Obama, Carter, Israel

Someone Had to Say It

I will probably not vote for Nader in November, but I am glad his campaign sent out this email.

August 30, 2008 www.votenader.org www.officialnaderstore.com Obama is such a man of principle. Take Israel/Palestine as an example. Tradition has it that former presidents get a speaking slot at the national conventions. Not at Obama's convention. Not in Denver. President Jimmy Carter was scheduled to speak at the DNC in Denver. And then, at the last minute, his speech was cancelled. Why? Because Carter has spoken out about the plight of the Palestinian people? Because Carter has written a book with the descriptive title: Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid? Because Obama didn't want to offend the militarist American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)? Apparently yes, according to this article from the Jewish Daily Forward. Denying Carter a speaking slot at the DNC "shows the party gets it and Barack Obama's campaign gets it," according to one Democratic party activist. Well, we get it too. While Obama and McCain take the hardline AIPAC militarist line. Nader/Gonzalez will stand with the millions of Americans, Israelis and Palestinians who want peace, with justice for all. Stand with us now. Stand with a candidacy that will be on 45 ballots, that is bumping up against ten percent in key swing state polls, and that will push hard over the next two months to make it a viable three way race. Help us reach our goal of $100,000 by September 4th. We're about a third of the way home. But we need to push hard this Labor Day weekend to make it. Give whatever you can -- $10, $20, $50, $100 -- for the peace candidacy. And remember, if you give $100 or more now, we'll send you three DVDs -- the Denver rally, the Minneapolis rally, and a special debate DVD. (Three DVD offer ends September 4 at 11:59 p.m.) Onward to November The Nader Team Forward to a friend  |  Comment on our blog

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GIVE – AND GO TO JAIL?

Historically wealthy Jews have used philanthropy as a tool of political manipulation and as a means to mainstream themselves.

In today's America Jewish Zionists feel threatened by Muslim giving, which is proportionally larger than that of Jews.

In addition, Muslims are far less reluctant to give to non-Muslims than Jews are to contribute to non-Jewish charities because Muslims see potential Muslims where far too many Jews see inherently blood-thirsty goyim.

As Ramadan approaches, Bill Fisher covers the important topic of the Jewish Neocon and Zionist attack on Muslim and Arab charities in GIVE – AND GO TO JAIL?

Update

Because the original GIVE - AND GO TO JAIL? blog entry has disappeared from Bill Fisher's web site and because it is necessary to understanding the exchange below, I include it here.

GIVE - AND GO TO JAIL

By William Fisher

As Muslims begin one of their most important holidays – the month of Ramadan -- charitable organizations serving the American Muslim community are taking what some observers believe is a desperate last step to keep the U.S. government from shutting them down.

Muslim Advocates (MA), a San Francisco-based national educational and advocacy organization established by a 500-plus network of Muslim American lawyers, is teaming with the Better Business Bureau (BBB) Wise Giving Alliance to launch a new initiative to improve the fiscal management and administration of American Muslim charitable organizations.

Aziz Ahmad, an MA staff attorney, told us that sponsors of the program hope it will begin to restore donors' confidence in charitable organizations that support Muslim causes. He added: "We hope the government will be less inclined to prosecute American Muslim nonprofits and mosques for supporting terrorist causes if they demonstrate that they meet the highest standards of legal compliance, financial accountability and good governance."

In the months following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the U.S. government launched its "global war on terror" by rounding up thousands of "Middle Eastern-looking" men and women, jailing without charges or access to lawyers, but accusing none of them of terror-related crimes, convicting no one, and ending up deporting some for non-criminal immigration violations.

At about the same time, the government opened up a second front against charitable organizations it suspected of providing financial or other material assistance to groups the government designates as "terrorist." While the campaign applies to all domestic nonprofit organizations, the lion's share of scrutiny, suspicion, and preemptive action has fallen on groups that support Muslim causes.

Since 9/11, there has been an exponential increase in government surveillance of the financial practices of charities serving Muslim communities both in the U.S. and abroad. Numerous charities have been shut down, their records seized and their assets frozen – all with virtually no due process. One such organization – the Holy Land Foundation -- has been brought to trial. That trial ended in the exoneration of one of the defendants and a hung jury on the fate of the other defendants. The government is about to re-try the case.

Meanwhile, none of the assets frozen by the Treasury Department – which administers the scrutiny of charitable organizations – has been returned, despite numerous requests. These assets include funds the charities require to pay for their legal defense.

The government's pursuit of not-for-profit groups that support Muslim causes has caused a dramatic decrease in contributions and has left donors and volunteers confused about which organizations and institutions they can trust. Fulfilling their "zakat" – giving to charitable causes -- is a fundamental tenet of Islam and a high priority for donors and volunteers.

For American Muslims, these charities play a vital role in society – from feeding the hungry, to building bridges of interfaith understanding, to helping victims in disaster stricken regions of the world.

The new initiative combines MA's legal expertise and the BBB's reputation as an independent charity evaluator with over 1,200 charities reviewed to date. It will provide charitable organizations with free services including assistance a network of attorneys and accountants to assess their current practices and identify information needed for meaningful review by the BBB's Wise Giving Alliance.

The Alliance will also conduct evaluations to determine that an organization has met its 20 Standards of Charity Accountability. These are considered by many to be the toughest, most comprehensive governance and fiscal management standards in the nonprofit sector.

At the same time, MA will produce informational materials and host a series of free educational seminars for nonprofit leaders in eight cities across the U.S., beginning in the San Francisco Bay area in October 2008. These seminars will advise Muslim charities on a wide range of issues, including how to improve their governance, increase transparency, and ensure legal compliance with anti-terror financing laws and regulations. Thus far, seven charities have signed on to the program, Ahmad told IPS.

But the BBB's Wise Giving standards are applicable to charitable organizations generally and do not specifically address the unique challenges that have been faced by Muslim not-for-profits since the start of the "war on terror." So what remains unclear is how improvement of these organizations' professional practices will influence the government's administration of the "material support" statute and regulations.

A number of authorities in the not-for-profit sector doubt that the government will be deterred by the new MA/BBB initiative. Kay Guinane, director of Nonprofit Speech Rights at OMB Watch, a widely respected government watchdog organization, told us she believes the MA/BBB initiative is "useful first step toward keeping Muslim charities from being shut down." However, she added, "fundamental change requires a change in the government's basic approach to interpreting the law" which she says is "ultimately counterproductive."

She added, "In order to preserve the rights of all nonprofit organizations, and indeed, the rights of all people, all levels of government must conduct their counterterrorism activities in a way that consistently protects liberty and civil society. Otherwise, Americans and others lose safeguards that were designed to protect us all from creeping tyranny."

OMB stands for the government's Office of Management and Budget, the White House office responsible for devising and submitting the president's annual budget proposal to Congress.

In a recent report, Guinane's organization charged that in the name of "global war on terror," the U.S. government is waging war on non-governmental organizations by applying "shortsighted, undemocratic policies" that are "constraining the critical activities of the charitable and philanthropic sectors, stifling free speech, and ultimately impeding the fight against terrorism."

The report found that "U.S. counterterrorism laws have made it increasingly difficult for U.S.-based organizations to operate overseas. For example, after the 2004 tsunami, U.S. organizations operating in areas controlled by the Tamil Tigers, a designated terrorist organization, risked violating prohibitions against 'material support' when creating displaced persons' camps and hospitals, traveling, or distributing food and water."

It concluded that the government views nonprofits as "conduits for terrorist funding and a breeding ground for aggressive dissent." It accused the courts of being "overly deferential" to the U.S. Treasury Department, which is responsible for conducting programs designed to stem the flow of money to terrorist organizations. And it contended that federal agencies "ignore nonprofits' calls for change," and that "Congress has not utilized its oversight powers to review counterterrorism programs."

The result, the report said, is that the U.S. nonprofit community today "operates in fear of what may spark (the government) to use its power to shut them down."

The Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) was the target of much of the report's criticism of the government's approach. After 9/11, Congress gave the government sweeping new powers to crack down on not-for-profit organizations that were allegedly using their charitable status as cover for funneling funds to terrorist groups.

These powers include the authority to designate any charity as a material supporter of terrorism. This action demands virtually no due process from the government, denies the target to see the evidence against it, and can result in freezing of a charity's assets, effectively shutting it down.

Guinane told us that the OFAC terrorist "watchlist" was originally designed to identify drug kingpins and other more conventional criminals and is of little value due to "questionable accuracy" caused by numerous duplications. Moreover, she said, most not-for-profit groups, especially smaller ones, lack the resources to monitor it.

She added, "I don't think there should be special rules governing not-for-profits that support Muslim causes. This has evolved into a bizarre regulatory regime that is unduly discriminatory."

In 2005, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) launched its Spy Files Project and uncovered an intricate system of domestic spying on U.S. nonprofits largely condoned by expanded counterterrorism powers within the USA PATRIOT Act.

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The Rabbi's Cow is Always Kosher

Slaughter Skandal and Halal Meat

The JTA discusses the onsite methamphetamine lab in the Agriprocessors kosher slaughtering plant in Postville, Iowa in Breaking News - JTA, Jewish & Israel News while the Desmoisnes Register has provided complete, updated coverage (including photos and videos) of this ongoing story. The social conflicts associated with the Agriprocessors plant were chronicled in a 2000 best seller entitled "Postville" by Stephen G. Bloom.

Problems and tensions associated with kosher slaughter are nothing new. In Germany before Hitler not only did Jews dominate the wholesale cattle, slaughtering, and meat packing industries, but they engaged in business practices that in the United States would constitute middle market restraint of trade to the anger especially of non-Jewish butchers, who correctly believed that a Jewish cartel was trying to drive them out of business. Tensions were particularly high in Saxony, which did not actually have a large Jewish population, and Saxon non-Jewish butchers became central players in German anti-Semitic politics.

Similar Jewish practices in Polish territories tended to be protected by Polish magnates. Misbehavior in kosher slaughtering occasionally became of concern to Polish Muslims, who were members of the Polish gentry or Szlachta, and generally depended on Jewish butchers for halal meat at least until the end of WW1. Similar situations have been common in other places where Muslims have depended on Jewish businesses for halal meat as has been the case in the USA,  where the halal meat business has generally been a component of the kosher industry.

My wife Karin Friedemann investigated halal meat packing and was not impressed with the quality. She developed some suggestions to improve the situation in Reforming the Halal Food Economy, which was distributed under her pen name Maria Hussain.

The following article appended below is a sermon on Postville from a conservative Rabbi named Abrahamson. Because it is about to vanish from the web, I have saved it here. It contains a lot of navel-gazing. While Abrahamson does mention that "[Bloom] frequently describes the Orthodox Jews' racism--that anti-goyim prejudice that makes many of us wince--but his own prejudices are more evident than he comprehends," the Rabbi like the vast majority of American Jews shows no awareness

• that Jewish prejudice against gentiles is hardly confined to Hassidim,
• that far too many American Jews are among the principle inciters of Islamophobic and Arabophobic prejudice, and
• that far too many American Jews are making massive efforts to conceal the mass murder, ethnic cleansing and genocide in which a significant number of Jews participated in planning or in undertaking in Eastern Europe or in the Middle East.

As Yom Kippur approaches, American Jews should reflect on the crimes Zionists have committed in the name of all Jews everywhere and join with decent people everywhere in the struggle against the State of Israel and Judonia, which exploits the vast majority of Jews just as it does non-Jews.

Postville: A Portrait of Whose Culture Clash?

Erev Yom Kippur 5765.  September 24, 2004.

A woman sits down on a train, in a pair of seats facing another pair of seats. Sitting opposite her is a man with a long beard, a white shirt, a black suit, and a large-brimmed black hat.

The woman takes one look at the man, snorts contemptuously, and declares: "You Orthodox Jews make me sick. Don't you know this is the twenty-first century? Don't you realize how ridiculous you look? You look like you just got off the boat--a hundred years ago! You make the rest of us modern Jews look bad--you're an embarrassment to the rest of the Jews! You Orthodox Jews make me sick!"

The man looks puzzled, and then gently answers the woman: "Madam, you must be mistaken. I'm not Jewish. I'm Amish."

"And isn't it wonderful," the woman responds, "how you people maintain your beautiful traditions!"

It's an old joke--one that came to mind three years or so when I first read Stephen Bloom's Postville and that came to mind when I re-read the book in recent days.

The full title of Stephen Bloom's book is Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America. I don't recall how long it was a best-seller, but even if it's no longer the new sensation among book clubs, it's an important book. If you haven't already done so, I urge you to read it--and, hopefully, within the next month.

Stephen Bloom is a journalist who teaches journalism at the University of Iowa, and who chronicled the impact of the Rubashkin slaughterhouse and meat-packing business that opened in Postville, Iowa, in the late 1980s.

Initially, the thriving business brought jobs and financial benefit to the Postville community. In time, though, it appeared that the culture clash--between the midwestern Protestant farming community of Postville and the Orthodox Jewish community that transplanted itself in Postville--had created far more problems than benefits. In time, the culture clash between these two separate communities living in the same community became a legal and political battle. Stephen Bloom's book is an interesting, engagingly written account of this struggle.

Stephen Bloom is a Jew--as if you couldn't guess from his name. He is, from his own description, "a Jew through and through, from my curly brown hair and robust nose to the synapses in my brain and the corpuscles of my blood." It is both as a journalist and as a Jew that he came to Postville, lived among the non-Jews and the Jews of Postville, and got to know both communities as well as he could.

His portrayal of the communities and their struggles is a "warts-and-all" portrayal, and on the surface, he is equally critical of both. As I read the bo ok, though, I found myself squirming when I came to uncomplimentary descriptions of the Orthodox Jews of Postville, their interactions--and lack of interactions--with the non-Jewish community, their business dealings, and their religious and family lives. I found myself uncomfortable sometimes, a little angry other times, defensive still other times, at some of the portrayals of Orthodox Jews and Orthodox Judaism--because, after all, I knew that plenty of non-Jews have read the book and will read the book, and I'm not comfortable with non-Jews reading too much negative stuff about Jews and Judaism--or, to put it another way, to give anti-Semites (the extreme ones as well as the subtle ones) more to resent, disapprove of, and feel smug about.

There is a biblical prohibition known as hillul hashem--the phrase literally means desecration of God's name--and hillul hashem is defined by Jewish law as doing or saying anything that reflects negatively on Jews and Judaism. There are those who feel that parts of Bloom's book constitute hillul hashem, pure and simple. But at my moments of greatest defensiveness, I'd say to myself: "Oh, come on! Does every critical comment or negative portrayal of Jews amount to anti-Semitism? Should we be so defensive this day and age that we can't abide a book like Postville, because of the frantic Cwhat-will-the-goyim-say?" paranoia of generations past?

Indeed, there are many Jews--Orthodox Jews and undoubtedly non-Orthodox Jews--who were quite offended by Bloom's book, by his disloyalty to the Jewish people, demonstrated by his "washing Jewish dirty laundry in public." But when I held my own discomfort up to the light of rationality, I had to conclude that we needn't be outraged by Stephen Bloom's book. After all, it's not The Protocols of the Elders of Zion!

To be sure, there were parts of the book that made me squirm uncomfortably even the second time I read the book--including some eyebrow-raising passages regarding some leaders of the Twin Cities Lubavitcher community--but I don't consider Stephen Bloom a "traitor to his people" because he wrote critically about the Jews of Postville. And even if his conclusions about which side he was "rooting for" regarding the political battles in Postville differs from the side I would have found myself "rooting for," I don't particularly begrudge him his conclusions.

But Postville is not simply a portrait of a culture clash in an Iowa community; it's not only a chronology of a political struggle. It's not only a portrait of Orthodox Jews and Orthodox Judaism that I find to be uninformed, harshly judgmental, and slanted. It is all of those things. But it's also a very sad portrait of a particular Jew--one whose Hebrew name is Shlomo, and whose English name is Stephen Bloom.

One gets a sense of Stephen Bloom's Jewish pride--even if he inappropriately bifurcates Jewishness as "religious culture," one hand, and "devotion to faith," on the other hand. I understand and identify with Bloom's Jewish defensiveness--for example, in a passage of the book in which a Cub Scout meeting turns hurtful and infuriating for him when the scoutmaster asserts, "All of us in this room have been taught to believe in God and Jesus…" And I kvelled a little at Bloom's description of the moment that, as a guest at a Shabbos dinner in Postville, his first bite of gefilte fish transported him back to his grandmother's Shabbos table on West 89th Street in New York City.

But mostly, I was disappointed at the portrait of Stephen Bloom the Jew that emerged from Postville. While he does write, "More than ever in my life, especially with [my nine-year-old son] Mikey, it seemed essential to nurture our Jewish souls, the sense of who we are, how we think, where we come from," Bloom seems particularly closed to exploring the richness, the beauty, the compelling nature of Judaism in his life. He is smugly dismissive of the spiritual shallowness that he experienced in a Reform synagogue in Iowa. But his most scathing portrait comes from his description of his experience of Jewish life among the Orthodox of Postville. He may think he's painting a biting portrait of the Lubavitchers' religious lifestyle, but in fact, he's painting a tragic portrait of his own Jewish shallowness and closed-mindedness.

Most telling is his description of the Shabbat that he and his son Mikey spend with an Orthodox family in Postville. He gets the details right in his description: the beautifully set dining table, the impeccably dressed hostess and her children, the delicious Shabbat meal that's served. But he gets none of the ta'am, the flavor, of the Shabbat. He's been privileged to be invited to a twenty-five hour immersion in a traditional Shabbat observance. But he doesn't get it. The recurrent theme of the Shabbat is his host's obsession with Mikey's yarmulke and its tendency to slip off the nine-year-old's head--and his often-repeated, frantic bellowing, "Moishe, your kippah !" Bloom notices his host's disgust at Mikey's Batman pillowcase--which the host contemptuously dismisses as "goyisher chazzerai"--but he seems oblivious to his own contempt for his Orthodox hosts' Jewish commitments and Jewish values. Bloom shares with us his furtively scribbling notes late Friday night--"I was breaking the rules of the Sabbath, but they weren't my rules, nor were they the rules my host had asked that I follow"--and he dismisses commitment to traditional observance and halakhah as "primitive ritual." He criticizes his Orthodox host's "ethnocentric I-told-you-so rule-dominated cosmos" and dismisses his host's and hostess's relationship as "primitive and unacceptable," but I don't think he realizes the terrible picture he presents of his own cosmic view and his own Jewish values. He frequently describes the Orthodox Jews' racism--that anti-goyim prejudice that makes many of us wince--but his own prejudices are more evident than he comprehends.

Tragically, the Jews whom Stephen Bloom studies and describes are as foreign to him as that Amish man on the train.

Well, enough "Bloom-bashing." It's easy for us to l ook at Stephen Bloom and see his narrowness and shallowness, his lack of receptivity. But what about the rest of us?

How many of us look at our Orthodox neighbors, acquaintances, or relatives as "meshugah-frum?" (You know, by the way, the definition of "meshugah frum": anyone who's stricter than I am…) How many of us are outraged when Jews to the right of us delegitimize our approach to Judaism--but at the same time, in our thoughts if not in our words and deeds, delegitimize their approach to Judaism as too antiquated for our tastes, or not enlightened enough for our standards?

And what about observant Conservative Jews? How many members of Conservative synagogues look at some of their fellow congregants with the same smug disdain with which Stephen Bloom views the Jews of Postville?

"He's really not shaving during sh'loshim? Isn't that…Orthodox?"

Or: "She's really grilling the waiter about whether the soup is completely meatless? Isn't that…Orthodox?"

Or: "He really wears tzitzis under his shirt? What is he…Orthodox?"

Or: "They're really insistent on not driving at all on Shabbos? Isn't that…Orthodox?"

You know that there are many reasons that I am proud to call myself a Conservative Jew, and many of you are as well. Some of the reasons that you and I are non-Orthodox Jews have to do less with religious laziness and more with issues of egalitarianism, pluralism, modernity, and intellectual integrity. But shame on any of us who, as we consider ourselves non-Orthodox Jews, somehow slips into being anti-Orthodox Jews. And shame on any of us who closes himself or herself off from recognizing the spiritual richness and depth of other people's approaches to Judaism--Jews to our right and Jews to our left.

Stephen Bloom's book has a lot to teach us--and I think it especially has a lot to teach us about our own Jewish horizons, our own view of other Jews, our own view of our own Judaism. 

In a month, I hope many of you will go to Postville, Iowa, with us. Our Adult Education Committee is planning an interesting and enjoyable day trip to Postville. No, we're not going just to "gawk at the frummies." (We can do that right here on 28th Street!) But we will have an opportunity to learn about the ongoing Clash of Cultures in Heartland America--and, hopefully, to learn about the progress that's been made in minimizing that clash. We learn a little about dairy farming, and a little about kosher meat production. And perhaps we'll learn a little more about the inner dynamics of other Jews' neshomehs--and, hopefully, about our own.

Rabbi David L. Abramson

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THOSE PESKY ACTIVIST JUDGES

Even though Illinois Justice Greiman is serving Zionist or Judonian interests, according to Those Pesky Activist Judges in The World According to Bill Fisher some members of the US judiciary are trying to uphold the US Constitution.

The profile section of Fisher's web site states that:

WILLIAM [BILL] FISHER [of] Old Chatham, New York, United States ... has managed economic development programs for the US State Department and the US Agency for International Development in the Middle East, Latin America and elsewhere for the past 25 years. He served in the administration of President John F. Kennedy.

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Bostonians Learn About Darfur

Sorting Truth from Zionist Fiction

by Karin Friedemann

 

On August 10, 2008, Dr. Samina Khan gave a talk in a private home in Boston about her recent trip to Sudan, where she attended the Peace and Reconciliation Conference on July 25 and 26, 2008 in Al-Fashir, Darfur. Two representatives from Dorchester People for Peace, Jeff Klein and Hayat Imam, were among the attendees, as well as David Rolde and Elaine Antonia of BAZA (Boston Anti-Zionist Action).

 

Dr. Khan, a kidney specialist at Tufts Medical Center joined a Muslim delegation led by British parliamentarian, Lord Nazir Ahmed in collaboration with Sudan's University of Science and Technology, to help resolve the inter-tribal conflicts in Darfur, which have killed tens of thousands and displaced millions. She represented "Claiming Our World," an organization providing mentorship to women in underdeveloped countries.

 

While the Jewish-organized Save Darfur Coalition has focused on punitive economic measures and military intervention, the Muslim delegation aimed for a grassroots solution to regional problems without interference from foreign political agendas and oil companies.

 

The delegation met with 250 leaders and representatives of Darfur's 178 tribes, the governor of Darfur, the city chairman of Al-Fashir, leaders of all the Sudanese political parties, including the former prime minister Imam al-Mahdi, representatives from Sudan Women's General Union, representing 4 million members, and a Sufi religious organization. Professors from Sudan's University of Science and Technology moderated the conference.

 

Dr. Khan toured Darfur's oldest IDP (Internally Displaced People) camp near Al-Fashir, capital of North Darfur, which hosts over 50,000 people that fled their homes in surrounding villages four years ago. With the help from the UN and international charities, the Sudanese government provides water, sanitation, a daily meal, safety, health care and schooling for the children. She said most kids know basic English.

 

Nearby, foreign contractors are building fancy hotels and fast food joints with our tax dollars to service the UN aid workers. Supplies arrive via air transport because Darfur has no paved roads.

 

"People come from all over the world to cash money out of this," said the doctor.

 

She reported that the general public and even the opposition parties fear that the frivolous genocide allegations against President Al-Bashir by the International Criminal Court before would invigorate foreign-aided rebels and derail the ongoing peace negotiations.

 

While visiting al-Fashir hospital, Dr. Khan asked the hospital superintendent for a list of needs. The Sudanese Health Ministry immediately released the money for new dialysis machines upon her request. She will return this year to set up a teaching program.

 

Dr. Khan visited the Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir at the president's house in Khartoum. He was very enthusiastic about this tribal reconciliation initiative.

 

Dr. Khan was impressed with the eloquence and intellect of everyone she met in Sudan, and by the high level of women's participation in Sudanese society. Women contribute significantly to the Sudanese work force. President Al-Bashir agreed to meet with the women from the British Muslim delegation and from the Women's Union to discuss their concerns for the peace process. The women told the doctor that if the men won't end the war, they would take things into their own hands.

 

A peace formula drawn up by local leaders at the conclusion of the conference, advised that the historic tensions between nomadic herders and farmers would decrease with more water access, human and veterinarian health care, disarming the citizenry and simultaneously creating an official local police force, and rural development projects.

 

Dr. Khan felt it important to counteract the media demonization stories about Sudan. For example, there is no government militia called the "Janjaweed," and there is no ethnic conflict between Blacks and Arabs, nor between Muslims and Christians. Everyone in Darfur is Black and speaks Arabic. They are all Muslim. The humanitarian situation in Somalia is far worse, where the US has bombed. In fact the UN has been sending refugees from Iraq to live in Darfur.

 

"They have so many resources if you just take away the negative publicity. They need real guidance. Don't leave them alone but don't bash them all the time. Let the government and others take care of the people. [There's] a lot of potential in that country," said Dr. Khan.

The demonization in the media and the ICC arrest warrant against President Al-Bashir seem to be a prelude to attempting to overthrow the Sudanese government leading to privatization and foreign exploitation of Sudan's natural resources. Hostile US sanctions make it illegal for any American to invest in developing Sudan except through military corporations.

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Red Herring: Resisting Islamic Law

Zionist Propaganda in Judge's Opinion

by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)

Hypocritical and extremist Zionists like Daniel Pipes complain that Sharia is creeping into the legal system,but there is probably no greater threat to the American way of life today than the covert infiltration of Zionist Law into US courts.

On July 18 Pauline Dubkin Yearwood of the Chicago Jewish News reported in The Jewish Clause that the Illinois Appellate Court affirmed on June 30 the decision of The Circuit Court of Cook County that the so-called "Jewish Clause" of the trust that Max Feinberg established for his descendants was unenforceable. Here is the provision.

"3.5(e) A descendant of mine other than a child of mine who marries outside the Jewish faith (unless the spouse of such descendan t has converted or converts within one year of the marriage to the Jewish faith) and his or her descendants shall be deemed to be deceased for all purposes of this instrument as of the date of such marriage."

Ron Grossman of Chicago Tribune covered the same case on August 28 in 'Jewish Clause' Divides a Family.

The case is disturbing not so much because of the legal particulars, which describe a nasty family battle, but because of Grossman's failure to report a significant detail and because of the material that Appellate Judge Alan Greiman included in his opinion.

Since the death of Max's wife Erla in 2003 seventeen years after his death, the estate has been in litigation. The probate hearing was the first case. Then Max's grand-daughter Michele Feinberg Trull brought a litigation against Max's son her father Michael Feinberg, Max's daughter her aunt Leila Feinberg Taylor, and Max's son-in-law her uncle Marshall Taylor, who together served as executors of Max's estate since his death in 1986. Michele accused them of conspiring in evasion of estate taxes and of misappropriating millions of dollars from both Max's and Erla's estates. The third case alleged that the three executors withheld putting stock certificates belonging to Max into the estate for twenty years.

According to the articles Max added the "Jewish Clause" to the rules of the trust because Michael's son Michele's brother Aron invited a non-Jewish Chinese-American girl to his high school junior prom. Aron later married her, and they have given their children at least a Jewish-aware upbringing. (See  The Jewish Clause by Edmund Case and Twisted Will for more discussion.)

Michele accuses her father of using money from the estate for unauthorized purposes including paying for her wedding, buying a car, finishing the floors in his home, and purchasing a summer home while her mother was still alive. Michael has argued in his deposition that he was merely taking an advance on his inheritance.

Aron stated that he was never informed that marrying his wife could cost him his inheritance, but he also claims he does not care because he is rich in his own right.

The payment for Michele's wedding has the appearance of an attempt to compensate Michele for being disinherited, but the Trull's are also upset at the treatment Erla received from the executors. One can speculate that Michele probably became Erla's primary caregiver because all the other grandchildren are wealthy and apparently either doctors or lawyers except for Michele, who is a paralegal.

The family should have negotiated a settlement among themselves. Michael alone has already spent $200,000 on legal costs.

Instead in all three cases the defendants have attempted to challenge the standing of Michele to bring a lawsuit on the basis of the "Jewish Clause," which declares her to be dead from the standpoint of the estate because of her marriage to attorney Ethan Trull.

The Appellate Court's ruling was confined specifically to this issue, and now the defendants have lost twice.

Non-Jewish Appellate Court Justices Cunningham and Quinn ruled narrowly on the public interest in encouraging marriage and discouraging divorce. Justice Quinn was also concerned that enforcing the "Jewish clause" could "result in the courts being required to enforce the worst bigotry imaginable" (decision, p. 11).

Both justices were concerned with the unspecified consequence if a grandchild married a non-Jew, divorced the non-Jewish spouse, and then married a Jew.

One could in fact argue that the "Jewish Clause" was completely meaningless because it does not really define Jewish faith.

Does the term include:

• Karaite Judaism,
• Samaritan Judaism (something of an oxymoron I admit, but I see it in the literature),
• Messianic Judaism,
• Reform Judaism,
• Conservative Judaism, and
  
• Reconstructionist Judaism?

In recent history modern (Yiddish-speaking) Jews have used three different definitions of "Jewish":

• a member of the E. European Ashkenazi ethnic group (Yiddishist definition but ambiguous with regard to religious practice),
• someone that obeys the commandments of the Law of Moses (religious definition but ambiguous with regard to interpretation of commandments), and
  
• a member of the pan-Judaic ethno-national group (Zionist definition, constantly subject to controversy in Israel).

The issue is even more complex if we look back more than 1000 years. Was King Herod Jewish? Harvard Professor Shaye Cohen points out in The Beginnings of Jewishness that the Talmud seems to have no doubt even though Herod's mother was a Nabatean Arab.* 

The Medieval religious text Sefer Hasidim does not consider marrying a non-Jew to be marrying out of the faith (in all circumstances), and Amitav Ghosh documents the acceptance of marriages with non-Jews (or more accurately concubinage of non-Jewish women) within the Egyptian Jewish community of the 12th century in his book In an Antique Land.

Justice Alan Greiman's dissent from the majority and his subsequent discussion with the Chicago Jewish News indicate that he has transgressed the boundaries of acceptable judicial behavior.  In his opinion:

"Max and Erla Feinberg seek to preserve their 4,000-year-old heritage" by inserting the marriage provision in their will... He adds that he finds the Illinois cases the majority cited to be irrelevant to the present case and cites other cases that seem to point to the validity of the clause. "Max and Erla had a dream with respect to the provisions of their will and if you will it, it is no dream," he concludes, echoing Theodor Herzl's famous aphorism.

Greiman expanded on his position in a recent phone conversation. "The majority opinion took three cases where the testator (person writing the will) had been advocating divorce," he said. "That kind of thing, encouraging divorce, is against the public policy of the state, and the majority opinion used those cases as the basis for knocking out the Feinberg case. But the majority of states have approved things like that."

The Jewish News article also notes the following.

A petition asking the Supreme Court to review the case must be filed in the next three weeks, he said.

While the Feinberg decision has not yet received much discussion in the Jewish community in general, one group of Jews has been preoccupied with it: lawyers.

"It's been an extremely hot topic in e-mails" among members of the Decalogue Society of Lawyers, Chicago's Jewish bar association, according to Executive Director Devorah Heyman.

In an e-mail sent out to members, the organization's recently installed president, Andrea M. Schleifer, wrote, "This case is important because it involves compelling Jewish interests on both sides: those who believe that each of us ought to have the right to determine the disposition of our own property; and those who believe that such provisions in a will ought to be prohibited as discriminatory, and echo anti-Semitic provisions which members of the community have historically been subjected to."

In a phone conversation, Schleifer said members feel so strongly about the case that, during an executive board meeting, it was decided to plan a program for the fall, in conjunction with several local law schools, in which participants would discuss the pros and cons and the impact of the decision.

Members are already doing that informally, she said.

"Justice Greiman is one of our most respected members, and we appreciate and acknowledge his brilliance," she said. "The discussion has been very heated about his dissent. Some of our members were very delighted with the dissent and think that should be the law. Others felt that discriminatory clauses have been used to harm Jews in the past and were happy with the majority decision." Within the society, as tradition has it in the Jewish community in general, there are often "three Jews and 10 opinions," Schleifer said.

To all appearances Greiman is acting to serve Jewish Zionist special interest, fanaticism, racism and extremism. Such behavior is un-American. Such an extremist Zionist mindset would almost certainly bias decisions relating to Arabs, Muslims, Arab Americans and Muslim Americans.

The argument over Michele's complaint even echoes the question of Palestine. When Michele or Palestinians attempt to address misappropriation or theft, Greiman and Zionists justify their positions by reference to the 4,000 year old heritage of Judaism even though Shaye Cohen argues that Jewishness begins in the fourth century CE. A case can even be made that Rabbinic Judaism did not crystallize until the 10th century CE. In either case Judge Greiman's dissent borders on the delusional and ventures into the Zionist mythology that certainly should not enter into his juridical opinions.

Greiman is unfit to serve on the Circuit  Court and should be removed immediately. His decisions should be reviewed, and if judicial misconduct is detected, he should be disbarred. If such misconduct could be construed as criminal, he should be arrested and tried.

Greiman is hardly unique among American judges. It does not take a degree in rocket science to understand the persistence in the US legal system of ridiculous court cases against Arab or Muslim charities, against Sami el-Arian and various nuisance suits against the PA or Iran. The judiciary is infiltrated top to bottom with Zionist facilitators and gate keepers.**

 

A comparison of the Chicago Jewish News and the Chicago Tribune versions of the story shows the same situation in the press.

The Chicago Jewish News writer explicitly points out that Greiman is paraphrasing Herzl.

"Max and Erla had a dream with respect to the provisions of their will and if you will it, it is no dream," he concludes, echoing Theodor Herzl's famous aphorism.

Yet, in the Tribune version of the story reporter Ron Grossman makes no attribution to Herzl  when he cites Judge Greiman.

Can't a person do what he wants with his money—like ensuring the survival of the Jewish people? Judge Alan Greiman thought so, writing: "Max and Erla had a dream with respect to the provisions of their will and if you will it, it is no dream."

Not only does Greiman frame his legal opinion to conform to the principles of Zionist ideology even when there is a conflict with those of the American Constitutional system, but Zionists in the mainstream media are also limiting information*** available to the general American public to prevent Americans from realizing they are losing their country as inexorably as the Palestinians are losing Palestine.

NOTES

* I prefer to avoid the use of the term "Jewish" to refer to people associated with some form of pre-Medieval Judaism.

** No central authority is giving the facilitators and gate keepers marching orders. They are simply so thoroughly indoctrinated from early childhood education through college that they base decisions in Zionist ideology reflexively and generally unconsciously.

*** Philip Weiss assumes that Grossman neglected to mention Herzl out of ignorance (see  Chicago Judge Invokes Herzl in OK'ing Ban on Intermarried Heirs), but Grossman almost certainly must have consulted the Jewish News version of the story while he researched his article for the Tribune.

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(Not) Spotlighting McCain's Senior Moments

Shabbesgoyism or Patriotism

by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)

 

Within approximately the last two weeks New York Times columnist David Brooks has asked whether Barack Obama comes from the right sort of family to qualify him to become the President of the United States. Then Joe Lieberman, who is more of a Senator from Israel than from Connecticut, felt qualified to assert that McCain has always put America first while Obama has not. And just a few days ago McCain had yet another senior moment. (Earlier McCain senior moments include a bizarre attack on Obama's Berlin speech  and general confusion about Iraq.) Yet the pundits are barely commenting.

 

About two years ago in a NY Observer column, Phil Weiss criticized Brooks for using coded language when he wrote about Jewish issues. Brooks's practice also shared by Lieberman is particularly irritating when parsing out the real meaning is so easy. Do Jews like Brooks and Lieberman really believe non-Jews are so stupid?

 

The issue of family, patriotism, and possible senile dementia are all related.

 

When Brooks says family, he probably means lineage or yichus. Historically, there has been a tendency among especially German Jews and Eastern European ethnic Ashkenazim to overlook differences among non-Jews and to see only an amorphous mass of blood-thirsty Jew-haters.*

By serving Jews by performing tasks that are according to religious law (Halakhah, הלכה) forbidden to Jews on the Sabbath, the small class of shabbesgoyim might achieve a certain amount of affection from Jewish employers.

McCain in the minds of people like Brooks has probably achieved the status of Shabbesgoy and even has yichus (lineage) as Shabbesgoy because his father helped cover up the USS Liberty Affair.

I discuss McCain's status in Money Jews, Brain Jews, Politics and in Followup: Obama vs. Israel Lobby. The latter article makes it clear that for Jews like Lieberman the highest form of patriotism is shabbesgoyism, i.e., groveling and swearing fealty to Israel.

If there is any doubt whose interests Lieberman would serve if he had to choose between Israel and the US, the Forward has answered that question. See What Would Abraham Cahan Think?

Zionist Jewish oligarchs, who dominate US media, must be drooling at the prospect of a McCain presidency. As the perfect Shabbesgoy, he slavishly follows the Kagan Kristol Neocon line on foreign policy. If McCain chose Lieberman as his running mate, McCain would probably receive an infusion of political contributions from Jewish plutocrats like Adelson, Saban or the Krafts of Massachusetts.

Selecting Lieberman would lay a trap for Obama because Jewish facilitators and gate-keepers in media would use the slightest hint from any Obama campaign official that Lieberman might care more about Israel than about the USA to hammer away at Obama with accusations of anti-Semitism and unfitness for office right until the November election.

Not only do the same facilitators and gate-keepers keep mum on McCain's signs of dementia, but they probably even hope for incapacitating Alzheimer's disease as long as McCain chooses the right running mate, who would become president under Amendment XXV [Presidential Succession (1967)] to the United States Constitution. If the VP in such a situation were Lieberman, he could complete the final takeover of the USA by Judonia.

NOTE

* There may be an exception to the principle that non-Jews constitute a single amorphous mass of blood-thirsty Jew-haters.

When I was working in Monsey in the late 80s and early 90s, I noticed a color preference with regard to servants and shabbesgoyim. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, they were mostly Haitian, but afterwards, the Haitians were fired and replaced with Slavs (mostly Poles) -- I suppose in order to create a more הײמיש ‬(heymish) feeling of E. European Yiddishkeyt.

In other words, for a certain Yiddish class, שוואַרצעס (niggers) whether Haitian maids or Harvard-trained lawyers like Senator Obama are simply too déclassé to recruit as shabbesgoyim if whites are available.

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Friedemann Contra Spritzler Contra Avnery

Re: Uri Avnery's Despicable Devil's Hoof

by Karin Friedemann

with some minor edits from Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)

 

John Spritzler's friendly Jewish Marxist advice (below) to the Palestinians is every bit as pretentious, arrogant and vacuous as Uri Avnery's.

 

It recalls the movie Zohan. There is also no logic to it. Since 99.9% of Jews are unlikely to support equal rights with Palestinians even in hope of peace, what's the program for making them buy into siding with Palestinians in a war against Jewish elites? The Jewish Marxists actually cannot have their little cute working class revolution as long as Palestinians get their land back. Because then they wouldn't be poor.

 

The class war theory is just leftist camouflage for the standard Jewish superiority complex vis-a-vis those ignorant peasants -- whether Arab, Polish, or Ukrainian -- who must learn from Jewish Marxists how to hate people of another social class. It really makes no sense because Palestinians are originally landowning gentry or peasantry. Their main industry has traditionally been agriculture and tourism. Palestinians neither identify themselves as proletariat or lumpenproletariat, nor do they seek answers in Marxist theory, which requires the farmland to be turned into a factory economy.

 

Islam specifically rejects the concept of Class War because it holds that God gives wealth as a test, and commands the wealthy to help the poor, including the possibility of waging war with their own money to liberate the oppressed. Christianity holds similar beliefs. So what Spritzler is suggesting basically is that Palestinians should give up their culture and their belief system and adopt the secular Jewish Marxist belief system. Nice friendly advice?

 

Not only do the majority of Palestinians traditionally refrain from hating people for how much wealth they own or do not own, but it's also simply not part of their culture to be so materialistic and shallow.

 

Application of doctrinaire "class warfare" theory in the past has mainly resulted in burning down the homes of the rich, destroying infrastructure and causing flight of industries out of the region.

 

Detroit's class war of 1969 resulted in worse poverty for Blacks -- no improvement whatsoever. If you drive around the burned down mansions, you will find them inhabited by homeless crack addicts, who wander around with glazed eyes like zombies and rob any pedestrian. As bad off as the Palestinians are, they have not yet become so absolutely and utterly degraded as those Detroiters that once believed in class war. Increasingly, these Detroiters are turning to Islam to regain a sense of dignity and adopt a realistic, sensible program for improving themselves and society both mentally and financially.

 

I do agree with the seizing of assets idea, but the idea that this can be accomplished with class warfare is comical. You need either a government or the bankers on your side to seize someone's assets. Most billionaires do not keep their billions stashed under their mattress so that some Robin Hood can liberate this wealth for distribution to the poor.

 

A far more reasonable approach would be to allow Black Americans to sue Jewish and non-Jewish investment banks that like Lehman Brothers or Brown Brothers Harriman that profited off slavery in American history* -- just as the Jews always like to sue any company that used Jewish underpaid labor during WWII. America already has a strong contingent of people who support Reparations for Blacks. The main thing holding it back is that most white people were not slave-owners so there is some resistance from poor whites to have to pay poor blacks for past misdeeds from which they did not personally profit. It would take a court ruling to do it, but it is far from impossible that Black Americans could liquidate the assets of New York Jews, whose wealth is founded in the slave economy of the pre-Civil War period.

 

It baffles me that Spritzler is super-offended by the idea that the US should use the *threat* of violence to force the Jews to accept equal rights for Palestinians, but violence in the form of class war is OK? I thought you were against all violence John. So sure of your moral superiority that you could not even look me in the eye or return my greeting. Talk about arrogance. Is this how you will treat any and all Palestinians who don't go along with your class war theory too? It sounds like just another excuse for Jews to feel smug and superior.

 

Note from Joachim Martillo

 

* The history of Jews, African Americans and Civil Rights is far more complex than commonly depicted in American history textbooks. When the NAACP was first founded with considerable Jewish financial assistance, wealthy American Jews might have hoped that mainstreaming African Americans could provide a sort of elevator effect to move the Jewish elite upward in American society as a whole.

 

I have questions about the behavior of the NAACP during the early period of Jewish "guidance." The recent release of Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas Blackmon opens up the question of the NAACP's behavior during this time period. The effective reenslavement of African Americans after reconstruction was not really secret. There was even a popular saying to the effect that Lincoln freed the slaves and his son Robert Todd Lincoln as General Counsel and then as President of the Pullman Palace Car Company put them back in bondage. Many important Jewish philanthropists involved with fighting racism against Africans had interests in companies profiting from African American forced labor in the South.

 

In other words profiting from coerced, stolen or otherwise non-reimbursed African American labor did not cease with the end of slavery, and among the profiteers seems to have been a number of wealthy mostly New York German American Jews, who vociferously espoused the cause of Negro Advancement within the USA.

 

 

In a message dated 8/24/2008 8:05:53 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time, spritzler@comcast.net writes:

http://spritzlerj.blogspot.com/

Sunday, August 24, 2008

Uri Avnery's Despicable "Devil's Hoof"

by John Spritzler

In his "The Devil's Hoof" Uri Avnery writes as if he were giving friendly advice to Palestinians. But his real message is a despicable threat: If you frame your struggle not as one for a separate Palestinian state but rather for full equality with Jews in a single state for all of Palestine, then we--the Jews of Israel--will ethnically cleanse you from all of Palestine. Using his "friendly advice" writing style, Avnery warns:

"There is no chance at all that the Jewish public will agree, in this generation or the next, to live as a minority in a state dominated by an Arab majority. 99.99% of the Jewish population will fight against this tooth and nail. The demography will not stop haunting them, but on the contrary, it will push them to do things which are unthinkable today. Ethnic cleansing will become a practical agenda. Even moderate Israelis will be driven into the arms of the fascist right-wing. All means of oppression will become acceptable when the Jewish majority adopts the aim of causing the Arabs to leave the country before they have a chance of becoming the majority."

This is no different from a Mafia thug giving "friendly advice" to a shop owner, warning what the consequences will be for failure to pay the Mafia's "protection" fee. Here we see Avnery the Zionist dropping his facade of "kindly friend of the Palestinians" and making it perfectly clear where he stands: challenge the Zionist project of an exclusively Jewish sovereignty in most of Palestine, and we will all unite as a "fascist right wing" to drive you out of Palestine.

Let's look closely at what Avnery and a Mafia thug have in common. The Mafia thug does not want the recipient of his "advice" to know how the Mafia can be defeated, and he does not support the efforts of people to do so. Likewise, Avnery does not want Palestinians to know how Zionism can be defeated, and he does not support the efforts of people to do so.

Avnery's Devil's Hoof Hides the Achilles Heel of Zionism

Avnery uses bogus talk about a Devil's Hoof to hide the Achilles Heel of Zionism. He does not want Palestinians to know that Zionism can be defeated by waging class war against it. Zionism is the ideology and practice of a Jewish upper class whose chief goal is to rule over and exploit a mainly Jewish working class, and whose chief strategy for controlling that Jewish working class is to wage war against non-Jews in the name of Jews in order to make non-Jews hate Jews and thereby make ordinary Jews so afraid of non-Jews that they will cling to their Jewish rulers for "protection." This fact is the Achilles heel of Zionism.

A class war against Zionism can defeat it. A class war against Zionism, for example, would, as I have discussed in detail elsewhere, call for wealth in the possession of the eighteen wealthiest families in Israel to be used to return to Palestinians the property that Zionism stole from them. The wealth of these eighteen families alone could make it possible for every Israeli family living on stolen land or in a stolen house to have one million U.S. dollars to either buy the property from the original and rightful Palestinian owner or return the property to them and use the million dollars to build a new house for themselves, thereby causing an economic housing boom that would benefit practically everybody, Jew or non-Jew, in all of Palestine. Ordinary Jews, far from fearing it, would welcome the return of Palestinians inside the Green Line if it were framed this way.

The Zionist ruling class of Israel (and Uri Avnery) does not want such a political agenda to see the light of day. It is horrified by any framework that puts ordinary Jews and non-Jews in Palestine on the same side of the issue. It loves the opposite, and it loves for its "enemies"--from Avnery to the PLO to Hamas-- to play along with the game of making it seem that ordinary Jews and non-Jews are necessarily enemies. As long as this game is played, the Israeli Zionist ruling class can continue to drive down ordinary Jews the same way the American ruling class is driving down ordinary Americans while controlling them with a "war on terror."

Another thing that Avnery does not want the recipients of his "advice" to know, is that a class framework makes it possible to turn the American public against Zionism, and to make a revolution in the United States, thereby depriving the Israeli ruling class of the American backing that it needs to stay in power.

Another thing that Avnery does not want his "friends" to know is that Jewish support for Zionism is no more carved in stone than white support for apartheid in South Africa was carved in stone. When the rulers are persuaded that an overtly racist strategy of social control is no longer viable because it is condemned by too many people around the world, then, like South Africa's President DeKlerk, they give "their own" people a green light for rejecting what had previously been beyond criticism, and suddenly what was thought impossible becomes quite possible. For example, in 1992 the BBC reported that "White South Africans have backed an overwhelming mandate for political reforms to end apartheid and create a power-sharing multi-racial government…In a landslide victory for change, the government swept the polls in all four provinces, and all but one of 15 referendum regions…It won 68.6% of the vote in a record turn-out, which, in some districts exceeded 96%." Avnery doesn't want Palestinians to appreciate the lesson of this historical event.

While Avnery is no better than a Mafia thug, the problem is not just Avnery. Good people who have been advocating for a One State Solution have been remiss in failing to identify the struggle as part of the class war--a war of ordinary people around the world to overthrow their elite rulers and shape society by the working class values of equality and democracy and solidarity. The consequence of this failure is that Avnery's "advice" persuades many people that our struggle is hopeless. Another consequence is that advocates of One State, fearing the permanence of the Israeli public's hostility to the just demands of Palestinians for a return of their property, try to avoid talking about or even thinking about how those just demands should be met; this makes the One State idea appear to many Palestinians as a goal that does not really address their concerns. We need to get on the right track--class war--if we are to prevail against Zionism and its "devil's hoofs" like Uri Avnery.

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Zionist Internet Censorship Never Stops

Angus Cook sent me a CC of the letter included at the end of this blog entry.

His correspondence with journalist Philip Weiss is representative of general and ongoing effort by Zionists to control discourse on the Internet by creating a perception that critics of Israel are so vile and contemptible that they are beyond the pale of acceptable discourse.

For the record, I do not remember any reference to Freemasons in the 9/11 Missing Links online video, but I may not have been listening carefully enough.

Unlike the video producers, I consider Zohan to be an anti-Zionist film.

In any case and more importantly -- because of the long history of Zionist false flag operations -- the video's hypothesis that the 9/11 attack was at least in part the result of Zionist agents provocateurs simply cannot be dismissed out of hand.

Because of Cook's letter, I listened to the video again but somewhat more carefully. I have to admit that I was fascinated by the discussion of the Danny Pearl kidnapping because it explains why the kidnappers chose Pearl as a target instead of Richard Behar.

If the 9/11 money trail ended not with Islamists but with Zionists, if Zionist agents provocateurs were involved in the planning and undertaking of the 9/11 attacks, and if Pearl was about to find the smoking gun of Zionist involvement in 9/11 (or an Israeli intelligence agent believed he was), Zionist agents provocateurs could have decided that Pearl had to die and could easily have transmitted to the kidnappers the relatively obscure historical information

• that identifies Pearl's great-grandfather as a Zionist founding father and
• that was practically guaranteed to enrage the kidnappers to murder.

Puppet masters in Israeli intelligence could also have set in motion the event sequence leading to the creation of the Daniel Pearl Foundation, which has become an extraordinary Zionist propaganda organization. (See Daniel Pearl Foundation Honors Sandel and In the Company of Arabophobes and Islamophobes.)

Here is Cook's email.

Dear Philip [Weiss],

Yesterday Joachim Martillo posted multiple links on his website to a video which claims that Jews and Freemasons were, amongst other things, behind the 9/11 atrocities. The conveniently anonymous "Guest" who submitted the accompanying text, conveniently claims to have "only skimmed the video", but also reveals a close familiarity with its content — which is antisemitic to the core.

You can take my word for this, or take the trouble to watch it. Either way, your linking [on your website Mondoweiss] to "Ethnic Ashkenazim Against Zionist Israel" amounts to your endorsement of a hate site.

With regards

Angus Cook

Click here for another blog entry on 9/11 Missing Links Video. Sphere: Related Content

Cowboys and Palestinians

Arguing with Jewish Zionist Trolls
by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)

I have been having such a discussion at Mondoweiss under the topic Anti-Anti-Semitism.

When all else fails the Jewish Zionist apologist for mass murder, ethnic cleansing, plundering and genocide of non-Jews, resorts to an irrational claim: "Well, Americans did it to Indians, and we Jews should be able to do Palestinians."

I hate to disillusion our racist little Zionist Jewish droids, but most Americans acknowledge that the treatment of the native population was wrong. In contrast, racist Zionist Jews

• believe that Zionists were correct to mass murder, ethnic cleanse and genocide the native Palestinian population (at a much later time period when the international consensus had concluded that such acts were criminal and vile),
• want to do even more mass murder, ethnic cleansing, and genocide of Palestinians, and
• want us Americans to pay for it.

As far as I am concerned, real atonement for mistreatment of the native Americans or for the Holocaust (in the German context) starts with punishing Zionists, not with embracing them, and certainly not with giving them money.

In my experience in traveling through the Bible Belt and explaining how much Zionism costs non-Jewish Americans, it takes about one half hour for the most extreme Christian Zionist to conclude

• that Zionism is completely incompatible with any rational understanding of Christianity and
• that he really wants to obliterate Jews-only cities in stolen or occupied Palestine

(unless he is like John Hagee being paid off by Zionist Jewish oligarchs).

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What the Globe Left Out

Hate Group Gets New Leader
by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)

Compare the following two stories!

ADL hires replacement for former leader who broke ranks - Local News Updates - The Boston Globe
August 19, 2008 12:19 PM

By Globe Staff

The Anti-Defamation League announced today that it hired a New England regional director to fill the position vacated by Andrew H. Tarsy, who broke ranks with the organization's national leadership last year over the acknowledgment of the Armenian genocide.

Derrek L. Shulman, the former chief of staff for the Massachusetts Executive Office of Elder Affairs, will begin serving as ADL regional director in early October, according to a statement. The post had been filled by an interim person since December, when Tarsy resigned.

"We conducted an exhaustive search and are fortunate to have found a leader of Derrek's caliber," said James L. Rudolph, chairman of the ADL's New England Regional Board, in a statement. "This is an exciting time for ADL New England, and Derrek has all the qualifications, contacts and leadership skills to ensure our organization performs its crucial mission of fighting anti-semitism and hate."

Tarsy was fired in August 2007 after he spoke out against the national ADL's refusal to acknowledge that the Ottoman Turks committed genocide when they slaughtered as many as 1.5 million Armenians from 1915 to 1923. It became an issue when Watertown, which has a sizeable Armenian-American community, pulled out of the ADL's No Place For Hate Program in protest.

Tarsy spoke publicly against the national ADL's position and was fired. Under pressure, the National ADL changed course and said the massacre was "tantamount to genocide." Tarsy was rehired two weeks later but resigned in December. In an interview at the time, Tarsy did not share why he was leaving but said it was "professional judgment based on knowing when it's your time."

The hiring of Shulman will strengthen the ADL in New England as it moves forward, the organization said in the statement.

"We are entering a growth period at ADL, and Derrek is the perfect choice to lead us through it," said Esta Gordon Epstein, chair elect of the ADL's New England Regional Board. "Derrek has the vision, people skills, and experience to enhance our ability to build bridges between ADL and other groups and communities, and to promote diversity and appreciation for our differences."

The Jewish Advocate | This Weeks Issue | Editorial

Leadership in Boston

Friday August 22 2008

The Boston Jewish community is made up of many component parts. From synagogues and schools to agencies, organizations and publications, the leaders of each have their hands full doing everything to keep their respe ctive ships afloat.

From fulfilling missions and raising money to developing new leaders and maintaining continuity, each of the many Boston institutions that work to promote and enhance Jewish life have their own set of challenges.

At the New England Anti-Defamation League, Derrek Shulman was named the new executive director this week following the able leadership of interim director Jonathan Kappel. As the former political director of AIPAC, Shulman knows all too well the passions that accompany strongly held social and political positions.

Following a long national search, he is no doubt the right man for the job. His appointment fills an important position in the community and the Advocate wishes him luck in the ADL's mission of fighting hatred and promoting unity and understanding among people of different faith backgrounds.

Indeed, the Greater Boston community has a great deal of diversity, and its many faith and ethnic groups have and continue to learn a great deal from one another.

COMMENTS

Note that the Globe fails to inform its readers about the revolving door connecting Jewish communal/"anti-racist" organizations, Israel lobby organizations, and government agencies. In this case neglecting to mention that Shulman joins the ADL after working at AIPAC as political director is an amazing omission, for AIPAC is in fact one of the main agents of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim demonization in the USA. As political director, Shulman almost certainly approved every racist hateful item disseminated during his tenure.

Why is the ADL a Hate Group?

The ADL sits on its hands when a "Jewish" organization like The David Project engages in Arabophobic or Islamophobic incitement.  See Emails show pro-Israel anti-Mosque Campaign in Boston .

During his keynote address, Boston Regional Meeting of the National Lawyers Guild, Suffolk Law School, "Can Muslims Build Mosques in Post 9/11 America?,"  Howard Cooper disclosed that he approached the ADL with prima facie evidence of David Project conspiracy against rights, but there was no response or action from the ADL.

Flings Accusations of Anti-Semitism -- Ignores Arabophobia and Islamophobia

In fact, the ADL even incites anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racists by adding its own Arabophobic and Islamophobic attacks.

I look at the cartoons that the ADL cites for anti-Semitism in the following articles:

• Extremists Attack John McCain as 'Pawn of Jews' or
• The U.S. Presidential Candidates: Cartoons in the Arab Media

The messages seem completely reasonable. We should have more like them in our media.

In contrast, the ADL does not condemn the demonization and dehumanization of Arabs that (very often Jewish) political cartoonists introduce into our media. See Making the US Islamophobia Central.

In other words in the case of Arabs and Muslims, not only does the ADL refrain from fighting hate, but the organization even stokes the animosity.

Note that I consider the Ramirez cartoon cited in Making the US Islamophobia Central to be completely reasonable

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