Turkish foreign minister Hakan Fidan, hosted in Tehran by his Iranian counterpart Abbad Aragchi, declared that both countries see “Israel as the biggest threat to stability in the Middle East”, because of its “expansionist policies”.

Ankara is increasingly angry over Israel’s military operations in Syria, which it considers a threat to security. Syria’s new regime is a close Turkish ally.

With the Iranian-backed Syrian regime overthrown and Iran’s diminishing influence in the Caucasus, another region of competition with Turkey, Tehran is viewed by Ankara as less of a threat

“Ankara sees that Tehran’s wings are clipped, and I’m sure that it is also very happy that Tehran’s wings are clipped”, international relations expert Soli Ozel told RFI.

So weakening Iran in Syria only strengthened Turkey, and what do you think will happen if the Iranian regime is overthrown? Turkey will most definitely capitalize on the scene to influence and entrench itself within whatever new government takes the place of the old regime, and Israel will be deeper in the pit that it has been digging for itself ever since it pushed for the overthrow of Saddam (which enabled the rise of Iran against Israel). Israeli official Amichai Chikli affirmed that Turkey currently represents “the greatest threat to the State of Israel.” If the Israelis manage to overthrow the Iranian regime, it will only be helping its “greatest threat”. Israel is like Judas, thinking it will benefit only to destroy itself in the end.

Even if the Islamic regime is gotten rid of, the Iranians will still hate Israel. Hitler is very popular in Iran, and the Iranians see Israel as a threat and untrustworthy, especially after Israel killed over a thousand Iranians in its last war with Iran. So removing the Islamic regime will not help Israel in the end, and Israel will only go deeper in its own pit and will be further tightening the noose around its own neck. No matter who rules over Iran after the Ayatollah regime is gone, Iran will hate Israel. This was observed by a recent article by Michael Rubin:

Many in Israel expect they can renew the warm ties they enjoyed with Iran before the 1979 Islamic Revolution. This, too, is wishful thinking. Many Iranians will resent Israel’s suspected association with the Mujahedin-e Khalq in subsequent years, as well as the tendency of some Israelis to support “South Azerbaijan” separatism. While Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi’s visit to Israel won cheers in Washington, Jerusalem, and among some diaspora Iranians, Israel’s subsequent bombing campaign against Iran offended many Iranian nationalists. Decades of propaganda also take their toll. Egyptians remain overwhelmingly anti-Israel decades after the Camp David Accords; it is unrealistic to believe that generations of Iranians fed anti-Israel conspiracies will switch sides overnight.

Perhaps the biggest long-term winner of the Islamic Republic’s collapse will be Turkey. Just as Qatar replaced Saudi Arabia as a financier for Islamic extremism, Turkey has transformed itself into an ideological engine that seeks to export its own brand of Islamist extremism with an aggressiveness akin to 1980s-era Iran. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will see Khamenei’s collapse not as a warning about his own future, but rather as an opportunity to expand Turkey’s own revolutionary export and terror sponsorship.

There is another element that is not being discussed in this Iranian equation, and that is Germany. What is happening in German politics should be a major highlight in international media: both nationalism and militarism are rising. And if history is a teacher, it tells us that when nationalism rises in Germany, the Jews are hated. Right now the second biggest party in Germany is the ultra-nationalistic and militaristic political party Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) which is really a modernly packaged Nazi party. If the Ayatollah regime is no more, that will give the opportunity to both Turkey and its biggest European ally, Germany, to deepen alliances with Iran. Without a doubt, whatever new government takes over Iran, it will be a nationalistic one. A nationalistic Iran, would most definitely deepen ties with a militaristic Germany and Turkey. In this setting, you would have the rise of a nationalist militarist neo-Ottoman Iranian German alliance, all to the applause of the United States which will praise such an alliance. But the Turks, Iranians and German Nazis all hate the Jews. So still, in the end, Israel will lose. What we are facing is the future annihilation of Israel.

Germany, in fact, has a long history of working with the Iranians. There is actually a history of tensions between the USA and Germany over commercial dealings with Iran.

The rift between the US and Germany over Iran is traced back to the 1990s when the Clinton Administration wanted to impose sanctions on Iran on account of its support for terrorist attacks against Americans, especially the suicide bombing of the American Embassy in Lebanon in 1983. According to Seyyed Hossein Mousavian, who served as the Iranian ambassador to Germany from 1990 to 1997, the tension between the US and Germany over Iran was first seen in 1992 at a G7 conference in Munich, when Germany refused to support a US initiated resolution condemning Iran. As Mousavian recounted, Minister Bernd Schmidbauer gave him the details on his conversations with the incoming Clinton administration about Iran: “Mr. Schmidbauer commented that he had never before seen the Americans so serious in their antagonism toward Iran and their hostility to the continuation of warm relations between Germany and Iran.” (Kuntzel, ch. 17, p. 171).

The Clinton administration, in 1995, prohibited all American firms from trading with Iran. But the Germans strove to break the American pressure by intensifying German exports to Iran. “Iranian decision-makers were well aware in the 1990s of Germany’s significant role in breaking the economic chains with which the United States had surrounded Iran”, remembered Mousavian. But Germany’s relation with Iran went beyond economics and into the realm of geopolitics and even, according to Mousavian, ideology. In Mousavian’s words: “the particular engagement of Germany had deeper institutional, ideological, and historical roots.” Peter Rudolf, a member of Germany’s leading think tank, Stiftung Wissenschaft, explained in 1997 that Germany’s ties with Iran was not solely about money: “Economic interests cannot fully account for why Germany has adhered to a policy so much criticized in the United States. And economic interests do not explain why engagement is the widely preferred approach in the German debate about dealing with Iran”.

Rudolf concludes that Germany’s connection with Iran can only be explained in light of a “historically rooted strategic preference.” This historical root was referred to in 1997 by Klaus Kinkel, who at the time was German minister of foreign affairs, when he stated that one must “take into consideration the fact that the German and Iranian people are bound to each other by a century-long tradition of good relations”. (Kuntzel, pp. 174-175) This deeply rooted relationship can be traced back from the 19th century, into the 1920s, into the Nazi era, to now. During the reign of Hitler, many Iranians revered the fuhrer, and today Iran wants to destroy Israel and its biggest backer in Europe is the very country that raised up the Third Reich.

Iran’s president, Rafsanjani, was trying to weaken the effectiveness of US sanctions. But, he also had another goal, one much deeper than what was currently taking place politically. Rafsanjani had a dream of restoring the “strategic alliance” between Iran and Germany reminiscent to the days of the Third Reich when the Nazis were backed by their many Persian supporters. As Rafsanjani would write in 2006, the reunification of East and West Germany brought an opportunity to Iran to revive its alliance with the Germans as it was in Nazi times:

“With the collapse of the strategic alliance between the two countries during the Second World War, the Allies were able to divide Germany into eastern and western parts. …. During the same period, Iran was also technically under the influence of foreign powers. … The reunification of East and West Germany into a sovereign, politically independent Germany in 1990 … provided leaders of both countries with a suitable opportunity to take steps toward the revival of historical ties and the adoption of a new diplomatic approach.” (See Kuntzel, Germany and Iran, ch. 17, p. 169).

This same opinion was echoed by Seyyed Hossein Mousavian, who wrote in his 2008 book, Iran-Europe Relations:

“Iran’s geopolitical situation has long attracted German strategists. This fact was clearly reflected in German military planning during the Second World War … [t]he allied forces occupied Iran, because of its close cooperation with Germany in the war. After half a century of division and weakness, Germany has regained its unity.”

Mousavian then describes the revival of German-Iranian relations after 1990 as “the revitalization of an old established relationship as the creation of a new one.” (Kuntzel, ch. 17. pp. 169-170).

In 2006, Volker Perthes, who was at the time the German government’s leading foreign policy advisor, argued in favor a “strategic partnership” between Germany and Iran. In October of 2011, the German Council on Foreign Relations (Germany’s national foreign policy network) published a paper by Simon Koshchut advocating a “reversal of existing policy toward Iran” and “comprehensive cooperation [with Iran] in various spheres.” Even a nuclear armed Iran was looked upon favorably by the German Council on Foreign Relations:

“The next step to military capability could give give a nuclear weapons-equipped Iran great power status and so international recognition and respect. At the end of the day, the production of nuclear weapons and delivery systems offer adequate deterrent potential against external aggressors.”

Who are the “external aggressors” to Iran, besides Saudi Arabia, but Israel and the United States? The only nation in history to have come close to exterminating the Jews — Germany — is now Europe’s biggest ally to the only government that currently openly calls for the destruction of Israel, the country that was to be a refuge for the Jews as a response to the genocide orchestrated by the Germans. As Israeli journalist Yossi Klein Halevi observed in 2007: “By strengthening the Iranian regime, Germany endangers Israel, to whose well-being it is committed. And perhaps the most ironic of all, by appeasing evil rather than resisting it, Germany compromises its profound efforts to break with its past.”

As shoebat.com monitors global trends, one thing that we have noticed — that changes the tide towards a direction to increasing German nationalism — is the rise of anti-Israel sentiment and how it is becoming fashionably more common. With such a phenomena intensifying, we have a rise in German nationalism boosted by the common public, alongside the increasing favor to German independence from US power, alongside Germany’s willingness to get closer to Iran as a partner against American control — not a very good combination.

The altering of the world order under American power is not a minor objective of the Germans, but rather it is top priority. For example, in 2013 the German Marshall Fund drafted a paper stating that “The most important of all foreign policy tasks” is the “renewal, adjustment, and reshaping of the international order”. In 2014, after Russia took control of Crimea, a German professor of politics, Wolfgang Seibel, reported on how the German Foreign Office was pivoting toward “new power centers of the world” with Germany desiring to make “strategic alliances.” With these new alliances the Germans wished to act as a counter to, and to contain, American power. One of these alliances is definitely between Germany and Iran.

When Hommels brings up US sanctions on Iran as an example of America’s global financial dominance, while pushing for European (German) independence from American power, it really coincides with Germany’s years long struggle with the American economic empire over commerce and financial dealings with the Iranians. Ultimately, the Germans are leading a revolt alongside Iran against the US. For example, in 2007, the Americans sent envoys to European countries to convince governments, banks and companies to cease doing business with the Iranians. This operation was supported by the British and, hesitantly, by the French. But it was resisted by the Germans. As the New York Times reported: “Britain is also backing the new push, as is France, although to a lesser extent. Germany, with far more business interests in Iran, is not quite as eager”. The German Chancellory was furious and declared in a policy paper: “A direct attack by US officials on European firms and banks is not acceptable”. A report from the FAZ newspaper stated that Germany was not ready “to stop underwriting business with Iran” because “That would mean surrendering the field to the competitors.”

The Germans see the US as their competitor, not entirely in the financial sense, but in the geopolitical sense, and they see America’s tension with Iran as a way to disrupt the American world order. By backing an enemy of the US, Germany undermines America’s leverage over the Near East. Germany also shares a nuclear interest with Iran. Germany (alongside Japan) are amongst the nuclear have-nots that have, nonetheless, become global industrial and technological powerhouses that can — if they wanted to — produce nuclear weapons within months. This is the status that Iran wants to obtain, and it has been doing so with the support of Germany. Both Iran and Germany are countries that are resisting US power and have interests in nuclear armament. In fact, in the 1990s the Clinton administration expressed worries about certain German nuclear projects, especially the storing of some 2.5 tons of plutonium in a bunker in the German city of Hanau, and the use of highly enriched uranium in a research reactor in Garching near Munich. (See Matthias Kuntzel, Germany and Iran, epilogue, pp. 268-9; p. 267; p. 231; p. 212) So, when Klaus Hommels complains about how Europe’s “most valuable tech companies” are “dependent on the US”, and then proceeds to talk about how the US uses this power “as a major foreign policy pressure point,” and then points to “US trade sanctions against Iran” as an example, such an opinion, obviously, comes from the German desire to be independent of the US while seeing Iran as an ally in the struggle against the US.

The following is another article that we wrote on the German-Iranian alliance and the next holocaust....

“We hear the shouts of the world-eating Jews from the throat of the Saudi king … Our missiles will rain down on our enemies. Our Sejjil Missiles will drop in the heart of Tel Aviv. The voice of Heydar [Ali] will prevail from the Kaaba. This is the Shia flag that will be waved from the top of the world. We will soon write ‘Ya Heydar e Karar’ (Imam Ali’s honorific title gained after the Battle of Khyber) on the green flag of Saudi Arab.” — Nohe (Iranian Shiite song)

Go up, O Elam!

Besiege, O Media!

All its sighing I have made to cease. — Isaiah 21:2

Within the last 6 years or so, there as has been much talk on the igniting of nationalism in the world. We have been hearing much on the spark of far-Right politics in countries like Germany, but we have been hearing very little on the phenomena of nationalism in Iran. We at shoebat.com decided to inquire into the world of nationalism in Iran, not as an isolated situation, but rather as something that can synthesize with another phenomena, and that is the growing rage in Germany to assail over and break away from the United States and establish its own power within Europe. The United States pressures European countries not to have any business ties with Iran, but Germany is adamant about its wants and still remains to be Iran’s biggest trading partner in Europe. With America no longer in the Iran Deal, there is no US control over what Iran does as it continues to exceed its nuclear production. As Iran becomes more dangerous, the rage within the country grows more violent; rage to destroy Saudi Arabia — its Sunni enemy — who it sees as a prostitute for the Jews; a rage to destroy Israel which has been filled with consternation over the rise of Iran as a regional power. Germany is the only country in history that has almost succeeded in exterminating the nation of Israel, and Iran today desires to carry out this very slaughterhouse. The countries — Germany and Iran — are united in their desire to break America’s empire, and perhaps the Star of David will be shattered under the shadow of the Iron Cross and the Shiite flag of Ali. In the Book of Isaiah it speaks of Elam (Iran) rising against Arabia and Israel. In the 21st chapter of Isaiah it reads:

“Go up, O Elam!

Besiege, O Media!” (Isaiah 21:20)

While the prophecy of Isaiah focuses on Elam’s destruction of Arabia, few biblical expositors pay close attention to what the same chapter later describes: Israel is being crushed: “O my people, crushed on the threshing floor, I tell you what I have heard from the LORD Almighty, from the God of Israel.” (Isaiah 21:10)

The prophecy describes a war torn Arabia, devastated by violence and its people fleeing for refuge:

“In the forest in Arabia you will lodge,

O you traveling companies of Dedanites.

O inhabitants of the land of Tema,

Bring water to him who is thirsty;

With their bread they met him who fled.

For they fled from the swords, from the drawn sword,

From the bent bow, and from the distress of war.” (Isaiah 21:13-15)

While Tema is today’s Medina (the second holiest city in Arabia), the prophecy speaks of a massive refugee problem as a result of an Iranian-Arab war. The Iranians of today are longing to destroy Saudi Arabia, they are also yearning for the destruction of Israel, and Isaiah foretells of an Iranian devastation of the Jewish nation. In the next chapter it speaks of Elam (Iran) bringing destruction to the City of David — Jerusalem:

“Elam bore the quiver

With chariots of men and horsemen,

And Kir uncovered the shield.

It shall come to pass that your choicest valleys

Shall be full of chariots,

And the horsemen shall set themselves in array at the gate.

He removed the protection of Judah.

You looked in that day to the armor of the House of the Forest;

You also saw the damage to the city of David,

That it was great” (Isaiah 22:6-9)

Scripture also foretells the shattering of Israel’s national security. It speaks of the removal of Israel’s defenses -- “the armor of the House of the Forest” -- which the NLT renders as: “Judah’s defenses have been stripped away.
You run to the armor for your weapons”, foretelling that Israel’s national security apparatus will be shattered. Micah also speaks of the devastation of Israel’s security defenses: “I will cut off the cities of your land and throw down all your strongholds” (Micah 5:11). We can expect the destruction of Israel’s Dimona and Soreq nuclear facilities. While many may think that Israel has the capabilities to defeat regional superpowers like Turkey and Iran, when we consider the fact that there is very little buffer between Israel and its neighbors, and how Israel’s Iron Dome was not as effective as many thought in the most recent conflict with Gaza, it becomes clear that the nation of Israel does not possess the invincibility that a great many people perceive.

In holy write we find the Iranian warpath foretold, and today we are witnessing Iran rising as a regional power. While many generalize the threat of Iran as an Islamic one (and it is), these ignore that with the coming of war also comes the spark of pride, the manifestation of nationalism. This phenomenon of nationalism is also being witnessed in Turkey and other Islamic countries. It is a mistake to simply look at countries like Iran as just another Muslim state; we must also factor in that -- just like in any other nation -- nationalism plays a central influence.

In the trend of nationalism within Iran there is a synthesis between Shia Islam and a praise of pre-Islamic culture, while Sunni Islam is looked down upon as being a part of Arab tribalism. Iranians revere their country as “God’s favorite nation,” destined to lead the Muslim world. There is a central aspect to Iranian identitarianism which focuses on the the Persian ethnic-linguistic (Iraniyat), and there has been tension between the Iraniyat and Islamism. For example, the Pahlavi regime of the Shah put more of an emphasis on the Iraniyat than on Islam. The Iranian journalist Sobh Sadegh described this conflict as such:

“Regarding Iranian identity and Islamic identity, some believe in a dichotomy and say that our Islamic identity and the framework that religion has set for us are not related to our national identity, on the other hand, some are “archaic and secular”. There are those who speak of the lack of empathy between Iranian national identity and Islamic identity.”

A major opinion in Iran is that nationalism and religion are inseparable. The Iranian philosophy professor, Abdol Hossein Khosrow-Panah, detailed how many people in Iran “believe in the fusion of Iranian-Islamic culture and identity, such as some of the writings of the late Shariati in which Islamic and Iranian culture are intertwined. Martyr Motahhari also expressed such an opinion in the book of mutual services between Iran and Islam that an interaction can be established between these two categories.”

The Iranians have maintained their Islamic identity while at the same time holding onto their own Iranian identity, creating a fusion that is distinct from the Islam of their archenemies, the Arabs. There is a belief in Iran that the reason why Iranians converted to Islam was not because of the Arabs, but because of their “morality and justice-centered spirit” and their “quest for freedom.” This mythical belief was reflected by Hojjat al-Islam Ali Yunesi, former Minister of Intelligence and special advisor to President Rouhani, when he described Iran’s devotion to Islam as something stemming from a history in which Iranians never worshipped fire but had always believed in one God (yektaparast). Now, the idea that Iranians have never worshipped fire is obviously untrue, given the fact that thousands of years ago the worship of fire was central in Iranian religion. But nonetheless, there is this idea within Iran that Islam was perfect for the country due to its history of monotheism.

[caption id=”attachment_144266” align=”aligncenter” width=”606”]

Ali Younesi[/caption]

Numerous Iranian writers have argued that Iranians were converting to Islam before the Arabian conquest of Iran. They point to the conversion of Salman al-Farisi, a companion of the Prophet Muhammad and the first Persian to become Muslim, as evidence of a broad phenomena of Iranian appeal to the Islamic religion. Moreover, because Yemen was under the control of the Iranian Sasanian Empire when Ali (who the Iranians revere as the successor to Muhammad) preached Islam there, his call to conversion was to the whole Iranian nation.

When the Arabs did invade Iran it was extremely gory. So much so, that the most famous battle in the Arab conquest of Iran is called “the Battle of Blood River” (known officially as the Battle of Ullais). In this battle, Khalid ibn al-Walid, the military commander under Muhammad and the caliphs Abu Bak and Umar, exclaimed a prayer: “O Lord! If you give us victory, I shall see that no enemy warrior is left alive until their river runs with their blood.” In the aftermath of the battle, al-Walid took Persians and their Arab Christian allies to a river where they were slaughtered and their blood flowed like a river. It actually took a day and a half to behead all of the captives. The obstacle for Khalid was that the ravine of blood coagulated and Khalid’s troops were forced to eventually release water into the canal in order that it would run red with the blood of the slain lest Khalid’s vow be left unfulfilled. (1)

With such a horror in the Arab conquest of Iran, how then do the Iranians reconcile their Islamic faith with such a history? They simply look to Ali who they esteem as a man of compassion who treated the Persians as equals unlike Khalid ibn al-Walid, Umar bin al-Khattab and Uthman bin A’affan who believed in Arab supremacy. Iranians believe that they hold onto a mystical Islam unlike their Arab neighbors, and are an intelligent people who recognized the pure teachings of Muhammad. The bottom line of the Iranian-Arab conflict over the religion of Muhammad is truly Arabization versus the Persianate. The Iranians (as Daniel the prophet predicted refuse to Arabize and want an Islam that is free of the ugly aspects of Arabian culture. There is more to Daniel’s prophecy in his Second Chapter than meets the eye of western commentary (2) since the entire structure of the image of gold, silver, bronze and Iron does not exclude Persia (Iran, the silver), especially since these empires collapse at the end of days. In fulfillment, today Iran (Persia) want a more of a non-Arabized mystical Islam fused together with Persian culture and linked to Persian history, and not the Islam of Arabian culture.

Meir Litvak summarizes the struggle against Arabization:

“While Umar (the ultimate evil ruler in Shi’a tradition) disparaged and mistreated the Iranians, Imam Ali and other Imams spoke Persian occasionally as an indication of the respect they had for Iranians and their culture. In particular, they praised the piety and conduct of the people of Qom and Khorasan (Mashhad), the two holy cities for the Shi’a in Iran. Later on, since the Umayyads and Abbasids treated the Iranians as “second rate” Muslims, they were repudiated by the Iranians and had no impact on “Iranian national identity and national essence.” By contrast, the Shi’a Imams became the “refuge of the oppressed,” and their relations with the Iranians had been truly “Islamic and humane,” and they “quenched” the Iranians’ thirst for justice and equality. Moreover, once the Iranians accepted Islam, they looked for the best source to address intellectual and doctrinal challenges and found it in the Imams. In other words, unlike the crude Arabized Sunni Islam, the Iranians saw Shi’aism as the more advanced branch of Islam which corresponded to their thirst for the truth. It was this fusion between Iranian traits and the nature of Shi’aism, which laid the ground for the consolidation of Shi’aism in Iran, and from then on the Iranians supported every Shi’a dynasty that ruled that part of the world.”

The Iranians, says professor Khosrow-Paneh, rejected the Arabian Islam of the Umayyads and the Abbasids, and have established their own Iranian Islamic identity: “Iranians did not accept Umayyad Islam and Abbasid Islam, so they rejected the negative values ​​of ancient Iran. The Iranians merged the positive values ​​of the Iranian nation with the original Islamic values ​​and created an identity that is interpreted as “national-Islamic identity”.”

[caption id=”attachment_144267” align=”aligncenter” width=”654”]

Abdol Hossein Khosrow-Panah[/caption]

The Iranians want to grip onto the Islamic religion while at the same time holding onto their Iranian identity free of any taint of Arab culture. It is similar to what the Japanese did, absorbing Western technology while at the same time preserving their Japanese culture with its fusion of Buddhism and Shintoism. The resistance of the Iranians towards Arabization was alive and well after the Arabian conquest of Iran. The Persian poet, Ismail ibn Yasar al-Nisai — who worked within the court of the Umayyad Caliphate, spoke of the roots of the Iranian race and the glory of its civilization and history as distinct from Arab culture:

“I swear to your ancestor that I am not weak in defense of my honor!

I have great roots and my glory cannot be compared with others! And my tongue is as poisonous as the sharpness of a sword.

With this language, I support the honor of the original (Persian/Iranian) lineage, who were all great and crowned rulers.

Open commanders and chiefs, border guards, pioneers, chosen benefactors and hospitable

Who, like Khosrow (Anoushirvan) and Shapur and Hormozan, deserves praise and strain!”

Here he praises his ancestry and even goes so far as to exalt Khosrow, a pagan king of Iran who fought the Christian Byzantines in the fourth century; Shapur, another pagan king of Iranian history; and Hormuzan, a Persian military officer who fought the Arab Muslim conquerers of Iran in the Battle of Qadisiyyah. All of these historical figures were not Muslim but a part of the pre-Islamic Iranian religion of Zoroastrianism and fire worship, and thus the words of the poet, al-Nisai, are not about praising Islam but about revering Iranian identity.

This ideology of the Iranians is not entirely Islamic, but really a syncretism between identitarianism and Shia Islamism. There is within the country a strong religion of Iran itself. This was reflected by Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei (an advisor to president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad) when he publicly declared, “We should believe in the idea of Iran, in the ideology of Iran.”

[caption id=”attachment_144268” align=”aligncenter” width=”576”]

Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei[/caption]

When Mashaei said this, it sparked outrage from Iran’s conservative establishment who wants Islam to be the dominating belief within Iran and not an ethno-nationalist religion. Mashaei’s statement was a reflection of a growing trend within Iran, one of ethnic pride and nationalist spirituality. This religion of soil ignores the Islamic prohibition of revering other gods and will praise artifacts of Iran’s pagan past. In 2010 Ahmedinejad saw the Cyrus Cylinder, an ancient text praising Emperor Cyrus as being chosen by the pagan god Marduk, as it was in display in Tehran (this was after almost a decade of Iran working to convince the British to bring it to Iran). The cylinder describes how “[Marduk] inspected and checked all the countries, seeking for the upright king of his choice. He took the hand of Cyrus, king of the city of Anshan, and called him by his name, proclaiming him aloud for the kingship over all of everything.”

Yet — despite the standard Islamic boasting of how the paganism of pre-Islamic lands was crushed by the Quran — Ahmedinejad described the cylinder as a “testament of all believers” and the standard by which “all rulers and kings in the history of humankind” must be measured. This adulation for pre-Islamic Iranian civilization is an ideology that reflects a political mission. The Iranians have a dream of reviving the Persian Empire, and Ahmedinejad’s lifting up of the Cylinder reflects this aspiration, since the ancient text reads: “I am Cyrus, king of the world, great king, powerful king, king of Babylon, king of Sumer and Akkad, king of the four quarters [of the earth], son of Cambyses, great king, king of Anshan, descendant of Teispes, great king, king of Anshan, the perpetual seed of kingship, whose reign Bel [Marduk] and Nebo love, and with whose kingship, to their joy, they concern themselves.” When Isaiah foretold of the end of things -- “Bel bows down, Nebo stoops” (Isaiah 46:1) -- no longer should this puzzle interpreters; how could an ancient Mesopotamian religion revive? Indeed, today the Iranian government praises an ancient artifact worshipping Bel and Nebo.

Iran wants to be like Cyrus, while ruling the world under the banner of Shia Islam. In 2018 there was a concert in Iran of a Shiite song entitled Nohe, in which the singer firmly patted the Shiite flag while singing: “This is the Shia flag that will be waved from the top of the world.” But, as Ahmedinejad’s praise of the cylinder indicates, this revived Persian power would not be entirely Islamic, and would contain the reverence of country and even the pagan roots of the nation. In Iran, pagan holidays are still celebrated. Iranians still observe Chaharshanbe Suri, a celebration of fire (which was worshipped by pagan Iranians before Islam) in which Iranians hop over flames.

Iranians still celebrate Nowruz, a festivity of the new year in dedication to nature. In fact, Iranian tradition teaches that the 12th Imam will appear before humanity on the day of Nowruz.

The insistence of the Iranians to preserve these festivities is another way of defying Arabization. The Iranians see themselves as having an Islam purer than that of the Arabs. This was also reflected by the Persian writer Musa ibn Yasar who said: “The companions of the Messenger of God (PBUH) were violent deserters. When we Iranians came, we purified the religion of Islam.” The Iranian newspaper, Kayhan (which is connected to the Iranian government), states that the Arabs — before Islam — were a “cruel and uncultured people” who lacked any understanding of written theology and laws, and were a people who had never witnessed a true prophet, and had been vacuous of divine and heavenly faith and belief.

If the Arabs did not receive Islam from a fellow Arab — so the newspaper teaches — then they would have never accepted Islam. The Iranians, on the other hand, were sophisticated enough to look past language differences and recognize spiritual truths. According to Iranian propaganda, the Qu’ran and the Prophet recognized the Iranians as a “God-fearing people, courageous and firm in their belief and possessing God-given intelligence and aptitude,” and praised their character traits as those of “the Party of God” (Hizballah). Iran sees itself as the true defender and preserver of Islam. This is reflected by Iran’s constitution which depicts the Supreme Leader as Vali amr al-Muslimin (Guardian of the Muslims) or in the official English translation “Supreme Leader of Muslims”. In 1995, Hassan Rouhani (who was at the time the head of the Center for Strategic Studies of the Expediency Council) declared that “The eminent leader of the Revolution, his eminence Ayatollah Khamenei, may his shadow extend, is the leader of the world of Islam today. This has nothing to do with whether we say so or not.” General Qassem Suleimani, the late commander of the Quds forces, boasted that thanks to the Islamic Revolution, “no country but Iran can currently claim leadership of the Islamic world.”

The Iranian philosophy professor, Abdol Hossein Khosrow-Panah, stated in 2009 that Sunni Islam had been hijacked by Caliphal (Caliphate) Islam and that the spirit of the religion of Muhammad was corrupted by the Arabized Caliphate to the point that the term Islamiyat was connected with Arab tribalism and chauvinism. In an interview, Khosrow-Panah explained: “Sometimes the meaning of Islam is the Islam that became the current of the caliphate and the period when the spirit of Islam fell victim to the Arab caliphate, so much so that if we talk about Islam, we mean the spirit of tribalism and ethnic-Arab pride.” Iranian ideologues like to point to a Hadith in which the Prophet Muhammad warned the Arabs that if they turn away from Islam, Allah “will replace you with another people who are not like you.” The Iranians hold that the people that replaces the Arabs are the Iranians because when the companions of Muhammad asked him to specify who these new people were to be, he replied: “If faith is in Soraya, a group of Persian men will acquire it.”

Others have even argued that the reason why Islam was so widely accepted in Iran is because of the similarities between pre-Islamic Iranian religion and Shia Islam, such as the ritual self-mutilation within the Shiite religion (Ashura) and the religious self-cutting that was done by ancient Iranians. Within the paradigm of Iranian nationalism is the belief that Iran threw away the corrupt elements of pre-Islamic Iranian culture while adopting pure Islam without the primitive aspects of Arabian Islam. The synthesis of pre-Islamic Iran with Islam was seen when Khamenei sought to nationalize the hijab. Before Iran was Islamic, there was a headscarf in society called the Chador, but it was only worn by elite women. Khamenei simply Islamized the Chador and argued that what was once only allowed for prestigious women can now be enjoyed by all women thanks to the democratic ways of Islam. The Chador, Khamenei declared, is “our national symbol and national garb”.

IRAN AND GERMANY

In Iran, there is even a phenomena of people believing in Iranian supremacy, revering their race as that of the Aryan heritage, a parallel ideology to Nazism with its emphasis on Aryanism. Khosrow-Paneh spoke of these racialists, stating that “some secularists and those who have ancient tendencies and emphasize Aryanism usually offer this interpretation of Islam.” There is definitely a racial element within Iranian nationalism that has become mainstream, and this is expressed by the belief that the reason why Iranians have a superior form of Islam to the one of the Arabs is because of something biologically innate within the Iranian people themselves. Khosrow-Paneh explains this eugenic ideology: “But there are also people who have linked Iranian national identity to truths that go back more to human instincts. … It seems to me that there is an innate feature and attribute in the human body that implies justice and truth-centeredness. But the most important factor that made Iranians accept pure Islam and oppose Umayyad Islam was their innate characteristics. …Those characteristics of Iranians, as I said, go back to the natural characteristics of Iranians.” The synthesis of Shia Islam and Iranian nationalism amalgamates into a religion of blood and soil that rages against both the Arabs and the Jews. This, as well, can be heard in the apocalyptic song, Nohe, when the singer proclaims:

“We hear the shouts of the world-eating Jews from the throat of the Saudi King … For as long as the divine spirit is in the heart of this soil (Iran), Our enemies will not be allowed to sleep a single restful night … Our Seijjil Missiles will drop in the heart of Tel Aviv.”

Here we have the praise of Iran as being a sacred land, ready to wipe out her enemies — the Arabs and the Jews -- in World War Three. These Iranian nationalist fanatics are subscribing to a blood and soil ideology, something paralleled to Nazism. The National Socialist writer, Hansjoerg Maennel, who wrote for the Third Reich, spoke of the soil of Germany being divine: “As our Germanic forerunners already recognized, blood and soil are eternal and holy values. … And eternal too is the soil, hallowed by the blood poured forth in its defense.” And just as the Germans wanted to exterminate the Jews, these Iranian Shiite cultists long for the day when missiles “will drop in the heart of Tel Aviv.” And just as the Germans were fixated on being “Aryan,” today’s Iranian nationalists are no different, looking back to a distant past and mythologizing their “Aryan” roots.

This has been something quite prevalent in modern Iranian history. For example, in 1965 Mohammad Reza Shah gave himself the title of ariyāmehr, “the light of Aryans”. Reza also told the British ambassador Anthony Parsons: “We Aryans are in fact members of the European family. It’s a mere accident of geography that Iran is in the Middle East rather than among its fellow European neighbours”. This fixation on Aryanism did not diminish nor remain stagnate, but has continued to intensify. Iranian historian, Reza Zia-Ebrahimi, wrote in his 2016 work, The Emergence of Iranian Nationalism, on this bizarre obsession:

“New publications with strong dislocative nationalist overtones appear every year. The greater number of these recent publications is startling when compared to the literary works of the early Pahlavi era or the history treatises of the same period. Anyone familiar with dislocative nationalist literature can notice that these publications are highly repetitive, merely recycling the works of Akhundzadeh, Kermani, and their heirs. There is something new, however, and this is their generally appalling quality and their outlandish claims. Any inaccuracy, any nonsensical theory is admissible as long as it fits into the strategy of discursively soothing the reader’s concerns with the state of the country, fundamentalism having replaced backwardness as the main malady of modern Iran. Some authors today attempt to establish Aryan calendars or claim that ancient Iranians had space-faring ships. We have come full circle as these new publications have abandoned the little methodological soundness that one could find in Pahlavi-era dislocative treatises and returned to the preposterous inventiveness of a Kermani. This is all the more ironic for our time, as Iranians have never been as literate as today, and empirical data has never been as readily accessible.”

So the dangerous obsession with being Aryan still thrives in Iran, and its right amidst a flaming rage to wipe out the Jews. In other words, Iranian Nazism is very strong. It is no wonder that, after the Second World War, Nazis from the the Third Reich found refuge within Iran and gained prominent positions in the government. It is also not to our surprise that the Iranian government, for decades, has wanted to see Germany revive her power in Europe.

In 2006, Mouhmoud Ahmadinejad, in an interview with Der Spiegel, posed the question to the interviewer that out of the 60 million people who died in the Second World War, why “are only the Jews the center of attention?” The interviewer wanted to avoid the subject and said: “perhaps we should now move on to the next subject.” But Ahmadinejad was adamant: “No, I have a question for you. … Why must the German people be humiliated today because a group of people committed crimes in the name of the Germans during the course of history?” Such a statement could have easily come out of the far-Right German nationalist party, Alternative for Deutschland (AfD).

The words of Ahmadinejad are reminiscent to that of AfD leader Bjorn Hocke, when he lamented in 2017 that Germans were “the only people in the world to plant a monument of shame in the heart of its capital,” referring to a memorial to murdered Jews in Berlin, adding that Germans had the “mentality of a totally vanquished people.”

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Bjorn Hocke[/caption]

The beliefs of Iranian nationalists and German nationalists are the same when it comes to any focus on Germany’s past atrocities: they want them to be belittled or reduced to mere nominal attention. All of these people, of course, are bent on erasing the blood soaked history of what happened to the Jews. For those who wish for massacres to be forgotten want to simply repeat those very inhumanities. There has been a desire within Iran to see Germany revive herself. In the early 1950s, the popular Islamic preacher, Abol-Ghasem Kashani (who had been a major supporter of the Nazis in Iran) had expressed his desire to allow Germany to remilitarize itself. After the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Kashani (who was by then dead) would be a famous icon for the mullahs’ regime.

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Abol-Ghasem Kashani[/caption]

In 1972, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, expressed his desire for a revived Germany to German Chancellor Willy Brandt. In his notes Willy Brandt recounted how the Shah and his government “still regard Germany as a great power. They think that we should put the ‘guilt complex’ stemming from the Hitler period behind us and that we could assume the leading role in Europe.” In Germany today there is a complaint about how looking after the country’s national interest is demonized. This ‘demonization’ is, of course, due to the Holocaust, and thus the militarists of Germany want to cast away this stigma and allow for Germany to remilitarize, even going so far as calling for the country to have nuclear weapons. In August of 2018, the influential political scientist, Christian Hacke, wrote of how the “demonization of national interest has led the European Union into a dead end and deep crisis”; and how that in “the face of new transatlantic uncertainties and potential confrontations, national defense based on an independent nuclear deterrence capacity must be given priority.”

Notice the words Hacke is using: “transatlantic uncertainties” -- he is referring to the United States no longer being reliable to deal with Germany’s security, and thus the Germans must have nuclear weapons. Both Germany and Iran are at tensions with the US; both are resistant to American control, both are seeking to become global powers, and both want to go nuclear.

The Iranians in the 50s and 70s wanted Germany to forgo its guilt and remilitarize itself into a great power again. Today, this Iranian dream is gradually becoming a reality. And Germany is pursuing national autonomy, in part, because of its desire to continue relations with the Iranians in spite of the Americans’ pressure on Europe to end commerce with Tehran. This desire for autonomy — in the name of preserving economic ties with Iran — has intensified to the point that rhetoric for replacing the US with Europe has been exclaimed. In 2018, Jean-Claude Juncker (who was then the president of the EU Commission) lamented that the US “no longer wants to cooperate with other parts in the world,” and concluded: “At this point, we have to replace the United States, which as an international actor has lost vigor, and because of it, in the long term, influence”.

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Jean-Claude Juncker[/caption]

A revived German empire has been a deeply rooted dream amongst Iranian nationalists. On August 4th, 1954, an anonymous Iranian dropped a note to the doorman which stated: “Hail Germany and the German people, death to your enemies who did not want you to stand up.” The note then went on to compare the situation of Germany to that of Iran: “Death to your enemies,” because the countries — Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States — that had occupied Germany in 1945 did not want Iran to “stand up” either. So strong was sympathy for the Third Reich in Iran that the American Office of Strategic Services on June 23rd of 1945 reported how there was “a tendency to sympathize with rather than condemn those who have aided the Axis”. This sentiment in favor of the Third Reich was so ubiquitous that major German Nazis who worked with the Iranians during the Second World War were still collaborating with Iran after the war. In December of 1952 a new German-Iranian Chamber of Commerce was established in Hamburg’s Atlantic Hotel, and “almost all the founding members of 1936 were reunited and assembled,” as was reported in Orient magazine.

The organizer of this Chamber of Commerce was Reinhard Hubner, who was the Eastern affairs expert in Goebbel’s Propaganda Ministry while at the same time being the secretary for the 1936 German-Iranian Chamber of Commerce. West Germany’s first postwar ambassador to Iran was Lutz Gielhammer who — between 1934 and 1938 — was the head of the Central Economic Department for Iran’s Melli Bank. After 1938, Gielhammer was a member of the Central Financial Management of IG Farben (the Nazi ran pharmaceutical company heavily involved in human experimentation and slavery). On September 3rd of 1953, Gielhammer was appointed to be ambassador to Iran. In 1952, the Iranian government under Mossadegh appointed as their economic advisor the very person who served in Adolf Hitler’s government as President of the Central Bank (Reichsbank), Hjalmar Schacht, who was sent by Hitler himself to go to Iran and sign the Clearing Payments Agreement after which Germany made substantial investments in Iran’s industrial infrastructure.

The Mossadegh government of the 1950s also wanted to remove all British experts in Iran’s oil industry and replace them with Germans. In 1951 over four hundred Germans applied for the oil work, but the plan was stopped when the British representative on the High Commission that controlled West Germany vetoed the move, after which (as Ahmad Mahrad writes) “the federal minister for the economy asked the chairman of the Oil Association in Hamburg to halt the departure of 450 applicants.”

After the overthrow of Mossadegh in 1953 (a revolution that was facilitated by the CIA), the new prime minister of Iran was General Fazllollah Zahedi, who was a close collaborator with the Abwehr (the German military intelligence service for the Wehrmacht from 1920 to 1945) and the SD (Sicherheitsdienst, the intelligence unit for the SS and the Nazi Party) during the Second World War and, as a result, was arrested by the British in 1942. A 1953 report from Der Spiegel asks the question that if Zahedi revolted against Mossadegh with CIA support, “then this would not have been the first time in postwar history that former German contacts had transferred their loyalties to the Americans.” Indeed, during the Cold War the United States was backing Nazis and ultra-nationalists in Europe (including Turkey’s Grey Wolves paramilitary cult) as anti-Soviet proxies; this was under the Gladio operation and its obvious that such a policy extended into Iran.

Thus, it is not to one’s marvel that Bernhardt Schulze-Holthus, who served as an Abwehr agent, praised Zahedi’s coup as an anti-communist popular uprising and compared it to the German nationalist “uprising” of 1941-44 (the years when Nazi Germany was at war with the Soviet Union). As a result of the 1953 Revolution, General Fereydoon Batmanghelidj became the new chief of staff. Batmanghelidj was trained at the German technical school and was considered “very pro-German”. This was certainly revealed in a 1953 meeting with a German Embassy official to whom Batmanghelidj (holding a book on General Rommel) emphasized his wish “to employ German experts in the Iranian army.” He explicitly requested German experts who worked for the Third Reich and who would thus form a “counterweight to the Americans” inside Iran’s military. So here we see the Iranians working with the Germans to bypass American control.

Similarly, today we see Iran working with Germany in spite of the US’s pressure to not work with Tehran. Hence why Germany’s Federal Foreign Minister, Heiko Maas — speaking on business with Iran — wrote that it is essential “that we strengthen European autonomy by setting up payment channels that are independent of the USA, creating a European Monetary Fund and building an independent Swift system”. Germany wanting to bypass American oversight to collaborate with Iran is not new. When Batmanghelidj made the request to the Germans for Nazi military experts in 1953, the German Foreign Office did not deny this request, but rather sought to meet this demand without consulting the Americans or the British.

Going all the way back to the 1920s, Germany has been in economic relations with Iran. After the Second World War, West Germany revived economic ties with Iran in 1949 and from then on it has been, for the most part, continuously growing. Just to show you how deep Germany has been in Iran’s economy, according to Abolfazl Adli, from 1952 to 1959, West Germany was “the leading supplier of metal goods, machines, electrical goods and appliances, and motorcycles, and was in second place for cars, buses and bicycles” in Iran. By 1952 West Germany had replaced the US as Iran’s number one trading partner. Germany held this position until 1972 (when it was overtaken by the US), but went back to being Iran’s biggest trade partner in 1979. But even before 1979 Germany’s economic ties with Iran were huge. “West Germany’s economic ties with Iran are closer than with virtually any other non-European country” wrote Der Spiegel in 1975.

But currently trade between Iran and Germany has declined due to US pressure through sanctions. Reuters reports that “German exports to Iran fell by nearly half in the first six months of 2019 ... suggesting companies are scaling back business ties with Tehran to avoid trouble with the United States after Washington reimposed sanctions.” Regardless of this, Germany still remains Iran’s biggest trading partner in Europe. In the midst of a growing Iranian nationalism that wants to see the destruction of Israel, with a reviving Germany (the only country to have almost exterminated the Jews) that wants to eclipse American power and desires to pursue ties with Iran, it makes one wonder if Germany will ever want to resume the Holocaust with Iran by its side.

NOTES

(1) Abu Jafar Muhammad ibn Jarir At-Tabari, the early Islamic historian and theologian recorded this event “Khalid said, ‘O Allah, if you deliver their shoulders to us, I will obligate myself to You not to leave any one of them whom we can overcome until I make their canal run with their blood.’ Then Allah defeated them for the Muslims and gave their shoulders to them. Khalid then commanded to his herald to proclaim to his men, ‘Capture! Capture! Do not kill any except he who continues to resist.’ As a result the cavalry brought prisoners in droves, driving them along. Khalid had detailed certain men to cut off their heads in the canal. He did that to them for a day and a night. They pursued them the next day and the day after, until they reached the Nahrayn and the like of that distance in every direction from Ullays. And Khalid cut off their heads.” Also see At-Tabari, Vol XI, The Challenge to the Empires, In series: The History of at-Tabari, (Ta’rikh al-rasul wa’l-muluk), Translated by K.Y. Blankkinship, SUNY series in near Eastern Studies, Bibliotheca Persica, State University of New York Press, Albany New York, 1993, p.44-45

(2) Daniel’s structure of the four metals included the gold (Babylon), silver (Persia), the bronze (Asia Minor), and they are all destroyed by Christ (the rock cut without hands). It is logical, then, to conclude a revival of these ancient empires. Western students focus on Daniel 2:41 which points to the nature of the two materials (Iron and Clay) as being partly weak and partly strong, but verse 43 is rarely addressed in full: “And in that you saw the iron mixed with common clay, they will combine with one another in the seed of men; but they will not adhere to one another, even as iron does not combine with pottery.” The other meaning of this riddle in this verse needs to be noted; the underlined words “mixed” and “combine” are actually the same words translated differently from the Aramaic, the original language of much of the Book of Daniel. The word is actually “Arab.” Strong’s Concordance confirms this “mArab {ar-ab’}; from ‘`arab’ (6150) in the figurative sense of sterility; Arab (i.e. Arabia), a country East of Palestine: --Arabia.” “or mereb (1 Kings 10:15), (with the article prefix), {eh’-reb}; from ‘`arab’ (6148); the web (or transverse threads of cloth); also a mixture, (or mongrel race):--Arabia, mingled people, mixed (multitude), woof.” And thus this passage can read: “And just as you saw the iron mixed with baked clay, so the people will be mixed (Arabized) with the seed of men (through intermarriage) and will not remain united, any more than iron does not mix with clay.”

THOUGHTS ON THE RISE OF NAZISM IN GERMANY

“May God enlarge Japheth,

And may he live in the tents of Shem”

(Genesis 9:27)

When Japheth — the patriarch of all Europeans — leaves the tents of his brother Shem, he slays his brother. Noah declared: “Blessed be the Lord, the God of Shem” (Genesis 9:27), for it was from the line of Shem whence Christ came. Thus when Japheth resides in his brother’s tent, he has civility, but when he leaves, he is ferocious and seeks to burn down the tent of Shem. The world saw this in the Holocaust, and now that the world is turning against the Jews, the question lies: will Germany take part in the future holocaust?

As the wood of the vine among the trees of the forest, which I have given to the fire for fuel, so have I given up the inhabitants of Jerusalem; and I set My face against them. Though they have come out of the fire [the first Holocaust], yet the fire will consume them [the final holocaust]. Then you will know that I am the Lord, when I set My face against them. So I will make the land desolate, because they have acted unfaithfully,’” declares the Lord God. (Ezekiel 15:6-8, brackets mine)

One December 13 of 2021, the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, published a series of papers under the umbrella title of German Foreign Policy in Transition. One of the papers was entitled, The Need for New Concepts to Address Conflicts in Europe’s Broader Southern Neighbourhood, and was written by Hürcan Aslı Aksoy, Wolfram Lacher and Muriel Asseburg. In this paper Asseburg refers to Russian intervention in other counties — such as Libya and Syria — as a response “to the partial retreat of the American hegemon”. This sort of talk has been growing popular in German political rhetoric, that America’s hegemony is declining, and therefore Germany must become a serious military power to defend Europe. Asseburg’s paper goes beyond just mere defense; she goes so far as to say that Germany should focus not just on Europe, but on the Middle East, in the sense that Germany could enter other countries to bring war criminals to justice.

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Muriel Asseburg[/caption]

The realm outside of Europe that is of interest for Germany in stopping war crimes, according to Asseburg, is the “broader Southern neighborhood,” which includes the Middle East, specifically “suspected war crimes in the Palestinian territories”. Asseburg puts forth the criticism that “interventions by regional powers that are not guided by principles of international law, as well as polarisation in the UN Security Council, today place much tighter constraints on international criminal justice than was the case in the 2000s.” Since there are countries that intervene which do not abide by international law (she is obviously referring to Russia) and since the UN is not reliable to stop war criminals and bring them to justice, Germany can be a pioneer in different way towards getting rid of war criminals. “Effective conflict transformation in the broader Southern neighbourhood”, writes Asseburg, “is in Germany’s own inter­est in order to avert negative repercussions and pro­vide a convincing alternative to the offers of illiberal actors.”

To bring these war criminals of the neighboring South to justice is not something that the International Criminal Court can be relied upon to do, Asseburg writes, and so national courts (such as the German court) must step in: “prosecution by the International Criminal Court (ICC) or international special tribunals is often impossible because per­manent members of the UN Security Council are involved. Therefore, the only option is for national courts to deal with the situation in accordance with the principle of universal jurisdiction.” To help solve this, Germany can take a pioneering role “by encouraging trials under the principle of universal jurisdiction in national courts (in Germany and other EU member states where this is possible)”, meaning Germany can intervene against war criminals and bring them to justice in a German court. Germany can also go against war criminals “by expanding the capacities of its own law enforcement agencies”. And when speaking of stopping war crimes, Asseburg speaks of the Palestinian territories: “Germany can only credibly act as a pioneer if it consistently fulfills this role. This implies that crimi­nal prosecutions do not stop with the nationals of friendly states (see, for example, the ICC investigation into suspected war crimes in the Palestinian terri­tories)”.

There is an interesting — and odious — trend that is building up within Germany: the care for the Holocaust, or the concern over the sensitivities around the Holocaust (or Shoah) is going down in Germany. This has been taking place for years without much attention. I remember when I was a sophomore in high school around 2005, I had a history teacher who had taught in Germany for some time, and I recall her telling me how the youths in Germany were tired of hearing about the Holocaust. This trend is very real, and has even been acknowledged by Germany’s foremost Middle East scholar, Muriel Asseburg who, in a 2015 interview, spoke of a “a gradual shift” in which Germany is not “automatically on Israel’s side” and that the care to remember the genocide of the Jews orchestrated by Germany is no longer as big as it once was:

“There is at least a gradual shift here, but so far no fundamental change in Berlin’s attitude. It is no longer the case that Berlin is always automatically on Israel’s side; a common European stance often takes precedence here. … While the significance of the Shoah [Holocaust] in the minds of citizens in Germany is decreasing, it remains a very strong constant in the Israeli education system. Accordingly, it powerfully underpins the desire to never want to be a victim again.”

What Asseburg is saying is that while Israel doesn’t want another Shoah to happen again — and thus why it uses strong military responses — the Germans don’t care so much about the Holocaust anymore. So, what we have is an Israel that focuses on the Shoah and wants to prevent another through a robust military, and a Germany that doesn’t care so much about it. It is very strange to even be talking about such a situation in which Germany doesn’t care so much about the Holocaust. The Germans conducted the greatest massacre of the Jews in history — they were the closest to ever fully exterminating Europe’s Jews — and this dark page of history does not bother the Germans as much. This should, in the very least, bother us. Asseberg spoke of Germany’s growing indifference to the Holocaust in an interview in 2015. This was the same year that the German Bertelsmann Foundation did a survey on views on Israel and the Holocaust in Germany. 48% held a negative view of Israel, including a majority of those in the age group of 18 to 29. 55% of respondents agreed with this statement: “Today, almost 70 years after the end of the war, we should no longer talk so much about the persecution of the Jews, but should finally draw a line under the past”.

The majority of these particular respondents were amongst the younger generation (67% of Germans under the age of 40), while amongst older Germans its 51% who agree with the above statement. In the youngest age group (18 to 29 years old), almost 80 percent said they were annoyed by discussion on the Holocaust. A total of 81 percent of German respondents agreed with this statement: “one should let history rest and focus on current or future problems”. These numbers were later reflected in 2017 when a German nationalist book entitled Finis Germania (The End of Germany) and written by historian Rolf Peter Sieferle, was published. The book was published after Sieferle killed himself in 2016, and with the fame of his death, his book sold very well, selling 250 copies an hour, according to its publisher, and ranking No. 1 on Amazon’s German best-seller list, a position it held for almost two weeks (altogether, its first edition sold 20,000 copies in a matter of weeks). The book addresses itself against what Sieferle sees as the “cult” of the Holocaust. The Jews, says Sieferle, received forgiveness for murdering Christ, but the Germans will never get forgiveness for the Holocaust. Sieferle was embittered by what he saw as the world holding the Jews up to a position of moral superiority, and deeming the Germans as forever damned:

“Today, the Jews, to whom God himself had promised eternity, build memorials throughout the world to their murdered coreligionists. Not only are the victims ascribed a moral superiority, the wrongdoers and their symbols are ascribed an eternal depravity.”

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Peter Sieferle[/caption]

He also stated in regards to the Holocaust: “National Socialism , or more precisely Auschwitz, has become the last myth of a thoroughly rationalized world. A myth is a truth that is beyond discussion”.

Sieferle loathed the continual reminder of the Holocaust, and even mocked it, saying that murdering six million Jews was a record meant to be broken:

“What can you learn from Auschwitz? That modern technology is used for mass murder in the modern era? Anyone who is surprised by this should learn from Auschwitz. Or is it the sheer number of victims, the ominous six million? So something for the Guinness Book of records? But be careful, records are there to be broken.”

If the leviathan that is Germany was put down after World War Two, then how could such a book become a best-seller? In the groundswell of Germany there is a growing feeling of ire towards the stress on the Holocaust: people are tired of hearing of it, and they mordantly say things such as, ‘When will we Germans be finally seen as redeemed from this past event? When will we be pure?’ This way of talking has been heard not only from those who are against taking in non-European migrants, but also from those who support the “Boycott, Divest and Sanction” Israel movement (BDS). These people want Germany to boycott Israeli products, and to sanction and no longer invest in Israel. The German parliament has condemned the BDS movement as antisemitic, and this move was seen as influenced by the emphasis on the Holocaust. Muriel Asseburg said in an interview in June of 2023:

“I believe that it has a lot to do with our perspective on this conflict … i.e. the German perspective and above all the German political perspective is extremely influenced by our past and how we try to come to terms with our past”.

In the same interview, Asseburg speaks in a sardonic way that eerily echoes someone like Sieferle when he wrote that the Germans “are ascribed an eternal depravity”. Asseburg cynically said that the Germans have been “cleansed” of their crime — the Holocaust — because Germany gave the Israeli government the power to purify:

“We are cleansed, we, those responsible for the Holocaust, are cleansed and we have given the Israeli government and a few other institutions the power to decide whether that is the case or not.”

The fact that figures such as Asseburg speak in such a way, and the fact that a book such as “Finis Germania” became a bestseller, tells us that a cynical view of the Holocaust has become mainstream in German society. This is also clear in the political realm. The German nationalist party, Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD), hit an all-time-high approval rating of 22% in election polls in July of 2023. The AfD is now amongst the largest parties in Germany, and it is full of politicians who have quite a bleak view of the Holocaust. In October of 2022, AfD politician Holger Winterstein sparked outrage after a photo came out showing him appearing to dance on top of the Holocaust memorial in Berlin. Alexander Gauland, a major leader of the AfD, referred to the Holocaust as a “speck of bird poop” in Germany’s history, stating that “We have a glorious history and it, dear friends, lasted longer than those blasted 12 years”. This conveys quite simply a ubiquitous feeling in Germany: ‘we are tired of talking about the Holocaust.’ Bjorn Hocke, probably the most famous of AfD’s leaders, exclaimed before an ecstatic crowd for the party’s youth branch: “our state of mind, is still that of a totally defeated people.” In other words, ‘we are still stuck talking about the Holocaust, and it is undermining us, weakening us.’ He then attacks the Holocaust memorial, expressing how sick of it he is: “we Germans, that is, our people, are the only people in the world who have planted a monument of shame in the heart of their capital.” He later affirms that the continual emphasis on the Holocaust has paralyzed Germany:

“Coming to terms with the past as a permanent task for society as a whole paralyzes a people. And this stupid coping policy paralyzes us even more today than in Franz Josef Strauss’ time. We don’t need anything other than a 180 degree turn in the politics of remembrance!”

Hocke deemed remembrance for the Holocaust as a “dead rite” and called for a renewed awakening for German pride:

“We don’t need any more dead rites in this country. We no longer have time to execute dead rites. We no longer need empty phrases in this country, we need a living culture of remembrance that, above all, brings us into contact with the great achievements of those who came before us.”

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Bjorn Hocke[/caption]

This new sense of patriotism, according to Hocke, should be enforced:

“In short: It’s about giving the newly created facades, here in Dresden, but also Potsdam, and in Berlin the city palace is currently being rebuilt - thank God it’s being rebuilt - it’s about giving these newly created facades a new, worthy appreciation to breathe spirit. It is the spirit of a new, honest, vital, deeply founded and self-confident patriotism. Because we know: Without such a new patriotism, no civil society can survive. … But we dare to demand this inner renewal. Not only do we dare to demand it, no, dear friends, we will also enforce it for the sake of our dear fatherland.”

Indifference towards the Holocaust will enable the revival of the German reich. As the past is ignored, so is the repetition of the past. For, in an ahistorical society, a warning about a repeat of past evils is received by deaf ears. In September of 2023, the historian on the Holocaust Christoph Kreutzmuller did an interview in which he was asked if he found the resurgence of the German right surprising, to which he replied:

“No, I mean, there’s more than one factor. One is that history is long gone now. People have forgot what it really [was] like in Europe. The witnesses are dying — the eyewitnesses — and so the impact is dying. It’s not just like the witnesses of the persecuted, it’s the people... who can say, ‘Look, my village has been bombed, and it was dreadful.’ That is kind of receding, this acute knowledge of destruction and murder.”

What makes the rise of nationalism even more concerning is that it is happening at the same time when the idea of Germany’s military becoming more independent of US power is growing in popularity. Bjorn Hocke, in his 2017 speech, echoed this sentiment:

“Our once respected army has degenerated from an instrument of national defense into a comprehensive, multicultural reaction force in the service of the USA.”

This opinion is closer to, than it is far away from, the mainstream. What Hocke is saying echoes a greater desire for military independence and strength within Germany. In October of 2023, Germany’s defense minister, Boris Pistorius, said something in regards to the military that is not commonly heard:

“We have to get used to the idea that there could be a threat of war in Europe … We have to become ready for war. We have to be defensive. And prepare the Bundeswehr and society for this.”

The striving for military willpower is not wanted simply for within German borders; rather, it widens to a greater European military strength. In September of 2023, German chancellor Olaf Scholz mirrored this yearning for a powerful Germany being the leading bulwark for Europe:

“As the most populous country with the greatest economic power and as a country in the middle of the continent, our army must become the cornerstone of conventional defense in Europe: the best-equipped force in Europe”

In a 2016 speech in Strasbourg , the head of the EU Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, called for a pan-European military independent of the US:

“Europe can no longer afford to piggy-back on the military might of others or let France alone defend its honour in Mali. We have to take responsibility for protecting our interests and the European way of life.”

In a 2018 speech for the Flemish regional parliament, Juncker was much more extreme in his words:

“At this point, we have to replace the United States, which as an international actor has lost vigor, and because of it, in the long term, influence”

So, in both the far-Right political realm with the AfD and the establishment political world, with the likes of Pistorius and Scholz, there is a greater desire for a powerful — and respected — German military. And in both the far-Right and the establishment, there is an antagonism and a growing ire for the emphasis on the Holocaust.

And what would happen if Germany tried to intervene against Israel, when you have Jews whose identity is grounded on surviving the Shoah, and you have Germans who don’t care about the Shoah who want to intervene against Israel in defense of the Palestinians? A horrendous bloodbath would be the outcome if such a thing would ever occur in the future. There is an idea in the mainstream world that Germany, because of its murderous past, will always be on Israel’s side. But this common belief is contradicted by Asseburg who clearly states that there has been “a gradual shift” in which it is “no longer the case that Berlin is always automatically on Israel’s side”.

Thus, it cannot be always counted on that Germany will side with Israel, which means that it is possible that Germany will one day go against Israel. Like the Ottoman Empire being revived as neo-Ottomanism, the deadly wound that inflicted the German beast, will heal. One day the bitter anger between Jew and Arab will erupt in Israel so horrendously that the streets of Israel will flood red with blood. Is it really so complex to see such a horrid future, what with the things the world has already seen? The savagery that took place in 2021 between Jews and Arabs; how one attacked the other, how Arabs attacked Jews and Jews attacked Arabs; numerous wars between Israel and Gaza, the storms of rockets; the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank; the rapid rise of the vicious Jewish nationalists as their population grows and thus their political might.

This reality is clear to the eyes, and it is ever so in front of us that what will come is a storm of chaos and gore that will shock the onlookers of the earth. What then would happen if the ultra-Orthodox and ultra-nationalists butcher the Arabs in a desire for extermination? The world will see, the nations will rage, and those of military might who sympathize with the Palestinians — or who would see their suffering as a geopolitical opportunity — will intervene. Within the geopolitical speak of Germany, there is an awareness of the rise of Jewish ultra-nationalism in Israel and how its henchmen desire violence, and there is a belief that Germany must not be so much of an ally of Israel any longer due to its nationalist policies. In a 2017 paper entitled “Shrinking spaces” in Israel, Ariel Asseburg wrote:

“Israel has always claimed to be the only democracy in the Middle East. However, the current government coalition of right-wing, ultra-Orthodox and national-religious parties is dominated by forces that represent illiberal positions and want to accentuate Jewish dominance in the entire “Eretz Israel” (i.e. in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories).”

She then goes on to write that “Germany and the EU should work towards enforcing international law, improving the human rights situation and preserving space for civil society to act against Israel.” How would Germany “enforce” the law on Israel, without a strong military able to do foreign policy? The paper calls for “A new paradigm for dealing with Gaza” and states:

“In view of the escalation of the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip and the acute danger of a new outbreak of violence, Germany and its European partners will not leave regional conflict management to regional actors.”

Asseburg does not want Germany to merely rely on the regional players of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to manage the conflict itself, but rather that Germany be a serious force within the fray. This means that Germany would not allow just the Israelis or the Palestinians to deal with the problem, but would itself be involved. Involved in what? Well, to use the words of Asseburg, in enforcing “international law”. But again, how would Germany enforce anything in a different country without a serious power to inflict violence? Foreign policy is nonexistent without the potential for violence. As Asseburg wrote, Germany has an interest in its “broader Southern neighborhood” in the Middle East, and could be a pioneer in “expanding the capacities of its own law enforcement agencies” against supposed war criminals.

When horrendous bloodshed breaks out between Jews and Arabs, Germany could impose itself on Israel against the Jews in the name of enforcing international law. Something to remember is that it was Germany who armed the KLA against Serbia in the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, and it was during this same conflict that Germany was pushing for the bombing of Serbia. This was Germany’s beginning stage of awakening from the ashes of the Second World War and sparking light in its desire for hegemony in Europe. Germany has been continuously and gradually working to make a shift in foreign policy, to make Germany mighty again. This desire for a change in the zeitgeist was expressed by Asseburg in regards to a new German foreign policy when it comes to Israel:

“A change of paradigm is needed: It should not be a matter of simply making the GRM [Gaza Reconstruction Mechanism] less susceptible to corruption, but rather of protecting the rights of the residents of the coastal strip.”

Asseburg then affirms that the protection of the Gazan people “will henceforth be given priority over the security interests of the occupying power.” In other words, Germany must protect Gaza from Israel, even if that means ignoring the “security interests” of Israel (“the occupying power”). Asseburg is calling for Germany to protect the Palestinians from Israel. In December of 2023, Asseburg wrote an article on German policy in Israel and the possible scenarios for Gaza, one of which “would involve the deployment of a robust international force to ensure comprehensive disarmament and security and the placing of the Gaza Strip under an interim international administration.” If this scenario is done, this would mean German troops in Gaza.

Later on in the article she writes that Germany, alongside other EU militaries, should provide protection for Gaza:

“Given this bleak outlook, it would be all the more important that the Federal Government and its partners in the EU quickly coordinate how they can achieve effective protection for the civilian population in the Gaza Strip, avoid further destruction and contribute to the realization of constructive future scenarios.”

So German troops in Gaza providing protection, from who? Since Asseburg condemns Israel as an occupier, this would mean that she wants the German military to defend Gaza against Israel.

When speaking of Germany’s future foreign policy in the Middle East, one cannot leave out the potential for the use of the German military. In 2013, the German Institute for International and Security Affairs and the German Marshall Fund published a paper entitled, New Power New Responsibility. In this paper it defines what German foreign policy would entail:

“German foreign policy will continue to deploy the full range of foreign policy instruments, from diplomacy, foreign aid and cultural policy to the use of military force.”

Why would Germany use military force in another country? According to the German Marshal Fund paper, Germany must be willing to use its military when “basic international norms” are violated and compromise can only be done in vain by the violator:

“However, where spoiler states question the international order, where they violate basic international norms (such as the genocide prohibition or the prohibition on the use of weapons of mass destruction), where they lay claims to – or even attack – the commons or the critical infrastructure of globalization. In other words, where offers of compromise or dispute resolution are made in vain, Germany must be willing and able to use military power within the framework of collective measures sanctioned by international law (or at least credibly threaten its use), in order to be able to protect these goods, norms, and collective interests.”

In the future, the anger with Israel is not going to be less but more intense, and Israel’s nationalism will be at a state more harsh. Israel will still be seen as a violator of human rights and a perpetrator of war crimes. If violence against the Arab population gets to a gruesome point, it would not be surprising if Germany deploys its military into Israel in the name of human rights. In fact, in the same report it says that Germany can no longer just focus on Europe, but must think on a global level, and specifically focus on the “increasingly unstable European vicinity”. What is this vicinity? North Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East. Furthermore, it says that in the case of “longer-term military operations” Germany will have to focus on the Middle East and it points out that a reason for this would be to take the place of the United States since the Americans are focusing more on Asia:

“This also means that a pragmatic German security policy, especially when costly longer-term military operations are called for, will have to concentrate primarily on the increasingly unstable European vicinity, from Northern Africa and the Middle East to Central Asia, not least to relieve Germany’s U.S. allies in NATO, as the United States increasingly focuses on Asia.”

As America more and more focuses less on Europe, it will have to unleash Germany to become the dominating power in the continent. This will be the consequence of America moving more towards itself and further away from its position as the world’s police force. When one of the most distrusted institutions in the United States is the military, how can the American empire remain? No longer is there the energy that the US had for military enlistment in the era of 9/11. At that time, people trusted the government more than now. So when the 9/11 attacks happened, there were massive lines of people wanting to join the military to punish the terrorists for what they did to the United States.

People eventually found out that Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11 and that the war wasn’t about fighting terrorism, since the removal of Saddam did not stop the horrifying crimes of ISIS, but in fact unleashed more Islamic terrorism and removed the check against Iran, thus allowing the Iranians to become a regional power. The people became disillusioned with their government, especially in any idea of war with other countries, and so people have massively turned towards social media as opposed to mainstream media. The national opinion has become even more fragmented, and any hint of military intervention is met with rage, because people look to the destruction of Iraq and do not wish to repeat such a nightmare. People who supported the war, regret it, and it is now seen as fringe to want America to militarily intervene in any country. When people enlisted to fight in Iraq, they thought they were fighting in a war of good versus evil, only to soon realize that it was a war for the American empire, and had nothing to do with 9/11. Pundits would argue that the Iraq war was simply done on ‘bad intelligence’ and that ‘mistakes were made’.

But even if this is true, people will look at this and ask, ‘Why should we trust you again?’ The military political apparatus is looked upon with suspicion, as the bearer of bad intelligence or mere lies. Either way you look at it, the military is amongst the most untrusted institutions in the United States. Americans don’t want to be in wars; they just want to live regular and comfortable lives. How then, can the American empire sustain itself? It eventually will say, ‘We cannot watch over Europe or the Middle East and will have to rely on regional powers to deal with these lands.’ This is why the political think-tankers of Germany say things like German military operations will have to focus on the Middle East “not least to relieve Germany’s U.S. allies in NATO”. As the American empire is atrophied by disillusionment, other powers will rise to fill in the void. The German Marshall Fund paper makes note of this:

“On the military-operational level, however, the Europeans will have to get used to the idea that the United States will not only assume a leadership role less often, but will also want to participate in fewer joint missions. Europe and Germany must therefore develop formats for NATO operations that rely less on U.S. contributions. This requires greater investment in military capabilities, and more political leadership. Europe in particular will have to provide more security in its own neighborhood. This is Europe’s unique responsibility, and Germany will have to make an investment that is commensurate with its strength.”

Florian Schöne, an officer in the German military’s General Staff Service, wrote in 2021:

“In Syria, with Russia’s help, a brutal war is being waged against the population, also with the calculation of using the refugee movement migrating towards Europe to destabilise the European Union. … When it comes to settling conflicts, German foreign policy still relies too much on the United States (US) in particular. Washington’s focus on Asia makes it necessary for the Europeans to contain the violence in their own neighbourhood and areas of interest – be it Ukraine, Syria, Libya, or Mali.”

If Germany is going to see the Middle East as its neighboring vicinity to watch over militarily, then what happens in the case of severe violence between Jew and Arab? One day the rhetoric from Germany may not be against a Syrian dictator, but an Israeli nationalist regime. One day, the Germans may say, ‘In Israel, there is a brutal war being waged against Palestinians, America cannot be relied upon to stop this, and it is up to Germany to fight the Jews.’

RIGHT-WING NATIONALISTS AGAINST ISRAEL

If there is one thing that unites both the far-left and the far-right it is enmity towards Israel.

Thor von Waldstein, a lawyer for the European New Right who works with German nationalist thinker Gotz Kubitschek, sees Israel as “a small state on the eastern Mediterranean that persistently tramples on human rights and has inflicted violence and terror on its Islamic citizens and neighbors for decades.” This is in total agreement with the Left who says the same things about Israel.

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Gotz Kubitschek[/caption]

After Israel began bombarding Gaza as a response to Hamas’s massacre, climate change icon Greta Thunberg began activism work for Gaza, and she got support from one of Germany’s most popular nationalist thinkers, Jurgen Elsasser who addressed her as such: “She was one of my favorite enemies. Now she has my respect. I extend my hand to you across the divide of the climate discussion, you crazy little Swede. Because: You have backbone. And you have a heart.”

There is a strange phenomena that has been occurring within this last decade and now: hatred towards the Jew and the Arab, simultaneously. In the 20th century, there was some antagonism against Arabs amongst the Germans, but the fullest hatred was towards the Jews. But today, we see tremendous rage towards both the Jew and the Arab. There was, in the past, something to the likes of what we see today; the head ideologue for the Nazi Party, Alfred Rosenberg (ironically, a Jew), wrote of a war between the White race and the Afro-Semitic Islamic peoples:

“I say to you Europeans: be on your guard! … Before this coming purified hatred of the Black races and bastards, led by the fanatical spirit of Mohammed, the white races have more than ever all cause to be on their guard.”

Such rhetoric would be accepted by the Right-wing of today. But the Nazis of the past were mainly hunting for the Jews. It appears that now, what Rosenberg taught is becoming center-stage: a violent bloodlust against the Jew and the Arab. Current events in regards to both Israel and jihad are used by various political figures and thinkers to foment anger or hatred towards either Jews or Arabs, or both.

On October 11th of 2023 (just days after Hamas’s massacre of the Jews in Israel) a group of neo-nazis in Dortmund, Germany, hung from their meeting house a banner that read: “The State of Israel is our misfortune”, and next to this banner was the Palestinian flag. The words on the banner were based on the National Socialist slogan: “The Jews are our misfortune”. Dortmund has an active neo-nazi scene, a figurehead of which, Michael Brück, held up the Palestinian flag during a speech in the Dortmund city council. The Palestinian flag is no longer this emblem waved for the establishment of a Palestinian state, but rather has become a global symbol against world Jewry.

One of Germany’s most notorious far-rightists is a former vegan celebrity chef and ethnic Turk named Atilla Hildman. After the October 7th massacre, Atilla stated that Shani Louk, a German Israeli who was kidnapped and murdered by Hamas, was not a German but “a jew” (the irony of this is that this is being argued by an ethnic Turk who is a German citizen). Atilla also said that all the pictures of Shani Louk in the back of the Hamas terrorists pickup truck are “a planned production with the Jew […] to justify the planned mass murder of Palestinians!”

In Germany’s biggest nationalist party — Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) — both anti-Middle Eastern and African refugee sentiments and anti-Jewish feelings have been expressed, and at times there have been clashes between those who want blatant anti-Jewish hatred expressed and those who want to be more cordial to make a better image for the party. We see this, for example, between AfD leader Jorg Meuthen and major German nationalist ideologue, Gotz Kubitschek. When Jorg Meuthen talked about pro-Israel policies and sanctions against Iran with reference to the Holocaust, Kubitschek gave a nasty response: “Is it the lesson of history that it is important to be on the winning side?” In the world of ethno-nationalism there is a two-sided coin when it comes to the Jews: simultaneously there is both hatred towards the Jews and a pointing out to the state of Israel as an example of an ethno-state.

If the Jews can have their own state specifically for people who are actually Jewish, then why can’t Germany be a state for actual Germans and not refugees and immigrants? This is the argument that is made by German nationalists. Meanwhile, there are German nationalists who point to Jewish forces as the ones behind the mass entry of migrants into Germany. So they point to Israel as an argument for ethno-nationalism while expressing adversity to Jews for mass migration of Africans and Middle Easterners. So here we can see the hatred towards both the Jew and the Arab. Gotz Kubitschek, after the October 7th massacre, wrote in an article:

“Israel has what we do not have and what many national conservatives around the world admire as an identity model: a people linked to birth and religion”.

So Israel is referenced as a nation that has something that the nationalists want: a country founded on ethnic identity. In the same article, Kubitschek says that Israeli Jews are mainly nationalistic, but regardless of this, the Jews in the West will always be pro-Israel and thus not fully loyal to their host country:

“In general, Jews in Israel are mostly nationalist, while in the Diaspora the majority are “multicultural.” But even if they represent positions more like ours, pro-Israel is always part of the package - prominent examples from France are Alain Finkielkraut and Éric Zemmour. It is in our interest to ask the question of loyalty here too.”

This suspicion of Jews because of their loyalty to Israel was also reflected in Martin Lichtmesz when he, after the October 7th massacre, wrote to the Jewish chairman for the “Jews in the AfD,” Artur Abramovych, how one feels “if one belongs to a people that is granted the right to retaliate from all sides?”, a direct criticism of Israel’s bombing of Gaza. He also expresses interest in “how you can reconcile being involved in Germany’s national movement via the AfD, while at the same time your primary loyalty appears to be to another state, Israel.”

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Martin Lichtmesz[/caption]

Kubitschek brings the loyalty of western Jews into question, and stresses that the loyalty of other immigrants must also be questioned:

“It must be in Germany’s interest to prevent any further flow of refugees, to ask the question of the loyalty of those who have already immigrated and to steadily and consistently reduce the potential for conflict.”

Both Jews and immigrants are seen with suspicion in regards to their loyalty to the country, and Kubitschek stresses that the number of immigrants must be reduced to preclude a conflict. So in this paradigm, the Jew and the Middle Easterner are not entirely trusted and too many immigrants means the potential for bloodshed. What the nationalists foresee is a bloodbath; this is what they are waiting for and expecting: a race war, with the Jew being the perpetrator behind the curtains. As Kubitschek writes:

“There are strong Jewish lobby organizations in this country that have supported the destabilization of the Federal Republic of Germany through mass immigration, using moral-political intervention - historically-politically charged and in a way that nipped necessary discussions in the bud.”

So the ethno-nationalist agrees with the Jewish nationalist on the making of an ethno-state, but at the same time there is enmity for the Jews in the West for their more liberal ideas, especially when it comes to immigration. The German ethno-nationalist does not like the immigrant, and he sees the Jews as the reason for the immigration; meanwhile the liberal is seen as a “masochist” because of his support for immigration from non-European countries. They refer to immigration as “Umvolkung”, or the process of getting the German people (volk) to forget about their national identity and language; and they refer to the liberal establishment with labels like “the ethnomasochistic theocracy”. This paradigm is applied to not just immigration, but to the government’s support for Israel. The ethno-nationalists point to mass migration and say that this is sign that the government cares more about outsiders than it does for the native people. And they will point to state support for Israel as a sign that the government cares more about the Jews than it does the people. This very sentiment was expressed by Martin Sellner, the leader for the Austrian Identitarian movement, which is an ethno-nationalist group that holds to syncretism between Christians and neo-pagans. After the October 7th massacre, Sellner wrote:

“The Middle East conflict is lighting up the darkness of the German political landscape like lightning. In this light it appears for moments like a theocracy. The protection of “Jewish life” is their top priority. The fact that millions of foreigners come to Germany without identifying with the country and its people, and that insults like “mutt race” and “potato” are commonplace, leaves the priestly caste of the theocracy cold. The population exchange and its bloody “distortions” are acknowledged with indifference. A particularly penitential order of the ethnomasochistic theocracy, the “Team Umvolkung,” even celebrates this.”

After the October 7th massacre, it became common for nationalists to use the bloodbath to argue against migration. To allow migration, they say, will only bring in antisemites from the Middle East. This is really more so just a strategy to foment hatred against any waves of migrant, than it is a pro-Israel expression. As Martin Sellner wrote: “I also don’t want to import legions of rabid anti-Semites from Arab countries. I wouldn’t bring them into the country even if they were big Israel fans.” Its not about being pro-Israel, its just about being against migrants and immigration. Another example of this is Martin Lichtmesz, an Austrian member of the European New Right. After the October 7th massacre, Lichtmesz wrote an article on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in which he feared the coming of Palestinian migrants coming into Germany.

He ended his article by saying: “we should be less concerned about what immigrants think of Israel than how they are changing our own demographic makeup.” Its not about being pro-Israel, but about keeping the German race pure of outsider blood. In the same article, Lichtmesz warned against the “guilt-cult-fueled dominant narrative that demands worshiping both the Jew and the migrant.” We can see here an adversity to both the migrant and the Jew. Lichtmesz is against immigration because, according to him, it will ruin the homogeneity of the Germanic nation. But, at the same time, he has an antagonism towards the narrative of the Holocaust being emphasized in education for German children because, as Lichtmesz argues, it breaks down the sense of national defense in the volk:

“Israeli school classes are taken to the former concentration camps (as depicted in the film “Defamation” ) in order to awaken and increase their national will to defend themselves; German school classes, however, in order to break their national defensive spirit.”

Lichtmesz, while agreeing with right-wing Western Jews on immigration, is adverse to the idea of allying with Zionists because, as he writes: “it has so far escaped me that any Israeli politician would be concerned about the right to exist of European nations that, like their own country, are threatened by demographic trends (which in turn are closely linked to events in the Middle East).” So, the German right is essentially saying, ‘Why should we care about the Israeli cause, when Israel does not care about mass migration into Germany?’ One would think that the German right and the Jewish right would be unwavering allies, but there is a feeling of distrust present within the circles of the German (and much of the European) right. American conservative Jews like to speak with jubilation when it comes to the rise of the European right, but truly the times they refuse to see the dark side of the European right are legion. They do not want to see that in the European nationalist circles there lies an enmity for the Jews. Yes, both the Jewish right and the European nationalist don’t want mass migration of Middle Eastern refugees, but there is something that the European rightist despises and the Jewish right-winger will not compromise on, and this is the Holocaust. The German right is tired of hearing about the Holocaust, but the Jew will never stop talking about the Holocaust. On this issue, the two sides are at violent odds. This is why Lichtmesz has a mistrust for the Jewish right, because it is in agreement with the mainstream German government position on the Holocaust, which he describes as “philo-Semitism”:

“The Israeli right and the leading thinkers of the Federal Republic of Germany (not just the decidedly left-wing or left-liberal ones) have a number of overlaps, for example when it comes to the singular meaning of the Holocaust and the special world-historical position of the Jews as a “victim people” and the Germans as a “perpetrator people”. In Germany, in addition to the “cult of guilt,” this has given rise to the “philo-Semitism” associated with it”

He gainsays the term “Semitism,” another sign of how the eyes of these “new” rightists of Europe hold onto a misgiving towards the Semitic race; they see it with suspicion. And take heed to how they see the emphasis on teaching the Holocaust with disdain. It reflects exactly what Asseburg spoke of back in 2015: that the Germans are caring less and less about the Holocaust.

Remember, the only reason why there are friendly relations between Germany and Israel is because of the Holocaust. Before the end of World War Two the relation that the Germans had with the Jews was one of extermination. Once the concern about the Holocaust goes down to the point that it becomes insignificant, then what will become of German-Jewish relations? The only reason why the German government has shown such a passionate support for Israel is because of Germany’s responsibility for the Holocaust and thus obligation to be outraged by the greatest massacre of the Jews since the Holocaust.

But what if the Germans stopped caring about the Holocaust? Then they would not care about the future holocaust. In Turkey, nobody cares about the Armenian Genocide; in fact, they deny it. What is Turkey doing in our own time? It has killed more Armenians through its proxy Azerbaijan. In Ukraine they don’t care that Ukrainian proxies for the Nazis butchered over a hundred thousand Poles in the 1940s. And in Ukraine today there are statues of, and buildings and streets named after the very criminals who did these massacres. And even today, Ukraine refuses to allow Poland to bury the dead of those killed by Ukraine’s national heroes. This all stems from an indifference to history. This is why it is so vital for Germany to continue remembering the Holocaust, and to continue speaking of it. History repeats for those who do not learn from history. For the Germanic New Rightist, continuously talking about the Holocaust weakens Germany. “Containing Germany’s original sin”, writes Martin Sellner, “is the task of the global community.” The teaching on the Holocaust is then seen as a conspiracy; hence, Zionists — who will always talk about the Shoah — are hinderances to the strengthening of Germany.

The insistence on always remembering the Holocaust is looked at with a disdain towards the Jews. Martin Sellner betokens this when he writes things like: “This Germano- and Judeo-centric guilt cult, as bizarre as it sounds, is currently the most powerful meta-narrative of all.” Immigration from so called “third world” countries is despised by both the European new right and the right-wing zionist. Nonetheless, the German new right grievously sees both the Jew and the migrant as having privileges that the German does not have. “Being a Jew or a migrant means a privilege in today’s Germany” writes Martin Sellner. “It provides a protected ‘place of speech’ from which one can act racistly against locals.”

If the Turk, the German and the Jew all shout slogans of ethnocentrism, what makes them so different from each other? In the end, it will become pottery cracking other pottery; the end result is potshard. Shem will destroy himself, and Japheth -- outside of the tent, will kill his brother.

On August 8th of 2025, an historic meeting took place between two leaders of the South Caucasus: Nikol Pashinyan, the prime minister of Armenia, and Ilham Aliyev, the president of Azerbaijan. Their countries have been enemies for decades, and have been at war over this little region called Nagorno-Karabakh for thirty-five years, having had numerous wars going back to the 1980s. In 1988, as the Soviet Union was fragmenting, Armenians and Azeris broke out into a war and eventually, in 1994, the Armenians won and seized Nagorno-Karabakh and made it into an Armenian controlled buffer zone within Azerbaijan.

They were in a horrific war that began 2020, with the Azeris eventually taking Nagorno-Karabakh in 2023, and pushing the Armenians out. In September of 2022, Azerbaijan even invaded Armenia, killing hundreds of Armenian troops. Donald Trump oversaw this meeting, in which the two leaders shook hands and signed a peace declaration and agreement on trade and security. Part of the deal is that the Americans will control the Zangezeur corridor which runs through Armenia’s Syunik province. As a showcase of Trump’s desire to have a legacy as a peacekeeper, this corridor will be called “the Trump Rout for International Peace and Prosperity.” “A great honour for me,” said Trump. To feed Trump’s ego, both Aliyev and Pashinyan promised to nominate him for a Nobel peace prize.

Knowing what America’s goals have always been since the Cold War, it is clear what the objective of the Americans is in Armenia and Azerbaijan: to keep the Russians out. Whatever the Americans do, it will be done to advance NATO, and in the case of Azerbaijan and Armenia, it will be to the benefit of Turkey since it is the second most powerful country in NATO and borders with Azerbaijan and Armenia. When Azerbaijan defeated Armenia in Nagorno-Karabak in 2020, it did so with the backing of Turkey, which means NATO. The United States and Turkey wanted the Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh defeated because Armenia is an ally of Russia, and thus by pushing the Armenians out of Nagorno-Karabakh, an ally of Russia was further weakened in the South Caucasus, and NATO further entrenched itself there. Also, Armenia was a member of Russia’s CSTO (Collective Security Treaty Organization, Russia’s attempt to rival NATO) since 1994. By Azerbaijan invading Armenia in September of 2022 while Russia was bogged down in Ukraine, it knew the Russians would have been unable to help Armenia, and thus NATO/Turkey was putting pressure on the Armenians to ditch the Russian alliance. In 2024 the Armenians froze their CSTO membership.

In 2020, as part of a ceasefire deal, both Azerbaijan and Armenia agreed to open a route through Armenia, supervised by Russian officials. But both Pashinyan and Aliyev abandoned this idea. In August of 2025, Armenia agreed to lease the land for 99 years to America, which will hire contractors to run the route.

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Zangezur corridor on the map. As you can see, it lies right next to Iran[/caption]

The vanquishing of the Armenians pushed out a Russian ally from the Nagorno-Karabakh region and thus enlarged the territory of NATO (especially Turkey) and pressured the Armenians to withdraw from its security alliance with Russia. Now, the Americans want to operate a corridor that runs across Armenia. This corridor will link Azerbaijan’s enclave, Nakhchivan, with mainland Azerbaijan, at Armenia’s expense. While also weakening Russia in the South Caucasus, this deal has also been hammered out to weaken Iran which is an ally to Armenia, a rival to Azerbaijan, and which also borders with both Azerbaijan and Armenia. What makes this goal so much clearer is the fact that the Zangazur corridor borders right with Iran, which means that the Americans want to control the Armenian side of the border with Iran, which means NATO being right next door to Iran, something that is viewed as obviously hostile in the eyes of the Iranians. This explains why Israel so ardently supports Azerbaijan. A strong Azerbaijan, a weak Armenia, and NATO right on the other side of Iran’s border means a further isolated and thus weakened Iran. Some Iranian analysts affirmed that the deal amounts to “Iran’s geopolitical suffocation in the region”. Abbas Mousavi, former Iranian ambassador to Baku and a deputy presidential spokesperson, described Trump’s actions regarding Azerbaijan and Armenia as “interesting, offensive and dangerous”.

NATO is provoking Iran to war. In 2023 and 2024, Armenia and Azerbaijan spoke about forming a corridor on the border with Iran, but decided that they could not make it happen because Iran began doing a buildup of forces and military equipment at the border with Armenia.

Armenia is Iran’s access way into Georgia, and thus into the rest of Europe and the Black Sea. By NATO placing a patrol on the corridor right on the Armenian side of the border with Iran, it is clearly desirous of cutting off Iran from Europe and the Black Sea. The geopolitics in this regard is centered, to an immense extent, on the Black Sea. Turkey is a major player in the entirety of this situation. Russia needs access from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean. And who controls that access? Turkey. Turkey controls the access from the Bosphorus Strait on the Black Sea into the Sea of Marmara, and from there into the Dardanelles which leads into the Aegean Sea which leads into the Mediterranean.

This is why Turkey is so vital to NATO. Turkey is NATO’s massive chess piece to control Russia’ access into the Mediterranean. Thus, the NATO strategy is to use the Turks to hinder the Russians’ access into the Mediterranean and to use the Azeris (and also the Turks, since the Azeris are a continuation of Turkish power) to block Iran’s access into the Black Sea. The agreement was also done to weaken Russia’s economic access in the South Caucasus. Before 2022, Russian imports to Armenia and Azerbaijan supplied 20-30 percent of regional trade, and now Russia’s imports in this region face sanctions constraints.

The corridor will also further empower Turkey. By having a continuous route from Nakhchivan, through Armenia, and into mainland Azerbaijan, Turkey will have direct access into the Caspian Sea, and thus into Central Asia. This route would thus enable Turkey to pursue its dream of a pan-Turkic union, in which the Turkic nations of Central Asia would be led by Turkey. One of these Central Asian Turkic countries is Kazakhstan, which is a major producer of oil, natural gas and the biggest producer of uranium in the world. Through this corridor, Turkey can have direct access from Kazakhstan and can more easily import not just energy, but uranium to make nuclear weapons. This would make nuclear armament easier for Turkey. Israel has been a major ally to Azerbaijan due to its hostilities towards Iran. Israel is happy with the Trump brokered deal because it isolates Iran and empowers Azerbaijan. But, this deal is also going to be beneficial to Turkey which is right now in the midst of tensions with Israel over Syria. Even though Israel is happy to use this deal to weaken Iran, this deal will also backfire, helping to further enable a nuclear armed Turkey which, in a major war, would be a massive problem for Israel, and its going to bite the Jewish state in the end.

The new route would also enable Europe to access the Caspian Sea while bypassing Iran and Russia. The Zangezur corridor project is not just geopolitical, but economic. A trade route through Azerbaijan and Armenia, would unlock $50-100 billion in annual trade value by 2027, according to the World Bank. According to Forbes Magazine, “Bloomberg data from May 2025 indicates the route could cut Europe-Asia transit times by 12-15 days compared to existing routes.” The Center for Economic Reforms Analysis and Communication For Azerbaijan, forecasts that the corridor would increase total exports for Azerbaijan by over $700 million and boost non-oil GDP by 2 percent annually. The Caspian Sea region is a major source for natural gas and oil, and Europe wants to increase its importation of these resources. A direct route connecting Armenia, Azerbaijan and Turkey would cut down the costs for Europe to import gas and oil.

The denouement of all this will be Armenia being persecuted by Turkey and Azerbaijan, while at the same time provoking Russia and Iran into further hostilities. Europe will also benefit from the trade route and (especially Germany) will further deepen its ties with Turkey. It was Turkey who genocided a million Armenians, and now it is Turkey, with its US ally, who want to rule over Armenia for the purpose of weakening Russia. Turkey invaded Armenia in 1920, in its goal to exterminate the Armenians, and lost. Turkey has never forgotten this loss, and wishes to resume from where it left off in the Armenian Genocide.

Photo showing the only Catholic church in Gaza after being struck by an Israeli tank

By Theodore Shoebat

“Therefore thus says the Lord God: ‘Like the wood of the vine among the trees of the forest, which I have given to the fire for fuel, so I will give up the inhabitants of Jerusalem; and I will set My face against them. They will go out from one fire [the Holocaust], but another fire shall devour them. Then you shall know that I am the Lord, when I set My face against them. Thus I will make the land desolate, because they have persisted in unfaithfulness,’ says the Lord God.” -- Ezekiel 15:6-8

History is a force that cannot be defeated. You can make the biggest bombs in the world, the most powerful guns, you will never stop the force of history. And what do we see?

The world is descending into madness -- the madness of tribalism, the madness of militarism. It is a genocidal madness that knows no bounds. The Iranians and the Turks want to destroy Israel, and as the Iranians bomb Israel, this desire is made manifest in the cheers of the Muslim world. Iran is relentlessly bombarding Israel, and with every bomb that strikes the Jewish state, Iran receives the adulations of the Islamic world. Now the Muslims have a hero to look up to, esteeming Iran as a country that is fighting to save the Palestinians from the tyrannical Zionists. History does not exactly repeat but it rhymes. And the history of the Jews is stained with blood. Why is the future exempt from the lessons of the past?

What has been is what will be,

and what has been done is what will be done,

and there is nothing new under the sun. -- Ecclesiastes 1:9

Just as there was a Shoah in the past, so shall there be one in the future, and are witnessing the presaging signs of this inevitable deluge of gore. Israel shall become one giant Auschwitz. A cry against the Jews has been resounding the world, and even in the Western world there are millions of people who embraced a song by Kanye West that has for its chorus, "Hiel, Hitler.” This is not coincidental, its not coming out of nowhere. There is a spiritual reality that is transpiring underneath all of this. Remember what Christ said to the Jews:

“Therefore I send you prophets and wise men and scribes, some of whom you will kill and crucify, and some you will flog in your synagogues and persecute from town to town, so that on you may come all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah the son of Barachiah, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar.” (Matthew 23:34-35)

Christ identifies the Jews with Cain, and what was the curse that was given to Cain? “You shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth.” (Genesis 4:12) The Jews have been driven out of countries for millennia, and have been hated throughout their history. Thus a rhyming of history is inevitable. Even while in their own country, the Jews are hated by their neighbors. But why has the hatred intensified? Because of Gaza. Why was Cain hated? Because he was a murderer. Israel has made Gaza into a giant war crime zone. Look at what Israel snipers were doing in the Netzarim corridor. I will let the report by Haaretz, which quotes the soldiers who witnessed these crimes, speak for itself:

"The forces in the field call it 'the line of dead bodies'" a commander in Division 252 tells Haaretz. "After shootings, bodies are not collected, attracting packs of dogs who come to eat them. In Gaza, people know that wherever you see these dogs, that's where you must not go.”

The Netzarim corridor, a seven-kilometer-wide strip of land, stretches from near Kibbutz Be'eri to the Mediterranean coast. The IDF has emptied this area of Palestinian residents and demolished their homes to construct military roads and military positions.

While Palestinians are officially prohibited from entering, the reality is more severe than a simple exclusion zone. "It's military whitewashing," explains a senior officer in Division 252, who has served three reserve rotations in Gaza. "The division commander designated this area as a 'kill zone.' Anyone who enters is shot.”

A recently discharged Division 252 officer describes the arbitrary nature of this boundary: "For the division, the kill zone extends as far as a sniper can see." But the issue goes beyond geography. "We're killing civilians there who are then counted as terrorists," he says. "The IDF spokesperson's announcements about casualty numbers have turned this into a competition between units. If Division 99 kills 150 [people], the next unit aims for 200.”

…

"Calling ourselves the world's most moral army absolves soldiers who know exactly what we're doing," says a senior reserve commander who has recently returned from the Netzarim corridor. "It means ignoring that for over a year, we've operated in a lawless space where human life holds no value. Yes, we commanders and combatants are participating in the atrocity unfolding in Gaza. Now everyone must face this reality.”

"Division commanders now have almost unlimited firepower authority in combat zones," explains a veteran officer in Division 252. "A battalion commander can order drone strikes, and a division commander can launch conquest operations." Some sources describe IDF units operating like independent militias, unrestricted by standard military protocols.

…

"One time, guards spotted someone approaching from the south. We responded as if it was a large militant raid. We took positions and just opened fire. I'm talking about dozens of bullets, maybe more. For about a minute or two, we just kept shooting at the body. People around me were shooting and laughing.”

But the incident didn't end there. "We approached the blood-covered body, photographed it, and took the phone. He was just a boy, maybe 16." An intelligence officer collected the items, and hours later, the fighters learned the boy wasn't a Hamas operative – but just a civilian.

"That evening, our battalion commander congratulated us for killing a terrorist, saying he hoped we'd kill ten more tomorrow," the fighter adds. "When someone pointed out he was unarmed and looked like a civilian, everyone shouted him down. The commander said: 'Anyone crossing the line is a terrorist, no exceptions, no civilians. Everyone's a terrorist.' This deeply troubled me – did I leave my home to sleep in a mouse-infested building for this? To shoot unarmed people?”

…

An officer in Division 252's command recalls when the IDF spokesperson announced their forces had killed over 200 militants. "Standard procedure requires photographing bodies and collecting details when possible, then sending evidence to intelligence to verify militant status or at least confirm they were killed by the IDF," he explains. "Of those 200 casualties, only ten were confirmed as known Hamas operatives. Yet no one questioned the public announcement about killing hundreds of militants.”

Another fighter describes witnessing four unarmed people walking normally, spotted by a surveillance drone. Despite clearly not appearing as militants, a tank advanced and opened fire with its machine gun. "Hundreds of bullets," he recalls. Three died immediately ("the sight haunts me," he says), while the fourth survived and raised his hands in surrender.

"We put him in a cage set up near our position, stripped off his clothes, and left him there," the soldier recounts. "Soldiers passing by spat on him. It was disgusting. Finally, a military interrogator came, questioned him briefly while holding a gun to his head, then ordered his release." The man had simply been trying to reach his uncles in northern Gaza. "Later, officers praised us for killing 'terrorists.' I couldn't understand what they meant," the fighter says.

In another incident, observation posts spotted two people walking toward Wadi Gaza, an area designated as restricted. A drone revealed they were carrying a white flag and walking with raised hands. The deputy battalion commander ordered troops to shoot to kill. When one commander protested, pointing out the white flag and suggesting they might be hostages, he was overruled. "I don't know what a white flag is, shoot to kill," the deputy commander, a reservist from Brigade 5, insisted. The two people eventually turned back south, but the protesting commander was berated as a coward.

…

This approach isn't limited to Division 252. A Division 99 reservist describes watching a drone feed showing "an adult with two children crossing the forbidden line." They were walking unarmed, seemingly searching for something. "We had them under complete surveillance with the drone and weapons aimed at them – they couldn't do anything," he says. "Suddenly we heard a massive explosion. A combat helicopter had fired a missile at them. Who thinks it's legitimate to fire a missile at children? And with a helicopter? This is pure evil.”

Why such indiscriminate slaughter? Because in their ideology, all Palestinians are terrorists. According to one Israeli soldier, Yehuda Vach, the brigadier general of the IDF’s Division 252, declared to his troops: ”there are no innocents in Gaza”. The same soldier recounted, that with Vach "it wasn't just opinion – it became operational doctrine: everyone's a terrorist.”

Under Vach, the demarcation of the “kill zone” shifted from day to day, and anyone who walked in said “kill zone” had to be killed, regardless if any of the civilian population was oblivious to his arbitrary changing of the lines. As the Haaretz article documents:

“Under Vach, the Wild West atmosphere intensified. The "kill zone" boundary shifted constantly – "500 meters here today, 500 meters there tomorrow," says one fighter. While other units also broke rules, officers say Vach went further. One of the concepts he introduced was declaring anyone entering the kill zone a terrorist conducting reconnaissance. "Every woman is a scout, or a man in disguise," an officer explains. "Vach even decided anyone on a bicycle could be killed, claiming cyclists were terrorists' collaborators.”

This aimless slaughter didn’t stop at kill zones. There was another method of torment that is done by Israel, and that is the “Mosquito protocol,” in which Israeli soldiers force a Palestinian civilian to enter houses and, if there is a bomb inside, to be blown to pieces, forcing them to be human shields. Why do they call it the “Mosquito protocol”? For the same reason that Japanese scientists called their Chinese test subjects (who they infected with disease) “logs,” and for the same reason Nazi scientists referred to their Jewish and Polish test subjects as farm animals. The Palestinian is the mosquito, sent to get swatted. For the same dehumanizing effect, IDF soldiers called their Palestinian victims “wasps.” As a Haaretz report from August 1th of 2024 documented:

"The senior ranks know about it," the source said. The army has played innocent despite footage shown on Al Jazeera about two months ago. Israeli soldiers can be seen dressing Palestinian detainees in uniforms and flak jackets, putting cameras on them and sending them into badly damaged houses and tunnel entrances with their hands bound by plastic ties.

…

There is also evidence that in some cases, minors or the elderly are used. "There were times when really old people were made to go into houses," one combat soldier said. If the Palestinian knows Hebrew, that's an advantage for the IDF; when Gazans are used in buildings and tunnels, they need to report to the forces outside.

As one soldier put it, Palestinians are told: "Do one mission of ... a [tunnel] shaft and you're free.”

Still, even though some Palestinians are required to remain with a unit "only" for 24 hours, others wind up staying for two days or even a week. "When you're inside this thing, you don't know how to say what's okay," the soldier said. "What's certain is that it's a horrible feeling.”

…

A soldier in a conscript army brigade added: "About five months ago, two Palestinians were brought to us. One was 20 and the other was 16. We were told: 'Use them, they're Gazans, use them as human shields.’"

According to this soldier, that day, soldiers in the unit began to ask questions about this use of civilians as human shields; they also wanted to know who gave the order.

According to the soldier, "They tried to say something about October 7, not something concrete. One person said: 'Don't beat them too much because we need them to open the locations'" where troops need to enter, such as buildings and tunnels.

…

Many soldiers felt uncomfortable about this, demanded answers and even shouted, said a person who was near one of the Gazans. "Most of them realized there was a problematic incident here, and it was hard for them to process," he said.

He added: "One of the commanders turned to one of the combat soldiers who tried to receive answers and told him: 'You don't agree that the lives of your friends are much more important than their lives? And isn't it better that our friends will live and not be blown up by an explosive device, and that they get blown up by an explosive device?”

This soldier said that the commander's comment was made with such aggressiveness that it was clear that there was little room for the troops to express doubts.”

Nadav Weiman, executive director of Breaking the Silence – a whistleblower group consisting of former Israeli soldiers who expose IDF atrocities, said in regards to the Mosquito Protocol: "These are not isolated accounts; they point to a systemic failure and a horrifying moral collapse… Israel rightly condemns Hamas for using civilians as human shields, but our own soldiers describe doing the very same.” One soldier recounted to AP News about a 2024 IDF meeting in which a brigade commander presented to the division commander a slide reading "Get a mosquito" and suggested they might "just catch one off the streets.” The same soldier told a horrific story in which a Palestinian was forced into a tunnel as a human shield, he passed out and died.

Another Haaretz report, published in February of 2025, documented a horrific incident of the Mosquito Protocol:

An IDF officer used an 80-year-old Palestinian man as a human shield to inspect houses in Gaza for booby traps, while threatening to blow off his head by tying an IED command-wire to his neck, according to a report Saturday by Israeli independent media outlet "the Hottest Place in Hell.”

The man and his wife were later forced to evacuate south, where a different IDF battalion spotted them and shot them both to death.

The incident took place in Gaza City, in the neighborhood of Zaytoun, in May. According to soldiers who interviewed for the report, the elderly man was forced to inspect neighborhood houses for booby traps, even though he needed a cane to walk.

The soldiers, from the Nahal infantry brigade, spotted the man and his elderly wife in a house in Zaytoun.

"They said that they did not have anywhere to go, and that they were not able to evacuate to Khan Yunis" in the southern Gaza Strip, one of the soldiers said. "The man walked with a cane, and they said that they just could not walk all the way there," he added.

"He entered each house before us, so that if there was a booby trap or a terrorist – then the device would be activated by him, not by us," said a soldier who witnessed the incident.

"The officer tied the [IED] command-wire to the elderly man's neck, so that he would not run away," another soldier said.

After the man was commanded to inspect houses with the squad for eight whole hours, the couple was ordered to evacuate south, to an area dubbed as a humanitarian zone. However, the soldiers said that they didn't update other IDF forces in the vicinity that the couple was about to head south.

"After 100 meters, the other battalion saw them and shot them on the spot. They died like that, on the street," one of the soldiers said.

The IDF said in response that it has yet to hear of the incident. "If more details surface, then another inspection will be undertaken," they said.

And then we have the massacres of starving Gazans as they rushed to food distribution centers, which was clearly exposed in an in-depth article by Haaretz. One Israeli soldier told Haaretz:

"It's a killing field … Where I was stationed, between one and five people were killed every day. They're treated like a hostile force – no crowd-control measures, no tear gas – just live fire with everything imaginable: heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars. Then, once the center opens, the shooting stops, and they know they can approach. Our form of communication is gunfire. … We open fire early in the morning if someone tries to get in line from a few hundred meters away, and sometimes we just charge at them from close range. But there's no danger to the forces … I’m not aware of a single instance of return fire. There's no enemy, no weapons.”

One reservist told Haaretz of the dystopian nightmare:

"Gaza doesn't interest anyone anymore … ”It’s become a place with its own set of rules. The loss of human life means nothing. It's not even an 'unfortunate incident,' like they used to say.”

Another officer said:

"Working with a civilian population when your only means of interaction is opening fire – that's highly problematic, to say the least … It’s neither ethically nor morally acceptable for people to have to reach, or fail to reach, a [humanitarian zone] under tank fire, snipers and mortar shells.”

The Haaretz report also spoke of how private contractors getting paid by Israel to demolish houses for roughly $1,500 per house, and these contractors getting close to the Palestinians coming for food, prompting the IDF to open fire on the crowds:

"Today, any private contractor working in Gaza with engineering equipment receives 5,000 [roughly $1,500] shekels for every house they demolish … They’re making a fortune. From their perspective, any moment where they don't demolish houses is a loss of money, and the forces have to secure their work. The contractors, who act like a kind of sheriff, demolish wherever they want along the entire front. … In order [for the contractors] to protect themselves, a shooting incident breaks out, and people are killed … These are areas where Palestinians are allowed to be – we're the ones who moved closer and decided [they] endangered us. So, for a contractor to make another 5,000 shekels and take down a house, it's deemed acceptable to kill people who are only looking for food."

We can continue to present such horrific events, but this will suffice to shed light upon the horrors of Gaza. The silence of the evangelical zionists of America about the crimes of Israel is an indication of their true religion: fixating on the Jewish race and justifying the crimes of Israel in the name of their genetic gospel.

It is of no surprise that the atrocity of Gaza has enraged the world against Israel. There is very little sympathy for Israel, and when the Jewish state gets bombed, people simply say, ‘This is what you get for Gaza.’ As Israel has used the October 7th massacre to justify its massacre of the Gazans, the haters of the Jews will point to the slaughter of Gaza to justify the destruction of the Jews. All genocides are done under pretexts. The same will be done to justify the next Holocaust: they will say, ‘The Jews are mass murderers and thus deserve to be murdered.’ This will be reminiscent to what the Nazis did when they annihilated the Jews: they argued that because many of the Bolsheviks were Jews, and the Bolsheviks were mass murderers, thus the Jews deserved to be murdered. Just as the Israeli hardliners make ‘Palestinian’ synonymous with ‘terrorist,’ the Nazis made ‘Jew’ synonymous with ‘Bolshevik.’ The praisers of Israel like to say, ‘Israel is fighting mass murderers.’ But, the Nazis were also fighting mass murderers, the Bolsheviks. A government can be murderous while also fighting another murderous state, it still does not justify the former. But this is what sinister people do all the time; they point to the evils of others to justify their own evils.

Absalom was enraged at his father for not punishing Amnon for raping his sister, and he used this fault of David to revolt against him. What Amnon did was evil, and David did wrong not to punish his son, but Absalom used this to justify an evil war against his father which was really done, not for justice, but for his own power. It was evil for the prince of Shechem to rape Dima, but after his people agreed to convert to the religion of Israel, it was evil for Levi and Simeon to, in the name of justice for Dima, break the covenant they had agreed upon and butcher the inhabitants of Shechem. They murdered in the name of justice for their sister, but they plunged themselves in injustice; they slaughtered with a facade of indignation, but spilt innocent blood for the purpose of thievery, for after they butchered those people, “They took their flocks and their herds, their donkeys, and whatever was in the city and in the field. All their wealth, all their little ones and their wives, all that was in the houses, they captured and plundered.” (Genesis 34:28-29)

They murdered those people who had nothing to do with the crime the prince had done, and this was after they had agreed to allow Jacob and his tribe to “dwell in the land and trade in it, for behold, the land is large enough for them.” (Genesis 34:21)

They murdered those people even after they agreed to be circumcised so that the Hebrews could “dwell with us to become one people” (Genesis 34:22) This was the beginning attempt at grafting the gentile world into the rootstock of Israel; here lied the beginning endeavor to unite humanity. But it was thwarted by Levi — the patriarch of the priestly class of Israel — committing to an action that harkens us to what Christ said to the scribes and Pharisees: “you shut the kingdom of heaven in people's faces. For you neither enter yourselves nor allow those who would enter to go in.” (Matthew 23:13-14) They unsheathed their swords to fight a monster, only that they had become monsters. They were suppose to lead the people of Shechem as a shepherd leads his flock, but instead they butchered the sheep. And these same sons of Jacob, were suppose to be watching their flock in Shechem, but instead were conspiring to murder Joseph. Jacob asks Joseph, “Are not your brothers pasturing the flock at Shechem? Come, I will send you to them.” (Genesis 37:13)

And then Jacob tells him: “Go now, see if it is well with your brothers and with the flock, and bring me word.” (Genesis 37:14) But when Joseph arrived at Shechem, his brothers were not there. A man noticed Joseph was searching for something with no avail and asked, “What are you seeking?” “I am seeking my brothers,” he said. “Tell me, please, where they are pasturing the flock.” (Genesis 37:15-16) They were not pasturing their flock at Shechem, but instead were conspiring a murder yet again, just as they were suppose to guide the people of Shechem as a shepherd guides his flock, but instead conspired and committed the murder of those people. The man told Joseph that his brothers were in Dothan, and when he arrived to this area, his brothers “saw him from afar, and before he came near to them they conspired against him to kill him.” (Genesis 37:18) And they said: “Here comes this dreamer. Come now, let us kill him and throw him into one of the pits. Then we will say that a fierce animal has devoured him, and we will see what will become of his dreams.” (Genesis 37:19-20) And what was this dream that drove them to such mad violence?

“Hear this dream that I have dreamed: Behold, we were binding sheaves in the field, and behold, my sheaf arose and stood upright. And behold, your sheaves gathered around it and bowed down to my sheaf.” (Genesis 37:6-7)

Their bundles of wheat — their bread — bowed before his bundle of wheat, his bread. With this are we reminded of that story in the Gospel when Christ and His disciples were harvesting wheat on the Sabbath and the Pharisees protested:

“Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath?” And Christ replied: “Have you never read what David did when he was in need and he and his companions became hungry; how he entered the house of God in the time of Abiathar the high priest, and ate the consecrated bread, which is not lawful for anyone to eat except the priests, and he also gave it to those who were with him?” (Mark 2:25)

If no one else was allowed to eat the consecrated bread except for the priests, then why was it allowed for David to consume such sacred bread? Because it was foreshadowing the rising of a new priesthood. Hence why in the same conversation Christ declared: “But I say to you that something greater than the temple is here.” (Matthew 12:6) And the Disciples were harvesting wheat on the Sabbath, and that is because the bundles of wheat of Christ was above the sacrifice of the Temple, just as the bundles of wheat of Joseph’s brothers bowed down before the sheaf of Joseph. Christ told the descendants of Jacob that something greater than the Temple was on earth, and that was because He was (and is) the fulfillment of the Temple, and He is the fulfillment of the consecrated bread. “Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body.” (Matthew 26:26)

The sheaf in Joseph’s dream, to which his brothers’ sheaves bowed, was Christ. King David ate the consecrated bread, because he was presaging the dawn of a new order. What did David write in his Psalms? “You are a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.” (Psalm 110:4) Melchizedek was the king of the Canaanite city, Salem (before it became Jerusalem under the Israelites), and he was also a priest who offered the sacrifice of bread and wine after Abraham crushed the kings who kidnapped his nephew, Lot. Abraham tithed to Melchizedek a tenth of the spoils he won on the battlefield, and about this event St. Paul writes:

“And those descendants of Levi who receive the priestly office have a commandment in the law to take tithes from the people, that is, from their brothers, though these also are descended from Abraham. But this man [Melchizedek] who does not have his descent from them received tithes from Abraham and blessed him who had the promises. It is beyond dispute that the inferior is blessed by the superior.” (Hebrews 7:5-7)

Levi was a son of Abraham, and his priesthood received the tithes of the Israelites, but Abraham gave tithes to a Canaanite priest and received his blessing. The order of Melchizedek — a Canaanite king — is thus higher than the order of Levi, a mass murderer of the Canaanites of Shechem. The order of Levi — with its shedding of animal blood — bows down before the order of Melchizedek, with its offering of bread, and that bread is Christ. Levi’s bundle of wheat bows down to the sheaf of Joseph, for that wheat was Christ. Abraham was promised a great nation from his seed, but his nation went beyond his tribe and transcended blood relations. Hence why God told Abraham: “in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” (Genesis 12:3)

And the promise of Abraham was not limited to one tribe, but to all of humanity. Hence why St. Paul says: “Now to Abraham and his seed were the promises made. He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ.” (Galatians 3:16) Those who follow, not Levi — the murderer of Canaanites — but Christ — a priest of the Canaanite king Melchizedek — are thus of the seed of Abraham. The promise of Abraham are not limited to race and tribe, but is universal. Levi did not wish to be universal, but rather butchered foreigners who had agreed to be grafted into God’s tabernacle, just as the priests in Christ’s day — the sons of Levi — violated the Temple when they sold merchandize in the Court of the Gentiles, and thus Christ exclaimed to them: “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it a den of robbers.” (Mark 11:17) Christ was quoting Isaiah 56 where it also reads:

“Let not the foreigner who has joined himself to the Lord say,

“The Lord will certainly separate me from His people.”” (Isaiah 56:3)

And surely this is what Levi did to the Canaanites of Shechem, severing their lives away after they had agreed to follow God. What God warned against in Isaiah was done by both Levi and his descendants in the time of Christ, for they placed the letter of the Law above the spirit of the law. “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith.” (Matthew 23:23)

Levi was a mass murderer, and Melchizedek was the King of Salem — that is, the King of Peace. Levi bows before Melchizedek — the Israelite bows before the Canaanite — just as Levi’s sacrifice bows to Joseph’s sheave. When Christ and His Disciples were harvesting wheat on the Sabbath, and the Pharisees objected, Christ harkened back to David consuming the consecrated bread which was only to be eaten by the Levitical priests, as if to tell them: A new priesthood has arisen, a priesthood not of Levi, who was a murderer, but a priesthood of compassion, of Melchizedek, the Prince of Peace. Hence, Christ declared to them in that same conversation: “I tell you, something greater than the temple is here. And if you had known what this means, ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless.” (Matthew 12:6-7) Mercy above sacrifice, this is what was rejected by Levi when he butchered those Canaanites of Shechem. And when Christ says, “I desire mercy, and not sacrifice,” He is specifically quoting Hosea 6, and it is not coincidental that this verse is declared as a condemnation of the Levitical priests — sons of Levi — committing murder on their way to Shechem:

“For I desire mercy and not sacrifice,
And the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings.

“But like men they transgressed the covenant;
There they dealt treacherously with Me.

Gilead is a city of evildoers
And defiled with blood.

As bands of robbers lie in wait for a man,
So the company of priests murder on the way to Shechem;
Surely they commit lewdness.” (Hosea 6:6-9)

Levi — the father of the Levitical priests — murdered in Shechem; these priests — sons of Levi — were murdering on their way to Shechem. And God condemns these sons of Levi when He says: “I desire mercy and not sacrifice”. These words were declared by Christ to the Pharisees, as if to say, ‘Your priesthood — founded by Levi the murderer — and the members of which, committed murder on their way to Shechem, is coming to an end.”

And it was because of Levi’s crime that he received a curse from Jacob:

“Simeon and Levi are brothers;

weapons of violence are their swords.

Let my soul come not into their council;

O my glory, be not joined to their company.

For in their anger they killed men,

and in their willfulness they hamstrung oxen.

Cursed be their anger, for it is fierce,

and their wrath, for it is cruel!

I will divide them in Jacob

and scatter them in Israel.” (Genesis 49:5-7)

In the Jerusalem Targum it renders the curse as being done specifically for the slaughter of the people in Shechem:

“Shimeon and Levi are brothers of the womb; their thoughts are of sharp weapons for rapine. In their counsel my soul hath not had pleasure, and in their gathering against Shekem. to destroy it mine honour was not united; for in their anger they slew the prince and his ruler, and in their ill will they demolished the wall of their adversary.”

The Targum goes on to say that not only was it Simeon and Levi who butchered the people of Shechem, but that it was these two who wanted to murder Joseph, and that the curse of being scattered was specifically laid upon Levi:

"And Jakob said, Accursed was the town of Shekem, when they entered within it to destroy it in their violent wrath; and their hatred against Joseph, for it was relentless. If, said Jakob, they dwell together, no king nor ruler may stand before them. Therefore will I divide the inheritance of the sons of Shimeon into two portions; one part shall come to them out of the inheritance of the sons of Jehuda, and one part from among the rest of the tribes of Jakob; and the tribe of Levi I will disperse among all the tribes of Israel.”

From this we can see that the curse of being dispersed was given to Levi. That curse was finally fulfilled when the priesthood of Levi was destroyed by Rome’s destruction of the Temple. With the destruction of the Temple came the dismantling of the priesthood. “Verily I say unto you, there shall not be left here one stone upon another that shall not be thrown down.” (Matthew 24:2) The Levitical priesthood’s demise was foretold, and as the beloved Temple of the sons of Levi lied engulfed in flames, with the smoke billowing to the sky, high priests (sons of Levi) begged for their lives before the Roman military commander Titus who declared to them that since their Temple was crushed, their priesthood had been toppled. As Josephus documented:

“On the fifth day afterward the priests that were pined with the famine came down; and when they were brought to Titus by the guards, they begged for their lives. But he replied, that “The time of pardon was over, as to them: and that this very holy house, on whose account only they could justly hope to be preserved, was destroyed: and that it was agreeable to their office that priests should perish with the house it self to which they belonged.” So he ordered them to be put to death.” (Wars, 6.1.1)

The priesthood of Levi died, but the priesthood of Melchizedek lives forever. Abraham belonged not to the priesthood of Levi — a butcher of Canaanites — but to the order of Melchizedek, for “because when Melchizedek met Abraham, Levi was still in the body of his ancestor.” (Hebrews 7:10) And of whose seed is the Church? Is it not of Abraham’s? “If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.” (Galatians 3:29) If the seed of Abraham is Christ, then why are we indulging in a genetic gospel that is fixated on bloodlines? People will claim to be of the bloodline of Abraham, but Christ did not see fleshy sons of Abraham as necessarily true sons of Abraham. In one conversation that Christ had with a crowd of Jews, He says: “I know that you are offspring of Abraham; yet you seek to kill me because my word finds no place in you.” (John 8:37) In just a moment later, Christ tells them that they are not sons of Abraham:

“They answered him, “Abraham is our father.” Jesus said to them, “If you were Abraham's children, you would be doing the works Abraham did, but now you seek to kill me, a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God. This is not what Abraham did.” (John 8:39-40)

So Christ recognizes them as sons of Abraham, but then says they are not sons of Abraham because of their evil. So Christ is making a distinction between fleshy sons of Abraham and true sons of Abraham. “Know then that it is those of faith who are the sons of Abraham.” (Galatians 3:7) We must say with St. Paul: “not all are children of Abraham because they are his offspring” (Romans 9:7) We are not sons of Levi — the murderer — but of Abraham, a member of the order of Melchizedek which transcends all bloodlines. But the hardliners of Israel make themselves into sons of Levi, into the sons of a dead and cursed priesthood. Today, the murderous act of Simeon and Levi is praised by fanatical rabbis. The Orthodox rabbi Hanan Porat, wrote of the Gaza war and applied it to it the Simeon and Levi massacre:

“Our people have an unhealthy and dishonorable tendency to think that "restraint is strength." Therefore, it is necessary that the fighting spirit of Shimon and Levi be spread throughout the nation.”

Even though the people of Shechem agreed to convert to the faith of Israel, and even went so far as to get circumcised, there is still a major rabbinic interpretation that says it was justified to butcher them. Their justification is that the slaughter of the Shechemites was “a war.” This way of thinking is influenced by the major Jewish authority, the sixteenth century rabbi, Judah Loeb (better known the Maharal):

“Shechem may have sinned, but the whole town, how had they sinned such that they deserved to die? But it seems that this is not at all problematic, for they were two separate peoples, Israelites and Canaanites… and it is permissible to engage in battle when one nations sets out to make war against another.”

Therefore, according to this rabbi’s way of thinking, covenant breaking and mass murder are permissible, even when your enemy has agreed to convert to your religion, as long as the crimes are done under the pretext of “war.” Even Abraham asked God to spare Sodom and Gomorrah if there were ten righteous people in those cities, and God replied: “I will not destroy it for ten's sake.” (Genesis 18:32) The people who praise Levi’s slaughter do not follow Abraham; for they do not follow Abraham’s seed — Christ — but rather they follow Levi against whom Jacob exclaimed:

“Let my soul come not into their council;

O my glory, be not joined to their company.

For in their anger they killed men” (Genesis 49:6)

They follow Levi and not Abraham, and with this we are reminded of the conversation that Christ had with a group of Jews. They told Christ “Abraham is our father”, and Jesus said to them, “If you were Abraham's children, you would be doing the works Abraham did” (John 8:9). Abraham desired to spare those who were not involved in the evil of Sodom, and Levi sought out to butcher even those who had agreed to convert to his faith. Is the latter the way of Abraham? Obviously not. But those who use the works of Levi to justify murder in Gaza, follow Levi and not Abraham. Not all are children of Abraham because they are his offspring (Romans 9:7)

When the war in Gaza began, the Israeli poet, Yehudah Weisen, wrote a poem calling for the destruction of Gaza, harkening back to Levi and Simeon, and going so far as to say that Jacob was wrong to condemn them:

“Simon and Levi

Dear, dear,

Simon and Levi, the beloved –

Their father was wrong and they were right,

Simon and Levi are the beloved.

This is a Jewish law that was born with Dinah,

This is the good Hebrew hand.

Once with a sword, today with D9 –

And just as it is, so too will your strength be lost.”

An Israeli soldier named Eli Shraga, wrote a poem and placed it onto an APC. It reads:

“Here in this APC

I am Shimon and Levi my brother.

And our sister Dina

If you see our cousin

This mother's son

Tell him we are

Coming”

Rabbi Moshe Hager, a famous teacher who was head of the pre-military preparatory school in Beitar and a colonel in the reserves, explained in 2012 that it was Simeon and Levi who were the correct ones while Jacob was preoccupied with international criticism:

"Our father Yaakov is afraid of international pressure on him and his family. Maimonides, as quoted by Rabbi Aviner, actually rules that Shimon and Levi made the right move.”

Yair Ben David, a commander in the 2908th Battalion, declared in a military speech in December of 2023:

“Battalion 2908 entered Beit Hanoun and did in Beit Hanoun what Levi and Shimon did in the city of Shechem. But the task is not finished; the mission is not over… We must do in Gaza what we did in Beit Hanoun … With God’s help, every Shechem and every city that dares to raise its head against the people of Israel will look like Beit Hanoun.”

The spirt of Levi possesses Israel. There is a sinister drive — influenced by the abysmal spirits — to lead mankind away from Melchizedek and into the fold of Levi. The return to Levi is a return to his murderousness. To walk the path of Melchizedek, is to join an eternal priesthood that continues forever (Hebrews 7:24). To concern oneself with Levi, is to concern oneself with genealogy, to fixate on the bloodline of Abraham. But, to be in the priesthood of Melchizedek is to do away with the fixation on race or genes. The Levitical priesthood had to descend from Levi, but Melchizedek was the king of Salem which, at the time of Abraham, was a Canaanite city. What does Noah say of Canaan?

“Cursed be Canaan;
a servant of servants shall he be to his brothers.” (Genesis 9:25)

The priesthood of our Salvation comes from Canaan, and its patriarch — Melchizedek — was (as we read in Josephus) a Canaanite chief. Canaan was deemed to be a servant, but Christ was a servant. If the priesthood of humanity’s Redemption came from “a servant of servants,” and not from the prestigious tribe of Levi, then in the Ark of Salvation, tribal hierarchy is rendered to nothing. Abraham was of the line of Shem to whom Canaan was to be a “servant of servants”, and yet Abraham gives tithes to a Canaanite, and he receives the sacrifice of bread and wine from the same Canaanite. Shem bows in respect to Canaan; the master gives his spoils to the servant; the offering of the lowly is embraced by the lofty.

“And those descendants of Levi who receive the priestly office have a commandment in the law to take tithes from the people, that is, from their brothers, though these also are descended from Abraham. But this man who does not have his descent from them received tithes from Abraham and blessed him who had the promises.” (Hebrews 7:5-6)

In the priesthood of Melchizedek, racial hierarchy is dismantled. Jerusalem is declared a holy city by Christian zionists because of its Jewish inhabitants, but Melchizedek was a priest of God and a king of Jerusalem (Salem) before the Jews even existed. Then Melchizedek king of Salem brought out bread and wine; he was the priest of God Most High. (Genesis 14:18) If Jerusalem was a holy city before the Jews and while it was inhabited by Canaanites — servants of servants — then there is a universality in the sacredness of Jerusalem, beyond bloodlines and earthiness. In Salem also is His tabernacle, And His dwelling place in Zion. (Psalm 76:2) When Jerusalem was lived in by Canaanites and under the holy king Melchizedek, it was still holy. But when Joshua entered Canaan, Jerusalem was under an evil Canaanite king named Adonizedek and Joshua went to war against Jerusalem. Was Jerusalem holy then? Obviously not. Absalom desired to murder his father David and rule over Jerusalem, and when a messenger told David: “The hearts of the men of Israel are with Absalom”, David told all his servants who were with him at Jerusalem, “Arise, and let us flee, or we shall not escape from Absalom.” (2 Samuel 15:13-14) He flees Jerusalem, knowing that the hearts of the men of Israel are with Absalom. And Absalom came into Jerusalem (2 Samuel 15:37). It also says: “Meanwhile Absalom and all the people, the men of Israel, came to Jerusalem.” (2 Samuel 16:15)

Was Jerusalem holy then? It was under Israelites, but wicked Israelites. Jerusalem was holy when it was under Melchizedek, a Canaanite king, but wicked when it was under Adonizedek, a Canaanite. Jerusalem was holy when it was under David, but not under Absalom. So why should we fixate on a physical city that — like all cities — wavers between good and evil? The holiness of Jerusalem is not about race, but a physical sign of the universality of heavenly Jerusalem. Israel declared war on David, and which of these was of heavenly Jerusalem? Obviously the latter. And while Israel was with Absalom, who was with David? A remnant of Israel and a large body of Philistines, one of the great enemies of Israel. David fled Jerusalem, and who came with him? “All his men marched past him, along with all the Kerethites and Pelethites; and all the six hundred Gittites who had accompanied him from Gath marched before the king.” (2 Samuel 15:18) All of these peoples were Philistines. And how does the Bible describe the battle between David, his Gentile army and Absalom and his Israelite army? “So the people went out into the field of battle against Israel.” (2 Samuel 18:6) David warred against Israel. And who was spiritual Israel? And which one of these truly mattered? God did not care for earthly Israel, for He sided with a diverse army of both Jew and Gentile against the whole of Israel and Jerusalem.

The holiness of Jerusalem transcends the earth and tribe; it transcends hierarchy and race. Our focus on Jerusalem is thus not confined to an earthly city, but to a universal one — a city of God. “But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem” (Hebrews 12:22). It is in this Jerusalem where we find Melchizedek’s priesthood, outside of the bloodlines of the Jews, outside of the fixation on genetics and tribes.

“For it is evident that our Lord was descended from Judah, and in connection with that tribe Moses said nothing about priests. This becomes even more evident when another priest arises in the likeness of Melchizedek, who has become a priest, not on the basis of a legal requirement concerning bodily descent, but by the power of an indestructible life.” (Hebrews 7:14-16)

To go back to the fixation on race, is to return to Levi who refused to accept Canaan into his tribe and chose rather to murder him than to embrace him. Abraham embraces Canaan and accepts the sacrifice of bread and wine from the uncircumcised Melchizedek; Levi rejects the circumcision of Canaan, kills him and robs him. The crime was so great that Jacob (Israel) never forgot it, and in his dying last breaths, exclaimed of Simeon and Levi: “Let my soul come not into their council; O my glory, be not joined to their company.” (Genesis 49:6) There is a mentality that too many people have when it comes to the Bible: they read a verse and think, ‘this is it, everything has been explained,’ and they go on to have an unstable view of Christianity. ‘The Bible says that Canaan will be a servant of servants, thus Canaan is endlessly condemned.’ But the Canaanites of Gibeon sought out Joshua to make a covenant with him.

Yes, they lied to Joshua and said that they were from a far away land, to make it seem as if they were not of Canaan; and yes, Joshua did make a covenant with them while he was deceived. This is all true. But, when Joshua found out that he was lied to, he could have said, ‘You made a covenant with us under false pretenses, and for this you should be destroyed.’ But instead, Joshua honored the covenant. Unlike Levi who butchered the Canaanites of Shechem after they had agreed to be circumcised as a covenant to Jacob’s God, Joshua honored the covenant. Even after the people of Israel complained against the rulers of Israel (Joshua 9:18), wanting bloodshed as Levi wanted blood, the rulers said to them, “We have sworn to them by the Lord God of Israel; now therefore, we may not touch them.” (Joshua 9:19) The Canaanites of Gibeon lied to Joshua, but they lied for the sake of attaining mercy, and mercy was given to them. “For I desire mercy and not sacrifice” (Hosea 6:6). The people of Israel did not want mercy, but death.

They had a viciously black and white view of things: ‘God told us to exterminate the Canaanites, these people of Gibeon are Canaanites and they lied to us. Therefore they must die.’ But mercy was given. The letter of the law was not extremely abided to, rather the spirit of the law was upheld. “For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others.” (Matthew 23:23) Even in the midst of this war of extermination, mercy prevailed. Joshua was still upset that the Canaanites of Gibeon had lied to him, and so he said to them:

“Why have you deceived us, saying, ‘We are very far from you,’ when you dwell near us?Now therefore, you are cursed, and none of you shall be freed from being slaves—woodcutters and water carriers for the house of my God.” (Joshua 9:22-23)

The Canaanite king of Jerusalem, Adonizedek, and his fellow Canaanite allies, did not wish to have peace with Joshua, but rather they “gathered together and went up, they and all their armies, and camped before Gibeon and made war against it.” (Joshua 10:5) The Canaanites of Gibeon begged Joshua to fight for them against these Canaanites, crying out: “Do not forsake your servants” (Joshua 10:6). Joshua did not hesitate, and war was done in the defense of Canaanite servants. Yes, Noah said, “Cursed be Canaan”; yes, Noah said that Canaan will be a servant of servants to Shem. But here, Shem serves Canaan. Shem risks his life in the battlefield for Canaan. Levi made a covenant with the Canaanites of Shechem; broke the covenant and spilled innocent blood. Joshua made a covenant with the Canaanites of Gibeon, but served them. Abraham — a son of Shem — bows in respect to Melchizedek.

And what of the battle for the people of Gibeon? The sun and moon stood still, and "there has been no day like that, before it or after it, that the Lord heeded the voice of a man; for the Lord fought for Israel.” (Joshua 10:14) The battle that has no rival, no comparison, was one in which Shem fought for Canaan. The Israelites grumbled against Joshua for not killing the Canaanites of Gibeon, but Joshua became their salvation, and “delivered them out of the hand of the people of Israel, and they did not kill them.” (Joshua 9:26) The people of Israel demanded the blood of these Canaanites after Joshua had made a covenant of peace with them, just as Levi desired butchery after making a covenant with the Canaanites of Shechem. Levi believed that he was imposing justice — telling his father, “Should he have treated our sister like a prostitute?” (Genesis 34:31) The Israelites wanted to enact their own form of justice when they murmured against the leaders (Joshua 9:18) for preventing them from slaughtering the Canaanites of Gibeon. And then what happened next? The king of Jerusalem, Adonizedek, encamped against Gibeon and made war against it. (Joshua 10:5)

What does Adonizedek mean? God of justice. Adonizedek believed he was imposing justice by waring against the Canaanites of Gibeon, just as the Israelites believed they were just when they demanded the blood of these same Canaanites, and just as Levi esteemed himself as just when he butchered the Canaanites of Shechem. But in this case, mercy prevailed over the justice of tyrants. Without mercy, there is no justice, only tyranny. The tyrant will always find a pretext to commit genocide to make the slaughter appear justified. Absalom pointed to David not bringing Amnon to justice for the rape of Tamar as a justification to overthrow David; Levi pointed to the rape of Dina to justify the butchering of the people in Shechem; and all the Israeli soldiers who commit atrocities will point to the crimes of October 7th to justify their inhumanities. The Israelites pointed to the command of God Himself to destroy the Canaanites as justification to exterminate the Canaanites of Gibeon, but mercy prevailed. “For I desire mercy, not sacrifice” (Hosea 6:6).

And so the king of Jerusalem, whose name was “god of justice,” saw himself as just when pursuing the Canaanites of Gibeon for slaughter. But it was the justice of tyrants, the one that demands bloodshed even of the innocent. Even though God did command the destruction of all Canaanites, mercy was to be observed with the Canaanites of Gibeon for the covenant they had made with Joshua. The Israelites demanded blood, but mercy was held aloft above everything. They could have said, ‘This covenant was done under false pretenses, and God ordered that we destroy these people.’ This is exactly what was done by the tyrant King Saul when in his zeal for the people of Israel and Judah he sought to strike down the Canaanites of Gibeon (2 Samuel 21:2) Saul had zeal for his tribe and forsook mercy. And here lies the demarcation between earthly Israel and spiritual Israel: one is committed to blood and the other to mercy. Surly, Saul thought that he was justified to kill these people of Gibeon — just like Adonizedek (the god of justice) wanted to destroy them — and surely he pointed to the commandment of God to destroy these people in the Torah. But mercy prevailed. Israel wanted nationalist justice, but God cursed them with a famine for three years. And when David asked God why this famine was occurring, God told him: “There is bloodguilt on Saul and on his house, because he put the Gibeonites to death.” (2 Samuel 21:1)

David went to the Gibeonites and asked: “What shall I do for you? And how shall I make atonement, that you may bless the heritage of the Lord?” (2 Samuel 21:3) Here Shem serves Canaan. Here, Shem seeks a blessing from Canaan, just as Abraham sought the blessing of Melchizedek, a priest of Canaan. And what does St. Paul say of this? It is beyond dispute that the inferior is blessed by the superior. (Hebrews 7:7) The Gibeonites told David: “It is not a matter of silver or gold between us and Saul or his house; neither is it for us to put any man to death in Israel.” But David persisted: “What do you say that I shall do for you?” (2 Samuel 21:4) Here, Shem persists on serving Canaan to receive his blessing. The Canaanites of Gibeon told David: “The man who consumed us and planned to destroy us, so that we should have no place in all the territory of Israel, let seven of his sons be given to us, so that we may hang them before the Lord at Gibeah of Saul, the chosen of the Lord.” And the king said, “I will give them.” (2 Samuel 21:5-6) Here, Shem turns over seven of his own countrymen to Canaan for justice to be imposed. Here, Shem serves Canaan to receive his blessing. Yes, Joshua did tell the Gibeonites that they were to be servants to Israel, laboring as “cutters of wood and drawers of water for the congregation and for the altar of the Lord” (Joshua 9:27)

But what did Christ say? whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave—just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” (Matthew 20:26-28) It is true that Noah exclaimed: “Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be to his brothers.” (Genesis 9:25) But David seeks a blessing from the Gibeonites, Abraham seeks a blessing from Melchizedek, the Canaanite priest, and Christ the Messiah is of the Order of Melchizedek. The Canaanites of Shechem made a covenant with Jacob and God and got circumcised, and “on the third day, when they were sore, two of the sons of Jacob, Simeon and Levi, Dinah's brothers, took their swords and came against the city while it felt secure and killed all the males.” (Genesis 34:25)

Joshua made a covenant with the Canaanites of Gibeon, and at “the end of three days after they had made a covenant with them” the Israelites found out that they were their neighbors and had lied about being from a faraway land (Joshua 9:16), but Joshua “delivered them out of the hand of the people of Israel” (Joshua 9:26). Christ, a priest of the Canaanite Order of Melchizedek, was murdered by earthly Israel, and on the third day, humanity was delivered from perdition. The reverse of what Levi did, was done by Joshua, and what Joshua did foreshadowed what Christ would do. A return to earthly Israel is a return to Levi and a rejection of Abraham, a disciple of Melchizedek. Thus, when king Saul butchered the Gibeonites, he was following his predecessor, Levi. This spirit of Levi breaks covenants and commits mass murder.

The world saw this spirit manifest itself in the year 1982, in the slaughter of the Sabra and Shatilla neighborhoods. The killings lasted for four days. Women were ravished, babies were murdered, and mounds of bodies were made. The killers were Maronites, or members of the Lebanese branch of the Catholic Church, and they were backed by the Israeli government. After an agreement was brokered by the US government, the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization) agreed to leave the Sabra and Shatila camps. The remainder of the population in these camps were almost entirely unarmed civilians, leaving many women, children and elderly at the mercy of bloodthirsty nationalists who were trained and armed by the Israeli government. The Maronite nationalists, with the green light of Israel, rushed into the camps, and almost immediately began slaughtering and raping. Just as the men of Shechem were left defenseless after they had made a covenant with Israel, the civilians of Sabra and Shatila were left defenseless after the Palestinian fighters agreed to leave the camps.

The Sabra and Shatila massacres began on September 16th and continued on into the 19th, in the year 1982. It was after Israel’s second operation in Lebanon, called Operation Peace in Galilee, which was launched on June 6th. Its stated objective was to establish an Israeli military presence within twenty-five miles of the Israeli border. But it quickly escalated in its aim. By June 13th, Israeli forces led by Defense Minister Ariel Sharon had advanced all the way to Baabda, the seat of the Lebanese presidency. This was also the headquarters for the PLO, and so Israel had trapped thousands of PLO combatants. Moreover, the Israeli army was completely surrounding West Beirut at this point. Israel was succeeding in its goal of, in the words of Sharon, “ridding the world of the center of international terrorism.” This meant the elimination of the PLO headquarters and infrastructure in West Beirut. The PLO was putting up a tenacious fight; the Israelis lost 368 men during the fight for West Beirut. However, the Israelis were winning by a landslide. In the first three months of Israel’s invasion, 17,825 Arabs were killed in all the areas occupied by Israeli forces. In West Beirut, 2,461 were killed from air strikes. By midsummer the PLO was in negotiations led by US envoy Philip Habib to end the siege.

Israel wanted the PLO to leave Lebanon. But the PLO was concerned about the fate of the civilian population in the camps. An agreement was finally made in mid-August. Part of the agreement was that the PLO would withdraw its more than 11,000 fighters out of Lebanon. This evacuation would be superintended by a multinational force that would leave within thirty days of its arrival. The agreement also entailed written guarantees for the security of the Palestinian civilians in the camps, personally signed by America’s representative in the negotiation, Philip Habib. The evacuation of the PLO fighters began on August 21st and ended on September 1st. By September 10th, the American, Italian and French troops who had overseen the withdrawal had left Lebanon.

Besides having the PLO removed, the Israelis also wanted to establish a government friendly towards Israel and saw Maronite Catholic militants as the ideal people to take hold of the state. Shortly after civil war broke out in Lebanon in March of 1975, Israel began collaborating with Maronite paramilitaries who were fighting the PLO, especially the Phalangists, far-right nationalists led by Bashir Gemayel. Ever since 1976, the Israelis had trained, armed and supplied the cadres and top lieutenants of these nationalist fighters. On top of this, Israel helped create a Lebanese border militia called Army of Free Lebanon, under the command of renegade Lebanese army major Saad Haddad.

The candidate that Israel wanted to lead Lebanon was Bashir Gemayel, a ruthless thug who had no qualms in butchering not only fellow Maronite rivals, but their family members as well (his gunmen forced his political enemy, Tony Frangieh, and his wife Vera, to watch the shooting of their infant daughter Jihane, then made him watch the murder of his wife, before killing him). Gemayel was very popular amongst the Maronite population and garnered a cult of personality for himself. On August 23rd, as the PLO was moving out, Bashir Gemayel was elected president of Lebanon. Israel immediately pressed him to sign a peace treaty with the Israeli government. But Gemayel resisted this. On September 14th, a week before he was suppose to assume office, Gemayel was killed by a bomb at the Phalange party headquarters in East Beirut. The perpetrator turned out to be Habib Shartouni, a Maronite Catholic who was also a member of a Syrian nationalist organization called the Syrian Social Nationalist Party.

Israel’s Minister of Defense at the time, Ariel Sharon, did not hesitate to blame the PLO on the killing of Gemayel, even though the PLO at that point had fully evacuated Lebanon. On the evening of the assassination, Sharon declared that Gemayel’s killing “symbolizes the terrorist murderousness threatening all people of peace from the hands of PLO terrorist organizations and their supporters.” Even though the killer was a fellow Maronite, the Maronite nationalists wanted to believe that it was the Palestinians who killed their beloved leader. According to Washington Post correspondent Jonathan Randal, Gemayel’s men were “only too willing to listen to the Israelis’ insistent argument that the Palestinians in the camps had killed Bashir and should pay.” The entire narrative of the PLO killing Gemayel was based on a lie, a lie that would instigate a lake of blood. As the saying goes, a lie can travel around the world before the truth can even get its shoes on. The lie had traveled like a demon, and possessed the souls of those who believed the lie and who thirsted for blood.

Within hours of the announcement of Gemayel’s death, Sharon and Prime Minister Menachem Begin decided to enter West Beirut. They did not consult the Israeli cabinet, and only told Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir of their deployment of troops. They did this despite an agreement with the US not to do such a move. According to Israeli journalist Amnon Kapelouk, this particular operation of entering Lebanon was meticulously planed long in advance. Thus, the death of Bashir Gemayel was merely used (albeit dishonestly) as a justification to enter Lebanon and use the Phalangists as proxies.

That evening, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) chief of staff General Rafael Eitan arrived in Beirut. Some hours later, at 3:00 in the morning, September 15th, Eitan, Major General Amir Drori, head of Israel’s northern command, and other Israeli officers met with Phalangist military leaders, including Fadi Frem, the militia’s new commander in chief, and Elie Hobeika, chief of intelligence. It was during this meeting that using the Phalangists in the Palestinian camps was discussed. Sharon’s instructions (presented as testimony to the Kahan Commission of Inquiry which was set up after the massacre) stressed that “Only one element, and that is the IDF, shall command the forces in the area. For the operation in the camps, the Phalangists should be sent in.”

Chief of Staff Eitan explained that while the IDF would not go into the camps, the Phalangists would be sent in “with their own methods.” The reason why the Israelis chose to work with the Phalangists, according to Eitan, was because “we could give them orders whereas it was impossible to give orders to the Lebanese Army.” Israel’s military entry into Lebanon commenced just about twelve hours after Gemayel’s death. Israeli Phantom jets flew over Beirut, Israeli gunboats took positions to shell the city, and tanks and troops advanced. The PLO was absent, which meant that resistance came only from the Lebanese Nationalist Movement (a coalition of Islamist and left-wing forces), and it was occasional and not very strong (this is indicated in the fact that Israel lost only seven soldiers during this operation). Sharon arrived in Beirut at around 9 AM to supervise the operation. By noon time, Israeli forces completely surrounded the camps of Sabra and Shatila. Now it was time for the “nests of terrorists” to be dealt with in “combing operations.”

This meant unleashing the rage of the Maronite nationalists. There were meetings that were held throughout the day between Phalangist commanders like Frem and Hobeika, and top Israeli military officials such as Chief of Staff Eitan, Major General Drori, head of military intelligence General Yehoshua Saguy and Brigadier General Amos Yaron. Yaron used photos to coordinate details for the Phalangist entry into the camps. There was also a warning “not to harm civilians.” At around 4 PM, 1,500 Maronite nationalists (Phalangists accompanied with militiamen from Saad Haddad’s Free Lebanon Forces) travelled from the Beirut International Airport on IDF-supplied jeeps towards the camps. If this operation was not intended to be a massacre, then what was the point of sending in militants into civilian populated districts?

On Thursday, September 16th, they entered the camps armed with knives, hatchets and firearms. The slaughter commenced almost immediately. They broke inside homes, slit throats, hacked people to death with axes, shot and raped people. For those who think these Maronites were fighting for a Christian cause, then explain what this has to do with Christianity? Almost nobody fought back because the camp was now full of unarmed civilians, many of them being women, children and elderly. The only people who fought back were those who owned some personal firearms.

When the sun went down, the Israelis made sure to fire nonstop flares into the night sky, so that the Maronites could see. The Israeli soldiers who were outside the camps were told that their mission was to fight terrorists. Did they know that they were firing flares so that the Phalangists could prolong the slaughter into the night? By 8 PM that night (just three hours after the Maronites bursted through the camps) a Phalangist representative reported to the Israeli officers at the forward command post, including General Yaron, that three hundred people — including civilians — had been killed so far. Forty minutes later, a briefing was held by Yaron. In the taped transcript of the briefing (which was included in the Kahan Report) the IDF divisional intelligence officer said that the Phalangists within the camp “are pondering what to do with the population they are finding inside. On the one hand, it seems, there are no terrorists there. . . . On the other hand, they have amassed women, children, and apparently also old people, with whom they don’t exactly know what to do.” When he began to cite a conversation with a Phalangist making clear that these people were going to be slaughtered, he was cut off by General Yaron.

When Friday morning — September 17th — arrived, rumors of nightmarish massacres had begun to spread from the mouths of medical personal, film crews, and refugees who managed to escape to the Gaza and Akka hospitals. IDF soldiers were ordered to seal off the exits, and there were even soldiers who pushed civilians, trying to flee, back inside. But because there were some soldiers who were so heartbroken by what was happening inside, they let people escape. Soldiers who were in an armored unit 100 meters from the camp witnessed groups of civilians being mass executed. IDF soldiers who were questioned later also spoke of how there was this absence of the “sounds of combat.”

At 11:30 AM, General Yaron (under orders from General Drori) ordered the Phalangist comanders to advance no further. Chief of Staff Eitan, being informed that the Phalangists had maybe “gone too far”, returned to Beirut from Tel Aviv. Drori, Eitan, Yaron and a Mossad representative, met together at the Phalangist headquarters in East Beirut. According to the minutes of the meeting (recorded by the Mossad representative), Chief of Staff Eitan “expressed his positive impression received from the statement by the Phalangist forces and their behavior in the field” and decided that they could continue their “mopping up” action until 5:00 A .M .

Regardless of the orders to advance no further, the slaughter did not slow down and the butchers were now told that they could continue on in satisfying their bloodlust. On went the executions — people shot at point blank range —, on went the gutting, on went the raping and the carnage. And as this horror transpired, bulldozers were seen scooping up corpses, their limbs and entrails hanging from the edges of their blades. It was like something out of the Holocaust, when mounds of bodies were pushed by tractors into pits. Only this was not the 1940s. This was 1982, and the murderers were being backed by the world’s only Jewish government. A batch of humans would be lined up, executed, and then the bulldozer would destroy a house and the debris was used to bury the corpses. The process was then repeated.

At midnight the killing stopped, only to be resumed at 5 AM (the time the Israelis and Phalange had agreed to cease the killing). At around 7:00 A .M ., Maronite militiamen had gone to the Gaza hospital north of Sabra, and murdered the Arab personnel on the spot. The Maronite nationalists attacked another hospital, the Akka hospital. According to the New York Times, who spoke with an Asian doctor who was at the hospital during the massacre:

“Most people were either in hiding or had fled. Early Friday, at Akka Hospital, according to the Asian doctor, a young boy came rushing in, saying that his mother had been knifed and his sister taken away by militiamen.

At about this time, the people in the hospital shelter were unable to control their fear any longer and almost all of them fled the hospital in a panic, scattering in all directions. What happened to some of them is not known.

The Asian doctor said that in addition to himself, the only medical personnel left behind at Akka Hospital were five Palestinian staff members and six foreign nurses. He said there were also some patients in their rooms. None of them could walk.

At about 10:20 A.M., witnesses said, militiamen came to the hospital. Speaking Arabic in a southern Lebanese dialect, the witnesses said, they ordered everyone to come out with their hands up.

Three foreign nurses left the hospital under a white flag, according to the Asian doctor. He said they were accompanied by a Palestinian physician who worked at the hospital, Mohammed Ali Osman.

As they were leaving, a shot rang out, and the Palestinian doctor fell to the ground, dead. At 2 P.M. Friday, a different group of militiamen came, wearing different uniforms, according to the Asian doctor. He said they started to molest one of the Lebanese nurses, whose name was Friyal. They stopped after she started screaming.

“Shortly after that we went down to the shelter,” the doctor said, ”and found that one of the Palestinian nurses down there had been raped repeatedly and then shot.” He identified her as Intisar Ismail, 19 years old.

At approximately 3:45 P.M., witnesses say, yet another group of militiamen arrived at the Akka Hospital. Their arrival suggested to the Asian doctor that there was very little coordination between these men, especially since they all tended to ask the same question. The militiamen said they wanted to see the nurses. He told the men that the nurses had all fled.

At this point, according to the doctor, the militiamen asked to search the hospital. During the course of their work, they found a photograph of Yasir Arafat in the Asian doctor’s room.

“You are a terrorist,” one of the militiamen said to him.

At that point, the doctor said, he began to beg for his life. He was told to bring the nurses back to the hospital by 7 P.M., or else, the militiamen said, they would blow his head off.

Fortunately for the physician, by about 5 P.M. Friday, an International Red Cross convoy made it to the hospital and evacuated everyone left there. The doctor said that at about 5:30 P.M., as he was leaving the facility for safety, he saw at the southern end of Shatila what he estimated to be 80 to 90 bodies. They had been mixed together with sand and were being pushed by bulldozers.”

Thousands were butchered in this nightmare. Israeli journalist Amnon Kapeliouk gives a rough estimate of 3,000 to 3,500 dead.”

The French journalist, Pierre Pean, did an in depth inquiry into the Sabra and Shatila massacre and was so traumatized by what he found that he later wrote:

“Throughout my investigation, I was paralyzed by these stories that carry, tangled, children with their throats cut or impaled, women's bellies cut open with their fetuses, heads and limbs cut off with axes, piles of corpses... To the point of nausea.”

Pean spoke with a survivor of the massacre, Oum Chawki, who described how her husband was taken away from her, how the Maronite militiamen ripped the earrings from her daughter’s earlobes and how she witnessed a pile of corpses:

There was a knock at the door of the house. Someone said, "We're Lebanese, we've come to search for weapons..." “My husband opened the door, not particularly worried, because he didn't belong to any militant organization. He worked at the golf club near the airport.” Chawki then talks about the three Israeli soldiers and a soldier from the Lebanese Forces, the right-wing Christian militias, who entered the house, took her daughter's bracelets and ripped off her earrings—she shows the torn lobe of one of her ears—and beat them.

“We were put into a van, which drove to the entrance of the Shatila camp. The soldiers separated the men from the women and children. The Lebanese man took the papers of three of our cousins before shooting them dead in front of us. My husband, my son, and other cousins were taken away by the Israelis. The women and children set off on foot towards the Sports City. On the side of the road, women screamed and cried, claiming that all the men had been killed.”

A sobbing woman, who had lost her entire family, showed her where the bodies were being dumped. The two women then walked towards the Orsal neighborhood and stepped over dead Lebanese, Syrian, and Palestinians. Mrs. Chawki said she saw hundreds of them. It was indeed the Orsal district which had the most victims.

“—They were unrecognizable. Their faces were deformed, swollen… I saw twenty-eight bodies from the same Lebanese family, including two disemboweled women… I was trying to spot the clothes of my son and my husband. I searched all day. I came back again the next day… I didn't recognize any of the bodies of people from Bir Hassan.”

Mrs. Chawki saw Lebanese soldiers digging pits to push the bodies into... She never found the bodies of her husband and son. She finds it more difficult to deal with the case of her daughter, who was raped.

Siham Balkis, another survivor of the massacre, recounted what she saw in the aftermath of the first wave of butchery:

“There were many corpses in the streets. Young girls with their hands tied. Destroyed houses. Tanks, probably Israeli. The remains of a baby embedded in the tracks of one of them. Before arriving at the Sports City, the men were separated. Soldiers asked the young men to crawl. Those who crawled well were considered fighters and shot by soldiers from the Lebanese Forces.”

Palestinians were not the only victims of the killing spree. Kemla Mhanna, who survived the massacre, recounted with nightmarish detail how there were many Lebanese who were butchered alongside the Palestinians:

“All the people from our neighborhood who remained were murdered. Mostly Lebanese. When I came back, a pile of bodies was piled up. Next to my house, a Palestinian was hanging from a butcher's hook, cut in two like a sheep. I saw how, in the large pit, they placed a first layer of corpses on which they spread sand, then another layer of corpses, and so on... I also saw another Lebanese from the Orsal neighborhood, Hamad Chamas, one of the few survivors of the massacre in that neighborhood. He was in a shelter when two Israelis arrived in a Jeep and seven or eight soldiers. I'm sure these soldiers were Israeli because they wore Israeli uniforms and didn't speak proper Arabic. The soldiers asked us to leave the shelter while insulting us. They ordered me to put down the child I was holding and line up with the others. One of them, who spoke good Arabic, searched everyone and took one of the men's money, then they all shot at us. I was only wounded in the head and thigh, under a pile of corpses. There were twenty-three dead… I hid in a shelter all night. In the early morning, there was a strong smell of corpses everywhere.”

One can go on and on with these horrid testimonies, but these will suffice to show the sadism and carnage of what happened in those camps under the hands of covenant breakers. The story of the Sabra and Shatila massacre is a microcosm of what happens when humanity turns away from Abraham: the Jew turns to Levi and the Christian violently fixates on nationalism. This is what happens when the Jews turn away from Abraham and tread upon the path of Levi. Covenants are broken, and a path of carnage and blood is paved. The world witnesses the horror of Levi and says, ‘Let us do away with this nation.’

And who in history arose to exterminate the Jews? It was the Germans and their acolytes who pursued the utter annihilation of the Jews and, like Adonizedek (the god of justice) and the Israelites who wanted to wipe out the Canaanites of Shechem, these Europeans believed that they were doing a righteous, necessary and just act by murdering the Jews, because they had made “the Jews” synonymous with Communism. The Jews were under the covenant of Abraham, but leaving that covenant, joined themselves to the atrocious ways of Levi. The Europeans are under a covenant with the tabernacle of Abraham and, forsaking it, return to savagery, paving a path of cruelty and carnage in the name of justice. Where is this covenant with the Europeans? It was declared and prophesied by Noah after the waters of the flood had calmed:

“May God enlarge Japheth,

and let him dwell in the tents of Shem” (Genesis 9:27)

The tents of Shem are the tabernacles of Shem. From whose line did Christ come? From Shem. From whose line did Abraham come? From Shem. The Hebrew line springs from Abraham, “and from their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ, who is God over all, blessed forever.” (Romans 9:5) St. Paul preached with much exertion to the Jews that Christ is the Messiah, but they rejected his message. One day, Paul went to the Temple to pray and Christ appeared to him and told him: “Make haste and get out of Jerusalem quickly, because they will not accept your testimony about me.” When Paul brought up his persecution of the Church, Christ insisted: “Go, for I will send you far away to the Gentiles.” (Acts 22:17-21) If Christ commanded to leave Jerusalem, then why is there is obsession with Jerusalem amongst Christian zionists? Christ directed Paul to leave the Temple so that he could preach to the gentiles. This was part of the beginning of Christ being taught to the Europeans, the posterity of Japheth. In Paul’s final attempt to tell the Jews about Christ, some of the Jews believed and the rest did not, and Paul declared to them:

“For the heart of this people is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes have they closed; lest they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them.

Be it known therefore unto you, that the salvation of God is sent unto the Gentiles, and that they will hear it.” (Acts 28:27-28)

Japheth was thus entering the tents of Shem, joining Shem’s descendant Abraham. Christ commanded Paul to leave the Jewish Temple, to bring the gentiles into the tent of Shem; and in turn, Christ commanded the gentile to leave the pagan temple.

But what happens when Japheth leaves the tent and returns to the pagan temple? The same thing that happens when the Jew returns to Levi and his Jewish temple. He focuses on race and tribe. Butchery is the rotten fruit. Japheth wars on Shem, and will form a new religion around his desire to wipe Shem out. The Israelites thought they were following God when they demanded the destruction of the Canaanites of Shechem; the Jews thought they were doing God a service when they murdered Christ; and so Japheth will think that he is doing something just and necessary when he commits to the annihilation of Shem.

“Because we have exterminated a bacterium we do not want,” declared Heinrich Himmler in a speech to the SS, “in the end, to be infected by the bacterium and die of it.” What was Himmler referring to? As he said in the same speech: “I mean the clearing out of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish race.” He does not speak of sadism nor cruelty, but moral duty: “we had a moral duty towards our people, the duty to exterminate this people.” In his zeal for Israel, King Saul butchered the Canaanites of Gibeon. In their zeal for Germany, the Nazis butchered the Jews. As Himmler declared: “That is why we are doing our duty more fanatically than ever, more devoutly than ever, more bravely, more obediently and more thoroughly than ever. We want to be worthy of being permitted to be the first SS-men of the Fuehrer, Adolf Hitler, in the long history of the Germanic people, which stretches before the US.” Nazism was a religion, and Hitler was held aloft as a prophet, bringing judgement upon the Jews. On January 30th, 1939, Hitler declared in a Reichstag speech a prognostication, which he deemed as a prophecy, about the extermination of the Jews by Germany:

“I want today once again to make a prophecy: In case the international Jewish financiers within and outside Europe succeed once more in hurling the peoples into a world war, the result will be, not the Bolshevization of the world and with it a victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”

Hitler saw the Jews as synonymous with Bolshevism, so his war against the Communist Soviet Union was esteemed by the Nazis as a war to protect Germania from Jewish Bolshevism. Thus, the annihilation of the Jews was seen as a judgement on the Jews for the spread of Communism, the atrocities of the Bolsheviks and for the fomenting of war on Germany. When the extermination of the Jews was ongoing in 1942, Goebbels wrote in his diary that it was the fulfilling of Hitler’s prophecy:

“The prophesy which the Fuehrer made about them for having brought on a new world war is beginning to come true in a most terrible manner. One must not be sentimental in these matters. If we did not fight the Jews, they would destroy us. It’s a life-and-death struggle between the Aryan race and the Jewish bacillus. No other government and no other regime would have the strength for such a global solution of this question. Here, too, the Fuehrer is the undismayed champion of a radical solution necessitated by conditions and therefore inexorable.”

In the same year, Goebbels again wrote in his diary of Hitler as a prophet against the Jews:

“The Jewish race has prepared this war; it is the spiritual originator of the whole misfortune that has overtaken humanity. Jewry must pay for its crime just as our Fuehrer prophesied in his speech in the Reichstag; namely, by the wiping out of the Jewish race in Europe and possibly in the entire world.”

Nazism — tribalism and fixation on race — becomes the new religion of Japheth after he leaves the tent of Shem. In the Nazi SS, before one received his SS dagger he had to swear an oath written in a catechism in which belief in God was inseparable from belief in Hitler and race:

“Q: Why do we believe in Germany and the Fuhrer?

A: Because we believe in God, we believe in Germany which he created in His world and in the Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, whom He has sent us.

Q: Whom must we primarily serve?

A: Our people and our Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler.

Q: Why do we obey?

A: From inner conviction, from belief in Germany, in the Fuhrer, in the Movement, and in the SS, and from loyalty.”

As the Jews will always turn to fixation on tribe and temple once they sever themselves from Abraham, so the European will always turn to racism once he exits the tents of Shem. What happened in the past, is a reflection of what will happen in the future.

What has been is what will be,

and what has been done is what will be done,

and there is nothing new under the sun. -- Ecclesiastes 1:9

Israel is not residing in the tens of Shem, and thus it murders Gaza, and follows Levi. Japheth, leaving the tens of Shem, will turn to the worship of race. The evils of the Holocaust will repeat, and the world will look at Israel’s destruction and rejoice. Even in the darling prophecy Christian-Zionists love to quote, Ezekiel 38-39, which according to them explains how God rescues the Jewish remnants from the impending danger by Gog and Magog, the prophecy adds: “The nations will know that the house of Israel went into exile for their wrongdoing, because they were disloyal to Me, and I hid My face from them; so I handed them over to their adversaries, and all of them fell by the sword.” (Ezekiel 39:23)

How many were killed by the sword?

Answer: “All of them”.

Who makes it? Daniel clarifies:

“… and there shall be a time of trouble, such as never was since there was a nation even to that same time: and at that time thy people shall be delivered, every one that shall be found written in the book.”

Only the remnant who recognize Christ are rescued (see Daniel 12:1)

What happens to the rest who are not in the “Book?”

I rest my case.

In every aspect of society, the most necessary thing is human life, and yet it is the thing that is least cared about. We will speak of the sacredness of human life, but in a whim, we will slaughter droves of human beings in the name of some geopolitical benefit. There was suppose to be a ceasefire between Israel and Gaza, and as part of the deal, Israel was suppose to begin the military withdrawal from the Philadelphi corridor (which lies between the border between Gaza and Egypt). But Israel made it very clear that they were not going to leave the corridor, and thus honoring the ceasefire was never in the minds of the Israelis.

Yes, Hamas is a terrorist organization, yes Hamas humiliated Israel when they delivered Israeli corpses back to Israel (which was in accordance to the deal) to the sounds of music, but this does mean that Israel actually had good will towards a ceasefire, because they clearly did not. And then, at around March 17th of 2025 (58 days after the ceasefire began on January 19th) Israel began striking Gaza, and by March 18th, over 400 people were killed and hundreds more were wounded. This is what I warned about in one of my videos, in which I said that no matter what happens with the ceasefire deal, “there will be blood.”

Israel had no intention of peace, and when Trump spoke about purging Gaza of Palestinians, the fanatical desire to expand Jewish settlements into Gaza got the MAGA stamp of approval. Israel ordered thousands of Gazans in the towns and neighborhoods of the Gaza Strip’s perimeter to leave their homes. This is all a sign of this intention, which was made out in the open when the Israeli government announced the establishment of a new office to facilitate the relocation of Gazans. Remember, before the Armenian Genocide was put into full effect, the Ottoman government presented their agenda as one of deportation. In May of 1915, the Young Turks introduced a bill to the Ottoman parliament calling for the deportation of Armenians. The plan got the stamp of approval from the German government. In fact, in February of 1914 (five months before the outbreak of WW1), General Field Marshal Wilhelm Leopold Colmar Freiherr von der Goltz presented a plan to the German-Turkish Society and the Turkish ambassador "to once and for all remove half a million Armenians living in the provinces of Van, Bitlis, and Erzerum, contiguous to the Russo-Turkish borders, and move them from those border areas southward, to the vicinity of Aleppo and Mesopotamia." When the butchery was happening, the German ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Hans von Wangenheim, responded to the outcry over the slaughter of the Armenians by saying that he had no right to interfere with Ottoman sovereignty. (See Balakian, Armenian Golgotha, pp. 79, 89, trans. Peter Balakian). Just as the Ottomans got the German stamp of approval, the Israelis are getting their stamp of approval from the Americans. The parallel between what the Ottomans and what the hardliners in Israel want to do was touched upon by Benny Morris, the prominent historian on the Arab-Israeli conflict. In an article published by Haaretz, Morris writes that a genocide of the Palestinians is pretty much inevitable and will perhaps be "a combination of expulsion (ethnic cleansing) and mass murder, as the Turks did to the Christian communities in Asia Minor between 1894-1924."

What Israel has been doing is all a foreshadowing sign of ethnic cleansing, or worse, genocide. The hardliners of Israel speak of simply relocating Gazans. But what if they don’t leave? Killing will be the solution they will happily choose, as they have clearly demonstrated. The mass killing of hundreds of people that Israel did, explicitly showing their disregard for the ceasefire, has left behind horrifying carnage. “Dismembered bodies are piling up in hospitals once more,” writes Israeli journalist Ben Reiff, “with medical staff across the Strip warning that their facilities are at full capacity." No matter what diplomatic gestures are made, there will be blood in this part of the insane asylum we call the Middle East. And the Israeli government has made it obvious that they intend to not stop. “Israel will, from now on, act against Hamas with increasing military strength,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in a statement. “With God’s help,” Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said, “[the renewed assault] will look completely different from what has been done so far.” Israel had and has no interest in completing the ceasefire.

This is why Israel never wanted to enter the second phase of the ceasefire, which was suppose to see the return of the rest of the hostages and a complete military withdrawal out of Gaza, which is something that Israel’s hardliners are not willing to do. The Israeli government, together with Steve Witkoff, pushed to extend the first phase of the ceasefire, which entails the release of hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners. Hamas did not want to prolong phase one and wanted to begin phase two. To quote Ben Reiff: “Israel knew Hamas would reject this proposal, and that was the point all along.” This is like when the Austrians gave Serbia their plan after the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand: Austria must control Serbia. They gave them a plan that they knew Serbia would reject. And when Serbia rejected the plan, Austria destroyed Serbia, slaughtering hundreds of thousands. Israel wanted to extend phase one, knowing Gaza would reject such an idea. As Reiff explains: “The maneuver simply gave the Israeli government a pretext to re-impose a total blockade on food, water, fuel, electricity, and medicine into the Strip; and now, with President Trump’s full backing, to resume its genocidal assault.”

The Israelis never had the intention of allowing life to return to normalcy in Gaza. The prevention of mobile homes from being allowed entry into Gaza (a violation of the ceasefire) makes this quite conspicuous. The Americans and Israelis are looking for countries to resettle the Gazans. American and Israeli officials told AP that their governments had approached Sudan, Somalia, and Somaliland about takin Palestinians from Gaza in exchange for financial, diplomatic, and security benefits. But there is a country that the US and Israel have really been eyeing, and that is Syria.

CBS reported that the Trump administration has approached the new Islamist government in Syria through a third-party interlocutor. But Syria is under the control of Turkey. If the Palestinians are pushed into Syria, Turkey could then make itself into the protector of the Palestinian people. Turkey could then become the hero of the Islamic world, which is perfect for the Turks since they are aspiring to revive their empire. But the whole of the Middle East was under the Turkish Ottoman Empire, and that includes Israel. The Israeli military has a presence in southern Syria, while the Turks control the Syrian government and already have thousands of soldiers in Syria. The Turks and Israelis have antithetical interests of expansionism, which means there will inevitably be a clash between the two regional powers. It is not for no reason that the Israeli government’s Nagel Committee announced that Israel must prepare for a possible war with Turkey.

But, on the other side of this rising tension are the Israeli hardliners who, believing in this idea that they are invincible due to American support, want to purge out the Palestinians. Which means, there will be blood. And because there will be blood, Turkey can then bolster itself as the protector of the Palestinians against the murderous zionists, gathering the other Muslim countries to be led by Turkey. Such will be a part of the root of the origin story of the new Turkish empire. With a new Turkish empire, and the Islamic world behind it, a jihad will be declared on Israel, and the clash between the Jews and the Turks will be presented as a war between good and evil, between the murderers of Palestinians and the protector of Palestinians. It will be tragic and horrific. No matter what happens: human life will not be respected, because while human life is the most necessary thing, it is the least cared about. There will be blood.

Yes, Hamas is a terrorist organization, yes Hamas humiliated Israel when they delivered Israeli corpses back to Israel (which was in accordance to the deal) to the sounds of music, but this does mean that Israel actually had good will towards a ceasefire, because they clearly did not. And then, at around March 17th of 2025 (58 days after the ceasefire began on January 19th) Israel began striking Gaza, and by March 18th, over 400 people were killed and hundreds more were wounded. This is what I warned about in one of my videos, in which I said that no matter what happens with the ceasefire deal, “there will be blood.”

Israel had no intention of peace, and when Trump spoke about purging Gaza of Palestinians, the fanatical desire to expand Jewish settlements into Gaza got the MAGA stamp of approval. Israel ordered thousands of Gazans in the towns and neighborhoods of the Gaza Strip’s perimeter to leave their homes. This is all a sign of this intention, which was made out in the open when the Israeli government announced the establishment of a new office to facilitate the relocation of Gazans. Remember, before the Armenian Genocide was put into full effect, the Ottoman government presented their agenda as one of deportation. In May of 1915, the Young Turks introduced a bill to the Ottoman parliament calling for the deportation of Armenians. The plan got the stamp of approval from the German government. In fact, in February of 1914 (five months before the outbreak of WW1), General Field Marshal Wilhelm Leopold Colmar Freiherr von der Goltz presented a plan to the German-Turkish Society and the Turkish ambassador "to once and for all remove half a million Armenians living in the provinces of Van, Bitlis, and Erzerum, contiguous to the Russo-Turkish borders, and move them from those border areas southward, to the vicinity of Aleppo and Mesopotamia." When the butchery was happening, the German ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Hans von Wangenheim, responded to the outcry over the slaughter of the Armenians by saying that he had no right to interfere with Ottoman sovereignty. (See Balakian, Armenian Golgotha, pp. 79, 89, trans. Peter Balakian). Just as the Ottomans got the German stamp of approval, the Israelis are getting their stamp of approval from the Americans. The parallel between what the Ottomans and what the hardliners in Israel want to do was touched upon by Benny Morris, the prominent historian on the Arab-Israeli conflict. In an article published by Haaretz, Morris writes that a genocide of the Palestinians is pretty much inevitable and will perhaps be "a combination of expulsion (ethnic cleansing) and mass murder, as the Turks did to the Christian communities in Asia Minor between 1894-1924."

What Israel has been doing is all a foreshadowing sign of ethnic cleansing, or worse, genocide. The hardliners of Israel speak of simply relocating Gazans. But what if they don’t leave? Killing will be the solution they will happily choose, as they have clearly demonstrated. The mass killing of hundreds of people that Israel did, explicitly showing their disregard for the ceasefire, has left behind horrifying carnage. “Dismembered bodies are piling up in hospitals once more,” writes Israeli journalist Ben Reiff, “with medical staff across the Strip warning that their facilities are at full capacity." No matter what diplomatic gestures are made, there will be blood in this part of the insane asylum we call the Middle East. And the Israeli government has made it obvious that they intend to not stop. “Israel will, from now on, act against Hamas with increasing military strength,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in a statement. “With God’s help,” Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said, “[the renewed assault] will look completely different from what has been done so far.” Israel had and has no interest in completing the ceasefire.

This is why Israel never wanted to enter the second phase of the ceasefire, which was suppose to see the return of the rest of the hostages and a complete military withdrawal out of Gaza, which is something that Israel’s hardliners are not willing to do. The Israeli government, together with Steve Witkoff, pushed to extend the first phase of the ceasefire, which entails the release of hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners. Hamas did not want to prolong phase one and wanted to begin phase two. To quote Ben Reiff: “Israel knew Hamas would reject this proposal, and that was the point all along.” This is like when the Austrians gave Serbia their plan after the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand: Austria must control Serbia. They gave them a plan that they knew Serbia would reject. And when Serbia rejected the plan, Austria destroyed Serbia, slaughtering hundreds of thousands. Israel wanted to extend phase one, knowing Gaza would reject such an idea. As Reiff explains: “The maneuver simply gave the Israeli government a pretext to re-impose a total blockade on food, water, fuel, electricity, and medicine into the Strip; and now, with President Trump’s full backing, to resume its genocidal assault.”

The Israelis never had the intention of allowing life to return to normalcy in Gaza. The prevention of mobile homes from being allowed entry into Gaza (a violation of the ceasefire) makes this quite conspicuous. The Americans and Israelis are looking for countries to resettle the Gazans. American and Israeli officials told AP that their governments had approached Sudan, Somalia, and Somaliland about takin Palestinians from Gaza in exchange for financial, diplomatic, and security benefits. But there is a country that the US and Israel have really been eyeing, and that is Syria.

CBS reported that the Trump administration has approached the new Islamist government in Syria through a third-party interlocutor. But Syria is under the control of Turkey. If the Palestinians are pushed into Syria, Turkey could then make itself into the protector of the Palestinian people. Turkey could then become the hero of the Islamic world, which is perfect for the Turks since they are aspiring to revive their empire. But the whole of the Middle East was under the Turkish Ottoman Empire, and that includes Israel. The Israeli military has a presence in southern Syria, while the Turks control the Syrian government and already have thousands of soldiers in Syria. The Turks and Israelis have antithetical interests of expansionism, which means there will inevitably be a clash between the two regional powers. It is not for no reason that the Israeli government’s Nagel Committee announced that Israel must prepare for a possible war with Turkey.

But, on the other side of this rising tension are the Israeli hardliners who, believing in this idea that they are invincible due to American support, want to purge out the Palestinians. Which means, there will be blood. And because there will be blood, Turkey can then bolster itself as the protector of the Palestinians against the murderous zionists, gathering the other Muslim countries to be led by Turkey. Such will be a part of the root of the origin story of the new Turkish empire. With a new Turkish empire, and the Islamic world behind it, a jihad will be declared on Israel, and the clash between the Jews and the Turks will be presented as a war between good and evil, between the murderers of Palestinians and the protector of Palestinians. It will be tragic and horrific. No matter what happens: human life will not be respected, because while human life is the most necessary thing, it is the least cared about. There will be blood.

The CEO of Rheinmetall, Armin Papperger, declared: “An era of rearmament has begun”. Such words reflect the zeitgeist we are living in; it is one of militarism. We predicted that the 2020s was going to be a decade of militarism:

And we were right.

Rheinmetall has been enjoying immense growth. Rheinmetall’s stock has boomed more than 1,000% since the beginning of Russia's war in Ukraine in 2022. In 2024, Rheinmetall reported that it grew 30%. For 2025, it is projecting as much as 40% growth, because German leaders want to increase military spending as a response to the Trump administration making it clear that Europe is no longer a priority.

While car making facilities are in danger of closing down, Rheinmetall is thinking about using such facilities to make military technology. One option that has been suggested is for Rheinmetall to take control of a plant that was once operated by Volkswagen near Osnabruck that barely survived in 2024.

The enriching of Rheinmetall is an indication of two things: the advent of the revival of German militarism, and the dawn of a militarily independent Europe. This was seen in the words of the head of the EU Commission, Ursula von der Leyen when she emphasized that 150 billion euros from the planned EU defense fund should be invested solely in European defense corporations in order to strengthen European industry.

This desire to have an independent militarism within Germany is agreed to by both the common mainstream parties, such as the Christian Democrats (CDU), and the ultra-nationalist AfD party. The AfD is definitely the most militaristic party in Germany, having military personnel and arms lobbyists among its elected representatives and being the most ardent supporter of bringing back mandatory conscription. Because of this, the AfD will agree with mainstream parties on policies to reinvigorate German military strength. This is why the German Greens, the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Free Democrats (FDP) received the approval of the AfD for military deployments for foreign missions such as the ASPIDES to secure the flow of goods and trade through the Red Sea. The German government wants for deeper ties between civilian life and military life, thus commencing the embryonic stage of a revival of German militarist culture. According to Germany’s Health Minister, Karl Lauterbach, the German healthcare system must become more robust and must be reshaped to prepare for possible "military conflicts." He further explained:

“It would be foolish to say we aren't preparing for a military conflict, and then it won't happen … Doing nothing is not an option. A new era is also needed for the healthcare system. Especially since, in the event of an alliance, Germany could become a hub for the care of injured and wounded from other countries, too.”

In March of 2024, the Federal Education Minister Bettina Stark-Watzinger advocated for civil defense drills in schools to better prepare students for war. She also advocated for Bundeswehr youth officers to visit schools to gain recruits, saying that schools must develop a "relaxed relationship with the Bundeswehr." She said in an interview: "Society as a whole must be well prepared for crises – from pandemics to natural disasters to war … The goal must be to strengthen our resilience.”

The explosive growth of Rheinmetall reminds us of the massive arms race and boom in military industry that took place before the First World War. For example, before World War One, the biggest business in all of Europe was the German armaments firm Krupp, just as today the German armament company Rheinmetall is the biggest munitions company in Europe. Europe’s biggest business became the preparation for war; it became militarism. Right now it looks like Germany — with its declining car industry — is on its way to becoming a war economy.

In 1917, during World War One The Kaiser Wilhelm II wanted to send the German military into the Baltic states to form a special police unit to destroy the Bolsheviks there, stating that such a policy would be like what the Ottomans did to the Armenians (the genocide of the Armenians was widely known by the Germans, so its quite obvious that the Kaiser had butchery on his mind):

“Bolsheviki must be disposed of. On this the following suggestion … we should give aid to Estonia. The Baltic must appeal for help against robbers. We will then provide assistance (analogue to Turkey in Armenia). Form a Baltic gendarmerie that will restore order … policing action, but not war.”

The quote from Wilhelm II reflects Germany’s historical desire to control the Baltic states. In the aftermath of World War One, on August 27th of 1918, Germany and Russia finalized the Supplementary Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. As part of this deal, the governorates of Livonia and Estonia were formally severed from Russian control, strengthening German power in Baltic region. By removing Russian power, Germany filled the vacuum, which really goes to show that the Baltics is the subject of the struggle between Russia and Germany over who will rule Europe.

Today, this struggle is still there. Hence why the German defense minister, Boris Pistorius, declared in January of 2025: “Lithuania’s security is our security.” He said these words in regards to Germany’s ongoing policy of deploying thousands of German troops into Lithuania. Why is Germany sending troops into Lithuania?

For the same reason it sent troops into the Baltics in both World Wards: The Russian-German struggle over Europe. Even if there is no war right now between Russia and Germany, this does not mean that there will be no rhyming of history. Before World War Two there was a duration of time in which there was no fighting; in fact, during this time the Germans made a promise not to join Poland in an attack on Russia, and in 1927 the Germans assured the Soviets that Britain and France had no intentions of attacking them. (See Tooze, The Deluge, ch. 25, p. 477).

Regardless of these gestures, there was war between Russia and Germany. And even though Germany’s military after World War One was controlled by the Americans, militarism still revived. From April of 1919 to January of 1921, Germany’s military shrank from 800,000 to just 100,000, while 30,000 of 34,000 officers corps were discharged. (See Burleigh, The Third Reich, ch. 1, p. 46).

A new international order was put in place, led by the United States, and it had rules to prevent another world war from happening. But Germany’s nationalists scoffed at international law and instead fixated on doctrines that spoke of the inevitability of conflict between different nations and races. A resurgence in volkisch thinking grew by leaps and bounds, foreshadowing the revival of German militarism. One of the major leaders of the nationalist and militarist party, the AfD, Bjorn Hocke, also promotes a volkisch ideology, advancing the idea of German mythology as a way to strengthen the people:

To draw inner strength from myths has always been helpful in times of change. And we are undoubtedly living again in a turning point. We have the task of us, our great story again re-appropriating. Whether we succeed in opening up a new feeling, a new myth for our people, that will depend on whether we as AfD can feed this new spirit into the political discussion and enforce it.

This resurgence of such an ideology is a sign of not just nationalism. Nationalism is a packaged deal: it comes with militarism. After World War Two the German military was put under the control of the Americans. This does not mean that militarism will not come back. For after World War One, the German military was also placed under control, and this did not prevent Nazi militarism from taking over the country.

After World War One, the German military was dissolved and replaced with the Reichswehr (Reich Defense) which was suppose to be a peacekeeping force. They were to be used only as border protection and to keep order. Heavy weapons above certain calibers, armored weapons and submarines and an air force were prohibited. Years before the rise of Hitler, the Germans under the Weimar government were secretly working on rearmament. Once Hitler took power, he amped up the militarization of Germany, out in the open for the whole world to see, flaunting his breaking of the rules. Today, the mainstream parties like the Christian Democrats, Social Democrats and Greens, are working to make Germany's military stronger. But, if Germany goes far deep into nationalism, it will intensify nationalism as Hitler did. Germany’s military is under the watch of NATO. But, just as the far-right of the post-WW1 era wanted intense militarization, so today Germany’s biggest nationalist party, the AfD, desires for a powerful and independent German military. The most famous leader of the AfD, Bjorn Hocke, does not see the Bundeswehr as a Germany army, but merely a tool of NATO. In his own words: "an objective look at the emergence and development of the Bundeswehr leads to the sobering conclusion: it was never a genuinely German army that wanted to build on the great national military traditions, but consciously forced this break and was always in the service of foreign powers.” Hocke is waiting for Germany to become fully militarily independent so that a truly patriotic German army can be formed; and he even goes so far as to say that if a German wants to serve his country, that he should wait for the US to withdraw from Germany:

“Today, as a Bundeswehr soldier, you help to implement foreign great power strategies. That could change after the American withdrawal from Europe and a possible dissolution or reorientation of NATO. But until then, if you're just looking for a job, you should look around at the Bundeswehr. If you really want to serve your country with arms, you should consider waiting for better times.”

Hocke’s party wants to revive German militarism and wants for Germany to run its own nuclear umbrella. The "Two Plus Four Treaty" signed in 1990 after German reunification states that Germany is not allowed to have its own nuclear weapons. German chancellor Friedrich Merz affirmed that Germany "cannot and must not have its own nuclear weapons," and that Germany has "expressly renounced the possession of nuclear weapons, and that will remain the case”. On March 15th of 2025, DW reported that “Merz wants to discuss nuclear deterrence in Europe with France and the UK, both armed with nuclear weapons. In Paris, that door was already wide open.” On the other hand, the AfD has discussed Germany obtaining its own nuclear weapons. Rudiger Lukassen, a member of the Bundestag's defense committee, from the German right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, explicitly stated: "Germany needs its own nuclear weapons and compulsory military service, including for women. To achieve this, it is necessary to change the Basic Law as soon as possible … Germany needs its own nuclear umbrella.” So the AfD not only wants Germany to have nuclear weapons for itself, but for Germany to have its own nuclear umbrella for Europe. This means Germany becoming a massive powerhouse of geopolitical might, rising up as the defender of Europe, with an independent military force leading European auxiliaries and owning its own nuclear weapons. The AfD is now the second most popular party in Germany, which is a reflection of a growing desire for a resurgence of nationalism. Nationalism is a packaged deal; its not just about waving flags, but about an enforced militarism. The rise of German nationalism is really a sign of a coming European war. Right now, the German government under mainstream parties like the Christian Democrats is talking about spending 500 billion euros on defense in the next twelve years. This would not be enough to create a force powerful enough to face an army like Russia's. But, if Germany becomes a hardcore nationalist country, then you will see the rise of serious militarism the likes of which we have not seen since the Third Reich.

The US has expressed support for the AfD, with JD Vance scorning German mainstream parties for "firewalling" the nationalist party, and Elon Musk declaring that the only hope for Germany is the AfD. It looks like the US wants the nationalist fanatics to take over Germany to accelerate the revival of German militarism to use it as a proxy against Russia.

Netanyahu's plan to convene a cabinet vote on the position of Ronen Bar, was announced less than a month after the Likud dominated government announced a similar goal to remove Gali Baharav-Miara from her position as Israel's attorney general. These things are happening in the midst of Netanyahu's coalition exerting their efforts to give Knesset members more power to determine who becomes a supreme court justice. The reason as to why people have been enraged by this aspiration, is because if the Knesset has more power than the supreme court, and can override the impediments which the court can unleash to stop excessive decrees, and if the Knesset is dominated by hardline fanatics, then there will be nothing to stop such hardliners from enacting unjust laws. In such a condition, Israel would become a talmudist state, a state of Jewish supremacy that can impose fanatical despotism. Thus, Netanyahu and his ilk are working to pave the way towards Jewish ko-sharia (kosher sharia) law. A taste of this was seen in March of 2023, when Moshe Gafni's United Torah Judaism party, a powerful faction of Netanyahu's coalition, introduced a bill that would put people in prison for one to two years for peaching Jesus Christ as the Messiah. Luckily Netanyahu, being a practical politician, not wanting to lose the favor of Christians (the biggest ally of Israel in the Western world), squashed the bill and declared: "We will not advance any law against the Christian community." So, it is evident that Netanyahu is more moderate than the fanatics around him. The question is what comes after Netanyahu? By the looks of it, something far worse will come after Netanyahu, something more fanatical, more vicious, more bloodthirsty. It will be like the fall of Assad, with a faction much worse than him ascending to power in his absence.

But what is happening now in Israel seems to be the priming of the society for nationalist despotism. “The removal of the head of the Shin Bet should not be seen in isolation,” said Amichai Cohen, a law professor and fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute, a Jerusalem-based research group. “It’s part of the general trend of taking on these independent agencies and increasing the power of the executive. ...The judicial overhaul is back”.

The situation surrounding Netanyahu's desire to fire Bar was a conflict in which Bar angered Netanyahu by investigating officials belonging to the prime minister's office, over allegations that they had leaked documents and collaborated with people tied to Qatar, the main funder of Hamas. Netanyahu denies these claims and the Qatari government has been silent on this issue. The tension between Netanyahu and Bar likely reached a boiling point, according to the New York Times, when Nadav Argaman, Bar's predecessor, said in a television interview that he might expose more claims of wrongdoing by Netanyahu if he believed that the prime minister was about to do something illegal. According to Nadav Shtrauchler, a former adviser to the prime minister, the comment from Argaman was "too much" for Netanyahu who, as he says, "saw it as a direct threat ... In his eyes, he didn’t have a choice.”

But there is a much deeper conflict at hand here, and that is the struggle over the future of Israel. Does Israel remain a secular country, or a religiously and nationalistic country where ko-sharia law is imposed? At the center of the judicial overhaul agenda is the settler movement which wants to diminish the power of the supreme court so as to allow the government to have deeper control over the West Bank. As the New York Times reports:

Mr. Netanyahu’s governing coalition is formed from parties that variously represent ultrareligious Jews seeking to preserve their privileges; and settler activists aiming to deepen Israel’s control over the West Bank and further curb Palestinian rights.

For years, these groups have resented the independence of watchdogs like the judiciary, the attorney general and the security services, which have variously moved to limit some privileges for the ultra-Orthodox; block certain moves by the settler movement; and prosecute Mr. Netanyahu for corruption. He is standing trial on charges that he denies.

If the Israeli government actually succeeds, or gets close to succeeding in diminishing the supreme court, it will further deepen the rift in Israeli society.

Anat Baron, a former Israeli supreme court judge (who retired in 2023) recently warned in an interview with Haaretz:

"There is no doubt that Israel is today at the lowest point in its history, both domestically and in the way the world sees us."

She also warned that the judicial overhaul (which wants to curb the authority of the supreme court) which she calls a "coup," is still ongoing even in the midst of the war in Gaza:

"The coup hasn't stopped. Now, and under cover of war, the regime coup is continuing to rampage in other ways. Without press conferences, grandiose bills and fireworks, but under the radar, in a series of steps all of which are eroding democracy. I view this development as nothing less than an existential danger, and I don't have the privilege to remain silent in the face of what I see."

She listed several examples of this, one of which is Itamar Ben-Gvir's excessive power over the police force:

Unfortunately there are many examples; I will list just a few. There is more than one sign of the politicization of the police and the implications are grave: depriving citizens of protection, when the very mission of the police is to protect them. The so-called spirit of the commander as embodied by the responsible minister [Itamar Ben-Gvir] is apparent, for example, in the violence being used against the demonstrators. The minister summons the police commissioner [Kobi Shabtai] to a hearing solely because the commissioner warned that the minister is acting against High Court rulings and contrary to the way the police force is supposed to be run – as an independent body, not dependent and not political.

They say, “Israel belongs to us!” Well, they can have it. They call Jerusalem the holy city, but St. John calls it Sodom and Egypt (Revelation 11), the land where Christ was murdered. They call it the holy land, but God tells them that whoever lifts Jerusalem will surely be cut in pieces (Zechariah 12:3). They will say that they are sons of Abraham, but John the Baptist tells them that God can make the very stones into sons of Abraham (Matthew 3:9). They say that God is on their side, but God warns that in Israel “Everyone will seize the hand of his neighbor, and raise his hand against his neighbor’s hand” (Zechariah 14:13). In time, the land that they believe solely belongs to them and no one else will be the place of their destruction.

Their pride will be their own noose, like Haman hanging by the very rope he reserved for Mordecai. They adore the land and they say, with one of Christ’s disciples, “See what manner of stones and what buildings are here!” (Luke 13:1) but Christ tells them: "Seest thou these great buildings? there shall not be left one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.” (Luke 13:2) The Temple was destroyed by fire in the midst of war between Jewish fanatics — who dreamt of their pure nation state— and the Roman government.

The destruction of the Temple had been foretold by the prophet Daniel who wrote that “Messiah shall be cut off, but not for himself: and the people of the prince that shall come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary”. The Messiah came, and the nation for whom He came who rejected Him would partake in the destruction of their own city and their own sanctuary. Christ came to die for the sins of the whole world (1 John 2:2). Judas rejected Him, only to destroy himself in the end. The word Judas means Jew and is synonymous with the Jewish nation. So as Judas destroyed himself, the Jews also destroyed themselves during their war with Rome.

Fascinatingly, the historian Josephus wrote that there was a prophecy that the Temple would be destroyed in a war, and he emphasized that the Jewish fanatics who fought the Romans, “trampled upon all the laws of man, and laughed at the laws of God; and for the oracles of prophets, they ridiculed them as the tricks of jugglers” and became instruments for the destruction of their revered Temple:

“yet did these prophets foretell many things concerning [the rewards of] virtue, and [punishments of] vice, which when these zealots violated, they occasioned the fulfilling of those very prophecies belonging to their own country: for there was a certain ancient oracle of those men, that the city should then be taken and the sanctuary burnt, by right of war, when a sedition should invade the Jews, and their own hands should pollute the temple of God. Now, while these zealots did not [quite] disbelieve these predictions, they made themselves the instruments of their accomplishments.” (Josephus, War, 4.6.3)

When one reads Josephus’s account of the Roman-Jewish War, one sees that the Jewish rebels destroyed not only themselves, but their own city and temple. Factions vied with one another through violence over power. Simon ben Giora, leader of the peasant faction, warred against John of Gischala, who led the Zealot faction. They fought each other over the temple, and so horrendous was the slaughter that it ended in a literal bloodbath, with the Zealots butchering both Hebrews and Greek converts to Judaism. John’s Zealot faction “went all over the buildings, and reached as far as the altar, and the temple itself, and fell upon the priests, and those that were about the sacred offices; insomuch that many persons who came thither with great zeal from the ends of the earth, to offer sacrifices at this celebrated place, which was esteemed holy by all mankind, fell down before their own sacrifices themselves, and sprinkled that altar which was venerable among all men, both Greeks and Barbarians, with their own blood; till the dead bodies of strangers were mingled together with those of their own country, and those of profane persons with those of the priests, and the blood of all sorts of dead carcasses stood in lakes in the holy courts themselves.” (War, 5.1.3)

Josephus then makes a profound declaration; he refers to Jerusalem as a wretched city that destroyed itself, and that was no longer a place for God to reside in:

“O most wretched city, what misery so great as this didst thou suffer from the Romans, when they came to purify thee from thy intestine hatred! For thou couldst be no longer a place fit for God, nor couldst thou longer continue in being, after thou hadst been a sepulcher for the bodies of thine own people, and hadst made the holy house itself a burying-place in this civil war of thine! Yet mayest thou again grow better, if perchance thou wilt hereafter appease the anger of that God who is the author of thy destruction.” (War, 5.1.3)

When speaking on the destruction of the temple, it is always heard that “the Romans did it,” but when we read Josephus we don’t get such a black and white explanation. What we read in Josephus is that the Jews were destroying themselves, their own city and temple before the Romans came and crushed them and finished off the already ruined temple. Josephus writes that in the Jewish civil war “all the places that were about the temple were burnt down, and were become an intermediate desert space,” and that “almost all of the corn was burnt, which would have been sufficient for a siege of many years.” (War, 5.1.4) The factions destroyed the grain storage to starve each other out, and they only starved their own nation. So bad would be the famine:

"that children pulled the very morsels that their fathers were eating out of their very mouths: and, what was still more to be pitied, so did the mothers do as to their infants. And when those that were most dear were perishing under their hands, they were not ashamed to take from them the very last drops that might preserve their lives. And while they eat after this manner, yet were they not concealed in so doing. But the seditious every where came upon them immediately, and snatched away from them what they had gotten from others. For when they saw any house shut up, this was to them a signal that the people within had gotten some food. Whereupon they brake open the doors, and ran in, and took pieces of what they were eating almost up out of their very throats, and this by force. The old men, who held their food fast, were beaten: and if the women hid what they had within their hands, their hair was torn for so doing. Nor was there any commiseration shewn either to the aged, or to the infants: but they lifted up children from the ground, as they hung upon the morsels they had gotten, and shook them down upon the floor.” (Wars, 5.10.3)

Josephus writes of how there was “A deep silence also, and a kind of deadly night had seized upon the city. While yet the robbers were still more terrible than these miseries were themselves. For they brake open those houses which were no other than graves of dead bodies, and plundered them of what they had, and carrying off the coverings of their bodies, went out laughing; and tried the points of their swords in their dead bodies; and in order to prove what mettle they were made of, they thrust some of those through that still lay alive upon the ground.” (War, 5.12.3)

It was an utter nightmare.

The Jewish people who were not interested in a war with Rome were the ones who suffered the most. Josephus explains that “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 domestic miseries.” (War, 5.1.5) The factions, while killing each other, agreed on only one thing and that was killing those who were not for war with Rome: “although they were seditious one against another in other resects, yet did they agree in killing those that were for peace with the Romans, or were suspected of an inclination to desert to them as their common enemies. They agreed in nothing but this, to kill those that were innocent.” (War, 5.1.5) The burning of Jerusalem is not attributed by Josephus to the Romans, but to the Jewish rebels. He speaks of the “vastly rich buildings that fire which was kindled by the robbers hath consumed; for these were not burnt by the Romans, but by these internal plotters” (War, 5.4.4) Josephus later affirms that it was the Jewish revolutionaries who destroyed Jerusalem, and not the Romans:

“for I venture to affirm, that the sedition destroyed the city, and the Romans destroyed the sedition, which it was a much harder thing to do than to destroy the walls; so that we may justly ascribe our misfortunes to our own people and the just vengeance taken on them to the Romans” (War, 5.6.1)

In another part of his history, Josephus writes that “it was a seditious temper of our own that destroyed it; and that they were the tyrants among the Jews who brought the Roman upon us, who unwillingly attacked us, and occasioned the burning of our holy temple” (War, preface, 4).

Amazingly, Josephus declares that God abandoned His temple and was with the Rome: “Wherefore I cannot but suppose that God is fled out of his sanctuary, and stands on the side of those against whom you fight.” (5.9.4) Jesus Christ, when speaking of Jerusalem, proclaimed: “It shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrha in the day of judgment, than for that city.” (Matthew 10:15) And Josephus wrote that if the Romans had not destroyed Jerusalem, then God would have used nature to destroy it like Sodom and that the people who were living in Jerusalem were more atheistic than the people of Sodom:

“I suppose that had the Romans made any longer delay in coming against these villains, that the city would either have been swallowed up by the ground opening upon them, or been overflowed by water; or else been destroyed by such thunder, as the country of Sodom perished by. For it had brought forth a generation of men much more atheistical than were those that suffered such punishments. For by their madness it was that all the people came to be destroyed.” (Wars, 5.13.6)

Josephus says that there was never a generation more wicked than the one that revolted against Rome: “It is therefore impossible to go distinctly over every instance of these men’s iniquity. I shall therefore speak my mind here at once briefly; that neither did any other city ever suffer such miseries; nor did any age ever breed a generation more fruitful in wickedness than this was from the beginning of the world.” (War, 5.10.5) Christ Himself said that the generation that lived in His time was like a man getting possessed by one demon and then getting possessed by seven demons. The Crucifixion of Christ was in 33 AD, and the Jews commenced their war against Rome in 66 AD, exactly thirty-three years later. Thus, when Christ speaks of the demon that “goes out of a man” and then “goes and takes with him seven other spirits more wicked than himself” to “enter and dwell” in the man so that “the last state of that man is worse than the first” and declares: “So shall it also be with this wicked generation” (Matthew 12:43-45), He was speaking of the very generation that would revolt against Rome.

When Josephus says that there was no generation more wicked than the one that rebelled against Rome, he was referring to the very generation that Christ described as continuously spiraling deeper into the diabolical. And truly, such people were demonic as was seen in their endless killings, and even their turning to the evils of Sodom which Josephus wrote of, saying that they “indulged themselves in feminine wantonness” and “they killed with their right hands; and when their gait was effeminate, they presently attacked men” (War, 4.9.10). The nation that murdered Christ would destroy itself just a little bit over thirty years after the Crucifixion. And this very nation today is the most pro-homosexual country in the world and even takes pride spreading this phenomenon from the United States.

If in doubt anyone can read “How Jews Brought America to the Tipping Point on Marriage Equality” (by Tikkun) Also see The history of LGBT rights in Israel predates that of many Western nations, including the United States. (Snellings, Satchie). Also see The Gay identification of Tel Aviv: Examining Israel’s Pro-Gay Brand (New York University, Global Liberal Studies) Also see Mor, Zohar; Davidovich, Udi (2016)). Also see My Jewish Learning “Israel is among the leaders in equality for sexual minorities” by Lee Walzer. Today Israel is also becoming intensely anti-Christian where even their most ardent evangelical allies are beginning to notice. CBN’s 700 Club exposes Israel’s persecutions (see Persecution In Israel—CBN—Youtube) Even my own father who was an ardent supporter of Israel today has second thoughts about its ability to exist.

It would not be shocking that Israel, like its ancestors, is heading towards destruction again, being violently divided as it was in antiquity.

Israel right now is split over what many politicians want to do with the High Court. Israel’s right-wing wants to diminish the authority of the High Court to just a merely figurative institution, to overhaul the High Court, limiting its “powers to rule against the legislature and the executive, giving the Israeli parliament (the Knesset) the power to override Supreme Court decisions with a simple majority of 61 votes out of the 120-seat Knesset.”

Netanyahu’s coalition wants to change the way judges are elected. Currently, judges are appointed by a nine-member committee (Judicial Selection Committee). For a judge to be appointed to the Supreme Court, requires the approval of seven out of the nine committee members. According to the Times of Israel, the Committee consists of “two other Supreme Court justices selected by the justices of the Supreme Court; the justice minister, who chairs the committee, and another cabinet minister; two members of the Knesset chosen by the Knesset in a secret vote (usually, but not always, one MK from the coalition and one from the opposition); and two members of the Israel Bar Association chosen by the association’s national council.” There were already negotiations in February and March between academics and government officials, and reportedly compromises were said to have been made for every issue except one: the ruling party refused to give up on its aspiration of appointing a majority of members on the committee that appoints judges.

What the right-wing Knesset members want is for elected politicians to be the majority in the Judicial Selection Committee, effectively putting the Supreme Court under the control of the ruling party in the Knesset. Now, its not as though the government has no representation in the Committee. The Committee consists of two ministers and one member of the Knesset, while the Judiciary has three members. And since a candidate needs a majority of seven (out of nine) Committee members to get elected, then those three government representatives can prevent an election. Regardless, supporters of the judicial overhaul— such as Justice Minister Yariv Levin, Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee chairman Simcha Rothman — argue that this is not enough.

As they see it, judges should be appointed by elected officials. In their argument, judges — who are not appointed by publicly elected officials — having the power to strike down laws passed by politicians chosen by the people goes against the will of the masses who chose the politicians to represent them. ‘How can members of the Knesset represent the people if their laws are struck down by judges undemocratically elected?’ argues the Israeli right. They want politicians to have the power to choose judges because, as they argue, it would reflect the will of the people. The opponents to this agenda say that such an overhaul would merely allow rightest Knesset members to fill the court with judges who would not hinder the laws they pass no matter how oppressive they may be, and that it would get rid of judicial review on the laws passed in the Knesset.

Netanyahu’s administration wants to alter the Committee by removing the two representatives of the Israeli Bar Association from the panel. It would change the rule of having two members of the Knesset to having three members of the Knesset (two from the coalition and one from the opposition). The Committee would also consist of three cabinet ministers, including the justice minister who will serve as committee chair.

Instead of having to have a majority of seven votes from the nine member Committee, a simple majority of five votes would be required to elect a Supreme Court judge. Since two members of the Committee must be Knesset members who are part of the coalition government, and three must be cabinet members, this would give Netanyahu’s administration an automatic majority five votes that it needs to get the judges it wants.

From 1948 until 1953, Israeli Supreme Court judges were appointed by politicians. This changed in 1953 with the enactment of the Judges Law, and its been in place for seven decades. Such a sudden change in the status quo is bound to spark a vicious reaction.

The anger intensified after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fired his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, who criticized the plan for causing a tumult within the military (Gallant has refused to quit). The outrage provoked a national refusal to work, which caused many services to stop and impeded air traffic. This pushed Netanyahu to announce a temporary halting in the judicial legislation to allow for a potential compromise between the right-wing ruling coalition and the opposition parties. National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir announced that he agreed with the pause on the judicial overhaul, in a deal with Netanyahu that the judicial plan will be submitted to the Knesset for approval in the next session. "I agreed to remove the veto to reject the legislation in exchange for a commitment by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the legislation would be submitted to the Knesset for approval in the next session," Itamar Ben-Gvir said in a statement. Negotiations between the enemy parties will continue on, but its possible they will be stalled with stubbornness and hatred will still increase and intensify.

The pause is suppose to last until the next Knesset session, which starts in early May, and is meant to provide time for negotiations between the ruling party and opposition figures. “Out of national responsibility, from a desire to prevent the nation from being torn apart, I am calling to suspend the legislation,” Mr. Netanyahu said. “When there is a possibility to prevent a civil war through negotiations, I will give a time-out for negotiations.”

The fact that Netanyahu says that a civil war could happen because of major judicial shifts, speaks volumes as to how real the prospect of civil war in Israel is. The tension is high enough that a civil war could erupt. Despite Netanyahu’s pause, Simcha Rothman, chairman of the Knesset's Constitution, Law and Justice Committee and one of the creators of the judicial overhaul agenda, pushed to have the Judicial Appointments Law go through the Knesset constitution committee. The bill was eventually passed by the committee and is now awaiting to be approved by the Knesset. In the final version of Rothman's proposed amendment, the Judicial Appointments Committee will have eleven members (as opposed to nine which is the status quo), which would consist of three Supreme Court judges, three ministers from three different coalition parties, three lawmakers from the coalition and two lawmakers from the opposition, giving Netanyahu’s coalition a majority in the committee for the election of judges.

Rothman’s proposal would also allow the governing coalition to choose two Supreme Court judges on its own, without the Committee.

Tensions still linger in the air of Israel. Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi spoke of how there is a storm forming within the country that is very different to anything the military has sensed: "This hour is different to any that we have known before. We have not known such days of external threats coalescing, while a storm is brewing at home”. His words are almost reminiscent to the words of Josephus. Former Defense Minister Benny Gantz, attacked Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and declared that "the responsibility for a fratricidal war lies with you".

Its not just in Israel that civil war is being warned about, but in the Arab speaking world as well. In an editorial written in the newspaper A-Rai al-Yom, published in London, it states that "everyone who follows Israel's affairs is fully and clearly convinced that the main question in the country today is not whether a civil war will break out, but when.” It further writes that "when talking about an indication of a deep rift in Israeli society, which is divided into 'Israel the First', as it is called, it largely represents middle-class Jews who manage the Israeli economy and bear the burden of military service, and those who represent secular Israel against Netanyahu and his religious coalition.”

The rift in Israel is for the most part between the secular and moderately religious Jews, and the Orthodox and settler extremists. American conservatives who favor the Orthodox Jews have yet to see what cruelty and viciousness their extremism can lead to. The leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, has also predicted a civil war in Israel, saying: “The situation in the enemy entity is unprecedented at the internal level. The strategic environment and the current foolish government are pushing matters into two major conflicts: the first, within Israel and the second with the Palestinians. It may expand throughout the region. … For the first time, we are hearing talks by the president, prime ministers and former defense ministers, all talking about civil war, bloodshed, immigration and an explosion that may occur in the near future.” Netanyahu himself warned: “Israeli society is on a dangerous collision course. We are in the midst of a crisis that is endangering the basic unity between us.”

For the first time in the modern state of Israel, civil war is being seriously discussed. It makes one wonder if this wicked generation of Israel — which has embraced Sodom and anti-Christianity — will destroy itself through the horrors of its ancient ancestors who both Josephus and Christ referred to as wicked.

The main parties involved in the latest clashes are the South Sudanese national military, under the government of President Salva Kiir, and an opposition force known as the White Army, which is believed to be allied with Vice President Riek Machar.

...

Clashes are frequently characterized by interethnic violence, particularly between Mr. Kiir’s Dinka and Mr. Machar’s Nuer ethnic groups. Recurring violence has precipitated large-scale displacement, plunged the country into economic free-fall and sharply raised the price of food and fuel.

Mr. Machar’s political coalition has accused the government of targeting his allies in February, including by launching a large-scale operation against his supporters in Upper Nile State. At least 22 political and military leaders allied with Mr. Machar have been arrested, with the whereabouts of some of them still unknown, Human Rights Watch has said.

In early March, the government accused the White Army of attacking and capturing a military garrison in the northern town of Nasir along the border with Ethiopia. The authorities in Juba responded by arresting several of Mr. Machar’s allies, including the deputy chief of the army, Gen. Gabriel Duop Lam, and the petroleum minister, Puot Kang Chol.

The U.N. helicopter in Upper Nile came under fire on March 7, despite assurances of safe passage, according to the chief of the U.N. South Sudan mission, Nicholas Haysom. In addition to a member of the helicopter crew, the attack left several military officers dead, including a general, the United Nations said.

...

“South Sudan is one major escalation away from slipping into a new civil war,” said Alan Boswell, the Horn of Africa director at the International Crisis Group. “Should the government collapse or large-scale ethnic violence break out, the country could fragment.”

...

Uganda said last week that its special forces had deployed to Juba to “secure” the South Sudanese capital. The Ugandan military chief said in a social media post that his nation recognized Mr. Kiir as the country’s only president.

“Any move against him is a declaration of war against Uganda,” he said, adding, “All those who commit that crime will learn what it means.”

...

Uganda’s longtime president, Yoweri Museveni, has deployed troops to South Sudan several times in the past to prop up Mr. Kiir’s government. Yusuf Serunkuma, a researcher and scholar at Makerere University in Uganda, said that reports of a decline in Mr. Kiir’s health meant he needed Mr. Museveni’s backing even more.

Syria’s interim government signed a deal Monday with the Kurdish-led authority that controls the country’s northeast, including a ceasefire and the merging of the main U.S.-backed force there into the Syrian army.

The deal is a major breakthrough that would bring most of Syria under the control of the government, which is led by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham that led the ouster of President Bashar Assad in December.

The deal was signed by interim President Ahmad al-Sharaa and Mazloum Abdi, the commander of the U.S.-backed, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces.

The deal to be implemented by the end of the year would bring all border crossings with Iraq and Turkey, airports and oil fields in the northeast under the central government’s control. Prisons where about 9,000 suspected members of the Islamic State group are also expected to come under government control.

Syria’s Kurds will gain their “constitutional rights” including using and teaching their language, which were banned for decades under Assad. Hundreds of thousands of Kurds, who were displaced during Syria’s nearly 14-year civil war, will return to their homes.

This may have a major effect on the US military's presence in Syria. There are 2,000 American soldiers currently stationed in Syria, and they were put there to help the Kurds fight ISIS. Trump has been wanting to withdraw those soldiers even during his first term. If the Kurds make "peace" with the Turks and the new Syrian government, then Trump could then use this to justify full military withdrawal from Syria, which would only further empower the Turks in Syria. On March 2nd of 2025, Haaretz published an article that stated that if there is peace between the YPG and Turkey, Trump could then have his window of opportunity to do a military withdrawal, with the the idea that Turkey could then take care of Syria. Remember, on March 1st of 2025 the PKK (a Kurdish terrorist organization) agreed to a ceasefire with Turkey after decades of war. The next day, Haaretz published an article speaking of Turkey's "master plan" to control Syria and how this "master plan will require Syria's president to integrate Kurdish forces into Syria's army". Well, the Kurds in Syria just agreed to this. The very article then goes on to say:

Now that Congress is on Trump's side and relations with the "international community," namely the European states, look like an arm-twisting competition accompanied by spitting, Syrian and American commitment to the Kurds will not be at the top of the White House's list of priorities.

Trump may now be persuaded that his friend Erdogan can replace the Kurds in the war against ISIS, thereby ending American involvement in Syria.

In February of 2025, it was reported that the Defense Department has been preparing for a military withdrawal from Syria, as we read in MSNBC:

The Defense Department is developing plans to withdraw all U.S. troops from Syria, two U.S. defense officials told NBC News on Tuesday.

President Donald Trump and officials close to him recently expressed interest in pulling U.S. troops out of Syria, the officials said, leading Pentagon officials to begin drawing up plans for a full withdrawal in 30, 60 or 90 days.

If the US does do a complete military withdrawal, it will mean a further empowerment for Turkey in Syria. This explains why Israel lobbied for the US to not pressure the Russians to leave Syria, because they feel safer with Russia there as a check against the Turks as opposed to Turkey being the biggest power in Syria. Israel's Nagel Committee recently announced that Israel must prepare for a possible war with Turkey.

Eventually Israel and Turkey will clash.

Israel was at once under the Altar, the Ark of the Covenant, the waters that purified, the Law of Moses, only to soon breakdown in the chaos of civil war, to reject its Messiah and ending with the destruction of its Temple by Rome in a time when Jerusalem was flooded with the citizens of Sodom. Christendom was once here, overlooking a Europe under the Chalice, the Host, the waters of baptism, only to be torn apart, ravished and murdered, torn apart by war, overtaken by paganism and Sodom. In this essay we will be going through a brief of this history, showing the decay of Christendom.

The flowers blossom in the spring, and humans will still murder one another. The bees will spread pollen from flower to flower, and humans will still spread discord. The earth will grow green and abundant, the soil will be fecund and generous, and humans will glorify that which is ugly, and will call it art, because humanity is born into misery, and in accepting our condition we look for some sort of ascetic as a sort of refuge from our gloomy reality. We have moments of happiness, and yet these are fleeting, ending with sudden thoughts that this life will end; that those who we are attached to will be deceased. Our sense of happiness is disrupted by the reality of cruelty; that there are millions of people who, if the opportunity arises, will not hesitate to carry out the most sadistic actions that go beyond a normal imagination. When Ukrainian nationalists — followers of Stepan Bandera — were butchering Poles in Lviv, they sliced up a mother and father and placed the pieces of flesh in front of their daughter and said: "Live for the glory of Stepan Bandera. And this is pork for you so that you do not die of hunger.” To this we can say that this is not human, and thus we say that it is inhumane. But the fact that such sadists exist, that we can see a microcosm of such large-scale cruelty in criminals who may live next door to us, or that our very neighbors may even fantasize about inhumanity, reminds us that this life is full of evil. In the Garden of Eden, man fell because he wanted to be as a god, and such is the root of all evil: the desire to dominate. Its as old as the moment when mankind spiraled downwards. We can hear of warcrimes today, but this is nothing new. In 413 BC, during the Peloponnesian War, a band of Thracian mercenaries, fighting for Athens, annihilated the entire town of Mycalessus, as we read in Thucydides:

“The Thracians dashed into the town, sacked the houses and temples, and slaughtered the inhabitants. They spared neither old nor young, but cut down, one after another, all whom they met, the women and children, the very beasts of burden, and every living thing which they saw. For the Thracians, when they dare, can be as bloody as the worst barbarians. There in Mycalessus the wildest panic ensued, and destruction in every form was rife. They even fell upon a boys' school, the largest in the place, which the children had just entered, and massacred them every one. No calamity could be worse than this, touching as it did the whole city, none was ever so sudden or so terrible.” (Thucydides, 7.29)

This was thousands of years ago. What has changed? What carnage was witnessed in 413 BC was seen in Lebanon’s civil war where the men of Etienne Saqr — leader of the militia group, “Guardians of the Cedar” — claiming to be Catholics (Maronites) would cut off the ears of their victims and tie them on their belts as trophies. (See Fisk, Pity the Nation, p. 540)

With this we are reminded of a painting called the Age of Iron. It was made by Pietro da Cortona in 1640, and depicts soldiers massacring an entire family in the face of a priest whose exhortations for mercy go unheard. *See Greengrass, Christendom Destroyed, ch. 1, p. 36* Such a painting harked back to the Thirty Years War, Europe’s worst conflict before the Two World Wars. The bloodshed did not happen in the midst of a thriving Christian civilization, but in a Europe that was decayed and fragmented, where the Christian Faith was being mixed with pagan thought and European pride. An example of this can be seen in a painting called the Rape of Europa, by Tiziano Vecelli, one of the most famous painters of the Renaissance, from 1562. The painting shows a woman (representing Europa) about to lose her clothing and virginity, but she is hanging on to the horns of a bull who is actually Zeus. The painting was inspired by Book II of the ancient Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and this reflected the fact that Ovid was one of the most read authors in the Renaissance period. Many people today will tend to associate this period with Christendom, but the reality is that by this time Christendom as a government body was dead. By 1556, the Holy Roman Empire had ceased to be one of the two pillars of Christendom (Church and State) and was reduced to being a Habsburg dynastic instrument for use in German lands. The separation from Christianity and the nearing closer towards Europe’s pagan past was demonstrated in the reign of Charles V. In the time of his emperorship, a specially minted coin showed the demigod Hercules with the words “Plus Ultra” (Yet Further’). Similarly, in 1610 Henry IV of France commissioned a painting to be made portraying him as Hercules fleeing Venus in favor of the goddess of hope and virtue. This was not the first time Henry wanted to be portrayed as Hercules. Toussaint Dubreuil completed his painting of Henry as Hercules killing the many-headed Hydra in 1592, the Hydra representing the Catholic League. There was also another painting of him as “Gallic Hercules” carrying the world on his shoulders.

Paganism in the Renaissance was rooted in the fixation on the ancient Greek philosophers that are revered today, Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, and the rest of those thinkers of pagan antiquities. Initially, Greek philosophy was seen as an authority on which to explain truth. But eventually these Greek philosophers were seen almost as prophets unto themselves. Christianity in the West had lost its rustic, spiritual simplicity, and got mixed into a quagmire of sophistry, pagan philosophy, occultism and even paganism itself. One can see this even before the Renaissance, in the later Medieval period when Dante, who arose to an insurmountable popularity, wrote his Divine Comedy riddled with pagan gods. Homosexuality is mentioned in Dante’s Divine Comedy, but it is not entirely condemned to hell, but rather to Purgatory, where some sodomites can work to find redemption. Purgatory is for those who are not evil enough for hell, but not pure enough for Heaven. Thus, Dante places homosexuals in the middle as to the level of sin. Thus, in his Purgatorio, Dante wrote of those who

“committed the obscene
same sex-act for which Caesar won the shame
in victory of being called a Queen.” (Purgatorio xxvi)

That Dante puts homosexuality as a sin worthy of Purgatory, shows us that even as far back as his era — the 13th century — there were attempts at minimizing the evil of Sodom. Homosexuality and pedophilia were a lot more common than some of us may think. Attesting to this are the sermons of St. Bernadino of Siena. His testimony speaks for itself, in a 15th century sermon:

“I’ve heard about those [boys] who paint themselves up and go around bragging about their sodomizers and make it into a profession for profit and incite others to do likewise.”

For Bernadino, his native city of Siena was like Sodom and Gomorrah, being riddled with the evils of those cities, with pedophilia, going after strange flesh (Jude 1:7):

“As for me, I don’t want to die in this city, if I can help it… because you are all entangled in this sin [of sodomy]. … I don’t believe there’s a single spot in the city that is not contaminated and corrupted. … Oimme, what you have been reduced to, O city of Siena! In what darkness you are, that a small boy can’t be sent out on the street without being seized and corrupted.”

Sodom was also in Florence, and so horrendous was it that, according to Bernadino, there was a law banning Tuscans from working as schoolmasters.

Bernadino did not just speak solely from his own knowledge, but also from his own experience. As a youth he was preyed upon by a homosexual predator. According to Leonardo Benvoglienti, a childhood friend of Bernadino:

“It also happened at that time [of adolescence], that after another malicious and evil man — not a citizen [of Siena] however — had many times expressed with impure words and signs a filthy and unspeakable desire toward Bernardino, Bernardino, that mirror of purity, asked some of his close friends and companions — like him, young men of good reputation — to help him be freed of this annoyance. And having consulted with them, he told each of them to arm themselves with stones. Once they had done so, they sought the evil man. Finding him near the gate of the Magnificent Lord Priors of the city, Bernardino said: ‘We mustn’t cause a scene here near the town hall; let’s draw him away from the square and then we’ll chase after him with the stones.” Immediately thereafter, the man, blinded by evil lust, gazing intently at Bernardino, held out to him a handful of florins, and made signs to him as if to say: ‘All of these are yours if you say yes to me.’ The clever lad nodded to him, signaling him to leave the square. As soon as they had left the square and were on the road of Porta Salaria, Bernardino shouted out to the man: ‘O wicked immoral man, you deserve to be burned at the stake! Everyone, get him! Get him! Get him!’ And, shouting aloud he began to pelt the man with stones. His friends as well responded in unison with shouts and stones and filled the air with their noise. The wicked man fled.”

The ubiquitous presence of Sodom in Italy is not merely something spoken of by a preacher. Bernadino’s words reflected the reality, and are attested to by the records of Florence. According to Michael Rocke:

“In the small city of around only 40,000 inhabitants, every year during roughly the last four decades of the fifteenth-century an average of some 400 people were implicated and 55 to 60 condemned for homosexual relations. Throughout the entire period corresponding to the duration of the Office of the Night, it can be estimated that as many as 17,000 individuals or more were incriminated at least once for sodomy, with close to 3,000 convicted.”

Bernardino’s sermons could be taken as exaggerations, but his testimony agrees with the research of modern scholarship. Homosexuality in Florence was so common that, according to Rocke: “In the later 15th century, the majority of local males at least once during their lifetimes were officially incriminated for engaging in homosexual relations.” The anti-homosexual law in Florence was quite lax. If a man knew that he was going to be condemned, all he had to do was appear before the Office of the Night, confess and be issued a civil absolution after paying a modest fine. If he was working class and lacked money, he could simply donate a sack of flour to a convent. The first person to have been condemned by the Office of the Night was Florence’s highest public official, a 70-year-old patrician who, according to a report, sodomized a 14-year old boy. The 70-year-old confessed and paid a small fine. “Homosexual activity in Florence was widespread and deeply rooted, a tenacious social and sexual reality that the community’s disciplinary effort [the Night Office] had to acknowledge and, to a certain extent, accommodate,” Rocke writes. The famous political writer of Florence, Niccolo Machiavelli — who really established the foundation of callous, ruthless secular politics and a idol of modern thinkers — expressed his concern to his friend, Francesco Vettori, about how his son, Ludovico, was in a sexual relationship with a young man. Vettori told him in a letter not to worry, to allow his son to indulge in this evil:

“Since we are verging on old age, we might be severe and overly scrupulous, and we do not remember what we do as adolescents. So Lodovico has a boy with him, with whom he amuses himself, jests, takes walks, growls in his ear, goes to bed together. What then? Even in these things perhaps there is nothing bad.” (See Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence)

When the sculptor Baccio Bandinelli accused his rival Benvenuto Cellini of being “a dirty sodomite,” the latter replied by praising homosexuality as something practiced by the gods and the greatest kings and emperors:

“Oh, fool, you’re wrong: but would God that I knew how to practice such a noble art, since one reads that Jove used it with Ganymede in paradise, and here on earth the greatest emperors and kings in the world use it. I am a lowly and humble wretch, and neither could I nor would I know how to get involved in such an admirable thing.”

One preacher tried to purge Florence of Sodom: his name was Friar Savonarola, and his combat against this evil sparked such rage that an entire pro-sodom faction, called the Arrabbiati (“Angry Ones”), was mobilized against him.

Some very disturbing things happened in this time in Florence. For example, a man was denounced for permitting wealthy men to sodomize his three sons. His reason? “it was good for the family,” meaning that they were going to give promotions or favors.

Even in those days there were atheists. While in his twenties Savonarola wrote a poem called De Ruina Mundi (On the Ruin of the World) in which he laments to God: “there are those who say that you do not exist and there are those who say that you dream.” There is nothing new under the sun, as King Solomon, thousands of years, wrote of atheists in his day: The fool has said in his heart, There is no God. (Psalm 14:1)

In the Renaissance period lied a deep fascination for the pre-Christian gods of Europe. People wanted to return to the deities of the ancient Graeco-Roman world. There is a letter from 1434, written in the Italian town of Ferrara, which speaks of a festival in which masked dancers performed as Greek gods. “First of all came Apollo”, reads the letter, “with his blazing rays … Then came Bacchus with lurching gait … Hoary-bearded Aesculapius followed shortly behind. Then it was well worthwhile to see furious Mars with his drawn sword and flashing armor, marching along with Bellona. After these Mercury with wings on his feet. … The fair form of Venus with her golden apple was not absent; Cupid followed his mother, no otherwise than as the poets depict him, shooting both leaden and golden arrows. Quite a few people were terrified by the raging furies — Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos — who, if it is to be believed, weave the lives of men. Then there was Hercules, clad in his lionskin and grasping his club”. (See Godwin, The Pagan Dream of the Renaissance, p. 3).

It is quite surreal to find out that the gods that the earliest Christians combated, these demons for whom the ancientest Christians were martyred to appease the vicious mob of pagans, these diabolical objects of worship who the Apostles exerted every effort to wipe out in the minds of men, were revered in so-called Christendom, because of a warped fantasy. This adulation for the pagan gods of pre-Christian Europe is greatly exemplified in Dante who asks Apollo to inspire him by entering his chest and breathing:

“O good Apollo, for the final effort, make me such a vessel of your genius, as you demand for the gift of your beloved laurel. Till now, one peak of Parnassus was enough, but now inspired by both I must enter this remaining ring. Enter my chest, and breathe, as you did when you drew Marsyas out of the sheath that covered his limbs.” (Paradiso, Canto 1)

In the midst of such pagan hysteria was a fixation on the occult. One of the most famous proponents of this at at the time was Paracelsus (real name Theophrastus von Hohenheim) who believed that prophecies could be made based on eclipses and comets, and held that the Apocalypse would be predicted by signs in the sky. When Haley’s Comet appeared in 1531, Paracelsus saw it on August 21st in the sky above St. Gallen and wrote: “All destruction of monarchies … are announced by portents and signs”. For him, astral occultism was a form of revolution, and he saw movement in the sky as presaging the end of monarchy (much like how the Freemasons in the 18th century awaited a coming world revolution to topple all monarchies). The occult was also used in the hopes of Protestant utopianism. For example, the German Lutheran pastor, Johann Valentin Andreae, wrote a book in 1616 entitled the Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz. The book promoted the work of Christian Rosencreutz, the legendary founder of the Rosicrucian Order which would end up being amongst the inspirations for Freemasonry. Andreae, in his work, used alchemical allegories to represent aspirations for a new Protestant golden age.

People will speak of “Christendom”, but there is no Christendom. Christendom is dead, and we killed her a long time ago, and from her grave arose Europa. Once you sever ties with Christianity, you no longer have Christendom, but Europa, and all of her internal divisions and rising empires. In the words of Mark Greengrass:

“the central issue in the history of Europe in the sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth centuries was: what was to happen to Christendom — the institutions which defined its centres of gravity and, still more, the belief-community which underlay it? If Christendom was destroyed, what, if anything, was to take its place? The process was one of a progressive eclipse of Christendom by Europe (defined as a geographical notion in a relationship of distance with other parts of the world). The two entities differed fundamentally. Christendom claimed the loyalties of those who were baptized into the belief-community and who related to the outside world accordingly. Europe’, on the other hand, claimed no unity beyond the geographical landmass that it represented and an emerging sense of the moral and civilizing superiority of the different states and peoples which occupied it.” (Greengrass, Christendom Destroyed, intro, pp. xxvii-xxix).

In the seventeenth century, the idea of Christendom had become an object of mockery. An example of this was Thomas Cockson’s engraving, The Revells of Christendome, which was made in the wake of the controversial truce between Catholic Spain and the recently born Protestant Dutch Republic. On the graving, Pope Paul V sits at a table with three kings — Henry IV of France, James I of England and Christian IV of Denmark. Next to them are three Catholic monks playing a game of backgammon, dice and cards over the fate of Europe. To further convey the point of mockery, a dog urinates on the leg of one of the monks. The message was clear: Christendom has become a joke. The breakdown of Christendom was accompanied by the beginning stages of the emphasis on native languages by their speakers. Michel de Montaigne described Gascon, the language of southwestern France, as “male” and “military”, while his fellow writer, Etienne Pasquier, insulted Italian as “soft” and “effeminate”. Both Montaigne and Paquier were part of the humanist zeitgeist of the time which elevated language as a great indicator of education. Various writers would vie with one another in elevating their own native tongues. The poet Joachim du Bellay wrote a book entitled Defense and Illustration of the French Language, condemning his compatriots for not promoting the richness of the French language. The 17th century saw the rise of “Gallicanism”, or the distancing of the French Catholic Church from Roman ecclesiastical authority.

Spanish humanists upheld the Castilian language for its Latin roots, while Martin de Viziana praised his native tongue of Valencian for its ancient origins. In 1589, Gudbrandur Thorlaksson advanced the idea of the ‘purity’ of Icelandic. Latin still remained the lingua franca for justice, administration and the Catholic Church, but nativism was beginning its advent. One clear example of this was the Edict of Villers-Cotterets of 1539 which refers to the “maternal French language” as what should be spoken in French courts.

In that same year, the Polish parliament (Sejm) decreed that all of its laws and edicts should be published in Polish. And the Act of Union between England and Wales in 1536 mandated that oaths be taken “in the English tongue”. In 1561, the Spanish Inquisition made Castilian the required language in Catalonia, and this caused ethnic tensions between the two (and to this day, the tensions between Spain and Catalonia linger). In the 17th century, the Swedes tried to restrict the use of Danish and Finnish in their new empire. The Hapsburgs sought to impose the German language in Czech lands after the Battle of White Mountain in 1620 (the battle that would mark the beginning of the Thirty Years War, the most devastating conflict in Europe’s history before the Two World Wars).

National pride went along with claims on territories that one kingdom once owned. Even though the One Hundred Years War between the English and French ended in 1453, the war left wounds that never healed and a climate of tension that continued to be present. When Henry VIII was crowned in 1509, he spoke of his ancestor Henry V and expressed his dream to retake Guyenee (which the English once had dominion over). To do this, Henry VIII joined the Holy League of Pope Julius II, King Ferdinand of Aragon and Venice to drive the French out of Italy. His expedition to retake Guyenee was a failure, and the fighting went to a halt with a mutual non-aggression pact (Treaty of London) in October of 1518. This was just a typical ceasefire between rival nations that eventually gets broken. For in 1522 a large English army led by Charles Brandon invaded France and wreaked havoc, reaching within fifty miles of Paris. What was gained in this attack was small and the costs were great. The English Parliament refused to mandate any additional taxes to support the war effort, so Cardinal Thomas Wolsey came up with a tax of 1/3 of the estimated revenues of the clergy and 1/6 on the lay population. This tax was, expectedly, hated, and it failed to get the necessary funds for the war. The English conflict with the French over Italy would be a part of a long series of wars known as the Italian Wars, which would eventually become a wider war between the Hapsburgs and the French (specifically the Valois). In 1508 Francesco Guicciardini described the Italian Wars as “a flame, a pestilence which has entered Italy”.

The Italian Wars consisted of the War of the League of Cambrai (1511-16), and then the Four Years War (1521-6) and the War of the League of Cognac (1526-30). The Church was heavily involved in the conflict. In 1511, Pope Julius formed the Holy League with the Spanish and Venetians against the French. The King of France, Louis XII, responded with a propaganda scheme against the Pope, spreading satirical pamphlets to smear his name. These pamphlets called Julius “serf of the serfs” — a mockery of the pontifical title of “servant of the servants of God” (servus servorum Dei) — and “prince of idiots”. French propaganda also described the papacy as the reason for schism in Christendom. According to the rhetoric, only temporal kings, led by France, could lead Christendom. On November of 1511, Louis XII summoned a council with Church officials in Pisa as his troops invaded the Romagna and Ravenna. Pope Julius declared the council to be schismatic and, as a response, conveyed his own council. This was a time of growing animosity towards the Church. As the general of the Dominican Order recorded in 1521: “All Germany is in open revolt. Nine-tenths cry out ‘Luther!’ And the remaining tenth… cry ‘Death to the Roman Curia!’” Luther’s cause was not just one of theology, but a national movement in which Germany endured a struggle of liberation from Rome.

In 1521 the French made an attack on the Hapsburg Empire in Luxembourg and Navarre. The Hapsburg Emperor Charles, being in an alliance with the Church, promised Pope Leo X Parma and Piacenza for his support, and invaded Milan. A large body of French forces tried to overtake the Hapsburg power, but were defeated at La Bicocca in April of 1522. Thirty thousand French soldiers surrounded Milan in 1524, but nothing was gained. Emperor Charles decided to amplify the conflict with a full on invasion of France, hitting Marseille. In Pavia, the French tried to make a stand, but imperialist forces from Germany arrived and overwhelmed the French, slaughtering thousands in the Battle of Pavia in February of 1525. Ten thousand more French were captured, including the King of France himself, Francis. He was released in the next year. Pope Clement VII, fearing Hapsburg expansion, made a pact with the recently freed French king (alongside Florence) and formed the League of Cognac. Charles V then saw the Vatican as his enemy. In August of 1527, the Emperor Charles launched the bloodiest sack of Rome in the city’s history.

With an army of 700 lancers, 800 cavalry, 3,000 Italian adventurers, 5,000 Spanish soldiers and 10,000 German mercenaries, the city was going to be overtaken by an utter nightmare. When they finally broke through Rome’s defenses, Spanish imperial soldiers rushed into the Borgo screaming “Spain! Spain! Kill! Kill!” The whole Borgo became a slaughterhouse. Some of the defenders fled only to drown in the Tiber. The Swiss Guards put up a fight right by the obelisk in front of St. Peter’s Basilica, only to be cut to pieces. The imperial soldiers, seeing that there was no one to oppose them, went through the Borgo killing all who they came across. They took the commander of the Swiss Guards, Roust (who was heavily wounded) and murdered him in front of his wife. Not even a hospital was spared as almost all of the patients were butchered. As a monk from the monastery of San Salvatore recounted: “Everyone in the Santo Spirito hospital was killed apart from from the few who managed to flee.”

The same monk also recorded that imperial fighters charged into an orphanage in La Pieta and killed everyone inside, and many of the children “were thrown from the windows into the street.” The Pope had been attending mass in St. Peter’s Basilica when the invasion began, but in the midst of the chaos he decided to flee to the Castel Sant’Angelo. While he made his way to the edifice, an immense crowd of panicking people were all seeking refuge in the same place. However, the Pope had a papal escape route that led right into the castello. Him and his entourage met the sight of Spanish troops who then opened fire on them. The huge crowd of fleeing people trembled into the castle, their horrified faces and trepidatious bodies jumbled together like a mass of chaos and hysteria, their terrifying voices chilling the air as they resounded to the ears amidst a deluge of destruction. An elderly Cardinal named Antonio Pucci was knocked down and trampled by the panicking crowd. So many people were trying to enter the castle that there was no way to even shut the gates. The Pope needed to get inside, and those who were deemed as having no use were cast out.

As Pesaro of Zara recorded: “The pope was told that there were many people in the castle, most of them of no military use, and there was little grain, so many of the useless ones were thrown out.” Cardinal Pucci managed to get inside by being carried up by rope through a window. The chaos continued. One military commander, Giuliano the Florentine, was seen “tearing at his face and sobbing bitterly” as he witnessed his wife and child being raped. The invaders, as one observer wrote, “threw the bodies of little children out of doorways into the street. And women were dragged out and outraged on the ground … crying and wailing so loudly that all the city could hear.” In the midst of the wailing and the ravishing, the blood splatter and the incessant gore, a multitude of priests were seen completely naked, left in a state of humiliation. A witness wrote of how “large numbers of the priests are naked and that it is a terrible thing to see the great number of dead, and most of all the little children younger than ten years old”. He also spoke of how the invaders “are exhausted from lack of sleep, drunk on blood, killing everything”. Francesco Guicciardini, an historian who lived in the time of the sacking, gives us an idea of the horror:

“In the streets there were many corpses. Many nobles lay there cut to pieces, covered with mud and their own blood, and many people only half dead lay miserably on the ground. Sometimes in that ghastly scene a child or man would be seen jumping from a window, forced to jump or jumping voluntarily to escape becoming the living prey of these monsters and finally ending their lives horribly in the street.”

The sacking of Rome was done mainly by Lutheran fighters who esteemed themselves as sacking the Harlot of Babylon. They carved the name Martin Luther onto the walls of the rooms in the Vatican Palace. It is not a surprise that the chancellor of the Hapsburg Empire at the time, the humanist Alfonso de Valdes, had been privately corresponding with both Luther and Melanchthon and expressed his contempt for the papacy in his defence of the sacking of Rome.

The Landsknecht took a donkey and dressed it with priestly vestments. They then ordered a priest to feed the Eucharist to the mule, and when he refused they murdered him. They took priests and monks and shed their blood right on top of the altars and raped young nuns. The altar in St. Peter’s Basilica was piled with the slaughtered bodies of those who fled into the infamous church thinking that they would be protected from the invaders. As they butchered these people on the altar, one after the other, the Landsknecht cried out: “Long live Pope Luther!”, unleashing their Protestant frenzy at the Church that they saw as the Harlot of Babylon. “If anyone had been walking through the streets of Rome by day or night,” wrote Guicciardini, “he would have heard not sighs and tearful laments, but pitiful cries and screams of hapless prisoners coming from every house and building.” (See Foster & Marcovitz, Rome, p. 100). In the end, around 45,000 people were slaughtered, wounded or exiled.

Peace would, eventually, be made between the Church and Crown, In June of 1529, when Pope Clement and the Hapsburg emperor agreed to the Treaty of Barcelona. But the damage had already been done. The carnage that struck Rome was one of many things that reflected the devastation of Christendom. Was not Jerusalem destroyed for its crimes and evils? Rome, which held a headquarters for the Church established by Christ, was not exempt.

Guicciardini described the miserable state of the clergymen under the Landsknecht’s reign of terror, and he mentions something that indicates the spirit of Sodom in the Vatican:

“many of these men wore torn and disgraceful habits, others were without shoes. Some in ripped and bloody shirts had cuts and bruises all over their bodies from the indiscriminate whippings and beatings they had received. Some had thick and greasy beards. Some had their faces branded, and some were missing teeth; others were without noses or ears. Some were castrated and so depressed and terrified that they failed to show in any way the vain and effeminate delicacy and lasciviousness that they had put on with such excessive energy for so many years in their earlier, happier days.”

Guicciardini describes the clergy as living an effeminate lifestyle prior to being devastated by the Landsknecht and imperial forces, indicating that homosexuality was prevalent within the Vatican, and these German fanatics, seeing themselves as the scourge of God against the Harlot of Babylon, rained down fury upon them. With this, it is not far-fetched to see how such destruction could come upon the Vatican again. Right before the destruction of Jerusalem, the Jews of that city “indulged themselves in feminine wantonness” (Josephus, Wars, 4.9.10). Before the sack of Rome in 1527, the clergy indulged themselves in “effeminate delicacy”. And today, the whole of the Vatican has been overtaken by Sodom. What fate awaits for Rome when God Himself did not spare Jerusalem? When Rome was at war with Jerusalem, Josephus tells us, the Zealots among the Jews “decked their hair, and put on women’s garments, and were besmeared over with ointments; and that they might appear very comely, they had paints under their eyes, and imitated not only the ornaments, but also the lusts of women, and were guilty of such intolerable uncleanness, that they invented unlawful pleasures of that sort.” (Wars, 4.9.10)

Rome destroyed Jerusalem and took the mantel, and now Rome has become like Jerusalem. When St. Paul wrote to the Church of Rome, he warned them of homosexuality, writing of “men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly” (Romans 1:27). There is a vicious circle that revolves in the movement of humanity, one that continues on a path of violence. Paradise was on earth, and man, full of discontent, wanted to elevate himself in his position within the Garden of Eden and become gods. The gardens still grow, the flowers sill bloom, the bees collect their pollen, the fruits still form, and yet man still sheds blood. There is a 17th century painting by Sebastian Vrancx portraying the slaughter of a village in the Thirty Years war: a woman is dragged from her hair as her child weeps, a man is on his knees begging for mercy as a marauder on his horse overlooks him and another pillager stands behind him, sword in hand, pulling the victim back as if he is about to slaughter him; a naked corpse lies on the ground, amidst numerous lifeless bodies. There is another piece of art from the 17th century, a little sculpture by Leonard Kern, showing a naked woman, her hands tied behind her back, being led by a soldier. The garden grows, but man still murders, man still rapes ravishes, man still destroys, man still seeks to impose himself on others, determining who lives and who dies, uplifting Sodom, uplifting earthly Jerusalem, uplifting Rome, uplifting cities that are skeletons.

By Theodore Shoebat and Walid Shoebat

With the Turkish scimitar hovering above Armenia, and the crescent of the red dragon lingering over Baku in Azerbaijan, and with Russian troops being deployed in Nagorno-Karabakh, we are going back to an era that we see as away and gone, dissipated in the forgotten past. We may forsake the past, but surely the past always makes its way into the present, into our minds, into our souls. Let us reminisce a little bit into the past, to see but a glimpse of the horrors of Ottoman reign, and a brief history of how the Russians and Ottomans fought over Armenia where today the Turkish leviathan — whose tentacles expand across the Mediterranean sea, looking to engulf the waters and lands of its past hegemony — and the Russian bear — whose claws wish to grip the lands of its former empire — are setting their gazes.

For now, the Russians and Turks are being diplomatic, but how long can diplomacy last when both sides — trying to revive their old empires — have opposing goals? As long as they are pursuing empire, it is inevitable that they will eventually clash (especially given the fact that they have had so many wars against each other). An Armenian analyst named Bogdan Atanesyan, just recently made this observation:

“Will Russians be able to get used to the Turks in Azerbaijan and, as they say, live peacefully? Hardly, considering that, firstly, they have a diametrically opposite vision of the way of the region, and, secondly, because the arena of their rivalry, which gradually turns into outright hostility, is geographically heterogeneous and widely scattered (Syria, Libya, the Caucasus and, finally, potentially - Ukraine and Crimea). Their clash in Azerbaijan may not necessarily take place on the basis of the Karabakh agenda, which means that the likelihood of confrontation here multiplies. It also means that even if the Russians and the Turks are able to work out a fragile balance with a great mutual desire, it will be quite easy for some third interested force to create an explosive situation through provocation.”

We are seeing the rise of both Russia and Turkey, and they are rivaling over control of the South Caucasus. Eventually, interests will conflict and the two sides will clash. And who will suffer the most but the people in the middle of the disorder? When the Russians and Ottomans were enemies during the First World War, the Armenian Genocide occurred, and in the midst of this genocide the Russians fought against the Ottomans on the side of the Armenians. Let us look briefly into this history as to get an idea of what the future holds.

At this time, in 1914 and 1915, the Ottomans had been devastated by the British in Basra (in southern Iraq) and by the Russians in Sarikamis. The empire was declining to its end, and the Young Turks prepared for total war with the British and the Russians. When the Turks were utterly defeated by the Russians in Sarikamis, the loss did not end with the shame of being crushed in the battlefield, but continued on as a horrendous plague that killed 150,000 Ottoman troops and civilians in north-eastern Turkey. From contaminated food and water that they scavenged (since their government gave them close to nothing for food), the soldiers got infected with typhoid and dysentery; lice and fleas had invaded their bodies gave them typhus. They brought the disease to the civilians in Turkey.

The pestilence spread and became an epidemic in the country in the early part of 1915. Instead of having to deal with just wounded soldiers, doctors and nurses and Erzurum were now being overwhelmed by an inundation of infected people. The military hospital only had a capacity of nine hundred people and so now every school, every mosque and every government building in Erzurum had to be used as hospitals. At the peak of the epidemic there were up to 15,000 patients in this area. Food and medical supplies were swiftly used up and at times patients would go for two or three days without food. According to the missionary doctor, Edward Case, who treated patients in this epidemic, between December and January as many as 60,000 people were wiped out by disease in Erzurum alone. The horrors of the disease were described by Dr. Case:

“The dead were so numerous they forbade their burial by day, and at night they were carried naked by wagon-load to the trenches, their clothing having been taken from their backs. I saw a trench or rather a large hole half-filled with dead bodies in every position, just as they had been thrown in like rubbish, and half-uncovered, their heads, arms, legs and even parts of their body showing. Others were later thrown in on top of them, and all covered up. It was a terrible site to see.”

Going through such a horrid experience, people began to do what always happens in these types of plights: they pointed to a scapegoat. In this case it was the Armenians. The Turkish Medical Corporal, Ali Riza Eti, was posted in Erzurum and was made chief orderly in the quarantine section. The work was strenuous, and seeing so many ill and dying, the hatred that he already harbored only grew more violently against Armenians, accusing them of disloyalty (there were Armenians who, understandably so, deserted their ranks to fight for the Russians) and saw them as having responsibility for the loss at Sarikamis. This hatred was already within Eti. While he was serving in the front in Sarikamis, when a Turkish soldier would murder an Armenian, he would simply report it as an “accidental” death. A wounded man told Eti that he had been abandoned by an Armenian soldier and left to die. After lying in the cold ground for two days, we was suffering from frostbite in both his hands and feet. The medics tried to save him and amputated his limbs, but he died the next day. Eti would write in his diary:

“Imagine how contemptible the Armenian soldier was … Could we be brothers and fellow citizens after this war? For my part, no! It is easy for me take my revenge. I will just make three or four of the Armenians in the hospital drink poison.”

In January of 1915, Corporal Eti used his position to abuse Armenian workers. “I dispatched three Armenians, one from Van and one from Diyarbakir, to be stripped and robbed [i.e., by rural marauders, who usually killed their victims]. This is what you call Turkish revenge … And I assign the most dangerous tasks to Armenian orderlies” wrote Eit with sadistic glee. The cruel rage of Eti was a reflection of a ubiquitous and insatiable bloodlust that lingered in the Ottoman atmosphere. It did not take long for the Young Turks to begin discussing the “Armenian problem”.

As Talat Pasha himself would admit in 1920, the objective was “eliminating [the Armenian problem] in a manner that is comprehensive and absolute.” In February of 1915, Dr. Bahaedin Sakir, the operational chief of the Teskilat-i Mahsusa (Special Organization, the imperial government special forces) and a member of the masonic Committee of Union and Progress Central Committee, returned to Istanbul from the Caucasus front to report to Talat Pasha and Mehmed Nazim that it was necessary to address “the enemy within” due to the “oppositional stance that the Armenians had taken toward Turkey and the assistance that they were affording to the Russian army”.

It was true that there were many Armenian nationalists who vocally supported the Allies against the Ottomans, but Armenians cannot be blamed for this. One cannot expect people to be loyal to a regime that hates them. But nonetheless, these nationalists did not really help their people by providing justification for the hatred that the Ottoman government had for them. It is why the Armenian priest, Fr. Grigoris Balakian, refused to support the nationalists and their cause. “Caught up in their nationalist sentiment,” wrote Balakian, “they were loath to miss this unique opportunity to redress the wrongs committed by the Turks against the Armenian people”. Armenian support for the Allies — for example, when the Armenians cheered in public when the British and French made their attack on the Dardanelles — was capitalized upon by the Ottomans who wanted to purge the Armenians from their empire.

One thing that occurred that would enable this ‘solution’ to the “Armenian problem” was the massive population exchange that took place after the Balkan Wars. The Ottomans would deport thousands of Greeks from their empire and the Greeks would deport thousands of Muslims from their country. The Muslims took refuge within the empire of the Ottoman, and the Greeks would return to their homeland. The massive deportation of thousands of Greeks established a precedent for the removal of populations deemed undesirable.

With their beliefs in Darwinism, the Young Turks — who were actually agnostic — had no qualms over the idea of mass extermination of people who would hinder their goal of Ottoman homogeneity, and they would use the violent hand of the jihadist to commit to their purge. What began as a controlled exchange of border populations between enemies after a war (the Ottoman Empire and Greece), and which was agreed upon by the belligerents, quickly shifted into a vicious policy of ethnic cleansing as hundreds of thousands of ethnic Greeks were violently deported before and after the First World War. Entire villages were rounded up, and those who resisted were murdered. But while there were deaths in the deportations, most of it took place without deaths since there was a home country that the Greeks could return to. This could not be said for the Armenians, who at the time did not have their own homeland. Rather the Armenians — being a minority in every province of the Ottoman Empire — had their highest concentrated populations in only three areas: Istanbul, Cilicia and the Caucasus (where Armenia is).

In February of 1915, the deportations began. On the model of the Greek population exchanges, the Turks began to deport Armenians from Dortyol and Alexandretta to the Adana region which lies in the southern part of Turkey. They dropped them in Adana and gave them absolutely no provisions or assistance, forcing the Armenians to rely on local Christians for survival. A haunting fear was felt amongst the Armenians, and they had a harrowing sense that death was coming.

Armenian nationalists sought to resist and spark an uprising with the hopes that it would get the Allies to intervene and support their cause. In the middle of February a group of Armenian rebels travelled from Zeytun to Tbilisi to request arms from the Russians. They told the Russians that they had a force of 15,000 men who were ready for combat against the Turkish enemy. But the Russians were in no position to provide arms and support an Armenian revolution. At the end of February, a number of Armenian leaders went to the Ottoman authorities and reported to them about an uprising that was being planned by Armenian rebels.

These leaders believed that by reporting this they could demonstrate that the Armenians were loyal to the Ottoman Empire and were thus not a threat. But this did not help, and in fact only exasperated the animosity against the Armenians. Ottoman troops were deployed to Zeytun to do mass arrests. But young men fled Zeytun to join rebel forces. On March 9th, Armenian insurgents ambushed a group of Turkish officers near Zeytun, slaying some of the soldiers and stealing their money. Now the Young Turks — and all of the Ottomans who hated the Armenians — had more propaganda to use as a pretext for genocide. Every single Armenian in Zeytun was deported to Konya. Muslims were then allowed to take over their now vacant homes (this is actually what is occurring in Nagorno-Karabakh, with Armenians being driven out of their homes by the tens of thousands). Over seven thousand of the Armenians deported to Konya were left homeless.

In Istanbul, the purge was commenced with the arrest of intellectuals, rebels and religious leaders. All together, they arrested 240 notables and crammed them in “blood-red” buses as we are told by Fr. Balakian, who was amongst those arrested. In the stillness of the night, they were put on a ferry and moved from the Asian side to the European side of Istanbul. “The night smelled of death; the sea was rough, and our hearts were full of terror,” wrote Balakian. More busses arrived crammed with people “in a state of spiritual anguish, terrified of the unknown and longing for comfort”.

This haunting feeling reverberated in the town of Van, where many Armenians lived which lied in eastern Anatolia on the coast of Lake Van. It would be here where much of the extermination of the Armenians would occur. In March of 1915, Cevdet Pasha, the governor of Van who was fanatically loyal to the Young Turks, ordered officers to search Armenian villages for weapons and arrest anyone who was suspected of owning a weapon to use against the state. Two Armenian rebel leaders were executed. A reign of terror was unleashed on the town of Van.

Armenians were butchered like cattle. On April 20th, Rafael de Nogales (a Venezuelan volunteer who joined the Ottoman military for the thrill of battle), wrote of how he saw Lake Van filled with “mutilated Armenian corpses”. In the village of Adilcevaz, which lies on the north shore of Lake Van, the Ottomans began butchering the Armenians. De Nogales, who was suppose to be partaking in the slaughter (being dressed in Ottoman uniform), was outraged by what he saw and demanded to an official that the bloodshed cease. The official nonchalantly told him “that he was doing nothing more than carrying out an unequivocal order emanating from the Governor General of the province [i.e., Cevdet Pasha] … to exterminate all Armenian males twelve years of age and over”.

At Edremit, de Nogales gazed upon the flames whose smoke covered the sky, from the burning homes, from the churches that were set ablaze. And from a distance he saw the Turks and Kurds fighting in gun battles with the Armenians, who were outnumbered. Gun smoke clouded the air in the midst of a torrent of flame and smoke. “Burning villages that bathed the sky in scarlet” wrote de Nogales. When he left Edremit and began heading back to Van, de Nogales witnessed the aftermath of slaughter; the smell of rotting corpses, voracious vultures crowding the road to gnaw on putrefied flesh. He would recount what he saw: “To right and left of the road circled screaming flocks of black vultures, disputing with the dogs the putrefied Armenian corpses thrown about on every side”.

By the time de Nogales returned to Van the town had been won by Armenian fighters. The Ottomans now had to fight to take it back, and de Nogales partook in the ruthless fray. “I have rarely seen such furious fighting as took place during the siege of Van. … Nobody gave quarter nor asked it.” Savagery was seen on both sides, and in the midst of the chaos, there came the Russians, to take the town from the Ottomans. They saw the Armenians' fight against Ottoman rule as their opportunity to back the Armenians and to further assert their rule in the area. The fear of the Russian army pierced the hearts of the Turks to the point that Cevdat Pasha ordered the evacuation of every Muslim in Van. Ottoman troops withdrew from the town on May 17th, 1915. The Armenians, sensing victory, set fire to Muslim homes and Ottoman government buildings. The Russians arrived in May of 1915 and appointed an Armenian nationalist, Aram Manukian, to be the governor of Van.

But the Ottomans returned and drove their Russian enemy, taking back Van. The Armenians were told to abandon their homes on July 31st of 1915, and around 100,000 Armenians left Van alongside the retreating Russian soldiers. But Russian forces would hit back, and again the soldiers of the Czar and the troops of the crescent would fight over the town. During the summer of 1915, the town of Van would switch occupiers three times, until the Russians finally took and occupied the town in the fall. By this time, the town had been utterly devastated and there was not much left of Van. Also in this time in eastern Anatolia there were very few Armenians left alive.

When the Russians entered Van in May, the Ottoman government passed the “Deportation Law”, approving the wholesale deportation of all Armenians. This was made known to the public. What was said in private, however, was a secret order for the mass extermination of all the deported Armenians. The order was never written on paper (for the Young Turks did not want to be held responsible for war crimes), but it was made orally to provincial governors by Central Committee officials such as Bahaeddin Sakir and others.

Any provincial governors who requested for the order in writing, or who disapproved of mass murder were faced with either being removed from their position or even assassinated. When a district governor in Diyarbakir Province demanded a document of the order, he was removed from office, commanded to arrive at Diyarbakir and was then murdered as he was making his way there. Provincial governors who were abiding by the murderous law began hiring armed gangs — thirsty for blood — and released criminals who, being so long in prison, had a ravenous desire for death that they were now given open reign to quench. Kurdish thugs were also allowed to hunt down Armenians like animals. Fr. Grigoris Balakian, who was now amongst his suffering flock, spoke with a Turkish captain who told him that “government officials” had sent officers “to all the surrounding Turkish villages and in the name of holy jihad invited the Muslim population to participate in this sacred religious obligation” of exterminating the Armenians. This unwritten order was attested by a member of the Ottoman Council of Ministers who testified in 1918:

“I’ve learned of a few secrets and have come across something interesting. The deportation order was issued through official channel by the minister of the interior [i.e., Talat Pasha] and sent to the provinces. Following this order the [CUP] Central Committee circulated its own ominous order to all parties to allow the gangs to carry out their wretched task. Thus the gangs were in the field, ready for their atrocious slaughter.”

Soon followed the massacres of cruel hands; of cold minds who think themselves objective and pious. Males aged 12 and older were separated from the women and slaughtered. In smaller villages, the men were murdered right in the sight of horrified women.The Armenians were forced to walk a death march towards and through the Deir al-Zur (the Syrian Desert), without food nor water. The sick, the weak, the elderly, were callously forced to walk and no sympathy was given when they were close to death or when they died. If starvation or thirst did not kill you, then it was the armed marauders who lurked about the people who were forced to tread the wilderness like cattle being led to the slaughterhouse. American Consul Leslie Davis, who witnessed the Armenian Genocide, described the systematic methods of mass murder as “the most thoroughly organized and effective massacre this country has ever seen.” The bloodshed was so harrowing and chilling, that Fr. Balakian would later recount:

“We were living through days of such unheard-of horror, it was impossible for the mind to fully comprehend … Those of us still alive envied those who had already paid their inevitable dues of bloody torture and death. And so we survivors became living martyrs, every day dying a few deaths and returning to life again.”

When Talat Pasha ordered for the general deportation of Armenians on June 21st, 1915, Fr. Balakian bribed local officials with 1500 pieces of gold which gave him and the small group of Armenians in Cankiri their freedom which only lasted seven months. After this, Balakian found himself in the Der al-Zur where he was confronted with the most egregious minds, saw the horrors for himself, and met with those who attested to the human slaughterhouse that the desert became. He met with one Captain Shukri and asked him: “Bey, where have all these human bones along this road come from?” To this Shukri responded: “These are the bones of Armenians who were killed in August and September. The order had come from Constantinople. Even though the minister of the interior [i.e., Talat] had huge ditches dug for the corpses, the winter floods washed the dirt away, and now the bones are everywhere, as you see”. “Upon whose orders were the massacres of Armenians committed?” asked Balakian. “The orders came from the Ittihad [i.e., Unionists] Central Committee and the Interior Ministry in Constantinople”.

As the front page of an Ottoman newspaper, Ikdam, wrote in November of 1918 — when the Young Turks had fled in fear of being prosecuted for war crimes: "Their response to eliminate the Armenian problem was to attempt the elimination of the Armenians themselves.”

In the ruthless Syrian desert, the people walked and walked, followed by the barrels of rifles, by the edges of blades, by insatiable cruelty and unquenchable lust for slaughter. Death followed them, and so unbearable was that walk through the wilderness, that some looked at death and embraced him, convinced that they could only escape this nightmare they were in by relinquishing themselves fully to the darkness.

“Lead me to the river’s edge” said one woman to her nine year old son. Her feet had become swollen from the miles of walking through the rugged desert, and she knew that if she were to succumb to her frailty that she would be pounced upon by a pack of marauders . “I am going to throw myself into the water. If I stay, the Arabs will kill me with torture.” Her husband would have none of this and refused to comply with her demands. But her neighbor carried her on his back and took her to the banks of the Euphrates. She threw herself into the river’s current, her son standing right behind her, watching his mother go down to her death. Her husband would fall asleep some days later, and never woke up. The boy, Manuel Kerkyasharian, was now an orphan, left to witness before him women and children — who, like him, were left behind — slaughtered by soldiers.

Manuel was eventually rescued by four Kurdish women who found him wandering on the open road. He spent the remaining years of the war going from one Kurdish village to another, surviving on compassion, and fleeing the sadism of the followers of the crescent. One evening, under the curtain of the night sky, he saw a village engulfed in flames. A Kurd noticed he was watching this and cruelly cried out: “Hey, child of disbelievers. Did you see? All of the Armenians of Turkey and all of the disbelievers of Turkey have been liquidated. The burning village is an infidel village and they are all being burned alive.” The village is filled with Assyrian Christians.

In the Anatolian town of Palu, Ottoman officers forced the women and children into a church and closed them in. They then heard horrific screams from outside. One girl climbed up to a window and peered outside. She described what she saw: “They’re cutting the men’s throats, and throwing them into the river.” The women and children were forced into the death march. One young girl, Heranus Gadarian, who was inside that church, recalled how when her pregnant aunt became ill the officers immediately bayoneted her to death. She would later write: “The elderly, the infirm, the ones who couldn’t walk — throughout the march they’d kill them with their bayonets and leave them lying there, just where they fell.” People today love to talk about how the End Times are coming, but reading this history, its as if the Apocalypse has shown its face in these prolonged moments of horror. Reading of these harrowing stories, one is reminded of the voice of the wicked in the Wisdom of Solomon:

“let us not spare the widow

or regard the gray hairs of the aged.

But let our might be our law of right,

for what is weak proves itself to be useless.” (Wisdom 2:10-11)

“It is impossible for human language to describe what those who went to Der Zor experienced”, said an Armenian coachman (who was serving in the Ottoman transport corps) to Fr. Balakian. He went on to say:

“Thousands of families put on the road from Aleppo, to be sent to Der Zor; of these, not even five percent reached Der Zor alive. Because bandits in the desert … in groups on horseback and armed with spears, attacked these defenseless people; they killed, they abducted, they raped, they plundered, they selected those appealing to them and carried them off, subjecting those who resisted to horrific tortures, before picking up and leaving. Because it was forbidden and impossible to turn back, those who survived had no choice but to go forward and were subjected to new attacks and plundering. Not even five percent reached Der Zor.” *

Reading the horrors of history, we should not simply confine them to the past, but understand that as long as humanity continues to be drunk off the grandiose ideal of power, there will be blood. *

*The information on the Armenian Genocide are mainly from Eugene Rogan’s The Fall of the Ottomans, ch. 7.