On Thu, Sep 27, 2018 at 10:47:23AM +1000, Zenaan Harkness wrote:

The truth will out yet, and DAMN it's been a long 70 years!

** Mainstream Holocaust Narrative 'Substantially, if not Entirely, False' - Editor of Top US Conservative Site (Ron Unz) https://russia-insider.us9.list-manage.com/track/click?u=fa2faf7034c3c3c413cb3652f&id=4986fae96c&e=5110f4b440 ------------------------------------------------------------ by Ron Unz The Unz Review (3,091 views) on Tue, Sep 25, 2018

The author spends a few weeks perusing the literature, which he summarizes in this 18,000 word article, and concludes that the Holocaust story relentlessly hammered into the public consciousness by Jewish-owned Hollywood and media is a load of baloney. He suspects that when the lie comes crashing down, a political earthquake will ensue.

So Ron Unz has shone some light, read and reviewed a bunch of authors and books, one such being his highly recommended Israel Shahak and amongst others, Shahak's: Jewish History, Jewish Religion - New Edition The Weight of Three Thousand Years Israel Shahak, published 1994, 1997, 2002, 2008 (new edition) Here's one instance of the first edition (does not contain the other forwards, nor the changes in the 2008 "new edition"): http://elibrary.bsu.az/books_400/N_240.pdf Forward (extract) to the first edition (1994) Gore Vidal Sometime in the 1950s, that world-class gossip and occasional historian, John F. Kennedy, told me how, in 1948, Harry S. Truman had been pretty much abandoned by everyone when he came to run for president. Then an American Zionist brought him two million dollars in cash, in a suitcase, aboard his whistle-stop campaign train. ‘That's why our recognition of Israel was rushed through so fast.’ …Unfortunately, the hurried recognition of Israel as a state has resulted in forty-five years of murderous confusion, and the destruction of what Zionist fellow travellers thought would be a pluralistic state - home to its native population of Muslims, Christians and Jews, as well as a future home to peaceful European and American Jewish immigrants, even the ones who affected to believe that the great realtor in the sky had given them, in perpetuity, the lands of Judea and Sameria. Since many of the immigrants were good socialists in Europe, we assumed that they would not allow the new state to become a theocracy, and that the native Palestinians could live with them as equals. This was not meant to be. I shall not rehearse the wars and alarms of that unhappy region. But I will say that the hasty invention of Israel has poisoned the political and intellectual life of the USA, Israel's unlikely patron. Unlikely, because no other minority in American history has ever hijacked so much money from the American taxpayers in order to invest in a 'homeland'. It is as if the American taxpayer had been obliged to support the Pope in his reconquest of the Papal States simply because one third of our people are Roman Catholic. Had this been attempted, there would have been a great uproar and Congress would have said no. But a religious minority of less than two per cent has bought or intimidated seventy senators (the necessary two thirds to overcome an unlikely presidential veto) while enjoying support of the media. In a sense, I rather admire the way that the Israel lobby has gone about its business of seeing that billions of dollars, year after year, go to make Israel a 'bulwark against communism'. Actually, neither the USSR nor communism was ever much of a presence in the region. What America did manage to do was to [viii] turn the once friendly Arab world against us. … Forward (extracts) to the 1997 edition Edward Said Professor Israel Shahak, emeritus professor of organic chemistry at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, is one of the most remarkable individuals in the contemporary Middle East. …Born in Poland, and having survived and then escaped a Nazi concentration camp, he came to Palestine immediately after World War Two. Like all young Israelis of the time, he served in the army …Possessed of a fierce, relentlessly inquisitive and probing intellect, Shahak pursued his career as an outstanding university lecturer and researcher in organic chemistry - he was often named the best teacher by his students, and given awards for his academic performance - and at the same time began to see for himself what Zionism and the practices of the state of Israel entailed in suffering and deprivation not only for the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza, but for the substantial non-Jewish (i.e. Palestinian minority) people who did not leave in the expulsion of 1948, remained, and then became Israeli citizens. This then lead him to a systematic inquiry into the nature of the Israeli state, its history, ideological and political discourses which, he quickly discovered, were unknown to most non-Israelis, especially Disaspora Jews for whom Israel was a marvelous, democratic, and miraculous state deserving unconditional support and defense. He then re-established and was for several years the Chairman of the Israeli League of Human Rights, a relatively small group of like-minded people whose idea it was that human rights should be equal for everyone, not just for the Jews. …The one thing that immediately distinguished Shahak's political positions from that of most other Israeli and non-Israeli Jewish doves was that he alone stated the unadorned truth, without consideration for whether that truth, if stated plainly, might not be 'good' for Israel or the Jews. He was profoundly, and I would say aggressively and radically, un- and anti-racist in his writings and public statements; there was one standard, and one standard only, for infractions against human rights, so it did not matter if most of the time Israeli Jews were assaulting Palestinians, since he, as an intellectual, -had- to testify against those assaults. It is no exaggeration to say that so strictly did he adhere to this position that he very soon became an extremely unpopular man in Israel. I recall that about 15 years ago he was declared dead, although of course he was extremely alive; the -Washington Post- reported his 'death' in a story which, after Shahak actually visited the -Post- to prove that he was not 'dead' he gleefully told his friends, had no effect on the Post which has never printed a correction! So to some people he is still 'dead', a wish-fantasy that reveals how uncomfortable he makes 'friends of Israel' feel. It should be said that Shahak's mode of telling the truth has always been rigorous and uncompromising. There is nothing seductive about it, no attempt made to put it 'nicely', no effort expended on making the truth palatable, or somehow explainable. For Shahak, killing is murder is killing is murder: his manner is to repeat, to shock, to bestir the lazy or indifferent into galvanized awareness of the human pain that they might be resonsible for. --- At times Shahak has annoyed and angered people, but this is part of his personality and, it must be said, of his sense of mission. Along with the late Professor Yehoshua Leibowitch, a man he deeply admired and often worked with, Shahak endorsed the phrase 'Judeo-Nazi' to characterize methods used by the Israelis to subordinate and repress the Palestinians. Yet he never said or wrote anything that he did not find out for himself, see with his own eyes, experience directly. The difference between him and most other Israelis was that he made the connections between Zionism, Judaism, and repressive practices against 'non-Jews': and of course he drew the conclusions. A great deal of what he writes has had the function of exposing propaganda and lies for what they are. Israel is unique in the world for the excuses made on its behalf: journalists either do not see or write what they know to be true for fear of blacklisting or retaliation; political, cultural, and intellectual figures, especially in Europe and the Unites States, go out of their way to priase Israel and shower it with the greatest largesse of any nation on earth, even though many of them are aware of the injustices of the country. They say nothing about those. The result is an ideological smoke screen that more than any single individual Shahak has labored to dissipate. … unlike most others, he does not allow the horrors of the Holocaust to manipulate the truth of what in the name of the Jewish people Israel has done to the Palestinians. For him, suffering is not the exclusive possession of one group of victims. …Shahak has admonished his compatriots not to forget that an appalling history of antisemtism endured does not entitle them to do what they wish, just because they have suffered. No wonder then that he has been so unpopular, since by saying such things, Shahak has morally undermined Israel's laws and political practices towards the Palestinians. --- Shahak goes even further. He is an absolute and unwavering secularist when it comes to human history. By this I do not mean to say that he is against religion, but rather that he is against religion as a way of explaining events, justifying irractional and cruel policies, aggrandizing one group of 'believers' at the expense of the others. What is also surprising is that Shahak is not, properly speaking, a man of the left. In a whole variety of ways he is very critical of Marxism, and traces his principles to European free-thinkers, libers, and courageous public intellectuals like Voltaire and Orwell. --- What makes Shahak even more formidable as a supporter of Palestinian rights is that he does not succumb to the sentimental idea that becdause the Palestinians have suffered under Israel they must be excused for their follies. Far from it: Shahak has always been quite critical of the PLO's sloppiness, its ignorance of Israel, its inability to resolutely oppose Israel, its shabby compromises and cult of personality, its general lack of seriousness. …During the 1980s when it became fashionable for Palestinian intellectuals and a few PLO officers to seek out 'dialogue' with the Israeli doves of Peace Now, the Labor Party, and Meretz, Shahak was --routinely excluded--. For one, he was extremely critical of the Israeli peace camp for its compromises, its shameful practice of pressuring the Palestinians and not the Israeli government for changes in policy, its unwillingness to free itself from the contraints of 'protecting' Israel by not saying anything critical about it to non-Jews. For another, he was never a politician: he simply did not believe in all the posturing and circumlocutions that people with political ambitions were always willing to indulge. He fought for equality, truth, real peace and dialogue with Palestinians; the official Israeli doves fought for arrangements that would make possible the kind of peace that brought Oslo, and which Shahak was one of the first to denounce. Speaking as a Palestinian however, I was always ashamed that Palestinian activists who were anxious to dialogue in secret or in public with the Labor Party or Meretz, refused to have anything to do with Shahak. For them he was too radical, too outspoken, too marginal with regard to official power. Secretly, I think, they also feared that he would be too critical of Palestinian policies. He certainly would have. …I have always known Shahak to be a prodigious historian, brilliant intellectual and polymath scholar, and political activist; but as I suggested above I have come to realize his central 'hobby' has been a study of Judaism, of the rabbinical and Talmudic traditions, and of the scholarship on the subject. This book is therefore a powerful contribution to these things. It is no less than a succinct history of 'classical' as well as more recent Judaism, as those apply to an understanding of modern Israel. --- Shahak shows that the obscure, narrowly chauvinist prescriptions against various undesirable Others are to be found in Judaism (as well of course as other monothestic traditions) but he also then goes on to show the continuity between those and the way Israel treats Palestinians, Christians and other non-Jews. A devastating portait of prejudice, hypocrisy and religious intolerance emerges. What is important about it is that Shahak's description gives the lie not only to the fictions about Israel's democracy that abound in the Western media, but it also implicitly indicts Arab leaders and intellectuals for their -scandalously- ignorant view of that state, especially when they pontificate to their people that Israel has really changed and now wants peace with Palestinians and other Arabs. Shahak is a very brave man who should be honored for his services to humanity. But in today's world the example of indefatigable work, unrelenting moral energy, and intellectual brilliance that he has set are an embarrassment to the status quo, and to everyone for whom the word 'controversial' means 'unwelcome' and 'unsettling'. I am certain, however, that what he says in Jewish History, Jewish Religion, will be a source of discomfort to his Arab readers as well. I am sure that he would say that he is pleased.