THE LEADERSHIP of the United States and their British cohorts have been deceiving the public for more than 100 years. Now yoked to Zionism, they are a deadly combination — and they are also deadly to themselves. (pictured: General Stanley McChrystal)

I don’t think the rest of the world really understands what’s wrong with America.  They see America as this huge bully, killing and maiming millions of people worldwide while America itself is collapsing.  The world is right about that. They also see that most Americans are blind to the aggressive nature of Washington and its wars — not aware of it at all.

Clearly, the world has a suicidal, homicidal, insane entity on the loose. But no one really understands why.

The United States Department of Defense (DOD), as well as the Wall Street bankers, and just about every other corporation in America are no longer cognizant that their actions are self-defeating.  The DOD is no longer protecting its own country. The Federal Reserve is no longer printing money which has any value. Wall Street creates unbelievably complex Ponzi schemes which have no — or a negative — value.  The thing they all have in common is that they themselves don’t understand how their actions are contributing to their own defeat.  There’s a reason for this, and once you know it, it becomes obvious.

The United States of America is suffering from an epidemic of Asperger’s Syndrome, which is a form of autism which some say is caused by too much mercury in vaccines, or other toxins.

Asperger’s victims are capable of highly complex understanding of singular issues (compartmentalized, myopic thinking), but are unable to comprehend the ramifications of their actions in a larger picture. Asperger’s victims are often not cognizant that the tasks they perform are either useless, highly detrimental to themselves, or highly detrimental to others.  Asperger’s victims view the world through a myopic lens of complete self-absorption and are not capable of knowing they are dangerous to themselves or others.  They are also not able to show remorse or true empathy to anyone.

One of the hallmarks of Asperger’s victims is their ability to diagram highly complex issues which they themselves understand — while failing to see that the complex issue so diagrammed is peripheral or useless to the overall job they’re trying to perform. See the diagram below (click for a full-size image) — which was actually part of a presentation on how the US military and NATO can “win” their war of aggression in Afghanistan. (By the way, according to a commenter on National Public Radio today, US troops there are still “pumped up” for their missions by telling them “we” are fighting for vengeance for 9/11 — with which Afghans and the Taliban had precisely nothing to do.)

People capable of such myopic obsession are normally unemployable in real-word businesses, but those with this kind of mentality seem to have found a niche in the American financial, political, and military establishments.

Without self-awareness there is no hope.

Read about the Asperger-like “PowerPoint Rangers” who have come to dominate the junior officer corps in Afghanistan

The United States and their British cohorts have been deceiving the public
>> for more than 100 years.

A review of Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine by Joel Kovel (pictured) (2007), Pluto Press, ISBN-13 978 0 7453 2570 5, Paperback $20.48 at Amazon.com

AMAZON.COM likes to tell its book-buying customers which books other customers also bought who purchased the same book, and I typically glance at this unsolicited information with bemused detachment (Oh really? But do they have my taste, interest and background?) but occasionally, when the subject matter is particularly controversial or arcane, with piqued interest (Well, maybe there is some great book on this subject that these other folks know about that I am missing out on!). One book that caught my attention this way is Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine by Joel Kovel. I didn’t know Joel Kovel from Adam when I ordered this book on a whim, but I have a keen interest in the single-state solution to the problem of Zionism, and so the way he worded his title caught my interest. I duly ordered it, expecting it to contain an apology for a single democratic state in Palestine, one that might fortify my own view and give me new ammunition to use against skeptics, and die-hard two-staters.

That old saw that you can’t judge a book by its cover (or its subtitle) certainly held true for this one: Of course, the author does unequivocally advocate a single democratic state of all its citizens for Palestine/Israel (“Palesreal” as he provisionally refers to it, but I personally prefer how some wags dub it: “Palestein,” which makes me laugh out loud.) But very little of his book is really about that. When I first began reading it, I quickly began to suspect that it was little more than an autobiographical account, yet another Jewish apology for Jewishness with lip-service criticism of Israeli behavior — my critical cockles were fully raised.

But I could not have been more mistaken: Never in my life have I read such a disarming book! Thanks to it, my seasoned distrust of so-called progressive Jewish intellectuals (who always seem to turn out to have a soft spot for racist Israel) has been resolved, for here, in this man and in this book, I have encountered the 21st century reincarnation of Israel Shahak, that first great (Jewish) writer to expose from within the perfidy and counterfeit nature of Zionist Israel, and its relation to Judaism and to a very checkered Jewish history. Joel Kovel takes up where that late, great scholar left off, but interestingly, while he holds absolutely no quarter for Zionism, he does lead the reader to a reasonably sympathetic understanding of how this pernicious ideology could have developed in the first place. This ability to appreciate Zionism from the inside out is invaluable in enabling us to learn how this pernicious belief system can be dismantled, and this, of course, is the author’s ultimate and unstinting purpose.

A more accurate title for this book might be “The Psychopathology of Zionism.” In the bulk of its 299 pages, Kovel meticulously deconstructs Zionism’s deranged psychology, and the reader very soon appreciates that this author’s long years of education in psychiatry and psychoanalysis were not spent in vain. Successfully dealing professionally with the mentally disordered prepared him, in a way no other profession could have, to analyze that sickest puppy of all: Judeo-Zionism. In his comprehensive deconstruction of this world menace, Kovel pulls no punches. Unlike many non-Jewish writers who tiptoe around some of the landmines that are sure to explode into charges of “anti-Semitism” against those who take things too far for the ADL-types (and the many publishers who censor in fear of them), this author does not pussyfoot around anything, and his straightforward, candid recounting of Jewish history, warts and all, and of Zionist perfidy, are as refreshing as they are rare in Jewish (or any other) authors.

But how did Jewish Joel Kovel slip through the fine sieve of Zionist indoctrination? Don’t all Jews imbibe it with their mother’s milk? Well, this particular Jewish lad seems to have had a “wet nurse” in the person of his Aunt Betty, who had rejected Judaism at an early age, so completely that she left strict orders not to be given a Jewish funeral, to the great consternation of her kin. She turns out to have been the significant other in his life, and her death during his formative years snapped the last thread of his already tenuous identification with Judaism.

His father was a wing nut — “almost a fascist” — who opposed Zionism “for all the wrong reasons.” He was a dyed-in-the-wool, all-American Cold Warrior, you see, so the socialist veneer of Zionism (which was not so clearly understood as mere window dressing in its earlier days) incensed him. So of these two significant others, both of whom were extremely strong-willed and unafraid to hold unpopular opinions, his male role model was rooted in America, not Israel, while his significant-other female had rejected the family religion. The budding Joel Kovel took the best of both worlds and in turn rejected both Judaism and Zionism (the latter for reasons opposite to those of his father: because Zionist particularism trashes socialist universalism, and because the grafting of Zionism to capitalist imperialism made it antithetical to the project of socialist liberation from this war-mongering death phase of capitalism).

Now, I realize that this last statement is not going to sit well with every potential reader of Overcoming Zionism, and so, while I cannot sing the praises of this book loudly enough, I also need to add that it is not for everyone. Do not order this book for that right-winger on your Christmas list… get him Jeff Gates’ Guilt by Association instead. But, for anyone to the left of, say, Barack Obama; for that progressive anti-war friend of yours who circumlocutes whenever you bring up the subject of Israel; and most importantly, for that Jewish acquaintance who thinks that Israel can do no wrong (or better yet, who has intimated a few unsettling doubts s/he has about Israel) — this book is tailor-made. To the progressive it demonstrates conclusively that Israel is a willing partner in the very imperialism s/he anathematizes… to the Zionist-oriented Jew it shows him how deep is the hole that has been historically dug for Jews by Israel, and convinces him that there is no way out of it except to reject Zionism root and branch. “The overcoming of Zionism is its dissolution.”

Here is a sampler of some of the more valuable insights I gained from this masterful work :

“Nationalism is bad enough, but it can be sublimated through devices like the World Cup. Nationalism by divine decree — whether Judaic, Islamic, Christian or Hindu — and exercised with state power, is a living nightmare.” (p. 6)

“For the Orthodox nationalist, G-d’s will trumps Man’s conscience. This lifts the burden of guilt, or more often, keeps it from arising in the first place. The land is ours because G-d said so: all is justified; case closed. The codicil attached to this is barely stressed though it is strenuously lived out: that the fact of ‘G-d telling us so’ means in practice the submission to Rabbi this or that telling us so on the authority of the Halakhah [the entire body of Jewish laws and traditions]. These Jews wish to live like their medieval forebears, in rabbinically supervised communities within a larger state — which, as it turns out, finds them very convenient for its purposes.

“This is an escape without transcendence, even if one is never going to convince a religious nationalist, engorged with the feeling of spiritual power, of the fact. Escaping the onerous strictures of bad conscience is to remove the restraints upon the will except for those legislated from within the tribe through its rabbinical chiefs. It is to set up a downhill path at the end of which stand Meir Kahane and Baruch Goldstein. For such people, conscience is directly turned into enmity, and its judgmental quality turns into paranoia.” (pp. 180-181) [The foregoing calls to mind that title of Erich Fromm’s famous study of the last generation: Escape from Freedom. Indeed, it seems to be Kovel’s subtext that Zionism represents exactly the Jewish rejection of Enlightenment values, together with the emancipation of Jews that they engendered.]

“All human beings are equivalently unique; and anybody who fancies himself chosen by God is by that measure fallen. It is impossible to ground the notion of exceptionalism in any spiritual value inasmuch as the ground of spiritual value is the universality of our being within nature….

“The finer minds of the [Jewish] faith have sought to inflect the Covenant so that it means that Jews are obliged to develop themselves spiritually and ethically. Well and good, but at some point this higher development has to lead to a jettisoning of the Covenant itself. For once it is fulfilled, the sense of specialness can no longer be maintained without corrupting the Jewish faith.” (pp. 200-201) [Here as elsewhere in his book Kovel seems not far from Christian catholic thinking.]

“Justice is grounded in truth, and truth inheres in the whole of things, which is not a homogeneous totality but the contradictory, dialectically moving ensemble of the real. There is therefore no single truth, but there are greater and lesser truths. The obligation for people of good will is to find the greater truth and to speak it to the power that would suppress it. And one of the greater truths is that there is such a power. For present purposes we may locate its surface in the tentacular Zionist lobby, extending from the upper echelons of the American and Israeli security apparatuses through the chambers of civil society. It follows that every particle of truth about Israeli violations of human rights should also be an exposure of the Zionist lobby. Every truth about Israel needs to be an exposure of the lie that keeps pumping up the leaky gas bag of its legitimacy.

“The Lobby intimidates, especially in the United States whose transformation must therefore be a goal of anti-Zionist politics. But once exposed, it can be confronted. Telling the truth about the Lobby is not mere recitation; it should be a guide, rather, to bringing down its corrupt and illegitimate power. We need a campaign to force the Lobby to register as an agent of a foreign power; and another to build data banks to expose those who collaborate with it; and to eliminate the special privileges enjoyed by Israel as tax breaks, technology transfers, indeed, the whole grotesque edifice of handouts, loan guarantees, technologies of death, and the like, which burden US taxpayers while bringing endless misery and destruction to Palestine and Lebanon; and to protest Israel’s nuclear arsenal and bring it under international control; and to keep bringing suits for violation of human rights against the likes of Avi Dichter and Moshe Ya’alon; and to insist that the media carry alternative views, and to build alternative media that do; and to expose the Israeli ‘spies’ who clustered around the events of September 11, and to re-open investigation into the attack on the USS Liberty in 1967.” (pp. 232-233) [Here we see how neatly Kovel’s Overcoming Zionism and Gates’ Guilt by Association , both anti-Zionist classics in their own time, reflect one another in their perspective, approach and conclusions, while the latter approaches the question of the Israeli-Zionist threat to America from the purely socio-political angle, while the former stays focused on its moral and psychopathological aspects: each is first an exposé and then a battle plan, like two valiant armies trapping the common enemy in a pincers movement; both might be said to be arguing that when it comes to anti-Zionism, faith without works is dead.]

Lest anyone should think that the ever-vigilant Zionist watchdogs gave the good professor a free pass for his trenchant criticism of their pathological belief system, rest assured that he has paid his dues: Just as Norman Finkelstein (author of The Holocaust Industry) was railroaded out of his academic position (even more incongruously by a Catholic university) for his anti-Zionist views, Joel Kovel lost his special professorship at Bard College, he reports, as a direct result of his anti-Zionist activism and publications. The decision to remove him was made by the College’s president, Leon Botstein, director of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra since 2003, and by others with clear conflicts of interest. Those interested in the sordid details of Professor Kovel’s forced retirement can read the details on his Web site: http://www.joelkovel.org/archives.html

In the end, what must be said of Joel Kovel is that he is the real McCoy …a true mensch. This Yiddish term, connoting decency, uprightness, fortitude and firmness of purpose, has almost lost all reference to real individuals in modern times, but Joel Kovel has solidly demonstrated that this is not an archaic concept… there is at least one Jew today who deserves the sobriquet. Get this book and see for yourself!

www.opinion-maker.org

WHO SAYS al-Qaeda takes credit for a bombing? Rita Katz. Who gets us bin Laden tapes? Rita Katz. Who gets us pretty much all information telling us Muslims are bad? Rita Katz? Rita Katz is the Director of Site Intelligence, the primary source for intelligence used by news services, Homeland Security, the FBI and CIA. What is her qualification? She served in the Israeli Defense Force. She has a college degree and most investigative journalists believe the Mossad “helps” her with her information. We find no evidence of any qualification whatsoever of any kind. A bartender has more intelligence gathering experience.

Nobody verifies her claims. SITE says Al Qaeda did it, it hits the papers. SITE says Israel didn’t do it, that hits the papers too. What does SITE really do? They check the Internet for “information,” almost invariably information that Israel wants reported, and it is sold as news, seen on American TV, reported in our papers and passed around the Internet almost as though it were actually true. Amazing.

Do we know if the information reported comes from a teenager in Seattle or a terror cell in Jakarta? No, of course not; we don’t have a clue. Can you imagine buying information on Islamic terrorism from an Israeli whose father was executed as a spy by Arabs?

It is quite likely that everything you think you know about terror attacks such as the one in Detroit or whether Osama bin Laden is alive or dead comes from Rita Katz. Does she make it all up? We don’t know, nobody knows, nobody checks, they simply buy it, print it, say it comes from Site Intelligence and simply forget to tell us that this is not only a highly biased organization but also an extremely amateur one.

Is any of this Rita’s fault? No. She is, herself, selling her work. The blame does not belong to Site Intelligence, it belongs to the people who pass on the information under misleading circumstances.

Imagine if a paper carried a story like this: Reports that Al Qaeda was responsible for bombing the mosque and train station were given to us by an Israeli woman who says she found it on the Internet.

This is fair. Everyone should be able to earn a living and information that comes from Israel could be without bias but the chances aren’t very good. In fact, any news organization, and most use this service, that fails to indicate that the sources they use are “rumored” to be a foreign intelligence service with a long history of lying beyond human measure, is not to be taken seriously.

Can we prove that SITE Intelligence is the Mossad? No. Would a reasonable person assume it is? Yes.

Would a reasonable person believe anything from this source involving Islam or the Middle East? No, they would not.

SITE’s primary claim to fame other than bin Laden videos with odd technical faults is their close relationship with Blackwater. Blackwater has found SITE useful. Blackwater no longer exists, as they had to change their name because of utter lack of credibility.

What can be learned by examining where our news comes from? Perhaps we could start by being realistic and begin seeing much of our own “news” for the childish propaganda it really is.

Propaganda does two things: 1. It makes up phony reasons to justify acts of barbaric cruelty or insane greed. 2. It blames people for things they didn’t do because the people doing the blaming really did it themselves. We call these things “false flag/USS Liberty” incidents.

Next time you see dancing Palestinians and someone tells you they are celebrating a terror attack, it is more likely they are attending a birthday party. This is what we have learned. Perhaps this is what we had best remember.

From an AFP article on Site Intelligence:

Rita Katz and S.I.T.E. are set to release yet another “al-Qaeda” tape

WASHINGTON (AFP) The head of the Al-Qaeda network Osama bin Laden is expected to release a taped message on Iraq, a group monitoring extremist online forums said Thursday. The 56-minute tape by the hunted militant is addressed to Iraq and an extremist organization based there, the Islamic State of Iraq, said the US-based SITE monitoring institute, citing announcements on “jihadist forums.”

It said the release was “impending” but did not say whether the message was an audio or video tape. Despite a massive manhunt and a 25-million-dollar bounty on his head, he has evaded capture and has regularly taunted the United States and its allies through warnings issued on video and audio cassettes.

Source: ME Times

Despite a massive manhunt by the world’s intelligence agencies, bin Laden seems to evade their combined efforts, staying on the run. But he still has time to drop into his recording studio and cook up a fresh tape for the likes of Rita Katz and her outfit called SITE. SITE is staffed by two people, Katz and a Josh Devon.

Yet these two individuals manage to do what the ENTIRE combined assets of the world’s Western intelligence can’t: be the first to obtain fresh video and audio tapes from al-Qaeda with Bin Laden making threats and issuing various other comments. If BL appears a bit “stiff” in the latest release, that’s because he is real stiff, as in dead.

How is it that a Jewish-owned group like SITE can outperform the world’s best and brightest in the intelligence field and be the first to know that a group like al-Qaeda is getting ready to release another tape?

How is it possible that Rita Katz and SITE. can work this magic? Maybe looking at Katz’s background will help:

Rita Katz is Director and co-founder of the SITE Institute. Born in Iraq, her father was tried and executed as an Israeli spy, whereupon her family moved to Israel [the move has been described as both an escape and an emigration in different sources]. She received a degree from the Middle Eastern Studies program at Tel Aviv University, and is fluent in Hebrew and Arabic. She emigrated to the US in 1997.

Katz was called as a witness in the trial, but the government didn’t claim she was a terrorism expert. During the trial it was discovered that Katz herself had worked in violation of her visa agreement when she first arrived in America in 1997.

She also admitted to receiving more than $130,000 for her work as an FBI consultant on the case.

Alan Sabrosky considers the characteristics that differentiate Jewish nationalism from other nationalisms, highlighting in particular its intrinsic extremism, its xenophobia, racism and militarism, its undermining of civic loyalty among its adherents in other countries and its propensity to hatred and racial exclusivity.

ISRAELI PRIME Minister Binyamin Netanyahu once remarked to a Likud gathering that “Israel is not like other countries”. Oddly enough for him, that time he was telling the truth, and nowhere is that more evident than with Jewish nationalism, whether or not one pins the “Zionist” label on it.

Nationalism in most countries and cultures can have both positive and negative aspects, unifying a people and sometimes leading them against their neighbours. Extremism can emerge, and often has, at least in part in almost every nationalist/independence movement I can recall (e.g. the French nationalist movement had The Terror, Kenya’s had the Mau Mau, etc.).

But whereas extremism in other nationalist movements is an aberration, extremism in Jewish nationalism is the norm, pitting Zionist Jews (secular or observant) against the goyim (everyone else), who are either possible predator or certain prey, if not both sequentially. This does not mean that all Jews or all Israelis feel and act this way, by any means. But it does mean that Israel today is what it cannot avoid being, and what it would be under any electable government (a point I’ll develop in another article).

The differences between Jewish nationalism (Zionism) and that of other countries and cultures here I think are fourfold:

1. Zionism is a real witches’ brew of xenophobia, racism, ultra-nationalism and militarism that places it way outside of a “mere” nationalist context – for example, when I was in Ireland (both parts) I saw no indication whatsoever that the Provisional Irish Republican Army or anyone else pressing for a united Ireland had a shred of design on shoving Protestants into camps or out of the country, although there may well have been a handful who thought that way – and goes far beyond the misery for others professed by the Nazis;

2. Zionism undermines civic loyalty among its adherents in other countries in a way that other nationalist movements (and even ultra-nationalist movements like Nazism) did not – e.g. a large majority of American Jews, including those who are not openly dual citizens, espouse a form of political bigamy called “dual loyalty” (to Israel and the US) that is every bit as dishonest as marital bigamy, attempts to finesse the precedence they give to Israel over the US (lots of Rahm Emanuels out there who served in the Israeli army but NOT in the US armed forces), and has absolutely no parallel in the sense of national or cultural identity espoused by any other definable ethnic or racial group in America – even the Nazi Bund in the US disappeared once Germany and the US went to war, with almost all of its members volunteering for the US armed forces;

3. The “enemy” of normal nationalist movements is the occupying power and perhaps its allies, and once independence is achieved, normal relations with the occupying power are truly the norm, but for Zionism almost everyone out there is an actual or potential enemy, differing only in proximity and placement on its very long list of enemies (which is now America’s target list); and

4. Almost all nationalist movements (including the irredentist and secessionist variants) intend to create an independent state from a population in place or to reunite a separated people (like the Sudeten Germans in the 1930s) – it is very rare for it to include the wholesale displacement of another indigenous population, which is far more common of successful colonialist movements as in the US – and perhaps a reason why most Americans wouldn’t care too much about what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians even if they DID know about it, is because that is no different than what Europeans in North America did to the Indians/Native Americans here in a longer and more low-tech fashion.

The implications of this for Middle East peace prospects, and for other countries in thrall to their domestic Jewish lobbies or not, are chilling. The Book of Deuteronomy come to life in a state with a nuclear arsenal would be enough to give pause to anyone not bought or bribed into submission – which these days encompasses the US government, given Israel’s affinity for throwing crap into the face of the Obama administration and Obama’s visible affinity for accepting it with a smile, Bibi Netanyahu’s own “Uncle Tom” come to Washington.

The late General Moshe Dayan, who – Zionist or not – remains an honoured part of my own Pantheon of military heroes, allegedly observed that Israel’s security depended on its being viewed by others as a mad dog. He may have been correct. But he neglected to note that the preferred response of everyone else is to kill that mad dog before it can decide to go berserk and bite. It is an option worth considering.

Alan Sabrosky (PhD, University of Michigan) is a 10-year US Marine Corps veteran and a graduate of the US Army War College.