Yellow Vests ‘Season 2’ begins – are Season 1’s always better?

 October 21, 2021

By Ramin Mazaheri posted with permission and cross-posted with PressTV

Last weekend, after more than one and half years away, the Yellow Vests hit the streets again for what they are calling “Season 2”.

You’re going to laugh and say, “But Season 2 of television programs are always worse!” Sure, for TV shows which turn out to be lousy. I find it hard to imagine that the Yellow Vests are going to sour into something unwatchable – in 2019 it was global can’t-miss politics.

The Yellow Vests poised to restart marching in Paris: The Bastille monument is in the background and a “Stop the genocide of the Gauls” sign is at the head of the demonstration. Photo Credit: Ramin Mazaheri

French President Emmanuel Macron may appreciate the coronavirus because it provided the only time in his term, other than his first several months when the streets weren’t swarming with protesters. There are self-centered Americans who claim that the corona hysteria was amplified in the West to push Donald Trump into losing re-election – some egotistical French say the hysteria was manipulated to get the Yellow Vests off the streets. Neither egos are totally out of control here, if you ask me.

Most everyone in France I talked with about the Vesters had the same response about Season 2: “The Yellow Vests still exist?” That’s fair – it has been a while.

I hate sounding like the perpetually self-referential Chris Cuomo of CNN, but no journalist in French or English attended more Yellow Vest demonstrations than I did… and even I had to catch up on what happened in the different epoch of 2019!

All I can say after doing so is – wow… France’s state-sponsored repression in 2019 boggles the mind and stuns the pen. It should not be forgotten, and someone needs to get it right.

Which is why at the end of 2019 I thought it was necessary journalism to compile this, A News Chronology of France in 2019: The Year of Yellow Vest Rebellion. I recommend it to anyone who wants to know exactly what happened in 2019, in what order, how, and why. It is 11,000 words but reviewing how the Yellow Vest phenomenon arose and exploded, and the depths to which France descended to repress it, make for astounding reading even if Chris Cuomo would have penned it.

To condense it all into two lines from the introduction: “The metronomic sadism of certain, massive state violence was not at all a normal state of affairs, and yet Parisians were expending all their psychic energy to convince themselves that everything was indeed ‘normal’. … The question that France cannot quite answer is: are they still the coloniser, or are they now colonised?”

Disgusting Eric Zemmour, who has risen to third in the April 2022 presidential polls, will say that France is the colonised – by Muslims. Nonsense: somehow the lowest socioeconomic class is the one pulling the strings which gutted France’s middle class? Yet he still gets all the airtime in the world. The Yellow Vests, however, get it right – France has been colonised by the European Union, which is indeed a neo-imperialist project that is openly and repeatedly anti-democratic. For this Vesters get no airtime.

But they do get plenty of tear gas (a more powerful type began getting used in March 2019), and rubber bullets (or “flash balls” shot from “defense ball launchers” per the MSM), from a new police chief who was hired because the Prime Minister said that “Inappropriate orders were given to reduce the use of LBD (rubber bullets)” by the previous police chief, while protesters were forbidden from covering their face (are corona masks ok now?).

You really can’t make this stuff up: remember the “anti-Yellow Vest law”, the lockdowns, the deployment of the army, the reactionary and short-lived “Red Scarves”, the fake turnout numbers, the fact that Macron didn’t even utter the words “Yellow Vests” until April 25, the banning of rural demonstrations, the tear-gassed tourists on Bastille Day, Lobstergate, etc.

So, yes, Mr. and Mrs. Jean Q. Frenchy stopped going to protests around mid-May 2019. You can say the Yellow Vests grew unpopular but you’d be wrong – they were consistently around a 60% approval rating, which is a staggeringly high number for a protest movement, and a great score for a political party.

But don’t forget the victories: they stopped Macron’s privatisation of the airports, they forced him to back down on yet another austerity budget (thus ending 9 years of austerity), they got €10 billion in concessions (which was credited to raising France’s 2019 Q3 growth rate of 0.3% (remember how many years of awful quarters they had when 0.3% quarterly growth would be trumped up as proof of austerity’s success!)), they must get credit for inspiring the 2019/20 General Strike (France’s longest labor movement in history) and also – they refused to give up.

These are low numbers, because how many hurt protesters (including tourists) didn’t report their injuries, but the 1-year tally in late November was 11,000 arrests, 2,000 convictions, 1,000 imprisoned, 5,000 seriously hurt and 1,000 critically injured.

Incredible… and yet France continued to claim to be a leader in human and political rights all the while. As if Danton and Robespierre wouldn’t have guillotined themselves rather than be associated with the French government of today….

But we all know what happened right after the French union-led, which is to say incompetently-led, General Strike failed: ”2 weeks to flatten the curve!”

Well, at least it gave France a reason to have a new type of state of emergency. Recall that those started under Francois Hollande – executive branch power-grabs are not something started by Macron.

Season 2 of the West’s most advanced political group

Oh, wait – aren’t they Islamophobic, per the repeated accusations of the MSM? Well, then why did the head of the Paris demonstration feature a Muslim woman wearing a hijab?

Photo Credit: Ramin Mazaheri

In 2019 they marched against both anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, by the way.

Nothing says, “The spirit of les Lumières (the Enlightenment)” like a machine gun at a peaceful, unarmed demonstration. Guess they don’t need to call out the army anymore?

Photo Credit: Ramin Mazaheri

I counted about 1,000 at one of the Paris protests on the opening act of Season 2, and I estimated there were 300 planned demonstrations nationwide. The Yellow Vests have always been a rural-based movement, and because the MSM dismisses and denigrates rural areas they have consistently undercounted Vester demos by a third. Here’s a shot of the Paris demonstration to see for yourself. Notice the Palestinian flag, even though Vesters are surely racist, Islamophobic, pro-imperialist, etc.?

Photo Credit: Ramin Mazaheri

Here’s the TV report we at PressTV did on Act 1, Season 2 – you may not find any others. I surprisingly did see a lone major French media there, which was a huge increase from the usual French media presence of “none”. An RT colleague was there, as always, so it was quite the same as it was from mid-May 2019 onwards – mostly just the Russians and the Iranians covering the Yellow Vests.

So what’s going to happen this season?

Well, the resumption of regular weekend repression of protesters would surely hurt Macron’s re-election chances, but will the average Jean and Jeanne Frenchy join them? Believe it or not, many people don’t like being tear gassed in 2021 as much as they didn’t like it in 2019. The massive state repression, the criminalisation, the tear gas, the beatings, the fines, the intrusive searches, the portraying of political protesters as mere rioters – the whole point was to scare away the average Frenchman, and it definitely worked.

People here tell me that Macron will just buy voters off with some one-off payments before the election, but Americans told me the same thing about Trump – I note that he did not.

The world is not going to lock itself down to sway the French election, like many said it seemed to do for the US election; the Western 1% really doesn’t care what happens to French protesters, and 2019 proved that emphatically.

If you’re going to pin me down for an early prediction, and fairly ask this foreign correspondent what exactly is going on in France, then at this point I’d say: Macron wins re-election regardless of how much petrol increases, inflation rises, the Vesters march, etc. for a simple reason:

The West postures on 18th century political and social achievements, largely disavowing 20th-century advances in political thought and anti-imperialism. Thus, France is a far-right country with a host of recent massacres, violence and repression which are forgotten or covered up as soon as the smoke clears – look at the Yellow Vests of 2019. The Yellow Vests are emphatically not poseurs, but they were and likely will be incredibly suppressed ahead of the presidential election.

Apathy is always the forerunner of catastrophe – however, perhaps France will grasp that and not cede the political field to the economic and social far-right (Macron, Le Pen, Zemmour)?

The story of French political modernity is not over – Season 2 has only begun.

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Ramin Mazaheri is the chief correspondent in Paris for PressTV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. He is the author of ‘Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism’ as well as ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’, which is also available in simplified and traditional Chinese.

Photos by Ramin Mazaheri

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Academic David Miller Speaks Out Following Firing & Israel Lobby Smear Campaign

October 08th, 2021

By Lowkey

Source

Ironically, Miller’s book, “Bad News for Labour: Anti-Semitism, the Party and Public Belief,” detailed how bogus charges of anti-Semitism were weaponized against Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn in order to defame and destroy him.

Instead of simply stopping its human rights abuses, the Israeli government has built an extensive and sophisticated public relations network across the West in order to protect itself from criticism.

Today, Lowkey speaks to one of the latest victims of that smear campaign, Professor David Miller. A prominent critic of the state of Israel’s policies, Miller was recently sacked from his position as Professor of Sociology at the University of Bristol, after a pressure campaign involving Zionist student groups and even members of parliament, who accused him of “inciting hatred against Jewish students.”

Miller, a graduate of the University of Glasgow Media Group, was appointed to his position at Bristol University in 2018. He also held positions at the University of Strathclyde from 2004 until 2011 and the University of Bath from 2011 until 2018.

Miller is the creator of the websites SpinWatch and Powerbase, both of which are dedicated to revealing networks of influence and power in Western society. Much of his academic work revolved around Islamophobia in the post-9/11 era. Miller maintained that Zionist organizations were one source of anti-Muslim bigotry, an accusation that put him on a collision course with those groups.

The final blow came late last month, as the university, under enormous external pressure, sacked Miller, citing his comments that certain Jewish students were being used as “pawns of Israel.”

Miller’s case has drawn considerable attention from those who see it as a harbinger of things to come. An open letter to Bristol University defending him as an “eminent scholar” was signed by hundreds of academics and public intellectuals — including prominent Jewish public intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky, Judith Butler, Norman Finkelstein and Illan Pappe, who described him as a trailblazer “exposing the role that powerful actors and well-resourced, co-ordinated networks play in manipulating and stage-managing public debates, including on racism.”

Miller described the disciplinary procedure as “a shambolic process that seems to have been vetted by external actors,” adding that, “Israel’s assets in the U.K. have been emboldened by the university collaborating with them to shut down teaching about Islamophobia. The University of Bristol is no longer safe for Muslim, Arab or Palestinian students.”

Miller is far from the first academic to be targeted in such a manner, and it is unlikely that he will be the last. Ironically, Miller’s book, “Bad News for Labour: Anti-Semitism, the Party and Public Belief,” detailed how bogus charges of anti-Semitism were weaponized against Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn in order to defame and destroy him. Just such an occurrence appears to have happened in his case as well.

For all the talk of cancel culture, it is highly unlikely that Miller’s case will be taken up by the usual suspects who pontificate about the increasingly stifling atmosphere on university campuses.

Join us as Lowkey and Miller discuss his work, his dismissal, and the network of power Israel has built in the West.

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Defamation (השמצה‎‎) anti-Semitism

Posted May 30, 2021

Source

Must Watch

Documentary examines anti-Semitism, and its affect on Israeli and U.S. politics.

Defamation (השמצה‎‎) is a 2009 documentary film by award-winning filmmaker Yoav Shamir. It examines antisemitism and, in particular, the way perceptions of antisemitism affect Israeli and U.S. politics. Defamation won Best Documentary Feature Film at the 2009 Asia Pacific Screen Awards.

See also

“I’m hopeful now, and I haven’t been hopeful in a long time. What’s happening now is putting a check on Israel. They have a problem now.”

Jewish-American political analyst Dr Norman Finkelstein speaks to MEE about his views on Israel’s latest offensive in #Gaza pic.twitter.com/Xw3ZOwT7on— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) May 16, 2021

Now it’s ‘antisemitic’ to say that Israel practices ‘apartheid’

Jonathan Cook: Jewish groups that aid Israel’s war crimes can’t deny all responsibility for those crimes

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The Yom Kippur Syndrome Revisited

 MAY 15, 2021 BY GILAD ATZMON

By Gilad Atzmon

One of the most interesting aspects of the Yom Kippur War (1973) was that it marked a sudden switch from Israeli manic ‘hubris’ to melancholia, apathy and depression.

Following their outstanding military victory in 1967, the Israelis developed an arrogant disrespectful attitude towards Arabs and their military capabilities. Israeli intelligence predicted that it would take years for Arab armies to recover. The Israeli military didn’t believe that the Arab soldier had the ability to fight, let alone score a victory.

But on 6 October 1973, the Israelis faced a devastating surprise. This time the Arab soldier was very different. Israeli military strategy, built on air superiority and fast ground manoeuvres supported by tanks, proved ineffective within hours. Egypt and Syria, helped by new Soviet antitank and ground-to air-missiles, managed to dismantle Israel’s might. In the first days of the war Israel suffered heavy casualties. It’s leadership and high military command were in a state of despair. Yet, this type of crisis wasn’t exactly a rare event in Jewish history.

The Israeli military fiasco at the first stage of the war was a repetition of a tragic syndrome that is as old as the Jews themselves. These repetitive scenarios involve Jewish collective hubris driven by a strong sense of exceptionalism (choseness), and lead to horrific consequences. I call this ‘the Yom Kippur Syndrome.’  

In 1920s Berlin, the Jewish elite boasted of its power. Some rich Jews were convinced that Germany and its capital were their playground. At the time, a few German Jews dominated banking and influenced Germany’s politics and media. In addition, the Frankfurt School (as well as other Jewish school of thought) were openly dedicated to the cultural uprooting of Germans, all in the name of, ‘progress,’ ‘psychoanalysis,’ eroticism,’ ’phenomenology and ‘cultural Marxism.’ Then, almost ‘from nowhere,’ a tidal wave of resentment appeared, and the rest is known.

But was there really a sudden shift in German consciousness? Should 1930s German ‘anti-Semitism’ have come as a surprise? Not at all. All the necessary signs had been present for some time. In fact, early Zionists such as Herzl and Nordau correctly predicted the inevitable rise of European anti-Jewish sentiments at the end of the 19th century. It was the Yom Kippur Syndrome, that same hubris that prevented Berlin’s Jewish elite from evaluating the growing opposition around them.

What we see in Israel at the moment is obviously a tragic manifestation of the same syndrome. Once again, the Israelis have been caught unprepared. Once again mania of omnipotence is replaced by melancholia.  Once again the Israelis failed to estimate Hamas’ military capabilities. They failed to recognise the growing frustration of Israeli Arabs and acknowledge the possibility that their frustrations could escalate into street fights or even civil war.

The Israelis have succumbed to the delusional thought that the Palestinian cause had evaporated. They were convinced that cracking the BDS and starving Gazans had dismantled the Palestinian aspiration. Yet it is Hamas that has managed to win the most crucial victory uniting the Palestinians in Palestine, in the camps and in the Diaspora, alongside Muslims from around the world. This unity is significant especially in the light of Israel being politically divided heading towards a fifth election.

Once again, Israeli arrogance is replaced by deep sadness. Israel could ask itself some necessary questions: What is it that we do wrong? Why is our history repeating itself? Is there something we could do to change our destiny? Rather than this necessary introspection, Israel is actually doing the opposite. Instead of dissecting the present crisis in the light of similar events in the past, Israel repeats the same mistakes. It refers to the current crisis as just another ‘round of violence. It delves into the strategic and tactical possibilities that will ‘enforce a ceasefire on Hamas’. Israel basically speculates over the level of carnage that will bring the ‘Arabs on their knees’ once again.

Israel defines itself as the Jewish State and its tragic mistakes are naturally determined by that fact.  If Yom Kippur is a Jewish day of introspection, the Yom Kippur Syndrome is the direct outcome of a total incapacity to self-reflect. Yet one may wonder whether the Jew can be emancipated from the Jewish destiny and the Yom Kippur Syndrome in particular?  Like early Zionist Bernard Lazare,  I believe that all it takes is drifting away from exceptionalism. But once stripped of exceptionalism, not much is left of contemporary Jewish identiterianism.

I guess that we are touching upon the most devastating existential aspect of the Yom Kippur Syndrome; there is no Jewish collective ideological escape for the Jew. We are basically dealing with a cultural and spiritual limbo.

I tend to believe that the only escape route from the Yom Kippur Syndrome is individual: self-imposed exile. Leave the ghetto late in the night, crawl under the fence, dig a tunnel under the ‘separation wall’. Once out on the land of the free, proceed quietly and modestly in search of the humane and the universal.

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Israeli Apartheid Confirmed

 13 May 2021

by Lawrence Davidson 

Part I—The Question Of Apartheid 

It was perhaps 6 or 7 years ago. I was part of a panel, debating on Israel and the Palestinians, that took place at a local (West Chester, Pa) Quaker Friends school. The school had such debates regularly until the administration caved-in to pressure from the Zionist parents of a number of Jewish students. One of these parents debated for the Israeli side. 

This particular event came to mind upon my seeing the latest Human Rights Watch (HRW) report conclusively laying out the apartheid nature of Israel. Here is the connection: just before the debate was to begin the participating Zionist parent tried to make a command decision. No one was to use the term apartheid in reference to Israel. This was because the assertion was, according to him, obviously nonsense. 

I remember at the time thinking, who gave him the right to define the terms of the debate? As it turned out, and this is quite often the case, those supporting the Palestinians knew twice as much history as did the Zionists, and could call upon twice as many facts and examples. Apartheid Israel was shown to be a matter of fact rather than nonsense. I am convinced that Zionist pressure on the school to end future debates was motivated by the additional fact that those supporting the Palestinians so readily won. 

I have run into many other cases like this. The Zionists would debate for a while, but upon realizing that they could not prevail, they opted for enforced silence—that is, attempting to deny their opposition a stage and eventually labelling them anti-Semites. I often wonder if that Zionist parent who did the one-time debate at the Friends school, ever did face the fact that he was wrong about Israel and apartheid. Not because we said he was wrong. He would never have taken our word for it despite the evidence we had at hand. Rather, because an ever greater number of humanitarian organizations, of which HRW is one, journalists and research institutions have thoroughly and repeatedly laid out the facts that make it so. To this one may now add the charge of “medical apartheid.”

And none of us could forget the ongoing campaign of ethnic cleansing if most of us were actually informed of the process.

Amidst the predictable resumption of mass resistance from Palestinians in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, The Human Rights Watch report confirming Israeli Apartheid presents the seminal context for what we now witness. 

Part II—Human Rights Watch’s 2021 Report

Here is part of the opening pages of the HRW report:

—“About 6.8 million Jewish Israelis and 6.8 million Palestinians live today between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River. Throughout most of this area, Israel is the sole governing power; in the remainder, it exercises primary authority alongside limited Palestinian self-rule.”

—“Across these areas and in most aspects of life, Israeli authorities methodically privilege Jewish Israelis and discriminate against Palestinians. Laws, policies, and statements by leading Israeli officials make plain that the objective of maintaining Jewish Israeli control over demographics, political power, and land has long guided government policy. In pursuit of this goal, authorities have dispossessed, confined, forcibly separated, and subjugated Palestinians by virtue of their identity to varying degrees of intensity. In certain areas, as described in this report, these deprivations are so severe that they amount to the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.”

—“The prohibition of institutionalized discrimination, especially on grounds of race or ethnicity, constitutes one of the fundamental elements of international law … [over which] the International Criminal Court has the power to prosecute …when national authorities are unable or unwilling to pursue them.”

The report goes on to definitively prove its allegations in 213 pages of depressing detail—all laid out like a damning legal writ. Nor, as suggested above, is this the first time the apartheid nature of Israel been demonstrated. The HRW document was preceded by 16 March 2017 report submitted by UN Economic and Social Commission for West Asia demonstrating Israel’s apartheid nature. Though the report was accurate, the UN Secretary General disavowed it under pressure from the United States and Israel. In May of 2018 a

thorough examination appeared entitled Apartheid Israel, by the journalist Jonathan Cook. This was published by Americans for Middle East Understanding in their journal, The Link (April/May 2018). More recently, a 21 January 2021 report by B’Tselem, Israel’s own premier human rights organization, entitled “A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid,” proved particularly revealing. One should also take a look at the Israeli Apartheid Factsheet, published 12 January 2021 online, by War On Want. 

The Israeli government dismisses all of these fact-based reports as propaganda. This sets up a question of what is real—one that can be readily resolved, one way or another, through objective outside observers. Unfortunately, Israeli behavior over the past decades has shown that, unless you agree with the Zionist interpretation of events, Israel does not consider you objective. Thus, the HRW representative, and many others as well, have been banned from entering the country. This sort of reaction is not just an Israeli tactic. It is typical of countries in the process of undermining the rule of law and destroying human rights. In a very real way, the charge of “it is all, in this case, anti-Semitic propaganda” is itself a form of propaganda design to shut done critics. 

Part III—The Zionist Rationale

The Zionists consistently say that Israel exists to save world Jewry from persecution—from the constant threat of anti-Semitism and another Holocaust. Many still believe this is true and some of a liberal orientation now resort to this rationale to undermine the HRW report. They charge that it will cause the current wave of anti-Semitism to gain greater traction. Such greater traction always leads to a greater fear of another Holocaust. And this fear will only make the Zionists and Israelis dig in their heels. And indeed, the cries of anti-Semitism and Holocaust has always created a smokescreen behind which can be hidden all Israeli sins. Has anyone ever considered that Israel’s abominable behavior, always committed in the name of the community of worldwide Jewry, is itself a major cause of growing anti-Semitism? 

While Zionism might have started out as a strategy to save the Jews, Israel and the Zionists are no longer in the saving business. In point of fact, various Israeli authorities are constantly bickering about who is or isn’t Jewish. What they are now about is the business of national glorification and expansion—carried on in the old 19th century style of racist imperialism. In this effort the Palestinians are the major victims, but all Jews are, if you will, collateral damage. They become denigrated by the behavior of a brutalizing racist regime that simply declares itself acting in their name.

In the process another truth is also brought low—the fact that means ultimately shape ends. And here is the irony of it all: the outcome of apartheid that is now playing itself out in “greater Israel” was all but predetermined by the nature and behavior of Zionism itself.

Part IV—The Predetermined Nature Of Israeli Apartheid

Here are some of the steps and decisions that made today’s apartheid Israel inevitable:

—The aim of the Zionist movement was to found an exclusively Jewish state. Most of the early Zionists were European Jews searching for a way to escape centuries of anti-Semitism. Living in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, their reference point was the ethnically homogeneous nation state. Soon they convinced themselves that Jews could only escape anti-Semitic persecution if they had their own nation state. 

—By the beginning of the 20th century the Zionists had focused on Palestine as their future political, religious, and cultural nation state. This was due to the land’s biblical associations—and despite the fact that many Zionists were of a secular rather than religious orientation. In 1917, they made an alliance with the British government to rally Jewish support for the British war effort in World War I (WWI) in exchange for British support of a “Jewish national home” in Palestine. This alliance was spelled out in the Balfour Declaration.

—Soon thereafter, the British took Palestine from the Ottoman Turks (the Turks were allies of the Germans in WWI). They then allowed Zionist organized immigration to commence. The British told the Palestinian Arabs that Zionist investment would raise the living standards of the land’s non-Jewish residents. In the meantime, the Zionists discouraged any cooperative interaction with the Palestinian Arabs. This was particularly true when it came to use of Arab labor. Jews who had Arab employees were forcefully pressured to replace them with Jewish immigrants.

—Between 1914 and 1947 both the Arab and Jewish population of Palestine grew. However, Jewish numbers, even though consistently bolstered by Zionist inspired immigration, were never more than 32% of the total population.

—Given Zionist ambitions and the demographics, the question can be asked, just how they could create a state for one group alone in a land where that favored group was a distinct minority? There were only three direct ways: (1) devising a method to get the Arab majority to move out of the country. (2) creating an unequal political and economic system that marginalized the majority, rendering them politically and economically irrelevant. (3) Committing genocide.  

—Both methods 1 and 2 were employed. The first led to the Nakba, the catastrophic removal of some 700,000 Palestinians, during the 1948 war that led to the creation of the State of Israel. Some of these people fled the fighting, but many were forced out at gunpoint by Israeli forces. In truth, the Nakba never completely came to an end as the ongoing home demolitions and evictions show. The second method followed in two stages for those Palestinians who would still find themselves under direct Israeli rule: (A) the so-called Palestinian Israelis, today numbering close to 2 million people or roughly 21% of the population of pre-1967 Israel. These Arabs have been given Israeli citizenship—actually second class citizenship. They are segregated from Jewish Israelis by  a host of discriminatory practices, among which are inferior housing, schools, and job opportunities. (B) The Palestinians who fell under Israeli control in 1967 and remain so today. These are the residents of the West Bank, Golan Heights and also the Gaza Strip, numbering roughly 5 million people. Most of these Palestinians have been denied Israeli citizenship. They are under the rule of Israeli military authorities or an allied Palestinian authority under Israeli supervision. Internal travel is made difficult for them, their ability to improve or expand their infrastructure is restricted. They are encroached upon by illegal Israeli settlements and harassed by Israeli settlers. Attempts at self-defense or counterattack are seen by the Israelis as terrorist acts.

—Means shape ends. (1) The nature of Zionist goals: the transformation of Palestine into a nation state for Jews alone, (2) undertaken with a group mentality shaped by a memories of European anti-Semitism, the outlook of racist European imperialism, and finally the trauma of the Holocaust, (3) strongly inclined the Zionists toward tactics that precluded compromise and equity with the indigenous Palestinians. (4) When the Palestinians inevitably resisted the Zionists they were cast as Arab Nazis, an image which justified the brutal tactics (suppression and expulsion) already in use. Finally, having conquered Palestine from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, and shying away from a second mass expulsion as long as the world was watching, the Israelis inevitably fell into apartheid to neutralize the 7 million Arabs under their rule.

Part V—Conclusion

Once you have segregated away those you oppress, the average member of the dominant group can proceed with his or her life in comfortable blindness—literarily not seeing their victims, and remaining purposefully ignorant of the deformed situation that sustains their status, security and wealth. As time goes on all aspects of society (education, employment, media, social norms) come to reinforce this condition. This is the situation in today’s Israel. 

The blindspots can extend to Israel’s Zionist supporters in the diaspora, even if they are otherwise progressive liberals. Take the case of the American Jewish progressive  Peter Osnos, who fears the definitive nature of the HRW report. Why so? Because, he believes, “this report—in detail, length and tone—could be the basis for sanctions against Israel.” As the old Jewish idiom goes, “from his mouth to God’s ears.” However, that is an unlikely prospect. Western governments are so committed to Israel—and steeped in the hypocrisy this requires—that they will simply ignore the HRW revelations, as they did the earlier reports.  

Nonetheless, when you strip away all the ideologically-bred magical thinking, rationalizations, and blindspots, what you are left with is the blatant truth: you cannot impose a foreign group of people, seeking exclusive domination, into a land already populated by a different people, and not end up with a discriminatory and abusive system of rule. And if the abusive system persists something akin to apartheid becomes inevitable. So does periodic mass resistance.

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The Zionist Protection Racket

 The Zionist infrastructure has been a racket since its inception, and politicians like John Kerry had to find that out the hard way.

Jonas E. Alexis has degrees in mathematics and philosophy. He studied education at the graduate level. His main interests include U.S. foreign policy, history of Israel/Palestine conflict, and the history of ideas. He is the author of the new book Zionism vs. the West: How Talmudic Ideology is Undermining Western Culture. He is currently working on a book tentatively titled, Kevin MacDonald’s Abject Failure: A Philosophical and Moral Critique of Evolutionary Psychology, Sociobiology, and White Identity. He teaches mathematics in South Korea.
Logoswars1@gmail.com

By Jonas E. Alexis –

March 31, 2021

…by Jonas E. Alexis, VT Editor, and Henry Makow

Henry Makow has a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Toronto in 1982 and is the author of best-selling books such as Cruel Hoax: Feminism & New World Order and Illuminati: The Cult that Hijacked the World.

JEA: The Zionist infrastructure has been a racket since its inception, and politicians like John Kerry had to find that out the hard way. At one point, Kerry was so angry at the mad man in Tel Aviv that he told him: “We’re conducting foreign policy, this isn’t a synagogue.”

Kerry moved on to say that instead of serious, logical and constructive foreign policy, America is being hoodwinked by “sandpaper like Netanyahu. Netanyahu just drove us crazy…because he was just unbelievably difficult.”[1] Netanyahu drove virtually every serious politician crazy.

This is one reason why Obama has declared in his recent book that, during his administration, Netanyahu was a problem child in the Middle East. Stephen M. Walt of Harvard and John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago noted that Obama never believed that Iran could be an existential threat to the U.S. or Israel.[2]

In any event, the Zionist power is a house built on sand, and Henry Makow has something to say about this whole racket.

HM: A “protection racket” is a scam where an aggressor instigates an attack, blames a bogeyman, and then offers to protect the victim from this bogeyman in return for money and power.

The “War on Terror” is a protection racket. The aggressor is the world financial elite known as the “Crown” based in the City of London. Their instrument is the Zionist project, specifically Israel, the Mossad and its Neo Con allies.

The victim is the people of the United States and the West in general. The goal is the overthrow of Western Civilization, and the establishment of a world police state called the “New World Order.”

“Zionism is but an incident of a far-reaching plan,” said leading American Zionist Louis Marshall, counsel for bankers Kuhn Loeb in 1917. “It is merely a convenient peg on which to hang a powerful weapon.”

The head of the Department of Homeland Security is Israeli dual citizen and Zionist Michael Chertoff. He was the New Jersey State Attorney when five Mossad agents were arrested after witnesses saw them congratulating themselves on the destruction of the World Trade Center. Their van tested positive for explosives. (See Chris Bollyn article below.) Speculators who shorted airline stocks before 9-11 have been identified as Israelis apparently.

“ANTI SEMITISM” THE ORIGINAL PROTECTION RACKET

The Jewish elite regards the Jewish rank-and-file as pawns to be manipulated. Jews had to be terrorized into setting up Israel as a “national home,” i.e. colonizing the Middle East and creating a center of world government. World Finance funded the Nazis. Zionists actively collaborated with them.

Zionist betrayal is the reason Jews went passively to their deaths, says Rabbi Moshe Shonfeld in his book “Holocaust Victims Accuse.” Non-Zionist Jews were worth more dead than alive to the Zionist leadership who, Shonfeld says, reaped the moral and financial capital from their “sacrifice.” See my “Zionism: Compulsory Suicide for Jews.”

The Jewish elite has a long history of manipulating Jews in this manner. For example, in 1950 a wave of anti-Semitism and terrorism in Iraq made Naeim Giladi, 21, join the Zionist underground. Giladi was imprisoned, tortured and sentenced to death by Iraqi authorities.

He escaped and fled to Israel only to discover that the bombings had been engineered by his fellow Zionists to dupe Iraqi Jews into going to Israel. An ancient community was deprived of its wealth and reduced to second-class citizen status in Israel, replacing Palestinian labor. See my “Zionists Double Crossed Iraqi Jews”

Israel provoked attacks from its neighbors in order to “retain its moral tension” according to the secret diary of Prime Minister Moshe Sharett. The state must “invent dangers” to start war and thereby “acquire our space,”
he wrote. See “The Zionist Roots of the War on Terror.”

“ANTI SEMITISM” BECOMES “ANTI AMERICANISM”

The pogrom on Sept. 11 2001 was designed to stampede Americans into forfeiting their civil rights and invading the Middle East.

There is a drumbeat in the media to convince Americans that they are victims of Muslim fanatics. This propaganda campaign is carried out by Neo Cons (a.k.a. Zionists.) In his book, “The New Jerusalem: Zionist Power in America,” the late Michael Collins Piper wrote:

“In the build-up to the Iraq war, Zionist propagandists and the media increasingly began touting the message to Americans that “the whole world is against us”… and the Israelis are our only real solid dependable ally …The theme that anti Americanism had run rampant was instilled in Americans for the very purpose of making them “anti” everyone who refused to support the…Iraq war…and the more broad ranging Zionist agenda.” (157)

Sound familiar? This is the tactic they use on Jews. Piper says that Zionism is being equated with Americanism. Zionist agents like Nathan Sharansky crafted the overblown and specious rhetoric of Bush’s second inaugural speech that committed the US to advancing the Zionist agenda using force.

History provides a sobering warning as to where this could be leading. In his essay, The Nature of Zionism, Russian author Vladimir Stepin writes,

“During the civil war in Russia, the Zionists also performed another task. Using some units of the Red Army – Trotsky was the chairman of the country’s Revolutionary Military Council – they organized the Jewish pogrom in Seversk.

“The result of this was the “Law on Those Involved in Pogroms” of 27 July 1918. In accordance with this law, a monstrous Zionist terror raged in Russia for ten years: a person accused of anti-Semitism was, without any argument being allowed, declared to be involved in pogroms and placed against the wall to be shot.

“Not only anti-Zionists, but the best representatives of the intelligentsia of Russia, could be accused of being anti-Semitic, and so too could anyone one felt like accusing of it. People saw who was exercising power in Russia and expressed their discontent with it. 90% of the members of the Cheka – the Soviet security organ, 1918-1922 – were Zionists.

“Apart from the law on those involved in pogroms, the Zionists practiced genocide against the ethnic groups inhabiting Russia, and they did so by accusing people of counter-revolutionary activities, sabotage, and so on, irrespective of whether or not the people in question really had conducted such activities. It was standard practice merely to put them against the wall to be shot.”

CONCLUSION

My hunch is that the central banking elite, using Masonic secret societies in the military and intelligence agencies, is responsible for 90% of terrorism. The purpose is to manipulate people into advancing the goals of the New World Order, which includes destroying true religion, nation states, democracy, ethnic identities, and family. In their mind, they have to destabilize and enslave us to protect their monopoly on government credit i.e. money creation.

They are running a protection racket to protect us from their artificial “terror.” Zionists or Americans who carry out their agenda could end up holding the bag if something goes wrong, or as I should say right.

Remember they are challenging the greatest power in the universe: God, or Truth as witnessed in the souls of all human beings. They are most vulnerable now on the 9-11 attack which they perpetrated. If we rise up as one to demand the truth about this atrocity, their obscene criminal enterprise will start to unravel.

[1]  Quoted in Gil Troy, “A History of U.S.-Israel Breakups and Makeups,” Daily Beast, March 3, 2015.

[2] Stephen M. Walt, “Bibi Blows Up the Special Relationship,” Foreign Policy, March 2, 2015.

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The Anti-Semitic Birth of the Zionist State: A History of Israel’s Self-Hating Founders

 

By Miko Peled

Source

When the victims of Zionism finally have their day in court, the world will see just how cruel and racist the early Zionists really were.

Zhid, Kapo, Nazi, and Little Jew” — are among the epithets used by Zionists to insult Jewish people who oppose or reject Zionism and its racist ideology.

A recent episode of Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro’s podcast “Committing High Reason” recalls the history of Theodor Hertzl, the founder of Zionism and of the Zionist State, and sheds new light on the term “Self-Hating Jew.”

Committing High Reason

Rabbi Shapiro sources all of his claims methodically and when one hears what Hertzl, who was Jewish himself, wrote about Jewish people, the only conclusion is that he was the quintessential “Self-Hating Jew.” There can be no doubt that he hated Jewish people and wanted nothing more than to dissociate himself from the “common” Jew. Furthermore, he was not alone: other Zionist leaders — Vladimir Jabotinsky, Chaim Weizmann, and others — were equally openly hateful of their Jewish brethren.

In 2018, Rabbi Shapiro published a 1,400-page book titled “The Empty Wagon, Zionism’s Journey from Identity Crisis to Identity Theft.”  The book outlines the vast differences that exist between Judaism and its main nemesis, Zionism. The book was written for Orthodox Jews and indeed every Orthodox Jewish home I have visited in the last two years had a copy of this massive work. Even though it assumes a great deal of knowledge about Judaism, the book has an unprecedented amount of well-sourced information, so that even those of us who are not well versed in Judaism can learn a great deal from it.

The information presented in this particular episode of Rabbi Shapiro’s podcast can also be found in his book, and it leads to the undeniable fact that the founder of Zionism — and many of his contemporaries — hated everything about Jews and Judaism and hated the fact that they themselves were Jewish. According to Rabbi Shapiro and many other Orthodox rabbis whom he quotes, it was their hatred of Jews and not their desire to save them from anti-Semitism that was the driving force behind the creation of Zionism and the establishment of a Zionist state.

The founder of Zionism not only believed that the anti-Semitic trolls about Jews were true, but also justified them. He claimed only that these racist accusations applied to the “other” Jews, those who were not as secular and “enlightened” as he.

The story of Hertzl, as it is told in Zionist schools both in Israel and around the world, makes him seem like the savior of Jews, a man motivated by the desire to do good. However, a more in-depth look into the man and his motivations reveals that he despised Jewish people and wanted to separate himself from “common” Jews by creating a space, an existence for people like himself who were Jews by birth but despised what it means to be Jewish.

Vladimir Jabotinsky, the father of right-wing Zionism and today’s Israeli Likud Party, was another classic case of the “Self-Hating Jew.” He wrote that “[t]he Jews are very nasty people and their neighbors hate them and they are right.”

Another Zionist spiritual leader, Uri Zvi Greenberg, wrote: “Those loathsome Jews are vomited by any healthy collective and state not because they are Jews but because of their Jewish repulsiveness.”

Zionists worship physical strength while Orthodox Judaism looks down upon it. In a conversation I had once with Ultra-Orthodox Rabbi Dovid Feldman of New York, I asked about this. I told him that to people like me, who were raised Zionist, Orthodox Jews look weak and pale and very unattractive. Rabbi Feldman looked straight at me and replied: “You have no idea how hard we work to maintain this look. Being a Jew is a spiritual-religious existence, not a masculine physical one.”

Maushel (or Moishel)

In the October 15, 1897 edition of the Zionist paper Dei Welt, a publication that Hertzl founded, he published an essay, titled “Maushe,” about a Jew who is an anti-Zionist. The focus of the essay was a fictional character, a Jew Hertzl called “Maushel,” which was a derogatory name for Jews used by anti-Semites at the time.

The front page of the Zionist paper Dei Welt circa 1897

Maushel — or Moishel, depending on one’s accent — is the “common” religious Jew. The article was originally written in German, with an English version published in another Zionist publication called The Maccabean. Here are a few examples of how Hertz depicts the Jews in his essay:

Maushel | Theodore Herzl

“Maushel is an anti-Zionist. We know him well and long and we always felt disgusted when we saw him.” Hertzl is all the more disgusted and chagrin by being obliged to acknowledge that Maushel is indeed “of our people,” though there is “not the slightest use of being proud of the fact,” which he laments results from “the co-mingling at one dark period of our history of a lower class of people with our nation.”

Hertzl goes on to say that “[t]he disgust which we had for him was coupled with pity. We sought to explain his miserable and wretched appearance. We told ourselves that we must tolerate him that it was our sacred duty to civilize him.” Wanting to disassociate himself from the Maushel Jew, Hertzl says, “He is the terrible companion of the Jews and so inseparable from them that one is always mistaken one for the other. “

Hertzl continues with his blatant hatred and writes that Maushel is “the antithesis of a human being, something unspeakably degraded and obstinate…Maushel proceeds with his own dirty business in poverty Maushel is a wretched schnorrer.” Then sadly Justifying anti-Semitic attacks on Jews, Hertzl says, “Maushel always supplied reasons for the attacks upon us.” In other words the Jews, the “real” Jews” like Hertzl are targeted by anti-Semites because of this distant, unrelated person who the anti-Semites confuse for a Jew.

Further, Hertzl writes:

In the eyes of the anti-Semite the Jew and Maushel were bound together; then Zionism appeared and the Jew and Maushel had to define their position, and now Maushel did the Jews a service: he divorced himself from the union because he is an anti-Zionist.”

In other words, Hertzl claims that only the real Jews are secular Zionist Jews. He then goes on to conflate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism: “When people say that Jews do not support Zionism the answer is no! The Jew cannot be an anti-Zionist, only Maushel is.”

Rhetoric like this is very common in Israel today, that the real Jews are the secular Zionists and religious non-Zionist Jews are described in a variety of derogatory terms.

“That’s fine,” Hertzl continues, “let us be relieved of him. It is an opportunity to purify ourselves of these degrading elements.”

The confusion regarding Jewish identity and the claims that Zionism is part of Jewish identity is very common, and indeed very troubling. This deep misunderstanding of both Judaism and Zionism clearly can be traced back to the founder of Zionism, Theodor Hertzl.

What makes a Jew a Jew?

The great Jewish sage, Rabbi Sa’adiya Ga’on- – whose full name was Sa’id Bin Yousef El-Fayyumi — was one of the most important Jewish rabbinic figures of all times. He was born in Fayyum in upper Egypt in the late Ninth century; went on to study in Tabariya, Palestine, which was an important center of Jewish learning; and later lived, worked, and wrote in Baghdad. In what is considered one of his most important books — “Emunot Ve-Deot,” or “Beliefs and Opinions,” which he wrote in Arabic using Hebrew letters — Ga’on wrote that the people of Israel — in other words, Jews — are a nation only by virtue of their religious laws (he used the term Sharia in Arabic for religious laws). In other words, a people bound by faith.

A Page from Rabbi Sa’adiya Ga’on’s book “Emunot Ve-Deot”

According to Hertzl, Jews are a nation because, as he put it, “our enemies made us one without our consent; distress binds us together.” The former defines Jewish people as a religious group bound by laws and faith, the latter as an undefined group united by the hatred of non-Jews.

A eulogy to Hertzl

Vladimir Jabotinsky’s eulogy to Hertzl was a monumental offering of praise and even veneration. First published as a booklet in Odessa in 1905, it was written in Russian and later translated into Hebrew. In it, Jabotinsky discusses the legacy of Hertzl, whom, despite their differences, he admired deeply. In one section, Jabotinsky praises the wonderful features of a Hebrew and compares them to what he calls the disgusting features of a Jew. Instead of saying Jew, he used the horribly degrading, anti-Semitic term “Zhid.”

“Doctor Hertzl,” the cover of the booklet containing Jabotinsky’s eulogy

The eulogy begins with Jabotinsky admitting that no one has ever seen a true Hebrew (“None of us has seen the true Hebrew with our very eyes.”) and continuing on to say that the Jew we see around us today is not a Hebrew but a Zhid (“And so today, we take as our starting point the Zhid, and try to imagine his exact opposite,” in an effort to imagine a Hebrew.).

Vladimir (Zeev) Jabotinsky’s photo on the Likud Party website

“Because the Zhid is ugly, sickly,” the father of Israel’s Likud Party writes, “we will give the ideal image of the Hebrew masculine beauty, stature, massive shoulders, vigorous movements,” Jabotinsky concludes:

The Zhid is frightened and downtrodden, the Hebrew proud and independent. The Zhid is disgusting to everyone, the Hebrew should be charming to all. The Zhid accepts submission, the Hebrew ought to know how to command. The Zhid likes to hide from the eyes of strangers, the Hebrew will possess brazensess and greatness.”

Hertzl, according to Jabotinsky, was the perfect specimen of the Hebrew that no one has ever seen.

Zionism — for whom?

If indeed Hertzl and the other leaders of Zionism were self-hating Jews and looked down upon the “common” Jew, what was their motivation for establishing Zionism and working so hard to found a Zionist State?

In Chapter One of his book, Rabbi Shapiro quotes one of the most respected rabbis of his day, Rabbi Chaim Soloveichik, who lived in Eastern Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. According to the quote, Rabbi Soloveichik says that Zionists wanted to create a state in order to destroy Judaism.

In other words, Zionists were secular and viewed themselves as enlightened and better than the “common” Jew. They looked down at Torah-observant Jews. They wanted a place where people like them, who did not look or live like “common” Jews, would be able to live without having to deal with (or even see) observant Jews, and where they could be like other nations.

The State of Israel was not created for the “common” Jew, the one with a long beard and payot (the curls that dangle from the side of their heads), those who lived in the shtetl (ghettos) of Europe. Neither was the Zionist state created for the Arab Jew, but for the secular European Jew, who wants more than anything to be European.

In a book that describes how Zionist leaders viewed the Jews of Europe, there is a photo that shows Jews in the market in Nalewni Ghetto in Warsaw. There is a quote attributed to Chaim Weizmann, a major leader in the Zionist movement and later the first president of the State of Israel. The caption reads, “Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel, or Palestine) was not meant for the peddlers of Nalewski, Warsaw.” These are the Jews that Hertzl and the other Zionist leaders despised.

When the victims of Zionism finally have their day in court, the world will see just how cruel and racist the early Zionists really were. The world will see that Israel, today’s Zionist state, is a perfect reflection of what the early Zionists were: racist, violent, and hateful.

In Israel today, Ultra-Orthodox Jews who oppose Zionism are despised and ridiculed; non-religious, anti-Zionist Jews are pushed away; and Palestinians are merely collateral — the price that needs to be paid so that the vision of Hertzl and the other “Self-Hating Jews” could become a reality.

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The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Blog!