Month: September 2017

Tyranny at Nuremberg

The following study was published in Paul Craig Roberts’ blog on Saturday 12th August 2017

Update Aug. 12, 2017: Here is David Irving’s account of his arrest, trial,
and imprisonment in Austria. His conviction was overturned by a higher
court, and he was released. http://www.fpp.co.uk/books/Banged/up.pdf
The show trial of a somewhat arbitrarily selected group of 21 surviving
Nazis at Nuremberg during 1945-46 was US Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson’s show. Jackson was the chief prosecutor. As a long-time admirer of Jackson, I always assumed that he did a good job.

My admiration for Jackson stems from his defence of law as a shield of
the people rather than a weapon in the hands of government, and from
his defence of the legal principle known as mens rea, that is, that crime
requires intent. I often cite Jackson for his defence of these legal
principles that are the very foundation of liberty. Indeed, I cited Jackson
in my recent July 31 column. His defence of law as a check on
government power plays a central role in the book that I wrote with
Lawrence Stratton, The Tyranny of Good Intentions.

In 1940 Jackson was US Attorney General. He addressed federal
prosecutors and warned them against

“….picking the man and then putting investigators to work, to
pin some offence on him. It is in this realm — in which the
prosecutor picks some person whom he dislikes or desires to
embarrass, or selects some group of unpopular persons and
then looks for an offence — that the greatest danger of abuse
of prosecuting power lies. It is here that law enforcement
becomes personal, and the real crime becomes that of being
unpopular with the predominant or governing group, being
attached to the wrong political views or being personally
obnoxious to, or in the way of, the prosecutor himself.”
[emphasis added by MW]

Later as a Supreme Court justice Jackson overturned a lower court conviction of a person who had no idea, or any reason to believe, that he had committed a crime.

Having just finished reading David Irving’s book Nuremberg (1996), I
am devastated to learn that in his pursuit of another principle, at
Nuremberg Jackson violated all of the legal principles for which I have
so long admired him. To be clear, at Nuremberg Jackson was in pursuit
of Nazis, but their conviction was the means to his end — the
establishment of the international legal principle that the initiation of war, the commitment of military aggression, was a crime.

The problem, of course, was that at Nuremberg people were tried on
the basis of ex post facto law — law that did not exist at the time of their
actions for which they were convicted.

Moreover, the sentence — death by hanging — was decided prior to the
trial and prior to the selection of defendants.

Moreover, the defendants were chosen and then a case was made
against them. Exculpatory evidence was withheld. Charges on which defendants were convicted turned out to be untrue.

The trials were so loaded in favour of the prosecution that defence was
pro forma. The defendants were abused and some were tortured.

The defendants were encouraged to give false witness against one
another, which for the most part the defendants refused to do, with
Albert Speer being the willing one. His reward was a prison sentence
rather than death.

The defendants’ wives and children were arrested and imprisoned. To
Jackson’s credit, this infuriated him.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt, General Eisenhower, and Winston
Churchill thought that surviving Nazis should be shot without trial.
Roosevelt laughed about liquidating 50,000 German military officers. Eisenhower told Lord Halifax that Nazi leaders should be shot while trying to escape, the common euphemism for murder. Russians spoke of castrating German men and breeding German women to annihilate the German race. US Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau wanted to reduce Germany to an agrarian society and send able-bodied Germans to Africa as slaves to work on “some big TVA project”.
[emphasis added by MW]

Robert Jackson saw in these intentions not only rank criminality among
the allied leadership but also a missed opportunity to create the legal
principle that would criminalize war, thus removing the disaster of war
from future history. Jackson’s end was admirable, but the means
required bypassing Anglo-American legal principles.

Jackson got his chance, perhaps because Joseph Stalin vetoed
execution without trial. First a show trial, Stalin said, to demonstrate their
guilt so that we do not make martyrs out of Nazis.

Whom to select for the list of 21-22 persons to be charged? Well, whom
did the allies have in custody? Not all those they desired. They had
Reichsmarschall Herman Göring who headed the air force. Whatever
the valid charges against Göring, they were not considered to be
mitigated by the fact that under Göring the German air force was mainly
used against enemy formations on the battleground and not, like the US
and British air forces in saturation terror bombing of civilian cities, such
as Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, or by the fact that in
Hitler’s final days Hitler removed Göring from all his positions, expelled
him from the party, and ordered his arrest.

The Nuremberg trials are paradoxical in that the law Jackson
intended to establish applied to every country, not to Germany
alone. The ex post facto law under which Germans were sentenced
to death and to prison also criminalized the terror bombing of
German and Japanese cities by the British and US air forces. Yet,
the law was only applied to the Germans in the dock. In his book,
Apocalypse 1945: The Destruction of Dresden (1995), Irving quotes
US General George C. McDonald’s dissent from the directive to
bomb civilian cities such as Dresden. Gen. McDonald characterized the directive as the “extermination of populations and the razing of cities”, war crimes under the Nuremberg standard.
[emphasis added by MW]

They had foreign minister Ribbentrop. They had field marshals Keitel and Jodl and the grand-admirals Raeder and Dönitz. They had a German banker, who was saved from sentencing by the intervention of the Bank of England. They had a journalist. They had Rudolf Hess who had been in a British prison since 1941 when he went to Britain on a peace mission to end the war. They wanted an industrialist, but Krupp was too old and ill. He was devoid of the persona of a foreboding evil. You can read the list in Irving’s book.

Göring knew from the beginning that the trial was a hoax and that his
death sentence had already been decided. He had the means (a poison
capsule) throughout his imprisonment to commit suicide, thus depriving
his captors of their planned humiliation of him. Instead, he held the
Germans together, and they stood their ground. Possessed of a high
IQ, time and again he made fools of his captors. He made such a fool of
Robert Jackson during his trial that the entire court burst out in laughter.
Jackson never lived down being bested in the courtroom by Göring.

And Göring wasn’t through with making his captors look foolish and
incompetent. He, the field marshalls and grand admiral requested that
they be given a military execution by firing squad, but the pettiness of
the Tribunal wanted them hung like dogs. Göring told his captors that he
would allow them to shoot him, but not hang him, and a few minutes
before he was to be marched to the gallows before the assembled
press and cameras he took the poison capsule, throwing the execution
propaganda show into chaos. To this injury he added insult leaving the
prison commandant, US Col. Andrus a note telling him that he had had
3 capsules. One he had left for the Americans to find, thus causing
them to think his means of escaping them had been removed. One he
had taken minutes prior to his show execution, and he described where
to find the third. He had easily defeated the continuous and thorough
inspections inflicted upon him from fear that he would commit suicide
and escape their intended propaganda use of his execution.

There was a time in Anglo-American law when the improprieties of the
Nuremberg trials would have resulted in the cases being thrown out of
court and the defendants freed. Even under the ex post facto law and
extra-judicial, extra-legal terms under which the defendants were tried,
at least two of the condemned deserved to be cleared.

It is not clear why Admiral Donitz was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
The chief American judge of the Tribunal, Francis Biddle, said: “It is, in my opinion, offensive to our concept of justice to punish a man for doing exactly what one has done himself.” “The Germans,” Biddle said,
“fought a much cleaner war at sea than we did.”

Jodl, who countermanded many Nazi orders, was sentenced to death.
The injustice of the sentence was made clear by a German court in
1953 which cleared Jodl of all Nuremberg charges and rehabilitated him
posthumously. The French justice at the Nuremberg Tribunal said at the
time that Jodl’s conviction was without merit and was a miscarriage of
justice.

The entire Nuremberg proceeding stinks to high heaven. Defendants
were charged with aggression for the German invasion of Norway. The
fact was kept out of the trial that the British were about to invade
Norway themselves and that the Germans, being more efficient, learned
of it and managed to invade first.

Defendants were accused of using slave labour, paradoxical in view of
the Soviets own practice. Moreover, while the trials were in process the
Soviets were apparently gathering up able-bodied Germans to serve as
slave labour to rebuild their war-torn economy.

Defendants were accused of mass executions despite the fact that the
Russians, who were part of the prosecution and judgment of the
defendants, had executed 15,000 or 20,000 Polish officers and buried
them in a mass grave. Indeed, the Russians insisted on blaming the
Germans on trial for the Katyn Forest Massacre.

Defendants were accused of aggression against Poland, and Ribbentrop was not permitted to mention in his defence the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that divided Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union, without which Germany could not have attacked Poland. The fact that the Soviets, who were sitting at Nuremberg in judgment on the Germans, had themselves invaded Poland was kept out of the proceedings.

Moreover, without the gratuitous British “guarantee” to Poland, the
Polish military dictatorship would likely have agreed to return territories
stripped from Germany by the Versailles Treaty and the invasion would
have been avoided.

The greatest hypocrisy was the charge of aggression against Germany
when the fact of the matter is that World War 2 began when the British
and French declared war on Germany. Germany conquered France and
drove the British from the European Continent after the British and
French started the war with a declaration of war against Germany.

Irving’s book is, of course, politically incorrect. However, he lists in the
introduction the voluminous files on which the book is based: Robert
Jackson’s official papers and Oral History, Francis Biddle’s private
papers and diaries, Col. Andrus’ papers, Adm. Raeder’s prison diary,
Rudolf Hess’ prison diary, interrogations of the prisoners, interviews
with defence counsel, prosecutors, interrogators, and letters from the
prisoners to their wives. All of this and more Irving has made available
on microfilms for researchers. He compared magnetic tape copies of
the original wire-recordings of the trial with the mimeographed and
published transcripts to ensure that spoken and published words were
the same.

What Irving does in his book is to report the story that the documents
tell. This story differs from the patriotic propaganda written by court
historians with which we are all imbued. The question arises: Is Irving
pro-truth or pro-Nazi. The National Socialist government of Germany is
the most demonized government in history. Any lessening of the
demonization is unacceptable, so Irving is vulnerable to demonization
by those determined to protect their cherished beliefs.

Zionists have branded Irving a “holocaust denier”, and he was convicted
of something like that by an Austrian court and spent 14 months in
prison before the conviction was thrown out by a higher court.

In Nuremberg, Irving removes various propaganda legends from the
holocaust story and reports authoritative findings that many of the
concentration camp deaths were from typhus and starvation, especially
in the final days of the war when food and medicine were disappearing
from Germany, but nowhere in the book does he deny, indeed he
reports, that vast numbers of Jews perished. As I understand the term,
a simple truthful modification of some element of the official holocaust
story is sufficient to brand a person a holocaust denier.

My interest in the book is Robert Jackson. He had a noble cause — to
outlaw war — but in pursuit of this purpose he established precedents for American prosecutors to make law a weapon in their pursuit of their
noble causes just as it was used against Nazis — organized crime convictions, child abuse convictions, drug convictions, terror
convictions. Jackson’s pursuit of Nazis at Nuremberg undermined the
strictures he put on US attorneys such that today Americans have no
more protection of law than the defendants had at Nuremberg.

 

9/11 – The Conspiracy That Won’t Go Away

Published in The Daily Mail on 9th September 2017:

Brother of 9/11 victim claims the US orchestrated the atrocity as new study shows it was impossible that the third tower collapsed from fire
• • Geoff Campbell, 31, was one of 67 Britons killed in
the New York 9/11 attacks
• • His brother refuses to accept the official line and insists
there was a cover-up
• • Matt Campbell will protest outside BBC Broadcasting
House on the anniversary
by Sue Reid for the Daily Mail

[Martin Webster notes: This report is good — as far as it goes. But it gives no mention to the issue of what became known as “The Dancing Israelis”, that is, the group of Israeli nationals who were arrested by New York Police Department patrol officers who spotted them on a lorry at a place which overlooked the Twin Towers site.

The men were dancing with joy and hugging one another as the attack was taking place. These Israelis were arrested and confined by the NYPD but, on the orders of the U.S. government, were all quickly released and allowed to fly back to Israel without any investigation. None of these facts have been denied by the U.S. government, but no explanation of the Israelis' release from custody and speedy flight back to Israel has been given. Later Israel’s prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, on arrival in New York, when asked about the attack on the Twin Towers, he said it was “Very good....I mean, of course, very bad....but....”]

Next Monday afternoon, Matt Campbell will stand outside BBC
Broadcasting House in London’s Portland Place, protesting about the
killing of his brother, Geoff, and 66 other Britons, in the 9/11 terror
attack at the New York World Trade Centre.

After the horror on September 11, 2001, there was no trace of Geoff.
The 31-year-old risk analyst had been attending a conference on the
106th floor in the North Tower, a short stroll from the Manhattan
apartment where he lived with his American fiancée, Caroline.
At first, his family clung to the hope he was alive, until one year later
fragments of a shoulder blade bearing Geoff’s DNA were found among
Trade Centre rubble at a landfill site.

Matt began asking questions. He has not stopped since. He, and others
who will be at the BBC protest, refuse to accept the official story about
9/11: that four U.S. airliners were hijacked by Islamist terror chief
Osama Bin Laden’s pilots. Two were flown into New York’s famous
Twin Towers, which collapsed.

A third rammed into the U.S. Defence Headquarters at the Pentagon in
Washington DC. The last went down in rural Pennsylvania, 150 miles
north of the capital, after a tussle between the hijackers and
passengers, later portrayed in the Hollywood film United 93.

Seven hours later, a third tower at the World Trade Centre, WTC7, fell
to the ground over seven seconds, even though no plane had hit it.
The red building, 100 yards from the 110-storey Twin Towers, was less
than half their height at just 47 floors, and few people even know of its
existence. It had already been evacuated after the planes had hit the
main towers.

In total, 2,977 people died, provoking President Bush to mount the ‘War
On Terror’ that led to the invasion of Iraq, with the UK in tow.
Yet as Monday’s anniversary approaches, Matt, a former City worker
who is married with three children and lives in Sussex, insists that 9/11
did not happen in the way we have been told and that there has been a
huge official cover-up to disguise the truth.

‘There are so many questions that the Americans and the British
Establishment refuse to answer,’ he says. ‘I believe that my brother and
thousands of others were murdered on 9/11 and there has been a
cover-up. We, as a family, are still overcoming this tragedy, but we will
never stop seeking the truth.’

He is not alone in his quest. A survey in U.S. magazine Live Science
last year revealed that most Americans (53 per cent) believe the U.S.
Government has concealed — and continues to conceal — vital
information about the 9/11 attacks. Crucially, a team of engineers at the
University of Alaska concluded this week, after two years of forensic
research, that fire could not have caused the collapse of WTC7.

Indeed, though the official story is that WTC7 was weakened by fires
caused by debris from the attack, it’s the only steel skyscraper in the
world ever to collapse purely as a result of a blaze.

And a new book by an academic who has become an authority on 9/11,
Professor David Ray Griffin, says that to believe that this building fell to
the ground without explosives being involved is asking the public to
believe in ‘miracles’.

Griffin, a retired philosopher at Claremont School of Theology in
California, adds in his bestseller Bush And Cheney: How They Ruined
America And The World, about the ex-president and his vice-president
Dick Cheney: ‘There is a growing consensus that 9/11 allowed the U.S.
to adopt extreme, unwarranted policies. They include the War On Terror
and the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq as first steps in taking control
of the Middle East.’

He, and other 9/11 sceptics such as Matt, have asked if the attack was,
in fact, a copy of Operation Northwoods, an aborted plan during John F.
Kennedy’s presidency to stage terror attacks in America and blame
them on Communist Cuba as a pretext for a U.S. invasion to overthrow
dictator Fidel Castro.

In other words, on that September morning in 2001, did the White
House fail to stop — or even fabricate — an outrage against its own
civilians so as to provide a pretext for war on Al Qaeda and Osama Bin
Laden?

Although there have been countless conspiracy theories about 9/11, the
idea that the U.S. Government connived in it still appears utterly
implausible and has, of course, been denied by U.S. intelligence
services and the White House.

Initially — like most people in America and Britain, including Matt Campbell — Professor Griffin dismissed any notion that the attacks
were an inside job aimed at triggering the war on terror. It was a year later that he changed his mind, when he was writing about
American imperialism and 9/11 for his latest academic work.

As part of his research he had come across a ‘timeline’ of the day’s
events based on newspaper and television accounts. It raised several
anomalies that caused him to doubt the official version of events. And,
however outlandish it seems, his argument bears consideration.

One of the most puzzling anomalies was that none of the hijacked
planes was intercepted by fighter jets, even though there would have
been plenty of time to do so and it is mandatory procedure in the U.S. if
there is any suspicion of an air hijack.

In the nine months before 9/11, the procedure had been implemented
67 times in America. Then there were the irregular stock market
dealings before the tragedy.

An extremely high volume of ‘put options’ — bets on the price of shares
falling — were purchased for the stock of Morgan Stanley Dean Witter,
the international financier that occupied 22 storeys of the World Trade
Centre.

Even more remarkable was the volume of ‘put options’ traded on
American and United Airlines, which operated the four aircraft hijacked
by the terrorists.

On these two airlines, and only these, the level of share trade went up
by 1,200 per cent in the three days before the catastrophe. As the
shares dropped in response to 9/11 the value of these options multiplied
a hundredfold. Someone, somewhere, made $10 million in profit.But, of all the conundrums, the most perplexing is how the three World

But, of all the conundrums, the most perplexing is how the three World
Trade Centre towers fell to the ground.

The official version is that the Twin Towers collapsed because their
steel columns were melted by the heat from the fuel fires of the two
crashed planes.

This explanation has been repeated in White House briefings, official inquiries into 9/11, leaks by the U.S. intelligence services and almost
every TV documentary on the attack in the U.S. and the UK.

However, sceptics say the science does not stand up. They argue that
steel does not begin to melt until it reaches around 2,800f, and open
fires of jet fuel — such as those in the Twin Towers inferno — cannot
burn hotter than 1,700f.

Official reports state the steel in the third tower reached a maximum of
1,100f.

Professor Griffin and other sceptics believe the Twin Towers were
deliberately blown up. They claim their controversial theory is
corroborated by first-hand testimony from firefighters at the scene.

In oral histories of 9/11 by New York Fire Department staff which have
been made public, almost a quarter suggest they heard explosions
going off before the World Trade Centre towers collapsed. Of the South
Tower, firefighter Richard Banaciski said: ‘There was just an explosion.
It seemed like on television when they blow up these buildings. It
seemed like it was going all the way round like a belt . . . all those
explosions.’

Colleague Kenneth Rogers heard them, too. He said: ‘There was an
explosion in the South Tower. Floor after floor after floor. One floor
under another after another . . . I figured it was a bomb because it
looked like a synchronised kind of thing
.
And Fire Captain Dennis Tardio recalled: ‘I hear an explosion and I look
up. It is as if the building is being imploded from the top floor down,
boom, boom, boom. I stand in amazement. I can’t believe what I am
seeing. The building is coming down.’

But a more extraordinary challenge to scientific reason would happen
on the day of the attacks in respect of the third tower, WTC7, which
contained the offices of the secret service, and then mayor Rudy Giuliani’s emergency command centre, fitted with bullet- and bomb-
resistant windows as well as secure air and water supplies.

In 2008, a U.S. Government-ordered report by the prestigious National
Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) concluded a six-year probe into the WTC7 attack.

Bystanders interviewed by U.S. television that day said there were
‘bang, bang, bang’ sounds before it fell down. Yet NIST insisted there
was ‘no evidence’ of a controlled explosion.

The fall was provoked by fires on multiple levels. The heating of floor
beams and girders had caused a critical support column to fall, initiating
the fire-induced progressive collapse that brought the building down.

This week, eminent Alaska University engineers dismissed this
explanation. Dr J. Leroy Hulsey, Chair of the university’s Civil and
Environmental Engineering Department, said: ‘Fire did not and could
not have caused the failure of this building.’

Griffin adds: ‘We are led to believe that for the first time in the known
universe, a steel-framed, high-rise building was brought down by fire
without the aid of explosives or incendiaries.

‘More clearly miraculous was the precise way in which WTC7 collapsed
[straight down, with an almost perfectly horizontal roofline] into its own
footprint. This is the kind of free-fall implosion that can only be caused
by a world-class demolition company.’

But there is another perplexing matter regarding this third building. It
concerns the bizarre TV reports in the U.S., and the rest of the world,
that it had collapsed when it was clearly still upright — announcements
made 23 minutes before it had actually fallen down.

One piece of BBC World footage shows a studio anchor talking to news
correspondent Jane Standley, who is standing in front of the clearly
visible WTC7 tower.

The anchor says: ‘The 47-storey building, situated very close to the
World Trade Centre, has also just collapsed. It seems that this was not
the result of a new attack. It was because the building had been
weakened during the morning attacks.’

Then, oddly, the link to Standley breaks up and is lost.

Of course, this may just be a mistake made on one of the most hectic news days ever. Certainly, the BBC seems to think so.

In a statement made in 2007, a spokesman said: ‘In the chaos and
confusion, I am sure we said things which turned out to be untrue or
inaccurate, but at the time were based on the best information we had.
We no longer have the original tapes of our 9/11 coverage, for reasons
of cock-up, not conspiracy.’

This response — and the question of why the BBC announced the fall
of WTC7 before it actually happened — has enraged those fighting for
the ‘truth’, such as Matt Campbell. They say a series of 9/11
documentaries put out by the BBC have not been impartial or
scientifically accurate.

It is why he, and other Britons who disagree with the official version of
9/11, have chosen to make their protest outside BBC headquarters on
Monday.

This unlikely rebel, a trained theoretical physicist, former IT expert in the
City, and now a reflexologist, has refused to pay his BBC licence fee for
the past four years.

He claims: ‘The BBC has presented information to the public that
breaks its own editorial guidelines. In at least one documentary, it
removed the sounds of huge explosions going off in WTC7 moments
before its collapse.

‘I think my brother Geoff and many others were murdered in an event
that conflicts with what we have been officially told.

‘I believe there has been BBC complicity in a deliberate cover-up about
how thousands died on that day nearly 16 years ago,’ he said yesterday
as he braced himself for the sad anniversary.

America’s Jews Are Driving America’s Wars

This article first appeared in The Unz Review: An Alternative Media Selection on September 19th 2017, written by Philip Giraldi.

UPDATE On the morning of September 21st Phil Giraldi was fired over the phone by The American Conservative, where he had been a regular contributor for fourteen years. He was told that “America’s Jews Are Driving America’s Wars” was unacceptable. The TACmanagement and board appear to have forgotten that the magazine was launched with an article by founder Pat Buchanan entitled“Whose War?” which largely made the same claims that Giraldi made about the Jewish push for another war, in that case with Iraq. Buchanan was vilified and denounced as an anti-Semite by many of the same people who are now similarly attacking Giraldi.

I spoke recently at a conference on America’s war party where afterwards an elderly gentleman came up to me and asked, “Why doesn’t anyone ever speak honestly about the six-hundred-pound gorilla in the room? Nobody has mentioned Israel in this conference and we all know it’s American Jews with all their money and power who are supporting every war in the Middle East for Netanyahu? Shouldn’t we start calling them out and not letting them get away with it?”

It was a question combined with a comment that I have heard many times before and my answer is always the same: any organization that aspires to be heard on foreign policy knows that to touch the live wire of Israel and American Jews guarantees a quick trip to obscurity. Jewish groups and deep pocket individual donors not only control the politicians, they own and run the media and entertainment industries, meaning that no one will hear about or from the offending party ever again. They are particularly sensitive on the issue of so-called “dual loyalty,” particularly as the expression itself is a bit of a sham since it is pretty clear that some of them only have real loyalty to Israel.

Most recently, some pundits, including myself, have been warning of an impending war with Iran. To be sure, the urging to strike Iran comes from many quarters, to include generals in the Administration who always think first in terms of settling problems through force, from a Saudi government obsessed with fear over Iranian hegemony, and, of course, from Israel itself. But what makes the war engine run is provided by American Jews who have taken upon themselves the onerous task of starting a war with a country that does not conceivably threaten the United States. They have been very successful at faking the Iranian threat, so much so that nearly all Republican and most Democratic congressmen as well as much of the media seem to be convinced that Iran needs to be dealt with firmly, most definitely by using the U.S. military, and the sooner the better.

And while they are doing it, the issue that nearly all the Iran haters are Jewish has somehow fallen out of sight, as if it does not matter. But it should matter. A recent article in the New Yorker on stopping the impending war with Iran strangely suggests that the current generation “Iran hawks” might be a force of moderation regarding policy options given the lessons learned from Iraq. The article cites as hardliners on Iran David Frum, Max Boot, Bill Kristol and Bret Stephens.

Daniel Larison over at The American Conservative has a good review of the New Yorker piece entitled “Yes, Iran Hawks Want Conflict with Iran,” which identifies the four above cited hawks by name before describing them as “…a Who’s Who of consistently lousy foreign policy thinking. If they have been right about any major foreign policy issue in the last twenty years, it would be news to the entire world. Every single one of them hates the nuclear deal with Iran with a passion, and they have argued in favor of military action against Iran at one point or another. There is zero evidence that any of them would oppose attacking Iran.”

And I would add a few more names, Mark Dubowitz, Michael Ledeen and Reuel Marc Gerecht of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies; Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum; John Podhoretz of Commentary magazine; Elliot Abrams of the Council on Foreign Relations; Meyrav Wurmser of the Middle East Media Research Institute; Kimberly Kagan of the Institute for the Study of War; and Frederick Kagan, Danielle Pletka and David Wurmser of the American Enterprise Institute. And you can also throw into the hopper entire organizations like The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) and the Hudson Institute. And yep, they’re all Jewish, plus most of them would self-describe as neo-conservatives. And I might add that only one of the named individuals has ever served in any branch of the American military – David Wurmser was once in the Navy reserve. These individuals largely constitute a cabal of sanctimonious chairborne warriors who prefer to do the heavy thinking while they let others do the fighting and dying.

So it is safe to say that much of the agitation to do something about Iran comes from Israel and from American Jews. Indeed, I would opine that most of the fury from Congress re Iran comes from the same source, with AIPAC showering our Solons on the Potomac with “fact sheets” explaining how Iran is worthy of annihilation because it has pledged to “destroy Israel,” which is both a lie and an impossibility as Tehran does not have the resources to carry out such a task. The AIPAC lies are then picked up and replayed by an obliging media, where nearly every “expert” who speaks about the Middle East on television and radio or who is interviewed for newspaper stories is Jewish.

One might also add that neocons as a group were founded by Jews and are largely Jewish, hence their universal attachment to the state of Israel. They first rose into prominence when they obtained a number of national security positions during the Reagan Administration and their ascendancy was completed when they staffed senior positions in the Pentagon and White House under George W. Bush. Recall for a moment Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, and Scooter Libby. Yes, all Jewish and all conduits for the false information that led to a war that has spread and effectively destroyed much of the Middle East. Except for Israel, of course. Philip Zelikow, also Jewish, in a moment of candor, admitted that the Iraq War, in his opinion, was fought for Israel.

Add to the folly a Jewish U.S. Ambassador to Israel who identifies with the most right-wing Israeli settler elements, a White House appointed chief negotiator who is Jewish and a Jewish son-in-law who is also involved in formulating Middle East policy. Is anyone providing an alternative viewpoint to eternal and uncritical support for Benjamin Netanyahu and his kleptocratic regime of racist thugs? I think not.

There are a couple of simple fixes for the dominant involvement of American Jews in foreign policy issues where they have a personal interest due to their ethnicity or family ties. First of all, don’t put them into national security positions involving the Middle East, where they will potentially be conflicted. Let them worry instead about North Korea, which does not have a Jewish minority and which was not involved in the holocaust. This type of solution was, in fact, somewhat of a policy regarding the U.S. Ambassador position in Israel. No Jew was appointed to avoid any conflict of interest prior to 1995, an understanding that was violated by Bill Clinton (wouldn’t you know it!) who named Martin Indyk to the post. Indyk was not even an American citizen at the time and had to be naturalized quickly prior to being approved by congress.

Those American Jews who are strongly attached to Israel and somehow find themselves in senior policy making positions involving the Middle East and who actually possess any integrity on the issue should recuse themselves, just as any judge would do if he were presiding over a case in which he had a personal interest. Any American should be free to exercise first amendment rights to debate possible options regarding policy, up to and including embracing positions that damage the United States and benefit a foreign nation. But if he or she is in a position to actually create those policies, he or she should butt out and leave the policy generation to those who have no personal baggage.

For those American Jews who lack any shred of integrity, the media should be required to label them at the bottom of the television screen whenever they pop up, e.g. Bill Kristol is “Jewish and an outspoken supporter of the state of Israel.” That would be kind-of-like a warning label on a bottle of rat poison – translating roughly as “ingest even the tiniest little dosage of the nonsense spewed by Bill Kristol at your own peril.”

As none of the above is likely to happen, the only alternative is for American citizens who are tired of having their country’s national security interests hijacked by a group that is in thrall to a foreign government to become more assertive about what is happening. Shine a little light into the darkness and recognize who is being diddled and by whom. Call it like it is. And if someone’s feelings are hurt, too bad. We don’t need a war with Iran because Israel wants one and some rich and powerful American Jews are happy to deliver. Seriously, we don’t need it.

The Truth About “Diversity”

Here’s the truth about so-called “Diversity”. “Diversity” is one of the Left’s favourite words, but that’s only because they’ve ascribed a new, poisonous meaning to it. Take a look at this video to see what I mean. In it, ​Barbara Lerner Spectre, an American Jew who is targeting Sweden, calls for the destruction​ of Christian European ethnic societies.

Now take a look at the next video, below, to see what these people are saying when it comes to themselves. This video is very good as it shows racist policies of Israel at that time, e.g. a TV statement by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu boasting about how Israel had taken effective steps, including building a “fence” to keep out “infiltrators from Africa” and how any such “infiltrators” who had managed to evade Israel’s border security would soon be deported.

And for a brilliant, in-depth examination of the concept of “diversity” take a look at this video:

John Northwind

September Days of the Month

1st – St Giles’ Day

Born in Athens in the 8th century, he was maimed by the French King Wamba, and suffered after that for most of his life. The King had been trying to shoot Giles’ pet hind, but the saint had thrown himself in the way. The arrow penetrated deep into Giles’ knee, crippling him for life. Cripples and beggars adopted Giles as their patron saint, and the slums around European town walls became known as St Giles parish.

St Giles’ Day was a popular date for feasts and fairs. The hind and the arrow are his distinctive emblems. On the font in Norwich Cathedral he is shown with the hind leaping up behind him.

Popular in the middle ages when more than 150 churches in England and Wales were dedicated to him, he is remembered in many place names such as St Giles, Oxford, St Giles Hill, Winchester, St Giles House, Dorset, and St Giles in the Wood, Devon.

It was customary that St Giles Church would be on the outskirts of a town, on one of the great thoroughfares leading into it, in order that cripples might the more conveniently come to and cluster around it. We have a memorial of this association of facts in the interesting old church of St Giles, Applegate, in the eastern part of the City of London.

Today marked the beginning of the gorse and bracken cutting season, the former for oven-fuel, the latter for bedding.

2nd

Today in 1666 the Great Fire of London began in Pudding Lane.

About two thirds of the city was burned down, including St Paul’s Cathedral, the Royal Exchange and about 100 parish churches. The conflagration commenced in the house of a baker, in Pudding Lane, near the Tower and, being favoured by a high wind, continued for three nights and days, until it ended at a spot called Pye Corner in Giltspur Street.

3rd St Gregory the Great’s Day

c 540-604. Elected Pope in 590, he preached, wrote books and music, giving his name to the tones known as ‘Gregorian’. His emblem is a dove.

Lacemakers were allowed to light candles on this day to work by, and could do so until Shrove Tuesday.

Oliver Cromwell died on this day in 1658. His death was preceded by the worst storm of the seventeenth century.

“Tossed in a furious hurricane
Did Oliver give up his reign.”

On the Monday after the first Sunday after 4th September the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance is held in Staffordshire. The horns are collected from the church by the six dancers. Each set is attached to a carved wooden deer head to which a handle has been fitted. They spend the day touring the district accompanied by ‘Maid Marion’, a fool, a hobby horse, a bowman, an accordionist and someone playing the triangle. They can often travel over a distance of ten miles, dancing and stopping along the way. It is thought to be very old. The horns date back to the eleventh century. Whatever the origins, the dance has been performed without a break up to the present day and draws great crowds of people to watch.

In the first weekend in September the Eccles Wake in Lancashire was held, at which the famous Eccles cakes were sold.

5th

Fairs held today included

Barnet, London, which took place from the 4th to the 6th;
Eccles Wake, and
Crewkerne, Somerset.

It was said,
The first rain after Crewkerne Fair,
Is the first rain of winter.

6th

A heavy crop of berries, and especially hips and haws and rowanberries, presages a hard winter.

‘Many haws, many snows.’

7th

On this day in 1838 Grace Darling, whose father had the Longstone Lighthouse, on one of Northumberland’s Farne Islands, rowed out in rough seas to save the crew of the ‘Forfarshire’ and rescued nine drowning men.

‘Shout, ye waves! Send forth a song of triumph
. . . Ye screaming sea-mews in the concert join!’
Wordsworth

9th

The Battle of Flodden, near Branxton, in Northumberland, took place today in 1513 between James IV of Scotland and the English forces, led by Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey.

King Henry VIII was engaged in the invasion of France at the time. It resulted in the defeat and death of James IV, the slaughter of nearly thirty of his nobles and chiefs, and the loss of about 10,000 men. James had been a popular and very respected King.

The flowers of the forest, that fought aye the foremost,
The pride of our land, lie cold in the clay.

Still from the sire the son shall hear
Of the stern strife and carnage drear,
Of Flodden’s fatal field,
Where shivered was fair Scotland’s spear
And broken was her shield!
Sir Walter Scott – Marmion (1808)

Finally, on this day William I of England, known as William the Conqueror, died in 1087.

11th

Widdecombe Fair is held on the second Tuesday of the month. The fair is perhaps most famous because of the song associated with it –

Tom Pearce, Tom Pearce, lend me your grey mare,
All along, down along, out along, lee,
For I want for to go to Widdecombe Fair
With Bill Brewer, Jan Stewer, Peter Gurney,
Peter Davy, Dan’l Whiddon, Harry Hawke,
Old Uncle Tom Cobley and all,
Old Uncle Tom Cobley and all.

13th

General James Wolfe died on this day in 1759, in a battle between the English and the French, at the plains of Abraham in Quebec.

His last words, as he lay dying, were, ‘How goes the battle?’ When given the news that ‘Quebec is all our own, none can contend it,’ he expired with the words, ‘I die contented.’

He became the subject of several songs and ballads after his death.

14th – Rood Day and Holy Cross Day

Fairs that were held today died out with the Reformation of the sixteenth century. It is an important day for odd goings on in the weather world.

If dry be the buck’s horn on Holyrood morn,
’tis worth a kist of gold;
But if wet it be seen ere Holyrood E’en,
bad harvest is foretold.

If the hart and the hind meet dry and part dry on Rood Day fair,
For sax weeks, of rain there’ll be nae mair.

In 1752, when the Gregorian calendar was introduced, this day followed 2nd September and there were riots by people demanding their eleven days back.

15th

There is traditionally an 86 per cent chance of good weather today. It is said that September 15th will be fine six years out of seven.

16th – St Edith of Wilton’s Day

St Edith lived in the 10th century and was the sister of Edward the Martyr. St Edith’s well in Kensing in Kent is said to be good for curing eye complaints. Two more wells are named after her in Stoke Edith, Hereford, and at Church Eaton, Staffordshire. She lived at Wilton Priory, Wiltshire, and turned down the throne after her brother died.

On this day in 1620 The Mayflower set sail from Plymouth bound for North America carrying the Pilgrim Fathers.

18th

Woodbury Hill Fair used to commence today, a massive sheep fair held on the site of an Iron Age fort near Bere Regis, Dorset.

19th – St Theodore of Tarsus 620-690, Archbishop of Canterbury

20th

The weather on the 20th, 21st and 22nd supposedly indicates the weather outlook for the next three months respectively.

On the Saturday nearest the 20th September the Ashby Statute Fair is held. This was once an important hiring fair, but has now long been a pleasure fair.

On this day in 1327 Edward II was murdered at Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire.

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In Kent and other hop growing counties September was the month when casual workers from London and elsewhere would arrive for the hop-picking season.

‘Haste, haste then and strip, as it bends from the pole
The fruit that gives vigour and strength to the soul.
Our hearts and our spirits to cheer
It warms and enlivens the true British beer.’

The Harvest Moon is the first full moon after the 21st September. It is the moon at its most potent. It symbolises the fertile earth and an abundant harvest.

The man in the moon is said to be Cain or Endymion. But the traditional British explanation is that it was a woodcutter put there because he went stick collecting on a Sunday. The bundle of twigs, a lantern and a dog are features that can still appear to be seen.

The man in the moon came down too soon
And asked his way to Norwich.
He went to the south and burnt his mouth
By eating cold plum porridge.
Traditional rhyme

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21st – St Matthew

He lived in the 1st century. His usual symbol is an angel, moneybag or sword. St Matthew’s Day falls close to the autumnal equinox, which marks the end of summer and the beginning of autumn. It is time to close the beehives for the year (‘St Matthee shut up the bee’) and to prepare for the darker nights ahead (‘St Matthew get candlesticks new’). It is also one of the two days known as Devil’s Nutting Day, when it is unwise to go off to the woods to gather hazelnuts.

St Matthew’s Day bright and clear
Brings good wine in next year.

Devil’s Nutting Day

Holy Cross Day is one of two days, also known as Devil’s Nutting Day, the other being St Matthew’s Day (21st September). It is said that those who went nutting on this day would meet the Devil. The Devil was said to also go nutting on a Sunday.

The Devil, as some people say,
A Nutting goes Holy-Rood day.
Let women then their children keep
At home that day, better asleep
They were, or cattle for to tend
Than nutting go, and meet the fiend;
But if they’ll not be ruled by this,
Blame me not if they do amiss.
Poor Robin’s Almanac (1693)

28th – Michaelmas Eve

Michael was patron saint of the sea. In Lincolnshire Michaelmas Eve bonfires were lit today, and seed was scattered on the land for the birds to forage. This brought good luck to the farm.

29th – Michaelmas

Over 600 churches are dedicated to St Michael. Michael does not fit the usual saint’s profiles. For a start he is not a mortal, but an Angel – the prince of all angels, in fact. It was Michael who evicted Lucifer and threw him from heaven.

Michael is the angel who receives risen souls and weighs them in the balance – the basis of his patronage of grocers.

Many pagan sites were reconsecrated to St Michael after the coming of Christianity.

Michaelmas is one of the four days on which quarterly rents are paid.

And when the tenants come to pay their quarters’ rent
They bring some fowl at midsummer, a dish of fish in Lent,
At Christmas a capon, at Michaelmas a goose,
And somewhat else at New Years’ tide, for fear their lease fly loose.
George Gascoigne (1575)

Michaelmas was the end of harvest, often the end of the farming year itself. And that meant dozens of fairs, trading in people and livestock.

‘Now Michaelmas is coming, boys what pleasure we shall find,
We’ll make the gold and silver fly like chaff before the wind.’

Michaelmas’s name still continues in the names of some colleges’ autumn terms.

A clear sunny show on the Michaelmas weather front means a fine but cold winter ahead. Alternatively the saying is, ‘A dark Michaelmas, a light Christmas.’

At Michaelmas or a little before,
Half the apples thrown away with the core.
At Christmastime or a little bit after,
If it’s as sour as a crab
It’s thank you, master.

So many days old the moon is on
Michaelmas Day so many floods after.

Michaelmas chickens and parsons’ daughters
Never come to good.
Traditional saying

Michaelmas Fairs

After the corn was cut, it was common practice to let geese into the fields of stubble ‘to go a-stubbling’. They would peck up the grains lying scattered on the ground, fattening themselves up.

Goose was the traditional item on the menu during the feasting at Michaelmas.

‘If you eat goose on Michaelmas Day
You will never want money all the year round.’

There were several goose fairs. The great Nottingham Goose Fair began on 2nd October and lasted three weeks, during which many geese, especially those reared in the fens of Lincolnshire and Norfolk, were marketed. To travel such long distances the feet of the geese were covered in tar mixed with sand to protect them from the rough road.

25th

The Battle of Stamford Bridge took place on this day in Yorkshire in 1066 between the Saxon King Harold II of England and King Harald III of Norway, who had designs on the English throne. Harald was supported by Harold’s brother, Tostig. Both died on the battlefield.

The exhausted Harold marched south to meet William of Normandy at the Battle of Hastings on 14th October, where he was mortally wounded by an arrow in the eye.

30th – St Jeromes Day.331-419

He was born into a wealthy Italian family and became a doctor. It is said he was travelling in Africa when he came across a lion with a thorn in his foot. At great risk he removed the thorn, freeing the lion from pain. Years later he was captured by the Romans and made to face a freshly captured lion in the Coliseum.

It seems it was the same lion, because instead of ripping him apart it merely lay down next to Jerome. For years after Jerome and the lion toured Italy displaying the same routine to the crowds.

He is the patron saint of students.

30th

On this day in 1399 Henry Bolingbroke rode to his Coronation in driving rain. It was said that he ‘arrived dry, as God had preserved him from the elements’. He became the first of the Lancastrian kings.

On the last Wednesday in September, Bridgwater Fair is held.