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Sep 12, 2010

Back in '95: Netanyahu said Iran was 3-5 years away from nuclear capability

 


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Netanyahu said Iran was 3-5 years away from nuclear capability– back in '95!
Sep 11, 2010 03:36 pm | Philip Weiss

Back in 1995, Benjamin Netanyahu published a scary book called Fighting Terrorism: How Democracies Can Defeat the International Terrorist Network that says that radical Islam is trying to conquer the west and extend Muslim rule. I carried a copy out with me to Jordan. From page 121:

"The best estimates at this time place Iran between three and fve years away from possessing the prerequisites required for the independent production of nuclear weapons. After this time, the Iranian Islamic republic will have the ability to construct atomic weapons without the importation of materials or technology from abroad."

But in Jeffrey Goldberg's scary Atlantic piece warning that Israel is preparing to strike Iran in the next year, and he can understand why, he says that Israel believes Iran is one to three years away from "nuclear breakout capability," the point that Netanyahu warns about above many years ago.

So who do you believe? Netanyahu in '95 or Netanyahu today? Shouldn't Goldberg have passed along Netanyahu's 1995 warning to readers and suggested that he's a Bibi who cries wolf? Goldberg said he'd spent years working on the piece. Maybe he should have read Netanyahu's back pages.

One has to question Netanyahu's sincerity because Israel uses this alleged threat. It uses it to distract the world from its oppression of Palestinians, and from Obama's pressure on it to stop settlement activities. Netanyahu has never wanted to stop settlement activity. He needs an existential threat to turn attention away.

I'm traveling in Jordan, but when I get back I plan to compare the Netanyahu book (published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux by the way, by Bibi's friend the late Roger Straus.) and the Goldberg piece more closely. I notice that Netanyahu refers to "annihilation," a recurring word in the Goldberg, and continually compares the Iranians to the Nazis. Auschwitz is the recurring point in the Goldberg. Is this paranoia masquerading as policy or simply manipulation? Israeli didn't strike at Iran back in the late 90s; it's always wanted us to do the dirty work.
 

These folks have been trying to wind us up for a long time.


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In the Wake of 9/11, Israel Put Iran into the 'Axis of Evil'
Sep 11, 2010 12:29 pm | Marsha B. Cohen

On September 11, 2001, after two terrorist attacks occurred on U.S. soil, Israeli political figures anticipated that the Americans finally be able to empathize with Israel's vulnerability to terror. In the hours immediately following the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Israeli leaders envisioned a massive U.S. retaliation in which Israel was uniquely equipped to be a partner, even a mentor, of the U.S. (1)

"The fight against terror is an international struggle of the free world against the forces of darkness who seek to destroy our liberty and our way of life," then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon declared in a televised statement just after midnight on September 12. "I believe that together we can defeat these forces of evil."

A spate of Israeli pronouncements proclaimed Israel's own foreign policy priorities. They drew upon a decade of Israeli assertions of Iranian complicity in all things terrorist, and warnings of imminent Iranian nuclear weaponization. A war of civilizations had begun. 9/11 was just the first strike of Islamic fundamentalists. The next might be a nuclear attack by Iran.

The pronouncements constituted the opening salvo in a months-long back-and-forth about how the U.S. would frame its new "global war on terror." Would the U.S. choose to court the cooperation of regimes in Muslim majority countries — even enlisting governments like Iran who might sympathize with the dangers of transnational terrorism – in preference to its steadfast strategic partner and loyal ally Israel?

Having just visited the U.S. on September 10, and stopping over in London on his way back to Israel, former Prime Minister Ehud Barak said that, while it was "probable," he couldn't say with certainty that the attacks were linked to Osama Bin Laden. He offered his expectation of a global response to September 11: "The very scale of these acts and the challenge they pose are such that they should evoke a worldwide fight against terrorism," he declared, citing Europe's effort against piracy. According to Le Monde, Barak [currently Israel's Defense Minister], saw a "a new and clear demarcation line," where the "fight" must go beyond Bin Laden and Palestinian resistance groups to include countries that support and harbor them, including "Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, to a certain degree North Korea and Libya, Sudan and a few other regimes that play a secondary role." (2)

Benjamin Netanyahu [currently Israel's prime minister] , warned that the attacks on New York and Washington could be a harbinger of the deaths of millions of people once Iran or Iraq acquired nuclear weapons. He emphasized that he personally had warned of such attacks soon after the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, and in his 1995 book Fighting Terrorism (reissued in 2001). The Jerusalem Post reported Netanyahu's call for a coalition against "terrorist states like Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and the Palestinian entity" that want to "devour the West." (3)

Opinion pieces derided Russia and its export of "nuclear know-how and equipment to Iran." (4) An Iran with a bomb, an editorial in the business daily Globes declared, meant that terror organizations could gain access to it. (5) Dan Meridor, an Israeli government minister without portfolio in charge of Israel's secret services, dismissed the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and spoke to Globes instead about a wider war between the free world and countries that support terror that would span "from Ramallah to Gaza, through the Al-Biqa Valley in Lebanon, the mountains of Iran and Afghanistan, all the way to Manhattan." (6) The war would come quickly: Yosef Lapid of the Shinui party declared in the Jerusalem Post, once Iran had a nuclear bomb in its possession "within three or, at most, five years." (7)

Whereas George H. W. Bush had kept Israel on the sidelines during the fist Gulf War, an unnamed "Western diplomatic source" now told the Jerusalem Post that Israel would be a full partner in George W. Bush's anti-terror coalition. Israel might now be allowed to even "participate in attacks against Iraq, as well as Iran and Afghanistan." (8)

A few days later, however, Efraim Inbar, Director of Bar Ilan University's Begin-Sadat Institute of Strategic Studies (BESA), suggested in a radio interview that  the inclusion of Muslim states in the U.S. "coalition against terrorism," among them Iran, might require some "compromises" on the part of the U.S. (9) Subsequent reports in the Israeli media built on this apprehension that the participation of Muslim countries would not only restrict Israel's membership in the anti-terrorist coalition, but might pressure the U.S. to demand Israeli concessions to the Palestinians. Alon Pinkas, the Israeli Consul in New York, informed the Foreign Ministry in a cable eight days after the attacks that a "paradigm shift" was taking place in American thinking that could raise questions about the U.S. role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and criticism of Sharon in major American newspapers might be early warning signs of an anti-Israel backlash.

Pinkas noted that the U.S. media was beginning to link Israeli policies and Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the September 11 attacks, and predicted that "this topic will gain currency on the U.S. agenda… and it becomes clear that Israeli and U.S. interests on the matter are not identical." (10)

Foreign Ministry officials accused Pinkas of being an "alarmist." But Israel did not appear on any of the televised maps of the "coalition against terror," and none of the 27 terrorist-supporting organizations whose assets had been frozen by Bush were groups linked to terror against Israel.

Adding to growing concern in Israel was the news that then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair had phoned Bush to inform him of a "remarkable conversation" with Iranian President Mohamad Khatami, and that he was dispatching his foreign minister to Tehran for a three day trip in late September. The Bush administration, the Jerusalem Post worried on September 23, "has no formal links with Tehran but regards Iran as a critical element in legitimizing the coalition and cloaking it in Islamic credibility." (11)

Israeli politician Efraim Sneh complained on Israeli radio that Iran "will buy itself legitimacy at very little expense." After the campaign against Bin Laden was over, Sneh predicted gloomily,  "[Iran] will continue  its support for terrorism, but with a kosher certificate from the United States." (12)  Just before his arrival in Tehran, British Foreign Minister Jack Straw wrote in an Iranian paper that "events over the years in the Palestinian territories" were a root cause of terror. Sneh called the article "an obscenity," and denounced the trip as a "stab in the back" of Israel. (13)

Israeli President Moshe Katsav refused to meet with Straw during his visit to Israel. Foreign Minister Shimon Peres canceled a dinner in Straw's honor, but met with him briefly. During their meeting, Peres accused Iran of both funding and directing Hizbullah, publicly calling for the destruction of Israel and of developing nuclear weapons. In the hands of extremist ayatollahs, Peres said, these weapons are "a danger to the entire world."

In late September, the Jerusalem Post offered the view of a senior IDF intelligence officer, speaking anonymously, that Iran "could have had a hand" in plotting the attacks on the U.S. "We don't have any information to support the possibility that Iraq is part of the plot," the officer said. "But we can't say the same for the Iranians. They are very deeply involved in everything that carries the label of Islamic radical terrorism." The anonymous officer declared that Osama bin Laden, Hizbullah and Hamas were all from the same school of thought, but Iran was unique as a nation state seeking weapons of mass destruction. (14)

Not surprisingly,  81 percent of nearly 13,000 respondents to a reader survey on the Jerusalem Post website said that they thought Iran was in some way involved in the attack on the World Trade Center. (15)

In Washington, when addressing Congress on September 20, Netanyahu lumped together Bin Laden, Syria, Iran, Hizbullah and Palestinian groups as a terror "network." The catalyst for the network, he said, lay in Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution: "This created a sovereign spiritual base for fomenting a strident Islamic militancy worldwide, a militancy that was often backed by terror." (16)

Sharon's domestic priorities — including containment of his right wing coalition partners who demanded he get tough on terrorists, expel Arafat and reject once and for all the idea of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza — were on a collision course with growing U.S. concern about how Israeli actions might affect the dynamics of the U.S.'s new coalition.  Foreign Minister Shimon Peres [now Israel's president]  proposed that Israel reaffirm its agreement with U.S. aims in the "war on terror." Several cabinet ministers agreed that "the [Palestinian Authority] should be presented in the U.S. as 'Israel's Taliban,' which gives aid and succor to terrorists."

In subsequent weeks, a series of Israelis came to Washington for visits with Bush administration officials. In a single week in mid-October, over a dozen government officials, envoys and senior military officers visited Washington. The Director General of Israel's Atomic Energy Commission briefed the U.S. administration on Israel's ent estimate of the progress being made in Iran's nuclear research, and urged the administration to make Russian support of Iran a foreign policy priority.

During talks with Condoleezza Rice, Sneh complained to reporters that the U.S. seemed to be ignoring Iran's terrorism record, and that Iran should be disqualified from any role in the U.S. alliance against terror. "Iran stands in first place as a sponsor of terrorism," Sneh said. "If someone forgets that, we are willing to remind them." Sneh expressed his certainty that Russia was damaging Israel's security by supporting Iran's nuclear weapons program.  "We believe they cannot be considered as countries that fight terrorism," he said.

The Israeli visitors were assured that the U.S. would win its war against terrorism and that Israel would benefit from the new international order that would follow. Iran and Syria would be watched carefully, and Hizbullah and other groups fighting Israel would be added to the list of terrorist organizations. However, senior U.S. officials expressed concern that Israel was trying to force the Palestinian Authority to collapse, a move the U.S. would not support because it would undermine regional stability and endanger American strategy by creating friction between the U.S. and moderate Arab states.

Iran was recognized among the "six-plus-two" states that met in New York on November 12, 2001, the day before the fall of Kabul, to decide Afghanistan's future. Iran's support of the Northern Alliance was credited with helping the U.S.-led forces seize large swaths of the country. But U.S. insistence that Afghan forces not enter Kabul aroused Iranian suspicions that the U.S. might attempt to install a puppet regime composed of Pashtun remnants of the Taliban hostile to Tehran.

In early December, Sharon met with Bush for a "working visit" that would discuss, according to the White House Press Secretary, "the international campaign against terrorism and the pursuit of peace in the Middle East" (17). Although analysts had expected little from the meeting, what emerged was Israel's inclusion, at long last, in the frontline of the "war against terror," and an unprecedented affirmation of Israel's right to act both defensively and proactively against terrorism.

During the months following the events of September 11 and the proclamation of the "war on terror," Israel played an active and discernible role in trying to prevent any possible warming of relations between the U.S. and Iran. The pinnacle of its success was Bush's 2002 State of the Union address on January 29, which, in a passage authored by neoconservative David Frum, declared Iran (and Iraq) to be part of an "axis of evil" comprised of regimes that sought to acquire nuclear weapons so they could provide them to terrorists.

This branding not only pushed Iran further beyond the U.S. foreign policy pale, it also undermined the domestic political position of Iranian leaders who had advocated the possibility of rapprochement with the U.S. While the denunciation of Iran by Bush may have delighted the exponents of the "Iranian threat" in Israel and the U.S., it also blurred, in American eyes, the boundaries between Iranian hardliners and moderates, conservatives and reformists. The failure of the Iranian reformists to achieve and sustain any substantial economic or political gains between 1997-2005 led directly to the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the current hardliners' hold on power.

(1) See, for example, Greer Faye Cashman, "Katsav Expresses Nation's Sorrow." Jerusalem Post, Sept. 12, 2001.
(2) Jean-Marie Colombani, Jean-Pierre Langellier and Georges Marion, "What Ehud Baraq Says About It," interview. Le Monde, internet version, Sept. 13, 2001.
(3) Gil Hoffman, "Netanyahu: World Must Join to Crush Terror," Jerusalem Post, Sept. 12, 2001.
(4) Shalom Rosenfeld, "Commentary:  Historical Leader." Maariv Hayom Supplement,  Sept. 13, 2001.
(5) Editorial, "World Gets a Warning," Globes, Sept.  13, 2001.
(6) Tzvi Lavi, interview with Dan Meridor, Sept. 12, 2001, "We Will Win in the End, And It's A Pity That They Won't Be There,"  Globes, Sept. 13, 2001.
(7) Yosef Lapid, "The Warning," Jerusalem Post, Sept. 14, 2001.
(8) Gil Hoffman, "Gulf War-Style Anti-Terror Coalition to Include Israel." Jerusalem Post, Sept. 14, 2001.
(9) Jerusalem Post Radio, interviewer by Miriam Shaked, Sept. 17, 2001.
(10) Herb Keinon, "US May See Israel as Obstacle to Coalition," Jerusalem Post, Sept. 21, 2001.
(11) Douglas Davis, "British FM to Iran for Historical Visit," Jerusalem Post, Sept. 23, 2001.
(12) Greg Myre, "Israel: Anti-terror Coalition Should Target Iran, Syria." Jerusalem Post, Sept. 25, 2001.
(13) Steve Weizman, AP, "Sneh Launches Blistering Attack on British FM," Jerusalem Post, Sept. 24, 2001.
(14) Arieh O'Sullivan, "IDF: Iraq not involved in attacks; Iran maybe," Jerusalem Post, Sept. 23, 2001.
(15) Online Jerusalem Post poll, Sept. 23, 2001.
(16) "We Are All Targets," transcript of remarks to US  House of Representatives' Government Reform Committee, Jerusalem Post, Sept. 24, 2001.
(17) White House Press Briefing, Nov. 21, 2001.

This article originally appeared on Lobelog.


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On night before 9/11, New Yorkers voice strong support for Muslim community center
Sep 11, 2010 09:11 am | Alex Kane

Rep. Keith Ellison's speech to the candlelight vigil. (Video: Alex Kane)

As the the anniversary of 9/11 and the Islamophobic rally led by far-right blogger Pamela Geller converge today, over 1,000 New Yorkers gathered Sept. 10 at Park Place in lower Manhattan for a candlelight vigil in support of the proposed Muslim community center two blocks from Ground Zero that has ignited a national firestorm over Islam in America.

Organized by New York Neighbors for American Values, a new coalition of over 100 groups formed in response to the opposition to the Cordoba House project, faith leaders, elected officials, musicians and activists voiced strong support for the proposed Islamic community center, which will also include a September 11 memorial, a restaurant and culinary school and more.

"This is not just an issue I should support silently," said Frank Fredericks, the co-director of Religious Freedom USA. "This is a core, essential issue that Americans should stand up for."

The supporters of the center, holding candles, filled more than two blocks, and some had to stand on a sidewalk across the street from the vigil. The music of Bob Marley, John Lennon and a live rendition of Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land" filled the air.

"There's enough for all of us. Nobody has to be thrown away. We can do this thing if we hang together. There's enough room in this neighborhood for an Islamic center," the keynote speaker of the event, Representative Keith Ellison (D-MN), the first Muslim elected to Congress, said. "We don't have to say they gotta go…They are our fellow Americans."

The action came the night before the 9th anniversary of the September 11 attacks and a planned rally in lower Manhattan organized by the right-wing Stop Islamization of America group. A counter-protest against Islamophobia and in support of Muslims backed by a broad left-wing coalition is also being held today.

"No neighborhood should be off-limits for any particular group," said Aliya Latif, the civil rights director for the New York chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations.

DSC00415
A man signs a banner in support of the proposed Muslim community center in lower Manhattan. (PHOTO: ALEX KANE)

Stop Islamization of America, led by Geller and Robert Spencer of the anti-Muslim blog Jihad Watch, is protesting the planned Muslim community center two blocks away from Ground Zero, claiming that it is "an effort to insult the victims of 9/11 and to establish a beachhead for political Islam and Islamic supremacism in New York." Geller is a leading Islamophobic voice who has called for the removal of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, one of the most holy sites for Muslims, and has posted on her website a picture that replaced the Prophet Muhammad's face with that of a pig. Spencer has compared the Islamic holy book, the Quran, to Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf, and thinks that Islam is "innately extremist and violent."

"I think we all know that nobody would object to a community center on Park Place unless it was sponsored by Muslims. And no one can say with a straight face that that's not based on religious discrimination," said Richard Gottfried, a New York State Assemblyman. "People who share American values do not do that."

The vigil came in the midst of an increase of anti-Muslim sentiment across the country, stoked by the right-wing press. There has been a spate of anti-Muslim actions over the past couple of weeks as the debate over the Muslim community center in New York has heated up. While two-thirds of New York City residents want the proposed center to be moved farther away from the site of Ground Zero, a majority of Manhattan residents support the project.

"We have every right to worship wherever we want. This country was founded on the basis of religious freedom," said Rabyaah Althaibani, a Muslim Arab-American.

This report originally appeared in the Indypendent.


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The secret to happiness–is it good for the Jews? "Before Professor Dershowitz accused me of being an anti-Semite (news to me), I was a happy person. Since then, I'm still a happy person". –Michael Santomauro

An antisemite condemns people for being Jews, I am not an antisemite.--Michael Santomauro

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Abnormal put and call options activity in the days before 9/11/2001

 

---------- Forwarded message ----------

From: Manuel Sotil <msotil@gmail.com>
Date: Sun, Sep 12, 2010 at 9:12 AM

Michael,

A few days before the 9/11 acts or terrorism, there was unusual options activity on the stock of American Airlines, United Airlines, Raytheon, insurance companies and others that would be affected by the disaster.

For example:

Losers
The stock market put options activity was 90 to 285 times greater than normal for United Airlines and 60 times greater than normal for American Airlines. Put and call activity for all other airlines remained normal. Others: Morgan Stanley = 27X, Merrill Lynch = 12X (companies located in WTC whose offices were destroyed). 

Winners
Raytheon: (Patriot, Tomahawk weapons systems) enjoyed abnormal call activity in expectation the stock would soar, which it did.
US Treasury Notes.

The above are just some examples. The operators who placed those put and call options knew that the underlying price of the stock was going to change +/- dramatically in the near future, or even the exact date. 

All people in the know were deputized for an investigation, in effect, legally shutting them up. Official explanation for this abnormal activity (hold onto your hat)?: Bin Laden!



Cheers!

Manuel Sotil






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The secret to happiness–is it good for the Jews? "Before Professor Dershowitz accused me of being an anti-Semite (news to me), I was a happy person. Since then, I'm still a happy person". –Michael Santomauro

An antisemite condemns people for being Jews, I am not an antisemite.--Michael Santomauro

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Lauren Booth- Letter to Israel (video)

Gilad Atzmon: Give History a Chance (video)

A talk given at Debunking 'The War on Terror' symposium, London,  14th July 2010

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Introduction by Ken O'keefe:
 

To watch the entire Symposium: http://noliesradio.org/archives/21621


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The secret to happiness–is it good for the Jews? "Before Professor Dershowitz accused me of being an anti-Semite (news to me), I was a happy person. Since then, I'm still a happy person". –Michael Santomauro

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Prof. Kevin MacDonald: Solzhenitsyn's "During the Civil War"

 

http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/articles/MacDonald-Solzhenitsyn-Chap16.html 


Sept. 2010

Solzhenitsyn's "During the Civil War" — Chapter 16 of 200 Years Together

Kevin MacDonald

Chapter 16 of 200 Years Together covers the pivotal period of the civil war (1918–1921)—pivotal because the Bolshevik victory was a disaster for the Russian people and for Europe generally. (The translation is available here; donations are of critical importance for finishing this important project.) Once again, Solzhenitsyn highlights the role of Jews as instruments of state terror, particularly their role in the Cheka and in the Red Army. The perception that this was a "Jewish terror" was widespread: "Why was the perception that Chekists and Jews were all but the same so widespread among both the Reds and the Whites alike and among the people in general?"  

At least part of the reason is because of the Jews' "ardent service on the highest posts in Cheka." Jewish Chekists "at that time weresupreme, by status and rank, representatives of Russian Jewry." He quotes a Jewish observer (also quoted by Yuri Slezkine; see here, p. 85):  "we were astonished to find among the Jews what we never expected from them — cruelty, sadism, unbridled violence — everything that seemed so alien to a people so detached from physical activity; those who yesterday couldn't handle a rifle, today were among the vicious cutthroats." Slezkine quotes another Jewish observer:  

The formerly oppressed lover of liberty had turned into a tyrant of "unheard-of-despotic arbitrariness"…. The convinced and unconditional opponent of the death penalty not just for political crimes but for the most heinous offenses, who could not, as it were, watch a chicken being killed, has been transformed outwardly into a leather-clad person with a revolver and, in fact, lost all human likeness (pp. 183–184). 

It is a cautionary tale on what kinds of behavior we can expect from current multi-cultural elites when Whites become a minority: Present-day platitudes about the future world of multicultural harmony and the moral imperative of Whites giving up power may be replaced very quickly by a quite different set of attitudes of revenge and hatred — the image of the kindly, tolerant Jewish professional quickly replaced by the image of a brutal perpetrator of torture and mass murder motivated by revenge against the old order. Images of hatred and estrangement from the White, Christian majority are commonplace among Jewish leaders — the Jews as a hostile elite theme of much of my writing (see, e.g., here and here).  

Indeed, Solzhenitsyn suggests that Jewish revenge against the Cossacks was a motive for "the genocide on the river Don, when hundreds of thousands of the flower of Don Cossacks were murdered …. What should we expect from the Cossack memories when we take into consideration all those unsettled accounts between a revolutionary Jew and a Don Cossack?"  

Indeed, the Cossacks were strongly identified with state power during the 19th century, and for Jews they were hated because of their role in assaults on Jews (for example, during the Khmelnytsky Uprisingin the 17th century) and popularized in stories by Jewish writer Sholem Aleichem. As I noted elsewhere:

The Cossacks served the Czar as a military police force, and they used their power against Jewish communities during the conflicts between the government and the Jews. After the Revolution, the Cossacks were deported to Siberia for refusing to join the collective farms. During the 1930s, the person in charge of the deportations was an ethnic Jew, Lazar Kaganovich, nicknamed the "wolf of the Kremlin' because of his penchant for violence. In his drive against the peasants, Kaganovich took "an almost perverse joy in being able to dictate to the Cossacks. He recalled too vividly what he and his family had experienced at the hands of these people.... Now they would all pay — men, women, children. It didn't matter who. They became one and the same. That was the key to [Kaganovich's] being. He would never forgive and he would never forget" (Stuart Kahan, The Wolf of the  Kremlin, 1987, 164). Similarly, Jews were placed in charge of security in the Ukraine, which had a long history of anti-Semitism (Albert Lindemann, Esau's Tears,1997, 443) and became a scene of mass murder in the 1930s. (See here, pp. xxiv–xxv.) 

It was payback time for ethnic hostilities that long preceded the Bolshevik Revolution. While Jews were vastly overrepresented among the perpetrators of mass murder, Solzhenitsyn "can't help noticing that almost all names [of the victims] were Slavic – it was the 'chosen Russians' who were shot. In Kiev, a key area because of its long history of tensions between Jews and Slavs, 75% of the staff of the Cheka were Jews, including 70% of the top officials.

His account of the murders is particularly chilling: 

An executioner (and sometimes "amateur" Chekists) escorted a completely naked victim into a shed and ordered the victim to fall facedown on the ground. Then he finished the victim with a shot in the back of the head.  Executions were performed using revolvers (typically Colts). Usually because of the short distance, the skull of the executed person exploded into fragments.... The next victim was similarly escorted inside and laid down nearby.... When number of victims was exceeding … the capacity of the shed, new victims were laid down right upon the dead or were shot at the entrance of the shed.... Usually the victims went to their execution without resistance. 

It's not surprising therefore that the opposition to the Bolshevik regime often had strong anti-Jewish overtones. Examples from 1921 are theKronstadt Uprising, where photos of prominent Jewish Bolsheviks were destroyed, and labor strikes, whose slogan was "Down with Communists and Jews!"

Solzhenitsyn wrestles with the question of whether the Jewish community as a whole supported the Bolsheviks: "Thus it looked as though not only Bolshevik Jews, but all of Jewry had decided to take the Red side in the Civil War. Could we claim that their choice was completely reactive? No. Could we claim that they didn't have any other choice? Again, no."  

As evidence on Jewish attitudes toward the Bolsheviks he cites a writer who noted that as Kiev was about to surrender to the Bolsheviks, the Jews remained, while "it was an entirely Russian exodus, people were leaving on foot with knapsacks, across the bridges over the Dnepr river. … And all of those rich and very rich Jews – they didn't leave, they chose to stay and wait for arrival of Bolsheviks. 'The Jews decided not to share their fate with us. And with that they carved a new and possibly the deepest divide between us.'" Throughout Russia and in Poland during the Soviet invasion of 1920, Jewish communities greeted the Bolsheviks with celebration, while the Slavic population was terrified of its future. 

The special role of Jews in the Soviet government was common knowledge, to the point that some Jews pleaded for Jews to fight Bolshevism because Jewish behavior was leading to intense anti-Jewish attitudes; however, this was not the view of the organized Jewish community: 

And yes, there were Jews then who appealed to their compatriots looking back on the tragedy that had befallen both Russia and Russian Jewry. In their proclamation To the Jews of all countries!, this group wrote in 1923 that "overly zealous participation of Jewish Bolsheviks in the oppression and destruction of Russia ... is blamed upon all of us ... the Soviet rule is identified with Jewish rule, and fierce hatred of Bolsheviks turns into the equally fierce hatred of Jews.... [We] firmly believe that Bolshevism is the worst of all evils possible for the Jews and all other peoples of Russia, and that to fight tooth and nail against the rule of that international rabble over Russia is our sacred duty before humankind, culture, before our Motherland and the Jewish people." Yet the Jewish community "reacted to these declarations with great indignation." 

Solzhenitsyn spends a great deal of time on the anti-Jewish pogroms of the period and the role of the White army and Symon Petiliura'sUkrainian nationalist forces. In general, he denies that Jews sided with the Bolsheviks because of the pogroms. For example, the Jewish dominance of the Cheka in the Ukraine happened in 1918, before the pogroms of 1919.  

Interestingly, he foregrounds his discussion by noting that wars and revolutions are nasty affairs, and, quoting a Jewish writer, they are "especially gruesome and dangerous for a minority, which in many ways is alien to the bulk of population." This is especially so when there is a long history of mistrust and hostility toward the minority because of traditional economic relationships and Jewish hostility toward the culture of the outgroup.

During this period, Jews suffered far more than they did under the Czar, with estimates of Jewish dead ranging to 200,000. The main force was the Ukrainian separatist movement. Rather than seeing the hostility of the separatists toward Jews as irrational anti-Semitism, Solzhenitsyn shows that Jews did not support Ukrainian nationalism—a familiar theme in modern anti-Jewish attitudes, present also in Germany, were Jews were often seen as insufficiently enthusiastic about German nationalism. For example, the prominent 19th-century intellectual Heinrich von Treitschke strongly opposed what he perceived as "alien" Jewish cultural influence on German life, because of Jewish tendencies to mock and belittle German nationalistic aspirations (see here, p. 140). Similarly, Solzhnenitsyn describes "Jewish philistines … making fun of the Ukrainian language and shop-signs." They were "afraid of Ukrainian nationalism, and believed in the Russian state and Russian culture." 

The opposition to Ukrainian nationalism had a Jewish face. When the Soviet government moved against the Ukrainian nationalists,

There was no shortage of Jewish names among the top Bolsheviks … in such centers as Odessa and Ekaterinoslav. That was sufficient to fuel talks about "Bolshevik Jews" and "Jewish Bolsheviks" among the troops loyal to the [Ukrainian parliament]. Verbal cursing about "traitorous Jews" became almost commonplace.

When a nationalist government led by Petliura came to power, his newspaper wrote, "The birth of the Ukrainian State was not expected by the Jews. The Jews did not anticipate it despite having an extraordinary ability of getting the wind of any news. They … emphasize their knowledge of Russian language and ignore the fact of Ukrainian statehood … Jewry again has joined the side of our enemy." 

Solzhenitsyn juxtaposes Jews being blamed for Bolshevik military successes in the Ukraine with accounts of pillaging and pogroms directed against Jews — the implication being that Jews were being repaid in kind.  Nevertheless, the pogroms were not official policy. Even commanders who were sympathetic to the Jews, such asNestor Mahkno, were unable to control the anti-Jewish actions of their troops. A result was that Jewish parties quickly began to radicalize toward the Left, thus inevitably turning their sympathies to Bolshevism.  

Pogroms occurred despite the best intentions of the leaders of the White army, such as General Anton I. Denikin. The misbehavior of the troops cannot be completely explained by resentment about the Jewish role in Bolshevism or traditional anti-Jewish attitudes. There was also the raping and pillaging that has always been part of the culture of undisciplined armies. Solzhenitsyn provides several sources corroborating this perspective. For example:  

A top White general, A. von Lampe, claims that rumors about Jewish pogroms by the Whites are "tendentiously exaggerated", that these pillaging "requisitions" were unavoidable actions of an army without quartermaster services or regular supplies from the rear areas. He says that Jews were not targeted deliberately but that all citizens suffered and that Jews "suffered more" because they were "numerous and rich." "I am absolutely confident that in the operational theaters of the White armies there were no Jewish pogroms, i.e., no organized extermination and pillaging of Jews. There were robberies and even murders ... which were purposefully overblown and misrepresented as anti-Jewish pogroms by the special press.... Because of these accidents, the Second Kuban Infantry Brigade and theOssetian Cavalry Regiment were disbanded.... All peoples, be they Christian or Jewish, suffered in disorderly areas." [The exception was that] there were executions (on tip offs by locals) of those unfortunate commissars and Chekists who did not manage to escape and there were quite a few Jews among them.  

One way that Jews aided the Bolsheviks was financially. Jews contributed little to the White cause, "yet whenever the Bolsheviks showed up and demanded money and valuables, the population obediently handed over millions of rubles and whole stores of goods." The Whites even rejected some Jewish support because of "the prominent involvement of other Jews on the Red side." While the White army was originally free of anti-Jewish attitudes, "the situation dramatically changed by 1919" when Jews were seen as the main base of support for Bolshevism, exaggerated by the intense local anti-Jewish attitudes in areas like the Ukraine with a long history of hostility between Jews and Slavs, now exacerbated by the prominence of Jewish support for the Bolsheviks. "The Whites perceived Russia as occupied by Jewish commissars — and they marched to liberate her."  

The fate of the White cause also was sealed because of failure to obtain Jewish support in the West. Solzhenitsyn states unequivocally that "the White Movement was in desperate need of the support by the Western public opinion, which in turn largely depended on the fate of Russian Jewry." Churchill appealed to Denikin to stop the pogroms, but he also quotes a historian who notes that Churchill feared the reactions of "powerful Jewish circles within the elite." Jewish elites throughout the West threw their support to the Bolsheviks, aided by idealistic perceptions of "grandiose plans" for a New World under communism.    

Solzhenitsyn is scathing in his condemnation of the Western powers: "And yet, the behavior of the former Entente of Western nations during the entire Civil War is striking by its greed and blind indifference toward the White Movement — the successor of their wartime ally, Imperial Russia." This inaction and indifference led to an incalculable tragedy for Russia. 

Both the general sympathy of Russian Jews toward the Bolsheviks and the developed attitude of the White forces toward Jews eclipsed and erased the most important benefit of a possible White victory — the sane evolution of the Russian state. 

And because of its long term reverberations in the history of the 20thcentury, the result was a disaster for all European peoples. The prominent role of Jews in the Soviet government dovetailed not only with the warm welcome by Jews for the Soviet invasion of Poland of 1921, but also with Jewish involvement in revolutionary movements in Hungary and Germany. The result was a deepening of anti-Jewish attitudes, especially in Eastern and Central Europe. A historian comments, "the intensity and tenacity of anti-Semitic prejudice in both the east and the center of Europe was significantly influenced by Jewish participation in the revolutionary movement." "The fact that the leaders of the suppressed Communist revolts were Jews was one of the most important reasons for the resurrection of political anti-Semitism in contemporary Germany."  

And in Hungary, "While Jews played a 'quite conspicuous' role in the Russian and German communist revolutions, their role in Hungary became central.... Out of 49 People's Commissars there, 31 were Jews." "Granted, the prime-minister was a gentile, Sandor Garbai, but[Mátyás] Rákosi later joked that Garbai was elected because someone had to sign execution orders on Sabbath days." As was typical wherever communists gained power, the traditional culture was eradicated: "Statues of Hungarian kings and heroes were knocked off their pedestals, the national anthem outlawed, and wearing the national colors criminalized."  

The Jewish role in Bolshevism and in the abortive revolutions in Hungary and Germany cast a long shadow on later events: 

For long after the Revolution, conservatives throughout Europe and the United States believed that Jews were responsible for Communism and for the Bolshevik Revolution. The Jewish role in leftist political movements was a common source of anti-Jewish attitudes among a great many intellectuals and political figures. In Germany, the identification of Jews and Bolshevism was widespread in the middle classes and was a critical part of the National Socialist view of the world. As historian Ernst Nolte has noted, for middle-class Germans, "the experience of the Bolshevik revolution in Germany was so immediate, so close to home, and so disquieting, and statistics seemed to prove the overwhelming participation of Jewish ringleaders so irrefutably," that even many liberals believed in Jewish responsibility (Ernst Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism [1965, 331]). Jewish involvement in the horrors of Communism was also an important sentiment in Hitler's desire to destroy the USSR and in the anti-Jewish actions of the German National Socialist government. Jews and Jewish organizations were also important forces in inducing the Western democracies to side with Stalin rather than Hitler in World War II.  

The victory over National Socialism set the stage for the tremendous increase in Jewish power in the post-World War II Western world, in the end more than compensating for the decline of Jews in the Soviet Union. As [Yuri] Slezkine shows, the children of Jewish immigrants assumed an elite position in the United States, just as they had in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe and Germany prior to World War II. This new-found power facilitated the establishment of Israel, the transformation of the United States and other Western nations in the direction of multiracial, multicultural societies via large-scale non-white immigration, and the consequent decline in European demographic and cultural preeminence. The critical Jewish role in Communism has been sanitized, while Jewish victimization by the Nazis has achieved the status of a moral touchstone and is a prime weapon in the push for massive non-European immigration, multiculturalism, and advancing other Jewish causes.  

The Jewish involvement in Bolshevism has therefore had an enormous effect on recent European and American history. It is certainly true that Jews would have attained elite status in the United States with or without their prominence in the Soviet Union. However, without the Soviet Union as a shining beacon of a land freed of official anti-Semitism where Jews had attained elite status in a stunningly short period, the history of the United States would have been very different. The persistence of Jewish radicalism influenced the general political sensibility of the Jewish community and had a destabilizing effect on American society, ranging from the paranoia of the McCarthy era, to the triumph of the 1960s countercultural revolution, to the conflicts over immigration and multiculturalism that are so much a part of the contemporary political landscape. (Seehere, pp. 95–96 and references therein; see also here, pp. xxx–xxxii) 

Solzhenitsyn's treatment once again hits all the right notes. While staying squarely within mainstream scholarship, he succeeds in laying bare the ethnic conflict that is at the heart of the fraught relationship of Jews and Europeans. 

Kevin MacDonald is editor of The Occidental Observer and a professor of psychology at California State University–Long Beach. Email him.

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Permanent URL:http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/articles/MacDonald-Solzhenitsyn-Chap16.html 

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The secret to happiness–is it good for the Jews? "Before Professor Dershowitz accused me of being an anti-Semite (news to me), I was a happy person. Since then, I'm still a happy person". –Michael Santomauro

An antisemite condemns people for being Jews, I am not an antisemite.--Michael Santomauro

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Sep 11, 2010

Tikun Olam : Israeli 9/11 Victim's Family: Islamic Center 'Like Bringing Pig in Holy Place'

 



Tikun Olam-תקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place
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The secret to happiness–is it good for the Jews? "Before Professor Dershowitz accused me of being an anti-Semite (news to me), I was a happy person. Since then, I'm still a happy person". –Michael Santomauro

An antisemite condemns people for being Jews, I am not an antisemite.--Michael Santomauro

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Recent Activity:
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