Thursday, May 30, 2024

"What Has Israel Done for Americans in the Past Week?" by Philip Giraldi


Source: The Unz Review

What Has Israel Done for Americans in the Past Week?
They’ve taken our money & weapons and made us complicit as war criminals

The Jewish Virtual Library asserts that “The US-Israel relationship is based on the twin pillars of shared values and shared interests. Given this commonality of interests and beliefs, it should not be surprising that support for Israel is one of the most pronounced and consistent foreign policy values of the American people.” That is, of course, the big lie among the many that constitute the tie that binds the two countries together. The back-up lies, regularly spouted in Congress, are that Israel is a democracy and an ally. It is, of course neither, as it is a Jews-only apartheid regime that has no fixed borders and no reciprocal security arrangements with the US. Israel and its promoters never tell the truth, particularly when they are conning the United States government into providing more money and more weapons, as has been occurring both openly and secretly over the past eight months during the horrific ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.

So how does it happen, particularly as Israel is manifestly evil in terms of its treatment of the Palestinians as well reckless in its aggression directed against neighbors like Lebanon and Syria. That it is not also bombing Egypt and Jordan is largely attributable to the billions of dollars in aid that the US gives to those countries conditional on their maintaining a wobbly modus vivendi with the aggressive and nuclear armed Zionists.

Given the wonderful comfort zone that Israel has established largely due to US protection in international bodies like the United Nations and the UN Security Council as well as vis-à-vis the several international courts and humanitarian aid agencies, Israel has been regularly attacking and otherwise killing its neighbors without ever being held accountable for anything. It is a pattern that is particularly visible now as the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza approaches the 50,000 mark, consisting mostly of women and children. The recent outrageous assault on the Tal al Sultan neighborhood refugee camp near Rafah, which killed at least 45 and included graphic photography of a burning child’s body without a head as well as other still flaming and smoking corpses, was directed against homeless Gazans living in tents who had previously been driven from their destroyed homes in the northern part of the country. And to the eternal shame of Biden and company, the slaughter used US-made and supplied weapons.

Add to the carnage the famine that is now threating to kill tens of thousands more Palestinians due to the Israeli government and its extremist settlers blocking the entry of food supplies and the scale of Israel’s chosen genocidal actions can be appreciated. Netanyahu’s claim that the army only used small munitions in Rafah and was targeting two Hamas officials hiding among the civilians was as usual a lie and the camp otherwise had no significance as a military target. Israel has followed up on the attack with another bombing run on nearby al-Mawasi the following night which killed more than twenty and the Jewish state’s tanks are now penetrating deep into the city no doubt preceding an infantry assault that could kill tens of thousands more. They have also cut off access to the entry point from Egypt to the south of Rafah. One senior Israeli government official is now predicting that the war will continue until the end of the year, another seven months, success apparently being measured by arriving at a point when Hamas and all other hostile Palestinians will be either killed or deported.

Following the Rafah slaughter, there no doubt occurred the mandatory phone call exchange between a sneering Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the grinning mental giant President Joe Biden, no doubt including Bibi’s expressing thanks for the American weaponry reportedly used in the killing. It’s really great when you don’t even have to pay for the weapons used to murder someone. To show his appreciation of the Israeli gratitude Biden no doubt muttered a phrase engraved on his prefrontal lobes, i.e. “Israel has a right to defend itself!” The transnational interaction presumably also produced the typical flatulence that emerges from the White House propaganda machine. Biden, in a bid to make it look like he was actually pressuring Israel to reduce civilian casualties, had previously warned that a full-scale invasion of Rafah would be hard to support and would be considered a “red line” issue, but it was a political stunt that he never intended to carry out apart from one delayed arrival of a shipment of the super heavy 2000 pound bombs. Many Americans, indeed a majority, are rightly deeply upset about the support of the US military and government for Israel’s latest war and an addled Biden is now counting votes while pretending to have humanitarian concerns.

Even so, the White House did not go so far as to blame the Israelis for their overreach. At a press conference, Biden’s National Security communications officer John Kirby, who reportedly was an Admiral once upon a time, possibly on the Good Ship Lollypop, articulated how “You’ve all seen the images, they’re heartbreaking, they’re horrific. There should be no innocent life lost here as a result of this conflict. Israel, of course, has a right to go after Hamas… As a result of this strike on Sunday, I have no policy changes to speak to. It just happened. The Israelis are going to investigate it. We’re going to be taking great interest in what they find in that investigation.” Sure you are John, and it will be a great and thorough investigation by Israel just like it was in the cases of the dead Americans on board the USS Liberty, peace activist Rachel Corrie, journalist Shireen Abu Akleh and, most recently, the 80 year old American citizen Omar Abdalmajeed As’ad who was beaten to death by elements in Israel’s “most moral army in the world” after being detained for the crime of having been walking in his West Bank village.

Why are Joe and company such dedicated dissimulators of the truth when it comes to Israel and all its malignant works? It is because of an entity known euphemistically as the Israel Lobby but which I much prefer to describe more accurately as the Jewish Money In Politics Entity (AIPAC, ADL and others) supported by the Scofield Bible Zio-Christian Crowd headed by clowns like House Speaker Mike Johnson. I know it’s a mouthful but that is what it is. Israel does not obtain US uncritical and overwhelming support because its behavior deserves it or because it serves American interests but rather because of all that money judiciously applied to corrupt the government at all levels and to buy and control the message of the media and entertainment industries. Professor John Mearsheimer, co-author of 2007’s The Israel Lobby, has long claimed that “Israel’s backers will go to silence anyone who challenges their narrative.” But according to Mearsheimer, something changed because of October 7th: “The big difference is that the lobby’s activities are completely out in the open today. I think few people knew much about the lobby back then. And very few people knew much about the lobby’s influence on American foreign policy, especially as it applies to the Middle East. And I think that we helped to expose that and now more people understand what’s going on. The lobby is now forced to operate much more out in the open.”

Pari passu, all that corruption judiciously applied is serving to strip Americans of their fundamental rights, particularly freedom of speech, as it will soon by illegal to criticize either Jews or Israel. And don’t expect any relief coming from the national election in November if there is a GOP victory in the form of Donald Trump and possibly Nikki Haley or some creature like that as a Ziocon replacement part. Trump sold out on every conceivable issue for Israel back in 2016-20 and would do it again. The Republicans have been striving to become the new party of “Israel First” as they want to steal away all that cash and media support from the Democrats. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina has been calling for nuking Gaza while Nikki has been in Israel signing on bombs to be dropped on the Pals with a purple marker: “Finish Them! America [Loves] Israel.” Her urging of a foreign military funded and armed by the US government to kill refugees living in tents after the destruction of their homes might be considered the cruelest way to endorse mass murder, but hey, Israel always comes first in the thinking of most Congressmen and those who are unfortunately sitting in the White House.

There is also legislation in the pipeline being pushed by the Republicans opposing any attempts by the White House to try to condition behavior by suspending weapons shipments to good friend and ally Israel, not that Biden would really go that route. The Congress has also been putting intense pressure on universities to clamp down on Pro-Palestinian groups on campus by claiming they are antisemites while not doing the same vis-a-vis the sometimes violent supporters of Israel, and the universities are obliging, canceling the graduation of protesters or even expelling them. Donald Trump has recently told a largely Jewish audience that he will deport any anti-Israel protesters if he becomes president, an interesting proposal as most of those demonstrating are native born American citizens and many of them are Jewish. He has also called on Israel to “finish” what it is doing to the Palestinians, clearly meaning that they should be exterminated or forced to emigrate, and has also told Jewish donors that today’s atmosphere in the US is very much like “before the holocaust.” No longer the loudmouth who called for an end to foolish wars, Trump has now in addition said that if he had been president when the Russian intervention into Ukraine had taken place, he would have bombed them. Likewise for China if it were to attack Taiwan. Either move would almost certainly start World War 3 even though neither Ukraine nor Taiwan is a vital security interest of the US but Trump is too stupid to know that. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is, for his part, urging that the US release for deployment in Ukraine advanced missile systems that would be able to strike deep into Russia. As dumb ideas go that it about as dumb as it gets, as the Russians have already indicated that they would respond with everything they have, meaning US military targets worldwide would be considered fair game for retaliation possibly using nuclear weapons.

We have truly been entering into something that might be entitled the Psycho Zone if it were to be made into a movie. War is being treated by the sociopaths in Washington, Israel and parts of Europe as if it something to be casually entered into in one’s spare time. There is even talk in both the US and UK as well as in some other European capitals about initiating active conscription at a close to war level so we freedom lovers can sock it to those Russkies and Chinks good and proper. And as for the Palestinian trash, the Biden pontoon bridge that cost $320 million appears to be broken but it can still be used to carry out Netanyahu’s plan to push a bunch of screaming Ay-rabs into the Mediterranean Sea to get rid of them for once and for all. Hopefully they can’t swim and the Chosen ones will again be able to take possession of what was given to them by Yahweh. Or something like that.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.

"The West is Hell-Bent on Provoking Russia Into Hot War" by Pepe Escobar

 

Source: Sputnik

Pepe Escobar: The West is Hell-Bent on Provoking Russia Into Hot War

A serviceman of the Tsentr Battlegroup of Russian Armed Forces perfects his skills in firing Kornet anti-tank missile system. - Sputnik International, 1920, 30.05.2024
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The warning by President Putin could not be starker: “In the event of the use of long-range weapons, the Russian Armed Forces will again have to make decisions about expanding the sanitary zone further (…) Do they want global conflict? It seemed they wanted to negotiate [with us], but we don’t see much desire to do this.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov then came up with the appropriate metaphor to designate NATO’s ramped-up military outbursts: not only NATO is raising the degree of escalation but delving into a warlike "ecstasy".
It does not get more serious than that. “They”, as Putin alluded to, do seem to want “global conflict”. That’s at the heart of NATO’s new suicidal “ecstasy” strategy.
For all their circumlocutions, NATO Secretary Jens Stoltenberg, French President Emmanuel Macron, and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz have effectively greenlighted Kiev using Western weapons for attacks deep inside the Russian Federation. The alleged debate, still ongoing, is just a “smokescreen” for the real objective: a pretext that could lead to WWIII.
There’s no reason to think Kiev will stick to “limited” strikes against relatively unimportant targets. Instead, it is likely to target critical security infrastructure in hopes of provoking an unrelenting Russian response, which in turn would pave the way for NATO to invoke Article 5 and de facto engage in a Hot War.

Already on the Edge of Doom

The escalation “ecstasy” defined by Peskov went out of control since a – secret - new batch of ATACMS was dispatched to Kiev earlier this year, complemented with longer-range ATACMS. Kiev has been using them for serious hits on Russian air bases and key air defense nodes. These ATACMS fire missiles at Mach 3 speed: a serious challenge even for the best Russian air defense systems.
All that seems to point to a crucial decision enveloped in several layers of fog: as the incoming, cosmic NATO humiliation in the black soil of Novorossiya becomes self-evident day after day, the Western elites who really run the show are betting on provoking a full Hot War against Russia.
Richard H. Black, a former US senator from Virginia, offers a sobering analysis:
“This is a continuation of the pattern in which the NATO forces recognize they are losing the war in Ukraine, with the fragile lines of defense breaking, and the NATO response is to escalate. This is not accidental, but very deliberate. It is not the first attack on the Russian nuclear triad. The ideological folks are seeing their world crumbling, after flying the rainbow flag over conservative countries and [waging] perpetual wars. They are frantic and could escalate to nuclear war to get out of the bind. They are taking a series of baby steps, and respond that ‘they don’t do anything in response,’ and so they keep taking baby steps until one of them lands on a land mine and we are into World War III. (…) Putin is very aware of the disconnect in the West, who keep saying he is just saber rattling, but he is not—he is informing the West of the dangerous reality.”
In Russia, Senator Dmitry Rogozin, a former head of Roscosmos, directly warned Washington: “We are not just on the threshold, but already on the edge, beyond which, if the enemy is not stopped in such actions, an irreversible collapse of the strategic security of the nuclear powers will begin."
General Evgeny Buzhinky advanced an ominous scenario: “I am sure that if the strikes of Taurus of ATACMS are very harmful for Russia, then I presume we will at least strike the logistical hub in the territory of Poland in Rzeszów” where the missiles are staged for delivery to Ukraine.
The connection in this case would be irreversible: Russia hits Poland; NATO invokes Article 5; WW3.

Be Careful What You Wish For

NATO warlike “ecstasy” is predictably cloaked in cowardice. For all the rhetorical garbage 24/7 about “we don’t want a war with Russia”, the facts point to NATO using Kiev to attack and try to destroy a wide range of Russian military assets. There’s also no denying the US Deep State’s role in enabling Kiev’s terror attacks against Russian civilians in the Donbass, Belgorod, and elsewhere.
Considering the serious debate finally on across several Russian platforms, all of that might constitute a reasonable pretext for a tactical nuclear drop on the – legally illegitimate – Kiev gang. At least that would finish a war that is dragging for too long.
Yet that would be totally out of character when it comes to legalistic Putin – who deals with Armageddon-laden issues with the patience of a Taoist monk. Yet Russia has an entire arsenal of asymmetric tools – both conventional and nuclear -- that can deliver a painful blow to NATO in places where the alliance least expects.
We’re not there yet – even as we get ominously closer day after day. Dmitri Medvedev has issued the umpteenth red line: a US strike on Russian targets, or the US letting Kiev hit targets within Russia using American missiles and drones would be the ‘start of World War’.
ATACMS Army Tactical Missile System - Sputnik International, 1920, 28.05.2024
Military
NATO Members Divided on Ukraine's Plans to Hit Russia With Western Weapons
And Foreign Minister Lavrov, once again displaying his trademark Taoist patience, had to come up with another serious reminder: Russia will regard the deployment of nuclear-capable F-16s in Ukraine – which de facto can only be operated by NATO pilots – as “a deliberate signal from NATO in the nuclear field to Russia”.
And still the gaggle of armchair Dr. Strangeloves – lavishly rewarded by the rarified Atlanticist plutocracy holding real power, funds, influence and mass media control - is not listening.

"'Jaw-Dropping': Mossad Chief Threatened ICC Prosecutor Over Israeli War Crimes Probe" by Julia Conley

 

Source: Common Dreams



A picture taken on October 15, 2015 shows Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (L) sitting next to Yossi Cohen, who was later named as the head of the Mossad intelligence agency by Netanyahu.

 (Photo: Gali Tibbon/AFP via Getty Images)


May 28, 2024

'Jaw-Dropping': Mossad Chief Threatened ICC Prosecutor Over Israeli War Crimes Probe

"Bullying won't hide genocide and war crimes," said one anti-war group.

Just over a week after the International Criminal Court announced it had officially applied for an arrest warrant for two top Israeli officials over the Israel Defense Forces' assault on Gaza, an investigative report revealed Tuesday that the Israeli intelligence chief spent close to a decade attempting to intimidate the ICC's prosecutor into halting a war crimes probe.

Former ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda opened a preliminary investigation into Israel's actions in Palestine in 2015, a year after Israel launched an offensive in Gaza that killed 2,251 Palestinians in less than two months. Bensouda aimed to make an initial assessment of allegations of possible war crimes in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem.

According to Israeli publications +972 Magazine and Local Calland U.K. newspaper The Guardian, Bensouda and her prosecution team soon began to receive warnings that Mossad, the Israeli national intelligence agency, "was taking a close interest in their work."

After briefly meeting Bensouda at the Munich Security Conference in 2017, Mossad Director Yossi Cohen "ambushed" the prosecutor at a hotel in New York in 2018, when Bensouda was meeting Democratic Republic of Congo President Joseph Kabila.

"The pair had met several times before in relation to the ICC's ongoing investigation into alleged crimes committed in his country," reported The Guardian. "The meeting, however, appears to have been a setup. At a certain point, after Bensouda's staff were asked to leave the room, Cohen entered, according to three sources familiar with the meeting. The surprise appearance, they said, caused alarm to Bensouda and a group of ICC officials traveling with her. Why Kabila helped Cohen is unclear, but ties between the two men were revealed in 2022 by the Israeli publication TheMarker."

The investigation found that Cohen—who retired in 2021—repeatedly called Bensouda and sought meetings with her after the "ambush," eventually prompting Bensouda to alert senior ICC officials about the Mossad chief's conduct after his tactics shifted to "threats and manipulation." One ICC official compared Cohen's behavior to "stalking."

Cohen initiated at least three meetings with Bensouda between 2019-21, including one where he allegedly told the prosecutor: "You should help us and let us take care of you. You don't want to be getting into things that could compromise your security or that of your family."

He also allegedly suggested to Bensouda that a full investigation into war crimes by Israel would harm her career, and showed her copies photos that had covertly been taken of her husband.

The Guardian reported that Cohen did not respond to a request for comment, and Bensouda declined to comment on the reporting. A spokesperson for the Israeli government told the newspaper that the report was "replete with many false and unfounded allegations meant to hurt the state of Israel."

Threats against an ICC prosecutor could amount to offenses against the administration of justice, a violation of Article 70 under the Rome Statute, which established the court in 1998. Israel is not a signatory to the Rome Statute and does not recognize the authority of the ICC, but Israeli officials including Cohen can still be prosecuted for an offense against the administration of justice.

After Cohen's alleged threats against Bensouda's family and career, the ICC in 2021 opened its formal war crimes investigation into alleged war crimes going back to 2014. Last week, current ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan announced he was seeking warrants to arrest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and three Hamas leaders for actions since October 7, 2023.

Jacobin journalist Branko Marcetic said the revelations about Cohen's targeting of Bensouda in the midst of her preliminary investigation proves the Israeli government "is completely out of control"—partially because continued political and material support from the United States, its largest international military funder, allows it to act with impunity.

Threats against an ICC prosecutor, said Canadian New Democratic Party lawmaker Charlie Angus, "are the actions of a criminal state."

Another of what one journalist called "truly jaw-dropping allegations" was that Mossad obtained transcripts and other materials that were part of a "smear campaign" against Bensouda.

"The diplomatic efforts were part of a coordinated effort by the governments of Netanyahu and [then-President] Donald Trump in the U.S. to place public and private pressure on the prosecutor and her staff," reported The Guardian.

The Trump administration imposed sanctions including visa restrictions against Bensouda between 2019-20, allegedly in retaliation for a separate war crimes probe regarding Afghanistan. Then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo suggested the sanctions were imposed because the ICC was "putting Israel in [its] crosshairs."

Tuesday's reporting indicated that Israel "is fast becoming a pariah," said Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

"Not only is it committing war crimes and likely genocide," said Parsi, "now we find out that they use their spy chief to threaten to hurt family members of ICC prosecutors."


"Gaza and the end of Orthodox Judaism" by Michael Lesher

 

Source: Mondoweiss

Gaza and the end of Orthodox Judaism

Over the last week or so, some of my friends – horrified, as I am, by the near-universal support of prominent Jewish organizations for Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza – have shared with me their attempts to understand how something like this can be happening. Since I am an Orthodox Jew, I’ve been asked about the role played by “religious Zionists” in the current degradation of Judaism. And anyone who listens to the rabid fascism-cum-mysticism articulated by Jewish “settler” fanatics in support of literally any crime Israel commits can only be bewildered and appalled.

But I take a somewhat different view of the problem – in part, no doubt, because Judaism is my religion, and I see Judaism from the perspective of what is often called the “Orthodox right-wing” or “yeshiva” community. And the following is what burst out of me when I was asked (on Facebook) how the great majority of Orthodox Jews can publicly celebrate genocide and ethnic cleansing – the worst crimes in the canon of international humanitarian law – while actually watching them unfold in real time on their television sets and computer screens. These are my own personal observations of the religious world around me; I’m not yet prepared to back them up with sociological scholarship. But they’ve been building inside me for many years, and I want to share them.

Here’s the point – which I’ll state as briefly as I can. First of all, much of the easily-recognized extremism among lawless Orthodox fanatics in the West Bank is actually foreign to the “yeshivish” or “haredi” environment that, at bottom, is my own intellectual and spiritual milieu. To take an obvious instance, Rabbi Meir Kahane was despised in the yeshivoth. I can’t remember ever hearing a good word about him or his disciples in my own experience – except from people who rebelled against the haredi culture. (I describe one such person in my memoir Turning Back, which gives as good a picture as I’m capable of giving of my own journey into traditional Judaism.) I was living in the intensely Orthodox enclave of Monsey, New York when Kahane was murdered, and the only people I heard even mention the news said, more or less, that he got what he asked for.

Likewise, Zionism – and the hysterical identification with Israel that is its modern counterpart outside Israel – meets with little but hostility or derision among the leadership of the more traditional Orthodox community. Agudath Israel (the right-wing Orthodox organization that takes its marching orders from old-style Talmudists like the late Moshe Feinstein, Elya Svei, Yaakov Kaminetzky, etc.) will tell you emphatically that it rejects Zionism.

And yet it proudly “stands with Israel” precisely in its most ghastly crimes. I’ve just received an email about an effort backed by Agudath Israel to get 100,000 signatures on a petition to Congress to give more support to Israel in its genocidal slaughter, and to “do something” about “anti-Semitism” that is supposedly rife in the U.S. – a palpable fiction designed to give propaganda cover for Israel’s crimes.

And that, to me, is the real problem. It’s less about an “extremist” ideology – a sort of Jewish nationalism modeled on the romantic German nationalism of the late 19th century – than about a kind of withering away at the moral core, a dulling of the collective mind and heart, a sort of willed infantilism that has reduced the Orthodox Jewish tradition to a kind of mindless cult of rabbi-worship and fear and hatred of everyone else.

I will concede that these tendencies have long been present to some extent among the Orthodox. And I know some people will claim (though I disagree) that they are dominant and that today’s ugly efflorescence of violent stupidity was inevitable. I won’t argue the point except to say that if I believed that I wouldn’t be living the religious Jewish life I am still living.

But right now, the victory of senseless hatred in my religious community is absolutely unmistakable. I don’t call it “extremism” because that implies a conscious point of view, at the very least, a kind of religious ideology, and in my opinion that would be giving the mainstream Orthodox too much credit. They and their rabbis don’t support Israel because they are Zionists. They support it because Israel enacts, in their eyes, the only outward manifestation of religious faith that their infantilized minds can still grasp: a perpetual Manichean violence in which our side, the Jews, is always right, always innocent, always victimized, and the other side is always entirely evil and subhuman.

They support it because they have been trained, first through the Orthodox educational system and then by living in Orthodox communities, to efface themselves as individuals, to have no backbone, to do as they’re told and never to question rabbinic authority – and because this training makes them admire a state which seems to have militarized an entire Jewish public and which has no doubts about its own superiority and its right to dominate.

They support it because they have been taught to regard with suspicion anything that promotes truth, accuracy, subtlety, intellectual sophistication, and above all the aesthetic dimensions without which a genuinely cultivated morality is impossible. Instead, they have been taught that all that matters is which side you’re on, and that lying to promote “our side” is infinitely preferable to truth for truth’s sake.

They have reached that fatal point of spiritual degradation at which they are genuinely incapable of knowing whether their emotions are being driven by angels or demons, much as a man, below a certain depth, cannot tell whether he is swimming toward the surface or away from it.

They support Israel most of all (I think) because murder, torture, and cruelty are the only things that can stir souls that are nearly dead from the lack of any real nourishment. They have reached that fatal point of spiritual degradation at which they are genuinely incapable of knowing whether their emotions are being driven by angels or demons, much as a man, below a certain depth, cannot tell whether he is swimming toward the surface or away from it.

Most of us know what it is to be jolted by a terrible thought and, paradoxically, to be tempted by it in some way; but most of us immediately recoil from something we know to be repulsive. The great bulk of Orthodox Jews today (though of course there are some very honorable exceptions), and virtually all of the dominant rabbinate, is unable to make this distinction because these Jews have cut out of themselves, slowly but surely, the kind of human faculties that instinctively recoil from what is ugly and welcome what is beautiful and sweet and true.

I know I am writing very generally and somewhat apocalyptically. And I apologize for what is bound to sound like over-simplification. But I’ve been seeing this for years – for decades, to be honest – and I’ve always feared that the right set of circumstances would bring out the very worst of these tendencies in a way so blatantly vile that the rest of humanity, if shown accurately what was being espoused in Orthodox Jewish circles, would probably react with a universal gasp of horror.

And now I am seeing exactly what I feared. So forgive me if I strike notes appropriate to a modern Jeremiah: I can’t help feeling as though such words should be screamed into the ears of the Orthodox Jewish world today, again and again, if not to awaken some consciences then at least to remind oneself that the voice of God cannot be silenced – to cry out, in other words, in an effort to set up echoes of the inescapable divine judgment that I feel must roll through our streets and cloud our skies and waver over the desert, to howl to heaven, as Jeremiah did, simply to show that there is a heaven, and that nothing the evildoers can say will ever replace it.

In my own small way, I’ve been trying to do that lately. And the results have justified my worst fears. The Orthodox Jews to whom I’ve written aren’t moved by my questions or challenges; they don’t even seem to understand what I am saying, though I do my best to use their own language and to limit myself to the simplest moral propositions. (Such as: genocide and torture are bad things. Killing children and destroying hospitals are bad things…) They literally don’t hear me. Invariably they respond as if I had taken sides against them, joined with the “enemy” – right now they call that enemy “Hamas,” but a year ago it would have been a different label and before long it will be something else again. And then they either denounce or disregard me, literally incapable of seeing, let alone acknowledging, the enormity of what they themselves are supporting at the moment of our exchange. 

Lately the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer about the connection between Nazi crimes and a kind of willed public infantilism have been circulating on social media. They’ve also been much on my own mind. And they’re painfully apt as a description of current Orthodox Jewish culture. The kind of moral blindness Bonhoeffer described among the Germans of his own time – a feature of people who have become the unthinking tools of some sort of powerful group or institution – can only be described in terms of a kind of deep and at least half-voluntary stupidity. As Bonhoeffer wrote, you don’t encounter a human intelligence when you debate these Jews: you hear slogans, catch-phrases, labels. This is all they seem to have left, all that they have retained of a rich tradition that once produced…but thinking along those lines will only stir up too much grief to allow me to continue.

I have long believed that Orthodox Judaism – I mean the thing as we know it now, as a sort of culture or institutional reality – is a house of cards ready to collapse in the first wind. And I’ve also believed, for years, that this grim future for Orthodoxy is really a good thing. Because the structure as it stands now is a cruel fraud: an imposing edifice, yes, but built on fakery and lies, a religious “economy” that is at bottom a mere swindle, headed by a rabbinate long on the details of abstruse Talmudic scholarship but utterly unable to consider even the most basic of moral questions, no matter how urgently the question looms right before the rabbis’ eyes.

For example, in the book I’ve written on the Israel-Palestine problem (which nobody knows because I haven’t been able to publish it), I describe in some detail the decision of my own former yeshiva (Ohr Somayach) to buy a new building in Sheikh Jarrah, inside occupied East Jerusalem. I say “decision,” but that is giving the rabbis too much credit. I do not believe they could even grasp the moral significance of buying stolen property (at a very attractive price, no doubt) in order to give the Israeli government a perfect pretext for accelerating its ethnic cleansing campaign in that already tormented town. Of course, when I first learned of the situation, I tried to call Ohr Somayach’s attention to the problem, but the only answer I received for my trouble was that a former teacher of mine from Ohr Somayach, when our paths happened to cross at a funeral a few years ago, refused to acknowledge my presence.

I don’t know if someone who hasn’t labored to make Torah study a central activity of his or her life can fully appreciate how awful it is to me, how ugly a sin, how painful a betrayal, that the institution where I did my first Talmud study will not only be a participant in crimes against humanity but will implicate at least a generation of eager young students in those same crimes, tarnishing everything it touches with a curse that will inevitably sully all it will claim to have achieved. And yet Ohr Somayach’s unexplained and inexplicable depravity has gone completely unnoticed in the Orthodox Jewish world. Apart from me, no one seems even to have noticed how this yeshiva is deliberately maiming the religion it claims to adore.

In my view, the evil we face among the religious Jews today – and we must not let this community off the hook with bromides like “Zionism isn’t Judaism” – is not simply, or even fundamentally, about a particular religious ideology or some lunatic romantic nationalism masquerading as a religious creed. Our problem is broader and deeper than that. Those responsible for preserving an ancient teaching have corrupted it to such a level – and have dragged down the minds and consciences of their followers to such a level in the process – that it doesn’t really matter what they believe. For, in truth, they don’t believe in anything. They have sacrificed their independence, have surrendered their souls, and are more or less mindless tools of the rabbinic and lay elites that govern their lives.

And that is why, at a word from the thugs who govern Israel, they are prepared to say anything – absolutely anything, any lie at all, no matter how false or vile or degrading or stupid – in order to be on what they think is the right side of power.

That is why a rabbi here in Passaic could write proudly of having joined a rally in Washington, D.C. for the express purpose of supporting a genocidal slaughter – and call it “standing with the Jewish people.” That is why a local synagogue is circulating a list of the Hebrew names of community members who are now serving in the IDF terrorist militia decimating Gaza and exterminating thousands of its inhabitants, together with an appeal to think of them when reciting certain blessings. These Judeo-Nazi sympathizers wouldn’t know a genuine blessing – or the real “Jewish people” – if it whacked them over the head. But they are so sunk in moral stupor that they cannot even perceive that the evil they do is evil, and that those they slander are only telling them the truth.

Though it horrifies me to say it, I believe that a whole world, formerly one of profound faith and thought and feeling and virtue, is literally coming to an end. And that world is not Palestine (heaven forbid). Palestinians are being martyred, yes – there are no words sufficient to howl one’s grief and outrage over what is being done to them. But the world that is dying is a Jewish world. And it’s being killed by Jews: the same Jews who claim to be its heart and soul.

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