Jake Wallis Simons - September 19th, 2012

It has been revealed that last month there was another covert attack on Iran’s nuclear project, in which the power cables to the Fordow Enrichment Plant were blown up. As with all attacks of this sort, at least two purposes were served. Firstly, the development of nuclear weapons was disrupted; secondly, it was intended to have a damaging impact on Iranian morale.

The perpetrators of this operation remain unconfirmed, but the immediate suspects will naturally be the Mossad. This may be true, but in much of the Muslim world there is a perception of the Israeli military machine as having a superhumanly long grasp. Notwithstanding Israel’s various inconclusive recent military operations, it maintains an almost mythological status. The legacy of Entebbe, Operation Wrath of God and the Six Day War lives on: the reputation of Israel’s military and secret services is so fearsome that it has been blamed for everything from the Breivik massacre in Norway to shark attacks in the Red Sea.

For its part, the Mossad has always seemed keen to perpetuate this reputation. Their attacks have always been as flamboyant and audacious as they are deadly. From the 1996 killing of the Hamas suicide bombmaker Yahya Ayyash, whose head was blown off by a booby-trapped mobile phone, to the assassination of the Hamas weapons smuggler in Dubai two years ago, for which operatives disguised themselves as tennis players (in Israel, tennis kit has become a standard fancy dress outfit), Mossad operations command the attention of the world. Even magnetic bombs on motorcycles have entered our cultural consciousness, and have sparked (failed) copycat attacks.

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Israeli democracy’s demise may be closer than we think as Shas power grows

Assaf Wohl - 09.21.10

The people of Israel are apparently unaware of what lies in store. Time after time, they receive reminders and warnings, yet they keep on dozing off comfortably. And I’m not referring to the Iranian threat here; the Iranians are treating us decently while openly declaring their intentions, so we can prepare accordingly.

I’m referring to the dramatic change in the ideological balance of power within the State of Israel, a country that is turning from a democracy into a theocracy. Sounds groundless? Keep this article tucked away and read it 10 years from now. I’d be happy to eat my hat.

Israel’s political-religious map shows new trends. The national-religious public has disintegrated and its effect on developments is minor. The Ashkenazi haredi public clings to the old ideology, seeking maximal state funds and minimal interference in national affairs. Against this backdrop, we would do well to pay attention to what goes on within the Shas movement.

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Joshua Holland - August 26, 2010

The United States has a long and rich history of exporting terrorism abroad, according to a CIA memo released by Wikileaks on Wednesday. After noting several incidents in which American Muslims launched much-discussed attacks abroad, the analysts warned, “less attention has been paid to homegrown terrorism… exported overseas” by non-Muslim groups.

The February 5 memo, marked “secret/ noforn” (the intelligence community’s designation for “not for release to foreign nationals”), was penned by the CIA’s “Red Cell,” a group tasked with “taking a pronounced ‘out-of-the-box’ approach” in order to “offer an alternative viewpoint on the full range of analytic issues.”

“Contrary to common belief,” noted the anonymous authors, “the American export of terrorism or terrorists is not a recent phenomenon, nor has it been associated only with Islamic radicals or people of Middle Eastern, African or South Asian ethnic origin.” According to the analysts, Jewish extremists “have supported and even engaged in violent acts against perceived enemies of Israel,” and “some Irish-Americans have long provided financial and material support for violent efforts to compel the United Kingdom to relinquish control of Northern Ireland.”

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Barbara Kay, Jul. 28, 2010

“Strange times to be a Jew.” That’s the master theme, voiced early and demonstrated often, in a haunting 2007 novel about Jewish messianism, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.

Michael Chabon’s darkly brilliant achievement in alternate history sprang to mind last week, when news broke that if Israel’s extreme right wing ultra-Orthodox — the Haredim, who control the Chief Rabbinate–have their way, who is or isn’t a Jew will be far more narrowly circumscribed than ever before in Israel’s history.

The Knesset has approved a draft bill that would permit the Haredim to dictate the criteria for legal Jewish status. They would then hold the power to exclude thousands of Jewish converts, even many converted by Orthodox rabbis, from eligibility for Israeli citizenship under the “law of return” accorded all Jews as aninherentright.

Whether the bill passes or not this time — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reassured panicked Diaspora Jews he wouldn’t support it — it reminds us that, given Israel’s electoral system of proportional representation, the political will of the disproportionately swelling ranks of Haredim (now about 1.3 million) will, one rapidly approaching day, dominate the Knesset–and Jewish destiny.

The root of the word Haredim means anxiety, which is what all Jews should feel about a putative Haredi balance of power. The Haredim are not simply religious fundamentalists with a prolific birthrate. The most eschatologically ambitious amongst them harbour lunatic urges to “force history,” to hasten the arrival of a dilatory Messiah.

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Jeff Gates, Apr 9, 2010

The history of Israel as a geopolitical fraud will fill entire libraries as those defrauded marvel at how so few deceived so many for so long. Those duped include many naive Jews who — even now — identify their interests with this extremist enclave.

Israeli leaders are wrong to worry about “de-legitimization.” They are right to fear that a long-deceived public is fast realizing that Israel’s founding was key to an ongoing deception.

The Invention of the Jewish People did not begin with Shlomo Sand’s 2009 bestseller by that title. There was no Exile says this Jewish scholar. Nor was there an Exodus. So how could there be a Return, the core premise of Israeli statehood?

If this patch of Palestinian land never rightly belonged to a mythical Jewish People, what then for the legitimacy of the “Jewish homeland”? And for that depiction by British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour in his November 1917 letter to Lord Rothschild?

Were Christians likewise seduced by Sunday school teachings reliant on the phony findings of Biblical archeologist William Albright? Shlomo Sand chronicles how in the 1920s Albright interpreted every excavation in Palestine to “reaffirm the Old Testament and thereby the New.”

In 1948, President Harry Truman, a Christian Zionist, was advised by Secretary of State George Marshall not to recognize this enclave as a state. This WWII general assured Truman that he would vote against him — and did.

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PHILIP WEISS - OCTOBER 21, 2009

MJ Rosenberg reports on Lenny Ben-David, who is leading the smear campaign against J Street, which is being sponsored by the Zionist Organization of America. Which is a big supporter of the illegal colonies in the West Bank.

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ce399 | research archive - 25 July 2009

In 1944, psychiatrist Kurt Levinstein gave a lecture at a Tel Aviv conference, where he advocated preventing people with various mental and neurological disorders - such as alcoholism, manic depression and epilepsy - from bringing children into the world.

The means he proposed - prohibition of marriage, contraception, abortion and sterilization - were acceptable in Europe and the United States in the first decades of the 20th century, within the framework of eugenics: the science aimed at improving the human race.

In the 1930s, the Nazis used these same methods in the early stages of their plan to strengthen the Aryan race. Levinstein was aware, of course, of the dubious political connotations implicit in his recommendations, but believed the solid and salutary principles of eugenics could be isolated from their use by the Nazis.

Recent research by historian Rakefet Zalashik on the history of psychiatry in Palestine during the Mandate period and following the founding of the state shows that Levinstein was far from a lone voice. Indeed, she claims in her 2008 book, “Ad Nefesh: Refugees, Immigrants, Newcomers and the Israeli Psychiatric Establishment” (Hakibbutz Hameuchad; in Hebrew), that the eugenics-based concept of “social engineering” was part of the psychiatric mainstream here from the 1930s through the 1950s.

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For real.

Charting Stocks.net - June 15, 2009

Right-wing Israeli interests are engaged in an all out Twitter attack with hopes of delegitimizing the Iranian election and causing political instability within Iran.

Anyone using Twitter over the past few days knows that the topic of the Iranian election has been the most popular. Thousands of tweets and retweets alleging that the election was a fraud, calling for protests in Iran, and even urging followers hack various Iranian news websites (which they did successfully). The Twitter popularity caught the eye of various blogs such as Mashable and TechCrunch and even made its way to mainstream news media sites.

Were these legitimate Iranian people or the works of a propaganda machine? I became curious and decided to investigate the origins of the information. In doing so, I narrowed it down to a handful of people who have accounted for 30,000 Iran related tweets in the past few days. Each of them had some striking similarities…

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Ezra Levant - April 28, 2009

In 1965 and 1966, the Canadian Jewish Congress helped organize the fledgling Canadian Nazi Party. That sounds crazy, but it’s true, and I wrote about it in Shakedown, my new book about Canada’s human rights commissions.

In a letter to the editor in the Citizen last week, the CJC’s current co-president, Rabbi Reuven Bulka, called my book’s description of the CJC’s role “fiction.” He said all the CJC did for the Nazis was buy them a bottle of rum.

It’s true that the CJC did buy drinks for Nazis in the 1960s. That’s pretty strange in itself, and I’d like to hear more of Rabbi Bulka’s thoughts on spending Jewish charitable donations that way. But the CJC did a lot more than that: they hired an ex-cop named John Garrity to go to work for the Canadian Nazi Party.

Full story (via Save The Males)

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See: Power Play : Friday, June 12 : Philippe Dufresne, CHRC and Ezra Levant, author of ‘Shakedown’

A new report by the CHRC delivered to parliament recommended improving on the Canada Human Rights Act to create a statutory definition of hate as it pertains to the Internet.

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Jennifer Lynch tries to bully CTV into cancelling my appearance on the news

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Opening Statement

I don’t answer to the state

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Max Blumenthal - June 06, 2009

On Wednesday, I walked around central Jerusalem with my friend, Joseph Dana, an Israel peace activist who has lived in the country for three years. We interviewed young people on camera about the speech President Barack Obama planned to deliver to the Muslim world the following day in Cairo. Though our questions were not provocative at all – we simply asked, “What do you think of Obama’s speech” – the responses our interview subjects offered comprised some of the most shocking comments I have ever recorded on camera. They were racist, hateful, and incredibly ignorant, and were mostly couched within a Zionist context – “this is our land, Obama!” The following day, we edited an hour of interviews into a 3:30 minute video package and released it on Mondoweiss and on the Huffington Post.

Within a few hours, I received an email from a Huffington Post administrator informing me he had scrubbed my video from the site. “I don’t see that it has any real news value,” the administrator told me. “For me it only proves that one can find drunk people willing to say just about anything. Especially drunk, moronic people.” For the first time, the premier clearinghouse for online news and opinions had suppressed one of my posts.

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VINEYARDSAKER - May 18, 2009

Amazing stuff is happening in France. It all began with a relatively well-known French-Cameroonian comedian, Dieudonné M’bala M’balawas invited to participate on a TV show on the channel France 3. The show also featured a Maghrebian artist and Dieudonne decided to impersonate an extremist Israeli settled infuriated by the presence of an Arab on a French show (for those of you who understand French, you can see an excerpt of his appearance that day here).

Dieudonne who, in the past, had always enjoyed ridiculing pretty much every segment of French society clearly had never expected the hysterical uproar that his humor would trigger that day: the huge constellation of French Zionists organizations lead by the notorious CRIF (”Representative Committee of Jewish organization in France” - the French version of AIPAC) immediately attacked Dieudonne, suing him for racists comments and suing him for “anti-Semitism” (a criminal offense in France). This was hardly the first time that the French Zionist mob had decided to crush an outspoken critic of its role in French politics or its unconditional support for the last racist state on the planet: Israel. But this time, the Ziomob miscalculated, badly.

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Joseph Cannon - April 24, 2009

For big laffs, check out Marty Peretz on the dropping of the AIPAC case:

The espionage that they were supposed to have committed turns out not to be espionage but rather casual talk on insignificant topics with people friendly to the United States.

The AIPAC case is “insignificant.” Uh huh. Then why did former DOD employee Larry Franklin receive a twelve year sentence? Why was the “insignificant” information classified Top Secret? Why was the FBI tapping Saban — and others? Do courts allow legal wiretaps on unimportant matters? Why did the FBI review the late Jack Anderson’s long history of AIPAC contacts? Why has the FBI been probing AIPAC since before 9/11?

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Jeremy Scahill - April 20, 2009

This is a huge story: Representative Jane Harman, a hawkish, influential “Blue Dog” Democrat “was overheard on an NSA wiretap telling a suspected Israeli agent that she would lobby the Justice Department reduce espionage-related charges against two officials of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, the most powerful pro-Israel organization in Washington,” according to a report from CQ Politics:

Harman was recorded saying she would “waddle into” the AIPAC case “if you think it’ll make a difference,” according to two former senior national security officials familiar with the NSA transcript.

In exchange for Harman’s help, the sources said, the suspected Israeli agent pledged to help lobby Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., then-House minority leader, to appoint Harman chair of the Intelligence Committee after the 2006 elections, which the Democrats were heavily favored to win.

Seemingly wary of what she had just agreed to, according to an official who read the NSA transcript, Harman hung up after saying, “This conversation doesn’t exist.”

The case, known as the AIPAC espionage scandal centers around allegations that at least two AIPAC staff members passed sensitive US intelligence on Iran, provided by Pentagon official Lawrence Franklin, to Israel. In early 2006, Franklin pled guilty to espionage-related charges and was sentenced to 13 years in prison. The case against two indicted AIPAC staffers, Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, is ongoing.

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JERUSALEM, March 20 (Reuters) - Rabbis in the Israeli army told battlefield troops in January’s Gaza offensive they were fighting a “religious war” against gentiles, according to one army commander’s account published on Friday.

“Their message was very clear: we are the Jewish people, we came to this land by a miracle, God brought us back to this land and now we need to fight to expel the gentiles who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land,” he said.

The account by Ram, a pseudonym to shield the soldier’s identity, was published by the left-leaning Haaretz newspaper in the second day of revelations that have rocked the Israeli military. (www.haaretz.com “Shooting and Crying, 2009″).

They were leaked from a Feb 13 meeting of armed forces members to share their Gaza experiences.

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