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Monday, December 18, 2023

Gaza and the Dangers of Jewish Paranoia, by Ron Unz - The Unz Review


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Although the subject is generally avoided in our politically-correct age, for many generations it has been known that different groups suffer from different social maladies, probably due to a complex mixture of innate traits and cultural factors.

The Irish have long been plagued by drunkenness and sometimes clinical alcoholism. The Chinese have loved to gamble, which has recently made nearby Macau the global profit-center of that industry. And European Jews have been prone to paranoia, perhaps the inevitable outcome of having spent more than a thousand years living as small, often highly-exploitative minorities among generally hostile host populations.

These sorts of deeply-rooted paranoid tendencies can quietly simmer beneath the surface, then suddenly erupt into uncontrollable spasms of terror and rage, ignited by a large or small spark. Many of these agitated individuals may be completely unaware of the true facts of the situation that had provoked them, let alone the underlying historical circumstances.

Last week the bloody Israel/Gaza conflict of the last couple of months suddenly claimed an important American political victim as Liz Magill was forced to resign as president of the University of Pennsylvania under the pressure of Jewish billionaire donors and pro-Israel elected officials, convicted of an inadequate response to the threats faced by Jewish students at her Ivy League university. Her supportive Board chairman was also swept out in a sudden ideological purge that may be completely unprecedented in the history of elite American higher education and might have very serious implications for academic freedom. Harvard’s president barely survived a similar fate, probably bolstered by her status as as the first black leader in that university’s history. All of this followed earlier threats by Jewish billionaires to organize a national campaign of permanent employment blacklisting against any students involved in anti-Israel protests.

Palestinian supporters rally at Harvard University on October 14th
Palestinian supporters rally at Harvard University on October 14th

In the wake of these dramatic events, I was somehow included in the email distribution list of a note sent out to nearly one hundred conservative-leaning mainstream academics, many of them Jewish, who seemingly favored these developments, suggesting that they might help in “De-politizing the Universities.”

Over the next day or two, I received a flurry of reply emails mostly focused upon the horrifying threats faced by Israel and the dangers of anti-Semitism at our elite colleges. Some of the views expressed by these scholars frankly astonished me and seemed almost delusional, being based upon total ignorance. For obvious reasons, I’ll withhold the names of the writers, but several of them would be reasonably well-known, especially in conservative circles, and I’ll quote a couple of their remarks:

This is not about free speech or any other arcane intellectual subject. If we go down this path we are doomed. This is about killing Jews, and all the yakking about free speech is a distraction. For thousands of years Jews have been cowards, surviving by our wits and talking and talking. A bad habit.

They want to exterminate us, what don’t you understand? This is the essence of Israel, not Talmudic discussions of free speech.

Of course they want to kill Jews they’ve said so many many times they want to annihilate Israel. Hamas is ready willing and able. The question is whether the nitwits on college campuses are taking any steps to kill Jews. I’m afraid to say that they haven’t taken such steps. It’s all just talk.

After being bombarded by nearly a dozen such emails, with the participants working themselves into a frenzy, I finally decided to interject my own very different views, arguing that they were living in a false construct of beliefs, totally divergent from reality. The emails continued for another day or so, with some of them naturally disagreeing with me—“Utter and complete nonsense! I can’t remember ever hearing such drivel”—before finally dying down, perhaps helped along by my sharply discordant sentiments.

I think those emails reveal some of the mistaken ideas beneath the surface of even the most seemingly rational academics, and the correction of those notions is imperative. Therefore, what follows might be seen as an “open letter” to such individuals, seeking to place some important facts in front of them.

 

First, in all fairness, I should emphasize that a large majority of the names I recognized on the list were associated with domestic policy issues, including opposition to political correctness, affirmative action, and censorship on college campuses, causes in which I entirely shared their positions. Therefore, it’s very possible that they had derived their entire understanding of the current Israel/Gaza war and the broader Middle East conflict from the sort of right-wing pro-Israel sources that provide an extremely misleading portrayal of the facts, probably supplemented by mainstream coverage in outlets like CNN and the Washington Post, which are almost as bad in that regard.

I think the best means of puncturing such an enormous propaganda-bubble is to begin with a single, sharp thrust, providing facts so utterly astonishing that they should force sincere individuals to completely reassess their entire world view and belief-system. And given their apparently wholehearted support for Israel and the cause of Zionism, I think that’s a good place to start.

It is an absolutely undeniable historical reality that without the crucial patronage of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, the Zionist enterprise probably would have failed. The Nazi-Zionist economic partnership of the 1930s was vital for Israel’s creation, and even after World War II began, one of the smaller right-wing Zionist factions led by a future prime minister of Israel repeatedly sought to enlist in the Axis Powers, seeking to join the military alliance led by Hitler and Mussolini.

These utterly explosive facts are certainly known to academic specialists and were even sometimes covered in the mainstream media several decades ago when they first came to light. But they have subsequently vanished from any public discussion and I wonder whether even one in a thousand supporters of Israel is today aware of them. I explored this hidden history in a long 2018 article, including extensive references to the underlying source material, and once skeptics have satisfied themselves that I am correct, they should begin asking what other important facts may have been carefully airbrushed out of the heavily expurgated histories that they have been taught.

Most of those agitated American academics on the email list are probably almost as misinformed about the true circumstances of Israel’s creation in 1948. At that point, the Jewish settlers constituted about one-third of the population of Palestine, with a large majority of these individuals having only arrived in the previous fifteen years. But their military forces were vastly superior to those of the almost unarmed native Palestinian Arabs, so following their strategic plan, they attacked and drove out 80% of the non-Jews, relying upon a campaign of terrorism, massacres, and summary executions to force those individuals to flee from the homes and lands in which they had peacefully lived for many centuries. This constituted an absolutely classic example of the war-crime known as “ethnic cleansing.”

These brutal Zionist attacks on the helpless Palestinians forced several neighboring countries to intervene, but those Arab militaries were feeble and just as expected, they were easily defeated by the Zionist forces that far outnumbered them, especially after the latter received a huge illegal shipment of heavy weaponry from Stalin’s supportive Soviet Bloc. So while the Jews had begun 1948 only owning 6% of Palestine’s land, they ended that year’s victorious campaign of conquest controlling 80% of the territory, then totally disregarded the UN Resolution requiring them to allow the Palestinian refugees to return to their homes after the end of hostilities. I recently discussed this sordid history in a long review article.

The circumstances of Israel’s creation and the current Israel/Gaza conflict were also the subjects of a long podcast interview I did a few weeks ago:

 

Skeptics might naturally wonder why the true facts of the 1948 war and its aftermath had not become more widely known in our country. The answer is the overwhelming control exercised over the American media by pro-Israel partisans, who managed to enforce an extremely one-sided version of events.

For decades Dorothy Thompson had been considered the “First Lady of American Journalism” and she was portrayed by Katherine Hepburn in the thinly fictionalized 1942 film Woman of the Year. Married to Nobel Laureate Sinclair Lewis, Thompson probably ranked alongside Eleanor Roosevelt as one of the most influential women in America. As a strong supporter of what she regarded as social justice causes, she had been one of the earliest and fiercest critics of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany during the 1930s, becoming a great hero to American Jews for those efforts, and she later served as a leading spokesperson for Jewish refugees and Zionism.

However, after 1945 she became troubled by the growing Zionist terrorism against the British and the Palestinians, and was even more appalled by the massacre and expulsion of the latter from their ancient homeland, becoming a strong advocate for the Palestinian refugees. As a result, Zionist pressure soon compelled many newspapers to drop her column and her media presence sharply declined. Commentary magazine was the flagship organ of the American Jewish Committee, and in 1950 it published her long and remarkably bold article raising serious concerns about Zionism and the growing “dual loyalty” of American Jews, charges that further enraged her Jewish critics. Thompson was soon blacklisted as a consequence, with even the memory of her once enormous public stature gradually forgotten.

Pro-Israel groups often employed even harsher methods to silence honest journalists. Since the 1980s Eric Margolis has been a distinguished foreign affairs correspondent and editor, the author of several influential books on South Asia. Having now reached his eighties and appalled by the current slaughter in Gaza, he recently published a short column describing the past involvement in that same issue of his own mother, a pioneering female journalist:

In the early 1950’s, my mother, a journalist and lecturer, went to Palestine sponsored by a number of US newspapers and, secretly, by the US State Department.

Newly founded Israel’s official position was that Palestine – and particularly the fertile Galilee region – was a ‘land without people for a people without land (meaning Jewish immigrants).’

My mother discovered hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees living in huts made from tin cans or cardboard boxes. There were some tents erected by foreign aid agencies and the United Nations. The refugees were huddled together in the biting cold. Many were near starvation.

There was only a handful of doctors or medical personnel, and no hospitals. Jewish settlers from Eastern Europe were moving in and seizing all the arable land. The United States was financing these settlers. Donations to Israel in the US were, mostly, tax deductible. The propaganda book ‘Exodus’ and subsequent film paved the way for the seizure of Palestinian land.

Those who challenged creation of a greater Israel on lands owned by Palestinians were viciously assailed in the US. The newspapers for whom my mother wrote were cowed into silence. Newspapers were threatened with boycotts by their vital advertisers if they did not eliminate my mother’s writings and lectures on Palestine.

Worse, pro-Israel supporters began banging on our front door in New York City, screaming death threats that included throwing acid into my mother’s face and mine. The war was not long over then and emotions after the Holocaust were still raw.

My mother was eventually terrified into silence because of threats of me being blinded by acid. She was forced to give up exposing the miserable fate of Palestinians. Meanwhile, Jews and non-Jews from Eastern Europe continued to pour into Palestine and expropriate Arab owned land. Usually with help from the Israeli government or American Zionist organizations.

 

Israel’s creation merely accelerated its efforts to control the media narrative and suppress any facts unfavorable to its cause.

By 1960 the Holocaust narrative had long since been forgotten by almost the entire world, but the government of Israel decided to resurrect it by staging the show-trial of Adolf Eichmann, an important Nazi figure who had been living in Latin America. Numerous influential foreign journalists attended the trial and reported on it to the world, but as I discussed in 2018, they were completely unaware of some of the most important elements of the story:

Also quite ironic was the role of Adolf Eichmann, whose name today probably ranks as one of the most famous half-dozen Nazis in history, due to his postwar 1960 kidnapping by Israeli agents, followed by his public show-trial and execution as a war-criminal. As it happens, Eichmann had been a central Nazi figure in the Zionist alliance, even studying Hebrew and apparently becoming something of a philo-Semite during the years of his close collaboration with top Zionist leaders…

A more cynical observer might find it a very odd coincidence that the first prominent Nazi the Israelis made such an effort to track down and kill had been their closest former political ally and collaborator…

The new state of Israel was just a few years old at that time, and very politically and economically fragile, desperately dependent upon the goodwill and support of America and Jewish donors worldwide. Their remarkable former Nazi alliance was a deeply-suppressed secret, whose public release might have had absolutely disastrous consequences…

…we may speculate that Eichmann’s elimination suddenly became a top national priority, and he was tracked down and captured in 1960. Presumably, harsh means were employed to persuade him not to reveal any of these dangerous pre-war secrets at his Jerusalem trial, and one might wonder if the reason he was famously kept in an enclosed glass booth was to ensure that the sound could quickly be cut off if he started to stray from the agreed upon script. All of this analysis is purely speculative, but Eichmann’s role as a central figure in the 1930s Nazi-Zionist partnership is undeniable historical fact.

I think all the many foreign journalists attending those judicial proceedings would have been astonished if they had known that during the 1930s Eichmann had been the chief liaison officer between his own Nazi SS and its Zionist partners, a philo-Semite who had studied Hebrew and traveled to Palestine as an honored guest of his Zionist allies. But by 1960 he had become a deadly liability to the young Jewish State, the individual who possessed the most detailed knowledge of the terrible secrets that could destroy it, so he was tracked down and liquidated.

A perfect example of this lack of awareness was found in the work of famed war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, the former wife of Ernest Hemingway, who covered the Eichmann trial and later wrote a long article about it for The Atlantic Monthly. I think if she had known the true facts of Eichmann’s relationship with the Zionists who were preparing to execute him, she might have fainted dead away. Concealing important information was far easier in those pre-Internet days when the centralized, hierarchical media landscape only contained a very limited number of influential nodes.

The successful deception that the Israelis practiced upon Gellhorn was to have fateful consequences. On that same visit to the Middle East, she also investigated the circumstances of the Palestinian refugees driven out and made homeless a dozen years earlier, and published an exceptionally long Atlantic Monthly article on their plight. Based upon her visits to several refugee camps, she found them to be an extremely nice and decent people, hard-working and deeply focused upon the education of their children. But she also discovered that they had been totally brainwashed by malicious Arab propaganda, which filled them with delusional notions. For example, they believed that the Zionists had cooperated with Hitler to create Israel and had later massacred large numbers of peaceful Palestinians, violently driving them out of their homeland. So partly for those reasons she concluded that it would be very inadvisable for the Israelis to allow them to return to their land and homes.

The problem is that everything those simple people told her was more or less true, and instead it was Gellhorn who had been brainwashed, though that was hardly her fault in those pre-Internet/pre-Amazon days, when the distribution of information was so tightly controlled and restricted. AIPAC’s predecessor organization was already very active and according to its internal documents, that pro-Israel group was thrilled by Gellhorn’s article and arranged for 10,000 reprints to be sent to public opinion molders around the country. It even prepared to also send copies to all 53,000 individuals whose names appear in Who’s Who in America, thereby achieving a huge propaganda-victory for the Jewish State in its ongoing conflict with the cause of the Palestinian refugees.

 

Then in 1967 Israel launched a sudden Pearl Harbor-type surprise attack against neighboring Arab countries, easily defeating their military forces and seizing and occupying large additional territories, including the remainder of Palestine. During this war, the U.S.S. Liberty, America’s most advanced spy ship, had been dispatched to the region to monitor the situation from international waters, and the Israelis deliberately attacked the almost defenseless vessel, killing or wounding more than 200 Americans and intending to leave no survivors. Although this was the greatest American naval loss of life since World War II, our government quickly whitewashed Israel’s completely unprovoked attack and for decades kept the story hidden from the American people, with the surviving officers and sailors all threatened with prison “or worse” if they ever revealed the facts to the media. I discussed this very serious incident in a long 2021 article:

Most of the Palestinians originally driven out of Israel during the 1948 war had fled to the West Bank and Gaza, and since 1967 they have lived for more than a half-century under Israeli control, notwithstanding decades of fruitless international negotiations aimed at allowing the creation of an independent Palestinian state on the remaining 20% of their original territory. During these two generations of sometimes brutal Israeli occupation, their land has been steadily encroached by hundreds of thousands of fanatic Zionist settlers backed by the Israeli government, with increasing public support among some Israeli leaders for a new and larger round of ethnic cleansing to drive them all out again.

For over fifteen years, more than two million Palestinian inhabitants of Gaza have been rigidly confined to what Human Rights Watch and other leading international organizations have widely described as the world’s largest open air prison or concentration camp, with all their food, fuel, medicine, and outward movement tightly controlled by their Israeli captors.

When the Gazans began staging months of large, unarmed peaceful marches in 2018 to protest their terrible situation, they were massacred by Israeli troops, with many thousands killed or wounded. In 1960 Apartheid South Africa, a single, somewhat violent protest march against aspects of white minority rule led to 69 deaths and horrified the entire world, which proclaimed it “the Sharpesville Massacre.” But given the tight control over the global media by Jews and other pro-Israel forces, the vastly larger number of deaths inflicted upon the totally unarmed Gaza protesters was almost entirely ignored. This remarkable story was told in a widely-praised 2019 documentary on the subject by filmmaker Abby Martin, herself a Jewish American sympathetic to the Gazans, as well as in her more recent interview on the same subject.

Under these unfortunate circumstances, a breakout attempt by Gaza’s Hamas militants was hardly surprising, though its size and success certainly were. For years, many thousands of Palestinians had been held without trial as prisoners in Israel, often under brutal conditions, and these captives included large numbers of women and children. So Hamas hoped to seize some Israelis who could be traded for their freedom, and they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, carrying around 240 prisoners back to Gaza. In later interviews with Israeli and foreign media outlets, the released or rescued Jewish hostages described how well and respectfully they had been treated by their Hamas captors.

This stunning military achievement was a direct consequence of the arrogance and over-confidence of the Israelis, who had assumed that the many hundreds of millions of dollars they had invested in their Gaza border defenses, featuring banks of high-tech electronic sensors and remotely-operated machine-guns, made them impervious to any attack from Hamas. But the latter used inexpensive small drones and other innovative tactics to disable those defenses, then breached the barrier at numerous points. This allowed 1,500 lightly-armed Hamas militants to cross over and overrun a number of army bases, military kibbutzim, and police stations, some of them deep inside Israeli territory. The IDF was literally caught napping, with many of their sentries asleep or away from their posts, and Hamas achieved an initial success far greater than their expectations.

The Israeli response to his devastating, totally unexpected military attack was panic-stricken, disorganized, and very trigger-happy, with Apache helicopter pilots unable to distinguish friend from foe on the road and merely blasting anything that moved. Video footage shows that hundreds of Israeli cars were incinerated by Hellfire missiles, with some of those vehicles driven by Hamas militants with or without Israeli hostages and others driven by fleeing Israeli civilians.

Since the mid-1980s, Israel has adopted a controversial military policy known as the Hannibal Directive, under which any Israelis captured by Palestinian militants who cannot be readily rescued must be killed to prevent them from becoming hostages, and an Israeli official described what happened on October 7th as “a mass Hannibal.” High explosive tank-shells and missiles were used to blast buildings occupied by Hamas fighters and their Israeli captives, killing everyone.

Taken together, I think the evidence suggests that a majority, perhaps a large majority of all the unarmed Israeli civilians killed died at the hands of their own government’s trigger-happy forces. An excellent recent article by longtime Middle East journalist Jonathan Cook effectively summarizes and links much of this material, while sharply criticizing the dishonest Western mainstream media for avoiding these important facts.

The Israeli government and its lick-spittle Western media have endlessly denounced the alleged brutal massacres committed by the Hamas fighters on October 7th, but the overwhelming scenes of carnage produced by Israeli high-explosive shells together with the eye-witness testimony of surviving captives indicate a very different reality.

Furthermore, all the Hamas fighters were equipped with GoPro cameras recording their activities, and the Israelis later obtained many of these from their bodies, then searched this massive video record for evidence of wanton atrocities or mass killings but seem to have found almost nothing, with such silence being extremely telling. Although the exact numbers cannot be determined, based upon all of this material, I personally think that probably fewer than 200 unarmed Israeli civilians were killed by Hamas fighters, with the true total possibly being closer to 100.

With so few actual civilian deaths, the Israeli government and its subservient Western outlets have been forced to rely upon grotesque falsehoods such as the ridiculous story of forty beheaded babies or a baby roasted in an oven. More recently, they suddenly “discovered” two months later that Hamas fighters have committed numerous gang-rapes and sexual mutilations, claims for which they could provide no solid evidence.

An excellent article by Max Blumenthal documented the extremely disreputable sources of most of these atrocity-hoaxes, and he also discussed these matters in a segment of his recent podcast:

 

The relatively few Israeli civilians probably killed by Hamas underscores the utterly disproportionate nature of the Israeli military response. This campaign of pure vengeance has amounted to a gigantic retaliatory massacre against the helpless Palestinians of Gaza, constituting the worst televised slaughter of unarmed civilians in the history of the world. Nearly 20,000 bodies have already been recovered and identified by the Gaza Health Ministry, and with so many thousands more still buried under the rubble of the 100,000 destroyed buildings, the true total may be rapidly approaching 30,000 deaths. Although Hamas fighters are all adult males, roughly 70% of the victims in Gaza have been women and children, a distribution close to that of the general population, indicating that nearly all the deaths have been those of civilians.

Top Israeli leaders, from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on down, have repeatedly indulged in explicitly genocidal language, seeming to call for the complete extermination of all Palestinians. Given the intentional destruction of so many hospitals, schools, universities, mosques, and other protected civilian facilities, they are obviously committing some of the worst public war crimes in living memory, apparently intending to kill or expel all the Palestinians once and for all. And such sentiments have been warmly endorsed by nearly the entire Israeli population, with recent polls showing that only a tiny sliver of the Jewish citizenry believes that too much force has been used in the ongoing attack on Gaza.

The casualty figures suggest that the ratio of unarmed civilian victims killed by Hamas and by the Israelis is probably well over 100-to-1 in favor of the latter, perhaps even approaching 200-to-1. Yet as I’d explained in a 2018 article, according to the tenets of traditional Judaism this is not at all inappropriate and perhaps even insufficient, with an Israeli rabbi famously declaring that a million Arab lives are not worth one Jewish fingernail. That statement had been made in the wake of Baruch Goldstein’s notorious massacre of dozens of Muslims who were at prayer, and one of Netanyahu’s top current Cabinet ministers has publicly endorsed such sentiments, hailing Goldstein as a great Jewish hero and martyr.

Such exceptionally bloodthirsty ideological proclamations by top Israeli leaders have real-world consequences in Gaza. Al Jazeera recently broadcast a seemingly credible report that Israeli soldiers had come across a group of women, children, and infants taking shelter in a school and killed them all execution-style, perhaps thereby doing their religious duty and fulfilling Netanyahu’s public calls to treat the Palestinians as “the Tribe of Amalak,” whom the Hebrew God commanded must be exterminated down to the youngest newborn baby.

Other eye-witnesses have also reported that large numbers of Palestinian civilians seeking refuge on the grounds of a hospital were buried alive by Israeli bulldozers, not long after the deputy mayor of Jerusalem had urged that exact method of punishment. If Israeli leaders call for atrocities, should we be too surprised that their troops sometimes carry them out?

Just a couple of days ago, three Israeli hostages in Gaza somehow managed to free themselves, and shirtless and unarmed, they approached nearby IDF forces waving a white flag, but were immediately shot and killed because they were assumed to be “terrorists.” This strongly suggests that the current Israeli rules of engagement involve shooting to kill any surviving Palestinians whom they encounter.

Earlier this month I’d discussed many of these controversial aspects of the Israel/Gaza conflict and related issues in a long, two-part podcast interview with Red Ice TV.

 Video Link

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A sort of frenzied blood-lust and megalomania seems rampant across Israeli society, with the leaders seemingly unaware of just how bizarre they may appear to most of the rest of the world. Not long after the Hamas attack, a top Israeli political figure interviewed on KremlinTV had denounced Russia for being insufficiently pro-Israel in the current conflict and therefore outrageously threatened the country possessing the world’s largest nuclear arsenal:

The Israeli government and organized Jewry have often stoked this sort of paranoia, with Israel’s national broadcaster released a propaganda video showing sweet young Israeli children singing a song calling for the total annihilation of Gaza and all of its inhabitants.

Indeed, the seemingly psychotic behavior currently exhibited by Israel’s government and citizenry is also apparently found among many of its American supporters, sometimes peeking through in telling episodes.

Last month, a Jewish former State Department official, a senior figure who had been responsible for Israel/Palestine relations in the Obama Administration, was caught on video berating a random Egyptian immigrant food cart vendor in New York City, promising to use his powerful political connections to have the poor man’s family brutally tortured and killed.

In a 2018 article I had noted that the tendency of Jews to cluster together may lead to them working each other into a dangerous frenzy, as seemed to be happening among the participants of that email distribution group:

As a rough analogy, a small quantity of uranium is relatively inert and harmless, and entirely so if distributed within low-density ore. But if a significant quantity of weapons-grade uranium is sufficiently compressed, then the neutrons released by fissioning atoms will quickly cause additional atoms to undergo fission, with the ultimate result of that critical chain-reaction being a nuclear explosion. In similar fashion, even a highly agitated Jew may have no negative impact, but if the collection of such agitated Jews becomes too numerous and clusters together too closely, they may work each other into a terrible frenzy, perhaps with disastrous consequences both for themselves and for their larger society. This is especially true if those agitated Jews begin to dominate certain key nodes of top-level control, such as the central political or media organs of a society.

Unfortunately, this sort of ideological frenzy can have very serious consequences. Indeed, the exceptionally bloodthirsty Jewish behavior in Israel, fully endorsed by many American Jews, seems to carry very strong echoes of a vastly larger historical pattern that I had originally noted in a long 2018 article:

Indeed, the topic of Communism raises a far larger issue, one having rather touchy implications. Sometimes two simple compounds are separately inert, but when combined together may possess tremendous explosive force. From my introductory history classes and readings in high school, certain things had always seemed glaringly obvious to me even if the conclusions remained unmentionable, and I once assumed they were just as apparent to most others as well. But over the years I have begun to wonder whether perhaps this might not be correct.

Back in those late Cold War days, the death toll of innocent civilians from the Bolshevik Revolution and the first two decades of the Soviet Regime was generally reckoned at running well into the tens of millions when we include the casualties of the Russian Civil War, the government-induced famines, the Gulag, and the executions. I’ve heard that these numbers have been substantially revised downwards to perhaps as little as twenty million or so, but no matter. Although determined Soviet apologists may dispute such very large figures, they have always been part of the standard narrative history taught within the West.

Meanwhile, all historians know perfectly well that the Bolshevik leaders were overwhelmingly Jewish, with three of the five revolutionaries Lenin named as his plausible successors coming from that background. Although only around 4% of Russia’s population was Jewish, a few years ago Vladimir Putin stated that Jews constituted perhaps 80-85% of the early Soviet government, an estimate fully consistent with the contemporaneous claims of Winston Churchill, Times of London correspondent Robert Wilton, and the officers of American Military Intelligence. Recent books by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Yuri Slezkine, and others have all painted a very similar picture. And prior to World War II, Jews remained enormously over-represented in the Communist leadership, especially dominating the Gulag administration and the top ranks of the dreaded NKVD.

Both of these simple facts have been widely accepted in America throughout my entire lifetime. But combine them together with the relatively tiny size of worldwide Jewry, around 16 million prior to World War II, and the inescapable conclusion is that in per capita terms Jews were the greatest mass-murderers of the twentieth century, holding that unfortunate distinction by an enormous margin and with no other nationality coming even remotely close. And yet, by the astonishing alchemy of Hollywood, the greatest killers of the last one hundred years have somehow been transmuted into being seen as the greatest victims, a transformation so seemingly implausible that future generations will surely be left gasping in awe.

The State of Israel was created seventy-five years ago and many hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled and made refugees, producing a conflict now three generations old. Nearly all the participants of that email list were merely young children at the time or in most cases not even born, and it may be very difficult for them to comprehend that they have lived their entire long lives immersed in the sea of lies and propaganda provided by our mainstream media and its offshoots, especially electronic broadcasting. But the actual facts of the current Middle East conflict are so extremely lopsided that when the Internet or social media allows a variety of different views to be heard, the conclusions reached are sometimes quite different.

For example, most younger people get their information from those latter sources, and a recent Harvard/Harris poll produced some striking results. A majority of Americans age 18-24 believed that Israel’s current military campaign was “genocidal” and that the country should be ended and given over to Hamas and the Palestinians.

Furthermore, the Middle East conflict is hardly the only major matter in which extremely skewed media propaganda has for generations successfully obscured the underlying historical facts, as I discussed earlier this year in several long pieces.

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