Sunday, April 13, 2014

336 Karel Kritisch

This Blog:

I do send a lot of 'reactions' to Dutch newspapers. Often they are refused. In most cases there is a 500-characters limit per reaction. 
For some unknown reason the site 'Welingelichte Kringen' does not apply any censorship at the moment.

I got into a discussion with a man who calls himself 'Critical Carl",  and as I got the impression that he was informed above average, and willing to learn, I found it usefull to continue the discussion with him. 
And it wàs useful: he rightfully showed me that the Elie Wiesel and Primo Levie quotes were taken out of context. ( I always thought that all prisoners in Auschwitz were free to stay behind in the camp and wait for the Russian Liberators. But this probably was not true: only the sick were given this choice. Even the sick often preferred to leave. Nòt because their fear of the Russians (as I was told), but because they feared that they would be killed by the Germans after the group of prisoners had left the camp. )

But after that one item the discussion was no longer useful to me. 
The man who calls himself Critical was not interested in new information. He prefers to keep believing what he always believed, even though it is proved wrong.

This reminds me of this quote: 
"The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow- witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made lear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him." -  Leo Tolstoy

Well, for people who read Dutch this conversation might be interesting (if they have some time at their hands) 





Goed wetenschappelijk onderzoek is helemaal niet verboden.
Door andere historische gebeurtenissen te vermelden bewijs je helemaal niets. Het heeft er simpelweg niets mee te maken. Oftewel: irrelevante gegevens
"Elie Wiesel publiceerde in 1957 zijn zeer bekende boek 'Nacht' en daar werd met geen woord gerept over gaskamers.
Er zijn dus erg veel opmerkelijke zaken."
Boeksamenvatting: Het wordt verteld door de ogen van een joodse jongen, die er ongewild
getuige van was hoe zijn moeder en zusje direct na aankomst in het kamp
naar de gaskamer werden gestuurd.
Maar ik zal het boek zelf eens gaan lezen.


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      Goed wetenschappelijk onderzoek krijgt geen enkele aandacht in de media. Vgl het boek van Jim Douglass over JFK. ( Elders door mij gelinkt)
      Ik noem andere historische feiten die ook bij ons allen totaal onbekend zijn: Naqbah, de 600.000 Oost Duitsers die door de muur mochten vertrekken. Dat bewijst dat precies gebeurt wat Bertrand Russell al zei: Je kan de mensen àlles wijs maken. Dat is de relevantie hier.
      Ja, lees Wiesel maar. Je krijgt 500 Euro van ekm als je het woord gaskamer tegen komt.
      Nog een opmerkelijke zaak: De gevangenen van Auschwitz kregen van de Duitsers de keuze : ze konden met de moffen mee wegvluchten naar Bergen Belsen, of in Auschwitz blijven wachten op hun bevrijders. Ook Primo Levi zat daar toen gevangen, en schriojft dat ook hij de keuze kreeg om al; dan niet met de Duitsers te vertrekken.
      Beiden gaven er de voorkeur aan om met de Duitsers mee te vluchten, weg van de Russische bevrijders.
      Dat rijmt dus helemaal niet met de monsterlijke voorstelling die wij van Auschwitz hebben.http://tiny.cc/rwfgc


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          Je trekt verkeerde conclusies: Levi op 22 februari 1944 als Jood en verzetsstrijder gedeporteerd naar Auschwitz, waar hij tewerkgesteld werd in de Buna-Werkevan Auschwitz-Monowitz. Levi overleefde Auschwitz, als een van de vijf
          overlevenden van een groep van 650 Italiaanse Joden, omdat hij als scheikundige een zogenoemd 'bruikbare Jood' was.
          In "Is dit een mens" beschrijft Levi het leven in het kamp en hoe mensen zich gedragen onder extreme omstandigheden. De onderliggende
          vraag is voortdurend: is dit een mens? Die vraag geldt voor de onderdrukkers en de onderdrukten. De afstandelijke wijze waarop Levi het leven in Auschwitz beschrijft, maakte erg veel indruk. De gevangenen beseften dat de gebeurtenissen in de kampen te ongehoord waren om geloofd te kunnen worden.
          Wiesel werd geboren in Sighet (nu: Sighetu Marmației), als zoon van Sjlomo en Sara, orthodoxe joden van Hongaarse afkomst die een kruidenierszaak hadden. Hij had drie zussen, Bea, Hilda en Tzipora. Sighet werd een gedeelte van Hongarije in 1940, en in 1944 deporteerden de nazi's de Hongaarse joden naar Auschwitz-Birkenau.
          Zijn moeder en Tzipora, de jongste zus, werden er vermoord; hij en zijn vader werden naar het aangrenzende werkkamp Auschwitz III Monowitz
          gestuurd. In januari 1945, werden vader en zoon gedwongen te marcheren naar Buchenwald, waar Elies vader overleed.
          Verkeerde conclusies Johan, helemaal geen vrije keuze..
          Nee dat rijmt dus zeker wel met de monsterlijke voorstelling!
          "Goed wetenschappelijk onderzoek krijgt geen enkele aandacht in de media." Ik vermoed dat jou definitie van 'goed wetenschappelijk onderzoek' behoorlijk afwijkt van wat binnen de wetenschappelijke wereld als 'goed' wordt aangeduid. Goed: http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/W... Fout:http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...


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              Beste Karel,
              Als ik U verwijs naar bepaalde boeken, en zelfs een link mee stuur waar U de gehele onderbouwing kunt lezen, dan kunt U mijn verhaal niet weerleggen door passages uit àndere boeken aan te halen.
              Wat ik beweer is wel degelijk te lezen in de boeken van beide schrijvers:
              In Levi's book Survival in Auschwitz, we have his words for January 17th, 1945:
              "It was not a question of reasoning: I would probably also have followed the instinct of the flock if I had not felt so weak: fear is supremely contagious, and its immediate reaction is to make one try to run away."
              Dus Levie schrijft: àls ik me niet zo zwak had gevold, dan was ik met de Duitsers weg gevlucht , weg van de naderende Russen.
              In zijn boek 'Nacht;' schrijft Wiesel over de keuze die hij had om in Auschwitz te blijven met zijn vader, of samen met vader met de Duitsers weg te gaan: "The choice was in our hands. For once we could decide our fate for ourselves. We could both stay in the hospital, where I could, thanks to my doctor, get him [the father] entered as a patient or nurse. Or else we could follow the others. 'Well, what shall we do, father?' He was silent. 'Let's be evacuated with the others,' I told him."
              Ik heb nergens beweer dat het leven in Auschwitz comfortabel was. Er vielen duizenden doden. Maar des te vreemder is het dat de gevangenen desondanks toch banger zijn voor hun 'bevrijders'.
              Het staat er echt. Kijk maar na.


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                  Bij deze word je ontmaskerd Johan als geschiedenis manipulator. Je haalt teksten uit boeken en plaatst ze in verkeerde context. Dit over de rug van holocaustslachtoffers. Het is gelukkig kinderlijk eenvoudig het tegendeel onomstotelijk te bewijzen:
                  Jij Schrijft: "In zijn boek 'Nacht;' schrijft Wiesel over de keuze die hij had om in Auschwitz te blijven met zijn vader, of samen met vader met de Duitsers weg te gaan: "The choice was in our hands. For once we could decide our fate for ourselves. We could both stay in the hospital, where I could, thanks to my doctor, get him [the father] entered as a patient or nurse. Or else we could follow the others. 'Well, what shall we do, father?' He was silent. 'Let's be evacuated with the others,' I told him."
                  Ik heb nergens beweer dat het leven in Auschwitz comfortabel was. Er vielen duizenden doden. Maar des te vreemder is het dat de gevangenen desondanks toch banger zijn voor hun 'bevrijders'.
                  Het staat er echt. Kijk maar na."
                  IK LEES:
                  We asked him what would happen to us. He replied that probably the Germans would leave us to our fate: no, he did not think that they would kill us. He made no effort to hide the fact that he thought otherwise. His very cheerfulness boded ill. He was already equipped for the march. He had hardly gone out when the two Hungarian boys began to speak excitedly to each other. They were in an advanced state of convalescence but extremely wasted away. It was obvious that they were afraid to stay with the patients and were deciding to go with the healty ones. It was not a question of reasoning: I would probaly also have followed the instinct of the flock if I had not felt so weak; fear is supremely contagious, and its immediate reaction is to make one try to run away.
                  paar zinnen verder:
                  "I learnt much later that, unable to continue, they had been killed by the SS a few hours after the beginning of the march."
                  POF.. daar gaat je valse aanname. Zie je nu hoe jij de geschiedenis bedrijft???? Het is om je kapot te schamen om over de rug van holocaustslachtoffers moedwillig getuigenissen te manipuleren en er een valse context aan te geven.
                  En de tweede..
                  Jij schrijft:
                  "In zijn boek 'Nacht;' schrijft Wiesel over de keuze die hij had om in Auschwitz te blijven met zijn vader, of samen met vader met de Duitsers weg te gaan: "The choice was in our hands. For once we could decide our fate for ourselves. We could both stay in the hospital, where I could, thanks to my doctor, get him [the father] entered as a patient or nurse.
                  Or else we could follow the others. 'Well, what shall we do, father?' He was silent. 'Let's be evacuated with the others,' I told him."
                  IK LEES: www-tc.pbs.org/auschwitz/learn...\u200e
                  "The camp had become a hive. People ran about, shouting at one another. In all the blocks, preparations for the journey were going on. I had forgotten about my bad foot
                  [Note: Wiesel had recently had an infection on the sole of his foot drained]. A doctor came into the room and announced:
                  Tomorrow, immediately after nightfall, the camp will set out. Block after block. Patients will stay in the infirmary. They will not be evacuated.
                  This news made us think. Were the SS going to leave hundreds of prisoners to strut about in the hospital blocks, waiting for their liberators? Were they going to let the Jews hear the twelfth stroke sound? Obviously not.
                  All of the invalids will be summarily killed, said the faceless one. And sent to
                  the crematory in a final batch.The camp is certain to be mined, said another. The moment the evacuation over, I till blow up.
                  As for me, I was not thinking about death, but I did not want to be separated from my father. We had already suffered so much, borne so much together; this was not the time to be separated.
                  I ran outside to look for him. The snow was thick, and the windows of the blocks were veiled with frost. One shoe in my hand, because it would not go onto my right foot, I ran on, feeling neither pain nor cold.
                  What shall we do?
                  My father did not answer.
                  shall we do, father?
                  He was lost in thought. The choice was in our hands. For once we could decide our fate for ourselves. We could both stay in the hospital, where I could, thanks to my doctor, get him entered as a patient or a nurse. Or else we could follow the others.
                  Well, what shall we do, father?
                  He was silent.
                  Let’s be evacuated with the others, I said to him.
                  He did not answer. He looked at my foot.
                  Do you think you can walk?
                  , I think so.
                  hope that we shan regret it, Eliezer.
                  I learned after the war the fate of those who had stayed behind in the hospital.
                  They were quite simply liberated by the Russians two days after the evacuation.
                  EN DAAR GAAT JE TWEEDE VALSE VOORBEELD!
                  Je kan beter een andere hobby gaan zoeken Johan want jou pogingen om de geschiedenis geweld aan te doen zijn kinderlijk eenvoudig te ontmaskeren.
                  Het is een walgelijke vorm van manipuleren en een kwalijke manier van vals spelen. BAHBAH


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                      Beste Karel,
                      lees mijn tekst nog eens door, en daarna jouw antwoord daarop.
                      Je citeert Wiesel tweemaal. De eerste maal zou je beter Levi hebben geciteerd, want daar spreek je over.
                      Uit de tekst blijkt dat Levi inderdaad in Auschwitz is achtergebleven. En hij is niet gedood. En hij schrijft dat hij liever was gevlucht mèt de Duitsers.
                      Precies wat ik zeg.
                      Het is wel algemeen bekend dat de Duitsers de mensen die niet de lange mars vol hielden, ter plekke doodden. Waarom ze dat dezen is me niet duidelijk. De mensen zouden wellicht toch dood gaan. Zou het een genadeschot zijn ?
                      Daarna gaat het over Wiesel. Hij vertrekt samen met zijn vader, en hoort dat de mensen die achter gebleven zijn gewoon in leven bleven en bevrijd werden.
                      Sorry, maar ik zie niet waar ik iets onjuist heb begrepen of geciteerd. Wat ik wel zie is dat jij de teksten niet goed begrijpt, en mij al begint te beschuldigen zonder alles precies op een rijtje te hebben.
                      Vraag eens aan een huisgenoot wat die er van vindt.
                      Gegroet, J V.


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                          Nee ik citeer Levi ook dus Wiesel en Levi en allebei je citaten zijn uit de context gehaald. Ik heb blijkbaar Wiesel 2x neergezet. Mijn fout maar als je de post leest zie duidelijk allebei. Voor de volledigheid nog 1 maal hieronder. Jij begrijpt de tekst niet goed..
                          Doodzieke gevangenen hebben de keuze om achter te blijven of mee op mars te gaan (evacuatie). Men denk dat als je achter blijft je doodgeschoten wordt door de SS. Dus verkiezen veel gevangenen om tegen beter weten in toch op dodenmars te gaan. Vele kunnen het onderweg niet bijhouden en worden doodgeschoten diegenen die het wel overleven komen in een ander kamp. Diegenen die achterbleven zijn later bevrijd door de sovjets en konden het navertellen.
                          Jou redeneringen noemen we VERLEGGEN VAN DE BEWIJSLAST en dat is een bekende drogreden om je ongelijk niet te willen toegeven. Het lijkt 'The Parrot' van Monty Pyton wel! Zodra het tegendeel wordt aangetoond vezin je weer wat anders om niet te hoeven toegeven. En ik heb geen huisgenoten maar een vrouw en twee kinderen. Ik verdiep me al 22 jaar in de tweede wereldoorlog. Ben geen leek die je van alles wijs kan maken. Je argumenten zijn allemaal drogredenen en valse contexten. De SS had over het algemeen geen medeleven met joden dus dat genadeschot is onwaarschijnlijk.
                          Omgang met gevangenen
                          Op 1 oktober 1933 gaf Theodor Eicke
                          instructies over de omgang van de SS'ers met de gevangenen. Eicke liet weten dat de gevangenen als vijanden van het Rijk moesten worden gezien
                          en daarom ruw aangepakt moesten worden.[49]
                          De SS'ers mochten niet op een menselijke manier met de gevangenen omgaan, want dit werd gezien als een zacht karakter of zelfs een gebrek
                          daaraan. Deze manier van omgang met gevangenen gold in ieder concentratiekamp, dus ook Auschwitz. Vele jaren van indoctrinatie zorgden er uiteindelijk
                          voor dat de SS'ers in staat waren om op onmenselijke en respectloze manier om te gaan met de gevangenen
                          LEVI:
                          We asked him what would happen to us. He replied that probably the Germans would leave us to our fate: no, he did not think that they would
                          kill us. He made no effort to hide the fact that he thought otherwise. His very cheerfulness boded ill. He was already equipped for the march.
                          He had hardly gone out when the two Hungarian boys began to speak excitedly to each other. They were in an advanced state of convalescence
                          but extremely wasted away. It was obvious that they were afraid to staywith the patients and were deciding to go with the healty ones. It was
                          not a question of reasoning: I would probaly also have followed the instinct of the flock if I had not felt so weak; fear is supremely contagious, and its immediate reaction is to make one try to run away.
                          paar zinnen verder:
                          "I learnt much later that, unable to continue, they had been killed by the SS a few hours after the beginning of the march."
                          WIESEL: "The camp had become a hive. People ran about, shouting at one
                          another. In all the blocks, preparations for the journey were going on. I
                          had forgotten about my bad foot
                          [Note: Wiesel had recently had an infection on the sole of his foot drained]. A doctor came into the room and announced:
                          Tomorrow,
                          immediately after nightfall, the camp will set out. Block after block.
                          Patients will stay in the infirmary. They will not be evacuated.
                          This
                          news made us think. Were the SS going to leave hundreds of prisoners to
                          strut about in the hospital blocks, waiting for their liberators? Were
                          they going to let the Jews hear the twelfth stroke sound? Obviously not.
                          All of the invalids will be summarily killed, said the faceless one. And sent to
                          the crematory in a final batch.The camp is certain to be mined, said another. The moment the evacuation over, I till blow up.
                          As
                          for me, I was not thinking about death, but I did not want to be
                          separated from my father. We had already suffered so much, borne so much
                          together; this was not the time to be separated.
                          I ran outside to
                          look for him. The snow was thick, and the windows of the blocks were
                          veiled with frost. One shoe in my hand, because it would not go onto my
                          right foot, I ran on, feeling neither pain nor cold.
                          What shall we do?
                          My father did not answer.
                          shall we do, father?
                          He was lost in
                          thought. The choice was in our hands. For once we could decide our fate
                          for ourselves. We could both stay in the hospital, where I could, thanks
                          to my doctor, get him entered as a patient or a nurse. Or else we could
                          follow the others.
                          Well, what shall we do, father?
                          He was silent.
                          Let’s be evacuated with the others, I said to him.
                          He did not answer. He looked at my foot.
                          Do you think you can walk?
                          , I think so.
                          hope that we shan regret it, Eliezer.
                          I learned after the war the fate of those who had stayed behind in the hospital.
                          They were quite simply liberated by the Russians two days after the evacuation.


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                              Beste Karel,
                              ik heb het nog eens goed gelezen - jouw citaat hierboven- en het cruciale punt dat ik nu voor het eerst zie is dit: De gezonde gevangenen moesten mee evacueren. Het waren alleen de zieken die ook mochten kiezen om ter plekke te blijven. ( Ik had begrepen dat àlle gevangenen een vrije keuze hadden).
                              Het tweede punt dat uit deze tekst naar voren komt is dit: de zieken die in A. bleven hadden daar 2 mogelijke argumenten voor: 1. Ze waren simpelweg fysiek niet in staat om zo ver te gaan lopen. 2. Ze waren bang om te blijven, niet omdat de Russen hen wat zouden aandoen, maar omdat men dacht dat de Duitsers nooit wilden dat al die zieken ( getuigen?) levend in handen van de Russen zouden vallen. Dus vreesden ze dat , na het vertrek van de gezonden mensen, de achterblijvers zouden worden gedood, of opgeblazen.
                              U hebt gelijk. En ik had dit nooit zo begrepen.
                              Toch heb ik deze info van een man die ik 100% vertrouw. ( Peter Myers. Zeer belezen man, heeft een fantastische website) Ik vraag me af of hij het zelf goed heeft onderzocht. Ik zal hem tzt ook van dit inzicht op de hoogte stellen.
                              Ik ben nu te moe om op dit moment de andere reacties te beantwoorden, en ik heb nu ook geen tijd.
                              Maar U bent een stuk in mijn achting gestegen, en ieder die mij iets kan leren, daarvan wil ik meer weten.
                              Verder is er nog ontzettend veel over te zeggen, maar dat komt mogelijk nog wel. Eventueel, als deze draad te oud wordt, ergens in een nieuwe draad.
                              begrijp me goed: Ik zoek echt naar de waarheid. Dus ik ben blij dat U me daar dichter bij hebt gebracht.
                              Vr. groet, J V.


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                                  Beste Johan,
                                  Dit is een methode die geschiedvervalsers vaak gebruiken. Kleine fragmenten van een boek in andere context zetten. Het is makkelijk te ontmaskeren. Ik denk dat deze Peter Myers, als hij dit als argument gebruikte, en jij dit zo hebt overgenomen, toch niet zo betrouwbaar is als jij denkt dat hij is.
                                  Als ik jou een tip mag geven, probeer eens in contact te komen met mensen die integer deze geschiedenis gestudeerd hebben. Misschien is er zelfs nog een overlevende te vinden die je wat kan vertellen.
                                  In deze wereld zijn er veel mensen, waaronder vermoedelijk deze Peter Myers, die anderen proberen te indoctrineren met schijnbaar bewijs maar haat als drijfveer hebben. Maar als je dit bewijs goed onderzoekt zul je merken dat het vals is.


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                                      Beste Karel,
                                      Peter Myers is van een ander niveau dan jij denkt.
                                      Hier vind je zijn melding van het citaat uit Wiesel en uit Primo Levie waar wij over discussieren:http://www.mailstar.net/holoca...
                                      Myers krijgt dit citaat van ene John Berg toegestuurd en plaatst het op zijn site. Tevens vraagt hij Berg om een uitgebreider citaat, zodat de context beter duidelijk wordt.
                                      Maar Berg doet dat niet adequaat, zoals je ziet.
                                      De lezer kan dit alles zelf zien. Ik had wellicht ook kritischer moeten zijn.
                                      Hier is de hoofdsite van Myers.http://www.mailstar.net/index....
                                      Op de File Index begint het echte werk.


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                                          Deze boeken zijn allebei gewoon online in te zien. En mensen die zaken bestuderen dienen boeken daadwerkelijk aan te schaffen en te lezen anders is het geen bestuderen he. Ik lees nu Rudolf Vbra 'Ik ontsnapte uit Auschwitz' daarin staan ook de Auschwitz Protocollen. Al gelezen?


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                                              Beste Karel,
                                              Er zijn boeken die ik helemaal gelezen heb, maar met Wiesel en Levie wil ik dat niet doen. (Van veel boeken lees is Amazon reviews. Het leven is te kort om alles te lezen.) Wiesel heeft ook toegegeven dat 'Nacht' geen feitelijk document is, maar deels gefantaseerd. Je weet dat hij in zijn boek schrijft dat er babies werden verbrand in greppels. Niemand die dat gelooft.
                                              Een boek dat toegeeft deels uit fictie te bestaan, daar kan ik geen tijd aan besteden. Welk deel is dan fictie?
                                              Ook heeft Wiesel altijd Joan Peeters 'From time immemorial ' verdedigd, wat natuurlijk aantooont dat hij een propagandist is, en niet iemand die waarheid vertelt.
                                              Als U de moeite neemt om Peter Myers te lezen, dan ziet U dat hij van mening is dat er gaskamers waren in Auschwitz, en dat hij de 'biografie' van Höss als waardevol en informatief beschouwt.
                                              Myers is echt op zoek naar de waarheid, niet op zoek naar bevestiging van zijn ingenomen standpunt. Dat is natuurlijk ook de enige methode om de waarheid te vinden.


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                                                  Heb jij een bron waar Wiesel zelf toegeeft dat het deels gefantaseerd zou zijn? Lijken zijn op grote schaal verbrand, ook ik greppels. Maar waarom vind jij Peter Myers betrouwbaar? Waar blijkt dat uit?
                                                  Wat Wiesel van het boek van Joan Peeters zegt heeft hier verder niets mee te maken. De conclusie die je trekt is een aanname die niet zo kunt nemen.
                                                  Wat ik zelf echt een goed boek vond: Monihttp://www.amazon.com/Moni-A-N...


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                                                      (Dit is mijn tweede reactie.)
                                                      Nog enkele punten.
                                                      1.U schrijft dat 'Night' op het internet staat, maar ik zie het nergens. Misschien wil U dit eens nazoeken: Ik lees dat Wiesel beweert dat er mensen ( babies?) levend in het vuur worden geworpen.
                                                      Schrijft Wiesel dit inderdaad in 'Night' of niet?
                                                      2. Peter Myers punt 16 vindt U hier:http://www.mailstar.net/holoca...
                                                      3. Ik ben van mening dat sommige joden een erg grote invloed op de wereld hebben, en dat het dus niet meer dan normaal ik om deze groep kritisch te volgen, en ze openlijk te bekritiseren. Dat is moeilijk, want wie dat doet wordt behandeld zoals vroeger 'De Kerk' haar tegenstanders behandelde. ketter =antisemiet.
                                                      Gisteren verscheen een goed overzich van de invloed van sommige joden op de wereldgeschiedenis.
                                                      Als U ècht kritisch bent en niet tevreden wil blijven met uw huidige inzichten, dan zou U dat artikel kunnen lezen:http://www.informationclearing...
                                                      Gegroet J. V.


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                                                          Met 'No true Scotsman' redenering schiet ik niets op. Of ik wel of niet tevreden ben is niet relevant. Welke bronnen je raadpleegt wel. Pseudowetenschappelijke amateurs met valse methodiek of propagandisten laat ik links liggen.
                                                          Sommige joden, sommige dat, sommige dit. Wat is een jood? een geloof? een etniciteit? een ras? een groep? Een ras is het sowieso niet want dat bestaat genetisch niet. We praten over joden in die zin in de holocaust omdat de nazi's deze mensen op die wijze definieerden (in hun pseudowetenschappelijke rassenleer). Maar spreken we van een coherente groep? Sommige Amerikanen hebben een erg grote invloed op de wereld, dat geldt ook voor sommige Chinezen en Russen etc etc. Ik vind zulke generalisaties weinig zinvol en de daarbij behorende verdachtmakingen absurd. En wat mij irriteert is dat je weer gebruik maakt van een valse analogie. Je gebruikt een religieuze waan (kerk, ketters) om je rassenwaan te vergoeilijken? Daar is geen logica in te vinden.. alsof 'de joden' (wie je er allemaal onder schaart is mij een ?) een instituut zijn.. Het is eerder andersom. Religieuze waan en rassenwaan hebben meer overeenkomsten. Ze zijn allebei absurd.


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                                                            Beste Karel,
                                                            Al twee keer eerder had ik mijn antwoord klaar. En dan kijk ik even op de link van het boek Moni, en dan is mijn anrtwoord weer geheel verdwenen.
                                                            Nu ga ik het heel kort houden, want voor de derde keer een heel verhaal schrijven, daar heb ik geenb zin in.
                                                            Naomie Seidman heeft de eerste versie van Nacht ( in het Jiddisch) vergeleken met de latere versie, die onder leiding van Francoius Mauric is geschreven.
                                                            De yiddische is veel haatdragender. Naomie begrijhpt wel waarom : http://www.radioislam.org/wies...
                                                            Lees ook even al de opmerkingen van Faurisson: elke bewering onderbouwd met een referentie.
                                                            Opmerkelijke zin daarin: "The gassing lie was spread by the Americans. (note 3) The lie that Jews were killed by boiling water or steam (specifically at Treblinka) was spread by the Poles. (note 4) The electrocution lie was spread by the Soviets.n (note 5) "
                                                            Bij Peter Myers, onder punt 16 lees je meer over Wiesel. O.a. hoe hij: From November 1947 to January 1949, Wiesel worked for Zion in Kampf, the newspaper of the terrorist gangsters of the Irgun. The Irgun extermination of innocent Arabs at the village of Deir Yassin took place on April 8, 1948, while Wiesel was on the payroll, yet he is always appalled by Palestinian "terrorism."
                                                            Het boek Moni lijkt extremer in zijn beschrijvingen van Auschwitz dan de meeste andere boeken. Maar ook dat boek wordt een .'novel' genoemd, en bevat dus ook gefantaseerde delen. ( Ook Nacht wordt een Novel genoemd.)
                                                            Hierover zei Wiesel zelf het volgende:
                                                            Wiesel tells a story about a visit to a Rebbe, a Hasidic rabbi, he hadn't seen for 20 years. The Rebbe is upset to learn that Wiesel has become a writer, and wants to know what he writes. "Stories," Wiesel tells him, "... true stories":
                                                            About people you knew? "Yes, about people I might have known." About things that happened? "Yes, about things that happened or could have happened." But they did not? "No, not all of them did. In fact, some were invented from almost the beginning to almost the end."


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                                                                RadioIslam, het is pure propaganda. Ik kan daar echt niets mee. Ik hou van geschiedenis en wetenschap. In zulke broddelsites ga ik echt mijn tijd niet verdoen.
                                                                Maar snap je nu wat ze aan het doen zijn? Ze proberen inconsistenties te vinden bij verklaringen van één enkele persoon om een hele historische gebeurtenis verdacht te maken? Stel nu dat Wiesel wat inconsistenties in zijn verhaal zou hebben wat vanuit anekdotisch oogpunt helemaal niet onwaarschijnlijk is aangezien hij waarschijnlijk niet over een fotografisch geheugen beschikt. Dan zegt dat helemaal niets, er zijn honderdduizenden verklaringen en documenten die van deze genocide getuigen en die worden dan genegeerd. De denkfout is hier dat er een algemene regel wordt afgeleid uit slechts enkele gevallen, in filosofische termen een inductie met een te smalle basis.Valt het je dan niet op hoe ze zich in bochten wringen om maar ergens een strohalmpje te vinden? Dat je al met teksten kwam welke totaal uit de context getrokken waren zegt toch al heel veel? Dat is waar deze geschiedvervalsers tot veroordeeld zijn. Omdat ze hun vooringenomen standpunt willen rechtvaardigen. Maar er is geen wetenschappelijke grond voor..


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                                                                    Malcolm X zei: I respect the truth, no matter who tells it.
                                                                    U kijkt neer op Radio Islam. Dat mag. Ik kijk neer op die duizenden boeken die door joodse fanaten geschreven zijn: ze vertellen wat in hun belang is.
                                                                    De uiteindelijke braon is dus waar het wèl om gaat, niet wie het verhaal vertelt.
                                                                    Dus: Naomie Seidman. Joodse vrouw, leest yiddisch. Wat zij vertelt is volgens mij betrouwbaar.
                                                                    Idem: Faurisson geeft 19 verwijzingen, o.a. naar US War Refugee Board Report, Neurenberg reports, etc. etc.
                                                                    De vraag is nioeyt of er inconsistenties in een verslag zitten. De vraag is of de man beschrijft wat er gebeurd is, danwel dat hij zelf bedachte scenes er bij voegt.
                                                                    Dàt doet Wiesel.
                                                                    Heeft U al de passage gelezen over de babies die levend in het vuur werden gegooid?
                                                                    Staat dat nu wel of niet in dat boek?
                                                                    En wat vindt U van een mijnheer Wiesel die met de genocide op de Palestijnen blijkbaar geen moeite heeft ?


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                                                                        Wanneer is volgens jou iets betrouwbaar? Wanneer het in overeenstemming is met je overtuiging? Of als iemand mooie blauwe ogen heeft? Radio Islam is een racistische haatsite. Één blik zegt genoeg, het is te zielig voor woorden. Holocaustontkenning en algehele jodenhaat, Terwijl het pleit tegen racisme. Men noemt dat een dubbele moraal.
                                                                        Uw laatste opmerking over genocide is niet meer dan retoriek. Het woord is bij jou blijkbaar zwaar onderhevig aan inflatie. Hamas heeft trouwens in zijn handvest wel een intentie van genocide beschreven.


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                                                                            Beste Karel.
                                                                            Ik probeer U het onderscheid bij te brengen tussen :
                                                                            1. De identiteit en reputatie van een bepaalde bron.
                                                                            2. De citaten die een bron vermeldt.
                                                                            Om het maar eens op omgekeerde wijze duidelijk te maken: U en ik zullen alles wat Mandela ooit schreef als waardevol en met respect willen beschouwen.
                                                                            Maar als diezelfde Mandela een uitspraak van Hitler citeert, zullen we die dan ook als waardevol zien?
                                                                            Vermoedelijk niet.
                                                                            Het omgekeerde is ook waar.
                                                                            U zult Radio Islam als partijdig en niet objectief beschouwen.
                                                                            Maar als diezelfde Radio Islam mensen citeert, of rapporten, of documenten, dan hangt de geloofwaardigheid samen met de reputatie van die rapporten en van die documenten. Niet met de reputatie van Radio Islam.
                                                                            En dan wordt het dus juist extra interessant, want blijkbaar heeft een bron als Radio Islam ( waar we het niet mee eens zijn) ergens ondersteuning gevonden voor haar inzichten bij bronnen die wij waardevol vinden. Dat is reden om goed te gaan luisteren, in elk geval voor mensen die op zoek zijn naar de waarheid.
                                                                            Ik heb niet de indruk dat De Waarheid U interesseert. U wenst uw huidige wereldbeeld te handhaven. U bent zo zeker van de juistheid daarvan, dat U niet wil openstaan voor nieuwe feiten.
                                                                            Dat is een onvruchtbare houding.
                                                                            Want logischerwijze is het zo dat àls Uw wereldbeeld reeds perfect juist is, dat U dan nergens bang voor hoeft te zijn: het zal steeds worden bevestigd.
                                                                            Maar als Uw wereldbeeld onjuist is, dan kan het worden gefalsifieeerd. Als U dat niet wil, ja , dan moet U de wereld opdelen in : leugenaars en goede mensen. Tot overmaat van ramp vindt U dat de argumenten van die 'leugenaars' niet hoeven te worden gehoord.
                                                                            Zo zult U nooit de waarheid vinden.
                                                                            De waarde van uw kennis stagneert: U leert niks bij. U komt nooit dichter bij De Waarheid.
                                                                            En als tragische informatie wil ik U wel dit verklappen: Ik heb, -- dank zij het internet-- , ontdekt dat we allemaal flink voor gek worden gehouden door 'De Media'. We worden collectief 'dom' gehouden.
                                                                            ---
                                                                            Het woord genocide voor de uitroeing van een aantal dorpen met Palestijnen is wat overdreven, maar laat ik het dan zo zeggen: Wiesel heeft zijn leven gewijd aan het bekend maken van de moord op de joden.
                                                                            Waarom heeft diezelfde man eerst jarenlang deel uitgemaakt van een groep die zoveel Palestijnen vermoordde? Hoe kan dat?
                                                                            ---
                                                                            Hamas is, dat weet U blijkbaar niet, in samenwerking met Israel opgezet, omdat de PLO veel te vredelievend van aard was.
                                                                            Lees Livia Rokach om te begrijpen hoe Israel denkt.
                                                                            Over Hamas en Israel: Lees Richard Forer:http://tiny.cc/483pcw


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                                                                                Het probleem is dat je nogal selectief bent in je bronnen. Een politieke spreekbuis, wat Radio Islam bijvoorbeeld is, is ongeschikt voor geschiedenis als wetenschap. Manipulatie van geschiedenis als politiek instrument is niet interessant voor mij. Dat heeft in ieder geval niets met de objectieve waarheid te maken (als deze zou al zou bestaan).
                                                                                Dit geldt voor Mandela evenzo. 'alles wat Mandela ooit schreef als waardevol en met respect willen beschouwen' is een onzinnige uitspraak. Je moet hem gewoon beoordelen op wat hij zegt.
                                                                                Jij: "Ik heb niet de indruk dat De Waarheid U interesseert. U wenst uw huidige wereldbeeld te handhaven. U bent zo zeker van de juistheid
                                                                                daarvan, dat U niet wil openstaan voor nieuwe feiten."
                                                                                Dan heb je een verkeerde indruk. Ik ben juist geïnteresseerd in feiten en dit is ook waarom ik mij richt op serieuze historici en niet op politieke manipulatieve sites welke met een heel ander belang geschiedenis 'onderzoeken' dan feitelijke gebeurtenissen. Nieuwe feiten zijn juist zeer welkom, maar wel via de historische methode (http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
                                                                                Jij: "Dat is een onvruchtbare houding.
                                                                                Wantlogischerwijze is het zo dat àls Uw wereldbeeld reeds perfect juist is,dat U dan nergens bang voor hoeft te zijn: het zal steeds worden bevestigd."
                                                                                Dus op wetenschappelijke wijze onderzoek doen vind jij onvruchtbaar? Ik zou een perfect wereldbeeld hebben volgens jou?
                                                                                Het is een aanname die totaal uit de lucht gegrepen is. Ik ben echter wel kritisch op de bronnen die ik raadpleeg. Zou jij ook eens moeten zijn.. ik heb je al een harde les geleerd geloof ik met je gemanipuleerde bronnen waar teksten uit context waren gehaald.
                                                                                "Maar als Uw wereldbeeld onjuist is, dan kan het worden gefalsificeerd. Als U dat niet wil, ja , dan moet U de wereld opdelen in: leugenaars en goede mensen. Tot overmaat van ramp vindt U dat de
                                                                                argumenten van die 'leugenaars' niet hoeven te worden gehoord."
                                                                                Mijn wereldbeeld is niet zwart-wit, mijn wereldbeeld is ook niet per se juist of onjuist. In mijn postmoderne denken heeft een ieder zijn eigen persoonlijke waarheid. Er kunnen ook verschillende waarheden naast elkaar bestaan. Maar dat is vooral een moralistisch oordeel. Als wij ons met de wetenschap geschiedenis gaan bezighouden dan ben ik zeer kritisch. Jij niet helaas.
                                                                                "Zo zult U nooit de waarheid vinden.
                                                                                De waarde van uw kennis stagneert: U leert niks bij. U komt nooit dichter bij De Waarheid."
                                                                                Ik vind deze uitspraak meer voor jou van toepassing. Jij bestudeerd gemanipuleerde geschiedenis kritiekloos en vanuit een vooringenomen positie. Je kunt niet verder van de waarheid geraken dan met zulke belabberde bronnen en kritiekloze aanname.
                                                                                "En als tragische informatie wil ik U wel dit verklappen: Ik heb, -- dank zij het internet-- , ontdekt dat we allemaal flink voor gek worden gehouden door 'De Media'. We worden collectief 'dom' gehouden."
                                                                                Ja die complot theorieën ken ik inmiddels wel. Maar 'de media' is geen vast instituut. Dus van collectief 'voor de gek houden' en 'dom houden' is in die zin geen sprake. Media kan door iedereen bedreven worden (in tegenstelling tot landen waar geen persvrijheid is) Op financieel economisch gebied ben ik zeker van mening dat er dingen gebeuren die niet door de beugel kunnen. Je joden obsessie vind ik gewoon racistisch van aard en je zoekt daar 'bewijzen' bij om je opvattingen daarmee te meer legitiem te maken. Maar het is niet meer dan zondebokmechanisme (Rene Girard)http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z... enhttp://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...


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                                                                                    Het is redelijk algemeen aanvaard dat de Westerse Media in joodse handen zijn. Volgens Israel Shamir zijn het niet alleen de Media, maar ook de universiteiten , ja zelfs 'de Wetenschap' die in dienst staat van de joodse agenda. Ik kan dat uit eigen ervaring beamen.
                                                                                    Dit is de summary op Amazon van Israel Shamir's boek 'The Masters of
                                                                                    Discourse' : http://tinyurl.com/7ts87ng
                                                                                    "Welcome to the new world order, where mass media, a fully integrated
                                                                                    public-opinion-forming machine of mind control had rendered the Left and Right
                                                                                    obsolete and subservient to Zionism. Who are the people who own and operate
                                                                                    this machine? Are they actually the Jewish Lobby? No, says Shamir. The
                                                                                    formidable Jewish Lobby is just the visible tip of the iceberg, while below
                                                                                    there are miles and miles of solid ice: media lords, chief editors, their
                                                                                    favourite university pundits – in short, the Masters of Discourse. "
                                                                                    --------
                                                                                    U heeft dit alles nog niet door. Kan ik U nauwelijks kwalijk nemen, want ik heb dat alles ook pas de laatste 6 jaar ontdekt, sinds ik besloot zelf wat minder in mijn bedrijf te werken en te gaan 'studeren' : op het internet alles opzoieken en proberen te begrijpen hoe de financiele wereld werkt. Etc.Etc.
                                                                                    U gelooft nog het volgende sprookje: "Wij van WC-eend adviseren: WC-eend."
                                                                                    Of concreter: wij ( joodse journalisten) zeggen: Wij joden zijn het slachtoffer.
                                                                                    Ik zocht en vond deze mensen: " Wij ( joodse journalisten, onderzoekers, activisten, wetenschappers) zijn het kotsbeu om overal de leugens te moeten aanhoren. Wij zeggen: Er was een Naqba, joden zijn bijzonder invloedrijk, joden controleren de wereld en de media, joden hebben het terrorisme uitgevonden en gebruiken het. "
                                                                                    Leest U eens een paar van deze joodse bronnen!
                                                                                    Ik heb U er al enkele genoemd:
                                                                                    Livia Rokach http://tiny.cc/kedj3
                                                                                    Israel Shamir ( diverse boeken)
                                                                                    Israel Shahak http://tiny.cc/d930n
                                                                                    Richard Forer ( ooit lid van Aipac)
                                                                                    Robert Blankfort
                                                                                    Gilad Atzmon ( op youtube ) ( Zijn interessantste video is zojuist verwijderd, helaas)
                                                                                    Yossi Gurvitz http://tiny.cc/hsw7dx
                                                                                    Ilan Pappé
                                                                                    Yaov Shamir
                                                                                    Max Blumenthal
                                                                                    Dan zijn er nog de alles onthullende rapporten en plannen :
                                                                                    Oded Yinon's Plan http://tinyurl.com/3wm9f6w
                                                                                    'A Clean Break'
                                                                                    Het PNAC rapport van de ,mensen als Robert Kagan (de man van Victoria Nuland.)
                                                                                    U zult het niet doen. precies zoals 100 jaar geleden de mensen ook in paniek raakten als ze even het gevoel hadden te twijfelen aan het bestaan van God.
                                                                                    U bent namelijk tot op het bot geïndoctrineerd.
                                                                                    Het komt niet eens in U op om te onderzoeken wat ik U adviseer. U heeft maar één geconditioneerde reflex: Antisemiet!
                                                                                    Dan houdt het voor U op.
                                                                                    U zult, als U iets van de wereld hebt begrepen, wel vaag vermoeden dat joodse mensen onvoorstelbaar veel invloed hebben in deze wereld. ( Niet De joden, maar slechts 0,01 % van hen. Of minder. Maar met hoeveel ze zijn is niet van belang. De invloed die ze hebben is van belang. Het feit dat de destructie van Iraq, Libië en Syrië en Ukraïne zonder hun hulp en vaak initiatief, NOOIT zou hebben plaatsgevonden, dàt is van belang. Dàt maakt het noodzakelijk voor ieder die EEN GOED MENS wil zijn, om hen te bekritiseren. )
                                                                                    Ze controleren America volledig. Ze controleren de Haute Finance volledig. Ze bepalen de grenzen van de 'vrije pers'. De bepalen wat wij denken door hun controle over de westerse nieuwsmedia: door zaken te hypen, zaken te verzwijgen, mensen zwart te maken etc. etc. ( Lees over Edward Bernays. Walter Lippmann etc.)
                                                                                    Maar het komt niet in U op om deze heel machtige groep gewoon eens kritisch te gaan belijken.
                                                                                    Behoort niet ieder machthebber kritisch te worden gevolgd?
                                                                                    Ja , natuurlijk.
                                                                                    Maar dat kan niet, want wie dat doet wordt meteen afgeslacht: Hij is een antisemiet.
                                                                                    Oud minister Shulamit Aloni daarover: http://tiny.cc/gjoz9w
                                                                                    Gegroet, J.V.
                                                                                    PS: Dit nieuws verscheen deze week in Haaretz:http://www.informationclearing... Eén van de honderden voorbeelden die iemand met een open geest jaarlijks tegen komt.


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                                                                                        Nou dat is nu toevallig er stond vandaag een interessant essay in Trouw over complotdenkers zoals jij:http://www.trouw.nl/tr/nl/4512... "U bent namelijk tot op het bot geïndoctrineerd." Ik vrees dat dat enkel voor jou geldt Johan.. door die sites met waanbeelden..


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                                                                                            Ik heb gisteren al een zachte reactie gegeven op dat artikel, zoals je kan zien. Ik had ook kunnen schrijven dat MP Archinbald Maule óók heeft beschreven hoe de Franse Revolutie door joden is gedaan. En dat zelfs de hoog aangeschreven Sir Walter Scott bescrhijft over de joodse origine van de Glorious Revolution.
                                                                                            En, nòg een stapje hoger: de van joodse afkomst zijnde Engelse prime minister Benjamin Disraëli die schrijft dat in àlle revoluties die in Europa plaats vinden in de eerste helft van de 19e eeuw, er vrijwel altijd joden een centrale rol spelen. http://tinyurl.com/9teln8
                                                                                            De informatie is dus niet alleen van Nesta Webster afkomtig, zoals deze verlichte geest ons wijs maakt.
                                                                                            Maar waarom zou ik al die info willen melden in Trouw? Ze hebben al honderden inzendingen van mij niet geplaatst. Maar als ik kletskoek in stuur, gewoon een platvloerse mening: daar hebben ze altijd plaats voor. Voor feiten die onbekend zijn, maar in elke grote bibliotheek te verifieren, feiten die ons 'common wisdom' idee over de geschiedenis ondergraven, ja, falsifieren: daar heeft Trouw geen interesse in.
                                                                                            Zit Trouw in een complot?
                                                                                            Welnee. Het gaat ze boven de pet. Het zegt ze niks.
                                                                                            En U, beste Karel, U denkt wel dat U kritisch bent, maar ik stuurde U voor 10 weken huiswerk in mijn vorige reactie. Ik heb niet de illisie dat het U interesseert.
                                                                                            U grijpt een volledig onzinnige strohalm ( artikel in Trouw over Illuminatie) aan om uzelf het gevoel te geven: mijn tegenstander hoeft niet te worden bekritiseerd. Zijn info mogen we ongezien weg smijten.
                                                                                            Laat U dat 'Kritisch' aub weg uit uw naam.
                                                                                            U bent 'volgzame, brave, kritiekloze, niet-nieuwsgierige, hard op de geloofsdogma's studerende (àl die boeken over WO2 !) ' Karel.
                                                                                            Nog een toevoeging.
                                                                                            Waarom wordt altijd Nesta Wewbster geciteerd, en niet PM Disraeli, MP Maule of Sir Walter Scott? Deze laatsten hebben vanwege hun rol meer autoriteit, terwijl Webster 'fout was in de oorlog'. En zo kan men het idee dat de revoluties door joden waren gestart meteen linken aan 'Een Fout iemand'.
                                                                                            Het zelfde deed men met het feit dat de Russische Revolutie door joodse krachten is geïnitieerd, betaald en uitgevoerd.
                                                                                            Wie zei dat ?
                                                                                            Wel, Winston Churchill schreef het o.a. in een grote krant, op 8 febr. 1920: http://tinyurl.com/d93pmj5
                                                                                            Nog veel meer mensen hebben dit bevestigd trouwens:
                                                                                            -- Ambassadeur Oudendijke, destijds in Petersburg.
                                                                                            - - Dr. Fahey;
                                                                                            -- Reverend George Simons getuigde in 1919 voor de Amer. Senaat.
                                                                                            -- In 1923 verscheen in Berlijn een boek van Russische joden die zich schaamden voor de Revolutie , en voor het feit dat de joden daarin zo’n grote rol hadden gespeeld. ( Yuri Slezkine pag 183 van zijn boek ‘The jewish Century”( 2005)
                                                                                            ( Niks geen anti-semitisch boek, Karel: Slezkine's boek kreeg 'The Jewish Book Award' in 2007. )
                                                                                            -- Bertrand Russell schreef het in een brief die hij later in zijn memoires op nam.
                                                                                            Àl deze mensen tonen aan dat de Russische Revolutie door joden is gepleegd.
                                                                                            En toch gelooft niemand dat nu nog.
                                                                                            Hoe hebben ze dàt nu weer geflikt?
                                                                                            Heel eenvoudig: Ze hebben keer op keer Adolf Hitler op film laten roepen 'De joden hebben de Russisiche Revolutie gepleegd" .
                                                                                            En omdat àlles wat Hitler zei wel een leugen moest zijn, werd dit ook een leugen.
                                                                                            Zo eenvoudig is dat.
                                                                                            Ik bèn een conspiracy adept. Maar wel een trotse Conspiracy adept. Omdat ik veel meer weet dan al die brave lieden die de propaganda volgen en elke kans aangrijpen die deze propaganda hen biedt om zich superieur te voelen. Die arme Trouw auteur weet ook te weinig om te begrijpen dat hij onzin schrijft.
                                                                                            Ik neem het hem niet eens kwalijk.
                                                                                            Stel dat je géén Conspiracy adept bent, dan heb je wel een heel treurig lot: dan moet je geloven dat Kennedy is vermoord door een 'Magic Bullit'. Dan moet je geloven dat gebouw WTC7 is ingestort door 'office fires'. Dat zou heéél misschien nog wel kunnen, hoewel.... Maar voor een deel stortte het in met de snelheid van de vrije val !! En dat kan natuurlijk gewoon NIET.
                                                                                            Nee, er is natuurlijk maar één echt verantwoorde en rationele houding in deze wereld: te bezien waar er complotten waren, en wie daar dan achter steken.
                                                                                            En het is niet meer dan logisch dat de 'Sterke Machten' die er achter steken àlles in het werk zetten om 'complotters' voor gek te verklaren. En deze Trouw artiest is wat men in de complot-wereld noemt een 'unwitting accomplice': iemand die hen helpt, maar het zelf niet weet. Stalin noemde ze dan weer 'nuttige idioten.'





                                                      Wednesday, April 09, 2014

                                                      335 This is Real History.

                                                      This blog.

                                                      Canadian author Martinez gives a fine survey of the Real History as I see it.
                                                      These are the influential people behind the screens who decide what does hapopen and what does not happen, and what is perceived to have happened.


                                                      A Century of Deceit: World Wars and Zionist Militarism

                                                      By Brandon Martinez

                                                      April 08, 2014 "
                                                      ICH" - "Press TV" - -  Some studies estimate that close to 1.5 million Iraqis have lost their lives as a result of the brutal American invasion and occupation of their country in 2003.  Millions more Iraqis have become refugees and orphans with no future prospects for prosperity, sanctity or stability.
                                                      Most of the critical infrastructure of the country was bombed into rubble and dust. American depleted uranium weapons have caused cancer rates in some Iraqi cities to skyrocket, permanently destroying the genes of future generations of Iraqis who are being born with horrific birth defects and diseases.
                                                      The culprits responsible for this genocidal campaign to subdue and enslave the Iraqi people are not the CEOs of American oil companies as some disingenuous commentators on the Left have claimed. President George W. Bush’s foreign policy in the Middle East was not his own nor that of the oil lobby, but was the brainchild of the neoconservative conspirators behind the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and other Zionist-oriented think tanks that dominated the Washington Beltway.
                                                      Three of Bush’s principal foreign policy advisors who are widely recognized as the prime movers behind the war in Iraq were neocon ideologues Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz, all of whom have well-documented histories of Israeli partisanship. Perle and Wolfowitz, for instance, were both investigated by the FBI in the 1980s for passing classified defence documents to Israel.  Perle was once an employee of the Israeli weapons firm Soltam.  Writers for the New York Times described Wolfowitz as one of Israel’s “staunchest allies” in the Bush administration and revealed that Wolfowitz “is friendly with Israel’s generals and diplomats” and that he is “something of a hero to the heavily Jewish neoconservative movement.”   Feith once ran a law firm in Israel and received an award from the Zionist Organization of America for his “services to Israel and the Jewish people.”  The New Yorker revealed that Feith even has a portrait of Zionism’s founder Theodore Herzl hanging on the wall of his home library.  It was Feith and his neocon Zionist colleague Abram Shulsky who oversaw the secretive “Office of Special Plans” in the Pentagon where all of the lies about Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction” were conceived and disseminated.
                                                      These Israeli militarists, masquerading as American thinkers, left behind a paper trail that unveiled their true objectives. In 1996, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser – all future Bush administration officials -- authored a strategy paper for Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israeli Likud regime entitled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.”  In the paper, these Zionist hawks advocated an aggressive Israeli foreign policy, calling for the removal of all of Israel’s possible military competitors in the region through force. They spoke of “weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria” and of removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq, calling it an “important Israeli strategic objective.” Also on their hit list was Iran, whose influence in the region they hoped to neutralize as well. By eliminating Israel’s external enemies the Zionist neocons were in turn endeavoring to subdue Israel’s internal foes, the indigenous Arab Palestinians who continue to resist Israeli occupation and apartheid. 
                                                      Meyrav Wurmser, the wife of neocon David Wurmser, confessed that most of the leading neocons are pro-Israel Jews.  Gal Beckerman, a writer for the Jewish Forward newspaper, admitted that the ideology of neoconservatism itself was the brainchild of chauvinistic Jewish intellectuals such as Leo Strauss, Irving Kristol and Albert Wohlstetter. “If there is an intellectual movement in America to whose invention Jews can lay sole claim, neoconservatism is it,” Beckerman wrote.  Prominent Israeli journalist Ari Shavit said the Iraq war was engineered by a cabal of 25 mostly Jewish neoconservative intellectuals.  Famed American-Jewish journalist Carl Bernstein expressed the same view on MSNBC. The Iraq war was launched on a phony pretext by Bush, Cheney and “the Jewish neocons who wanted to remake the world,” Bernstein opined, much to the chagrin of the pro-Zionist host.
                                                      The engine driving the Zionist-led neoconservative war machine is “holocaust” mythology. “For those of us who are involved in foreign and defense policy today of my generation,” explained Richard Perle in a BBC interview, “the defining moment of our history was certainly the holocaust.”  Douglas Feith often invokes the holocaust to justify his militarism. In a New Yorker profile, Feith asked, “What’s the answer to the Holocaust?” He answered his own question by suggesting that it is not surprising that this alleged event has caused so many Jews to become militant neocons dedicated to aggressive, unyielding warfare against all those who pose a “threat” to Jews and their interests.  In a New York Times profile, Paul Wolfowitz spoke of the holocaust as having a profound impact on his worldview.  Another neocon ringleader, Michael Ledeen, revealed his obsession with the subject in an article he authored entitled “The New Holocaust.”  Political analyst Kevin Barrett observed that the Israelis and their Jewish neocon patrons in Washington “are fanatical extremists who feel that they are being persecuted everywhere they go and that they have to be extremely harsh, unyielding and aggressive, as well as deceptive and violent with the world” in order to ensure their survival.  Somehow it doesn’t dawn on them that maybe it is their unscrupulous behaviour that is the cause of hostility towards them in the first place. Obviously introspection is not exactly a Zionist virtue.
                                                      The Zionists’ militarist mindset is evidently motivated by the ethnocentric myths of Jewish victimhood. World-conquering Neocon-Zionist belligerence is driven in large part by the religious adherence to the official propaganda of the victors of World War II. Elite Jews played an important role in bringing about the Second World War as the final phase of their plan to establish the state of Israel. The First World War accomplished several things for the Zionists: it freed up Palestine from Ottoman control (the Ottomans previously rejected Zionist offers to purchase Palestine), it fractured the big empires of Europe who could then be manipulated into future conflicts, and lastly it delivered Russia to the Bolsheviks, a majority of whom were Jewish chauvinists hell-bent on the subjugation of that Christian Empire. With Russia now in the hands of Jewish communist extremists and Palestine falling under British dominion, the Zionist plan for Israel was well on its way.
                                                      “It has been repeatedly acknowledged by British Statesmen,” wrote Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann in a 1941 letter to British leader Winston Churchill, “that it was the Jews who, in the last [world] war, effectively helped to tip the scales in America in favour of Great Britain. They are keen to do it - and may do it - again.” Wiezmann went on to ask for British assistance in the formation of a “Jewish fighting force” that would be used to ethnically cleanse Palestine of its Arab population. Wiezmann promised Churchill that if the British would help create a Jewish militia to conquer Palestine, he would do his utmost to mobilize American Jewry to exert their influence to draw America into the Second World War on Britain’s side, as they did in the first great war.
                                                      Benjamin Freedman, a former top-level Zionist, exposed the machinations of his brethren relating to the First and Second World Wars and the Zionist conquest of Palestine. In a 1961 speech at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., Freedman explained that the United States was “suckered into the [first world] war merely so that the Zionists of the world could obtain Palestine.” Freedman described how Zionist Jews made a secretive deal with the British leadership during World War I promising to bring America into the war in exchange for Palestine. The result of this agreement was the “Balfour Declaration” of 1917, a British government decree that promised to make Palestine into a national homeland for the Jews.  Freedman stressed the absurdity that Britain “should offer [Palestine] as coin of the realm to pay the Zionists for bringing the United States into the war.” The Zionists, said Freedman, “have complete control of our government. … The Zionists and their co-religionists rule this United States as though they were the absolute monarchs of this country.”
                                                      In a December 1919 speech in Jerusalem, Chaim Wiezmann boasted about securing the Balfour Declaration from the British government through “persistent propaganda, through unceasing demonstration of the life force of our people.” “We told the responsible authorities: We will establish ourselves in Palestine whether you like it or not,” Weizmann said. “You can hasten our arrival or you can equally retard it. It is however better for you to help us so as to avoid our constructive powers being turned into a destructive power which will overthrow the world.”  Threatening the world into approving the creation of Israel was part and parcel of the Zionist project from its inception.
                                                      In 1903 an early Zionist leader named Max Nordau conspicuously predicted the outbreak of the First World War, which lends credence to the suggestion that a hidden force of Jewish Zionists, Freemasons and bankers are responsible for instigating the conflict for their own purposes. “Let me tell you the following words as if I were showing you the rungs of a ladder leading upward and upward: Herzl, the Zionist Congress, the English Uganda proposition, the future world war, the peace conference - where with the help of England a free and Jewish Palestine will be created,” Nordau told his compatriots at the sixth Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, 11 years before the outbreak of the First World War and 14 years before the British issued the “Balfour Declaration.”
                                                      Such predictive powers unveil a plan that was consciously followed and executed during and after World War I. The “peace conference” Nordau envisioned was the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, which resulted in the Treaty of Versailles, a farce that unjustly punished Germany for a war it did not start, thus laying the groundwork for the inevitable outbreak of the Second World War. An international peacekeeping body was established shortly after World War I known as the League of Nations. The League put its stamp of approval on the British seizure of Palestine after the war, an imperial land-grab that had no real legitimacy outside of the self-serving declarations of the political elites, bankers and oligarchs who chaired the League.
                                                      The League essentially functioned as a tool of the financial elite and served the geopolitical aspirations of the Zionists. “The League of Nations is a Jewish idea, and Jerusalem some day will become the capital of the world’s peace,” proclaimed Jewish leader Nahum Sokolow at a Zionist conference in Carlsbad, California, in 1922. “The League has recognized our rights to our ancient home,” he said. “We Jews throughout the world will make the League’s struggle our own and will not rest until there is ultimate victory.”
                                                      Even with Palestine now in the palm of their hands, the Zionists still had a problem: convincing Europe’s Jews to leave their lives of luxury and embrace Palestine as their new home. Such a task proved difficult, with only a minority of European Jews strongly identifying with Zionism at this time. This reality sheds a different light on the rise of Adolf Hitler and National Socialism in Germany, which proved very convenient from the Zionists’ perspective. While publicly professing scorn and hatred of Nazism, Zionist Jews secretly initiated a deal with Hitler’s government – the “Transfer Agreement” – which saw the transfer of tens of thousands of German Jews and their assets to Palestine. Lasting from 1933 through 1941, the Nazi-Zionist pact proved crucial to the future establishment of the Zionist state. The large amounts of capital and agricultural equipment that was shipped into Palestine by way of this agreement substantially contributed to the creation of Israel. “Through this pact, Hitler’s Third Reich did more than any other government during the 1930s to support Jewish development in Palestine,” opined historian Mark Weber in his article titled “Zionism and the Third Reich.” “[D]uring the 1930s no nation did more to substantively further Jewish-Zionist goals than Hitler’s Germany,” says Weber.
                                                      Still, the Transfer Agreement alone did not produce the amount of Jewish emigration necessary to form an exclusivist Jewish ethno-state in Palestine, as the Zionists intended all along. There simply were not enough Jews in Palestine that would be required to replace the expelled Arabs and keep them at bay. Not only that, but there was still not enough global support or sympathy for the creation of a state for Jews. Since the dawn of Zionism in the late 1800s, Jewish-Zionist ideologues had been ravenously promoting the story of “six million” persecuted and oppressed Jews. “We Jews need a homeland of our own because we are persecuted wherever we go” was the traditional Zionist argumentation. But the First World War did not produce the circumstances needed to foist this propaganda on the world. Jews were not singled out for persecution or mistreatment by any belligerent in that war, which is why the Zionists, following the dictates of their founder Theodore Herzl, deliberately aided and abetted Hitler’s forces to corral their fellow Jews into ghettos and concentration camps during the Second World War.
                                                      Herzl, in his diaries, advocated making use of “anti-Semitism” to spur Jewish emigration to Palestine. “It would be an excellent idea to call in respectable, accredited anti-Semites as liquidators of [Jewish] property,” he wrote. “The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies. … I have already told you that we want to let respectable anti-Semites participate in our project, respecting their independence which is valuable to us—as a sort of people's control authority.”  Did Hitler not carry out Herzl’s exact mandate? It must be pointed out that Hitler’s “final solution of the Jewish question” was the same procedure outlined by Zionists decades earlier: sequestering all Jews into a single state, isolated from other nations. “The final solution of the Jewish question lies therefore in the establishment of the Jewish State,” said the 1897 manifesto of a German-Zionist group.  In an 1899 letter, Theodore Herzl asked the Russian Czar if he would hear out his “Zionist plan for the final solution of the Jewish Question.”  In 1936, the Jewish nationalist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky laid out what the Zionist plan would ultimately entail: “It is not our task to establish in Palestine a home for selected people, not even a state for a small portion of our people. The aim of our efforts is to organize a systematic massive Jewish evacuation from all the countries in which they live.”
                                                      “The transfer of millions of Jews to their homeland [Palestine] will save the European Jewry from extermination,” declared Jabotinsky in 1940, adding, “Evacuation of the Jewish masses is the only cure for the Jewish catastrophe.”  The “extermination” Jabotinsky spoke of was not happening, but that didn’t stop Zionist propagandists from disseminating reckless atrocity stories of systematic genocide in order to win the world over to the Zionist cause. Legends of human soap, skin lampshades, shrunken heads, electric shock chambers, gas chambers and other absurdities were trumpeted from the rooftops by Zionists and their controlled press.
                                                      Jewish leaders made numerous public pronouncements designed to provoke Hitler, hoping he would unleash his fury upon Europe’s Jews, and with the help of Organized Zionism spur them to make their way to Palestine. For instance, Organized Jewry made a declaration of war against Germany in March 1933, before Hitler took any serious measures restricting the rights of German Jews. “Judea Declares War on Germany: Jews of All the World Unite in Action,” read the headline of the March 24, 1933, edition of Britain’s Daily Express. The corresponding article declared a Jewish “holy war against Germany.” “The Israeli people around the world,” the article continued, “declare economic and financial war against Germany. Fourteen million Jews stand together as one man, to declare war against Germany.”  A year later Jabotinsky made a similarly bellicose pronouncement, stating:
                                                      “For months now the struggle against Germany is waged by each Jewish community, at each conference, in all our syndicates, and by each Jew all over the world. There is reason to believe that our part in this struggle has general value. We will trigger a spiritual and material war of all the world against Germany's ambitions to become once again a great nation, to recover lost territories and colonies. But our Jewish interests demand the complete destruction of Germany.”
                                                      As the war drew near, Chaim Weizmann did everything in his power to invite definite reprisals against Jews from Hitler’s regime. In a 1939 letter to British leader Neville Chamberlain, Weizmann declared that “the Jews stand by Great Britain and will fight on the side of the democracies.”  Weizmann and his Zionist colleagues made many public statements to that effect, which Hitler referenced in a July 1942 speech.  In 1941, an American Jew named Theodore Kaufman made an even more brazen effort to deliberately provoke hostility towards Jews. He authored and published a book advocating the genocide of the whole German people by way of a forced sterilization program. Kaufman’s text, titled Germany Must Perish!, outlined “a comprehensive plan for the extinction of the German nation and the total eradication from the earth, of all her people.”  A map illustrating the possible territorial break-up of Germany and the “apportionment of her lands” was also found in the book. “Germany must perish forever from this earth!” Kaufman declared, calling for “a final solution” of German extinction. Hitler’s propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels was well aware of Kaufman’s hateful screed, and widely distributed it in Germany to bolster his case of a Jewish conspiracy against his country.
                                                      Zionist leaders and activists gave Hitler more than enough ammunition to justify interning Jews in camps as a security threat to Germany. The American and Canadian governments imprisoned Japanese, German and Italian citizens in camps during the war with a far weaker rationale. Japanese, German and Italian citizens of the US and Canada had not declared a “holy war” against their adopted countries, but were interned nonetheless. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that these Zionist provocations were a cleverly calculated ruse intended to create an atmosphere in Europe conducive to the Zionist transfer plan. Without the uprooting process initiated by the National Socialists and their Zionist assistants, it is unlikely that any large amount of European Jews would have voluntarily left Europe for an uncertain future in Palestine.
                                                      Some Jewish casualties in a devastating war that took tens of millions of lives was inevitable and very much desired by the Zionist leaders seeking a pretext to invade and conquer Palestine for Jewish colonization. “There are 6,000,000 living, bleeding, suffering arguments in favor of Zionism,” declared Rabbi Stephen S. Wise at a meeting of Zionists in New York in 1900.  In 1906, a German-Jewish philanthropist named Dr. Paul Nathan publicized the notion that the Russian government had initiated a policy of exterminating its Jews as a “solution” to the “Jewish question” and that six million were in grave danger.  Max Nordau, the Zionist leader who predicted World War I, invoked the story of six million persecuted Jews in 1899, 1911 and 1920.  At a Zionist conference in 1911, Nordau warned that it was only a matter of time before six million Jews would be “annihilated” by European governments.
                                                      This familiar narrative was repeatedly advanced a few dozen times before, during and after World War I.  A most interesting example is from October 1919 when the American Hebrew publication carried an alarmist story headlined “The Crucifixion of Jews Must Stop” which alleged that “six million Jewish men and women” were on the brink of a “holocaust of human life.”  A New York Times report from the same year headlined “Ukrainian Jews Aim To Stop Pogroms” alleged that six million Jews in the Ukraine and Poland were being targeted in pogroms and massacres.  Another report from 1921 titled “Begs America Save 6,000,000 In Russia,” also from the New York Times, said, “Russia’s 6,000,000 Jews are facing extermination by massacre.” 
                                                      As the Second World War approached, Zionists amplified their atrocity propaganda. In 1936, Chaim Weizmann told a British Commission that “six million Jews” in Europe had “neither hope nor future save in the land of Israel.”  In 1940, World Jewish Congress chairman Nahum Goldmann proclaimed that if the German National Socialists achieved victory in the war “6,000,000 Jews in Europe are doomed to destruction.”  Amazingly, Zionist newspapers betrayed the pre-meditated and fraudulent nature of the six million myth by proclaiming precisely six million Jewish victims six months before the end of the war.   Soviet-Jewish war propagandist Ilya Ehrenburg told his readers that “the world now knows that Germany has killed six million Jews” in March of 1945, two months before the end of hostilities and long before any accurate statistical data of war casualties would become available.  “At that time, no demographic figures could have been available to [Ehrenburg],” writes German Rudolf in the preface of The First Holocaust. “Just a year later,” Rudolf continues, “British Historian David Irving emphasized that as early as June 1945, in other words immediately after the end of hostilities in Europe, some Zionist leaders claimed to be able to provide the precise number of Jewish victims - six million, of course - even though the chaos reigning in Europe at that time rendered any demographic studies impossible.”
                                                      In an effort to whitewash their own egregious war crimes, the Allied Powers went along with the Zionists’ pre-meditated fictional account of six million dead Jews. At the post-war Nuremberg trials, an Allied-run kangaroo court staffed to the brim by Zionist Jews and their Allied lackeys, the truth was buried underneath a tidal wave of falsehoods. The Zionist motives for the war itself were purposefully obscured and a cartoonish propaganda narrative of “Nazi evil” was foisted upon the world to advance the victors’ post-war aims for Europe and accelerate the Zionists’ ambitions for a Jewish ethno-state in Palestine. American Senator Thomas Dodd, who was a chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials in 1945, revealed in a letter to his wife that the staff at Nuremberg was about 75 per cent Jewish. “Now my point is that the Jews should stay away from this trial -- for their own sake,” Dodd wrote in the letter, adding, “For … the charge ‘a war for the Jews’ is still being made and in the post-war years it will be made again and again. The too large percentage of Jewish men and women here [at Nuremberg] will be cited as proof of this charge.”
                                                      When the Soviet Union and its communist satellites in Eastern Europe collapsed in 1991, so did the myth of the six million. The Soviet lie of four million deaths at Auschwitz – a monstrous exaggeration accepted as ‘fact’ for decades -- was officially reduced to around one million, but revisionist historians doubt even that figure. Revisionist scholarship has determined that somewhere between 100-150 thousand people perished in Auschwitz mainly as a result of disease and starvation, which was not a deliberate act on the part of the Germans but rather the outcome of Allied carpet-bombing of Germany’s infrastructure.  For years Zionist propagandists claimed several million Jews had been killed by the Germans at the Mauthausen and Majdanek concentration camps, but recent official revisions place the Jewish death totals there at 74,000 combined.  Despite the vast lowering of the death figures at many major camps, Zionists and those they have convinced through incessant propaganda still repeat the erroneous six million number as fact.
                                                      Jewish scholar Norman Finkelstein outlined Zionist deceptions vis-à-vis the orthodox holocaust narrative in his book The Holocaust Industry.  Finkelstein observes that a dogma has been fashioned around the “holocaust” by the Jewish-Zionist establishment as a means of thought control. Shielding Israel from criticism and rebuke, Finkelstein argues, is a primary motivation behind the ceaseless promotion of holocaust mythology, in addition to Zionist shakedowns for reparations money from Germany. This profitable industry is bolstered by the Hollywood entertainment establishment which is “totally run by Jews” according to the Jewish Los Angeles Times columnist Joel Stein.  Not only does the holocaust dogma provide Zionist Jews with psychological cover to commit heinous crimes against the Palestinians and mask them under a façade of victimhood, but it also acts as a perpetual pretext for wars that serve Israel’s interests, such as the war in Iraq.
                                                      Gilad Sharon, the son of Israeli war criminal politician Ariel Sharon, vividly unveiled the bloodthirsty and bellicose nature of Zionism in a 2012 op-ed for the Jerusalem Post. Calling openly for the genocidal carpet-bombing of Gaza, Sharon declared: “We need to flatten entire neighborhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza. The Americans didn’t stop with Hiroshima – the Japanese weren’t surrendering fast enough, so they hit Nagasaki, too.”  Sharon’s remarks are not the ravings of a fringe lunatic -- they are completely consistent with the teachings of the pioneers of Zionist ideology, like Dr. David Wolffsohn, the late World Zionist Organization chairman, who told a meeting of Zionists in 1907 that Jews must put aside their differences and unite to “conquer the world.”  Vladimir Jabotinsky, the father of the Revisionist strain of Zionism, said candidly, “We want a Jewish Empire.”  Zionism is a “death-crazed narcissistic cult,” said Rich Siegel, a former Zionist who saw the light.  The inhuman precepts of the Jewish supremacist mentality that is so prevalent in Israel today can only result in more violence and bloodshed, more misery and suffering for the Palestinians and Arabs in general. 
                                                      While the West bears much shame and responsibility for aiding and abetting the Zionist project and all of its murderous and destructive consequences, bringing history into accordance with the facts is one way to uplift the Palestinians whose struggle for freedom and justice goes on.

                                                      Brandon Martinez is a freelance writer and journalist from Canada whose area of expertise is foreign policy, international affairs and 20th and 21st century history. His writing is focused on issues such as Zionism, Israel-Palestine, American and Canadian foreign policy, war, terrorism and deception in media and politics. Readers can contact him at martinezperspective@hotmail.com

                                                      334 Sy Hersh proves Assad was accused falsely of Ghouta

                                                      This blog:

                                                      For a long time already many real journalists are convinced that the sarin gas at Ghouta was not thrown by Assad's men.
                                                      But now Sy Hersh has convincing evidence and information that it was Turkey who did this gas attack, hoping it would draw the USA into the fight.
                                                      The article has made impact: ( Jonathan Cook) ( Robert Parry) ( Jeroen Pauw op 25.30 min)

                                                      Here is Hersh's article:      (Original:  London Review of Books)

                                                      Update: bericht uit 2019 van Belgisch journalist:  https://21stcenturywire.com/2019/03/17/journalist-taken-hostage-by-farouk-brigade-2013-syrian-government-didnt-use-chemical-weapons-in-ghouta/?fbclid=IwAR1nSe-IAzfUipHyIgkepi68rlJ_1fJxdhC_g-ZxlQC-cCF0GCEBLC_qk1w

                                                      The Red Line and the Rat Line

                                                      Seymour M. Hersh on Obama, Erdoğan and the Syrian rebels


                                                      In 2011 Barack Obama led an allied military intervention in Libya without consulting the US Congress. Last August, after the sarin attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, he was ready to launch an allied air strike, this time to punish the Syrian government for allegedly crossing the ‘red line’ he had set in 2012 on the use of chemical weapons. ( Article ) Then with less than two days to go before the planned strike, he announced that he would seek congressional approval for the intervention. The strike was postponed as Congress prepared for hearings, and subsequently cancelled when Obama accepted Assad’s offer to relinquish his chemical arsenal in a deal brokered by Russia. Why did Obama delay and then relent on Syria when he was not shy about rushing into Libya? The answer lies in a clash between those in the administration who were committed to enforcing the red line, and military leaders who thought that going to war was both unjustified and potentially disastrous.
                                                      Obama’s change of mind had its origins at Porton Down, the defence laboratory in Wiltshire. British intelligence had obtained a sample of the sarin used in the 21 August attack and analysis demonstrated that the gas used didn’t match the batches known to exist in the Syrian army’s chemical weapons arsenal. The message that the case against Syria wouldn’t hold up was quickly relayed to the US joint chiefs of staff. The British report heightened doubts inside the Pentagon; the joint chiefs were already preparing to warn Obama that his plans for a far-reaching bomb and missile attack on Syria’s infrastructure could lead to a wider war in the Middle East. As a consequence the American officers delivered a last-minute caution to the president, which, in their view, eventually led to his cancelling the attack.
                                                      For months there had been acute concern among senior military leaders and the intelligence community about the role in the war of Syria’s neighbours, especially Turkey. Prime Minister Recep Erdoğan was known to be supporting the al-Nusra Front, a jihadist faction among the rebel opposition, as well as other Islamist rebel groups. ‘We knew there were some in the Turkish government,’ a former senior US intelligence official, who has access to current intelligence, told me, ‘who believed they could get Assad’s nuts in a vice by dabbling with a sarin attack inside Syria – and forcing Obama to make good on his red line threat.’
                                                      The joint chiefs also knew that the Obama administration’s public claims that only the Syrian army had access to sarin were wrong. The American and British intelligence communities had been aware since the spring of 2013 that some rebel units in Syria were developing chemical weapons. On 20 June analysts for the US Defense Intelligence Agency issued a highly classified five-page ‘talking points’ briefing for the DIA’s deputy director, David Shedd, which stated that al-Nusra maintained a sarin production cell: its programme, the paper said, was ‘the most advanced sarin plot since al-Qaida’s pre-9/11 effort’. (According to a Defense Department consultant, US intelligence has long known that al-Qaida experimented with chemical weapons, and has a video of one of its gas experiments with dogs.) The DIA paper went on: ‘Previous IC [intelligence community] focus had been almost entirely on Syrian CW [chemical weapons] stockpiles; now we see ANF attempting to make its own CW … Al-Nusrah Front’s relative freedom of operation within Syria leads us to assess the group’s CW aspirations will be difficult to disrupt in the future.’ The paper drew on classified intelligence from numerous agencies: ‘Turkey and Saudi-based chemical facilitators,’ it said, ‘were attempting to obtain sarin precursors in bulk, tens of kilograms, likely for the anticipated large scale production effort in Syria.’ (Asked about the DIA paper, a spokesperson for the director of national intelligence said: ‘No such paper was ever requested or produced by intelligence community analysts.’)
                                                      Last May, more than ten members of the al-Nusra Front were arrested in southern Turkey with what local police told the press were two kilograms of sarin. In a 130-page indictment the group was accused of attempting to purchase fuses, piping for the construction of mortars, and chemical precursors for sarin. Five of those arrested were freed after a brief detention. The others, including the ringleader, Haytham Qassab, for whom the prosecutor requested a prison sentence of 25 years, were released pending trial. In the meantime the Turkish press has been rife with speculation that the Erdoğan administration has been covering up the extent of its involvement with the rebels. In a news conference last summer, Aydin Sezgin, Turkey’s ambassador to Moscow, dismissed the arrests and claimed to reporters that the recovered ‘sarin’ was merely ‘anti-freeze’.
                                                      The DIA paper took the arrests as evidence that al-Nusra was expanding its access to chemical weapons. It said Qassab had ‘self-identified’ as a member of al-Nusra, and that he was directly connected to Abd-al-Ghani, the ‘ANF emir for military manufacturing’. Qassab and his associate Khalid Ousta worked with Halit Unalkaya, an employee of a Turkish firm called Zirve Export, who provided ‘price quotes for bulk quantities of sarin precursors’. Abd-al-Ghani’s plan was for two associates to ‘perfect a process for making sarin, then go to Syria to train others to begin large scale production at an unidentified lab in Syria’. The DIA paper said that one of his operatives had purchased a precursor on the ‘Baghdad chemical market’, which ‘has supported at least seven CW efforts since 2004’.
                                                      A series of chemical weapon attacks in March and April 2013 was investigated over the next few months by a special UN mission to Syria. A person with close knowledge of the UN’s activity in Syria told me that there was evidence linking the Syrian opposition to the first gas attack, on 19 March in Khan Al-Assal, a village near Aleppo. In its final report in December, the mission said that at least 19 civilians and one Syrian soldier were among the fatalities, along with scores of injured. It had no mandate to assign responsibility for the attack, but the person with knowledge of the UN’s activities said: ‘Investigators interviewed the people who were there, including the doctors who treated the victims. It was clear that the rebels used the gas. It did not come out in public because no one wanted to know.’
                                                      In the months before the attacks began, a former senior Defense Department official told me, the DIA was circulating a daily classified report known as SYRUP on all intelligence related to the Syrian conflict, including material on chemical weapons. But in the spring, distribution of the part of the report concerning chemical weapons was severely curtailed on the orders of Denis McDonough, the White House chief of staff. ‘Something was in there that triggered a shit fit by McDonough,’ the former Defense Department official said. ‘One day it was a huge deal, and then, after the March and April sarin attacks’ – he snapped his fingers – ‘it’s no longer there.’ The decision to restrict distribution was made as the joint chiefs ordered intensive contingency planning for a possible ground invasion of Syria whose primary objective would be the elimination of chemical weapons.
                                                      The former intelligence official said that many in the US national security establishment had long been troubled by the president’s red line: ‘The joint chiefs asked the White House, “What does red line mean? How does that translate into military orders? Troops on the ground? Massive strike? Limited strike?” They tasked military intelligence to study how we could carry out the threat. They learned nothing more about the president’s reasoning.’
                                                      In the aftermath of the 21 August attack Obama ordered the Pentagon to draw up targets for bombing. Early in the process, the former intelligence official said, ‘the White House rejected 35 target sets provided by the joint chiefs of staff as being insufficiently “painful” to the Assad regime.’ The original targets included only military sites and nothing by way of civilian infrastructure. Under White House pressure, the US attack plan evolved into ‘a monster strike’: two wings of B-52 bombers were shifted to airbases close to Syria, and navy submarines and ships equipped with Tomahawk missiles were deployed. ‘Every day the target list was getting longer,’ the former intelligence official told me. ‘The Pentagon planners said we can’t use only Tomahawks to strike at Syria’s missile sites because their warheads are buried too far below ground, so the two B-52 air wings with two-thousand pound bombs were assigned to the mission. Then we’ll need standby search-and-rescue teams to recover downed pilots and drones for target selection. It became huge.’ The new target list was meant to ‘completely eradicate any military capabilities Assad had’, the former intelligence official said. The core targets included electric power grids, oil and gas depots, all known logistic and weapons depots, all known command and control facilities, and all known military and intelligence buildings.
                                                      Britain and France were both to play a part. On 29 August, the day Parliament voted against Cameron’s bid to join the intervention, the Guardian reported that he had already ordered six RAF Typhoon fighter jets to be deployed to Cyprus, and had volunteered a submarine capable of launching Tomahawk missiles. The French air force – a crucial player in the 2011 strikes on Libya – was deeply committed, according to an account in Le Nouvel Observateur; François Hollande had ordered several Rafale fighter-bombers to join the American assault. Their targets were reported to be in western Syria.
                                                      By the last days of August the president had given the Joint Chiefs a fixed deadline for the launch. ‘H hour was to begin no later than Monday morning [2 September], a massive assault to neutralise Assad,’ the former intelligence official said. So it was a surprise to many when during a speech in the White House Rose Garden on 31 August Obama said that the attack would be put on hold, and he would turn to Congress and put it to a vote.
                                                      At this stage, Obama’s premise – that only the Syrian army was capable of deploying sarin – was unravelling. Within a few days of the 21 August attack, the former intelligence official told me, Russian military intelligence operatives had recovered samples of the chemical agent from Ghouta. They analysed it and passed it on to British military intelligence; this was the material sent to Porton Down. (A spokesperson for Porton Down said: ‘Many of the samples analysed in the UK tested positive for the nerve agent sarin.’ MI6 said that it doesn’t comment on intelligence matters.)
                                                      The former intelligence official said the Russian who delivered the sample to the UK was ‘a good source – someone with access, knowledge and a record of being trustworthy’. After the first reported uses of chemical weapons in Syria last year, American and allied intelligence agencies ‘made an effort to find the answer as to what if anything, was used – and its source’, the former intelligence official said. ‘We use data exchanged as part of the Chemical Weapons Convention. The DIA’s baseline consisted of knowing the composition of each batch of Soviet-manufactured chemical weapons. But we didn’t know which batches the Assad government currently had in its arsenal. Within days of the Damascus incident we asked a source in the Syrian government to give us a list of the batches the government currently had. This is why we could confirm the difference so quickly.’
                                                      The process hadn’t worked as smoothly in the spring, the former intelligence official said, because the studies done by Western intelligence ‘were inconclusive as to the type of gas it was. The word “sarin” didn’t come up. There was a great deal of discussion about this, but since no one could conclude what gas it was, you could not say that Assad had crossed the president’s red line.’ By 21 August, the former intelligence official went on, ‘the Syrian opposition clearly had learned from this and announced that “sarin” from the Syrian army had been used, before any analysis could be made, and the press and White House jumped at it. Since it now was sarin, “It had to be Assad.”’
                                                      The UK defence staff who relayed the Porton Down findings to the joint chiefs were sending the Americans a message, the former intelligence official said: ‘We’re being set up here.’ (This account made sense of a terse message a senior official in the CIA sent in late August: ‘It was not the result of the current regime. UK & US know this.’) By then the attack was a few days away and American, British and French planes, ships and submarines were at the ready.
                                                      The officer ultimately responsible for the planning and execution of the attack was General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the joint chiefs. From the beginning of the crisis, the former intelligence official said, the joint chiefs had been sceptical of the administration’s argument that it had the facts to back up its belief in Assad’s guilt. They pressed the DIA and other agencies for more substantial evidence. ‘There was no way they thought Syria would use nerve gas at that stage, because Assad was winning the war,’ the former intelligence official said. Dempsey had irritated many in the Obama administration by repeatedly warning Congress over the summer of the danger of American military involvement in Syria. Last April, after an optimistic assessment of rebel progress by the secretary of state, John Kerry, in front of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Dempsey told the Senate Armed Services Committee that ‘there’s a risk that this conflict has become stalemated.’
                                                      Dempsey’s initial view after 21 August was that a US strike on Syria – under the assumption that the Assad government was responsible for the sarin attack – would be a military blunder, the former intelligence official said. The Porton Down report caused the joint chiefs to go to the president with a more serious worry: that the attack sought by the White House would be an unjustified act of aggression. It was the joint chiefs who led Obama to change course. The official White House explanation for the turnabout – the story the press corps told – was that the president, during a walk in the Rose Garden with Denis McDonough, his chief of staff, suddenly decided to seek approval for the strike from a bitterly divided Congress with which he’d been in conflict for years. The former Defense Department official told me that the White House provided a different explanation to members of the civilian leadership of the Pentagon: the bombing had been called off because there was intelligence ‘that the Middle East would go up in smoke’ if it was carried out.
                                                      The president’s decision to go to Congress was initially seen by senior aides in the White House, the former intelligence official said, as a replay of George W. Bush’s gambit in the autumn of 2002 before the invasion of Iraq: ‘When it became clear that there were no WMD in Iraq, Congress, which had endorsed the Iraqi war, and the White House both shared the blame and repeatedly cited faulty intelligence. If the current Congress were to vote to endorse the strike, the White House could again have it both ways – wallop Syria with a massive attack and validate the president’s red line commitment, while also being able to share the blame with Congress if it came out that the Syrian military wasn’t behind the attack.’ The turnabout came as a surprise even to the Democratic leadership in Congress. In September the Wall Street Journal reported that three days before his Rose Garden speech Obama had telephoned Nancy Pelosi, leader of the House Democrats, ‘to talk through the options’. She later told colleagues, according to the Journal, that she hadn’t asked the president to put the bombing to a congressional vote.
                                                      Obama’s move for congressional approval quickly became a dead end. ‘Congress was not going to let this go by,’ the former intelligence official said. ‘Congress made it known that, unlike the authorisation for the Iraq war, there would be substantive hearings.’ At this point, there was a sense of desperation in the White House, the former intelligence official said. ‘And so out comes Plan B. Call off the bombing strike and Assad would agree to unilaterally sign the chemical warfare treaty and agree to the destruction of all of chemical weapons under UN supervision.’ At a press conference in London on 9 September, Kerry was still talking about intervention: ‘The risk of not acting is greater than the risk of acting.’ But when a reporter asked if there was anything Assad could do to stop the bombing, Kerry said: ‘Sure. He could turn over every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community in the next week … But he isn’t about to do it, and it can’t be done, obviously.’ As the New York Times reported the next day, the Russian-brokered deal that emerged shortly afterwards had first been discussed by Obama and Putin in the summer of 2012. Although the strike plans were shelved, the administration didn’t change its public assessment of the justification for going to war. ‘There is zero tolerance at that level for the existence of error,’ the former intelligence official said of the senior officials in the White House. ‘They could not afford to say: “We were wrong.”’ (The DNI spokesperson said: ‘The Assad regime, and only the Assad regime, could have been responsible for the chemical weapons attack that took place on 21 August.’)
                                                      *
                                                      The full extent of US co-operation with Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar in assisting the rebel opposition in Syria has yet to come to light. The Obama administration has never publicly admitted to its role in creating what the CIA calls a ‘rat line’, a back channel highway into Syria. The rat line, authorised in early 2012, was used to funnel weapons and ammunition from Libya via southern Turkey and across the Syrian border to the opposition. Many of those in Syria who ultimately received the weapons were jihadists, some of them affiliated with al-Qaida. (The DNI spokesperson said: ‘The idea that the United States was providing weapons from Libya to anyone is false.’)
                                                      In January, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report on the assault by a local militia in September 2012 on the American consulate and a nearby undercover CIA facility in Benghazi, which resulted in the death of the US ambassador, Christopher Stevens, and three others. The report’s criticism of the State Department for not providing adequate security at the consulate, and of the intelligence community for not alerting the US military to the presence of a CIA outpost in the area, received front-page coverage and revived animosities in Washington, with Republicans accusing Obama and Hillary Clinton of a cover-up. A highly classified annex to the report, not made public, described a secret agreement reached in early 2012 between the Obama and Erdoğan administrations. It pertained to the rat line. By the terms of the agreement, funding came from Turkey, as well as Saudi Arabia and Qatar; the CIA, with the support of MI6, was responsible for getting arms from Gaddafi’s arsenals into Syria. A number of front companies were set up in Libya, some under the cover of Australian entities. Retired American soldiers, who didn’t always know who was really employing them, were hired to manage procurement and shipping. The operation was run by David Petraeus, the CIA director who would soon resign when it became known he was having an affair with his biographer. (A spokesperson for Petraeus denied the operation ever took place.)
                                                      The operation had not been disclosed at the time it was set up to the congressional intelligence committees and the congressional leadership, as required by law since the 1970s. The involvement of MI6 enabled the CIA to evade the law by classifying the mission as a liaison operation. The former intelligence official explained that for years there has been a recognised exception in the law that permits the CIA not to report liaison activity to Congress, which would otherwise be owed a finding. (All proposed CIA covert operations must be described in a written document, known as a ‘finding’, submitted to the senior leadership of Congress for approval.) Distribution of the annex was limited to the staff aides who wrote the report and to the eight ranking members of Congress – the Democratic and Republican leaders of the House and Senate, and the Democratic and Republicans leaders on the House and Senate intelligence committees. This hardly constituted a genuine attempt at oversight: the eight leaders are not known to gather together to raise questions or discuss the secret information they receive.
                                                      The annex didn’t tell the whole story of what happened in Benghazi before the attack, nor did it explain why the American consulate was attacked. ‘The consulate’s only mission was to provide cover for the moving of arms,’ the former intelligence official, who has read the annex, said. ‘It had no real political role.’
                                                      Washington abruptly ended the CIA’s role in the transfer of arms from Libya after the attack on the consulate, but the rat line kept going. ‘The United States was no longer in control of what the Turks were relaying to the jihadists,’ the former intelligence official said. Within weeks, as many as forty portable surface-to-air missile launchers, commonly known as manpads, were in the hands of Syrian rebels. On 28 November 2012, Joby Warrick of the Washington Post reported that the previous day rebels near Aleppo had used what was almost certainly a manpad to shoot down a Syrian transport helicopter. ‘The Obama administration,’ Warrick wrote, ‘has steadfastly opposed arming Syrian opposition forces with such missiles, warning that the weapons could fall into the hands of terrorists and be used to shoot down commercial aircraft.’ Two Middle Eastern intelligence officials fingered Qatar as the source, and a former US intelligence analyst speculated that the manpads could have been obtained from Syrian military outposts overrun by the rebels. There was no indication that the rebels’ possession of manpads was likely the unintended consequence of a covert US programme that was no longer under US control.
                                                      By the end of 2012, it was believed throughout the American intelligence community that the rebels were losing the war. ‘Erdoğan was pissed,’ the former intelligence official said, ‘and felt he was left hanging on the vine. It was his money and the cut-off was seen as a betrayal.’ In spring 2013 US intelligence learned that the Turkish government – through elements of the MIT, its national intelligence agency, and the Gendarmerie, a militarised law-enforcement organisation – was working directly with al-Nusra and its allies to develop a chemical warfare capability. ‘The MIT was running the political liaison with the rebels, and the Gendarmerie handled military logistics, on-the-scene advice and training – including training in chemical warfare,’ the former intelligence official said. ‘Stepping up Turkey’s role in spring 2013 was seen as the key to its problems there. Erdoğan knew that if he stopped his support of the jihadists it would be all over. The Saudis could not support the war because of logistics – the distances involved and the difficulty of moving weapons and supplies. Erdoğan’s hope was to instigate an event that would force the US to cross the red line. But Obama didn’t respond in March and April.’
                                                      There was no public sign of discord when Erdoğan and Obama met on 16 May 2013 at the White House. At a later press conference Obama said that they had agreed that Assad ‘needs to go’. Asked whether he thought Syria had crossed the red line, Obama acknowledged that there was evidence such weapons had been used, but added, ‘it is important for us to make sure that we’re able to get more specific information about what exactly is happening there.’ The red line was still intact.
                                                      An American foreign policy expert who speaks regularly with officials in Washington and Ankara told me about a working dinner Obama held for Erdoğan during his May visit. The meal was dominated by the Turks’ insistence that Syria had crossed the red line and their complaints that Obama was reluctant to do anything about it. Obama was accompanied by John Kerry and Tom Donilon, the national security adviser who would soon leave the job. Erdoğan was joined by Ahmet Davutoğlu, Turkey’s foreign minister, and Hakan Fidan, the head of the MIT. Fidan is known to be fiercely loyal to Erdoğan, and has been seen as a consistent backer of the radical rebel opposition in Syria.
                                                      The foreign policy expert told me that the account he heard originated with Donilon. (It was later corroborated by a former US official, who learned of it from a senior Turkish diplomat.) According to the expert, Erdoğan had sought the meeting to demonstrate to Obama that the red line had been crossed, and had brought Fidan along to state the case. When Erdoğan tried to draw Fidan into the conversation, and Fidan began speaking, Obama cut him off and said: ‘We know.’ Erdoğan tried to bring Fidan in a second time, and Obama again cut him off and said: ‘We know.’ At that point, an exasperated Erdoğan said, ‘But your red line has been crossed!’ and, the expert told me, ‘Donilon said Erdoğan “fucking waved his finger at the president inside the White House”.’ Obama then pointed at Fidan and said: ‘We know what you’re doing with the radicals in Syria.’ (Donilon, who joined the Council on Foreign Relations last July, didn’t respond to questions about this story. The Turkish Foreign Ministry didn’t respond to questions about the dinner. A spokesperson for the National Security Council confirmed that the dinner took place and provided a photograph showing Obama, Kerry, Donilon, Erdoğan, Fidan and Davutoğlu sitting at a table. ‘Beyond that,’ she said, ‘I’m not going to read out the details of their discussions.’)
                                                      But Erdoğan did not leave empty handed. Obama was still permitting Turkey to continue to exploit a loophole in a presidential executive order prohibiting the export of gold to Iran, part of the US sanctions regime against the country. In March 2012, responding to sanctions of Iranian banks by the EU, the SWIFT electronic payment system, which facilitates cross-border payments, expelled dozens of Iranian financial institutions, severely restricting the country’s ability to conduct international trade. The US followed with the executive order in July, but left what came to be known as a ‘golden loophole’: gold shipments to private Iranian entities could continue. Turkey is a major purchaser of Iranian oil and gas, and it took advantage of the loophole by depositing its energy payments in Turkish lira in an Iranian account in Turkey; these funds were then used to purchase Turkish gold for export to confederates in Iran. Gold to the value of $13 billion reportedly entered Iran in this way between March 2012 and July 2013.
                                                      The programme quickly became a cash cow for corrupt politicians and traders in Turkey, Iran and the United Arab Emirates. ‘The middlemen did what they always do,’ the former intelligence official said. ‘Take 15 per cent. The CIA had estimated that there was as much as two billion dollars in skim. Gold and Turkish lira were sticking to fingers.’ The illicit skimming flared into a public ‘gas for gold’ scandal in Turkey in December, and resulted in charges against two dozen people, including prominent businessmen and relatives of government officials, as well as the resignations of three ministers, one of whom called for Erdoğan to resign. The chief executive of a Turkish state-controlled bank that was in the middle of the scandal insisted that more than $4.5 million in cash found by police in shoeboxes during a search of his home was for charitable donations.
                                                      Late last year Jonathan Schanzer and Mark Dubowitz reported in Foreign Policy that the Obama administration closed the golden loophole in January 2013, but ‘lobbied to make sure the legislation … did not take effect for six months’. They speculated that the administration wanted to use the delay as an incentive to bring Iran to the bargaining table over its nuclear programme, or to placate its Turkish ally in the Syrian civil war. The delay permitted Iran to ‘accrue billions of dollars more in gold, further undermining the sanctions regime’.
                                                      *
                                                      The American decision to end CIA support of the weapons shipments into Syria left Erdoğan exposed politically and militarily. ‘One of the issues at that May summit was the fact that Turkey is the only avenue to supply the rebels in Syria,’ the former intelligence official said. ‘It can’t come through Jordan because the terrain in the south is wide open and the Syrians are all over it. And it can’t come through the valleys and hills of Lebanon – you can’t be sure who you’d meet on the other side.’ Without US military support for the rebels, the former intelligence official said, ‘Erdoğan’s dream of having a client state in Syria is evaporating and he thinks we’re the reason why. When Syria wins the war, he knows the rebels are just as likely to turn on him – where else can they go? So now he will have thousands of radicals in his backyard.’
                                                      A US intelligence consultant told me that a few weeks before 21 August he saw a highly classified briefing prepared for Dempsey and the defense secretary, Chuck Hagel, which described ‘the acute anxiety’ of the Erdoğan administration about the rebels’ dwindling prospects. The analysis warned that the Turkish leadership had expressed ‘the need to do something that would precipitate a US military response’. By late summer, the Syrian army still had the advantage over the rebels, the former intelligence official said, and only American air power could turn the tide. In the autumn, the former intelligence official went on, the US intelligence analysts who kept working on the events of 21 August ‘sensed that Syria had not done the gas attack. But the 500 pound gorilla was, how did it happen? The immediate suspect was the Turks, because they had all the pieces to make it happen.’
                                                      As intercepts and other data related to the 21 August attacks were gathered, the intelligence community saw evidence to support its suspicions. ‘We now know it was a covert action planned by Erdoğan’s people to push Obama over the red line,’ the former intelligence official said. ‘They had to escalate to a gas attack in or near Damascus when the UN inspectors’ – who arrived in Damascus on 18 August to investigate the earlier use of gas – ‘were there. The deal was to do something spectacular. Our senior military officers have been told by the DIA and other intelligence assets that the sarin was supplied through Turkey – that it could only have gotten there with Turkish support. The Turks also provided the training in producing the sarin and handling it.’ Much of the support for that assessment came from the Turks themselves, via intercepted conversations in the immediate aftermath of the attack. ‘Principal evidence came from the Turkish post-attack joy and back-slapping in numerous intercepts. Operations are always so super-secret in the planning but that all flies out the window when it comes to crowing afterwards. There is no greater vulnerability than in the perpetrators claiming credit for success.’ Erdoğan’s problems in Syria would soon be over: ‘Off goes the gas and Obama will say red line and America is going to attack Syria, or at least that was the idea. But it did not work out that way.’
                                                      The post-attack intelligence on Turkey did not make its way to the White House. ‘Nobody wants to talk about all this,’ the former intelligence official told me. ‘There is great reluctance to contradict the president, although no all-source intelligence community analysis supported his leap to convict. There has not been one single piece of additional evidence of Syrian involvement in the sarin attack produced by the White House since the bombing raid was called off. My government can’t say anything because we have acted so irresponsibly. And since we blamed Assad, we can’t go back and blame Erdoğan.’
                                                      Turkey’s willingness to manipulate events in Syria to its own purposes seemed to be demonstrated late last month, a few days before a round of local elections, when a recording, allegedly of Erdoğan and his associates, was posted to YouTube. It included discussion of a false-flag operation that would justify an incursion by the Turkish military in Syria. The operation centred on the tomb of Suleyman Shah, the grandfather of the revered Osman I, founder of the Ottoman Empire, which is near Aleppo and was ceded to Turkey in 1921, when Syria was under French rule. One of the Islamist rebel factions was threatening to destroy the tomb as a site of idolatry, and the Erdoğan administration was publicly threatening retaliation if harm came to it. According to a Reuters report of the leaked conversation, a voice alleged to be Fidan’s spoke of creating a provocation: ‘Now look, my commander [Erdoğan], if there is to be justification, the justification is I send four men to the other side. I get them to fire eight missiles into empty land [in the vicinity of the tomb]. That’s not a problem. Justification can be created.’ The Turkish government acknowledged that there had been a national security meeting about threats emanating from Syria, but said the recording had been manipulated. The government subsequently blocked public access to YouTube.
                                                      Barring a major change in policy by Obama, Turkey’s meddling in the Syrian civil war is likely to go on. ‘I asked my colleagues if there was any way to stop Erdoğan’s continued support for the rebels, especially now that it’s going so wrong,’ the former intelligence official told me. ‘The answer was: “We’re screwed.” We could go public if it was somebody other than Erdoğan, but Turkey is a special case. They’re a Nato ally. The Turks don’t trust the West. They can’t live with us if we take any active role against Turkish interests. If we went public with what we know about Erdoğan’s role with the gas, it’d be disastrous. The Turks would say: “We hate you for telling us what we can and can’t do.”’
                                                      4 April

                                                      Saturday, April 05, 2014

                                                      333 How Vladimir Putin Became Evil

                                                      This blog: tinyurl.com/on69oqc

                                                      The US and UK condemn him for Crimea but supported him over the war in Chechnya. Why? Because now he refuses to play ball

                                                      By Tariq Ali

                                                      March 29, 2014 "Information Clearing House - "The Guardian"-
                                                        Once again, it seems that Russia and the United States are finding it difficult to agree on how to deal with their respective ambitions. This clash of interests is highlighted by the Ukrainian crisis. The provocation in this particular instance, as the leaked recording of a US diplomat, Victoria Nuland, saying "Fuck the EU" suggests, came from Washington.Several decades ago, at the height of the cold war, George Kennan, a leading American foreign policy strategist invited to give the Reith Lectures, informed his audience: "There is, let me assure you, nothing in nature more egocentric than embattled democracy. It soon becomes the victim of its own propaganda. It then tends to attach to its own cause an absolute value which distorts its own vision … Its enemy becomes the embodiment of all evil. Its own side is the centre of all virtue."
                                                      And so it continues. Washington knows that Ukraine has always been a delicate issue for Moscow. The ultra-nationalists who fought with the Third Reich during the second world war killed 30,000 Russian soldiers and communists. They were still conducting a covert war with CIA backing as late as 1951. Pavel Sudoplatov, a Soviet intelligence chief, wrote in 1994: "The origins of the cold war are closely interwoven with western support for nationalist unrest in the Baltic areas and western Ukraine."
                                                      When Gorbachev agreed the deal on German reunification, the cornerstone of which was that united Germany could remain in Nato, US secretary of state Baker assured him that "there would be no extension of Nato's jurisdiction one inch to the east". Gorbachev repeated: "Any extension of the zone of Nato is unacceptable." Baker's response: "I agree." One reason Gorbachev has publicly supported Putin on the Crimea is that his trust in the west was so cruelly betrayed.
                                                      As long as Washington believed that Russian leaders would blindly do its bidding (which Yeltsin did blind drunk) it supported Moscow. Yeltsin's attack on the Russian parliament in 1993 was justified in the western media. The wholesale assaults on Chechnya by Yeltsin and then by Putin were treated as a little local problem with support from George Bushand Tony Blair. "Chechnya isn't Kosovo," said Blair after his meeting with Putin in 2000. Tony Wood's book, Chechnya: The Case for Independence, provides chapter and verse of what the horrors that were inflicted on that country. Chechnya had enjoyed de facto independence from 1991-94. Its people had observed the speed with which the Baltic republics had been allowed independence and wanted the same for themselves.
                                                      Instead they were bombarded. Grozny, the capital, was virtually reduced to dust as 85 percent of its housing was destroyed. In February 1995 two courageous Russian economists, Andrey Illarionov and Boris Lvin published a text in Moscow News arguing in favour of Chechen independence and the paper (unlike its Western counterparts) also published some excellent critical reports that revealed atrocities on a huge scale, eclipsing the siege of Sarajevo and the massacre in Srebrenica. Rape, torture, homeless refugees and tens of thousands dead was the fate of the Chechens. No problem here for Washington and its EU allies.
                                                      In the calculus of western interests there is no suffering, whatever its scale, which cannot be justified. Chechens, Palestinians, Iraqis, Afghans, Pakistanis are of little importance. Nonetheless, the contrast between the west's attitude to the Chechen war and Crimea is startling.
                                                      The Crimean affair led to barely any loss of life, and the population clearly wanted to be part of Russia. The White House's reaction has been the opposite of its reaction to Chechnya. Why? Because Putin, unlike Yeltsin, is refusing to play ball any more on the things that matter such as Nato expansion, sanctions on Iran, Syria etc. As a result, he has become evil incarnate. And all this because he has decided to contest US hegemony by using the methods often deployed by the west. (France's repeated incursions in Africa are but one example.)
                                                      If the US insists on using the Nato magnet to attract the Ukraine, it is likely that Moscow will detach the eastern part of the country. Those who really value Ukrainian sovereignty should opt for real independence and a positive neutrality: neither a plaything of the west nor Moscow.
                                                      Tariq Ali has been a leading figure of the international left since the 60s. He has been writing for the Guardian since the 70s. He is a long-standing editor of the New Left Review and a political commentator published on every continent. His books include The Duel: Pakistan on the Flightpath of American Power, and The Obama Syndrome
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