Osmund Gjerde from the Norwegian magazine Argument recently interviewed me. The list of questions and answers turned out to be too much material, so we decided on the following solution. I would publish the full list of questions and answers here, and he would write an article for his magazine based on some of this material:

Åsmund B. Gjerde, "Pro-Israel?", Argument, No.1, Vol. 2, Oslo 2007, pp. 8-9.
http://argument.uio.no/utgaver/argument 01-07.pdf

Here below is the hyperlinked (<) full list of questions, with my answers.
___________________________________________________________

<  1) What proof do you have that the reason you were fired was your views on US policy towards Israel?

<  2) In Norway, and probably in most of the rest of the world, the perception of US foreign policy as being staunchly pro-Israel is absolutely unchallenged. How is it possible that this perception has become so widespread, if in fact the opposite is true?

<  3) The US practically always votes against UN-resolutions condemning Israel and financial support from the US to Israel amounts to something like $3 billion a year. Doesn’t this prove that US foreign policy favors Israel?

<  4) Even though the US might have pressured Israel into accepting a PLO-state in the West Bank and Gaza, the situation seems to have changed considerably since Hamas became the most powerful political movement among the Palestinians. The US seems to work against the Hamas government and are urging other governments to follow its lead in boycotting Hamas. Is this a deceit? What is the real US policy on Hamas?

<  5) One frequently sees reports about the American ‘Jewish Lobby’ and how they manage to get their way with US foreign policy makers. Are these reports part of an attempt to make use of the traditional antisemitic myths about the hidden powers of a Jewish conspiracy? Are American Jews not really that powerful? Or is it that the most powerful American Jews share the agenda of the foreign policy elites?

<  6) The Norwegian historian Hilde Henriksen Waage recently wrote a report on the Norwegian role in the ‘Oslo peace process,’ claiming that the Norwegians were heavily biased against the Palestinians and the PLO and in favor of Israel. Do you agree? What was the real Norwegian role in the ‘peace process’?

<  7) In Norway most researchers and professors who work with the middle east tend to criticize Israel heavily, and I have the impression that the same thing is true about most of the ‘western world.’ Why do you think this is?

<  8) What is your analysis of this summer’s war between Israel and Hezbollah and the current Hezbollah attempt to overthrow the Lebanese government?

<  9) Why would the US want Iranian dominance in the Middle East? And what proof do you have to support the claim that this is actually a goal for US policymakers?

<  10) Why do US policymakers want to destroy Israel?

___________________________________________________________

1) Q. What proof do you have that the reason you were fired was your views on US policy towards Israel?

A. The single best piece of evidence is a letter that I wasn’t supposed to see (somebody placed, anonymously, a copy of it in my mailbox [1]), written by Ian Lustick, professor in the political science department at the University of Pennsylvania, and also a director of the Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict. The Asch Center is the poli-sci ‘think tank’ inside the Penn psychology department that got interested in my work and brought me to Penn. Ian Lustick’s letter was addressed to Robert DeRubeis, then chairman of the Department of Psychology (and hence my boss, as I had been hired as an assistant professor of psychology).

Lustick begins his letter by stating that he is replying to an official request to evaluate me for the normal process of reappointment to a second three-year contract, for which I was then due:

“Dear Rob, You have asked me for my impressions of Professor Francisco Gil-White’s teaching and research in connection with your consideration of his reappointment.”

But other than a quick remark praising my scientific research, there is not one lonely word about the anthropological and psychological work I do that got the University of Pennsylvania interested in me, and which I had continued doing and publishing in academic journals. Ian Lustick’s “impressions” of my “teaching and research” are nowhere to be found in his letter. What his letter contains is a long string of complaints concerning my public service journalism investigating the activities and history of terrorist groups such as the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization).

Even there, Lustick does not complain about the quality of these investigations but merely about my conclusions. This is to say that he does not accuse me of making any errors of documentation in my writings on the PLO and other terrorist groups (such as the Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA, the Bosnian Muslim troops of Alija Izetbegovic, and the terrorist Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka); Lustick said that my research was objectionable because it contradicted “work done by me [Lustick] and my colleagues at the Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict.” Or as Ian Lustick’s colleague Brendan O’Leary (another Asch Center director) once told me in a very public fit of rage: the problem is not with my documentation -- which he publicly declared “impeccable” -- but with my “interpretation.” Somehow, I always came to the ‘wrong’ conclusion, in their view.

Lustick closes his letter to the psychology department chairman with these words:

“…aspects of Francisco’s behavior have raised questions in my mind regarding his ability to contribute as a responsible member of our academic community, his respect for the rules of evidence, and his understanding of the difference between polemical disputation and scientific exchange. I would recommend that he be advised that his future at Penn will require him to remove such questions from the minds of his colleagues and I encourage all his colleagues in the Psychology Department to do what they can to help him harness his manifest talents for systematic scholarly work.”

Francisco Gil-White’s articles investigating the PLO and other terrorist groups have, says Lustick, “raised questions in my mind.” But this cannot mean that Ian Lustick really has problems with my “respect for the rules of evidence” given that he makes no comment on the quality of my evidence. Lustick is upset that I contradicted him.

To have a future at Penn, what will be required of one who has thus trespassed upon Ian Lustick?

“His future at Penn will require him to remove such questions from the minds of his colleagues [in the psychology department].”

Which questions were those? The questions “in my mind” -- in Lustick’s mind. In other words, my future at Penn, Lustick declared, would require me to satisfy the psychology senior faculty that I would no longer upset Ian Lustick’s mind by contradicting him; else, I should be denied reappointment. And so, after explaining to Rob Derubeis, the psychology chairman, that I would continue doing my public service journalism as before, as is my right under the US Constitution and under the UPenn Faculty Handbook, I was denied reappointment to my second three-year contract.

Because Lustick sells himself as a scholar of the Arab-Israeli conflict, it was my writings on this topic, especially, that had caused him “considerable distress.” How did I “distress” him? I wrote a piece, and published it in Israel, documenting that Al Fatah, the controlling core of the PLO, had been created after World War II by Hajj Amin al Husseini’s Arab Higher Committee. The same piece documents that Hajj Amin al Husseini led several massive anti-Jewish terrorist attacks in British Mandate Palestine before the World War, in collusion with the British authorities, and in the last instance with weapons supplied by Adolf Hitler. And my piece documented as well that during the World War, Hajj Amin al Husseini traveled to Berlin, met with Hitler, and subsequently became top co-architect, with Adolf Eichmann, of the German Nazi Final Solution: the project to murder every Jew in Europe. My article ended by asking: Since this is also the man behind the PLO, doesn’t this mean that the PLO is an extension of the German Nazi Final Solution? This is, after all, what the PLO’s own constitution, which calls for the extermination of the Jews, would seem to be screaming.[2]

Now why did this documentation -- not one detail of which Ian Lustick has yet chosen to dispute -- make him so mad? Because Ian Lustick’s entire career has been an effort to cover for the terrorist enemies of the Jewish state.[3] But does it make sense that Ian Lustick would cover for an antisemitic, genocidal, terrorist organization? It does if Ian Lustick is involved with US Intelligence, because, as I have shown, US Intelligence has been, for a long time, assisting the terrorist enemies of Israel, and this includes the training of PLO troops.[4] Ian Lustick explains himself in his curriculum vitae that he began his professional career as an employee of US Intelligence, and that he has remained in close association ever since, providing multiple consultations to the National Security Agency (NSA), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and such.[5]

Ian Lustick’s relationship to US Intelligence may explain why, from his perch as a professor in the political science department, he could nevertheless tell the psychology department chairman to fire me and have it done. Perhaps Ian Lustick is not without some power. This might account, also, for the thinly veiled threats I kept getting in person and by email from other Asch Center directors and from my own mentor in the psychology department, Paul Rozin (also an Asch Center director). The message was consistent: if I didn’t turn my investigating eye elsewhere, my job could be in jeopardy. I had been to my psychology department chairman, Robert DeRubies, to explain that I was being threatened, and I told him that it was an Asch Center thing, with Ian Lustick probably pulling the strings, since it was his academic reputation that my work threatened. DeRubeis promised devoutly to keep my reappointment process free of extra-scientific political issues, and yet went ahead and, for my reappointment process, got a letter of evaluation from...Ian Lustick. I should also point out that there were only two such letters requested, and the other went to another Asch Center director. (This second letter, however, had nothing but words of praise.)

___________________________________________________________

2) Q. In Norway, and probably in most of the rest of the world, the perception of US foreign policy as being staunchly pro-Israel is absolutely unchallenged. How is it possible that this perception has become so widespread, if in fact the opposite is true?

A. The reason a mistaken perception of US policy toward Israel (and US policy more generally) has taken hold universally is that the mainstream Western media, every day, repeats a million times the opposite of the truth. “US foreign policy is pro-Israel, US foreign policy is pro-Israel...” This kind of repetition, from sources that news consumers assume to be free of governmental interference, has a decisive effect on public perceptions. But the same US Intelligence that, as I have argued, determines US foreign policy toward Israel has control over the media establishment, so it can simultaneously seek the destruction of the Jewish state and represent this everywhere as the precise opposite.[6]

For people to change their public perceptions, they would first have to suspect that they are being lied to by the New York Times. But this is difficult, because readers of the New York Times pride themselves on being especially intelligent for choosing to read the New York Times. And it is difficult because for 2000 years Westerners have been trained to accept the most spectacular lies so long as these lies attack the Jews, as I have summarized in an HIR piece.[7]

In the Middle Ages Europeans were told that, at Passover, the Jews would steal Christian children in order to torture them to death and perhaps also eat them. The point of these supposed rites, it was explained, was to celebrate the ancient murder of Jesus, for which the Jews of every generation joyously accepted responsibility. These ridiculous accusations were believed because Christians heard them from sources they were brought up to trust: their religious authorities, who repeated every Sunday the gospel accusation that ‘the Jews’ had supposedly murdered God. As you might expect, accusations of this nature contributed to create an atmosphere in which Christians grew up in literal terror of Jews, and in consequence there were mass killings of Jews throughout the Middle Ages. In the 14th century, for example, when the Black Plague hit Europe, killing about a fourth or more of its population, the Europeans were easily led to believe that the Jews, acting as an international conspiracy, had simultaneously poisoned all the wells in the continent. Never mind that in Norway, where half of the population died of the Plague, there were no Jews because they were forbidden by law: nobody paid any attention to the disconfirming evidence because trusted sources of authority had already declared the supposed truth, which in any case fit perfectly with the supposedly satanic nature of Judaism. The Jews were exterminated in Germany and the low countries in the mass hysteria that resulted from the Plague, when Christians, acting like cannibals, slaughtered their fellow human beings thinking that they were acting...in ‘self defense.’

Before World War II a fraudulent document by the name Protocols of the Elders of Zion, created by the Russian secret police (the Okhrana) as an attempt to defeat the growth of opposition to the Zar’s repressive and unequal regime, accused the Jews of being an international conspiracy that in secret controlled all the workers movements, all the big capitalist concerns, all the media, all the banks, and all of the Western governments, including the government of the United States. (In other words, everything.) With this near-total clandestine international power, the Jews were planning to destroy…‘Christian Civilization.’ These accusations were instrumental in producing mass killings of Jews in the Russian pogroms of the early twentieth century, but they didn’t distract the angry workers sufficiently and the Russian Revolution happened anyway (later betrayed by people such as Stalin who re-enslaved the workers and revived antisemitism). These identical accusations later became the backbone of Nazi propaganda, much of it published by Henry Ford, who produced many thousands of copies of The Protocols and shipped them to Germany so that Adolf Hitler, who considered Henry Ford his inspiration and kept a life-size portrait of him in his office, could distribute them in Europe.[8]

Once again, Westerners believed the lies and, once again, they ignored the disconfirming evidence: in 1921 Phillip Graves of the Times (London) demonstrated that The Protocols was a fraud -- a cut and paste job mostly from Maurice Joly’s Dialogues in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, which is a work of fiction having nothing whatever to do with Jews.[9] But it didn’t matter. And once the mass killings began there was more evidence against the accusations: the Jews obviously controlled nothing because no country would receive them as refugees, including Britain and the United States, and to a close approximation everybody was cooperating with the murderers, or else keeping silent. Killing these supposedly ultra-powerful Jews turned out to be spectacularly easy. But it didn’t matter: nobody drew the obvious lesson. Once again, Westerners exterminated the Jews in a hysteria of ‘self-defense.’

It is happening again. These days everybody believes that the old bogeyman of Western imagination, ‘the Jews,’ controls the policy of the greatest power on earth and in history: the United States government. The polite way to say this is that “US foreign policy is staunchly pro-Israel.” This is once again an attack on the Jews because the overwhelming majority of people on this planet have a very negative perception of US foreign policy; many feel directly attacked by it and most of the rest think it is a tremendous threat to world peace. If the Jews are behind all this, well, they must be once again trying to destroy us all. What will we do in self defense? We will kill the Jews again. Why not? After all, we have once again fallen prey to the same lies that made us kill Jews before, and thus to predict a different outcome would hardly be scientific. In any case, the mass killing of Jews is easily the most stable, recurrent process in Western history: it has happened in the ancient world of the Greek and Roman empires, in the feudal world of the Middle Ages, and in the modern world. So the mass killing of Jews survives all kinds of political and cultural transformations in the West, and in consequence there is one almost every century. One hardly needs a rocket scientist here: the Jews will be killed again.

This coming genocide will happen very soon, now, for it is quite evident that the good people of this world are asleep or else stopping their ears, like they did in the prelude to World War II. I must include here almost the entire Jewish population, which is stopping its ears in order not to face the dreadful reality, like they also stopped their ears before World War II. This means that, like a looped rerun that will necessarily always produce the same tragic story, ordinary Jews will once again passively cooperate with their executioners (the cooperation of many Jewish leaders, by contrast, is active, not passive [10]).

Those actually dripping their hands in Jewish blood will be the terrorist soldiers of the Muslim world, but behind these forces, as I have explained, is the power of the US government. This should have become obvious, for example, from the famous 1980s Iran-Contra scandal, when the US government was found to be illegally and secretly sending billions of dollars in armaments, each year, to the antisemitic and terrorist regime of Iran, while telling the US citizens whose money it had stolen in order to arm these terrorists that it supposedly opposed Iran. This is the same Iran whose president now says in public that he means to exterminate the Jews, and which now has a land corridor connecting it with the northern border of Israel thanks to the US invasion of Iraq, because the US invasion has given Iraq to Iran, and Iran already controls Syria and Lebanon (and Hezbollah).[11]

As before, the cause of this coming genocide will be lies, tremendous lies. Just as the Jews did not steal Christian children to crucify and eat them, and just as they didn’t poison the wells of Europe, and just as they didn’t murder God, the most oppressed people in history, naturally, also does not control history’s greatest political and military power. (Such a hypothesis would contradict the entire experience of Western history, in which Jews have always been oppressed and routinely slaughtered, as they indeed still are). But in any case the hypothesis that ‘the Jews’ control US foreign policy is roundly refuted by the evidence: it was because of US pressure -- specifically from Bush Sr.’s administration, in 1991 -- that the Jewish state ended up accepting the PLO inside its borders.[12] It was because of US pressure that the PLO -- a tentacle of the Nazi Final Solution reaching into the future to finish the job with a final snap[11a] -- became the government over most of the Arabs that live in the Jewish state. (In the past twelve years, this population has been trained for an ecstatic slaughter that will produce an overflow of virgins in heaven.) And the US forced the PLO on Israel, mind you, despite the fact that, at the time, the PLO was already a defeated organization, languishing in Tunisian exile.

This is just one example in the long list of US attacks against Israel (though it’s a dramatic one). For the full list:
http://www.hirhome.com/israel/hirally.htm

___________________________________________________________

3) Q. The US practically always votes against UN-resolutions condemning Israel and financial support from the US to Israel amounts to something like $3 billion a year. Doesn’t this prove that US foreign policy favors Israel?

A. The answer is no. I will explain why by first putting the structure of Israel’s geopolitical situation in personal terms, so that we can reason about it without the cloud of propaganda that would otherwise surround it.

Imagine the following scenario. This guy Sam is the local gangster and he is terribly powerful. He hurts a lot of people. But you are not worried because he always says very loudly that you are his best friend, and he puts his arm warmly around you and slaps you on the back a lot. “You can count on me for anything,” he tells you, and the display of emotion is histrionic. You and Sam both know that this other guy, Hamid, wants to kill you. So Sam gives you a gun -- a revolver. “For protection,” he explains, and he winks fondly at you. But later, Sam goes over to Hamid and gives him a bazooka.

Is Sam your friend? On the contrary. The fact that Sam gave you a gun and promised friendship has you off your guard, which makes things easier for Hamid, who now aims his bazooka at your house, ready to blow up your entire family. You’ll be caught napping, confident that all is well because big gangster Sam is supposedly your friend. In this context, naturally, Sam giving you a gun does not prove that he favors you; what it proves is that he really wants you dead, because he is trying to make you feel safe when you aren’t.

Now, it is true that the US -- Uncle Sam -- sends around 3 billion a year to the state of Israel. However, other things are also true, and they will round our understanding of the context.

First, Egypt gets almost 2 billion dollars a year from the United States, and more than half of that is officially so that Egypt can buy US weapons. Unofficially, however, Egypt probably spends it all on weapons. At least this is what I gather from the fact that when Representative Tom Lantos tried to introduce a bill in the US Congress forcing Egypt to spend some of its US money on the impoverished Egyptians, the entire Bush administration mobilized quickly to defeat it.[13] Obviously, the US government wants Egypt armed to the teeth. What for? Look at the map: Egypt is threatened by nobody. And as Rep. Tom Lantos explained, Egypt does not assist the US in its military adventures. Given that there is only one country that Egypt means to harm, Israel, the universe of possible hypotheses to explain the US arming of Egypt is narrowing. Among the valid hypotheses, I would argue, including the hypothesis that says “because the US favors Israel” is absurd. Oh yes, they will tell you that these weapons are Egypt’s reward for signing a ‘peace’ treaty with Israel, but why couldn’t the reward be economic aid? The Bush administration, in the Lantos episode, already demonstrated it hates the idea of giving aid to ordinary Egyptians. And, in any case, a peace treaty is a piece of paper. What matters, naturally, is what the Egyptian government does, not what it says. Egyptian government media constantly spew antisemitism and anti-Israeli invective, and weapons that kill Israelis are constantly smuggled to the ‘Palestinian’ antisemitic terrorists under the Egyptian border. This country that the US arms to the teeth is not at peace with Israel.

Alas! We have considered just one enemy of Israel and already the US ‘aid’ to Israel would appear to have been wiped out.

Let us consider a second enemy: Saudi Arabia. It turns out that, starting with Jimmy Carter, the US began a secret program to arm this state that makes Saudi Arabia “ultimately...the largest beneficiary of U.S. weapons sales in the entire world [and] one of the most heavily armed countries in the world.”[14] In other words, Israel is not the country getting the most weapons from the US -- that title goes to Israel’s mortal enemy Saudi Arabia.

Shall we consider a third enemy? Iran. HIR has been careful to document the pattern of US foreign policy towards Iran since the early 1980s, when the US began arming Iran in secret during the Iran-Iraq war. When the US government got caught red-handed this was called the Iran-Contra scandal (because the US was also arming the Contra terrorists in Central America).[15] We have shown that US policy has been consistently pro-Iranian, despite the fact that in public the US loudly claims enmity (as it did during the Iran-Iraq war).[16] US policy continues to be pro-Iranian. Everybody now agrees that the stated reasons for attacking Iraq were probably not the real ones, and everybody also agrees that Iraq is now, for practical purposes, controlled by Iran.[17] So perhaps giving Iraq to Iran was the real reason for the invasion. That would certainly make sense if the greatest power in history probably usually gets what it wants, which I think is the most reasonable starting hypothesis, and it would also be consistent with the entire history of US foreign policy in the region, which has always been to favor Iran (despite public claims to the contrary). Ignore, then, all the noise about how badly the US ‘blundered’ in Iraq: it’s propaganda, like so much that is endlessly repeated in the media, such as the claim that the US favors Israel. Which reminds me: since Iran already controlled both Syria and Lebanon, it now has, thanks to the US invasion of Iraq, a land corridor going all the way to the northern border of Israel.

So this country, whose president says out loud that the Israeli Jews should be exterminated, will soon be in a position to attempt this crime -- thanks to US policy. It won't need nuclear weapons: it can now easily launch a conventional attack.

How about a fourth enemy? The PLO. As mentioned earlier, the PLO has gotten a lot of help from the US government. Not only did the US government obtain the diplomatic result of an invitation into Israel from the Jewish state (by threatening this Jewish state), but US Intelligence has also trained the PLO terrorists, to give just two dramatic examples.[18]

This could go on for a while so I will consider just one more enemy of Israel: Hezbollah. As HIR has shown, the US government has been very nice to Hezbollah, intervening to sabotage Israeli defense every time the Israeli government decides to do something about the Hezbollah murders of innocent people. This is true of the recent war, and has been true also in the past.[19]

I think the point is clear, even if Israel gets some aid from the United States, what matters is this: What is the net effect of US foreign policy on the probabilities of survival of the Jewish state? The answer, obviously, is that US foreign policy greatly increases the probability of an anti-Jewish genocide in Israel.

What about the votes in the UN? Well, even assuming every single US vote in the United Nations had gone Israel’s way, it would not outweigh the above, so one could argue that this is another way of duping the Israelis into thinking that the US government is a friend. And one could argue that this is part of the strategy to paint the US as controlled by Israel, which then gets everybody to hate Israel without really helping the Jewish state, because the US votes in favor of Israel at the UN don’t help Israel that much in the material plane when all is said and done.

But when you examine carefully the US’s behavior at the United Nations, it does not look pro-Israel at all.

Although the US sometimes votes in favor of Israel, sometimes it does not. And sometimes it reverses its votes in favor, as happened in the case of Israel’s destruction of an Iraqi nuclear facility. This case is full of lessons.

First, Israel destroyed the Iraqi reactor on the grounds that, since Iraq was a practically neighboring state that promised in public to destroy Israel, the Jewish state could not allow Iraq to develop nuclear weapons (not too different from the reasons the US advanced for attacking Iraq, though in this case it cannot be argued that Iraq threatened the US, even under the assumption that Iraq did have lots of Weapons of Mass Destruction). At the UN, the United States at first supported the Israeli attack.[20] Immediately after this, however, the US voted at the UN to declare the Israeli annexation of the Golan Heights null and void.[21] (And this, despite the fact that a US government study had determined that the Golan Heights were indispensable to prevent the destruction of the Jewish state.[22]) And just a little later, the US reversed its earlier vote on the Iraqi reactor and condemned the Israeli attack.

The outgoing Secretary General of the UN, Kurt Waldheim, who we all know these days was one of the biggest Nazi war criminals[22a], praised the US for both votes against Israel.[23] It was the US that had lobbied for Waldheim to get the top job at the UN, with George Bush Sr. telling the public that Mr. Waldheim was “ideally equipped” to be Secretary General of the UN (US Intelligence, naturally, always knew who Waldheim was, and soon George Bush Sr. would become the head of US Intelligence).[24] The US government pushed to have Waldheim reelected and they even pressed for a third term (this was blocked by China, so he served two terms).[25] While in office, this Nazi Kurt Waldheim did lots of anti-Israel diplomacy, including extending an invitation to the antisemitic terrorist Yasser Arafat (whose organization, Al Fatah, was created by the top Nazi war criminal Hajj Amin al Husseini [25a]) to give a speech to the UN General Assembly in 1974.[26] This greatly raised the prestige of the PLO. A year later Waldheim presided over the UN vote that equated Zionism -- the effort to create and preserve a state where the Jews can live free of the threat of extermination -- as racism. Yes, the US voted against that resolution, but remember: the UN Secretary General presiding over this vote, the Nazi war criminal Kurt Waldheim, was the US’s candidate, and the US vote against did not exactly help Israel when weighed against the fact that the vote was held in the first place.

The Nazi Kurt Waldheim also gave the PLO permanent observer status at the UN![26a]

So is the US’s behavior at the UN clearly pro-Israel? Hardly. A case can easily be made for the precise opposite. But, once again, the loud repetition of the US’s pro-Israeli UN votes convinces everybody that the US government has a pro-Israeli policy. Repetition is key.

___________________________________________________________

4) Q. Even though the US might have pressured Israel into accepting a PLO-state in the West Bank and Gaza, the situation seems to have changed considerably since Hamas became the most powerful political movement among the Palestinians. The US seems to work against the Hamas government and are urging other governments to follow its lead in boycotting Hamas. Is this a deceit? What is the real US policy on Hamas?

A. Before the elections that brought Hamas to power, the Financial Times reported that

“Israel has denounced the participation of an organisation that refuses to turn in its weapons but Washington, while also regarding Hamas as a terrorist organisation, is more ambivalent. …Condoleezza Rice, US secretary of state, recently said that Hamas must ultimately be disarmed. However, drawing a parallel with the Northern Ireland peace process and the eventual disarming of the Irish Republican Army, she said: ‘There are periods of time of transition in which one has to give some space to the participants . . . to begin to come to a new national compact.”[27]

The US exerted pressure so that Hamas would be allowed to participate in the elections. Do I think that the current anti-Hamas noises from the US are a deceit? Yes, I do. For a long time the US government and the world media have sold us the PLO/Hamas ‘good cop/bad cop’ routine. The PLO, which is essentially Al Fatah, an organization created by a leader of Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution[25a], and responsible for the lion’s share of terrorism (in other words, more than Hamas) is supposed to be the good cop! The US ruling elite is just doing what it has done all this time, representing Hamas as the ‘extremists’ so that we will accept the PLO as the ‘moderates.’ But this is theater. Both organizations are terrorist and both seek to exterminate the Jewish people.

___________________________________________________________

5) Q. One frequently sees reports about the American ‘Jewish Lobby’ and how they manage to get their way with US foreign policy makers. Are these reports part of an attempt to make use of the traditional antisemitic myths about the hidden powers of a Jewish conspiracy? Are American Jews not really that powerful? Or is it that the most powerful American Jews share the agenda of the foreign policy elites?

A. The claim that the ‘Jewish Lobby’ controls US foreign policy and makes this policy pro-Israel cannot be true given that US policy is not pro-Israel.[27a] Therefore, the repeated accusations that the so-called Jewish Lobby controls US foreign policy (which recently have reached a fever pitch [27b]) are just more of the same: it's the old accusation that ‘the Jews’ in secret control everything to hurt us, which has been the engine of antisemitic slaughters throughout Western history.[27c]

But the lies are bigger than you might think, because, as HIR has shown, the organizations that together comprise the so-called Jewish Lobby do not, in fact, even lobby for pro-Israel policies, let alone achieve them. They have lobbied in favor of the PLO.[28]

Concerning many prominent people who identify themselves as ‘Jews’ and who help direct US foreign policy, since this foreign policy is anti-Israel, they would indeed appear “to share the agenda of the foreign policy elites,” and their behavior is perfectly consistent with the prominent people who also identify themselves as ‘Jews’ and who direct the organizations of the ‘Jewish Lobby.’ HIR has a piece analyzing the behaviors of prominent ‘Jews’ in the US government, and we show that one cannot distinguish their behavior from that of antisemites.[29]

I should point out that this is a pattern that we saw already in WWII, when prominent leaders of the American Jewish community, and people claiming a Jewish identity in high positions of the US government, by and large sabotaged the efforts to rescue the European Jews even though everybody knew already that this population was being exterminated.[30]

And the pattern is repeated in Israel, because the Israeli ruling elite, astonishingly but unambiguously, attacks the Jewish state that they are supposed to be leading.[30a]

___________________________________________________________

6) Q. The Norwegian historian Hilde Henriksen Waage recently wrote a report on the Norwegian role in the ‘Oslo peace process,’ claiming that the Norwegians were heavily biased against the Palestinians and the PLO and in favor of Israel. Do you agree? What was the real Norwegian role in the ‘peace process’?

A. When the secret Oslo negotiations began, the PLO was (as it still is) a terrorist organization. The PLO was (as it still is) an antisemitic organization. Its constitution called (as it still does) for the extermination of the Jewish people. Most importantly, however, at the time the PLO was a defeated organization, in exile, in Tunis.

Norwegian diplomats created a process to give territory inside the Jewish state to a defeated antisemitic terrorist organization, thus reviving it, in exchange for a total absurdity: the PLO, which from far away was having great difficulty killing innocent Israelis, would promise that once revived and brought close to its Jewish targets, and moreover given an entire Arab population to indoctrinate, it would stop killing Jews! Is this production supposed to demonstrate that the Norwegian diplomats, who put it on, had a bias in favor of Israel?

If Norwegian negotiators created a process to give Texas to Al Qaeda in return for a promise not to murder any more innocent Americans, I think it would make little sense to accuse the Norwegian negotiators of having a bias in favor of Americans.

But the Norwegian diplomats are consistent. They have been hard at work creating a ‘peace’ process that will reward the ETA, the Basque terrorist movement, and they have already done much diplomacy to assist the terrorist Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka.

The role of Norwegian diplomats, as we have argued, is to appear to the world as representing a ‘neutral’ country. But Norway is not neutral: it is a NATO member, and the big fish in NATO is the United States. The appearance, however, is effective, and through Norway’s ‘peace-keeping’ diplomacy the NATO foreign policy elite (i.e. primarily the US ruling elite) achieves many of its ends. At HIR we have documented how Norwegian diplomats assisted the deployment of the terrorist KLA by the US and its NATO allies in order to destroy Yugoslavia.[31]

___________________________________________________________

7) Q. In Norway most researchers and professors who work with the Middle East tend to criticize Israel heavily, and I have the impression that the same thing is true about most of the ‘Western world.’ Why do you think this is?

A. For more than 2000 years, the intellectual classes in the West have attacked the Jews with ferocity. If the intellectual classes are attacking the Jews now, one attractive hypothesis is that this is just more of the same old antisemitism.

The facts of the Middle East, after all, are not difficult to document. I myself did not start out as a student of the Arab-Israeli conflict, but when I started looking into it I quickly documented that many widely believed accusations against the Israelis were not true. I did not have a pro-Israeli bias but the opposite: I started out as a defender of the PLO, because I was listening to the “researchers and professors” you mention. But I found the allegations against the Israelis to be untrue, and I found also that those making these false allegations knew them to be false. Upon becoming a student of the Arab-Israeli conflict I found:

1) that the PLO was not a national liberation movement, but an antisemitic terrorist organization with its roots in Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution;[32]

2) that the ‘Palestinian people’ had never existed and in fact the PLO itself has denied the existence of the ‘Palestinian people’![33];

3) that the Zionist movement did not take land by force from anyone, but instead bought it from those who had title and freely wanted to sell[34];

4) that the ‘Palestinian refugee problem’ was a consequence of Arab, not Israeli policies.[35]

5) that the Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza were politically freer and economically better off before the PLO was brought over to be the government over them.[36]

among other things.

My experience at Penn, which led to my firing, also demonstrated that the so-called ‘experts’ on the Middle East understood all this, because nobody pointed out any errors in my work and in fact they declared my documentation “impeccable.” They just wanted me to stop.

This is consistent with the obvious hypothesis: that if antisemitism has been the main reason for intellectuals to attack the Jews in over 2000 years, it is still the reason they are attacking them today. In the cases of those intellectuals who pose as ‘experts’ in the Middle East, we are talking about simple dishonesty, because the facts are not difficult to establish, and yet they deny them. In the case of intellectuals in other areas, who likewise feel no compunction about attacking the Jews (many will be careful to say that they merely oppose the policies of the Israeli state, but this is a cover), it is a combination of antisemitism and ignorance.

I think it is important to distinguish between cultural and ideological antisemitism. Cultural antisemitism affects almost all of us (including perhaps a majority of Jews), because the Western ruling classes have produced antisemitic propaganda for over 2000 years, so it is difficult not to inherit antisemitic prejudices growing up, which then make us susceptible to believe slanders against the Jews. But the ideological antisemite is someone for whom it is really very important, as a personal matter, to attack the Jews. Although ideological antisemitism is quite intractable, cultural antisemitism can be fought with the truth. When I found out that the accusations against the Jews were lies, and that the defense of the PLO was equally based on lies, I changed my mind and stopped supporting the PLO. Why? Because I was not an ideological antisemite. Others would change their minds too if they had access to the truth. But the world media is a difficult thing to fight.[36a]

___________________________________________________________

8) Q. What is your analysis of this summer’s war between Israel and Hezbollah and the current Hezbollah attempt to overthrow the Lebanese government?

A. I have produced a series of articles analyzing this war.[37] I think the war was launched prematurely by Hezbollah, and the initial Arab reaction to this attack is consistent with that view. Ideally, for the forces that wish to destroy the Jewish state, an all out attack will begin when the Golan Heights are in Syria’s possession, and the West Bank, like the Gaza strip, is firmly in the hands of the ‘Palestinian’ terrorists (if Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, gets his way, this will all happen very soon). This way the Israelis can be attacked from all sides at once -- by Egypt and the PLO/Hamas in the south, by Saudi Arabia, Jordan and PLO/Hamas in the West, and by the Iranians, Syrians, Lebanese, and Hezbollah in the North. Also, the terrorists will be attacking from strategic ground that they, rather than Israel, will control. The Israelis will be defending with their backs against the sea, in the tiniest bit of lowland, while their enemies shoot from the hills. After flushing into the state of Israel many of the Jews who survived the European extermination of WWII, and after the war of 1947-48 a great many of the Jews who lived in the Arab world, the Jewish state, always a ghetto, is being forced to give up more and more territory, and is finally being tranformed from the concentration camp it has now become into a death camp. It is the Nazi policy on a different scale.

In 1974 Yasser Arafat promulgated his ‘Plan of Phases,’ which called for promising ‘peace’ to Israel in return for an invitation into the Jewish state, from which position the PLO would then launch its war of extermination.[38] Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), the current leader of the PLO, explained in 1979 that the way to destroy Israel would be to fragment Israeli society. If the Israelis could be made to fight each other, they could be destroyed. How to achieve this? According to Abbas, “it was necessary to bring the Israelis down from their tanks to the ground and cause them a sense of security and peace, to allow their social maladies [i.e. their internal divisions] to appear and to prevent their unification in the face of a[n external] danger.”[39] The Oslo process achieved all this. The Israelis are losing territory, they are terribly divided, and it appears they have lost their will to fight. All that remains is for the Israeli government to give Syria the Golan Heights and to cleanse the Jews from Judea and Samaria (West Bank) as it did in the Gaza Strip. But we are not quite there yet: Hezbollah (and Hamas) jumped the gun -- it was not yet time, and the initial Arab reaction makes this perfectly clear.[40]

In the war against Hezbollah, under US pressure, as it has done repeatedly in the past, the Israeli government brought Israeli defense to a full stop. It then allowed international troops to come and protect Hezbollah’s rearmament. And these international troops are quite serious about protecting the Hezbollah terrorists. This was reported on 18 November:

“United Nations antiaircraft batteries in southern Lebanon took ‘preparatory steps’ to fire at Israeli warplanes after they violated a cease-fire by repeatedly flying overhead, United Nations officials said. They flew over United Nations positions 14 times, 11 of those over positions staffed by French troops, the officials said. Maj. Gen. Alain Pellegrini, commander of the United Nations forces in Lebanon, issued a protest to Israeli authorities. Israel says the flights are for reconnaissance. On Oct. 31, French peacekeepers came close to firing at Israeli jets when they flew overhead, and Paris issued an official complaint.”[41]

In sum, I believe this summer’s war, though it may have delayed a bit the Final Solution that is coming, for having been a premature attack, will not change the eventual outcome, and in many ways has been a disaster for the Israelis. The fact that the Israelis did not force the government to resign after its dismal performance is quite worrisome.

___________________________________________________________

9) Q. Why would the US want Iranian dominance in the Middle East? And what proof do you have to support the claim that this is actually a goal for US policymakers?

A. Let’s start with the evidence, and then move to the motivations. HIR has a piece that summarizes the entire history of US foreign policy toward Iran in order to put the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq in its proper geopolitical context, and I will briefly repeat that summary here below.[42]

Before 1979 the US had a policy to support the repressive, unequal, and totalitarian regime of the Shah Reza Pahlavi. Most people believe that ever since 1979, when the Islamist regime replaced the Shah, the US government has been an enemy of the new Iranian government. However, the facts suggest otherwise.

Immediately after the Ayatollah Khomeini succeeded in his coup d’état against the Iranian Revolution (which had not been primarily Islamist), he provoked a war against Iraq. The Iranian military had been depleted in the revolutionary struggles and it was almost entirely US-made, so Khomeini could not afford to provoke a war with Iraq unless he knew he was going to be supplied by the US. And he was. Though Khomeini and the Reagan administration exchanged dramatic insults in public, throughout the Iran-Iraq war the Reagan administration secretly supplied the Iranians with billions of dollars in US weapons and spare parts every year. When caught -- this was called 'the Iran-Contra scandal' because the US was simultaneously arming the Contra terrorists in Central America) -- the Reagan administration explained that it had been trying to get on Iran’s good side in order to beg for Iranian influence on the Hezbollah terrorists who had taken some US citizens hostage in Lebanon. But this absurd explanation could not be true even in principle because the arms shipments began in 1981, as a Congressional investigation subsequently showed, and the first hostage in Lebanon was taken in 1982.

When the war ended badly for the Iranians in the 1988 ceasefire, Zalmay Khalilzad, a big power, fretted out loud that year, and then again in 1989, that it was very bad for Iran to be weak relative to Iraq, and called for “strengthening Iran and containing Iraq.” The next year, in 1990, Khalilzad became assistant under secretary of defense for policy planning, and the year after that, 1991, we had the Gulf War. This war destroyed Iraq and thereafter the United States followed a policy of containing Iraq, which in turn strengthened Iraq’s rival Iran, precisely as Khalilzad had recommended.

During the 1990s the US Pentagon teamed up with the Iranian government to import tens of thousands of mujahedin ‘holy warriors’ into Bosnia, so they would help out Alija Izetbegovic’s other Muslim terrorists in the slaughter of innocent Serbs.

Recently, Iran helped out in the initial stages of the invasion of Iraq.

The greatest beneficiary of the US invasion of Iraq (which everybody now agrees was probably not launched for the stated reasons) is...Iran. As the Guardian said, explaining the obvious:

“Iran is the true winner of that war. They only had to sit tight and smile as the West delivered on a golden plate all the influence Iran had always sought in the Middle East. The US and its allies will soon be gone from Afghanistan and Iraq, leaving Iranian-backed Shias dominant in both countries, their influence well spread across Syria, a chunk of Saudi Arabia and other countries for decades to come. Historic Iranian ambitions have been fulfilled without firing a shot while the US is reduced to fist-shaking. How foolish was that?”[43]

Foolish? That is one hypothesis. Another is that this is what the US ruling elite wants. This latter hypothesis would be consistent with everything I summarize above, and with the reasonable assumption that the greatest power in history probably usually gets what it wants. It is consistent also with the fact that the US has not really tried to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons, despite the noise about it, and will obviously not attack Iran (something HIR predicted back in February 2006 when everybody was saying an attack against Iran was imminent[44]). It is also consistent with how the Congressional Iraq Study Group has now made an official recommendation that the US ask the Iranians to stabilize Iraq![45] Although the Bush administration has made a show of reacting negatively to this recommendation, I believe this is theater: the public fact of the recommendation is making the idea imaginable, preparing the ground for when it will seem inevitable.

As pointed out earlier, Iran already controls Syria, Lebanon, and Hezbollah, so control of Iraq gives it a land corridor all the way to the northern border of Israel:

The true policy aims of a government, in my view, have to be inferred from that government’s behaviors, not its public statements, because we all know that government officials will say the opposite of what they are doing if it suits their purposes (it’s called ‘diplomacy’ and also ‘propaganda’). During the Iran-Iraq war, the entire Reagan administration said they preferred an Iraqi victory and that they were bitter enemies of Iran, all the while stealing the US taxpayer’s money to arm to the teeth an Iranian regime that slaughtered its own children in ‘human wave’ attacks that launched thousands of youngsters against Iraqi tanks, and that wishes to exterminate the Jews. Actions speak louder than words. So it is best, when producing a political analysis, to leave aside what government officials say they are doing (unless one is making an analysis of propaganda). US officials say they support Israel, but recent US policy has made it much easier for Iran to attack Israel.

Now, why does the US ruling elite want Iranian dominance in the Middle East?

In my view, because the US ruling elite that determines US foreign policy is not like ordinary Americans -- it has a quite different ideology. This is of course why the US government has to lie to its citizens about what it does: they would not approve.

What is the ideology of the US ruling elite? I think this was made dramatically clear by historian Christopher Simpson’s investigation, published in 1988.[46] Simpson showed, with a trickle of partially declassified documents belatedly obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (and which reveal but the tip of the iceberg), that almost the entire Nazi war criminal infrastructure had been absorbed by the US government, in secret, after the Second World War, creating US Intelligence with this personnel. When Simpson’s book was released, the Washington Post wrote:

“It is no longer necessary -- or possible -- to deny the fact: the U.S. government systematically and deliberately recruited active Nazis by the thousands, rescued them, hired them and relied upon them to serve American interests and purposes in postwar Europe.”[47]

Actually, it was tens of thousands of Nazis, and these Nazis became US Intelligence (the CIA and the rest of the intelligence alphabet soup).

The Toronto Star added:

“Many East European Nazi collaborators, leaders of fascist groups and governments in Eastern Europe, and leaders of pro-fascist East European émigré organizations soon became politically active in the States [because they were brought to the US in secret by the CIA and given new identities] ...and gained remarkable access to the most powerful intelligence chiefs, politicians, business associations and media moguls in America.”[47a]

This is indeed documented in Simpson's book.

The Washington Post and the New York Times tried to apologize for all this, rather than denouncing it as a truly free press should have done. Soon after this, all mention of Simpson’s book in the media died completely, and the book has been taken out of circulation.

Now, since it is US Intelligence that determines US foreign policy, and since it is a nest of Nazis, should we be surprised that US policy has been making it easier and easier for Iran, which denies the Holocaust while loudly calling for another one, to attack the Jewish state?

But perhaps we should be surprised that the US ruling elite absorbed all those Nazis after the war? Not according to the recent investigations of historian Edwin Black, who in War against the weak: Eugenics and America's campaign to create a master race, published in 2003, showed that the dominant ideology in the US ruling class, in the first half of the 20th century, was eugenics.[48] The eugenics movement preached the biological superiority of Germanic stock, and the natural right of ‘Germans’ to rule everybody else. This ideology was popular in the Western ruling classes because they could claim to be of Germanic stock (‘Arians’), as it was German tribes that conquered all of Europe when the political structure of the Roman Empire collapsed, with the result that these Germans became the aristocracies all over Western Europe (Visigoths in Spain, Ostrogoths in Lombardy, Franks in France, the Low Countries, and Germany, Anglo-Saxons and then also Normans in Britain, and hence also in the United States, and the Scandinavian tribes in the north -- all Germanic). The same eugenics ideology preached the extermination of the ‘mentally retarded,’ who would be identified employing the ‘IQ’ tests that these same eugenicists invented (with a series of frauds and cultural biases meant to ensure that the ‘Arians’ -- which is to say, the upper classes -- would come out ‘smartest’). Hundreds of thousands of humble and innocent US citizens were forcibly sterilized or incarcerated in the first half of the 20th century, by the US government, because the eugenicists were largely in control of it. The eugenics movement was bankrolled by the great fortunes of the American robber barons, people such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, who launched the eugenics movement to attack the working classes who were trying to end what the journalists of the day called "industrial feudalism" only to find themselves attacked, militarily, by the hired guns of Carnegie, Rockefeller, et al. These robber barons also spent their money taking over government institutions, and used them to grow the eugenics movement all over the world, but spending especially large fortunes growing it in Germany. They handed over the reins of the movement to Adolf Hitler after they had educated him, and precisely at the moment when the Nazi Party was roaring on its way to victory thanks to disastrous economic conditions in Germany that the Western powers had been careful to create.

HIR has published a book that traces much of the history of the eugenics movement down to the present day, paying special attention to the IQ fraud and its consequences, which are still pervasive all over US society, where they have been used in the second half of the 20th century to attack blacks, especially.[49]

To conclude, then, the absorption by the US ruling elite of the most successful eugenics movement -- the Nazi war criminal infrastructure -- after the World War is perfectly consistent with the ideology of the US ruling class before the war, and, as HIR has shown, with the behavior of the US ruling elite during the war, because the US government cooperated with the Final Solution, denying refuge to the desperate European Jews, refusing to bomb the death camps or the railroads leading to the death camps, and refusing until the last minute -- and only because ordinary Americans exerted heavy pressure -- to do anything about rescuing any Jews.[50] Thus, we should not be surprised if US foreign policy since the war, determined as it is by government institutions that supported the attack against the Jews and then absorbed the criminals directly responsible for this, turns out to be anti-Jewish.

In my experience, whoever learns this will raise the question: But why is the US ruling elite against the Jews, in particular? And you yourself have asked me:

___________________________________________________________

10) Q. Why do US policymakers want to destroy Israel?

A. This is a question that people don’t ask about the Nazis, because the Nazis were supposed to be crazy, whereas the US ruling elite is supposed to be rational. I think they are all rational. Hatred of Jews in the Western ruling classes is more than 2000 years old, because the ideology of the ancient Greco-Roman ruling classes, who first persecuted the Jews, has continued to be quite common, for our entire history, among the elite in power. This ideology opposes Jewish law because Jewish law is the source of progressive ideas in the West, so those who would oppress the Western working classes must get rid of the Jews and their ideology of liberty and equality.

When the Greco-Romans were enslaving pretty much the entire Mediterranean, brutalizing the common people with cruelty that was not seen again until the Nazi party took over Germany, the Jews were preaching freedom, equality, and brotherly tolerance of one’s neighbors. Why? Because that is what the Law of Moses, contained in the books Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy preaches. By law, a Jew can only become a slave voluntarily, to pay a debt, and he can be a slave no more than 6 years. On the seventh year, he must be set free and given a little something for his service. While he is indentured, a Jewish ‘slave’ cannot be mistreated in any way: any evidence of physical mistreatment will set him automatically free. And he can’t even be yelled at, because if he doesn’t like the way he is treated and takes refuge in somebody else’s house, that person, by law, may not return him. If a master kills his slave he risks the death penalty, and if he makes a slave by force he gets the death penalty for sure. Naturally, the slave must rest, like his master, on the Sabbath (these are just a few examples of the compassion and social justice that Jewish law demands).[51] So these were employees, not really slaves, and carefully protected by law.

In the ancient Mediterranean, where Greco-Roman fascism was making the lives of everybody miserable, subjecting even those not officially recognized among the great multitudes of formal ‘slaves’ into a kind of slavery, the Jews were treating even the formal ‘slaves’ like protected employees, and defending a constitution that was a political revolution. In consequence, great multitudes of pagans converted to Judaism. The Jews became about 10% of the Roman Empire in the lower estimate of modern historians, and there was an even bigger chunk of the pagans who did not convert yet but were heavily influenced by the Jews and allied with them, making the Jewish pressure movement something like a fourth or a third of the Roman Empire. In reaction to this threat, the repressive Greco-Roman aristocracy used its large mercenary forces to attack the Jews with ferocity and produced a genocide of the Jewish people in the first and second centuries that was not inferior, in relative terms, to what Adolf Hitler did in the 20th. HIR has published a book that explains this history and also the manner in which it has extended its tentacles all the way to the present.[52]

We are about to see another great genocide of the Jewish people because that is what the Western ruling elites do in order to oppress us all. Which means this: if they succeed, and they kill millions of Jews again, we are next. This will repeat the pattern of World War II except that I fear this time we will not recover, because Islamist terrorism is growing fast and this ideology is hard to distinguish from that of the German Nazis, preaching as it does the extermination or slavery of infidels. The way to defend the West -- now as always -- is to band together in defense of the Jews, but Westerners seem unable to outgrow the millenarian propaganda that has polluted their minds, produced by the Western ruling classes that are sponsoring the growth of Islamist terrorism. The liberties and protections Western workers have won in the last two centuries will be permanently lost if this process is not quickly reversed. I hope I am wrong about all this, and especially in my prediction that there will be another anti-Jewish genocide, but HIR's predictions are not often wrong. Of course, making the prediction public is a way of hurting its chances of being correct, because it may cause people to react in time. This is my fervent goal.