Empire Of Hate

Yesterday I came across several articles/interviews that, together, present several themes that have been presented here in a fairly coherent package. One important theme is, Who’s running this show, the Anglo-Zionist show. Michael Hudson—picked up by Alastair Crooke—convincingly argues that the Anglo-Zionist wars on Russia and the Middle East are joined by common motives and players. He also traces the growth of this agenda within the US Deep State. Another prominent theme is the need of the Anglo-Zionist Empire for proxies who are consumed with hate.

Let’s start with excerpts from Larry Johnson’s interview with Judge Nap, which tracks LJ’s Israeli Ultra-Zionists Lay Their Cards on the Table. Both are recommended. As you begin reading, if you wonder how representative Smotrich’s genocidal views are, whether LJ’s presentation is over the top, be aware that Hudson’s accounts of his personal interactions with the early Neocons will directly address that:

How fanatical are the Zionists in Prime Minister Netanyahu's cabinet, and even some of the members of the IDF itself?

Yeah, it is the Zionist mentality. It's not just that Israel as we know it must be safe and secure and free from terrorism. That's the line they push. That's their narrative, but the reality is revealed by the Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich who, in an interview, said, 'Hey, we're going to take Lebanon. Syria is ours, Jordan is ours, Saudi Arabia is ours. These others'--these animals, as he refers to them, these subhumans--'they've got to go.' So what he revealed was that this Zionist mentality isn't about trying to secure Israel's current borders so that its people can be safe and they can have a nice bagel in the morning. No, this is about conquering the entire region, including Egypt. Israel, these Zionists, believe that they are empowered by God to take all this land and that all of these people that oppose them are the Amalek--they are to be killed, they are to be destroyed. It doesn't matter whether it's women or children. And it's not that Smotrich is just some isolated crazy. He's not some guy that's escaped from the insane asylum. He's the Finance Minister. His views are held by other people like Ben Gvir, the Homeland Security director for Israel, and others. I mean, we're talking about at least two to three million Israelis that hold these kinds of views, that see themselves as destined to control all of what we now call the Middle East, the Levant, some will call West Asia.

As Israeli historian Ilan Pappe has put it: “Most Zionists don’t believe in God, but they do believe that God gave them Palestine.” That is actually an important observation that Ron Unz—channeling Israel Shahak—will address in part. With regard to the control that these crazies have, it’s interesting to note that Ben Gvir was exempted from military service—because of his incitement to “racism and terrorism.”

It's irrational. These are the rantings of people who ought to be locked up in a psychiatric institution, but the problem is they really believe their own rhetoric and so they they believe that there will be some miracle from God, some intervention from the other world that will make all this possible for them ... It's madness, but it's important that people understand that this is what they believe, because the narrative we get here in the United States is that, 'Oh, Israel's a civilized country and these uncivilized terrorist nations are threatening Israel.' ... What's going on right now is Israel is trying to expand the war, get the United States involved, and pursue its dream of taking control of Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia.

The Israelis really are their own worst enemy through their brutality, and you know it's getting bad when even the New York Times puts a front page story about the Israelis murdering children--deliberately shooting children in the head and in the chest, not one, not an accident here or there--deliberate targeting. So in the New York Times--the so-called paper of record in the United States, and at least among the Jewish community that are in the policy world--when they come out with that, it tells you that the worm is starting to turn even here in the United States, that Israel has overstepped.

This degree of murderous hatred does require an explanation, which Unz offers below. LJ moves on to Israel’s deliberate targeting of journalists:

Israel has killed more journalists in 13 months than all the journalists who died in World War II, covering both the war in Europe and the war in the Pacific--and that was over six years. Think about that. This is a level of excessive brutality that--I don't want to say it's unprecedented because we saw this from the Nazis, for example, and I'm not making an idle comparison of Israel to the Nazis--they literally are possessed of the same kind of ideological fury that permits them to believe that they are physically, genetically superior to these other people and that those other people have no right or reason to live, they must be eliminated, whether worked to death, starved to death, or executed. Until America wakes up out of its slumber and realizes we're just the great enablers here ...

Please try to internalize that last part—America the Great Enabler. That’s not leftist rhetoric. We’re talking about basic human decency. Next we move on to excerpts from Alastair Crooke’s interview with Judge Nap. These excerpts track Crooke’s latest article (Israel does what it does; it was always planned this way) which, in turn, is a summary of an interview that included Michael Hudson, which we’ll get to. Be aware that when Crooke uses the first person “I”, it’s Hudson’s voice, not Crooke’s. The important idea here is that what’s currently going on is the unfolding of a plan that’s at least 50 years in the development. The excerpts begin with Crooke referring to the deployment of THAAD in Israel as a tripwire for a war with Iran. The excerpts quickly move on to the personalities—highly placed in the Deep State—who were deeply ideologically crazed and who set in motion the takeover of the US Goverment by their kindred spirits who are with us now—the Neocons.

… the whole plan, dating back a long long time, to gradually bring the United States into a war with Iran. And this [deployment of THAAD] is precisely the first step, because if that missile system is attacked by Iran in retribution for what Iran suffers from Israel in this next period ... even if they don't use a Hypersonic missile and take it out directly, as they did with the X-band radar, it's a very different, very dangerous, situation because, of course, the red line for America has been when its troops are killed in the Middle East. This will be a red line crossed, justifying in the view of many in those circles in the United States, an escalation against Iran. Clearly.

Big picture, what has made the United States Israel's partner in war? Is it the influence of the Israeli donor class on American politics, or is it America's lust for oil, or is it something else--or is it a combination of those things?

As I wrote [in the article linked above]—and I was drawing on the experience of Professor Michael Hudson, who worked in the Hudson Institute in the' 70s, 1974 to 1976. He was there when it really started. Everything we've seen since really began around about that time, between the Hudson Institute--Herman Kahn, who was in charge of it--and Scoop Jackson, who who was a very celebrated Senator who represented the Military Industrial Complex. He came from Washington State, but he was also the Democratic contender for presidency twice. So a formidable presence in the Democratic party, although many of the "Scoop Jacksonists" then went over to the Republican party, which is why you've got the confluence in the Uniparty. The Neocons are both in the Democratic and in the Republican party that's how it happened ...

For this next part, it’s important to understand that Uzi Arad has been personally close to Netanyahu as well as a senior adviser and a top official at Mossad. Hudson was present at these deliberations:

But the aim of it--and it was very clear-- the Hudson Institute was working at that stage with Uzi Arad, whom I [Hudson] used to know when I was there. Uzi was formidable, really hard line--you talk about the Right in Israel now, he was absolutely in line with Ben Gvir and Smotrich and all of the rest [cross talk] to kill, yeah, and then he became head of Mossad [Head of the Research (Intelligence) Division]. His view was--and he kept saying this, then in the 70s, the solution to where we are is, We have to kill the Arabs. Kill the Arabs--he kept saying this all the time. And what Herman Kahn did was to say to Senator Jackson, 'Look, this is the solution for how we are able to sort of progress [?] the empire in the Middle East because we need the oil. We must have the oil and this is the way to do it.’ We can't field an army after the Vietnam War. Because of the anti-war sentiment having conscription, a draft, was just no longer acceptable. So war had to be supported by not actually occupying and invading. So it had to be done by bombing and by terrorism--actually subjugating people. And so the plan from 1973, 1974, was to make life so unbearable for Palestinians that they either decide it wasn't worth living and just go and find somewhere to go to or, if they wouldn't go, you bomb them and you kill them. Because you don't have to lose forces if you bomb. You don't lose your own men in this process. Professor Hudson says, ‘I was in these meetings, I was there in the Hudson when all of this was discussed, and Scoop Jackson bought into this.’ So then he made sure to put Zionists in the State Department and he made sure to put the Zionists in the National Security Council and they were there to make sure that this idea and this thinking was built out and developed and embedded so that it couldn't be easily rolled back. ... through Scoop Jackson and the Jacksonites--Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, all these people who then became the Neocons. The aim was not just to take the Palestinian area but to take Lebanon, to take all of the Middle East divided East and West--Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, which weren't difficult for the United States to manage, but the other part in the west, Iraq Syria Lebanon all of these had to be [?] by bombing and by force so that they could be brought to some form of surrender. On one side you had the jihadis as a proxy force and on the other side you had Israel as the other proxy force.

The next excerpt gets into the regime change aspect.

The question is, is it going to work today? Is there going to be push back in the United States that will stop it?

Clearly there's some [pushback] in the Pentagon who are questioning this and saying, 'We're overextended as it is.' Not only is Israel invading Lebanon, now the White House says it wants to completely change the political disposition of Lebanon. They want to actually put in a proxy president of Lebanon, but they've even invaded Syria recently. Only about 500 meters or so, but they made it clear that this isn't just about the Palestinians. It's about taking a whole swath of land, and the White House reaction is full support for what they're doing in Lebanon--we can change the whole character of the region is what Blinken is saying and Hochstein is saying. We want General Aoun to be the new president and we want to make sure the Shia are removed from politics altogether. ...

Next, Crooke articulates quite clearly what I’ve been saying—the war on Iran is actually a front in the war on Russia (and China). It’s a key front in the war for world domination that is focused on subjugating Eurasia—meaning, Russia and China.

How does the Kremlin view this partnership of Americans giving the Israelis whatever they want, whether it's because of the donor class in America or the American lust for oil?

They understand very clearly that this is a good cop bad cop [routine]. America says, 'No, no, we have values and we're pursuing those. It's all Netanyahu and Netanyahu is out of control!' This is just a charade, because they both have this confluence of interests. American interest is to weaken the the power of Iran ultimately--which they see is going to weaken Russia, so they want to weaken Iran. And they want to get at Iran through Hezbollah and through Syria, and so there's a confluence of of interests. One plays the bad cop--that's Netanyahu's role, and the White House is saying, 'Oh no, we're trying to get restraint!' but the reality is everything that Netanyahu wants is given to him. Money, the bombs--you don't see any real pushback except something from the Pentagon. But is it enough to to stop these are deep seated policy initiatives in the United States? These are the deep structural layers of foreign policy--always the support for Israel and the aim to control the Middle East, and if they can get at Iran of course they crush China, because then China loses its own source of fuel and oil. It's heavily dependent on Iran. It would be a major blow to China strategically, and of course would weaken Russia which depends on Iran for the whole of the Central Asia Corridor. So it it all makes sense and that's why we see this confluence of interests, but for presentational purposes of course we're trying to dissuade Israel from going ahead, but America's interest has been for 50 years this project in the Middle East to bring it under the US government control. This is a Neocon project. It doesn't belong to this or that party but it combines parts of all the parties.

Will Russia ever allow the United States, without resistance on the part of the Russians, to damage Iran?

No, I don't believe they will, and I believe that's why they've been providing Iran with assistance, with weapons, with missiles, with air defense systems, with electronic warfare. I think they're very determined. The killing of Hassan Nasrallah marked a big shift in thinking, because before that we were in the era of careful calculation, incremental moves up the escalator ladder. What's Understood in Russia is we're no longer playing chess. We haven't got an adult on the other side of the chess board. We have to take a hammer and smash the chess board. That's the change that's taken place in this recent period.

Next up, excerpts from Michael Hudson’s extended remarks in an interview group led by Nima. You can find the entire interview at Ben Norton’s site, also, but I’ll also link to Hudson’s site, below:

Why does the US support Israel? A geopolitical analysis with economist Michael Hudson

We begin with Norton’s introductory remarks:

But this is about something much bigger than just oil and gas. The U.S. military’s stated policy since the 1990s, since the end of the Cold War and the overthrow of the Soviet Union, is to try to maintain control over every region of the world.

This was stated clearly in 1992 in the so-called Wolfowitz Doctrine. The U.S. National Security Council wrote:

[The United States’] goal is to preclude any hostile power from dominating a region critical to our interests, and also thereby to strengthen the barriers against the reemergence of a global threat to the interests of the U.S. and our allies. These regions include Europe, East Asia, the Middle East/Persian Gulf, and Latin America. Consolidated, nondemocratic control of the resources of such a critical region could generate a significant threat to our security.

Then, in 2004, the U.S. government published its National Military Strategy, in which Washington stressed that its goal was “Full Spectrum Dominance – the ability to control any situation or defeat any adversary across the range of military operations”.

Now we get to Hudson’s actual remarks to Nima, which Crooke summarized:

Zionists the USA’s Trouble Makers

NIMA: [Nima puts what is to follow in the context of Israel assassinating the Hamas representative in negotiations with Israel—Haniyeh—in Iran.]

And the question right now is here, why is this with the United States, Michael? Go ahead.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, the United States doesn’t want a ceasefire because it wants to take over the entire Near East. It wants to use Israel as the cat’s paw. Everything that’s happened today was planned out just 50 years ago back in 1973 and 1974. I sat in on meetings with Uzi Arad, who became Netanyahu’s chief military advisor after heading Mossad.

And the whole strategy was worked out essentially by the Defense Department, by neoliberals, and almost in a series of stages that I’ll explain.

[Henry Martin] “Scoop” Jackson is the main name to remember. Scoop Jackson was the ultra right wing Neocon who sponsored them all. And he was the head of the Democratic National Committee in 1960 and then worked with military advisors. I was with Herman Kahn, the model for Dr. Strange Love, at the Hudson Institute during these years, and I sat in on meetings and I’ll describe them, but I want to describe how the whole strategy that led to the United States today not wanting peace, wanting to take over the whole Near East, took shape gradually.

And this was all spelled out. I wrote a book about the meetings that I had at the War College and the White House and various Air Force and Army think tanks back in the 1970s.

The starting point for all the U.S. strategy was that democracies no longer can field a domestic army with a military draft. America is not in a position to really field enough of an army to invade a country, and without invading a country you can’t really take it over. You can bomb it but that just is going to incite resistance. But you can’t take it over.

...

And what that means is that today’s tactics are limited to bombing, not occupying, countries. They are limited to what the Israeli forces can drop the bombs on Gaza and Hezbollah and try to knock out things, but neither the Israeli army, nor any other army, would really be able to invade and try to take over a country in the way that armies did in World War II.

Everything has changed now and there can’t be another occupation by the United States of foreign countries, given today’s alliances with Russia and Iran and China.

So, this was recognized 50 years ago and it seemed at that time that the U.S.-backed wars were going to have to be scaled down. But that hasn’t happened. And the reason is the United States had a fallback position: it was going to rely on foreign troops to do the fighting as proxies instead of itself. That was a solution to get a force.

The first example was the creation of Wahhabi jihadists in Afghanistan, who later became al-Qaeda. ...

..., and the United States realized that in order to have an army that’s willing to fight to the last member of its country — the last Afghan, the last Israeli, the last Ukrainian — you really need a country whose spirit is one of hatred towards the other, a spirit very different from the American and European spirit.

Well, Brzezinski was the grand planner who did all that. The Sunni Jihad fighters became America’s foreign legion in the Middle East and that includes Iraq, Syria and Iran and also Muslim states going up to Russia’s border.

And the aim of the United States was, oil was the center of this policy. That meant the United States had to secure the Near East and there were two proxy armies for it. And these two armies fought together as allies down to today. On the one hand, the al-Qaeda jihadis, on the other hand, their managers, the Israelis, hand in hand.

And they’ve done the fighting so that the United States doesn’t have to do it.

The foreign policy has backed Israel and Ukraine, providing them with arms, bribing their leaders with enormous sums of money, and electronic satellite guidance for everything they’re doing.

...

... Biden and the United States for the last 50 years, has posed as a good cop criticizing the bad cops that it’s been backing. Bad cop ISIS and al-Qaeda, bad cop Netanyahu.

But when all of this strategy was being put together, Herman Kahn’s great achievement was to convince the U.S. Empire builders that the key to achieving their control in the Middle East was to rely on Israel as its foreign legion.

And that arms-length arrangement enabled the United States to play the role, as I said, of the good cop, designating Israel to play its role, and Israel has organized and supplied al-Nusra, al-Qaeda while the United States pretends to denounce them. And it’s all part of a plan that’s been backed by the military, the State Department, and the National Security Operation.

And that’s why the State Department has turned over management of U.S. diplomacy to Zionists, seemingly distinguishing Israeli behavior from U.S. empire building. But in a nutshell, the Israelis have joined al-Qaeda and ISIS as troops, as America’s foreign legion.

MICHAEL: ... after I mentioned that the U.S. realized it needs foreign troops, it also realized that the only kind of full-scale war that democracy could afford is atomic war. And the problem is that that only works against adversaries that can’t retaliate.

But in recent years, U.S. military policy has been so aggressive that it’s driven other countries to band together and back their allies with nuclear powers. So all of the countries of the world now are associated with nuclear backups. ...

The result is that today’s military alliances mean that any attempt to use nuclear weapons is going to risk a full-scale nuclear war that’s going to destroy all the participants and the rest of the world as well. So what is left for the United States? Well, I think there’s only one form of non-atomic war that democracies can afford, and that’s terrorism. And I think you should look at Ukraine and Israel as the terrorist alternative to atomic war. I think Andrei Martyanov recently has explained that that’s the alternative to atomic war. And this, unless NATO-West is willing to risk atomic war, which it doesn’t seem to be willing to, then terrorism is the only alternative left to it. And that is the basis of the regime change plans that the United States has in countries bordering Russia, China, and other countries that it views as adversaries. That’s what we’re seeing in Ukraine and above all in Israel, as it’s fight against the Palestinian population in Gaza.

The whole idea of the Ukrainians and Israelis is to bomb civilians, not military targets, but civilians. It’s a fight literally to destroy the population under an ideology of genocide. And that is absolutely central. It’s not an accident – it’s built in, built into the program. And Lebanon, even though it’s largely Christian, is part of that.

So the other weapon that the United States has is economic. And that’s oil and grain – it was decided way back in 1973-74. ... just to starve countries into submission – either by cutting off their food supply or cutting off their oil supply. ...

...

... So Saudi Arabia became the key and the result was the petrodollar that was put into U.S. banks and just increased the liquidity, the whole growth of third world debt that exploded in the 1970s, leading to the debt crisis of the ‘80s was all of that. And basically the United States realized, “okay, we want to extend control to conquer the Near East, conquer countries that have vital raw materials; we want to use the World Bank to make sure that global South countries don’t feed themselves – we’ll give money for plantation export crops, not for food.”

...

MICHAEL: ... The U.S. policy, as I said, 50 years ago, and I’ll go into that more now, was based on the U.S. actually taking over all of these countries, again using Israel as the battering ram, as what the army called “America’s landed aircraft carrier” there. Well, all this began to take place in the 1960s with Henry “Scoop” Jackson.

It initially, Israel didn’t really play a role in the U.S. plan. Jackson simply hated communism, he hated the Russians, and he had got a lot of support within the Democratic Party. He was a senator from Washington State, and that was the center of military-industrial complex.

He was called, nicknamed, “The Senator from Boeing,” for his support for the military-industrial complex. And the military-industrial complex backed him for becoming chair of the Democratic National Committee. Well, he was backed by Herman Kahn – as I said, the model for Dr. Strangelove – who became the key strategist for U.S. military hegemony and the Hudson Institute – no relation to me, an ancestor discovered the river we were both named after. They used the Hudson Institute and its predecessor, the Rand Corporation, where Herman came from, as it’s major long-term planner.

And I was brought in to discuss the dollar exchange rate and the balance of payments. My field was international finance. Well, Herman set up the institute to be a training ground for Mossad and other Israeli agencies. There were numerous Mossad people there, and I made two trips to Asia, as I mentioned, with Uzi Arad, who became, as I said, the head of Mossad.

So we had discussions about just what was going to happen for the long term, and they were about just what’s happening today. Herman told me over dinner one night that the most important thing in his life was Israel. And that’s why he couldn’t get military information even from U.S. allies, like Canada, because he said he wouldn’t pledge allegiance to their country or even the United States, when he swore loyalty to another country. And he described the virtue of Jackson for Zionists was precisely that he was not Jewish, but a defender of the dominant U.S. military complex and an opponent of the arms control system that was underway. Jackson was fighting all the arms control – “we’ve got to have war.” And he proceeded to stuff the State Department and other U.S. agencies with neo-cons, who was planned from the beginning for a permanent worldwide war, and this takeover of government policy was led by Jackson’s former senate aides.

These senate aids were Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and others who were catapulted into the commanding heights of the State Department and more recently the National Security Council. The Jackson-Vanik amendment to the U.S. Trade Act of 1974 became the model for subsequent sanctions against the Soviet Union.

The claim was it limited Jewish immigration and other human rights. So right then, the State Department realized: here is a group of people who we can use as the theoreticians and the executors of the U.S. policy that we want – they both want to take over all of the Arab countries.

On one occasion, I’d brought my mentor, Terrence McCarthy, to the Hudson Institute, to talk about the Islamic worldview, and every two sentences, Uzi would interrupt: “No, no, we’ve got to kill them all.” And other people, members of the Institute, were also just talking continually about killing Arabs.

I don’t think there were any non-Jewish Americans that had that visceral hatred of Islam that the Zionists had, or also the visceral hatred of Russia, specifically for anti-Semitism of past centuries, most of which was in Ukraine and Kiev, by the way.

Well, that was 50 years ago, and these sanctions that Jackson introduced ... became the prototypes for today’s sanctions against all the countries that the Neocons viewed as adversaries. Joe Lieberman was in the tradition of the Jackson Democrats ... the pro-Zionist Cold War hawks with this hatred of Russia, and that made Israel the cat’s paw for these Cold Warriors.

They were completely different from most of my Jewish friends, who I grew up with in the 1950s. The Jewish population that I know were all assimilated – they were successful middle-class people. That was not true of the people Jackson brought in. They did not want to be assimilated, and they said just what Netanyahu said earlier this year, that “the enemy of Zionism are the secular Jews who want to assimilate – you can’t have both.” This policy of the 1970s has split Judaism into these two camps: assimilationists, who are for peace and the Cold Warriors, who were for war. And the Cold Warrios were nurtured and financed by the United States – the Defense Department gave a big grant of over $100 million to the Jackson Institute to help work out essentially race-hatred military policies to use to spur this anti-Islamic hatred throughout the Near East. It’s not a pretty sight.

There are not many people around today that were there then, and remember how all of this was occurring, but what we’re seeing is, as I said, a charade that somehow what Israel is doing is “all Netanyahu’s fault, all the fault of the Neocons there,” and yet from the very beginning they were promoted, supported with huge amounts of money, all of the bombs they needed, all the armaments they needed, all the funding they needed, and Israel is a country whose economy needs foreign exchange in order to keep its currency solvent. All of that was given to them precisely to do exactly what they’re doing today. So when Biden pretended to say, “can’t there be a two-state solution?” No, there can’t be a two-state solution because Netanyahu said, “we hate the Gazans, we hate the Palestinians, we hate the Arabs – there cannot be a two-state solution and here’s my map,” before the United Nations, “here’s Israel: there’s no one who’s not Jewish in Israel – we’re a Jewish state” – he comes right out and says it.

This could not have been said explicitly 50 years ago. That would have been shocking, but it was being said by the Neocons who were brought in from the beginning to do exactly what they’re doing today. To act as America’s proxy, to conquer the oil-producing countries and make it part of greater Israel as much of a satellite of the United States that England or Germany or Japan have become. The idea that they will continue the U.S. policy to receive all the support they need has become a precondition for their own solvency that, as Richard [Wolff] has just said, looks like it’s not working anymore. It isn’t solvent – there’s no solution to the black hole that Israel’s painted itself into.

And yet, there’s no willingness to have a single state because Biden and the entire national security council – Congress, and the military, and especially the military industrial complex, says there cannot be any common living between Palestinians and Israelis anymore than there can be in Ukraine, Ukrainians speakers and Russian speakers in the same country. It’s exactly the same, it’s following exactly the same policy and all of this is planned and sponsored by the United States and funded with enormous amounts of money.

I like this final paragraph. It’s something I said just a few days ago:

And if you look at the Neocons, they have a virtual religion. I met many at the Hudson Institute; some of them, or their fathers, were Trotskyists. And they picked up Trotsky’s idea of permanent revolution. That is, an unfolding revolution – what Trotsky said began in the Soviet Russia was going to spread to other countries, Germany and the others. But the Neocons adopted this and said, “No, the permanent revolution is the American Empire – it’s going to expand and expand and nothing can stop us for the entire world.”

This final part is drawn from one of Ron Unz’s enormously long essays, Oddities of the Jewish Religion. This is Unz’s attempt—in 2018—to explain the genocidal hatred described above, and which we’re seeing play out in real time with US backing. Unz is working from Israel Shahak’s short book—almost just an extended essay—Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years. Since for most Americans this may somehow appear to be a controversial topic, here is some background on Shahak. The point of this is that what we’re seeing today has deep roots. Shahak and others warned about where these attitudes—which the Deep State and Neocons have used for their own purposes—were leading.

Israel Shahak … was an Israeli professor of organic chemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a Holocaust survivor, an intellectual of liberal political bent, and a civil-rights advocate and activist on behalf of both Jews and Gentiles (non-Jews). For twenty years, he headed the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights (1970–90) and was a public critic of the policies of the governments of Israel. As a public intellectual, Shahak's works about Judaism proved controversial, especially the book Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years (1994)

The Attitude of Judaism Towards Non-Jews

If these ritualistic issues constituted the central features of traditional religious Judaism, we might regard it as a rather colorful and eccentric survival of ancient times. But unfortunately, there is also a far darker side, primarily involving the relationship between Jews and non-Jews, with the highly derogatory term goyim frequently used to describe the latter. To put it bluntly, Jews have divine souls and goyim do not, being merely beasts in the shape of men. Indeed, the primary reason for the existence of non-Jews is to serve as the slaves of Jews, with some very high-ranking rabbis occasionally stating this well-known fact. In 2010, Israel’s top Sephardic rabbi used his weekly sermon to declare that the only reason for the existence of non-Jews is to serve Jews and do work for them. The enslavement or extermination of all non-Jews seems an ultimate implied goal of the religion.

Jewish lives have infinite value, and non-Jewish ones none at all, which has obvious policy implications. For example, in a published article a prominent Israeli rabbi explained that if a Jew needed a liver, it would be perfectly fine and indeed obligatory to kill an innocent Gentile and take his. Perhaps we should not be too surprised that today Israel is widely regarded as one of the world centers of organ-trafficking.

As a further illustration of the seething hatred traditional Judaism radiates towards all those of a different background, saving the life of a non-Jew is generally considered improper or even prohibited, and taking any such action on the Sabbath would be an absolute violation of religious edict. Such dogmas are certainly ironic given the widespread presence of Jews in the medical profession during recent centuries, but they came to the fore in Israel when a religiously-minded military doctor took them to heart and his position was supported by the country’s highest religious authorities.

And while religious Judaism has a decidedly negative view towards all non-Jews, Christianity in particular is regarded as a total abomination, which must be wiped from the face of the earth.

Whereas pious Muslims consider Jesus as the holy prophet of God and Muhammed’s immediate predecessor, according to the Jewish Talmud, Jesus is perhaps the vilest being who ever lived, condemned to spend eternity in the bottommost pit of Hell, immersed in a boiling vat of excrement. Religious Jews regard the Muslim Quran as just another book, though a totally mistaken one, but the Christian Bible represents purest evil, and if circumstances permit, burning Bibles is a very praiseworthy act. Pious Jews are also enjoined to always spit three times at any cross or church they encounter, and direct a curse at all Christian cemeteries. Indeed, many deeply religious Jews utter a prayer each and every day for the immediate extermination of all Christians.

Over the years prominent Israeli rabbis have sometimes publicly debated whether Jewish power has now become sufficiently great that all the Christian churches of Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and other nearby areas can finally be destroyed, and the entire Holy Land completely cleansed of all traces of its Christian contamination. Some have taken this position, but most have urged prudence, arguing that Jews needed to gain some additional strength before they should take such a risky step. These days, many tens of millions of zealous Christians and especially Christian Zionists are enthusiastic advocates for Jews, Judaism, and Israel, and I strongly suspect that at least some of that enthusiasm is based upon ignorance.

This final paragraph is very important in explaining why some of this seemingly arcane stuff remains key to what’s going on today:

Obviously the Talmud is hardly regular reading among ordinary Jews these days, and I would suspect that except for the strongly Orthodox and perhaps most rabbis, barely a sliver are aware of its highly controversial teachings. But it is important to keep in mind that until just a few generations ago, almost all European Jews were deeply Orthodox, and even today I would guess that the overwhelming majority of Jewish adults had Orthodox grand-parents. Highly distinctive cultural patterns and social attitudes can easily seep into a considerably wider population, especially one that remains ignorant of the origin of those sentiments, a condition enhancing their unrecognized influence. A religion based upon the principle of “Love Thy Neighbor” may or may not be workable in practice, but a religion based upon “Hate Thy Neighbor” might have long-term cultural ripple effects that extend far beyond the direct community of the deeply pious. If nearly all Jews for a thousand or two thousand years were taught to feel a seething hatred toward all non-Jews and also developed an enormous infrastructure of cultural dishonesty to mask that attitude, it is difficult to believe that such an unfortunate history has had absolutely no consequences for our present-day world, or that of the relatively recent past.