AI is an invisible force to which people cannot contend. Visible are the vast Data Centers, which house the hardware that contains the data that provide the patterns for training the models and operating AI. The stark, monotonous, and fenced Data Centers occupy acres of land, drain water resources, and elevate local energy prices. They have their adversaries, but the monster Data Centers are only a side effect service to the dislocations AI will visit upon humanity. I do not say this with authority and with observation from my experiences.

Wanting to change the cover of a novel I wrote, The Victory, AI pushed me to seek the services of an illustrator. Not desiring the cost and hassle with working with an illustrator, I asked my son, who has expertise in graphic arts, if he could do the design. I sent him a preliminary outline with images and, in a few minutes, he returned a finished cover. It still needed work and he suggested I do what he had already done and would continue to do ─ go to AI, and suggest my needs.

I already had limited experience with AI, using it for many purposes, never with my substack writings, and in order to gain understanding of difficult subjects, resolve maintenance problems, and clarify mistakes in the novel — historical, geographical, grammatical, redundant, spelling and punctuation that Word spelling and grammar did not capture. Without going into detail, finalizing the cover for publication involved minimal effort and correspondence with Claude AI. I estimated Claude, and its amiable manner, saved me $2000, several hours of time, and a positive reduction in aggravation. Here are the covers; the image on the left is the previous cover, which took me days to design. The new one on the right took several hours.

I concluded it is more credible to obtain personal experience with AI and determine its effects from a real life situation. This real life situation demonstrated the need for Illustrators would greatly diminish, and so will other occupations that depend upon research and summarize the efforts. Only needed will be a few people that provide services for those unable or unwilling to perform the activity themselves, and a few to check results. In the former labors, the workers will use AI, greatly shortening the personal effort involved; one worker replacing the efforts of several others. I can visualize Amazon AI taking an Internet order, relaying it to its AI companion, who will send the order to a selected vendor or warehouse, an AI driven machines retrieving the product, packaging, addressing, and shipping it by either drone or a self-driven truck, and delivering to destination by a small robotic machine.

Permit the established mind to leap into identifying other occupations diminished in intensity by transference to AI and we have clerks, public relations, lawyers, doctors, software engineers, architects, graphic arts, publishing, teachers, and a host of other occupations. Add combining AI with numerical control of machinery and robots and the list of threatened workers of all types — professional, service, clerical, and manual —increases dramatically. As of today, analysis does not predict an unusual decline in employment.

MIT Sloan Management School, has identified jobs that shrank:

Top-paying roles (like management analysts, aerospace engineers, and computer and information research scientists): Employment within firms fell by about 3.5% over five years. These more lucrative roles are more likely to be in firms that adopt AI; the productivity gains that those firms realize more than offset the losses. As a result, the highest-paid jobs still make up a slightly bigger share of employment than those less exposed to AI.

Business, financial, architecture, and engineering jobs: These shrank — by about 2% to 2.5% over five years — because they have a high share of tasks that match what AI can do. Among them, business and financial jobs are more exposed to AI than architecture and engineering roles, but they’re also more likely to be in firms that use AI heavily, which helps offset some of the losses.

The trend to reducing employment will occur slowly, waiting for a new generation to adapt to an AI preferable scenario. These people will be unaware that their flirtation with AI is causing economic havoc. For competitive reasons, industry will seek AI whenever it enables cost cutting, and will be unable to resist the productivity gains emerging from replacing staff rather than from seeking gains from making staff more efficient. Similar to previous technologies, effects grow slowly and, after reaching an inflection point, cascade rapidly into acceptance. The present analyses are shaped by an early stage of AI.

Previous technological advances did not reduce the labor force and shifted it to newly created and expanding industries. AI is different; the labor force contracts and has only minor replacements. AI creates a new industry of data centers and an expanding industry of chip manufacture, neither of which are labor intensive and add much to the labor force.

The descent into chaos has a happy ending; from the shambles of unused cars and abandoned homes, a new system able to understand AI’s impact and capable of adapting it for beneficial purposes. will emerge. The Capitalist system has already evolved into a welfare system and has elements of a Democratic Socialist system. AI domination in the economy will demand a managed economy and this system will allocate resources so they benefit society — Karl Marx’s interpretation of history will prove correct again — when the tools available for improving society are not used, people will rise and implement the new tools for their satisfaction.

The 40 hour work week will be reduced and workers will work in shifts of reduced time that allow all workers to be employed.

Medicare for all will become a reality. Stalled by excessive administrative costs and insufficient medical assistance to accommodate the rush of applicants, Medicare will enlist AI to sharply reduce administration, assist practitioners in research and discovery, enable patients to resolve less serious situations that do not need medical help, and guide them more carefully in their visits.

People will be in better control of their lives, having a source of unlimited information to inform and advise them.

There will be cultural, societal, and human relationship shifts and breakdowns that disturb a mass of people. That has already happened with the computer and Internet, and social media ages. The personal touch, doctor/patient relationship has been submerged by organizations that employ doctors and force them to regard the bottom line before sympathetic attachment. The inevitable cannot be stopped. People will adapt to the new society, a more placid, more controlled, less free, and robotic society that generates pleasure and reduces wants.

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Truman not following through on his cabinet’s 1947 trusteeship plan; Johnson not replying to Israel’s 1967 attack on the U.S.S. Liberty and looking aside as Israel developed its atomic bomb, Nixon, via Henry Kissinger, saving Israel in the 1973 war; Carter believing Israel would abide by the Camp David Accords, which silenced Egypt’s threat to Israel’s Greater Israel plans, and awarding the genocidal state an annual $3 billion in military assistance; Reagan rushing into Lebanon after the Israeli invasion and rushing out after marine casualties; Clinton naively believing Israel would agree to a two-state solution and silently watching Israel’s state sponsored settlers preventing it (I was in front of the White house on the day of the signing. Israel’s supporters organized speeches to the crowd, telling everyone that Arafat was a criminal terrorist. A few Palestinians carrying the Palestinian flag had the flags violently ripped from them in front of police and the police did nothing. The Palestinians looked bewildered, saying kind words of, “Aren’t we both having peaceful states?”); Bush obeying the Israel lobby and dispatching Israel’s greatest foe, the Iraq nation; Obama promising Palestinian deliverance from oppression and doing nothing; Biden allowing the Gazan genocide to proceed; and now Trump, behaving as the biggest fool of all, have given the U.S. and the world the greatest mess that faces civilization ─ genocidal Israel. All these presidents are traitors to the American people.

The world has regarded The Islamic Republic as an irresponsible and tyrannical nation. It may be a valid description, not unlike almost all the other nations in the world from Tierra del Fuego to the Sakhalin Island. It is also an exaggerated description, enhanced by the Zionist propaganda machine. Iran has gained no economic, financial, or political benefit, and no friends or territorial advancement in its outspoken and aggressive tactics; just the opposite, it has suffered economic deprivation and international isolation. Who has Iran invaded, except for a few isolated instances, who has Iran bombed, from whom has Iran seized territory? Compare Iran’s military engagements with peace loving USrael (Us and /or Israel). The Mullahs could have knuckled down and become leaders of a quasi-51st U.S. state. Domestically, they may be failing the Iranian people; internationally they chose what they believed to be a high road of moral superiority. The world has failed its responsibility to protect Iran from the malevolent forces that confront the world and which Iran has valiantly contended.

Iran is an Islamic nation, loosely guided by its interpretation of Islamic principles, two being protection of religious sites and support of the downtrodden. Unlike Saudi Arabia, which has contributed a massive number of terrorists to the world, Iran has been a leading fighter against al-Qaeda and ISIS, providing Iraq with leadership by Major General Qassem Soleimani, commander of Iran’s elite Quds Force, who stalled and eventually defeated the Islamic State in Iraq. Iran, unlike Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states has confronted Israel in its slow grinding attempt to seize the Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem and in its destruction of the Palestinian people. The Islamic state’s quarrel with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states arise from the latter espousing Islam, but using Islamic Authority as a protective shield to disguise their corruption and oligarchic operations. Look at Saudi Arabia and its Wahhabism, Bahrain and its subjugation of the large majority Shi’a, and the Gulf States and their monarchies.

The Iranian nightmare was created decades ago, when governments failed to observe the obvious ─ in the Middle East, Israel has always been a problem to the world; the Islamic Republic is only a problem to itself. An article I wrote in 2006 contains the same perspective and words as if written today, revealing the ignorance of those who govern us. It has been slightly shortened to remove the superfluous, allow quicker reading, and to stress its application to present times. No words that modify the verisimilitude of the original article have been eliminated. Here is the 20-year old article.

Is a powerless Iran, similar to the previously powerless Iraq, a threat to the United States and does it have reason to inflict damage to the U.S. before being attacked? If the U.S. attacks, Iran will be able to gather sufficient force to harm the U.S., militarily in Iraq and economically in the oil market. The latter harm can create a catastrophe for America. The U.S. has more to lose by hostile action against Iran than by quiet negotiations with the Islamic Republic.

The Revolutionary government of Iran places dignity and morality before consequences. In its war with Iraq, Saddam Hussein made several overtures to end the war; all of which Iran refused unless Hussein stepped down - tens of thousands of casualties because of the refusal. Now, Iran is willing to challenge nuclear powers that demand Iran halt its nuclear developments. The challenge poses dangers to the world, but a greater danger is the whetted appetite of the extremist fundamentalist groups that might be eager to use an Iranian conflict to initiate a full-scale fundamentalist war. Who else could be propelling this madness, creating an Iranian nightmare, especially when Iran is technically not in violation of the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty, couldn’t have a nuclear bomb for many years, and wouldn’t be able to use nuclear weapons for offensive operations? The creation of an Iranian nightmare requires examination.

Negotiation of problems with Iran can lead to world peace rather than world war.
What was Iran’s Relation to the previous Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT)?

According to the NPT, Iran has not legally violated the treaty nor been accused of doing that. The treaty provisions permit signatories to enrich uranium and develop atomic energy. Nor has Iran violated any UN Resolution. The UN only asked Iran, in a non-binding resolution, to halt all nuclear activities, something it voluntarily did once before. Hyperbole and media reports generate hysteria and exaggerate the IAEA challenge to Iran.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), in the 2006 report by its Director General: Implementation of the NPT Safeguards Agreement in the Islamic Republic of Iran, stated the following.
[ED: This 2006 report described a decisive moment, when close cooperation with Iran in 2006 could have prevented the tragedy that exists today.]

B. Current overall assessment
All the nuclear material declared by Iran to the Agency is accounted for. Apart from the small quantities previously reported to the Board, the Agency has found no other undeclared nuclear material in Iran. However, gaps remain in the Agency’s knowledge with respect to the scope and content of Iran’s centrifuge programme. Because of this, and other gaps in the Agency’s knowledge, including the role of the military in Iran’s nuclear programme, the Agency is unable to make progress in its efforts to provide assurance about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran.

While the results of Agency safeguards activities may influence the nature and scope of the confidence building measures that the Board requests Iran to take, it is important to note that safeguards obligations and confidence building measures are different, distinct and not interchangeable. The implementation of confidence building measures is no substitute for the full implementation at all times of safeguards obligations. In this context, it is also important to note that the Agency’s safeguards judgements and conclusions in the case of Iran, as in all other cases, are based on verifiable information available to the Agency, and are therefore, of necessity, limited to past and present nuclear activities. The Agency cannot make a judgement about, or reach a conclusion on, future compliance or intentions.

For the complete report go to: http://www.iranfocus.com/uploads/iaea280406.pdf

How Significant was Iran’s Pursuit of a Nuclear Bomb?
Every effort should be made to prevent Iran, and all other nations, from pursuing or increasing nuclear weapon capabilities. Nevertheless, according to observers of Iran’s nuclear developments, the Islamic Republic could not acquire nuclear weapons for many years, will not have delivery systems (long range missiles, submarine marines, aircraft) to attack outside its continent and cannot use nuclear weapons for offensive means without being instantly demolished. Even with nuclear weapons, Iran is powerless in a war with the United States. Development of nuclear weapons is a bargaining chip for Iran; a deterrent against attack and a power play during negotiations.

What Problem is Iran to the United States?
Considering that Iran has always been antagonistic to the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, has not been proven to interfere in Iraq’s political situation, and has not shown any territorial ambitions, what problem can Iran be to a United States that supported the Shah, armed Iraq against Iran, has attacked Iranian installations and boats in the Straits of Hormuz and shot down an Iranian civilian airliner?

Iran is militarily hapless - no warships, mostly antiquated air force, dubious air defenses and some missile systems which can cause limited damage. Nevertheless, if USrael (U.S. or/and Israel ) attacks Iranian installations, Iran can cause excessive damage to the United States. [Remember, this is 2006.]

· Iraq’s cleric, Moqtada al-Sadr, commander of an Iraq militia, declared that he would fight alongside Iran if the United States attacked the Islamic state. Considering the growing hostility to American troops in Iraq, combine the Mahdi militia with weapons from Iran and U.S. forces will be in extreme jeopardy.

· Iran has paramilitary units that could join with Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Palestinian militants and attack Israel.

· Iran has the capability to temporarily interrupt oil flow by reducing its oil exports, closing the straits of Hormuz to oil shipments from the Persian Gulf, soliciting assistance in destroying oil facilities in Iraq, especially at the port of Basra, and using paramilitary forces to destroy other Middle East oil facilities.

· Paramilitary units and missiles could damage U.S. military facilities in Kuwait .

· More militant groups in the Moslem world could react aggressively in the defense of Iran. The Middle East and possibly other regions of the world would be in turmoil.

· Other third world nations that have gained economic power, such as Venezuela, also support Iran and might join in economic reprisals against USrael (United States and Israel).

Washington has no issue with Tehran that cannot be negotiated. The U.S. does not prefer the Islamic government, but why is that a problem for the United States? After all, one of the best friends of the U.S. is Saudi Arabia, a fundamentalist Islamic nation.

Who is Leading the Creation of an Iranian Nightmare?
The Islamic Republic of Iran is guilty of creating its own nightmare. Iran has led itself into a trap by reacting in a non-diplomatic, confrontational, and paranoid manner to hostile words against it. Iran is driven by fear. This fear arises from an examination of what motivates the United States.

War is usually driven by contests for resources or markets, by territorial expansion, by defense, or as a solution to economic problems. What is motivating the belligerent attitude of the United States toward a defenseless Iran? If it is due to preemptive war, what is the reason for the future war, which is being preempted? After exhausting all possibilities, we are left with a reaction to the fear that Iran is experiencing, which is that its fundamentalist vision of unifying the state with the Moslem religion is being singled out as threatening to the West, and Islam is being readied for attack by western fundamentalists, both Christian and Jewish.

Islamic fundamentalists believe they follow the final words of their God. Christian fundamentalists believe it is their duty to convey the “true words” of their God and have a messianic mission to convert non-Christians to their beliefs. The Jewish fundamentalists believe they are the “chosen of God” and deserve to occupy the lands given to them by their God. They fear the western world will accept an Iran that is willing to exchange its development of nuclear weapons for measures that roll Israel back to its 1967 borders, derailing their mandate with God.

This thesis that extreme fundamentalists worldwide are propelling an eventual war in Iran is speculative and conspiratorial. That is true. Nevertheless,

· Leading western political theorist Samuel P. Huntington has predicted a “Clash of Civilizations;”

· American neocon Norman Podhoretz has asked that “the U.S. overthrow the regimes of six or seven Muslim countries;”

· Osama bin Laden has called for a “war against the Crusaders;”

· Benjamin Netanyahu has said: “Islamic fundamentalism, like communism... is bent on the expansion of its dominion to as many corners of the world as possible;”

· Dr. Robert Morey of Faith Defenders Christian Ministry has said: “If the U.S. wants to be the policeman of the world and invade Kuwait, Haiti, Bosnia, Somalia, and other places, then it is about time to take on the Muslims in Iran, Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan.”

· Evangelist Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham, wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the Koran “provides ample evidence that Islam encourages violence in order to win converts and to reach the ultimate goal of an Islamic world.”

Some of this smoke is bound to lead to fire and Iran is smoldering.

A Preferred Solution
If past actions by the United States, such as those concerning North Korea, Pakistan and India are indicative, then the U.S. will assuredly impel Iran to become a nuclear power. The international community can take advantage of the smoldering situation by realizing and addressing its consequences. Iran might be bluffing about the advances of its nuclear developments, but if forced to fight, the Islamic Republic will receive support from all sectors of the radical fundamentalists in the Muslim world. If this becomes a reality, the world will be headed towards an unwarranted and unnecessary catastrophe. So, what can be done? A preferred approach is to remove the reasons that Iran might have for pursuing nuclear weapons.

Iran and the United States should cooperate in the resolution of the Iraq crisis. The U.S. fears Iran will determine Iraq’s future. Iran fears the U.S. will use Iraq to control the Middle East. Therefore, isn’t it mandatory that Iran and the United States resolve the Iraq crisis together? The recognition that both nations are willing to work together to combat the insurgency and achieve a mutually acceptable solution to the dilemma will immediately improve the situation.

Iran and other Middle East nations, should sign agreements not to support international terrorism and not provide a haven for any terrorists. Despite specious media reports that consider Iran a supporter of terrorism, the facts indicate that Iran, similar to the United States, has been an enemy of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. The two nations share the conviction that militant Islam is not to be supported. They differ in who they consider are the terrorists and whom they define as the freedom fighters in the Israel/Palestine conflict. If the U.S. pressed Iran, it might learn that Iran and other Middle East nations are close to U.S. principles in the war against international terrorism.

The Palestinian issue should be justly resolved. The UN has decided several times that Israel has acted illegally. Unless Israel dismantles its separation barrier, removes West Bank settlements, retreats to its 1967 borders, and permits international arbitration concerning the obligations of all parties to Palestinian refugees, peace will not be readily attainable and Iran will not cooperate.

Iran will display a different attitude after its reasons for pursuing nuclear armaments (if it is doing that) are removed. Iran will undoubtedly sign an accord to halt any nuclear activities after Israel retreats to the UN defined borders.

Naive and unworkable? Undoubtedly, but that only tells us where political incompetence, guidance by falsehoods and attendance to false prophets have brought the western world. Does anyone have a better solution that doesn’t involve mass destruction?
Alternativeinsight
May, 2006

The truth is that those who control the lives of all of us do not listen to solutions to problems; they cannot, they are the problem. Does anyone have a solution to that problem?

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Economic warfare requires preparation before implementation.
First, the “grieved” country accuses its adversary of intended crimes of aggression. The adversary is powerless to defend itself and becomes marked with the adjective “rogue state.” Since the “rogue state” cannot ameliorate the crimes of which it is accused, being that they do not exist, and because these states are usually proud and will not compromise with their national integrity (one reason for their fate), further action must be taken against them. The next step is isolation. This step has several stages.

Although contrary to law in democratic countries and contradictory to the criticism made by the democratic countries against a policy of the former Soviet Union, which imposed travel restrictions on its citizens, the “grieved” country cautions and sometimes forbids all its citizens, except its intelligence services, to travel to the “rogue state.” Subtle enforcement procedures, such as heavy fines, harassment, embarrassing airport searches, letting the neighbors know, and calls from the Internal Revenue Department are used to protect travelers from being contaminated with “rogue” germs, shield them from vicious propaganda, and prevent them from being kidnapped for ransom and from being arrested due to accusations of spying. The two latter reasons are valid. The unmentioned reasons are to assure the adversary does not acquire tourist dollars that enable it to survive, make certain that travelers do not learn that all they have read and heard from their government is propaganda, and prevent rogueidization, in which a citizen suddenly sympathizes with the rogue state and acquires rogue traits.

In the final stage, the enemy is isolated from international agencies, relief efforts, finances, and communications, and is ready to receive the ultimate strike of economic warfare. The ultimate strike has many shapes. If preferred methods have been insufficiently effective, warships produce an illegal embargo by arriving close to the beaches and dwarfing the rowboats of the sanctioned nation, and airplanes guard against the infiltration of military weapons, such as water pumps, medicines, and construction materials. If the embargo does not complete the cleansing task, then the “grieved” country might arm surrogate warriors inside or close to the “rogue country” and have them add human catastrophes to the imposed catastrophes that already punish the undesired country.

“Rogues,” which have special qualifications, earn the title of terrorists. This title sticks to their names like Velcro. It appears in all articles, headlines, dispatches, reports, and news as if the word terrorist followed by the name is one word. The “terrorist xxxx” (insert Hezbollah, Hamas, or Iran) earns this title by committing an evil deed that is usually in response to the tens of evil deeds committed against it. At times, economic warfare leads to a final step in whipping a “terrorist nation” back into shape ─ borderline starvation. If the food supply dwindles, certainly the unfortunate citizens of the “terrorist nation” will act as those who proclaimed “Liberté,” “Egalitie” and “Fraternitie” in the French Revolution. They will storm the gates of their oppressors, take away their cake, and demand bread. The United States has implemented political policies that have harmed nutrition in several countries, most notably Iran. Despite the punitive measures, the leaders of “terrorist” nations still eat cake, while the populations suffer greatly from economic deprivation and, in some cases, function at a subsistence level

Iran’s romance with the atomic age provoked a series of sanctions. Asset freezes (March 2008) and an expanded arms embargo (June 2010) prohibited Iran from buying heavy weapons, such as attack helicopters and missiles. All of this initially proved futile and counterproductive. The 2007 US sanctions against Iranian banks provided Iran with immunity from the global financial crisis and enabled it to be one of the few major economies not to be severely affected by the 2008 economic downturn.

Economic warfare soon reached full scale by strikes against Iran’s earnings from its most precious resource and export ─ oil. The U.S. Congress passed unilateral sanctions that targeted Iran’s energy and banking sectors and imposed penalties on firms that supplied Iran with substantial amounts of refined petroleum products.

The economic warfare affected Iran’s industries and welfare. On August 20, 2026, 1000 Rial of Iran’s currency was worth two cents. Real GDP fell from $644b in 2010 to $363b in 2025. Food inflation averaged 34.95 percent from 2012 until 2026, reaching an all-time high of 105 percent in February of 2026

Sanctions did not stop Iran’s nuclear activities, did not prevent it from signing contracts with foreign firms to develop its energy resources, and did not stop the Islamic nation from implementing other contracts by funding in currencies other than the dollar. Crude oil exports, an essential part of Iran’s economy greatly declined, but increased in recent years, as Iran adapted to a new world order.

Economic warfare against Tehran has not worked and will not work for one simple reason ─ The Islamic Republic continues its efforts without regard to consequences. In its war with Iraq, Saddam Hussein made several overtures to end the war; all of which Iran refused unless Hussein stepped down ─ tens of thousands of casualties because of the refusal. Moral authority comes before personal wants. The Iranians will never give in to threats and obfuscations. Not surrendering to their oppressors is a guiding principal of the Axis of Resistance members, shown by the bravery and endurance of the Palestinian people and Hezbollah’s refusal to surrender.

A former economic adviser to Iran’s central bank, Mehrdad Sepahvand, disputed Trump’s claim that the country is on the brink of economic collapse. “We should be a little bit cautious about the view that the Iranian economy is simply on the verge of collapse,” Mehrdad Sepahvand told CNBC’s Dan Murphy on “Access Middle East.” Sepahvand also said, “Shops are still full of food and basic goods, and there is no sign of panic buying. Despite serious imbalances in the banking system and even severe cyberattacks, public confidence in the banking system has not collapsed, and we have not seen any major run on banks. Although hope has clearly weakened, it has not completely disappeared. So the situation around is not as bad as we imagine.”

Completely ignored by the commander of the oval orifice is that there are other nations in this world and they may decide not to obey the commands. China, Russia, and the growing powerhouse – The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) ─ might have their own plans. Surprise, the shoe might be on the other foot.

Iran might suffer , but the U.S. might collapse. We are already witnessing a slight wiggle in the U.S. dollar market and a larger movement in other markets that indicate dollar weakening — long term bond rates escalating, gold returning to a bullish pattern, foreign currencies ticking upwards, and bitcoin quickly recovering from a recent $60,000 low and again reaching $73,000. Dollar weakening increases import and supply chain prices, which are heavy influencers on inflation and industrial production. With U.S. government debt at $40 trillion and total U.S. debt at $102 trillion, borrowing rates will increase, lending will become more restrictive, and bankruptcies will frequent those denied monetary support. As the dollar falls and exports to the United States of Duped Americans decrease, Japan, South Korea, and Germany might also decide that obeying Trump’s edicts is counterproductive and decide to engage in all the good things — oil smuggling, currency swap lines, cash transfers, exchange houses, ship registries, and front companies for the vicious deeds.

Conclusion
Warfare is visualized in terms of dead soldiers, battlefield blood, eerie noises, and bombed-out structures. We cannot easily comprehend that warfare can be silent and still be deadly. Economic warfare has equivalents to military war ─ the country that takes the offense becomes the aggressor, as in any war, and the destruction to the defending state is equally brutal. In most cases, the economic war has worse results. In a one-sided manner, the civilian population of the defending nation suffers greatly and the aggressor country suffers few losses. The war rarely achieves the results that the offended party desired, and no peace treaty is signed. The struggle remains an open issue. This economic war has subtle differences.

Iran has shown resilience. Trump has shown impatience. Resilience has an edge over impatience. Iran’s resilience will win out over the Trump impatience, the final blow to the 81 years of U.S. holding the rating as the world’s #1 superpower. The phrase applied to King Louis XI will soon be applied to King Trump, “apres moi, c’est le deluge - after me there is the deluge

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The forlorn looking Trump is ready to accept a quiet ending to a disquieting aggression. Iran exhibits an opposing scenario, loudly proclaiming that, “the US must permanently end its war and naval blockade against Iran, withdraw military forces from the region, fully compensate Iran for damages from the war, lift sanctions, and unfreeze assets abroad.” Supreme National Security Council Secretary Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr also demanded, “an end to Israel’s attacks on Palestinians and a withdrawal of Israeli forces from southern Lebanon, as well as an end to US and Israeli attacks against the Houthis in Yemen.“ Is all this possible? Would be nice, but I doubt it.

What drives Iran? Is it asking too much, and by not settling for “good enough,” leading itself and the world into an endless conflagration? Methinks so! Permanently ending anything is equivalent to death, compensating for damages is admitting war crimes, and withdrawing forces from the region is not what the Gulf states want. Why ask the impossible to gain a moral victory when you have been ceded the possible that gives military, political, and economic victory?

The Islamic Republic has earned world admiration and respect; two adjectives that its detractors have consistently refused to apply to the ever-struggling nation. It is now recognized that the Iranian nation we saw is not the Iranian nation that is, not quite what we have been told. The Iranian regime is repressive, but not without cause. Treason and espionage led to the war waged against its people, originating from knowing the coordinates of its strategic defenses and the behavior of its government officials, and the treason resulted in the extermination of its entire government. Fear of treason and espionage have caused paranoia in the Mullahs from the moment Ayatollah Khomeini stepped off the plane in Tehran. Believing they represent the aspirations of the downtrodden, the regime has acted vigorously to smother any attempt to challenge their authority, seeing sinister and imperialist forces behind every demonstration that contradicts its convictions. Khomeini’s reign was a brutal reign of terror, a 20^th century version of Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety. His death greatly diminished the repression, but has not brought its extinction.

The war against Iran sallied forward Trumpfully, eagerly waiting for the revolutionary forces to unite and take up arms against the embattled regime. The opposite occurred ─ the Iranian people quietly acquiesced to the government’s pursuit of the war, enduring the hardships, and ready to sacrifice themselves to Trump’s threats of total destruction. The Iranian officials can smile; instead, they are unduly grimacing. Their objectives of having almost absolute control of ship movements in the Strait of Hormuz is illegal, alienates those they want to befriend, and provides meager benefits to their operations.

The Traffic Separation Scheme (TSS), first established in 1968 by the International Maritime Organization (IMO), organized traffic in the Strait of Hormuz into “an inbound lane (managed primarily through Iranian waters) and an outbound lane (primarily through Omani waters). Each lane is 2 miles wide and separated by a 2-mile buffer zone to prevent head-on collisions.” The TSS has worked successfully for the last 58 years. Iran wants increased direct management, and has engaged Oman to devise a plan that is acceptable to both of them.

Oman replied with a plan where “Iran and Oman would cooperate in managing safe passage rather than leaving control of shipping movements predominantly in the hands of either side.” Similar to the TSS, Oman’s proposed routes are divided equally between Iranian and Omani territorial waters, with vessels entering the Gulf through the Iranian side and leaving through the Omani side. Shipping companies would pay voluntary fees, which has a precedent in arrangements used to support navigational safety in the Strait of Malacca.

Iran rejected Oman’s proposed equal division of the territorial waters. Its Deputy Foreign Minister, Kazem Gharibabadi, said that, “Tehran wants to manage the shipping route on its side of the strait while Oman will oversee only part, rather than all, of the opposite lane,” giving Iran oversight of both inbound and outbound maritime traffic. The disturbing fees became ambiguous, dependent on the words “maritime services,” which Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei said should have imposed charges.

Another ripple in the channel’s wave is China’s role in support of Iran. China has no economic reason to support Iran. Although The People’s Republic is the world’s largest importer of oil that transits the strait, accounting for 37.7% of the oil that slips through the Strait of Hormuz, Iran supplies only about 12% of China’s oil imports. Saudi Arabia supplies about 14%, Iraq contributes roughly 11%, and the UAE, Oman, and Kuwait load the ships with a combined total of 16%. Credit China with patience and neutrality, who, unlike the United States, is greatly affected by closures of the Strait of Hormuz. Beijing has behaved responsibly and cordially, and not bellicosity and threateningly, pleasingly contrary to Washington’s warmongering and ravings.

Iran’s presumed role in gaining almost complete authority over shipping in the Strait of Hormuz and its aggressive behavior in forcing closures does not align with Iran’s economic activity in the Strait. Using the Strait for political purposes and as an economic weapon does not sit well with other nations and does not benefit Iran. Lacking compromise in ending the aggression committed against it and making demands that ensure aggression to continue is baffling. Moral victories are worth nothing in the international battles. Pride, well doesn’t that “goeth before the fall?”

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Major impediments to mutual liberation are those who perceive Israel’s genocidal intent as a temporary aberration, who believe the genocide will halt by re-connecting Israeli Jews with “diaspora” Jews and by asserting a moral duty of not going “from victims to perpetrators.” Several problems with the former thesis, one being there are no “diaspora” Jews, a self-serving and fraudulent identification that entices all Jews to join the fracas. Jews, as all people, are at home in the country in which they were born and raised, are socially, physically, and psychologically attached to the culture, environment, soil, air, and climate that nurtured them, and are not cognizant of being mysteriously transported from a non-existent land to the ground beneath them.

Barry Finestone and the Jim Joseph Foundation, might have good intentions by being dedicated to, “Engaging, educating, and inspiring young Jewish minds,” “Re-imagining Israel Education,” and believing, “We can shape the relationship between the two largest Jewish communities in the world — Israel and North America.” The foundation is duplicitous and wasting its time. A growing number of American Jews, especially its new generation, have no connection and aren’t inclined to establish connection, let alone a dubious re-connection with criminal, murderous, and genocidal Israeli Jews. Who would?

Western Jews’ connection with Israel was flimsy until Israel’s victory in the 1967 war. The French sociologist Georges Philippe Friedmann argued in his work, The End of the Jewish People that “the complete emancipation of the Jewish people signaled by both the creation of Israel and their assimilation of the West would lead to the demise of the Jewish people. Israel was a melting pot in which Israelization was bulldozing the differences of 102 Jewish subcultures.” In the words of this author, who has expressed a similar view, “Gathering together forms a new Jew, the Israeli Jew.”

After the 1967 war, Friedmann, as many Jews throughout the world, became emotionally attached to a winner. Links between Israelis and western Jews became stronger. Realizations have arrived. Zionism was created on a fallacy that Jews needed their own land to survive; Zionism’s thrust has been to create the conditions that force Jews to need their own land to survive; survival in Israel is precarious; western Jews are being made accomplices to genocide; and Jews should be free to choose with whom they associate and not live in a monolithic world. if Judaism loses adherents it is because it is not spiritually satisfying to people and they have a duty to themselves to seek preferable climes. What is wrong with discarding archaic and failed institutions and finding other avenues of salvation? Isn’t that progress?

From Victims to Perpetrators is the theme of an article by Daniel Bar-Tal, Professor Emeritus, School of Education, Tel Aviv University Israeli. Daniel Bar-Tal’s dialectic approach and logical sequencing of the “history of a conflict,” more appropriately termed, “the slaughter of the Palestinians,” derives flawed conclusions from the usual mind-setting distortions of history.

One of history’s most troubling paradoxes concerns the Jewish people. For nearly two thousand years, Jews experienced persecution, expulsions, pogroms, discrimination, and ultimately the Holocaust, in which six million Jews were murdered. Yet within a few decades of establishing Israel, many observers came to view the Jewish state as responsible for the dispossession, occupation, and oppression of another people: the Palestinians. How can a people shaped by victimhood become associated with practices many regard as oppressive?

I don’t intend to mitigate persecution of the Jews before the Holocaust, but the discussion needs exactitude and qualification. A portion of Jews throughout Europe, a fraction of world Jewry, experienced expulsions, property damage, and killings (mainly due to charges of Jews causing the Black Death plague) during the centuries of feudalism, religious wars, and monarchical dominance ─ from 1300 to 1800 CE. Unlike thousands of creeds that were decimated in the thousands of years of civilization and did not survive to tell their gruesome stories, the mass of dispersed Jews found new homes and survived in huge numbers, many eventually returning to the areas from which they had been displaced. The word dispersed had value; like all organisms, differentiation assisted survival, while crowding together in one place would have assured extinction.

Concurrent with the 18th century Enlightenment and 19^th century Emancipation, Jews integrated into previously restricted societies and gained positions of authority and power. Despite problems, most Jews managed to survive well.

Persecution of Jews in Western Europe
Available data does not support extensive persecution of Jews in Western Europe after the year 1800. The road to emancipation contained a number of anti-Jewish riots, a few forced and voluntary expulsions, personal anti-Jewish behavior, and some incitement against Jews, but those temporary incidents involved a minor part of European Jewry population and locations, and rarely erupted into severe bodily harm or killings.

Pursue any timeline on 19th century anti-Semitism, such as at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_antisemitism_in_the_19th_century, and the record shows that physical attacks on western European Jews, distinct from attacks on Jews in Russia, Middle East, and North Africa, after the 1819-1826 Hep-Hep riots in Germany, were few.

The Dreyfus case, an unjust conviction of a French Jewish military officer, highlighted the century of exaggerated violence against Jews in western European nations. Was Dreyfus twice convicted because he was Jewish, or was that a side issue to circumstantial evidence, and became the issue by those who preferred it to become an issue, or because there was no other significant issue the anti-Semite hunters could find in late 19^th century France? According to Piers Paul, The Dreyfus Affair, p. 83, “The French army of the period was relatively open to entry and advancement by talent, with an estimated 300 Jewish officers, of whom ten were generals.” (Only five African-American officers in the much larger US army in WWII.) Why would a military institution “rife with anti-Semitism” permit a recently emancipated and relatively small minority to advance so rapidly? Why is one French officer’s problems significant to nationals of other countries, especially non-Europeans? Americans have heard the name Dreyfus almost daily with their breakfast cereal.

Persecution of Jews in the Russian Pale.
Insufficient communication in Russia during the 19th century, coupled with a tendency to create sensational news and accept exaggerated rumors, has made it difficult to ascertain the nature and extent of attacks on Russia’s Jewish community and the role played by government authorities. The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, an English-language reference work on the history and culture of Eastern Europe Jewry, prepared by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and published by Yale University Press in 2008, is an objective and authoritative source. Excerpts from their work, are quoted.

Anti-Jewish violence in the Russian Empire before 1881 was a rare event, confined largely to the rapidly expanding Black Sea entrepot of Odessa. The first Odessa pogrom, in 1821, was linked to the outbreak of the Greek War for Independence, during which the Jews were accused of sympathizing with the Ottoman authorities. Although the pogrom of 1871 was occasioned in part by a rumor that Jews had vandalized the Greek community’s church, many non-Greeks participated, as they had done during earlier disorders in 1859.

The pogroms of 1881 and 1882, which occurred in waves throughout the southwestern provinces of the Russian Empire, were the first to assume the nature of a mass movement. Typically, the pogroms of this period originated in large cities, and then spread to surrounding villages, traveling along means of communication such as rivers and railroads. Violence was largely directed against the property of Jews rather than their persons. In the course of more than 250 individual events, millions of rubles worth of Jewish property was destroyed. The total number of fatalities is disputed but may have been as few as 50, half of them pogromshchiki who were killed when troops opened fire on rioting mobs.

From https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/law/pogroms-imperial-russia

The second wave of pogroms began in Kishenev, the provincial capital of Moldova, on May 2, 1903. Two days of rioting, which began on Easter Sunday and the last day of Passover, left nearly fifty Jews dead and hundreds more injured. In addition, enormous damage was inflicted on Jewish-owned property.

From Pogroms: anti-Jewish violence in modern Russian history, edited by John d. Klier, Eliizabeth and Sidney Carob Lecturer in Modern Jewish History at University College London and Shlomo Lambroza, Associate Professor of History at St Mary’s College, Maryland.

The wave of anti-Jewish pogroms that swept the Pale of Settlement after Tsar Nicholas II issued the October Manifesto in I905 reflected the ethnic and political tensions and hostilities that characterized popular unrest and marred the social landscape of late Imperial Russia in that revolutionary year. In the weeks following the granting of fundamental civil rights and political liberties, pogroms directed mainly at Jews but also affecting students, intellectuals, and other national minorities broke out in hundreds of cities, towns, and villages, resulting in deaths and injuries to thousands of people. In the port city of Odessa alone, the police reported that at least 400 Jews and 100 non-Jews were killed and approximately 300 people, mostly Jews, were injured, with slightly over 1,600 Jewish houses, apartments, and stores incurring damage.

Violation of any human life can neither be underestimated nor ignored. Bothersome is that although Jews suffered in Europe, so did almost everyone else, and Jewish travail takes prominence. For centuries, Europe featured civil wars, insurrections, peasant riots, massacres, a 30-year war, and other wars. Millions killed, injured, pauperized, entire communities and ethnicities wiped out. Wasn’t there a French Revolution? Must have occurred for a reason. Go through the statistics and learn that the Jews, despite periodic interruptions to their lives, were probably better off than most of their neighbors.

The Russian Pale included Russians, Jews, Poles, Ukrainians (largest minority), Belarusians, Lithuanians, Germans (in some regions), Armenians (more common farther south) and Tatars (in certain areas). Poles conflicted with Ukrainians; Ukrainian Cossacks and peasants attacked Polish nobility and Roman Catholics; Poles and Russians fought each other. Rarely mentioned are the 15th–17th centuries Crimean Tatar slave raids.

Before the Pale of Settlement was established (1791), the Crimean Khanate conducted frequent raids into present-day Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, and southern Russia. Victims were primarily Ukrainians, Poles, Russians, and others. An estimated 1–2 million people were made captive (ED: Might be exaggerated.) during several centuries. Russian annexation of Crimea in 1783 ended the slave trade and started a forced large-scale Tatar emigration from Crimea.

From what I have been able to confirm, In all of Europe, less than 200 Jews were killed and possibly a few thousand were injured in anti-Jewish riots during the 100 years of the 19th century.

Hidden from the book of woe are the overwhelming opposing stories, the protection and benefits accorded to Jews by friendly communities and leaders who valued their contributions to everyday life.

Although the Romans did not permit allegiance to Gods other than their own, Julius Caesar and Emperor Augustus granted the Jewish people formal legal status across the empire. Synagogues were legally protected, and Jewish communities were exempt from the requirement to worship Roman state gods or the Emperor. From my research, I cannot find one Jewish person condemned to death by a Roman emperor for worshiping the wrong God. The Jews in the Roman Empire, as all dissidents, were politically repressed after 3^rd and 4^th century revolts against the Romans. Sufficient reason for the Romans to suppress them. Good reason for them to leave.

During the Persian Parthian and Sasanian Empires (248 BCE to 641 CE), communities of Mesopotamian Jews appeared in the Fertile Crescent. They housed the three great Jewish academies of Surah, Pumbadita, and Nehardea, from where the legacy and heritage of modern Jews and Judaism are best expressed. In The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, by Maristella Botticini, Zvi Eckstein, 2012, the authors state that “Jewish life reached a high level in the Abbasid Empire during the years 800 -1200 CE. Before 900 CE, Mesopotamia and Persia contained 75% of world Jewry with the rest in North Africa and Western Europe.”

Jews living in al-Andalus, Iberian territories under Muslim rule from 711–1492, experienced relative tolerance, prosperity, and socio-cultural integration within the broader Muslim society.

in 1388, Grand Duke Vytautas the Great, from the Grand Duchy of Lithuanian/Poland, granted local Jews a charter that established them as a class of freemen directly under the Grand Duke’s protection, placing them equal to the lesser nobility in legal standing. Through the years 1400 to 1650, Jews leased huge estates, obtained great wealth, and engaged in commerce and trade. Jews from Switzerland, Flanders, France, Spain, Bohemia, and the Holy Roman Empire migrated to Lithuania to enjoy the religious freedom and participate in economic opportunities,.

Little of the past plays a determining role for Jews in contemporary times. The positions and dispositions of Jews have changed. Their dress, their customs, their language, and their relations with neighbors are no longer of difference, separation, and isolation. The social, material, and political conditions of the years before the late 20^th and present 21^st centuries were entirely different from the present and do not apply to life in contemporary times. The oppressed Jew and the oppressed Russian serf no longer exist. Mentioning their experiences as a crutch for their modern descendants is an insult to intelligence.

Daniel Bar-Tal’s article, From Victims to Perpetrators? The Israeli Jewish Case, inevitably leads to the Holocaust.

Another critical factor is the central role of the Holocaust in Israeli collective identity. The murder of six million Jews by Nazi Germany remains the defining trauma of modern Jewish history. In Israel, it is not merely remembered as a historical event but as a foundational lesson about vulnerability and survival. The Holocaust is taught extensively in schools, commemorated through public rituals, and embedded deeply within national consciousness.

The Holocaust occurred in Europe to European Jews. The concepts of “collective identity” and defining trauma” are spurious comments that have been given life by indoctrination. The Holocaust did not affect Jews who lived in the Middle East, North Africa, and North America. Few knew about the catastrophe until after the war and they initially digested it as a newspaper article. I never met a Holocaust survivor, a Jewish person related to someone who suffered from the Holocaust, or any Jew who exhibited trauma from the Holocaust, and whose future life was determined by the horrifying event.

Native Americans still exhibit the effects of the genocide. African Americans in ghetto life demonstrate lingering effects from their severe oppression. Rohingya struggle to survive from their displacement. Rwanda Tutsis have moved on and now control Rwanda. Armenians don’t plead eternal victim in their wars with Azerbaijan. Contemporary Jews are not victims of the World War II genocide. The victims are dead, with a few still surviving. Nevertheless, Jews, who have the highest standard of living in most of the countries in which they reside and don’t show a minute psychological defect from a past genocide to others claim perpetual trauma and compensation for past grievances.

Daniel Bar-Tal’s finishes his essay with,

The tragedy is that both peoples possess legitimate histories of suffering, fear, and attachment to the same land. Lasting peace will require recognizing those realities simultaneously rather than treating one narrative as valid and the other as irrelevant. Only through such recognition can Israelis and Palestinians hope to move beyond a conflict that has shaped both societies for more than a century.

The year is 2026 and Israeli governments have had 75 years to unilaterally force a two state, a bi-national state, or a one-state solution that brings peace and resolution to the area. Instead, its Nation State Laws unilaterally claim Israel is a “no state,” with no define borders, and acts as “the sole representative of all Jews.“ There cannot be peace in the Levant until Jews recognize they do not have a unique history of suffering and fear, refuse to be shaped by victim hood, and understand they have no attachment to the Palestinian lands. Not only Jews should gain the recognition, many others in this disillusioned world — strange legislators who betray their constituents by being guided from what is good for Israel, strange states, such as Maine, that iterate they “have shared an affinity with the people of Israel, and the bonds of friendship and cooperation that have existed between Israel and Maine for the past 74 years have enriched the cultural diversity of our State’s tapestry (how?),” and passed a “Joint resolution recognizing May 5, 2022 as the 74th anniversary of the founding of the modern state of Israel” (Why is Israel or any country singled out from the tens of new and modern states created after World war II?), and implausible constructions of dozens of Holocaust memorials around the world in countries that have no relationship to the Holocaust and don’t recognize other genocides, even those that happened in their own nations.

Moshe Menuhin, father of violinist Yehudi Menuhin, In his book, “Not by Might, nor by Power”: The Zionist Betrayal of Judaism in our Time, recalls his childhood in Palestine, “It was drummed into our young hearts that the fatherland must extend to the ancient borders and that it must become Goyimrein (that is, free of Gentiles).”

Discard the fabric of victim hood and Jews will live freely and normally with all peoples. Maintain the thin tissue of falsifications and Jews will suffer from their self-inflicted wrath, their generated hatred toward their own selves.

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In a capitalist system, the capitalist owns means of production, invests profits to regenerate more profits, and increases capital from constant reinvestment. An outgrowth of the industrial revolution, Capitalist economies promoted industrial progress and substantially increased the material wants of much of the worlds’ population. Stumbling through recessions, depressions, and panics, Capitalism periodically breaks down, retreats, and petitions government rescue. From another perspective, pure Capitalism has a short life, and needs to be constantly resuscitated. In one resurrection. Capitalism embraced neoliberalism, a global free-enterprise sub-system with a mixed economy that uses capitalist structures. Forecasted global problems indicate that neoliberaism cannot meet future challenges; a new socioeconomic system is warranted.

Pure Socialism is a centralized economic and political system, where the government owns a major portion of industrial production and regulates production and prices. In its purity, Socialism has two primary built-in impediments ─ difficulty to efficiently allocate resources and struggles to sufficiently motivate workers. The former occurs from companies hoarding to meet quotas and creating waste, and from producers unable to meet commitments and creating production bottlenecks. Failure to sufficiently motivate labor is a product of workers’ lifetime employment arrangement, which lessens incentive to operate in the most efficient manner. Although a similar problem occurs in the capitalist system, Socialism needs special safeguards to prevent a sinecure system, where close associates are favored by top management.

Democratic socialism has many definitions. For this conversation, Democratic Socialism defines an economy and society that is politically democratic, allows private enterprise to generate surpluses, and uses government controls to assure profits are optimally reassigned for both business (profit reinvestment) and public needs (taxation). Government policies, such as subsidizing, regulating, and distributing, help shape the economy. Social ownership of businesses is encouraged. These include worker-owned cooperatives, publicly owned enterprises managed by workers, and workplace democracy, where workers’ representatives have a seat on corporation boards. Some inefficient and vital industries necessitate a form of state ownership, but most industries are best run as private enterprises.

Democratic Socialists consider central planning for major public industries — mass transit, housing, and energy — and permit market mechanisms to determine the demand for consumer goods. Democratic Socialism attempts to combine the positives of Capitalism and Socialism and eschew the faults of other systems.

Behind the appearance of Capitalism’s (free enterprise) success in providing material wants to vast population, lays failures — economic depressions, world wars, civil strife, and inability of the private sector to respond quickly to catastrophes, as was shown by responses to the corona virus.

Since its beginnings, periodic economic recessions, depressions, and panics gripped the United States . Government actions to repair the defects and adjust for the failures proceeded from recognition that Capitalism became comatose every few years and urged remedies to be constantly revived. A plethora of laws, regulations, agencies, government deficits, and other amelioration have provided stitches, transplants, band-aids, and surgical operations to patch up and rescue a constantly ailing patient, reviving the collapse after each fall. The history of Capitalism reveals a system that ignored the nation and a nation that did its utmost to maintain free enterprise.

From 1867 to 1929, the U.S. economy exhibited a shock every several years. Seven severe depressions or financial panics occurred during that 62-year period. One of these started in 1873, and is considered to be the Long Depression ─ a period of bursts of prosperity and contractions from 1873-1896.

Constant economic disturbances and sputtered growth prompted lawmakers to socialize capitalism, and correct the excesses of “rugged individualism” capitalism, in which a few financiers exercised control of the economic system and used it for their private gain ─ essentially robbing banks by owning them. Establishment of the Interstate Commercial Commission in 1887 for regulating the railroads, passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which “declared illegal all combinations in restraint of trade,” creation of the Federal Reserve System in 1912 to regulate the money supply, stabilize the financial system and subdue inflation, passage of the Clayton Act in 1914 in order to further restrict anti-competitive practices and enforce the earlier Sherman Antitrust act, establishment of the Federal Trade Commission in 1914, an agency with powers to “prevent business practices that are anti-competitive or deceptive or unfair to consumers,” and formation of The Federal Communications Commission , by the Communications Act of 1934, to “maintain jurisdiction over the areas of broadband access, fair competition, radio frequency use, media responsibility, public safety, and homeland security,” are a few examples of government attempts to rectify Capitalism’s problems. They did not halt the calamities ─ “boom” and bust” persisted; speculation remained rampant; mergers tending to monopolies continued; banks went bankrupt.

The call for regulatory legislation proved that the capitalist system, which had its moments of genuine success, was, as constituted, only partially effective and efficient ─ it could not exist without government intervention. Legislators, in their ardor to preserve the system, neglected to realize that the capitalist system had survived with special advantages. How far would the capitalist system in the United States have advanced without a century of slave labor, land and resource appropriation from the Native Americans, constant wars to seize territory in North America and command global markets, and tens of millions of immigrants working at subsistence wages? Government attempts to stabilize the erratic free enterprise system with regulatory capitalism served as a temporary palliative, which eventually became co-opted and could not prevent the Great Depression.

Hunger and unemployment in the land of plenty drove the New Deal toward the rescue plan of welfare capitalism ─ government sponsored programs and legislation that fostered institutions to re-distribute wealth and enable all citizens to escape poverty and gain equal opportunity. Soon more rescue came from government construction of transportation, communication, and power infrastructure ─ interstate highways, airports, hydroelectric and nuclear power plants, and ARPANET (the first wide-area packet switching network). Equal opportunity laws, subsidized mortgage loans, and direct coordination in research and development between the defense department and private industry drove free enterprise toward a mixed economy. Government defense contracts developed the electronics and aviation industries; Eisenhower administration’s interstate road system magnified the automobile and steel industries.

The role of the defense department in providing sustenance to the free enterprise system is insufficiently considered. Entire industries — defense, armaments, electronics, shipbuilding, aviation, space exploration — and parts of some industries — airlines, plastics, chemical, metallurgical, Internet — owe their existence and prosperity to defense department developments, funds and contracts. Airplane designs and manufacture are direct outgrowths from defense industry aircraft. Airline growth relied upon government subsidies, mail and freight deliveries, and airport constructions.

OPEC’s higher oil prices during the 1970s challenged a troubled Capitalism, initiating inflation, ultra-high interest rates, and a 1981 recession, which invoked the principally recognized rescue plan ─ pump the economy with government deficits and easy credit ─ the most accepted means to maintain the system.

Since the Reagan administration, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has closely followed an almost continually increasing sum of public and private debt. Growth in the Capitalism system became allied to and dependent upon the ever growing debt.

GDP and DEBT

Red is Total Credit Outstanding
Blue is GDP
Dashed yellow is government debt
Note the slow growth of GDP until debt started to escalate, government debt quickening during the Reagan administration, and its decisive role in replacing stalled overall debt by reinvigorating the GDP after the 2008-2009 financial crisis.

Excessive debt enabled the Reagan administration to emerge from its incipient recession. Escalated private debt offset budget surpluses during the Clinton administration. A combined whammy of private and public debt during the Bush term soon hit a wall and caused the huge 2008 recession. Wisely, Obama pursued slow growth policies that, by using a slow accumulation of debt, prevented any downfall during his two administrations.

Almost all money is conventional debt, issued by banks in their lending process, and by Federal Reserve open market operations. Capitalism runs on this debt. As debt plus interest is retired, new and more expensive debt must replace it or the monetary base will decrease and money available for purchase of goods and services will decline.

GDP and the MONEY SUPPLY

Here we observe the exact relation between the GDP and money supply and their divergence after the Federal Reserve over pumped the economy in order to prevent additional disasters occurring from the 2008-2009 financial crisis. Where did the excess money supply find a home; search for excessive investment in the stock market and investigate purchasing power losses to inflation.

Capitalism needs profit in order to grow and generate its periods of prosperity. Because profit is the lifeblood of the capitalist system, understanding the modern concept of profit ─ how profit is made, its functions, problems, benefits, and failures ─ provides an improved understanding of the contemporary Capitalism system.

The price of goods Pr = C+ P, where C is cost, and P is profit. In the production process, excepting for some subsidies, no funds are supplied to the economy for purchase of the goods represented by profit, or as Karl Marx defined it, the surplus value, the value in goods that workers’ wages are insufficient to purchase. From where comes the added purchasing power to obtain the mysterious profit?

Increasing the Purchasing Power

(1) Private debt supplies a major increase in purchasing power.
(2) Distribution of profits by dividends, share buybacks, and bonuses to management and employees recirculate profits for purchase of goods.
(3) Government debt supplies the knockout punch to clear the shelves, growing when private debt shrinks.
(4) A positive trade balance brings purchasing power into the system, reclaiming dollars circulating throughout the world. A negative balance, which has occurred during the last decades, removes purchasing power from the system.
(5) Some liquid funds from savings and investments re-enter the system.

The first three components have operated strongly and actively to restore purchasing power. Government debt, issuance of bonds to foreign buyers reclaim the dollars lost to a negative trade balance.

Ultimate failure
The ultimate failure of the profit system is apparent. To continually increase purchasing of goods and obtain more profit, the money supply must increase. Trade imbalances (subsidized by government debt), and retirement of private debt soon hit a wall and a decrease in the money supply occurs. An estimated $40 trillion of it may be double bookkeeping, nevertheless, how much further can the present $110 trillion total debt advance? When, debt servicing becomes saturated, which means the money supply cannot increase, wants from all sectors are fulfilled, or insufficient workers are available for increased production (due to low birth rate and immigration restrictions), the economy will stagnate and soon decline. Proper actions can slow the failures but not forever. Bust is inevitable.

The true meaning of profit
Profit is perceived with awe, glorified as the deserved result of risky and arduous effort. Household debt is viewed with sympathy, as an opportunity to purchase hard goods and participate in the material life of the nation for those who cannot immediately earn enough to buy the goods. Government debt has severe detractors; many consider it a theft on future generations. The true meaning of profit is that they are all the same, the principal component of someone’s profit is debt accrued by others. When debt stagnates, and it eventually must, the economy will stagnate and profits will stagnate. The latter conditions lead to decreased employment, decreased investment, and decreased purchasing power. These provoke inabilities to repay debt, bankruptcies, and tighter lending requirements. The money supply shrinks and the GDP shrinks. Government valiantly attempts to rescue the falling economy and the efforts provide plants more bricks in the Democratic Socialist structure.

A Capitalist system does not exist on its own merits; capital formations are only one part of a complex socioeconomic system, which includes credit control, welfare, government spending, taxes, subsidies, regulation, directives, and oversight, all which determine production, growth, and progress. The entrepreneur deserves remuneration, but. in a final analytics, he/she and the capitalist system maintain existence due to government spending.

Profit is not tied to Capitalism, and other economic systems can incorporate it for growth and material enrichment. A severely modified Capitalism can more efficiently and effectively employ profit, which has significant benefits. Enter the Democratic Socialist system, issuing credit to those willing to amortize expensive items that would ordinarily require years of savings. Dividends to stockholders and harbored profits from the credit purchases are recirculated as bonuses to laborers. The profit motive remains, and the rewards enrich a greater number of people.

Industry wide sharing of profits between investors and employees extends the years between economic cycles and allows stable and high profits ─ previous year distributed profit allows purchase of next year’s surplus. Less domestic and government credit are needed to keep the system alive.

The Economic Consequences of Wealth Concentration
An economy that has operated as “trickle down” has reached a peak, and it is time for an economy that pours itself out for all. Share the wealth and lessening inequality by distribution of income are not just idealistic expressions or populist proposals; they are sound economics. More equitably distributed wages and spending power lessen social grievances, reduce social problems, and increase domestic spending. More equal distribution of wealth has also been associated with improvements in national health. Fairness to all reflects as benefits to all, including a lower need for government spending on social programs.

Rationalizing ill-conceived wealth distributions by describing the American poor as wealthier than the lower middle class in many developed nations is a deception. Poverty is defined as an absolute number, but its effects are relative. The lower wage earners in the United States are unaware of what they have in relation to foreigners; they are aware of what they do not have in relation to those living close to them. The wide disparity in wealth creates resentment and tension, and leads to psychological and emotional difficulties. Minimizing social problems combiner the giving of more to the lower classes with the taking of less by the upper classes.

The social problems and associated costs in developed nations that have wide distributions of income and wealth are well-documented — elevated mental illness, crime, infant mortality, and health problems. Every citizen suffers from and pays for the social problems derived from income inequality, an unfair condition in a democratic society. Several investigators have clarified the social determinants of health.

Kawachi, I. and B.P. Kennedy, 1997, in Socioeconomic Determinants of Health: Health and Social Cohesion: Why Care About Income Inequality? British Medical Journal.

Growing evidence suggests that the distribution of income, in addition to the absolute standard of living enjoyed by the poor, is a key determinant of population health. A large gap between rich people and poor people leads to higher mortality through the breakdown of social cohesion. The recent surge in income inequality in many countries has been accompanied by a marked increase in the residential concentration of poverty and affluence. Residential segregation diminishes the opportunities for social cohesion.

University of Chicago, Nov, 16-22, Sir Michael Marmot, The Social Determinants of Health and Disease Health

One of the dominant features affecting the health situation of all industrialized countries is the social gradient in health and disease. Analysts who approach this topic commonly think of it as a problem of poor health for the disadvantaged and good health for those who are not in the disadvantaged category. This is an inadequate way to pose the problem. The Whitehall Study of civil servants showed that, amongst people who are not poor, there is a social gradient in mortality that runs from the bottom to the top in each society. People in each socio-economic category have worse health than those above them in the hierarchy.

The Future
A future of growing challenges — climate change, pandemics, robotics and artificial intelligence replacing workers, greenhouse gas emissions heating the atmosphere, change from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources, prevention of nuclear war, migration chaos, political polarization, and redistribution of the wealth — demand a realignment of the socioeconomic system.

Governments are wanted that can assure the safety and security of all the worlds peoples, no matter their economic status, and no matter the hardships of the prevailing circumstances. Wealth will be less a measure, and escaping human extinction will be the motivation, requiring government action in many aspects that shape human existence. Capitalism will slowly evolve into a system that reflects the demands of a global society, a Democratic Socialist system that provides the structures for maintaining democratic substance and resolves the challenges of a difficult future.

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Doubtful that finding the truth will be an objective in this upcoming trial. The prosecution will argue sentencing for a hate crime and the defense will be wary of exposing the defendant as a possible bribe-taking criminal. Revealing the truth behind Kadar’s actions must pursue another avenue, which is worth pursuing; it might demonstrate the manipulations used to establish false anti-Semitic acts, deluding the public into believing Jews are constantly attacked, and need Israel to defend them. Michael Ron David Kadar’s trial deserves attention.

Anti-Defamation league (ADL) statistics on anti-Semitism have always gathered skeptics. Careful examinations indicated the ADL reports everything it can as an anti-Semitic incident. Reports contained mostly passive and non-violent attacks.

… in the first quarter of 2017, preliminary reports of the 541 anti-Semitic incidents included: 380 harassment incidents, including 161 bomb threats, an increase of 127 percent over the same quarter in 2016; 155 vandalism incidents, including three cemetery desecrations, an increase of 36 percent; 6 physical assault incidents, a decrease of 40 percent.

Only 6 physical assaults, and none serious in the ADL report.. Included in the first quarter of 2017 ADL statistics were the multitude of calls from Michael Kadar, which were almost all the bomb threats. Kadar, then a juvenile of 17 years, resided in Ashkelon, Israel when making the calls, and eventually served seven years for his crimes. After leaving prison, he migrated to Norway, unaware that the Norwegians would agree to extradite him to the United States to face charges of committing the hate crimes, and additional charges “in the District of Columbia for threats made against the Israeli Embassy and the Anti-Defamation League Washington, D.C. offices and in the Middle District of Georgia for cyberstalking and conveying false information to police dispatch.” In total, Kadar is accused of instigating in early 2017, “a wave of more than 2,000 bomb threats against Jewish Community Centers in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Norway, and Denmark.”

The reason for all these bomb threats ─ Kadar was said to have acted out of boredom — the extent and complexity of the acts, and Kadar’s personal life and financial gain, hint at more than a careless teenager committing pranks; they intimate of a well-conceived plot to fool the public that a great number of anti-Semites were operating in the U.S. and Europe. What is the evidence?

Start with the most convincing evidence from the New York Times, Nov. 22, 2018.

According to court documents, the defendant demanded payment for his services on the dark net in Bitcoin, the virtual cryptocurrency, and earned nearly 184 Bitcoin, now worth about $800,000. In his decision, the judge provided details of the defendant’s price list for his services. A phone threat to a private house cost $40; a call to a school cost double that; and for a call warning of a bomb on a plane, he charged $500.

Since the defendant refused to reveal the codes to access his Bitcoin wallet, most of his earnings have not been recovered. Only a few thousand dollars were found in cash, according to the Israeli authorities.

Earning $800,000 in Bitcoin (worth $240,000 when Kadar made the calls) for telephone calls sounds like serious business and not “acting out of boredom.” Implementing a complex system of using an antenna use to seek a public Wi-Fi, paying a spoofing company to disguise voice and identity, and requiring bitcoin payments to finance the efforts indicates a well-constructed and elaborate plan to commit illegal activities and evade authorities. Unanswered questions:

(1) Where did the youth obtain the funds for implementing the system, advertising the services, and paying the spoofing company?

(2) Why would he make an investment in a speculative adventure, whose financial return was dubious?

(3) Who paid him for his services? Only two persons are cited to have possibly paid and nobody has been identified.

(4) Would anybody pay in bitcoin in advance for a service of this type and would Kadar perform the service before being paid?

(5) Kadar had dual American and Israeli citizenship and his parents chose to live in Jewish dominated Israel rather than more secular America. Because he had strong attachments to a Jewish heritage, why would he agree to target Jewish institutions and not institutions of other faiths?

Let’s place this in a more believable and trustworthy perspective. It does not seem possible that this type of service can have viable customers nor earn the amount of bitcoin that appeared in Kadar’s wallet. Somebody guided the youth into the criminal actions and awarded Kadar for his efforts. That someone had to know Kadar and be geographically close to him. Lots of bitcoin for a multitude of transactions was obtained and passed to the youth. This is the work of a careful and highly organized group and not the random operations of disconnected individuals.

Conclusion: A group solicited Kadar, an isolated and precocious youth (he was home schooled, and nobody in the neighborhood, including those his age, knew much about him), and adept in network technology, to design a system that could make threatening phone calls to Jewish institutions outside of Israel. The system would operate without detection by disguising the voice and identity of the caller. Having the plot originate from Israel and involve a Jewish Israeli makes it highly improbable the Jewish institutions were targeted by people hostile to Jews. They were targeted to feign anti-Jewish activity and increase the statistics for Jewish victim hood, a conspiracy that has proven true in other instances.

(1) George Washington University (2007): A Jewish freshman at George Washington University admitted to drawing a series of swastikas on her own door and on other dormitory surfaces, causing significant campus panic.

(2) Paris, France (2004): A non-Jewish French woman falsely claimed that she and her baby were assaulted and targeted with antisemitic slurs on a suburban train by a group of men of North African descent. The hoax generated massive political outrage before she admitted to fabricating the entire event.

(3) Winnipeg, Canada (2019): The Jewish owners of Burmax Cafe in Winnipeg, Manitoba, were charged with public mischief after police concluded they staged a severe, highly publicized vandalism and hate crime incident at their own business. Police determined the family had vandalized the cafe and painted antisemitic graffiti on the walls themselves.

I have no positive proof to my conspiracy theory. Let’s put it another way; I am not a conspiracy theorist and I trust my instincts. Will be interesting to learn what the trial reveals.

The Jews during Zionism’s formation did not believe in or trust Zionism. Reform Judaism’s Declaration of Principles: 1885 Pittsburgh Conference stated,

We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.

Zionism slowly impressed itself on the Jewish community and, together with the 1913 founding of the Anti-Defamation league, covertly carried a message that Jews would always suffer from “anti-Semitism,” and a Jewish state was the only solution to the “problem.” Immigrant restrictions in the United States, which affected Eastern Europeans and included Jews from that region, and persecutions in Nazi Germany intensified the rhetoric and gained converts to Zionism. Rabbi Andrue Kahn, Executive Director of the American Council for Judaism, argues that “the alignment of Reform Judaism with Zionism represents not an organic development but an authoritarian imposition. It is a ‘slow-moving coup,’ executed over decades by an outnumbered minority against the authentic universalist tradition of the movement’s founders.”

Nor was ancient Israel an established home of the ancient Jews.
Freed from a pastoral life, dry conditions, and restricted economies in the Levant, new communities of Mesopotamian Jews, knowledgeable and worldly, appeared in the Fertile Crescent after the third century B.C., and survived there until the establishment of Israel. The region between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers housed the great Jewish academies of Surah, Pumbadita, and Nehardea, and best expressed the legacy and heritage of modern Judaism. In The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, by Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein, Princeton University press, 2012, the authors claim that “Judaism reached its Golden Age in 800 -1200 A.D. During that time, Mesopotamia and Persia contained 75% of world Jewry with the rest in North Africa and Western Europe.”

Ancient Israel was home to ancient Jews. The area that is now Israel was not the ancient home of modern Jews. When an ethnicity speaks of an ancient home, it speaks, such as from the voices of Native Americans, of caring for the land and hunting grounds, for attachment to a soil that nourished the people, and with intimate knowledge of ancestors. It may look back at a recognized civilization that gave the world new advances in technology, culture, warfare, administration, or other disciplines, and left identifiable physical traces that excite mankind. Modern Jews have no attachment to a soil, no memories of an advanced civilization, no honest attraction to an ancient land, and do not have intimate knowledge of ancestors. The Zionists had no original investment in the area, no physical attachment to the area, and no care for its surroundings. The Palestinians had 100 percent “skin in the game;” they cherished every olive tree their ancestors planted centuries ago, every orange tree that gave aroma to their surroundings, and all the ground eggplant for the baba ganoush they nourished.

The Middle East and North African Jews who came to Israel were Arabs; the European Jews were Ashkenazi; the Ethiopian Jews were Beta Israel; and the Yemenite Jews were from the Arabian Peninsula. The Zionists replaced the differing languages, dialects, music, cultures, and heritage of each unique ethnicity with uniform characteristics, and created a new people, the Israeli Jew. Destruction of centuries old Jewish history and life in Tunisia, Iraq, Libya, and Egypt accompanied the creation of the new people. The Zionists, who complained about persecution of Jews, wiped out a major portion of Jewish history, determined what is Jewish, and required all Jews to shed much of their ancestral characteristics before integrating into the Israel community.

The newly established Israeli Jew duplicates the Spartan militant, nationalist, and racist citizen, and is satisfied by the propositions of being “God’s chosen people” and “returning to an ancient homeland.” Tied together by biblical scriptures, three prominent doctrines shape the minds of the faithful — a World War II holocaust, which did not affect the non-Ashkenazim Jews, the largest sub-group in Israel, and which is daily drilled into the Jewish conscience, as if it lurks closely and is ready to revive at an opportune moment; a non-existent anti-Semitism, where attacks on Jews, provoked by identification of Jews with Israel’s genocidal policies, are conflated to willful attacks on innocent Jews, who are not made innocent by Israel declaring it is the home of all Jewish people; and a sense of victimization, where Jews are promoted as the most wandering sufferers in mankind’s history, although Jews have often been the wealthiest, healthiest, and best educated in the surroundings in which they lived. Untold in the tales of victim hood is that multitudes of other victimized societies have been annihilated and, in death, have been unable to tell their stories of prejudice and repression. Paranoia and fear are installed in Israeli minds, and this allows them to be directed into vicious aggression and repression, which is disguised as defenses against helpless and manufactured enemies. Portrayed as the only safe place for Jews to live, Jews have had magnitudes more deaths inflicted upon them since the inauguration of their safe haven, Israel , than in entire 19^th century Europe.

Zionist irredentism concerned itself with the folk; it did not express concern for the land. Keeping biblical names as a subterfuge, Israel turned the contemporary land into an extension of northern Europe. In “beloved” Judah, and Samaria, imported pine trees dot the landscape, olive groves with centuries old revered trees have been torched, dormitory towns replace the green and ancient hilltops, and super highways pave over the quaint roads. Jewish National Fund’s newly planted forests hide dynamited picturesque villages. Jerusalem, with its train, mall, contrived City of David, cable car, and falsified tourist attractions has become a theme park.

Jews are no longer categorized by religious observance — Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, Ultra-orthodox, Reconstruction, Humanist, Secular — but by attachment to Israel. The categories have been reduced to three:

(1) Israel above all, the center of Jewish life, represented by World Zionism and coordinated by AIPAC and dozens of worldwide Jewish organizations;
(2) Israel as a significant aspect of Jewish life, represented by J Street and other organizations, who strive to “secure the State of Israel as a democratic homeland for the Jewish people;” and
(3) Israel as an entity, separate from Jewish life, represented by American Council for Judaism, Jewish Voice for Peace, and several other organizations.

Israel above all
The best words to describe Israel’s most rabid followers, those who devote money, time and energy promoting the cause of Israel, are genocidal denier, terrorist, and traitor to the lands in which they live and to all humanity. In the United States, AIPAC leads a pro-Israel chorus that carries the tune of Israeli government orchestrations. DAWN has described the mechanism by which AIPAC radiates its Israel serving message to all of the American society.

Not shown are the plethora of U.S. organizations, too numerous to mention, large and small, tens, if not hundreds, that promote Israel and defend it against its enemies.

Example of the incomprehensible disregard for an organization’s home in the United States, and perverted loyalty to the genocidal nation of Israel. From Detroit Free Press, Feds accuse private Michigan Jewish Institute college of grant fraud, David Jesse, March 23, 2016.

A private Jewish Michigan college committed fraud over the past decade, leading to millions of federal dollars being sent to the West Bloomfield school to pay for the education of students who weren’t enrolled there, according to the federal Department of Education. In a 17-page letter to the Michigan Jewish Institute, the department outlines more than 2,000 cases where Pell Grant funds were sent to the school to pay for students who were in Israel studying and never took one class at MJI.

Here is how Israel loyalists deceitfully plant a permanent memory of Oct 7 on the U.S. psyche. No get together to remember Americans killed by Israeli and a get together for foreigners held hostage in a foreign war.

NEW YORK — Several hundred Jewish New Yorkers and allies gathered at Central Park on Sunday morning to dedicate a bench to the Israeli hostages taken captive by Gaza terrorists, in an emotional last event for a community that came together each week for the captives for more than two years.

“We always said we wanted one last time to gather, one last time when they’re all back, and now it’s finally here, so we wanted to mark this event together,” said Dana Cwaigrach, the New York director for the Hostages and Missing Families Forum US.

Americans, growing up in a nation in which they are the wealthiest, well educated, healthy, and have all rights and privileges, demonstrate loyalty to a foreign and genocidal nation, and wave a sign that says, “WE HAVE NO OTHER LAND.” No attachmentt to the land that nurtured them and on which they are now standing. This is the pro-Israeli mind.

Supporters of Israel gather on the National Mall in Washington for the ‘March for Israel’ last November. Photograph: Michael Nigro/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images.

Appearing on discussion group Quora, Israel’s supporters display a grotesque ignorance and insulting depravity that shocks the senses.

Do not forget that they’ve [ED: Palestinians] been trying to complete the work of Nazis, and boost about it till today (also were lead by a Nazi and were joined by multiple Nazi “refugees”).

Not one Arab would have lost their home or been refugees if they didn’t try to invade attack and exterminate the Jews who lived in that land that the Jews bought and paid for, and cultivated, and created a thriving economy which was the basis of a democratic state.

Deir Yasim is Arab propaganda. Its story is not true, but used by the Arabs to attack the Jews in Israel.

The Palestinians (then called “Arabs”) could have had a state. They chose not to. It’s not the Jews’ fault that they chose not to. Neither is it the Jews’ fault that the Arabs tried to kill all the Jews.

While Ben Gurion was begging the Arabs to stay and help build a democracy the Arabs were lead by the Grand Mufti, former SS recruiter. The secretary general of the Arab league called for “war of annihilation” and 6 Arab armies promised ethnic cleansing and drowning of every Jew from the “river to the sea.”

Israelis paid for any property they did live in….Almost all the arab countries murdered and hounded jews from their homes for decades, and stole all the goods and properties jews were forced to abandon.

Israel as a significant aspect of Jewish life
J Street and the New Jewish Narrative, accompanied by several other progressive Jewish organizations, serve as antagonists to the Israel expansionist agenda. Framed as liberal organizations allied with the Democratic Party, they advocate for “a sovereign Palestine alongside a secure, Jewish, and democratic Israel,” and “focus on mobilizing the progressive American Jewish community around peace, social justice, and a two-state solution.” Good words and good intentions with unanswered questions — after 75 years, what have they accomplished; why have they not halted the trend that now makes their endeavors impossible; and what, in detail, do they propose that will invigorate their stalled plans?

I have always been suspicious of Americans for Peace Now (AFP), which merged with the left-of-center advocacy group Ameinu to create the New Jewish Narrative. In attending their inaugural 1981 meeting, I had the impression they were formed to sidetrack American Jews who were critical of Israel’s oppressive and expansionist policies; give them a place to complain, argue, and debate, without giving them support or an avenue to bring their beliefs to fruition. The 44 years of AFP existence substantiate the suspicion; in the direction of the policies they proposed, they never moved the needle by a fraction of a degree.

The same suspicion envelops J Street, a confusing Zionist organization that lobbies for an antiquated two-state solution, opposes Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS), argued against recognizing Palestine as an independent state at the United Nations, and recently, in August 2025, had its president, Jeremy Ben-Ami, state, “Until now, I have tried to deflect and defend when challenged to call this genocide. I have, however, been persuaded rationally by legal and scholarly arguments that international courts will one day find that Israel has broken the international genocide convention.”

J Street came alive in 2007 to become the political salvation for liberal Zionists and serve as a progressive PAC that counters reactionary AIPAC. J street is the street that does not appear on Washington DC maps, where H street is followed by I street and I street is followed by K street. It is the new street that fills the void in Jewish political life. It may be new, but it has not replaced the old. It is still not on the map. No successful efforts that slowed steamrolling AIPAC until the last two years occurred, and it is uncertain if JStreet played a role in AIPAC’s fall from grace, and the American public’s disillusion with Israel. Indications are these are due to the workings of campus groups and other organizations, such as Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). JStreet only, and belatedly, joined the established trend of a mass of American Jewry in the negative attitude toward Tel Aviv.

Israel as an entity, separate to Jewish life
This is represented by organizations that want modern Judaism, with its progressive and humanist values, to survive. They view Zionism and Israel as harmful to Jewish life, and have been the leaders in enabling Americans to understand the disastrous effect the Israel Lobby and U.S. support for an oppressive, apartheid, and genocidal nation has had on the U.S. public. Unlike the Zionist groups, they shape by veracity, reality, and social awareness, and move by objectivity and not emotional instability. They are human beings in a collective of humanity, then Americans by nature and development, and Jews by circumstances and choice.

The leading organizations in this effort have been

• Jewish Voice for Peace, which slowly matured from a small group opposed to Israel’s repressive and apartheid tactics, successfully promoted the BDS movement, and ripened into a national and confrontational movement that has sparked huge demonstrations and changed voting habits.

• IfNotNow intensively organizes communities to solicit congress to end U.S. financial and military support for Israeli. Founded in 2014, it has grown into a million dollar organization that claims tens of thousands of members and supporters.

• Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) , after its 1993 campus origins, founded its first chapter at the University of California, Berkeley in 2001. Since then, it has grown to about 200 chapters across the country. The leading organization in a myriad of campus campaigns and demonstrations, SJP members have suffered severe attacks initiated by pro-Israel groups, including arrests and suspensions.

• International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN) “is an international network of Jews who are uncompromisingly committed to struggles for human survival and emancipation, of which the liberation of the Palestinian people and land is an indispensable part.”

• American Council for Judaism was founded in 1942 “to uphold Reform Judaism as a tradition dedicated to universal ethics and justice at a time when many Jewish institutions began centering Jewish nationalism through Zionism.” The Council supports justice for Palestinians but does not play an activist role in condemning Israel’s apartheid and genocidal practices.

Conclusion
The struggle for Palestinian survival and ethical Judaism existence have common constituents and common determinants. Both depend upon defeat of political Zionism and the country that lives by Zionist ideology. Those who struggle for Palestinian survival and ethical Judaism existence follow the ethical principles voiced by biblical prophets and defy those who accept Zionist practices that contradict the beliefs that guided Judaism.

Amos, who insisted that social justice lies at the heart of Judaism. “Let justice roll on like an ever flowing river and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

Micah, who said, “What is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, And to walk humbly with your God?”

Isaiah, who said, “This is the fast I desire: To unlock fetters of wickedness, and untie the cords of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free; to break off every yoke. It is to share your bread with the hungry, and to take the wretched poor into your home; when you see the naked, to clothe him, and not to ignore your own kin.”

Zechariah, who said, “Render true judgments, show kindness and mercy to one another, do not oppress the widow, the fatherless, the sojourner, or the poor, and let none of you devise evil against another in your heart.”

Jeremiah, who said, “Do justice and righteousness, and deliver from the hand of the oppressor him who has been robbed. And do no wrong or violence to the resident alien, the fatherless, and the widow, nor shed innocent blood in this place.”

From Psalm 23 A psalm of David.

Its compassion renews my soul’s life.
Its call for righteousness encircles me and guides me on pathways of justice to what ought to be.
For the sake of Transformation,
You spread before me a table in front of my enemy – those I’m bound up with – so we can break bread together.
You anoint my head with oil, comforting me.
My cup overflows.

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What we have seen is an exhausted Trump, a tired man who initiated battles that have constantly been contended, in which he had to respond with new battles that were also contended, until his weary body and disoriented mind became overwhelmed, and he lost control of suitable weapons in which to continue the fight. Learning he could not retain his name on the Kennedy Center wall taught him to exercise care his name is not associated with causing world conflagration, world inflation, and world depression. Only guessing, but wise man Xi Jinping gave Trump advice he trusted, and Trump succumbed to Gulf State leaders’ anger at no longer wanting to be victims of a policy they never endorsed. Substituting a less aggressive Vice President JD Vance as a critical spokesperson for the defeated policy and hearing Vance’s rhetoric that defies Israel reinforces the argument of a new leadership, new directions, and a new foreign policy.

Vance has been waiting in the wings and is ready to fly. If Trump is out of breath, the VP might supply the oxygen. One good note; the ill-named Jewish Democratic Council of America (JDCA) claims “Vance has opposed aid to Israel and promotes policies that are harmful to Israel.” That recommendation stirs my approval for Vance, far from the best but far from the worst. Taking charge from the worst is a step in the right direction.

Couple Vance’s entry into the conflagration with Trump’s movement away from interfering in the Ukraine conflict, which he previously boasted he could settle. Trump is basking in a climate of agreement with other world leaders and seems to feel satisfied with that new position. With that in mind, I believe it is unwise to beat down a beaten person, who could become angered at the vituperation and react in a more violent manner than originally imposed. Same advice goes to Ayatollah Khamenei, who referred to “America’s humiliating defeat” and said “Iran will implement new management rules over the Strait of Hormuz amid the ongoing conflict.” Why stir up a wounded foe?

In the French film, Valmont, philanderer Valmont asks his courtesan friend if a man who seduced women and preyed on society can change. “Yes, he can,” she responds. “He can become worse.” Let’s hope that aged Valmont Trump recognizes he has time for redemption and that time is now.

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Particularly appalling and revealing was Tim Russert of NBC’s Meet the Press, “recalling the deaths by machine guns on the Square of ‘ten thousand students.’” Ten thousand students? This is the same Tim Russert who received accolades as one of the U.S. most admired and honest commentators. Very revealing to whom accolades are awarded. For those who are interested, I previously posted an article, The Tiananmen Square Confrontation ─ Rewriting History for a New Generation, that gives a more authentic description of the happenings on June 4, 1989 at Tiananmen Square.

A court decision in Israel, which exonerated the driver of a huge bulldozer in the death of activist Rachel Corrie, recalled a previous confrontation between man and machine – the June 5, 1989 stance of the Tank Man, who stood before a tank squadron moving away from Tiananmen Square. Chronologically and physically displaced, these two events have similar beginnings but different endings; one ending with a smile and relief, the other ending with declamation and grief. Comparing the two events demonstrates how conjecture becomes a historical fact and then is resurrected periodically to direct thoughts in a specific direction, and how history, which should educate, is purposely ignored. Start with the famous “tank man.”

Shocking to see on Daily Kos, a supposedly accurate media, a CBS video of the June 5 “Tank Man’s” courageous confrontation with a squadron of tanks, described by the CBS narrator as “stopping an army while hearing the gunfire,” although the tanks were leaving the city after peace had been restored and there was no gunfire. All comments to this distorted presentation expressed ebullient praise for the heroism of the ‘lone warrior,’ or more likely troublemaker, and made me realize that each new generation is swayed by falsehoods and brainwashing. One comment, an typical example of all comments, was,

This event, this display of resolve and restraint between men is just one of many that I have marked dates of on calendar. The man who “slow danced” a line of tanks to a halt. As powerful an image as the fall of Berlin Wall, but sadly a different result.

What do we know about the Tank Man? The answer is nothing, absolutely nothing. The well-dressed hero, holding a bag in each of his hands (groceries?), never disclosed his identity or intentions. No posters, reference to any cause or any form of identification accompanied his short and provocative act. If he had a special purpose, it can be assumed that somewhere in time, he would have clandestinely revealed his agenda . Although clever investigation of videos could have probably identified him, the Chinese did not bother and apparently regarded him as a crank, which he could well have been. There is no evidence to conclude he was either demonstrating defiantly against the government, was a daredevil, was tempting fate, was a crank, or was a plant by the Chinese government to prove the Peoples Army’s restraint. Any of the above could have been an explanation of his effort.

That is what we don’t know. What do we know?

(1) The “Tank Man’s” defiant act occurred after the clashes in the streets close to Tiananmen had ended and the students had vacated Tiananmen Square. Because the battles were over, there wasn’t anything he could accomplish, except a negative – provoke and start another calamity.
(2) The Peoples Army showed restraint and regard for life. No harm was done to the man.
(3) Videos of the event definitely show that ordinary civilians tugged him away; he was not detained by undercover agents.

How has this event been treated?

The perpetrator (Tank Man) has been given a special place, as a symbol of the Tiananmen student movement. It is not his story; it is an embellished story, which is transformed from histrionic to historical. Every June 5, the famous photographs are circulated throughout the US media and used, together with slogans, to impress citizenry with the defiance and heroism of the Tiananmen encampment and with ugly violence committed by the Chinese authorities. All of this makes interesting reading, but is opposite to the actual occurrence shown in the photographs and videos of the bold, likable, and adventurous ‘Tank man.’ His story is not history.

What do we know about the history of Rachel Corrie and her fatal day? Rachel Corrie expressed sympathy with the plight of the Palestinian people. The American activist specifically demonstrated against the bulldozing of a Palestinian house in the Gaza strip in 2003 and confronted the armored machine, driven by an Israeli soldier who was ready to demolish the home. The bulldozer crushed and killed the young woman. The history of this event is well defined.

Not well defined is the exact role of the Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) driver in Rachel Corrie’s death. The Israeli military replied to a lawsuit brought by her parents and cleared the IDF of any wrongdoing. The army’s “investigation” validated the bulldozer driver’s claim that he had not seen the 23-year-old non-violent activist from Olympia, Washington, who wore a fluorescent vest, before his vehicle crushed her. Published images and cockpit transmission from the D-9 bulldozer driver to the adjacent watchtower cast doubts on the Israeli court decision.

The driver exclaims, “I hit an object.”

The watch tower responds, “I think the object got hit by the dobby and he is in severe condition.”

The driver answers, “What about him? You saw him? Did you see the object?”

The tower says, “Yes, I saw him. I think he is dead.”

Both the driver and tower knew that Rachel Corrie was somewhere in front of the bulldozer. It is possible that the driver could not see her at times or was not looking in her direction. It is not possible that the tower could not see her. After all, they saw her silent body lying in front of the bulldozer. Why didn’t the tower signal the driver to stop?

Bulldozers hit objects all the time. That is what they are designed to do. This “object” did not stop the bulldozer from continuinging its operations. So, why was it important for the driver to inform the tower that he had “hit an object”? It’s obvious that he knew that he had hit a person. If so, why didn’t he stop and get out?

The tower “think(s) the object got hit by the dobby,” as if the person was an inanimate thing, and then concludes, “he is in severe condition”. Why did the tower ‘think’ when the tower knew? And why use the word ‘object’ when the object was clearly identified as a person (a wrongful he)? The self-proclaimed “most humane military in the world” identified a deceased human being as an object.

The driver shows his inhumanity by also designating ‘him’ as an ‘object’.

The tower confirms complicity by replying “Yes, I saw him. I think he is dead.” Neither Israeli personnel showed interest in approaching the body hit by the military machine or cared to confirm Rachel Corrie’s condition.

The two events expose the molding of minds, predominantly in America. Although the Tiananmen uprising occurred in 1989, a small band of neo-cons and China bashers continue to promote an annual exposition of the incident, preventing reconciliation and encouraging hatred. While almost all the world, from Tierra del Fuego to Murmansk, rails at Israel’s oppressive treatment of the Palestinian people, a small band of the religious right and Israel supporters determine America’s Middle East attitudes policies and fate of the Palestinian people.

The Tank Man lives in spectacle, with political significance to this who enjoy confrontation. Random viewing of his defiant deed is warranted. Rachel Corrie lives in history, as an international and eternal symbol of protest against injustice. She cannot be allowed to have died in vain. A monument to her sacrifice and an annual tribute to her bravery will serve as a reminder to the criminal behavior of those who commit injustice. Where should such a monument be located? How about the White House lawn?

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It is difficult to ascertain when the present disjointed conflict started. Israel and the U.S. have been at Iran’s juggler vein for decades; Trump changes the objective to satisfy questions; the battlefield is wherever a drone or missile runs out of fuel; and there is no end to the “truces that are on the way” and “the declared and self-pronounced victors” in the intolerable chaos and mayhem that degrades humanity. Most puzzling is that Israel who started the latest round of mass killings is not a participant in the supposed discussions to end the homicides. The Times of Israel expressed this succinct observation in an editorial:

Netanyahu said the war was meant to halt the Iranian threat and suggested it brought the US and Israel closer than ever. Now Trump has frozen the PM out of talks that may leave that threat intact.

If Trump, who took command of Israel’s war, and whoever is in charge in the Islamic Republic agree to cease hostilities, does that mean the war has ended? Who will stop Israel from continuing its original plans that includes the destruction of the Lebanese community? Let’s review. The present mayhem started on February 28, 2026, when the US and Israel launched surprise airstrikes across Iran. In the initial “sneak attack,” Israel killed several high-level Iranian officials in an attempt to create complete anarchy in the Islamic Republic. Israel made its objectives clear — completely destroy the heirs to the ancient Persian and Safavid Empires and eliminate an obstruction to its expansion into a Greater Israel and dominance of the Middle East region.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, speaking for the U.S. administration, stated the US objectives, “We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties and perhaps even higher those killed.” What happened? The U.S. “preventive attention” spurred Iran to attack American facilities and troops, although it was possible that without the U.S. assisting Israel, Iran might not have struck U.S. facilities and subjected innocent Gulf states to falling missiles.

The Secretary of State’s supervisor, Mr. Donald Trump, contradicted his subordinate. In response to an ABC News question, “Did Israel force his hand to launch strikes?” Trump responded, “No. I might have forced their hand. You see, we were having negotiations with these lunatics, and it was my opinion that they were going to attack first. They were going to attack. If we didn’t do it, they were going to attack first. I felt strongly about that.” Unasked question’ “Attack who first?”

What is discussed and agreed upon at cabinet meetings? It certainly is not foreign policy and military strategy. The U.S. had no reason to enter this war and had reason to halt Israel from waging war. The world has no reason to allow a 21st century Caligula to manipulate all of us into destruction. In the meaningless chaos, an ealier article written for my previous website, Alternative Insight ─ year 2006 to be exact — which proposed arguments to stop the never-ending war with Iran, rattled my mind. I concluded these past predictions of the future are as relevant today as they were back in 2006, before president Obama’s treaty with Iran ─ the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — and before Trump discarded that treaty and introduced his plan —the disjointed incomprehensible plan of military action. Note that the article was written in 2006 and some of Iran’s behavior, due to U.S. behavior, toward the Taliban and Iraq might have changed.

The Fundamentalists Move to War
Creation of the Iranian Nightmare

Is a powerless Iran, similar to the previously powerless Iraq, a threat to the United States and does it have a reason to inflict damage to the U.S. before being attacked? If the U.S. attacks, Iran will be able to gather sufficient force to harm the U.S., militarily in Iraq and economically in the oil market. The latter harm can create a catastrophe for America. The U.S. has more to lose by hostile action against Iran than by quiet negotiations with the Islamic Republic.

The Revolutionary government of Iran has always continued its efforts without regard to consequences. In its war with Iraq, Saddam Hussein made several overtures to end the war; all of which Iran refused unless Hussein stepped down ─ tens of thousands of casualties because of the refusal. Now, Iran is willing to challenge nuclear powers that demand Iran halt its nuclear developments. The challenge poses dangers to the world, but a greater danger is the whetted appetite of the extremist fundamentalist groups that might be eager to use an Iranian conflict to initiate a full-scale fundamentalist war. Who else could be propelling this madness, creating an Iranian nightmare, especially when Iran is technically not in violation of the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty, couldn’t have a nuclear bomb for many years, and wouldn’t be able to use nuclear weapons for offensive operations?

The creation of an Iranian nightmare requires examination.
Negotiation of problems with Iran can preferably be used to lead to world peace rather than world war.
What is Iran’s Relation to the Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT)?

According to the NPT, Iran has not legally violated the treaty nor been accused of doing that. The treaty provisions permit signatories to enrich uranium and develop atomic energy. Nor has Iran violated any UN Resolution. The UN only asked Iran, in a non-binding resolution, to halt all nuclear activities, something it voluntarily did once before. Hyperbole and media reports generate hysteria and exaggerate the IAEA challenge to Iran. The NYT headline is accurate, but the text is exaggerated.

ELAINE SCIOLINO, New York Times, April 29, 2006
U.N. Agency Says Iran Falls Short on Nuclear Data

VIENNA, April 28 - Iran has drastically curtailed cooperation with nuclear inspectors over the past month as it has sped forward with its nuclear enrichment, the International Atomic Energy Agency said Friday.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), in the latest report by its Director General: Implementation of the NPT Safeguards Agreement in the Islamic Republic of Iran, accuses Iran of not providing sufficient information for “full transparency,” which Iran disputes and which the IAEA report admits “goes beyond the measures prescribed in the Safeguards Agreement and Additional Protocol.” The reports assessment:

B. Current overall assessment|
33. All the nuclear material declared by Iran to the Agency is accounted for. Apart from the small quantities previously reported to the Board, the Agency has found no other undeclared nuclear material in Iran. However, gaps remain in the Agency’s knowledge with respect to the scope and content of Iran’s centrifuge programme. Because of this, and other gaps in the Agency’s knowledge, including the role of the military in Iran’s nuclear programme, the Agency is unable to make progress in its efforts to provide assurance about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran.

Additional understated information:
Iran can leave the NPT at any time.
There is still not the slightest proof that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons.
Other nations: North Korea, Pakistan, India, Israel, as examples, continue with their military nuclear developments and aren’t bothered by the UN. Why not Iran?

How Significant is Iran’s Pursuit of a Nuclear Bomb?
Every effort should be made to prevent Iran, and all other nations, from pursuing or increasing nuclear weapon capabilities. Nevertheless, according to observers of Iran’s nuclear developments, the Islamic Republic could not acquire nuclear weapons for many years, will not have delivery systems (long range missiles, submarine marines, aircraft) to attack outside its continent and cannot use nuclear weapons for offensive means without being instantly demolished. Even with nuclear weapons, Iran is powerless in a war with the United States. Development of nuclear weapons is a bargaining chip for Iran; a deterrent against attack and a power play during negotiations.

What Problem is Iran to the United States?
Considering that Iran has always been antagonistic to the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, has not been proven to interfere in Iraq’s political situation and has not shown any territorial ambitions, what problem can Iran be to a United States that supported the Shah, armed Iraq against Iran, has attacked Iranian installations and boats in the Straits of Hormuz and shot down an Iranian civilian airliner?

Iran is militarily hapless ─ no warships, mostly antiquated air force, dubious air defenses and some missile systems which can cause limited damage. Nevertheless, if USrael (U.S. or Israel ) attacks Iranian installations, Iran can cause excessive damage to the United States.

Iraq’s cleric, Moqtada al-Sadr, commander of an Iraq militia, declared that he would fight alongside Iran if the United States attacked the Islamic state. Considering the growing hostility to American troops in Iraq, combine the Mahdi militia with weapons from Iran and U.S. forces will be in extreme jeopardy. Iran has paramilitary units that could join with Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Palestinian militants and attack Israel.

Iran has the capability to temporarily interrupt oil flow by reducing its oil exports, closing the straits of Hormuz to oil shipments from the Persian Gulf, soliciting assistance in destroying oil facilities in Iraq, especially at the port of Basra, and using paramilitary forces to destroy other Middle East oil facilities. Paramilitary units and missiles could damage U.S. military facilities in Kuwait.

More militant groups in the Moslem world could react aggressively in the defense of Iran. The Middle East and possibly other regions of the world would be in turmoil. Other third world nations that have gained economic power, such as Venezuela, also support Iran and might join in economic reprisals against USrael (United States and Israel). Washington has no issue with Tehran that cannot be negotiated. The U.S. does not prefer the Islamic government, but why is that a problem for the United States? After all, one of the best friends of the U.S. is Saudi Arabia, a fundamentalist Islamic nation.

Who is Leading the Creation of an Iranian Nightmare?
The Islamic Republic of Iran is guilty of creating its own nightmare. Iran has led itself into a trap by reacting in a non-diplomatic, confrontational, and paranoid manner to hostile words against it. Iran is driven by fear. This fear arises from an examination of what motivates the United States. War is usually driven by contests for resources or markets, by territorial expansion or defense, or as a solution to economic problems. What is motivating the belligerent attitude of the United States toward a defenseless Iran? If it’s the new phrase pre-emptive war, what is the reason for the future war, which is being pre-empted? After exhausting all possibilities, we are left with a reaction to the fear that Iran is experiencing, which is that its fundamentalist vision of unifying the state with the Moslem religion is being singled out as threatening to the West, and Islam is being readied for attack by western fundamentalists, both Christian and Jewish.

Islamic fundamentalists believe they follow the final words of their God. The Christian fundamentalists believe it is their duty to convey the “true words” of their God and have a messianic mission to convert non-Christians to their beliefs. The Jewish fundamentalists believe they are the “chosen of God” and deserve to occupy the lands given to them by their God. They fear the western world will accept an Iran that is willing to exchange its development of nuclear weapons for measures that roll Israel back to its 1967 borders, derailing their mandate with God. This thesis that extreme fundamentalists worldwide are propelling an eventual war in Iran is speculative and conspiratorial. That is true. Nevertheless,

Leading western political theorist Samuel P. Huntington has predicted a “Clash of Civilizations.”
American neocon Norman Podhoretz has asked that “the U.S. overthrow the regimes of six or seven Muslim countries.”
Osama bin Laden has called for a “war against the Crusaders.”
Benjamin Netanyahu, former Prime Minister of Israel has said: “Islamic fundamentalism, like communism... is bent on the expansion of its dominion to as many corners of the world as possible.”
Dr. Robert Morey of Faith Defenders Christian Ministry has said: “If the U.S. wants to be the policeman of the world and invade Kuwait, Haiti, Bosnia, Somalia, and other places, then it is about time to take on the Muslims in Iran, Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan.”
Evangelist Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham, wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the Koran “provides ample evidence that Islam encourages violence in order to win converts and to reach the ultimate goal of an Islamic world.”

Some of this smoke is bound to lead to fire and Iran is smoldering.
A Preferred Solution

If past actions by the United States, such as those concerning North Korea, Pakistan, and India are indicative, then the U.S. will assuredly impel Iran to become a nuclear power. The international community can take advantage of the smoldering situation by realizing and addressing its consequences. Iran might be bluffing about the advances of its nuclear developments, but if forced to fight, the Islamic Republic will receive support from all sectors of the radical fundamentalists in the Muslim world. If this becomes a reality, the world will be headed towards an unwarranted and unnecessary catastrophe. So, what can be done? A preferred approach is to remove the reasons that Iran might have for pursuing nuclear weapons.

Iran and the United States should cooperate in the resolution of the Iraq crisis. The U.S. fears Iran will determine Iraq’s future. Iran fears the U.S. will use Iraq to control the Middle East. Therefore, isn’t it mandatory that Iran and the United States resolve the Iraq crisis together? The recognition that both nations are willing to work together to combat the insurgency and achieve a mutually acceptable solution to the dilemma will immediately improve the situation.

Iran and other Middle East nations should sign agreements not to support international terrorism and not provide a haven for any terrorists. Despite specious media reports that consider Iran a supporter of terrorism, the facts indicate that Iran, similar to the United States, has been an enemy of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. The two nations share the conviction that militant Islam is not to be supported. They differ in who they consider are the terrorists and who they define as the freedom fighters in the Israel/Palestine conflict. If the U.S. pressed Iran, it might learn that Iran and other Middle East nations are close to U.S. principles in the war against international terrorism.

The Palestinian issue should be justly resolved. The UN has decided several times that Israel has acted illegally. Unless Israel dismantles its separation barrier, removes West Bank settlements, retreats to its 1967 borders and permits international arbitration concerning the obligations of all parties to Palestinian refugees, peace will not be readily attainable and Iran will not cooperate.

Iran will have a different attitude after its reasons for pursuing nuclear armaments (if it is doing that) are removed. Iran will undoubtedly sign an accord to halt any nuclear activities after Israel retreats to the UN defined borders.

Naive and unworkable? Undoubtedly, but that only tells us where political incompetence, guidance by falsehoods and attendance to false prophets have brought the western world. Does anyone have a better solution that doesn’t involve mass destruction?

Alternativeinsight
May, 2006

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This article, originally posted on Winter Wheat, tells an important story, which deserves wide circulation and complements the unfolding story of what is Zionism and how Israel raises and indoctrinates its children. The start has been previously related in simpler terms. The later narrative provides significant background to how the genocidal Israeli is developed; a must read.

25 May—A text arrived on Friday, 15 May, from the village of Kisan. It was Adnan. He had sent a video then circulating throughout the West Bank. It showed a young Jewish settler mercilessly beating a Palestinian family’s dog while it was tied up and unable to escape. The video has since circulated widely on social and mainstream media in the Arab and Western worlds. It was reported throughout the Israeli press. But you didn’t read or hear of it in the major dailies or broadcasts in America.

I watched the short clip, unguarded and entirely unprepared for the brutality it showed. I recoil even now just thinking about it.

Perhaps you’ve seen the video. If not, here it is:

The dog’s name is Lucy and she survived the beating, as reported by The Cradle in a post on X. A cab driver who runs a “pet taxi service” and who transported Lucy to a veterinary hospital told Haaretz, “I constantly receive reports about animals being beaten by settlers.”

I reported previously in West Bank Alerts on the sadism directed toward Palestinian livestock. In all of these attacks you see exactly what you see in the above video—a pathological compulsion to eradicate all things Palestinian—to wipe the people and their animals from the land.

Think about your reaction to the video. I’ve thought rather a lot about mine: It was visceral revulsion. Why, I ask myself, do images of settlers brutalizing animals seem especially horrific? Have I become numb to the relentless torture and murder of Palestinian people?

I care deeply about animal welfare, as most of us do. How we treat animals is an indication of how we treat and care for each other. But unlike Israeli animal rights activists who “rescue” donkeys from Gaza—depriving Gazans of their last remaining mode of transportation—while the I.D.F. daily slaughters more Palestinian children than there are donkeys I don’t prioritize the life of animals above people.

The video is shocking to those of us with an intact moral compass because we understand that animals are inherently innocent. Brutalizing an animal is not unlike brutalizing a child. It’s a complete betrayal of trust. An animal is dependent and vulnerable and entirely unable to defend itself against violent attack. This is what I saw in the video.

Think for a moment about the settler who beat Lucy. Study the video: He wields two sizable sticks beating her repeatedly on the head in what appears to be uncontrolled rage even as she crumples to the ground and rolls over helplessly. Think about the frenzy of his attack, and then the intimacy. What you see is a complete absence of empathy. Here is a person without a conscience, lacking a capacity for rational thought, unable or unwilling to control himself. I saw this in the video, too.

The settler’s behavior—learned, condoned, encouraged in Zionist Israeli society—is sociopathic.

Sociopathic behavior is learned in the sense that it arises from trauma and abuse. This young man—once a child, once innocent like the dog he beat—was turned into a sociopath by the society in which he was raised and educated—that is to say, by his parents, teachers, and rabbis.

Jewish Israeli society is sociopathic by design, by virtue of Zionist education and indoctrination practices that are ahistorical, racist, and Jewish–supremacist. The Jewish state instrumentalizes sociopathy as a political, geopolitical, and national-security strategy for territorial expansion and regional dominance and to ensure a collective state—psychological and social—of constant terror, constant violence, constant warfare.

At its root, what I’m talking about is systemic, generational child abuse in Jewish Israeli society at all levels within the family and educational and religious environments. And this explains the behavior of Jewish soldiers and settlers whose psyches have been profoundly damaged.

Israeli peace activist Nurit Peled–Elhanan has written extensively on the dehumanization of Palestinians in Jewish Israeli schools, a process of indoctrination that prepares them for military service. Her two books are Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education (I.B. Tauris, 2012) and Holocaust Education and the Semiotics of Othering in Israeli Schoolbooks (Common Ground Research Networks, 2023). She was a professor of language and education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem until October 2023, when she was suspended for expressing empathy for Palestinians in Gaza and accused of supporting Hamas.

I recently watched an interview of Peled–Elhanan on the Palestinian–Israeli podcast Women Ending War. The episode, “Narratives of Fear and Hatred: Holocaust Education’s Impact on Society,” explains how Jewish children are repeatedly and intentionally traumatized by stories and images from the Holocaust. Zionist Holocaust education begins when a child is three years old and continues year after year until he or she graduates and enters military service.

Jewish children learn nothing about the actual history of World War II or how Jews lived in Eastern Europe prior to the war. Instead, the focus is on every horrific detail of the violence perpetrated against European Jews during the Holocaust. Events are purposefully decontextualized. The victims themselves remain nameless and are portrayed with contempt so that there’s no actual identification with their humanity.

Children are told that the Holocaust happened because Jews didn’t have their own state. The only things protecting them from being murdered today—by all the Palestinians that surround them—are the Jewish state and the I.D.F. If the enemy isn’t controlled and eliminated today, another Holocaust will happen tomorrow and you, Jewish children are told, will all end up like them. Them: The thoroughly dehumanized Holocaust victims and survivors, deserving of scorn in the minds of Israeli Jews.

In this way a state of psychological terror is intentionally cultivated in children to instill unthinking loyalty to the Zionist project and the Jewish state. In the Holocaust curriculum, the crimes of Nazi Germany are projected onto the Arab populations that surround Israel, and onto Palestinians in particular. Early Zionists cynically conflated Nazism and Arabs well before Israel was even established to justify their crimes and the ethnic-cleansing of Palestine. Jewish children today grow up equating Palestinians with the Holocaust and with Nazism.

The consequences of what Jewish children are taught to believe cannot be overstated. If you truly think the Jewish state and the I.D.F. are all that stands between you and catastrophe, then any amount of violence against Arabs is reasonable and defensible. By the time young Israelis begin serving in the military—as all Israelis other than ultra–Orthodox are obliged to do—any form of brutality against Palestinians, without limits as is now horribly evident, is acceptable because it saves Jews from another Holocaust.

Peled–Elhanan describes this years-long process of indoctrination as “child abuse.” It turns Jewish Israelis into “traumatized heterophobic human beings.” Israelis are fearful of and have no tolerance for people who are not also Jewish. “Everyone hates a Jew,” they have been taught to believe.

No one, according to Peled–Elhanan, has undertaken a careful study of what this perverse process of Holocaust indoctrination does to Jewish children. And perhaps a clinical study would indeed be useful. But the impact of this social and psychological conditioning is unambiguously clear. You have merely to look at Israeli society—each generation more racist and violent than the previous.

Jewish Israeli children are broken. Their humanity is broken. Their capacity for clear, rational thinking, for a developed conscience, for empathy is broken. Intentionally.

You see this in the behavior of Israeli soldiers as they carry out war crimes, as they laugh and dance and photograph themselves committing every atrocity imaginable, as they brutalize and rape and slaughter Palestinians, and Lebanese, and Syrians, and Iranians by the tens of thousands. What you see is naked sadism. And in the sadism you see the purposeful cultivation of sociopathy over many generations.

You see this in the unhinged barbarism of settlers in the West Bank. You see it in the video I posted above.

By destroying the psyches of Jewish children, Israelis destroyed their most precious, and one would have thought most beloved, resource. They have destroyed the future for their own children. They destroy the future of Israel itself. Because no nation can survive a state of permanent warfare.

This is Zionism. This is what Zionism has done to the Jews of Israel. The “so-called Jews,” to borrow Chas Freeman’s recognition of the chasm separating Judaism from the perversions of Jewish Israelis.

And this is the question I can’t get out of my mind: How is peace possible with a people who don’t want peace, who intentionally destroyed any chance of peace, and who celebrate their naked sadism?

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The archaeological park in Ashkelon, formerly the Palestinian village, al-Majdal, has an important story that contradicts the Hebrew Bible and denies the importances of mighty King David and Temple Building King Solomon. Its story begins with the Canaanites of 1800 B.C. and the existing Canaanite gate at the walled city that eventually gave the modern city its derived name. By constructing the gate, the Canaanites used the Mediterranean Sea, together with city walls, to provide a unique defense against invaders. Start with that Canaanite gate, vault through the archaeological park, and discover artifacts and history from succeeding civilizations — Philistines, Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, Persians, Arabs, and Crusaders — all of whom eventually ruled the area until the Mamluks destroyed Ashkelon in the year 1270 A.D.

Missing from the list of intruders into Ashkelon are the Israelites. No substantiated history or archaeological finds describe Israelite administration of the coastal areas. This lack of coastal identification is surprising because, if the biblical claims of the extent of David’s and Solomon’s realms are true, would not these empires include seaports and fortifications close to the Mediterranean Sea? A Canaanite gate from 1800 B.C. is extant, but not a single identifiable structure from the reported eras of David and Solomon has been uncovered along the coast.

Discoveries by Israeli archeology professors, Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, Tel Aviv University, described in the book, The Bible Unearthed, complement the conclusion from the Ashkelon archeological park exposition. Depicting Solomon’s Jerusalem, “at best, no more than a typical highland village … no empire, no palatial cities, no spectacular capital,” the professors tell us, if Solomon ain’t there, then Solomon ain’t anywhere.

Near East archaeologist Margreet Steiner in an article titled It’s Not There: Archaeology Proves a Negative, Biblical Archaeology Review, July/August, 1998, adds additional doubt.

…from the tenth century B.C.E. there is no archaeological evidence that many people actually lived in Jerusalem, only that it was some kind of public administrative center...We are left with nothing that indicates a city was here during their supposed reigns (of David and Solomon)...It seems unlikely, however, that this Jerusalem was the capital of a large state, the United monarchy, as described in Biblical texts.

Equally problematic is the close relationship the secular Zionists assert with Jerusalem. A definite relationship between Jews and the Holy City exists; less significant when compared to Christianity and Islam’s relationship with the Haram al Sharif and its surroundings. Exhortations of “If I forget thee, O’ Jerusalem,” Psalm 137 of the Hebrew bible, credited to an anonymous Hebrew exile living in Babylon during or shortly after the Babylonian captivity, “next year in Jerusalem,” whose origin is a tenth-century poem by Spanish rabbi Joseph ibn Abitur, and “Jerusalem undivided,” whose origin is a Zionist proclamation after the 1967 war, camouflage Israel’s hidden agenda, and why its faithful are sent forth on Jerusalem Day to shout and create havoc. Expose the agenda and the Western Wall comes tumbling down.

Huge granite stones rest comfortably on the top of Midbar Sinai Street in Givat Havatzim, Jerusalem’s northernmost district. Cut to specification, the imposing stones represent one of several preparations by the Temple Mount and Land of Israel Faithful Movement to erect a supposedly Third Temple on the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount.

According to the Old Testament, 1 Kings 6, New International Version, King Solomon erected the first Temple (Zionist historians describe ancient Hebrew history by Temple periods, which constantly implants the Temples as historical realities of special significance in people’s minds.).

In the four hundred and eightieth year after the Israelites came out of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon’s reign over Israel, in the month of Ziv, the second month, he began to build the temple of the Lord.

A few problems with this narrative.
The Hebrew Bible describes Solomon’s empire as “a powerful, extensive and united kingdom, which extended from Beersheba to Dan, and had a wider sphere of influence beginning at the Nile River in the west, encompassing Edom in the south, and extending all the way to Syria in the far north and east.” The Ashkelon archaeology park exposition and notable archeologists refute that description of Solomon’s reign. There is no historical King Solomon. Nowhere in historical documents is his name or kingdom mentioned.

The Bible’s description of Solomon’s Temple suggests that the inside ceiling was 180 feet long, 90 feet wide, and 50 feet high, overlaid with pure gold. Text of 2 Chronicles 4:22 states.

…the lampstands and their lamps of pure gold to burn before the inner sanctuary as prescribed; the flowers, lamps, and tongs of gold—of purest gold; the wick trimmers, sprinkling bowls, dishes, and censers of pure gold, and the doors of the temple— the inner doors to the Most Holy Place and the doors of the main hall of the temple— were overlaid with gold.

Impressive construction by an elusive Solomon, who cannot be found. Without a King Solomon and an empirical city, isn’t it logical to question the construction of an opulent first Temple and the “history” of the first Temple period? If no Solomon as foreman, who built the first Temple? Ask the question from another perspective; why is Solomon and his Temple casually accepted and consistently portrayed when there is no evidence of the former and that lack of evidence denies the possibility of the latter? If Jewish tradition has the Divine Presence dwelling on the Temple Mount from where it radiates to all of Jerusalem, then without Solomon, his empirical regime, and the first Temple, there is no Divine Presence and Jerusalem has no special meaning to the Jews.

Because the Islamic Wafq owns and controls all the property on the Haram al-Sharif, these stones cannot be legally transferred to a Temple Mount nor can a Temple be constructed there. The provocation, represented by the stones, which the Israel government refuses to curtail, leads to a belief that an eventual Muslim reaction to the increasing provocations will give Israel an excuse to seize total control of the Holy Basin, the ultimate of the properties that Israel intends to incorporate into a united Jerusalem.

For decades, Israeli authorities have spoken of a united Jerusalem ─ suggesting a spiritual quality to its message, as if Israel wants the home for the three monotheistic faiths to be solid and stable. Guided from one central authority, a united Jerusalem offers a preservation of distinctive ancient heritages. However, Israel lacks a sufficiently supporting and verifiable historical narrative that could bolster its thrust to incorporate all of an artificially created united Jerusalem into its boundaries. Coupled with inconsistencies and contradictions, Israel’s eagerness to create a united Jerusalem under its total control becomes suspect. The intensive concentration on a ‘united’ Jerusalem reveals a hidden agenda that debases Jerusalem’s religious in-gathering and heightens division, hatred, and strife.

Examine the Holy Basin. The Holy Basin contains well-marked Christian sites — Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the most sacred Christian site in the world, Via Dolorosa, which features 14 Stations of the Cross, Mount of Olives, Garden of Gethsemane & Church of All Nations, where Jesus prayed and was betrayed by Judas, Chapel of the Ascension, where tradition holds Jesus ascended to heaven, Dominus Flevit Catholic church, where Jesus wept over Jerusalem, Pater Noster Church, where Jesus taught his disciples the Lord’s Prayer. Other reverent sites exist on Mount Zion and the surrounding areas. Muslim institutions — Al-Aqsa Mosque is the third holiest site in Islam, Dome of the Rock marks the spot where the Prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven, Al-Buraq Mosque commemorates where the Prophet Muhammad tied his winged steed, and the Mosque of Omar commemorates Caliph Omar Ibn al-Khattab, who prayed at the mosque after entering the city in 638 A.D. — tie Muhammad’s followers to Jerusalem.

Some remains of Jewish dwellings and ritual baths can be found, but few if any major Jewish monuments, buildings or institutions from the Biblical era exist in the “Old City” of today’s Jerusalem. The often cited Western Wall, proclaimed as the most sacred spot in Judaism, is a modern invention, which may have gained its reputation due to default — there is no other Jewish place in Jerusalem of much significance. The wall is a support for Herod’s platform and is not directly related to the Second Temple. This Temple undoubtedly existed , but no remains of it have been located in Jerusalem.

According to Karen Armstrong, in her book Jerusalem, Jews did not pray at the Western Wall until the Mamluks in the 15th century allowed them to move their congregations from a dangerous Mount of Olives and pray daily at the Wall. At that time, she estimates that there may have been no more than 70 Jewish families in Jerusalem. Do 70 Jewish families determine the most revered Jewish site? After the Ottomans replaced the Mamluks, Suleiman the Magnificent issued a formal edict in the 16th century that permitted Jews to have a place of prayer at the Western Wall. Is Suleiman the Magnificent responsible for selecting the most sacred spot in Judaism?

The only remaining major symbol of Jewish presence in Jerusalem’s Holy City is the Jewish quarter, which Israel cleared of Arabs and rebuilt after 1967. During its clearing operations, Israel demolished the Maghribi quarter adjacent to the Western Wall, destroyed the Tomb of the Sheikh al-Afdhaliyyah, and displaced about 175 Arab families. Although the Jewish population in previous centuries comprised a large segment of the Old City (estimates have 7000 Jews during the mid-19th century), the Jews gradually left the Old City and migrated to new neighborhoods in West Jerusalem, leaving only about 2000 Jews in the Old City. Jordanian control after the 1948 war reduced the number to nil. By 2009, the population of the Jewish quarter in the Old City had grown to 3000, or nine percent of the Old City population. The Christian, Armenian and Muslim populations are the principal constituents and their quarters contain almost the entire Old City commerce.

In an attempt to attach ancient Israel to present day Jerusalem, Israeli authorities continue the attachment of spurious labels to Holy Basin landmarks, while claiming the falsification is due to the Byzantines, who got it all wrong.

King David’s Tower’s earliest remains were constructed several hundred years after the Bible dates David’s reign. It is a now an obvious Islamic minaret.
King David’s Citadel is partially from the Hasmonean period (200 B.C.). The Citadel was entirely rebuilt by the Ottomans between 1537 and 1541 A.D.
King David’s tomb, located in the Dormition Abbey, is a cloth-covered cenotaph (no remains) that honors King David. It has not been verified that the casket relates to King David.
The Pools of Solomon, located in a village near Bethlehem, are considered to be part of a Roman construction during the reign of Herod the Great. The pools supplied water to an aqueduct that carried water to Bethlehem and to Jerusalem.
The Stables of Solomon, under the Temple Mount, are more likely a construction of vaults that King Herod built in order to extend the Temple Mount platform.
Absalom’s Tomb is an obvious Greek sculptured edifice and therefore cannot be the tomb of David’s son.
The City of David is a contentious dig that claims to have been the established city of King David. Excavations have exposed artifacts that date from the Early Bronze Age (3500–2350 B.C.) to the Byzantine period (324–628 AD.) and no verifiable attachment to a King David has been uncovered.

The Jerusalem Archaeological Park within the Old City, together with the Davidson Exhibition and Virtual Reconstruction Center tell the same story. Promising to reveal much of a Hebrew civilization, the museums shed little light on its subject. The Davidson Center highlights a coin exhibition, Jerusalem bowls, and stone vessels. The Archeological Park in the Old City contains among many artifacts, Herodian structures, ritual baths, a floor of an Umayyad palace, a Roman road, Ottoman gates, and the facade of what is termed Robinson’s arch, an assumed Herodian entryway to the Temple Mount. The exhibitions do not reveal many, if any, ancient Hebrew structures or institutions of special significance.

Difficult to digest and believe that delving into details and flushing out the results comes up empty ─ Jews, as a population, have some attachment to an ancient Jerusalem. Jews, as a community, have little to observe that is inherited from ancient Jerusalem and less involvement with the contemporary operations of the ancient city. If spurious memories and heritage of an unproven first Temple and a distorted aggrandizement of the city that contained it are sufficient material to claim an attachment that warrants ownership, the Mayans, who live in the forests of Mexico, can claim vast areas of Central America that expose their living, breathing Temples and monuments in Tikal, Chichen Itza, Tulum, and tens of other places. They await a United Nations partition plan, Proclamation 1811, that divides Central America into Mestizo and Mayan populations.

Israel’s Hidden Agenda
Israel is a physically small and relatively new country, with an eager population and big ambitions. It needs more prestige and wants to be viewed as a power broker on the world stage. To gain those perspectives, Israel needs a capital city that commands respect, contains ancient traditions, and is recognized as one of the world’s most important and leading cities. Almost all of the world’s principal nations have capitals that are great cities of the world. To assure its objectives, Israel wants an oversized Jerusalem that contains the Holy City. That’s not all.

• Jerusalem has significant tourism that can be expanded and provide new commercial opportunities as an entry to all of the Mid-East. An indivisible Jerusalem under Israeli control is worth a lot of shekels.

• Israel competes with the United States as the focus of the Jewish people. It needs a unique Jerusalem to gain recognition as the home of Judaism.

• By controlling all of the holy sites, Israel commands attention from Moslem and Christian leaders. These leaders will be forced to talk with Israel and Israel will have a bargaining advantage in disputes.

• Whatever Israel gains the Palestinians are denied. Because East Jerusalem and its holy sites greatly benefit a Palestinian economy and increase Palestine legitimacy, Israel will do everything to prevent East Jerusalem remaining with the Palestinians.

• West Jerusalem only gives Israel a North/South capital. An indivisible Jerusalem gives Israel an East/West look of a centralized capital.

• The Zionist socialist ideals and the cooperative kibbutzim received support and sympathy from idealistic world peoples for many years. Israel’s attachment to the Holocaust tragedy extended that sympathy and support to more of the world. With the end of the Zionist dream, the decline of kibbutz life and the over-popularizing of the Holocaust, Israel needs a new symbol of identity that captures world attention.

If Israel has legitimate claims to Jerusalem, then those claims should be heard and discussed in a proper forum. However, that is not the process forthcoming. The Israeli government is using illegal and illegitimate procedures, as well as deceitful and hypocritical methods to force its agenda. Israel is not presenting its case but is exerting its power to trample legal, moral, and historical considerations. The Museum of the Citadel of David has an inscription: The land of Israel is in the center of the world and Jerusalem is the center of the land of Israel.

This self-praise was echoed at a West Jerusalem coffee house in a conversation with several Israelis. A youthful Israeli abruptly sat at the table and entered the conversation with the words: “All the world looks to Jerusalem. Jerusalem is the center of the world and Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. Everyone needs Jerusalem and they will need to talk with Israel.”

That is why Israel tries to convince the world that Jerusalem has been the eternal capital of the Jewish people. This is stated regardless that in 140 B.C., Jerusalem, the Hasmonean dynasty capital, housed only about 8000 of the estimated 3-4 million Jews at that time, half of whom were scattered throughout the Mediterranean and Mesopotamia, and when Rome had about 350,000 citizens and Alexandria had about 500,000 mixed populations. Prestige and shekels and not spirituality and attachment drive Israel to desperately want all of Jerusalem.

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From a slowly increasing number of people who realized that something was inconsistent in the descriptions between Israelis and Palestinians — Israelis were not suffering and Palestinians were gasping, Israelis were gaining land and Palestinians were losing land, Israelis were being elevated and Palestinians were being destroyed, Israelis were perpetrating massacres and Palestinians were being massacred — the world has reached an inflection point of actualization; a point at which the curve rises asymptotically and rapidly increases its numbers.

The numbers bump against one another, anguished at the present, fearful of the outcome, seeking a solution that impedes genocide, uniting in a “call to action” that will defeat the criminal enterprise known as Zionism. Immersed in the numbers are the multitudes of those who had favored Israel and succumbed to the presentation of Zionists as progressive and innocent pioneers, working barren grounds in harsh conditions. Realization that the secular Kibbutz pioneer was a short-lived phenomenon of hard-working and self-sacrificing immigrants, captured in prose by the poet Rachel, and has been replaced by a gun-toting, hardly working religious orthodox, who lives comfortably in a house supplied by the Israeli government on groomed hilltop land and spends the day battering Palestinians, has transformed Israel admirers into Israel adversaries.

On the Shores of the Kinneret by Rachel

Dawn rises when we begin to work. We number fourteen, with blistered hands and tan, bare and scratched legs. Strong faces, burning hearts. The whole air echoes our tunes, our talk and our laughter. The hoes go endlessly up and down. For a moment one may stop working and wipe the sweat from the forehead with the corner of a kaffiyeh, and throw a loving glance at the sea

I went to the West Bank to bear witness to the destruction there by Ilana Blumberg, Times of Israel.

Palestinians are chased away from the land designated for them by attacks of fire, gunfire, sadistic slaughter of animals, and the threat of worse. In Hamam Al Maliah, where I visited, the morning after my visit to an abandoned spot, Jewish Israelis had set up a prayer service there, and a video celebrating the return of the land from “Ishmaelite” hands to Jewish hands was published on social media. Days later, the town’s small schoolhouse was torn down overnight. Everything in it, including the children’s picture book, Dirah Lehaskir, (“Apartment To Let”), in Arabic translated from the Hebrew, was destroyed. The army camp across the road reported seeing nothing.

Never, in all history, have the world’s peoples organized in a massive common effort to protest and halt abuse, oppression, and genocide committed by a government against another people, as they have in apartheid Israel’s aggression against the Palestinian nation. It’s not hatred for Israel and its people that drives the protests; it’s more anguishing; an uneasy and gruesome feeling, similar to confronting a serial killer. It’s more encompassing; Israel’s government, all of its leaders, its Jewish citizens, and its worldwide supporters are complicit in the genocide, not deserving to share a dinner table with others, deserving antipathy and disdain from everyone. New York Times columnist, Nicholas Kristoff, reporting from the West Bank, May 11, 2026, tells one of the shocking stories, which is not new, a B’Tselem report, “Welcome to Hell,” published in 2024, related a similar narrative.

In wrenching interviews, Palestinians have recounted to me a pattern of widespread Israeli sexual violence against men, women and even children — by soldiers, settlers, interrogators in the Shin Bet internal security agency and, above all, prison guards.

“Israeli forces systematically employ rape and sexual torture to humiliate Palestinian female detainees,” the Euro-Med report [April 2026] said. It cited a 42-year-old woman who said she had been shackled naked to a metal table as Israeli soldiers forcibly had sex with her over two days while other soldiers filmed the attacks. Afterward, she said, she was shown photos of her being raped and told they would be published if she did not cooperate with Israeli intelligence.

PM Netanyahu’s response ─ anti-Semite. Another government official used another of the usual metaphors ─ blood libel. One–worded attacks that tell us the report is true.

Zionists recognize that world opinion does not favor their continuation and they don’t care. They only care about themselves and rationalize and twist the events. Listen to David Horovitz, founding editor of The Times of Israel.

We’re not in the 1930s… yet. Diaspora Jews the world over face a rising tide not ‘merely’ of Israel-hatred but, increasingly, of Jew-hatred. And where social media incitement, misrepresentation, religious indoctrination and miseducation lead the public, politicians are quick to follow

That’s changed now. Just as Diaspora life the world over has changed — most especially since Hamas invaded Israel on October 7, 2023, and a vast, well-prepared campaign swung into action to demonize the Jewish state and deny it the right to defend itself against aggressors openly determined to destroy it. It swept up Jew-haters from left and right. And, by the violent actions of its own adherents, targeting not only those members of the Jewish people who live in Israel, but Jews everywhere, it has shown itself to be a rising tide not “merely” of Israel-hatred but of Jew-hatred.

A relatively few of the 15 million Jews in the world are being knocked around by a relatively few of the one billion people living in the western world, while tens of Palestinians, Lebanese, and, for a while Iranians, are murdered daily by the people Mr. Horvitz defends, and he only sees harm done to innocent Jews. Horvitz refuses to recognize that attacks against Jews are due to the harm he and his cohorts are inflicting upon others. Well, Mr. Horvits, this is the 1930s, multiplied by several magnitudes, only the Israelis are the Nazis, and the Middle East peoples take the place of the 1930 German Jews.

The number of worldwide organizations and activities that counter the genocide have no precedent in responses to oppression.

• Elections have included stances on the genocide and relationships of candidates to AIPAC. Election of Zohran Kwame Mamdani, an ardent supporter of Palestinian rights, as the 112th mayor of New York City, a city identified with the Zionist movement, and nationwide primary elections, in which candidates have refused AIPAC money and pro-Israel candidates have been defeated, signify a shift in American sentiment away from favoring Israel.

• MAGA leaders — Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes, and former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene — have broken with Trump and voiced strong opinions against Israel’s genocidal tactics and influence in the American government. These leaders have large followings and will influence voters in coming elections.

• Demonstrations continue worldwide, despite Israel’s influencers’ attempts to impede them. Protests that highlight apartheid Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians have stirred the world community into decisive actions.

• Attacks on suspected Zionists and their institutions, performed more for highlighting the issues than harming individuals, are increasing rapidly.

• Personal sacrifices to highlight the genocide are occurring. Britisher Daniel Day climbed the Elizabeth Tower (Big Ben) in London and remained there for over 16 hours as a protest against British involvement in Gaza

• Editorials from previous Israel aligned commentators, such as that from Nicholas Kristoff, indicate the media is shifting from all out support of the tyrant.

• The growing number of anti-Zionist Jews, speaking loudly and acting boldly, have started a bandwagon of desertions from a strict Jewish support of Israel. Members of Jewish campus organization Hillel at Middlebury College voted to rename the group and depart from Hillel International. Reason ─ the organization’s pro-Israel stance no longer reflected the values of many Jewish students on campus.

• Vocal outcries at meetings, demonstrations, artistic gatherings, cultural functions, and international events highlight the intense feelings that seek expression. Irish singer Becky Hill publicly addressed crowds, urging them to raise voices against Israel’s war crimes and shout for a free Palestine.

Despite the extensive and commendable efforts of a massive part of humanity, Israel’s trajectory to demolish the Palestinian community and fulfill the commandment of a Greater Israel remains unchallenged. Lingering in the commotion are the ever unanswered questions — where does Israel go and how does this happen?

Zionists shriek and rant that the protests are intended to delegitimize Israel and push out Israelis “from Jordan to the Sea,” which more accurately describes Zionist intentions toward the Palestinians. Their ravings provide the answer to the first question.

Israel has never acceded to any of the UN Resolutions that condemned its behavior. Zionism’s “just drive forward and listen to no one” statement is an “all or nothing” philosophy. Because they want all, which they cannot obtain, they will receive what they propose as an alternative ─ nothing. If defeated, they will pack up, leave, and raise the Star of David in established satellite communities in New York, California, and Florida. Few Israelis will notice a change of locale.

How this happens is more difficult to decipher.
Israel is a formidable military power and cannot be defeated on the battlefield without severe damage to its adversaries. No combined armada wants to engage in that battle. Internal or external forces exist that can defeat the present Israel, difficult but possible.

Hiding behind a facade of a unified country, Israel is endangered by polarized constituencies and internal frictions of religious differences, racism, and economic inequalities that will grow. Not widely publicized is that, at 17.9 percent, Israel has the third highest poverty rate in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and is number 46 in CATO Institute’s Human Freedom Index; Hungary is at 45th place. No murmurs of rebellion or coup d’etat at this moment; maybe there is quiet seething. Faced with an external moral and economic bludgeoning and internal frictions, especially between secular and orthodox Jews, Jews will leave Israel and eruptions will eventually happen

By sheer numbers, Israel’s adversaries will swamp Israel’s friends. The Zionists may not be able to retain unqualified support from Evangelists, and will have the worldwide media and its deceptive propaganda mechanisms greatly diminished. The Democratic Party is no longer tightly aligned with Israel and, if it obtains executive power, may change the relationship. If that occurs, other nations could follow and modify their relationships. Once Israel loses advantage, its dominance will decay quickly. Hopefully, the electoral momentum will sufficiently change governing bodies and governments will force the Zionists to pack up and leave. Non-Zionists can stay.

Accomplishing the task involves changing a mindset that has been convinced the Jews deserve a nation, have a nation, and UN Proclamation 181 certified the plea for nationhood. All are untrue.

Is there a nation called Israel? Not according to Israel; its answer to proposals for either two-state or one-state solutions for the Middle East crisis is simple ─ a no-state solution, a route Israel has deceptively pursued from day one and is prepared to purse for eternity. Here are the facts:

• Borders define a nation. Israel has no defined borders.

• There is no Israel nationality. In modern and democratic nation states, nationality and citizenship are identical. Israel has more than 130 recognized nationalities to register for an ID card, most prominent being, Jewish, Arab, and Druze. The recognized nationalities might be Israeli citizens, but none is an Israel national. Because nation implies people of a common nationality, Israel cannot be a certified nation.

• Laws govern a nation and some of Israel’s laws are contested and prejudicial applied. Israel does not have a written constitution and is governed by a basic set of incomplete laws. When convenient, the government invokes and incorporates British Mandate law into its legal system for managing security and administration in occupied territories. The British 1945 Defense (Emergency) Regulations provide the legal framework for house demolitions. There is no civil marriage. Jews can only be married by an Orthodox rabbi under the authority of the Chief Rabbinate Religious. Interfaith marriages cannot be performed within the country.

• A large percentage of Israelis do not live in Israel. Accurate statistics are not available, but a figure of more than 1 million Israelis living abroad, which is 10% of the population, has been accepted. Claims have been made that an estimated 70-80 percent of Israeli Jews have passports from other nations, and a quarter of all Israeli academics live abroad.

• The Israeli Right of Return, which permits Jews from any nation to migrate to Israel and automatically have the right to apply for citizenship, is not a rule pursued by nations, except Armenia. Nations that have a Right of Return give that right to previous nationals and usually their children. By granting non-citizens title to citizenry only because they are Jews, Israel does not operate as a normal nation.

• Israel does not have a recognized capital city. Nations with Embassies in Jerusalem are few — United States, Guatemala, Honduras, Papua, New Guinea, Fiji, Paraguay, Kosovo, and Nauru.

Israel’s Nation State Law established a privileged Jewish community, governed by communal administration, with an extension to Jews in other nations, who can align themselves with Israeli society. This makes Israel an atavistic revival to a tribal form of governance, where borders and boundaries are not fixed. It is as if the mythical Joshua, leader of the Biblical Conquest, is brought back to life and, with sword and Lord, clears the land for the “chosen people.”

Important and overlooked.
When UN Resolution 181 partitioned Palestine on 29 November 1947, the population statistics showed about 500,000 Jews (mostly new to the area) and 1.1 million Arabs in the partitioned land. The Arab population was indigenous to the area with almost its entire population born to parents who had resided in the Levant. The Arab population also owned and occupied a major part of the territory with one area, the Negev, mainly inhabited by Bedouin tribes.

Because neither state had official names at that time, the designations of Arab and Jewish states were artificially used to map out contours of land where the major portions of each ethnicity would live. The designated Jewish state, not its name nor its description, meant the area carved out to contain the Jewish population, despite the area being principally owned by Arabs and containing an almost equal number of Palestinians. That area, which hastily became Israel just before President Truman recognized the state, failed at that moment of origin. Although the state was bi-national, a small Zionist group took control of all apparatus of the new state, and did that without consulting any Palestinian leadership. What leadership, well, no defined leadership, but place it all in proper context.

A census will have shown about 500,000 people described as Jews in the new state (another 100,000 in Jerusalem), but only a portion of that group had lived in the area for a long period of time and only that portion had investment in its past, present, or future. In 1850, there were only 13,000 Jews in Palestine and mostly in Jerusalem. In 1947, outside of Jerusalem, there were a few thousand descendants of those Jews and about 40,000 earlier 20th century Zionists. All other Jews had arrived within the previous 30 years and not necessarily to stay — some to work in the British Mandate, many fleeing Nazi Germany, others from refugee camps after World War II, and some adventurers. Relatively few Jews were native to the region and almost all were from foreign nations. The UN divided one Palestinian state into two Palestinian states — a Palestinian state composed of almost 100 percent Palestinians, and a Palestinian state composed of about 650,000 native to the area, of whom about 60 percent were Palestinians (400,000 Palestinians), and 40 percent were foreign Jews and their children (250,000), who had arrived earlier to live permanently in Palestine. Another contingent of foreign Jews (250,000) had arrived for expediency and not with intention of remaining in the British Mandate. From that perspective, David Ben-Gurion and a small clique of opportunists took advantage of an ill-advised UN, an ill-led and ill- equipped Palestinian community, and a confused world to declare their state, and, with seasoned militia forces — Haganah, Irgun, Lehi, and Palmach — cleansed the area of Palestinians and established Israel

The Palestinians were neither prepared to govern nor be governed. Aware of this, and by not enforcing Article 4 of Resolution 181, the UN shamelessly allowed the expulsion of the Palestinians and did not stop the havoc.

Article 4. The Commission, after consultation with the democratic parties and other public organizations of The Arab and Jewish States, shall select and establish in each State as rapidly as possible a Provisional Council of Government. The activities of both the Arab and Jewish Provisional Councils of Government shall be carried out under the general direction of the Commission. If by 1 April 1948 a Provisional Council of Government cannot be selected for either of the States, {ED: That did not happen] or, if selected, cannot carry out its functions, the Commission shall communicate that fact to the Security Council for such action with respect to that State as the Security Council may deem proper, and to the Secretary-General for communication to the Members of the United Nations.

The UN inquiry committee, which proposed the majority resolution of two separate states, displayed a lack of knowledge of what constituted a nation-state. After the decline of empires, nation states rose from strong leaders binding tribes of similar linguistic, cultural, social, and historical backgrounds, all of whom had lived in a contiguous area for generations, into a national entity. Palestinians had the credentials to become a nation-state; the Jews, who spoke different languages, had differing social and historical backgrounds, came from different areas, and had been in the region for a short time, did not have the attachments to form a nation-state.

The culprits in the havoc and crises that have plagued the Middle East are the nations that voted for the Partition Plan and the United Nations that permitted the hostilities and crimes to escalate. They owe the Palestinians, the Middle East peoples, and a world that expects justice, a reversal of their fateful decisions.

Actions can be taken.
Jewish populations should take legal action against Israel for placing them in jeopardy and unfairly transgressing upon their lives. All nations should consider the egregious consequences of the Nation State Law, one of which is that some of their citizens have loyalty to another state, and take administrative action — vocal, diplomatic, and in international institutions.

The world has spoken. Israel must go. The momentum to accomplish that goal is beginning to take shape. It needs only a U.S. president exclaiming, “Israel tear down that separation wall,” and a western world that imposes economic measures that brings Israelis into desperate economic conditions. Techies finding one zero missing from their six figure salaries will carry their bone marrow and cerebral neurons to richer climes. The well-educated and equally knowledgeable Palestinians will take their place, the democratic and just state of Palestine will be created, peace will be restored, and the world, which includes the Jewish community, will regain its moral compass.

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Concepts buried in the Old Testament and in the history of independent Jewish governing shaped the minds that eagerly approve of the genocide and are targets for extinction. Zionist behavior today includes a mythical atavistic endeavor that complements the original political Zionism and aligns with behavior of Jews in ancient history. This is a significant change that demands revelation. Theodore Herzl’s incipient Zionism, promoted by secular Jews, brought havoc to the Middle East; the mythical atavism attachment is creating havoc for the entire world.

No longer are Jews and their religion veiled from criticism; the protective shield of anti-Semitism has been lifted and slowly, quite slowly, the minds corrupted by inability to assimilate information guarded by the protective shield are gaining clearer thinking of the relations between Jews and their religion and the rest of the western world. The corrupted minds are not only non-Jewish minds; they are Jewish minds, molded together by doctrines that espouse a violent “eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth,” molded together by a deliberate implantation of insecurity and victim hood. The ultra-orthodox element has gained unusual power and downplays the teachings of math, science, English and other non-religious topics. Instead, it directs the faithful to a mind-bending religious study.

At Passover, Jews celebrate the mythical Exodus that glorifies the “killing of the first born” in Egypt, not an enviable rite in a peacefully oriented religion. The mythical and false history of an Exodus is presented as a reality, of Jews emerging from slavery. That slavery whispers through 3000 years, breathing life in films, stories, novels, and song, making it seem that contemporary Jews today carry the memory of slavery in their souls as intense as that imposed upon the descendants of African slaves, and Jews, because of this memory, are the vanguard against injustice. The truth shall make you free.

Exodus 21:2-4

When you acquire a Hebrew slave, that person shall serve six years — and shall go free in the seventh year, without payment. If [a male slave] came single, he shall leave single; if he had a wife, his wife shall leave with him. If his master gave him a wife, and she bore him children, the wife and her children shall belong to the master, and he shall leave alone.

Leviticus 25:44-46

And as for your male and female slaves whom you may have—from the nations that are around you, from them you may buy male and female slaves. Moreover you may buy the children of the strangers who dwell among you, and their families who are with you, which they beget in your land; and they shall become your property. And you may take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit them as a possession; they shall be your permanent slaves. But regarding your brethren, the children of Israel, you shall not rule over one another with rigor.

The strength and audacity imposed on contemporary Jewish thought by the fiction recited from the Torah appeared at a seminar where former Israeli Prime Minister Simon Peres participated. Know him, the man who started the West Bank settlements and then tried to convince everyone he was party to a “two-state solution?” In answer to the question of “Why is Israel oppressing the Palestinians?” I personally heard the esteemed hypocrite respond, “Would we who were enslaved be guilty of enslaving others?” “We,” twentieth century individuals, probably no more attached to those who roamed the Middle East three thousand years ago than to the Italians, who live much better than most on the planet, identifying themselves as carrying memory of and being shaped by a spurious servitude. Oh, by the way, Seňor Peres, during the antebellum South, approximately a quarter of all Jewish households owned slaves.

From Exodus 23:31, the second book of the Torah, written by those who composed the Old Testament (the early Zionists) in the last centuries before Anno Dominini (A.D.), a self-serving and demented claim is made, an assertion that the faithful utter in the scientific, technologically advanced, and “we are all equal” 2ist century ─ Jews are the “Chosen People.”

For you are a people holy to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth.

Can it be that Zionists, many of whom are secular, believe the land that is now called Israel was given by a God to the Jewish people? The belief may be accepted metaphorically. Everyone is entitled to a belief in God as a spiritual matter, but making God into a property manager who disburses lands to a select group is bizarre and not a friendly gesture. Strange that Mr. Omnipotent allowed other peoples to occupy the same property - rent free. Has anyone else heard this decree, other than the beneficiaries who may, yes may have fabricated it? My personal attitude - I’d like to see a written contract.

Now that they are the “Chosen People,” they can set the borders where they wish to reside. In Deuteronomy 7:6-8, the fifth book of the Torah, Moses clarifies their Lord’s directives to the Zionists.

And I will set your border from the Red Sea to the Sea of the Philistines, and from the wilderness to the Euphrates, for I will give the inhabitants of the land into your hand, and you shall drive them out before you.

“Drive them out before you,” and because Joshua’s genocide of the local inhabitants of the Levant was incomplete, the 20th century Zionists attempted to complete the task. They seized the Sinai Peninsula in their 1956 war and arranged a secret meeting, in which they asked France and Great Britain to give permission for them to extend Israel to the Litani River in Lebanon.

Rarely mentioned is a controversial meeting, known as the Protocol of Sèvres,1956, and reported in Anatomy of a War Plot, Avi, Shlaim. International Affairs, volume 73, 1997, pp. 509-530, which describes Israel Prime Minister David ben Gurion’s proposed plan to Great Britain and France. Although the meeting records are not available in French and British government archives, the meeting occurrence and parts of ben Gurion’s plan are confirmed in Shimon Peres: the biography By Michael Bar-Zohar.

The session started at 4 p.m. on Monday, 22 October, in the conservatory of the villa and it was intended to enable the leaders of the two countries to get to know each other and to have a preliminary discussion. Ben-Gurion opened the discussion by listing his military, political and moral considerations against ‘the English plan’. His main objection was that Israel would be branded as the aggressor while Britain and France would pose as peace-makers but he was also exceedingly apprehensive about exposing Israeli cities to attack by the Egyptian Air Force. Instead he presented a comprehensive plan, which he himself called ‘fantastic’, for the reorganization of the Middle East. Jordan, he observed, was not viable as an independent state and should therefore be divided. Iraq would get the East Bank in return for a promise to settle the Palestinian refugees there and to make peace with Israel while the West Bank would be attached to Israel as a semi-autonomous region. Lebanon suffered from having a large Muslim population which was concentrated in the south. The problem could be solved by Israel’s expansion up to the Litani River, thereby helping to turn Lebanon into a more compact Christian state. The Suez Canal area should be given an international status while the Straits of Tiran in the Gulf of Aqaba should come under Israeli control to ensure freedom of navigation. A prior condition for realizing this plan was the elimination of Nasser and the replacement of his regime with a pro-Western government which would also be prepared to make peace with Israel.

After President Dwight Eisenhower forced France and Great Britain to retreat from their partial occupation of Egypt, the Zionist proposed trip to the Litani River got interrupted. They retained the Sinai until the 1979 Camp David agreement, trading captured Egyptian territory for recognition of captured Palestinian lands.

Joshua’s task was partially extended when Jews arrived in Babylonia, and is celebrated during the feat of Purim. Considered a biblical story, the drama might have some historical validity. From the Book of Esther, 9:1-17,

On the 13th of Adar that year, the Jews throughout the Persian Empire mobilized and killed the enemies who had wanted to kill them. Esther asked the king’s permission for the Jews in Shushan to have one more day to destroy their enemy—and the king acceded to her wish. On that day, the 14th of Adar, the Jews worldwide celebrated, and the Jews of Shushan killed more of their enemies (75,000 people across the empire), and also hung Haman’s sons. The Jews of Shushan then rested and celebrated on the 15th of Adar.

After biblical history we arrive at modern history, which has foundations and might not always be correct. Two thousand years ago, there were no press services and surviving original sources are scarce.

During a limited time, of about 110 years, the Hasmonean Jews governed Palestine. This occurred during the 2^nd century B.C., after the Maccabees wrested power from the Seleucid Empire. Not entirely reliable historian Flavius Josephus relates that Hasmonean leader John Hyrcanus used this period to expand territory in a less than usually violent manner. Hycranus “forced the Idumaeans to convert to Judaism. Those who wished to keep their land were required to undergo circumcision and adopt Jewish laws, transforming them into ‘entire Jews.’” This forced conversion allowed the absorption of Idumaean territory into the small and growing Judaic Empire. The greed and over-extension steered the corrupt Hasmoneon dynasty into a civil war. Before Roman troops reached Jerusalem in 70 A.D, Jews were murdering each other and setting the stage for a deadly famine. From Josephus Chronicles:

And now, as the city was engaged in a war on all sides, from these treacherous crowds of wicked men; the people of the city between them were, like a great body, torn in pieces. The aged men, and the women were in such distress by their internal calamities, that they wished for the Romans; and earnestly hoped for an external war, in order to their delivery from their domestical miseries.

The next time Jewish tribes rebelled was 50 years later, in the little mentioned and most important, Kitos War, which happened in several locations simultaneously. One original source is Roman historian, Cessious Dios, Epitome of Book 68, P.431, who may have originated and exaggerated the atrocities. Jews, Greeks, and Romans contested the lands and there were atrocities on all side. Lucius Quietus, governor of Judea Quietus for whom the war and land was named, destroyed Jewish existence in several locations. In Alexandria, Turbo, with the assistance of the local Greeks, massacred the Jewish community.

Meanwhile the Jews in the region of Cyrene had put a certain Andreas at their head, and were destroying both the Romans and the Greeks. They would eat the flesh of their victims, make belts for themselves of their entrails, anoint themselves with their blood and wear their skins for clothing; many they sawed in two, from the head downwards; others they gave to wild beasts, and still others they forced to fight as gladiators. In all two hundred and twenty thousand persons perished. In Egypt, too, they perpetrated many similar outrages, and in Cyprus, under the leader­ship of a certain Artemion. There, also, two hundred and forty thousand perished, and for this reason no Jew may set foot on that island, but even if one of them is driven upon its shores by a storm he is put to death.

A major migration of Jews to Yemen began at the beginning of the 2^nd century A.D. In the 4th–5th centuries, people in Yemen (Himyarites) converted to Judaism and established a Jewish-ruled kingdom. Dhū Nuwās, the last prominent Jewish king in Yemen, reigned from approximately 517 to 525 A.D. Maybe it was the times, but he committed crimes against Christians, which few people know.

Having heard of the persecutions of the Jews by the Byzantine emperors, Dhū Nuwās retaliated by putting to death some Byzantine merchants who were traveling on business through Himyara. This destroyed the trade of Yemen with Europe and involved Dhu Nuwas in a war with the heathen king Aidug, whose commercial interests were injured thereby. Dhu Nuwas was defeated (521), but succeeded in reestablishing his kingdom. Soon, however, he entangled himself in a new difficulty. He made war against the Christian city Najran, in Yemen, which was a dependency of his kingdom; and on its capitulation, in spite, it is said, of his promise of immunity from punishment, he offered the citizens the alternative of embracing Judaism or being put to death. As they refused to renounce their faith, he executed their chief, Ḥarith ibn Kaleb, and three hundred and forty chosen men.

The last time that a Jewish national authority existed happened with the conversion of a Khazar king. Not entirely verified, but accepted by historians, is the conversion of Turkic people who established a powerful empire in the region between the Black and Caspian Seas during the early medieval period; these were the Khazars who converted to Judaism in the 9th century under King Bulan. A strange episode has been used to verify the conversions.

In the sixteenth century, Isaac Abraham Akrish, a collector and publisher of books, discovered correspondence between Hasdai Ibn Shaprut, minister at the court of Abdulrahman III, caliph of Cordova, and Joseph, king of the Khazars. The correspondence verified that the kingdom of the Khazars had converted to Judaism. Supposedly, Judaism flourished within Khazaria with prominent synagogues and educational institutions. To their credit, the Khazar kingdoms tolerated all religions. The document authenticity has been challenged.

Ancient Israel was home to ancient Jews. The area that is now Israel was not the ancient home of modern Jews. When an ethnicity speaks of an ancient home, it speaks similar to the voices of Native Americans, of caring for the land or for their hunting grounds, for attachment to a soil that nourished them, and with intimate knowledge of ancestors. They may look back at a recognized civilization that gave the world new advances in technology, culture, warfare, administration, or other disciplines, and left identifiable physical traces that excite mankind. Modern Jews have no honest attachment to an ancient land, no relation to its soil, no memories of an advanced civilization, and do not have intimate knowledge of ancestors in biblical lands.

Historical evidence shows that, after the ancient Hebrews, due to conquest and subjugation, faded from history, many of the later Jews were not attached to the land and did not consider it a national home ─ just the opposite ─ a large number of the later Jews preferred to remain in Babylonia. Jews moved throughout the Roman Empire, populating Alexandria, Rome, Cyrenaica, Salonika, Cyprus, and other places. From the time of the Maccabean revolt of the mid-2nd century B.C. to the Bar Kokhba revolt of the 2nd century A.D., some of whose centuries included the reign of the Hasmoneans, a sizable Jewish exodus to Mesopotamia and Persia and throughout the Roman Empire occurred. Freed from a pastoral life, dry conditions, and restricted economies, new communities of Mesopotamian Jews, knowledgeable and worldly, appeared in the Fertile Crescent. That region, which housed the great Jewish academies of Surah, Pumbadita, and Nehardea, best expressed the legacy and heritage of modern Judaism. In The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, 70-1492, winner of the 2012 National Jewish Book Award in Scholarship, by Maristella Botticini, Zvi Eckstein, Princeton University press, 2012, the authors claim that “Judaism reached its Golden Age in 800 -1200 A.D. During that time, Mesopotamia and Persia contained 75% of world Jewry with the rest in North Africa and Western Europe.”

Jews who scattered throughout the world have only one connection ─ the scriptures. This has proved to be a powerful connection; words that proclaim a “chosen people,” a special people, distinct from the rest of mankind, deserving to live in their own “promised land.” Words that excite, invigorate, and allow to violate. Zionism has become an atavistic revival of the ancient Hebrews, guided by third century B.C. literature, a manuscript written to unite an unsettled people by giving them a fabricated and powerful history. Formulation of the Torah formed Judaism in the third century B.C. There were Jews before 200 B.C.; there was no Judaism before 200 B. C. Until there was a Torah read by the masses, there could not be a Judaism.

A constant drumming of public relations and historical misconceptions have made it seem as if the more than two thousand years of lack of control and sizable physical presence by Jews in the Levant did not occur. Today is portrayed as only a short interval from the 2700-year-old reign of ancient King Hezekiah. Centuries of Christian and Crusader rule and more than one thousand years of Muslim rule and their tremendous constructions and creations in Jerusalem are downplayed. The Christian and Muslim everything become nothing, and a minor Hebrew something becomes everything. Myth replaces reality. Ethereal spirituality replaces physical presence. Myths have been portrayed as reality and that portrayal is incorrect.

Gone are the Zionist pioneers, struggling in Kibbutzim against nature to reclaim a land. On stage are Zionist settlers, struggling to evict Palestinians and steal their land. Halting the catastrophe has a prerequisite ─ halting the spread of documents that shape the mind that commits the genocide.

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Part I – Are Historical Arguments Against Segments of the Jewish Community Proving True?

Close attachment of segments of the worldwide Jewish community to the genocidal behavior of Israel divides the followers of Judaism. From this division, it is expected many Jews will leave the religion, others will fight to establish a religion with anti-Zionist credentials, and some will propose a revised Reform Judaism that promotes humanism, openness, and obedience to the religion’s moral codes, rather than inhumanity, orthodoxy, and a lip service to the Ten Commandments.

In retaliation to the cruel, morally corrupt, and criminal behavior exhibited by the Zionists and their followers, a Jewish person on the Quora discussion website offered a disturbing solution.

Iran has to obliterate Occupied Palestine, and although I’m very reluctant to go after everything and everyone, the only option to successfully get rid of this moral infestation of so many countries is to eliminate every single Jew, worldwide. And the reason why I don’t say this easily, is because you would have to terminate me as well.

This aggressive post is either sarcastic, subject to interpretation, or displaying a touch of mental disarrangement. Regardless, it shows the extent to which Zionists’ atrocities have degraded the feelings that people have for Jews. An extreme attitude toward Jews is not new and has been a part of recorded history for centuries, which makes one ponder if the reasons that propelled dislike of Jews today are similar to those that caused friction with Jews in the past. Is anti-Semitism another word for perceived Jewish duplicity? Treacherous actions of a nation that proudly highlights itself as the “Jewish nation,” reinforce the thesis.

The daily murders committed by the Israeli military in Gaza, Iran, and Lebanon, three simultaneous genocides against people who have inadequate means to defend themselves from the onslaught, has no precedence in history. Genocide is insufficient to describe these horrors. The killings are meaningless, heartless, without compunction, and contain a bloodthirsty desire to see people suffer; done as an everyday activity, no different from daily work. The deliberate intention of the violence has triggered an intense hatred for the perpetrator. Here are two of the latest summaries.

Israeli soldiers and settlers are using gendered violence and sexual assault and harassment to force Palestinians from their homes in the occupied West Bank, human rights and legal experts say. Palestinian women, men and children have reported attacks, forced nudity, invasive and painful body cavity searches, Israelis exposing their genitals, including to minors, and threats of sexual violence.

An estimated 1.1 million children in Gaza now need mental health and psychosocial support, as a growing number lose their ability to speak due to trauma and injuries from Israeli attacks.

Does Israel constantly bomb areas in Gaza to keep children awake and frighten them? I think so.

The world has been given a one-sided history of the Jews. A new history is now unfolding, a history of a clever minority that traded government protection of its people, a worthwhile endeavor, for their unique resources — financial, intellectual, commercial, intelligence, literacy — and enabled established leaders to maintain power. The history surfaced in a 1993 book, The fatal embrace: Jews and the state by Benjamin Ginsberg, Professor of Political Science and Chair of the Hopkins Center for Advanced Governmental Studies in Washington, DC. Professor Ginsburg’s principal theses.

… over the past several centuries, Jews have played important roles in the construction of absolutist, liberal, and socialist states as well as major parts in movements seeking to reform or supplant regimes to which they were unable to obtain access. Jews have traditionally offered their services to the state in exchange for the regime’s guarantee of security and opportunity. Ironically, however, precisely this relationship between Jews and the state has often sparked organized anti-Semitic attacks…During the eleventh century, the Jews of Speyer asked the ruling prince-bishop to grant them a charter of privileges and to build a defensive wall around their quarter. (Ed note: Not the often expressed imposed ghetto.) Because the Jews were economically valuable and he wished to induce more to settle in his city, the bishop agreed. Subsequently, the bishop protected the Jewish community from rioting crusaders, going so far as to hang the ring leaders of the mob that sought to attack the Jewish quarter. (Ed note: Protected from the Crusaders and not attacked, as often expressed.)

During the 1920s and 1930s, Jews were a major element in the secret police and other Soviet security forces. Genrikh Yagoda served as chief of the secret police during the 1930s. Other high-ranking Jewish secret policemen included Matvei Berman and Naftali Frenkel who helped to expand and institutionalize the slave labor system. Slave laborers working under Frenkel’s supervision built the White-Sea Baltic Canal in 1932. Another Jewish security officer, K. V. Pauker, served as chief of operations of the secret police in the 1930s. Lev Inzhir was chief accountant for the Gulag. M. T. Gay headed the special secret police department that conducted the purges of the 1930s. In what came to be called the “Great Terror,” he supervised the mass arrests, trials, and executions of Stalin’s opponents. Two other Jewish secret policemen, A. A. Slutsky and Boris Berman, were in charge of Soviet terror and espionage abroad during the 1930s.

Frequently, Jewish communal leaders sought an alliance with the state for still another reason. Not only did they offer protection and opportunity for the community, but the Gentile authorities could bolster the position of their Jewish colleagues by providing them with what they otherwise lacked: coercive powers through which to enforce their commands. In turn, the Gentile authorities welcomed a cooperative relationship with Jewish communal leaders because this facilitated the collection of taxes from the Jews. Thus, the Gentile government and Jewish communal authorities could serve one another’s interests.

The symbiotic relationship between states and Jewish communities did not always end happily for the minority Jews. Embrace of the state often proved “fatal;” ascendancy to power angered local citizens and generated hatred of Jews. Regimes often reacted harshly when they perceived Jews were contesting power (Roman Empire, where, until the first century AD, Jews lived in relative harmony and were allowed to practice their faith as a school. Rebellions led to a major change in Rome’s attitude.); discarded the Jews after they consolidated power (Soviet Union removing Jews from government before World War II); turned against the Jews in response to rebellious forces that could undermine the regime (pre-World War I Magyar Hungary restricted political rights after previously extending them); or accused Jews as responsible for a failed government (Hitler labeling the Weimar Republic as the “Judenrepublik”).

The success of Jews in the Weimar republic proved fatal. For the super nationalist, racist, and demagogue Nazis, the success of the one percent of Jews in the population undermined the German Volk.

Through their commercial and banking activities, Jews contributed to the substantial economic development and reconstruction that took place during the Weimar era. Jewish firms accounted for nearly 80% of the business done by department and chain stores, 40% of Germany’s wholesale textile firms, and 60% of all wholesale and retail clothing businesses. Almost half of all private banks were owned by Jews, as were the largest and most successful of the credit

Jews were extremely important in the professional, intellectual, and cultural life of Weimar Germany. Approximately 11% of Germany’s physicians and 16% of its lawyers were Jews. Jewish academics, intellectuals, and artists were the leading figures in German theater, literature, music, art, architecture, science, and philosophy during the Weimar era. Jews were also the most influential critics of drama, art, music, and books as well as the owners of the most important art galleries and theaters.

During the past thousand years, Jews have reached economic and, sometimes, political power in

• ·Fatimid North Africa during the 10th and 11th centuries — self-rule and wealthy merchants;

• Grand Duchy of Lithuania, from the 14th to 18th centuries — self-rule, owners and managers of huge estates, and wealthy merchants;

• The al-Andalus area of the Iberian peninsula from the 11th to the 15th centuries — “Golden Age” of cultural flourishing, intellectual advancement, administration, and political influence;

• Ottoman empire during the 15th and 16th centuries — active in trade, tax farming, medicine, and crafts. Jewish doctors and diplomats were part of the court;

• Courts of the Hapsburgs, Bourbons, Orléanists, and Bonapartists during the 19th century;

• Soviet Union leadership from 1920 to 1940; and in the

• Weimar Republic from 1920 to 1933 — proportionally much greater economic, financial, educational, cultural, and government power than other citizens.

Critics cannot fault the Jewish populations for their desire to ingratiate themselves in government circles and to attain highest levels of prosperity and positions. Attacks, labelled anti-Semitism, occurred when Jews served the state to control and extract taxes from peasantry (Grand Duchy of Lithuania), mercilessly controlled the population (Soviet Union), subdued economic competition (Tsarist Russia where the “main driver of pogroms was the interaction of economic shocks, political turmoil, and the domination of Jews in the middleman sector related to agriculture.”), or banded together to promote themselves and exclude others (Imperial Germany). An interesting case of the latter is the experience of Richard Wagner.

An impressive intellectual, humanitarian, the most recognized genius of the musical world, and a classical composer who could do everything from composing operas to designing the scenery, Wagner had his writings and thoughts twisted and vilified to characterize him as a vitriolic anti-Semite. At a young age, he wrote, “the Jew is incapable ... of artistic expression, neither through his outer appearance, nor through his language and least of all through his singing;” words that remain attached to him by the anti-Semite hunters 150 years after his death. Big deal, words similar to those of Wagner have been said of the Brits and their culinary arts.

Wagner’s animosity toward Jewish artistic expression, not the Jews, arose from an encounter that would bother any genius. Unable to have his early opera, Rienzi, staged, Wagner visited his Jewish friend, Giacomo Meyerbeer, in Paris. At that time, Meyerbeer was numero uno as a commercial opera composer and had influential friends in the music world. Meyerbeer’s arranged introduction to his “influential friends” enraged Wagner. From the encounters, Wagner concluded that Meyerbeer was a superficial composer, who achieved success due to his relationship with a group of Jewish investors. The latter controlled entrances to production and stage and were only interested in commercial properties that guaranteed return on investment, were not supportive of great works and the most exemplary composers, and inhibited the advancement of German opera. In retrospect, Wagner’s opinion of Meyerbeer has been authenticated; his work is seldom, if ever, performed in contemporary opera houses.

No part of Wagner’s life exhibits hatred of Jews; just the opposite; he was close to many Jews — Hermannn Levi was his lifelong, conductor, Polish-born pianist Carl Tausig and pianist Joseph Rubinstein, who revered Wagner, were his greatest friends, and Angelo Neumann produced his later works.

The charges made against the Jewish community, that they promote themselves in detriment to others, play victim while victimizing others, have dual loyalties, coalesce in an international conspiracy, control media to popularize their cause, and exercise undue influence in governments have been mentioned throughout history. Before 19^th century emancipation, Jewish leaders could be excused for bargaining the enabling of regime success in exchange for community protection. In absolutist regimes, survival is difficult for everyone. Making friends in high places is the best way to survive. The Jews cannot be blamed if their services to the courts reacted detrimentally against other citizens. Back in medieval times, there was no mass media or international conspiracies, and those charges did not arrive until the later centuries. Nevertheless, from the perspective of the average citizen, subjected to subjugation, Jews were sometimes complicit in their subjugation and, at times, the populations and regimes that no longer needed the assistance of Jews reacted harshly - one severe example.

Mass atrocities committed by Cossacks against prisoners of war and the civilian population, especially Poles, Jews, Roman Catholic and Ruthenian Uniate clergy, accompanied the Khmelnytsky Uprising, known as the 1648 and 1657 Cossack–Polish Wars. Atrocities against the Jews were due to their operating as land leaseholders (arendators), who earned money from the collections they made for the magnates, and were seen by the peasants as their oppressors. Jewish merchants also were allied in a vertical combination with Jewish producers, financiers, and intermediaries to compete effectively with local merchants, and this created additional hostility. From an eyewitness, Abyss of Despair, a 17th-century book by Nathan ben Moses Hannover:

Wherever they found the szlachta, royal officials or Jews, they [Cossacks] killed them all, sparing neither women nor children. They pillaged the estates of the Jews and nobles, burned churches and killed their priests, leaving nothing whole. It was a rare individual in those days who had not soaked his hands in blood ...[

This ruthlessness has not been unique. In 100 days of 1994, the Hutu majority, feeling domination by a Tutsi minority that controlled the economy and armed forces of Rwanda, and comprised only 15 percent of the population, went berserk and massacred the Tutsi minority. Domination by a minority can have consequences, and the ethnic or religious tag line is not the principal motivator of the atrocity. Jews allied with the wrong people at the wrong time suffered from their alliances, and not because of their religion. Economic rivalries also brought ethnicities to battle each other and these were not one-sided aggression. Listening to the constant rendition of “the world’s oldest prejudice is against the Jews,” and “Jews have suffered all through history,” and making it seem that events that occurred a thousand years ago are relevant today, substantiate the charges made against the Jewish community, that they promote themselves in detriment to others, play victim while victimizing others, coalesce in an international conspiracy, and control media to popularize their causes.

Promotion
I don’t want to make this a screed, a shaggy dog story of rants, which it can be; the evidence of Jewish groups promoting themselves in detriment to others, playing victim while victimizing others, coalescing in an international conspiracy, and controlling media to popularize their causes are endless. Before finalizing this saga, let’s briefly mention interesting and arresting accompaniments to the woeful charges.

I am perplexed at the attention that composer George Gershwin gets, and I know it is a Jewish thing. Growing up, I heard about Gershwin on a daily basis. The man could not read music and mainly wrote the melodies to his brother’s songs, worthy of Tin Pan Alley recognition, but no comparison to classical composers. His principal accomplishment is Rhapsody in Blue, arranged by Ferde Grofé, catchy phrasing that melds classical with Jazz.

Being a fan of fantastic actor, Mickey Rooney, I view his old time films. In one of Mickey’s Andy Hardy movies, he longs to be a musician and tells Judy Garland, he wants to be like George Gershwin, “who was as good as Schubert, and some say greater.” Maybe Mickey meant Phil Schubert and not Franz Schubert; anyway, how did that ridiculous remark enter into a film; who orchestrated the orchestra to play Gershwin’s tune? On classical WETA, Gershwin is popular, often edged between Schubert and Beethoven, as if he were on their level. I’ve had a few conversations with the program director on that contrived arrangement. Most baffling and annoying is that in the hallowed Library of Congress, America’s contribution to intellectual greatness, there is a George Gershwin room. Egads!

Imagine Europeans arriving from nations that could have rooms for Beethoven, Debussy, Rachmaninoff, Grieg and thousands of other great classical composers, coming to the Library of Congress and the best America can offer is who, a man named George Gershwin. How did this insult to all Americans happen? Out in the ether is a George Gershwin club, manned by what we Jews call, “the Jewish mafia,” that taps out rhythmical messages to the media, constantly popularizes George, and keeps him alive.

Playing victim
President Carter, wanted to appease Jewish interests during the Camp David talks, and permitted construction of a Holocaust museum dedicated to informing Americans about all genocides, except for those committed by Americans against the Native American and African American peoples. Not knowing the constituents he was appeasing, Carter fell victim to his folly; founding chairperson, Elie Wiesel, ignored the sufferings of other genocide victims and proceeded to initially establish a World War II Holocaust museum with mainly memories of Anne Frank, photographs, and shoes, a museum of little history and much horror. In usual style of not rewarding those who help the Jewish people, Carter, because he did not serve Zionists one hundred percent, has been accused of being an anti-Semite. After the 1979 approval, the deluge started.

The Wiener Holocaust Library states, “There are now hundreds of museums dedicated to educating people about the Holocaust all over the world.” If the purpose of the museums is education, then the museums are failures; the “education” has not prevented a single genocide. The unanswered question is, “Why does the United States contain special museums that are part of European history and have no attachment to American history? The answer is obvious. “Continually emphasizing the almost century-old Holocaust has one objective ─ emotionally capture new generations and advance Zionist interests.

Control media to popularize their causes
Media control is documented. However, the duplicitous subtleties, insertions of television programs and radio and TV words into daily discourse are not recognized. PBS programming, which includes Finding Your Roots and Antiques Roadshow, two harmless and innocent vehicles for propaganda, is the most favored culprit.

Although Jews are less than two percent of the nation, an earlier calculation of Finding Your Roots had programs that featured ancestry in which 16 percent of the rootless were Jewish personalities. By coincidence, almost all had relatives consumed in the Holocaust, even if the relative was distant. One program had a fourth cousin, entirely unknown to the participant. Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., host, executive producer, and moderator of this pernicious program asked the personality how it felt to have a relative who was a victim in the Holocaust, as if it were meritorious. From the interchange, I expected the person to respond with, “It feels great.” Nothing makes your day like knowing a distant relative was killed in the Holocaust.

It’s exciting to watch Antiques Roadshow find a Ming dynasty artifact, bought for tens of dollars and worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Surprising to have someone present a paper cutout and ask for its interpretation. Is a paper cutout an antique and why bring it to Antiques Roadshow for interpretation? The paper cut lattice was a Star of David with words that were interpreted as “love of religion” and “love of country.” Didn’t say what country. Well, we understand; a clever insertion to show that American Jews, who are often accused of disloyalty, decorate with equal equanimity of “loving their religion” and “loving their country.” One of several “antiques” that boosted the Zionist effort.

Parse through PBS programming and find the needless videos that contain Jewish themes:

• The Story of the Jews explores Jewish history, culture, and experience, from ancient times to the creation of Israel,

• Resistance: They Fought Back tells us that Jews were not passive during the Holocaust and fought back,

• Children of the Holocaust: Drawn from Memory - 19 first-person accounts of the Holocaust from survivors living in Southern Arizona,

• 1913: Seeds of Conflict explores pre-WWI Palestine when Jewish, Muslim, and Christian communities intermingled freely.

• Family Recipe: Jewish American Style ─ world’s most pedestrian cooking, derived from countries in which they lived

• American Masters – Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse, and his gruesome comic strip, Maus, a fictional Holocaust theme that passes as non-fiction and portrays Poles as pigs,

• The Jewish Americans, 350 years of Jews in America that nobody cares about,

• Worse Than War, a documentary of genocide, which premiered during National Holocaust Remembrance Week on April 14,

• Blacks and Jews in America ─ Jews attaching themselves to the Black experience and deceitfully convincing others that they are partners in a common struggle,

• The Jewish Journey: America, chronicles Jewish immigration to America from 1654.

• Defying the Nazis: The Sharps’ War ─ Waitstill and Martha Sharp leave their children in the care of their parish and help Jews and other refugees at the beginning of World War II.

• The U.S. and the Holocaust ─ a contemptible and spurious account of U.S. responsibility in the Holocaust. Giving Americans a “guilt trip “so they will be kind to Israel.

• Hannah Arendt: Facing Tyranny relates the philosophy of Ms. Arendt, who was briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo in 1933,

• The Jewish People: A Story of Survival — Fraudulent history of the Jewish people, who started as “desert nomads,” went from “slavery “to “loss of their homeland.” from “exile” to “anti-Semitism,” and from “pogroms” to near annihilation in the Holocaust.

• Jews of the Wild West tries to tell us that Jewish pioneers, all three of them, helped shaped the Western United States.

• A Life Apart: Hasidism in America — documentary about a traditional Eastern European religious community who migrated to America after World War II,

• Growing up Jewish ─ Important documentary that follows four very important Jewish teenagers as they prepare to celebrate their exciting Bar and Bat Mitzvahs in the same week.

Nothing on Armenians, Hindus, Sikhs, Mennonites, Russian Orthodox, Catholics, and tens of other immigrant ethnicities.

The decades of Jewish life that succeeded the granting of equal rights in the western democracies no longer needed bargaining for community protection. Jewish leaders cannot avoid criticism for cajoling, bribing, mystifying, and deceiving government officials and fellow citizens into supporting causes that advance their economic, financial, and political positions. Jewish interests have done that by promoting the Zionist cause, which landed only 15000 Jews in Palestine at the end of World War I, and still generated the Balfour Declaration, bulled their way into the League of Nations to convince the delegates to support the establishment of a Jewish presence in a foreign land, bribed American President Harry Truman to support the UN partition plan (Resolution181) in exchange for helping him get elected, used U.S. diplomatic pressure to force nations to vote for UN Resolution, engineered the theft of Palestinian lands and ethnic cleansing of the native peoples, and operates to silence those who contend the genocides of the Palestinian, the Lebanese, and the Iranian peoples.

Too much to say. Had to keep a book to an article.

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The descriptions we receive of the Islamic Republic are incomplete, do not add up to the accepted conclusions, and have derailed the proper approach to a misguided country. If those who actively favor toppling the Iranian government are sincere, they would not support sanctions. Sanctions harm the Iranian people and have given its government an excuse to throttle opposition during the decades of aggression by Israel and the United States. Sanctions are counterproductive and hypocritical.

Imposed on Iran since the 1979 taking of US hostages at the American embassy in Tehran, sanctions have restricted Iran’s ability to access frozen assets, estimated at $100 billion, and obtain capital from credit markets. They have disrupted revenues from oil sales, and hindered imports of vital materials. Result has been stagnation of GDP, collapse of the national currency (42,000 Iranian rials for one dollar,

GDP Trading Economics from World Bank

and increases of inflation (rate at 48.6 percent) and unemployment (7.8% to 8.3%).

Those who vehemently criticize the Iranian government, including its exiled detractors, do not consider that relief from sanctions is the fastest and best way to liberate its women and turn dissent into satisfaction. No sanctions leads to a strong economy, increased production, increased jobs, increased want for women to enter the work force, increased need to entertain a cooperative population. Women will gain financial power (women have their own bank accounts in Iran), which translates into political power. A thriving economy will be Iran’s industrial revolution, and the present intention of having an affluent country that features egalitarianism and rural-biased populism will be forced to pacify the demands of the women and the population and lessen the need for an Islamic government that gives identity to a few and suppresses the identity of the masses. By imposing sanctions, the United States and its allies show their true intention ─ prevent the desirable ─ an irresponsible behavior doomed to failure, another “we had to kill them in order to save them.”

Reviewing some of the charges leveled against the mullahs, and placing in proper perspective the Islamic Republic’s foreign policies, and we conclude; “Iran has already shown it can contribute to the world’s salvation.” One problem, a catch-22; the two nations causing the world’s problems, the United States and Israel, are the nation’s Iran contends and who, with the world’s assistance, are militarily suppressing Iran.

The December Demonstration
Presentation of the December 2025 demonstrations as a massive uprising by the Iranian people for freedom and a massive killing of the Iranian people by the Iranian government had elements of truth in an incomplete story. Human Rights Watch reports,

The protests began on 28 December 2025, after a sharp collapse of Iran’s currency. This happened amid soaring inflation, state mismanagement of essential services, and worsening living conditions. The protests started with shopkeepers in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar going on strike and closing shops.

This was not initially a “human rights” demonstration, not a plea for freedom in a repressive atmosphere. Collapse of the Iranian rial, soaring inflation, particularly in food prices, and widespread shortages triggered the widespread demonstrations. Internal and external forces took advantage of the initial demonstrations to strike out against a faltering government, which responded forcibly to attacks on police stations and institutions.

The government’s response to the protests was a frightful and sickening display of a lack of dutiful engagement by a repressive government with its repressed citizens. Any killing of peaceful citizens is outrageous; using the dead by inflating their numbers to gain political high ground is equally outrageous. Assuredly, several thousand Iranians were killed, not all innocents and not all civilians. Demonstrators attacked police stations and military installations. Tens of thousands of Iranians were not killed; that is not possible in 19 days of turmoil, where the only weapons are rifles and handguns, and not mass destruction armaments. In almost 1000 days of Israel’s intentional genocide of the Gazan people by a large military force that used shelling, bombing, tanks, and rapid fire automatic weapons, about 100,000 Gazans have been killed, an average of 100/day.

Rightful uproar to the murder of Iranians by their government; congressional silence to the genocide of the Palestinian people. And the nations that condemn the Iranian government oblige by massacring the same Iranian people, daily continue to murder Gazans, and add new victims — Lebanese.

Clerical Government
No point in debating whether Iran’s quasi-clerical government is less or more theocratic and harmful to women than Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. It is difficult to browse through the conflicting reports, events, and discussions that describe the domestic and political situation in Iran and arrive at an objective appraisal of “who is Iran?” The country is male dominated and archaic laws that favor the male population and subordinate the female population reinforce the domination. The Iranian people and its women have spoken and the great majority find the Islamic Republic is not to their liking, most, and not all. One woman, who represents the controlling side, succinctly expressed another view, “We don’t want our children growing up to be like Britney Spears.”

Iran is a problem, a problem to its citizens. The United States and Israel are greater problems; they are a problem to all humanity, including their own citizens. In its operations in the external geopolitical system, which affects all the world peoples, Iran displays different and admirable characteristics. Despite the deceitful propaganda from its adversaries, Iran has been prominent and courageous in the battle against Israel’s expansion and oppression of the Palestinians. The mullahs have been fervent in combating al-Qaeda and ISIS terrorist activities. In Iraq, the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) coordinated with Iran Major General, Qasem Soleimani, recaptured Tikrit from ISIS and started the counteroffensive that eventually defeated ISIS in Iraq. The country that nurtured the growth of ISIS brutally assassinated the man who played a leading role in the defeat of ISIS.

The Islamic Republic has not started wars against others, has not sought to expand its territory, has not engaged in international terrorist activities, and has worked positively to resolve disputes. Displaced from the rhetoric and warfare is Iran’s sympathy to America’s plight in the 9/11 tragedy. At the Tokyo donors’ conference in January 2002, the Iranians showed willingness to create a new Afghanistan by pledging $560 million worth of assistance, which is a large amount for a not-fully-developed country, and almost equal to the amount that the United States pledged at the same conference. After the Northern Alliance’s significant role in driving the Taliban out of Kabul in November 2001, the alliance demanded 60 percent of the portfolios in an interim government and blocked agreement with other opposition groups. According to the U.S. envoy to Afghanistan, Richard Dobbins, Iran played a “decisive role” in persuading the Northern Alliance delegation to compromise its demands.

Unable to show proof, the Iran bashers accuse the Islamic Republic of controlling Hamas and Hezbollah, from which the terrorism charges flow, manipulating surrogates for Iran’s ambitions, without explaining how this control manifests itself and what benefits Iran receives by having these “proxies.” Hamas and Hezbollah have definite grievances against Israel, with sufficient burials of their relatives to display these grievances. Do they need Iran to prod them to counter Israel? Iraq’s government has the United States’ support. Do they need to cower to Iran?

Can Tehran have provided much military equipment to a hapless Hamas, which has displayed few weapons, except homemade rockets that are more flying bullets than explosive missiles, and possibly some ineffective Fajr 3 (43 kilometers) and Fajr 5 (72 kilometers) rockets with which to combat Israel? Where are the anti-tank weapons, grenades, and automatic firing arms? Since the invasion of Gaza, Hamas has not fought major battles or inflicted damage on the Israeli military or Israeli territory.

Same with Hezbollah. Where are all the rockets and missiles and weaponry to counter Israel’s offensive? Where are the multitudes of Hezbollah soldiers, trained by Iran, and fully equipped with defensive arms supplied by Iran?

Expansion and hegemony
It is natural that Iran, bordering on Iraq and spiritually attached to Iraq’s Shia population, would be and should be involved in the commercial, economic, and political future of Iraq. Iran wants a stable and affluent Iraq that is friendly and promotes trade. There is no evidence or reason for accusations that Iran is a destabilizing and expansionist nation. Why would it be – there are no external resources or land masses that would be helpful to Iran’s economy. Iran has not invaded any nation and its few sea and drone attacks on others are reactions from a perception that others have colluded in harming the Islamic Republic and its allies. Ayatollah Khomeini’s vision of expanding his social ideology never got anywhere and died with him. Subsequent leaders have been forced to reach out to defend their interests and those of their friends, but none of these leaders has pursued an expansionist philosophy or wants the burden that accompanies the task ─ enough problems at home.

Greatest menace to peace in the Middle East
Being classified as the greatest menace to peace assumes there is peace in the Middle East. Is there peace and has there been since the words Middle East entered the lexicon? The conflagrations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria would have existed without the presence of Islamic Iran, and the former two wars would not have occurred without the United States interference in those nations. Is the Islamic Republic responsible for Israel’s continuous wars with its neighbors, and with Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait and the Emirates battles with their own citizens and their military engagements in South Yemen and North Africa? Despite constant disagreeable happenings between Iran and Saudi Arabia, Iran has sought reconciliation. The Iranian embassy in Riyadh reopened on June 6, 2023, and the Saudi embassy in Iran reopened on August 9, 2023. In August 2023, Iran and Saudi Arabia both applied to join BRICS. Iran joined in 2024 while the Saudi Kingdom has not fully formalized its participation.

The Big Mistake
The African continent, South America, Latin America, and Eastern Europe are ablaze with wars, insurrections, corrupt governments, terrorist militias, anarchy, and people on the move. Much entanglement of western governments, and, in parts, Israel, with the horrendous activities. No sign of Iran in the mayhem. No sign of Iran in any mayhem, except those that counter the mayhem created by the master duo of making mayhem — Uncle Sam and Zionist Israel. Western government’s don’t care to deal with this reality. The manner in which agencies describe Iran’s external policies are sinister and bewildering. If correctly approached, the Islamic Republic can and will assist the world to resolve foreign and domestic problems. Its little known assistance to an ailing Afghanistan during the American occupation is an example.

Ali-Akbar Salehi, Foreign Affairs Minister of Iran from 2010-2013, claimed, and no reports have contradicted him, “Iran has already invested over $600 million in infrastructural projects in its Southeastern neighbor (Afghanistan).” He adds, “over 3 million Afghan refugees live in Iran, above 300,000 Afghan students are studying at the Iranian schools and over 7,000 Afghan students are studying in the country’s universities.” After the U.S. left Afghanistan, the Islamic Republic sent the Afghan refugees back to their home country.

As in Afghanistan, the Islamic Republic assisted in the re-building of Iraq. On January 2012, the guardian.co.uk reported that “Iran is one of Iraq’s most important regional economic partners, with an annual trade volume between the two sides standing at $8bn to $10b.” Iran’s FARS agency quotes Representative of the Iraqi Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) Nazzem Dabbaq as saying that “the value of the trade ties between Iran and Iraqi Kurdistan region will exceed $4bln this year (2012) thanks to the two sides’ growing cooperation.”

Of course Iran operates for its self-interest. Isn’t that how all nations operate? Nevertheless, the world should not confuse competitive advantage with diabolical meddling and not regard Iran as a troubling factor in the Fertile Crescent, especially when the inhabitants of Mesopotamia consider the United States as the troublemaker in the region. Iran has leverage in Iraq and that cannot be ignored nor easily combated.

Iran has a vital role in reducing the Shi’a/Sunni divide.
Using slogans of democracy and freedom as the path to peace and stability, the U.S. in the last ten years has brought neither peace nor stability to the lands between the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean. One reason - the Shia/Sunni divide, which grows larger each year.

The Sunni/Shia divide, portrayed as a religious conflict, is a social and economic conflict. Caliphs who centralized rule of each of the two Muslim sects no longer exist and Imams exist as spiritual but not as temporal leaders. Differences between the two Muslim groups on Mohammad’s succession, Muslim prayer, and Sunnah/Hadith interpretations incite resentment between Muslim’s extreme religious leaders, but are insufficiently significant for most of the 1.2 billion Muslims, who do not care to waste their time and energy in futile battles. A Muslim is defined by adherence to the five pillars of Islam. Both Sunnis and Shiite follow those principals and are therefore ‘fellow’ Muslims. The masses of Islam are no different than the masses of Protestants who don’t care to whom and how their neighbor prays. Similar to Northern Ireland, where Irish Catholics protested against their second class citizenship and economic persecution by English Protestants, the deprived Shia minorities (majority in Bahrain) in Sunni led nations and the suppressed Sunnis in Shi’a dominated nations legitimately protest their political and economic subservience.

Iran can provide economic benefits to the world.
Iran holds the world’s third largest known oil reserves and second largest natural gas reserves. Both can soothe the world’s appetite for energy. Its inefficient and unstable government has been unable to develop these resources or solicit foreign capital for their developments. Why make them more unstable, more opposed to western influence, more inefficient? What can be more absurd in a world of limited resources? Containing a resource rich nation, which serves as a bridge between Arab and Oriental regions, with seaports on the Caspian Sea, Straits of Hormuz, Persian Gulf, and entry to the Indian Ocean, is global sabotage.

Most of all, Iran is the last man standing against criminal and genocidal Israel. Absorb the manner in which an Israel military behaves after invading Lebanon to “protect the homeland.” From Israeli newspaper Haaretz:

Israeli soldiers have been looting significant amounts of civilian property from homes and businesses in southern Lebanon, according to testimonies given to Haaretz by IDF soldiers and commanders stationed inside the country.

Time to recognize that Iran is not a one-dimensional nation, that it might not serve its people well, but can serve the world. Quoting a Londoner, looking up to his wife standing on the roof, “Don’t throw out the baby with the bath water.”

In its 1947-48 wars on the Palestinian people, the genocidal Zionists threatened death to hundreds of thousands of conquered people whom they forced to leave. Documented incidents describe the deliberate killings of Palestinians, which were used to frighten the mass of Palestinians to vacate their homes and flee. To prevent their return, the emptied villages were demolished. Contributions to the Jewish National Fund (JNF), by duped Americans (The Israelis won’t even spend their own shekels on seeds.), paid for the plantings of foreign botanical species that covered the remains of the beautiful Palestinian villages. The technique of threaten them with death, force them to leave, kill anyone who remains, seize the property, and destroy their attachment to the land, has been the modus operandi of the heirs to their genocidal leader, the biblical Joshua.

We witnessed this pattern of behavior in Israel’s “war of liberation,” its 2006 Lebanon invasion, the ongoing Gaza war, and the present invasion of Lebanon. In its war against Iran, Israel cannot displace 90 million Iranians and intends to demolish the country’s infrastructure, making daily life difficult, reducing the population to subsistence living, and leaving the nation barely functioning. I have seen this method of planned destruction after the 2006 Lebanon invasion — Israel tanks emptied bullets at every structure in their path and Israeli planes reduced the next village to rubble.

South Lebanon village, a few miles from the border.

Fortunately, the war ended before the Israeli military advanced too far into Southern Lebanon. In other parts of Lebanon, Israel’s military destroyed bridges, main roads, and neighborhoods.

To enter Lebanon from Syria, our auto had to navigate around the destroyed Mudeirej Bridge, the tallest and highest bridge in Lebanon and the Middle East.

Israel’s disregard for human life echoes the biblical exploits by its supposed ancestors and generates the belief that Judaism is a violent religion. I often wondered why fellow Jews eagerly embrace the tenth plague of the Passover stories, “killing the first born,” and recite a Torah that contains Joshua’s genocidal warfare against the people of Canaan. Purim is presented as a joyous holiday, in which the Persian Jews supposedly prevented their annihilation. The Megillah: Book of Esther, read on the holiday, reveals a different story, a horrific story that many Jews refuse to read.

Throughout the provinces of King Ahasuerus, the Jews mustered in their cities to attack those who sought their hurt; and no one could withstand them, for the fear of them had fallen upon all the peoples.

Mordecai was now powerful in the royal palace, and his fame was spreading through all the provinces; the man Mordecai was growing ever more powerful.

So the Jews struck at their enemies with the sword, slaying and destroying; they wreaked their will upon their enemies.

The rest of the Jews, those in the king’s provinces, likewise mustered and fought for their lives. They disposed of their enemies, killing seventy-five thousands of their foes; but they did not lay hands on the spoil.

That was on the thirteenth day of the month of Adar; and they rested on the fourteenth

On Shabbat Zakhor, the Shabbat before Purim, Jews gather in synagogues and read a section of the Torah, Deuteronomy 25:17-19, that recites what “Amalek, the enemy of the Israelites, did to us on our journey from Egypt,” verses that dictate genocide against the Amalekites.

Remember what the Amalekites did to you along the way when you came out of Egypt. When you were weary and worn out, they met you on your journey and attacked all who were lagging behind; they had no fear of God. When the Lord your God gives you rest from all the enemies around you in the land he is giving you to possess as an inheritance, you shall blot out the name of Amalek from under heaven. Do not forget!

A previous University of Tel Aviv professor, George Tamarin, addressed 168 Israeli schoolchildren and told them a story of “General Lin.”

Using religion as a pretext for ‘ethnic cleansing,’ the general, who presided over the Chinese kingdom three millennia ago, ordered a massacre of men, women, and children throughout China.

When asked for their response to the story, only 7 percent of the children agreed that the general’s actions were morally acceptable, while 75 percent disapproved of the violence.

The professor faked the story. He changed the names and recited the biblical story from the book of Joshua. When Professor Tamarin asked another 1066 students about Joshua’s campaigns, the results were reversed; 66 percent of the students approved of the Israelite conquest while 26 percent disapproved. The University of Tel Aviv fired Tamarin, finding him not “integrated” into Israeli society, and deciding his research “caused harm to the relationship between the departments of psychology and education and the Ministry of Education.”

Without borders, and by having its citizens’ nationality designated by religion or ethnicity and not as Israeli, Israel does not pretend to be nation. The reason for the unique designation is to maintain that Jews are a nationality and extend the definition to Jews throughout the world, no matter the nationality of the country in which they were born or are citizens.

An October 6, 2013 Israel Supreme Court, Sitting As a Court of Civil Appeals, ruled, “One of the characteristics of Israel as a Jewish state is its responsibility for the fate of the Jewish people as a whole, because it was established as an expression of universal Jewish solidarity. In view of this responsibility, it has the right and the duty to employ the tools of collective state action for the protection of Jews who are harmed “qua Jews.”

Article Three: 13 (b) (2) of Israel PENAL LAW 5737-1977 states: “Israel penal laws shall also apply to foreign offenses against – the life, body, health, freedom or property of a Jew, as a Jew, or the property of a Jewish institution, because it is such.”

The Israel Supreme Court and the Israeli penal code claim that their laws apply to crimes that are committed against Jews, even if the crimes are committed outside of Israel. Israel has the self-proclaimed duty to protect world Jewry. Israelis Jay Ruderman, Prof. Yedidia Z. Stern. in an article, Why ‘Israeli’ is not a nationality, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, March 3, 2014, reflect the Israeli mind.

The responsibility of the State of Israel for world Jewry is an important expression of the fact that Israel is not an ordinary democratic state, but also a “Jewish state.” Though we may be divided by geography and citizenship, Israeli and American Jews—and their brothers and sisters around the world—are members of one nation.

Israel is an assembly of delusional, disoriented, and senseless people who follow a mythical narrative, endorsed by a mythical God, They find self-worth and superiority by reliving a mythical past and imposing it upon the present. Nobody of sound of mind can support Israel, which, unfortunately, tells us the world is not sound. The war on Iran is dictated by circumlocutory logic and this dictate proves the point.

Trump says, “They’ve been killing innocent people all over the world for 47 years, and now I, as the 47th President of the United States of America, am killing them. What a great honor it is to do so!”
How many innocent people outside of Iran, those not considered as having committed crimes against Iranians within Iran, have the Iranian regimes killed in the last 47 years? Two or three, let’s have a number.
How many innocent people outside of Israel’s UN Resolution 181 border, those not considered as having committed crimes against Israelis within Israel, have the Israeli regimes killed? One or two hundred thousand in their continuous wars? Let’s have a number.

Trump said, “For nearly half a century, the Islamic Republic of Iran — the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism — has killed and maimed American citizens and service members through its own forces and proxy militias. More Americans have been killed by Iran than any other terrorist regime on Earth. Iran is the world’s number one state sponsor of terror.”
A more accurate assessment of Iran’s “terrorist activities” against Americans is there has been few, if any Americans killed. Israel killed 34 Americans on board the U.S.S. Liberty and wounded 171 of its crew members during the 1967 Israel/Egypt war. The human rights organization DAWN details 14 American citizens killed by Israeli forces or settlers in the West Bank since 2003. The number of Americans killed in Gaza during the several Israeli incursions has not been available

Trump said, “Iran’s plans to take over the Middle East and destroy Israel were “now dead,” as the United States and Israel continue military operations against the country.” What plans could Iran, a third-rate offensive military power with no occupying force, have that allow it to take over the Middle East and destroy Israel?

If the objective of the war is to defeat the country that has been killing innocent people all over the world, is a leading sponsor of terrorism, and wants to dominate the Middle East, then the missiles and bombs that are shattering Iran should be programmed to boomerang and explode at their places of origin.

The Mongols had an ethos that unified their masses and motivated their military. All nationalistic and militaristic nations need that. Israel is no exception. Prime Minister Netanyahu defined Israel’s ethos in a September 15, 2025 address at a conference of the Accountant General in Jerusalem.

We will increasingly have to adapt to an economy with autarkic characteristics. It’s a word I hate. I’m a proponent of the free market. I worked to bring Israel a free market revolution, but we could find ourselves in a situation where our weapons industries are blocked. We will have to develop weapons industries here. We will have to be Athens and a super-Sparta.”

Political observers are beginning to agree with the Israeli Prime Minister.
Like Sparta, Israel relies on a citizen army. All Israelis are required to perform national service. Men serve as regular soldiers for 36 months, women for 24 months, and officers for an additional 12 months. Reserve duty is obligatory for men up to the age of 40 to 45. Children from 14 years old receive military training, including the use of weapons.

Since its inception, Israel has been at war and its citizens permeated with a warlike mentality. Take a bus or train in Israel and find seats occupied with soldiers on constant move, their Uzis pointed in your face.

Combine all of them — Joshua, Sparta, and the Mongols — and there is a strong smell of Israel. Remember that Sparta aligned with Athenian democracy against Persia, and then overcame Athens and imposed the Thirty Tyrants oligarchic government. Is history repeating? Another war with Sparta and a democracy combating Persia? Is the tyrannical Trump government directed from Spartan Tel Aviv?

In the 1964 presidential election, Lyndon B. Johnson campaigned as the “peace candidate” and portrayed his opponent, Republican Barry Goldwater, as “a dangerous warmonger whose election would lead to the escalation of the Vietnam War.” After one year of Johnson’s election victory, a joke emerged, “Sure enough, I voted for Goldwater and U.S. troops fought in Vietnam.”

In the 2024 presidential election. Donald Trump campaigned as the peace candidate and said, “If Kamala becomes President she will start a war with Iran. You know why? Because she’s a lousy negotiator!!! When I become President we won’t be doing any wars because I know how to negotiate a good deal!!!”

Aren’t we and Iran lucky that Ms. Harris was not elected. Another joke, which is not funny, lies in Trump’s words. Let’s see where the Sparta and Washington democratic alliance leads.

The Iranian Regime’s Decades of Terrorism Against American Citizens, The White House, March 2, 2026

For nearly half a century, the Islamic Republic of Iran — the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism — has killed and maimed American citizens and service members through its own forces and proxy militias. More Americans have been killed by Iran than any other terrorist regime on Earth.

President Donald J. Trump is doing what Presidents over the last five decades have refused to do — eliminate the threat once and for all. By destroying Iran’s missiles, annihilating their navy, and ensuring they can never obtain a nuclear weapon, the Trump Administration’s bold and decisive action is protecting American lives and advancing American interests.

According to the White House, Iran’s missiles, navy, and a potential nuclear weapon have killed American citizens. Now the threat is eliminated, and we can relax. Here is a partial record of the White House list of the “Iranian regime’s blood-soaked war on Americans.”

• November 1979: Iranian students, backed by the regime, seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran — taking 66 Americans hostage in a 444-day standoff.

• April 1983: The Islamic Jihad, an Iran-backed terrorist group, carried out a suicide car bombing at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, killing 17 Americans.

• October 1983: Iran-backed Hezbollah terrorists killed 241 U.S. military personnel — including 220 U.S. Marines and 21 other service personnel — in a truck bombing at a Marine compound in Beirut.

I’ll stop here. The complete farcical list can be found at the farcical website of the farcical U.S. government. Read the complete list and note there is none, not even one, Iran military or intelligence agency attack on Americans. The record is couched with “Iran-backed Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and Hamas “terrorists,” making it seem that these groups operate on direct orders from Tehran and do not have legitimate grievances against the United States. No proof that the specified organizations deliberately targeted Americans. No proof of a direct link of the Mullahs to any of the attacks.

Examine this notation, similar to all other notations accusing Hamas.

• August 1995: An Iran-backed Hamas suicide bomber blew up a bus in Jerusalem, killing an American and three other passengers, and wounding more than 100 others.
  Because an American, who probably was an Israeli citizen and lived in Israel, was in the wrong place at the wrong time, Hamas, who has never attacked Americans, is accused of deliberately murdering an American, and Iran, who probably knew less of the attack than the United States, is accused of being an accomplice.

Here is another notation, which characterizes many of the notations linking Hezbollah to killings of Americans.

• August 2006: Iran-backed Hezbollah terrorists killed American citizen and Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldier Michael Levin during the Second Lebanon War — the only American to die in the conflict.
  A Lebanese militant shoots an invading Israeli soldier in a war and Hezbollah is portrayed as murdering an American. Iranian officials, several hundred miles away from the battle, are in contact with the militant and steer the weapon to aim at the IDF soldier, who they knew was American.

• August 1998: Al-Qaeda suicide bombers, facilitated by Iran-backed Hezbollah, simultaneously bombed U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224 people — including a dozen American citizens.

  Connecting Hezbollah, a Shia organization with al-Qaeda, a sworn enemy of the Shia, is nonsensical. Connecting Iran with al-Qaeda is equally nonsensical. Washington, D.C. Think Tank, New America, analyzed nearly 300 declassified documents in Arabic. Key Findings:

• Al-Qa‘ida views Iran as a hostile entity, a hostility that is evident throughout the documents examined for this study.

• The examined documents provide no evidence of cooperation between Al-Qa‘ida and Iran on planning or carrying out terrorist attacks.

• The presence of jihadis in Iran was out of necessity, not a result of strategic planning. Jihadis, including Al-Qa‘ida members, and their families as well as members of bin Ladin’s family fled Afghanistan to Iran following the 9/11 attacks and the resultant fall of the Taliban regime.

• When jihadis began to set up communications with entities outside Iran, thereby violating the terms of the security measures set by the regime, Al-Qa‘ida experienced a campaign of arrests and deportations.

• Following the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Al-Qa‘ida perceived Iran’s policy as one of detention/imprisonment, refusing to allow jihadis to leave Iran. Some jihadis managed to evade arrest and adopted stringent measures to maintain a clandestine presence in Iran.

Al-Qaeda has linked Shi’ite Muslims, who are represented by Iran and Hezbollah, with Crusaders — Zionists and Americans— as its most bitter enemies. Deceased al-Qaeda in Iraq leader, Al-Zarqawi, in a speech, said: “Days go by, and events follow one after the other. The battles are many, and the names used are varied. But the goal (of the Crusaders) is one: a Crusader-Rafidite war against the Sunnis.” Who are the Rafidites? They are Shi’ite Muslims who reject (rafḍ) the caliphate of Muḥammad’s two successors Abū Bakr and ʿUmar.

A more accurate assessment of Iran’s “terrorist activities” against Americans is there has been none. Iran has been involved in assassinations of dissidents, whose groups have engaged in sabotage in Iran, and in tit-for-tat violence with Israel, whose intelligence agencies have murdered scores of Iranians. A few plots against U.S. officials that purportedly link the plotters with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) were foiled, but do not indicate plans of an international terrorist organization. These were revenge actions, reprisals for the assassination of Iranian Major General, Qasem Soleimani, and others in his entourage, and to U.S. complicity in aiding Israel in several assassinations of Iranian scientists and government officials.

Trump’s post on Truth Social, “They’ve been killing innocent people all over the world for 47 years, and now I, as the 47th President of the United States of America, am killing them. What a great honor it is to do so! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP,” tells the story — an American president takes pleasure in murdering others. Iran has not killed innocent people, whereas the United States in wars, sanctions, starvation and helping ally, Israel, is responsible for millions of deaths.

The nation that murdered most Americans, outside of military confrontations, is Israel, which killed 34 people on board the U.S.S. Liberty and wounded 171 of its crew members during the 1967 Israel/Egypt war. The human rights organization DAWN details 14 American citizens killed by Israeli forces or settlers in the West Bank since 2003. The number of Americans killed in Gaza during the several Israeli incursions has not been available. Iran, which has not murdered any Americans, is bombed mercilessly, and Israel, which has murdered many Americans, is assisted in murdering the innocent Iranians.

Popular and influential political columnists certify the charade that describes Iran as the world’s villain.

Tom Friedman can be confusing, showing unnecessary endearment and subdued criticism of Israel, leaving it to others to determine if the slaughter in Gaza can be declared genocide. The NY Times foreign affairs columnist has a huge following and a possible restraint; he depends on his relationships with Israeli government officials to supply him with inside information. His facts and opinions on the ugly war are ugly and unreal.

First, I hope this effort to topple the clerical regime in Tehran succeeds. It is a regime that murders its people, destabilizes its neighbors and has destroyed a great civilization. There is no single event that would do more to put the whole Middle East on a more decent, inclusive trajectory than the replacement of Tehran’s Islamic regime with a leadership focused exclusively on enabling the people of Iran to realize their full potential with a real voice in their own future.

While you’d never know it if you listened to the campus left in recent years, the Islamic Republic of Iran has been the biggest imperialist power in the region since 1979, cultivating proxies to control four Arab states — Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen — and undermining liberal reformers in all four by promoting sectarian divisions.

The highly vocal supporter for the war on Iraq changes the q in Iraq to the n in Iran and whoops it again up for the killing machines. Examine each phrase.

• It is a regime that murders its people.
  We never get the complete story. Murder is not the correct word. As many nations, the Iranian government acted ruthlessly when peaceful protests spilled over into attacks on police stations, security personnel, religious institutions, and government buildings. The country has a unique security problem — the United States and Israel intelligence services clandestinely instigate the peaceful protests to violence. The recent large protests are more due to economic factors — credit denial, inflation, and currency deterioration — caused by the sanctions and embargoes imposed upon Iran. Repression is proportional to threat, and the United States and Israel, eagerly enlarge the threat and augment the repression.

• Destabilizes its neighbors.
  The Middle East neighbors that have been unusually unstable in the last forty years are Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, and maybe Bahrain, at moments. The first six were consistently unstable before the Islamic Republic came into existence and the first four became more unstable due to Israeli and U.S. aggression. Bahrain’s troubles stem from its autocratic government and treatment of its oppressed majority. The Shia population is a slight majority and has been treated as a foreign minority under control of Sunni monarch Shaikh Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa. Human Rights Watch says, “Bahraini authorities use the many repressive tools available to them to silence and punish anyone who criticizes the government.”

  Meanwhile, Israel has consistently destabilized its bordering nations and Egypt by invading them and several African nations — Libya, Sudan, and Ethiopia — by assisting opponents of their governments

• Has destroyed a great civilization.
  Weren’t the great civilizations destroyed a long, long, long time ago? What great civilization existed recently and how was it destroyed?

  Safavid dynasty rule (1501–1736) began modern Iranian history. Because Shah Ismail I established the Twelver denomination of Shia Islam as the official religion of the nation, and mingled Shia Islam with Iranian identity, we can speciously conclude the opposite to Friedman’s characterization ─ the Mullahs returned Iran to its ancient civilization roots.

• No single event would do more to put the whole Middle East on a more decent, inclusive trajectory than the replacement of Tehran’s Islamic regime.

  What has Iran done to modify the trajectory of Middle East nations? Only Egypt, Syria, and Iraq have modified their “trajectories,” whatever they were, and those are due to U.S. and Israel interference.

• The Islamic Republic of Iran has been the biggest imperialist power in the region since 1979.
  That is a whopper. Without gaining one inch of territory, never attacking any nation, not colonizing other nations, not controlling the commerce or government of other nations, and suffering from isolation and sanctions, by some invisible mechanism, known only to Tom Friedman, Iran is the “biggest imperialist power.”

• Cultivating proxies to control four Arab states — Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen — and undermining liberal reformers in all four by promoting sectarian divisions.
  Where does or did Iran exercise one finger of control over any of these states and promote sectarian divisions that have always existed in the Middle East? According to Friedman, Iran, which, as all nations, seeks friends of mutual interests, cannot have friends, only proxies.

Former NYT columnist, David Brooks, is another popular and influential commentator who has shown no understanding of the war on Iran and has propagandized the administration’s position. On the Friday PBS Nightly News, David Brooks hallucinated Iran’s history of the last 47 years.

• Iran has been at war with us for 47 years.

  Brooks escalates arguments and disagreements into war and forgets that Iran assisted in freeing seven U.S. hostages held in Lebanon during the Iran-Contra affair, offered assistance in rehabilitating Afghanistan after the U.S. invasion, and signed the 2014 Joint Plan of Action” (JPOA), an interim agreement that froze parts of Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for limited sanctions relief.

• One of worst events of 20^th century began 47 years of terrorism, extremism, theocratic fascism.
  As debated above, what terrorism has Iran committed?

• It started with one to two million people dead in the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980’s.

  This twist in assigning blame to Iran for the killings of its people, and demonstrating a lack of empathy for its citizens, when Iran suffered extensive casualties after being attacked by Iraq, who had assistance from U.S. intelligence, reduces David Brooks to Donald Trump’s level.

• There were 241 Americans killed by Iranian supervision in Beirut.
  Another unproven statement that ties Tehran to happenings in Beirut. The suicide bombers who drove a truck into the marine barracks coordinated with suicide bombers who simultaneously performed a suicide bombing at a French base. These fanatics revenged the shelling by French and American forces of the Shouf hills that killed fellow Lebanese.

• Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, they have destabilized the Middle East.
  Another statement that was debated above.

• They have killed people in Syria.

  A vague and accusatory statement. Can Brooks name one person and describe the circumstance in which Iran killed the person(s)?

• Iran recently killed 25,000 to 35,000 of its citizens, a destructive and savage regime that has destabilized the Middle East.
  Official government figure of deaths in the uprising is about 3000; other agencies claim much more. As explained above, “We never get the complete story.”

How does David Brook’s fallacious commentary excuse the illegal attack on a mostly defenseless nation?

Conclusion
Israel and the United States attacked Iran for one reason — Iran is only country to contend the genocide and willing to stand up against Israel and its expansionist policies. Iran may not be the best nation but its failings, which are mostly the unequal status of women, are not much different from America’s friends — the Gulf nations and Saudi Arabia. The theocracy unnerves its citizens; the economic problems drive the populace into despair. Economic problems are due to engineered U.S. sanctions, which hinder economic expansion and job opportunities for women Denial to credit markets has caused a huge inflation. Without sanctions, Iran would be a prosperous and more obedient nation.

Why Trump does not comprehend his contradictory statements on the war and why there is nobody to make him understand is baffling.
He pleads for an end in the war in Ukraine so Ukrainian and Russians will no longer be killed and does not exhibit regret for massacring more than Iranian 100 school children in a U.S. missile attack.
He says all elements of the Iranian military have been destroyed and continues the war.
He exults over previously low oil prices, for which he claims credit, although OPEC and other producers determine production and price, and disregards the increased prices due to his war on Iran.
He poses as president of the U.S. people and gloats that the increased oil price benefits the United States, which has surplus oil. His United States is the petroleum conglomerates who will benefit from the higher oil prices paid by the U.S. people.

The corrupt and sinister warmongers that occupy executive positions in Washington, D.C. and Tel Aviv are beginning to realize that Iran will not falter. Subduing Iran implies murdering millions of its people. An endless war is being waged, in which Cyrus the Great will never die, while Trump and Netanyahu, the degrading duo, have numbered days.

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As Israel slowly guides the hostilities, the real reasons for the war against Iran, to which the Trump is in the dark, is slowly being revealed. For the United States, the war on Iran does not follow any strategic plan; it has less conviction than the war on Iraq, where Sadaam Hussein was accused of already having weapons of mass destruction. The mullahs are accused of only considering weapons of mass destruction. House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson gave reporters a reason for the attack. “Senior administration officials told Republican and Democratic lawmakers at a classified briefing on Capitol Hill that the Israeli plan to strike Iran pushed the United States to take preemptive action to protect U.S. troops stationed at bases throughout the Middle East, whom the Pentagon believed would have been targeted by retaliatory strikes.”

Is this believable? Knowing that Israel’s belligerent actions will cause damage to United States personnel, the U.S. administration does not attempt to stop the belligerent action that will cause America damage. Trump and company join Israel in the gruesome adventure and gladly invite the damage.

Wait, no that was some administration officials’ reason. Trump had another reason. He claimed that “Iran had been about to attack its neighbors and Israel, and he made the decision to go to war to preempt that action.” Why would Iran attack anyone, knowing that they gain nothing, except getting pulverized? Did Trump preempt that action or assure that action? Can anyone believe this?

Not knowing that the Israeli leadership was giggling and laughing at his remarks, Trump clarified “U.S. aims” — destroying Iran’s missile capabilities and their capacity to produce new ones; annihilating the Iranian navy; ensuring Tehran can never obtain a nuclear weapon; and finally ensuring it cannot arm and fund groups outside their borders. Have the U.S. destroy an Iran that has never has been a threat, is not now a threat, and cannot conceivably ever be a threat to Uncle Sam. In other words, do the dirty work for Israel, as was done in Libya, Sudan, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq.

Sticking their chests out as if they are accomplishing something, which again provokes Israeli leaders into raucous laughter, we hear:

From Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, who hardly appears in any of the deliberations and reads from a teleprompter that tells him when to pause and when to emphasize: “If you kill Americans, harm Americans, or threaten Americans, we will hunt you down without apology and without hesitation and we will kill you.” Know of any Americans recently killed, harmed, or threatened by Iranians? I have read of more than a few Americans recently killed, harmed, and threatened by Israelis. By the way, kill, harm or threaten Iranians and they may hunt you down without apology and without hesitation kill you.

Another from Secretary of War Hegeseth: ”We didn’t start this war but we will finishit under President Trump.” True, Israel started the war. Correction: President Trump will not finishit; it will finish him. Israel will finishit when they achieve their aims.

From Secretary of Stateless and looking solemn, Marco Rubio: “Our embassies are being attacked by a terrorist regime.” Iran is not allowed to defend itself against a terrorist attack.

From Trump: “We thought these lunatics were going to attack us, so we attacked first.” Spoken like a true lunatic.

The principal reasons for the war on Iran, of which Trump and his entourage are clueless, were Iran’s vocal condemnation of the genocide of the Palestinian people, and being the only physical opposition to Israel accomplishing that purpose and other covert purposes. The covert purposes began to be exposed in the first day’s attack. Trump recited the reasons and did not know the meaning of his own statement.

President Trump said on Tuesday that officials the United States had eyed as potential new leaders of Iran had been killed in the U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign. As the war in the Middle East widened, he said that the worst outcome would be that whoever takes over Iran could be “as bad” as their predecessors.

Wanting to pretend that the U.S. guided the first day attack by providing Israel with intelligence of the daily location of Supreme Leader, Ali Hosseini Khamenei, and other Iranian leaders (Ed: Never proven), Trump contradicted himself by stating, “potential new leaders of Iran had been killed in the U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign.” They had not been killed in the “U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign,” they were killed by a solo Israeli strike and, if, Trump directed regime change, why would he permit those who could accomplish regime change and regime turnover to be killed?

In the first attack, Israel, by itself, ensured that Iran would be leaderless, anarchistic, and unable, especially after its military, energy grid, energy sources, and communication were destroyed, to prevent minorities from successfully rebelling and decapitating the ancient state. Israel has cultivated ties with the Kurds and Azerbaijan and is prepared to assist the former in creating a state that will counter Turkey, and the latter in having Iran’s Azeris join their ancient motherland and provide a powerful Central Asian ally. Lackey and clueless Trump continued to serve Israel’s purposes.

In calls this week to Kurdish minority leaders in Iran and neighboring Iraq, President Donald Trump offered “extensive U.S. aircover” and other backing for anti-regime Iranian Kurds to take over portions of western Iran, according to multiple people familiar with the effort.

Trump was clear in his call to PUK leader Bafel Talabani. “He told us the Kurds must choose a side in this battle — either with America and Israel or with Iran,” said the official, one of several Kurdish and U.S. officials who discussed sensitive matters on the condition of anonymity.

Meanwhile, Hezbollah tripped into another planned Israeli provocation, sent a few harmless drones and fired a few harmless missiles at an Israeli base, for which they will be rewarded by Israel extending itself to the Litani River. Hezbollah’s rockets were its first major violation of the November 2024 agreed “ceasefire.” According to the UN, since the agreement date, “Israel has bombed Lebanon on a near daily basis, killing over 340 people, and committing over 15,000 ceasefire violations. It also established five military positions and two ‘buffer zones’ inside Lebanon.”

Extending borders to the Litani River finalizes a pursuit described in the Zionist 2019 platform and which Israel attempted to achieve in its 1956 attack on Egypt by seizing the Sinai and trying to convince France and Great Britain to allow its expansion into Lebanon up to the Litani River.

Note that Greater Israel extends close to Beirut in Lebanon, Damascus in Syria, and Amman in Jordan. The boundary captures all the aquifers and facilitates use of the now archaic Hedjaz railway.

Rarely mentioned is a controversial meeting, known as the, 1956 Protocol of Sevres, and reported in Anatomy of a War Plot, Avi Shlaim, International Affairs, 73:3 (1997), pp.509-530, which describes Israel Prime Minister David ben Gurion’s proposed plan to Great Britain and France, and executes the Zionist proposals. Although the meeting records are not available in French and British government archives, the meeting occurrence and parts of ben Gurion’s plan are confirmed in Shimon Peres: the biography by Michael Bar-Zohar.

The session started at 4 p.m. on Monday, 22 October, in the conservatory of the villa and it was intended to enable the leaders of the two countries to get to know each other and to have a preliminary discussion. Ben-Gurion opened the discussion by listing his military, political and moral considerations against “the English plan”. His main objection was that Israel would be branded as the aggressor while Britain and France would pose as peace-makers but he was also exceedingly apprehensive about exposing Israeli cities to attack by the Egyptian Air Force. Instead he presented a comprehensive plan, which he himself called “fantastic”, for the reorganization of the Middle East. Jordan, he observed, was not viable as an independent state and should therefore be divided. Iraq would get the East Bank in return for a promise to settle the Palestinian refugees there and to make peace with Israel while the West Bank would be attached to Israel as a semi-autonomous region. Lebanon suffered from having a large Muslim population which was concentrated in the south. The problem could be solved by Israel’s expansion up to the Litani River, thereby helping to turn Lebanon into a more compact Christian state. The Suez Canal area should be given an international status while the Straits of Tiran in the Gulf of Aqaba should come under Israeli control to ensure freedom of navigation. A prior condition for realizing this plan was the elimination of Nasser and the replacement of his regime with a pro-Western government which would also be prepared to make peace with Israel.

Enlarging upon the ethnic cleansing plans in Gaza and the West Bank, Israel has forced the evacuation of villages below the Litani River. From the Washington Post, March 4, 2026. “The Israeli military issued a statement Wednesday telling people living in dozens of villages in southern Lebanon close to the border with Israel to evacuate and move “immediately” north of the Litani River.”

With Iran demolished, Turkey occupied with the Kurds, and stronger friends to help in its expansion plans, Israel will continue its genocide unimpeded and slowly extend its territory in accord with the Zionist vision and its neurotic impulses ─ victory of a mythical Jewish kingdom over an Islamic kingdom, defeat of the descendants from Cyrus the Great , king of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, who graciously permitted exiled Jews to return to their homeland. No good deed goes unpunished.

In the meantime, the attack on Iran, a relatively defenseless nation that had not harmed its neighbors, has moved the western peoples into reality — apartheid Israel and the U.S. are lying, scheming, vicious, and ignorant nations, leading the world to destruction. A recent Gallup poll reveals, “Forty-one percent of Americans say they sympathize more with the Palestinians in the Middle East situation, while 36% sympathize more with the Israelis. The five-percentage-point difference is not statistically significant, but it contrasts with a clear lead for the Israelis only a year ago (46% vs. 33%) and larger leads over the prior 24 years.... Currently, 65% of Democrats say their sympathies lie more with the Palestinians, while 17% say they sympathize more with the Israelis” Primary elections in North Carolina and Texas have demonstrated that the war waged on Iran has rapidly shifted sentiment; an awakening against AIPAC and Israel has occurred and, finally, the anger is being translated into votes.

In North Carolina House District 4 Democratic primary, incumbent Valerie Foushee purposely rejected AIPAC funds to help herself in an effort that barely beat Nida Allam, a 32-year-old commissioner in Durham County, who was funded by “a new super PAC founded expressly to counter AIPAC’s influence.”

In Texas, state Rep. James Talarico defeated U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett and won the Democratic Primary for U.S. Senate. Talarico, who is attending a Presbyterian seminary, is an outspoken critic of Christian nationalism and AIPAC. “He criticized Democrats for supporting Israel’s war in Gaza during the 2024 presidential election and has called the war ‘the moral test of our time.’”

In Texas’s 30th congressional district, Reverend Frederick Douglas Haynes won the Democratic primary by a landslide, 72.6% to 23.1%. Haynes has been a strong supporter of the Palestinians. In a 2023 sermon, “he spoke out against Israel and admitted that most want to support the country so they won’t get in trouble. ‘Well, I’m here to get in trouble,’ he said.”

If the outcomes of the primaries forecast the outcomes of the November congressional races, then the intensive battle against the Zionist foe, the greatest threat to world survival since the Biblical flood, is underway. Those who believe they are the Chosen People that “Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me,” will soon learn that modern life is not moved by Biblical myths and 7 billion of the world’s people do not entertain succumbing to a nuclear inferno because of a relatively few disoriented minds.

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