To Straddle the Fence...Or to Tell the Undiluted Truth?

"The Deposition"

By Richard Edmondson

Striking work of art, is it not? I first came across it a number of years ago in a book by the Mary Magdalene scholar Susan Haskins. The painting, done in 1895 by the German artist Lovis Corinth, is called “The Deposition.”

At first I had a hard time wrapping my mind around the title. When we hear the term “deposition,” most of us probably think of court depositions in legal proceedings. But this is not the artist’s intended connotation. What he was portraying here is a literal de-positioning, of the body of Christ, from the cross…to the ground. Produced relatively early in the artist’s career, The Deposition took a gold medal at the Munich Glass Palace in 1895 and was well received at an international exhibition in Berlin the following year, becoming in the process the first of Corinth’s paintings to actually earn him some money. A gentleman by the name of Martin Feuerstein ended up purchasing it for the tidy sum of 1,350 marks.

In my view, the work completely transcends the boundaries of “religious art,” for what is revealed and depicted here is so very, very much more than simply the events of 2,000 years ago in the city of Jerusalem. The painting actually suggests volumes about where we are today and what we need to have happen at this point, and I say that because we essentially at present find ourselves nailed to a cross by global bankers who are intent on plundering one country after another. If we are to liberate ourselves, it is vital that we now de-position ourselves from that cross. And the way we achieve this is by having the courage to speak the truth. If we simply straddle the fence, taking pains always to watch what we say in hopes of not offending our Jewish friends, we will in essence remain on the cross.

Currently as we look around the world, we see austerity measures, in one form or another, being implemented or discussed in Greece, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Lithuania, Italy, Luxembourg, and Slovenia, among other countries. And of course in America, the U.S. government presently engages in “deficit reduction talks” in an effort to cut at least $2 trillion demanded by Republicans in return for raising the nation’s $14.29 trillion debt ceiling. So what’s being negotiated now is in essence our own program of austerity. But have you ever stopped to consider? The one country we never seem to hear about having to undergo austerity measures is Israel. In fact, whenever we hear economic news at all about Israel, it invariably comes in the form of telling us how great things are going. We hear that it’s high-tech sector is becoming a world leader; it’s venture capital industry is thriving; its arms industry is booming; and its software and telecommunications companies form “a remarkable picture of innovation, growth, and diversification.” Israel, a country with few natural resources to speak of, even has a diamond industry, one which has become “an important world player in producing cut diamonds for wholesale.” To what might all this be attributable? Is it simply “superior Jewish intelligence”?

Philip Giraldi seems to offer us some thoughts on the matter here, discussing, among other things, a) Israel’s theft of American technology and its sale of that technology to other countries such as China, b) U.S. taxpayer subsidization of Israeli industries; as well as, c) what he refers to as a “triple whammy against Americans” under which:

The expensive planes are given to Israel free, the technology is then stolen, and future sales vanish as our Israeli friends market their knock down versions of weapons systems reliant on the stolen technology.

Giraldi is on the right track, but I suspect he is only barely scratching the surface here. Moreover, the $3 billion known to be transferred from the U.S. Treasury into Israel’s coffers each year probably would not account for the striking difference we’re seeing between Israel’s economy, on the one hand, and everyone else’s on the other. So again we inquire: how is it possible that the Zionist state alone could be doing so marvelously while the rest of the world sinks ever deeper into the economic equivalent of a black hole in space? Most pertinently of all, we must ask ourselves: Is it possible the wealth being plundered from countries like Greece is ending up in Israel? As you will see below, this is a quite legitimate, nay vital, question to ask. Perhaps we could look to Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke to shed some light on the matter, but he and the other financial criminals aren’t talking, so for the moment let’s turn our attention once more to the Corinth painting—for as I say, it speaks volumes: 

Notice Mary Magdalene, her figure in the artwork representing the anguish, the lives torn apart by the crucifixion tragedy, much like our own lives at present; notice also the Roman soldiers in the background—like the Greek riot police, “just doing their jobs.” Another interesting aspect is the faces of the disciples, their emotions fusing a mixture of contrition, shock, uncertainty, puzzlement. The only figure in the painting who really “gets it”—that is to say, who grasps what’s truly happening—is the mother of Jesus. And what she understands, what she recognizes, is the nature of the virulent essence, or entity, with which she and all the others in the painting have come face to face: Pure Evil. She alone in the picture recognizes it, identifies it for what it is. And then of course Jesus—dead but not dead—surrounded by flower petals. The petals have about them a random, scattered look. Where did they come from? Did they blow down from the cross? Or perhaps heaven itself? It is Corinth’s—and Christianity’s—way of showing us that the human spirit cannot be killed. No matter how often Evil may think it has triumphed, no matter how many times it may presume itself to have won the final battle—that decisive and incontrovertible victory it so ruthlessly and assiduously seeks—that spirit, to our complete, utter astonishment, rises back up…again and again and again. We see it today, oh so very clearly, in the Palestinians.

Corinth was born in 1858 in the town of Tapiau in the Province of Prussia, Kingdom of Prussia. He first studied art at the Königsberg Art Academy under Professor Otto Günther, later moving on to the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, and finally to the famous Académie Julian in Paris. In 1891 he returned to Munich where he became involved in the Secession (in German Sezession) movement, a group of modern artists who were in essence “seceding” from conservative artists’ associations and from traditional, and often-state-funded, sources of support. Corinth founded the Munich Secession group, and in 1900 moved to Berlin, where he eventually would become president of the Secession group there, but times were not easy. Due to a lack of work, Corinth, in 1902, started a painting school and ended up marrying one of his first students—Charlotte Berend. She was 20 years younger than her teacher, but the two seem to have been very happy together, and family life became a recurrent theme in Corinth’s work. Moreover, it was Charlotte who saw her husband through a particularly difficult period starting in December 1911, when Corinth suffered a stroke leaving him paralyzed on his left side. With Charlotte’s help, he was painting again within a year—with his right hand. In fact, it was in this period of his life that the painter produced what many regard today as his best work. This includes a series of paintings done at Walchensee, a lake in the Bavarian Alps where the family bought a house, as well as this especially interesting composition—entitled “The Blinded Samson.” Whatever else we might say about it, the painting does seem to capture the Jewish sense of eternal victimization:

In 1925, Corinth succumbed to pneumonia while on a trip to The Netherlands, where he had journeyed to study the works of the Dutch masters, and in 1933, Charlotte moved to America with their two children. In 1958, she published a complete compilation in book form of her husband’s paintings. Her death came in 1967, and in 2005, Karl-Ludwig Hofmann published a book of the couple’s combined works of art, entitled Charlotte Berend-Corinth and Lovis Corinth. Their life together seems to have been very much a love story. But, as we did with “The Deposition,” let us return once more to “The Blinded Samson” and consider a few things, because, like the aforementioned work, it too speaks volumes.

We can imagine the sociopathic rage Samson must feel, the desire to revenge himself upon those who have harmed him (without cause in his view, for of course with sociopaths the fault always lies with others). The rage doesn’t subside, it increases, and not only increases, but over a period of several centuries Samson and his friends compile their own voluminous and rather markedly sociopathic collection of religious texts, rationalizing, among other things, the cheating, subjugation, and destruction of any non-sociopaths they may so choose. A small sampling of this material should suffice here:

Sanhedrin 57a : When a Jew murders a gentile ("Cuthean"), there will be no death penalty. What a Jew steals from a gentile he may keep.

Tosefta, Abda Zara VIII, 5: “How to interpret the word ‘robbery.’ A goy is forbidden to steal, rob, or take women slaves, etc., from a goy or from a Jew. But a Jew is NOT forbidden to do all this to a goy.”

Baba Mezia 24a : If a Jew finds an object lost by a gentile ("heathen") it does not have to be returned. (Affirmed also in Baba Kamma 113b). Sanhedrin 76a. God will not spare a Jew who "marries his daughter to an old man or takes a wife for his infant son or returns a lost article to a Cuthean..."

Schulchan Aruch, Choszen Hamiszpat 156: “When a Jew has a Gentile in his clutches, another Jew may go to the same Gentile, lend him money and in turn deceive him, so that the Gentile shall be ruined. For the property of a Gentile, according to our law, belongs to no one, and the first Jew that passes has full right to seize it.”

Seph. Jp., 92, 1: “God has given the Jews power over the possessions and blood of all nations.”

Now we must try and imagine, if we can, a global banking system run in large part by the adherents and true believers of Samson’s religion.

The House of Rothschild

Usually credited with pioneering and implementing the system of international banking is the Rothschild family. It was in 1815, Nathan Mayer Rothschild uttered his somewhat famous, “I care not what puppet is placed on the throne of England to rule the Empire on which the sun never sets. The man who controls Britain’s money supply controls the British Empire, and I control the British money supply.” Nathan obviously learned the art of controlling a nation’s money supply from his father, Mayer Amschel Rothschild, the family’s founding patriarch, who had earlier offered up similar thoughts on the matter: “Give me control of a nation’s money and I care not who makes her laws,” he said. Like father, like son, we might say.

Histories of the Rothschild family are available on the web here and here. The first link includes a section on “Talmudic influence” upon the family, while the second offers a highly detailed chronology starting in the year 1743 and working its way gradually forward, all the way up to the year 2005. Both histories mention Rothschild meddling in the internal affairs of the U.S. starting as far back as the opening of the 19th century, these early efforts being temporarily thwarted by President Andrew Jackson, who exclaimed, “You are a den of vipers and thieves. I intend to rout you out, and by the grace of the Eternal God, I will rout you out,” as he was expelling a delegation of international bankers from the Oval Office. Jackson made good on his word. In 1836 he vetoed a bill to extend the charter of the country’s central bank, known at the time as the Second Bank of the United States. But the efforts to establish a permanent central banking system to control the nation’s monetary policy did not die there. They continued on for another 77 years, culminating finally in 1913 with the passage of the Federal Reserve Act.

Both of the Rothschild histories, linked above, discuss family involvement in establishment of the Federal Reserve system, mainly through the efforts of their U.S. agents—Jacob Schiff and Paul Warburg, both of whom were connected with the Kuhn, Loeb, and Co. investment bank. In a 1907 speech to the New York Chamber of Commerce, Schiff asserted that “unless we have a Central Bank with adequate control of credit resources, the country is going to undergo the most severe and far reaching money panic in its history.” Coincidentally, the U.S. plunged into an economic crisis shortly thereafter. The crisis became known as the 1907 Banker’s Panic. Some rather astonishing information about Schiff can be found at Wikipedia (astonishing, that is, by Wikipedia’s often not-so-objective standards), including his activities as a Zionist and his hostility to Tsarist Russia:

From his base on Wall Street, he (Schiff) was the foremost Jewish leader from 1880 to 1920 in what later became known as the "Schiff era", grappling with all major Jewish issues and problems of the day, including the plight of Russian Jews under the Tsar, American and international anti-semitism, care of needy Jewish immigrants, and the rise of Zionism.

Schiff even went so far as to finance Japan, to the tune of $200 million, in its war with Russia in 1904-05—the Russo-Japanese War—following which Japan emerged as a world power. Again from Wikipedia…and again it’s quite eyebrow-raising information:

He (Schiff) was willing to extend this loan due, in part, to his belief that gold is not as important as national effort and desire, in helping win a war, and due to the apparent underdog status of Japan at the time; no European nation had yet been defeated by a non-European nation in a modern, full-scale war. It is quite likely Schiff also saw this loan as a means of avenging, on behalf of the Jewish people, the anti-Semitic actions of the Tsarist regime, specifically the then-recent pogroms in Kishinev.

This loan attracted worldwide attention, and had major consequences. Japan won the war, thanks in large part to the purchase of munitions made possible by Schiff's loan. Some within the Japanese leadership took this as evidence of the power of Jews all around the world, of their loyalty to one another (emphasis added-ed.), and as proof of the truth of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In 1905, Schiff was awarded the Japanese Order of the Sacred Treasure; in 1907 he was honored with the Japanese Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Star, which represents the second highest of eight classes associated with the award. Schiff was the first foreigner to have been personally awarded the Order by Emperor Meiji in the Imperial Palace.

As for Schiff’s pal, Warburg (the two were actually related by marriage), he served on the first Federal Reserve Board and later became a director of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Today

Since its creation in 1913, the Federal Reserve has had 14 chairmen, five of whom have been Jewish, including Charles S. Hamlin, the very first Fed chairman, and Ben Bernanke, who holds the position today. This means slightly more than a third of all the chairmen have been Jewish. To put that into perspective, Jews make up roughly 2.2 percent of the U.S. population, while Asians, African-Americans and Hispanics/Latinos together comprise approximately 34.5 percent. There has never been a single Hispanic, African-American, or Asian-American Fed chairman. Last year, Obama appointed three new members to the Fed’s Board of Governors: Janet Yellen, Sarah Bloom Raskin, and Peter Diamond. Though such things are difficult to verify, it has been claimed that all three are Jewish. Yellen succeeded Donald Kohn as vice-chairman of the board.

In the video here we can see Fed Chairman Bernanke testifying before a congressional committee in 2009, essentially threatening financial disaster should Congress pass a law authorizing the Government Accounting Office to conduct an audit of the Fed. The bill mentioned by the congressman is HR 1207, a proposal which would have required a comprehensive audit of the Federal Reserve had it become law, but while the measure ended up passing in the House, it was rejected in the Senate by a vote of 37-62. In the video Bernanke alludes, somewhat condescendingly, to what he insists is a need for the Fed to retain its “independence” from congressional oversight. On the Fed’s website, here, we can find the issue of this presumed direly-needed “independence” elaborated upon at greater length. Strip away the rhetoric and it mostly boils down to a matter of insulating the central bankers from any nasty populist sentiments:

The Congress established two key objectives for monetary policy--maximum employment and stable prices--in the Federal Reserve Act. These objectives are sometimes referred to as the Federal Reserve's dual mandate. The dual mandate is the long-run goal for monetary policy, and the Congress also established the Federal Reserve as an independent agency to help ensure that this monetary policy goal can be achieved. The independence of the Federal Reserve in conducting monetary policy is critical to guaranteeing that monetary policy decisions are free from political influence and focused exclusively on achieving the Federal Reserve's dual mandate. For example, a problem experienced in many countries without an independent central bank is that elected officials have put pressure on monetary policymakers to follow policies that boost the economy in the short run even if doing so would result in high levels of inflation later on. The Federal Reserve's dual mandate and the provisions for the independence of the Federal Reserve are two key factors that help guard against such outcomes in the United States.

Of course one “outcome in the United States” the Fed not only allowed to develop but seems in fact to have worked consciously to achieve is wealth disparity—now standing at an all-time high.

Late last year disclosures hit the media that in addition to bailing out U.S. banks, the Fed had in 2008-09 extended billions in bailout money to a number of foreign banks as well, including the Swiss-based UBS; Britain’s Barclay’s Bank; Deutsche Bank of Germany, the French BNP Paribas; and the Korean Development Bank, owned by the government of South Korea. The official reason given is that all these bailouts were necessary to avert global financial meltdown, but was that really the main objective? Or was it in reality a laundering operation designed to funnel stolen wealth into Israel? The Fed claims all this money has now been repaid. Richard Fisher, president of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank, acknowledged to the Washington Post, “we took an enormous amount of risk with the people’s money.” But then Fisher went on to insist: “we didn’t lose a dime, and in fact we made money on every one of them.” It’s a reassuring attestation perhaps, but without an audit how do we know whether it’s true? We don’t. We simply are supposed to take the “independent” Fed’s word on it.

In a recent RT program we can observe Max Keiser offer some rather astounding remarks on the global financial crisis. “There’s a common theme emerging. All roads are pointing to one culpable source of the catastrophe,” says Keiser, who then proceeds to identify Bernanke as that source. In his customary tongue-in-cheek (perhaps) manner, Keiser issues a call for the Fed chairman to be waterboarded—for “sheltering financial terrorists”—and then proceeds to draw a holocaust analogy that could easily have served as Abe Foxman’s blue plate special of the day:

The message to the Greek people is clear: to buy gold and silver to protect yourself against the financial holocaust provokers like Bernanke. Remember back to the occupation days in 1939, Greece was occupied. Now Greece is being reoccupied—by Bernanke and his central banker holocaust provokers.

If, as Keiser avers, Bernanke is the “one culpable source of the catastrophe”, then it would behoove us to ask: Is the Fed chairman yet another powerful figure in Washington of a kind with those “dual loyalists” we hear so much about? The following info is culled primarily from Wikipedia as well as shorter, more concise bios to found here, here, and here :

Ben Shalom Bernanke was born in 1953, and spent his formative years growing up in Dillon, South Carolina, where the family attended Ohav Shalom, a local synagogue. Bernanke learned Hebrew from his grandfather, who was a professional hazzan (cantor), shochet (kosher slaughterer of animals), and Hebrew teacher. It must have been interesting being from such a family while growing up in what is often referred to as America’s “Bible Belt,” and indeed Wikipedia makes a point of noting that the Bernankes “were one of the few Jewish families in the area.” As a teenager Bernanke helped roll the Torah scrolls in his synagogue while also playing saxophone in the Dillon High School Marching Band. After achieving an SAT score of 1590 (out of a possible 1600), he went on to Harvard, where he obtained his undergraduate degree in economics, and finally to MIT, where, in 1979, he received his Ph.D. Over the years he taught at Stanford, New York University, and Princeton, until finally being tapped for a seat on the Fed’s Board of Governors in 2002. In 2006, George W. Bush appointed him to his first four-year term as Fed chairman, and in 2009 he managed to get re-nominated for a second term by Obama.

Bernanke’s policies at the Fed have come to be known as the Bernanke Doctrine—a policy of manipulating fiat currency (money that has value only because a government insists it does, as opposed to money that is backed up by precious metals) in a number of ways to achieve the objective of combating deflation. The methods include increasing the money supply as well as lowering interest rates…all the way to zero if necessary. Among Bernanke actions which have generated the most controversy are the AIG bailout, as well as the Bank of America-Merrill Lynch merger, in which the Fed chairman is alleged to have threatened Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis after the latter had announced intentions of pulling out of the merger deal due to concerns over potential losses to BOA shareholders. The threat allegedly was relayed to Lewis via Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson at a meeting in Washington on December 8, 2008 and consisted of a vow to have Lewis as well as the rest of the BOA board forced out. The merger went through. On September 30, 2009—less than a year later—BOA announced Lewis’ retirement.

One other little interesting tidbit we might note about Bernanke is his desire to see “modifications” to “entitlement programs” such as Social Security and Medicare. This was expressed in a speech given in Dallas on April 7, 2010. (see here and full text here) “The arithmetic is, unfortunately, quite clear,” he said. “To avoid large and unsustainable budget deficits, the nation will ultimately have to choose among higher taxes, modifications to entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare, less spending on everything else from education to defense, or some combination of the above. These choices are difficult, and it always seems easier to put them off—until the day they cannot be put off any more. But unless we as a nation demonstrate a strong commitment to fiscal responsibility, in the longer run we will have neither financial stability nor healthy economic growth.” Nowhere in the speech did he mention the possibility of reducing the deficit by cutting off aid to Israel or ending the wars being fought on Israel’s behalf.

Who owns the Fed?

The Fed, of course, is not a branch or agency of the U.S. government, although the government ostensibly has some limited control over it. But in the final analysis it is a privately-owned enterprise. The question then arises: who owns it? The Fed website seems to offer no clue on this (not here nor here , for instance), and in fact seems almost deliberately vague on the subject, professing the organization to be a “central bank under public control, with countless checks and balances.” However, a number of websites (here, here, and here, for instance) name the following as being among the “primary owners”: 1) Rothschild Banks of London and Berlin, 2) Lazard Brothers of Paris, 3) Israel Moses Seif of Italy, 4) Kuhn, Loeb & Co, 5) Warburg Banks (Hamburg and Amsterdam), 6) Lehman Brothers, 7) Goldman Sachs, and 8) Chase Manhattan. Whether this is true or not (the ADL says it is not ), in the absence of any clear information from the Fed itself about precisely who its owners are—and in light also of the Fed’s unwillingness to undergo an audit—some credibility must be given to the claims on these websites. At the same time it should also be noted that Lehman Brothers, formerly the fourth largest investment bank in the U.S., has filed for bankruptcy, and according to its website has been acquired by Barclay’s, one of the European banks Bernanke bailed out in 2009. Basically, the bottom line is that there is an opaqueness about the Fed that seems to strive very hard to deflect penetration.

One man who spent a good deal of his life investigating the Federal Reserve is Eustace Mullins, who appears in the video below and who called the Fed a “criminal syndicate.” An associate of the 20^th century poet Ezra Pound, Mullins authored the book Secrets of the Federal Reserve and became quite outspoken on the issue of Zionist control of America prior to his death in February of last year. Wikipedia, perhaps not surprisingly, labels Mullins an “antisemite” (in the very first sentence of its article no less!), and then goes on to belittle what it refers to as his “ranting about America’s subservience to the Jews.” A considerably more balanced view of Mullins’ life and work can be found at Macropedia. At any rate, here in this video we have Mullins discussing the roots of the Federal Reserve as well as what he says is a deliberate attempt by Israel to instigate a Christian-Muslim war.



The video is actually the first of a 10-part feature. Additional parts can be found here, here and here. One segment has Mullins offering an especially interesting pronouncement about the role of a central bank: “A central bank’s principle role is for war finance, because war finance is the most profitable enterprise you can get into.”

Calling it What it Is

We should be under no illusion. The power of the global bankers is real. We can just about count on one hand today the governments whose sovereignty they have not yet subverted or undermined. What nations which do continue to defy them will, like as not, be targeted. Some already have been.

We should also be clear on something else: the ‘global bankers’ and ‘Israel’ are virtually synonymous. To (somewhat inexactly) paraphrase Vice President Joe Biden, there is “no daylight” between them. As all this plays out, we as average citizens of the West, become angered when we see our government officials kowtowing to the Israeli lobbies that exist in our respective countries, but what most of us don’t stop to consider is that our leaders actually have a very good reason for serving as Israel’s lap dogs. Quite simply, that reason is this: the bankers have the power to engineer a country’s or a government’s complete collapse. They can do this by applying economic pressure if they choose, or, if they want to really get serious, they can go all out and engineer a destructive and ruinous war against the country. Recall, if you will, Schiff’s strike against Tsarist Russia in 1904. Or, if that’s not enough evidence for you, go to the Rothschild history website here and read how Nathan Mayer financed the British invasion of the United States in 1812. Two separate wars, a century apart, both started by bankers. If the global bankers of those days held such titanic powers, what monstrous acts, pray tell, might they be capable of today? Could these include, for instance, financing a false flag terror attack against the U.S. with the concomitant result of igniting a bloody conflagration in the Middle East?—would such achievements fall within their reach? For those interested in this question, a number of excellent websites have addressed the issue of Israeli involvement in 9-11. Here are two:

http://theinfounderground.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5367

http://wikispooks.com/wiki/9/11:Israel_did_it

The bottom line I think is that no Western leader is any longer capable of standing up to the power of the international bankers. Only the people can do that at this point. Our failure to act will result in feudal slavery—basically a fulfillment of the dreams of those who wrote the Talmud.

In an article entitled “Whither Greece,” economist Michael Hudson offers an analysis of the Greek crisis that includes a reference to Socrates:

Socrates said that ignorance must be the root of all evil, because no one deliberately sets out to be bad. But the economic “medicine” of driving debtors into poverty and forcing the selloff of their public domain has become socially accepted wisdom taught in today’s business schools. One would think that after fifty years of austerity programs and privatization selloffs to pay bad debts, the world had learned enough about causes and consequences. The banking profession chooses deliberately to be ignorant. “Good accepted practice” is bolstered by Nobel Economics Prizes to provide a cloak of plausible deniability when markets “unexpectedly” are hollowed out and new investment slows as a result of financially bleeding economies, medieval-style, while wealth is siphoned up to the top of the economic pyramid.

With all due respect to Socrates—and Michael Hudson, whose articles I have often enjoyed—evil is very real. It does exist, and it is not merely the result of ignorance. I don’t believe the banking profession—unless Hudson is referring to the owners of small and medium-sized banks—is deliberately choosing to be ignorant. The global bankers have a very conscious agenda, and that agenda should be called what it is: evil. Yet on the subject of evil, Hudson seems to maintain a deliberate ambiguity, for later in the same article he poses the question of what motivates the central bankers and concludes they are “acting as class warriors.” Still further into the piece, he surmises that for the most part the whole thing pretty much equates to “financial theater of the absurd.” But when we consider the wars currently stretching over a good part of the globe—from Libya in the West to Afghanistan and Pakistan in the East—and when we consider the incredible life toll these wars have taken—we cannot dismiss it merely as “financial theater of the absurd” or assume that it has all been a result of ignorance or misunderstanding. Evil, as a bringer of death, has a consciousness. It is aware of itself. What we have here is a synagogue of Satan, not figuratively or metaphorically speaking, but one that is very real.

Throughout the global economic crisis, since its start in late 2007 all the way up through the present, people have looked to economists for explanations as to why this is all happening—the debt, the bankruptcies, the ever-increasing slide into misery, etc. No one seems to have given much thought to the possibility of consulting theologians for an analysis. But it may be time to start doing so. Answers, it is sometimes said, come in the direction from which we least expect them, and it could well be that honest theologians—whether Christian, Muslim, or Neturei Karta—are capable of shedding light that honest economists simply may not have available to give. For in my view, the problem almost certainly did not begin in 2007, and in fact may be thousands of years old.

If Satan is the father of lies, then our greatest weapon against him is the truth. We must use this weapon, not sparingly, but to its fullest. We must become walking truth tellers. To do less will mean we remain on the cross. Many of us, when feeling brave, will allow a few truths to slip out of our mouths, but then when we instinctively realize we are making someone uncomfortable, we shut down. In so doing, we are straddling the fence; we are hedging. And we know we are hedging. But we wish to avoid unpleasant complications, and of course we all remember what happened to Helen Thomas and so many others. And so we remain cautiously seated on the fence, one leg on the “truth” side, one on the “falsehood” side, and perhaps, seated that way, we even congratulate ourselves for summoning the courage to speak at least a part of the truth. It is a pattern we must break out of, for continuing to perch ourselves in such a manner means we remain on the cross. It condemns us to an eternity there.

Speaking the full, undiluted truth begins the de-positioning—and this one simple act in turn opens up additional avenues that further the de-positioning along. Sound is vibration. At barest minimum, we must demand the doors to the synagogue be thrown wide open and a full-scale audit conducted. But this alone will not defeat the bankers. The only way I can see their downfall ultimately coming about is for revolutions to take place in key Western countries where these global banking concerns are headquartered and for the families operating them to be placed under arrest. This may sound improbable or unlikely to occur, but with God such things are possible. And when The Truth and God walk together, the unexpected, yea even the miraculous, can and often do happen.

So let the de-positioning begin.

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian