David Seaton's News LinksA Ponzi scheme consists in the perpetrator offering unrealistic returns on the capital invested and then using the assets of the later investors to pay high profits to the earlier ones. It's success depends on the new investors bringing more and more even newer ones into the game. It all falls apart when people start asking awkward questions and demanding their money back. This causes a panic and the entire pyramid collapses.
Bernard L. Madoff has become a household word with his Ponzi-Pyramid scheme that has bilked billions of dollars from the world's wealthy. Many if not most of Madoff's victims are Jewish. They trusted him and he betrayed them.
My thesis is that the state of Israel is a huge Ponzi scheme: a geo-strategic Ponzi, a military-Ponzi and finally, or perhaps first of all, a moral-Ponzi.
How is Israel a "Ponzi scheme"?
Israel's first "selling point", the much quoted and much disputed old saw, "a land without a people for a people without a land", which, whoever actually said it first, has led to much ethnic cleansing, is the nucleus of the entire "scam". Although in the light of the "New Historians" the phrase is not being used so much anymore, when I lived in Israel in the 1970s, soon after the Six Day War, this phrase was repeated to me endlessly.
Zionism's second and most powerful selling point and the final, by default, defense of everything that Israel does, is that the pain that Europeans inflicted on the Jewish people entitles the Jewish people to inflict pain on a third party, the Palestinians, who played no part whatsoever in the Shoa. This has to be the most curious reading of the law of Talion in all its endless history.
"A land without a people for a people without a land" presupposes that some people are entitled to be more visible than others, have more rights than others, are more "equal" than others. No democracy can be built on sands like these. Take the finest people in the world, and Israel has taken some of the finest, and then flatter, force, entice, fool or trick them into playing out that phrase and despite the quality of the players, nothing but evil can result.
What is happening today in Gaza flows naturally from that phrase.
Why is all this a fraud?
The victims of the Israeli Ponzi are many...
In physical pain, and humiliation, the Palestinians are the greatest victims of course, but immense will be the pain of the Jewish people all over the world as they awake to find that what was sold to them as a safe refuge, a place of regeneration and a "light unto the gentiles", has in fact, become a death trap and a moral sewer of corrupt politicians committing sordid common crimes of every sort while simultaneously bombing entrapped civilians.
When they find that their refuge and light has become a place where the Jewish people's name is being dirtied for the ages, then that awakening will finally have a much more lasting effect on our western world then rivers of innocent blood. In many ways the Jewish people have always been and continue to be the "mirror soul" of western culture, and the tarnishing of that mirror deforms us all.
I also said that Israel is a geo-political and military Ponzi too.
After the Six Day War and especially after the Yom Kippur war Israel and its military have been sold in the USA as an essential American strategic asset in the Middle East, when in fact America's support of Israel's military machine is probably the greatest, perhaps the only obstacle that America faces in having normal relations with the Muslim world.
The Gaza operation is so sordid and criminal and the images of civilian suffering so horrifying, that to be associated with them drains any life out of the soft power that America may still possess.
Gaza has been a wake up call for even the most sober of strategists.
Bernard L. Madoff has become a household word with his Ponzi-Pyramid scheme that has bilked billions of dollars from the world's wealthy. Many if not most of Madoff's victims are Jewish. They trusted him and he betrayed them.
My thesis is that the state of Israel is a huge Ponzi scheme: a geo-strategic Ponzi, a military-Ponzi and finally, or perhaps first of all, a moral-Ponzi.
How is Israel a "Ponzi scheme"?
Israel's first "selling point", the much quoted and much disputed old saw, "a land without a people for a people without a land", which, whoever actually said it first, has led to much ethnic cleansing, is the nucleus of the entire "scam". Although in the light of the "New Historians" the phrase is not being used so much anymore, when I lived in Israel in the 1970s, soon after the Six Day War, this phrase was repeated to me endlessly.
Zionism's second and most powerful selling point and the final, by default, defense of everything that Israel does, is that the pain that Europeans inflicted on the Jewish people entitles the Jewish people to inflict pain on a third party, the Palestinians, who played no part whatsoever in the Shoa. This has to be the most curious reading of the law of Talion in all its endless history.
"A land without a people for a people without a land" presupposes that some people are entitled to be more visible than others, have more rights than others, are more "equal" than others. No democracy can be built on sands like these. Take the finest people in the world, and Israel has taken some of the finest, and then flatter, force, entice, fool or trick them into playing out that phrase and despite the quality of the players, nothing but evil can result.
What is happening today in Gaza flows naturally from that phrase.
Why is all this a fraud?
The victims of the Israeli Ponzi are many...
In physical pain, and humiliation, the Palestinians are the greatest victims of course, but immense will be the pain of the Jewish people all over the world as they awake to find that what was sold to them as a safe refuge, a place of regeneration and a "light unto the gentiles", has in fact, become a death trap and a moral sewer of corrupt politicians committing sordid common crimes of every sort while simultaneously bombing entrapped civilians.
When they find that their refuge and light has become a place where the Jewish people's name is being dirtied for the ages, then that awakening will finally have a much more lasting effect on our western world then rivers of innocent blood. In many ways the Jewish people have always been and continue to be the "mirror soul" of western culture, and the tarnishing of that mirror deforms us all.
I also said that Israel is a geo-political and military Ponzi too.
After the Six Day War and especially after the Yom Kippur war Israel and its military have been sold in the USA as an essential American strategic asset in the Middle East, when in fact America's support of Israel's military machine is probably the greatest, perhaps the only obstacle that America faces in having normal relations with the Muslim world.
The Gaza operation is so sordid and criminal and the images of civilian suffering so horrifying, that to be associated with them drains any life out of the soft power that America may still possess.
Gaza has been a wake up call for even the most sober of strategists.
One of America's most highly respected strategic thinkers, Anthony H. Cordesman, writing for the Center for Strategic and International Studies:
Perhaps there is a window opening briefly where Barack Obama may have the opportunity, by simply washing his hands, to rid the USA of this horrible problem... perhaps by just giving the Israelis enough rope, they may end up hanging themselves.
Read this by Gideon Levy in today's Haaretz:
I think Barack Obama or any other president of the USA that I can think of, or even imagine, would do anything in their power, up to and including invading Holland in order to prevent Levy's scenario from ever taking place.
However, if Obama does allow a Hague trial of the Israeli "kitchen cabinet" to occur (and why not include Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld while they are at it?) I will be forced to conclude that Obama's admirers are not blowing smoke out of their hinder parts, but that he is, in fact, the great man they insist he is. DS
Has Israel somehow blundered into a steadily escalating war without a clear strategic goal or at least one it can credibly achieve? Will Israel end in empowering an enemy in political terms that it defeated in tactical terms? Will Israel’s actions seriously damage the US position in the region, any hope of peace, as well as moderate Arab regimes and voices in the process?In short Israel is in the process of destroying any future the United States might still have of influencing events in its favor in the Middle East.
To be blunt, the answer so far seems to be yes. (...) As we have seen all too clearly from US mistakes, any leader can take a tough stand and claim that tactical gains are a meaningful victory. If this is all that Olmert, Livni, and Barak have for an answer, then they have disgraced themselves and damaged their country and their friends. If there is more, it is time to make such goals public and demonstrate how they can be achieved. The question is not whether the IDF learned the tactical lessons of the fighting in 2006. It is whether Israel’s top political leadership has even minimal competence to lead them
Perhaps there is a window opening briefly where Barack Obama may have the opportunity, by simply washing his hands, to rid the USA of this horrible problem... perhaps by just giving the Israelis enough rope, they may end up hanging themselves.
Read this by Gideon Levy in today's Haaretz:
This past weekend, the UN and the Human Rights Commission in Geneva have demanded an investigation into war crimes allegedly perpetrated by Israel. In a world in which Bosnian leaders and their counterparts from Rwanda have already been put on trial, a similar demand is likely to arise for the fomenters of this war. Israeli basketball players will not be the only ones who have to shamefully take cover in sports arenas, and senior officers who conducted this war will not be the only ones forced to hide in El Al planes lest they be arrested. This time, our most senior statesmen, the members of the war kitchen cabinet, are liable to pay a personal and national price.A very slender hope, indeed.
I don't write these words with joy, but with sorrow and deep shame. Despite all the slack the world has cut us since as long as we can remember, despite the leniency shown toward Israel, the world might say otherwise this time. If we continue like this, maybe one day a new, special court will be established in The Hague.
I think Barack Obama or any other president of the USA that I can think of, or even imagine, would do anything in their power, up to and including invading Holland in order to prevent Levy's scenario from ever taking place.
However, if Obama does allow a Hague trial of the Israeli "kitchen cabinet" to occur (and why not include Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld while they are at it?) I will be forced to conclude that Obama's admirers are not blowing smoke out of their hinder parts, but that he is, in fact, the great man they insist he is. DS
5 comments:
I have seen a fair amount of discussion of Hamas, rockets, civilians dead, border tunnels, AIPAC etc but next to no discussion that there is an election in Israel going on.
American presidential candidates prove how macho they are by promising to kill people. Israeli politicians actually kill people.
It appears to me that this war was solely for the purpose of short term electoral gain. I find this disgusting. I cannot see how it is in the long term interest of Israel.
Meanwhile, Congress, urged on by Pelosi, passed a resolution in support of Israel. My own allegedly radical congresswoman (Barbara Lee) voted "present".
Remember, Obama visited Sderot during the campaign and announced his sympathy for the Israelis. We are complicit.
It may be worse, Israels crimes may only be preparations for WW3, a wholesale invasion of the "middle east" by Western powers like in the 19th century. After all the Anglozone has never stepped out of this era like the the continental Europeans have.
It appears we’re re-visiting our relationship with Israel, at least among the chattering and political classes. When and how that manifests through policy remains to be seen, but you can sense the public is not so blindly loyal, not so much, now.
It took a financial meltdown to influence public opinion; maybe, the social epidemic of 'victimization' is evolving into a more internal reality.
Re Israeli elections.
I recently checked out the platforms/policies of Likud and Kadima parties re the 'road to peace.'
There is no way the Israelis will give the Palestinians a real state. Their optimum solution is send all Palestinians far, far away and re-establish the biblical Land of Israel or maybe a South Africa solution.
http://www.ynet.co.il/english/articles/0,7340,L-3498238,00.html
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Politics/kadimaplatform.html
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"The Israeli nation has a national and historic right to the whole of Israel."
about says it all.
mike doyle
Yes, this is going to work well:
http://uk.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUKTRE50C4E120090113?pageNumber=2&virtualBrandChannel=0
"The United States hopes to use post-war reconstruction of the Gaza Strip to help the Western-backed Palestinian Authority reassert its presence and influence in Hamas's stronghold.
U.S. and Western officials said details have yet to be worked out and depended on the extent to which Israel's military offensive, which has killed more than 900 Palestinians, weakens Hamas's hold on power."
Words fail me.
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