As a retired academic and tertiary administrator Dr William Cook has finally embraced the personal freedom that enables him not to tow the official party line in matters of national and international political concern, at all times being conscious of the fact that he has a hereditary democratic tradition to defend that extends back to the days of General George Washington.

Cook’s training in classical literature shines through this book, and in small measure in this blank-verse monologue:

Eyes I would not dare to meet

In death’s dream kingdom,

I greet in full obeisance,

Like some Mas’sr of old,

With shifting feet and eyes to the ground,

The invisible man shuffling around

Lest I be flung from these citadels

That I breached these many years ago.

2. Form

In 367 pages of tightly-argued text, and in 43 chapters that now seem to resemble the Internet tendency to write mini-essays varying in length from 4 to 11 pages; the exception to this length is Chapter 34, 20 pages, and the final chapter, 39 pages. Cook presents the reader with an uninhibited and biting-stinging analysis of George W Bush’s Middle East political policy.

A quick glance through the 7-page Index indicates most relevant matters appear to be listed. Even the comparatively recent assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Harir, but the term ‘Holocaust’ does not appear. That’s interesting.

Cook’s many referenced sources are listed within the text and not in a separate section, and I am still not resolved on this method. It certainly facilitates the flow of reading when a title appears within the text rather than as a footnote that then has to be looked up in the Bibliography section of the book.

3. Content

I read the book in a couple of sessions and sensed that the essays were well selected to bring together Cook’s main thesis that set out to illuminate the US President’s Mid-East Policy as being outright deceptive and an absolute failure for all parties concerned.

Yet, may deception not be another form of incompetence and foolishness that strikes those who simply cannot understand the deeply-ingrained complexities that make up Middle East politics where individuals actually believe God has favourites and God rewards the faithful?

In his Introduction to the book, Jeffrey St Clair, recounts the origins of democratic impulses as they manifested themselves in the 17^th century fighter John Lilburne’s statement: “Every free man of England, poor as well as rich, should have a vote in choosing those that are to make the law.” Vicious sedition laws were enacted to curb the English cry for freedom and democracy, much like the Patriots Act in the USA or the Terrorism Laws in Australia. The pattern is all too familiar for those who have read up their history.

Lilburn’s opposition to Cromwells’ oppressive rule ultimately had him banished from England, but he would return, be charged and then a jury would discharge him, again and again. The jury system still worked then. In Australia we have lawmakers that pride themselves in having partially succeeded in eliminating juries.

St Claire likens William Cook to the above, to men and women of conscience who stand up against what is happening today, as he says, “We have become an empire without a heart, brokering IMF austerity measures, Frankenstein crops, privatization of natural resources, all backed up by cruise missiles and Stealth bombers. And some dare call it liberation.”

According to Cook the starting point, the watershed of this oppressive political development began with 911 when on 20 September 2001 President Bush self-righteously in biblical terms declared, “You are with us or against us.” The dialectic process then took its inexorable course towards the ‘ axis of evil’ via that pre-emptive doctrine so much frowned upon in the past because Adolf Hitler had used it to justify shooting back at the Poles who were massacring ethnic Germans. An attack on Iraq followed in March 2003, with Iran the next target, possibly in March 2006.

“So he resorted to this doctrine, trusting, I suspect, that no one would notice that Israel has defied over 55 UN resolutions since 1967, and others prior to that, reaching back to 1948. These resolutions condemn Israeli intransigence against implementation of fundamental human rights and illegal occupation of Arab territory.”

The hypocrisy of condemning Iraq and not Israel is one of the factors that disturbs Cook: “Bush condemned Iraq for not returning 600 prisoners of war as demanded by UN Resolution 686 and 687, but he said nothing of the many UN resolutions demanding that Israel permit Palestinians who number in the million to return to their homeland. Why? The answer is clear enough: Bush supports Israel and condemns Iraq. He determines who is good and who is evil.”

From this dichotomy flows US imperialism, guided by a man “who has no shame”…he hypocritically ignored his administration’s support for a regime that makes Saddam look like the Archangel Michael, the regime of Ariel Sharon in Israel.”  Iraq invaded Kuwait and defied the UN, exactly what Israel has done to Palestine, yet it receives Bush’s support while Iraq is seen as a threat to the UN authority and to world peace.

Bush supports the Israeli religious fanatics who despise ‘the Palestinians are not ordinary people, but “uncircumcised,” “little people,” and “evil”, by contrast with the Jews who are “the blessed,” and who have “returned home for our rendezvous with the Lion of the World and the Lioness that is our nation.” …and “Jews who kill Arabs should be free from all punishment.”

Aptly Cook illuminates this terrible process: “Reaching this level of behaviour requires dissembling rational thought, indeed a total rejection of it, blind adherence to beliefs that have no justification outside of the fanatical zealots’ own cult, and an abhorrence of normal morality that applies to humans in favour of a morality that fulfills the cult’s own perceived destiny. Ultimate depravity becomes the end product of God’s command. … and the philosophical foundation of Western thought be abandoned in favour of God’s directives as determined by a small segment of a small population as though they alone possess the truth. ” Cook aptly titles this chapter ‘Blinded by the Right: America Stumbles into the Ditch’. He states that such myths/beliefs should have died a long time ago instead of forming the mental framework of the US president.

4. Images of the ‘Holocaust’ appear

In a brief essay Cook compares pictures he saw that children of Terezin had drawn, then briefly alludes to the children “separated from their parents before they were transported to Izbice, Maly Trostinec, Sobibor, Majadanek, Treblinka or Auschwitz.  … It occurred to me that Sharon’s savagery against the Palestinians mirrors the plight of the Jews in Terezin”. The imagery is graphic, that Palestine is one huge concentration camp. But Revisionists know the true and un-propagandized story of which Cook may know little. Hence the importance of what in December 2005 the Iranian President stated about the ‘Holocaust’, so that Jews cannot use a fictitious gassing story as a justification of their oppression and ethnic cleansing of Palestine’s original inhabitants.

As the Intifada accelerates Cook identifies three main factors that Americans don’t seem to be aware off: 1. The Stolen Homeland; 2. The Chasm of Indifference and Desperation; 3. Ethnic Erasure by Global Capitalism. This is the explosive mix that explains the phenomenon of ‘suicide bombers’. While in the West the suicide rates are generally hidden from public scrutiny for fear of social consequences, the Palestinians, and Muslims generally, celebrate the martyrs who sacrifice themselves for a cause, for their religion. Cook elaborates his thoughts on this by writing an open letter to Osama bin Laden. He desires Jews and Muslims to co-operate and live peacefully together as had been the case “before the advent of Nazi Germany’s attempt to exterminate the Jews”. I assume Cook is not aware that this claim is one of the other myths that he failed to mention in his myth essay.

5. Details of Iraq fiasco

In Chapters 8-20 Cook presents us with a monthly account of the significant developments before and during the Iraq invasion, ever pointing out the US hypocrisy in pursuing Saddam Hussein and Iraqis with the same tactics of which he complains are used by Saddam Hussein, forever remaining silent on the terrible plight suffered by the Palestinians at the hands of the Jews in Israel. The use of Bush’s concepts ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’, “the twin absolutes” that make up the justification for the “war on terrorism” is pure cynicism if not already nihilism writ large. Governments and nation states are not defined as having anything to do with ‘terrorism’. The US armed forces had become Israel’s mercenary force, something Ariel Sharon publicly boasted about, i.e. Israel controls the USA. One need not mention anymore the WMD lie.

The usual Neo-Con suspect guiding the Bush policy are named: Richard Perle, Daniel Pipes, Norman Podhoretz, William Kristol, William Bennett, their Jewish background is not.

Cook mentions a Prague conference in March 2003 where a comparison is made between Sharon’s Israel and Nazi Germany’s and their use of euphemisms to make extermination more palatable – sadly Cook seems to be a believer in the ‘Holocaust’ mythology, thereby negating his own perceptive comment on how “Language always suffers from those who wish to camouflage the reality of their actions. …”to acquire the fabled lands of Judea and Samaria promised them by their mythical god 2500 years ago.”

At pages 107-108 there appears what makes Cook’s work safe from outright attack by the World Jewry: “Leo Strauss, a Jewish political philosopher, taught at several American Universities between 1938 and 1973. Strauss specialized in Plato and Aristotle, but conveyed many of his ideas by citing the Weimar Republic that fell to the Nazis and resulted in the Jewish Holocaust. Strauss belittled the weak, liberal Weimar Republic’s democratic values, charging that a secular Deocracy is inherently weak since it depends on the importance of individualism with rights resident in each citizen.”

Cook presents a clear picture how through the Neo-Con’s Straussianism US interests locked in with Israel’s. The 911 tragedy is regarded as a Muslim attack and not an inside job that provided the pretext for publicly launching this US-Israel connection. One just recall that just four days before 911 in Durban, South Africa, the UN Conference on ‘Racism, Xenophobia and related matters’, had ended in chaos because Israel had been branded a terrorist state, and the attempt to enshrine the ‘Holocaust’ as myth failed. This was, of course, achieved when recently the UN voted to hold an annual Holocaust Memorial Day on 27 January, something that has significantly been countered by Iran’s President when in December 2005 he claimed the ‘Holocaust’ is a myth used by the West to justify Israel’s existence in the Middle East.

Six months after the Iraq invasion Cook writes how the Bush administration returned to the UN so that its invasion could be legitimized, that the Un now take over the burden begun when the US established facts on the ground.  Cooke calls for duplicitous Bush and the Neo-Con Cabal members, responsible for the Iraq invasion, including the criminals of the cloth, to be brought “before a people’s court, by impeachment, to atone for their crimes against America and the world communities”.

In his February 14, 2004 article ‘Faith-Based Fanatics: The Other Intelligence Failure’, Cook asks a probing question concerning the responsibility that religious leaders must carry in having incited their flock to follow the US President into war. Christian Zionists are openly inciting hatred against Muslims, and this makes the Osama bin laden role ever more important. He asks the same question of Ariel Sharon, then labels Israel as America’s albatross. That the Jewish attack on Palestinians is nothing but genocide is a given fact. Such observations should be cause to re-evaluate the US-Israel alliance.

By March there appears the phrase “brutality masked as innocence” for the wall that separates Palestinians from Israelis. The Berlin wall of the mind concretized as a ‘separation wall’ is flourishing as it should within a people for whom ghetto thinking is part of their religious belief. The wall stands as a “monument to failure, to retaliation and to vengeance. It could be nothing else.”

Cooks reminds us of the insanity prevailing within Sharon’s mind as an American missile kills Sheik Ahmed Yassin, “an unarmed, deaf, half-blind, crippled 67-year-old paraplegic being pushed in a wheelchair!” The killing is an assassination called ‘extra judicial killing’, and Cook welcomes us to a new Dark Age. Revisionists know of this possible danger as they continue to refuse to believe in the Holocaust, thereby openly disputing one of Israel’s founding myths. Whether the Revisionist conference planned for Iran sometime in April will be permitted to take place, that is something no-one can predict.

The breaking point of Mid-East policy gone wrong occurred when pictures flashed around the world of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib and coffins of dead soldiers returning to the US at the dead of night. And still Israel continues doing the same thing to Palestinians, in particular at Rasfah – in defiance of world opinion, as ever. Cook fittingly calls it ‘Violence disemboweled of law’. In his ‘The Legacy of Deceit’, Cook calls upon Dante’s The Inferno, and draws parallels with what occurred in 14^th century Florence with what is happening in Washington, DC. – mentioning the usual names: “Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle, Feith, Wolfowitz, Libby and the whole crew at the AMERICAN Enterprise Institute and the Project for the New American Century … Halliburton, Bechtel, Titan, CACI corporation … tele-evangelists Franklin Graham, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Pastor John Hagee among others … are the corruptors of God stuffed upside down in tube-like holes … use religion – Zionism and Christianity – to manipulate millions by invoking fear on one side and prophecy on the other – instinct and superstition – as motivating drives to empire …”.

6. Nazi-‘Holocaust’ trap

Sadly Cook again falls for the trap of drawing parallels with Nazi Germany, this time raising the Nuremberg trials, in error, and recounts how a man watching the Eichmann trial fainted because he was astounded by the ordinariness of Eichmann, the accused. The premise here is that Eichmann was responsible for the gassings of countless Jews, and because the premise is false, what follows is unbalanced. The moral lesson Cook wishes to impart is, however, still valid, i.e. that individuals have been silenced to such a degree that Bush and his administration is getting away with it all – ‘it’ being the implementation of its policy to save Israel as a viable state. Fittingly Cook quotes Aldous Huxley’s 1958 perceptive sentence from Brave New World Revisited: “Never have so many been manipulated so much by so few”.

7. Revisionist Illumination

On 5 February 2003 I spent the day with Bradley Smith and wife at their home in Rosarito, Mexico. We watched on TV how on this day Colin Powell presented his evidence to the UN, and it hurt us to see Powell visibly lying about Iraq’s WMDs. A photo of a mobile ‘gas’ van was shown, and both Bradley and I laughed because it reminded us of the ‘Holocaust’ mobile gassing claims – now you see the van, now you don’t! We both liked Powell but after this performance he had lost all his credibility because he had begun outright to lie.

Also on this day the US Jewish lobby managed to activate the local Tennessee police to kidnap Ernst Zündel from his home at Pigeon Forge, send him to Canada where he spent two years in solitary, and from where he was then extradited to Germany on 1 March 2005. Zündel’s case resumes at Mannheim at the beginning of February 2006.

I am raising this matter because William Cook devotes Chapter 34 to ‘Colin Powell: A Dramatic Monologue in One Act {October 9/10, 2004]’. The essence of the chapter Cook explains thus: “The Colin Powell in this play is a representative character, not unlike Everyman, who must face his inner self, having lived a life contrary to the values, principles, and morals that had governed his behaviour before his ascent to the pinnacle of power … the play a fictitious portrayal of a person in spiritual and emotional agony confronting his dark night of the soul.” What follows is brilliant panoramic view of the inner circle that makes up the Bush presidency.

Just as Powell knew he was now authoring lies, so the Israelis continue to lie about the origins of terrorism in Palestine/Israel – and the world media continues to turn myths into truths that then become fodder for the mindless. As the 2004 US presidential elections get under way Cook takes the opportunity to point out the destructive power of faith and how supporters of the US Mid-East policy is “Killing for Christ”, and in vain he looks for Christ in the right-wing Christianity espoused by those who support Bush’s re-election.

Cook’s January 2005 focus is on the depressing side of Bush’s re-election as reflected in Bush’s inaugural address. There is nothing to celebrate – 911 and Osama bin Laden remain fabrications made in the USA, though Cook is careful not to spell this out, and he runs his argument on the premise that they are not home-grown constructs that enable Bush to justify his Mid-East policy, calling it ‘righteous racism. He quotes Condoleezza Rice: “We on the right side of freedom’s divide have an obligation to help those unlucky enough to be born on the wrong side.”

He reflects: “What fuels slavery, ethnic cleansing, land theft, and genocide? What enables a mind to justify imprisoning another without cause, without trial, without rights of due process and assumption of innocence until proven guilty? What enables a soul to accept dominance over another, to degrade and humiliate other humans, to participate in or acquiesce to genocide?”

8. Fraudster Elie Wiesel appears

Unfortunately Cook spoils his reflections when he mentions that arch-fraudster Elie Wiesel, then quotes: “All killers were Christians … The Nazi system was the consequence of a movement of ideas and followed a strict logic; it prophesied it, prepared for it, and brought it to maturity. That tradition was inseparable from the past of Christian, civilized Europe.”

Cook says, “Wiesel’s observation implies that the Nazi holocaust utilized the belief structures in the church and the faithful’s acceptance of them as articulated by their leaders to carry forward the devastation of the Jews. Both trends were in operation as the Nazi leadership imposed its will on the German citizenry while enunciating the innate superiority of the German nation.”

What a pity Cook misunderstands this ‘superiority’ aspect, which indicates that the Jewish, et al, - driven propaganda of hate against Germany still flourishes and still succeeds in simplifying what World War II was all about. Horst Mahler has clarified what for Germans it is all about – to disconnect mentally from things Jewish by overcoming the connections through German idealism. Why? To find that deeper meaning of self-determination, of personal freedom as expressed in German idealism where the dichotomy of SELF versus GOD is overcome through solid self-reflection – thinking! Mahler’s political-social-cultural-economic program makes it clear that the attempt to bring together Germans and Jews cannot and will not succeed because both true Germans and true Jews wish to remain true to themselves.

It is good to see Cook take apart Charles Krauthammer, and by implication his peers in the Neo-Con club. [What a good German name! It always reminds me how the Jews are only as good as their host nation, and that in the past had been Germany, until the Jews wished to take over that nation, as they have done with their new host-nation USA.] On the occasion of Krauthammer celebrating the “Bush Doctrine” as a great success, Cook states, “No doubt Krauthammer and his minions understand this truth believing they can manipulate the public to believe whatever lies they wish to perpetrate. And why shouldn’t they, since the whole debacle of the Bush Doctrine, so-called began in lies, continues in lies, and will, with Krauthammer and his ilk as historians, convert lies to truth, as the victors write the texts for the defeated … Blind arrogance can see no fault, assume no responsibility, nor bear any guilt. It omits all that disturbs the comfort of its proclaimed truth.”

As indicated at the beginning of this review, my bias on matters ‘Holocaust’ enable me clearly to focus on Cook’s own attitude towards this specific topic. The closest he gets to addressing it in any depth occurs in the penultimate chapter ‘Glossing over Israel’s Human Rights Abuses: The Janus Face of the Department of State’, dated April 9/10, 2005. Cook makes reference to two US Department of State reports: “Country Reports on Human Rights Practices” and “Report on Global Anti-Semitism”.

The former report was, of course, effectively shredded by China, which delighted in revealing world-wide human rights abuse perpetrated by the USA – http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200403/01/eng20040301_136190.shtml.

Cook exposes the latter report’s definition of anti-Semitism: “… The distinction is at root subterfuge; it forces legitimate criticism of the state’s political and human rights actions into a category that stops the criticism in its tracks, thus, in effect, legitimizing the undemocratic, illegal, and abusive state actions should they exist.”

Cook then quotes a definitive item from Joseph Massad, Professor of modern Arab politics at Columbia University – ‘Semites and anti-Semites, that is the question’ - http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2004/720/op63.htm.  Though for Holocaust Revisionists there is nothing new in this article, a reading of it is still valuable. It exposes the mechanism whereby Israel’s human rights abuses against Palestinians remains beyond legitimate criticism.

In the final chapter of his book, ‘The Destructive Power of Myth: Implications for 9/11’ William Cook presents an historical analysis that catches 13^th and 17^th century episodes of  myth-making, which directly led to genocidal acts. The parallels with the USA’s ‘war against terrorism and for freedom and democracy’ are striking.

He concludes: “Governments do not mobilize a people by telling the truth; they mobilize through mystery: fear of the unknown that threatens their livelihood, fear of forces that could destroy them, fear that their religious beliefs could be undermined by the forces of evil that accept no religion …If Democracy recognizes duly elected governments, why does the US support dictatorships? The answer lies in the need for the monied forces that control the US to have in power governments that support capitalistic interests … Our economic system has literally forced Americans into an indentured servant relationship with the banks and corporations that manufacture, advertise, and sell the product. That reality has created a lethargic and unquestioning public that must, for its own sanity, believe the system is the best in the world… fear compels obedience …Fear that the American way of life will be destroyed…Capitalism, not Democracy, is at fault…”.   

Currently there is a gloom overhanging anything that emerges from the United States of America. Leaving aside Cook’s blind spot about the Holocaust lies, his reflections are a beacon of hope that more US citizens of Cook’s courage - with moral and intellectual integrity intact - will emerge and bring forth that which made the USA what it once was: a great nation where Jewish destructive influence did not alone set the political, cultural and economic agenda.

I am hoping aloud –

Adelaide

19 January 2006