Category: Censored by Totalitarian Dictatorship of NWO.
[Zionism, Jew, NWO, Iraq, terror, genocide, Illuminati, war]
Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburg declared, "We have to recognize that
Jewish blood and the blood of a goy are not the same thing."
(NY Times, June 6, 1989, p.5).
"Neo-cons: the modern day Bolsheviks"
Printed on Friday, November 14, 2003 @ 00:00:31 CST
By Raff Ellis
YellowTimes.org Columnist (United States)
(YellowTimes.org) ? As often happens, current events seem to be torn
from the pages of history and, as Santayana said, those who do not
remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Of course, the places
and names change but a meticulous inspection reveals the same patterns
and the same destructive behavior.
When the Russian Revolution appeared on the world stage, life, which
was already quite cheap, became incredibly cheaper, to be dispensed
with on a whim in the cause of the end result -- an establishment and
solidification of the new regime. Minds had to be changed or the
bodies that housed them eliminated. Independent thought was dangerous
and expressly forbidden. Many people, in order to curry favor with
those in power, informed on their neighbors and adopted the slogans of
"patriotism." Individuals could be incarcerated on an impulse of the
government, tortured, sent off to the Gulag or worse, the firing
squad. There was no Bill of Rights for these people.
To further their ends, the Bolsheviks co-opted communications and
created Tass and Isvestia, the infamous propaganda organs of the
Soviet regime. American students were taught at an early age how
terrible this was, how we couldn't believe what was printed or said by
these despicable people. This could never happen in America where we
were free to think what we wanted and the press would always report
the truth.
So, what has happened? In the glorious USA, we've had a revolution of
our own. No, it wasn't an armed rebellion but an insidious, creeping
change from our former democratic government to one where an oligarchy
of big business interests has seized control. We now have in
Washington our own modern version of Bolshevism. Far out, you say? I
don't think so.
Consider that since the events of 9/11 we have had an administration
empowered to seize people, citizens or not, and incarcerate or deport
them without charge, without due process, without legal representation
and without familial notification. We've created our own Gulag called
Guantanamo and others we know not of. Our Justice Department is
"disappearing" people and blocks all attempts at accountability in the
name of security. We even send people off to countries where we know
they will be tortured. The president, who has been given and has
assumed dictatorial powers, decides whether a person has rights or
whether enacted laws apply to them. Do we, too, like the hapless
Russians, not have a Bill of Rights?
Consider also the monopolistic communications empires that have been
created by "friends" and patrons of the administration. When you think
about it, what is the difference between Fox Network and Tass? They
both spout the party line without regard for the truth. They promote
their government's adventures while reviling dissident opinion. In
short, Fox is just like their Bolshevik brethren.
Investigative journalism has gone the way of the vacuum tube radio.
What doth it profit a newsman to report the actual chaos in Iraq
instead of the coalition-claimed "positive" developments? Or the
serious morale problems in our armed forces, glossed over by
fraudulent form letters sent to the press? What of the true body count
of dead and wounded and images of the dead GIs returning home that
would perchance awaken a compliant, general public? How about the
casualties inflicted on the Iraqi civilians, casualties that aren't
counted because they don't count? Or the numerous lies told by
administration officials to justify their war mongering and pillaging
of the treasury to support their adventures? Where are the juicy
stories of profiteering by corporate friends and relatives of the
administration in the reconstruction of Iraq? Is not the chaos in
Afghanistan, where the "huge victory" is in reality limited to the
occupation of one large city, a reportable event?
Instead of these earthshaking stories, "respected" journalists write
columns that claim the Patriot Act is a benign piece of legislation
that is misunderstood and that the reconstruction contract awards for
Iraq are strictly above board. One newspaper filled its pages with the
breathtakingly important details about the firing of a local college
football coach (217 column inches in one edition) instead of events in
the Middle East (92 column inches in the same edition) that are
supposed to be "vital to America's security interests." Yet, hundreds
of people are being shot at and many are being killed every day in
Iraq and Afghanistan, and this gets a fraction of the ink used about a
football coach being fired. No, the lackey press does not highlight
the nasty things that do not further their interests or protect their
administration friends.
You should also take note that whenever someone rushes to cover up
their bad acts by labeling critics with pejorative names. you can be
sure their actions will not bear close scrutiny. When people tried to
complain in Bolshevik Russia, they were called counter-revolutionaries
and dealt with extremely harshly. When Americans complain about their
country's policies, they are called unpatriotic and subjected to
public ridicule. The rallies and protests of dissenters aren't
reported fairly, if at all. If you criticize George W. Bush, you are
being disrespectful of the presidency. If you criticize the war in
Iraq, you are not supporting our troops. If you criticize the Justice
Department or Homeland Security, you don't care about the defense of
our country. If you criticize America's Middle East policy, you are
anti-Semitic. I could go on but I think you get the picture. All
tyrannical regimes have used the same strategy.
Unfortunately, these tactics always work on a largely docile and
uninformed population, a large number of whom, like their president,
don't read the newspapers and form their opinions from a few repeated
sound bites. When the history of this era is written, it will contain
all the eerie similarities of times past that we refused to recognize
and learn from.
[Raff Ellis lives in the United States and is a retired former
strategic planner and computer industry executive. He has had an
abiding and active interest in the Middle East since early adulthood
and has traveled to the region many times over the last 30 years.]
Raff Ellis encourages your comments:
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54448-2003Nov17.html
washingtonpost.com
Israeli Army Engaged in Fight Over Its Soul
Doubts, Criticism of Tactics Increasingly Coming From Within
By Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, November 18, 2003; Page A01
JERUSALEM -- The hunt for suspected militants sent Sgt. Lirom Hakkak
bashing his way through a wall into a Palestinian family's
threadbare living room, his slender frame sweating under nearly
35 pounds of body armor and combat gear, his M-16 rifle ready.
He noticed the grandmother first, her creased face so blanched
with terror that she appeared on the verge of collapse. A
middle-aged couple huddled close by, trembling.
"They could be my parents," Hakkak, the 22-year-old son of an
Israeli poet, recalled thinking. In that split second of
recognition, he said, "you really feel Disgusting.
You see these people and you know the majority of them are
innocent and you're taking away their rights.
You also know you must do it."
With the Israel Defense Forces in the fourth year of battle
with the Palestinians, the most dominant institution in Israeli
society is also embroiled in a struggle over its own character,
according to dozens of interviews with soldiers, officers,
reservists and some of the nation's preeminent military analysts.
Officers and soldiers have begun publicly criticizing specific
tactics that they consider dehumanizing to both their own troops
and Palestinians. And while they do not question the need to
prevent terrorist acts against Israelis, military officials and
soldiers are speaking out with increasing frequency against a
strategy that they say has forsaken negotiation and relied
almost exclusively on military force to address the conflict.
Nearly 600 members of the armed forces have signed statements
refusing to serve in the Palestinian territories. Active-duty
and reserve personnel are criticizing the military in public.
Parents of soldiers are speaking out as well, complaining that
the protection of Jewish settlements in the West Bank
and Gaza Strip is not worth the loss of their sons and daughters.
Such issues are being debated at the highest levels of Israel's
political and military leadership. At the end of last month, the
military chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon, told columnists
from Israel's three leading newspapers that the road closures,
curfews and roadblocks imposed on the Palestinian civilians were
creating explosive levels of "hatred and terrorism" among the
populace. Last week four former heads of the Shin Bet domestic
security service said the government's actions and policies during
the Palestinian uprising had gravely damaged Israel and its people.
While such public comments have infuriated Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon, a former general who favors stringent measures
against the Palestinians, they reflect the anxieties of many
active-duty soldiers and reservists over whether the military
is provoking more terrorist attacks than it is preventing.
In addition, members of the armed forces said they feared that
some of the harsher tactics -- especially assassinations of
suspected Palestinian militants, which often also cause civilian
deaths -- are corrupting Israeli soldiers, and by extension,
Israeli society.
"What's happening is terrible," said retired Brig. Gen.
Nehemia Dagan, former chief of education for the armed services.
"The ethics and morals of Israeli society are more important
than killing the heads of Hamas or Islamic Jihad."
"It's a difficult type of war. It's harder to uphold ethics,"
said Asa Kasher, a professor of military studies at
Tel Aviv University who is rewriting the armed forces' code of
ethics, which he first wrote nine years ago.
"There are no books on moral regulations for fighting terror."
While Kasher said he does not believe the core values of the
Israeli military have changed, this conflict has "put people
into utterly new situations -- whether it's a private at a
checkpoint or the chief of staff."
"Even my friends who are Jewish think what the army is doing
is wrong," said a 20-year-old first sergeant, Noam, who is a
sniper in the 202nd Paratrooper Battalion.
Israeli military officials requested that the full names of
active-duty soldiers not be printed for fear that they could
be subject to prosecution for war crimes in countries that
oppose Israel's actions in the Palestinian territories.
Noam said he has told his friends: "I'm not killing anyone
for no reason. I'm doing this because I have to do it."
At the same time, many other soldiers assert they are proud of
what they have done. For much of this year, Dor, a shy
19-year-old medical officer, was based with the paratroops near
the West Bank city of Nablus. He was only 27 miles from his home
in Netanya, an Israeli seaside city that has been the target of
six suicide bombings since the Palestinian uprising began in
September 2000.
"You think of your girlfriend sitting in a cafe, and it makes
things here more personal, more relevant," Dor said.
"When you stop a bomber, you feel good about yourself."
Dissent against military action is not new to Israel:
Military historians note that public discontent with Israel's
two-decade occupation of southern Lebanon and its slowly mounting
casualty toll helped pressure the government to withdraw its
forces in May 2000 -- over the objection of the military
leadership.
Opinion polls continue to rate the Israel Defense Forces as
the country's most respected institution, though public confidence
levels have eroded slightly since the military's incursion into
West Bank cities in the spring of 2002.
The Israeli news media, including the military's official weekly
newspaper, have become more willing to scrutinize an institution
once considered sacrosanct.
Many analysts say they see a growing willingness among today's
soldiers and officers to not only speak out against the tactics
employed in the Palestinian territories, but also to refuse to
serve.
That, the analysts say, signals an unprecedented challenge to
the armed forces and the government.
Israel maintains mandatory military conscription and reserve duty
in which eligible men, and some unmarried women, serve about one
month each year, usually until age 41, though requirements vary
substantially depending on the individual's military specialty.
The military is what Michael Oren, a military historian, calls a
"neighborhood army," which most Israeli boys and girls grew up
knowing they would join. Active-duty and reserve soldiers maintain
a fierce dedication to the military, and believe they have an
obligation to protect their homeland, as well as the lives of
families and friends.
But in dusty camps, at blistering desert roadblocks and, perhaps
most frequently, when soldiers go home and take off thei
uniforms, introspection often blurs the clear outlines of duty.
"You're in a situation where you need to be blind," said Hakkak,
the Israeli sergeant, tugging nervously at unruly strands of his
brown hair as he discussed his role in the conflict.
"You do things as a machine, it doesn't matter if it's right or
wrong. The things you've done affect you in a very serious way."
Nearly 900 Israelis have been killed during the conflict -- more
than 250 of them soldiers. Almost 2,500 Palestinians have been
killed.
It is difficult to determine how many of those casualties were
civilians, with estimates by Palestinian human rights groups and
Israeli research groups ranging as high as 85 percent and as low
as 48 percent. No verifiable independent count exists, and the
Israeli military provides no statistics on Palestinian civilian
deaths.
Nearly a year after leaving active duty, Hakkak, who like many
soldiers later found work as a security guard, said he was still
haunted by his West Bank tour.
"In my dreams I see myself killing people I didn't kill,"
he said.
An Army's Mystique
Cpl. Mati Milstein was sweaty and bored -- extremely bored, as
he recalled.
He was halfway through an eight-hour shift at a Gaza Strip
checkpoint near a Jewish settlement when he spotted a car
approaching. A Palestinian man and his young son were inside.
Milstein, his coffee-colored eyes set in a face that seemed all
sharp angles, trained his M-16 rifle on the father and ordered
him out of the car. He remembered that the "young son watched
in horror."
The soldier peered inside the trunk. The father and his boy
were probably returning from the beach and were no security
threat, Milstein told himself.
"But I wasn't finished," Milstein later wrote in a Jewish
newsletter. "At gunpoint, I ordered the father to open the hood
and show me the engine, open the glove compartment, lift up the
front seats, crawl into the back and show me whatever was stuck
between the rear seats, open his shopping bags, empty his
pockets."
Then, with the man's identity card in his pocket, Milstein
ambled over to his shaded and fortified checkpost and gossiped
with a colleague, keeping his M-16 trained on the father and
son, who remained standing under the wilting sun.
"I held them for 20 minutes -- because I could," he recalled.
"Then I let them go because I got bored with the game."
Milstein, an American who moved to Israel and joined the army
four years ago, said he discussed the incident with no one --
not with fellow soldiers, nor with his parents back in
Santa Fe, N.M.
"We tend to keep those experiences within us," he explained,
echoing the feelings of almost every soldier interviewed.
"It's very personal. We might prefer to forget what happened.
"I didn't think about the implications until afterward,"
said Milstein, whose father is a psychiatrist and mother is a
psychologist.
"I didn't feel good about what I did -- that I couldn't keep
myself from sinking to this."
Last year Milstein decided to tell his story in the newsletter
of the Jewish Federation of Greater Albuquerque. Sitting in a
Tel Aviv coffee bar with an army buddy on a recent afternoon,
he tried to dissect his reasons for taking his personal feelings
public.
"There's a mystique about the army -- that we are the most moral
army in the world, we only do good things," Milstein said.
"But this is what's happening. I think it's important for people
to know."
He thought it particularly important to tell other Jews because,
he said, "they don't really know what's going on."
Today, as a 28-year-old reservist who works for an Israeli Web
site, Milstein continues to serve -- reluctantly -- in the
Palestinian territories when he receives call-ups.
"There are terrorists stopped and terrorist attacks prevented,"
he said. "In that respect, there is a very clear purpose and
reason for being there. But I don't think we should be there.
All the incidents that happen at checkpoints make the Palestinian
population hate us more. It counteracts the useful work of
tracking suicide bombers. It strengthens the hand of the armed
Palestinian groups. It makes it easier for Hamas to justify its
attacks on Israelis."
Disobeying Orders
Brig. Gen. Yiftah Spector is one of the most decorated pilots in
Israeli history, a triple ace credited with downing 15 enemy
planes in wars spanning three decades. In recent years, Spector
became a revered flight instructor for the air force. This year
alone he spent 47 days on reserve duty and flew 110 times, mostly
training cadets and their instructors.
Last month scores of Palestinians were killed or wounded when
pilots attempting to kill militant leaders dropped bombs or fired
missiles into crowded urban neighborhoods in the Gaza Strip.
Spector and 26 other current and former Israeli air force pilots
signed a letter stating their opposition to executing "illegal
and immoral orders to attack." They refused "to take part in air
force strikes in civilian population centers" and "to continue
to hurt innocent civilians."
The letter angered many of their commanders, rattled the
political establishment and astounded a society that has long
considered military pilots to be among the elite. The air force
commander, Maj. Gen. Dan Halutz, grounded all the pilots and
fired the nine instructors, including Spector, his longtime
friend and colleague.
Spector, 63, was undeterred. In an interview a few days after
personally surrendering his wings to Halutz, he said:
"I am the public. I can speak my heart."
"If we continue, there are going to be greater and great dilemmas
and there will be more and more mistakes," said Spector, a sculptor
and painter who invented a computerized aircraft flight control
system. The government, he said, is "deaf, blind and stupid"
for relying exclusively on military force to resolve the conflict.
In addition to the pilots, 567 reserve army officers and soldiers
have declared publicly that they will no longer serve in the
Palestinian territories, and hundreds of others have quietly asked
their commanders for reassignment, according to military lawyers
and Israeli military experts.
Many government officials have dismissed the numbers as
inconsequential in a military of about 186,000 active-duty
and 445,000 reserve troops. Some military analysts disagree.
"This is very significant," said Yagil Levy, author of a recently
published book on changing trends in the Israeli military.
"For the first time in Israeli history, you're talking about
hundreds of officers. They are very prominent officers who served
in the IDF in very prominent jobs."
Fear of the Unknown
"My biggest fear is that we get numb," Nadav, a 26-year-old captain,
said recently at a shabby Israeli base just outside of Nablus,
about 28 miles north of Jerusalem. He sat at a dusty,
plastic-covered table in his office, chain-smoking Marlboro Lights
and contemplating the impact of this war on his army.
Like all officers in the Israeli military, he began service as an
enlisted soldier.
Nadav, a compactly built man who took a break to travel the world
after his mandatory service and returned to active duty last year,
described a trip to Ethiopia. On the first day, he was overwhelmed
by the poverty. After a few days, he said, "I didn't see it as much,"
adding, "I'm afraid that will happen to us. We will start doing
things, like taking over a house, and blowing up a door will look
natural -- that we'll do stuff and not think about the person,
even if he's killed."
Nadav commands a company of about 105 soldiers in the 202nd
Paratrooper Battalion. His troops are native Israelis as well
as immigrants from across the globe -- 20 from Russia and other
former Soviet republics, 10 from Ethiopia, others from Argentina,
Britain and, until recently, two from the United States. The unit's
members call themselves "the Rattlesnakes."
He refers to them as "my children." He worries about the strain
the conflict has put on the unit and his men. Before last year's
West Bank incursions, troops usually spent four months in the
field and four months training at a rear base. This year, Nadav's
men were allotted one month of training and reorganization after
11 months of combat operations.
One night this year at the beginning of a shift, the Rattlesnakes
collected in front of an elaborately detailed, computer-projected
aerial photograph of Nablus, an ancient city known to most of the
men in the room by its Hebrew name of Shechem and revered by Jews
as the spot where Abraham received the promise of a land of Israel.
The night's mission was a raid intended to nab a suspecte
Palestinian militant.
"We know very little," cautioned the deputy commander who gave
the briefing.
"Name, what he looks like. . . . We don't know where he is.
These are the suspected places" -- three houses where
intelligence reports indicated the suspect could be spending
the night.
Each squad was to leave its armored jeeps or truck at a specific
location; each man had a precise rooftop, tree line or alley at
which to position himself; each was responsible for knowing the
location of his colleagues to reduce the chances of casualties
caused by friendly fire.
Soldiers say few operations prey on their psyches more than
searches for suspected militants. Sometimes the troops blast
through doors with explosives, fearful of the potential danger
of armed fighters on the other side. All too frequently, they
find Palestinian families cowering in their own houses.
"One time we went into a house . . . really, really aggressively,"
said a 22-year-old first sergeant, Gabriel, whose copper-colored
hair sprouted from beneath a maroon skullcap emblazoned with the
emblem of the paratroops.
"The people were really scared. The people were shaking. Not
just the women -- the father, all of them were shaking."
It was the wrong house.
"I really, really, really felt bad," said Gabriel, who said he
watched Walt Disney movies to relax on his weekends at home.
"If it's a terrorist, you don't feel as bad. I really felt bad.
I couldn't stop apologizing. There was nothing I could do.
I'm a simple soldier."
Noam, the 20-year-old first sergeant, spent his youth in Israel,
moved to England with his family and returned nearly three years
ago to serve in the armed forces. In those three years, he said,
he has lost count of how many Palestinian homes he has raided.
"You feel sorry for the family," said the lanky soldier with
short black hair. "They have done nothing wrong. . . . You think
of what it would be like if someone came to your family."
"A person not in the army might think you should get out of the
occupied territories," said Noam, watching two Rattlesnakes play
a heated game of table tennis as they waited for the night's
mission to begin. "But by being here, you know you stopped a
potential murderer. That's the only satisfaction."
His soft voice drifted off: "Even that's not too much
satisfaction. It's a war. No one likes this."
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
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