Why We Need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

-Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis

From washingtonsblog.com

What is the end goal of the battle against Wall Street fraudsters, government officials on the take, insane torturers and other other bad guys we are fighting against? Is it to see the perpetrators tried for their crimes, and then sentenced to life in jail? Or executed?

I think that's aiming too low. That's not going far enough.Why? Because the people who have done these criminal acts will likely be replaced by some other corrupt, ruthless folks in the future.

Meet the new boss ... same as the old boss.

If all we do is punish the perpetrators, the spin will be it was just a "handful of bad apples". This is the same angle that was used on the grunts at Abu Ghraib, even though we now know that the orders for torture in Iraq came from the very top.

Further, many American military, intelligence, financial and political folks are afraid to expose what they know for fear that it will plunge the country into chaos. As someone wrote anonymously in response to an essay I wrote:

"I think this is the key question. What would happen if this great crime were exposed and justice meted out to the many involved? How would the system be rebuilt and who would keep the broken pieces together during the healing process? Without some thought along these lines, many people will see exposing [these crimes] as stepping into the abyss."

So unless we can provide a way to obtain truth and justice and save our country, many people with inside knowledge or who are in positions of power will hinder rather than help us.

Finally, even if the criminal masterminds are prosecuted, other countries will just blame it on the "crazy Americans".

Who cares about other countries? Well, countries all over the world have problems with crime and corruption. So even if the American criminals are brought to justice, it is likely that the true lesson will not be learned by others.

A Different Strategy

There is an alternative strategy: a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

As you may recall, South Africa set up a truth and reconciliation commission.

The Commission granted amnesty to the people who committed brutal acts of murder and torture under the apartheid regime. I wasn't in South Africa at the time, but my impression is that the Commission helped South Africa heal its incredibly deep wounds quickly. Not only did the victims have a chance to tell their stories, but the people who carried out these horrible acts had a chance to confess in public.

Would the same work with current crimes? Maybe so.

What if the perpetrators of the financial, military, torture, and other crimes and their assistants were granted amnesty from prosecution on the condition that they fully explain how and why the crimes happened? And anyone caught consciously lying would automatically go to jail? The following might occur:

• Lower-level conspirators would probably be more likely to come forward and tell what they know

• When they come forward, they are more likely to point their finger at the real masterminds

• Seeing a way to support the truth without destroying the country, others who have knowledge of the true facts -- even if they were not direct participants -- would be more likely to work publicly for truth and justice, instead of hindering us

• People in other countries will hear the true facts, so that the same types of crimes will be somewhat less likely to be used in their countries

Less is More

Does this sound like I'm being soft on the criminals? Well, initially a Truth and Reconciliation Commission would not grant amnesty to anyone who failed to fully confess. So let's say higher-level people did not admit their role in the crimes: they would be prosecuted and punished to the full extent of the law.

Moreover, sometimes less is more.

Remember those Chinese finger cuffs you played with as a kid? If you tried to pull your finger out quickly, you got trapped ... but if you patiently pushed the ends towards the middle, you could free your finger.

Well, the current criminal situation we face in America today may be like Chinese finger cuffs. If we insist on jailing or executing all of the perpetrators, the resistance might be so great that we stay "trapped" in the current "cuff" of immobilization and resistance to the truth and magnitude of the crimes.

But if we are a little more patient and a bit more intelligent in our approach, we might be able to "free" the forces of truth and justice, and free ourselves from the nightmare in which we are currently trapped.

We need to be fierce and unrelenting in our push for truth and justice. And -- though it may seem paradoxical -- with a Truth and Reconciliation Commission as an end-game, I believe we might get there a lot quicker than if we demand the heads of all those involved in the crimes.

I am not talking about going easy on the bad guys. They've got to come totally clean or they get life in prison or worse. But I am talking about doing something that actually might work.

I'm also, frankly, talking about turning lemons into lemonade. Financial fraud and manipulation, starting the Iraq war based on false pretenses, torture, spying etc. are all acts of tremendous evil and deceit. But through the idea of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, we might be able to use these crimes to wake up America and the world to the secret history of what's been happening behind closed doors, the true nature of governments and manipulation, and the possibilities for a better society.

We might be able to confess our sins as a nation, and to -- perhaps for the first time ever -- truly start living up to the ideals expressed by the Declaration of Independence and Constitution.

Note: Senator Leahy has proposed a truth and reconciliation commission, but it is limited to crimes under the Bush administration, and it does not include financial crimes. I believe that a T & R commission must investigate whoever broke the law - republicans or democrats - and include financial crimes, which are some of the worst crimes as far as their harm to the greatest number of people.

Israel Boycott

"One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail."
-Rabbi Jaacov Perin

Israel: Boycott, Divest, Sanction
By Naomi Klein - January 8th, 2009

It's time. Long past time. The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa.

In July 2005 a huge coalition of Palestinian groups laid out plans to do just that. They called on "people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era." The campaign Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions—BDS for short—was born.

Every day that Israel pounds Gaza brings more converts to the BDS cause, and talk of cease-fires is doing little to slow the momentum. Support is even emerging among Israeli Jews. In the midst of the assault roughly 500 Israelis, dozens of them well-known artists and scholars, sent a letter to foreign ambassadors stationed in Israel. It calls for "the adoption of immediate restrictive measures and sanctions" and draws a clear parallel with the antiapartheid struggle. "The boycott on South Africa was effective, but Israel is handled with kid gloves.… This international backing must stop."

Yet even in the face of these clear calls, many of us still can't go there. The reasons are complex, emotional and understandable. And they simply aren't good enough. Economic sanctions are the most effective tools in the nonviolent arsenal. Surrendering them verges on active complicity. Here are the top four objections to the BDS strategy, followed by counterarguments.

1. Punitive measures will alienate rather than persuade Israelis. The world has tried what used to be called "constructive engagement." It has failed utterly. Since 2006 Israel has been steadily escalating its criminality: expanding settlements, launching an outrageous war against Lebanon and imposing collective punishment on Gaza through the brutal blockade. Despite this escalation, Israel has not faced punitive measures—quite the opposite. The weapons and $3 billion in annual aid that the US sends to Israel is only the beginning. Throughout this key period, Israel has enjoyed a dramatic improvement in its diplomatic, cultural and trade relations with a variety of other allies. For instance, in 2007 Israel became the first non–Latin American country to sign a free-trade deal with Mercosur. In the first nine months of 2008, Israeli exports to Canada went up 45 percent. A new trade deal with the European Union is set to double Israel's exports of processed food. And on December 8, European ministers "upgraded" the EU-Israel Association Agreement, a reward long sought by Jerusalem.*

It is in this context that Israeli leaders started their latest war: confident they would face no meaningful costs. It is remarkable that over seven days of wartime trading, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange's flagship index actually went up 10.7 percent. When carrots don't work, sticks are needed.

2. Israel is not South Africa. Of course it isn't. The relevance of the South African model is that it proves that BDS tactics can be effective when weaker measures (protests, petitions, back-room lobbying) have failed. And there are indeed deeply distressing echoes of South African apartheid in the occupied territories: the color-coded IDs and travel permits, the bulldozed homes and forced displacement, the settler-only roads. Ronnie Kasrils, a prominent South African politician, said that the architecture of segregation that he saw in the West Bank and Gaza was "infinitely worse than apartheid." That was in 2007, before Israel began its full-scale war against the open-air prison that is Gaza.

3. Why single out Israel when the United States, Britain and other Western countries do the same things in Iraq and Afghanistan? Boycott is not a dogma; it is a tactic. The reason the BDS strategy should be tried against Israel is practical: in a country so small and trade-dependent, it could actually work.

4. Boycotts sever communication; we need more dialogue, not less. This one I'll answer with a personal story. For eight years, my books have been published in Israel by a commercial house called Babel. But when I published The Shock Doctrine, I wanted to respect the boycott. On the advice of BDS activists, including the wonderful writer John Berger, I contacted a small publisher called Andalus. Andalus is an activist press, deeply involved in the anti-occupation movement and the only Israeli publisher devoted exclusively to translating Arabic writing into Hebrew. We drafted a contract that guarantees that all proceeds go to Andalus's work, and none to me. In other words, I am boycotting the Israeli economy but not Israelis.

Coming up with our modest publishing plan required dozens of phone calls, e-mails and instant messages, stretching from Tel Aviv to Ramallah to Paris to Toronto to Gaza City. My point is this: as soon as you start implementing a boycott strategy, dialogue increases dramatically. And why wouldn't it? Building a movement requires endless communicating, as many in the antiapartheid struggle well recall. The argument that supporting boycotts will cut us off from one another is particularly specious given the array of cheap information technologies at our fingertips. We are drowning in ways to rant at one another across national boundaries. No boycott can stop us.

Just about now, many a proud Zionist is gearing up for major point-scoring: don't I know that many of those very high-tech toys come from Israeli research parks, world leaders in infotech? True enough, but not all of them. Several days into Israel's Gaza assault, Richard Ramsey, the managing director of a British telecom specializing in voice-over-internet services, sent an email to the Israeli tech firm MobileMax. "As a result of the Israeli government action in the last few days we will no longer be in a position to consider doing business with yourself or any other Israeli company."

Ramsey says that his decision wasn't political; he just didn't want to lose customers. "We can't afford to lose any of our clients," he explains, "so it was purely commercially defensive."

It was this kind of cold business calculation that led many companies to pull out of South Africa two decades ago. And it's precisely the kind of calculation that is our most realistic hope of bringing justice, so long denied, to Palestine.

*On January 14, in response to Israel's aggression in Gaza, the EU called off its plans to upgrade the EU-Israel Association Agreement, a sign of growing understanding that political sanctions can be brought to bear to bring an end to the war.

This column was first published in The Nation

The "Family": Secretive "Christian" Advocacy Group Praises Hitler as Paragon of Leadership

U.S. Rep. Bart Stupak (Creative Commons photo by Brian Rendel via Flickr)

By Ed Brayton for the Michigan Messenger
7/23/09 3:26 PM

This story is especially disturbing.

Despite weeks of media attention paid to the now-infamous “C Street” house owned by The Family, a secretive Christian group, U.S. Rep. Bart Stupak — who lives at the house near the U.S. Capitol — denied any knowledge of the nature of the mysterious Washington, D.C., rowhouse and any involvement with the organization that owns it and uses as a seat of influence on Capitol Hill.

Jeff Sharlet, contributing editor at Harper’s magazine and the author of “The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power,” lived for a time at Ivanwald, another boarding house owned by the group in Arlington, Va., this one for younger men without political power.

“The bottom line here is that Stupak is either being dishonest or confessing dangerous ignorance,” Sharlet said. “The house’s function has been public knowledge since the [Associated Press] wrote about it 7 years ago. Multiple mainstream media outlets have reported on the house’s role as in effect, a lobby in all but name, led by a man who is on video and audio record citing the leadership lessons of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.”

Matt Taibbi Accused of Anti-Semitism Over Goldman Sachs Article

Posted by Matt Taibbi, True/Slant at 8:00 AM on July 13, 2009.

It’s been interesting, to say the least, watching the public reaction to my Rolling Stone piece last week. I of course expected that some kind of highly unpleasant response would come my way from Goldman and its allies in the press, but I admit to being surprised a little by the form this response took. Obviously I don’t want to dwell on this business, because it’s beyond boring when someone in my position complains about his critics, but I feel like I have to say something about at least a few of the talking points of the inevitable Goldman counteroffensive, which in various forms (letters sent to me personally, public comments) have reached my desk in the last few days.

The most ludicrous of these, and the one that surprised me the most, is the accusation that my article was anti-Semitic propaganda. The first letter I got on this score I actually mistook for a joke sent to me by one of my friends. Then I got another one which I quickly realized was not a joke at all. “Isn’t it convenient,” it read, “that an Arab-American writer for Rolling Stone looks at Wall Street and picks the most prototypically Jewish firm around to demonize.”

The last time I heard something similar was a few years ago, when Debbie Schlussel, a severely dimwitted Detroit-based right-wing pundit, railed against my supposed Arabness after I wrote an article about the Lebanese population in Dearborn, Michigan. I wrote to her to let her know that I’m actually Irish and Filipino, and not at all an Arab, but never got a response. This time the charge is a little different, as several writers complained that my article was “a rehash of every classic anti-Jewish conspiracy theory” and “a pale copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

The evidence for these charges seems to be as follows. One, I used the word “tribe” somewhere near the end of the piece. Two, the term “blood-funnel” was used (one person also hinted that the use of a squid image was somehow anti-Semitic, but I was not entirely clear what was being referred to there). Three, I “singled out” Goldman and failed to level similar charges at “less Jewish firms” (yes, one letter-writer actually used that phrase) like Morgan-Stanley.

A few points in response to this preposterous argument. Firstly I’m going to make a blanket denial and just say that the question of religion was so far outside my thinking while writing this piece that I never even considered it. If this issue had even entered my head so much as once, I probably would have been more careful, and it is remotely possible that I might not then have used a distantly suggestive word like “tribe,” if only to avoid having to answer charges like this. But I didn’t consider it, for the simple reason that it’s completely ridiculous and not at all relevant.

For one thing, while Goldman’s founders a gazillion years ago were apparently Jewish, I seriously doubt that religion plays any role at all in the makeup of the modern Goldman. I don’t have any way of knowing this, but I would be shocked if it weren’t true that a majority of Goldman’s current employees were not Jewish. And whatever the reality is, I don’t care; it’s not a concern of mine and we didn’t make it a concern in the article.

If anything it seems to me that what defines these Wall Street characters is not religion but the absence of it: even a hardened atheist like myself comes away from the experience of reading about the last two decades of Wall Street history shocked by that community’s complete and utter Godlessness and moral insanity. What I’m saying in other words is that if any of these clowns actually had a real religious sensibility, we wouldn’t be in this mess — and that’s coming from someone who believes all religions to be inherently ridiculous. For Goldman now to hide behind the cloak of Jewish victimhood is both more obnoxious and less convincing than Marion Barry wearing a dashiki after the indictment.

Then there is this other argument, the one being bandied about by Time magazine, among others. According to Steven Gandel of Time, the problem with my piece is that it is — get this — too specific. According to the above passage, focusing on Goldman in particular when attempting to explain (in general) the crimes of Wall Street to ordinary readers is somehow a distraction from the “real problem.” To repeat:

…spend too much time on Goldman and you miss the fact of how broadly the financial system and the regulations that are supposed to keep profiteers in check failed us.

I had to read that passage several times to even begin to grasp its ostensible meaning. Apparently this is the best argument that Time could come up with to discredit this article, that the rhetorical technique of using a specific example of a specific bank like Goldman to tell a broader story about Wall Street in general distracts readers from the “more important” issue of how government regulators… failed to stop banks like Goldman! I mean, really, how’s that for circular thinking? This is silly stuff even by Time magazine’s standards.

I’ve been shocked by how many grown adult people seem to have swallowed this argument, that the argument against Goldman’s behavior during the bubbles of recent decades is invalid because “everyone was doing it” -- and other banks, like for instance Morgan Stanley, were “just as bad” as Goldman was.

Two things about that. One, it isn’t true, not really. By any reasonable measure Goldman is and has been the baddest guy on the block for a long time. When it comes to government influence, no other Wall Street company even comes close. And while maybe one might have made an argument that other players were more damaging to society before the crisis of last year, there’s simply no question now, after the bailouts and especially after the AIG fiasco, that Goldman now reigns supreme in the area of insider advantage. To pick any other bank to tell the story of the rapidly growing influence of Wall Street on politics and the blurring of public and private roles would be a glaring journalistic oversight, and surely even Goldman’s biggest supporters would admit this.

Two, even if it is true that “everyone else was doing it”: so what? Who cares? To me this response is highly telling. We published a piece accusing Goldman Sachs of systematically ripping off pensioners and other retail investors by sticking them with rafts of toxic mortgages it knew were losers, of looting taxpayer reserves to cover its bad bets made with AIG, of manipulating gas prices to massive detrimental effect, of helping to explode an internet bubble that caused over $5 trillion in wealth to disappear, and numerous other crimes -- and the response isn’t “You’re wrong,” or “We didn’t do that shit, not us,” but “Well, Morgan did the same stuff,” and “Why aren’t you writing about Morgan?”

Why didn’t we write about Morgan? Because we didn’t. Because it’s your turn, you assholes. Maybe later someone will tell the story of the other banks, but for now, while most ordinary people are only just learning about the workings of the financial innovation era that blew up in their faces last year, the top dog in that universe is going to be first in line to get the special treatment. That might be inconvenient for Goldman, but it doesn’t make the things I or anyone else say about them untrue.

Normally I don’t care so much when people criticize my work. It goes with the territory. But in this case, the response of a bank like Goldman and Goldman’s supporters is characteristic of the subject matter in a way that is important to point out, even after the fact of publication. These are powerful people who know how to play the public relations game, have all the appropriate contacts, and have a playbook that they follow to discredit their critics. Whether it’s me now or the next guy who takes them on, they’re going to come back with some kind of charge, be it “Everyone was doing it,” or “We’re just smarter than the other guys, you can’t blame us for that,” or “The real culprits are the ineffective regulators,” something.

They’re going to say that and more, but whether it’s this time or the next time, the important thing is to pay attention to what they don’t say. And what they didn’t say about this piece is that it was wrong. They didn’t deny any of it. They said others were just as bad, they said I was a bad guy, they said it was a conspiracy theory. But they didn’t say it was mistaken, and that’s the only thing that matters.

Chomsky on Finkelstein: The Fate of an Honest Intellectual

Excerpted from Understanding Power, The New Press, 2002, pp. 244-248


I'll tell you another, last case—and there are many others like this. Here's a story which is really tragic. How many of you know about Joan Peters, the book by Joan Peters? There was this best-seller a few years ago [in 1984], it went through about ten printings, by a woman named Joan Peters—or at least, signed by Joan Peters—called From Time Immemorial.

It was a big scholarly-looking book with lots of footnotes, which purported to show that the Palestinians were all recent immigrants [i.e. to the Jewish-settled areas of the former Palestine, during the British mandate years of 1920 to 1948]. And it was very popular—it got literally hundreds of rave reviews, and no negative reviews: the Washington Post, the New York Times, everybody was just raving about it. Here was this book which proved that there were really no Palestinians!

Of course, the implicit message was, if Israel kicks them all out there's no moral issue, because they're just recent immigrants who came in because the Jews had built up the country. And there was all kinds of demographic analysis in it, and a big professor of demography at the University of Chicago [Philip M. Hauser] authenticated it. That was the big intellectual hit for that year: Saul Bellow, Barbara Tuchman, everybody was talking about it as the greatest thing since chocolate cake.

Well, one graduate student at Princeton, a guy named Norman Finkelstein, started reading through the book. He was interested in the history of Zionism, and as he read the book he was kind of surprised by some of the things it said. He's a very careful student, and he started checking the references—and it turned out that the whole thing was a hoax, it was completely faked: probably it had been put together by some intelligence agency or something like that. Well, Finkelstein wrote up a short paper of just preliminary findings, it was about twenty-five pages or so, and he sent it around to I think thirty people who were interested in the topic, scholars in the field and so on, saying: "Here's what I've found in this book, do you think it's worth pursuing?"

Well, he got back one answer, from me. I told him, yeah, I think it's an interesting topic, but I warned him, if you follow this, you're going to get in trouble—because you're going to expose the American intellectual community as a gang of frauds, and they are not going to like it, and they're going to destroy you. So I said: if you want to do it, go ahead, but be aware of what you're getting into. It's an important issue, it makes a big difference whether you eliminate the moral basis for driving out a population—it's preparing the basis for some real horrors—so a lot of people's lives could be at stake. But your life is at stake too, I told him, because if you pursue this, your career is going to be ruined.

Well, he didn't believe me. We became very close friends after this, I didn't know him before. He went ahead and wrote up an article, and he started submitting it to journals. Nothing: they didn't even bother responding. I finally managed to place a piece of it in In These Times, a tiny left-wing journal published in Illinois, where some of you may have seen it. Otherwise nothing, no response. Meanwhile his professors—this is Princeton University, supposed to be a serious place—stopped talking to him: they wouldn't make appointments with him, they wouldn't read his papers, he basically had to quit the program.

By this time, he was getting kind of desperate, and he asked me what to do. I gave him what I thought was good advice, but what turned out to be bad advice: I suggested that he shift over to a different department, where I knew some people and figured he'd at least be treated decently. That turned out to be wrong. He switched over, and when he got to the point of writing his thesis he literally could not get the faculty to read it, he couldn't get them to come to his thesis defense. Finally, out of embarrassment, they granted him a Ph.D.—he's very smart, incidentally—but they will not even write a letter for him saying that he was a student at Princeton University. I mean, sometimes you have students for whom it's hard to write good letters of recommendation, because you really didn't think they were very good—but you can write something, there are ways of doing these things. This guy was good, but he literally cannot get a letter.

He's now living in a little apartment somewhere in New York City, and he's a part-time social worker working with teenage drop-outs. Very promising scholar—if he'd done what he was told, he would have gone on and right now he'd be a professor somewhere at some big university. Instead he's working part-time with disturbed teenaged kids for a couple thousand dollars a year. That's a lot better than a death squad, it's true—it's a whole lot better than a death squad. But those are the techniques of control that are around.

But let me just go on with the Joan Peters story. Finkelstein's very persistent: he took a summer off and sat in the New York Public Library, where he went through every single reference in the book—and he found a record of fraud that you cannot believe. Well, the New York intellectual community is a pretty small place, and pretty soon everybody knew about this, everybody knew the book was a fraud and it was going to be exposed sooner or later. The one journal that was smart enough to react intelligently was the New York Review of Books—they knew that the thing was a sham, but the editor didn't want to offend his friends, so he just didn't run a review at all. That was the one journal that didn't run a review.

Meanwhile, Finkelstein was being called in by big professors in the field who were telling him, "Look, call off your crusade; you drop this and we'll take care of you, we'll make sure you get a job," all this kind of stuff. But he kept doing it—he kept on and on. Every time there was a favorable review, he'd write a letter to the editor which wouldn't get printed; he was doing whatever he could do. We approached the publishers and asked them if they were going to respond to any of this, and they said no—and they were right. Why should they respond? They had the whole system buttoned up, there was never going to be a critical word about this in the United States. But then they made a technical error: they allowed the book to appear in England, where you can't control the intellectual community quite as easily.

Well, as soon as I heard that the book was going to come out in England, I immediately sent copies of Finkelstein's work to a number of British scholars and journalists who are interested in the Middle East—and they were ready. As soon as the book appeared, it was just demolished, it was blown out of the water. Every major journal, the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review, the Observer, everybody had a review saying, this doesn't even reach the level of nonsense, of idiocy. A lot of the criticism used Finkelstein's work without any acknowledgment, I should say—but about the kindest word anybody said about the book was "ludicrous," or "preposterous."

Well, people here read British reviews—if you're in the American intellectual community, you read the Times Literary Supplement and the London Review, so it began to get a little embarrassing. You started getting back-tracking: people started saying, "Well, look, I didn't really say the book was good, I just said it's an interesting topic," things like that. At that point, the New York Review swung into action, and they did what they always do in these circumstances. See, there's like a routine that you go through—if a book gets blown out of the water in England in places people here will see, or if a book gets praised in England, you have to react. And if it's a book on Israel, there's a standard way of doing it: you get an Israeli scholar to review it. That's called covering your ass—because whatever an Israeli scholar says, you're pretty safe: no one can accuse the journal of anti-Semitism, none of the usual stuff works.
So after the Peters book got blown out of the water in England, the New York Review assigned it to a good person actually, in fact Israel's leading specialist on Palestinian nationalism [Yehoshua Porath], someone who knows a lot about the subject. And he wrote a review, which they then didn't publish—it went on for almost a year without the thing being published; nobody knows exactly what was going on, but you can guess that there must have been a lot of pressure not to publish it. Eventually it was even written up in the New York Times that this review wasn't getting published, so finally some version of it did appear. It was critical, it said the book is nonsense and so on, but it cut corners, the guy didn't say what he knew.

Actually, the Israeli reviews in general were extremely critical: the reaction of the Israeli press was that they hoped the book would not be widely read, because ultimately it would be harmful to the Jews—sooner or later it would get exposed, and then it would just look like a fraud and a hoax, and it would reflect badly on Israel. They underestimated the American intellectual community, I should say.

Anyhow, by that point the American intellectual community realized that the Peters book was an embarrassment, and it sort of disappeared—nobody talks about it anymore. I mean, you still find it at newsstands in the airport and so on, but the best and the brightest know that they are not supposed to talk about it anymore: because it was exposed and they were exposed.
Well, the point is, what happened to Finkelstein is the kind of thing that can happen when you're an honest critic—and we could go on and on with other cases like that. [Editors' Note: Finkelstein has since published several books with independent presses.]

Still, in the universities or in any other institution, you can often find some dissidents hanging around in the woodwork—and they can survive in one fashion or another, particularly if they get community support. But if they become too disruptive or too obstreperous—or you know, too effective—they're likely to be kicked out. The standard thing, though, is that they won't make it within the institutions in the first place, particularly if they were that way when they were young—they'll simply be weeded out somewhere along the line. So in most cases, the people who make it through the institutions and are able to remain in them have already internalized the right kinds of beliefs: it's not a problem for them to be obedient, they already are obedient, that's how they got there. And that's pretty much how the ideological control system perpetuates itself in the schools—that's the basic story of how it operates, I think.

Rothschilds and the "Grail" Bloodline

Warren Buffett, Ahnuld, and Jacob Rothschild

By David Livingstone

Jacob Rothschild, the current head of the Rothschild dynasty, has intermarried with the Sinclair family, forging an important alliance between the head family of the Illuminati, and the supposed descendants of the Grail family.

As has been popularized recently by Dan Brown in the Da Vinci Code, or before him by the Holy Blood, Holy Grail, the Stuarts of Scotland are supposedly descended from King Arthur and Jesus Christ. These families are of course not descended from Jesus. The idea is preposterous. But they are related to the Holy Grail, and they are not Christians, but Kabbalists.

After Queen Elizabeth I died without an heir, she was succeeded by the son of Mary Queen of Scots, James Stewart I of England, also known as King James. It is for this reason that the Freemasons of the eighteenth century conspired to back the Stuart cause, after their last monarch, James II Stuart, King of England, was deposed, and replaced by William of Orange. The Stuart cause then became the essence of Scottish Rite Freemasonry, which regarded the Stuarts as the inheritors of the Templars.

Since the late eighteenth century, however, the Illuminati have come under the leadership of the Rothschild family. The founder of the dynasty, Mayer Amschel Rothschild, ordered his sons to marry only their first cousins, continuing the careful intermarrying practiced by their predecessors.

However, the first exception was Hannah, the daughter of Amschel Mayer's son, the notorious Nathan Mayer Rothschild, who married the Rt. Hon. Henry Fitzroy, a direct descendant of Charles II Stuart King of England, the father of James II.

More recently, however, is the great-great-great grandson of Nathan Mayer, Nathaniel Charles Jacob Rothschild, 4th Baron Rothschild, who married Mary Serena Dunn. The mother of Mary Serena was Lady Mary Sybil St. Clair-Erskine, who was the daughter of James Francis Harry St. Clair-Erskine, 5th Earl of Rosslyn.

Jacob Rothschild is the current head of the UK Rothschild family, having inherited the fourth baronetcy from his father, Victor, an eminent zoologist, and sometime MI5 agent and friend of KGB agents Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess. Jacob resigned from the family's bank NM Rothschilds in 1980, run by his cousin Evelyn, and started RIT Capital Partners.

Jacob Rothschild resigned from the family's bank NM Rothschilds in 1980, run by his cousin Evelyn, and started RIT Capital Partners. He is chairman of Yad Hanadiv, the Rothschild foundation, which built and gave the Knesset government buildings and the Supreme Court to Israel, and chairs the Jewish Policy Research, dedicated to promoting issues affecting Jews worldwide.

Jacob Rothschild is chairman of Yad Hanadiv, the Rothschild foundation, which chairs the Jewish Policy Research, dedicated to promoting issues affecting Jews worldwide. Yad Hanadiv was also responsible for building and granting the Knesset government buildings, and the Supreme Court of Israel, which prominently features Masonic symbolism and the pyramid and all-seeing eye of the Illuminati.

Jacob Rothschild was a close personal friend of the Princess Diana, and maintains strong personal and business links with Henry Kissinger. He knows Rupert Murdoch well, having been friends since the Australian newspaper proprietor first came to the UK in the 1960s. His country estate has been a regular venue for visiting heads of state including Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. Margaret Thatcher received French President François Mitterrand there at a summit in 1990. He hosted the European Economic Round Table conference in 2002, attended by such figures as James Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank, Nicky Oppenheimer, Warren Buffet and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Is This Website Anti-Semitic?

It depends.

If Semitism is controlling the media and how people perceive the world then yes, I AM ANTI-SEMITIC.

If Semitism is staging false-flag terrorist attacks and blaming them on other nations or people then yes, I AM ANTI-SEMITIC.

If Semitism is fooling a nation into doing illegal and unjust military actions for them in which millions are slaughtered then yes, I AM ANTI-SEMITIC.

If Semitism MAKES U.S. leaders put the interests of Israel, an APARTHEID NATION, above those of American citizens then yes, I AM ANTI-SEMITIC.

If Semitism is spying on your alleged friends, stealing their secrets and selling them for profits or using them against "friends" then yes, I AM ANTI-SEMITIC.

If Semitism is assassinating, spying, blackmailing, smearing and worming your way into control of another nation's government then yes, I AM ANTI-SEMITIC.

If Semitism is smearing anyone who dares speak up for justice and freedom in a realistic sense then yes, I AM ANTI-SEMITIC.

If Semitism puts one group of people above others in a "racially superior" sense then yes, I AM ANTI-SEMITIC.

If Semitism blackmails and smears public leaders into submission to an agenda that is un-American then yes, I AM ANTI-SEMITIC.

Anyway, the real Semites are the Arabs. Most Jews are Khazar Ashkenazis who converted around the 9th century and NEVER LIVED IN PALESTINE. It also must be said that most Jews are liberals who desire peace.