How come the Chosen People turned into emissaries of death, violence, and terrorism?

The persecution plague

How did it happen that a nation that was persecuted, hunted, oppressed, exiled, humiliated, and nearly annihilated has become so violent and hateful? How come the Chosen People turned into emissaries of death, violence, and terrorism?

Tal Eitan Published: 04.16.07, 16:51 / Israel Culture

For centuries, the Jewish nation was persecuted by all kinds of evildoers - religious, political, and even "scientific." Persecuted first because they introduced monotheism, the Jews were later victimized by Christians over the crucifixion of Christ, and later encountered all kinds of hate and smear campaigns that peaked with the systematic killing of Jews by the Nazi regime in the Holocaust. The hatred that blinded the world and left millions dead led to the establishment of the state of the mistreated, a refuge for the Jews in the Land of Israel.

We have always treated ourselves as the chosen nation. Judaism does carry individual and collective power, exciting culture, wisdom, simplicity, beauty, and magic, offering a tradition to be praised, extolled, admired, and commended. Our Bible contains advanced and enlightened rules and laws that protect those among us who are different, weak, and oppressed. It is full of love for humankind and all other God's creatures. Over the years, our greatest rabbis and Halakic rulers used the Book of Books to bring justice and wisdom, to tell right from wrong, to instill values of true and human morality that even the best legislators of the most enlightened countries would envy.

Alas, as time goes by, the beauty of our religion is eroded gradually as people abuse the Book and exploit its phrases to promote political causes. Once those good old words are distorted this way, they get politically biased, lose their human meaning, and become extremely dangerous. Under the rule of cynics with no moral scruples, the attitude of Judaism toward all men who were created in His shape has turned into a terrifying smear and hate campaign where mad rabbis push for the death of politicians, promote the oppression of entire sectors, and preach harming others, who are different and weak.

Hatred that ignores all traditional interpretations

For example, the "best" rabbis explained why it is so dangerous to let Gay Parade - which they named Profanity Parade - march in Jerusalem. Wishing to reunite their disintegrating courts, to regain their lost followers and eroded status, the heads of those religious courts referred to a single sentence from Leviticus. Ignoring dozens of other decrees that call on the Nation of Israel to severely punish the deviants, those rabbis decided to excite their followers by condemning Gay Parade.

Leviticus contains many other sentences, of course, that order us to "love thy neighbor," to love the foreigners among us, and to respect our parents and elderly. It contains rules that are not less severe than the one against sodomy - stating that it is wrong to shave beards, make tattoos, or hire sorcerers or necromancers. It is, therefore, surprising that the rabbis decided not to pick on those who mark their skin with tattoo or the readers of astrology sections in the weekend papers, but chose to rise against homosexuals. Something about gays made the rabbis produce such hatred that ignored all the traditional interpretations, the humane concepts that are the foundation of Judaism, the concept of loving all other God-made humans.

The results were not late in coming: Severe violence that has nothing to do with true, beautiful, old and forgotten Judaism erupted. Garbage cans were torched, police officers wounded, property damaged. One hateful person even went as far as trying to murder a marcher. Adam David-Russo still carries the scars from the wounds he sustained in Jerusalem's Gay Parade 2005. Some called it a "civil war," blaming the cynical and ugly abuse of universal and Jewish values by rabbis and leaders.

Emissaries of death

How did we - the chosen, kind, and exalted nation turn into emissaries of death, violence, and terrorism? Who dared claim the right to turn the meaning of our beautiful and wonderful Book into a murder-instigation call? Moreover, why did we keep silent in the face of this dreadful and cynical abuse? Why did we let them translate the Good Book into this kind of horrible and destructive meaning?

Really, how did it happen that a nation that was persecuted, hunted, oppressed, exiled, humiliated, and nearly annihilated for hundreds of years has become so violent and hateful? Have we learned nothing from that blind hatred that was based on old beliefs and clear interests that any intelligent person should have seen?

This is my plague and it hangs like a rattling saber over our heads, threatening to cut - in a single blow - hundreds of years of faith and love, of loving traditions that stand humble in the face of God's most wonderful creation - Man, all of mankind.

Jundullah: Iran-Contra Crimes Revisited

Friday April 06th 2007, 9:39 am

It is part Contra, part “al-Qaeda,” and part Taliban. “A Pakistani tribal militant group responsible for a series of deadly guerrilla raids inside Iran has been secretly encouraged and advised by American officials since 2005,” reports ABC News. “The group, called Jundullah, is made up of members of the Baluchi tribe and operates out of the Baluchistan province in Pakistan, just across the border from Iran…. U.S. officials say the U.S. relationship with Jundullah is arranged so that the U.S. provides no funding to the group, which would require an official presidential order or ‘finding’ as well as congressional oversight.”

Congressionally approved funding is not an issue, as Jundullah’s leader, Abd el Malik Regi, is not only “part Taliban, part Sunni activist,” but a drug smuggler as well—a not uncommon profession for “activists” working for the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI. “Regi is essentially commanding a force of several hundred guerrilla fighters that stage attacks across the border into Iran on Iranian military officers, Iranian intelligence officers, kidnapping them, executing them on camera,” explained Alexis Debat, a senior fellow on counterterrorism at the Nixon Center and an ABC News consultant.

Not that you’ll hear a peep about this in the corporate media, now so obsessed with the Iranian release of British “hostages,” that is to say admitted military intelligence operatives working for the Royal Marines.

Jundullah members captured in Iran after blowing up a bus with members of the Revolutionary Guard onboard back in February “said they had been trained for the mission at a secret location in Pakistan.” Back in 2003, the CIA established “secret bases” in Pakistan, ostensibly to hunt for the dead Osama bin Laden and his dour pranksters, that is to say patsies and mental deficients.

Of course, this is but the latest effort in a long and sordid relationship between the CIA and ISI, stretching back into the 1980s when “the ISI’s Covert Action Division received training in the US and many covert action experts of the CIA were attached to the ISI to guide it in its operations against the Soviet troops by using the Afghan Mujahideen, Islamic fundamentalists of Pakistan and Arab volunteers,” according to B. Raman, writing for the South Asia Analysis Group. As we know, select members of the “Islamic fundamentalists,” particularly the “Arab volunteers,” later became “al-Qaeda,” the CIA spawned terrorist group named after a Mujahideen database.

“Some former CIA officers say the [Jundullah] arrangement is reminiscent of how the U.S. government used proxy armies, funded by other countries including Saudi Arabia, to destabilize the government of Nicaragua in the 1980s,” ABC continues.

In the Contra operation, drug smuggling played a central role, as it did in Afghanistan. “In 1984, stories began to emerge about a secret Nicaraguan Contra network run by a Lieutenant Colonel in the basement of the White House and financed by the importation of large amounts of cocaine,” write Dennis Bernstein and Julie Light. “It was soon revealed that the name of the Lieutenant Colonel was Oliver North and that there was in fact a secret illegal network that was pieced together by the Central Intelligence Agency,” a fact “actively suppressed by Democrats and Republicans alike” during the Iran-Contra hearings. The late Gary Webb, writing for the San Jose Mercury News, documented in “a three-part well-documented story … how the Contra network created, supervised, and funded by the CIA, had run for 10 years a cocaine supply line by transshipping from Central America through San Francisco and down to Los Angeles thousands of kilos of cocaine,” in essence creating the crack cocaine epidemic.

As noted in Volume II of the CIA’s Inspector General’s report, complicity in drug smuggling and the crack cocaine epidemic runs deep—either by direct participation or facilitating a cover-up—including such insiders as Richard Armitage, Frank Carlucci, Hillary and Bill Clinton, Michael Ledeen, Ed Meese, Adm. John Poindexter, Richard Secord, Casper Weinberger, and James Woolsey.

“For criminal organizations, participating in covert operations offers much more than money. They may get a voice in selecting the new government. They may get a government that owes them for help in coming to power. They may be able to use their connections with the United States government to enhance their political power at home,” explains Jack Blum, the former Chief Counsel to John Kerry’s Subcommittee on Narcotics and Terrorism in 1996 Senate Hearings, a subcommittee chaired by Arlen “Magic Bullet” Specter. “I think that if people in the government of the United States make a secret decision to sacrifice some portion of the American population in the form of … deliberately exposing them to drugs,” Blum added.

Naturally, sacrificing “some portion of the American population” is no big deal for the U.S. government—although we are told, most recently during the hysterical reaction to the comments of Rosie O’Donnell, that our government would never do such things, never mind ample evidence, from CIA biological weapons experiments conducted upon unwitting citizens to the plans detailed in Operation Northwoods to “sacrifice some portion of the American population” through terrorism and thus hopefully undermine the government of Fidel Castro. As well, history is littered with instances of the U.S. government sacrificing hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers—to say nothing of millions of victims in targeted countries—in “military adventures” stretching back to the Spanish-American War in 1898 and continuing to this day in Iraq, Afghanistan and, if the neocons have their way, Iran.

In effect, the undeclared “secret” war against Iran, well underway as the “story” on Jundullah reveals, is simply the latest episode of this long and sordid history.

It should come as no surprise the effort against Iran is a pet project of Dick Cheney. “ABC cited Pakistani government sources as saying the secret campaign against Iran was on the agenda when Vice President Dick Cheney met with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf in February,” notes a post on the Indian-Muslims website.

Finally, so enamored are the neocons with Cheney, they want to run him as president in 2008, as none of the Republican selectees currently dominating the field are “hawkish” enough, that is to say they apparently lack the required degree of murderous psychosis.

“Mr. Cheney has virtues as a candidate in his own right. He has foreign policy experience by virtue of having served as defense secretary,” an op-ed appearing in the New York Sun assures us. “His wife, Lynne, would be an asset to the ticket in her own right,” as her connections to the military-snoop-industrial complex and the neocon “think tanks” run deep. Dick’s unflagging desire to expand the neocon “war” into Iran, as evidenced by his working closely with the dictator Musharraf to spawn yet another CIA created terrorist group, according to the neocon organ the New York Sun, is a “contrast to the carping over tactics that has infected some of the Republican field and to the fever among the Democrats for cutting off funds for our GIs and sounding a retreat.”

Dick Cheney is the neocon choice for president, never mind he may well keel over dead from a heart attack before the “election” come 2008. In that case, the neocons will need settle for one of the other “contenders,” none of them as blood-thirsty and sadistic as Dick.

McVeigh had high-level help

Affidavit: McVeigh had high-level help

According to Oklahoma bombing conspirator, ranking officials were involved in the attack

By Pamela Manson
The Salt Lake Tribune
Article Last Updated:02/21/2007 01:03:43 AM MST

Oklahoma City bombing conspirator Terry Nichols says a high-ranking FBI official "apparently" was directing Timothy McVeigh in the plot to blow up a government building and might have changed the original target of the attack, according to a new affidavit filed in U.S. District Court in Utah.

The official and other conspirators are being protected by the federal government "in a cover-up to escape its responsibility for the loss of life in Oklahoma," Nichols claims in a Feb. 9 affidavit.

Documents that supposedly help back up his allegations have been sealed to protect information in them, such as Social Security numbers and dates of birth.

The U.S. Attorney's Office in Utah had no comment on the allegations. The FBI and Justice Department in Washington, D.C., also declined comment.

Nichols does not say what motive the government would have to be involved in the bombing.
The affidavit was filed in a lawsuit brought by Salt Lake City attorney Jesse Trentadue, who believes his brother's death in a federal prison was linked to the Oklahoma City bombing. The suit, which seeks documents from the FBI under the federal Freedom of Information Act, alleges that authorities mistook Kenneth Trentadue for a bombing conspirator and that guards killed him in an interrogation that got out of hand.

Trentadue's death a few months after the April 19, 1995, bombing was ruled a suicide after several investigations. The government has adamantly denied any wrongdoing in the death.

In his affidavit, Nichols says he wants to bring closure to the survivors and families of the attack on the Alfred B. Murrah Federal Building, which took 168 lives. He alleges he wrote then-Attorney General John Ashcroft in 2004, offering to help identify all parties who played a role in the bombing but never got a reply.

Nichols is serving a life sentence at the U.S. Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility in Florence, Colo. McVeigh, who carried out the bombing, was executed in 2001.

McVeigh and Nichols were the only defendants indicted in the bombing. However, Nichols alleges others were involved.

McVeigh told him he was recruited for undercover missions while serving in the military, according to Nichols. He says he learned sometime in 1995 that there had been a change in bombing target and that McVeigh was upset by that.

"There, in what I believe was an accidental slip of the tongue, McVeigh revealed the identity of a high-ranking FBI official who was apparently directing McVeigh in the bomb plot," Nichols says in the affidavit.

Nichols also says that McVeigh threatened him and his family to force him to rob Roger Moore, an Arkansas gun dealer, of weapons and explosives. He later learned the robbery was staged so Moore, who was in on the phony heist, could deny any knowledge of the bombing plot if the stolen items were traced back to him, Nichols claims.

He adds that Moore allegedly told his attorney that he would not be prosecuted in connection with the bombing because he was a "protected witness."

Moore could not be reached for comment Tuesday.

In addition, Nichols says McVeigh must have had help building the bomb. The device he and McVeigh built the day before the bombing did not resemble the one that ultimately was used, Nichols says, and "displayed a level of expertise and sophistication" that neither man had.

pmanson@sltrib.com

Data mining it is not well suited to the terrorist discovery problem

Effective Counterterrorism and the Limited Role of Predictive Data Mining
by Jeff Jonas and Jim Harper
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Jeff Jonas is distinguished engineer and chief scientist with IBM’s Entity Analytic Solutions Group. Jim Harper is director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute and author of Identity Crisis: How Identification Is Overused and Misunderstood.
Full report(PDF)