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Monday 20 April 2015

Michael Jones on Jewish Impact on World History

Dr. E. Michael Jones, a Catholic historian and author, editor of Culture Wars magazine (formerly called Fidelity Magazine), explains the content of his book The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) .

Whatever you think of what he says, you should read his book if you want to open and expand your views and stop getting stuck with Islam, as if all problems ended with it.

All those who are aware of Islam and rightly opposed to it should, if they haven't already done so, take a better look at Judaism.

Only people who know very little of Judaism can think that it's doctrinally close to Christianity.

Judaism is very similar to Islam. Judaism is antithetical to Christianity.

We always invite people to take a look at and read the Quran to see for themselves what Islam is. Well, to see what Judaism is take a look at and read the Talmud, where you'll find the most hateful assertions against goyim (a highly offensive term for non-Jews, similar to the word "kaffir" in Islam), Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary.

The "Catholic Church" of the Vatican II in general and Nostra Aetate in particular had been infiltrated by crypto-Jews even at the high levels of its hyerarchies.

The real, pre-existing Catholic Church was Jewish-realist and knew how to deal with Jews: it is the only force that did know how to deal with them. In the same way as the real Catholic Church was also the only force that defeated Islam.

E. Michael Jones undoubtedly introduces an interesting historiography of the Jewish question.

I have three prima facie objections, though:

1) is it a tested, evidence-based hypothesis that usury is the only cause of the progressive accumulation of wealth in fewer and fewer hands? If you think of a Muslim country like Saudi Arabia, totally implementing sharia law that forbids usury, you see that riches (generally from oil) are indeed in the hands of few.

2) Michael Jones reintroduces Marx's theory of capitalists' appropriation of surplus value produced by labour. We know, and Jones knows, that Marx is one of the most potent Jewish forces responsible for the destruction of Christian West. How can he reconcile his two positions?

3) Michael Jones elsewhere denies to be a racist, as this would be against his Catholic beliefs. But being race-realist wouldn't be. Sometimes he appears to be opposed to race-realism too, which would be a mistake.

We were all created equal before God, but not equal in our characteristics.

Equality is an ethical prescription, not a factual description.

Friday 17 April 2015

Italy Is Losing to Illegal Migration

African migrants to Italy


In February, the people smugglers who constantly ferry African immigrants to Italy fired on a patrol boat of the Italian Coast Guard because they wanted to take back the small vessel which had just transported hundreds of illegal immigrants.

On Tuesday, it was instead a patrol boat of the Libyan Coast Guard, paid by the traffickers, that fired shots in the air to speed up the transfer of 250 immigrants to the Italian tugboat Asso 21, with the aim, once again, to get their hands on the wooden boat that had carried them, an old tub which will soon be seen again in the waters of the Strait of Sicily with a cargo of Africans bound for Italy, with the complicity of Italy's fleet and that of the European "Triton" mission.

Asso 21 is an Italian private tugboat. Its owner, Mario Mattioli, said: "Our tug was called to carry out this rescue operation of 250 migrants. The smugglers fired in the air and not at our crew or the migrants. They did so to speed up the transfer operation, as if to tell the migrants to hurry up."

Mattioli explained that "the incident occurred in international waters," arguing that a response from the tug's crew was impossible.

He went on: "We are civilians, with only 12 people aboard. We answer these rescue calls primarily to save lives in danger. Theoretically, I do not mean that we should not save them, it might seem like a terrible statement, but as an Italian citizen I'm saying that this migration flow cannot be solved through the use of civilian vessels. Imagine 12 crew members having to handle 250 migrants, many of whom sick, and we certainly have no doctor on board."

With the wooden boat in tow, the Libyan patrol boat sailed back home, guarded by an Italian Navy helicopter the and the "Bergamini" missile frigate, a technological jewel worth half a billion euros but powerless in the face of the mockery made ​​by the small Libyan unit which justified its behavior with the necessity not to leave in the sea an abandoned boat, dangerous for navigation.

But certainly the Asso 21 could have also towed the boat to Italy, where it would have been seized and destroyed. The point, however, is that, if the Libyan soldiers were even prepared to fire in the air to take possession of it, it means that for them it was a rich booty. Given the shortage of boats suffered by the Libyan smugglers and the fact that a boat with 250 seats can earn over half a million euros for a trip, it's easy to understand "the sense of duty" that motivated the Libyan crew.

Less easy to understand is the way Italy surrendered. Italy never uses force to respond to threats, attacks and terrorism, thus risking encouraging traffickers, militants and terrorists representing a constant threat to Italian soldiers and civilians operating close to the Libyan coast.

Of course, according to international law, if the Bergamini frigate had blocked the Libyan patrol boat, it would have committed an act of war. But war against whom? The Libyan state does not exist and that Coast Guard patrol boat responds to a Libyan "government" not recognised by the international community, and chock-full of Islamist groups, the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafis supported by Qatar and Turkey.

In fact, with a little more courage, Italy could have done more to prevent yet another mockery. But, in order to do that, the military should be given more aggressive rules of engagement, which obviously the current government, like its predecessors, would not have the political capacity to authorise.

Moreover, Italy's "Mare Sicuro" (Safe Sea) operation (another misnomer which is likely to be ridiculed even more than the previous operation called "Mare Nostrum" or Our Sea, the Roman name for the Mediterranean) has shown with this episode not to be a credible deterrent against the Libyan gangs.

The assistance given to 10,000 illegal immigrants brought to Italy just in the recent few days makes everyone think that the Italian ships and the few European ships of the EU-wide Triton operation actually do nothing but continue the work of humanitarian welcoming carried out by Mare Nostrum.

Two days ago, Italy's deputy foreign minister, Lapo Pistelli, condemned Triton without appeal, stating that "the system is not sufficient. In 90 days it has saved 1,700 people, while over the same period our Coast Guard has saved 17,000, 10 times more."

The problem that seems to escape even an intelligent politician like Pistelli is that, in the race to bring more immigrants to Italian shores, the only loser is Italy because, if Italy doesn't refuse to take in more immigrants, their flow will never end, and because the country is not capable in social and financial terms of accommodating these masses.

No-one has ever seen a state so clearly helping criminals and terrorists to enrich themselves, well knowing who profits from the trafficking of human beings.

Illegal immigration flows could be even more intense if the traffickers owned a sufficient number of boats. A great increase in thefts of vessels in all the ports of southern and eastern Mediterranean has been reported.

Theses crimes feed the needs of people smugglers. There are also rumors of a frenetic activity taking place in the small shipyards on the Tunisian coast which have changed their production and now build as quickly as possible rudimentary boats commissioned by Libyan gangs.


Thursday 9 April 2015

For the Talmud All Land Is Jewish, Says Lawyer

An explosion after an Israeli air strike in Gaza


UPDATE
The article this post is about has been removed from Times of Israel (ToI) website and replaced by announcements and tirades about white supremacists having hijacked the ToI’s blog with a fake profile but adopting the name of a real Jewish lawyer living in Australia.

It turns out, though, that the forgery had nothing to do with “white supremacists” or “anti-Semites”, but was the act of Joshua Ryne Goldberg, a Jewish man who for a long time had been employing false profiles on the internet for the purpose of inciting Muslims to commit terror attacks, having university professors suspended due to "anti-Semitism", and for other unsavoury goals, now arrested and facing imprisonment if convicted.

The Times of Israel, however, never corrected the baseless slander nor apologised for it, in a way similar to what we’ve done here.

This didn’t surprise us, as we already knew that, to people who follow the conditioned reflex of using the label of "anti-Semitism" for everything and everyone they dislike or disagree with, what is or is not true doesn’t matter.

We regret the error we made. But let’s not make another mistake: although the article was apparently not genuine, at least some quotations and concepts contained in it are. For example, the New York Times reports:

"One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail," Rabbi Yaacov Perrin said in a eulogy.
Regarding the difference in rights to property between Jews and non-Jews, this is what the Talmud says (Talmud - Mas. Avodah Zarah 72a, The Babylonian Talmud (Complete Soncino English Translation)):
If his neighbour came and stole it from him, [that man] is put to death on account of it.
Now this is quite right with the first circumstance because [the original thief] caused trouble to an
Israelite; but what had [the second thief] done in the latter circumstance [to be put to death]!3
(3) He would not be executed for stealing the property of a non-Jew.

END UPDATE

Straight from the horse's mouth.

The Talmud contains the Jewish law and, as Netanyahu says, it should be the basis of Israel's - as the Jewish state - laws.

And the Talmud unequivocally states that non-Jews were born only to serve Jews, and thall all land in the world belongs to Jews.

We've heard a lot about Muslim supremacism, but very little about Jewish supremacism.

From The Times of Israel, blog post by Australian Jewish lawyer Josh Bornstein:

"However, by acknowledging the idea of “Palestinian land,” Netanyahu is betraying the Talmud and Talmudic law. If there is one term that I truly cannot stand to hear, it’s the term “Palestinian land.” Talking to other people in the Jewish community, I often hear the term “Palestinian land” thrown about, and it always deeply irks me. Any Jew who speaks of “Palestinian land” clearly has a very deep misunderstanding of Jewish law.

"The Talmud makes it very clear that all land belongs to Jews, and that Jews may seize any land that they so desire.

"Schulchan Aruch, Choszen Hamiszpat 348: “All property of other nations belongs to the Jewish nation, which, consequently, is entitled to seize upon it without any scruples.” This is directly from the Talmud.

"Why, then, should the “Palestinians” be entitled to any land? Why should they even be allowed to exist?

"In the words of top Israeli Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, “Goyim were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world; only to serve the People of Israel.”

"Likewise, Rabbi Ya’acov Perin has publicly stated: “One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail.” Shocking? It shouldn’t be. This is Talmudic law as well.

"The Talmud makes it very clear that the life of a non-Jew has no value, and that gentiles exist only to serve Jews.

"Sanhedrin 59a: “Murdering Goyim is like killing a wild animal.” Abodah Zara 26b: “Even the best of the Gentiles should be killed.” Baba Necia 114, 6: “The Jews are human beings, but the nations of the world are not human beings but beasts.”

"Midrasch Talpioth, p. 225-L: “Jehovah created the non-Jew in human form so that the Jew would not have to be served by beasts. The non-Jew is consequently an animal in human form, and condemned to serve the Jew day and night.”This is directly from the Talmud, and these are just a few of many examples.

"Jewish divine law makes it very clear: the “Palestinians” not only have no right to any land, but the “Palestinians” are not even human beings and thus have no right to even live at all.

"The “Palestinians” are worthless subhuman beasts and vermin. Jews are human beings, but gentiles are subhuman beasts whose only purpose is to serve the people of Israel.

"The only reason that goyim have to exist is to serve Jews. If goyim cannot serve Jews, then they should be exterminated.

"We [Jews] allow Americans, Australians, Canadians, and Europeans to exist because they serve Jews and they serve Israel – and, when they get out of line, we attack them, like we did to the Americans when we sunk their USS Liberty.

"In the words of former Israeli Knesset member Yossi Sarid, “We control US politicians like marionettes.”

"Countries like the US, Sweden, and Australia play valuable roles not only in protecting Israel, but also in serving as dumping grounds (or garbage cans) where Israel can send Sudanese, Syrians, and other subhuman waste who seek asylum in Israel.

"Multiculturalism in the West has ultimately been of great benefit to the people of Israel, as it allows Israel to ship off invaders to the West rather than having them infiltrate and invade the Jewish state of Israel, thus threatening Israel’s Jewish character.

"Multiculturalism is something that exists strictly for gentiles. It is NOT something that should ever be attempted in Israel.

"Israel is the Jewish state, and allowing ANY non-Jews into Israel would be unthinkable. This is precisely why, when African baboons come to Israel, they are sterilized, shoved into crude containment facilities, and eventually shipped off to gentile nations like Sweden, Canada, and Australia – as they should be.

"Their inferior monkey genes are not wanted anywhere in Israel, as they spread nothing but crime, destruction, ignorance, and misery.

"Non-Jews have absolutely no place in Israel, and they have absolutely no place attempting to boss Israel around.

"The life of a non-Jew is disposable, and Jews are entitled to take the lives of non-Jews whenever necessary.

"Again, the only purpose of non-Jews is to serve Jews. If non-Jews are not able to serve Jews, then, under Talmudic law, they should be exterminated.

"“Palestinians” do not serve Jews in any way. In fact, “Palestinians” do the exact opposite. “Palestinians” are the single biggest threat to the continued existence of the Jewish state that there is.

"As such, it’s time to stop pretending that “Palestinians” have any rights whatsoever. It’s time to deal with the “Palestinians” the exact same way that we would deal with cockroaches, termites, fleas, ticks, and all other parasites: through swift and merciless extermination.

"The Talmud clearly states (Bammidber raba c 21 & Jalkut 772): “Every Jew, who spills the blood of the godless (non-Jews), is doing the same as making a sacrifice to God.”

"Isn’t it time for a mass sacrifice of ignoble “Palestinian” scum? Isn’t it time to cleanse the land of Israel – which rightfully belongs to the Jews – of all inferior subhuman vermin?

"What we need to do is to round up all “Palestinian” cockroaches and slaughter them like cattle. We need to take immense pleasure in raping, torturing, and murdering “Palestinians.” We need to boil “Palestinians” alive in boiling human feces. We need to take “Palestinian” babies and stomp them to death in front of their parents. We need to cut open pregnant “Palestinian” women, put their fetuses on pikes, and leave the fetus-pikes all over “Palestinian” neighbourhoods. We need to anally rape “Palestinian” women with butcher knives in broad daylight. We need to burst into “Palestinian” hospitals and butcher “Palestinian” newborns right in front of their helpless mothers. We need to stuff pig’s heads with explosives and throw the explosive pig heads into “Palestinian” mosques and community centres. We need to take Uzis, bust into “Palestinian” preschools, and slaughter every single “Palestinian” child and teacher inside. We need to mutilate, rape, beat, and torture “Palestinians” in public, while other “Palestinians” watch helplessly.

"We need to massacre “Palestinian” men, women, and children without any mercy or pity. The Talmud orders us to do so, and any Jew who disagrees has clearly never read and understood the Talmud."

And:

"I will never condemn ANY act – no matter how cruel or savage – committed against a “Palestinian.” The “Palestinians” are inferior subhuman beasts, and are not even worthy of breathing in Jewish air. The life of a “Palestinian” has no more value than the life of a flea or a tick. They are vile, filthy, disgusting, worthless, parasitic, subhuman vermin and they need to be violently purged from the face of the Earth, which rightfully belongs to the Jewish people. We need to hate them, we need to segregate them, we need to discriminate against them, and, most of all, we need to kill them. Israel is not going NEARLY far enough in its attempts to wipe out the “Palestinians.”"

It continues like this.

Tuesday 7 April 2015

Anti-Italian Bias in Kercher Case Comments

Amanda Knox


Published in Italian on Italia Oggi

By Enza Ferreri


If we have followed the debate about the murder of Meredith Kercher and the prime suspect Amanda Knox on both sides of the Atlantic, we may have observed a strange phenomenon. As most people know, the former, the victim, was English, while the latter, now acquitted, is American. The two girls were students living in Perugia, Italy, where the murder was committed and the case tried.

Analysing the comments, we find this. For Americans, the Italian justice is to be condemned as too severe, to be compared even to the Inquisition. For the British, instead, the Italian justice is to be condemned because, on the contrary, too permissive, unable to do justice and punish the guilty. Such accusations shed light on prejudices that reign in the media, and in particular the anti-Italian prejudice, more than they say about the crime itself and the Italian justice.

A thorough study of high academic level published on the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, "The Amanda Knox Case: the Representation of Italy in American Media Coverage" by Sarah Annunziato, a university scholar who researches, among other things, how Italy is represented in the US media, analyses as many as 409 between articles and television programs on the case, from the most widely-read print media and the most popular TV channels in America, in a period of over two years. The researcher concludes that 251 of these journalistic pieces are neutral, 158 unfavorable to Italy, and zero favourable to Italy.

The details of the case are often presented unilaterally. Declarations of "Fellini forensics" and "the whole of Italy should be ashamed," along with unsubstantiated allegations of police's physical and psychological violence against Amanda Knox, abound. There is, at times, some anti-Catholic hint in certain statements that Amanda was put on trial for her lifestyle at odds with the prevailing Italian culture.

Sarah Annunziato discovers traces of so-called "litigation journalism", in which one of the parties seeks to influence the outcome of the trial through the media. A sign of its presence is the tendency of some US journalists to repeat the same criticisms of Italy and its justice system already expressed by Knox open supporters.

The last sentence of the study says it all in its prescience: "If the Amanda Knox
conviction is later reversed, what will American journalists say about their use of anti-Italian stereotypes?"

Across the Pond, in Britain, Italy is described as retrograde, misogynist and medieval. "Amanda Knox was acquitted because she is rich and American, says Patrick Lumumba," headlines The Guardian.

The British online publication Spiked, in an article titled "Opportunity Knox for Italy-bashing", summarises: "Italy, its culture and its legal system, has been as determinedly calumnied and demonised by American and British observers." A Guardian commentator called the Knox trial an indictment of Italy’s whole judicial system, such as to raise serious doubts about Italy’s ability to mete out criminal justice. A considerable jump from a particular case to the generality.

Among the comments in UK Internet forums one can read: "Italy's legal system is as flawed and as complicated as its parliamentary system"; "Just consider Berlusconi: there you have Italy's system fully exposed"; "The court did release her [Knox]. Why, when she was still the prime suspect? I can't imagine that happening in the UK"; "Just seems like they keep rolling the dice until they get an outcome they like. Scary"; "It [the trial] looks like a purely political event driven by emotion rather than logic"; "[Italy's] legal system has often been criticised for being influenced by the Mafia and politics, well, say no more. Great food, excellent wines, fascinating history, beautiful cities, but confidence in 'the system', I don't think so"; "Italy is a lovely place, but it is not well regulated".

The problem is that people who say these things generally know next to nothing about Italy.

All this reminds me of when I arrived in England in 1984, and could not find anyone who did not believe that Italians have lots and lots of children. Only later did the newspapers begin to report the fact that Italy had, with Spain, the lowest birth rate in the world. A great discovery, with several years of delay.


Friday 3 April 2015

The Lavon Affair: How to Make Jews Look Good and Muslims Look Bad





Published on The Occidental Observer

By Enza Ferreri


There's so much talk - usually derogatory - these days about "conspiracy theories" and "false flags".

Contrary to a widespread understanding of this term, the noun "theory" does not have a connotation of falsity or groundless, far-fetched speculation.

Science is made of theories. Relativity is a theory, and so is quantum mechanics. Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton created theories that gave birth to the science of physics.

A theory can turn out to be false but can also turn out to be true.

Specifically, I’ll describe a historical case - one of the many - in which a real event was dismissed and derided as an "anti-Semitic conspiracy theory", just as it happens today.

What is also interesting about this case, known as the “Lavon Affair”, is that it reassumes many of the traits that are typical of the way organised Jews think, operate and cover their tracks.

Exactly 10 years ago (give or take a few days), on 30 March 2005, Israel honoured nine Egyptian Jews recruited by its Military Intelligence as spies and terrorists, and Israel’s President Moshe Katsav presented the three surviving members of the bomber ring with certificates of appreciation.

Katsav went as far as calling them “heroes” when he said: "Although it is still a sensitive situation, we decided now to express our respect for these heroes."

This was Israel’s official admission, after having publicly denied any involvement in the incident for 51 years, of its responsibility in the Lavon Affair, to the point of even celebrating and honouring the Jewish terrorists who had attacked American targets.

Didn’t hear much in the media about that, did you? Israel seems to have completely escaped any blame in the West for this. Wikispooks explains why thus:
Israel used Egyptian Jews as fifth-columnists to mount terrorist attacks on American and British-owned targets in Cairo and Alexandria. That it was actually Zionist terrorism was discovered when one of the saboteurs was caught planting a bomb in 1954. Israel blamed antisemitism in Egypt for the accusations and anyone who dared repeat them, silencing almost all western comment. [Emphasis added]
Let the Lavon Affair be described by a Jewish source, Israeli newspaper Haaretz:
Israel's plan was to bomb Western targets, make it seem as though Egypt was behind the attacks…

[T]he strategic goal its operators had set: the cancellation of the planned British evacuation of the Suez Canal…

The Lavon affair - also known locally as esek habish, "the rotten business" - was a plan to discredit Egypt's government, then headed by Gamal Abdel Nasser, by bombing theaters, post offices and U.S. and British institutions, and making it seem as though Egypt was behind the bombings. The thinking in Israel at the time was that if the British were to give up control of the Suez Canal, it would be left in Egypt's hands, putting Cairo in a better position to exert pressure on Israel.

The agents were told "to undermine the West's trust in the [Egyptian] government by causing public insecurity" while concealing Israel's role in the sabotage.
Noteworthy in the Haaretz article – and for that matter in all other Jewish sources I consulted - is the concern for the fact that the operation was unsuccessful, rather than for the use of violence and deception again allies, one of which, the United States, has been Israel’s main benefactor and defender, militarily, financially and politically.

The Lavon Affair was a “false flag” operation, also called a “pseudo operation.” The name “false flag” has its origin in the naval attacks in which a flag other than the belligerent's true battle flag is used as a ruse de guerre to deceive. It has come to mean operations conducted under false identity to cause an enemy to be blamed for them.

In 1954, Egypt’s President was Gamal Abdul Nasser, who had some backing from the United States. After WWII, an impoverished Britain was withdrawing from its colonial interests and wanted to give up the giant military base it had in the Suez Canal Zone. Israel was afraid that US policy of support for Egyptian nationalism would encourage Britain to withdraw its military forces from the Suez Canal.

Israel feared that, after British withdrawal, Egypt would nationalise the Suez Canal, and wanted to induce the British government to retain its occupying troops in the Canal area; but diplomatic means had failed. Israel also wished to prevent Washington from becoming too friendly with Cairo.

The Jewish state then thought of another way to alienate the US and Britain from Egypt and Nasser and to damage Egypt’s relationship with the West.

In the Summer of 1954, Israeli Military Intelligence – helped by David Ben-Gurion - conceived such a plan.

Israeli agents had already laid the groundwork, by infiltrating Egyptian society and recruiting some Egyptian Jews, who were then trained in Israel and deployed back in Egypt, with the idea of creating a fifth column in a future war against Egypt. But the intended spies were given different commands: bomb American and British buildings and plant evidence implicating Egyptians, specifically the Muslim Brotherhood. The operation was code-named “Operation Susannah”.

If Americans could be made to believe that the Egyptians did it, they would turn against Egypt.

Here’s another Jewish source, JTA:
Within weeks, an Israeli military intelligence unit known by its code-number, 131, recruited nine young Egyptian Jews to stage terrorist attacks that, they thought, would be blamed on local insurgents and would discredit Nasser’s rule…

What was more hurtful was Israel’s refusal to take responsibility for Ninio, Natanzon and their accomplices, who had undergone secret military training in Tel Aviv before the mission

“Givli overlooks the fact that we were soldiers in active service who were dispatched by the State of Israel. We went through the officers’ course, were mobilized and were sent to carry out a mission in enemy territory,” fumed Robert Dasa, who, like Ninio, got a 15-year sentence…

It is hard to believe that there were those in the political or military echelons who believed that by planting improvised bombs in public buildings in Egypt it would be possible to shake the regime there and drive a wedge between Gamal Abdel Nasser and the West,” Ha’aretz correspondent Yossi Melman said. [Emphases added]
The targets were sites frequented by foreigners. On 2 July the Israeli agents bombed an Alexandria post office. On 14 July, they exploded bombs inside libraries of the U.S. Information Agency in Alexandria and Cairo.

But the campaign ends when a firebomb prematurely detonates in the pocket of one of the terrorists, Philip Natanson, when he is about to plant it inside a cinema in Alexandria, setting his clothes on fire and nearly killing him.

A fire engine waits in front of the cinema, as double agent Avri Elad allegedly had informed the Egyptians of the Israeli false flag operation and the Egyptian Intelligence Service had followed Natanson. Egyptian authorities arrested him, found incriminating evidence in his apartment and got him to name his accomplices.

On 23 July the Israeli agents still at large set off firebombs inside two Cairo cinemas and in Cairo’s central post office and railway station. By 27 July all the members of the cell are apprehended. Two commit suicide. Two Israeli commanders escape and flee back to Israel.

If this terrorist operation had succeeded, it could have provoked an American war against Egypt, an innocent country, on the side of Israel, which was perhaps Israel’s hope.

Characteristically, when the operation became known and a scandal erupted, Israel responded with claims that there was no spy ring and it was all a hoax perpetrated by "anti-Semites".

The events of the Lavon Affair were later documented in the diaries of the Israeli Prime Minister of the time Moshe Sharett, who did not know of the plot until after its end. They formed the basis of the book Israel’s Sacred Terrorism: A Study Based on Moshe Sharett’s Personal Diary and Other Documents (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) by Livia Rokach.

In the book we find the following statement by Moshe Sharett to Israeli Parliament’s 514th meeting on 13 December 1954:
In my speech in the Knesset on November 15 I said "The uncontrolled behavior of Egypt . . . does not indicate . . . that its leadership . . . is seeking moderate approaches and peace. How far Egypt is from this spirit [of moderation and peace] can be learned from the plot woven in Alexandria, the show-trial which is being organized there against a group of Jews who became victims of false accusations of espionage, and who, it seems, are being threatened and tortured in order to extract from them confessions in imaginary crimes."…

The government of Israel strongly rejects the false accusations of the general Egyptian prosecution, which relegates to the Israeli authorities horrible deeds and diabolic conspiracies against the security and the international relations of Egypt. From this stand we have protested many times in the past persecution and false accusations of Jews in various countries. We see in the innocent Jews accused by the Egyptian authorities of such severe crimes, victims of vicious hostility to the State of Israel and the Jewish people. If their crime is being Zionist and devoted to Israel, millions of Jews around the world share this crime. We do not think that the rulers of Egypt should be interested in being responsible for shedding Jewish blood. We call upon all those who believe in peace, stability and human relations among nations to prevent fatal injustice.
Although there are good reasons to believe that Sharett was not aware of the plot behind the false flag operation when he delivered this speech, the latter reveals the well-known pattern of Jews’ closing ranks and defending members of their own group against an accusation from the outgroup as their first reaction, before and without learning the details. At the same time the pattern includes an automatic blaming of the accusers: that’s how the concept of “anti-Semitism” must have been invented.

This doesn’t happen in Western, White, Christian cultures, where an introspective examination and self-analysis is the primary response to accusations, followed maybe by taking the blame and accepting the guilt even when innocent.

Even after Israel has admitted that its role in the Lavon Affair was real and not “imaginary” and therefore the corresponding conspiracy theory was true, Jewish attitudes are typically different from those that Westerners would display. I’ve already observed earlier that the main concern seems to be with the fact that the operation resulted in a “fiasco” rather than whether it was ethical. The participants were honoured and given military titles. They seem proud of what they’ve done and Israel is proud of them:
More than a decade later, the five surviving Egyptian spies, and Natanzon’s widow, have asked the Education Ministry to incorporate the episode into the history syllabus of Israeli high schools. The ministry said it would pass the request to the professional educational committees that meet on the syllabus before every school year.
The innocent Prime Minister Moshe Sharrat was replaced by one of the perpetrators, David Ben-Gurion. From Wikispooks:
Ben-Gurion went on to conceive and carry out a number of wanton provocations and killings, including the 1956 attack on Suez, the mass-killing of Egyptian POWs and the first major destruction in Gaza…

Israel suffered no adverse public relations consequences in the west, while generating significant antisemitism in Egypt and elsewhere in the region.
Here again, we see an example of anti-Semitism being provoked by legitimate reasons, as a reaction to having been targeted and damaged by Jewish interests.
This hatred was of great assistance to Zionist efforts to ingather Jews needed to work in the fields and to protect the new borders of Israel (far beyond what had been claimed in the Declaration of Independence).

Prime Minister Moshe Sharett denounced "the show trial which is being organized there against a group of Jews who have fallen victims to false accusations". The trade union newspaper Davar claimed that the Egyptian regime "seems to take its inspiration from the Nazis" and lamented the "deterioration in the status of Egyptian Jews in general" For Haaretz the trial "proved that the Egyptian rulers do not hesitate to invent the most fantastic accusations if it suits them" and added that "in the present state of affairs in Egypt the junta certainly needs some diversion". The Jerusalem Post headlined "Egypt Show Trial Arouses Israel, Sharett Tells House. Sees Inquisition Practices Revived."[9]

Egyptian Jews with skills and contacts did their best to get to Europe or the US, those with only manual skills (often brown-skinned and speaking no Hebrew) were put to work in the fields. An additional part of their duty was to be armed and to kill any Palestinians attempting to return to their homes and lands. [Emphases added]
Nice. I guess those Palestinians – if they survived - became “anti-Semitic”.
The attacks are still known in English by the Zionist narrative, the "Lavon Affair" with little recognition that this was a quite straightforward terrorist campaign aimed at the US and the UK.

Zionist sympathisers at the Wikipedia have been hostile to calling it a "False Flag Operation" and all such references have been repeatedly removed from the WP again in June 2011 (a top admin and personal friend of Jimbo Wales) and Jan 2012… Some Israeli sources have claimed that the fire-bombing was an "Intelligence Operation" rather than an attack.
It is also underplayed in Commentary (a Jewish website) and the Jewish Virtual Library, where, once again, a terminology is used that seems to point to Israel as the victim and not the aggressor (“a nasty mark on the young state”). This paragraph from the Jewish Virtual Library sets the tone:
The "Zionist spies," as they came to be called, hadn't been well treated before they admitted they had been working on behalf of Israel. But it was bearable. That all changed after their association with Israel was known.
Wikipedia describes the affair as a “covert operation”, and declares: “There were allegations that evidence had been extracted by torture”. Is this another Jewish victimology pattern? I found it in the Trento trial of ritual child murderers too. In the Lavon Affair no-one can dispute the veracity of the confessions, though, however obtained.

False flag operations are not used only by Israel. But, for a country with such a short history, they seem to be employed with relative largesse by Israel which, from its early days, has made regular use of them:
It is therefore a fact that Israel has a prior history of setting off bombs with the intent to blame Arabs for them.

This is not the only example of a "False Flag" operation designed to trick the United States into attacking Israel's enemies. According to Victor Ostrovsky, a Mossad defector now living in Canada, Ronald Reagan was tricked into bombing Libya by means of a radio transmitter smuggled into Tripoli by the Mossad, which broadcast messages designed to fool the United States into thinking Libya was about to launch a massive terror attack on the west. On the basis of this fake evidence, the US bombed Libya, killing Khadaffi's daughter.

The Jews of Iraq is a story by a Jewish writer revealing yet another false flag operation where Israelis used bombs and planted the blame on Arabs.

More recently, Captain Ward Boston, who served as senior legal counsel for the Navy's Court of Inquiry into the Israeli attack on USS Liberty, has come forward to report that the Court of Inquiry was ORDERED to conclude that the attack was an accident by President Lyndon Johnson. In hindsight, given the use of unmarked aircraft and boats by Israel during the actual attack, it appears that Israel intended to sink the US ship and frame Egypt for the attack, tricking the US into the war against Egypt.
Think about the fact that most American and British people have never heard about this Israeli terrorist attack against them, and probably never even heard of Jewish terrorism. It shows the power of controlled media.

Israel, which could be described as an illegal state because its recognition by the United Nations in 1948 was conditional on the country's allowing the return of Palestinian refugees, which Israel never allowed, is in an understandably and justifiably very precarious situation, and needs to manipulate the public opinion of the world - and particularly of certain countries which are world powers - so that they will be persuaded by deception and against their interests to protect this kind of rogue state from which many of the problems that the West is currently experiencing with the Muslim world derive.

Making the US and Britain believe that enemies of Israel like Egypt committed terror attacks on them in 1954 or that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction in 2003 is the way Israel and its lobby sometimes operate.


American Institute of Architects Will Vote on Supporting an Investigation into Building 7 on 9/11




There is the widespread idea that those who dispute the conventional explanation of the events of September 11 2001 are just loonies and naive persons, of the same kind of those who believe in flying saucers.

It's not well known that the people who have the most serious doubts are engineers and architects, namely the individuals whose technical expertise tells them that something in the current 9/11 orthodoxy doesn't fit with the available evidence, the laws of physics, or both.

At the annual convention of the American Institute of Architects, which will take place on May 14-16 in Atlanta, Georgia, (an important, Establisment meeting, whose keynote speaker is former president Bill Clinton), there will be a debate and a vote on a resolution supporting an investigation into the destruction of World Trade Center Building 7 on Sept. 11, 2001.

The resolution is the work of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, a professional body of over 2,200 architects and engineers who dispute the results of official investigations into the September 11 attacks, including the 9/11 Commission Report. The organisation's members think instead that the World Trade Center was destroyed by controlled demolition using explosives.

Something else that many people don't know is the fate of a third building which collapsed on that day, besides the Twin Towers: Building 7, a 47-storey skyscraper. According to a 2006 Zogby poll, 43% of Americans did not know about Building 7.

Nobody, not even the official investigations into the events, claims that an airplane flew through it. The conventional wisdom is that the building collapsed due to an internal fire.

If this were true, it would be the first ever fire-induced collapse of a steel-frame high-rise building.

Building 7’s collapse was not mentioned in the 9/11 Commission Report. It took the federal government seven years to conduct an investigation and issue a report for Building 7.

Many witnesses say the possibility of demolishing Building 7 was widely discussed by emergency personnel at the scene and advocated by the building’s owner. Building 7 housed several intelligence and law enforcement agencies, and the New York City Office of Emergency Management’s Emergency Operations Center, more commonly known as “Giuliani’s Bunker”.

The members of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth call for a new investigation into the destruction of Building 7, specifying that it should include a full inquiry into the possible use of explosives to destroy it.


Just to see in what kind of police state we are living, you should know that a couple of months ago in Britain a vicar was investigated by the Church of England over his Facebook post linking to the article "9/11 Israel did it" on Wikispooks. At the moment it's impossible to access that page. The Virginia Waters reverend was accused of the worst possible crime, ie "anti-Semitism", had to apologise for and delete the post.

The Board of Deputies of British Jews's vice-president Jonathan Arkush, who pushed for the link to be removed, called the article "beyond absurd". Why worry so much about it then? If the piece is so nonsensical, people will realise it and the "Semites" will have scored a goal against the "anti-Semites". This is the real absurdity: that people are so concerned about something they allegedly believe to contain its own disproof.


Friday 27 March 2015

I'm not voting UKIP because I Want to Exploit This System


I normally don't reproduce other websites' posts, but this was too good to miss.

At the next General Election for the UK Parliament in May, there is only one party, as things stand, that can shake things up and make a change for the better: UKIP.

I'm the first to admit its many limitations, but it's the best we've got.

The blog Nope, not Hope has produced these graphics and the following text:
Hope not Hate have recently launched their "I'm not voting UKIP because" campaign, where they encourage people to write in and tell them why they are so opposed.

Here at Nope not Hope, we were a little worried they'd censor some of their biggest supporters in the interests of political correctness. So, in the interests of free speech, we thought we'd help out a little and create some posters which more accurately reflect their 'members' beliefs.

We're always open to suggestions, so if you create any yourself, please let us know.







"Liberals" Are the Most Totalitarian People

Unite Against Fascism supporters at the same Birmingham demonstration shown above



An intolerable double standard is this. Whereas people with - for want of a better word - "Right-wing" ideas are constantly demonised by casually throwing slurs at them and calling them "fascist", "Nazi", "racist", "anti-Semite", "homophobe", "Islamophobe", "bigot" (in short, what today are considered the most despicable characterisations, possibly even worse than murderer, rapist and paedophile) just for the crime of questioning, say, the wisdom of unrestricted immigration from the Third World to Europe or the advisability of same-sex marriage, people on the "Left" end of the political spectrum are treated with kid gloves.

For example, Leftists are allowed to get away with calling themselves - and being called by others - "liberals".

This is a misnomer, like the insults listed above, but in the inverse sense. Whereas the use of "bigot" for many traditionalist thinkers is a defamatory statement, treating a person worse than he deserves, the use of "liberal" for a Leftist is an equally undeserved praise, since this word - rightly or wrongly - has come to acquire positive connotations, like love of freedom, open mindedness, generosity, tolerance, enlightenment, indulgence and, most important of all in the modern world, lack of prejudice.

In reality, whereas Right-wing people not necessarily are supporters of fascism or hold National Socialist views and more often than not are opposed to dictatorship and totalitarianism, Left-wingers tend to fall into one of three categories: socialists, communists and "useful idiots", the appellative given by Lenin to those naive individuals who were helping the Bolsheviks without realising what these communists really were doing and wanted to achieve, and now used in a more general sense for those who help socio-communists with the same somnambulism as their predecessors.

Far from loving freedom and tolerance, the so-called "liberals" are usually the most totalitarian, dictatorship-loving suppressors of others' opinions and expression.

An even cursory glance at the websites of the self-proclaimed "anti-fascist" groups shows what sort of autocratic, despotic way of thinking they share with their intellectual ancestors Marx and Lenin. The group behind the British magazine Searchlight, "opposing racism and fascism in Britain and abroad", is a classical example.

Of Searchlight's founder and publisher Gerry Gable Wikipedia says:
The son of a Jewish woman and a nominally Church of England father, Gable grew up in post-war east London considering himself Jewish.[1] As a youth, Gable was a member of the Young Communist League and the Communist Party of Great Britain, and worked as a runner on the Communist Party's Daily Worker newspaper, leaving after a year to become a Communist Party trade union organizer. He stood unsuccessfully for the Communist Party on 10 May 1962 at Northfield Ward, Stamford Hill, North London.[2] He finally quit the communist party because of their Anti-Israel policy and because "first and foremost [he has] always been a Jewish trade unionist".[1]

Joined by other Jews and anti-fascists, many ex-serviceman and members of the (Spanish) International Brigades the militant anti-fascist organisation 62 Group was formed, to confront fascists organising on the streets.
I'm not giving any link to them, but this is what is found on their website:
While we would generally support antifascist efforts to ban public fascist meetings...

Our volunteers who attend these [private] meetings and report back to us on the proceedings are carrying out an important task at some personal risk.
The risk, even physical, is in reality for the people they are stalking, harassing and persecuting just for having different ideas from their own. Respect of privacy doesn't mean anything to these "liberals", and that's only the smallest of the problems their unfortunate targets encounter at their hands:
...we still obtain detailed and accurate reports, to their [the supposed "fascists'"] great annoyance.
That's how they describe themselves:
Searchlight exposes the fascists and racists’ activities and alerts the antifascist community to our opponents’ intentions, plans and trends...

Searchlight is the first port of call for activists, journalists, politicians and academics seeking information on organised racism in Britain.
In other words, their only purpose is to spy and publicly inform on people with the excuse that the latter are "fascist". You never see in their writings, or in the slogans such groups shout at their counter-demonstrations, any shred of thought, idea, vision of the future or proposal to solve any country's problems.

Hatred and witch hunt seem to form their only motivation and activitity, respectively.

"Bigotry" is defined in dictionaries as "intolerance towards those who hold different opinions from oneself."

Well, then, who is the bigot here, and uses the vilest means to give vent to his prejudiced feelings?


Tuesday 24 March 2015

Who Is for Free Speech? The Ariel Toaff Case

Published on The Occidental Observer
By Enza Ferreri


This article is about three things: free speech, a book about the so-called “blood libels”, and how these ritual murders of which Jewish groups have been accused are linked to aversion for Jesus and Christians in Judaism.

The threads are all related. I’ll start from the third.

The above video, which I posted on my blog [note: I've removed the video because it was not playing any more, instead carrying the warning "This video is no longer available because the YouTube account associated with this video has been terminated."], among others attracted comments to the effect that it is not representative, publishing it is a biased choice, and the people in it are just a band of idiotic alcoholics. (In addition, Christians in Israel are treated wonderfully, have the same rights as Jews, and they all lived happily ever after.)

Those who make these claims have (or pretend to have) little knowledge of Jewish religion and Jewish history.

Because the people in the clip may as well have been drunk (or not), but what they say is due to much more than just alcohol. After all, in vino veritas, "in wine there is truth."

The video shows images of 2012 Jewish attacks on a church and a monastery in Israel, with the background of a song from a group of Jews who gathered on Christmas Eve 2007, “to ‘celebrate’, in the Jewish way, the birth of Jesus.”

The signs defacing the church’s walls read “We will crucify you”, “Death to the Christians”, “Jesus is dead”, “Jesus son of Mary, the prostitute”, “Jesus the son of a whore”, “death to Christianity!”. And on a car: “Jesus is now a corpse”.

The lyrics of the song repeatedly convey one of the messages written on the church’s walls: “Jesus is a bastard.”

In the same way as Islamic apologists attempt to portray Muslim terrorists, murderers and jihadists as betraying the true meaning of Islam, so Judaism apologists try to describe Jews who have attacked Christian buildings or gratuitously insulted Christian beliefs as having nothing to do with Judaic religion.

Both are wrong.

Today, the 24th March, is the Feast of the Holy Infant Martyr St. Simon, patron saint of Trent.

He is the subject of a book published in early February 2007, Pasque di sangue. Ebrei d'Europa e omicidi rituali (Blood Passover. The Jews of Europe and Ritual Murder), which shows that there may have been some truth to several “blood libels”, including the case in which Ashkenazi Jews of German descent living in the northern Italian city of Trent, near the Austrian border, were found guilty of murdering a Christian 2-year-old boy named Simone, crucifying him head down, mutilating his body and using his blood to bake matzot for Passover in 1475.

The child was canonised by the Church and became San Simonino di Trento. His entry in the Roman Martyrology was removed in 1965, after the Jewish-friendly, please-forgive-us Vatican II which gave us Nostra aetate re-examined the case and changed the verdict.

What makes this book extraordinary is that it hasn’t been written by a nasty “anti-Semite”, but by Professor Ariel Toaff, who is descended from a line of rabbis, is the son of Elio Toaff, former chief rabbi of Rome and considered Italy’s highest Jewish spiritual and moral authority from the end of World War II to the early 2000s, and is a rabbi himself.

He also teaches at Tel Aviv University and at the time of the book’s publication was professor of Medieval and Renaissance History at Bar Ilan University in Israel. His work has focused on Jews and their history in Italy and is regarded as a world authority on Italian Jewry.

Ariel Toaff, who holds dual Italian and Israeli citizenship, was 64 when Blood Passover was published by the academic publishing house Il Mulino based in Bologna, a highly reputable company that prints books used in university courses, especially in humanities like philosophy and history. If you, like me, had studied philosophy at an Italian university, many – if not most – of your books would have been published by Il Mulino. This is important, as it shows that the scholarship of this volume must have been of a respectably high level, or this publishing house wouldn’t have risked its reputation by printing it.

As the Israeli newspaper Haaretz commented at the time of its publication in the aptly-titled article “And if it's not good for the Jews?”:
It would have been far easier to dismiss the book if the author had been Christian. Then the dilemma could have quickly been solved by branding the scholar an anti-Semite. It's also easy to dispense with radical Diaspora Jews who not only attack Israel's policies but also sometimes challenge its very right to exist. They can simply be dubbed self-hating Jews. The matter becomes much more complicated when a Jewish scholar from a religious Jewish university touches on an issue that arouses primordial Jewish fears.
The book's blurb tells the reader that “this book takes on, courageously, one of the most controversial themes of the history of European Jews … rereading the vast documentation of this trial [the Trent Trial] and of many others without prejudice… the author explains the ritual and therapeutic meaning of blood in Jewish culture and reaches the conclusion that as far as Ashkenazi Judaism is concerned, the ritual murder accusation was not always an invention.”

Blood Passover was viciously attacked even before it was published by people, to use the author’s words, who didn’t even know what colour its cover would have:
The book sparked intense controversy including calls for him to resign from or be fired from his professorship, the questioning of his research, historical method(s), and motives as they relate to his writing of the book, threats to his life, and demands that he be prosecuted. [Emphasis added]
Really? And here I was, thinking, after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, “Je Suis Charlie” and free speech marches, that Jewish communities everywhere were totally in support of freedom of speech.

Some sordid, mindless cartoons must obviously be on a much higher level, far more worthy of being defended than a decades-long scholarly historical research.

Censorship in this case is a mild word. Violent polemics erupted in the Italian media, Jewish population and rabbinate even before the book was out. Blood Passover was withdrawn from bookshops very few days after its release, deliveries were blocked and the merchandise recalled.

Such a rapid action of withdrawal from the market can be comparable only to that of products which are physically harmful.

EBay quotations of such a rare work fetched at the time 100-400 euros.

The actions against Blood Passover were compared by historian Franco Cardini to Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451, in which books were considered damaging for people’s minds and burnt. A book withdrawn from circulation after few days is tantamount to a book burnt or destroyed in other ways.

Two days before the volume's publication, an advance review by another Italian Jewish historian, Sergio Luzzatto, appeared in Italy’s main daily Il Corriere della Sera, entitled "Those Passovers of Blood. The staggering revelation of Ariel Toaff: the myth of human sacrifice is not just an anti-Semitic lie". It’s worth quoting a long excerpt from it:
Trent, March 23 1475. Eve of Pesach, or Passover. In the home-synagogue of a Jew of German origin, the usurer Samuel from Nuremberg, the battered body of a Christian 2-year-old baby, Simonino, the son of a humble tanner, is found. The city is in shock. As the only consolation, the investigation is moving forward. According to the investigators, the most notable men of the local Jewish community participated in the kidnapping and killing of the “cherub”, also involving women in a macabre ritual of crucifixion and outrage of the corpse. Even Moses “the Elder”, the most respected Jew of Trent, made a mockery of the hanging body of Simonino, as if to mock a renewed passion of Christ… Only torture - it was thought - could push peaceful Jewish householders to confess to have killed children of the Gentiles: murder followed not only by the crucifixion of the victims, but also by practices of ritual cannibalism, ie the consumption of young Christian blood for magical or therapeutic purposes… So, in today's world, only an unheard-of gesture of intellectual courage could allow to reopen the whole dossier, on the basis of a question as precise as it is delicate: when we discuss all this - the crucifixions of infants on the eve of Passover, the use of Christian blood as an ingredient in the unleavened bread eaten during the feast – are we talking about myths, namely ancient beliefs and ideologies, or rites, namely real events and even prescribed by the rabbis? The act of bravery has been accomplished now. The disturbing question has been posed to the sources of that age, by a historian perfectly equipped to do so: an expert in the food culture of the Jews, including religious precepts and eating habits, as well as the story of the intertwined Jewish and anti-Semitic ideas… Toaff maintains that approximately from 1100 to 1500, in the period between the First Crusade and the autumn of the Middle Ages, some crucifixions of Christian “cherubs” - or perhaps many - really happened, leading to reprisals against entire Jewish communities, punitive massacre of men, women, children. Neither in Trent in 1475, nor elsewhere in late medieval Europe, Jews were always innocent victims. In a large geographic area of the German-speaking area between the Rhine, the Danube and the Adige, a minority of Ashkenazi fundamentalists really performed, and many times, human sacrifices. Moving with extraordinary skill on the land of history, theology, anthropology, Toaff illustrates the centrality of blood in the celebration of Passover: the blood of the lamb, celebrating the liberation from slavery in Egypt, but also the blood of the prepuce, from the circumcision of Israel’s male infants. It was blood that a biblical passage in Exodus says was spilled for the first time by the son of Moses, and that some Orthodox tradition regarded as one with the blood of Isaac that Abraham was ready to sacrifice. Therefore, in the ritual meal of Passover, the solemn unleavened bread was mixed with powdered blood, while other dried blood was dissolved in wine before reciting the ten curses of Egypt. Which blood could be more fit for purpose than that of a Christian child killed for the occasion, asked the most fanatical among the Jews studied by Toaff? This is the blood of a new Agnus Dei [lamb of God] to be consumed for the purpose of good wishes, so as to precipitate the downfall of the persecutors, cursed followers of a false, lying faith. [Emphases added]
This astonishing declaration confirms what Professor MacDonald and The Occidental Observer have always said: in their interactions with European Gentiles, Jews may have been victims at times, but they were not passive, innocent victims. Something, other than mere “racism” (of which anti-Semitism is considered a form), incited the often despised and hated goyim to attack the “Chosen People”.

Before his outright persecution – there’s no other word for it – Ariel Toaff was so sure of his assertions, the result of decades of studies and research, continually taught in his university courses, that he gave an interview to Trent’s regional newspaper L’Adige on 8 February 2007 titled “The truth about San Simonino and the Convictions for the Simonino Rituals, the Case Must Be Reopened” and subtitled “Professor Ariel Toaff has no hesitation: «The case of Simonino must be reopened, because there is reason to believe his ritual infanticide probable»”. In it he said (the original article has been removed from the paper’s site, but I’ve found the following reproduction):
In short, the analysis of these acts and other documents prompts me to consider unlikely that the judges had been able to put in the mouth of the accused, who spoke a sort of German Hebrew, tales so full of precise references to the tradition, the rites, the memory of these communities of the Germanic area. It’s not possible that public officials knew all that, therefore those testimonies could not be the result of extortion or a projection of the thought of the judges.
About his method, he says:
I started by ignoring the most problematic aspects of the matter: the Passover, the blood for the Passover unleavened bread etcetera. So I checked that for everything else there is a hundred percent historical evidence. For example, a witness mentions an acquaintance, one Asher, a Jew convicted of usury in Venice: I checked and it was all true. At this point, I focused on Passover celebrations and compared the Trent depositions with the texts of the Jewish communities in Germany at the time: here too the correspondence is perfect.
This is crucial, because the convictions were based on the confessions of the accused, and the 1965 review of the trial exonerated the Jews on the grounds that the confessions must be false as extracted under torture, which is by no means a foregone conclusion.
Yes, the final obstacle was exactly the testimonies which made reference to the sacrifice of Simonino. And it’s here that the linguistic aspect is fundamental. It was a bad Hebrew which was said to add an exotic and Satanic aura to these communities. I used not the Italian but German pronunciation, looked for the possible semantic variants and found the references to a certain environment of Nürnberg Judaism. In this way it became clear that the speech in Ashkenazi Hebrew of Trent Jews could not have been induced by non-members of the community. Therefore the confessions can be considered credible. Let’s not forget that we are talking about a minority of fundamentalists who were not representative of the entire religious galaxy: the Jewish world of the time was as varied as the Islamic one, which harbours even small fringes of terrorists, is today.
Ariel Toaff explains that he covers the story of Trent in eight chapters of his book, adding that he studied trials of Jews in various parts of Europe. A series of elements, the professor maintains, clearly confirms the thesis that infanticide has actually happened. He concludes:
I'm ready for discussion, but first I wish my interlocutor be informed on my research. Those who answer by reminding me that the Jewish tradition forbade the use of human blood in rituals adds nothing serious to scientific analysis: we're talking about fanatics who violated the prohibition. On the other hand, several colleagues who have approached my work agree with my reconstruction of the presence of those violently anti-Christian Jewish communities which included very virulent and aggressive members. There may be someone who still has doubts on the last link of my reconstruction, ritual murder. For my part, however, I believe there is no room for doubt in terms of historiography. Therefore I think it would be right for Trent to reopen that chapter on the basis of the new elements in my book. [Emphases added]
When Taoff examined the trial records of the murderers of St. Simon of Trent he was staggered. The confessions of the murderers contained details of the crime that only the killers could know, and material that could not have been known to the Italian clergy or public officials. The secret rites practised by the Ashkenazi community, which could not have been known by the judges, were faithfully reproduced in the confessions.

Even historian and member of the Venice Jewish community Gadi Luzzatto Voghera, who is clearly a Jewish apologist, admitted that there was no real argument among the Italian Jewry to answer Toaff’s accusation:
In Italy (but the reaction would have been the same in France or Britain) even the Jewish intellectual elite is clearly without arguments when faced by Toaff’s arguments. They lack the basics, to use soccer jargon, namely they completely lack the knowledge of Hebrew (which would allow one to read and learn about the rich bibliography produced in thousands of years of history by the Italian Jewish communities), they are not up to date with the real and not rhetorical situation of historical studies and research on even fundamental issues like the Trent Trial in 1475. They are desperately looking for 'expertise' that cannot be improvised.
In other words: Italian Jewry knew that the atrocities described in the book never happened even without knowing – or maybe because they didn’t know - any of the relevant facts.

Dr. Amos Luzzatto, former president of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities, said:
"Even if the author should manage to prove that a deviant sect existed for centuries...clearly it could never be identified as a Jewish group, or as part of a Jewish community. This would be comparable to saying that the rabbis who were present at [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad's Holocaust Denial Conference in Teheran represent mainstream Judaism."
No, it would be comparable to saying that terrorists shouting “Allahu Akbar” and proclaiming to vindicate the prophet Muhammad while killing Jews are not a Muslim group, which is the opposite of what most Jewish people say.

Just after the book’s release in Italy, in the article “Bar-Ilan to order professor to explain research behind blood libel book” Haaretz showed that initially, despite the pressure he was under, Toaff was still defending his position, albeit with some incipient sign of vacillation:
University historian Toaff has raised a storm by alleging in his book that some blood libels - accusations that Jews killed Christians in ritual murders to add their blood to matza and wine on Passover - may be based on real ceremonies in which the blood of Christians was actually used…

In an interview with the Italian newspaper La Stampa, Toaff responded angrily to his critics, saying, "My research shows that in the Middle Ages, a group of fundamentalist Jews did not respect the biblical prohibition and used blood for healing. It is just one group of Jews, who belonged to the communities that suffered the severest persecution during the Crusades. From this trauma came a passion for revenge that in some cases led to responses, among them ritual murder of Christian children."…

In an interview Friday with The Associated Press, Toaff said, "There is no proof that Jews committed such an act." But he added that the confessions do hold some truth - as when the accused recount anti-Christian liturgies that were mainly used on Passover, when the Israelites' liberation from ancient Egypt became a metaphor for Judaism's hope for redemption from its suffering at the hands of Christians.

"These liturgical formulas in Hebrew cannot be projections of the judges who could not know these prayers, which didn't belong to Italian rites but to the Ashkenazi tradition," he said…

Bar-Ilan University spokesman, Shmulik Algrabli, said, "Professor Toaff is one of the greatest scholars in his field, and we have confidence in his scientific method. The contentions of the study will be clarified when the author returns to Israel." [All emphases added]
After saying in Italy after the publication that he would let himself be crucified in order to stand by his book’s conclusions, when he returned to Israel Toaff surrendered, withdrew the book from the market and said he would give the proceeds from the past sales to the (then) Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith. A new, revised edition of the work was published in 2008, which however didn’t substantially change the thesis of the first edition.

For a murder to be ritual an essential component is religious hatred. And this has been very widespread, deep-rooted, taught from an early age, practised for generation after generation.

For Jews, says Toaff, in rabbinic texts Abraham did kill Isaac, was not stopped by God as in the Bible. Isaac was then resurrected by God.

This shows that the two prohibitions adduced by the rabbis as obstacles to the ritual murders examined in Blood Passover - prohibition on the consumption of blood and prohibition to kill – become absolutely null and void if even the patriarch Abraham was considered pious for ritually sacrificing his son.

Toaff’s book incontestably shows that there has been a profound, sometimes violent and even murderous, anti-Christian streak in European Jewish communities.

It’s not an accident. It derives from Jewish sacred texts, filled with hatred for Jesus and Christianity, which say very much the same as the song and the graffiti in the video above this article.

There are numerous texts, besides Blood Passover, illustrating Jewish hate for Jesus, the Virgin Mary and Christians, who have been the symbols behind various Jewish sacrifices, rituals and obscene mockeries over the ages. What Toaff says in the 12th chapter, that Jesus was called “bastard, son of whore”, was already well known.

In the Jewish book Toledot Yeshu (Generations of Jesus, or Life of Jesus), Jesus is described as an illegitimate child, "the bastard son of a menstruate woman". Jewish tradition considered as the worst thing for a woman to conceive during menstruation, a period of ritual impurity during which relations are forbidden according to Jewish Law. In the case of Mary, this was made even worse by the accusation that the child’s father was a pagan, and she had committed adultery. The same book says that Jesus was a sorcerer, and is now in Hell immersed in boiling excrement.

Toledot Yeshu only reproduces descriptions of Jesus contained in the Talmud.

Rev. I.B. Pranaitis writes in The Talmud Unmasked. The Secret Rabbinical Teachings Concerning Christians:
The Talmud teaches that Jesus Christ was illegitimate and was conceived during menstruation; that he had the soul of Esau; that he was a fool, a conjurer, a seducer; that he was crucified, buried in hell and set up as an idol ever since by his followers.
Author Mirza Tahir Ahmad says:
[A]uthentic Jewish religious literature is full of their gloatings about Jesus’ death upon the cross…

The Talmud, the doctrinal book which fully expounds all the knowledge and beliefs of the Jewish people, taught that Jesus had not only an illegitimate birth, but was doubly uncouth in view of his having been born out of a devilish wedlock of Mary during the period of her menstruation…

All that is decent in man revolts against the stinking filth which was heaped upon the holy name and image of Jesus in the literature of his hostile antagonists.
I conclude with Ariel Toaff’s entry in Discover the Networks. I find it odd that it considers the fact that the Jewish people who confessed to the sacrifice of the little boy San Simonino did so under torture as a sign that their confession is false, but doesn't consider the fact that Toaff has recanted the accusations contained in his book under various threats, including death threats, as a sign that his recanting is also false.

His overall behaviour has in fact seemed very different from that of a man who has altered his views.

But then, freedom of speech is only invoked when the targets of free expression are Muslims – or even better Christians. When it comes to Jews, the rules of the game immediately change.



Saturday 21 March 2015

What's Happiness to Do with Catholicism?

Ceiling of the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, containing a fresco cycle by Giotto, one of the most important masterpieces of Western art



Yesterday, the 20th of March, was the International Day of Happiness, proclaimed in July 2012 by the United Nations General Assembly, "recognizing the relevance of happiness and well-being as universal goals and aspirations in people's lives and the importance of their recognition in public policy objectives."

Being happy is in fact what everybody wants, but people hugely differ in their definition of happiness and views of how to achieve it.

Contrary to public perceptions due to prejudices and intentional distortions, Catholicism also wants people to be happy. A person couldn't be declared saint, for instance, if he hadn't been happy in his life.

Professor of philosophy Christopher Kaczor, in the book The Seven Big Myths about the Catholic Church: Distinguishing Fact from Fiction about Catholicism (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) , writes:
[E]very saint experiences and exhibits joy - no saint is canonized without it.
The Catholic idea of and route to happiness are surprisingly similar to what current scientific psychology thinks, on the basis of empirical studies.

Here are some results of psychological research.

Sonja Lyubomirsky, professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside, is the author of the book The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) , in which she examines hundreds of empirical studies and concludes that about 50% of individual differences in happiness are caused by genes, 10% by life circumstances and 40% by our intentional choices of goals and activities.

That 40% is in our hands, and is going to have an important effect on our happiness.

Drawing on the work of psychologists and philosophers, the book Healing the Culture (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) by Robert J Spitzer distinguishes four kinds of intentional goals and activities corresponding to four different levels of happiness. Here they are:
  1. Physical, bodily pleasure through food, drink, drugs, sex and so on.
  2. Attainment of money, power, success, popularity, fame and other material goods.
  3. Loving and serving other people, and therefore avoiding hurting others.
  4. Loving and serving God.
The amount, length and depth of happiness increases at each of these levels.

This is what the Catholic Church says. And this is also what evidence-based psychological research says.

This subject requires more than an article, but let's make some reflections.

The paradox of hedonism


The first level is the easiest and the quickest to attain, but it's also the quickest to end. Not only it's short-lived, it's also short term. Only an addict or someone with serious problems would base his life on the search for this kind of pleasure, often followed by much greater pain (physical and psychological), ill health and other serious consequences.

There is nothing wrong with bodily pleasure, but in moderation and not as final goal. Catholicism says the same.

The first level is related to what is called the "paradox of hedonism", something already known to ancient Greek philosophers. It's very simple: you don't find happiness by directly pursuing it. Happiness is only the indirect consequence of something else, the result perhaps of something we produced or created and we are satisfied with. We find happiness when we aim at something else.

We all have experienced this type of failure. If you desperately try to have fun at a party, you're more likely to end up with the opposite effect. A deliberate effort to enjoy oneself, to find happiness or pleasure with alcohol or drugs can be one extreme case of this paradox. Another extreme case, at the other end of the scale, can be psychotherapy: continuously looking for possible internal obstacles to one's happiness.

Happiness and money: dispelling a myth


At the second level we find the goals that probably most people, in today's materialistic society, associate with happiness, so it needs more analysis.

It may seem obvious, and yet not many people take notice of this thing, that philosophers have always said, from Epicurus onwards: finding happiness in wealth is an illusion.

American affluence research shows that. In the early '80s, Americans had 5 times as many air-conditioners per head, 4 times as many clothes dryers and 7 times as many dishwashers as in 1958; 93% of American homes owned colour TVs, as opposed to 1% in 1960. Yet, despite this dramatic increase, people didn't feel happier. The University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center found that the proportion of Americans describing themselves as "very happy" had remained the same (one third).

For most people, once they've satisfied their basic needs, the pursuit of material wealth does not achieve happiness. That explains why the huge gulf in affluence between, say, the Germans and the Indians, or the Japanese and the Kenyans doesn't translate into a different degree of how happy the people of these countries judge themselves.

R. A. Easterlin, of the University of Pennsylvania, has performed a comparative international survey of the link between affluence and happiness. His conclusion is that there is little relation between the two: "Economic growth does not rise a society to some ultimate state of plenty. Rather, the growth process itself engenders ever-growing wants that lead it ever onward".

Lottery winners and paraplegics


Suppose you win the National Lottery. Now suppose you have been paralysed in a major car crash. You probably think that, if the first were true, six months after the event you'd be much happier than if the second were true.

Well, empirical evidence shows that it is not so. Studies of the way people react to major happenings show that big money lottery winners, statistically, are no happier than those paralysed in a car accident, six months after each event.

Six months is the keyword, here. There is an element of habituation, a mechanism by which our minds get used to almost anything.

Basically, the maintenance of an emotional state (whether good or bad doesn't matter) and the repetition of a stimulus result in a neutral state, in which the stimulus has no more or little effect.

Here is the abstract of "Lottery winners and accident victims: is happiness relative?", a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology:
Adaptation level theory suggests that both contrast and habituation will operate to prevent the winning of a fortune from elevating happiness as much as might be expected. Contrast with the peak experience of winning should lessen the impact of ordinary pleasures, while habituation should eventually reduce the value of new pleasures made possible by winning. Study 1 compared a sample of 22 major lottery winners with 22 controls and also with a group of 29 paralyzed accident victims who had been interviewed previously. As predicted, lottery winners were not happier than controls and took significantly less pleasure from a series of mundane events. Study 2 indicated that these effects were not due to preexisting differences between people who buy or do not buy lottery tickets or between interviews that made or did not make the lottery salient. Paraplegics also demonstrated a contrast effect, not by enhancing minor pleasures but by idealizing their past, which did not help their present happiness. [Emphasis added]
Happiness is relative, and depends just on the contrast with a previous state. A way in which this habituation occurs is through a series of rationalizations, a sort of "lying" to ourselves which is not necessarily lying, but giving a different interpretation to things.

Maybe, we can think, lottery winners are not so happy because they didn't earn that money and therefore they didn't appreciate it. Maybe they felt guilty about it.

Well, wrong again. Studies of Fortune 500 executives found they had only average levels of happiness, and 37% of these ultra-wealthy business leaders are less happy than the average person.

Christopher Kaczor says in an interview:
As St. Thomas Aquinas pointed out more than seven centuries ago, we want many things that no amount of money can buy. We cannot find true happiness in more fame, power or “winning” of any kind...

Scientists have studied this question extensively. It turns out that more money can make you much happier — if you live in abject poverty. If you do not have clothes to keep you warm, if you have no food for your children, and no roof over your head, money for these basic provisions greatly improves reported happiness.
Once you have enough money for food, clothing and shelter (what St. Thomas Aquinas called "natural wealth"), increases in money are unrelated to stable increases in happiness. In other words, once a person has the necessities, more money — money spent in shopping as well as money in the bank — does not lead to more happiness.

Social psychologist David Myers, the author of The Pursuit of Happiness (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) in which he reviews thousands of scientific studies, observes that the happiness attained by a purchase or achieving a particular level of wealth soon wears off and people adapt to whatever level of wealth they have achieved. Soon after having achieved a certain level of wealth or having purchased the desired product, the happiness recently enjoyed will fade and disappear.

This perhaps explains why, if you compare a person making $30,000 a year, another making $100,000 and a third making $500,000, there is very little difference in their self-reported happiness or levels of depression.

Not only that. However much money they make, they will all say that, if they had about 10% more, they would feel happier. When they do get that 10% more, however, which does happen over a few years of salary increases, they want another 10% and so on, ad infinitum.

Looking at other level-2 goals like power, success, popularity and fame, it's impossible not to notice how many so-called celebrities, people who have achieved all that - as well as money -, lead very miserable lives and often end up alcoholic, drug-addict, depraved, promiscuous, paedophile, HIV-positive and depressed even to the point of committing suicide.

Yet again, as in the case of physical pleasure, there is nothing wrong in any of those things per se: it's elevating them to supreme goals - or, as Catholicism puts it, loving them more than other people and than God - that turns a positive into a negative.

Think of the seven deadly sins: lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, pride.

They all correspond to some lack of self-discipline, by which we give more importance to something else than to others and God. If we had faith and followed His commendments, we wouldn't need any self-help book.

It turns out that psychologists, even those who don't believe in God, recognise - simply on the basis of empirical evidence - that the people who are happiest, mentally healthiest and most fullfilled are those who attain both the third and the fourth levels: serving and loving other people and God.

Robin Skynner, just as an example, in the book he co-wrote with John Cleese, Life And How To Survive It (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) , says, like so many other psychologists, that the healthiest individuals are those who manage to feel part of something greater and higher than themselves. And, considering the secular nature of this book, he gives a surprising emphasis to Jesus' words.

It's because God and the Church want us to be happy that they guide us towards certain goals and behaviours.