Dear Reader,
Italy is glorious this time of year, with
lush green grass covering valleys, with first figs breaking out,
and cherry blossoms already being blown away by spring rains. I
was there at a conference on Holocaust and the Middle East:
the Gagged History, organised by the great Professor Claudio
Moffa, a Paul Newman look-alike; a tall, lanky, noble-looking
and blue-eyed Italian who excels in charging into one-way lanes
the wrong way. His dislike for prohibitions is not limited to
traffic signs: it seems it is enough to put a No Entry sign
anywhere, even in some historical discussion, and the man will
charge head on. He found the hottest and most tabooed part of
European discourse and organised a conference, well attended by
history professors, - from the Universities of Siena and
Calabria, Torino and Napoli, Rome and Urbino, by writers and
journalists from all over Italy, me being the only foreigner.
The conference took place in Moffa’s university of Teramo, a
charming, quaint medieval town in the Abruzzi Mountains, in the
shade of Gran Sasso's snow peaks. Among many attendees and
speakers I’d mention Prof Mauro Manno, whose articles you can
find on my
site, and Dr Tiberio Graziani, the
editor of Eurasia Magazine. You can read about the
conference, and the talks given there on Prof Moffa’s site
http://www.mastermatteimedioriente.it/
, while here I offer you my talk:
Clio Gagged
By Israel Shamir
(A Talk given in Teramo University, Italy,
at the Conference on Holocaust and the Middle East: the Gagged
History, on April 18, 2007)
One should not be amazed that the gentle muse
of history, Clio, finds herself gagged. History is not a
peaceful collection of facts and trivia. History is a perpetual
tug-of-war, for its re-writing may change the world. One can’t
change the past, so goes the old adage, and it is true. But if
we are dissatisfied with our present, we may change our
understanding of past, and this will change our future. This has
been known since time immemorial, and this is why history was
given into custody of sacred keepers, to ensure the power
structure and some continuity. Whoever controls the past
determines the future. The subject of this conference deals
exactly with this topic: we are dissatisfied with present, we
turn to the past, and by re-assessing it we plan to influence
future. If some parts of the historical narrative are strongly
defended, or perverted outright, the more reason we have to
attack it.
By no means is the Holocaust the only
vigorously defended domain of history, where an offender may
find himself in deep water. The old case of Jewish human
sacrifices re-emerged recently in Italy, with the publication of
Professor Ariel Toaff’s book,
Passovers of Blood. As you may
already know, Prof Toaff proved that some Jews accused of
kidnapping and killing Christian children in the Middle Ages
were actually guilty as charged. They were executed for brutal
murder, and they weren’t victims of alleged Christian prejudice
or primordial antisemitism. One may think it would be a reason
for celebration: the criminals were not libelled but properly
punished; justice was carried out, and modern Jews should be
happy that the medieval anti-Jewish prejudice is but a myth,
akin to the myth of Germans turning Jews into soap.
But the Jewish organisations were not happy
at all. They attacked the Jewish Professor of Medieval Jewish
studies in an Israeli University; the mentally tortured, almost
crucified professor Toaff withdrew and destroyed the book
(mercifully in our days it is not that easy, and the book can be
read on the web on
http://www.vho.org/aaargh/fran/livres7/pasque.pdf
), surrendered the small amount of money he got from the
publisher to the Jewish inquisition of ADL, and was forced to a
new act of repentance.
The Israeli parliament (Knesset)
plans to send Dr Toaff to jail,
others intend to sue him for all it is worth, and see that he
dies a pauper and an outcast. Here in Italy, it is natural to
compare Dr Toaff with Galileo, this great Italian scholar, who
was persecuted for his scientific discovery, and preferred
repentance to a fiery death.
But the actual achievement of Dr Toaff is
best compared to that of his Italian Jewish colleague, Dr Carlo
Ginzburg, the author of
The Witches’ Sabbath. Ginzburg
proved that the Friulians, that is people of Friuli, neighbours
of Venice, were dabbling in Black Magic, growing out of its
ancient fertility ritual. Toaff achieved a similar result for
the Jews, that they were dabbling in Black Magic and that it
grew out of their ancient cult of vengeance and
salvation-through-blood. But the Friulians remained calm, while
the Jews almost lynched the Professor, thus proving that the
Friulians are open-minded folk that can look with mild curiosity
at the misdeeds of their ancestors, while the Jews still cannot
come to terms with their non-exclusivity, their non-Chosenness,
and their non-sacrality.
Together with Dr Ginzburg, Dr Toaff had
completed the process of reassessment of the Middle Ages which
was well described by Mircea Eliade in his
Occultism, Witchcraft, and Cultural Fashions.
Eliade wrote: “Some 80 years ago, prominent scholars Joseph
Hansen and Henry Charles Lee considered the black magic an
invention of inquisition, not of the sorcerers. They considered
the stories of witches’ Sabbath, of Satanist rites, orgies and
crimes to be a whim of imagination or a result of
torture-induced confessions. Now we know, - writes Eliade, -
that black magic was not invented by inquisition”. Nor, we may
add, the Jewish human sacrifices that were proven beyond
reasonable doubt.
Toaff dealt with the case of Simon of Trent,
a child ritually murdered by the Jewish black magicians. The
guilt of a few Jews was established by the best court of law
anybody could have those days, and the innocent Jews did not
suffer more than innocent Muslims have suffered in the US after
9/11. Another case was that of Hugh of Lincoln, a child ritually
murdered in 1255: out of 90 Jews detained in the aftermath of
the crime, over 70 were released unharmed as their innocence was
established, while those found guilty were hanged: hardly a case
of “mob justice”!
In a blatant case of ethnic bias, the
Jewish-edited Wikipedia
described Hugh of Lincoln as
“allegedly murdered”, while the proven accusation is termed
“blood libel”. “Blood libel” is a standard definition of these
cases, implying that always-innocent Jews were libelled by
prejudiced Christians. But, if a moral lesson can be extracted
from these old criminal cases, then it is that the European
sense of justice and fairness invariably prevailed; while guilty
Jews were punished, innocent Jews lived and prospered as the
only non-Christian community in Europe.
Muslim justice was not worse, either: in an
1840 Damascus case, a Catholic friar was murdered by a few Jews
who confessed to the crime and were punished. But this did not
interfere with prosperity of their brethren, and Farkhi, a Jew
of Acre, was considered the richest man in Syria after the
affair as well. This case was investigated by the great
Orientalist, Sir Richard Burton, the British consul in Damascus,
who began as an avowed philosemite (“'Had I choice of race there
is none to which I would more willingly have belonged than the
Jewish”) but accepted the guilty verdict in this case, and wrote
a full exposition of the affair. The London Jews
paid good money to buy the Burton
manuscript from his heirs, and it has never been published to
this very day, being kept in the cellars of the Board of
Deputies of British Jews. A British Jewish journalist
Aaronovitch
chided Syria for a Syrian minister
daring to write about it; Aaronovitch never mentioned the Burton
investigation, just exclaimed “blood libel” as if this explains
everything.
Indeed, before there was the Holocaust, there
was blood libel. When one reads Jewish and Judeophile pre-WWII
texts, one notices that the place currently occupied by the
Holocaust dogma in the Judeocentric universe was not vacant; it
was taken by pogroms in Russia, by the Dreyfus trial, by the
Inquisition, by the expulsion from Spain, by the destruction of
the Temple and to a great extent by the “blood libel”. They
carried the same message: they proclaimed eternal, unique,
reasonless and baseless suffering of Jews caused by the
irrational hate of Gentiles; they united and mobilized Jews
against the Gentiles; they deflated some envy, hostility and
distrust into pity, even engendering guilt feelings among the
best of goyim.
The case of Dr Toaff may help our friends who
are over-involved with the Holocaust narrative to see the point.
I respect the dissidents/deniers for their going against the
stream, but I do not share their enthusiasm. Yes, these tales of
undeserved and unique suffering could be argued against on the
factual grounds. This is what Dr Serge Thion did in connection
to the Holocaust, noting that Elie Wiesel, the great narrator of
Holocaust, preferred to stick to his Nazi persecutors rather
than stay with his Russian liberators. This is what Dr Toaff
and Sir Richard Burton did with respect to blood sacrifices,
proving that the authorities’ response was measured and
legitimate.
The Russian historian Kozhinov dealt with the
Russian pogroms proving that more non-Jews than Jews were killed
in these violent encounters. The greatest and the bloodiest
pogrom, that of Kishinev, was described by Bialik, the national
Jewish poet, as the greatest of massacres with blood flooding
the streets, and in recent issue of Haaretz, an Israeli
journalist wrote that “no one doubts
the Russian nation's right to exist because Christians in
Kishinev at the beginning of the 20th century stuck nails into
the eyes of Jewish children.” However, as opposed to the cases
of the Italian and English babies tortured to death by Jewish
black magicians, the allegations of “nails into the eyes etc”
were a flight of fantasy disproved almost instantly, while the
total loss of life in Kishinev amounted to 45, a quarter of Deir
Yassin, a month's harvest of the Intifada.
So all these stories of unprovoked suffering
can be deconstructed, but why bother, if the only thing the
producers of the narratives wish to convey is that Jews are
unique and special, have suffered more than anybody else and
that is why they are entitled to have their way, are the best
there is, while whoever doubts it is obsessed by mystic
antisemitism. These narratives are brought forth to wake Jewish
fury against their alleged persecutors, c’est tout.
I take great dislike to these victimhood
stories, and not only because they are factually weak. The
victimhood stories are not the result, but a cause of
suffering. Whenever these stories of unprovoked persecution are
being delivered, have no doubt: their promoters are preparing a
beastly atrocity of their own. Jews brandished the story of the
holocaust and erased the peaceful Palestinian population in
1948. Armenians recited the story of their unique unprovoked
suffering, and massacred innocent Azeri civilians in Qarabağ in
1991-94 war, sending hundreds thousands of
refugees to Baku. Poles and Czechs
inflamed by stories of their suffering under the Reich expelled
millions of ethnic Germans from their ancestral lands, while
Ukrainians who told the stories of their suffering in Rzecz
Pospolita slaughtered the Poles of Volyn by the thousands.
National politics parallel gender politics,
as it was outlined by Otto Weininger: thus, the feminists
promoted a narrative of women’s suffering under their eternal
male oppressor, and caused the breakdown of many families, the
impoverishment of women and the emasculation of men. A narrative
of this kind may be balanced by a counter-narrative. While it is
true that men lead in physical violence, women are much more
efficient in verbal aggression. The lashing tongue of Lady
Macbeth was no less guilty than Macbeth’s piercing knife. Women
do know how to provoke a man; and men respond – sometimes with a
kiss, sometimes with a blow, sometimes with a bullet. Jose
killed, but Carmen provoked. Despite the much promoted myth of
the muscular
Barb Wire type of girl, women are
less successful when it comes to physical blows, so they tend to
forbid physical violence but allow the verbal one and outlaw the
very concept of provocation.
Coming back to the subject, if Turks killed,
the Armenians provoked; and whenever there were actions against
Jews they were caused by actions of Jews. Indeed, a
through-and-through denier, I deny the very existence of
antisemitism, the “irrational hate towards Jews”. It does not
exist. Jewry was fought against, as every power, from Roman
Catholic Church to Standard Oil Co was. Jews are not lambs, but
quite an active factor of ideological and economic life. One may
be for or against them. But “hate”? Surely not. Non-Jews have
usually been fairer to Jews than the other way around. Even the
“blood libel” turned out to be not a libel but a regular
criminal case.
Were there anti-Jewish actions, in Europe and
in the Middle East? Surely they were. But were they caused by
“irrational hate”? Hate my foot! In 1911, the US government
undid the mighty empire of John D. Rockefeller. Not being a Jew,
Rockefeller could not claim it was due to antisemitism. He did
not say that it was because they did not like his looks, race,
breed, manners, or that’s divine punishment for his sins. They
broke up the Standard Oil Company because it became too
powerful. For the same good reason, Russian President Vladimir
Putin broke up the oil company of his unruly oligarchs. Not
because they were Jews, or because they supported democracy.
Power creates the demand for a countering power, force calls for
counterforce, and Jews were and are a power.
Jewry is stronger than the Catholic Church,
as we learn from the fate of an Italian scientist we can compare
Dr Toaff with. Yesterday, just off the main square, I saw a
plaque commemorating Giordano Bruno, the martyr of science. It
said: “He was killed by the Catholic Church, the enemy of
science.” Go over hundreds of books, crawl all over Internet,
you will read that the Church is guilty of this crime. You can
say it freely, and nobody will scream at you hysterically: “ALL
the Church? All billion of Catholics from Brazil to Poland are
guilty? Shame on you! You are anti-Catholic!” Actually, the late
Pope even apologised for it, as was his wont.
In vain you’ll look for a plaque
commemorating a Jewish philosopher, scientist and sceptic Rabbi
Samuel Ibn Zarza, the author of Miklal Yofi, who
expressed his doubt about Creation, and was burned at the stake
in Valencia – by order of the Jews. Now, I wait to hear the
shout “All the Jews? Antisemite!” What, nobody says it? Good, we
may proceed. In the
Book of Lineage, a 15th
century Jewish book I had pleasure of translating (into
English), there is a gloss saying “When the Rabbis read ‘The
year such and such since creation of the world’ this Zarza
fellow placed his hand on his beard and alluded to the world’s
pre-existence by holding the hairs of his beard. The Chief Rabbi
Isaac Campanton stood up in his place and said, ‘Why is the bush
not being burnt? Let the bush burn!’ (Zarza is a sort of bush in
the Castilian; so this pun alludes to Exodus 3:3) The Rabbis
led him to the tribunal and had him sentenced to death by
burning for confessing pre-existence of the world.”
So there are two scientists, both burned, but
one was sent to the stake by the Church, while another one by
the Jews. If you go into the details, you can find even more
similarities. Samuel Ibn Zarza was executed by the tribunal at
the instigation of the Jews. There are some hints that the Jews
were active behind the scenes in sending Giordano Bruno to his
death as well, for he was strongly anti-Jewish. Giordano Bruno
called the Jews 'such a pestilential, leprous, and publicly
dangerous race that they deserved to be rooted out and destroyed
even before their birth.' (Giordano Bruno, Spacio della
Bestis Trionfante (1584). This opinion contributed to his
execution, for even then, the Jews could access the authorities’
ears, and there were always enough officials ready to follow
their orders. But in the case of Bruno, there are no visible
traces, thus his case remains known, while the case of Samuel
Ibn Zarza is forgotten or denied.
If you open the Jewish-edited Wikipedia,
you’ll read: “though Samuel Shalom (a 16th century
Jewish sage) states that Zarza was burned at the stake by the
tribunal of Valencia on the denunciation of Rabbi Isaac
Campanton, who accused him of denying the creation of the world,
historians have proved this assertion a mere legend.” Thus, the
Jewish history-making and vetting Ministry of Truth still can
decide and rule what happened and what was and remains a “mere
legend”. The Catholic Church can’t even dream of such power.
Can one quantify Jewish power? Some months
ago, the British weekly Economist published an unusual
map of the world: a country’s territory was represented in
proportion to its GNP. This is a revealing map: India was
smaller than Holland, all of Latin America was only as big as
Italy; Israel was bigger than all its Arab neighbours. This map
was not exactly the map of power: in order to draw the true map
of the world one should consider other parameters as well: gun
power, nuclear and conventional capability, discursive influence
connected with output of films, books, newspapers, university
cathedras, international positions. On such a power map, Jewry
would look impressive enough. The Jews are an important power in
the world we live in. It is a first-rate power, stronger than
the Catholic Church, surely stronger than Italy or any single
European state, stronger than Shell and Agip or any
trans-national corporation.
In space studies, there is a phenomenon
called the black hole: a very dense and heavy star changes the
geometry of surrounding space, and rays of light can’t escape
the gravitation trap it creates. Such a black hole star is
invisible because it is very powerful. Likewise, Jewry is a
black hole. It is so powerful that it is not seen. One is not
allowed to see it. This is the strongest taboo of our day. The
famous “tail wags the dog” discussion about the Jewish Lobby in
the US, is an attempt to go around the taboo without actually
breaking it. For sure, a small Middle Eastern country called
Israel can’t possibly “wag the US dog”. The Israel Lobby of
AIPAC and sundry can’t influence much, despite its efforts. But
the Israel Lobby and the state of Israel are perceived as
manifestations of the Black hole, of the great unmentionable: of
Jewry.
In a recent
debate between James Petras and
Norman Finkelstein, Dr Petras comes very close to real thing as
he describes the pro-Israel lobby as
“a whole string of pro-Zionist think tanks from the American
Enterprise Institute on down, and … a whole power configuration,
which not only involves AIPAC, but also the Presidents of the
Major American Jewish Organizations, which number 52… and
individuals occupying crucial positions in the government
(Elliott Abrams and Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and others), …
the army of op-ed writers who have access to the major
newspapers… the super-rich contributors to the Democratic
Party, Media moguls with the leverage in Congress and in the
Executive”. It is not a lobby, it is Jewry.
Why is Jewry so powerful now? In my book,
Pardes, I give an explanation: historically an alternative
church, Jewry had a traditional enemy in the Apostolic church.
When the Roman Catholic church’s hold was broken, the
alternative one spurted forth. But if this explanation is too
complicated, or unacceptable to strict materialists, one can
translate it into dollars and pounds.
Recently, Jewish pundit
Zev Chafets
rose in defence of American
sportsman Richardson who was suspended for saying that the Jews
are powerful and crafty. He said: “The Jews have got the best
security system in the world. Have you ever been to an airport
in Tel Aviv? They're real crafty. Listen, they are hated all
over the world, so they've got to be crafty. They got a lot of
power in this world, you know what I mean? Which I think is
great. I don't think there's nothing wrong with it. If you look
in most professional sports, they're run by Jewish people. If
you look at a lot of most successful corporations and stuff,
more businesses, they're run by Jewish [sic]. It's not a knock,
but they are some crafty people."
Chafets retorted: “Excuse me, but Richardson didn't say anything
offensive. In fact, Jews, as a people, are smart, in my
experience. And they're proud of it (especially the dumb ones).
What other hurtful things did Richardson supposedly say? That
Israel has the best airport security in the world? This is both
true and something Israel itself brags about. That Jews are
hated and need to protect themselves? That's the founding
premise of the Anti-Defamation League itself. Sure, Richardson
exaggerates when he says that Jews own most sports teams. As far
as I can tell, Jews (about 1% of the population) only own about
half the teams in the NBA (and a pretty fair proportion in
baseball and football too). So what? As to the observation that
Jews run a lot of successful businesses, no kidding. Jews are
very likely the most economically successful ethnic group in the
U.S. What's the matter with that?”
This question (“What's the matter with
that?”) was
answered by David C. Johnston in
the New York Times. He wrote: “Income inequality [in the
US] grew significantly in 2005, with the top 1 percent of
Americans - those with incomes that year of more than $348,000 -
receiving their largest share of national income since 1928,
analysis of newly released tax data shows. The new data also
shows that the top 300,000 Americans collectively enjoyed almost
as much income as the bottom 150 million Americans. Per person,
the top group received 440 times as much as the average person
in the bottom half earned, nearly doubling the gap from 1980.”
A question Johnston does not answer (nor even
posits) is: out of “the top 300,000 Americans who
collectively enjoyed almost as much income as the bottom 150
million Americans” how many belong to “the most economically
successful ethnic group in the U.S”? Isn’t it to be expected
that – in absence of a national church or other non-economical
limiters - their influence on the US politics would be roughly
proportional to their joint income?
“Democracy” is an ideal political system
where each person has one vote and all votes are equal. This
ideal can hardly be realised even in the absence of economic
inequality, for there are more and less influential people by
their very abilities. In the conditions described by Johnston,
when one member of elite has the income of 500 ordinary people,
democracy is severely undermined. But this ideal is betrayed
outright if these elite people own mass media and thus have an
ability to shape the world view of others. If these media lords
pool their resources as happens in the US, democracy loses its
meaning. I agree wholeheartedly with Frau Merkel who
said: “A
free press is the cornerstone of our society and the basis for
all freedoms." But I can’t even guess why she considers the
press as being free if it is owned by Jewish and Judeophile
media lords, like Alfred Neven DuMont, owner of one of Germany's
oldest publishing houses and part-owner of the Israeli
newspaper Haaretz, (she spoke at his birthday party) or
your own Berlusconi? Why is this press freer than a
state-controlled press, as in Putin’s Russia?
A State can anyway claim to represent all its citizens.
Why do I stress “Jewish
and Judeophile media lords”? Surely “media lords” would suffice?
Not really. A DuMont-owned Haaretz may run a piece called
Confessions of an anti-German racist, but a DuMont-owned
German newspaper would never run a piece by a man who dislikes
Jews. Judeophilia integrates the media lords and their holdings
into one totalitarian machine, like Communist ideology
integrated all Soviet media into one totalitarian (and boring)
device. This comparison may be developed: in
the US and in the West in general, Jewry occupies the
controlling heights once kept by the Communist Party in the
USSR: practically unmentioned in the Constitution, formally not
a part of state apparatus, this opaque body controls all
processes and is not controlled by external forces. Joe Public
is not represented at the board of
Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations, just as
Ivan Publicoff was not represented in the Politburo.
Once, this position was occupied by the
Church. Anticlerical campaigns consumed much of people’s energy
and thought in the end of 19th and beginning of 20th
century. The major complaint was that the church controlled
society, but was not controlled by society. The Communist party
in Russia (or the fascist one in your country, with all the
difference recognized and acknowledged) faced the same
complaint. Now is the time to address the latest usurper, for
the majority did not appoint Jewry to guide and control its
thinking process. The excessive influence of Jewry is an
indicator of lack of democracy: in a truly democratic country,
Jewry would have an influence proportional to its numbers. But
history is not over yet, and freedom can be ushered in by
sending Jewry the way the Church and the Party went, i.e. into a
modest niche of our dynamic society.
Holocaust revisionists believe that the
Jewish power will collapse if the Holocaust narrative is
undermined. They believe that “Jewish power is founded upon the
lie”. I disagree. The power of Jewry is quite real, it is based
on money, ideology and everything a power could be established
upon. This real power could and should be undone, and then the
Holocaust narrative will be of no interest to anyone but the
next-of-kin.
Led by love of freedom and by compassion,
this solution will be good for individual Jews. What is the
position of an individual Jew versus Jewry? It is the same as of
an individual Party member versus the Party. In the last days of
the Soviet Union, there were 16 million Party members; it was
profitable to be a member; but when the Party membership ceased
to bring benefits, the membership shrunk down to a few hundred
thousand. See it not as a tragedy: yesterday’s Communists
regained freedom. Some of them (like Yeltsin) became
anticommunists, others dropped politics and went into faith, or
trade, or business. Those that remained Communists do not regret
the collapse either: they parted with hypocrites and do not have
to try and please millions of petit bourgeois; they may proclaim
their true belief.
Likewise, undoing of Jewry by bringing its
influence into proportion to its numbers will cause mass
ideological exodus. Out of 16 million Jews, probably a few
hundred thousand believers will remain faithful to the Mosaic
Law and to Talmud and Cabbala study (God bless them!), while the
rest will find other interests and allegiances (God bless them,
too). All of them will be grateful to dissidents like Dr Toaff
who buried the myth of antisemitism and helped them to regain
freedom.
Can’t they be free within this framework of
Jewry? In the 1970s-80s, a similar discussion went on regarding
freedom and pluralism within the Communist Party. Eventually, it
did not work out. Jewry is not less monolithic than the Party,
it also allows for some spread of opinions, but the spread is
not wide enough. On the right end, there is Gilad Sharon, who
wants to strip non-Jews of their
Israeli citizenship, on the left end, there is Uri Avnery, who
actually
proposes the same. We may and
should help Jews to regain freedom, like the Party members, and
before them, Church attendees, were helped to recover their
freedom of choice.
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