Fredrick Töben reviews

Israel Shamir: Our Lady of Sorrow - The Collected Essays from the Holy Land
 

INTRODUCTION

While the deconstructionists, in their final gasping moments still attempt to discuss away the actual object of their contemplation, any serious literary criticism still retains the basic elements of form and content,. The equivalent is outside-inside, or personal appearance and character. Remember The Rocky Horror Show’s “…don’t judge a book by its co-over…”? I recall that one of Oxford University’s colleges has as a motto: Manners maketh man. To that we could add: Clothes maketh man. The successful person-art work should ideally balance the two categories where neither form nor content predominates. For example, excessive physical beauty often comes with a mental deficiency – as most of us know from experience!

Shamir’s book is undoubtedly the product of the quick print, limited run publication era, something that Revisionist publisher Germar Rudolf knows only too well. Thanks to the computer age and the Internet it is now possible to get any book printed without going through mainstream publishing houses. While postage rates rise it is now possible to print locally worldwide, often at reduced rates. Publishing has been democratized and the free flow of information is – still – a reality. Official lies and cover-ups are difficult to sustain in a chaotic electronic world – but information overload has created the conscious ‘Hollywood’ effect, e.g. 911, where blatant controlled demolitions are sold to the world as a ‘terrorist’ event when in fact such are self-inflicted wounds that aim to sustain and justify a specific political power base.

This makes it all the more important that anyone publishing and airing a view-point has credibility – moral and intellectual – and is not just a talker who pontificates and smart-arses, usually after an event.

The title of Shamir’s book alone suggests its contents will take the reader on a journey to the troubled Holy Land, and this means that for any reader of Shamir’s book there will be lots of accompanying baggage of the prejudiced kind. Further, anyone on the Internet email service will feel some affinity with the author because he is not an unknown entity – who has not heard of Israel Adam Shamir, the Jewish Russian-Israeli who converted to Christianity, and now supports the One State solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict?


FORM

While flicking through the pages to get the technical aspect of the review right, I noted that this 288-page paperback is published by BookSurge, dated 3 May 2005, ISBN 1-4196-0835-5. There is no physical or postal address given, and the website address is www.israelshamir.net

Two unusual notes appear on the technical details page: Disclaimer and Reader Agreement and Reader Agreement for Accessing This Book. The contents of both paragraphs essentially distances the author from any possible action that may flow from a reading of the book, and the emphasis is that a reader must “bear sole responsibility for your own decisions to use or read any of this book’s material”. Some readers will find such cautionary advice a little amusing and may now expect to read something revolutionary if not an outright incitement to violence and terrorism.

The photograph on the book’s front cover features the Our Lady of Sorrow Chapel. It well symbolizes the struggle for Palestine as Judaism, Christianity and Islam renew their battle for the Holy Land. That, in essence, is what the book is about, so according to an anonymous endorsement of it on the front cover, above the photograph:

>The Companion Volume to his bestselling Galilee Flowers, Shamir’s book connects politics and theology of the War for Palestine in one compelling narrative. A great intellectual and spiritual adventure into uncharted waters by the Khalib Gibran of our time, “a wonderful Hebrew Prophet”.<

The two-page Contents divides the book into four parts: Part One contains ten stories; Part Two, 25 stories; Part Three, six stories; Part Four, seven stories.

This is fittingly followed by ten pages of additional information about the book and its author:

Acknowledgements – where Shamir thanks the individuals who made his work possible. I appreciate such candour where an author unflinchingly thanks those many individuals who make it all possible, often the unsung heroes who usually stand behind those men and women at the battlefront. I pity those who believe their work output is theirs alone, and where the implication is that in “cracking the myth”, for example, it is the work of one individual only. Surprisingly I note that Shamir thanks Sophie Johnson of Australia as the editor of the essays. I say surprisingly because I know Sophie, and surely there is only one Sophie Johnson in Australia!

The Shamir Legend – in essence offers a four-page biographical sketch of Shamir where the man’s erudition is celebrated and his danger to the State of Israel is pointed out:

“But when a Jew, steeped in the Bible and Talmud criticizes not only the state of Israel but the very concept of ‘the Jewish People’, the familiar world around us collapses and the situation requires immediate re-interpretation”.

Reviews of Israel Shamir’s writing – where Shamir’s numerous fans endorse his courageously adopted stance on the Palestine-Israel conflict. This endorsement is continued on the back cover of the book where a small colour picture of the author reveals his black hair, wearing sunglasses and sporting a graying moustache, and puckering his lips into a possible whistle, perhaps befitting a man reaching the three score years. The watch on his left wrist indicates it is either 12.30 pm or 6pm.

The book does not have an Index for either subject or names, something that busy readers would appreciate. A friend of mine whom I had sent my last tome to read almost scoffed at the thought of reading the whole book, and was pleased that he could just look up the index to see what I had written about him. I appreciated his honesty!


CONTENT

There is a thematic unity within each of the 48 stories that reveals to the reader the mind that created them. That is good because I am interested in both the subject matter of the book as well as the value system of its author.

In The Wall, the reader is introduced to the basics of the Zionist state’s ghetto mentality. It began in 1948 when the Jews ethnically cleansed Semadar of the Templar Germans who had built the thriving settlement. The Jews also strangled an Armenian village with a wall, and from which the last resident after selling his house fled in the 1950s. This apartheid mentality extended to Jews-only roads whereby “…every Arab village has a bypass: a broad highway encircling and limiting its development.”
This by-pass road system then did not make sense on its own, but now with the wall in place it certainly does as “Stage One of devastation and imprisonment”.

Shamir points to something well known to Revisionists who intimately know the ‘Holocaust’ myth:

“…the Wall is the utmost manifestation of the Jewish spirit … is eruv, a symbolic Wall to separate them fro non-Jews … built by the sweat of impoverished Palestinian workers, guarded by Russians, paid for by Americans to jail their brothers … the Holy Land has become a high security prison for all its dwellers, Jews and non-Jews alike … The Jewish state is enactment of the paranoid Jewish fear and loathing of strangers, while the Cabal policies of Pentagon are another manifestation of the same fear and loathing on global scale.”

In the final sentence, above, Shamir’s English reflects his Russian background where definite and indefinite articles are not so often used as in English, a recurring habit throughout the book.

Concluding the six-page essay, Shamir makes a courageous stand and spells out his desire:

“Sharon’s Wall, this unmitigated disaster, provides a rare opportunity to observe the true nature of the Jewish State, and to call for its dismantling. Not the wall, silly! The Jewish State.”

His next article about the Road Map introduces the essence within the first sentence with such precision that it is difficult to summarize it here:

“The Road Map is not a compromise between Palestinians and Jews, but between Jews and Jews, none of whom lives in the Middle East, namely, between Jewish liberals of New York and Jewish neo-cons of Washington.”

He likens the acceptance by Palestinians of the Road Map to the sodomite prince in one of Marquis de Sade’s stories, and he calls it a fictitious peace plan, and “It appears the American Jews decide not only who is an antisemite (one who calls for equality of a Jew and non-Jew) but who is a liar, too.”

The connection is also made between what is going on in Israel, the US invasion of Iraq and the expected attack on Iran. Just as the Crusaders turned out to be nasty neighbours, so now the “Jews were given a good chance to strike root in the land of Palestine and make peace with the native population. But they blew it … the fifth column of Israel-supporters instigates wars all over the world, from Chechnya to the Phillipines, from North Korea to Cuba. They push the world straight into Armageddon. John Bolton calls for the takeover of Iran… Israel is a safe haven for criminals … Israel’s behaviour is partly connected to the Jewish superiority complex, and its consequence, the apartheid structure …”.

He mentions the long Israeli arm that assassinates at will, but then calls Mugabe ‘Joseph’ instead of Robert. Sophie, did you do the factual proof-reading?

Mordechai Vanunu also is mentioned in a chapter of its own because his conversion to Christianity is doubly significant – for Vanunu as a person and for Israel as a state. Vanunu’s 18-year imprisonment did not break him. It is suggested that his Moroccan Jewish background and growing up in arid Negev made him tough but compassionate, especially towards the Palestinians.

“There was no Hollywood smile of a released prisoner. Not a timid lamb anymore, but the Son of Man who saw death and came back. His face was stern and grim in the blue frame of the iron bars, like that of Christ breaking the Gates of Hell on an old icon ... ‘Kill him!’ – yelled the Jewish crowd, braying for blood, like in Mel Gibson’s film. They raised their signs declaring ‘Kill the traitor’. But the prey escaped them: in a minute, his car took him into the safe sanctuary of St George cathedral, the Anglican Neo-Gothic building in East Jerusalem, where kind Bishop Riah expected him ... Vanunu told us he was trapped not by Mossad but by a CIA agent, for his revelations were mightily embarrassing for the US, for the country that forced the world to disarm while turning its blind eye to the Dimona nuclear facility… Italy’s Berlusconi, this great friend of Sharon and Bush, did not move a finger to save the man kidnapped on Italian soil.”

It was at this point of my reading the book that I decided to continue reading and somewhat selfishly walk into Shamir’s world without taking notes.

Shamir’s world is all too familiar to Revisionists. The latest news that Siegfried Verbeke was on 3 August 2005 arrested at Amsterdam Airport and most likely marked for kidnapping to Germany, is a story regularly repeated in Germany as the German occupied government enforces the ‘Holocaust denial’ laws against its own citizens, be they 16, 60, 70 or 80. Horst Mahler valiantly has grasped the nettle and during his own Berlin trial has called for nothing less than the murder of the Jewish God if Germans – who still want to be Germans – wish to survive as a cultural Volk. Mahler was stripped of his right to practice as a lawyer and so cannot defend those who are accused of denying the ‘Holocaust’, such as the retired 78-year-old Ernst Günter Kögel. Then there was the kidnapping of Ernst Zündel outside his home in Tennessee on 5 February 2003 and imprisonment since then in the US and Canada for two years, and since 1 March 2005 in a German prison.

5 February 2003 was also the day on which Colin Powell held up a vial to members of the UN assembly and showed photographs of a truck that allegedly proved the existence of Iraq’s WMDs. Also on this day I was at Bradley Smith’s home in Mexico, watching Powell lying through his teeth about WMDs, and we found his story so reminiscent of the ‘Holocaust’ story and how it keeps on changing. It hurt me to see how Powell, then the only upright individual in the Bush administration, in one fell swoop lost all credibility that he ever had. Now we ask: Powell, who? – all this came to my mind as I read Shamir’s account of the Vanunu tragedy.

And now instead of my going on with the writing of this review I suggest you contact Israel personally – info@israelshamir.net and request your copy of his Our Lady Of Sorrow. You will not regret it. The wealth of factual historical information alone will enrich your perspective on the crisis that is the Middle East.
 

Palestinian Suad Amiry's Sharon and my Mother-in-Law. Ramallah Diaries, Granta Books, London, 2005, offers a passionate view of the daily trials and tribulations that Palestinians suffer under Israeli occupation.    
 

 

 

From: Peter Myers

Sent: Friday, 2 September 2005 6:36 PM

Subject: Publisher prosecuted over Shamir's book

(1) Publisher prosecuted over Shamir's book [shamireaders]

 

Date: Thu, 01 Sep 2005 15:48:06 +0300 From: Israel Shamir

Stop Targeting Publishers!

Please sign and forward to plumenclume@yahoo.co

 

The Parisian publisher Al Qalam ('The Quill' in Arabic) has been taken to court on a complaint by LICRA on a charge of anti-Semitism, for having published Israel Shamir's book L'autre visage d'Israel (The Other Face of Israel, known in English as Galilee Flowers), a translation of essays in defence of equality and democracy for Jews and non-Jews in Palestine/Israel.

The court case will take place at Nanterre Court, near Paris, on September 6th, at 13.30.

The judicial harassment of publishers who have enough courage to publish authors critical of the State of Israel has thus attained a new level, following the case against La Fabrique for having published L'industrie de l'Holocauste (The Holocaust Industry) by Norman Finkelstein (the case was won against Avocats sans frontières, represented by W Golnadel, who has launched an appeal).

This latest charge is based on a list of sentences taken out of context, in the usual inquisitorial fashion, with the aim of creating an image of the author as a dangerously extremist individual. Al Qalam's catalogue is focussed on the culture of the Arab-Muslim world. This prosecution is a part of the process of de-legitimising Arab-Muslim thought, as a part of the hysteria orchestrated by the US and Israel, for their expansionist, hegemonic plans.

We are appealing to publishers and readers to demonstrate their devotion to freedom of thought and expression by supporting Al Qalam Publishers. Otherwise, the publishers of Molière, Baudelaire, Céline, or Voltaire may be next in the line. Unless, in the colonial mood, only the heirs of colonisation should be prevented from participating in the influence of francophone culture?

The targeted author, Israel Shamir, is an Israeli writer, originally from Russia, whose works had been translated into all the languages of Europe, and who is not the subject of prosecution, neither in his own country, nor in France.

Those who practice judicial harassment under the pretext of combating anti-Semitism, hope that the sort of social corporatism inspired by the Israeli model will gain ground in France, unravel the fabric of republicanism, and involve us in a pseudo-war between civilisations which would only be a new stage in the war between the haves and the have-nots. Nobody is obliged to support the plan for a democratic society, respectful of the beliefs of all its members, as Israel Shamir is arguing for the territory of historic Palestine (i.e. British Mandated Palestine).

However, the principle of a democratic society, respectful of the beliefs of all its members, is where the great strength of secular, republican France has lain to date. We deem that the defence of the publishers, Al Qalam, comes under the protection of thought of all. We are thus appealing for support to its courageous editor, Mr Cherifi, at the Librairie du Monde Arabe, 220 rue Saint Jacques, Paris. We will not let him be ruined by an inquisitorial trial, which would then be followed by redoubled attempts at stifling everyone's freedom of thought.

Support Editions Al Qalam!

I support the French publisher Al Qalam, as I would support La Fabrique publisher last year, because they publish important books about Israel/Palestine, for I value freedom of expression. I forward this call to other persons and send some financial support for the trial expenses to:

CCP 30041 - 00001- 1382554G020- 70

Name

First name

Occupation

Works by Israel Shamir available in French:

L'autre visage d'Israel I « Fleurs de Galilée », 430 p, Paris, ed. Al Qalam 2004;

Pardes, une étude la Kabbale, 159 p., Paris, éd. Al Qalam 2005 ; (order it by writing a message to : Association Entre la Plume et l'Enclume (http://www.geocities.com/plumenclume/index.htm), plumenclume@yahoo.com

The books of Israel Shamir Galilee Flowers, Our Lady of Sorrow and the Pardes are also available in English from Surge Books, www.booksurge.com

The Galilee Flowers is available also in Norwegian, Italian, Hungarian, German, Swedish, Spanish, Russian etc see details on www.israelshamir.net