Gary North (Lew Rockwell):

“By many accounts, Steve Jobs was a mean, ruthless SOB. He was the living incarnation of the opposite of those people who gave him his start in life, beginning with his parents, who sacrificed for his education.

That was the great tragedy of Steve Jobs. He was productive as few men ever are. He was driven internally – by what? – to serve customers well. As a driven man, he drove others. But at the start of his career were people who were not driven and who did not drive him. They let him follow his gut. They let him connect the dots at his leisure and their expense. Those forgotten people – unknown to us, but not by God – made possible his success.

Read the testimony again. Look for the central word.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.

The central word is “I.” This was the paradox of Steve Jobs’ life. It was all “I,” yet to build up his own ego, he had to serve customers.

CONCLUSION

The free market made possible his economic success. The free society made possible his early life as a moocher. Voluntarism was at the heart of Steve Jobs’ success.

He absorbed others’ charity and returned the favor to others, not as charity, but as profit-seeking output. This economic system has made us all rich in the West, by any standard of pre-1850 comparison. As P. J. O’Rourke put it, “When you think of the good old days, think ‘dentistry.'”

The free market is a moral system, not because it makes men moral, but because it rewards those who serve others efficiently and penalizes those who don’t.

Steve Jobs’ personal characteristics in his economically productive years did not inspire the development of those virtues which had made his early years productive. In another economic system or social order, Steve Jobs would have made a first-class tyrant. He was far more Simon Legree than Uncle Tom. But the free market made him a giant”

I look at the classifieds and I watch the lines at the stores. Yes, jobs are harder to get for working people, and yes, there are fewer benefits. Yes, it’s harder to be in the middle class, but still….

It’s as if someone WANTS to put the fear of revolution out there…

Maybe tampering with LIBOR and market indices is too obvious these days. Why not a staged “revolution”?

Where I am, you can’t get someone out to work for under $12/hr (manual work needing no skills). At Walmart , you can get a loaf of bread for a little over a dollar, if you look.  Flour and rice are still cheap. Beans are cheap.  Canned fish costs very little.  Clothes are cheap. Furniture is cheap. You can get a second hand car for 500 bucks.  Houses prices are lower than they have ever been in years. You can rent a nice home in a middle-class neighborhood for $500 a month and a room for $200. Mortgage rates are low. The only things that are high-priced are things the government has been subsidizing, like education. And there’s never been a better time to skip university. I wish I had. I would have been considerably better off.  Health care is expensive, but not alternative health, and for $200 you can always fly to Mexico, if you need to.

What is Occupy Wall Street crying about?

Student debt? Here’s a thought, go to a lawyer and comb through your loan applications. He may find a way to mitigate some of the terms or even get them waived. Consider suing your university for misleading representations.  File bankruptcy, if nothing else can be done.

Then start over. Sure, you’ll never get a loan, but that is strictly a good thing. With housing prices this low, you don’t need one. If you’re willing to put in sweat equity (a few cans of paint and a rag), give me a buzz and I’ll find you a house for under $20,000, including my finder’s fee. I kid you not. And you can buy it with 10% down.

How to save money?

Live in your parents’ basement, shop in thrift stores, cook at home, and make being thrifty a game. Or if there aren’t any jobs at home, move to Texas or N. Dakota where there are.

Then fall on your knees and thank the stars that you were born in the United States of America.

Except for the surveillance, it’s still one of the best places to live and work.

Class-warfare on the bourgeois (read, Judeo-Christian) virtues by Yale professors:

“As we all know from the great Marx-Bakunin controversy, it was the anarchist constituencies that actually rose up: whether in Spain, Russia, China, Nicaragua, or Mozambique. Yet every time they did so, they ended up under the administration of socialist bureaucrats who embraced that ethos of productivism, that utopia of over-burdened shelves

(Lila: evidently Graeber has never lived in a socialist country and longed for over-burdened shelves, like many hard working Asian bourgeois women, whose lives were immeasurably improved by them)

and consumer plenty, even though this was the last thing they would ever have been able to provide.

The irony became that the social benefits the Soviet Union and similar regimes actually were able to provide—more time, since work discipline becomes a completely different thing when one effectively cannot be fired from one’s job—were precisely the ones they couldn’t acknowledge; it has to be referred to as “the problem of absenteeism”, standing in the way of an impossible future full of shoes and consumer electronics. But if you think about it, even here, it’s not entirely different. Trade unionists feel obliged to adopt bourgeois terms—in which productivity and labor discipline are absolute values—and act as if the freedom to lounge about on a construction sites is not a hard-won right but actually a problem. Granted, it would be much better to simply work four hours a day than do four hours worth of work in eight (and better still to strive to dissolve the distinction between work and play entirely), but surely this is better than nothing. The world needs less work.

All this is not to say that there are not plenty of working class people who are justly proud of what they make and do, just that it is the perversity of capitalism (state capitalism included) that this very desire is used against us, and we know it. As a result, the great paradox of working class life is that while working class people and working class sensibilities are responsible for almost everything of redeeming value in modern life—from shish kebab to rock’n’roll to public libraries (and honestly, do the administrative, “middle” classes ever really create anything?) they are creative precisely when they are not working—that is, in that domain of which cultural theorists so obnoxiously refer to as “consumption.” Which of course makes it possible for the administrative classes (amongst whom I count capitalists) to simultaneously dismiss their creativity, steal it, and sell it back to them.

The question is how to break the assumption that engaging in hard work—and by extension, dutifully obeying orders—is somehow an intrinsically moral enterprise. This is an idea that, admittedly, has even affected large sections of the working class. For anyone truly interested in human liberation, this is the most pernicious question. In public debate, one of the few things everyone seems to have to agree with is that only those willing to work—or even more, only those willing to submit themselves to well-nigh insane degrees of labor discipline—could possibly be morally deserving of anything—that not just work, work of the sort considered valuable by financial markets—is the only legitimate moral justification for rewards of any sort. This is not an economic argument. It’s a moral one. It’s pretty obvious that there are many circumstances where, even from the economists’ perspective, too much work and too much labor discipline is entirely counterproductive. Yet every time there is a crisis, the answer on all sides is always the same: people need to work more! There’s someone out there working less than they could be—handicapped people who are not quite as handicapped as they’re making themselves out to be, French oil workers who get to retire before their souls and bodies are entirely destroyed, art students, lazy porters, benefit cheats—and somehow, this must be what’s ruining things for everyone.”

Comment:

According to Comrade Graeber:

1. Work is unnecessary, because we don’t need to produce anything (er, that’s a PhD in anthropology for you, a mark of complete insanity)

2. There is too much consumption anyway (maybe, but let each man decide for himself)

3. The “working” class (i.e.  manual labor) built everything of value (nice try at buttering up your constituency, but likely when the heads start rolling, you won’t be counted among the brawny and fit-to-live)

There’s much more, but a nauseated stomach makes it impossible for me to read.  Pol Pot would be proud. Next, the Occupiers will be taking out people who wear glasses or own a vegetable plot. Round up the kulaks! The commissars have come.

What a lot of twaddle. No one is claiming that handicapped people are living off productive folk. Unless you’re talking about the morally handicapped financial elites or the morally blind academics (like this one), or the morally vicious (like the media).

I contrast this with the real working man’s credo that such sophisticates dismiss as simple-minded and sentimental:

“Toiling,—rejoicing,—sorrowing, Onward through life he goes; Each morning sees some task begin, Each evening sees it close;Something attempted, something done, Has earned a night’s repose. Thanks, thanks to thee, my worthy friend, For the lesson thou hast taught! Thus at the flaming forge of life. Our fortunes must be wrought;Thus on its sounding anvil shaped Each burning deed and thought!”

More sense in this doggerel by Longfellow, apparently, than a PhD from London.

Notice that, like financiers who support them (Soros), the great enemy of this fellow is not the rich. It’s the middle-class and its religious values.

Thus comes the capitalist-communist convergence,  with its collective boot on the neck of the American kulak.

Von Mises:

“Lenin was cynical enough to say that revolutions must be achieved with the catchwords of the day. And he achieved his own revolution by affirming publiclyagainst his better conviction the catchwords that had taken hold of public opinion.”

Mises on why fascism is a branch of international socialism – the nationalist branch:

“IN 1947, Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises published a short book entitled Planned Chaos. He analyzed and put into perspective the intellectual and ideological forces that had been at work in the Western world since the First World War and which had led to the Second World War.

Furthermore, Mises said, “There were nowhere more docile disciples of Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin than the Nazis…. They imported from Russia: the one-party system and the preeminence of this party in political life; the paramount position assigned to the secret police; the concentration camps; the administrative execution or imprisonment of all opponents; the extermination of the families of suspects and of exiles; the method of propaganda,” and many other techniques besides.”

He pointed out that it was “important to realize that Fascism and Nazism were socialist dictatorships” and that both had been “committed to the Soviet principle of dictatorship and violent oppression of dissenters.” He reminded his readers that before the First World War, Benito Mussolini had been one of the leading socialists in Italy. His major heresy from Marxian orthodoxy had been his strong endorsement of Italian entry into World War I on the Allied side as a means to “liberate” Italian-speaking areas under Austrian control in the Alps.

When the war ended, Mussolini organized the Fascist movement, unifying Italian nationalists, economic collectivists, and various groups from all walks of life that had come to reject traditional Marxian socialism. Mussolini took his economic agenda from the philosophy of syndicalism, the idea that trades, crafts, professions, and industries would be grouped into mandatory cartels and unions through which the nation’s economic system would be planned and directed under government supervision and control. Mises pointed out that fascism “began with a split in the ranks of Marxian socialism…. Its economic program was borrowed from German non-Marxian socialism” and that “its conduct of government affairs was a replica of Lenin’s dictatorship.” Mises also argued that the philosophy of Nazism was “the purest and most consistent manifestation of the anticapitalistic and socialistic spirit of our age.” Indeed,

The Nazi plan was more comprehensive and therefore more pernicious than that of the Marxians. It aimed at abolishing laissez-faire not only in the production of material goods, but no less in the production of men. The Führer was not only the general manager of all industries; he was also the general manager of the breeding-farm intent upon rearing superior men and eliminating inferior stock.

My Comment:

And what else have I been saying but this? Why do I emphasize the need to get away from ideology and see how that is played by our two-faced one-party system? Why else have I been insisting that the only way to fight secret spying, blackmail, extortion, bribery, and propaganda is by INCREASED respect for intellectual property (our right to our own selves, our minds, our privacy) and by fidelity to some standard of objective truth.

The danger of slogans about the Fed. Once the population thinks all problems are solved simply by nationalizing or even removing the Fed, it still leaves other mechanisms of the elites in place.

Does Alex Jones talk about ending the BIS?

Euro-Med.dk (unfortunately, along with the handy economic analysis, there is some over the top language, but we’re all adults, now, and surely a little screechy language (I’ve cut it out) is a fair price for good links:

“The power of the BIS to make or break economies was demonstrated in 1988, when it issued a Basel Accord raising bank capital requirements from 6% to 8%. By then, Japan had emerged as the world’s largest creditor; but Japan’s banks were less well capitalized than other major international banks. Raising the capital requirement forced them to cut back on lending, creating a recession in Japan like that suffered in the U.S. today. Among other collateral damage produced by the Basel Accords was a spate of suicides among Indian farmers unable to getloans.

“BIS regulations serve only the single purpose of strengthening the international private banking system, even at the peril of national economies. The IMF and the international banks regulated by the BIS are a team: the international banks lend recklessly to borrowers in emerging economies to create a foreign currency debt crisis, the IMF arrives as a carrier of monetary virus in the name of sound monetary policy, then the international banks come as vulture investors in the name of financial rescue to acquire national banks deemed capital inadequate and insolvent by the BIS.”

When governments fall into the trap of accepting loans in foreign currencies, however, they become “debtor nations” subject to IMF and BIS regulation.

Large international banks managed to escape the rules, although they actually carried enormous risk because of their derivative exposure. The mega-banks succeeded in avoiding the Basel rules by separating the “risk” of default out from the loans and selling it off to investors, using a form of derivative known as “credit default swaps.”
However, it was not in the game plan that U.S. banks should escape the BIS net. When they managed to sidestep the first Basel Accord, a second set of rules was imposed known as Basel II. The new rules were established in 2004, but they were not levied on U.S. banks until November 2007, the month after the Dow passed 14,000 to reach its all-time high. It has been all downhill from there. Basel II had the same effect on U.S. banks that Basel I had on Japanese banks: they have been struggling ever since to survive.8

Basel II requires that banks on a daily basis assess their assets according to a market price of their securities, a rule called “mark to market.” If a bank does not have 8% net capital it is technically insolvent.  It was imposed ex post facto, after the banks already had the hard-to-market assets on their books. Lenders that had been considered sufficiently well capitalized to make new loans suddenly found they were insolvent. At least, they would have been insolvent if they had tried to sell their assets, an assumption required by the new rule. (Thus, Bear Stearns became technically insolvent – to be bought by JP Morgan for a song – even with plenty of money from the Fed. No wonder that JP Morgan has just booked a big profit!!) Financial analyst John Berlau complained: Imposing the mark-to-market rule on U.S. banks caused an instant credit freeze, which proceeded to take down the economies not only of the U.S. but of countries worldwide.”

Comment:

If you go back and look at my articles from 2008, I argued for restoring mark-to-model to prevent the banking sector from being completely cannibalized by the “connected” banks, a position quite different from those who think ideologically and argue that any regulation is always and everywhere bad, even when it has a strategic use.

On this blog, back in 2009, I also pointed out (as did others) that ending the Fed, without addressing the global central bank, is pointless.  End the Fed, then, would only mean a step in the direction of more central control, at a higher level, through the mouthpieces of the supranational government, operating in the media (Wikileaks, social media  speculator-media complex, spy agencies).

Observers of the OWS claim it is mainly about self-inflicted wounds, caused by the government/non-profit sector, where lack of market pricing and continual subsidies of college education mean there is

1. No market discipline (universities don’t attract students by a better product but by more subsidies of their product)

2. No consumer choice being exerted (students pick what they want to study, without any thought to cost)

3. Cartelization and price-fixing by universities

4.  No incentive for people to choose gainful employment over universities subsidies/debt forgiveness

Student loans are a bizarre focus for a protest about financial corruption or private sector (for-profit) bail-outs, because they are completely a government/non-profit created problem. The only real solution is to get federal subsidies out of the university system, allow for bankruptcy filing in extreme cases (although I suspect this will create another boondoggle), and educate people away from choosing expensive colleges, or even college itself) when many other options are now available to them, with the internet.

National Review’s Reihan Salam:

Many college grads have good reason to be upset. Educational inflation has been running far ahead of general inflation, without improvements in quality. Most higher education is still a good value (at least at the undergraduate level)  but it’s not as good a value as it used to be. And that’s really what complaints about student debt are—complaints about how much education costs the consumer.

The persistence of this runaway inflation is mysterious to me. Consumers are not imposing discipline on the market in the way I would expect—they fail to shop around for the best education value, and sometimes they buy education products that are worth less than their cost. People keep paying small fortunes to attend Tier 3 law schools even though the job market for their graduates is terrible. I don’t know how to get them to stop, but it seems to me that downward pressure on education prices will ultimately have to be applied from the consumer side. I do my part by trying to dissuade my friends from going to graduate school.

Megan McArdle makes a strong case that allowing student loan debt to be discharged in bankruptcy would both provide needed relief to people who can’t service their debts and discourage inefficient consumption of education in the future.

[Lila: It would be better if students were discouraged from taking out loans for education in the first place, especially for non-professional degrees. How about skipping college and starting a small business?]

Some of the rumblings from the OWS folks are toward the idea that there should be broader relief of student loan debt. This makes little sense. Unlike with the housing market, there was no general lurch in asset prices that went unmatched by a reworking of liabilities. The better avenue for relief is one targeted to people who can’t service their debts—i.e., bankruptcy.

While there are major problems to do with education prices and related debt, these problems have almost nothing to do with Wall Street and little to do with the for-profit sector. Most student loan debt is provided (directly or indirectly) by the government, and education is mostly provided by government and non-profit entities. [Lila: Exactly. That’s why there is a problem. The universities can keep charging prices the student think they can pay, because the federal sugar daddy is picking up the tab]

College graduates’ problems should be kept in perspective. The unemployment rate for people with bachelor’s degrees or higher is 4.3 percent. The really big consumer debt problem in America is with mortgage debt. As such, the degree of focus within OWS on a problem that is specific to the relatively well-educated is a misfire.

Not everybody who is complaining was wronged. The We Are the 99 Percent Tumblr includes complaints like this: “My father (multiple PhD’s) lives in his car so that he can do what he loves for a living rather than be a slave to the system.” A Columbia graduate student complained to the Associated Press that she has to eat rice and beans. These are not people who got screwed. These are people who have gainful employment available to them and made follow-your-dreams life choices that reduce their incomes. That’s their prerogative; it’s not anybody else’s problem.

WhoWhatWhy.com:

“WhoWhatWhy has found evidence linking the Saudi royal family to Saudis in South Florida who reportedly had direct contact with the 9/11 hijackers before fleeing the United States just prior to the attacks. Our report connects some of the dots first laid out by investigative author Anthony Summers and Florida-based journalist Dan Christensen in articles jointly published in the Miami Herald and on the nonprofit news site BrowardBulldog.org.

In early September of this year, Summers and Christensen reported that a secret FBI probe, never shared with Congressional investigators or the presidential 9/11 commission, had uncovered information indicating the possibility of support for the hijackers from previously unknown confederates in the United States during 2001.

Now WhoWhatWhy reveals that those alleged confederates were closely tied to influential members of the Saudi ruling elite.

The House

As reported in the Herald, phone records documented communication, dating back more than a year, that connected a Saudi family then living in a house near Sarasota, Florida, with the alleged plot leader, Mohammed Atta, and his hijack pilots—as well as to eleven of the other hijackers. In addition, records from the guard house at the gated community tied Atta’s vehicle and his accomplice Ziad Jarrah to actual visits to the house.  Although requiring further investigation, this information suggests that the house may have functioned as an operational base for the hijackers.

According to interviews and records examined by The Herald, Anoud and Abdulazzi al-Hiijjii and their young twins abruptly departed their home in Sarasota only days before September 11, 2001 and traveled to Arlington, Virginia, where they stayed briefly at another house owned by Anoud’s father, Esam Ghazzawi.

Then, still well before 9/11, the entire group, now including the father, flew to London and on to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The Sarasota house was sold in 2003, as was a penthouse apartment in another DC, suburb, Rosslyn, Virginia. The Ghazzawis do not seem to have set foot again in the United States.

New Revelations

Building on these revelations, WhoWhatWhy has found documents laying out the Ghazzawis’ royal connections through a nest of Saudi corporations that share the name EIRAD. Esam Ghazzawi is director of EIRAD Management Company, the UK division of EIRAD Trading and Contracting Co. Ltd., which among other things holds the Saudi franchise for many multinational brands, including UPS. Esam’s brother Mamdouh, whose name shows up on public records associated with family properties in the U.S., is the Executive Managing Director of the parent firm, EIRAD Holding Co. Ltd. EIRAD has connections to the US government via contracts. In 2008, records show, the State Department paid EIRAD $11,733 for rental of facilities, presumably in Saudi Arabia.”

Assuming there is a new world order, you can believe it in its most conspiratorial form (300 or so wealthy families of ancient predominantly European ancestry conspiring to consolidate their transnational power) or in a looser form (the ideology of the ruling classes, more or less informally conveyed through a variety of governmental and non-governmental institutions, and steered by the preferences of the financial elites, headquartered in London, New York, Switzerland, Singapore, and perhaps Hong Kong as well).

The second is closer to what I believe.

So what is the ideology?

I call it for precision Zionism. Not Illuminism, not Talmudism, not Phariseeism, not Cabbalism, not Luciferianism, Satanism, or anything else, because the word Zionism is fed by all these various strains of thought (which are all related to it) and they find concrete political expression through it.

I could also call it British Israelism (which would be more comprehensive and accurate) but not one would understand it.

What is the concrete expression of Zionism? Anglo-Jewish world government.

I say Anglo to refer in part to geography (since London – both the City and the monarchy – is considered the center of the ideology and of the financiers) and in part to race. I say Jewish to refer both to ethnicity (because the Ashkenazi – most European Jews –  share some common genetic markers) and to religion.

Obviously, many of the ultra rich that are part of this ruling class come from other races, including Saudis, Iranians, Indians, Chinese, Latins, and others.

Zionism encompasses all the following elements which are needed to understand what is going on:

Anglo-American dominance, British Israelism, Judaism, Talmudism, Cabbalism, Chabad, the Sabbataean-Frankist heresy, the re-establishment of Israel, the building of the Temple, Masonic and Illuminist symbolism, and religious syncretism.

Zionism is Jewish (through its Ashkenazi heritage), but it is not Judaism as ordinarily understood by Christians (that is, the Judaism solely of the Old Testament). It includes the oral and occult traditions of Judaism – found in the Talmud and in related or derivative occult/mystic books, like the Zohar or Kabbala,  and it has a distinct political agenda.

The fact that most secular Jews are not aware of the relation between what they think and this occult Judaic tradition is an unfortunate fact, but it is all the more reason to bring the tradition out into the open in a reasonable and respectful but uncompromising manner.  Not doing so is precisely what is giving rise to Jewish and American exceptionalism (Br-Israelism is behind that too) which, in turn, will fuel anti-Semitism  and anti-Americanism (not the allegation of it, the real thing).

The Babylonian Talmud (the Talmud of the Pharisees) incorporates many of the practices and beliefs that were used by occultists like  Blavatsky, Crowley, Steiner and other thinkers from the occult revival of the late 19th century and early 20th century. Of course, they derived them from other sources as well, notably Hindu and Buddhist, but they were refracted through the spiritual/political secret societies that developed at this time.

But these occult teachings (like those of Alice Bailey) are popular, idiosyncratic, and syncretic expressions or refinements or variations of ancient beliefs, beliefs that probably existed during the Babylonian exile of the Jews, from whence they entered the Talmud.

They probably predate it. Nonetheless, the Talmud is important in understanding Zionism, just as much as the Bible, and perhaps more so.

The occult practices I refer to include astrology, numerology, spiritualistic practices, forms of western tantra and yoga, and similar things that we now consider New Age.  In their oldest and (many think) most developed form they are found in ancient Hindu lore (c. 2500 BC or earlier), but they are also part of the Western occult tradition, which is also called the Hermetic or Rosicrucian tradition. The Hermetic tradition derives its name and descent  from the mythic Hermes Trismegistus of the Egyptians.

So, Zion is not solely about the establishment of Eretz Israel, although Israel is, or may be, a marker along the way. It could well be dispensed with, once its role is played, and that, of course, is the danger for ordinary Jewish people, as it was when the power-elites discarded them during the Holocaust.

Zion is, in the long run, about the world order –  the kingdom of god on earth – in which the Jewish tradition will have a privileged position, because Jews compose the majority of the power-elite and its praetorian guard and are the most influential among them.

Zionism is not Catholicism or Christianity, nor is it ruled by the Vatican. The lines of hierarchy are the other way around. Power is understood by what cannot be mentioned. One did not mention the name of g-d at one time, because the name invoked deity. What is not mentioned today as well is that which everyone fears.

So no, I do not worry about Vatican Assassins when I write anything about Christians. But, yes, one does worry about Mossad, CIA (headed by Zionists), sayanim and various mafias on the net that all spring to life when the topic is Zionism.

No one is in jail for questioning how many Indian sepoys were killed during the Indian Mutiny (or First War of Independence). No one is fired if he takes a controversial position on the Hutu-Tutsi massacre. But indeed, people are fired all the time for saying one half of the things that have been mentioned on this blog, which, by the way, is most circumspect and modest in its assertions.

You could write a website called Cracker News,  and talk about white trash and Christianity all day long, and it would probably be held up as a model of anti-racist activism. Or win you prizes. Or at least, get you a spot on the mainstream media. Simply take out those words and insert epithets referring to other groups and see what happens.

That is what tells me that orthodox Christianity and Gentiles are not in the seat of power.

On the other hand, it is not true to say that Orthodox Judaism is not in power. The Haredi are very influential in Israel and many of their opinions on Zionism find their way into the belief system of secular Jews.

Chabad is also very powerful. Is there any Catholic priest to whom the members of Congress have shown as much deference as was shown to Rabbi Schneerson, without criticism from the press? I doubt it.

Is there a Catholic or Italian lobby before which heads of state bow and scrape?

Has the US declared war on country after country for the sake of the Queen of England and the Pope? I recall the Pope was opposed to the war in Iraq. So forget Vatican Assassins and black popes, at least in these days.

Now it is true that British-Israelism is more accurately the phrase that best encompasses the whole racial-religious theory behind Zionism, but how many people would understand that if you used it? Zionism, however, is accessible. People already understand what it means in political terms.

That is why I stick to it. At least, until the Society of The Golden Dawn revives, sets up office in DC and starts running spy rings out of the place.

One final point.  I do not consider the occult core of this ideology at all evil, although many anti-NWO writers constantly use the term. Quite the contrary. I consider it simply the occult or mystic core of many religions. What is popularly called magick by some.  Nor are the NWOs opponents all good. Not at all. In fact, some of them are quite despicable.

That is why Lloyd Blankfein made his much reviled statement about doing God’s work. Indeed, in his eyes, he was.  It was simply not the god most people have been brought up to believe.

However, none of its foes is as powerful as the Anglo-Zionist establishment. And the point of blogging it would be to expose and delineate it in the hope that publicity checks it ambition and reach.

Update:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/06/genetics-the-jewish-question/

I should make it clear that Sand’s Khazar origin of Ashkenazim, is controversial still. At the time I wrote “LOE”, I relied on Qumsiyeh and on Koestler’s earlier work. Since then, new genetic research apparently shows that the Ashkenazi are more likely the result of the Jewish diaspora in Italy intermarrying with the central European population. I don’t have the background in mathematics or genetics to verify those conclusions, and the matter is so politicized that I wonder if any research will really change people’s opinions one way or other. I don’t know if this means the Khazar theory is really refuted or whether this just makes the question more complicated. In any case, Ashkenazy certainly do share more, rather than less, with their European ancestors, nor can they in any way claim to be MORE linked by blood to Israel than Palestinian Arabs, who likely descended from the Judaeans of Biblical times. None of this is to suggest that blood should be the basis of a state, of course. Or that origin myths are peculiar to Jewish people and no one else. Far from it. I bring it up, because I’m trying to figure out if there is some merit in criticism of Sand’s work, or not.

Update:

It was the research of Mazan Qumsiyeh, the Palestinian activist, that first informed me of the genetic research relating to this subject, but let’s get it straight from a Jewish researcher, quoted in the New York Times:

“Though no final consensus has emerged on the ancestral link between Palestinians and Jews, Harry Ostrer, director of the Human Genetics Program at New York University Langone Medical Center, who has been studying the genetic organization of Jews, said, “The assumption of lineal descent seems reasonable.”

Update:

There is one part of Sand’s account that I do not care for. And that is his belief that the Davidic and Solomonic kingdom never existed. This strikes me as reaching. Architectural evidence or lack thereof is not the only thing to be considered. An oral and literary tradition of thousands of years surely is strong evidence too. Still, at least the story of the Khazars goes mainstream and the intellectual angels have now joined this fool, who broached the subject back in 2005, believing, as Sand does today, that telling that suppressed truth would begin the purging of bad blood.

ORIGINAL POST

A brave and truthful man takes the first step toward the healing of the Israel-Palestine conflict:

“Sand is scathing about accusations made by Jews living elsewhere that his book is anti-Israel. From the comfort of the diaspora they charge him with sedition. Some say his thesis fuels antisemitism. Overseas donors to Tel Aviv University have called for him to be sacked.

But Sand has voted for Israel with his feet. He is not anti-Zionist, he says, but post-Zionist: accepting modern Israel as a fait accompli. Besides, his interest in the country’s survival as a democracy is not theoretical. His family lives there.

Diaspora Zionists can nurture the Jewish myth of biblical nationhood as dual citizenship alongside their passports from safer states. When they refer to “Israel” and “Jerusalem” in their prayers, they do not have to distinguish between scriptural metaphor and political reality. It is a distinction on which Israel’s survival depends.

“A lot of pro-Zionists in London and New York don’t really understand what their great-grandparents felt about Zion,” says Sand. “It was the most important place in the world in their imagination, as a religious, sacred land, not a place to emigrate.” That “Israel” was a metaphysical destination to be reached at the End of Days. The modern Israeli state is a political enterprise, conceived in the late 19th century, made necessary by the Holocaust, founded in 1948.”

My Comment:

The attacks on Sands’ book have come mainly from people who themselves live no where near the “homeland” they so revere, and who have long lost the characteristic features of the “identity” they claim to be the sole mouthpieces for.

Tamil “Tigers” were funded by ex-Tamil domestic tabbies, comfortably lapping milk in affluent suburbs across the West. BJP’s shrillest Hindu supremacists made sure to post their demands from the tolerant shores of multicultural societies.

And those who attack any mention of Jewish identity do so, really, because their affluent networks are offended by truth and so they too must undermine it.

But truth though it first wounds also heals.

If Zionism or Jewish or Israeli, as words, must be avoided for the sake of not offending the powerful (that is the real reason), then surely one should not mention the names and identities of the less powerful, for offense to them is surely a much greater moral failing. Let us not criticize feminists or women, Americans, or Anglos, or blacks, or whites, or Freemasons, or Gentiles, or fundamentalist Christians, since such criticisms must also have a covert agenda. If one cannot say Jewish or Zionist without verbal contortions ensuing, one should not say Afro-Dalit, or Hutu, or Brahminical or Vedic or Russian or Iranian or German (as in German death cult) or Vatican (as a stand-in for Catholicism) or Goddess-worship (to attack feminists), or even Satanist (who see Satan as a positive life force) for to demonize a nation or culture or way of life or institution is surely no better than demonizing a religion or faith.

Indeed not.

Extreme anti-Semitic statements should be suspect, since they often come from the mouths of paid provocateurs. But by the same token one should also suspect extreme statements against ordinary people working in government outfits. Or extreme statements about America or empire.

But how is it there are never any objections to that kind of extremism?

Reason and balance in all things. That surely cannot be misconstrued as misleading or false.

Dr. Sand having written a brave, most truthful and obviously well-intentioned book deserves all the support he can get, rather than to be undermined.

Some take aways:

1. Ethnocentrism is built into the Jewish religion, but no more than in any other religion, Israel Shahak not withstanding.

2. The formation of Israel constituted a rape, but the child of a rape is not guilty of the rape. Jews who have been brought to Israel have a right to continue where they are.

3. A two-state solution with federated states as the goal is the most practical solution.

4. Compassion for the sufferings of Palestinians and outrage that those were born in a country cannot return there is the reason for his writing the book.

And what is my excuse for returning to this topic over and over?

Lifelong interest in inter-faith dialogue, fascinated attachment to the great Jew Jesus, Messiah or not, historic or not; my love for the wealth of spiritual knowledge and practices embodied in the Hindu tradition and my fear that it will be wiped out or corrupted by imperial ideologues and ethnocentric scholars who are promoting strife in Asia on that basis; the belief that the banishment of the occult traditions in all faiths is the main reason they cannot come to terms with each other; and a belief that human society cannot be ordered correctly without the heavy hand of the state, unless it is reordered rightly from within human beings themselves.