Category: Behind the News

From New Dawn Special Issue Vol 17 No 2 (Apr 2023)

More than a decade ago, the US drug giant Pfizer was described as a “habitual offender” by the journal, Healthcare Policy. Between 2002 and 2009, the company had forked out $3 billion in civil and criminal penalties.

But Pfizer is far from being the only one. At the end of 2019, the Australian Department of Health and Aged Care’s Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) fined the UK-based multinational, Mundipharma, more than $300,000 for 24 infringements over the company’s relations with medical professionals in its efforts to promote opioids, which were marketed as TARGIN. “[A]dvertising to health professionals was misleading, imbalanced and otherwise inaccurate,” says the TGA. It was “in breach of the requirements of the Medicines Australia Code of Conduct regarding promotional materials directed to health professionals.” According to TGA guidelines, opioids should not be advertised as a core element of managing non-cancer pain, yet the company’s promotional material did exactly that.

Pharmaceutical giants have a long history of criminal behaviour, some of which involve killing people by selling dangerous products for profit, while others involve killing people by raising prices on life-saving medicine and suing for the production of generics. Regulators tend to give companies a financial slap on the wrist and thus enable them to continue their gangster operations while appearing to take public health seriously. Mundipharma generates an annual $2 billion, so a $300k fine is hardly a deterrent.

Smaller pharmaceutical companies, particularly those developing drugs derived from natural substances and not synthetic chemicals, are receiving comparable fines. In September last year, the TGA fined three domestic firms specialising in cannabinoid-based products: Cannatrek, Little Green Pharma, and MGC Pharmaceuticals, which shares its headquarters with Europe. The companies were accused of promoting prescription-only medical cannabis, including products not on the Register of Therapeutic Goods.

Why are regulators going after natural and natural-based producers? ABC Australia reported on the “secretive relationship” between companies and government advisors, which the report said “is enough to make you sick.” But I thought conspiracies were just a theory and you’d be a fool, a weirdo, and even a menace to society to believe and promote them? In 2012, Bond University’s Ray Moynihan said: “The TGA has confirmed to me there is no public disclosure of the financial relationships between drug companies and the professionals who advise Australia’s drug regulator.” In 2017, Dr Wendy Bonython and Associate Professor Bruce Arnold of Canberra University’s Health Research Institute told the Senate that the TGA needed a complete overhaul. They said: “There needs to be a clear break between the regulator and the parties they’re trying to regulate.” In August last year, the BMJ (formerly British Medical Journal) cited professionals who advocated changing the “TGA’s structure and function, arguing that the agency has become too close to industry.”

One could reasonably assume that the New York Times, with all its bias and spin, would at least cover penalties imposed by courts on major drug companies. Yet, from 1970, when Pfizer and others won major court appeals, to the early-2000s when increasing numbers of fines were imposed, the archive contains hardly any information. This suggests that successfully suing drug giants is a relatively new phenomenon. Most of the information contained in this article, therefore, comes from the post-Millennium period. What follows are the top ten global (mostly US-based) pharmaceutical and biotech companies, by market capitalisation, and a sample of their criminal history.

ABBVIE

AbbVie was founded in Chicago in 2013 as a spinoff from Abbott Laboratories. The parent company has a sordid history. The earliest fine I can find dates back to 1975 when the company’s lawyers accepted guilt but entered a no plea in a case where the corporation was fined just $1,000 for adulterating and misbranding intravenous solutions. Since then, Abbott and its subsidiaries have been fined millions of dollars in the US for committing various crimes, including environmental, consumer and labour violations, and false claims and the promotion of unapproved or off-label products.

The fines have become increasingly steep. In 1999, Abbott had to pay $100 million over its production of diagnostic devices that did not meet federal regulations. The biggest was a near-record $1.5 billion in 2012 for illegally marketing the anti-epileptic drug Depakote as a dementia drug.

Abbott’s spin-out, AbbVie, has an even worse record, given its nascence. For instance, in 2016 a company called Teva Pharmaceuticals bought another company called Allergan. In 2020, Allergan was purchased by AbbVie. But Allergan was bogged down in lawsuits relating to its alleged role in America’s opioid crisis. In 2022, AbbVie agreed to clear the lawsuits for Teva to the tune of $2.37 billion so that AbbVie and Teva could agree a deal worth $6.6 billion.

ASTRAZENECA

The Anglo-Swedish firm AstraZeneca is known for its COVID “vaccine” being withdrawn from more than a dozen countries over fears that it causes blood clots. In June 2021, after previously being described by the Australian government as building a “pathway to normal,” it was announced that the government would withdraw the product in favour of Pfizer’s jab.

The company was formed in 1999 when Sweden’s Astra AB merged with Britain’s Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI). Between 1948 and 1960 with intermittent help from Australia, Britain invaded and fought “communists” in Malaya (now Malaysia and Singapore), during which time the military engaged in chemical warfare, spraying defoliant over swathes of jungle in order to identify the hidden enemy and drive villagers into British-run concentration camps. The Colonial Office reckoned that ICI saw it as “a lucrative field for experiment.”

In the 1970s, ICI fabricated toxicology and efficacy reports into its PP796 chemical, an additive to the paraquat pesticide. ICI scientist Jon Heylings described it as “a conspiracy within the company to keep this quiet.” Company documents show that 1980s’ efforts to introduce a diluted and less deadly compound were rejected, as they would “destroy Group profit from paraquat.” In 2010, as AstraZeneca, the company paid $520 million after it “illegally marketed the anti-psychotic drug Seroquel for uses not approved as safe and effective by the [US] Food and Drug Administration.”

BRISTOL-MYERS SQUIBB

BMS was founded in 1989 when Bristol-Myers merged with the Squibb corporation. In 1937, for instance, Bristol-Myers was ordered by the US Federal Trade Commission to stop presenting its hair tonic, Vitalis, as a baldness cure. In 1941, to give another example, E.R. Squibb and other companies were accused by the US Department of Justice of fixing insulin prices.

But they did much worse. In the 1940s, Bristol Laboratories, the Squibb Institute, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Johns Hopkins University tested their new penicillin products on Guatemalans: over 400 of whom were deliberately infected with syphilis without their knowledge or consent.

This spirit of deception has followed the company into more recent history. In 2007, BMS was fined $515 million for illegally marketing drugs. Attorney R. Alexander Acosta of the Southern District of Florida said that the company “fraudulently inflated the cost of a drug used primarily to reduce the side effects of cancer treatments and other generic drugs without regard to the increased costs borne by government health care programs or elderly and indigent patients.”

GLAXOSMITHKLINE

Now stylised as GSK, the British company was formed in 2000 when Glaxo Wellcome merged with SmithKline Beecham. For 40 years, Glaxo scientists warned in secret that chemicals used in the production of the company’s ulcer drug, Zantac, were potentially carcinogenic, but the company covered it up. The story broke in 2019 when researchers found potentially significant cancer-causing elements in the drug. One year later, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recalled the product.

In the ‘90s, SmithKline Beecham was fined by the Hungarian government for exaggerating the efficacy of its hepatitis B vaccine. In the US, the company billed the federal government for unnecessary lab tests, some of which were not even performed. The company was fined $325 million for these fraudulent practices, as well as for bribing doctors. In 2012, the merged GSK was at it again. This time, the company was fined $3 billion in the US for bribing doctors to overprescribe the anti-depressants Paxil and Wellbutrin, as well as the asthma drug, Advair.

The antidepressants were unlawfully marketed to children, despite not being approved by the FDA. In 2020, the Federal Court of Australia fined GSK and Novartis $4.5 million for marketing what amounts to the same product, Osteogel and Emulgel, at unjust prices.

JOHNSON AND JOHNSON

For decades, J&J knowingly sold talcum powder contaminated with asbestos. To avoid litigation, J&J created a new company called LTL Management and then placed LTL into bankruptcy. Prior to the filing, the company paid $2 billion to women who claimed that their cancers had resulted from J&J’s products. The BBC covered for the company, saying that the volumes of asbestos were “small.”

In 2013, J&J was fined $2.2 billion by US authorities for promoting the mental health drugs Risperdal and Invega for non-approved uses and for bribing doctors. In 2019, Australia’s Federal Court awarded damages after J&J’s subsidiary, Ethicon, failed to warn professionals about the risks to women using vaginal mesh implants to treat pelvic floor damage. Hundreds of women endure “debilitating pain” as a result of various injuries related to the product. Justice Anna Katzmann said: “While the law does not require that goods be absolutely free of risk, it does require that manufacturers and suppliers disclose the risks.”

Another J&J subsidiary, Janssen, attempted to develop a COVID-19 vaccine. In December 2021, the US FDA ordered a halt after six women developed blood clots, one of whom died. In May last year, the FDA imposed more restrictions over further clots, limiting the Janssen jab as a shot of last resort.

MERCK

Merck is the world’s oldest drug company. Set up in Germany in the 17th century, it is now owned by US asset managers, like all the giants, such as BlackRock and State Street. In 2017, the Union of Concerned Scientists wrote that Merck had “skewed the results of clinical trials in favour of the arthritis drug, Vioxx,” which was approved in 1999, “to hide evidence that the drug increased patients’ risk of heart attack.”

Internal documents reveal that the marketing team developed what they called Assessment of Differences between Vioxx and Naproxen to Ascertain Gastrointestinal Tolerability and Effectiveness. This was a doctrine for manipulating clinical trial results. For example, the company compared trial data to the existing drug Naproxen instead of comparing it to placebos. They hid the fact that Vioxx increased the risk of heart attack by 400 per cent. Instead of neutral scientists, articles for publication in peer-reviewed journals submitted by Merck listed company employees as the lead authors of original drafts. Merck looked for prominent scientists willing to use their names on the pre-written articles. The Union alleges that 100,000 people died as a result of the product in the seven years that it was available.

More recently, France launched an investigation into Merck’s failure to inform patients about potentially damaging changes to its thyroid drug, Levothyrox.

NOVARTIS

Novartis is a Swiss pharmaceutical giant created in 1996 when Sandoz merged with Ciba-Geigy. During the 1970s, the latter company “conspired to defraud and deceive [US] government agencies by concealing the nature of the chemical waste in order to obtain and keep certain disposal permits,” says the Associated Press, reporting on a fine imposed a decade later.

Ciba-Geigy was fined again in 1992 for dumping waste from its Toms River chemical plant in New Jersey (now owned by BASF). Local authorities attribute elevated rates of leukemia among girls in the area to the pollution.

As noted above, in the year 2020, Australia’s Federal Court fined GSK and Novartis for marketing what amounts to the same product at different prices. In February this year, Novartis, Roche, and Gentec (now owned by Roche) won an appeal in France against a record fine of more €500 million. The companies developed a drug called Lucentis to combat macular degeneration. To promote the product, the companies were alleged to have colluded to discredit the rival drug, Avastin.

PFIZER

When it comes to fines, Pfizer is in a league of its own. Little has been reported on Pfizer’s criminality in Australia and information is hard to find. In 2005, Pfizer Australia violated the industry’s supposed code of conduct when it sent a letter to health professionals in defence of its anti-inflammatory drug, Celebrix, following the recall of its predecessor, Vioxx. Pfizer claimed that Celebrix, which it said could aid in the treatment of arthritis, had no significant impact on cardiovascular systems. But in 2004, Dr Peter Mansfield, then-Director of Healthy Skepticism, wrote to Medicines Australia to alert them to Pfizer’s unfounded claims. In early-‘05, Medicines Australia issued Pfizer with a paltry $25k fine. The report casually mentions at the close of the article two previous Pfizer Australia fines: One in 2003 relating to the promotion of Viagra and another in 2004 for undisclosed violations.

In 2014, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) took Pfizer to the Federal Court for profiting from the cholesterol treatment drug, Lipitor, when the product became a generic in 2012.

[Editor’s Note: Read the shocking truth about Pfizer – and its numerous legal cases – in an article published in New Dawn 197 (Mar-Apr 2023)].

ROCHE

Switzerland’s other drug giant, Roche, was founded in 1896, making it one of the oldest pharmaceutical companies in the world. In 1999, the US Department of Justice (DoJ) sentenced Roche’s Swiss marketing director, Dr Kuno Sommer, to four months’ US jail-time and issued the company with a then-record $500 million fine. For those who think it’s stupid and weird to have an interest in conspiracy theories, the short DoJ press release used the word “conspiracy” and derivations of the word 17 times. But the DoJ protects US companies that were involved by not naming or investigating them. These “unnamed co-conspirator companies in the US” allocated contracts to supply vitamins for human and animal consumption and then rigged contract bids.

In 2008, Australia fined Roche $110,000 for violating the country’s ban on direct consumer drug advertising. The company promoted approved drugs for unapproved indications. For instance, it promoted the results of its clinical trial for trastuzumab, even though the drug was not approved for treating early-stage breast cancer.

Roche promoted Tamiflu, claiming through its funded research published in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine, that the drug reduces the risk of death from H1N1 by 19 per cent and up to 50 per cent if taken within two days of contracting the flu. Based on these data, the US government spent $1.5 billion stockpiling the drug. But a whistleblower working undercover, the British epidemiologist Tom Jefferson, has brought a lawsuit against Roche to reclaim the $1.5 billion. At the time of writing, the suit is ongoing, despite Roche’s efforts to get it quashed.

SANOFI

In 2021, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Sanofi were fined $834 million by a Hawaiian court for dangerous marketing of the blood thinner, Plavix. Ethnic Chinese and black people are generally less able to metabolise the product than whites, yet the companies did not update their product information to warn non-white patients of this fact.

Dengue fever kills 22,000 people a year, mostly children in the southern hemisphere. Sanofi claimed to have developed a vaccine for the disease. But in 2017, the company’s so-called Dengvaxia was withdrawn over safety concerns. Rose Capeding was head of the dengue department of the Philippine’s Research Institute for Tropical Medicine. Capeding was principal author of a 2014 Lancet publication promoting the safety and efficacy of the injection. The very notion of vaccinating against dengue fever alarmed some virologists because secondary, not primary, infection risks fatality. Virologists feared that being injected would produce a similar immune response to the first infection. So, if a vaccinated child caught their first dengue infection, their immune system would respond as if it was the second and thus heighten the risk of death. By that year 130 injected Filipino children had died.

OPEN CRIMINALITY

A tiny minority of Westerners – typically ten per cent of any given population – were opposed to being injected with experimental COVID-19 products, mandated or not. Roughly the same percentages remain unjabbed. For the rest of the population, however, it’s a different story. The majority wanted the injection and got double-jabbed and, later, majorities or significant minorities took three or more doses.

The public did this despite Big Pharma’s long history of criminality. The criminality is not a secret: it is just that the media only report the crimes when they happen. The media do not return to the crimes, make them central news stories, or make a point of reminding viewers that they occurred. They present Big Pharma context-free, as if it exists for health not profit.

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Footnotes

1. Robert G Evans (2010) “Tough on Crime? Pfizer and the CIHR,” Healthcare Policy, 5(4): 16-25

2. “Mundipharma fined for misleading advertising of opioids to health professionals,” 20 December 2019, tga.gov.au/news/media-releases/mundipharma-fined-misleading-advertising-opioids-health-professionals

3. Kane Wu, “Sackler-owned Mundipharma seeks bids for China unit in over $1 bln deal -sources,” Reuters, 5 May 2021

4. “Three medicinal cannabis companies fined almost $1 million for alleged unlawful advertising,” 27 September 2022, tga.gov.au/news/media-releases/three-medicinal-cannabis-companies-fined-almost-1-million-alleged-unlawful-advertising

5. Ray Moynihan, “The unhealthy alliance between drug companies and regulators,” ABC News, 23 October 2012

6. Quoted in Joanne McCarthy, “Australia’s health watchdog accused of ‘too close’ relationship with industry,” Sydney Morning Herald, 5 November 2017

7. BMJ News, “Are drug regulators sufficiently independent from the companies they regulate?,” August 2022

8. nytimes.com/search?dropmab=false&query=%22pfizer%22%20%22fined%22&sort=oldest.

9. New York Times, “Abbott Pleads No Contest In Adulterated Drug Case,” 14 August 1975

10. Good Jobs First, Violation Tracker, “Abbott Laboratories,” violationtracker.goodjobsfirst.org

11. Department of Justice, “Abbott Laboratories to remedy deficiencies…,” justice.gov/archive/opa/pr/1999/November/522civ.htm

12. Department of Justice, “Abbott Labs to Pay $1.5 Billion to Resolve Criminal & Civil Investigations of Off-label Promotion of Depakote,” justice.gov/opa/pr/abbott-labs-pay-15-billion-resolve-criminal-civil-investigations-label-promotion-depakote

13. Jan Hoffman, “Allergan Reaches Tentative $2.37 Billion Deal to Settle Opioid Suits,” New York Times, 29 January 2022

14. Al-Jazeera, “Which countries have stopped using AstraZeneca’s COVID vaccine?,” 15 March 2021, aljazeera.com/news/2021/3/15/which-countries-have-halted-use-of-astrazenecas-covid-vaccine

15. Nick Sas and Sophie Scott, “Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine result gives Australia pathway to ‘normal’, Government says,” ABC, 24 Nov 2020

16. Frances Mao, “Covid vaccine: Why are Australians cancelling AstraZeneca jabs?,” BBC, 22 June 2021

17. Quoted in Mark Curtis, “Malaya—Britain’s forgotten war for rubber,” Economic History Malaya, ehm.my/publications/articles/malaya%25E2%2580%2594britains-forgotten-war-for-rubber

18. Quoted in Sharon Lerner, “The paraquat poisoning problem,” The Intercept, 24 March 2021

19. Cited in Crispin Dowler, “The Paraquat Papers: How Syngenta’s bad science helped keep the world’s deadliest weedkiller on the market,” Green Peace Unearthed, 24 March 2021, unearthed.greenpeace.org/2021/03/24/paraquat-papers-syngenta-toxic-pesticide-gramoxone

20. justice.gov/opa/pr/pharmaceutical-giant-astrazeneca-pay-520-million-label-drug-marketing

21. New York Times, “Hair Tonic and Perfume Claims Will Be Discontinued,” 20 June 1937

22. New York Times, “Indicted in a Plot on Insulin Prices,” 1 April 1941

23. Jonathan Stempel, “Johns Hopkins, Bristol-Myers must face $1 billion syphilis infections suit,” Reuters, 4 January 2019

24. justice.gov/archive/opa/pr/2007/September/07_civ_782.html

25. Eric Sagonowsky, “GSK was warned repeatedly about Zantac impurity but played down risks: Bloomberg,” Fierce Pharma, 15 February 2023

26. Carl Kovac (1997) “SmithKline Beecham fined in Hungary,” BMJ, 315: 1397

27. Tampa Bay Times, “Drugmaker to pay $325-million fine,” 25 February 1997

28. Simon Neville, “GlaxoSmithKline fined $3bn after bribing doctors to increase drugs sales,” Guardian, 3 July 2012

29. justice.gov/opa/pr/glaxosmithkline-plead-guilty-and-pay-3-billion-resolve-fraud-allegations-and-failure-report

30. accc.gov.au/media-release/gsk-and-novartis-to-pay-45-million-in-penalties-over-voltaren-osteo-gel-claims

31. Peter Hoskins, “Johnson & Johnson to replace talc-based powder with cornstarch,” BBC, 12 August 2022

32. justice.gov/opa/pr/johnson-johnson-pay-more-22-billion-resolve-criminal-and-civil-investigations

33. Quoted in Nick Pearson, “Victims to be compensated in pelvic mesh class action lawsuit,” Nine News, 21 November

34. Noah Weiland, Sharon LaFraniere and Carl Zimmer, “Johnson & Johnson Vaccinations Paused After Rare Clotting Cases Emerge,” New York Times, 16 December 2021

35. Kevin Dunleavy, “Back where it started: FDA restricts use of J&J’s COVID-19 shot because of blood clot threat,” Fierce Pharma, 6 May 2022

36. Union of Concerned Scientists, “Merck Manipulated the Science about the Drug Vioxx,” 12 October 2017, ucsusa.org/resources/merck-manipulated-science-about-drug-vioxx

37. France24, “Merck charged in France over changes to popular thyroid drug,” 19 Oct 2022

38. nytimes.com/1985/10/25/nyregion/ciba-geigy-indicted-in-jersey-for-illegal-dumping.html

39. United Press International, “Ciba-Geigy to spend $64 million to settle dumping suit,” 28 February 1992

40. Wayne Parry, “Town where child cancer rose blasts deal over polluted site,” Associated Press, 27 January 2023

41. Le Monde and Agence France-Presse, “Novartis, Roche win French appeal after being handed record fine,” 16 February 2023

42. Bob Burton (2005) “Pfizer Australia is fined for misleading promotion of celecoxib,” BMJ, 330(7502): 1230

43. accc.gov.au/media-release/accc-takes-action-against-pfizer-australia-for-alleged-anti-competitive-conduct

44. justice.gov/archive/atr/public/press_releases/1999/2450.htm

45. Bob Burton (2008) “Roche fined for breaching direct to consumer advertising ban and publishing unbalanced advertisements,” BMJ, 336(7648): 792

46. Owen Dyer (2020) “Cochrane reviewer sues Roche for claiming Tamiflu could slow flu pandemic,” BMJ, 368:m314 doi: 10.1136/bmj.m314

47. NS Healthcare, “Bristol-Myers, Sanofi fined $834m over Plavix warning label,” 16 February 2021

48. www.niaid.nih.gov/diseases-conditions/dengue-fever

49. Fatima Arkin, “Dengue vaccine fiasco leads to criminal charges for researcher in the Philippines,” Science, 24 April 2019

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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From New Dawn 192 (May-June 2022)

The following article by Patrick Henningsen – written only months after Russia launched its special military operation in Ukraine on 24 February 2022 – explains the background dynamics of this war. The facts outlined here – that were suppressed in the West but well known to informed observers – are only now emerging in mainstream media as Western backers of Ukraine begin to face reality.

There is no avoiding war; it can only be postponed to the advantage of others.
– Niccolo Machiavelli

They say timing is everything. Had this war happened two years earlier, or one year later, the outcome would have been vastly different.

As for the great Atlanticist power bloc, this isn’t a war they’ve been willing to fight, not in the traditional military sense anyway.

As the mortars and bombs continue to fall and efforts to kickstart negotiations are ongoing, a sustainable path to peace seems unlikely to emerge in Ukraine.

While Russia seems intent on seeing through its “Special Military Operation,” the US and its allies will have to decide what they want and exactly how long they plan to fight Russia down to the last Ukrainian.

The western chorus of nations contends that by waging their ‘war of choice’ against its neighbour Ukraine, the Russian Federation and its President Vladimir Putin have fallen foul of the vaunted Rules-Based International Order. By doing so, they have effectively left the international community.

However, on closer examination of the evidence and historical context surrounding this highly contentious geopolitical event, it becomes clear that it was the “international community” which left Russia – leaving it with no choice but to pursue its national security interests on its own accord.

As it stands, Russia, Ukraine, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) alliance are now at war, with each party firmly in the belief that they are fighting an existential conflict – not over any particular political or territorial dispute but for their future existence, or in the case of NATO, its relevance as a regional hegemonic entity.

No one saw this coming, or did they?

How Did We Get Here?

It’s no secret that over past decades numerous foreign policy experts warned that NATO’s continued eastward expansion, coupled with the US and UK’s increasingly strident rhetoric and aggressive policies directed against Russia would end up fomenting war in Ukraine.

Chief among those were luminaries like George Kennan and Henry Kissinger. Kennan, the architect of America’s policy of Soviet containment during the Cold War, was adamant that unchecked NATO expansion would eventually lead to war with Russia. Kissinger agreed, and thought that Ukraine should not be dominated by either NATO or Russia but rather act as a neutral bridge between east and west.

Also raising the alarm was one of America’s leading international relations scholars, Professor John Mearsheimer, who succinctly drove this same point home in public interviews and lectures,¹ but even his cogent and considered realist arguments garnered little interest within Washington’s foreign policy clique.

The US, UK, and western Europe were fully engaged on this path following the February 2014 Maidan coup d’etat in Ukraine, especially after Russia’s supposed ‘annexation’ (as the West refer to it, while Russians will regard it as a reunification) of Crimea, an act that triggered some of the harshest economic sanctions seen yet prosecuted by the US and European Union against Russia.

And just like that, The Great Game was truly in play again.

Undoubtedly, one of the material consequences of the 2014 US-backed coup in Kyiv was Ukraine losing the Crimean Peninsula to the Russian Federation in February/March of that year. Two main factors made this transfer a fait accompli. Firstly, with a predominantly Russian population, Crimeans viewed the unconstitutional toppling of democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych in Kyiv as an illegitimate seizure of the government and feared ethnically-motivated retribution against Russians and Russian-speaking citizens at the hands of western-backed  radical Ukrainian nationalists who had seized power.

This policy of disenfranchisement and lustration (where a new regime bars any opponents to its legitimacy from participating in the political process) had already reared its ugly head in other primarily Russian-speaking regions of Ukraine, in the eastern region of Donbass, where protests against Kyiv’s illegal coup regime broke out in Donetsk and Luhansk. They were suddenly treated as insurrectionists for not recognising the new putsch government in Kyiv, which effectively suspended the parliamentary representation of the Donbass parties, and even deployed the military to quell the growing political opposition.

Knowing they may meet a similar fate, Crimea’s local councils held a regional referendum on leaving Ukraine and joining the Russian Federation. The result was overwhelming, with roughly 95% favouring secession. The process was made that much easier by the fact that Crimea is home to one of Russia’s largest military installations housing some 20,000 personnel located on the southern-most tip of Crimea, in the port city of Sevastopol. Since the time of Catherine the Great it has been the historic home of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, and since the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia had been leasing the base from the Ukrainian state.

It should be noted that none of this would have gone smoothly had the overwhelming majority of Crimea not supported the new mandate. That, and the fact that Crimea had previously belonged to Russia up until 1954 when then Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev gave the peninsula to the Soviet republic of Ukraine – a purely political move designed to curry favour with Ukraine at the time – explains why this changing of the guard was virtually seamless.

This brings us to the second reason Crimea reunited with Russia. From a national security standpoint, Moscow could not risk the fate of its main naval port to the machinations of an unstable, US-backed radical nationalist junta in Kyiv. From Russia’s point of view, if Ukraine joined the EU, or worse, was folded into the NATO alliance, it would only be a matter of time before Moscow’s cherished warm water port was jeopardised, and with that closing Russia’s access to the Mediterranean Sea.

If Ukraine joined NATO and then tried to take back Crimea by force, Russia would be compelled to retaliate, triggering NATO Article 5, opening the door for all-out war between NATO and Russia. For Russia, that risk was simply unacceptable. From a statecraft point of view, these series of events can be viewed as totally logical, and not the impulsive machinations of an unstable despot in Moscow.

Russia’s canny but ultimately necessary geopolitical move incensed the West to no end. From this point on, Washington and London have ben determined to find new ways to isolate Russia, beginning with the work of discrediting and isolating them internationally, and aiming to somehow retake the Donbass and Crimea, while edging ever closer to achieving regime change in Moscow. That’s the general plan, and war planners in Washington and Brussels are sticking to it.

A War Like No Other

For all practical purposes, World War III has already begun. It is a war being fought on multiple levels, and the conflagration over Ukraine may only be the start.

For its part, the West has declared full-blown economic war against Russia including a total embargo on trade and commerce, and the banning and restriction of Russian communications, media, culture, and even participation in international sports. Who would have imagined that a leading global power could be cancelled, at least in western spheres of influence in the “International Community” as it common refers to itself, the moralising confederation comprised mainly of North America, UK, the European Union, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. The rest of the world, including China, India, Africa, the Middle East, and large portions of South America including Brazil, have taken a much more neutral stance in relation to Russia.

But in order to really understand what is happening, we must consider how we arrived at this point in history, and maybe speculate where events are likely to take us once the dust finally settles on this phase of the conflict.

How We Got Here

The narrative in popular western mainstream media discourse is that this war came out of nowhere – an impulsive act of hubris by an unstable ‘mad man’ and dictator, Russian President Vladimir Putin, who simply decided one day to invade Ukraine to realise his ambition of reconstituting the former Soviet empire. That’s a favourite fallback position for most American and British politicians and pundits. If only it were true.

In reality, we are seeing the logical conclusion of a series of events and provocations coming from NATO and Ukraine itself. Ever since their open invitation to Ukraine and Georgia at the 2008 NATO Summit in Bucharest, the West has steadily supplied weapons, military ‘advisors’, and other technical and intelligence support to those former Soviet republics. Could Russia afford to wait for US-made medium-range missiles to arrive in those countries?

For those and other reasons, Russia’s military intervention did not surprise foreign policy heavyweights like Kissinger or Mearsheimer. Even Ukrainian president Vodolymyr Zelenskyy’s political advisor, Oleksiy Arestovich, predicted this clash would unfold during a 2019 interview.²

If that’s not convincing enough, read the RAND Corporation’s 2019 strategic report, “Overextending and Unbalancing Russia,”³ which describes chapter and verse how Washington’s primary goal has been to undermine Russia by repeating what it considers as past successes against the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Only this time, rather than ‘hedge for peace’ by simultaneously engaging in productive bilateral relations or outpacing the enemy in arms and technology, the report opines that NATO should focus on enacting a dizzying range of anti-Russia measures in what it calls hybrid war. This includes leveraging NATO members against Russia, engaging in political and economic warfare, and active measures across all information warfare fronts. Whereas communism vs capitalism was the defining dialectic that shaped strategy and tactics during the old Cold War, new quasi-ideological fault lines should be reframed, like ‘dictatorship vs democracy,’ and the fomenting of divisions on religious and ethno-nationalist lines. Beyond this, we have the military theatres. For war planners at RAND, these are ranked according to perceived risks, benefits, and “likelihood of success.”

The RAND report also suggests capitalising on what the West perceives as Russia’s “deep-seated” anxieties about provocations from the West and advises that this vulnerability must be exploited to get Russia to react. And react it did.

When Russia launched its military intervention in Ukraine on 24 February 2022, it was the culmination of a long series of events that had effectively forced Russia into a national security quandary that would be difficult to avoid without making serious compromises. It could ultimately degrade its current position as a global power in the short term but, more importantly, pose a severe risk to its territorial integrity in the long term.

Operation Z: Putin Springs the Trap?

To present a thorough analysis of this historic impasse taking place over Ukraine, we need to first cast the scene back a few centuries, followed by a detailed depiction of both World Wars, and give a brief analysis of the formation and dissolution of the Soviet Union, including a granular look at the post-Soviet development of its respective satellite states. In New Dawn 191 (Mar-Apr), I covered some of the historical rivalries between the British and Russian empires in my article, ‘The Great Game 2.0: What’s Behind the Ukraine Crisis’.

For this analysis, we’ll move the timeline forward to February 2014, to the infamous Maidan uprising, known locally as the “Revolution of Dignity” in Kyiv. While the mainstream media likes to portray this colour revolution as a grassroots uprising ‘embodying the spirit of western democracy’ with young Ukrainians expressing their EU aspirations, the hard reality was that this was a violent coup d’etat, leading to the ouster of a democratically elected president, Viktor Yanukovych. The evidence now reveals that he was replaced by a succession of hand-picked US political puppets installed to do the bidding of regime change practitioners in Washington.

This was exposed in detail during a leaked phone call between then US Undersecretary of State, Victoria Nuland, and US Ambassador Geoffrey R. Pyatt in Kyiv. The degree to which they were micromanaging their new incoming regime was astonishing. The full sequence of events is well-documented in director Igor Lopatonok’s 2016 film, Ukraine on Fire, featuring Oliver Stone.

It turns out that this hostile takeover of Ukrainian politics was in the works for a very long time. Perhaps the most shocking aspect of the 2014 Maidan coup was how the US and its allies harnessed the power of Ukraine’s radical far-right nationalist cells to enforce a political line on the streets of towns and cities across the country.

Many refer to movements like Right Sector (Pravyy Sektor) and their respective paramilitary and ‘volunteer corps’ militant factions as Neo Nazi. However, they are much more than that. By any reasonable measure, these are not ‘neo’, but rather, bona fide Nazis – adherents to the Nazi ideology, descendants in the political (and in some cases, genealogical) lineage of Hitler’s western Ukrainian brigades, and inspired by controversial figures like Stepan Bandera, who to this day, is still idolised by radical nationalists in Ukraine. Bandera was leader of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists in the 1930s and 1940s, which fought alongside the Waffen SS during Nazi Germany’s scorched earth march towards Stalingrad. It is a matter of historical record that Banderites engaged in pogroms and atrocities against Jews, as part of the broader Holocaust, as well as slaughtering Poles. History also reveals that Washington and the CIA groomed Banderite cells in western Ukraine after WWII through programs like Operation Aerodynamic.⁴

Following the Maidan coup, Washington installed interim Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, followed by billionaire oligarch, President Petro Poroshenko, who marshalled these same radical nationalist forces and began integrating them into the Ukrainian military structure. Extremist militias like the Aidar and Azov Battalions were deputised to help Kyiv prosecute a brutal civil war in eastern Ukraine’s Donbass region – to put down the rebellion against the post-coup government which the rebel opposition in Donetsk and Luhansk regarded as an unconstitutional regime.

After his election, Poroshenko mounted an “anti-terror operation” in the eastern regions – bringing the full force of Ukraine’s military against its own people. A bloody eight-year-long civil war ensued that was systematically whitewashed from Western mainstream media and politics. Burying this inconvenient truth was essential for the United States, British and their NATO partners to condition the western public to see no evil in a newly-minted ‘democratic’ Ukraine.

Meanwhile, Russia was incensed, only it could not intervene militarily in Ukraine to protect ethnic Russians without provoking a major international incident. So instead, it provided diplomatic, economic aid, no doubt some special military support and technical training, likely comprising of some arms, hardware, intelligence and communications support. For its part, Moscow also offered invaluable international media coverage of the conflict through Russian outlets like RT and Sputnik.

In order to de-escalate the situation, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, France and Germany drafted the Minsk Accords, or “Minsk I & II,” in 2014 and 2015 respectively. This initially helped reduce fighting which had already taken thousands of lives and displaced many hundreds of thousands from the region. It’s important to note here that Minsk Process was codified by UN Security Council Resolution 2202, unanimously endorsing the “Package of measures for the Implementation of the Minsk Agreements.” But unfortunately, in the years that followed, successive US-backed governments in Kyiv systematically undermined the agreement and rather than de-escalate the fighting in Donbass, increased the military build-up, culminating in a massive uptick in troop and equipment deployments to the region under President Zelenskyy.

Ironically (or not), Zelenskyy ran for office in 2019 on the promise of uniting the country and ‘bringing peace’ to Donbass, neither of which happened. Instead, the violence and proliferation of far-right militias in Donbass increased dramatically. It was clear this is what Ukrainians wanted, which was a far cry from what eventually unfolded. To make matters worse, Zelenskyy threw gasoline on the fire by constantly courting NATO membership when he (and his western handlers) knew full well that this was an absolute red line for Russia. Zelenskyy could have defused tensions earlier by disavowing NATO aspirations and declaring Ukraine a neutral state. The coup de grace came in February 2022 after Zelenskyy remarked at the Munich Security Conference that he would like his country to acquire nuclear weapons. At that point few can argue that Russia lacked sufficient reason to make its bold move in order to secure its own vital national security interests.

It is not at all surprising that most western pundits are largely aloof to this progression of events, and that Russia’s concerted moves are as much political as they are military. The great strategist Carl von Clausewitz said it best in his seminal text, One War: “War is simply the continuation of political intercourse with the addition of other means.”

In the spring of 2021, Moscow would increase its frequency of military drills and manoeuvrers, amassing more military forces along its border with Ukraine. In December of that year, Washington and its allies began raising the alarm that Russia was planning to invade Ukraine. Moscow issued an urgent letter to the Washington demanding that its security concerned be addressed immediately to avoid further escalation, but its overtures were largely brushed aside and ignored by the US State Department. For the next three months, western alarm bells dominated media coverage, all the while Russia was denying any intention to move its forces into Ukraine.

Then on 21 February something extraordinary happened. Vladimir Putin sprung the trap.

After eight long years of bloodshed and failed peace negotiations, the Russian president took to the airwaves to announce Moscow’s formal recognition of the independent republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. For a legal perspective, this immediately qualified them for official Russian military protection, including the establishment of humanitarian corridors which were quickly opened. After more than seven years of stalled diplomacy, Moscow finally chose to abandon the already dead Minsk agreement and directly deal with the situation in Donbass – and the threat posed by a US-controlled and NATO-occupied Ukraine to its national homeland security.

On 24 February, Putin took to the airwaves again to deliver an hour-long lecture on the geographical, cultural, political, and geopolitical history of Ukraine and its interconnected relationship to Russia. Western pundits were left puzzled. Why was Putin delivering this masterclass in Soviet history and articulating concepts underpinning Russia’s national security doctrine?

Those questions were soon answered when Moscow announced its military intervention code-named “Z,” effectively invading Ukraine from four different directions, with these goals: to secure the Donbass, followed by “demilitarisation,” and “denazification” of Ukraine.

Within 72 hours, the Russian armed forces had begun their “Special Military Operation” (SMO).

For the West, decrying Russia’s surprise invasion of Ukraine means they’ve suddenly discovered the concept of international law and are pointing to Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, and how the international community must condemn this egregious violation of Ukraine’s territorial integrity. While this may be true with respect to the letter of the law in this instance, such international treaties have never hindered the United States and its allies in the recent past – not in Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Yugoslavia, nor in Vietnam, to name but a few. The same could be said for Turkey’s incursions and occupations in Cyprus and northern Syria, and especially Israel’s 75 year-long incursion, illegal occupation and systematic ethnic cleansing of the native Palestinian population.

Following Russia’s SMO, the West enacted an unprecedented reflexive, collective response – a program of full-spectrum dominance – which includes overlapping strategies of hybrid warfare, the results of which have invariably altered the current world order.

Hybrid Warfare & Full-Spectrum Dominance

Governments and military structures are engaged in hybrid warfare. If you’re living in the West, they don’t tell you that you are immersed in a theatre of constant conflict is a 360-degree hippodrome of mass media information warfare with active measures and countermeasures. Even seemingly innocent bystanders – the general public – are viewed by governments and military strategists as active participants in the broader war theatre.

This has always been the case throughout history, articulated as propaganda and soft power, with citizens in whatever country on whatever side find themselves in a war for the age-old ‘battle for hearts and minds’. The process of public engagement also requires an incendiary ingredient to drive it, whereby the state conditions the people to both fear and hate the enemy de jour. Without that sense of personal and collective threat, or at the very least, in the Orwellian sense, that “two minutes of hate,” members of the public will not feel civically and emotionally invested in the process.

Additionally, an emerging new compliment to the military theatre is cyber warfare, now touted by western planners as a key domain to build up offensive and defensive capabilities. Klaus Schwab in Davos is gaming out this digital conflagration with the World Economic Forum’s “Cyber Polygon” tabletop simulations.

As much as the mainstream media spinners try to frame it, this Russia vs ‘The West’ conflict is not the proverbial ‘black hat vs white hat’ square-off. On the contrary, it is incredibly complex with many overlapping layers of history, culture, ethnic strife, and political and geopolitical forces which push and pull various actors, both in the theatre of war and on its periphery.

It’s crucial to understand that this is a proxy war pitting a US-UK-led NATO against Russia using Ukraine as the proxy, or cudgel, to poke the Russian bear. This was done numerous times during the Cold War, and it should be of no surprise history again repeats itself here. As it cannot engage in a direct military fashion, NATO is applying the Syrian model – trafficking an unlimited number of lethal arms, supplies and military advisors into Ukraine, with the express goal stated in the RAND document of wearing down and’ overextending’ Russia. Western planners openly boast about creating “another Afghanistan” for Russia.

Economic Warfare

Part of this hybrid warfare was the “mother of all sanctions,” an all-out economic war waged by the West against Russia to destroy their economy, hoping it provokes the Russian population to rise up and overthrow their leader. This is an attempt to cancel what is arguably the world’s top commodities producer – exporting a large share of the world’s gas, oil, wheat, fertiliser, minerals and key components for the highly globalised nuclear power, and space exploration industries.

The move to ban and restrict the Western bloc from purchasing Russian natural gas, oil, food and fertiliser has come even though Europe overly relies on these Russian supplies to heat their homes and provide power, minerals and product to run their industries, and put food on their tables. This highly self-destructive collective economic suicide pact is already backfiring spectacularly in the West, triggering tumults in already shaky natural gas and oil markets, and causing food shortages, supply chain disruptions, and a lack of available and affordable supplies of grains, sunflower oil, fertiliser and other essential staples.

Some western farmers cannot plant in the spring due to either a lack of supplies or the fact that the fertiliser price is too high, making farming unprofitable. A hike in fuel prices has triggered record-levels of inflation across the board in the West, spelling a lower standard of living for the working and middle classes right across the western world.

In another significant development, in late March the US sanctioned Russia’s Central Bank and seized some $300 billion of Russia’s foreign currency assets to bring on financial armageddon in Russia. President Putin turned the tables by announcing that Russia would no longer accept dollars and euros for its gas and oil, and payment would need to be made in Roubles. With the stroke of a pen, Putin made the Russian Rouble a type of reserve currency, and there was an immediate effect on the US dollar’s near-global monopoly as the pre-eminent world reserve currency. To make this move stick, Putin pegged the Rouble to gold, effectively making the Rouble a gold-backed currency. Russia’s currency was further bolstered by the fact it’s backed by a basket of essential commodities like oil, gas, and wheat. Interestingly, this very same move propelled the US economy after the Second World War following the Bretton Woods Agreement.

Time will tell how well this pans out for the Russian economy, but early signs are western economies are suffering most in sanctions blowback – the sort of damage that might eventually lead to political consequences in elections.

The only people in the West who seem pleased with these ruptures are the green lobby and Klaus Schwab’s Great Reset parishioners, both dreaming to leverage this artificial crisis to advance their ‘sustainable’ agendas and press home the argument that fossil fuels are now too expensive and a liability to global stability (because they supposedly pad the pockets of the Russian war machine).

Will it work or will it all end in tears? You might ask the Central Bankers who have certainly used this crisis to accelerate their roll-out of a new Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), completely in line with the Great Reset’s digital global fiat and cashless society, with its digital ID wallets, to be tied to your social and carbon credits. Many believe, and rightfully so, that this looks very much like the final implementation stage of the globalist plan to enslave the planet. It’s becoming harder to argue with that conspiracy theory.

Are we seeing a new bipolar or even multipolar world order taking shape – with Russia and China leading Eurasia in one direction while Klaus and the West head towards their technocratic digital ‘utopia’? If this unfolds, we may see a bifurcated world economy and digital media, on polar ends of a bifurcated world order, with different rules, values, and practices in different hemispheres.

Negotiating into a New World

As we go to press, Ukraine’s actor-cum-statesman, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, was still being paraded (via Zoom) in front of US Congress, the British, Canadian, and Australian parliaments, and the Council of Europe in Brussels, with western leaders enthusiastically chanting the nationalist mantra Slava Ukraini!” (Glory to Ukraine!)

This issue has become a global cause célèbre in the West, with Ukrainian flags flying over municipal buildings, businesses, and lapel pins, and with school children and churches doing bake sales, airline hostesses passing the hat around on long-haul flights, and other endless online fundraisers – all raising money for the Ukrainian cause as everyone joins in the biggest geopolitical virtue-signalling campaign in modern history.

However, none of this will change the facts on the ground.

What we know of the ongoing conflict resolution talks between Russia and Ukraine is that there is a stalling for time which is likely being directed behind the scenes by the US State Department. In reference to the previously-cited RAND report and US/UK/NATO strategy, stretched-out negotiations allow for the unrestricted flow of weapons over the Polish border into western Ukraine. But the longer Kyiv drags this on, the more territory Zelenskyy’s Ukraine stands to lose. The territory presently held by Russian forces is beginning to resemble historic “Novorossiya,” which is also the proposed confederation of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republic. This would create a land bridge stretching from Moldova, over to Crimea, across to Mariupol, and up to Kharkov. The remainder of the current Ukrainian state would have lost access to the Black Sea.

Another potential outcome is providing the West and its media establishment with a face-saving ‘out’ – something like how the invasion has gone so poorly for Russia and wore them down so much that in the end they were forced to negotiate a settlement due to the brave Zelenskyy-led resistance. Remember, the western PR machine can spin anything into a win, no matter how bad things have really gone.

One of the most extraordinary parts of this story is the revelation that just days before the Russian invasion, Zelenskyy was offered a peace deal by German chancellor Olaf Scholz while attending the Munich Security Conference – but the Ukrainian president turned it down.⁶ The peace deal was “that Ukraine should renounce its NATO aspirations and declare neutrality as part of a wider European security deal between the West and Russia” and that “the pact would be signed by Mr. Putin and Mr. Biden, who would jointly guarantee Ukraine’s security.” It’s reported that Zelenskyy rejected the offer, saying, “Putin couldn’t be trusted to uphold such an agreement and that most Ukrainians wanted to join NATO.”

Was Zelenskyy in a position to dial-down tensions and nullify one of Russia’s main reasons for the invasion? But through a combination of incompetence and pressure from anti-Russia US hawks, did he make one of the most careless and fatal mistakes in history?

This rapid sequence of events has exposed the intellectual, ethical, and moral bankruptcy of western neoliberal chauvinism, and its postmodern civilisational narcissism. That phase of unipolar dominance may be coming to an end.

It is a time of great turbulence, but it is also a time of great revelations. In just a few short months, this war is already reshaping the global order, and before long it may not be the same world order the master planners had envisioned.

Don’t look now, but these are those interesting times you always dreamed about.

The great awakening continues…

[alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn 192.[/alert]

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Footnotes

1. John Mearsheimer: Is the West Responsible for the Ukraine Crisis?, https://21stcenturywire.com/2022/03/02/john-mearsheimer-is-the-west-responsible-for-the-ukraine-crisis/

2. Former Ukrainian presidential advisor perfectly predicted Russian invasion in 2019, www.intellinews.com/former-ukrainian-presidential-advisor-perfectly-predicted-russian-invasion-in-2019-238183/

3. RAND Corp. Overextending and Unbalancing Russia, www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB10014.html

4. Operation Aerodynamic, https://cryptome.org/2016/01/cia-ua-aerodynamic.pdf

5. Pentagon-Ukraine Bio Labs: The Hunter Biden Connection, https://21stcenturywire.com/2022/03/23/pentagons-ukraine-bio-labs-the-hunter-biden-connection/

6. Vladimir Putin’s 20-Year March to War in Ukraine – and How the West Mishandled It, www.wsj.com/articles/vladimir-putins-20-year-march-to-war-in-ukraineand-how-the-west-mishandled-it-11648826461

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
For our reproduction notice, click here.

From New Dawn 200 (Sept-Oct 2023)

What happens when the government itself becomes the country’s greatest purveyor of misinformation and disinformation – gaslighters of their entire populations?

And that same government is hell-bent on censoring the truth?

That is exactly what has happened, and is happening, in Australia. 

Long known as the most illiberal of all Western democracies – as the greatest surveiller, manipulator and oppressor of its own population of any so-called democracy – Australia stepped straight off the cliff into a totalitarian abyss during the Covid era. And made headlines around the world for all the wrong reasons. 

Without the right to freedom of assembly or freedom of speech in its Constitution, and without a Bill of Rights, the despotic conduct of Australian governments has run out of control, accelerated first by the overreach of the terror response post the September 11 attacks in the United States in 2001, and then by the heavy-handed government response to the Covid panic beginning in early 2020. Aided and abetted by a legacy media taken hostage by its funding sources, principally the government, either through direct grants, tax right-offs, or threats to withdraw advertising if they step out of line.

Not content with having a controlling hand in all the country’s mainstream media and untrammelled by common sense or any inconvenient social conscience, the Australian government is now introducing a new and entirely counterproductive level of censorship unseen at any time in the nation’s history. 

On 25 June 2023, on what – appropriately – marked 120 years since George Orwell’s birth, the Australian government released an “Exposure Draft” of its The Communications Legislation Amendment (Combating Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2023, for public and institutional comment.¹

The public had until 6 August 2023, later extended by a fortnight, to make submissions to a government Inquiry on the Bill, which would give the media regulator, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), yet greater powers. Private submissions will not be published.

Once a paper tiger, an obscure bureaucratic backwater, ACMA has grown dramatically in power over recent years and now has the power to control all online public discourse.

ACMA wields power over Australia’s entire communications spectrum, including television, radio, newspapers, digital platforms, and the internet. 

The new laws include content aggregation services, connective media services, media sharing services and, somewhat broadly, “a digital service specified by the minister.” Targets include websites that collate information and present it to end users, self-produced information, search engines, instant messaging services, social media platforms and podcasting services.

Many Laws “in this space”

There have been flotillas of government overreach legislation launched on the public since the early days of the millennium; so many laws “in this space,” an expression beloved by bureaucrats, that it is hard to keep track. One piece of Malcolm Turnbull-era legislation the general public has never heard of is the innocuous-sounding Defence Trade Controls Act, a poorly drafted piece of catch-all legislation. Interpreted literally, it could make the use of mobile phones or internet banking illegal, both, obviously, using encryption.²

As usual, the government has only been going through the motions of a public inquiry and has zero interest in what the public thinks. The tight deadlines, the complexity of making a submission – well beyond the average punter – the lack of any genuine public information campaign and town hall meetings are all designed to ensure the voices of ordinary people are eliminated from the process. 

The last people this government wants to hear from are its many incensed citizens, offended by the censorship they have repeatedly endured, at the Australian government’s request, on American-owned social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. 

Subjects which the government has seen fit to censor or deplatform or outright ban have included Christian websites, opponents of mass immigration, critics of the current LGBTQIA+ obsessions, and in the past three years, thousands of often factually correct communiques on the safety and efficacy of vaccines, the effectiveness of masks and lockdowns, and the views of world medical experts dissenting from the Big Pharma line. Bill Gates, of course, is a protected animal online. Protected with our money. Not for us. And not for the public good. But purely for the benefit of the world’s elites. 

All this is being done under the rubric of keeping Australians safe and under the auspices of the Orwellian named “eSafety Commissioner,” a World Economic Forum (WEF) acolyte now acting as the country’s Chief Censor, Julie Inman Grant. 

Touted as the world’s first government regulatory agency committed to keeping its citizens safer online, there’s a reason why every other country on Earth has avoided going down this path. Censoring your citizens builds enormous stressors in the system, rapidly leading to chaos, state control, and a totalitarian nightmare.

Julie Inman Grant was appointed by the conservatives in 2017 when an already intensely disliked Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull dominated the political stage and took every opportunity possible to get himself on the nightly news.

Turnbull’s Totalitarian State Measures

Before becoming Prime Minister, Turnbull headed the Australian arm of the obscenely wealthy financial group Goldman Sachs, one of whose specialties is the creation of new markets, particularly renewables, an agenda Turnbull pursued with great diligence and which is now being equally diligently pursued by the Labor Party. Always follow the money. In this case the money of Goldman Sachs, which Turnbull re-joined after leaving politics.

As The Australian Financial Review describes the firm: “Its occasionally dodgy reputation among the public is outweighed by the deference it commands in circles of power. The network. The platinum Rolodex. Rich people who help powerful people get rich, and powerful people who make rich people powerful. It all stems from a culture of breathtaking exclusivity.”³

Malcolm Turnbull passed into law some of the most anti-democratic, anti-free speech anti-journalist legislation Australia, indeed the world, had ever seen. Under his watch, journalists became Persons of Interest under the Australian Security and Intelligence (ASIO) Act. He introduced Journalist Information Warrants, meaning the authorities can legally sweep all of a journalist’s communications. Created without any consultation with the industry, the legislation means if perchance a journalist discovers he, she, they, or them, discover they are the subject of such a warrant and publicises the fact, they can be sent to jail.⁴

As former Inspector General of Intelligence and Security Margaret Stone pointed out publicly, it is possible to be arrested and jailed for five years for breaching orders you did not even know existed in Australia. 

It also became legal under Turnbull for the intelligence agencies to detain ten-year-olds and hold them incommunicado for a fortnight, without access to their families or to a lawyer. If a concerned family publicised the fact, they also face jail.⁵

Equally, under the Stasi chambers of anti-corruption commissions, a journalist can be hauled before a Commission and forced to reveal their sources. If they fail to comply, they can be jailed, and if they so much as tell a family member, a friend, a lawyer, or their own union that they have been thus summoned, they can also be jailed for up to two years.

That’s not democracy. That’s a totalitarian state.

The WEF & Our New eSafety Commissioner

It is no surprise that back in 2017 the fully committed globalist Malcolm Turnbull, with his extreme hostility to the profession of journalism and thereby to free speech, was responsible for the appointment of one Julie Inman Grant, the so-called eSafety Commissioner now more than willing to censor her fellow Australians.

Easy to find online is her 2022 call to recalibrate what we understand to be free speech at the World Economic Forum, an increasingly reviled organisation whose dystopian vision of humanity’s future has provoked widespread criticism. Any notion of a modern democracy being “Of the people for the people by the people” has long been dispensed with under the tutelage of the caricature of an evil despot, WEF head Klaus Schwab. 

A contempt for the views and indeed the lives of ordinary people pervades everything the WEF does and is on full display at their annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, frequented by some of the wealthiest, and some would argue most ruthless, dishonest, and unpleasant individuals on Earth.

“We are finding ourselves in a place where we have increasing polarisation everywhere,” Ms Grant told a WEF Forum in 2022. “Everything feels binary when it doesn’t need to be. I think we are going to have to think about a recalibration of a whole range of human rights that are playing out online, from the freedom of speech to the freedom to be free from online violence. Or the right of data protection to the right to child decency.”⁶

Right, that makes sense. 

Ms Grant’s biography reads like a holy writ of horror, a long dance with the world’s worst corporate entities, bookended by the rapid expansion of her powers which have made her the country’s unelected Chief Censor.

Reappointed for a five-year stint just before last year’s election, she has been fervently embraced by the so-called “progressives” of the left, whose desire to censor the views of ordinary Australians is outdoing even their censorious predecessors. 

The World Economic Forum records: “Julie has extensive experience in the non-profit and government sectors and spent two decades working in senior public policy and safety roles in the tech industry at Microsoft, Twitter and Adobe. The Commissioner’s career began in Washington DC, working in the US Congress and the nonprofit sector before taking on a role at Microsoft. Julie’s experience at Microsoft spanned 17 years, serving as one of the company’s first and longest-standing government relations professionals, ultimately in the role of Global Director for Safety & Privacy Policy and Outreach. At Twitter, she set up and drove the company’s policy, safety & philanthropy programs across Australia, New Zealand & Southeast Asia.”

Translation: Ms Grant worked closely with Bill Gates, whose devastating role promoting unsafe, ineffective, and highly profitable “vaccines” during the Covid era has left him as a discredited and widely despised figure. She also worked with Twitter during the height of its suppression of freedom of speech at the request of American military and intelligence agencies. 

At the height of government-propelled Covid hysteria, the World Economic Forum notes, “Julie oversaw significant increases in the eSafety office’s budget, increased staffing levels and launched the global Safety by Design initiative. As Commissioner, she has led work to stand up novel and world-first regulatory regimes under the new Online Safety Act 2021, with implementation of a sweeping new set of reforms beginning on 23 January 2022.”⁷

Well, that’s reassuring!!

The WEF also nominated Ms Grant as one of their so-called Agile 50: The World’s 50 Most Influential People Revolutionising Government. It says: “This list seeks to laud those politicians, civil servants and entrepreneurs driving agility in governments all around the world. Julie Inman Grant is Australia’s eSafety Commissioner. In this role, Grant leads the world’s first government agency committed to keeping its citizens safe online.”⁸ 

If you’re not reassured by having an unelected person closely associated with Bill Gates, Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum acting as the nation’s Chief Censor and dedicated to “transforming government,” you’re not alone. As the saying goes, one of the only good things to come out of the Covid era is that the power structures have now been exposed for all to see.

Dangerous Legislation

The response to the government’s plans to expand the power of the Australian Communications and Media Authority to become our very own Ministry of Truth has been hostile and widespread, provoking an onslaught of criticism, with the bill being repeatedly described as Orwellian and labelled the most dangerous legislation ever introduced into the Australian parliament.

The laws would give the government the power to censor content they decide is “untrue, false or misleading,” declared Sky News host and favoured News Ltd personality Sharri Markson.

“A government entity cannot be allowed to decide what is misinformation,” she said. “They do not have first-hand contact with sources like journalists do. This is extremely dangerous territory.”

Paul Gregoire, winner of a New South Wales Council of Civil Liberties award for excellence in journalism, suggests the laws will be used to silence political dissent.

He writes: “The freedom of expression the internet has brought to the global community has always posed an issue for governments. This is especially so in this country, now that the mainstream media has become so compliant that ministerial press releases often dictate whole stories, as they’re taken as gospel.

“Of course, governments don’t lie, they produce propaganda. Could it simply be that the government of what The New York Times described as ‘the world’s most secretive democracy’ is seeking to empower itself?”⁹

Human rights lawyer Peter Fam described the misinformation bill as “a poorly drafted piece of proposed legislation” that poses a threat to the rights of free expression, self-determination, and freedom of thought, conscience and religion.

“Do we want a government department to have the power to impose civil and criminal penalties on users of the internet if they publish something that the government doesn’t like? That is what the ACMA bill would allow. It proposes an unacceptable and contemptible breach of the right to freedom of speech and freedom of expression.”¹⁰

Rukshan Fernando, one of the most talented journalists and broadcasters to emerge from the Covid era, says: “It has become very apparent that we in Australia are at the forefront of a battle for internet freedom, for freedom of speech, for the freedom of political communication. The right to share ideas that we in a modern society should have. The internet is now the town square. People get together online. The fact that people can do this is a very powerful part of our human nature. There is nothing more that our government would like to do than diminish the ability of people to have this form of communication. Government people will tell you they are doing it to keep you safe. I am telling you, there are many people out there who are looking at this, from all experts to the layman like you and me, and we can see it for what it is. Our government is running rampant.”¹¹

Under the proposals, the Australian Communications and Media Authority could require digital platforms to keep records about matters regarding misinformation and disinformation and turn them over when requested.

Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said this would “essentially mean that the regulator is able to look under the hood of what the platforms are doing and what measures they are taking to ensure compliance.”¹²

The ACMA would also be able to request the industry to develop a “code of practice” covering measures to combat misinformation.

Violating the code could result in penalties up to $2.75 million dollars or two per cent of global turnover – whichever is greater. 

And lastly, ACMA would be empowered to create and enforce its own industry standard. Penalties for breaching those standards could see companies paying up to $6.8 million or five per cent of their global turnover.

Frequently incandescent with rage, Paul Collits has come to the fore in recent years as one of Australia’s most perceptive and acerbic political commentators. As he has repeatedly pointed out, during the Covid era Australian governments gaslighted the entire population, lying about everything from the effectiveness of masks, social distancing and lockdowns to the safety of the vaccines administered to millions of the nation’s children. 

He writes that the massive fines to be imposed on social media giants if they fail to comply with the Australian government’s agendas and censor or delete their users has reached the point of absurdity. 

“Is the eSafety Commissioner – one Julie Inman Grant – coming for me? Or you? Well, she is coming for Elon Musk, threatening Twitter with a $700,000 a day fine unless the company shows that it is countering online ‘hate’.

“Like many, I had never heard of this person or her job until this week. I wish I hadn’t. This is a takeover by the State of our rights to determine what we hear, what we believe, what we say. It has nothing whatsoever to do with alleged hate speech.

“The loudmouthed threats to Twitter by Julie Inman Grant are merely a foretaste of what is to come. Who gets to define what is mis- and disinformation? This is THE question.”¹³

Covid-19 Censorship

As one of the best of a new breed of journalists actively reshaping Australia’s media landscape, Rebekah Barnett of Dystopian Down Under, observes that all these moves to censor the citizenry are highly ironic after revelations that the federal government censored thousands of online posts during the Covid era, many of which were factually correct.

Barnett reports that a Freedom of Information request by Senator Alex Antic revealed that from the start of the pandemic up to 15 Dec 2022, the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) referred 4,213 social media posts that they argued were a breach of big tech platforms’ community guidelines. 

“This comes as a surprise, given that the Department’s purview includes border security, counter-terrorism and immigration, but not public health,” notes Barnett. DHA representatives told Senator Antic that under the Scott Morrison Government, the Department was directed to “lean in on Covid dis- and misinformation.”¹⁴

Covid was the most politicised disease in Australian history, which meant that the Prime Minister was using both the bureaucracies and social media platforms to further his own political ends. It is clearly scandalous that the Australian government was censoring correct information to further the careers of politicians and the interests of Big Pharma, most notably Moderna and Pfizer.

Censored posts included claims that lockdowns were ineffective, now a widely accepted truism. Ditto mask mandates. Claims that the Covid-19 vaccine did not prevent infection or transmission were removed as “potentially harmful information” yet, as is now also well recognised, were correct. 

Barnett writes: “Notably, the government will be exempt from the new Bill. The collusion of government with big tech, industry, academia and think tanks to steer public conversation and suppress inconvenient truths veers sharply from the democratic ideals that our societies were founded on. In a world where the experts were always right, this would only be a violation of our freedom of expression and thought. But as we know from the Covid era, the experts get it wrong, a lot, which makes the Censorship Industrial Complex a violation of truth itself.”¹⁵

Broadcaster Chris Kenny wrote in The Australian: “It is extraordinary and alarming to see the factual, arguable and reasonable social media posts the government censored. This was a secret stifling of proper debate and crushing of dissent over crucial government actions. Much of this censorship did not protect the public from misinformation. Rather, it protected the government from dissent and suppressed sensible discussion of the facts.”¹⁶

There has been not one word of concern from Australia’s Chief Censor, Ms Julie Inman Grant, over the revelations to parliament that the government was actively censoring correct information on Covid.

In other words, the government is free to lie. 

The people are not free to tell the truth. 

Why surveillance is such a serious threat

Australians now find themselves under surveillance, and therefore under some sort of state control, both physically and online, in their homes and their cars, on the streets and in the supermarket, and on the social media platforms that the majority of the population rely on for their news.

Despite the uber surveillance of the past few years, to this day people will shrug and say: “If you’re not doing anything wrong, why does it matter if you’re under surveillance?”

It matters because surveillance, in and of itself, alters human behaviour and severely impacts the culture. 

Bruce Schneier, one of the world’s leading cyber security experts and author of Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World, told this writer that mass surveillance profoundly affects liberty and justice, fairness and equality, and freedom.

“When we are observed at all times we become conformist, and creativity suffers,” he said. “Fear, discrimination, oppression. Again and again, society forgets that targeting entire groups of people in a vain effort to find the few bad actors is both ineffective and toxic. There’s a reason why surveillance states aren’t the ones that flourish; it’s profoundly inhumane.”¹⁷

Books such as The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power and Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet clearly demonstrate that for the Australian authorities, technology is the gift that keeps on giving, offering levers of social control they could once only have dreamed of. 

A technology that evolved from the electronic footprints recorded by online searches during the earliest days of the internet now means you cannot enter a Woolworths or a Bunnings, you cannot drive down a public street or meet a friend on a street corner, without being under surveillance. 

The technology does not merely track your whereabouts and online activity but can determine your mood, IQ, heart rate, and multiple personality traits. It can detect whether or not a woman is pregnant before she herself knows.

In recent years there has been a plethora of advances in biometric tracing and associated technologies, including facial recognition at scale, and rafts of legislation to accompany it. 

Where does it all end? With the relaxation of euthanasia laws to include mental health issues, it is no longer science fiction to imagine a state where anyone who disagrees with climate change, mass immigration, gender diversity, or claims that vaccines are safe and effective, can be classified as mentally ill, and thereby a candidate for elimination. A surplus human. Easily dispensed with. And if anyone has the temerity to disagree with the state’s diagnosis and publicises the fact on social media, their voice will be systematically eliminated.

As US presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the repeatedly deplatformed author of The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, told a US House Committee inquiry recently: “Once you start censoring, you’re on your way to dystopia and totalitarianism.”

With the rapid evolution of brain-reading technology, there will soon be literally no place to hide. 

And if you think this is all being done for your benefit, you really do need your head read. You are not in good hands.

John Stapleton is the author of the new book Australia Breaks Apart, which shines a light on one of the darkest episodes in Australian history, the COVID overreach that gripped the nation in madness between 2020 and 2022. Order your copy from online booksellers.  

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Footnotes

1. infrastructure.gov.au/department/media/publications/communications-legislation-amendment-combatting-misinformation-and-disinformation-bill-2023

2. thenewdaily.com.au/news/national/2015/11/25/turnbull-doublespeak-encryption

3. afr.com/companies/financial-services/goldman-sachs-alumnus-malcolm-turnbull-runs-the-country-others-the-us-treasury-20161216-gtcb5k

4. michaelwest.com.au/australia-the-surveillance-state-with-journalists-now-pois-under-the-asio-act

5. thenewdaily.com.au/news/national/2017/10/30/detain-children-without-charge

6. youtube.com/watch?v=p9MJ8071l7M

7. weforum.org/agenda/authors/julie-inman-grant

8. apolitical.co/list/en/agile-50

9. sydneycriminallawyers.com.au/blog/will-new-federal-laws-protect-us-from-disinformation-or-serve-to-silence-political-dissent

10. news.rebekahbarnett.com.au/p/australian-governments-misinfo-bill

11. youtube.com/watch?v=8ZdV16Zreqc

12. abc.net.au/news/2023-06-25/fines-to-punish-online-misinformation-under-new-draft-bill/102521500

13. paulcollits.substack.com/p/peddling-outrage

14. news.rebekahbarnett.com.au/p/breaking-the-australian-government

15. Ibid.

16. theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/government-censors-work-hard-to-decide-what-we-are-allowed-to-see

17. thenewdaily.com.au/news/national/2017/01/09/surveillance-australia

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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From New Dawn Special Issue Vol 17 No 4 (Aug 2023)

Waiting for the Apocalypse, the Prologue to Volume One of my book Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, ends with a quote from (retired) Major General Shlomo Gazit, the best and the brightest of Israel’s Directors of Military Intelligence.

Over coffee one morning in early 1980, I took a deep, Gentile breath and said to him: “Shlomo, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s all a myth. Israel’s existence has never, ever, been in danger.” Through a sad smile he replied: “Alan, the trouble with us Israelis is that we’ve become the victims of our own propaganda.”

In this article for New Dawn I’m going to put some flesh on the bone of that statement to explain in tight and possibly inadequate summary how the Zionist (not Jewish) state of Israel became its own worst enemy and a threat not only to the peace of the region and the world, but also to the best interests of Jews everywhere and the moral integrity of Judaism itself.

The key to understanding is knowledge of the difference between Judaism and Zionism.

Judaism is the religion of Jews, not “the” Jews because not all Jews are religious. Like Christianity and Islam, Judaism has at its core a set of moral values and ethical principles. As Nazi holocaust survivor Dr Hajo Meyer states in his 2007 book, An Ethical Tradition Betrayed: The End of Judaism, these values and principles put Jews “at the forefront of humanitarian and socially constructive endeavours” throughout much of history. (A sort of light unto nations, I add, until Zionism came along).

Even the shortest definition of Zionism must begin by recognising that there is what might be called spiritual Zionism and political Zionism. In the sense that they look to Jerusalem as their spiritual capital or centre, all Jews who are religious could regard themselves as spiritual Zionists. The Zionism of my book’s title and substance (and this article) is political Zionism, hereafter Zionism.

It is Jewish nationalism in the form of a sectarian, colonial enterprise which, in the process of creating in the Arab heartland a state for some Jews, mainly by terrorism and ethnic cleansing, made a mockery of, and demonstrated contempt for, Judaism’s moral values and ethical principles.

Judaism insists that the return of Jews to biblical Israel must await the Second Coming of the Messiah. Zionism, when it declared itself to be in existence, in Switzerland in 1897, said, in effect: “We can’t wait for Him. Zionism is the Messiah.” As Israel’s longest-serving Director of Military Intelligence, Yehoshafat Harkabi, noted in his seminal book Israel’s Fateful Hour (published in English in 1986), the return of Jews to the land of the ancient Hebrews by the efforts of man and thus Zionism was “proscribed” by Judaism. Very few Jews today are aware of this, but it is a fact.

Judaism & Political Zionism are Total Opposites

Supporters of Israel right or wrong conflate Judaism and Zionism because the assertion that they are one and the same enables them to claim that criticism of the Zionist state of Israel is a manifestation of anti-Semitism. Often, almost always these days, the accusation that criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic is a form of blackmail intended to silence criticism of, and suppress informed and honest debate about, the Zionist state and its policies. The reality is that Judaism and political Zionism are total opposites, and knowledge of the difference is the key to understanding two things:

1) Why it is perfectly possible, with good reason on the basis of all the facts, to be passionately anti-Zionist – opposed to Zionism’s colonial enterprise – without being, in any way, shape or form anti-Semitic. (It’s worth noting that the most perceptive and devastating critics of Zionism were and are Jews).

2) Why it is wrong to blame all Jews everywhere for the crimes of the hardcore Zionist few in Palestine that became little Israel and then Greater Israel.

Most Arabs and other Muslims have always known the difference between Judaism and Zionism. And it can be said without fear of contradiction that throughout much of their history, Arabs and other Muslims were the best protectors of Jews in need of sanctuary. It was Zionism’s colonial enterprise that poisoned the relationship, but not to the point, yet, at which most Arabs and other Muslims blame all Jews for Zionism’s crimes.

Zionism’s Big Lies

Adolf Hitler best defined “The Big Lie.” It was, he wrote in Mein Kampf, “a lie so enormous that people would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” Zionism is the master of this art. Its narrative about the making and sustaining of conflict in and over Palestine – the narrative upon which the first and still existing draft of Judeo-Christian history is constructed – is one big propaganda lie after another.

Zionism’s first big lie was in its recruiting slogan which described Palestine as “A land without people for a people without land.” In reality, there were hundreds of Arab settlements in Palestine. And Haifa, Gaza, Jaffa, Nablus, Acre, Jericho, Ramle, Hebron and Nazareth were flourishing towns. And Jerusalem was a flourishing city. As many a traveller had noted, the hills of Palestine were painstakingly terraced, and irrigation ditches crisscrossed the most fertile part of the land. The products of the citrus orchards and olive groves were known throughout the world. Cottage industries were much in evidence. It’s true that Palestine was underdeveloped, as was all of the Arab world and much of the whole world; but uninhabited, uncultivated and uncivilised Palestine was not. Except in Zionist mythology.

It also has to be said that most if not all of the Jews who went to Palestine in answer to Zionism’s call had no biological connection to the ancient Hebrews. The incoming Zionist Jews were mainly foreign nationals of many lands, descended from those who became Jewish by conversion to Judaism centuries after the fall of the ancient Jewish kingdom of Israel and what is called the “dispersal” into “oblivion” of its people. The notion that there were, are, two entire peoples with an equally valid claim to the same land is historical nonsense. The relatively few Jews with a valid claim were the descendants of those who stayed in Palestine through everything. They numbered only a few thousand at the time of Zionism’s birth; they regarded themselves as Palestinians; and they were fiercely opposed to Zionism’s colonial enterprise – because they rightly feared that it would make them as well as the incoming, alien Zionist Jews enemies of the Arabs among whom they had lived in peace and security.

According to the first and still existing draft of Judeo-Christian history, Israel was given its birth certificate and thus legitimacy by the UN Partition Resolution of 29 November 1947. This, too, is nonsense.

In the first place, the UN without the consent of the majority of the people of Palestine, did not have the right to decide to partition Palestine or assign any part of its territory to a minority of alien immigrants in order for them to establish a state of their own.

Despite that, by the narrowest of margins, and only after a rigged vote, the UN General Assembly did pass a resolution to partition Palestine and create two states, one Arab, one Jewish, with Jerusalem not part of either. It was a formula for a massive injustice. Some 56.4 per cent of Palestine was to be given for a Jewish state to a people (many of them recently arrived alien immigrants) who constituted 33 per cent of the population and owned 5.57 per cent of the land.

But the General Assembly resolution was only a proposal – meaning that it could have no effect and would not become policy or confer even spurious legitimacy unless approved by the Security Council.

The truth is that the General Assembly’s partition proposal never went to the Security Council for consideration! Why not? Because the US knew that, if approved, it could only be implemented by force, and US President Truman was not prepared to use force to partition Palestine.

So the partition plan was vitiated (became invalid) and the question of what the hell to do about Palestine – after Britain had been driven out by Zionist terrorism and washed its hands of the problem – was taken back to the General Assembly for more discussion. The option favoured and proposed by the US was temporary UN Trusteeship. It was while the General Assembly was debating what to do that Israel unilaterally declared itself to be in existence – actually in defiance of the will of the organised international community, including the Truman administration.

The truth of the time was that the Zionist state had no right to exist and, more to the point, could have no right to exist unless… Unless it was recognised and legitimised by those who were dispossessed of their land and their rights during the creation of the Zionist state. In international law, only the Palestinians could give Israel the legitimacy it craved. And that legitimacy was the only thing the Zionists could not take from the Palestinians by force.

Foundational Myth “a sheer fabrication”

Zionism’s second big lie was in its explanation of how the Palestinian refugee problem was created. According to it, the 700,000 Arabs who became refugees left their homeland voluntarily, in response to a call from Arab leaders for them to leave a clear field of fire for the incoming Arab armies. The truth about how three-quarters of the indigenous Arabs of Palestine were disposed of their land, their homes and their rights is now fully documented in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Professor Ilan Pappe, one of Israel’s leading “revisionist” (which means honest) historians. He describes Israel’s foundational myth (the Palestinians left voluntarily) as “a sheer fabrication.” And he documents the planning and implementation of Zionism’s ethnic cleansing policy – a systematic reign of terror which, from December 1947 to January 1949, included 31 massacres.

In 1940, when Nazi persecution of Europe’s Jews was turning to extermination, Joseph Weitz, the head of the Jewish Agency’s Colonisation Department in Palestine, wrote a secret memorandum headed A Solution to the (Jewish) Refugee Problem. In it, he said: “It must be clear that there is no room for both peoples together in this country. We shall not achieve our goal if the Arabs are in this country. There is no other way than to transfer the Arabs from here to neighbouring countries – all of them. Not one village, not one tribe, should be left!” (In Israeli terminology, then and today, “transfer” is a euphemism for ethnic cleansing).

On 17 November 1948, Aharon Cizling, Israel’s first minister of agriculture said the following at a cabinet meeting: “Now the Jews have behaved like Nazis and my entire being is shaken.” But having spoken those words, he agreed that the Zionist state’s crimes should be covered up.

Zionism’s colonial enterprise would not have attracted enough Jewish financial and political support and would have been doomed to failure but for the obscenity of the Nazi holocaust. Prior to the extermination of six million Jews – a European crime for which the Arabs, effectively, were punished – most Jews of the world were not interested in Zionism’s colonial enterprise, and the most informed and thoughtful of them were strongly opposed to it.They believed it to be morally wrong. They believed it would lead to unending conflict. And they feared that if Zionism was allowed by the major powers to have its way, it would one day provoke anti-Semitism which could threaten the wellbeing and perhaps even the survival of Jews everywhere. In 1986 Harkabi gave this fear a fresh airing when he wrote (my emphasis added):

 “Israel is the criterion according to which all Jews will tend to be judged. Israel as a Jewish state is an example of the Jewish character, which finds free and concentrated expression within it. Anti-Semitism has deep and historical roots. Nevertheless, any flaw in Israeli conduct, which initially is cited as anti-Israelism, is likely to be transformed into empirical proof of the validity of anti-Semitism. It would be a tragic irony if the Jewish state, which was intended to solve the problem of anti-Semitism, was to become a factor in the rise of anti-Semitism. Israelis must be aware that the price of their misconduct is paid not only by them but also Jews throughout the world.”

The core assertion of Zionism’s version of history – this is the third big lie – is that poor little Israel has lived in danger of annihilation – the “driving into the sea” of its Jews.

The truth of history, which flows fully documented through my book and is implicitly endorsed in its Prologue by Shlomo Gazit as quoted above, is that Israel’s existence has never, ever been in danger from any combination of Arab force. Zionism’s assertion to the contrary was the cover that allowed Israel to get away where it mattered most – in America and Western Europe – with having its aggression perceived as self-defence and presenting itself as the victim when, actually, it was and is the oppressor.

Despite their stupid rhetoric to the contrary which enabled Zionism to sell its lies as truth, Arab leaders did not have either the ability or the intention to destroy the Zionist state at birth. When they ordered elements of their armies into Palestine in response to Israel’s unilateral declaration of independence on 14 May 1948, their only intention was to hold the territory assigned to the Arab state of the vitiated partition plan – to prevent the Zionists from grabbing it, too.

During a 30-day truce that ended on 9 July, the IDF (Israeli Defense Force) came formally into being with 60,000 men added to its fighting strength. When the first Arab-Israeli war was resumed, it was no contest. Some 90,000 well-armed Israelis were taking on not more than 21,000 Arab soldiers and irregular forces who were without the ammunition and weapons to offer more than token resistance. From that point on it was the Arab (Palestinian) state of the vitiated partition plan that was facing the prospect of annihilation, not the Zionist state. And from that point on Israel was the Goliath. (US President John F. Kennedy tried and failed to prevent it from becoming a nuclear-armed Goliath).

The Six Days War & Israel’s Warhawks

I write and speak as an eyewitness to the Six Days War of June 1967. For ITN, I was the first Western correspondent to the banks of the Suez Canal with the advancing Israelis; and because of the quality of my contacts – they included one of the founding fathers of Israel’s Directorate of Military Intelligence – I was privy to some of the plotting behind closed doors on the Israeli side in the countdown to war.

Nearly four decades on, almost all Jews everywhere and most other people still believe that Israel went to war either because the Arabs attacked (that was Israel’s first claim), or because the Arabs were intending to attack (thus requiring Israel to launch a pre-emptive strike). The truth about that war only begins with the statement that the Arabs did not attack and were not intending to attack. The complete truth includes the following facts.

Israel’s prime minister of the time, the much-maligned Levi Eshkol, did not want to take his country to war. Nor did his chief of staff, Yitzhak Rabin. They wanted only very limited military action, an operation far, far short of war, to put pressure on the international community to cause Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser to re-open the Straits of Tiran. (Nasser was, in fact, looking forward to that pressure to save face).

Israel went to war because its military and political hawks insisted that the Arabs were about to attack. They, Israel’s hawks, knew that was nonsense – years later some of them admitted that much, but at the time they promoted it to undermine Eshkol by portraying him to the country as weak. The climax to the campaign to rubbish Eshkol was a demand by the hawks that he surrender the defense portfolio and give it to Moshe Dayan, Zionism’s one-eyed warlord and master of deception. Four days after Dayan got the portfolio he wanted, and the hawks had secured the green light from the Johnson administration to smash Egypt’s air and ground forces, Israel went to war.

What actually happened in Israel in the final countdown to that war was something very close to a military coup, executed quietly behind closed doors without a shot being fired. For Israel’s hawks, the war of 1967 was the unfinished business of 1948/49 – to create Greater Israel with all of Jerusalem as its capital. (In reality, Israel’s hawks set a trap for Nasser and, for reasons of face, he was daft enough to walk into it).

The single most catastrophic happening of 1967 was not, however, the war itself and the creation of Greater Israel. At America’s insistence, and with the eventual complicity of the Soviet Union, it (the single most catastrophic happening) was the refusal of the Security Council of the United Nations to condemn Israel as the aggressor. If it had done so, the history of the region and the world might well have taken a very different course. There might well have been a negotiated end to the Arab-Israeli conflict and a comprehensive peace within a year or two.

Question: Why, really, was it so important from the Zionist state’s point of view that it not be branded the aggressor when actually it was? The full answer is in my book, the short version of it comes down to this.

Aggressors are not allowed to keep the territory they take in war. They have to withdraw from it unconditionally. This is the requirement of international law and, also, a fundamental principle the UN is committed to upholding. Eisenhower was the first and last American president to uphold it with regard to Israel when he read the riot act after it had colluded with Britain and France in 1956 to invade Egypt. That is on the one hand.

On the other hand is the generally accepted view that when a state is attacked, is the victim of aggression, and then goes to war in genuine self-defence and ends up occupying some (or even all) of the aggressor’s territory, the occupier has the right, in negotiations, to attach conditions to its withdrawal.

In summary, it can be said that although Security Council Resolution 242 of 23 November 1967 did pay lip service to “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war,” it effectively put Zionism in the diplomatic driving seat. By not condemning Israel as the aggressor and thereby giving Israel the scope to attach conditions to its withdrawal, Resolution 242 effectively gave Israel’s leaders and the Zionist lobby in America a veto over any peace process.

In 1956, when he insisted Israel withdraw from the Sinai without conditions, President Eisenhower said that if a nation that attacked and occupied foreign territory was allowed to impose conditions on its withdrawal, “this would be tantamount to turning back the clock of international order.” That’s what happened in 1967. President Johnson, preoccupied with and distracted by the war in Vietnam, and mainly on the advice of those in his inner circle who were hardcore Zionists, turned back the clock of the international order. And that effectively created two sets of rules for the behaviour of nations – one set for all the nations of the world excluding Israel, which were expected to behave in accordance with international law and their obligations of members of the United Nations; and one set for Israel, which was not expected to behave, and would not be required to behave, in accordance with international law and its obligations as a member of the United Nations. That double-standard is the mother and father of Arab and all other Muslim hurt, humiliation and anger.

And that’s where we still are today, with two sets of rules for the behaviour of nations. But it’s no longer one set of rules for the Zionist state of Israel only. Under President George “Dubya” Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair, America and Britain became associate members of Israel’s Club of One and demonstrated complete contempt for international law. They turned back the clock on it.

On 7 October 1973, it was the Arabs – the Egyptians and the Syrians – who initiated the fighting. But their intention was only to liberate (take back) territory Israel occupied in 1967, in Egypt’s case only a small amount of it, to give US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger the opportunity to get a peace process going – a peace process in which Israel had no interest prior to that war. Even Kissinger had been troubled by Israel’s intransigence and the threat he believed it posed to America’s and Israel’s own real and best interests in the region. (In Volume Two of my book I tell the story of Kissinger’s collusion with Egypt’s President Anwar El Sadat and how and why the war for peace they both wanted went seriously wrong when Israel’s General Ariel Sharon decided to teach Kissinger as well as Sadat a lesson).

Israel, not the Arabs, Sabotaged Peace Efforts

Zionism’s fourth big lie, repeated ad nauseam over the years, was that Israel had “no partners,” Palestinian or other Arabs, for peace. The most detailed and fully documented demolition of this lie is in The Iron Wall, Israel and the Arab World by Professor Avi Shlaim, another of Israel’s leading revisionist historians. On the basis of his examination of de-classified Israeli state papers, other documents and conversations with key players, Avi concluded that it was Israel, not the Arabs, which spurned opportunity after opportunity to be serious about making peace.

Take, for example, Egypt’s President Nasser. According to Israel and its most zealous French, British and American supporters, Nasser was the “Hitler on the Nile.” In reality, Nasser was looking and working for an accommodation with Israel from almost the moment he came to power in a bloodless coup in 1951. He authorised a low-level, secret exploratory dialogue with Israel and subsequently had secret exchanges of his own, some in writing, with Israeli Foreign Minister and briefly Prime Minister Moshe Sharett, who was probably the only completely rational leader Israel has ever had.

As I discovered during the research for my book Arafat, Terrorist or Peacemaker? it was Nasser, after the 1967 war, who convinced Yasser Arafat that if the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) wanted to be taken seriously by the major powers of the West and the Kremlin, it had to be “realistic.” What did that mean? Arafat and his leadership colleagues would have to come up with a policy for an accommodation with Israel inside its pre-1967 borders, in accordance with the letter and spirit of Resolution 242.

It took Arafat ten long years to persuade first his Fatah leadership colleagues and then the PNC (Palestine National Council, more or less the Palestinian parliament-in-exile) to back his policy of politics and unthinkable compromise with Israel. The compromise he was requiring his people to make was unthinkable to almost all at the outset because it required the Palestinians not only to legitimise Israel’s existence and make peace with it in return for only 22% of the land they were claiming with right, legal and moral, on their side. It also required them to legitimise Zionism’s theft of the other 78% of their land.

Towards the end of 1979 when the PNC voted on and approved Arafat’s policy of politics and compromise, I had the first of many meetings with him. As he came to the end of the story of his struggle to sell compromise, he extracted a notebook from his hip pocket. “It’s all here,” he said with triumph. “Let me tell you the figures… 296 votes for the mini-state formula, only four against. Imagine that! We have turned our people around. No more this silly talk of driving the Jews into the sea. Now we are prepared to live alongside them in a little state of our own. It is a miracle.”

Arafat himself was the miracle worker. No other Palestinian leader could have done it. With his policy of politics and compromise endorsed by the highest decision-making authority on the Palestinian side, Arafat was then at the height of his powers. He could have delivered the compromise necessary from his side for peace on terms that any rational government and people in Israel would have accepted with relief. The problem was that Arafat did not have a partner for peace on the Israeli side. The most successful terrorist leader of modern times, Menachem Begin, was in power in the Zionist state; and he was stuffing the occupied West Bank with settlers to make it impossible for any future Israeli government to withdraw for peace. And that was a manifestation of an underlying truth – Zionism is not interested in peace on any terms the vast majority of Palestinians and most other Arabs and Muslims everywhere could accept. (Arafat did eventually have a partner for peace on the Israeli side, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, but he was assassinated by a zealous Zionist who knew exactly what he was doing – killing the peace process).

Why does the truth of history matter?

The political reality to be faced can be summarised as follows. The governments of the major powers are never going to use the leverage they have to call and hold Zionism to account for its crimes unless and until they are pushed to do so by informed public opinion – by demonstrations of real democracy in action. The problem throughout the mainly Gentile Judeo-Christian or Western world is that citizens, the voters (most of them), are too uninformed to do the pushing because they’ve been conditioned by the corporate-controlled mainstream media to believe a version of history that is simply not true. It follows, or so it seems to me, that if the countdown to catastrophe for all is to be stopped, the name of the game must be empowering the citizens of nations to make democracy work for justice and peace in the Middle East. That’s why I devoted more than five years of my life to researching and writing Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews.

The above article originally appeared in New Dawn 113 (Mar-Apr 2009). Alan Hart passed away at the age of 75 in 2018, but you can still obtain his valuable and powerful books, Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews (Volumes 1, 2 & 3), from claritypress.com/book-author/alan-hart.

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From New Dawn 118 (Jan-Feb 2010)

In the “last times,” said the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, “You’ll be riding along in an automobile… When the trumpet sounds, you and other born-again believers in that automobile will be instantly caught away… the car suddenly crashes.… Other cars on the highways driven by believers will suddenly be out of control and stark pandemonium will occur.”¹

He was speaking of the Rapture, an integral part of his belief in Armageddon and the return of Christ. He spoke with confidence; did he have any reason to do so? 

Around AD 95 a Christian convert called John, exiled by the Roman authorities to the Greek island of Patmos, had a vision of Christ’s return: not the compassionate Christ of the Gospels but a violent one, stained with the blood of his enemies and about to battle against the Antichrist at Armageddon – a site in the Jezreel valley, northern Israel, beneath the brooding ruins of ancient Megiddo.

John wrote a furious and violent text, his Revelation, which after several hundred years was finally included in the New Testament as its final book. 

John was certain that the end was coming at any moment. Indeed, he believed that some who had witnessed the crucifixion would still be alive. John was wrong but his apocalyptic prediction of the last days has reverberated through the centuries. Even today there are those who think they will live to witness it.

Fifty-nine percent of all American Christians – according to polls in 2002 – believe that the events described in Revelation will occur in their lifetime; amongst fundamentalist Christians the figure reaches seventy-seven percent. In the last days, they believe, the Messiah – Jesus – will return, win the great battle against Satan (the Antichrist, the Beast) and convert the entire world to Christianity. Thereafter he will rule from Jerusalem.

Beliefs can create events. Ideas are powerful and linger well-entrenched and active in the cultural consciousness. And if those who share these beliefs are serving in an army in the Middle East and think that the ultimate enemy is Satan, what then?

“And the enemy is a guy called Satan”

US Lieutenant General William Boykin, in June 2003, during the Iraq war, laid out such an explanation at a church in Oregon. 

“We… are in a spiritual battle, not a physical battle… the battle this nation is in is a spiritual battle, it’s a battle for our soul. And the enemy is a guy called Satan.… Satan wants to destroy this nation.”²

Lieutenant General Boykin has a history: in 1980 he was in the Iranian desert as operations officer for the attempt to free the United States Embassy hostages; in 1989 he was in Panama with the operation to capture President Noriega; in 1993 he was in Colombia with Delta Force, chasing Pablo Escobar, the cocaine baron. That same year Boykin was an adviser on the confrontation with the Branch Davidian sect at Waco, Texas, and by October he was in Somalia, commanding the Delta Force group and was present during the battle of Mogadishu, the subject of Black Hawk Down.

He was appointed head of the Special Operations Division at the Pentagon, moved to the CIA as Deputy Director of Special Activities and then placed in charge of the United States Army Special Forces Command. In 2003–2004 he was involved with the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. 

Boykin was not a lone eccentric: when, in 2004, Lieutenant Colonel Gareth Brandl was leading his men in an assault on Falluja, in mid-Iraq, he inspired them by proclaiming, “The enemy has got a face. He’s called Satan. And we’re going to destroy him.”³

Of course, fundamentalist Christians have an escape card that they can play: the Rapture. It is a very simple concept, if you are on the side of Jesus, then you get whisked away by God before the troubles start. If you are somewhere else in the vast realm of religious aspiration then you don’t. 

When you get taken there is no warning that allows you to park your car or finish brushing your teeth. God grabs you and you are gone. Implicit in the story is that those left behind actually deserve whatever happens. They are sinners who must be punished. The Rapture does not “do” compassion.

But curiously the Rapture is not mentioned in Revelation. Neither is there any such teaching in Judaism. Islam too is silent on the subject. Nor does Roman Catholic, Orthodox or mainstream Protestant theology contain its story. 

In fact, the Rapture is a relatively recent spin on cherry-picked biblical extracts. It has its origins in two sources: the writings of John Nelson Darby (1800–1882), the founder of the Plymouth Brethren and in the commentaries of the Reverend Cyrus Ingerson Scofield (1843–1921) in The Scofield Reference Bible, 1909. The modern picture of the Rapture with its crashing cars and aeroplanes dates from the 1950s and was first launched to a large public audience by fundamentalist preacher Hal Lindsey in 1970 with his book The Late Great Planet Earth. 

The Biblical Prophecy Industry

During the morning of 7 June 1967 the future of the Middle East changed dramatically. The Temple Mount was taken by Israeli forces. With the Old City and the Temple Mount in Jewish hands, the Christian fundamentalist prophecy industry went into overdrive. These events, they said, provided direct proof that their understanding of biblical prophecy was correct and that the last days were closing in.

During March and April of 1967 Hal Lindsey was lecturing on college campuses throughout California on the apocalyptic events prophesied in the Bible. His talks centred on the three great events concerning the Jews that would be signs of the return of Jesus and the final defeat of the Antichrist: firstly, the gathering of Jews together to reform their ancient nation; secondly, the possession of Jerusalem and the holy places by Israel; thirdly, the rebuilding of the Temple.⁴

The first sign was fulfilled on May 14, 1948, with the creation of the modern state of Israel. One can imagine Lindsey’s excitement when Israel took Jerusalem and its holy places, thereby fulfilling the second sign. Would the third event take place? Lindsey had no doubt at all that it would despite his admission that the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount was an “obstacle.” 

When the Israeli paratroopers took the Temple Mount they assigned one of their young brigade chaplains, Yisrael Ariel, to guard the entrance to the Dome of the Rock. He later recalled thinking that he was simply minding the site until army engineers could come and tear the structure down.⁵ 

The expectation of the hard-line fundamentalists was that the Israeli state would take this opportunity to return the Temple Mount to Jewish worship. But the engineers never arrived; the site was maintained as an Islamic place of worship. 

Ariel had studied under a messianic teacher, Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook, who saw the influx of Jews into Israel as part of a divine plan and opposed any Arabs holding land that was once Jewish. Kook felt that the time of the Messiah was coming closer; the events in the world about him were a prelude to the last days.

In 1974 a number of Rabbi Kook’s followers organised the West Bank settler movement, the Gush Emunim, whose members flooded into the West Bank and built heavily defended communities. Ariel, by then a rabbi, moved to the hard right of religious Zionism joining the violent and racist Kach political party; in the 1981 elections Ariel was on the Party list. He despised those Jews who did not want to rebuild the Temple and he stated his belief that Christians and Muslims were idol worshippers who, by Jewish law, were forbidden to live in Israel. Then, in 1984, Ariel founded the Temple Institute. Its registration documents state that its long-term aim is to rebuild the Temple. 

I first encountered the Temple Institute in January 1992 while on a break from cave-exploration in the high cliffs bordering the Dead Sea. I decided to visit them and hear what they had to say.

There, Rabbi Chaim Richman told a story that left me shaken: members of the Institute wished to remove the Dome of the Rock and the al-AqsaMosque so that the Temple of Solomon could be rebuilt. And to serve the Temple they were training priests in the tradition of blood sacrifice. Richman carefully explained the Institute’s mission: 

“The Temple represents harmony; it will bring harmony to the world.”⁶

He later wrote that Jerusalem would be recognised “as the spiritual centre of all humanity.”⁷ 

“Israel,” he added, has the divine mission of being a “kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”⁸

And this brings us to their interest in the “red heifer.”

A Perfect Red Heifer

Of the many enigmatic stories in the Old Testament, there are few stranger than that related in Numbers 19:1–22 which concerns the sacrifice of, “a red heifer without fault or blemish.” This animal was slaughtered and burned, its ashes gathered and kept in a ritually clean location. These ashes were the most powerful substance known in ancient Judaism to ensure ritual purity. 

The orthodox Jews wishing to build the Third Temple today cannot risk entering the Temple Mount in case they inadvertently step upon the site once occupied by the Holy of Holies. Since no one knows exactly where this stood there is only one way of proceeding: to purify the site using the ashes of the red heifer. 

As they enter the Temple Mount they will sprinkle sacred water mixed with the ashes of the red heifer to ensure that they do not lose their ritual purity. In this way they can begin the demolition of the Islamic structures.

No such perfect red heifers exist today but Rabbi Richman mentioned a cattle-breeding programme being conducted in the United States with the help of fundamentalist Christian groups that also await the Messiah – for them, Jesus. But Richman was adamant that there was no possibility of Jesus being the Jewish Messiah.

A key figure in this breeding programme was a Christian Pentecostal rancher, the Rev. Clyde Lott of Canton, Mississippi. In 1989 he realised that the Red Angus breed might produce the required animal. Lott and Richman quickly joined forces. During 1991 and 1992 they instituted the breeding program, initially on ranches in the United States but later in Israel. However, producing a perfect heifer proved difficult. 

In 1996 a red heifer – named Melody – was finally born on a farm near Haifa though by 1997 she was pronounced unworthy of sacrifice. Since that time a number of others have been born but all have proved less than perfect. 

Nevertheless, the Temple Institute presses on. In 2007 they gave an explanation of the importance of the red heifer, commenting that, “A perfect heifer, born and raised under a controlled environment, would be fit to be used for the Temple. And that is precisely what is being done today.”⁹

I returned to the Temple Institute in 2007, paid my fee and slipped down to join the small group of US Christians. Next to me was Mark from Texas. We were taken to a room containing a large model of the Temple. Our lecturer began explaining the various elements. I noted, leaning against the rear wall of the room, a framed colour photograph of a red heifer. I wondered why it was not hanging on the wall. It seemed oddly disrespectful. And curiously, our lecturer didn’t mention it at all.

As we exited the Temple Institute and were walking up the street, I approached Mark from Texas and asked, “Didn’t Jesus’ death remove the need for animal sacrifices in the Temple?”

“Yes,” replied Mark from Texas with a knowing smile, “He was the sacrificial Lamb of God and stopped animal sacrifice for all time. The Jews don’t recognise that Jesus stopped the animal sacrifices.”

Mark from Texas had touched upon a major difficulty that accompanies Christian support for those Jewish groups wishing to rebuild the Temple. The Christians want the Temple rebuilt because this brings the second coming of Jesus closer. The Jewish groups are happy to accept their patronage since it represents backing for Israel as well as significant financial aid. In addition, of course, both groups are also choosing to ignore that the fundamentalist Christians are intent upon convincing all the Jews that Jesus is the Messiah. 

And there is more to worry about: in ancient times there was a Jewish religious authority operating in parallel to the Roman administration, the Sanhedrin, the ultimate authority in matters of the interpretation of Mosaic law and which had the power to impose the death penalty. 

After the Temple’s destruction in AD 70, the Sanhedrin moved through a series of sites, the last being Tiberius, around AD 425. And so it was in Tiberius, in 2004, that the new Sanhedrin was convened. 

One of the Sanhedrin’s aims is to influence the political direction of Israel, seeking power to veto any laws that it deems incompatible with biblical Jewish law. A leadership council of seven prominent members was formed; this included Rabbi Yisrael Ariel, the founder of the Temple Institute along with his colleague Rabbi Chaim Richman.¹⁰ It is no surprise to find that “the Sanhedrin is researching ways to renew the deepest roots of our faith – to renew Temple service.”¹¹

The Mahdi and Jesus Return for the Last Days

The relevance of events of June 1967 was not missed by the Muslims. Their traditional enemies were now in possession of the third most sacred site in Islam. The defeat of the Arab armies ushered in radical Islam which believes the only solution is a world united in a great Islamic state under a Caliph based in Jerusalem ruling by sharia law. 

For most Muslims who await the caliphate its appearance would be the sign of the last days when the Messiah – the Mahdi – will appear. And at his side, they believe, will stand Jesus.

But before the Day of Judgment can begin, according to one widely accepted hadith dating from the ninth century AD, all Jews must be slaughtered. This has become an integral part of Middle Eastern politics: the 1988 foundation charter of Hamasstates explicitly that the organisation seeks “to implement Allah’s promise” that the Day of Judgment will not come until the Muslims have killed all the Jews.¹²

The aim is to ensure that not a single member of the Jewish race survives, then to seize Jerusalem which will become the messianic capital of Islam; to take over all the technology developed by the West and put it in the hands of the true believers and finally, to convert the whole world to Islam, placing Allah’s people into their rightful position – in charge. That, in essence, is the Islamic apocalyptic vision of the last days.

But the Mahdi and his armies are not just fighting a coalition of disparate races; there is a single directing force acting behind them – the Antichrist, the Dajjal.

Modern Islamic writers have gone far beyond traditional texts in the search for material to justify their last days prophecies and the Christian book of Revelation has proved a rich mine to plunder. Material has also been drawn from many other sources, ranging from early Gnostic texts through the prophecies of Nostradamus to modern Western UFO literature.

Best-selling Egyptian author Muhammad Isa Da’ud would have us believe in the existence of, “the Antichrist army of Jinn [spirits] and demons, which kidnap unfortunates who wander into the area of the Bermuda Triangle. Those who are kidnapped are taken down into his fortress castle far beneath the waters.”¹³

In 1997 Muhammad Izzat Arif, who considered rather more plausibly that this Bermuda Triangle base was above water, explained that, “The truth is that the Antichrist is a power chained on a remote island, sending his orders through demons subordinated to him, and working before him as servants,”¹⁴ adding that, “They inspire Jews, and their slaves the Masons.”

These demons under the control of the Antichrist have another specific role: they pilot the UFOs the Antichrist uses. In 1996 writer Hisham Kamal ‘Abd al-Hamidexplained that the flying saucers were not from extraterrestrial sources but rather from the earth, which he reminds us is inhabited by both humans and jinns. He concludes, as we noted earlier, that the “people of flying saucers are demons in human form.”¹⁵ 

Perversely, as noted, much of the material comes from Christian sources, which seem well known to the Islamic writers. Jerry Falwell’s writings are frequently referred to by Muslim apocalyptic writers and he is considered an authority on the end of the world. 

Others who receive a mention in the Islamic sources are Caspar Weinberger, Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker, Pat Robertson, Oral Roberts, Kenneth Copeland, Richard De Haan, Billy Graham, and, surprisingly, the Scofield Bible.¹⁶

These radical Muslims assume that the world will convert to Islam; the extremist Christians assume the world will convert to Christianity; the Jewish fundamentalists care only that Jews serve on the Temple Mount, they don’t seem to be concerned how the rest of the world shakes out. But all three religions claim Jerusalem as the centre for their Messiah’s rule. 

It appears that these apocalyptic writers from the three Abrahamic religions have more in common with each other than with the moderate majority within their own traditions, a majority who generally have no great arguments with each other. 

The certainty, self-confidence, and aggressiveness of the fundamentalists is shifting their faith’s centre of gravity toward the rigid and intolerant edges. The hardliners are deliberately encouraging a focus upon differences instead of seeking points of similarity, accord, and mutual understanding. A separation is being created, which, in time, may become too wide to bridge.

Fundamentalist Arrogance and Ignorance

What worries me about all this is the breathtaking arrogance and willful ignorance of spirituality by the fundamentalists of the three faiths. There is no room for any other spiritual systems, no room for Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, or the many other perfectly valid paths by which spiritually minded people journey toward knowledge of matters divine.

Fundamentalist Christian authors Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins are blunt, “The idea that all religions point to the same god is blasphemy. So is the idea that there are many ways to God. Buddha, Mary, Gaia, Muhammad, and Christ are not in the same category.… Just one was God’s ‘only begotten Son’, and only He gives us access to God through prayer.”¹⁷

The concept of a divine Jesus is a problem for Judaism and Islam. For Muslims, the failure of the other two religions to recognise Mohammed as the last prophet represents an additional conflict point. For the Jews, the failure to recognise the importance of the Temple and its priesthood as a conduit between God and earth is a crucial difficulty. The three positions seem irreconcilable. 

Can we continue to live with this or should we reconsider our position towards the anthropomorphic god of the Abrahamic religions? Should we really accept all authority deriving from a vengeful and jealous god who claims to be unique? Should we just sit back and watch as the fundamentalist religious teachings leak inexorably and dangerously into our politics? 

We have found ourselves across the Rubicon, by default rather than design. The question is: what are we going to do about it?

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Footnotes

1. Ronnie Dugger, “Reagan’s Apocalypse Now,” Guardian (reprinted from Washington Post), April 21, 1984, 19.

2. Esther Kaplan, With God on Their Side, New Press, New York, 2005, 21.

3. Paul Wood, “Hunting ‘Satan’ in Falluja Hell,” BBC News, November 23, 2004, quoted in John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, Penguin, London, 2007, 28. 

4. Hal Lindsey, The Late Great Planet Earth, Zondervan, Grand Rapids, 1970, 50–51.

5. Gershom Gorenberg, The End of Days, Free Press, New York, 2000, 100.

6. Richman, personal communication, January, 1992.

7. Chaim Richman, A House of Prayer for all Nations: The Holy Temple of Jerusalem, Temple Institute, Jerusalem, 1997, 7.

8. Chaim Richman, “Rosh HaShana Blessings from the Temple Institute”, September 21, 2006, www.templeinstitute.org/news.htm. 

9. The Temple Institute, “The Red Heifer: The Original Ashes”, www.templeinstitute.org/red_heifer/original_ashes.htm.

10. “Current members of the Sanhedrin”, www.thesanhedrin.org/en/main/officers.html.

11. “Reestablished Sanhedrin Convenes to Discuss Temple”, Arutz-7 IsraelNationalNews.com, February 9, 2005, www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/76624.

12. Noted in a submission by the World Union for Progressive Judaism to the fifty-ninth session of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, February 18, 2003, 5. File No. E/CN.4/2003/NGO/226.

13. David Cook, Contemporary Muslim Apocalyptic Literature, Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, 2005, 78.

14. Ibid, 188.

15. Ibid, 81.

16. Ibid, 92nn9,10, 11.

17. Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, Are We Living in the End Times?, Tyndale, Wheaton, 1999,176.

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
For our reproduction notice, click here.