violent is sufficient for sane people to conclude that Israel is indeed violent. To buffet his argument, Simons admits that Israel has killed upwards of 86,000 people, which is "negligible" when compared with the killing of 600,000 Iraqis by the Americans, Israel's main sponsors and funders after Britain lost its imperial colonial status.

Then, Mr. Simons says that Israel "is not a bad place to live".What he means is that while it is a little violent, Israel's puny violence (as one of the most hypermilitarized countries on earth, thanks to British and American military and financial assistance) manages to survive the hatred it generates among the native indigenous Palestinians whom it has eviscerated out of their millennial land and continues to brutally occupy. What success! Yes, the fact that foreign invading settlers have water and electricity and roads specifically built for them, while the native indigenous people are dehumanized and herded behind racist walls into destitute refugee camps, is really not a problem. A brilliant success, from a 19th century colonial perspective.

And now, to dispel any critique of the paradisiac features of Apartheid ultra-religious racist Israel, Mr. Simons blames a whole bunch of people, inluding Israel's own victims, and feels he must coin a new term to replace the dying term of "anti-Semitism": ISRAELOPHOBIA. Tough to utter, scarier sounding than the more poetic anti-Semitism, but it will serve from now on in the Zionist propaganda toolbox, perhaps for a while. At least that is what Mr. Simons hopes. 

First, he blames Christians after listing a bunch of Zionist lies. Since the Holy Land is "Jewish" (which is not true, as we saw earlier. Joshua's Jews massacred the Canaanites and took their land), and since Jerusalem is "Jewish" (it was, but for only 300 years of its history over at least 3,000 years), and since the fantasy and dubious figure of Jesus, the self-proclaimed Son of God, is "Jewish", then the Christians are jealous of the Jews and blame them because everything the Christians believe is Jewish! 

Hence a long history of anti-Semitism among Christians, with "anti-Semitism" being a misnomer since Jews represent only 5% of all Semites on the Globe. As people emerged from the ignorance of the pre-18th century period, they have come to realize that Jews are not the only Semites around, which made them lose the exclusivity of victimhood with which they have long blackmailed Europeans and others into subscribing to the Zionist propaganda. With this premise, Mr. Simons now makes his next move: Introduce his new Zionist propaganda tool: ISRAELOPHOBIA, by defining it as “the old hatred decanted into new bottles”. From now on, stop using anti-Semitism and use Israelophobia instead. Since anti-semitism can no longer logically be applied exclusively to Jews - worse yet, it does apply to the Palestinian victims of the Jews who thus become anti-semitic! - the new "Israelophobia" is very specific and cannot be "stolen" from them. There are so many other Semites around, but there is only one Israel, luckily for the civilized world.

Mr. Simons then places everything in the same blender as it were: "Like the anti-Semitism of previous centuries, the bigotry is based on conspiracy theories and falsehoods. Israel is accused of pulling the strings of politicians, finance and the media". 

No, Mr. Simons, if some numskulls of the extreme right and left conspiracy theory club use stupid arguments like the ones you describe, no one in the world of sane, reasonable and moderate people is accusing Israel of conspiracies and plots. You should not insidiously amalgamate legitimate questions with irrational claims, just as you should have never amalgamated legitimate Palestinian National Resistance and the right to self-determination with extremist Islamist terrorism. Stop doing that. It's unethical. Israel is guilty, and therefore legitimitally accused of land theft (true fact), apartheid (true fact), racism (didn't Israel's minister Ben-Gvir say that Israelis have rights but Palestinians don't?), expansionism (the state of Israel has no constitution, which means it deliberatly refuses to delineate its borders, which suggests that it plans of stealing more land)... And those facts do not excuse the anti-Semitism which has existed long before the creation of the colony of Israel. They simply objectively judge Apartheid Israel for its actions, as was the case with Apartheid South Africa where no one hated the white Afrikaaners because they were white, but simply because they were racist and were dehumanizing the native indigenous black south-Africans.

Israel is presented to the West by Zionist propaganda as a "white" country. In fact, the media always focus on blond-haired, blue-eyed East European or American settlers (who are only Jewish by conversion, not by ethnic ascendancy) as the prototypical Israeli, while showing dark-haired, brown-eyed Palestinians, as if to always emphasize the point that Israelis are "like us" while Palestinians are "alien" to us. If Israelis speak English with an American accent, which makes them likable to the dumb US audience, it is because they ARE American settlers from Brooklyn, NY.

Then Mr. Simons goes on to elevate every insignificant detail using suspicious percentages to Israel's advantage to make his point: Despite being such a fantastic country, tiny Israel is hated by everyone, the poor thing, including by the wealthy and rich people on this earth: "Israelophobia is now one of a suite of “luxury beliefs” about race, gender, colonisation and slavery which are taken on by the elites as badges of political identity"... "patrician liberalism and old-fashioned socialism, shot through with the sort of intense focus on race that is normally only seen on the far Right".

At least, The Telegraph's Mr. Simons admits that extremist right-wing conservative British have always been anti-Semitic, but now they have graduated into Israelophobes.

With no conscience to aid him, Mr. Simons asperges the entire world with his brand new "Israelophobia" accusation: "Wherever you find toxic identity politics, you find Israelophobia. From the EU to the Foreign Office, from universities to museums, from publishing houses to advertising agencies, bigotry towards the Middle East’s only democracy is rife." Regardless of the tiresome lie that Israel is the only democray in the Middle East, Mr. Simons's paranoia wants us to believe that everyone is against Israel, the whole old and gigantic world is against tiny, little-violent, young Israel. Mr. Simons is literally saying that 8 billion people are wrong and that the 6 million plunderers of Palestine, foreign Jewish colonists, rapists, terrorists and settlers, are right.

According to this racist eunuch, any attempt by a Holocaust guilt-inflicted world to redress the existential harm done by genocide and land theft to the native indigenous Palestinians and bring them a modicum of justice "erodes Western self-respect; undermines our history; destroys national pride and patriotism; and sows social division. It emboldens our enemies, whether Islamists or Putin’s fascists". Why he omits "Zionist Jewish racist fundamentalist settlers" from his list of enemies is questionable at the very least.

He then throws his final punch which aims at digging the guilt deeper into the involuntary autonomous brains of Western minds and, like a vaccine, immunize Israel against future legitimate accusations of further land theft and ethnic cleansing against the remaining Palestinians: "Make no mistake", he says, "the fight against Israelophobia is the fight for Western liberalism." Self-serving stupidity could not have done better!

The British conservative movement is rife with racist hatred. Just as its embers continue to glow under the ashes, anti-Jewishness and anti-anything that is not white anglo-saxon protestant still smolders in Perfidious Albion. But it's been said and proven so many times in history: the path to peace can only be through justice. Mr. Simons, who thinks he can embark us on another century of lies, manufactured propaganda terminology, and false premises, is sweeping justice under the rug. Neither he, nor Israel nor Western liberalism will ever see peace as long as the Palestinian people are treated like disposable humans by Torah- and Bible-thumping barbarians. Just like the Crusades a millennium ago who came with an identical religious argument to take back the "Holy Land": They stayed 200 years but were ultimately evicted. Israel will never know peace as long as it pursues a blatant unfair and deliberately violent approach to abscond with the fictional biblical fantasy of the "Holy Land" otherwise known by its real name: Palestine. 

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Appendix: List of British Nazi and Fascist movements of the 20th century:

PRE-WW II:

• The British Fascists (BF), founded in 1923 as the British Fascisti by Rotha Lintorn-Orman
  
• The National Fascisti, a splinter group of the BF founded in 1924 that loved Mussolini
  
• The Imperial Fascist League (IFL) formed by Arnold Leese in 1929 embraced Nazism
• The British Union of Fascists (BUF), formed in 1932 by Oswald Mosley was the largest British fascist party with support from members of the House of Lords, Commons, and others
  
• The Militant Christian Patriots (1935) were a strongly anti-Semitic propaganda organization
  
• The pro-Nazi National Socialist League, formed in 1937 by William Joyce and John Beckett
  
• The English National Association, initially called the British National Party
  
• The Scottish Fascist Democratic Party (early 1930s) under William Weir Gilmour
  
• The British Democratic Party became involved in the Coordinating Committee, an initiative of Archibald Maule Ramsay in the late 1930s
  
• The British Empire Fascist Party, set up by Graham Seton Hutchinson in November 1933, was strongly anti-Semitic
  
• The British People's Party (BPP) was founded in 1939 and led by ex-British Union of Fascists (BUF) member John Beckett, a co-founder with William Joyce of the National Socialist League
  
• The British Union emerged in the early 1930s and worked with the BF
• The British United Fascists were established in Kensington in 1933. The BUF's Blackshirts attacked their offices
  
• The British Empire Fascists were mentioned in 1920s reports in the Socialist Review
  
• The Fascist Movement was another 1920s splinter group from the BF
  
• Italian Fascismo was established in Leith in 1924, with a black-shirted uniform. It was entirely mimetic of Italian fascism and was particularly popular among Edinburgh's Italian community
• The Kensington Fascist Party 1920s-1930s. Worked closely with the BF, IFL and the Unity Band
  
• The Legion of Loyalists in 1931 signed a BF document calling for the abolition of parliamentary government. It joined the British Council Against European Commitments, a pro-German umbrella organization founded by Viscount Lymington in 1938
  
• The Loyalty League emerged in 1923 as an anti-Semitic group attached to the Conservative Party that sought to promote Italian fascism
• The Nordic League, active between 1935 and 1939, was a coordinating body for various Nazi extremist movements
  
• The Nordics were a small group of anti-Semitic "racial nationalists^"
  
• The Scottish Union of Fascists was set up by T.W. Denholm-Hay in 1934 as a Scottish-minded breakaway from the BUF
  
• The Stamford Fascists were a 1926 splinter group from the BF
  
• The United Empire Fascist Party was established by C.G. Wodehouse-Temple in December 1933 and included a former IFL member and agent for Nazi Germany
• The Unity Band was established by Lieutenant-Colonel Oscar Boulton in 1930
  
• The White Knights of Britain, also known as the Hooded Men, were a Ku Klux Klan-inspired secret society that existed between 1937 and 1938. Deeply anti-Semitic, the swastika was their emblem and Edward I of England was their patron figure due to his expulsion of the Jews
  
• The Yorkshire Fascists emerged in the 1920-1930s
  

POST WWII:

• The Union Movement, a re-founded version of the BUF that played a pivotal role in developing the Europeanist outlook of neo-fascism
  
• The British National Party (1960–1967) which uproduced pro-Nazi propaganda until 1962
  
• The National Socialist Movement (NSM), a breakaway from the BNP that was openly Nazi and was a charter member of the World Union of National Socialists
• The Greater Britain Movement, set up by John Tyndall when he split from the NSM, called for a specifically British form of Nazism
• The British Movement, a 1968 branch of the NSM, used images of Hitler and the swastika on election literature
• The November 9th Society, a neo-Nazi organization founded by Terry Flynn in 1977.
  
• The Britain First Party which is a right-wing, anti-Islam and ultranationalist party that has been described as "fascist" by multiple media outlets
• The National Socialist Action Party, a splinter group from the BM formed in 1982
• National Action, a banned neo-Nazi terrorist organization that has done political activism
• New British Union, an openly fascist group founded in January 2013 by Gary Raikes, a former British National Party candidate for Scotland

Lebanon's Christian Hezbollah Goons

Yes, Lebanon can be very confusing for outsiders. But keep it simple: the country is roughly divided between Muslims and Christians. 

In recent decades, the Muslims have regressed into barbarian ultra-religious practices and have been trying to dominate the country and reduce the Christians to a second-class "Dhimmi" citizens. That was the genesis of the 1975 war that has yet to end. Generally the Muslims look to the Arab and Muslim worlds for their inspiration.

The Christians have been mostly on the defensive, trying to rescue a system of shared coexistence and division of power they and the Muslims had agreed to. Generally, the Christians look to the West for their inspiration.

But, just as there are outlying liberal, open-minded Muslims who oppose religious radicalism and fanaticism, there are Christians who are as illiberal and extremist as their Muslim counterparts.

Only yesterday, a group of Christian thugs calling themselves the "Soldiers of God" descended on a bar in the Christian neighborhood of Mar Mikhail in Beirut, known for its nightime parties and festive environment, and attacked an LGBTQ+ party. These thugs, just like their Muslim cognates of Daesh, Al-Qaeda and other regressive religious movements, claim to speak on behalf of God and declared the bar venue "Satan's place". 

Despite its affiliation with the Vatican, the Maronite Catholic Church of Lebanon remains hesitant to follow Pope Francis's exhortation to welcome the LGBTQ community in its churches and be tolerant. The reason is that the Christian community of Lebanon is usually very conservative on social issues and lags several decades behind in its cultural adjustment to Western social and political trends, as are other  Christians throughout the Third World. The Catholics of East Timor or the African Anglicans are perfect examples. 

Unlike the West where the Church has been severely reduced to playing a uniquely religious role and no longer has the political power it once had, Christian churches in the global east and south continue to play primary political roles. But since their survival depends on their alliances with western religious institutions, the growing chasm between an evolving western world and its liberal churches on one hand, and an eastern-southern world stagnating in barbaric Bronze Age beliefs on the other, is likely to have dangerous repercussions on the survival of these minority Christian communities. 

France used to play a significant role as a protector of the Christians of Lebanon, a relationship dating back to the early centuries of the Church when the Lebanese Maronite Catholic Church sided with western christian dogmas against eastern churches, then during the times of the Crusades, and up to the 19th and 20th centuries when France endorsed the creation of a majority-Christian independent Lebanon in 1920. With France still Catholic back then, that relationship had obvious religious, but also political, underpinnings. But France has, during the past two centuries since the French revolution, gradually evolved from its status as the Church's "eldest daughter" to a secular and essentially atheist nation that could no longer associate well with the still somewhat "primitive" nature of Lebanon's Christians who desperately try to superimpose a facade of modernity over their backward religious inclinations. 

With the protestant United States indulging in a chronic dislike of Lebanon's catholics, and a France increasingly becoming a political poodle of the US, Lebanon's Christians seem to be abandoned to their fate in their increasingly assertive Islamic environment. Perhaps the Christian "Soldiers of God" thugs, in attacking the easy target of the LGBTQ community, are in a way appeasing their Islamic counterparts of Hezbollah, Daesh and others by being more radical than the radicals themselves. Somewhat like France's Vichy government rounding up Jews to send to the concentration camps to appease their German Nazi occupiers.

[See more on: https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2023/08/hardline-christian-group-attacks-queer-friendly-bar-lebanon]

Israel, Iran, Afghanistan.. What's the Difference, Lassie?

The rising trend in Israel in gender-based segregation, especially on public transport, is exposing the deeply religious nature of the country, contrary to the decades-old Zionist propaganda. While Israel claims to be a liberal democracy, it is increasingly obvious that it is just another barbarian ultra-religious country that, ironically, resembles its declared enemy Iran.

In recent weeks, there have been several media reports about Israeli bus drivers forcing women to sit in the back of the bus or simply refusing to take them on board. One report said the driver of a public bus told a group of teenage girls to sit in the back and cover up after they boarded dressed in tank tops and jeans, so as not to offend the other barbarian ultra-religious riders. Not very different from what women have to put up with in Iran.

The issue of gender segregation is not new in Israel where, as it is in barbaric Muslim countries, many observe religious practices that restrict mingling of the sexes. Activists say that the discrimination against women has always been latent and hidden, but it has been coming out of the closet in recent years. According to an activist lawyer, some Jewish groups really believe that women are the source of all evil.  

Typical scenes of Israeli women in Jerusalem

 

Tel Aviv, the country's commercial hub, has been the epicenter of protests against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's controversial plans to overhaul Israel's judiciary. Since his government is made up of ultra-religious and terrorist right-wing extremists, the mass demonstrations against the government have revealed the dual nature of Israeli society.

On one hand, the so-called secular Israelis, concentrated mostly in Tel Aviv, oppose the domination of the religious groups, but this position contradicts the essence of the foundation of the state of Israel, namely that it is a homeland for Jews. It was the secular, Communist and Socialist, and often atheist Jews of Russia and Eastern Europe - founders of Bolshevism - who entered illegally into Palestine and violently founded the British colony of Israel by exterminating a third of the native Palestinian population, driving another third into refugee camps inside and outside of Palestine, and subjecting the remaining third to a degrading racist occupation. These "secular" Jews were the founders of the Kibbutzim - Socialist-run Israeli settlements along the Soviet "sovkhoz" and "kolkhoz" models of centralized economy. These “secular” Jews in fact reject the foundational tenets and practices of Judaism, and ironically cast doubt on the rationale of the existence of Israel as a “Jewish” nation. If these "Jews in name only" reject the idea of a purely Jewish state, then what the heck are they doing in Israel? They should go back to Europe whence they came, a Europe that has become very Jewish-friendly.

On the other hand, ultra-religious orthodox Jews literally believe the garbage fiction of the Torah – Old Testament – and are copy-paste clones of ultra-religious radical Islamists like the homo barbaricus talibanus of Afghanistan or the homo putridus fartus rulers of Iran. They want to segregate women from men in public places, they refuse to serve in the military draft, and do not pay taxes, among other dispensations they have imposed. Along with their control of government and their attempts to curb the power of the courts, the ultra-religious appear to be moving Israel on a par with Iran and Afghanistan in their attempts to create and impose a more authoritarian radical form of religious government. 

No wonder that God-El-Yahweh-Allah-Dieu-Whatever-His-Name-Is has chosen them as his favorite pet people. They must provide Him with lots of entertainment because of their self-inflicted troubled history, challenging Him by being very naughty (as they are doing now in Palestine) and incurring His divine wrath. Is the putrid religious stench emanating from Jerusalem these days a warning sign of His impending august punishment? Could God-Yahweh-Dieu-Whatever-his-name-is be himself an antisemite or a self-hating Jew?

Mideastern or Russian/East European?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Tongue in cheek] The various kinds of hats and coats you see on these pictures represent traditional Middle Eastern clothes that used to be worn by the Hebrew nomadic tribes in the deserts of Arabia during the Bronze  Age (~2500 - 500 BC). Apparently the thick and enormous cylinders made of camel wool protected the wandering Hebrew nomads against the scorching sun. The coats also helped them against the excessive heat. 

The profound similarities between these clothes and those worn today by modern Arab tribes testify to the deep connection that these modern recently converted Jews have managed to create with the Middle East, because the fallacious 2,000 years of exile does not apply to them. Also, their reddish-blond hair and blue eyes (seen only in men, since women are hidden just like Iranian and Afghan women) is also a sign that these people are direct genetic descendants of the ancient and defunct, but otherwise dark-haired, brown-eyed Semitic Hebrews. But Yahweh forbid! that they have any genetic link whatsoever with modern Semitic Palestinian Arabs.

All of this to add to the many proofs and evidence that these people, known as modern Israelis, who illegally migrated from Russia and Eastern Europe to Mandatory Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s, have the God-given right to murder, ethnically cleanse and evict the native Palestinians from their land. Apparently the Bronze Age-vintage Big Zombie in the Sky, a.k.a. God, a.k.a. Baal, a.k.a. El, a.k.a. Yahweh gave them the land some thousands of years ago and authorized their leader Joshua to commit genocide and ethnic cleansing against every man, woman, child and beast of the Amalekite Canaanites - the ancestors of the Palestinians. All you have to do is look at their Russian-steppe clothes to conclude that they belong to the land of Palestine. It doesn't matter that the vast majority of them are relatively recent converts to Judaism and have no genetic or cultural connection with the Semitic Hebrews, and therefore no legitimate claim to the land of Palestine.

As an example, the Khazars were a Turkic people who lived between the Black and Caspian Seas in Southern Russia. The Khazar King Bulan is said to have held a debate between proponents of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, and on the basis of what he heard he decided to convert his people to Judaism because he liked the idea of being God's "Chosen People". When Khazaria eventually fell, its newly converted Jews went to Eastern Europe and became the Ashkenazi Jewish stock that subsequently migrated to Palestine as illegal migrants, stole Palestinian land by terrorizing, expelling and killing the native indigenous Palestinians, and created the brand new artificial state of Israel. Have you ever wondered why there are hundreds of Palestinian refugee camps all around Israel? Of note is that Ashkenazis were identified as Germans by medieval Jewish tradition, and Ashkenaz was the name used for the Rhine river, which was the starting point of Jewish settlement for the newly converted central and eastern European Jews.

Retired Israeli General: Israel is like Nazi Germany

A retired Israeli general and former Mossad spy accused his country’s government of “total apartheid” as he appeared to compare Israel’s occupation of the West Bank to Nazi Germany.

Amiram Levin, who served as commander of the Israeli army’s northern forces and deputy director of Mossad, made the remarks during an interview with the Israeli broadcaster Kan.

“There hasn’t been a democracy there in 57 years. There is total apartheid,” Mr Levin said, referring to the ongoing Israeli military occupation of the West Bank.

“It [the army] is standing by, looking at the settler rioters and is beginning to be a partner to war crimes. These are deep processes,” he added.

Israel increasingly faces accusations from human rights groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, of imposing apartheid on Palestinians in the West Bank. But such criticism from former military commanders or other senior officials is rare.

Later in the interview, the former Mossad deputy drew an apparent comparison between Nazi Germany and the situation in the West Bank, which this year has suffered some of the worst Israeli-Palestinian violence in two decades.

“Walk around Hebron and you will see streets where Arabs cannot walk, just like what happened in Germany,” the Jerusalem Post quoted him as saying, referring to the southern West Bank city where Palestinians live in close quarters with a Jewish settler minority backed by the army.

Mr Levin’s comments suggest he has had a profound change of heart on the issue since 2017, when he claimed Palestinians “deserved” to be occupied.

Danny Danon, a senior figure in Israel’s ruling Likud party, rejected the claims. “Those who compare us to Germany or the Nazi regime should be examined,” he said.

Israel’s government vehemently denies the charge of apartheid and has suggested that applying the label to Israel is anti-Semitic. Apartheid was the policy of racial segregation and discrimination enforced by South Africa’s white minority government against black people from 1948 to 1991.

In recent years a number of human rights groups, including Israeli organisations, have started using the word in the context of the West Bank occupation.

In January 2021, the leading Israeli rights groups B’Tselem levelled the charge against Israel for the first time. This was followed by an April 2021 report by Human Rights Watch accusing Israel of “committing the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution”.

The following January, Amnesty International published its own report accusing Israel of apartheid on the grounds that it “considers and treats Palestinians as an inferior non-Jewish racial group”.

It is not the first time a former senior Israeli official has issued the apartheid charge. In 2015, former Mossad chief Meir Dagan said of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu: “On the Palestinian matter, his policies are leading to either a binational state or an apartheid state.”

[Source: The Telegraph via Yahoo News, Monday August 14, 2023] 

Why it is Important to Deconstruct Zionism

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2013/12/8/here-is-why-deconstructing-zionism-is-important/

OPINION
Here is why deconstructing Zionism is important
To criticise Zionism means to demand justice for its victims.
The conflation of Zionism and Judaism is a gross mistake

Professor Michael Marder 

University of the Basque Country in Spain.
Dec. 08, 2013

The final sequence of Eran Riklis’ poignant 2008 film Lemon Tree, based on actual events, is symptomatic of the hidden dynamics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel’s defence minister, who moves with his family to a new house on the occupied West Bank, deems the neighbouring lemon grove of a Palestinian widow Salma Zidane, a security threat. His legal team files a motion to uproot Zidane’s lemon trees in a case that reaches Israel’s Supreme Court.

The Court’s decision is truly Kafkaesque: The trees are to be “pruned” to a height that would not exceed fifty centimetres off the ground in order to allow for an unobstructed view of the territory. In the final sequence, we see the defence minister standing in front of a concrete wall separating his backyard from his Palestinian neighbour’s grove.

As the camera zooms into and sweeps over the wall – in a cinematic transgression of boundaries, “separation fences”, and apartheid lines – it reveals Salma Zidane wistfully walking on the other side, amid the maimed stumps of her trees.

The symbolic identification between the lemon grove and the stateless Palestinian people is obvious. But what does the Supreme Court decision mean in this context? Does it not imply that, whenever they are not altogether uprooted, expelled from their houses, and forcibly removed from their land, Palestinians find themselves in an impossible situation of barely remaining alive, no more than fifty centimetres off the ground? Does it not suggest that, even if they are to keep the roots tethering them to Palestine, their growth will be stunted and they will bear no fruit?

The concrete wall casts everything around it in its own image, rendering the world it divides uninhabitable and hence world-less, lifeless and sterile. And so, the film reconfigures the entire Palestinian-Israeli conflict as a standoff between the inorganic (and deadening) force concentrated in the wall and the vanishing presence of the organic realm condensed in the lemon trees. The Israeli national myth of “having made the desert bloom” reveals the dark underside that has made it possible in the first place: Zionism has turned, and continues to turn, blossoming tree groves into a desert.

To deconstruct Zionism is, therefore, to demand justice for its victims – not only for the Palestinians, who are suffering from it, but also for the anti-Zionist Jews, ‘erased’ from the officially consecrated account of Zionist history.

Zionism and deconstruction

French philosopher, Jacques Derrida once said that deconstruction is the possibility of justice.

To deconstruct Zionism is, therefore, to demand justice for its victims – not only for the Palestinians, who are suffering from it, but also for the anti-Zionist Jews, “erased” from the officially consecrated account of Zionist history. By deconstructing its ideology, we shed light on the context it strives to repress and on the violence it legitimises with a mix of theological or metaphysical reasoning and affective appeals to historical guilt for the undeniably horrific persecution of Jewish people in Europe and elsewhere.

It is, of course, possible to appeal to justice without evoking deconstruction, which is not, in formal philosophical terms, the necessary condition of possibility for this demand. Why, then, deconstruct Zionism? Why now? And, in the first place, what does such a deconstruction entail?

Let us begin with the meaning of deconstruction as it bears on Zionism.

In its most basic sense, the injunction to deconstruct Zionism entails a radical ideology critique with its careful examination of all the presuppositions hidden in an “-ism”. History matters: Like other ideologies, Zionism was a historical construction, a more or less coherent project that took a vast array of forms, running the gamut from the religious to the secular.

Deconstruction replays the history of Zionism backwards; teasing out its motivations, strategies, and above all the unstated preconditions for what is included in its doctrine (for instance, the dismissal of the pre-1948, of the already existing non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine in the slogan, “A land without a people for a people without a land”).

In a deeper sense, deconstruction means exposing and undoing the claims to an eternal truth that are prevalent in a metaphysical way of thinking. In all its forms, Zionism takes the concept of the Jewish people and its connection to the “Land of Israel” to be trans-historical and unitary, temporary exiles notwithstanding.

Proclaiming Jerusalem to be the “eternal and indivisible” capital of the State of Israel wilfully neglects the city’s historicity, its changing architectural, demographic, and political realities through the centuries. Zionism further presupposes the return of the Jewish people to their “historical homeland” and, thus, a recovery – political and otherwise – of the lost unity of the exiled.

To deconstruct Zionism is to interrogate, at once with rigour and with intense personal and political commitment, the myths of national-religious-ethnic origins, of an Odysseus-like return to the place from which ancestors were exiled, and of the unbreakable unity of a people underlying the diversity of its exilic identities.

Responses to the critics

It is easy to anticipate some of the criticisms that will be addressed to any attempt to deconstruct Zionism. These are likely to fall into three broad categories.

1- A focus on Zionism but not on Palestinian ideologies is one-sided and therefore asymmetrical. It lacks the neutrality that marks scholarly research.

But how can one champion a neutral and symmetrical scholarly approach in situations where conditions on the ground are decidedly asymmetrical and become ever more so day by day? What is symmetrical about a confrontation between a powerful state and a stateless people?

More often than not, scholarly neutrality is but a subterfuge, a cover of neutralisation and depoliticisation (as Carl Schmitt would have it) that creates the desired “every story has at least two sides” effect, allowing injustice to proceed with impunity. This is a textbook case of such a stratagem. The plea for neutrality is itself a part of the metaphysical narrative to be deconstructed.

2- Scrutinising Israeli Zionism, instead of discussing the oppression prevalent in other states in the region, is unfair. Israel is singled out, while many of them are much worse.

Curiously, the proponents of this argument would not have a problem endorsing Israel’s exceptionalism: For instance, when it becomes the first country in the world to refuse the request to appear before the UN Human Rights review. At once a state among others states and a unique state above international law, it is ideally rendered immune to criticism.

Our task is to single it out precisely because it is a state that is quite exceptional, though not in the same sense as those making this claim have in mind. Israel’s exceptionalism hinges on the fact that it was a state created thanks to a massive displacement of Arab populations that inhabited the area under the British Mandate and an equally massive influx of immigrants from war-torn Europe and the Middle East.

First, the biggest threat to the wellbeing and security of Israeli Jews (and, often, by implication of Jews who live elsewhere in the world and are assumed to be the supporters of Israeli policies) is neither Iran nor Syria; it is the State of Israel itself.

A state that was constituted, presumably, to atone for one of the biggest tragedies of the 20th century and that, without delay, perpetrated countless crimes against its Palestinian neighbours.

A state that, to this day, re-founds and legitimises itself based on a mix of millennia-old theodicy and a frozen mould of 19th-century European-type nationalism, which has not survived in this form anywhere in Europe.

A state that proclaims itself to be the only democracy in the Middle East, while systematically treating its Arab members as third-class citizens and keeping the imprisonment of some of its Jewish citizens secret.

3- Critique of Zionism is rooted in contemporary anti-Semitism, practised by dissident Jews and non-Jews alike. To criticise Israel is to hate the Jewish people and to prepare the grounds for a new Shoah.

First, the biggest threat to the wellbeing and security of Israeli Jews (and, often, by implication of Jews who live elsewhere in the world and are assumed to be the supporters of Israeli policies) is neither Iran nor Syria; it is the State of Israel itself.

Aside from Israel’s belligerent behaviour on regional and international arenas, its occupation of Palestine not only makes the lives of people who live under this regime impossible, but is also unsustainable as it drains public resources for the purpose of providing “security” to fanatical settlers. It is imperative to deconstruct Zionism not out of hatred, but out of intense concern for the Jewish Israelis, who are set on a path of self-destruction in oppressing and decimating a neighbouring Palestinian population.

Second, the conflation of Zionism and Judaism is a gross mistake: Many Jews, in Israel and outside its boundaries, are non- or anti-Zionist, while many Zionists are not practising Jews. Even a conflation of Zionism and the current State of Israel is unjustifiable, as many in the history of the Zionist movement considered the possibility of creating a Jewish state elsewhere – for instance, in East Africa.

Third, deconstructing Zionism is not just a critique; it is an exercise in unravelling its philosophical suppositions. Zionism is a metaphysically inflected ideological and political worldview, not a religion, and most definitely, not an ethnicity.

To criticise it is no different from criticising, say, Portuguese imperialism in the period between the 15th century and the end of the Salazarist New State in 1974 (except that Portuguese imperialism is already a thing of the past, while Zionist occupation is still on-going).

Finally, why now?

The question echoes that of a Jewish sage, Rabbi Hillel, who famously asked: “If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, then what am I? And if not now, when?”

A question of ethical commitment, “Why now?” receives a response in the form of another question: “If not now, when?” Against the backdrop of the farcical “peace process”, deconstructing Zionism is a matter of urgency, because the past, present, and future victims of Zionist oppression demand justice. Ethically, we must be for them. Only then, can we hope to be anything at all.

Michael Marder is Ikerbasque Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country, Vitoria-Gasteiz. He is the author of The Event of the Thing: Derrida’s Post-Deconstructive Realism (2009), Groundless Existence: The Political Ontology of Carl Schmitt (2010).

How Long Before Lebanon's Christians Take up Arms, Again?

[Post-script to the post below:
https://lebanoniznogood.blogspot.com/2023/08/the-woman-from-kahhaleh.html ]
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Back in the mid-1960s when the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was founded, Lebanon's Christians had - since independence in 1943 - strictly abided by the country's basic laws, namely the written constitution and the unwritten National Pact, that divided the highest offices among the three largest communities, the Maronite Catholics, the Sunni Muslims and the Shiite Muslims. Under that system, Lebanon was a successful democracy, had a prosperous economy and a free press, and was a haven and refuge for Palestinian refugees and for all Arab dissidents and freethinkers. But Lebanon's success invited the jealousy and hatred of Arab and Islamic nationalists, often beholden to the military dictatorships and Islamic monarchs around who could not accept the contrast between Lebanon's democratic successes and their own dictatorial failures. An example is Syria: Whereas Lebanon had 6 duly elected presidents between 1943 and 1976 in peaceful transfers of power, neighboring Syria had on average one bloody coup d'état per year during that same period up to the 1970 coup that placed the Assad regime in power ever since. Yet, Muslims and Arabs began accusing Lebanon of being a Christian dictatorship under the ideology of "political maronitism".

The Lebanese Muslims, encouraged by Nasser of Egypt and a rising tide of Arab and Islamic nationalism, began rejecting the country's basic laws to which they had subscribed. Under the banner of Arabism, Lebanese Muslims wanted to turn small and neutral Lebanon into a military front against Israel, just like Syria, Egypt, Jordan and others were. Obviously, given its puny size and avowed neutrality, Lebanon could never win a war against Israel which had defeated all these other powerful Arab countries. But in their rage and crushing humiliation at their defeat by Jewish Israel, Muslim Arabs found solace in turning their vengeance, not against Israel, but against their own "brother" country, the other "alien" in their midst, the semi-Christian Lebanon, which they thought would be an easy target. Under massive Arab pressure that included boycotts and border closings, Lebanon was forced in the Cairo Accord of 1969 to cede its territory south of the Litani river to Yasser Arafat's PLO so it can "liberate" Palestine, while those frontline Arab countries of Egypt, Syria and Jordan had denied the Palestinian guerillas any military activity against Israel from their own borders. Jordan, in fact, had massacred its own Palestinians in September 1970, pushing them to seek shelter in Lebanon.

The intrinsic weakness of a small, diverse, liberal, neutral and Christian-tagged Lebanon invited the hatred and jealousy of the Arabs who believed that Lebanon had to stand by its "brothers" by losing territory to Israel, just like they did. Defeat had become the criterion for being a "true" Arab: Lebanon had to join the "losers" club, otherwise it would be a traitor to the Arab cause. Egypt had lost the Sinai, Jordan had lost Palestine west of the Jordan river including Jerusalem, and Syria had lost the Golan Heights. Lebanon had not lost any territory because it refused to fight Israel and was bound by the Truce Agreement of 1949 following the Lebanese Army's brief incursion into the Galilee.

It took ten years between 1965 (PLO founding) and 1975 (the start of the Lebanese-Palestinian War) for the Christians to lose their patience. During that decade, they did not resort to violence, they tried to negotiate and convince their fellow Muslims that Lebanon's free press was the Palestinians' best weapon in the war of information against Israel, and that violence could not be the answer, at least not from a small and militarily weak country like Lebanon. Lebanese President Sleiman Frangiyeh, a Maronite Catholic, had introduced Yasser Arafat to the UN in 1974, thus propelling the Palestinians on the world stage as a nation, and not as a bunch of stateless refugees. But Arab machismo, honor and dignity, all attributes of primitive societies, doubled by Islamic and Arab Baathist Fascism, overruled. Backed by Syria's Assad regime that conveyed weapons and terrorist groups across the lawless border (that Syria refuses to this day to demarcate), the Palestinians engaged in kidnappings, random killings of innocent Lebanese citizens at nighttime checkpoints, targeted assassinations, hijackings, and all manner of guerilla activity that no sovereign country could countenance without falling apart. The Lebanese security forces had done nothing to the Palestinians, yet they were constantly harassed, kidnapped and occasionally killed on the grounds that they were not fighting Israel. Because the Lebanese president was by custom a Christian, the entire Lebanese state was deemed a pro-western, crusader, imperialist, isolationist, colonial entity whose objective was to hurt the Palestinian "revolution" that was sponsored by the Communist and Soviet blocs and by a Leftist Europe. Yasser Arafat was behaving like a sovereign ruler, inviting dignitaries and welcoming them at Beirut Airport without any consultation with Lebanese officials. Lebanese Muslims, leftwingers, and Palestinians held demonstrations in Beirut against the Lebanese Army because it refused to engage in open warfare with Israel.

With the Cairo Accord bringing calamities to Lebanon, another agreement, the Melkart Accord, was signed in 1972 to regulate the presence and activities of the PLO, but to no avail. Arafat wanted to liberate Palestine by destroying Lebanon first, as captured in his infamous "the road to Jerusalem goes through Jounieh", the latter being the capital of the Christian heartland. The Lebanese state, being a composite of sectarian camps, was paralyzed. Athough the Christian president had the ordinary executive powers that any president has in a democratic system, he could not use them without the consent of the Sunni prime minister and the Shiite speaker of parliament. The army could not be used against the Palestinians without the consent of the Muslims. Force could not be used to impose order, like Jordan's King Hussein of Jordan had done in 1970. And even when it didn't intervene, the army ended up splitting along sectarian lines with a Christian brigade remaining loyal to the central government, while seditious Sunni, Shiite and Druze brigades fought alongside Syria and the PLO against their own country. The Sunni brigade, a.k.a. the Arab Army of Lebanon, was led by a Syrian-paid traitor, Lebanese Army Lieutenant Ahmad Khatib. Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt, PLO's Yasser Arafat and Syria's Hafez Assad formed a coalition known as the "National Movement", a weird assortment of Islamists, Druze, Communists, Socialists, western anarchists (German Baader-Meinhof, Italian Red Brigades, Japanese Red Army, etc.) and Palestinians, among others. The only thing they shared was their hatred of the state of Lebanon and its Christians. Kamal Jumblatt will later pay for his treason when Syria, after using him to undermine Lebanon, assassinated him in 1977.

That is when a Christian resistance became unavoidable. Having founded the Lebanese state in 1920 and having evicted the French in 1943, the Christians agreed with their fellow Muslims on a power-sharing coexistence, even when the latter, well into the 1920s and 1930s, had not ceased demanding to be part of Syria, not Lebanon. The Christians therefore had more of a stake in the fate of the country. As the Palestinians were creating their own state within the Lebanese state and were dragging the Muslims in their wake, the Christian community felt abandoned by a paralyzed state that could no longer protect them against repeated massacres and abuses by the PLO and other Syrian Baath party militias.

The American war criminal Henry Kissinger had sealed an agreement with the Syrian Baath dictatorship in 1974 in which the latter would not challenge Israel's seizure and annexation of the Golan Heights in exchange for a Syrian dominion over Lebanon that would include the settlement of the Palestinian refugees permanently in Lebanon. The Americans, it seemed, favored the destruction of friendly Lebanon and its conversion into a substitute Palestine, thus relieving Israel of its obligations vis-a-vis the Palestinians refugees, most notably their Right of Return to their villages and towns in Palestine-Israel. The Christians of Lebanon were the sacrificial lamb in this devilish plot.

The Christians were faced with the impending collapse of Lebanon, a meltdown of state institutions, and their own disappearance as a community. Both US Presidents Kennedy (1950s) and Bush Sr. (1980s) had offered a "solution" to Lebanon's Christians: Emigrate to America, leave Lebanon to the Muslims who would immediately annex it to Syria; our friends the oil-drenched Arabs would be happy and keep pumping their oil to us, our lapdog Israel would not have to deal with the Palestinian refugees, and the problem would be solved in one example of many dumb American foreign policy blunders. Since WWII when it became a superpower, America had not won any war: Except for the easy Kuwait promenade in the 1991 Gulf War, the US had lost Korea, Vietnam, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and we now realize that the US-mediated solution to the Balkan Wars of the 1990s is one huge disaster. The dumbness of American foreign policy was first introduced on the world stage when US President Wilson introduced his idiotic 14 points at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference after WWI. US foreign policy succeeds only with political assassinations, betrayals, and toppling democratically-elected governments (Mosadeg in 1950s Iran, Allende in 1970s Chile, Lebanon of the 1980s, etc.).

The Christians decided to take up arms to defend themselves and try to salvage a nation-state they had founded. That is how the Lebanese-Palestinian War of 1975 began. The Christians formed a number of militias that confronted the Palestinians in various regions across the country. That war was to last until 1989 when the West, whose own soldiers, ambassadors, clergymen, administrators, journalists, diplomats etc. were bombed, kidnapped or assassinated by the Syrian-Iranian-Palestinian tandem, handed Lebanon to Syria. The West had become indentured to the wealthy Arabs and was fearful of another oil embargo. Thanks to American and western treachery, the Muslims ultimately won the war, demoted the Christian president to a powerless figurehead in the Taef Agreement of 1989, and the last free Lebanese government was evicted from its headquarters in Baabda by the US-allied Syrian Baathist airforce which, with the consent of the Israelis, was permitted to bomb Baabda and dislodge the last free Lebanese government. One Christian leader (Michel Aoun) was exiled, another (Samir Geagea) jailed, and yet another assassinated (Dany Chamoun), not to mention the dozens of other politicians, journalists and dissidents that were killed. This monstrous charade of delivering a democracy into the hands of a vulgar Stalinist tyranny would continue with its killings, kidnappings, disappearances, and abuses through 2005 and even through today via proxies like Hezbollah.

Today, after more than 30 years of Muslim rule, Lebanon is a cesspool of corruption, crime and mismanagment which has led to a virtual collapse of all its institutions: There is no President, there is no Central Bank Governor, the State-owned television channel has stop broadcasting, etc. The country is going through a period similar to the decade (1965-1975) that preceded the outbreak of war in April 1975. There's no war yet, but pro-Iranian Hezbollah has assumed the role of then pro-Syrian PLO in its abuses and willful dismantling of the country's institutions. The Christians are confronted with the same exact scenario: the Iranian militia of Hezbollah is behaving like a state within the state; it has its own territories, its own army, its own banking system (to bypass western sanctions), etc. Hassan Nasrallah, the alpha silverback of Hezbollah, does not hide his distate of the state of Lebanon and openly flaunts his strict obedience to the Iranian Ayatollah in Tehran. The fear of a repeat of the fragmentation of the Lebanese army is real. All it takes is for Hassan Nasrallah to call on the Shiite soldiers in the army to defect, and they'll do it in a split second to join Hezbollah. The Christians are again faced with a slew of problems that threaten their existence. They fear suffering the same fate as the Syrian, Iraqi and Palestinian Christians, all victims of Muslim terror and discrimination in Syria and Iraq, and of Jewish terror in Israel. They fear suffering the same fate as the Christian Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh who are being ethnically cleansed by an oil-rich Muslim dictatorship in Azerbaijan in another chapter of the long-standing Armenian genocide at the hands of Turkey.

Hezbollah is behaving in Lebanon like the American-Zionist settlers of Palestine. The Shiite community of Lebanon, virtually entirely hijacked by Hezbollah, continuously try to steal land from the Christians in order to increase their sway and change the demographics of the country. They forge official property deeds through their operatives who have infiltrated the institutions. In the towns of Lhassa in Byblos District, Rmeish in south Lebanon, Zahle in the Bekaa Valley, and others. In the Christian neighborhoods of Beirut that were destroyed by Hezbollah's ammonium nitrate explosion in the harbor, predatory buyers serving as fronts for Hezbollah are preying on destitute owners to purchase their ruined properties in order to implant a yet non-existent Shiite presence. In another scenario, the Shiites approach the Maronite Church and ask for permission to "temporarily" exploit communal church land for agriculture. The Church reluctantly approves and Shiite farmers begin growing food inside greenhouses. After a season or two, they erect a tent, then a cinder block structure, then a house, and one day a mosque. The communal church-owned land had become a Shiite village flying Hezbollah and Iranian flags. By then, it is too late to dislodge them because they are backed by Hezbollah, and if there are in principle legal or law-enforcement systems to resort to, they are all under Hezbollah's fist.

Hezbollah has since 2016 obstructed the work of the Lebanese Parliament in order to force its own Christian puppet candidate into the presidency, someone it can control and manipulate. In 2016, it took 2.5 years before pro-Hezbollah puppet president Michel Aoun was elected, after the Christian opposition finally gave up trying to have a genuine democratic election. With Aoun's term coming to an end last October 2022, Hezbollah is repeating the same maneuver. The country has been without a president for the past ten months, and every session of parliament that seems to be going against a Hezbollah puppet candidate is scuttled by the Shiite MPs who walk out to break the quorum. Other state institutions, like the governorship of the Central Bank, are being undermined by the Shiite politicians. The Beirut Harbor blast of August 4, 2020 remains outside the reach of the judiciary because Hezbollah-affiliated judges have been blocking the work of the Independent Investigator in charge of the inquiry by filing no less than 40 lawsuits against him, thus forcing him to suspend his work. The Lebanese equivalent of the Supreme Court has also been blocked by Shiite ministers who refuse to sign decrees appointing judges to the Court which would reinstate the Independent Investigator. And the list goes on and on about how the Iranian militia of Hezbollah and its affiliated politicians are literally dismantling the state of Lebanon and its institutions. Just like the PLO was doing back in the 1960s and 1970s.

Syria occupied Lebanon for 30 years (1975-2005). Prior to that, and since independence in 1943, it refused to recognize Lebanon's right to exist as an independent nation. Since 2005 when its occupation army was evicted by an angry population and by a West under the shock of the september 11, 2001 attacks, Syria continues to harass and abuse Lebanon via proxies and now, since the onset of the Syrian civil war in 2011, with 2.5 million Syrian refugees that the international community says it wants to settle permanently in Lebanon on top of a 4-million strong native Lebanese population. In other words, the international community appears to want to eliminate Lebanon by settling Muslim Syrians and driving Christian Lebanese into emigration. The Kissinger plan is still alive and kicking. The world does not notice the flight of Lebanon's Christians because, unlike stereotypical refugees, Lebanon's Christian refugees do not settle in tents in muddy filthy terrains, nor do they beg for handouts. No one notices their plight. But they are refugees nonetheless and their five-decades-long social and psychological traumas are no less devastating than for other refugees.

Christian leaders, politicians and church officials continue day in and day out to call for the rule of law, for Hezbollah to cede its weapons to the regular amy and for its fighters to join its ranks, for the Independent Investigator to resume his work, and to allow the constitutional processes to work instead of bypassing them through what the Muslims call "consensus" and "dialogue". The Christians continue to demonstrate peacefully and, despite multiple assassinations of outspoken critics of Hezbollah, the Christians have not resorted to violence against Muslim Shiites or Syrian refugees, with the exception of defending themselves when Hezbollah's terrorists invaded the Christian neighborhood of Ayn Remmaneh and rampaged through it, just like those radical Jewish-American settlers did in the Palestinian village of Huwara a couple of months ago. Hezbollah is copy-pasting Zionist methodology. In fact, after claiming that its "resistance" against Israel was motivated by what it considers the Israeli "occupation" of some puny territory in the south that technically belongs to Syria, Hezbollah's puppet government signed an agreement last year with Israel over the maritime borders between the two countries. In this agreement, Israel ceded to Lebanon an area that technically belongs to Israel but which is continuous with a prospective oil field in Lebanon's waters. The reason: both sides stand to benefit from potential oil revenues from offshore platforms. But Hezbollah refuses to display similar flexibility on the land border disputes. The reason? If a land border is agreed to by both Lebanon and Israel, then Hezbollah's own existence would become moot. No more resistance against Israel means no more raison d'etre for Hezbollah to remain an armed militia.

The Christians have been sending delegations to western countries trying to get some help in resolving the accumulating and increasingly complex problems the country is facing. But even with the magnitude of the disasters that have befallen Lebanon for the past decade, the West hesitates, wavers, ignores, and turn its head. Only one court in London has issued a judgment on the ownership of the ship that carried the ammonium nitrate to Beirut. Not one country, not one international instance have had the courage to launch an investigation into the Beirut Harbor explosion, despite the fact that the West is facing Iran and Syria with stiff sanctions. But in Lebanon, the Syrian-Iranian proxy Hezbollah is handled with velvet gloves. The reason? The West wants a nuclear deal with Iran and is afraid of confronting Iran in Lebanon, lest Hezbollah launches its hundreds of thousands of rockets on Israel.

Hezbollah is dissolving Lebanon as we know it and pushing the country into a civil war. The West too appears interested in a blowup in Lebanon, particularly the Americans who give the Lebanese army just enough of their second-hand rusty equipment to fight Hezbollah but never win. And lose it will, because the army will fracture again along sectarian lines. For 5 decades, the West has done nothing serious to solve the Lebanese quagmire. In contrast, it has rallied NATO armies to rescue the Muslims of Bosnia and Kosovo. It has massed an armada to rescue the Christians of East Timor from Indonesian occupation. And now in Niger, the French and the Americans have bases in the country and are willing to join a Pan-African force to counter a military coup and bring democracy back. The UN has had a force - UNIFIL - in south Lebanon since 1978 without accomplishing anything other than the death of hundreds of its soldiers who spend their days counting bullets and rockets in an area in which the regular Lebanese Army is denied entry by, guess who? Hezbollah, a terrorist organization according to a majority of the UN's member states. And the UN, year after year, continues with the very costly charade of renewing UNIFIL's mandate in south Lebanon. Why is Lebanon out of the realm of assistance? Why are the Christians of Lebanon abandoned to their fate? Fifty long years and generations of Lebanese Christians have left the country to settle anywhere they could on the planet. There's something pathological or deeply insidious in the manner with which the international community has been handling a small country like Lebanon, yet a founder of the UN and a co-author of its human rights charter.

What do the Christians do in the face of a potential repeat of 1975? They haven't yet taken up arms. But do they fight again and go through a horrible decade or two with a treacherous West in their back and hostile Arab and Iranian Muslims facing them with a willful objective of dechristianizing Lebanon? Do they give up and submit to Islamic rule and live like a Dhimmi community? A highly unlikely scenario as the Christians have survived centuries of Muslim threats to their existence as perhaps the only free Christian community in the east that has not been crushed. For now, they are exercizing patience and appealing to the world to abide by the legal and ethical standards of international law. In the 1970s, the Christians of Lebanon were accused by both West and East of being radical extremists who hate Muslims, when the reality is that they have sought, and continue to seek, to accommodate their political life with the Muslims by sharing power with them, unlike Jewish Israel which has taken an openly hostile, racist and brutal militarized approach to their shared living with the Muslims.

If there is no change in the current calamitous course of events, the world will soon witness a second Lebanese war in which the Christians will face, not the Arab-Syrian-Palestinian coalition backed by a cowardly and obsequious West as they did in the 1970s, but a Syrian-Iranian-Shiite terrorist threesome that has haunted the West itself for decades. Just consider that the Assad regime of Syria, in power in Damascus since 1970, an ally of Iran, a state sponsor of terrorism, a haven for Jihadists, a killer and ethnic cleanser of its own people, an occupier of Lebanon and an amply documented human rights abuser and war criminal, has just been rehabilitated by the filthy Arab League and probably soon by the West. What are the Lebanese Christians, whose country has been swamped by a second Syrian occupation and an Iranian occupation, waiting for before sounding the alarm and taking action in preparation for war, one more time? I imagine the bleeding-hearted NGOs getting all excited at the prospects of war, because they'll have much to do and much more money pouring in into their coffers.

For more:
https://ia801500.us.archive.org/20/items/invisible-jihad-report/Invisible-Jihad-Report.pdf
https://www.christianpost.com/voices/the-deliberate-and-slow-eradication-of-lebanons-christians.html

Deconstructing Insidious Israeli-Zionist propaganda

Below is a piece posted on Yahoo News by Aaron Kliegman on August 3, 2023. Whereas such news outlets claim to be objective and unbiased, Zionist propaganda injects words (nouns, adjectives, verbs, modifiers, etc.) in the text that biases the reader’s mind into accepting misinformation as normal and mainstream. Mr. Kliegman is obviously a mouthpiece for the lobbies that keep American public opinion blindly biased in favor of the Apartheid state of Israel as defined by the UN, Amnesty International and none other than the Israeli B’Tselem organization. The entire construct of the US media is based on such a methodology of injecting biased information. No wonder the US is virtually the only country in the world to blindly adopt - lock, stock and barrel - the Zionist and Israeli views on the question of Palestine. Forget justice, rule of law, American values,... All the American machismo breaks down to wimpy cowardice in the face of the Zionist threat.

The text is abridged where passages are irrelevant, but those passages presented below are reproduced unedited in their integrity.

Bold passages are Mr. Kliegman's original passages. Between brackets are my comments in Italic.

[For more on the topic, see: 

1-  https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2013/12/8/here-is-why-deconstructing-zionism-is-important

2 - Deconstructing Zionism, by Gianni Vattimo and Michael Marder (eds.), Bloomsbury Academic, 2013, pp.208.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., whose anti-Israel rhetoric and activism [“anti-Israel” invites a negative judgment on Rep. Tlaib; why not use the more positive“pro-Palestine”?] have become staples of her tenure in Congress, recently attended an art show with work on display calling for Israel's destruction [false; defending Palestine and promoting a Palestinian state does not mean the destruction of Israel, except in the minds of rabid Zionists who aim to ethnically cleanse the West Bank and Gaza and build an exclusively Jewish supremacist country emptied of its native indigenous Palestinian population. Alternatively, the creation of the British-American colony of Israel caused the destruction of Palestine. So what gives?] and promoting known and suspected terrorists [an unbiased and objective observer would use the word “militants” or “freedom fighters”. After all, the international community agrees to the illegality of Israel’s occupation of Palestine and its mistreatment of the native indigenous Palestinian population. What Israel is doing in Palestine is illegal under US-approved international law, so any native of the land who fights a foreign and illegal occupation is not a terrorist, but a freedom fighter].

The Handala Coalition, a group of Palestinian [By deliberately dropping the obvious hyphenized '-American' from Palestinian-American, Mr. Kliegman sneakily tries to discredit the movement as a foreign one, worse yet in the brainwashed minds of the stupefied dumb American public, a Palestinian one] and allied organizations in Michigan, organized the controversial art show [controversial to whom? Not to me. Perhaps to people like Mr. Kliegman whose job is to misinform and who fears outing the truth], which was held at the Swords into Plowshares Peace Center and Gallery in Detroit from May 26 to June 17. Tlaib visited the art gallery May 30 and posed for photos [why is posing for photos by a member of congress with his/her supporters newsworthy?] with several attendees and organizers, according to press reports and social media posts.

In one picture posted to Facebook, Tlaib is smiling [OMG! smiling as she calls for the destruction of Israel? Bad, bad Tlaib! But why shouldn’t she smile, she's been very successful and courageous for speaking out against an otherwise monolithic totalitarian US press?] in front of what the Handala Coalition described as an "apartheid wall" [What else is a wall that separates one hypermilitarized supremacist racist group from another group treated like cattle led to the slaughter?] with the words "We Will Return." The words appeared [No, they don’t just “appear”, they do in fact make reference] to reference a call that pro-Palestinian activists often make for the so-called [Another term that casts doubt on the internationally recognized right of refugees to return to the country they were ethnically cleansed from] right of return [in a decent non-biased press, the “Right of Return” is spelled with uppercase first letters, but Mr. Kliegman hypocritically chooses to diminish the import of the concept by not capitalizing] of all Palestinian refugees to Israel [Kliegman at least recognizes the existence of millions of Palestinians who were made refugees by the creation of the English-US colony of Israel].

The United Nations uniquely classifies Palestinians, and no other people, as refugees at birth — even if they never fled persecution [Another Zionist lie that the Palestinian refugees "left on their own and were not persecuted". The use of the term "uniquely" implies that the UN gives the Palestinian refugees preferential treatment instead of favoring Israel. But remember that this classification, if it were true, was enacted in 1948 when the genocide and expulsion of the Palestinians by Jewish terrorism was one of the first at the end of WWII].

Facts: Today's Israeli army was formed by the coalescing of Jewish terrorist orgnizations like the Stern Gang, Haganah, Lehi, Irgun and others that persecuted, massacred, raped and forced hundreds of thousands of Palestinian villagers during the 1930s and 1940s to flee and seek refuge both inside and outside the borders of their historic land of Palestine. Jewish terror groups demolished homes, uprooted olive orchards, raped Palestinian women and girls, killed women, men and children just like Joshua did in the first ethnic cleansing of Canaan of biblical vintage, erased 500 Palestinian villages from the map so their indigenous inhabitants could not return. Remember what ISIS did to the Yazidis? That is exactly what the Zionists did to the Palestinians. This was deliberate ethnic cleansing, no less. Samples of Jewish Zionist terrorism: Foreign unbiased observers like UN peace envoy, the Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte, were assassinated by the ingrate Jewish Lehi terror organization in 1948 after Bernadotte had rescued 31,000 Jews from German concentration camps during the war. The King David Hotel in Jerusalem where the Mandatory Power for Palestine, i.e. the British colonial crooks, had their headquarters was bombed by the Jewish terrorist group Irgun in July 1946. And there's much more to discover for those who really want to learn how the colony of Israel was crafted by Jewish terrorism.

Inform yourselves: 

Read [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/22/world/middleeast/arab-loss-art-kibbutz-israel.html; or 

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2020/11/06/israel-destroys-entire-palestinian-village-in-a-massive-demolition-operation/; or 

The Tantura massacre and mass graves at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/25/study-1948-israeli-massacre-tantura-palestinian-village-mass-graves-car-park ]

Perhaps Mr. Kliegman is suggesting that children born to refugee parents are no longer classified as refugees. If he is, then he is lying - check the UN definition of a child refugee. These children's parents were made refugees by Israel which persecuted them and ethnically cleansed them out of their villages where their forefathers had lived for millennia. Perhaps Mr. Kliegman is suggesting that once a baby is born to refugee parents in a refugee camp, that baby is no longer a refugee. How convenient! In other words, as a Zionist liar, land thief and pro-ethnic cleansing, Mr. Kliegman is hoping that once the first generation of refugees dies off, their children can be excluded from the definition of refugees and can no longer claim the Right of Return]. 

So, the right of Palestinian refugees to return would mean all Arabs [By using the term “all Arabs” instead of “Palestinians”, Mr. Kliegman is peddling the Zionist argument that denies a unique identity to the Palestinians and lumps them with all the other Arabs, which in turn promotes the Zionist fallacy that since Palestinian refugees are “Arabs”, they can settle anywhere in the Arab world, forget Palestine and leave the artifical foreign implant of Israel alone. According to that line of thinking, Ukrainians are “Europeans”. They can settle anywhere in Europe; they should forget about Ukraine and leave it to its Russian occupiers] displaced after Israel's founding and their descendants could settle in Israel [Notice the "after Israel's founding" phrase: Mr. Kliegman deliberately ignores those Palestinian refugees who were displaced before and during the Palestinian-Jewish civil war that preceded the crafting of the colony of Israel. Between the 1920s and the 1940s, the Palestinians mounted a revolt against the invading hordes of European Jews, but they were no match to the Nazi-trained invaders. The issue concerns ALL Palestinian refugees regardless of whether they were evicted by Jewish terrorism in the many ethnic cleansing campaigns before, during, or after 1948.  Also, there exists today a part of what remains of historic Palestine, namely the West Bank and Gaza, where refugees could re-settle. Why can’t the so-called "Righteous Among Nations" Jews of Israel show some human decency and compassion, and offer their Palestinian refugee victims to return there after they have raped their country and stole it from them? By using the term “settle in Israel”, Mr. Kliegman is denying and excluding a Palestinian State]. Some activists [which ones? Those extremist fanatic ultra-religious terrorist barbarians whose ideas are drawn from biblical trash fiction in an exact copy-paste manner as their alter egos, the extremist fanatic terrorist Mulisms whose ideas are inspired from Koranic verbiage?] have said such an outcome would end Israel's existence as a Jewish state [Naturally, a Jewish state for only its Jewish citizens and no one else, as Benyamin Netanyahu has clearly said, just as Iran is a Muslim state for only its Muslim citizens and no one else. Again, by using “end Israel’s existence”, Mr. Kliegman is peddling the Zionist zero-sum argument that any Palestinian state will mean the destruction of Israel, and therefore a Palestinian state should never exist. But what does Mr. Kliegman want to do with the 5 million Palestinians still living and resisting his barbarity in occupied Palestine? I'll tell you what he wants to do: Ethnically cleanse the West Bank and Gaza, expulse the Palestinians, yet again, and add another Nakba tragedy on top of the 1948 one. That is the plan of the criminals now in power in the Israeli government for whom Mr. Kliegman serves as a perfect spokesman].

The art show also featured a piece showing a Palestinian [again, Palestinian-American] woman who appears to be holding a gun with the phrase "Power to Our Freedom Fighters, Glory to Our Martyrs." [Yeah? So what? Haven’t we seen enough hypermilitarized Nazi-style American Zionist squatters and Israeli soldiers terrorizing and killing civilian Palestinians while chanting "Death to the Arabs"?] Several other works depicted Israel as a violent aggressor [How dare they? Sadly for Mr. Kliegman, Israel is one of the most violent states on earth, and is an aggressor under the law and according to all human rights organizations, including Israeli ones] guilty of "land theft" [Mr. Kliegman's quotation marks notwithstanding, daily land theft by Jews has been amply proven and documented in the press with the illegal seizure of Palestinian land and building of illegal settlements on Palestinian land] and practicing "apartheid" against the Palestinians [Again, his quotation marks are supposed to cast doubt on the term Apartheid, but isn’t it what the wall of separation built by the Nazified Jews does: separate the "superior Jewish race" from the "inferior Palestinian race", even though in the genetic reality as well as the biblical bullshit, they both ought to be the same Semitic people? "Apartheid" is in the Afrikaans language - the language of the racist whites of South Africa - a term that means "aparthood" or "separation", a favorite idea of those imbecile white racists of the American south with their "separate but equal" mantra to keep them apart from the "inferior" Black African-Americans. Isn’t this what the Jewish occupation does with the daily humiliations, the dehumanization of the native Palestinian population, the denial of construction permits, the demolition of homes, the incarceration of teenagers…If he doesn't like the word "Apartheid" because it equates him with the now discredited white south African barbarians, I invite Mr. Kliegman to propose another term to describe the abomination of Israel’s inhumane treatment of the Palestinians?]

Prominent pro-Israel activist David Lange and Arab American News also both posted photos of the artwork, which included multiple pieces with the written message "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free." [That land between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean sea is the original historic millennial Palestine that the crooks of Mandatory Britain dismembered by selling it to the nazified European Zionists. Why can’t the indigenous native Palestinians claim all of their own land, while foreign barbarian invading Zionists do claim a much bigger real estate from the Nile to the Euphrates that God supposedly gave them in the fictional trash of the Bronze Age Torah?]

The art show also featured a canvas that said, "Free our martyrs. Free them all. Zionism will fall." Zionists are those who support a "Jewish national home" [Mr. Kliegman forgot his quotation marks around this sentimental label for a criminal enterprise, so I intervened on his behalf. This "National Home" was in reality a British, then American, colony of ultrareligious barbarian settlers whose job was to give access to the British colonial empire to the oil fields further afield in Arabia] in the historic land of Israel [False. Here "historic" deserves the quotation marks. There is nothing "historic" to the land of Israel. The Hebrews, divided into two separate enemy countries, Judah and Israel, ruled over parts of the historic land of Palestine for some 300 years about 800 BC, after Joshua had killed all the men, women and children Canaanites – the forerunners of the Palestinians - on orders from God, in a first ethnic cleansing of Palestine as documented in the bible. Since that time, the land has been successively occupied by the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Crusaders, Mamluks of Egypt, Ottoman Turks, and finally perfidious Britain. All these nations have stronger factual and historical claims to the land than any modern East European who converted to Judaism some 300 years ago and who lays claim to the land based on the fictional bullshit of the Old Testament. Modern Israel was indeed born out of a second ethnic cleansing and genocide of the native population of Palestine].

Beyond Israel-related imagery, the Handala Coalition's Facebook page includes several provocative pictures with anti-police messaging, including one depicting an officer as a pig [OMG, provocative? What an insult to the violent white racist police officers in the United States, historically depicted as pigs by 1960s-1970s American protesters and by such protest movements of our time as Black Lives Matter. Is Mr. Kliegman suggesting that African-American victims of police violence provoke the police?].

Tlaib, a Palestinian-American, has repeatedly called Israel an "apartheid state" [So do the UN, Amnesty International, the Israeli organization B’Tselem, and several countries around the world that do not submit to the Holocaust blackmail like the Europeans who live with guilt of their Nazi past and who got rid of their Jews by sending them to Palestine. Does Mr. kliegman suggest that only Israeli protesters can call their country “Apartheid”, but no one else? Luckily for his readers, Mr. Kliegman has refrained from accusing the entire international community, including many Jews and Israelis, of being “antisemitic”. This certainly indicates that the world now knows that “antisemitic” is such an abused and abraded term that even apologists of racist Apartheid Israel have stopped using it in their propaganda, including Kliegman himself!] that discriminates [Too soft a term] against Palestinians, even comparing the world's only Jewish state to Nazi Germany. [The term "only" is meant to portray Israel as the victim. It's the only one, so even if it was born out of sheer violence against the native Palestinians, it should be forgiven because it's the "only" one. The poor thing. Since, in the opinion of racist supremacists like Mr. Kliegman, Israel is such a unique success, why not have this time the US - not England - issue a second Balfour Declaration and work on crafting a second Jewish state somewhere else on the planet, say in Africa. There are places in Africa where the population is as poor and rural as Palestine was in the 1930s, so the natives can be easily exploited and terrorized by the very sophisticated and hypermilitarized Jews, just as they did with the native Palestinians with land theft, ethnic cleansing and such refined western colonial means. This way, Israel would no longer be the "only" one and hence no longer a victim, the poor thing. The Zionist settlers that stole Palestine and genocided the Palestinians came from 1930s-1940s Europe that was ruled by the Nazis, so they must have learned their racist terrorist trade from them, as we showed earlier].

Earlier this year, House Republican leadership stopped Tlaib from hosting an anti-Israel event on Capitol Hill. [Of course, what else to expect from the racist anti-Jewish, anti-Catholic, anti-African-American, anti-immigrant, white supremacist House Republicans whose heads are so deep up Donald Trump's rectal sphincter that they continue to defend and support a soon-to-be 4-times indicted criminal racist like Donald Trump, just as Mr. Kliegman in all likelihood supports his own racist and criminal Prime minister Benyamin Netanyahu].