Review and Revision

Afghanistan

“To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they make a desert, and call it peace,” wrote the Roman historian Tacitus, in a free version of a British terrorist’s anti-Roman rant nearly two millennia ago. Afghanistan seems to have been mostly desert even before the past twenty years of war and anarchy, but whatever hadn’t been desert is today, after official America morphed the angry zeal of the populace against the suspected masterminds of the 9/11 attacks into a general war to overthrow the Afghan government. President Bush and his advisors evidently believed that, like the unfortunate hamlet in Vietnam, Afghanistan had to be destroyed to save it. As ordnance rained down in unprecedented quantity and quality, considering the size of the targets, we Americans were able to chortle over colorful but sanitized graphics demonstrating the efficacy of this or that bomb or missile, in the warm comfort of their own living rooms, as the Afghans died in their thousands and fled in their millions. There were even instances of civilians being brained by cases of the dehydrated junk food that Uncle Sam is dropping as a salve to the consciences of our softer-hearted citizens (while the threat of mass starvation rises unabated). It is well that our leaders refer to this as a war, and not a “police action”: as of this writing a tape of the elusive Osama bin Laden has been found, but not the world’s most wanted criminal.

Kunduz

One didn’t have to be a revisionist to wonder about the official story of a prison uprising by non-Afghan volunteers who had fought for the Taliban. Supposedly these foreign prisoners of war, evidently particularly hated by their Northern Alliance captors, had somehow secreted weapons on their persons, and then managed to smuggle them, while captive, into the fortress prison at Kunduz (one hopes that those of their warders who receive the bonus of immigration papers to America will find employment elsewhere than in airport security). Evidently the U.S. special forces and the civilian commissars from the Defense Department and the CIA who were supervising the NA on the spot had somehow been distracted. What happened next certainly had many of the earmarks of a massacre (as British foreign minister Jack Straw called it), with hundreds of the POWs slaughtered by machine gun fire and by air strikes called in by a “hero” Green Beret (as if he and a handful of Montagnards had been beset by a Viet Cong battalion). We can’t help wondering what the “international community” would have made of such a slaughter if it had happened at the hands of the Serbs in Kosovo, or been perpetrated by other certified bad guys. Meanwhile, the United States continues to pursue, try, and depart 80- and 90-year-old men whose only crime was to stand guard outside a forced labor camp in central Europe sixty years ago.

Washington

The debate in the councils of the U.S. government over the aims of the global war against terrorism seems to have taken shape as a contest between two wings of the Bush administration. Team America, headed by Secretary of State Colin Powell, is doing battle with Team Israel, led by an undersecretary (!) from the Defense Department, Paul Wolfowitz, for the heart and mind of President George W. Bush. Team Israel, needless to say, desires that America’s armed forces begin doing Israel’s immediate bidding against Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and whatever other targets the government in Jerusalem may designate. The opportunists who abound in any Washington administration, such as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who’s added a steel edge to his tinhorn core in his manic impersonation of Robert McNamara, are poised to jump whichever way will advance their personal fortunes. While many say that after 9/11, everything has changed, it’s good to see that some things haven’t, such as the presence of Richard Perle as a top advisor in the unabashedly Zionist Wolfowitz camp. In the 1970s, Perle was investigated for passing intelligence to Israel while a congressional staffer with access to America defense secrets, dealing with defense matters in the 1970s. (Surprise! The case unaccountably petered out.). We hesitate to use the term “dual loyalist” for the Wolfowitzes and Perles … at least until we discover which is the second country that they’re loyal to.

Capitol Hill

Twenty-six years ago, three quarters of the U.S. Senate in effect pledged allegiance to Israel by publicly demanding that President Ford continue providing Israel with a free lunch (courtesy of American taxpayers) and a free hand in the Middle East, U.S. laws and American interests be damned. Recently eighty-nine spineless U.S. senators provided a new profile in cowardice. Apparently stung by lip service the Bush administration had given to the proposition that the Palestinians deserve something like their own country, infested by Israeli colonies, police, and soldiers though it might be, on the 22 percent of pre-1948 Palestine that remains to them, the legislators, with the dog-like fidelity of a mutt bringing its master his slipper, reprimanded the president for being insufficiently attentive to Israel’s interests. Soon enough, President Bush was cozying up to Prime Minister Sharon, posturing in front of the Mogen David, and insuring that our ambassador to the UN veto any resolution critical of Israel’s racist, murderous policies against the Palestinians. Two images from this past autumn stick in our mind: the New York city firefighters, many of them heavily laden with equipment, toiling up the stairs of the burning World Trade Center towers, and the entire U.S. Senate, its vast entourage of staffers and camp followers hot on its heels, swarming pall-mall out of the Capitol at the first word that a letter containing anthrax had made its way to their post office.

Irv Rubin, leader of the Jewish Defense League, harangues a crowd. On December 11, 2001, Rubin was arrested along with JDL member Earl Krugel, and charged with plotting to blow up a Los Angeles mosque and the office of a US congressman. The JDL is a militant Zionist group with a long record of terrorist activities. In 1985 the FBI identified it as “the second most active terrorist group in the United States,” linking it to 37 terrorist attacks carried out from 1977 to 1984. In 1987 the FBI announced that Jewish extremist groups had carried out 24 terrorist acts from 1981 through 1986, 17 of which were the work of the JDL. The Institute for Historical Review was a target of systematic JDL violence and harassment during the 1980s. The attacks included a drive-by shooting, three firebombings, vandalization of IHR employee-owned vehicles, 22 slashings of tires of employee automobiles, demonstrations outside the IHR office, and numerous telephone threats. This campaign culminated in a devastating arson attack on the Institute's offices and warehouse in the early morning hours of July 4, 1984. Damage was estimated at $400,000. No one was ever arrested in connection with this crime. In February 1989 JDL intimidation forced the cancellation at two hotel sites in southern California of a three-day IHR conference. The meeting was successfully held at a makeshift alternate site, in spite of further harassment by a handful of JDL thugs led by Rubin.

An IHR news release on the arrest of Rubin and Krugel is posted on the “News & Views” section of the IHR web site. “The Zionist Terror Network,” an IHR report with detailed information about Rubin and the JDL, is posted on the site's “Books on-line” section.

Justice

Against the ominous backdrop of the new P.A.T.R.I.O.T. law (with its disarmingly corny acronym and its threatening implications for our constitutional liberties), Jewish groups that have long enjoyed an entree with law enforcement groups were spreading fabrications aimed at revisionists and revisionist groups. Thus in October Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center told the world press that unnamed revisionists who had attended a conference in Beirut together with “Islamic militants” earlier in the year might well be behind the anthrax attacks. The rabbi’s fib that the conference had taken place (it was banned under U.S. pressure), and his strong implication that IHR staffers and associates involved in conference preparations had been busily dispatching anthrax spores, wound up in prominent outlets such as the Washington Post (October 27) and the (London) Observer (October 28), sandwiched among less explicit accusations against the American “right wing” from U.S. government sources. Despite a Halloween flurry of similar reports featuring denunciations from Cooper, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and other professional anti-anti-Semites, the FBI recently announced that all such “leads” have proved worthless.

Treachery

News that at least sixty Israelis have been detained and investigated for espionage by the U.S. government since September 11 may account for the squid-like efforts of Cooper and other cuttlefish to jet obfuscatory ink, while Israel-firsters inside and outside the American government work feverishly to control the damage. The story, broken by Fox News on December 12, reveals that as many as two hundred likely Israeli agents are strongly suspected of having spied on the terrorists who carried out the September 11 attacks, as well as on American military bases, the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agent, and American officials throughout law enforcement and intelligence. The Fox report also revealed that American officials believe that the Israelis may have known of the attacks in advance, but failed to inform the U.S. In another choice revelation, Fox reported that six of the suspects worked for an Israeli-based company, Amdocs, which has had access to virtually any private telephone call made in the United States through its telephone “security” contracts with America’s twenty-five biggest phone companies. (Is that why Bill Clinton tried to warn Monica a few years back – or had she already been “warned”?). This story was still unfolding as this issue went to press, but only on Fox News: five days after its first part was released, America’s thousands of other news hounds, normally straining at the leash for any plausible scuttlebutt or scandal, were acting like the timid lapdogs they are when faced with real news.

Terror

The arrest of Zionist goon Irv Rubin and his thuggish aide-de-camp, Earl Krugel, for allegedly plotting to assassinate U.S. congressman Darrell Issa and to blow up a mosque in Los Angeles, comes better late than never, or so we may hope. Rubin is reportedly still considered a suspect in the 1985 bombing murder of Palestinian poet Alex Odeh, just a few miles up the road from the IHR’s offices. There was no mention in the news reports of the July 4, 1984, destruction of the Institute’s offices and stocks, although Rubin visited the wreckage of the building and the heaps of ruined revisionist books to gloat publicly over the attack, as he later gloated over Odeh’s death. Convicted for that murder, after years of delay (as the suspects lurked in Israel’s occupied territories on the Jordan’s West Bank, allegedly beyond Israeli reach): several former members of Rubin’s Jewish Defense League who were probably trained, and certainly protected, by the State of Israel. Did someone say “terrorism”? Be sure it wasn’t the Bush administration.

New York/Jerusalem

Did six thousand really die? As inflated figures for WTC deaths were being revised, to coin a word, downward, New York’s Mayor Rudy Giuliani renewed a long mayoral tradition of snubbing Arabs (Robert Wagner refusing to meet with Saudi Arabian King Ibn Saud; Ed Koch snubbing Yasser Arafat; Giuliani snubbing Arafat) and snuggling with Israelis. Soon after the attacks, Giuliani turned down a ten million dollar contribution to the survivors and victims’ families from a wealthy Saudi who had dared to name Israeli oppression of the Palestinians as a factor in the attacks. Then, not too long after having participated by telephone in a Jerusalem conference organized to expel the Palestinians from the West Bank and their refugee camps on the Gaza strip, the mayor doffed his Yankee cap for a yarmulke, to mourn the only Mideast victims who really count, together with war/peace criminal Sharon and various of his accomplices in Jerusalem. The Butcher of Beirut, now wanted by Belgium for his role in the Sabra and Shatila massacre (a recent BBC program reported that dozens of the massacre victims had been led off to be dealt with by the Israelis) and lately reprimanded by Amnesty International for his current policy of torturing prisoners, had earlier promised Giuliani that Israel would be planting five thousand scrawny trees in Jerusalem in memory of the dead. Sounds to us like a poor trade for ten million dollars of relief for those in need – and don’t think the Israelis aren’t waiting for the casualty figures to drop some more before they start planting.

The Holocaust

Rumors of the demise of the big H on September 11 turn out to have been greatly exaggerated. After all, James D. Bindenagel, America’s official ambassador to the Holocaust (or was it from the Holocaust?) continues his work of arm-twisting and indoctrination in support of still more “reparations” and ever more Holocaust “education.” If some readers imagine that the designation “Holocaust ambassador” is a tad overdrawn, the unembroidered truth is that Bindenagel, a career diplomat, was raised to ambassadorial status and designated “Special Envoy on Holocaust Issues” by President Clinton in 1999 (reportedly as a reward for his service in helping Stuart Eizenstat gouge Germany for $5.2 more billion, this time in “reparations” to “slave laborers).” Bindenagel, reported a little-noticed story issued by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency back on July 10, “is proud to be the full-time point person,” and hails “the emphasis the Bush administration has placed on Holocaust issues, as evidenced by his ‘open-ended’ mandate.” He’s still at it, of course, devoting what was once Americans’ hard-won money to “promoting national memorial days and programming in schools and helping develop teacher training programs” in ten different foreign countries, probably even as you’re reading this … The Holocaust is alive and well, too, in the universities. In a recent and typical incident, a flyer announcing a lecture on the “Search for Survivors: The Fate of the Saint Louis” was circulated in the mathematics department of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Given on October 1, it didn’t coincide with any of known Holocaust holidays and didn’t seem to speak to any particular concerns of mathematicians. If anything, the Holocausters would seem to need schooling in math (arithmetic might suffice) more than mathematicians need Holocaust “education.”… Like the Flying Dutchman, the St. Louis, the Hapag liner that carried Jews from Europe to Cuba – and back again – in 1939 seems to be popping up everywhere these days. The latest sighting was in a big-think essay by Stephen Steinlight, a Senior Fellow of the American Jewish Congress, that counsels American Jews to rethink their traditional support for unlimited immigration (except for revisionists and Nazi “war criminals”). It’s rather evident that, its orotund arguments aside, the Steinlight article (titled “The Jewish Stake in America’s Changing Demography,” accessible at http://www.cis.org/articles/2001/back1301.html, the website of the Center for Immigration Studies) means to say that too many Muslims are coming to America now for Jewish comfort. The St. Louis makes its appearance in an elaborate bit of shtick (subtitled “Leaving Inviolate the Holy of Holies”) wherein the writer takes pains not to seem to give comfort to the American immigration policy that prevailed from the 1920s to the 1960s. Here Steinlight decries America’s “evil, xenophobic, anti-Semitic, and Red Menace-based Great Pause” – and he’s only talking about the 1920s! As for American policy in the1930s and 1940s (when in fact hundreds of thousands of Jews were admitted to the U.S.), Steinlight informs us with poker face that “… only handful were grudgingly granted safety here”; decries the nation’s “vast moral failure”; bewails “appalling tales of grotesque treatment” (of prospective Jewish immigrants); and invokes the odyssey of the St. Louis (which, contrary to Steinlight’s imaginings, never even attempted to land in the U.S.) as “perhaps the most poignant and most widely known instance of this monstrous policy.” Aside from what Steinlight’s article reveals about Jews’ perceptions of Jewish influence over U.S. immigration policy, for all its nods to “civic virtue” it reveals an appalling self-centeredness: as when Steinlight hazards that America’s restrictive immigration laws were “arguably the greatest moral failure in its history,” nosing out, one supposes, the execution of the Rosenbergs, the Pollard sentence, slavery, and the dispossession of the Indians (probably in that order).