Denis says

Excellent piece Mr. Shamir. I always look forward to your views on Unz’ articles; you have a way of reviewing them in layman’s terms, which I like.

One thing that occurs to me when reading your and Unz’ articles is the comparison that he made between America today and Russia near the end of the Tsar’s days. He said that the average American is becoming like the abused Russian commoner in the Pale of Settlement, hated and exploited by his Jewish neighbours. He might have added that this commoner his also hated and exploited by his government; that would make the parallel even more accurate.

But I think the most accurate analogy to modern America can be seen in old Poland, when it was Poland-Lithuania, before it was conquered by Russia and the Germans. That state was a perfect example of what becomes of the common people in a land where Jews dominate, or nearly dominate. The Serfs were constantly terrorized by their lords’ Jewish retainers, and the rich Jews were a pseudo-nobility; they were allowed to tax and exploit Christians Churches first the Orthodox, and then the Catholics a well, while they gave a portion of the proceedings to the nobility.

All the while, the state became weaker and weaker, and was progressively taken down by Russia, while the justified rage of the commoners was redirected away from the nobles and the rich Jews and towards Russia. The commoners were kept in ignorance and poverty, and were taught that Russians were the cause of this. Americans are being forced to relive this situation almost exactly.

Also, you say:

“Like fire, like women, – Jews are good when under control and dangerous and destructive when they are in control.”

I am going to steal this, haha.

Authored by Tom Luongo,

Israel announced a major pipeline project from the gas fields off its shore involving four countries, terminating in northern Italy. The EastMed Pipeline could be one of the longest in history as well as one of the most technically difficult to pull off.

The deal was announced on World Israel News a few days ago and has been in negotiation for a couple of years now.

It’s being billed as a counter to both Arab and Russian power but that’s not really true. This will supposedly deliver 20 bcm annually to Cyprus, Greece and Italy and come at a significant cost because of the challenge of it. But the first train will be 10 bcm according to IGI Poseiden’s website, the company building the pipeline. 10 bcm is similar in size to the Southern Gas Corridor bringing gas in from Azerbaijan.

The agreement has been some two years in the works, with the four countries’ energy czars signing a memorandum of understanding regarding the pipeline in December 2017. It is considered a technically difficult project to complete not only because of the depth of the undersea route, but also because it will have to pass through a volcanic area in the ocean bottom between Cyprus and Greece.

No discussion of cost was in the announcement.

It was all about the politics. But, the politics of this is Kabuki theatre. The Russians don’t care about more pipelines to Italy, now that Turkstream is ongoing and Europe’s gas needs are accelerating.

This is a European Union project developed by IGI Poseidon under the auspice of the EU’s Connecting Europe Facility program. The EU is footing a lot of the bill for this.

For all the talk about Russia’s monopoly on the European gas market, it’s simply untrue. Russia supplies between 35% – 40% of Europe’s gas. That share has increased because of rising demand and no new pipeline developments.

And for Europe, the most economical gas is that delivered by Russian pipes. Both the STC and EastMed pipelines will be profitable but only after the EU portion of the funding is written off, which it will be.

EastMed, like the STC, has been in development for nearly ten years. Turkstream went from idea to reality in two.

These are projects force-fed onto European consumers for political purposes, not economic ones. Diversification of supply is fine if it makes economic sense. But if it doesn’t all it’s doing it lengthening the time to profit for the people who paid for the project in the first place, the consumers through their taxes.

Moreover, if these projects were fundamentally economic they wouldn’t require such a long time to negotiate. The negotiations stem from none of the principles wanting to pay for the uneconomic part of the costs. And that’s where the EU steps in to provide that cost which is then passed onto the consumer.

In the end, none of this will truly matter since the need for gas into Europe is so high and unlikely to be replaced by anything else in the foreseeable future. Europe is wedded to bad environmental ideas which, in turn, become bad energy policy.

The latest of which is the announcement by French President Emmanuel Macron that France would be shutting down 14 of its 58 nuclear reactors by 2035. The only thing keeping France’s insanely Marxist economy functioning is its cheap nuclear-generated electricity.

Macron wants to drop this from 72% of current power needs to 50% and spin up unreliable sources like solar and wind.

But, back to Israel and the politics of EastMed, this pipeline, like the SCT from Azerbaijan, doesn’t threaten Russian market share because of its ultimate cost. Transport costs money, even for piped gas. And the longer the pipeline the more transport costs matter.

And if Israel finally getting its pipeline to Europe is the price Russia has to pay to help stabilize the region a little bit, then it’s a small one in the end. The smarter play for Israel, of course, is to develop a pipeline that goes east to Syria rather than northwest to Italy, but don’t hold your breath there.

What I think is interesting is the dichotomy between what Germany gets and what Italy gets in terms of gas supply. Germany gets the massive Nordstream 2 bringing in more than twice what Italy gets from the more expensive EastMed and SCT will bring.

The Now Dead Southstream Pipeline Project

Remember, SouthStream’s original plan was to go through Bulgaria, across to Austria and a second stream across Greece to Italy. That was quashed because of U.S. interests in keeping Russia down. And because Israel wanted EastMed and the Saudis were working for a pipeline through Turkey through Syria.

And Angela Merkel was only too happy to oblige to keep Greece and Italy from accessing cheap Russian gas.

No, they can have expensive Azeri and Israeli gas instead.

This is yet another reason why Italy needs to be done with the EU. It is obvious Germany and France want control over energy inflows to ensure political as well as economic dominion over any state that thinks about getting uppity to their rule.

This latest win for European Energy Security is exactly that.

By Piotr Bein via https://piotrbein.wordpress.com/

Ukraine, which parted from Russia in 1991, has never achieved a true independent state. Just like in Russia, or even 80 years earlier in the Weimar Republic, a tribe of vultures descended upon the body of the nation.

In the early 1990s, backed by the financial power of international Jewish bankers, the vultures bought for pennies, and plainly seized, all major enterprises previously owned by the state. Including the biggest factories and entire sectors of the newly “privatized” national economy.

According to the 2001 Ukrainian census, there are 103,000 Jews in Ukraine, which is 0.2% of the total population. Out of 130 nationalities in the Ukraine, the Jewish minority numerically is behind Bulgarians (204,000), Hungarians (156,000), Romanians (151,000) and Poles (144,000). However, as one might expect, the Jewish “oligarchs” were the ones who happened to seize all positions in mass media.

Professor Vasyl Yaremenko, director of the Institute of Culturological and Ethnopolitical research at Kiev State University, released an article in 2003 entitled, “Jews in Ukraine today: reality without myths.” In it he says the following:

“Ukrainians need to know that the mass media is completely in the hands of Jews, and everything that we watch or read is the product of Jewish ideology…”

He then reviews the situation in regards to Ukrainian network television and cable broadcasters:

• “First National Television Channel UT-1” is owned by the president of the Social Democratic Party, led and dominated by chief of staff Viktor Medvedchuk.• “Inter TV” and “Studio 1+1 TV” have been Ukrainian national broadcasters since 1996, they are available in English, Ukrainian and Russian languages. They are owned by Viktor Medvedchuk and Gregory Surkis.

• “Alternativa TV”, “TET Broadcasting Company”, and “UNIAN (Ukrainian Independent Information & News Agency)” are also owned by Viktor Medvedchuk and Gregory Surkis.

• “STB TV” and “ICTV” are owned by the Viktor Pinchuk, the wealthiest man in Ukraine, with an estimated net worth of $3 billion.

• “Novyi Kanal (New Channel) TV” is owned by Viktor Pinchuk with a group of Jewish oligarchs from Russia called “Alpha Group.”

Zionists control all of Ukrainian television media!

According to Professor Yaremenko, all major newspapers are also owned by Jews:

• The publishing house of Rabinovich-Katsman owns the newspapers Stolychka, Stolichnye Novosti, Jewish Review (in Russian), Jewish Reviewer, Vek, Mig, and Zerkalo .• Jed Sandes, an American citizen and a Jew, publishes Korrespondent and Kiev-Post.

• Gregory Surkis publishes Kievskie Vedomosti and the weekly 2000.

• Jew Dmitro Gordon publishes Bulvar.

• Viktor Pinchuk publishes Facts and Commentaries.

• The Donetsk Group (Jewish-Russian oligarchs) publishes Segondnya.

Who are these “Ukrainian” oligarchs?

Jew Victor Pinchuk is the son-of-law of Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma [Kuchma was placed into office by Jew George Soros]. He is the owner of several oil, gas and energy import/export companies. He also owns the nation’s largest steel mill and a chain of banks. His group has very strong ties with other Jewish organizations in Ukraine, as well as in the U.S. and Israel. He is a member of the Ukrainian Parliament, an adviser to the president, and one of the leaders of the Labor Ukrainian Party.

Jew Vadim Rabinovich is a citizen of Israel. In 1980 he was charged with stealing state property and spent 9 months in a jail. In 1984 he was arrested and sentenced to 14 years in prison for his black market activities . He was released in 1990. In 1993 he became a representative of the Austrian company “Nordex” in Ukraine. The company received exclusive rights to sell Russian oil from president Kuchma. In 1997 Rabinovich became president of the All-Ukrainian Jewish Congress, and in 1999 he was elected head of the United Jewish Community of Ukraine. Also in 1999, Rabinovich created the Jewish Confederation of Ukraine. That same year the Associated Press estimated his wealth as $1 billion. Rabinovich owns Central Europe Media Enterprises, which controls television stations in seven East European countries.

Jew Victor Medvedchuk is Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma’s Chief of Staff. The Medvedchuk-Surkis cabal controls Ukraine’s energy sector (8 regional energy companies), oil and gas market, alcohol and sugar production, shipbuilding, and athletic organizations. He is a member of the Ukrainian Parliament, and a leader in the Social Democratic party of Ukraine (SDPU).

Jew Gregory Surkis is second in command of the SDPU. He owns a soccer team, Dynamo-Kiev, and is a president of the Professional Soccer League. He is CEO of Slavutich, a company that controls several regional energy companies (KirovogradEnergo, PoltavEnergo, etc). He too is a member of the Ukrainian Parliament.

Professor Yaremenko points out that out of the 400+ members of the Ukrainian Parliament, 136 (possibly 158) are Jews. That is more than in the Israeli Knesset. Who voted for them, asks professor Yaremenko. Who paid for costly election campaigns? — 90% of Ukrainian banks are owned by Jews.

Ukraine is the perfect example of so-called Democracy – “democracy” where the rule of a tiny, ethnic minority is disguised under the cloak of the will and rule of the majority. By controlling mass media and skillfully manipulating the opinions of the Ukrainian electorat, these “fat cats” as they’re called in Ukraine — these liars and corrupters, are the real masters in this beautiful country.

Does it surprise anyone to see the rise in “anti-Semitism” around the world, and in Ukraine in particular?

“Jews in Ukraine: Reality Without Myth” was published on Sept. 30, 2003, and was the article that prompted the Ukrainian Jewish Congress to file a lawsuit asking the court to shut down the newspaper Sel’skie Vesti, which published it. Sel’skie Vesti had a circulation of over 500,000 and was the largest in Ukraine.

On Jan. 28, a court in Kiev, Ukraine, ordered the closure of the daily newspaper on the grounds that it was publishing “hate literature,” a crime in Jewish-owned Ukraine. The newspaper was found guilty of publishing “anti-Semitic” materials, and promoting ethnic and religious hostility.

A well-known Ukrainian Jewish community leader and anti-Zionist, Eduard Hodos, has come to the defense of the newspaper and the articles’ author, Vasily Yaremenko. In the course of his speech intended for a hearing of the Appellate Court of the City of Kiev (scheduled for May 25, 2004, but delayed indefinitely for reasons unknown), the author denounces the Talmud as “monstrous” and defends Mel Gibson’s ‘The Passion of the Christ’, which has come under attack by ‘human rights advocates’ everywhere. You can read it here:
http://web.archive.org/web/20050310165024/oag.ru/views/love.html

Prior to being shut down, the newspaper published the following letters from readers, which were reprinted by Jewish organizations and used as “proof” of “anti-Semtism.”

…Today the Jewish community in Ukraine is not experiencing the rebirth of a national minority but is in the process of legalizing its dealings as an apolitical and economic structure, which is well planned, organized and financed. This so-called minority exhibits extreme aggression. It poses an elevated threat to the national security of Ukraine. As a foreign political body that practically oversees international trade, national finances, mass media and publishing, it must be placed under strict government and sate control, and must be regimented and regulated.

…90% of Ukrainian banks are run by Jewish “specialists.” In other words, Ukrainian finances are in Jewish hands. As a Ukrainian citizen and an ethnic Ukrainian, my origin forces me speak up and ask: “Is this normal?”

…In the 1930s, all Ukrainian gold that had been passed down from generation to generation ended up in Jewish wallets after the famine organized by Jews [the author earlier writes that 99% of PCIA members––Stalin’s secret police––were Jewish] and Ukrainians had to reach deeply into their pockets. However, Jews were not able to enjoy those stolen goods as German fascism changed the course of events. Today the gold of Ukrainian Jews, these gold diggers of the Ukrainian Klondike, is in banks in Switzerland.

…It is not safe to write about Jews not because the writer will automatically be accused of xenophobia, but because every Ukrainian, if not openly then secretly, is an anti-Semite ready to participate in a pogrom.

…Ukrainians must know that Ukrainian mass media is in the hands of Jews and that we absorb information and food for the soul from a Jewish ideological kitchen.

…Jewish publicists deny the fact that [Jewish people] organized the Ukrainian famine in 1933. However, eyewitnesses claim otherwise…. Not one Jewish person died from starvation in 1933.

…We are not anti-Semites. However, we believe it is dishonorable and demeaning to stay quiet when Zionists are taking over the political and economic spheres of our country. We must let people know the truth about the doings of Zionists in Ukraine.

…He told the truth about the vicious activities of Zionists in Ukraine.

…We cannot allow Zionists to destroy Ukraine.

GILAD ATZMON • Via Unz

In 1994 I enrolled in a postgraduate course in philosophy at a British University. On my first day at the University I had to complete a few routine administrative duties such as registering my name with the philosophy department and meeting my supervisors. I was also told that I had to join the student union. Being a subservient type, I walked over to the Student Union hall where I soon realized that the task was slightly more complicated than I had expected. There were a plethora of student unions to choose from: The Black Student Union, The Asian Student Association, The Socialist Students, The Gay Student Society and more. Confused, I asked for assistance. They asked where I was from. When I told them “Israel,” I was told that the “Jewish Student Union” was my home.

It was then, at the Student Union Hall, that I first encountered the identity split between Israel and the Jewish Diaspora. It would take some time before I was able to define this binary tension in philosophical or post political terms and before I understood the Jewish dilemma in terms of Nationalist/Identitarian dialectics. Two decades later, the political battle now going on in America is basically an extension of that internal Jewish debate.

Back in 1994 I didn’t see any reason to join the Jewish Student Union. I had never identified ‘as a Jew’ and Judaism meant little to me. Israel was my place of birth. My ‘identity’ as I then saw it was geographically oriented. Fortunately, I managed to complete my postgraduate course without becoming a ‘union member.’ But my thoughts about that morning at the student union hall have evolved into a few controversial books and hundreds of papers on ID politics and the current Identitarian dystopia.

In 2011 I wrote The Wandering Who? A Study of Jewish Identity Politics. The premise of the book was that if Israel defines itself as the ‘Jewish State’ then we have to dissect the meaning of the J-Word. We have to grasp how Judaism (the religion), Jews (the people) and Jewishness (the spirit, ideology and culture) relate to each other and how these terms influence Israeli politics and the activities of the Jewish Lobby around the world. Instead of studying ‘Zionism,’ an archaic term that is not relevant to most Israelis, my book focused on Jewish identifications. I did not address the problematic question of ‘who and what Jews are,’ I tried instead to find out what those who call themselves Jews identify with.

While this question is certainly germane to an understanding of Israel and the Middle East conflict, it is also crucial to an understanding of the current American dystopia. Instead of asking ‘who Americans are’ let us explore what Americans identify with.

In the post-political era, America is divided into two camps, let’s call them Americans and Identitarians. Americans see themselves primarily as American patriots. They often subscribe to a nationalist populist ideology and, like the Israelis, identify with a piece of geography. On the other hand, Identitarians are primarily liberals and progressives. They identify themselves in biological and sociological terms, and they see themselves first as LGBTQ, Latino, Black, Jewish, feminist etc. Their bond with the American nationalist ethos is at most secondary and often non-existent.

This division in America between ‘nationalism’ and ‘identitarianism’ is similar to the dichotomy I observed at the student union hall in 1994. In fact, Israel has become a prime model for American nationalists. Similarly, it is Jewish progressive ideology that inspires Identitarians globally and in America in particular. It is the pervasiveness of Jewish ideologies within both nationalist and Identitarian discourses that sustains the dominance of Jewish and Israeli political institutions in American politics.

The Israeli Lobby’s hegemony over American foreign policy and its force in advocating policies that favor Israel has been widely recognized. Numerous studies on the topic have been published, such as: The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (Prof John Mearsheimer and Prof Stephen Walt), The Power of Israel in The United State (Professor James Petras). Alison Weir’s website, If Americans Knew routinely presents a devastating chronicle of Israeli intervention in American politics. The Washington Report on the Middle East Affairs has been producing outstanding work as well. The crucial question is, why have Americans let this happen?

My study of Jewish ID politics suggests that America isn’t just influenced by one Jewish lobby or another. The entire American political-cultural-spiritual spectrum has been transformed into a internal Jewish exchange. Most American do not see the true nature of the battle they participate in and, for the obvious reasons, their media and their academics do not help. It is more convenient to keep Americans in the dark.

America is rapidly moving towards a civil war. The divide isn’t only ideological or political. The split is geographical, spiritual, educational and demographical. In a Voxarticle titled, “The Midterm Elections Revealed that America is in a Cold Civil War,” Zack Beauchamp writes, “This is a country fundamentally split in two, with no real room for compromise.” Of the midterm election Beauchamp reports that “American politics is polarized not on the basis of class or even ideology, but on identity… One side open to mass immigration and changes to the country’s traditional racial hierarchy, the other is deeply hostile to it.” He correctly observes that “Republicans and Democrats see themselves as part of cultural groups that are fundamentally distinct: They consume different media and attend different churches; live in distinct kinds of places and rarely interact with people who disagree with them.”

Despite this American schism, Israel and its Lobby are somehow able to influence both sides, managing to finding pathways to the secluded corridors of both parties. Although Democrats and Republicans can no longer talk to each other, it seems that both are happy to talk to Israel and the Lobby. And it is at AIPAC’s annual conference that these political foes compete in their eagerness to appease a foreign state. This anomaly in American politics demands attention.

As a former Israeli, I had not observed the effects of the Israel/ Jewish Diaspora dilemma until I had my experience at the Student Union Hall in Britain. Israel was born with the Zionist desire to eradicate the identity of Jews as cosmopolitans. Zionism promised to bond the Jew with the soil, with a territory, with borders. Thus, it is consistent with the Zionist paradigm that Israel is notorious for its appalling treatment ofasylum seekers, immigrants and, of course, the indigenous people of the land. Israel has surrounded itself with separation walls. Israel deployed hundreds of snipers in its fight to stop the March of Return – a ‘caravan’ of Palestinian refugees who were marching towards its border. Israel has been putting into daily practice that which Trump has promised to deliver. For a Trump supporter, Israel’s politics is a wet dream. Maybe Trump should consider tweaking his motto in 2020 into ‘Let’s make America Israel.’ This would encompass building separation walls, bullying America’s neighbors, the potential to cleanseAmerica of the ‘enemy within,’ and so on. It is not surprising that in 2016 Trump beat Clinton in an Israeli absentee exit poll. The Israelis do love Trump. To them, he is a vindication of their hawkish ideological path. Although during the election Trump was castigated as a vile anti-Semite and a Hitler figure by the Jewish progressive press, once elected, Fox News was quick to point out that Trump was actually the ‘First Jewish President.’

We can see that Israel, Trump and his voters have a lot in common. They want militant anti immigration policies , they love ‘walls,’ they hate Muslims and they believe in borders. When alt right icon Richard Spencer described himself on Israeli TV as “a White Zionist” he was actually telling the truth. Israel puts into practice the ideas that Spencer and Trump can so far only entertain. But the parallels between Israel and the Trump administration’s Republican voters is just one side of the story.

In my recent book, Being in Time – A Post Political Manifesto, I point out that while the old, good Left tried to unite us by insisting that it was not important whether one was Black, a Woman, a Muslim, a Jew or Gay; in the class war, we were all united against capitalism. It was the new Left that taught us to speak ‘as a’: as a Jew, as a Gay, as a Black and so on. Instead of being one people united in the struggle for justice and equality, within the post political realm we are pulled into endless identity battles.

Seemingly, this Identitarian revolution has been inspired by a few Jewish ideological and philosophical schools including, most importantly, the Frankfurt School. Truth must be said, when it comes to ID politics, Diaspora Jewish ideologists are often slightly more advanced than others, not because Jews are more clever than anyone else but simply because Jews have engaged in identity politics far longer than anyone else. While Gay identity politics is about four decades old and Feminism is maybe a century old, Jewish identity politics started in Babylon two and a half millennia ago. In fact, Judaism can be realised as an exilic Identitarian project. It deliberately and carefully sustains Jewish cultural, spiritual and physical segregation. Although Jews often drop their religion and dispose of God, many cling to Jewishness. For one reason or another, Jews often choose to operate within Jews- only political cells such as Jewish Voice for Peace, Jewish Voice for Labour and so on. These Jewish bodies tend to preach inclusiveness while practicing exclusivity.

So it is hardly surprising that Jewish Identitarian philosophy and Jewish Identitarian success provides the model that inspires most, if not all, Identitarian politics within the New Left milieu in general and the current Democratic Party in particular. This isn’t the place to discuss at length or in depth the reasons behind Jewish identitarian success, however, it should be mentioned that while most Identitarians are taught to celebrate victimhood, to blame others for their misfortune, Jewish Identitarianism has a subtle dynamic balance between victimhood and entitlement.

Naturally, Jewish ideologists are at the helm of the Identitarian revolution. Maybe more well known is the fact that a chief funder of that revolution is financier George Soros and his Open Society Institute. Soros may genuinely believe in the Identitarian future: It is cosmopolitan, it is global, it defies borders and states but far more significantly, it also serves to divert attention from Wall Street and capitalist crimes: as long as Identitarians fight each other, no one bothers to fight Wall Street, Goldman Sachs and corporate tyranny. Soros didn’t invent this strategy, it has long been called ‘divide and conquer.’

The abovesheds light on the depth of influence of Jewish politics in America. While Israel is an exemplar of contemporary Republican goals, Democrats are emulating Jewish Diaspora identitarianism. The two contradictory Jewish ideologies are each well- ensconced within the two rival ideologies that are tearing America apart. The red Republican counties want America to be Israel Again. Thelarge metropolitan areas near America’s coasts have adopted the twelve tribes of Israel model – a loose Identitarian coalition threatened by Samaritans, Canaanites, Amalekites or as Hillary Clinton calls them the ‘basket of deplorables.’

The story of Jewish political strength in America doesn’t end there. A New York Jew can easily metamorphosize from an hard-core Identitarian into rabid Zionist settler and vice versa, but such a manoeuvre is not available to ordinary Americans. White nationalist Richard Spencer can not make the political shift that would turn him into a progressive or a liberal just as it is unlikely that a NY transsexual icon would find it possible to become a ‘redneck.’ While Jewish political identity is inherently elastic and can morph endlessly, the American political divide is fairly rigid. Jewish ideologists frequently change positions and camps, they shift from left to right, from Clinton to Trump (Dershowitz), they support immigration in their host counties yet oppose it in their own Jewish State, they are against rigid borders and even states in general, yet support the two state solution in Palestine (Chomsky). Gentiles are less flexible. They are expected to be coherent and consistent.

It was this manoeuvrability that made PM Netanyahu’s 2015 speech in front of a joint session of Congress a ‘success,’ although it might well have been considered a humiliation for any American with an ounce of patriotic pride. As we wellknow, Bibi can communicate easily with both Republicans and Democrats just as he cansimultaneously befriend Trump and Putin. He deploys snipers at the Gaza border with orders to kill while considerately peppering his statements with LGBTQ human rights advocacy. Not many Americans have dared to address this topic, but I believe that there are some who, by now, can see the situation clearly.

It was the Israeli in me who saw the disparity between ‘Israeli’ and ‘Jew’ at the Student Union Hall because I was raised as an Israeli patriot. I was trained to love and even die for the soil I mistakenly believed to be mine. As an Israeli, I was also trained to think tribal but speak universal, and I learned how to whine as a victim yet exercise oppression. But at a certain point in my life, around my thirties, I started to find all of it too exhausting. I wanted to simplify things. I demoted myself into an ordinary human being.

Will Israel-lobby-captured OTFI sanction Americans?

by Grant Smith Posted on August 30, 2018

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) was ordered to register as an Israeli foreign agent on November 21, 1962 when it was part of the American Zionist Council. AIPAC has never complied with the order, and the Department of Justice has never enforced it. AIPAC’s associated think tank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) was spun off from AIPAC as a survival tactic during a 1980s FBI investigation into AIPAC over economic espionage that produced America’s worst-performing bilateral trade agreement. Incredibly, decades later both organizations appeared to want to get into law enforcement and were instrumental lobbying President George W. Bush for the 2004 launch of the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence (OTFI) Treasury unit. (See Washington Institute for Near East Affairs congressional testimony in support of the creation of OTFI to be headed by Stuart Levey)

Although OTFI proclaims it is “safeguarding the financial system against illicit use and combating rogue nations, terrorist facilitators, weapons of mass destruction (WMD) proliferators, money launderers, drug kingpins, and other national security threats,” the secretive office has a special blind spot for major terrorism generators, such as tax-exempt money laundering from the United States into illegal Israeli settlements and proliferation financing and weapons technology smuggling into Israel’s clandestine nuclear weapons complex.

As AIPAC and WINEP demanded in 2003, the office as initially led by Undersecretary of Treasury Stuart Levey, who worked in unusually close coordination with the Israeli government. Levey’s Harvard thesis (PDF) was about how Israel lobbying organizations could become more effective by staying beneath the radar of public scrutiny and distancing themselves from the notoriety generated by the illicit activities of such ideological fellow travelers as the Jewish Defense League. JDL was a Department of Justice-designated terrorist organization involved in bombings and more recently had a supporter indicted for 2017 violence against a peaceful protester of AIPAC’s policy conference.

In its early years OTFI rebuffed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) attempts to obtain information about OTFI operations and the purpose of Levey’s numerous taxpayer-funded trips to Israel by citing the Bank Secrecy Act. OTFI is even more impenetrable to outside scrutiny than most Treasury offices, most particularly OTFI’s personnel records. Levey made OTFI briefers available mostly for private presentations and off-the-record Q&A sessions to a limited number of organizations well-known for having the advancement of Israel as a top organizational goal, such as WINEP and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

When Levey finally stepped down in 2011, the top job at TFI was transferred to David Cohen, who worked at the same Washington DC law firm as Levey, Miller, Cassidy, Larroca & Lewin LLP (which later merged into Baker Botts LLP). Cohen continued Levey’s practice of curtailing OTFI’s availability to any concerned public opposition. On September 12, 2012, Cohen refused to answer reporter questions about Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons, and whether sanctioning Iran, a signatory to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, over its internationally-inspected civilian nuclear program was an example of endemic double standards at OTFI. In 2015, Mondoweissobserved that the key requirement for Americans working in the top “counterterrorism” job at OTFI appeared to be being both Jewish and Zionist. Most Americans (70%) do not self-identify as Zionist. (Defined in the poll as any person who believes in the development and protection of a Jewish nation in what is now Israel.)

Cohen was succeeded by longtime OTFI employee Adam Szubin, former counsel to Stuart Levey, who was appointed to lead OTFI during the Obama administration, but never confirmed by the Senate. Szubin also visited Israel frequently on the taxpayer dime and, like Levey and Cohen before him, kept WINEP and AIPAC lobbyists well-briefed on OTFI initiatives. Szubin served as interim under secretary from January 20, 2017 until February 13, 2017. In 2017 the already narrow hiring criteria of OTFI was even further restricted. According to the news and intelligence website DEBKAfile, OTFI’s current leader Sigal Pearl Mandelker, also a dedicated Zionist, either had or still has Israeli citizenship.(PDF) Mandelker was confirmed by the Senate on June 21, 2017.

Within its own organization, Department of Justice policy has no issue with dual-nationals seeking and being granted sensitive jobs. (PDF) However, there are obvious potential conflicts of interests with an Israeli-American dual national, dedicated to the advancement of Israel, running OTFI. The progression reveals that the leadership of OTFI is being hand-picked by the Israel lobby on the basis of predicted devotion to advancing the strategic position Israel. This raises the question of how such influence negatively impacts Americans, as AIPAC and the Israel advocacy ecosystem prepare to expand the OTFI model across states and within the federal bureaucracy.

AIPAC is attempting to pass new laws and enforcement powers to target Americans found “guilty” of boycotting Israel over its endemic human rights abuses. Drafts of the “Israel Anti-Boycott Act” appear to allow secretive units such as OTFI or new units housed within the Export Import Bank to fine Americans up to $1 million and imprison them for up to 20 years for such boycott activities. Free speech rights arguments have not been much of an obstacle to such secretive extra-judicial operations. OTFI worked to successfully to imprison New Yorker Javed Iqbal for nearly six years over airing Hezbollah videos on his privately-owned cable network that Israel affinity organizations found distasteful. OTFI shut down nonprofit charities the Israel lobby opposed such as Al-Haramain, Benevolence International, Global Relief, and Kind Hearts with little due process. Because the Israel lobby’s “Israel Anti-Boycott Act” could go even further, it is particularly relevant to scrutinize OTFI as the model for taking sanctions applied mostly to disenfranchised foreigners, and turning them against American citizens residing and doing business in the U.S.

OTFI has extraordinary powers to sanction entities and individuals and enact secondary actions against entities that do business with them under broad executive orders. An examination of OTFI’s Specially Designated Nationals And Blocked Persons List (SDN) Human Readable Lists provides further evidence of Israel lobby regulatory capture. As part of its enforcement efforts, OFAC publishes the SDN list of individuals and companies it accuses of being owned or controlled by, or acting for or on behalf of, targeted countries. It also lists individuals, groups, and entities it claims are terrorists and narcotics traffickers designated under indicators that are not country-specific. Collectively, such individuals and companies are called “Specially Designated Nationals” or “SDNs.” Their assets are blocked, and banks and US persons are generally prohibited from dealing with them. Lawyers specializing in this area attest to the difficulty of removing those listed on the Treasury’s SDN list. The tipoff that the list is Israeli-approved, is the absence of well-known nuclear weapons technology traffickers for the only country in the region that actually has a clandestine nuclear weapons program – Israel.

TFI/OFAC operatives code each SDN individual or entity suspected of trafficking in nuclear weapons technology with the designator code “NPWMD” meaning “Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferators Sanctions Regulations” which cites 31 C.F.R part 544 authorities for the application of sanctions. However, Israeli film producer Arnon Milchan, who transacts millions of dollars through the US and international financial system, and his accomplice, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, are both known to the FBI and DHS as having facilitated the unlawful smuggling of hundreds of nuclear weapons triggers from the United States through a global network of front companies. Though never convicted, nothing prevents their listing on the SDN. However, neither individual nor their related business organizations or front companies used in the operation appear as sanctioned entities under the SDN.

In 2012, Belgian company Telogy International NV committed 23 violations of the Export Administration Act of 1979 (PDF) by smuggling 22 Tektronix oscilloscopes worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Oscilloscopes are critical nuclear weapons testing and production technology and export-prohibited without proper end-user licenses. OTFI’s agents never entered either Telogy or the company that acquired it, Electro Rent Corp, into the SDN database to ward off banks and others from doing business with it – because Telogy smuggled the oscilloscopes to Israel.

It appears that OTFI leadership has ordered SDN list compilers not to include any Israeli nuclear weapons traffickers on the list. In the current SDN there are multiple entries for countries not believed to have nuclear weapons programs, such as Iran and Syria. There is not a single SDN NPWMD entry for any Israeli individual or entity, despite the CIA’s having confirmed the existence of an Israeli nuclear weapons program in 1974, and that the program was fueled by material stolen from the United States in the 1960s. CIA considered Israel a proliferation threat to countries such as Taiwan (which appears a few times in the SDN) and South Africa. Indeed, there are only a handful of SDN entries for Israel at all, which mostly appear to be Russian oligarchs with Israeli passports.

AIPACs Israel Anti-Boycott Act legislation requires “enforcement actions” under some of the same authorities used by OTFI, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, 50 U.S.C. § 1701-1706, in declaring as a “US national emergency” grassroots-led boycotts of products made in illegal Israeli West Bank settlements and other Israeli products and services. These boycotts are not really US emergencies in any sense, but rather target a grassroots strategy to protest of Israel’s dismal human rights record. AIPAC considers the OTFI model of unaccountable, anonymous judges, jurors and financial executioners as an appropriate model to apply to Americans and foreigners who engage in entirely peaceful, lawful, First Amendment protected boycotts. AIPAC has lobbied for passage of the Israel Anti-Boycott Act for years even though statistically significant polling reveals that 69.1% of Americans oppose it.

One of the most cherished rights in America is the Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment to the US Constitution which provides, “in all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right…to be confronted with the witnesses against him.” However, the right only applies to criminal prosecutions, and not civil cases or other proceedings. But it is a commonplace American expectation that citizens will not be punished for accusations of wrongdoing by anonymous accusers. OTFI and SDN operate beyond such expectations.

Having already served as de facto criminal prosecutors, judges and juries, and financial access executioners of foreigners, OTFI agents may upon passage of the Israel Anti-Boycott Act turn their extrajudicial powers on fellow Americans. Until now, OTFI staff has never borne any burden of confrontation by the accused. And even Americans who disagree with OTFI’s selective interpretations of laws, based on executive orders and other authorities used to place foreigners on the SDN list, are unable to meaningfully interact with the OTFI personnel making such punitive policy decisions – unless they are an attendee of a special briefing conducted by Adam Szubin and also already fully paid-up donors or members of AIPAC or WINEP. Though courts have held that the US Constitution applies to non-citizens, if a foreigner has been unjustly placed on the SDN with no due process, he or she is presently unable to make a phone call from overseas to a known OTFI agent and informally present their case. OTFI is now clearly worth a much closer examination, because if AIPAC has its way either OTFI or an operation very much like OTFI, with anonymous extra-judicial Treasury powers, handpicked by the Israel lobby, may soon sanction American companies and individuals it secretly finds “guilty” of boycotts.

Excerpt from a 61-page legal memorandum, with 1,230 pages of exhibits filed in DC District Court on August 24, seeking full release of OTFI personnel records alongside those of other Treasury units.

Grant F. Smith is research director of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy and the plaintiff in civil action no. 17-CV-1796 seeking data to reveal “whether the depth of the Israel lobby’s capture of OTFI reaches all the way down to front-line employees.” He is the author of the 2016 book, Big Israel: How Israel’s Lobby Moves America now available as an audiobook.

Frequently attributed to Joseph Goebbels, the oft-cited big lie theory appears instead to have been Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler‘s explanation for how people came to believe that Germany lost World War I in the field — a “big lie” that Hitler attributed to Jewish influence on the press.

Hitler writes in Mein Kampf (James Murphy translation, page 134):

“All this was inspired by the principle – which is quite true in itself – that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying. These people know only too well how to use falsehood for the basest purposes.”From time immemorial. however, the Jews have known better than any others how falsehood and calumny can be exploited. Is not their very existence founded on one great lie, namely, that they are a religious community, whereas in reality they are a race? And what a race! One of the greatest thinkers that mankind has produced has branded the Jews for all time with a statement which is profoundly and exactly true. Schopenhauer called the Jew “The Great Master of Lies.” Those who do not realize the truth of that statement, or do not wish to believe it, will never be able to lend a hand in helping Truth to prevail.”

Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda, is alleged to have stated that if a lie is repeated enough times it would become widely accepted as truth. However, in a 1941 article titled “Churchill’s Lie Factory,” he wrote:

“One should not as a rule reveal one’s secrets, since one does not know if and when one may need them again. The essential English leadership secret does not depend on particular intelligence. Rather, it depends on a remarkably stupid thick-headedness. The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.”

Portions of this article were adapted from Wikipedia’s article.

By Thierry Meyssan
The confrontation which recently occurred in Lattakia may result in a complete global redistribution of the cards. There are two reasons for this, the second of which is being hidden from the Western world. First of all, it cost the lives of 15 Russian soldiers; secondly, it not only implicates Israël, but also the United Kingdom and France. This is potentially the most dangerous crisis in more than 60 years. We now have to find out whether President Trump, currently in the middle of his election campaign, is capable of supporting his Russian counterpart, in order that the United States and Russia may sanction the colonial powers as they did in 1956, during the Suez crisis.

Moscow, 20 September 2018 – the Chief of Staff for the Israëli Air Force, General Amikam Norkin, arrives in a hurry to present his version of events. Once these proofs were checked and compared with other recordings, it transpired that Israël was lying straight-faced.

On 17 September 2018, France, Israël and the United Kingdom carried out a joint operation against Syrian targets. During the brief moments of combat, a Russian reconnaissance plane was brought down by Syrian ’friendly fire’. Study of the recordings shows that an Israëli F-16 had flown hidden behind the Ilyushin Il-20 in order to confuse the Syrian Air Defences.

The destruction of a Russian military aircraft by the fault of Israël, during a joint operation by the United Kingdom, France and Israël, caused consternation in all the chancelleries. Since the start of hostilities in Syria seven years ago, if there were a ’red line’, it was that the different protagonists should never endanger Russian, US, or Israëli forces.

We are sure about very little of what actually happened, except that :
a British Tornado took off from Cyprus to land in Iraq. During the flight, it violated Syrian air space in order to scan the Syrian defences and make the allied attack possible.
less than an hour later, four Israëli F-16s and a French frigate, L’Auvergne, fired on targets in the Syrian governorate of Lattakia. The Syrian air defences protected their country by firing their S-200s against the French and Israëli missiles.
During the battle, an F-16 used a Russian Ilyushin Il-20 as a shield. The Ilyushin was flying a surveillance mission over the area, localising jihadist drone launch sites. The Syrian defences fired a missile, aiming for the thermal signal of the Israëli aircraft. Theoretically, therefore, it could have destroyed the Russian plane by mistake.

This is, however, implausible, because S-200 missiles are equipped with a reconnaissance system able to distinguish between friendly and enemy targets, which the Russian Minister for Defence successively confirmed, then denied. In any case, the Ilyushin was destroyed, without our knowing for certain how, or by whom.

The cowardice of the British and French leaders led them to censor all information concerning their responsibility in this operation. London made no comment, and Paris denied the facts. Neither the BBC, nor France-Television dared to mention the subject. For these two countries, more than ever, the reality of external politics is excluded from the democratic debate.

Immediate interpretation of the events

We do not know if the destruction of the Russian aircraft (causing the death of the 15 men on board) can be blamed on the Israëli pilot – which seems highly unlikely – on the Israëli army, or on the alliance which carried out the attack.

On the answer to this question hangs the possibility of conflict between four nuclear powers. The situation is therefore extremely serious. It has no precedent since the creation of the Russian Federation, at the end of 1991.

The British-French-Israëli aggression is the response by these three countries to the Russian-Turkish agreement signed only a few hours earlier at Sotchi. It came into play after the US refusal, at the beginning of September, to bomb Syria under false pretences, and the sending of a US delegation into the Arab world in order to express its disagreement with the British-French initiatives [1].

The Sotchi agreements were signed by Turkey under intense pressure from Russia. In Teheran, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had refused to sign the Memorandum concerning the withdrawal of the jihadist and Turkish forces in Idlib. This had not pleased President Vladimir Putin, who answered first of all by reaffirming the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Syria [2] and, furthermore, by underlining for the first time the illegitimacy, under international law, of the Turkish military presence in the country. Ten days later, a very unsettled Mr, Erdoğan accepted an invitation to Russia.

The Sotchi agreement, while distancing Turkey a little further from NATO with its energy contracts, forced Ankara de facto to withdraw from a part of the territory that it occupies, allegedly to better protect the pseudo-« rebels » gathered in the governorate of Idlib [3]. Besides this, Turkey only has one month in which to confiscate the heavy weaponry of its friends from Al-Qaïda and Daesh in the demilitarised zone [4].

This agreement was obviously unacceptable for London, Paris and Tel-Aviv :
in the end, it plans for the disappearance of the jihadists as an army, while London has been supervising, training and manipulating them for decades [5] ;
the end of the dream of a French mandate over Syria and of the creation of a new French colony in the North of the country, under the phoney name of Kurdistan (Kurdistan is legitimate only within the frontiers which were recognised by the Sèvres Conference, in 1920.) In other words, not in Iran, nor Iraq or Syria, but only in what is now known as Turkey [6]).
the end of the regional domination of Israël, faced with a stable Syria under Russian protection.

Mid-term interpretation of the events

The British-French-Israëli military alliance has not entered into action since the Suez Canal crisis in 1956. At that time, Anthony Eden, Guy Mollet and David Ben Gourion joined their forces in order to humiliate the Arab nationalists, particularly the Egyptian Gamal Abdel Nasser, and to re-establish the British and French colonial empires (« Operation Musketeer »).

This is exactly what happened with this new attack : as was confirmed by the Secretary General of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, none of the targets under attack were linked in any way to Iran or Hezbollah. This British-French-Israëli action had nothing to do with the international struggle against the jihadists in general and Daesh in particular. It also had no connection with the overthrow of the Syrian Arab Republic or its President, Bachar el-Assad. Its main objective was to kill military scientists, in particular the rocket specialists from the Institute of Technical Industries in Lattakia.

This is therefore the resumption and continuation of the policy of targeted assassinations waged by Israël for the last twenty years, successively against the Iraqi, Iranian, and now Syrian scientists. It is one of the pillars of colonial policy : to prevent the submitted populations from attaining the same level of education as their masters. In former times, the Westerners forbade their slaves from learning to read under pain of death. Today, they eliminate their scientists.This policy was relaunched with the British-French-US bombing of 14 April 2018, in which the only target destroyed was the Scientific Research Centre in Barzeh [7], then with the breakdown of the 5+1 agreement with Iran (JCPoA) which forced the country to close its nuclear physics faculties (May 8, 2018).

It was a joint initiative : the jihadists destroy the past, the Westerners destroy the future.

Long-term interpretation of the events

Since the deployment of Russian troops in Syria, on 13 September 2015, to help Syria in its fight against the terrorists, the allies of the United States have understood the impossibility of carrying out the US plan without risking a world war. With the arrival of Donald Trump at the White House, they have progressively questioned their war objectives, abandoned the plans of the « Friends of Syria » and fallen back on their respective historical strategies [8].

It is this logic that led them to reform the alliance which provoked the Suez crisis, and it is this same logic which pushed Germany to distance itself from them.

At the beginning of the First World War, the British, French and Russian empires decided on the partition of the world which they would implement as soon as they had gained victory. The treaty was negotiated by Mark Sykes, Georges Picot and Sergueï Sazonov. During the course of the World War, however, the Tsar was overthrown by the Bolcheviks, which meant that the areas of the world originally reserved for the Russian empire were once again up for grabs. Finally, at the end of the World War, only the part of the plan relative to the Middle East was applied, under the name of the « Sykes-Picot » agreement.

The return of Russia to the international game obviously brings into question the British-French colonial sharing of the Middle East. The foreseeable clash has just occurred, either accidentally or deliberately, with the destruction of the Ilyushin Il-20 during the joint British-French-Israëli military operation.

How to react

The bewilderment of the international community in the face of this brutal awakening of a century-old conflict can be measured by the Twitter silence from the White House.

During the Suez crisis, the Israëli troops engaged were twice as numerous as all the British and French forces together. The total number of coalition forces was about 250,000 men. This was therefore a very large-scale operation compared to that of Lattakia. But it remains true that the two sequences work from the same diplomatic logic, and may lead to the same developments.

During the Suez crisis, in the middle of the Cold War, the Soviet Union threatened the United Kingdom, France, and Israël with a nuclear riposte if they refused to withdraw from Egypt. At first, NATO supported the Europeans in threatening Moscow with a World War, before changing its mind. In the middle of the Cold War, therefore, the United States temporarily supported the USSR in order to halt the European folly.

For Washington, allowing the Europeans to pursue their plans was the equivalent of pushing all the Arab nations into the arms of the Soviets. Apart from that, it simply was not feasible to accept the French-British intervention at the same time as they were denouncing the repression of the Hungarian revolution by the Warsaw Pact.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Vice-President Richard Nixon launched a monetary attack against the pound sterling, sent their naval and airborne forces to interfere with the British-French-Israëli complex, and forbade the use of French military material financed by US funds.

International peace was preserved thanks to certain third parties such as the Secretary General of the UNO, Dag Hammarskjöld (who was assassinated three years later, and was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace Prize); the Canadian Minister for Foreign Affairs Lester B. Pearson (who also received the Nobel Peace Prize); and the leader of the non-aligned nations and Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru.

The Suez crisis profoundly upset not only international political life, but also the national reality of the United Kingdom, France and Israël.
Circumventing the European vetos at the Security Council, the UNO General Assembly called for the withdrawal of the invaders and created the first United Nations intervention force.
In the United Kingdom, the House of Commons demanded the end of colonial politics to the profit of the promotion of the economic interests of London via the Commonwealth.
In France, the Communists, the Gaullists and the Poujadists (including Jean-Marie Le Pen) united against the Centrists and the Socialists; a configuration that has never been seen since. Six years later, President De Gaulle considered that by recognising the independence of Algeria, he would put an end to military collaboration with the colonial state of Israël and restore the policy of friendship and collaboration with the Arab peoples, which had always characterised France, apart from its colonial period [9].

The position of the Western powers concerning the aggression on Lattakia is all the more difficult because, in violation of their agreement with Russia, the Israëlis only informed Moscow of their operation a long time after it had begun, and only one minute before they began firing. As for the Pentagon, they affirmed that they had not been warned at all. But let us not forget that the Israëli-Russian mutual non-aggression pact in Syria only exists because Israël is the US arsenal for the Middle East, housing (with Italy) the stocks of US weaponry for the entire region. If Israël truly did not inform the Pentagon of its actions in advance, then it can not benefit from US protection, and consequently the mutual non-aggression pact may be called into question by Russia.

The Russian response depends on the position of the White House, which we do not know for the moment. It must be guided by a desire to lessen tension, if possible, and also to maintain dissuasion by punishing the guilty party or parties as soon as the Kremlin names them. It is not necessary for Russia to make this sanction public as long as the chancelleries concerned are informed.

The Russian response

Russia has the choice of seeing in the destruction of their aircraft nothing more than a mistake by an Israeli pilot, or by the Israëli army, or again, by all three of the states implicated (the United Kingdom, France and Israël). The Russian Minister for Defence, Sergueï Choïgou, telephoned his Israëli counterpart, Avigdor Lieberman to inform him that he held Israël responsible for the accident, and reserved the right to riposte. A little later, President Putin declared « This is a series of tragic events, because our plane was not shot down by an Israëli aircraft ». He was careful to distinguish this situation from that of the deliberate destruction of a Sukhoï 24-M by Turkish fighters in November 2015. We are therefore heading towards the public designation of Israël as the sole responsible and a secret sanction against the three states involved.

The Israëli chargé d’affaires in Moscow, Keren Cohen Gat, was summoned by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, while in a knee-jerk reaction, Israëli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attempted to shovel the responsibility for the accident onto Iran. An Israëli delegation, led by the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, General Amikam Norkin, rushed off to Moscow with unprecedented haste. They contested the claims of the Russian Minister for Defence, affirmed that Israël was innocent, and that all the blame belonged to the negligence of the Syrians.

President Donald Trump, a great admirer of Richard Nixon’s foreign policy, was thus provided with the perfect occasion to finish with the British-French-Israëli support for the US deep state. However, in the middle of his election campaign, he can not afford to give the impression of supporting the Russian rival while he beats up his allies. He is therefore seeking a way of presenting his internal public with this major change of direction. From this perspective, during an interview with Hill TV, he condemned the US engagement in the Greater Middle East which was decided by his predecessor George Bush Jr after the attacks of 11 September 2001.

On 23 September, the spokesman for the Russian Ministry of Defence, General Igor Konashenkov, presented the synthesis of Russian intelligence and the information transmitted by Syria and Israël.
He accused the Hebrew state of having deliberately violated the mutual non-aggression agreement of 2015 by not giving Russia advance notice of its attack and by lying about its targets.
He accused it of having endangered civilian flights present in this zone of the Mediterranean, and of being responsible for the destruction of the Ilyuchin Il-20.
He denounced its non-assistance to the Russian soldiers when their plane stalled.
He also accused General Amikam Norkin of lying by pretending that the Israëli jets had already returned to Israël when the Russian plane stalled and crashed.
Finally, he deflected the accusations of amateurism laid at the door of the Syrian Anti-Air Defence System.

However, he abstained from publicly blaming the United Kingdom and France, who were nonetheless just as concerned by his remarks against Israël.

In case the White House should find an acceptable narrative of the facts for its electors, Russia could forbid the United Kingdom, France and Israël from making any intrusion into the maritime, terrestrial and aerial space of Syria without the authorisation of Damascus. London and Paris would have to cease their threats of bombing under whatever pretext at all (false chemical weapons) and withdraw their special forces. This measure would be valid for all protagonists in general, except for the United States and, in Idlib, for Turkey.

Thierry Meyssan

Translation
Pete Kimberley

[1] “Who wants to relaunch the war in Syria?”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Pete Kimberley, Al-Watan (Syria) , Voltaire Network, 4 September 2018.

[2] “Joint Statement by Iran, Russia and Turkey dealing with Syria”, Voltaire Network, 7 September 2018.

[3] “The battle of Idleb is pushed back”, Translation Anoosha Boralessa, Voltaire Network, 22 September 2018.

[4] “Memorandum on Stabilization of the Situation in the Idlib De-escalation Area”, Voltaire Network, 17 September 2018.

[5] See the second part of Right Before our Eyes. From 9/11 to Donald Trump, Thierry Meyssan, Soon publish by Progressive Press.

[6] “The Kurdistan projects”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Pete Kimberley, Voltaire Network, 5 September 2016.

[7] “The fiasco of the bombing raid on Syria”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Pete Kimberley, Voltaire Network, 24 April 2018.

[8] “Finding a way out of the war against Syria”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Pete Kimberley, Voltaire Network, 11 September 2018.

[9] « Conférence de presse de Charles De Gaulle, extrait relatif à Israël », Réseau Voltaire, 27 novembre 1967.

Like President Reagan, President Trump seems to be anti-Iranian. But perhaps this is only in appearance. While the former drew up a secret alliance with Imam Khomeiny, the latter may be dealing with ex-President Ahmadinejad in the same way. This is Thierry Meyssan’s heterodox theory.
Mike Pompeo announces the creation of the « Iran Action Group »

On 16 August 2018, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced the creation of the « Iran Action Group » tasked with coordinating US policies after their withdrawal from the 5+1 nuclear agreement (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) [1].

This announcement was made as President Trump decided to postpone sine die the implementation of his plan for the Middle East (The Deal of the Century). But nothing can change in Palestine without the support of Iran.

Let’s remember, by the way, that Barack Obama’s JCPoA Treaty was not conceived only to guarantee that Iran is not making nuclear weapons. This was only the pretext. Its true aim was to prevent Iran from having access to high-level scientists and developing state of the art techniques [2]. Incidentally, the agreement forced Iran to close several faculties.

According to the US Democratic opposition, the Trump administration is reprising the neo-conservative policy of régime change, as indicated by the choice of the date of the announcement – the 65th anniversary of the Anglo -US coup d’etat against Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. However, although « Operation Ajax » of 1953 did indeed inspire the neo-conservatives, it occurred years before their movement was born, and has no connection with them. Besides which, the neo-conservatives served not only the Republican Party, but also the Democrats.

During his electoral campaign and for his first few days in the White House, Donald Trump continually stigmatised the globalist thinking of the neo-conservatives, and swore that the United States would no longer seek to change the régimes of foreign countries by force. As for the Secretary of State, he claimed that the coincidence of dates was simply fortuitous.

The people known as « neo-conservatives » form a group of Trotskyist intellectuals (thus opposed to the concept of nation-states), militants of Social Democrats USA, which worked with the CIA and MI6 to fight the Soviet Union. They were associated with Ronald Reagan’s power structure, then followed through all the US political mutations, remaining in power under Bush Senior, Clinton, Bush Junior and Obama. Today they conserve the control of a common Intelligence agency connected with the « Five Eyes » (Australia, Canada, New-Zealand, UK, USA) – the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) [3]. Partisans of the « World Revolution », they have popularised the idea of « democratising » régimes by way of « Colour Revolutions », or directly by means of war.

In 2006, they created the Iran Syria Policy and Operations Group within the Bush Junior administration. It was directed by Elizabeth Cheney, the daughter of Vice-President Dick Cheney. At first, they were housed with the Secretariat of Defense, then transferred to the Vice-President’s offices. The group had five sections.
The transfer of weapons to Iran and Syria from Bahreïn, the United Arab Emirates and Oman ;
The support for the Trotskyists and their allies, in Iran (the Peoples’ Mujaheddin) and Syria (Riad al-Türk, Georges Sabra and Michel Kilo) ;
The surveillance of Iranian and Syrian bank networks ;
The infiltration of pro-Iranian and pro-Syrian groups in the « Greater Middle East » ;
The penetration of the medias in the region in order to broadcast US propaganda.

In 2007, this group was officially disbanded. In reality, it was absorbed by an even more secret structure tasked with the strategy for global democracy (Global Democracy Strategy). This unit, under the command of neo-conservative Elliott Abrams (who was involved in the « Iran-Contras affair »), and James Jeffrey, spread this sort of work to other regions of the world.

It is this Group which supervised the planning for the war against Syria.

When the new President had a long meeting with Abrams at the White House, the US Press, which is violently anti-Trump, presented him as the first possible Secretary of State for the Trump administration. It obviously came to nothing.

However, the fact that ambassador James Jeffrey has just been nominated as a special representative for Syria makes the accusation that the Trump administration was attempting to resuscitate this strategy more credible.

Special representative for Syria, James Jeffrey, takes the oath before Mike Pompeo

Jeffrey is a career « diplomat ». He organised the application of the Dayton agreements in Bosnia-Herzegovina. He was on post in Kuwaït during the Iraqi invasion. In 2004, under the orders of John Negroponte, he supervised the transition from the Coalition Provisional Authority (which was a private company [4]) to the post-Saddam Hussein Iraqi government. Then he joined Condolleezza Rice’s cabinet in Washington, and participated in the Coalition Provisional Authority. He was one of the theorists for US military redeployment in Iraq (the Surge), implemented by General Petraeus. He was also the assistant of National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley during the war in Georgia, then Bush Junior’s ambassador in Turkey and Obama’s ambassador in Iraq.

If we look a little closer, we may note that his entire career since the collapse of the USSR has been centred around Iran, but not necessarily in opposition to it. For example, during the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Iran fought alongside Saudi Arabia under the orders of the Pentagon. On the other hand, in Iraq, Jeffrey opposed the influence of Teheran. But when Georgia attacked South Ossetia and Abkhasia, he did not defend President Saakachvili, since he knew that he had rented two airports to Israël to facilitate an attack on Iran.

Brian Hook

Mike Pompeo named Brian Hook as the head of the Iran Action Group. He is an interventionist who was the assistant for Condoleezza Rice, working with international organisations. Until now, he was tasked with elaborating strategies for the State Department.

According to Pompeo, the aim of this new group is not to change the régime, but to force Iran to change its politics. This strategy appears while the Islamic Republic is navigating a major economic and political crisis. While the clergy (doubly represented by the Cheikh President and by the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution) is clinging to power, there are demonstrations against it all over the country. Contrary to the image we were presented in the West, Ayatollah Khomeiny’s revolution was not clerical, but anti-imperialist. The protests can therefore either lead to a change of the régime, or to the continuation of the Khomeinist Revolution, but without the clergy. It is this second option which is represented by ex-President Ahmadinejad (today under house arrest) and his ex-Vice-Ppresident Baghaie (imprisoned for 15 years and held incommunicado).

On 21 May last, before the Heritage Foundation, Mike Pompeo presented his 12 objectives for Iran [5]. At first glance, this seemed to be a long list of demands which are impossible to satisfy. However, when we look closer, points 1 to 3 relative to the nuclear question do not go as far as the JCPoA. Point 4 concerning ballistic missiles is unacceptable. Points 5 to 12 aim to convince Iran to give up the idea of exporting its revolution by force of arms.

On 15 August, in other words, on the day before Pompeo’s announcement, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, recognised that he had been in error when he allowed Cheikh Hassan Rohani’s team to negotiate the JCPoA agreement with the Obama administration [6]. Note that the Supreme Leader had authorised these negotiations before Rohani’s election, and that he – and the eviction of Ahmadinejad’s movement – had been part of the preparatory discussions.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who makes a distinction between the policies of Presidents Obama and Trump, wrote to the new President just after his election [7]. He demonstrated that he shared Donald Trump’s analysis of the Obama-Clinton global system and its painful consequences for the rest of the world and also for the citizens of the United States.

When the demonstrations began in December 2017, the Rohani government accused Ahmadinejad of being responsible. In March 2018, the ex-President clinched his break with the Supreme Leader by revealing that Khamenei’s office had misappropriated 80 billion rials belonging to humanitarian and religious foundations [8]. Two weeks before Pompeo’s announcement, although he was under house arrest, he called for the resignation of President Rohani [9].

Everything therefore points to the idea that although the Obama administration supported Rohani, Trump’s administration supports Ahmadinejad’s party. Just as when President Carter and his advisor Brzeziński launched «Operation Eagle Claw » against the Revolution, while President Reagan supported Imam Khomeiny (October Surprise).

In other words, the White House could be quite comfortable with a return to power of Ahmadinejad’s party, on the condition that Iran agrees to export its Revolution only by the debate of ideas.

Thierry Meyssan

Translation
Pete Kimberley

The author lived in Iran for six months. He advised President Ahmadinejad during his speech before the UNO in 2010.

[1] “Remarks on the Creation of the Iran Action Group”, by Michael R. Pompeo; “Briefing on the Creation of the Iran Action Group”, by Brian Hooks, State Department, August 16, 2018.
[2] “Who’s afraid of Iran’s civilian nuclear programme?”, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network, 27 July 2010.
[3] “The networks of “democratic” interference”, “NED, the Legal Window of the CIA”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Anoosha Boralessa, Оdnako (Russia) , Voltaire Network, 22 January 2004 and 16 August 2016.
[4] “Who Rules Iraq?”, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network, 13 May 2004.
[5] “Mike Pompeo at The Heritage Foundation”, by Mike Pompeo, Voltaire Network, 21 May 2018.
[6] “The Supreme Leader of the Iranian Revolution Rectifies his Views”, Voltaire Network, 18 August 2018.
[7] “Letter by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Donald Trump”, by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Voltaire Network, 26 February 2017.
[8] “Ahmadinejad accuses Ayatollah Khamenei of embezzling funds”, Translation Anoosha Boralessa, Voltaire Network, 24 March 2018.
[9] “Iran: Former President Ahmadineyad exhorts President Rohani to resign”, Translation Anoosha Boralessa, Voltaire Network, 10 August 2018.

It only makes sense when you look at what their religion says. They see themselves as “missionaries to the gentiles”. Jews are colonizers of Whites.

Just as Whites colonized the primitive races with the intention of spreading Christianity internationally; Jews colonized Whites by exporting their Christianity to Europe and replacing all the gentiles Gods with their own- a prophecy laid out in their religious texts.

Jews believe their actions influence the divine. They believe they must destroy the gentiles in order to create a gentile free world, allowing Jews to inherit the world.

It is pretty simple. Dont go complicating it with made up notions about Jews having a minority complex.

by Andrew Joyce, Ph.D.

“Under the pretext of recording fables and current reports about the Jews, he [Manetho] took the liberty of introducing some incredible tales, wishing to represent us as…condemned to banishment from Egypt.”
Flavius Josephus, Against Apion

I’ve been intrigued by the story of the Israelite Exodus from Egypt for more than a decade. More than any of its close rivals, including the tale of Haman in the Book of Esther, the Exodus looms large as an early and extremely influential psychological landmark in the lachrymose and highly dubious pseudo-history of the Jewish people. Most obviously, the putative liberation from Egypt is commemorated by Judaism every year, in the form of the Pesach, or Passover festival. Indeed, this festival is one of the most important features of the Jewish religious calendar. Historian Paul Johnson remarks that Exodus “became an overwhelming memory” and “gradually replaced the creation itself as the central, determining event in Jewish history.”[1]

Exodus has a power that exists independently from the trappings of religious myth, acting through the centuries as a defining narrative of victimhood, group vindication, and self-validation. Jews living under the Tsar produced endless Yiddish plays and satires containing barely concealed allusions to the Tsar as the latest incarnation of Pharaoh.[2] Exodus is a foundation upon which Jewish identity, as well as Jewish religiosity, is built, and for this reason it has greatly preoccupied even the most atheistic of Jews, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud among them. Moses, as a subconscious archetype, squats in the shadows of the Jewish psyche.

The early reception of Exodus by non-Jews also plays an important role in the Jewish worldview, in the sense that the “virus” of “anti-Semitism” is said to have originated in response to it. In this regard, there is an almost universal consensus among Jewish intellectuals that the earliest origins of “anti-Semitism” can be traced to the writings of an Egyptian priest allegedly offended by the account of the Israelite escape from Pharaoh. The theory relates specifically to a history of Egypt, the Aegyptiaca, written by an Egyptian priest named Manetho around the third century BC. Although the Aegyptiaca is lost to us, we are able to piece together much of its contents based on subsequent rebuttals by later Jewish writers such as Flavius Josephus, and also references to the text by several Greek and Greek-Egyptian intellectuals.

In summary, Manetho reported that centuries earlier a foreign population had entered Egypt’s eastern border via “infiltration of the Delta.” This foreign population subsequently rose in power within Egypt, becoming a burden and a pestilence to the natives. At some point, the foreign population developed a serious disease of the skin, and the Egyptians were finally motivated to expel the invaders, who later relocated to Jerusalem.

Manetho’s narrative certainly provoked some of the earliest examples of Jewish apologia. His account filtered through the ages and was taken up by the Hellenized Egyptian Apion the Alexandrian (30–20 BC – c. AD 45–48), in turn provoking a polemical text by Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (AD 37 – c. AD 100) titled simply Against Apion. In this text, Josephus remarked dismissively that “Under the pretext of recording fables and current reports about the Jews, he [Manetho] took the liberty of introducing some incredible tales, wishing to represent us as…condemned to banishment from Egypt.” It is interesting that Josephus was most concerned with rejecting the accusation that the Jews had a skin affliction, and was quite prepared to accept that Egyptian hostility was based on “the original grievance of the domination of our [Jewish] ancestors over their country.”

Today, historians are almost unanimous that Manetho was a malicious originator of anti-Jewish libels. Paul Johnson’s philo-Semitic A History of the Jews is a good example in this respect, though his treatment of ancient Jewish history is full of contradictions. For example, Johnson acknowledges that proto-Jewish populations were highly problematic for Egyptian authorities. Referencing the Amarna letters (dated to 1389–1358 BC), Johnson concedes that ancient Egyptian accounts referred to a Hebrew called Labaya or Lion Man who “caused great difficulties for the Egyptian authorities and their allies…[H]e was hard to control, a nuisance. He eventually met a violent death in the reign of Pharaoh Akhenaten.”[3]

Johnson further adds that only part of the Hebrew nation ever lived in Egypt, “a fifth column within the land” that played a crucial part in the broader geo-political strategies of the group.[4] Even setting aside the supernatural elements inherent in the Exodus tale, Johnson also appears to concede the unlikelihood of a Jewish-instigated departure since it would represent “a successful revolt and escape of a slave-people, the only one recorded in antiquity.”[5] Despite these acknowledgements, Johnson describes Manetho’s account of the expulsion of proto-Jewish infiltrators out of Egypt and into Jerusalem as a “fundamental matrix of anti-Semitism, the Ur-libel.”[6]

Jewish academic activist Robert Wistrich, now deceased, described Manetho as “malevolent” and “one of the first anti-Semitic polemicists of Antiquity.”[7] Kenneth Roseman argues that Manetho “disseminated virulently anti-Semitic propaganda.”[8] Ernest Abel called the Egyptian priest “the father of anti-Semitic literature.”[9] A special 1985 edition of Jewish Social Studies labelled Manetho “the first literary exponent of the anti-Jewish trend in Graeco-Roman Egypt and as the man who was instrumental in creating, or at least in popularizing, some of the oft-recurring anti-Semitic motifs.”[10]

In order to explain why Manetho may have constructed his “Ur-libel,’ Wistrich referred to a wider atmosphere in Alexandria in which Jews were in “socio-political competition with the Hellenized Egyptians.”[11] In the midst of this competition, Jews had come to be seen as exclusivist, unpatriotic, possessing dual loyalties, and possessing a “position of privilege, wealth, and power.”[12]

These accusations were given their most enduring articulation by leading intellectuals of the day, including Apion, Lysimachus, and Chaeroman, who acted as one of Nero’s instructors.[13] Antipathy towards Jews was so rife that even after the conquest of Judea, both Titus and Vespasian would refuse to adopt the honorary title “Judaicus.”

Manetho was thus, by modern academic consensus, merely the first to register the first grumblings of a jealous, intolerant non-Jewish civilization.

While non-Jewish grievances during this period are viewed by academic gatekeepers with great scepticism and alarm, Jewish self-aggrandizement from the same era is accepted without contest. Just as Manetho is said to have borrowed from Exodus for his Aegyptiaca, so every Hellenistic writer was alleged to have merely grafted ideas from an intellectually superior Judaism. On the contrary, in my own summation, Jews didn’t interact with Greek culture in Alexandria in any manner other than the co-option of its achievements.

This is of course the timeless phenomenon of Jewish cultural chauvinism, built on the re-writing of history. Academic activist Simon Schama writes that, in Alexandria, many Jewish writers and philosophers argued that Judaism “was the ancient root and Hellenism the young tree. Zeus was just a paganized version of the Almighty YHWH, and Moses was the ultimate moral legislator from whom all ethical law-giving had originally sprung. The Jewish Aristobulus of Paneas, writing in the mid-second century BC, wanted his readers to believe that Plato had painstakingly studied the Torah and that Pythagoras owed his theorem to ancient Jewish learning.”[14] This is the ancient root of the familiar drive to perpetuate the idea of “Jewish genius,” a theme now well-documented here at TOO (e.g., my “Pariah to Messiah: The Engineered Apotheosis of Baruch Spinoza” for a discussion of how Jewish intellectuals have rewritten the history of the Enlightenment to be the result of Jewish influence).

Although the narratives coterminous with the Exodus fable remain bloated and inert within the academic corpus, I wish to draw the attention of readers to a quite remarkable book published in 2006. Largely ignored by the gatekeepers of academia, Russell Gmirkin’s Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus: Hellenistic Histories and the Date of the Pentateuch represents nothing less than a multi-front assault on both the Jewish interpretation of Manetho and the account of Exodus itself. Gmirkin’s study offers compelling evidence that Manetho did not react to Exodus, but rather that Exodus was written by Jewish intellectuals in Alexandria in reaction to Manetho, whose account was both older and more accurate. Or, as the author puts it, rather than Manetho attacking the Jews, “the borrowing and polemics took place in the opposite direction; the Penateuch polemicized against the Egyptian expulsion stories in Manetho.”[15] The implication of Gmirkin’s thesis is that, by writing Exodus, a text given later cultural protection and greater credence and authority by the spread of Christianity, Jews essentially captured history, re-writing it in a manner that salved Jewish pride.

Although what we understand as the Jewish group evolutionary strategy, and the cultural codes underpinning it, was certainly extant prior to the third century BC, Gmirkin argues that the “Hebrew Pentateuch was composed in its entirety about 273 BC by 72 Jewish scholars at Alexandria.”[16]Combining archaeological discoveries with meticulous textual analysis, Gmirkin demonstrates a heavy literary dependence of Genesis on Berossus’s Babyloniaca (278 BC) and Exodus on Manetho’s Aegyptiaca (ca. 285–280 BC), as well as a general reliance of Exodus on literary sources available at Alexandria’s Great Library. Contrary to allegations that Manetho engaged in polemics against the Jews as a response to Exodus, Gmirkin points out that his narrative does not mention the Jews by name, referring instead to a tribe of mixed ethnic origin known as the Hyksos (Egyptian for ‘rulers of foreign countries’). Furthermore, Manetho’s account “displays no awareness of the biblical account,” and “can be demonstrated to have drawn exclusively on native Egyptian sources.”[17]

Substantial elements of Exodus appear to have been plagiarized or corrupted from the Aegyptiaca. Gmirkin writes that:

The Exodus story, meanwhile, shows considerable knowledge of Manetho’s accounts regarding Hyksos and expelled Egyptians, showing systematic agreement with Manetho in all details favorable or neutral to the Jews but containing polemics against precisely those points in Manetho that reflected unfavorably on the Jews.[18]

Gmirkin highlights crucial facts which bring one to wonder just how the “Manetho as anti-Semite” myth came to dominate for so long, even taking into consideration that the march of Christianity protected Exodus from criticism for centuries. Most striking is the fact that “Manetho predated the Septuagint, the first Greek translation of Jewish writings. This chronological consideration alone excludes possible influence of the Jewish Exodus story on Manetho’s account of the Hyksos.”[19] Explicit knowledge of Jews in Manetho is “really quite limited.”[20] The real linkage between the Jews of Alexandria and Manetho’s account appears to have been a number of now obscure “Jewish traditions equating the Hyksos with the Jews.”[21]

Expressed more simply, Jews were offended indirectly by Manetho because he presented a negative portrayal of the Hyksos, whom Jews had, by the third century BC, come to regard in some respects as quasi-ancestral.

While Manetho’s account “had nothing to do with the Jews and was not dependent on the Pentateuchal tradition,” it did indeed advance a negative account of the Hyksos in Egypt.[22] Utilizing ancient king lists, the life of the last Pharaoh Nectanebo II and the older Aegyptiaca of Hecataeus of Abdera, Manetho described the Hyksos as “invaders of obscure race” who had brought misfortune and plagues in their wake following their infiltration of the Delta. [23] Modern archaeology has been able to determine that the Hyksos were a hybrid people combining West Semitic (Canaanite), Indo-Aryan, and West Asiatic lineages. Regardless of whether the Jews of Alexandria had significant genetic links to the Hyksos, we do know that the latter were expelled from Egypt twice and later settled “in Jerusalem and geographical Judea.”[24] Perhaps even more important is the fact that for over two thousand years Jews have taken Manetho’s account to be a direct insult, evidence, if nothing else, of their own belief in some form of connection to the Hyksos.

In relation to Manetho, the composers of Exodus employed “a systematic, consistent, predictable pattern in the points of similarity and violent contradiction.”[25] Both accounts feature Jews/Hyksos as foreigners in Egypt who are in some fashion compelled to leave by authorities or circumstances. Both accounts locate the action at the eastern border of Egypt. Both reference the demographic growth and swelling influence of foreigners in Egypt, as well as the contemporaneous presence of plagues. Gmirkin explains these similarities by pointing out that “the authors of the Jewish Exodus story chose their battles carefully, accepting the basic framework of Manetho’s account, accepting whatever details were deemed harmless, but rising to the defense of the Jews on every point of honor.”[26] Generally speaking, “the Pentateuch accepted as much of Manetho’s account as possible, due to the authority and reputation of Manetho.”[27] Where the Jewish writers of the biblical account needed to flesh out their version with references to Egyptian history, they appear to have repeated errors already present in Manetho, specifically in relation to the latter’s misreading of sections of the ancient king lists and chronicles.[28]

Although successive generations of Jewish intellectuals have taken issue with “anti-Semitic” ancient Egyptian claims that the foreigners suffered some form of skin affliction, and were in part exiled because of it, Exodus and other books in the Pentateuch display obvious attempts to parry such inferences. In Exodus (4:6–7) Moses is able to turn his hand leprous and heal it at will as a magical sign to Pharaoh. In Numbers (12:10) there is the strange story of Miriam’s brief leprosy, imposed by the Hebrew god as a punishment for rebellion. Both Leviticus and Numbers contain many prominent laws dealing with leprosy. Most damning of all is perhaps Deuteronomy (28:60), in which the Hebrew god warns the Jews that if they ever apostatized he would “bring on them again the diseases of Egypt.” There is thus clear evidence that the composers of Exodus and the Pentateuch adopted or at least acknowledged earlier accounts of the Hyksos in Egypt in which that foreign tribe had suffered some form of skin affliction or disease during the sojourn.

One might ask what relevance such ancient history has to the present. By way of answer I refer to the remarks made at the outset of this essay. Exodus remains a pivotal text in the Jewish mental landscape, shaping ideas about identity, victimhood, and validation. Its early reception has also come to represent, in the Jewish mind, the origins of “anti-Semitism” and the plagiarism of a putative Jewish genius. Because of the influence of Christianity in retaining and reinforcing the Pentateuch, and even extending it somewhat into the Western psyche, the story of the Exodus has been undeservedly preserved under a kind of cultural permafrost. We have for the most part lost touch with the fact that it was at one point in time merely one tribal repudiation of an overwhelming consensus. Historian Gohei Hata has argued that by the time of Josephus at least seven major Greek or Greek-Egyptian writers and intellectuals had published accounts asserting that Jews had some distant connection to Egypt, that they had been banished, that they had suffered from an affliction of the skin, and that Moses himself was an unstable Egyptian apostate.[29]

While our people may recall none of these chroniclers, they are extremely familiar with the tales of oppressed Jews fed to them by their churches, and by a Hollywood that continues to produce both adult and children’s movies concerning a “heroic” Moses stripped of the murderous, psychopathic qualities that drench the pages of the Pentateuch. Imagine if they were instead confronted with the fact that the tale of Moses familiar to them is even more distant to reality than they could imagine, concealing a much more sinister history in Egypt, and revealing instead the psychotic and fevered imaginings of a cabal of Alexandrian rabbis.

Even if Moses never existed other than as a kind of Golem squatting in the psychological recesses of the intellectuals who conceived him, he still retains a kind of “reality.” And in this regard we might consider the comments of Christian Bale, the Welsh actor chosen to play Moses in the 2014 film Exodus: Gods and Kings. Asked about the character he had been asked to play, and his own research into the figure, Bale replied that Moses “was ‘likely schizophrenic’ and was one of the most ‘barbaric’ individuals he’d ever read about in his life.” He cited biblical passages that were not included as events in the film: The chapter in Numbers where Moses orders the slaughter of all Midianite prisoners of war, save the virgin girls; and the section of Exodus in which Moses punishes the Israelites for worshiping the golden calf by forcing them to drink a scalding liquid made of the ground-up idol before ordering the slaughter of 3,000 Hebrews for the transgression. Bale closed his remarks by adding that “if Moses were alive today, he would likely be tried for war crimes.”

Asked to choose between Exodus and Manetho we might cast our minds back over the more than two millennia of history since both entered the Western canon. Has the exodus or the expulsion featured more prominently in the history of the Jews? Historiography has not been kind to the Egyptian priest, but history finds him vindicated.