American Pravda: Israel, Gaza, and Broader Issues
A Sudden Attack by Hamas and Its Consequences
A couple of weeks ago, the smoldering political landscape of the Middle East suddenly exploded as the Hamas militants of Gaza launched a surprise attack against Israel, unprecedented in its size and success. News reports now place Israeli fatalities at around 1,400, more deaths in a single day than the country had ever suffered in any of its previous wars, and greater losses than in all of those conflicts combined since 1973, while as many as 200 Israelis were captured and taken back to Gaza as prisoners and hostages.
In recent years, Israel had focused upon technological solutions for its border defense, relying upon numerous sensors and remote-control machine-guns to guard the Gaza perimeter, but Hamas used small drones to quickly disable these and the signal-towers that controlled them. Meanwhile, discipline at the nearby IDF garrisons had apparently grown very lax with the sentries asleep or away from their posts, so the bases were easily overrun and the soldiers killed in their beds, by some accounts suffering up to 600 deaths in just a matter of hours, a tremendous military disaster.
The IDF had been widely regarded as one of the world’s most formidable military organizations, while Hamas consisted of lightly-armed Palestinian militants lacking any heavy weaponry, so the very serious losses the former suffered at the hands of the latter constituted an enormous national humiliation.
Indeed, decades of boastful Israeli propaganda had inspired such an exaggerated sense of the invincibility of the IDF and its Mossad intelligence service that there were widespread conspiratorial claims all across the Internet, not least among the columnists and commenters of our own website, that the Israeli government must have deliberately allowed the attack to take place. It has long been known that the Israelis originally promoted Hamas as a means of dividing the Palestinians and weakening the PLO, so some even seized on that fact to argue that the Hamas attack had probably taken place under Israeli orders.
Although such conspiratorial beliefs were most common among sharp critics of Israel, they actually attained far broader acceptance. Charlie Kirk is the leader of a large pro-Israel conservative organization, and in an interview, he set forth exactly those same dark suspicions.
For many months, the Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been facing enormous public demonstrations by his bitter political opponents, representing a historic division in his own society that was even verging on civil war. So according to this theory, Netanyahu had deliberately allowed that attack to take place, hoping to use it as his “Pearl Harbor” or “9/11” to solidify his own political position, perhaps even providing him an excuse to expel the Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank, thereby achieving the political goal of the more extreme members of his coalition by expanding Israel’s frontiers while permanently solving the festering “Palestinian problem.”
Despite its apparent popularity, the likelihood of this scenario disintegrates upon any careful consideration. Israel probably suffered the worst one-day defeat in its national history, a strategic disaster. Even aside from the huge loss of life in such a small population, the tremendous Hamas success punctured the powerful myth of Israeli military strength, which for three generations has been the cornerstone of the country’s national security strategy. Such heavy losses suggested that the IDF had become a paper-tiger, greatly amplifying the lesson of its 2006 military setbacks at the hands of Hezbollah in Lebanon. If poorly-armed Hamas militants could achieve such a serious blow, all of Israel’s regional adversaries were surely emboldened, and this would have been obvious to any Israeli national security officials who might have considered such a gambit.
We should also remember that Israel had been on the very verge of achieving normalized relations with Saudi Arabia, the wealthiest and most influential Arab state, a prospect that has now completely vanished. Israeli leaders had been pursuing that particular objective for decades and it seems very unlikely that Israel’s government would have sacrificed that opportunity by deliberately enabling a large Hamas attack.
But suppose that Netanyahu had actually been so politically desperate and so irrational that he had decided to allow a successful Hamas assault by standing down his own security defenses. How could he have possibly done so?
Aside from its regular army, Israel has three separate intelligence services, Mossad, Shin Bet, and Unit 8200, all of which tend to be rivals. So as former CIA Analyst Larry Johnson noted, Netanyahu would have needed to enlist the leadership of all three of those organizations in his treacherous plan to facilitate a successful Hamas attack, while making sure that none of the relevant rank-and-file officers disagreed and leaked the ultra-explosive story to the fiercely anti-Netanyahu media. This seems an impossibility.
Moreover, as already mentioned, Israeli society has recently been extremely divided, with the bulk of the nation’s elites lined up against Netanyahu and trying to drive him from office. According to media reports, the leadership of Mossad was squarely in the anti-Netanyahu camp with claims that Mossad agents were even helping to orchestrate the huge public demonstrations demanding his resignation. Surely if they had gotten the slightest hint the Netanyahu was deliberately opening the country to a huge Hamas attack, they would have used that fact to destroy him.
Also, Netanyahu is running a coalition government, with many of his top ministers hating him and eager to undermine his reputation. Even his own lieutenants might welcome his fall so that they could replace him and rise to power and it’s difficult to believe that so deadly a secret could have been kept in such a political snake-pit. And now that so many hundreds of Israeli civilians have been killed, a single outraged leaker could have Netanyahu and his fellow conspirators put on trial or even lynched. According to Seymour Hersh’s Israeli sources, Netanyahu’s long political career cannot possibly survive the aftermath of the military disaster his country has now suffered.
Reports that an Egyptian warning of a planned Hamas attack were ignored may or may not be a sign of negligence; perhaps numerous previous warnings along similar lines had always turned out to be false alarms. More serious are reports that Netanyahu had recently redeployed two of the three Israeli battalions based on the Gaza border to the West Bank in order to support Jewish settlers in their aggressive actions against the local Palestinians. But that seems more a sign of complacency and incompetence than treasonous plotting.
Under normal circumstances, the notion that the Hamas attack was an “inside job” facilitated by Israel’s own government seems so totally absurd I would hardly have given it a single sentence. But with so many on the Internet promoting the idea, it was worth explaining some of the obvious flaws, not that this may do much good. Kevin Barrett is a Muslim convert who has spent decades as an active participant in the 9/11 Truth movement and embraced a very wide range of other conspiracy theories, but when he doubted that this one was correct, most of the commenters angrily disagreed with him, and I got the same reaction when I took a similar position.
Based upon my experience, I’d say that 90-95% of all the so-called “conspiracy theories” floating around on the Internet are false or at least unsubstantiated. But the remaining 5-10% still provide a shocking catalog of important exceptions, and when many individuals first discover the reality of these, they often begin to gullibly accept all too many of the others as well.
Stunning military defeats naturally produce a wave of wild claims, and the theory that Netanyahu’s government had deliberately allowed the disaster was hardly alone among these. Within days, the Internet and much of the media was awash with the particularly grotesque atrocity-tale that the Hamas fighters had beheaded 40 Israeli babies, an accusation heavily promoted by pro-Israel activists.
This outrageous report had apparently originated with a particularly fanatic leader of Jewish settlers, no evidence was ever provided, and to its credit, the Israeli military refused to endorse the story. But nonetheless it still swept through social media and even reached the lips of our own befuddled President Joe Biden, who claimed to have seen the grisly photos before the White House “walked back” the story.
Mike Whitney published a good column summarizing the narrative arc of this debunked example of especially black propaganda:
- No, Hamas Did Not Behead 40 Babies at an Israeli Kibbutz Last Saturday
Mike Whitney • The Unz Review • October 13, 2023 • 1,500 Words
While many Israeli civilians were certainly killed, I had been immediately skeptical of such extreme atrocity claims, whose huge distribution merely illustrated the overwhelming dominance that Israel and its partisans enjoyed over the Western media.
Around the same time I had come across a short interview of an Israeli woman with two young children who told a very different sort of story. According to her, the Hamas militants who occupied her home for a couple of hours were quite respectful, even asking her permission to eat one of the bananas on her kitchen counter. But such eyewitness accounts have received only an infinitesimal fraction of the attention given to those on the other side.
A similar but even more striking story came out in the radio interview of a Kibbutz survivor, who was one of about a dozen civilians taken prisoner by a group of Hamas militants. According to her, none of the captives were harmed and they were all treated “very humanely,” but many of them were later killed, probably by the Israeli forces that eventually arrived and engaged their Hamas captors in a fierce gun-battle. Questions are now being raised about exactly how many Israeli civilians died and who actually killed them.
In 1986, the Israeli government had adopted its notorious “Hannibal Directive” requiring that any Israelis captured by Palestinians must either be rescued or killed to avoid allowing them to become future bargaining chips, so accounts like this raise the likelihood that many of the Israeli civilian victims actually died at the hands of their own troops. Indeed, the Hamas political leader claimed in an interview that his forces were not responsible for the civilian deaths, but instead blamed the Israeli military, an accusation supported by a growing number of eyewitness reports.
The outrageous hoax of 40 beheaded Israeli babies that swept across the Western media soon disappeared, supplanted by a far larger and more real catastrophe as a huge explosion on October 17th rocked the grounds of Gaza’s largest Christian hospital. For days, the Israelis had demanded that the hospital be evacuated, underscoring that order by dropping several small bombs, but the staff refused to leave or drive away the many hundreds of desperate refugees sheltering in the vicinity.
Given these facts, few were surprised twenty minutes later when an official Israeli military spokesman took credit for the successful attack, which he claimed had killed a number of Hamas militants who had been using the nearby Palestinian civilians as “human shields.” The Gaza Health Ministry similarly blamed Israel.
However, reports then began appearing of the enormous number of civilian casualties—perhaps as many as 500 dead—along with devastating images of the scores or hundreds of bodies, many of them young children, sparking enormous outrage across most of the world, especially in the Middle East. So the Israelis recognized the looming PR disaster, and quickly deleted their Tweet, while also beginning to argue that an errant Palestinian rocket had been responsible, soon producing a very doubtful alleged recording of two Hamas militants acknowledging that the Israelis were innocent.
In lock-step fashion, a spokesman for America’s own National Security Council declared that the Israelis were correct and the Palestinians had accidentally massacred their own people, and Biden took the same position in his Oval Office address. With the Israeli and American governments on the same page, nearly the entire Western mainstream media reversed itself and eagerly took up this new version of reality, just as a year earlier they had all declared that the Russians had destroyed their own Nord Stream pipelines, with the news headlines and several New York Times columnists leading the way. Among the latter, Michelle Goldberg courageously explained that the Israelis had notoriously lied about numerous far smaller atrocities over the years, which was why she hadn’t initially believed them, but with the Biden Administration now supporting their story, perhaps this time it was true. My impression is that outside the immediate reach of the Western media, almost everyone in the world was convinced that Israel was responsible.
I’m hardly a military expert, but I certainly shared that conclusion. Videos of the explosive strike have been widely distributed on Twitter and elsewhere, and it sounded absolutely nothing like the small home-made rockets fired by Gaza militants, while the scenes of massive devastation are enormous compared to the small explosives used by Hamas and its allies.
Meanwhile, Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst with considerable military expertise, spent several days carefully reviewing the evidence and reached a very similar verdict.
Over the last twenty years, Gaza militants have fired tens of thousands of rockets into Israel, only inflicting one or two deaths each year, so it’s difficult to believe that a single one of those rockets could have now killed hundreds.
Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who had spent fifteen years at the New York Times and served as its Middle East Bureau Chief, published a scathing column condemning Israel for its long history of routine deceit.
- Israel’s Culture of Deceit
Chris Hedges • MintPress News • October 19, 2023 • 2,400 Words
Indeed, just a couple of days later, an Israeli airstrike hit Gaza’s oldest Christian church, killing at least sixteen people, including several relatives of former U.S. Congressman Justin Amash, so there’s no particular reason to think they would have been reluctant to target the Christian hospital.
The Surprising Elements of Traditional Judaism
This deadly attack upon the largest Christian hospital in Gaza resulted in the apparent deaths of hundreds of the pitiful Palestinian refugees sheltering there, and stands as a remarkable atrocity, a blatant war-crime whose egregious nature was only magnified by Israel’s immediate efforts to dishonestly blame the devastation upon the Palestinians themselves.
Unfortunately, such a pattern of behavior is hardly unusual in the history of the Jewish State, as I first began to recognize more than forty years ago. I described those circumstances at the beginning of a long 2018 article:
About a decade ago, I happened to be talking with an eminent academic scholar who had become known for his sharp criticism of Israeli policies in the Middle East and America’s strong support for them. I mentioned that I myself had come to very similar conclusions some time before, and he asked when that had happened. I told him it had been in 1982, and I think he found my answer quite surprising. I got the sense that date was decades earlier than would have been given by almost anyone else he knew.
Sometimes it is quite difficult to pinpoint when one’s world view on a contentious topic undergoes sharp transformation, but at other times it is quite easy. My own perceptions of the Middle East conflict drastically shifted during Fall 1982, and they have subsequently changed only to a far smaller extent. As some might remember, that period marked the first Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and culminated in the notorious Sabra-Shatila Massacre during which hundreds or even thousands of Palestinians were slaughtered in their refugee camps.
I went on to explain that around that same time I first became aware of the late Israel Shahak, an especially outspoken Israeli academic whose very harsh remarks regarding the behavior of his own government sometimes appeared in my mainstream publications such as The Economist and The New York Times. Given that his views and statements totally diverged from everything else I read, at the time I had always regarded him as a marginal and eccentric ideological extremist.
Following the Gulf War and the Oslo Accords of the early 1990s, I began paying much less attention to the Middle East, but the 9/11 Attacks and the Iraq War eventually returned that region to center-stage. I then discovered that prior to his death in 2001, Shahak had published several short books on Judaism and Israel, which I eventually ordered and read. I explained how his works had an absolutely transformative impact upon my understanding of so many crucial issues.
My first surprise was that Shahak’s writings included introductions or glowing blurbs by some of America’s most prominent public intellectuals, including Christopher Hitchens, Gore Vidal, Noam Chomsky, and Edward Said. Praise also came from quite respectable publications such as The London Review of Books, Middle East International, and Catholic New Times while Allan Brownfeld of The American Council for Judaism had published a very long and laudatory obituary. And I discovered that Shahak’s background was very different than I had always imagined. He had spent many years as an award-winning Chemistry professor at Hebrew University, and was actually anything but a Communist. Whereas for decades, Israel’s ruling political parties had been Socialist or Marxist, his personal doubts about Socialism had left him politically in the wilderness, while his relationship with Israel’s tiny Communist Party was solely because they were the only group willing to stand up for the basic human rights issues that were his own central focus. My casual assumptions about his views and background had been entirely in error.
Once I actually began reading his books, and considering his claims, my shock increased fifty-fold. Throughout my entire life, there have been very, very few times I have ever been so totally astonished as I was after I digested Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, whose text runs barely a hundred pages. In fact, despite his solid background in the academic sciences and the glowing endorsements provided by prominent figures, I found it quite difficult to accept the reality of what I was reading. As a consequence, I paid a considerable sum to a young graduate student I knew, tasking him to verify the claims in Shahak’s books, and as far as he could tell, all of the hundreds of references he checked seemed to be accurate or at least found in other sources.
Even with all of that due diligence, I must emphasize that I cannot directly vouch for Shahak’s claims about Judaism. My own knowledge of that religion is absolutely negligible, mostly being limited to my childhood, when my grandmother occasionally managed to drag me down to services at the local synagogue, where I was seated among a mass of elderly men praying and chanting in some strange language while wearing various ritualistic cloths and religious talismans, an experience that I always found much less enjoyable than my usual Saturday morning cartoons.
Although Shahak’s books are quite short, they contain such a density of astonishing material, it would take many, many thousands of words to begin to summarize them. Almost everything I had known—or thought I had known—about the religion of Judaism, at least in its zealously Orthodox traditional form, was utterly wrong.
If these ritualistic issues constituted the central features of traditional religious Judaism, we might regard it as a rather colorful and eccentric survival of ancient times. But unfortunately, there is also a far darker side, primarily involving the relationship between Jews and non-Jews, with the highly derogatory term goyim frequently used to describe the latter. To put it bluntly, Jews have divine souls and goyim do not, being merely beasts in the shape of men. Indeed, the primary reason for the existence of non-Jews is to serve as the slaves of Jews, with some very high-ranking rabbis occasionally stating this well-known fact. In 2010, Israel’s top Sephardic rabbi used his weekly sermon to declare that the only reason for the existence of non-Jews is to serve Jews and do work for them. The enslavement or extermination of all non-Jews seems an ultimate implied goal of the religion.
Jewish lives have infinite value, and non-Jewish ones none at all, which has obvious policy implications. For example, in a published article a prominent Israeli rabbi explained that if a Jew needed a liver, it would be perfectly fine and indeed obligatory, to kill an innocent Gentile and take his. Perhaps we should not be too surprised that today Israel is widely regarded as one of the world centers of organ-trafficking.
As a further illustration of the seething hatred traditional Judaism radiates towards all those of a different background, saving the life of a non-Jew is generally considered improper or even prohibited, and taking any such action on the Sabbath would be an absolute violation of religious edict. Such dogmas are certainly ironic given the widespread presence of Jews in the medical profession during recent centuries, but they came to the fore in Israel when a religiously-minded military doctor took them to heart and his position was supported by the country’s highest religious authorities.
And while religious Judaism has a decidedly negative view towards all non-Jews, Christianity in particular is regarded as a total abomination, which must be wiped from the face of the earth.
Whereas pious Muslims consider Jesus as the holy prophet of God and Muhammed’s immediate predecessor, according to the Jewish Talmud, Jesus is perhaps the vilest being who ever lived, condemned to spend eternity in the bottommost pit of Hell, immersed in a boiling vat of excrement. Religious Jews regard the Muslim Quran as just another book, though a totally mistaken one, but the Christian Bible represents purest evil, and if circumstances permit, burning Bibles is a very praiseworthy act. Pious Jews are also enjoined to always spit three times at any cross or church they encounter, and direct a curse at all Christian cemeteries. Indeed, many deeply religious Jews utter a prayer each and every day for the immediate extermination of all Christians.
Over the years prominent Israeli rabbis have sometimes publicly debated whether Jewish power has now become sufficiently great that all the Christian churches of Jerusalem, Bethleham, and other nearby areas can finally be destroyed, and the entire Holy Land completely cleansed of all traces of its Christian contamination. Some have taken this position, but most have urged prudence, arguing that Jews needed to gain some additional strength before they should take such a risky step. These days, many tens of millions of zealous Christians and especially Christian Zionists are enthusiastic advocates for Jews, Judaism, and Israel, and I strongly suspect that at least some of that enthusiasm is based upon ignorance.
For the last two thousand years, Jews have almost invariably existed as small, relatively weak minorities living in the lands of others, whether Christian or Muslim, so a religious doctrine so unswervingly hostile to outsiders has naturally presented considerable obstacles for peaceful co-existence. The solution to this dilemma has been based on the divine mandate to preserve Jewish life and well-being above all else, superseding almost all other religious considerations. Thus, if any of the behaviors discussed above are considered likely to stir up resentment from powerful Gentile groups and put Jews at risk, they must be avoided.
If the Gentile population became aware of these Jewish religious beliefs and the behaviors they promote, major problems for Jews might develop, so an elaborate methodology of subterfuge, concealment, and dissimulation has come into being over the many centuries to minimize this possibility, especially including the mistranslation of sacred texts or the complete exclusion of crucial sections. Meanwhile, the traditional penalty for any Jew who “informs” to the authorities on any matter regarding the Jewish community has always been death, often preceded by hideous torture.
Much of this dishonesty obviously continues down to recent times since it seems very unlikely that Jewish rabbis, except perhaps for those of the most avant garde disposition, would remain totally unaware of the fundamental tenets of the religion that they claim to lead, and Shahak is scathing toward their apparent self-serving hypocrisy, especially those who publicly express strongly liberal views. For example, according to mainstream Talmudic doctrine, black Africans are traditionally placed somewhere between people and monkeys in their intrinsic nature, and surely all rabbis, even liberal ones, would be aware of this religious dogma. But Shahak notes that the numerous American rabbis who so eagerly worked with Martin Luther King, Jr. and other black Civil Rights leaders during the 1950s and 1960s strictly concealed their religious beliefs while denouncing American society for its cruel racism, presumably seeking to achieve a political quid pro quo beneficial to Jewish interests with America’s substantial black population.
Shahak also emphasizes the utterly totalitarian nature of traditional Jewish society, in which rabbis held the power of life and death over their congregants, and often sought to punish ideological deviation or heresy using those means. They were often outraged that this became difficult as states grew stronger and increasingly prohibited such private executions. Liberalizing rabbis were sometimes murdered and Baruch Spinoza, the famous Jewish philosopher of the Age of Reason, only survived because the Dutch authorities refused to allow his fellow Jews to kill him.
Given the complexity and exceptionally controversial nature of this subject matter, I would urge readers who find this topic of interest to spend three or four hours reading Shahak’s very short book, and then decide for themselves whether his claims seem plausible and whether I may have inadvertently misunderstood them. Aside from the copies on Amazon, the work may also be found at Archive.org and a very convenient HTML copy is also freely available on the Internet.
My encounter a decade ago with Shahak’s candid description of the true doctrines of traditional Judaism was certainly one of the most world-altering revelations of my entire life. But as I gradually digested the full implications, all sorts of puzzles and disconnected facts suddenly became much more clear. There were also some remarkable ironies, and not long afterward I joked to a (Jewish) friend of mine that I’d suddenly discovered that Nazism could best be described as “Judaism for Wimps” or perhaps Judaism as practiced by Mother Teresa of Calcutta.
There may actually be a deeper historical truth behind that irony. I think I’ve read here and there that some scholars believe that Hitler may have modeled certain aspects of his racially-focused National Socialist doctrine upon the Jewish example, which really makes perfect sense. After all, he saw that despite their small numbers Jews had gained enormous power in the Soviet Union, Weimar Germany, and numerous other countries throughout Europe, partly due to their extremely strong ethnic cohesion, and he probably reasoned that his own Germanic people, being far greater in numbers and historical achievements could do even better if they adopted similar practices.
It’s also interesting to note that quite a number of the leading racialist pioneers of 19th century Europe came from a particular ethnic background. For example, my history books had always disapprovingly mentioned Germany’s Max Nordau and Italy’s Cesare Lombroso as two of the founding figures of European racism and eugenics theories, but it was only very recently that I discovered that Nordau had also been the joint founder with Theodor Herzl of the world Zionist movement, while his major racialist treatise Degeneration, was dedicated to Lombroso, his Jewish mentor.
Even as late as the 1930s and afterward, international Zionist groups closely cooperated with the Third Reich on their economic projects, and during the world war itself one of the smaller rightwing factions, led by future Israeli Prime Minister Yizhak Shamir, actually offered a military alliance to the Axis Powers, denouncing the decadent Western democracies and hoping to collaborate against their mutual British enemies. The Transfer Agreement by Edwin Black, 51 Documents by Lenni Brenner, and other writings have documented all these facts in detail, though for obvious reasons they have generally been ignored or mischaracterized by most of our media outlets.
Obviously the Talmud is hardly regular reading among ordinary Jews these days, and I would suspect that except for the strongly Orthodox and perhaps most rabbis, barely a sliver are aware of its highly controversial teachings. But it is important to keep in mind that until just a few generations ago, almost all European Jews were deeply Orthodox, and even today I would guess that the overwhelming majority of Jewish adults had Orthodox grand-parents. Highly distinctive cultural patterns and social attitudes can easily seep into a considerably wider population, especially one that remains ignorant of the origin of those sentiments, a condition enhancing their unrecognized influence. A religion based upon the principal of “Love Thy Neighbor” may or may not be workable in practice, but a religion based upon “Hate Thy Neighbor” might have long-term cultural ripple effects that extend far beyond the direct community of the deeply pious. If nearly all Jews for a thousand or two thousand years were taught to feel a seething hatred toward all non-Jews and also developed an enormous infrastructure of cultural dishonesty to mask that attitude, it is difficult to believe that such an unfortunate history has had absolutely no consequences for our present-day world, or that of the relatively recent past.
- American Pravda: Oddities of the Jewish Religion
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • July 16, 2018 • 7,800 Words
Understanding Anti-Semitism
As might be expected, the extremely hostile and exclusionary aspects of the traditional Jewish religion often led to fraught relations between small Jewish minorities and the large Gentile populations that hosted them. These days, such resulting conflicts are often explained by “anti-Semitism,” a descriptive term first coined in the late nineteenth century that has gradually been transformed into an exceptionally powerful accusation in today’s Western world.
A couple of weeks after my article exploring the true tenets of traditional Judaism, I published another major piece attempting to carefully analyze the phenomenon of anti-Semitism, heavily relying upon the important books of Prof. Albert S. Lindemann, an eminent academic scholar.
All of us obtain our knowledge of the world by two different channels. Some things we discover from our own personal experiences and the direct evidence of our senses, but most information comes to us via external sources such as books and the media, and a crisis may develop when we discover that these two pathways are in sharp conflict. The official media of the old USSR used to endlessly trumpet the tremendous achievements of its collectivized agricultural system, but when citizens noticed that there was never any meat in their shops, “Pravda” became a watchword for “Lies” rather than “Truth.”
Now consider the notion of “anti-Semitism.” Google searches for that word and its close variants reveal over 24 million hits, and over the years I’ve surely seen that term tens of thousands of times in my books and newspapers, and heard it endlessly reported in my electronic media and entertainment. But thinking it over, I’m not sure I can ever recall a single real-life instance that I’ve personally encountered, nor have I heard of almost any such cases from my friends or acquaintances. Indeed, the only persons I’ve ever come across making such claims were individuals who bore unmistakable signs of serious psychological imbalance. When the daily newspapers are brimming with lurid tales of hideous demons walking among us and attacking people on every street corner, but you yourself have never actually seen one, you may gradually grow suspicious.
Over the years some of my own research has uncovered a sharp contrast between image and reality. As recently as the late 1990s, leading mainstream media outlets such as The New York Times were still denouncing a top Ivy League school such as Princeton for the supposed anti-Semitism of its college admissions policy, but a few years ago when I carefully investigated that issue in quantitative terms for my lengthy Meritocracy analysis I was very surprised to reach a polar-opposite conclusion. According to the best available evidence, white Gentiles were over 90% less likely to be enrolled at Harvard and the other Ivies than were Jews of similar academic performance, a truly remarkable finding. If the situation had been reversed and Jews were 90% less likely to be found at Harvard than seemed warranted by their test scores, surely that fact would be endlessly cited as the absolute smoking-gun proof of horrendous anti-Semitism in present-day America.
It has also become apparent that a considerable fraction of what passes for “anti-Semitism” these days seems to stretch that term beyond all recognition. A few weeks ago an unknown 28-year-old Democratic Socialist named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez scored a stunning upset primary victory over a top House Democrat in New York City, and naturally received a blizzard of media coverage as a result. However, when it came out that she had denounced the Israeli government for its recent massacre of over 140 unarmed Palestinian protesters in Gaza, cries of “anti-Semite” soon appeared, and according to Google there are now over 180,000 such hits combining her name and that harsh accusatory term. Similarly, just a few days ago the New York Times ran a major story reporting that all of Britain’s Jewish newspapers had issued an “unprecedented” denunciation of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, describing it as an “existential threat” to the Jewish community for the anti-Semitism it was fostering; but this apparently amounted to nothing more than its willingness to sharply criticize the Israeli government for its long mistreatment of the Palestinians.
In 1991 Cambridge University Press published The Jew Accused by Albert Lindemann, a noted scholar of European ideological movements, and his book focused on exactly that era and those sorts of incidents. Although the text is quite short, running less than 300 pages, Lindemann built his discussion upon a huge foundation of secondary literature, with his footnotes drawn from the 200 works included in his extensive bibliography. As far as I could tell, he seems a very scrupulous scholar, generally providing the multiple, often conflicting accounts of a given incident, and coming to his own conclusions with considerable hesitation.
As Lindemann candidly describes the tension between Russia’s very rapidly growing Jewish population and its governing authorities, he cannot avoid mentioning the notorious Jewish reputation for bribery, corruption, and general dishonesty, with numerous figures of all political backgrounds noting that the remarkable Jewish propensity to commit perjury in the courtroom led to severe problems in the effective administration of justice. The eminent American sociologist E.A. Ross, writing in 1913, characterized the regular behavior of Eastern European Jews in very similar terms.
The remarkable ferocity with which some Jewish writers attacked Lindemann’s meticulous attempt to provide an accurate history of anti-Semitism may carry more significance than merely an exchange of angry words in low-circulation academic publications. If our mainstream media shapes our reality, scholarly books and articles based upon them tend to set the contours of that media coverage. And the ability of a relatively small number of agitated and energetic Jews to police the acceptable boundaries of historical narratives may have enormous consequences for our larger society, deterring scholars from objectively reporting historical facts and preventing students from discovering them.
The undeniable truth is that for many centuries Jews usually constituted a wealthy and privileged segment of the population in nearly all the European countries in which they resided, and quite frequently they based their livelihood upon the heavy exploitation of a downtrodden peasantry. Even without any differences in ethnicity, language, or religion, such conditions almost invariably provoke hostility. The victory of Mao’s Communist forces in China was quickly followed by the brutal massacre of a million or more Han Chinese landlords by the Han Chinese poor peasants who regarded them as cruel oppressors, with William Hinton’s classic Fanshen describing the unfortunate history that unfolded in one particular village. When similar circumstances led to violent clashes in Eastern Europe between Slavs and Jews, does it really make logical sense to employ a specialized term such as “anti-Semitism” to describe that situation?
Furthermore, some of the material presented in Lindemann’s rather innocuous text might also lead to potentially threatening ideas. Consider, for example, the notorious Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, almost certainly fictional, but hugely popular and influential during the years following World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution. The fall of so many longstanding Gentile dynasties and their replacement by new regimes such as Soviet Russia and Weimar Germany, which were heavily dominated by their tiny Jewish minorities, quite naturally fed suspicions of a worldwide Jewish plot, as did the widely discussed role of Jewish international bankers in producing those political outcomes.
Over the decades, there has been much speculation about the possible inspiration for the Protocols, but although Lindemann makes absolutely no reference to that document, he does provide a very intriguing possible candidate. Jewish-born British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli certainly ranked as one of the most influential figures of the late 19th century, and in his novel Coningsby, he has the character representing Lord Lionel Rothschild boast about the existence of a vast and secret network of powerful international Jews, who stand near the head of almost every major nation, quietly controlling their governments from behind the scenes. If one of the world’s most politically well-connected Jews eagerly promoted such notions, was Henry Ford really so unreasonable in doing the same?
Lindemann also notes Disraeli’s focus on the extreme importance of race and racial origins, a central aspect of traditional Jewish religious doctrine. He reasonably suggests that this must surely have had a huge influence upon the rise of those political ideas, given that Disraeli’s public profile and stature were so much greater than the mere writers or activists whom our history books usually place at center stage. In fact, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, a leading racial theorist, actually cited Disraeli as a key source for his ideas. Jewish intellectuals such as Max Nordau and Cesare Lombroso are already widely recognized as leading figures in the rise of the racial science of that era, but Disraeli’s under-appreciated role may have actually been far greater. The deep Jewish roots of European racialist movements are hardly something that many present-day Jews would want widely known.
These important examples may help to explain the puzzling contrast between the behavior of Jews in the aggregate and Jews as individuals. Observers have noticed that even fairly small Jewish minorities may often have a major impact upon the far larger societies that host them. But on the other hand, in my experience at least, a large majority of individual Jews do not seem all that different in their personalities or behavior than their non-Jewish counterparts. So how does a community whose individual mean is not so unusual generate what seems to be such a striking difference in collective behavior? I think the answer may involve the existence of information choke-points, and the role of relatively small numbers of particularly zealous and agitated Jews in influencing and controlling these.
We live our lives constantly immersed in media narratives, and these allow us to decide the rights and wrongs of a situation. The vast majority of people, Jew and Gentile alike, are far more likely to take strong action if they are convinced that their cause is a just one. This is obviously the basis for war-time propaganda.
Now suppose that a relatively small number of zealous Jewish partisans are known to always attack and denounce journalists or authors who accurately describe Jewish misbehavior. Over time, this ongoing campaign of intimidation may cause many important facts to be left on the cutting-room floor, or even gradually expel from mainstream respectability those writers who refuse to conform to such pressures. Meanwhile, similar small numbers of Jewish partisans frequently exaggerate the misdeeds committed against Jews, sometimes piling their exaggerations upon past exaggerations already produced by a previous round of such zealots.
Eventually, these two combined trends may take a complex and possibly very mixed historical record and transform it into a simple morality-play, with innocent Jews tremendously injured by vicious Jew-haters. And as this morality-play becomes established it deepens the subsequent intensity of other Jewish-activists, who redouble their demands that the media “stop vilifying Jews” and covering up the supposed evils inflicted upon them. An unfortunate cycle of distortion following exaggeration following distortion can eventually produce a widely accepted historical account that bears little resemblance to the reality of what actually happened.
So as a result, the vast majority of quite ordinary Jews, who would normally behave in quite ordinary ways, are misled by this largely fictional history, and rather understandably become greatly outraged at all the horrible things that had been done to their suffering people, some of which are true and some of which are not, while remaining completely ignorant of the other side of the ledger.
Furthermore, this situation is exacerbated by the common tendency of Jews to “cluster” together, perhaps representing just one or two percent of the total population, but often constituting 20% or 40% or 60% of their immediate peer-group, especially in certain professions. Under such conditions, the ideas or emotional agitation of some Jews probably permeates others around them, often provoking additional waves of indignation.
As a rough analogy, a small quantity of uranium is relatively inert and harmless, and entirely so if distributed within low-density ore. But if a significant quantity of weapons-grade uranium is sufficiently compressed, then the neutrons released by fissioning atoms will quickly cause additional atoms to undergo fission, with the ultimate result of that critical chain-reaction being a nuclear explosion. In similar fashion, even a highly agitated Jew may have no negative impact, but if the collection of such agitated Jews becomes too numerous and clusters together too closely, they may work each other into a terrible frenzy, perhaps with disastrous consequences both for themselves and for their larger society. This is especially true if those agitated Jews begin to dominate certain key nodes of top-level control, such as the central political or media organs of a society.
Whereas most living organisms exist solely in physical reality, human beings also occupy an ideational space, with the interaction of human consciousness and perceived reality playing a major role in shaping behavior. Just as the pheromones released by mammals or insects can drastically affect the reactions of their family members or nest-mates, the ideas secreted by individuals or the media-emitters of a society can have an enormous impact upon their fellows.
A cohesive, organized group generally possesses huge advantages over a teeming mass of atomized individuals, much like a disciplined Macedonian Phalanx could easily defeat a vastly larger body of disorganized infantry. Many years ago, on some website somewhere I came across a very insightful comment regarding the obvious connection between “anti-Semitism” and “racism,” which our mainstream media organs identify as two of the world’s greatest evils. Under this analysis, “anti-Semitism” represents the tendency to criticize or resist Jewish social cohesion, while “racism” represents the attempt of white Gentiles to maintain a similar social cohesion of their own. To the extent that the ideological emanations from our centralized media organs serve to strengthen and protect Jewish cohesion while attacking and dissolving any similar cohesion on the part of their Gentile counterparts, the former will obviously gain enormous advantages in resource-competition against the latter.
- American Pravda: The Nature of Anti-Semitism
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • July 30, 2018 • 5,500 Words
Today most Westerners would automatically point to Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany as representing the most extreme and murderous example of anti-Semitism in modern times. But as I discussed in a long article published a week later, the true history of that era was actually far more complex than most might suspect, especially with regard to the nascent Zionist movement.
Forty years ago the New York Times and other mainstream newspapers had published some astonishing revelations regarding the wartime activities of Yitzhak Shamir, who was then serving as Israel’s Prime Minister.
Apparently, during the late 1930s, Shamir and his small Zionist faction had become great admirers of the Italian Fascists and German Nazis, and after World War II broke out, they had made repeated attempts to contact Mussolini and the German leadership in 1940 and 1941, hoping to enlist in the Axis Powers as their Palestine affiliate, and undertake a campaign of attacks and espionage against the local British forces, then share in the political booty after Hitler’s inevitable triumph.
Among other things, there were long excerpts from the official letters sent to Mussolini ferociously denouncing the “decadent” democratic systems of Britain and France that he was opposing, and assuring Il Duce that such ridiculous political notions would have no future place in the totalitarian Jewish client state they hoped to establish under his auspices in Palestine.
As it happens, both Germany and Italy were preoccupied with larger geopolitical issues at the time, and given the small size of Shamir’s Zionist faction, not much seems to have ever come of those efforts. But the idea of the sitting Prime Minister of the Jewish State having spent his early wartime years as an unrequited Nazi ally was certainly something that sticks in one’s mind, not quite conforming to the traditional narrative of that era which I had always accepted.
Most remarkably, the revelation of Shamir’s pro-Axis past seems to have had only a relatively minor impact upon his political standing within Israeli society. I would think that any American political figure found to have supported a military alliance with Nazi Germany during the Second World War would have had a very difficult time surviving the resulting political scandal, and the same would surely be true for politicians in Britain, France, or most other western nations. But although there was certainly some embarrassment in the Israeli press, especially after the shocking story reached the international headlines, apparently most Israelis took the whole matter in stride, and Shamir stayed in office for another year, then later served a second, much longer term as Prime Minister during 1986-1992. The Jews of Israel apparently regarded Nazi Germany quite differently than did most Americans, let alone most American Jews.
These remarkable historical disclosures had been the product of extensive research by Lenni Brenner, an anti-Zionist of the Trotskyite persuasion and Jewish origins, which he had published in his 1983 book Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, as well as his later companion volume, 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis.
Among other things, Brenner provides considerable evidence that the larger and somewhat more mainstream right-wing Zionist faction later led by future Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin was almost invariably regarded as a Fascist movement during the 1930s, even apart from its warm admiration for Mussolini’s Italian regime. This was hardly such a dark secret in that period given that its main Palestine newspaper carried a regular column by a top ideological leader entitled “Diary of a Fascist.” During one of the major international Zionist conferences, factional leader Vladimir Jabotinsky entered the hall with his brown-shirted followers in full military formation, leading the chair to ban the wearing of uniforms in order to avoid a riot, and his faction was soon defeated politically and eventually expelled from the Zionist umbrella organization. This major setback was largely due to the widespread hostility the group had aroused after two of its members were arrested by British police for the recent assassination of Chaim Arlosoroff, one of the highest-ranking Zionist officials based in Palestine.
Indeed, the inclination of the more right-wing Zionist factions toward assassination, terrorism, and other forms of essentially criminal behavior was really quite remarkable. For example, in 1943 Shamir had arranged the assassination of his factional rival, a year after the two men had escaped together from imprisonment for a bank robbery in which bystanders had been killed, and he claimed he had acted to avert the planned assassination of David Ben-Gurion, the top Zionist leader and Israel’s future founding-premier. Shamir and his faction certainly continued this sort of behavior into the 1940s, successfully assassinating Lord Moyne, the British Minister for the Middle East, and Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN Peace Negotiator, though they failed in their other attempts to kill American President Harry Truman and British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin, and their plans to assassinate Winston Churchill apparently never moved past the discussion stage. His group also pioneered the use of terrorist car-bombs and other explosive attacks against innocent civilian targets, all long before any Arabs or Muslims had ever thought of using similar tactics; and Begin’s larger and more “moderate” Zionist faction did much the same. Given that background, it was hardly surprising that Shamir later served as director of assassinations at the Israeli Mossad during 1955-1965, so if the Mossad did indeed play a major role in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, he was very likely involved.
The cover of the 2014 paperback edition of Brenner’s book displays the commemorative medal struck by Nazi Germany to mark its Zionist alliance, with a Star-of-David on the front face and a Swastika on the obverse. But oddly enough, this symbolic medallion actually had absolutely no connection with the unsuccessful attempts by Shamir’s small faction to arrange a Nazi military alliance during World War II.
Although the Germans paid little attention to the entreaties of that minor organization, the far larger and more influential mainstream Zionist movement of Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion was something else entirely. And during most of the 1930s, these other Zionists had formed an important economic partnership with Nazi Germany, based upon an obvious commonality of interests. After all, Hitler regarded Germany’s one percent Jewish population as a disruptive and potentially dangerous element which he wanted gone, and the Middle East seemed as good a destination for them as any other. Meanwhile, the Zionists had very similar objectives, and the creation of their new national homeland in Palestine obviously required both Jewish immigrants and Jewish financial investment.
After Hitler had been named Chancellor in 1933, outraged Jews worldwide had quickly launched an economic boycott, hoping to bring Germany to its knees, with London’s Daily Express famously running the banner headline “Judea Declares War on Germany.” Jewish political and economic influence, then just like now, was very considerable, and in the depths of the Great Depression, impoverished Germany needed to export or die, so a large scale boycott in major German markets posed a potentially serious threat. But this exact situation provided Zionist groups with an excellent opportunity to offer the Germans a means of breaking that trade embargo, and they demanded favorable terms for the export of high-quality German manufactured goods to Palestine, together with accompanying German Jews. Once word of this major Ha’avara or “Transfer Agreement” with the Nazis came out at a 1933 Zionist Convention, many Jews and Zionists were outraged, and it led to various splits and controversies. But the economic deal was too good to resist, and it went forward and quickly grew.
The importance of the Nazi-Zionist pact for Israel’s establishment is difficult to overstate. According to a 1974 analysis in Jewish Frontier cited by Brenner, between 1933 and 1939 over 60% of all the investment in Jewish Palestine came from Nazi Germany. The worldwide impoverishment of the Great Depression had drastically reduced ongoing Jewish financial support from all other sources, and Brenner reasonably suggests that without Hitler’s financial backing, the nascent Jewish colony, so tiny and fragile, might easily have shriveled up and died during that difficult period.
Such a conclusion leads to fascinating hypotheticals. When I first stumbled across references to the Ha’avara Agreement on websites here and there, one of the commenters mentioning the issue half-jokingly suggested that if Hitler had won the war, statues would surely have been built to him throughout Israel and he would today be recognized by Jews everywhere as the heroic Gentile leader who had played the central role in reestablishing a national homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine after almost 2000 years of bitter exile.
This sort of astonishing counter-factual possibility is not nearly as totally absurd as it might sound to our present-day ears. We must recognize that our historical understanding of reality is shaped by the media, and media organs are controlled by the winners of major wars and their allies, with inconvenient details often excluded to avoid confusing the public. It is undeniably true that in his 1924 book Mein Kampf, Hitler had written all sorts of hostile and nasty things about Jews, especially those who were recent immigrants from Eastern Europe, but when I read the book back in high school, I was a little surprised to discover that these anti-Jewish sentiments hardly seemed central to his text. Furthermore, just a couple of years earlier, a vastly more prominent public figure such as British Minister Winston Churchill had published sentiments nearly as hostile and nasty, focusing on the monstrous crimes being committed by Bolshevik Jews. In Albert Lindemann’s Esau’s Tears, I was surprised to discover that the author of the famous Balfour Declaration, the foundation of the Zionist project, was apparently also quite hostile to Jews, with an element of his motivation probably being his desire to exclude them from Britain.
Once Hitler consolidated power in Germany, he quickly outlawed all other political organizations for the German people, with only the Nazi Party and Nazi political symbols being legally permitted. But a special exception was made for German Jews, and Germany’s local Zionist Party was accorded complete legal status, with Zionist marches, Zionist uniforms, and Zionist flags all fully permitted. Under Hitler, there was strict censorship of all German publications, but the weekly Zionist newspaper was freely sold at all newsstands and street corners. The clear notion seemed to be that a German National Socialist Party was the proper political home for the country’s 99% German majority, while Zionist National Socialism would fill the same role for the tiny Jewish minority.
In 1934, Zionist leaders invited an important SS official to spend six months visiting the Jewish settlement in Palestine, and upon his return, his very favorable impressions of the growing Zionist enterprise were published as a massive 12-part series in Joseph Goebbel’s Der Angriff, the flagship media organ of the Nazi Party, bearing the descriptive title “A Nazi Goes to Palestine.” In his very angry 1920 critique of Jewish Bolshevik activity, Churchill had argued that Zionism was locked in a fierce battle with Bolshevism for the soul of European Jewry, and only its victory might ensure amicable future relations between Jew and Gentile. Based on available evidence, Hitler and many of the other Nazi leaders seemed to have reached a somewhat similar conclusion by the mid-1930s.
The very uncomfortable truth is that the harsh characterizations of Diaspora Jewry found in the pages of Mein Kampf were not all that different from what was voiced by Zionism’s founding fathers and its subsequent leaders, so the cooperation of those two ideological movements was not really so totally surprising.
Also quite ironic was the role of Adolf Eichmann, whose name today probably ranks as one of the most famous half-dozen Nazis in history, due to his postwar 1960 kidnapping by Israeli agents, followed by his public show-trial and execution as a war-criminal. As it happens, Eichmann had been a central Nazi figure in the Zionist alliance, even studying Hebrew and apparently becoming something of a philo-Semite during the years of his close collaboration with top Zionist leaders.
Brenner is a captive of his ideology and his beliefs, accepting without question the historical narrative with which he was raised. He seems to find nothing so strange about Eichmann being a philo-Semitic partner of the Jewish Zionists during the late 1930s and then suddenly being transformed into a mass-murderer of the European Jews in the early 1940s, willingly committing the monstrous crimes for which the Israelis later justly put him to death.
This is certainly possible, but I really wonder. A more cynical observer might find it a very odd coincidence that the first prominent Nazi the Israelis made such an effort to track down and kill had been their closest former political ally and collaborator. After Germany’s defeat, Eichmann had fled to Argentina and lived there quietly for a number of years until his name resurfaced in a celebrated mid-1950s controversy surrounding one of his leading Zionist partners, then living in Israel as a respected government official, who was denounced as a Nazi collaborator, eventually ruled innocent after a celebrated trial, but later assassinated by former members of Shamir’s faction.
Following that controversy in Israel, Eichmann supposedly gave a long personal interview to a Dutch Nazi journalist, and although it wasn’t published at the time, perhaps word of its existence may have gotten into circulation. The new state of Israel was just a few years old at that time, and very politically and economically fragile, desperately dependent upon the goodwill and support of America and Jewish donors worldwide. Their remarkable former Nazi alliance was a deeply-suppressed secret, whose public release might have had absolutely disastrous consequences.
According to the version of the interview later published as a two-part story in Life Magazine, Eichmann’s statements seemingly did not touch upon the deadly topic of the 1930s Nazi-Zionist partnership. But surely Israeli leaders must have been terrified that they might not be so lucky the next time, so we may speculate that Eichmann’s elimination suddenly became a top national priority, and he was tracked down and captured in 1960. Presumably, harsh means were employed to persuade him not to reveal any of these dangerous pre-war secrets at his Jerusalem trial, and one might wonder if the reason he was famously kept in an enclosed glass booth was to ensure that the sound could quickly be cut off if he started to stray from the agreed upon script. All of this analysis is purely speculative, but Eichmann’s role as a central figure in the 1930s Nazi-Zionist partnership is undeniable historical fact.
- American Pravda: Jews and Nazis
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • August 6, 2018 • 6,800 Words
Controlling the Narrative While the World Changes
Napoleon famously quipped that “history is a set of lies that people have agreed upon.” But there is always the danger that those who created those lies or their heirs may come to believe them and act accordingly.
The State of Israel was established in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War and its existence has been deeply intertwined with the official narrative of that conflict, a narrative that is largely false, as I outlined in several long pieces earlier this year:
- Why Everything You Know About World War II Is Wrong
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 12, 2023 • 12,600 Words - More Falsehoods of World War II
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 19, 2023 • 7,500 Words - Hitler, Churchill, the Holocaust, and the War in Ukraine
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • July 17, 2023 • 9,700 Words
Today that narrative is uniformly promoted by our Western media and almost entirely accepted by Western populations and political elites, but with the growth of social media and the rise or resurrection of powerful states such as China and Russia outside our media orbit, the ground may be shifting.
The shocking success of lightly-armed Hamas militants against Israel’s formidable armed forces a couple of weeks ago captured the imagination of the world’s two billion Muslims. Meanwhile, the brutal retaliatory strikes employed by the Israelis have produced gripping images of dead or suffering Palestinian civilians that rapidly spread across the relatively uncensored information channels of social media, stoking outrage in those same Muslim populations and propelling their governments in that direction.
Many of the most important Muslim nations have now united behind the Palestinian cause, with the top leaders of once bitterly hostile Iran and Saudi Arabia joining together to coordinate their support. Some prominent figures in Pakistan have suggested that the country might offer Turkey its nuclear weapons to deter Israel’s own arsenal, thereby allowing the Turks to deploy their very powerful conventional armed forces on behalf of the Palestinians. In a recent interview, Col. Douglas Macgregor, a highly-regarded military analyst, argued that Israel may have created a broad regional coalition that could threaten its survival.
Meanwhile, in the West severe ideological repression has been used to quash any dissent from the pro-Israel narrative. Universities unwilling to wholeheartedly endorse Israel’s actions have been publicly threatened by their Jewish billionaire donors. When a collection of Harvard student organizations issued a public statement supporting the Palestinian cause, the names of their members were publicized amid demands that they be blacklisted from any desirable future employment. Paddy Cosgrave, the CEO and co-founder of Web Summit, the world’s largest tech conference, merely declared that he was opposed to all war crimes, regardless of who was committing them—hardly an extremist position—and he was forced to resign as a consequence.
Yet although our media and our political leadership has remained in absolute lock-step behind Israel, with their support approaching the 99% level, I was very surprised to see that an outright majority of the American public currently opposes providing any additional weapons to the Jewish State, while supporting aid to Gaza. I wonder if this sort of striking disconnect between leaders and led may have been common during the last years of the decaying USSR.
There exist some telling indications of what a less one-sided presentation of the facts might produce. Chinese media has been relatively neutral on the conflict, and when a leading Chinese influencer polled his followers on Weibo, some 98% were opposed to Israel’s current actions in Gaza.
Russia has also largely remained neutral, though strongly supporting a cease-fire and opposing Israel’s starvation and slaughter of Palestinian civilians, but such even-handedness has provoked spittle-flecked outrage from some Israeli leaders. Consider the recent angry rant of Amir Weitmann, a top leader in Israel’s ruling Likud Party and Netanyahu’s possible successor, who denounced Russia on KremlinTV for being insufficiently pro-Israel in the current conflict and outrageously threatened the country possessing the world’s largest nuclear arsenal.
Towards the end of my long article exploring the nature of the Jewish religion, I summarized some of my disturbing conclusions.
Most of these disheartening facts that have so completely upended my understanding of reality over the last decade could not possibly have come to my attention until the rise of the Internet, which partially broke centralized control over the distribution of information. But many other people must surely have known large portions of this important story long before that, and recognized the very serious consequences these matters might have for the future of our society. Why has there been so little public discussion?
I believe one factor is that over the years and the decades, our dominant media organs of news and entertainment have successfully conditioned most Americans to suffer a sort of mental allergic reaction to topics sensitive to Jews, which leads to all sorts of issues being considered absolutely out of bounds. And with America’s very powerful Jewish elites thereby insulated from almost all public scrutiny, Jewish arrogance and misbehavior remain largely unchecked and can increase completely without limit.
I’ve also sometimes suggested to people that one under-emphasized aspect of a Jewish population, greatly magnifying its problematical character, is the existence of what might be considered a biological sub-morph of exceptionally fanatical individuals, always on hair-trigger alert to launch verbal and sometimes physical attacks of unprecedented fury against anyone they regard as insufficiently friendly towards Jewish interests. Every now and then, a particularly brave or foolhardy public figure challenges some off-limits topic and is almost always overwhelmed and destroyed by a veritable swarm of these fanatical Jewish attackers. Just as the painful stings of the self-sacrificing warrior caste of an ant colony can quickly teach large predators to go elsewhere, fears of provoking these “Jewish berserkers” can often severely intimidate writers or politicians, causing them to choose their words very carefully or even completely avoid discussing certain controversial subjects, thereby greatly benefiting Jewish interests as a whole. And the more such influential people are thus intimidated into avoiding a particular topic, the more that topic is perceived as strictly taboo, and avoided by everyone else as well.
For example, about a dozen years ago I was having lunch with an especially eminent Neoconservative scholar with whom I’d become a little friendly. We were bemoaning the overwhelmingly leftward skew among America’s intellectual elites, and I suggested it largely seemed a function of our most elite universities. Many of our brightest students from across the nation entered Harvard and the other Ivies holding a variety of different ideological perspectives, but after four years departed those halls of learning overwhelmingly in left-liberal lock-step. Although he agreed with my assessment, he felt I was missing something important. He nervously glanced to both sides, shifted his head downward, and lowered his voice. “It’s the Jews,” he said.
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