Newsletter No 442

So, one more winter season is kaput, the best snow conditions in 50 years gone the way of all things. Like the song says, referring to a girl, every time I say goodbye to the Alps, or to the Med six months later, I die a little. Mind you, the sea is feminine, especially in her rages, but the mountains are as masculine as they come, majestic, dangerous and permanent.

This has been the Madoff season, and I didn’t make any new friends by naming names and expressing certain opinions about them. How strange people are. They take innocents down the Swanee and then howl that they’re being hard done by. Too bad. I read somewhere that Madoff was fond of Savile Row suits, expensive watches and very large houses in Palm Beach, on the Côte d’Azur and in the Hamptons. He would be, of course, but what bothered me the most was the fact that he owned three boats. Crooks and conmen try to clothe themselves in establishment credentials, and until recently — and the arrival of the oligarchs — boats were reserved for gentlemen. Al Capone never owned one, nor did my friend Frank Costello, the real life Godfather, who once upon a time got me out of a hell of a scrap with some very nasty people.

What I find outrageous is that Bernie’s crooked family is getting the benefit of the doubt. He supposedly managed billions in a small space run by a handful of his family and a few associates. His ghastly wife, Ruth, supervised the firm’s accounts, yet she’s walking around free and claims his ill-gotten gains as her own. When I was approached by a good friend last August and asked to invest in Madoff, no one could tell me anything about him except that I had to keep it quiet. Thank God for the mother of my children, who put her foot down for reasons unknown. He certainly fostered a climate of fear, and now we know why. Robbing Peter to pay Paul is an old trick and discretion is paramount.

While we are on the subject of gullibility, what I’d like to know is why this Binyam Mohamed is taken at his word when he claims he underwent medieval torture in the hands of the Americans in cahoots with the Brits. The other thing I’d like to know is why I, a poor little Greek boy, cannot insult militant Muslims who boo British troops in Luton by calling them towelheads, yet they can call the troops murderers and child killers? I realise the sainted editor has to adhere to certain modern conventions, but being called a towel is less of an insult than being called a murderer. Muslims vilify Christians and Jews, seek death for apostates, call for Jihad against the West, yet only Taki is silenced for pointing out the fact that they wear tablecloths on their heads. A Dutch MP is banned from entering England, and a British MP is banned from entering Canada (lucky him), both men judged to be dangerous to the peace, as ridiculous an excuse as the one about Madoff’s wife not being in on the con.

Freedom of speech is not for everyone, certainly not for those who dare point out that militant Islam is the greatest danger to our way of life in the past two centuries, and that what Israel is doing to the Palestinians constitutes war crimes and genocide. Incidentally, I am very proud of my betrothed, the deputy editor of The Spectator, whose dispatch from Gaza was as fair as it was timely. Israeli ‘religious’ soldiers were exposed by their secular brothers-in-arms for killing unarmed civilians, women, children and babies. And this from a country conceived to shelter the weak from just such crimes.

Religious nationalist elements in the Israeli army have totally changed the principles of the occupiers, and it will get worse now that Netanyahu and his gang are in power. ‘Iran is Germany, and it’s 1938,’ said Netanyahu on CNN in November, ‘except that this Nazi regime that is in Iran wants to dominate the world, annihilate the Jews, but also annihilate America.’ Nothing like framing the issue in Holocaust terms in order to get American Jews to open up their wallets. Heaven help the Palestinians.

If Netanyahu is a warmonger and a zealot, what can one say about Gaddafi, the clown who has run Libya into the ground these past 40 years and is now playing nice with the West. Nothing works in that oil-rich country, absolutely nothing, except that the Gaddafi children are getting richer and more arrogant by the minute. Some of you may remember that I met one of the sons at Nat Rothschild’s in New York, mistook him for a drug dealer but made no offers to buy. He looked arrogant and cheap, like dealers tend to do. The other one, grandiosely named Hannibal, was arrested with his vile wife in Geneva for allegedly beating up and mistreating his servants. The Swiss caved in quicker than you can say oil, once the head clown threatened to cut off the black stuff. They let the couple go and most likely apologised. We should have invaded and overthrown these clowns years ago, if only to stop the cruelty they inflict on their people.

Instead we went after Iraq and Afghanistan doing Israel’s bidding. The Israelis don’t mind Gaddafi. He is the perfect example of what is wrong with Arab potentates, and he wears funny costumes to boot.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-magazine/life-and-lives/3472166/high-life.thtml

In a recent interview, Brian Singer, the Jewish Hollywood producer of the Stauffenberg epic, Valkyrie, said that he is obsessed with the history of the Third Reich: “Stauffenberg’s attempt to assassinate Hitler was not the only attempt on Hitler’s life. There were approximately 25 other attempts, which failed.”First one has to pay Singer a compliment in regard to the team of characters he chose, including Tom Cruise, who played Klaus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg.

Partly filmed at the authentic historic places in Berlin, including Hermann Göring’s Reichsluftfahrtsministerium – now the headquarters of the German Taxation Department, and the German Finance minister sits in Göring’s office milking German taxpayers. The filming also took place at Joseph Goebbel’s Reichspropaganda Ministry, Brigitte Zypris, which is now occupied by the German Justice Minister, and like her counterpart finance minister, now sits in Goebbel’s office where she attempts to force upon the Germans – and the world – a politically correct version of history, which Britain and others have resisted to date.

Filming also took place at the famous Tempelhof Airport, which was opened in 1935 and is still, according to the British architect, Norman Foster, “the mother of all airports”.

Regarding the details in his film one has to pay Singer a compliment that every filmed detail is authentic.

However, problems emerge when it comes to historical facts because Singer follows, like all the other film producers, writers and court historians, the official political correct version of World War Two – which we all know is not only a distortion but has been deliberately falsified by the victory powers. After all, history is always written by the victors’ and the defeated just plod along in order to survive.

Here is one example from Singer’s film: In a dialogue between Stauffenberg and his wife, Nina, Stauffenberg tells her, “If we fail (to assassinate Hitler) they (the government) will come after you and the children”. His wife’s response was, “Yes, I know”. What Singer conveniently forgot to tell his audience was the fact that the government did not kill Stauffenberg’s wife and children. Nina Stauffenberg died in 2006 and her children are still alive today.

If we would transfer the Stauffenberg situation to Stalin’s Soviet Union, it is quite clear that the whole Stauffenberg family and relatives would have been wiped out, or at least sent to Siberia for 25 years, which for anyone would be a death sentence. We may recall that one of Stalin’s son’s suicided after he, as a German prisoner-of-war, heard that his father refused to consider a prisoner exchange, stating that there are no Soviet prisoners. Stalin also drove his wife to suicide, as mentioned by their daughter, Svetlana in her autobiography.

Singer could have also added the career of Melitta Stauffenberg, ne Stiller, who was Bertold Stauffenberg’s wife, the brother of Klaus. After Hannah Reitsch, Melitta became the number two test pilot in the Luftwaffe. In 1945 she was shot down by an American fighter plane, then still managed to crash-land the plane but lost both her legs, and as a result she bled to death. Melitta Stauffenberg was of Jewish heritage and perhaps that is why Singer didn’t want to mention her because it would open up the uncomfortable factual matter addressed by Jewish author, Brian Rigg, in his book Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, where he stated that at least 150,000 Jews fought in the German defence forces and worked in other ways for the German Reich.

Another example of politically correct history regarding the Stauffenberg plot to assassinate Hitler is served to us by ‘distinguished British foremost historian’ Andrew Roberts. His Stauffenberg version follows filmmaker Brian Singer’s line but then he conveniently forgets to mention basic historical facts:

1. Churchill and Roosevelt did not want peace with Germany but war. Such unrefutable assertion has been addressed by Pat Buchanan in Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, and in Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization.

2. In 1935 Churchill said ‘Germany must be destroyed by us’, but in 1938 Churchill called Hitler the saviour of the German nation, and wished that God would send Great Britain a man like Adolf Hitler, if Great Britain would be in a similar situation like Germany was in 1933.

3. After visiting Germany in 1936 Lord Halifax told his friend, the MI6 agent Henry Channon: “I was very impressed with the Nazi leaders including Goebbels. I think the Nazis are absolutely fantastic.” Lloyd George said, “Hitler is a genius’.

4. In 1939, just before the beginning of World War Two, Churchill again changed his mind in regard to Hitler and Germany and said: “I will set Europe ablaze, not only Germany”. The US Ambassador to France, Bullit, said: “We must force Germany to fire the first shot”. This reminds me of the Lusitania incident and Pearl Harbour as false flag operations? This type of politics also reminds me of Mossad’s motto: ‘By Way of Deception You Shall Make War’. Or we can also say it with Shakespeare: “What a tangled web they weave, when first they practice to deceive’.

5. After the failed Stauffenberg plot to assassinate Hitler, Churchill called Stauffenberg and his officers, “Dogs and Traitors”.

6. On 21 July 1944, a day after the failed plot to assassinate Hitler, BBC London broadcast all the names of those involved in this plot. The Gestapo and Sicherheits Dienst – SD – in Germany recorded this BBC broadcast and as a result 300+ people were executed or were forced into suicide. With that broadcast Churchill managed to eliminate Germany’s opposition against Hitler, thereby ensuring that Churchill and Roosevelt did not have to negotiate a peace treaty with Germany in order to end World War Two. The unconditional surrender was perfected– as both Churchill and Roosevelt demanded.

7. In February 1945, during the closing days of World War Two, Churchill wanted to drop anthrax poison, carried by his Halifax bombers, on to the already defeated Germany and any territories still occupied by German forces. Sensible men in British High Command stopped him from doing so. Unfortunately within US High Command there was no-one who stopped Truman from ordering the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

8. Hitler had sarin gas bombs at the ready just in case Churchill would have succeeded with his anthrax attack on Germany. Besides the Allied saturation bombing, totally destroying many Germany cities as well as numerous other European cities, which killed about 600,000 civilians, including concentration camp inmates and prisoners of war. Also there was the bestial killing, rape and mutilation of civilian men, women and children committed by the Soviet Soldateska in Eastern Europe and eastern parts of Germany. This was encouraged by, Illia Ehrenburg, Soviet poet laureate, while Hitler forbade the use of the sarin bombs against his enemies. Approximately two months later, on 30 April 1945, Hitler committed suicide with his wife, Eva, in his Berlin Chancellery bunker.

9. Also not mentioned in Singer’s film, Valkyrie, is the fact that neither the Allied victory powers, including the Soviet Union, were willing to negotiate a peace treaty with Hitler’s Germany in order to end World War Two any earlier, which would have save human lives. In 1941 Churchill’s chief diplomatic adviser, Sir Robert Vansittart, made it crystal clear that the Allies did not fight World War Two against Adolf Hitler and/or National Socialism but against Germany. The reason for this stance was that Germany had become an economic competitor on the world markets, which were controlled by Britain and the USA. Stalin, addressing the Soviet Politburo on 19 August 1939 said, “It is essential that the coming world war continue for as long as possible”.

In 1974 Henry Kissinger repeated the Vansittart’s statement in Washington, DC. This also explains why the Allies, including the Soviets, rejected about 40 peace offers of Hitler’s Germany before and during World War Two. Remember what the 22 November 1963 assassinated US President John F Kennedy said about Hitler in 1945 while as a soldier visiting Hitler’s Berghof and Eagle’s Nest: “Hitler will emerge from the hatred that surrounds him now as one of the most significant figures who ever lived … He had a mystery about him in the way that he lived and in the manner of his death that will live and grow after him…He had in him the stuff of which legends are made”.

Conclusion: Great Britain and its Allies won World War Two. Germany, large areas of Europe including England, was totally destroyed. Although Churchill warned Roosevelt about Stalin’s intentions regarding world revolution, Stalin successfully swallowed half of Europe for the communist ideology – thanks to Roosevelt’s stupidity. After the war the USA became the new world empire but unfortunately the Americans are not empire builders like their British cousins were, and the USA will now lose this privilege to their creditors, The Peoples Republic of China.

Note the irony in all this: The communist system, China, is keeping the capitalist system, USA, alive but barely functioning. When will they ever learn? They may well never learn!

RONALD Conway, who died on 16 March, was a more perceptive social critic than Donald Horne but not nearly as well known.

Conway's first book, The Great Australian Stupor, first published in 1971, sold almost 70,000 copies. After Horne's The Lucky Country, it has been by far Australia's largest selling work of serious social criticism. While Horne's title has become part of Australia's self-description, his book is a period piece. By contrast, there is a timeless quality to Conway's psycho-study of Australian society, especially his account of the dysfunctional Australian male.

Conway was a product, in part, of Melbourne's brilliant post-war intellectual efflorescence. He was taught at the University of Melbourne by, among others, A.D. Hope and Manning Clark. He was a student contemporary of Geoffrey Blainey, Vincent Buckley and Max Charlesworth. In the political and cultural schisms of the 1960s and '70s, he was a fellow traveller with B.A. Santamaria and James McAuley.

Conway described himself as a conservative, and was a frequent biting critic of much that was associated with the modern world: consumerism, materialism, feminism and especially the post-Vatican Council disarray of institutional Catholicism. Yet he was far too aware of the complexity of the human condition and especially of the power and ambiguity of human sexuality to be a straightforward barracker for conventional thinking. While he supported orthodox Catholic teaching, Conway also observed that "the Catholic has been far too long made to suffer a scarred conscience because he or she could not, or would not, always be able to live up to such lofty ideals".

In turn, Conway was a schoolteacher, practising clinical psychologist, university lecturer and, for 40 years, adviser on priestly vocations for the Archdiocese of Melbourne. He appeared regularly on '70s ABC television programs such as Any Questions and hosted commercial radio programs in the '80s. He wrote and produced plays and musicals, mostly for '50s and '60s Catholic festivals in Victoria. From the '70s until about five years ago he was a regular contributor to newspapers such as The Australian and magazines such as Quadrant.

His six books, though, are his most enduring contribution to Australians' self-understanding. Stupor was followed by two companion volumes, The Land of the Long Weekend in 1978 and The End of Stupor in 1985. Being Male was published in 1986 and The Rage for Utopia in 1992. In 1988, he published an elegant autobiography. His work hasn't always been as well promoted as it deserved because he was rarely entirely on any side. Much of his writing has the capacity to surprise, dismay or exhilarate a wide range of readers. Instead of cementing his position in the front rank of Australian public intellectuals, however, many thought that this made him not quite trustworthy. The danger is that his insights will be forgotten because they aren't sufficiently partisan even though he stands to the analysis of social behaviour in Australia much as Edmund Burke does to conservative political thinking more generally.

Conway was the only child of an extensively self-educated but not very financially successful father and a mother who often resented her lot in life. Division over religion exacerbated Depression-era tension over how to get by. Scarcely in his teens, Conway became a Catholic and experienced the authoritarian mediocrity that mingled with the aestheticism, intellectual rigour and powerful solidarity of Australian Catholicism in its halcyon years. He was a thoughtful, precocious child uninterested in sport and thus subject to terrible persecution until the belated discovery of physical strength and verbal dexterity.

Perhaps bruised by those years, he could be a somewhat intimidating conversationalist with little small talk and a slightly ostentatious tendency to outquip people in discussion. On the other hand, long before it was fashionable to "feel people's pain", he was quick to discern inner need and, for thousands of students, clients and friends, opened the doors of the mental prisons they had constructed for themselves. He never contemplated joining the priesthood (as might have been expected of a bright young man of his temperament in that era) and never seems seriously to have considered marriage. He seems largely to have come to terms with any demons of his own and, in any event, chose not to make a spectacle of himself.

It must have taken rare strength of character for Conway to have lived his entire adult life without the emotional sustenance of his own family, the institutional support of a structured community or even the reassurance of a modern partnership. It freed him to search unfailingly for truth and beauty. He had the discipline to persevere in his quests. I suspect that he might indeed have been touched and subsequently carried by that sense of the presence of God, or of the infinite, that many crave but few find. He certainly had a sense of mission: to address the two great concerns of troubled souls, religion and sex; and to help people to look unflinchingly at what they really are and to make the best of it.

Of course, his work deserves to be read, not merely described. This sinewy passage from his autobiography is a good sample: "Prior to World War I, Australia was an emotionally hard country where only tough and resiliently unsentimental people could hang on and prosper. Small family joys alternating with large sacrifices were the order of the time. The men usually drank too much (and) fraternised awkwardly ... Meanwhile, the women had to respond to domestic circumstances where both fullness of purse and largesse of feeling were usually in short supply. The children of such families grew up with a knack for survival, blending raw courage with a jaunty impertinence ... But loving exuberance among kinfolk was only to be reserved for a green spring, a mild summer or perhaps a world war ... Life was a task, not an adventure.

"The radical resentments of our present generation ... ought to be seen against this disenchanting historical backdrop. Yet all social reactions tend to go too far. The way to rehabilitate the Australian nuclear family is not to rage destructively at its past inadequacies. Any fool can dismantle a tradition. It takes love, courage and imagination to renovate human history, to make the dead true teachers to the living. No unconfronted family resentment can ever be buried in cemeteries ... It must be faced by every one of us in our hearts and in our own season. To live for this year, rather than for past or future years, is the science of sciences offering the only hope of wholeness, or indeed holiness, we can know."

When a conservative hardly dared speak their name in this country, Conway had become one through the insights of religion and psychology. Long before the men's movement, Conway was drawing Australian males out of their ghettoes of too little deep thought, too much manic activity and emotional intimacy only with fellow drinkers. One particular gift was to help young men to understand that affectionate friendships need not be a sign of repressed homosexuality.

As a student, I had been much struck by a passage in The Land of the Long Weekend quoting a letter written by a soldier of the First Australian Imperial Force: "When Jim died last week I took him in my arms, kissed him and cried like a baby. I loved that stupid big cow with my guts. I suppose June will think I've turned queer or something but she knows me better than that. They say the old Spartan fighters used to take men lovers into battle. I know we used to laugh ourselves silly when we read about it at school ... men cuddling up to one another and all that sort of stuff. But I used to sleep very close to Jim more than once in the trenches ... It felt good, decent, even grand to be close ... Why didn't Dad or someone tell me that when I was home? Why did I have to come over here to this dirty butcher's shop of guns and broken bodies to find out?"

Years later, after I'd written about leaving the seminary, perhaps sensing some turmoil, Conway made contact and helped me to understand that God did not expect the impossible. The letter he subsequently sent was a masterpiece of perception and pastoral care; no doubt now lost, as so many gems are.

So many feckless young gods still need their Conway. This philosopher of human frailty was indeed a prophet who should be much honoured in his own country. For anyone who wishes to pay tribute to this remarkable man, there will be a memorial service at St Patrick's Cathedral in Melbourne at 10.30am next Thursday.

Tony Abbott is a federal Opposition frontbencher and former minister

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25216373-28737,00.html

Despite the huge amount of verbiage being uttered by sites such as Israpundit we on 4international believe that the key issue for Israel, for Jews, and for us on the Left who support Israel unconditionally is the issue of the Mullahs’ nukes.

We wish it were otherwise but…Israel simply does not have any alternative. If Israel allows the Iranian Nazis to gain the Nuclear bomb then it will certainly be used against the Jews of Israel.

Those who try to gloss over this issue are simply antisemites. Iran has stated clearly that it sees the Zionist state as being something to them evil.

Ahmadinejad talked about either wiping Israel off the map or about the end of the Zionist presence in the Middle East.

And certainly Ahmadinejad is a backer of Hamas and Hizbullah both of which are sworn to destroy Israel.

If all that was not enough Ahmadinejad and the Mullahs are at the centre of Holocaust Denial, in fact actually organizing a major Holocaust Denial conference in Teheran in which all the antisemites of the world who deny the Holocaust were present. Antisemitism, denial of the Holocaust, are signs that lead on to a new Holocaust.

This article on 4international seeks to make known the role of the US CIA organization and its role specifically on this issue.

Remember that Christopher Simpson in his famous book “Blowback” provided the clear evidence that the CIA was made up of tens of thousands of Nazis who were recruited by the US Government out of those Nazis who had led in carrying out the Holocaust.

This therefore throws a major light on the following, when this CIA agency and its organizations came out and claimed (National Intelligence Estimate November 2007) that Iran had given up its pursuit of the Nuclear Bomb. (Specifically had halted in 2003 for a number of years)

But if one bothers to read their report that was their conclusion, and that was the Headline, but in the content of their report they admitted that Iran was continuing to enrich uranium and that a nuclear bomb was possible in 2009.

You can find this on

http://www.dni.gov/press_releases/20071203_release.pdf

If you can surmount the usual guff and scan down to the section called “Key Judgments” and look at “C”, then they state that the Mullahs are accelerating the process of enriching uranium in their centrifuges in Natanz, and that it is possible for them to have enough material for a nuclear bomb by 2009.

So what was all the fuss about. How come Hadley the US Government spokesman tried to tell the world there was no problem?

Well for one thing all the antisemitic journalists that I know of in the world who hate Israel honed in on the Headline and obviously did not read the report itself. If they had read the report they would have found that the US was saying 2 contradictory things.

This is the murky world of the US Governmental Imperialism, which is throwing Israel into such deep crisis.

The whole thing is amazing. You have these leftist type journalists (the BBC is full of them) full of Israel hatred and they are so against the Iraq war which overthrew an absolute fiend in Saddam. Yet here they provide an apology for the Iranian Mullahs aim to wipe out the Jews. If that is not antisemitism by these journalists I do not know what is.

It is clear that Obama is in bed with the Islamist Fascists and that Israel is very vulnerable.

This is why the one historical role of the Netanyahu Government is to strike, and either destroy totally or significantly delay the Iranian Nuclear Bomb making.

This in itself will change the political landscape of the world.

Expect NO thanks from those Arab regimes who also fear the Iranian Bomb. They will use the Israeli strike to stir up antisemitism. That is what they do.

As to those in the west who oppose Israel on this we on 4international say…”Quite simply you are antisemites”.

To expect that Israel can be (it is somehow normal to be) threatened by the Nazis Mullahs and their hideous bomb, along with their Holocaust Denial etc, is to be a dyed in the wool antisemite.

It is vital that a big organization is built in the US which will drive out into the ordinary people and garner the necessary suport for Israel in these vital months ahead in the aftermath of the Israeli strike against the Nazi Mullahs.

This will be against Obama, against the Nazi linked Bush family, against Bill Clinton who lined up with Islamist Nazi Izetbegovic in Bosnia, against McCain and (Joseph) Lieberman with their pro Kosovo past.

All those Serbs and Russians who fought the Nazis of the US and their allies in the Balkans (like Izetbegovic) must urgently get off the fence. Decisive moments lie ahead.

Either make a comment below, or if you wish privacy mark it private and we will not publish. But DO ACT!

We give the url for the report itself below.

http://www.dni.gov/press_releases/20071203_release.pdf

It is an easier way into this notorious report by looking at newspapaer reports. We chose here that of the Washington Post

[Begin report from Washington Post here]

WASHINGTON, Dec. 3 — A new assessment by American intelligence agencies concludes that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and that the program remains frozen, contradicting judgment two years ago that Tehran was working relentlessly toward building a nuclear bomb.

The conclusions of the new assessment are likely to reshape the final year of the Bush administration, which has made halting Iran’s nuclear program a cornerstone of its foreign policy.

The assessment, a National Intelligence Estimate that represents the consensus view of all 16 American spy agencies, states that Tehran is likely keeping its options open with respect to building a weapon, but that intelligence agencies “do not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons.”

Iran is continuing to produce enriched uranium, a program that the Tehran government has said is designed for civilian purposes. The new estimate says that enrichment program could still provide Iran with enough raw material to produce a nuclear weapon sometime by the middle of next decade, a timetable essentially unchanged from previous estimates.

(The above was precisely what the antisemites who quote from this report leave out, and since they are indeed antisemites they do this quite deliberately!)

But the new estimate declares with “high confidence” that a military-run Iranian program intended to transform that raw material into a nuclear weapon has been shut down since 2003, and also says with high confidence that the halt “was directed primarily in response to increasing international scrutiny and pressure.”

The “high confidence” is bullshit as the following observation from Washington Post makes clear. They do not say how they have this “high confidence”. The whole thing was a fraud being played out against Israel and in the service of Jew Haters everywhere.

The estimate does not say when American intelligence agencies learned that the weapons program had been halted, but a statement issued by Donald Kerr, the principal director of national intelligence, said the document was being made public “since our understanding of Iran’s capabilities has changed.”

Rather than painting Iran as a rogue, irrational nation determined to join the club of nations with the bomb, the estimate states Iran’s “decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic and military costs.” The administration called new attention to the threat posed by Iran earlier this year when President Bush had suggested in October that a nuclear-armed Iran could lead to “World War III” and Vice President Dick Cheney promised “serious consequences” if the government in Tehran did not abandon its nuclear program.

Yet at the same time officials were airing these dire warnings about the Iranian threat, analysts at the Central Intelligence Agency were secretly concluding that Iran’s nuclear weapons work halted years ago and that international pressure on the Islamic regime in Tehran was working.

Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, portrayed the assessment as “directly challenging some of this administration’s alarming rhetoric about the threat posed by Iran.” He said he hoped the administration “appropriately adjusts its rhetoric and policy,” and called for a “a diplomatic surge necessary to effectively address the challenges posed by Iran.”

But the national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, quickly issued a statement describing the N.I.E. as containing positive news rather than reflecting intelligence mistakes.

“It confirms that we were right to be worried about Iran seeking to develop nuclear weapons,” Mr. Hadley said. “It tells us that we have made progress in trying to ensure that this does not happen. But the intelligence also tells us that the risk of Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon remains a very serious problem.”

“The estimate offers grounds for hope that the problem can be solved diplomatically — without the use of force — as the administration has been trying to do,” Mr. Hadley said.

The new report comes out just over five years after a deeply flawed N.I.E. concluded that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons programs and was determined to restart its nuclear program — an estimate that led to congressional authorization for a military invasion of Iraq, although most of the report’s conclusions turned out to be wrong.

Intelligence officials said that the specter of the botched 2002 N.I.E. hung over their deliberations over the Iran assessment, leading them to treat the document with particular caution.

“We felt that we needed to scrub all the assessments and sources to make sure we weren’t misleading ourselves,” said one senior intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/03/world/middleeast/03cnd-iran.html

http://4international.wordpress.com/2009/04/02/the-iranian-fascists-and-the-bombwhen-the-cia-stepped-in-to-enable-the-fascists/

The G-20 has agreed on plans to fight the global downturn. But its approach will only lay the foundation for the next, bigger crisis. Instead of "stability, growth, jobs," the summit's real slogan should have been "debt, unemployment, inflation."

Now they're celebrating again. An "historic compromise" had been reached, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said at the conclusion of the G-20 summit in London, while US President Barack Obama spoke of a "turning point" in the fight against the global downturn. Behind the two leaders, the summit's motto could clearly be seen: "stability, growth, jobs."

US President Barack Obama: The G-20 is laying the foundation for the next crisis.

When the celebrations have died down, it will be easier to look at what actually happened in London with a cool eye. The summit participants took the easy way out. Their decision to pump a further $5 trillion (€3.72 trillion) into the collapsing world economy within the foreseeable future, could indeed prove to be a historical turning point -- but a turning point downwards. In combating this crisis, the international community is in fact laying the foundation for the next crisis, which will be larger. It would probably have been more honest if the summit participants had written "debt, unemployment, inflation" on the wall.

The crucial questions went unanswered because they weren't even asked. Why are we in the current situation anyway? Who or what has got us into this mess?

The search for an answer would have revealed that the failure of the markets was preceded by a failure on the part of the state. Wall Street and the banks -- the greedy players of the financial industry -- played an important, but not decisive, role. The bank manager was the dealer that distributed the hot, speculation-based money throughout the nation.

But the poppy farmer sits in the White House. And during his time in office, US President George W. Bush enormously expanded the acreage under cultivation. The chief crop on his farm was the cheap dollar, which eventually flooded the entire world, artificially bloating the banks' balance sheets, creating sham growth and causing a speculative bubble in the US real estate market. The lack of transparency in the financial markets ensured that the poison could spread all around the world.

There are -- even in the modern world -- two things that no private company can do on its own: wage war and print money. Both of those things, however, formed Bush's response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Many column inches have already been devoted to Bush's first mistake, the invasion of Baghdad. But his second error -- flooding the global economy with trillions of dollars of cheap money -- has barely been acknowledged.

No other president has ever printed money and expanded the money supply with such abandon as Bush. This new money -- and therein lies its danger -- was not backed by real value in the form of goods or services. The measure may have had the desired effect -- the world economy revived, at least initially. And US consumption kept the global economy going for years. But the growth rates generated in the process were illusionary. The US had begun to hallucinate.

The addiction to new cash injections was chronic. The US had allowed itself to sink into an abject lifestyle. It sold more and more billions in new government bonds in order to preserve the appearance of a prosperous nation. To make matters worse, private households copied the example of the state. The average American now lives from hand to mouth and has 15 credit cards. The savings rate is almost zero. At the end of the Bush era, 75 percent of global savings were flowing into the US.

The president and the head of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, knew about the problem very well. Perhaps the Americans even knew just how irresponsible their actions were -- at any rate, they did everything they could to hide them from the world. Since 2006, figures for the money supply -- in other words, the total number of dollars in circulation -- have no longer been published in the US. As a result, a statistic which is regarded by the European Central Bank as a key indicator is now treated as a state secret in the US.

Only on the basis of independent estimates can the outside world get a sense of the internal erosion of what was once the strongest currency in the world. These estimates report a steep rise in the amount of money in circulation. Since the decision to keep the figures confidential, the growth rate for the expansion of the money supply has tripled. Last year alone, the money supply increased by 17 percent. As a comparison, the money in circulation in Europe grew by a mere 5 percent during the same period.

But the change of government in Washington has not brought a return to self-restraint and solidity. On the contrary, it has led to further abandon. Barack Obama has continued the course towards greater and greater state debt -- and increased the pace. One-third of his budget is no longer covered by revenues. The only things which are currently running at full production in the US are the printing presses at the Treasury.

At the summit in London, delegates talked about everything -- except this issue. As a result, no attention was given to the fact that the crisis is being fought with the same instrument that caused it in the first place. The acreage for cheap dollars will now be extended once again. Only this time, the state is also acting as the dealer, so that it can personally take care of how the trillions are distributed.

The International Money Fund was authorized to double, and later triple, its assistance funds -- by borrowing more. The World Bank is also being authorized to increase its borrowing. All the participating countries want to help their economies through state guarantees, which, should they be made use of, would result in a huge increase in the national debt. The US is preparing a new, debt-financed economic stimulus package. Other countries will probably follow its example.

We live in truly historic times -- in that respect, German Chancellor Angela Merkel is right. The West may very well be giving itself a fatal overdose.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090402/us_nm/us_hunger_usa

From: Adelaide Institute

toben@adelaideinstitute.org

Sent: Sunday, 5 April 2009 1:34 AM

Subject: Letter from Horst Mahler to G. Deckert dated 30 March 2009

1. It appears Mahler is being treated as if he was suicidal and under constant watch – sharing a cell with another prisoner. If his cell mate wishes to leave the cell, Mahler must also leave, etc., makes it difficult for him to prepare the appeal.

2. Once he’s settled into routine Mahler will organize a visitors’ timetable.

3. The German judiciary is in the process of selling Horst Mahler’s house because he has not paid his court costs – can anyone help, please?

Send money direct to Mahler’s prison account:

Landesjustizkasse Bamberg / für JVA München

Bayr. Landesbank

Kto. 24919, BLZ 700 500 00

IBAN: DE 347 005 000000000 249 19 --- BIC (Swift-Code): BYLADEMM

___________________________

From: guenter.deckert@gmx.de

Sent: Sunday, 5 April 2009 1:08 AM

Subject: Brief von Horst Mahler an G. Deckert

Brief von Horst Mahler an G. Deckert vom 30.3.2009, Eingang 4.4.2009

Horst Mahler

Stadelheimer Str. 12

(D) 81548 München, den 30. März 2009

Lieber Herr Deckert,

Ihr Brief vom 19. März hat mich

Mit den Beilagen mit dem heutigen 30.3. erreicht. Herzlichen Dank!

Ihr Prozessbericht lag nicht bei. Bisher hat mich niemand vom Ergebnis in Kenntnis gesetzt. – Von Sylvia habe ich seit dem 19. Februar 2009 nichts mehr gehört. Ich bin beunruj´higt.

Meine Haftsituation ist alles andere als „normal“. Man behandelt mich, als hätte ich nichts anderes im Sinn, als mich bei erster Gelegenheit selbst umzubringen. Zunächst war ich – ohne daß dafür ein Grund ersichtlich war – auf der Krankenstation untergebracht. Seit letztem Donnerstag bin ich in eine Zweimann-Zelle verlegt. Wenn der Mitbewohner diese verlässt, muß auch ich den Haftraum verlassen. Habe keine Arbeitsmöglichkeit, kann also die 3 anstehenden Revisionsbegründungen nicht vorbereiten. Vielleicht ist das Absicht.

Einen Besuchstermin werde ich erst vorschlagen, wenn sich hier einen verläßlicher Rhythmus eingestellt haben wird, und ich mich organisieren kann.

Die Berliner Justiz hat mein Häuschen in Klein-Machow gepfändet und droht mit Versteigerung. Es geht um die Gerichtskosten aus dem Berliner „Judaismus-Prozeß“ (2004/2005). Die Forderung beläuft sich auf etwas über 8000 €. Ich habe Ratenzahlung beantragt. Hier wäre Hilfe sehr willkommen. Beträge können auf „Haftkonto“ überwiesen werden:

Landesjustizkasse Bamberg / für JVA München

Bayr. Landesbank

Kto. 24919, BLZ 700 500 00

IBAN: DE 347 005 000000000 249 19 --- BIC (Swift-Code): BYLADEMM

Ansonsten sind die Aussichten glänzend: Untergang oder Nationalsozialismus.

Herzliche Grüße

Horst Mahler

Briefumschlag retour.

The world wrings its hands, anxious and despairing. Israel presses on, grim and resolute. There are a number of interesting short-term questions. Would the Israelis have acted now if their election were six months away, not two, and if Mr Obama had already taken office? What led Hamas to end its ceasefire and fire hundreds of rockets, killing hardly any Israelis but infuriating almost all of them, providing Israel with an ideal pretext?

Clearly, Israel had a plan for war in Gaza. There is nothing sinister in that: a country in Israel's circumstances ought to have contingency plans for all conceivable threats. But if you are up against an adversary as ruthless as Israel, forethought would be sensible, it is not clear that the Hamas leadership understands that concept.

Yet the longer-term consequences are far more important. If the rest of Operation Cast Lead goes as well for the Israelis as the bombing campaign – a risky assumption, given the hazards of combat in built-up areas – it is to be hoped that General Ehud Barak is aiming for an early end: some symbolic climax, after which he could declare a victory and pull back. Then the hard thinking needs to begin. The Israelis will, no doubt, draw conclusions. Their country's future depends on those being the right conclusions.

An Israeli hawk would have obvious reasons for self-satisfaction. If Gaza ends as well as it began, this will expunge the memories of Lebanon in 2006. Then, Israel suffered a strategic defeat. Worse still, a lot of foreign observers – and a fair few Israelis – wondered whether the Israeli army had lost its edge. It seems unlikely that anyone would think that this time.

Apart from applauding the IDF, our hawk would point to the number of dogs which have not barked in the night: southern Lebanon has been quiet; Hizbollah has done nothing to relieve the pressure on Hamas; perhaps Lebanon was not such a defeat after all. There has been minimal trouble in the West Bank, or in the rest of the Arab world. Our increasingly scornful hawk would insist that the idea of the Arab street ready to explode, sweeping away regimes friendly to the West and replacing them with psychopathic theocrats, is a fantasy dreamt up by bed-wetting European liberals. The hawk has grounds for confidence and many Israeli voters would agree with him. There is a background to this: the suicide bombings, especially when the bombers were children. It is impossible to overestimate the effect which that had on Israeli opinion. There is a phrase which was and is endlessly repeated, often by Israelis who are far from hawkish: "What sort of people are these, who send their children to murder our children?" Military historians have invented a phrase which is as ugly as it is indispensable; then again, it describes an ugly reality. "Species pseudo-differentiation": if you decide that your enemy is from a different and lower species, it is much easier to kill him in battle.

Over the past 60 years, the Israelis have been far less guilty of species pseudo-differentiation vis-à-vis the Arabs than the Arabs have towards them. They have occasionally been guilty of exploiting the Holocaust for emotional blackmail. This time, they have a point. Child suicide bombers almost seem to justify species pseudo-differentiation and they inevitably reawaken memories of the Holocaust – not that those are ever asleep.

Facile moral judgements are even less useful here than they are normally. It is no use dismissing our hawk and those he appeals to. Their anger is understandable, as is their pride in their young men's valour. But if the hawks have their way, Israel will not survive the century.

The Crusader kingdom lasted for a century, nearly twice as long as Israel has been in existence, and the Crusaders had a problem which Israel shares. Both of them resemble organ transplants into a body whose immune system was determined to reject the intruders. The Israelis may have a far more powerful armoury than the Frankish knights of Outremer, but like the Crusaders, they are only the masters of a tiny littoral enclave, surrounded by much larger territories whose inhabitants resent their existence. What Prince Hassan of Jordan said of his own country applies equally to Israel: "We live in a dangerous neighbourhood." As long as those dangers could merely express themselves in conventional weaponry, the situation was manageable. But we can be certain of one thing. As this century progresses – if that is the right word – it will become steadily easier to manufacture nuclear weapons. So we are back to species pseudo-differentiation. There is a terrorist who hates Jews and is prepared to blow himself up. Why should he restrict himself to a bus queue, when he could take Tel Aviv with him?

There is no way in which Israel can guarantee that this will not happen: no way of removing all the danger from the neighbourhood. As long as the state of Israel exists, some Muslims will hate it. But the risks can be mitigated, or enhanced. As long as Israel occupies the West Bank, Palestine will be the Arab world's sore tooth. It will also be the Arabs' excuse for their failure to make political, social and economic progress. "Westerners lecture us on democracy and human rights. But look at the way they allow Israel to treat the Palestinians. What hypocrites."

That statement may be a gross over-simplification, but it is still a potent one. Up to now, Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia have proved to be much more durable and resilient than was feared. Iraq has been far less effective than Nasserism in undermining friendly Arab states. Yet there must be limits. The longer Palestine is unresolved, the nearer we will come to breaking point. Unless Israel's neighbours enjoy stability, Israel can never enjoy security. One can hear the Israeli protests already. Most Israelis, including many hawks, are in favour of a Palestinian state. In the Camp David negotiations at the end of Mr Clinton's Presidency, when Ehud Barak, now the hammer of Gaza, was Prime Minister, he offered generous terms. Who rejected them? Arafat.

But it is not only liberals who have fantasies. So do some Israeli hawks, who believe that there can be no deal on Palestine until the Palestinian leadership recognises the state of Israel. That would have been like asking the IRA to begin the Ulster peace process by recognising the legitimacy of Northern Ireland. Moreover, even the Camp David terms would only have handed over around 91 per cent of the pre-1967 West Bank. Forget the wretched Arafat: it would be very hard for any Palestinian leader to put his name to a loss of territory and survive. The Irish revolutionary leader Michael Collins did a deal with the British and was assassinated. He was a much more powerful figure than Mr Abbas or his likely successors. The hawks who claim that Palestinian intransigence is blocking a deal have a point. They ought also to recognise that a compliant Palestinian would not find it easy to buy life insurance.

That said, we are not in an impasse. There is a way out. Israel should despair of signing a deal with the Palestinians and act unilaterally to implement the Camp David terms, preferably with a small territorial sweetener, taking the new nation up to about 95 per cent of the pre-67 acreage. This would not be easy, for it would involve the removable of at least 100,000 Israeli settlers: in many cases, a forcible removal. That would place the Israeli political system under immense strain, but it would be a price worth paying.

Yet it will probably not be paid. The likelihood is that the Israelis will learn the wrong lessons from Gaza, comforting themselves with the thought that we can always beat them if we have to. If so, there is trouble ahead and every likelihood of a ghastly ending. Israel was created partly to ensure that there could never be another holocaust. Generals are sometimes accused of planning for the last war. Israel is in danger of planning to avert the last Holocaust and ignoring the threat of the next one.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/bruce-anderson/bruce-ander

Kofi Annan condemned Iran’s intention to hold a conference next week questioning the Holocaust. The U.N. secretary-general “would deeply deplore any conference whose purpose is to question or deny the reality of the Holocaust,” said a statement issued Thursday by Annan’s spokesman, Stephane Dujarric. The statement noted that Annan had spoken to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad about the issue when they met in Tehran in September. Annan further called on all “people of goodwill and of whatever faith” to resist attempts to cast doubt on the Holocaust. http://jta.org/page_view_breaking_story.asp?intid=59

Swedish teacher suspended over attending Holocaust meeting in Iran – December 14, 2006

Stockholm- A Swedish computer science teacher who attended a controversial Holocaust conference in Iran earlier this week has been suspended, news reports said Thursday. The teacher, identified as Jan Bernhoff, had given a lecture where he alleged that 300,000 Jews died in the Holocaust during World War II as opposed to the number of six million commonly used by academics. Although he did not teach history as a subject at the adult education college where he works in Stockholm, local politicians and the school management questioned if he could continue as a teacher. "I think he will have a hard time at school since so many students and colleagues have contacted me about his participation at the conference," principle Britt-Marie Johansson told Swedish radio. Johansson said a probe would be launched and in the meantime Bernhoff would be suspended. Minister for Schools Jan Bjorklund, who is in charge of education issues in the cabinet, said the teacher's participation in the Iranian conference was "unacceptable," but that he had no constitutional right to intervene in the case. The two-day conference in Tehran, sponsored by the Iranian government, was widely condemned.

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4international

defending Israel, defending Jews against antisemitism, support for Serbs, unity of Serbs and Jews

THE IRANIAN FASCISTS AND THE BOMB…WHEN THE CIA STEPPED IN TO ENABLE THE FASCISTS

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