Tag Archives: israel

How The Scofield Bible Came To America…

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An excerpt from “Zionism’s un-Christian Bible,” at Online Journal explains how one of the defining political doctrines of our time was fostered by the selective promotion of one heretical interpretation of the Bible:

“Central to Christian Zionist belief is Scofield’s commentary on Genesis 12:3. For the sake of clarity, Scofield’s notes have been italicized in the following passage:

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“‘I will bless them that bless thee.’ In fulfilment closely related to the next clause, ‘And curse him that curseth thee.’

Wonderfully fulfilled in the history of the dispersion. It has invariably fared ill with the people who have persecuted the Jew — well with those who have protected him. The future will still more remarkably prove this principle.”

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Drawing on Scofield’s speculative interpretation, John Hagee claims, “The man or nation that lifts a voice or hand against Israel invites the wrath of God.”

However, as Stephen Sizer points out, in his definitive critique, Christian Zionism: Road-map to Armageddon?

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“The promise, when referring to Abraham’s descendants speaks of God blessing them, not of entire nations ‘blessing’ the Hebrew nation, still less the contemporary and secular State of Israel.”

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Apparently unaware of this more orthodox reading, The New Scofield Study Bible, published by Oxford University Press in 1984, enhanced Scofield’s interpretation, by adding,

“For a nation to commit the sin of anti-Semitism brings inevitable judgment.”

Reading such tendentious comments, a bible-believing Christian could easily assume, for example, that God will punish the 114 countries which endorsed the Goldstone Report.

Stephen Sizer writes,

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“Sustained by a dubious exegesis of selective biblical texts, Christian Zionism’s particular reading of history and contemporary events . . . sets Israel and the Jewish people apart from other peoples in the Middle East . . . it justifies the endemic racism intrinsic to Zionism, exacerbates tensions between Jews and Palestinians and undermines attempts to find a peaceful resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, all because ‘the Bible tells them so.’”

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The incredible Scofield

In his 2008 book, The Rise of Israel: A History of a Revolutionary State, Jonathan R. Adelman describes the crucial support Israel receives from Christian fundamentalists as “totally fortuitous.” The incredible career of the man who wrote “the Bible of Fundamentalism,” however, casts considerable doubt on that assertion.

Two years after Scofield’s reported conversion to Christianity in 1879, the Atchison Patriot was less than impressed. Describing the former Atchison resident as the “late lawyer, politician and shyster generally,” the article went on to recount a few of Scofield’s “many malicious acts.” These included a series of forgeries in St. Louis, for which he was sentenced to six months in jail.

Being a “born again” preacher, however, did not preclude Scofield from becoming a member of an exclusive New York men’s club in 1901. In his devastating biography, The Incredible Scofield and His Book, Joseph M. Canfield comments,

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“The admission of Scofield to the Lotos Club, which could not have been sought by Scofield, strengthens the suspicion that has cropped up before, that someone was directing the career of C. I. Scofield.”

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That someone, Canfield suspects, was associated with one of the club’s committee members, the Wall Street lawyer Samuel Untermeyer. As Canfield intimates, Scofield’s theology was

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“most helpful in getting Fundamentalist Christians to back the international interest in one of Untermeyer’s pet projects – the Zionist Movement.”

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Others, however, have been more explicit about the nature of Scofield’s service to the Zionist agenda. In “Unjust War Theory: Christian Zionism and the Road to Jerusalem,” Prof. David W. Lutz claims,

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“Untermeyer used Scofield, a Kansas city lawyer with no formal training in theology, to inject Zionist ideas into American Protestantism. Untermeyer and other wealthy and influential Zionists whom he introduced to Scofield promoted and funded the latter’s career, including travel in Europe.”

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Absent such powerful connections, it is hard to imagine “this peer among scalawags” ever getting a contract with Oxford University Press to publish his bible. Nevertheless, it remains a mystery why OUP chose to endorse such a sectarian work.

Atonement

If there had been no Scofield Bible, American presidents influenced by Christian Zionism, such as Truman, Johnson, Reagan and George W. Bush, would most likely have been less sympathetic to Israeli demands, and consequently more attentive to U.S. interests. Moreover, the American people might have been spared the well-publicized pro-Israeli rants of John Hagee, Pat Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell, not to mention the lucrative End Times “prophecy” peddled by Hal Lindsey and Tim LaHaye.

But it is the people of the Middle East who have suffered most at the hands of an expansionist Israel, emboldened by the unswerving allegiance of America’s Christian Zionists, who were led to believe that Scofield’s words were God’s will.

Although much needless suffering has already been caused by the Scofield Bible, perhaps it’s not too late for Oxford University Press to publicly disavow its harmful book. Among its many victims are 3.5 million Palestinian refugees whose right to return is fervently opposed by Christian Zionists, who believe that the land belongs exclusively to “God’s chosen people.” At the very least, OUP could demonstrate remorse for its role in promoting ethnic cleansing by compensating those refugees with the considerable profits accrued over the past century from sales of its Zionist bible.”

My Comment

Not many people know about the role of the Scofield Bible in fostering one marginal interpretation of the Scriptures, the dispensationalist views of John Derby, a 19th century minister of the Plymouth Brethren.

Dispensationalism went onto become so influential among American Protestants that it changed the political dynamics of the country. However, while the article demonstrates how financial interests actively promoted the Scofield Bible, it wouldn’t have become so influential if the culture into which it was introduced wasn’t already receptive to it at many levels.

This is the argument I make in “Language of Empire” (MR Press, 2005), in which I analyzed the influence of Christian Zionism on the practice of torture as well as on the rhetoric that justified the war on terror.

[Because my publisher had actually set a limit to the number of pages and characters I could use, I had to prune each sentence so the writing ended up a lot denser than it might have been].

You can find the core of the argument in “Christian Zionism: An Ideological Tower of Babel” (Counterpunch, January 15, 16, 2005), finished a year before the book actually came out.  While Christian Zionism is important to the justification of American empire and of Israel’s role in it, it isn’t the only source of justification. There are broader streams in American religious and intellectual history with which Christian Zionism coincides. Those streams are identified below in the Counterpunch piece, which forms a concluding chapter in the book:

“Both secular and religious exceptionalists also share a unique relationship to the law that suggests that law and legal institutions are themselves implicated in the policies of Abu Ghraib and clarifies why it may not be possible to look to them alone for salvation.

[Legalism – the tendency to turn every moral/political/social debate into a courtroom drama over technical legality]

Both groups share the heritage of covenant theology which reads holy scripture as the record of legal contracts between God and man, a heritage which both privileges the law while simultaneously also promoting a sense of not being subject to it. The written contract binds us, but the interpretation of that contract remains with the state whose favored status has been granted by the law.”

[Voluntarism – the belief that the essence of divinity is not rationality, but will, and that God’s acts are beyond or even contradictory to reason]

“Dispensationalists read the final book of the Bible, Revelations, as a literal account of a post-war progression to a world-consuming conflagration, Armageddon. In doing so, they discount the importance of reason, learning, or social consensus in their interpretations in favor of what they see as a literal reading of the Biblical text. Parallel to this is their reading of the unfolding of human history as also a literal record where that text transparently reveals itself.”

[Dispensationalism – the belief that Biblical prophesies can be seen unfolding in history today and that God’s promises in the Bible relate to the political state of Israel]

“Just as fundamentalism disdains mediation, an anti-intellectual culture might find an oral tradition based on a continuing interpretative dialogue between past and present actually less attractive than the fixed guidelines of a written contract, whether made between one nation and another or between nations and God.”

[Literalism, Anti-intellectualism – the acceptance of the literal meaning of texts, the devaluation of interpretation, and a dislike for intellectual theories and intellectuals]

“From Biblical righteousness, the Promethean sense of the state as virtue incarnate; from Christian dominionism, the impetus to expand; from apocalyptic ruminations, the Promethean obsession with terror. And through all of these runs an unexamined sense of supreme moral satisfaction, a Puritan certainty about the nature and precise physical location of evil in the other that is translated not simply in the messianic language of Americanism but even in the shibboleths of liberalism. Evil is outside, out there in the world, radically disordered, deserving of eradication.”

[Dominionism, Puritanism, Apocalyptic Millenarianism —  the belief that society should be ordered by the Christian religion working through the state; the belief in the essential depravity of human beings and the need for salvation by grace, that is unearned and not universal; a belief in the return of Christ as prophesied in Revelations, accompanied by a world-wide confrontation with the forces of evil, followed by a golden age of a 1000 years]

How these beliefs impact policy-making in the west can be seen most clearly and stunningly in the  Declaration of the first  Jerusalem Summit (October 12-14, 2003) which reads in part thus:

“ISRAEL AS THE KEY TO THE HARMONY OF CIVILIZATIONS

Billions of people believe that Jerusalem’s spiritual and historical importance endows it with a special authority to become a center of world’s unity.

Israel’s unique geographic and historic position at the crossroads of civilizations enables it to reconcile their conflicts. Israel’s unique spiritual experience enables it to find a golden mean between the fault lines dividing civilizations: between tradition and modernity, religion and science, authority and democracy.

We call upon all nations to choose Jerusalem, the eternal and indivisible capital of Israel, as a center for this evolving new unity. We believe that one of the objectives of Israel’s divinely-inspired rebirth is to make it the center of the new unity of the nations, which will lead to an era of peace and prosperity, foretold by the Prophets.”

UK Foreign Office Warning to Travelers About Israeli Passport Forgery

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I didn’t have time to complete this post from a week ago, but with the really bizarre story of the Polish plane, I thought I should revisit it, as is:

At the end of March, Haaretz (March 31) reported that the British Foreign Office issued a travel advisory last week to citizens traveling to Israel and Palestine, “hours” after it decided to expel an Israeli diplomat.

“The risk applies in particular to passports without biometric security features,” the warning on the [UK foreign office] Web site said. “We recommend that you only hand your passport over to third parties including Israeli officials when absolutely necessary.”

This follows confirmation last week that killers of a Hamas operative in Dubai used forged passports from multiple countries, including the UK, Australia, France, Ireland, and Germany.

An editor at the Guardian notes that this is the lowest point in Anglo-Israeli relations since 1988, when an Israeli diplomat was expelled for being an agent of the Mossad.

Current relations with Israel are already strained, because senior Israeli officials visiting the UK have been threatened with arrest for alleged war crimes.

[Note:

The Hamas operative Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was killed in January in a hit that Dubai police have said they are 99 percent certain was the work of Israel’s spy service, Mossad. Israel has neither confirmed nor denied this.

Dubai has named 27 alleged conspirators in the pursuit and killing of the Palestinian, and has claimed that they used fraudulent British, Irish, French, German and Australian passports to enter and depart from Dubai. More than half of the people identified share the names of foreign-born Israeli nationals].

Earlier, UK foreign secretary David Miliband had said there were “compelling reasons” to believe Israel was responsible and had called the use of 12 forged British passports “intolerable,” according to an earlier report by the BBC (March 23).

Meanwhile, Israel’s ambassador to Britain, Ron Prosor, confirmed there would be no diplomatic retaliation, but expressed disappointment at Miliband’s decision. Israel has previously said there is no proof it was behind the killing at a Dubai hotel.

Israel claims the Australians are also going to follow suit, says this report:

“Official Israeli sources told The Australian newspaper that there is a high chance that Australia will follow Britain’s lead and also expel a high ranking Israeli diplomat. “It appears that Israeli officials have received indications in Canberra that Australia is preparing to expel a diplomat,” it said in the newspaper.”

Meanwhile, according to The Australian (March 31) ECAJ president Robert Goot told The Australian: “I think it would be an extreme reaction or possibly an overreaction (to expel an Israeli diplomat). The Jewish community would hope the Australian government might adopt a more nuanced position, depending on the outcome of the (Australian Federal Police) investigation.”

That’s not likely, now that former Mossad case officer Victor Ostrovsky has told ABC Radio that the spy agency had used Australian passports for previous operations before last month’s hit on a top Hamas commander in Dubai that has been blamed on Israel. (see the Sydney Morning Herald (Feb 26, 2010)

Israel has previously dismissed claims from Ostrovsky, who has detailed various accusations against the country in his books. He said Mossad prefers to use “false flag” passports, as Israeli papers frequently invoke suspicion in the Middle East.

“They need passports because you can’t go around with an Israeli passport, not even a forged one, and get away or get involved with people from the Arab world,” he said.

“So most of these (Mossad) operations are carried out on what’s called false flag, which means you pretend to be of another country which is less belligerent to those countries that you’re trying to recruit from.”

Ostrovsky said Mossad had a “very, very expensive research department” dedicated to manufacturing the fake documents which simulates different types of paper and ink.

The Australian newspaper also said Ali Kazak, a former Palestinian representative to Australia, had warned in 2004 that a Mossad agent in Sydney had obtained 25 false Australian passports.

According to The Age (Feb 26, 2010), in Dec 2004, a second secretary in the Israeli embassy in Canberra was recalled because he was suspected of ties to passport fraud in New Zealand, where in March 2004 two suspected Mossad agents were convicted for fraudulently trying to get local passports. The New Zealand case eventually led to the downgrading of diplomatic ties and the canceling of Israeli PM Moshe Katsav’s visit.

The same report notes that Mossad used forged Canadian passports in 1997 in a bungled plot to assassinate Hamas leader Khaled Meshal.

Then, as now, the Israeli prime minister, who has to approve all assassination attempts, was Benjamin Netanyahu.

Possible Mossad Links to Killing of Syrian Man In Hungary?

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Last, week there was another killing suspected to be the work of the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad. This one was in Budapest, Hungary. The dead man was supposedly involved in money laundering. Hungarian officials have since played down the connection, but it was widely reported there, as well as in Israel and Russia.

“On Wednesday March 17, just after seven in the morning, Dr Bassam Trache, a 52-year-old veterinary surgeon with dual Syrian and Hungarian citizenship, was shot dead in his black Mercedes at a junction in Budapest’s 16th district. The killer grabbed a black briefcase from the car and made off on foot.

Dr Trache, it was revealed, operated a money-changing business. A few years ago he was acquitted in court of attempting to bribe – with jewellery and Arab cakes – the head of the Budapest police’s money-changing investigation division.

At first, his murder was regarded as yet another killing connected with the shady world of money-changing; in the past ten years, there have been no fewer than 123 murders connected with the business in Budapest.

But then a more fantastic theory to explain Dr Trache’s murder emerged.

It transpired that on the very day that Trache was killed, two Israeli Gulfstream V-type jets were spotted flying low over the Hungarian capital, leading to speculation that, just two months after the assassination in Dubai of Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, the Syrian might have been the victim of a Mossad hit…..”

That’s from The First Post ( UK), which goes on to list some of the puzzling inconsistencies in the government’s statements that have been fueling the rumor.

“Last week, however, it was announced that a leading official of the NKH had been sacked, with a further four members of staff disciplined, over their failure to consult Hungary’s secret services before issuing a permit for the Israeli aircraft to enter Hungarian airspace.

And while Szollar claimed that Israel’s flying manoeuvres were merely “routine”, Hungary’s transport minister, Peter Honig, conceded that they were not fully in line with Hungarian laws. Then the Hungary’s HirTV claimed that the Israeli ambassador to Hungary, though denying the term “spy planes”, had referred to the planes as reconnaissance jets.”

The New York Post has reported that the Israeli ambassador told the Hungarian news agency MTI that the jets were on a diplomatic mission and were not spying. The NY Post said the Hungarian government had declined to comment on this response.

Another newspaper, MY Sun, reported that it was Hungarian officials who claimed the jets were on a diplomatic mission.

In a Reuters report, Hungarian spokesman Domokos Szollar stated that the jets were in “routine training” and Israel had cleared the overflights with Hungary two months in advance. Szollar explained the earlier confusion by officials as a case of bad internal communications. Apparently, the Hungarian defense department hadn’t been notified, and so, on first hearing of the flights, PM Gordon Bajnai had ordered an investigation.

The head of Budapest’s criminal investigations team, Zsolt Bodnar, reportedly dismissed allegations about a Mossad link as “fiction.”

I’m going ahead, nonetheless, and posting this video, because it happens to follow two far more substantial stories I’m also watching: the story about documented Mossad links to the murder of a Hamas operative in Dubai, as well as the possible Mossad ties of David Headley, the CIA operative who admitted to being guilty of the Mumbai terror attack of November 2008, at the time blamed on Islamicists. All three events together form a news story that’s quite riveting, especially since it accompanies the continual drum-beat for war with Iran. This story also suggests that any arrests for domestic terrorism need to be looked at with a great deal of skepticism, at this point.

At this point, I should repeat, the forgery of the passports in the killing of the Hamas official is documented; any ties to Headley are very plausible but so far unproven (and have not been reported in the mainstream press, for that’s worth); and the Hungarian story seems to be still in the “allegations” stage.

Sibel Edmonds On Traitors In High Places

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“Sibel Edmonds: The Traitors Among Us,”

by Brad Friedman, Hustler Magazine, March 2010

“Edmonds’s most disturbing allegations, however, may be against high-ranking appointed officials in the Bush Administration. Elaborating on testimony she laid out in her sworn deposition, Edmonds told American Conservative magazine’s Phil Giraldi—a 17-year CIA counterterrorism officer—very specific details of alleged traitorous schemes perpetrated by top State and Defense Department officials. As already noted, these included Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz and, perhaps most notably, former Deputy Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman, the third-highest-ranking official in the Bush State Department.

Edmonds said that Feith and Wolfowitz were involved in plans to break Iraq into U.S. and British protectorates months prior to 9/11. She also claimed that the duo shared information with Grossman on how to blackmail various officials and that Grossman had accepted cash to help procure and sell nuclear weapons technology to Israel and Turkey—and, from there, on to the foreign black market. There the technology would be purchased by the highest bidder, such as Pakistan, Iran, Libya, North Korea or possibly even al-Qaeda.

Additionally, Edmonds claimed that Grossman, the U.S. Ambassador to Turkey before taking his State Department post, had tipped off Turkish diplomats to the true identity of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson’s front company, Brewster Jennings & Associates, a full three years prior to their being publicly outed by columnist Robert Novak. That in itself, according to George H.W. Bush, would be an act of treason carried out by “the most insidious of traitors.”

Former CIA counterterrorism officer Giraldi summed up Edmonds’s disclosures to me in blunt terms: “This was a massive coordinated espionage effort directed against United States nuclear secrets engineered by foreign agents who successfully corrupted senior government officials and legislators in our Congress. It’s that simple.”

According to a declassified version of a 2005 Department of Justice Inspector General’s report, Sibel Edmonds’s allegations are “credible,” “serious” and “warrant a thorough and careful review by the FBI.”
Perhaps more damningly, the FBI’s John Cole recently confirmed a key element of Edmonds’s claims when he revealed the existence of “the FBI’s decade-long investigation” of the State Department’s Grossman. Edmonds claimed that Grossman was perhaps the top U.S. ringleader for the entire foreign espionage scheme. The probe, Cole added, “ultimately was buried and covered up.”

More at Antiwar by Philip Giraldi, on Edmond’s credibility.

Here is an op-ed written by Sibel Edmonds about the role of foreign agents in “hijacking” the country.

I should note that Edmonds herself has been seen by some as playing a sophisticated role of disinformation by overemphasizing Arab involvement in 9-11.

Frankly, I don’t know enough about her to argue if that’s plausible or not. In any case, even if her revelations serve an ulterior purpose, they are bad enough as they stand….

US Support For White Phosphorous In Gaza

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Eileen Fleming in Op-Ed News:

“The Ileana Ros-Lehtinen/AIPAC driven House Resolution 867 boiled down to a call for censorship of the Goldstone Report without “any endorsement or further consideration” from the Obama Administration, rife with inaccuracies and undermines support for the universality of human rights.

“It is no surprise that Congress is trying to cover their culpable asses for during the 23 days of Israeli assault on Gaza, “Washington provided F-16 fighter planes, Apache helicopters, tactical missiles, and a wide array of munitions, including white phosphorus and DIME. The weapons required for the Israeli assault were decided upon in June 2008, and the transfer of 1,000 bunker-buster GPS-guided Small Diameter Guided Bomb Units 39 (GBU-39) were approved by Congress in September. The GBU 39 bombs were delivered to Israel in November (prior to any claims of Hamas cease fire violation!) for use in the initial air raids on Gaza. [1]

One of the few who have been to Gaza, Congressman Baird D-WA, wrote, “H.Res. 867 is very serious business. If, as Goldstone asserts and the evidence I have seen supports, there were in fact gross violations of international law and human rights on all sides, we cannot in good conscience support H.Res. 867.

“This is about much more than just another imposed political litmus test that we are all too often asked to perform. This is about whether we as individuals and this Congress as an institution find it acceptable to drop white phosphorous on civilian targets, to rocket civilian communities, to destroy hospitals and schools, to use civilians as human shields, and to deliberately destroy nonmilitary factories, industries and basic water, electrical and sanitation infrastructure. This is about whether it is acceptable to restrict the movement, opportunities and hopes of more than a million people every single day.

“At the end of the day, this is also about our own domestic security. If we are seen internationally as condoning violations of human rights and international law, if our money and our weaponry play a leading role in those violations, and if we reflexively obstruct the findings of someone with the credentials, history and integrity of Justice Goldstone, it can only diminish our international standing and our own security.“-Rep. Brian Baird (D) represents Washington’s 3rd district.” [2]

Time To Talk About the Elephant

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Crazy terrorist or method to his madness? When will the media start providing context?

From Mondoweiss:

“He [Balawi’s brother] described Mr. Balawi as a “very good brother” and a “brilliant doctor,” saying that the family knew nothing of Mr. Balawi’s writings under a pseudonym on jihadi Web sites. He said, however, that his brother had been “changed” by last year’s three-week-long Israeli offensive in Gaza, which killed about 1,300 Palestinians…. Continue reading →

Anarchism In the Kibbutz Movement

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Haaretz on a study of anarchism in the Kibbutz movement:

“If there is a vision of Israel that can avoid the polarization and mythmaking of much Diaspora and Israeli discourse, it requires an appreciation of the complexities of Israeli society. James Horrox’s “A Living Revolution: Anarchism in the Kibbutz Movement” provides a welcome reminder that Israel wasn’t always seen by radicals as an outpost of Western imperialism. Horrox unearths the utopian, anarchist influences behind the growth of the kibbutz movement in pre-state Israel. Anarchism may be a highly flawed ideology, but at the very least it offered a vision of Zionism that, in not aiming to build a Jewish state, held out the possibility of a land in which Jews and Muslims could coexist peacefully. This was never likely to happen, of course, but at the very least it’s important to remember that Israel didn’t have to be the place that its contemporary detractors and defenders imagine it to be – and it doesn’t have to be that place now.”

My Comment:

Notice the reflexive genuflection to the state. Why is anarchism that promises coexistence a flawed ideology? Isn´t “flawed” a much truer description of the statist ideology rooted in race and faith (Zionism) that guarantees displacement of one people by the other?

Israeli National Airline a Front for Israeli Secret Police?

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Jonathan Cook in Dissident Voice:

“South Africa deported an Israeli airline official last week following allegations that Israel’s secret police, the Shin Bet, had infiltrated Johannesburg international airport in an effort to gather information on South African citizens, particularly black and Muslim travellers.

The move by the South African government followed an investigation by local TV showing an undercover reporter being illegally interrogated by an official with El Al, Israel’s national carrier, in a public area of Johannesburg’s OR Tambo airport.

The programme also featured testimony from Jonathan Garb, a former El Al guard, who claimed that the airline company had been a front for the Shin Bet in South Africa for many years.

Of the footage of the undercover reporter’s questioning, he commented: “Here is a secret service operating above the law in South Africa. We pull the wool over everyone’s eyes. We do exactly what we want. The local authorities do not know what we are doing.”

Support the Goldstone Report

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Jewish Appeal to Support the Goldstone Report

The primary author of the recently released UN Report on Gaza, the internationally respected jurist Richard Goldstone, has been attacked by establishment voices within the Jewish community. When those within a community try to “excommunicate” and dishonor a truth-teller, it is our obligation and responsibility to speak out vehemently on their behalf and on behalf of the truth they bring.

By all accounts, Judge Goldstone, who has a deep connection to Israel, approached his task with no pre-conceptions about what he and his team would find as they investigated the circumstances and aftermath of the Israeli attack on Gaza. Goldstone is a former South African constitutional law court judge who also served as a prosecutor of the Yugoslav and Rwandan war crimes tribunals. His credentials for this task are impeccable.

For following where the truth led him and releasing a report detailing human rights abuses and violations of international law by Israel, as well as Hamas, Judge Goldstone should be applauded for his honesty and integrity. Instead, he and the report have been viciously and relentlessly attacked by many within the Jewish community.

When it comes to Israel, hard-core censorship and intimidation by those claiming to speak in the name of the Jewish people have been the order of the day. Our saying, “Three Jews–four opinions,” reflects the traditional Jewish encouragement to argue and debate. But the reality, sadly, is that diverse opinions are welcome–except when it comes to Israel.

We must hold the Israeli government and the Jewish establishment accountable for attempting to vilify a truth-teller and for suppressing the truth about Israeli government crimes against the Palestinian people. We call upon each and every one of us to speak out at every opportunity–at our community centers and synagogues, in our homes, in the street, wherever we go.

We must demand that the truth be heard and that those claiming to speak in our name stop manipulating truths that have been well-documented for years, long before the Goldstone report. We are also appalled by the Obama Administration’s reaction to the report. We call for a fair and impartial investigation of the report’s allegations by non-military institutions in Israel. Failing that, we call for an investigation by the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Let us begin the New Year in the pursuit of justice.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned

 

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No Check Points in Heaven

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Palestinian activist Ramzy Baroud writes about his father’s struggles, and eventual death, in Gaza:

“My father’s reputation as an intellectual, his obsession with Russian literature, and his endless support of fellow refugees brought him untold trouble with the Israeli authorities, who retaliated by denying him the right to leave Gaza.

His severe asthma, which he developed as a teenager was compounded by lack of adequate medical facilities. Yet, despite daily coughing streaks and constantly gasping for breath, he relentlessly negotiated his way through life for the sake of his family. On one hand, he refused to work as a cheap labourer in Israel. “Life itself is not worth a shred of one’s dignity,” he insisted. On the other, with all borders sealed except that with Israel, he still needed a way to bring in an income. He would buy cheap clothes, shoes, used TVs, and other miscellaneous goods, and find a way to transport and sell them in the camp. He invested everything he made to ensure that his sons and daughter could receive a good education, an arduous mission in a place like Gaza.

But when the Palestinian uprising of 1987 exploded, and our camp became a battleground between stone-throwers and the Israeli army, mere survival became Dad’s new obsession. Our house was the closest to the Red Square, arbitrarily named for the blood spilled there, and also bordered the ‘Martyrs’ Graveyard’. How can a father adequately protect his family in such surroundings? Israeli soldiers stormed our house hundreds of times; it was always him who somehow held them back, begging for his children’s safety, as we huddled in a dark room awaiting our fate. “You will understand when you have your own children,” he told my older brothers as they protested his allowing the soldiers to slap his face. Our ‘freedom-fighting’ dad struggled to explain how love for his children could surpass his own pride. He grew in my eyes that day.

It’s been fourteen years since I last saw my father. As none of his children had access to isolated Gaza, he was left alone to fend for himself. We tried to help as much as we could, but what use is money without access to medicine? In our last talk he said he feared he would die before seeing my children, but I promised that I would find a way. I failed.”